Laplace's Demon and the Bad Guy

Today's subject was choice. At the outset, it seems obvious that people have choice. We talked about, essentially, sentience and the importance of choosing to choose - metacognition. A lot of people pointed out that going through life on autopilot is fairly common in this day and age. We all do it at certain points, whether it's because we don't feel the need to, we haven't the concentration, or we have other things on our minds.

The conversation took another bend as it became necessary to define our terms. Free will and metacognition are different things. Yes, we do not always make specific choices, that's true, but whether or not our ability to make decisions is an illusory facet of our lives, is something that we got into a lot more.

A few people were really uncomfortable with the idea of causal determinism: the idea that every cause is an effect and, in turn, another cause. Some of us felt that that was a sort of damning prognosis on life and an abnegation of responsibility. After all, if all of your decisions are the product of genetics, circumstance, and biology no one can really blame anyone for anything else, right?

Susan pointed out that understanding that a person does things because of a confluence of forces helps us to empathize with them, rather than believe them to label them.

This segued into a talk about the criminal justice system, and something that most of us - it seemed - could agree on: the idea of punishing criminals, rather than trying to figure out ways to prevent them from committing crimes or getting the to understand why wrong is wrong, etc. is not terribly beneficial. This is one of the things that Harris talks about specifically in this (long) video:

Some of us did feel that it might be impossible to get people to understand their own moral deficiencies. Psychopaths, for instance, may have neurological make up that does not allow them to be taught moral lessons - see Jon Ronson's The Pyschopath Test.

James and Suzy helped articulate a few of our linguistic problems a bit better. James pointed out that if we believe that everything in the universe is material and must follow material rules, then it must all be predictable. If we do not accept that everything in the universe must be material, then things may not be as predictable.  The if clause here is the key: if we accept that. Our group was a bit divided on this point.

Suzy eloquently pointed out that we are talking about the difference between whether or not human beings are complex robots or there is, to borrow a phrase, a ghost in the shell, so to speak.

Laplace's Demon is a thought experiment - untestable because of practicality and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - pointing out that if - like James said - everything is physical and follows the same rules, and we could isolate every piece of matter in the universe and determine its velocity, we would be able to figure out everything that ever had happened and ever would happen. It's one way of talking about causal determinism (perhaps a better name than scientific determinism). It's also a character in a comic that I've been drawing. :D

Again, it was brought up (Lyn, I believe, pointed it out) that this is only true if we believe that everything in the universe is material.

Randy pointed out that to attempt to make changes in a world of causal determinism might be paradoxical - how does one influence a closed chain of causality when one is in said chain? Technically, it wouldn't be possible. The choices that we make would be our experience of that illusion. But even if choice is illusory, it isn't as cynical as it sounds. What we see as our choices are actually a confluence of neurological variables, shaped by biology and circumstance, it doesn't change the feeling of choosing. It would be important to make the best choices that we can because that would be part of the causal chain.

At a few points in the discussion, we talked about different religions' obsession with free will because without people being able to be judged good or evil based on their actions, punitive or rewarding afterlives make no sense... then again, Calvinists just sort of go there anyway.

My point in bringing this up is as a segue into our next topic:

SATAN!

The idea of evil creates a lot of problems, even in a non-religious world. It's much easier to chunk that which we think of as "bad" by ascribing it to a sentient evil being. A lot of religions have some manner of anti-god. Soooooooo... Let's discuss!

Created in Man's Image

Notes from Anne:

April 16, 2017

Our topic today was “God Created in Man’s Image?”

Sean gave us some guidance to start the discussion: “What is it with Western (and some Eastern) religions and women? Obviously, the founders were male, so it stands to cynical reason that they would set things up to treat women, often, as second-class believers. Does this say something about us as a species?”

Most religious apologists point to the restrictions their faith places on women, such as modest dress (which can run the gamut from not wearing booty shorts all the way to full burqas), sexual purity or restrictions on the roles women can fill within society, as a way to protect women and actually reflect honor and respect for women. Judging from the expressions of the group, most of us disagree with this assessment. So the question is, is this a case of religion influencing culture, or culture influencing religion?

Charles pointed out that in ancient religions with both male and female gods, the male god is always the creator, though female gods are often nearly as powerful. The misogyny began with the Sumerians and was transferred into the Jewish and Muslim cultures from the creation myths which make up most of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. This seems odd, given the fact that women are the child bearers. The group agreed that this could be, in large part, due to men being physically stronger and perhaps because of men’s role in building and invention (although there are many examples of women scientists and creators, even in ancient cultures).

In Polynesia and parts of Africa, misogyny did not exist before the influence of outside cultures. Lyn brought up the difference between domineering and partnership cultures, which could also be linked to differences between patrilineal and matrilineal societies.

We have made some progress in recent years, but in Muslim countries and some others, things for women are still very bad, with honor killings and female genital mutilations still happening with sickening regularity. Both of these things are filtering into the United States as well with the influx of immigrants from other parts of the world. Several people shared personal stories of sexist treatment they have experienced, although we all agree that the men in our group are great examples of men who fully support women's rights.

We discussed why women support misogyny, for example, women who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and conservative Christian women who support traditional roles for women or who argue that women have equal rights or even superior rights, within the framework of Biblical teaching. Although there are many reasons for this, Lyn summed it up by saying that most have “drunk the Kool-Aid.” This extends to LGBTQ rights, with either Bob or Joe (sorry, I didn't catch who) pointing out that children are more likely to be assaulted by a Republican congressman than a trans person.

In other religions, culture also seems to play a big part in the treatment of women. In some Native American cultures, elder women elect tribal leaders. Shinto, the majority religion of Japan, is a nature-based religion, and from what we could discover, treated women as equals until the introduction of a particularly misogynistic Buddhist sect from China into Japanese society, although within Buddhism, treatment of women is a mixed bag, with some groups supporting equality and some not so much. Hinduism strictly regiments society into castes and not surprisingly, women have fewer rights. Cyrus pointed out that Baha’i  is quite egalitarian towards women.

We ended with a question from Charles: If the god of the Hebrew Bible had been a woman, would societies based on that tradition be different? The consensus seemed to be that in order for the god of the Hebrews to be a female, early Jewish society would have had to be significantly different, not the other way around.

Announcements: The Science March is next weekend, on April 22^nd. We are not sure what plans have been made for Greensboro and Raleigh to participate. Also, ReasonCon is next weekend, beginning on Friday, the 21^st with dinner and a concert, continuing through Saturday, the 22^nd with discussions starting at 9 am and ending with a party Saturday night. Joe is planning to go and will report on this to the group. He wasn’t sure if tickets are still available, but the website is www.reasonnc.com

Thank you for allowing me to facilitate today.

The Newish Testament

Today:

This morning we talked about beauty. While there are some obvious evolutionary benefits to sexual attraction/attractiveness (reproduction), our ability and proclivity to get aesthetic pleasure out of seeing colors and patterns is not as easily explained. Our conversation almost immediately went to the strange treatment of beauty in the Bible. There are some parts of the Song of Solomon that are clearly about beauty - even sexual - that seem to be in direct contradiction to some of the less *ahem* progressive parts of the old Testament. We talked about how our brains, which not only seek patterns, but love to be rewarded for being right, can and will find beauty and patterns everywhere. Much like the scene in "Amadeus" where Mozart hears musical notes in the seemingly dissonant screaming of a woman. Still, we do see beauty in design, in symmetry, and in real or imagined patterns - the Fibonacci sequence, lowercase music, and the near symmetry of faces.

The absence, or perhaps opposite of beauty, is something that we can see for any number of different biological reasons. We're repulsed by the smell of the corpse flower for the exact reason that carrion beetles, etc. are attracted to it. Even still, personal preferences are as diverse as people. Someone out there probably loves that smell. Then, there is the common phenomenon of finding thing so ugly that they are beautiful - the adjective "campy" is a close approximation. Even though our interests are diverse, there tend to be commonalities. Most people find nature to be beautiful. The concept has even been monetized with things like trees in office parks, etc.

Context can be as important as content in terms of aesthetics. Someone who is used to being terrified may find beauty in what a lot of others would simply see as boredom. Conversely, we are excited by things that out of context could be completely terrifying. We talked about cultural influences on views of beauty - the fluctuating aesthetics of weight and how that is often influenced by the standing power structure. Things like heroin chic, foot binding, and breast feeding have been used as ways of manipulating the population. Beauty, like nearly everything else can be manipulated by patriarchy to make a buck and to reinforce the entrenched status quo. As Chris said, "who benefits?"

Randy asked if anyone had looked into brain imaging and beauty - the answer is, yes.

We talked about happiness and the appearance of beauty, erotica vs. pornography, and linguistic concepts of beauty. The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis, while subject to some debate, shows a lot of recursive logic that could explain some elements of cultural concepts of beauty. Is anything considered universally beautiful? Flowers perhaps? Sunsets? Again, our conversation turned to the rare vs. the mundane. Again, even what most people consider mundane could be beautiful to someone who has survived a concentration camp or something similarly horrific.

Laughter, agreed upon by some evolutionary biologists to be a coping mechanism, has some pretty dark aspects to it. The tortured artist is a trope, but is it that people who have had terrible events in their lives feel more acutely?

Next time:

I mentioned this last time, but I forgot to say anything today - Kia and I will be out of town for the next meeting. Additionally, we'll be returning the day before the meeting after that. So, I don't know if I'll be at that one either. Could I call on someone to coordinate the next meeting (April 9th) and possibly the one on April 16th?

I was thinking that next time our topic could be the New Testament. Is it as friendly as its believers seem to think? Why don't they seem to follow it? How or why do you think it transitions from the gospel accounts to the fever dream-esque imagery of Revelation?