Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/25
According to the Friendly Atheist, a Republican State Representative, John Ragan, filed a bill called HB 1490 in which taxpayer money would not be permitted to subsidize abortions.
The basic belief, here, is that the funding of abortion will endorse secular humanism in addition to violating the separation of church and state. I will not need to delineate the obvious to the audience here, on those first points of inquiry implied by the strange but expected bill.
The language of HB 1490 states some of the common tropes within the rhetoric amongst pro-life advocates; those who wish to deny safe and equitable access to abortion, which, as described by Human Rights Watch, is a fundamental human right and, in fact, saves women’s lives — literally — and livelihoods.
Important to note, this is not simply about the legislation. The documentation, in terms of rights, is explicit about three criteria. One is accessibility. Another is safety. A third is equity. It should be within the national consciousness.
Women have the human right, in fact, fundamental human right not simply “human right,” to reproductive health services with abortion as an aspect of this. The notion of abortion is to have the ability to get one in a legal fashion, as a fundamental human right.
Think about the opposition case, if women have their access to abortion denied, what will happen to these women who become pregnant with an unwanted child, for an example?
As a friend and colleague and former child violin prodigy, Paul Krassner, noted decades ago, there will need to be underground referral services, where, in fact, Krassner provided some referral services; in other words, women will get those abortions anyway.
When women get them in a legal or illegal context, in which the access is there or not & the state approves it or not, the main consideration becomes the respect for fundamental human rights or not.
By refusing to provide these services, which are far and away one of the least frequent provided services by reproductive health centres anyway, the legal structures, the society, and the opposition actively oppose the right to this fundamental human right and, in fact, the eventual — and statistical — health and wellness of women. It may not be in every single case, but, on average and based on the empirical evidence available to us at an international level, the general principle of heuristic is women will have improved wellbeing, as a group within societies, with the provision of abortion services.
That’s layer one. The basic respect for the right for it, as women will get them anyway. Thus, the best work would be to give this to them anyway. Following from this, we come to the second consideration, which is safety. Once women have it, is it safely available to women? This is a highly relevant question given the context of the United States of America after the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh.
If not, then this violates the fundamental human right. Women will be in only marginally better circumstances getting unsafe abortions in a licit context as they would in an illicit environment. Therefore, the purpose of a legal protection and provision of abortion services under the banner of reproductive health services would be two-fold: 1) the protection of the fundamental human right of women and 2) the increased probability for the improved outcomes for women in the context of a needed medical service, abortion.
The final criterion is equity, or “equitable.” Different sectors of the population of women have different levels of access to these provisions. This requires an explicit statement as to the import of the protection of women of color, rural women, poor women, and so on, in the case of provision of abortion.
With these criteria for the respect and implementation of a fundamental human right, it is simply about safe and equitable access to abortion services. Without these, with these made illegal or women turned into outlaws for needing or even wanting them, women will die or become injured by the thousands, in the former case, and by the millions, in the latter case, according to Human Rights Watch, at an international level.
The language of HB 1490 simply speaks to the talking points of the pro-life stance on this debate. That is to say, there will be references to direct opposition about abortion not being murder, about abortion not being immoral, and abortion not beginning at conception, and so on:
The naked assertions that “abortion is not murder”, “that abortion is not immoral”, and that “life does not begin at conception” are unproven faith-based assumptions that are implicitly religious and are unproven truth claims that are inseparably linked to the religion of secular humanism;
The stance of secular humanism is against religious dogma, where the stance is not dogma, e.g., no holy text, nothing to pray to, no suggested practices, no gods as traditionally defined at least, and so on; thus, the assertion of secular humanism as a religion simply speaks to the indication that religion, in the United States, continues to garner a bad reputation as an idea and as a term, which is cynically being exploited by Ragan in the language here.
This comes from a fundamentalist branch of Evangelicalism within the United States that has been working to demonize secular humanism, and other groups, for some time, including feminists, activists, progressives, and the like.
The statements continue:
That the establishment clause prohibits the state of Tennessee from enforcing, respecting, recognizing, favoring, or endorsing policies that fund abortion facilities with tax dollars because the practices are nonsecular and such appropriations have the effect of excessively entangling the government with the religion of secular humanism, putting religion over nonreligion;
To deconstruct this, the obvious implication of the title “secular” in secular humanism is the endorsement, explicitly if not implicitly, of the separation of church and state, or, more properly, place of worship and state. How does this qualify as a faith, exactly?
As we have seen in the history of the United States, the conservative religious fundamentalist base — not simply old fashioned conservatives — are working with what has worked for progressives in the past and then, non-creatively, attempting to reverse the arguments with their own talking points on the notion of religion interfering in the politics and health provisions of the country, which has been a progressive argument and pro-choice — as in, pro-human right, pro-maternal health, pro-infant health, and pro-women’s reproductive health — argument for years in order to prevent the encroachment of the fundamentalist religion into the reproductive lives of women.
Now, the conservatives realize the loss in the courts, e.g., Roe v Wade from 1973, but then see the utility in the form of the argument of the prevention of religion entering into political life. In this case, the attempt is to fight the ‘evils’ of secular humanism by trying to label secular humanism as a religion and then working to encroach religion into the public sphere, into the domain of reproductive health services and reproductive health rights for women, through the denial of abortion services, but from the opposite angle.
By the implication of this reversal, the pro-life sector represented by Ragan, perhaps not all but many, therefore, become people of politic rather than people of principle and may reflect the general assault on the population by “people of means,” as recently declared as a preference by billionaire Howard Schultz. The principles would be the same, as in the arguments would be consistent. But now, the arguments have reversed for Ragan and, thus, the principle is not principles but the restriction on the rights of women — full stop, by whatever arguments or means in order to do it.
The statements in the reportage continue:
The direct or indirect subsidization or facilitation of abortion with funds distributed by the state of Tennessee constitutes paying for an abortion and, therefore, conflicts with the First Amendment establishment clause of the United States Constitution;
The state of Tennessee may not favor or endorse one (1) religion over another, nor may the state of Tennessee favor or endorse the religion of secular humanism generally over nonreligion.
By the respect for human rights and the provision of a fundamental human right, the notion is the utilization of the First Amendment establishment clause to the United States Constitution in HB 1490 as, in some way, a religious issue from the other side, where, in fact, the basic principle of secular humanism is human rights and the separation of place of worship and state.
The argument for the prevention of abortion services through the labeling of secular humanism as a religion simply restricts the provision of abortion services to women — for the vast majority of cases — in need of one. By default or reflection, this would lean towards and instantiation of the pro-life position, or standard fundamentalist religious position, of the prevention of abortions for women. In either case, the outcome is the same: women simply denied equal status in American society through the denial of respect for their fundamental human rights.
“Not that we should have to waste time debunking any of that, but the assertion that abortion is ‘murder’ or ‘immoral’ and that life begins at conception are all faith-based statements that also have no basis in reality. It’s rhetoric, not science,” Hemant Mehta explained, “To suggest that a pro-choice chance promotes secular humanism but that an anti-choice stance has nothing whatsoever to do with religion is the sort of lie we’ve come to expect from conservative Christians. Keep in mind that the laws have nothing to do with whether abortion is ‘moral.’ That’s your call, not the government’s.”
In addition to HB 1490, Ragan, according to Mehta, is also endorsing, as a co-prime sponsor, a bill with the clear intent to ban abortions based on the detection of a fetal heartbeat, where, not conception, but the heartbeat detection becomes the first point of no abortion possible. As the readers here can tell, and certainly know, the work is to try anything that work, simply to restrict women’s freedom; the sensibility seems to come in the indirect pervasive truth, in some manner: a fear of sexually and economically free women — not a proof of this but a sense of it.
Mehta, properly, notes, “I guess it’s not government overreach when it involves his religious beliefs. In case that point about hypocrisy isn’t clear, Ragan also co-sponsored a resolution just this year that would literally change the state’s Constitution to say our ‘liberties do not come from government, but from Almighty God.’”
As Mehta reasonably and accurately observes, the issue is not about principle; it is about the innervation of a singular interpretation of religion into government rather than the permission of all voices via the denial of religion into public life. No religion in the politics is simply a recognition of the obvious: a respect for the non-religious and the religious across the board through equal treatment. The religious have been in power forever; thus, any movement towards equality feels like oppression.
The issue may seem ambiguous, to some, in the single HB 1490 case, but, if compared across examples, then the conclusions seem clear: the purpose is forced intervention into public life of one denomination of Christian religion in American legal structures and political life in order to have the consequence of the denial of the fundamental human rights of women.
And as this comes down to an individual choice of abortion, if you do not want an abortion, then don’t get one; if you disagree with it, on religious grounds, or for others, then still don’t get one, but, at the same time, don’t deny the safe and equitable access for women, or, if the case may be, other women.
—
Photo by Guillermo Álvarez on Unsplash
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/24
A young man, 18-years-old, Ethan Lindenberger, has not been vaccinated, pretty much, his entire life, NPR reports.
This is becoming a common phenomenon with the rise of measles cases, for example. Lindenberger is among a cohort of young people who are simply tired of the denial of medical science, in this case, vaccines, that can put their — as young people — health as a real risk.
Now, this cohort of young people, in part, is simply going outside of the dictates of the parents in their lives and getting vaccines themselves; even though, the parents may have been deluded into anti-vaccination hysteria over the years.
It is a sincere, heartfelt, and honorable desire: to protect one’s children. But it comes at a cost when being explicitly exploited by the peddlers of what has been termed junk science, pseudoscience, and non-science depending on the framing of it.
Lindenberger, literally, is being vaccinated for diseases including “hepatitis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, or the chickenpox.” That’s remarkable. The mother of Lindenberger, a Jill Wheeler, is an anti-vaccine advocate, which simply translates into anti-medicine or anti-science advocate based on the firm empirical basis of the efficacy of vaccinations.
This, much or all of it, started with the reiterations of a debunked study. The notion is that the vaccines themselves, somehow, “cause” rather than correlate with autism. Do vaccines cause autism? No. Do vaccines correlate with autism? As far as I know, “No.”
As some have joked, autism may increase chances of interest in science and maths; thus, autism ‘causes’ vaccines. Aside from the lighthearted sideshows, these are serious issues, of which, unfortunately, due to the negligence of the elders in these young people’s lives, the youth are having to take matters into their own hands — to, potentially, save their lives. And that’s no joke.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/23
Prominent actress, Ellen Page, has been more outspoken, recently, about what she sees as injustices, then simply speaks directly on the subject matter. Some of these can include environmental issues, and hateful rhetoric and leadership or racism.
The Progressive Secular Humanist wrote on this calling out of an American actor, Chris Pratt, in an interview with Stephen Colbert. The interview focused on sheep, sheering of sheep, and a diet coming from the Book of Daniel in the Bible called the Daniel Fast. Pratt said that this diet made him feel good.
As reported, “According to its website, the Daniel Fast is ‘based on the fasting experiences of the Old Testament Prophet,’ and serves to help people ‘draw nearer to God.’” Always, always, there should be a “maybe” followed by a comma and a space — and other conceptual necessities — preceding bold pseudohistorical statements like the one there, as in: “…maybe, the Daniel Fast is based on the fasting experiences of the purported Old Testament ‘Prophet’…”
Pratt described to Colbert how this was, in essence, their church’s Lent, to bridge the conceptual gap with Colbert, who is a practicing Roman Catholic Christian. The diet consisted of no meat, no sugar, and no alcohol. The interviewed continued in this chummy way.
Page went on social media to critique Pratt because of the anti-LGBTQ nature of the church that Pratt takes part in now; in fact, Page, at the same time, was critiquing the soft interviewing of Colbert.
A statement (2015) from the church, Hillsong Church, stated, “God’s word is clear that marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Thus, the traditional view is the one purportedly endorsed by a supposed god, where this god is displeased and looks down upon gay ‘lifestyles’ and gay marriage.
That is to say, Hillsong Church views homosexuality as a social lifestyle rather than a reality; an innate tendency within the human species. Why? Because God did not intend things this way, likely. He intended marriage between male and female without homosexuality in the cards.
To their credit, the statement noted a welcoming attitude to everyone coming into the church. However, they do not affirm all — what they non-scientifically assert as — “lifestyles”:
Put clearly, we do not affirm a gay lifestyle and because of this we do not knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership, either paid or unpaid. I recognise this one statement alone is upsetting to people on both sides of this discussion, which points to the complexity of the issue for churches all over the world.
Discrimination in marriage, regressive in social outlook, and bias in hiring all-at-once; this is Hillsong Church circa 2015, where this extends to the non-Australian extensions in which Pratt and other American celebrities take part now. Other promoters of the Hillsong Church have been “Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and the Kardashians.”
America is coming to the head of a huge culture war. One of the linchpins, among many, is the issue of LGBTQ+ acceptance within their society or not. This callout by Page will be among a number of others, as this continues to be just below the surface of public consciousness.
As with the many explosions in American history, the outcome will be further repression of the LGBTQ+ community or further acceptance of them. Hillsong Church is based on Australia but boasts over 100,000 members worldwide. It is a massive church, where the lead pastor, Brian Houston, has been embroiled in media ploys to try to clear the name of infamous misogynist pastors including Mark Driscoll of defunct Mars Hill Church.
The Hillsong Church stands against stem cell research, abortion, supports Creationism, and views homosexuality as against the teachings of the Biblebut Hillsong Church, itself, does not, at the same time, condemn homosexuals. This exists along the lines of “hate the sin but not the sinner” seen in some weaker arguments in the Pentecostal arsenal for social control of homosexuals and theological grounding for marital and sociocultural discrimination of the LGBTQ+ community.
The bottom line is that Houston does not think the Bible can be unwritten or rewritten, as it is the fundamental delivery from He on High, the Creator of the Universe. Pastor Chad Veach of Zoe Church — Pratt’s pastor and church — modeled everything after Hillsong Church. These are not complicated moral issues. These are not complex questions about the nature of human relations. These are basic, elementary even, moral and ethical questions.
Do you, as a leader of a community, want to include sexual orientation and gender identity minorities into your communities as full members or simply as advocates of Christ in the church as members but those members who simply are not permitted the possibility to be real equals based on the contents of the holy text within the fundamentalist Pentecostal reading of the Bible? In short, do you want to include homosexuals in the community as full participants or not?
If you don’t, then you do not believe in equality for all, as in the case of marriage only for heterosexuals in binary units or a male and a female united in the eye’s of God as a husband and wife. If you do, then you believe in the inclusion of these members of the community, not as honorary badges of marginal progressivism.
Furthermore, if the latter, it would be an interesting reflection and observation that the progressive secular communities have already been working on this issue for some time without the need to pray on it, to read the holy text for answers, to go to a higher religious authority or body for detailed theological exegesis, but only to the basic instincts, when unencumbered by too much dogma, for inclusion, general honesty, and compassionate community-building based on mutual respect and camaraderie.
It becomes a basic ethical fact. Either LGBTQ2IA+ are included in the subculture or not. If not, please explain the reason. Because, the reasons, typically, are amoral if not immoral and based on the tacit understanding of a purported holy text in which they may be identified spiritually as equal — whatever that means — but, in the concrete world, the nitty-gritty of everyday life, simply get left out as equals compared to the heterosexual communities. Pratt, Houston, Veach, et al, seem to have failed this base moral question. Pratt et al in terms of implicit endorsement, e.g., attendance and financial in terms of tithing; Houston and Veach in terms of preaching and theology. Page is on point; I look forward to reading her next one.
Get flipping.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/22
BET conducted an interview with the rapper Killer Mike, recently. In the interview, as outspoken as Mike has been for years, he may have caused a bit of a ruckus with some commentary on Christianity. His baseline argument: Christianity does more harm than good for black people.
In an episode of Trigger Warning With Killer Mike, which is on Netflix, there was further exploration of the world of African-American communities and the cultural taboos within it.
This particular episode covered the belief in a Jesus who was European, Caucasian, or simply ‘white.’ A Middle East holy figure who was white, think about it. Killer Mike considers this an idea needing deconstruction: directly and without recourse to apologetics. The episode was entitled “Church of Sleep.”
As reported, “Using ‘Church of Sleep,’ a recent Q&A with the Atlanta MC further examines white Jesus, the African Diaspora, ancestral devotion, economic self-sufficiency, the current state of affairs for Black people, and more…”
In the interview, Killer Mike reported on how he viewed African-Americans as imprisoned with the image of a white Jesus and that they are in the “bondage of Christianity.”
“What I ended up discovering is that not only is that image oppressive because it denies the identity of myself — all of it hurts the followers,” Killer Mike explained, “Personally, white Jesus is not good for me. And for my community, it’s not good for them. So I went in with the [intention] of destroying this image, a very patriarchal and racist image.”
In the process of this rapid deconstruction of the image, Mike created a new church entitled the Church of Sleep, hence the title of the episode. He noted prayer simply, for him and his family, is talking to oneself and finding their own inner divinity.
Mike has a shrine devoted to his grandmother and mother with an entire prayer room within the household, where there are women divinity figures.
Astutely, Mike stated, “People find community and stability in religious practices and churches, so I get it. Like, I still go to church. I will go to church with my children and their mothers. ’Cause the sense of community and fellowship — I get that. I ain’t giving no money at the end. I don’t buy or need to buy loyalty to talk to God.”
He noted how he has been questioning the faith, asking critical and probing questions, for years, since about the age of 15. Mike stated that he studied religion and philosophy at Morehouse too.
“Without the African diaspora, particularly the East and Horn and formerly South Sudan — without South Sudan, you wouldn’t have religion. You wouldn’t have Abrahamic religions. All of those religions borrow from folklore, from mythology,” Killer Mike explained, “You wouldn’t have — without the Orishas of Africa, you wouldn’t have Greek gods. So without a basis of calling out the attributes of gods of different names and having different powers, the Greeks would never set up what became figures like Zeus and Hercules, so I’m cool with everything that came before those.”
He noted a binary position or set of responses to his critical inquiry. Either the African-American community likes the message or not. By Mike’s thinking on the issue, the indoctrination into Christianity and, in this particular consideration, into the mythology of a white Middle Eastern Jew named Jesus begins at age 4, approximately.
Killer Mike stated, “You’re put in a school or nursery or something, and you’re not free anymore because you have to agree to the structure of that reality. But before that, your imagination is alive. You’re already in tune with God. You’re already talking to the air. No one knows who you are talking to. You’re walking out into the grass, so that’s appreciating God to me. So to me after that, you kind of agree to the system and you spend the rest of your life trying to un-agree and sometimes you don’t.”
BET’s interviewer was an intriguing person, to say the least. They asked good questions, direct queries getting at the heart of it. They asked about the path to personal enlightenment, of which Killer Mike recommended paying closer attention to the internal voice for them. As a youngster growing up, as with most gifted young people, he simply began to question the foundational belief structures handed down to him. He continued to disbelieve it. Now, he is one among many leading a charge of, at a minimum, critical thinking about Christianity and, at least, a white Jesus in African-American communities.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/19
The Metro reported on Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun from Saudi Arabia, who has been granted asylum to Canada, recently. She fled to Kuwait from alleged abuse and then landed in Bangkok. Following this, she began to seek asylum.
With the surprising effectiveness of the work by al-Qunun and others, and similar social media social justice campaigns including #MeToo, Twitter became a catalytic platform for the improved efficacy of the calls for social justice for Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun.
As some may note, the socio-political left and the socio-political right tend to disagree on what should be the emphasis of the social justice in most instances, and utilize epithets against the opposition in the cases of that which they disagree.
But the possibility of further abuse of a girl and the killing of an ex-Muslim united the internet for social good, a social justice activist effort. Many Canadian voices were in favor of the work there.
The unifying story was the abuse and the context in which men and women live in the culture. Men and women are grossly unequal in Saudi society.
One interesting story is relayed within the article about the way this works for gay men too. The former Muslim man, who left, had to disengage with family, because of the disagreements in belief.
The author described a sympathy, in common experiences, with leaving religion in an area of the world at this time that takes the violent approach to those who leave. One can see this environment with Christian in the centuries past.
Those who leave in these coerced-into-religion contexts become difficult, dangerous, and even life-threatening. The man felt as though — as a gay Muslim man — he had let down the creator and sustainer of the universe.
As opined, “I know of Christians who have left their faith and converted to Islam who talk of pressures from their families, and where some have had their immediate family stop all communication, sometimes for decades. However, what is troubling is that the levels of pressure and intimidation against ex-Muslims rumbles on and that time and time again,”
To attribute this to innate tendencies is wrong, as if one group is a separate species, while, at the same time, to deny this happening disproportionately in Muslim communities is also wrong, it is happening at a higher rate, insofar as a large number of ex-Muslim communities are showing u — and the subsequent stories coming out connected to them.
The author of the opinion piece explained, “I heard from those I interviewed they feared to leave Islam and when they did, they felt scared all of this, it is important to mention that it is not faith or religions themselves that are the problem. Yes, there are difficult elements of texts, but it is how they are interpreted and how families and individuals implement them in their families. For many of the people I interviewed, a harsh and controlling interpretation of Islam meant that they pushed their loved one away from Islam. Yet, there are just as many families where Islam is interpreted so that people feel accepted, loved and valued.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/18
In the modern history of the sport, the world had great difficulty in the acceptance of what has now been termed mental sports, including chess and other non-contact, mostly non-physical competitive activities.
People devote their entire lives to these competitions out of sheer love of it. Some of the chess world came to a head with the long-time world champion Garry Kasparov competing against the supercomputer — super for the time at least — named Deep Blue.
Since this time, the interest in what may best be termed, for now, mental sports has simply grown a lot. This is particularly true for the number of those who have entered into the competitive gaming realm earning — and no word of exaggeration — hundreds of thousands of dollars (USD) in their professional careers, akin to professional skateboarders who you can appreciate in the artistry of their excellence in their chosen craft.
Akin to other sports worlds, some of the interesting aspects of the world of this new domain of sports gone mental-digital is the, yes, often well-known and substantiated instances of open misogyny within some sectors and amongst some members of the video gaming or gamer community.
But there may also be other facets to this dialogue not entirely covered. One is the win for the transgender community, likely, with the inclusion and non-controversy in the inclusion of a trans individual in the ranks of one of the more prominent and long-time famous real-time strategy or RTS games: Starcraft II.
Sasha Hostyn, born in December of 1993, is a professional Starcraft II player amongst the highest ranking in the world in addition to playing Dota 2 to some degree. The questions here relate to the ways in which a Canadian gamer is anything new.
It’s not.
What is newer, especially given some of the regressive aspects of some of the community some (in-)famous incidents over the years in the world of professional video gaming, Hostyn, or “Scarlett,” has been the only woman to win an international Starcraft II tournament.
More significantly, she is known as the queen of Starcraft II and, potentially, one of the most accomplished women video gamers in the land today, as well as being a trans woman.
What has been especially noteworthy in the world of professional video gaming here, Scarlett’s gender identity is a non-issue within the community of announcers, gamers, and, as far as I can tell, the wider community of professional Starcraft II video gamers, which sets a tone and timbre on the world of professional video gaming different than before — not simply symbolically but in a display of recognized excellence in performance based on rankings and winnings.
That’s trend-setting.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/17
The issue of climate change is often misreported. It should be reported consistently and affirmatively as anthropogenic climate change or human-induced global warming in which the human industrial activity is a major factor in the problem in climate change.
One major aspect of the work is climate science literacy in order to combat the problem here. Washington has two identical bills now, which are aimed at climate science literacy.
These are for the Washington state legislature. One is called House Bill 1496. Another is entitled Senate Bill 5576. These are intended to establish a comprehensive program for more learning opportunities and education on climate science. It is meant to increase knowledge about climate science.
One facet for the media would be the introduction of the terminology as “anthropogenic climate change or “human-induced global warming” as a start.
There is an affirmation, in the pair of bills, for the increase in the skills and knowledge about climate science. It is only within Washington but this is a start, especially in a huge advanced industrial economy such as the United States.
The point is to introduce a greater skill and knowledge base amongst the young there. It will have information and opportunities for climate literacy and environmental education.
There is a reference to environmental and sustainability standards in one section of the Washington state code listing that is required as areas of education through the public schools.
This, according to the NCSE reportage, is simply an introduction of a new emphasis on sustainability.
As reported, it affirmed, “…critical knowledge and innovative strategies for effectively teaching climate science can be strengthened by qualified community-based organizations.”
One intriguing proposal is the foundation of a grant program through a nonprofit of the community for educational purposes via the Next Generation Science Standards. It’s not indoctrination; it’s minimal standards of a modernized educational on the environment.
The reportage concluded, “House Bill 1496 was introduced on January 23, 2019, and referred to the House Committee on Education; Senate Bill 5576 was introduced on January 24, 2019, and referred to the Senate Committee on Early Learning & K-12 Education.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/16
Time Magazine reported on a man from Alabama who is, in fact, filing a lawsuit against a reproductive health center for an unborn fetus.
This is stated as, potentially, one of the first cases of this. A lawsuit based on the purported rights of an aborted fetus.
Obviously, the Alabaman has sincere beliefs as to the rights and privileges — legal and otherwise — of the fetus. The question is truly if this fits into a standard human rights framework or only in the minds of a minority of the American public aligning themselves within the perspective of the man from Alabama.
“Ryan Magers, who says his ex-girlfriend had an abortion against his wishes, filed a lawsuit against the Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Madison Country, local CBS affiliate WHNT News 19 reported Tuesday,” Time Magazine stated.
In the papers filed to the court for the lawsuit, Magers stated that the ex-girlfriend took a pill to terminate or end the pregnancy on February 12, 2017, in spite of the pleas of keeping the baby, by Magers.
Of course, this implies, if taking the testimony of Magers, a strong difference of opinion on the eventual birthing as a child after the fetus sufficiently developed or the actual termination of the fetus — not a baby.
Time Magazine said, “This week, an Alabama probate judge granted Magers’ petition to represent the estate of the fetus, which the suit calls “Baby Roe.” But according to WHNT, the court papers do not make it clear that “Baby Roe” was an aborted fetus.”
A jury trial is being sought, purportedly, by Magers, where Brent Helms will be the attorney for Magers. Helms is claiming the case breaks legal ground, as a Baby Roe case — so to speak. This appears as if an explicit attempt to build off the success of the Roe v Wade decision of 1973 in the United States.
This is, for a Canadian audience, akin to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–1969 superseded and expanded, in a sense, by the R v MorgentalerSupreme Court of Canada decision from 1988.
The name “Roe” is a reflection of “John Doe” for the everyman but for the everywoman, “Jane Roe.” It is intended as a general law. The current context is, in this sense, for the “Baby Roe” to mirror this. Ironically, the traditionalist strain wants to have the women and children take the man’s name.
But, in this case, the every-child, or, rather, the every-fetus, takes on the name of the mother, the everywoman Jane Roe.
Helms said, “This is the first estate that I’m aware of that has ever been opened for an aborted baby.”
Alabama stated that the unborn fetuses have identical rights as an individual born in an amendment from last November. It has been marked a victory by some.
It is part of the growing movement called the “Personhood Movement.” Their sole goal is the constitutional rights of personhood being granted to a fertilized egg — a single cell. In this, we can see the influence of traditional religious ideological stances about the moment of conception.
“The same legislation also says that the Alabama constitution does not protect a woman’s right to an abortion — language added in the event of Roe v. Wadegetting overturned,” Time Magazine described, “The Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision granted women in the U.S. the legal right to abortions. The addition of conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh on the bench has raised concerns among pro-choice activists that women’s right to abortion in the U.S. may come under threat.”
Pro-choice activists are beginning to talk more about this and view this as a scary development for some of them.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/15
Amongst the noblest pursuits of the human species appears to be the education of the young, in which there is a proper and responsible passing onto the next generations the acquired knowledge of the prior ones.
One effort in the United States in the Next Generation Science Standard intended for school districts and accredited nonpublic schools. Iowa, for example, adopted the NGSS in 2015.
However, House File 61 is an interesting recent proposal that would prevent this from coming into full effect in Iowa, preventing NGSS from becoming the norm and expectation within the education system.
As reported, “The bill, introduced on January 23, 2019, and referred to the House Education Committee, is sponsored by Skyler Wheeler (R-District 4). In a 2016 interview with the Caffeinated Thoughts blog (April 19, 2016), Wheeler declared, ‘’I also oppose NGSS as it pushes climate change … NGSS also pushes evolution even more.’”
The denial of standard and mainstream scientific findings is an important issue. Denial of evolution simply leaves medical and biological sciences professionals less likely to come out of Iowa.
But also, there is the issue of anthropogenic climate change denial. This is an issue threatening species survival and requires immediate action as this is an urgent issue.
“In 2017, Wheeler cosponsored House File 140, which contained the same provision about the NGSS, as well as House File 480,” the NCSE stated, “which would have required teachers in Iowa’s public schools to include ‘opposing points of view or beliefs’ to accompany any instruction relating to evolution, the origins of life, global warming, or human cloning. Both bills died in committee.”
There is nothing new here. Indeed, the educators see through the ploy and the Iowa Association of School Boards has already made an open declaration of opposition to the House File 61.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/11
The struggle continues onward with the reindeer hit mainly by the plane in Maine, but also with the latest “controversial issues” measure. This is a new tactic and a common one.
The proper move, politically and legally, is an identification of the move and then steadfast work against it. The tactics tend to stay the same. The titles and names tend to be different.
There is a bill within the Maine legislature that would, in fact, require the public school teachers to follow a code of conduct. That’s not bad, in fact. But the content is the questionable part of it.
There is a background context. The NCSE reported on the fifth measure of its type in 2019 alone. There are “South Dakota’s House Concurrent Resolution 1002 and House Bill 1113, Virginia’s House Joint Resolution 684, and Arizona’s House Bill 2002.”
The Maine Legislative Document 589 (House Paper 433), prefiled in the Maine House of Representatives, could require the state board of education to adopt an ethics code — again, ethics are good — but the code would prevent public school teachers from engaging in “political or ideological indoctrination.”
This would make the topics appearing on platforms of a state political party subject to open questioning and, thus, creating a basis for questioning scientific truths via questioning of party platforms. The big issue is the fact that a large number of the party platforms, at the state level, mention evolution via natural selection and anthropogenic climate change.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/10
The government of British Columbia will be introducing legislation in order to implement an international document relating to the Indigenous rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada.
The document is a declaration entitled the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). This was announced in a recent throne speech.
This would make British Columbia the first province in the country to legislate the endorsement of Canada of the UNDRIP. British Columbia Premier John Horgan stated that he remains unsure as to what this may look like but the legislative councils are working on solutions.
“I know it will be more than symbolic,” Horgan said, “We need to address reconciliation in British Columbia, not just for social justice… but for economic equality for all citizens, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.”
During the campaign trail for Horgan, there was a promise to respect, recognize, and implement the 46 articles of the UNDRIP. Those recognized as human rights for Indigenous peoples around the world. One of which is the right to self-determination. Other peoples have it. Therefore, Indigenous peoples should have it. That’s elementary.
The UN Member States with Indigenous peoples and questions surrounding land and territory should acquire free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) in order to ensure the rights of Indigenous peoples are respected in these areas.
Horgan’s NDP campaigned on a promise to implement UNDRIP, which includes 46 articles meant to recognize the basic human rights of Indigenous Peoples’ along with their rights to self-determination.
Horgan stated, “For too long uncertainty on the land base has led to investment decisions being foregone, and I believe that that hurts Indigenous people and it hurts other British Columbians.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/10
A resolution in South Dakota was brought to the legislature that was urging for the adoption of an ethics code that would be for the public school teachers.
The NCSE reported on the resolution and considered this as potentially adversely affecting the state of science education.
As reported, “House Concurrent Resolution 1002 (PDF), filed on January 25, 2019, by fifteen legislators (all Republicans) and referred to the House Education Committee, is aimed primarily at preventing what it describes as ‘political or ideological indoctrination.’”
While, at the same time, there would be a provision within the proposal, the code, for the prohibition for educators from teaching “any issue that is part of a political party platform at the national, state, or local level.”
Glenn Branch, of the NCSE, stated that it is common for state political parties to take individual stands on evolution and purported other options in the development and speciation of life.
Indeed, this can happen with climate change as well. With the imposition of the possible bill, then the teachers would be prevented from teaching evolution and, in fact, pressure into teaching anti-evolution stances and climate change denialist positions.
The reportage concluded, “A similar resolution, House Joint Resolution 684, is under consideration in Virginia, and a similar bill, House Bill 2002, is under consideration in Arizona.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/10
Female roles in Hollywood and women in the movie and television industry continue to make further strides due, mostly, to their own efforts and activism for recognition, respect, and equal treatment with the men in the industries and on the screen.
Sarah Jessica Parker spoke on feminism and humanism. In the call for better roles for women, she remarked how this is not simply a feminist issue but, in actual fact, a humanist issue, broadly speaking.
Part of this may be due to the stigmatizing of the term “feminist.” Another part may be due to the universalist nature of the implications, in terms of direct representations, of the term “humanist.”
Of course, the terminology of feminism, in its traditionalist meaning, is universalist, as in women and men recognized as social and legal equals. Humanist simply moves this out into the level of the species.
“The actor reiterated this sentiment in a recent interview, explaining that she believes the LGBT+ community must be included when discussing better representation in film,” the Independent reported, “When questioned over whether or not female actors are being offered higher calibre roles than they have done in the past, the actor stated that she doesn’t feel as though she’s ‘equipped to speak to the quality across the board.’”
Parker’s hope is for the quality parts in movies and television will be part of the industry, not simply as a “call-to-arms” for feminists but, in fact, a general movement for the furtherance of humanism.
A humanist is someone who does not identify with the supernatural — not necessarily the rejection of the metaphysical but the supernatural — and emphasizes human reason, compassion, and science, in addition to their inherent limitations as evolved organisms.
Both respect the human rights of men and women. In that, there is a wide overlap in their outlooks.
“People of colour, gays, lesbians, and transgenders who are carving out this space. I’m not spitting in the face or being lazy about what still needs to be done — but I don’t think it’s just women anymore,” Parker said in 2015, in Cosmopolitan.
She further explained how the movement within the television and movie industry could be even more powerful if this was identified with the humanist movement. Others have proclaimed this as, in essence, an evasion tactic with the aforementioned demonization of the term feminist.
While, at the same time, these can both be true positions; the shift into humanist language may be more powerful than the limitations, currently, of the plurality of feminisms on offer.
But this could also lead to a similar problem with a wide range of humanisms on offer as well. As there is a wide range of humanisms, indeed, these can range from the deistic humanists to the atheistic humanists, and never the two meeting.
The world is complicated; people similarly so. Meryl Streep was also on record as identifying as humanist because of being for “nice easy balance,” which does reflect the casual style and flavor of thinking of the actress.
In addition, Susan Sarandon described her view of humanism too. It is not simply about the distinction but more about the overlap and then the appropriateness of the term to social context.
But certainly, these identifications as humanist by prominent women is an important aspect of the work to modernize the views of the humanist world and, as importantly, getting the title out into the mainstream sphere through prominent and respectable actresses.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/10
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
David McGinness: Good Morning, Scott: For the most part, I was raised Catholic because of my mother. My sister and I would attend Sunday school, the family would go to church once a week, we would pray before dinner and occasionally before bed. After my mom passed away, when I was 9-years old, we gradually stopped going to church. Christmas and Easter celebrations were still celebrated, but more so for the fun and family gathering aspects of these holidays (arguably, these aren’t even Catholic traditions anyway). After my family struggled to get over my mom’s passing, my dad made the decision to move us to California to be closer to her our aunt, who became a mother figure to my sister and me. It wasn’t until I grew up in California that my religious identity became important to me, so I dedicated time to research the topic.
In terms of the geographical locations where we lived, we moved around a lot due to the demands of my father’s job. My sister was born in Washington D.C., three years later I was born in Ecuador, three years after that, we moved back to Virginia. We lived in Colombia for approximately fours years, back to Virginia and finally California, where I have lived for over 10 years, and is where I consider home to be.
My father is dominantly of Irish decent and my mother is Guatemalan. We grew up mostly within what I would call the American culture, although since I have experienced different states within the USA, and lived in Latin American, as well as I was partially raised by my Latino family, I believe I am multicultural.
We are English speakers, dad has a Southern accent that my sister and I never adopted. We are semi-decent Spanish speakers as well.
My sister and I went to public schools growing up. My sister graduated in UCSD with a Bachelor Degree in Biology, and I am still working at CSUSM to earn my degree Criminology and Justice studies, as well as going through an Air Force ROTC program at SDSU.
My religious identity, of course, is a non-believer, non-religious, and have chosen to be completely void of it. I am technically a member of state-recognized religion known as the Temple of the Jedi Order, hopefully I don’t need to explain why this doesn’t fall into the same category as the leading religions of today. If someone wished for a full and official title I would say that I am an Antitheist-Agnostic-Atheist.
I probably should break that down a bit; atheist is the title I prefer to go by, but due to a very common misconception/stigma, I find myself usually forced to be more specific. So here it goes: I am not someone that says that I can disprove the existence of god (personally don’t know of any well known atheists that say they can do this), I simply believe that the lack of evidence that there is a God, presented by the religious, isn’t convincing enough for me to buy into. In this way, I am agnostic; I can’t prove God’s non-existence but I don’t think there is anyone that can do so either. My answer is I don’t know and I live my life as if there wasn’t one, thus the “agnostic atheist” portion.
Antitheist, simply enough, means that if hypothetically the theistic doctrine were true, I would wish it was not. In nearly all the leading religions followed today, I find the doctrines/scriptures/texts of the holy books to be not only immoral and disturbing but evil in nature.
And yes, Christopher Hitchens is an indirect mentor to many of my beliefs on religion and faith, may his memory live long.
Jacobsen: What is the personal background in secularism for you? What were some seminal developmental events and realizations in personal life regarding it?
McGinness: Secularism to me is someone that supports the separation of Church and State, I’m pretty sure this is the dictionary definition for it, but it’s as simple as that. I suppose my background in secularism can be summed up by indirectly benefiting from it as a United States citizen, thanks to our longest living, ever-reforming, Constitution. If a citizen gets pulled over by an Officer of the Law, their religion, or lack of it, will not be a question that will would induce arrest, conviction or punishment. If applying for a job or college, religious background won’t determine whether a citizen gets accepted or not. Under no circumstance will (or should) anyone be forced to religious teachings or scrutiny that is backed by governmental support, a concept that is not yet universally accepted, which I think is unfortunate to say the least.
Reading, education, studying the constitution and watching religious debates were what brought me to this understanding: that it is only through Secular government, that a nation can achieve religious freedom. It is through Secularism that we have the greatest rights we earn as Americans and why the nation has prospered.
Jacobsen: You are the president of the SSA at California State University — San Marcos. What tasks and responsibilities come with the position? Why do you pursue this line of volunteering?
McGinness: To be honest, I am very new to the club and it is the first one I had ever joined. The club was pretty much inactive and was one day from being unrecognized by our national organization. Attempting to help, I made a quick and desperate attempt to fill in all the information needed to register (much of which I did not have), and presenting it less than an hour before it was due. Afterwards, I began receiving emails from both from the national organization and representatives from my campus, that insinuated that I was the leading officer of the club. By default, I became the new President of Secular Society Alliance at SSA and have accepted the challenge of getting us started from scratch.
My main goal is to successfully reboot the club and build awareness on campus regarding the club and secularism. I would like to create an environment for likeminded students to gather, discuss their ideals, and create long-lasting friendships. Currently, I am in the process of creating a weekly schedule that includes a weekly event, besides our weekly meeting.
So far, we are doing very well. I have gotten 13 members of my fraternity to join already, have gotten boxes full of SSA merchandise and two posters for free from a request to the national organization, nearly completed the requirements of the university to be recognized and have found a new proactive campus staff member to be the advisor for the club.
Jacobsen: What personal fulfillment comes from it?
McGinness: I suppose leading an organization that strongly stands behind the most important principle of the constitution, that I have taken an Oath to support and defend as an American Airman, is an honor. I truly love this country and the freedoms it has provided my family, friends and myself. Meeting others that feel the same way is something I am looking forward to, as well as learning new perspectives on secularism, atheism, agnosticism, free-thinking, free-inquiry and patriotism. (Scholarship opportunities would be nice as well).
Jacobsen: What are some of the more valuable tips for campus secularist activism?
McGinness: I don’t have the experience, yet, to share some tips. However, the former president gave me the following advice: connect with other clubs that have similar interests, reach out to religious organizations occasionally for respectful discussions, keep activities simple with a clear purpose, try to have fun and most importantly keep your cool when confronted with opposition.
Jacobsen: What have been some historic violations of the principles behind secularism on campus? What have been some successes to combat these violations?
McGinness: I don’t know of any violations due to lack of secularism on my campus. We have a lot of on-campus religious demonstrations that are sponsored from religious organizations, but they are legally manifesting their freedom of speech. My club would have to investigate my university’s history to answer this question properly.
Jacobsen: What are the main areas of need regarding secularists on campus?
McGinness: To combat religious attempts to violate our first amendment and other constitutional rights. In recent years, attempts have been to violate the Anti-Establishment Clause. For example, teaching creationism/intelligent design in public schools, Religious Freedom Restoration Act and establishing a National Day of Prayer. Religious freedom is an outcome of secularism, borne from Thomas Jefferson’s metaphorical wall that separates church and the state. I believe, as a secularist, it should be us that continues to support this wall.
Jacobsen: What is your main concern for secularism on campus moving forward for the next few months, even years?
McGinness: Besides keeping the club that represents secularism running for years to come, making sure that future members feel safe, make sure to let members know they can count on our support of their ideology is being questioned. Maintaining club confidentiality is something I will eventually have to address and plan for soon.
Jacobsen: What are the current biggest threats to secularism on campus?
McGinness: Sorry to say again, I am honestly not too sure. However, since most statistics show that many Americans don’t trust atheists, I believe I will have to build the trust and respect of fellow students.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to secularism on campus?
McGinness: I would say political attempts to fight secularism (breaking down the wall), and religious ridicule/public shaming as to discourage secularism — leading to the silencing of secular voices.
Jacobsen: What are the main social and political activist, and educational, initiatives on campus for secularists?
McGinness: Suggestions are endless, if needed I would recommend researching the teachings from the following people:
· Socrates (Founder of Western Philosophy)
· Marcus Aurelius (Founder of Stoicism)
· George Holyoake (Founder of Secularism)
· Charles Darwin (Biological Emancipator, Founder of Evolution)
· Thomas Huxley (Founder of Agnosticism, nickname: Darwin’s Bulldog)
· Thomas Jefferson (President/Founding Father, Jefferson’s Wall)
· James Madison (President/Founding Father, “Detached Memoranda”)
· Carl Sagan (Cosmologist, TV Show “The Cosmos”)
· Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Astrophysicist, Reboot of “The Cosmos)
· Bill Maher (Host of Politically Incorrect and Documentary; Religulous)
· Christopher Hitchens (Columnist/Author, book: “God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything),
· Richard Dawkins (Oxford Professor in Biology, book: “God Delusion.”)
Jacobsen: What are the main events and topics of group discussions for the alliance on campus?
McGinness: I would be proud of my organization if we managed to get a secular political activist to come to campus to speak on our behalf or on major secular issues that face our nation or the world.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved and maintain the secular student alliance ties on campus?
McGinness: Joining the club would be the first step. From there, learning to be open about secularism, understanding its importance and being prepared to teach others about it. Also, important is having a positive attitude while being active in the club and welcoming disagreement.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
McGinness: Thank you for this opportunity and questions. Glad you reached out.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, David.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/09
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was your family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Roar Johnsen: I am living in Oslo, the capital of Norway, with a population of more than half a million people. I have a degree in marketing and administration, but have worked as a consultant in IT for the last 35 years.
Norway has had a Christian state church system, which only recently separated from the state, so Christianity is dominating in school education and cultural tradition. However, the majority of Norwegians are not really believers, but stay on as church members out of tradition and ceremonial services. My parents were passive church members and freethinkers.
I realized while in college that I was an atheist, and left the church as soon as I could, and my parents followed shortly after. I joined the Norwegian Humanist Association ten years later, and has been an active volunteer since 1979.
Jacobsen: You are board member for IHEU. How does the position work? Why do you pursue this line of work?
Johnsen: The Board of IHEU are responsible for IHEU strategy development and its operation between the annual General Assemblies. Over time, the workload of the Board change quite much.
When we have a very small office staff, or none at all, the Board has to be very active and operational, while when we have an Chief Executive and other staff, as now, the Board can be more strategic and leave most of the operational issues to the staff.
The Board meet in person four times a year, and have four Board meetings by Skype. Some Board members are also participating in working groups or sub-committees.
Jacobsen: What personal fulfillment comes from it?
Johnsen: Apart from the satisfaction of seeing the organization operating successfully and growing over time, it is very stimulating to meet with local activists all over the world.
When we meet at a world Humanist congress, a general assembly or a national event, it is always a positive exchange of experiences, viewpoints and challenges. Even if the conditions are very different from country to country, we share many of the same issues, and can use many of the same strategies to work on those issues.
When we hear that we have been able to help a local organization grow, or someone has been motivated to continue their effort for a Humanist group, that is a very good motivation for me as well.
Jacobsen: How does the general global public view the humanist and ethical culture movements compared to other worldviews and movements?
Johnsen: That is a difficult question! I am not sure that we have something we can call “the general global public view” on these matters. The situation is very different in various places and contexts.
Some non-religious organizations focus on their own members and keeps a non-confrontational style in public. Such organizations are often well respected in society, but does not get big headlines in media and grow slowly.
Other organizations are more confrontational, and create more headlines in media, but may have problems achieving a good working relationship with the authorities and other religious and life stance groups. Overall, I think that non-religious groups are, slowly but surely, gaining more understanding and respect worldwide.
Jacobsen: What are the main areas of need regarding the irreligious in the world?
Johnsen: We must focus on respect for human rights, which is the topic of the Freedom of Thought report that IHEU publish every year. In too many countries the non-religious are discriminated against, partly by governments and partly by extremists not being stopped by governments.
Other issues are religious education in public schools, which should be only in history classes, and promotion of scepticism and the scientific method, which can help people avoid the worst problems of traditional thinking, superstition and new age prophets.
Jacobsen: What has been one of the most touching stories you’ve ever personally witnessed or heard of through IHEU?
Johnsen: Over the years, I have met many activists and many people who have been helped out of situations where they were victims of discrimination based on religion. They all have a story to tell! The Atheist Centre in Vijayawada in India has helped many people, and one of their major projects has been the rehabilitation of an entire village “of thieves” called Stuartpuram.
When they started that work, they realized that they would have to carry on for at least two generations, but started anyway. When we visited the village, they could look back on many years of dedicated and successful work. A touching story, indeed!
Jacobsen: Also, you are an IT consultant, and IT service management project manager. You volunteer for the Norwegian Humanist Association too — and have been its president too. How have these positions helped prepare you for the current and ongoing IHEU work — since 2006?
Johnsen: All people who volunteer for organizations bring with them good practices from their professions, whether they are lawyers, teachers, business people or project managers.
My background has helped me guide organizations in developing their organizational structures, their finances and their work programs. Volunteer organizations need good management too! Having been internationally active since my first World Humanist Congress in Hannover in 1982, it was natural to volunteer for the IHEU Board at the end of my tenure as president for the Norwegian Humanist Association.
Jacobsen: What is your main concern for humanism moving forward into 2017–2020? How about into the next decades?
Johnsen: Humanism will continue to grow, there is no doubt about that. However, not all Humanists or other non-religious people feel the need to be organized in one of our many groups, so organized Humanism will always be smaller than our wider community.
Many of our organizations are having much more to do than their resources will allow, so for many years ahead we will have to focus on the core issues for the non-religious that only we will do.
Jacobsen: What are the biggest threats to irreligious types in the world today?
Johnsen: In most countries, the non-religious does not face any serious personal threats, the problems are more of a systemic kind. However, in some countries, intolerant religious groups and even the authorities themselves, are threatening, intimidating and even hurting people for their lack of religion.
All Humanist groups must participate in helping our less fortunate fellow humanists, as well as taking care of their own local business.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to humanism and ethical culture?
Johnsen: Political instability and continued poverty are the main problems in many societies today, and often affects cultural minorities even more than the majority. It is interesting to see that many studies show that when a population grows from poverty through education to a more secure society, the need for religion is reduced.
And we find that regardless of which religion you come from, when you leave it and find a secular life stance, most people ends up with Humanism.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Johnsen: It is very nice to see the way IHEYO has developed over the last few years, and it is important that we continuously manage to engage with new generations of youth. The sooner they become engaged in Humanist activism, the faster the world will improve!
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Roar, that was interesting.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/08
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is there an embassy or someplace which can help with a visa and travel to at least a more moderate country?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: I basically belong from Pakistan and currently living in Saudi Arabia for my job Purpose. So here we don’t see any forum which can help the people like me to move to a better place.
Jacobsen: What is your story in becoming a non-believer?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: I was a believer till I was under graduation but then I met a friend on Facebook and in no time we became best friends. Slowly he made me to think over the Concept of GOD and Science. I started to analyze the things and my findings made me to accept that I was just obeying someone blindly and in real there is no such power. This was a turning point for me from believer to non-believer.
Jacobsen: How has this impacted personal life?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: It impacted my personal life in a way that I get irritated seeing the religious stuff happening in my surroundings and I find myself unable to utter a word even as I live in society where if I will go to speak for me I will be dumped like anything. My family is believer but they are moderate ones. I am non believer in closet actually.
Jacobsen: Do you keep things inside and do not tell many people?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: Yeah exactly I do same. But there is only one person whom I love more than anything in life; He knows all my feelings and things which I cannot share with anyone else. He is love of my life.
Jacobsen: What would be the likely reaction of the community and religious authorities to your beliefs and sexual orientation?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: If I expose myself to them I will have to face serious consequences which will lead to my death without any doubt as there have been such cases in my society where innocents were killed just due to some doubts of being non-believer of God etc. Sexual orientation also matters a lot in my community as it’s forbidden in our religion to make relation with same sex partner. There are some rules for that which leads to death of victim or life lasting prisoning.
Jacobsen: What is your main message for people in developed countries — mostly Western — that you can’t say publicly with an open identity in your country without being labeled a terrorist or an infidel/apostate and then threatened with death?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: I will give a loud voice to the West that please helps me. I love a boy and without him I feel myself incomplete. I would request them to help me by any mean to get me out of this place into a better one where I can live my life freely with my love and can enjoy the multiple colors of life which is just given one time to us.
Jacobsen: Is there an underground renaissance of critical thinking and moderate religiosity and outright irreligiosity in your home country?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: Yes there are many more like me who are non-believers like me in closet. Some teams also do hidden work to sort out issues and help people like me. But very few of us can approach them as they work so silently that it’s hard to find them.
Jacobsen: What is your main situation now? How can the international community help those in similar circumstances because so many more stories like this are out there?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: My situation is like I was living with my love in Saudi Arabia who belongs from another country. Due to bad situation of work he left Saudi Arabia. Now we both are apart from each other and it’s very difficult to stay far like this. I will want and request international community to help us in a way which brings us together and in a better place where there is freedom of speech and equal rights of choice to all. I believe that love is something which if someone loses, he or she cannot be happy at all. I found my true love and I don’t want to lose. Those who are reading this and they also love someone they will surely understand my feelings and pain of being far from your love.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?
Anonymous Gay Ex-Muslim: I would like to thanks your platform which gave a chance to speak out and convey my feelings to others. I just hope this step will lead me to some success and better life. I convey my thanks to all those who support me and understand me.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the time today.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/07
Is nonconformity required to be humanist in our current society?
Humanism is a philosophy of life that considers the welfare of humankind — rather than the welfare of a supposed God or gods — to be of paramount importance. (American Humanist Association, 2017).
As existing social, political practices draw largely on views that consider the welfare of a belief system to be of paramount importance, there is an intersection in the efforts of humanists and nonconformists. To be humanist is, and has been through time, to be a nonconformist.
Humanists are few. Where are they? They’re scattered. Some may not even know of their individual perspective on the world — as if the distant scent of love on the horizon. You know it’s there, but you can’t quite find it — and then it goes away.
But humanists are around. Why so few humanists, though? I think one variable or factor is time. It hasn’t had time to catch like wildfire as with the Abrahamic religions, for examples.
Also, as with the stated differences with atheists in the past and into the present, the transition is the explicit, open statement, “I am an atheist.” (Translation: ‘I don’t eat babies, give the ‘evil’ eye, or stand at the right side of the Satan in the Left hand path.’)
As a young explicit philosophy, maybe tacit in earlier times, humanism, as with ethical culture, is more open, in the countries which permit it, than probably ever. This openness may differentiate this time more than the eras in which prominent atheists lived such as Voltaire.
That means prior eras of atheists didn’t have the luxury of talking openly. The upcoming generations of atheists have an increasing platform. There are fewer heroes in the movement too, which is another outreach barrier.
The population, generally speaking, is more educated. More education will, statistically, translate into less religiosity (Pew Research Center, 2017). As with the more educated population — correlation is not causation but, the higher the birth rate then the higher the new number of children indoctrinated into the faith.
Richard Dawkins made this point, originally as far as I know. You do not have Muslim or Christian children. You have children of Christian or Muslim parents. That’s where the social and familial privilege of religion exists in another domain.
The ability to label and inculcate the children with the title prior to the child’s critical faculties have been built. That means, more or less, the religious family with this social and familial privilege having a higher birth rate will have more adherents in the long-term because the children of Christian or Muslim, and so on, will be labelled as the religion of their parents — out of tacitly abusive custom and norm, universally asserted as an implicit right.
There will be a decline in the number of global freethinkers, as in religious “none,” over time, as a percent of the global population of the religious grows, at least into 2050 (Pew Research Center, 2015).
The birth rate for the religious, simply even taking into account the Christianity and Islam examples, is higher than the nones. It seems tautological.
If a group’s collective birth rate is below replacement — 2.1 — and the other group’s birth rate is above replacement (and your group’s), then, in the long run, the group’s with the highest birth rate (above replacement rate) will be the ones to grow — with those having the highest birth rate having the highest new numbers per capita (Lipka & McClendon, 2017).
Pressures in nonconformity and being a “prudent” nonconformist involves outward and inward conformity. When reflecting on the outward conformity, there are the clothing someone wears. Their means of self-presentation is one form of conformity.
If in home life, in a place of worship, in the workplace, or in another country, the style of one’s hair, the coloring of the makeup and hair — if any, and the appropriateness of the clothing will be evaluated by others.
Conformity means fitting in; clothing is part of fitting in, or dress writ large, e.g. makeup, hair, and dress. Conformity can be in the spoken and written as well. Is this individual speaking, not necessarily the truths but, the ‘proper’ norms and attitudes as reflected by their speech and writing?
It could be as subtle as the introduction and send-off of an email, down to the specific vocabulary one uses in the aforementioned places, e.g. “in home life, in a place of worship, in the workplace, or in another country.”
Also, the partaking in the social practices of the culture for ease of interaction, security, prevent erroneous assumptions. Inward is a little different in style, but the same in content. One of the strongest forms of inward conformity may be the inculcation of the beliefs of the society in internal speech.
So if someone has completely imbibed the truisms of the culture, whether public, academic, or what have you, then things best not written or spoken may in fact best be unthought or not felt.
Then there are issues of media presence too. How many open atheists are there, for a sub-demographic example? If you take Reverend Gretta Vosper, she has been pilloried and praised in the media. She is an openly atheist reverend in the United Church of Canada, which may hold the title of the most progressive church in Canada.
The most prominent noted prejudice against non-believer comes from social life. So, it becomes harder to measure, but can affect future life success in a realistic sense, e.g. job prospects, social encounters, relationships.
This leaves a quandary for the non-believer, “Do I keep everything private or live honestly?” Tough choice. If the boss has a holy day, or day of observance, on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, then the employees may, more than chance, have to observe this, not in personal but, professional life.
That means the employee is, in a direct sense, engaging in parts of the observance with the employer. So, what does this mean for the limits of nonconformity? Should we accept a certain limit in our nonconformity?
No, but only if we are willing to accept every consequence that follows for the implication that this sacrifice will result in future progress. This is a lot to ask of most people.
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2017)
Yes, if our life is at risk, then personal safety and basic survival of loved ones are important because, at times, lives are at stake for nonconformity, especially for one international second class: the irreligious.
The irreligious are given the death penalty in many countries for rejecting the divinity of holy figures, the authoritativeness of religious authorities, the inerrancy of holy texts, the rightness of asserted morality, and superiority of those upholding the dominant mythological doctrines.
Keeping in mind, that nonconformist views, in a society that shares everything with everyone, that humanists must be ready to defend their sentiments at any point in the future, no matter when or how genuine the sentiment.
What can be done, practically speaking? You, yes you, can use outward conformity and inner nonconformity for activist purposes. In a way, this is a means of the direct and indirect articulation of humanist ideals, through your way of living while remaining practical about the reality of the obstacles set for the secular types.
So, I leave you with a question:
Do we have an obligation to use our privilege to draw attention to the promotion of humanism?
References
American Humanist Association, 2017). What is Humanism?. Retrieved from https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/definition-of-humanism/.
Lipka, M. & McClendon, D. (2017, April 7). Why people with no religion are projected to decline as a share of the world’s population. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/07/why-people-with-no-religion-are-projected-to-decline-as-a-share-of-the-worlds-population/.
Nelson Mandela Foundation. (2017). “I am prepared to die.”. Retrieved from https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/i-am-prepared-to-die.
Pew Research Center. (2017). Educational Distribution. Retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/educational-distribution/.
Pew Research Center. (2015, April 2). The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050. Retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/06
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Cayman Travis Gardner: Family background is where one derives a majority of their childhood moral compass. Depending of where in the country one grew up in, (Bible belt vs. northern states) they will be subjected to a number of cultural and religious factors during childhood. These factors can guild one’s life in terms of faith, or lack thereof, which in turn guild the rest of their opinions and moral reasoning.
Jacobsen: What is the personal background in secularism for you? What were some seminal developmental events and realizations in personal life regarding it?
Gardner: Personally, I was raised in a semi-religious Christian household where there were irregular, but forced, visits to church. Church always gave me anxiety as I have never agreed with the philosophies of the Bible. I considered myself Agnostic for much of my adolescent years, beginning when I began to understand independence from religion and what that really meant for me. But when I got to college I began to discover more about myself, as everyone does, and started to determine my exact ideals and how I wanted to support them. I familiarized myself with some philosophies about religion itself and this led to my declaration as an Atheist as I found problems with Christianity and religion as a whole that I could no longer associate myself with even partially, as I was as an Agnostic.
Jacobsen: You are the president of the University of North Alabama SSA. What tasks and responsibilities come with the position? Why do you pursue this line of volunteering?
Gardner: UNA Secular Student Alliance has opened many doors for myself and others in the group for self-exploration in the means of religion. We hold weekly meeting where we discuss a topic pertaining to religion and faith in our community/university, the area we live in and ultimately in the U.S.A. as a whole. These discussions often open the minds of our group members as well as myself. Alongside weekly meetings we have an assortment of events that we orchestrate on campus to spread awareness of Secularism, have open forums with the public on campus, and attempt to gain new members. For example, one of our events in Spring 2017 was named “Ask An Atheist Day” and we set up a table in one of the most popular buildings on campus all week and allowed any and all to ask our members any questions about Atheism or Secularism. This event is very helpful for bridging the gap between the Atheist and religious communities here at UNA.
I perused the title of President of UNA SSA because I could see no higher duty in my community for opening minds to the Atheist, Agnostic, freethinkers, AND religious individuals alike.
Jacobsen: What personal fulfillment comes from it?
Gardner: Our weekly meetings are also used as a safe place for secular individuals to escape the hyper-religious culture of the south that we live in. I have no better feeling than knowing that my meetings and events help others and myself in this fashion.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more valuable tips for campus secularist activism?
Gardner: Specifically in the south, we as Secularists and Atheists are not the most liked individuals on campus. However in the growing culture of acceptance of LGBT groups and other social “outliers”, our Secular group is growing more accepted by the day. In contrary to this, some believe that by UNA SSA holding an event such as “Ask An Atheist Day” in such a public space, we are attempting to infringe on their religious freedom or in some way are attacking their religion. While of course this is not true, it is important to understand as a group that holds events such as these that some individuals believe this and you may be on the receiving end of some hate. Do not be discouraged by this, our organization exists in part to spread awareness of Secularism and promote friendly discourse between differing opinions, thus resulting in coexisting peacefully.
Jacobsen: What have been some historic violations of the principles behind secularism on campus? What have been some successes to combat these violations?
Gardner: Generally speaking, UNA is a Christian majority campus where many organizations and groups are united under the umbrella of faith. There have been times where a Christian organization has set up their advertising tent in front of the residence halls. This is a breach of secularism on campus because the individuals who live on campus are subjected to experience their attempts to spread faith as they see it, making them unable to avoid the tent since they have to walk by it to return to their dorm. There has been relative success with this issue as the organizations have not done such advertising since.
Jacobsen: What are the main areas of need regarding secularists on campus?
Gardner: I believe the main requirement for Secularists on campus is a space to feel welcome. Having a group of friends or individuals where they can feel safe to not “hold their tongue” so to speak. As anyone does, we too desire a place to feel safe and welcomed.
Jacobsen: What is your main concern for secularism on campus moving forward for the next few months, even years?
Gardner: Specifically here at UNA, my worry is the cessation of having an SSA on campus after I leave in a couple of years. Our group numbers hover around 10–15 active members. Before I became the President there was a crisis within UNA SSA and the group’s continuation was threatened by the absence of a President. Thus, I became the President and have done my best to grow the group while also providing a successful organization for our current members. I am happy to say that we have done a great job so far with this goal!
Jacobsen: What are the current biggest threats to secularism on campus?
Gardner: The biggest, most current threat to secularism on campus is stigma. The stigma surrounding Atheism both historically and currently, though diminished, causes many people to assume our organization has ill-intentions. We are here to provide a healthy outlet for our members as well as spread awareness through de-stigmatization.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to secularism on campus?
Gardner: Stigma once again. The ideas of a few radiate through friend and social groups who think alike, thus propagating stigma.
Jacobsen: What are the main social and political activist, and educational, initiatives on campus for secularists?
Gardner: Sadly, the UNA Secular Student Alliance is the only organization providing for Secularists in campus currently. In the future, I would like to see a growth in either number of groups or size of the UNA SSA to better help those who are possibly questioning their faith.
Jacobsen: What are the main events and topics of group discussions for the alliance on campus?
Gardner: Our events often focus on educating the public by spreading awareness. Our discussions often relate to injustices among social groups or individuals based upon their defining traits (gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.) and how those injustices differ among the Secular crowd, and the religious crowd.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved and maintain the secular student alliance ties on campus?
Gardner: Through attending meetings and participating in events individuals can help UNA Secular Student Alliance with our mission as well as become a part of a welcoming group on campus.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Gardner: It is truly a new world, one where acceptance of groups or ideas that are not shared among the majority populous is growing. However, even though acceptance is growing, this does not mean our work is done. Many individuals emerging from their childhood, finding adolescence and/or emerging from their adolescence finding adulthood are searching for answers. We are able to help these individuals in their own pursuit of defining their faith, or the lack there of.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Cayman.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/06
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: George Thindwa recommended you. I interviewed him about the irreligious community in Malawi. You noted that no one has done more for the formal irreligious movement than George.
So, in light of the mutual respect and acknowledgment of contributions to Malawi’s non-religious community, I want to start with the background to provide a framework for everyone.
Did family background influence religious or non-religious perspective? If so, how? Can you recall some pivotal moments?
Dr. Paul Munyenyembe: I grew up with my paternal grandparents who were very religious. But they were too old to enforce church attendance for me. So, I only attended church if and when I wanted. I cannot say that at that time I was irreligious. I started seriously questioning religion when I was in boarding secondary school.
I could not find answers to the many questions I had about religion. So, I completely lost my faith when I was still in secondary school. So, the short answer to your question is that my family background did not really influence my non-religious perspective.
Jacobsen: Since you have seen the developments in Malawi for some time, from youth to the present, what bigger developments took place in Malawi?
Munyenyembe: In my view, the bigger developments in Malawi are that we now have an organized irreligious movement. It’s also important to note that Malawian society, in general, has accepted the existence of the non-religious in the country.
We often participate in discussions about paranormal issues. We have been able to educate society about the dangers of superstitious beliefs in violating human rights. We have a dedicated column in the Sunday Times newspaper titled “Science and critical thinking”.
Many Malawians, especially the youth, are now not afraid to come out as non-religious.
Jacobsen: How have these aforementioned bigger developments influenced the religious landscape of the country, the demographics of the nation?
Munyenyembe: While the population as a whole is predominantly religious, our views and activities have led some religious people to start questioning their beliefs. The youth are becoming particularly sceptical of religious claims.
We are confident that the non-religious community will continue to grow in numbers. Of course, we are under no illusion that religion in Malawi will disappear anytime soon.
Jacobsen: Historically, what helps the formal irreligious movement in Malawi? What hinders attempts at it?
Munyenyembe: What has been very helpful to the formal irreligious movement in Malawi has been the advent of the internet and social media. Over the past few years, it has been easy for members of our movement to instantly share views and news. Right now we have a very active Whatsapp group. We have also created a newsletter which can be read online.
In spite of these positives, our movement is facing many challenges. Malawi is one of the most religious countries in the world. It’s also one of the poorest. And so religious organizations, especially Pentecostal churches, exploit people’s poverty by promising wealth and a lot of other incredible benefits offered by them.
In this way, people flock to these churches for material gains. The more traditional churches offer heavenly rewards which are very attractive to the poor. The other problem is that the education system in Malawi does not promote critical thinking. As a result, students memorise facts and do not question ingrained religious beliefs.
Jacobsen: What authors and organizations from Malawi should the international community, such as countries like Canada, look to help out in the movement towards moderation of the bad parts of formal religion and the development of the community for those whom religion does not feel like the right life path?
Munyenyembe: The Association for Secular Humanism is the only atheist organization in the country at the moment. It needs help in different forms for the smooth running of its activities.
There are other organizations that champion secular views and human rights. Some of these are: Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, Centre for Development of People, and Malawi Writers Union.
Jacobsen: What have been successes and honest failures in the non-religious movements in Malawi?
Munyenyembe: The successes of the non-religious movement in Malawi are numerous. They include the growth of the movement’s membership from a handful to hundreds of members today; the eradication of witchcraft-based violence and human rights abuses; organization and participation in debates on superstitious beliefs and their dangers; participation in international fora, such as the World Humanist Congress; increased visibility of the movement in electronic and print media; and others.
One of the challenges we have been facing is that of fund-raising in an overwhelmingly religious environment. As a result, we have not been able to implement some activities. Due to this same constraint, it has been difficult to organize national conferences.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved other than simply reading and becoming more informed?
Munyenyembe: We have plans to establish humanist educational institutions and also to involve the youth in sexual and reproductive health. We are also promoting human rights activism, especially the rights of sexual minorities. We are also promoting activism in transformational leadership at the community level. In future, we have plans to introduce youth camps.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. Munyenyembe.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/06
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Kaeleigh Pontif: I was born and raised in Houma, Louisiana. As you can imagine, growing up in the southern bible belt has a certain set of challenges. The south takes cultural preservation very seriously, despite how archaic some of the traditions may be.
For the first 16 years of my life I practiced as a Jehovah’s Witness. Growing up, bible study always came before school work. We attended the kingdom hall two or three times a week, and frequently preached door to door. I graduated from H.L. Bourgeois High School in 2011, and moved to Marysville, California in 2013.
I will graduate from Yuba College this December, and plan to attend Sacramento State University in the spring of 2018 where I will study environmental science.
Jacobsen: What is the personal background in secularism for you? What were some seminal developmental events and realizations in personal life regarding it?
Pontif: There were many times in my religious upbringing where I attempted to ask questions to those teaching me. I was always told I was concerned about the wrong things, or that I simply had to pray on it.
Between the ages of 15–18, there were many arguments with my family concerning my religious position. I began to feel like the Jehovah’s Witness religion had practices that I simply did not agree with or wish to participate in.
It became harder to get me to attend. I so badly wanted to find the right religion since I had doubts about my own, I joined numerous Christian clubs at my high school in hopes of finding the right path. As I’m sure it has begun for many atheists, at some point you realize things just don’t make sense.
With all the cruelty and suffering in the world, I could no longer believe in an all knowing and loving god. I also noticed the hypocrisy among many of the religious, and numerous biblical contradictions. I denounced religion and deism altogether and stopped attending church.
I felt depressed due to the lack of community that I once had with church and family. I started to pay attention and learn about all of the atrocities committed in the name of god and religion, and wanted nothing to do with doctrine.
In Houma, where I spent the majority of my life, I knew of no such meetup groups where people discussed philosophy, religion, humanism, etc. I felt like that area had no opportunities for me, be it personal or professional, so I decided to move to California.
After a couple months of living in Marysville, I did a quick google search for atheist groups in the area and found the group Sac FANS on meetup.com. Within this group, there was an atheist book club which I attended regularly, Sunday Assembly, a secular congregation, opportunities to do volunteer work in the secular community, and so much more.
I met some of the best people I know through this group and have had many rewarding experiences because of it.
Jacobsen: You are the president of the Yuba Community College SSA. What tasks and responsibilities come with the position? Why do you pursue this line of volunteering?
Pontif: That’s right, I am the president of the Yuba College Secular Student Alliance, I founded the group in January 2017. Because this is the first semester we’ve existed at Yuba, I’ve had a little more responsibility than one typically would.
I organize and preside over meetings, activities, and events, maintain our web presence, book speakers, coordinate volunteer and service work, and other fun outings for the group. I choose to pursue this line of volunteering because I find it to be extremely necessary.
Unfortunately, many people don’t realize how participating in certain religious practices and beliefs can be harmful to others. One’s religious beliefs might cause them to vote in favour of anti LGBTQ rights, against reproductive healthcare, against certain environmental policies, etc.
When I start to tell people about the SSA, the first question I usually get is, “What does secular mean?”. Because young adults are oblivious to the most fundamental word concerning our government, is just a reminder that I have lots of work ahead of me.
Jacobsen: What personal fulfillment comes from it?
Pontif: In the short amount of time that I have been an officer with the SSA, I have had several rewarding experiences and the opportunity to meet some truly amazing people. Our group has had some great discussions about women’s rights, indoctrination, secularism in the government, etc.
All of these discussions left attendees with a better understanding of the topic and a desire to do something about the issues. Because I recognize the injustice reflected by certain religious practices, I feel that I have a responsibility to shed light on them and do something about it.
When I lobby for secular values, volunteer at outreach events, I get a huge sense of fulfilment in knowing that I served my community in a way that benefits everyone. I believe that when I do better, we do better.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more valuable tips for campus secularist activism?
Pontif: Great question, I’m still picking up on a few tips myself. So far, I’ve learned that the most useful form for secular activism is simply talking to people. When I learn that a student is intimidated by the word secular, despite knowing what it means, I’m able to open up a conversation and help them better understand how everyone benefits from secularism, not only nonbelievers.
As long as people are scared to initiate conversations regarding secularism, it will always be a taboo. I encourage others to discuss religion and humanism on campus and generate those discussions that can lead people in the more enlightened direction.
I often remind people that we were not here to condemn religion, but rather discuss it and its effects on social structures like government and education.
Jacobsen: What have been some historic violations of the principles behind secularism on campus? What have been some successes to combat these violations?
Pontif: Personally, I haven’t experienced any major violations of secular principles on campus however, there have been a couple of minor issues Last year I had a professor who spent valuable class time preaching the Mormon religion.
I’m fully aware of academic freedom and a professor’s right to teach the class as he/she sees fit however, this was without a doubt a violation of those privileges. On more than one occasion I kindly asked him to discuss this matter before or after class time with anyone who may be interested.
Despite my attempts, he continued to preach about flying serpents, Jesus Christ visiting the Americas, evidence of the earth being 6,000 years old, and so on. I decided to contact an associate at the California Community College Chancellors Office to assist me with a formal complaint to the dean.
Although he continued preaching the following semester, I knew I had an obligation to speak up for secular values like the separation of church and state. Because many academics feel like they can utilize a public classroom to impose their religious beliefs on others, this is an ongoing issue, and I can only hope that students defend themselves and their rights.
Jacobsen: What are the main areas of need regarding secularists on campus?
Pontif: I feel like secularists are needed on campus to erase the stigma that we are not or cannot be kind, caring, contributing members of society. Student groups like SSA, are a way to reach out to students who may have questions about religion or non-belief.
Many campuses have Christian or Muslim clubs and we need secular clubs to remind people that we are a diverse nation. Many secular groups like to show people that we do good for goodness’ sake, not in hopes of being rewarded or in fear of being punished.
Jacobsen: What is your main concern for secularism on campus moving forward for the next few months, even years?
Pontif: I suppose my biggest concern is student involvement. Yuba Community College is rather small and is located in a rural area, so we didn’t expect to rally or anything.
Many students are focused on their studies and don’t make much time for extracurricular activities. I’d like students to know that they can focus on school work and still advocate for secular values. If we don’t do it, who will?
Jacobsen: What are the current biggest threats to secularism on campus?
Pontif: Frankly, I don’t see many threats to secularism on campus. I think if you have students who are willing to gather around the cause, you’re good to go!
There can be some push-back from administrators or other students, but legally you have the right to make your voice heard. Groups might deal with their posters being defaced or something of that nature, but I think that makes what we do even more necessary.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to secularism on campus?
Pontif: As long as people are ignorant to what secularism is, there may always be threats against the movement. The current political landscape is trying to impose barriers for secularists, but I think we will ultimately prevail.
Jacobsen: What are the main social and political activist, and educational, initiatives on campus for secularists?
Pontif: All students should get involved with social, political, or educational activism. I think it is very important for people to learn about the resources available to better their overall experience.
Other means of secular activism have led me to become involved with the SSA. I know that having these groups on campus can open many doors for student involvement, not just on campus, but in the community as well.
Jacobsen: What are the main events and topics of group discussions for the alliance on campus?
Pontif: Our weekly meetings are centered around discussion topics such as, women and religion, indoctrination, and LGBTQ rights. Throughout the semester we managed to get two phenomenal guest speakers to come out.
In January, we hosted Mandisa Thomas, president and founder of Black Nonbelievers Inc., She spoke about religion in the black community and certain issues associated with that such as slave mentality, and socioeconomic setbacks.
In May, we were honored to have president of California Freethought Day, David Diskin, speak to us about better understanding atheism and its history.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved and maintain the secular student alliance ties on campus?
Pontif: First, you have to make your group known and let people know that such a group even exists. To do so, I would suggest frequently putting flyers around campus letting people know when are where the meetings are held.
At the end of the semester, many people told me they would’ve loved to join our group, but hadn’t heard of it. Communicating with your school’s club organizing office can help with promotion and web presence.
Do something fun with your group, have a pizza party and feature a debate or movie. Engage in an activity with another club on campus, participate in a campus cleanup or fundraising event. Another way to maintain ties on campus, is to have an interfaith activity or event.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Pontif: Being a positive force in the community allowed me to channel my passion for humanism into real life actions, rather than into prayers that never get answered. Don’t just sit back in frustration of all the absurdity and inequality in the world, do something about it!
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Kaeleigh.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/05
What’s your own story? How did you get into the recovery business?
To be honest, in 1994, it started out as simply a part-time job. I had a full-time job, but my former boss was hired by SMART Recovery as SMART’s Executive Director, and I would work about 4–6 hours/week trying to help get the organisation off the ground. It wasn’t long before we learned there weren’t ample funds to pay his salary, so he departed. I thought SMART was a great organisation, so I stayed on. I transitioned to full-time and accepted the role of Executive Director in 2005. And here I am 22+ years later.
SMART Recovery (Self-Management and Recovery Training), is based on self-empowerment and science-based processes to assist with addiction coping and recovery. What are the main steps to this system of recovery?
As you correctly note, SMART is a self-empowering, science-based program. As opposed to steps, SMART Recovery uses a 4-Point Program®:
Point 1: Building and Maintaining Motivation
Point 2: Coping with Urges
Point 3: Managing Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviours
Point 4: Living a Balanced Life
Each of the 4-Points has tools and techniques that our participants use to overcome their addictive behaviour(s). The tools are terrific — they’re great for recovery, but many of them are truly life skills that can be used time and again through life even once someone has overcome their addiction.
As well, it caters to believers and non-believers alike, and does not require belief in a higher power. How does this differ from some other programs?
You’re exactly right — SMART Recovery doesn’t require a belief in a higher power. That’s not to say people who are believers can’t combine their faith with the SMART program — we have people who have success with SMART and do just that. But our meetings and program don’t have a spiritual component. I think everyone reading this interview is familiar with AA and other 12-step programs, which rely on a belief in a higher power. Such programs work for them, and the same can be said for people using SMART Recovery, LifeRing, Women for Sobriety and others that have been offered for many years. We all offer proven programs, but they won’t all appeal to every individual seeking recovery. There are many pathways to recovery, SMART being a great choice for many. We believe that it’s important for people seeking a recovery program to learn about all of the available pathways, and one (or, in some cases, a combination) that works for them.
What is the main line of evidence in support of the SMART Recovery program?
SMART is based on six principles that underlie proven and effective treatment programs:
Self-empowerment — people take control of their recovery and assume responsibility for its success.
Mutual support — recovery works best when the challenges and successes are shared with others, typically at meetings. People learn that recovery is possible by observing and following the example of others in the group.
Motivation — building and maintaining motivation is the first point in SMART’s 4-Point Program®. The program uses methods from Motivational Interviewing, a standard practice in more than 90 percent of addiction treatment programs today.
Coping with urges — the second point in the program helps people identify all the triggers to use and how to resist them. Over a short time, they learn that urges grow less intense and occur less often.
Managing thoughts, feelings and behaviours — point three teaches how to calm extreme anxiety and avoid relapses by growing aware of the beliefs that control feelings and acts. This concept is drawn from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, also used by more than 90 percent of treatment programs.
Leading a balanced life — the fourth point helps secure recovery through the creation of a new lifestyle to replace the one associated with addiction.
The truest measure of effectiveness is its widespread and growing use since the program was founded in 1994. SMART currently hosts 2,200 weekly meetings in 19 countries, including 30 online gatherings that people anywhere in the world with an internet link can attend.
In addition, numerous recovery professionals are incorporating SMART into their practices and launching meetings. In 2016, professionals comprised 61 percent of the 2,500 people who signed up for SMART’s facilitator training course.
Leading medical and government authorities worldwide endorse SMART for recovery support in best practice and quality care guidelines for people seeking to overcome addictions.
How does the program differ in the outcomes for its treated recovering addict sub-population from the general untreated recovering addict (control) sub-population?
As much as this question is debated, the honest answer is that it is difficult to scientifically measure outcomes for people using mutual support models such as SMART Recovery and 12-step programs. Addiction scientists have tried but meta-analyses of the research on both programs have been inconclusive. These are not treatment programs in which attendance can be easily measured and tracked. Attendance is anonymous. Large numbers of participants are coerced to attend meetings, especially 12-step programs. As a result, it is extremely difficult to conduct randomised controlled trials measuring the effectiveness of such programs.
How is this more effective than other forms of recovery? Also, what are the other kinds of — ineffective — addiction recovery programs/systems?
There are numerous potential pathways to recovery, including ones that use no treatment or recovery support program at all. I don’t feel comfortable suggesting that SMART is more effective than other forms. That’s why part of SMART’s mission statement reads “To support the availability of choices in recovery”.
I’ve had the privilege of witnessing many people’s lives change when using the SMART program. I also know that it won’t appeal to all people seeking a recovery support group. The same is true for AA, Women for Sobriety, LifeRing, etc. We are all going to attract and help people, but we’ll have the most success when people know their options and select the one that best meets their beliefs and needs. Some people will benefit by combining SMART Recovery and inpatient or outpatient therapy. Others find combining mutual-support meetings helpful. Some find becoming involved with art or yoga/meditation helpful. Recovery can take on many forms and we feel individuals should determine a program that will be most helpful to them.
Now, you are the executive director of the SMART Recovery. What tasks and responsibilities come with being the executive director?
That’s an interesting question. I have a heart for people — I love to see people succeed, and I love being in communication with our volunteers and the people who come to SMART Recovery for help. I’ll admit that, as the organisation has grown, there are duties and responsibilities that now require more of my time — fiscal responsibilities, organisational development responsibilities, helping to ensure the organisation stays vibrant and continues to grow and keep up with technology, etc. We have a small staff because we rely so much on volunteers, so it’s challenging to keep all of the plates spinning. But we have amazing volunteers and staff, which makes my job both challenging and rewarding!
If I were a recovery addict, and if I came to SMART Recovery, how would I be introduced to SMART Recovery?
Our 2016 survey concludes that nearly 50% of our participants find SMART Recovery via an online search. Over 20% were introduced to SMART while in a treatment program, and nearly 20% were referred by a counsellor or therapist. Interestingly, more than 10% found SMART when it was recommended by a friend or family member. Once they find us, we encourage them to attend a face-to-face meeting (if there’s one in their area) or to become involved in our online community, which has 30 online meetings per week, highly active message board forums and a 24/7 chat room.
What would be my typical struggles on the path to recovery? What would be the chances of recovery?
I believe that the typical struggles encountered by anyone in recovery are covered within our 4-Point Program®:
- Building and Maintaining Motivation — Nobody will change based on someone else wanting them to change. Each individual needs to identify motivating factors that will help see them through their recovery process. (SMART tool examples include: Cost/Benefit Analysis and Hierarchy of Values.)
- Coping with urges — You won’t give up an addictive behaviour without experiencing urges, so having coping mechanisms in place is key to one’s recovery. (Tool examples include: Urge log and ABCs of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy.)
- Managing thoughts, feelings and behaviours — As someone is going through recovery, there are all sorts of opportunities to reflect on one’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and to assess which are helpful, unhelpful and need to be changed. (Tool examples include: ABCs of REBT for emotional upsets and Role-playing.)
- Leading a balanced life — So often the drug or behaviour has really taken over an individual’s life. Everything had revolved around time spent planning for or involved in the addictive behaviour. Returning to a balanced life can be a challenge. (Tool examples include: Lifestyle Balance Pie Chart and Vital Absorbing Creative Interests — finding helpful activities to replace the former unhealthy/unhelpful activities.)
As far as chances of recovery, I’m sure that there are statistics out there somewhere regarding the number of people who succeed in recovery. From my perspective, if people are truly motivated, and are able to achieve the 4-point program noted above, the likelihood of success is great. And a reminder that people’s personal recovery journeys vary, so for some, combining SMART Recovery and other groups or activities may increase the chances of achieving recovery for that individual.
Are there appropriate supports for the recovering addicts as they transition back into normal life and as they have entered into a new non-addicted lifestyle?
We choose not to use the term “addict” or apply labels to participants. We help people who are struggling with addictive behaviours. We offer meetings and online support for as long as the individual deems them to be useful. As far as other supports, i.e., job-skills, transitional housing, etc., we leave that to other organisations and agencies. Our goal and mission is to provide mutual support meetings that encourage cross-talk, allow people to learn the SMART tools and techniques, and allow participants to learn from one another’s experiences — both success and failures.
What are some of the main social and communal services of the SMART Recovery, if any?
Social activities vary from meeting to meeting. Some meetings allow for a half-hour social gathering at the end of the meeting. Others have some planned activities — a bowling night, a recovery walk during Recovery Month, etc. I’ve always found it interesting how much of a community spirit there is within our online activities. We have people participating from all over the world, and most have never met the others with whom they’re in online meetings, posting on the message boards, or chatting within the chat room. But they really are a cohesive group that find inspiration and help from one another.
What is the scope and scale of the SMART Recovery? Who are some of its most unexpected allies?
Growth and awareness of SMART Recovery continues to increase with more than 1,000 new meetings launched in the past three years. (I’ll share a growth chart which makes it easier to grasp, if you’d like to include it.) And our international expansion is also continuing, even to the point of us creating a new SMART Recovery International organisation, with what was known as Alcohol & Drug Abuse Self-Help Network, Inc., d.b.a. SMART Recovery, soon to become SMART Recovery USA. And, of course, online activities know no boundaries and our online registrations continue to grow each year.
I, of course, believe everyone should be an ally of SMART, with none being unexpected (laughs). We have volunteers who are peers, professionals, and a growing number of non-peer/non-professionals. Mums and Dads who have children who have struggled with an addiction and they feel a need to provide choice in mutual support meetings, so they train and start meetings. We have a nice partnership with other non-12-step groups including Women for Sobriety (WFS) and LifeRing. We have a growing number of treatment centres that are ensuring that SMART Recovery meetings are available to their clients. SMART was recognised by President Obama and Michael Botticelli during our 20th anniversary celebration and conference in 2014. I think even some of the “hard core” 12-step people are beginning to realise that there truly are multiple pathways to recovery, and the importance of people having choice. This isn’t a competition — there are plenty of people in need with different backgrounds and beliefs and they need choices like AA, WFS, LifeRing and SMART Recovery.
With the current Trump Administration, do you see new threats to the practice of science-based and self-empowering recovery programs?
It’s not yet clear to me if or how the new administration will impact addiction in the US. SMART Recovery will carry on with our message and program regardless of the level of support from the administration.
What have been the largest activist and educational initiatives provided by SMART Recovery?
All of SMART’s activism and education has been devoted to creating the best possible recovery support program, including meetings and educational materials, for the millions of people worldwide who need help overcoming additions. We have focused intensely on educating the volunteers who facilitate our meetings, developing a rigorous 30-plus hour training program. We are now training 2,500 people a year. Our facilitators are hosting well over than 100,000 meetings a year in countries from Australia to Canada to the UK and Uzbekistan, including more than 1,200 in the US alone.
SMART hosts meetings in correctional institutions and Veterans Administration medical centres. Since 2010, we’ve held meetings for the family members and friends of people with loved ones suffering from addiction. Our Family & Friends program is based on the highly effective model known as Community Reinforcement and Family Training or CRAFT.
As much as we’d like to engage in activism in the conventional sense of term, our time and energy is best spent focusing on our mission.
How can people get involved with the SMART Recovery, even donate to them?
I’d suggest a wander through our extensive website at www.smartrecovery.org. (Our new site will debut soon!) If you’d benefit from using the program, there’s lots of information about the program and tools, as well as a meeting list, access to our online activities, etc. If you want to serve your community by starting a SMART meeting, you can visit our training page. If you’d like to donate to SMART, you can visit https://secure.processdonation.org/smartrecovery/. (Note, that link will likely change with our new site, but a visit to www.smartrecovery.org will connect you to a donation button.)
Any closing thoughts or feelings based on the discussion today?
We’re always so grateful for the opportunity to help acquaint people with our 4-Point Program and tools, and I want to thank you for providing us with this opportunity to do so. I want to encourage anyone who is struggling with an addiction to visit www.smartrecovery.org and see what SMART can offer you. If you have a loved one struggling, our Family & Friends program is an amazing resource. If you’re involved in serving people with addictions in a treatment setting, or court, or government agency, I encourage you to become familiar with SMART Recovery to recommend it to your clients and constituents.
Thank you for your time, Shari.
Thank you again for this opportunity!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/04
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have an association with SMART Recovery. What is SMART Recovery? What is your relation with it as an entity?
Chris Debo: I am a meeting facilitator with SMART Recovery. I facilitate a weekly meeting in Northern California. SMART Recovery is a science-based recovery program that provides proven, practical tools and techniques for dealing with the challenges a life in recovery presents. It is based on the psychological modalities of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), as well as other modalities.
Jacobsen: Why is the organization important?
Debo: SMART Recovery is important for a number of reasons. It brings the teachings of Albert Ellis and others to people in recovery. It provides a secular, proven approach to managing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in order to improve one’s outlook on life, reducing the need to resort to maladaptive behaviors and substance use for “relief” from the stressors of life.
Jacobsen: What are some notable and touching experiences in working with them?
Debo: Well, in being a meeting facilitator, I’ve had some notable experiences with attendees. I’ve had people thank me for providing them with useful tools to deal with difficult situations. These are tools that we don’t learn growing up in this society.
I recall in particular one woman who thanked me for helping her to realize how her harmful eating habits are a learned behavior, a way to cope, and that she could replace them with healthy alternatives. I’ve also witnessed people in meetings finally “get it,” understand what their addictive substance or behavior is for them: a coping mechanism. The penny drops and a look of understanding beams from their faces. Those types of events are extremely gratifying.
Jacobsen: How does your own background tie into them? What lead you to SMART Recovery, and the absolutely wonderful and magnanimous Shari Allwood?
Debo: I myself suffered from many years of substance abuse, primarily alcohol. Booze was my only mechanism for coping with life, good and bad. It worked every single time in a predictable way. Finally I realized that I needed to make a complete change in my life. Having had little success with a traditional 12-Step approach, I searched online for alternatives to traditional 12-Step programs and came across SMART Recovery. This discovery changed my life.
After being sober for a time, I decided that I should give back in some way to the community, so I took SMART Recovery’s Facilitator Training and became a facilitator. This experience has been incredibly gratifying for me. I could help others see that there is a way out of their addictive, and destructive, behaviors, while strengthening my own knowledge and use of SMART Recovery’s program.
Jacobsen: With your current position (if applicable, what is it…), what are your tasks and responsibilities?
Debo: At the moment, I am training to start a new career. At 45, it is a challenge. Overall, though, my goal in life is to achieve healthy balance across all aspects of life. I have a chance to do this now that I am solidly in recovery. SMART also has shown me how to prioritize long-term benefits over short-term satisfactions.
Jacobsen: How does a science-based and non-faith-based — with or without religion as a component — treatment work compared to faith, religiously oriented, treatments?
Debo: This program offers practical solutions. Change your thoughts to change your emotions. Take responsibility for your future. Take charge and own your recovery and your life. Don’t rely solely on others or a “higher power” to save you from yourself. Live for today and the future, not in the past. I’ve never seen faith save someone from addictive behavior, at least not in the long run.
Having had experience with AA, I can tell you that these programs are based on taking your power away from you, taking your responsibility away from you. You are forced to look backward at all your negative behavior and consequences in order to scare you from repeating those mistakes. It is based in shame. You don’t learn anything practical to help you in the day-to-day. Your higher power will save you. Nope. I stayed sober for five years, but I was miserable every single day. With SMART Recovery, I can be content and occasionally even happy. Hah.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?
Debo: I would not be living the life I am living without SMART Recovery. I will be forever grateful to the organization for helping me to learn what I need to know to live a healthy and fulfilling life.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Chris.
Debo: My pleasure! Thank you for giving more exposure to SMART Recovery!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/03
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was family and surrounding culture like growing up? I know memories can fade and become distorted. However, there are themes, which can help set the groundwork for our discussion here today.
Jamie De Rosario Martinez: I was a product of a broken family, eldest of 4 siblings, I was a battered child being beaten from small to no reasons at all getting punishments even if it was not my fault, I have a womanizer and a gambler dad and a Martyr mother and community full of Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) members, all my relatives from my mother side are INC members and so do we. I was forced to stop from school at the age of 14 so I could work and bring my siblings to school since my father doesn’t want to take that responsibility I started working as an entertainer in Japan at the age of 15 using fake passport etc. to look like 19yo. To earn money only to be confiscated by my father and leave me with only 500 Pesos ($10) this routine continued until my father permanently left us to go with other women.
Jacobsen: When did you begin to question God?
Jamie: when I was 16 I was excommunicated from INC and I found out that my cousin reported to INC that I was working as an entertainer in Japan. And they judged me without even asking my side they accused me of doing things that are against the will of their god they accused me of selling my flesh to Japanese men which made me really mad and made me realize that they are so judgmental, I worked abroad to be able to send food to my family and to be able to send my siblings to school.
Jacobsen: How did you find HAPI? What is its main goal? Why is it important to build irreligious communities, especially in hyper-religious countries?
Jamie: I was in a Reproductive health law Rally with a friend in Baguio when I met this group of young guys from HAPI they were so kind and gentlemen, during lunch time our leader told us to go back to the bus and have lunch but me and my friend went to the cr first and when we get back to the bus there are no more pack lunch left for us to eat having only enough money to go back home me and my friend went out the bust to by biscuits while we are falling in line some HAPI members saw us and asked if we already had our lunch and we said No because there are no more lunch for us in our bus, surprisingly they offered me and my friend a free lunch it was like WOW how kind these guys are a total stranger like us then I asked them do HAPI has FB page or group that I could join and the rest is history
HAPIs main goal for me is to spread humanity to all regardless of beneficiaries’ religion especially kids they promote humanity and critical thinking based on my personal observation.
Currently, I am not yet aware of the importance of building Irreligious community as I myself I still under transformation from religious to nonreligious.
Jacobsen: What are some of your more notable initiatives with HAPI in the past and the present?
Jamie: I have a monthly feeding of 200 kids through HAPI, Self Sufficient because of the HAPI Farm, I also have HAPI Merchandise for fundraising.
Jacobsen: How are things for the religiously unaffiliated, socially and legally, and politically, in the Philippines?
Jamie: socially; still need to hide due to stigma as a non-believer.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Jamie.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/02
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Wade King: I grew up in Greenwood, South Carolina, a medium-sized town surrounded by even smaller towns. Most of my family came from more rural areas of the country, such as Estes Park, Colorado. Most would say my family is the typical rural, white, southern, Christian family. As far as religion goes, my family practiced an old-school form of Southern Baptism in the in the 1990s and 2000s. However, my immediate family broke away due to issues such as gay marriage and race, and joined more laid-back churches such as NewSpring. I kept away from church most of my life, using my education as an excuse. It helped in the long run, as I became the first in my family to go to a 4-year university.
Jacobsen: What is the personal background in secularism for you? What were some seminal developmental events and realizations in personal life regarding it?
King: I started becoming skeptical at around the age of seven, stopped going to church by middle school, and became an agnostic atheist in high school. My schools and community lacked any sort of secular community, so most of my experiences were internal. The whole process began due to my introduction into social issues and communities that these issues affected. By elementary and middle school, I was well aware of LGBT+ issues, abortion, secularism in schools, etc. High school science classes really cemented my beliefs.
Jacobsen: You are the president of the SSA of Clemson. What tasks and responsibilities come with the position? Why do you pursue this line of volunteering?
King: As president of SSAC, I perform most, if not all, administrative duties for the group. I also share responsibility for all other aspects of the organization, including financial organization, social media, outreach, and event participation with my fellow officers. I do all this in order to help build a community of secularists and people who are accepting of secular values.
Jacobsen: What personal fulfillment comes from it?
King: I have always thought that the area lacked a strong secular community. Community is important for sharing ideas, networking, and other’s personal wellness. A community can more easily bring change than a fragmented set of small groups. This is my higher level of fulfillment I get from this. It also doesn’t hurt to make some friends in the process. All of our members have built some form of friendship with other members and even participate in other secular groups in the upstate.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more valuable tips for campus secularist activism?
King: I hate to sound cliché, but balance is the key. You need to be able to plan well, but also be flexible enough to change with the tides of the community. You need to be able to be kind to those who do not share your beliefs, but don’t let them run over you or others. You need to have some degree of focus, such as my focus on community-building, but also be able to focus on other aspects of secularism, such as science, social issues, government, activism, etc. I have missed many opportunities because I wasn’t willing to add new events to our semester schedule; or because I wasn’t confident enough to hold an extended conversation with certain people; or because I focused too much on building a community and didn’t get enough guest speakers to talk about science and government.
Jacobsen: What have been some historic violations of the principles behind secularism on campus? What have been some successes to combat these violations?
King: Clemson University, being one of the larger and more advanced public universities in the south, has had its fair share of incidents. Most are the typical religious imagery around campus, professors enforcing religious beliefs onto students, and non-student religious groups using school funds. However, the most significant recent and well-covered issue on campus involved our football team’s head coach, Dabo Swinney. The first incident dates back to before I even attended Clemson. The Freedom from Religion Foundation accused Swinney of promoting Christianity to his players by holding events with religious themes or venues and by allowing the team’s chaplain to proselytize the players. Considering Swinney’s position as a state employee, this was a huge problem for the FFRF, who had help from SSAC and other local groups. In the long run, Swinney suffered few consequences, given his success in the football team’s performance the past few years, and secular groups suffered a new stigma of aggressiveness and a lack of respect for important personnel on campus.
Jacobsen: What are the main areas of need regarding secularists on campus?
King: For individual secularists, community and social activism are perhaps the most needed aspects in their lives. While students are generally accepting of secular individuals, most large groups on campus have religious ties or activities that exclude secularists. I would very much like to think we provide a strong community for them. However, with secular issues branching into other communities, especially LGBT+ and racial justice groups, many hope to see social progress come to Clemson’s campus. Outreach is currently SSAC’s largest area of need. While our group’s ties remain strong with each other and with other secular groups in the area, we are still small. As mentioned earlier, we still suffer from a stigma that even prevents other secularists from joining.
Jacobsen: What is your main concern for secularism on campus moving forward for the next few months, even years?
King: I very much like to think I am making the correct decision in focusing on building a community for secularists. I feel much of it has been accomplished, so the next few months or semester will have more of a focus on science, social issues, and intellectual discussion and debate. However, the main focus will still be community since we do not want to lose our new, stronger connections. The next few years will be up to new officers and members as our current members graduate or pursue other goals. I am hopeful that our new focus will once again be activism as new secular and related issues arise in our world.
Jacobsen: What are the current biggest threats to secularism on campus?
King: Our biggest concern has to be the chapel that is planned to be built on campus. Luckily it has faced tough criticism over the past couple of years, but it has started flying under the radar due to the university’s willingness to be accommodating towards non-Christians in the building of this chapel. SSAC’s faculty advisor is one of the heads of the program overseeing its construction and assures us that it is much more of a inter-faith center. SSAC plans to have extended discussions and dialogue about this in order to cement our general positions on the matter. Currently, the consensus is that the chapel should be given a better label to avoid religious connotations and/or favoritism and to encourage acceptance and community.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to secularism on campus?
King: Faculty and administrative favoritism for religious activities and organizations always remain in our watchful eye. Long-time faculty are especially tricky to deal with, and it doesn’t help that they have formed their own organization for this purpose.
Jacobsen: What are the main social and political activist, and educational, initiatives on campus for secularists?
King: SSAC is the only group exclusively dealing with these issues, as our campus lacks initiative on these issues. Usually we must collaborate with other local secular groups, such as Piedmont Humanists and Foothills Humanists, and with other activist groups, such as Clemson’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance and FEM Club.
Jacobsen: What are the main events and topics of group discussions for the alliance on campus?
King: Our most recent and favorite discussions have centered around science and sociology of religion. Quantum physics and evolutionary biology are common topics given that some of our members are graduate students in physics and biology. While none of us are majors in sociology or religion, many of us have related hobbies and we have had discussions on cult behavior and the pros and cons of religion in society.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved and maintain the secular student alliance ties on campus?
King: If your campus has any sort of online portal for student organizations, that is the best place to start. Clemson has a Tiger Prowl every year for organizations to recruit new students and members. Attending these sort of events makes it easy to meet leaders personally and build a relationship from there. Maintaining these relationships should be easy as long as the group’s leadership remains serious about SSA and its values.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
King: I have already said plenty, but I don’t think I can stress this enough: SSA is not the only resource young secularists have to participate in activism. Other local groups and national organizations exist. Getting involved with them is just as important. This is why I value community so much. Getting to know others who agree (or even disagree) with you is a powerful tool for social change. Use it frequently, and use it wisely. Also, thank you for this opportunity, Scott.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Wade.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/01
Houzan Mahmoud is the Co-Founder of Culture Project. She is a women’s rights activist, campaigner, and defender, and a feminist.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Your work focuses on the Kurds and Kurdish culture. I want to focus on Canada in this conversation. We collaborated on the repository and incubator of Kurdish culture called Culture Project. Are many Canadians involved in this effort? Have any organizations helped with it?
Houzan Mahmoud: Apart from you, no one has yet supported us or our initiative as such from Canada. We are new, though we are just making ourselves known. I am hopeful that the more people learn about our work, the more they will get in touch and support us.
Thanks to wonderful friends like you who take time to both support us and make our voices heard, it means a great deal to our struggle.
Jacobsen: Canada was involved in the first Gulf War in 1991. So, Canadians, whether knowledgeable or not, have ties to the modern environment of Iraqi Kurdistan or Kurdistan. Did the Canadian government help or hinder the progress of the Kurdish people for independence?
Mahmoud: As far as I know, Canada had forces in Kurdistan in the past three years, at least since the fight against ISIS. They were there to provide support to Kurdish and Iraqi forces to fight against ISIS.
However, Canada did oppose the Kurdish referendum for independence, under the excuse that ISIS is still in the region and so on. So, their opposition, of course, was not good.
Jacobsen: How does Canada fare now, in terms of the assistance of the Kurds?
Mahmoud: I might sound sceptical to say no western intervention makes me happy. I am always sceptical and worried when Western countries intervene in our region. They usually don’t help, and will always undermine any local effort that is fair and just.
Let’s not forget when the US or UK is in the Middle East then every other Western government wants to be there both for economic achievement and for the political rivalry. Unfortunately, our region has been for a long time a centre for competing for international intervention and rivalry.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Houzan.
Mahmoud: You’re most welcome dear Scott. Thanks for all your support.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/31
Tehmina Kazi is an activist, writer and author based in Ireland. Tehmina was, until mid 2016, the Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy (a position she took up in May 2009).
British Muslims for Secular Democracy aims to raise awareness within British Muslims and the wider public, of democracy particularly ‘secular democracy’ helping to contribute to a shared vision of citizenship (the separation of faith and state, so faiths exert no undue influence on policies and there is a shared public space).
Prior to joining BMSD, Tehmina was a Project Officer at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Tehmina has done extensive research on domestic and international human rights issues, particularly the detention of foreign nationals and violence against women in South Asia.
Tehmina regularly contributes to debates and forums on civil liberties and foreign policy. Her articles have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and blogs.
How did you become an activist?
I was always passionate about combating injustices, even from an early age, when I was subjected to a sustained campaign of bullying at both primary school and high school.
I did an A-Level in Politics, loved it, and consequently decided to devote my career to campaigning for the rights of oppressed and marginalised people. I then studied Law with an emphasis on human rights law at university, and ended up working for a number of human rights organisations afterwards. I was the Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy from 2009 until 2016.
Were parents or siblings an influence on this for you?
They support me in everything I do, although deep down they would probably prefer me to be working in one of the “safe” professions like medicine, or a conventional legal career in private practice.
Was university education an asset or a hindrance to this?
An asset. I never went on to become a lawyer after completing my law degree, but my legal education has come in spectacularly useful for my campaigning work, particularly on equality and human rights matters like gender segregation.
Did you have early partnerships in these activist pursuits? If so, whom?
My early partnerships were with far-left anti-war groups. I don’t support them anymore, as many of them are only interested in opposing Western interventions for the sake of it, rather than genuinely working towards the cessation of hostilities and casualties.
How did you come to adopt a socially progressive worldview?
Because I was so keenly aware of injustices, regardless of who the perpetrators were, or who the victims were. I knew I couldn’t just sit back and not even attempt to tackle them (whether I’ve been successful or not is another matter!). Some individuals and organisations turn a blind eye to injustices where one of “their own” happens to be the perpetrator. I had no truck with this kind of tribalism from the very beginning.
Why do you think that adopting a social progressive outlook is important?
Most of us are working towards the same goal: a fairer, more inclusive society for all. Promoting socially progressive values in everything you do — or at least, trying to — is the best way to achieve this.
Do you consider yourself a progressive?
Yes, I do consider myself to be a progressive.
Does progressivism logically imply other beliefs, or tend to or even not at all?
It implies a belief in the FREDA principles: fairness, respect, equality, dignity and autonomy.
What are your religious/irreligious beliefs?
I was a practising Muslim for twelve years, but now consider myself to be a deist with a strong interest in humanism.
As a progressive, what do you think is the best socio-political position to adopt in the United Kingdom?
Enlightenment values: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of all faiths and none.
What big obstacles (if at all) do you see social-progressive movements facing at the moment?
A lack of sustained funding and resources, personality clashes, groups refusing to work with each other over differences that are ultimately quite petty.
Many groups have either been wound up, or end up running out of steam once a particular charismatic personality decides to leave.
How important do you think social movements are?
Critical, but they should not allow themselves to be torn apart by ego-driven personality clashes. They should keep a tight focus without becoming overly partisan.
What is your current work?
I am the Policy and Advocacy Officer for the Cork Equal and Sustainable Communities Alliance, an alliance of 16 equality and human rights organisations in Cork.
Where do you hope your professional work will go into the future?
More opportunities for creative and non-fiction writing, hopefully! (Tehmina recently published a short story called The Tulip Asylum’ about homosexuality in contemporary Iran).
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/30
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When did you find yourself explicitly irreligious?
Oscar Gabriel Pineda: I can’t really point out the exact moment when I stopped believing in God. It wasn’t an epiphany, an emotional catharsis or a tragic moment, like it happens to other people. To me, it was a process that took a couple of years.
My childhood wasn’t traditional, in the sense that I grew up being exposed to two very different and quite opposite worldviews. On one side, my mother and her family are evangelical Christians; on the other side my grandfather was a distinguished scientist in his field, who, like my father, was an atheist.
I heard magical and religious explanations for things every day, since for different reasons I spent a lot of time at my maternal grandparents’ house. Even though I did believe the overall story of Christianity when I was a kid, it never really took root in my mind or became a part of who I was.
In part, because at the same time that I heard the Christian version of things, I also heard the scientific one. My maternal great grandmother took the time to teach me how to read when I was 3 years old; I owe my love of reading to her.
My father and my grandfather always encouraged me to question everything that I read or heard, and to look for natural explanations for things I didn’t know; I owe my love of learning about science and my skepticism to them.
Armed with these tools, I kept finding things that just didn’t make any sense. If the world was created by an all-powerful God, who created that God? If that God had the power to rid the world of evil, why didn’t he do it?
When I asked these sorts of questions, I was told to go look for answers in the Bible, which contains the Absolute Truth about everything. I did, and far from finding answers I ended up with even more questions, the God that I found in those pages was violent, jealous, vindictive, misogynistic and cruel.
He didn’t seem to know a lot about cosmology, mathematics of zoology. Weird stuff, considering what millions of people around the world believe. The years passed and I progressively distanced myself from religion and all those things. I watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on TV.
There, he showed me that there is an endless source of awe and meaning to be found in science and philosophy; a sort of naturalistic spirituality that didn’t require me to believe very improbable things about the Universe to make me feel a part of something greater than myself. I never told anyone about this because I knew I would hurt my family’s feelings.
But then I started to pay attention to the horrible things that religion, belief in God, in the supernatural, in eternal life after death, could inspire in people. Yes, there’s a good side to God and religion, but there’s also a dark one, and it isn’t mild. Not just at that precise moment, but throughout history.
That finally inspired me to speak my mind about all of these things and to start being open about my atheism. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, I took the risk of thinking for myself and found much more happiness, beauty and wisdom that way.
Jacobsen: What seem like common moments of people losing their religion, to you?
Pineda: Talking to many different people who lost their faith, I find that nearly everyone has the same feelings that something is just not right with the whole God story, although what triggers those feelings is different from person to person.
Whether it’s reading those awful passages in the Bible, or seeing how people use religion as a cover for their own hatred, or just learning a bit about science, I have found that nearly all people who were once believers share the same feelings of uneasiness and intellectual struggles when they start realizing that what they have been taught as the truth, isn’t so pretty or so true after all.
And when this happens, people can feel bad and “dirty” and guilty, and even think that they are alone. That they are bad for thinking this way, and that they should just keep quiet. A few days ago we asked people on our social networks to tell us why they walked away from religion and it was a formidable experience.
Many, many people opened up and some of them told their stories publicly for the very first time. Losing your religious beliefs can be a painful process, but it doesn’t have to be.
Jacobsen: How does the landscape of the country dictate the morals and norms regarding sex and language?
Pineda: Well, even though Guatemala is a secular State, 87% of Guatemalans are Christian. About half of those are Catholic and the other half practice some form of Protestantism, the largest one being evangelical Christianity.
They are also deeply conservative when it comes to social issues, especially human sexuality, and many groups who identify as “pro-life” group together and lobby in Congress and the media to try to prevent anything resembling equality for the LGBT community, evidence based sex-education, or a smart conversation about what the best way to reduce abortion rates, childhood pregnancy and maternal mortality from ever happening.
They say that they want abortion rates to go down, and most reasonable people agree with them. But then, instead of having an honest conversation about how we can achieve that, they resort to absurd distortions and outright lies.
Just this Tuesday we (Humanistas Guatemala) were invited to a radio talk-show to discuss the billboard campaign and a woman called in to voice her opinion about it. She said that it was a clear attempt to impose the “LGBT agenda” on everyone and described our science-based approach to sex-education as “books that teach 3 year-old children to explore their body.”
That is not only dishonest, it is patently cruel, considering what women and children are suffering from, stemming from the fact that a large percentage of Guatemalans, especially those in poor, rural areas, have no access to information about sex, family planning or even contraceptives.
Jacobsen: What have been effective tools in the fight against superstition?
Pineda: The antidote to superstition is always scientific knowledge, but that by itself is not enough. The way that scientific knowledge is delivered taking into account how people come to believe things and how those beliefs connect with deep personal emotions is very important.
If you go out and tell people that astrology is bullshit and that only idiots believe in homeopathy or prayer, because of all of these scientific reasons, you will probably only offend them and maybe even reinforce their beliefs.
If, instead, you take an empathetic approach, admit that everyone can be fooled into believing weird things, and show people that there are real negative consequences caused by those beliefs, you have a much higher chance of changing their mind.
Jacobsen: If you could take a single exemplar, who would it be? Why this person?
Pineda: Carl Sagan. He was a very important part of my journey towards skepticism and one of the first personal heroes I had growing up. In his books and in his Cosmos series I found the answers to a lot of the questions I had about the Universe, and learned the importance of applying science, philosophy and critical thinking to my everyday life.
I also found a profound naturalistic spirituality in his ideas. The fact that we are not the special creation of some omnipotent being, but that we are a collection of star stuff that evolved over billions of years in this pale blue dot circling an average star in an average galaxy, and how that makes us a way for the Universe to understand itself gives me a sense of awe and wonder that has stayed with me all my life.
Jacobsen: Any recommended books for those wanting to learn more about irreligiosity?
Pineda: Asides from the genre classics ‘Why I’m not a Christian’ by Bertrand Russell, ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins and ‘god is not Great’ by Christopher Hitchens, I strongly recommend books that deal with irreligion in a more positive, indirect way.
‘Cosmos’ by Carl Sagan is a wonderful book that shows the richness of the scientific worldview and its capacity to provide feelings of awe that are widely believed to be only found in religion. Once you are done with ‘Cosmos’ you will probably want to go ahead and read all of his other books.
‘The Varieties of Scientific Experience’ is probably a great follow-up. Christopher Hitchens compiled a great collection of essays, excerpts and poetry from many different authors from different places and different times called ‘The Portable Atheist.’
It features writings by people as diverse as Lucretius, Omar Khayyám, Hume, Darwin, Freud, Spinoza, Hobbes and Einstein. Finally, Richard Carrier wrote a splendid book called ‘Sense and Goodness Without God’ that builds an entire naturalistic philosophical system from scratch.
Jacobsen: What have been some of your main contributions to the irreligious community?
Pineda: I wrote about the subjects of irreligion, humanism, science, philosophy and criticisms of religion for an online journal some years ago. Now, I am Vice President of Humanistas Guatemala, a legally established organization in Guatemala that defends the separation of Church and State, and the rights of non-believers and people whose rights are infringed upon by fundamentalist religion.
Jacobsen: What are the main impediments to the free practice of living a life they choose themselves — for the irreligious?
Pineda: Mainly, the prejudice against being a non-believer, which was recently confirmed by a paper in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0151?ncid=edlinkushpmg00000313), in combination with States that privilege religion in the public sphere and therefore impact the cultural landscape.
Jacobsen: What are your near-future plans?
Pineda: For the moment, we are focusing on our billboard and social media campaign to reach out to non-believers and believers who share humanist values. That is going great so far. Lots of people have contacted us to express their gratitude and their support, and in the next months we will work hard to provide the things they’ve been looking for, community-wise, in an organization like ours. We also want to strengthen our position defending the separation of Church and State, which is one on the main issues affecting Guatemalans, not only non-believers.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Oscar.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/29
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the big issues for humanists in Guatemala?
Humanistas Guatemala: Wow, where to begin? There are so many issues, ranging from intolerance towards any type of diversity or anything that resembles a departure from the status quo, to overt religious extremism that seeks to impose “Christian values” everywhere. Many people who are open about their lack of belief in God, are often shunned and told that they cannot be ethical or moral, and as a result many choose to lie about their convictions. Religious leaders and public officials do not respect the principle of separation of Church and State, and are often attempting to pass discriminatory laws based on the Bible and “Christian values.” Just in the last two years, members of Congress tried to force Bible lessons into every private and public school in the country, to forbid evidence based sex-ed, to make every single instance of abortion a criminal offence, and to make sure that the LGBT community is never granted equal rights. There’s lots of work to be done.
Jacobsen: How do you reach out to the general public? How can people reach Humanistas Guatemala?
Humanistas Guatemala: Our work is mainly done through social media, but we also host events throughout the year where people can attend and know that we exist. We’ve had two year-round book clubs in the largest bookstore in the city and we will host a third one in 2018. We recently started a new series of events with the support of IHEU under the ‘Cafe Humaniste’ banner, but with our own local touch called ‘ideas & chelas’ (ideas & beers). People interested in our work and joining us can do so through our website, on our sign-up form: http://www.humanistasguatemala.org/sumate
Also, we are in the middle of a large-scale media campaign using social networks and billboards placed around Guatemala City that has allowed us to reach thousands and thousands of people. This has caused quite a stir with fundamentalist and conservative groups, even though our message is not directed at criticizing organized religion, but to inform atheists, agnostics, freethinkers and open-minded believers that can identify with secular humanist values that they are not alone. (“You don’t need a god or a religion to be a good person. If you know this, you are not alone.”)
Jacobsen: In terms of the social and educational initiatives, what are you pursuing now?
Humanistas Guatemala: Our work is done around 4 main areas: promoting secular humanism as an alternative to religion, promoting scientific knowledge and critical thinking as a way of knowing what is true about the world, defending the separation of Church and State, and defending sexual and reproductive rights — especially, the rights of the LGBT community and women who are often bullied and discriminated against because of fundamentalist religion.
Jacobsen: What have been some honest failures and real successes in the domain of outreach and education to the public about humanism, and the formal irreligious?
Humanistas Guatemala: Criticizing religion and presenting secular alternatives like humanism in a country that is deeply religious is very hard. One is often met with outright hostility and all sorts of accusations that prevent the arguments from getting through. Nobody wants to hear that they’ve spent their lives believing a very big lie, and that’s what many prominent atheist individuals and organizations have been telling people for a long time. When we started out, we took our cues from them and preached to the choir for a few years. We realized this, and stopped focusing on the negative aspects of religion and started talking about the positive elements that secular humanism has to offer. People are much more receptive this way.
Jacobsen: Who are the prominent humanists in Guatemala that deserve more international exposure?
Humanistas Guatemala: Even though we know many of them, atheism, freethinking and humanism are only starting to gain ground here in Guatemala and being openly secular is still a taboo. Many people choose to stay in the closet to avoid problems, but we are starting to change that. That’s one of the aims of our billboard and social media campaign. Hopefully I can give you some names the next time we talk.
Jacobsen: What are the general demographics of Humanistas Guatemala?
Humanistas Guatemala: Our board and our staff, as well as most of our members are young men and women between the ages of 20 and 35.
Jacobsen: What are some of the fun social activities that the organization hosts for Guatemalan humanists?
Humanistas Guatemala: In the past we’ve hosted book clubs, and several events with invited speakers on important subjects such as science, philosophy, art, and the relationship between religion and societal ills such as sexism, homophobia and the obstruction of sexual education. We plan to continue with this, under the ‘ideas & chelas’ concept that we mentioned above, and many more that we will be revealing in the near future.
Jacobsen: What are your hopes for the global humanist movement in the coming years, even decades?
Humanistas Guatemala: We would love to see humanism continue to grow and reach more and more people all over the globe, and to have an impact in the way people think and take important decisions that affect all of us. In a world where global warming is a huge issue, and where people are still being discriminated against because of their race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation and religious affiliation, the humanist approach of empathy and critical thinking is more important than ever.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/28
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Patricia Flanagan: I grew up in the Ozarks near Branson MO, but most of my family is originally from California. My parents are divorced and I spent my childhood living with my mother. I am a first generation college student.
Mom worked mostly in the Branson hospitality industry, and my Dad did mechanics. I grew up going to church. I went to Catholic Sunday school when I was very young, but started attending a Methodist church around fourth grade.
Church and Jesus was always a big part of my life. My Mom was more spiritual than religious, but she has a strong belief in Jesus and wanted me to grow up in a Church community. I spent a lot of time involved in youth groups in middle school and early high school.
Jacobsen: What is the personal background in secularism for you? What were some seminal developmental events and realizations in personal life regarding it?
Flanagan: I first started to question my beliefs in my Junior year of high school. Learning in history class about all of the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity was very disturbing for me.
It became apparent to me that people around me whom I deeply respected (teachers, friends) did not share my beliefs, but were still good and happy people. This was in conflict with what I was taught about non-believers.
I was also starting to develop more progressive views about social justice which also seemed to be in conflict with my beliefs. There was not one huge event that changed my mind about Christianity and the supernatural, but one day I said to myself, “Jesus is like Santa Clause, I used to need to believe in him, but now I don’t.”
From that moment I have never looked back. Lingering beliefs in the supernatural have dissipated and I focus on building community for people like me who have transitioned out of them as well.
I fell in love with secular humanism and developed a passion for secular community building when I met Bart Campolo, the Secular Humanist Chaplain at University of Southern California my Freshman year of college.
I was a part of the secular community there, and Bart helped mentor me to be able to build a similar community when I transferred to Truman.
Jacobsen: You are the president of the Secular Student Fellowship. What tasks and responsibilities come with the position? Why do you pursue this line of volunteering?
Flanagan: Our group is still in it’s infancy. As president I am basically responsible for figuring out what we want to do at meeting and what events we want to have. I lay out what needs to be done and delegate tasks as needed.
The most difficult thing to do was find like minded people in the beginning to get the group started. I made a post on FB saying that I would be at a certain place on campus at a particular time every Tuesday for people who wanted to talk about being secular.
I found a couple of other people and we have all worked together to get the group off the ground. I have to admit that I pursue this mostly for selfish reasons. I wanted a community of people who have similar worldviews and experiences, so I worked to establish one.
I also do this out of a deep sense of empathy and compassion for the difficulty and loneliness associated with transitioning out of religion. I want to be there for the people who feel isolated and alone.
Jacobsen: What personal fulfillment comes from it?
Flanagan: Most of the fulfillment comes from the amazing friends I have made. We all share similar values and have a blast working together to create a safe and open environment for secular people to express themselves on campus.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more valuable tips for campus secularist activism?
Flanagan: I have not participated a lot in secularist activism. At this point our group is mostly focused on building community. We have found that it can sometimes be hard to do both because there are still broadly varying opinions of what activism and for what cause is appropriate.
If simply existing as a group of people banded together by humanist values and naturalistic worldview is activism, then my advice is to kill them with kindness. Its hard for people to hold onto their belief that you are an amoral, meaningless, empty person when you are smiling and handing them a cookie!
Also, reach out and connect with other groups on campus who share your values and vision for the world.
Jacobsen: What have been some historic violations of the principles behind secularism on campus? What have been some successes to combat these violations?
Flanagan: I don’t know of any on campus. I’m sure they existed at one point, but in all of the activities of this club we have felt supported on campus, even by religious organizations.
Jacobsen: What are the main areas of need regarding secularists on campus?
Flanagan: I can’t speak for all secularists, but I believe community is important. We are in the bible belt and while most people on campus are supportive, all bets are off when we step out into the real world.
Many secularists I have talked to have to hide their true beliefs from their families and pretend to be religious. This can be taxing and it helps to have a group of people who allow you to truly be yourself.
Jacobsen: What are the main events and topics of group discussions for the alliance on campus?
Flanagan: We talk about a large variety of things. Many of our members have interest in other religions, so we have talked about that. We have only been having official meetings for one semester, so a lot of our time is devoted to talking about what we would like to do with the club in the future.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved and maintain the secular student alliance ties on campus?
Flanagan: Simply by being an active member of the community. I think the biggest challenge for us is getting out there and showing people that atheists and secular humanists etc are just normal people.
Each new member brings their own special skills and talents which allow us to reach out and interact with our community in different ways.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Flanagan: I think building communities is one of the most important things we can do as secular people. There are so many people who hold onto religion not out of true belief, but out of a desire to have a community in which they feel connected and integrated.
If we can recreate that without violent ethnocentric narratives and logic denying supernaturalism, then those people will have a place to go. Parents who don’t believe but don’t what their child to believe “nothing” will be able to find similar ways to pass down values without all the extra stuff.
I really love the idea of secular churches like KC Oasis which I think are an awesome way to create secular communities beyond just on college campuses.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Patricia.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/28
Anouar Majid has authored several books on Islam and the West, and has been on Bill Moyers Journal and Al Jazeera television. He is the Founding Director of the Center for Global Humanities.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Your work focuses on Americans and Muslims, the West and Islam, Muslims in the modern world, and so on. Why is this dialogue important in the public sphere now?
Anouar Majid: Anyone who is alive today and pays attention to the news must be aware that the question of Islam is the topic du jour. Samuel Huntington was not joking, nor was he wrong, when he talked about a clash of civilizations.
Maybe not civilizations, but definitely worldviews. Of course, underlying such clashes are other elements, not necessarily of a religious nature, such as lack of education, resentment of Western progress, etc.
Jacobsen: In one book, you asserted that we’re all Moors. Who were the Moors? Why claim this? What is the reasoning behind it?
Majid: The Moors are the Muslims who lived in Spain during the Middle Ages. (Spaniards today still use the term to describe Moroccans and Muslims.) They ruled most of Spain at one point, but the Catholics regrouped in northern Spain and started a process of reconquest that culminated in the surrender of the Kingdom of Granada in 1492.
One of the people who witnessed this event is Christopher Columbus. He was there to persuade the Spanish monarchs to sponsor his trip to India across the Atlantic. So, as you could see, defeating Islam in Spain and the discovery of America are two major events that are somewhat connected. Interesting, isn’t it?
Jacobsen: With increasing secularism among the American population, especially the young, what place does religion have in the public sphere, civic life?
Majid: It is true that the “nones” (those without a religion) are one of the fastest growing demographics in America (if not the fastest), so traditional religion, embodied in church attendance and the like, seems to be on the wane. It’s interesting to watch how this development could affect the political landscape in the long term.
Jacobsen: What do you see as the major contributor to a disinclination of the younger generation towards religion? How does this impact American life in general?
Majid: The United States is the last Western bastion for traditional religious commitments. For the longest time, religious practice was woven into the fabric of American republican life in a sort of unique combination that is hard to find elsewhere.
For example, the Constitution is resolutely secular, in that it doesn’t privilege a religion over another, or even make religion necessary for holding office, including that of the presidency; but a strong strain of Judeo-Christian morality courses right below the surface of political life, giving tacit support to those who adhere to such values and excluding those who don’t.
In all the time I have spent in the United States (my adopted nation), only one politician—Jesse Ventura, a onetime governor of Minnesota– has declared publicly that he is an atheist. It would be interesting to see more people like him run for office.
Is America ready? I wouldn’t bet on it. Protestant morality, without piety, is very much alive in American society today and manifests itself in all sorts of behaviors and cultural practices. But this is a discussion for another time!
Jacobsen: Of these trends, what ones can be extended into the culture of Canada as well, so extrapolation to North America in general?
Majid: I am not sure about Canada, but my suspicion is that the country has avoided the severe puritanical bonfires that cast a long shadow on American mores and outlook. Also, the Quebecois, with their French heritage, add a dimension to the country’s multicultural traditions that has no exact parallel in the United States.
Canada may very well be the only European-style nation in the Americas, so it wouldn’t surprise me if its attitudes toward religion in general hewed closer to those of Europe.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Anouar.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/27
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Karma Alvey: I was raised in rural Southern Illinois in a highly Christian, Conservative, and Poverty Stricken area. My family went to a Presbyterian church for a while, and we occasionally attended church with a grandparent, but usually our family was never incorporated in a church. My mother is a Christian with liberal-leaning values, my father and brothers are unaffiliated, and I am an agnostic atheist. Both of my parents hold Master’s Degrees, and I am currently earning a Bachelor’s. We are Irish and Scottish descent and all speak English as a first language.
Jacobsen: What is the personal background in secularism for you? What were some seminal developmental events and realizations in personal life regarding it?
Alvey: I actually used to pray a lot and was really involved in religion as an older child and younger teen. I was “saved” at church camp in 4th grade, went to church for a while in middle school, but moved away from organized religion in early high school. Some negative feelings about the church, their attitudes, and their actions arose and I realized I didn’t agree with any of it. I would still pray regularly, nearly every night, but somewhere in late high school, I realized that I wasn’t really doing it out of belief, but more out of fear and some twisted obligation. Questions arose and I started to understand that I didn’t know if there was a God (or gods). Further down the line, I started to doubt the existence of a “higher power.” I met a guy in Marching Band my first semester of college who introduced me to the Secular Student Alliance on our campus, and I’ve been a member ever since.
Jacobsen: Why do you pursue this line of volunteering?
Alvey: As a secular person, I see so many ways other secular individuals can benefit from having a safe place to discuss anything — from schoolwork to activism to how to tell your parents you don’t believe in God. It’s also just generally good to be generally good, in my opinion, and by raising money for the local animal shelter or picking up trash at the park as a group, we’re doing good and challenging people’s preconceived notions that atheists can’t be moral. Our activism is also important to religious people, too. By advocating for the separation of church and state and freedom of (and from) religion, we are working to ensure no one is pressured or forced to adopt one religion or another. We want everyone to be able to practice what they believe freely, individually, and consensually, whether that be Daoism, Catholicism, Atheism or any number of other religions.
Jacobsen: What personal fulfillment comes from it?
Alvey: Personally, it’s really important to me to be able to help people. I’m not Iron Man, and I know I’ll never save New York from a massive alien invasion, but saving one person means saving a little piece of the world. It’s an earth-shattering feeling to know that you’ve made a difference for someone — that you changed someone’s life, and that they can change the lives of others moving forward.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more valuable tips for campus secularist activism?
Alvey: Get out there! If you establish yourself on campus and put a familiar friendly face to the “scary atheist agenda,” people will be more likely to ask questions rather than judge you immediately. Of course there will always be antagonists as well, which brings me to the next tip — don’t get discouraged. For every person who calls you a name, there is a person who thinks, “How brave of them to stand up for their beliefs.” For every person who tears down your flyer, there’s a person who is thankful to have a secular presence on campus. The payout is far greater than the pain.
Jacobsen: What have been some historic violations of the principles behind secularism on campus? What have been some successes to combat these violations?
Alvey: I can’t think of too many, thankfully. As long as I’ve been here, I’ve only seen our president continue to strive for inclusivity and respect. One instance that comes up repeatedly, however, is the prayer before the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Dinner on campus every year. It’s been suggested the prayer be replaced with a moment of silence, but no news on that so far. We live in a heavily religious area so I’m honestly surprised (and proud) that institutional religiosity isn’t a recurring problem.
Jacobsen: What are the main areas of need regarding secularists on campus?
Alvey: Support from others. One hundred percent. Our greatest need is for positive support for religious freedom from all faiths. Respect is a big one as well. When we advertise, we see a lot of negative backlash — torn down flyers, water on our chalk drawings, etc. It’s important to respect other’s advertisements in any capacity, especially when it comes to something as personal and defining as religion or non-belief.
Jacobsen: What is your main concern for secularism on campus moving forward for the next few months, even years?
Alvey: Right now, it’s hard to be anything in America other than a straight, white, Christian man. Considering the regresses our federal government is making concerning religious freedom and the separation of church and state, I am afraid it will become increasingly hard to be secular (or Muslim or Jewish or anything other than Christian) openly on a college campus.
Jacobsen: What are the current biggest threats to secularism on campus?
Alvey: Betsy DeVos. Hands down. She could be the end of the secular movement on campuses if she’s not kept in check. I’m also quite worried about Missouri’s own state government — especially Eric Greitens. We’ve already seen some steps back with women’s rights and other issues that hinge on his religion, so there’s no telling how far he will insert his religion into state affairs. Overall, I feel that the current state and federal administration has encouraged a hostile environment to several groups of people — secular people included.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to secularism on campus?
Alvey: The long-standing stereotypes about atheists are the biggest threat to our organization. Just general misinformation and negative attitudes make it hard to keep a group enthusiastic and strong. Things have slowly gotten better over the last few decades, but there’s still a lot of work to do before it’s generally socially acceptable to be secular, especially in Southeast Missouri.
Jacobsen: What are the main social and political activist, and educational, initiatives on campus for secularists?
Alvey: Here there’s not much. We have the Secular Student Alliance, obviously, and we’ve done some interfaith events to educate the student body. There’s Campus Democrats, — they do a lot of political activities, and we are trying to partner with them for some events, but have had no luck just yet. We take part in any event we can to try and educate and stay active, like involvement fairs, charity benefits, and organization showcases.
Jacobsen: What are the main events and topics of group discussions for the alliance on campus?
Alvey: We meet weekly and talk about everything you could imagine — fears, the Satanic Temple, food, television — you name it, we’ve had a discussion about it! We hosted an interfaith panel last semester that we hope to continue, and we host a lot of social events, like hikes and game nights. The only thing we try to steer away from is politics so nonbelievers from every walk of life feel comfortable sitting in on our meetings.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved and maintain the secular student alliance ties on campus?
Alvey: On our particular campus, we meet at the same time every week (Thursdays at 7 if anyone is reading). Go to meetings, volunteer to lead a discussion or present on a topic, table with your group, or join them for dinner or a camping trip. Follow them on Facebook (to plug us again, we’re on there as SEMO Secular Student Alliance), and join any Facebook groups or group chats they provide! It’s the best way to follow what’s going on and check for last minute changes.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Alvey: I was thrilled to be a part of this interview. Visibility is vital, so thank you for the opportunity to speak about our movement.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Karma.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/26
Houzan Mahmoud is the Co-Founder of Culture Project. She is a women’s rights activist, campaigner, and defender, and a feminist. She is a friend and colleague, too. In this wide-ranging and exclusive interview, Mahmoud discusses the Kurds, Iraq, women’s rights, and more.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You are a women’s rights activist, feminist, and an anti-war activist. You were born in Iraqi Kurdistan. What were the moments of political awakening for you?
Houzan Mahmoud: One of the things I’ll never forget is the break-out of war between Iraq and Iran. I was only six-years-old at the time. Iraq’s bloody dictator Saddam Hussein coming to political power in 1979 changed our lives in Kurdistan and Iraq forever.
Being Kurdish poses all sorts of problems as it is, and living under the fascist regime of Saddam made things incredibly hard for my family.
Prior to Saddam coming to power, my brothers took up arms during late 70’s against Iraq’s regime, I was too little to remember the particulars. However, what I do know is that from 1973 to 1991 I grew up and lived under one of the most horrendous regimes in modern history.
I am forty-four years old now, but I still live with the horrors I faced during my childhood and adolescence years living in Iraq. From the day I was born, all the way to this moment, all I have witnessed is war, a never-ending war in Iraq.
That’s why even my life in London is very much shaped and affected by the events that have and are still unfolding in Iraq and Kurdistan. I have many shared memories with my own people from the region, memories of struggle, loss of loved ones, horrors of genocide, and the pain of having to leave our homes again and again.
I live like a nomad; even if I live in a home I always think to myself, “I am not sure how long I will be living here — where next?”
Jacobsen: How did you come to align with the principles inherent in feminism and anti-war activism?
Mahmoud: I grew up in a warzone. A climate of long-lasting and bloody wars, a constant exodus and displacement. I am strongly opposed to war because it only brings devastation and abject poverty.
It destroys homes, it destroys entire lives. However, I wouldn’t say that I am a pacifist largely due to the environment in which I was born. As Kurds, we are always subjected to the horror of war, occupation, and repetitive cultural, linguistic and physical genocides.
For example, I support the armed struggle of Rojava against the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS). In such cases, you can have one option: you either take up arms or be ruled by the monstrous forces of ISIS.
As for my feminist principles, there were various reasons that are personal, social and political. Of course, when you grew up in a socially-conservative society, a place in which every move you make somehow amounts to either shame or honour, if you adopt progressive views there is a considerable backlash, you become a ‘rebel’.
The mentality that women are ‘inferior’ and men are superior is somehow imbued with almost every aspects of daily life — politics, art and literature. The language we speak carries a great deal of words that reinforce women’s subordination.
I must admit that from a very early age, I was aware of my own position in my society, I felt trapped, powerless and lonely. I felt stranded on a small planet that was destroyed by war. Making the smallest demand for women’s rights felt like a crime.
Everything was about war, killing, survival, and political-struggle against the enemy. There was little room for feminist ideas. Even when I joined a leftist political party, hoping that it provide the equality I sought after, I felt it was a man’s club.
I left it and started reading feminist books intensively, as well as the history of feminism and the different schools of thoughts. I found within feminism a home, a place in which an ideology truly spoke for women.
So, yes, going through a painful life journey full of loss and being a woman was and still is not easy. That’s why feminism is vital to me, to my thinking, activism, and worldview.
Jacobsen: What are the more immediate concerns for women’s rights relevant to the Iraqi Kurdish community?
Mahmoud: There are many issues to fight against, such as so-called ‘honour killings’, female genital mutilation (FGM), forced and arranged marriages, and other forms of violence — like many other societies in the world.
Kurdish women are fighting against all of these issues, and they’re fighting outside invaders too — such as ISIS. So the problems are not limited, but are changing and are varied in addition to the political instability that, as we know, forays into the lives of women and their rights.
Jacobsen: You co-founded Culture Project, which is a platform for “Kurdish writers, feminists, artists, and activists.” What inspired it — its theme and title?
Mahmoud: I am one of the founders of Culture Project and have supported it, as well as having worked with various organisations and campaigns that highlight and assuage violence against women.
One thing that was missing was a holistic approach to the important need of raising awareness about gender and feminism and challenging cultural productions that are patriarchal and male-dominated.
So, I discussed the idea with a couple of friends and supporters about creating such a platform, a platform that supported those people who have non-conformist views, as well as challenging regressive/conservative norms and values which are “traditional”.
This platform is open for all regardless of sex and gender. We would love to bring forward new faces, young writers and others in order to create a debate and produce new knowledge that challenges the old schools of thought.
As for the name, I thought that if we give it a name that gave our organisation the appearance it is female-only, it will just limit our scope of work. We decided to call it Culture Project in order to be inclusive of all people: activists, writers, philosophers, feminists, novelists, poets, etc.
Jacobsen: What have been some of its more popular articles — title and contents?
Mahmoud: We have various writers on both our Kurdish and English websites — websites proving to be very popular. Of course, on the Kurdish website, we have far more writers, poets, feminist writers, philosophical essays, art and cultural reviews, etc., as well as short stories.
On our English website, we have a very well-informed new generation of young Kurds who are active politically and are critical of the status-quo in Kurdistan. They challenge existing gender relations.
You can find some very interesting poems, short stories, artistic-writing, and essays. One of the important pillars of our project is that we have gender and feminist awareness at its core.
We promote and motivate our writers to be gender sensitive and champion feminist positions. When we were in Kurdistan in May, we hosted a debate on Feminism and Art, which was very well attended and created a very interesting debate.
Jacobsen: As a secular feminist have there been threats to your life, or others involved with the project?
Mahmoud: There have been several threats directed at me when we launched our Anti Sharia Campaign in Kurdistan and Iraq back in 2005. Even now when I write and criticise Islamism and advocate for feminist ideals I get hate mail, threats and expletive diatribes on Social media.
Also, one of our writers who openly writes against Islamism received letters containing death threats. The fact is that those of us who are non-compromising and are open in our criticism of Islam and Islamism our lives are automatically in danger. We are not safe in either the Middle East nor in the UK.
Jacobsen: What are the unique concerns of women and girls in war in contrast to boys and men, in general?
Mahmoud: One of the major features of all wars is the use of rape as a weapon of war. Most of the times women in war situations end up becoming victims to rape, trafficking, sexual slavery and dealing with the consequences of the devastations that war brings to their societies.
For example, women who become widows in socially conservative societies who have very little welfare are living in dire conditions. Conversely, men and boys, who are fighting, face death, injuries and other war traumas.
However, in some cases, men who are caught as prisoners of war are sexually assaulted as an act of humiliation in order to breakdown their ‘manhood’. The case of the Yezidi genocide committed by ISIS symbolises this horror.
Women were taken as spoils of war; they could be raped, sold and turned into slaves. Men who did not convert were killed.
Jacobsen: Looking into the past a bit, you were one of the speakers for the March, 2003 London, United Kingdom anti-war rally. What was the content of, and the reaction to, the speech?
Mahmoud: I used to take part in anti-war demonstrations against US-lead wars in Afghanistan. Later on, when the US and its allies decided to attack Iraq in 2003, I became more involved and active in the anti-war efforts in UK and elsewhere.
I asserted my opposition to the war on Iraq, despite the fact of being Kurdish and someone who has suffered immensely under Saddam’s regime. I still didn’t think that any foreign intervention was going to improve our lives.
I also emphasised that this war will only bring more terrorism because it will strengthen political Islam, i.e. Islamism. Some people on the political Left liked my opposition to the war but disliked my opposition to political Islam, as they view them as an “anti-imperialist” resistance.
To me, however, this is absurd — how can a terrorist force that kills, beheads, and oppresses women have anything to do with resisting imperialism?
There is no doubt that we all wanted an end to Saddam’s totalitarian regime, but I was opposed to the foreign invasion. In this region, we don’t have a good experience with foreign interventions and colonialism throughout history.
Imperialist powers invade, destroy and support or install puppet regimes to serve their interest only. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan — since the invasion, we are faced with much more terrorism, instability, poverty, displacement, and mass migration of people.
There is a humanitarian disaster and an endless tragedy of war and bloodshed.
Jacobsen: As well, you have been on major news media such as The Guardian, The Independent, BBC, CNN, NBC, and Sky News. You have campaigned strongly against Sharia law in addition to the oppression of women in Iraq and Kurdistan. Does this campaigning against Sharia law extend into the international domain?
Mahmoud: Yes, because political Islamist groups are now everywhere seeking to impose Islamist ideals on people and restricting freedom of speech and expression. Even in UK, we have the problem with religious schooling, Mosques that advocate for Jihad, and hate speech.
We have Sharia councils that violate women’s rights. I am part of the One Law for All coalition that seeks to expose these violations and influence government policymakers. The struggle for women’s rights, secularism and universal values is an international struggle.
I always felt I was part of this worldwide struggle even if we are confined to local issues, but we fight with a universal vision for rights, gender equality, secularism and an egalitarian alternative to patriarchal capitalist system.
Jacobsen: What religious/irreligious worldview and ethic makes the most sense with respect to the proper interpretation of the world to you?
Mahmoud: I am not interested in any religions that seek to convince me of another world. I live here in the now, that is what it matters to me. I take a stand against injustice, class division and the gender apartheid that is currently taking place.
We need to replace the horrendous climate that has been created by capitalism and corporate profit-making by creating a heaven on this earth, one in which we are all treated equally, fairly and with justice for all.
I have no time for tales of heaven and hell in another world. There is no evidence of such realms. However, I have experienced very similar places here in this earth. After having lived in war zones and having had fought for survival, being in London is to me like heaven.
I felt human again. I can enjoy the freedoms I am entitled to as a woman. I owe it to the struggle of generations of powerful feminist movements in this country.
Jacobsen: Does this comprehensive activism — women’s rights, Kurdish culture, feminism, anti-war, and, I assume, others — come from the religious/irreligious worldview at all?
Mahmoud: To me, they come from an irreligious worldview. This is because religions limit our imaginations and they limited our freedom of thought. Religion restricts human creativity, it restricts our freedom of ideas.
It subjects people to outmoded dictates — be they from the Bible, the Quran, or any other holy book. The notion of sin, guilt, shame and honour create a gender divide and it imposes a heteronormative narrative that is shamefully discriminative.
As a woman, I felt I was half human when I was religious. I felt everything I do was loaded with guilt, and that I am somehow inferior to men. When I started to question and dislike all the restrictions I realised that religion is not for me and that it is a man-made and merely in the service of men.
The more I read into world-religion, the more I realised it is extremely patriarchal and oppressive towards women.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved with the Culture Project, or in the advocacy and promotion of Kurdish culture, even donate to initiatives relevant to their advocacy and promotion?
Mahmoud: Well, we really need help and support from talented people, people who have editing skills, who can review and analyse art work, who can write reports, proposals, and we need people who have design skills. Any support through volunteering would be deeply cherished.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Houzan.
Mahmoud: You are most welcome, it is my pleasure.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/25
Waleed Al-Husseini founded the Council of Ex-Muslims of France. He escaped the Palestinian Authority after torture and imprisonment in Palestine to Jordan and then France. He is a friend. Here we talk about the Council of Ex-Muslims of France, developments, of the organization, death threats, torture, and secularism.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As a friend and colleague, we published several interviews together on a variety of topics centered in religion and the ex-Muslim community, especially the ex-Muslim community in France and the organization founded by you: Council of Ex-Muslims of France.
Waleed Al-Husseini: Yes, and thank you for this and interviewing numerous ex-Muslims, because it’s for many still very taboo. For others, it’s fear in the name of not offending some Muslims.
Jacobsen: What new developments occurred for the Council of Ex-Muslims of France for 2017?
Al-Husseini: The most important thing is that we become more recognized in France and more in the media, especially talking about us, our activities. Many have joined our cause once they discover that they are not alone and have the same ideas as us. We support each other.
We improve the discussion in France about most of the Islamic issues including the hijab and what they like to call Islamophobia. So, more and more, we become a real part of this discussion about Islamic values and what Islamists are trying to pass into the secular and liberal parts of society.
I know the debates in France. It is increasing in Canada and the USA.
Jacobsen: For the Council of Ex-Muslims of France, how often do death threats come to the inboxes, or via other means, of members including yourself?
Al-Husseini: I received 5 death threats by internet today. This is a great day and nothing dangerous. It’s been like that since the beginning. The easiest threats are by the internet. For me, it’s not dangerous because the ones who really want to kill you will not tell you before.
The most serious things come from some Islamist organizations and sites, who post our photos to all their readers. This puts us in a very dangerous situation. For any random person, the organized Islamists ask and try to acquire our addresses.
This happened to me, personally, many times. That’s why now my address is hidden and why I am taking greater care to take care of myself. For example, I simply do not travel to certain areas in Paris controlled by Muslims – Muslim areas.
This religion didn’t accept someone to go out. It didn’t accept the criticism. In 2017, only Islam and the mafia act this way.
Jacobsen: You were tortured, for several months, in a Palestinian prison by the Palestinian Authority for charges of blasphemy. I know the types and extent of the torture based on conversations with you. Do these memories resurface, at times, in personal life – of the torture?
Al-Husseini: I’m always trying to forget it. It was a hard time. Most of the time for me was hard. It’s the time recollected when I wrote my book Blasphemer: The Price I Paid for Rejecting Islam. I had to remember all this time with the most difficult detailing.
Now, not that much compared to some others because the victims of Islamic fundamentalism are so many, many paid their lives all over the world and have had the same as what happened to me or worse.
Jacobsen: What threats to secularism exist in France? How does the Council of Ex-Muslims of France represent a bulwark against those who wish to silence the non-religious, ex-religious, and the general formal irreligious?
Al-Husseini: Secularism in France threatens Islamists and is threatened by Islamism. The main problem for some Muslims is that they want the Islamism in place of secularism rather than secular Islam.
So, they do all that they can. They want society to accept the hijab in the name of liberty. They want limited freedom of speech and limited criticism of Islam, which comes in the form of false charges of Islamophobia and racism.
That is why, always, the Islamophobia charges, for me, are a modern fatwa: nothing else. A lot of examples are like the halal food, etc. What we do to protect secularism is that we explain the ways of Islamism, show it clearly, and have a rich debate about it, we do our best to show their hypocrisy and their spokespeople for hypocrites.
We present the real hate of the Islamist imams and Islamism in general, and raising the standards of all these definitions in French society, keep the secular values out of the religious values and going forward with secularism, not back because only secularism will protect our society from civil war.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Waleed.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/24
“In prison, one of the only freedoms inmates have is to practise their religion — but in some cases, even that’s getting harder to do.
There’s been an increase in the number of prisoners filing complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission about religious accommodation.
Inmates are concerned about the delivery of spiritual services, the accommodation of spiritual practices and the observance of holy days, said Ivan Zinger, Canada’s correctional investigator, the country’s prison watchdog.
Religious leaders also say there aren’t enough chaplains in prisons to meet the spiritual needs of inmates.”
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/prison-religion-human-rights-commission-inmates-1.4401229.
“OTTAWA — Amid controversy over the cancellation of a film screening at an Ottawa Catholic university, the federal Liberals are attacking the Conservatives for being selective about the ideas they’re choosing to defend in campus battles over free speech.
Science Minister Kirsty Duncan demanded Monday that the Tories react to news that Saint Paul University last week cancelled a film festival event featuring a documentary about abortion. The Conservatives, who have publicly defended free speech in other cases, hadn’t immediately commented on the cancellation. But a spokesman said Monday the party believes in the free exchange of ideas in academic settings, including on issues such as abortion.
Liberals have already confronted Conservatives on abortion this fall and Conservatives have tried to provoke Liberals on campus free speech. Politicians appear poised to continue floating attack lines on both issues as the clock ticks closer to a federal election campaign and a 2019 vote.”
“Bishop Strachan would sit bolt upright in his grave if he could see what is happening to the old Deer Park United Church. John Strachan was the first bishop of Toronto, a stern figure often pictured in flowing clerical robes. In his time, the pious city that came to be known as Toronto the Good was putting up churches left and right.
Today, it is turning many of them into condos. Across the city, developers are buying up old churches and making them over as high-end residences. The combination of two trends – rising property prices and falling church attendance – has produced a whole new real estate category: the church conversion.
Deer Park United is becoming part of the Blue Diamond Condominiums at Imperial Plaza, “an address of distinction nestled in the exclusive Forest Hill neighbourhood.” Builders have already torn down most of the 1913 church at St. Clair Avenue West and Avenue Road. Demolition machines clawed at its heavy stone walls, leaving piles of rubble that made Deer Park look like a bombed out church in Normandy after D-Day. All that’s left is the church tower and the empty front end of the building, open to the elements at the back like a hospital gown.”
“Eli Wu brought his wife and teenaged son to Vancouver this past summer, emigrating from China in search of a better education for his child. He wasn’t searching for God, but after arriving in Canada he found himself drawn in an unexpected direction.
In China, he said he didn’t pay too much attention to Christianity, although some of his family members attended church. Organized religion was prohibited in China during the Cultural Revolution, but there was a revival of Christianity at the beginning of 1980s, when the government lifted restrictions on religion. Still, the Chinese government maintains some control over worship.
“In China, [things like] getting baptized and accepting legitimate Christianity are controlled by the government,” Mr. Wu said. “When the gospel is discussed in China, because of some political factors, it cannot be [considered] too real.””
“The Trudeau government recently announced that it will no longer permit religious charities to access the Canada Summer Jobs (CSJ) program unless they conform to government ideology on social policy.
The CSJ program provides students with opportunities to work at non-profits. However, the government’s view is that if a charity does not accept abortion, or agree with government views on sexuality, then it need not apply.
This government decision is part of what I call the legal revolution against the place of religion in society. It is a rejection of the legal rights, enshrined in the Charter, that religious communities and individuals hold to express their religious commitments in public service. These rights are relied upon to run private Christian schools, summer camps, soup kitchens and other welfare agencies.”
Source: https://ipolitics.ca/2017/12/22/trudeau-trinity-western-war-religious-dissent/.
“Metro Vancouver citizenship court judge is applauded every time he tells newcomers about Santa Claus and the inter-faith meaning of Christmas in Canada.
Gerald Pash, who presided over six ceremonies for 360 new citizens this week in Surrey, responds to the season by offering new citizens warm, inspiring comments about the value of Christmas for all.
“I have used the same words for the past three years for the ceremonies in advance of Christmas. The new Canadians applaud every time,” said Pash, who was a public affairs officer for the department of national defence and has been an aide de camp to B.C.’s lieutenant governor.””
“OTTAWA — The government is sticking to its message that filtering Canada Summers Jobs program funding to groups that promise to respect human rights will catalyze the middle class, but a chorus of Conservative MPs say the change tramples religious freedoms.
Funding applications for the 2018 federal program opened Tuesday. It’s an annual initiative designed to help local small businesses, non-profit and faith-based organizations by providing wage subsidies to create summer jobs for secondary and post-secondary students.”
“OTTAWA—A federal jobs program targeted at youth met the government’s goal for placements for this past summer after falling short in the first year of the Liberals’ mandate.
The government says almost 69,000 spaces and counting were created in 2017, double the number in 2015 and a target the Liberals had vowed to reach in every year of their mandate.
The Liberals have put an extra $113 million annually into the summer jobs program to double the number of placements each year to 70,000 from 35,000 for students working at not-for-profit organizations, public sector employers and small businesses with 50 or fewer employees.”
“A 1996 memoir manuscript written by Barry Sherman reveals the late pharmacy mogul gave ample thought to the meaning of life, and concluded there was none.
“I have always been conscious of my personal mortality,” he wrote two decades ago.
The 75-year-old founder of generic drug manufacturer Apotex, and his wife Honey Sherman, 70, were found dead in their North York home last week. Their funeral is Thursday.
A partial draft of the memoir, called “Legacy of Thoughts,” was submitted as part of Sherman’s motion for summary judgment in a lawsuit brought by his orphaned cousins. He described the manuscript as his observations on philosophy, Canadian politics and the pharmaceutical industry.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/24
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So what was the family background, culture, geography, religion, irreligion?
Kevin Bolling: Well, that’s a long question. My family was a military family, so my father was in the navy. I didn’t have like most people the home town. I don’t. It was wherever we lived. So we moved around a lot when I was young. Probably not as much as other military families. Most military families move every three years, we did it about every four and five years, but I’ve lived up and down the east coast.
We lived in Puerto Rico where my brother was born and lived in Spain for four years, mainly during my high school. And then at that point, we came back to the United States and I did college and my master’s in the southeast, including around Everson. Growing up, I’ve come from a very Catholic based family. I remember my grandparents going to church every single day, so my family was very involved in the Catholic church,
My mother was extremely involved in all the stuff she did. I was an altar boy for years. So I always think my mother was very outspoken with the church as far as with regard to their treatment and inequality for women within the church. I think that very much, my brother and I definitely learned that from her to speak out and that equality should be the part for everybody. So we can see how that lesson is played out through our lives. We’ve gotten involved with different things, and so I think a lot of it comes from my mother.
Jacobsen: I think that’s a fabulous foundation. And the personal background, so by that I mean, I meant more specifically, the pivotal moments or even the seminal moments in your trajectory to a more secular outlook. You hinted at some of those before.
Bolling: For me, of course, I think growing up in a strong religious background, my mother’s approach to religion was very different, probably very different from the rest of my family. So she really applied us more to evaluate what the church was telling us.
So sermons with stories on how to do better. What was in the bible was, these would not be her words, but were dated and old. They were written at the time they were written and they were for that time. So, you had to look at them and just remember how things were these days. You didn’t take the stories in the bible at face value, or the sermon at face value; you had to translate them to today’s world and what you would do with them now, but they were stories on what was supposed to be good or how you were supposed to be a good person.
So I don’t think she intended it. But she very much allowed us to question that, and we examined in different ways. She didn’t take it as truth, an absolute truth. My aunt believes the Bible is absolute truth, even today she believes that men physically have one less rib than women because, of course, God took the rib from Adam to make Eve. I was like you can just count and that is really easy to disprove. But she doesn’t.
She is very hard in having that belief system and that is how she runs her life. I’m fortunate that my family does not. So, I think out of another pivotal moment for me was I think my very slow and gradual process to coming out as gay. I finally came out in graduate school. And so you know, I hadn’t thought about this before from my father where the family is more important than religion. So, of course, I’m going to accept you. You are more important to me than what the Bible says.
For my family, that was a very easy transition. I think it’s where their priorities were and family things are first. So I think we always had that; we had that nurturing environment from our family, but also, it was okay to question the things that were sometimes presented as absolute. So there was a strong belief, I think one from my father’s background as far as the military, that service to the country was always important.
So we were always doing things when we were young about being involved in volunteering and those sorts of things. Because a large part of what we did was growing up on naval bases, I think we were introduced to a lot of different cultures and then living outside of the United States is a very different perspective of a very Americentric world. All you hear about is the United States and that’s the only thing that’s important.
Being outside the United States, you see things differently in the world and recognize that’s not true, where it’s not always the same experience in the United States. So I think all of those things were pivotal. I’ve always remembered volunteering with something. I continued that on through my personal life, so you were always giving back in a way and that was just important for us to do.
Personally, it gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, so I’ve always done things that I have continued. I do remember history class in college and talking about world religion, and coming up with the Catholic church, which is, of course, the paradigm I associated with at the time. The professor really going in and talking about the church more as a corporation and why we’re doing all these things historically to make itself survive. So it gave me a very different perspective on the church and allowed me to question communion, and just the different practices of the church.
I do remember my first stances against religion: “I’m not going to confession anymore.” And then coming out gay, the church does not have a great relationship, especially the Catholic church for a long time, and not much is better, of not being very accepting of LGBT people. So there were times when unfortunately I never went through this, but you weren’t allowed to take communion, and being very negative. So I separated from the church a little bit more, and then I don’t believe in God anymore. I do remember having conversations with people; I don’t think there was anything specific that was a definite moment for me.
It was generalization, “That’s how I feel and I’m okay with that.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/23
Faisal Saeed Al Mutar founded the Global Secular Humanist Movement and Ideas Beyond Borders. He is an Iraqi refugee, satirist, and human rights activist. He is also a columnist for Free Inquiry. Here, we start a series together about Canadian culture.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, when you look at the landscape of Canadian culture, you can notice certain trends, especially if you’re someone who travels in the speaking engagement circuit, as you do, as an Iraqi refugee, and as a non-religious person speaking on irreligious issues. What do you notice as some big takeaways from all of that speaking and traveling and seeing Canadian culture?
Faisal Saeed Al Mutar: My experience has been pretty great. At the same time, I don’t see much difference between Canadian and American culture. I know Toronto and Vancouver. They are very close to the coastal United States in this regard.
From what I observed, there are some forms of frustrations in Toronto that I’m hearing from at least the ex-Muslim community who are seeing a rise of conservative Islam in Toronto. They are seeing more and more women wearing Niqab and covered from head to toe.
An Iranian friend of mine mentioned that she is getting a lot of catcalls from a lot of people that came to Toronto from the Middle East, recently. She feels that she has to censor herself in front of some of these folks.
I saw this mostly in Toronto. I didn’t see it in Vancouver. I think Vancouver has a lot of immigration from Hong Kong or East Asia, and less from the Middle East, but in Toronto, you have Mississauga with a significant Pakistani and Indian population.
Then Toronto has Syrian refugees that came in, recently. Obviously, these are questions that are very complication. I am supportive as a refugee. What makes Canada and America and others great is that we stand for universal human rights by supporting some of these refugees, there is a paradox there.
Some refugees may stand against universal human values and freedom of thought. I am noticing some of that in Toronto more than in most American cities, except two. One is Dearborn, Michigan, which is East of Michigan. It is close to Detroit and Detroit is close to Canada.
The other one is in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can see a significant Somali community. Some of them have joined Al Shabab. These are some of the negative things I have witnessed in Canada. As for the positive things, I think it is a great country and I am always happy to be back.
Jacobsen: What do you notice about the younger population, especially in religious affiliation?
Al Mutar: I think it is the same as many other Western countries. I think with the older generations in Canada. They tend to be less conversant than the United States. They are weaker in Canada. The Christian Right in Canada is less active than the Christian Right in America. So, there is less of theocratic movement.
There is less of a theocratic movement. The Conservative Party and others tend to be different than the Republican Party in the United States to some extent. I think many of the younger people tend to be more secular and secular in the sense that they support separation of church and state and live for the most part a non-religious life.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Faisal.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/23
Waleed Al-Husseini founded the Council of Ex-Muslims of France. He escaped the Palestinian Authority after torture and imprisonment in Palestine to Jordan and then France. He is a friend. Here we talk about principles of free speech and secularism, values increasingly in the public sphere in Canada and so relevant to the Canadian general public as discussion pieces.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about principles in opposition to one another, for example, freedom of speech and secularism versus restricted speech and theocracy (or its various tendencies). How are France’s values and your own values more in line with freedom of speech and secularism? Why are these more important to be in place rather than restricted and theocratic values seen more in Islam?
Waleed Al-Husseini: For sure, my values are more in line with French values and secularism, and a perspective on humanity that sees everyone deserving of equal rights, and is firm on the need to get religion divorced from the state.
All of these things do not exist in Islam. These things only exist when all Muslims are seen as part of humanity as a whole. When Muslims are the majority in a country, it is different than when they are the minority.
Often, secularism and freedom of speech, and similar secular values, can only be computed only within the framework of Islam and Islamic values. That is why they are asking for the defense of the hijab in the name of liberty, but then they attack criticism of Islam in the name of racism.
Although, Islam is not a race, as I explained in one of our interviews!
Even the hijab is an example of slavery and second-class citizenship in society, in my opinion, it means that women are a sexual tool. It becomes one of the most important signs of Islam in politics.
The criticism of Islam is a human right, according to human rights declarations. I gave you this example to show that is how they use things, to spare Islamic values from criticism!
Jacobsen: Sharia Law can imply Sharia courts, separate and distinct from the universal laws in a secular culture for everyone. So, in effect, a dual-law system can be set in a secular society.
How do these Sharia courts arise in a secular context? What can dismantle them? Why do these separate courts violate the principles of, for instance, one law for all?
Al-Husseini: This is what happened in the UK. That’s why I don’t like “secularism” and prefer the term “laïcité”! With secularism, they make insular communities and everyone lets them do what they want.
I remember in 2010, maybe, one court released someone who was charged with beating his wife, because he said that it is okay to beat your wife within Islam and our religion!
That is why the religions should be out of the state and public arena. The religions should be in their places of worship! No more than this, not in courts, education, or the political and even economic spheres like the factories and goods.
Even the ones with the (halal) label. Yes, because this label is more proof of communitarianism, to create a mini-society inside the mother society.
Jacobsen: What will make for a more just and secular society aligned with secular morality and international ideals expressed in the UN Charter, especially for minorities within minority groups such as ex-Muslims?
Al-Husseini: The way for secularism is very long, especially in the Arabic world. It is the need built from childhood. That’s why we need to stop teaching religion in schools – especially assumed as true rather than as a set of beliefs of one group or another like a world religions class – and we need to teach children secular values.
Also, we should stop telling kids about jihad and should not separate people into Muslims and non-Muslims! It provides a simplistic view of the world. Let them see all of us as humans of many stripes and shades, and types.
And the governments should have a secularism in law and work hard for it!
Because, you know, our problem is not only with the government, but even with people. For example, when the Saudi girl made a video while she was wearing a miniskirt, many people were asking to arrest her and the government did.
So, the problem is in the people! Sure, it’s because this is coming from the brainwashing since they are kids. We have an example looking at what happened recently after Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive the car. People were attacking the cars of women.
Jacobsen: One more principle is the truth, or attempts at its attainment, and obscurantism, or attempts to lie or half-lie and cover the truth in some way. One obscurantist terms, one is the word, which is vague: Islamophobia.
How can truth overcome the obscurantism surrounding difficult topics in a discussion on Islam and the ex-Muslim community?
Al-Husseini: Islamophobia: this the Kalashnikov of what they call themselves ‘moderate’ (for me, moderate in Islam does not exist at all, we just have peaceful Muslims at the moment).
Because, for example, there are the jihadists or terrorists who physically attack you, but then there are these moderates who also attack you in courts! And try to kill you when they make Islamophobia and racism look like the same and mixing all the definitions up. It’s kind of a war of terms; I talk about it in my last book I published in French!
About the truth, we ex-Muslims know more about Islam and the way of Islamism. Let us talk, and hear us out! Don’t attack or fight us, and then allow for our Muslim brothers who destroy their own countries to speak.
So, what do you think they will do with other countries like Europe and USA? They can open more for us to be in the media to speak and not to attack us with Islamophobia and other epithets and invectives.
They can protect those in Arabic and Islamic countries from being arrested based on using their freedom of speech. This liberty to choose. Also, inside France or these other countries for that matter, they can stop the call to kill us because this is hate speech, at a minimum: calling to have someone killed.
I hope the media and people become more serious and more open-minded on this issue.
Jacobsen: Thank you for taking the time once more, Waleed. Always a pleasure, my friend.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/22
Angelos Sofocleous is an agnostic atheist, skeptic, and the president of the University of Durham’s Durham Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society. Recently, he was elected as the President-elect for Humanist Students in the United Kingdom. I reached out to congratulate him, and to talk about the recent election. He is also a friend and colleague (Conatus News).
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re colleagues through writing and friends through constant interaction and united in common cause in the youth activist sector. Happily, you were elected the president-elect of Humanist Students, recently. First, I want to say, “Congratulations.” Second, I wanted to talk about some targeted objectives and plans for the position. What seem like the bigger areas for advancement of the humanist movement?
Angelos Sofocleous: Thank you, Scott! Very glad to be working with you on a variety of causes in so many different projects. As the position I have been elected to is within a students’ movement, I would like to focus on aspects relating to students. As Humanist Students, we want to ensure that religious students and religious institutions and union societies are not in a privileged position over non-religious students and societies. It’s alarming and sad that this is the case in most universities around the UK. For the sake of having a belief, in this case a religious belief, religious societies, especially societies of the Christian religion, are treated differently from universities and students’ unions. It’s concerning that a student society is privileged simply because of their belief. Of course, this shows an absurdity. The absurdity is revealed once we think of a world where societies of certain non-religious ideologies (e.g. political) are privileged over societies of other ideologies. Imagine if the Marxist, the neoliberal, or the conservative society at universities enjoyed privileges that other societies did not have. That would cause a lot of uproar. But this is not the case with religious societies; they can be in an advantageous position without the student population reacting. This is our job as Humanist Students: React against this unfair privilege that religious student societies enjoy and ensure that non-religious students are treated as religious students are.
Despite the fact that, according to the latest British Social Attitudes Survey, 71% of young people are non-religious, this figure does not seem to reflect the work that is done by universities to cater for the needs of non-religious students. More specifically, the number of UK universities which offer non-religious pastoral care is limited, and this, again, makes some students privileged simply because they have a religious belief. No effort has taken place to cater for the needs of non-religious students. A number of universities have argued that their pastoral carers are trained to accommodate for the needs of students of all faiths, even non-religious ones. This is simply not true. The beliefs and ideologies of non-religious students are fundamentally different from the basic beliefs of religious students. Most of the world’s religions have some common characteristics; that is, they believe to the existence of a supernatural world, hold a belief to a deity, give value to faith, and have a limited respect for science. Therefore, as the primary structure of the majority of religions is similar, one can’t argue that help and advice to a non-religious student can be provided with reference to that structure. Help and advice to a non-religious student should be strictly administered on non-religious grounds.
Apart from countering privileges enjoyed by religious societies and providing non-religious pastoral support to students, we need to bring humanism into campuses to provide a platform and a community for non-religious students. As I will explain later, this is not to be done in a form of dogmatic introduction, or by presenting humanism as a new ideology (this will be harming to humanism itself), but by presenting an alternative to religious societies and to religious institutions which, in many universities, manage to dominate and, at times control, university policies and practices. As a matter of fact, it has been the case that members of religious societies, in this case mostly Islamic ones, at least in the UK, have attempted to de-platform and rally against certain speakers, accusing them of ‘islamophobia’ and ‘hate speech’. This is the mindset that needs to be overturned at our universities. We should be very cautious about what is ‘hate speech’ at our campuses. There are certainly practices that can be labelled of as ‘hate speech’; but criticizing any religion or any belief system is certainly not ‘hate speech’. Criticizing any ideology is vital for our development as a society and no ideology shall be immune from criticism. If one gets ‘offended’ because their religion, ideology, or belief system is criticized then that’s their problem. However, when speech calls for violent action against a particular group of people then, yes, that is ‘hate speech’. It is vital that we distinguish between the two, so that we are able to not mislabel certain events as promoting a ‘phobia’ against a particular religion or ideology. It is crucial that we keep our universities as places in which thoughts can be exchanged, challenged, and heavily criticized. There is no place for emotions here.
Wishing to give voice to the 73% of young people, many of whom are students, we are structuring Humanist Students in a way in which we’ll have stronger presence in university campuses, battling against religious privilege, and for freedom of speech, equality of opportunity, and promoting critical thinking.
Jacobsen: As a student at the University of Durham, you study philosophy and psychology. You have been the president of the Durham Humanist Students Society since May, 2016. You hold numerous board and executive positions in and for the non-religious community. With these backgrounds, how can we leverage these organizations and publications, and so on, to target those bigger areas with coverage, speaking engagements, political endorsements even, and making the humanist position an acceptable mainstream viewpoint?
Sofocleous: Firstly, I wish to point out that our aim, as I see it, is not to make the humanist position ‘an acceptable mainstream viewpoint’. Let me explain what I mean by that because such a statement can easily be misinterpreted. This is not to say that I don’t believe that the world would not be a better place if people embraced humanism or that we should not campaign for the wide variety of values that humanism endorses. The case, rather, is that there are dangers in viewing humanism as a concrete ideology itself, as an ideology which can turn into a dogma, if managed incorrectly.
Our aim is not to preach for humanism, it is not to try to ‘convince’ people that humanism holds the absolute truth. Doing this, we fall into the trap of the way of thinking that a number of religions, political ideologies, and other belief systems share. We should not view humanism as a set of ideas to which someone can ‘convert to’ or ‘deconvert from’.
We do not want humanism to be treated as ‘any other ideology’. This is simply because respect for other human beings, other animals, and nature is not an ideology. Valuing reason, critical thinking, and logic, over faith, superstition, and belief is not an ideology. Battling religious indoctrination, religious privilege, and Church of England Bishops having a say in politics is not an ideology. Criticizing the atrocities that take place in theocratic nations and campaigning against blasphemy laws and for freedom of speech is not an ideology. We must not, foremost, treat humanism strictly as an ideology.
Someone who has respect for other human beings, values reason over faith, and is against laws which call for the killing of apostates does not just ‘hold an ideology’. Rather, they have just adopted the mindset through which societies can develop and prosper, always having respect for other human beings and human rights. It is the neutral position that every human being must follow, for the sake of being human.
I can make my case clearer by bringing in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), something that humanism fully supports and endorses. Do we want to hold that the UDHR is a ‘set of beliefs’ which is merely suggestive? Is there any sense in saying that a violent dictator ‘converts’ when they decide to adopt the UDHR? Is ‘preaching’ the right way to establish the UDHR as the ‘mainstream’, as you called it, position? I think that the answer is ‘no’, in all three questions.
We wish to make the humanist position ‘an acceptable mainstream viewpoint’ – but this is not to be done by any mechanism or method employed by religions or other belief systems which can be characterized as dogmatic. That is, we do not preach for humanism nor we do not ‘convert’ people. This is not even an option for humanism.
It is vitally important to understand the points I make above. This is directly related to your question as I see, unfortunately, that many humanist, atheist, secularist, and freethinking organizations become dogmatic and establish a concrete ideology to which all of their members must conform to or they become ostracized. If we, as the non-religious community, want to work together to have an impact in the world and fight for the causes that concern us, we should work according to our values and not fall into the trap of exercising the same practices which we criticize. Those are preaching, hate speech, ostracization.
We must work together, but we must also avoid treating humanism as a system whose values do not change and also avoid treating it as ‘any other ideology’. It is not ‘any other ideology’ for the same reason the UDHR is not ‘any other set of beliefs’. It is the position that we ought to take as human beings.
Jacobsen: In the UK, there are various privileges for the religious. How can the young student population work to overcome these biases, e.g. Bishops in the House of Lords?
Sofocleous: Indeed, there are a lot of privileges that religious institutions enjoy in the UK. In fact, as a non-British, I find it puzzling, and almost paradoxical, that in a country where the population is increasingly non-religious, the Church of England is recognized as the state church in England, operates its own schools, and can affect or decide on government policies, as it holds seats in the House of Lords. The paradox lies in the fact that, while in most countries the religiosity of people correlates with (or is caused by) the involvement of religion in public and state affairs, in the UK the Church of England seems to hold a position in society which does not reflect its actual effect in society.
The young student population can be active in battling religious privilege in many ways. On a personal level, they can be active in social media raising awareness for the existence of religious privilege, or writing a letter to their local MP presenting their views and exercising criticism if the MP supports religious involvement in politics. What is more, they can write articles through which they support their position and explain why religious privileged needs to be challenged, potentially affecting other people.
On a wider level, they can join nation-wide campaigns organized by organizations such as Humanists UK and National Secular Society who very carefully plan and promote campaigns battling religious privilege. Such organizations are doing great and important work in securing freedom from religion and active participation immensely contributes to their causes.
Jacobsen: To found a humanist publication would be a step forward for Humanist Students in general, how do you envision this coming to fruition? How can people help out?
Sofocleous: A humanist publication will be a big step forward for Humanist Students. One of the main reasons as to why Atheist, Humanist, and Secularist Students (AHS) was rebranded and restructured as Humanist Students was to give a sense of cohesion and unity among AHS (and now Humanist Students) societies. As a cohesive movement, then, Humanist Students needs to give voice to its students and provide a platform for them. The work that each Humanist Students society is doing at a local level is exceptional. However, mostly, these societies support humanism, express their concerns and promote their causes through talks, small-scale campaigns, socials, and fundraising. A humanist publication will give a new dimension to the ways Humanist Students societies express themselves – it will allow them to be direct and clear about the issues that matter to them. Currently, local issues stay local. An issue which a Humanist Students society faces at its university or city does not receive considerable attention by other Humanist Students societies as it’s the case that there is no medium through which the news will reach them. A humanist publication, then, will allow Humanist Students societies to communicate with each other about their successes and challenges they face on a local level.
Humanist Students societies members do have ideas and concerns, and do use writing to express themselves. In the absence of a Humanist Students newspaper, though, they look to find other platforms on which to publicize their material. A humanist publication, then, will not only encourage people who do not usually write to express themselves through writing, but will also utilize the vast number of people and societies who wish to present their ideas to the rest of the student population.
It is vitally important for the Humanist Students movement to have a voice; to have a platform on which it can express itself and through which it can criticize religious privilege and indoctrination. It will be a point of reference both for all Humanist Students societies, but also for any one who wants to learn more about humanism.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Angelos, I had a lengthy conversation with Hannah Timson. You are both highly competent. I look forward to your collaborative efforts to make these plans realities.
Sofocleous: Many thanks for this interview, Scott. I greatly value all the amazing work you are doing and the platform you give to so many people to speak out and express themselves. I am sure we will have the opportunity to join forces again during my term.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/22
*This Interview has been edited and updated from the original.*
Jessica Schab went from being a spiritual New Age leader to being a skeptic. She began to think more critically about the claims of the movement and has been working to educate others about the falsehoods in the New Age movement. She is a Co-Founder of the EOF Project.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To begin what was family background regarding faith?
Jessica Schab: I was raised in a cult. It was a combination of Christianity, Judaism, and Jehovah’s Witness. It was known as ‘The World Wide Church of God.’ The church did not have a building of its own.
Its services were held in a high school that we attended every Saturday. We weren’t allowed to eat pork, seafood, or things like this. We were also not really allowed to talk much to people who were not in the church.
The church taught that when you died God would resurrect you. God would bring you back to earth, but only after the planet is destroyed. Then the world would have peace for 1,000 years and then after that, well, no knows.
I was encouraged to learn the teachings of the church by heart. It instilled in me the importance of being a good person and helping no matter what, even if it meant sacrificing myself for the greater good. I remember having to always pray for the church leader, who I had never even met. His name was Herbert W. Armstrong.
Then when I was 14, my dad decided to leave the church. I was upset with him because suddenly all of our friends were no longer our friends because, sadly, I found out they only like you if we believed what they believed.
I later found out, not long after we left, that the church was shut down due to some scandal. Only recently, it has returned as ‘The Restored Church of God’. After we left the church, I started to explore other churches.
I searched for ones that I could attend, but none of them felt right. So, I started to explore other religions. Yet, none of them felt right too. What I ended up doing, instead of choosing one over the other, was to embrace them all because they seemed to say the same thing: God is love, be a good person, and so on. This was a Segway into New Age beliefs, as they claim to embrace or mix every faith into one.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get into the New Age?
Jessica Schab: Mainly, because of multiple tragedies I went through, the first was my sister died when I was 16. Then my dad had a stroke. He started to make claims: that he talked to beings of other dimensions – angels, aliens, and stuff like this. He told me that he could talk to my sister.
That she wasn’t really dead. That she was alive in another realm and was a bridge for us. There to help us with our mission on Earth. Then my dad told me aliens were interested in me. That they are preparing me for a very important mission.
I was upset because I wanted to be normal. I was rebelling against all the things my dad was saying. Though, looking back, I think it was his way of comforting me.
At age 21, my father died from a massive brain hemorrhage. If this was not painful enough, just a week before he died, I said horrible things to him. So, I had this huge amount of guilt. What made it worse, it had been drilled into me: our thoughts create reality.
So, I convinced myself. I was the one who killed him with my words. I resented myself for this. Especially when I realized how much I missed my dad, I wanted to be close with him. That’s when I decided to embrace his spiritual New Age work.
My dad said I was a leader. I would help many people…one day. I never thought of myself as a leader, but I would become one if it meant I could accomplish his mission, save the world, and make my dad proud on the ‘other side’.
I felt people needed real-life examples, not fictional characters in movies and books. So, I decided to be an example. As the desire started to grow in me to find and help like-minded people, to let them know they were not alone, I started making videos on YouTube.
I developed interest and support. People were telling me that I changed their life. I was even healing illnesses. I was invited to attend the Nexus Conference in Australia. That is where I was introduced to Project Camelot.
They were well-known for interviewing people on conspiracy theories, reptilian people – and basically all things woo. They ended up interviewing me, introducing me to the world as a ‘Crystal Child’. I became famous overnight.
Shortly after that interview, I became invited to speak all over the world. I had convinced myself that my spiritual message/beliefs were truth. Thus, I was able to convince others. These beliefs were also the solution and answer to everything for me.
However, as time went on, I started to realize how something wasn’t quite right with them. These beliefs were becoming filtered information that came into my mind. They were not helping me with my problems,
They were making them worse, but I was not able to see this at the time. It was too scary to confront that head-on because it was who I was. It was my job, my life. My entire world was comprised of these beliefs.
It’s hard to question something so close to you. That’s done so much for you. But then, when I started to notice how it was affecting other people, the way they think and not wanting to think or to question it.
I was burned out from always trying to help people, to heal them, to make videos. It felt never-ending. I started to get burned out. Shortly after, I became involved in an abusive relationship.
The guy was manipulative, controlling, and exploiting my followers and me. I could not take much action to get out of the relationship because my beliefs had convinced me. I can change him with my love and such, but the more loving and forgiving I was, the more the abuse amplified, the more he could get away with.
I was frustrated that my beliefs were not able to help me with my problems. I knew there was something wrong, but I did not know what it was. All I knew was that I had to get away from the relationship and have a fresh start, to get my mind clear and heal myself.
Jacobsen: How did this transition into the EOF?
I decided to go all over Asia and right before the 2012 ‘end of the world’, I went to Bali, Indonesia and set up a workshop to prepare people for the big shift in consciousness. That is where I met Diego Fontanive, the founder of the EOF Project via couch surfing.
He was the first person in years I spent time with that did not have the same beliefs as me. At first, I took what he had to say as: “Ok, that’s your perspective; I respect that. I am open to discussing our differences in views.”
I felt sad for him that he did not have a connection to his spirit. At one point, I wanted to help him with this. Yet, it was the opposite in the end. It was him who helped connect me back to my rational, sober mind.
He asked me questions that started to create doubts about my beliefs. He wanted me to understand the mechanics of the mindsets, especially the self-deception. He would ask me things like, “Are you sure this is true?”
If I said, “Because I feel it to be true or had certain experiences.” He would then say something like, “Are you sure your emotions and experiences are as reliable as you think? Who are you with your beliefs? Can you think outside of them for a minute?”
But there was one question he asked me, “Are you sure you are helping by spreading these type of ideas?” That got me the most out of all of the questions.
The more he got me to question and think about things, the more I was able to see how these beliefs were harmful. I was able to see how I was a drug dealer/addict. I did not even know it. This realization made me feel awful.
The way beliefs and mindsets can prevent us from thinking and questioning. The way they create a war with reality.
I wrote in great detail about my experience in Bali and with Diego. I call this my Bali Blog series. For a long time, I thought Diego was an advanced being from another dimension because he was so mysterious, which I interpreted as mystical.
I had him on such a high pedestal. I would have to face this pattern later.
Later, Diego admitted playing along with my ideas about him, in the hope that it would help me to see how I manipulate myself. Since I saw everything and everyone through a filter of mysticism, it was my language. Diego felt he had to learn it in order to get through to me.
No one wants to admit they were duped. That they duped themselves, nor do they want to admit that they could be wrong in following something for many years. People want to think of themselves as smart, but actually, this idea is what gets in the way of people being able to see that they have been deceived.
This is what is known as ‘The Dunning Kruger Effect’. Diego showed me how to develop my logic and reason. I worked those muscles every day. These tools are so vital to have in life in order to be able to think properly and make better decisions, to not have them is to be like driving drunk.
You are bound to crash sooner or later. Why risk it?
I decided to share my concerns and new realizations with my followers. They ended up turning on me. They said I was a traitor, a liar, and compromised. Diego was evil. They thought Diego had brainwashed me, but I kept sharing.
I thought people would understand and see it. I was naive thinking it would be so easy for people to question things that are so near and dear to them. But I kept on sharing, and more and more people started to understand what I was saying. They saw their own problems that were coming from these beliefs.
Diego and I set up the EOF Project. It uses critical thinking, metacognition, and memetics to help people via coaching and courses, to have a better understanding of the mechanics of irrational fear and flawed thinking.
The project focuses on helping people to transition from being a believer to a skeptic/thinker, and how to be both logical and emotional at the same time.
I later started to speak about my transition at a skeptics’ conferences. It was challenging and humiliating to show people how credulous I had been! However, my determination to prevent others to fall in the same mental traps was stronger.
Now, I find it fascinating how I used to think and it’s quite therapeutic to make fun of my old self and to use blasphemy on beliefs that used to have such an authority over me.
Working on improving our thinking skills, being savvy to our blind spots is not easy, unfortunately, critical thinking skills do not happen naturally. Its everyday work on our mental muscles that show results. It is one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but also the most fruitful as well.
Now, I am working on a documentary about my transition from mystic to a skeptic. I hope that with my story people will be able to see their patterns and biases, so as to prevent them – and for them to see the importance of being able to think in a healthier way. My documentary is called Memoirs of a Former Mystic: Caution too much love and light will make you sick.
http://www.memoirsofaformermystic.com/
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/21
Waleed Al-Husseini founded the Council of Ex-Muslims of France. He escaped the Palestinian Authority after torture and imprisonment in Palestine to Jordan and then France.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the pressing concerns of the moment? Miniskirts can make headlines. What are the fundamental issues right now?
Waleed Al-Husseini: The fundamentalism is the headline for this moment. What I mean in terms of fundamentalism is not only the jihadists who are bad, but also the miniskirts making the headlines in the media and making everything amiss in one country, this then takes over social media.
This is the fundamental issue. Every time, you will find something: summer coming soon. So there will be people discussing the issues around the Burkini. You will continue to see these headlines that make it seem like the Dark Ages.
Exactly, Muslims in there mini-society in Europe and the USA live in the Dark Ages. They live it in Arabic and Islamic countries.
Jacobsen: What about Muslim leaders who want an internal-to-Islam reformation? Is this a possibility? How far will it go?
Al-Husseini: This is our problem. Even if some Muslims need it, the population will not accept it. Last year, Jordan wanted to change the school’s lessons plans, reform it, but what happens often was people not liking this because they want to learn Sharia!
That is why even at this time it’s impossible for reform in Islam. Now, it’s like reform in Nazism, in their time when they have the power. Islam has the power. The religion has the connections and the money. So, it is impossible. Maybe later they can! In this time, yes, it is impossible.
Because the 1st religion to have a revolution of light was Islam in the time of Muʿtazila. That time was one of the best things about everything! Because they were looking for Quran at most as a historical document and nothing more!
So, we have problems because they believe this Quran is for every time and everywhere!
And for me, anyone can believe that he is a terrorist.
Jacobsen: What part can the ex-Muslim community play in the reformation of the faith and providing a safe way out for those trapped by religion and culture?
Al-Husseini: We are the reason for making many Muslims use the term moderate because of us. Because they don’t accept killing us, the non-believers or ex-Muslims! We know more from the inside.
Most of us know the Quran through its original language, in Arabic, which is the strongest translation of the Quran! And we know the ways of them, and will never be in these traps.
We showed and explained this. We can be part of a united Muslim front, who really want to help against the fundamentalists. And try it help our pal to be in the modern life, not stay there in the 7th century while we are in 21st.
Jacobsen: Insightful and cutting once again, my friend.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/20
Gabrielle Fahmy of CBC News reported on the inability of the Roman Catholic Church in New Brunswick to compensate sex abuse victims (2017).
Numerous Moncton archdiocesan priests were involved in sexual abuse cases, which is a liability for the finances of the church. In New Brunswick, based on reportage from the CBC, 56 lawsuits have been brought against the church.
There was a reconciliation process several years ago. Therefore, this number may be lower than it might have otherwise been in non-reconciliatory circumstances. Judge Michel Bastarache talked to victims between 2012 and 2014, privately.
109 victims were paid $10.6 million while the Bathurst diocese paid $5.5 million to 90 victims. The compensations ranged from $15,000 to $300,000.
The criteria were the age, extent, and severity of the sexual abuse within the archdiocese. Major cutbacks were inevitable for the church based on the multimillion-dollar expenses.
Moncton diocese staff were but from 19 to fewer than 10. Two were kept full-time. The rest were not full-time, even if kept on staff. The Dieppe diocesan center was sold. It was the home of the archbishop at the time.
With Bastarache, about 200 victims were given settlements based on abuse within the Roman Catholic Church within New Brunswick. Based on finances provided by Canada Revenue Agency, the Moncton archdiocese has been operating at a deficit for the past 2 to 4 years.
The church is now in confrontation with its insurance company saying that the insurance company should be paying for some of their compensation expenses to the sexual abuse victims.
The Archdiocese of Moncton is in a civil lawsuit, since 2015, with Co-Operators General insurance company, totaling $4.2 million. The insurers accuse the church of knowing about the abuse and doing nothing to stop it, while at the same time failing to inform the insurance company even after knowing about the ongoing sexual abuse within its church.
Other churches, such as those in the United States, have shut down before in the wake of sexual abuse victims coming forward and then being embroiled in lawsuits.
References
Fahmy, G. (2017, November 16). Catholic Church might be too broke to compensate sex abuse victims. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4402875.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/18
Diego Fontanive founded EOF. His background is in sociology, psychology, and critical thinking. Here we talk, briefly, about some of his background and work.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your background, so people know where you’re coming from?
Diego Fontanive: I never had a religious background. Nevertheless, I grew up in Venice, Italy. The society there has a religious background, Catholic or Christian. My parents were not really religious. But they did send me to the church for a couple of years as a child because they said this would help with social skills.
I do have a background in sociology, psychology, critical thinking, and memetics or the study of memes.
Jacobsen: How did you become more involved with the skeptic movement in general?
Fontanive: I always struggled with the issue somehow. The acknowledgment of how people who are not really that and who can think decently critically can think these things. Even when they claim to be atheists or secular, or even skeptics, we do know critical thinking is an unnatural way to think.
We are biologically prone to be fallacious. Nonetheless, I think we should go beyond critical thinking and try to integrate methods of study such as the study of memes or memetics. This is what triggered me.
Also, I saw people who were people even supposedly trained in critical thinking didn’t actually apply that in their own lives. I think that was the main trigger for me. I grew up in a non-religious family, but throughout the five years in the primary school. I had a teacher. She was religious.
I used to question her a lot. She completely discharged and refused to approach my questions critically. That was probably the trigger. That instead of questioning beliefs that people would rather protect them. Even though, they know in the back of their minds that something is wrong with it.
To explain that in a superficial way, it is existential security. That was a trigger.
Jacobsen: How did this lead to the End of Fear Project or EOF?
Fontanive: I am no longer comfortable with the full name, so that is why we use EOF. End of Fear sounds a bit bombastic and can open the door to misunderstandings. We do distinguish between natural fears, biological ones, such as the fear of others and so to defend oneself and those that are irrational fears.
The thing is to end irrational fear such as fear of God. If Jesus, then the fear of Jesus not loving me anymore, or irrational conspiracy theories. We have a lot of irrational conspiracy theories. Even with the further crazy beliefs, we promote magical thinking.
This is the aim and mission and vision of the project, which is to try and erase irrational fears – true logical fallacy detection, understanding of memetics, and also what I call metamemetics which is the understanding of fallacious and conditioning memes.
Jacobsen: What would you recommend for others to gain a little grounding in skepticism?
Fontanive: I would recommend The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, which explains the relationship between genes and memes. The Selfish Gene explains quite beautifully how memetic evolution cares about its own replication and adaptation and doesn’t care about critical analysis of itself. I would say Richard Dawkins because of his approach.
I would recommend Susan Blackmore. I am not comfortable with Blackmore regarding her approach to spirituality. I believe spirituality is a meme. It doesn’t exist. We have no evidence of it. Spiritual experiences, we can call them merely highly emotional experiences. But I would definitely recommend Richard Dawkins.
Jacobsen: What projects are you going to engage with EOF and others, for yourself?
Fontanive: What I am working on now as a priority alongside initiatives, we are working one-on-one with other people. We have work with artificial intelligence. We are developing programs for high schools and universities, for students and teachers.
The programs are a combination of critical thinking, metacognition, and the understanding of memes. I have done, recently, a speech or lecture at the European Skeptics Congress in Poland. The talk was about metamemetic thinking and the possibility that skepticism could be a meme in terms of many people calling and thinking of themselves as skeptics.
But their priority, cognitively speaking, is to seek a sort of identitarian shelter. For the next 2-3 years, I want to undertake this project for education. It goes back to education.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Diego.
Fontanive: It was a pleasure.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/17
“As debate over religious schools continues in Canadian courts and legislatures, a new poll has found that 61 per cent of Canadians support full or partial public funding for faith-based schools.
The Angus Reid Institute survey found that 31 per cent of respondents believe religious schools should receive the same funding as public schools, while 30 per cent believe they should receive partial funding.
“For those who think that, given all the changes that have happened on the religious front, the days of support for religious schools are coming quickly to an end, I don’t think that’s true,” said Angus Reid, the institute’s founder and chairman. “I think there’s a bit of a line in the sand here.””
“The government is changing the rules around which employers can qualify for funding to hire students through the Canada Summer Jobs program to try and ensure that groups advocating against abortion rights or the equality of LGBTQ2 Canadians will not be able to get funding.
At the same time, the changes will seek to boost support for groups offering services and supports to the LGBTQ2 community as well as those offering opportunities to women in engineering and mathematics, Indigenous Canadians, immigrants and minority official language communities.
The change comes after a series of articles about Liberal and Conservative MPs approving tens of thousands of dollars in summer job grants to anti-abortion groups in their ridings during the 2016 program, despite the money being made available by a government that prominently branded itself as pro-choice.”
Source: https://globalnews.ca/news/3914528/canada-summer-jobs-anti-abortion-anti-gay-groups/.
“CRANBROOK, B.C. — Convicted polygamist Winston Blackmore believes Canada’s guarantee of religious freedom gives him the right to have multiple wives.
But it is the Constitution’s legal rights sections that may provide the strongest reason for a judge to stay his guilty verdict or exempt him from punishment.
The former bishop of the fundamentalist Mormon community of Bountiful was found guilty in July of one count of polygamy along with James Oler, another former bishop.
On Wednesday, Blackmore’s lawyer argued in B.C. Supreme Court that his client was unfairly tried because the provincial government dithered for 25 years before charging him with a single count of polygamy for having two dozen wives.”
“Toronto billionaire and philanthropist couple Barry and Honey Sherman were found dead Friday, prompting politicians and prominent Canadians to express condolences and share memories on social media. Barry Sherman was the founder of generic drug giant Apotex.
“I am beyond words right now. My dear friends Barry and Honey Sherman have been found dead. Wonderful human beings, incredible philanthropists, great leaders in health care. A very, very sad day. Barry, Honey, rest in peace.” — Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins.
“Deeply shocked to learn of the deaths of Honey and Barry Sherman, such remarkable people. Grappling with this terrible news.” — former Ontario premier and former interim federal Liberal leader Bob Rae.”
“By now, many if not most will be well acquainted with the saga of Trinity Western University’s efforts to open a school of law, which would be the first religious (and private) law faculty in Canada.
Initially on track to open its doors in 2015, the university was forced to put its plans on hold following staunch opposition from the Law Societies of British Columbia and Upper Canada (i.e. Ontario) and the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society, along with other prominent members of the legal profession.
The controversy concerns Trinity Western’s Community Covenant, a school-wide code of conduct which reflects traditional Christian teachings and practices. At issue is the relatively small section on sexual ethics, which calls on students to abstain from sexual intimacy outside of the Biblical model of marriage between one man and one woman. After significant internal debate, the aforementioned law societies all decided not to accredit the law school, insisting that the Community Covenant is contrary to the public interest since it discriminates against LGBTQ students. “
“Closing arguments in a B.C. Supreme Court case involving a man found guilty of marrying two dozen women are expected to be delivered today.
Winston Blackmore is a leader in the small community of Bountiful and was found guilty earlier this year of one count of polygamy after the court heard he had married 24 women, including three who were 15 years old at the time.
His lawyer Blaire Suffredine told the court yesterday that Blackmore didn’t believe he could be charged with polygamy because a provincial attorney general in the early 1990s issued a statement that said such a charge would breach a person’s charter rights.”
Source: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/closing-arguments-in-winston-blackmore-s-polygamy-trial-being-heard-1.3721459.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/17
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, Dec. 17, 2017 /INGSOC/ – The Ministry of Truth, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Health and Human Services (HHS) branches, spoke on the recent work to protect the American citizenry and to help with funding.
Not to be listed here, so as to protect the reader from threatening words, dangerous thoughts, our ignorance is a strength after all. The CDC and HHS announced the ban in a public information release. The potential for a higher-order command from Emmanuel Goldstein for the banned words remains uncertain.
“I do not know if this came from the HHS or the CDC, but I assume this came from the HHS,” a former official of the CDC said, “as the HHS officials make the budget. Some words can confuse, even discombobulate, those with budgetary concerns. So, why use them?”
A current spokesperson for the Party commented, “Look at what happens on colleges and universities now, they want to restrict our freedoms. They are anti-Party. We of the Party are the real and true freedom of speech people, but not for thoughtcrimes.”
Some current CDC officials complained about pressures from the Inner Party since their instantiation after the revolution. But if Big Brother can’t watch your words and you in your place of work, why not simply watch yourself for Big Brother? Be the best representative, especially if involved in budgetary works.
Be prole, be free.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/15
Something of note: the Canadian Criminal Justice System opened for suggested reforms, “The Government of Canada is undertaking a broad review of Canada’s Criminal Justice System to ensure that it is just, compassionate and fair, and promotes a safe, peaceful and prosperous Canadian society” (Government of Canada, 2017).
It feels like a good opportunity for a Christmas present to the country from citizens. Five topic areas in the call for recommendations for the changes to it: victims’ experience, Indigenous over-representation, mental health and addictions, restorative justice, and court delays.
For means of involvement, the government set the number at four. An Online Choicebook, online discussions, Twitter townhalls, and email submissions for those with an interest in it. As a public consultation process for those with an interest in the possibility for slight reduction in long-term suffering of some citizens, here’s a chance, deadline: January 15, 2017.
One month.
References
Government of Canada. (2017, July 19). Justice Transformation. Retrieved from https://www.tcjs-tsjp.ca/en/?utm_source=paidtweet1EN&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=tcjs.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/15
How did you become involved in humanism? When was the moment, or series of moments, that eventually led into you becoming an open humanist?
In the early years of 2000 I became critical of religion, in the year 2000 when I started being skeptical about the natural world and things in it, was asking myself questions, asked religious people plus other people both in school and out of school and their answers to my queries did not satisfy me, so I became critical and curious of religion. Through my research online, I stumbled about humanists. Humanism/Atheism and Rationalism and since then I later joined organized humanism by creating in place a community based organization.
Was there a family background?
Yes, am from an Anglican back ground.
Is humanism demonized in Uganda, or an accepted minority philosophical and ethical worldview?
Humanism is demonized by religious zealots who want to paint a bad picture on humanism so that people can tag it and the majority remain believing that being religious is the only way to success, a great life which actually is not the case.
To some extend I think Humanism in Uganda is an accepted minority philosophical & ethical worldview.
You are the school director for Kasese Humanist Primary School. What tasks and responsibilities come with being the chairman for the Kasese Humanist Primary School?
My common tasks are:
Planning for the school
Identifying projects, lobbying for support and publicity of Kasese United Humanist Association & its associated schools.
Ensuring the workers are paid as an appreciation for their hardwork
Am also engaged in construction efforts of the schools and its sister projects.
Ensuring I coordinate the sponsored pupils with their sponsors and notifying them 3 times in a year about their progress.
When did this become a calling for you — teaching the young?
In 2010, I together with other colleagues and members of Kasese United Humanist Association, we thought it was a wise idea if we created a school and one year later we opened Kasese Humanist Primary School.
Kasese Humanist Primary School was only founded in 2011, which is a relatively short time ago, and is run by the Kasese United Humanist Association. It is a secular school grounded in science education. How does the Kasese Humanist Primary School differ from the majority of other primary schools in Uganda?
Humanist Schools and orphanages differ from religious schools in the ways below:
We teach religious education on comparative terms.
Our learners are encouraged to think for themselves and are given opportunity to think freely without any sort of commands.
We cherish evolutionary science other than creation science.
Our school welcomes learners from all religions, it matters less if one is religious or proclaimed non religious since we look at our schools as a center or source of knowledge and not a place of worship.
We have secular posters or messages on classroom walls or compounds.
We observe and celebrate secular days by holding celebrations, happy moments or memorial events.
There are no religious instructions or observance of religious tenets.
We do not indoctrinate our learners to any religion or belief system but what we do is to enlighten and allow our learners to be curious, explore and come up with their perceptions.
We do not perform rituals of any kind.
It has a number of clubs and teaches during the day to a limited number of students. Are there after-school programs to cater to other students?
Yes, we do have after school programs like: Running activities, computer lessons, vocational skills training, playing a key board, music dance and drama, weaving, knitting and gardening
Is the primary school in high demand, but can’t fill all of the potential slots based on a limited number of pupils being taught there?
Yes, there is a high demand for primary school education to accommodate learners,
Uganda has scores of children and the level of illiteracy is still high as some parents out of ignorance, poverty don’t know the value of education, some times we do force parents to keep their kids in school.
As well, there are 3 campuses now. So within 5/6 years, not even, the primary school developed up to three campuses. What were the honest failures and successes on the road to development of Kasese Humanist Primary School up to the present?
Kasese Humanist School has developed over the years from being a nursery & primary school and now has 3 campuses in a period of 6 years now. We earlier this year opened the Secondary Section. In spite of this we have had successes and failures quoted as below:
Challenges:
Misconceptions by locals who don’t know the meaning of Humanism or being a humanist, some locals tend to associate humanism to devil worshipping or satanic. The rumours are propelled by enemies of the schools mostly religious zealots and selfish locals who are enemies of development.
Salaries payment to the staffs sometimes delays or they get paid in bits due to poor collections as some parents pay in bits.
Disease out breaks is common among learners due to the living conditions in their homes. Poverty, ignorance remains a key factor affecting people here.
Successes:
Having our schools on permanent homes owned by ourselves.
All learning spaces have classrooms.
The Child Sponsorship scheme where more than 100 children schooling in our schools have sponsors who meet their tuition needs.
School’s potential to have in place income generating activities like the Bizoha Tractor, maize & cassava milling plant, land for rent etc.
My projects have got international attention and this has been possible because of my online presence which has exposed me to organizations and individuals who have helped much in boosting up my works financially, morally and materially.
What are some of the main campaigns and initiatives of the Kasese Humanist Primary School?
Promoting humanism
Encouraging debates
Comparative religion
Vocational skills training
Computer lessons
Gardening
Anti Witchcraft campaign
Eco huts & botanical gardens project for eco tourism & out door learning.
Letter Exchange & pen pal program
Child sponsorship program
Reading for Pleasure program
Running program by Kasese freethinkers academy
In general, what are the perennial threats to the practice of humanism in Uganda?
Religious bigots who do not understand humanism and what it entails end up making ignorant statements about it and misguide people.
Some school proprietors most of them in the religious circles may also smear a bad picture in an effort to smear our schools out of envy.
How can people get involved with the Kasese Humanist Primary School, sponsor a child, even donate to staff salaries?
You can help my work by sponsoring a child at any of my schools.
Volunteering in my projects as teachers, nurses or farmers
Spreading the message to friends, relatives and working colleagues about our innovations.
Donate finances or material to my initiatives.
Offer moral support, knowledge, advice to my projects.
Donate to staff salaries or even sponsor a classroom.
Any closing thoughts or feelings based on the discussion today?
I think Kasese Humanist Primary school and Kasese Humanist Secondary School is on the right track. Setting our schools on a science and humanist foundation is a good thing that other schools in Uganda or any part of the world could adopt.
It remains our core duty to enlighten people about who we are and what we stand for.
I am so grateful for this brief interview. I thank Jacobsen of Conatus News for this interview.
Yours in free thought,
Bwambale Robert Musubaho
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/11
George Ongere is the Director of the Center for Inquiry-Kenya, and a colleague and friend. Here we talk about atheism there.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How prevalent is atheism in Kenya?
George Ongere: Atheism is currently gaining popularity in Kenya. The media has gained interest at the rate through which young people are currently abandoning religion. In her article in the Daily Nations, which appeared on July 3rd 2013 with the title, The Rise of Atheism in Kenya, Vera Okeyo brought the stunning reality of how young people were abandoning religion and embracing Atheism. It became public trending rage and talk in the weeks that followed with religious personalities claiming that young people in the country were being misled to embrace unethical realities. Even though the article received negative comments condemning the young people who had abandoned religion, the article made three different hallmarks in Kenya. First, it introduced the term “Atheism” to the general public where Kenyans, even at the rural, came to the reality that there was an alternative life stance to religion, where people could live without believing in God and any supernatural entities. The importance of this popularization is that a good percentage of the population started to distinguish the term with other confusing ideologies like devil worshiping. They understood that Atheists did not believe in anything supernatural be it Satan, Witchcraft or God. Secondly, it gave rise to militant Atheism in Kenya. It gave courage to personalities like Harrison Mumia, the President of Atheist in Kenya, to start militant atheism in the media. Third, it popularized organized Atheism, where one of the organizations that got fame during that time was Freethinkers Initiative Kenya (FIKA) since it was featured in the article. Lastly, because of the interest of Atheism, live debates between religious people and Atheists started to be hosted live in the Kenyan televisions.
With the rise of technology where many young people can gain access to the internet and find reading materials that gives alternative view to religion, young people are embracing skepticism, humanism, Atheism and other radical ideologies that makes them non religious.
Jacobsen: What is the state of atheism in social life in Kenya?
Ongere: Atheism is still a life stance that is still looked at with suspicion in many Kenyan cultures and societies. Many people who have embraced atheism still fear to come out of the closet for fear of being dismissed by their relatives and friends. The challenge is the way religion has corrupted Kenyans to believe that it is the best model to all the realities. Religion has captured all institutions including marriage, family, work, and institutions of higher learning where most people socialize.
Whereas many people, even close relatives, might be aware an individual is an atheist, they might not be comfortable around the person. Particularly areas that challenge atheists who are still in their youth are relationships and dating. Most women tend to believe that people who subscribe to religion will make good husbands than those who are atheist. Particularly, marriages in Kenya still follow the traditional procedure where the parents play important roles in marriage, where they have to know the people engaged to their sons and daughters by doing background check. It means that people who do not believe in God might be trapped where the parents refuses their child to be married to someone who does not believe in God. Additionally, most Kenyans still believe that a perfect acceptable wedding is a religious one that includes a wedding presided over by religious personnel.
Nevertheless, young people in Kenya are trying to change the situation where religion does not influence relationships and friendship anymore. The social media have brought free flow of information where the youths get a lot of materials concerning atheism and they are starting to accept it as a reality. I am optimistic that religion will not be of much influence to them.
Jacobsen: For those in North American culture, or Canadian culture, what is something that they will not be likely to know about irreligion in Kenya?
Ongere: Most people in the west still have the belief that finding Atheists in Africa is fictional. “Africans are notoriously religious” a renown quote by John S. Mbiti, who was is an authority in Africa religion, believed that Africans will at no time abandon religion. The quote has shaped western scholarship and judgment about Africa religiosity such that they cannot imagine of some Africans living without religion. However, what most people in the west do not know is that scholars like Mbiti used short-sighted binoculars that could not see the future clearly. Mbiti did not know that technology could expose people in Africa, mostly the young to alternative views to religion. One of the best happenings in Kenya is that the Atheist movement is courageous and they have challenged some of the doctrines of religions, talked about separation of church and state, the removal of compulsory religious teaching in primary schools and they have also put the government to pressure to have then registered. The government refused to register the Atheist Movement in Kenya arguing that the group was unconstitutional since Kenya was founded on religious principles. The case is still in court where the movement has accused the attorney general and the head of register of society of denying them their fundamental rights of registration.
Jacobsen: How has Christianity hurt Kenyan citizens and the development of the country?
Ongere: In Kenya, people who subscribe to Christianity are the majority and are estimated to be about 84.4% and followed by Muslims who are about 9.7%, 2.4% to non religious people and the other remain to traditional African religions and others. Thus, Christian religion is dominant in the country thus most of the current cultures are influenced by Christian principles.
Christianity has hurt the country in many ways. To start with, the country is suffering from the HIV/ AIDS scourge. In the current times, about 1.6 million people are living with HIV and there are about 62, 000 new infections. In 2016 alone, about 36, 000 people died of AIDS related deaths. Moreover, about 64% of the adults infected were on antiretroviral drugs and about 65% of children were on antiretroviral treatment. In this way, the people diagnosed with the disease are amongst the vulnerable population that has been targeted by Christianity. There are many cases where Christian denominations have carried out healing crusades and advised these people to abandon taking antiretroviral drugs and this has contributed the many deaths that would have otherwise be living happily. Moreover, religion has brought about stigmatization of people with the disease. Mostly, most religious people believe that people who prostitute are the people who should have the disease. As such, many people would not come in the open and declare their status for fear of being discriminated. In this way, Christianity has thwarted the efforts to prolong the lives of HIV/ AIDS.
Moreover, Christian belief has made many poor people to be exploited through healing missions that involve trickery. The best case in Kenya was that of a re-known rich pastor of the Salvation Healing Ministry Victor Kanyari who was conning people by using trickery. Through radical journalism, the pastor was exposed of conning people by using magical tricks. Un ware, the followers of the church sold their properties to get such healings. There are many Christian denominations who still used these tricks to exploit their victims and driving them into poverty.
To add on, Child trafficking has been linked to many religious organizations. One of the prominent cases in Kenya was that of UK-Based Televangelist Gilbert Deya who was famous for the miracle babies. Deya claimed to give people miracle babies that were given by God to people. However, it was discovered that the Deya was in a network of a scheme that linked themselves with cartels that stole children in delivery rooms and trafficked them abroad. Currently, the preacher is in the toughest prison in Kenya; the Kamiti Maximum Prison.
It thus demonstrates how Christian religion as a belief does not help Kenya progress in any way.
Jacobsen: Has it helped develop in anyway?
Ongere: It would be biased to say that Christianity has not helped Kenya in any way. First, many great institutions of learning were launched in Kenya through Christianity. The missionaries in Kenya, who were in their mission to spread their religions, did many positive things to the places they were involved in. They even penetrated the rural areas and built schools that gave rural folks a chance to get educated and improve their lives. Moreover, religious institutions have also been involved in many social justice issues. They have helped the poor, orphans and built hospitals that have helped many Kenyans.
However, when looked deeply, even though Christianity brought help in Kenya, their motive behind such efforts discredits the assistance they brought to Africa. Christianity was a tool that was used to colonize Africans and they did not even intervene during the harsh rule that Kenyan underwent under the colonialists. The education and the help they brought were to tame Africans not to resist the subjugation that they were being put under. This was even captured by first Africa President and Desmond Tutu. They said, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land”. As such, it is inevitable that most Kenya would not be impressed much by such efforts.
Jacobsen: Where are some educational, political, and social-cultural initiatives on going to improve the knowledge about an acceptance of atheism in Kenya?
Ongere: Campus Activism, organizing of debates and workshops on topics of Atheism, science, reason, free inquiry and humanist values are some of the initiatives that are going on to promote the acceptance of atheism in Kenya. When I became the director of the Center for Inquiry in Kenya in the year 2007, Atheism was still strange to many people and the atheist movement had not even started actively in Kenya. I knew I had a big task to steer the development of skepticism and rationality at the institutions of higher learning and in the community using the youth organizations that I was involved with.
The first step was to start an On campus group at the University of Nairobi. I knew it was going to be a challenging task but with the help of CFI, I managed to hold the first workshop successfully in 2008 and the turn out amazed me. I noticed the youth were in dilemma about religion and wanted to find out if there were other alternatives. I invited speakers like Leo Igwe of Nigeria, Deo Sessitoleko of Uganda, and Betty Nasaka of Uganda. They were experienced by then and they help spread the humanist message to the groups I have formed at the campuses.
Moreover, we have also used humanism message to start social justice programs in the rural where irrational beliefs like religion and witchcraft have thwarted human progress. In the year 2012, we came with the Humanist Orphans Program. In the rural of Kisumu, we witnessed unreason that was threatening to gag the future of the young generation. Practices like wife inheritance were spreading HIV/ AIDS and the result was that many parents were dying leaving behind children who faced a bleak future. Moreover, religion was also contributing to this demise where instead of educating the people about taking Anti-retroviral drugs, they organized healing crusades and cheat the people that they had been healed. Thus, it made the people in the rural to rule out taking anti-retroviral drugs. With many orphans left behind without any means of survival, most of them went to the streets turning into prostitution and some went to become sex slaves. We believed that with the help we got from CFI Transnational, we could help save the situation. In this way, we started the Humanist Orphans Kenya a program that educates abandoned children; provide them with uniforms and other basic materials. Saving the future generation to lead better lives is one of the humanist messages we have passed across and this has helped in the acceptance of humanism in the village.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/11
Imam Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi is an Australian Shi’i Muslim. He is an author, creationist, educator, preacher, researcher, and thinker. He has Iraqi origin and was born in Qum, Iran. Here we discuss Islam and atheism, and media representation and being silenced.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The first question: Why do you think you’re being targeted?
Imam Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi: I’m being silenced because my following grew 45,000 in 3 months and the radical Islamists are complaining. I was receiving an average of 20k views for my videos and over 7k comments. Facebook didn’t even explain what’s going on.
Jacobsen: What is the main message of peace? What are the some of the more prominent reasons youth become radicalized?
Tawhidi: My message on Facebook was exposing extremism in Islamic books. And youth are being radicalized because of the lack of condemnation of terrorism by Mosque preachers
Jacobsen: What does Facebook need to do to be welcoming to you? There are anti-Israel and Anti-Jew pages. They are not shut down. Atheist Republic was shut down. The Council of Ex-Muslims of North America was shut down. Now, you are shut down. What does this mean for atheists, and those that left the faith and are ordinary reformers within the faith?
Tawhidi: I was not made by Facebook. Therefore, my Facebook page being shut down doesn’t slow me down, but it’s affecting my audience who were on my page daily and it’s hurting their feelings
Jacobsen: Why do you think atheist pages are taken down? Do you think atheists and peaceful Muslim s can unite against those trying to silence them and take them down?
Tawhidi: Yes, I have been calling for all Peaceful Muslims to unite with the West against Islamic radicals from their own faith.
Jacobsen: What have been effective tactics and communication channels – outside of Facebook – to get the message of unification against Islamic radicals out to the public?
Tawhidi: Gab, minds.com, Twitter, and national media
Jacobsen: What do you think of those trying to silence you?
Tawhidi: They’re giving aid to radicals and slowing down the message of peace
Jacobsen: Even with their feelings hurt, and while the Facebook is down now – while you were a paying customer for promotions, where can people get in touch with you?
Tawhidi: Twitter: @imamofpeace.
Jacobsen: You have become big in the media, lately. Why do you think your message is resonating?
Tawhidi: Because people are attracted to the truth.
Jacobsen: Who are other, secular and religious, exemplars who are telling the truth?
Tawhidi: And they’re realizing much of the attacks against me are not true. Many people are doing what they can but none of them are being censored like me
Jacobsen: What about the issue of fake reformers? What can be done about them? How can the West best help?
Tawhidi: Fake reformers are everywhere I have written an entire article about it on the Huffington Post.
Jacobsen: Why can’t people who disagree come and argue with you, rather than simply silence you?
Tawhidi: I have invited the Australian National Imams Council for a debate, however, there has been deafening silence from their behalf.
Jacobsen: Atheist Republic and Council of Ex-Muslims of North America were shut down too. You are a Muslim page. Why were you shut down now? What does this portend since this extends from the ex-Muslim and atheist community to the ordinary, peaceful Muslim community – through at least one of its leaders: you?
Tawhidi: It seems to me that Facebook does not want any voices opposing their agenda.
Jacobsen: What are the common tactics of the Islamic radicals?
Tawhidi: Mass reporting of pages they disagree with, and in return, Facebook’s Automated system shuts down the page and blocks the administrative accounts from posting.
Jacobsen: Who are personal heroes or heroines for you?
Tawhidi: Imam Hussain.
Jacobsen: What are your favourite verses in the Quran?
Tawhidi: “And we created you as nations and tribes so that you may get to know one another. Verily the most honorable amongst you is the most pious”.
Jacobsen: What do the Islamic radicals most often use to justify their ideology and actions?
Tawhidi: The corrupt teachings of Sahih Bukhari
Jacobsen: Why can’t people who disagree come and argue with you, rather than simply silence you?
Tawhidi: Because I know their arguments and how to invalidate them.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Tawhidi: The dawn of freedom is near.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Imam Tawhidi.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/08
This morning, I reflected on belief in Canada over coffee. In particular, belief in the ‘other worldly’. Where, in John von Neumann’s (Poundstone, 2015) terms, propositions, as these describe the world, about material things or abstract objects, come in three states — yes, no, or maybe — based on the question, for instance, “Does X exist?” Yes, X exists; no, X does not exist; or, maybe, X might exist. Where the other worldly exists, does not exist, or might exist, most seem contained in the lattermost categorization.
So, “Does Apollo (or Cthulhu, or Ahura Mazda) exist?” The technical categorization remains: possible, or “maybe.” For all intents and purposes, most humanists will choose, “No.” The former as a technical, logical selection; the latter as a functional, utilitarian selection. Both work in context. In surveys of belief, Canadians, a little under half at 47%, believe in ghosts (Ipsos Reid, 2006).
If reduced to 30,000,000 for the total Canadian population, that means ~15,000,000 Canadians believe in ghosts, in the other worldly, in the supernatural. Many small towns will host ghost, haunted house, and cemetery tours with scant, or no, evidence for the claims. At the same time, the revenue from these tourist activities might prevent, whether passive or active, appropriate investigation into the evidentiary basis of the claims to the ghosts, the hauntings of the house, or the spirit-wanderings of the cemeteries. Some might think, “Why ruin business?” Indeed.
If the percentage of the Canadian population from the survey, and other surveys and other beliefs parallel this finding about ghosts, then many Canadians, in spite of functional living in numerous areas of life — work, school, paying taxes, raising kids, being neighbourly, and so on, live in a world of other worldliness, of the supernatural, of the magical-mystical. Many Canadians aren’t living in the natural world, in their minds’ eyes. They live in a world of magic.
Maybe, it feels cozier.
But what about the serious implications for the reality of death? To return to the libretto, the belief in ghosts seems, at first evaluation, in denial of death. Death as, not necessarily but “for all intents and purposes,” final. The dead are gone, and aren’t coming back — as most humanists would, likely, say, “…for all intents and purposes.” I am reminded of Ezra Pound (Stock, 2017). Who in his Cantos, when speaking of the “Gods,” stated:
“The Gods have not returned. ‘They have never left us.’
They have not returned.” (Pound, n.d.)
For all intents and purposes… ’The dead have not returned. ‘They have never left us.’ They have not returned.’
References
Ipsos Reid. (2006, October 25). Do You Believe In Ghosts? Almost Half (47%) Of Canadians Say They Do. Retrieved from http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/do-you-believe-in-ghosts-almost-half-47-of-canadians-say-they-do-618230.htm.
Pound, E. (n.d.). Cantos CXIII. Retrieved from http://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=34&poem=1736.
Poundstone, W. (2015, December 8). John von Neumann. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-von-Neumann.
Stock, N. (2017, January 12). Ezra Pound. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ezra-Pound.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/01
Bamidele Adeneye is a friend from Nigeria. Here he, kindly, recounts threats to life: his.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have had threats to your life. What have they been, my friend?
Bamidele Adeneye: Well, it all started in 2014 when I had a video interview challenging miracle healers and pastors in my country, Nigeria. I didn’t even know the video would be aired on TV. Then the calls started coming in. I even noticed that friends and people I did business with started avoiding me.
Then I had to rescue a gentleman from death in Kano because he denounced Islam and his family were going to hurt him. That made me famous to not just Christians but Muslims as the face of atheism in Nigeria. My phone number was listed on my social media account and I guess that’s where they got my number from. I would receive calls from strangers saying things like they were going to kill me.
Online messages promising to “show” me. It was a very disturbing experience. I became paranoid because it’s Nigeria. I am surrounded by people who see me as an agent of the devil, even relatives. I lost friends as well. Because of the situation, I had to change my daughter’s school. My sister’s who live abroad are always worried because they are the threats online and even get told by people they know to earn me that I should be careful.
Jacobsen: Can you recall some examples?
Adeneye: There are quite a number of them. I was as recently as July physically attacked by a group of strangers while I was trying to get back to my car. They called my social media name and when I mistakenly answered, I was attacked. They kept saying I’m the agent of the devil all the while they were beating on me. I had to escape. I was so afraid.
Calls at odd times of the day from hidden numbers issuing threats, promising attacks on me and my family. I had to get dogs to protect my home at some point before I later decided to move them to a sage location. It became difficult to live as a family as we couldn’t go out together in public anymore. We spent our holidays at home most of the time because I was afraid of potential attacks on us.
Jacobsen: You are traveling. Are these threats part of the reason for the travels?
Adeneye: Definitely. It became necessary to stay away from my home and my family. I took long breaks away from home for peace of mind. I had to create a space between myself and my loved ones for security reasons. My younger brother who looks exactly like me has been targeted as well. He had to deactivate his social media account because of backlash from people who thought he was me.
Jacobsen: What countries did you visit? What did you expect in terms of the social and cultural aspects of religion entering in these countries? What was the actual experience there?
Adeneye: I took trips to the UK to see my family and friends. It felt normal being an unbeliever there. I also went to the USA where I met those who were exactly like the ones back home. Although, unlike Nigeria where you’re judged even at work by your religious beliefs or otherwise, you’re protected by law somewhat by the law in the USA. I’m planning to visit Canada to are what it truly means to live in a liberal secular state.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Bamidele.
Adeneye: You’re welcome, Scott.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/01
Humanism is universal creed, and deed. A life taught and lived in one breath, and step, for all people. Whether in the lonely, snowy white-capped North of Canada in North America or in Nigeria on the Gulf of Guinea in Africa, human beings live, eat, work, educate kids, raise families, and build communities around ideas.
Those ideas form the base for mutual solidarity, sympathy, and pursuit of cooperative endeavours.
In Lagos, Nigeria, humanism is probably unknown to most Nigerian citizens — except, maybe, to members of the Humanist Assembly of Lagos and others like it. In that spirit, we think humanism has unique applications to Lagos. Here’s how and why.
Bamidele grew up in a society viewed from the perspective of two Abrahamic religions, namely Christianity and Islam. Many ascribe their actions and interactions to faith. Most Nigerians have religious upbringings. So Abrahamic religion is the main lens for perspective on the world in Nigeria. That is, most Nigerians see the world with religious-tinted glasses.
Lagos is a bustling city; it is sleepless. A busy urban area, where acts of kindness are rare. If they happen to a Nigerian, they are taken for granted because life is so on-the-go all of the time. Everyone is working in their daily, weekly, and monthly hustle in the bustle. How can you be humanistic when you are busy and trying to get ahead of others?
Take, for example, the daily routine for many Nigerians in Lagos trying to build their professional profile. The day starts early at 5am. There’s no time to even say, “Hello, good morning. How are you?” These kind gestures are ignored. Unless, of course, you are reminded by the ‘Word of God’ when you read from the daily devotional. Even though, it does not say it explicitly.
You feel compelled to be kind to your neighbor, to empathize with others, to do the right thing, and so on. In essence, you are being a humanist effortlessly and without knowing it. Your moral values are purported to be derived from Christianity and Islam, both with promising rewards — for those who behave good, and threatening punishment, for those who behave bad.
This is a misconception. Humanism implies the good and bad stem from us. Humanism is an intricate part of our being, inherent in us as long as we are of sound and healthy mind. Happily, most of us are good most of the time.
So, what is Humanism to the average Nigerian? The International Humanist and Ethical Union states:
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance that affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. Humanism stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based on human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. Humanism is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
This aptly describes everyday acts people engage in readily, acts of kindness, of concern for others…UBUNTU!
In Lagos, there are countless instances of people helping accident victims and those in need, giving food and shelter to the hungry and the homeless, and lending a helping hand without regard for where the person being helped is from or what the person worships. These are all acts of humanism in Lagos. The city of hustle and bustle, and busy people taking their time to act with compassion, consideration, and kindness.
Similar to the anchor to normal human compassion and kindness religious texts and services can be for ordinary Nigerian citizens in Lagos, the Humanist Assembly in Lagos and other humanist organizations — and their teachings, values, and community — perform the same function without, by necessity, reference to the transcendent.
Except for the secular, who value freedom of expression, freedom of thought, conscience, and belief, it does not necessarily have to come from the divine. It can come, simply, from Nigerians. Besides, in its own way, moment-to-moment compassion has its own transcendence.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/27
Members of The Clergy Project were featured in the documentary film called Losing Our Religion. It was shown October 13th and 14th at the Carlton Theatre in downtown Toronto. The documentary was made by Leslea Mair and Leif Kaldor, who come from Zoot Pictures.
Other prominent individuals in the film are Katherine Dunphy, Linda LaScola, Daniel Dennett, Dan Barker, and Phil Zuckerman. Several other prominent individuals within the formal irreligious community appear in the film.
As a feature-length documentary, it is about preachers who are no longer religious believers. The Clergy Project has about 600 members. With the documentary film, this is an exploration of some of their stories. For many people, the loss of faith can mean the loss of family, community, work, income, and hope and meaning from the belief in a hereafter.
Without these life assurances, life can become difficult, uncertain, and even shatter the individual preacher, where even the support from a regular traumatic life event can be taken away, such as job security, and family and community.
This raises personal questions, such as, “How do I make a living? Will I have contact with my family at all? Where can I find meaning in life? Can I even find another community?” Or simply, “What do I do?” These are important questions that arise in the context of losing one’s faith as a leader in the community, potentially.
Now, there are even experiments with communities that have a form of religions and religious ceremony without having the supernatural tenets and beliefs associated with them, including the secular churches, Sunday Assemblies, the Oasis Network, and others.
There will be another showing at 12250 SW Denney Rd in the Southminster Presbyterian Church Church in Beaverton, Oregon. This will be on November 30 at 7:30 PM, which is a Thursday.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/26
“Most Canadians respect religion, believe it is relevant and think it benefits society, according to a new Angus Reid Institute poll.
But despite those positive findings, religious freedom expert Andrew Bennett is worried about Canada’s acceptance of religion and religious diversity.
“My fear is that increasingly the public square is becoming this gated community, where the only people who can inhabit it are those who adhere to this new type of secular orthodoxy,” Bennett told The Catholic Register.“”
“Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board did not infringe on a Hamilton father’s religious freedom, Ontario’s appeal court ruled last Wednesday.Steve Tourloukis, a father with two children in the public school system and a Greek Orthodox Christian, filed for appeal after the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that the school doesn’t have to give him advance notice before discussions of sex, marriage or family happens in the classroom.
Justice Robert J. Sharpe, who dismissed Tourloukis’s appeal, wrote in his ruling the “central and fatal shortcoming” in his case was “the lack of any concrete evidence of interference with his right to religious freedom.””
“A new national survey shows Canadians are divided about the role religion should play in government and societal affairs.In an Angus Reid Institute survey, more respondents said religion is good for society or does more good than bad (38%) than those saying it’s bad or does more harm than good (14%). However, some 48% were equivocal saying it represents a mix of good and bad.
However another question showed that a majority felt that religion should have little to no influence on public life.””
Source: http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/11/20/religion-and-its-place-in-canadian-public-life/.
“When it comes to the way Canadians perceive various religions as either benefiting or damaging Canadian society, Judaism is seen in more or less the same way as mainstream Christian faiths – and far removed from Islam.
Twenty per cent of Canadians see Judaism as providing benefits to Canada or Canadian society, according to a new national survey conducted by the Angus Reid Institute (ARI), in conjunction with Faith in Canada 150. At the same time, 35 per cent of those polled said the presence of Catholicism benefited Canada, with 26 per cent saying the same about Protestantism and 24 per cent about evangelical Christianity.
However, when it came to evaluating whether faith groups cause damage to Canada or Canadian society, only 12 per cent said that about Judaism, 17 per cent said it about Catholicism, nine per cent about Protestantism and 21 per cent about evangelical Christianity. A remarkable 46 per cent, however, said that Islam was damaging to Canada or Canadian society, while 13 per cent said it benefited Canada.”
Source: http://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/one-five-canadians-see-judaism-benefiting-canada-study.
“Recently, Julie Payette, the new Governor General of Canada, created a minor furor when she addressed the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa. She praised scientific progress and achievement and castigated those who clung to pernicious and outmoded ideas, including militant religious fundamentalism.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book “The Great Partnership, Science Religion and the Search for Meaning,” maintains that religions work best when they are open and accountable to the world. When they develop into closed systems and sectarian modes of community, when they place great weight on the afterlife or divine intervention into history, expecting the end of time in the midst of time, then they can become profoundly dangerous. For there is then nothing to check their descent into fantasy, paranoia and violence.
We need a vigorous, challenging dialogue between religion and science on the massive problems confronting humanity. Each needs the other if it is to avoid hubris and intellectual imperialism. Bad things happen when religion creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven. And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bioengineering, treating human beings as objects.”
Source: https://www.therecord.com/opinion-story/7961943-science-religion-do-go-hand-in-hand/.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/26
Monica Miller is Senior Counsel for the American Humanist Association in the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. Here we have a chat, enjoy.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was family background – geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Monica Miller: I grew up in a non-religious household in Northern California. My mom is “spiritual” but not tied to any denomination and my dad is generally agnostic. That said, my sister and I were put in a nearby Catholic school (a beautiful school in Sleepy Hollow, Marin) from pre-K through eighth grade, which I started to resent around middle school but am now grateful for the experience, as I think it helped shape my atheist views. My parents agreed to let me go to a public high school. I took an elective course at our community college on world religions and it was there I discovered I was definitely an atheist. It wasn’t until college I learned about humanism.
Jacobsen: Graduating from Pitzer College in 2008, and from Columbia University in 2009 with a MPA in environmental science and policy, and cum laude from Vermont Law School (2012). What have been the personal and professional benefits from this in work advancing humanism?
Miller: Humanism teaches that we must use science and reason to solve our world’s problems. I’ve always been an animal rights advocate (deciding to go vegetarian by third grade) and now I work for the only civil rights organization in the country that is using litigation to secure legal rights for nonhuman animals (rather than animal welfare). (The Nonhuman Rights Project). I’m fortunate to be able to work for both the NhRP and the AHA. During my senior year at Pitzer College, I took a first-in-its-kind course, “Sociology of Secularism,” taught by Phil Zuckerman. Now Pitzer has created an entire Secularism Studies program. Through that course, I learned more about humanism and issues concerning separation-of-church-and-state. Then at Vermont Law School, I started my own Secular Legal Society student group. I later discovered American Humanist Association and my career took off!
Jacobsen: What are perennial issues and battlegrounds to maintain a solid line between church and state, or any other religious institution and state?
Miller: The most common church-state-separation violations we encounter are government religious displays (the cross, nativity scenes, Ten Commandments), and school prayers.
Jacobsen: What have been more recent, difficult battles?
Miller: The most recent battles I’ve been fighting have been over two giant government Christian cross displays, one in Pensacola, Florida and one in Bladensburg, Maryland. The Florida District Court ruled in our favor, and ordered that the cross be removed. The City has appealed the decision to the Eleventh Circuit. In the Maryland case, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled in our favor, and the county is talking about trying to take the case to the Supreme Court. I do not believe they’ll be successful, as the federal courts have been virtually unanimous in finding government cross displays unconstitutional. I also recently filed a petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court asking it to take our case challenging school prayers in Texas.
Jacobsen: Women’s rights, especially reproductive rights, in America are under direct, and indirect, attack. How can grassroots activists, and legal professionals, fight to maintain those new and fragile rights from the historic norm of religious violations of women’s bodies?
Miller: From a legal standpoint, we support the efforts of Planned Parenthood and stand ready to file or co-sign friend-of-court (amicus) briefs in their cases. So far, we haven’t had to get involved but are prepared to do so. And obviously, we (AHA), joined the Women’s March last January. Grassroots activists can also support the AHA’s Feminist Humanist Alliance. The Feminist Humanist Alliance is a multi-issue movement powered by and for women, transpeople, and genderqueer people to fight for social justice.
Jacobsen: What are non-humans are non-human rights applied to most often? How can people get involved, even donate to, organizations and individuals fighting for their rights?
Miller: Right now, at least in our country, nonhuman animals have no rights. Despite the commonly used term “animal rights,” animals are considered mere “things” under the law and are therefore not considered rights-bearers. At the Nonhuman Rights Project, we are trying to change this, at least for autonomous animals (such as chimpanzees, orcas, and elephants). You can support our work here: https://secure.everyaction.com/w968uwjsAUK2ommJxs0LHg2 and learn more about our work here: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/who-we-are/
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Miller: Thank you for the interview!
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time today, Monica.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/24
Janet French is a Reporter for the Edmonton Journal. Here we talk about Catholic education and the sex ed curriculum.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did they currently come to the controversy in sex ed? What is some of the history of it?
Janet French: It was in Spring or early Summer of 2016 that the Government of Alberta announced a complete overhaul of the K-12 curriculum. It was the first of its kind in Alberta. Curriculum in the past has been piecemeal, “Now, we’re going to redo social studies.” It would be done in isolation from other topics. They would rewrite all of social studies K through 12.
Another interesting element is that it in different languages at different times. There is also a Francophone element. They would do social studies, implement it, and then do the Francophone version. I think many Francophone people felt there was not a lot of Francophone input into the system.
Now, they are putting Francophone in the rewrite as well as including a lot of Indigenous people in. There are people from Nunavut and the Northwest Territories too because many people use the curriculums from Alberta in their curricula.
There are either 6 or 8 broad subject areas about this, like math, social studies, English, French, sciences, and the health and wellness, which is where the sex ed comes in. In Alberta, most of the sex ed comes between grade 4 and grade 9.
In high school, there is a course called CALM 20. it stands for Carrer and Life Management. It has been around forever. I am old. You can take it any year in high school. it covers just like it sounds, career and life management. It teaches you to apply for a job and to get a resume done. Then it teaches sex ed.
Jacobsen: At present, there has been some mild back-and-forth within the news about a proposed alternative sex education curriculum. What have been some of the proposed additions or changes by the Catholic superintendents?
French: What is weird about this is that we don’t know what’s going to be in the curriculum yet, I am going to talk a little technical about curriculum writing. There seems to be some general public misunderstanding about what it takes for a curriculum.
They had these huge teams, like 300 and something, even 400 sometimes, mostly volunteers such as teachers and professors spending their own hours on this as well as people employed by Alberta Education.
They work on those 6 or 8 areas depending on who you talk to. They depend on who you talk to. They have written something called an introduction, which is – “What do we want to cover in each grade or each subject?” – the Scope and Sequence. They are very, very broad and high level.
They are almost like themes that they want to touch on. I haven’t looked at the health one. The one in Alberta that has been the one of the most debated has been the social studies one and people argue if there is enough history in it. Same with the math one about serving kids well.
We didn’t hear much about the sex education or the wellness one. back in April or May of 2016, when Alberta Education Minister David Eggen introduced this idea of a curriculum rewrite, he said, ‘One of the elements will be teaching consent.’ Updated sex ed would be part of it, already, if you were a private religious school board or Catholic school board, you would be asking if this would be like Ontario’s. it was revealed in 2015.
It has been very controversial. many parents pull their kids out of public schools as a result of it because they didn’t want their kids learning some of the outcomes, There were rumblings or rumors about this being a problem.
So, I heard in June. There was a small organization called Accessing Information Not Myths. They put out a press release in June saying, “We’re hearing that the Catholic school boards want to run their own curriculum.”
But they didn’t have a lot of evidence. There were rumors. They were reading into things that were in annual reports and newsletters from various Catholic education groups. There wasn’t a lot of solid evidence.
I emailed the president of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees Association and said, “Is there any truth to this? I talked to the Ministry of Education. it looks like you’re submitting something that is parallel and would replace what would be in the new health curriculum.”
She said, “No, we’re just writing resources. Basically, documents that help the teachers teach the curricular outcomes. Those exist right now for the current sex ed curriculum. But then, I filed a Freedom of Information request because I wasn’t sure who was telling the truth.
What I got back was a series of documents that you can see on the website, what I got back you can see on our website, there was a bit of a back and forth between the Council of Catholic Superintendents of Alberta, which is, like it sounds, the superintendents who work at the different Catholic school districts across the province.
Also, people who work for the Ministry of Education. What they did was apply for a grant, I don’t have the documents at home with me. It says to write a parallel sex education curriculum that is from a Catholic perspective.
The Deputy Minister wrote back in March and said, ‘Sorry, no sorry, we don’t pay for religious education. That is in your wheelhouse. There are other resources you can draw on nationally to write religious curriculum. That is not our job.’
When I interviewed Karl Germann from the CCSSA, he said, ‘We’re going ahead with it anyway.’ I said, ‘How are you going to pay for that if you need $66,000?’ He said they will be using time from people who are already employed in various Catholic school districts.
Doing it in a way in Grand Prairie, where he works, taking somebody who doesn’t work in a classroom, so they don’t have to pay for a substitute teacher, so it is more cost-effective for them. What they wanted to do was to second some teachers outside of the classroom to have them be able to work on the curriculum.
The next thing they wrote, which seems to be causing a lot of tension or debate, is that they sent in this document, and they say Alberta Education requested this information, but this did not turn up in my FOI.
I didn’t have an email that said, “Send us all your concerns.” I don’t know that for sure. That’s what they were saying. That they were asked to explain what their concerns were about the upcoming sex ed curriculum. That’s where they went through the listing, ‘Okay, here is our subject headings that concern us.’
‘Consent: We don’t think consent should be the minimum bar for having a sexual relationship with somebody. It should be consent but within the context of a marriage.’
‘We can teach about different kinds of contraception, but we can’t promote contraception.’ Then there are certain things they say they can’t teach at all, ‘We can’t promote a homosexual lifestyle.’ Yes, they used the word “homosexual.”
‘People experience same-sex inclinations, but they would have to be taught that the Church’s teaching is that they should live a life of chastity or I guess abstinence. Some other things that they touched on were that they didn’t want to teach about anal or oral sex because in their belief the Catholic teaching is you should have sex to make babies and that doesn’t make babies.
There was a section that talked about ‘sexualization of girls (and boys).’ It is interesting that boys are an afterthought in that discussion.
Jacobsen: I am piecing together some of the narratives from some of the things noted in the response, so if I can relay some of the things that you said with regards to the changes. They would view the regular sex education proposal as promoting certain things rather than simply teaching them.
French: That’s what they’re concerned about. Yes, they’re saying there are certain things they can teach. And they don’t go into much detail about how they would teach or how much detail they would teach it into, but it is saying, ‘We can teach about what different kinds fo contraception do, but we can’t promote it because the Church does not smile upon it.’
One thing they say they will flat out not teach it. The language in the document is very closed off to the idea of what they call “modern gender theory.” They say, ‘God’s Plan or vision is that your biological sex matches your gender identity. Full stop. We can’t promote anything that would teach biological sex as different from gender identity.
Jacobsen: So, the idea would be the promotion or teaching of a lifestyle of abstinence, sex only within a marriage, non-promotion of homosexuality (gay, lesbian, or bisexual), as well as rejection of more modern gender theory with a preference, in other words a full stop strong preference, for ‘God’s Providence’ – so to speak – or ‘God’s Plan’ with biological sex and gender being one and the same.
French: Yes. It all has to be discussed within the appropriateness of a marriage between a man and a woman. That phrasing was in there repeatedly. There are ideas about contraception: ‘We believe that when you have sex it is full giving and you are not fully giving of yourself if you are holding back the life making portion of it.
Jacobsen: What has been proposed as some of the next steps in terms of the conversation between the Government of Alberta, the Catholic education schooling system within the province, as well as the regular school system?
French: So, what happened was, after I interviewed Karl from the CCSSA (he’s the president), he said that they were concerned about the Ontario sex ed curriculum. This document outlining all of their areas of concerns, which was a proactive outreach step to say, “When you write your learning outcomes (what you have to teach), they want to be as vague as possible to be able to teach it from their perspective.”
It would have an influence not only on what Catholic students learn but on what all Alberta students learn no matter where they went to school. Education Minister David Eggen said, ‘This document is unacceptable. Schools are not going to teach that being gay is wrong or that God has a moral judgment about it.
The problem is the Catholic superintendents haven’t put out their alternative sex education plan. That hasn’t happened yet. They say that’s going to happen sometime in November. The health and wellness committee or the working group working on the provincial curriculum haven’t written their outcomes explaining what they think students should learn.
We probably won’t see that until Spring. Karl said that in his conversations with the Ministry, not the Minister but the people who work in the government such as the civil servants said this is not going to be a big problem.
We’re not going to have a big conflict here. But when I hear the Minister and the Premier talk about how their perspective is not acceptable, I do not see how that can be the case. They’re probably going to butt heads about this for a while.
I imagine there are a lot of conversations happening behind the scenes after all of the attention that this got.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Janet.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Of the perennial ethical precepts in the world, the Golden Rule stands ‘head and shoulders’ above the others in terms of durability and consistency across time and culture, respectively. Religious institutions, formal or informal, preach the ethic. Secular ethical frameworks advocate for it, too. Right into the present, it is presented as an ideal. Maybe, it is unattainable, but the ethics hold sway in religious and secular moral universes.
So the Golden Rule in the modern context remains consistent with the proclaimed ideal of the religious ethical worldviews and the international equivalent with human rights. Human rights are not equivalent to, but overlap significantly with, women’s rights: do as you would be done by. So if one was a woman, and required appropriate medical attention for reproductive health, and the technology was available and funded, then the moral act would be to provide the access to the medical services because another would want the same. This is consistent with ‘middle-of-the-road’ human rights organizations as well.
“…equitable access to safe abortion services is first and foremost a human right.” Human Rights Watch has affirmed, “Where abortion is safe and legal, no one is forced to have one. Where abortion is illegal and unsafe, women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or suffer serious health consequences and even death.” Research shows that many pregnant women, desperate in their situation and without access to safe abortion, will undergo dangerous procedures, risking harm unto themselves.
The Golden Rule should compel us to act in accordance with our better natures and provide the “equitable access to safe abortion” for women. Governments pressured by religious groups, whose leadership are made up primarily of men, like the Trump Administration, have posed a direct threat to this affirmation. Take, for instance, the Executive Order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump on his very first day in office, notably surrounded by a group of men.
The “Global Gag Rule” as it is commonly referred to prohibits NGOs from providing abortions or even providing information or services (counseling, referrals) about abortions if they want to receive funding from the U.S. for family planning. The U.S. has an undisputed powerful global influence, and with this executive order, countless women around the world will undoubtedly be negatively affected.
According to Forbes, “The U.S. hasn’t allowed use of federal funds for abortion since the 1973 Helms Amendment, [applied] internationally as well as domestically. In fact, gag rules that harm women are already widespread in the U.S. under the guise of ‘religious freedom.’”
“There is no evidence that the global gag rule reduces abortion, according to Wendy Turnbull, PAI [Unparalleled Leadership and Impact] senior advisor.” Forbes said, “Instead, loss of funding from this punitive regulation eliminates access to contraceptives for more than 225 million women globally, greatly increasing the need for abortion. It also increases pregnancy-related deaths by about 289,000. How is that ‘pro-life?’”
Exactly whose life is valued and to what extent? Why must the compassion for an unborn fetus ring louder than that for the child that is born into poverty and for the mother and the state who is forced to shoulder that burden?
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Based on research, $1.25 to $1.6 billion could be saved if we have a single public school system based on two languages. But we continue to have a separate Catholic school system. It is expensive to have a religious separate school system. How is this prejudiced against the non-Catholic majority of the Canadian population?
Reva Landau: Education is generally a provincial responsibility in Canada, and you have to talk about provinces, not Canada. Only three provinces, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta give public funding to separate schools. Some provinces such as New Brunswick, give no public funding to any private schools, including religious schools. This does not discriminate against the non-Catholic population in their province. Other provinces, such as Quebec, have a non-denominational public school system, and fund any other schools that meet certain criteria (including non-religious schools) at a lesser rate. This also does not discriminate against the non-Catholic population of these provinces [though personally I prefer public funding of only one public non-denomination (two-language) system]. Alberta and Saskatchewan fund separate Catholic schools at a comparable level to public schools but also fund other schools that meet certain criteria (including non-religious schools) at a lesser level. This discriminates against non-Catholics to some extent. I will speak only about Ontario because that is the only province on which I have done extensive research and its discrimination is the most egregious.
Only Ontario fully funds Catholic separate schools at the same, or a greater rate, than they fund the public non-denominational school system, and does not fund any other religious or philosophical school system at all. This discriminates against the non-Catholic population in several ways. Parents who want their child to have an Anglican, Baptist, Buddhist, atheist, etc. education have to pay for their schooling entirely out of their own pocket, as well as pay through residential property and other taxes for a publicly-funded school system they do not use.
If Ontario separate schools were paid for entirely through the residential property taxes of separate school supporters (which they are not), it would still be unfair because non-Catholics who want their child to have a particular religious (or humanitarian, etc.) education have to pay residential property taxes to the public school system and pay for their child’s schooling themselves. But in fact only less than 8% of the operational and capital funding for Catholic separate schools comes from the residential property taxes of separate school supporters.
About 72% comes from general provincial revenues, that is from the taxes of all, Catholic or non-Catholic, religious or non-religious. About 15% comes from the property taxes of businesses (they cannot control where their taxes go) and 5% from other sources. So non-Catholics are being forced to fund a particular religious system with whose policies on, for example, abortion or the right of gays to marry, they might not agree.
The current Ontario system also discriminates against non-Catholics because of the separate school system, for several reasons, receives more in funding from general revenues per student, than the public school system so funding the separate school system is costing non-Catholics more in taxes than if we had only one public non-denominational school system.
The current Ontario system discriminates against non-Catholic parents because Catholics, as of right, can send their child to a separate school or a public school. Non-Catholics at the elementary school level, can ask for their child to go to a separate school (because it is closer, or newer, etc.) but they do not have the right to send their child. Many non-Catholic parents would not want their child to go to a separate school even if it was closer, and no parent should have to choose between their child going to a school nearer them or their child having a non-denominational public school education, but non-Catholic parents do not even have their choice. Some elementary separate schools admit non-Catholics if they have room, some do not. At the high school level, all students have the right to attend separate schools and to be exempted from religious courses, though some boards are more co-operative than others in granting these exemptions.
The current Ontario system also discriminates against non-Catholics for teaching positions but that is covered in the next question.
Jacobsen: Catholic schools require teachers to be Catholic. How is this prejudiced against the non-Catholic population in Canada, especially the teachers?
Landau: See my point under Question 1 about education in Canada being generally under provincial control so can’t speak about discrimination in Canada, just by province. Again, I am talking only about Ontario.
Catholic separate schools can legally discriminate against non-Catholic teachers. The application form for Catholic Boards requires a Personal Reference Letter from a priest. Catholic School Boards may occasionally hire non-Catholics if they cannot find any Catholic with the qualifications to teach, for example, calculus but they will never become a head of department, superintendent, etc. [See (Daly v. Ontario (Attorney General), 44 O.R. (3d) 349 for a court case upholding separate school right to discriminate]. Some boards also require educational assistants and library assistants to be Catholics.
So Catholics, who are about 31% of the population of Ontario, have access to 100% of teaching jobs. Non-Catholics, who are about 69 % of the population of Ontario, have access to only 69% of the jobs. Catholics have about twice the chance of non-Catholics of getting a teaching job in Ontario.
Jacobsen: How can the Ontario government abolish separate school funding, completely?
Landau: Ontario could pass a resolution through the Provincial Parliament asking for the federal government to amend the Constitution Act, 1867, so subsections (1) to (4) of s.93 of the Constitution Act, 1867 which guarantee the rights separate schools had in 1867 in Confederation no longer apply to Ontario. Quebec did this in 1997 and within 7 months of Quebec’s resolution the Constitution Act amendment had gone through Parliament and been proclaimed into law by the Governor General. Newfoundland also abolished its requirement for separate school funding in the same way. Quebec now has one public (two-language) school system.
Jacobsen: How much more money do separate schools receive in operational funding from the provincial revenues?
Landau: From 2002-03 to 2014-15, separate schools received about $1,500 more in operating revenues per student per year than public schools (about $1,600 more from 2011-12 to 2014-15). They received about $1,700 more per student per year in combined operational and capital funding per year from 2011-12 to 2014-15. I am using the figures from 2002-03 to show this is a steady persistent pattern, using the recent figures to show this pattern continues, and using the combined operating and capital figures to show it is not that public schools somehow receive more in capital grants.
Jacobsen: Those who support public schools also support separate schools through grants. The separate schools received almost $1600 more per student per annum. How is this economic privilege for religious schools still extant?
Landau: There are two main reasons. One is that the three main political parties keep on saying: “it is a complex constitutional issue about which we can do nothing”. They ignore that Quebec abolished funding for separate schools in 1997 by a resolution through the Quebec National Assembly (or Provincial Parliament) asking for the federal government to amend the Constitution Act, 1867 so subsections 93(1) to 93(4) no longer applied to Quebec. Within 7 months the amendment had gone through the House of Commons, the Senate, and been proclaimed into law by the Governor-General. Ontario could do the same thing. It would be even easier because Quebec has set an example for us. But most people don’t know this so they just accept the excuses of the three main political parties/
The second reason is most people don’t realize how much the current system costs us. They say Catholics pay for separate schools through residential property taxes. I know residential property taxes cover less than 8% of the operational costs (and none of the capital costs) but most people don’t. Separate school supporters say we would need the same number of teachers and school supplies, ignoring all the administrative costs which our duplicate system incur. Even if you look at the cost of transportation, separate schools spend way more per student busing students because they have fewer students over the same area. Same goes for trustees and superintendents, and schools not fully utilized in both systems. As people have commented, suppose we had two fire departments, one which served Catholics and hired Catholic firefighters, and another one which served everyone else, and hired firefighters of all religions. Think of all the duplicate administrative costs. The Federation of Urban Neighbourhoods of Ontario did a study in 2012 which estimated that 1.25 to 1.6 billion dollars would be saved yearly if funding for separate schools were eliminated but most people don’t know about it.
Jacobsen: Circa 1867 only 25% of Catholic students, or 5% of all students, went to separate Catholic publicly funded schools, but at the present, 31% of all students attend these publicly funded separate Catholic schools. How did this come to be? How can this be reversed?
Landau: About 25% to 30% of all Catholic students went to separate schools in 1867. This was about 5% of the student population. First of all, only about 15% of the school population was Catholic in 1867. Now it is about 31%. That is one difference. But the biggest difference is the funding. In 1867, separate schools received only about 62% to 66% of the funding per student as public schools. There were several reasons for this but two important ones. First of all, public schools received funding from the local municipalities. About 20% of their funding came from local municipalities. But municipalities did not contribute to separate school funding. Secondly, property owners could only direct their rates to separate schools if they swore an affidavit saying they wanted to contribute to separate schools. An incorporated business cannot swear an affidavit. So while owners of small businesses could direct their taxes to a separate school, incorporated businesses, of course, cannot swear affidavits and could not direct their taxes to separate schools. There were other reasons, but these were the main two explaining why separate schools had 62% to 66% of the funding per student as public schools.
Catholic parents, like non-Catholic parents, wanted their children to have a good education. They realized that in general children would receive a better education at public schools, partly because of the funding, but also because they would be as Dr. Ryerson, the Superintendent of Education, put it, measuring themselves against the majority and not receiving an isolated, inferior education.
So what has changed? As I said, now there is a larger percent of Catholics in the Ontario population (about 31% are Catholics) but I do not think that is the main reason. Ontario separate schools were funded at a lower level than public schools for many years. Various changes were made such as allowing incorporated businesses to estimate the percent of their shareholders who were Catholic and contributing to public and separate schools on that proportion but it made little difference.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, it appeared Ryerson’s prediction that separate schools would fade away because of their poorer tax base was coming true. Separate schools had to set higher mill rates (education tax rate on property) which alienated Catholic ratepayers or they matched the public school mill rates and had lower salaries, less qualified staff, higher pupil-teacher ratios and narrower programs. Most chose the latter. In Toronto, up to 50% of Catholics were in public schools.
But in 1963 Premier Robarts (Conservative Party) announced the Ontario Foundation Tax Plan. This Plan had a commendable goal of helping poorer boards, often rural. But by treating separate school boards as poor boards like any other poor board, it greatly increased their funding and Robarts is credited by many with saving the separate school system. Unqualified staff were replaced with qualified staff, etc.
There were other steps that increased funding for separate schools. In 1978, funding was greatly increased for grades 9 and 10 in separate schools. In 1985, grades 11-13 which had not been funded for separate schools, were funded. In 1997, the Fewer School Boards Act and the Education Quality Improvement Act changed the entire basis of funding of all school boards. While its intention may have been (or not been) to give students the same level of funding based on their needs regardless of where they lived, the result was to greatly increase funding for separate schools. Businesses were forced to direct their property taxes on a per capita basis to the public and separate school boards in their area. The owners could be Anglican, atheist, Sikh, etc. It made no difference.
As separate schools raised less per student in residential property taxes, they were given more funding per student from the provincial government in general revenues to make up the difference. As separate schools generally have fewer students over the same area as public schools, they are given more money in administrative grants to pay for busing, administration, etc.
So now, unlike 1867 when separate schools received only 62% to 66% as much per capita as public schools, they receive more per student yearly than public schools. And this is even though public schools have in general more students who have English as a second language or special needs. So it is not surprising, aside from any other reason such as priests pressuring parents to send their children to separate schools, or claims by groups such as the Fraser Institute that separate schools have better results (which they generally don’t especially if the number of ESL and special needs students are taken into consideration), that Catholic parents send their children to the better-funded and often newer schools.
The only way to reverse this is to stop funding for separate schools altogether or reduce the funding they receive. OPEN’s legal challenge will try both these strategies.
Jacobsen: What can Canadians in their municipalities, provinces or territories, and across the nation do to either eliminate the separate publicly funded school systems, merge them with the regular public school system, or defund of them for those that don’t want them?
Landau: Again, we have to talk about provinces, not Canada, as I made clear in Question 1. In Ontario, Canadians should donate to the legal challenge by OPEN (One Public Education Now) at https://open.cripeweb.org/aboutOpen.html . We welcome donations from across Canada. To make it clear, we do not want to “merge” the separate and the public school system. The physical buildings might remain, but there would be only one publicly-funded non-denominational two-language school system. Any teachers hired in the future would be hired as they are currently hired in the public school system, without a preference for any religion (or no religion). Teachers would no longer spend about 11% to 13% of the school day teaching the Catholic religion. Any teaching about religion would be based on the principle that no religious or philosophical outlook (including atheism, humanitarianism, etc.) should be promoted as superior. Students would go to the closest publicly-funded school, which would all be public.
The three main political parties, the Conservatives, Liberals, and the NDP all claim it is a “constitutional issue” about which they can do nothing. People in Ontario could vote for the Green Party, which is the only party that wants to stop funding separate schools. They could go to public meetings in the run-up to the June 2018 election and ask all candidates if they would support a resolution similar to Quebec’s, asking for the federal government to pass a resolution saying s.93(1)-(4) no longer apply to Ontario, and say they will not vote for a candidate that does not support this resolution. But I think given that the three major parties all support the status quo, that donating to OPEN (One Public Education Now) is the best strategy for Ontario.
Alberta and Saskatchewan may have different strategies, but someone from these provinces would be better able to comment. I know that in theory separate schools are funded at approximately the same level as public schools in these provinces and private religious or non-religious schools that follow required rules get funding at a lower level but someone from these provinces would be better able to describe how it works in practice and what the best strategies for these provinces is.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Reva.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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“Canadians are divided over whether religious diversity is healthy for the country, but they consider Islam in particular to be a negative force, a new poll has found.
In the survey, conducted the same week Quebec adopted a law prohibiting niqab-wearing women from receiving government services, 26 per cent of respondents said increasing religious diversity is a good thing while 23 per cent said it is bad. Nearly half — 44 per cent — said diversity brings a mix of good and bad; the remaining seven per cent were unsure.
When the pollsters sought respondents’ views on particular religious groups, anti-Islam sentiment stood out. Forty-six per cent of the people polled said Islam is damaging Canada compared with 13 per cent who said it is beneficial. The others either did not know (20 per cent) or said it has no real impact (21 per cent.)”
Source: http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/new-poll-finds-religious-diversity-continues-to-divide-canadians.
“Throughout autumn, the soup of our multicultural society has almost boiled over with questions about secularism and religion – of what is and isn’t allowed in contemporary public and common Canadian life. Efforts to relegate religious expression and thought to the margins have been ramped up. Those efforts, however, are out of step with broader Canadian society.
So, what evidence is there of the secularist push? In September, some openly questioned whether a turban-wearing Sikh who heads a major political party is an acceptable national leader. In the same month, niqab and burka-wearing Muslims felt targeted by a Quebec law that seeks to expunge public spaces of their particular religious expression. Just a couple of weeks ago, Governor General Julie Payette mocked those who believe life is a divine creation. And at the end of November, Trinity Western University will appear before the Supreme Court of Canada as law societies challenge the private Christian school’s right to set religious standards for its faculty and student community.
But the push for secular supremacy – often done in the name of inclusion or neutrality – doesn’t mesh well with Canadian society. In fact, the latest Angus Reid Institute (ARI) poll conducted in partnership with the think-tank Cardus suggests those who are anti-religious are the outliers.”
Source: http://troymedia.com/2017/11/19/its-the-religious-who-tend-most-to-favour-diversity/.
“A new poll reinforces a bleak truth that many of us have probably known for a long time—almost half of Canadians have a negative opinion about Islam.
It’s not hard to see this sentiment having a real world impact, whether it be the rise of a far-right looking to “counter terrorism,” the many anti-Islam rallies across the country, or recent laws specifically targeting Muslims being passed.”
“The Supreme Court recently ruled against the Ktunaxa Nation’s efforts to block construction of a ski resort in Jumbo Valley, B.C., on land the Ktunaxa consider the sacred home of the Grizzly Bear Spirit.
The court concluded that building the resort would not violate the Ktunaxa’s freedom of religion, because “neither the Ktunaxa’s freedom to hold their beliefs nor the freedom to manifest those beliefs is infringed by the Minister’s decision to approve the project … The state’s duty is not to protect the object of beliefs or the spiritual focal point of worship.”
Freedom of religion is supposed to provide equal protection for all religions. The Supreme Court’s judgment disadvantages Indigenous spiritual traditions, whose objects of reverence are connected to pieces of land vulnerable to physical destruction.
The judgment shows how Eurocentric ideas about religion enable the continuing appropriation of Indigenous lands.”
“My inner nerd is delighted that Queen Elizabeth II chose a spacewoman as her new governor general of Canada on Oct. 2. Julie Payette was previously an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency, flying two space shuttle missions and working at mission control in Houston. After her space career, among other things she worked as the chief operational officer of the Montréal Science Centre. In her new job as governor general, she is responsible for many of the functions of the head of state.
Unfortunately, some of her recent comments about science have caused controversy. Addressing the recent Canadian Science Policy Convention in Ottawa, Ms. Payette said that science literacy has a long way to go. Everyone is expected to know who Beethoven is, she pointed out, but not what neutrinos are. She expressed dismay that some people still distrust vaccines, question whether global warming is caused by human activity, think that “taking a sugar pill will cure cancer” and believe in astrology. But her most controversial comment was “that we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process, let alone—oh my goodness, lo and behold—[a] random process.”
“When Kristy Cuevas decided to leave the Jehovah’s Witness faith as a teenager, she had no idea that choice would one day save her life.
The mother of four required 10 blood transfusions when she hemorrhaged after the birth of her son. She woke up after being unconscious for two days, and a single thought crossed her mind.
“If this was not me, if this wasn’t my husband who’s a non-believer making the calls for me, if this had been my parents or if I had stayed, I would be dead right now,” she said. “And it made that choice too worth it.”
“I chose to leave, and that day it saved my life.””
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/jehovah-witness-blood-transfusion-woman-speaks-out-1.4404193.
“Ktunaxa elder Chris Luke Sr. lives in B.C.’s Purcell Mountains, about 600 kilometres east of Vancouver. He uses a translator to communicate in English and he knows how to keep his silence.
Still, Luke is a powerful man.
For eight years, the elder’s religious vision has seized the attention of Canada’s top courts, demanding the focus of hundreds of lawyers, judges, civil servants and politicians.
Their work became necessary because Luke said he had an epiphany in 2004 — which he did not reveal to his people until 2009 — that the grizzly bears that inhabit a large chunk of public land in the Purcells are sacred, divine protectors.
As a result, Luke’s small tribal group entered into years of hard political negotiations with the B.C. government, which turned into a precedent-setting court case against developers of a ski resort called Jumbo Glacier.”
Source: http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-who-decides-the-land-is-sacred.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Minister Gretta Vosper is in the news, once more, circa November 14, as the ongoing review of suitability for the position in the United Church of Canada has been delayed, indefinitely (Perkel, 2017). It has been postponed, without a reason or a specified date to reschedule the “unprecedented ecclesiastical court hearing” (Ibid.).
Vosper was ordained in 1993. She took the ministerial position at West Hill United in 1997 (West Hill United Church, 2017). Over time, several years, she lost many beliefs in the faith. She is the “Ye” in “Ye of little faith.” She self-defined as an atheist in 2013 (Vosper, 2017).
It was public for some time. Some congregation left her; others stayed. Why? She came out as an atheist. An open atheist in the ranks of the religious leadership, ministering to United Church of Canada members at West Hill United Church.
As those aware of The Clergy Project (2017), nothing new to this, but threatening to the leadership, possibly – and if so, likely embarrassing to them, too.
Because coming out in the midst of what is seen as a cultural monolith begs questions for some of the membership, “Who else in the church doesn’t believe? How many? Do the congregation know about it? Do the leadership know about it? Has it been covered up? If so, why? Also, if covered up, how long has this been the case?”
The church is seen less as a block without problems and more as a series of shards. The question then, “Which one might cut?”
Her review, according to the committee, is based on lack of belief in a supernatural interventionist God, the divinity of Christ, and the existence of the Holy Spirit: hence, the “a-” part (Johnston, 2017; Perkel, 2017). As Seinfeld would say, “So, what’s the deal?”
The deal is, this makes Vosper questionable, in the eyes of the United Church of Canada in terms of her suitability for being a minister – almost a liability.
From a personal sympathetic view, for Vosper, that’s stressful enough: being out as an atheist, losing congregation, being put in the national news, and placed under suitability review, and then to have this public in the national news – live.
Perkel (2017) wrote:
“It is now clear that the panel will not be established in time to hold the hearing on the dates that you are holding in November 2017,” according to the church letter sent to her.
Acting on complaints about Vosper, a United Church reviewing panel in September last year recommended in a split decision that Vosper be defrocked for her beliefs. The hearing scheduled for this month was to make a final church decision on her fate.
“I understand the judicial committee executive has not finalized dates for the hearing,” Mary-Frances Denis said this week. “The parties are still working on a number of preliminary matters that need to be addressed, including finding dates that would accommodate everyone’s schedules.”
Vosper has her own views. She thinks the reasons run farther than scheduling problems. She thinks it is a challenge for the United Church of Canada to create and coordinate an unbiased committee to meet the standards of civil courts. The notoriety of the context around Vosper makes this a possibility.
More to come, I assume.
References
Johnston, M. (2015, November 25). Q&A: Gretta Vosper, the United Church minister who doesn’t believe in God. Retrieved from https://torontolife.com/city/life/gretta-vosper-united-church-minister/.
Perkel, C. (2017, November 16). United Church postpones hearing for atheist minister indefinitely. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/11/14/united-church-indefinitely-postpones-hearing-for-atheist-minister.html.
The Clergy Project. (2017). The Clergy Project. Retrieved from http://clergyproject.org/.
Vosper, G. (2017). About. Retrieved from http://www.grettavosper.ca/about/.
West Hill United Church. 92017). West Hill United Church. Retrieved from http://www.westhill.net/.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/15
Sophie Shulman, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sci. is the Director of CFI-Victoria. I wrote two articles based on two petitions by and for CFI-Victoria. I reached out to Dr. Shulman for an interview. She agreed. By the way, she is retired.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was early life like? I want to touch on the language in the home, the culture of the community, the religion of the area, and expectations for women time.
Sophie Shulman, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sci.: I was born in pre-WWII Stalin’s purposefully pauperized Russia when ‘steel and guns replaced shoes and butter’ as the official goal TO CATCH UP WITH AMERICA at all costs. The costs for the population had been grand, but so was the ultimate reward: the victory over Nazism.
My parents (both MD), my nanny and myself as a child, all lived in one room of a communal apartment (7 rooms, 7 unrelated families of all walks of life, one shared kitchen with two electric ovens with 8 hot-plates, one communal bathroom (each family had their day of a week for family bathing and by-hand laundry; clotheslines crisscrossed the air under high kitchen ceiling) and a telephone on the corridor wall); all families struggled to make the ends meet. Our next door neighbor was a known lawyer with his wife, an aspiring concert-singer, the next one – a single seamstress, then a factory worker with his family, an accountant with wife, etc.
Russian culture and Russian language exclusively. The Soviet Union was officially a secular state; my parents were secular, no religion in my childhood.
Feminism was ‘in the air’ and I had been sensitive to it: as a pre-schooler, I objected that my last name was my father’s name: “unfair, it should be both, hyphenated father’s and mother’s names!”.
Jacobsen: You are a retired medical doctor. Why did you pursue this professional training? Why did you pursue this career? How much did medical quackery, as it sometimes called in a derisive tone – sometimes meanly, factor into the medical community at the time?
Shulman: I had always liked medicine as a branch of science; my parents were both MD (an internist and a pediatrician). Quackery was not on the radar.
Jacobsen: How did you come into contact with the skeptical community?
Shulman: I searched for them, volunteered: it is so encouraging and comforting to be among those who think alike with you.
Jacobsen: What values do you take away from the skeptical movement as well as worldview or methodology for investigation of the world?
Shulman: SAPERE AUDE or DARE TO THINK FOR YOURSELF. I agree with Kant that this is the [noblest] motto of the entire Enlightenment and as such – the major guiding light for me too.
Jacobsen: What advice would you have for young people entering into the medical disciplines?
Shulman: Well chosen, good luck! But do not just pursue ‘big’ money, there is so immeasurably much more in medicine!
Jacobsen: Center for Inquiry is typically secular humanist in orientation. How does this influence you if at all?
Shulman: It suits me well: I’m a secular humanist, have always been.
Jacobsen: What is your favorite book? Who is your favorite thinker?
Shulman: Too many to be listed: they differed at various periods of my life. As for historical figures – Marquis de Condorcet, the Gracchi brothers.
Jacobsen: What medical problem do you consider the most difficult to solve within the medical community, having entire career to observe this?
Shulman: Dissociation between the need and availability, such as in organ transplantation (who get it and who equally needs but doesn’t).
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Sophie.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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In terms of geography, culture, and language, where does your family background reside?
Vancouver B.C.
Your biographic information from the Center for Inquiry Canada (CFIC/CFI Canada) website describes brief personal information about the pivotal moment for your transformation into a skeptic mentality, as follows:
At the age of 8 when told “watched water never boils”, Pat put a pot of water on the stove and proved the adage wrong, thus began the life of a skeptic. Pat did not begin his official involvement in the secular/skeptical movement till 2001 when he was researching a documentary on Humanism.
What other pivotal moments in early life stimulated intellectual affirmation of skepticism?
I was raised a Catholic but from an early age I liked to ask questions and the church never seemed to have satisfactory answers. My education from grade 1–5 was in a Catholic school where we were taught by nuns and they did not have any answers either so it was a gradual realisation that the teaching of the church, since they could not be backed up by facts, must be in some way wrong.
What about other moments which piqued interest in humanism, secularism, and other “-isms” with relative correspondence, or reasonable conceptual overlap, with aspects of the skeptical worldview?
I was always a contrarian. I liked to take the “other” side of an argument because it seemed the best way to learn about the argument. I never took someone’s word for anything, I always wanted proof. This is the basis of scepticism and although I did not know it at the time, that is the first step towards atheism.
In an article entitled ‘Humanists see light at end of subway tunnel’, you defined humanism, as follows:
Humanism is neither a religion nor a theology and the fact that a person can live a moral life, without deferring to any deity, has been recognised and accepted by religious and secular communities.
Organisations such as American Humanist Association, for instance, defined humanism within the Humanist Manifesto, in one of its three forms, in a similar frame of reference. A suite of associations, societies, and organisations exist for the secular humanist community — which can create a chary sense in the less secular, less humanistic, and more religious — in British Columbia, other provinces, the territories, and the nation at large. Of course, the major continental and international organisations for the secular humanist movement exist, too. These remain theories and collectives, though. What does humanism look like in one’s real life to you — big and small aspects?
This will sound arrogant and is something I criticise the religious for but I believe that we are all Humanist at our core. I don’t think people get their morality from religion, I think religion gets its morality from humans and our shared evolutionary past that imprinted morality not on our hearts but in our DNA. So, to answer the question, Humanism is the articulation of that morality that is inherent in most of us (there will always be the Clifford Olsen’s) and our shared humanity, our feeling of what is right and wrong is innate in us, in a naturalistic way. So unlike religion where one must constantly have their religious version of morality reinforced by prayer church attendance etc. we Humanists simply live a moral life without much thought to it most of the time.
What unique opportunities and representations exist for the sub-population of the “unaffiliated,” “no religious affiliation,” “no religion,” “none,” and so on, in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada?
I think we have a lot to offer the general public, mostly in the area of science and the discovery of the natural world and how that creates a most beautiful way of looking at the world. Some, like Oprah, think atheists can’t have either awe or wonder. I think the opposite is true because we see things as they really are, not as we would like them to be. The beauty of a rainbow is not enhanced by thinking a celestial painter did it, but by the understanding of light and refraction. To paraphrase one of the brightest physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman; is it not more awe inspiring to have a complete understanding of the way a phenomenon like a rainbow is created that to have an answer that is almost certainly wrong?
What instigated involvement with Dr. Robert Buckman for the filming, editing, and eventual production of Without God, The Story of Secular Humanism?
I was researching the documentary when I happened to come across the B.C. Humanist Association. I sent an email to the web site and got a reply from their board. I met with several of them who proved to be most helpful in the making of the film. It was one of them that suggested Rob. When I contacted him he was very excited about the project and jumped on immediately. We decided that he would be an excellent on air narrator as he had a lot of experience in front of the camera and with that one of the most influential relationships of my life began.
What core message did Dr. Robert Buckman and yourself want to come across with, and what seemed to emerge from the viewership in reaction to, the final product of Without God, The Story of Secular Humanism?
We wanted to show two things, first of all, what exactly a humanist is and, more importantly, why we are not less moral than the religious. It is well known that atheists have a bad reputation and we wanted people to know that we are just like everyone else with the same basic hopes, dreams and sense of right and wrong.
You earned positions including “board of the B.C. Humanist Association (BCHA), President of BCHA and then on the board of Humanist Canada (HC), eventually taking over as President of HC.” HC, as an organisation, exists within the philosophy of “education, reason, and compassion.” With more depth, the organisation defines itself:
Founded in 1968, Humanist Canada has its roots in the former Humanist Fellowship of Montreal. This fellowship was an organisation of humanists that was founded in 1954 by Drs. R. K. Mishra, Ernest Poser, and Maria Jutta Cahn. Lord Bertrand Russell and Dr. Brock Chisholm were its first patrons.
As the past president of Humanist Canada, your insight, from experience, into the membership involvements and activities, organisational structure and internal dynamics, theory and practice, positions and tasks, internal humanist membership sustainability and national public outreach, seems deep, comprehensive, and relevant to me. How does one run a large organisation from the national scale?
You don’t, you let it run itself. It has been said many times that trying to get Humanists to agree on something is like trying to herd cats. I learned early on that as a leader I could not rule from above, or make unilateral decisions. The membership is highly educated and smart they do not respond well to decrees or being told what to do or what position they should take on a matter so one learns to be inclusive, trying to reach consensus. Without going into too much detail, the reason I resigned was because I felt in a particular circumstance unilateral action was the best course to take and still believe I made the right decision, but it lead to me being forced to resign. In the end, my decision was upheld.
You held the presidency of the BCHA too. How does one operate a provincial-scale organisation?
It is easier because you meet regularly with members, they know who you are and there tends to be more trust. Again though, the members are smart, skeptical people who will question everything so you have to not only know what you are talking about but must be willing to compromise. All Humanist groups function democratically and all decisions must be discussed and voted on at least the board level. The other thing about running a local group is that it is easier to plan and hold events. Most of the work that gets done even in a national organisation is initiated and run by local groups.
What common problems emerge, and solutions require implementation, in the midst of leadership at the national and provincial magnitudes?
The biggest problem is fundraising. It is difficult to get Humanists to part with their money. We can’t offer eternal salvation so when we do fundraise it has to be a specific initiative. Even then, most Humanist living in Canada do not feel the need to be out there advertising and being social activists, most are happy with weekly or monthly meetings where they discuss topics of interest. This does not require much money so the donations reflect this.
Your biographic information from CFI Canada concludes:
In the interim Pat was an ambassador for Atheist Alliance International, sitting briefly on their board. Pat is involved in many grassroots initiatives in his hometown of Vancouver where he has a successful career as a Props Master in the film and television industry. Pat is also an award winning documentary filmmaker.
What personal and social fulfillment, and duties, necessitate involvement with grassroots initiatives and ambassadorship?
I am someone who wants to make a difference in my community. I like being part of social change and I think we need more people like that who are willing to take on leadership roles to try and make our society better. I really do believe, and the evidence is on my side, that the world would be a better place with less religion. My goal is not to stamp out religion but to show people there is an alternative to living a full rewarding life that does not include believing in the unbelievable and hopefully they will see us as a suitable alternative.
What does “Props Master in the film and television industry,” personal career, implicate for you, e.g. tasks, responsibilities, projects involved in, capabilities and limitations, and so on?
My job is what I do so I can afford to do the things I really enjoy such as being part of the Humanist/Skeptical community (and playing golf). I am also very lucky to have a job I really like. It is very rewarding to know that my work entertains people and allows them an escape from their daily lives.
You work for CFI Canada. Another secular organisation, a registered educational charity, devoted to “educate and provide training to the public in the application of skeptical, secular, rational and humanistic enquiry through conferences, symposia, lectures, published works and the maintenance of a library.” Your core position exists within the board, as Board Vice-Chair. What conduct, duties, and responsibilities remain expected with this position within CFI Canada?
As the board member from BC I keep an eye on things in the west and try to engage the membership here. I also am the media representative in BC so if a story is in the news and they need the Humanist/Atheist side, I often will get the call. As Vice Chair, all that really means is that I take over the duties of the Chair if he or she is unavailable.
Your representation in the media emerges in numerous avenues internal and external, obscure and mainstream, pro and con, to CFI Canada, and Humanist Canada. What duties and responsibilities come from influencing the public mind through the media, especially whilst holding an important position in an organisation in the educational charity sector?
I think it is the most important thing I do. Communication is the key to understanding and I take my responsibility as a communicator very seriously. It sometimes means I have to tone down the message I would like to give, when one is on TV talking to the masses, one must be succinct and clear, without putting people off to the point where they turn the dial. It is a fine line because to many religious types my very existence as an atheist is offensive to them. So my job is show them that I am a regular person with some (I hope) interesting things to say, and if I can educate one person or show one person a new way of looking at an issue then I call that a win.
Many, many organisations, formal and informal, with concomitant publications exist for the distribution of principles and values interrelated with critical thinking, humanism, naturalism, secularism. For example, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, the old title)/The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, the new title) publishes Skeptical Inquirer. What importance do flagship publications, such as Skeptical Inquirer, have for the “no religious affiliation” individuals and groups?
They are very important. It is vital that our point of view is out there in the public. Magazines, TV and radio programs are essential to both creating a sense of community and as a means of education, without being pedantic.
Exemplars manifest themselves under the umbrella of “no religious affiliation,” at least in standard interpretations such as a lack of formal religion. An array of unmentioned artists, columnists, scientists, and writers. What role do exemplars perform for these movements without direct religious affiliation?
Unfortunately we live in a world where the “cult of personality” influences many people. By creating our own “stars” we are better able to communicate our message. But when an existing star such as Ricky Gervais or Bill Nye take up the cause, people listen. Some in our community see this as a bit of a sell out. I disagree, as long as the message is consistent and not dumbed down, using famous people and TV and Movie starts is a very good way to give your message some credibility.
Apart from non-theistic — e.g. agnostic, atheistic, deistic, und so weiter — humanisms, plural manifestations, under the banner of Humanism, singular concept, some religious formulations ground themselves, in socio-cultural and ethical life, in belief systems translatable into humanism. An argument articulated by Dr. Susan Hughson, another past president of the British Columbia Humanist Association, in conversation with David Berner about Judaism, which could extend to others, as noted. What relationship do religious belief systems connected to humanist proclivities have with the secular humanist movements in history?
For most of recorded history the concept of an atheist did not exist. It was taken for granted that there was an unseen world inhabited by goblins, ghosts, gods etc. It was not until relatively recently that the idea of a world view that carried no supernatural baggage was even possible. There were pockets of it, some Greek philosophers are a good example but mostly the world was made up of people who had some kind of supernatural belief. So it was the religious, looking for something more, who began the slow intellectual march towards Humanism, Erasmus is a good example. Today he would be considered a religious person but in his day he had many ideas that did not endear him to either the Catholic or the burgeoning Protestant church. He is considered by many to be the founder of Humanism. Today, most religious Humanists seem to come from the Jewish tradition. Jews have a history of doubt and questioning so this does not come as a surprise, in fact the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University is almost exclusively the product of Jewish Humanists.
With respect to their positive or negative interrelationship, the theistic and non-theistic humanisms, how might their mutual futures turn out to you?
If you are talking about theistic Humanism, I find that a contradiction. I don’t use the term as I think it has outlived its usefulness. Either you believe in God and are a theist or you do not and you are an atheist, many atheist adopt the Humanist worldview but Humanism and atheism do not necessarily go together. So I see a conflict between theists and Humanist and so the term Theistic Humanist is meaningless to me.
You noted, astutely, the separation of church and state in the United States of America, but not by necessity in Canada. Preaching the Word of Atheism notes the forceful nature of creationism into Canadian schools and bias against atheists in the family court system too. What remains the highest importance about this separation, the absolute division between church and state?
Religion is a personal matter as are family and personal relationships. In a free and democratic society, the only guarantee that you can keep your personal religious beliefs or your family structure or maintain the relationships that are important to you is by keeping government and by extension, laws out of those areas. When someone tells me that their religion should inform how we are governed my first questions is, which of the thousands of versions of your religion do you want? Which interpretation of you scripture do you want to live under. Religion is something not even the religious can agree on how on earth could we form a societal structure that at its core is purely personal and introspective? The only way to design a society and laws so as to serve the most number of people is to base them on the things we have in common, not those things that divide us and religion is the great divider. The problem we secularists face is that the religious have had it their way for thousands of years. They do not want to give up any ground, this is understandable. But when someone asks for the same rights you have, it is not taking away you rights, many religious people see it this way and we need to fight this notion.
Dr. Carl Sagan gets quoted a lot. A great science communicator who carved the paths for numerous artists, fellow science communicators, professional scientists, and public intellectuals to express personal wonder for the universe. One quote, attributed to him, became immortalised about extraordinary claims with the need for proportioned evidence, which states, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” even quoted in the CFI Canada updates, for instance. An adaptation from Marcello Truzzi’s quotation, which states, “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.” You typed one coda sentence, and in other forms throughout the article On Atheists:
Claiming there is an unseen transcendental being who is outside space and time and created the entire universe is a pretty extraordinary claim so the evidence had better be pretty extraordinary.
What evidences and arguments make a transcendental being seem impossible, implausible, or unreasonable to you?
It is not the evidence or arguments for the existence of god that are unreasonable, it is the lack of evidence and sound argument that makes gods highly improbable. I have read dozens of books both for and against, seen dozens of hours of debates with brightest and the best of both sides and after all that I have yet to hear a convincing argument in favour of a god. The arguments in favour of a god could fill an encyclopaedia and after all that human effort, no one has proved anything, every argument seems to end with “well ya gotta have faith”, that to me is an admission of defeat.
What evidences and arguments might make a transcendental entity or object with some, most, or all of the traditional “divine attributes” appear possible, plausible, or reasonable to you?
I have given this a lot of thought over the years and every bit of evidence that I can think of that might convince me that there is a god, I can think of a naturalistic explanation. In other words, I honestly cannot think of any evidence that could convince me. But that does not mean there isn’t any, otherwise I am guilty of the argument from ignorance fallacy. No, if there really is a god who literally created my mind, then that god would know exactly what kind of evidence could convince me. So, if there is a god, the evidence is trivial for it to produce belief. The fact that this evidence is not forthcoming gives me comfort that there is none. Of course the theists would say “Ya gotta have faith”, and that, QED, is the worst kind of evidence.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/14
ourIDEA is calling for a moratorium on Catholic school construction. A press release was published today (ourIDEA, 2017a). They make an explicit series of calls.
Former Alberta Education Minister David King has made the call. Earlier in November, he made a petition calling for a referendum on the continuance of separate Catholic school boards (ourIDEA, 2017b).
This is an exciting time in Canada, in Alberta. The call is for the merger of public and Catholic school boards. It is to keep things up to date regarding human rights practices. In addition, it will save money.
There are three main points in the press release. One is the moratorium on construction of the Catholic separate publicly-funded schools pending the outcome of the Saskatchewan court case, which is a recent case.
The second point is that they call “on the provincial government to issue a Moratorium pending the completion of a comprehensive and transparent review of the criteria that determine approval of new school construction” (ourIDEA, 2017a).
Lastly, they then “insist that the Alberta Catholic School Trustees Association (ACSTA) rescind their non-cooperation policy demanding stand-alone Catholic schools.”
There will be a special event on November 27, which is a panel discussion and conversation about the future of separate school boards.
David King will present, Luke Fevin who is a parent advocate will be there, and the former Catholic School Board Trustee Patricia Grell will be there as well. You can RSVP to attend at the University of Alberta in Telus Building Room 150.
All information in the reference link.
We invite Albertans to join us in a campaign calling for a referendum on the unification of Public and Catholic school boards. From Milk River to Keg River, and from Lloydminster to Blairmore, it is time for a thoughtful conversation, involving every interested Albertan, about why we duplicate administration and services, and operate under-utilized schools, to preserve a denominational privilege that is out of keeping with current human rights practices and may no longer be relevant.
The recent provincial budget revealed serious on-going financial shortfalls for the provincial government. In education, this raises questions about duplicating administration and infrastructure costs when the money could be re-directed to the classroom for better service to students or reduced costs to parents. Imagine how much further school fees could have been reduced without the current cost of duplication.
David King, Former Education Minister
References
ourIDEA. (2017a, November 14). ourIDEA Calls for a Moratorium on Catholic School Construction. Retrieved from http://www.ouridea.ca/nov_14th_moratorium_on_catholic_school_construction?utm_campaign=nov14mr&utm_medium=email&utm_source=publicyes.
ourIDEA. (2017b). Petition: It’s time for a referendum on separate schools. Retrieved from http://www.ouridea.ca/referendum.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/14
Something of interest to me in terms of the sociological analysis of religion in Canadian society is the futurist perspective or the futurism perspective on religion. I do not mean science fiction.
I mean the potential streams in the evolution of religion in light of modernity as well as kinds of selection for faith. How will it change the future? What will be the variables or factors that select one stream or another for the set of possible futures of religion?
In British Columbia, for instance, we find New Age spiritualists and practices formalized or disjunct. Formal New Age spiritist groups emerge with complete, and incoherent, worldviews. But I also see individual movements based on practices or beliefs disjunct from a complete worldview, which amount to weekender New Age practices groups.
In the nation as a whole, we find a distaste for religion in general, increasingly. So, religion, especially Christianity in many contexts, takes on a ‘He-who-shall-not-be-named persona.’
The religious leaders understand this to some degree. Some prominent academics understand this too, I suspect. So, they want to proselytize to the new, younger generations, which they know are far less religious – where this becomes particularly important when religion is a political tool in Canada (and everywhere else).
That leaves the need to take a new marketing and advertising approach to religion. As far as I can tell, it is mainly taking Christianity – its principles, ethics, worldview, and central figures especially Christ – and then re-selling it to the younger generations without calling in Christianity: keep an eye out for it.
In the irreligious community, we find the Sunday Assemblies, Calgary Secular Church, and the newly founded Oasis Network. But for those that this fails to appeal to, we find an emphasis on arts and culture, as well as an emphasis on stewarding the next generation and nature a la Margaret Atwood. Granted, she is an agnostic.
Another possible path of interest to me was something that came up in an October 24 news article by Jeff Walters (Walters, 2017). In it, he looks at two religions in one church with one reverend. (It sounds like the setup to a bad joke.) It is Emmanuel Anglican United Church. It is for the Anglican religion as well as the United Church of Canada.
This dual religion has happened for four decades. With an inability to sustain one faith because of a decline in numbers, they decided to merge.
I see hints of this with the Eastern Orthodox Church Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Roman Catholic Church Patriarch Pope Francis meeting together. I’m intrigued as to the mergers that happen, which seem to occur because of declining numbers or simply less religiosity.
So, we have formal leaving religion with alternate community groups arising. We have efforts to teach, even impose, faith-based worldviews on the secular culture through not stating it as a faith-based worldview because faith and religion have a negative connotation in Canadian culture at times. This is especially true for younger generations.
There are efforts to be an individual in Canadian society who focuses on environmental efforts as well as the development of a community of arts and culture while leaving religion behind without much thought. Something that may appeal to apatheists. Then for the declining religions, often the more moderate ones, they merge.
I would love to see a more formal study into this as an academic discipline. If you see anything, please send to my email: scott.d.jacobsen@gmail.com.
References
Walters, J. (2017, October 24). Dual religion church in Ignace, Ont., unique in Canada. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-religions-ignace-1.4368665.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/12
In some ways, coming out gay is so 80s, the new coming out, likely, is as someone without a formal religion. This can be in media. This can be in politics. This can be education and within families.
No matter the means through which an individual comes out for the area of life that they choose to do it in, it is a difficult thing to do because of the standard stigma against those who come out.
Think about some of the most difficult areas for people to come out such as those in The Clergy Project, in this initiative, those pastors, preachers, and ministers who lost faith while at the pulpit have difficult choices to make (The Clergy Project, 2017).
Those choices involve family, as well as community and income. How will they make a living? How will they find a community? Will their current community accept them still? If lucky, as with Grett Vosper, you will be accepted.
One lawmaker in the United States has come out as an atheist. He does not believe in God. U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) used to decline statements about his formal or informal religious beliefs (Boorstein, 2017; Mehta, 2017).
He went from the California state government to Congress. Of the 535 members in the United States Congress, Huffman was one of nine who chose to leave their markings of religious belief blank.
Huffman has been active during the time of President Donald Trump, the Trump Administration, Roy Moore, and the campaign of Betsy DeVos to move Public Funding for schools into religious schools religious schools. He notes that religion has now been used in such a negative way.
He has now stated openly that he is a humanist with an ethical life focused on reason compassion and science, while explicitly rejecting the supernaturalistic outlook on life. We have the Natural Life Here and Now.
Insofar as religious identity is related to Congress and a members existence in it, Huffman appears to be only the second in the history of Congress. This is coming out. I would argue this is probably coming out more explicitly than gays in the 80s, where the closet is much, much deeper.
Although, as Eddie Murphy quipped in a different context, some have skeletons in their closets; others have cemeteries. The first member of Congress in the United States to state their identification, religiously, as unaffiliated was U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) in 2013.
Huffman makes an explicit point that he is not hostile to religion or judgemental of other individuals’ religious beliefs. Religion is not central to his political life. Rather, he focuses on an ethical life in the natural world here-and-now. That’s that.
How’s that for coming out?
References
Boorstein, M. (2017, November 9). This lawmaker isn’t sure that God exists. Now, he’s finally decided to tell people. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/11/09/this-lawmaker-is-skeptical-that-god-exists-now-hes-finally-decided-to-tell-people/?utm_term=.651e442f24af.
Mehta, H. (2017, November 10). Why Didn’t a Congressman’s Humanism Declaration Make a Bigger Splash? Retrieved from http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/10/why-didnt-a-congressmans-humanism-declaration-make-a-bigger-splash/#bXGTtpqRir6vDlgI.99.
The Clergy Project. (2017). The Clergy Project. Retrieved from http://clergyproject.org.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/12
“FREDERICTON — Governor General Julie Payette, who faced criticism for a speech last week that some said mocked people of faith, praised Canada’s tolerance and freedom of religion Tuesday.
She told the New Brunswick legislature that Canada is in a fortunate position to be able to make a difference, because the country is rich in values.
“Our values are tolerance and determination, and freedom of religion, freedom to act, opportunities, equality of opportunities amongst everyone and for all,” she said.”
“OTTAWA — Disrupting a religious service is likely to remain a crime, since MPs on the House of Commons justice committee have agreed to change a controversial part of proposed legislation aimed at modernizing the Criminal Code.
This spring, the Liberal government moved to rid the Criminal Code of sections that are redundant or obsolete, including those which involve challenging someone to a duel or fraudulently pretending to practice witchcraft.
One of the changes proposed in Bill C-51 would have removed Section 176, which makes it a crime to use threat or force to obstruct a clergyman or minister from celebrating a worship service or carrying out any other duty related to his job.”
“In July 1925, the State of Tennessee put a substitute biology teacher named John Thomas Scopes on trial for teaching children about evolution in the Tennessee public schools.
The American Civil Liberties Union hired Clarence Darrow as the defence in what H.L. Mencken, writing for the Baltimore Sun, coined as the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’.
The sensational trial took place in Dayton, Tennessee and was covered blow by blow on radio throughout the United States, as the colourful and bombastic three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution. It was seen as a case pitting religion against science.”
“OTTAWA, November 10, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — After huge backlash from the public, faith leaders and pro-family groups, a Liberal-dominated committee voted to keep Canada’s only law explicitly protecting religious services and clergy on the books.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government nixed the section from the Criminal Code in Bill C-51, legislation intended to clear allegedly redundant, unconstitutional, or outdated sections from the Criminal Code.
But in its review of Bill C-51, the House of Commons justice committee voted Wednesday to keep Section 176 in force.”
“As far as religion goes I am all for people celebrating their religion (every religion) as long as they understand there are times and places to practice, such as in their homes and buildings dedicated to such practice.
The reality is religion does not trump law and laws are usually created to protect us from very real danger. I wonder how the bank would feel if I wanted to do my banking in a balaclava.
It’s not about not letting someone wear a piece of cloth on their face its about the ignorance it represents and the threat one being able to totally cover their face imposes.”
Source: http://ottawasun.com/opinion/letters/you-said-it-religion-and-trudeau-ditching-remembrance-day.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/11
According to Reuters, circa 2012, those who lack formal religion, atheists, or the unbelievers, face bias (Evans, 2012). The bias can manifest in discrimination to outright persecution of atheists.
Those atheists in Islamic countries, apparently, face the most brutal treatment by both the government as well as adherents of Islam.
The report, also, points to the discrimination in many European countries as well as the United States, which are in direct favor of the religious and against atheists. The report is called the Freedom of Thought Report (IHEU, 2016).
Atheists can be denied rights of existence, restrictions on their freedom to believe and express themselves, have the ability to lose their citizenship, even have the possibility for restriction or elimination of their ability to marry.
In a brief introduction by the UN special rapporteur here on the freedom of religion and belief at the time, they noted that atheists have global human rights covered by various agreements, but the knowledge of or the awareness of them was highly limited.
Based on the survey at the time, there were seven countries out of 60 where the expression of atheist views or leaving the official religion of the state are given the capital punishment.
Even if an individual citizen does not want to adhere to one of the formal religions of the state, they are forced to have to take on the veneer of belief in one of the official state or stated religions of the government by signing off on one of them.
This can typically include only Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In other words, non-believers must live dual lives. Public lives of saving faith. Private lives of truly being non-religious.
The report goes into further depth (and has been updated) as to the ways in which the prejudice and bias and discrimination and persecution of atheists is pervasive throughout the world, to such an extent as in some places serving the death penalty to “unbelievers.”
References
Evans, R. (2012, December 9). Atheists around world suffer persecution, discrimination: report. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-religion-atheists/atheists-around-world-suffer-persecution-discrimination-report-idUSBRE8B900520121210.
IHEU. (2016). Freedom of Thought Report. Retrieved from http://freethoughtreport.com/download-the-report/.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/08
Was there a family background in humanism and skepticism?
To be honest, no. My family, being ethnically Norwegian, has strong ties to the Lutheran church, going back generations. My great grandfather was a missionary in Africa. Of course, he was an older kind of missionary, meaning his mission was in part to better the physical situation of those around him. While I personally reject some of his ideas and the motivation for what he was doing, the value of being in service to others was carried forward by my relatives and I do feel that some of the values that I learned from those around me are not now in conflict with my current humanist values.
My family also placed a strong emphasis on education, which gave me a solid knowledge base. However, it took time for me to learn how to be a critical and skeptical thinker.
What is your preferred definition of humanism and skepticism?
My preferred definition of skepticism is the one used on the Media Guide to Skepticism on the Doubtful News website “Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies tools of science.” The organized Skeptical movement works to promote this approach in people’s lives and society as a whole. I know many people see skepticism as an intellectual exercise or an attempt to debunk wild claims, but really it is a great tool for individuals to save time and money, as well as maintaining their health, by avoiding scams and frauds.
Humanism is not easily defined. Some of the biggest organizations around the world have tried and have only been able to narrow it down to page long manifestos and declarations. If I were to try to give you an elevator pitch of humanism, it would be, humanism is a worldview that appreciates both individual differences and the right for individual development, and tries to create a society that will not limit your ability to flourish based upon those individual differences. Furthermore, humanism should be informed by evidence, but it should also make room for inspiration from other fields such as the arts. I am a secular humanist, but I don’t think one needs to be an atheist to be a humanist. Humanism is anti-dogma, not anti-religion, and if our values line up, I’m happy to work towards progress with anyone.
Are there many legitimate cases of proper skepticism turned into cynicism, or cynicism masquerading as skepticism?
I believe there are some cases, and I imagine some of my fellow travelers are more cynical than skeptical. Skepticism is a process based on certain fundamental ideas. It is not a set of beliefs. Yet, for some this is the case. They hold certain ideas to be true, ghosts aren’t real for example, and will never change their minds on the matter. Cynicism is not far behind this kind of mindset.
If you are not willing to examine the evidence and revise your beliefs based on it, then you are not being skeptical. There are several examples of people who merely set out to debunk things and later gave up on the endeavor entirely. Skeptical investigator, Joe Nickel, has avoided this because he is driven by curiosity to find out what is actually go on, not to merely prove that certain claims are false.
For myself, I am happiest when the skeptical process leads me to a nuanced position on a situation. It would be nice to have simple answers, but reality is not always kind to us in this regard. I think it is this enjoyment of nuance that keeps me from becoming a cynic.
How did you find and become involved with IHEYO?
I first became involved with humanism and skepticism in Taiwan when I started two groups there. From that I got some notice in the region and connected with others who were doing similar things. Later, I found that another group, PATAS, was holding a conference in the Philippines so I decided to attend. It was there that I met some people from IHEYO. It was through the contacts I met there, as well as some others in Singapore, that I became involved with IHEYO directly. When the chairperson position opened up, I volunteered and having been facilitating the working group for a little over a year now.
Wherever you are, I suggest that you start a humanist or skeptical group, even if it is just at a local or community level. We need more advocates for good ideas, and a group is a great way to connect with like minded individuals. Who knows, it could be the first step to become an international leader in the humanist movement.
What are your tasks and responsibilities as the chairperson of the Asian Working Group for IHEYO?
There are two main responsibilities that I have as chairperson. The first is to facilitate communication between groups in the region. Asia is a very big region with every sub-region and even country having problems of their own and issue the groups there would like to focus on. It would be a fool’s errand and counterproductive of me or IHEYO to try and tell them what to do. Instead, I help the group stay in contact with each other and know what everyone is doing. In this way, they can share ideas and expertise and hopefully all the groups will benefit from each other’s experience.
My other responsibility is to find ways for IHEYO and the working group to support the member organizations. Again, each group has its own needs. Using the resources I have available, be it contacts with organizations or individuals, volunteers, time, or money, I try to support the local groups to make what they are doing more effective. One thing we have done for example was organize translation efforts, so groups could have humanist materials in their native languages and are better equipped to engage with people in their counties.
In general, I view my position as being in service to those I lead. They know best what their organizations need. I want to do what I can to help make them better.
What are the main threats to the practice of humanism in the Asian region now?
This is of course a large question and it’s hard to point to all of Asia and say there is just one issue. If I were to try to point to one issue that many countries are facing, it would be a rise in authoritarianism and nationalism in Asia. Obviously, illiberal and totalitarian governments like China and North Korea, have been long standing presences in the region. Theocracies of many stripes also continue to limit the spread of humanistic values. Lastly, strong men and nationalists, like those currently in power in the Philippines and India, have chilled free speech and limited human flourishing in the region.
I do hope that humanists in continue to promote our values and fight hard against authoritarian dogmas as they are one of the greatest threats both human life and human progress in the Asia.
Who have been the most unexpected allies for the humanist and skeptical movements in Asia?
For me, on the ground in Taiwan, the LGBTQ rights movement has been our biggest and most unexpected ally. When the issue of marriage equality came up in Taiwan, many were surprised how quickly people organized against it. As it turned out, the main opposition was organized through Christian churches with help from abroad. In response, seemingly overnight, many anti-dogmatic religion groups sprouted up on social media translating videos and memes from the west. Not only has this increased, the overall dankness of our memes, it has also meant that we can reach more Taiwanese with our ideas, if only in sound bite form, and we can support a movement that many of us already agree with.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/05
The Governor General of Canada, Julie Payette, spoke to a room of scientists on November 1, regarding climate change, evolution, horoscopes, and bad science in general (Moscrop, 2017). She was the keynote speaker at the ninth annual Canadian Science Policy Convention in Ottawa (CSPC, 2017).
Payette targeted evolution, climate change, horoscopes, and alternative medicine in the speech. Some quotes, on climate change from human activity:
Can you believe that still today in learned society, in houses of government, unfortunately, we’re still debating and still questioning whether humans have a role in the Earth warming up or whether even the Earth is warming up, period? (Persian Mirror, 2017)
On evolution by natural selection, unguided:
And we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process. (Ibid.)
On alternative medicines:
And so many people — I’m sure you know many of them — still believe, want to believe, that maybe taking a sugar pill will cure cancer, if you will it! (Ibid.)
On horoscopes:
And every single one of the people here’s personalities can be determined by looking at planets coming in front of invented constellations. (Ibid.)
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau supported the remarks by Payette. (The Canadian Press, 2017).
I read prominent commentators, even nationally so, on Payette’s speech. I feel concern about these public intellectuals, journalists, and writers now.
I feel as though each took the same script, and then played their role as they were cued to come stage right and read their lines to the public and exit stage left. In short, I am disconcerted and annoyed at the uniformity of the media in misrepresentation.
Payette broke the mold of the culture around governor generals, as this was seen to “rankle” via the “tone” of the speech (Moscrop, 2017). Moscrop argued, and ‘can understand,’ the position of those citizens’ feeling that the Governor General, as a role, should be non-partisan.
But I find this misses the point, as the Governor General listed scientific truisms: well-substantiated theories backed by facts, or rejection of ones lacking those characteristics. Science is non-partisan.
Does evolution amount to a Libertarian or a Socialist perspective? Do horoscopes remain Conservative or Liberal? Does the Green Party hold sole ownership of climate change?
Apparently, Moscrop is concerned about the effects of Payette speaking scientific truisms, e.g., the questionable persistence of the human species if action is not taken regarding climate change. It is a concern around faux feelings of insult about a joke around denialists because these points of science are “accepted as fact.” He states:
As for the substance of Payette’s message—that climate change and evolution are real, and that sugar pills are bunk—she might as well have been acknowledging, as political scientist Emmett Macfarlane pointed out, “the existence of gravity.” Indeed. But the controversy seems to be less about Payette’s recognition that climate change, evolution, and the value of mainstream medicine are accepted as fact, and more about her pointing out that, in the 21st century, there are Canadians who doubt that. (Ibid.)
I can understand Macfarlane’s and Moscrop’s positions, as some say. I can understand that they are articulate, educated, and wrong. As written by CBC News (2016), the scientific literacy of Canadians exists as a concern.
They note this about a survey by the Ontario Science Centre (CBC News, 2016). 2/5 Canadians think the science on climate change is unclear (Ontario Science Centre, 2016). 1/5 Canadians trust intuition over science regarding genetically modified organisms (Ibid.).
1/5 think there’s a link between vaccines and autism (Ibid.). On those points, the general Canadian public – at least 2/5, then 1/5, followed by 1/5 Canadians, respectively, based on the prior survey results – hold empirically false beliefs. Payette spoke her mind. The Ontario Science Centre states:
Climate change is a highly charged topic hotly debated by politicians and industry. But in the scientific community, there is a substantial consensus on the factors that contribute to this global issue. (Ibid.)
Moscrop continues:
Still, while stating facts is one thing, criticizing those who don’t believe in those facts is another. Those are different sorts of utterances and therefore different sorts of acts. The question is whether and when the governor general ought to cross that line. To the former, I say “yes.” To the latter, I say “sometimes.” That’s the wisdom of good governance: knowing when to speak, how to speak, and what to say. (2017).
Payette – for the when, how, and what – can speak this way when in the company of scientists as a keynote speaker at a science policy convention (when), so able to speak directly and with humor about scientific matters including science literacy (how), and speaking about concerns such as denial of scientific truths or acceptance of pseudoscientific falsehoods (what).
She did nothing wrong and made a joke. The next was Postmedia News.
Postmedia News published an editorial (2017). They say, “Canadians hold a diversity of views on religion and climate change and the GG, who on behalf of the Queen represents all Canadians, has effectively suggested those who disagree with her views are ignorant.”
Nope: she relayed the views of the science. Science provides explanatory frameworks of the natural world. It’s great. You can know which beliefs are more probable or improbable, or simply wrong. Many of the diverse views on climate change in the public are wrong, not by necessity brought about by ignorance. Canadians have a variety of wrong beliefs about climate change, evolution, and horoscopes. Variety relates little to truth.
Postmedia News continued, “The world’s full of nitwits with Twitter accounts who think they have licence to lecture those they disagree with. Our Governor General shouldn’t be one of them.” Duly note, she was the invited keynote, who spoke to a room of scientists at a science policy convention. Not exactly Twitter, a lecture, or lay people, or an informed editorial for that matter.
Following them came Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who, in the prominent and highly respected media forum of Facebook, said:
It is extremely disappointing that the prime minister will not support Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians and other faith groups who believe there is truth in their religion…Respect for diversity includes respect for the diversity of religious beliefs, and Justin Trudeau has offended millions of Canadians with his comments. (Wherry, 2017)
Insofar as I know, believing something to be true, regardless of tenet or premise of a religion, faith, or way of life, doesn’t make it true, but showing something empirically to be true, repeatedly, does increase its probability of being so, Payette’s speech comes from science.
Scheer’s comments are as cynical as they are insulting. Cynical through twisting meaning, then insulting because the turn of meaning is directing the majority resentment and prejudice of many religious – already extant – against the large minority, the formal irreligious or formerly religious, for the points in the intangible economy of politics.
The joke was not at religion at large. It was at the notion that can be in some religions – often asserted, unproven, and a matter of faith – of divine guidance for humanity, whether young or old Earth creationism, or purported directed evolution.
The scientific consensus is unguided evolution. That is, no divine guidance in the birth, maturation, decay, and death of organisms, or in the reproduction, perpetuation, and speciation of species. Besides, why should empirically false beliefs deserve respect? They are beliefs, like 2+2=5 or squares are circles, or the Sun orbits the Earth.
The people holding them is another matter. Scheer did not say irreligious people can hold wrong beliefs about climate change and horoscopes, too, not simply “Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians and other faith groups.” Did he even see the full speech or think about it, or did he simply observe a political opportunity?
Therein lies the cross-points, the crucifix, of the notion or narrative throughout the news coverage, ‘Payette targets religion, especially religious individuals’; whereas, the truth is the targeting of empirically false beliefs with a joke while in the community of professional scientists.
Of course, the media misrepresentation seems like a politically convenient maneuver, so Scheer used the opportunity to score political points by bravely targeting, not Payette directly but, Trudeau. Easy, expedient political currency, if cynical enough, why not? Next was the long-time Canadian commentator Rex Murphy.
Murphy made note about religion and science not being in conflict: how cliché and delightfully vague. What is meant by religion?
It depends on the contents of the religion to an individual. Some see “the good” in religion as a motivation for protests outside abortion clinics, killing abortion doctors, holding signs saying, “God hates fags,” killing homosexuals, criminalizing atheism with the death penalty, even suppressing women and denying rights, and so on. Others see the same good in religion through self-sacrifice for fellow human beings in disaster areas, or for the donation of their income to those in most need.
Payette’s statements point to empirical claims about the natural world without evidence, not religion. Unless, the religion’s specific tenets or beliefs contain empirical claims in conflict with scientific evidence, to the individual religious person, but this remains different than religion at large.
If the religious tenet or belief remains in conflict with the evidence about the natural world from the science, and if the religious tenet or belief asserts an empirical foundation, then the religious claim is dust, nothing, or simply wrong.
Murphy queried the reader, “In this wonderfully diverse Canada that Ms. Payette now represents, was it her intent to ridicule the religious beliefs of so very many faiths whose cosmologies include a divine creation, some as myth, some as a fact of faith — as opposed to a fact of science?” Nope.
The fulcrum for Murphy’s teeter-totter is Payette claiming umpire status, tacitly in his opinion at least, on faith and religion. Here’s a question: Who made Murphy umpire on the interpretation of the meaning of the Governor General’s words?
Payette iterated a series of the strongest theories backed by the empirical evidence discovered by science, e.g., climate change or global warming is real, human activity is a major contributor to global warming, horoscopes are bogus (sorry, Georgia Nicols), and humans arose via the principles of unguided evolution, and so on.
Murphy noted the “truths” of religion without a statement, again conveniently, of what exactly, I wonder. If moral codes, these amount to heuristics for behaviour, evolved (without divine intervention, to Payette’s point).
Then came the epithets, I was waiting for one: “Scientism.” A dishonourable history of what I consider “terms to defame to dismiss.” Use a word, give it bad implications, apply against an enemy, you don’t need to address the claims anymore. It’s perfect.
Then there’s also only implication of terms to defame to dismiss, where some conceptions behind terms are well-instantiated in the society without need for direct reference, e.g., elitism. Payette, by the insinuation of Murphy, is elitist talking down to the general public, especially non-college education and non-science types.
Case in Murphy wrongness, she spoke against elitism, saying, “We will be able to claim as a people, as a nation, as humanity. That we are a science literate species. By science literacy, I don’t mean we should all have a math degree” (Persian Mirror, 2017). The point isn’t higher education. The point is science literacy.
Also, speaking of condescension, Murphy quipped, “A backhand dismissal of religion is a sophomoric indulgence.” I feel under the stronger impression that belief without evidence and backhand dismissal of fundamental empirical truths is such an indulgence.
Following Mr. Murphy was Mr. Levant, Ezra Levant, of Rebel Media fame, dove into the public discussion as well. In a video entitled “Ezra Levant: Governor General equates religion with superstition,” he decided to be ambitious by being wrong from the start, from the title (Rebel Media, 2017).
His opening salvo starts with a mediocre jab with the common tactic of misquotation of a great individual in history, in this case the little-known historical figure and scientist named Albert Einstein.
Levant quotes Einstein, “Science can only ascertain what is and not what should be” (Ibid.) Of course, Einstein also said:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Einstein, 1989).
As well as:
The word God for me is nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can [for me] change this. (Jones, 2015)
It is a fun game, and easy too. Levant moves next into the purported equating of God and superstition by Payette. Only if your definition of a God somehow implies horoscopes, anti-evolutionism, and global warming denialism, which seems like the problem to me.
The definition of God, in the context of the Levant video, amounts to a God defined by a metric of rubber inches. Somehow, by any means, this God will be fit into the appropriate category to imply Payette being a) anti-religion and b) anti-religious people.
For quotation of Payette, the research team at Rebel Media didn’t selectively quote as much, as in the case of Einstein, which is nice. They quote Payette on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life or SETI.
Background: Frank Drake, who is alive, created the Drake Equation to estimate the probabilities of extraterrestrial life. If life arose by nature here, what odds elsewhere? The equation, depending on the values given to the parameters in the equation, calculates the estimate.
As a former astronaut, I am certain Payette knows about the equation, incorporates this into her worldview, and likely answers questions about extraterrestrials, or aliens if you will, in that context.
The difference between the superstitions and the aliens is the evidence. Life exists here, on Earth. It arose, naturally. Then you can ask, “What parameters need to be taken into account to calculate those probabilities?”
The superstitions or false beliefs lack evidence, or are overwhelmed by the vast majority, the preponderance, of evidence. That points to the – ahem – point of Payette’s statements and joke about divinely guided evolution, horoscopes, and climate change denial.
Levant moves into a complete non-sequitur about God creating the universe, extraterrestrial intelligence, and then insinuating Payette said that you’re a kook if you believe the former but not the latter. Of course, Payette never said anything of the sort.
Another individual in the media personalities with concerning popularity playing the cynical, if purposeful, or ignorant, if accidental, game “Missing the Point” is Chris Selley. He noted 53% of Canadian citizens believe God is active in this world. What’s their evidence?
Argumentum ad numerum is the Hail Mary, or argument by the majority. The response: the majority can hold false beliefs. Quantity, in people, does not determine veracity. Again, this was not a jab at religion, so Selley was playing in another baseball field: with other Canadian media personalities while Payette was absent.
Mia Rabson of Global News did a good job. She represented the speech with honest intent to relay what Payette said, and meant, to the audience at the Canadian Science Policy Convention (Rabson, 2017).
The argument remains imaginary, though, as with the insinuation of the narrative throughout the prominent media, generally. Payette didn’t jab religion. She jabbed empirically false claims or assertions without evidence. That is not anti-religious; it is pro-empirical truths. So Moscrop and Emmett, Postmedia News, Scheer, Murphy, Levant, and Selley (and I assume others) miss the point, then run on steam or tirade oil.
References
CBC News. (2016, September 22). Q&A Survey reveals ‘significant gaps’ in Canadians’ understanding of science. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/survey-reveals-significant-gaps-in-canadians-understanding-of-science-1.3772707.
CSPC. (2017). Canadian Science Policy Convention. Retrieved from http://cspc2017.ca.
Estate of Albert Einstein. (1989). Albert Einstein, the Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=T5R7JsRRtoIC&pg=PA43&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Moscrop, D. (2017, November 2). Julie Payette takes on junk science—and tests the limits of her job title. Retrieved from http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/julie-payette-takes-on-junk-science-and-tests-the-limits-of-her-job-title/?platform=hootsuite.
Murphy, R. (2017, November 2). Rex Murphy: Governor General appoints herself umpire of questions of faith and science. Retrieved from http://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-governor-general-places-herself-as-umpire-of-questions-of-faith-science.
Ontario Science Centre. (2017). Ontario Science Centre survey reveals gap in public understanding of critical scientific issues. Retrieved from http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/Media/Details/432/.
Persian Mirror. (2017, November 3). Governor General Julie Payette speech at CSPC2017. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbvRPazFsts.
Postmedia News. (2017, November 3). EDITORIAL: Julie Payette speech oversteps her role. Retrieved from http://torontosun.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-julie-payette-speech-oversteps-her-role.
Rabson, M. (2017, November 2). Julie Payette takes on climate change deniers, divine intervention and horoscopes. Retrieved from https://globalnews.ca/news/3839305/julie-payette-takes-on-climate-change-deniers-divine-intervention-and-horoscopes/.
Rebel Media [Rebel Media]. (2017, November 4). Ezra Levant: Governor General equates religion with superstition. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axe7YrikDkw.
Selley, C. (2017, November 3). Chris Selley: With her dig at religion, Julie Payette plays a dangerous game for Liberals. Retrieved from https://www.google.ca/amp/nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-with-her-dig-at-religion-julie-payette-plays-a-dangerous-game-for-liberals/amp.
The Canadian Press. (2017, November 2). Trudeau applauds Payette for standing up for science in convention speech. Retrieved from http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/trudeau-applauds-payette-for-standing-up-for-science-in-convention-speech-1.3661058.
Wherry, A. (2017, November 3). Scheer blasts Trudeau for supporting Governor General after ‘divine intervention’ comment. Retrieved from https://www.google.ca/amp/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4385895.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/05
“There are reasons to be skeptical of The Way of the Future, a newly incorporated American religion that worships artificial intelligence as “the Godhead.”
It has no church, no worshipers, no doctrine, no scripture, and no rituals. But Anthony Levandowksi, the multi-millionaire engineer who secretly founded it in 2015, and today serves as president and CEO, has a track record of predicting and capitalizing on the future, as he did for example in the self-driving car industry.
The Way of the Future, a non-profit religious corporation in California, says its purpose is “To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society,” according to records obtained by Wired magazine.”
“Does freedom of religion extend to the Charter-protected right to have spiritual places or spiritual beings important to those beliefs protected?
No, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada ruled this week in a decision that has offended many Indiginous communites.
On Thursday, the high court dismissed an appeal by the Ktunaxa Nation that would have blocked development of a B.C. ski resort in Jumbo Glacier Valley.”
“OTTAWA — In a landmark freedom-of-religion case, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a massive ski resort development in southeast British Columbia can go ahead despite a claim by a First Nation that it violates sacred land.
The decision clarifies a boundary on the Charter right to freedom of religion, establishing that the government does not have a duty to protect an object of religious beliefs. Instead, the duty is to protect the right to hold such beliefs and to practice those beliefs in worship.
“In short, the Charter protects the freedom to worship, but does not protect the spiritual focal point of worship,” the decision says.”
“Is religion violent?
It’s a common question that arises when discussing religion, politics and world crises, particularly apparent terrorist attacks of the type that played out in New York City on Tuesday.
Islam in particular is branded as a violent faith, but others argue Christianity deserves the same assessment.
But behind the question is a whole host of problems, and so it isn’t surprising some scholars suggest that classifying any religion as violent is problematic and unreliable.
As a scholar of religion, I also question whether calling oneself “religious” really says anything meaningful about one’s identity. Given the diversity of religious groups, the term “religion” is not only extremely general, but it has a long history.”
Source: http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/challenging-the-notion-that-religion-fosters-violence.
“TORONTO — Doctors say Shalom Ouanounou is brain-dead, and has been for over a month after suffering a cardiac arrest.
His family, devout orthodox Jews who do not believe that neurological demise equals death, insist the 25-year-old is still alive.
On Wednesday, the Toronto residents launched an unprecedented court case against a hospital, doctors and coroners that could overturn the way end of life is handled in Canada.
Citing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they are pressing for an exemption from the brain-death declaration for patients whose religion does not accept the concept.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/01
Was there a family background in humanism?
I grew up in a nonreligious home, and although neither of my parents identified explicitly as humanists, humanist values were very much a part of how I was raised. Both my parents are extremely nonjudgmental and supportive of the fair and equal treatment of all people. They raised me to be open-minded, to love learning, to question authority, and to respect the humanity in everyone. We frequently enjoyed culture as a family, spending a lot of time in the theatre, art galleries, etc., and we traveled often. This instilled in me a love of world culture and a sense of cosmopolitanism which I believe to be central to the humanist worldview. They encouraged political participation and a sense of civic duty. In its own way, it was a very humanist upbringing.
What is your preferred definition of humanism?
Humanism seeks to recognize and uphold the dignity of every person. It is a life-stance which asserts the ability of human beings to work together for the improvement of humanity, without the need for divine intervention. Humanists promote the values of reason, compassion, and hope: the ability of human beings to use our own intellect to make sense of the world; the equal dignity and worth of every person; and the ability of people to improve the world on our own.
How did you find and become involved with The Ethical Society of St. Louis?
I began training as an Ethical Culture Leader (that’s our word for the professional clergy who lead Ethical Societies) after visiting the New York Society for Ethical Culture while I was on the Humanist Institute’s leadership training program. I was studying for my doctorate at the time, and travelling the USA giving presentations on humanism, and I wanted to find a way to make humanist leadership into a career. When I discovered there are humanist congregations which bring people together to deepen their understanding of and commitment to humanism, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I began my training with the American Ethical Union, and part of the training includes an apprenticeship at an Ethical Society. I moved to St. Louis to complete that apprenticeship, and then was hired as their Leader with responsibility for outreach. I feel very lucky: I’m one of very few people who are clergy for a truly humanist congregation.
What are your tasks and responsibilities as the leader of The Ethical Society of St. Louis?
I am one of two Leaders — the other is Kate Lovelady, who has been leading the Society for more than ten years now. I play many of the all the roles of a clergy person in a religious congregation: I provide pastoral care for members, speak on Sundays, organize events for the community, lead educational workshops and discussion groups. I have particular responsibility for outreach, meaning I represent the Society and humanism in general in public events. I speak on panels, make presentations about humanism, visit college campuses etc. I am the professional public face of our community.
What are the main threats to the practice of humanism in St. Louis and the US at large now?
I don’t think there are major threats to the practice of humanism, in the sense that people can believe what they want and practice that as they wish. There are, however, major threats to the success of humanist values in the culture. The US (and many European nations) is facing a very powerful populist right wing movement currently which threatens to overwhelm political institutions and make the country more nationalistic, xenophobic, and closed-minded. Trump — and the political forces which swept him to the presidency — represents a grave threat to the humanist ideals of international cooperation, respect for science, equal treatment of people, and religious freedom. All across the wealthy west people’s baser natures are reaching for the controls. People are afraid of their economic condition and tired of a political system which doesn’t serve them, and are looking to strongmen who promise a return to national glory. The parallels with the pre-war era are extremely worrying. The humanist movement must work extremely hard to help people resist these trends.
Who have been the most unexpected allies for ethical societies and the humanist movement in North America?
My strongest allies have been liberal religious clergy who understand the importance of crafting and presenting a powerful moral vision of society. Although we disagree over theology, these clergy understand the humanist project as an essentially cultural one, and since we share many of the same values, we are often together at rallies and events trying to promote a hopeful vision of society. I’ve been amazed by how principled and hardworking many liberal clergy are: I count them among my closest allies.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/01
Rome Bethea is an administrator of an atheist Facebook group: Atheists. Here, I ask him some questions about background, views, and hopes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s dive little bit into your background. What was family life like? Was religion a big part of it? What were some individuals in your life that you note as influences on you with regards to theological beliefs? Whether or not you held them, those that were of influence.
Rome Bethea: Growing up in Detroit I was raised a Baptist Christian, my whole family is Baptist actually. We weren’t really a church-going family until I was about 10. My mom would take me, my sisters, and a couple of my cousins that spent the weekend over at a church called Universal Praise Center. I was even apart of their choir.
I didn’t really like going to church but whatever mom says goes. A couple years had past and she let me leave the church. After that, I haven’t found a church home until I was 16. Called New Haven’s rest I went two times and I remember this day like it was yesterday.
The bishop said he saw that they have a couple of new faces and would anyone like to get up and introduce themselves. I got nervous as the mic got closer and closer to me. Finally, it’s on me. I say my name and how good it is to be around good people.
The bishop put me on the spot and asked me have I been saved? I told them the truth and said, “No.” So the whole church started talking together and told me to go sit in this chair up front and get saved.
We go through the whole, “So I accept Jesus,” stuff and when I got up they told me to come back next weekend to be baptized. I came back and got baptized December 19, 2009. I kept with that church until I realized they’re no good. The first lady was telling people’s secrets and the pastor was hitting on women. So I left but still believed in (the Word) up until I was about 21.
Jacobsen: Can you recall a pivotal moment or series of experiences that instantiated a lack of belief in God or gods?
Bethea: I went jail over unpaid driving tickets and I called my mom and she said this is a good time to read the Bible and get right with the Lord, so that’s what I did, well tried to do. But as I read the Bible I started to see verses that the church never said anything about.
God being Okay with slavery, women must be quiet and submissive and cannot teach men. I thought maybe I’m just thinking too much on it. And I tried reading it from the first page to the last, hoping hopefully I can make sense of this and I see in Genesis it says God made the sun on the 4th day and that’s where I believe I started to question it all.
It doesn’t take and a rocket scientist to know a day cannot pass without the sun. Lol. That’s when I started to watch YouTube videos on religion. And my friend from across the street, Darnell, was showing me how the Bible contradicts itself and has no historical data for things the Bible says happened on Earth
Like the Chinese were keeping track of their stuff around the same time Noah’s ark supposedly happened. The fact that we had rocks and trees older then what the Bible claims the Earth to be just set everything in stone for me, really.
Jacobsen: What books would you recommend for those that are first questioning your faith?
Bethea: Yes, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, of course. And The End of Faith by Sam Harris. Great books.
Jacobsen: What individuals would you also recommend?
Bethea: David Silverman, it’s cool and funny but he doesn’t play around and stay on point. Richard Dawkins again and I’m sure I don’t have to say why lol also Michael Shermer, once you made it this far you should be an atheist by now lol.
Jacobsen: Would you consider some of the more toxic aspects of some branches of atheism in the late 20th and early 21st-century?
Bethea: I know some people may come off the wrong way but if you stop and think about it they don’t mean any harm. You have people fighting for gay rights, people fighting people of color. They’re just fighting to be equal. They might come off the wrong way but sometimes to be heard you must scream.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the good aspects of religion? How does the nonbelieving community compensate for those to provide a better community?
Bethea: I think some people are good people but just don’t know any better. I know a handful of churches that give back to the community but it’s also a lot of them putting money into these banks that’s trying to kick poor people like myself out of our neighborhoods. I think it some good people in religion. But all together we need to kill religion and just be good people.
Jacobsen: How did the group Atheists start?
Bethea: I actually just started helping with this page but I’m doing my best to spread the word and get everyone back thinking.
Jacobsen: What are your hopes for its growth? What are your hopes for the atheist movement in general?
Bethea: I’m hoping to get as big as we can! I want all 7 billion people on the same page as us (atheist) but, baby steps.
Jacobsen: Thanks for the opportunity and your time, Rome.
Bethea: Thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed with you. Hope that helps and wish you the best with everything.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/01
Jon King is an acquaintance through a mutual friend. He is Christian. Here we talk about faith and Christianity.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We came into contact through a mutual friend. You are Christian. Let’s start with a definition and brief story. What sect – or if not sect, then set of beliefs – defines your Christianity? How did you first come into contact with that form of it?
Jon King: Presently, I am ordained as an Apostle just like Paul, Peter, or John from the New Testament. I do not align myself with a sect or denomination because I understand that there is only “the way” as it is written. This is the example by faith and works as well as by affiliation that Jesus showed us according to example in His three-year ministry. This was validated not just by speech but in the deed of the active ministry of His Apostles as they would go to fulfill what is known as the Great Commission, therefore establishing the early roots of the Church. I have learned that God is not a God of denomination but He is the truth. The truth is not in part and certainly does not align Himself according to our fake box with an artificial ceiling. So, as Jesus walked I walk. As He lived I live. I only do what I must and the example of His life unlocks many of the hidden secrets to how being a Christian or follower of Christ is to be successfully lived out. Every day since my conversion, I have read the Bible, spent time in prayer and doing good works as they demonstrate the faith I have in the need for truth to change the world. This is not a religion, this is a revolution. And the Bible is my roadmap with the direction of God through His Spirit.
My conversion to walking in the way of truth like Christ officially transpired on the evening of 9/11/2014. I was sitting on my couch in Arlington, VA and all of this sudden, I just knew that God’s presence was consuming me. In that knowing, my faith started to grow and reveal to me the Trinity and how God was communicating with me through His Spirit by the finished work of Christ. I didn’t own a Bible, attend church, or for that matter give any thought about God or my relationship with Him. I was just living however I wanted and had this sort of burning bush consumption and my heart began to melt in sorrow as the presence of fear and trembling mixed with peace and understanding came over me. Right about then, I was overwhelmed like a secret door in my being was opened and I knew it was Jesus by name. I would spend much of that evening in tears and by the time I went to bed, I knew that following Jesus despite the cost was my only option. I was certain in a way that I had never experienced before. I realized my life was being spared and that there was purpose in everything that had occurred before in my life. It was incredibly powerful and humbling. God was speaking to me like He spoke to Moses and my mind was blowing but I knew it was real and it was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I saw a vision of the Church falling away into this kind of corporate black hole and then I saw the rising and falling of nations. I knew in an instant that I must go speak to the church I was a part of as I young teenager, though it had been about 15 years or so since I attended a service. Within 60 days, I would commute from my place of work as a strategic advisor working national programs for Defense and Intelligence to my hometown to share a seven-minute prophetic message about change. No sermon but me standing on a stage looking out into a crowd in a full house (no one believed it was me) sharing a message about changing and preparing to fight as warriors in this present crisis of darkness. There was weeping and I called a veteran friend from childhood out of the crowd and had him stand. It was Veteran’s day so I had them all stand. Before I knew it, I was going from one person to the next laying my hands on them and speaking truth into their lives. I felt whole and since then, I have been doing ministry everywhere I go. A seed was planted inside of me and on it is written, “truth.” The seed came from God when I was younger but on 9/11/2014, God pointed at it and commanded the rain to grow it. That was the day the fire roared inside of me.
Jacobsen: I want to split this into formal argument, so philosophy, and informal sentiment, so experience. To the former, what arguments – as much detail as you wish – make the best case for faith in general?
King: We all exercise a great degree of faith. What separates us on this journey is what we are putting our faith in. To make decisions based off of what we cannot definitively prove or see is to follow some degree of faith. Whether you believe Jesus is Lord and follow Him or believe in humanism or Buddha, you are deciding to place your smaller decisions in the figurative hand of a worldview. And to exercise your free will to satisfy a form of belief leaves us in a vulnerable place. That is unavoidable, as even the Big Bang has to have an originating author, because everything comes from something. So, why not acknowledge that we just are exercising faith in some sort of originating way. “In the beginning…God created.” That is a huge step if we believe that. Those two things together beg for us to go further. If He is God and has purpose for everything, then why did He? What does it mean for me? What relevance does believing or not believing this have in my life journey? Think about it but either way, you will have to accept that you cannot prove or disprove what you are putting your faith in when it comes to answering these worldview questions. Not to have the desire to have faith is death man. Because with faith comes the will to hope and hope inspires man to keep walking towards that dim light on those dark days so that tomorrow can be freer than yesterday. Look around at this creation and see it all growing towards that infinite sky and think back to those experiences where you just knew something divine was occurring. Believe because your soul is begging to swim in that life.
One day this machine down here is going to slow down significantly then stop. Then what? Deep down, we all think about that potential life in eternity where it will all be different and without the same complication as this time in the dirt is. There are many beliefs, religions, faiths, and cynicism out there. So much so that over time we have started to worship not believing with all of who we are as some sort of badge of courage but I tell you to do the very opposite is to do the title of one of my favorite movies, “Into the Wild.” You have to find out who you are for real and be set free from unbelief so that you can live in the presence of peace and walk in those mysteries with God that make this life worth living. It’s not that weak people need to make a case for faith. It’s that faith made a case to people who had the desire to listen to Him. That case was closed when Jesus came out of that tomb resurrected from the death of a criminal. I believe in that and I have that faith because I decided to let my preconceived notions about God and myself go. I say to you, there is a God and He is in three parts. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He loves you man and you’re worth it. Believe because there is no better place to go. Believe and have faith because that is where greatness resides. This isn’t a conversation about rational. You can’t rationalize thoughts of the heart. But you can meditate on their significance. The mind will follow the faith that is in the heart. The roots of your faith are life producing or death. We believe that where the root is planted, the tree will grow. That’s because we have faith in the process of life. To live this life and depend only on intellect would defy the number one thing that every human is willing to fight for, love. Love cannot be measured or seen but we feel Him and we know it’s so important. In fact, we die for it every day. We didn’t create love but we hunger and we thirst for His riches. So I dare you to believe friends. To have faith is to live and not just survive.
Jacobsen: What arguments – as much detail as you wish – make the best case for Christianity in general – as well as your own?
King: No argument makes the best case for Christianity. All I can do to make the case for Christianity as the best option for those who want to live a life in truth is to reason with their hearts and minds, hoping that the grace of God instructs them where they are open to absorbing that goodness. Even within the ranks and files taking up territory within the evangelical Christian church, you will get several different answers to this question. But I am more concerned with what God through Christ would say, or better yet, what He would do to best inform the reader. I am convinced that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father by the saving power of the Holy Spirit because I exercise this faith in my life every day and the fruit of this belief has completely transformed me in every way possible. So much so that I sold my possessions to the poor, got on a bus and came to Washington D.C. with only a bag and a hot fire burning inside that produced the fruit of prayer. Leaving all I ever knew and losing every relationship I had in order to follow this invisible but personal God. He commanded my soul to be refreshed in His presence and gave me tremendous purpose. “Go teach them faith with your life.” That is the apostolic calling He gave me, more or less. I have been full-time in ministry now for over three years operating mostly individually and I’ve experienced so much truth, love, and hope all over this hurting nation. I have gone without food for days at a time, slept in the open while it was raining, walked up to thirty plus miles to get around the next corner and be a part of real miracles. I have come back from my own grave following a Judas kind of betrayal and been persecuted in a U.S. court (2nd circuit court in Plymouth, NH) for my radical faith in Jesus and the way as written in the Bible. One year ago today to be exact. On Halloween of 2016, my accusers stood before me and asked me inside quotes to explain to them my conversion to following Jesus, so I stood up in the power of courage as they scorned me and testified the gospel of God until my liberal judge spoke into the microphone, “blessed is he who does not take offense because of Me.” I heard her and knew it was God with me so I said “Amen” and spoke the scriptures until my spirit was retired and they had no questions left to ask. Looking into the eyes of my wife at the time, I knew I was choosing my faith over everything else. So they said I was crazy because I did not defend myself but shared the truth of who God is. I lost it all that day and I gained it all that day. As I walked into the cold street following, I joined the ranks of those who made it possible for me to understand what Christianity truly is. Following that day, I was rejected and cast away by everyone and anyone I ever thought I knew. So I thought about Him while He was walking to that mount to be killed for my sake and I wept with a bitter joy as I asked, “Father! Why have you forsaken me?” He said, “My grace is sufficient for you my son.” So I said, “glory to God. Forgive my unbelief Father.” And then I knew for certain that one must die to live. We choose to die for a time now and then live or we live for awhile then die forever. When I decided it would be better to die than to forsake the Jesus I know, I knew that I believed. That is everything I could have asked for.
I share this sequence and story with you because it’s the evidence that makes the case. So I reason with you my friends but I cannot argue because believing in Jesus is not an argument but it’s being connected to the truth. That’s above reproach and it’s magnanimous in nature. It’s a supernatural work in natural circumstances that point to the power and nature of God. Many call God by many names but from the thunder I hear Him say, “this is the way, walk in it.” He was 33 when He was put to death for us and He didn’t complain at all. We owe Him our best. That’s why I’m here right now. I have to finish the work of Him who sent me.
Jacobsen: What experiences speak to the heart of the Christian faith? How do these attest to the truth of the faith?
King: When you see someone love in the face of hatred, you are seeing the faith of God overcome by grace the darkness. That is the faith of Christ which is the epicenter of the Christian faith. That really is interchangeable for the heart of God. Not Catholicism or Mormonism or any other kind of mimicking religion that claims to represent the equity of an infinite God who is present with us in spirit and in truth can claim it is Christianity. When you are forgiven for doing what you know was wrong, that’s the evidence of God’s heart in the Christian. To be a Christian is to share in the heart of God and respond like Jesus as it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives within us. Those who feed the needy and shelter the poor. They are them that represent the heart of the Christian. The guy you see walking down the street in meekness while giving the five dollars he has to someone who claims to be poor but isn’t is that Christian heart in action. Because that guy knows that he is rich in faith and in faith exists the opportunity to receive everything. He would rather give away his last five dollars to know he is representing Jesus than to spend it on the dollar menu. He just screams inside for the world to look up and see the character of God for who He rightfully is. The woman at the well Jesus spoke to in the book of John is such a great illustration. She was living in adultery and wasn’t even a Jew but Jesus walked a good distance with no water to connect with her at that historical well. So he prophetically connected with her in spirit and spoke truth into the core of her being. Then she believed Him and went and got her friends and He showed them the way like Joe Cocker says in his song, “With A Little Help From My Friends.” We are called to go and do that same thing and we know it’s the truth because we see these things happen everyday. When someone is living a certain way and the love of God comes upon them through someone else being used as a vessel, the radical impact it has is the testament and evidence of that faith’s power. The trick is discerning the regular product that faith produces. If it’s forgiving, patient, kind, selfless, humble, faithful, it’s Christianity. The staying power of Christ to transform the lives of everything and everyone He touches is not rivaled. That’s why He has the most contested name on earth (still). There is only one God and no one gets to the Father part of Him without going to and becoming like the Son part of Him. And that only happens when we believe and receive that third Holy Spirit part of Him that instructs and teaches us how to do it and win.
I spend my days spontaneously responding to the direction of God in much anticipation of His epic plans for each day. He has shown me how to live a completely submitted life as Jesus did and go where He wants when He wants so that I will do what He wants and be satisfied with my contribution to the greatest mission of all time. The mission of love going forward and conquering death. Most of my interactions are unplanned and I only speak what I must. My actions follow that prophetic speech and become a part of changing broken things into better things. Some people see and believe. Some people see and become fearful and don’t believe. But this is the tradition of what it is to be a Christian. We do it because it’s who we are, not because it makes us feel good. We live as servants because that is the way to freedom. We want to be free all the time and to do that we have to look closely at the character of God at work in people. Those who are most like Jesus provide the best evidence for why this Christianity is so wonderful. It’s not our job to “save everyone.” It’s our job to live like Jesus in faith and trust God to do His will in all that we are a part of.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the strongest atheist arguments against Christianity?
King: I’m not an expert apologist but I’ll give you a couple insertion points that I believe atheists are trying to commonly promote. It has been made known to me through multiple engagements that the average atheist wants to believe in God but has not experienced a life yet where the case for God’s love has been made known to them. So. they do their best to undercut His existence so that they do not have to subject themselves to His mission. Because if you believe God is real then you must consider what it is He created you for and then dissect what it is He is asking you to do. Atheism is dead. Literally, it is a dead spirit that is being oppressed by unbelief and pain at its core and it desires to multiply it’s product because that’s how power works. Whether good or bad, power goes out looking to multiply itself. Atheists try to use evolution but it doesn’t quite stand firm when you start to poke at its genesis. If that doesn’t work, atheism is really good at getting philosophical so that you will get trapped in a horizontal or worldly angle of perspective and start to compare and contrast dissimilar things. But at its core, I really believe that atheism’s strongest case against Christianity is the same as most cases against Christianity. It all has to do with who Jesus is and his role in our lives by His sheer state of just being worthy due to His set apart holy nature as God and man. Atheism is a good way to exercise selfishness which is human nature without letting your conscience get too wrapped up in things like accountability or consequences. And that’s great if you just want to consume and maybe feel good because you donate to puppies or recycle because going green is trendy. But atheism is terrible at defending the importance of love and it’s relevance on the global stage. Because love stems from the center of Christ, there is a division that cannot be reconciled unless the atheism is willing to believe God is who He says He is. Love cannot reside outside of truth so atheism may try to sell you the same fake version of love that Hillary or Obama does. I can make the case for a triune God in the first two chapters of the Bible, which has much historical and archaeological evidence to support it. At least more than “nothing” or atheism does. Atheists think believing in Jesus is absurd but aliens are no problem because I guess they live in outer space with Zeus and emo-ism. This may come off a little sharp but I’m trying to stir a bit for the sake of getting us to ask what validity atheism really has in general. Not to mention that comparing the thought of atheism to the evidence of Christianity is like comparing dust and a fruit bowl. They’re just very different things but I know one of them is just better and grows from the source of life and the other was created by life for a purpose but doesn’t taste as good.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Jon.
King: Scott, it’s great to connect with you and I really enjoyed sharing with you and the readers from my core. I made it a point just to share it how it’s coming to me as the best things in life are inspired.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/30
Renton Patterson is the President of Civil Rights in Public Education (CRIPE). Here we talk about the history of the separate school system, violation of the Charter, the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, and more.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is there a separate school system in the first place?
Renton Patterson: A brief account of how and why we have a Roman Catholic separate school system:
Any discussion of the separate school issue and what to do about it to-day must take into account the origin of separate schools, over 150 years ago.
In 1841, when Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) were joined together in a legislative union known as the United Province of Canada, the Day Act provided that “any number of Inhabitants of any Township or Parish professing a religious faith different from that of the majority of Inhabitants of such Township or Parish” may “dissent from the regulations” and set up their own school.
At a time when religious intolerance was widespread, provision for a religious minority to “dissent from the regulations” and therefore from the religious majority, was a solution that suited the time.
The intent, then, of the original legislation, was to establish social harmony by allowing antagonistic faith groups to separate in different schools. The original intent was not to elevate any one faith group into a position of privilege.
Despite the above, subsequent legislation made it easier to establish separate schools for Roman Catholics but more difficult to establish them for others.
One piece of such legislation, the Tache Act of 1855, applied only to Ontario, but was introduced into the Legislature by a member from Quebec, and was passed on the strength of Quebec votes.
Similarly, the Scott Act of 1863, which turned out to be the basis of today’s separate schools, applied only to Ontario, but was presented each year for four years before it finally passed – again because of a solid Quebec (Roman Catholic) vote. The vote was 76 to 31 for the Scott Act, but the Ontario vote was 31 to 21 against.
These two acts demonstrate that Roman Catholic legislators of the United Province of Canada, being a majority, voted into law, a privilege, for the Roman Catholic citizens of Upper Canada (Ontario).
In the early years, the Legislature was held alternately in Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) during the winter months. Many legislators were farmers, and when the Ontario legislators met in Quebec, and the session ran into spring, many returned home to tend to their land before the legislative session was over.
It was not unheard of for legislation to be introduced late in the session when a number of Ontario members had left for home, legislation which Ontario legislators may oppose.
In a flurry of activity prior to Confederation, both the Quebec Protestants and the Ontario Roman Catholics tried to improve their respective school provisions, which failed. It was instead agreed that the settlement of 1863 should be embodied in the new federal constitution of the Canadian provinces.
Thus, section 93 of the British North America Act ensured that any change to the school provisions must be made with the approval of the federal government which ensured that school privileges could not be removed prematurely, nor in a frivolous manner.
MINORITY RIGHTS
Some writers refer to the laws which govern Roman Catholic separate schools as “minority rights.” It stretches the imagination to view the largest religious organization in the province as a “minority.” The “minorities” are more properly Hindus, Jews, Serbian Orthodox, Muslim, Anglican, etc. and they, as religious minorities, have no rights.
Politically, a “right” is an entitlement enjoyed by all citizens as outlined in charters of rights. A “privilege” is an advantage (or immunity) enjoyed by an individual citizen or group of citizens.
These “minority rights” (as some call them) are really privileges, they are advantages or immunities enjoyed by a group.
MAJORITY PRIVILEGE
Publicly-funded separate schools for Roman Catholic citizens represent a privilege given to the largest religious organization in Ontario — the majority.
When talking about publicly-funded Roman Catholic separate schools, we are not talking about minority rights, we are talking about majority privilege.
No charter of rights would ever grant a privilege.
Privileges are anathema to rights.
Jacobsen: Why does the Supreme Court of Canada confirm the existence of the publicly-funded separate school system as a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (CRIPE, 2017)? Yet, the separate school system persists in the country.
Patterson: The Supreme Court agrees that the public funding of the Roman Catholic separate school systems is a violation of the Charter. This is the result of a Supreme Court Reference re Ontario’s Bill 30, the Bill to extend the public funding of RC schools to the end of high school.
In the Bill 30 decision Justice Estey wrote: “It is axiomatic (and many counsel before this Court conceded the point) that if the Charter has any application to Bill 30, this Bill would be found discriminatory and in violation of s. 2(a) and s. 15 of the Charter of Rights.”
However, Justice Wilson wrote that “The Charter cannot be applied so as to abrogate or derogate from rights or privileges guaranteed by or under the constitution.”
Her reason for saying this is spelled out through no fewer than 12 references to the “confederation bargain”, one being the statement: “The rights or privileges protected by s. 93(1) …. cannot be prejudicially affected…..both are immune from Charter review…..because the whole of s. 93 represents a fundamental compromise of Confederation in relation to denominational schools.”
The “confederation compromise” is spelled out in s. 93(2); Ontario must provide separate schools for Roman Catholic and Quebec must supply the same for Protestants. Through the decision on Bill 30, the Supremes turn the Charter into a bare-faced lie. No federal political party finds this bothersome – why?????
In most cases in a developed society, new laws automatically over-ride older laws. Our Charter or Rights and Freedoms was introduced, but the Supremes won’t let its terms get in the way of how they wanted to rule in the Bill 30 case. Heck, they didn’t even consider section 32 of the Constitution Act, 1982 with the title “Application of Charter”.
They didn’t have the fortitude to consider it because it would blow away their reasoning for allowing Bill 30 to be implemented. It reminds me of a statement by Pierre Trudeau, who is responsible for our Charter: “When each citizen is not equal to all other citizens in the state, we are faced with a dictatorship, which arranges citizens in a hierarchy according to their beliefs.”
Jacobsen: The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights is a United Nations document, which Canada both signed and pledged to uphold as a United Nations member state (General Assembly of the United Nations, 1966).
However, Canada, nationally, and Ontario, provincially, have been admonished four times. Why? The reason is simple: “non-action of both governments to correct the abuse” (Ibid.). What is the non-action? Why do both governments refuse to act? What are the consequences for the general public from the non-action? Frankly, four times is a lot.
Patterson: The non-action is the refusal of either Canada or Ontario to abide by the “views” of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which stated: “….the Covenant does not oblige States parties to fund schools which are established on a religious basis. However, if a State party chooses to provide public funding to religious schools, it should make this funding available without discrimination.”
It would be extremely easy for Canada to abide by the ICCPR by simply invoking its power of disallowance – section 56 of The Constitution Act, 1867. Mr. Justice LaForest, (former Justice, Supreme Court of Canada), in his book on disallowance stated that “The makers of our Constitution, in order to prevent the local legislatures from abusing their legislative rights, granted to the government the power of annulling provincial legislation.”
Why do both governments refuse to act? Their answers just refer to a certain section of the Constitution Act, 1867, section 93. But since there are avenues they may follow to make things right, I, personally, have concluded that they are both corrupt. Blatantly corrupt. Just listen to the rhetoric about human rights from both – window dressing? Just propaganda? Or absolute lies?
The consequences are that neither government can claim to be democratic, because one of the bases of a democracy is the rule of the majority. See the latest poll entitled “The Vector Poll on Public Opinion in Ontario” – attached. Any honourable government would see the results and respond.
Consequences include the fact that both Ottawa and Toronto support a two-tier citizenship for Ontario, and also support the absolute waste of over $2 billion each year. That $2 billion doesn’t count the interest on that borrowed money nor the social cost to the disadvantaged – the homeless, the hungry, the disabled, etc., etc., – who do without because the government “can’t afford it.” Separate schools in Ontario are a social disgrace and an economic disaster.
Jacobsen: The Civil Rights in Public Education organization agrees with Article 26 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which “ensures individuals equal treatment and prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion” (Ibid.; General Assembly of the United Nations, 1966).
How do documents, such as the convention or other ones representative of international law, impact Canadian law and the Canadian Constitution status regarding the publicly-funded separate school system – especially alongside the Convention and its Article 26?
Patterson: International law, in my limited experience with it, does not seem to have any impact on Canadian law, and when it seems obvious to others that it should, it appears that the Supreme Court just ignores it.
When international law is mentioned in a case, it seems to me, that a mention by the Court is only when that law agrees with the Court’s decision. International covenants are binding on countries that accede to their terms, but federal politicians will say it is not binding whenever the government finds itself in conflict with its policy, so the terms are ignored. If the Supreme Court in the Bill 30 case considered the terms of the ICCPR, it would have to do a lot of squirming.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Renton.
References
CRIPE. (2017). Why One School System?. Retrieved from http://www.cripeweb.org/about-us/why-one-school-system/.
General Assembly of the United Nations. (1966, December 19). International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. Retrieved from https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%20999/volume-999-i-14668-english.pdf.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/29
“This was not a good week for religious symbols in Quebec. Well, some people’s symbols, anyway.
In the federal byelection in Lac-Saint-Jean riding, the New Democratic candidate who finished a strong second in the general election two years ago dropped to fourth place, while losing more than half her 2015 vote share.
The obvious explanation is that Quebec New Democrats were justified in fearing that voters in this province would reject their new national leader, Jagmeet Singh, because of his turban and beard representing his Sikh faith.”
“Beijing, China – President Xi Jinping of China announced this week that he wants to tighten Beijing’s strict government controls on religion in the communist country.
In a speech this week during the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi said that religions not sufficiently conformed to Communist ideals pose a threat to the country’s government, and therefore must become more “Chinese-oriented.”
While these comments were reportedly intended particularly for Tibetan Buddhists, who have lobbied for independence from China, it could also mean a cooling of the already-rocky relations between the Vatican and China.”
“It’s impolite to talk about religion in public. And that goes doubly for Canada, a country imbued with far less spiritual fervour than our neighbours to the south.
But the past few weeks, Canadians have become uncharacteristically interested in what goes on in the hearts of the godly.
Is a Toronto imam a virulent anti-Semite or a misunderstood man who flubbed a phrase? Does the new NDP leader want an independent Sikh homeland carved out of India? Did Bill Morneau provide a human sacrifice to our Reptilian overlords at this year’s Bilderberg meeting?”
“Day by day, Quebec’s Bill 62 gets curiouser and curiouser. The law, which is almost certainly unconstitutional, was created by politics, and keeps spawning new opportunities for political conflict. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau criticized the law and edged a step closer to the federal government becoming involved, while the provincial opposition Parti Québecois,which goes to bed every night fantasizing about fights with Ottawa, said that if it were the government, it would use the notwithstanding clause to protect the law. So, triples of constitutional crises all around.
And all of this for a law that even its authors can’t explain, let alone justify. The bill’s wording implies that anyone in the province who wears a Muslim face-covering garment, such a niqab or burka, will have to remove it while receiving government services, from hospitals to libraries. Last week, Quebec Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée insisted that’s how it will be applied. She said that it will, for example, prevent a woman in a niqab from riding a public bus.”
“Last week, Alberta’s Catholic school board announced it is seeking to have an alternative sex-education curriculum approved by the province. The proposed curriculum will emphasize faith-based instruction on topics such as same-sex relationships and contraception for their schools.
In response, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley firmly stated that public money will not be used to support sex-ed programs that “deny science [and] evidence.” Jason Kenney, who won the leadership of the United Conservative Party on Saturday, countered last week that Ms. Notley shouldn’t be dictating how the Catholic education system teaches its values.”
“Last week, the province of Quebec became the first jurisdiction in North America to usher in legislation that bans anyone who is delivering or receiving public services from wearing the niqab, burka or any other face covering, all in the name of governmental religious neutrality. Introduced by Liberal Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée and unanimously supported by the Quebec Liberal Party under Premier Philippe Couillard, Bill 62 was voted into law beneath the crucifix that hangs above the Speaker’s chair in the National Assembly.
The incoherence is both stunning and confusing. Is Quebec’s government secular, or is it not?
The next day, Quebec solidaire tabled a motion proposing that the question of the crucifix — which has hung in the National Assembly since it was installed by Premier Maurice Duplessis in 1936 — be reopened and debated among MNAs behind closed doors at the Office of the National Assembly, whose role it is to oversee and direct the Assembly administration.”
“Despite ample evidence in current events to the contrary, the celebration shone with optimism for a world of unity, equality, and peace — and where doubt is as important as certitude.
The event Sunday marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Baha’i faith, one of the youngest, yet most widespread, religions in the world.
Bahá’u’lláh was born in Iran, and died in 1892, in Israel, at 74.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/28
Serious activist efforts can change the landscape of an entire province, even a country. Some are symbolic, but I do not see even these as minor either.
One particular petition of note is the e-petition by Doug Thomas, President of the Secular Connexion Séculière, called e-petition 1264, or E-1264 (Jacobsen, 2017; House of Commons, 2017; Secular Connexion Séculière, 2017).
The petition is about the discrimination against nonbelievers in Canada.
Another petition relates to discussions happening for a long time now. Those conversations with the decrease in relevance of formal faith including the Roman Catholic Church to Canadians – especially so for younger generations, national and even international controversies over an alternate sexual education program proposed by the superintendents of a Catholic school system, and the desire for a merger of the Catholic separate publicly funded school system and the regular public system in Alberta (Boswell, 2012; French, 2017a; French, 2017b; Mehta, 2017).
The sex education system alternative proposal appeared to have differences of intrigue. Hemant Mehta, a prominent online atheist, noted:
Their curriculum said sex was only permissible within marriage (and never before), downplayed “consent” as the main prerequisite for having sex, ignored condoms and birth control, and only spoke about various types of sex and masturbation in negative ways. (Ibid.)
The Government of Alberta officials didn’t agree. Mehta punctuated the article with the conclusion:
The Alberta government officials deserve plenty of praise for taking this strong stance against misinformation and ignorance. It won’t stop the Church from trying to spread its irrational beliefs, but it will put some giant hurdles along their path. (Ibid.)
In short, the hasty moves to reinstantiate Roman Catholic Church authority in the province diminished it. Hence, the decrease in Catholic Church relevance once more, in some ways.
Enter IDEA and King: Inclusive Diverse Education for All and Former Alberta Education Minister David King, respectively. The organization tied intimately with King, regarding the two school systems, says, “At the beginning of the 21st century, this duplication is obsolete, unnecessary, expensive, and contrary to what we understand about personal and religious freedom, and the religious neutrality of the provincial government” (IDEA, 2017a).
IDEA has a petition, which garnered over 1,000 votes in under 48 hours (King, 2017). It is for a referendum on the merger of both school systems in Alberta. In the midst of the controversies, present, and the crimes, past, of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, this seems like another decent step for secularism. If this doesn’t work this time, we can try again, from another angle.
You can sign here.
Also, please see the E-1264 petition here.
References
Boswell, R. (2012, April 7). Religion not important to most Canadians, although majority believe in God: poll. Retrieved from http://nationalpost.com/holy-post/religion-not-important-to-most-canadians-although-majority-believe-in-god-poll.
French, J. (2017a, October 23). Catholic school districts want their own sex-education curriculum. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/catholic-school-districts-want-their-own-sex-education-curriculum.
French, J. (2017b, March 15). Catholic school board support wanes among young adults, survey says. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/catholic-school-board-support-wanes-among-young-adults-survey-says.
House of Commons. (2017, September 14). E-1264 (DISCRIMINATION). Retrieved from https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-1264.
IDEA. (2017a, October 24). Petition: It’s time for a referendum on separate schools. Retrieved from http://www.ouridea.ca/referendum.
Jacobsen, S.D. (2017, August 6). Interview with Doug Thomas – President of the Secular Connexion Séculière. Retrieved from https://conatusnews.com/interview-doug-thomas-president-secular-connexion-seculiere/.
King, D. (2017, October 27). We just broke the 1000 signature mark in 48 hours…. Retrieved from http://www.ouridea.ca/1000sig_referendum.
Mehta, H. (2017, October 26). Alberta Officials Reject Proposed Catholic Sex Ed Lessons That “Deny Science”. Retrieved from http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/10/26/alberta-officials-reject-proposed-catholic-sex-ed-lessons-that-deny-science/.
Secular Connexion Séculière. (2017). Secular Connexion Séculière. Retrieved from http://www.secularconnexion.ca/.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/27
Prof. Imam Soharwardy is the founder of Muslims Against Terrorism (MAT). He founded MAT in Calgary in January 1998. He is also the founder of Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (ISCC).
Imam Soharwardy is the founder of the first ever Dar-ul-Aloom in Calgary, Alberta where he teaches Islamic studies. Prof. Soharwardy is the Head Imam at the Al Madinah Calgary Islamic Centre. Imam Soharwardy is a strong advocate of Islamic Tasawuf (Sufism). and believes that the world will be a better place for everyone if we follow what the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (Peace be upon him) has said, ” You will not have faith unless you like for others what you like for yourself.” He believes that spiritual weakness in humans causes all kinds of problems.
Mr. Soharwardy can be contacted at soharwardy@shaw.ca OR Phone (403)-831-6330.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did your family come to Islam? What was its impact on your own personal development?
Prof. Imam B. Syed Soharwardy: I was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. My father was a famous scholar and Imam in Pakistan. Millions of Pakistanis knew him personally. He passed away in 2001. He established a religious institution in Karachi, where he was the principal.
This is our family tradition. that we always send our children to religious schools. Once they graduate, they start the religious education. I went to this Madrassah. I learned my Islamic studies: the Quran, the Hadith, Arabic language, and so on, and the Islamic sciences and jurisprudence.
I also graduated from the University of Karachi with a bachelor of arts degree. Then I got another degree in religious studies. I started studying as the assistant imam at 17-years-old in the mosque, where my father was the head imam. I was an assistant imam for him.
I was, at that time, studying myself in grade 10. Afterwards, after I finished the religious degree, I went to my engineering education. I graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Karachi. I came to the U.S. for my education.
I got my masters degree in industrial engineering management from New Jersey. I got another masters degree in project management.
Jacobsen: You founded the Supreme Islamic Council of Canada and Muslims Against Terrorism. What was the inspiration for founding them? What tasks and responsibilities do you do with those positions?
Soharwardy: I established the Muslims Against Terrorism in 1998. I was inspired by the media about some American tourists in Malaysia. A group from the southern Philippines called themselves Muslims and kidnapped them in Malaysia.
There were already some news items about some Muslim groups saying bad things about Jews and Christians and gays in America and elsewhere. I know Islam. But when I heard the news, I don’t care if Christian, gay, atheist, or whatever.
You don’t kidnap people. So, when I heard this news, I thought, “Nope, not anymore.” So, I established it. I wanted to establish it for a long time. When I heard about the kidnapping and then asking for ransom by ‘Muslims’, I decided to found it. I did that, way before 2001.
After the tragedy on September 11, this Muslims Against Terrorism got spread out more than 23 Muslim/non-Muslim countries including Australia, UK, and so on, like wildfire it spread after the tragedy of 9/11.
The Islamic Supreme Court of Canada, I established The Islamic Supreme Court of Canada in the year 2000, before 9/11. The Muslims Against Terrorism not on religious grounds, but on humanitarian grounds. It had some flavor of Islam in it.
I wanted to reach out to non-Muslims and include them in this organization and sending the message of unity. That we human beings are together. That Muslims are leading this organization and showing we can live in peace with other human beings.
It was founded on anti-violence, anti-extremism, anti-terrorism, and with Muslims and non-Muslims working together. When all of this extremism was still rising, especially Taliban, it started creating atrocities. I saw those pictures on TV when Taliban was hitting a woman because she was wearing white socks.
That news item disturbed me, bothered me, so much. These people were committing those crimes in the name of Islam. I decided to create a channel to reach out to the Muslim community here and explain to them that what the Taliban are doing in 2000 here is absolutely horrible, criminal, un-Islamic and a sinful activity.
That was why the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada was a purely Muslim organization, to reach out to Muslims across Canada and through Canada, of course, to other parts of the world and to explain that these fanaticism and extremism and hatred towards women, Jews, and non-Muslims are not Islamic in any way, shape, or form.
It has not been endorsed by any Islamic scholar. Muslims have never done this the same as Al-Qaeda was trying to do in 2000. We are trying to focus on Muslim community with the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada while Muslims Against Terrorism had a focus on everybody together as human beings.
Jacobsen: What would be your one message for those concerned about loved ones who may be engaging in anti-social activities that could potentially lead to small tragedies such as murders from which they claim religious grounds for those murders – often these are men?
Soharwardy: My message to those people. Since 1998, almost 20 years now, my message is to those committing those crimes in the name of my faith, Islam. They are dead wrong! I invite them to talk.
I will explain to them that in Islam there is no room for violence, hate, or misogyny, and intolerance for any other group of people who disagree with Islam.
Yes, Islam disagrees with Christians, Jews, Sikhs, atheists, and Hindus, and generally, those other groups disagree with Islam. It has the beauty that we different people with different beliefs. It does not mean we should hate or hurt each other.
People misinterpret the Quran and think they shouldn’t make Jews and Christians friends. It is not a mainstream Islamic interpretation. It is a narrow misguided radicalized interpretation of Muslim scripture as in the Quran and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
I was born and raised in a very, very highly religious family in Pakistan. I am not saying these things because I am in Canada. I was taught the same beliefs. My father taught me the same beliefs. We cannot kill civilians.
We cannot be hateful to any part of society. We can have a difference of opinion. Yes, we can strongly disagree. Yes, we can go against something that is strongly against our belief system.
But we should reach out to human beings and convey the message of Islam. Islam doesn’t condone violence against any person, except when you are attacked then you have the right to defend yourself.
In defense, yes, there is not an organization or group that can call Jihad. Jihad is a noble cause. Jihad and terrorism are different beliefs or traditions, or actions. Jihad has certain ethics. You cannot kill women and children. You cannot defy places of worship of any religion.
Now, these terrorists are killing women and children, which is not the fundamental value of Islam. The fundamental value is the sanctity of life and the freedom of all humanity.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Imam Soharwardy.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/26
The Catholic school system has undergone one of its largest expansions in provincial history. All funding has been paid for by the province at public expense for the schools. In a province mostly consisting of some Catholics and then everyone else, about 32% to 68%, this seems unfair to the citizenry of Saskatchewan (Statistics Canada, 2005).¹
A court order in April declared the province could no longer fund non-Catholic students in Catholic schools. The Premier, Brad Wall, used the notwithstanding clause to overrule the decision in order further instantiate Catholic education in the province.
“Despite some initial fears that the ruling could result in Catholic school closures, the opposite is occurring. Parents, free to choose a school system for their children, are choosing Catholic,” Siedler said (2017).
Within days of the decision in April, Premier Wall said that his government would use their constitutional power to protect the Catholic separate publicly funded educational system – in a province with only 1/3 of the population as Catholics, one might add.
The Chair of the Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools, Diane Boyko, described the results of further Catholic school growth as a sign of the trust in the Catholic educational system on behalf of families of all faiths in the province (Ibid.).
Siedler goes on to reference the case in Alberta:
It’s a different story in Alberta. Some high-profile Albertans, including former education minister Dave King, have used the Saskatchewan court ruling to campaign for the abolishment of Catholic divisions.
King’s cause has been joined by former Edmonton Catholic school trustee Patricia Grell, who has called for the merger of the public and Catholic systems.
I have talked to Grell (Jacobsen, 2017a; Jacobsen, 2017b). This is true; she believes in the merger of the school systems. Why? She has said, “I do not believe that Catholic schools are any better academically, socially or even spiritually than their public counterparts” (Siedler, 2017).
But there’s a background, too, founded in hard experience and courageous campaigning as a trustee in the Edmonton Catholic School Board in Ward 71 (Jacobsen, 2017b).
With declining relevance, the Roman Catholic Church seems to work to entrench more in the public, especially the minds of the young, the Saskatchewan case with the use of the notwithstanding clause appears to be another example of it.
¹Catholics comprise only 305,390/963,150 of Saskatchewan’s population.
References
Jacobsen, S.D. (2017b, October 15). An Interview with Patricia Grell, B.Sc., M.Div.. Retrieved from https://in-sightjournal.com/2017/10/15/an-interview-with-patricia-grell-b-sc-m-div/.
Jacobsen, S.D. (2017a, October 19). Question with Patricia Grell, B.Sc., M.Div.: Trustee, Edmonton Catholic School Board (Ward 71). Retrieved from https://medium.com/humanist-voices/question-with-patricia-grell-b-sc-m-div-trustee-edmonton-catholic-school-board-ward-71-76ffb4700d1b.
Siedler, R. (2017, October 24). Saskatchewan opens nine new Catholic schools. Retrieved from https://www.catholicregister.org/item/26233-saskatchewan-opens-nine-new-catholic-schools.
Statistics Canada. (2005, January 25). Population by religion, by province and territory (2001 Census) (Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan). Retrieved from https://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/demo30b-eng.htm.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/25
According to The Canadian Press, the Canadian Criminal Code (Government of Canada, 2017) is too narrow, as in exclusive to too many:
Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould says the fact that it is against the law to disrupt a clergyman or minister — but not an imam or a rabbi — is one of the reasons she wants to modernize the Criminal Code.
This spring, the Liberal government moved to rid the Criminal Code of sections that are redundant or obsolete. (National Post, 2017)
Bill-C-51, as proposed, may lead to the removal of one section of the Criminal Code. The section is about making “it a crime to use threat or force to obstruct a clergyman or minister from celebrating a worship service or any other duty related to his job.”
At present, an assault on a clergyman on travels to or comes from such duty is an indictable offence.
Wilson-Raybould stated religious freedoms are protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom and other sections of the Criminal Code. Presumably, the removals make the protections less redundant.
Based on the language, the Justice Minister sees reasons for change too, as in the references to males only and Christians. The reasoning is the restricted inclusivity and explicit exclusivity of the statements towards, for example, women and other faiths – and those without a formal religion.
Rob Nicholson, a Conservative MP, used the provision in the Criminal Code in April of this year. There was, apparently, a charge of vandalism of a St. Patrick’s Basilica (Ottawa) statue (Pringle, 2017).
Regardless of the vandalism, which I deplore and condemn as well as the Christian members of community in Ottawa near St. Patrick’s Basilica, the provision for more inclusive statements – to give a ‘face lift’ to the Criminal Code – seems apt.
References
Government of Canada. (2017, October 13). Criminal Code. Retrieved from http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/C-46.pdf.
Pringle, J. (2017, June 12). Charges laid after St. Patrick’s Basilica vandalized. Retrieved from http://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/charges-laid-after-st-patrick-s-basilica-vandalized-1.3454092.
The Canadian Press. (2017, October 18). Criminal Code too narrow on religion, says AG. Retrieved from https://www.ourwindsor.ca/news-story/7661762-criminal-code-too-narrow-on-religion-says-ag/.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/23
Mark A. Gibbs is the managing editor (my boss) and contributor to Canadian Atheist. He’s a big deal. Here we talk about him!
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was there much religion in family upbringing?
Mark A. Gibbs: My relationship with religion growing up was peculiar.
Where I grew up, Christianity was the only game in town, and it was everywhere. Every day at school we said prayers at morning assembly, and there were mandatory religious studies – read that as “Christian indoctrination” – classes. And they weren’t just for show; people really believed. I started a band at school with my friends, and the music teachers actually arranged an intervention to warn us about demonic influences in rock music. My closest friends growing up were a family of American missionaries, and I went to weekly Bible studies with the parents for many, many years. I still have the old Bible I used to have to carry around regularly, adorned with Transformers stickers.
But within my immediate family, there was virtually no consideration of religion. I was baptized twice within weeks, in two different Christian sects, to satisfy the two branches of the family – that should illustrate how important religion was to the people around us, while at the same time how unimportant it was to my parents. I didn’t even learn my mother was atheist until after she died. Religion was simply never discussed, neither positively nor negatively. It was just something that other people did; it was their “thing”, and that was fine.
My parents just didn’t care about religion. They’d support anyone who needed it. When I was a kid, we actually had people stay with us who had been “disfellowshipped” from the Brethren – they’d been kicked out of the Church and lost their friends, their families, their jobs… everything. My parents let them stay with us until they got back on their feet in secular society. On the other hand, my parents also helped people who were recovering drug addicts who were trying to put together a Christian recovery ministry. Whether it was helping people start a ministry or escape from one, all that mattered was that people needed help.
In fact, my brother went through a phase where he was very seriously considering going to seminary and becoming a priest, and my parents gave him their full support, even going so far as to arrange interviews with ordained clergy to talk about what the job was like… and then a few years later that same brother was playing bass in a heavy metal band with Satanic imagery, and my parents were totally supportive of that, too, with my dad teaching him metal licks on the guitar and lending equipment. Whether it was religion or irreligion, my parents just didn’t care.
Jacobsen: Was the part of Canada in which you grew up religious or more irreligious than the national average?
Gibbs: Most of my growing up was in Barbados. It’s hard for me to measure how religious the areas of Canada I’ve lived in were compared to the Canadian average, because my own impressions are spoiled by my Bajan experience. I don’t think anywhere in Canada is even remotely as religious as Barbados.
Jacobsen: How did you become formal irreligious, an atheist, in Canada?
Gibbs: I was born an atheist, and never spoiled. But for most of my life I identified as “Anglican”. I don’t know if ever even set foot in an Anglican church, and I couldn’t even tell you what the uniquely Anglican tenets are. But I needed to call myself something, and the only things I knew from growing up were Christian denominations, so I figured I had to be one of them. Wasn’t Catholic, didn’t seem to be Baptist, and so on; I eventually narrowed it down to Anglican just by process of elimination.
I don’t think my transition to explicitly atheist was something that happened in a single event. In university I got involved with a number of social justice groups of various stripes, and I guess I realized over time that they were all struggling against religious oppression in different ways. Religious groups just never seemed to be on the side of right. So somewhere along the way I decided that I couldn’t keep identifying myself with organizations and beliefs that were so intolerant, irrational, and odious, so I stopped calling myself “Anglican”. That was just before the rise of New Atheism, so I think I called myself “agnostic” for a while before the New Atheists inspired me to start using the label “atheist”.
Jacobsen: What is your best argument for irreligion?
Gibbs: The best argument for irreligion is simply parsimony – Ockham’s Razor: there’s no evidence for religious claims, so there’s no reason to believe them.
By my favourite argument for irreligion is the moral argument, based on William Kingdon Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief”. The idea is that it’s actually wrong – morally wrong – to believe things without evidence. I don’t buy the argument completely, but up to a point it’s hard to argue against. Ockham’s Razor can only tell you that faith is unnecessary; Clifford shows you that it’s outright immoral.
Jacobsen: What is the long-term future, say 50 years, of religion in Canada?
Gibbs: I think the future is very bright! Assuming nothing globally catastrophic happens, religious influence will continue to fade. I doubt religion will be completely eliminated from Canada in any foreseeable future, but we’ll probably come to a time where it’s so niche that it won’t have any impact on most Canadians’ lives. If I had to speculate, I’d say that fifty years from now we’ll have a few provinces with more than half the population having no religion, and a couple of provinces with atheist premiers. (An atheist Prime Minister? Possible, but the odds are just slightly against.)
Jacobsen: What is its near-term future?
Gibbs: I don’t see any major changes in the short term. We’re making such good progress, both socially and legally, that it’s in our best interests to just let things continue to advance at the current pace. It’s probably unsatisfying for some atheists to have such gradual improvement, as opposed to the rather rapid social progress made by other groups, like LGBT people. But moving gradually means we don’t have to face the kind of active hostility and opposition those other movements face. Instead, every time we win a new battle it sorta slips just under the radar and just becomes “normal” before the haters even realize we’ve made progress.
The other problem with trying to push too hard too fast is that we might get careless and swing the pendulum of injustice the other way. Right now we’re (mostly) on the side of right, fighting against religious oppression… but if we’re not careful we could start promoting policies that change the dynamic to where nonbelievers are actually the ones doing the oppressing of believers. There are already worrying signs of that happening in other countries, and even hints of it here. We need to make sure that we’re fighting for our own fundamental rights and for equality… not fighting to take away fundamental rights from believers.
Jacobsen: Why did you begin work through Canadian Atheist?
Gibbs: I started out as a commenter taking issue with some of the things being said on CA. This was just about the time that the Québec Charter of Values was first being introduced, and I was appalled by some of the reactionary and downright irrational arguments being offered in support of it. I challenged the rhetoric, and that caught the eye of the managing editor at the time. I was already writing for a couple of other sites at the time, and I was really stoked to be able to contribute to CA.
Jacobsen: What things do you do for it?
Gibbs: As managing editor of Canadian Atheist, I try to find new voices interesting in contributing to the site. We’re always looking for new contributors. CA’s editorial policy is very liberal – I never tell anyone what to write or censor their contributions – so most of my time is spent doing technical work to keep the site running smoothly, and to catch the attention of search engines so that we can reach more people and have more impact.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved with it?
Gibbs: Basically anyone who wants to contribute content that will be of interest to Canadian atheists and can demonstrate an ability to write, draw, or record clear, coherent, and relevant content is welcome to join the team! Just drop us a line using the contact form on the site and introduce yourself.
Jacobsen: What is the state of not only atheism but also irreligiosity writ large in Canada?
Gibbs: I think we’re actually on the cusp of a very big change. In the past, atheism and non-religion in general were always there, but generally ignored and not given any particular respect by politicians or established institutions, like the CBC. No politician could be arsed to pander to nonbelievers – or even mention them – and institutions like the CBC treated us like this weird freak show on the fringes of Canadian society.
But a couple of things are happening now that might change the game. The rise of the Canadian far-right has made religious-based hate (in their case, it’s usually Christians specifically targeting Muslims) headline news, and it’s leaving a sour taste in Canadians’ mouths. I don’t think Canadians have made the connection yet – I think they’re still seeing it as plain racism, not religious discrimination – but there are other things, like M-103, that are putting religion on the discussion table despite the Canadian tradition of not talking about religion publicly. And now we’ve just elected the first non-Christian leader of a major, Federal political party. We’ve never really had to talk about the religion of potential Prime Ministers before… now we might.
Canadians generally take a “don’t want to deal with this” attitude toward potential conflict, and pick the path that seems to lead to the least strife. If religion becomes a flash point for conflict, I think most Canadians – who are already virtually atheists; they’re certainly not particularly religious – will decide that non-religion is the path to peace.
Maybe? We’ll see.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to non-belief in Canada?
Gibbs: Canadian apathy and the tendency to stick with the status quo.
We don’t suffer from a lot of focused hostility in Canada. Rather, we suffer from passive, almost “bored” discrimination – historical methods of discrimination that Canadians just can’t be arsed to do anything about. Even many Canadian nonbelievers don’t care; the discrimination isn’t so bad that it’s intolerable, so they’d rather not rock the boat.
I don’t see any plausible path to things getting worse for nonbelievers in Canada… unless Canada goes batshit insane like the US and elects a Trump-like PM, which is not likely (but not impossible!). So it’s really just an issue of things not getting better. It took us until 2017 to get a bill to repeal the blasphemy law (which still hasn’t passed!), and we’re still forced to plead to God in our national anthem, and to listen to our elected Parliament praying. There are plenty of things that need to be fixed, but for now I’m not really worried about regressing.
Jacobsen: What are the bigger areas of social discrimination against nonbelievers in Canada?
Gibbs: It may just be that I’ve lived only in fairly progressive and tolerant areas of Canada, or it may be that I’m spoiled for making a decent comparison by my Barbadian experience, but I can’t see I see much social discrimination against nonbelievers in Canada. Oh, sure, no doubt you can find pockets where the ignorance and bigotry runs hot. But broadly speaking, I think Canadians are fairly ambivalent toward irreligion and irreligious people.
At least in my personal experience, whenever I “out” myself as an atheist, the response I almost always get is simple bemusement. People respond by asking me questions about atheism or my personal atheist experience. Some of those questions are the kinds of ignorant questions that make atheists roll their eyes, like, “do atheists believe in nothing?” or “how can you be moral without god?” But I honestly don’t think they are being asked from a place of hate… I think they’re genuinely curious about something they don’t understand, and have been lied to about all their lives. So I try to answer patiently, with a touch of humour and humility. And I’ve found that generally, people walk away thinking better of atheists than before we talked.
Now, I have to be careful to say that that Canadians seem generally ambivalent and curious about atheists… the same is not always true for atheism. I have noticed mildly negative views of atheism – as an ideology or movement. But I think what we’re seeing there is not actual hate of atheism, but rather annoyance at atheism for being activist, and for rocking the boat. Canadians generally want people to keep their heads down and not stir the pot or create conflict… but as an activist movement, atheism has to create a bit of a ruckus to get anything accomplished; only the squeaky wheel gets the grease, after all. I believe that if all of our political and social goals were accomplished, so that atheism no longer had to be politically activist, Canadians wouldn’t have anything against it at all.
Jacobsen: What are the bigger areas of political discrimination against nonbelievers in Canada?
Gibbs: While I don’t think there is a lot of active political discrimination against nonbelievers in Canada, there are a handful of politicians who routinely say bigoted, intolerant, and, frankly, stupid things about atheists that they wouldn’t say about any other “religious” group. The fact that those statements are considered acceptable, and usually ignored by the mainstream media, illustrates that we still have work to do.
But the real problem is subtle forms of discrimination, or “micro-agressions” against atheism. Most of Canada’s public institutions are essentially “old boys’ clubs”, with the same-old gang doing things the same-old way they’ve been doing them for many decades. They’re still mired in old-school thinking – which is usually heavily religious, at least in affiliation – and they don’t really have any voices from the demographics that you’ll find a lot of atheists in, like younger people. To give an example, just a couple years ago, the CBC aired a discussion panel that asked whether atheism was any good for Canada. Can you imagine them doing a discussion on whether Judaism or Sikhism was any good for Canada?! And then to add insult to injury, they didn’t include a single atheist voice on the panel… and instead had invited a Catholic priest. Again, can you imagine Canada’s national broadcaster airing a discussion on whether Judaism was any good for Canada, then not only neglecting to invite any Jewish people, but instead inviting a representative from an antisemitic organization?! There was simply nobody in that “old boys’ club” who had the wherewithal to notice how wildly inappropriate that was.
This is not just an atheist problem. We badly need more diversity in our public institutions, because several groups are simply being ignored or misunderstood.
Jacobsen: What are the bigger areas of legal discrimination against nonbelievers in Canada?
Gibbs: In 1982, Canada basically got a brand, spankin’ new Constitution, complete with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Prior to that, there were numerous laws on the books that were very discriminatory toward atheists. But the Charter changed everything. Those old, discriminatory laws remained on the books… and many still remain to this day… but they’re now dead letter.
However….
There is still one particular area of legal discrimination based on religion. It doesn’t specifically target atheists, but at least in Ontario, Catholic schools enjoy a specially protected “right” that other religions – and non-religion – do not. And not just that, they have the legal right to refuse to hire atheists (or anyone who is not Catholic) as teachers. Doesn’t even matter if it’s a math teach – what does math have to do with Catholicism? The hypocrisy is astonishing; Catholic schools will refuse non-Catholic teachers… but happily accept non-Catholic students – after all, they get paid for the latter. The majority of Ontarians oppose the public Catholic system, but there’s just no political will to do anything about it.
Jacobsen: What are the positives of religion?
Gibbs: I’ll flip the question and say what the negatives of religion are, and there are only two: faith (which I define is belief without or in spite of reason or evidence), and authoritarianism. If you take those things away, religion becomes benign, and possibly even positive.
There are a lot of features of religion that could be put to such wonderfully positive social and cultural use if they weren’t tainted by belief in supernatural or mystical nonsense, or unquestioning obedience to religious authorities or doctrines. It’s a nice way to define and bind a community – it provides a shared identity, shared customs and traditions that can be celebrated together, and a focal point for community organization. It’s not really the silly claims that make religion bad, because the claim that a man lives at the North Pole with elves and travels around the world with flying reindeer to hand out presents is not causing any harm, nor are the customs or traditions associated with that story that we celebrate. It’s the belief in irrational claims that’s the problem; it’s faith that is the problem, as well as the authoritarian idea that the claims must be respected and obeyed without question.
Of course, it’s arguable that if you take the faith and authoritarianism out of religion, whether it’s still “religion”. And none of the positives associated with religion actually require religion; not even watered-down non-faith/non-authoritarian “religion”. We could, in theory, replace every beneficial feature provided by religion with something completely new. But since religion is already extant, and ubiquitous, maybe if we could take the faith and authoritarianism out if it, maybe it would be easier to harness that existing power for good, rather than trying to make something new from scratch.
Jacobsen: Who are people attempting to move the conversation within religion to a higher plateau, a more progressive platform?
Gibbs: Within religion, I honestly don’t know. I was born without religion and never got sucked in, so I’m a bit of an outsider to the whole scene. I can only give a few names, that I vaguely know of via the media. For example, there’s Gretta Vosper, the former United Church of Canada minister who came out as atheist. But I’m not sure how much she can be counted as “within religion” anymore, since they kicked her out. There are also people like Malala Yousafzai, and so on … but there are a lot of people who wouldn’t consider Yousafzai to be a True Muslim™, and so on.
Honestly, I am fairly disinterested in efforts to “reform religions from the inside”. I don’t oppose them, and I’ll even support them if they ask for my assistance, but I just don’t find “reform” efforts to be compelling pursuits. I don’t see it as coincidental that religions are a lot more conservative, dogmatic, and aggressive about their beliefs now than they were fifty years ago. To me that’s the natural result of the growth of nonbelief. In times past, religions were very often at the vanguard of the fight for human rights (not all religions, but every major human rights movement had strong religious support)… but not any more, and probably never again in the future. The people who walk away from religions are going to be the more moderate reasonable people, leaving only the more extremist, unreasonable people behind… thus it’s to be expected that religions are becoming more extremist and unreasonable. As this trend continues, I don’t expect reform efforts to be particularly fruitful in the long term.
Really, the only thing I hope for from reform movements is that they just keep the religion sane (relatively speaking) and non-genocidal long enough until its membership has withered away to make it no longer worthy of serious concern. If they also manage to make the religion tolerant and reasonable, that’s great… but I’m not going to bet anything on them managing that.
Jacobsen: Who is a personal hero for you?
Gibbs: Oh, I don’t believe in heroes anymore. Too many of them have proven themselves to be far too human. But there are people I respect, and I follow their opinions because I find them to be usually far better informed well thought-out than the average.
Off the top of my head, focusing on Canadians, in alphabetical order:
- Ian Bushfield, Executive Director of the British Columbia Humanist Association;
- Eiynah, who writes as Nice Mangos;
- Spencer Lucas, aka The Positive Atheist;
and of course, all of the contributors to Canadian Atheist, past and present.
Jacobsen: Who, naming names, are attempting to either argue for the traditionalist, even fundamentalist, religion in Canada? Also, who are closet religious-minded individuals who are attempting to rebrand religion, especially Christianity, and sell it to the modern generations such as the, as they’re automatically labelled, Gen Xers and the Millennials?
Gibbs: I am not a fan of naming names, for the simple reason that it gives them too much power. Oh, certainly when I’m addressing someone or their arguments specifically, I’ll address them directly – that’s only civil; I’m not suggesting dehumanizing our opponents by refusing to name or acknowledge them. But I prefer not to raise particular people or organizations up as symbols of things I oppose. When you create a boogieman (boogieperson?), you make it too easy to attack the boogieman itself, and not their ideas. And it’s their ideas that need to be challenged.
I don’t think, though, that there’s anyone doing a particularly good job of repackaging religion for the young. Younger Canadians are growing up more skeptical and less religious than any generation before them. And they’re particularly unimpressed by the bigotry, intolerance, and stubborn opposition to science and reason displayed by most religions. Most every attempt I’ve seen to “sell” religion to the young have tried to avoid that core problem; they’ve tried to pretend there’s really no problem with intolerance and ignorance in religion, but young Canadians have seen enough evidence to the contrary that they’re not buying. Nowadays there’s simply nothing that religions have to offer younger Canadians that they don’t already have – they get their community, their support, and their understanding of the universe from the Internet. With no benefits and with that nasty stain of association with bigotry and ignorance, it would take a pretty brilliant marketing campaign to make religion attractive to younger Canadians, and I’m just not seeing it.
Jacobsen: What are your major initiatives the irreligious movement in Canada in the coming months?
Gibbs: Canadian Atheist is going through a bit of a renaissance right now, and that should pick up even more steam in the coming year. We’ve just rolled out a new back-end infrastructure that will allow us to build some really cool new features.
The first one that’s probably going to see daylight is something I’ve called Rosetta. The idea is to create a collection of the documents and writings most important to Canadian secularism, humanism, atheism, and freethought (SHAFT), and translate them to all Canadian languages. All Canadian languages; not just English and French. That means translating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to Plains Cree, translating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Inuktitut, translating the Amsterdam Declaration to Ojibwe, and more. Rosetta will also include a translation dictionary, so one day you may be able to translate “I am an atheist” to every Canadian language.
Ultimately the goal is to make Canadian Atheist less of a platform that a select few can use to shout their opinions at the community, and more of a community hub with an egalitarian ethic – a place where everyone can hear and share their opinions about Canadian atheism. But that goal is a bit of a ways off yet.
Outside of Canadian Atheist, I think the biggest thing happening in Canadian non-belief right now is that are a hair’s breadth away from finally getting some of the most pernicious religious-based discriminatory laws repealed. One more push, and Canada may no longer have laws against blasphemy, witchcraft, and other such things.
Another thing I think is brewing, but has not yet coalesced into a single, organized initiative, is opposition to publicly-funded religious schooling in the provinces of Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. There are some court challenges in flight that could change the landscape completely, and force the government to end funding for separate, religious schools. It’s something I’m keeping a close eye on for 2018.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Gibbs: I just want to say that I really believe in the foundations of humanism: reason, compassion, and hope. I believe that if we use those ideals as a guide, we’ll be on the right path – a path that our descendants can look back on and be proud we took. We shouldn’t define ourselves by the things we disagree with or hate; we should not define ourselves as “anti-religious” or “anti-theist”. We should define ourselves by the things we aspire to.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Mark.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Aside from governments telling women what they can wear and can’t wear around the world, minor political activist efforts come in at a consistent pace, on the periphery of the news cycle. Some even have sole article reportage (Peritz, 2017).
As noted in the Freedom of Thought Report from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), Canada has symbolic inequality with preferential treatment with explicit religious symbols – some of the most important in this case – in the Quebec National Assembly (IHEU, 2016). In the section called Provincial Privileges, it states in full:
A crucifix hangs at the National Assembly of Quebec, right above the Speaker seat, and protocol rules give higher ranking to Catholic prelates than to elected ministers. Buildings used for worship or other religious purpose in Quebec are taxed at a much lower rate than others.
Also in Quebec, the mandatory course on “Ethics and Religious Cultures” is supposed to give all primary and secondary schoolchildren an understanding of the main religions. However the term “Atheist” was deemed to be too “negative” to be included in the course. (Ibid.)
The symbol has been “thrust into the centre of the province’s roiling debate over faith and state secularism” (Peritz, 2017). This is about symbol and reality at the same time, which has some humor to it. As talked about in First Principles Activism – how lovely, I quote and reference myself, (Jacobsen, 2017), some documents can help guide activism, even political forms of it. These start small and become big. This seems symbolic: small.
As has been asked before by others, in a passive tone, is the government – municipal, provincial, territorial, or federal – neutral on matters of faith? Matters in the broad sense, e.g., symbolic and political matters. The question arises for the neutrality of the government in the context of normal political life in Canada. How would one of the non-faith individuals or faithful individuals feel about unequal representation in the Quebec National Assembly?
Now, those without a formal religion tend to lack religious symbols. That leaves two options and one equal option. Either all religious symbols permitted or none: if all, then non-faith lacks representation, so leads to inequality; if none, then non-faith and faith alike lack representation, so equality via neutrality. The government as neutral creates equality. The government as all in on religion makes for inequality for the irreligious; the government pro only one religion becomes unequal too, to all other religious and irreligion
I, as I assume you as well, would want government as neutral, in the interpretation of government out of matters of faith altogether: true secularism with separation between places of worship, symbols, rituals, and so on, and the government.
“Now it’s time to talk about the apparent secular nature of the most important institution of Quebec democracy, the National Assembly…For us, there’s something profoundly contradictory in the fact we’ve been debating secularism all these years without having the political courage to take action on the crucifix,” Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, an MNA with Québec Solidaire said (Peritz, 2017).
Some claim the crucifix unfairly targets faiths such as Islam, minority faiths. In short, government pro one faith or all other faiths, or lack thereof.
It is past 1936, when the Christian or Roman Catholic symbol was installed, and the Quiet Revolution happened and the province secularized. The province remains mostly Catholic, but if many are not – either through adherence to no formal religion or another formal religion – then the fair option is to remove the object because one main argument is that it’s a representation of all Quebeckers.
If many aren’t, then that’s false. It’s a symbol of the majority of Quebeckers harking back to the time when only Roman Catholic Christians could settle in New France. A colony, mind you, that was well-known for slavery in this country of both Indigenous peoples and blacks (Henry, 2017). Christian European-Canadian slave owners of Indigenous peoples, the Pawnee Nation, and blacks. Do we want to represent this as a heritage as well in the Quebec National Assembly? If not, while still wanting the crucifix up, does this mean only the positives of one colonial religion become represented?
It seems more reasonable to remove it:
The motion by the left-leaning Québec Solidaire to debate the removal of the crucifix requires the support of the governing Liberals to move ahead. The main two opposition parties, the Parti Québécois and Coalition Avenir Québec, support the motion. The PQ says that if it were in government and all parties agreed, it would be open to removing the crucifix. The CAQ says it is open to discussing the issue, although its historic position is to leave the crucifix. (Peritz, 2017)
This remains one small arena for political activism for secularism. What about religion as an exemption to anti-hate speech legislation? What about the blasphemy law? What about the wedding licenses for humanists? How about interpretations of “sincere beliefs” and “reasonable accommodations”? How about Catholic school privileges? Or the anti-GSA, or Gay-Straight Alliances, activities of some Catholic education? Or even the big symbol with the Preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms talking about the “supremacy of God”?
All of these are subject to question and secularization. The crucifix as wholly inappropriate could be a signal to activists across the country for further secular activism. It seems reasonable to me. I would support it.
References
Henry, N.L. (2016, June 15). Black Enslavement in Canada. Retrieved from http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/black-enslavement/.
IHEU. (2016). Freedom of Thought Report: Canada. Retrieved from http://freethoughtreport.com/countries/americas-northern-america/canada/.
Jacobsen, S.D. (2017, October 21). First Principles Activism. Retrieved from https://www.canadianatheist.com/2017/10/first-principles-activism/.
Peritz, I. (2017, October 24). Quebec legislature’s crucifix hangs over secularism debate. Retrieved from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/opposition-party-looks-to-remove-crucifix-in-quebecs-national-assembly-amid-bill-62-debate/article36700123/?service=amp.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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There has been discussion over a long time with some ‘flash-points’ about one publicly-funded education system in Canada. Organizations such as Civil Rights in Public Education (CRIPE), One Public Education Now (OPEN), One Public School System for Ontario, One School System, OneSystemSask, and others, presumably (CRIPE, 2017a; OPEN, 2017; One Public System, 2017; One School System, 2017; OneSystemSask, 2017).
Even with a brief scan of some articles, it continues to be a topic of interest to the general Canadian public, active members at any rate (Gee, 2017; Pascal; 2014; Emann, 2016; Brown, 2017; Mang, 2010; Ostroff, 2016; Roden, 2017; French, 2017a; Medicine Hat News, 2017; Schuklenk, 2014; Ramsay, 2017).
The call comes from the desire for one public education system for all. A recent news item talked about the proposal from the publicly-funded Catholic education school system for a separate, not only school system but, sexual education curriculum.
Intriguing, at a minimum.
As reported by the Edmonton Journal Editorial Board (2017), a publicly-funded Catholic school system set of superintendents have been developing, in essence proposing, a sex-education curriculum in parallel to the current one in the publicly-funded schools. In the development of a separate sexual education curriculum, the implicit message seems to be that the current one is wrong or flawed in some fundamental ways – enough to justify, to the Catholic superintendents, the need for an entire overhaul and proposal of another one.
The one in development by the superintendents would stand in the place of the provincial health and wellness curriculum. The provincial government “rejected the request to fund its development but the project is still going ahead in hopes the province will agree to it” (Ibid.).
That hope is a faith, for sure.
Granted, the Alberta Act of 1905 (Government of the Province of Alberta, 1905) provides the privilege to one religion, the Roman Catholic Church, to form a separate publicly-funded school board; also, apparently, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario fully fund a Catholic separate school system (Edmonton Journal Editorial Board, 2017). But should this separate system exist in the first place? Roman Catholicism is the dominant faith in the country. It has declined in dominance over decades.
1905 onwards, these were the times of its dominance, the Residential School System, and so on. I will grant, in the discussion, ignoring the historical over one century-long series of crimes by the Roman Catholic Church against the Indigenous populations within the borders demarcating Canada.
Nonetheless, one-quarter of the Canadian general public identify with no religion (Statistics Canada, 2017). Only ~39% of the Canadian population identifies at Roman Catholic, so a publicly-funded separate religiously-based education system based on only 39% of the population, in a country with an increasing number of people lacking formal religious belief or have no religious affiliation (Ibid.).¹ Does this move against the larger demographics, something like a tacit or implied will, of the people in our democracy?
Possibly, almost certainly.
Aside from the apparently outdated reasons for a separate school system, misalignment with the demographics of the country – or the desires of the general population for a single publicly-funded education system (as apparently found by Civil Rights in Public Education with about 54% of the public wanting a single publicly-funded education system), what is the justification for the difference from the provincial health and wellness curriculum in the separate, religious sexual education curriculum from the Roman Catholic superintendents in development (CRIPE, 2017b)?
The Catholic School Superintendents found the future sex-ed lessons “problematic” (Edmonton Journal Editorial Board, 2017). That comes out as one reason. The provincial health and wellness curriculum will include the following: “promotion of homosexual relationships and lifestyles, teaching of gender identity as disassociated from biological sex, masturbation and anal and oral sex” (Ibid.).
Those come out as others: disagreement with Roman Catholic morays, norms, and theology.
David Eggen, Education Minister, rejected the substituted curriculum as an idea. Eggen said, “I can assure Albertans that, under our government, any curriculum changes will be inclusive of all students — no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
All schools in the province of Alberta must follow the universal program of study set out by the Government of Alberta, including Roman Catholic educational institutions. One curriculum for all. I love the statement of the Edmonton Journal Editorial Board:
It makes no difference that it’s the forthcoming provincial human sexuality curriculum that the Catholic superintendents want to replace with their own. Whether it’s math, language arts, social studies or sex education, the principle is the same: there is one curriculum for all. In the case of sex education, that concept is particularly important.
The point of including human sexuality in the curriculum is to ensure that children get accurate knowledge and respectful instruction on a subject matter historically fraught with misinformation, angst and stigma. (Ibid.)
This becomes a subset in the national discourse about separate educational curricula and institutions with the preferential treatment of one authority structure grounded in faith apart from the general public even as most of the general public do not identify as that faith, nor do they likely, as a simple majority, want a separate publicly-funded school system.
A discourse on one publicly-funded sexual education curriculum. As Eggen stated, and as others have echoed, such as Janet French, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, President of Alberta Teachers’ Association Local 80 for Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools Brice Unland, Alberta Teachers’ Association Spokesperson Jonathan Teghtmeye, a spokesperson on behalf of the Red Deer-based Trans and Non-binary Aid Society (TANAS), Red Deer Public Schools Trustee Dianne Macaulay (who has been arguing for one public education system), Alberta Liberal Leader David Khan, Luke Fevin of Edmonton Atheists and A PUPIL, and others probably, a single publicly-funded secular school system is needed and the proposal for an alternate Roman Catholic sexual education curriculum is “completely unacceptable” (French, 2017b; The Canadian Press, 2017; Hall, 2017; Simons, 2017; Franklin, 2017).
Not only in Alberta, but nationally: we can make the change too.
But it’ll take work, not hope.
¹12,810,705/32,852,320 or Catholic/all others equals 38.9% or ~39%. Statistics Canada. (2017, February 14). 2011 National Household Survey: Data tables. Retrieved from http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/dt-td/Rp-eng.cfm?LANG=E&APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0&GC=0&GID=0&GK=0&GRP=0&PID=105399&PRID=0&PTYPE=105277&S=0&SHOWALL=0&SUB=0&Temporal=2013&THEME=95&VID=0.
References
Brown, J. (2017, June 18). It’s time to end public funding of Catholic schools. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/radio/the180/stop-funding-catholic-schools-restore-trust-in-the-neb-and-let-me-change-my-name-1.4162978/it-s-time-to-end-public-funding-of-catholic-schools-1.4163049.
CRIPE. (2017a). Civil Rights in Public Education. Retrieved from http://www.cripeweb.org/home.php.
CRIPE. (2017b). Why One School System?. Retrieved from http://www.cripeweb.org/about-us/why-one-school-system/.
Edmonton Journal Editorial Board. (2017). Editorial: One curriculum for all. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-one-curriculum-for-all.
Emann, S. (2016, March 14). Canada’s publicly funded religious schools have to go. Retrieved from http://www.metronews.ca/views/opinion/2016/03/14/canadas-publicly-funded-religious-schools-have-to-go.html.
Franklin, M. (2017, October 25). Alberta government reacts to Catholic school’s stance on sex education. Retrieved from http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/alberta-government-reacts-to-catholic-school-s-stance-on-sex-education-1.3647944.
French, J. (2017b, October 23). Catholic school districts want their own sex-education curriculum. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/catholic-school-districts-want-their-own-sex-education-curriculum.
French, J. (2017a, May 11). Red Deer public school board advocates elimination of Catholic school system. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/red-deer-public-school-board-advocates-elimination-of-catholic-school-system.
Gee, M. (2017, June 9). Toronto needs a single, secular school system. Retrieved from https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/toronto-needs-a-single-secular-school-system/article35264933/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&.
Government of the Province of Alberta. (1905, July 20). Alberta Act. Retrieved from http://www.solon.org/Constitutions/Canada/English/aa_1905.html.
Hall, J. (2017, October 24). Exclusive sex-ed push putting ‘final nail in coffin’ for Catholic system, says local advocate. Retrieved from http://rdnewsnow.com/article/558051/push-exclusive-sex-ed-final-nail-coffin-catholic-system-says-local-advocate.
Mang, E. (2010, October 7). A publicly-funded Catholic school system is unjust. Retrieved from http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/ericmang/2010/10/publicly-funded-catholic-school-system-unjust.
Medicine Hat News. (2017, May 29). Single, publicly funded school system the best route for Alberta. Retrieved from http://medicinehatnews.com/commentary/opinions/2017/05/29/single-publicly-funded-school-system-the-best-route-for-alberta/.
One Public System. (2017). One Public System. Retrieved from http://www.onepublicsystem.ca.
One School System. (2017). One School System. Retrieved from http://www.oneschoolsystem.org/fast-facts.html.
OneSystemSask. (2017). OneSystemSask. Retrieved from http://www.onesystemsask.ca/.
OPEN. (2017). One Public Education Now. Retrieved from http://open.cripeweb.org/aboutOpen.html.
Ostroff, J. (2016, January 8). It’s Time To Excommunicate Public Catholic Schools. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/joshua-ostroff/end-public-catholic-schools_b_8712316.html.
Pascal, C. (2014, November 3). Public funds shouldn’t pay for Catholic schools in secular Ontario. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/11/03/public_funds_shouldnt_pay_for_catholic_schools_in_secular_ontario.html.
Simons, P. (2017, October 24). Paula Simons: Catholic sex-ed proposal puts church, NDP on collision course. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/paula-simons-catholic-sex-ed-proposal-puts-church-ndp-on-collision-course.
Ramsay, C. (2017, May 11). Red Deer Public School Board supports unified Alberta school system. Retrieved from https://globalnews.ca/news/3444865/red-deer-public-school-board-supports-unified-alberta-school-system/.
Roden, T. (2017, July 12). Niagara school closures show need for a single school system. Retrieved from https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/7419349-niagara-school-closures-show-need-for-a-single-school-system/.
Schuklenk, U. (2014, January 24). Why special funding for Catholic schools is wrong. Retrieved from http://www.thewhig.com/2014/01/24/why-special-funding-for-catholic-schools-is-wrong.
Statistics Canada. (2017, February 14). 2011 National Household Survey: Data tables. Retrieved from http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/dt-td/Rp-eng.cfm?LANG=E&APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0&GC=0&GID=0&GK=0&GRP=0&PID=105399&PRID=0&PTYPE=105277&S=0&SHOWALL=0&SUB=0&Temporal=2013&THEME=95&VID=0.
The Canadian press. (2017, October 24). Catholic school sex-ed plan as advertised won’t ever be taught, premier says. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/catholic-school-sex-ed-notley-1.4370304.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/24
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were some of the first moments of strange responses from the school and the community, if any, about the young trans student, your child?
Mother of Trans Child: There were no strange responses from the community at all. Her friends thought nothing of her living as her authenticate self and their parents were all very supportive. The strange response was from the school admin itself. We first had a meeting in January where an unnecessary amount of people were in attendance, including a priest.
The biggest resistance we received from the school was that what washroom she would use. I insisted on the female washroom and that was declined. It was then determined by the school that a single stall washroom would be deemed the “everyone washroom” all the kids in the school had the option of using what washroom they wanted the gendered washroom or the “everyone washroom”. My daughter’s choice was taken away and she was required to use the “everyone washroom only”. When I pressed about this, I was given reasons such as:
- It violates the rights of the “real girls.”
- There are no doors on the stalls in some schools, so she wants to gain access to the girls.
- It’s not segregation to force one student into a separate washroom. (Not only was she forced, she required an escort to attend the washroom with her. This was one of two of her closest friends).
This, of course, is the Coles Notes version of event… we could write a book with everything that has transpired over the last three and a half years.
Jacobsen: How did this become a ‘flash-point’ issue with the Catholic school system in that sector of the province?
Mother of Trans Child: After much debate between the school and I, and when they made their decision final to only allow her to use the “everyone washroom,” I went to the media as I was not going to allow my child to be treated differently. This is when one of the trustee’s, Patricia Grell, learned what was really going on in the school system. She came out confirming that my daughter should be able to use the female washroom. The school board and admin’s response was terrible citing such things as ‘God chooses the gender not the person’. After public criticism, my daughter was “granted permission” to use the female washroom. The story really blew up in September of 2015. There was a school board meeting that went astray. The meeting was to implement a policy allowing transgender students to use the washroom of the gender they identify with. This was truly one of the most disgusting displays of human behavior I have ever seen. It was this meeting that made the story international news.
Jacobsen: What were the feelings of your child, if I may ask, as well as yourself based on the reactions of the hierarchs in the school system and the publicity in the media over it? What has been the most hopeful, as well as difficult, part of the situation?
Mother of Trans Child: At the time my daughter was only 6 just turned 7, so her and her friends did not have access to media outlets and were not aware of what was truly happening. She knew that she was not “allowed” to use the female washroom and couldn’t understand why. Here I am trying to tell her, she is normal and there is nothing wrong with her and her response was, ‘Why then am I not allowed to use the girl’s washroom?’. She was confused on that part; when she was ‘granted permission’ to use the female washroom, she was elated. She was getting to truly live as her authenticate self. It’s truly been amazing to witness.
My feelings are a different story, lol. I was sad that a faith-based group would be so quick to judge and discriminate. That sadness turned into disbelief witnessing the corruption in the Catholic faith and listening to the accusations made about myself by the school administration (child abuse, money hungry, being divorced, and wanting a daughter so forcing her to do this). That sadness is now just disgust, how such bigoted individuals are allowed to teach and lead children is beyond me. Time, and time, again, we have seen the arrogance and disregard this system has for LBGTQ children as well as the Education Act. Yet, nothing is being done by our government to correct this.
There have been hopeful parts of this. It has been the people that I have met through this process. Some of my closest friends are my friends because of my amazing daughter. The most difficult part is now I suffer from bad anxiety as a result of the treatment by the school board. I find it hard to socialize and speak to people due to the anxiety I now have as a result of the last three and a half years of dealing with this. I truly understand why we are the first family to have filed a complaint against the Catholic school system in regards to this topic. They will do everything to attempt to beat a person down to the point where they just switch to the public system.
Jacobsen: Who were some faithful allies for the family?
Mother of Trans Child: First and foremost, Patricia Grell, she risked everything for a little girl she had never even met. She embodied what it meant to be a “good Christian.” She saw a person being hurt and accepted that person as they were. She would not and has not stopped fighting for my daughter. I know how difficult it was for me. I cannot even imagine having to work with those people and deal with that day in and day out. Grell truly is my family’s guardian angel.
Thomas Lukaszuk is also another big ally for us; I brought him the situation just before the election happened. While working on his campaign, he still advocated for my child. After the election, and when he had no vested interest, he still continued to advocate for her.
The former director of the Pride Centre Micky Wilson, who is now one of my closest friends, has always been willing speak to anyone who seeks understanding on this topic.
Dr. Justin Petryk and Dr. Lorne Warneke are also huge allies, and then many friends and family as well.
Jacobsen: What do you think should be done moving forward?
Mother of Trans Child: Moving forward, I think the government needs to take a more aggressive approach. To date, they have had consultations and conversations. However, the Catholic system still finds ways to challenge the authority. They truly believe that religion is above basic human rights and have shown that they do not have the best interest of the child at hand. The Minister of Education needs to amend the Education Act to outline any confusion the Catholic school board and any religious figure may have about human rights. One might say well that’s is what the Human Rights Act is for… my response is, “Yes, I agree. However, the school system keeps referencing the School Cannon Law, which is tied into the Education Act. There is no harm in having it (human rights) outlined in more than one place.”
Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts?
Mother of Trans Child: I just truly hope that the NDP step up and act as they promised they would. So far there has been nothing up empty threats by the government. Now, with a new school board and trustees pledging their responsibility to the archbishop rather than the students, we are going to need more than just words. We see the arrogance as recently as this week; after the minister has said, “No,” to a Catholic teaching sexual education program. A release of said program was still leaked. This type of teaching is extremely harmful to an already vulnerable group of children.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time to share your story.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/23
I spoke with Dr. David Orenstein, Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, and author of “Godless Grace: How Nonbelievers are making the world safer, richer and kinder.”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s cover a little of your brief background. What was faith in your family, community and, subsequently, to yourself?
David Orenstein: It is a great question. I really grew up very secular. My family members were believers, but they never pushed faith on me or my sisters. I was Bar Mitzvah’d, but it was more of a social event than a need to be recognized by God or the State or something like that.
I don’t think my family was very happy when I came out an atheist and I came out an atheist at a very young age. Not full well knowing what that implies in terms of philosophical belief and that stuff, I was simply not a believer in the divine.
While my parents specifically were believers, we didn’t subscribe to any faith tradition, really. I always tell people, “I see myself as a cultural Jew.” If you grow up in New York City and in Brooklyn, from my generation and perspective, I am of the Jew from the mold of Woody Allen or Carl Sagan, very into arts and culture and open to things.
I always surrounded myself with people of that perspective.
Jacobsen: You wrote Godless Grace. How did that background influence it?
Orenstein: Godless Grace was almost a catalyst for something that Christopher Hitchens always used to say, ‘Tell me something a religious person can do that an atheist cannot.’ One is, “Well, we can’t create fault lines.” [Laughing]
But there was always this position and maybe it is in religious marketing as well that, “You can only be good with God.” Knowing my personal history as a nonbeliever, knowing that I always felt that my humanity came before any faith doctrine, I knew that there would be many other people out there without faith that do good for the sake of goodness and human empathy.
I started writing this work as an ethnography. I am an anthropologist. I looked to people who I knew in the nonfaith community and through tons of introductions to other people, my co-author, Linda Blaikie and I were able to put together a book of interviews of people who are doing wonderful human and civil rights work as well as environmental justice work around the world.
They’re really doing the goodwill and the good work of healing the environment, and helping people who don’t have, or are speaking out for human rights and against violence. My goal was to use this book, to use those stories, that atheists are not the bogeyman and bogeywoman that a lot of religious people like to paint us as.
I wanted to move the conversation away from the ideas that nonbelievers are intellectually vapid, morally bankrupt or even physically violent people and that being without God meant we must be all murderers. No, not only can we live a moral and just life without faith, but we can do it one step better because we’re not doing it to please anyone per se but for the love and sake of humanity – knowing we have only 85 years on the earth for better or worse.
In essence, that if we don’t speak up now for our rights no one else will and that our nonbelief activism and humanitarian work can build a better world. A just world, a world of human rights, a world of environmental justice, things that are equalized not in the name of the Lord but in the name of Humanity.
Jacobsen: If you look at the landscape of those who lack a formal faith, of those who lack a religion, in other words, it is a rapidly growing population, very rapid. What can organizations do or temporary coalitions of people to accommodate this rapidly growing population who are often very young – 18-35?
Orenstein: I think there are a lot of really good things being done, because in order to have a supportive community we have to transfer our culture and values to the next generation. We need to have different types of leadership within all of our non-theist organizations now.
We can have thought leaders. I consider myself a thought leader. I write. I do public speaking. I connect other people. Then there are boots-on-the-ground activists. Those are the people in my book. Then there are the people who don’t have the time to be activists, but they can support our organizations with finances. There shouldn’t be one way anyone is told is the right way to contribute to the movement.
Also, we certainly have to lead by humanist, atheist and secularist example. For example, what comes out of Camp Quest, the secular summer camps, is one generation wanting the next generation to have a secular experience and be together in their youth. This really does build the next generation of leaders.
On college campuses, even in New York City, you would be surprised at the number of students who think, “I don’t really believe what my parents believe. But I’m too shy or afraid to say anything.”
I have had students come to speak to me privately about this. It is about giving counsel as well. It is also about supporting student organizations in high school and even in middle school.
Downwards, it is making sure all of the local chapters of national organizations have at least some element of a young person’s having the opportunity to gather at least once a month.
That’s the wonderful thing about technology like YouTube and Meetup. People can get together, express themselves, and see that they are not alone. It is important because we are not a monolithic group. People my age or people who are even Baby Boomers don’t have the same needs as atheists or humanists who are 20-somethings.
We are different stages of our lives. So if we only program for people who are only of a certain ethnic group, or a certain age group typically, then you will not get the next generation of activist leaders every organization needs to move into the future.
If you are not building the next generation of leadership you are not making the next link in the chain and whatever good you’ve done won’t be there for the future. We must pass the baton onto someone. Or, let me put this in evolutionary terms, Extinction is forever!
It also means you’ve got to let go as to what you see as the priorities because the next generations coming up might see things very differently.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, David.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/23
Terry Sanderson, the President of the National Secular Society – a British campaigning organization that promotes secularism and separation of Church and State. He has cancer. Here we talk about atheism in the 21st century, the meaning of life, the possibility of death, absolute finality, and more. Prior interview here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What does being an atheist in the 21st century mean to you?
Terry Sanderson: It means nothing more to me than a lack of belief in anything supernatural. There is no such thing as “the supernatural”. Anything that occurs is, by definition, natural. There is nothing outside those bounds, no ghosts, no gods, no miracles. That is all atheism means to me – add other things – humanism, secularism – and it becomes something else.
Jacobsen: You have cancer. You are about to enter major surgery. What does this make you think about the meaning of life?
Sanderson: Life has no meaning beyond itself. People who cling to religion are appalled by such thinking and regard it as sad. But trying to ponder the supposed “Big Questions” – things like “Why are we here?” “What comes after”, “What is the meaning of life?” is a complete waste of time. These questions have no answers so why ask them? Or as Gertrude Stein put it, “The answer is: there is no answer.”
Why torment yourself with such stuff? Get on with life, enjoy your senses – have good food, good wine, good sex. Our senses are all that we have to tell us we are alive. Make the most of them.
Jacobsen: How do you feel about the possibility of death?
Sanderson: Death is not a possibility, it is an inevitability – for everyone, no exceptions. The fact that my own end may be arriving sooner than I had anticipated is disappointing only in the sense that life is good and I want more of it.
I have had seventy years of perfect health, which I have taken for granted. Such good fortune can give one a misguided sense of immortality – nasty things happen to other people, not to me. But when the reality of life’s conclusion suddenly presents itself, you start to think – sometimes resentfully – about the things you will miss by going too soon.
My mother lived until she was 97 and by that stage, with rapidly fading senses and physical decline, she longed for death and welcomed it when it came. I watched her take her last breath and she struggled to cling on, but she was under the influence of morphine so it might just have been her body’s natural instinct to survive. If she had survived, she would have cursed the doctors for reviving her. So death is not always the terrible enemy, sometimes it is a welcome friend.
One wise philosopher once said, “The living are just the dead taking a vacation” and I find that comforting. The eternity of non-existence before I was born was a state of complete unawareness for me. That is the state I expect to return to when I am dead. No need to fear non-existence (although for some Christians non-existence is the very definition of hell, a denial of the time they had expected to spend with their god).
Jacobsen: How important does the potential for the reality of death, of absolute finality, make friends and family and their love for you?
Sanderson: Love is a wonderful thing. It is life’s grandest experience. Naturally, we want our loved ones to stay with us, not to die, and we mourn when they are gone. But the pain of loss is what we must endure in order to experience love. There is no escape. I don’t want my partner to hurt when I am gone, but he will. We have spent half a lifetime together and when that comes to an end it will be hard. Bereavement seems unendurable, but it can be endured. I hope that those who have loved me will remember me with affection. That’s the best I can hope for.
Jacobsen: If you could advise youth on making the most of life, and fighting for the rights of others in the livelihood of others, what would you recommend for them? Even though they may not know the most about the world, this might help some who are reading this find some guidance from an elder.
Sanderson: I hesitate to give advice because life as a young person is very different to life in later years. When I think back to my own youth, it is like looking at another person. What I thought then has changed several times. And we are all molded by our genes and our upbringing, so there is no formula that fits everyone.
I was lucky to have a childhood filled with love and I have always wanted to be like my mother, who was gentle, tolerant, forgiving, understanding and affectionate.
I want people to be happy and to accept them as they are in all their irritating variety. I try not to make sweeping statements about groups and to judge everyone on their individual qualities. If you can learn to do that, you will have a happy life filled with people who love you because you love them for who they are, not for any perceived racial or religious identity or ideological label that they put on themselves or have put on them by others.
Life is about fun, too. Fun is not trivial, never think that. It is about being happy. As the great American atheist Robert Ingersoll said, “Happiness is the only good, the time to be happy is now, the place to be happy is here and the way to be happy is to make others so.”
So, have fun, be silly if you feel like it (I love being silly) and don’t make cruel or humiliating jokes about other people, however much you think they deserve it.
Jacobsen: The United Kingdom is much more secular and atheistic then Canada. What is one thing about the United Kingdom that Canadians should know but potentially don’t with regards to lack of faith?
Sanderson: Our histories are very different and despite the long centuries of religious dominance, I have a feeling that the British have never really been very religious, not in their hearts.
If you read some Victorian novelists – like Anthony Trollope – you will see that even in those days, when the Church was very powerful in politics and society, there was still a lot of skepticism.
The Church has been cruel and greedy all along the way, and people know that, but until they got organized there was no way for ordinary folk to resist. Gradually the Church’s powers have been reduced until now it is regarded by most people as a complete irrelevance.
I don’t think there is much that secular or atheist groups can do to persuade people out of religion. I’m not sure that we should even try. For some people it is comforting and it brings the community into their lives. Such people will have to find their own way out of it.
The churches seem to be doing a good job of bringing themselves into disrepute by being so completely irrational and out of step with modern life. They take themselves so seriously and some religious people actually believe all the self-important bilge that they spout. Fervent religionists will have great difficulty seeing how fatuous their beliefs are. They have devoted their lives to nonsense and admitting it is next to impossible. That’s their problem.
It is when they demand that we all respect faith that I get annoyed. I don’t respect it. I never have. Why would anyone respect something so crazy? In some parts of the world, though, people are forced to respect religion or risk death. Blasphemy laws illustrate just how weak religion really is at its foundations. When respect has to be enforced by threats and menaces, you know that it isn’t deserved.
We should just keep on encouraging religious leaders to make stupid statements. We should continue pointing out how dangerous religious identities can be. It’s a gradual process, but it is gaining momentum every day.
Jacobsen: In the latter part of life, you have experienced quite a lot. You’ve experienced a lot of abuse. But you have come out an important voice. How do you persevere in light of all of the pain inflicted on you simply for being different and speaking your mind for the rights of others?
Sanderson: I have never really been affected by abuse and only on a few occasions have I been threatened with physical violence.
I have love all around me from my friends and family, and I know that I can always retire to the safety of my home where warm hearts are waiting. Surround yourself with supportive friends and no amount of abuse will then penetrate.
If you see a glaring injustice (as I did with the treatment of my fellow LGBT people back in the 1970s and 80s) and you want to challenge it, then there is no easy way to do it. You just have to do your best, campaign as hard as you can and keep on going in the face of setbacks.
There may be people telling you that what you are doing is wrong, that you don’t understand the issues, but don’t take notice of that. If your conscience tells you that you are doing the right thing, something that will improve the lot of others and harm no-one, then press on despite opposition.
Jacobsen: What have been the bigger changes away from religion in the UK?
Sanderson: Gods are no longer the most powerful influence in this country, as they have been in the past. People will claim to believe in “something greater than themselves” but pressed about what precisely they mean, it is soon apparent they don’t believe any religious claims.
Most religion-inspired legislation has been repealed – abortion is no longer illegal, homosexuality has been decriminalized, family planning is easily available. The churches have had to adjust to all these changes, but each one of them reduces their influence a bit more. Every reform secularises the nation further. Education and easy communication have also weakened the grip of superstitious thinking.
Religion is dying in the West, in Islamic countries, though, its baleful influence continues to grow. People in poverty often turn to religion as their only comfort and solace. It’s understandable. But one day they, too, may achieve the affluence enjoyed by the West and be educated without indoctrination. Then that they will have the luxury of being able to reject the religious props that seem so important when they have nothing else. They will, as in the West, abandon beliefs that ultimately bring them so much misery. It is then that religion will collapse once and for all.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Terry, I wish you the best in recovery and good health.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22
“A long-standing goal of artificial intelligence is an algorithm that learns, tabula rasa, superhuman proficiency in challenging domains. Recently, AlphaGo became the first program to defeat a world champion in the game of Go. The tree search in AlphaGo evaluated positions and selected moves using deep neural networks. These neural networks were trained by supervised learning from human expert moves, and by reinforcement learning from self-play. Here we introduce an algorithm based solely on reinforcement learning, without human data, guidance or domain knowledge beyond game rules. AlphaGo becomes its own teacher: a neural network is trained to predict AlphaGo’s own move selections and also the winner of AlphaGo’s games. This neural network improves the strength of the tree search, resulting in higher quality move selection and stronger self-play in the next iteration. Starting tabula rasa, our new program AlphaGo Zero achieved superhuman performance, winning 100–0 against the previously published, champion-defeating AlphaGo.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v550/n7676/full/nature24270.html.
“Thousands of scientific papers contain a fundamental error, according to a new study published in the online journal PLOS One.
In more than 33,000 publications, scientists unknowingly used the wrong types of cells for their experiments, and the mistakes remain uncorrected, contaminating the scientific literature.
It matters, the researchers say, because if scientists are using the wrong cells, their observations and conclusions might be inaccurate.
“We’re not saying those 33,000 articles are wrong,” said Willem Halffman from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
“But among those 33,000 there are definitely some with wrong conclusions.”
It’s a dirty secret in science, one that many researchers don’t like to talk about. The problem was first identified in the 1960s by early whistleblowers.”
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/second-opinion-171021-1.4365023.
“Basic research in the space sciences holds essentially limitless potential for tackling profound questions of our existence and opening the doors of exploration, innovation and future economic opportunity. Space science continues to generate extraordinary discoveries, whether groups are exploring Mars, investigating the fundamental physics of the universe or discovering new exoplanets around nearby stars.
This drive to explore and exploit space has led to the emergence of new companies and innovations in traditional aerospace companies seeking to reform the way spacecraft are designed, built, launched and operated. There has also been a surge in private resources dedicated to creating new commercial capabilities and initiating the next wave of space exploration — though not yet for discovery-driven scientific missions. [NASA Could Reach Mars Faster with Public-Private Partnerships, Companies Tell Congress]”
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/space-science-needs-a-private-funding-boost/.
“THE PANDEMIC OF sexual harassment and abuse — you saw its prevalence in the hashtag #metoo on social media in the past weeks — isn’t confined to Harvey Weinstein’s casting couches. Decades of harassment by a big shot producer put famous faces on the problem, but whisper networks in every field have grappled with it forever. Last summer, the storywas women in Silicon Valley. Last week, more men in media.
Earthquakes of this magnitude are never any fun for people atop shifting tectonic plates. But the new world they create can be a better one. No one misses Gondwanaland.
Still, records of those lost continents remain in the fossil record. The downstream effects of sexual harassment have the potential to color everything from the apps you use to the news you read. From now on, when we watch movies that Weinstein touched we’ll think about the women actors, wondering what they had to go through to be there — or what happened to the ones who couldn’t bear it, who left, who didn’t get the jobs, who self-deported their talent from Hollywood. We’ll wonder who enabled it, who let it happen and then perhaps surfed to their own success on Weinstein’s waves of destruction. The same goes for movies directed by Woody Allen or Roman Polanski. Or others.
There’s a word for that kind of work: “problematic.” It’s stuff you love tainted by people you hate. It’s Steve Ditko’s weird Randian objectivism metastasizing into Spider-Man, and Dr. Seuss doing anti-Japanese propaganda work during World War II. It’s Roald Dahl, anti-semite. Can we love Kind of Blueand Sketches of Spain and also condemn Miles Davis for beating his wives? Is Ender’s Game less of a masterpiece for Orson Scott Card’s homophobia? Maybe. Looking hard at the flaws of the artist is an important way to engage with the art.”
Souce: https://www.wired.com/story/science-harassment-data/.
“Amy Hinsley has spent years studying wildlife conservation and she’s become an expert in her field. But whenever she attended a scientific conference, she felt reluctant to put up her hand and ask a question.
“I would wonder whether my question was good enough or I would hesitate to ask a question,” said Dr. Hinsley, a 33-year-old research fellow at the University of Oxford who studies the black market for endangered plants and animals.
A few years ago, she raised her insecurities with fellow researcher Alison Johnston, a statistician in the department of zoology at Cambridge University, and found she’d had similar experiences.”
“n ordinary discourse, a theory is a guess or a surmise, as in “that’s only a theory.” In science, however, a theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is supported by confirmed facts and/or observations. Verification of a theory’s predictions ensures its eventual acceptance by the community of scientists working in the particular discipline.
“Acceptance by the community” means that a consensus has been reached. In other words, at least a large majority, if not almost all, of the scientists who work in the discipline have agreed that the particular theory is the best way to explain or understand the relevant phenomena. In contrast to the bogus claim of some global warming deniers, reaching consensus is an integral feature of successful scientific theories. Once reached, the culmination of consensus is the publication of monographs and textbooks, and the introduction of university/college courses on the subject.
How consensus may be achieved is beautifully illustrated by the development of quantum theory.”
Source: https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/theory-consensus-in-science/.
“With time and money running out, Brazilian scientists are turning up the pressure on the federal government to avoid a total collapse of the national science and technology funding system before the end of the year.
Researchers last week delivered a petition with more than 82,000 signatures to congressional leaders in Brasília, demanding the reversal of deep budget cuts that have left research institutions struggling to pay even basic water and electricity bills. The petition delivery was part of a series of meetings and protests held across Brazil.
As a result of Brazil’s mounting economic woes, federal funding for science and technology is now at its lowest level in modern history, dropping by more than half over the past 5 years. The science ministry kicked off this year with a slim $1.8 billion budget, but President Michel Temer’s administration later reduced that by 44%, imposing a spending cap of just over $1 billion.”
Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/brazil-researchers-struggle-fend-deepening-budget-cuts.
“The three young dinosaurs had snuggled together to sleep when disaster struck. A thick layer of ash or soil, probably from a volcanic eruption or sand storm, poured over them and the animals, each the size of a large dog, died within minutes.
For 70 million years they lay entombed, cradled beside each other within a slab of rock, until US scientists uncovered their remains earlier this year. Subsequent analysis of the fossilised bones — which come from the Gobi desert — reveal the first known example of roosting among dinosaurs.
The discovery, outlined at the recent Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology meeting in Calgary, has caused considerable excitement among scientists because communal roosting — sleeping in groups — is exhibited by many modern species, including crows and bats.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/21/dinsoaur-roosting-secrets-revealed.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22
“George Weigel’s Witness to Hope was written before its subject was canonised, but that exhaustive biography vibrated with confidence that the day of universal recognition would be inevitable. Weigel has become something of a pontifical Boswell, and his third volume about John Paul II is like the last wing on a vivid triptych by Memling or Rubens. The first two books were analytical, while this one — Lessons of Hope (Basic Books, £25) — is a portrait more ruminative and personal, and not without humour. It may even be more valuable precisely for that. History is disserved by those who think that private asides and impressions are secondary to major dates and deeds.
Weigel’s classical theological formation and his own urbane humanism made him a good fit for understanding Karol Wojtyła, and it would seem that the Holy Father sensed the same, enjoying his company and table talk. Through that association, Weigel was able to perceive the pope’s sources and initiatives, beginning with his pastoral work in Poland.
Wojtyła’s Polishness was not something to be thrust aside when he became Universal Pastor, like some gnostic shedding of irrelevant skin. Poland was an icon of Christ in its heroic deeds and salvific suffering, far more than most nations. That land, with trembling borders but unflagging chivalry, was crucified over centuries, only to rise with valour when its people cried out in 1979: “We want God.” And Wojtyła was there to hear them.”
“Twelve students. Many religions. One common goal.
A new program on campus called the Center for Religion and Global Citizenryis bringing together students of different beliefs, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and secular humanism, to promote inter-religious dialogue at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The center, which had its first meeting Oct. 10, is a co-curricular, non-credit educational opportunity for a selected group of students, who each receive a $750 stipend for their work at the center. The 12 students who were selected from around 30 applicants will meet weekly to discuss a curriculum created by Ulrich Rosenhagen, the center’s director.
Rosenhagen, who is also a lecturer in religious studies, says the goal of the new center is for students to have “tough conversations” about religion in a meaningful and respectful way. The core group of students can then bring these interfaith discussions to the larger campus community by organizing events, panels and discussions for the whole campus.”
Source: https://news.wisc.edu/new-center-seeks-to-foster-religious-dialogue-on-campus/.
“Parents be vigilant! And this also is why groups like Humanists UK are so important, supporting such ideals. This is from them:
A Church of England school in Kent has been forced to stop a Christian group from delivering assemblies and lessons to its pupils after parents complained about their children being exposed to ‘a potentially damaging ideology’. Humanists UK, which campaigns against the privileged position given to religion in schools, has stood by the parents, and called for a ‘national conversation’ about religious influence and evangelising in the education system.
In a letter to parents, the headteacher of St John’s Church of England Primary School in Tunbridge Wells, Dan Turvey, stated that ‘After careful consideration I have decided that we will end our regular commitment to CrossTeach and that they will no longer lead assemblies or take lessons.’ However, he said he was ‘deeply saddened’ by the move.”
“For admirers of mainstream Bollywood films, the name Rahul Bose commands attention. But for audiences of Bengali and art house cinema, his name commands respect.
The actor, known for being choosy when it comes to signing films, is now also a director, and his second directorial venture Poorna is generating a great deal of buzz in showbiz circles.
Recently, Poorna got a standing ovation at the opening of the Indian film festival in Dublin. Many of those who saw it were pleasantly surprised because they did not have high expectations of the film, expecting it to be a simple story about a little girl who climbed Everest — a film for children.”
Source: https://images.dawn.com/news/1178627.
“Regardless of whether we are cognizant of it or not, we all have a worldview that shapes our ideas, gives a framework for our lives, and dictates our presuppositions about morality and mortality.
In the United States, two prevailing views are a Christian eternal worldview or humanistic view. Why do people who have so much in common see the world and make choices so differently? Why is there such deep chasm between people regarding what is right and wrong, just or unjust, or understanding of the meaning of life?
The humanistic view rejects God and sees man as the measure of all things, that man sets the standard for ethical and moral standards, that man is basically good, not sinful. This kind of thinking is based in moral relativism. If this life on earth is all there is for us, then as much pleasure as possible should be sought before it’s over.”
“I have been reading lately about the rise of humanism in Europe. The old scholars often described themselves as “ravished” by one of the books newly made available to them by the press, perhaps also by translation. Their lives were usually short, never comfortable. I think about what it would have been like to read by the light of an oil lamp, to write with a goose quill. It used to seem to me that an unimaginable self-discipline must account for their meticulous learnedness. I assumed that the rigors and austerities of their early training had made their discomforts too familiar to be noticed. Now increasingly I think they were held to their work by a degree of fascination, of sober delight, that we can no longer imagine.
John Milton said, “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book.” He was arguing, unsuccessfully, against licensing, the suppression or censoring of books before publication. This was usual in the premodern and early modern world, of course. How many good books were killed outright by these means we will never know, even granting the labors of printers who defied the threat of hair-raising punishments to publish unlicensed work, which others risked hair-raising penalties to own or to read.”
Source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/what-are-we-doing-here/.
“The potential of Corbynism is enormous. But, for its full potential to unfold, we see it as essential that forms of politics beyond the purely electoral make use of all the capacities and enthusiasm of the Labour Party’s expanded activist base
In late 2016, Labour was polling in the mid-20s and many were happy to say that supporting the leadership was a foolish endeavour, if not an entirely futile one. It felt at the time as though the potential and energy of Corbynism was at risk of waning as it struggled to move beyond the immediate defence of Jeremy Corbyn’s position as leader. However, our aim when we imagined a new project was not so much to be at the vanguard of this defence, as vital as it was, but to pour our energies into being useful in other ways.
We want to bring together people in Labour, Momentum and trade unions who are already active and engaged. The aim is to assist and encourage these comrades in their efforts to broaden the reach of the labour movement and build a political force capable of radically transforming society.”
“”Please don’t jump down my throat,” Taylor Grin thought as he approached his training instructor with a request.
It was 2013, and Grin was a few weeks into Air Force basic training at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. He had just learned which religious services were available to trainees — Catholic, several Protestant denominations, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist, among others.
Grin, then 26, considered himself a secular humanist, someone who pursues an ethical life without a belief in God. With no chaplain-facilitated service for trainees like him, he wanted to start one — and became a key player in a national culture war playing out within the U.S. military.”
“It is his view of the death penalty, not theirs, that departs from Catholic teaching.
For decades, liberal Catholics have relativized Catholic dogma and dogmatized relativism. Pope Francis is the champion of this movement. One moment, he is pushing Jesuitical situation ethics, which is an outgrowth of moral relativism; in the next, he is hectoring Catholics that his flaky political opinions constitute “Catholic social teaching.” To adulterers, he says: Go and sin some more. To people who fail to recycle, he has urged confession and repentance.
To more fanfare from the media this week, he declared the death penalty “inadmissible” everywhere and always and says that he wants to change the catechism to reflect this absolutist view. Never mind that his entire pontificate has been devoted to saying that life is too murky for “black and white” moral norms. Somehow he has managed to find one.
Not a single one of his predecessors took the position that the death penalty is intrinsically unjust. But he does and says that anyone who disagrees is a proponent of “vengeance.” He claims a deeper understanding of Christian imperatives, even though the origin of his pacifism isn’t Christian. It springs not from the moral absolutes of the Christian tradition but from the relativistic humanism contained within post-Enlightenment moral and political philosophy. He is rendering not to Christ or Caesar but to Cesare Beccaria, the 18th-century father of left-wing criminology who set the modern world on its pro-prisoner course.”
Source: https://catholiccitizens.org/views/75471/pope-francis-vs-predecessors/.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22
“As allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein re-ignite discussions about sexual violence, the global advisor of the United Nation’s Global Safe Cities Initiative says Winnipeg is taking the right steps to help curb sexual violence.
Winnipeg became the first Canadian city to sign onto the UN’s initiative to reduce sexual violence against women and girls in 2013, and the program’s global advisor, Laura Capobianco, was in the city this week as part of the UN Women Safe Cities Initiative.
She told CBC News she’s been impressed by the efforts Winnipeg has undertaken since joining the initiative, which has since been adopted by 27 cities around the world.”
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/sexual-violence-united-nations-winnipeg-1.4366218.
“Every so often in the United States, a scandal erupts to temporarily demolish the country’s marketed image as a pioneer in gender equality and related rights.
The name of the current scandal is, of course, Harvey Weinstein — the millionaire Hollywood film mogul accused of sexual assault by an ever-expanding number of women, as his decades-long impunity appears to be coming to an end.
Weinstein, however, is merely the tip of the iceberg. In a recent New Yorker piece titled All the Other Harvey Weinsteins, actress Molly Ringwald writes about her own history as a victim of sexual harassment in the film industry, noting, “I never talked about these things publicly because, as a woman, it has always felt like I may as well have been talking about the weather.””
Source: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/face-epidemic-sexual-harassment-171020091640079.html.
“KOBANE, Syria — The battle to take Raqqa, the Syrian capital of the Islamic state (IS) group, is almost over. But one of the main challenges that the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) face after IS is not only the huge destruction but also how to expand their model of women’s rights to conservative tribal areas in northern Syria and ban people from marrying more than one wife.
Since the war broke out in 2011, there has been an increase in the rates of child marriage and polygamy, both in the country and among the refugee population. The amount of marriages registered as polygamous in Damascus has risen from five percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2015.
The opposite has been true in areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Syria, and a drive for equal rights for women has seen the practices largely abandoned.”
Source: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/kurdish-fight-women-rights-faces-challenges-syria-1018812004.
“100 Women: The male movie star campaigning for women’s rights
Farhan Akhtar is not only massive in the movie world, he’s also the founder of a movement to get men to support women’s rights.
He talks to Asian Network’s Haroon Rashid about why men need to take responsibility for their actions and raise their children to respect women.”
“The inaugural Animation is Film Festival supplied a family night of fun and culture on Friday at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre in Hollywood.
Among the guests to arrive at the opening night and U.S. premiere of “The Breadwinner” was producer Angelina Jolie, with children Shiloh and Zahara in tow. Before the screening of the fest’s first premiere, Jolie-Pitt introduced the film she described to be “so exquisitely done and very important.”
The animated film is based on Deborah Ellis’ children’s novel of the same name, which follows a young girl in Afghanistan who disguises herself as a boy to provide for her family.
“There are few countries in the world where it is harder to be a young girl, where barriers between girls and their dreams and their rights are so high and so painful to experience and observe,” Jolie said, adding that the story was also able to highlight Afghanistan’s “deep humility, rich culture and a resilient warm people.””
“Laura Boldrini, president of Italy’s Chambre of Deputies, breezed into her boutique hotel in Old Montreal on Saturday followed by an entourage of elegantly dressed Italian diplomats and assistants.
She wore her newly acquired “Je parle féministe” sweatshirt.
“I didn’t know there would be a photographer,” she said, slightly embarrassed. “I could get you other photos of me, if you like.”
But the sweatshirt was a signpost for the conversation that would follow with Boldrini — a journalist turned refugee advocate turned politician — taking on fake news and Facebook, Harvey Weinstein and the (continuing) fight for women’s rights.
“Fake news is like drops of poison that we drink every day with water and in the end we get sick and we don’t even realize it,” Boldrini began. “It pollutes public debate and it’s dangerous to democracy.””
“Faculty at Okanagan College in Kelowna are speaking out on behalf of students after a recent anti-abortion protest on campus left some students feeling harassed, threatened and unsafe.
On October 11 and 12, an anti-abortion group called Expose the Reality demonstrated in a high-traffic area of the Okanagan College Kelowna campus carrying large, graphic signs showing aborted fetuses.
“Many of our students experienced [the signs] as very traumatizing. They experienced those signs as harassing,” said Sasha Johnston, an English professor at Okanagan College and the status of women representative for the faculty association.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22
“MONTREAL—Calling it a North American first, the Quebec government passed legislation Wednesday forbidding anyone from receiving or giving a public service with their face covered — and even while riding the bus.
The opposition said the law doesn’t go far enough, while members of the province’s Islamic community said it targets Muslim women and violates their fundamental right to express their religion as they see fit.
“This has been a debate that’s been tearing Quebec apart for the past few years,” Premier Philippe Couillard told reporters. “We need to hail this exercise. We need to remind people we are the only jurisdiction in North America to have legislated on this issue.””
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the federal government is looking into the implications of Quebec’s Bill 62, which would require Muslim women wearing a niqab or burka and anyone else using public services to uncover their faces.
“I don’t think it’s the government’s business to tell a woman what she should or shouldn’t be wearing,” said Trudeau while campaigning in Alma, Que., with candidate Richard Hébert ahead of Monday’s byelection.
“As a federal government, we are going to take our responsibility seriously and look carefully at what the implications are.”
When asked if that would include taking the bill to court, Trudeau would only repeat that Ottawa is “looking carefully at the implications.””
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-bill-62-implications-1.4363989.
“Major global conflicts and the need for justice will be the topics up for discussion at the 12th annual World Religions Conference.
The free event is taking place October 25 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Red Deer College Arts Centre.
Organizer Malik Agyemang says those in attendance will hear about global issues and thoughts on how we can all live together in harmony from a number of speakers of different faiths.
“It doesn’t matter whether we all have the same religion, or even for people who do not have any faith. How do we quell this? How do we live together in peace and harmony?” he asks.
Agyemang says the potential for global conflict is real and it must be spoken about.”
Source: http://rdnewsnow.com/article/557160/world-religions-conference-global-conflict.
“(JTA) — Jewish leaders in Canada are debating a measure meant to prevent intolerance aimed at Muslims and other minorities.
Earlier this month, the head of B’nai Brith Canada outlined his objections to M-103, a parliamentary motion passed earlier this year that “condemns Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.” The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage held hearings on the measure this week.
Critics of the measure say it singles out Muslims for special treatment because it condemns only Islamophobia by name and does not explicitly mention other religious groups. Others have accused the motion of hampering free speech.”
“Across the world, Diwali celebrations are underway and thousands are gathering in Metro Vancouver to be a part of the festival of lights that starts Thursday.
One Hindu temple in Surrey was bustling to get ready for a morning of festivities and preparing for 10,000 people to attend the opening celebration.
The day before Diwali, on Wednesday, volunteers gathered at the Laxmi Narayan Mandir Temple to decorate.
“It’s the happiest moment,” said Santosh Joshi, one of the volunteers.”
“Current and former Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada have filed a $66 million class-action lawsuit against the religion’s leadership claiming that its policies protect members who sexually abuse children.
The suit was filed in Ontario on behalf of alleged victims of sexual abuse across Canada, where more than 100,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses reside.
“It appears the organization has not established policies to prevent sexual abuse from happening and has faulty policies when sexual abuse is reported to it, at the hands of elders or otherwise,” said Bryan McPhadden, the lead attorney on the case.”
Source: https://www.revealnews.org/blog/jehovahs-witnesses-sued-in-canda-for-history-of-sex-abuse-cover-up/.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22
*This interview has been mildly edited for clarity and readability.*
Tell us about yourself — family background, culture, first language, and religious/humanist background.
I was born and raised in St. Louis. My parents were raised Catholic. Independently, they decided Catholicism and Christianity were not for them. They didn’t want to follow that any further. When they had kids, my brother and I, they realized that they did want us to have a religious education, but not necessarily in a Christian context.
We found the Ethical Society in St. Louis. We learned about the different religions and the core values of ethical humanism. That is what had me ‘hooked’ — the core values. I believed in them. I thought they were good principles. As I got older, I became more involved with it. I took on leadership roles at every stage. That’s my background.
My parents are still members. They attend regularly. They have a role at the local ethical society. English is my first and only language. I can speak some Spanish, but that’s from speaking Spanish in school.
When did you find IHEYO?
I found it a couple of years ago. FES, the Future of Ethical Societies, is the group that I was a part of. The connection to IHEYO grew from the national level of FES. At IHEYO, I applied to be the social media manager. Over time, that evolved into communications officer. Now, I am managing the social media and the blog. All outreach for humanists between the ages of 18 and 35.
Any demographic(s) analyses of humanist youth?
A lot of our humanist activity is in Europe. That’s not that surprising.
(Laugh)
Right.
There’s a lot of different organizations there. That’s where the funding comes from. What I found with our social media is a large number of people from Pakistan, India, and Nepal are active in following our page and reading our content, I found that interesting.
Anyone from Bangladesh?
There are quite a few from that region, specifically. Western Asia and the Middle East are becoming more active. They are up and coming.
So, what are some tasks and responsibilities that come along with being the social media person and communications manager?
I try to keep our presence active. It can be difficult. It is a volunteer role. I do what I can with the time that I have each day. I try to make the content diverse. I don’t want too much being posted on specific region of the world too. I know I can get carried away by posting on what is going on here, in the US. There’s a lot to be said now.
(Laugh)
There’s a lot going on in the world. I want that represented on the page because we are an international organization. Also, I manage our blog, Humanist Voices. I look at the content submitted to us. We have the regional groups submit one piece per month. Then I edit them or somebody on the team edits them. We look over them, have them published, and try to distribute over social media. We’re trying to get our newsletter back. We want to expand our presence online.
Who are some humanist heroes in history for you?
I always look to Felix Adler, who is the founder of the ethical societies here in the US. He came from Germany. He grew up Jewish. His father was a rabbi. He decided that he wasn’t really feeling being Jewish.
(Laugh)
(Laugh)
He came up with his own thing, ethical humanism. which I find different from classical humanism. People tend to associate atheism and agnosticism with traditional humanism. Ethical humanism is more inclusive, in my opinion. It welcomes people of all backgrounds, religious or not. It focuses more on the principles that we stand for rather than the beliefs and how we got to those principles which I really admire in the motto: deed before creed. That’s something that I believe in.
Outside of Adler, and inclusive humanism — that is, whether religious or not, if you were to take one core argument for humanism, what would it be?
It’s that we have this one life that we know of and we have science to help us understand how life works. That is really the best that we have. I think that we can make the most out of life with this scientific approach and by appreciating this life. Also, the placement of humans first is the main thing that I stand behind. It is human rights as the main principle.
It is like the Bill Nye line: ‘I want to save the planet for me!’
Yea, exactly!
(Laugh)
(Laugh)
It is silly that we prioritize profit. How can we prioritize profit when we don’t have a home to live in later? If we kill the planet, how can we prioritize profit later? With the Dakota Access Pipeline, for example, it blows me away. People can be obtuse about the world and what it offers us. The prioritization of the transfer of oil over access to clean water blows me away.
From an international vantage, what do you consider the most pressing concern for humanist youth?
This rise in pushback against principles of the classically ‘Left.’ It is threatening to the principles held dear by us. It is the result of hatred from both sides. Hatred isn’t doing any favors for us, as humanists. I know many, especially young, atheists have this belief that their beliefs and values are superior to those who don’t have those beliefs and values.
It is a grave mistake, I think, to have that attitude. It doesn’t do us any favors. It makes people less inclined to support the movement. They think the movement is supported by an elitist organization, which creates more pushback. We’re up against it. It creates a hateful divide. Some of us are complicit in it.
We need to reform the way that we think about ourselves and our values. We need to take a step back and ask, “What are we doing here?” We say, “We stand for all humans.” But do we, if we act like we’re superior to some humans? We need to do some self-reflection as humanists. We need to ask, “Are we trying to value all human beings?”
Does that trend, which you’re noticing among younger atheist humanists, of considering their own values superior to others lead to a certain type of self-exaltation that can exacerbate the trend seen in youth in general — possibly across time — of seeing their time as ‘The Time?’
Yes, it is hard not to think of it as that, when everything is coming to the climactic point with things as inevitable. Millennials have always prized themselves. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It has an innate value, but can have its disadvantages. One is thinking this time, this place, these values are the most important thing. If we don’t communicate those values for people to stand behind and with us, then we will create a greater divide. It will get worse. The way we go about standing behind this change is in an inclusive way.
You mentioned the pushback from the Left and the Right. Can you clarify the pushback from the Left, and the pushback from the Right?
The pushback follows politics and social behaviour, which, I think, follows the laws of physics. For example, we had Obama as president for 8 years, which is a long time. A lot can happen in 8 years. We saw many not liking anything done by Obama because it was Obama. That is some of the pushback seen now.
The whole Donald Trump era is the pendulum swinging back towards the Right. The more swing that this pendulum has, then the more extremism that will result. With this pushback from the Right, and Donald Trump as president, we are seeing this pushback against the Left and the push of the Left against the pushback of the Right. It is getting tense.
There’s a large, swinging pendulum. That’s what I mean by the physics of politics and social behaviour. The more you push in one direction, then the more pushback you’ll get in the other direction.
What are some near-future initiatives for IHEYO, communications-wise?
I want to push the outreach more as a resource for people concerned for our future. People are looking for guidance. They are looking for words of encouragement, which inspire hope. I hope IHEYO can jump on it, can provide it. I hope IHEYO can provide this need without furthering the divide.
What are your hopes within your lifetime for the humanist movement?
I would like to see the youth organization in a grand, sweeping effort. I think there’s a lot of activity going on around the world. It is so off and away. So, it can be hard for others to notice. I went to the youth section of the BHA. My vibe was the lack of awareness about other humanist organizations. They are unique, but they thought they were one-of-a-kind. I was surprised to hear it. There is a lot of humanist activity ongoing around the world. If people made more effort to connect around the world in a productive way, we could accomplish great things.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/21
I was reading the news. Something ‘struck’ me. An article by CBC News entitled “‘I don’t think it’s fair’: Ontario group pushing to end government funding for Catholic schools” (2017).
The basis appeared something of interest to me, for a decent amount of time now: working from first principles to enact secular change within province and territory, and the nation.
I saw (and see) different means by which to acquire change towards secularism. One is the use of national or provincial documents such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Government of Canada, 1982), as the organization is attempting to do in the article.
Another is temporary coalition building. For example, if you look at Humanist Canada, you can find a list of organizations counted as allies, or affiliates:
- The International Humanist and Ethical Union, (IHEU), based in London England with an office at the United Nations.
- Center For Enquiry, (CFI), based in the US and is represented in multiple Cana-dian cities.
- Atheist International & Atheists of America.
- AHQ our Quebec partners.
- Secular Ontario.
- Humanist Perspectives a humanist publication based in Ottawa.
- Dying With Dignity, Canada.
- One School System Network, OSSN, an Ontario based organization.
- Imagine No Religion Conference, INR5, 2015.
- Ontario Humanist Society, A positive force for Humanism in Ontario.
- Quinte Secular Humanist Society, QSHA. This is the “freethinking” group started by Bill Broderic many years ago. It is an active and collegial group of friends. (Humanist Canada, 2017).
I could see this extended between the moderately religious and the stripes of the irreligious to provide a framework for change: said coalition. But the coalition must retain common marks, goals, or targeted objectives.
Those targeted objectives amount to specific, identifiable marks. Those which start small, work into the medium, and then into the larger, e.g. municipal, provincial, and then federal/national, respectively. And why not? It has been the tide of history for this country and for the world, especially the developed world or as countries/nations become more developed.
Women gain rights; minorities gain rights; children gain rights; labor rights become more instantiated; quality of life rises; lifespan and health span rise; education access, completion, and level of final achievement rise; and so on. Also: religiosity declines in raw numbers and level of markers of religious life, and secularism increases.
If activism becomes oriented within this axis, then the tides of history seem easier to grasp, manage, and ride.
Another possibility seems like the utility in the Freedom of Thought Report (International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2016a), which contains a section on Canada (International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2016b). These kinds of documents can act as guides as to what inequality exists and then where to acquire the targeted objectives.
That makes temporary coalition building, finding targeted objectives, utilization of robust documents for activism. There does exist such a thing as first principles reasoning, working from the basics and then develop the strategy. It seems robust.
Insofar as activism may contain first principles, the utility in documents capable of the provision of the basic fruits of the secular activist ideals. I would argue for a first principles process: identification of inequality, targeted objective acquisition, examination for coalition need or not, the creation of or building on prior successes, and persistence.
The documents can help find the inequality, or the locale or nation’s controversial discourse in a relevant secular domain. Basing decision of the targeted objectives on the availabe resources for those inequalities to be reduced or eliminated, the determination of the need for assistance, or not, given the magnitude of the problem. Then the creation of successes and persistence in the activism, or looking to prior successes to simply make the job easier.
And in Canada, we have the open, easy capability to make those secular changes, not for superiority but for equality.
References
CBC News. (2017, October 19). ‘I don’t think it’s fair’: Ontario group pushing to end government funding for Catholic schools. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/ontario-catholic-funding-1.4361542.
Government of Canada. (1982). Constitution Act, 1982. Retrieved from http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html.
Humanist Canada. (2017). Vision, Mission, and Values. Retrieved from https://www.humanistcanada.ca/about/vision-mission-and-values.
International Humanist and Ethical Union. (2016a). The Freedom of Thought Report. Retrieved from http://freethoughtreport.com/couhttp://freethoughtreport.com/countries/, ntries/.
International Humanist and Ethical Union. (2016b). The Freedom of Thought Report: Canada. Retrieved from http://freethoughtreport.com/countries/americas-northern-america/canada/.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/20
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was religion a part of family life? If so, what was a big moment of awakening and leaving the faith?
Moninuola Komolafe: Religion was a major part of my family especially because my father owns a church. I began participating in three-day fasts, revivals, and vigils when I was barely eight years old.
Occasionally, I had doubts but the turning point came at an outreach my church organized sometime in 2012. About eight of us laid hands on this madman on the street. He appeared healed and we had a crowd behind us chanting and praising Jesus but looking at him, I didn’t think he was healed. We later realized this and two of us shipped him out of that community so that our ministry activities could continue because we knew people would question the message if they saw the man we healed roaming the streets. That raised questions that I just couldn’t push aside. Why wasn’t he healed? Why wouldn’t god heal him and convert unbelievers? Are miracles real? If miracles aren’t real, isn’t the bible just an ordinary book? Can the book be trusted?
I followed this questions and when I got my answers, I realized I no longer believed the Bible and its message.
Jacobsen: In the surrounding culture, how much did religion determine the style of social and political life? How does it do so today if at all?
Komolafe: Religion influenced impacted almost every aspect of our lives, from proscriptions against alcohol to relationships between people of different religions, to dictating how women should dress and how homes should be run, even sexual relations between unmarried people. It also played a major role on law-making with lawmakers refusing to pass laws on issues where their religious books had opposing views. Today, the influence remains but no longer has a stronghold because people are asking questions and are coming to the realization that times are changing and that some of those practices should become obsolete.
Jacobsen: What makes for the better arguments for a reason and against faith to you?
Komolafe: Faith, by its very definition, means believing without evidence and because of this, anything, no matter how ludicrous it is, can be believed. Faith in ideas such as demons, demonic oppression, and witches is why a sick person will be dropped at a church instead of the hospital. Faith is why we label any occurrence we do not understand as supernatural and why an innocent child can be labeled a witch and left to starve. Faith in a religious book is a reason for discrimination against people who don’t share our beliefs. Faith is why people will adamantly go against facts because it negates the dictates of their religion. Faith is harmful.
The truth, however, is that we do not apply faith to everything. We conduct investigations before moving to new locations. We check if the place is not constantly robbed if there’s constant power supply. We immunize our kids too and not rely on supernatural protection. Why not something that impacts our lives as much as religion?
Jacobsen: What are some common stories that you hear – over and over again – from those who have lost their faith? In short, what are their reasons for becoming irreligious in your locale?
Komolafe: For those that came out of my kind of setting, the absence of evidence to support the miraculous claims of the bible was a push for them. For others, it was the ridiculous stories of the bible and the disparities with our reality.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Moninuola.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/20
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How was religion in your family and community growing up?
Bayo Opadeyi: Religion was very important in our home growing up, Catholicism especially. Though my father came from an Anglican/Baptist family, he wasn’t much into church going when we were young, and so my mother a staunch Catholic was responsible for our religious education. The Nigerian society is made up of mostly Christians and Muslims, with some who still practice our traditional religions. It would have shocked me as a 10-year-old to hear from someone that there were no gods. A lot of the stories we heard were packed with the supernatural.
Jacobsen: Did this impact your own view on religion? How so? Also, what were some moments that were crucial for leaving religion?
Opadeyi: Looking at my childhood and my then firm belief in the teachings of the “church”, I can empathize with religious people I meet today and understand their visceral reaction when they hear for the first time that some people believe there are no gods. My religious upbringing, I think, has given me that. The seeds of disbelief for me started when I was in my teens and in the middle of an “evangelical” phase. I decided to read the bible from cover to cover but had to pause when I got to 1 Samuel, the story of Saul and his army going to kill all the Amalekites. My 15 yr. old’s sensibilities were shocked by the morality of killing children and animals just because, I could not understand how the “loving” god I worshipped would want this, and so I asked older people what they thought. They just beat about the bush and tried unsuccessfully to explain it away. And that was when I realized that the people whom I assumed understood the “faith” were more or less like myself. So why would I accept their views blindly? I started to read the Bible with a pinch of salt from that moment. Another important point was during a vacation we spent with our grandparents, I was going through their library and came across a book by Winwood Reade “The Martyrdom of Man” where he talked about the history of religion. This was the first time I was seeing religion being talked about from a secular, irreverent point of view. And from that moment I was on my way for another 20 years to call myself an atheist.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the strongest argument against religion and for reason, and for secularism and against theocratic tendencies (implicit or explicit, e.g. in culture and political life, or in law, respectively)?
Opadeyi: I think religion encourages a lot of harmful practices. In the North (of Nigeria), free-speech is often met with mob action that sometimes leads to death or serious injury. Women’s rights being trampled upon because some religious book says so. In the South, old women are assaulted on accusations of witchcraft, Mega-church pastors milk their congregation on promises of “divine favor”, and people fall into this “magical thinking” mindset that is not very useful for solving problems and planning long-term.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Bayo.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/20
Chiedozie Uwakwe is from southern Nigeria. Ukwakwe and I talk about irreligiosity in Nigeria.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Regarding family of origin, what are its language, culture, and religious background?
Chiedozie Uwakwe: I’m Nigerian, from the Southern part of Nigeria. The first language of my tribe is called the Igbo Language. The name of the tribe is Igbo. So, I’m basically am Igbo guy. Traditionally, we practiced a religion that is grouped under African Traditional Religion, it is a form of Animism, until the British Colonized Nigeria and brought with them Christianity. The Igbos embraced it, so they are more or less a Christian culture now. I was born and brought up a Christian. The traditional culture of the Igbos still reflects the animistic religion of their forebearers. With the land, bodies of water, animals, sky, and sun considered sacred.
Jacobsen: Was this religious upbringing a benefit for you? If so, how? Also if in some ways not, how?
Uwakwe: I would say the religious upbringing had a few benefits, for example, even though the bible is a poor book on the subject of morality, it gave me my first lessons on morality and I developed from there.
The disadvantage of religious upbringing for me that readily comes to mind is that it made me think that I wasn’t at fault for my problems, instead of me taking charge of my problems, it made shift the blame to some nonexistent entity, thereby robbing me of the opportunity to take charge of my life and assume responsibility for my actions and failures. After all, you can always blame it on the devil.
Jacobsen: What seems like some pivotal moments in movements towards the reduction in religious belief for you? Why those moments?
Uwakwe: Firstly, when I stumbled on books and articles on the history of religions, especially Christianity and Islam, it was nothing like what was written in their holy books, the metamorphosis of religious gods like Yahweh and Allah. How they went from obscure deities to huge forces. That was my first step towards doubt. Secondly, the issue of evil in within the concept of a benevolent and all-powerful god. I couldn’t wrap my head around that fact. It just didn’t make sense. Thirdly, watching people around me pray for things that didn’t come to pass, which is a direct contraindication to what is written in the holy books.
Jacobsen: Canadians can live in a cultural bubble. We hold internationalist values often, enshrined in things like the UN Charter, but we live lives high in life quality that can exacerbate our bubble. What should Canadians know about your own society’s dabbling in religion, faith, and superstition, and their impacts politics, law, and social interactions in daily life?
Uwakwe: I would say my society is largely religious because of the failure of the government and social structures. Religion and superstitions offer a kind of hope and succor that is not forthcoming from our political structure. So, this has greatly influenced our social relationships and interactions as they are all laced with religion as that is they only system they believe that can’t fail us. Since the political structure has made life unbearable for us on earth, there must be some sort of compensation in the afterlife. This has led to so many religious leaders feeding fat off of this false hope.
Jacobsen: What seem to have been effective methods in combatting religious superstition?
Uwakwe: Awareness campaigns, with increased penetration of the internet, there has been an insane increase in social awareness campaigns on social media especially. Irreligious people have been writing articles, debating on social media and forums, challenging religious superstitions and dogma, debunking and ridiculing them. Those honest enough to recognize a superior argument have been welcoming and they’ve been supportive.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Chiedozie.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/19
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You met Richard Dawkins. Many consider him the most famous atheist of the New Atheist movement. Where did you meet him? What was it like? What did you get to ask him?
Mohammed Charlie Khadra: I met Richard Dawkins at the international conference of free expression which was the largest gathering of ex-Muslims in history. It was very brief as people were all over him. I just thanked him for being the spark which leads me to atheism.
Jacobsen: When did you become convinced of it? That is atheism.
Khadra: It was back in 2012 when I was on the midway between looking into sects and religions were. I started a new path to look into which was: what’s goes science say about all of this? Later that year I became an atheist.
We can all agree on one simple idea, no proof of a supernatural deity exists. That’s pretty much what we all have in common. Other than that we can’t say that we stand for something else although most of us appreciate free speech, science, and human rights.
Jacobsen: What are your current tasks and responsibilities in activist work for the non-religious?
Khadra: No one can say of at certain tasks or set of ideas that an atheist has. We are left wing and right wing, active and non-, so some choose to be “militant” some might focus on saving those at risk, some choose to just keep it to themselves. What I mean is there are no responsibilities that come with atheism.
Jacobsen: What do you see as the next steps for atheism in North America?
Khadra: While we win on some grounds and lose in another North America is soon to be a ground to lose in. With the introduction of laws to limit people’s rights, Canada and Trump’s “protection” of religious “rights”, people there are giving up their rights in exchange for peace. What they don’t understand, this type of behavior, especially with a fascism, the only result is more rights being asked to be dropped and more lives to be lost if they don’t obey.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Mohammed.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/16
“RCMP officers have been screening Muslim refugee claimants entering from the U.S. at Quebec’s Roxham Rd. crossing, asking how they feel about women who do not wear the hijab, how many times they pray, and their opinion about the Taliban and the Islamic State, a questionnaire obtained by the Star shows.
The 41 questions appear to specifically target Muslims, as no other religious practices are mentioned, nor terrorist groups with non-Muslim members.
Refugee lawyers representing the more than 12,000 men, women and children who have crossed from New York this year at the informal crossing on Roxham Rd., near the Quebec town of Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, have heard stories of profiling, but it wasn’t until a client of Toronto lawyer Clifford McCarten was given his own questionnaire last month — seemingly by mistake — that there was proof of the practice.”
“CALGARY — The tall, slim teenager asks a question that’s on the minds of many of the young people gathered around the cloth-covered tables in a small meeting room at a mosque in northeast Calgary.
“If someone from [Daesh]* approaches you, how would you respond to them, so that you’re not attacked any further?” wonders Zubair Tariq, 16.
“If they approach, you should be smart enough to know that [Daesh] is very big criminals in the eyes of Islam,” answers Imam Syed Soharwardy, founder of Muslims Against Terrorism and the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada.”
“Will newly-minted federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s religion or race revolutionize politics in Canada?
In the U.S., the election of Barack Obama was supposed to not only revolutionize politics, but improve race relations.
It didn’t!
Initially, for some, Obama was “not black enough”.
Many only jumped on the bandwagon when they realized Obama was inspiring the younger generation to follow him.
Race and religion are inextricably woven into and complicated by complex human emotions.”
Source: http://www.torontosun.com/2017/10/14/the-singh-factor.
“MONTREAL, Canada – Canada’s Ministry of Public Safety has suspended the use of a controversial questionnaire used during interviews with asylum seekers crossing illegally from the US because it is “inappropriate” and inconsistent with government policy, a spokesperson said.
The move comes after civil rights groups raised concerns over the questionnaire that Canada’s federal police have used during interviews with asylum seekers.
Thousands of asylum seekers have crossed the US border without visas in recent months. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police intercepted 2,996 asylum seekers who had crossed into Quebec without visas in July, and another 5,530 asylum seekers in August.”
“(CNN)A Canadian man who was freed along with his family after five years in militant captivity in Afghanistan said his captors authorized the killing of one of his children and raped his wife.
“The stupidity and the evil of the Haqqani network’s kidnapping of a pilgrim and his heavily pregnant wife engaged in helping ordinary villagers in Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan was eclipsed only by the stupidity and evil of authorizing the murder of my infant daughter, Martyr Boyle,” Joshua Boyle told reporters upon his arrival Friday night at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.
He said his goal now is to build “a secure sanctuary for our three surviving children to call a home … and try to regain some portion of the childhood that they have lost.”
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/14/asia/taliban-family-freed-canada-boyle-speaks/index.html.
“OTTAWA — Human rights expert Irwin Cotler has the ear of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland.The former Liberal MP and human rights lawyer is advocating for political prisoners and has advice for how Canada can seek a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Cotler spoke to the Post in Ottawa this month, the morning after the Raoul Wallenberg all-party parliamentary caucus discussed major human rights issues and just a couple of hours before a sitdown with Freeland.”
“The problem with politicians who bring up race or religion is how it inevitably reveals more about the politician than it does citizens.
The latest example comes from Naheed Nenshi, who in recent comments to the leader of a local Pakistani community group, expressed a concern. “Everything we’ve built together,” said the mayor — who self-identified as the “the first Muslim mayor” of any western city — is “very, very tenuous.”
He then remarked on “forces” that wanted the city to go “backwards.”
Nenshi later pointed to racist and anti-Muslim remarks on social media as justification for his comment. But cranks, misogynists and bigots have long populated the netherworld of online commentary. They are nothing new and explain little about the motivations of most Calgarians, unless one believes in stereotypes.
Nenshi’s language about “backward” is curious. It implies that pre-2010 (when Nenshi was first elected), Calgary was … what exactly? — an abyss of antebellum racism from the deep American south, circa the 1960s? Some of us were alive in Calgary in 2009. We recall a rather more positive civic culture.”
“What should be an investigation into systemic hate in Canada often feels like a referendum on one word mentioned in M-103: Islamophobia.
From the start of the hearings, witnesses have weighed in, with the active support of some committee members, about whether Islamophobia exists, where the term came from, and whether it is an appropriate term of art. Perhaps, some have offered, we should instead use the term “anti-Muslim”; perhaps we should differentiate between hate that is directed at Islam and hate directed at Muslims; perhaps we should be focusing less on Islamophobia and more on Muslim extremism and radicalization.
Each of these theoretical forays into the technicalities of a single term represents a theft from the task of combating systemic hate, which is the mandate of the committee.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/16
Nsajigwa I Mwasokwa (Nsajigwa Nsa’sam) founded Jichojipya (meaning with new eye) to “Think Anew”. We have talked before about freethought in Tanzania. Here we continue the discussion, other conversation here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We talked about the situation in Tanzania. How are things for surrounding countries? Are the bad parts of religion as prevalent or more prevalent there?
Nsajigwa: By religion, we should include African’s own traditional beliefs. Now Tanzania borders with 8 countries. Yes, the negatives jump across borders notable witchcraft believe from Zambia in the past, to kill young girls and flay to get the human skin. Albino killing from here got exported to Rwanda, Burundi, and Malawi.
The glamorous flamboyant Preaching pastors termed “Pastorpreneurs” style came all the way from Nigeria West Africa. It is bad in Uganda. Pentecostals speaking in unknown sound evolved following influences from Uganda and Nigeria.
In politics, consulting traditional medicine men during campaigns for election, rampant here got exported elsewhere. President is God’s choice, a fallacy that lingers except now in Kenya the high court annulled the results. So that brings contradiction, has God erred this time..?
Jacobsen: How do these bad parts influence politics and daily life?
Nsajigwa: In politics, it enforces religious-based myth, a fallacy that a President is God’s choice in Swahili “Rais ni chaguo la Mungu”. It also causes “historicism”- people are made to believe such and such things have never happened, implying (such changes) cannot happen.
In daily life people believe in kismet – fatalism that everything is God’s will even to accidents caused by reckless driving. Circles of killings to flay humans for skin, killing the bald-headed all the way to Albino. Hitting people on the head and use the iron rod split with blood to hang on butcher’s shops to “attract” customers, killing people with disability who are seemingly successful or influential.
More-so people become gullible to “pastorpreneurs” to believe that just by their praying they can cure diseases instead of sending the sick to hospitals, and there are prayers for one to pass examinations even at higher learning levels!
There are an advertisement for a cure to enhance love magical-wise, also by “Doctors” (diviners) about making one get rich quick, in some cases telling clients to bring parts of human bodies to enhance the combinations. There is Culture of blaming it to an owl as messenger bird of bad omen. Christianity makes people hate snakes seeing it as a symbol of Satan himself, plus Swahili being neo-Islamic culture, there is believe in Jinns.
Furthermore, people believe literally in the miracle of virgin birth, and in the resurrection (in Swahili“Msukule”).
There is a misinterpretation of recurrence of incidence in a particular area if accidents happen from time to time in a place, there has to be a vampire kind of ghost there. Just recently people believed there was a big tree that cried with a human voice, oozed blood while being cut to make way for road expansion. The work had to stop to the next day and when eventually it was cut down with many people witnessing afar, its branches suddenly became antidote medicine to cure anything. People believe these things in the 21c century of science, computer, internet, and technology!
Jacobsen: Reflecting on your own locale in Tanzania, what are the impacts on the daily lives of believers? What are the rituals and superstitions they have in their daily lives?
Nsajigwa: Impacts are, believers use sound amplifiers in sermons even at night for the Pentecostals. It causes “noise pollution” tolerated (endured) because it is in the name of God. Even Moslem have adopted that on Fridays and for Muezzins daily.
The faithful are so self – assured thinking because they are on God’s side, therefore, their way is the only right way, unchallenged. By contradiction, they would insist on maintaining our cultural values yet forget even these modern scruples that we cherish today as “ours” came from outside, our very prejudice to say African culture being based on those very holy books from outside Africa, yet still they would be against “western values” meaning secular one’s example on dress code, how women should or shouldn’t wear, this or that being against our (African) ethics, they would argue.
Some are anti secularist by outlook, some are anti-science confusing science as a “western thing” yet using it overwhelmingly in their everyday lives – Phones, Tv, Medication, Transport etc.
Many are against evolution theory that they don’t understand and aren’t ready to know it.
It causes blame game mentality, just looking for someone or something to blame on – be it the devil, snake, women or the West. Some have compartmentalized, they live secular life but becomes religious on Fridays Saturdays and Sundays.
On Rituals, It is Praying constantly as individually and in fellowship, believing prayers answers human wishes even if it’s to the contrary. They blame game others for one’s own problems and incompetence, wishing those others bad, those that they think, more so feel as to be the ones who caused them problems that they are in. It is a witch-hunt mentality. They go around preach threatening people with stories of hellfire, in some cases their prayers ending in ecstatic trances.
On Superstitions, they believe in speaking (while in a trance) an unknown language sounding “abracadabra” as if from Congo. They believe in chasing away evil spirits and jinns, believe in prayers (and pay tithe for) to get employment, promotion in work, getting someone to get married to even as far as winning one’s case in a court of law. They believe in wishful thinking that life is driven by lucky or misfortunes all as ordained by Almighty God. That for anything happening, there are (super)natural forces behind, that holy books (Bible and Koran) have all the answers for any and all human questions and problems, even those of scientific field while some even thinking science is a Europeans “western thing”. There is too much confusion as between modernization and westernization, Africa had “bad bargain” for that. The SWOT Challenge is to modernize our cultures like say how the Japanese did theirs.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the positives of religion? As a freethinker, it can’t be all bad.
It brought modernity or rather came with it, thus services of modern education (on top of African’s traditional functional one) that made Africans discover the world beyond their villages, modern medication (hospitals) to cure or just explain scientifically diseases notably malnutrition-based, and for Islam the service of free water as in every mosque there must be water available for ablution. This even today alleviates water supply which is a big problem in cities. Neighbors are assured to get it at the mosque reservoir out of its well once dug. Religion brought fellowship, a sense of “Ummah” for Islam and “Catholicism” loyalty beyond Ethnics for Christians. It fought to eradicate some kind of (tradition) superstitions example colonial church based schools discouraged practice of female circumcision (FGM) but overtime new kind of superstition, religion-based emerged.
For many religion gives Hope, in the past especially those who joined were the ones being secluded by traditions example women (unlucky), not in marriage, or were in it but childless (seen as worthless). Today for those whom the harsh struggle for the survival of the fittest of modern life has not worked well for them.
Jacobsen: How do you cope with the social circle that by definition is much smaller than the religious? It must make a finding for fulfilling conversation difficult at times.
Nsajigwa: Yes! Very difficult most of the time. It is hard to reason logically with believers as they have a sense of self-assurance thinking they are right just by using their holy books (however most haven’t read the whole of). I developed solitude aspect of life, book reading on philosophy, comparative religions, world history, psychology, sociology, and culture gave me the only company. Libraries became my sanctuary place. A lonely person that became used to this life.
Otherwise a hardworking Teacher, guide, and mentor inspirational to the Youth and kids, jovial, Socratic elenchus, approachable to anyone for any question, Humble, Peaceful, classless, Empiricist, realist. More than books its music that keeps me going, also watching Tv sports soccer being favorite. Likewise, traveling (to learn new things) when a trip arises, and write a story about.
Jacobsen: What words best describe your struggle there? What has been your greatest emotional tribulation or trial?
Nsajigwa: ENDURANCE describes my struggle. Like a Stoic philosopher, living been misunderstood, what you can’t change, you have to endure. I carry with me several bruises first one is to be thought a crazy madman literally, ostracized Spinoza-like but never committed anything negative to law or humanity, then even now. Over years people realized I am just a mentally normal person, possible just more enlightened by book reading, plus a rationalist, ever curious questioning reality to try to seek answers.
Second going to mid-1990s when multiparty came back to Tanzania, I was rounded by Police just because of the high level of discussion I had with my freethinker brother in a public bus while Tour-guiding a visitor. A plain policeman happened to be on that bus. Three days later in town, we were suddenly rounded up, picked in a cab each and send to the police station, searched up and locked. They didn’t find anything in our bags, even a march box or a piece of cigarette, non-smokers. They found instead books on Philosophy and comparative religions.
Nevertheless, They locked us without ourselves knowing what the charges were. When our Guarantor came late he could not believe what they wrote as our crime, theft of shoes! No said he, not those two I know, not even money unless you tell me it is a book that they have taken. After a week-long trauma, we were released as free though nothing as our crime was established in the first place. We never knew what. African state machinery can jail independent thinker to freethinker for any excuse. I am a victim of that.
The third is when I met a Professor of history while a youth, after much discussion to his amazement the sad part came along. He told me I am so impressed that you know all these things by your book reading habit but now realize this, just by being that, you have become dangerous, your very knowing will annoy so many people. This bitter truth shocked me innocently, I only came to understand it along the way, a freethinkers life journey, what an odyssey!
I am someone suffered for living ahead of my time, just by analyzing contextually I see things straight which for others it takes months or years. I am lucky to have met few like-minded, in fact, these are my own students, few that I molded into philosophy in general, and freethinking in particular.
Jacobsen: Do you think that the number of religious people and the level of religiosity will both decrease in the coming decades for Tanzania?
Nsajigwa: It is tough to forecast based on the experience that during 1960 – 70s it was thought then that the campaign going on to fight against “enemy ignorance” would, by the year 2000 lead to high level of literacy. It surprises that irrationality and gullibility is still high despite education. Someone said it was free education but also free of knowledge too!
So likewise prospects are, religiosity could decrease thanks may be due to the internet that has made it possible to access just by oneself, by one’s own computer or a smartphone, religions being questioned left, right and center, plus being informed Atheists zeitgeist elsewhere asserting itself. This can inspire many others anywhere with doubting mind to questions and possibly end up being nonreligious. By SWOT approach, I see a golden Opportunity than (n)ever before. Thanks to internet connectivity.
However there must be efforts like ours of Jichojipya to showcase (thus catalyze) the populace to know that even at the local level there are freethinkers individuals, that it’s possible to “live clean”, ethically good, rationally guided without a religion, any.
Jacobsen: Is religion in Tanzania more about theology or about social cohesion based on non-reality grounded structures of conceiving in the world?
Nsajigwa: It is both more so for the second. The church is powerful theological-wise on what it disseminates each Sunday plus it has several educational institutions that it runs. Mosque exerts quite an influence too. But it’s social cohesion where religion is strong in playing the non-reality of how to conceive the world, as I have explained the impacts of religions to our daily life here. That is a big part, African triple heritage cultural reality on the ground.
Jacobsen: How can people in the surrounding areas help you out? How can surrounding countries in the African Diaspora help out?
Nsajigwa: First, by people in surrounding areas do you mean my neighborhood? if so they should just be open-minded open-ended, rational and skeptical to any claim, including those of religions. They should question things, everything. They should seek evidence, logical, rational and more so empirically-based.
For surrounding countries bordering Tanzania, they also should foster skepticism outlook likewise, establish Freethinkers secular Humanist movement at the grassroots. I am aware there are such positive initiatives across.
If by African diaspora you mean Africans of the continent now living overseas? Then Yes if willing to support Motherland’s emancipation from the mental slavery of superstitions in any form, including that of religions. If they are for secular and scientific Africa, if they are for STEM projects, if they, in particular, are independent thinkers, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists they should support these efforts to bring about modernization, science-based of our traditions here to match the reality of 21stCentury.
And if you mean Afro-Americans, Yes likewise if they are open-ended Black freethinkers nonbelievers, those free from keeping a blame gaming white man for everything 50 years since civil rights movement, Humanistic to see things beyond either-or black and white. If willing they can help out. In fact, anyone within a human race can help on this. Thanks for the opportunity.
Jacobsen: You are welcome. Thank you for the opportunity and your time.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/15
You grew up as a Catholic. You went to Holy Child School, Cape Coast as well. What is your story as a youth growing up in a religious household? What was the experience?
I attended Catholic schools, St. Theresa’s School in Accra from primary, junior high school and in Holy Child School I got my Senior high school education. They were one of the best schools at the time and provided us with the best teachers in all subjects. The major criteria for admissions was to be a Catholic and I was baptised at the St. Theresa’s Parish so it was easier for me to gain admission. In primary school, we had ‘Worship service’ on Wednesday mornings as part of our curriculum and from 1st grade, we were read the Bible and taught to understand it.
In the beginning, I did not really understand it, especially when it came to topics on the afterlife since my mother had died when I was 4 years old and I had still not come to understand the concept of death by then. I must have tried to discuss the existence of God once to my classmates, but I was told that I could go mad (mentally ill) so I stopped. I then made it a point to understand and accept Christianity because I felt that everyone believed in it and it was the right thing to do. By 6th grade, I attended catechism classes and had received my First Holy Communion.
My Senior High School was an all-girls boarding School and was built by the Catholic church in a town called Cape Coast in the Central Region of Ghana in 1946. It had been run initially by British nuns for decades and later by alumni of the school. It was strict and aimed to form students into ‘women of substance’ who would grow up to be the best in the country at home as good wives, at work, and in the Catholic church.
Obedience, discipline, and morality were the core teachings there with religion and especially Catholicism at its core. It was compulsory for all students to attend Mass at least 3 times a week and observe ‘The Angelus’ prayer’ 3 times a day. Most of the students were Catholic, but we had Anglicans and Protestants of various denominations as well. I became more exposed to Christian Charismatic teachings, joined nondenominational prayer groups and underwent a period of ‘being born-again’, which cemented my belief on God. It was there I had my ‘Confirmation of the Holy Spirit’.
Due to my mother’s death, I was brought up partly by my mother’s family and later by my dad’s. My mother’s family is mostly Catholic and conservative who encouraged and supported me to be a good Christian and was proud of me whenever I hit a milestone in my religious life. My father’s side of the family is mostly Anglican and also went to church often, but were more liberal and reformed.
I was encouraged there to think for myself and I learnt to care for myself and my sister at an early age since there was no mother-figure and my dad was not really ‘there’ either. Staying at my dad’s, my sister and I grew up with lots of books and educational programs on satellite TV, which at the time was expensive for most homes to have. As my mother’s side taught me to be obedient and subservient in their understanding of being respectful, my father’s side of the family encouraged me to ask questions and express myself freely.
You de-converted and became an atheist in 2007. What were the major reasons, arguments, evidence, and experiences for the de-conversion?
I had finished University where I acquired my BA in Linguistics and Modern Languages and I had made lots of friends in the expat community. At the time, I had come to realise that I had certain views such as feminism that a lot of Ghanaian men were not interested in due to cultural and religious reasons so I seemed to connect well with foreigners. Dating a Serbo-Croatian then, I became familiar with the Eastern European community in the Capital, Accra.
I came to realise that most of them were non-religious as most people from Europe tend to be including my partner although they were baptised in the Orthodox church. I also started to notice that whenever I made religious statements, there would be a short awkward silence and a change in topic. I felt then that I was not doing my job properly as a Christian if I could not teach them about the Word of God and pass on the teachings of Christ. It was at this juncture that I set on a personal course to do objective research on the origins and importance of religion, especially Christianity, in order to properly inform my friends about it. We had Satellite TV then as well so I gave more attention to programs on channels like the HISTORY channel, which at the time showed objective documentaries on the life and times of Jesus Christ and the origins of the Bible.
This was eye-opening because all my life, I had watched the same type of movies and documentaries which were shown every Sunday and especially on Christian Holidays, but those ones had certain relevant information left out of it and they also did not give archaeologically documented information so came my first ‘shocks’. I also watched the Discovery and National Geographic channels for scientific documentaries on evolution the possibilities of life on other planets and these baffled me further because I had been taught to believe in only Creationism and I did not know there was another way of explaining how humans exist. At that point, I had not gotten any information to preach with and I had no one to talk to about my findings.
I went through stages of grief, disappointment, sadness, anger, and finally stopped going to church. Even when I stopped going to church I felt that God would strike me with lightning for disobeying him or ‘betraying’ him, but as time went by and nothing bad seemed to happen, my fear lessened. I did not know how to explain it to my family and friends. So for years, I kept my non-belief to myself and gave excuses for not attending church and sometimes hoped that I could be proven wrong with my non-belief so I could go back to worshipping God but that time never came.
You studied French at the University of Ghana for a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Modern Languages (French and Spanish). Was this education assistive in personal and professional pursuits during postsecondary education and post-graduation?
Yes, it was. Actually, at the time, the University of Ghana did not give much room for choice by students. They mostly took subjects you excelled in from High School and gave you subjects in that field to study and since I passed exceptionally in English, French and Geography, I was given the Language subjects. I grew to enjoy Linguistics which was a social science program and it interested me greatly as its history taught me a lot about who we are as humans and how far we have come in terms of communication in our development as a species.
I studied various courses in pragmatics, phonetics, syntax, linguistics in Ga (my local language) and Linguistics in English. In Spanish, history and literature formed a big part of our studies and French grammar as well. As Ghana is the only Anglophone country in Africa completely neighboured by Francophone Countries, it became integral that I learnt it as it could get me a long way in the job market although I never really used it much in my career. It came in handy in translating for visiting clients, contractors. I loved studying Spanish for the love of it and linguistics helped me in my career as an administrator in creating and reviewing company documents. I speak 3 local languages and knowing 3 more foreign languages came in handy in my social life meeting people from all over the world.
How did you become an activist?
I became active in activism after joining the Humanist Association of Ghana. I gained confidence to ‘come out’ then as atheist and I wanted to help share what I knew now just as I was as a Christian but this time, based on evidence. I also realised how religion was destroying my country and continent due to ignorance, lack of education, and human rights abuses, and I felt I had to do something to help change things for the better. I felt that if I knew of an alternative to the dogmatic teachings I was given, I might have been atheist earlier and maybe, I could give someone else the opportunity to be a freethinker, which I was never given.
Were parents or siblings an influence on this for you?
My family had no idea that I would turn out to be atheist/humanist. I used to know that my uncle (father’s brother) who moved to the USA over 40 years ago was a deist by then, but never got the opportunity to discuss it with him until now. My sister’s godmother was also a German atheist, but it was never discussed perhaps because I felt it would be rude.
My sister left the Catholic church to become an Evangelical youth prayer group member while I was turning atheist. It was not until 2 years later that she became atheist. Even though we are so close and tell each other everything, it wasn’t until 3 years after her de-conversion that I got to hear about her story during a HAG group meeting. I definitely had no influence from Family. The best they helped was by giving me a good education and logical reasoning skills.
Did you have early partnerships in this activist pursuit? If so, whom?
Not really. I did not know about humanism until after I joined the Freethought Ghana group from which HAG came. Once I was introduced to it and I was able to recognise that humanism describes my personal philosophy of life, I began to identify as a humanist. The group then organised the 1st ever West African Humanist Conference in 2012 and after learning what steps other groups across the West African region were taking, we started to realise the importance of organising and formalising our group from a social group to an activist group.
The conference also gave the group the opportunity to meet other groups and their representatives that are working on humanitarian projects on human rights activism such as now Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Honourable Mrs. Nana Oye Lithur who spoke to us on the LGBT situation in Ghana at the time, Mr. Gyekye Tanoh of 3rd World Women’s rights group, Mr. Leo Igwe a renowned African humanist from Nigeria who was then doing his research in Ghana on Witchcraft accusations in the Northern region for his PhD in Germany and other humanist groups from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. They gave us an insight on what they had been doing and gave us ideas from which HAG was inspired to join in.
Do you consider yourself a progressive?
Yes, I do. I am of the view that as a humanist who bases her ideas and decisions on logical reasoning and human value, I have had to rethink a lot of negative dogmatic beliefs, superstitions, and culture. I believe that Ghana, and Africa as a whole, is knee deep in ignorance and social dogma, and that is why we remain undeveloped for the most part. I love my country and my people of various tribes and cultures and for that, the need to create a better future for our next generations urges me on to fight age-old systems that stagnate our progress as a people.
Does progressivism logically imply other beliefs, or tend to or even not at all?
Progressivism, in my opinion, has not got to do with any belief in the supernatural or deities. There has been no proof of that and so moving forward for me, would mean totally discarding those beliefs and critically thinking of ways people can create better systems of living as a civilised nation that takes into account the responsibility of the well-being of its people.
However, I personally believe also that people have their right to association as enshrined in our constitution and therefore, need to have their rights respected but monitored so that its members and the general public are not badly affected by negative religious practices that would infringe on their rights. Rather, the religious can also be freethinkers with progressive views using religion as their source of inspiration.
How did you come to adopt a socially progressive worldview?
Personally, I have always been progressive since I was young. I was a member of the Wildlife club and Girl Guide Association since Junior High School and in Senior High School, I became President of the Wildlife Club of my school as well as held the position of Public Relations Officer of the Student & Youth Travel Organisation (SYTO) in 2002. With these organisations, I advocated for the rights of animals and the plight of near-extinct species, the rights of girls, participated in various donations and awareness campaigns such as HIV/AIDS and Breast Cancer.
I believe that becoming atheist made me more aware of my passions and my part to play in advocacy and the promotion of human rights based on the realisation that there is no one and no god to help us other than ourselves as people.
Why do you think that adopting a social progressive outlook is important?
It is very important since our lives and our well-being depend on the environment and the kind of society we are in. Having bad cultural practices, harmful traditions, and laws could lead us backwards rather than providing us with a bright future for ourselves and the next generations around the world. I have grown to witness and live with hearing cases of child abuse at homes and in schools, seeing child trafficking on my streets, the handicapped begging, the mentally ill left naked to roam the streets, people dying of diseases that could have been prevented or cured, the loss of trust in policing and the judicial system and the effects of bad governance, bribery, and corruption on a populace.
People are growing ever so desperate that they are falling for the con of others using religion as a means of using them for their sexual perverted desires and money. Poverty is driving people to abandon their loved ones or accuse their own mothers of witchcraft in order for them to be put to death or banished from their communities for life. It is important that we do away with these in our societies as we have come to know better and rather look to our past which in the Akan language has a term called “Sankofa” which teaches us to learn from our past to build a better tomorrow.
As a progressive, what do you think is the best socio-political position to adopt in the Ghana?
A major investment into Ghana’s educational system and the review of our school curriculum. Almost all government and private schools are influenced or owned by religious institutions and they dictate what should and should not be taught to our children. It is in schools that major indoctrination starts and stifles freethinking in children. It is also there that teachers are given a right to beat up children to enforce ‘god’s will’ of the “spare the rod, spoil the child’ culture. If our educational system is revamped as our 1st President, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, a humanist himself, started and envisioned it to be, Ghana could have a well-educated and empowered workforce to develop the country in all the other sectors.
I attended the first University built by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, The University of Ghana.
You became a member of the Humanist Association of Ghana (HAG) in 2012. You helped organised the first ever West African Humanist Conference (2012), which was sponsored by the International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organisation (IHEYO). What tasks and responsibilities come along with volunteering and organising for the HAG?
At the time, our group was quite small but vibrant.
It was an exciting time to meet other Ghanaian atheists and agnostics and we were very pleased that IHEYO would entrust us with organising such a big event despite us being so new as a group. We did not have any formal leadership or an Executive Committee at the time so most of this was planned by volunteering members especially Graham Knight who helped to bring us together and started the Freethought Ghana group. I was then working for an Australian Mining Company out of Accra so I made myself available to attend and help with last minute preparations like picking up delegates from the airport to their hotel and vice versa after the event.
During the event, I volunteered to be at the information desk where I helped to register attendees, distribute pamphlets, notebooks, pens and provide drinking water. I also took it upon myself to film the conference since the funds were not enough for photo and video services. I also represented the group for interviews by local and international media. To be a volunteer, to me, is about helping however, wherever and whenever you can. Whether financially, using your skills or socially, any help at all goes a long way to achieve a successful event and team effort makes it even more motivating, fun and organised.
In Ghanaian culture, what are some of the more effective means to teach critical thinking within the socio-cultural milieu?
Ghana is made up of a culturally diverse population. It consists of roughly 100 linguistic and cultural groups. These groups, clans and tribes, although very different from each other, have certain similarities in various aspects of their culture. In Ghana, a child is said to be raised by the whole village rather than just the nuclear family. Traditionally, information was passed on from generation to generation mainly through song and dance. However, in modern days, education not only begins from home but in schools, mainstream media such as TV, radio and religious institutions. As humanists, our focus has been with the youth in schools and social media.
What about modern scientific ideas?
Most of the understanding of things around us are taught from home by parents and extended family members who usually pass on what they learnt from their elders. This is mostly dogmatic and superstitious rather than scientific even though the end result is meant to educate. Educational institutions are good grounds to teach modern scientific ideas. Ghana can boast of some of the best science institutions such as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology as well as research centres such as the Noguchi Memorial institute.
We also have some of the most renowned Medical Teaching hospitals in the West
African region such as the Komfo Anokye and Korle-Bu Teaching Hospitals. Ghana
has the only Planetarium in West Africa which is 1 of only 3 on the continent,
which HAG members patronise and promote. There are also science programmes and
quiz competitions amongst schools on TV.
What are the main barriers to teaching critical thinking and modern scientific ideas?
Lack of infrastructure, dedicated science teachers who are poorly paid, medical personnel and government interest has made our science sector struggle as compared to more developed countries. The average Ghanaian sees science as more theoretical and career-specific than practical. The understanding of science is seen mostly as a ‘Western’ construct than a global one. This could have stemmed from the fact that most modern inventions known to us came from Europe and the USA.
As a Ghanaian and African, what seem like the positives and negatives of religion
and religious fervour on individuals and communities in Ghana and Africa in
general?
Using the major religions like Christianity, Islam and Traditional worship, the positives of religion are that they give a sense of community, feelings of love, boosts self-esteem and gives hope and inspiration. The negatives however, are countless. Many of which include spiritual leaders taking advantage of people financially and sexually, having delusional thoughts out of superstition and religious indoctrination, self- loathing, and guilt from unnecessary thoughts, a sense of false hope, illogical reasoning, lazy attitudes towards work and charity, a false sense of entitlement, mandates to abuse yourself and others most of which turn out to be fatal, etc.
What big obstacles (if at all) do you see social-progressive movements facing at the moment?
1. Lack of governmental/State support
2. Lack of funding or insufficient funds
3. Mismanagement of funds
4. Lack of public support
5. Inadequate and outdated rules of law
6. Insufficient legal backing and law enforcement
How important do you think social movements are?
Social movements are very important especially in 3rd world countries in being the voice of the people and putting pressure on government and the people to review and approve the living conditions of people and the state of affairs of a country and its environment in the best interest of everyone. This is because despite democracy being adapted as a system of rule in most African countries, most of the time, cultural, traditional and religious biases steer the governments in the wrong direction and also because most of the countries may not have enough funding to care for its citizens and infrastructure.
In November, 2015, you became President of the HAG and in July, 2016, the Chair of the IHEYO African Working Group. What do these elected-to positions mean to you?
In the beginning of joining the humanist movement, I honestly never really saw myself as a leader. I just wanted to contribute my quota. However, I started to realise I had it in me to do great things for my group when I wrote my first article and got the most hits online! I received over 200 comments within days of posting it.
Most of the comments were negative but I felt I had left a mark and got people thinking. It also got the group recognised. I was recommended to IHEYO for a position as Secretary of the African working group in 2014 and at the time, I did not have much on my portfolio as an activist so I was so surprised and over-the-top excited when I got the news that I had been elected by international humanists who barely knew me from a record number of nominations!!! I was grateful that they read through my nomination and entrusted me with the position, which I held for 2 years.
I took it very seriously and had a lot of guidance from the IHEYO EC whose President was Nicola Jackson. I saw how long the working group had been dormant, and so many things I could do to bring it to life and so many ideas started coming to me. I increased social media presence on our Facebook page for the African Working Group and membership increased from 12 to 183 members within 2 years (It is now over 230). I also started a new Twitter page, @IheyoAfwg, with 130 followers including local and international humanists and humanist organisations. I helped create a network of African humanists and humanist organisations that are in regular communication via email, skype and WhatsApp and I discovered several African humanists and organisations that I am in constant contact with to advise and guide.
In December 2014, I together with the Humanist Association of Ghana, hosted the 2nd West African Humanist Conference (WAHC), sponsored by HIVOS and IHEYO. Please see below for links to the videos of the 2-day event which was aired live online setting a record for my group: Day 1 — Day 2– I founded the HAGtivist podcast project and started it with other volunteering members of HAG.
I had been a contributor to the IHEYO newsletter Youthspeak personally and from various member organisations in Ghana and Nigeria, and I represented the working group at the recently held General Assembly (GA) in Malta this year. I was part of the team that helped to organise the first ever continent-wide humanist conference held in Kenya called the African Humanist Youth Days (AHYD 2016) in July. This year, I knew that if I won the election as Chair, there would be so much more I could do to lead the Working group and despite a new resolution to have only Working group MOs voting this time, I came out victorious once again.
I am grateful to my fellow African humanists for their support and belief in me. It was on the same day I also received news of our election from HAG that I had also gained the position from Interim President in November 2015 to President elect in July 2016. It was truly humbling that my work was recognised and my fellow members had given me the responsibility of representing our group of highly intelligent, creative and wonderful people. These 2 positions come with the responsibility of representing Africa positively, dedicating a lot of time and resources, being passionate, bold, charismatic, firm, principled, professional, discerning, and diplomatic.
I believe that history is to be made this time round with young African humanists, and I am really happy to have the opportunity to be one of the ones at the forefront of change at this time setting a foundation for generations to come.
Who are personal heroes within the culture?
Historically, there are many personalities that are celebrated in Ghana. Some of my personal heroes are Yaa Asantewaa, an Ashanti Queen mother who, in 1900, led the Ashanti rebellion known as the War of the Golden Stool, also known as the Yaa Asantewaa war, against British colonialism. Her courage and bravery for a woman of her time inspires me.
Our first President of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah is also one of the most renowned figures in Africa. He was born in a small village in Ghana and was able to finish his education in 1 of the most prestigious institutions in the world at Oxford University, returned home a humanist and fought for Ghana’s independence from the British, making Ghana the 1st African country to be free from colonial rule in 1957. He was able to transform Ghana by providing us with our first and largest Hydroelectric dam, free basic school education, universities, science centres, Highways, our only International airport, our biggest port, etc. which we enjoy to this day.
In modern times, I have come to admire the work of our current
Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur. Although
Christian, even before her Ministerial appointment, as a Lawyer, she has helped
fight for the rights of the LGBT community despite serious opposition, worked
Pro bono to solve many domestic cases especially those against women and
children and is working tirelessly through her Ministry in assisting alleged
witches banished from their communities.
What is your favourite scientific discovery ever?
Electricity! It forms such an integral part of modern day living that I cannot imagine where we would be without it.
What philosopher(s), or philosophy/philosophies, best represent your own views about aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and politics?
I do not follow any philosophers in particular because I have not read about any. Instead, various documentaries have helped shape my thoughts on various aspects of life. I am a lover of nature, science and art. I am not interested much in politics and I derive my ethics from logic, constant research and debates amongst friends and members of HAG.
Who seem like the greatest anti-scientific representatives in Ghana?
Religious leaders!
What about the greatest anti-scientific and anti-humanistic movements within Ghana?
Ghana’s greatest enemy in the progress of science and technological advancement is religion. It is the only and greatest barrier because it allows for so much wrong to go on with little or no opposition. From faith healing, false prophecies, work ethics, illogical theories, women’s oppression, authoritarianism, human rights abuse, bribery and corruption, etc. Ghana is highly religious in the sense that everything that happens is attributed to a deity or superstition or both! If something good happens, it is “By His (God’s) grace”, if something bad happens, it is “God’s will” or “the devil’s work” or “a bad spirit” or “angry ancestors”. It is almost impossible to argue with people no matter how educated because of this train of thought.
Religion is not a private matter as most religious countries practice. Here, it is allowed everywhere and anyone who stands in the way of their ideology or spiritual leader is an enemy of progress to them. Most homes force relatives to pray at odd hours loudly and some go on the streets at midnight to pray or preach. In the public buses, herbal medicine traders who also double as Christian pastors are allowed to stand and preach for hours during the journey. At work, highly religious entrepreneurs and Managers force employees to sing and pray before and after work. All official meetings and occasions, private or public begin and end with a prayer. Our entire lives are circulated around prayer and worship of one deity or another. There is little space for intellectual conversations and critical thinking.
What can external associations, collectives, organisations, and even influential individuals, do to assist you in your professional endeavours in Ghana?
I implore all external associations, collectives, organisations to partner with legitimate, active organisations here especially HAG. I advise that not only should they support the work of HAG, but also keep following up on our work. You may support the activities of HAG through bringing in substantive ideas, financial aid, materials such as books, clothes, Resource persons, promoting our activities on social media and mainstream media and influential people can also visit to help promote our work and start fundraising campaigns that would be widely reached.
International women’s empowerment, equality, and rights are important to me. What is the status of women regarding empowerment, equality, and rights in Ghana?
I am very happy to be born at a time when women empowerment is starting to benefit the masses. However, there are several factors that are hampering empowerment and gender equality in Ghana, which include Cultural and religious beliefs. I wrote an extensive articleregarding this issue in March 2016.
Can humanism improve the status of women in Ghana more than traditional religious structures, doctrines, and beliefs?
Most definitely it can! This is because, humanism emphasises the value of all human beings regardless of gender and promotes wellbeing of people whereas religion and superstition creates an illusion of differences between the gender making men feel superior than women. Humanism also brings about a sense of selflessness and working to better the lives of the deprived in society which are mostly women.
Thank you for your time, Roslyn.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/14
Angel Sumka is the President of the Alberta Sex Positive Centre. Here we talk about sex culture in Alberta.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the current sex culture in Alberta?
Angel Sumka: Sex culture in Alberta is a mix of positive and negative. Alberta has a very diverse and rich population when it comes to gender, gender expression, and sexuality, yet we are still the province with the highest increase in cases of syphilis and gonorrhea, which may indicate some sex-negative values related to stigma and sexual risk profiles. That said, Alberta has many sex-positive organizations that provide services, countless groups that meet to discuss sex positive topics or enjoy sex positive entertainment/gatherings, and our universities appear to be working towards supporting consent culture. It is not perfect, but it is exciting to be part of the growth of sex-positive culture in our province!
Jacobsen: What was the sex culture in Alberta?
Sumka: That is a very complex question that depends on what we count as sex culture. On the surface, it may seem as is Alberta was a very repressed culture. Our sex education was (and still is to a large extent) lacking in providing accurate and shame-free information to youth, our government was slow to recognize same-sex marriages, and attitudes about sex, sexuality, and gender often seemed to indicate a reticence to acknowledge that sex is about pleasure, that gender is a social construct used to oppress individuals and society in general, and that risk reduction measures are worthy of support. Under that fairly grim surface, however, there is and always has been an active sexual underbelly. Steamworks, for example, has been around for a long time, as have other clubs and organizations that create opportunities for people to explore their sexuality.
Jacobsen: What are some ongoing initiatives of the organization regarding positive sex culture?
Sumka: ASPECC has, and continues to, offer workshops, written literature, presentations and gatherings for individuals and groups to learn about sex, sexuality, gender, and alternative lifestyles. We host workshops on bondage, consent, ethical communication for sex, transgender topics, sex-positive parenting -you name it. We are always working on developing our content and facilitating other presenters on topics that are within their expertise/experience. We also host the consensual play space at the Edmonton Taboo show, where attendees can come watch BDSM related demonstrations and learn about the local communities and how consent works within these lifestyles.
Jacobsen: What seems like the positive trends for positive sex culture in Alberta?
Sumka: There does seem to be an increase in consent culture, which is very exciting! We are also seeing many changes to our educational system, such as the mandates regarding Gay-Straight Alliances and changes to the sex education curriculum; and increase in organizations that are focusing on supporting persons who face challenges due to sexuality and/or gender, with many addressing the intersectionality of sexual oppression.
Jacobsen: Would have been some of the bigger successes in the progression of this trend?
Sumka: Some of the successes, as mentioned above are the implementation of GSA’s, the protection for children who are gender variant and/or queer, and the development of programs that target homeless youth who are queer. The inclusion of consent and the increased scrutiny that universities are facing is also things to celebrate, although we have a long way to go still.
Jacobsen: Would have been some honest failures in this movement as well?
Sumka: A huge failure would be the way in which our legal system addresses sexual assault and sexual harassment. Until drastic changes are made to how such cases are handled we are not likely to see a decrease in gender-based intimate violence.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved in terms of donations? How can they volunteer their time and skills?
Sumka: Donations and sponsorship are welcome. If you are interested in sponsoring the community center we are working towards the opening, you can contact us at info@aspecc.ca. Donations can be made through our webstore (see www.aspecc.ca). Volunteers are also greatly valued! We are always looking for people to help with a wide variety of projects and tasks. We have a volunteer application on our website or you can email to have one sent to you.
Jacobsen: Any final thoughts or feelings?
Sumka: Sex positive culture is not about encouraging promiscuity, but about removing the shame from sex, gender, and sexuality. We believe that consensual sexual activity is healthy and that every individual has the right to know about their body and to learn not just about diseases and risks but to learn about pleasure and how to talk about sex in a way that is consensual.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/13
According to Nathan Fung of The Gateway, the next convocation at the University of Alberta will not mention God, whatever that one happens to be or whoever they happen to be, but, rather, the community will be the target of service. As in, you serve your community rather than your personal god.
The General Faculties Council at the University of Alberta, which is the highest body for academic governance, approved, or passed, the changes to the convocation admission. As an undergraduate student, I find this intriguing as a development, as this has been something of discussion in elementary and secondary schools in sectors of the country. The conversation around the level of the secularization of the schools or, more properly, the level of one or other religion’s privileges over other religions/irreligion, or most/all religions educational privileges over the irreligious.
That being, the secularization of the educational system at the first two recognized tiers, primary and secondary. Now, apparently, this is another instance in the long march towards further secularization at the post-secondary, or tertiary, level now.
Intriguing.
The original phrasing in this convocation speech was “to serve your God,” which in a majority Christian adherent nation makes sense, but, with the decline in the numbers of the religious, the questions begin to arise with the increase in the irreligious – those with no religious affiliation – throughout the nation, as well as the reduction in the markers of faith (e.g., religious attendance, in the secondary beliefs, and so on), “Why have ceremonial reference to gods or a God? What if this was the hope of much of the student population but not a significant minority of them, say lower double-digit percentages? Why not have the university or college be neutral in its convocation on religion in the first place?”
Now, the phrase is “to serve your community for the public good.” That seems fair. I would commend Chancellor Doug Stollery for doing so, whether religious or not. It is a public good and community life statement, so the University of Alberta becomes a neutral player on religion at least in its convocation reference.
It seems similar to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada with God’s supremacy stated in the Preamble (Government of Canada, 1982). Why not remove it, even if only symbolic, for neutrality of the state on matters of faith? If not, does one argue the state remain preferential in matters of faith? If so, why? (und so weiter…)
It also seems like the tide of history for advanced industrial nations with highly educated populaces such as Canada. Religion becomes more personal, which I respect, and less socially, culturally, and educationally leaned-to in terms of privileges, which I observe as a loose historical heuristic – especially for education.
Stollery said, “A very important value of the university is inclusivity…that includes inclusivity of students of all faiths and students of no faith.” That seems fair to me, too.
Prior to 1999, the religious statements were, in essence, basic statements of allegiance: “for the glory of God and the honour of your country.” This was changed into: “for all who believe, to serve your god,” To top it off, the convocation began with a prayer with a call for blessings from the, at the time, chancellor of the University of Alberta.
That will be replaced with a call for the celebration of community and no prayer. Less than two decades to go from prayer, blessings, and the “glory of God” to no prayer and simply serving the community. That’s the rapid trend towards secularization.
References
Fung, N. (2017, October 8). Convocation speech changed to be more secular. Retrieved from https://www.thegatewayonline.ca/2017/10/convocation-speech-changed/.
Government of Canada. (1982). Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Retrieved from http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/12
Ian Bushfield, M.Sc., is the Executive Director of the British Columbia Humanist Association (BCHA). The BCHA has been working to have humanist marriages on the same plane as other marriages in the province. Here we talk about it.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did humanists not acquire legal equality for their marriages in British Columbia, Canada in the first place while others have the marriage equality?
Ian Bushfield: The Marriage Act in BC governs who gets to perform marriages. It delegates that responsibility to the head of Vital Statistics. When we applied in 2012 to be able to perform marriages, that person decided that our group didn’t qualify as a religion for the purposes of the Act.
We’re not so convinced by his reasoning though. He argued that we describe ourselves as “an alternative to religion” in one of our governing documents but just because a bicycle is “an alternative to a car” doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid way to get to work. He also says we have no dogma, but the same is true of many other religious groups that are registered, such as the Unitarians, many spiritualist churches, and a metaphysical ministry.
Jacobsen: Is this an inequality across the country, all provinces and territories?
Bushfield: As far as we’re aware, Ontario is the only province that allows Humanists to perform marriages. This is particularly frustrating as the Ontario Marriage Act is nearly identical to BC’s. It just happened to be that one bureaucrat there said yes while ours said no.
We know that the Quebec Humanists ran into the same stonewall as we did when they requested approval from their provincial government. They even failed to bring a human rights complaint against the government as their Human Rights Commission ruled that Humanism isn’t a religion for the purposes of human rights protections! This leaves atheists without human rights in Quebec.
Jacobsen: What makes a humanist marriage different than, say, a theologically-based marriage?
Bushfield: Simply put, it’s a lack of god in it. A Humanist marriage is based on a celebration of the people involved – the couple, their families and their friends. It’s entirely personalized around the values of the couple and seeks to celebrate that coming together. It’s more of a bottom-up commitment than one given approval from on high.
Jacobsen: As the executive director of the BC Humanists Association (BCHA), how effective has the petition for inclusion in the Vital Statistics of the province of BC been for the BCHA (BCHA, 2017a; BCHA, 2017b)?
Bushfield: Our petition, which currently has just over 500 signatures, has been invaluable in helping us raise public awareness of this issue. We’d hoped it would have a greater effect on the Government, which has continued to dismiss our concerns, but we’re just going to have to keep on building a movement as we take this campaign forward.
Jacobsen: Why did you decide to target the Health Minister and the provincial Vital Statistics?
Bushfield: Vital Statistics is the department in charge of who gets to perform marriages and they’re a branch of the Ministry of Health. After our rejection by Vital Statistics, it seemed clear to me that we weren’t likely to argue a different result from them. Instead of appealing to court (which is still an option), we hoped the new government might be willing to direct the Agency to open the door to our Association.
Jacobsen: What is the next step?
Bushfield: We still have a couple options moving forward. First, we’re going to keep trying to put pressure on the Ministry to allow us to be registered through an internal directive. There’s no definition for religion in the Act, so we contend that the Minister can simply direct Vital Statistics to adopt a broader definition of religion, in line with Ontario’s, for example. If that fails, we’ll look to start building a legal case in case we need to launch a constitutional challenge. And at the same time, we’ll start reaching out to MLAs to see if any might be willing to bring forward an amendment to the Act.
In any case, we’re going to continue to need supporters – both signatures on our petition and donors to help make all of this happen.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Ian.
References
BCHA. (2017a, September 18). Over 500 for Humanist Marriage. Retrieved from http://www.bchumanist.ca/over_500_for_humanist_marriage.
BCHA. (2017b). Legalize Humanist Marriage in BC. Retrieved from http://www.bchumanist.ca/legalize_humanist_marriage?splash=1.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/12
There is a new course on the block on the cognitive science of religion (edX, 2017; The Ubyssey, 2017). It comes riding the wave of the Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, movement continuing to make inroads into the alternate-to-Academia educational route, i.e. more affordable, more points of intake, more variation in content depth and course length, and so on.
The host of the course is edX while the material is taught by Dr. Azim Shariff from the University of California, Irvine (University of California, Irvine, 2017). I have been a scholar there. It is a lovely campus and community. Dr. Edward Slingerland also is part of the course (The University of British Columbia, 2017). They’r basically asking, “So why do some believe, have faith that is, and others do not?”
The funding is coming from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Slingerland said that the course uses “the tools of cognitive science and evolutionary theory to explore and understand religious behaviour and belief.”
The assumption, or primary premise, in the course is naturalism. If granted as the premise, then the rest of the course, at least according to the descriptions, follow from it.
There are views on the functional utility of religion, for survival in an evolutionary perspective. Some see it as a means of social control, as per the social control hypothesis, which “posits that religion has historically been controlled by social elites who trick the populace into contributing resources for their own gain” (The Ubyssey, 2017).
Professor Daniel Dennett posits that religion is an invasion of the mind, of sorts, where the cultural abstraction has a neurobiological parallel in the real world, in the brain (Tufts University, 2017). That religion is this points to the idea of the phenomena – religion – as a virus that attacks the mind: hijacks it.
After sufficient ‘hijacking’ of the mind, the host of the virus of religion goes about for the propagation of the idea, akin to memes from Dr. Richard Dawkins – the most prominent of the New Atheists’ ‘Four Horseman’, to other suitable hosts: other human beings – so the theory goes.
Another idea is that it is a means of anxiety reduction through a strong sense of agency – so to speak – with religion giving that sense of control over our lives. I suppose this may implicate not even necessarily concrete ideas but simply notions of freedom of the will, or free will.
If you remove the tacit premise of naturalism, the longstanding view is that, in general, one’s religion is true, so the benefit may come from having the correct belief, or justified true belief in the theological phraseology.
The cognitive science of religion course views religion in the naturalistic frame, as a social benefit:
Grand temples, for example, could serve a symbolic social purpose and create solidarity among groups that could help them outcompete others, explained Slingerland. (The Ubyssey, 2017)
Alongside the social benefit view could be the impairment of the ability for theory of mind, for making natural events somehow the result of agency, by impairment in this context becomes excess theory of mind, of seeing other people as having minds but also natural events too, e.g. Poseidon and Zeus, or Yahweh in modern cases.
It seems like an interesting course. If I get the time, I may take it; if you do, please send me an email at scott.d.jacobsen@gmail.com to know what it’s like.
References
edX. (2017). The Science of Religion. Retrieved from https://www.edx.org/course/science-religion-ubcx-religionx-0.
The University of British Columbia. (2017). Edward Gilman Slingerland III. Retrieved from http://eslingerland.arts.ubc.ca/.
The Ubyssey. (2017, September 26). Massive online course from UBC investigates religion from a cognitive science perspective. Retrieved from https://www.ubyssey.ca/science/edX-course-science-of-religion/.
Tufts University. (2017). Daniel C. Dennett. Retrieved from http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/.
University of California, Irvine. (2017). People: Azim Shariff. Retrieved from http://sharifflab.com/staff/.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/08
“More than one in five countries has an official state religion, with the majority being Muslim states, and a further 20% of countries have a preferred or favoured religion.
A slim majority (53%) of counties has no official or preferred religion, and 10 (5%) are hostile to religion, according to a report by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.
Most of the 43 countries with state religions are in the Middle East and North”
“”Will God survive science?” asks the author of the blockbuster “The Da Vinci Code” and other philosophical-religious thrillers during a recent interview. “All the gods of our past have fallen. So the question now is: Are we naive to think the gods of today won’t suffer the same fate?”
His new novel is “Origin,” already a chart-topper on Amazon.com, and for Brown fans a familiar blend of travelogue, history, conspiracies and whodunit, with asides on everything from the poetry of William Blake to the rise and fall of fascism in Spain.
Brown protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, is in Spain and back in danger. A former student, Edmond Kirsch, has been assassinated just as he’s ready to unveil a scientific-technological breakthrough that he promises will bring about the downfall of Western religion and revolutionize how people think of life and death. Langdon, with the help of a prince’s wayward lover and a voice of artificial intelligence named Winston, attempts to find out what Kirsch had planned.”
Source: https://www.columbian.com/news/2017/oct/08/dan-brown-continues-probing-religion/.
“The ‘Mission of Delhi Police’ charter highlights the need for the force to discharge its duty with ‘integrity, common sense and sound judgment’ and to act ‘without fear, or favour or prejudice’. The station house officer (SHO) and a few of his colleagues forgot these objectives when they hosted controversial ‘godwoman’ Radhe Maa at a police station in east Delhi on September 28. A photograph of the ‘godwoman’ — who has been accused in at least two cases, including one of dowry harassment — sitting on the SHO’s chair, along with a video of policemen singing songs/ bhajans with her soon went viral on social media.
It is shocking and shameful that the pending criminal cases against Radhe Maa — recently, a Mumbai court rejected her application to drop her name from the dowry harassment case — did not deter the policemen from allowing her to sit on the SHO’s chair.”
“You know how it is. A newswriter comes across a really interesting item and sets it aside for a serious second look.
Then the pile of other goodies continues to grow and said item disappears amid the clutter on your desk. Weeks or months go by, you force yourself to clean up, and there it is. At this particular weblog, the GetReligionistas like to talk about finding things in their “Guilt Files.” Well, we all have them.
In just such a cleanup, The Religion Guy unearthed three set-aside articles about U.S. culture with solid story potential for fellow writers on the beat:
One more time, “Nones” explained: Writing last January 23 for the scholarly theconversation.com, Richard Flory of the University of Southern California culled current research for the five chief factors behind the recent rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans (“Nones”)”
“A Missouri woman who is an adherent of the Satanic Temple won a victory in court last week in her quest to show that state abortion law violates her religious beliefs.
The Western District Court of Appeals ruled in her favor Tuesday, writing that her constitutional challenge — rare for its basis in religion — presented “a contested matter of right that involves fair doubt and reasonable room for disagreement.”
The woman, identified as Mary Doe in court documents, argued that her religion does not adhere to the idea that life begins at conception, and, because of that, the prerequisites for an abortion in Missouri are unconstitutionally violating her freedom of religion protected by the First Amendment.”
Source: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article177663856.html.
“What is freedom of religion? It is not actually or directly freedom to think or not think religious stuff — not to the extent that one can, or chooses to, keep one’s thoughts secret. Rather, it is the right to display or to refuse to display religiosity.
If you have freedom of religion, as I think everyone should — and if we all have the right to our own lives and well-being, as I think we should — then as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you have the right to hold various things sacred: books, statues, symbols, buildings, trees, whatever. And everyone else has the right not to hold those things sacred.
In Saudi Arabia, if you do not act as if you hold certain objects and words and behaviors sacred, your life is in jeopardy.”
“IF I ASKED you what comes to mind when you hear the word “blasphemy”, what would you say? Would you think of comical scenes from Life of Brian? Or of places where religious oppression is rife?
Would you even be aware that in Ireland blasphemy is a crime that could cost you up to €25,000? If not, you’re probably about to hear a lot more about our blasphemy law. In 2018, we may be voting on repealing it.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/08
The latest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) results placed Brazil in its deepest economic level ever, according to Reuters. In 2016, Brazilian economy shrunk 3.6%, following a 3.5% fall in 2015.
The economic downturn is, allegedly, being remediated by president Michel Temer — a centre-right partisan, and his Congress through harsh austerity. The greatest measure has been imposing a federal spending cap for the next twenty years. The cap is extremely harmful for the younger generation, who is already suffering from high rates of unemployment and inflation. Professor Phillip Alston, from the United Nations, called the spending cap “socially regressive”.
The spending cap looks even more absurd when it is taken as the only measure to find austerity. The New York Times reports that Temer’s government is still refusing to apply taxes on wealth, another traditional measure in austerity rulings. In Brazil, shareholders are exempt from paying taxes on dividends — and still remain so, despite the current conditions.
When discussing the issue on the State not being able to afford food for the poor class, Legislator Pedro Fernandes actually suggested in session that the population could eat “every other day”
UN Charter Article 25(1) states, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” Who is this going to affect in the present up to 20 years from now? There has been a 20-year public spending ceiling, basically compromising the educational and health system.
As with most similar examples, and most common sense based on observation of other countries’ social strata, the usual victims of austerity in economic downturns — which worsen the downturn — are women with emphasis on single mothers, the middle and lower classes — or the working classes, and the young who are the basis for the taxation to support the retirements of the older and senior populations in many societies.
It is a easy cascade of conditionals with the catalyst being bad policy, poor implementation, and myopic self-interest among the ruling classes. Women are oppressed. The young are stifled. The poor are poorer.
The working classes are given stagnant or declining wages. If the policy put forth and implemented in the economic downturn is austerity, as it is, and if the austerity affects the usual victims of harsher economic policy, then the standard populations of women, single mothers, the young, and the middle and working class will be the most hurt by it, which will alter the situation for the chance for a decent end of life in retirement for many older people.
This has obvious intergenerational damages too. Men and women still want marriage and kids by the vast majority. Women want marriage more than previous decades as an important life goal. Austerity and economic struggles prevent healthy family formation because finances are probably the single greatest complaint between couples. Kids and marriage need money.
So if someone wants to form a family and be married, as most heterosexual men and women — who are 96.6% of the general population — have those as some of their highest ideals, secular or religious, and if the “unbelievable” devastation, predictable dissolution, of aspects of the healthcare and education system emerge from the actions in the present, then the leaders of the country have been irresponsible for the next a reasonable extrapolation for the next 20 years, so for one whole upcoming and ongoing generation of Brazilians. Of course, there are the perennial ignorant and myopic who do not see life in terms of legacy, but the vast majority want the responsible things in life.
The austerity, however, does not to apply to Brazilian leaders themselves. The economic recession and the precarious conditions of the population do not stop the politicians from enjoying the perks of being part of the government of the biggest country in Latin America; which means having abusive salaries and benefits such as monthly housing allowance, limitless medical and dental aid, extra payroll expenses and return air tickets to the capital, Brasilia.
A Brazilian MP made the suggestion that poor Brazilians might want to eat every other day rather than like normal people that prefer not be starving every day. One might assume this is akin to the gaffe of Republican politician Paul Ryan. Ryan suggested, ‘You don’t need healthcare because you have an iPhone.’ It was a recent unconscientious statement by the American politician. There’s salary increases of the leaders too.
Employees of Brazil’s Judicial branch are seeing a 41% increase in their salary. And in São Paulo, the most populous Brazilian state, Legislators voted to raise their own salary by more than 26%. To worsen the situation, the same Congress who is preparing to impose a major cut in the Brazilian pension scheme, is now offering lifelong pensions for its members after only two years in office. Real people are being affected by poor governance.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/02
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To start, are you an atheist, an agnostic, or some other non-theistic title?
Cheri Frazer: I am a lifelong atheist, 4th generation on one side of my family.
Jacobsen: What is Dying With Dignity, as a movement and organization?
Dying With Dignity Canada is the national organization committed to improving quality of dying, expanding end-of-life choices, and helping Canadians avoid unwanted suffering.
We defend human rights by advocating for compassionate end-of-life choices and by providing personal support to adults suffering greatly from a medical condition who wish to die on their own terms.
We educate Canadians about all of their legal end-of-life options, including the constitutional right to medical assistance in dying (MAID), and the importance of advance care planning. We also support healthcare practitioners who assess for or provide MAID.
We are part of a growing international movement seeking to stop suffering and help ensure peaceful deaths for people at the end of their lives.
We enthusiastically support the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Carter v. Canada, which established medical assistance in dying as a right for competent adult Canadians who are suffering intolerably as the result of a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition. We believe rules for assisted dying must, at the very least, comply with the Supreme Court’s decision and ultimately, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved in it?
Frazer: There are plenty of ways people can get involved, from running workshops to writing for our blog to witnessing applications for medical assistance in dying. Readers can visit http://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/volunteer to explore the options they’re interested in. Winnipeg announces its events here: https://dwdwinnipeg.weebly.com.
Jacobsen: What makes this movement more noble than the idea that a religious authority can determine what Canadians can do with their, arguably, most important decision of their life – how they die?
Frazer: I think that if a person subscribes to a particular religion and believes in that religion’s views on assisted dying (or dying in general), then that’s the definition of “noble” for that person. Actually, I think “dignified” is a better descriptor. In my years with the Winnipeg chapter I’ve met people from many different religions (and no religion) who support medical assistance in dying, and sometimes that support is at odds with their religion’s stated beliefs. To me, dignity comes in having your choice for your own end-of-life respected. If a Catholic person comes to me for advice on making an end-of-life plan that does not include medical assistance in dying, then I’m happy to help that person find all the answers needed. If another Catholic who believes in MAID comes to me for advice, I’d give the same advice but with one more option added. Our service is about the patient, not about forcing our personal beliefs on others—an approach I wish religious authorities would take as well.
Jacobsen: Have there been any attempts to prevent assisted dying from moving forward in Canada? How, and by who? Is it a fair series of attempts or not?
Frazer: Yes, attempts are being made to prevent MAID from moving forward, both legislatively at the federal level, and physically at “faith-based” institutions. Initially, a federal panel that was assembled to study the current law was chaired by a vocal opponent of MAID; he has since been replaced. Institutions all across Canada that call themselves “faith-based” are denying patients access to legal medical services, sometimes resulting in painful, traumatic patient transfers to different facilities, assuming there are other facilities nearby, and that those facilities will accept such transfers.
You’ve probably heard about the situation at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, where a Catholic-controlled board of directors was ‘stacked’ in order to re-vote and reverse a democratic decision among staff to allow medical assistance in dying (MAID) on the premises in certain circumstances (e.g., where a transfer would be painful or traumatic). Please note that this is not a criticism of the hospital or its staff; the staff there are dedicated professionals who provide excellent care, and the majority of them support their patients’ right to make their own health care decisions. The issue at stake is the control of hospital policy by a religious board of directors.
This is a serious issue because in our publicly funded health care system, patients frequently do not have the opportunity to choose the hospital in which they are treated. Many services are consolidated at certain sites and not offered at others – so even if a patient goes to the emergency room at the hospital of their choice, they could end up being transferred to another. Ambulances are directed to hospitals according to both service and bed availability, so in an emergency, the patient has no say whatsoever. This means that all publicly funded hospitals must be able and willing to accommodate all patients. An institution has no right to limit access to legal services to patients who have different beliefs than they do, if a publicly funded institution can claim to have “beliefs” at all.
It’s time for Canadians, the majority of whom support MAID, to speak up and demand that something change. Recently, the Pallister government required that all institutions in Manitoba that provide health care declare whether they are “faith-based” and whether they will allow assisted dying on their premises. DWDC has been gathering this information on institutions all across Canada in their “Shine a Light” project, which provides an online map of institutions near you and their policies on MAID. What’s important to note in Manitoba, that’s different from all other provinces and territories, is that no healthcare worker is required to participate; we have one central team that services the entire province. The institution doesn’t have to be involved in any way either, since the team comes to the patient.
For more detailed information on this issue, you can read DWDC’s report, “Challenges to Choice: Bill C-14 One Year Later”, found here: http://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/challenges_to_choice.
Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts?
Frazer: We stand up for the rights of the dying, the weak, and the vulnerable. We believe in a Canada that respects the rights of people who are suffering intolerably as a result of a devastating medical condition. The person — their rights, interests, and choices — is at the centre of our work.
In our society, the way we express love is to say “do everything you can to save grandma” in an emergency; but if grandma didn’t want to be saved, then that’s a cruelty rather than an act of love. Better to know each other’s wishes and values before you’re faced with a terrible decision in an emergency.
No matter what your age or health status, if you are a competent adult you should fill out an Advance Care Plan (health care directive) and discuss your values with your friends and families. Kits are available free to download from the DWD website, and two of the Winnipeg chapter members have posted ours publicly in the hopes it will help people to fill in their own answers. Please note that the kits are province-specific, so be sure to get the right one!
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/01
Bob Churchill is the Communications Director for The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), Editor of The Free Thought Report. Bob Churchill is also a trustee of Conway Hall Ethical Society and a trustee of the Karen Woo Foundation.
How did you become involved in humanism and IHEU?
I have a habit of looking at any situation and saying “Ok, but what’s the wider context, what assumptions are underlying here, what is beyond this?” The habit was deeply entrenched enough in me that I decided to study philosophy at university. So I started as a kind of curious, Enlightenment humanist, and it became a circle: the humanist impulse took me to philosophy and that sort of formalised my humanism. But of course you don’t have to be a philosopher as such to have some or all of the attitudes and ideas of humanism. I think of humanism as something lying somewhere between the level of “being an environmentalist” and “having an ideology”. Because it’s not an ideology: there’s no foundational texts or dogmas etc. And like environmentalism it is a broad attitude to a bunch of questions, yet it’s a bit more all-encompassing than “being an environmentalist”.
And professionally, my first role in humanism was at the British Humanist Association. I got for a fairly technical job there, starting in 2008 but it quickly became a broader membership role. Head of Membership and Promotion was my final title. I left in mid-2011 and approached the IHEU and basically I developed a proposal with them to support a knowledge sharing program, and I went and worked for the best part of a year alongside various Ugandan humanist projects under the banner of the Uganda Humanist Association.
As that project was nearly concluded a role was coming up in IHEU and it was a great fit because now I had organised humanism experience on two continents, at two humanist organisations about as far apart as they come in terms of practice and circumstances, but sharing that common worldview.
You are the director of communications at the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). What tasks and responsibilities come with this position?
It’s very wide-ranging. At the staff level the organisation is relatively small so it means that “communications” is a lot broader than it would be in a large NGO for example. I’m responsible for all external and internal communications of course, including web presence, also campaigns and press work, but even wider than that… this week for example we’ve launched the latest edition of the Freedom of Thought Report. This is the IHEU’s “flagship” publication examining the rights of non-religious people and discrimination against them, examining every country on the planet. I’m the Editor of the report and manage the whole project. So in recent months I’ve been managing the development of a new online platform for the report, as well as coordinating volunteers and our Member Organizations who make content contributions, and editing the final result. Right down to encoding my own footnotes into the webpages! And on Tuesday was the big launch at the European Parliament so I’d been planning the event with the parliamentary Intergroup on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and I went to Brussels and spoke on the panel there, telling everyone about the report, the findings this year, and introduced the new online system which we think sets a very high standard for civil society reports like this.
What is the overarching vision and mission of IHEU?
So, IHEU is an umbrella organisation — the “global representative body of the humanist movement, uniting a diversity of non-religious organisations and individuals.” And we want to see a world where human rights are respected and everyone is able to live a life of dignity. And of course lots of things are implied by that: we’d favour rational politics with an evidence base. I think it would be nice if humanity didn’t have to spend the next few millennia trying to geoengineer our way out of an apocalyptic feedback loop of global warming in a world where all the big animals are dead and it’s just us and the cockroaches.
Obviously those are very long-term goals though! So let me answer more practically in the near-term. IHEU works towards a rational, humanist world by building and representing the global Humanist movement here and now, supporting new and developing organisations. We promote human rights — we’re at the UN and other international bodies where as I see it very often our role is to be talking about things from a uniquely humanist perspective — there aren’t many organisations doing that in the international system which still has a lot of religious NGOs. We’re defending individual people and advancing human rights topics: LGBTI rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, against slavery, for freedom of thought, bioethical issues, religion or belief, and freedom of expression. Obviously in principle any ethical and human rights topic you can think of a humanist might care about, we do strategically focus often on issues that others are less keen to talk about: We call it out when religion is used to justify violence and human rights violations, we campaign against “witchcraft” accusations and abuse based on these beliefs, against child marriage, we promote secularism, and we defend the rights of the non-religious to be, to identify as, and to manifest non-religious views.
The Freedom of Thought Report looks into the discrimination against the non-religious. One pressing sentence says that “…there are laws that deny atheists’ right to identify, revoke their right to citizenship, restrict their right to marry, obstruct their access to or experience of public education, prohibit them from holding public office, prevent them from working for the state, or criminalize the expression of their views on and criticism of religion.” Of these, what seems like the greatest form of discrimination against the non-religious?
Interesting question! I think that one way or the other all of these things are human rights issues — remember any kind of discrimination like this is bound up in the human rights framework. So I’m reluctant really to prioritise between them, and this really isn’t just a cop-out. I think it’s a good rule of thumb for advocates of human rights that you shouldn’t be prioritising between them because in principle they’re all basic, and in the right context a denial of the right can be devastating. It would be tempting to say that something like the last one is most important because if you restrict free expression you can’t do anything else, that’s quite a common response and makes a kind of sense. But equally, what if you live in a state where you can’t legally say “I dissent from religion, I’m an atheist”, then you can’t even begin to speak. If the state says you’re second class by denying the right to attain certain offices or to register a certain way or marry who you want, then again there’s a sense in which you’re potentially deterred from even thinking about developing your thinking in certain directions.
In human rights language they are “indivisible” and “interdependent”. And I don’t think that’s some dogma. I think it really is the case, logically speaking, that when you deny one real human right you weaken other parts of the whole framework at the same time. I know a lot of people look at human rights and just think, “Well it’s all just a big convention, it’s not written in the sky or in our DNA that we have these rights,” and of course that’s right — but there’s nevertheless an objective component to them. They do map onto real human needs and desires (in that sense they kind of are written into our DNA!) inasmuch as the contravention of these rights must represent a frustration of our preferences, our aspirations, or our health or our very lives in some cases. So for anyone who thinks human rights do not, broadly speaking, map some realities of the human condition, I would say they should think about which human rights exactly they’d be prepared to just disown for themselves. (And of course, they can’t just reject their own rights because that’s what we mean by “inalienable!”)
The reports note the more somebody has more education and more income then their religiosity declines. What seems to be the reason for this link?
We point this out in the context of global secularisation and how it links to development trends, the point being to show that there are lots of non-religious people in the world and that the number is growing. Again, defending human rights isn’t a numbers game, it doesn’t matter in a sense if there’s only one atheist in a country or a million. Nevertheless, it’s worth explaining, especially to those in countries where there’s a kind of pretence that no one within their borders is a “non-believer”, that actually they’re wrong about that and that many people are just being efficiently silenced by a combination of social taboo and oppressive laws.
On the reason for the correlation: I’m sure you’d get ten different answers from ten anthropologists. But I’ll bite and speculate that individual security is a big part of it. I think most research that links higher religiosity to trends like education and wealth are ultimately about wealth inequality and social instability and the increased risk of early death and so on. It would be trite though to simply say that religion is “just a crutch” for people who are insecure in some sense. There’s always more going on than that, but personal security does seem to play a big role.
I do think we have to be careful with all research like this. and ask questions of it: Is it that education makes you smarter and therefore atheism is smart and religion is stupid? Or is it that education means you’re formally instructed in such a way that you’re more likely to acquire non-religious views? There’s also research that finds atheists aren’t as “happy” as theists — So, is that just because theists tend to have one more social network (based around their religion)? Or are religious people more likely to lie that they’re contented? Or is the atheist just more realistic about the world? To be clear, I’m not saying “We’ll never know!” and that all research like this is worthless, by the way. I’m just saying it’s complicated, we should be super cautious about reading too much into any social survey results like this, and most of all to avoid the temptation to homogenize huge groups of people, especially if there’s any chance it makes us feel superior in any way.
The violations against humanists comes in a black through green, grave through free and equal scale: Grave Violations, Severe Discriminations, Systemic Discrimination, Mostly Satisfactory, and Free and Equal. Why was this scale selected to describe discrimination against atheists?
The report works by looking at a whole list of boundary conditions (assessment statements really) and whether they apply to each country. Each condition has a “severity level” attached. So the terms you mention are really just labels on a scale of 1 to 5. It’s meant to give a general idea of how severe the problems are. At the level of what we call Systemic Discrimination we’re talking about things like tax exemptions for religious organisations if they’re not available to non-religious analogues, we’re talking about control of some public services by religious groups. At the level of Severe Discrimination we’re talking about things like if there’s a “blasphemy” law or similar on statute under which you could be sent to prison for criticising religion, we’re talking about serious controls on family law, like if you live in a country where as an atheist you couldn’t marry unless you lied about it — which might not at first glance seem as serious as the risk of going to prison but obviously it’s a serious impediment to living your life how you want to live it, potentially! And at Grave Violations we’re talking about for example if you can be put to death in principle for “apostasy” or “blasphemy”, if the constitution says that all laws must derive in some way from religious precepts, and of course if it’s an outright totalitarian state.
What continent is the most leaning towards Free and Equal? What continent is leaning most towards Grave Violations? Where is the global average now?
Europe, which is more secularised, certainly has a lot of good social conditions and the most “green” countries across the most thematic areas. Though it’s also got a surprising number of laws linked to old established churches and traditions that are problematic. There’s still a lot of legal discrimination that is inherent in privileging religion in general, or particular religious denominations. And there’s still a few European countries including Denmark and Germany with “blasphemy” or “defamation of religion” laws on statute punishable with a prison sentence, so they get a “Severe” rating in the free expression strand of our report.
The Middle East and North Africa clearly perform worst on our ratings and that’s because many Islamic states right now are most clearly associated with the most harsh suppression of non-religious worldviews, and are the most controlling of freedom of thought and belief generally. In fact, if you’re plotting worst countries against anything then it’s not the continent but “being an Islamic state” that is the most obvious correlating factor, I think it’s worth saying that clearly. This includes places outside of the MENA region, like Malaysia, Maldives, problems in Indonesia, and of course Southern Asia: Pakistan, Bangladesh… I’m not saying all Islamic states are as bad as each other, and I’m not saying it’s only Islamic states in the worst categories: North Korea is dominated by its own kind of enforced national cult, and China obviously is extremely restrictive and that’s the official atheist Communist party that’s doing it. But as a region, as a whole, definitely MENA; and really that’s because of so many countries where Sharia and hudud laws are enshrined under civil codes and practiced, reinforcing social taboos and threatening actual manifestations of non-religious worldviews with legal ramifications.
All the data by the way is available here, and all the individual country reports here.
Who is a personal hero for you?
A few years ago I was giving a talk about the philosophy of Karl Popper and someone said “Well he was in Europe during the war what did he do about the Nazis he just wrote books!” I have no idea why this person had come to a philosophy lecture given their attitude, by the way. And I replied “Well, as a young Jewish man he fled the Nazis and then he wrote one of the twentieth-century’s seminal works taking on fascist and totalitarian ideologies and promoting the alternative. That’s The Open Society and its Enemies. He’s always been a bit of an intellectual hero.
I’m allowed more than one hero, right? I would also say Avijit Roy. He was the first of the humanists to be killed in Bangladesh in the spate of murders of “atheist bloggers”, activists and authors in 2015. He wasn’t the first overall: there had been others previously, including the blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in 2013. It was after the events of 2013 that Avijit Roy got in touch with IHEU and other human rights NGOs and secular groups. He was desperately concerned for his friends, his peers. Ahmed Rajib Haider had been killed and his friend Asif Mohiuddin and a number of other bloggers instead of being protected by the state, the state effectively put a bullseye on them, took them through the courts and sent them to prison for “hurting religious sentiments” in their blogs. Avijit Roy was one of the first to see the real long-term danger here and I worked with him through IHEU trying to raise awareness, trying to put pressure on the Bangladesh government and make them see that by giving into Islamist demands and arresting bloggers they were only going to spur them on and end up with more and more Islamist demands, and fewer and fewer people left to speak against them. Avijit Roy himself lived in America, but he was worried about all the death threats that his friends were getting — we knew they were serious because Ahmed Rajib Haider had been cut down with a machete and now the state was effectively joining with the Islamists in silencing all the bloggers. Always Roy’s main concern was what might happen to these other young men who were writing about science, defending human rights, writing about minority ethnic groups in Bangladesh, women’s rights — it’s the same humanism you see anywhere.
Then he started to get death threats himself. He was worried about them, but he lived in America, so proportionately he didn’t seem at risk in quite the same way, but it was real cause for concern and it would be absurd to be complacent based on your geography alone today. Anyway, early in 2015 he took a trip back to Bangladesh — very much under the radar for the most part of course — but he made an appearance at the famous book fair at the university in Dhaka and they murdered him there, also seriously injuring his wife Rafida Bonya Ahmed. This would become the first of several murders of non-religious writers in Bangaldesh in 2015. All attacks by groups of men on motorbikes carrying machetes — it’s extremely brutal.
Avijit Roy is a hero because not only was he an intellectual trying to put his message into society to change it for the better, but when that came under threat he worked as hard as he could behind the scenes, reaching out to NGOs, he became a kind of informal advisor to me at IHEU for a time, he was trying to protect the humanists and human rights defenders back in Bangladesh, and then Islamist radicals took his life.
He is a hero. And Bonya as well for standing up after that attack, overcoming that horror and injury and continuing to campaign — she’s been giving talks and writing and building up the blogging platform that Roy was working with. Incredible of her to be able to come back from that kind of attack and say “I will not be silenced!”
What do you consider your highest ideals?
Kindness and empathy. Reason and truth.
I could stop there because that’s pretty much all human life, but I’ll say one more thing, about reason and truth. Rationality is about having ideas and being open to criticism. It is about truth, but it’s not about establishing and certifying statements as true, we can’t do that. Rationality means attempting to isolate truths, by being bold in creativity in the hope that you might generate some truth ideas, and then being ruthless in intellectual criticism to get rid of the errors.
Any recommended authors and books?
For philosophy, read the vastly under-appreciated Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence, and Out of Error by David Miller. They’re probably not easy to come by though.
What has been your greatest personal or professional emotional struggle?
Professionally, it must be the last few years, working with Bangladeshis under threat, in some cases seeking asylum elsewhere — in 2015 watching as one blogger after another was killed. And any time we’re able to work with someone who is a human rights defender under threat. It is gut-wrenching and a kind of torture even for those that survive. It can feel like there is nothing anyone can do, or that the things you can do are so small, but you have to try to focus on those small things, those actions you can attempt, to nurture hope, rather than despairing about what you cannot do.
Thank you for your time, Bob.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/01
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Ayahuasca?
Avery Sapoznikow: Ayahuasca is an ancient tea originating from the Amazon Basin of South America. It’s an admixture of, at a minimum, two different plants, one being a source of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a potent psychedelic compound, and the other being a source of monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs; drugs that prevent stomach enzymes from destroying DMT post-ingestion). Traditionally, Ayahuasca is made from the leaves of the Psychotria viridisshrub (DMT source) and the stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine (MAOI source). Generally Ayahuasca has been reported to cause intense distortions to normal perception, usually in the form of hallucinations or visionary experiences.. People also tend to be affected emotionally in terms of empathy and openness. Individuals have also reported interactions with what they referred to as “divine beings” or in many cases a strong female or motherly presence (often named “Mother Ayahuasca”).
Jacobsen: How has the substance been used in the past?
Sapoznikow: Ayahuasca has been used in several ways in the past. Firstly, there are formalized Ayahuasca religions such as the Santo Daime and União do Vegetal where they use Ayahuasca as religious sacrament. Secondly, Ayahuasca was used as a medicine to treat various ancient maladies and psychopathologies. Finally, Ayahuasca has simply been used to have personal visionary or spiritual experiences.
Jacobsen: How has the substance been used in Canada? Why is it used?
Sapoznikow: Use of Ayahuasca in Canada has been very limited due to the locations where the plants needed to brew the tea naturally occur. Further, DMT is a schedule I drug in both Canada and the United States so possession of the DMT is technically breaking the law. Fortunately, Canada and some US states have recognized certain Ayahuasca religions and allow them to practice and drink the tea as sacrament for religious purposes; similar to indigenous use of the peyote plant. Other than religious use, sometimes you can find shamans living in Canada who have brought some of their own materials to brew the tea themselves with them from the Amazon. These shamans host their own Ayahuasca rituals or retreats where individuals may ingest ayahuasca many times over the course of several days, for the purpose of spiritual, physiological, and psychological healing. The only other forms of use of ayahuasca would be individuals. As for why it is used, other than as religious sacrament, individuals tend to drink Ayahuasca in Canada for healing experiences as well as to experience one of the most powerful psychedelic experiences one can have.
Jacobsen: What are some of the experiences that users report? Although, the reported experience is more difficult to translate the direct experience; however, this can give an indication at a minimum.
Sapoznikow: What users experience has a lot to do with the set and setting of the experience and the individuals ingesting. What I mean by this, is that an individual’s set – their mindset, temperament, emotional state – and setting – the physical space of the experience and the other individuals present – play a huge role in how the experience unfolds. If someone is in a very dark place mentally when they use ayahuasca, the experience will likely be extremely unpleasant. They may be forced to face these issues in a state when they feel most vulnerable. This could be a healing experience or an extremely scary experience, it all depends on the individual. The shaman or ayahuasca guide also plays an important role when drinking ayahuasca as they are said to be able to somewhat direct where the experience will go with music and chants (icaros).
On the topic of translating experience into words, a year ago I conducted an archival research study on a collection of over 150 ayahuasca experience reports where individuals detailed what they experienced after ingesting ayahuasca in various contexts (i.e. with shamans, alone, in a group, etc.). For the study I had to read and edit all of these reports so I’ve a pretty solid idea of what occurs. That being said, one cannot truly understand what the experience was like unless they experienced it themselves.
Some fairly common descriptions that came up were visual hallucinations of some otherworldly “beings”, often relaying important information to the individual. There also tended to be almost entire loss of connection to reality when the dose of ayahuasca is strong enough. Conversely, there were other reports of little to no effect after drinking ayahuasca. This variance could be due to the quality of the prepared brew, the dosage of the brew, and/or the weight/size of the individual. An extremely common physiological effect of drinking ayahuasca is nausea and a reflexive vomiting sensation, which more often than not leads to actual vomiting. This is generally seen as a cleansing or purge of an individual’s being.
Jacobsen: Have you used it?
Sapoznikow: I personally have not used ayahuasca.
Jacobsen: What is the process of using it in terms of dosing, intake, and making a spiritual practice in one’s own life?
Sapoznikow: As I mentioned earlier, ayahuasca is traditionally used in a group or ceremonial context with a guide to the experience. If one wishes to use ayahuasca for any purpose, I would strongly recommend following tradition and go to an ayahuasca ceremony being run by a trained and well-experienced shaman. You’ll likely be given a cup (relative measurement, not an actual cup full of ayahuasca) of ayahuasca to drink and after 20-30 minutes if there are no effects, the shaman may deem another dose necessary. For making use of ayahuasca for spiritual exploration and practice, participating in these well-known ceremonies will surely provide an individual with a spiritual experience, given they are in the right right set and setting.
Jacobsen: What are the short-term effects on the psyche?
Sapoznikow: Some of the diverse short-term effects of ayahuasca on the psyche that have been reported include: increased happiness, feelings of inner peace, love, and empathy, and feelings of connectedness with the earth and other people. On the other end of the spectrum, people can also feel very disconnected from the world, and may experience unwanted or undesirable feelings. Again, these effects have a lot to do with the set and setting of the individual and experience and resulting outcomes.
Jacobsen: What are the long-term effects of it on the psyche?
Sapoznikow: While under the influence of ayahuasca, individuals may have had intense revelations about reality or a divine/spiritual experience where they feel as if they have spoken to or reached a higher power. This could result in profound life-changing effects in terms of behavior and personality. Few studies have been completed surrounding ayahuasca relative to other psychoactive drugs, however some studies have show associations between the ingestion of ayahuasca and reductions in substance abuse and other maladaptive behaviors. Of course, there is always the potential for negative long-term effects such as loss of sanity and exacerbation of current or initiation of underlying mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia, in those vulnerable if the proper precautions aren’t taken. Ayahuasca isn’t just the next psychedelic for people seeking a fun experience, it likely will not be “fun”, but moreso exploratory and mentally taxing. However, if it is exploration of the psyche, the potential to change views and beliefs, or to heal oneself spiritually and potentially even psychologically or physiologically, ayahuasca may be something for one to look into. I would recommend to be sure to do your own research and try to gain as much knowledge about the brew as possible before trying it, it isn’t something to take lightly.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Avery.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/30
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Can you describe the local context? What is it like where you live? Also, to fill in some more blanks, what are some misconceptions about where you live?
Bwambale Robert: Irreligiosity, where I live, is not much as religions take a large threshold in the community. I can estimate that the percentage of religious diehards goes to 80% for Christian sects, Muslims may take 10 % and surprisingly even those going to places of worship to foreign religions still practice African religion traditional practices, those who don’t believe in god or gods is a small fraction of less than 2%.
Whereas education seems to unlock doors and enlighten people about good and bad, very few believe religions were invented by the people themselves.
Many people where I live are religious, normally respect and observe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday for some traditional loyalists. The evangelical churches here open all day throughout the week as many have morning glory, lunch hour fellowships, evening fellowships and most Fridays conduct over night prayers which goes from dusk to dawn.
In this era of competition among churches, in my community, I have witnessed scores of open crusades by the Anglicans, Catholics, Evangelicals, Adventists and surprisingly traditionalists in their shrines.
For every two kilometers apart, you can easily locate a church or several churches of different denominations. In their business each one is trying to win the attention of believers, the music played has also changed, we now have versions of reggae, Rnb, Raga, pop-gospel music or song versions, and this is accompanied by real dancing. At least most churches I have gone to have invested in drums, keyboard, drum sets, guitars and music speakers.
The percentage of women in churches here outweighs that of men. Elderly people seem to be more religious. The percentage of children going to churches is also high while among the youths especially those struggling hard to earn a living seem to be boycotting going to churches. This might be attributed to their realization that the church might be using them as ladders, the behaviors of some church leaders too of committing crimes like fornication, adultery, pedophile practices, thuggery and some being arrested as con men or con women has made people alert that some mess is going on somewhere.
Some other youths seem to be fed up being told that Jesus is coming for years now and scores of them are questioning the religious leaders or groupings about things that matter to them and have not been given justifiable answers.
The high costs of living and the ability of humanity to meet the basic needs themselves have made them realize that their well-being here on earth depends on how best they work and plan for their lives. People have seen scores of people perish in floods, die in hospitals or accidents or die of hunger which are cases where god or Jesus the savior could have intervened.
A section is ignoring being religious because they see that it’s like they are being milked each other day, they see religious heads living worthwhile fulfilled lives while the majority of believers are in shacks of poverty. This annoying factor turns away believers who in the end shun religion.
Misconceptions about my work:
These misconceptions are propelled by the following:
Religious fanatics mostly leaders of the mainstream religions from the Anglican church, Catholic church, a section from American evangelical churches, some school Directors who look at my schools a potential threat in the world of competition and a few individuals who don’t wish me well economically in life
- Several people think that am satanic just because they think that being a non-believer; you have to subscribe to satanic practices.
This is a big lie because I have a feeling that Satan does not exist but I do agree that wrong acts do exist in our society and it’s our right as people to fight against them. You don’t have to be religious to fight against a wrong act.
- People think I get money from under the seas or underwater and often link me to belong to a certain group of people called “Illuminati”. Why they say so is that they fail to understand how I get money. When I take a photo with a camera, some think I am taking the photos to the witchdoctors to seek blessings.
The truth is, all my works are online and I do once in a while receive generous donations from kind people or organizations who think what I do is important for the world, it’s a pity that even those who already know I get donations, because of hate, envy or jealousy, they go on painting a bad picture so that am brought down.
- People think I will go to hell since I don’t believe in god. I think the people have no right to judge me since I live my life and if I am to go to hell as they claim, why are they bothered. The truth is neither hell nor heaven does exist since there is no proof for it. We have lost people over the ages, among them who has ever come from hell or heaven to tell us what is there?. I just think we live in a world of recycling, a world of the food chain and a world of diversity. I normally argue people to always be good, do well and avoid doing bad for it’s what makes us special.
- People think that children who study at my school are possessed by the devil, this is evidenced by some of the enemies of the school mostly bishops and pastors conducting prayers and deluding the masses that they are casting out demons in them. This is complete rubbish for my schools are as clean and tolerant to people’s beliefs, we welcome learners from all walks of life and our role is to offer knowledge, we are not devilish as they claim for I believe there are no demons.
- People think that the word BIZOHA I normally use in my projects is the kind of god I believe in, others think that am a self-proclaimed god codenamed BIZOHA. The truth is the word BI ZO HA represents three personal friends of mine whom I admired because of their good deeds and reputation in the world and generated a word from their three names as below:
BI for BIBA Kavass
ZO for Zoltan Istvan
HA for Hank Pellissier
All these three people live in the United States, one of them by the names of HANK has so far visited me three times now, Biba is a high school teacher while Zoltan Istvan is a politician, scientist, and a transhumanist.
- People think am ritualistic and that the humanism is promoting is religion. This is a total lie, Humanism is a life stance, and it’s an alternative to religion.
Jacobsen: Is Humanism is a religion or not?
Robert: Humanism is not a religion or some sort of new religion; I think it lacks the basic characteristics of religion as listed below:
A religion should have a leader, should have several sects, should perform rituals and sacrifices, should have elements of spirits or supernatural elements in its settings, should have a promise of afterlife…. paradise…… hell, should have a sacred book which believers believe in or refer to all the time, should have mediators or middlemen who connect believers with the super deity, should have a place of worship codenamed church, shrine, temple, synagogue. Should have the likes of a pyramid scheme in its setup with few people at the top and the believers at the bottom, should have elements of offerings, tithes, offertories, should have their leaders take special training and thereafter take oaths not to disclose some secrets, most dominant religions should be closely attached to global superpowers over the ages, history has it from the Roman empire, British empire, Former USSR, Arabic empire and of recent The United States of America all created religions to expand their influence worldwide.
In summary humanism, none of these shows up in humanism and this discredits it to be called a religion though like-minded individuals not interested in joining world religions do have a right to assemble and associate together in meetings like these there can’t be elements of spirits, higher powers or unjustified promises.
Jacobsen: In terms of the religion in the local area, how much authority do religious leaders have? What about secular leaders?
Religious leaders in my area have too much authority in their religious circles, secular leaders as in political circles like village chiefs; local councils and traditional clan heads have much more authority in their areas. Religious leaders here are looked at as opinion leaders and some people here still think that what they always say is the right thing.
On social functions or events, both of them are given a platform to pass a word to the locals.
Jacobsen: Is there intermingling of politics and religion? In what ways is this more subtly done?
Robert: Yes, there is a mix-up of politics and religion almost in everything. Our government set up embraces this too as the National Motto speaks it all “for god and my country”. On some occasions though political heads normally go on fooling religious leaders to stay away from mixing the two while inwardly the politicians do a great deal in corrupting religious leaders to campaign for them such that they achieve their political ambitions.
Jacobsen: What do people tend to worry about in the daily lives?
Robert:
- People tend to worry about the future of Uganda as a country which is currently under the leadership of President Museveni, things keep on changing and an imminent war is possible by those against life presidency of the current leader.
- People tend to worry about life after death after being duped by a section of religions who pedal information that there is life after death.
- People worry a lot about the current health trends, high rates of HIV/AIDS, narcotic and drug use and alcoholism is at its best among most youths and mature people.
- The locals are worried about the future of their children who are growing under harsh economic conditions, most parents hardly manage meeting the basic needs of their families, there is a high rate of teenage pregnancies, high rate of school dropouts.
- Most youths and the elite community are worried about getting jobs which is almost a national problem. There are mushrooming colleges, universities each day producing graduates who find themselves in the job market.
- Most locals especially those having homesteads are worried of the land grabbers, many of the locals traditionally owned the land and have no papers to prove the land they sit on is theirs, even acquiring those land papers with this vicious cycle of poverty looming only a few can manage to process land documents accredited by the government.
Jacobsen: How do they go about their daily and weekly worship?
Robert: In an average religious home, there is mandatory prayer each time one takes a meal thanking God for providing food and life, this means one has to make one at waking up, breakfast, lunchtime, supper time and sleeping time.
Prayers have to be made on holy days as they call it say Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday for traditionalists. Locals depending on the church one are attached to are supposed to attend worship.
Among born-again sects and mostly American evangelicals, they worship all day long with services in mornings, lunchtime and evening fellowships, night praying normally follow suit most Friday nights at some churches.
Jacobsen: How much of this is truly harmful to the lives of ordinary citizens where you live?
Robert: Even though its people’s freedom to worship or pray, I think it’s high time locals try question the beliefs they believe in. I have a feeling that religion tends to make people weaker than stronger since it creates an impression that whatever we do or get, there is always a provider who is god, who can choose to give you or not yet in my perception I think its people’s hard work or weaknesses that makes them stronger or weaker. If one works hard and calculates well his moves, you succeed, if you work hard and plan poorly; you lose so I think it’s high time people start believing in themselves.
People should be encouraged to think for themselves and come up with solutions than relying on an imaginary higher power to guide them in what they want to accomplish. This means their brains should be free from brainwashings that tend to come along with religion.
Jacobsen: How can people donate and help out?
Robert: People can donate to my initiatives via the Brighter Brains Institute whom we share with several projects under the BIZOHA Initiatives. The link to donate is:
https://www.humanistglobal.org/donate/bizoha-day-scholar-sponsorship-or-renewal or send check to BBI, 425 Moraga Ave., Piedmont CA 94611
Atheist Alliance international, one of my longtime partners do accept donations to Kasese Humanist Primary school. They periodically redirect donations to me. The link to donate is: http://atheistalliance.org/support-aai/donateThen select KHPS under directed donations to AAI specific projects.
You can make donations on my website at Africa Humanists; you can pick an item that suits your donation. The link to donate to is: http://africahumanists.org/new-products/ and choose a project to support.
Alternatively, you can volunteer and fundraise for my projects in your own areas in support of what I do. In case you want to fundraise, notify me so that I write up a simple intro or biodata about myself and the strings of projects that I manage. My email is kasesehumanistschool@hotmail.com.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/30
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What convinced you of the Gospel?
Suzie Mason: ‘Convinced me of the gospel’ is not a phrase that sits well in my brain. It sounds far too certain to have anything to do with faith. You wouldn’t find too many British Christians using that phrase. I’ve chosen to be a Christian because I think that given the choice between two positions with evidence (theism and atheism) where neither has proof, theism is the one that makes most sense (in many ways). Once a theist, Christianity appeals for many reasons, personal and practical. Christianity teaches that we are flawed broken beings in desperate need of help. It doesn’t take much observation to gather evidence for that claim. Christianity is radical and wildly opposed to the easy ways we would love to live. Forgiveness is hard. Loving your enemy is all but impossible. I want a religion that kicks me in the arse to do better, every day. As for why I believe in Jesus, that’s between the two of us.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/30
Christine Shellska is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication, Media and Film, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her research involves studying the rhetorical strategies employed by the Intelligent Design Creationism movement, and her areas of focus include history, philosophy and sociology of science, and rhetoric. Among other involvement in the secular community, she is the first Canadian to be elected to the Board of Directors for the American Humanist Association, and a regular co-host on the Calgary-based Legion of Reason podcast.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Recently, the LGBTQ+ community held its pride parade in Calgary. You are a multi-generational Calgarian. How do events like this make you feel?
Christine M. Shellska: Calgary has grown to become very diverse. Not only have our industries, educational institutions, and quality of life attracted people from around the world, but we welcome about 10,000 immigrants every year. As a happy consequence, the number of cultural events[1] held here have increased, most of which centre around music, dance, art, and of course, delicious ethnic food and (frequently intoxicating) beverages.
Calgary’s Pride movement started in 1990 with about 100 marchers, many of whom wore masks to protect their identities. One year later, Pride week was declared an official civic event by Mayor Al Duerr, but the parade only attracted about 400 attendees[2]. In 2016[3],[4], there were 140 parade entries, about 4000 participants, and about 60,000 attendees. This year, Calgary Pride reported[5] that there were 175 parade entries, about 5000 participants, and about 65,000 attendees.
To give you a bit of context, the annual parade that kicks off the Calgary Stampede is regarded as one of the world’s largest, with 2017 attendance estimated at 275,000[6]. This year’s martials were Chiefs of the Treaty 7 Nations, and it featured over 150 western-themed entries, including 30 marching bands, 40 floats, 750 horses and 4,000 participants[7]. Following the Stampede parade, Pride is by far our most popular and well-attended.
Because we have long been well-known for the Stampede, the history of which spans over 100 years, I think some hold the perception that Calgary, often referred to as “Cowtown,” is a bit of a backwards hick-town. Alberta’s reputation for its high population of religious fundamentalists, some of whom hold very bigoted attitudes, doesn’t contribute positively to this image. Stampede Week features many western-oriented exhibits and events, but it also features world-class artists and musicians, a large fairground, strange and novel foods like scorpion pizza, and a substantial amount of partying at almost every drinking establishment in town, as well as some that are erected solely for the festivities.
Stampede Week, like Pride, is an opportunity for Calgarians to reflect on our history – to acknowledge the reality of past transgressions, and to celebrate hard-earned rights won – to show our civic pride, and to leverage the spirit of these events to unite as a city. Cultural events that celebrate ethnic arts and food reflect our diversity, encourage community among new Canadians, and welcome Calgarians to share aspects of our friends’ and neighbours’ cultures. And, perhaps most importantly, during rather a humourless time in our global history, many of our events are just a good excuse to have fun, like our yearly Zombie walk and 4-20 gathering at City Hall.
Unfortunately, this year’s Pride parade sparked off a great deal of controversy when the organizers announced that they would not permit the Calgary Police Service to participate in uniform. Within my personal sphere, when the Centre for Inquiry (CFI) Calgary announced its decision to withdraw their support, after a lengthy process that included input from members of both CFI and the LGBTQ+ community, a nation-wide shitstorm arose on social media. Our Executive Director, whom we interviewed on the Legion of Reason podcast[8], was the target of much verbal abuse, resulting in her resignation.
Having said that, there were many who supported CFI Calgary’s decision, including several members of the LGBTQ+ community. There were also many thoughtful contributions, which resulted in some productive dialogue. However, the voices of cis-gendered people (including me) soon came to dominate the dialogue, most of whom reside outside of Calgary and are largely unaware of the history of the relationship between the CPS and our LGBTQ+ community. By most accounts from LGBTQ+ Calgarians, the Pride parade organizers did not consult the broader community. The proposal was presented Voices – Calgary’s Coalition of Two-Spirit & Racialized lgbtqia+, a small, local advocacy group inspired by BLM, founded in 2016[9]. Their position is summarized by Carrie Tait of The Globe and Mail[10]:
Some two-spirit people – an umbrella term to describe and used by some, but not all, individuals who are Indigenous and identify as LGBTQ or elsewhere on the gender and sexual spectrums – feel their white counterparts are leaving them and people of colour behind. The broader LGBTQ community has made significant gains in the quest for equality, thanks to years of fighting for rights. But some members of the LGBTQ community who are not white feel overlooked because, while homophobia may be dissipating, they may still be on society’s social and economic margins because of race.
Pride announced, “We acknowledge the historical oppression and institutionalized racism faced by queer/trans people of colour and Indigenous persons, and the potentially negative association with weapons, uniforms and other symbols of law enforcement.”
While the usual, trite accusation that “You need to educate yourself!” was tossed around in its various instantiations on social media, the argument is clear. Few, if any, CFI Calgary members would deny these claims. What many objected to, however, was the method, because of its exclusion of uniformed officers, many of whom are non-white and LGBTQ+. Summing up the sentiment, in response to Pride’s statement, “We welcome the participation of Calgary Police Services, and other law enforcement agencies in a manner that demonstrates allyship and understanding,” Kelly McParland of the National Post[11] observed, “Just as long as they do their best to hide their identity, like gays used to do.”
The CPS agreed to respect the Pride organizers’ decision, from what I understand, reluctantly. Even our mayor, Naheed Nenshi, expressed his disappointment in the decision.
Jacobsen: When you look at some of the particulars of the event, what were notable highlights for you?
Shellska: Oddly, Calgary’s Pride Week does not coincide with Pride Month, which is widely recognized as June, to commemorate the Stonewall riots. The Pride parade held in early September concludes Pride Week, followed by Pride in the Park, a family-friendly event that features live entertainment, a marketplace, and a beer garden.
In recent years, highlights of Pride Week include the raising of the Pride flag at City Hall, the Calgary Tower’s light display, rainbow sidewalks (this year featuring a sidewalk representing the transgender flag colours), public transit signage, and countless other shows of support by individuals, local businesses, and corporations.
Jacobsen: In reflection on the progressive outlook, one of progression to greater inclusion in spite of, usually religious, attempts to narrow the landscape of people’s self-identification and expression. How has the environment changed for the LBGTQ+ community? What are some notable examples of this?
Shellska: Since I’m cis-gendered, I really can’t speak to this personally. The best I can try to do is relay my personal observations. Growing up, my best friend in high school was gay, and he certainly wasn’t socially open about it, although his family knew. Some of his family members were bigoted and occasionally rude, especially his grandmother, who was clearly a product of a different era. Despite her ignorance, she did love my friend in her way. Fortunately, his mother was very supportive.
For awhile, he had a partner who adamantly denied being gay. He would make very offensive comments about gays, and he drew on his Italian heritage to present a macho, tough-guy façade. In hindsight, he reminds me very much of what some refer to as “self-loathing” gays who adamantly endorse “family values” and the like. I think he was Catholic; my friend was also openly atheist, so we shared that bond in common as well as others (we are both only children and introverts). The partner was clearly jealous of our friendship, and he was horrible to me. My friend later confided that he was being physically abused. Sadly, this was the beginning of a pattern of long-term, abusive relationships for him.
Maybe things would have been different for both of them if society had been more accepting of LGBTQ+ people back then. Then again, my friend’s abusive father passed away from alcohol-related illness when he was young. Clearly, being LGBTQ+ does nothing to shield one from the psychological consequences of familial violence, nor being the victim of domestic abuse. Perhaps the self-loathing partner might have fared better if he’d been spared a religious upbringing that focused upon guilt, shame and suffering. I hope he is living the best, most honest life he can.
Jacobsen: For sexual minorities, what do you see as the modern battleground for greater freedom and acceptance in socio-cultural and political life in Calgary?
Shellska: I’m happy to see that things have changed here: it is true that “the broader LGBTQ community has made significant gains in the quest for equality.” My daughter is a young adult now; several of her friends have comfortably inhabited various gender identities and/or openly expressed their sexual orientations since high school. Same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada since 2005, and it is commonplace to see same-sex couples strolling the streets holding hands in my community. This year, a bill was passed to include gender identity and expression, and sexual orientation, in the Canadian Human Rights Act.
In my observation, my daughter’s generation doesn’t much care about gender identity, sexual orientation, or race, when it comes to social acceptance of their peers, possibly because of a general trend toward irreligion and the consequent rejection of the bigotry and prejudices that often accompany it. That’s a good thing, worth celebrating. However, it’s important that her generation understand that minority rights were hard-earned, and this is why so many of our cultural events, like Pride, are important. The people who fought for those rights deserved to be recognized and honoured.
While LGBTQ+ people have successfully challenged legislation, there still remain social stigmas that need to be overcome, religiously-based and otherwise. I think that Voices is correct in asserting their identity, and reclaiming their history of two-spirited people, who were revered and not marginalized in many First Nations’ cultures. I think they’re correct in asserting the historical cultures and rights of non-white LGBTQ+ people; even if those rights are legally recognized, in many communities across Canada, some police officers continue to abuse their authority and enact violence against marginalized groups. I think they’re correct in pointing out the historical and present failures of authorities, of which there are many. Unquestionably, these stories need to be told.
But from what I’ve heard from my friends in the broader LGBTQ+ community, the CPS are largely regarded as allies, having earned trust over many years by protecting their rights as individuals (including ethnic minorities), business owners, etc.
Singling out the CPS was interpreted by many as rejecting allies by denying their identity. This is very much an American strategy that doesn’t necessarily align with Canadian issues and values. It raises questions about groups that were not excluded. For example, if we take up the premise that certain groups should be excluded, it is simply outrageous to include many Christian groups, given the history of residential schools, who participated in what the Truth and Reconciliation Council deemed “cultural genocide.” Not to mention their historical treatment of LGBTQ+ people.
There also seems to be an underlying assumption that non-whites accept LGBTQ+ people, and we know this is simply not the case. Many cultures around the globe are notoriously misogynistic, homophobic, bigoted, etc.
I admit that I find it very distasteful when Canadians jump on American bandwagons with no regard to our unique context, as if we’re affected by the same issues. Granted, we share very many similarities, and some of their issues are ours as well. But racism and LGBTQ+ bigotry are not uniquely American nor Canadian issues. They are global issues that require culturally-appropriate strategies.
Clearly Calgary is merely a microcosm of a broader movement. Police have been disinvited to Pride parades across the US, and now Canada. Protests that include disrupting vehicular and even air traffic have sprung up across North America and Europe. More recently, some protests have erupted into violence. These events have alienated many who are allies or potential allies, and have been responded to by violent and overtly racist groups who were marginalized long ago, and should have remained so. I don’t want to see that happen here. We don’t need to flock like a bunch of lemmings to American “solutions.” On the global stage, Canada is respected as a humanitarian country. We can do better.
What if Voices were to propose something along the lines of a March Against Racism, or something like that, and invite Pride as an honoured guest? As a new initiative, the organizers could unproblematically choose who they wanted to exclude and include, thus setting their own precedent. It would be more inclusive in the sense that it would support the right of all non-whites, not just LGBTQ+ non-whites. And it would be a chance to educate and foster community among Calgary’s multiple cultures. I think this is something most Calgarians would support, even if it meant some of us, even most of us, were excluded. Not only would it be a contribution to our civic events, it could provide an alternative approach that could serve as a model for other communities facing similar issues.
Jacobsen: What was the turnout for the uniform event? Why was this an important event to hold?
Shellska: The Unity in Uniform was organized as a Pride alternative event by Gregory John and Jim Heaton[12], in response to the exclusion of the CPS, to “show the community that there’s another part of the community that is in support of the police [and] other people in uniform,” including firefighters and EMS professionals. The event was important to many members and groups representing the broader LGBTQ+ community, including Morley Pride and the Drag community.
I hadn’t intended to go, because I felt there were others far more deserving to attend the limited-seating event. But I wanted to contribute something positive to both communities, especially given the division amongst CFI Calgary internally, as well as with other Canadian branches. When I pitched the idea, several individual members of CFI Calgary offered to support a crowdfunder to contribute toward the evening’s festivities. Greg kindly thanked me for my offer but felt it was improper to accept a contribution of this nature, and instead encouraged us to donate to Officer Tad Milmine’s “Bullying Ends Here” campaign, located here: https://www.bullyingendshere.ca/.
When I explained why I wanted to do the crowdfunder, Greg was saddened to learn how the decision impacted CFI, especially the Executive Director. He placed me on his guest list, and when we met I extended my hand, to which he responded, “Sorry, I only do hugs.” Exactly what I hoped he’d say!
The event was very well attended, and represented by many groups and individuals, including some gay CFI members. It was an honour to attend the inaugural Unity in Uniform event, and I met several inspirational leaders of the LGBTQ+ community, including police officers. The speeches delivered by the organizers and other leaders focused on inclusivity and widely stirred the audience’s emotions. Despite the controversy, attendees were encouraged to participate in the Pride parade. Many officers showed up out of uniform, carrying the CPS Pride banner, graciously accepting the decision and taking the higher road.
Jacobsen: Was there any backlash to the uniform event, whether online or with protestors of the event?
Shellska: When I found out about the Unity in Uniform and shared it on facebook, I rather harshly pointed out that those who were shouting, “Educate yourself!” ought to do the same. There were some interesting exchanges, but the discussion on the general principle of excluding police officers continued in other posts, for several days after Pride Week.
I can’t confirm whether there was any backlash toward the Unity in Uniform event, but I highly doubt it. It seemed clear that the event represented the views of the broader LGBTQ+ community, the strength of their relationship with the CPS, and the strong overlap of the two communities. Certainly there was no physical presence of protestors, and there were, to my knowledge, no notable public criticisms of the event.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time again, Christine.
Shellska: Thank you again too! I’m looking forward to future discussions.
[1] http://www.geoscalgary.com/misc/magazine/content/cultural_festivals_in_calgary.htm.
[2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-pride-25th-anniversary-1.3217157.
[3] http://globalnews.ca/news/2920620/2016-calgary-pride-parade-brings-thousands-to-downtown-core/.
[4] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-pride-2016-1.3748147.
[5] http://globalnews.ca/news/3715669/thousands-expected-to-attend-2017-calgary-pride-parade/.
[6] http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/2017-calgary-stampede-parade-draws-an-estimated-crowd-of-275-000-1.3492932.
[7] http://globalnews.ca/news/3538653/watch-live-2017-calgary-stampede-parade/.
[8] http://www.legionofreason.com/episode-211-calgary-prides-regrettable-decison/
[9] https://www.facebook.com/yycvoices/
[10] https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/alberta/calgary-pride-indigenous-lgbtq-two-spirit/article36154435/
[11] http://nationalpost.com/opinion/kelly-mcparland-pride-won-yet-now-chooses-to-be-picky-about-its-allies
[12] https://globalnews.ca/news/3701993/calgary-lgbtq-community-members-create-alternative-pride-event-where-uniforms-are-welcome/
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/29
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the demographics for humanism in Greece? Because most of the population is Greek Orthodox.
Angelos Sofocleous: According to the latest Pew report, 90% of the Greek population identifies themselves as a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. It has to be stressed, however, that many people identify as a member of the Greek Orthodox Church only by convention. From birth, Greeks are proselytized into the Greek Orthodox Church by baptism at a very young age – when they are a less than a year old – and, therefore, on paper, almost every Greek citizen is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/29
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you’re out in Tanzania. That is far removed from the normal life of Canadians. What is something that those in Canada are almost certainly not likely to know about atheism in Tanzania but they should?
Nsajigwa I Mwasokwa (Nsajigwa Nsa’sam): Thank you I am Mr. Nsajigwa, Canadians should know that as it is for every human society throughout ages and generations that there have been within independent thinkers and freethinkers, so too there are such ones in Tanzania, though few, as it has hitherto been.
There are Tanzanians who think outside of the box of religiosity despite the fact that in Africa religion is overwhelmingly omnipresent and -potent, covering all aspects of life, from the birth point of entrance to death point of exit. In past, Africans were said to “Think emotionally” and being more “spiritual” as a philosophy of Negritude would assert, “rational is Greece as emotion is black.” Maybe today, we might just understand that to have been too much of a generalization.
In terms of percentage, it is recorded that independent thinkers individuals living without religion in Tanzania could be up to 1% of the population (the challenge is to make it rise to 10% as there might be enough such ones who however are in the closet).
Jacobsen: How is atheism viewed by the general public in Tanzania?
Nsajigwa: In the past, it was associated with socialism of communism brand, the USSR type, thus ideological.
But also by Tanzanians who are fundamentalist in their religious outlook, they view it negatively, as an arrogant rebellion against God’s will by the few people educated (to become confused) by too much secular book reading. Further extremes view it as for those who are “lost” and on Satan’s side (Satan being the opposite of good God).
Jacobsen: How common is atheism there?
Nsajigwa: As a movement it is coming up, emerging as is the reality of it all over Africa. Some individual independent thinkers to freethinkers exist, it’s only recently since new millennium that there have emerged some pioneer efforts to teach it by philosophy, identify and bring such individuals together.
I am the pioneer number one for this philosophy, life-stance here since the mid-1990s before the arrival of the internet in Tanzania. We are developing a fellowship to be a community in the future via Jichojipya – Think Anew as a formal organization and vehicle for that, we founded it to live to achieve common goals of institutionalizing Humanism ideas and ideals guided by Humanist’s Amsterdam Declaration 2002 of which I translated into Swahili that being first time that it was in an African language.Its Humanistic aspects happen to be similar to some aspects of Tanzanian own Arusha declaration doctrine of 1967.
Jacobsen: If you could pick one great atheist thinker in Tanzania, who would it be?
Nsajigwa: It would be an eminent elder retired public figure named Kingunge Ngombale-Mwilu. We identified him as one because he was the public figure, only one known throughout to swear for a public position (he has served since independence in top ranking positions even as a minister of state) without holding Bible or Quran.
That is, how we suspected him to be a nonbeliever and on interviewing him recently he came out as such, a freethinker who is Agnostic (though our society thought of him as a socialist communist). He told us himself he became freethinker inspired by reading the subject of Philosophy including the writings of Thomas Paine and Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis that;- “it’s not god creating man in his own image but rather a man creating God in his imagination.”
Another longtime freethinker would be Nsajigwa (me myself) a self-taught individual operating at the grassroots. I have taught and inspired many enough by my knowledge (book reading) and my own everyday life as a freethinker, someone living ethically good without a religion.
Jacobsen: If you could take one great atheist book in Tanzania, what would it be?
Nsajigwa: There is no one whole book on that, however, there are particular stories on some books say by one late Agoro Anduru – a good writer that he was. Also stories (in Swahili) by one Mohamed Salum Abdalla (in short Bwana Msa) and speeches by Mwalimu (Swahili for a teacher) Nyerere – Tanzanian founder father, teaching, insisting and reminding on several occasions that Tanzania is a secular state.
Jacobsen: What are some of the prejudices and biases that the atheist community experiences in Tanzania?
Nsajigwa: Basically so far organized atheist community is just emerging, we few freethinkers are just pioneering to bring it out but judging from our personal life experience, our social milieu is such that to be a nonbeliever you are misunderstood in many ways and judged negatively, its something you just have to endure, too much pressure and frictions to confront right from the family level. African culture is “communitarian” in outlook, wanting conformity to all its members. Things should be done as traditions and what religions require. On religion itself, it is very influential, plus our political culture is illiberal, yes we are a peaceful Nation since independence but skepticism and criticism are not tolerated despite the fact we became a multiparty democracy since 1992.
Jacobsen: What are some of the biases in law that are explicitly anti-atheist or, at a minimum, tacitly so?
Nsajigwa: The founder father Mwalimu Nyerere was, fortunately, a good student of John Stuart Mills philosophy “on liberty”. He made it clear the fact that our Nation is secular though people (including himself) are in religions. There is a temptation though from various players to wish that religion should penetrate more into government because people and their leaders are religious anyway. In Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous government with a majority of its population (90%+) being Moslem, Islamic laws applies (via what are known as kadhi courts) in dealing with matters of inheritance, marriage, and divorce.
Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts?
Nsajigwa: We live in modern times yet we have not yet successfully modernized our cultures and societies.The need to secularize our outlook to life, thus STEM (Science Technology Engineering and (rationalism of) Mathematics) Project. We by Jichojipya – Think Anew a Tanzanian Freethinkers secularist humanists organization here initiated a GalimotoCar making STEM project from the grassroots, we need support to continue doing that, a fight against superstition believes including Albino killings.
There is modern African triple heritage concept by which in Tanzanian case, Islam, Christian, and Traditionalists are almost one-third each by percentage (35-35-30 respectively), though there is much dominance of the first two in the public while the third (tradition believes) are somehow dormant, activated only when everything else fails to work.
By SWOT approach most African countries Tanzania included are illiberal. In such situations, independent thinking and freethinking are thwarted and such individuals live to endure hard life mentally (psychologically) and physically. Freethinking Atheism Humanism in Africa should mean an idea to emancipate Africans from illiberality and concurrently from the mental slavery of religions that have evolved to become dysfunctional, as they shape ideas of superstition and wishful thinking that support dogma, irrationality, and fatalism.
It’s a herculean task needed to be met to push the cause of African renaissance and its enlightenment. All due support by Freethinkers Humanists from other parts of the world (Canada etc) is needed, to sustain this work for modernism by secularism in Africa, Tanzania inclusively. That is the historic generational duty for humanity. Thank you.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/29
Doug Thomas of Secular Connexion Séculière, who I have talked with before, has done something, which I have talked with some others in the irreligious community in Canada before about: using the Freedom of Thought Report from 2016, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, for activism in every country because it remains of the most succinct and comprehensive listings of discrimination in law, in culture, in societies generally, against the irreligious (Secular Connexion Séculière, 2017; Jacobsen, 2017; International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2016a; International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2017).
That leads to E-Petition 1264 (DISCRIMINATIONS), or simply E-Petition 1264, which is about the formal investigation into the discrimination against non-believers in Canada (House of Commons, 2017). Doug Thomas, with sponsorship from Marwan Tabbara, proposed this e-petition, which is already in the 3-figure zone for signatories and seems better than many based on a brief scan of the others surrounding it. It states in full:
“Whereas:
- Approximately 25% of Canada’s people are non-believers; and
- The International Humanist and Ethical Union, in its December 2016 Freedom of Thought Report, has identified Canada as a nation that systemically discriminates against non-believers.
We, the undersigned, citizens of Canada, call upon the House of Commons in Parliament assembled to ask the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Canadian Heritage to investigate, through the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, with specific invitations to the national leaders of the secular humanist community, the systemic discrimination against non-believers in Canadian laws and regulations, specifically, but not limited to: (a) the National Anthems Act, 1980; (b) the Criminal Code of Canada, section 319 3(b); and (c) Regulations for registered charities under the Income Tax Act.” (Ibid.)
I signed it.
Because I know the Freedom of Thought Report (2016) provides a good introduction to the levels of discrimination against the irreligious in this country (International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2016b).
While ignoring the historical crimes in the name of Christianity, often by Canadian Christians against the Indigenous population, we have remnants with the privileges for those with a belief in a Theity in the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982 in the Preamble, where there is the, as many reading this know about the, statement about the “supremacy of God…” (Government of Canada, 1982). What if this was removed?
Even if symbolic, it would mean, for the next generations, formal equality with the Constitution Act of 1982 as neutral, no preference for one or the other, on a God or not. That would be fair and equal; not asking for superior but for real equality.
Another remnant is the Catholic system, often for non-Catholics as well. What about the Muslim, Daoist, and Scientologist schools for non-Muslims, non-Daoists, and non-Scientologists, even Catholics? You don’t see them. Why should we see Catholic schools, especially in the long view? Secular public educational systems and schools for all Canadians seems fair and simple too.
Do these denominational rights for Catholics, and at times Protestants, violate Section 2 and Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Yes, but Section 29 makes that a move no-no, apparently, that protection against potential action later amounts to an educational and charter privilege in the favour of one religion, Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians (so, two, technically), who happen to be the mostly settler-colonial religions (International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2016b).
But we can do things about these and others such as prayers in public meetings, in schools, and so on. They were placed by Canadian citizens at one point, so they, too, can be removed. We can do the same with Canada as others have moved to secular systems for public life. The data is there. The undercurrent is there. Likely, the will is extant throughout the nation with 1/4 people having no formal religious faith and may of the other 3/4 sympathizing with the 1/4 on common issues. So, why not? The petition is simply waiting to be signed by Canadian citizens. It’s a start.
Let’s get to work!…
References
Government of Canada. (1982). Constitution Act, 1982. Retrieved from http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html.
House of Commons. (2017, September 14). E-1264 (DISCRIMINATION). Retrieved from https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-1264.
International Humanist and Ethical Union. (2017b). International Humanist and Ethical Union. Retrieved from http://iheu.org/.
International Humanist and Ethical Union. (2016a). The Freedom of Thought Report. Retrieved from http://freethoughtreport.com/countries/.
International Humanist and Ethical Union. (2016b). The Freedom of Thought Report: Canada. Retrieved from http://freethoughtreport.com/countries/americas-northern-america/canada/.
Jacobsen, S.D. (2017, August 6). Interview with Doug Thomas – President of the Secular Connexion Séculière. Retrieved from https://conatusnews.com/interview-doug-thomas-president-secular-connexion-seculiere/.
Secular Connexion Séculière. (2017). Secular Connexion Séculière. Retrieved from http://www.secularconnexion.ca/.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/01/11
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, this is the ultimate frisbee of virtual realities. You go first, please.
Rick Rosner: Ok, so, from time to time, we’ve casually kind of discussed how it’s interesting/possibly important that the issue of whether the universe is real or a simulation. In pop culture you have The Matrix, which is a huge trilogy of movies. Blockbusters, that center around the universe being simulated and in pop culture in the future the issue’s going to be, I think, bigger and bigger because of video games. Maybe, other forms of entertainment will simulate reality with greater and greater verisimilitude.
Jacobsen: That’s right.
Rosner: The simulations will get better and better. But then I was thinking about it a little bit and realize that just saying casually say, “You can’t tell whether the universe is real or a simulation.” Or if you couldn’t tell did, what would you mean when you talk about simulation? It turns out to be. Well, I don’t know if it’s not simple, but it certainly needs pinning down. Because you have issues like, “Who is the simulation for? Is it for the video game? Is it for the consciousnesses in that world? Is it the whole universe or is it just a chunk of it?” And all those things have implications for reality. It is naturally arising, but exists in an artificial armature – well, not necessarily artificial.
That’s another issue, but our minds are supported by our brains. You’d call that a natural armature versus a consciousness that would be supported by an information processing device that’s been built by people who are built by individuals who learned how to create consciousness. And then, of course, you have the problem of the turtles all the way down thing. What’s supporting each of these worlds – the hardware world and all that stuff? And it probably leads to what you were talking about, which is you kind of like you said, ‘Who cares?” Simulated versus natural, because in the end, it was a stack of turtles. The whole thing may become moot at some point. Anyway, it doesn’t seem trivial or simple to me. What do you think?
Jacobsen: Yes, I don’t think it’s trivial. I do think it’s simple because you don’t have a lot of options. So, let’s say, you have a naturally rising universe. Okay, let’s say, you get a civilization. They perform various virtual reality simulations of their universe and other possible universes. So, there you have a virtual universe arising out of the universe. Let’s say, you have some kind of not quite existent, not quite nonexistent universe; that is very quantum mechanical, just extremely virtual in its existence, because it’s not fully manifested insofar as it can exist and cannot exist. It’s at that edge between kind of solidity and not. You have others start off natural and have an entire timeline, a world line of the entire universe. There’s no need for a simulation in the first place. So, in that case, okay, you have a natural universe running all the way through. And the first case, you have a natural universe running into a virtual simulation. You could also have this iterative effect where you have extraordinarily long-lived universes, where you start off natural or you start off kind of quantum mechanically virtual. Then it becomes natural, then that civilization in that natural universe that happens to evolve simulates a universe in which you have other little mini civilizations that then themselves do simulations and you have this kind of matryoshka doll situation of simulations.
Rosner: You have that even with the natural universe, because every armature needs to itself to be part of a material world that is made of information that’s being stored in, so the turtles all the way down. And also, there’s another issue which gets back to your point of “who cares?”; if the better a simulated universe is, the less it’s going to violate the rules of a natural universe.
Any decent similar universe? Go ahead.
Jacobsen: Or any simulation in our natural universe or another natural universe, the laws of physics that govern the computation of that computational device, doing the simulation will limit the type of simulations it can do.
Rosner: Yes, and also, the probability of discernible divergences from apparent naturalness in a decent simulation is low.
So, like, well, just doing naive math, there are eight billion people in the world and you find out. And one person is magic because it’s a simulation. The odds against that are one in eight billion. And of course, in practical and more realistic terms the odds that you see violations of natural physics revealing that you’re in a simulation are just super low because it’s just there are probability arguments to be made. For one thing, we live in a world where there’s no good evidence of the world; we live in now, being a simulation. The same way, there’s no evidence of there being time travelers visiting us, right? There have been no probabilistic arguments to be made. So, based on the evidence of our world and the history of the universe as we know it, it’s apparently highly probable that the rules of the universe are not being violated, right?
Jacobsen: Yes. I mean, for that simulation, for any simulation to exist, which is grounded on a natural universe, that simulation, the computation behind it must rely on that natural universe physics. You can’t get out of that.
Rosner: But it’s easy to imagine a series of 50 years in the future. One hundred and fifty years in the future. It’s easy to imagine video games that are convincing simulations. And you can enter into them. And it’s even possible to imagine that you can have your awareness abridged so that when you’re playing the video game, you think you’re actually living in the world, the simulated world. You can also imagine that this video game has characters like free guy that are conscious and not realizing that they’re in a video game.
Jacobsen: Absolutely. And to say, that it’s limited by the physics. That its computation is based on the virtual universe. It’s not to say it can’t have its own variables and kinds of laws. It’s just the computation behind it will limit what is possible there. And it may be such that when we talk about computers as universal computation machines, like a universal Turing machine or something; these are only limited by our experience of this kind of computation in our universe. I mean, so, “Yes.”
Rosner: Yes, it’s certainly easy to build from our physics.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, our computers might not be universal. They might be general in this context.
Rosner: Yes, but the deal is, it’s possible to imagine a future that has a whole bunch of video games that are convincing simulations. Where within the games, the rules, some of the rules of reality would be violated. You can imagine a convincing simulated world video game in which you can fly, for instance.
Jacobsen: Gravity is reversed.
Rosner: Or something, it’s easy to imagine that these kind of games will be pervasive in the future. So, yet, we live in a world. The world we live in now doesn’t have any of those violations of reality. So, what’s the deal, probabilistic? You find yourself being a conscious being in the world that you’re in. And what are the odds that it’s a natural world? We, apparently, are in or it’s a simulated world. That you’re part of a game that runs for three weeks or three hours. You become conscious. You’ve got backs in your awareness. You’ve got a history. All these issues need to be addressed scientifically and philosophically, ideally scientifically. Are there probabilistic arguments to be made about whether you’re more likely to find yourself in a natural world or a simulated world?
And, of course, the simulated world you assume is an offshoot of the natural world, and as we’ve been talking of a natural world; it’s that assumption of legitimation. We have talked about, “I think, therefore, I am.” Within the context, given the extreme complexity and self-consistency of the worlds of our minds or an individual’s mind with its memories and its ability to mentally simulate the world, given the extreme consistency in the amount of information involved, that’s a statistical argument for the existence of the possessor of that consciousness. So, analogously, are there probabilistic arguments to be built around natural versus simulated worlds? Also, the extent of the simulated world.
Jacobsen: They are, in some sense. Any evolved mind in a natural universe is running a simulation of it. And this is not digital. Like my own mind is running a simulation of my little environment here, in front of the laptop. Similarly, with you in front of your Skype machine, it’s just the way things are. So, you could say simulation is the dominant strain of quantity of computation. Although, natural is the dominant quality of it. I mean, we’re only in a finite volume. We have seven or eight billion people running all these simulations based on their own minds. But those are very small volumes in the entirety of the Universe, the natural universe. I think you make the same argument where in any other universe where they have these simulations, even massive galactic-scale simulations. Computational devices of that scale, they would themselves be limited in that natural universe, which is bigger.
So, there’s one split there. Maybe, in that argument, it’s not usually made, which is that natural universes are the ground state. They’re much bigger. So, there’s a lot more computation happening with regard to them. Any kind of simulation that’s happening within them, whether it’s what we call digital or evolved consciousness, either case evolved or constructed. They’re far more plentiful. Because once the natural universe is already set up, then you have a simpler setup to kind of run different simulations.
Rosner: Yes, so, I mean, there’s that argument that we think can be made, which is that it’s just much more likely that we’re in a natural universe.
Jacobsen: Yes. Even though, the number of “simulated universes,” are arguably much more plentiful.
Rosner: Yes, so, it’s a mess.
Jacobsen: I mean, just the human species is a hundred billion simulations at various kind of world lines.
Rosner: We intuitively think that it’s much more probable. We’re in a natural universe, but we don’t know the framework to do any kind of calculation.
Jacobsen: You can throw a ballpark even by saying one planet in one universe for one species amounts to one hundred billion simulations. So, 100 billion little tiny world lines within that one natural universe.
Rosner: At that point, I am still finding myself confused. There’s another level. There are plenty of issues around simulation. Another issue, though, is that if the universe is a vast information processing entity. It is not necessarily aware of structures such as ourselves and our planet that have originated, that are built out of the matter that is made of the information in that information process. That the information in the processor is manifest as matter and space. And the whole thing is as our universe, but that the information processor gets the information out of the process that we experience as the universe without necessarily any awareness that this universe exists. Without any specific idea:: If it’s a sufficiently sophisticated entity, if I see this is anything like true, then that entity will have a general idea that there’s a universe made of the information in processing without any specific knowledge of what happens in that universe.
Jacobsen: I mean, consider the consciousness of an ant. Who knows how many ants in the world? What I am calling simulations in a natural universe, I am including those. I am not just talking digital; I am talking evolved. And so the non-conscious, so to speak, like an ant.
Rosner: So, we’re talking about two different things. There’s another issue with simulation, which is intentional simulation for a video game, and a simulation you’re talking about, which is a mental picture of the world.
Jacobsen: So, an objective simulation and a subjective simulation. Subjective can have a lot more flavors.
Rosner: I mean, that’s another like framework that needs to be fairly well defined.
Jacobsen: Maybe, in an intrinsic simulation and extrinsic simulation? Something like that.
Rosner: Well, I mean, like the simulations I am talking about are meant to emulate a world.
Jacobsen: You mean the simulations where you have two black holes processed virtually in these massive supercomputers and trying to see what happens when two black holes collide?
Rosner: No, I am not. I am not talking about that. I am talking about simulations that lead somebody in the simulation to potentially ask the question whether they’re living in a natural world or a simulated world. So, I guess, to be more clear, I am talking about simulated worlds, simulations.
The simulation we have in our minds are not intentional. They’re not constructed worlds. I mean, just talking about it shows that there are issues that need to be pinned down.
Jacobsen: You’re talking at a high level of simulation in my mind.
Rosner: It’s not just high level. It’s something different. It’s like the simulation that makes free guy think he’s living in a natural world. But it’s just as the simulation in a video game.
Jacobsen: So it’s an as if natural universe.
Rosner: There’s external intention there. Somebody built that world with the intent of making it seem real for their own purposes. Simulations we have in our minds. I mean, we didn’t intentionally build them. They’re a product of our evolved minds. They’re not there. For nearly every organism on Earth, they are meant to simulate the real external world.
Jacobsen: So right there. So, you’re talking at three layers. You have a universe, a really sophisticated simulation. And then the subjective impression, the mental map that simulated being has in that simulated universe.
Rosner: Yes. And I want to bring up one more point. So, if the universe is a giant consciousness, it’s not aware of the specifics of the material manifestation of the information in its consciousness. You can still argue that a system that’s possibly aware of that universe that is contained within the information. And an external world, an armature could tweak the events. Within the information universe it contains, it seems unlikely. But maybe also not by that, the quantum of events in our universe, the outcomes of when an open quantum frame becomes closed. Because an event, a quantum event has happened, you would think that the outcome of that quantum event reflects something that happened. For that outcome contains information about the world that the information is about, and those things should be… anyway. I’ve done myself a whole lot of lack of clarity and would just be wasting more time to go further into it, but anyway. This discussion, at least in my mind, is that the simulated worlds and universes need a lot more clarity in pinning down what they’re about in order to discuss them effectively.
Jacobsen: And we can both agree the ground state has to be a natural universe.
Rosner: Yes, but no. I mean, the easiest universe to imagine is one that has a timeline where every quantum event that has a complete timeline representing an actual history, and that the events on that timeline… Although, all the gazillion quantum events are randomly operating, according to the rules of quantum mechanics in a natural way. That’s the easiest universe to imagine.
Jacobsen: Any simulation that comes out of that has to be based out of some processing unit grounded in that universe. I think those are two points. So, any kind of simulation coming out of that universe or any type of simulation, virtual reality, coming out of that universe will have to be grounded in the physics of that universe, which will have a particular kind of computation.
Rosner: Not necessarily video games now that have alternative physics.
Jacobsen: That’s not what I mean. I mean, the physics for the actual computation to take place. So, in our case, we have digital computers, so you can simulate any kind of physics, but that type of range of simulation is grounded in competition.
Rosner: Objects.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Is actually generating the simulation, the computer’s operating in our world, which we naturally assume to be natural.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, in that sense, that’s a point of huge clarity, where the material object in our universe that is the computational unit is constrained by a particular physics. But the virtual reality that it creates can have all sorts of physics. But it’s constrained by that original physics.
Rosner: Yes, although, I don’t know if that’s a big deal.
Jacobsen: Well, I think it might clarify the difference with the armature in our universe. This sort of thing.
Rosner: So, in the armature, the whole idea of the armature and the turtles all the way down is itself a mess. In that, we’re assuming that you can have this implied infinity because it’s an infinity that is informationally moot.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: That, even though it’s implied, it’s so distant in terms of having any possible effect on our world that you can just kind of wave it away. It seems like a terrible way to reason, though they’re in like Feynman type physics. There is similar hand-waving to get rid of troublesome infinities.
Jacobsen: As far as I am aware, that’s common in physics to hide infinities in various places.
Rosner: Yes, and it’s mathematically ugly. It’s philosophically ugly.
Jacobsen: Which makes it unlikely to be true because typically the true is beautiful.
Rosner: No, I was just reading. Somebody was writing about that whole true as beautiful thing and was debunking it. When physicists like Einstein say that beautiful is true, that’s based on many years of work in physics. And so, that’s a very educated aesthetic if you want to call it an aesthetic. But it might be more legitimate to call it a scientific intuition that what Einstein would find beautiful isn’t what somebody who finds astrology, somebody who believes in astrology, would find beautiful.
Jacobsen: I see.
Rosner: So rather than call it beauty, call it educated intuition.
Jacobsen: Makes sense. Okay, that’s fair.
Rosner: So, I don’t know that any further discussion on this stuff will be productive.
Jacobsen: Well, I think a wrap up would be helpful.
Rosner: My wrap up is that there are lots of issues around what we mean when we talk about simulation and the different types of simulation we might talk about. And it would be helpful to get that stuff more pinned down before we talk about the implications of simulated vs. natural universes and worlds. Because there’s a difference between a simulated universe because you could set up a randomized quantum universe within a computer and let it play out; it would be very small and it could be a whole universe.
Jacobsen: We should make that distinction.
Rosner: What’s that?
Jacobsen: Maybe, we should make the distinction.
Rosner: Distinction between an entire simulated universe and a simulated part of the world?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Matrix. Because The Matrix doesn’t simulate the entire universe.
Jacobsen: Yes, I mean, in a sense.
Rosner: It simulates like the surface of Earth for all the people who are imprisoned in the simulation. And it simulates the stars and the sky and everything. But it dispenses in the interest of efficiency in The Matrix simulation. Does not give a shit about what might be happening on planets and some other galaxy. The simulation, matrix simulation, you have the images of other galaxies. And they appear to behave as distant galaxies might. But beyond that level of simulation, the prison keepers aren’t going to go to the trouble. The computational trouble of fully simulating distant galaxies.
Jacobsen: Well, in that sense, I think it’d be very, very rare to come across a true universe simulation. I think in that sense. You can make a distinction. This is a placeholder. That when you’re speaking of universes; you’re speaking of natural universes and you’re speaking virtual universes. You’re talking about worlds because it’s very likely only to be part. It’s going to be very partial.
Rosner: Again, just for me to wrap up, is just to say that this whole area is something that needs pinning down.
Jacobsen: Yes, I don’t even know what the terminology would be properly set forth to limit when we’re talking about that simulation of a world versus that subjective simulation.
Rosner: And what’s kind of weird is that, probably, the people building the universe will become the accepted terminology for, at least, some of these ideas that are going to be video game makers.
Jacobsen: Also, there’s another part of this, which is, “Do we simulate agents without agency?” Like bad guys in video games, they don’t have any agency. They’re just sort of these 3D.
Rosner: Right now, in video games, the only characters with agency are the characters being played by actual people.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: There may be characters within video games that are sufficiently complicated. I don’t know, because I don’t play video games. They might have like a sub-ant like level of agency. Because it’s a question as to “How much agency?”
Jacobsen: Very little.
Rosner: OK. But even so, an ant probably has more agency because an ant brain, probably, has like a hundred thousand neurons, which is not much compared to humans, 80 billion neurons. But it’s still a shitload of neurons enough to generate some behavioral complexity. And I am sure there’s no engine that runs a bad guy in a video game that has even the complexity of an ant brain. But in the future, it’s easy to imagine video game characters with the agency of an ant.
Jacobsen: And it’s different in what we have with those videogame characters because it’s a coding around which they behave as a 3D figurine, but ants have built into them – with ants that’s built into their system. It’s unified. There’s a central processing unit in them. In the simulated characters we have now in video games, that’s not even close to what is the case.
Rosner: No, but you got me. I am sure, like some of the non-playable characters and video games have very complicated decision trees.
Jacobsen: Sure. But it’s built. It’s distributed into the whole system and then played out through that little 3D figurine. In the end, it’s intrinsic to it. It’s much more tightly closed off.
Rosner: Yes, I think one thing we can say, at least in terms of this discussion, is that agents to have agency: Yu need to have consciousness.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: I think that in general, that seems. Well, that’s right.
Jacobsen: Yes, and maybe, also, there’s that sense of agency that has to come with a certain closed offness to the rest of the universe, where the only channels of information are getting in from your own little sensory apparatuses – whatever it is.
Rosner: Alright, I am tired. My voice is raspy.
Jacobsen: Ok, yes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Any commentary from the individuals who would be husbands or the boyfriends or the partners of the women who would go out and sleep with Feynman or Feynman like people at that time?
Rick Rosner: I’ve read a couple of Feynman autobiographies. Of course, he’s not going to mention that he banged everybody in sight and those weren’t those autobiographies. It didn’t go into great detail and didn’t track down people.
So, no, there is no commentary. I’m sure it caused certain amount of pain and rancor that he was one of the top five physicists of his era. Not that you can necessarily rank physicists like that, but he was huge and people probably felt super lucky to work with him.
This is also an added time when he was banging his female grad students in advanced physics. I’m not sure that he ever had a female grad student, he might have, but just the demographics weighed against that.
But anyway, the guys who were cuckolded, maybe, just kind of – I don’t know – sucked it up as part of the price they pay. I don’t know.
Jacobsen: What’s the more objective analysis of that? Does it make Feynman partly a bad guy?
Rosner: Yes. He wasn’t considered a bad guy when he was alive, but he worked on the Manhattan Project.
Jacobsen: Famously, Einstein did not.
Rosner: Einstein didn’t work on the Manhattan Project. But Einstein set in motion the foundations for the Manhattan Project.
Jacobsen: He was, actually, outside that Szilard letter with them.
Rosner: Yes. So, Szilard goes to… some physicists are concerned that if Hitler gets the atomic bomb, that would lead to the Nazis owning the world, nobody could stop them. So, Szilard went to Einstein and said, “You’re the only…” – I’m probably getting parts of this wrong here. Correct me if I’m wrong because you know better than I – “…physicist that FDR will listen to. So, you should go to him and say this is a threat.”
So, Einstein wrote this letter to FDR saying that there is a weapon. I don’t know if he put it in exactly these terms, but just ‘one of these bombs could blow up a city. If Hitler gets it first, we’re fucked.’ Then I think Einstein went to meet with FDR and then based on their meeting, maybe, Szilard came along with FDR who authorized spending at least a billion bucks, which was a huge amount of money back then, probably many billions of dollars to do the Manhattan Project.
The Manhattan Project was not just a bunch of physicists fucking around with Plutonium spheres in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This was the thing that, it’s very hard to refine. For one thing, Plutonium doesn’t exist in the wild. It decays too fast.
You have to start with Uranium. You’ve got to pull out well less than one percent of the Uranium that’s easily fissionable. So, I don’t like Uranium has an atomic weight of like 238. But the stuff that’s unstable has an atomic weight of 235, I think.
You have to take a bunch of Uranium ore and spin it in centrifuges, which is what Iran keeps trying to do. Hundreds of centrifuges have to spin the stuff out to separate stuff that differs in density by only one percent. So, it takes just a lot of effort, a lot of refining. So, you had Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who was doing that. You have the Hanford nuclear plant, which I think was in Washington, not D.C., but Washington State.
A bunch of places you had the early experiments where they build a nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago. It was all secret. If you wrote a science fiction story or you talked about the possibility of an atomic bomb, the FBI might come and tell you to shut up about it, “Don’t write any more of those stories.”
It was a huge project that stretches from one side of the country to the other, all just based on Einstein writing a letter to the president. And, of course, people will argue about exactly what happened to the atomic bomb project under Hitler.
But I think the people pretty much agree they did not get close at all. They were working on doing stuff with heavy water, which is H2O atoms, where the Hydrogen atoms are Deuterium or Tritium.
They have normally a Hydrogen atom just as a proton or an electron, but you can hang one or two neutrons on the proton. So, they were working on this. They had a refining enterprise going on, I think, in Denmark maybe, maybe Sweden.
I don’t know. They just didn’t get very far. People will argue on behalf of who is in charge of it. Was it Schrodinger No that was the German effort. Oppenheimer was Manhattan. But German effort was a big theoretical guy who didn’t get the fuck out of Germany when it went Nazi, as a lot of scientists did.
They ended up being in charge of the nuclear bomb project. People will argue that he didn’t want to give this weapon to Hitler, so he fucked it up on purpose. Other people will argue, “No, they just didn’t have the resources to do it.” Either the huge number of scientists that you need or the raw materials or whatever.
But anyway, the Germans did not get close at all. But then, we went ahead and dropped two atomic bombs on cities full of people of a different ethnicity than us, which from the perspective of 75 years later, looks suspect because we blew up one city to shreds.
We started with Hiroshima and killed at least 120,000 people there. Although not right off the bat, maybe, instantly, half that number. Then the number doubled as people died of radiation sickness.
But it blew up the city to the radius of several kilometers. It was obviously a devastating weapon on August 6th, 1945. But then they didn’t surrender immediately. So, on August 9th, we dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the somewhat smaller town.
So, the death toll there was only about 80,000 when everybody got done dying. People argue, at the time, that Japan was not going to surrender easily and that we might have lost a million troops in trying to invade Japan because it would have had to be; we would have had to fight island by island.
But that argument, people don’t necessarily agree about that either. I don’t know what exactly the arguments are, but in all of World War Two, in two theaters of war, the European theater and the Asian theater, we only lost – it’s still a huge number – 4,600 Americans, American soldiers and related personnel.
So, the idea that we would have lost two and a half times that number of soldiers die to take Japan. I don’t know that seems like a number that was inflated to make us feel better about killing 200,000 Japanese.
Then the question is, could we have just let them know and said, “Be here at nine o’clock on this date and you’re going to see something you don’t want to see,” and just detonate a bomb, blow up a town of 10,000 or blow up just an industrial plant.
Why do you have to blow up an entire good sized city?
So the thinking has shifted to the extent that people think about it at all. A lot of people still argue that it saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers because after the second atomic bomb, they immediately surrendered at a cost of zero American lives.
Still 75 years later, we are less battle hardened. o the extent that we think about World War Two at all, I think people are more naturally skeptical and, if not skeptical; they, at least, think about how guilty the atomic scientists must have felt after their atomic bombs were used in this way.
There is some evidence of that. Some of the scientists remain belligerently oblivious to criticism. But others of them felt like shit, one would have to think that somebody as human as Einstein would have felt pretty bad about how things played out.
Because not only did we blow up two cities, but this led a huge arms race where at the peak of the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, I think each side had about 6,500 nuclear weapons. Then we did arms control work.
I think we’ve dropped it down to where each side now only has about 1,600 nuclear weapons still enough to sterilize the Earth many times over.
The point of that was when this strategy was being developed, it was called mutually assured destruction to come up with weapons so devastating that each side was terrified to deploy them, to use them.
Because they knew that if they used them that both nations and the whole rest of the northern hemisphere and probably eventually the southern hemisphere, everybody would die. There was a famous novel and movie of the fifties called On the Beach.
Where it takes place among the last living people in Tasmania, in southern Australia, because they’re the last people who haven’t been poisoned by the spreading cloud of nuclear fallout after a big war, the crew of a sub, of a US sub, just hauls ass to the southern hemisphere, and it’s their last few months of life among the Tasmanians as the cloud draws near and they all die.
And there were plenty of books and movies. We have the Russian missile crisis, which was, maybe, the closest that, at least, we knew that we came to nuclear war in the early 60s. You had Dr. Strangelove, the movie which ends with a series of nuclear explosions.
You had freaking what’s the Fail Safe, it’s a movie with Henry Fonda, made from a novel in the 50s the crew of a nuclear bomber, my dad, my real dad, my stepdad, all my dad’s, my dad was a navigator bombardier in Strategic Air Command.
He flew a B-36, a huge plane with like 14 engines. I think it had like 6 prop engines and 8 jet engines. I think I’m exaggerating the number of engines, but just a monster of an airplane. they started off. He flew around with nukes for at least 3 years.
When he started, I think they started with A bombs. By the time he was done, I think they were flying H bombs around. An H bomb is like 100 times more powerful than an A bomb. H bomb uses an A bomb explosion to create fusion.
It started with fission in the A bomb and use that explosion to collapse a bunch of heavy Hydrogen to create fusion. You get a bomb that’s 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Anyway, my dad was flying those around and my step dad was guarding them on a base, I think in Louisiana, maybe.
Then my father in law was doing nuclear bomb accounting. He was keeping an account of nuclear bombs. So, everybody was in the nuclear bomb business. Everybody was fucking terrified of being obliterated in a nuclear war.
There is a little bit of fear now that fucking Trump has six weeks to go. But we’re much less afraid than people in the 50s and 60s. And so, the Manhattan Project scientists probably felt like shit about bringing that world into existence.
They probably console themselves with the idea that the cat was going to get out of the bag eventually, anyway. That it was good that America democracy had a head start versus this fascist dictatorship, this repressive… these motherfuckers in Russia and the other motherfuckers in China.
But it would have been nice to, maybe, hold off the nuclear arms race for a few, maybe. we went from A bombs to H bombs faster than we needed to, if at all. Edward Teller, for some reason, Hungary turned out a bunch of genius physicists in the first half of the 20th century. like Norbert Wiener, I think probably came out of Hungary and Teller came out of Hungary and Teller was this huge, like proponent of the H bomb.
Without him pushing forward, we, maybe, wouldn’t have made it. Because what the fuck do you do if someone drops one of these on Chicago and kills 10 million people all at once? What’s the point of that weapon?
Anyway, if you want to learn about this stuff, there are good books by Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I think he did a sequel, maybe he didn’t. It explains in great detail the science and the politics. We started talking about whether Feynman was a bad guy.
Feynman just gleefully liked to figure shit out. He would crack safes. He liked to figure out just by fiddling around with the dial, what was going inside the lock of one of these Manhattan Project safes.
So, he kept cracking them. Then he’d leave a note saying, “Hey, I was here, ha ha.” He played the bongo drums. He was a hipster, a beatnik. He was a good looking guy, which helped his project of getting laid a lot.
He was a very cheerful guy and a great teacher, a great popularizer of science and just a friendly, lively guy. So, I don’t know if he had moments of crisis, of conscience. I don’t know. I doubt it. He just seemed to barrel forward figuring shit out.
He’s the one who figured out why the space shuttle Challenger blew up, or at least he came up with the most effective presentation as to its demise. I don’t know. He’s like 72. He’s dying of stomach cancer. A lot of the atomic scientists died of cancer because they were fucking around with radiation like maniacs for years.
They had a ball of Plutonium and some guys have a sphere. You go to the office and say, “Hey, pick that up,” and you pick it up and it would be warm in your hand because nuclear fission was going on, nuclear decay was going on in the ball of metal. So, they just had that ball, the guy who had that in his office; I don’t know how long he lived.
There was another guy who got killed immediately. There was a thing called tickling the dragon, I think, where it would take two half spheres of Plutonium and bring them as close together as you safely could because you needed it.
While people were standing by with Geiger counters to measure the rate of nuclear decay, they needed these numbers to figure out how the bomb was going to perform. They’re bringing these half spheres together, using probably some like thumb screw arrangement from a safe distance.
But the fucking thumb screw slips and the two half spheres “tunck” together. This is bad because it’s a critical mass. In two seconds, they’re going to have, if not an explosion then, a huge meltdown that will render the whole fucking, probably the whole, base uninhabitable.
So, this guy runs in and knocks the spheres apart basically with his bare hands. Maybe he had a hammer or something. But you have a nuclear weapon that – I don’t know – if they were so critical, they would have exploded.
But they were pretty fucking close to critical mass. This guy runs up to it, knocks the spheres apart and saves everybody’s life except his own because he was cooked. He was dead within a week. Yes, fucking hero, probably buried in a lead coffin, literally.
So, the atomic bomb is pretty much the point where science went from a force of good to feeling like it was a little dirty. And America tried to forget about it, but we couldn’t because of the arms race. But the government tried to convince everybody that the atomic era was a good thing, atoms for peace.
I think about the project, where they tried to prospect for oil by setting off a bomb. They did nuclear fracking in the 60s or 70s. They set off like one or two nuclear weapons like two miles deep in the earth to fracture rock and free oil and natural gas, atoms for peace.
“Hey, here’s what we could do with that.”
It worked. They got a lot of oil, but it was radioactive. So, it freaked everybody out and it also caused earthquakes. Colorado, which isn’t a big earthquake country. So, anyway, did Feynman feel bad? I don’t think so.
Anyway, so, he’s 72, he’s dying. He goes and testifies in front of Congress about what cause Challenger to blow up. And the deal is that joints in the rocket where the rocket vibrates like crazy because it’s a fucking rocket.
So, sections of the rocket were gaskets, rubber gaskets between the sections to allow them to move around with the vibrations without cracking and also without breaking the seal. When Challenger launched, it was cold and the rubber was not sufficiently flexible.
So, fuel got out and was ignited outside the rocket and it blew up the challenger. Then Feynman sits in front of Congress with a glass of ice water. before he sits there and he goes, this is the O-ring material. He goes ‘It’s stretching.’
Then, he dips the O-ring in ice water and then he tries to stretch. It doesn’t stretch. like, even the idiots in Congress were like, ‘Oh, that’s fucking bad.’ That was his last heroic moment in his life. So, I think he like doing shit like that. No, I think he was a happy warrior.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, home of the University of Colorado, where I eventually ended up attending after I had a nervous breakdown and failed to complete my application to any college.
I only wanted to go to Harvard and then I felt that I couldn’t even get a girlfriend in high school. Anyway, I ended up just going to my hometown school. This week, in a Covid devastated intercollegiate football season, my school and the school where I met my wife is for the first time in a while, they broke into the top twenty-five college football teams in the nation in a season, where nobody should be playing intercollegiate sports.
It’s just exploiting the kids. I’m sure all the players want to play, but it’s a sleazy proposition. But the schools make a shitload of money on school anyway. They would be late in the season. The season would be basically over by now because of Covid. They’ve played four games and won all of them.
So, they’re there nationally. So, I tweeted, “Congratulations.” Also, everybody’s stupid to be playing football. So, I thought I’d tweet another congratulation to my hometown school for having on its faculty back in the 60s, George Gamow, the guy who came up with the Big Bang Theory, which is the world’s the most important current theory in cosmology.
All cosmology stems from it and what’s interesting about Gamow, my dad, my stepdad, played poker with one of the chancellors of the university. The one who was in charge of cleaning up messes, and a faculty member did something. They wanted to make it go away back in the era when you could do that stuff.
So I don’t know if my dad knew this about Gamow. My dad owned a lady’s ready to wear school. So, he didn’t have a deep background in physics, but, somehow, he knew that Gamow was drinking and was prone to drive off the side of mountains because Boulder goes right for Boulder, up into the foothills, into the mountains.
So, I don’t know if my dad knew it because my dad knew everybody in town. He grew up there. He was a friendly guy. He was well-loved you, knew everybody and everything. I don’t know if he knew that Gamow was drunk because he knew everybody or because he knew the chancellor who was in charge of cleaning up messes.
Anyway, when I was going to tweet about it, but, before I did, I wanted to play. You can’t slander the dead, or is it libel? Libel as a print, I think, okay, you can’t libel the dead. You can say whatever you want about dead people in America, whether it’s true or not.
So I could go ahead and say he’s drunk and not get in trouble. But I didn’t want to do that without some verification. So, I Googled “George Gamow drunk” and like a gazillion references came up. It’s part of his standard biography.
He was a heavy drinker. He died at age 64, probably because of his heavy drinking, which amazed me that this is a well-known part of his biography. That one of the greatest the physicists with one of the greatest theories – Oh, right now. I don’t believe in an unadulterated Big BANG, but it’s still a great theory.
one of the greatest theories of the 20th century in physics and there it was. A party monster came up with it. He wasn’t a solitary, surly drunk. He was a gregarious fun drunk. So, what’s that? So, he likes going to and throwing parties and having a lot of cocktails.
There is a picture with a funny party hat on when he went drinking and Einstein showed up and all these great physicists. Those guys.
Jacobsen: Overdrinky?
Rosner: I don’t know how Drinky Einstein was, but he had a number of affairs. He banged like five women while he was married to other women. That’s the number I’m most comfortable with. I don’t think he went out of his way to do it.
But I think if women threw themselves at him or if he had a meeting of the minds to some extent, then he’d do it. So, Feynman was an unstoppable pussy hound. He would seduce anybody who got within 50 feet of it.
The wives of his grad students. Wives and girlfriends of his grad students in his later years. He’d go to teaching at Cal Tech, living in Pasadena, and he’d spend some of his afternoons in strip joints just scribbling physics on bar napkins.
So when people think of science, they don’t think of drunk people or of Feynman getting late into a science. We’ve talked about that. That’s one of the original pickup artists with developing principles for what would and wouldn’t work with women.
You might meet in a bar. Anyway, one of the greatest fucking theories of the 20th century in physics came from a party monster.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, you, by alternative intelligence test standards, have one of the highest IQs in the world, repeatedly. So, it’s established, in a loose alternative sense.
Rick Rosner: What you’re saying is, I’ve taken a lot of these tests and done well.
Jacobsen: So, you would technically have the qualifications to join a lot of these alternative high-IQ societies. Are you offered to join a lot of them, or have you?
Rosner: Yes, I’m all offered by some. Some societies they just sign you up. They send you a thing and you’re in. That’s like, “Okay.” But I haven’t gone out of my way to join into these. I’ve tried to join the most exclusive ones. Ones that I could use for – I don’t know – publicity of some credential that might – I don’t know – get me interviewed somewhere, though barely ever happens.
As a younger man, I was mostly concerned about getting a girlfriend. I’ve told you this story before, but I joined Mensa because Playboy in the mid-80s did a photo series called the “Women of Mensa.”
It’s naked pictures of women who are in Mensa. My thinking wasn’t to join Mensa to meet these women. My thinking was that if Playboy did this, then Penthouse certainly was going to do the ‘Naked Men of Mensa.’
I was always lifting weights. I figured I had a good shot at getting into the ‘Men of Mensa’ photo, whatever, in Playgirl magazine. Then all these women would see me and somebody would want to be my girlfriend. This was stupid for a number of reasons.
Including that women generally didn’t read stuff like that, this was stupid because, even though the magazine is ostensibly for women, apparently, it is mostly for gay guys. Women don’t necessarily want to see naked guys with boners as much as guys want to see naked guys with boners.
I found that mostly true with stripping. If women want to see some fucking loser gyrate around naked, they can just go home and see their own personal loser. So, anyway, reason number two is Playgirl never did anything of the sort, but, anyway, join Mensa.
So, I had a year’s worth of membership, so I went up to a few things. There are no girls. I don’t know what the gender breakdown by sex in Mensa is, but it’s got to be like 90% guys. I don’t know if I wanted to hang out with blowhard guys. I can just hang out with myself.
Then I figured I worked in bars, so I could meet women. Everything I did, I did so, maybe, somebody would find me a reasonable would consider me an okay boyfriend.
Jacobsen: Someone you even met at the Jewish singles dance.
Rosner: I went to a Jewish singles dance, yes, but in 1986. I met a woman who’s now my wife. Even that wasn’t, that was just because I’d had a bad breakup a long time before, but I still felt bad about it. So, to get myself out of my rut, I challenged myself to do something stupid, and pointless once a week.
That week, it was go to the stupid Jewish singles dance. Anyway, I didn’t see the point of joining any of these other like high IQ clubs because they just didn’t seem to offer an angle on meeting women in a nutshell.
Jacobsen: Do you think you have the world’s highest IQ?
Rosner: I don’t know. I could make an argument that I do, but it’s a pretty nebulous thing. I’m definitely one of the best takers of high-end IQ test in the world, but it’s a pretty arbitrary set of skills. It’s like being the “World’s Strongest Man” if you’ve ever watched that on TV.
Jacobsen: It’s not something to take time before. If I happen to come across, then I’ll little watch it, but not usually. Because I don’t really own a television or watch much or any television.
Rosner: But you’ve seen the events. It’s deadlifting stuff, like picking up a car. How many times can you pick up one end of a car within 60 seconds? Can you lift these rocks that are these spheres made of stone that are like 30 inches in diameter?
How many of those can you lift to the top of pedestals in two minutes? How far can you tow a truck or a train? It’s events that people practice train for; certainly, these are among the strongest guys in the world.
Some of them go 360 pounds and six foot eight. It’s like 12 percent body fat or less. They’re super strong, but to determine who’s the strongest of them, you’ve got all these arbitrary events, and even powerlifting is arbitrary.
So, you have to be head and shoulders above every other super strong guy to be clearly hands down and just absolutely, the strongest guy in the world. That might happen occasionally, but, mostly, there is a little cluster of people who, due to natural ability or obsession or just lots of practice doggedness, do well on IQ tests.
I’d like to think that if I and everybody else who claims to be to have the world’s highest IQ were sat down or were assigned like three or four tests, given enough time to do a good job on all of them that I would prevail. But who knows.
Jacobsen: Was that the argument?
Rosner: Well, the argument is that I’ve taken – I don’t know – dozens of these high-end tests. I’ve gotten the highest score ever scored on like three quarters of the high-end test that I’ve taken.
Jacobsen: Were any of these tests normed on you?
Rosner: A lot of them were normed on me, where they look for people who’ve taken a lot of other high-end tests. They have you submit your scores and from your scores plus your performance on their test, they help determine the scoring scale for their test.
I’m sure none of them were exclusively normed on me, but I probably helped with a lot of them. Because I’ve got the most on other test scores to send people, that want them.
Jacobsen: When did you stop taking so many?
Rosner: I don’t know. There is this one that I wanted to do so well on that I just never stop taking it. I quit working on it a long time ago.
Jacobsen: What is the score if you do well on it?
Rosner: Over 200 if you do well.
Jacobsen: SD 15?
Rosner: I think so. Then there is this other one that I’ve been working on recently. But I’ll submit in the next few days. If I could I have to submit it before, I don’t know the 20th, I believe is the deadline.
The guy who created the test is having a little competition that I’d like to be in. If I get to the point where I’m satisfied with my answers, then awesome. When I get to the point that I’m satisfied with it, enough of my answers, I’ll submit.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, you have this idea about necessity, a lot of people do.
Rick Rosner: I just have thought that just came to me that freedom from necessity is an emergent quality.
Jacobsen: As in an increase in degrees of freedom?
Rosner: Well, you don’t have choice until you can make choice and choice is generally associated with awareness. It doesn’t have to be like an amoeba, which can still reach some inflection point where it has to move one way or another.
And, of course, in an amoeba, it’s all chemistry, but you could argue that a choice has been made. You’d get people who would argue back that, no, it’s not a choice, it’s chemistry. But you don’t get a choice of where alternatives are weighed and decisions made until you get some level of awareness.
Jacobsen: So, the way I’m interpreting necessity is in its most general sense of unaffordability.
Rosner: Yes!
Jacobsen: Something is necessary.
Rosner: Da Vinci didn’t know the fundamental particles of physics, but I’d say it’s a minority of scientists, who spend much time thinking about how the fundamental particles could be any other way than the way they are.
Even most scientists do not specialize in questioning the particles we have and what they do, I would think that the underlying assumption in scientists and everybody else is that the universe had no choice in particles. You have to take a physics class or read some article on physics for the layman, for somebody to tell you that it’s an active question whether there was any where you could among possible universes, whether there is a choice of particles.
People, I think, assume that physics is the way it is by way of necessity, that I think you can find all sorts of examples of that, like the inverse square law for forces. How could it be otherwise? Because space itself spreads out by the square of the distance from the particle that’s exerting the force.
Jacobsen: Yes, I think you just take the common domains of knowledge, chemistry, particle physics, biology and fundamental questions about creation and annihilation in cosmology. Each of those layers, you can apply this principle of necessity.
Rosner: It brings up an area that where there is the wild boys, where: Can you imagine alternative worlds? And that is the history of evolution, where the species that survive and then the species that evolved from those species, there is a lot of luck arbitrariness.
We’ve had six waves of mass extinction where we had to rebuild after every wave. All that depends on a random meteor. So, earlier, I was arguing that the choice can’t exist without awareness, but their choice is just one thing and then random chance. What I’m saying is there is nothing necessary about the history of evolution, what’s necessary is that things would evolve.
Jacobsen: So, that’s a fundamental statement on necessity in biology. The fact that things evolve, the ways that things fundamentally evolve. Is this something like talking about primary and secondary necessities as you get the higher order complications?
Rosner: Is he talking about that or are we talking about that?
Jacobsen: He’s so cool, “Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature,” or, “Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.” So, we’re talking about choice. It’s not that there has to be choice. That’s a secondary deal.
I think it’s fundamental. I think there is a similar process when you just have differentiation happening in a universe and choice between options of a conscious agent, of an operator.
But it’s the same process going on, but they’re fundamentally different and one simply differentiates and one has a certain recursive element to it. It’s reflective back onto itself and then making a choice, a differentiation relevant to its own nature.
But fundamentally, this is a bifurcation in either case. Self-consistency and principles of existence, but he’s using it. The way he says necessity sounds like the way we use principles of existence, that which cannot be; those which are necessary. In other words, that which can’t be the other.
Yes, and so, there is a certain unavoidability to existence in the same way there is a necessity for existence. In the same way, there are principles of existence and those principles of existence and that necessity is reflective of self-consistency.
So, the fact that things are unavoidably existent means that they are necessary, means that they are grounded in principles of existence. What those principles are, that’s another question, but essentially necessity is fundamental and is another way of framing in another century, in another philosophical paradigm of principles of existence, of self consistency, I think.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/27
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If someone was to look out into the world, there appears to be objects. There appears to be subjects. You ask the question, “What is that object, or who is that to point out a subject?” How do those get slotted in thinking in an actual perception?
Rick Rosner: You’re talking about two different questions. One is how stuff is identified, and the second is how stuff is classified. You were pointing at this last night when talking about essentials.
I would argue with the essentials or at least things that you don’t know well or the things/the identifiers in your mind. I don’t know when you see a new person or when you see a car. For you to be able to remember that person or perceive the car, you have to do some classification work.
That’s largely a combination of conscious and less conscious. If the person’s got a broken nose, you’ll explicitly notice that. But there will be a bunch of other stuff about their face that you will note, but less consciously.
So, you’ll be able to identify him if you see him again in a half an hour. That means that for faces and for cars, we’ve got classification systems that we’re only like half aware of. We have a mental model and a subconscious or unconscious mental model of the different configurations the faces can take.
Then we see a new face, we map that person into that face in the face database. I don’t know if the face classification is as simple as all that, but probably so that you’ve got a number of different dimensions.
You find that person’s face along all these different dimensions, which is the same thing as finding a point in multidimensional face space. Except it’s not quite that easy because faces might have 30 or 50 potential dimensional characteristics, your average face won’t register along most of those dimensions.
You only plot that. You pick the dimensions that are appropriate for each face you classify. The broken nose might be an optional dimension of its own. It’s broken noses. There are interesting things like Brian Williams, the newscaster, has a nose that goes to one side, but he’s unconsciously learned to tilt it, to turn his head, just enough that his nose presents as less to the side than it would if he were perfectly squared up to the camera.
So, the broken nose is less noticeable. But anyway, you pick the dimensions, the face is distinctive along it, then you plot that in some face space. You do that with a lot of stuff. That you pick your dimensions.
And along with picking the dimensions, you pick along those dimensions the distinguishing characteristic, and then you contextualize the distinguishing characteristics; and that’s it. It’s not necessarily a dimension like somebody just mentioned, though.
We were watching a movie with Emma Stone from 10 years ago, where a character is described as six on the Kinsey sexuality scale, which is almost as gay as you can be. That’s a linear scale. I think it goes from one to seven or something.
We don’t necessarily rank like an eyebrow or a an ear along a bunch of dimensions. We contextualize the ear or the eyebrow or the busted nose with a comparison to other ones that we found notable.
Maybe, that does break down into classification along a bunch of linear dimensions. I don’t know. Maybe, that’s the most efficient way to classify information. But in any case, you can find the distinguishing characteristics and you contextualize, among other things, that have the same distinguishing characteristic, that aren’t the same tags. For that being a characteristic that’s notable, that’s it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/27
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: This comes off of the idea that the actual worlds, the universes that could exist that are highly parallel to ours can’t be magically different. You can’t have a universe in which the South won the Civil War.
Unless, you can explain how that might happen through causal effects, you can’t magically have something happen. So, anyway, I was thinking about it. That’s also a principle of writing decent science fiction where I thought about these two productions that annoyed me.
One is called True Love, where several years in the future scientists have discovered how to find someone’s soul mate. No, I think the show’s called Soul Mates, that there is an actual thing. There is some soul that we have.
Scientists have figured out how to read the soul to find out which two souls actually belong together out of the whole world. And then the show is like 4, 5, 6 episodes, each telling its own story about the problems created by this deal.
I’m like, fuck the show because A, it’s not very good. B, this isn’t a thing that can reasonably exist. There is no soul that only matches up with one other soul on the planet. A, that’s dumb. B, the problems created by this thing that’s dumb don’t concern me because it doesn’t cast much light on actual things.
Decent science fiction examines things that are pertinent and important to people in the world. Some people would even argue that science fiction isn’t science fiction at all. It’s just an examination of the present dressing it up in science.
I don’t know. The Day The Earth Stood Still examined dangerous Cold War conflicts, the anxiety that everybody was feeling in the 1950s about like the potential for nuclear war. And this was examined through the perspective of an alien species that shares our same concern.
That we’re going to wipe ourselves out and sends a giant robot custodian, basically. Then there is this other this movie with Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake called In Time. In the future, instead of money, you have time.
It’s built into a chip on your arm. If you’re rich, you’ve got like years of saved up years. If you’re poor, you’ve only got a few minutes of saved up time and you have to keep working to replenish the time you have.
If you run out of time, you just drop dead on the spot. It’s a whole movie about the problems and dangers that the system creates. I’m like, fuck this movie A, because it’s not very good. B, it’s like, I understand the point that the rich people have more resources than poor people.
But it’s a dumb way of arguing about that. It doesn’t offer any insight on any of this shit and it’s via a device that will never happen, compared to the semi-successful like Blade Runner. The Blade Runner movies, they look good.
But they’re frustrating because they’re not as good as they should be and they’re not as good as they look. Half of science fiction movies and TV shows have ripped off their look. The rainy streets, the dystopian Los Angeles, but the movies themselves are only semi-successful.
But even so, the reason for their whatever success they have besides how good they look, is that they try to examine what makes somebody human particularly in a world that verges on one we’re moving into more and more, where it has the potential for artificial intelligence.
It feels like there is relevance. You feel the relevance of points in the movie, like when Roy Batty is dying on the roof of the building. He’s arguing that he has as much right to existence as any non-engineered human based on what he has experienced in his life. Have you seen the movie?
Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: Well, anyway. The decent science fiction doesn’t just pull a bunch of futuristic shit out of its ass. It deals with issues that concern us. It’s believable. This isn’t an issue for a lot of science fiction fans. Believability isn’t that much of an issue like Star Trek. You’ve certainly seen Star Trek.
Jacobsen: Oh, yes. All right.
Rosner: All right. So, Star Trek is super antiseptic. The first series, the first three years of Star Trek with Captain Kirk and Spock and everybody is antiseptic, underimagined, and cheap, because it was in the early to mid-60s.
Their big deal was sliding doors that made a whooshing sound, and things that act like cell phones do now. But it was just cheap. If they wanted an alien, they’d slap some shit on their foreheads or they paint them blue. Humans were not modified.
It didn’t get modified humans until like the third series of Star Trek when you have the Borg. But you’re just like humans that are part robots with circuit boards glued to their faces. So, Star Trek gets points with people for having good writers.
They hired some of the best science fiction writers of the 50s to write scripts in the 60s. So, the issues were there, the philosophical issues. The world they built was just shit. There was no advertising in the world of Star Trek, where, 30 years later, when you’ve got Minority Report.
People realize that the future is driven by market forces and it has very annoying advertising. What I’m arguing is that, the best science fiction addresses issues we’re interested in, looks cool, and presents a pretty believable future, an awesome but believable future, either awesome in a good way or in a bad way or in both ways.
There is another show that pissed me off, which is Altered Carbon. In the future, you can move from body to body. You’ve pretty much got a little hockey puck that plugs into the back of your neck and that contains your accumulated experience, your consciousness, and all the information that comprises it.
And it looks pretty cool, that fucking show. But it’s a terrible show, again, because it’s under thought. It’s written probably by people who don’t have a deep grounding in science fiction. It’s set like 300 years in the future. Everybody, even 300 years in the future, the only thing people care about is looking hot and fucking.
That’s just not a reasonable future. We’re already seeing changes in sexual behavior. We’re barely in the future. 300 years from now, some people won’t worry about sex.
Others will want to have four percent body fat and amazing abs. There are always will be people who want to just do a lot of fucking. There will still be those people. But there will also be like 80 other kinds of conscious beings, none of whom are concerned with having abs and fucking. The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/27
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I had some more thoughts. It’s not a different stream. Yes, there are different stream of thoughts. I think that is a stream of thought, which is more precise.
So, I think the vague notion that people who are in the non-religious communities or people who are in a Freudian state of mind. They see the Gods as projections of human limits. Okay, cool, I think that’s limited though, because it’s not very precise.
Rick Rosner: What projection of human limits?
Jacobsen: That human limitations or needs, those are the Gods, are projections of those.
Rosner: You mean, God is the creation of or is the solution for a human limitation. Is that what you’re saying?
Jacobsen: Yes. Not necessarily a solution for limitation, but a projection of that, of the fulfillment of that need. So, in some ways, it is a solution, yes. In other ways, it’s simply a manifestation of that lack.
Rosner: So, people feel fear because they suck, basically. They have limitations. So, they create the gods. Out of that fear, you have the creation of Gods.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, I think that’s like the whole notion with the anthropomorphization of the divine. But that’s redundant because the divine are characteristically anthropomorphic.
The polytheistic Hellenistic pantheon are all just human characters, but they have more capacity. So, they’re superhuman.
Rosner: They were the superheroes of their time.
Jacobsen: I think the Marvel DC Universe, same deal, the Hindu Gods, same deal. They have more arms or they have more sex or they have a longer lifespan or they have the power to do something like have control of nature; humans don’t.
Zeus’ control over lightning, things of this nature. So, there is this notion, but I don’t think it’s that precise because it’s just a one-step. Humans have a certain set of identities and we project that outwards.
Then we call those te Gods and then atheists, materialists come around and say – or skeptics come around and say, “Look how stupid these people are.” Neither conversation is very helpful.
Because I think you have to be precise about it and take it as an operation, not surgery. Unless, you’re taking it as a dissection analogy. But I think you can make an operation to how that happens.
Rosner: How the creation of gods happen?
Jacobsen: Yes. So, not in a historical sense, not in a cultural sense, but how you can operationally define how this reasonably could happen in most cases. So, the Abrahamic God is in modern terms omni-infinite.
So, omniscient, knows everything, omnipotent can do everything, with aseity, which is to say self-existent. It is contingent or dependent upon nothing, and it is eternal. So, it’s a-temporal. It’s imminent. It’s, in and of, reality while being outside of reality. It’s everywhere.
In other words, these sorts of things. So, it’s infinite in all these different capacities.
Rosner: Basically, what you’re saying is that, it’s a more sophisticated solution to the problem. If you’re going to design a God, you might as well make the God Superman in all ways.
Jacobsen: I think this isn’t more sophisticated necessarily. I think it’s the nth degree of what is normally happening. So, is that more sophisticated?
Rosner: Gods that are just like you, that have specific functions like the pantheon Gods that are you can imagine. They’re ad hoc.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, these other ones, you can take them as like superhuman finites, like a pluralism. But when it comes to these modern gods that are most dominant in the world. Typically, they’re taking them as a singular, infinite identity.
So, it’s not more sophisticated. It’s just “mash them all together” and then sayin, “You can’t measure it.” Is that more sophisticated?
Rosner: Really, it’s more efficient and harder to argue against. I’d say it’s more sophisticated. It feels the God who is all powerful, all knowing, the monotheistic God, feels simplistic. At the same time, that idea is more powerful.
I say it’s more powerful and sophisticated. If you look at it, half of the people on earth, at least nominally, subscribe to a religion with that one most powerful God. So, you can’t argue with success. Except for science, which is even more successful than that one God.
Jacobsen: So, I would take this then that you just take Christians and Muslims of all denominations. These become over half the population or near half the population of the planet. So, I agree with you. That is successful by the numbers.
But if you just take this process of just saying, “It’s anthropomorphizing with these polytheistic versions or these monotheisms, but these monotheisms with a limited God as opposed to these monotheisms with one infinite God, who is personal.”
I think they’re all about same category. Although, typically, they’re characterized as the former ones. They’re taken as anthropomorphic. They have human attributes. The latter ones taken as more objective and scientific.
That’s why its harder to refute in your words. However, I think, in either case, they’re all still anthropomorphic in different framings around that orb.
Rosner: Yes, they all exist to solve human problems and questions and all that. Yes, sure.
Jacobsen: So, here’s the process that I’m proposing: First, you can name a psychological lack. I’m not saying people that believe in these Gods are doing that now, explicitly. But you name a psychological lack.
You objectify it as a property, goodness, spatial limitation, temporal limitation, etc. Externalize it as out there in the universe. You make it infinite and personalize it once more. So, it becomes an omni-infinite personality based on that human lack. So, it’s in the new version, externalization.
Rosner: More simply you’re framing the universe in human terms and then buttressing your framework by claiming that the universe is explicitly framed that way.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, I characterize it this way. Internal made external, finite made infinite, personal psychology made “defined” psychology. I think that basically all the pantheons of limited gods would be a self-limiting formulation going through this process.
Rosner: It’s just like first attempts when people weren’t really or they hadn’t got down to the essentials of what their spiritual concerns were. Creating a whole bunch of little Gods, each in charge of some aspect of life for survival, speaks to people who are less dominant over their environment.
Appealing to the weather gods and hunting gods, there is still a bunch of stuff to work out, both theologically and in terms of building a civilization. They’re like almost preliminary Gods.
Jacobsen: So, in this sense, I think, and I wrote in this argument in an article, the end point, the end result of theology, which is grounded on these ideas, is simply to die out. Due to the fact that this is the process that’s ongoing, it’s just bound to unravel the more and more we understand about the world.
Rosner: I don’t know why the process that created these gods is the thing that guarantees they’re going to die off. They’re going to die off because they’re contravened by the more and more stuff we know about the world.
Jacobsen: Maybe, that’s a dual process. The fact of this inversion externalization is also happening alongside those findings about the actual world given by science, hypothetically activism, whatever you call it.
Rosner: I think you can make that argument if you also argue that the will towards science has a lot of things in common with the will to create gods.
Jacobsen: I like that phrasing. Question. Does teleology mean final purpose or end of something? Like the reason for it.
Rosner: I was thinking about this, but in different terms. Last night, we were spending a lot of time talking about possible worlds, how actual possible worlds; worlds that you could argue pretty much have to exist, because there is nothing about them that’s inconsistent with existence.
As an example, I was using worlds in which Abraham Lincoln survived being shot and how he can’t magically survive being shot. There has to be something within causality to explain how that might happen.
Anyway, I was thinking about that, not in terms of in a physics or philosophy or whatever, but in terms of what makes a decent science fiction story. I was thinking about two stories that I’ve seen recently that have annoyed me.
It’s a mark of bad science fiction, where you create like a future in which there is this thing that has been there. Something has been invented or something’s happened. Then your whole story is about all the problems that this thing has caused. I have two examples.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So in metaphysical inversion, that’s the idea, continuing from last session, I was in correspondence with a Christian professor friend. He recommended reading “Letters on Humanism” by Heidegger.
As I read through some comments and the essay through the day, I wrote an article for the day. Yesterday, I posited something. I’ve had called it, something like universal metaphysical inversalization, because Heidegger in that article or the lengthy article, “Letters on Humanism” talks about the reverse of a metaphysical statement is still a metaphysical statement.
He is critiquing Sartre because Sartre is positing Existentialism as a form of Humanism, not only Humanism or the only Humanism, but a form of Humanism. I think it is wrong. So, I also think Heidegger is wrong because I think that you can basically have an operation, which, I think is probably novel.
Where, basically, universally, you can take a metaphysical statement now and make an inverse of it. So, basically, you evoke a stomach and then you just squeeze it out so that the innards of the stomach are on the outside now.
Basically, it’s like physicalizing what was seen as the metaphysical.
Rick Rosner: So, can you give an example?
Jacobsen: Yes, I checked titles of the stuff. It isn’t around. So, the idea would be something like… first as an analogy, I’ll give an example. So, the analogy, the infinities that were seen before, the majesty of God, the Heavens.
Those were infinite to more original people. I think it’s a fair statement. However, I think we what can say is that it turned out to be the case is that it’s an apparent infinity, which is a big finite.
Rosner: So hold on, because that brings up a question where, like the gods that we’re used to, the God we’re used to, the Christian, Jewish…
Jacobsen: God of Abraham and Isaac.
Rosner: Yes. That God is infinite in power.
Jacobsen: I would go even better than that. He has a series of attributes theologians give him. Omnibenevolence, omniscience, and, say, anything like this. He’s omni-infinite. He’s infinite in all relevant properties.
Rosner: Yes. Now, the Greek and Roman gods, they weren’t monotheist. No, there were a shitload of them and they include gods that were infinite in power or whatever else?
Jacobsen: They had ideas like the Fates. But I don’t think that was kind of…
Rosner: Is a God with infinite power… how common is that?
Jacobsen: Right now, right now, over half the world, easily.
Rosner: Right. But when you look at all the different religions, did anybody have a modest God who only had enough power to create the world? That wasn’t that much power.
Jacobsen: Yes. The Descartian gods, Spinoza and Einstein, the Pantheist god, or some of the Founding Fathers, the Hellenistic polytheistic pantheon, some of the Hindu gods, they do creation stuff. A lot of the Native American myths, they have capital C “Creator,” they call them.
There is the Vancouver School of Theology. They, basically, have some people who are Aboriginal or Indigenous, and they talk in the manner of the Christian God and Creator as the same, where there was God’s providence.
There is the hope. There was a purpose of bringing together a literate people, Europeans and oral people, First Nations. The way in which it happened was evil. But in “God’s providence,” it’s going to be right in the best of all possible worlds.
So, there is a lot of that around, “Yes,” Parochial gods, powerful but finite gods.
Rosner: Because we’re used to thinking of God as infinite.
Jacobsen: Infinite in all relevant attributes, I would say. It’s not just the beyond apex conceivable of all relevant traits. But, “We are like God.” So, they extend human attributes to that God.
So, knowing that’s a human attribute of being in a space, that’s a human attribute, being outside of time rather than in time, so infinite in temporality in a way by being outside of it. Self-existing, so, it’s better than him because every human being is contingent on so many different things, including each other, or God is non-contingent.
That’s just stealing from Aristotle arguing about Forms and having the final form as God, so it’s common, is prevalent. Even if there is an infinite God like a creator God, it might just be in that one attribute.
But it’s not in an omni-infinite way or it’s in all sorts of different things. So, I think the analogy there is with the idea that we have about what are claimed as infinities are really large finites in a real world, not in some imaginary world.
Also, you can then extend that to this operation. So, you just, basically, invert the guts of metaphysical statements, even by prominent people like Heidegger, who made a mix of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche into a formalized philosophy of being and time, and so on.
I think he’s wrong on a number of levels. So, an example that arose in the correspondence is the idea that, even if “A equals B” is a statement, “Yes,” the reversal of that is just a reversal in presentation: “B equals A.”
So, that’s just a reversal of metaphysical statements. So, yes, Heidegger might be correct. In that, on Humanism, to state both, Sartre’s reverse of a metaphysical statement. It’s just another metaphysical statement.
But if you have an inversion, in other words, make the innards or the guts, the outer shell, then you have a different situation. I named the operation “Universal Metaphysical Inversalization.”
It’s like a universal acid for metaphysical statements, which would mean that which appear to be metaphysical but are truly physical and putting ‘physical’ in air quotes to have more general applicability to natural or informational, to make it more relevant.
Rosner: Ok, that makes sense. But can you give me a sentence that works like that?
Jacobsen: Yes. So, I’m going to read out, and again; this would not be getting rid of the magic or the power of formerly metaphysical statements like “consciousness.” It’s not meant as a magic property, but has a certain — not powerful in the way other words are powerful to as claims of the world — power to us.
So, something that would be metaphysical will physicalize either absolutely or probabilistically to the point of asymptotic certainty. This’ll be something making us somewhat more scientific.
He (Heidegger) talks about Being as if there is a certain process, metaphysics as this undivided base, but it seems like two properties on the face as one. Then it’s reified into an infinite circular.
So, it’s both to exist or to be, and an existing being. So, there is both existence and time in existence. So, it’s not one concept, really. It’s two separate things as to be properly divided existence, as opposed to non-existence temporality — as opposed to atemporality or non-temporality.
So, by separating that, you can then throw that paint up against the canvas of what we know about existence and time. So, it’s not a reverse of these things. It’s inverting it so that you come to basically more concretized forms of ideas, so it’s not filled.
So, he has this idea of being in time and it’s like the everything is being, but then time is a severe concept alongside that. So, he’s talking like he thinks philosophy is metaphysics and metaphysics is philosophy.
So, characterized as philosophical being, philosophical time, when you’re deriving from this process is natural philosophical existence and natural philosophical temporality. The latter, natural philosophical temporality or scientific time, is, basically, built into the principles of existence, as we call them, or the laws of nature, where you see something like the second law of thermodynamics tied to the arrow of time as in an actual temporality.
That’s the physical whizzing out of the metaphysical.
And so by doing that, you both nullify the definitions of metaphysics and the physical in that way, the metaphysical and physical in that way, into an extended sense of what we mean by the physical, but by concretizing what we mean by the metaphysical.
Because you’re tying it to that which is; then if you’re going to define anything that it’s not, then you use that which we know about the reality via science, then you pass what we know about reality through those, and then you use the negation of those as the nothing of those as in an actual nothing as opposed to a no-content nothing.
Nothing that’s not defined with respect to that which is and isn’t. Yes, so, to get a proper nothing, you have to define what isn’t, to define what is, and what is given to us by nature, philosophy, or science.
So, Universal Metaphysical Inversalization would take metaphysical statements, invert them, concretize them, and then give you a proper framework for them. It can be done even down to psychology where you don’t get absolute truths about consciousness, but you do get an asymptote to certainty about the physical process of these metaphysical statements.
So, consciousness is not a magical property running around in a flesh and bone body. You get neural correlates of consciousness that give a very strong indication that the brain is the seat of what’s going on or running or processing through time.
So, that’s a way you get to that place and you can have no absolute knowledge of consciousness, but you get this asymptote to certainty that you can sit relatively comfortably where you’re not. It’s so you’re dealing with metaphysics when it comes to even consciousness or existence.
Rosner: Sounds like what you are saying is that a good durable metaphysical statement comes as close as possible to physical description of what’s going on.
Jacobsen: That would be the first step. Yes, basically, you can then extend what we even mean by physical, so that the whole question, “Is it metaphysical, or is it physical?”, or just even the questions; it’s beyond those questions.
So, for instance, we talk about the physical. It, by definition, is something connected to the body, of the senses.
Rosner: The metaphysics has to hew, has to stick closely like a coat of paint to the physics of the thing.
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s more general than physical as material. Because it’s a building off there, but objectifying things. Then beyond that, you have a natural, where you, basically, are saying there is no magic.
There is no divine figure coming in and helping you with your spelling bee because you prayed for it, or the informational. I think it’s a more modern view, which, again, we’re not claiming computers are doing metaphysical processes. Therefore, we cannot claim human beings are either.
So, it’s either something like a universal acid or an asymptotic acid where there might be some areas in which it doesn’t quite work in an inalienable way. But in general, I think this is a way in which the whole question about discipline, titles, and domains might not be appropriate.
So, it might not be metaphysics. It might be… I don’t know what the term would be because I don’t think when we’re talking about these things, we’re making much sense in a modern context because you’re talking about mentation.
You’re talking about just your senses coming in from the world. The brain is caged in the world and the processes, the objects that are in mind. They’re about the world, the relationships, about each other, about things.
They’re both the world. So, it’s not about anything else. There is no invocation of anything transcendent. So, that, by definition, isn’t metaphysical, but it’s thought to be. That’s the problem. That’s why I think this process of thinking, this preparation, helps clarify that and actually extends some thinking.
Rosner: Okay.
Jacobsen: So, there we go. So, theology is dead and what we think is metaphysics isn’t metaphysics. That’s a lot for one night.
Rosner: Ok. All right, tomorrow?
Jacobsen: Yes, please.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So I think when we left off, it was somewhere around the idea that at least on our planet, the apex, the alpha information processors, the smartest beings dominate the planet with ethical behaviour towards each other, sometimes.
But the lack of ethical behaviour for animals that aren’t us, often we have pets, but the number of pets compared to the number of meat animals that we destroy and keep in terrible conditions is tens of billions of chickens slaughtered in just the US over a year.
So, if you extrapolate that to the future where augmented humans won’t be the smartest things, it seems to me a little frightening that we’ll stumble our way to new ethical frameworks that will probably leave us in the dust.
Given that we’ve got an ethical framework for humans that is supposed to provide us with some safety and stability of shitty things happening to people all the time, having a bunch of things running around that are smarter than we are, it won’t necessarily lead to more justice.
The justice we might find is if it turns out it is so cheap computationally to store human consciousnesses and, maybe, other animals’ consciousnesses that it’s just no big deal. It’s the floor mats that the dealer throws in for free. So, they’re never free. You always have to negotiate them out of that.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you have an apex predator, how you convince it to be altruistic?
Rosner: There is altruism there, the failure of altruism or the failure of people to be altruistic; you see this in America with its apex predators, the very, very rich who have controlled the levers of government for the last decade or more and haven’t been persuaded to give up any meaningful portion of their wealth.
We have a minimum wage in the US that remains at $7.25 an hour and hasn’t gone up. I don’t think it’s gone up in the 21st century. The deal is: You can’t be an apex predator if you’ve killed all the prey.
So, some of the financial strength in the US before Covid was the very rich people owned too much shit. There has to be a way for the rest of the population to experience some financial growth, so they can buy shit.
So, the very rich people can make more money, more legitimately than they’ve been making money, lately. The very rich people make money by controlling government and by harnessing all the increased productivity.
When some new step in automation comes along and a factory lays off 70% of its workforce, it’s not like the wages of the 30% remaining triple. The reduced costs only added profit. Profits almost all go to the to the owners, and it’s been bad just based on the tweets I read during Covid and that the fucking companies, particularly the big ones like Facebook, Amazon, I guess, Netflix and Google.
Facebook is, I would think, faltering a little because everybody fucking hates Facebook now, but Amazon, I think, Bezos’s wealth has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars during Covid because everybody has to shop online.
Yet, Bezos hasn’t improved wages or working conditions for the people who work for him. They have to do shit like piss in a bottle because they don’t have time to run to the bathroom. But only with the altruistic reasoning for apex predators to be generous with their prey is so as to not to fuck up the ecosystem.
But I don’t know what ecosystems we’re going to form with humans and augmented humans and then engineered consciousnesses of a lot of various degrees and types. But eventually some of this stuff will go to court, people of various degrees of still being alive or not being alive and being augmented, will go to court and argue that they deserve the rights that they formerly had when they were fully human.
We’ve talked about a lot of this stuff. All that shit’s going to lag. The deal is that government was always going to fall behind technology. It’s falling behind faster under Trump. Trump’s a fucking idiot and he hires fucking idiots and he’s put three conservatives at least two of them loathsome conservatives on the Supreme Court.
So, there is now a six, three conservative majority. they may take away governmental services or rights that most people want the right to – abortion, health insurance. Then people will have to set up extra governmental systems.
They’ve done it before. When 80 years ago, when abortion was mostly illegal, there were networks that helped people, mostly people with money get abortions, poor people get shitty abortions and maybe die or threw themselves down a flight of stairs or something else.
Anyway, I would hope that if Roe v. Wade goes away this time around; that social networks will do a better job of hooking people, who live in abortion prohibited states, up with services. But the general trend is, even if Trump had had the good fortune to fuck up, the Supreme Court government was always going to fall, start lagging behind what it needs to do as far as technology changes, as all technology changes everything.
There was always going to be a need for makers, for technologists, or social networks to figure out replacements or the government to figure out ways to do the things that people used to turn to the government for; I think that is the general trend. Until, you can’t predict a trend because it becomes increasingly unpredictable, where I can’t imagine that.
Well, at least in the near future, you don’t get much of a pause in technological improvements and do get increases in the power of A.I., in what A.I can do in every other field. But I don’t see any stable resting point being reached.
You can look at Moore’s Law. People for a decade or more have argued that Moore’s Law has to come to an end because you can make it smaller than atoms. I’m sure there are other limitations. But they’ve been predicting the end of Moore’s Law, which is the reduction of size of micro-circuitry, the number of microcircuits you can cram together.
There are various Moore’s Law, but they also say how long it takes for your chip to become the square root of two more powerful or smaller or whatever. And various Moore’s laws are always in the range of 18 months to two years.
Recently, some of the Moore’s laws have been hanging up on the limits of miniaturization. So, you can argue that there is a plateau there. The resting point, as well as the brute force miniaturization of circuitry, comes to a pause and then people have to figure out how to make chips more powerful, even when you can’t shrink them any further.
Which includes, I don’t know, going from two dimensions to three dimensions, stacking your circuitry. But I can’t see anything similar to that. Not that I know all that much about it or anybody knows all that much about the technological waves of the near future.
I can’t see a point where we’ll necessarily have a stable society, where the augmented humans are on top. There are the engineered eyes of various degrees of consciousness, depending on what you want them to do.
Then just regular people divided into nations and sex to some extent based on their attitudes towards technology. I just don’t see that mix being stable. Maybe, for a couple years, you’ll get some social, political, technological solution that works. But some new tech is always going to blow that up.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, we’re talking about values now. Values in the universe.
Rick Rosner: We should talk about what things can feel well, which is in the realm of conscious beings. But maybe, there are some areas where things aren’t quite conscious, but still want stuff. Some of it gets into semantics, like an amoeba doesn’t want stuff just because it moves toward stuff.
That’s more almost just chemistry. But the grasshopper has some awareness. You need to have awareness in order to want this part of the emotional repertoire, I guess.
Jacobsen: So, evolution is based on survival. So, things that live tend to have this inbuilt bias towards surviving.
Rosner: Yes, it’ll be interesting in the future as we build things that might have awareness that aren’t biased towards surviving or we can choose what they want. It’s not necessarily survival. All animals more or less commit suicide in order to reproduce.
So, they want to live up to a point and then they want to do other stuff. But just at a very basic level, you got to start with a consciousness of where things want things. Generally, you can imagine awareness of things that don’t want, but in our experience of where things want stuff.
Jacobsen: One of those things is things that help them continue existing.
Rosner: Right.
Jacobsen: Where their lineage continues.
Rosner: There is a bunch of stuff that is biased way towards order. There are some animals that thrive off of a certain chaos, but that’s still because they can control the chaos. So, we don’t have to pin everything down, but there are a bunch of things involved in what aware beings want.
It’s like agency control, stability. A lot of it just seems to me when we talk about how order is. would we want that sound is not complicated enough. We want other stuff, but, at base, we want some stability. That’s why it’s the base from which we can build more complicated actions and wants.
Jacobsen: Yes. Given that existence is probabilistic at bottom, all the stuff is not going to be absolute. It’s like organisms are functioning on principles. So, they want a little. They want a suitable environment. They want to live longer. So, they want to preserve their own little order of their lives.
Rosner: When we look at it, the order that we want is so basic in a lot of ways that we don’t even realize we want it because it just seems like we don’t spend much time thinking about it. We want the Sun to come up every day.
We want to still have a planet. We want air and water. but also those things are so stable that we don’t spend much time thinking about them – except in special circumstances.
Jacobsen: So, if we look at like effects and a literal dictionary definition, which I looked at, one of the principles governing behavior more generally, just actions in the world. Things that are conscious act and live in the world.
So, their very act of existing as something conscious, I think, brings ethics into the universe. It’s an emergent property that comes with that, by definition. So, I take it this way. People will have – we have the phrase, “He’s a moral person.”
Whose image, we mean, in our terms, an order preserving person. But someone who’s destructive, they are enacting an ethic by that definition, too. So, it is to make a distinction between the people who are tending more towards disorder based ethics and those are more towards disorder based ethics.
Rosner: Yes, and we’ve talked about the Golden Rule when like when we talk about a mensch, it’s somebody who sees the Golden Rule, understands it, and then acts on it. It’s a mutuality that adds stability that people want a world in which that they won’t have to always be looking out for other people exploiting a momentary advantage.
So, it’s self-serving as well as others-serving. If we can look at other people and know that they’ll treat us decently, the bargain is that we treat them decently overall. It increases order for everybody. Then in America right now, we’ve been suffering through ordered systems not being prepared for the one-sided exploiter.
Jacobsen: And so, in that sense, the fact that you need order generation and maintenance for existence itself and for evolution to take place to make an agent. I think you can then make an argument.
Those facts come first and then second come the values, the values follow the contours of existence. Which to me, it’s following order. That bias in ethics is the same as the bias in existence.
It’s that which will assist in preserving order but similarly, what exists can wink out of existence. There is going to be outliers in very atrocious devastation-prone people, murderers, mass murderers, etc.
Rosner: So, order, the drive for order and for mutuality, which we could argue is a thing. The mutuality exists in areas of life where there are enough resources to support mutuality. When you look at where ethics stop, this is just off the top of my head.
But ethics stops when there isn’t the wherewithal to support, for instance, certain behaviours. With regard to meat animals, to some extent, society is built on exploiting, eating the flesh of animals.
Yes, and to a large extent, we don’t behave ethically towards animals. There are areas in which we do, but there are more areas just in terms of raw numbers of animals that are slaughtered. The ethics don’t apply or they apply, but only do it to the extent of what is kosher with regard to meat.
There are also kosher meals that have to conform to certain sanitary standards. But also, the animals have to be killed as well, with as little cruelty as possible, which is still plenty of cruelty given the technology that people have been working with. But the idea is that there are some limited ethics there.
Jacobsen: I always would fall back on the fact that we are surviving and are living. A lot more things are in many cases due to human guardianship in many ways, though human destruction as well. It goes back to not absolute ethics.
It’s the idea that these are principles or tendencies. These aren’t absolute. So, even people like Leonardo da Vinci who said centuries ago, viewing the future, people will view murder of animals as we do a murder of another human being.
That is a growing ethic of animal rights people. But we still have the ethic present. We have it growing, but it’s not absolute. Even if it becomes the norm rather than an outlier phenomenon, I think still older world people would be diehard meat-eaters.
Rosner: Yes. I’m sure that it may become more and more trumpy thing to be that defiant. “I defy your sensitivity to the suffering of animals.”
Jacobsen: And so, I was trying to think of a phrase for this. I think when I pitched with a philosophy of truism, so this is without the physics and without the numbers. It’s just a sensibility argument based on these tendencies.
It just one follows from the other. Then it’s a situation in which I took this phrase from you, which is “it can’t not be.” In fact, it’s overwhelmingly likely these kinds of things cannot be. They will be not absolute, but they’ll be bottom-up first.
Rosner: And then we’ve talked a lot about the creepy things that will happen when the full menagerie or a growing menagerie of different forms of constructed consciousness comes into the flower.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Where all sorts of ethical calls will be made both institutionally and individually.
Jacobsen: I think even this ethics is applicable there too, easily.
Rosner: The idea will be the argument that you want to make to survive in that society is to convince the people who control your fate that you are deserving of equivalence. That your consciousness is as valuable as there, which is going to be a tough thing to argue.
Especially if there is a shortage of resources, so, if we’re lucky, there won’t be a shortage of resources. That in some cyber world of the future; there will be enough room for everybody.
Jacobsen: That’s also a tendency when you want intelligent behavior. It makes a world of abundance as opposed to not. There is one period we call the Agricultural Revolution, but there have been all sorts of mini-revolutions in food production making our lives easier.
To the sanitary conditions for living, you name it. Intelligence applied along that order tendency will create a world more livable and enjoyable and abundant.
Rosner: Yes, I just read a science fiction novel set four thousand years in the future and all the characters are still just basically human. They can copy their identities of consciousness and send them to other people to share and stuff. But basically, everybody there was unrealistic because 4,000 years from now.
It’s not going to look like that. Unless, you are part of a very specialized enclave, as we’ve talked about. So, we wish we could talk about how under IC ethics; ethics favors the apex information processors or the apex consciousnesses.
If there is a shortage of resources, we’ve talked about the risks of understanding consciousness mathematically because that can lead to the disfavor of inferior consciousness or the understanding of ending a consciousness within context.
Because, even though, we have ethics. The ethics stops where we become powerless over death. It’s crazy how beyond a certain point people are allowed to die because they’re just too sick. Even like the most powerful highly moral people like Nelson Mandela, we sit while he’s dying.
There is not a general freaking out. It’s like, “Yes, well, he’s old, at the end of his time.” So, it’s understandable because, a lot of times, you can’t do anything. Although, sometimes, once the death happens, like fuck ups on the way to death, like in America and probably a lot of other places medical errors are the third leading cause of death.
Yet, we don’t see doctors being hauled into court like every fucking day. And if the world becomes jam-packed with higher consciousness, there may be a callousness to inferior consciousness being allowed to pass away or understanding the struggles of consciousness or not the ultimate value of things.
For example, the way we let it be game over for billions of chickens every year. It’s like, “Sorry, we need the meat. You’re dead. It doesn’t matter. You don’t feel anything anymore.” It’s, again, as we’ve talked about before. A whole new set of ethical frameworks are going to need to be constructed or will be constructed with various degrees of fairness and horribleness.
But I think what you’re arguing, and I think I agree, is that an underlying driver for the frameworks is the preservation of order and stability where it can be reasonably preserved; that a mutuality among the beings that hold power in a society.
Jacobsen: You’ve got a situation in which the ethic lived out by an organism, by some multi-planetary civilization, is a disorder at some point there is obliteration eventually or instantaneously.
Rosner: Well, that’s the deal. Once you can do it, once you can master consciousness technologically, you can also engineer what you want. So, we will be making beings that don’t strive for individual survival with all their might.
They weren’t built that way. We could build ourselves that way. So, yes, it becomes possible. I would assume that if we eventually know more about extraterrestrial civilization, we will, probably. here will be cases where a civilization decided we don’t have to strive.
We could just extinguish ourselves and nobody will know because we’ll be dead. Nobody’s, keeping score, but that’s not accurate because the universe is in some ways keeping score. It’s processing information, but it’s likely conscious. It likely has drives. It’s not unlikely that the preservation of information and order are among the things that it wants.
Jacobsen: I would argue the philosophical point of view. It’s unavoidable. The fact of the matter of existence being here. All of this follows naturally from that. So, in other words, there is a stream of a strong bias towards all this being and inevitably so, in effect.
Rosner: Yes, but okay, the same way there is no inherent value of continuing consciousness versus deciding to end it. There is a similar thing. We don’t know. This thing about there is a chicken or egg deal, probably, where we can’t even decide between a naturally evolving universe and an engineered one.
Because of the infinite turtles problem. But you can set up an arena in which an information structure can naturally evolve, or you can probably set up a somewhat natural arena in which there is some natural evolution, but there is also some interference, external interference that is okay.
As long as it doesn’t mess with causality, it doesn’t. You can add stuff to an evolving system that you want to get in there as long as you put it in there in a way that doesn’t violate causality too badly and slide it in from the edges of the universe. So, it requires a mutual history, so you’ve got a naturally evolving universe.
It’s when we think of the universe; we think of a naturally evolving universe.
Jacobsen: The object.
Rosner: Yes. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Somewhere, there is intentionality. In that, somebody had to build the hardware in which the naturally evolving universe can evolve. Or the armature, we think of it.
In fact, we haven’t even discussed like a natural intervention. I haven’t even thought of it until now. Is there an armature that creates information preserving hardware that does come into existence without intentional creation?
It seems like, just by saying it, a possibility, but not very likely. So, basically, that whole discussion leads to the idea that you can’t say what’s natural or not because there is unnaturalness lurking behind every fucking armature. Does that seem reasonable?
Jacobsen: I think that’s okay. I think that’s more the physics side of it. Let’s go for more of an idea as to the boundaries required for setting it up in the first place.
Rosner: Ok, but of our minds, our brains have evolved, so that they naturally provide an armature. So, that gives you two worlds that are naturally evolved. We can argue.
Jacobsen: Yes, one’s bigger, one littler. Okay.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: So, the qualitative differences will be there, the functionality. But we can construct a model in which there is no necessary need for any teleology to make it functional.
Rosner: Yes, you can imagine and naturally all structures all the way. I’ve just done the slightly short of saying: Once you get a couple of generations in the armatures, you can’t discuss them at all because they’re remote enough that they don’t directly impinge on your world’s existence.
Jacobsen: Yes. Also, most of the old theories proposed some top-down interventionism, reincarnationism, some cyclical universe, that has got in its head a God, the creator, or the tortured design argument or some creationist argument.
We can knock those down as a whole if they’re considered completely true because of evolution by natural selection. That’s how life works. That’s how all that came to be. So, anything that’s not incorporating that into its framework just doesn’t work or anything that tries to make anything extra to make it work is just superfluous, basically, because it works with or without any guiding hand.
Rosner: Yes, although, you can argue that there is room for the guiding hand if the guiding hand is subtle.
Jacobsen: But then the question would be: What’s the evidence for it? And people, typically, go back to intelligent design or creationism, “Look how complex things are. It could not be except for the hand of a God,” where some lunatics, believing it, they claim that they themselves are the manifestation of God or whatever.
So, as I think, typically, those arguments fall down pretty quick. There is only a limited set, like pantheism, hold a place.
Rosner: There is not a probabilistic argument that we’re looking at a universe with apparent history of 40 billion years and the universe can’t survive that many interventions, magical type interventions. So, what are the odds of one out of 10 to the 22nd planets in the universe in a year out of 14 billion experiencing such an interventionist event? It’s got to stay clean.
Jacobsen: Absolutely. So, it’s a common sense argument. It’s using reason and empiricism and then focusing on the principles. I think the failure of a lot of these older ideologies have been trying to force-fit partial knowledge into an absolute truth, or vice versa.
Rosner: Yes, you got to look at like the “San Junipero” thing that we know is going to happen. “San Junipero” is the episode of Black Mirror of this young woman who finds herself in this world. She’s looking around and, eventually, gets a girlfriend.
Over the course of the episode, it turns out that she’s in a human created after cyber stuff. After that, there is nothing inherently impossible in that we know that’s coming. So, that just like we said, that constructed world, there are prohibitions against it.
There are probabilistic arguments against our world being that. But I don’t know. Then you can you can have a world that’s clearly intervened, and it doesn’t make the world impossible.
Jacobsen: And so, that’s why I want to leave that out right there, which is it’s just extremely likely that existence exists, both existence and things that persist. The values follow quite naturally along the contours of existence itself.
Rosner: And a lot of the things we have trouble understanding or expressing will probably become much more clear once there is a mathematical framework. Once a hundred years pass or so, people can become adept at navigating the framework.
Same way that quantum mechanics weirded everybody out at first. But I feel, at least, in science for the layman, they like to talk about how weird quantum mechanics is, but I feel like people who work with quantum mechanics as their jobs are not particularly weirded out. They’re not going to work on rules.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, I think one thing we can add as a tack onto that is things are here existing and they have things that live in it. You can speak about, only in reasonable terms, a factual morality.
You have to use what are the facts of the matter, which is scientific to inform your values. Otherwise, your values aren’t worth very much because they’re not connected to the real world.
Rosner: Ok, that makes sense. It’s like sociobiology tries to explain everything in terms of eggs expensive, sperm cheap. When you’re arguing that, you need to look at the processes that underlie the world to get a base understanding how they mesh with what we experience as a force here.
Jacobsen: And I take ethics from the dictionary of actions in the world. They could be order or disorder ethics, or something neutral.
Rosner: But I think you can also argue that that approach that the physics of the world is so many generations removed from ethics that we’re just not used to doing that.
Jacobsen: Yes, and if ethics are actions in the world, the great part about that is the fact that there is… Agency in any universe means nihilism fails in the sense that nihilism means there are no values. But if you have agency, the full manifestation of a being in reality is itself ethics lived out through time for disorder or order. Nihilism completely fails.
Rosner: There is another argument that works against nihilism. If you assume that there is no limit to the size of the possible world, possible universe, which means that no matter how big there is a possible universe, that is, it’s always bigger than any you can imagine.
That that universe had to get to where it is through time. So, there are anti-extinguishing forces that allow things to get arbitrarily big to anything short of infinite.
Jacobsen: And so, in either case, you’re up to the fact this is the question fundamentally about ethics, “Is there an ethic?” It is not, “Are there values or not?” It’s, “What ethic?” Then you start just defining how that entity is living in the reality, how it’s an actually going about being.
Rosner: Is there a name for this? Is it physical ethics? Because it starts with the way the physics of the world perates.
Jacobsen: I would say all these are coming as a package. I think the tide I see in some deep ways with the math. I’m just calling them the Philosophy of Truism.
Rosner: So, you could also call it Informational Ethics because of truism. I don’t know if that’s the best term, because the truism is something that’s so obvious that it’s so simple, but it’s so obviously true.
Jacobsen: What do you think exists?
Rosner: Yes. So, I don’t know, if that’s what you’re going after and that there is a lot of stuff here that’s not obvious.
Jacobsen: Do you assume that you’re conscious?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: Yes. Like this data thing.
Rosner: But then you question it, then you have to bring it back, you have to make a statistic. Eventually, you have to make a statistical argument based on the likelihood of of how information works.
Jacobsen: So, honestly, I think these are probably five or six separate arguments. In the article, I wrote everything as statistical argument for existence, for temporality, reality. I give them capitalized names.
But, to me, when I tie them all together with conditionals, both the individual premises and the conditionals linking them all together for an overarching philosophical seemingly trivially true one.
They seem almost unassailable, not in absolute terms, but in probabilistic terms. I don’t think there are moral facts because I think morality is derivative from things existing first. So, you have the factual part, then you have the morality.
So, there have been some philosophers literally who talked about moral facts. I think that’s just backwards.
Rosner: Seems like, what’s his name?
Jacobsen: Sam Harris, I think they’re wrong. You can only speak meaningfully in terms of your ethical premises having content, both facts and morality. There is one other point I wanted to make.
Yes, so, the fact that the total manifestation of something in reality comprising its ethics. It doesn’t have to be aware of the ethical. So, if you evolved a program, something that was not conscious of how it’s acting out in the world is ethical, or not, in terms of maintaining order or not; it’s still acting ethically.
Rosner: Yes, we’ve talked about how sex makes people make bad decisions and people don’t realize how much their decisions are warped by sex.
Jacobsen: Yes, so, all ethics is unavoidable once you get agency and then you have a bias towards order from there.
Rosner: Yes, there is actually free agency pseudo-ethics, where amoebas probably behave in a lot of ways that would preserve the species. Even though, they’ve got no agency.
Jacobsen: Yes. Something like, the baseline of survival as reflective of the facts of things developing order, having unconscious organisms, valuing order for their own survival. That if you value survival, you value your own order.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So, the deal is: For the statistical arguments, I agree with you that. I think those can be made based on if you have a moment, then you’ve got a set of most likely next moments and then that ranges from most likely to least likely.
The most likely next moments have roughly, almost exactly, the same information content as the moment you’re starting. Those next possible moments of the universe. They’re very similar to the previous moment. But there is an overall, maybe, a probability.
There is certainly one around the null universe. The next possible moment is likely to be not known. Because if you look at the set of all possible next moments, because we’re assuming there is only one known universe and there is a range of next possible moments that have a little room.
So, the bias is moving towards the more information, especially in super low information universes, but still in the big universe.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we want to add a hint or a really tiny sense of quantum mechanics into this, the only example, we have conscious agents in the universe or at the macro scale. So, there will be a directionality to time as well.
So, and even if someone says, “Well, what about a reverse universe or the backwards will seem as if forwards in that reverse universe, but it still has a direction in either case?” So, the arrow of time at a macro scale is there.
So, you have existence. You have time. You have directionality of time. You have agency. I think those are statistical arguments as well. That there is a persistence there. The fact that things are relatively the same from moment to moment and that permits a process like evolution.
That permits existence to continue existing. Like what you argue, in terms of a bias towards order rather than disorder, it’s not to say there is no disorder. There are things that are indelible to some order, but there is a bias or a tendency, statistically speaking, towards these things, including order. So, that’s the facts.
Rosner: So, if you look at it like a triangle with the null universe at the apex of the time, and then the number of possible states with increasing information, the more information you have for any given amount of information, you have a number of possible states that have that much information and the more information, the more possible states.
So, starting with the zero information, the next moment you could move to there is a bias to move to increasing information with the next move and that bias continues to exist. To get to the triangle as you move towards the base, an expanding base like a pyramid of the next level.
The next floor, as you move now is going to have more space than the floor above. So, if you’re moving at random in the pyramid, in a state of more information because there are more states off of your state that have more information as opposed to less.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Along the world line, what is a set of reasonable next possible moments in that universe?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: And so, that would be more building into the assumption of a second layer, that argument, which is you can have single moments, certainly. Which is a universe that doesn’t have a moment, non-existence, then some wide array of spatial arrangements that act. That have no temporal dimension. They are in some particular shape and cues here.
Rosner: I’m not sure you can have space without time. It’s all part of a package that I want to say is unitary, but that’s probably not the right word. For something to have space, it has to have matter. It has to have the history that it apparently created that space and the matter in it.
Jacobsen: Is it possible to have a universe of time as something that doesn’t function by Minkowskian space? It’s just this Cartesian system. There is no time. Or does it naturally have to have a history? Is that the only way to be changed?
Rosner: There is probably a math of this stuff. It’s very quantum mechanics savvy. There is room in the math to go from an apparently existent universe to the next moment of complete non-existence, just a very improbable statistical blip that ceases to exist in the next moment.
It’s just if you’re looking at the set of next possible moments for a universe that exists; it’s an unlikely next possible moment. Also, you can make the argument, as you’re saying in reverse. That the universe can blip up into, apparently, complex existence, having not existed, not existed before and not existed after that.
You just get a single moment or a couple of moments and then it disappears. There is a statistical argument against that. When you look at all the sets of all temporarily adjacent universes, the blip universe is the zero information; that as possible moment is unlikely compared to everything else.
Jacobsen: And that’s actually a cornerstone of the general idea, I think, which is persistence. Things that exist will likely persist, more than not. I think, and again, it’s just based on you taking the two sets together and things will likely persist as opposed to not.
Rosner: Any argument with probability is extended from quantum mechanics. Otherwise, these arguments are probably in trouble because we don’t know what we’re dealing with mathematically. Also, I don’t know if you can go from an existing universe to pure nothingness.
You probably can, or whether there have to be transformations to cover the loss of all that information. You’ve got a universe. The temperature of our universe is 2.7 degrees (Kelvin)? The temperature of the background radiation, microwave radiation.
It’s cool because it has had 14 billion years to cool down and to erase all the information you need to keep the universe up into pure chaos. Can you raise the temperature to the point where all information disappears in an instant? Probably so.
But there is the possibility that you need to propagate a wave of high temperature across the space that you have to erase it. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter in terms of the arguments you’re making.
Jacobsen: And so, take a step back.
Rosner: Similar to the argument, if it were in mind terms, you’ve got a mind with a picture of consciousness, the picture of reality. Say you’re on one of the planes in 9/11 hitting the World Trade Centers, if you do the math, those people were obliterated in some crazy fraction of a second. Just a horrible, horrible fraction of a second.
Jacobsen: A terrible example, a clear but tragic example.
Rosner: Yes. So, what happens to those people’s thoughts in that instance? Do they have a perceptible moment of the loss of all information?
Jacobsen: If you were to go nanosecond by nanosecond and the person was facing forward, you would see the mental landscape deteriorate.
Rosner: A terrible fraction of a second. I’ve thought about what that second would look like and it would be bad.
Jacobsen: Like the deterioration of the frontal lobes, followed by the temporal and parietal lobe followed by the occipital lobe, so, vision in terms of imagination would be the last thing to go strangely enough.
Rosner: So does that necessitate like a transitional moment or fraction of a moment or something that? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a thing to look at.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, all in all, without the math of it, I don’t think that’s the focus here. In fact, we don’t have the math of it. Just in terms of the philosophy, the general philosophy of it, you do have a larger set of those; that which can exist.
You also have a set of universes where it’s still existing larger than not. So, this is both an existence argument there and a temporal argument. So, running the numbers, you have a statistical consideration of both existence and time.
Things will generally persist. Although, they can wink out or they can devolve into a null state. I think the only way in which we know agency comes to be in a natural universe is evolution.
So, you will need existence and you will need time to come to any form of agency. Even if they have simulated agency, you still have the evolved agency behind this.
Rosner: Because the deal with a simulated world is that it implies, it necessitates; unless, you’re doing that statistical argument. It just blipped into existence, which is unlikely. The odds are infinitesimal. So, a small simulated world implies a wider world, probably.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I think one of the basic premises, that I see, would be the idea that the set of null universes is not bigger than the set of things that can exist. I think the set of universes that cannot exist is smaller than the set of universes that can.
Rick Rosner: What do you mean by that?
Jacobsen: By that, if you have a universe, basically, that which cannot exist, so a null universe, makes it not there, like can empty set.
Rosner: OK. That’s different from a universe that can’t exist.
Jacobsen: How so?
Rosner: A null universe is a universe with like no information, like the number of those is very small. A magical universe where things pop into without rhyme or reason. Certainly, , there is many more universes that can exist because you just take a universe that can exist and you do something stupid to it.
Jacobsen: Would it not make it like catastrophically inconsistent if you had this magical universe? If you had a universe where magic was literally possible, so you have a Hogwarts universe, but to the nth degree, wouldn’t that collapse in on itself, completely inconsistent?
Rosner: I don’t know. It would make no sense. Okay, you could argue. If we’re going to get into this stuff off the top of my head, there would be a whole bunch of different semi-possibilities. You could certainly have a universe that’s Hogwarts, but it would be a simulated universe.
That it would be something that was designed from outside the universe, like a video game universe was built to contain the elements that you want narratively in the scope of it. You can certainly have a Hogwarts universe or Call of Duty universe.
But that implies an external agent that makes it possible. You need an external agent, anyhow. But in a naturally occurring universe, there would be ongoing external jiggering around with it, I guess. But that’s a whole field we could talk about.
Obviously, we’re moving into an era, where it’s not an uncommon science fiction thought. That, in the future, video games will have characters who are conscious and they may or may not be aware that there is some video game.
But like a video game universe is a very abridged a Call of Duty universe is one planet or part of one planet. The action takes place over a few days, maybe.
Jacobsen: So then, okay, I’ll take it this way. What I’m trying to get at, since the whole thing just starting from the top, there was reporting originally. What I’m getting into then is the null universe, that which isn’t, as opposed to that which is or that which can be, probabilistically.
So, you take those sets. The one set of that which is or that which can be, which is vastly larger than that which isn’t or can’t be. So, that’s the first premise that existence is favored probabilistically or statistically over nonexistent.
So, it’s not providing a generative functional precise formula of how this is done. It’s providing what I call a statistical inevitable argument.
Rosner: Okay, so, I like it. There is probably a statistical problem with it. I’m not sure that you can apply probability to the set of all possible universes, including the null universe as the zero information element.
Jacobsen: How many know universes are there possible, like one?
Rosner: How many null universes?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: I would think one, but I don’t know quantum mechanics. So, that’s probably a question. How many forms of zero information are there? It seems like there has only been one. But I don’t know what the space, the possibilities would be for universes with just a hint of information, because that’s the whole thing.
If you start with a null universe, what are the states that it can move into? And I know there could be quite a few different states that would have the next minimum amount of information.
Jacobsen: If you’re talking about its moving into something, then you’re talking about a state transition. That, by definition, is in a way of speaking talking about information itself or existence itself rather than non-existence.
Rosner: Yes. So, that’s a universe that has moved from null to something other than null that has some existence.
Jacobsen: So, technically that then falls into the category of the existing universe. It’s not the nonexistent.
Rosner: Yes. But I don’t know if you’re looking at degenerate universes, universes that go the other way, go to zero from having a little bit of information. Maybe, there is more. Maybe, there is a small variety of the general universes that have ended up at zero from someplace else.
Maybe, I don’t know. I’d assume not, but it’s a possibility. Where, if you go from a universe that has some equivalent of an electron and a positron that cancel each other out or something like that and leave just energy, though, energy is exists.
But anyway, I don’t know how all that works, except that it’s safe to assume that the number room to generate universes or null universes is going to be small.
Jacobsen: And if you can orient, there is no information in different ways to get different types. Then you can also orient universes with one bit of information too, in different ways. If you just take that one bit, two bit, out to the nth degree, if you include the one to two to the nth degree bit universe with the inverse exclamation point as a set, I think just looking at it; it would appear far larger as a set than zero.
So, I think that to me seems almost unassailable. Unless, there is some way to do the math that flips the intuitive markers there. So, that’s why, I think, that’s a very base orientation point, as I see none in terms of the math, but in terms of the philosophy.
The set of possible universes is larger, possible existences is bigger, than the set of no existences. You just say, “Okay, therefore, existence is favored over nonexistent. That’s just a general statistical outcome based on looking at the ratio of those two sets.”
Rosner: I agree that numerically, the crazy infinity of possible existent universes is way larger than the number of null universes. But in terms of picking a universe out of that said, I’m not sure that you can do that probabilistically.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, some new research.
Rick Rosner: This evening, an article on information in black holes.
Jacobsen: Here, this has been a confirmation of the finding or the calculation of Hawking. That information is not destroyed by black holes. It’s preserved. But obviously, the structure was so…
Rosner: Well, I mean, when you say, “Structure,” you mean how all the atoms have stuck together. Yes, anything that falls into a black hole will be ripped to pieces, is what you’re saying.
Jacobsen: Yes, so, intuitively it doesn’t make sense, however, if it’s true…
Rosner: Actually, hold on, because we’re talking about traditional black holes, we’re not talking about IC black holes. So now, I may be wrong, but it might be. No, I guess not. I think I’ve seen the math on this. I don’t think there are stable orbits within the event horizon of a black hole. The event horizon is the point where if you get so close to the black hole that you go beyond the event horizon, which is a sphere. An abstract sphere around the black hole, that’s the point beyond which you can’t get back out of the black hole. Now, you may not be in the black hole, yet, because the black hole is smaller than the event horizon. So there is a period in which you fall down. You’re still falling in and haven’t yet crashed into the black hole itself. You just are in a position where you can’t get out no matter what you do in a traditional black hole. It’s also known as the Schwartzchild radius. This is how if you’re this far away from a black hole, then you’re fucked. But I mean, you could probably design something small enough and strong enough that it would at least last for a little while or be torn apart by the tidal forces near the black hole. So, there are situations in which the structure is at least momentarily preserved. But you’re right, over any reasonable time period. Anything that falls in will be torn to bits. I don’t think either of us knows enough about the black hole theory to know exactly what they’re talking about when they talk about the information that is preserved.
Jacobsen: I would make a prediction – I know it’s dangerous because early in the game – that if you change the structure internal to the universe but can preserve the information, then the structure can disappear while preserving the information as external, which would match an IC structure of the universe and is consistent with the dynamics of the internal universe.
Rosner: We should talk a little bit more about, what this article talked about, which is that the article said that there’s some mathematical indication that information is preserved, but nobody knows how to present a complete picture of how that might work. It just suggests that as black holes get older and older, that they get no more forgiving, maybe, that you don’t get the information out immediately. But as black holes get older, I don’t know. I’m guessing here that they become more leaky of information. They leak more information. Is that pretty much what you get out of the article? But nobody really knows how that would work in. There are equations that indicate that something like that is going on now to us. We get happy, I think, because the black holes, and I see, are less severe.
Jacobsen: They are leaky.
Rosner: When they are leaky, and they don’t crush everything into oblivion because, we argue, that black holes create their own space and a space in which the gravitational force, which was created in conjunction with the world, the block is attenuated around the black hole. So normal business can be done in the vicinity of a black hole. You can have entire little mini universes within a black hole and that they’re not perfectly black. They’re much less perfectly black than a regular Stephen Hawking black hole, which is very, very close to perfectly black. The amount of energy is able to trickle out of Hawking black hole is minuscule one part ten to the – probably something like – twenty-fifth or something per year. But can I see a black hole super league, especially under certain conditions where sufficiently durable objects can get reasonably close? There’s no Schwarzschild radius there. A black hole is pretty fucking black, but never so black, in the sense, that you know what makes stuff unable to get out of a traditional black hole, which is that it would need to travel faster than the speed of light to get out of it. I see the speed you need to travel to get out of a black hole. You can never reach the speed of light. It can get really close. But the light itself and, a powerful enough rocket, I guess, could get out. Even under certain conditions, other matter besides the light, but, even I see black holes, given our current technology; unless, we were right up on it on a black hole, which would be bad because the black holes fucked things up. We would be able to see much radiation escaping from them. Even if you did see, I could get close enough to see a fairly leaky black hole. It would be easy enough to mistake a leaky black hole for something else, like maybe neutron stars, or neutron star is just a collapsed star that has just that last step away from collapsing into a black hole.
And it just doesn’t have mass enough to do it. It’s a neutron star. I think is stopped short of totally collapsing by Fermi pressure where the pressure that the particles have is insufficient. Two particles can’t occupy the same quantum state. I think that’s the only thing. It’s the last step before a full-on black hole of it. I see there’s never enough pressure to collapse anything beyond that last step of Fermi pressure. Maybe, you can have a fully collapsed. But generally, I see black holes are closer to the composition of neutron stars than they are to the totally collapsed shit in a black hole. Though, I may be wrong. Then you run into the problems of what I see black holes look like from the outside versus what they look like on the inside. Close to them, you’ve got a whole lot of extra space. Now, I haven’t thought about this. There’s all this extra space, so nothing can ever be collapse into the black hole. Anyway, that’s enough of that.
Jacobsen: The end.
Rosner: Yes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Jacobsen: Rick, what is the future of IQ?
Rosner: Like we’ve talked about this before.
Jacobsen: Or what is the future relevance of IQ and its diminishment?
Rosner: Well, IQ has only been around for a century, Binet came up with an idea of a five-point scale for testing kids to see what kind of educational resources they might need. Ones and twos need help for dumb kids. Four and five need help for smart kids. Terman took it over in the US. Put it on that, the hundred-point chronological ratio scale. You take your middle age divide by your calendar age times a hundred is your IQ. You’re going to kind of grow from there. It was fairly widely accepted, I believe. A lot of, I think, psychology, psychiatry was pretty widely accepted in the US from the 20s through the 60s and 70s, then people started questioning everything and including IQ and now IQ, I think is considered kind of quaint. People have tried to replace it with various other theories, indices, emotional IQ and multifactor models.
And the whole thing has also been hampered by it just not being that handy, I think. Like it is falsely precise, like somebody who says they have an IQ of 143 is not going to be any different from somebody who says they have an IQ of 138 or 147 or 130. It is as with the SAT it doesn’t add much. Adding some score on an IQ test to their academic or professional dossier doesn’t tell you much more than you could learn from the rest of the dossier and from talking with them for half an hour. It is, in a lot of instances, actually a minus. It is somebody who brings up their IQ. I think Hawking was quoted as saying anybody who needs to brag about their IQ is a loser. This is from a guy who’s melted into his wheelchair. So it is people who are culturally cognizant, kind of know that IQ has a stink of loserdom about it. Which doesn’t mean you cannot have fun with it. I have obsessively taken IQ tests off and on for most of my life, so I can brag in a sad way about my high scores. But it is mostly useless.
A couple times, maybe in my 20s, it may have help get me laid. Maybe, though, that’s a really small window to try to jump through, who you’re jumping on to if it is based on IQ, anyway. What replaces IQ, I feel will be measures of information processing power based on more sophisticated models of how information and processing and consciousness works, which will eventually get to in a pretty precise way. But we probably still have twenty years of not being there yet. You could consider the various measures of calculating capacity associated with computers as a type of measurement of machine intelligence. But really shitty measure, because for the most part, machines are at the very beginning of machine learning and really do not have that much intelligence at this point.
They still have a specific task oriented intelligence that you can set up a machine learning program that will in a short amount of time make a computer the best Go player in the world, except for other computers or the best video game player in the world. But it is still pretty specific. Computers still cannot pass the Turing test. So measures of computational power are pretty bad indices for machine intelligence. The number of floating point calculations per second doesn’t really tell you how smart a machine is. We understand what intelligence is, the mathematical models of consciousness should be decent indices originating from that. Regardless of the indices, we should see people for the most part not give a shit about becoming smarter in general.
Some people are like; how can I make myself smart? I get written; I get emails from people and I tell people the best thing you can do is just read your ass off and then engage in the types of exercises that are parts of IQ tests. Try to mathematicise things in your world, like try to mathematically analyze aspects of your world. But not many people are interested in doing that. In general, people are more interested in making themselves more competitive in whatever their specific endeavors are. The same way when I was writing jokes for late night, I was very interested in making myself a better joke writer because I’d often get told that my jokes sucked, so with everybody else. So I felt like I was getting told that more than other people.
Also, so, I’ve tried to increase my IQ, but in terms of my career; I was interested in making myself smarter and better. I think that applies to most. I think that people are and will increasingly begin to get the idea of strategically becoming really good and certain applications or certain A.I. aided technologies to make yourself effectively smarter in ways that pertain to your work. I think that will happen more and more. That will be a thing that can actually happen, that you can team up with A.I. to make yourself smarter in a specific field.
For instance, doctors are kind of notorious for once they’re done with their medical training, not every doctor, but some doctors for knowing what they know, but not really extending themselves to extend what they know. You can maybe learn stuff that said you get it. If you get a disease, you can go on the Internet and you can learn shit about your disease that your doctor may not know because your doctor is busy treating people with the disease and may or may not be keeping up perfectly well with everything that’s going on with the disease. Also, the doctor may be kind of snotty about what he considered or she considers information and may just poo-poo a lot of shit that you can learn from the Internet because it doesn’t come to them from a journal.
And also because there’s such a high ratio of bullshit garbage to legit stuff that comes to you via the Internet. But still, doctors or most doctors aren’t optimal at learning everything there is to learn in their field and certainly not everything there is to learn about medicine in general. But I could see a doctor, I could see apps arise. A.I. based apps that keep doctors better informed than they are now. the doctors who are become really good at using those apps might be better doctors. When I could see that happening in a lot of fields. The hard sciences all these fields, the amount of information in the world, what doubles every year or so now.
Jacobsen: Yes, super crazy.
Rosner: Yes. So apps that help plow through all the best stuff would make any. If they’re decent would make anybody better at their job if their job is involved, staying up to date. So I guess that’s what I think the future of intelligence where it lies is the human A.I. alliances and alliances is too lofty a word that initially humans just using getting really good at using A.I. A.I. getting better at being A.I. then in the beginning, it is a Google relationship. It is via a keyboard or it is via a thing you yell at like an Alexa, then in the future things get creepier and more intimate as people. The Alexa the future become more like robot butlers. They become more people like. on the one hand, and on the other hand, people can become more intimately linked with A.I.
If Google Glass didn’t work because it was too creepy, but there will certainly be some optical based interfaces coming. Smart contact lenses, smart glasses that do not piss people off as much as Google Glass did. More risk based stuff. Maybe, I always imagined some A.I. like being worn as like a little breastplate in this novel I’m working on. You’ve got what I call “bugs,” which are basically your handheld device, except they’ve got little legs and they just ride you. They sit on your shoulder or if you need them, they crawl down your arm and they’re like, “Hey, pal.” So there will be wearables. Anyway, it is increasingly pervasive and intimate partnerships with A.I. that’s where intelligence is going and that’s where it already is to some extent. It is hard to tell. I think I’ve said this a zillion times before, that our apps have made us so obviously into idiots that it is easy to miss where they’ve made us smarter. The example I always use being ways that nobody has to get lost driving anymore. Getting lost is a weird thing if you’re driving a car that was made after I do not know what, 2011 now or if you’ve got a fucking phone. You might be driving like an asshole because you’re dividing your attention between your driving app and your actual driving, but you’re not really getting lost. Might be driving past your turn and having to go two more extra miles to get to the next exit. But still that’s not lost, where something in your car knows where you are. So anyway, I guess that’s pretty much it. That’s where intelligence is going.
And it’ll get there probably before we have ways of measuring how good it is. People will get smarter in conjunction with A.I. Faster than we will have measurements of how much smarter working with A.I. might be making this. that might not be a big deal, because when you look at how helpful IQ is not and the new indices may not be that helpful either, the proof is in the pudding. Does it matter to Bill Gates who has 80 billion dollars, what his IQ is? No, fucking, does it matter? Did it matter to Steve Jobs? His IQ didn’t make him the saint of Apple, nor did it stop him from being proactive about treating his cancers. So the proof is in the fucking pudding and not in your score on a test.
Jacobsen: The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How many IQ tests have you taken?
Rick Rosner: Probably 40 if you include the SAT and GRE, they can be converted to IQ scores. I have easily taken 40 IQ and IQ-type tests.
Jacobsen: Do you take more alternative tests or mainstream tests?
Rosner: I’m pushing 30 alternative tests. I’ve gotten the highest score ever recorded on more high-end IQ tests than anyone else.
Jacobsen: Is that why you’re legendary within that niche community?
Rosner: One reason I am legendary is there aren’t that many people in the community.
Jacobsen: I like the way Tim Roberts characterized it. He characterized the community as stamp collectors. You’re the one with the rarest and most stamps.
Rosner: It’s a sport nobody plays. It’s like the world’s strongest man, but with fewer competitors. It is really niche, because it is niche; people involved with it know each other. You said, “What about unmeasurable genius? The people who take all these tests.” [Ed. Before the recording.]
There is no person who maxes out the tests all the time. Nobody does that. The reason I have done that well myself on these tests; not because it is easy, but because I have put in the time and work. I worked hard on the tests. I did the research and the deduction, and, to a great extent, the profiling of the various authors of the tests.
Because when an author has written multiple tests like Ronald Hoeflin, like Paul Cooijmans, like out of Tasmania Jason Betts. It is really helpful to take multiple tests by the same person. Because you learn their habits of item construction.
It is easier for me to do well on the Titan Test. Maybe, Hoeflin’s toughest test, but I spent a lot of time on the Mega Test, probably Hoeflin’s second-toughest test. There was a show, Scorpion, which was a show about a real-life genius.
But it was turned into an adventure show about a squad of geniuses that didn’t have much to do with the actual guy’s life. I wrote to them a couple of times, “You should have me in for an interview to write for the show. This is right up my alley, because it is a show about geniuses.” There’s a big production show a mile away from where I live.
But nothing, I thought a good episode of that show would be to have a high-IQ guy, who doesn’t feel acknowledged by the world and starts sending bombs to people. Booby-traps that you have to be really smart to figure out the puzzles built into the bombs.
Jacobsen: Like the misnamed Unabomber?
Rosner: He didn’t want people to disarm bombs. He wanted his bombs to go off. This is for the purposes of the show. The world has not acknowledged his gifts, so he will get revenge on the world by sending these high-IQ booby-traps to people.
“If you think you’re so smart, if you’re as smart as me, you’ll be smart enough to solve this bomb puzzle.” That’d be a great plot for one of those shitty shows.
Jacobsen: Isn’t that setting a bad example in the media?
Rosner: I don’t think so because there are shows about serial killers. Do shows about serial killers make more serial killers? Maybe, I don’t know. But nobody is saying those shows have to be shut down because they are making people into serial killers.
I haven’t gone to a meeting and to present my idea. So, it’s not like that show is going to be made, except that it was kind of the third Die Hard as a series of riddles for Bruce Willis and Samuel T. Jackson to solve, Samuel Jackson. Does he have a middle initial? I don’t know.
What I am saying, a component of that show if turned into an actual episode, a component would be profiling the guy who is sending out these booby-traps. As much as solving the puzzles, you’re solving the person. That’s what is happening when you’re solving these tests.
Like Paul Cooijmans without giving too much away, some of the analogies are rooted in the culture he grew up in.
Jacobsen: What is your full range of scores here? Yes, bottom-bottom to top-top.
Rosner: When I was a kid, I scored a 135 on of the tests administered to every kid in the class. Then I was given an individual administered test to see if I was going to skip first or second grade. I scored high enough that they discussed skipping me.
But they saw me on the school ground and saw that I had no friends and thought that it would be a bad idea to make me even more socially awkward by skipping me a grade. On that test, I scored a 140. Those are toward the bottom of the recorded range.
There were a bunch of these tests. There might have even been a 128 on one of these group-administered tests when I was a little-little kid. The highest I ever scored on one of these group-administered tests was 151.
The reason I believe that I didn’t score higher is that is as high as it went, which was about 150. They don’t go higher. There’s not point, which we’ve discussed before. The bottom of the scale is about 130. The top of the scale is in the mid-190s.
Jacobsen: On S.D. 15 or S.D. 16?
Rosner: I don’t know. Maybe, 192 S.D. 15 and 198 S.D. 16, I believe, even 199.
Jacobsen: 199 on what?
Rosner: I think on a Cooijmans test.
Jacobsen: Who else has done 199 S.D. 16?
Rosner: I don’t know. Evangelos Katsioulis and some others who have scored in that range. There’s a little bit of luck involved, where you find a test that fits your abilities or you find a test where the scoring is, maybe, a little bit loose.
It’s tight enough for the scoring to be accepted for people who look at the scoring, but loose enough that it might be easier to score in the 190s on one test than it is to score that on another test because norming tests is an imprecise thing.
I was always looking for slutty tests. Tests where it was within my ability to score over 100. But I never got there on an adult test.
Jacobsen: Are you still working on them?
Rosner: There’s one where I did a lot of work on and thought I had a decent shot at, but I haven’t worked on it in years. This is not prime time for doing well on these tests. Maybe, it would take a pretty big time commitment to go through it again.
I could take a look at the tests that have come along since the last time I took a real push to take one of these tests… somebody is setting off firecrackers right now. It is spooky.
Jacobsen: Jesus. Okay, then, if you were to take all those scores in a fair assessment, what do you think is the tight range of, maybe, plus or minus two points on either side?
Rosner: You’ve got applied IQ. Where, supposedly, IQ is some inherent thing that you have or born with, it is supposed to stay the same throughout your life. That’s bullshitty. How effective your IQ is, it is connected to how hard you are willing to work on problems.
I don’t know. Give everything, probably in the 180s, the 190s might be me working hard, especially harder than might be appropriate – putting in 120, 150, 170 hours on a test. That’s a lot of time. Most people would not waste 4 40-hour weeks that could be used productively in other ways to kick ass on a test.
Jacobsen: Are a lot of the highest scores test junkies? I know you’ve taken a lot. I know Evangelos has taken a lot.
Rosner: When people claim, and people claim, that they got above 45 out of 48 on the Titan Test or the Mega Test and did it in 8 hours. I know they’re full of shit, because it is impossible to do that. I would be surprised somebody got above 45 out of 48 on the Titan Test without spending, at least, 80 hours or working as part of a team.
I know people have tried that.
Jacobsen: Ron told me people tried that on the Mega Test.
Rosner: I tried that on one super hard, crazy hard, test. I didn’t want to put in 100 hours. I wanted to see by teaming up with somebody if that would make it possible to do really well without a time investment. So, each person, it was something that I wanted to try.
We turned in our test. We got a pretty high score. Although, some of the problems were just impossible. They required some specialized training in logic and paradoxes. It was highly specialized. I don’t think we could have solved any of those problems without the specialized background.
We turned it in under a pseudonym. The guy was excited. The test was so brutal. Some o these tests are so hard that one person or even anybody turns in a set of answers. That was the case for this one.
We were the only ones who turned in answers. Initially, he was excited. I said, “We were two people.” He felt violated. Our deal was not to deceive him. Our deal was to, at least, get a score to see how the combined effort worked and then tell the truth. The guy was a little bit Aspergery.
So, it took lots of apologizing on our part.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the future of the relevance of IQ, its diminishment?
Rick Rosner: IQ has only been around for a century. Binet came up with a 5-point scale for testing kids to see what educational resources they might need. 1s and 2s need help for dumb kids. 4s and 5s need help for smart kids.
Terman took it over and put it on the 100-point chronological ratio scale. You take your mental age divided by your calendar age times 100 is your IQ. Then it grew from there. It was fairly widely accepted. A lot of psychology, psychiatry, was pretty widely accepted in the U.S. from the ‘20s, and ‘60s/’70s.
Then everyone started questioning everything, including IQ. IQ, now, I think, is considered kind of quaint. People have tried to replace it with various other theories and indices, e.g., Emotional Quotient, multifactor models.
The whole thing has also been hampered by it just not being that handy a thing. Like, it’s falsely precise. Somebody who says they have a score of 143 isn’t going to be any different from someone who has an IQ of 138, 147 or 130.
As with the SAT, it doesn’t add. Adding somebody’s score on an IQ test to their academic or professional dossier doesn’t tell you much more than you could learn from the rest of the dossier or talking with them for half of an hour.
In a lot of instances, it is a minus. If someone who brings up their IQ, I think Hawking called people who bragging about their IQ is a loser. People who are culturally cognizant know that IQ has a stink of loser-dom about it.
It doesn’t mean that it is of zero value. Or you can’t have fun with it. I’ve obsessively taken IQ tests on and off for most of my life. So, I can brag in a sad way about my scores. But it is mostly useless. A couple of times, maybe, in my 20s, it helped get me laid.
But that is a really small window to try to jump through.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: And who you’re jumping onto, IQ is iffy. What replaces IQ, I feel, will be measures of information processing power based on more sophisticated models of how information processing in consciousness works, which we’ll, eventually, get to in a pretty precise way, we have 20 years of not being there, yet.
You could consider the various measures of calculating capacity associated with computers as a type of measurement of machine intelligence, but really shitty measures. Because, for the most part, machines are at the very beginning of machine learning and really don’t have that much intelligence.
They have specific task oriented intelligence. You could set up a machine learning program in a short amount of time make a computer the best Go player or the best video game player in the world. But it is still very specific.
Computers still can’t pass the Turing Test. So, measures of computational power are pretty bad indices for intelligence. Petaflops per second, the amount of floating point calculations per second doesn’t really tell you how smart a machine is.
But as we understand what intelligence is via mathematical models of consciousness, there should be original indices originating from that. Regardless of the indices, we should see people as – for the most part – not giving a shit about getting smarter in general.
I get emails from people about how to get smarter. I tell people. The best thing is read your ass off. Engage in the types of exercises that are parts of IQ tests, try to mathematicize things in your world, try to mathematically analyze aspects of your world. But not many people are interested in doing that in general.
People are more interested in making themselves more competitive in the specific endeavours for them. When I was writing jokes for late night, I was very interested in making myself a better joke writer because I was told that my jokes sucked. Others were, but I thought I was being told this more.
At various times, I’ve tried to increase my IQ. In my career I was more interested in becoming a better joke writer and maker. The idea of strategically becoming really good at certain applications or certain A.I. aided technologies to make yourself effectively smarter in ways that pertain to your work will happen more and more.
But that’ll be a thing that will happen. You could team up with A.I. to make yourself smarter in a specific field. For instance, doctors are notorious for, once they’re done with medical training, knowing what they know but not extending themselves to extend what they know.
If you get a disease, you can go on the internet, learn shit that your doctor may not know, because the doctor is treating people with the disease and may not be keeping up with what is being learned about people with the diseases.
Also, the doctor may be snotty about information and may poo-poo stuff you learn from the internet because it doesn’t come from a journal. Also, because there is such a high ratio of bullshit garbage to legitimate stuff that comes to you via the internet, most doctors still aren’t optimal about learning everything to learn in their field or, certainly, everything about medicine in general.
I could see apps arising, A.I.-based apps, that keep doctors better informed than they are now. The doctors who become really good at using those apps might be better doctors. I can see that happening in a lot of fields, e.g., the hard sciences.
The amount of information in the world doubles every year or so now. Apps that help plough through the best stuff would make anyone better at their job if their job involved staying up to date. That’s what I think the future of intelligence lies.
It is in human-A.I. alliances. Alliances is too lofty a word. Initially, humans just getting really good at using A.I. and A.I. getting better at being A.I. At first, it is a Google relationship, via a keyboard, via a thing that you yell at – like an Alexa.
In the future, things become creepier and more intimate. Alexa’s of the future become more like robot butlers. They become more people-like, on the one hand. On the other hand, people can become more intimately linked with A.I.
Google Glass didn’t work because it was too creepy. They would, certainly, be some optical-based interfaces coming, e.g., smart glasses that don’t piss people off as much as Google Glass, more wrist-based stuff.
I always imagine some A.I. being worn as a little breastplate. In this novel that I am working on, you’ve got what I call bubs. Your basic handheld device, but they ride you, e.g., on your shoulder. If you need them, they crawl down your shoulder and go, “Hey, pal.” Wearables; it is increasingly pervasive and intimate A.I.
That’s where intelligence is going. Where it already is to some extent, it is hard to tell. Our apps have made us so obviously into idiots. That it is easy to miss where they’ve made us smarter. With the example I always use being Waize, nobody has to get lost driving anymore.
Getting lost is a weird thing if you’re in a car made after 2011 now, or if you have a fucking phone, you may be driving like an asshole because you’re dividing attention between the driving app and driving.
You may have to drive an extra two miles if you get past a stop. But you’re not lost. It’ll get there, probably, before we have ways of measuring how good it is. People will get smarter in conjunction with A.I., then faster than how working with A.I. may be making us smarter.
That might not be a big deal. Because if you look at how helpful IQ isn’t, the new indices may not be that helpful either. The proof is in the pudding. Does it matter to Bill Gates’s $80 billion what his IQ is? No!
Steve Jobs’s IQ didn’t make him the Saint of Apple, nor did it stop him from being proactive about treating his cancer. The proof is in the fucking pudding and not in your score on a test.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If at all, how conscious are Watson and Google Translate? Both of which are association engines.
Rick Rosner: The way Watson answers questions in Jeopardy, the question would be put into its system. The words it had learned and the word associations, e.g., word order, would bring up candidates for possible correct answers within Watson’s system.
I guess, Watson might, or eventually would, get a tally of possible answers with a probability of each answer being right. If some answer broke a threshold of 80%, 90%, Watson would ring in an answer.
Google Translate works somewhat the same way. Actually, I don’t know how it exactly works. Probably, Google Translate, you have to build each system, so, not that it knows stuff but, that there are words in each system.
Then you build the associations with each word. With Google Translate, they probably built in a lot of language-to-language dictionaries. That bread in English and French relate this or that way. They might have started with that.
Once it started running, it has access to all sorts of literature in each language that it is working with. It can reach conclusions about what word you’re looking for if it doesn’t have it in its system. Unless, it doesn’t have contextual clues in each language and statistical likelihoods.
In each case, a set of inputs brings up associations of varying strengths. Google Translate has gotten better and better. I used it yesterday. It is crazy good. I was looking for a word in French, not having the exact word I wanted in English.
I was poking around. I plugged in a word close in English. It translated it into French. When I translated it back into English, it gave me the word I was looking for in English. It did my thinking for me, in the language I was starting in based on context.
So, we can ask the question, “How conscious, if any, are these association engines?” It’s been said – and I haven’t read a paper on it or anything – that inside Google Translate; there’s a metalanguage that expresses relationships among words hat are common across all languages.
Somehow, Google Translate finds it. I don’t know if this is true or not. But this sounds plausible that Google Translate finds it efficient to catalogue the relationships among words in a meta way that isn’t dependent on any single language, but is really an outgrowth of all languages that it is working with.
It is a sophisticated associative net. So, to the extent that these engines are aware of anything, they are probably not aware, but there is something going on where they reliably bring up the right association, even when that wasn’t plugged in there by someone early on.
It is an association that has been developed via machine learning. So, it has the mechanics, the associational mechanics. It has the ability to associate things and to bring up things based on association the way consciousness does.
But it is missing so many other ingredients of consciousness; that it is unlikely to be what we’d consider conscious. Among the things that it is missing are, maybe, the biggest things like real-world correlations, e.g., Google Translate knows that there’s a relationship among the parts of a car and the word “car.”
It knows that it can group other words, e.g., it knows wheels are associated with tires and the word “rotate” and “grip the road” and “steering.” All these things associated with wheels and driving. But it probably lacks any kind of imagery library that explains in any way what rotate means and what steer means, even circular.
Although, you have to figure. With Google being a big science fictioney sinister company, and ditto for IBM, they have probably made attempts to associate visual imagery, plug it into the associative net.
We know Google Image search is pretty good at visual associations. So, it is possible that Google Translate might have visual imagery having been entered – pictures having been entered – into its system.
It may have increased its effectiveness at coming up with the right word. Who knows if Google would tell us about it? Because that would make people nervous. I don’t still don’t think it is multiplicitous enough, seen from enough different angles, that Google Translate could come up with any real understanding of how wheels work at this point.
Because I don’t think that the nodes, the words and, maybe, images in its system, are associated enough with what we would consider sensory input, say video; that it would have a well-developed enough associative net with aspects of the world, working as they do in the world; that it would have any real kind of understanding.
That is big thing one that it might be missing. Thing two is judging. I don’t this either system has any way of judging. First of all, neither system has an idea of itself. Neither system has any means of judging whether something is good for either itself or good for some kind of aesthetic or some multiplicitous set of values.
In each case, each system is looking for the optimal word or answer to a question. That’s a simple enough measure of relevance. It makes its best guesses, best calculation as to how relevant a word choice is or an answer is.
If it is high enough for Watson, Watson rings in and answers the question on Jeopardy. I think with Google Translate. It gives you its best stab at what it thinks you’re trying to say, even if it is a bad stab, I assume.
I don’t think the measure of relevance is tied into enough of an associative system that a supported judgment; that it can be truly said to judge or to experience things that it likes versus things that it doesn’t like.
I don’t think it has the experiential and associative net to do that. Beyond that, it doesn’t have emotions. At the very least, emotions are also an associative net.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we’ve talked about the colour red and perception and a certain universality in the perception of red amongst everyone. Let’s re-open that a bit here.
Rick Rosner: There is an age-old philosophical question about talking about the colour red. How can what they picture as red in their mind is the same in each person’s mind? The argument that you can’t prove it: You can’t go in somebody else’s mind. I believe a very effective argument against that – and, since it’s good, many people have thought it, which comes from modern brain science – in addition to a predictor, your brain, which sets you up for the things to come. Brains are association engines. Consciousness throws stuff into the conscious arena. So, you can get the widest spectrum of potential associations. Things that might be helpful. Stuff that is semi- or un-conscious is stuff that doesn’t need a lot of analysis – walking, breathing.
But novel stuff as we have talked about a zillion times before needs to be analyzed. It is one of the more efficient ways, as proved by what conscious is, to analyze things is to see what associations it brings up. This isn’t a good example William Shatner who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek put a picture online of himself from the original series put through a girl filter, turned him into a woman. He said, “I’d do me.” This caused a lot of consternation on Twitter. A lot of people agreed lady Captain Kirk was highly doable. It went around a lot on Twitter. She looks fuckable, but looks like William Shatner. It is a weird thing capturing your attention, or actively enters consciousness. It is a weird thing, which you’ve never seen before. Unless, you’ve seen the app before.
Your consciousness thinks it needs your attention and generates a bunch of associations. So, the argument about why two people probably roughly picture the same thing when they talk about “red.” Both people come from the same age, a Western country, then their associations – the things that they have associated with “red” – have a big overlap, between each person’s associations with “red” – assuming each person’s perceptual apparatus are functional. Some might be unable to see “red.” Assuming each perceptual systems are at par, each person has the same background, and their mental ‘definition’ or “red” are the same, e.g., for an apple or a corvette (terrible example because they come in a number of colours, but people think of the Prince song), a zit, and blood, these will be associated with “red.”
They are not perfect. My wife wanted me to paint our doors red. They were painted red. They seemed too Chinese red or tomato-y. She didn’t like it. I went to paint it more. She made me repaint it. I painted it with 5 different colours with hints of blue and cranberry. She doesn’t think it is red, but some type of weird pinky thing. So, there is room for disagreement. Anyway, that’s my argument.
The other thing I want to talk about is the question of reversibility. In physics, there are these subjects for lay people in physics, but professionals are too busy looking at other stuff. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, it gets a lot of play among non-physicists, while physicists got over thinking about it a gazillion years ago. Another thing that used to come up, I haven’t seen it a lot lately. It is the problem of reversibility, where all the equations in physics – that I know of at least – are time invariant.
The equations and the physics that describe simple interactions can be run in reverse. There is no arrow to tell you which way things are going. To have an arrow, you need macro events. That is, the standard example is the tea cup falling off the table and shattering off the ground involving 10^25th atoms. It is a lot of stuff happening and is irreversible. But the paradox is that any of the single or two or three atom interactions going into the 10 to the 20-something interactions that go into the breaking of the cup, and when you zoom into the little interactions of one atom with other atoms. You could turn back the clock and not violate the laws of physics.
Extend that to the entire cup, there’s nothing against the laws the simple physics of running the timeline of the cup backwards and have it form on the table. All these shows like Nova, and so on. The broken cup is probably shown a dozen times in different shows. The thing that makes the breaking of the cup irreversible is thermodynamic and statistical because it involves a lot of stuff. One thing I would argue, probably tautologically, is that reversible processes are reversible because they don’t contain any information. They don’t leave their mark on the universe.
We’ve talked about long-distance photons and neutrinos that travel for billions of lightyears. They escape their local solar system, which makes it extremely unlikely that they will run into anything as they traverse the universe, but, in traversing the universe, they lose energy to the curvature of space – which is the same thing to interacting with the universe for billions of years. A photon travelling across th universe for billions of lightyears has been interacting with the universe for billions of years.
Although, the photon travelling at the speed of light doesn’t perceive time passing at all because of the equations of relativity and the universe is relativistic. The universe perceives the photon for traversing for billions of years, but the photon not perceiving any time passing. That’s a good way to contain information. That is a good way for the information the photon contains to not decay. That photons that traverses for billions of years has become entangled in a big chunk of the universe. That’s not reversible. It means information has been generated. The information or the mass the photon lost is added to the universe in the form of information.
You could add the same argument for the broken cup. It is so complicated and so irreversible that information has been added to the universe because we know for sure. It is such a big set of interactions, the cup broke. You fire an electron at another electron. You say, “A bounce and then electron 1 went left and electron 2 went right.” Somebody could say, “Are you sure? Did they? You can’t tell the difference between those electrons.” In certain collisions, you can’t tell which electron is which after the interaction.
Oar maybe, they didn’t interact. They bounced off each other and changed trajectory. There is less discernible information there. It is less definitive. Look at photon interactions in the center of the Sun, where the energy released from two deuterium nuclei fusing into a helium nucleus, that releases energy in the form of a photon or, maybe, more than one. It is in the form of light. The light takes a long, long time to reach the surface of the Sun. That energy is in the form of who knows how many – more than 10^20th photons, as that photon gets emitted by the fusing nuclei and gets absorbed by something and then emitted, again, within 10^1/100 trillionth of a second. This happens for 500 years. Until, that energy has slowly percolated up to the surface of the Sun, where it is emitted in the form of photons.
Most of which will go for billions of years. In the center of the Sun, you have these short lifetime photons. The idea that any one of those photon interactions being absorbed and emitted within 1/100 trillionth of a second would have durable information is completely unlikely. Each of those little interactions contributes very little information to the universe. The Sun shining, the information that it is contributing. We’ve talked about information a lot over 6 years. We still don’t have a clear idea about it. The universe is not a good enough book keeper to keep track permanently or for more than an instant of all those mini-interactions; that it takes macro-interactions, e.g., the Sun shining and generating events on Earth to generate information that is discernible to the information processing system that is the universe.
If we’re right, and if the universe is both material with time and space and matter & an information processing system, the systems have to be loose enough to permit each of those levels of existence to co-exist, which means the information involved with the universe perceiving and defining itself needs some looseness where, on a moment-to-moment basis, there is no durable record of the individual mini-interactions that take place within the center of the Sun. There is an aggregate picture of the processes, but the universe doesn’t have enough information to create a record of the interactions that are happening in the center of a star.
It’s Schrodinger’s Cat every billionth of an inch, of a centimetre, across the whole guts of the Sun. There are things that have to have happened. Fusion has to have happened. There’s no record or information impact of these gazillion individual interactions. There’s only information generated in the aggregate. Sometimes, it’s not even then. But there’s something there in the shaping of the universe. We know that in our information processing system. If we experience something, and then we never think of it again, we never remember it for the rest of our lives. We just never remember it.
It has very little impact on our overall consciousness and it’s pretty much as if it never happened. You can take that to the most grotesque extreme. Once we die, it is as if we never thought anything in terms of our experience of the world because we have been obliterated from the world. We left impacts on the world. But in terms of our thought patterns, it is as if it never happened.
Jacobsen: There is a lot of philosophizing about substrate independence with a carbon-based evolved consciousness and then a silicon constructed intelligence. In either case, you could change the substrate while having the same consciousness more or less. In other words, I think we have touched on a principle of existence with consciousnesses, but I think have another one now.
Rosner: We have talked about how consciousness is a little bit free. We have never talked much about the manipulation of consciousness. It feels as if our consciousness is free. We have talked a little bit about it. The manipulation of consciousness is the same as the simulation of consciousness. That kind of manipulation is via a substrate. We haven’t talked about that, but could at some point.
Jacobsen: Yes, so, the idea of substrate independence is a fundamental issue. In fact, I think it so fundamental as if to be a principle of existence. No matter the universe that you have or no matter the fundamental particles and table of elements that arise, if they arise, in that framework, you should have something like a principle of substrate independence in existence to the kind of consciousnesses that could evolve. I think a corollary to this is not something I have seen, which is structural dependence.
The idea that you can change a substrate while producing a similar consciousness is a reasonably premised idea. You should have structural dependence. No matter the architecture or armature that you have, if you have a similar architecture or structure that the armature represents, you should get a similar consciousness. That structural dependence is similar to substrate independence. It seems like structural dependence is related to substrate independence and vice versa.
Rosner: Computers are not conscious. People who are reasonable would argue the computers aren’t conscious because it’s a different architecture in the computer than people, which is that something in the architecture of the brain permits consciousness and is different in the computer to the point that computers don’t think and humans do. That’s a structure-based thing, which is what you’re saying. To the extent that you have substrate independence, you have information working according to the rules of information. Those rules are very close to, if not equivalent to, the rules of quantum mechanics.
So, if you set up an architecture that is sweet enough, capacious enough, to allow consciousness, then you’re going to see information within that consciousness interacting with all the other information in the consciousness appear frictionless, superconductory frictionless, independent of the substrate. So, what happens in a computer is super highly tied to the substrate; it’s all determinate. Everything is going to get executed. There’s not a lot of wobble in computer processes. Unless, it has been built it, but it is still deterministic wobble. A computer executing a program is deterministic. A substrate that allows for information to interact independent of the substrate is indeterministic in the same way that quantum mechanics is. That’s what I think what you’re talking about sits.
I want to talk about another thing, which we don’t like to talk about readily or apply to ourselves. But we readily this to animals. That we eat, or just in general. When we think about the lives of animals, which we don’t think go to heaven, that is, people who are soft on dogs and cats like to not think of cats and dogs not being snuffed out when they die. But sentimental people like to think of dogs and cats as having some transcendental existence. But when we think of chickens and cows, and pigs, maybe especially pigs, we think that when they get slaughtered it is game over. These smart animals having terrible lives doesn’t matter because their brains have been wiped. They’re dead. They have more thoughts. The misery they’ve experience has been wiped from the world.
There’s that. If you think that about the pig you’re thinking, then it is hard to sit down and then not think this about anything else with a brain.
Jacobsen: Yes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we were talking off-tape about the arrow of time and physics.
Rick Rosner: So, the physics that I know has always had a problem with the arrow of time. The physical interactions, e.g., particles smashing into each other, the stuff that contains few enough particles that you’re not dealing with statistical, thermodynamic phenomena. The stuff that is reversible. It is something that physics has dwelled on it. People who do physics have not paid much attention to it because they have their own physics to do. It is that the universe is not reversible. The stuff happening to us has a definite time arrow. The individual physical interactions as dictated by the rules of physics seem not to. You can run everything backwards.
If you could run a film of a cup running backwards exploding, there’d be nothing in the backward film breaking the laws of physics. It would regain its kinetic energy and use that energy to come back together and jump back onto the table and come together. Between the kinetic energy of the parts of the cup and the floor, nothing would be disallowed by running the film backwards. But we’ve talked. I think the arrow of time is determined by large-scale physical interactions.
That is, the photons that make it to the surface of the Sun, the vast majority, go for billions of lightyears and lose most of their energy to the curvature of space, which is, I believe, a tacit exchange of information. That large-scale transmission of energy across billions of lightyears is what propels the arrow of time. Because when you have a gazillion of photons and neutrinos sharing information that way, none of those long-distance photons are doing anything that can be time reversed. They are spreading their information across the skyn of relationships in the universe in an irreversible way.
That’s not a local thing. Like I said, if a photon gets out of the Sun, it’s not going to be local. I don’t know. I haven’t done the math. Somebody probably has; how many photons there are that travel a quadrillionth of a millimetre within the Sun before they get captured again? I guess the sheer number of photons that only travel a tiny distance would outnumber the photons that travel a huge distance.
If you consider each increment between each photon travelling from the center o the Sun to being captured, and if you consider that one interaction, then the number of those close interactions outnumbers the number of interactions with long-distance photons, maybe. It’s the long distance particles that shape the universe and determine the arrow of time. But there is another arrow of time under IC, and under quantum mechanics, which is, “What moments are allowed to follow each other?”
The deal is, under quantum mechanics, there is the universe – or whatever system you’re looking at – contains a lot of open interactions, open positions, where something is due to happen at some point in the future. That thing that can happen can have a number of different outcomes. There’s a reaction that sets a neutron loose. A free neutron lasts for 10 or 11 minutes before decaying on average. So, the decay of that free neutron is like an open proposition. You don’t know when.
Because there is no way under the rules of quantum mechanics to predict exactly when it is going to decay and when the various energies of the products of the decay… the amount of energy has to stay the same. But how that energy is distributed among the particles that fly apart from a decayed neutron, those are all unpredictable things. There is a gazillion of these open issues in each moment of the universe. But your subsequent moments of your universe or system have to follow the open positions and be consistent with the closed positions too – to the extent that there are closed positions.
It is probably a philosophical-quantum mechanical issue. Anyway, each candidate for next possible moment of the universe is going to be a member of the set of possible moments that close some of these open issues. That some of your possible next moments of the universe are going to have that neutron decaying from one moment and the next. That, itself, is an ironclad arrow of time. Of course, it still has the same issue; super local or micro interactions appear to be time reversible under the laws of quantum mechanics.
Neutrons can undecay too. Shit can come together and form a neutron without violating the rules of quantum mechanics, but, still, it is a macro, large-scale system-wide thing. The moments follow from each other. The open issues are closed in a sequence that follows the arrow of time. Partly what I am saying is that the super local apparent reversibility of physics is, maybe, like free will or dwelling on the wrong question. I think what needs further analysis besides everything is how the sequencing based on determining previously indeterminate quantum questions.
That is, we know in a moment when the neutron has decayed. We know it has decayed. Before it decayed, we didn’t know when. So, that open question has been closed. There should be interesting things about linking the closing of open questions and the large-scale loss of energy of long-distance particles. Those need to work together to determine the arrow of time. That’s a place to look to see how they relate to each other in some very obvious and, probably, in some not very obvious ways.
Then you want to relate that to thermodynamic systems, which are all embroiled in the arrow of time, too. So, that’s mostly it.
One issue that seems to arise or one principle that seems to arise is that when you’re looking at super local interactions that don’t have an arrow of time according to the rules of physics. According to Newtonian and traditional physics, under the rules of quantum mechanics, nothing is entirely local in quantum mechanics. Everything is tied to everything else. There is always a non-zero probability that a particle showing up in one place can show up way the fuck away just due to chance. There is quantum tunneling.
A particle confined in the box can appear outside the box because there is no way to completely confine a particle’s probability wave. It spreads across all of space. Where it is next detected within its own probability wave, which is anyplace, it could be anywhere with varying degrees of probability. It is always possible an electron bouncing around in a lead box can appear outside the lead box. So, quantum mechanics, in that way, is non-localized.
The arrow of time stuff appears to be tied to the universe as a whole. It is a non-local thing. There is a sense of that in the thermodynamic arrow of time. Statistically, it is much more likely the cup falls off the counter and smashed on the floor than the cup unsmashing on the floor and coming together on the counter. The unlikelihood requires a lot of atoms, 10^23rd or 10^25th atoms on the floor. It is a non-super-local interaction. Even though, it only involves the table top, the floor, and the cup.
It still involves a shitload of particles and a shitload of things implied by statistical likelihoods and unlikelihoods. It is not super local in this sense. It is not just one electron repelling another electron. When you look at the other stuff that seems to have an arrow of time, super long distance particles and the universe having all of these open questions that get solved sequentially with an arrow of time. There’s the strong implication that arrow of time is tied into the entire system.
That the entire system is tied into the entire system via the rules of quantum mechanics. It means everything is tied to everything else. Maybe, worrying about the irreversibility, the complete apparent reversibility, of super local, super discrete interactions – a few particles in small scales – is worrying about the wrong issues, instead, you want to worry about, “How about does a system with all these discrete particles tied together work?”
Of course, many of the answers are contained in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics needs to be tied to cosmology to get the rest of the answers out of it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you had an equation mentioned in an interview with Errol Morris and in one of the really, really short ebooks. What is it?
Rick Rosner: In the equation, I said Planck’s Constant, which is basically a measure o the blurriness of matter or the lack of blurriness is dependent on the amount of matter within a region of space. It says that in areas with a local high concentration of matter. The scale is space is going to be smaller. You’ll have more space where there’s more matter. Let’s say you live in California where rent is too high, I think the average rent in Westwood has the highest average rent in the state, $4,900 or so per month for the average apartment if you want to live next to UCLA.
What you could do is if you had a device, you could rent a closet or a mailbox and live in that, if you have a device that can shrink you. There’s a Matt Damon movie from five years ago that permits people to do that. It can shrink you down and permit you to live like a millionaire on almost no money because it costs so much less to make a dollhouse than it is to make a mansion. If you’ve got a bunch of matter that’s gravitationally collapsing into itself, then the scale of space is smaller.
So, this is a limiting thing. As matter collapses into itself and pulls away from the rest of the universe gravitationally, then it will reach asymptotically an equilibrium where the closer the matter in a ball of matter gets to itself, the smaller the ball gets, the smaller space gets, so, at the asymptote, it looks like it stabilizes with the thing not being able to collapse at all because the more it collapses; the more space gets smaller, so it always looks the same size.
In general, looking at the entire universe, the principle is that how precisely the particles in a universe are defined is decided by the density of information-sharing particles flying around. In other words, if you had two people in a gun fight in a dark room, and let’s say the guns aren’t lethal, every time they get hit. They make a noise. Two people trying to figure out where the other person is in a dark room by shooting at each other and listening for the yelps would have a rough idea of where the other person is.
But if you had a hundred people in the room shooting at each other, the positions with the two people in the room would be blurry. Let’s say there’s a device tracking the yelps, which knows which yelp corresponds to which person, we call this the Universal Detector. If you had 100 people being registered on the detector – having a Universal Detector fucks things up a little bit, but let’s go with it, the locations each person would be much more narrowed down because each person would be getting hitting with 100x more bullets than in the room or 99x more bullets than in the room with only 2 people.
So, their positions would be much more defined. According to the rules of quantum mechanics, I say or claim – some might disagree – the exchanging of particles is what determines where particles are in terms of how they affect the rest of the universe, which is the only measure of where they are. There is not some secret measure of where they are and do not have access to the more perfect information.
If you had 1,000,000 people in the room, and say they’re small enough to not getting in each other’s way, everyone would be hit 1,000,000 times more bullets than the room with 2 people. You’d know where they are with 1,000,000 times more accuracy. That’s the whole deal. The more matter you have interacting with all of the other matter; the more precisely that matter is located in space, which equals the scale of space. Let’s say we’re talking about protons, a room with a million protons – let’s ignore it would blow apart because of the Coulomb Repulsion of all the protons, the protons would be so much more tightly located.
It means the protons would be so much more tiny in a room with a million of them than with just 2 of them. The tininess equals the scale of space, it would fill space. The scale of space would be smaller. In a room with two protons, the two protons would be blurry as shit and would occupy roughly half of the room. They would be fluffy enough that there wasn’t much of the room that wasn’t occupied by a significant proton cloud, probability cloud, for a possible location of the proton. It would be two blobby things semi-overlapping each other.
In a room with a million protons, the probability clouds would barely overlap each other. They would be more like blurry little pinpoints in space. The scale of space, the volume of space that you need to contain 90% of the protons’ probability cloud. That is, a space thrown up around where you think a proton is most likely compactly; there’s a 90% of the proton in this chunk of space. In the 2-proton world, the 90% spheres around the proton would affect most of the room. In a 1,000,000-proton world, those spheres would be tiny and leaving most of space not within one of those spheres.
In significant ways, you can define the scale of space by the size of those spheres. To make sure you’re not cheating by having some overall definition of space, you’re not measuring the extent of space itself against some other thing. Space is space. You have no way of measuring in size besides the stuff inside of it. It is comparing the size of the spheres containing 90% of the proton to the overall diameter of your space.
That’s the deal. The more matter you have in space interacting with all the other matter, the more tightly defined space is going to be. It applies to all matter in space as a whole and to tight clumps of matter, where you’re adding the extra interaction of the tight clump of matter with itself to the overall amount of interactions in the universe. To put it in gunfight terms, if you had a room with a billion protons all firing each other, then the protons would be pretty tightly defined. If you took a billion of those protons and packed them more tightly together, so all of the protons in the tight ball of protons are hit with twice as many bullets per second with half of the bullets coming from within the ball or tight of protons, then the protons in the clump would be twice as tightly defined as the protons not in the clump because the protons in the clump are getting hit with twice as many bullets.
That would have to be a super tight clump for just a million protons, for 1/1,000th protons in the room to be providing half of the bullets hitting the protons in the clump. So, that’s the whole deal. It’s what the equation says.
One addendum, protons and electrons, charged particles, are exchanging photons, which help define space or the scale of space and the distribution of matter within space via gravitation. But protons are much tinier, much more massive, and neutrons, than electrons. I postulate that not only are protons and neutrons being defined by its electromagnetic interactions. It is also being defined by all its interactions, especially the long-distance interactions mediated by photons and neutrinos. I would suspect that the neutrino interactions make particles involved in neutrino interactions much tinier, much more tightly defined, within space because there is a huge amount of collapsed matter outside of the center of the universe, which helps define – via neutrinos – the matter (all matter as well as), the active matter in the center is a beneficiary of all this collapsed matter acting as tent poles holding open a tighter universe/a universe in which the scale of space is tighter for neutrino mediated particles.
Now, I’m realizing what I’ve said is a little garbage-y. When a neutrino is absorbed by a neutron, it doesn’t just emit a proton. It also emits an electron. You have to say electrons are, somehow, participants. Proton-electron pairs are kind of linked particles. In that, the universe probably has the same number of electrons as it does protons.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we talked a little bit about spirituality. We talked bluntly, in the not too distant past, about traditional religions. What about these practices? Is there any efficacy of prayer?
Rick Rosner: In the current American landscape, everything has been turned to crap because every time a bunch of people get shot up. The only thing they can say, especially politicians who want to say they are for gun control, is that they offer thoughts and prayers. If you live on Twitter, as I do, somebody is like, “Fuck you! Do something concrete because thoughts and prayers don’t do anything.” So, the efficacy of thoughts and prayers in the current American landscape is zero. They don’t do anything. They don’t even get people to do anything concrete in terms of action, except getting pissed off about the “thoughts and prayers” people.
Jacobsen: In this IC model, does prayer work?
Rosner: …No. Although, there is the Oprah model, The Secret, that what you actively wish for will come to you, which is mostly bullshit except if, by actively wishing for something, it causes you to either take action – to get ready to go after this thing – or makes you more able to perceive opportunities to find this thing in the world. So, wishing for things doesn’t make them happen, except that it prepares you to notice and go after these things, there’s the saying, “Chance favours the prepared mind,” or, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
If you work at something, and if wishing helps you change perceptual settings, then, “Yes,” but wishing all by itself doesn’t send a signal out into the world for it to send things to you shit; that it otherwise wouldn’t send you.
Jacobsen: So, there is nothing there to which you are praying. Therefore, there is nothing to help you, outside of changing your own perceptual system.
Rosner: Right. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pray. It doesn’t mean you should expect things to happen if you do pray. You could cynically use it. Republican politicians are corrupt and not willing to do anything, and cowardly. People who have been selected via the recent trends in politics have been shitheels.
The deal is, I could imagine heroically cynical politician, of which there aren’t any on the Republican side, going ahead and saying, “Thoughts and prayers,” all the time. This generates tremendous outrage, then something is done, but no one is doing that.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is meant by mathematicization of consciousness in IC?
Rick Rosner: For a very persuasive theory of consciousness to exist, we would have to show what an information world looks like. We hypothesize it would have the physics of the world that we live in. We’d have to show the information in consciousness moment-to-moment and in memory, able to be brought up, how all that can be represented by a physical structure – call it a universe – with rules – call that physics, and how everything you know is part of it.
I have this clock radio and telephone in one in the home. It has rounded corners and a green LED display and has shading because it is sitting under a light. It looks like an actual thing in the world. A mathematical theory of consciousness would have to show how that information exists within a structure that incorporates my perception of this phone clock radio, and the rest of the room that I am in, and how it is embodied. Until recently, we were thinking information is more “holographic.” I don’t like it, the term – ugh.
Jacobsen: How about globally distributed and locally represented?
Rosner: Yes. I am not sure even know about that. It is globally distributed and able to be manipulated, so that it can be an object within my perception and imagination, or within my consciousness.
Jacobsen: It is like saying, “Everywhere and nowhere.” Does it really say anything? How can this be stated more precisely?
Rosner: Because you have to link the information and how this device, this phone deal, is represented in the information world, which probably includes the roughly global sharing of information via long-distance photons.
Jacobsen: There should numbers, symbols, and equations behind that.
Rosner: Yes, the whole deal.
Jacobsen: Then this would be the mathematicization of consciousness.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: We talked bluntly about traditional religion. What does this mean for spirituality?
Rosner: In the US, spirituality has been entirely fucked over by Evangelicals. As a liberal American offering any respect to religion at this point seems stupid because religion has been turned into this fantastically corrupt deal in America, this shouldn’t reflect on spirituality because this should be a different thing. Religion in America are real crap right now.
Jacobsen: How many people are part of these movements now?
Rosner: I don’t know. Maybe, it’s tens of millions.
Jacobsen: Okay.
Rosner: So, that’s thing one. My patience with religion, right now, is low. Thing two is, science is supplanting religion. Where I don’t think anybody expected this at the beginning of the scientific revolution, including scientists, the work of science to explain everything to every corner of the world. At this point, 500 years later, it looks like science can explain everything in the world. It is not to say we have explained everything or science can explain some metaphysical assumptions, such as the set of all possible worlds that have principles that can connect to ‘spiritual goods’ or properties that are good under ‘spirituality.’
From those things, you can extrapolate ethics. A sloppy half-assed understanding of the scientific world puts a premium on things happening without anyone in charge, but a more nuanced view of the scientific version of the world says, “It’s not random. Order emerges. Persistence persists. Under these principles, there is room for ethics and goodness, and a whole bunch of things, which are spiritually preferred. Even though, we are in a heartless and leaderless universe.”
Jacobsen: I like the phrase, “There are no governors anywhere.”
Rosner: I agree, but there are principles – not in charge – that describe what structures and entities persist and exist in the universe. Those entities are generated by order producing processes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We use a lot of terms consistently. Since we us them a lot, we should specify some more. What meant by technical consciousness rather than mystical consciousness?
Rick Rosner: I call consciousness a technical not a mystical phenomenon. It has been clear for decades, maybe a century, that when consciousness is figured out. It will be materialistic. That is, it will be generated by the same stuff that generate everything else in our world, the rules of physics and matter. That consciousness is made of stuff. Given that you can map consciousness into a separate space made of an abstract stuff, it doesn’t change the fact that consciousness is generated by matter doing regular things.
Jacobsen: Can I pause you there?
Rosner: Sure.
Jacobsen: If you look at the worldviews on offer, the major ones, the assumptions are non-materialistic origins of this stuff. It puts us as odds.
Rosner: As scientism has become more prevalent, it has become apparent consciousness isn’t magical. Even when we didn’t understand how it worked, it became increasingly obvious that it would be materialistic.
Jacobsen: You mean undeniably materialistic explanations.
Rosner: There is no extra fluid. There is no extra world consciousness exists subject to some mystical God-given or some hocus-y pocus-y separate set of phenomena. You can mathematicize consciousness and show the information within consciousness as existing within its own physics. Normal physics, but the physics of a separate space, we assume under IC. We assume consciousness can be mathematically represented in its own space. Just because we can’t do that now, it doesn’t mean consciousness can’t be represented via the processes in the brain, and the brain itself is built from physics.
Also, we have thought about consciousness under IC, as we have been working together for 5 years.
Jacobsen: It is more physics than metaphysics and more philosophy of physics too.
Rosner: As we built this out, I do not find this particularly hard to understand. Consciousness is the sharing of information among different sensory and processing subsystems, so that they all inform each other in a kind of shared arena. So, they generate a vivid, rapidly-changing, moment-to-moment picture of the environment and your thoughts of the environment and associated emotions with those inputs.
Jacobsen: In a way, you take among those who accept modern standards of science. You take premises most people would agree with and then come to conclusions only a minority of people agree with.
Rosner: If you sit people down and talk to them, here is what is feels like to have consciousness, what is consciousness, I think you’ve convince a significant number of people: Shared processed information generates the feeling of inhabiting a vivid reality.
Jacobsen: I don’t think it’s unreasonable. I do think it’s too optimistic. In North American culture, people would assume “immortal otherworldly stuff connects to me.”
Rosner: Take my wife, she doesn’t think a lot about science stuff. I get this a lot when I throw jokes at her. I will throw a decent one. He will say, “Anyone could have thought of that.” It doesn’t make it a bad joke.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: It means a lot of people could get the joke. I tried explaining IC to her. Similarly, it is obviously not obvious because we are sitting on thousands of years of thinking about consciousness, which we believe gets it wrong.
Jacobsen: What are the impediments to understand our view of consciousness? What have been the impediments?
Rosner: The impediments consisted of not existing in the right technological and scientific space in which we exist in a growing jungle of AI and apps, and increasingly CG and burgeoning brain science. We have the conceptual tools to think about consciousness as an information processing process. An emergent property, if you want to call it that; although, I’m not sure how emergent it is because it is right there.
Have a system that is getting multi-dimensional, that is, multi-faceted analyses of its current situation. All of the analysis that goes into fleshing out its world will produce what acts like and feels like consciousness. Obviously, that needs to be further mathematicized, as we have said a thousand times.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s another one.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, it was turtles, turtles, all the way down. This is the infinite turtles ‘problem.’
Rick Rosner: In IC, we postulate the universe is made of information, which means a hardware containing the universe. It is not part of the universe, but contains the universe. The information space, we do not see it as information, but as space, matter, and the laws of physics. For that information to be able to exist needs to be stored and kept track of, and manipulated in some other physical environment, which implies another universe, it is made of information, which implies another hardware universe out to infinity.
Infinities are to be avoided in doing physics. We live in a universe that doesn’t have any infinities. It has a limited amount of information. It has a limited, though huge, number of particles. It has a limited, though huge, amount of space. It has a limited, though huge, duration of time. The manifestations of quantum physics are generally manifestations of the less than infinitely perfect defining of matter in space, and space itself, so there’s only a finite amount of information in the universe. So, quantum mechanics is the physics of non-infinite information.
We’re postulating this infinite chain, stack, Russian nesting dolls, of containing universes. Another principles of IC is that existence is dependent on non-contradiction and self-consistency. Requiring an infinity of universes seems to imply circumstances, that seem impossible to the point of “How can that fucking be?”, basically. It seems suspiciously like something that should preclude existence because existence should not require an infinity of universes. I was thinking about our actual, physical environment, and the larger universe containing our more local environment.
Our environment is specific and concrete. It comes with self-consistent history, a non-contradictory history. The universe seems to have played out, at the very least, over many billions of years. The events on Earth have played out for a few billion years for any kind of life and then less time for complicated life, and then you get to human history. It all plays out without any serious complications. It seems like stuff developed through evolution and the laws of physics without crazy contradictory stuff like time travellers, dragons, or stuff popping into the world for no reason or does not comport with the rules of physics as we know them.
Then you compare the specific non-contradictoriness of our world with the potential problematically infinite set of universes. Each bigger than the one it contains outward to infinity. That seems non-demonstrably, non-concretely abstract. It seems abstract. If it is so abstract, and if we only know the universe that we are in, and if we can look across billions of lightyears, our knowledge of the universe drops off dramatically. We only know about our immediate universe. We are perfectly abstract in that external universe. All we know is that we’re postulating that it should exist. Things get more abstract as we get further down the line of container universes out to infinity.
I would postulate that you can’t have inconsistency that serves to make existence impossible in stuff that we can’t know anything about. The stuff that is wildly abstract. You need specifics. We can have a concrete universe that exists in a non-contradictory way, as far as we know the universe, and as far as get to know the container universe. We may develop physics and analytical techniques so powerful; that we learn things about the hardware universe if it turns out that we are contained in another universe.
Still, that’s another island of specific and non-contradictory stuff. As long as you can keep sticking fingers out of exploration and continue to run into non-contradiction, you might be okay. You keep the infinities at bay. It reminds me of the stuff of Godel and the incompleteness theorems. I think it’s been proven that multiplication is never going to steer you wrong. Two pairs of numbers that don’t have prime factors in common will never be able to be multiplied together to make the same product. 7 and 9, and 6 and 10, an never be multiplied together to get the same number.
There is probably some theorem that says, “Multiplication will work that way we always expect it to work without blowing up,” but the overall consistency of mathematics can be proven within mathematics. You may be able to prove some arguments for math. But even that will be hinky because you will not able to prove that type of metaphysics to math, there may some hidden bombs within math that, once discovered, will show math as inconsistent. However, we know math works because we have been using it for thousands of years.
Math gets used quintillions of times a day without a problem. For practical purposes, math is self-consistent enough to exist, at least as a system for analyzing the world. Even though, it may not be infinitely consistent. Similarly, the world exists with enough concreteness and self-consistency that it apparently can exist. Even though, there may be troubling implied infinities that threaten to blow it up. But in practical terms, it is consistent enough. The threats to its consistency, the dangerous infinities, are sufficiently isolated via abstraction and not impinging on our finite world that they may turn out to be problematic. Our existence proves they would not be problematic, at least not making it impossible for anything to exist.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s going on with Noether’s Theorem?
Rick Rosner: I know of it. I know it is amazing. It was a theory discovered in 1918. Basically, as far as I know, it says that things not changing as you change position in space implies conservation laws.
Jacobsen: Angular momentum of the system is conserved as a consequence of the laws of motion. The part that is interesting to me. The system doesn’t have to be symmetric.
Rosner: It is a deep theory. Deeper than me. If you like that stuff, then you should probably follow John Baez. You guys (Canadians) say, “Zed.” He is a physics guy and a deep math guy at UC Riverside. He is good on Twitter. Today, he was talking about Noether’s Theorem. He also created the crackpot test. Because he is a physics guy in a densely populated state. If you are a physics guy in a densely populated state, lunatics will approach you with their own theories of the universe. Nobody who is crazy enough to have a theory of the universe would take the test, probably.
Jacobsen: Just pulled it up. Some examples of 1 point, 3 point, 5 point, 10 point, 20 point, and the 50 point.
Rosner: It is a 37-question questionnaire. If you are above a certain level, then you are a crackpot likely.
Jacobsen: “1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false,” “2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous,” “3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent,” “5 points for each mention of “Einstien”, “Hawkins” or “Feynmann…” [Laughing].
Rosner: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing] “5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment,” “5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).”
Rosner: That should apply to Twitter. People who type in all caps on social media, including our fucking president.
Jacobsen: “10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it,” “10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a ‘paradigm shift,’“ “20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact,” “20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.” I suspect these are based on real emails.
Rosner: Yes, there’s a story my buddy Chris tells, who got his doctorate at CalTech. He watches into the faculty office of the physics department there. He’s behind a guy. The office secretary is blowing the guy off, “Professor so-and-so isn’t here.” My friend is like, “What is up with that? The guy is here. It is kind of rude to blow this person off.” The guy turns around to leave. His glasses are covered by tinfoil to block signals from space.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] “30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).”
Rosner: In 1984, I had a bad breakup.
Jacobsen: Is this the bouncer girlfriend?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: She was very attractive.
Rosner: She was cute. Before she was a bouncer, she was a dancer. But the thing that made her a good bouncer was this free floating anger. There was a certain amount abuse from here. It added spice and weird psychological underpinnings, which are hard to recover from.
Jacobsen: That doesn’t sound good to me.
Rosner: You know baby ducks imprint the first thing they see.
Jacobsen: So, you imprinted on very aggressive sexual experience.
Rosner: If you mix fear with everything else, then it makes a lasting impression.
Jacobsen: In 2020 terms, I am sorry for the emotional abuse that you went through.
Rosner: I am a big boy-ish. To get over it, I made a deal with myself that I would do something stupid every week. One time, I was walking across campus. I just dumped into a hole, not knowing what was in it or how deep it was. There wasn’t that much rebar in it.
Jacobsen: Back to the John Baez: “40 points for claiming that the “scientific establishment” is engaged in a “conspiracy” to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike,” “50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.” I can think of several people who fit those categories and function as crackpots.
Rosner: He may not have offered a cutoff. It would be like a physics guy to offer a probability cloud. Anyway, one of the stupid things I did. I met my wife at a Jewish singles’ dance. Before I went, I knew they were stupid. Nevertheless, I forced myself to go and it worked out. Another is writing to the National Inquirer. I scored well on an IQ test and was published in Omni. I wrongly considered myself famous, no.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Omni was this science-y and science fiction-y publication for people who liked Penthouse. I wrote a letter to Penthouse Letters. It is someone writing in to talk about the great sex that they happened into. I wrote one tied to my Omni persona. I wrote one to the National Inquirer about how I got my high-IQ based on ‘being kidnapped by aliens.’
Jacobsen: [Laughing] They thought you were a little off.
Rosner: Because it was stupid. If I had any actually degree of fame, then they might have done something with it, but they don’t know anything about this.
Jacobsen: Knowing you personally, you are one of the funniest people I know.
Rosner: Thank you.
Jacobsen: You are the least pretentious high-IQ person I know.
Rosner: That’s my shtick. On the inside, I am.
Jacobsen: So, you would have substantive internal prudery with the perfect score on the Titan Test.
Rosner: I worked in bars for years. I just finished watching some movie about a high-functioning autistic guy who is training himself to have normal interactions. I think Temple Grandin did that. Working in bars, it was the equivalent of that because I met three-quarters of a million people.
Jacobsen: So, you know what the range of American citizenry are like.
Rosner: That’s not the point. The point is I was never fully Aspergery or autistic. I was that off, but I wasn’t great.
Jacobsen: I don’t think you have Asperger’s. I think you have lack of socialization earlier on.
Rosner: I don’t even know if that’s the right term now.
Jacobsen: That’s true. It’s a spectrum. If you look at these individuals, I have some experience.
Rosner: You don’t hear about autism much. I think one reason it has been abused is because people not in the field abused it. When a supermodel goes on a late night talk show and says, “I was so nerdy in junior high,” which they all say, they probably were. To be a supermodel, you need to not get any boobs until you are 19. Unless, your parents are each 6 feet tall. You will not get womanly curves until older because when you get the estrogen that goes with having boobs. It shuts down the bone growth. It is annoying when a supermodel says, “I was Skeletor and nerdy in 8th grade.” It’s not necessarily not true because she probably was 5’9” in 8th grade and 103 pounds because this would allow her to grow to supermodel proportions.
There were probably some supermodels who when she went on one of the late night Jimmys said that. It was one of the most self-diagnosed characteristics out there. If you felt awkward, then you might go on social media and claim having Asperger’s.
Jacobsen: Concluding statements on Noether’s Theorem: How does it relate to IC? How about that?
Rosner: The deal with physics or one of the main quests of physics is an attempt for a unified field theory. On single theory that explains everything. Elegant physics theorizes one thing, but that theory when pursued along a number of different lines generates a number of surprising results that are consistent with observations of the universe, e.g., General Relativity. There is some quote from Einstein where somebody asked him, ‘Is it really true of the universe?’ Einstein who liked to talk about ‘God,’ said, ‘If God did choose it as a thing that describes the universe, then he fucked up because it is a beautiful theory.’ It is something like that. What makes a theory beautiful in physics is that it is simple and does way more than you’d that it would do, it is unexpected. I know Noether’s Theorem does this big time without remembering or ever even knowing how.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, we have these general distinctions between fields. We have physics. We have chemistry. We have biology. IC, as we conceive of it, deals with metaphysics and its relationship with physics.
Rick Rosner: Yes, but it’s mostly physics.
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s more spikey than gooey. There’s an armature connected to the ways in which we conceive of physics working.
Rosner: It is the reasons why.
Jacobsen: The reason for a universe structured as it is comes from the form of processing and the structure of the processor. That has a physical manifestation for us, but an informational manifestation. Yet, with those physics, chemistry, and biology, distinctions, we make those distinctions with diagrams, Latin language, equations.
Rosner: Those have emerged from their histories.
Jacobsen: But if there wasn’t a human operator to make those distinctions, those distinctions exist, but they don’t, fundamentally, exist. We conceive them of these distinctions, so they are apprehensible to an intelligent human being.
Rosner: Yes, but you can argue the three fields are distinguished by their internal order, where a living being has a high level of internal order – at least while it is alive and has all these feedback loops and governors, there’s all this stuff happening that sustains life. It is a whole system of stuff working together in a highly ordered way to make living things that behave with complexity, have life. This was always going to be in the history of stuff a field that arises naturally because life is so apparently different.
If you take it down to base levels, it may not be anything but physics, but, in terms of life, to somebody observing the world free of the history of everything: Life will look different from non-life. Physical processes are going to look even more simple than chemical processes because physical processes are at best mechanical, as you understand them mechanical. They are mechanically transformative. Something goes from standing up to falling down. Something goes from hot to cold. Something goes from not broken to broken.
The materials involved in physics when you are doing Galileo-type physics with cannonballs and ramps. You’re not transforming things. Then you get chemistry, or alchemy back then, where you’re trying to or turning stuff into other stuff. It boils down to physics. But nothing boils physics down except physics.
Jacobsen: How much of this is fundamentally an illusion? How much is this stuff simply quantum mechanical fields interacting? I am not taking this as a reductionist argument.
Rosner: A theory of the universe doesn’t have to account for everything, but it kind of should. There is an indication that in the whole increasing order of the universe over time. That increasing order will, often, include what you can call “hyper-order” or “life.” Life is order taken to a crazy degree. Living matter is super organized. I think a decent bonus of a unified theory of stuff would include the hyper-order arising. Maybe, not as a necessary consequence, but as something that is, certainly, part of the set of all things that can happen, the set of all things that are expected to happen. There might be roles for hyper-order in the overall operation of the universe.
So, I would guess that an overall theory of the universe contains multitudes. Quantum mechanics on its own, the way we think of quantum mechanics; you have to really reach to claim that it suggests that life will originate. Maybe, some combination of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics; you could make a stronger argument that those things could be combined to make life originate. It is a bit of a reach, but some kind of an overarching theory incorporating the principles of existence, quantum mechanics, and high-level information processing. All that stuff together; the theory that puts all that together would include consciousness and, as a consequence of efficient broadband, multi-nodal, self-consistent information processing.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can the universe lose information, part of it structure, internally, in other words?
Rick Rosner: Assuming: Let’s say one way to lose information that is uncommon is to find out everything you know to be true, isn’t true. That you get plunged into chaos because the world that you live in is chaos, but that’s not really what we’re talking about because you still have your memories. Even as fucked up as the world is now, it works on the 99.9999% rules. Democracy may not be working, but gravity works. We still live in three dimensions. The more common way to lose information, or the more devastating and pervasive way to lose information, is the hardware to break down – for your brain to lose the ability to lose information.
As you get older, you can get Alzheimer’s. Somebody with Alzheimer’s goes to retrieve the information that they have been retrieving all their lives, like words, and it’s not there; it doesn’t come up. You can get the same feeling without Alzheimer’s, e.g., being tired, or a simple glitch. Boogie Nights has been on a lot lately. The Red Head who plays Burt Reynolds’s wife has been on, but you can’t remember the name. “It’s Juliet something.” You can’t remember it. I had this happen a couple of weeks ago. It took time to remember Julianne Moore. Even though, she is a pretty big time actress. Although, in most circumstances, I would know her name.
It’s a combined hardware-software issue. You need the hardware. You need a functioning brain. Then you need enough experience with somebody, e.g., seeing Julianne Moore and knowing who she is, or having memorizing it. You could study Boogie Nights or The Red Head. I learned some things. Your hardware could get bad. What does a fuzzier mental landscape look like? If we’re positing, as we have been for years and years, that our information landscape looks like a physical landscape, then that universe with lesser information will be smaller and hotter. Hotter seems counterintuitive.
Because hotness seems like it should be information. All those thermal photons seems like they’re carrying information. We have background thermal noise in the universe. That is the Cosmic Background Radiation. It’s not very noisy. Because we live in a very information packed, very big, very apparently old, universe. These thermal photons are from what is apparently 300,000 years old. Now, we are at 13.8 billion years old. The photons using a naïve calculation that is probably wrong only have 1/46,000th the energy they originally had. The background temperature of these old ass photons – the oldest photons in the universe – is only 2.7 degrees Kelvin. That’s not enough to disrupt much.
It is probably hard to even absorb these photons because they were first discovered in 1964 or something. When some people at Bell Labs were building a big old radio telescope, the signals that they were getting, were noisy. They thought it was bird shit on it. You’ve seen what a radio telescope looks like. It is a giant bowl. It can be like 300 feet across or more. They had this big old thing. The birds were shitting on it. They realized that it was background radiation. They needed this big apparatus to discover the very long wavelength photons. Those old school TV antennas were 3 feet across to capture TV signals. Those would be anywhere big enough to capture CMB photons.
You need a wingspan to capture these long ass photons, spread out photons. So, anyway, they don’t do much interfering with stuff. In a low information universe or a universe losing information, a heating up universe, the universe might appear to be collapsing. As the universe pulls in on itself, the background radiation gets hotter and hotter. I don’t think the universe operates like an oscillating or Big Bang universe in which there is a falling back in. I think a universe that’s losing information shares some outward characteristics with an oscillating universe that is collapsing, but a Big Bang universe exploding outward and runs out of enough kinetic energy and then falls back in on itself has the same amount of matter in it or matter/energy.
So, we are under a Big Bang system if that were true; the universe that we have that has 10^11th galaxies would have the same number of galaxies, roughly. Maybe, some of them would become less visible. Maybe, some stuff falls out; maybe, the horizon would get shorter and less of the universe would be less accessible. A universe losing information would have the size of the universe proportional to the amount of matter and energy, so information, in it. You’d see fewer and fewer outlying galaxies. Everything would get hotter and hotter, until everything boils away to nothing and all information is lost. Maybe, the math of a collapsing Big Bang universe has those same outward characteristics.
Less and less of it becomes or remains visible. I don’t know the math or come close to knowing the math. Information is lost at the edges of the universe. As the universe heats back up, stuff that was clearly defined – particles, positions space – become blurrier. So, there’s less information to exchange signals and bounce signals off. The massive amount of information is what keeps the particles in the universe nicely tightly defined. The less exchange between particles and everything gets blurrier and blurrier. Looking at it from a different point of view, the 80-year-old person’s brain cannot hold onto anything anymore, cannot reliably retrieve the information that helps structure consciousness.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: In the last couple of sessions, we have been pushing towards the idea of the universe as an association engine in which things cluster over time. Hydrogen atoms fuse into heavier elements. Hydrogen gas clusters into stars and galaxies. You start off, in a Big Bang sense, with a largely homogenous distribution of simple matter. Three-quarters Hydrogen, one-quarter Helium, with some anisotropy, some small irregularities leading to clusters forming over time. These clusters being galaxies and stars. In the stars, the stuff boils down further. Hydrogen into Helium into heavier elements. Everything gets tighter and tighter. These tighter things are, looked at informationally, information being made when things fuse. This thing connected to this thing. It releases a photon that, more or less, lets the entire universe lets this entire this happen. At the same time, the universe knows itself. There are precise things happening.
Jacobsen: There are imprecise things happening too.
Rosner: Yes, the universe knows what is going on in general about itself. Things are defined fairly precisely, locally, but the local information doesn’t make it to the rest of the universe. We were talking about how in a star. You’ve got 10^68th ‘atoms’ or what would be atoms if not ionized, so nuclei. They are bouncing around fusing. It doesn’t really matter in terms of the overall structure of the star which Hydrogen atom fuses with which other Hydrogen atom. Specific events happen, but the record is not permanent. Stuff is bouncing around everywhere. It is fusing down, fusing down. There is probably not an exact history detectable where it is learnable for all these nuclei; these 10^68th particles.
But you have a rough record, which says, “It’s a star. After 8,000,000,000 years, it has used 2/3rds of its Hydrogen.” That rough description is apparent to the rest of the galaxy and, to some extent, the universe. The universe is precise in its interactions, but not precise in its record-keeping and still manages to define itself, where the individual particles in the universe have a really tiny blur to them. They are precisely defined even if their histories are not precisely preserved. So, the universe defines itself and perceives the information it contains in a rough and flexible way, which is not unlike what happens in a computer.
All the calculations in a computer are precisely recorded. The computer can forget previous calculations. Maybe, there’s time machine in windows, where you can go back and find out what was happening at your computer at any given time. When you are playing a game, I don’t know if there is a precise recording of every game. I don’t know if that would have to be. Anyway, part of our precision is a preservation of every previous moment. The universe doesn’t work that way; it doesn’t have to work that way. It is part of the flexibility of the universe as an information processor and a place for us to live. If there was precise knowledge of everything all the time in the universe, I’m not sure there’d be enough flexibility for the two things to be happening at once: The universe processing information and being a material place in which stuff evolves.
Jacobsen: With the universe as an association engine, I want to take two views. One is the galaxy forming, stars and other materials are being sloughed off, all over the place, then being picked up by another galaxy or something. Other stuff is like higher-level elements being formed. There is a lot of waste in the formation of the elements. So, more energy goes into making them than is in them, as stuff is sloughed. What part there is less computer-like and more association-like? What is the appropriate, common way of representing this idea laid out?
Rosner: There’s a lot of information in the clustering and the way these determine the shape of space and the distribution of matter within space because, if the universe works the way our minds work, then you can pull up memories and other associations. You can throw stuff into a central awareness because this is efficient for finding new associations, which can be helpful for the mind figuring out what is going on and what to do next. So, the associative net needs to be able to efficiently pull up the best associations; the things that needs to understand stuff and know stuff to come to new conclusions, and not bad ones. The associative net must have a lot to do with the filaments, the large-scale structures, in the universe, which lets the universe pull strings and pull stuff back in when appropriate.
But that whole system has a lot of flexibility of sloppiness in it. In the way two people can have a similar of idea of what the colour “red” is, while having similar associative nets for the colour red based on culture, growing up, the century or decade, everyone has roughly the same idea – unless, they are colour blind – of what the colour “red” is. You can have a colour spectrum of the reddest reds. Everyone would cluster. It is the same more or less the same. But everyone’s association nets of the colour “red” are different. There is a difference with all leading to the same conclusion that this is the colour “red,” but having the same rough information content.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, outside of photons, based on the last session, what would be some other indivisible things, as in an extension of the atomists?
Rick Rosner: Neutrinos and anti-Neutrinos, electrons (kind of), while electrons are indivisible, they are interchangeable. There are the two different types of fundamental particles. The bosons that follow Bose-Einstein statistics and then the ones that do the other thing. There are two different type of particles depending on whether the particles are interchangeable in a certain way or not. Protons are semi-indivisible. In that, they contain three quarks, so do neutrons. But the quarks can’t be pulled apart. You can flip a proton into being a neutron. Protons can turn into neutrons and vice versa. However, the process involves emitting energy and electrons, and anti-neutrinos, or neutrinos, depending on which way you are going. So, they are divisible. Protons and neutrons can come apart into sets of particles. Or you can take several particles and crash them together. They have a low capture. Neutrinos have a low capture cross-section. So, any one event is unlikely. But in the aggregate, it happens. So, protons are divisible.
Jacobsen: What is the informational equivalent of division here? If you take various particles that can be divided, then they do get divided. What is the equivalence in informational terms there?
Rosner: I look at protons as being more open to the universe. Protons have a charge, an electrical charge. So, they interact electromagnetically with the stuff in their vicinity. Neutrons have zero charge. So, they don’t interact. I look at protons as being some open variable, where, in situations that we would consider normal – that is, situations on Earth with regard to most matter, the vast majority of protons have an electron associated with them. Most of the time, either a proton is part of an atomic nucleus, which has a cloud of electrons that has the same number as the number of protons or it’s a nucleus that’s slightly ionized. It is temporarily missing an electron, part of a molecule, etc.
For the most part, stuff forms that has little net charge. Anything that is normal matter, not a plasma and so a solid, liquid, or gas, has the same number of electrons as protons in a reasonably sized sample of this stuff. I see the proton-electron system as a system for information exchange; the way everything is a system of information exchange. When parts of the universe coalesce, and release energy by coalescing, you’ve created information. You’ve created a bunch of association and information when a bunch of hydrogen atoms forming a gas in space gravitationally collapse into each other and form a star. Before the star even starts burning through fusion, a bunch of energy is released – heat energy. Gravitational energy is released as photons because as the gas coalesces, falls into itself, from a big cloud of gas into a star or a pre-star.
All the fall in has turned potential energy into kinetic energy, which, eventually, gets released as photons. The photons contain the information that this stuff has coalesced. This mass of 10^68th atoms has come together. So, I see protons plus electrons as association generators. With all these new associations formed, here is the information about them released to the rest of the universe, a neutron is not stable. Unless, it is locked into a nucleus. A free neutron has a half-life of like 11 minutes. It will break apart into a proton plus an electron plus a neutrino, or anti-neutrino, plus a photon. But a proton that gets locked into the nucleus with another neutron forming a deuterium nucleus – one proton plus one neutron – is again releasing a lot of energy. It, too, is – that energy – information about an association a linking that has been formed, which is shared with the rest of the universe.
The deal is, it happens a lot in stars, but stars have 10^68th atoms. So, the odds that there will be two protons crashing into each other and fusing into a proton-neutron nucleus. The odds are low individually. But there are 10^68th atoms smushed into each other, super smushed into the guts in the star, plus absorbing tremendous energy all of the time from the huge temperature at the centre of the Sun. Protons by the quadrillion per second fuse. These collisions that are unlikely as individual events; these potential fusings. So many of them happen, even though, they are super unlikely – a gazillion of them happen every second. It is a tight association that these two protons found themselves so close together with enough energy to overcome their mutual repulsion. That they formed into a stable nucleus. It has one net charge instead of two. You take two protons. It turns into a proton-neutron with one charge of a nucleus. If it weren’t ionized at the centre of a star, if you had a deuterium atom somewhere else, it would have one electron orbiting it.
That, to me, is an associative shorthand in the universe. It says, “You don’t need to worry where these two protons are because they are locked together. There’s only one variable here. That’s the one proton with its electron and the other proton has been locked down. We know what’s up with it. It’s so close. Its history let it become so close to this electron. Now, it’s locked down and very tightly linked with the electron. It is a tight association.” So, the universe is an association engine.
Jacobsen: What is another term for engine here, generator?
Rosner: Yes, as you move through time, the number of associations formed generally increases. Things don’t fall apart. They fall together.
Jacobsen: I see two-way association here too.
Rosner: We should talk about what IC says in terms of the cycle of things. Associations are formed. As galaxies run out of stuff to fuse, the galaxies go dark and are pushed aside by more active association engines. The burned out galaxies participate less and are frozen on the outskirts of the universe. Until association on a huge, cosmic scale pulls them back in, and also lights them back up again, strips them of some of their associations, or they accumulate new wads of gas, which can light the galaxy again.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You just asked, “What’s the lowest possible wavelength for a photon?” I think you could probably set up some electron-scattering apparatus that would have a range of energies for emitted photons. I am talking out of my ass. It would be arbitrarily close to zero. I think there’s no limit on the least energy that a photon could have. But it might be tough to set up an apparatus that reliably produces super low energy photons, but maybe not. The lowest energy commonly found photons without setting up a special apparatus are the photons close to the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These are photons that have travelled across the universe since the universe was 300,000 years old. So, they’ve lost all but 1/10,000th of their energy. They’ve got a temperature of 2.7 degrees above Absolute Zero. They are really weak.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s take a step back, so, this is an impossible experiment in reality, in terms of it actually happening. The one mentioned earlier with a pipe, vertical, shoot a photon through the top. It splits through a perpendicular pathway going one way and the other way. So, this is a question about what is possible and impossible. In terms of light, what can you not do with them (photons)?
Rosner: You can’t divide them.
Jacobsen: So, they are functionally indivisible.
Rosner: You can’t add energy to them. Unless, the energy is due to the shape of space. In other words, a photon travelling down a gravitational well will gain some energy. But it is not like you can inject a photon with energy. It’s not like you can bounce energy off a photon. Maybe, I’m wrong. You definitely can’t turn one photon into two. There might be a way to scatter a photon that would change its energy. But I kind of don’t think so. You can have a pair of photons spontaneously appear and shoot off in opposite directions. It doesn’t happen very often at all. But you could do that. I don’t know what you’re going after with two photons shooting off in either direction.
Jacobsen: I was making an incorrect assumption of a probability goo entering the pipe and then becoming definite as photons.
Rosner: It is not like a photon is one thing until it is observed and then it is another thing. There are equations describing photons. They describe them as both particle and wave. You can design experiments that will show a more wavelike nature to the photons. You can have experiments showing the photons as particles. But you are not changing the nature of the photons. They are what they are. For a photon to be detected, I would have to read up on how you detect a photon without absorbing the photon. But obviously, there are ways to do that.
Jacobsen: What would be an approximate number of active photons traversing the observable universe?
Rosner: I would guess the mass of all the photons out there would be within an order of magnitude of 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 of the combined mass of all the non-photon particles. I don’t know how neutrinos fit into that. I would guess that one way to get not too far off to the number of photons out there would be to take the mass of all the particles that have mass and come up with some kind of average energy of a photon; that you’d find out in the universe and divide the mass of all the massive particles by the average energy of a photon. That would give a rough idea. Or you could Google it. Someone has done that calculation out there. Let’s say it is 10^95th or 10^100th photons out there.
Jacobsen: If we take the 10^95th to the 10^100th range, and if we take those two numbers as a post in a range, somewhere in the goal posts there. There is going to be a photon that could get warped around galaxy after galaxy after galaxy without hitting anything. So, if IC is right, and if the universe is cycling, and if that happens to something of a single data point for billions upon billions of years, then it’s…
Rosner: There are a gazillion photons that haven’t hit anything; that have wrapped around stuff and warped around space. They have travelled across space without hitting anything. The CMB photons, I don’t know how many there are. Those are photons from when the universe became transparent to photons. They are constantly hitting us. Also, there are ones constantly hitting us.
Jacobsen: How long can those photons travel without their energy completely lost?
Rosner: Basically, forever.
Jacobsen: Is it lost to an asymptote across the curvature of space-time? In some sense, it seems like a convergence of having a finite amount of energy, but they have an infinite capacity to not be nullified to non-existence through the traversing of space-time.
Rosner: Yes, they lose energy. There is some equation. The simplest would be of the universe at which they were emitted over the current age of the universe. It is probably not that simple. That is one stab at it. So, you take 300,000 over 13,800,000,000. You get 1/46,000 of their energy is left. That’s probably too simple. It seems too straightforward, but it is something like that. Their wavelength keeps getting stretched out as they traverse the universe. You can look at the universe as if it is expanding. The expansion stretches out the wavelength of the photon, then the less energy it has. Maybe, it is that simple.
Jacobsen: Is there an upper limit to the amount of energy a photon can contain?
Rosner: Something has to happen that releases energy to release a photon. When atomic nuclei fuse, when two lighter nuclei fuse into a heavier nucleus, that, generally, changes the total atomic number of the combined nuclei. You could have two deuterium atoms. Anyway, if the atomic number changes, then you have two neutrinos or anti-neutrinos emitted. When nuclei fuse, you have a huge amount of energy released. It is a huge x-ray spectrum photon being emitted. If nothing else is being emitted, say two deuterium nuclei, one proton plus one neutron, they can fuse to form one new helium nucleus. If no other particles are emitted, that may be a possible interaction. All of the energy created in that fusion will be shot off by a super high-energy x-ray photon. You have to set up some kind of system where the energy created or released in a system is emitted in the form of a photon.
Theoretically, if stuff fell into a black hole, it would be super accelerated. But then, you have horizon problems. But theoretically, there is no upper limit. You just have to have some process that would release energy. I know how you do it! You take the most massive particle that you can find, single particle, and then you take its anti-particle and then smash them together. They are obliterated and then they release two photons shooting in opposite directions. There are hugely massive particles that you can create, or that you can find in the universe. The Higgs boson is the most massive particle every created. It has the mass of 500 or 1,000 protons. If you can create a Higgs and an anti-Higgs, if there is such a thing, and if you could smash them together, they would obliterate each other. They would be 1,000 more energetic then x-ray photons. That’s impossible to do with current technology. They barely manage to create a Higgs for probably one trillionth of a second. So, yes, you can make arbitrarily energy photons.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking about the sameness for everyone.
Rick Rosner: So, yesterday, when we talked, we talked about the philosophical question as to whether the colour red is the same for everybody and “how do you even know?” Also, we talked about the structural flexibility of the universe, where micro-events, micro-interactions, e.g., a single photon is emitted or absorbed probably have very little impact on what the universe knows about itself.
To have a photon that travels one billion billionths of a millimetre in the center of the Sun, the universe doesn’t hold onto interactions happening in the Sun. A gazillion of the interactions happens every second in the center of the Sun. The universe doesn’t have the information to do it. Which means however the universe interacts and defines itself, it means there’s certain flexibility or a looseness based on their not being enough information to completely define its entire history or even the position of every particle/identity of every particle/every interaction.
The universe has no record of which electron is which after the interactions. There’s looseness. That’s similar to everyone having the same colour of red, at least with the same background. Some argued the ancient Greeks didn’t understand the colour blue because it doesn’t show up in a context where you’d expect it to come up. It might be The Odyssey mentioning the wine-dark sea. People think that’s weird when the sea is blue-ish. But it is dark. So, it might not matter. But blue doesn’t show up in Greek literature of certain eras. People have shown in research that various colours show up in various literature of ancient civilizations, which means ancient people were quicker to notice other colours first than others with red as one of the first.
When people come from the same rough background, being born from the 1920s to the year 2000, those people will have similar enough backgrounds. So, when you talk about something being “red,” you know that given the perceptual structures and socio-structures of the brain. People have the same rough idea of red. But everybody’s got a different map of red based on their own individual unique associations. Their personal histories as they learn “red.” Some may have different feelings about red based on the things that happen to them if they have a bloody accident or saw somebody have a bloody accident. I am looking at our bar cart here. I am seeing red labels of Smirnoff Vodka. Maybe, somebody likes red because it reminds them of vodka.
Someone may have different emotional associations with red, but people are going to picture roughly the same colour. In fact, I am sure somebody has done that test giving people a range of colours saying, “List the reddest red,” to see what people consider a deep red. It is probably 10% by wavelength or less. That seems like too much, maybe 3% or 4%. Nobody’s associative net is the same. But we work with the same rough concepts for commonly understood things, as we build up mental representations of these common things. They are never the same two things for two people, but the universe, similarly, can represent what it knows in a gazillion different ways. The same way 200,000,000 people can each have a different associative map of red but all see red.
The same way the universe can see what it sees, and knows what it knows assuming it can know, without having a precise map of the constituent parts that define what it knows. You’ve got these rough things. The universe is shaped by the matter within it. But the overall shape of the universe doesn’t depend on the precise precision of each star within each galaxy. The overall shape is generated by the overall distribution of mass. So, you could switch stars around; there’s an imprecision in the universe, but one that still allows it to perform its information processing and thing-knowing function.
Jacobsen: What is the efficiency, the optimization, of information processing when you have standardized units, quarks? There are interchangeable, but have this gooeyness in the distribution of mass.
Rosner: So, the optimization, we know consciousness is an optimization of some type. We wouldn’t have consciousness without the sharing of information among the different information processing nodes of the brain, if this didn’t help with modelling or predicting the world. At the same time, it is a loose optimization. We have talked about there not being one optimum leaf. You have thousands of different leaf shapes. Compared to eyes, there’s no optimal shape of eyes. Given that, mammals have one type of eyes and bugs have another. But it is a much tighter optimization. Human-mammal type eyes have a much stronger optimal position than leaves because human type eyes have evolved lots of times over the process of evolution of life on our planet. It is a highly optimal structure. Although, it is not the only structure for seeing. It shows up again and again.
So, it really works. Compared to leaves, there is no single strong contenders for best leaf because there is such variety. So, I would harbour a guess that consciousness is that any sufficiently developed and complicated information processing entity is going to gravitate to a structure that includes globally shared information among processing nodes, but, beyond that, there’s no sharp model defining the relationships and the constituents of consciousness. However, when it gets down to the individual Legos, the individual building blocks of consciousness. I think those things are pretty solidly pinned down, the fundamental particles of physics, are pretty close to the same across all possible universes. Unless, the universe is an engineered universe. What do you call the substrate…?
Jacobsen: Oh, the Substrate Independence and the Structural Dependence.
Rosner: So, a sufficiently advanced civilization could simulate a universe of 5 dimensions to set up rules that would let it work, more or less, and have some weird physics with not all the same particles. That would be a simulated universe and would have huge lack of optimality. You’ve wasted all these resources to build a toy universe, a donut-shaped universe, whatever. At some point, in looking back and back and back among the layers, you could imagine a donut-shaped universe being engineered by a civilization living in a simulated 5-dimensional universe… and then you see a natural type universe. One that is the easiest universe to have arisen and exist; those natural type universes – those there’s trouble with that idea, which we can discuss, but not now – have the same type of particles because these are the types of particles that can exist without contradiction. The fundamental particles, when most people think of fundamental particles would only be able to name three of them.
Even when scientists, e.g., biologists or chemists, work with fundamental particles or elementary particles, a chemist is working with, for the most part, electrons and protons and nuclei, and not with muons and gluons and Higgs bosons, and photons. All of the big five that we have talked about too. Those that do most of the work that we rely on or perceive in the macro universe. Protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, and neutrinos, there are other constituent parts that help those things work, but you don’t see their work in the macro world. You barely see neutrinos in the macro world. But anyway, you’ve got these particles that make the macro world work, then you have five of them, basically. But then, you have dozens more that do the microwork that keep the macroparticles functioning in their macro way. If microparticles didn’t hold atomic nuclei together, then you couldn’t have atoms, couldn’t have elements, so the macro world wouldn’t work.
The whole menagerie of fundamental particles has all these deep symmetries under group theory. It is probably that you have these macro particles great for building worlds out of, but those can’t exist without contradiction and a whole underlying structure with deep symmetries or deep resistance to contradiction. That’s the deal. We’re the skin floating on top of a contradiction resistant substrate. Although, not the substrate that you brought up in another session about another hardware world supporting our world.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s like the top of the x-axis as the future, as they run through the sequence of time. The universe kind of evolves in its relations from point to point in what would work as opposed to what would not. So, going from the original point to the future points being more complicated while still self-consistent maps, a graph theoretic map, this is what I’m seeing here. Anything that could be sufficiently consistent running from T=0 at the top to the bottom in increasing scales of complexity would continue to function. Maybe, one could plug in certain emergent principles like space or volume.
Rick Rosner: It would have to be built from what is going on, but they would be emergent. The deal is, in a quantum system, in a system functioning according to Quantum Mechanics, you can have open nodes. There are places where there is missing information. There is a missing value that can be filled in, in the future. You don’t know what is going to happen, but in the next iteration, in the next moment, something will have been picked. A value, they used to talk about it as the collapse of the wave function, but it is picking values from moment to moment. So, you have a bunch of open nodes. In the subsequent moment, some of those nodes have been determined. Generally, in a universe that works, when those values are determined, they add information to the universe.
They add more information to the universe than they remove, or, at least, the amount of information in the universe doesn’t appreciably decline. Most of the events, most of the quantum events, are consistent with the universe, or can be consistent with the universe, as the information is transmitted across the universe. You could burn the universe down. You could have a bunch of quantum events that are sufficiently contradictory; that the universe would eventually lose information and boil down to a soup that contains almost no information.
You could see that playing out as the hardware behind the universe if that were corrupted the way a brain gets Alzheimer’s. That brain loses information; it loses the capacity to hold information. You could probably express the loss of information via a series of quantum events that are showing the universe melting, boiling, down, where the things that happen with information is lost. But Quantum Mechanics, I think, is a way to show sequences of moments, fuzzy moments because it is Quantum Mechanics, where you are plugging values into open nodes to increase information. You could model universes where what happens quantumly boils down the universe.
For instance, if a background radiation, the CMB, from the apparent beginning of the universe, and if you turned the temperature up on that, then you could boil the universe away to nothing. You’d have to do a couple other things, e.g., have a universe that looks collapse-y rather than expand-y. Anyways, the temperature goes up and the CMB ionizes everything, as it gets hotter and hotter; it cooks everything away back to something that looks closer to T=0.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you read something about Wolfram and a computational view of things. What is it?
Rick Rosner: Wolfram is like the Terrence Malick or the Quentin Tarantino of math. He believes in cellular automata as a way to understand the world. For people who are not familiar with that, they were big in the 80s, where you set up some simple rules in the form everyone has seen them at all. You set up a 2-dimensional grid, like on graph paper. You colour in a couple of squares. You see what happens when you set up rules for what squares become coloured next. If you start with 3-coloured squares and each square touched by 2 coloured squares becomes coloured itself, then a pattern begins forming. There is an infinite number of rules to set up. Wolfram played with this endlessly.
He found certain rules produce very complicated patterns, changing patterns, patterns that move, patterns that shoot off little space ship looking things. All this was with the idea in mind that the universe is probably predicated on some simple rules. If you can find those rules, then you can find out how the universe works. It is like a modern version of a Unified Field Theory. You try to find the simple things behind the universe that generate the complexity that we see in the universe. So, he brought out a book. Anyway, he impresses a bunch of smart people as a very smart guy. He has a super fancy App called Mathematica allowing you to do complicated math with simple tools.
Most recently, he has announced a crowdsourced physics project to come up with the rules that make the universe. He says since everyone is home with the coronavirus; everyone who is able to can work on this. The rule tools that he seems to have generated are based on networks of relationships among elements. These networks or relationships are depicted via things that look like Feynman diagrams You’ve got points. They’re connected by arrows. Each of these diagrams is a point in the development of a universe over time. So, it goes from simple diagrams to more complicated networks of points and arrows, which are determined by the rules for relationships among the elements.
He says that he and his team have produced a lot of physics type behaviour. They have seen in the universes as they unfold gravitation and electromagnetism and, possibly, 3-dimensional space. The problem they are having is they don’t know what networks of relationships generate what would eventually become a universe that looks like ours. All this, to me, and you’ve looked at it, and so to you; it looks promising.
Jacobsen: Yes, it keeps to low dimensionality in each format as if they are trying to grasp to higher dimensionality. Wolfram mentions this in the paper. It has some very appealing elements at grasping what the real world is like.
Rosner: What you were mentioning, what these universes generate, some of them, they want to exist in more than 2 dimensions, but don’t go crazy and to dimensions more than 3. Some of these universes seem to like 3-dimensionality. It seems like something is here. You get simple relationships, which become complicated and seem physics-like. I think that harkens back to IC. In that, we have kind of anything goes as long as it’s self-consistent as a stab at systems. We know counting numbers and more complicated math pop up in a lot of contexts because numbers are self-consistent in a lot of really simple and direct ways.
Yes, you have Godel’s theorems that say mathematics can’t be proven perfectly consistent, but simple mathematics; a bunch of it can be proven to be consistent. It is only when you get to more complicated implications that math becomes complicated enough that you run the risks of inconsistencies. Although, no critical inconsistencies have been discovered. Is that pretty much Godel?
Jacobsen: Yes and no, it comes down to having a consistent system within itself while incomplete.
Rosner: The system can’t prove itself consistent.
Jacobsen: Yes, if consistent, then incomplete. If complete, then inconsistent.
Rosner: But for kitchen math or grocery store math, addition and multiplication, all of that stuff you can prove a lot of consistencies.
Jacobsen: The universe can deal with contradictions. It probably needs more consistencies than inconsistencies to function.
Rosner: There’s some rule that we’ve been poking towards, which is the principle of distant inconsistency. It is inconsistencies don’t necessarily matter as long as they are far enough away from the nuts and bolts of the universe, day to day workings of the universe.
Jacobsen: If something works in and of itself, and if another thing doesn’t, then let’s hope the latter is far away.
Rosner: Sure, for the turtles all the way down thing, it is hard to account for existence without some infinite number of frames. You go back to this apocryphal story, maybe, from thousands of years ago in which someone invents a theory of the universe with the universe sitting on the back of a turtle. Then someone asks, “What’s that turtle on?” They respond, “Another turtle.” The questioner asks, “What about that turtle?” The person exasperated says, “It is turtles all the way down.”
We postulate the universe is made out of information and the hardware that supports this information is probably in an armature universe, another universe, that supports the universe that we perceive. It prompts the question, “What supports that universe?” It leads to an infinity of armatures that contains each universe. The answer might be the contradictory nature of what you have in an infinity of turtles might be so far away – an infinity away, in fact – that it doesn’t affect the self-consistent nature of the universe in which we exist. The flies in the ointment are so freaking distant that the universe can operate in a largely self-consistent way without some potential contradiction scuttling the universe, as long as the universe has a finite duration and a finite number of elements.
Similarly, when you look at the Wolfram thing, he is looking for and his people are looking for a specific set of rules, where it might be that it is a “catch as catch can” universe. Rules that don’t lead to catastrophic inconsistencies can generate a universe. It’s likely that the set of all sets of non-catastrophic rules may converge around a familiar kind of physics. I remember 30 years ago trying to track down a paper by Hawking that says that there is a parallel between Knot Theory and cosmology, where you could build a universe from sliding knots in from the edge of the universe.
Where the knots reflect relationships amongst the elements of the universe, the universe becomes has so many knots from being thrown knots for billions of years which creates this self-consistent structure. It might be that Wolfram’s approach fits into the same bucket. As long as you are building from relationships among elements and slide in more and more relationships from the edge as your universe develops, you will end up with something like a universe as long as your elements are in the aggregate squeeze contradictions to the edges or prevent contradictions from being entirely corrosive.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What if math isn’t the way to understand the universe but spatial relationships are the way? Is there interchangeability here if at all?
Rick Rosner: I’ll tell you what I tell Carole when Carole wants to set up a separate savings account to make sure that we have money for something. It annoys me. I say, “It is all the same money.” No matter the account, we will not have more money if we put the money into another account. In this case, it is all the same. Math and spatial relations, and space, come from some optimization of relation of laying out relationships. The universe is a history of things being linked with each other. It is not just a history. It is a geography of things being linked to each other, relationships. Things like gravitation are indicative of this optimization process. Where there is some kind of rule in play, where you’re trying to minimize, if two things are connected, you want to minimize the total collection lengths. If things are connected to each other, then they should be spatially close to one another. There is a temporal aspect. In reality, we experience what we experience. The universe acts the way it acts. In a way, what we experience is a processing of a library of connections among the elements of the universe, the change over time optimized, at least as we experience it, to minimize unnecessary connection lengths.
Things that are related to each other are physically close to each other. You want to minimize the number of really long connections. This probably ties back into quantum physics because a long connection is just a connection or a relationship established at some point in time among two things moving relative to each other and has been uninterrupted for a really long time. For instance, something happens leading to a photon being emitted. The photon gets loose from the solar system. Once it is loose from the solar system, it is likely to go on and on and on for tens of billions of lightyears. Because it is light, that means tens of billions of years. That is a long-distance relationship between the photon and the thing that emitted it. You only have a long, long relationship because nothing detected the photon yet, not for 20 billion years. But the majority of photons are emitted in stars. They don’t even travel like a millionth of a millimetre before being detected or intercepted by matter. So, the vast majority of photons do not last long at all. They are indicators of really short relationships, which is at it should be. You want the universe arranged, so you’re not wasting your cosmic thread laying out all the super long-distance relationships. You want everything to be as short as possible.
It is conservation something. The universe is full of conservation principles. There are a least action principle and the least time principle for the transmission of light, which results in diffraction. When light goes from travelling through air or nothing into travelling through water, you’ve got a flashlight in the air. You shine it on a detector that’s underwater; the light beam travels through empty space, vacuum or air, until it hits the water and then the angle changes. It bends downward. If you do the mathematics, the bent path that light took or takes is the minimum time path because light moves more slowly in water. So, by travelling a little farther in air, so that it can travel less far in water than if it went in a straight line; light arrives quicker than it would – had it travelled in a straight line. It always takes the minimum time to get from emitter to detector. That’s one of the minimization principles of the universe. I would guess that the universe is kind of like an index, a library, of all the connections that have happened over its entire history. The library wants to help itself out by minimizing the duration and length of as many connections as possible.
From that, from this messing with connections, and also reinforcing connections, connections reinforce each other; the universe is defined by its history of connections. From this, it is all the same stuff. Space and math, and time, are all a result of this library-ing, this grouping of connections. To say more would mean that I am talking out of my butt, then it wouldn’t be productive.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Bill Sidis, William James Sidis, what are some preliminary thoughts to set forth this discussion?
Rick Rosner: If you look at the history of the people who are famous for having a high IQ, Sidis is considered to have had the highest IQ of anybody ever between 250 and 300. He is one of those guys like John Stuart Mill. His dad noticed the intellectual talent and really pushed him. He pushed him, went along with it. This was like 100 years ago, way before tiger parents pushing the kid to enter college at age 15 or 16 or something. He entered Harvard super young. He was teaching at Harvard at age 17. He may or may not have had a nervous breakdown. He ended up working at the post office. He died at age 46 of a brain hemorrhage, as you just told me. He is widely regarded, to the extent that he is regarded at all, as being a cautionary tale for how superintelligence doesn’t necessarily get you anything because he worked at the post office and had a hobby of collecting bus transfers. If you need to take more than one bus to get where you needed to go, then the bus would give you a slip of paper functioning as a ticket for the next bus. He collected those. He has been presented as a tragic, really smart loser.
This isn’t fair at all. If he had not had the brain hemorrhage, then he might be seen as really successful, because, as he was working at the post office, he was writing a multi-volume… what was it? You know it better than I do.
Jacobsen: Yes, a multi-volume or comprehensive statement of the 100,000-year history of the settlement of the Americas.
Rosner: Of America?
Jacobsen: Of the Americas.
Rosner: Did it ever get published? I assume it did at some point. He was working on this huge fucking work. You can’t imagine how shitty life in America was in the 1930s, whenever he worked in the post office. Unemployment got as high as 25%. Here’s a guy who would probably not have functioned well as a claims adjuster in an insurance office, or some other office job. He was probably pretty eccentric. He taught at Harvard for a while.
Jacobsen: He was a kid, adolescent, teaching at Harvard.
Rosner: Yes, he probably got cantankerous and grew up. The post office job was pleasant in its repetition and left his mind free to work on this huge deal. Plus, jobs may not have been easy to come by.
Jacobsen: A treatise called The Animate and the Inanimate, which dealt with a reverse universe for reverse cosmology. Buckminster Fuller stated that he made a logical proposition of black holes before black holes were a thing.
Rosner: He liked thinking for thinking’s sake. He probably liked the pleasure of his own company. You said he was an atheist. He wasn’t an anarchist. He was certainly hyper-liberal.
Jacobsen: He claimed atheist identification, but belief in something other than the human. So, he didn’t believe [Laughing] ‘the big dad in the sky of the Christians.’ Something like this. He, certainly, was critical.
Rosner: He is a smart guy who liked following his own paths of thought and knowledge who had the bad luck to die really young, and who has been packaged ever since as a schadenfreude example of how you don’t want to be really smart because then you’ll end up working at the post office and having a really odd hobby. I have odd hobbies, which give me pleasure. When I first got to L.A. to know what Southern California is like, I drove around and got a library card from every local library system. I got 44 library cards because I visited all these little communities. That’s ridiculous. Also, I have a collection of fake IDs from people while working at bars catching people trying to sneak in. My wife likes micromosaics, really tiny pieces of jewellery made out of slivers of glass on a millimetre scale. I will buy broken ones. I will rehabilitate them. I like doing that. It doesn’t mean that might be a little eccentric. It doesn’t mean my life is a failure; you could argue on other things, as a failure to fully live up to my potential. Nobody is obligated to live up to their full potential. I try from time to time, but you don’t have to be a supergenius to not live up to your full potential.
Jacobsen: Who else is like Sidis and John Stuart Mill?
Rosner: Some parents who noticed the talent and worked them hard at a young age. It happens a lot in sports. Tiger Woods, his dad spotted talent. Tiger Woods was showing off golf skills on the Merv Griffin/Mike Douglas show at age 3. Wayne Gretzky’s talent was seen by his dad. His dad built him a hockey rink in the backyard. Gretzky was building his Gladwell 10,000 hours of practice starting at age 3. Venus and Serena Williams’s dad saw their talent and got them going really early. Then there are the charlatans, like a woman 20 years ago who was from Colorado, who got the answers to IQ tests and drilled her 4-year-old kid, gave him all the answers to the IQ tests. When he was tested, he had an IQ of 400. Eventually, she got caught.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What have been the dangerous jobs?
Rick Rosner: Nothing has been that dangerous. When bouncing bars, every once in a while, they would punch me. Drunk people don’t hit very hard. At one bar, the Oar House, it was on the border of Venice and Santa Monica with gang people who you would see every once in a while. Somebody, a bicyclist, pissed off a gang guy. He was shot at. I saw the bullet ricochet off the pavement.
I guess, that’s slightly dangerous. Another at the same bar when I was not there was standing out front. A car pulled out into the intersection without knowing a truck full of gang guys was coming out at 80 miles an hour. She underestimated the speed of this oncoming vehicle, because they went much slower. There was a collision. The truck rotated in the air, there was a guy, or two, in the pickup truck, which, as it rotated, the bottom of the bed became parallel to a light pole. It covers one of the guys in the pickup truck in half.
The bottom of the guy hit the bouncer, who would be where I would have stood if I was there, in the arm and broke his arm.
Jacobsen: That’s insane [Laughing].
Rosner: [Laughing] Yeah. The same bar, I got dragged out by my hair. You don’t want long hair as a bouncer. The guy had whipped a glass beer mug across the bar and cut somebody’s head open. Two bars were throwing him out. I came over. He grabbed my hair. I dropped to the ground. The bar bouncers were smashing this guy’s head on whatever they could on the way out. I got my head smashed minorly as he wouldn’t let go. I got bitten a couple of times working at a bar. I got bit a couple of years ago, who I was paid to harass by giving him a strip tease.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the odd jobs?
Rick Rosner: The oddest job I ever got was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I worked for a stripping telegram company. That’s not that odd. What was odd, my boss would call me with other jobs. He called me one time. I had to show up at somebody’s house and dump a bucket of water on aa guy because he and his wife were having an escalating water fight. I show up at the house. I am not that physically adept. I throw the bucket of water at the guy. I miss him with most of the water and clip him in the head a bit with the bucket.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Although, it was a plastic bucket. I doubt these people stayed together much longer. Because when you’re hiring people to assault your husband, even if it is all in good fun, and if you’re living in Albuquerque, everybody gets divorced anyway. It was an odd job. Also, in Albuqurque, I worked at the Fat Chance Bar & Grill as a bouncer. One of my duties at the end of the night is people would throw their pennies at the end of the night into the urinal. My job was to fish the pennies out of the urinal. I would fish them out. I was broke. I would use them to help pay for cans of chunky clam chowder, which I would mix with a can of tuna. I was lifting weights. I liked the calories. I liked the protein. I used to eat cans of tuna, just dry out of the can, which is miserable. Also stupid, it is hard on the kidneys to eat that much protein. Putting the tuna in the chowder made it palatable.
I’ve had jobs where I model for somebody. This hasn’t happened in more than 30 years now. The guy, it is always a guy, would ask if I would get a boner. And… I said, “Yeah.” He wouldn’t touch the boner. But he would look at the boner. Getting a boner [Laughing] is an odd job.
Jacobsen: You’ve been naked a lot in T.V. and a movie.
Rosner: Oh, yeah! Being naked is not that common of a job, I have been naked, maybe, 1,500 times, roughly, in public, for money, generally. One time, I wanted to get naked to be an a-hole, at a party. I would not get naked for free because that is perverted; they would pay whatever pocket change, like 73 cents or something. I went undercover as a high school student a few times. But that was self-assigned. Nobody gave me that job.
Jacobsen: “Hello, fellow kids!”
Rosner: Do you know what movie that is from?
Jacobsen: The Simpsons?
Rosner: That is one of the best memes. I saw this with Steve Buscemi with a backwards hat and a skateboard saying, “Hello, fellow kids!”
Jacobsen: Oh wait, you’re right. It is 30 Rock.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, when you have a 2-dimensional surface, you’re dealing with an x and a y-axis as the dimensionality, so squares and circles, etc. You can calculate the area in the 2-dimensional surface. If you expand this with z-axis, you have volumes with spheres, cubes, etc. So, when someone wants to block off something in some abstract 3-dimensional space, they will calculate the volume of the 3-dimensional space. If they want to block off a 2-dimensional space, they will block off an area. It can be part of the overall geometry if in 4-dimensional geometry. What is the proper terminology when blocking off a spatiotemporal volume?
Rick Rosner: It doesn’t come up much. It would be a worldline. A worldline is the history of an object’s position in space over time. So, I assume something like a world-volume. You trace the history of a region of space over time. In geometric terms, that is a hypercube or a tesseract or a hyperrectangular prism depending on the dimensionality. Not exactly, because the time dimension, the units or the extent of the 3 spatial dimensions, or the scale of the spatial dimensions, has to be the same. An inch in each direction is still an inch or the same. If you have the time axis with whatever scale preferred, you take a cube. You extend the cube along a unit line in a 4th dimension. It gives you a hypercube. But the time dimension doesn’t have to be; it can be whatever scale you want, so you may not end up with a hypercube, but a hyperrectangular prism. A prism being a bunch of hypercubes stacked up if you’ve stretched the time scale sufficiently. It is a stack of hypercubes or some hypercube times some x, which is a product of what scale you’ve chosen for the time dimension. There’s nothing profound about that.
Jacobsen: From my view, human beings are natural objects. We’re just part of the natural world, which we describe with math. Can human beings, in some future time advancement of science, be described by a worldline in more precise terms?
Rosner: There’s Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which is a cubistic rendering of a woman every step that she is coming down. So, you’ve traced her worldline during the time that she was coming down the stairs. You see all these effects in videos with people tripping. They leave a trace or in sports, sometimes. There are effects. People trip to the basket, as seen in a series of stills. So, you can trace somebody’s worldline. There is a physicist whose autobiography was called “My World Line.”
Jacobsen: What does this mean in terms of the math? Or is this preliminary in the research?
Rosner: It is just a framework. There is a profound idea of Hawking’s. That the dimensions of time and space interchange at T=0. So, the 4 dimensions form the base, not that a hypersphere has a base (every point is a base); they form the bottom of a bowl. I forget exactly how it works. But there is no time before that. Your time comes from no matter where you go; you’re moving forward in time from the bottom of the bowl. It is like the South Pole. The only direction that you can move is North. People do mess with how the dimensions relate to each other. There’s Special Relativity, which has an equation of possible simultaneity, which involves a Pythagorean formula for all the square roots of the spatial dimensions. Each squared versus the time dimension squared to decide whether two events are within each other’s light cone or something.
Jacobsen: For those who don’t know when reading this series, if we assume a range of physics knowledge, what is possible simultaneity?
Rosner: Under Special Relativity, there is no simultaneity because what you see happening of two events separated by space; the spacing in time of when they happen depends on where you’re observing those events from. Although, there’s not much give or leeway if the two events are only separated by like half of an inch. If two events are synchronized, so that somebody standing a quarter of an inch away from each point sees them happening at the same time, then the greatest amount of time difference in the signals arriving at you as a an observer and someplace else is half of an inch divided by the speed of light, which is like a billionth of a second. It is the greatest separation in time between the two events, the two flashes. But there’s a fairly easy geometry of that.
Jacobsen: Now, there was another term used following on the same point of clarification. For those who don’t know, what would be a light cone in this context?
Rosner: Imagine a 2-dimensional sheet of paper, which is your universe with a third dimension perpendicular to the axis, which shows the progress through time of your universe; so, the light cone is having a flash of light emitted at T=0. That becomes a circular wave front on the piece of paper, which gets bigger and bigger the more time passes. If you are ten miles away from the flash, you will certainly know of the flash within a second because the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. So, the radius of places that can know about the flash that will see the flash is anything not blocked within 300,000 km. within the first second. So, if you are ten miles away from where the flash happened, the light cone – this expanding circle that is getting wider and wider, thus making a cone – advances along the vertical axis will intersect you within 1/18,600th of a second because you are ten miles away. The speed of light of 186,000m/s. That’s what a light cone is. You can do interesting things with a light cone in a gravitational field moving close to the speed of light and tilt the thing over. In the case of Special Relativity, it is semi-basic trigonometry. In General Relativity, it is more complicated, but still geometry.
Jacobsen: What extends an information framework into this? Why? What justifies consideration of an information-based cosmology into this framework? These types of geometry considerations.
Rosner: If you go back to Quantum Mechanics being about the ways the universe can define itself through the interactions of its particles and its space, then shared information is the basis for the existence of the universe and its appearance. Essentially, the universe is always being constituted by the interactions among its constituent parts and the history of those interactions.
Jacobsen: We’re dealing with the large-scale too. How are you justifying the large-scale geometric concerns that are going to be around worldlines, light cones, and different scales of objects still macro like human beings and orbiting bodies into the framework?
Rosner: These are the tools you need to use, or the tools the universe paints itself with. If you are looking for deeper stuff, then you have to look at why the universe is locally, spatially 3-dimensional. I believe that has to do with degrees of freedom of information. That each part of the universe is defined versus other parts of the universe by its informational history versus the informational history of other parts of the universe. So, parts of the universe, the less information or the less history, the fewer interactions, over time that two parts of the universe have had with each other. The more that they are going to be farther apart, the farther apart they are going to be. The universe is arranged spatially with regard to commonality of information. Stuff that has a lot in common with you is close to you. Parts of the universe that don’t have much in common with you are far away. The amount of variation, every part of the universe that only has 90% of the information in common with you. It should, on average, be a certain distance from you. Ditto for parts of the universe that only have 80% of interaction in common with you. That missing information allows for variation. Let’s say, you have a set of 10 marbles. There’s only one set of ten marbles. It is the set of all of them. However, if there were ten sets of nine marbles, one for each marble that can be left out. There are 45 possible sets of 8 marbles, of 2 marbles being left out, because there are 45. 10*9/2 combinations of two marbles that can be left out.
So, if you’re sitting at the point in the universe that is all ten marbles, and the points of the universe that are each a set of nine marbles, it is going to be some distance from you, and then double the distance for double the amount of missing information. Then your universe at radius 1 has ten points. At radius 2, it has 45 points. At radius 3, it has 120 points. 10*9*8/6, which is 120 points. Because there are 120 possible sets of 7 marbles because there are 120 possible sets of 3 marbles that have been left out. At radius 0, you are right there. At radius 1, your universe has 10 points. At radius 2, it has 45 points. At radius 3, it has 120 points. So, it is growing weirdly. I believe that at small distances; the missing information that allows for the variation in the size of the universe that’s missing a tidbit of information versus you, which means that it is all close to you. The way that that expands is by the square of the distance. So, you’ve got a set of spheres defining each distance from you, which necessitates a 3-dimensional or a locally 3-dimensional universe.
Jacobsen: I want to make a customary set of caveat questions because I know in the United States and in Canada a little bit less. There is a wide range of what is termed woo. How is this disconnected from any kind of magical, mystical, supernatural claims?
Rosner: The aim of science is to explain things without resorting to supernatural handwaving. So, basically, the aim of physics, at least, is to get everything down to things are the way they are because that’s the way they have to be, according to some inarguable principles. There’s always going to be room for handwaving questions, “Yes, but why?” Why does something have to exist or not exist? Isn’t that the Law of the Excluded Middle? Something either is or isn’t. There is no half is, except under quantum physics; there are indeterminate states.
Jacobsen: It is the most tested and confirmed theory to date. In other words, those three laws of thought of Aristotle are fundamentally wrong in some sense.
Rosner: The deal is, you want a universe that exists in the way it does because, according to the principles of existence, it has no choice but to follow these principles. You want to start with some stuff being easy to see as being justified in itself. Although, it is not really justified in itself because for something to exist; it has to exist for a non-zero length of time. Because something that exists for zero time doesn’t exist. That seems true within itself. Although, if you poke at it for a while, there are all sorts of questions. Why does existence require duration in time? Is there something else besides time that some thing could exist in or because of? Somebody could argue about mathematical objects. They don’t exist in time. They exist in the rules of math and our minds as we imagine them. They don’t have a duration in time. When we think of a triangle, our thinking of a triangle may have duration, but the triangle exists in the pantheon of mathematical shit, which is timeless. So, you can pick apart the idea that to exist; something has to have duration because we just thought of a whole class of objects, which have some kind of existence that isn’t necessarily temporal. It is like a mental existence. We can think of it. It leads to a whole new set of questions to tamp down or get back on something that resembles firm ground. You are never on firm ground because you can always come up with important quibbles. The idea is to push the quibbles and the handwaving and the mystical “it is because it is, because God is so powerful; that he doesn’t have to a creator, because he is that powerful.” You try to push away the magic as far away as possible.
Jacobsen: The end.
Rosner: Okay.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: IC is, basically, about big structures.
Rick Rosner: The Cosmological Principle that the universe is homogeneous lover large distances in terms of how the universe formed with the galaxies roughly evenly distributed. You’re looking at, taking a step back, a billion-light year swathe of the universe. That’s a huge scale of regularity. What we like to say, recently, is the universe is less homogeneous spatially and more homogeneous temporally, the universe is older than it looks and has been around longer than the apparent age of the universe. That could, possibly, account for some other stuff like when a bunch of galaxies are orbiting each other. They do it in a single planet, like the planets are in a solar system. The deal is, if you give the planets a few hundred million years or a couple billion years after they form, they will, eventually, sort themselves out by orbiting around the central star in a common plane. Because, otherwise, they would collide with each other. It may take a billion years to work out the collisions and have the planets lined up, so things don’t collide as in planets, except asteroid. You can’t have planets hitting one another because you have planets working in a sync with the sync being the same orbital plane.
They are seeing the same things with galaxies rotating around each other. I think that would take than the age of the universe. If you give everything longer than the other apparent age of the universe, then, maybe, that accounts for that.
Jacobsen: Is the summary statement homogenous orbital planes, rotational planes?
Rosner: It takes a long time for dynamic systems like gravity-based systems of a central body or bodies being orbited by a bunch of other bodies. At the solar system level, it takes hundreds of millions of years for things to finishing crashing together and for stuff to coalesce into planets. The Earth-Moon is supposed to have formed through the collision of a couple of planets. They smashed into each other and the Earth reconstituted itself with part away becoming the Moon. Those form over hundreds of millions of years. I assume on a galactic scale this will take far longer. You will not have galaxies forming these systems. It may take a bunch of billions of years. Because you’re talking about objects moving across much larger distances.
Jacobsen: Increasingly large distances over time with the expansion rate of the universe.
Rosner: I don’t know about that. The distances galaxies are at in the current iteration of the universe.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by the “current iteration of the universe”?
Rosner: Yes, that’s an unfortunate phrasing. I tend to disbelieve the while expanding thing. Unless you are adding information to the universe. The average distance among galaxies has been more or less uniform or consistent for more than the apparent age of the universe. Distances among galaxies are not increasing much over time, necessarily, or, at least, over the time scales that we’re talking about.
Jacobsen: Does this really imply any metaphysical statements into metaphysics or simply meaning more dynamic and advanced statements about physics itself?
Rosner: A couple of things, we’ve talked about that you can hypothesize that there is no limit to the size of things that can exist. We live in a big universe. There is nothing that says that the universes that could exist are limited on size. No limit is known to the size of possible universes. That’s thing one. Thing two is, I’m not sure how much redundancy in an efficient system of existence with the system of existence being equivalent to physics. There are the normal subatomic particles, fundamental particles, that make up most of normal matter. Then there are these exotic other families of particles, where these families have the same sets of particles that the particles we’re used to have. But it is a whole other family of exotic particles. It is like the Smith family with 12 members. Then the Smootles have the same 12 members: a grandma, a parakeet, a poodle. Then the Canoodles have the same 12, but are weirder while having the same structure. All roles in the family are kind of the same. I would say that there has got to be a reason for it not being a real redundancy. It either has to be a kind of necessary bookkeeping this. The rules of existence saying that you have this kind of stuff.
Or they perform some function. That you don’t have symmetries if the symmetries are inefficient. You don’t have unnecessary extra shit in physics. So, when you look at it, it is 100% efficient, but it is reasonably close. So, the structures found at every scale all contain information that is essential for something or a couple things. The structures found at every scale are necessary and an unavoidable product of the dynamics of physics. In terms of the physical manifestation that the universe is probably made out of. Everything is unavoidable in terms of structures from small to large. On the information end of it, every structure from small to large has a role to play informational and dynamically.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There are 251 nations and territories.
Rick Rosner: You told me this yesterday. The virus has been found in more than 200 of them. The places that it has been found probably account for, at least, 97% of the population of Earth. The little dinky places where it hasn’t turned up yet, probably have small populations like territories and island nations with only 2% of the population of Earth. So, it is probably everywhere.
Jacobsen: That means no prevention, only mitigation, now.
Rosner: Although, some countries have enough of a handle on it, like South Korea and Hong Kong (people look at it as separate). They’ve bent the curve away from exponential growth. Also, China, if you believe their numbers, used dictatorial powers. Some people were basically welded into their homes. The U.S. is the most virus-ridden nation on Earth. Through bad leadership and some technical fucking up like the Covid-19 test kits with dysfunctional test kits, and so on. People couldn’t tell if someone had the virus. Through various failures, we have the most confirmed cases of any country in the world. We have the most cases probably confirmed plus unconfirmed. We are a big country. We have a lot of people. Some of the people are quarantining themselves. Others have no idea and are out there spreading it. If it gets away from India, there is some indication. Then eventually, India will be the most virus-ridden nation on Earth.
For a while, we will be the number one shittiest country at preventing new cases of it. We already have this. So many cases per day and deaths per day. I’ve been surprised at how fast the social distancing and quarantining hammer came down with the restaurants and the gyms, and everything else, shutting down. You are a schmuck if you leave a lot. I didn’t leave the house at all today. It is probably the way to go. It is mostly on people to manage themselves. It is not like it is martial law. You are told to stay inside. However, there are dozens of states who are stupid. Most states have a ton of people who are out there infecting people and have no idea about it. According to various statistical analyses, if you are not sheltering in place, the numbers increase more than they have to. The president talked about everyone leaving on Easter.
That everyone can attend church. Our president is an idiot and evil guy who is trying to preserve his image. He goes on T.V. and dumb people think that he is showing leadership. When Easter came around, we were looking at about 1,000 deaths a day. That’s only gone up. Anyhow, everywhere there will be competent and incompetent governments. We have seen that with what has happened so far. It is a rare government that is able to stop it at the testing level. They find out everybody who has it for the most part and then shut those people down to prevent it from being spread further. But those are rare countries that had a combination of competence and the political leverage, whether good citizenship and fear in South Korea or a communist dictatorship in China. They were able to stop it at the testing level.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about dreams.
Rick Rosner: Okay, if we’re going to talk about dreams, when we’re asleep, our brains are still doing a bunch of stuff. We’re only vaguely aware of it. Only if you happen to wake up in the middle of a dream and try to figure out what happened, you’ve got enough of a record to have some idea. But mostly, the sleeping life of your brain is unremembered and vague. You know from being in dreams. The information available to the dreaming brain is really patchy, really incomplete. Often, a lot of the action in dreams is being confused because the information is missing or the brain is building new imaginary structures to make sense of things. Your brain is struggling to make sense of incomplete information. If IC is correct that there is a physics to the information in personal awareness, then the physics has to fit the mechanics of dreaming, where your brain is only half on; there’s a logic to dreams. You have some information. Your brain tries to plug in the information. Dreams are a combination of partial information and the brain trying to struggle with not having all of the information.
Jacobsen: For those reading this, the main idea in IC is a technical, non-mystical consciousness. That which can be discovered by science in principle.
Rosner: There’s two ideas of IC. One is the information within an information processing entity and often a conscious information processing entity has physical principles. That information, the world in which it exists, looks like our universe. The physics of information within an awareness or a sophisticated information processor looks like the physics of the universe.
Jacobsen: Within dreams, though, it’s experienced randomly or uncoupled from sensory information.
Rosner: In dreaming, at least, your dreams are coherent enough to read as thoughts. You are conscious. In that, you can think and experience things, but the memory is crap because it is so not connected to your waking world. It’s hard – unless, you try really hard to record it in your memory upon waking what you dreamt. The information in your awareness while you’re dreaming has to, somehow, fit in with the physics of the information in your awareness when fully awake, whatever state you’re in. One way of looking at it, assuming IC is correct in some way, is the changes that dreams make in your memory don’t have to be as thoroughgoing because what happened didn’t really register. It was virtual mental events as opposed to real mental events. You can only make mental events real by making them accessible to retrieval by having them impact the structure of our information world. So, if they didn’t make changes, they didn’t happen. If your dreams don’t make any changes in the information map of your brain, then they didn’t happen to you experientially. You could argue. It’s not the best argument. Because the dreams happened, but they didn’t impact on you.
Like when you get a colonoscopy, but when you hit your 50s, you need to get a colonoscopy. They put you in Twilight Sleep. You’re awake and relaxed. You don’t remember. They tell you, “You’re not going to remember.” I’ve had 2 or 3. The last one, I remembered most of it.
Jacobsen: What was in the dream?
Rosner: It wasn’t a dream. You’re awake with a tube up your butt. You’re relaxed. I’m in my little gown. I’ve got the camera in my lower intestine. I’m looking at T.V. what my intestines look like; it’s pink, which is pretty good. I wasn’t too embarrassed. It would be embarrassing if not a clean out done beforehand with poop around.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Have you read stories of how colonoscopies can go wrong?
Rosner: Some guy got poked. You probably have to be rushed to surgery. One guy had to cut it short because they rammed the camera too fast.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Anyway, a mathematics that can embrace a conscious awareness or sophisticated information processing. The math, the physics, has to be able to handle the phenomenology, or something like that, or the physics of thinking when your brain isn’t entirely on. Then similarly, it has to be able to handle the physics of information as when you descend into dementia or go insane. There has to be a physics of the remaining information in a fucked up brain. Otherwise, the theory is likely to be bullshit. I think, you are able to have the mathematics and physics handle the information in an incompletely turned-on brain. You look at the changes made in the information world by the thinking that’s being done in the half-on brain. If it creates changes in the information world, then it is recorded and counts. Then you have to also look: if the universe is made of information, what does the universe look like when it’s made of information that’s being processed in a half-awake brain. It is going to be less of a turned-on universe. I would guess.
Jacobsen: Can I take on the opposite view? Why don’t you buy these mystical, spiritual answers of the universe with synchronicity, Jung, magical entities, extra dimensions, non-falsifiability, and so on?
Rosner: One, for the last 50 years, people didn’t use to have theories of how science is done. That’s a recent thing in the last 50, 60, 80 years. One of the principles of the theory of science. You can do science without a theory of science. Kuhn and Popper had studied science itself. One of the principles was Falsifiability. It is not science; unless, it can make claims that can be proven or disproven via experiment.
Jacobsen: Is this related to Verifiability?
Rosner: Yes, same stuff, a lot of that stuff is usually unfalsifiable. A bad theory is one without the ability to falsify it. A half-awake brain is only a thing that happens if it leaves an impression in the information world and, by extension, in the hardware. At this point, I am guessing one of the units or mechanisms or changes in the brain that reflects memories being formed is dendritic. Do you agree by the way? Dendrites forming and falling away are the recorders of memory in the brain, of learning and experience.
Jacobsen: I would take one step back. Insofar as we know, we have a neuron with three parts. It has a dendrite or dendritic connections. It has a soma or cell body. It has an axon. Those have individual parts. Axons have the myelin sheath allowing rapid transmission of signals, as in white matter. These can contain 1,000 to 10,000 connections per neuron. These are acting dynamically with each other. You’re probably talking 86,000,000,000 neurons times the 1,000 or 10,000 individual connections. Dendrites and axons, axons are the output. Dendrites are taking the input. So, they’re both acting dynamically, but the axons appear to be more active, longer while the dendrites appear fatter with little tendrils. Dendrites tend to cause problems in the older with dementia when they develop fibrillary tangles. Their branches start getting messed up.
Rosner: Dendrites are the ones that can bloom and fall away, more transient and changeable than other parts of the neuron.
Jacobsen: I don’t know. I know dendrites and axons are extraordinarily dynamic.
Rosner: Let’s say it is the growing, shrinking, and tuning of those connections that record memory and experience. It is probably not a whole mini-computer in the neuron itself.
Jacobsen: Yes. It basically has a summative action where it takes in all the outputs from external axons into its own dendrites and it, if and only if, hits a particular amount of charge; it will fire. If not, then it won’t.
Rosner: I don’t think stuff is super-duper complicated within the individual neurons.
Jacobsen: I would look at neurons, in this model, as statistical engines with binary output. So, it’s 1,000 to 10,000 inputs, and then it fires or doesn’t. It is a statistical network in the neuronal networks too. Even more so, it is interesting. The gap junctions between the axons and dendrites don’t contact. They are a train station or gaps for the neurotransmitters to be released through the axons to the dendrites as the basis for the summative action for firing or not firing to the axons to the other dendrites.
Rosner: I am saying the information is in the tuning and creating, and destroying, of those junctions, is where most of the information lies or is stored.
Jacobsen: That’s an interesting point. It is a bit like a bowl or a wheel. The functional part of the bowl important for human beings is not the bowl; it is the half-sphere that you put the soup in. It’s probably the same as the brain with its networks and gap junctions. It hosts information. It is in a reasonably rigid structure that allows changes in response to the environment and in its own internal environment with thoughts.
Rosner: You’re saying the bowl itself, whether acrylic or wood. It is the shape, as long as you have an inner surface. It doesn’t much beyond that.
Jacobsen: Yes, it is a way of saying, “Substance independence.” It is a simple way of putting it.
Rosner: It doesn’t matter what the bowl is made out of and as long as you have a concave shape that allows gravity to keep the object in place in its shape.
Jacobsen: Yes. Let’s say you have a silicon solid base and electrons, some recent research with photons, which is interesting. They are at the speed of light and processing things rigidly. It is only different from coding and how to process things. It is silica and solid. I am ignoring external things like Brownian Motion entirely. With carbon-based forms, you have neurotransmitters. Those are shotgunned across the gap junction to the dendrite. The brain is solid. Its large gross anatomy is very observable from birth until death. Its microstructure is what matters and has lots of change. There’s more flexibility there. But it’s a lot slower.
Rosner: We have so many junctions. You can probably encode a lot of information by tuning the junctions. Creating new junctions, letting bad junctions disintegrate, and adapting in a machine-learning type way, it evolves over time.
Jacobsen: In the case of the carbon model, you have brute connectedness. In the silicon model, you have brute linear or serial-parallel processing.
Rosner: If your brain is experiencing only white noise…
Jacobsen: …you’re having an epileptic seizure [Laughing]…
Rosner: … you can tune the brain with electroshocks. Let’s say, your sleeping brain having no coherent thoughts. Incoherent thoughts, non-thinking brain activity lacks the machine learning function. It shouldn’t make any changes in the connectivity to the brain. It shouldn’t leave a trace. You can make the argument without axons and dendrites and junctions. Let’s assume this is where the changes would go, it is not learning anything. So, there shouldn’t be any changes to the junctions or whatever it is encoding. In a dream, your brain is awake enough to think and draw conclusions. You’re dreaming lost in a museum, in your underpants, and trying to solve the problem of being in public in your underpants. What do you do? Your brain is trying to learn, but the stuff is bullshit. Because not much external inputted, but not entirely as it is from stuff that you’ve learned. Anyway, as your brain tries to problem-solve and analyze in the dream, it has the potential to make changes in your brain. I would guess; everything, in the IC sense, that happens in an awake brain and a dreaming brain should obviously be reflected in changes in the information world and other changes in the brain wherever information is encoded. I would guess this is associated with the junctions.
Jacobsen: In both models, an electron jumping between transistors. Same with the brain. It is the same general model.
Rosner: You can get into trouble talking about bits in the brain. I have a sense information isn’t stored bit-wise in the brain. It is not stored with each junction acting in some computer-like way, but, rather, all the junctions acting in concert are storing information in what may not be a binary on-off type way.
Jacobsen: It may be both-and. The summative stuff feeding into a neuron. That’s a lot more than binary. It is pluralistic. Its action potential is binary. It happens or doesn’t. The networks layered on top of that are statistical and multi-logical.
Rosner: Although, the firing of a neuron may not be, even though it fires or doesn’t. That firing may be more like running water through pipes or electricity along wires. It is doing work. The work it’s doing needs the electricity firing and hitting the junctions to power the tuning of the junctions, to pass information from neuron to neuron. As it does so, it signals that something is there. Well, you may be right. It’s both. It signals this neuron went off. Its relation with other neurons signals something. At the same time, the electrical energy in the brain flowing may do work. There used to be sending signals from hilltop to hilltop with guys with two flags. They would signal different letters or something with different arm configurations. It would be signals. If you had elastic bands attached to the guys’ arms to power a generator while moving their arms around, then they would be signalling with the flags and providing the energy by moving their arms; that would help some machine to record their arm positions. Not only are they sending signals, but powering the device that records the signals.
Jacobsen: This is almost like cognitive momentum. It is as if the brain offshored or biology offshored future thought potential on what is currently being thought. The momentum of that is feeding into the future. The idea of energy, electrical current, flowing from next thought to the next thought to the next thought. There should be a predictable or expected outcome into the near future of the actions of the brain of more electrical current flowing in certain patterns.
Rosner: I am thinking of something else. When we talk longer, I get wronger and wronger. There are two types of information. There’s the binary of individual neurons going off. Although, the network of neurons may not be connected; so, they’re not connected like computers.
Jacobsen: That would certainly explain the strength and weakness differences.
Rosner: Also, the flow of electricity and neurotransmitters may be information; in that, as the fluid or the electricity as fluid flows among these connections, the connections are tuned and changed. So, it’s a bunch of guys running with flags or flashlights making signals, but their stomping around changes the landscape and the landscape has its own information.
Jacobsen: Like deers marching making a long-standing path.
Rosner: Yes, like the cobblestones in Boston, London, or Paris, that are weird because they are cow paths in the past.
Jacobsen: It reminds me of escape velocity. You can get more and more energy pumping into a rocket. The rocket can finally escape into orbit or out of the orbit of the Earth. Either you’re out of orbit or in orbit.
Rosner: It is a neuron built to notice other things based on connections with other neurons. In a sleeping brain, to get really simple, you will get see many neurons going off because neurons are systematic and are built to notice patterns. If you don’t see patterns, and if no neurons firing, then no neurons firing in the normal systematic. way.
Jacobsen: We have the bottom layer of statistical summation. The statistical summation is binary and so not statistical like a light bulb getting enough juice to fire. Then the statistical networks with everything contextualized. If you’re awake, it is bound to the world and makes more sense. If you’re asleep and dreaming, the sense is uncoupled from regular awareness. Yet, you have regular connections. It explains why common structures come up, e.g., grandma, a puppy, etc. It is uncoupled, so free-play, but makes less sense because it is not contextualized.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Coronavirus, let’s talk, I hope COVID-20 or Covfefe-20 doesn’t come around.
Rick Rosner: This is already bad. The fear is that this is as bad as the Spanish Flu of 1918/1919. A vaccine may take a year or more to come to the market. The deal is, you want to keep this from exploding and infecting millions of people. You can’t stop it, because it has a long and often asymptomatic incubation period. During which, you are contagious up to two weeks. You can’t stop it. Because it will keep bubbling along undetected. Until, you have a vaccine or enough people have become infected or developed an immunity to it. So, it cannot be transmitted as easily. That’s the game. In Japan, they have already shut down all schools until April. They’re playing baseball games with nobody in the stadium. I feel like America should do this. However, we’re dumb cowboys. We will be pretty slow to do that kind of stuff. The Spanish Flu, so-called because the King of Spain got sick, not because it originated in Spain. Journalists were allowed to write a lot about the King of Spain being sick. They were not allowed to write about this potentially starting in America because we were at war.
Countries have been censoring stories. Of course, by censoring stories about how bad it was, they made it worse. The Spanish Flu killed tens of millions of people worldwide and infected hundreds of millions when we didn’t have a billion people on Earth. Carole has been stockpiling stuff. I have been washing my hands a lot. At the gym, I used to hate people who wiped down the machine after using a machine or after you used a machine. I thought the goop or wetness after using a machine as worse than the not wiping it down. Now, I am a big wiper downer. I think it is going to be bad, not as bad as 1918. Trump told him the regular flu kills 60,000 regular Americans every year. But so what, this is a whole new thing. It is an additional set of unnecessary deaths.
Jacobsen: People should know the number killed by the Spanish Flu was equivalent to the number killed in WWI.
Rosner: Yes. If it goes really crazy and infects 10% of the people on the planet, that’s 750,000,000 people. We might be closer to 8 billion now. 750,000,000 at a 2% mortality is 15,000,000 dead from this stuff. It is hard to tell with the mortality rate, though, because the baseline in time is so short. It is too new as a disease to get a good statistical handle on the mortality.
Jacobsen: Who is most likely to die?
Rosner: They say men more than women and people over 60.
Jacobsen: So, you’re okay, sort of. And I’m super okay, aside from being a guy.
Rosner: Yes. But it is hard to anticipate what will happen, like people with heart disease and diabetes, because it makes it hard to breathe. Messes with the lungs and then the immune system overreacts and does further damage to the lungs. If you have metabolic issues, heart stuff, and so on, people who are already pretty unhealthy are further at risk here. I read a long tweet thread. it was talking about how if this becomes crazy the country; this could mess with the elections. Trump could decide to postpone the elections.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you’re pretty healthy, but have some unhealthy habits.
Rick Rosner: I’m pretty healthy. I would never eat fettuccine alfredo. Unless, you put it in front of me. I would never pick it off a menu. I would never order the Pizza Hut pizza that comes with mozzarella sticks built into the crust or something like that. It is really bad for you, I think. Once in a while is okay, if I eat something rich like that, my body rejects it violently.
Jacobsen: When did you start taking all these supplements?
Rosner: Right when my step-dad was dying, I read a book by Mr. Singularity, Ray Kurzweil. I had been taking a few vitamins. Then it was building up. I would go to the vitamin store and buy whatever was expired or half-price. In 2006, I got very systematic with it.
Jacobsen: Has it helped?
Rosner: I don’t know. I still got cancer.
Jacobsen: What does that say?
Rosner: I am not sure what it says. Maybe, I should have not taken the crazy shit and stuck to the basics. Only 1/3rd of kidney tumours do they catch the murder cases. You’re a smoker. You’re an alcoholic. You’re overweight. The other 70%, they don’t know what caused it. It could be bad luck. It could have been all the crazy shit I was taking. I don’t know.
Jacobsen: What now? What are you going to do moving forward?
Rosner: I’ve been pretty lazy about putting together my vitamin kits. Every 4 months, I would put together 4 months of daily pills. Lately, I’ve been too lazy to do that shit. It takes many hours. Now, I put them on the counter and then do it day by day. I am not taking as many as I was. Eventually, I will get it together to put together some new stock of vitamins minus some that I think are useless or fucked me up, or might fuck me up in the future.
Jacobsen: What do you think are the most questionable ones?
Rosner: Methylene Blue that supposedly break down tau proteins, which cause Alzheimer’s in the brain. It is a very chemically chemical. It doesn’t look benign. It is like a violent blue. It is a super blue. It’s got methyl right in its name. Maybe, I am definitely not taking any more of that stuff.
Jacobsen: Do you think that stuff is still coming along with better longevity and so on?
Rosner: Yes, but only missing it because the storm of bullshit is overwhelming the good stuff every day, technology continues to advance. It is not like bits of technology fall off into a dark age. Technology advances, politics is hard to tell. It is always too soon to see if something is a trend. We know politics, at least with regards to the latest horrible politics. We don’t know if Trumpism is a thing that will persist for decades. We do know that the dumbification and loonification and believing-lies-ification of the Republican Party have been going on and increasing since the 1970s. Reagan was one of the first big manifestations of the new Republican Party against the government and willing to do any unethical thing to get its way. That has been going on long enough to acknowledge that it is a trend. But the most terrible manifestations, now, haven’t been going on long enough to see if evil guys like McConnell and Trump will hold onto reins of power or not. Or if we can knock them down, then we can clean things up. Republicans are demographically challenged. They re loathsome. So, people leave them. They are older. So, people age out. The country is browning, so the country becomes less and less white. People have been predicting the end of Republican dominance for decades simply based off demographics.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: People who think with either the formal arguments of religion or by revelation, or by personal experience, or by arguing by some kind of moral source, or making formal arguments, whatever it might be.
Rick Rosner: Basically, you’re talking about philosophers who philosophies about the divine.
Jacobsen: And those people are formally called theologians. So, those people, they are automatically superphysicians or metaphysicians, whatever you call them. They are thinking about things extramaterially. They are a whole other class of people. They are usually arguing from religious texts or around them to justify them. So, all the cruelty and evil in the world. Why is there this? That becomes the Problem of Evil. There’s a lot of arguments. I won’t go into them. If you look at the trajectory since the Enlightenment, since the humanist revolution, since the empirical revolution and more the information-tech revolutions, we have seen a growth in the number of religious people sheerly by the fact that people who are more religious tend to have larger families and 2/3rds of those people stay in them. That’s one thing going on there. Another thing is a decline in the number of people who study the theological world in academia and the theological world outside of it; we’ve seen a decline in religion’s formal thinking.
Rosner: Because science won.
Jacobsen: Science won, by and large. So, when you look at people who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or spiritual in some vague sense with arguments tacked on, they are in a corner. They are in philosophy schools and theological seminaries. Theological seminaries, they have been around forever; that’s where they’re going to be now. The Jesuits are struggling for numbers, for one. For two, if you’re stuck in the philosophy schools, that means most of the other schools of thought, where a very large number of people are attracted to intellectual activity, very smart people; that tend not to have ticks or bugs mentally because there is a formal channelling of them, and filtration processes. What am I saying? I would make an argument or an assertion based on observation over time, recent history, that theology is, basically, going to head into something like anthropology or archaeology as something that primitive human beings once did and then slowly declined over time as we sort of got a handle on more of how the real world works. Is that fair?
Rosner: Okay, well, thinking about stuff, we’ve talked about how science has discovered out more stuff. The less room there is for forms of mysticism and God. If we figure out how consciousness works in a material way, there is no more room for consciousness as this extramaterial fluid. That’s pretty much already gone. Most people don’t believe in or don’t – in your terms – think in terms of extramaterial fluid that influence consciousness.
Jacobsen: I would add a point there. People who have an empirical background, a scientific or naturalistic background in education, formally or informally. They will go with the preponderance of evidence pointing to the fact that organized matter functioning in a particular way that we call a living organism produces thought. It’s not some other stuff. There is no magic. It is unknown, but it is not magic.
Rosner: So, there will be fewer people doing good theological work. There is a lot of yahoo theology, like in America in particular. People do all sorts off thinking to justify religion. But when religion gets hokey, then the thinking to justify it is kind of garbage. There have been, during the Middle Ages, the best thinkers were thinking about religion because it was a legitimate form or the highest or the most well-developed form of belief.
Jacobsen: Aristotle gets full credit for that right into the neo-Scholastics, but those took a pounding over the last centuries.
Rosner: Someone trying to justify developing arguments as to why God doesn’t tolerate same-sex relationships. Those arguments are going to be crap. A related thing, the Republican Party in the U.S. has been cheapened brutally over the past 30 years. Social media, the whole internet era has, maybe, fucked up thought in general. It is not that people would sit around in the 1970s and think deeply, but, certainly, people, now, are super distracted. I don’t know if easy access to any information that you want has led to, at least, some people thinking more powerfully. I would assume that – or, I would even assume, I know – people are thinking more powerfully. But in terms of the level of thinking, I don’t know. I’ve talked myself into a rut.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Then I’ll take the bat. I would have more to say than most other days. Religion still has a utility for ordinary believers. It still has an apparent utility to some theologians, but the second category is a diminishing number. So, it becomes a more rarefied field. Of people who I trust in those areas, there is, apparently, a development of liberal theology of very abstract arguments for God. But those are so far removed from anything remotely close to what people are thinking for centuries and centuries when they interpret their holy texts and their culture around them, in terms of what their ultimate destiny is going to be in the end. In that context, the making of an argument for God is the universe or God created the universe or is some thing & he doesn’t write books. It is to basically say that if still believing in an afterlife of a heaven and hell, etc.; all of those previous generations, billions and billions of people, are going to burn in hell because of having the wrong beliefs. To take one example, that’s in Western religious examples. You don’t find that in Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. They appear to produce more peaceful societies. The reforms we see as in your own tradition with Israel Jacobson in 1810 in Germany. That’s a period of change for equality for boys and girls, for single mothers, for women, in a tradition that didn’t particularly like having equality for them. I think that is a healthy change.
Rosner: So, you can still have decent, legitimate thought among religious people. People can still think about ethics in both religious and non-religious contexts. But in thinking about religion itself, that’s just taken a bunch of hits.
Jacobsen: In and of itself, yes, it has maintained itself through a couple of things. The most religious countries tend to be poor. The most religious who are the least educated and the poorest tend to have more kids and the kids tend not to leave. It is hard to leave it later. I think Hypatia was right. It was very difficult to get out, dig yourself out of the hole if the child is taught that at a very young age. Now, they’re an adult. To question things, they have so many associations – mom and dad, culture, their sense of identity. It is part of their culture. That’s much harder than changing a premise on a formal argument and then changing your mind on that. It’s like Galileo and the hierarchs of the Catholic Church who didn’t want to look through the telescope. My own opinion, as a subjective assessment, is the changes to the liberal theology, if we are to have theology, are positive. However, the alternatives we see in ethical societies, Unitarian Universalists, Reform Judaism, Humanism. These are strongly positive, in my opinion, compared to a lot of others because they appear to provide more wellbeing and longevity, and intellectual richness, to more categories of people. Although, they are newer and haven’t had the time to proliferate as much. Some of the good core values are the ones that you find in religious traditions as well.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rosner: So, we were talking and wondering if there is an upper limit to IQ and, more importantly, if there is an upper limit to intelligence.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes. Is it a functional question?
Rosner: All of these issues come up. In the Golden Age of science fiction, in the 40s and the 50s, that’s a misnomer now. Obviously, we live in science fiction now. Obviously, this is, by a more reasonable definition, the Golden Age of science fiction.
But in the Golden Age of old school science fiction, there were stories written with people in the 50s not skeptical of IQ yet, You had novels like Brainwave, where everybody on Earth suddenly has their IQ multiplied by 5.
There is some other story, where this baby accidentally comes into contact with a ray gun from the future and has his IQ cubed. So, it was an easy shorthand for people becoming fantastically intelligent. The idea of IQ as it was used without skepticism in the 50s kind of made people think without thinking much.
That you could just turn IQ up like the volume knob in Spinal Tap. You could just keep going. If you look around online, then you could find all sorts of questionable claims being made for maximum possible intelligence.
An intelligence that would span the entire universe or seeing claims that Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived with an IQ of 300… or more.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: I would argue against unlimited intelligence. In that, the possibility of there being unlimited intelligence because everything that could be analyzed through intelligence or cognition has its own limits to complexity.
That some systems are just not that complicated themselves like arithmetic. If you had unlimited intelligence, then you could go from arithmetic to every other area of math and then build the entire edifice of math in a short amount of time if you had an IQ of 1,200 or something.
But in practical terms, you don’t go from buying three apples at the grocery store to uncovering the entire structure of mathematics or going from figuring out what some creepy guy says when he tells a woman that she has “nice gams” in 1952.
It doesn’t take that much intelligence to figure out what the meaning and then the subtext. Most things aren’t that complicated. We’re about to enter an era of big data and A.I. analytics. A.I. is going to find patterns and principles that are way beyond unaugmented humans’ abilities to principles and patterns.
In that way, we will have an explosion in intelligence. Is that without limit? Is it really meaningful, as you were asking at the beginning of the discussion, because it is contextual? We will have super powerful analytics in a world that’s propelled by those analytics.
That, itself, the analytics, will find natural complexity beyond anything that we have ever seen before. It will also be contending with its own complexity. Yet, the whole world of computation and analytics will become – not alienated – far from humanity, at least at the start, that you can’t apply human concepts to it.
But at some point, things will become so far… I’ve talked myself into a bunch of corners. The only tool that we have for assigning a number to human intelligence is IQ. It is really sucky. In the future, if you consider computers, we don’t consider computers smart. We consider them powerful.
We have all these numerical indices for comparing power and speed, and counting power and speed, of computers. In the future, IQ will go away. As we understand thought better and how it applies to computation, we will come up with a bunch of increasingly reasonable or increasingly descriptive and accurate numerical indices for the power of cognition.
IQ will be made obsolete. Seeing those future indices, future entities will score higher and higher on these indices. So, in that way, there may be no upper limit to intelligence. Although, at the very craziest levels, there will be practical, not limits but, hurdles to overcome.
We have talked about the Dyson Sphere, which is when an entity becomes so powerful and energy-hungry. It constructs a sphere around the star to capture its energy. The sphere will be a giant cognitive entity or set of entities.
It won’t be a computer because computers aren’t as powerful as cognitive entities, which will take technology and use this in more powerful ways than computers do. It is like a computer, like a giant computer, if you believe something like that will happen with something like a Dyson Sphere constructed.
A Dyson Sphere may not be the best structure to build. In that, it would be tough to manage a sphere with the radius of Earth. That a super-powerful civilization takes all the planets, not the radius of Earth, but the radius of the distance of the Earth to the Sun to the Earth. A powerful civilization takes all the planets and asteroids that it is not using and then deconstructs them and then reconstructs them into this giant sphere.
It may not be the structure that ends up being built. Some huge solar system-sized structures may be built for the future expansion of civilizations’ computational abilities or civilizations may try to move around or into the black-ish hole at the center of a galaxy.
In that, the scale of space may be smaller there. You may be able to do more calculations faster. A governor on calculations becomes the speed of light or the speed of electricity within a computer. That’s a speed limit.
Unless, you can mess with the scale of space. The technology that you will need to do something like that will effectively, at various times in our future, put limits on how much computational power you can have.
It is similar to the limits we’re running into now, as Moore’s Law comes to an end. In that, Moore’s Law is that certain forms of computational power and capacity double every 18 months to 2 years. It has been coming to an end for the past few years because the way that you can miniaturize circuits are getting down to near atomic levels. Physical impossibilities are kicking in.
You can’t just keep making stuff smaller and smaller in the same circuitry schemes. You need to invent more sophisticated strategies to increase computational power.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/15
*Sessions conducted earlier.*
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is it comparable to here?
Rick Rosner: Everyone will realize how bad this thing is. Shortly after this interview comes out, people will have a better idea of how bad it’s going to be. Unless, the world gets extremely lucky. It is going to be bad.
The Swine Flu of 2009 infected between 10% and 20% of the entire population of the world. But it wasn’t very lethal. The U.S., about 59 million people were infected and only 12,000 died, according to the CDC, but the coronavirus looks like it has a death rate of upwards of 2% around the world. The more people get infected; there’s no stopping it.
It is in 87 countries now. It is in 18 U.S. states. Nobody has a natural immunity to it. It is going to rip through the population. Unless, the entire world becomes extremely careful. I don’t know how you make the entire world extremely careful.
It could infect 2.5 billion to 5 billion people. If it infects 1 billion people with a death rate of 2.5%, that’s 25 million dead people around the world. That’s in the range of how many people died from the Spanish Flu in 1918/1919.
Jacobsen: This is where you’re thinking about WWI. This is the Spanish Flu corollary.
Rosner: It was hard to say because death was on such a wholesale, massive scale. I have seen statistics claiming Hitler was responsible for 30 million deaths. Yes, it is, anyway, in the range of the death of a world war.
It was when the world had only 2 billion people. This may kill a smaller portion of the population. But it will still kill, if the mortality statistics hold up, or has the potential to kill tens of millions of people.
Since there is no community immunity, nobody is naturally immune to it. There is nothing to stop it from going through the population. Unless, there is a vaccine. A vaccine is 6 months and probably closer to a year away.
The most we can do is try to protect ourselves and slow it down by practicing the big rules of pandemic hygiene: wash your hands, keep a social distance. I was reading somebody’s tweet chain, tweet thread, in how it had all sorts of side effects.
It may mark the end of handshakes as the standard greeting. You should not be shaking hands. If you get rid of handshakes for a year or two, what is to make them come back? We have reduced physical contact with our electronic contact with people.
It will increase telecommunication. Somebody on Twitter, as I said, noted that it may mark the end of frequent flyer programs. It may change flying, the airline industry, irrevocably. Airlines will have to be bailed out by their governments of the countries where they are headquartered.
It is just going to change daily life. It will take roughly 3 to 6 months to get undeniably bad. It may stay undeniably bad for another 8 months after that. All the schools in Japan, as we’ve talked about, are closed. Seattle closed down a bunch of its schools.
All around the world hundreds of thousands of schools may get shut down. Millions of businesses may temporarily either shut down or have most of their employees work from home. Or six months into it, people may decide that it is mostly old people dying from it.
That it is not worth it to keep civilization shut down just to save old people. So, people may decide to freakin’ re-open stuff and deal with getting sick because, for 80% of the people who get it, the symptoms are mild, like having a cold or a cough.
Jacobsen: It is probably disproportionately prime-age health men and women.
Rosner: Yes, it is. It may change. We’re at 100,000 cases and 3,400 deaths. That’s a lot of people. It is a small enough sample that things may change as the number of people infected climbs above a million and ten million.
Jacobsen: It came from a snake.
Rosner: That’s what I’ve heard.
Jacobsen: We’re back to the Garden of Eden, eh.
Rosner: I’m hoping it doesn’t get worse. What is going on in America, America has only tested about 1,400 people compared to South Korea, which is a much smaller country that’s tested about 110,000 people. People speculate that it is a combination of ineptitude on the part of our government and intentional shittiness to try to keep the numbers down, so Trump doesn’t look bad.
Because if you don’t test people, then you don’t find cases and the numbers don’t look so bad. American is currently in 9th place among nations. It will not stay in 9th place. It will be a top 5 country within the next couple of months.
Jacobsen: It is also in reverse order of its science education rankings.
Rosner: Yes, you could say that. As you know, we have a born again guy who doesn’t believe much in science or evolution. Trump went on Hannity and said a bunch of bullshit, said it is no worse than flu and acted like it’s no big deal with people going to work.
It looks like, basically, tacitly endorsing people going to work sick. He says that he has a hunch that the mortality rate is actually under 1%.
Jacobsen: “A hunch” [Laughing]. Let’s take the viewpoint of Mike Pence, he has denied the foundations of biological and medical sciences.
Rosner: He can do this when it is not in front of him. But when he is tasked with fighting something that has the potential to kill a lot of people, if 50,000,000 Americans get it, and if this has a 2% mortality rate, it could kill 1,000,000 Americans. If he is tasked with preventing the deaths of 1,000,000 Americans, then his beliefs will play much less of a role.
In Indiana, he didn’t believe in needle exchange programs. He had a moral judgment about this, I guess, and it leads to a disease outbreak.
Jacobsen: If he doesn’t believe in these foundations of science, and if he is a highly religious evangelical who believes in an intervening god, the Christian God, as selectively literally read in the Bible, then I would probably point to whoever is reading this as him seeing this as a punishment from God.
Rosner: He is a bureaucrat. I don’t think he will let his beliefs get in the way of letting people who know better than him tell him what to do. He went to 3m today. 3M makes the masks. We will need a lot of masks if this becomes an epidemic in the U.S. There’s a picture of him shaking hands with the CEO of 3M, which is retarded.
They’re shaking hands! There’s a person from the CDC making a statement from the White House or something. She says not to touch your face with your hands. As she gives the speech, she licks her hand.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Those are cosmetic things. But as we talked about, there are bigger ineptitudes. Trump fired the pandemic response team, preparation team, from the CDC, just cut them loose. All this stuff is going to make a difference in the rate at which Americans become infected.
Jacobsen: Will this idiocy and ignorance cost lives because of the way American governance works?
Rosner: Yes, it will. The game they’re playing, say this was a video game. The idea is to have the lowest body count from this thing. The deal would be to make sure that measures are in place to help and encourage people to not pass this onto other people, which means knowing who has it and everyone is really afraid of passing it on.
If not for their own selves, then for the people that they love. If you keep the transmission rate low or low-ish, or if you get through the next 8 months while they rush a vaccine into production (if only 15,000,000 Americans can be infected in the next 8u months compared to 30,000,000 or 40,000,000), then you’ve reduced the mortality rate by 50%.
That’s if you take measures that most Americans are not used to taking now.
[End of recorded material]
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rosner: Overnight, in the last 12 hours, since we last talked, the White House, Kellyanne Conway, is saying coronavirus is contained and then acted surprised when people said that it is not contained. Coronavirus is not contained. The numbers are getting worse at an accelerating pace.
It has gotten a little bit crazier. As I said last night, it is not really containable. The only thing that can save us from many millions of people getting it is if somehow rising temperatures in the Spring and Summer work against it.
Otherwise, we’re in for tens of millions of people coming down with it.
[End of recorded material]
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: For coronavirus, if you are 70+, you are the death rate. 18-to-39-year-olds sit around 0.2%.
Rick Rosner: Most of the people killed will be 70+. There’s a small chance the death rate will go down. If you look at places that have done a lot of testing, like South Korea, then they have a death rate of about 0.7% compared to the U.S. rate with only testing about 2,000 people and finding 545 cases with 22 deaths, which is a death rate of 4%. It is because we haven’t fucking tested.
For every American tested, South Korea has tested 360 people. We’re testing at a rate of less than 1/3rd of 1% of what South Korea is doing per capita. If this behaves, and there’s no sign that it won’t behave like a flu pandemic, the last flu pandemic was in 200910 with H1N1 Swine Flu.
By the end, that infected 59,000,000 Americans. Let’s say the death rate goes down to 1% when we actually test people, 1% of 59,000,000 is 590,000 people. This thing, even if it doesn’t infect that many or simply 20,000,000 people in America, is going to kill 200,000 people or more.
How long it takes to do that will determine how miserable the country is, every year, we lose 60,000 people to the flu in this country. But it doesn’t overwhelm. This stuff mostly takes people with pre-existing conditions. It doesn’t make the hospitals overflow.
If there’s a lull, or if there is a decline in deaths over the Summer months, but not a certainty that it will, then 200,000 people will make people freak out. But it wouldn’t feel like an all-out apocalypse. It would be loved in the family who would be taken by it.
It wouldn’t necessarily lead to an interruption in civilization. The stock market, the Dow Jones is supposed to open up 5% down. All the major average according to the futures will take a 5% hit, which will make it the biggest point drop in history for the Dow if it does that.
It is not just coronavirus. Saudi Arabia has decided to sell a bunch of oil for well under the going rate. I am not sure why. We can’t catch the contagion curves. Last time we talked about coronavirus, in the last few days, the number of infected per day has doubled from 2,000 new cases per day to 4,000.
If that keeps going up to 6,000 and 8,000 a day, then it will go pandemic. It is 109 countries and territories. 33 out of 50 states have confirmed cases. In the words of a CDC official who was interviewed on the radio earlier today, we’ve gone from trying to confine or contain this into mitigation.
We just try to reduce the rate at which this spreads through public awareness.
[End of recorded material]
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is new with coronavirus?
Rick Rosner: People who know what they are talking about, talk about the flattening of the disease curve. Until a vaccine comes out, it means the disease will spread. Assuming the same amount of people will get it across the next year, regardless of what you do (e.g., everyone getting it all at once or spreading out the contagion more), the reason that is preferred is to spread out the contagion because hospitals can manage this more.
If not, hospitals overflow and they can’t manage coronavirus or what other shit people go to the hospitals for. You see this in Italy. Doctors have to pick and choose who to treat. So, that’s the primary reason to practice sanitary precautions and stuff.
It is to keep the rate of people getting infected in order for hospitals to deal with it. You may not significantly reduce the overall number of people who get infected. Anyway, you understand. There’s some demographic evidence or epidemiological evidence from China.
Although, China’s numbers are always a little bit suspect. I don’t know. I haven’t heard much about China’s numbers being bad in the last few days. Anyway, China and South Korea, if you really get in there and make a concerted effort to hold down new infections, South Korea and China by testing people.
China by locking down a whole province or big area. It looks like the number of new cases for them is dropping. Korea has had four consecutive days of dropping. They’ve gone from 500 cases a day to 250 cases a day. Obviously, there’s some statistical wobble that is possible.
It is also possible different stages of contagion can take time to be detectable. But it is a reason for hope. Even if you have as many cases as China or South Korea, you can still practice whatever you need to do to knock it down and keep the new cases from exploding exponentially.
However, in the U.S., the government is not being helpful. We have only tested 5,000 people. Even though, Pence and Trump seem to be lying and saying that there are a million tests available. They said 75,000 tests sent out.
If they were, then I don’t know what happened because only 5,000 have been tested. They said 1,000,000 tests by this week and 2,000,000 by later this week. I have seen no evidence of this. If you can’t find out who has it, then you can’t fight it.
But we are a big spread out country. People with it have popped up in 36 states and the District of Columbia. I don’t know if we are practicing much of the things that South Korea and China have been doing to really hold down further infection.
I am still thinking that we are going to get exponential growth in the U.S. There are 1,000 confirmed cases now. Because we have only tested 5,000 people, it is likely that there are 8,000 or 10,000 cases out there with each of those people potentially infecting 2 to 5 or more people.
The update is some countries are doing better than others at updating, apparently. The time frame, it is still early days. We’re not sure how successful anybody was until it is 6 months or a year later.
[End of recorded material]
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does this compare to H1N1 or others?
Rick Rosner: If your model is the H1N1, that thing infected a billion people around the world plus or minus 300,000,000/400,000,000. In the U.S., they estimate that it infected 59,000,000, which is a little less than 20% of the population. Since this thing is more deadly than H1N1, there is more concern about it.
Maybe, people will work a little harder to tamp this down. So, this doesn’t infect 1,000,000 people worldwide. Maybe, it will only infect a million people worldwide. Let’s say that they get really good at detecting cases in countries that they aren’t good at it. South Korea is testing far more than in other countries.
They found a bunch of cases that were pretty asymptomatic. They found so many cases that it drove the rate down to 0.7%. Compared to others, you have to be really fucking sick to get tested, like here. Let’s say that there are 100,000,000 cases when this is over with community immunity and there is a vaccine, a year or a year and a half from now, there’s a possibility that the death rate may only be 1%. That would only be 1,500,000 people.
But that rests on really the whole planet engaging prophylactic measures, sanitary measures, until they can hold the rate down to the point of what the Swine Flu did and the death rate is a half or a third of what it looks like right now.
If those two things hold, or if we get really lucky and the warmer weather knocks the virus down, or if all that stuff happens, then you only lose 1,500,000 people, mostly old people. I saw statistics today. Again, it is early days. So, these statistics will not stay or hold, probably.
The death rate for people 80 and above is more than 100 times the death rate of people in their 20s. It is going to be mostly old people. I’ve heard the argument that these people are on their way out anyway. That is bullshit.
I have run the actuarial numbers. People in their 80s have a life expectancy of 7 years. By writing off those people by saying, “It is going to happen, get used to it.” You are costing people the last 10% of their lives because you cannot be bothered to help contain this shit.
Another reason for holding down the infection rate is just to avoid the massive societal disruption that we’re only in the beginning stages of. The stock market is down 15%. We went 11 years without a recession, which is either the longest or the second-longest in history/modern history.
So, stock values were a little bit fluffy anyhow. I don’t see how we avoid a recession now. If the virus gets out of hand and hospitals are overflowing and many more countries are locked down, then that guarantees a recession.
I don’t see how we avoid that. But it would be possible to mitigate it by everybody exercising some discipline. Unlike, our fucking president who is holding a rally in the next few days. Biden and Bernie both cancelled rallies.
That they were holding to get ready for the Ohio primary. They listened to sound medical advice and realized that we were endangering people and maybe even themselves, as they are old and in the risk group.
They cancelled the rallies. Not Trump, he is going full-out with his rallies against all medical advice. A good 30% of the country is either only a little worried or not worried at all about the virus. They either think it is mild or that it is democratic hype designed to make Trump look bad.
So, with a third of the country, if those people put their behaviour where their attitudes are and do not practice sanitary measures, then it’ll be even harder to contain it. So, it is not unreasonable to think that we will have 1,000,000 cases by late May in the U.S.
Given that we do not detect it until it is serious, if we have a million confirmed cases, then you are looking at 20,000 dead. Republican pundits, or just Republican assholes, like to say, “Flu kills 60,000 or 37,000 people per year in the U.S. So, it is just like another flu.”
That’s asshole-ish because the 20,000 could just be the first wave. Also, you’re adding another 20,000 deaths of loved ones. Rudy Giuliani tweeted something like this. And he’s an old demented asshole who may have been an asshole all along and people didn’t notice it. Because he had been governor during 9/11.
But just because the death rates from a new disease are roughly commensurate with the death rates from other things doesn’t mean that it isn’t a tragic thing that you’ve added 20,000 deaths to your year of people dying.
Jacobsen: That was depressing.
[End of recorded material]
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: I’ve been following this site. Ten days ago, it was 2,000 new cases worldwide a day. A week ago, it was 3,000 new cases. Three days ago, it was 4,000. Yesterday, it was 7,000. If you look at the curve, then it looks pretty exponential.
Although, shit can only be exponential for so long. At the beginning of something like this with a huge population to feed into it. That exponential can keep going for a while. I am guessing that we could see 2,000,000 cases worldwide by June.
That’s being a little conservative. If you wanted to go pure exponential, then you could be over 100,000,000 by June. I am thinking that some of the mitigation might be effective in some countries. In some countries, you might be able to contain it.
It is in over 100 countries and territories now. probably, 20 of those countries and territories have 1 confirmed case. If those countries have an effective government and enough infrastructure to really do testing and keep this down, some countries may be in the containment phase.
I think that there are enough shitty countries in the world that if it gets loose in a failed state. It will spread across the whole region. I hear Africa has a lot of countries with zero testings. So, we do not know what is going on there.
So, if you have enough countries where it gets out of hand, is the U.S. the third most populous nation in the world? You’ve got India. You’ve got China. Brazil is up there.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, it is the third-largest.
Rosner: I think the number of people tested has reached 8,300. we’ve confirmed 1,300 cases. There are probably, at least, 5,000 undetected cases because we have not done enough testing. So, those people or many of those people are bumbling along going about their business.
They will soon turn 5,000 undetected cases to 10,000 and beyond. The U.S. may become a huge generator of it and can not contain it.
Jacobsen: I would argue given the inability to contain this in the U.S. that eventually, speaking in the rapid and short-term here, that the U.S. will become a pandemic-disease vector.
Rosner: Yes, we are going to fuck you up because there is a pretty porous border. Unless, you tighten it up. Canada doesn’t think it has to do it yet. Mexico may do this soon. Who knows what will happen on the border there, in six months, this way to conservative of an estimate for how long things will be not normal.
A lot can happen in the U.S. with 40,000,000 people having it. We will not ever have 40,000,000 people having this at once because people will get over it. I haven’t done the math as to how many cases we will have at any time. Certainly, it will be enough to mess up you guys.
You guys will have to take it a lot more. You are taking it seriously, but not paranoid enough. You are not on defensive footing enough yet I don’t think Canada has realized the U.S. is about to be overwhelmed by it.
Italy, the hospitals have been overwhelmed. Here, we aren’t testing enough. There is a lot of room for exponential growth. What happens with exponential growth, the growth expands to exhaust the sources of growth, the uninfected people.
There is mitigation where you can try to hold it down. The ultimate limit, if you fail at that, is the number of people available to be infected. The U.S. with 300,000,000+ people, it has a lot of doubling to go now.
China seems to have a handle on it. The world population is about 7,800,000,000. I can’t imagine that there are more than 2,000,000,000 in countries and territories that will be able to hold this off. Let’s say China really does close everything down or setup testing at the border, so every single person coming in is tested in such a way that there are early tests that can help you catch it if you have it at all.
Let’s say China contains it, that’s 1,500,000,000 people contained. India won’t. U.S. won’t. Now, you’re already down to countries under 200,000,000. Maybe, if you find enough of those countries, you can get the total of those countries holding this off to a couple of billion.
This still leaves more than 5,000,000,000 people living in countries where it will probably hit the entire population. It doesn’t mean everyone will get infected. But you’ll see between 10% and 40% of countries being infected.
Conservatively, you’ll see 20% of 5,000,000,000 getting it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about a material world and information processing, or that a material world taken as an information processor can get pretty big in all sorts of models.
Rosner: The principle of there being no limit to the size of things. Physics, information theory, and quantum mechanics are built around finitude, a lack of infinities. Once you run into anything that requires an infinite amount of something, you have a problem.
There are implied infinities, like with 2. It is 2.0000… out to infinity. But 2 is an abstract concept. You encounter two of the things in the world. They’re pretty much 2. You’ve got 2 apples. You’ve pretty much got 2 apples. The infinite precision of the number 2 doesn’t enter in, in practical terms.
To have a universe with an infinite number of particles, that doesn’t work. Anything short of infinite should work. We are bound by our universe having 10^85th particles, protons and stuff. If it has 10^85th, then it is reasonable to assume, at least, for the sake of thinking about stuff that any size is possible.
Jacobsen: Can we make an argument, future A.I. walking around or floating around in virtual space will have thought that will be so complicated and precise compared to us; what they think about, it will seem like infinity to us.
Rosner: There is the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There’s the stuff that seems infinitesimally precise, like the wavelength of a baseball, the Planck wavelength of a baseball.
The deal is the Planck wavelength of something in Quantum Mechanics is inversely related to the mass of the object. So, you take something macro like a baseball. Its wavelength is super infinitesimal. You can talk about stuff so precisely that it might as well be infinitely precise.
In practical terms, any theory that has infinitudes in it is probably not right. Unless, the infinities are just these abstract things involved in the math of it. Anyways, we are forced towards the idea of any size of the universe is possible by the idea in IC that our universe is an information map of an information processing entity in yet another universe, and one that is likely way, way, bigger than ours.
Then you can kind of extrapolate from that. That universe implies a yet bigger universe. All the way out. That you probably don’t need that kind of thinking to still postulate that any sized universe is possible. Assuming that, you have to have a physics that allows for that.
That any kind of physics that says, “Once you get past a certain size of the universe, it is going to be inherently unstable and then collapse in itself to a smaller form.” Or some limit on duration. Universes can be of any size, not only in space or amount of matter but also in how old they are.
Based on Big Bang Theory or the variations on it, from what we know, I don’t think it puts limits on the sizes of universe, at least the masses of universes. When you take traditional Big Bang theory, they expand, use all their stellar fuel, succumb to entropy, and, eventually, develop into a lukewarm soup of decaying protons that is maximal entropy and has nothing going on in it.
It has nothing going on and continues for trillions of years or I don’t know what. I don’t think that’s an accurate future for the universe. But I do think that you can have an active universe. A universe that has a lot of the physics that we do with stars and galaxies of just about any size.
But the bigger the universe, under IC, the larger its apparent age. I guess in an old ass or super old ass universe with a lot of matter in it. I’d guess. Galaxies would have more time to crash into each other. There’d be many more galaxies.
Galaxies will crash into each other and form these globular structures, spherical galaxies. If you take two spherical galaxies and crash them into each other, then they combine. You get a spherical structure. I think it takes a few million years to calm down to a spiral galaxy again.
That spiral galaxies are settled galaxies. I assume in an old ass universe. You just have way bigger galaxies, way bigger blackish holes at the center, way more galaxies. I would assume galaxies would still be a unit of organization of matter.
We semi-know that there are larger organizations of matter, even in our universe, e.g., filaments, strings of galaxies, and matter, that stretch out across hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of lightyears.
I guess, in vastly bigger and older universes, galaxies are kind of self-contained. They are organized by their own gravitational fields to be limited in space. We have these larger structures that are not little blips in the overall map of the universe.
They are strung out across vast spaces. I don’t know, in a much bigger and older universe, if there would be structures that would be bigger than galaxies but would be settled down into galaxies of galaxies. That would be orbiting agglomerations of a pretty good number of galaxies.
There would be these mega-galaxies or galaxies^2. I don’t know if there would be a bunch of these spread out like a bunch of dots across the universe.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, any unified theory of consciousness will come from two ways and will be sandwiched horizontally.
Rosner: Do you mean a theory of consciousness that doesn’t suck?
Jacobsen: Yes, one that sucks less: empirical, and concrete, and naturalistic, and technical at the end of the day, but is stacked up like a deck of cards over time.
Rosner: Something that stands up to scrutiny.
Jacobsen: It would be something standing up to the stringent standards of modern psychological science.
Rosner: It is something like a theory of physics that hopes to derive all the forces as manifestations of a single set of principles.
Jacobsen: Empirical and sufficiently filled out to cover the relevant bases. I’m thinking of two paths. One, we are finding this stuff out accidentally with A.I. that works out things similar to the human brain. It does things the same or similarly to the A.I. algorithm/the human brain.
That is direct discovery through replication in a different substrate. Two, we have thousands of papers on how the brain sucks, a knowledge base. Visual hallucinations, inability to see certain things, portrayals of dots and lines that mess with our visual system, etc.
Rosner: Not that the brain sucks, it does not do everything that we would want the brain to do.
Jacobsen: I would say, “Yes, and no.” That way, but also sucks in other ways. This suckiness can give us an idea as to what theories of consciousness would produce that level and kind of suckiness. So, the details of suckiness that we have could infer the general idea of what the brain is and does rather than just a dozen or so schools of psychological thought.
Something covering the relevant fields and then making predictions based on it. The direct replication is more solid. It is harder to argue against that. But the failures, you can say, “Certain systems will produce certain types of failures.”
It will have caveats of being part of a system evolved in a substrate and the limitations themselves are reflective of evolution for something good enough. These are an extension of “good enough” into real data.
Then you stack those up horizontally, direct and inferred, towards one another. At some point, you can kind of get a pretty clear picture to say, “This is what was in the picture the whole time.” You have enough wattage in the light to give us a good enough picture of what is going on in the room, the little man in the room.
Rosner: We were talking, basically, about the sources of what the brain sucks at: the current hot theory is that the brain’s primary job is to be a good predictor, setter-upper, tries to anticipate whatever is going to happen and tries to maximize the positive outcomes and anything else is just a happy byproduct of that, including consciousness.
If having consciousness reduced an organism’s chances of survival consistently, then that organism wouldn’t have consciousness.
Jacobsen: I would add one caveat. Consciousness is new evolutionarily to levels seen now. With deep time of evolution at billions of years, then it may be a lethal mutation. If simple consciousnesses assumed earlier, then maybe not.
Rosner: If you take consciousness as rich information sharing among the brain’s processing systems, then it is hard to argue that it is mutation and isn’t part of the life of any organism with a brain beyond some minimum size.
There is that argument about sexual reproduction. It was some flukey thing that turned out to be so advantageous to the organism’s engaged in it. That it has basically taken over reproduction among all animals that are beyond just very, very simple.
With a few exceptions, the exceptions also being variations on sexual reproduction. It is hard to argue that consciousness is some kind of glitch because it is so pervasive and has been around so long; it makes so much sense that it is not a glitch.
Jacobsen: There are other ideas we’ve covered over the years. There are ideas of a magical property to consciousness. I don’t buy that. Certainly, you don’t buy that. What can we expect on such a prediction, that it is a technical property and a naturalistic thing.
That given it is technical. It can be reverse-engineered and produced in another substrate.
Rosner: What can we expect with the increasing ability to replicate conscious-like thinking?
Jacobsen: That too. But also, what can we expect as a consequence of this thinking? What things are present that we should sort of expect over time? We will have artificial consciousness to different degrees. Fine.
Rosner: You’re saying artificial consciousness. But you’re asking about how this will play out in terms of people’s lives in the future.
Jacobsen: Is it really artificial if it is doing the same stuff?
Rosner: People will always want to distinguish. In my lifetime, it has gone from impossible to make diamonds to now, probably, making diamonds in just about any size of jewelry now.
Jacobsen: Artificially?
Rosner: Yes! It is from incredible pressure. I don’t know what else. The last time I looked into it was probably a decade ago. They could make quarter carrot diamonds at the time. Now, they could probably make carrot diamonds, which can be pretty good quality.
The natural diamond industry now, there is a De Beers three blocks down the road with an ad. A wife being like a shitty wife, e.g., burning food and not giving a shit, because the husband gave her a lab-grown diamond. The natural diamond industry is saying only to buy a natural diamond, which is ridiculous.
For a long time, they have been able to grow really nice, chemically indistinguishable rubies, emeralds, sapphires. There’s always an emphasis on being able to tell what is a synthetic. The natural stuff is much pricier. Even though, visually, you put them in a ring.
They are the same. They look equally beautiful. I am sure there will be, for all sorts of reason – even when synthetic consciousness in terms of performance is indistinguishable from natural consciousness, a push from all sorts of various places to consider artificial thinking in consciousness inferior, at the very least, to natural consciousness.
When it comes to diamonds, people don’t have religious objections to synthetic diamonds. But when it comes to synthetic consciousness, we’ve talked about abortion. Abortion is much less complicated to think about than artificial consciousness.
You can frame the issues around abortion very clearly. That won’t be so for a long time with consciousness. A lot of the people around issues like abortion and climate change. There are people who try to obfuscate.
People hired by oil companies have spent decades trying to confuse the issue. Anyway, for diamonds, there is a ceiling. Artificial diamond products could be better if they made artificial stuff like rope, like an elevator to space.
An industrial-grade diamond has so specks of non-diamond carbon in it. That you can’t use it for jewelry. [End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/02/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: On the one hand, there is the notion of eggs being expensive and sperm being cheap…
Rosner: …which is the idea of men being more expendable than women. You have lower impulse control associated with guys. My girlfriend in college was always going through some files at the college library.
The idea was that the idea of men in this country is true around the world or consistent. Wherever there are guys, there is less impulse control. The action orientation is connected to masculinity in our culture. Guys are expected to do something or want to do something, even if it is wrong.
Guys might crack because of expectations that guys should be successful, creating more pressure on guys. A lot of this stuff is subject to change, as society has been examining ideas of masculinity and femininity.
You could argue guys might be more comfortable as slackers or society may be comfortable with it than in the 1950s. As a general idea, the expectations and the stereotypes about guys and masculinity put pressure on guys, which generates a range of guy behaviours both good and bad.
Versus stereotypical female behaviours that are laying back and having things happen like Emily Dickinson with being okay with having a quiet life, it is like you said, ‘A guy can knock up a gazillion women. A woman is more precious biologically because a woman has the babymaking technology. It is a huge biological commitment.’
A guy just has to jizz. He can make several women pregnant with one batch. But there isn’t someone walking around with a test tube and a turkey baster. Is there another reason for guys losing their shit more than women if that is indeed so?
Jacobsen: Probably two or three things, one, more testosterone than estrogen. Two, the genetics that is preprogramming a set of an interrelated network of reactions along with the testosterone. It has to do with genetics encoding certain types of reactions in proportion to the amount of testosterone and estrogen ratio that men are more likely to have, which, in itself, is being preprogrammed in terms of how much is being produced.
Rosner: There’s also the idea that women have a larger corpus callosum, which is a fibre bundle that connects the two hemispheres. One can make an argument from this that women think more holistically – though, it is the wrong word – or globally, and may be less likely to go off half-cocked or less likely to take action without considering the consequences.
But that sounds like something I learned in a class in the 80s; that’s probably been or potentially been debunked. I do know the corpus callosum is thicker. I don’t know if it has consequences for masculinity and femininity or not.
I don’t know if we have covered all the reasons for men losing their shit more than women.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/02/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is a thought?
Rosner: I think the most straightforward definition or idea of a thought is that when you are thinking. You are aware of a bunch of things simultaneously. Some of these things count as what we understand as thoughts. A thought is just your set of things in mind in a moment.
When my wife takes my mother-in-law our for a meal, my mother-in-law has a habit, that my wife hates, of pointing out fat people. She points out people, “Boy, those people are really heavy.” My wife says, “Yes, you don’t need to point it out. Just shut up about that.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: But seeing somebody heavy and realizing that they are heavy counts as a thought, it is realizing something about something in your current awareness. It doesn’t have to be in your current awareness. Somebody could write something down.
A thought can be considered in the form of an equation in linking two things or forming two things, or putting them in a category. You’re generally linking two or more things. Even that is subject to not being exactly accurate, you can have a thought about one thing, which isn’t really about one thing.
You can see your friend walking down the street. You can think, “There’s my friend.” You are linking, “My friend,” “here”, “right now.”
Jacobsen: You are walking around. You see someone heavy. You are walking around. You see someone’s face. It identifies in another part of your brain. It is your friend’s face, not just a face. Then the fireworks set off. It is a distributed-sequential thing.
Rosner: As a process thing, sensory input, in your brain, can include external sense, input from different parts of your brain, putting words to things. You see your friend. You think, “Jeff!” You just linked. The link as formed in your brain as this person you’re seeing, and who this person is, and their name. You can recognize without the name.
Basically, thoughts are forming associations between different aspects or things in your current mental arena. I don’t know if that is going to be the most durable idea of what a thought is. I think linkages might be kind of essential to the idea of thoughts.
It is a thought to see your wife. She walks into the room. Your wife is in the room. It is seeing and recognizing her. She is on the couch. She is reading. Those are all thoughts. They are all kind of one thought.
They are all observing and lining using stored knowledge. You recognize that it is your wife. You recognize that she is reading. Another way of looking at thoughts is in conjunction with the current hot theory that brains – their job, maybe their only job according to some people – are meant to prepare you for what comes next moment-to-moment.
They to set you up as best as possible for each subsequent moment, which relies on recognizing what is going on around you, as each moment unfolds. You can be completely unconscious and then by reflex be told what to do by your brain.
There is some recognition going on, even without conscious recognition. Is all this close to a thought?
Jacobsen: I’m not buying it, yet.
Rosner: Okay, what needs to be further refined? Let’s look at it this way without bringing consciousness into it at all. Some aspects of the environment, both external and internal, trigger things, realizing what they are, naming them, acting on them, but sensory input triggers an action, whether physical action or it brings up other things into awareness.
That triggering and that forming of association counts as thinking. Then you can draw the line, like walking into a read and then watching your wife reading. Is it one or three thoughts? It seems like a bullshitty distinction.
You are consciously recognizing your wife and the stuff associated with her. It doesn’t matter whether you call it one thought or several linked thoughts, or whatever. But thinking, in general, is forming associations, inputs triggering outputs within your brain.
What we think of as thoughts are things that we don’t necessarily express in words when we are thinking them, but that can be expressed in words. You could say something. Say you see your wife walking through the room for a half of a second, you see her reading on the couch reading for half of a second. You can think, “My wife is reading.”
Your awareness of that doesn’t have to trigger the words in your head. It can still be a thought. But if you are asked to notice what you are thinking, you can describe what you are thinking via short sentences.
“I see my wife,” “she is reading,” and “she is on the couch.” If those are things that happened in your consciousness, then they are thoughts, which are part of one thought. I don’t know if drawing distinctions is super helpful because there’s a super larger thought that you are in your house. It is a certain time of day.
Of course, your wife is around. She is at home at this time of the day. It is part of this more global awareness if you wanted to completely describe everything that you were aware of, or thinking. It may 2,000 sentences to completely catalogue one moment of awareness.
But thoughts are just generally like what is in your conscious arena at any given moment. We would have to talk about any unconscious things that you are reacting unconsciously to. Maybe, there is some rough cutoff.
You put your hand on a hot stove. You pull your hand back, even before you are aware of putting your hand on a hot stove. Maybe, the awareness from the nerves of your hand to the nerves of your spine will be a thought, “Ow, that’s freakin’ hot.”
But these may or may not count as thoughts.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: According to Encylopedia Britannica, an idea is an active, determining principle of a thing. Another definition including a formulated thought, which is close to thinking. Whatever is known to supposed about something, in terms of prior knowledge and predictive-hypothetical knowledge.
Rosner: That’s still what we were talking about [Ed. off-tape.]. It is the linking of one thing with another thing. “That person has pointy ears,” “This coffee tastes like vinegar,” my wife cleaned out the coffee machine with vinegar and didn’t tell me.
I kept making all this terrible coffee. I didn’t know why. Coffee is this thing. Coffee with vinegar is another thing. It is a realization. I would say that linking is an unavoidable part of an idea or a thought. Maybe, that’s like seeing a Jeff on the street. There’s Jeff.
It is not much of a linking, but it is still a link. Jeff in my awareness right now. You are linking categories and categorizations and labelling items. Everything is hooking things up to other stuff. That’s Jeff. That’s Jeff right now.
That’s Jeff right here. It is just linking stuff. We have talked about the brain being an association engine.
Jacobsen: Yes, in an idea extended to the universe being an associative engine.
Rosner: Maybe, it is sub-associations. The things your brain needs to do for you to be prepared. Still, there’s some implicit linking there, where “car coming at me, right now, here.” There’s still some contextualizing and some linking.
You got the realization: car. Then you have associated, linked realizations as to why that’s important. I don’t think you can characterize thoughts or ideas without the idea of association.
Jacobsen: Another definition is around the chief meaning.
Rosner: When you have a sentence, obviously, the idea is about what is in the sentence, even if it is trivial.
Jacobsen: By the 17th century, it became thought, plan, or intention. The word intention has the meaning of being used for something.
Rosner: You can have ideas that are super trivial. I don’t know that you need to differentiate between thoughts and ideas. They can be miniscule. I’m looking at this cabinet. It has four knobs. It is an idea, a thought, “It’s got four knobs.”
You can link nebulous things that you have definitions of with other things that you have definitions of. You are able to link the things, even if nebulous, with other things that you have linkage about, including knobs and cabinet.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/02/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, what is percent fidelity in this regard for the future of brain replication?
Rosner: The ultimate objective for extended human life is replicable consciousness. It renders everything else moot. The various strategies for living long and making your own body not age. Freezing your body, until they can come and fix whatever is wrong with it, all this stuff becomes much less of a desperate gambit or mott. You don’t need it if you can move your consciousness around.
Your memories, way of thinking. Your brain, basically, or a duplicate of your brain. A brain that is sufficiently duplicated that it has as much fidelity as your own biological brain does from day to day and month to month. I think that when this technology becomes available.
People will sell it on the basis of what percent it duplicates your thinking and experience with minimal discontinuity. The earliest products probably won’t even use this term because the numbers will be so terrible. The earliest products might not even reach 10% fidelity.
We already have something that has some non-zero fidelity, a technology, or a bunch of related technologies. Those are hanging out and talking with people. If you live with someone for 50 years, once you die, your way of thinking, memories, and attitudes are, to some extent, carried on by your close survivors.
In fact, Reformed Judaism have this as the only afterlife. We live on in the memories of others. It is a really terrible afterlife.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: It is not zero, the fidelity. It is way less than 1%. You’re, as a dead person, not getting any conscious experience. Your thoughts and attitudes are carried on while not getting the benefits of being alive anymore.
You are getting very minimal benefits from those who knew you have a picture of your mental landscape. It is a shitty picture. It is not your consciousness. However, people are already doing stuff with direct brain communications.
They are developing certain technologies for thinking certain thoughts and a reader will react. You can think stuff and manipulate stuff with your thoughts. It is very imprecise and shitty. Eventually, you will have technology that will allow increasingly direct brain-to-brain communication.
It will super shitty at first. One measure of how shitty is how ridiculous it is to talk about it.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: If two people decided to have direct brain-to-brain communication without needing speech or other forms of communicating and could, basically, think together, maybe not as a single entity but, as a linked pair of entities, and if you did this long enough with somebody else with sufficient technology, to some extent, some of your thinking would live on. Some of your consciousness would live on, after the person dies.
The percent fidelity would go from 0.0001% to, with this technology, 10% or 12%. Something that is much better than the near-zero that we have right now. Eventually, as we decipher consciousness and bran processes, the fidelity will go to 40% and, eventually, into the 80s.
As we understand how our brains will work better, there will be two indices to consider: the natural fidelity of our brains over time to ourselves, which isn’t perfect. I don’t even know how to calculate how much less than perfect it is because we lose most of what we experience.
We don’t remember most things in our lives. It is unrecallable. An unremarkable lunch from 2006 will not be something to remember. An afternoon spent clipping your toenails for ten minutes. Most daily stuff is not recallable.
Is that a huge ding against our fidelity score? We don’t experience it as a ding. We’re at home in our brains. We’re at home with the incompleteness of or deficiencies of our brains and our thinking. It doesn’t bug us that we are losing so much.
Jacobsen: Is that a bug or a feature?
Rosner: It is both. There are people with eidetic memories who can remember everything.
Jacobsen: Curse more than blessing, or blessing more than curse?
Rosner: I think it is just a thing that you have, which is kind of cool. Marilu Henner, the actress on Taxi a million years ago, claims to have an eidetic memory. I think the claim holds up. Because when she is quizzed on stuff, she is good at remembering things. She is good as an actress and adult in the world, and still able to live a normal life as a person. It hasn’t made her crazy.
So, people will like to make the claim that it’s good that we don’t remember everything. But I don’t know. I don’t think that that claim holds up. At the very least, we want to be better at remembering than we are.
We will be, as technology improves. As we deal with improved technology, we will have a lot of dumb, stupidly complete, remembering, that will be, “Meh.” It will need some more-than-fine-tuning. It may not be ideal an ideal adjunct to our brains.
We’ll have to learn to live in conjunction with brain add-ons and brain replication. It is not like things will not get figured out. Things won’t ever be settled because technology will keep coming along. We will keep discovering memory schemes.
When it becomes possible to remember with what fidelity that you want, whatever we become, they will determine what are the optimal levels and strategies of memory, for memory, given the software and the hardware that we will be working with.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A big thing we’ve talked about are infinities and the ways the universe can be finite. Let’s narrow it down, then, human life, why is immortality unreasonable if not impossible?
Rosner: Humans, or whatever you want to call the future us, are on the cusp vastly expanded lifespans. Nobody wants to die. It takes a special set of circumstance to die, but most people don’t want to die.
But living forever, in the largest terms, is impossible because the odds of living without end are like zero, and they used to say nature abhors a vacuum. But nature really abhors infinities. The idea that it’s at all reasonable to hang out without end in perpetuity is highly unlikely.
But short of that, one is: say, we maintain the way we think now. Our basic human abilities and ways of thinking. It is not possible to live for tens of thousands of years. It seems unlikely to be able to live for tens of thousands of years and to remember much of any of it.
There’s probably some limit to the amount of experience that you can have given the limits of the human brain. I think Heinlein wrote about this in the 50s and the 60s. Is it really an infinite lifespan if you are only remembering a couple hundred thousands of it at a time?
Jacobsen: It would be staggering.
Rosner: It would be great, but it wouldn’t be infinite. Imagine slapping on more and more memory, where you can slap on 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 years more of life. It would be pretty great, but still falls short of infinity. It also seems pointlessly hedonistic to live for 10,000 years without growing in memory and wisdom, and in ability to understand and do stuff in the world.
We wouldn’t want to stay basically human for more than a couple thousand years. It would be pointlessly decadent. So, the capacity problem and the related growth problems mean that you would want to transcend your basic humanity and grow into something else.
But the problem with that, over periods of many tens of thousands of years, you’d want to continue to grow and not just decadently experience stuff without being able to retain and process your added experience.
To live forever and what it would mean, it means that we would have to give up our current aspects and lives that make us human. It seems unachievable. Even though, vast lifespans may soon be possible. Immortality in human terms might just be paradoxical.
That you can’t live forever or even for many thousands of years without getting some of the things that we would want with vastly expanded lifespans. You can either stay human and stay limited and not have added years count for anything and become a deeper, more insightful, and more experienced person, or you can give up what it feels like to be human.
One more thing, some of these objections might be quibbles and could be worked out over hundreds and thousands of years
Go ahead.
Jacobsen: We have three possible futures from Feynman. We may have three possible futures n the ways that things can go: annihilation and evolution continues onward. It is post-human without humans involved in the post- in the sense of trans-human.
Rosner: 300 years from now, there will be humans with long lives who choose to experience the world in ways that are pretty close to the way that we experience the world. Then there will be humans or post-humans who choose to keep expand their capacities along with their expanded lives.
Then there will be humans who choose to do what humans have always done, which is get old and then die. Then there are beings who will take advantage the future mutability of consciousness and will bud in and out of things, will merge with people and unmerge.
They will move beyond unitary individual consciousness. Consciousness will still feel the same. It will still feel like a hyper-real moment-to-moment experiencing of the world around you, and your thoughts about it. Although, it will feel the same. It will be much more mutable. Future beings will dick around with it, in terms of creating big old consciousness, merging with consciousness, pairing them down.
There will be a devaluation of individual consciousness. It will be cheap. You will be able to buy consciousness from manufacturing places for cheap, which will lead to abuses. Consciousness will be engineered to be targeted towards specific goals.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is – and I am kind of embarrassed as I don’t think I have ever asked this to you directly – the heart of intelligence, ignoring tests and such?
Rosner: The first answer is, “How do you even know there is a heart of intelligence?” There is something in the realm of IQ testing and intelligence testing. There is a concept called g, which stands for “general intelligence.” You could and people do debate whether g even exists.
We infer general intelligence from people’s performances on specific tasks. There’s no such thing as general intelligence tasks. Everything is a specific thing: the eloquence of speech, skill at math, social skills, all the little tasks measured by or tested by an IQ test like how fast you can circle all the stars on a sheet of paper where 1/5th of the symbols are stars.
What is missing in this picture taking blocks and making shapes out of them? Taking all those tasks, we are supposed to get an idea of someone’s general intelligence. You could argue there is no such thing as general intelligence because our brains are adapted for doing the things that we need to do in our specific environments in this specific world.
That’s a pretty extreme argument to make because of 2+2=4, regardless of which galaxy you live in. There should be some really basic forms of thought. You should be able to figure out some kind of criteria for general intelligence.
Jacobsen: Ron Hoeflin has a theory on that. The Categories of Thought, his encyclopedia of philosophy.
Rosner: Ron has spent more than 40 years cataloguing philosophies. I didn’t know it was a catalogue of ways of thought. That’s pretty interesting as it’s thousands of pages long.
To get at what intelligence might be, one of the primary tasks of thought is to form associations, to define things in our experience by what characteristics they have, which is a form of linking. That we know a dog is a dog because we’ve defined in our heads what characteristics are associated with dogs, say versus cats.
Size, fur, shape of ears, I like to say the brain is an association engine.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?
Rosner: Intelligence, you could argue, is involved in the accuracy and profundity of the associations formed. Are you able to get to the heart of things or analyze what is going on and get to the/find the essentials?
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Have institutions moved beyond human competence?
Rosner: In the specific instance that we’re in right now, Russia — a shitty country — has exploited people’s susceptibility to social media messaging to move people politically and make people distrust the news, institutions, and the government.
This is in concert with political parties within various nations and people who like to stir things up, paranoids and lunatics. Right now, in America, it feels like institutions have been highly compromised. It probably feels like that in the U.K., France, and other countries where White Nationalism has been on the rise, abetted by social media, making people crazy.
People wonder whether this is a new normal, whether it can be healed.
Jacobsen: I would argue the fact things are more compromised now: things are more compromisable now. That is, from my point of view, indicative of things getting more out of human control.
Rosner: Is this something that can fix itself if we’re lucky? Or does it mean that we’re going to need to build new institutions? I believe that there are a whole set of problems. A whole set of problems facing humans on this planet, which will be solved by combining humans with A.I. over the next couple of centuries.
Jacobsen: To clarify, as I am hearing that, I am interpreting that as actual biological and synthetic integration rather than the time delays seen now.
Rosner: Right, the integrated, augmented humans that are to come, or the conscious beings who are able to live in a variety of vessels, including entirely in some kind of cyberspace. 200 years from now, there will be a bunch of ways for conscious beings to live. A lot of these won’t be as hard on the environment.
It will less of a carbon footprint. Although, while a lot of today’s problems will be solved by beings to come, the change in society will create a whole bunch of new problems. But the capture of institutions by assholes and idiots, and grifters, we still have to address this in the short term.
Even though, humans won’t be replaced entirely. The unaugmented human population will continue to be in the many billions for the next 400 or 500 years while the augmented human population and the population of conscious beings that aren’t human will grow into the many billions and tens of billions in the same time period.
We’re talking centuries. We still have to wonder what will happen in the next 40 or 50 years or the next 5 to 10 years. In America, we have an election that people who don’t like Trump having captured all three branches of government.
For people not in America, the American government is designed to be divided between three branches: the Executive (the President and the people around him), the Legislative (the House, Senate, and Congress), and the Judicial (the Supreme Court and the lesser courts).
Trump through corruption and anti-democratic practices has captured all three branches. People who don’t like this hope that the election that is happening in less than a year will drive him out of office and help, or give, Democrats control of Congress.
So, we’d be able to make moves to clean this stuff up. But when you look at previous examples of presidents misbehaving in office, they and their people once out of office tend not to be prosecuted. It is in the interest of healing.
Lip service is made to the healing of national wounds by not being vindictive. But in the case of Nixon, while president, there are a bunch of things that you cannot be charged with, criminal things. After out of office, you can be charged with things that you did while president, criminally.
While this happened, President Ford pardoned Nixon, a big swath of the nation hated that. That happened 46 years ago. How that played out has largely been forgotten, Clinton was disbarred, had to give up his law license for lying to the F.B.I. about getting blowjobs.
But that wasn’t a big deal for the Clintons who made tens of millions of bucks writing books and giving speeches. Also, that somebody should be held criminally liable for blowjobs is questionable anyway. Reagan and his people were not held to much account for Iran Contra, which was this complicated scheme to sell weapons to Iran and use the money to finance the Contras.
These were a scary right-wing paramilitary group in El Salvador. Few were prosecuted for that. It may be that there will be enough of a national outcry. A bunch of people have gone to jail who worked around Trump.
Nowhere near as many as went to jail after Watergate, which was 4 dozen or so. I think 6 or 8 of Trump’s people have gone to jail so far. Anyway, is this a blip of human incompetence? Or is this a thing that we have to deal with from here on out until human society reaches the point where shitty government doesn’t matter, as societal structures form in a Cory Doctorow way?
What do you think?
Jacobsen: I think a lot of stuff that you’re talking about is pointing to a trendline of the old institutions staying and being corruptible in newer ways. That’s due to newer tech. That’s probably what you find, where you have these long-term political institutions as the baseline, which are more or less fixed.
The ways that technology evolves really, really fast around it, changes the kind of corruption that you see. One potential example might be very extreme forms of manipulating voting booths in the future with the types of processes that go into counting digital votes.
Falsifying that, hiding record, deleting any records of it being done, but, finally, the count not being the true winner — who got the most votes — but another ‘winner.’
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: So, here you have the same democratic institutions, same American constitution and political setup, you have people voting as per regular democratic processes. Although, there might be different types of barriers, don’t need to go too deeply into those. But all that tech leaves it vulnerable in newer ways, sort of stuff. I think you could see this all over the world.
Rosner: How’s Canada doing?
Jacobsen: Cold.
Rosner: You guys haven’t been attacked. Is it because you have fewer than 40,000,000 citizens and aren’t a big enough target?
Jacobsen: Well, our economy is bigger than Russias.
Rosner: Everything in Russia sucks, except for their ability to fuck up other countries.
Jacobsen: That’s part of the reason that they’re poor. That’s why China will last and Russia won’t last. Putin can’t keep this game up forever. I think the way that a poor country, like Russia, can mess up other countries says a lot about the power of technology and the increasing power of technology.
Rosner: Are technology and social media permanently in a position make a huge percentage of the population crazy?
Jacobsen: I think yes and no. I think authoritarian structures have their same structures. I think democratic structures have their same structure. I think the world is still trending towards democracy. We have more democracies than any other time in the history of the world. That’s a really important point.
Then you’ll see cases. There’s El-Sisi in Egypt getting rid of term limits until 2030. Benjamin Netanyahu is in office probably longer than any democratic leader, which is akin to the length of power of many dictators. Not to call him that, to make a time length comparison. Putin is functionally finding ways around that. Xi Jinping got rid of term limits, and on and on.
Those are trending towards authoritarianism with the ability amplified to control the population. I think there is enough of a contingent in the democratic parts of the world, where you are seeing the trendline of more freedom of expression to call bullshit, bullshit, to call a spade, a spade.
That leads to things that were called democratic being more true to the name. Maybe, what we’ll find is a polar setup, on the one antipode, you’ll have more and more freedom. On the other end, you’ll have less and less freedom.
On one side, you’ll see decentralization, not anarchy, with more direct democracy without the need for public representatives, so not anarchosyndicalist.
Rosner: Do you think society will rearrange itself to circumvent the corrupting of older institutions?
Jacobsen: Yes, then there will be ways those can be taken advantage of too. With direct democracy, the coalitions for funding particular projects, “We want a pipeline here,” “We want a solar panel installation or field here,” and so on. People want it, vote on it.
The funding then goes proportionately to it. Say everyone has a UBI of $10,000 a year, people say, “Do you want to give $1,000 or $5 of your UBI towards this project in Long Beach, California?” People go, “Okay, yeah.”
The funding goes to the project. It gets built and based on the majority of votes, or the amount of votes. Those that didn’t vote for it. They don’t pay for it. Their money is funnelled to other projects or their private interests. This gives a baseline.
This is a direct democracy without formal representation seen now. But this could be exploited, as these are very, very temporary coalitions. Temporary coalitions are fleeting.
Rosner: There’s going to be more volatility. Things can go from good to bad faster. There’s a higher probability of institutions being corrupted than there used to be.
Jacobsen: I would call it the Bitcoin-ing of democracy. Things are volatile, as you said. But there’s a capacity of digitization there, infused right into democracy. We are seeing the start of that. I don’t think we’re even close to seeing what that can do.
With the digitization, it is more vulnerable because it is more networked, but faster too. It will be another stage up in terms of speeding up regular human processes. We have spoken word. We have hearing. those are fast, but not moving at the speed of light.
With Alexander Graham Bell, you cut the distance to speak to someone while able to speak farther to someone instead of horseback, chariot, or yelling. These verbal or auditory outputs-inputs are limited.
Rosner: The big time thing was, as you said, the telephone or the telegraph. Anything that reduced everything to the speed of electricity. Now, you get the ability to immediately transmit high-bandwidth information, video basically.
Jacobsen: I would add another thing to this. If you tap all these different ways of speeding things up, including Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the printing of books, the internet and digitization of print, audiovisual media for everyone. I think another aspect of that is a lowering of the transmission of things with the centralization of this.
We’re seeing this in our phones.
Rosner: You mean being able to do things out of our phone.
Jacobsen: Yes, one of our efficacies as a species in spite of crummy single aspects, e.g., no sharp claws. We have centralized functions in one unit. We are a 3.5-billion-year-old iPhone, so to speak. Things are centralized from the single-celled to multiple celled organisms performing plural functions through automated development of an immune system, and, more importantly, the developing of centralized processing units to guide all of the organisms to-ings and fro-ings.
I think you could argue the same of the phone in the way it has taken human inventions and then putting them in one place. It is not only spoken word to auditory intake. It is all of the other channels. Let’s say 10 times in some, 20 times in others. You combine those. It becomes efficient input-output and in terms of noise.
Rosner: There’s also getting the exact information that you want.
Jacobsen: Fidelity, yes! There are probably the three things: speed, centralization of channels, and the fidelity of things.
Rosner: What about clarity? People can’t get an understanding of what is going on that is accurate and trustworthy.
Jacobsen: Maybe, that would be the combination of centralization and fidelity. Ease of comprehension, if you don’t know, someone can explain it to you. If you can’t do the math, Mathematica can do it for you.
Rosner: I heard the noise on our phones described as censorship by confusion. You don’t stop the information from going out. You just swamp the information with a bunch of bullshit, so you can’t tell the information from bullshit.
Jacobsen: That would be one of the unforeseens. This centralization permits more intakes in one place, the central place. It is like how a neuron has all these different dendrites to intake — 1,000 to 10,000 intakes.
Rosner: But the brain cleans itself out by letting the bad dendrites shrivel.
Jacobsen: That’s your Norton Antivirus.
Rosner: We don’t have it, yet.
Jacobsen: Maybe, that is the unforeseen thing that developers have to robustly get done. Or if it can’t get done technologically or assisted that way, it has to be done through another channel: a culture that imbibes a certain sensibility in people of critical thinking.
Rosner: There are too many people trying to exploit. There’s too much money and power to be had to by bullshitting people right now. Various factions are going to fight being held to being truthful.
Jacobsen: That’s true.
Rosner: So, are you optimistic about the next 10 years and humans’ ability to organize themselves in such a way that they can fight the corruption of existing institutions?
Jacobsen: I would say one thing. If you aren’t optimistic, then you aren’t getting things done. I am not a prognosticator, divine, or some expert in all these fields. But it seems there is a lot of ways for things to become better, as we’re talking about centralization and reductions in time, the clarity of the message, and the prevention of adding noise to all those extra points of contact as we are finding in misinformation campaigns. So, yes and no [Laughing].
Rosner: Let’s end this with a numbers game, 0 to 10 game, the corruption of the institutions in the U.S. with zero corruption being 10 and complete descent into Nazi Germany being a 0. The U.S. used to be at an 8 and dropped to a 6 with the potential to be a 5 or a 4 depending on how the next year plays out. That’s my estimation.
Where would you put Canada?
Jacobsen: The only highly corrupt area is in Ontario with the Ford family. There’s a little in Quebec and a little in the prime ministership. I think Canada has a much lower chance of becoming anti-democratic and not being oriented around anti-science, misinformation, gullibility, superstition, than America. However, caveat being: America was already twice as much there if not more.
It is off the charts compared to other nations.
Rosner: Is it that there is such a large population that is exploitable in that way that makes it fertile ground?
Jacobsen: I don’t think necessarily. But it is a factor. In the United States, it could be more vulnerable with its size. It is the second biggest democracy in the world outside of India. Although, people have question marks about India. It is the freest in terms of ideas, in terms of speech.
No country is completely free. Canada has hate speech laws, in some ways for good reasons. America is so free in terms of ideas. You see people expressing those behaviours so freely, and often in coalitions. You can see the mentally ill acting out.
There’s a common meme coming out of real mental illness in Florida with “Florida Man…” Here are serious cases of seriously ill, often, men entering the news cycle.
Rosner: Do you have better structures in place in Canada to deal with the mentally ill?
Jacobsen: We have a robust medical system, but we do not have a pharmacare system due to an accident of history.
Rosner: Do you have more laws to institutionalize people?
Jacobsen: That’s a good question. I know there is an orientation to more punitive laws and systems. However, there is a movement working against the punitive forms of treatments, including, say, drug issues. I think this relates to issues of regular mental illness, including depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, and so on.
Rosner: In Canada, does anybody with a drug problem get adequate rehab or get into a rehab program?
Jacobsen: Not anybody, but there are dissenting people, brave, morally upright, and poor, in fact, people who will make up makeshift tents and tell the city or municipal government, “We’re not moving.” Some of this reflects formal policy in the Four Pillars initiative of Vancouver.
There are a few names. If you look at these news articles, their names come up over, and over, and over again. Mostly women, a few are extremely involved. There is Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, CSSDP. It has a group of smart, leftwing students.
They work on campus initiatives. In Canada, we have the language change from saying “drug abuser” and “drug abuse” to “drug misuse” and “drug use.” Someone who has a problem. You’d say, “It is drug misuse.” You don’t label them as criminals automatically. You say, “They are sick.” It says, “A drug or substance misuser who is sick.” It is more accurate and compassionate and humanistic.
The other perspective would be a drug abuse who is a criminal. We need to imprison them to make an example to themselves and others. That’s the United States example. That’s where you get even famous examples of people getting very hefty sentences for simple possession of marijuana.
You don’t get that as much in Canada. You do get drug problems. You do get drug trafficking. You do get them mixed up with sex trafficking, which is, mainly, the dehumanization of girls and women mostly with sexual abuse, rape, even forced pregnancy by, most often, men. You see these initiatives and issues tied up.
It ties to women’s rights. If we look at the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), if you look at a map of who has signed it, who has ratified it, and who hasn’t done either, you get these colourings for them.
There’s one major outlier in North America, in North America and Europe combined, probably. It is the United States, only signed rather than ratified.
Rosner: The Equal Rights Amendment is back in play after 40, 50 years.
Jacobsen: Yes, the United States is a big country and a free country, and a democratic country. The biggest or the second biggest democracy, I think, statistically, that is where you will find more data points for a bigger curve and a flatter curve, so more extremes on either side of things.
Places like New York and Los Angeles. Also, on the other end, places like Texas and South Carolina. That’s different in a small country like Canada, which is already progressive in its orientation.
In the United States, you will find places that look like the third world. Several ten million Americans who are functionally illiterate. Then you will find others like Yale, Harvard, MIT, UCLA, UCBerkeley, and UCIrvine that are the most intelligent or motivated and intelligent with the funding and stability of mind to be amongst the best minds in the world.
My optimism is confirmed by history and also by pragmatism. In that, if you are pessimistic, you don’t shit done; if you are optimistic, you, at least, have a fighting chance for things to get done.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about hidden linkages here or the clarity of the information?
Rosner: Einstein famously hated the idea and said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” That’s a paraphrase. He said it in German. It bugged people that things should not be determinate. You can’t predict what is going to happen, even if you know everything about the universe or some part of the universe.
People looked around to see if there was a way around it. It was proven, “No, there is not a way around it based on Bell’s Theorem or Bell’s Inequality.” It means that you cannot have hidden linkages in the universe that provide the information.
However, you have black and black-ish holes, which are shielded informationally from the rest of the universe. Those things, I suspect, can be linked in a non-straightforward way. Because they are not part, to some extent, of the overall information or the accessible information that is being processed in the universe.
They generate information and suck up information. But what’s is going on in them is shielded, which means that there can be more complicated linkages. That’s a possibility. Maybe, you can do business in the universe without.
If you are looking at the universe as an information processor similar to our brains as information processors, certainly, there’s a lot of information being processed not available to conscious consideration. There’s a lot of information that comes to us pre-processed, like visual information.
We can become savvier about the processes that go into making a polished vision of the world. If you take LSD, which I don’t recommend, you can see a breakdown in those processes. When you get information that has been shittily processed or incompletely processed, you lose the smooth presentation of the world that we are used to.
Normally, you don’t see 99% of the processes that go into presenting the visual picture of the world. You don’t see the processes. For the most part, those that go into choosing the words you’re going to say from moment-to-moment.
You can pick words for a piece of writing. But all of the words in my head, I have ideas; the words to express those ideas are largely auto-filled almost. The feeling is the feeling of auto-fill. Here’s what I want to say, here are the words, these are the presentations of the ideas in the auto-filled words.
It makes sense to assume that there would be processing in the universe if the universe is an information processing entity like our own brains. It would make sense that there would be processing going on behind our brains.
It would make sense that there would be processing behind the scenes and the processing would be fed into the universe via the places in the universe that are conduits for information that isn’t open to the conscious arena or until it enters the conscious arena.
The places to do that are the massive black holes at the center of each galaxy and, maybe, some of the black and near-black objects throughout galaxies, like neutron stars, collapsed stars that have turned into black holes.
Although, I would suspect. If you were looking for a good place to process information, a billion sun mass black hole at the center of a galaxy is a better place, a better suspect, for an information processing factory than a neutron star, which, though it is collapsed, probably has much less room for hidden masses.
I would guess the objects outside the central black hole may act as associative hooks. This is what I was thinking last night at 2 in the morning. Like everything I think, it could be garbage. A star is going to go through its life cycle, or one life cycle, within the life cycle of the active universe or one cycle of 20 to 30 billion years.
A star will burn out if 15 to 20 billion years and then become a black hole or a neutron star and then becoming dormant with al the stuff in it locked in place. Maybe, this locked star or these locked stars. Say a galaxy lights up, again and again, maybe, a hook to relight up the galaxy may be these locked stars. These stars that once burned bright and now sit there almost invisible.
Maybe, these are time capsules to previous iterations of the active universe. So, maybe, a galaxy that has gone through a bunch of cycles would have a bunch of collapsed stars from different cycles. Maybe, you can light up different versions of galaxies based on which dormant parts of the galaxy get re-lit via being associated with earlier iterations of the galaxy.
Say the universe has gone through 10 cycles, a cycle is a deceptive term because we don’t think the universe blows up and then shrinks down. We think parts of the universe blow up, move to the center, and shrink down, and then are replaced with other parts of the universe blowing up, so the universe isn’t expanding and contracting or roughly stating the same size and processing the same amount of information – plus or minus.
It is not a full expanse or a full collapse. It is a rolling boil. If 10 cycles, which sounds like a spinning class, maybe, the combinations of galaxies that light up for each cycle are based on which combinations of galaxies are lit up in previous iterations, and are being lit up by association.
It is similar to the way a neuron can play a roll in the expression of more than one thought based on the combination of neurons that light up. Maybe, it is a combination of galaxies that light up with there being more information available via the combinations than if each galaxy represented a single thing, e.g., a 22-degree angle, “This is the galaxy that lights up if you have a line with a 22-degree angle in front of you.”
Maybe, the galaxy does more than one thing given what other 10^n or 100 billion other galaxies light up. Certainly, something facilitating this are dormant galaxies hit by floods of neutrinos. If this doesn’t entirely work within normal space, if that doesn’t give enough control over what galaxies light up, then you can sneakily postulate more complicated connections among the structures of the universe as long as those connections are held within black-ish gravitationally collapsed structures.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How are large-scale structures in the universe providing an image of the informational content and structure of the universe?
Rosner: To take a wider view, whatever model of whatever is going on in the universe informationally has to have enough information in it to be reasonable, for instance, it makes sense that there are roughly 10^11th galaxies in the universe.
They are not exactly evenly spaced, but they’re distributed throughout the universe in such a way that the universe is roughly not misshapen. The universe is curved spacetime. You can consider, for the purposes of relativistic math, the curvature of space as an additional dimension.
So that, the universe is the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere without being weirdly convoluted. So, given the shape of space is roughly, according to General Relativity, in part determined by the matter within it, the galaxies are regularly enough distributed that space is fairly smoothly shaped.
Given that, it makes sense to think of galaxies as, potentially, units of some type of information or units of some type of information processing within the overall information processor that is the universe. They’re huge structures.
There are a lot of them, 10^11th. That’s just the ones that are, according to IC, active versus ones that might be hidden at the outskirts of the universe and not shining at this point, not full of stars that are actively undergoing fusion and emitting light.
So, one place that there might be information is which galaxies are on. Let’s assume that in the universe, one galaxy in 2,000 active. Then there’s information in the choice of galaxies that are lit up, which then the information simply in the choice of galaxies – the number of potential combinations of 1/2,000th of 2,000*10^11th galaxies being selected is 2,000^10^11th/10^11th!.
In terms of the number of zeroes in the number, you can ignore the 10^11th factorial. It doesn’t make much of a dent in that humongous number, which, for the sake of quick math, make it 1 in 1,000 galaxies turned on.
That would 10^3rd to the 10^11th power, which would be a 1 followed by 3*10^11th zeroes. It would be divided by the factorial, which is negligible because you’ve got 300 billion zeroes after the 1 in your number. That’s the information content just in the choice of galaxies that are turned on.
That number, of course, would be less because galaxies would be correlated. If galaxy a is turned on, then it’s highly likely that galaxy b 100 lightyears away is also turned on. They’re local or connected via being a short distance from one another.
But it makes sense that there is information in the choice of galaxies that are turned on. I have gone back and forth about whether under IC the universe is super old with galaxies going through their natural lifespans of 20 or 30 billion years and then falling back away, so that you’ve got a rotating roster of galaxies.
More recently, it was like, “Wait, there are things going on, like apps within information processing that might require some galaxies to be perpetually on.” Now, I’ve gone back to the former view of a sort of rotating roster.
Given that the information capacity of just the choice of which galaxies to turn on is titanic, the information is in the combination rather than in the individual galaxies. Even though, the galaxies function as non-individual entities.
The mechanism for turning on the galaxies, as we were talking about last night, is probably a flood of neutrinos generated by the active center of the galaxy. So, there’s a thing called Bell’s Theorem in Quantum Mechanics about not having a hidden variable.
Some of this comes from Einstein and other people in the early days of Quantum Mechanics and being annoyed that some things in Quantum Mechanics being purely indeterminate. When a quantum wave function says, “What happens next can’t be decided and is instead a probability function.”
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can predictive power increase freedom, potentially?
Rosner: I wonder about increased freedom, if any, if our actions are based on more and more predictive information. There are plenty of time travel books, movies, and T.V. shows, where people are can travel into the past to try and fix things that they want to change. That did not go the way that they wanted. So, the question is, “Does it change the experience of time to be able to run multiple parallel simulations of the next few moments and even further into the future than the next few moments and then choose among those moments?” We already do that.
It doesn’t feel like we are choosing among future moments. It feels like we are moment-to-moment taking the best actions based on what we think will happen. We don’t really think of ourselves, generally, as predicting what will happen moment-to-moment, but we are doing it.
We stop at a stoplight that is red because we predict that there is traffic. Or, also, because we see cars are coming, we predict that if we step into traffic that the cars will keep coming and hit us. We are predicting and making the best possible choices based on those predictions.
But we don’t see those as predictions. We see ourselves as reacting to circumstances. In only some of our choices do we see ourselves as predicting and acting according to our best predictions, if you come up to a girl, a woman, I’m from the 70s and the 80s, and the 90s, where you went up to women in bars and said stuff to get the woman to like you.
In doing that, you are trying to figure out what the best thing to say would be. My default was to ask the woman to dance because I did not know how to talk to women. After 3 songs, it would get sweaty and weird.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: All I had to do was say, “Enough of that dancing shit, let’s get you a drink.” I was bad at it. I was a little clueless. But my best-predicted action was to ask a girl to dance. That seemed, at least, to get me to the next moment of dancing based on the prediction that, sometimes, the girl would say, “Yes.”
But it doesn’t seem like a prediction when you take a step predicting the floor will still be the floor and gravity will still be like gravity in the next few subsequent moments. So, I am saying that there is a possibility that future powerful entities with more global information and a much more powerful ability to predict will experience the world.
There’s a famous book or series of books from the 70s called Dune. It is getting made into a T.V. series again. It was made into a movie nobody liked, maybe a T.V. series a while ago. In the book, that one character can see the future exactly as it will play out. He is blind. He can see the future so well that he just knows where to go and what to do because he can so exactly predict the future.
I am saying that time won’t be experienced as moment-to-moment. But we don’t experience time as moment-to-moment now. We accumulate a history. But our perception of each moment, our awareness of each moment, is smeared out across moments and out consciousness and sub-conscious smooths everything out.
So, it feels as if we are experiencing time in a moment-to-moment fashion. Even though, the information that we get about the world does not perfectly fill out each moment at that moment and our processing of each moment does not happen at each moment.
We accumulate knowledge about changes in the world across a span of, a short span of, time, but still a span of time. We don’t experience a bunch of instantaneous moments. We experience, vaguely, a bunch of smeared out moments.
Again, it raises the question as to what a vastly more powerful moment to moment massive amount of predictive information would look like or would feel like within a vastly knowledgeable and powerful consciousness.
The default point of view would be that we would still experience things linearly. In that, we would take action. That action would be locked into the moment. We would take another set of actions that would be locked into subsequent moments. We would still experience things linearly even as we were working through a much wider range of possible futures.
Because generally, we don’t see the possible futures in any kind of fully fleshed out way. When I went up to a girl in a bar and asked her to dance, I didn’t picture ten different versions of the next few days based on how the girl might react. She says, “Yes.”
We get along. We have a one-night stand. We still like each other in the morning. Or if she says, “Fuck off,” then I get embarrassed and leave the bar or go to another bar, or go home. You don’t picture fully-fleshed out futures.
You experience the possible reactions the woman could have. I don’t know whether the more powerful consciousnesses of the future will perceive more fleshed out possible futures. That’s probably a dumb supposition in a lot of ways. But I am not even sure of the ways.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Jacobsen: In terms of hidden infinities, could the dimensionality vary based on the amount of precision of each moment?
Rick Rosner: Nope, probably because the amount of freedom that increasing amounts of missing information can give you.
Jacobsen: What is the upper limit to that?
Rosner: The way information works in a self-consistent system. I would guess, it has to be locally 3-dimensional. Unless, you’ve engineered a special space that doesn’t work according to the rules of information, like a simulated world, where you want your characters to live. You could build a 4-dimensional video game.
It would be hard to picture on the screen. You could have the characters battling each other in a 4-dimensional space. But the space has been specifically constructed from the game and is not governed by the rules of information.
Jacobsen: How do the rules of information in that space, where a) a universe for the mechanical philosophy as dead and b) there are non-local effects?
Rosner: It is a fake world. That world isn’t built from the information. That world is a simulated world built within a video game. You can give it whatever physics you want. You can even have some approximation of whatever you picture as multiply dimensional time.
But as you work through the game, you can build worlds, where time works weirdly. But it is all simulated. In the natural world, I think things are generally 3-dimensional. We have 3 spatial dimensions and 1-time dimension.
Discussing variations in dimension is getting caught up in mathematical extrapolation and doesn’t have anything to do with the deeper questions about operating in the world, which has the rules that we are operating in.
Let’s talk about how this effects the experience of time to have increasing abilities to predict the future, and whether that influences the linear experience of time. To do something with time, where time works normally, you need a succession of moments.
Anything that is not a succession of moments is a different game and is not exactly a time-based game. Maybe, I’m wrong, but I think the more interesting thing is what the world looks like if you can extrapolate possible futures with greater and greater power.
We can predict a great deal about the world that we’re in now. But there are plenty of things that we can’t predict, like the behaviour of the people we encounter or dealing with traffic. We can predict the physics of everything.
We can’t predict individual events governed by other people’s actions. We get better and better at predicting weather. I don’t have any good answers for this. But I wonder how the experience of time will be changed when we have greater and greater knowledge, which equals greater and greater predictive knowledge.
Where under linear time, we have no choice but to move along with the flow of time, from moment to moment. Each choice that we make is locked in to the next or subsequent moment. Everything we do is locked in time. We deal with the consequences of the actions of each previous moment.[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What if there is more than 1-dimensionality of time?
Rosner: Asking what time would look like if it were more than 1-dimension mistakes the character of time, I think time is 1-dimensional. But more than that, time is a succession of points and cannot be anything but that.
To suggest a time that’s more than 1 dimensional, it can’t be. Time has to work the way time works. However, there are multiple potential futures and similarly multiple potential pasts. We know. Eveything we know is based on the past. All knowledge comes from history. The stuff that’s come before.
All that information constrains the possible futures. But since we do not have complete information about the past, there are a bunch of possible pasts, too. So, the diagram of what we know has this big wad of knowledge representing the past with the most known about the immediate and then getting more and more vague as you get further into the past, and somewhat similarly for the future.
We know most about what is going to happen in the current moment and less so as you move into the future. But the cones of spreading possibilities in the past and in the future, I don’t think they have a dimension. It is possible.
Basically, a dimension is how much spread you get at each successive distance from your point of origin. For instance, along a 1-dimensional line, there’s no spread. At each spread along the line, it is a point. If things are spreading along a cone, along a 2-dimensional surface, then the size of the cone or the radius of each cone at each cone or distance is increasing linearly by x.
For a 3-dimensional spread, it spreads by x^2. Maybe, there is some math to be done with the increasing spread like at T2 and T1. I don’t know the math of this and if it is cleanly dimensional
Jacobsen: If something was probabilistically not quite real, it would be a 1.2-dimension of time?
Rosner: No, it is to some extent exponential. Because the possibilities multiply exponentially. At T1, you have, in a very small system, 100 different open questions that can be resolved or each resolved in several ways. At T2, the open questions have compounded. The number of possibilities haven’t increased arithmetically, but more exponentially. If they are increasing exponentially, then that’s not describable dimensionally.
Because if it is x to the n and n is the number of moments in the future, then that’s exponential rather than arithmetic. So, you don’t have a steady increase by x^3, x squared, or x^7. On the other hand, maybe, it is not perfectly exponential because of the future events, the specific events that answer the 100 open questions; those may constrain the open questions at T2. It is 100 open questions at any subsequent moment.
Anyway, I don’t know how to characterize the rate of increase of possibilities moment-to-moment starting at T0 as the present moment and moving forward exponentially. I doubt the spread or increase in possibilities is describable x^n with n as some specific number that doesn’t vary across future moments.
There is a lot of convenient math for combining the 1-dimensionality of time with the 3-dimensionality of space, and any further tweaking of dimensionality due to the curvature of space due to General Relativity.
Jacobsen: If those are emergent phenomena and create the world, are they separate before they come into being?
Rosner: No, they are all part of the same deal. I don’t think you should be tempted into thinking time can vary 1-dimensionally. That you can have time that functions as anything but 1-dimensionally.
Jacobsen: What about space?
Rosner: According to the rules of information, you probably need space that is 3-dimensional. I doubt you can vary the dimensionality of space. You could probably do it in your imagination to simplify your image of things.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One tentative conclusion for hard or soft sciences is a naturalistic worldview. The world as a natural rather than a supernatural place.
Rosner: Yes, though, you could make the argument that we come to the natural view via science invalidating a lot of supernatural things. My kid, as you know, has been working on a paper about frogs as embroidered objects in the 17th century.
She ran into an issue in discussing why people would be at home wearing embroidered frogs when frogs during that time were associated with witchery. The deal is that frogs were thought to be useful, naturally, in a naturalistic sense.
But they had spooky uses under witchery. There were natural uses. People who weren’t, who used frogs for good purposes – and witchy and possibly evil purposes. Given the level of scientific knowledge in the 17th-century, it is very hard for a modern analyst of frog uses to distinguish between witchy uses and natural uses.
She mentioned one use. You take a frog and burn it, and mix it with some honey and stuff. Then you feed it to a cat, and then kill the cat. At some point, whatever you have done with the frog mixture will make foxes come out.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: She mentioned that as a non-witchy use of frogs. She mentioned this as a non-witchy use of frogs in a non-witchy way. To us, it sounds like a use of frogs in a witchy way, pure witchery. It is because people didn’t know shit back then. They couldn’t tell the difference between the natural and the supernatural based on the stuff they did.
They had no good idea of whether the stuff would work or not. They weren’t or things were not tested scientifically and recipes were passed on. It is only via 3 or 4 centuries of using the scientific method, where we have a pretty good idea of what is supernatural, what’s likely bullshit, and what’s natural.
To the point, we have some laws that we understand pretty well.
Jacobsen: Based on the stuff discussed in the Born to do Math series, when we think of chakras, ghosts, and efficacy of prayer, in the way fundamentally, espoused…
Rosner: Let’s take a detour since you mentioned the efficacy of prayer. Until recently, I have been willing to let religious people have their religious beliefs. I have even, from time to time, had some semi-religious beliefs myself.
But now, given the state of religion in America, I and I think lots of people find ourselves oppressed by crazy levels of hypocrisy. I find myself less willing to let certain religious hypocrisies stand. For instance, the idea that what we need to do after a gun massacre is praying.
You got to say, “Fuck you,” to that because making that the main thing that you can do. You can’t pass laws, can’t do studies. That’s just bullshit and lining up to do the NRA’s bullshit for them. American politics is being scuttled by a religious demographic that support Trump.
Even though, he is not just non-religious, but a really huge breaker of most of the 10 Commandments. He is a terrible con man and bullshit artists. He is terrible for the country and supported by a majority of Evangelical Christians.
Jacobsen: May I interject?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: If we take the main thrust of the question while sustained in the detour, do the negative, the social, impacts and ease of the political manipulation of a sector of the United States, in some ways, relate closely to a lack of acknowledgement of there being this separation what we consider science and non-science now?
Rosner: I would argue a lack of acknowledgement. Most people who are engaged, mostly evangelicals, in this religious hypocrisy have an inkling of doubt that what they are doing is legitimate. The people who support Trump because he supports their values. Even though, he doesn’t follow any of those values.
Others who support Trump and Israel because, maybe, he is hastening the End Times, the apocalyptic war between good and evil, which will wipe out most of humanity on the planet with only the good people going on to salvation.
I have a feeling that most of those peoples. If you really put it to them, they would admit some doubt with this really bullshitty system that they are supporting. There’s a new report. It came out on Jerry Falwell, Jr. He runs Liberty University, I think.
It is called a real estate scam in the article. He is not godly at all. He brags about the size of his dick and sends salacious pictures of his wife to people. He might have a weird, creepy relationship with his exercise trainer.
He is an all-around terrible guy and a one in a long line of scamming preachers, televangelists.
Jacobsen: This comes out of a very strong movement of the WWII Healing Revival Movement.
Rosner: Yes. In the 60s, there was another revival as hippies rejected the materialism of their parents. A lot of them tried to embrace religion. Some Christianity, some eastern religion, religion used to reinforce decent behaviour. I can get behind that.
But that’s not the way it is being used in America right now. So, anyway, back to demarcation, I think after 400 years of science. We’re pretty clear as to what science is and isn’t. Although, there are a not-insignificant number of people who are in the business of obscuring the border between science and not science to scam money out of people.
People who sell health and beauty products want their shit to sound scientific. There’s a product that I’ve heard a lot of ads for, ‘Man Pills.’ They supposedly raise your testosterone, over the counter ‘Man Pills. You put in a mail-order, then they keep arriving each month. They say that they have been clinically tested in the ads.
They do not say any results: “Clinically tested,” and then no results. Probably, because the results were shit, they sell boner pills over the counter too. A lot of bodegas have these tiger pill packs, which are supposed to increase your virility. These are ridiculous because a) they don’t work and b) there are pills that work that can do the things that these B.S. pills claim to do.
Science is science. We know what it is for the most part. People who are trying to smudge the borders are, usually, trying to take your money.
Jacobsen: So, could we say that we live in an amazing place but not a magical one?
Rosner: Yes! But there are people working in fringey areas because science doesn’t cover everything. Even the stuff covered by science is subject to being hugely revised with new discoveries, as with our discussions before, our main theory of the universe is not even a century old. This very complete cosmology before us is subject to vast and radical revision as we discover more about the universe.
Jacobsen: You and I differ in some ways, in terms of what is presented in a digital physics view of the world. You look at the universe as very probably as having a mind or the characteristics of a mind based on large-scale information processing. I agree with a fundamentally information-based view of the world. I need more premises to have that supported.
It is a basic agreement. The question is to what degree is that conclusion supported in terms of some of the derivatives.
Rosner: You could look at what we with our minds and their characteristics. We have minds in order to predict the future and prepare for it, which is a popular view of minds and brains right now. In that, every action that we take is in anticipation and prediction of the future.
It feels like we’re dealing with present realities. But really, we’re dealing with a prediction of what the world is, even if it is a world of a micro-second from now. We’ve built a vision or version of the world in our minds. That allows us to, we hope, live safely and productively in the world.
Every action that we take is, if you want to get really technical according to this theory, based on a prediction. This couch is solid, gravity works. It will work a second from now, 10 seconds from now, next week. Everything that we do is, as we move into the future and thus our brains help us move into the future, building a model of the future world for us.
Even if it is a fraction of a second from becoming now, as a world, that’s one thing. Our brains help us survive in the world. That they are predictive. That they simulate a world. We could probably come up with about 20 different things that our minds and brains do.
You could probably go down the list and, for each of those 20 things, discuss whether a self-consistent or a vast self-consistent information-processing system or set of subsystems would necessarily have to fulfill each of these 20 characteristics of our minds.
For example, each of our minds is assigned to a single organism, helping one organism doing its shit. That’s not a requirement for other minds like a mega-mind, some universe-sized mind. It could be the information-processing, predictive, conscious arm of a group of organisms. Our mind is located on our bodies. Our brain is located in our bodies. There is this locality characteristic.
That doesn’t have to be so. The information processing can be done remotely for something operating a gazillion miles away. It becomes impractical. If you are talking about huge distances where the speed of light becomes a problem, it doesn’t become a problem if you have this little robotic soldier or bomb defuser, or a little spider assassin that needs to crawl inside somebody’s ear, but is too small to have a sophisticated brain.
This could be directed from a sophisticated brain 2 miles away. The locality isn’t necessarily a thing. You can go down a list of things and pick whether this would be a characteristic of an information processing system. Then everything is up for question if the universe or whether other things are information system, and whether the information pertains to something outside of our universe.
The way our mind pertains to a world. If we think the mind is a world with its own existence, the mind is doing its work is predicting things in a world beyond it or mathematically distinct/separate from the information that it contains. That’s open to question.
Whether you need hardware to support the software, whether the universe is a thing made of information the way our minds are made of the information and needs a hardware structure, an actual existing structure to support the information that it contains. We have assumed because it makes sense to be made of information; that there needs to be an armature to support the information as a framework.
That physically supports the information that cannot exist on its own because our minds cannot exist on their own. They need brains to be the physical structures where the interactions of the neurons and dendrites, and everything, encode the information. That’s open to questions. Everything is open to being questioned.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Demarcation Problem, there are a lot of criteria.
Rosner: There’s the Marky Markation Problem.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] what’s the Marky Markation Problem?
Rosner: It is when you are in Times Square in your underpants in the ’90s on a huge billboard.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Singing about what? Or rapping about what?
Rosner: Or maybe, it is when you are in your teens and beat up a guy and cause him to lose an eye.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] what is science to you?
Rosner: Finding regularities in the environment, by “regularities,” I mean repeatable phenomena. Often, there are theories. You try to explain the repeatable phenomena. That’s pretty much it. As generalists, humans evolved to exploit all sorts of regularities in our world, as opposed to other animals who occupy more specific niches based on a more limited repertoire of behaviour, like anteaters.
It’s right in the name. They eat ants. There are some other things that go along with it. There’s falsifiability. If you have a theory, it has to explain some results that would invalidate the theory if they turned out otherwise.
Jacobsen: It has to make predictions too.
Rosner: Yes, that’s a little tricky. Often, theories follow discoveries. So, theories involve extrapolations. You can have a theory explain a repeatable phenomenon. But it is worthless and also not testable if it is so specific to the on experimental set-up; it is not generalized.
This ball will fall to the ground. Every time you drop the ball. It will fall to the ground. It doesn’t tell you anything or why. It just applies to the one ball. You can, at least, generalize to any ball falling to the ground. It still doesn’t help you.
It is not general enough or predictive enough. You mentioned pseudoscience and soft science. When people think of the sciences, they generally think of the hard sciences: biology, chemistry, physics.
Jacobsen: What are the hard sciences? What are the soft sciences?
Rosner: The hard sciences try to build things up from the least complicated elements of what is being looked at, trying to get at the least complicated elements, formulate theories of those elements, and they’re fairly universal. The elements that are measurable with great precision.
Then the soft sciences are things like political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology. Things that deal with smushy, often human, behaviour. You can come up with rules for soft sciences that are nearly as universal as the rules of the hard sciences, at least statistically.
But they are based on smushier and complex biological systems, humans. That rule would be true well over 99% of the time, which makes it a pretty decent rule in terms of its ability to predict behaviour. However, you’re still dealing with soft sciences.
You don’t get mathematically, numerically exact results. Everybody understands this distinction. If they don’t, then they should pay more attention.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would be something that would be nice to have as an evolved mental function that is not evolved into us?
Rosner: You can look at the stuff that we have evolved for ourselves via apps. An infallible sense of direction would be good. I am always arguing everyone should be forced to take statistics. So, maybe, a more developed understanding of and ability to apply risks.
An ability to find more subtle patterns in big data. This is coming. We won’t need this in our brains because we will get it in our apps. You can always say various apps built into your head would be helpful.
Jacobsen: What about perceptual functions?
Rosner: People can always use more power to get social clues and interpersonal clues. Some people are really good at reading other people. That’s a good skill to have. It’s a good skill. It means that some people will have more partners than other people.
I call it anti-Asperger’s. Some schmoozy people, especially where I live in L.A., are at home with asking for more from people and then getting it, because they are able to judge what people are willing to give.
Although, I may be overestimating people’s social skills. When I first had this thought, it was before MeToo. What looked liked increased social skill, ten years ago, to me, I’ve hit on a lot fewer women than people I know.
Some of this I attribute to shyness or fear. Some of this I attributed to being less charming. Now, in the light of MeToo, maybe, I was wrong about that because, maybe, the people who I admired or envied for getting with a bunch of women.
Maybe, they were bigger assholes. Maybe, they were not getting away with anything and the women were thinking the guys were assholes. Maybe, they weren’t getting away with as much as I’d thought. But it would be nice – all that aside – to be able to perceive more of what people are thinking.
Jacobsen: H.L. Mencken described many men as having elephantine emotions [Laughing].
Rosner: Do you mean huge and plodding?
Jacobsen: Huge, plodding, blatant, cloddy, just uncouth generally.
Rosner: Yes, I’ve heard this described in Women’s Studies as men having less impulse control.
Jacobsen: What does this mean in a mental context? Why is this happening way more? Are we talking about more sociological reasons or more innate reasons leading to those sociological/sociocultural consequences?
Rosner: Emotions, in the context we’re talking about, are judged by action. If someone is like Emily Dickinson shut up in her house, we don’t know what emotions she’s having compared to somebody who is getting in bar fights, or road rage incidents.
So, we can make an argument that guys are more action-oriented. You can trace this to the frontal lobe dementia. You lose your Superego and act on pure ID to put it in obsolete terms. Guys have a lower threshold to act on what they’re feeling.
Jacobsen: Men do develop slower. We know that.
Rosner: You can argue men are generally crappier. Men have less quality to control in a lot of areas.
Jacobsen: You mean this not as a moral judgment, but as a biological descriptor.
Rosner: Men are, you can argue, more disposable. My wife hikes with a bunch of people her age and little older. Like half of their husbands are fucking dead!
Jacobsen: What from, for them?
Rosner: One had a sclerosing disease. He was in a parking garage and had just walked out from pitching a T.V. show and dropped dead that was hardening parts of his body. I take super good control of my body. I just had cancer.
It is a small sample size. When you talk about sex or gender differences, you always run the risk of over-generalizing or making conclusions that are too big on a small sample size, or culturally limited sample sizes. I don’t know in general.
Would there be a geometry of lower impulse control? Yes, you could do it, even without a geometry of consciousness of that.
Jacobsen: It would be less integrated geometry. It would be shorter pathways and less integrated.
Rosner: Yes, some people like to argue a thicker corpus callosum in women leads to a more integrated consciousness and a more even-keeled personality. But that’s probably over-concluding.
Jacobsen: Will this imply with greater self-control and greater awareness of a situation that women would be better able to conceal emotions better in terms of propriety and social dynamics?
Rosner: In our world, it is harder to determine. Women are smaller and weaker than men. A smaller and weaker person will be more prudent. If the average woman was 6’1″ and weighed 185lbs, would women be as asshole-ish as men? There’s too much going on there.
There’s too much cultural loading to reach any super-definitive conclusions. There’s, at least, one member or former member of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team who has been dinged more than once for spousal abuse.
She’s a big, strong, angry, at times, person. So, is that a brain thing or a hierarchy thing? Too many variables.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does this make certain thoughts impossible and other thoughts extremely difficult for us?
Rosner: Yes! Unless, you practice recalling dreams and actively recall your dream as you wake up, really rehearse it in your head. It is almost impossible or very rare that you spontaneously remember a dream because the weird combination of arbitrary crap in your dream is like a very tough to break code.
You are very unlikely, at random, to simultaneously think about enough of the random assortment of stuff in your dream that your dream will resurface.
Jacobsen: Are there certain things whether awake or dreaming that are impossible for the human mind to comprehend?
Rosner: Yes, if there is too much going on, and if you haven’t really turned into what you’re seeing or hearing, or if most of the content has not been rehearsed and been reinforced by being part of consciousness, then it makes it harder to have enough associations with that thing to recall it.
Jacobsen: We’ve talked about the mathematics of consciousness before. One of the things that follows from that is that even the things seeming fundamental or mysterious, like consciousness, in experience, as in qualia. If we can get mathematics of consciousness, then there should be a derivative from that.
One of those should be the qualities that should be describable by math or apprehendable immediately in the math.
Rosner: I think that a lot of people have a practical understanding of what consciousness is, already. This generation has this more than any other generation. We understand. I read some article discussing various niceties of consciousness, e.g., whether consciousness is an illusion.
We’ve talked about this. It sort of is, but it doesn’t matter because it works as if it is not an illusion. Anyway, there were all these different things. This article talked about that stuff with Tegmark and all the modern guys with models of consciousness and some of the guys with models from 20 or 30 years ago.
Everyone pretty much agrees what consciousness is. It is the sharing of information among a bunch of subsystems, such that you get a very vivid, fleshed out, real-seeming version or model of the world.
Jacobsen: One characteristic not pointed out about consciousness is in the weaving together of thoughts and experiences is the all-at-onceness of it. It feels as if it is happening all at once. But we’re getting feedthrough of all these different subsystems at different timescales. Somehow, there is the illusion behind the illusion of consciousness. That it is this simultaneous thing. It’s not.
Rosner: I think what you’re talking about are smoothing functions. I don’t know if there is a formal name for them. But they are like another app to ensure that you’re not confused by the nuts and bolts of assembling moment-to-moment awareness.
Jacobsen: You know people who have podcasts. They speak into a microphone and have software that smooths out the voice and the background. That seems like the characterization of the “smoothing functions.” In one view, they are an illusion behind the illusion. In another sense, they make the real feel that much more real.
Rosner: If you take LSD, which I don’t recommend doing, and if you take anything, then you can take mushrooms because LSD lasts for like 20hours. It becomes a pain in the ass after the first 2 hours.
Jacobsen: Did you see the video of the three Mormon guys who took LSD?
Rosner: No, I hope they poke each other’s eyes out like the horror films of the 60s would threaten happening to you if you took it. Or did they just get really loose and giggle?
Jacobsen: They get loose and giggle in front of a camera. It’s the first substance any had taken.
Rosner: Oh wow, that’s a big first step. Anyway, take mushrooms, not LSD. If you do take LSD, then it fucks up a lot of stuff, like visual smoothing functions. People’s faces look like intermediate steps in building CG faces.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: You get polygonal faces. You don’t get the final work product or a good final work product. You see what, to some extent, the raw crap – not raw perception – or an incompletely formed perception looks like, e.g., polygonal and lizardy. Not the rounded rosy, for white people…
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: [Laughing] you get fucked up shit. You time fucked up, because all the time smoothing functions. One function of consciousness is so that we’re not constantly freaking out about glitches in perceptions.
Jacobsen: Those freaking outs are still part of the overall safety functions.
Rosner: They are. When you look at a doorway, and for like half a second, and are like, “What was that?” Then you get more information and it’s like, “Oh, false alarm.” If you didn’t see people lurking in doorways when they are there as soon as possible. Then you are in danger. Your brain will sometimes see lurkers where there aren’t because it is safer to be that way.
If we were seeing like a hundred lurkers in a room a hundred times a minute because our smoother-outers are not working right. We’d be constantly freaking out. It wouldn’t be a good use of resources. We’d be constantly shitting our pants because phantoms are thrown up so much.
I suspect this happens to some people. I think schizophrenia is a breakdown to some degree of smoothing functions. So, people are jumping to all sorts of conclusions about what is happening in the outside world.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were speaking about some of the aspects of IC with the long-distance particles, photons, functioning as information carriers as they travel through the curvature of space over billions of years and lose energy to the curvature of space. It’s a mechanism of the universe defining itself, in a manner of speaking. Let’s keep this going.
Rosner: When we last talked about this, IC, Informational Cosmology, we decided that information had to be less localized, less linked to specific structures like galaxies in the universe than we’d thought before. Although, black holes still have to be specialist structures, particularly the black holes at galactic centres because they are getting more information from within themselves than the rest of the outside universe.
We decided that there’s a lot of information in the loss of energy from long-distance particles losing energy to the curvature of space. That lost energy provides a gravitational force. The universe rearranges itself and space exists due to the cumulative, or space and the distribution of matter in space, energy loss of long-distance particles due to the curvature of space.
So, there’s some information on that. Although, it is tacit information because it is information that isn’t conveyed by detecting particles across distances. It is tacit information via not detecting particles. It is letting those particles keeping going and losing energy with the distances that they travel, slowly reshaping space.
So, how much information in terms of how the universe perceives what is going on with itself from moment to moment, how much information it gets from that kind of information versus the information that it gets from particles being detected, I don’t know.
I would guess that the universe’s moment-to-moment picture of itself is due to particles being detected. The framework information, the gravitationally conveyed information, I don’t know. Maybe, they both contribute to the universe’s picture of itself.
But I don’t know what the breakdown is or the qualia of it is. Here’s what I do know, the universe is an association engine. If it is a hologram, and I don’t like the term because I am fuzzy on what I mean by “hologram,” but if the universe is something that perceives itself as a whole, then it means that we as thinking beings with our own mental universes can pick out specific aspects, specific things that we’re thinking about, from moment-to-moment.
When we’re driving, we’re thinking about our car, other cars, billboards, street signs, and other stuff like whether we will get laid that night, what we will do at work, etc. All of these are specific ingredients in what we are thinking at any given moment.
At the same time, there’s an overall information sphere that encompasses all of that. We’re association engines because when enough aspects of what we’re thinking about at the moment are associated with something else that we have thought about at some time; information from the past becomes part of what we’re thinking about currently.
That stuff can be words. If we see a picture of a kangaroo on a billboard, we will think the word, “Kangaroo,” because there is enough information from our current thoughts to bring the word, “Kangaroo,” from our thought history. Also, if we saw a billboard with 6 + 6, we would think 12 because we have developed thought structures that are recallable thought structures that are part of math that will give us 6+6.
We have memories that are recallable. Memories feel different from mathematical principles. 7*14 being 98. That feels like a different kind of thought than remembering your 3rd-grade classroom. But they probably have in common that they are pulled up in their various qualities by association.
We’ve built structures that will allow us to pull by association, maybe strings of associations, e.g., 163*162. You’d have to build a bunch of structures. You’d have to go 160*160, 256, so 25,600. Then you’d have to remember that, hold that in your awareness and then add in the products to get it up to 162*163. But all that is probably via association.
You build structures. Then you associate or continue to recall them via associations. Memories come up or feel as if entire different worlds because everything is associated with everything else in the memory. The way the windows in my 3rd-grade classroom had semi-circles at the top, how a lot of Sun came through the windows, how there was a row of books lined-up under the windows, as I became more nearsighted during the year then I lost the ability to read the titles across the room.
All that stuff is brought up via association. That feels like a type of holography. Although, not necessarily lightwave holography, which is a very specific mathematical thing. But the deal is, the general rule is, when you think of enough stuff associated with things that you have thought about in the past, those things come up, depending on how amenable those things are to being recalled, how many hooks there are to get at them.
We’ve discussed this as being a geometric property. That some things are harder to get at than others because they’re less hooked in or are in harder to access parts of space.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/10/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What does this have to do with reincarnation?
Rosner: It has nothing to do with reincarnation. People want to feel as though they have an essence. People want to feel like there is a personality or a psyche. Some underlying framework with which they approach the world that is not dependent on just being a collection of specific memories and bits of knowledge.
It is a set of underlying attitudes. To really blunt that, we all know people are, at base, happy people and other people who are, at base, sad people. People who have a tendency to be more perverse than other people, to view things through humour than other people, to view the world as more dog-eat-dog as other people.
It is a potential mistake to think that somebody’s underlying attitudes are some kind of essence.
Jacobsen: So, all conscious experience and all consciousness do bind to something natural, something material.
Rosner: You mean the material.
Jacobsen: I take the material as a limiting form of the natural.
Rosner: I would go further: consciousness is the result of the material. It is what happens in our brains and the rest of our nervous systems with mostly our brains and a fraction outside. To be simple, consciousness is what happens in our brains.
Jacobsen: It is kind of like occasionally getting a stomach ache in your enteric nervous system.
Rosner: But for shorthand, the focus is on the brain. I am thinking that it is a way to think about it. How does the shape of an information space effect the experience of consciousness?
Jacobsen: You know when you take a mathematical formula with enough variables. But it is different variables represented in different ways. The different things that you’re describing – the landscape, the math of consciousness, the material aspect of the brain, and the information space. To me, I take these as different orientations on the same fundamental ideas.
Rosner: Yes, but at some time, you need to come up with predictions and workable empirical models. Let’s go to something with less nebulousness. We can call this a new session. But let’s talk about neutrinos.
Matter is, as you know, super transparent to neutrinos. It takes a fantastic amount of matter to have any kind of probability of stopping a neutrino, of detecting a neutrino. The neutrino detection experiments in the world, what it takes to detect them; you set up a huge tank.
Some huge block of matter, e.g., a tank of mater, but it has to be gigantic, like a million gallons, with detectors all around the tank. The deal is, quadrillions of neutrinos are passing through the tank every second. You’re only detecting a few neutrinos every second, only a tiny fraction, because neutrinos aren’t stopped by matter, except to only a very tiny extent. The deal is that neutrinos and photons are the only two long-distance particles, which includes anti-neutrinos.
But the difference between neutrinos and photons is that photons are just energy. They have a wavelength, but are only the energy that they consist of. Once a photon is largely exhausted by travelling across the universe and losing energy to the curvature/gravitation of the universe, there’s nothing left. There’s no geegaws; there’s no doodads associated with the photon. Photons are just energy stuff.
But with neutrinos, neutrinos will also lose kinetic energy as they travel across the width of the universe. No matter how much energy a neutrino loses; there’s still the doodad, which is the key – picture a physical key that can unlock a neutron.
If the neutrino is intercepted, or if a neutron is hit and detects the neutrino, if the circumstances are right, then the key in the neutrino will unlock the neutron and turn this into an electron plus a proton plus energy. A neutron can decay into a neutron and a proton plus energy.
But it also decays, spontaneously decays, into an anti-neutrino, which, I guess, can run into a neutrino and then they cancel each other out. The deal is, there is this little scorekeeping key. No matter how much energy a neutrino loses travelling across space.
It is still the key to unlocking a neutron and turning it into a proton plus an electron. So, it seems like neutrinos are the key to the associational mechanism of the universe as an information processing system. Neutrinos travel across the open universe, which we’ve called the active center.
They are mostly not going to be stopped. Most photons travel across the active center of the universe and don’t get stopped. Stars only cover one-trillionth of the night sky. So, most photons go on and on and on. Most photons travel across enough of the universe that they lose much of their energy to the curvature of space.
Most photons that escape from their immediate neighbourhood. Most that make it to the surface of a star only have a one-trillionth chance of hitting the surface of another star, which is similar to the odds of them hitting the surface of a planet. They’re just not gonna and then deplete most of their energy.
The deal with neutrinos is that they are even less likely to hit anything once they make it to the surface of a star. Inside of a star, there are a gazillion collisions every second. I’ve seen calculations as to how many photon collisions it takes for energy to get from the centre of a star to the surface of a star. It has a bunch fo zeroes in it. It is huge.
Once on the surface, nothing is stopping you. It is the same with neutrinos, or more true for neutrinos. They get free of the star where they were released. They just keep going. Until, they hit what we’ve discussed as the outskirts near T=0, where everything is collapsed.
It makes sense that the active center of the universe is stuff not needing to be opened up because it is already open. It is already under conscious consideration. So, it makes sense neutrinos don’t interact with that stuff, which isn’t created or released.
It makes sense that they open up the closed stuff based on the shape of space and the gravitational lensing based on the gravitational associations among the matter in the universe. When most people, or when I think of, all this stuff in the universe. I tend to think of every galaxy sitting in its own gravitational wells rather than walls, filaments, and large-scale gravitational structures that span 20% of the observable universe.
But we should think in terms of filaments because those large-scale gravitational structures determine or help direct the associational process by flooding some parts of the closed outskirts with neutrinos that will blow those things open. We have talked about that, but not in those terms.
It makes sense that neutrinos are the associational engines. They all splatter against the back wall of the universe. The really tight, dense, closed-up neighbourhood of the universe close to T=0 that has the requisite density and probably the requisite energy available for these depleted neutrinos, depleted of kinetic energy.
I do not know enough about neutrino action to know what part a neutrino’s kinetic energy role plays in whether a neutrino is captured or not. Nobody’s done any research into kinetically depleted neutrinos anyway. It is hard to capture a neutrino. I don’t know if anybody has ever researched.
Neutrinos waste so little. If they have any kinetic energy at all, then it means that they are only travelling at 99.99999% the speed of light. I don’t even know how you would even study kinetically depleted neutrinos. I would guess that all the neutrinos created by fusion in that active centre. Almost all of them splash against or crash against the dense, closed-up, inactive or dormant T=0 area of the universe.
They’ll flood certain parts of that around that. A lot of energy available around T=0 because, even if the universe did not big bang, the universe still has the geometry of the Big Bang. Assuming that you could get there, it would be very dense and very hot. You got stuff frozen in time and super hot if you can open it up.
If you can open it up, then it is the same as starting time again. All these neutrinos splash into it. A closed part of the universe opens up and becomes part of the active centre with the energy that’s needed to open it up being available because the universe close to T=0 is dense and super hot.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/10/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The clumpings in different areas. Those amount to really dense interaction areas. There is something relevant and important about the associations there.
Rick Rosner: Yes, but we haven’t made much headway, once you’ve seen an equation written so many times, once you hear or see it, you immediately pick up the symbols automatically. You’ve heard it or remember it, auditorially. One way that you don’t experience it is doing the math, in a sense.
When putting things together, you see as one object that which is multiple objects. You just do the math. There may be another way in which it has been rehearsed in your head so many times. Even without going to the associational trouble of seeing it, or hearing it, in memory or sub-vocally.
When you say stuff within your head, you don’t even really need to think of the final answer. Do you need to think of it? Is it that ingrained? I am beginning to think something is so deeply ingrained in your brain so many times that I am beginning to think that that is part of the landscape, the mental landscape, and so the spatial landscape too.
The information there feels more profound. It will be deceptive phrasing. It feels less specific and deeper. It is like an underlying worldview or set of worldviews expressed. That would constitute something more of a structural thing.
Some deeply rooted framework upon which more specific sensory information are at rest. We have specific memories. Then we have this underlying set of feelings about the world. One suspect or several suspects in discovering those inchoate feelings or attitudes about the world, about stuff in general.
One is that they are like every other specific piece of information because they are based on less information. There’s no difference. That all information is the same, except for the degree to which you have the information.
The picture that you have no idea about will be vaguer than the one that you do have information about. Another way to look at it is that, maybe, another, deeper – I don’t want to say, “Metaphysics,” because it is a deceptive phrasing – underlying vague attitudes that might be a form of deeply held, deeply researched information that is rooted in the gravitational history. This kind of tacit information.
It is this tacit information that is this substratum – or the underlying structure or landscape – upon which the associational structure is built. Almost like a golf course or a pinball field, where – not exactly a pinball field or machine… I don’t know.
It is not the best analogy because you have flat play areas and ramps. I am thinking of an undulating landscape. When you try to remember something, it is like rolling a ball across the landscape. Whatever declivity the ball falls into, that is the triggered memory.
Imagine a rolling landscape with ball holes.
Jacobsen: A really, really complicated billiard balls table.
Rosner: More like a golf course because when you roll a golf ball around it, and when the ball rolls into a divot, then that calls up a memory. The landscape is what helps determine where the ball goes, the hills and valleys.
That landscape is the shape of space. The landscape contains information. The expressed associations as in the ball goes in the divot. That triggers a file to be recalled and presented to awareness. You don’t directly perceive the landscape, but the landscape helps determine what you do perceive.
This may be indirectly perceived because, when you’re rolling a billion balls a day across the landscape, your picture of reality is shaped by the landscape.
Jacobsen: How do all these billions of individual interactions on this landscape, on this virtual golf course, called the universe, come together in terms of non-physical connections between the parts while all part of this weave connected in some manner?
Rosner: Yes, the universe perceives itself via exchanging particles. In other words, the tightness, the thereness, of particles in the universe; I believe there is an argument to be made under the rules of Quantum Mechanics with the lack of fuzziness of everything in the universe due to the universe continually perceiving itself.
It is this particle exchange that determines the universe. It is the Tarantino gunfight. All the particles moving and interacting helps to pin the particles down fairly tightly in space, and in time; it is the universe detecting itself.
Jacobsen: This is in an intimate way with close interactions and far distant interactions.
Rosner: And due to the history of the interactions, that formed the basis for this landscape. The whole idea of fields is to avoid some of the problems of action at a distance. You get a field via the interaction of particles that hit you, directly. You being a particle.
So, something happening 10 lightyears away. It doesn’t influence you until particles from that deal take 10 years or more to travel across to you, and then influence you, directly. There’s no action-a-distance, I think, in an old sense that what happens there, now, is perceived or felt here-now.
Instead, the idea of fields, I think, is that you perceive what happens elsewhere once particles from elsewhere or the net product of particles, for instance – as I believe gravitation is the product of other forces (e.g., electromagnetic force expressed via photons with unbalanced net forces among swarms of photons manifesting gravitational force), but, still, you don’t feel the force until particles have had enough time to travel from there to here.
That’s a more complicated way of saying, “There’s no instantaneous action-at-a-distance.” Everything is mediated by stuff travelling across space. I would guess that the shape of the landscape is or potentially has, or can be, part of the conscious experience. Even though, we may not perceive it directly.
I would also argue: if so, it can be mistaken for a soul. Although, it’s not. I think when people talk about the soul.
Jacobsen: You mean most people here.
Rosner: I mean people who have been exposed to a fair amount of science and are talking about the soul more philosophically than the idea of the soul as defined by a particular religion.
Jacobsen: I interpret that as liberal theology and natural philosophy.
Rosner: People have a sense. You see this in movies. I do not know if people believe in it or want to believe in it. There’s something about reincarnation. There was a movie from 40 or 45 years ago called Heaven Can Wait. You see this in movies.
There’s a bunch of movies like this, like 20 or more, where somebody dies and goes to heave. But they are put through some heavenly bureaucracy.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: They are sent back out as a baby. For that to work, there has to be some essence of the person that is the same that comes back in the movie.
Jacobsen: Is there any part of that that makes any sense, practically, to you?
Rosner: Not exactly, no, it doesn’t make any sense practically. If you obliterate all the information in somebody’s head, if all the information is disallowed, then there’s nothing to be transferred to the baby. But people do have a sense that there is some essence that transfers some specific memories.
I don’t think people have any time to even entertain this kind of nonsense anymore. But I am wondering if the tacit information that is the rolling landscape is perceived within consciousness indirectly and vaguely, as a set of underlying knowledge.
The more I talk about it; the more it sounds like garbage. There is information is in the shape of space and in the distribution of matter. I am wondering how, assuming that IC is right and that our moment-to-moment consciousness can be visualized or manifested in a physical universe and the universe looks like the universe that we live in, we perceive the shape of our information space. Is it rolling hills? If we perceive it, do we perceive it vaguely but deeply?
Something that is less based on specifics. I don’t know. I entertain the possibility, not that it is a soul, but that the information perceived that way has this vagueness that can be mistaken for that bullshitty soul that is the crux of cheesy reincarnation movies.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/10/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The universe at face value. Go!
Rick Rosner: So, I am working on this novel. One of the characters in the novel is working in the same direction that we’re working. I thought about it a little. The last time we talked; we talked about the universe being an associative engine
It is just to say that your mind or brain is an associative engine.
Jacobsen: It is the old phrase everything is connected but some things are more connected than others.
Rosner: Yes! Your brain exists to form connections and then to the best of its ability pull up relevant connections given your present mental circumstances. That is, that which is in your current conscious arena and unconscious arena. Your brain will pull up what it thinks what you think is relevant from its store of associations.
Jacobsen: The puller-upper is par of you, too.
Rosner: Everything is you, right. You could argue, maybe less so your unconscious. What you experience as “you” is your conscious, to some extent your subconscious.
Jacobsen: I would mean in terms of the complete makeup of the person as the psyche.
Rosner: You are everything that comes out of your brain. If limited to what you’re conscious of, there are many things that happen outside of your awareness. But that’s a distinction that we can talk about at some point.
Anyway, your brain works to give you the information that you think that you need. It works by association.
Jacobsen: Is there a better term than association?
Rosner: I don’t know. How else could it work?
Jacobsen: Relationally?
Rosner: Relationally, connectedness. But I mean in terms of a sophisticated information processing entity to work.
Jacobsen: Probabilistic network.
Rosner: Is the only alternative to either give you no information or just random information? It is almost tautological to say that your brain works via association, or either tautological or elementary.
Jacobsen: It makes sense too. Anything associational can be built via networks or can build a network.
Rosner: That’s obvious. The game is to figure out how it does that, what the rules are. In thinking about that, we’ve decided that there’s a lot of shared information in, if you consider the universe as an information processor, or being distributed to the universe via the energy lost due to long-distance particles due to the curvature of space, which that energy goes into space itself and makes things more precisely defined in space and, also, determines where things are in space or where they move because that lost energy is manifested in the form of gravitation.
In the lazy way that I half think about things, that’s the way I decided information is shared on a universe-wide basis. It ignores the obvious other way that information is shared. Here’s where taking the universe at face value kicks in; when photons are received, are detected, are seen, that’s another huge way that information is shared.
That is, photons from hundreds of millions and billions of years away; we are perceiving the universe. It makes sense that the universe also perceives itself that way via photons and, also, tacitly via the loss of energy in space via the travelling of long-distance photons.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/10/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about personality and intelligence flaws in Newton?
Rick Rosner: Newton, according to most sources, was a prick – vindictive, arrogant, and kind of a shit. He lived for a long time. So, he could get revenge on people. He had a long time to work out his grudges.
Did this mess with his physics? I don’t think so. He did a lot of shit. He didn’t revolutionize math alone via Calculus and physics via Universal Gravitation. He ran the Royal Mint. He spent decades to research the Bible looking for hidden messages.
Jacobsen: Did he find anything?
Rosner: I don’t know.
Jacobsen: Do you think it’s even possible or just a fruitless endeavour?
Rosner: No, it is a fruitless endeavour, because guys wrote the Bible. You could argue that they were inspired by the Word of God, but they did not include secret codes. It was translated from Aramaic or whatever to English and from Latin to English.
So, no, there’s no pulling legit signals out of the frickin’ Bible.
Jacobsen: So, it is a dumb endeavour.
Rosner: Well, so is most stuff, apparently, Newton didn’t want or have sex with anybody. Maybe, that freed up time to do shit. He was kind of iconoclastic in terms of behaviour. He got up when he wanted to, laid in bed and thought when he wanted to. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
He had that position. In that position, he had servants who would bring him hot milk, whatever he wanted. I don’t know what his responsibilities were, but he, probably, did mostly whatever he wanted – maybe delivering one lecture a year.
There’s no way he would have put up with teaching classes, which may have freed him up to get shit done.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the general problems in science fiction?
Rick Rosner: Sometimes, or even often, science fiction is built around addressing a specific aspect of the future world. For instance, I just finished The Murder Bot Diaries, which I just finished and highly recommend set about 300 years from now.
It is an AI plus some human brain matter security robot of the future. He is called “Murder Bot.” He calls himself the Murder Bot. I came in on the 3rd and 4th ones. I don’t know the beginning. But he is really good at killing other robots.
He does security. That’s what he does. Actually, it does a semi-decent job of depicting a lot of the aspects of the future. It is really good. I like it. They work this into the culture with Murder Bot taking a lot of time in storage.
A lot of time is spent in transit between space stations or planets. I don’t know if he ever goes down to a planet. Basically, he watches T.V. and movies. So, at least, those are part of the future world. But we never see what like is like on planets.
Basically, he spends a lot of time in space offices and space hotels built around as hubs to space stations. He spends a lot of time on rocket ships and a lot of one novel on a terraforming craft floating above the surface of a planet.
But the world isn’t fully fleshed out because the books concentrate on the adventures of this security robot and the people that he protects. Now, probably, the author has a much more fleshed out view of the world based on all the thinking she had to do to write these four novels.
At the same time, her thinking is not presented beyond the books. If you could sit her down and ask her, “What is like on Earth like? How many planets been colonized? How does your FTL drive work? What were the aliens who brought FTL drive who discovered it? How did we stumble upon the aliens work?”
She would be able to answer a lot of questions about how the world would be. Her thinking does not need to be as laid out and non-contradictory as if she were writing. Maybe, in her other books, things take place on the planets Murder Bot is in; and she has a fleshed out picture of what it is going to be like.
But! That’s not necessarily clear from the Murder Bot series. That’s, often, the case with stuff like Star Trek. Star Trek very seldom goes to Earth. In the first series of Star Trek, the one with Spock and Kirk. If they went to Earth, it was in a different period or going back in time to the Nazi period.
I am not sure. In that, I think there were 88 episodes of the original Star Trek. I am not sure that they ever touched down on planet Earth in whatever fucking year it is supposed to be. So, everything happened on the freaking Starship Enterprise or on some alien planet.
So, they didn’t have to flesh out what life was like on Earth. Or where it was fleshed out, obviously, people are still walking around in human bodies almost entirely augmented. You don’t get augmented human bodies until the Borg enter in one of the series.
By the way, there’s a whole sex scandal that led to Obama becoming Senator from Illinois that involves a borg, Seven of Nine, the actress Jei Ryan. Her husband was a perve and wanted her to do shit. People should look her up and her sex scandal.
She did not do anything pervy, but she was married to a perv. It is interesting how a Star Trek actress’s fucked up marriage led to Obama becoming president. There are all these issues with depicting the future.
Unlike the far future, the near future, if you want to do a good job of it, you need to flesh out the world. I am only starting to try doing it with predicting our devices in a not lazy and extrapolating way. That they will be bigger or smaller. Or that you’ll wear them on your wrist.
Shit that is easy to predict or boring to predict. I did come up with an idea that will happen with our devices that will be fun. Actually, there is some accuracy to it. But I won’t tell it here.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How will these cultural ephemera issues feed into the future?
Rick Rosner: Now, I may just blatantly have people from now just make up shit that they are doing in the future, which I don’t think is weak to libel or slander. I think libel is printed to things in the future because, obviously, you’re not trying to claim that they are doing that shit because it is the future.
It is hard to come up with near future devices that don’t sound bullshitty. But you have to bite the bullet and do it. Uber is a non-sense word. Google is largely a non-sense word. The words that have come into being for devices are all these made-up words.
If you are having to bring new devices into your world, you’re either going to have to make them later versions of existing devices or give them new names. It will be unsatisfying. Because, obviously, you are not going to get it right and people will see what you’re doing.
“Oh, you’re taking semi-non-sense words and having them do something with what is its function, like Lift. You are getting a lift. Or Uber, they are Uber cars. They are everywhere, super cars. The words have a little bit to do with the function.”
So, you just got to do the same thing in making up new products that the actual makers of new products have to do. It is not going to be entirely convincing. You are going to have to hope that what you’re saying about the culture and the events are compelling enough and/or funny enough to overcome the problem of readers saying, “I see what you’re doing.”
There’s an issue of extrapolation by going too far or not far enough, or in fashion. When I was a teen, when I really young, there were two books by a guy named John Brunner, which were near future histories set in the U.S.
We mentioned them before: The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. They were science fiction when science fiction was very niche. They probably didn’t sell that much, as this was before science fiction books became bestsellers.
It was left to science fiction readers rather than everybody. Dune is science fiction. The Lord of the Rings is not but is lumped in with science fiction (as it is fantasy). Brunner’s books probably did not. But they tried to address what the U.S. would look like over the next 10 or 20 years starting in roughly 1968.
I don’t remember many details. But I remember that the one detail that jumps out at me is that, in the future women wore skirts that were so short where you could just barely see their underwear all the time, basically. It was a kind of extrapolation from the miniskirts of 1968.
His additional detail was that the underwear had fake pubes in day glow colors attached to the front of the underwear. It took the extrapolation and added a little bit of a curve to the raw extrapolation, a little bit of a creative filler or doodad.
I like that. Also, when I read it, I was probably 14 or 12. I was super horny.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Anyway, that’s what you got to do. But there’s a truism about science fiction. That everything depicted in science fiction will eventually happen, but it will take longer. This guy writing in 1967/68 has people’s underwear being on view in the late 70s.
That did become a thing. He was right. But it didn’t become a thing until the 21st century, where, now, performers, like Ariana Grande or whoever, just go out on stage in a lyotard. It was correct. But it just took 30 or 35 years instead of 10 years.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You are writing a book now. Why? What makes this different than in the past?
Rick Rosner: The deal is, if I do not write something or a paid guild writing job in the next year, I am going to lose health insurance and will have to retire and then go on retirement guild health insurance. I don’t want to do that.
Because you take a financial hit in retiring so early. Besides, I am not fucking retired because I am still doing stuff. I have something decent, which should sell. I haven’t had my hopes dashed yet. The novel begins a year or two from now and then covers the next 15 or so years.
There is a reason for 15 years. I will not disclose this here. I won’t really disclose many of the specifics about the novel because that would wreck the fun of it. I don’t want to give everything away. I will talk about the issues involved with writing about the immediate future.
One thing is probably now more than ever before. It matters who wins the next presidential election because the character of the country will be extremely dependent on whether we have got that motherfucker in office for the next four years or if we have a democrat.
Also, whether the democrats take back the Senate too, because, at this point, the Republicans are the worst major U.S. political party since, at least, the Gilded Age. They are super corrupt. It is a fantastic period.
By fantastic, I do not mean great. I mean almost unimaginable previously to all this shit happening in a period in American history. It is crazy how shitty things are. The time period I am covering in my novel, what happens or what I can talk about, and what I have to dance around, a lot of it depends on the election of 2020.
That’s one thing that has to be addressed or danced around. Probably, the biggest movie that looks at the near future, the period that I am talking about, of the past 2 to 4 years is Her with Scarlett Johannson and Joaquin Phoenix.
It is very careful to keep its scope limited. Ex Machina is another movie probably set in the near future. It is even more limited taking place in a house with an opening scene in an office. It could be 2 or 3 or more years from now.
But there are no clues because it is just in a house. But Her goes out and is filmed in Singapore, which has futuristic architecture. Everyone wears futuristic clothing, high-waisted pants. But not everything is overall too different.
I haven’t taken a census of the relative number of books from different periods to the near, medium, to the far future. But I think writing about the future depends on the nature of the book. A book set 5 years from now about 3 sisters and their relationship.
You can make it seem like it is set in the future by making it seem like the sisters have a few devices, and taking forms of transportation that are now available. If you keep the focus on how people are affected by modern technology, any author is going to have to dance around the not being able to get the specifics of the future right.
We know the stars of 2032. You can do jokey references to Madonna trying to be sexy 8 years from now, when she is 68. It is a tough thing because the specifics are important in the near future. They come out of the present in which we live.
If you write about 800 years from now, you can put Ryan Gosling in it. You could say this with helps of advanced medical technology. But most aspects of 2350 will not have much of a relationship to the cultural ephemera of now.
Although, it is a mistake that sloppy science fiction writers make, trying to build bridges between now and 800 years from now by having characters interested in shit from now. One character will say, “Have you ever seen Pulp Fiction?” It is like, “Fuck no!” Nobody cares about that stuff.
It is like asking about The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is fucking forever ago and apparently a good novel. So, the farther future has fewer issues of cultural ephemera. One is cultural ephemera as an issue and then carrying it into the future.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why “Born to do Math,” though?
Rick Rosner: I like thinking about the universe, but not as much as I like thinking about the universe. I just don’t do it enough. And I do a lot of non-sense. The tattoo is trying to shame me into doing what I should be doing.
Jacobsen: You were eating jello in high school.
Rosner: Not high school, I was aged 20 years and 11 months. I had an insight into the nature of the universe. Yes.
Jacobsen: What was the feeling?
Rosner: This makes so much sense. This has to be right.
Jacobsen: What sense?
Rosner: That the universe is made out of information. And that if you drew a map of the information in an individual consciousness, it would probably look like and behave like the universe. That information exists within an information space.
That space has rules that are probably the rules of the universe. It clumps up via gravitation. It is shared via long-distance particles, like photons and neutrinos. The more information that you have, then the more precisely defined the information is within its information space.
Just all that.
Jacobsen: Why pursue obsessive IQ testing and memorization of the World Almanac in place of doing the math?
Rosner: Because I am a lazy fucker and made choices that kept me from becoming an academic in the areas of physics, which I probably should have done. The prospect of that just bummed me out. The work that it would take.
The laid that I would not be getting. I looked at the grad. students. All grad. students in physics at my university had their pictures up in a display case. None of those fuckers had hair. I thought, “Do I just want to think so hard that I could the hair off my head?” I was worried.
I probably shouldn’t have been so worried about getting a partner, a girlfriend, or a wife. I was very concerned about that. I couldn’t see how to do that while doing physics, except not in a way that I would get laid a lot.
Which I didn’t, except in modern terms, I had sex with 16 or 17 women. If I were in my 20s now, that wouldn’t be a horrible number because people are having less sex and are less concerned about racking up numbers.
It was a mediocre number for the 80s. I don’t know.
I like my wife. I like my marriage I have with her. Would I have been able to find somebody else who I would be able to be with? It is a crap shoot. My wife and I have been in couple’s counselling for more than a quarter century, not every week, just once a month.
It is not a yelling match every time. There is mostly no yelling. It is a way to do a little bit of work. It is to show that you’re committed to the relationship. I could’ve ended up with somebody else who was just as lovely as my wife.
But maybe, we couldn’t have stayed married. I think half of all marriages end in divorce.
Jacobsen: What are the benefits of marriage over singlehood to you?
Rosner: Having a friend around all the time, having somebody to keep things on track, somebody who allows me to be distracted and who takes care of a lot of stuff. I can take care of some of the stuff, having someone who does nice shit for me and who I can do nice shit for.
Having somebody with whom I have a long shared history, so, we’re not always explaining ourselves to the other person. I have been with Carole since April 5th, 1986. That is more than 33 years. It is nice not to start over.
It is nice economically, as we have talked about before. Society is set up to help couples get ahead more than singles and non-traditionals. When my wife and I got married, we had zero assets. Then we started accumulating fucking assets in the course of things.
It is built into society. We are lucky that my wife at first had decent jobs. Then later, I got good jobs. It is one of the preferred modes of existence in society. So, being in that mode, it lubricates life.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why does everyone have a tattoo now?
Rick Rosner: People could only see mine when I posed for art classes. In the 30 years since I have gotten my tattoo, which is faded and blurry like an old sailor’s tattoo, people have nice, elaborate tattoos or not-so nice elaborate tattoos.
I have OCD about fitness. I am kind of a prick about it. I am a little bit judgy, even though I shouldn’t be I used to say, before I trained myself not to think shit like this so much, “If you are going to decorate your body, do some work to make your body worth decorating.”
It is a shitty thing to say. I trained myself to never say it, except now, and think this much less. We live in an era when people are chunky because food is cheap and delicious. Not because people are weak. Everyone is weak.
I am weak in a huge number of areas. People only have a limited amount of resistance to deliciousness. I probably shouldn’t eat Popeye’s fried chicken, but I found out that I like it. I think it is better than others, especially the tenders or the boneless wings.
Because they aren’t really that greasy. The chicken legs and thighs are greasy. But the wings and the tenders, I take three cholesterol blockers too. I have little resistance to Popeye’s chicken. Anyways, we should talk about why people get tattoos.
Jacobsen: Why did they get tattoos? Who do they get tattoos?
Rosner: You are making a correct point that people get tattoos for a different set of reasons now. Tattoos used to be – 40 years ago – a sign of badassedness, and not playing by the rules of society, and setting apart and not being able to take certain jobs because they wouldn’t allow a tattooed person get hired.
If you went to get hired at a bank and had a tattoo on your wrist, they would say, “No, you can’t be a teller or anything else here creepy tattoo weirdo.” Even in the military, you can’t have a tattoo past a certain line in your body.
If you are in a uniform that has short sleeves, I am not sure if you can have a tattoo past a certain line on your body. If you have a uniform with short sleeves, I am not sure you’re allowed to have tattoos poking out from under there.
If you join the military after getting tattooed up, I am not sure if they will turn you down. I think there is a social media or a sharing aspect to them. The same way people announce themselves on social media, what they like, who they are.
You can share what you’re into via your body. Also, there’s a chance that people want to mark or have a reminder of what they like. Maybe, they want to use their body to mark the passage of time by getting something that’s irreversible or only reversible with great effort and expense.
If you’re getting tattoos to mark the passage of time, don’t do it, because your will do it for you – for free. After having tattoos for 30 or 40 years, it will just make you sadder. Or you won’t care that they now look like shit.[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Born to do Math tattoo. what is it?
Rick Rosner: I only have one tattoo. I got it in late 1988. It says, “Born to do Math.” It’s on my right ankle. It is remind me that I should be doing math because I do a lot of bullshit that isn’t math, and math and physics are really the stuff that I should be doing.
Because I am good in that area, but am really lazy. I also, at the same time, got a couple of dots of eye liner at the corner of eyes to distract from that fact that my hair was going away. But those tattoo dots have long since gone away.
But I still have an old blurry “Born to do Math” on my ankle. The best thing that ever happened with it. That is, the only story that I really have about it. I was modelling for an art class. A guy asks if I am gay. I say, “No. How come?”
He says, “Because you have the tattoo ‘Born to do Matt’ on your ankle.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: That’s just an interesting to have if I indeed had that tattoo. That I have decided that my one purpose in life is to fuck this one specific guy.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] this is an encapsulation of your entire life.
Rosner: [Laughing] yeah, I guess so [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing] this is everything. This is everything rolled into one. Everything else is a variation on this theme.
Rosner: Yeah, I suppose so.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We talked yesterday about Will. We came up with two extra points of contact, at least one main one, which was Confirmatory Will. It was pinning things down.
Rick Rosner: It is using will as a conscious decision. The point we left off on was, ‘Why is consciousness expressed to us in the form of a narrative? What is efficient informationally about us feeling as if we’re part of a story?”
It is not unreasonable to consider humans generalists and adapted to finding regularities in the environment as opposed to more specifically adapted creatures who have less general intelligence to the extent that general intelligence may exist.
I would suggest that narrative framing is an efficient way of structuring experience. That part of general intelligence is identifying situations involving cause and effect, finding the reasons for things, and tracing out the causes and the effects.
That making it part of a story is a compact way of structuring that knowledge.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How was Newton limited by his period, his time?
Rick Rosner: One was observational limitations. Newton as in the 17th century. We didn’t know there were other galaxies until the 1910s or 1920s. It was 250 years away until we knew about other galaxies.
Thing two, he was building an entire cosmology in the absence of any other reasonable cosmology, any other mathematics based cosmology. You had the Copernican system and Kepler’s laws. They were not a cosmology.
They were some rules for planets. Newton came up with Universal Gravitation, which includes his assumption that in an infinite universe; all of the stars spanning across infinity would keep each other from collapsing into a point because the local stars would pull on each other and the other stars would be keeping you stable.
But if you the universe can contract even if the universe is infinite, you can imagine an infinity shrinking. I guess that argument there. Given all Newton had to do, he didn’t have time for that shit. He didn’t have time to consider the greater implications of his cosmology.
To simplify stuff to the point where he was comfortable with it, he assumed a fixed space against which his physics played out. I read that he considered the idea of space and the entire world as determined by the matter within it.
It just wasn’t a fixed space that did shit within but that matter had something to do with the structure of space. I guess that’s possible. If he had considered it, I think he backed away from it because it was too much (!) for him to deal with at the time.
Because there was no precedent for what he was doing. He made simplifying assumptions. It was a lack of information and history of building cosmologies that worked against him. If you gave me time, I could come up with 2 or 3 other limitations.
He didn’t know about atoms. Would have knowing about atoms have helped him? He did work in optics. Atomic knowledge would have helped him there. Light rays are emitted when an electron drops an energy level orbiting around an atom, which means he could have been helped by knowing quantum physics.
All that stuff was more than 200 years in the future. So there you go. Newton.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the limit to the possible sizes of the universe or other informational objects within the conceptual and physics traditional of digital physics in which all that exists reflects the objects, quantities, and dynamics of information?
Rick Rosner: The idea that there is no limit to the size of things, including the sizes of universes. We live in a finite universe. A large thing compared to things that we familiar with that aren’t the entire universe. The universe has 10^85th particles. Stars have 10^57th particles are something like that.
The universe is one million billion billionth the number of particles of the entire universe. So, it is kind of small. The Earth has like 10^50th particles or something. The human body has Avogadro’s number, so like 10^23rd particles or something.
So, we are a lot smaller. Even though, the universe seems fantastically big. It is. Under IC and the possible turtle stack of universes containing other universes, it seems like there is an idea that a universe can be any finite size, which a) seems obvious.
We live in a big universe. The rules of physics do not seem to preclude a smaller universe or a ibigger universe. Although, we do not know the rules of physics that preclude the size of a universe. There’s nothing saying a universe could not be a billion ties bigger.
That’s thing a), the universe can be bigger. Thing b) is the universe is the universe is rather self-balanced in terms of its gravitational energy. Although, there’s now the expanding universe, which has fucked with an open and a closed universe. It seems very closely balanced to having the amount of matter within it.
I guess, that includes dark matter and some other shit. It is precisely or exactly balanced being an open and a closed universe. That is, a universe that will keep on expanding forever, but just has enough energy it needs to do that.
If it even had a billionth less expansive energy, it would, at some point, run out expansive energy and then start collapsing into itself. IC doesn’t entirely believe that that’s by accident. It is more that it is a property of information.
However, the universe does seem to be precise in its dynamics. So, you could argue that, at some limit, larger than our universe it becomes impossible to have a universe or a stable universe that can expand uniformly, at least apparently uniformly, in a Big Bang way and have a bunch of local collapses and fold into itself like a big piece of paper.
Because it has a bunch of anomalies in the states or densities of matter. Assumption A is that you can any size universe. Question B, “Really? You can have a universe that is an octillion times bigger and still get the matter arranged in such a way that it doesn’t become unstable and just quickly unfold into itself.”
Part A is you can have any size universe with Part B as a retort of “really?” Anything short of infinity. We postulate that not only is any size universe possible. But if you’re cataloguing possible universes, the frequency with which different sized universes show up – I don’t know what “show up” means because we only live in one universe and only one universe showed up.
But if you are counting universes somehow, you can still get any sized universe because there may be a principle that says any sized universe can exist. But if the likelihood of that universe drops to zero, then it can’t exist. The principle that any sized universe can exist includes that there is a non-zero probability of any sized universe existing.
This leads to another weird infinity. If any sized universe out to infinity has a non-zero chance of existing, then that implies that there is an infinity of possible universes. Is that determining infinity? Or is it an infinity that seems okay? I have no idea. I don’t even know, as I said, what that means in terms of counting or making a zoo of universes. That’s pretty much the end of that whole deal.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Another possibility if you’re thinking of really, really big construction projects. You’d probably be thinking of massive manipulation of gravitation to move stuff around.
Rick Rosner: I think there are some hard and fast rules to physical dynamics. The speed of light might be one thing, or the travel faster than the speed of light.
Jacobsen: I would think of contracting space to move faster than the speed of light for transportation through space.
Rosner: They talk about warp drives. That would require the large scale manipulation of matter. I think there are many properties of the universe that are really hard to get around, so that you don’t get miracles with faster than light travel being a miracle, kind of.
If civilization is able to last long enough to travel across a galaxy, it might have the power to manipulate or move large objects, but in a way that would take advantage of natural phenomena because purely being able to engineer whatever you want will run you into limits on what you want to do.
If you want to construct a quasar, for instance, a civilization may be able to do that, but it might take, at the fastest, 30 to 40 million years. So, a civilization might want to take advantage of things that are either already quasars or are close to being quasars.
If you wanted to hose down some part of the universe, or if you wanted to propel some things somewhere, you might want to use structures that already exist. Things can’t suck over all areas of its surface. You want to get something that has things that can escape, like with the jets that might be able to rotate over a period of millions of years.
The jets point in the direction that you find helpful. That, to us, not knowing shit about any of this, just wildly speculating, the direction of quasars don’t indicate anything to us, let alone anything about intentionality. However, if you did a large-scale sky survey and found weird regularities in the direction of massive quasars that are spraying stuff, then, at the very least, you can speculate about causes.
Again, the end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have been talking a lot about new forms of order on and off tape.
Rick Rosner: I addressed the fact that there are different forms of order that look vastly different, like the order of biological life versus the order in the universe. Where every point in the universe has an average redshift versus the rest of the universe, or versus other points in the universe, every point in the universe has an average redshift of the objects near that point.
The objects surrounding a point within 20, 30, 100, a million, light years of a point in the universe when observed from any other point in the universe have an average redshift from whatever point they’re being observed from.
That redshift is going to depend on what point that redshift is being observed from. But the objects, the large objects that are being observed tend to have velocities that are not too far off from the average apparent velocity of that region of the universe.
In other words, everything in the universe appears to be expanding with an expansion or an apparent expansion vector that isn’t too far off the expected expansion vector for that point in the universe. That is, there is a form in the universe.
The universe has largely sorted itself out. Where you can imagine a more compact universe in which stuff is flying every which way, but if you allow enough time to pass, and if you allow the expansion of the objects and their velocities will tend to organize the recessional vectors of every large object, so, you have fewer and fewer collisions over time.
Then everything will have a central explosion like a firework and everything will move in roughly straight lines from the central point. Within the initial bag of explosives, there could have been chaos within the initial deal, where things are burning and flying around with stuff crashing into other stuff.
It is only when you have the collision, the number of collision per unit time declining and then everything appears to be flying out in an orderly fashion. The collisions more early than late, that is a form of order. It is much different than the form of order that you would find in a possum.
They are both forms of order in the universe. I would suggest that all those forms of order fit under or can be fit under an umbrella of increasing order. There are stories to be told that we have not found out yet. We do not have any inkling about how these forms of order on large scales of space and time – how they interact with each other.
But we can look for evidence of local order, of the order that evolves, on planets, say. Maybe, it goes off a planet and starts re-engineering the nearby areas in the solar system or forming non-evolved order.
When evolved life starts making artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence is constructed order. You get another form of order. I believe all these forms of order are potentially important to the story of the overall universe.
We just don’t have an inkling of how far that stuff goes. But we can look for evidence or can, at least, imagine looking for evidence. It shouldn’t be that hard. According to IC, the universe is older than it appears to be.
So, it is easy to make a list of where to look and what to look for, for large objects that might be bigger than the apparent age of the universe. We still need to do that. It is also possible – and some science fiction writers have occasionally written about this on the most superficial level – to imagine a civilization trying to construct a galactic empire.
Star Trek has it. Star Wars has it. I didn’t watch enough Battlestar Galactica. You could imagine human-type galactic empires constructed with the help of a faster than light travel being possible. But it is also possible beyond the really simplistic idea of that kind of empire.
It is the idea that sufficiently advanced civilizations, for their own purposes and perhaps for greater purposes – even without faster than light drive, might take it upon themselves to travel across a galaxy and to develop powerful technologies to stella-form to mess with stars, to galacti-form or mess with galaxies, to cosmo-form or mess with the structure and stuff of the universe in order to raise the probability of its survival on some vastly huge time scale.
For instance, at various times, we have talked about parts of the universe like galaxies and galactic clusters fusing material and running out of material and then burning out, and then falling out of the active center of the universe to be reactivated later.
But let’s say there is some civilization that does not want to do that any longer, and wants to manipulate matter to reduce the possibility of a collapse, if a) IC or something like IC is more accurate than a Big Bang or a solely Big Bang type universe, and if we start to understand what galactic engineering might look like, we might look for indications of it or proof of it.
For example, is the universe more smoothly distributed in its apparent recessional velocities than the apparent history of the universe would indicate? Has there been intentional smoothing? I would assume that observers of the future will look for stuff like that.
That’s pretty much the end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Are there any intellectual predecessors who we should be giving more credit?
Rick Rosner: There are all the IC people. It from Bit like Wheeler and Ed Fredkin and a bunch of people whose names I do not know because I have not read up on it much lately or at all. All the universe as giant computer people.
These are part of this. The universe as information people are part of this. Then information theory people that include Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon who are part of this. You cannot have a theory of the universe as information if you do not have a theory of information as a thing.
It helps if you have a mathematical model of it, which is what Wheeler and Shannon gave us. They had predecessors. But I don’t know who they are. Also, certain science fiction writers who are part of this. I would think that Larry Niven at some point.
There have been a series of books that include civilizations hiding out in black holes trying to get past some choke point in the universe, like the collapse of the universe, by hiding out in a black hole. Ideas like that. That civilizations can interact with the universe on a large scale is a predecessor to some of that stuff that we’re thinking.
Anyone who has tried to deal with infinite recursion in trying to think about the universe, which is the old joke of “turtles all the way down.” That we have cited a gazillion times. That doesn’t even cover it all. The theorists of consciousness – both right and wrong, including the more modern ones like Max Tegmark and anybody who thinks they have a theory.
People like Minsky. Anyone who thinks they have an information-based view of consciousness. Including those who think that consciousness and examine how consciousness works, the brain researchers who found that a lot of conscious decisions happen after the unconscious decision that initiated the action that was apparently decided consciously.
So yes, all of those people and more.
Jacobsen: Who has a different approach similar to IC approach that would still be a possibility, a standard materialistic framework?
Rosner: I think all the It from Bit people are all a little bit off. I think information resides in the system of particles that we have – protons, neutrons, quarks, photons, neutrinos. But those things don’t easily equate to bits, to the computer equivalents.
They can’t really be called equivalents because they don’t really equate. The particle system that occupies the natural world, comprises the natural world, is able to contain information, but, perhaps, not in the neatest bit-wise, byte-wise, way that computers contain information.
Lately, with Lance, my brand has been being underinformed. Because Lance will attack me ’cause he knows a lot of stuff. But what he knows are these bullshit conservative arguments, I will not be equipped to respond to fight them and call them bullshit, except to call them bullshit – other than that they come from the conservative side and support bullshit points.
They are probably cherrypicked and have been spun to ignore a lot of the points that are being made, but because I am underinformed. I do not know what the legitimate counterpoints are. I will say that my brand is being underinformed.
Jacobsen: When does physics become chemistry?
Rosner: When you have enough constituents, when it becomes easier to talk about what is going on in chemical terms rather than in the bare bones physics terms, it is the same for when physics becomes biology.
There are a lot of biological processes that you can talk about without going all the way down to the quantum principles. You can talk about stuff that a 3rd grader might know. That hemoglobin in the blood captures oxygen molecules and carries the oxygen to the body to use in burning fuel.
I just said that without mentioning any quantum mechanical principles. But I know that the hemoglobin molecules do some weird quantum mechanical stuff as they snap open and shut. When they’re shut, they accept no oxygen molecules.
But an open and expanded hemoglobin molecule has four oxygen atoms that it has captured, the guy who owned the only gym that I ever belonged to; he was a researcher in hemoglobin. He was trying to capture hemoglobin molecules at the time of capturing the four oxygen atoms.
That was in the 70s, maybe even the 60s. They could never find an intermediate hemoglobin molecule. It was either collapsed with no oxygen atoms or expanded with four oxygen atoms. There was probably some quantum stuff going on there that they did not have the technology to get it at that time, in the 60s and 70s.
I do not know the state of it now. I am sure there is a lot of quantum stuff going on with oxygen capture with hemoglobin. There are many things that you can say without going into the quantum mechanics of atom capture.
Similarly, all of these other disciplines become these disciplines when it is easier to think about and talk about them without going to the base level quantum mechanical phenomena.
Jacobsen: What does this modern understanding of the world – in quantum terms, in information terms – do to all these traditional religious views? This materialistic view of the world now.
Rosner: We talked about this before. You talked about the God of the Gaps. The more the materialistic view of the world accounts for things, then the fewer things have room for mysticism and religion, except as moral systems and as overarching metaphysical systems.
Let’s talk more about some of the aspects of the growth of order.
Jacobsen: Sure, we can even pivot. If we look at some of the standard answers in some of these older philosophies, they try to account for things in vague, mystical, and non-technical ways. How does an IC approach to order differ from them? What is an example of it?
Rosner: An IC approach to order draws huge connections between order and information. The more order, the more information, the more matter, time, and space, it is all part of the same package. As we were discussing in the last session, it, maybe, allows for the growth of local order – planet-based, evolution-based – as part of the overall increase in the order of the entire universe, especially when local order expands to mess with the macro affairs of the universe.
That all processes, which increases order, increase the precision and fidelity with which the information is modelling something or computing something. It makes the universe more fine-grained and more accurate in doing whatever tasks it’s doing.
The contributions of local order, planet-based, are small until the civilizations that thus arise start messing with the macro features of the universe, which means that it might be a falsifiable thing or an idea, a principle. I don’t know because IC isn’t far enough along. It might be that IC implies the long-term survival of civilizations and the increasing reach of civilizations across solar systems and then parts of galaxies, and then entire galaxies, and not exactly empires.
Because empires along the lines of Star Wars do not feel computational. Maybe, we are being fooled by the computational trend that civilization has taken in the Computer Age. But that seems like a permanent trend.
You would kind of think that the large-scale movements and expansions through galaxies would be in pursuit of computational goals. For instance, if the scale of space is shrunken and usable without obliteration in the blackish hole that is in the center of a galaxy, then you, maybe, want to get to the center of the galaxy and understand the physics of it.
Because if the speed of light stays roughly the same and the scale of the universe is shrunken in a huge blackish hole, or if the speed of light outside of the blackish hole is the same but the scale of space is shrunken, then this means that you can get more matter in a smaller space, more precise matter, and you can do computation faster because, eventually, in non-shrunken space computers run into limitations because of the delays in signals travelling through the computer.
For example, if you build a Dyson Sphere that is one big computer at the radius surrounding the Sun, that means that it is 500 or so seconds – that radius is 500 or so light seconds. That is, to send the signal from the surface of the Earth to the Sun takes about 8 minutes, in a Dyson Sphere that is a computer that has a radius of 8 light minutes is going to have significant computational delays among the various nodes of that huge ass computer; but if you can find an area of space where the speed of light or the speed of signals are the same and the scale of space is shrunk 100-fold, then you can reduce computational delays by 99%, which an advanced civilization might be interested in.
An advanced civilization might be interested in facilitating the survival of the structures of the universe, so that it doesn’t get crushed in some kind of collapse as galaxies run out of fusible matter and begin to collapse. A falsifiable claim or a falsifiable test might be to look for it, instead of terraformed, stellar-formed, or galacti-formed bodies in ours and other galaxies, which would be something at the center of the galaxy.
We wouldn’t know what we were looking for. But would we be able to see the signs of engineering? Is the flatness of the universe – the closeness of the universe forming, though I do not know how this has been adapted with recent models of cosmic expansion – associated with this? I grew up with the knowledge of the universe balanced between being completely open and completely closed.
It had this precision of not being to open or closed to continue expanding forever or to collapse in on itself. Could this flatness be a consequence of the information or simply the behaviour of an expanding structure? Because expanding space tends to kind of smear anomalies versus the average recessional or apparent recessional velocity of every point in the universe, the anomalies of local bodies tend to fade away as those bodies use their excess bodies to travel over large amounts of time to travel to where their recessional velocity matches the apparent velocity of that part of the universe.
It is like a firework. An explosion goes off, say a firework goes off at five different points and five different explosions in the shell that goes into the air, and immediately after five things explode, you have things hitting each other.
But as the explosion goes on, the points at which things hit each other are at a smaller radius than the stuff flying outward. You end up with something that looks fairly regular and spherical as everything flies outward.
The difference in the original locations – the five bags of explosives – become less and less consequential as the radius of expansion get bigger and bigger proportionately to the original explosion of the explosive shell. So, the big banginess of the universe could be a natural consequence of expansive dynamics.
Or it could be a consequence of the consistency of information, or it could be something that could be aided in some areas by galacti-forming, which is a dumb term that I made up. There should be a better word with better Latin. But civilizations nudging large objects, e.g., black holes, stars, clusters, using the technology that might be at hand for a civilization that has been around for 200,000,000 years to smooth out the universe, where you don’t get collapses.
I don’t know what galacti-forming might look like. It might look fairly natural. When you’re dealing with super large objects, it is the problem of “how do you deal with an asteroid that may crash into the Earth?” The kinetic energy of an asteroid is such that you can’t just bat it away even by shooting a bunch of nuclear weapons at it. You have to find it when it is far enough away that your nuclear weapons, rockets, or whatever, can nudge it slightly, so the slight nudge is sufficient to have it miss Earth.
Because you don’t have enough energy to fight the asteroid when it is ten minutes from crashing into Earth. Similarly, you can’t just push black holes around. But a quasar is a type of black hole, I think, where the radiation escapes the poles. You might be able to nudge the black hole around so the jets of radiation or the streaming matter coming out of the poles of a quasar point in a direction you like. So, it hoses down something else that you would like to mess with.
But that kind of messing with megastructures. I don’t know how we would look for that. I don’t even know if it would be reasonable to look for it. But it is a possibility in a science fictioney way.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we are talking about order, persistence, etc., etc.
Rick Rosner: The most fashionable model of brain and model, as far as I understand – which doesn’t mean that it is wrong and so it is probably mostly right, is that the sensation, computation, consciousness, qualia, and so on, comes from the – the idea is that the – function is to model the external world predictively that lets the organism anticipate what happens next and then assume the best stance relative to what happens next.
Jacobsen: Also, I want to make an unequivocal statement from you. I will put it in the form of a rhetorical question to just clear the water or air if anybody is ever reading this: does the mind not exist independent of the brain and its operations?
Rosner: Yes. 100 years ago, 80 years ago, 2,000 years ago, if you asked people who thought about it all, you would get answers that indicated that the mind is not something necessarily magical or spiritual, but somehow made of different stuff and not generated by material, the physics, and the biology of the brain and the body in general.
Jacobsen: The structure and dynamics of the brain do not exist independent of the mind and vice versa.
Rosner: 300 to 200 year ago, you would get the idea that the brain is a receiver or intermediary between the magical mind stuff and the material world. That the mind was not a product of material processes. It worked within stuff separate from the material world.
Whereas in the last 50 years, it has become increasingly accepted that the mind is a product of the physical and biological processes. Although, there might have been a few who speculated that this is the case. They were by far the minority until some time into the 20th century.
You talked about the God of the Gaps. Science keeps squeezing out where magical stuff can happen. Science operates on most of the board. There are fewer and fewer places for the mystical mind stuff to exist.
Jacobsen: Yes, I agree.
Rosner: People think that the brain works to get you ready to address the world by modelling the world, by making you half aware of what might happen next. In some instances, you’re getting ready for what is going to happen next.
You see a car coming towards you. It is two feet away, or a fist is coming at your face. You jumped off a six-foot wall. What is going to happen, the fist, the ground, the car, are going to be making contact. This is the main focus now.
It is an inevitable event. But in general, what you’re anticipating is a bunch of different possibilities along with different time scales, what you’re going to have for lunch, what happens if you go in for a kiss, you need to make another rent payment.
It depends on what your focus is. You’ve got a kind of a rough awareness of a bunch of possibilities in different spheres of your life. Your brain tries to take the best stances towards all those events, which depends on the quality of your senses, the quality of your thinking.
That is dependent on, among other things, the size off your brain, the sophistication of the connections of the various components of your brain, your brains ability to hold onto memories and analyze new sensations, the quality of your sensory apparatus, which mostly depends on the quality of your equipment and the sophistication and durability of your processing equipment.
You’ve got sensory equipment. You’ve got processing equipment. The various measures that you can apply to this stuff will determine the quality of the model of the world. Ours is better than a grasshopper. A grasshopper has a real half-assed picture of the world.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: It is ditto for a worm. There’s no way an amoeba is conscious. Unless, you’re willing to extend consciousness down with some index. If our measure was 1, the amoeba’s would be 14 digits to the right of the decimal point to the point where that doesn’t even count as conscious.
The quality of modelling the world is proportionate to the quality and quantity of the equipment. Then if we’re looking at the universe as an information map, as a physical embodiment of the information within a vast awareness, a vast information process system, then there are measures of the material world that have something to do with the quality of that information system and whatever it is modelling, assuming that it is doing the same job that we think our minds and brains are doing. Right?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Some of the numbers might be indicative of the scale and quality of that model are that there are 10^80th or 10^85th particles in the universe. That there are 10^11th galaxies each containing 10^11th stars with each star containing roughly something 10^60th protons or neutrons, or whatever.
The scale of a proton, it has a wavelength of – I haven’t looked it up in a long time – one ten billionths of a centimetre is its deBroglie wavelength. It is very not fuzzy. The extent to which a proton is fuzzy is space or is indeterminate is teeny, teeny. It is to one ten billionths of a millimetre, say.
All the various matter is space is precisely located. You’ve got all kinds of matter. It is precisely arranged. It is clumped in a bunch of clumps – 10^22nd clumps, 10^22nd stars in the visible universe. Clumping is a measure of the kind of development of the universe.
The universe is one mushy thing is not very differentiated. A universe that is clumped into 10^22nd clumps with each clump as a star is highly differentiated. You could argue that the differentiation or the clumped upness of the matter is a measure of the degree of fidelity of the universe and the information that it contains.
So, you can also argue that in a lot of universes that order is increasing. There are processes that we have talked about that contribute to the overall increase of order or the overall increase of information within the universe.
That is the long-range sharing of information, the sharing of information across billions of light years. Because most photons, once they escape their immediate environment or once it gets out of the Sun – I do not know how long an event of nuclear fusion takes to get from the center of the Sun to the outside of the Sun. But it has to ping pong a lot. (I haven’t looked it up in a long time. So, I don’t know how long.)
It is going to keep going for many billions of lightyears because there is less stuff for it to run into than for it not to run into. When you look at the night sky, it is dark. I think that is Olbers’ Paradox, which was figured out by Edgar Allen Poe.
The question, “Why if the universe if filled with stars when you look at the sky at night is it dark?” Because if there is an infinity of stars, then, at night, when you look at the night sky it should be as bright as the surface of the Sun.
Poe solved the riddle by saying, ‘It just means that there are a finite amount of stars and the universe has only been around for a finite amount of time.” By the same idea, a photon will not run into stuff. If it does run into something, it is going to be way the frick far away, because the universe is mostly empty or mostly a near vacuum.
It is comprised of stuff or space that is going to allow the photon to keep going. Assuming, and we have talked about how it is not unreasonable to think, that the universe we see needs an armature external to the universe, to keep track of the information in the universe, to store it, in the way that our minds need a brain to be the physical hardware that holds or exists in the state that reflects the information in the mind.
Assuming that the armature of the hardware is competent and is not degrading, then the processes in the universe, the large scale sharing of information should increase the amount of information in the universe and make the universe even more intricate over time.
Photons going on and on and then losing their energy to the curvature of space, which is the same as losing information is the same tacitly shared information with the wider universe. That is a fairly simplistic process.
A photon gets emitted and just goes. That is not that many steps. It is a simple process. Then you have order generating processes on places like the Earth where things become more orderly and then more complicated.
They evolve and we evolved, and life on the surface of the planet evolves across hundreds of millions and billions of years in a local fashion. A planet that was just not ordered cools down becomes an order generating system.
Then the question becomes, “What does this local increase in order have to do?” But another question before that, “What does an increase in order within an information processing system look like?”I would say that it looks like what has been going on with our televisions.
You just have a decrease in the graininess, an increase in precision, and an increase in the fidelity with which something is modelled. Right? You go from a picture that consists of a hundred pixels to something that consists of a hundred million pixels.
The model of the world becomes more detailed and accurate in the way the mind or the information processing system is not even necessarily aware of. When I was a teenager, I did a lot of a stupid shit. My model of the world was sufficiently underdeveloped that any time that I came up with a plan, then it was likely to not work in the way that I intended.
Now, I am 40 years old. My plans are less ambitious. I have a higher success ratio with the things that I intend to do. I would guess that my model of the world after 40 years of gaining experience is more accurate and more detailed.
But on a moment to moment basis, I have not noticed an increase in accuracy of my model of the world. I have not a degradation of my sensory apparatus. My eyes are blurrier. My experience does not feel more accurate, detailed, and precise than when I was a dumb teenager.
But my experience of the world and my model of the world probably has become much more accurate and detailed and informed by past experience. So, we can guess that there is a fair chance that the entity that is embodied in the information in the universe may not even be aware of a gradual increase in the information that it contains.
To get back to local manifestations or increases in order where life evolves, perhaps even beyond planets if the life on planets starts building and extending civilization into the solar system and perhaps beyond, the question, “Does this local stuff have much to do with the increase or the overall increase in information in the universe?’
My guess, “Yes, but not much, until, the local increases in order become less local.” Life on a planet is piddling compared to the overall scale of the universe. Perhaps, only appreciably impacts the overall order of the universe when it goes big, which it has time to do.
Let’s say life when it reaches a certain level of sophistication is likely to persist or it is going to develop ways to not be wiped out. I am reading a book called Falter by Bill McKibben, who is a writer on ecology.
He says humanity is about to destroy the world so badly that the human enterprise is doomed. I don’t buy that. I think technology will save humans from themselves. I would also say that humans and the related descendants 500 years from now will be much more likely to survive for a very long time than we are.
An increase in sophistication once you get over some humps means that that civilization might go for thousands and even billions of years. It gives those civilizations time, perhaps, to involve themselves with the large scale affairs of the universe.
At which point, those local increases in order will be much less local and much more contributory to the overall increase in order within the universe, much more fine-grained in helping the universe in its reactions to information and to sensory input – and to the equivalent of thought.
All without the proposed awareness that is embodied by the information that we think the universe is made of. All without that awareness being very aware. There is not a strong coupling between the events, that matter based events, in the universe that we see on the local level.
The trivia of what the matter is up to and what the overall universe is aware of.[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you consider more, you have a richer decision tree. Each node will have more detail on the decision tree, in terms of the more thought out things, more thought out decisions. What about those ones that are more well-formed?
Rick Rosner: We were talking about this before we started taping. You were talking about the “I meant to do that reaction.” It is kind of part of the confirmatory will, I guess. You forget all of the other things that you may have done and then agree with what you did, and then forge that you were of more than one mind.
That goes along with the “I knew that was going to happen” reaction. Where, sometimes, I will be doing something. I will drop a cup. I will do some sort of bobble. I am pouring something, then something goes wrong.
I think, “You a-hole. You asshole. You knew that was going to happen.” So, you are of more than one mind when you’re picturing what is going to happen. When you’re anticipating what happens, you forget; you only remember the half-formed thought, “This was going to happen.”
You forget a number of different semi-pictured possibilities and only remember the one that happened. Part of your brain may realize what happened and is telling the rest of your brain what happened before you get more sensory information.
Another part of your brain may tell another part before your senses say it. That’s a goofy kind of explanation. You’re picturing what might happen and what happened before you’re fully aware of what happened.
That could lead to the reaction, “You knew that would have happened. Why the hell did you let that happen?” It is two things. Your brain anticipating what will happen. Your brain perceiving what happened at different rates.
One job of consciousness or the main job of consciousness is to consider holistically – that is, using all easily available means of thought to consider – problems that cannot be considered unconsciously. The stuff that gets tossed into the conscious arena to be made aware of.
And once it is in the conscious arena, you have all these analytic tools including words, dynamical analysis, what’s likely going to happen, and all sorts of dynamics including interpersonal dynamics and physical dynamics. “What is going to happen if I lose my shit and punch this person?”
Depending on the person, you may anticipate that they fall over or that they don’t fall over. That they sue you. That they hit you back. That they call the cops. This is all based on physics, on perspective. If you throw a punch at somebody 40 feet away, nothing will happen because your fist won’t reach.
So, you use all your analytical subsystems to analyze the current situation and your actions in that current situation when those actions in your current situation require higher level analysis. We can do another session as to why consciousness takes the form of a narrative in our minds.
Jacobsen: We are our stories.
Rosner: But what is helpful to us in feeling like we’re living a story that can be pictured as a movie or a novel, or a linear recounting of thoughts and actions and incidents? Why do we have to weave everything into a story? What is helpful about that?
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s true. In this model, they aren’t too dissimilar either. One has more time to come to more options to select among those choices as opposed to one.
Rick Rosner: According to modern experiments, modern decisions kind take place after a lot of stuff has happened, especially with regards to split-second decisions. The way to understand this is a really popular model of what your brain is for right now.
It is to help you prepare for what is next, to help you anticipate, to help you act based on what your brain predicts will be occurring based on its model of the world, which is developed through thought and perception.
I believe a lot of brain people would agree with the fashionable idea. That, whether you’re aware of it or not, consciously aware of it or not, your brain has a set of possibilities in mind for what might happen in the immediate future and in the less immediate future.
The best way or one good way to see this is to see or imagine what you’re doing when you’re driving. You have a bunch of ideas in mind. The light is going to turn yellow. Some dickhead is going to cut in on you…
Jacobsen: …[Laughing]…
Rosner: …somebody is going to brake unexpectedly. A ball is going to roll out. A kid is going to run in front of you. A tire is going to blow out. There are a bunch of possibilities that you are more or less conscious of.
Your brain is constantly teeing up a bunch of possibilities for you to be ready for. In addition, it is also teeing up responses to those possibilities. When something happens in an instant, you react pre-consciously. Your brain takes the best spontaneous action before you even have time to be consciously aware of the action.
You have what, I guess, I call Confirmatory Will. That, as enough time passes for you to be aware of everything, it appears that you are confirming your action. Somebody cuts in on you. You suddenly decide to either swerve out of your lane or slam on your brakes, or yell, or something.
It appears to you afterwards that you decided to do that in response to a rapidly unfolding situation. You feel as if it was part of your conscious awareness, or maybe you don’t. Maybe, you feel as if it was part of your conscious awareness.
Maybe, you feel as if it was automatic. But it gets incorporated into your consciousness before you had time to think about it, and make a conscious decision.
Jacobsen: This is like hindsight confirmation.
Rosner: Yes, you did something. You confirm what you did. Most of the time you don’t even realize at what level of consciousness that it occurred. It allows for the possibility of Contradictory Will. Where your immediate spur of the moment reaction is to do one thing, in the split second to make the decision, you modify the action.
When people used to do something stupid in traffic, I used to yell a certain word that I no longer use.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] what is it?
Rosner: If somebody cut in on me, and if I would yell, “You fucking… [no longer used word]”, I am able to stop myself. It is a tendency to stop the spur of the moment action over the years.
Jacobsen: Maybe, it is like the long consideration of willing something. Those ones you can be more rounded about in terms of who that person really is. These split-second changes; you’re bending a will a slight bit to another direction rather than a complete 180.
Rosner: Yes, everything is felt that you decided to do as a default state. You touch a hot stove and dive back. Nobody says that they decided to do that. Or you wake up to find somebody standing next to the bed.
You do a startle reaction. You jump. Nobody says, “I decided to jump.” Beyond things like that, the flow of consciousness is such that you’re deciding everything that you decide to do.
Jacobsen: There is an evolutionary reasoning for it, probably. In the sense that, you don’t want to be consciously thinking about everything. If you’re a pianist or a violinist, you want things automated, so you can more emotively express yourself in the moment, in performance.
Rosner: Yes, we signed off on a lot of stuff. We signed off on walking, on breathing, on the hand gestures that we might make when we’re talking and not thinking about what our hands might be doing. We decided through long experience that we don’t need to think about those things.
Those don’t enter the realm of conscious decision-making. If a mean girlfriend says, “You look like a dork,” or, “Your posture is terrible.” You may think about how you move through the world.
Jacobsen: On the one hand, it is informed will, approved will, and confirmatory will, then contradictory will.
Rosner: Your unconscious staging of actions wanting to push you in one direction, then you actively kind of move into another. Although, you could argue the conscious interference with the staging is your brain setting yourself up for the future.
So, that there is no difference between the conscious interference and the staging. It is all part of the same dialogue. Your split second reaction is contradicted by you being conscious about it. You are not confirming the staging. You are deciding to do something else.
Jacobsen: There is also the thinking about something at the start and then making a choice along those lines.
Rosner: A lot of my reactions take a long time to play out. I have a do the wrong thing and a do the right thing. I walk by a panhandler. I think, “No, I don’t want to give money to people.” I’m like, “Really? Am I that kind of dick? You haven’t given to someone in a long time.”
By that time, I am 4 or 5 steps past the person. Then I go and give in to the decision and give them a buck. That whole process takes several seconds. It is a long term playing out of staging. What do you do when you see a homeless person asking for money?
My default is generally not to give. Then there is the contradictory will that places this in a context of being kind of a dick if you never give. How long has it been since you have given? Then asks you, “Are you reflexively more inclined to give to others?” This whole thing plays out over several seconds.
I will make a more conscious decision over several seconds to walk on or to give them a buck. That whole thing is a longer and more involved kind of process. It is the same process as the dialogue between staged reactions – reactions that you’re ready to have in a tenth of a second – and more considered reactions.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, so, we’ve been talking off-tape about will and willpower.
Rick Rosner: We don’t have to go to straight to IC with this stuff because this is a lot of stuff just being worked on in neuroscience or the hottest term for doing a direct physical observation of the brain and conscious processes.
IC intersects with the stuff. But generally when we talk about this stuff, there is agreement. For our purposes, and I think the brain people would agree to the extent that they agree at all, “will” can be used to refer to consciously mandated decisions.
That is, that you think about something consciously. You decide on a course of action.
Jacobsen: Is this the only formulation of it? Is there another logical progression to call something still will? You think about something. You decide.
Rosner: We can talk about will before information theory. Information theory didn’t start until 1948.
Jacobsen: That’s a good point. There was no formal definition of information in a mathematical framework before.
Rosner: No, then Clause Shannon developed the theory at Bell Labs.
Jacobsen: Also, Norbert Weiner helped with the probability theory development. I have a copy of the work by Shannon.
Rosner: Before that, 18th and 19th century, it was kind of the feeling, I believe, based on not much knowledge of a soul or a spirit juice existent in some semi-independent realm that decided things, “I am going to do this.” The “this” was an expression of self.
The self was somewhat connected to soul. It was connected to the mind, which was this thing that was not necessarily part of the material world. It was operating on the material world and you, as a material being.
It was the puppeteer operating your part of the material world from a different realm or using different stuff. Over the next couple of hundred years, as science and math became more able to explain how the material world can operate itself, how the brain can make the mind, and how everything can work entirely materially without having to resort to some other realm or some magic, it isn’t to say that there isn’t another framework, as IC postulates that there is an optimal mathematical representation of mind that can be graphed or mapped in its own dimension.
That map or dimension can be tied to the brain. But in terms of describing consciousness and the rules of consciousness, you’re, at least, picturing another dimension. It doesn’t mean necessarily another dimension. It means a dimension in which your mind works. I haven’t been made to make this distinction before. It is not some extra juice.
It is a consequence of information in a massive self-consistent information processing system.
Jacobsen: That brings two things to mind. On the one hand, you have thought about something, say two options come forward. Of those two options, someone selects one and wills towards it, to actualize it in the world.
The other isn’t really picking any choice. There isn’t anything conscious. They are simply acting on it. It is a one-channel path of acting in the world.
Rosner: According to modern brain science, those things aren’t that dissimilar.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the overall argument?
Rick Rosner: My argument would be that it is untenable with the overall universe and its information processing with its holding every individual atom in its awareness. So, the matter in the universe at our scale – a planetary scale or planetary affairs, what goes on, on a planet. That stuff is allowed to go on below the overall awareness of the information processing that is the universe.
The universe still needs this stuff going on, this micro stuff. It still needs stars at 10^60th atoms. But the universe is not concerned or able to keep track of what is going on from a moment to moment basis among the 10^58 to the 10^60 atoms in a star
Because among those 10^50th atoms – they’re really atoms as everything is ionized, so nuclei and free electrons, each atom – let’s call them atoms for now – might interact a billion times in a second. It doesn’t matter if a million or a trillion times in a second.
It is still 10^58 times 10^9 interactions per atom per second gives you 10^67 interactions in a star per second, and the computational entity that is the wider universe, even though it has a huge information capacity, is not aware of its computations.
Every one of the 10^67 interactions going on in every 10^22 stars in the universe per second. That raises a second question, “What then does count as a computation in the universe or a consequential computation in the universe, or a consequential thought or conclusion?”
Jacobsen: A computation not separated from the wider universe.
Rosner: Regardless of whether the universe is conscious, a computational entity should be able to draw something like conclusions. That when we put data into a computer, we expect data to come out. We expect the computer to compute and to deliver the product of those computations, whether it is numbers on a spreadsheet or frames of a videogame.
Those frames are the results of computations. That’s what computers are for, to do computations. ON a larger scale, in an analogous way, you would expect the universe to be processing data and producing results.
Regardless of whether the results are end products or through products, but, what are they in the wider universe? For one thing, the universe is computing itself. The quantum interactions that take place at the huge rate that we’re talking about.
We’re talking 10^67 interactions time 10^22 stars is close to 10^89 quantum interactions per second in the entire universe. But those are micro computations or interactions. You would expect that the universe is operating on a more macro level.
What are those more macro computations or forms do those macro computations take? Or is the universe just the sum of its micro computations? Which I have a hard time believing, because if the universe were really just its micro computations and quantum interactions, why would it need these vast macro structures – 10^11 galaxies each containing 10^11 stars with the galaxies, clusters, and the solar systems? These macro structures that reflect the overall structure.
You cannot have a universe that is self-defining to this extent without those macro structures or the universe having differentiated itself into 10^22 stars. There is a question as to the significance of micro phenomena and macro phenomena and what they mean informationally to the overall universe.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This notion of non-base quantifiable phenomena in our consciousness, not just 1s and 0s, are registered in the universe in another way. That’s an open question.
Rick Rosner: Kind of, we know that every little quantum event is registered by the universe. If you make sure that some events are not known and never known to the wider, universe, then they never register with the wider universe.
The events, though, and quantum events are such that they are shared with the rest of the universe. The question is if the quantum events have meaning to the overall information processing of the universe. I would argue that that would be a really tough row to hole… row to hoe [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: That’s expecting way too much out of the computational universe. Instead, it might be better modelled to say that micro-events happen and the universe is built from microevents, but the overall state that the universe knows and computes is based on more macro phenomena.
Jacobsen: There is a sense of things being built from blocks. You give the Minecraft example in other interviews. If we take the micro world being built from little blocks, itty-bitty blocks, into a larger scale universe, then it becomes a sense of not just bottom-up construction, but top-down influence with the larger scale influence of all those little bits wrangling things together, like gravitational effects, where you have this agglomeration into things like galaxies.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: So, there could be another conversation around the feedback loops that the universe has with itself once it gets to sufficient levels of size for other forces in the universe to begin to wrangle things together.
Rosner: The universe functions in a Minecraft or a Lego block way, what is registers is the macro form of the clay, as it is being sculpted, but doesn’t have a prescription that requires a strict recipe or set of instructions for putting together a sculpture in the same way that you might have if you were putting together a Lego sculpture of the Millennium Falcon.
If you buy the Millennium Falcon Lego kit, there is only one way to build it, according to their instructions. There may be workarounds. But you buy the kit and follow the instructions step-by-step. The two competent model builders who aren’t being creative will end up with identical Millennium Falcons.
So, I am thinking doesn’t scrutinize micro-events with that degree of awareness, as to whether each Millennium Falcon is perfect. The more the universe has a somebody looking at a clay sculpture level of awareness. When you look at a clay sculpture, it seems as if infinitely malleable.
But you see that it is the difference between analog and digital. It feels as if you can move clay into an infinity of positions, and you’re not aware of the individual components of the clay, you’re only aware of this gray stuff that appears to be homogenous and infinitely deformable as opposed to a digital construction medium.
In it, you’re aware of all the blocks and how the blocks fit together. You’re not aware of all the individual components of clay. It is this homogenous and amorphous stuff. You’re aware of its larger sculptural forms.
If somebody has made it into the sculpture of a head, and if you’re aware of the hair if the hair is really nice – and the years, but, you’re not aware at what is going on at 10^22 orders of magnitude smaller than the overall sculpture – the individual atoms.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The whole argument is “why is there something rather than nothing?” But the real argument is “why wouldn’t there be something?” [Laughing]
Rick Rosner: But then we go back to another form of that question, can the universe exist without a support structure? The simplest analogy that comes immediately to mind is the score of a basketball game as seen on a scoreboard.
The rules of basketball are consistent. So, you see or you can follow the basketball game by following the scoreboard. It makes sense. It is not as exciting as actually watching the game. I am thinking of the old scoreboard that doesn’t show video. It just has numbers and lights.
Jacobsen: Red bulbs.
Rosner: Right. That’s a perfectly consistent system within the rules of basketball. But you can’t have that system. Either the series of scores on a scoreboard throughout a game or the scoreboard, it implies a scoreboard is there to keep score and that there is a game that the scoreboard reflects.
You can’t really have the scores in just a free floating way. Unless, there is some kind of structure to provide the scores. It is a terrible analogy. Because you have both the support structures that include the game being played and the scoreboard that shows you the score of the game at various moments.
Also, your consciousness that registers what is going on. But still, the idea that there would be this free floating and consistent series of scores rolling without forms of external support or external correlates that those scores reflect doesn’t make sense.
So, if the matter in our universe is some sort of thing of the universe keeping score, then that implies there are some structures that pertain to and are relevant to the score. The universe, itself, at any given moment is a score.
Does there have to be a scoreboard to show the score to physically support it? Does there have to be a reality that is reflected in the score? A game that is being played. Both of which refer to this world that is external to the universe.
But the universe is a model of or an information processing model in the same way our mind is a model of the world around us.
Jacobsen: Take some of the aforementioned terms, the idea of 3D spatial relations, the idea of colour, the idea of fairness, with in-built systems.
Rosner: Yes. Anyhow, that is a larger question than we’re discussing now.
Jacobsen: It is important, though.
Rosner: Yes, it is one of the central questions. But right now, we want to find out if micro events, e.g., whether or not I have toe fungus, and I do…
Jacobsen: Thanks.
Rosner: Mmhmm.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: …have some informational meaning to the overall computational structure that is the universe. It is a computational structure. Even if, it is supported externally. To put it in scoreboard terms, do my fungus toenails register on the scoreboard that is the universe?
Jacobsen: You don’t mean the casual way people are imagining this. I don’t mean the gross way they’re imagining this. I mean registering via photons hitting an apparatus and being registered on an information processor, even pain registering generally.
Rosner: The state of my toenails is definitely registered by the wider universe. There is a model of my foot right here in the room we’re sitting. But that model is 8 years old. It is the actual size of my foot. It might be slightly bigger, as it is made out of silicon. I forget if it ends up bigger or slightly smaller.
Jacobsen: Why is your second toe so big?
Rosner: That’s just the way my toes came out. That’s the reason that model exists because my foot is grotesque.
Jacobsen: It looks like your second toe and your big toe went “hey, let’s trade places for this life.”
Rosner: [Laughing] It is horrifying.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: That’s why somebody decided to make a model of it and turn it into an ashtray and hand it over to my boss.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: My boss had had enough of it after 8 years, 10 years and said, “Do you want your foot back?” I am like, “Hell, yeah.” To some extent, the state of my toe is reflective in the outside world. But is it reflected in the ongoing game that is the universe’s computations?
That is, the scoreboard of a basketball game, an old school scoreboard, does not tell you whether one player shoved another player, one player for one reason gets a boner in stressful situations like basketball games, where he is not only trying to play basketball but also hoping that people don’t see that he gets a boner.
The scoreboard only represents the most general information about the game, like the score and the number of fouls. It doesn’t reflect the minutiae. That there is a girl in the audience that has a crush on the center. Or the school colours that are there.
The question is if the minutiae of our lives have informational meaning to the universe itself.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With respect to the question from a few moments ago, the questions would be human beings and relatively similar sized organisms that have kind of broad based broad band sharing of information to make a mind and then applying this to the large scale structure of the universe to imply an armature.
For myself, I would have more question marks about what are the pinnings down about making that extension from this implies consciousness for human beings, say, to this implies consciousness to the universe, say.
For myself, I am agreeing on the general claims. I am agreeing on large scale information processing. The universe appears to be doing a lot of information exchange. There are various ways of modelling this. But then, the making the extension to the armature.
I am not saying it is an illogical leap. What I am saying the number of hidden premises or puzzle pieces face down are many.
Rick Rosner: Okay, the main question as to whether there is an armature or a structure that is necessary to support the information that the universe is made of. That boils down to the question, “Does pure information exist without external support?”
It is not something that people have done a lot of thinking about because it is not an immediately apparent thing. It is not a question that arises easily outside or beyond the idea of informational cosmology and other theories of the universe being information.
Even within quantum physics, which treats the universe as information, or little parts of it as information.
Jacobsen: As an aside, it is the most tested theory with empirical evidence in the history of science.
Rosner: Quantum mechanics, that makes sense. It is easy to do quantum experiments or look at stuff already done, and see that it agrees with what quantum mechanics would predict about it. You can take old experiments and old phenomena.
Not everything has to be a new experiment, you can take old things that you know and then say, “How does this agree or not agree with quantum mechanics?” I would say that given the small or modest scale of quantum mechanics.
There is probably a lot of confirming experiments and data, and phenomena, compared to relativity. In that, to do experiments with relativity, you need something moving close to the speed of light. Some stuff does, but most stuff doesn’t.
So, you need to look at cosmic ray evidence like muons, which move 99% of the speed of light, as they are shot out of the Sun rather than out of a cyclotron and aren’t moving very fast. It would make sense that there would be a lot of evidence for quantum mechanics.
Jacobsen: Within that long history of digital physics, it is not the mainstream, but, certainly, it is not fringe.
Rosner: The universe as information?
Jacobsen: The universe as information.
Rosner: But I would say that within the realm of all physics and quantum mechanics, and the universe is information; the question of whether the universe is enough to support itself is not a question that has arisen.
Because, why wouldn’t the universe be enough to support itself? For instance, in quantum mechanics, there is a fuzziness, which arises due to the universe having a finite amount of information to define itself and its constituent parts.
The universe is inherently incomplete and fuzzy. But there is an argument or a deep assumption based on that fuzziness that – wow – the universe cannot be precisely defined, but given the constituents of the universe; the universe defines itself to the extent that it can, which is to a very fine degree.
It down to one part in, maybe, 10^-34th or near that. People like to argue that without a creator. How can the universe exist because you start with nothing? Yet, we have everything. I disagree with the idea that we have nothing. That nothing is the default state of existence.
Jacobsen: That goes against 2,000 years of philosophical history.
Rosner: Yes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, we were talking about forms of order.
Rick Rosner: We talk about various aspects of the universe as a computer.
Jacobsen: Informational cosmology.
Rosner: We move on in our discussions without locking things down in precise mathematics. Right now, we have been talking about if micro events – particularly the events that happen on our planet – are registered by the computational entity that is the entire universe.
It almost seems too literal to think that every little thing that happens to us is an informational event in the computational awareness of the overall entity that is the universe. You can argue about whether the universe is conscious or not.
You can argue about whether consciousness is an emergent – which we believe – property and a technical property of sufficiently large broadband information processing. Whether or not if the universe is conscious, it is reasonable to think the universe is some kind of information processor and the information that we live in and are made of is, at base, information.
Information whose existence is made possible by an external framework. That is, matter in an external universe, the information that the universe consists of is a model of that external world, regardless of whether the universe itself is conscious.
For the sake of the discussion, let’s say, the universe is an information processor.
Jacobsen: From my knowledge of you, you lean towards tentatively conscious…
Rosner: …Not just tentatively, strongly, I strongly believe, once you get up to a certain level. Max Tegmark posits a measure of mind. It has something to do with bandwidth. I haven’t read his stuff in a while.
If you can somehow make a cross-section of the computations taking place in a human mind at any given moment, that informational cross-section – that is, the number of computations going on and the braidedness/number of places the information is coming from – becomes a metric of the computational magnitude and complexity.
While not agreeing with his methodology entirely, I don’t remember what it was. I think that consciousness is generally an emergent property when you have sufficient computational magnitude and complexity.
That is, the computers that we use and are familiar with in our phones and laptops. They may process a lot of information, but the information is mostly processed linearly. It is just a straight flow-through of information.
It is different than the way information flows through our brains. In our brains and minds, there is a central arena. That is a bunch of linked subsystems that are all, at least, roughly aware of the overall state of what is being considered, which is our moment to moment awareness.
What is generally being considered is the reality that we are in and that we are modelling moment to moment along with our self-talk, the words that we use in our heads, and the other tools that we use in our head to help conceptualize what we’re experiencing, it is our model of the external world and our commentary on that model through various apps.
The verbal app, whether or not we are talking out loud, we are talking to ourselves, “That motherfucker,” or, “What is that dude doing?”, or, “That is a shapely ankle,” if we’re in 1802 and see a women lift her skirt and see her ankle.
There is a commentary. There is a sense of beauty app or an aesthetic app. An app for a sense of fairness and then you decide if it is fair in general, “Is that guy a dick?” If a guy is acting in a way that is impinging on other people, that guy is a dick or an asshole.
It differs if he is acting like a dick or an asshole to you personally, e.g., acting like an asshole in traffic. There is the feeling being tired, of being wrapped in cotton or as if drunk when tired. There is the perspective app.
It is so much a part of our reality that we just experience three dimensionality most of the time as just the way that the world is. Even though, the three-dimensionality is part of our brain constructing the world for us, so that we can understand it.
All of these apps working simultaneously and working with each other moment to moment about this set of sensory input – this flow of sensory input – is unlike how our computers, our mechanical computers, work, which do not have this broad sharing of information among subroutines.
That is changing as various things like Google Translate and machine learning algorithms – I’m sure – is not conscious, but a baby step closer to consciousness than straightforward non-machine learning computing because you have all sorts of feedback and feedarounds.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was listening to a lecture. The comedic punchline by Krauss was “suppose a cow is a sphere.” Similarly, if we assume are looking at a quantum mechanical universe, at an information-based universe, an homage would be “suppose the universe is a computer.”
I am echoing Seth Lloyd. We’ve have done conversations on this. We can build classical computers in the universe. We can build quantum computers in the universe. The question is, “The universe is a computer. But what kind of computer?”
Rick Rosner: So, the problem with this kind of thinking is everybody gets this feeling. People who think about how the universe works or people who have some knowledge of physics, and quantum mechanics, get the idea that information is very entangled in what the universe is.
When people try to popularize it, the universe for lay people; you get these analogies. The universe is a computer. The universe is a hologram. But that’s usually where it stops, or “the universe is made of information.”
But then everybody hits a stopping point, eventually, we believe that there will be a theory that makes explicit all these hand-wavey metaphors. But that theory doesn’t exist yet. It badly needs to exist. Quantum mechanics is a theory of how limited information, non-infinite information, propagates through a system with weirdly initially paradoxical appearances.
When quantum mechanics was invented 100 years ago, the effects of some of the consequences or some of the experimental results, and the theoretical results, freaked out the scientists of the time who had grown up under determinism and thinking of the universe in terms of infinite precision.
Because one of the big questions for the 200 years before quantum mechanics was invented, “Is the universe entirely deterministic?” Is it a clockwork universe? That is, if you knew one moment of the universe, could you predict every subsequent moment based on extrapolating the paths of every object within the universe?
Given that the universe is infinitely precise, you should be able to do that. It should be a clockwork universe. It is that there is no new information. Information wasn’t really a concept before the 20th century.
But nothing new comes out of the universe. One moment plays into the next moment inevitably with no choice. There is only one next moment and a whole string of these forever. People ask, “Is that the deal with the universe? How could it not be?”
You had some scientists or the scientists who grew up in science had this background. As they explored the non-deterministic effects of quantum mechanics, it was confounding. Einstein was famously frustrated by the idea of chance in the universe.
That new information could sneak into the universe via arbitrary quantum events happening. That an atom decays now instead of 2 seconds from now. That there is no determining factor except for randomness.
He hated that. At least, he hated certain aspects of that. The scientists of the 30s kept looking for hidden causes for what has now been accepted as perfectly mathematically indeterminate events. Claude Shannon in 1948 came up with Information Theory.
He is the one who codified what a lot of people were thinking. He took hold and mathematicized information, but information as a precise idea is only 70 years old. We have yet to figure out how that information is part of the universe.
There is a basic argument of what else could the universe be made of besides pure information because the information is what’s left when you strip everything else away. Information is the choice between states or at least it is expressed that way in information theory.
When you strip the universe down to its basic components, you can argue – though I can’t because I didn’t sleep that well and so my sleeping is not that precise even when I do get enough sleep – the extra stuff that the universe is made of besides information is nothing.
It is a basic existence. Although, you could argue because, in IC, we speculate or postulate that there has to be a support structure external to the universe and in an entirely different space that contains the information that the universe is made out of.
You could argue that the universe is pure information. The support structure, the brain say, that holds the thoughts that are the universe. That thing is a material structure. That thing, while you can do the infinite regress, or that information is something in another universe separate from our own.
You can argue that the hardware is, in essence, in itself pure information if you strip it down enough. The universe is hardware. You can argue that that armature universe, or hardware and supporting universe, can game the system.
It can simulate a universe of pure information that is being made up Matrix-style. To have a good Matrix universe or a good simulated universe, the universe in the Matrix movies is a shitty simulated universe because people are constantly being able to Red Pill that universe and to see the world behind the world.
It is glitchy. It is permeable. You can tear it apart. You can easily find out that it is base reality. All of the heroes of the Matrix movie tear apart that simulated universe. A decent simulated universe will not give itself away.
It can’t, to operate as a universe. You can’t be violating the rules of physics willy-nilly. You would have to be able to sneak in to game the universe externally. But you can do it at the quantum level without giving anything away and without violating the rules of quantum mechanics.
The things that are indeterminate within a pure information universe can be determined from outside that universe as long as the determining follows Bell’s Principle, I think. That it is not a systematic thing or maintains certain rules of randomness.
Here is where I get really ignorant, Bell’s Inequality proves that you cannot have hidden correlations among the quantumly indeterminate events in the universe. In other words, you can’t have findable hidden clockwork.
But you can have, I believe, non-findable hidden clockwork. If the new information entering the universe via indeterminate events becoming determined over the passage of time – that is, you don’t know when the nucleus is going to decay and the time passes and, at some point, it decays, an indeterminate event becomes determined over time.
So, you don’t know the final score of the game until the game is played. Information is introduced into the universe as indeterminate and becomes determined as part of the history of the universe. Bell’s Inequality says that you cannot find correlations among these randomly determined quantum events.
That there is no hidden clockwork to be found. However, if the universe is made of information, and if that information reflects a sensing, a simulating, a processing, of information about a world external to our universe by some vast information processing entity – that is, the universe as a giant computer or a giant mind – thinking about something else or receiving information from the hardware world that supports it and thinking about the hardware world/processing information about the hardware world, information will largely conform to Bell’s Inequality.
The information coming from a huge external world will appear to be pretty perfectly uncorrelated. We within the world are not going to be able to see the hidden clockwork, seeing the hidden clockwork would violate the rules of quantum mechanics.
There is still room for simulation. The mind or the computer that is the universe can be fed simulated information. That simulated information can be seen as perfectly real as long as it is high-quality simulated information.
I would postulate that the universe is being gamed in a couple of ways. One of them is the quantum events that seem random to us are, actually, the registering of new information entering the information processor from the hardware world.
The world that contains the hardware that the information processor is thinking about. That’s game one. That the universe is actually getting systematized information that we cannot perceive as systematized because we are not in the hardware world.
The information that is so unpredictable because it reflects a real-world elsewhere that it conforms to the random rules of quantum mechanics. No hidden variables, so, there is an entire hidden universe of sufficient complexity that we cannot find from our universe.
We can only treat it as at the quantum mechanical level as a bunch of perfectly randomized potential future events. So, that’s game one. The whole other world gaming a whole bunch of quantum events in our world because those quantum events reflect the actual gathering of information from that external world, which is itself a completely ordered universe itself.
Game two is that since we’re just brains that are at the mercy of our perceptions. We are being told via our perceptions that we are the naturally evolved beings in a naturally originating universe. But we could – it’s possible – be matricized. Everything could be simulated, partially that or only that.
Game one is a mind or an information processing entity receiving naturally occurring information. Game two is “yeah, it doesn’t have to be entirely naturally occurring. If it is good enough, we can’t tell the difference.”
In any case, quantum mechanics is gamed because what we see as random quantum events are perhaps perceived by the information processing entity that is the universe whose information we’re built from as the information is manifested as spacetime and matter; our quantum events are reflections, are perceptions, of events happening in an entire other universe.
Is that enough of that?
The deal is that all this goofy hand-waving can be put and will be put on a more solid mathematical basis – and everyone else’s handwaving, including Krauss’s, and Wheeler’s It From Bit, Ed Fredkin, and everyone saying the universe is a giant information – once we figure out how to do it.
It is a thing that I solidly believe is a thing and is decodable. We can’t decode the individual meaning of every frickin’ atom in the universe. Every atom in the universe might not have individual meaning. The universe may be sufficiently holographic that not every single particle and every single quantum event signifies something, but what they signify in the aggregate.
It is something that we should talk about more. If the universe signifies in the aggregate rather than “this galaxy here is a map of the concept of orangeness” and “this galaxy over here is a map of linear motion” and “this galaxy handles the concept of perspective within this giant information processing entity,” or if not every part of the universe is precisely signified here or there but in the aggregate holographically, then that probably gives the universe more leeway to have us in it.
If not every quantum event individually signifies, then this might give the universe sufficient looseness for us to come into existence, and the equivalence between the universe and an information processing entity at the same time that it is matter; that equivalence may be sufficiently loose to allow more stuff to happen the point of that stuff being us.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: On the other hand, if you’re making a sculpture of a horse out of clay – and for the moment ignoring the horse is made out of molecules and atoms that follow the rules of physics, in a macro sense, you do not see the molecules and atoms.
You see a homogenous material. That isn’t limited to analog ways. There used to be a lot of talk about analog and digital stuff. Minecraft and Lego would be digital. They are grainy. They are made out of a bunch of roughly identical blocks that fit together in systematized ways.
That would be digital and precisely defined as opposed to analog, which is the clay. You can mush it around it any way that you want. I would suggest that there is a possibility that in terms of whether stuff that happens that we register in the material universe is registered as information in the information universe.
I would argue that no so much. There may be some flexibility. You can sculpt a horse out of clay. You can do it in a gazillion different ways versus more limited ways you can do it with a horse made out of Minecraft blocks, especially if you’re limited in scale.
You can make a horse that is horselike out of Minecraft as you can out of clay if you’re allowed to make a trillion Minecraft blocks and can make a huge ass horse, but assuming that Minecraft blocks are half of an inch across and your horse is 8 inches.
Your horse is going to look blocky and pixelated, grainy, as opposed to your clay horse. There will be the ways that you can make a horse, including box cover, are very limited compared to the flexibility that you have to make your horse out of clay and to keep tweaking the horse for whatever effects you want, or because you are lousy at working with clay.
It is not unreasonable to think that there might be flexibility in the information content of the universe. A looser linkage between the information in the universe and the manifestation of information as matter that we experience.
That the informational universe or the information processing universe does not care that our horse sculpture looks like or that there is a planet making horse sculptures. That information might be more holographically distributed, so that individual events in our world. Somebody makes a horse. Somebody eats pizza. Somebody trips down a flight of stairs.
That those are not significant in the information universe. Although, I don’t know because this is the initial stage of thinking about that. There is a caveat. A picture of a black hole versus a photo composite of telescopes that gather information from a galaxy 55 million light years away, where the center of the galaxy apparently has a huge central black hole with 5 billion solar masses.
We got a donut looking picture of that central black hole. I would assume that there is a looser connection between events as we experience them and events as the information processor that is the universe experiences them.
That some things are big enough that they do have, at least, some semi-informational meanings. A central black hole, a supermassive black hole, at the center of a galaxy that has the mass of a billion suns.
I would assume that the occurrences centered around that black holes have definite informational meaning to the universe’s information processor. That the flow of matter into and out of a massive central black hole probably reflects a huge flow of information into and out of the universe’s information processor.
I assume that the universe is a pipeline of information into the universe. The same way the cosmic background radiation is the horizon at apparent T=0. If you’re going to slide new matter into the universe, you can do it by bringing it into T=0 at the apparent edge of the universe close to the time or the apparent time that time began.
I assume that those things, the flow of matter into and out of black holes, massive ones and galaxies, proto-galaxies, sliding into view at what looks to us like close to T=0. Because as time goes on, we see more and more of the universe originating from around T=0.
Then if we watch long enough for billions of years, we would see the stuff from around T=0. we would see more proto-galaxies sliding and maturing. Anyway, all that stuff has us perceiving it as physical phenomena.
I would assume that those things are at a sufficiently huge scale that they have something to do with how the universe is perceiving the information that it is processing. I guess that is sufficient, for now.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s touch base on the flexibility of information, the flexibility of an information processor view.
Rick Rosner: What we have been talking about since we have been talking about 4 years ago – ? – is the idea that the universe is made of information, you cannot really have a universe of information without it being an information processor with a lot of shared characteristics with the information processors that are our minds.
You can make a decent argument that the universe is a vast mind-like information processor. But, of course, we don’t experience it that way since we experience the information as spacetime and matter. That means the universe is doing double duty.
It is something looking like contained information in an information processor. That’s one hand. Another that it is spacetime and matter from which we have originated. It has galaxies, stars, and the apparent history of 15 billion years.
But we think it is a lot longer than that. Anyway, the universe is doing double duty. Which the naive assumption that we made is that every event that happens in the universe, e.g., an atom emitting a photon or another atom absorbing a photon, or hydrogen fusing into helium in the interior of a star.
All of that stuff – planets forming. All of that stuff has a specific meaning in the information world as if the events happening to matter are registering on a magic 8 ball. Every event that happens is the answer to a question in the information universe.
That seems like a huge task informationally. That everything that happens, all of the quintillions of micro-events in the universe correspond to information events – I would assume somewhat often macro-information-events in the information universe.
Lately, I have been thinking that, maybe, that doesn’t have to be so. This is my first stab at an analogy. So, it is not very good. In a Minecraft universe, everything has to fit together very specifically. If you’re going to make a sculpture of a horse in a Minecraft universe, you have to fit blocks together very specifically.
Unless, you get sloppy. But you’re not allowed to get sloppy. The rules of Minecraft, as Lego sculpture has become more complex, people have learned workarounds to achieve more effects with legos, sticking things together in ways that aren’t really according to the Lego rules of interlocking blocks – ways to cheat at legos.
I do not know if you can do that with Minecraft. I do not play Minecraft. Anyway, you get the point. Things have to stick together in very systematized ways.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, let’s continue on the ideas of information discussed…
Rick Rosner: Basically, we have been talking off-tape roughly about the hardware that supports the information that the universe consists of, and if we can derive any subtle conclusions about the hardware or the world behind the world.
My claim is that you can make up stories or science fictioney stories about the world behind the world and the objectives of the beings, or the entities, either whose brains contain the information that the universe consists of or who build something, the hardware, that provides the support structure that contains the information that the universe consists of.
But in terms of deriving any conclusions that subtle about the ways in which those beings are like, we are really limited. You asked, “Can we, at least, disallow magic in the world?” I said, “No.” A powerful entity with a lot of computing power could build a toy world in which the rules of physics could be violated.
Jacobsen: Do we live in such a world?
Rosner: It is doubtful. There are some arguments to be made that a world that proceeds according to the rules of physics, a rule set in motion and then proceeds according to the rules of physics, is more efficient in terms of computing power compared to a world constantly fiddled with to allow magic.
I would argue that worlds that follow the rules of physics are more probable than toy worlds. Although, that’s a hard argument to make. We seem to live in a world that follows the rules of physics. It seems intuitive that such a world would be more probable than a toy world, which is equivalent to a Matrix-type world.
A world that is created. A world of limited scale that appears to be of a larger scale designed to contain conscious entities that are being fooled about the scope of the world. The people in the Matrix think that they are living in the full natural world.
Until, they take the red pill. Then they realize that they are living in the Matrix world. It seems intuitive that the natural world is less unlikely than some toy world. On the other hand, we are on the verge, technologically, of building all sorts of toy worlds that contain or have the capacity to contain conscious beings.
So, that argument will be hard to defend. It is not unreasonable to think that a video game or some video games 25 years from now will allow you to play, operate, guide, or have as part of your world, creatures that are conscious within their simulated worlds.
If you wanted to drop in Al Capone or Abe Lincoln, or Jane Austen into your simulated world, you would be able to drop in a conscious being that has been built in based on the best guess of what Al Capone, Abe Lincoln, or Jane Austen would be.
This being would wake up in this world and believe the world is some version of the world. You could brief the conscious being and say, “This is a simulated world. You’re a simulated being. This is an afterlife of sorts,” or, “This is not an afterlife. This is a world you have been technologically resurrected into.”
You would have beings living in toy worlds. Given the way technology is going, it is not unreasonable to think that there will be tens of millions of toy worlds in operation at any given time. Maybe, we will develop ethics as to what is or is not fair to do to beings that are artificially conscious.
Maybe, it will be free for all. These simulated beings will come into existence and then be slaughtered over and over again. Everybody will think that it is alright because once their consciousness ends in the game, then it is no harm and no foul because no memory or trace persists of the suffering, because the entire simulated being along with its memory and experiences is erased.
Or maybe, there will be more durable simulated beings that can live from iteration to iteration, where this will put limits on how much suffering you can put a durable simulated being through. But you can certainly design worlds.
If you can simulate consciousness, there are degrees. One is fake, like Cortana and Alexa. Their creators aspire to have you think of them as almost conscious beings. You can have more and more sophisticated versions of that without them being conscious.
You can have simulated beings who have actual consciousness. You put them in video games. Those video games may be more interesting. It may be that the hottest video games of 2044 may allow you to pilot conscious simulated beings in a simulated world.
You may even have a conscious buddy, like a Cortana who is with you half of the time and is conscious to some extent. Where, she functions as a real-life imaginary friend. Toy worlds and conscious simulated beings are coming.
They are coming within this century. You can’t have worlds that allow magic, but simulated ones can. There are arguments as to why magic worlds are less probable than worlds without magic, where the most persuasive arguments lie in the realm of not having a really big ass world.
It is more likely to have a really big ass world that follows the rules of physics. The argument is that it is likely that a big ass world is not an engineered world. It is kind of naturally evolved. This isn’t even a discipline that exists yet.
The logic and epistemology of real versus simulated worlds. It seems intuitive. A big ass world or a world that we live in and apparently contains 10^85th or so particles is likely to be a non-engineered world. Because, for it to be an engineered world, it requires a world that contains it that would be much bigger than the world that contains the natural version of our world.
I don’t know if that is our argument. Also, there are arguments to be made that if you are going to violate the laws of physics. It will require keeping track of the moment to moment affairs of the universe to maintain consistency, which is part of the package of the natural worlds of physics if you don’t mess with the rules of physics.
You get the consistency kind of built-in. It doesn’t require the massive moment to moment bookkeeping to maintain consistency if you are going to start allowing magical glitches in the world. There’s a whole field of metaphysics and perhaps physics that could address the demands of a naturally progressing world versus a world that gets messed with – for the sake of magic or superheroes or narrative and excitement.
Jacobsen: How does this relate to two things? One is the structures relating to possible or potential functions. Another about the knowledge of possible functions of something given its structure. It is not precise, but it provides a context for heuristics of understanding.
Rosner: Your question makes me think of another question, which is, “How can we live in a world that is so tolerant of imprecision?” We consist of a bunch of tiny, tiny things: atoms and the particles that comprise atoms.
Those things exist on a scale of something like 1 ten billionths of a millimetre, really small. Those things are precisely located in space. The fuzziness doesn’t kick in until you get to those tiny scales. The millionth of a micron scales. So if things are only fuzzy at a millionth of a micron, how can we do anything in the world where when you hit an elevator button, you’re allowed a margin of error of like a half of an inch or more?
When you take a step, it doesn’t matter where your foot lands within several inches. If you tried to step four feet in front of you, you would end up doing the splits. If you are just walking through the house or through the street, you have a margin of error as to foot placement that is a bunch of inches in either direction.
Part of the reason is that we’re macro. We are these big and meaty constructions of a lot of cells. We are big and the macroness – I haven’t thought this all through – of everything allows for macro margins of error, which is weird because we’re built of the tiniest and most pin-pointy things in the universe.
To go to structure and function, it is kind of the same deal. If you look at it as whether or not you believe in God, look at what God has given us, it is the ability to exist in the world and to fill various drives and desires, because we are the current endpoint of evolutionary history that has covered several hundred million years.
It is coming with a technology that is encompassing several thousand years. We look at these as the natural progression of things. But for the sake of talking about it, you can say, “Thank you, God, for all this,” but also, “Fuck you, God…”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: “…for the limitations of those things. If we’re lucky, we will have 30 or 40 years of decay in mental and physical abilities on the way to death.” Those things come from our place in a world that has been evolving 4.5 billion years since the Earth formed.
So, because we’re macro and because we’re sloppy and the products of persistent processes, we are able to operate in the world. We perform various functions. We develop tools to perform various functions.
You have been making arguments about trying to get at the world behind the world based on how our world functions; how a world of information that isn’t our information but does follow the rules of physics and the operation of a large-scale world, the things this tells us is not much beyond the obvious.
That there is hardware. We can make various stories as to what the hardware might be. We can discuss the range of various hardwares based on our experience with hardware and mental ware or wetware in our world.
We know our brains can contain information. Our brains have a certain structure. We know computers contain information. We can imagine other structures that might contain information. We can even imagine structures that are so simple that they should not be able to contain information at all, like a Turing Tape.
Turing proved that a simple tape reader – a paper strip with holes punched in it – and a scanner that reads the holes punched in it. Given a paper strip long enough and rules simple enough, you could simulate a world of unlimited complexity.
Even though, you just have this strip of paper. It is possible to imagine all sorts of information containing structures. It is hard. I have not thought about it a whole lot in terms of what is the information containing structure that contains the universe.
But it seems pretty obvious that that structure would be vast in the amount of information that it contains the then the amount or length of time it has to exist for our world to persist across billions of years, and probably much more than billions of years.
It is along the metaphysics of all that and the epistemology of all is not worked out. It may be part of the future of thought. I think it will be.
That’s that.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do events in what appears to be a universe relate to information and structure?
Rick Rosner: When we started out, we were assuming a certain precise definitiveness and correspondence between events in our world and the information structure from which our world is made.
To recap: we suspect the universe is made of information, but not our information. Information in a vast information processing structure, which is reflected in thought. That basically we exist in a material map of the information within some self-consistent information processing entity.
Basically, our notions about this were that everything reflects meaning, informational meaning, present in the armature. Every galaxy represents things like the color orange. It can reflect the color of the cone and the orange fruit and so on. Those relationships represent informational relationships.
Maybe, there is some relationship in the information processing entity that represents some color or idea like bouncing. Some things are bouncier than others. Maybe, the concept of bounciness has a literal meaning. It is a limited attempt at understanding. Lately, I have been leaning more towards a holographic image of the world.
Perhaps, the information in an information processing structure is distributed less locally and across space. That the way information is understood is distributive. That when a photon travels billions of light years and loses information to the curvature of space; that can be seen as the sharing of information across space.
The tacit understanding of an event via the loss of energy to the curvature of space, as if the photon carries out the news, ‘This thing happened at this point in space and time. Any problem with that?”
This photon can keep going without causing another event in the universe. That is tacit acceptance and tacit understanding of the event.
The universe behaves as if it understood the event. It didn’t, paradoxically, cause some other event. That means the universe is now behaving as if it’s part of that structure.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It can be more general for evolved systems, too. If you have reasonably or sufficiently accurate images or conceptualizations of the world, you can survive better.
Rick Rosner: That’s it. You get paid for success. For evolved beings, that success is continuing to live, getting laid, getting food, getting money, which is the means to all this other stuff. You get paid for understanding.
You are rewarded for understanding. You are more likely to earn more through this information warehouse that we consider consciousness. Then you would get paid via novel information hitting subsystems that are linked to each other.
Consciousness is a more efficient deliverer of the goods of existence. The main good is that you don’t get killed and other things related to success.
Jacobsen: It relates to the more general idea of existence as a good or consistency as a good. In other words, the principles of persistent structures in the universe. Things that exist longer continue to exist. It builds up that fundamental structure, tautological structure.
Rosner: Sure. Consistency in the outside world will kill you less than an inconsistent world. Consistency is good in the outside world. Understanding of the consistencies of the outside world is a second level, a second, good; a necessity for survival good.
But consciousness is expensive. It is not perfect at filtering out trivia. Where every higher level creature we know can be bored, so, one of the prices that you pay for being conscious is being aware of things that, if consciousness weren’t so global, you could turn over to your unconscious systems.
Consciousness is imperfectly efficient at filtering out stuff that could be ignored.
Jacobsen: There’s also the idea of independently evolved structures in organisms so that they can better adapt to the environment. That reflects the general world. Another one is having those likely independently evolved structures such as ants, and bees, and us, in terms of building our own habitat out of the world.
I think there can be a distinction made there too, in terms of activities of different things.
Rosner: Yes. You could almost characterize the global gene pool. All the genes of all the creatures throughout history. That’s almost like a Google Translate. Obviously, there’s not a consciousness running the interactions among the various genes of all the organisms.
But there is a library of genes. We only use like 1% of our genes. The rest of them are kind of not used; they’re options or trash genes. They are the accumulated history of each organism that has generated a bunch of fellow travelers and rider-alonger genes. That don’t usually get used.
Jacobsen: This reminds me of the principles of survival that are widespread. The individual organisms have fewer options than DNA. DNA has lots of options.
Rosner: Yes, the world DNA sphere can act like a giant app. It has no consciousness. But it has a high level of complexity, not a high level – I would say – of efficiency on the scale of individual organisms.
But it can pop up new stuff.
Jacobsen: To clarify, you don’t mean – when you say the world sphere of DNA, there could be misperceptions.
Rosner: Every frickin’ cell in every fucking organism has this library of DNA. This Swiss army knife of stuff that that DNA can do if the parts of the DNA are expressed. But only a small percentage in the DNA of each cell is expressed.
Jacobsen: You mean a concrete sense of the world sphere of DNA. Nothing magical.
Rosner: Nothing handwaving Gaia or gaias. This overall thing. It was big in the 70s, at least in hippy towns, where the Earth is an overall organism. None of that horse shit.
Jacobsen: We’re dismissing James Lovelock here.
Rosner: Yes. It is saying there is a crazy Swiss army knife or library here. If you went into a cell and made it express various strings of DNA, you would get all sorts of crazy stuff. It can get expressed in all sorts of ways.
Epigenetics is one. It is a bit Lamarckian. Some switches can be switched on that weren’t normally expressed. You can have mutations that are random. You can have mutations that aren’t quite random.
Mutations are random, except when they’re epigenetic. I have already confused myself. Epigenetics isn’t a mutation. It is turning on a gene that hasn’t normally been turned on.
Jacobsen: Most normal DNA mutations are random. Most are harmful. Some are helpful. With epigenetic changes, they can more likely helpful, potentially, since they are working with what has been kept.
Rosner: There is creating pressure or biasing breeding toward the characteristics that you want, which can be unintentional with normal Darwinian processes running that deal. The organisms with the best characteristics make more organisms.
You can do that. You can do that with plants that aren’t conscious at all, or bugs that are barely conscious. Then you have these various mechanisms for expressing the various aspects of the DNA in cells.
The basic ones are that the DNA in the cells is expressed according to the normal life cycle of an organism. But now, we’re entering the era of humans messing around with CRISPR and turning on new genes, and ones that haven’t been normally turned on.
It is this world app of genetics that encompasses evolution and genetic engineering, and the world sphere of every cell having a bunch of DNA in it. It is not conscious. It was not designed to be an app. But it really functions to be this not conscious highly complex and not designed app that covers the globe and covers a million, billion, maybe trillion different species.
Jacobsen: We have talked about a quantum mechanical world giving rise to a classical world. That classical world can, at times, have what we call biology. That comes through a principle of evolution.
We have systems that can register something about the environment. Some not only register but can form maps of the world.
Rosner: Let’s talk about going from quantum to macro. One of the reasons that we live in the macro world is because we live in a Mine Craft world. Where for us to be capable of all the things that we’re capable of doing, we need to be built of all these atoms and molecules.
It is boggling to me. I have been working on a micro mosaic. It is the face of a girl from the 1870s. The mosaic is only 20 millimeters across. The girl’s face is only 7 millimeters across. It is comprised of probably 1,200 little tiles that are probably a half millimeter by a quarter millimeter invisible surface.
They are mostly like a millimeter deep. I have been dealing with these tiles. I have filled in the biggest ones. I was working with a piece today that was probably a quarter millimeter by maybe a third of a millimeter by a 1/7th of a millimeter, which is 184/th of a cubic millimeter.
It is only 12 cubic microns. Yet, this teeny teeny pain in the ass glass still has like 10^15th atoms in it, which is fucking crazy. It is the smallest fucking thing. You can barely fucking see it. Yet, it has a million billion atoms in it.
One reason we’re so big; we’re comprised of so many atoms. We are comprised of particles that basically doing nothing. Big because macro is consistent and quantum isn’t consistent. Macro is consistent because you have enough things put together that are fuzzy and then become not fuzzy because of their size.
There is something you learn in first-year high school physics is that the de Broglie wavelength of an object is inversely proportional to its mass. An electron has a long wavelength. They always use a baseball that has a tiny wavelength. An electron is hard to pin down.
It is fuzzy. Baseball is easy. It is big. It contains 10^25th atoms or something. I don’t know. Anyway, we live in a macro world because a macro world is consistent by virtue of various laws of large numbers. That’s all I got. Unless you got another question.
Jacobsen: This is helping. This is helpful. It leads to the next questions. We have general frameworks from bottom to top, in terms of how far we’ve brought it. We factorize things to this level. What would be the next level? That is not an easy question.
Rosner: The sad thing is that the stuff that we’re talking about; there are probably people in the field – AI and machine learning for example – who use different terminology and may not understand things better than we do.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of my favorite Florida Man stories – the world’s worst superhero. Man murders an imaginary friend and turns himself in [Laughing]. That one really tickled me.
Rick Rosner: Most Florida Man stories, your immediate handle on most of them is that people are dumb, especially in Florida.
Jacobsen: 2/3ds of their mentally ill go untreated. It is a funny representation but also a serious issue.
Rosner: You start with the idea that people are frickin’ idiots. Then you have to dig down for as many stories of the guy. You go online and see if you can find stories that are more in-depth. Eventually, you either find more details you start fleshing it out yourself.
That is a lonely guy. He’s got an imaginary friend. He’s got anger issues, perhaps. You can make all these guesses as to what is going in the guy’s black box of a brain. It is going to be the same thing with humans, augmented humans, and machine learning. It will be different black boxes talking to one another.
Jacobsen: It will be two types of black boxes. Evolved things, they are bound to simply a dynamic life. They have development, decrepitude, and death. The artificially constructed ones, they may be dynamic. They could in their software. But, in general, they are static in their registration, in their information processing.
Rosner: We will begin to see a whole zoo of what you are calling “static” and “dynamic.” It will be a while before Google Translate begins to manifest explicitly conscious behavior. But it is not impossible to imagine.
Where you could imagine a busybody Google Translate, you are trying to translate from English to Russian. The system uses its accumulated experience of the world. Although, it may not be conscious.
It begins to accumulate an unconscious knowledge of what people want when they’re searching or typing, “Yea, you may not want that word, schmucko.” It may complete thoughts, “You may not have thought of Schadenfreude. Have you heard of Schadenfreude, bro?”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: We certainly know it is possible machine learning things to manifest as rudimentary busybodiness. That can be somewhat mistaken for conscious understanding. But at some point, when the machine understanding and the super-duper-busybodiness gets super-duper-powerful, you might be able to reasonably supposed that it is a non-zero level of conscious living in the system.
It would help to develop a mathematics of consciousness, whether we do it or someone else does it. It would be good to have a mathematics of consciousness. It would be good to get a picture, a rough picture, of the level of understanding within machine systems.
Whether that level of understanding is functionally conscious or not, once you get to consciousness, it is the establishment of a central information processing arena for new information that is sufficiently new, sufficiently complicated; that it can’t be dealt unconsciously.
It is informationally efficient to throw it into the central conscious arena. At some point, a system that is on a computational budget. As it becomes more and more complicated, it is reasonable that there would be an emergent economy that says, “This new information is most likely to be productively processed if our system had a central arena where that information is presented to all the subsystems in our overall system for some kind of global analysis.”
It is a kind of information processing efficiency. Many actors are involved in it. You earn points, existence points in an evolved creature by figuring out what is going on. You are paid for understanding. We get paid for understanding the world for continued existence and some other stuff.
If you understand the stock market, you get paid stuff. If you get good at social life, you get social points.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Some concepts or ideas seem basic here. I do not mean simple, but base. The idea of information as a result of the relation between things.
But also, the basic notion of two points for that interaction to happen and for the exchange of information. But as you’re noting months ago, even those two points, say, they’re also emergent.
Rick Rosner: Everything is emergent. You need the hardware to register phenomena. I am not well-versed in neural nets. But I can gloss over it. You need things that are capable of keeping score.
Systems capable to register a wide variety of signals about the outside world. There should be consistencies in the outside world – the world outside of the neural net. You have the sensory apparatus.
Then you have whatever is impinging on the sensory apparatus, whether something outside the net and inside your head, sensory input from outside, and so on. It can be inside or outside your head.
Something is capable of keeping score and becoming aware of things that are consistent among the set of all things that impinge on the system or that part of the system.
Jacobsen: Could this be seen as something like unlinked that are emergent and linked things that are emergent? Things emerge out of the bubbly soup. Those that are linked up. Others simply are taken into the registration of the linked systems.
Rosner: Some of it depends on the apparatus. The apparatus is only capable of registering consistency within its purview.
Jacobsen: What does purview mean in this context? It is that which is possible to be registered in the universe.
Rosner: A purview is a limited number of type of things that can trigger its sensors. It has a limited analytic capacity. Depending on how it is set up, it has a limit to the complexity that it can register as consistent.
That is, a grasshopper has a less sophisticated understanding of the world than a human because the human has more analytic capacity and more sensory capacity. The grasshopper will not be able to register as many consistencies as a human.
Jacobsen: In a sense, does this imply two other concepts? The scope and type of registration. The other is the depth and speed of processing of that scope and type of registration. What can add to it? How can we wrangle this into an IC framework or system for understanding the world? Because this is good.
Rosner: In a general sense, you can argue that a system’s capacity is proportional to the size and power and speed of its hardware. To add to that, it is also proportional to the system’s experience. That as the system adapts itself experientially to the world that it is in.
It will become more powerful at understanding, digesting, and analyzing that world.
Jacobsen: We have these systems that are emergent. The basic framework of the system that is bubbly emergent out of some fuzz.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: Then we have systems only arising from one of two ways. One is evolved. The other is artificially constructed.
Rosner: Sure.
Jacobsen: Within those two, we have registration with scope and type. Then we have depth and speed and processing.
Rosner: You can divide it into natural and unnatural, and evolved and – call it – forced. Where somebody has already done the analyzing, in our case, when you’re building a video game, at some level, the analysis is being done by evolved creatures who input their accumulated experience and understanding into the system.
Jacobsen: You mean the case with Deep Blue in Chess and AlphaGo with Go.
Rosner: Yes, the understanding and interpretation are now being turned over to machine analytics. You might be able to turn over the behavior of a head of hair.
Jacobsen: Is this part of the decoupling of possible human science to simply aided human science and then catapulting beyond anything normal and natural human science?
Rosner: Yes. Except, there will always be bridges.
Jacobsen: Fair enough.
Rosner: A sufficiently powerful AI. An AI with enough computing capacity behind it – this is probably a general principle – will begin to behave in ways opaque to its constructors. Google Translate has its own metalanguage inside it, known only to the AI itself.
There are examples of Go and Chess. As the AI becomes more powerful, it makes moves that are good but inexplicable to humans. This is no different, really, than human beings inexplicable to other humans.
We are trying to understand one another, whether a true crime novel or a TV show. We are looking at other people and trying to know why they behave the way they behave. If you’re in a relationship or a working relationship, you are looking at a black box.
You are trying to figure out why people are being such fuckheads.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What does self-consistency mean in the context of information processing in consciousness, in an IC context?
Rick Rosner: First off, nothing means anything except in relation to other things. There’s no meaning outside of context. There is not information that’s not contained in a system.
That is, when you look at words, there is no word that means anything independent of some language. Words are defined by all the other words in the language. It is a network of words and meanings.
That serves to define everything. What self-consistency means, at least in my mind, is that things that should stay the same regardless of what angle their viewed from, distance their viewed from, or time their viewed at, should be the same; in simple terms, an apple should remain an apple whether you’re looking at it from the north or from the east, or from an inch away or a foot away, or on a Monday or a Thursday.
But over time, given the nature of the apple, the apple will not stay the same over time. But it will still stay the same way apples do over time. Given the environment, it can change. If in a freezer, an apple could stay an apple for years.
But an apple on a table will get nasty after a few days. Self-consistency means that things behave reliably. That things don’t happen for no reason. Although, randomness can be a reason. All the way down to the quantum level.
But macro events should not happen for no reason. Macro events should behave in a consistent way. They shouldn’t change for no reason. They shouldn’t change without context. But at some point, there is a way in which you cannot see it anymore.
An apple is not an apple if the only information that you’re seeing is from 12 miles in space looking down on the Earth. There is uncertainty that creeps in. But that is built into what you understand in the system.
You understand that when you get far away from something then you will not be able to tell what it is. Self-consistency feels like a conservation law. That gravitation is a universal force. Gravitation behaves – we think – regardless of where you are in the universe.
And there are things conserved. Electric charge is conserved. Mass-energy is conserved. These are all parts or among the self-consistencies that allow the universe to work and to not be chaotic.
Jacobsen: If these self-consistencies permit things to work, how can a complex information processor permit emergent forms of information or emergent forms of information processing?
How do those relate back to the forms of self-consistency seen in the relations of things at the lowest magnitude in the universe in terms of emergent forms of order, of information?
Rosner: It can probably be seen in forms of machine learning and AI. In that, repeated instances experienced by a neural net establish consistencies in that net. If something keeps happening, if some signal is repeatedly tripped, and if the net is registering that, if it is set up to have neural net-like feedback, then it may have something Bayesian.
The nets’ estimate that this consistency increases its certainty. That becomes a piece of information within the net. You have a big enough net or big enough interaction between sets of nets.
As long as the net is exposed to consistent phenomena, the net registers those phenomena as being consistent with increasing levels of probability. If the linked nets have sufficient information capacity and bandwidth and interaction amongst each other, then you have something resembling consciousness.
Things with such intricacy and fidelity that those things feel registered within the system.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s return to the original line of thinking of human beings as mathematical structures, we have a certain type of math in its own dynamics that is different than simply the physical mechanics of the snow falling, rain falling, ripples across the water. How does a mathematical structure differ in us compared to these others?
Rick Rosner: Everything has to be able to exist, to exist. Everything has to have rules of self-consistency, which means that you’ve got basic structures and patterns that emerge all over the place. They are easy. They are basic. They have easy self-consistency.
If you look at philosophizing, everything boils down to the simple principles. Biology is boiled down to physics, and so can chemistry. It doesn’t mean that there is no function fo chemistry or biology. Sometimes, it is more convenient to discuss them us as large and complicated entities.
When you talk evolutionary biology, zoology, the units in zoology are animals. You have to way out of your way to talk about animals as being built up from fundamental and subatomic particles. Philosophy, the hard sciences, the soft sciences, there is a utility in taking the right context to talk about those objects and subjects that fit into the umbrella of scale.
You can boil aesthetics down to basic principles, which we have talked about. The search for the preservation of order. It might be better to talk about aesthetics on its own terms. You may know that beauty may be built from evolutionary principles.
We think something is beautiful because of biases that have been evolved into us. We don’t need that kind of scaffolding or foundation or disclaimer for a possible discussion of aesthetics. You can discuss beautiful forms as themselves, as increasing beauty going all the way back primates on the Savannah.
It is similar to all the other areas of philosophy, or simply most of them. There may be some that are sufficiently specialized to not be. Similarly, there will be emerging areas of philosophy with the most pertinent one coming up being the ethics of dealing with powerful information processing entities that are not entirely human, or merged humans. It is humans merging with technology.
At the most pragmatic level, sometime in the next 100 years; someone will move into a non-human body, into a body that is not even human. Someone may go to court. Even though, they do not live in a human body; they still have the rights that they had when they were in a human body.
Another person will go to court to claim that AI should be able to marry a person or permit the AI to inherit stuff. That the AI person should have rights. That is a whole new area of ethics and philosophy.
That is a looking upward development of ethics with humans and the things that will eventually supersede humans. But then there is the question about the things superseding humans. There will need to be a philosophy for them on how to treat us, who will be those things inferiors.
You need the philosophy for humans to do things and for the things that we create, which will, eventually, be in charge. One is decency in both directions. Not even just decency, but it is also defining what entities own.
It is clear what an individual consciousness is now. But that will be the case 150 years from now, when consciousnesses can be merged, budded off, and there will be all sorts of different and fleeting existences of information processing entities.
It will be complicated to assign rights to those things. Having to develop philosophies with new types of consciousnesses, there will be the economics of it, of trying to figure out the economics in which information is increasingly the most valuable thing; information plus the knowledge that makes that information durable.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you think of those three Feynman futures? What do you think is the most likely one?
Rick Rosner: I think the most likely is that we get a more and more complete understanding of the universe. But there is never a complete understanding. There are always questions. Some are challenging. Some will remain the same. Some questions will remain resistant for a long time.
Some will be solved. New big questions will emerge. Some of the big new questions of 200 years from now may be so far along philosophically, making so many philosophical paths; that if you tried to explain them to people today – even a philosophy or a scientist today. They would say, “Why is that an issue? It is so beyond the beyond the beyond that it doesn’t seem like a concern.”
We will continue to find metaphysical questions beyond those. That may or may not impact people’s existences on a daily basis. But they are still foundational. They are still questions about how things can be. They may still have implications, in the way of getting down to quantum mechanics will lead to quantum computing and will lead to powerful information processing entities 80 to 100 years from now.
We will push further and further along the paths of the questions of existence and along the paths of understanding things in a big data way. We will have an increasing understanding but we will be facing increasingly vague and basic questions.
I think, of the three possibilities or three possible scientific futures, that would have been the future that would have made Feynman the happiest, or the happiest when we bring him back.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: …Your choices are fairly simple. It is either open or closed. That is still only one molecule out of basically trillions in your body. It is the combination of trillions working together based on systems that have evolved over 4 billion years; that makes thems sense complicated and mathematical.
But when you get down to it, it is still mathy. When we get into the era of big data, humans can only understand things up to a certain amount of information. But as we build bigger and bigger information understanding structures, they will understand things that we can only understand in an indirect way.
We only understand things in an approximate way. Bigger information processing entities will be able to understand things better. I read the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. One of the chapters is that humans don’t understand anything.
I guess they did an experiment asking people if they understand how zippers work. Most said, “Yes!” But then they tried to explain, most failed. I think data entities of the future will understand things that we understand only half-assedly in much greater depth.
They will have a much greater understanding and appreciation of the mathiness of the messiness of the human body, where we can only understand it in little bits.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Nature can be described via mathematics. In this sense, as humans are inescapably a part of nature, humans can be described via mathematics, in principle. That is to say, human beings, in some sense, are mathematical structures in the sense of nature existing as a mathematical structure and human beings existing as a part of nature. This seems like an unavoidable modern conclusion of philosophy and science: human beings are mathematical structures.
Rick Rosner: You have mentioned this before. Biology boils down to physics. Physics boils down to quantum physics. Quantum physics is highly mathematical. When you boil it down, it is the physics of information; the physic and math of information. Information is the most featureless thing that you can have.
The most basic information you can have is a choice between two things. But you can probably go below that too, where you have a fuzzy choice between two fuzzy things without a clear choice between two things. But it almost boils down to nothing.
You can build back up from there into humans and the world around humans. The reason that humans do not seem mathematical is that we are so macro. In economics, there is microeconomics dealing with little things like one person buying this stick of gum or this candy bar.
Macroeconomics is the largescale behavior of economic systems. Quantum mechanics is micro with all the weirdness of the quantum world at the micro world. But the macro world makes sense to us because we are macro beings living in the macro world.
I have been messing with micromosaics, recently. Carole likes micromosaics. I guess I do too. They are like these thin pieces of glass, like a millimeter across. Some are less than a cubic millimeter. I think that these things are so small and should not contain so many atoms.
But if you do the math, a cubic centimeter – what’s a mole? 6*10^23, so a cubic centimeter contains 10^23 atoms roughly. A cubic millimeter still contains close to 10^17th atoms. So, even this thing that is as small as you want to deal with in regular macro life, it still contains a billion, billion atoms.
We are super macro. It also that we are organic, i.e., soft, squishy, and wet and mucousy. None of that has the clean sharp purity of math. When you think of math, you think of things that are super symmetrical and pretty well behaved. Things that are limited, perhaps, in extent.
When you think of parabolas, every parabola looks like every other frickin’ parabola. Every circle looks like every other circle. Every ellipse looks like every other with some tilting. You have these simple structures. There is nothing, at least on the surface, on 3. The threeness of something seems simple.
A die, the kind that you throw, is only having 6 different outcomes; unless, it gets wedged against a wall with no face on top. But if you’re throwing craps and one die, there are only 6 possible outcomes. But humans with our huge number of components and 4-billion-year evolutionary history that makes us complicated; there’s not a lot of simplicity in our form, or in our behavior.
It is basically because of our bigness and the number of components. Our duration, our evolutionary history, our extent in time. Everything is macro and macro is messy. You can boil it all down to math. Every single interaction in the human body can be characterized by quantum mechanics.
At the smallest level, you can find these interactions that boil down to simple possibilities. Is this blood cell going to capture oxygen molecules or not? Hemoglobin can exist in two states, generally. Either folded up having absorbed oxygen atoms and expanded, where the hemoglobin has four holes for oxygen molecules.
You put it in an oxygen-rich environment. Under the laws of quantum physics, it will pop open and grab four oxygen atoms. The first gym I ever belonged to; it was owned by a guy who started as a graduate student at the University of Colorado to see if you could actually see the moment when a hemoglobin molecule goes from having grabbed no molecules to having gone open and grabbed four oxygen molecules.
It was something that happened, at least with the technology then, or seemed to happen instantaneously. When the hemoglobin went from empty to full of oxygen, there was never a point when you saw it has two oxygen atoms.
I do not know if that is still the case. Even though, the hemoglobin molecule consists of, maybe, 50 atoms to make this mechanism. But it still governed by laws of quantum physics and can exist in basically only one or two states.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you have the larger structure that is an as if. But you have a certain set of preconditions to get to it.
Rick Rosner: If you want to disregard consciousness with regard to mind, mind, or at least an organism with a mind, is an organism that can a bunch of different possible states and actions and possible states of awareness, depending on what is going on in its environment.
That an organism with a mind can put itself into a whole bunch of different states as part of a survival optimization. Maybe, that is more mechanistic and a more understandable way of approaching organisms.
That something in the mind, as opposed to a tree, has an option of taking action to preserve itself, to not be obliterated. A tree has a bunch of mechanisms to increase the probability of its survival. The probability that it can reproduce.
But it is severely limited in how can react to moment to moment changes in its environment. A tree cannot get out of the way of a truck. A tree is not aware of a truck. But it does have protective mechanisms.
A tree can be big and thick and cannot be knocked over by the truck, because its base trunk is two feet across. But most of the tree’s mechanisms aren’t moment to moment, and moment to moment reactions to the environment are sufficiently helpful; that you have an entire branch of the kingdoms. The plants are one; the animals are another.
The animals, for the most part, can have a moment to moment understanding of their representations of their environment, and can react. Although, that is not 100% true. It is not true entirely. I am not sure if an amoeba is any more sophisticated in its moment to moment defenses than a tree.
However, an amoeba is a tiny little thing. It is no more likely to react on a momentary basis than an amoeba. When you think of animals, you think of things that can react to situations on a moment to moment basis.
Basically, the moment to moment reactions are such that the organism assumes a state or takes on a state that changes from moment to moment to optimize its survival to the best of the ability of its evolved systems.
In some cases, that involves reflecting the world, developing an information processing model of the world that is sufficiently sophisticated that it embodies consciousness. Not only that a conscious being has subconscious systems to handle things that can be handled in contingent situations, which can be handled without much more than algorithmic processing.
For example, the traversing of terrain by walking is via the mechanisms of taking a step and are not very conscious. It can be handled with or by algorithms that generally do not throw the central problems of walking into the conscious arena.
But in a general sense, the order seen in animals is the ability to change state from moment to moment based on the information that the entity gets from its world.
That’s it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I am getting the sense of the why questions being how questions. Why do we have minds? Because of evolution. How that? If chemistry, then biology, then minds, eventually. So, what you’re tapping into is, really, the bridge between those how questions and how they extend more into a why?
Rick Rosner: I kind of think everything boils down to consciousness and information spaces, and also the larger physical processes of the universe. They are “as if” questions. The information of the universe at large and the information of mental worlds.
Both the large information processing structures and the small ones do a lot of stuff that behaves as if they know stuff. The “as if” is enough to embody actual knowing. If you set it up right, it’s information processing capacity is far mre than straight up serial processing with integrated circuits clacking along.
It is a setup – the quantum computers – in as if systems. You set up indeterminate states that behave as if in multiple states for a computational purpose. If everything is in an as if state, then everything is in 3-bit quantum computer that runs as if in 8 different states, and then is consistent across all 8 states.
Something like that; I don’t know. It seems as if there is a tacitness, an as ifness. The efficiency of as if information, as if knowledge, and as if knowledge-sharing probably exists in the universe at large and in individual minds at the small.
Becuase it is persistently efficient.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/28
It is International Safe Abortion Day. Some thoughts come to mind for me. Many (maybe most, even possibly all public) pro-life positions equate to anti-human right positions. If you’ll indulge, I can support the argument:
Human Rights Watch states:
Women’s ability to access safe and legal abortions is restricted in law or in practice in most countries in the world…Abortion is a highly emotional subject and one that excites deeply held opinions. However, equitable access to safe abortion services is first and foremost a human right. Where abortion is safe and legal, no one is forced to have one. Where abortion is illegal and unsafe, women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or suffer serious health consequences and even death.
…international human rights legal instruments and authoritative interpretations of those instruments compel the conclusion that women have a right to decide independently in all matters related to reproduction, including the issue of abortion. [Emphasis added.] (Human Rights Watch, n.d.)
As “first and foremost a human right,” the arguments for the pro-choice perspective amount to the pro-human right view because the right to choose, or not, is the point, which implies safe and equitable access to the abortion services or part of reproductive health services.
In areas of the world, countries or sections of countries, where the reproductive health service is limited, the ability of women to make the choice is limited, which is the right, and so becomes a violation of the right.
That’s what a free choice is: the ability to select between at least two options. If no options, then no choice, so denial of the right is implied.
Many pro-life positions want to limit the access of this reproductive health service, which goes against the equitable and safe access to the service and so violates the choice and, thus, the right: hence, the pro-life position becomes anti-human right; and the pro-choice position becomes pro-human right.
Multiple United Nations experts¹ came together,* deliberated on abortion, and “called on States across the world to repeal laws that criminalize and unduly restrict abortion and policies based on outdated stereotypes, to release all women in prison on abortion charges and to counter all stigma against abortion” (OHCHR, 2017).
I am pro-human right here. Even in Calgary, Alberta, there are clinics simply calling for the end to harassment (Cameron, 2017). That is, the social bullying for restriction of abortion is an issue in Canada, too. Worse yet, throughout the globe, half of the abortions performed in the world are in unsafe conditions (Thomson Reuters, 2017).
In these reflections and in sympathy with many, many Canadians with pro-life, or even simply conflicted-agnostic positions, I must stand with the pro-human right positions. If someone doesn’t want them, the only fair one for all is to be able to choose or not, not to force the ability to not choose, to not have the right, on all implied by the pro-life/anti-human right positions through restriction of services in any way.
Endnotes
¹ International Safe Abortion Day – Thursday 28 September 2017 (2017) states:
Kamala Chandrakirana, Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice; Dubravka Simonovic, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences; Dainius Pûras, Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. Ms. Agnes Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
OHCHR. (2017, September 27). International Safe Abortion Day – Thursday 28 September 2017. Retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22167&LangID=E.
References
Cameron, E. (2017, September 27). Calgary abortion clinic wants provincial protection from harassment. Retrieved from http://www.metronews.ca/news/calgary/2017/09/27/calgary-abortion-clinic-wants-provincial-protection-from-harassment.html?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2F7S0OSo3t7S%3Famp%3D1.
Human Rights Watch. (n.d.). Abortion. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/legacy/women/abortion.html.
OHCHR. (2017, September 27). International Safe Abortion Day – Thursday 28 September 2017. Retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22167&LangID=E.
Thomson Reuters. (2017, September 27). Nearly half of abortions worldwide are unsafe, study says. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/unsafe-abortion-around-the-world-1.4310002.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/28
The Alberta school educational system will be providing protections for the traditionally vulnerable sexual minority, gay, students with new legislation aimed at Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs).
The GSAs have been integral for the protection of these students who are either gay and in-the-closet, or not and simply want a place to mingle without discrimination, or who are not and who remain allies to the sexual minority community.
In any of these students who would see themselves as such, GSAs can be and are for many important places for community, similar to sports teams and chess clubs are for others.
Imagine if you had something that you were being discriminated against on and then this became a basis for wanting a social group for a small community to, at times, protect yourselves in some way, the GSAs perform this function and to be forced to be outed as gay or an ally would go against one, not the only but one, of the purposes of the alliances public educational facilities.
There have been calls in Alberta to make outing gay students a norm as if it has to be done, but it doesn’t have to be nor, personally, should it be. The Herald News talked about the recent events with Eggen and Kenney:
Alberta’s education minister says he will be introduce legislation to make it illegal to out students who join gay-straight alliances.
On Twitter, David Eggen says the government believes all students deserve to feel safe and welcome at all schools.
He says no student who belongs to a gay-straight alliance — intended to foster understanding and give LGBTQ students a haven from bullying — should be outed.
His comments come as the issue creates a rift among leadership candidates for the new United Conservative Party.
Former federal cabinet minister and leadership candidate Jason Kenney has said schools should tell parents in some circumstances when their child joins an alliance. (The Canadian Press, 2017)
This is the rift topic: GSAs. I feel a little surprised, but not too much, to be typing that first portion of this sentence and to read that in the Herald News, but there you go. The Edmonton Journal commented on the situation, too (French, 2017a).
Eggen’s proposal is a new bill with requirements for all Alberta schools receiving public money to “establish an anti-bullying code of conduct that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and other grounds in the Alberta Human Rights Act.”
One issue is the “legal loophole” that would permit private schools exemption from the bill (French, 2017b). Nonetheless, if approved, the bill would protect LGBTQ+ students and allow them to create GSAs. Not bad, what can we do? Show solidarity through protections, wouldn’t want the same if heterosexuality, in a hypothetical universe, was the minority and often bullied? I stand with Norway’s statement in December of 2006, the UNHCR’s statement in 2011, and the Government of Canada’s position in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in section 15, and on and on (Strommen, 2006; UNHCR, 2011; Government of Canada, 1982).
References
French, J. (2017b, March 23). Education Minister David Eggen issues order for Christian schools to accommodate LGBTQ students. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/education-minister-issues-order-for-christian-schools-to-accommodate-lqbtq-students.
French, J. (2017a, September 28). Education minister vows to tighten privacy rules around gay-straight alliances in schools. Retrieved from http://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/education-minister-vows-to-tighten-privacy-rules-around-gay-straight-alliances-in-schools.
Government of Canada. (1982). Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Retrieved from http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html.
Strommen, H.E.W.C. (2006, December 1). 2006 Joint Statement: 3rd Session of the Human Rights Council Joint Statement. Retrieved from http://arc-international.net/global-advocacy/sogi-statements/2006-joint-statement/.
The Canadian Press. (2017, September 28). Alberta to bring in legislation to protect students who join gay-straight clubs. Retrieved from http://thechronicleherald.ca/canada/1507250-alberta-to-bring-in-legislation-to-protect-students-who-join-gay-straight-clubs.
UNHCR. (2011, November 17). Discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. Retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Discrimination/A.HRC.19.41_English.pdf.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/25
Caleb W. Lack, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Oklahoma, and the Director of the Secular Therapist Project. Dr. Lack is the author or editor of six books (most recently Critical Thinking, Science, & Pseudoscience: Why We Can’t Trust Our Brains with Jacques Rousseau) and more than 45 scientific publications on obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome and tics, technology’s use in therapy, and more. He writes the popular Great Plains Skeptic column on skepticink.com and regularly presents nationally and internationally for professionals and the public. Learn more about him here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With Alcoholics Anonymous, I notice one thing in particular, which is an amorphous or vague definition of “God.” Is there a functional utility to it? Does it have a purpose?
Dr. Caleb Lack: If you go back to the 1930s, there was basically a cult called The Oxford Group, which is what splintered off into Alcoholics Anonymous. They were very specific about their God, which was a Christian God. Fast forward some 25 and more years later, they started to have this vagueness about what their “higher power” could be, saying things like “Your higher power can be a rock or yourself.”
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/25
Calistus Igwilo is the President of the Atheist Society of Nigeria, who was kind enough to give an extensive, exclusive interview with me. Here we talk about religious faith, atheism, and religion in Nigeria.
—
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was there a family grounding in religious faith?
Calistus Igwilo: I was baptized a Catholic, couple of months after my birth, and was raised a Catholic until about age 13 when I joined my mum to attend a prayer ministry (Where they purport to see the vision and predict the future). And I eventually became a “visioner” at about age 15. Then about age 20, I became a “born again” Christian and was supposed to live above sin, to be holy even as Christ was holy, so I sincerely and honestly struggled to live above sin, I didn’t watch television at the time because I could see a sensual advert that will make me lust in my heart thereby committing sin. Prior to being born again, I masturbated a lot, but as a born again I tried very hard to resist masturbation and struggled for about 1 year until I lost it. So it dawned on me that I was a “sinner” and numerous attempt to repent proved abortive as those desires were real, therefore, I stopped going to church in other not to be a hypocrite. And when I accepted life the way it really was, I started to have doubts about religion but I was alone on that thought, there was no like minded person to share my doubts with.
Later, when I became independent and started living by myself, I asked myself some crucial questions: “all the things I know so far, who thought me?” My answer was mainly my parents, then I asked, “Who thought my parents” the answer was my grandparents. Then I asked the crucial question “What do these grand and great grandparents know? Are my not supposed to know more than them, since they did not have the level of education I have?” And that was how my journey into skepticism started, I resolved to reevaluate everything that I have been thought by my parents and choose for myself only things that made sense and conform to the knowledge I had gained thus far. I began to think for myself, I became responsible for my life and my actions, then I realized that the whole religious stuff lacks logical merit.
About that period, I met my first business partner Leoard F. Runyon Jr. who we formed a computer company together. He lived life the way life was without any recourse to a supernatural being or superstitions. We never discussed religion or talked about atheism, I do not know about atheism at the time, but for the first time in my life, I associated with people that live their lives very plainly without invoking God or religion for any task, they depend on their brain to make decisions. At that point, religion became irrelevant in my life and any thought of returning to it someday vanished. After few more years, I started looking for Nigerians like me, I couldn’t see any around me, so I took to the internet to search for Nigerian Atheists. Leo Igwe’s name was the prominent name that pops up each time I searched so I did him an email which he replied and informed me about an upcoming humanist convention in 2011 at Abuja. I attended that conference and met for the first time, Nigerian atheists, and that was the beginning of my association with atheists.
Jacobsen: Who were some influences in losing it or simply becoming an atheist?
Igwilo: The first influence was my personal experience. I have always tried to be sincere and honest to myself, so when I started struggling to keep up with religious teachings, I knew somehow that they weren’t tenable, then I became a “backslider” and because I don’t want to deceive myself claiming to be what is not tenable, I gave up on religion. The next influence was Leonard F. Runyon, my business partner, in whom I saw for the first time in my life how someone can live one’s life without the need for a God. Then when I a degree course in Biotechnology, everything fell into place, I had a rational explanation for the emergence of life and I applied that knowledge to every other supernatural belief. Life ceased to be mysterious to me and I never looked back since then. There was nothing to look back for anyway because I have traveled the road of religion and have studied the bible from page to page from cover to cover so there was nothing curious left there to go back to.
Jacobsen: What is the prevalence religion in Nigeria? What are the types that you’d typically find there?
Igwilo: The prevalent religions in Nigeria are Islam and Christianity, the traditional religion is steadily going extinct. Majority of northern Nigeria are Muslims while the majority of Eastern Nigeria are Christians, the western Nigeria are split between Muslims and Christians. So each region is dominated by their own common religion (Christian or Muslim) and they tolerate each other to a good extent except for some small part of northern Nigeria where sectarian crises arise once in a while.
Jacobsen: Why did you found the Atheist Society of Nigeria?
Igwilo: While I was doing my masters degree at the University of Nottingham, UK, I joined the University of Nottingham Atheists Secularists and Humanist (UNASH) association, it was my first experience of belonging to an atheist group, I also joined the Nottingham Secular Society an umbrella body for atheists and humanists living in Nottingham. I was elected to serve on the executive committee and was closely mentored by Dennis, the then President of Nottingham Secular Society and I gained some experience in running a secular society. So when I returned to Nigeria in 2013, I started Port Harcourt Secular Society with Timothy Hatcher under the suggestion of Becca Schwartz. The main reason was to create a community for Atheist, Humanist, Secularists and Freethinkers. By then there was a vibrant Nigerian Atheist group and Nigerian Humanist group on Facebook which serves as home for all atheists, humanists, and freethinkers. The need to organize so that we can engage with government, institutions, and societies led to us applying to be registered with Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), but our application suffered numerous setbacks, when we got some kind of nod to go ahead, we didn’t have the fund to see the process through as Port Harcourt Secular Society had very few members then. So we organized at the national level to register Humanist Society of Nigeria but it suffered a huge setback from the CAC, they always come up with a reason to have us start the application all over again, it’s been up to 2 years now and Nigerian Humanist Association hasn’t been incorporated. While at it, some group of Atheists who belong to a Facebook group called Proudly Atheist made a move, and quietly got initial approval after their lawyer threatened to sue CAC, so we rallied around the process and finally got it registered. This has given us the backing of the law, to engage our community.
Jacobsen: How momentous is the occasion of ASN registration?
Igwilo: Well, the day the news broke that we have been incorporated, it was in the evening, I was just speechless, I couldn’t describe what I felt, and it was the same for other 9 members of the board of trustees. But very quickly, it dawned on me that we have achieved something very great something capable of making a positive lasting change to Nigeria and I could see the enormous task ahead of us. I still don’t have words to describe the feeling that night, but that sense of accomplishment drove us to this present day.
Jacobsen: Also, it was registered as an official organization, which is a first for an organization of its kind. How else is this a momentous occasion for the atheist community in Nigeria?
Igwilo: First it has given the Atheists, Secularists, Humanists and Freethinkers a sense of community backed by the law, where they can actualize their common goals, it has given them a voice which hitherto was non-existent, many never believed that this day will come. ASN wants to engage with the Nigerian community to raise awareness on why public policies, scientific inquiries and education policies should not be based on religious beliefs but rather on sound reason, rationality and evidence. This will help liberate people from superstitions and myths and promote science and technology, it will also make Nigeria a saner, safer, more sustainable place for reason and freethought.
Jacobsen: What are some initiatives underway to normalize atheism, reduce superstition, and secularize public life in Nigeria more?
Igwilo: We have started campaigning against qualified professionals that use their authority to promote superstitious practices among vulnerable Nigerians which could lead to loss of lives. A case study is our petition against the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria about some medical doctors and healthcare professionals that refer patients to “faith healing homes” and some that support phantom miraculous healing testimonies in their places of worship giving credence to superstitious beliefs.
We also want to promote religious tolerance in Nigeria because Nigeria is grossly divided along religious lines which breeds suspicion and mistrust among the divide. Our solution is to educate the youths on various religions in Nigeria, this can be achieved by campaigning for the merging of all religious studies under a single subject of learning in secondary schools. We are making the case that Traditional Religious Knowledge, Islamic Religious Knowledge, Christian Religious Knowledge be taught as a single comparative subject of study, it will enable the students to critique religions and have an academic knowledge of various religions and help them develop critical thinking and reasoning. When they become adults, they will vote in people with rational and critical thinking into governance who will in turn make public policies that are not based on religious beliefs but on sound reason, rationality and evidence. It will be a very long drawn out campaign, we will lay the foundation now and sustain it.
Nigerian national assembly has passed some laws that breed hate and victimization against some minority citizens, we intend to mount campaign in due cause to call for repeal of those obnoxious laws that infringes on citizens fundamental human rights.
Jacobsen: How can people get involved or donate to the Atheist Society of Nigeria?
Igwilo: People can get involved with us by registering as members of Atheist Society of Nigeria though our membership registration portal on our website at www.atheist.org.ng.
We are a not-for-profit organisation and depend on donations and goodwill to carry out our programs and local development projects. We are open to donations and volunteering of time and skills to help implement our projects. For monetary donations, we have a bank account where we can receive donations, it can also be done online using credit or debit card. We also have a portal for volunteers registration on our website.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Calistus.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/25
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: For those that don’t know, what is the situation with the conversion therapy ban ongoing at the moment?
Pirate Jen Takahashi (petition): We are continuing to collect signatures on letters. We are continuing to reach out to PRIDE organizations and churches in the province. The letters are a sign of support, of solidarity with the ban and the PRIDE community. We are showing the government there is this support and that we want to see this ban happen. You can go on the website and add your own thoughts, stories, or suggestions to the letter. It auto-sends to multiple ministers, MLAs, and the Premier.
Recently, Minister Hoffman made some statements to the effect that she doesn’t see conversion therapy as a problem in the province. We beg to differ. She said to contact her office directly about conversion therapy. It is offensive and tone deaf. It destroys families and lives in communities regarding work and education.
Jacobsen: How does one respond to an individual who considers conversion therapy effective, when there’s no evidence for it?
Takahashi: There’s no way to respond to someone who believes raping and torturing someone will change their biology and genetics. There is no amount of science and evidence out there that will prove to these people that they are wrong. We have report and study, report and study, that conversion therapy doesn’t work. These people can’t believe otherwise. That you can rape the gay out of somebody.
Jacobsen What faith organizations are the main endorsers and practitioners?
Takahashi: Typically, Reform and Evangelicals are the ones who do this. The Mormon church gave this up a while ago. It is Evangelical and Dutch Reform, especially here in Southern Alberta. They will be the ones in compounds with the most virulent forms of it.
Jacobsen: What have been the most tragic stories to come out?
Takahashi: One was a gentleman who was queer-identifying and actually handcuffed down and forced to watch pornography while being electrocuted. The theory was he would then associate gay sex with violence. Those negative neural pathways being built was the idea. It is that pseudoscience. There is also a particularly upsetting woman, a queer-identifying woman, who was raped. She had decided, queer or not, to save herself for marriage. The church told her it doesn’t count as sex because Jesus wanted this to happen to cure her. So, she was raped and received no support or therapy to deal with the trauma of rape.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/25
Conservative Party leader, Andrew Scheer, has made recent comments on harm reduction in practice (Conservative Party of Canada, 2017; CBC News, 2017). He is touring B.C. to boost the profile with voters (Ibid.).
Scheer said, “I don’t believe that should be the focus…There’s nothing there that breaks that cycle of addiction. I think that’s what more and more Canadians want to see.” He spoke out against safe injection sites as well:
“I really do think we need to move beyond this kind of supervised injection, where government makes it quote unquote safer to inject illicit drugs, and to focus more on recovery and helping those who are addicted to get off drugs.” (Ibid.)
No evidence or authority was referenced in the assertion; as well, he considers the awareness of young people particularly important as an emphasis.
When queried about the “onerous” factors to be taken into account as set out by the previous Conservative Party of Canada government, Scheer said the emphasis should not be on the repetition of the cycle of addiction.
Of any new party candidate leader, Scheer has had the smallest bump in the last 14 years out of any of them (Grenier, 2017). Even with the attempts for politicization of harm reduction in the attempts to garner voters in B.C., the B.C. health authorities have already spoken through the evidence, as per the most important question: what does the evidence say?
“Harm Reduction: A British Columbia Community Guide” (2005) from the B.C. Ministry of Health stated, firmly:
Harm reduction benefits the community through substantial reductions in open drug use, discarded drug paraphernalia, drug-related crime, and associated health, enforcement and criminal justice costs. It lessens the negative impact of an open drug scene on local business and improves the climate for tourism and economic development.
Scheer is bringing a musket to a battle lost for his party in another generation. He’s engaged in historical re-enactment.
References
B.C. Ministry of Health. (2005). Harm Reduction: A British Columbia Community Guide. Retrieved from http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/library/publications/year/2005/hrcommunityguide.pdf.
CBC News. (2017, August 29). Q&A: Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer says harm reduction doesn’t break addiction cycle. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/q-a-conservative-leader-andrew-scheer-says-harm-reduction-doesn-t-break-addiction-cycle-1.4267020.
Conservative Party of Canada. (2017). Andrew Scheer. Retrieved from https://www.conservative.ca/andrew-scheer/.
Grenier, E. (2017, August 30). ANALYSIS Andrew Scheer’s Conservative leadership bump the smallest any new party leader has had in 14 years. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-scheer-honeymoon-1.4265903.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/25
The Canadian public, though, by and large, religious in proclivities, remains skeptical as to the functional utility of religion throughout the nation. According to Crux Now in “Canadians think religion does more harm than good, latest poll says,” 51% of Canadians, even with the majority of the population as religious, viewed religion as a net negative on society (Din, 2017; Pew Research Center, 2013).
One possible interpretation seems to be the steady growth of a sentiment, or taste, for secularism: place of worship and government separation.
Tied to the growth in this taste comes the decrease in fervor, such as the removal of the last residential schools in 1996 (and so a lessening in the numerous crimes against the Indigenous population) and the reduction in self-reported church attendance, this points to the rise in the “Nones” or those without formal religious affiliation (Miller & Marshall, 2016; Lindsay, 2008).
Whether in the world, America, or Canada, the rate of growth for the non-religious is stark and the total numbers are over 1 billion in the world, the number is set to increase, too (Bullard, 2016; Lipka, 2015; Fiedler, 2016).
The world, as well as Canada, has a larger secular and “Nones” base, where even the religious across the country hold views in support of the notion, or at times explicitly empirically supported claim, that religion does more harm than good in society on net, which includes Canada. It’s the ‘Opinion of the People.’
References
Bullard, G. (2016, April 22). The World’s Newest Major Religion: No Religion. Retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160422-atheism-agnostic-secular-nones-rising-religion/.
Din, J.K. (2017, July 1). Canadians think religion does more harm than good, latest poll says. Retrieved from https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2017/07/01/canadians-think-religion-harm-good-latest-poll-says/.
Fiedler, M. (2016, October 3). The rise of the ‘nones’ or ‘nons’. Retrieved from https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/rise-nones-or-nons.
Lindsay, C. (2008, November 21). Canadians attend weekly religious services less than 20 years ago. Retrieved from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-630-x/2008001/article/10650-eng.htm.
Lipka, M. (2015, May 13). A closer look at America’s rapidly growing religious ‘nones’. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/.
Miller, J.R. & Marshall, T. (2016, September 29). Residential Schools. Retrieved from http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools/.
Pew Research Center. (2013, June 27). Canada’s Changing Religious Landscape. Retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/2013/06/27/canadas-changing-religious-landscape/.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/25
I was reading an article in the Law Cruces Sun-News on secular humanism and naturalism, which made me begin to think some more about the philosophy in a similar way.
Paul Kurtz was a hero to many. Hempstead opened the article with a quote by him. In echoing the thoughts of Hempstead, the philosophy of naturalism is one focused on the natural world and natural means to discover that world. It is a philosophy that entails a lack of supernaturalism about descriptions of the world. In other words, they look to the material world and physical explanations for it.
Often, the secular humanist community will support this kind of philosophy. In terms of the epistemological stance, its position is focused on empirical, evidence-based reasoning. For some, they can see the world is meaningless without divine existence, guidance, even intervention. The secular humanist community does not see this at all, generally.
The meaning you get is the meaning you make. There’s no intrinsic meaning to the world, which means that any meaning can only be derived from the world. Any thinking thing can get meaning in the world, but the meaning is not an intrinsic property of the universe. That is an enlightening and freeing perspective on the cosmos.
It follows that responsibilities to ourselves and others come from ourselves and others, and not from some outside supernaturalistic super entities.
The justice that we will get in addition to the fairness that we will experience comes from ourselves and others, not from some divine intervenor.
That makes things like constitutions of secular countries and the United Nations Charter, and similar documents, important for guidance based on global consensus around the right and the wrong things, or the correct and incorrect behaviors in any given instance.
This implies human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, sexual minority rights, labor rights, and so on, and their implementation by ourselves and others. However, to secular humanists, we view the world as not ideal, which means that idealized notions will be tempered by reality.
Prayer and fasting won’t solve our problems. Ideas of saints and sinners will not. Authority figures in dresses will not. Also, being born of a virgin will not, the world exists by natural means and can be understood by natural methods. That natural understanding of the material world or the physical world will be the best guide for our actions, right or wrong, by and for ourselves and others. That is part of a secular humanist outlook.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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“While I am sure that there are many people working in scientific fields who would claim to be religious, it always seems to me that there really is a basic conflict here, rather than a “misunderstanding” (“Would you Adam and Eve it? Why creation story is at heart of major misunderstanding”, News).
How can any ultimately “supernatural” explanation (whatever that means) for a phenomenon ever be a “scientific” answer? At what point can any dedicated scientist investigating a difficult problem decide that there is no scientific answer to it and that it can be explained only as an act of God? How would such results be presented for scientific peer review and in what terms would they be couched?
Exactly what “specific steps in the universe’s history must be the direct result of divine intervention” (quote: Rowan Williams – my emphasis)? Isn’t this supernatural view just a resort to mystery? And isn’t it the job of science to defy, examine and explain mystery?”
“The demand of independent religion status for Lingayatism gathered new momentum on Sunday with another massive community rally in Kalaburagi.
It was the fourth rally in the last two months after Bidar, Belagavi and Latur (Maharashtra).
Lakhs of community members arrived from different parts of Hyderabad Karnataka region as well as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana marched from Gunj through Supermarket and Jagat Circle to Nutan Vidyalay Grounds where a public meeting was conducted.”
“IF you don’t like being told what to do, how to think, or how you should vote, Australia is a pretty excruciating place to be right now.
This postal ballot process is being rendered unbearable by the two warring camps in the battle over same-sex marriage.
Let’s deal with the churches first, for whom the SSM debate is their equivalent of what the 2007 WorkChoices battle was for the labour movement.
Australia’s spiritual life is at a crossroads. The most recent Census showed the fastest-growing category of religion over the past 50 years has been “No religion”, up from just 0.8 per cent in the 1960s to a whopping 30 per cent last year.”
“The Reverend Sister said this on her arrival at Murtala Muhammed International Airport after a ten-day exchange program in Lebanon where she had the privilege to tour the country and learn about its culture and traditions.
Sister Aboekwe suggested the teaching of Islamic religion in Christian schools and vice versa, arguing that such will engender better understanding between Muslims and Christians alike. She said both Christians and Muslims worship the same god, and therefore the constant religious conflicts and misunderstandings are needless.
“After seeing what happened in Lebanon, I came to conclude that religion needs to be downplayed in Nigeria,” she said. “When we come out to discuss the unity of this nation, let us put religion aside, because it will not unite us. We will never be united when we talk of religion. Instead let us all believe that we are all children of God, created by one God.”
Source: http://saharareporters.com/2017/09/24/reverend-sister-says-religion-will-not-unite-nigerians.
“In the words of the late rock musician, David Bowie: “This is not America.”
On August 12. white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.
They said they were there to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
But, they were really there to march against blacks and Jews. Three people were killed: Heather Heuer, the victim of a car driven into the crowd; and two policemen who were killed in a helicopter crash – as well as a black man who was seriously beaten.
The thugs were dressed in army fatigues. They carried semi-automatic weapons. They yelled: “There’s the synagogue!” Nazi websites had called for the burning of the building. The worshippers were so terrified, that the synagogue leaders removed the Torah scrolls, and told the congregants to leave by the back door.”
Source: http://religionnews.com/2017/09/24/charlottesville-jews-rosh-ha-shanah/.
“Paul Nelson reviews the recent book The Big Picture, by physicist Sean Carroll, in Dr. Nelson’s characteristically charming and insightful way. Nelson writes in the Christian Research Journal. You’ll need to subscribe (and you should) to read the whole thing.
This we did not know: Dr. Carroll’s “poetic naturalism” is avowedly a religious stance, albeit an atheistic one.”
Source: https://evolutionnews.org/2017/09/poetic-naturalism-as-a-religion/.
“A man, on a visit visa, has been charged in the Court of First Instance with blasphemy and trying to commit suicide while in police custody.
According to public prosecution records, the 28-year-old Jordanian man was brought to the police station at around 9.30pm on July 3. He smelled like he had been drinking alcohol and was behaving aggressively, the records show.
He was then placed in detention pending the legal procedures. Then it was reported he took a blade out of his wallet and self-inflicted cuts all over his body in a bid to end his life. A medical team was called to the scene but he refused to cooperate. He would not let the paramedics take him to hospital but rather treated them aggressively.
After he was calmed down and given first aid for his injuries he became wild again and would not want to be taken to hospital. He allegedly insulted religion.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/24
“Schools should teach pupils about all faiths and allow them to form their “own conclusions about life’s big questions”, Britain’s leading secular body has said. The comments by Humanists UK — which are backed by the Church of England’s chief education officer — came ahead the publication of an interim report into overhauling the teaching of religious education, or RE. Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanist UK, said: “Education about religious and humanist beliefs is vitally important for any child growing up in Britain today.”
Source: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/re-schools-let-kids-draw-conclusions-say-humanists-uk/.
“More than a quarter of secondary schools in the UK are not teaching their pupils any religious education (RE), a new report by the National Association of Teachers of RE (NATRE) and Religious Education Council for England and Wales has revealed. Humanists UK, which is a founding member of the RE Council and campaigns in favour of inclusive education about religious and humanist beliefs, has stated that the report makes a strong case for fundamental reform of the subject.
The report, which details the results of a survey of 790 schools, found that no RE is being provided in 28% of secondary schools. The situation is much worse in academies and free schools, where RE is not taught at Key Stage 3 in 34% of schools, or at 44% of schools at Key Stage 4.”
“JACKSON, Mississippi, September 22, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — A group of polygamists and a “machinist” who claims to want to marry his computer are challenging homosexual “marriage” in Mississippi.
Chris Sevier and others filed a federal lawsuit reasoning that same-sex “marriage” is part of the religion of secular humanism, and since it is of a religious nature, the state has no right to recognize it over other faith-based “marriages” such as polygamy, zoophilia, and machinism.
The belief that two men or two women can have a marriage is a religious leap of faith, the plaintiffs argue. Therefore, government sanctioning it goes against the Constitution’s Establishment clause.”
“Comedian-turned-hero Sunil has been making continuous efforts to secure a hit to his name after tasting a marathon of duds. He has joined hands with acclaimed filmmaker Kranthi Madhav for Ungarala Rambabu. Having seen his recent outings, one has to walk into a theatre with thoughts wondering how unique does the story seem. A film which was supposed to be rib-tickler ends up as an obsequious fare. Sunil is Ungarala Rambabu, a staunch believer in astrology and is so smug in his superstitious notion that he attributes all his success to a fake godman Badam Baba.
He sports unusual outfits with weird colours every day to work. Director Kranthi Madhav tried to show how Rambabu’s character is coping with the financial loss and how his beliefs get him back on track provided he marries a girl born in an unusual (chikubuku) star. What we get for the rest of the film is an emotional Rambabu’s struggle to win his love.”
“In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev has pledged to focus his government on bringing greater prosperity and human rights to his nation and the Central Asian region.
The Uzbek leader said on September 19 that his goal of improving the living conditions of citizens was what led him this month to allow the free float of the Uzbek currency while also reducing business taxes, expanding loans to businesses, and establishing free economic zones.
“We proceed from one simple truth: the richer the people are, the stronger shall be the state,” Mirziyoev said, according to an English-language translation of his remarks provided on the UN website.”
“Just 5% of Christians say that they became Christians after reaching the age at which they left school, a new poll commissioned by the Church of England has revealed. The poll, carried out by ComRes, also reveals that just 6% of British adults consider themselves to be practicing Christians.
Humanists UK has stated that the findings raise questions not only about the motivation behind the church’s involvement in schools, but also the appropriateness of a school admissions system that requires people to attend church just to gain access to their local state school.
Of the 8,150 adults in Great Britain who responded to the ComRes poll, 64% stated that they became Christian between the ages of 0–4, 13% from 5–10 years old, 8% 11–18, and just 5% thereafter (9% of respondents didn’t know). The figures for Anglicans specifically were similar, though just 3% of Catholics stated that they became Christian after reaching 18 years of age.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/24
“The secret to enjoying a good whiskey? A dash of water.
Whiskey drinkers have been doing this for centuries to heighten certain flavors and reduce burn.
Science has two competing theories for why this works. One explanation suggests water traps bad flavors. Whiskey contains a compound called “fatty acid esters”. These compounds interact with water in an interesting way. One end repels water molecules and the other end attracts it.”
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-add-water-to-whiskey-2017-9.
“atthew Walker has learned to dread the question “What do you do?” At parties, it signals the end of his evening; thereafter, his new acquaintance will inevitably cling to him like ivy. On an aeroplane, it usually means that while everyone else watches movies or reads a thriller, he will find himself running an hours-long salon for the benefit of passengers and crew alike. “I’ve begun to lie,” he says. “Seriously. I just tell people I’m a dolphin trainer. It’s better for everyone.”
Walker is a sleep scientist. To be specific, he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute whose goal — possibly unachievable — is to understand everything about sleep’s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health. No wonder, then, that people long for his counsel. As the line between work and leisure grows ever more blurred, rare is the person who doesn’t worry about their sleep. But even as we contemplate the shadows beneath our eyes, most of us don’t know the half of it — and perhaps this is the real reason he has stopped telling strangers how he makes his living. When Walker talks about sleep he can’t, in all conscience, limit himself to whispering comforting nothings about camomile tea and warm baths. It’s his conviction that we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic”, the consequences of which are far graver than any of us could imagine. This situation, he believes, is only likely to change if government gets involved.”
“DUNE is one of the better particle physics acronyms. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment involves a large, sensitive detector which will indeed be deep underground — in the Sanford Lab at the Homestake goldmine in South Dakota — and will study neutrinos produced from a high-intensity beam of protons at Fermilab in Illinois. UK scientists from several universities are already deeply involved in the experiment, and Cambridge’s Prof. Mark Thomson is one of the two spokespeople who lead the experiment internationally.
The science of neutrinos is fascinating, with wide implications for our understanding of the universe and how it operates. Neutrinos are produced copiously in the Sun, and are the second most abundant particle in the universe. In the original conception of the “Standard Model” of particle physics, they were taken to be massless. The discovery that they actually have a — very tiny but non-zero — mass remains the only major modification forced upon the Standard Model since it was established. Fittingly, the first measurement leading to that discovery took place in the Homestake mine, which will now be reoccupied by one of the DUNE detectors. A goldmine in more than one sense.”
“Last week, Disney Parks Blog held a Galactic Meet-Up for their fans, who were treated to a meeting-of-the-minds between NASA representatives, Imagineers and superhero storytellers. It was a unique panel discussion that explored how the science of space exploration influences storytelling. Turns out that if you love Disney, you may be a budding scientist.
On the panel was retired U.S. Navy pilot and NASA astronaut Capt. Mike Foreman, NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Kimberly Ennico Smith, Marvel Entertainment’s Vice President of Development, TV and New Media, Stephen Wacker, and Walt Disney Imagineers John Mauro and Amy Jupiter. The panel spoke about their various fields and how the intersection of science and storytelling comes together to celebrate both technology and entertainment.
“As a physicist we solve problems,” said Dr. Kimberly Ennico Smith. Having worked at NASA for 17 years she related, “If you’re curious — if you ask questions — you are a scientist. Science is going to make the world a better place, and our future even brighter. In this age of technology, with technology within the Disney Parks, animation, and movies, it gets you to think beyond reality. You can use that thinking to solve problems in science and engineering.”
Source: http://nerdist.com/science-space-exploration-influences-disney-storytelling/.
“KOZHIKODE: Creative thoughts are a must for the growth of science and scientific education, scientist C.N.R. Rao has said.
He was interacting with select students from the State as part of a three-day conference on ‘Emerging frontiers in chemical sciences’ at Farook College here on Sunday.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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The Independentreported on some of the outspoken feminism and empowerment of girls and women of Annie Lennox, former member of Eurythmics. She acknowledged the truism is the vast majority of older women simply becoming forgotten, but affirmed that this does not necessarily have to be the case. That older women do not simply have to become “invisible.”
This seems like the right orientation tome. She has continued to support important initiatives including Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Lennox is serious about feminisms and about the inculcation of the values and the term, likely, into the public sphere more and more.
Annie Lennox has spoken about the importance of empowering girls and women through feminism, expressing her belief that women her age should not have to feel as though they’ve become “invisible”.
The reportage stated, “‘My current focus is to bring the term ‘Global Feminism’ into the zeitgeist,’ Lennox tells Good Housekeeping. ‘I’m so happy we can use the ‘F’ word now and talk comfortably about being feminists!’”
For a long time, the term was something uncomfortable and not seen as worth mentioning. But, at the present moment, we are seeing a resurgence of consideration for the rights and responsibilities of women. Bearing in mind, the equality of women simply was not on the agenda for centuries and this continues to be fought against — in a red and tooth and claw manner.
As she — Lennox — has noted, it is criticizing men. It is critiquing negative behaviors that are damaging to men, women, and society that are being criticized. However, this is misrepresented as criticizing all masculinities, all men, and simply being a purported witch hunt. Not the case in most or all cases, insofar as I can tell, once one looks by the media extravaganza and hyperbole.
Now 64-years-old, Lennox is work to establish a renewed culture of interest in and public acceptance of older women, to fight against the stigma and the disappearing from public consciousness of women.
Lennox said, “At the end of the day, Global Feminism is about the fundamental human rights of girls and women — why should we continue to tolerate disrespect, abuse and disempowerment?”
“Dressing up for this photoshoot was really fun and trying on all these clothes for the pictures was enjoyable,” Lennox continued, “I want people to realise that women of my age don’t have to become invisible.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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To start some movement, whether of a religious or secular, political or social, nature, there should be a clarification of terms and appropriate utilization of the terminology.
If we look into the general work of the free speech advocates who label others with the epithet social justice warriors, the appropriate terminology for them, thus, becomes free speech warriors.
For the free speech warriors, in Canadian society, there seems to be a consistent confusion of terminology and rights. There is a discussion around the right to free speech in Canadian environments, as if this is the proper terminology, right, and replicates or maps identically onto the Canadian landscape.
With even a single Google search or a trip to the local library, the most base research can represent the incorrect stipulations amongst the free speech warriors.
As the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada states, “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
This doesn’t require research. It simply needs reading. That’s it. This appears to not have been done, at all, amongst an entire modern ideological movement.
When we look further into the Charter, we can see the respect for the rights and freedoms in Canadian society for the acknowledgment, respect, and maintenance of the free and democratic society of modern Canada.
This leads to some further analysis, though. If the phrase is “free speech” or “freedom of speech” amongst the free speech warriors, the, obvious, contextualization is where does this terminology come from, as noted the terms come from the United States of America and then get exported to the cold place in the North.
Reading the First Amendment to the U.S Constitution, it, in full, states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The abridgement of “freedom of speech” is prohibited here. In other words, the right is not to freedom of expression but, in actual fact, the freedom of speech or “free speech.” Thus, the only true free speech warriors are from America in this interpretation.
But also, we can read further in the Canadian Charter. It, clearly, states in Article 2:
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c)freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
Here we come to the crux and comparison of the issue, it is not complicated, easily read, and simply overlooked. David Millard Haskell gets the terminology correct. That’s praiseworthy.
However, others simply fail to notice this. The free speech warriors miss the stipulation — because they didn’t read the Charter and may have simply wanted to be a part of an ideological movement — about freedom of expression.
This is unassailable in the terminology. In America, the right is specific to freedom of speech. In Canada, the right is to freedom of expression. The question to the free speech warriors is if they want to have a coherent movement and activism in order to protect the correct rights within the appropriate bounded geography within which the rights and responsibilities are bound as well.
If not, it will continue, as it has for years, to remain incoherent, overgeneralization, and wrongly using rights in different contexts in which they do not apply.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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There is a need to support the compassionate ending of life. For some, there simply is nothing but pain until they die. Setup in an ethical society would permit the compassionate ending of life.
It would be something in which the individual living through this would make a cognizant choice or could pass the choice to another individual in order to live a healthier life.
The 2019 Annual Fundis important in the ability to pursue this, as Compassion & Choice is one such organization working to help with this level of autonomy at the end of life.
If you have some funds to donate to this enterprise, it would be greatly appreciated, as this would benefit the general welfare of multiple people who may not have the option otherwise — as we move into the future.
In the end, it is about values. Does one value the autonomy of the individual at the end of life, or not? If so, then this may not be a simple issue, but does become a compassionate and individual choice issue.
Moving into 2018, we can see the end of life freedom advancing, slowly. One important advancement was Our Care, Our Choice Act in Hawai’i. If finances are donated to the fund, then the goals for 2019 can be important for guiding the years forward.
Compassion & Choices wants to advance a 10-year goal of the procurement of medical aid in dying for, at least, half of the country. They also want to protect the current gains and increases that have been won so far.
They shift in the conversation is important too. We can find the ways in which Barbara Coombs Lee’s work has been important for the provision of personal stories and advice around and on the issue of end-of-life care and medical assistance in dying.
All of this is important in a multipronged approach to the advancement of end-of-life care. Please donate if you can.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Humanists UK has been pushing for what they have been terming a compassionate assisted dying law, in which there is a law set forth in support of a “compassionate, humane, assisted dying law.”
This movement comes with a wide variety of terms. One of the important aspects of all of this is the public support for it. The Royal College of Physicians is opposed to a humane right to die law.
However, if we look into the public support, it is overwhelming at 80%. 4 out of 5 citizens support the law for this most important of choices about the end of the journey — likely — for human life.
The recent survey can be important for the advancement of medical assistance in dying, in a prominent nation. Humanists UK formed the Assisted Dying Coalition.
With the cooperation and coordination with other organizations, this can be an important move for the empowerment of those who truly want to plan and make the choice for their final days.
UK citizens may be forced to travel to another country for an assisted death. If most of the nation wants it, and if this can be passed to democratically support what the nations wants, then this can be an important democratic advancement and, in fact, a compassionate one too.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Andrew Sullivan, prominent and long-time essayist, declared every person has a religion. By implication, this would include atheists, as most see themselves, likely, as a-religious within the referent frame of a-theism. This seems more wrong than right, and also appears to miss the basic nature of religion: handed down answers, or, rather, assertions bequeathed with dogma; where with a-religiosity, values become discovered, obviously confined within the cognitive-emotional bounds of living as a human being. Thus, the first-answer as to why everyone leans towards common values and the Golden Rule, within constraints.
He has written and published hundreds of articles in a variety of publications. In the view of Sullivan, the modern atheists take on the garb of a quasi-religion through their “attenuated form of religion,” as this is a “practice not a theory” view of religion (Sullivan, 2018).
He views the denial of God as absolute as others’ faith in God, but, in fact, he contradicts himself with the denial of God as views while the religions of those who believe in God amount to actions. This retains the similar tactical flavor of prominent evangelists of everything becoming referred back, in some manner or other, to Christianity or God.
He points to the values individuals live by in the world, including daily rituals, meditation, and prayer. He even points to secular people with Buddhist practices as part of their view of the world. Atheism does not imply Buddhism or Buddhist practices; it implies a non-belief in God. That’s it.
Sullivan stated, “In his highly entertaining book, The Seven Types of Atheism, released in October in the U.S., philosopher John Gray puts it this way: ‘Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe’” (Sullivan, 2018).
Religion becomes Confirmation Bias writ worldview. Sullivan argues for this as part of a self-knowledge of every individual member of the human species of their own individual demise, of absolute finality.
Thus, the reconciliation with the world comes in the form of the assertion of “meaning in events” and not as an attempt to “explain the universe” (Sullivan, 2018). He, quoting Gray, in essence argues for a why rather than a functional-how of the universe, of which religion provides the explanatory filler and, presumably, the evolved necessity of a search for meaning gives the cognitive filter.
He asserts, “This is why science cannot replace it. Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning” (Sullivan, 2018). Take the temporality of the claims of science, this, to him, likely implies lack of ultimate meaning in time; take the spatial limits of the human body, this implicates a void in ultimate meaning in space; examine the limitations in mentation of all human beings, this derives eventual emptiness to meaning from the self and imaginary inventiveness of human beings.
The gap between the infinite, absolute, or ultimate meaning and any finite temporal or spatial meaning leads to a conclusion that religion gives ultimate meaning. However, when we look closer on the assertion of science not being capable of replacing religion, we can see the finite explanations of religion, in its practices – as Sullivan argues religion is actions.
Meaning does not exist as a constituent element of the universe, but, rather, in the relation of consciousnesses to the universe. Meaning remains derived rather than fundamental in this sense and, ultimately, constructed and finite, as this comes from the fundamental substructure of a mind’s transactional relationship with the cosmos (and other minds).
But even in the theories propounded by some sects of religions as natural world truths, they contradict the knowledge of the natural world provided via science, which remains the largest reliable set of epistemologies to derive better functional explanations of the cosmos. In this, religion becomes non-ultimate too; indeed, its assertions of the ultimate in meaning amount to assertions, of which non-religious people make commitments.
But back to the how of the universe, science works on the level of engineering to a significant extent, to the hows of the universe, but not on the whys. Art, literature, music, and religion comprise – not always practice – but sets of expression of the internal landscape of consciousness and perception in such a way as to have others see the world and feel about the world as the artist or writer sees and feels reality. None of this seems ultimate, including religion and its by-products.
The claims to the ultimate often are wrong as well. An ultimate meaning to the universe with the resurrection of the dead following the forgiveness of sins starting with the Fall in the Garden of Eden and the virgin birth of the Son of God, and then the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as the Saviour of Humankind.
To this assertion of ultimate meaning in avoidance of an extrapolated heat death of the universe in an immensely deep time into the future, or the ultimate meaning in the transcendence of death via atonement of Original Sin to this, we can ask a question, “What direct empirical evidence for the Garden of Eden?” (Sullivan, 2018) Answer: none. Whence Original Sin?
Outside of literary import, akin to Shakespeare or European folktales and legends, e.g., King Arthur and Merlin and so on, the purported ultimate meaning provided within the, for example, Roman Catholic Christian Church tradition of Sullivan becomes non-evidenced and, thus, probabilistic, at best, and, by implication, non-ultimate, i.e., no ultimate meaning in it.
The sensibility of the transcendent and ultimate in meaning becomes a placeholder for chauvinism in specific religions and particular theological assertions within the faith: “Our faith, our religion, harbors ultimate meaning in theology, in practices, in scriptures, and in community living, unlike the non-religious or, even especially, the irreligious” (Sullivan, 2018).
It simply amounts to arrogance and chauvinism cloaked in another guise of the religious, in this case, Sullivan. Temporal and spatial, and cognitive, limits bound the nature of the discussions, discourses, and dialogues possible for human beings, and then claims to ultimate and transcendent simply tend to mean parochial religious assertions and limits of understanding, and reaffirmations of traditional religious practice.
Characteristic of the fearmongering of equality for others while still the dominant faith demographic by a long shot in much of the West, especially where Sullivan is housed in America. A slight loss in prominence breeds a reactionary tone in addition to the regular unfolding of epithets.
Sullivan states, “Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism” (Sullivan, 2018).
Secularism becomes post-Christian, which implies theocratic-leaning as more Christian or the reduction in the reliance on faith-based initiatives for health and secular means by which to achieve better material and wellness conditions becomes post-Christian, even with most of the nation adherent to a Christian narrative, as in America.
Even besides these concerns, Catholics may want to work less on demonizing others as a distraction of the horrific sexual scandals and abuses of nuns, of children, and others, and more on the asking of forgiveness of their victims, the national potentials they’ve destroyed through denial of contraceptives and family planning, the women who they have denied livelihoods in their opposition to safe, legal, and equitable abortion – as the Guttmacher Institute shows legalization lowers the rates of abortions (true pro-life, thus, should become pro-choice), imposition of theocratic rule in constitutions, and illegitimate abuse of religious privilege in societies to maintain political power, und so weiter(Guttmacher Institute, 2018).
Non-religion becomes “scientism” and “materialism.” On “scientism,” this term is a covert epithet of the non-religious and started with Friedrich von Hayek in 1943. Materialism relates to the outcomes of public relations and the industry devoted to the fabrication of wants, where I agree with him.
The campaigns to get kids to nag parents for unnecessary junk or to get pregnant women to smoke are evils, and a result of deliberate materialistic advertising and marketing campaigns to delude the public – and vulnerable sectors to boot.
As Sullivan correctly notes, “We have leveraged science for our own health and comfort” (Sullivan, 2018). Indeed, one big impediment to the reproductive health rights and technology of women has been the Roman Catholic Christian Church. Rather than focus on his own backyard, Sullivan, instead, aims at prominent writers and then criticizes abstracts including “reason.”
As has been said by others, perhaps, we need pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, but we should remain wary or chary of the obvious moral goods being ignored in the real manifestations of their consequences in the directly implicated deaths and injuries of millions of women through simple rejection of contraceptives, abortifacients, family planning and associated educational provisions, safe and legal abortion, sexual education including consent, and so on.
Sullivan argues humans are religious creatures. This seems, in part, true, but, probably, more reliant on superstition and ignorance and myths as we remain an evolved and cognitively flawed species. He also argues humans seek meaning as part of our nature. This, once more, seems to identify a bug in what we may view as a benefit or a plus.
It depends on the orientation of the meaning sought by the individual or the group. As well, he draws attention to some non-religious individuals with too much emphasis on reason. This begs the question as to what reliance on emotionalism can derive for the truths about the world outside of the social relations.
In fact, this Vulcanization of the opposition – the non-religious – seems like another stereotype and asserted with thin evidence, except within the general derogatory statements about and odd opposition to the fundamental premises of rationalism with “reason.”
But this leads back into the notion of religion as actions or practice, mainly; however, Gray and Sullivan seem flat wrong here. Religion, in most contexts, amounts to beliefs plus suggested practices, where core a priori beliefs necessitate the faith and suggested practices can be adhered to varying degrees of seriousness: Jesus rose from the dead (core belief) and can perform miracles with enough serious and sincere prayer (suggested practice). Muhammed is the last Prophet of the one true God, Allah, (core belief) and the Hajj is an incredibly important Pillar of Islam to partake in the life of a sincere Muslim believer (suggested practice).
Someone without these, in either case, simply lacks traditional religion. Otherwise, what defines the boundaries of religions, exactly? If nothing, then religion simply becomes moot as a concept. But we tend to realize the distinctions and, intrinsically, understand religion as real phenomena and the contents of it, and practices from it. The common phrase or description of these actions is the moving of the goal posts.
One can see this angle from prominent pastors and theologians in North America who see the negative implications of the term “religion” and then work to distance their particular denomination from it: “That’s not Christianity. That’s religion.”
Giving the game away, of course, religion is seen as bad by the public more and more, based on well-documented evidence in history and evidence right into the present, and then garners a bad public persona. Christianity then, must, get separated from it. Same for other traditional religions.
Another methodology is simply to denude the term “religion” of context by moving the goal posts to such an extent as to leave anything with long-term adherence as a religion: materialistic pursuits, practicing meditation in a secular context even, or utilization of the tools of science and medicine for the improvement of human wellbeing defined in modern and secular terms.
Selectively quoting some prominent non-believers in history, Sullivan tries to mount the argument with appeals of various forms, including emotional. Without formal religious institutions or, in some modern lines of thought, old Disney films and European folk tales to give structure, order, and meaning, what will become of the world and the nature of being? Are these attacks on traditionalism? Are these assaults on the fundamental substructure of the world, of being itself?
The same as has happened in proportion to the reduction of religious fundamentalism, more freedom of thought and story-making, and meaning-making, and focus on secular notions of well-being: societies become better. Some may point to the United States of America as a high standard of living nation while also retaining high religiosity; we can simply extend the examination internal to the nation.
As it turns out, the most religious states in America have the worst health and wellness outcomes, in general, compared to the more secular ones. Thus, the benefits come with the secular offerings and technological advancements as applied to the standard secular concerns for human wellbeing, e.g., vaccinations, healthcare, better food, easier lives, cleaner working conditions, maternal and infant care, reproductive health technologies, and so on.
This comes, in fact, from a rejection of the non-answers or excuses for the problems of the real world before us, often provided in the form of religious orthodoxy. The argument cropping or popping up more and more is the notion of atheists or non-religious people generally practicing a Christian metaphysics in spite of their protestations to the contrary.
That is to say, from these chauvinists’ views, to behave in a decent and honorable manner, you must be acting in a way reflecting Christianity; therefore, you owe a debt of gratitude to Christianity for behaving well and, in fact, only behave well since you act in a purportedly Christian way.
This is simply a way of saying even ‘atheists’ aren’t atheists because they are Christians or ‘atheists’ who are truly Christians acting out a Christian metaphysics who claim that they aren’t Christian. Assumption: if you act in a good way, then you are Christian; if you act bad, then you are a non-believer. Even if you are a purported or self-proclaimed non-believer, you act as a non-believer with a Christian metaphysics. The chauvinism is “anything Christian good” – presumably, even that chauvinism, though “pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” – and “anything bad is not Christian” (The Bible: King James Version, 2018).
No one should play by the rules set out here because a) they’re false as our values predate the mythology of Christianity and b) it’s a simple dishonest Sophist tactic. Ethics is apart from religion. It can be incorporated into the moral systems, myths as guides, and stipulations of the faith, but hundreds of millions of people act well without religion and build better, more functional, and healthier societies with less religion as a heuristic – based on decades of evidence, thus not a hunch but not an axiom either.
There’s a joke among some Westerners with Indian heritage that their parents claim everything came from India. You point to some discovery in scientific or technological marvel, then the punchline is the parent claiming that this came from India.
One can also hear the notion, by analogy, that – quite astonishingly with a straight face said – separation of church and state came from Christianity, as a ‘miracle,’ seen in the statement, purportedly, by Jesus, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s,” which is from Matthew 22:21 (2018).
This one takes tremendous amounts of gumption and myopia on the part of the speaker, ignorance – if believed – on the part of the listener, and complicity in the gumption, myopia, and ignorance if journalists or others repeating it, at least uncritically.
Following the foundation of Christianity, we find one of the largest theocracies ever founded in the history of the world with the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity. The same idea can be seen in the analogy. The claim would be this is not true Christianity or real Christianity; that is to say in the former context, everyone behaving good acts in a Christian metaphysics.
Anyone not acting in such a way isn’t a Christian and, therefore, we come to the fallacy known as No True Scotsman. The sloppiness of the arguments is tiresome and the presentation of individuals making these arguments as our public intellectuals and best minds is both a travesty and a shame.
But even taking the issue of homosexuality, one which remains controversial for the hierarchs of the Roman Catholic Christian Church. Not in my words, the church’s own doctrine and positions, richly endowed statements on it, too.
As stated by the Vatican, the proper beliefs are “Sacred Scripture” placing homosexuality and homosexual acts as “acts of grave depravity,” “intrinsically disordered” or “objectively disordered,” “contrary to natural law,” “do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity,” where “homosexual persons are called to chastity” and “under no circumstances can they be approved” (The Vatican, n.d.).
Thus, the hard beliefs behind the firmly suggested practices are chaste sexual lives of homosexuals: men and women. Presumably, anyone engaging in this, within the tradition of Sullivan, become non-Christian; hence, sexually active homosexual (Roman Catholic) Christians becomes an impossibility, especially troublesome as the Good, to some, marks a Christian metaphysics – noted earlier.
Then Sullivan with the banal notions of religion as necessary for human beings states, “Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity that rests, in Jesus’ formulation, on a distinction between God and Caesar. And this separation is vital for liberalism, because if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural” (Sullivan, 2018).
One need merely look, briefly, at the crypto-theocrats within the midst of the United States creating havoc and suffering in the lives of millions of women through blockades to fundamental human rights, as per a statement by Human Rights Watch, of equitable and safe access to abortion. Women get them anyway. However, in the rather desperate and clandestine process, women die and acquire varieties of injuries from unsafe abortions due to restrictions on the “equitable and safe access to abortion.”
To Sullivan’s (2018) question in his soliloquy, “So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed?” He asserts illiberal politics. In fact, the affirmation of fundamentalist Christianity has been an impediment to the liberal politics for a long time, straight into the current moment.
Christianity as illiberal in this interpretation, not in some abstracted and idealized notion but in the illiberal implementation of adherents since its foundation, whether now or with the majority of the German populace as Christian decades ago. That’s not “anchored in and tamed by Christianity”; that’s fanned flames of illiberalism by Christianity, from its origins (Sullivan, 2018).
Secular and humanistic frameworks have been the taming force on Christianity. The impotence of Christians’ love, rather than the simple love, has been a force by which the liberalism has flourished; whereas, when they could, Christians were burning people at the stake or imposing their religion as the state religion, including many who wish to impose Christianity as the state religion in the US and elsewhere – to save souls.
Christianity and Christian mythology formed an early cult in recorded history. Now, the more direct attacks on its supremacy are met with some spurious, but not all, arguments posited by Sullivan and others.
Some decent observations by Sullivan come from the idea of “tribalized… religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country” (Sullivan, 2018).
He seems correct here. Sullivan takes the stance of reduction in Christianity leading to the Trump Administration and others, or Christian truths. Then he uses this to equate or place on the same platform social justice activists, say a Martin Luther King, Jr., with President Trump.
Plentiful important moral work has been done by individual Christians and mass mobilizations by Christian ethical visionaries, but also in a secular social justice framework as well. The issue here is an ascendance not of social justice but, rather, of the obvious, of which the analogs are not many: Christian theocratic hopes tied to negative nationalism or populism. To link this to social justice activists, it amounts to poor journalism as a false equivalency characteristic of simply not seeing past the prejudices of the time.
One prior example of a Christian theocracy was mentioned, Constantinian Christianity is seen in the Roman Empire with the conversion of Emperor Constantine. Another can be seen in fundamentalist Evangelical Christians within the US.
The Bible is steeped in supernaturalism and with political acts and even concluding on a political execution. It is an ancient cult built over centuries. As a political tract and supernatural mythological, and quasi-historical, text, the orientation of Christianity has been political with the “kingdom of God” not necessarily as an other-worldly spatial location, but as a physical location and “kingdom” of the time as some kingdoms were around at the time, including the Roman.
Christianity never truly saw a split between politics and religion in this sense. Hence, the theocratic impulses seen throughout Christian history is the rule and not the exception.
He, once more, asserts, “It is Christianity that came to champion the individual conscience against the collective, which paved the way for individual rights. It is in Christianity that the seeds of Western religious toleration were first sown. Christianity is the only monotheism that seeks no sway over Caesar, that is content with the ultimate truth over the immediate satisfaction of power. It was Christianity that gave us successive social movements, which enabled more people to be included in the liberal project, thus renewing it” (Sullivan, 2018).
The liberal movements, such as the Enlightenment, were a reaction to the superstition and bigotry of Christianity. The liberalism is anti-Christian in this sense. Now, to the modern fundamental claim of the individual or the purported ‘divine’ individual, or the individual conscience, as bound to the Christian faith, this assertion tends to come from individuals spewing epithets and complaining about identity politics and virtue signaling.
But if we take a moment to reflect, we can note some of the original identity politics in religious identification and virtue signaling prayers and other religious practices. This seems ironic. The Christian identity is one of a group, of a collective in the Body of Christ.
The idea of the social and moral worth of the individual started, in part, with democratic norms and institutions, but, as one can glean from the ideals imagined in Kallipolis by Plato or in the opinions of women by Aristotle, only for a select group of people – most often men.
Plato would be considered progressive for the time; Aristotle would be seen in some of the worst sexist terms today. In Christianity, the focus isn’t on the individual as an idea, but on an individual, Christ, and the collective as an idea, the Body of Christ.
Then the response pivot to this may be a divine spark or soul in each person. But this also predates Christianity, including Egyptians and the Chinese with the conceptualization of a dual-soul and in Aristotle, once more, with a tripartite soul. Epicureans saw the soul as tied to the material body. Platonists saw the soul as an immaterial substance. Duly note, each predating or co-existing with Christianity and having a notion of ensoulment of each individual human being.
The fundamental distinction is in the selection of values and ideas: to the non-religious, they’re chosen; to the religious believer, they’re pre-selected by authority and then given in advance. Sullivan et al simply miss this, often to the detriment of modernity based on their primitivity.
References
Guttmacher Institute. (2018, March). Induced Abortion Worldwide. Retrieved from https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide.
Sullivan, A. (2018, December 7). America’s New Religions. Retrieved from nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-americas-new-religions.html.
The Bible: King James Version. (2018). Matthew: 22:21. Retrieved from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A21&version=KJV.
The Bible: King James Version. (2018). Proverbs: 16:18. Retrieved from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+16%3A18&version=KJV.
The Vatican. (n.d.). Catechism of the Catholic Church: Part Three, Life in Christ. Retrieved from www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a6.htm.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/03
Scott Jacobsen: Let’s move into your new research, as those who have followed the previous sessions know, you have an expertise in the philosophy of economics. Dr. Stephen Law recommended you. How else can social sciences differentiate from and inform society in contrast to the natural sciences?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: I class psychology as a natural science rather than a social science. I think psychological research can serve many important social functions – for example educating us out of moral prejudices, but this is not what you’re asking about.
Social sciences can be what Joan Robinson called “an organ of self-consciousness” because they can expose the origins of our social institutions. This can lead us to see them in a different light. And then, sometimes, they exercise less control over us.
For example, René Girard, whom I admire very much, went as far as he possibly could in identifying scapegoating as the hidden mechanism that underlies many of our institutions and social practices. He found that art, theatre, worship, criminal trials, marriage – there are many more examples – have their origin in scapegoating rituals. This is in stark contrast to the more rationalistic functional explanations given by other social scientists.
While I have no expertise to pronounce on whether or not he was right, I admire his work because it inspires us to take a second look at our institutions, to see that they really are what we think they are. It was crucial for Girard that once we recognise a practice as a scapegoating practice, we can no longer commit to it. Scapegoating only works when those participating in it think they’re doing something else, i.e., prosecuting a deserving criminal.
This is, perhaps, an example of what Joan Robinson was talking about. When we become self-conscious in our institutions, they stop working on us. In political economy, when we start to see that what we have been institutionalised to think of as a market composed of individual exchanges might be in fact something quite different, we begin to wriggle loose from an ideology that controls much of our social life. Likewise with many other social practices and institutionalised forms of life.
In future work, I plan to look at early modern theories of society, particularly those of Spinoza, Hobbes, and some of their contemporaries.
Spinoza was the most philosophically radical thinker of the Early Modern period, at least in Western Europe. He challenged the theological prejudices of his day while retaining the grand and sweeping cast of mind of a religious thinker.
Jacobsen: You have a deep interest and have published research on Spinoza. Who was Spinoza? Does his work inform your own on the philosophy of economics?
Douglas: Spinoza was the most philosophically radical thinker of the Early Modern period, at least in Western Europe. He challenged the theological prejudices of his day while retaining the grand and sweeping cast of mind of a religious thinker. He believed in the power of pure reason with a conviction seldom found elsewhere in Europe, outside of the period of ‘Idealist’ philosophy.
His work informs my views on everything, including on the philosophy of economics. One thing I’ve been interested in lately is the treatment of time inconsistency in economic models. A time-inconsistent policy is, roughly, one that determines what it is best to do nowversus what it is best to do in the future. The inconsistency arises from what was previously ‘the future’ eventually becoming ‘now’, in which case the same policy delivers a different result inconsistent with the first. Spinoza was one of the first philosophers, to my knowledge, to consider time-inconsistency. The last few propositions of Part Four of his masterpiece, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, discuss how a crucial component of rationality is the avoidance of time-inconsistency.
Spinoza also deals with the social aspects of human desire, in a way that I find more insightful than the standard liberal tradition. Spinoza notices how insecure we often are in our desires: we’re really very unsure about what we want. One effect of this is that we both model our desires on those we seem to observe in others and aim at being emulated in our desires. Having others around us wanting certain things confirms our belief that we really want those things. This plays havoc with the transactions that economists treat as basic and standard. Exchange, for example, is profoundly complicated by the tendency of desires to converge on certain goods rather than being spread stably across diverse goods.
This is, I believe, part of the explanation of why one of Spinoza’s chief influences, Hobbes did not believe that any stable allocation of goods could temper the tendency to rivalrous violence in the ‘state of nature’. This insight puzzled his contemporaries, but Spinoza’s psychological account fills in some crucial details. Here I take inspiration from the work of Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who have looked from this angle at Hobbes, Adam Smith, and other supposed founding figures in the liberal tradition.
Jacobsen: Spinoza had an interest in Ibn Khaldoun, who was the father of trickle-down economics. Why did Spinoza have this interest? What is behind the philosophy of trickle-down economics in past and the present?
Douglas: I don’t know of any evidence that Spinoza read Ibn Khaldoun. I’m not sure Khaldoun was very well known in Western Europe until after Spinoza’s time. But Spinoza was more connected, via the Hebrew tradition, to the medieval Arabic literature than many of his contemporaries.
I don’t really know much about the history of trickle-down economics. Arthur Laffer wrote an article on his famous ‘curve’, showing some historical precedents for the central idea. The Laffer Curve is, roughly, the idea that increasing tax rates up to some point increases overall revenue to the Exchequer, but increasing it past that point decreases overall revenue due to a detrimental effect on national income. It’s often cited as a prime example of an economic idea with very little practical importance, due to the strength of its assumptions and its abstraction from complicating issues.
Spinoza has very little to say about taxation as such. In the Political Treatise (ch.6, §12) he argues that during peacetime there should be no taxation, though all land and housing should be publicly owned and then leased from the government. In this sense, he can be interpreted as an early proponent of the Land Value Tax famously promoted by Henry George in the nineteenth century. But trickle-down economics doesn’t seem to me to appear anywhere in his writings.
The Laffer Curve is, roughly, the idea that increasing tax rates up to some point increases overall revenue to the Exchequer, but increasing it past that point decreases overall revenue due to a detrimental effect on national income.
Jacobsen: Were there any social and cultural values – including freedom of speech – that Spinoza supported in order for the economic flourishing of society?
Douglas: It’s almost the other way around for Spinoza. He argues that commercial relations foster peaceful cooperation among people so that they can bind together under a common law and sovereign power. For him, the best guarantee of free speech is a powerful sovereign authority, subject to the democratic control of the citizens, which acts to protect freedom of speech from the soft power of religious and private institutions. So long as the citizens know what is good for them, they will insist upon the sovereign power acting in this way.
Commercial relations support the stability of the state, and thus the authority of the sovereign power, which is the protector of freedom of speech and other rights of citizens. Commerce is important because it keeps the citizens interested in each other’s welfare; “everyone defends the cause of another just so far as he believes that in this way he makes his own situation more stable” (Political Treatise, ch.7, §8). And there’s a positive feedback loop since, as Spinoza argues in the Theologico-Political Treatise, support for free speech and other civic rights ends up strengthening the sovereign authority and the rule of law.
On the other hand, Spinoza is well aware that economic institutions can often work to divide people rather than bringing them together. In the Political Treatise he has a few suggestions for ensuring that the institutions work in the right way; also in the Theologico-Political Treatise he speaks favourably of the Biblical debt jubilee. But, as I’ve argued in a recent paper (“Spinoza, money, and desire”), there is always a risk, on Spinoza’s theory, that our economic institutions will foster socially destructive passions rather than working in more pro-social ways.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the philosophy of economics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How is philosophising about economics useful in the development of insights into economics itself?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: Many economists doubt that it is. They can argue that they get along just fine without reading any philosophy of economics. And I suppose they do, given their goals. Companies and governments keep on hiring them to give advice and make forecasts. Philosophers can criticise their models for being not scientific enough, or ignore what is of real human value. Anyone can criticise their forecasting record based on whatever external standard they deem appropriate. But the economists can always reply: ‘If we’re so wrong, why are we always consulted?’ I think philosophers of economics ought to think about that question. But doing so would mean moving in the direction of social critique and away from contributing to economics as such.
Joan Robinson claims, in Freedom and Necessity, that the task of the social sciences is very different to that of the natural sciences. It is, she says, to provide society with an organ of self-consciousness. I think contemporary economics fails at this task. Economists build models in which the system works a certain way; they plug in values and predict outcomes, and policymakers and others base their decisions on these predictions. What is left out is the amount of social control required to keep the systems working in this theoretically tractable way. Economists rarely discuss this, as far as I know. Nor do they acknowledge the extent to which their models are self-fulfilling prophecies: the systems they describe work the way that they do because decision-makers unconsciously internalise the models that describe them working in that way. A real organ of social self-consciousness would make us aware of all this. If economists don’t provide one, maybe philosophers will have to.“Contemporary economics fails at this task.. of providing society with an organ of self-consciousness.”
Jacobsen: How will the economics of the future change – as the implicit philosophy and descriptions around it change into the future?
Douglas: I’m not sure what the engine of change would be. While economics is heavily criticised in certain portions of the media, economists are still, as I said, routinely hired to produce the analyses which government agencies and businesses use to determine their strategies. The analyses are based on models, the basic types of which were developed in the 1970s. Economists criticise some of the types and promote others. But, from the outside, I don’t see a huge amount of theoretical innovation; within the economic profession, improvement is just about making the right upgrades to the classic machines.
To me, this theoretical conservatism goes with political conservatism. We theorise how we govern, and vice-versa. Economic modelling is all about predicting and controlling human actions with increasing precision – winning that little bit more margin by tracking us with better algorithms. Politics works to render us algorithmically tractable. The goals work in a positive feedback loop. The more our political institutions can trap our behaviour into predictable patterns, the better the economic models can track us; the better the models track us, the better the institutions can control us. If we refuse to be described in this way, we can refuse to be governed in this way, but we can’t successfully refuse the one and not the other.
Jacobsen: Do you think the era of individual economic philosophy is almost dead, where a pluralistic approach becomes ideal because of the complexity of an international economy such as our own?
Douglas: Pluralism sounds nice. But the problem is that different approaches are non-diversa sed opposita. They are at odds with each other more than they complement each other.
Take the most fundamental question: how the entire economy, in the most general sense, works. One answer appeals to the idea of a ‘dynamic’ general equilibrium. Households maximise their utility over an entire lifetime, looking over the menu of goods that exist now and will be produced in the future. Firms decide which goods to produce by optimising a profit function, which is partly determined by the household utility functions. The government tries to minimise losses from inflation and unemployment, and this policy can, as Michael Woodford demonstrated, be derived from household utility functions. Samuel Bowles called this picture ‘utopian capitalism’. I think most economists see the real economy as an approximation, though perhaps a distant one, to this utopian picture (some might call it dystopian).
Here is an entirely different picture, which I tried to sketch in my book. Institutions determine the prices, production, and allocation of goods, in a way that is almost entirely independent of household utility. Companies get big enough to hold spare capacity and run operations too complicated for their shareholders to understand. They don’t need to worry about profit maximisation. Smaller firms, rather than competing with the market leaders, simply copy their apparently successful strategies. The government, meanwhile, chooses its policy targets by thinking about what will win votes, not what will maximise household utility. And production decisions are primarily determined by central bank policy.
Here is a concrete example of the latter. If you’re a bank in the UK, and you issue a mortgage, you can swap the mortgage with the Bank of England for pure cash (or a reserve balance): mortgages are on the Eligible Collateral List. Their placement there was a political choice. If, on the other hand, you issue a loan to an entrepreneur, you can’t swap the loan for cash (unless you find someone to buy it), and you’re stuck with the loss in case of default. Unsurprisingly, the financial sector is much more interested in lending to house-buyers and aspiring ‘property asset managers’ than to entrepreneurs in other sectors. And so we get a British economy obsessed with trading in property and doing very little else. Households readily internalise this obsession, but I doubt that it came from them originally. I think this is a pretty clear case of the economy being directed from the top, by political decisions that have nothing to do with maximising household utility.
The first picture is of a traditional free-market economy; the second is of a command economy. I suspect we live in a command economy. For all the rhetoric about free enterprise, the defeat of the Soviet Union by the Western powers was the victory of one sort of command economy over another – one controlled through the monetary system rather than through the industrial system. But whether or not you agree with me depends on which approach to economics you take. I don’t think we can avoid this argument by taking some ecumenical approach.
Jacobsen: Does modern economics imply a certain amount of faith in particular axioms? If so, what is the faith? What axioms?
Douglas: Yes, at the broadest level most economic theory (including Marxist theory, I should say), implies faith in the existence of a market system, in which capitalists pursue profit by producing at the lowest possible cost the goods that people want. I’ve never seen much evidence that our system works like that. Certainly its behaviour resembles that model to some degree of approximation, but then it resembles anything to some degree of approximation.
Above I tried to sketch out another model – not a mathematical model, but a verbal one – that I think our system resembles a greater degree of approximation. The production and allocation of goods are decided by the executive decisions of committees whose members got there by a combination of inherited privilege and blind chance.
Economists can reply that a verbal ‘model’ of this sort is unscientific: it is a satirical caricature with no mathematical precision. But then caricatures and models are the same in one way: they flatten reality by emphasising certain features and ignoring many others. Mathematical models can deliver precise predictions, but caricatures can predict outcomes in a different way – more generic, but perhaps more nuanced in a deeper sense. Which is preferable depends on what our ultimate purposes are: what we want our economic theory for. I return to Robinson: if we are after an organ of social self-consciousness, caricature might be preferable to mathematics. But if we want to sustain the status quo at the lowest possible cost, economists are probably getting it about right.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 