"Angry" Atheists and an Implausible God

The Big Fella.
Watching the game.  Snacking on cherubs.

This post may be a departure from earlier ones in some ways.  Even though it may still deal with some of the themes that I have been interested in exploring (because let's face it, thinking about thinking is a broad theme...), it may be a bit more personal.  And it may diverge from the focus on the process of thinking and perception into more of a series of anecdotes about things I have thought or experienced.  But the reason I want to write this has to do with many of the same reasons I have wanted to explore the whole mind thing.  Sooner or later if we start thinking about thinking we end up thinking about our place in the universe.  That is because one of the first things that comes up in the mental conversation about thought is identity.  The in-here and the out-there.  And as soon as you contemplate the out-there, you are just two mailboxes down from wondering about the nature of the universe.  You know, God's house.  Or the house God would live in if he hadn't picked up and moved.  Or never existed.  Or whatever.

I am an atheist.  I have always been an atheist.  I was not raised in a particularly religious home and I did not go to church.  I have never been baptized.

I was welcome to go to church.  I would have been taken to any church I wanted to attend if it was important to me.  I was never a fan of mornings and wasn't sure there was any force in existence that would be powerful enough to make me want to leave the house on a Sunday morning.  My sister, however, did go to church.  She went with friends.  She did not get grief from anyone in the family about doing this.  I say this to dispel any belief that I was actually raised in some sort of atheist cult.  My home was neither a God-fearing home nor a God hating home.  My mother went to church when she was growing up and she was not and is not an atheist.  It was an open minded home.  Now, no one -- no matter how smart or sophisticated -- can be perfectly open minded at all times, but the general values I was raised with were love and respect and open mindedness (and politeness, which is an important and often undervalued form of respect).

As a child, I didn't have God taught to me.  At least not unless I asked questions.  And the answers I received when I did ask were always bewildering.  Even as a six year old, God made no sense.

Father Christmas.
Note the similarity...

I had been told by my brother when I was five that there was no Santa Clause, but by the age of six or seven I looked out over my neighborhood at all the rooftops and wondered how I could ever be so stupid to think anyone could visit all those houses in one night.  Not just those houses, of course.  That seemed marginally doable.  But all the houses in all the neighborhoods in all the states and countries all over the globe.  It seemed so obvious I couldn't understand how I had never questioned it.

And God felt pretty much the same way.  To be in the minds of every single person at every single moment for all of history seemed like a task no one had ever really thought through.  I could imagine a God that was sort of a telephone operator, switching from call to call.  But then you would just have the rooftop problem all over again.  If I was waiting for God to be on my line, I'd be waiting a long time.  Even as a child I appreciated big numbers and although I had no idea how many people were on the planet, I knew it was more than the number of rooftops Santa would have to visit.

The notion that God was everywhere might have taken some time to work through.  And I possibly could have done it, except each new piece of evidence I received about God and his works made less and less sense.

While most of the animals are lining up to
board the Ark, that lion in the lower
left has to think this looks more like
an Appleby's.

The science of Noah's ark was insufficient by the time I was in second grade.  There was simply no way that two of every animal could fit on a boat nor could they all survive even if they did.  And what of the ants?  You have two ants on a boat and in a few days you have two dead ants.  I knew ants needed more than two members to survive, and I suspected that many other animals did too.  Did ants not count?  Surely they were animals.  They weren't plants!*  And what of the wasps and beetles and slugs and spiders?  It seemed untenable to collect so many creatures in time to save them from a flood much less feed and house them on a boat for 6 weeks. (It was actually over a year in the story, but I considered only the 40 days of the storm.)

*Please note this is not a refutation of the Biblical account of Noah.  It is merely what I was thinking about when I was seven.  (Of course the ants and worms and spiders were not on the ark.  That would be silly!)

As I grew older I felt my initial suspicions were confirmed.  As convenient as the male-female pairing is for a fable about animal husbandry, it would not be practical for many animals which are prone to living in larger groups.  Wolves are pack animals.  Some animals are solitary except for brief periods of mating.  No, the more I learned about it, the more the story of the ark sounded like a parable.  And some Christians do believe that the Bible is a book of stories, but I lived in the Northern edge of the Bible belt, and I was told by my classmates what they had been told by their parents and pastors -- that the Bible was literally true.

Perhaps if I had been exposed to a more sensible treatment of the Bible -- such as the ones I have heard quite often as an adult from people who consider themselves Christian -- I would have had a different impression of God and religion.  But faced with the choice of either accepting the dubious tales as true or rejecting them as false, I could choose no other path.  By the second grade I was telling my classmates I was an atheist.  That I did not believe in God.

I was told that I was wrong and that God did exist and I was going to Hell.  I specifically remember engaging my 7 and 8 year old friends in theological debates (though I did not know to call them that of course).  "You say God made all of us.  Well then he must have made me.  And if he made me to be who I am, then he must have made me an Atheist."

Dear ole Dad

One child came up to me and told me he had checked with his father.  "He says you were made by the Devil."

Ponder that for a moment.  Telling your child that he attends Bennet Elementary School in Manassas Virginia with the spawn of Satan.  I wonder how that person is doing now, forty years later.

It is worth making clear that I did not often wear my atheism as a badge of honor.  I was certainly not ashamed of it, but I also knew it created problems for me socially.  There were surely times it was not appropriate to bring it up.  I don't remember ever challenging a religious adult until I was much older.  This was not because I was afraid that they would convince me I was wrong, but quite the opposite.  It would be rude.  I would not have wanted to embarrass them by making them defend their beliefs.  People challenged me to defend my beliefs all the time.  And they didn't shake my beliefs, but they did teach me something about impolite behavior.  Remember that respect was a core belief of mine.  It had been instilled in me not out of a fear of God but simply because it was the decent thing to do.  The Golden Rule -- treating others as you would wish to be treated -- was something I could endorse.  But I lived by it because it made sense, not because it had any relation to reward or punishment.  (To be clear, I can be a prick as much as anyone else.  I'm certainly not claiming to have cornered the market on tolerance and politeness.  But when I am a jerk, I am usually not proud of it.  I am simply the kind of person who would rather be stilted and polite than natural and laid back at the risk of offending someone.  I'm comfortable in my own skin, but I don't think the rest of the world needs to know what I think of them all the time.)

But the point I want to make here is that by growing up an atheist I was not being trendy or cool or trying to get attention or defying the world to prove something to me.  I was simply responding with my appraisal of what felt true.  As a child my confidence in my own ability to learn the truth was outweighed only by my naiveté in thinking that all people shared the same goal.  I really thought that all anyone wanted was to get it right no matter what the truth turned out to be.  This belief was slow to erode.  But over time I have met plenty of people -- even "deep thinkers" -- who have a vested interest in what they have decided is the truth, and they have no interest in pursuing the matter further, thank you very much.

The power of the mind...
(for illustration purposes only)

This is an important point that is worth a small pause.  I do believe in the power of the mind to discover what is true.  I always have and probably always will.  One of the reasons this blog experiment interests me so much (and why I am also fascinated by conspiracy theories) is that I have an unshakable faith in the ability of honest thought to dispel bullshit and shine a light on the truth.  (For anyone who realized I just confessed a "faith" -- albeit a faith in reason -- that is not an accident and will be a topic for another day.)

I know some things are unknowable. (This is something not all rationalists realize.)  But I don't fear the limits of the mind any more than I fear what it can discover when focused on a task with a clear and open mind.  Maybe this is folly.  But it has always been part of my genetic makeup to trust in the power of thought.  I enjoy discovery even when it means my previous ideas (and ideals) are wrong or at least less right than I had thought.

My trust in the mind is so deep that if I were to discover God on my path of introspection and philosophy, I would not reject the idea.  I do not disbelieve God because I am afraid of the possibility of God, nor do I have such a vested interest in a universe that lacks a God that I would be willing to delude myself into rejecting that important discovery if and when the time came.

This all sounds very self centered and egotistical, as biographic ramblings often do, but the point is an important one to me.  My disbelief in God comes from not believing in "Him" (or "it" or whatever), not from any desire not to find God.  I do not cast God aside.  I do not reject him.  I simply do not buy the concept.  That is a critical distinction which many atheists will appreciate, since we are used to being accused of having some kind of anti-God chip on our shoulder or an inability to look at religion with an open mind (as if that is all it would take to buy in).

The Anti-theists

Some folks truly do harbor hostility toward the notion of God.  I am not one of them.  But for whatever reason, and there are many, some folks can't stand that others believe in God.  Some of these folks have suffered at the hands of others who claimed a belief in God, who preached kindness and tolerance while practicing cruelty and exclusion.  And others may have different reasons to feel hostile.

The original Doubting Thomas,
Saint Thomas the Apostle,
making sure it wasn't done with mirrors.

Many anti-theists I have known were raised religiously and in fact convert back to religion later in life.  That's not a judgement, that's just an observation.  It is a normal part of religious discovery for some folks to reject their childhood teachings only to later return to them with a more refined and reasonably nuanced perspective.  Of course some people go all in and end up becoming Born Again Christians.  Again, I am not trying to judge the life paths of others.  But I suspect these people became atheists or anti-theists out of a sense of spiritual deficit more than an honest rejection of religion for rational reasons.  This is to say some folks are hungrily questing for order and purpose in their lives and when they do not find it in religion, sometimes they seek it through "lack of religion".  Often these particular atheists end up coming back into the fold.  It is hard (perhaps impossible) to find a lasting sense of meaning through reason alone.  (There's an atheist somewhere howling at this assertion, but I will try to defend it at a later date.)  The exhausting business of the pursuit of meaning using only reason can understandably send some folks retreating to a more comfortable mental framework.  Or maybe even discovering that there is more to life than reason alone.  It's possible.

Again, I should try to make clear, the reason I talk about different kinds of atheists and how some are merely temporary, is because I do not care much about the cause of atheism per se.  I only care about the quest for truth.  And only a bigot thinks that all others must share his truth.  That is both the source of many atheists' anger -- being told by others that they must fall in line -- and the cause of the mistreatment some atheists visit upon religious folks.  (Religious folks are frequently hostile to atheists as well, but that really should be expected given the nature of their worldview.  I've always thought proponents of reason and open mindedness should exhibit behavior which is, well, more reasonable and open minded.  It should be no surprise that the proponents of dogma and unquestioning obedience do not display civility.  That should not be an excuse for reasonable people to behave unreasonably.)

I usually have no need to call anyone an idiot.  (Though late night on the internet it can be very hard to restrain oneself.  And let's face it, if there are some people who are amazingly bright it is a statistical fact that others must be colossally stupid.)  As someone who simply has never believed in God, I have had a life's worth of practice being surrounded by those who do not see the world the way I do.  I am no more interested in converting anyone to atheism than I am in being converted by them to whatever silliness allows them to sleep each night.

The Silliness that Allows Us to Sleep

But here is the thing that I think some more militant atheists and certainly many anti-theists fail to fully appreciate.  We all need to sleep.  Whatever our worldview, we all need to find enough peace and order in the world that we can close our eyes and know that we will likely awake in the morning in a world that is very much like the one we went to sleep in.  I am talking, of course, about "meaning".  That should be Meaning with a capital M.  Each of us -- atheist or lamb of god -- is programmed (whether by design or evolution) to seek out a sense of our place in the universe.  It is an unavoidable side effect of self-awareness.   Again, it goes back to the basic questions of our life.  Who am I, where am I, and what am I doing here?

I could go off at length about all the ways that religious fundamentalists have gotten it wrong, and all the injustices they visit upon the world, but frankly, I don't have the time or the interest.  I grade on a curve and the fundamentalists are in the remedial class of rational thought.  I am not interested in their test scores.  Instead, I'd like to focus on what I think are some of the errors of the smarty-pants crowd.  Those who frankly should know better.

Richard Dawkins recently tweeted:

And this, to me, is a complete miss.  It is a demonstration of ignorance by someone who would like us to believe he is intelligent and a "deep thinker".

The explanation for why someone is religious is a simple one.  Even a natural one.  If we're so proud of reason, maybe we should accept that religion evolved as part of our human culture in order to explain that which we had no way of explaining.  It is a kind of cultural appendix: once more necessary than today but in every way a very natural phenomenon which arose through the simple process of (in this case cultural) evolution.

An Aside About the Appendix

Recent science has posited that the appendix is kind of a petri-dish for essential gut bacteria.  In ancient times when we may have had to go without food for days at a time our natural gut flora would starve.  The appendix was a little nursery that ensured when we finally did get to eat, we'd have a supply of bacteria that aided us in our digestion.  In modern times, we don't really have the same incidence of gut bacteria starvation, so the appendix is less critical than it once was.  But the little organ does not simply disappear on the day we no longer need it.  It hangs around, possibly performing secondary functions, being replicated long after it is an essential organ for our survival.

Our lack of need for wisdom teeth would be another example.  Our mouths are shrinking and can often no longer accommodate so many huge teeth which are hardly needed for today's diet.  While many of us have to get ours pulled at the dentist, some of us can still fit them in our mouths, and still others -- a lucky forwardly evolved bunch -- do not grow wisdom teeth at all.

Back to Religion

A cultural evolutionist who believes that ideas and customs function somewhat analogously to genes, Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" back in the 1970's.  Despite my misgivings about the word itself, and some of how it has been bastardized (one could say the meaning of the word meme was itself a victim of cultural evolution), I think it is clear that Dawkins is a man who understands the progress of ideas.   But as such, shouldn't he be the first to admit that if religion came into being in the first place and has been with us so long in the second place, that religion must be a collection of memes that is subject to the same evolutionary forces as any other ideas?  So it would not be a stretch to say that the mutation of religion arose and served a purpose relevant to the survival of the species.

Basic evolutionary science requires that we accept that ideas and customs which serve no purpose or which are in fact harmful to our ability to reproduce and prosper  will die out.  The Shakers were strict believers in celibacy.  They went from a peak of 6000 members down to just three today.  Evolution takes care of some ideas more quickly than others.   Is Dawkins forgetting that religion is just a part of the cultural evolution he espouses?  Does he think he can nudge cultural evolution along through ridicule?

Religion is a broad concept serving many purposes.  If some or all of these purposes are outmoded they will inevitably be replaced by concepts which better promote human survival.  But this process will take time.  Telling someone, in essence, they have no defense for being religious is over simplifying the matter in a way unbecoming to a scientist.  Richard Dawkins' tweet has all the intellectual sophistication of a dentist yelling at his patient for still sprouting wisdom teeth.

What is truly problematic is that it belies a hostility that I think is not necessary and certainly not helpful to the progress of cultural evolution.  When I stated earlier that I do not care about converting others to my beliefs, this is partially why.  I see religion as a natural response of a primitive culture to the vagaries of the environment.  And as a "big picture" kind of person, I readily accept that we are still a very primitive people.  We are barely (if at all) qualified to call ourselves intelligent in any real sense of that word.  Again, this is from having spent a life listening to others talk about how they believe the world works.  The refrain, "How can you be so stupid?" may ring out from time to time in my inner mind, but it is rarely productive or becoming to allow it to pass one's lips.   I don't know of any times the sentiment actually convinced the listener to re-examine his assumptions.

Straight-lace Pimpin'

In point of fact, if reason is sufficient to meet the needs of humanity, than it will win the day by being reasonable.  It will not win over the world by bullying.

There is no doubt that proponents of religion promote things which are anathema to reason.  But the target of the debate should be about the harmful products of religion, not religious people themselves.  In 1990's parlance, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game."

Can You Choose What To Believe?

There is another question that is brought up by Mr. Dawkins inelegant tweet as well.  Can we really choose what we believe?    What if I told you the President of the United States was really an alien lizard man who was using his shapeshifting technology to appear human?  Would you believe it?   Could you choose to believe it if you wanted to?  Or would you be stuck holding your current belief unless I convinced you?

But here is the thing.  Could I convince you?  If I asked you to have an open mind about the possibility that the President was an alien lizard man, would you honestly be open to evidence?  How indisputable would my evidence have to be before you were convinced?  Indeed given the inability of most of us to accept all the changes in our world views that would be required for such a thing to be true, could you even believe it if you saw it with your own eyes?

Now on the other hand, what if I told you that the President was actually born a day earlier than he claimed to be?  I could explain that there was some confusion in the hospital and his delivery was actually several hours earlier than had been recorded.  Would you believe that?  Could you "choose to" believe it, or would it take some evidence?

In all likelihood the degree of evidence I would need to present would be a great deal less to prove that the President was a day older than he claimed than it would be to prove he was a lizard man alien.  And you'd examine the evidence I did provide much less skeptically.  In fact, you would probably view my documentation with an open mind that readily accepted such a thing was possible.  Are you choosing which thing you believe to be more likely, or is it just a product of all your experiences and what you already believe about the way the world works?

Mmmmmm... Dogma

Belief is not like something we get out of a vending machine.  We can't simply select those beliefs we want, push a button labelled "Truth", and have them dispensed to us in stay fresh packaging.  No, our beliefs are quite complicated.  And they are often in conflict.  Sometimes people who don't really think praying does any good will pray anyway.  In times of great anguish and feelings of overwhelming helplessness, the rational reasons not to pray are overcome by the hope that it might possibly do some good -- especially if the custom was common when they were growing up.  Likewise some people who have always believed in a caring God will get vexed when they experience something -- usually a great personal loss -- that they did not see coming and feel has no possible justification in a world that is good.  One purpose of religion, rightly or wrongly, is to help such a person maintain a sense or order and purpose in life even in the face of such incongruous tragedy.  Usually the "explanation" is that larger forces are at work.  (The ole "Must be part of God's Plan" conspiracy theory.)  Our human reactions to human experiences are not candy dispensed from a machine.  They are complicated and multivariate processes.   Blaming someone for what they "choose to believe" is a very silly notion when you get right down to it.

Richard Dawkins again:

This merits a short discussion here, because it is the obvious answer to much of what I have been saying here.  The possibility of a lizard man President is simply a matter for evidence.  Similarly if there is no evidence for prayer working then there is no reason to pray -- your own happiness or mental comfort be damned.  The truth is the truth and that is all there is to it.  Or so goes the strict rationalist's credo.

But that is exactly the point.  Truth is not belief.  And belief is not truth.  None of us knows the whole truth of the universe, and we do not have the luxury of waiting until we do before we form our beliefs.  So all of us must build our beliefs around incomplete evidence.  This evidence enters our mind through our existing perceptual screens and is influenced by well known processing errors such as confirmation bias (where evidence that confirms our beliefs is given more weight than evidence which might challenge them).   This is why it would be hard to convince anyone without the mental discipline of a Vulcan that the President is a lizard man alien.  The evidence would have to be overwhelming to get us to change all our assumptions.  Yet we'd like to believe we are open minded and rational.

And the very reason I chose such a ridiculous example is that it does sound ridiculous to us.  There is no evidence we have ever encountered in our daily lives that would make this situation sound even remotely possible.  Yet our duty as rational people requires us to keep an open mind.  But evolution is not on our side here.  There is an actual survival benefit to discounting the mental effort required to allow for extremely unlikely events.  So no matter how open minded we wish to be, and no matter how much we focus on the skill, pre-conception is programmed into our brains for its time saving, possibly life saving, benefits.  The number of times that the ability to grasp most of the situation in an instant outweighs the survival benefit of making a more complete and painstaking analysis guarantees that we have been evolved to "jump to conclusions".  Even when we strive to "believe only evidence" there is no guarantee the beliefs we form from the evidence have the intellectual rigor we might expect.

It is all well and good to suggest that all humans should be highly polished reasoning machines, but that is not the case.  In fact, if we are really interested in evidence painting our picture of truth, we must admit that the examples I give above of irrational human behavior (like praying when you don't think you really believe in prayer) are actual evidence of human behavior.  So while we may wish human behavior was more rational or pure, the evidence suggests otherwise.  That may make Richard Dawkins unhappy, but I know his happiness is not his concern.  He only wants the truth.  And the truth is that human beings form their beliefs using irrational components alongside of reason.  We may not think the situation ideal, we may wish it were not true, but evidence does not care about what we wish were true.

So the point is that if the actual truth is something very distant from our own working truth, our ability to make all the necessary mental accommodations to allow the new evidence to take up residence is compromised.

Our Adaptable Minds

We have established that we do not get to choose what we believe, but even this is not the whole truth.  In some contexts, we do seem to have some control.  Or at least we seem to have a great deal of input into how we frame the context that we place information into.  This is how a prisoner serving a long sentence in a dank cell can come to look forward to Fridays because it is "chicken fried steak day".  It is how we can happily accept a $1 tip for some good deed, or a $5 bill slipped into a greeting card when such sums of money may make no difference to us in other contexts -- such as when we are doing our taxes.  Finding that I have $1 more in my bank account than I thought I did is not as interesting to me as finding a $1 bill on the ground.  They both indicate that I was $1 richer than I thought I was (or $1 less poor if you prefer), but only one has the real thrill of found money.  But I could "choose" to look at the bank account error as found money if I wanted to.  I can decide to remind myself that it is really the same as finding a dollar on the ground.

Make anything you want.
But if you're a girl that
better mean a cake.

We can shape the context into which we place information.  In this sense, we may get to swap the lenses through which we view events in sort of the same way the optometrist clicks lenses back and forth when asking us which image is clearer.  When met with bad news, I can decide "I don't have time for this".  When realizing I am about to socialize with someone I don't particularly care for, I can decide to "make the best of it". With some varying degree of success, we can actually control how we think of information we encounter.  But that doesn't necessarily mean we can control what we believe.  For example, could I convince myself that I actually like the tedious person with whom I must exchange pleasantries, or is the limit of my control in deciding how I react to the collision of my beliefs and my circumstances?

Or harken back to the experiments with "intent". The subjects, having been given post-hypnotic suggestions, had no idea why they were leaving the room but unknowingly invented reasons all the same.  This strongly suggests we do not even know the precise reason for our own behavior.  We know what our mind has decided is the reason for our actions, but this explanation does not have any iron clad connection to the truth.

This is easier to see in others' behavior than it is our own.  We have all seen someone do something that they claim was for a reason entirely unrelated to why they did it.  A good friend may tell you the story about how he went back to his ex-girlfriend's apartment to retrieve a copy of a movie he wanted to watch, and that is how he discovered who his ex-girlfriend was now sleeping with.  But as more impartial observers, we can often see the motivation was a pretense.  The movie may have been his excuse for paying a visit -- he may have even convinced himself or believed that he really wanted to see it -- but the real reason for going back to his ex-girlfriend's house was to see what she was up to.

So the question remains, is your buddy lying?  Did he knowingly invent an excuse to drop in on his ex at that particular time?  Maybe.  Or maybe he is simply in denial.  He may actually believe he was motivated by innocent feelings and was subsequently exposed to that horrible new information about what his ex was up to.

Assuming it was the latter, should we be held personally responsible for our own denial?  How can we be, when our conscious mind is picking and choosing among many personal identities and agendas to report to us what we really want and why we are really behaving as we are?  Just because a good friend can easily spot our own deception, should we be blamed for not thinking more clearly?  Out right lying is one thing.  Storming over to her house and pounding on the door and inventing an excuse only after he sees the DVD sitting next to the television is a clear case of failing to take responsibility for his actions.  But does he bare the same responsibility if he had been trying to get through a painful period of his life and his mind was having its own internal dialogue about all the ways he could find himself back over at her house?  A part of him wanted to go over and for them to reconcile.  A part of him knew who she was seeing and knew that this particular night was the most likely time to "catch" him over there.  (I put "catch" in quotes because if they were broken up, there was nothing to get "caught" about.  It was only the ex-boyfriend's lingering jealously that would prompt a word like "catch").  A part of him simply wanted to know if she was as lonely and miserable as he was.

All of these feelings are obvious to the outside observer.  But when you are going through them these feelings are overwhelming, and it is hard to be objective.  This young man may have been using all of his emotional energy to simply get out of bed every morning and keep his job.  Can we fault him for not having the insight to avoid going over to his ex-girlfriend's house when one piece of his mind had offered him a perfectly innocent reason for wanting to do so?

Intention, as we are repeatedly concluding, is a very tricky concept.  We can't even be sure we know why we do what we do, yet for some reason it seems easier to determine what motivates others.  I always think of this as the Monday Morning Quarterback problem.  It is easy, from the outside, with nothing to gain or lose, and usually after the fact, to see how the choices made by others were destined to play out.  This is true whether the action in question is throwing the ball on fourth down or going over to an ex-girlfriend's house without calling first.  But when we are in the midst of the game, when the competition is real and the outcome means the difference between our own success and failure,  these choices are much less cut and dried.  Thousands of possible scenarios and hundreds of competing motivations play into the choices we make repeatedly throughout the day.

A 20th century ritual hammer. 

In this context, we come back to the question of how we can hold others accountable for what they "choose to believe".

For the sake of social order, we may accept that we can insist on people taking responsibility for their actions.  Yet even there we have to carve out an exception for those who have no ability to control themselves or comprehend the results of their actions (the people we call insane).  But if we are to be reasonable people -- and those committed to rational thought are supposed to be the epitome of reason -- then we must recognize that beliefs are not always a choice.  If we expect others to respect us, we must act respectfully.  There are some zealots and bigots and crazies who will never respect reason and rationality.  But that does not give us license to adopt their brutal and primitive behavior.  If anything it should shine a very clear light on why it is we do not act that way.   Hateful bigots and spiteful losers are no more deserving of our hatred and spite than anyone else.   They are the walking poster children for the error of their ways.  Validating their behavior by responding in kind makes no rational sense.  Hate and spite are the enemies.  Giving these people "a taste of their own medicine" is no more logical than using nuclear missiles to blow up the world's nuclear weapons.

The following quote is attributed to Gandhi.  Though this exact usage has not been found in any of his writings, the sentiment is clearly consistent with his beliefs, and Martin Luther King Jr. would also later borrow the concept if not the quote:

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

To me this appeal for restraint and respect (and peace) is compelling not for its compassionate tone but for its eminent logic.  Reasonable thinkers can't help but accept the logic that if bad behavior is met with more bad behavior, the cycle of violence and aggression will never end.  To me, the answer to hate speech is not more hate speech.  Nor is it silence.  It is the persistent and rational insistence that clear thinking human beings will not sit idly by while others manifest their hate in destructive ways.

So while I certainly understand the frustration that leads to the kind of tweet Dawkins sent about another person's religious beliefs, I think the better (more effective and more rational) response would be to say that the person has every right to their beliefs but that we rational people are organizing to put an end to the harm those beliefs are causing others.  The adults in the room are speaking now.

Chapter 6, Wherein Aristotle Gets Hooked on Real Housewives of New Jersey

This is the only civil caption I could think of.

A mind needs concepts like a body needs enzymes.

As mentioned earlier, without the right enzymes we can not digest food.  Similarly, without the right mental enzymes (concepts) we can not digest information.

Take the example of an ancient greek watching an episode of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" on a TV screen you have brought back in time.  (Assume the TV is hooked up to a DVR and that power is being provided by a generator – in other words, you loaded down your time machine with all the technology it takes to make a self contained video machine).  The greek can not comprehend what is happening, not because he is stupid, but because his mind lacks the enzymes needed to digest the information.

Some of the information will be clear to him.  He will see that the images on the screen are moving.   He will see the little images of people and will recognize them as such.  He might find the fashion confusing (or given the picture above, maybe not as confusing as we might think).  He wouldn't understand anything that was being said, of course, unless it was in Greek.  Maybe The Real Housewives of Athens would be a better program to introduce him to.  Of course, even then the modern Greek would be substantially different from ancient Greek.

In any case it is not clear what he would make of the moving people images.  Would he think they are very tiny people in some sort of window or would he think it was some kind of moving mosaic?  Perhaps he would think it was a vision, a prophecy, or a collection of spirits.   Whatever sense he did make out of what he saw would be determined by the concepts he was used to or was working from.   The information would be digested, even if imperfectly, but it would only be broken into whatever pieces those concepts could process.

There is a well known quote which is actually Arthur C. Clarke's "3rd Law":

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C Clarke 1917-2008

There are several implications of this assertion, but one of them is surely that our minds can not comprehend what we are not conditioned to accept.  To the ancient Greek, watching a television show -- even a mind-rottingly bad television show like Real Housewives -- would be a transcendental experience.

Could we ever hope to explain to the ancient citizen what was "really happening"?  For that matter, how many of us actually have a firm grasp on exactly what it is that is happening with our little machine.  From the endothermic reaction of burning hydrocarbon in the generator and the digital storage of video and sound on the hard drive of the DVR, to the use of lighting and lenses and editing to convey the dramatic storyline, there are a lot of details many of us modern folk may be a bit fuzzy on.  Would we be able to adequately explain our video machine even if the Greek listener was willing and able to learn?  It is an interesting feature of concepts that they can function on a high level without needing to understand every single detail which constructs the lower levels of a process.  We can use a microwave without knowing how to build one, or even how it works.  And we can watch TV without needing to understand all that goes into making, transmitting, and storing a television show.

But if this is true it is because we were taught to accept these concepts.  In all the discussion so far on thinking and context forming, we haven't yet touched on TEACHING.  But that will have to wait for now.

What is Smarts?

Intelligence takes many forms -- another topic of discussion that is long overdue -- but I'd like to focus on learning and analytical intelligence for the time being.  I will call it "intelligence" even though we know that word is slippery.  We'll get more precise later.

One mark of intelligence is mental flexibility.  This is in large part the ability to adapt existing concepts or create new ones on the fly in order to process new information.  A "smart" person learns easily because she can move around the legos of her mind to build sensible shelves for storing new data and ideas.  As context means "woven with", an intelligent learner joins strands from existing mental fabric into the threads of new information quickly and securely.

But if the blocks of new learning fall easily into place, it is largely because existing mental enzymes catalyze this process.  Concepts can hold new ideas in place like vice grips while the work to join them with other information is being performed.  Picture a person trying to nail two boards together without any surface to place them on or any tool to hold anything in place.  A great deal of effort would be expended before even the most tenuous connection is made.  This is because every hammer blow meant to drive the nail into the boards simply pushes the boards away from each other.  And this is a little like trying to absorb information with no context to set upon and no concepts to hold them in position.

Another look at mental enzymes we call concepts

If I gave you three pencils, how would you know how many pencils you had just received?  You could count them.  But now what if I gave you three more pencils.  How many would you have now?  You know the answer is six.  And you could derive this by the same method as before (counting them all) or you could simply add 3+3 and come up with 6.  In this case the concept of “addition” is the mental enzyme that simplifies the work (or lowers the reaction energy) of counting and gives you a result very quickly.  You could still use the "manual method" of counting.  You will certainly not get the wrong answer, but counting is a slower (if more natural) reaction pathway and takes more time and effort.

To drive the point home, what if I gave you 94 pencils and then 93 more?  We already know you have to count them all to begin with.  I give you 94 pencils and you count them.  I give you 93 pencils and you count them.  But now how many pencils do you have.  If you count them you will reliably come up with 187.  Or you could simply do the math.

3+2 = 5

Once we have formed the concept of addition in our minds, we have catalyzed all future number problems of the same type.  Instead of counting one number on top of another, we simply “add them together”.  This saves us time and effort.  Of course the concepts of subtraction, multiplication and division function much the same way.  And each concept builds on the others that precede it.   It is almost as if the enzyme we call multiplication is made up of addition enzymes joined with some new material.  The fact that we know that multiplying something by four is the same as adding it to together four times  (2*4 = 2+2+2+2 and 19*4 = 19+19+19+19) helps us build the mental enzyme we call multiplication.   But each new concept which builds on the previous ones contains its own new powers.  So for example we learn (to our initial surprise) that 19*4 is not only 19+19+19+19 but also equal to 4*19 which is also 4 added together 19 times (4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4).  We could confirm this by counting, but once we have mastered the concept, we do not need to. We are sure the catalyzed reaction gives us same product as the more basic one, only much faster.

Basic math is a great example to use in explaining the principle of concepts as mental enzymes, partly because we all share that knowledge and can verify its outcome.  And the beauty of numbers is that they are discreet.  The number 2 always means the same thing whether it is in a recipe for chocolate cake or a formula for determining the escape velocity on the moon.

If we want to be technical (and the jury is out on whether we actually do want to be technical or not) we would have to admit that we glossed over some other concepts in our rush to extol the virtues of the mathematical concepts above.  For even the notion of counting or heck even numbers themselves are concepts.  It is easy to say “Here’s three pencils.  You can count them and see.”  But the reality is that “numbers” and “counting” are both concepts.   And they are pretty abstract concepts at that.

George Gamow, in his book One Two Three... Infinity, says that many Hottentot tribes in Africa have no specific words for numbers larger than three.  Anything requiring an answer larger than three is simply "many".  So we may take counting for granted, but we would do well to remember that it is a mental concept to assess the number of objects in a group in an unambiguous way.

This will not end well.

So even for our addition example, we needed to rely on the concept of counting to set the stage.  It becomes clear that as we try to explain even very basic concepts we are stuck using still other more basic concepts in the process.  This paradox is both common and problematic.  It is a bit like trying to use language to describe language or indeed using our minds to think about how our minds think.  “Thinking about thinking” is a nice playful phrase, but it is also a kind of paradox.  "I think therefore I am" could really be described as "I think I think, therefore I think I am."  For we can't know what thinking is without thinking about it.  As such it is a mental Uroboros, a thought snake eating its own tail.

Douglas Hofstadter examines some of the mental paradox of thinking about thinking and using our sense of identity to discover our own identity in his book I am a Strange Loop.   We will leave recursive systems and strange loops for another day so as to stick with the concept of concepts for the time being (pun unintended but unavoidable -- as so many recursive systems are).

For now it is sufficient to say that although there is something oddly delightful about seeing something perform its function on itself (a child will marvel at the site of a tow truck being towed by another tow truck and I still enjoy pointing a mirror at another mirror) there is nothing intrinsically illegitimate about a recursive process.  We may think about thinking all we want. The result may simply not be what we expect.

Another feature of enzymes and concepts

If you'll recall, when we touched upon the definition of an enzyme, or any catalyst really, we mentioned that it was not consumed in the reaction that took place.  It can be ALTERED, but not CONSUMED.  So too it is with concepts.

No matter how many times we add numbers together, we do not destroy or consume the concept of addition.  Addition is not the fuel that powers this energy saving device.  Rather it is the mental mold that we fit numbers into in order to produce the sum.   The mold is re-usable.  No matter how many numbers we add, we can "dump them out" and add new ones as many times as we want to.

Birthdays were once exciting and delightful

A catalyst can be affected by the reaction it catalyses, however.  In the chemical world there are many catalysts which become less efficient over time due to minor changes in the catalyst (such as coking referred to earlier).  Concepts can similarly be affected by the information they help process.  So while the concept is never "used up", we can form additional insight or flexibility (find more cases where a concept applies for instance), or we can even find that certain concepts we rely upon don't age well and become less useful.  What was once a concept that produced a perfectly acceptable result may over time yield information which is less useful or accurate for our evolving purposes.  To cite a crudely complex example, our notion of "happiness" changes over time as we grow from early childhood into adulthood.  The kinds of mental states we craved as children become less meaningful or fulfilling as we age.  Our knowledge of this change can even lead to melancholy as we long for a time when "life was simpler".  But what has happened is that the concepts we used to measure, evaluate -- and even seek out -- happiness changed over the years we used them.  And interestingly they were changed by the very experiences brought about in our quest for happiness.  So in other words, the information process that was catalyzed by the concept in turn altered the concept.

As we proceed in the coming months to examine what kinds of concepts we build and how they relate to the contexts we form, we will investigate these points further.  Specifically we will look at how concepts help us build new concepts, how concepts evolve through use, and what happens when people are confronted with information when they lack the conceptual basis for breaking down the data and forming any kind of understanding.

Before we do that, though, we'll take some detours into self-similarity, recursive systems, strange loops, and that troubling news Godel forced us to confront with his Incompleteness Theorem.  As we'll see, these will all illuminate something about how we form conceptual understanding.  Ultimately we will need all of these tools to properly think about thinking.

How is a Mini-Van like a Vitamin?

The Soccer Game

Suppose there were a soccer game among 5th graders from rival schools.  The game is being held at a field near one of the schools, but the visiting team is from another part of town.  Neither school has any buses. The students all walk to school or get rides from their parents.  So the question is how you get the students from school A to the game at school B.

An obvious solution is to just have all the kids walk.  After their school gets out for the day, they could all just walk across town to the soccer field at the other school.  This could work, but these are fifth graders we are talking about.  Some of them are probably not good candidates for this plan.  You could ask all the players to walk but (for whatever reason), some of them may not make it.  One way to mitigate this would be to send enough players so that even if you lost a few enough would make it across town that you could still have a game.  Not surprisingly, this plan does not go over well with the parents.  And it's worth noting that even under the best of circumstances, the game would have to be scheduled to account for the time it took to walk across town.

So a second solution to the problem would be to have each child's parents drive him to the game.  This would solve both the time issue and the safety/distraction issue.  You would not lose any of your soccer players in transit if each one was chauffeured to the game.   But the logistics of this aren't very good either.  Not every single parent has the time to pick up his or her child and bring them to the game.  For one very important game it might be workable but it would be hard to imagine a season of games being played where each child gets his own ride to and from the game.  The cost in parents' time and the resources involved in each child being driven separately are just too high.

So enter the "soccer moms".  This is a small group of mothers who have volunteered to use their mini-vans to take the kids to each game.  Using one volunteer driver to transport 4-6 kids in each vehicle solves all of the problems while minimizing the total time and expense.  With enough volunteers, the system can work even if a soccer mom or two can not make every single event.  As long as their are three moms available for each game, all of the players can be dropped off at the field in time for the game.  (And yes, I realize that sometimes a soccer mom is really a soccer dad, but in this example, they are all moms, so that's just the way it is.)

The point is that this system allows the game to take place when at first it seemed complicated to get so many players to the right place at the right time in order to hold the event.

Enzyme: Soccer Mom Solution

The reason I have chosen this example is to show how the soccer mom is acting as an enzyme if we look at the game of soccer as an event analogous to a chemical reaction.

Let's talk about what an enzyme is and how it works.  An enzyme is a catalyst.  This means that it accelerates a chemical reaction by lowering the activation energy required for the reaction to take place.  Importantly the catalyst is NOT consumed as part of the reaction.  It can be AFFECTED by the reaction (as takes place with "coking" which is basically a coating that forms on a chemical catalyst).  An enzyme is a "bio-"catalyst.   It is an organic structure that by its design makes certain chemical processes more likely to occur.

Life would be impossible without enzymes.  As a basic and common example, the process that converts sugar into energy would take place so slowly that we would starve if not for the help of enzymes.

So an enzyme is a special kind of organic structure which aids in the chemical processes in our bodies.

Now we can talk about how the "soccer mom solution" to our problem is like an enzyme.

To begin with, there is a game you would like to have played (the reaction you want to take place) but there are inputs to that reaction, including a dozen or so fifth graders comprising the visiting team.  You need to get these molecules (er, kids) to the reaction site.  But getting the reaction to unfold in the way you want it to with all the right components for a successful conclusion (in this case enough players to have an official game), requires a lot of energy and maybe even some excess molecules to account for those who stray or otherwise become unavailable for your reaction.

An enzyme provides leverage to make it easier for a reaction to take place.  It makes it more likely that enough molecules will be where they need to be and it lowers the energy cost of the reaction.  This is very much like how the soccer moms leveraged their mini-vans and spare afternoons to ensure that the right number of kids were delivered to the game on time.

In this example, the mom with the mini-van is the enzyme.  The mom alone is not the complete enzyme because although her services as a driver are essential, the other critical ingredient is that she has a vehicle with the carrying capacity required to bring several kids at once -- which creates the efficiency we need for this reaction to take place.

The mom can be seen as the Apoenzyme -- the polypeptide or protein part of the enzyme.  The mini-van, on the other hand, is the Cofactor or non protein portion of the enzyme.  In biochemistry, these are typically derived from vitamins.  So the mini-van is essentially the vitamin part of the enzyme in our little example.

Enzymes on a Social Scale

The takeaway here is that we can use the concept of an enzyme as something that by its very structure enables something that might otherwise be complicated to take place more smoothly.  It catalyzes the process.  There is a savings in either time or energy or both because the enzyme coordinates or organizes the components in the proper way.

The Legal Enzyme

The analogy of enzymes works on a conceptual level as well.  Which is to say that concepts themselves can function as informational or intellectual enzymes.  Take the example of a law.  A law is a conceptual enzyme in the sense that it simplifies how to cope with a particular circumstance.  A law may say that a certain behavior is illegal and may even proscribe specific punishment for those who commit such an act.  So for example we have laws about speeding which suggest that you will receive a ticket and a fine for driving too fast.  The concept of "too fast" is defined by the speed limit.

Without the conceptual framework (legal enzyme) of "speeding", we would have to deal with drivers who drove too fast on a case by case basis.  There would have to be judgement calls by police officers for each and every instance of "driving too fast" and a potentially complicated process for determining how to punish violators.  The likelihood that the results would be rather arbitrary are high.  But even more importantly from our perspective, the time and energy spent on addressing the problem of "driving too fast" would be enormous.

By creating a conceptual enzyme called the legal speed limit complete with its cofactors like the "speed limit sign" and all of its proteins like the laws regarding speeding, we are able to metabolize highway safety in a timely and energy efficient way.

The efficacy of conceptual enzymes varies, of course.  We can imagine an old west town with a very crude system of justice.  Its lack of sophisticated conceptual enzymes (laws) for parsing daily life makes justice both capricious and porous.  On the other hand, complexity can have its own inefficiencies.  The US tax code is nothing if not full of concepts and definitions.  But the lack of cohesion makes for a different kind of capriciousness and porousness.  Still the analogy of how a concept can "hold information in place" and allow actions to be performed on it similar to the way that chemical processes are assisted by enzymes can be rather useful.

What is a Concept?

When I used the term "conceptual enzyme" earlier, I could have simply used the word "concept".  Because that is really what a concept is.   It is an information structure that simplifies information by organizing it so that certain associations, reactions or events are more likely.

Take for example an exotic food I have never tasted.  I may be leery of the new experience.  I don't know what to expect.

"Is it safe?"  I ask someone who has eaten the food many times.

"Yes," she assures me.

"Well, what's it taste like?"

"It is delicious," she says.  "It is sweet and tangy."

Now all of these words "safe" and "delicious" and "sweet" and "tangy" are actually concepts.  They provide me with a way to anticipate what I am about to experience.  The knowledge that the food is safe is critical, of course, because I don't want to eat something poisonous.  But beyond that I am told to expect that the food will be "delicious".  This is simply another concept.  It is a mental enzyme that gives me a ready made context for the information I am about to receive as I experience eating the food.

Context, as we have touched upon, is that complicated mental story we have written for each experience we encounter.  Well concepts -- intellectual enzymes -- are merely a special kind of information that help us build more complete context in much the same way that digestive enzymes assist us in breaking down food in order to build healthy teeth and bones.

And just as our body actually uses some of the nutrition we absorb to build its own enzymes, we can sometimes use the information we receive to build new concepts.  The enzymes our body makes go on to do their enzyme magic -- lowering the cost of chemical reactions in our body.  Similarly, the concepts we build go on to do their intellectual enzyme magic -- improving the efficiency with which we place new information into context.

The Idea of a Concept and the Concept of an Idea... Thingy

The problem with the word "concept" is that it is so over-used as to basically be a stand in for "thought thingy".  It is a very general term, as vague as the word "idea".  In its literal sense its meaning is profound, but in its usage it is rather bland.  We use the words, "thing" and "concept" and "idea" as such generic stand ins for more specific notions ("notion" is just another generic word too) that it can be hard to really appreciate the power of these words.  But in its pure sense, a "concept" is a collected set of associations with its own internal logic and set of rules.  It is an informational superstructure -- a chain of idea proteins with some thought vitamins thrown in for good measure.  Despite the generic sound of the word, when we hear the word "concept" we should try and remember that is suggests a powerful organizational structure that impacts the speed with which we can break down and absorb information.