The Martians Explain Consciousness

April 5, 2007 Greta Christina5 Comments

This is one of the smartest, most perceptive things I’ve read about consciousness and our understanding of it, and I just had to pass it along.

“Suppose you’re a medieval physicist wondering about the burning of wood,” Pat likes to say in her classes. “You’re Albertus Magnus, let’s say. One night, a Martian comes down and whispers, ‘Hey, Albertus, the burning of wood is really rapid oxidation!’ What could he do? He knows no structural chemistry, he doesn’t know what oxygen is, he doesn’t know what an element is — he couldn’t make any sense of it. And if some fine night that same omniscient Martian came down and said, ‘Hey, Pat, consciousness is really blesjeakahgjfdl!’ I would be similarly confused, because neuroscience is just not far enough along.”

This has stuck with me ever since I read it. It’s a quote from a New Yorker article by Larissa
MacFarquhar (2/12/2007) , called “Two Heads,” about philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, who were among the first modern-day philosophers to argue that philosophers needed to pay attention to science — and in particular to neuroscience — to understand how we think and why we think that way. (I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while, but I kept waiting for the New Yorker to get their shit together and put the article on their website; but all they have is this abstract. Dummies.)

Anyway. The reason I love this passage so much is… well, a lot of reasons. I love how humbling it is. I love how simple and obvious the analogy is, and at the same time how completely it fucks with my head.

But mostly I love that it said what I was trying to get at in my piece The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely — but so much more cleverly and succinctly.

This is what I’m getting at when I gas on about how the fact that life is full of mysteries doesn’t mean the answers to those mysteries are metaphysical. But this passage really gets across the overwhelming, awestruck quality of all the things we don’t know, will never know, can’t know. It’s not just that there are things we don’t understand. It’s that there are things that we don’t even have the basic tools to understand. There are things that we — you and me and everyone alive today on this planet — will never understand, or even come close to understanding. There are things that we — the human race — may not understand for hundreds of years, and may indeed never know. Big, important things, like consciousness and free will and the origins of space-time.

Just like the medieval scientist couldn’t have understood about fire.

And even if an explanation somehow appeared to us — an accurate, rational, completely scientific/ naturalistic explanation — it might not even make sense.

I keep trying to come up with some perfect, pithy way to conclude this. But honestly, all I can come up with is: Woo. Freaky.

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The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely

January 14, 2007 Greta Christina19 Comments

So if an explanation isn’t proven, how do you decide how likely it is to be correct?

There are two big arguments that believers in the supernatural make again and again. One is the “Explain that!” argument — the world is full of things for which there is currently no explanation, and therefore it’s reasonable to believe that those things might have supernatural causes. The other is the “You can’t prove anything!” argument — naturalists can’t definitively disprove the supernatural, and therefore it’s just as reasonable to believe in it as it to disbelieve.

In the most literal sense, these arguments would seem to be unanswerable. Yes, it’s certainly true that the existence of supernatural phenomena has not been disproven â€“ it’s notoriously difficult, even impossible, to prove conclusively that something doesn’t exist. And yes, of course the world is full of phenomenon for which we currently don’t have naturalistic explanations.

So in the narrowest sense, these arguments are true.

But they’re terrible arguments.

I want to talk about why.

*****

Let’s look at the history of the world. Specifically, let’s look at the history of knowledge in the world.

When you look at the history of the world, you see thousands — tens of thousands, arguably hundreds of thousands or more — of phenomena for which a supernatural explanation has been replaced by a natural one. Why the sun rises and sets; what thunder and lightning are; how and why illness happens and spreads; why people look like their parents; how people got to be here in the first placeâ€Š all these things, and thousands more, were once explained by gods or spirits or mystical energies. And now all of them have natural, physical explanations.

Natural explanations, I should point out, with mountains of solid, carefully collected, replicable evidence to support them.

Now, how many times in the history of the world has a natural explanation of a phenomenon been supplanted by a supernatural one?

As far as I am aware, exactly zero.

Of course, people are coming up with new supernatural explanations of naturally-explained phenomena all the time. Intelligent design is the most obvious example. You can pick up any New Age magazine to find more.

But explanations with evidence? Replicable evidence? Carefully gathered, patiently tested, rigorously reviewed evidence? Internally consistent evidence? Large amounts of it, from many different sources?

Again, as far as I’m aware — none.

Which brings me to my point: the question of likelihood.

Given this pattern — thousands upon thousands upon thousands of natural explanations accurately supplanting supernatural ones, zero supernatural explanations accurately supplanting natural ones — doesn’t it seem that any given unexplained phenomenon is far more likely to have a natural explanation than a supernatural one?

Far, far more likely?

Like, several orders of magnitude more likely?

So when you’re looking at a phenomenon — consciousness, for instance, my current favorite example — that doesn’t currently have a good naturalistic explanation, you can of course argue “Explain that!” or “That doesn’t prove anything.” You can argue that scientists don’t really know what consciousness is, and therefore it could be some sort of metaphysical energy, and science can’t conclusively prove that it isn’t.

But I think it makes a lot more sense to look at the pattern — the overwhelming pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones by the thousands and more — and consider which kind of explanation is really more likely.

Please Think of the Children: Sex Offender Hysteria

December 18, 2006 Greta Christina21 Comments

I don’t normally expect to get interesting sex news from the Skeptical Inquirer. But they had a recent article about sex offenders and sex offender hysteria — a fascinating and important article, with info that surprised even me.

Now, some of the stuff here is just obvious — or should be. You’ve seen those billboards about how 1 out of every 5 children/teenagers will be approached online by a sexual predator? My first reaction to them wasn’t, “Oh how terrible, won’t someone save the children?” My first reaction was, “That can’t possibly be right. How exactly are they defining ‘approached by a sexual predator’? Are they including every piece of Viagra and porno spam that lands in the kids’ mailboxes?”

Turns out my instincts were pretty much dead-on. No, they didn’t get the “1 out of 5” figure by counting Viagra spam. They got it, among other things, by counting unwanted requests for sex or sexual information that teenagers got — FROM OTHER TEENAGERS. In other words, if you’re 16, and your 16-year-old best friend emails you asking if your honey has ever gone down on you, and you think it’s none of their business — that counts as an act of online sexual predation. The pertinent quote: “When the study examined the type of Internet ‘solicitation’ parents are most concerned about (e.g., someone who asked to meet the teen somewhere, called the teen on the telephone, or sent gifts), the number drops from ‘one in five’ to just 3 percent.”

Some of the article’s other revelations are also not entirely surprising — although it’s fascinating to see these myths ripped up in such vivid detail. There’s a lot of stuff about how many of the sex offender laws — notification laws, sex offender registries, laws banning sex offenders from living in certain areas, etc. — bear no relevance to the reality of how sex crimes are committed and by whom, and are almost entirely ineffective in preventing further sex crimes. And the article has a marvelously clear-eyed analysis of how both politicians and the news media have taken people’s real fears about sex crimes and run with them screaming into the night — all the way to the bank. Pertinent quote: “Nobody really wants to go on the record saying, ‘It turns out this really isnâ€™t a big problem.'”

And the article’s most crucial conclusion — that sex predator hysteria diverts attention and resources away from efforts that might actually be effective — while it’s extremely important, is also not entirely surprising. Pertinent quote: “The resources allocated to tracking ex-felons who are unlikely to re-offend could be much more effectively spent on preventing child abuse in the home and hiring more social workers.”

But this article doesn’t just confirm the obvious (or what should be obvious). There are some very commonly-held myths about sex offenders that turn out to be total bullshit — myths that I believed myself until I read this piece.

And the one that surprised me most was the one about repeat offenders.

If you’ve watched any crime shows ever (fiction or non-), you “know” that sex offenders are more likely than any other type of criminal to repeat their crimes. This “fact” is what’s used to defend practices like monitoring and registering sex offenders. And it is apparently completely untrue. Pertinent quote #1: “In the largest and most comprehensive study ever done of prison recidivism, the Justice Department found that sex offenders were in fact less likely to reoffend than other criminals.” Pertinent quote #2: “A study released in 2003 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that within three years, (only) 3.3 percent of the released child molesters were arrested again for committing another sex crime against a child.”

I really need to stop getting my legal information from “Law and Order.”

There’s just one important piece of information missing from this article. It has to do with how “sex offender” is defined in the first place — and in my opinion, it’s central to this discussion.

Here’s the thing. When you see statistics on how many sex offenders there are, or what percentage of people will be victimized by one, you should know this: In many states, including California, “sex offender” statistics include people who have committed consensual sex crimes. Depending on the state you’re in, it can include prostitutes, johns, gay men arrested for cruising in public parks, teenagers arrested for having consensual sex with other teenagers, etc.: folks who are totally not what people picture when they’re getting freaked out about how the streets are crawling with sex offenders. (An old friend of mine is very likely being counted in sex offender statistics due to a public indecency arrest — not from flashing women in dark deserted streets, not even from getting a blowjob in an alley, but from a midnight skinny-dipping adventure with friends when they were in college.)

So when you see statistics in the paper about how many convicted sex offenders there are, or how likely it is that there’s one in your neighborhood, remember that they’re not just talking about rapists and child molesters. They’re also talking about people like you and me.

Of course we should be upset about rape, child molestation, and other violent, invasive, actual sex crimes. But let’s aim our anger and fear in a direction that makes sense, reflects reality, and might actually make a difference.

Why Are We Here? One Agnostic’s Half-Baked Philosophy

November 19, 2006 Greta Christina11 Comments

A friend of mine recently read my essay, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, and she had an interesting criticism of it.

Well, not a criticism exactly. What she said was that it didn’t address her own existential crises. Her non-believer crises aren’t about “What happens when we die?” She’s not troubled by that. Death isn’t the problem for her.

Life is. The non-believer question that keeps her up at night is, “Why am I here?”

So I want to talk about an atheist/agnostic answer to the question, “Why are we here?”

*****

Let’s make it more general. Let’s not ask why we, human beings, are here. Let’s ask why anything is here.

When you ask why something is here, the question can have two completely different meanings. The first is, “How did it get here? What caused it to be here?” The second meaning — often totally different from the first — is, “What is its purpose?”

Example. If you ask, “Why is the television in the living room?”, you could answer by saying, “It’s there because I put it there.” That’s the first kind of answer — “What caused it to be here?” Or you could say, “It’s there so we can watch ‘The Simpsons,’ and the living room is where the sofas are.” That’s the second kind of answer — “What is its purpose?”

So what does this have to with God, and why we’re here?

I think the problem with the famously big philosophical question “Why are we here?” comes, to a great extent, from a confusion of these two meanings of the question.

I mean, if you do believe in God, the answer to both versions of the question is the same. The answer is God. God is the cause of us being here — and God is our purpose for being here.

But if you don’t believe in God, then those two versions of “Why are we here?” become very different questions — with completely opposite answers.

The “what caused us to be here?” version of the question has a very straightforward, physical answer. We are here because of evolution and natural selectionâ€Š and in a larger sense, because of the laws of biology and chemistry and physics. We are here because this planet supports life, and life happened to evolve in a certain way, and our ancestors — and their ancestors, and theirs, and theirs before them, ad infinitum — were successful in surviving and reproducing. It’s spectacular, it’s wicked cool, there’s huge amounts of detail about it that we don’t understand — but it’s not conceptually difficult, or philosophically traumatic. It’s physical cause and effect. It doesn’t keep anyone up at night.

Of course, like any other “How did it get here?” type question, any answer to the question “What caused us to be here?” just begs the new question of what caused the cause to be there… and so on, ad infinitum. Once you answer the question of how you personally got here, you then have the question of how humans got here. When you answer the question of how humans got here, you then have the question of how life started at all. When you answer the question of how life started… you get my point. But even when you reach a place in the cause-and-effect chain that’s currently mysterious and unanswered, the basic concept of physical cause-and-effect isn’t mysterious at all.

But let’s look at the other version of the question.

When you don’t believe in God, the question “What purpose do we serve?” is as elusive as “What caused us to be here?” is solid. It isn’t simply mysterious. It’s unanswerable. Or at least, it has no objective, external answer. There’s no-one who put the TV in the living room. There’s no creator or designer with any job for us to do.

But I don’t think that means we have no purpose. I think it means we get to make up our purpose for ourselves.

I think it means we’re free.

And I much, much prefer that. I don’t want my entire reason for existing decided by someone else’s design, like I’m a memory chip in some cosmic video game. I want my place in the world decided by me, based on my own values and ideas and experiences. It’s a huge responsibility — it sometimes feels like I’m carrying a sixteen-ton weight on my shoulders — but I want to decide my own purpose in life. (Lately I’m leaning towards some combination of “Connect with other people and other living things,” “Work on making the world more like you’d like it to be,” ‘Be a strong, interesting link in the chain of history,” and “Get as much joy as you can out of this very short life that you were unbelievably lucky to get”… but it’s still evolving.)

There’s a passage from “The Lathe of Heaven” by Ursula K. LeGuin that says part of what I want to say better than I can, so I’ll just quote it: The hero, George Orr, has been asked what he thinks man’s purpose on Earth is. This is his reply:

“I donâ€™t know. Things donâ€™t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

Of course, we aren’t quite like grass or a galaxy. We have consciousness, and conscience, both of which make everything less simple. But conscience and consciousness don’t hand us any external purpose. They’re tools we use to help us create our own.

The thing is… believers in God have this exact same freedom as well. Even if you believe that there is a God and we’re here to fulfill his or her divine plan, you still have to choose which of your religion’s specific teachings you should follow, and what to do when different teachings conflict — and of course, which basic religion to follow in the first place, and indeed whether to believe in God at all.

So it’s not as if believing in God gets you off the “What is my purpose?” hook (although many believers do act as if it does). All of us — believers, non-believers, doubters, everyone — we all have the same freedom, and the same responsibility, to decide what our purpose is, and to act on it.

Love the Inventions, Hate the Inventors: Smacking Around Mark Morford, Round 2

September 4, 2006 Greta Christina7 Comments

Once again, the otherwise smart and funny SF Gate/SF Chronicle columnist Mark Morford has written a column revealing a strange and unsettling brand of New Agey religious intolerance. This time, his target is the stupidity of science — in particular, scientific studies that confirm common sense and common knowledge, and scientific studies that attempt to understand mystical and religious experience.

So once again, I’ve taken it upon myself to smack him around. Here’s my latest letter to him. Enjoy! (And let me know if you think my “persecution of Galileo” analogy went too far…)

Dear Mark,

This is getting frustrating. I usually love your column, and usually feel that we’re on the same side. But this is now the second time that you’ve written something intolerant and insulting — not to mention flat-out factually inaccurate — about people who don’t share your spiritual views. You’re beginning to sound like a New-Age version of a fundamentalist Christian, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be doing that.

I’m referring to your August 4 column, “God Is In The Magic Mushrooms,” in which you refer to the Johns Hopkins study showing that taking psilocybin mushrooms can create profound and life-changing mystical experiences. To me, this study was a beautiful example of how science and spirituality can connect, can come together to provide new information and create insight. But instead, you chose to use it as another opportunity to be snarky and bitchy and disdainful about science, with comments like “studies that merely reinforce ageless common sense,” “the illuminating shortcomings of science itself,” “the Science of the No Duh,” “smacking us upside the scientific head,” “science peering over the edge of understanding and jumping back and saying, ‘Holy crap.'” And so on, and so on.

Your dismissive remarks about scientific studies that confirm obvious, self-evident, common-sense conclusions are a good example. See, one of the most important things scientists do is investigate the obvious — because the obvious isn’t always true. It used to be obvious that the sun went around the earth. It used to be obvious that black people were inherently less intelligent than white people. It used to be obvious that ulcers were caused by stress and best treated with antacids and a bland diet. These things were obvious — but they weren’t true. It’s important to actually test the things we think are true (the ones that are testable, anyway)… because they might not be. And that’s the value of the scientific method — it short-circuits pre-conceived notions. It tells you whether or not the thing you believe is true, regardless of how strongly you believe it. It doesn’t do this 100% perfectly — the history of science is full of bad experiments whose methodology and results were warped by unconscious bias — but on the whole and in the long run, it does it pretty damn well.

If your point is that science is limited, that it can’t completely explain every single facet of human experience — well, duh. But if your point is how stupid and blind scientists are for thinking that it can… that’s kind of a pointless point. The reductionist scientist who thinks science and logic can answer all questions and solve all problems — that’s a straw man, a cartoon character. I’ve never in my life known or read a scientist who thought that. I’ve never known or read a scientist who didn’t care about art and emotions and ethics and ecstasy and so on, or who believed science could answer all life’s mysteries. If you’re going to argue against science, then at least do so against science as it really is — not some made-up Professor Brainiac from a New Yorker cartoon.

What’s more, your “three choices” of ways to look at the experience of psychedelic drugs are not only pissily judgmental — they’re also seriously limited. I could think of half-a-dozen more just off the top of my head — and not one of your three comes close to describing my own life-altering experiences with hallucinogens. (For me, the mind-bending kicker was the revelation of just how profoundly my perception of reality could be altered simply by a minuscule amount of foreign chemicals in my brain — and the corresponding revelation of just how much of my perception of reality was my perception, and how little of it was reality.)

And since you seem to think this study somehow proves the objective reality of mystical experience, I feel compelled to point out that it does nothing of the kind. In fact, it could easily be argued that this study does the exact opposite — it demonstrates that mystical experience is a mental process, a function of the nervous system that can be induced by the consumption of a chemical compound. I’m not sure I would make that argument — but it’s not an unreasonable one.

I am particularly puzzled by the fact that you accept on its face the validity of the Johns Hopkins study — and yet at the same time you mock it for being redundant and pointless. Don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical? And do you really want to be making fun of people who are trying to understand how human consciousness works, in the most careful, most rigorous, most unbiased way they can? When scientists come up with a result that surprises them, and acknowledge their surprise with humility and awe, do you really want to respond by pointing and laughing at what ignoramuses they are? Do you really want to be one of the kids in the schoolyard making fun of the nerdy Poindexters and how they think they’re so smart? It seems to me that the researchers in the Johns Hopkins study were very respectful of the spiritual experiences of the study’s subjects — do you really want to be returning the favor with contempt?

More to the point, do you really want to be taking the position that dumb old scientists don’t know anything about the real world, the important world, the world of the metaphysical divine whose reality always trumps the mundane physical? Because when you do that, you ally yourself philosophically with creationists. You ally yourself with the Pope who made Galileo recant about the earth orbiting the sun. And I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be doing that. I’d bet dollars to donuts that if you read a fundamentalist Christian screed about science that had the same level of snide, pitying superiority towards non-believers that your piece did, you’d be foaming at the mouth.

But here’s what truly puzzles me about your piece.

You love technology. Passionately. You’ve written in glowing terms, and at great gushing length, about the coolness of iPods, and electric cars, and Macintosh computers, and hundred-dollar vibrators, and so on and so on.

So what I want to know is: Who do you think makes those things? They’re not conjured into existence by New Age gurus or neo-pagan covens. They’re created by scientists and engineers. They’re created by people who think it’s important to know if their observations about the world are accurate, and who take the time to make sure that their theories work. They’re created by people who think and work more carefully, more patiently, more rigorously, with more respect for reality and more willingness to be proven wrong, than I could ever imagine being capable of myself.

Have a little respect for them.

Sincerely,
Greta Christina

Oh, The Believer and the Skeptic Should be Friends…

August 6, 2006 Greta Christina25 Comments

Quick question: Am I a total geek here? Will any other than me get the “Oklahoma” reference?

Ever since I wrote the “Transcendental Skeptic” piece on this blog, I’ve been thinking a lot about the skeptic/spiritual believer question. Questions, I should say. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the question of how agnostics/atheists/skeptics and religious/spiritual believers can get along — and why, sometimes, we really can’t.

I have friends — extremely dear and close friends — who have religious or spiritual beliefs, in some cases strongly held ones. And this is not a problem, either for me or (as far as I know) for them. I don’t feel superior to these folks, and I don’t pity them. I don’t happen to agree with them — but so what? I don’t agree with a lot of people about a lot of things. I don’t even agree with myself all the time. Not agreeing with someone doesn’t mean I can’t connect with them.

In a few cases I even think they’re flat-out mistaken — but again, so what? I’m sure people in my life think I’m flat-out mistaken, about this topic or any number of others. And I’m sure that, in some cases, they’re right. I would be shocked beyond measure to find that I wasn’t mistaken about anything. And ultimately, it doesn’t matter that much. It doesn’t feel like an insurmountable barrier, or even like much of a barrier at all.

But why is that? I mean, at least on the surface, the skeptical and the spiritual outlook would seem to represent seriously different values, fundamentally different ways of looking at the universe and our place in it — a difference that would seem to be irrevocable.

And yet, I don’t think it is. Not to me, anyway. Not always.

Why?

And why is it that sometimes the difference really is insurmountable?

Part of it, for me, is that I care more about what people do than what they think. A good example is a friend of mine, whose Christianity is a big part of what drives her to do progressive grass-roots political work. A whole hell of a lot more work than I do, I feel compelled to point out. And of course, you have all the obvious examples from history: Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, the Quakers in the underground railroad, etc. If people’s faith inspires them to do good in the world — and if their idea of “good” resonates with mine — then I don’t care very much why they do it, as long as they’re not doing it as part of a sinister plan for indoctrination or world domination or something.

There’s something else, though. Something both less utilitarian and more fundamental, something that does have to do with values and motivations.

Here’s what it is. I think there’s a profound difference between having a religious or spiritual faith that you hold despite there not being substantial evidence supporting it — and having a religious or spiritual faith that you hold despite the existence of substantial evidence that actually contradicts it.

And the former is something I can strongly identify with — while the latter is something that I just can’t.

See, science is different from life. In science, you don’t advocate theories that you don’t have any evidence for — or at least, you try like hell not to. In science, substantial evidence that’s carefully gathered, rigorously and double-blind tested, peer-reviewed, independently replicated, all that good stuff… that’s the name of the game. That’s what makes science special and cool: the fact that it takes the time — immense amounts of time, usually — to test its hunches thoroughly and see if they’re right. It often starts with hunches, with imagination and irrational inspirations, but it doesn’t rely on them.

But in life, you do that all the time. You have to. In life, you have to make decisions based on insufficient evidence, or even no evidence at all except your gut feeling. Big decisions, even. Especially if you’re going to have any kind of interesting and fulfilling life. You have to take risks and chances; you have to make leaps of faith.

I do, anyway. And while those leaps and chances have sometimes been disastrously wrong — the first several years of my romantic life leap to mind — much more often than not they’ve been right, and they’ve gotten more right as I’ve gotten older. The impulse to pick my college major based on two weeks of classes with an inspiring teacher; the impulse to quit a job I loathed despite having no other job prospects lined up; the impulse to call Ingrid ten days after we started going out to tell her that I loved her… I could go on for pages about life-changing decisions I’ve made, and important conclusions I’ve come to, based on little or no evidence other than a moment of calm, powerful clarity in which some inner voice spoke with confidence and certainty.

So the fact that some people have decided that Yes there is a God of some sort, or Yes there is an immortal soul of some sort, or Yes there is some sort of metaphysical energy permeating the physical world, despite not having solid evidence to support that hunch… that’s something I can identify with. I don’t agree with them about that particular hunch, but the fact that they’re making major life decisions based on a hunch isn’t alien to me.

But hanging on to a religious or spiritual belief despite actual compelling evidence that contradicts it — that’s profoundly different.

To hold on to a belief — religious or otherwise — that flies in the face of reality speaks of a special sort of arrogance. It says that you think the inside of your head is more interesting, more important, even more real, than the vast, mysterious, unimaginably complex immensity of reality itself. It’s an approach to life that puts your own opinions and beliefs on one side of a scale, and the universe on the other side — and sees your own opinions and beliefs as carrying the greater weight. (Creationism is the classic example, of course, although there are examples from the groovy alternative-spirituality end of the faith spectrum as well.)

And this is just baffling to me. I mean, even if you do believe in a God who created the universe, wouldn’t that make you respect and revere that universe more, and want to understand exactly what it is and how it works, as clearly as you could? Wouldn’t you think that God knew what He/She was doing — and when faced with hard evidence of how His/Her creation works, wouldn’t your religious humility and awe force you to revise your view of the world to better reflect His/Hers?

Faith that’s unsupported one way or the other by reality is one thing. Faith that flat-out denies reality is something else entirely. And it’s that kind of faith that reflects an approach to life that I find fundamentally and insurmountably different from mine.

It’s not that I can’t identify with it at all. The tendency to ignore reality when it contradicts your beliefs is probably a universal human trait, and it’s certainly something I’ve done more than once in my life, and will almost certainly do again.

But it’s not the foundation of my belief system. And I don’t think I’m right to do it. In fact, when I am doing it, I almost always feel a squirming in my belly, and an awkward foot-shuffling in my head, that tell me I’m being a jerk. And most of the time, after a certain amount of wrestling between my conscience and my opinionated stubbornness, I eventually let go of my old belief, and either revise it or abandon it to let the new evidence in.

And this willingness to revise your beliefs is key. The spiritual people I feel connected with — the ones whose beliefs don’t actually contradict real-world evidence, even though they’re not supported by it — are flexible about those beliefs, and willing to modify them as their experience grows. They’re willing to acknowledge that their faith is just that — faith, not objective truth — and they’re willing to admit that they might be mistaken. “To turn and to turn, it will be our delight/Till by turning, turning, we come ’round right,” and all that. And as a result, they’re accepting and supportive of people with different spiritual beliefs — and of people with no spiritual beliefs at all.

Which brings me back around to my first point — namely, the fact that I care more about how people act than how they think. See, the reality-deniers don’t just think like close-minded assholes. They act like close-minded assholes. The kind of faith — religious or otherwise — that denies reality is what makes the Catholic Church deal with its child-molesting clergy crisis by drumming out gay priests… when the evidence shows that most child molesters are straight, and that gay people overwhelmingly do not molest children. It’s the kind of faith that makes people oppose sex education in schools because they believe it’ll make kids have sex earlier… when the evidence shows the exact opposite. (You knew I’d get sex in here somehow, didn’t you?) It’s the kind of faith that makes the Bush administration pursue a military/foreign policy that runs counter to the evidence and counsel provided by their own military and intelligence advisors, and continue to pursue it in the face of overwhelming evidence that it’s not working… because that evidence contradicts their own unshakable belief in their own righteousness.

It’s the faith of life in the bubble.

And that is the insurmountable obstacle, the fundamental difference in values. To some extent, we all live in bubbles, the solipsistic bubbles of our own consciousness and experience. We all frame our observations and experiences with our beliefs and values. We all give more weight to facts that support our opinions, and less weight to facts that contradict it. But when someone consistently responds to solid real-world evidence that contradicts their beliefs by denying the evidence and clinging harder to their belief — and when they firmly believe that this is the right and moral thing to do — that represents a way of looking at the universe and your place in it that I simply can’t be tolerant of. And I don’t think I should be.

But that’s not a difference of spiritual versus skeptical. There are true-believer reality-deniers in the secular world, and flexible, open-minded people in the spiritual one. So when I find myself getting enraged at radical religious extremists — around the world and of every stripe, Christian and Muslim and Jewish and New Age and everything — who are trying to hammer a huge, messy world into a tiny square hole, I remind myself that this isn’t religious intolerance. It’s not the religion I’m intolerant of. It’s the rejection of reality — scientific, political, or simply human.

Transcendental Skepticism: My Letter to Mark Morford

July 23, 2006 Greta Christina15 Comments

So Mark Morford (the SF Gate/SF Chronicle columnist) wrote this column last week about how pathetic it is when people can’t relate to the mystical energy of inanimate objects, and it really honked me off. I normally like Morford a fair amount — he’s smart and he’s funny, and he convinced me and Ingrid to stop shopping at Safeway, for which I will be eternally grateful. But this piece had my blood boiling, in that special way that won’t let me sleep until I’ve written a calm-but-passionate, closely reasoned, blisteringly eloquent reply, pointing out in careful detail exactly why someone is wrong.

Here is that letter. Enjoy!

*****

Dear Mark,

In your column of 7/21 (“Please Kiss Your Old Toaster”), you wrote at some length about people who donâ€™t believe in the mystical divine energy of physical objects. You had many harsh things to say on this topic, most notably that this lack of belief “reeks of a sort of deep sadness, a sort of spiritual decay, a savage limitation of perception.”

I’m generally a fan of your column. But with all due respect, I must strongly and passionately beg to differ. (I was originally going to write, “With all due respect, bite me,” but decided that it wouldn’t set the proper tone.)

It is entirely possible to be a skeptic, an agnostic, and/or an atheist — regarding all metaphysical beliefs, not just deities or organized religions — and still lead a rich, satisfying life, full of creativity and connection and love. More to the point, it is possible to be a skeptic, an agnostic, and/or an atheist, and still experience awestruck wonder at the mysterious majesty of the universe, and a feeling of transcendent oneness with it.

Let’s take your case of inanimate objects. I get very attached to the things in my life. (Probably more than I should, in fact — I have a hard time getting rid of anything I’m sentimental about, so I’m a bit of a pack rat.) I have an ongoing argument with my wife about my milk crates, which she wants out of the damn house, but which I fondly associate with my wild Bohemian youth (as opposed to my stodgy middle-aged life as a sex writer). I have intense emotional attachments to books I love, gifts my friends have given me, clothes I’ve worn to memorable parties, boots I’ve had wild kinky sex in, my mother’s recipe book, my vibrator, my wedding ring. And yes, my computer. They aren’t empty to me. They have meaning.

But as an agnostic/skeptic, I don’t believe that these objects have meaning because they carry some sort of metaphysical energy. (More accurately, I believe that there’s no evidence that they carry metaphysical energy.) They have meaning because they trigger memories and emotions and connections. They have meaning because Iâ€™ve invested them with meaning.

I think part of the problem here is with the use of the word “energy” — and two extremely different meanings of it that get conflated. There’s the colloquial use of the word “energy” to mean someone’s persona, the way they come across to other people. Their “vibe,” in ’60s/’70s parlance. As in, “She seemed nice enough, but I got a really weird energy from her.” And then there’s the literal, physical meaning of the word “energy,” kinetic and thermal and whatnot, the energy that equals mass times the speed of light squared. These are both useful and expressive meanings, and I use them both myself — but they don’t mean the same thing, or even a similar thing. And this confusion is, I think, responsible for a pseudo-scientific mysticism that makes actual scientists — people who devote years of their lives to difficult, tedious work in labs and swamps and astronomy towers making sure the things they believe are actually, you know, true — want to tear their hair out and scream.

Why does this matter?

Well, I could go on at length about the problems of basing your life on beliefs for which you have no real evidence. I could talk about the ease with which the mind deceives itself, and the value of careful, rigorous testing of beliefs to minimize that self-deception. I could talk about the hazards of “arguing from ignorance” — the error of thinking that, because you don’t currently have an answer to a question, the answer must therefore be X… X often being something supernatural. (Read a few issues of the Skeptical Inquirer if you want documentation of the real-world harm that untested beliefs in the supernatural can cause — from the refusal of proven medical treatment to rip-offs by fraudulent psychics.) I could even point out that disdain for the scientific approach has led to serious social disasters, from crappy sex education to global warming.

And I could go on, at even greater length and in appalling purple prose, about the mind-boggling beauty and mystery of the physical universe, and how every new answer we get about it leads to ten new questions. I could talk about the giddy delight I feel when I learn about pygmy dinosaurs, or dolphins using nouns, or spider species that turn out to be social. I could talk about the awestruck humility I feel in the face of everything we don’t know about the world, and at the almost certain fact that in 100 years, things we’re dead certain about now will turn out to not be true. I could talk about the admiration and respect I have for scientists, and the patience and rigor and years-long attention span that they’re willing to devote to their work — especially in a society that increasingly holds science and reason in contempt. I could even talk about those rare, raw moments of existential presence and epiphany, and how my lack of belief in a metaphysical soul makes me feel more connected to the stars and plants and planets, more of an integral part of the universe — not less.

But that’s not really the point.

Here’s the point. I try very hard to be tolerant and understanding of people with religious and metaphysical beliefs (as long as they come by them honestly and don’t try to shove them down everyone else’s throat). I am, in fact, an agnostic and a skeptic, not an atheist. I know that questions about God and the soul and such are questions that nobody really knows the answers to, and I try to remain humble in the face of — how did I put it? — the mysterious majesty of the universe, and the vastness of my ignorance about it.

But it’s very difficult to do that when religious people are scornful, or hostile, or pitying of my skepticism. And I don’t just mean narrow-minded sex-hating fundamentalists, either. I mean Goddess-worshipping believers in sacred vibrations and mystical energy fields, too. My life is not sad or empty, decayed or cynical, flat or leaden, detached or cold or dead (all words from your column, by the way) merely because I decline to base my life on a belief in mystical energy. I don’t want or need your pity, any more than I want or need the pity of sanctimonious parents because I’ll never experience the wonders of parenthood, or the pity of sanctimonious straight people because I’ll never experience the joys of heterosexuality. It’s insulting and patronizing, and I respectfully request that you knock it off.

Sincerely,
Greta Christina

Reading diary, 5/31/05: Unweaving the Rainbow

May 31, 2005 Greta ChristinaLeave a comment

Just finished “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” by Richard Dawkins. (If you’re not familiar, Dawkins is the evolutionary biologist who wrote “The Selfish Gene” and “The Blind Watchmaker.”) “Unweaving the Rainbow” is his response to people who feel that science (as opposed to spirituality or paranormalism) destroys wonder, that the scientific approach to the world is essentially nihilistic, dreary, dull, and lacking in joy, passion, or poetry. Dawkins tries to counter this view by writing about the beauty and wonder he sees in an assortment of scientific fields, and the sense of awe he experiences at the physical world and our gradually unfolding understanding of it.

Does it work? Yes and no. Dawkins is an amazing writer, excellent at making complicated scientific concepts clear to the layperson (to the educated layperson, anyway). And lots of what he writes about is fascinating, mind-opening, freaky, and even hilarious. (The bit about superstitious pigeons is still my favorite.)

But he’s definitely more of a scientist than he is a philosopher (like, duh, he *is* a scientist). He’s very successful at showing how science is useful and even enlightening; but when it comes to conveying how science can be wondrous and transcendent, he’s more hit and miss. I think he takes the awe as a given; he assumes that anyone who understands these ideas will be awestruck by their beauty and power and meaning. And alas, I’m not sure if that’s true for anyone who doesn’t already feel that way. My own response to this book was less often “I am struck dumb by the complex, beautifully balanced majesty of the physical universe,” and more often “Cool!”

Still. Dawkins is fucking brilliant, and this book rocks like Dokken. If you’ve never read Dawkins before, I’d probably start with “The Blind Watchmaker” instead (or “The Selfish Gene,” except I haven’t read that one yet). But if you have read him and yearn for more, Greta-Bob says check it out.

Books I’m currently still in the middle of:

“Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond
“The Forbidden Zone” by Michael Lesy
“Mutants” by Armand Marie Leroy
“Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” by Studs Terkel
“Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
“The Onion Ad Nauseum: Complete Archives Volume 14” by the staff of The Onion
“Zounds! A Browser’s Dictionary of Interjections” by Mark Dunn

Greta Christina's Blog

Atheism, sex, politics, dreams, and whatever.

Skepticism

The Martians Explain Consciousness

The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely

Please Think of the Children: Sex Offender Hysteria

Why Are We Here? One Agnostic’s Half-Baked Philosophy

Love the Inventions, Hate the Inventors: Smacking Around Mark Morford, Round 2

Oh, The Believer and the Skeptic Should be Friends…

Transcendental Skepticism: My Letter to Mark Morford

Reading diary, 5/31/05: Unweaving the Rainbow

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