This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.
In my recent post "Yes, You Imagined It", I mentioned how unreliable the human memory is in recalling events from our life. A reader commented, "With that in mind, don't you doubt yourself? If you can't rely on your own memory, what can you rely on?"
Your memory is unreliable. That's a fact that has been experimentally documented. You can accept that fact, or you can choose to go through life with the notion that everything that has happened to you occurred just the way you remembered it. But in doing so, you are remembering a fake life, as every one of your memories, upon recall, is subject to associations, suggestions, and other errors that get reinforced every time you recall it.
I know that this is a little troubling. But I prefer to live a life that is troubling but real, as opposed to comforting but fake.
This desire to live a comforting life, even if it forces us to deny certain aspects of reality, is rampant in the human race. Religion (and related worldviews that suggest life after death) is the most obvious example. To the believer, it is a huge bummer to imagine that when your life is over, it's over — that one's consciousness and self-awareness is totally finite in duration, and that being dead feels exactly the same as not yet having been conceived. Yet, religious faith notwithstanding, it certainly appears to be the case that death is the end. And I choose to live my life acknowledging this, even though theists are constantly telling me, "It must be so depressing to believe that when you die, it's over."
My fellow atheists know it isn't depressing for a person who has accepted this as fact. It is thoroughly eye-opening and exhilarating to accept that life is finite, let's make the most of what we've got here on Earth, because this is it!
I don't exactly know why it rubs me so wrong when I see people choosing comforting self-delusion over difficult reality. I feel as if they're cheating themselves somehow. I value my own life so much, and I find reality so interesting and challenging as it is, that I am downright offended when someone puts themselves in a delusional bubble. It's the same feeling that I might have if I were attending an incredible Stravinsky concert, and then learned that the guy sitting next to me is wearing headphones and listening to elevator music, because that's more comforting to hear than Stravinsky. I would want to yank off those headphones and force the guy to listen to some real music for a change.
Here are some other realities I choose to acknowledge. I sometimes find myself fighting people online because of these (largely unpopular) viewpoints.
• No, kids cannot be "anything they want to be" when they grow up, or achieve any dream they may have if they "believe" or "try" hard enough. There are such things as talent and circumstance. Sorry, moms and dads.
• No, if you ran for public office and won, you would do exactly the same things that all elected politicians do to stay in office.
• No, you would not be immune to abuse of power or moral decay if you found yourself in a position of absolute power. See the Stanford Prison Experiment.
• No, those corporate "ribbon campaigns for the cure" aren't all sweetness and goodness. There is a huge, self-sustaining industry behind every major cause, with thousands of people gainfully employed (no, many of them are not doing any research), and all kinds of tax-writeoff and PR motives going on for the sponsors. "Cause marketing" is not without controversy. I know it feels wonderful to buy a pink box of cereal and everything — but how about giving directly to a charity, rather than tossing in a few cents by way of the cereal company? What's that, you just wanted a box of cereal, but couldn't resist the opportunity to pretend that you're actually a charitable person? Oh. (Update: Here's a blog post on pink-ribbon saturation.)
• No, your thoughts, beliefs, or trivial actions will not impact events in ways that you desire. The outcome of the game does not revolve around whether or not you put on your lucky hat — there are other people in the world besides yourself, and they have lucky hats, too. This especially applies if you're at home and watching the game on TiVo. See also: Prayer.
• No, your pet conspiracy theory is almost certainly false. Conspiracy theories are like movie scripts: They dress up reality to make it more interesting and exciting. They also deny the uncomfortable reality that sometimes, a few random piss-ants with a mission, like the 9/11 hijackers, can cause a huge world-changing event. (Typically these theories put the control in the hands of a far more deliberate and powerful entity, like the CIA — which in an odd way is more comforting.)
• Speaking of 9/11, no, the Al Qaeda hijackers were not cowards. I don't exactly approve of mass murder or terrorism, but the hard reality is those hijackers gave their lives for what they believed in, as warped as those beliefs may have been. Objectively speaking, that means they were acts of courage. (Of course, part of their motivation was a reward in the afterlife, but I'm talking strictly about the acts themselves.) The moment President Bush called the hijackers cowards, I knew he was wrong. People wanted to think of 9/11 as a cowardly act because the hijackers were so vilified. But from a neutral viewpoint, a suicide mission is anything but cowardly! Is it so wrong for an American who denounces mass-murder terrorism simply to acknowledge this one hard fact? Bill Maher tried, by saying about a week later, "We're the cowardly ones, launching missiles from 2,000 miles away" — but people didn't want to hear that, and his ABC show was canceled as result. So much for acknowledging reality.
• And finally, no, an intrusive, expensive safety measure is not worth it "if it saves just one single innocent life." This is another feel-good platitude that has no basis in reality. Banning cars in America would save tens of thousands of innocent lives per year. Do we do that? Why not? People are used to chalking up car-crash deaths as "accidents," a consequence of living in a free society. Terrorist attacks really are accidents; contrary to popular belief, they almost never happen, and that's not because of the TSA, which has yet to intercept a single explosive device some 90+ million flights (and counting!) after 9/11/01. If only we had treated that event as an accidental failure of the imagination — remember, airport security allowed passengers to carry boxcutters back then — the terrorists would not have defeated America, which they most certainly have, as any stroll through an airport today will indicate.
What are some hard realities that you accept, even though your viewpoint is less comforting than the more popular view? What difficult facts do you choose to acknowledge, simply because that's how the world actually is?
Showing posts with label imagination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imagination. Show all posts
Friday, December 3, 2010
Yes, You Imagined It (07/24/2010)
This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.
In a recent online discussion about spiritual matters, a woman wrote about an encounter she’d once had with a supernatural being. She spotted a figure standing about ten feet away, watching her, and suddenly, it moved to more than 100 yards away. “I didn’t imagine it,” she wrote.
I always find these kinds of expressions interesting. Aside from being oddly defensive — like the crazy person who tells you “I’m not crazy,” even though you didn’t ask — it reveals the distorted, almost bizarre way in which we view our perceptions, our memory, and the objective world. The world is like a giant machine that runs one particular course of events “out there,” and we like to believe that through our senses, we take in a perfectly accurate representation of what that machine is doing. We then store that representation in our memory bank, which we assume operates like a video camera: We “record” the event, and when we want to remember it, we “play it back.” Being like a video camera, it always plays back the same accurate representation of reality, or so we think.
Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t work like that. It is a complex biological organ; it doesn’t run mechanically and predictably, like a camera and hard drive. Instead, it has the astonishingly difficult job of sorting through a barrage of light and other stimuli, and producing a coherent internal representation of the world that it perceives — a mental picture. This mental picture must be assembled internally, and then reassembled, again internally, every time an event is remembered, even moments later.
When a person says “I didn’t imagine it” — whether it’s a shadowy figure that zips across space, the ghost of a loved one, or the voice of Jesus speaking through prayer — they are wrong. But they are also wrong when they see a meteor streaking across the night sky, or a hawk catching a field mouse, and they say “I didn’t imagine it.” We all imagine everything. The brain that produces the mental representation of a meteor or a hawk is the same brain that produces the mental representation of a ghost or heavenly voice. Alone, how can any one of us distinguish the difference? We can’t — and therefore, the veracity of one person’s eyewitness account of the laws of physics being broken, or anything else for that matter, must be considered accordingly.
When multiple persons are involved, eyewitness accounts can be taken more seriously, but even then there are exceptions. One of my favorite examples is the Hindu milk miracle, in which thousands of Hindus claimed to see statues of Ganesha taking offerings of milk. Really, the only reliable way to assure that something actually happened is if it was mechanically recorded, preferably on multiple devices — meaning that it holds to the scientific standard of being demonstrated predictably and repeatably, upon playback. In many ways, the common expression of dismissive skepticism, “pics or it didn’t happen,” is correct. (Camera images of Ganesha would have revealed that the milk was being drawn onto the statues’ surface by capillary action, something that believing eyewitnesses probably weren’t looking for.)
Finally there is the huge problem of human memory. All recalled memories are imagined, by definition, so it’s ludicrous to claim any objective authority when recalling an event. Also, when we remember something, we aren’t necessarily remembering the original event. Instead, I believe that we’re remembering the last time we remembered the event. What else in our brain would we be accessing? This is why memories tend to shift and evolve over time. How many times have you noticed this: Re-watching a movie many years later, a scene that you remember vividly is surprisingly different; or, reading an old letter or book, a sentence that you have recalled many times, it turns out, wasn’t worded that way. “I could have sworn it was ...” you tell yourself. Yes, and you would have sworn if given the opportunity, because a vivid memory can seem as real to us as reality itself. But study after study (a review can be found here) have found that the human memory, particularly of eyewitness accounts, is dreadfully unreliable.
By eliminating the purely artificial distinction between perception and imagination, a lot of things make sense — like how a normal-seeming person can believe, with all their heart, that a supernatural or otherwise impossible experience was a real event. (I toyed with this theme in my satire video “How I Know That God Exists”.) So the next time you meet someone who’s had a religious vision or personally witnessed a miracle — and swears they “didn’t imagine it” — tell them, “Yes you did.” But, bear in mind that even if your life revolves around reason and rationality, you imagine plenty of things, too.
In a recent online discussion about spiritual matters, a woman wrote about an encounter she’d once had with a supernatural being. She spotted a figure standing about ten feet away, watching her, and suddenly, it moved to more than 100 yards away. “I didn’t imagine it,” she wrote.
I always find these kinds of expressions interesting. Aside from being oddly defensive — like the crazy person who tells you “I’m not crazy,” even though you didn’t ask — it reveals the distorted, almost bizarre way in which we view our perceptions, our memory, and the objective world. The world is like a giant machine that runs one particular course of events “out there,” and we like to believe that through our senses, we take in a perfectly accurate representation of what that machine is doing. We then store that representation in our memory bank, which we assume operates like a video camera: We “record” the event, and when we want to remember it, we “play it back.” Being like a video camera, it always plays back the same accurate representation of reality, or so we think.
Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t work like that. It is a complex biological organ; it doesn’t run mechanically and predictably, like a camera and hard drive. Instead, it has the astonishingly difficult job of sorting through a barrage of light and other stimuli, and producing a coherent internal representation of the world that it perceives — a mental picture. This mental picture must be assembled internally, and then reassembled, again internally, every time an event is remembered, even moments later.
When a person says “I didn’t imagine it” — whether it’s a shadowy figure that zips across space, the ghost of a loved one, or the voice of Jesus speaking through prayer — they are wrong. But they are also wrong when they see a meteor streaking across the night sky, or a hawk catching a field mouse, and they say “I didn’t imagine it.” We all imagine everything. The brain that produces the mental representation of a meteor or a hawk is the same brain that produces the mental representation of a ghost or heavenly voice. Alone, how can any one of us distinguish the difference? We can’t — and therefore, the veracity of one person’s eyewitness account of the laws of physics being broken, or anything else for that matter, must be considered accordingly.
When multiple persons are involved, eyewitness accounts can be taken more seriously, but even then there are exceptions. One of my favorite examples is the Hindu milk miracle, in which thousands of Hindus claimed to see statues of Ganesha taking offerings of milk. Really, the only reliable way to assure that something actually happened is if it was mechanically recorded, preferably on multiple devices — meaning that it holds to the scientific standard of being demonstrated predictably and repeatably, upon playback. In many ways, the common expression of dismissive skepticism, “pics or it didn’t happen,” is correct. (Camera images of Ganesha would have revealed that the milk was being drawn onto the statues’ surface by capillary action, something that believing eyewitnesses probably weren’t looking for.)
Finally there is the huge problem of human memory. All recalled memories are imagined, by definition, so it’s ludicrous to claim any objective authority when recalling an event. Also, when we remember something, we aren’t necessarily remembering the original event. Instead, I believe that we’re remembering the last time we remembered the event. What else in our brain would we be accessing? This is why memories tend to shift and evolve over time. How many times have you noticed this: Re-watching a movie many years later, a scene that you remember vividly is surprisingly different; or, reading an old letter or book, a sentence that you have recalled many times, it turns out, wasn’t worded that way. “I could have sworn it was ...” you tell yourself. Yes, and you would have sworn if given the opportunity, because a vivid memory can seem as real to us as reality itself. But study after study (a review can be found here) have found that the human memory, particularly of eyewitness accounts, is dreadfully unreliable.
By eliminating the purely artificial distinction between perception and imagination, a lot of things make sense — like how a normal-seeming person can believe, with all their heart, that a supernatural or otherwise impossible experience was a real event. (I toyed with this theme in my satire video “How I Know That God Exists”.) So the next time you meet someone who’s had a religious vision or personally witnessed a miracle — and swears they “didn’t imagine it” — tell them, “Yes you did.” But, bear in mind that even if your life revolves around reason and rationality, you imagine plenty of things, too.
Another "Proof of God," Refuted (5/15/2009)
This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.
A couple of people have sent me a fictional story about two Christians in a philosophy class confronting their atheist professor. (Maybe you've seen it; apparently it's been circulating by e-mail for years. A version can be found here.*) The story, which frankly is an embarrassment to anyone who has sat in a philosophy class or studied science, is an elaborate take on one argument for theism that I see over and over. Basically: "Yes, it may be true that we cannot see God, but what about magnetism, or electrons, or the wind? We can't see those, either. And what about love, or hope, or compassion, or any kind of thought -- not only can we not see them, but in addition science can't detect them, can't explain exactly what they are or how they work. If God doesn't exist, then the wind, hope, and love all must not exist, either."
This idea was touched on in the film "Contact," in the scene where Ellie Arroway demands proof of God, and Palmer Joss responds by asking her to prove that she loved her father.
If you're inclined to believe, it's fairly convincing. Surely, there are intangible things that actually do exist, so of course God is like that, too. But the argument introduces two classes of entities: merely invisible things, and states of mind, and it conflates the two classes into one class, the assumption being that God must be in that class as well.
Let's think of some merely invisible things: Air. Wind. Magnetism. Radiation. Low-voltage electricity. Hydrogen gas. "You can't see any of them, right?" Perhaps, but why the sudden emphasis on human vision? All of those things, and any other real-but-invisible thing you can think of, have effects that can be directly observed. Air, when it circulates as wind, makes leaves move. Magnetism affects a compass. Radiation can be picked up with a Geiger counter, electricity with a voltmeter. Hydrogen burns when ignited along with oxygen. Unlike acts of God, these things are all 100% predictable, testable, and repeatable; there is no case where hydrogen is not flammable or a magnetic field doesn't affect a compass. Basically, for all real-but-invisible things we know about, we have some kind of device or process that will reliably detect their presence. So, could we come up with a device that detects the presence of an invisible "God field"? Perhaps -- but if we do, atheists will no longer have much of a defensible position. To date, such a device hasn't been invented, so atheists remain atheists.
The other class in the argument comprises human states of mind: emotions, feelings, thoughts. I'm prepared to say that hope and compassion didn't exist on Earth in, say, the Devonian period 350 million years ago. Are theists prepared to say God didn't, either? I doubt it. But if they are, then we are in complete agreement. To me God seems to be a state of the human mind in the same way as love, anger, or hope are: a subjective phenomenon confined exclusively to the self. I have no issue with that kind of God whatsoever. (Just don't tell me He caused the Steelers to beat the Cardinals.)
The most likely counter-objection to what I'm saying would be something like, "God is more like a state of mind than a mere invisible thing, except that He exists independent of humans, existed before humans, and will exist after humans." Well, fine, but that kind of destroys the analogy between God and fleeting, human states of mind, doesn't it?
If God exists, then He exists in His own class separate from merely invisible things and states of mind. That's the God that the theist must argue for.
* The most egregious misstatement in the story is, "According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist." There's a subtle but critical distinction between having a position (saying something) and not having a position (saying nothing). "Science" -- and by the way it's quite a stretch to identify science in such singular, authoritarian terms, as in "the Vatican" or "the White House" -- is unable to take any position whatsoever on the existence of God.
A couple of people have sent me a fictional story about two Christians in a philosophy class confronting their atheist professor. (Maybe you've seen it; apparently it's been circulating by e-mail for years. A version can be found here.*) The story, which frankly is an embarrassment to anyone who has sat in a philosophy class or studied science, is an elaborate take on one argument for theism that I see over and over. Basically: "Yes, it may be true that we cannot see God, but what about magnetism, or electrons, or the wind? We can't see those, either. And what about love, or hope, or compassion, or any kind of thought -- not only can we not see them, but in addition science can't detect them, can't explain exactly what they are or how they work. If God doesn't exist, then the wind, hope, and love all must not exist, either."
This idea was touched on in the film "Contact," in the scene where Ellie Arroway demands proof of God, and Palmer Joss responds by asking her to prove that she loved her father.
If you're inclined to believe, it's fairly convincing. Surely, there are intangible things that actually do exist, so of course God is like that, too. But the argument introduces two classes of entities: merely invisible things, and states of mind, and it conflates the two classes into one class, the assumption being that God must be in that class as well.
Let's think of some merely invisible things: Air. Wind. Magnetism. Radiation. Low-voltage electricity. Hydrogen gas. "You can't see any of them, right?" Perhaps, but why the sudden emphasis on human vision? All of those things, and any other real-but-invisible thing you can think of, have effects that can be directly observed. Air, when it circulates as wind, makes leaves move. Magnetism affects a compass. Radiation can be picked up with a Geiger counter, electricity with a voltmeter. Hydrogen burns when ignited along with oxygen. Unlike acts of God, these things are all 100% predictable, testable, and repeatable; there is no case where hydrogen is not flammable or a magnetic field doesn't affect a compass. Basically, for all real-but-invisible things we know about, we have some kind of device or process that will reliably detect their presence. So, could we come up with a device that detects the presence of an invisible "God field"? Perhaps -- but if we do, atheists will no longer have much of a defensible position. To date, such a device hasn't been invented, so atheists remain atheists.
The other class in the argument comprises human states of mind: emotions, feelings, thoughts. I'm prepared to say that hope and compassion didn't exist on Earth in, say, the Devonian period 350 million years ago. Are theists prepared to say God didn't, either? I doubt it. But if they are, then we are in complete agreement. To me God seems to be a state of the human mind in the same way as love, anger, or hope are: a subjective phenomenon confined exclusively to the self. I have no issue with that kind of God whatsoever. (Just don't tell me He caused the Steelers to beat the Cardinals.)
The most likely counter-objection to what I'm saying would be something like, "God is more like a state of mind than a mere invisible thing, except that He exists independent of humans, existed before humans, and will exist after humans." Well, fine, but that kind of destroys the analogy between God and fleeting, human states of mind, doesn't it?
If God exists, then He exists in His own class separate from merely invisible things and states of mind. That's the God that the theist must argue for.
* The most egregious misstatement in the story is, "According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist." There's a subtle but critical distinction between having a position (saying something) and not having a position (saying nothing). "Science" -- and by the way it's quite a stretch to identify science in such singular, authoritarian terms, as in "the Vatican" or "the White House" -- is unable to take any position whatsoever on the existence of God.
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