The Nature of Belief

 Much of my thinking is influenced by reading and I am currently reading a book about some people who changed American thought in the period after the Civil War. One thing I find interesting is that even the most scientific of these tried to defend a belief in God, meaning the Christian god and the Bible as scripture. The author goes through a list of the approach of various people, including Louis Agassiz, who made important contributions to science, especially in glacier studies and classification of fish including fish fossils, but also rejected Darwin's theories and tried to disprove them, unsuccessfully. The author says he simply rejected modern science to preserve his beliefs.

The part that caught my attention today was discussion of William James Pragmatism, in which he describes his understanding of thought and how belief works. He says we believe things that we are willing to act on, and we believe them because that belief provides value, which makes the beliefs "true". To me, that suggests that he does not believe in objective truth, in the existence of facts outside human thought, which seems rather silly, but he was certainly a more successful man than I am, so maybe he saw something I don't. The Law of Errors was something still working its way through science and culture during that time, so a belief, for example, of the "true" position of a star or "true" trajectory of a comet was something they had just learned to calculate based on measurement, which they had to admit contained errors.

One could wonder about the "value" of a belief in God, but I expect it is largely social. I have read many times that those who study belief in religion find that the beliefs come largely from family. There are people who convert from one religion to another. I know this from experience because I was a missionary for the Mormon church, which may not like my using that name, but no one objected when I was a Mormon missionary and everyone knows to whom I refer when I use the name, so it serves a purpose in communication, and I don't care if it offends so old white guy with whom I disagree on fundamental issues, the naming of his church being rather trivial in comparison.

So I believed in God because my family did. It made my parents happy, which was a major goal in childhood and into adulthood. It was reinforced by responses to affirmation of my belief by others in the church, even strangers I met when attending church with relatives. As the Mormon church was of prime importance to my father and most of those in the church, it is not surprising that I did believe. It seems more surprising that I stopped. When and how did belief in God cease to have value that reinforced the belief.

I can't answer that clearly. I do remember having and asking questions about scripture, such as how much water would it take to flood the Earth and cover all the land, as in the story of Noah and his ark. No one can answer that in a manor consistent with science. Also, how many species could actually fit on Noah's ark? While in college, the one run by the Mormon church, Brigham Young University, I looked up the number of mammal species known, and calculated that space based on estimates of the dimensions of Noah's ark, and found that per creature, there was about 2 square feet if there were two of each species. My calculation was very simple, and didn't make any attempt at following the instructions of seven pairs for certain kinds of animals or subtracting out the aquatic mammals, nor make any allowance in space for Noah and family because the point was that just the mammals wouldn't fit, and then there are birds, reptiles, and maybe a few amphibians, before getting into invertebrates. The whole story lacks credibility. Later I learned that The Epic of Gilgamesh has a great flood story with a lot of similarity to the Noah story, but with different gods.

Then there was science. I read a book by Apostle Mark E. Peterson, who I admired for his talks at General Conference and because we shared a name, but in this book, directed at youth of the church, he denounced belief in the Theory of Evolution without explaining the theory or showing any reason except his own conceit why we shouldn't believe it. I was crushed. Totally disillusioned. Never got over that. I always felt like an outsider in the Mormon Church for believing in evolution, though I never found a member who could explain it and give any reason to disbelieve in the theory other than that some General Authorities spoke against it.

Maybe I was just a teenage rebel against my parents. Maybe my father insisted on reason from his offspring, and that shot down any belief in God of Mormonism, which don't hold up under scrutiny, as far as I have seen. But I stopped believing in God, and then I stopped professing a belief.

I haven't worked out a system of belief, or created a new brand of philosophy. I may examine my beliefs as I read this book, and I may change my understanding and come to new beliefs. I doubt I will reconsider God or any god, because there is too little evidence to suggest a belief is based in objective reality, which I still consider true.

Possible Reasons for Optimism

 Reports in the media are now saying that nationally new cases of Covid have peaked and are beginning to decrease. Deaths, which are usually a lagging indicator, still seem to be rising, but if the normal trend holds, those may begin to drop in a week or so. I'm not quite so optimistic.

The United Kingdom announced an end to isolation requirements and so forth, as if the pandemic were being declared over even though new cases were not dropping there. I hope there is reason behind the decision, though I fear it may be an attempt at distraction from the pressure on the PM to resign over his blatant disregard for Covid policies, and his denial that the parties at 10 Downing Street were parties that violated the rules. I think he deserves to be hounded out of office. But the people of the United Kingdom deserve leadership and public health decisions based in science. I expect I will track cases there for a week or two to see what happens.

I am still wearing a mask in public. Masks are required at work and I support the policy. I'm not clear on the basis for the decreased isolation time after contracting Covid, though my employer has adopted the updated recommendations. I am still having students reporting active cases, though I have not yet been informed of any known cases of spread at the school. Still, it seems like we should still be cautious, as thousands of people are dying of Covid. I expect we will reach 900,000 deaths within three weeks.

I sometimes think about going back to Facebook conversations from 2020 and pointing out to the deniers that this pandemic was very much the real deal. One guy I know is still trying to claim that he was right all along, and that Covid is a hoax, that masks don't work, that the vaccine is a conspiracy, and that Trump was right about all those crackpot treatments. I find it hard to understand that level of delusion, but I know he is not alone.

It seems the political pundits are saying much of the approval issues for President Biden center around the continued problems of Covid, which is not really reasonable, but the American electorate and public in general is not known for its reasonableness. I hope that Covid cases have peaked and will drop rapidly, and that this latest surge is the last, but I know that most people don't understand the complexities of a pandemic. America had the worst response to Covid of any advanced nation, and while there has been progress, there is still a lot of open resistance to public health measures. There is a case in the media of a woman making reference to "all the guns, fully loaded" in talking about a mask requirement at an elementary school. I have read that law enforcement are investigating. Based on what I have seen, I think she should be arrested and tried, and at the very least should permanently lose any right to own a gun. But she will not be the last. Aside from having an incompetent president at the critical beginning of this pandemic, America struggles with issues like this because of an astounding level of ignorance and fear, something the perpetrators fight to maintain. There is no easy solution to this.

New Toys

 There is a new topic for science lovers. The James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched and is making its way to its programmed orbit. The JWST group on Facebook is an active discussion group that addresses all kinds of questions about the telescope and about the cosmology it will be used to study.

I'm not that excited about the group. Some of the questions people are asking are old questions, and there sure seem to be a lot of them. I am tempted to drop out of the group, which I joined because Liz invited me to. I eagerly await the images from the telescope. I am interested in the advances in engineering and everything else that led to development of this project. I enjoy learning details of the plans for the telescope. I'm just not that interested in rehashing basic cosmology with so many newcomers, I guess. How big is the universe? How old can the most distant objects the new telescope will see be? Is it possible that the speed of light hasn't always been the same, that it has slowed as the universe has expanded because the space/time continuum has stretched out? Yeah, someone asked that. I'm more interested in that question, maybe because I've read science fiction stories that include technology to slow the speed of light as a way, for example, of trapping people around a specific planet or something so by the time they get out of the trap, millions of years have passed in the rest of the universe while they made their slow light speed dash of a measly few million miles. The technology in those time traps was not explained, just assumed.

Still, it is exciting to see the response and to anticipate the improved data collection of the new instruments. People should be excited by advances in science and technology.

There was also an article on the BBC News website about a new projection for when the sun will become a red giant star, which will cover Mercury and Venus and burn up the surface of Earth. About 5 billion years, so I won't be around to see that one, I don't think. Besides, increases in solar radiation are expected in more like one billion years, enough to kill all life as we know it on Earth's surface. So, the authors of the article say, we should look for ways to expand human existence beyond Earth, start travelling the galaxy, so we might have a possible future beyond a billion years.

I'm not going to worry over the fate of the planet due to the shifts in the life cycle of our star. That's a time scale beyond my limits.

I am wondering, though, what sort of algorithms are involved in the calculations of these expected developments in solar activity and in controlling the fancy new space telescope. Will the AI involved have a meaningful affect on the chosen actions or the interpretation of data? If the advertising algorithms on the Internet are any guide, I hope the control and calculations are pretty much human, because the algorithms are even less efficient that plant reproduction processes.

Experience

 I am reading a book about how though in may areas changed in America after the Civil War. The war probably influenced some of the changes, but so did the rise of science. After all, a lot changed with publication on On the Origin of Species. I wasn't aware of some of the changes, including the influence of science on the restructuring of American universities.

I find it sad that much of America still has no understanding of evolution. Darwin contributed to this, but so did many others. After all, Darwin didn't know the source of the variations among individuals in a population, and didn't know the details of inheritance patterns, either. We should not be debating about whether to teach children and college students about theories of evolution. Perhaps we should be debating whether there is any value in discussing Christianity in the modern world, as the history is quite dark in many ways, and contribution to knowledge has often come from heresies that were punished and suppressed as long as possible.

Still, many of the leaders of change in philosophy, science, and politics in America in that period were quite racist, sexist, and religious, and even some who were not were believers in some supernatural or spiritual realm on which our experience reality depended. Ah, the arrogance of humans.

My thinking about this is that the universe seems to have existed long before any human mind did, and I see no need for any mind to understand existence for it to exist. It is only our understanding the requires a mind, and that is only our mind because it is our understanding. Reality is probably more than an abstract concept.

Our minds have developed in ways that were conducive to biological success of our ancestors. We experience the world as continuous and three dimensional because it is, so our perception presents it to use that way as well as it can. That seems to have bothered some thinkers back in the 1880's; they had figured out that the retina of the eye is more or less flat and that signaling to the brain was episodic, so what our brains "see" and record are moments, or frames, of sensory input, so they didn't understand why our perception isn't like that. On the other hand, I doubt they could come up with any utility in such perception, flipping frame by frame slowly enough for us to notice each change of frame. We don't make movies that way because if we want to catch dinner, we have to follow the actual movement of our next meal, and not the true frames we catch.

I have read that engineers have been trying to make robots with "true" depth perception like what we seem to experience, but haven't been able to create it artificially. So the forces of evolution still have a few tricks hidden from us. I expect it is due to speed of processing and complexity of processing. I don't know how fast modern robots can catch and process frames of visible input, or actually how fast signaling occurs in the visual pathways of the human nervous system. I recently read that new observations of neurons show that there is a whole level of processing in dendrites of neurons, which basically adds at least an order of magnitude to the computing capability of the brain to previous models. Let the robots figure that one out.

Dark Comedy

 My brother and all his family got Covid. I think all of them had been vaccinated, but a few days after they were all together after rChristmas, they started getting symptoms and they all tested positive for Covid. My oldest niece has a compromised immune system. She got the worst symptoms. She was pretty sick for about a week.

I just saw a post on Facebook from IFLS that says people who get Covid become much less smart. The brief bit I saw compared Covid to having a stroke and said Covid could be worse.

I hope that is not the general experience. I know quite a few people who have had Covid.

I am sad that the United States has had the worst response to Covid of the developed world. Dead last. And it still goes on, with fights against tools that help decrease the spread like vaccine mandates and mask mandates. The Supreme Court, with no understanding of public health and a big chip on its shoulder since so many of the current members have tainted histories, including three being appointed by a corrupt and incompetent president, will decide on the legal powers of the president and Congress in taking steps to protect public health, probably without actually considering the value of such actions in promoting the general welfare, which is explicitly part of the justification for the Constitution. I expect it will be another blow to the myth of American values and success. It seems the fears of the uninformed have become the driving force for politics in America, and it is only getting worse. We are very likely stuck with a bunch of political hacks on the Supreme Court for decades, and the undemocratic institutions we are operating under work against the interests of pretty much everyone in this country.

I'm glad I have a sense of humor. It's better than spending all my time crying for my country.

Don't let is slide

 I see the news, and I keep wondering when some things are going to happen. I still want to see Trump prosecuted for felony campaign finance violations from 2016 for which his co-conspirator was convicted. I want to see a criminal investigation into felony campaign finance violations in connection with Trump's infamous phone call with the president of the Ukraine, plus maybe investigation into bribery and conspiracy to commit there crimes. I would also think it was a criminal offense for a president to use his position to commit crimes for personal campaign benefits, though I'm not sure I can name the crime in accurate terms. And obstruction of justice.

There seems to be progress in the fraud investigations in New York. I'd like to see that continue.

I'd like to see some  progress in criminal investigations into interfering in the Georgia election and vote counting.

I think a case can be made about inciting insurrection from the 6 January assault on the Capitol. I hope the House committee investigating that event continues. A lot of insurrectionists have been charged and convicted, but there are still questions to ask. I would not balk at expulsion of every member of the House who voted against certification of the election on the grounds that such a move is supporting the cause of the insurrectionists and violates the oath they all took to defend the Constitution, but I don't think that will actually happen. Our system of justice is not that robust.

I have seen enough reports and opinions about the state of American democracy to make me afraid that we might be in real danger of losing our democracy, and I don't want to have to deal with what these dimwits responsible try to replace it with. But since they don't acknowledge facts, I don't know how to work against them. Except to pursue criminal charges against Trump and his ilk wherever possible.

Cars

 We bought a used Subaru Impreza in October, I think, because our '97 Toyota was falling apart and would have cost more to repair that it was worth. The Impreza is an '18, so much more modern than our other car, an '07 Honda Fit.

This car, which we named Prudence, has proximity sensors on all sides and a backup camera. It has seat warmers, which I haven't used deliberately but might if it gets cold enough. It has coordination between the cruise control and proximity sensors, so I can set the cruise control to go 60 mph and when the vehicle in front of me is going slower than that, the car adjusts speed to maintain a safe distance. I just have to keep us in our lane.

I spend some of my time while driving Prudence watching the average gas mileage reading. There is a menu of parameters you can have up on the screen, but I mostly keep it on average gas mileage, which is calculated for the current "trip" which means tank of gas, since I reset the trip indicator when I fill the tank. I haven't used it for anything else. I don't know why I enjoy that as much as I do, but I see how the numbers vary quickly at first, and start rather low, but once I get a trip to work and back done, the changes slow down. Still, on today's second trip to work, the gas mileage dropped from 32.3 to 29.8 before I got to the highway. Then it went up until I exited near work, and dropped only a couple of tenths from the peak of 33.1. I'm making up these numbers, because the actual values don't matter, but the size of the changes is pretty close.

The mileage drop was greater when I got to the car to drive home today because my mask strap got caught on my hearing aid, which flipped off my ear and disappeared. I thought if had fallen between the seat and the middle ridge where the transmission is, which is a tight groove I have trouble reaching into and can't see anything in. I looked down, tried the flashlight function on my phone, reached around trying to feel for it, and then finally noticed it was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. But since I had started the engine as I removed my mask, well, for those two minutes or so, my gas mileage rate was zero.

Prudence recovered most of the lost value, and got back to 33 mpg by the time I got home.

I think it is really the cruise control feature that makes it easier for me to maintain my chosen speed of 60 mph or less, and not seeing the gas mileage. When the car is controlling the speed, distractions like up-tempo music have no effect, as they do when I am driving myself. But the gas mileage display keeps me smug about my choice and helps to reinforce the decision. Sometimes I like technology.