A reconciliation between scientific and religious discourse through the understanding of what enables consciousness and need to practice it regularly.

Well, my theory about it at least:

A former boss of mine was driving home one evening and observed a dead squirrel by the side of the road and observed, “Today is not a good day to be a small woodland creature.” He then considered this for a moment, and expanded, “Really, no day is a good day to be a small woodland creature. When the source of your survival is to make lots of babies, any individual’s chances to have a long life are pretty small.”

Consider for a moment that this is true. Creatures do not stress about the future or the risk of being eaten. They are certainly cautious, but the mouse does not stay up all night, chewing on its fingernails, fretting over whether tomorrow it would be caught by an owl or hawk. In truth, the odds are that it will be caught by an owl or a hawk. As such, it’s not something to stress over. When a deer takes down a deer, the other nearby deer don’t cry or mourn. They actually relax, because they know that the chase has ended for the moment. It is accepted, and unquestioned.

A very long time ago, our ancestors could be considered beasts. Born to procreate before they die, they subsisted on what they could gather or catch. Then, cooking was discovered.

Several anthropologists suppose that the discovery of cooking was a turning point for our race. Cooking helps to break down the fibers that store a lot of the energy inside of meats and vegetables. Taking in so many extra calories than we were used to, it allowed portions of the body to expand, like the brain. Smarter brains allowed for better hunters, which permitted us to step outside of the food chain. No longer was it accepted that we would be eaten at some point in our lives. Our lives extended into old age and that became a new normal.

Suddenly, the question of purpose became relevant.

It is often difficult to recognize a situation when you are in the middle of it. Only by taking a step back and extricating yourself can you see the forest instead of the trees, and recognize that something much bigger is taking place. People, no longer a part of the food chain, can see it for what it is. Instead of participating, they can now observe and become masters of it.

People start living longer, elders can pass along their learnings to their children and grandchildren. Trades become more specialized, as learnings abound and start to require documentation and record keeping. Smaller groups band together to trade goods and services, as we learn that we work better together than trying to do everything by ourselves. As energy and information becomes more abundant, people no longer have to work as hard to survive. Effectively, the cost of living is going down.

Finally, when learning about how we think and act, someone asks, “Why? Why do we think and act the way that we do?”

And that is the point that we gained consciousness.

Consciousness is our ability to think about how we think. Like stepping out of the food chain and observing it objectively, it is our ability to step outside of the trappings of our minds to consider that a lot of the natural programming doesn’t necessarily apply in this thing called society. Our ability to change has outpaced our ability to evolve with it. But, now that we recognize it, we can be aware of it, and even introduce countermeasures to guard against it.

This is a wonderful thing. The problem is that we’re still not very good at it. Current estimates are that we figured out cooking about 10,000 years ago. From an evolutionary perspective, that’s not very long. Consciousness came even more recently. If so, then it’s not safe to assume that we are conscious all the time. In fact, that would be really hard, so the brain often reverts to more primal leanings to get us through a lot of the day to day events, even if it’s not well suited for such things.

If we accept these things as true, then it opens up a lot of possibilities to accept about ourselves that are important for us to grow as a species.

Some examples:

Observation #1: You are racist. You are also sexist, and homophobic. It doesn’t matter if you are a black lesbian, or a white, straight male. Consciously, you are none of those things. No one ever believes they are racist, or sexist, or homophobic. No one ever believes that they are the villain in their own story. But that is exactly why one ends up being racist, sexist, and homophobic. By assuming that one is none of those things, one is never on guard for exhibiting such behaviors or thoughts. When a black man sits next to you the subway, you don’t pay attention to the fact that you are tightening your grip on your purse. When a flamboyantly gay man is talking at the next table, you suddenly find it harder to focus on your own conversation, because you find his inflections and mannerisms intolerable. Harvard conducted a series of surveys regarding word associations and timed how long it took people to respond. Even when people respond with non-racist answers to the word associations, the time required for their conscious mind to take over and correct a biased answer shows up in the results time and time again. There is undercurrent of bias that is inculcated and, by ignoring it, allow it to influence our thoughts and emotions.

I am a mechanical engineer by training and by trade. I’ve worked predominantly in the northeast United States for a variety of high technology startups. These are environments with lots of energy, but not as much direction. If you are not self-motivated, you will not thrive in a situation like this. It is a known fact that women are a minority in STEM careers, but they are present and their presence is not shocking. That’s the good news. The bad news? Occasionally, the women will get together and have a women’s lunch. The male engineers do not like this. They grumble that they are being discriminated against. “Why isn’t there ever a men’s lunch?” they ask. But there is a men’s lunch. It’s called, “Lunch.”

It is a subtle thing, but an important one. It is an attitude that belies an opinion of feeling threatened without realizing a dominance that already exists. Attitudes and behaviors like this manifest all of the time, but because everyone assumes they are already conscious and enlightened, they are not looking for it in themselves, and thereby allow themselves to unconsciously carry out actions learned from previous behaviors witnessed before people thought about these things. You can deny, but your actions will speak louder than any words you can say.

Observations #2: Science does not preclude the existence of God. It simply does not require it. This is a good thing. Those that would deny the existence of God because science miss out on a great deal of good that comes from theology. Conversely, those that deny scientific research because they consider it an affront to God fail to appreciate how much good has come out of a better understanding of our world and universe. What better example of someone who gets it than the current Pope, who has a degree in chemistry?

Pure science has no assumptions. It also has no morality. This understanding is a necessity for knowledge to be gained, but followers of science often forget that they still have assumptions, and are just as easily able to fall victim to confirmation bias and the backfire effect as anyone else.

Theology provides a method of inquiry into morality. Some might argue that it is not the best, and that may even be true, but it is the one that perhaps the most widely recognized and accessible. One of the most important things to have in place for a conversation is a common language and framework to stage the discussion.

Critics are quick to point out that many immoral things have happened in the name of God. To be fair, there is no shortage of them. At the same time, there are a number of examples of immoral scientific research that exists as well. One could also argue that religion has been around a lot longer than the current scientific method, so humanity has had a lot more time to screw things up from a religious perspective.

For any one person, there will always be more that is unknown than is known. Failing to remain on guard for our unconscious biases taking over and closing us out of a conversation that might expand our understanding of reality does a disservice to ourselves and those around us. Just because human beings have attained consciousness does not mean that we’re very good at it. Please, keep an open mind.

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

Alex looked on, astonished as the living room transformed before his very eyes. A woman he’d seen on occasion was busily painting the walls with broad strokes of a rolling brush. Dip. Roll. Dip. Roll. Within minutes, almost the entire wall was a new color.

Alex was astonished because only a few months prior he’d tried his hand at painting on the walls and gotten scolded. It was a colorful combination of orange crayon, a glitter pen, and various pencil marks, culminating in what he considered to be a wonderful abstraction detailing his relationship with the universe.

His parents were not happy, scrubbed the art off the walls, and Alex lost his crayon privileges for a week.

Amelia’s explorations in food art had met a similar response. They both thought her Rage in Spaghetti Sauce to be an excellent representation of the trials and tribulations often experienced by a pre-adolescent testing the boundaries of parental tolerance.

Instead, more scrubbing and no dessert that night.

Alex had presumed that his parents were simply culturally inert, incapable of appreciating the walls for the canvases that they were. He was ready to populate them with wonderful creations that they need only put the frame around. It’s easier than hanging something up!

And yet, now, they’re letting an adult paint not just a little part of the wall, but the entire thing! Moreover, they moved the furniture to make it easier. The entire wall was getting painting in a single color, which didn’t strike Alex or Amelia as especially vogue. Parents just don’t get art.

CASE: UNSOLVED

My son is Superman

My wife and I recently watched Man of Steel. As super hero movies go, meh. Admittedly, it’s really hard to make a good movie about superman, and it’s better than some efforts, but that’s not what this post is about.

The scene that Julie and I found the most compelling was one relatively early in the movie, showing Clark as a young boy in school. At a young age, still adjusting to his super powers, he is overwhelmed by the number of sights and sounds coming in. The teacher is trying to ask him a question, but he has trouble hearing her over the other kids tapping their pencils, heartbeats, birds outside, and pretty much anything else. He can’t see her directly because he can see everything else all at once.

Young Clark Kent is a kid with autism. There’s no filter to drown out the stuff you don’t need to pay attention to. A kid with autism can’t hear you because of the vent that has a slight rattle you never really noticed, or the slow drip of snow melting off the roof and hitting the car roof, or maybe even the hum of the fluorescent light.

He’s trying to listen, it’s just really hard for him to hear you.

So, in conclusion, our son is Superman. Just without the heat ray vision.

Yet.

Superkids

In third grade, my teacher had an incentive program called superkids. Every time you did well on a homework assignment, or test, you were awarded a superkid certificate. Once you collected ten or so of these things, you could redeem them for a pencil or an eraser.

This program did not work on me.

My birthday occurs right at the beginning of the school year, so each year I received more than enough school supplies for my birthday to last me the entire year. So, each time I got one of these certificates, I saved it. I wondered if possibly I saved up enough, I might be able to redeem it for something amazing by the end of the year. That was a nice thought, but mostly I just didn’t know what to do with them.

The teacher’s policy for handing them out was perhaps a little too liberal, as I ended up with a lot of these certificates.

By the middle of the year, my teacher was getting rather puzzled about why she had to keep making more and more copies of these certificates. This all came to a head one morning when I was pulling out a sheet of paper for a test, and the teacher saw a massive pile of the certificates crammed into my binder. That wasn’t even with the two stacks of them that I was now leaving at home because they were breaking my binders.

“Michael!” she asked. “What are you doing?”

I had something of a frugal nature. I would use the same sheet of paper for multiple assignments until there wasn’t enough room left on the page for anything else before going to another sheet of paper. I really took that whole ‘Reduce Reuse Recycle’ mantra to heart.

At this point, I became the bank of superkids. Whenever the teacher needed to give some out to other students (she didn’t bother giving me anymore), she would come to me and I’d give her a stack of them from my cache. At the end of the year, I gathered up the plenty I still had and gave them all back to her.

I sometimes wonder if she, assuming she’s still teaching, uses that same method. If so, does she still have any of those superkid certificates left over from that year. She certainly had plenty!

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

It was raining that day. A hard rain. Actually, more of a light sprinkle, but that didn’t have as much dramatic effect as a hard rain.

After forty minutes of driving, Alex and Amelia arrived at ‘The Farm.” Much to Alex’s disappointment, it was not the CIA headquarters, but an actual farm. The parents said they were here for apple picking. Aunt Joy and Uncle Kevin came too.

Why they came all of this way to pick apples was a curiosity to Alex. After all, they picked apples every week at the grocery store, and that was only about ten minutes from the house. Yet here they stood, on the wet grass, under trees with leaves covered in droplets.

Alex insisted on carrying the bucket, so that he could more closely inspect these apples to figure out what made them different. Then he realized, there was no counter. Looking for the apples, he finally spotted them in the trees. This was only getting stranger! Why someone would hang apples in trees? At the store they were piled on a shelf, all together. Here they were all spread out!

Dad bent down and scooped up Amelia to where she could reach an apple. It took a few tries, but she finally managed to get her hands around one and pull it free. As she did so, the branch shook, pelting both of them in rainwater. Amelia squealed happily, and demanded that she be brought to another apple for pulling. Dad complied, and they dashed around the farm, scouting various apples for Amelia to wrench free of the tree and then carry back to the bucket all by herself. She had a bit of trouble in some of the wet grass, but overall thoroughly enjoyed herself.

Alex examined the apples closely as they went into the bucket, but could not figure out what about them made them so special. Mom and Dad helped him up to pull down apples as well. Aunt Joy and Uncle Kevin helped him when the bucket started to get too heavy, as well as reach more apples.

After an hour, with two buckets overflowing with apples, everyone quite soaked, only Amelia still wanted to continue picking, so they packed up and headed for Aunt Joy and Uncle Kevin’s house. There, they took off their socks and put them in the dryer, and Alex and Amelia changed into dryer clothes. The adults discussed uses of apples, and everyone had lunch.

Alex and Amelia both enjoyed themselves thoroughly, but never could quite figure out why someone would hang apples on trees.

CASE: UNSOLVED

Is Kickstarter part of the problem?

I recently listened to an interview with one of the head’s of Pimco. Pimco is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, with over two trillion dollars that it manages, and is the world’s largest bond investment manager. They know a thing or two about global trends and markets

One of the questions asked was what caused the financial crisis. The answer given, which is admittedly controversial, is that consumers took on too much debt. This is something that’s been said before, but consumers are supposed to take on debt, that’s part of how the economy grows. The clarification is that the debt they took on was predominantly consumption based, not investment based. People were spending money on nice things, fun experiences, trying to improve their overall happiness, but not investing in methods of improving productivity, or increasing domestic output.

This makes sense to me. One takes on debt with the presumption that it will generate a return greater than the cost of the debt with interest. A college education will generate a higher salary, a car will permit greater choice of living options and careers, etc.

If true, this is both compelling and frightening. Just because people have less money to spend does not mean that their appetite for new things and experience has gone away. If anything, they desire more because they can only afford less.

When the financial crisis really came to bear near the end of 2008, a lot of banks shut down their loan programs to small businesses, much to dismay of many economists. Without loans, these businesses cannot expand or grow their businesses. But something else did show up: Kickstarter.

Kickstarter launched in late April 2009, and it allowed people to ask for money from the public at large to produce things for the purposes of consumption: games, videos, movies, albums, etc. Looking at kickstarter, everyone and their grandmother has an idea for a 3D printer that they want to sell.

Pros: This effectively democratizes the creative process. You don’t have to know somebody in the publishing business to get your new album financed. So long as you have a means of demonstrating your talent and people are excited about your project, you have a decent chance of getting the funding you need.

Cons: This does not address our need to invest in small business capital expenditures that are important for growing the economy. The public at large has been trained by advertising agencies to view opportunities on a more selfish level. A sheet metal fabrication company is not going to have success on kickstarter trying to raise funds for a new stamping machine. It’s not very sexy compared to a new videogame by the creator of Mega Man.

There’s also no accountability. Donating to kickstarter does not guarantee that you will receive anything for your money. If a company fails to produce the good for whatever reason, you’re out of luck. Part of the vetting process for getting a small business loan was demonstrating one’s ability to handle funds appropriately, or at least be accountable if the company failed in it’s mission to generate profitability for those providing the loan. That vetting process has been thrown out the window. Say what you will about rich institutions, they can afford to take risks. The public is now bearing those risks, with less information, nickel and diming away our savings on neat things we may never even receive.

I hope I’m wrong. I’ve donated to a kickstarter campaign, helped a friend setup his own, and have several projects that might be good to bring to kickstarter to help get them off the ground. But is that the right thing we should be doing with our money?

The Alex and Amelia mysteries

Alex did not understand feet.

Feet seem to be inadequate for any real purpose, and need a lot of help to do anything. As Amelia demonstrated on a daily basis, they did not do a lot to support a person trying to walk upright. They’re simply too narrow to do the job effectively.

And even once you get decent with the whole walking thing, you need to cover them up to go anywhere. Mom and Dad insisted on Alex wearing both socks AND shoes whenever they went outside. Why not just one? But then inside, he could only wear socks, not shoes. Why not shoes?

As feet go, they seem to be really useless without at least socks and/or shoes. And the combinations and situations made his head hurt.

His sister’s selection was even more confusing. Alex had one pair of shoes. The socks rotated on a daily basis, but any random pair seemed to be sufficient, and you could always count on just one pair of shoes. If a pair got too tight or worn out, they disappeared and a new pair replaced them.

But for Amelia, she had at least three different pairs she could wear at any given time. Morever, she seemed to have opinions about which pair she should wear.

Amelia could not explain it, but the pink shoes with the ribbony lace were not for day to day use. Most of the time, you choose between the red or the purple shoes, depending on which onesie you’re wearing. But also the pants, or overalls, and possibly even the socks helping to determine which option to go with made for an absurd number of combinations to keep track. Sometimes, none of the options seemed right, and Amelia wished she had still more pairs of shoes to choose from to find a pair that was right.

Dad seemed just as puzzled by this as Alex, which worried him greatly. Dad seemed to understand a lot of things, but choice in clothing was not one of them. Often Dad might pick out an outfit, only for mommy to deem it unsuitable and go and choose something else. This never bothered Dad, it was simply beyond his grasp.

Alex sat by the door, waiting to go play in the park, while Amelia peered at the shoes on the mat in front of her. After a few moments, she picked up a pair and brought them to Dad to put them on. Once Dad finished, he proceeded to put on his only pair of shoes to also go to the park. But, while he did so, Amelia wandered over to the shoes again. After several moments, she picked up a different pair and brought them to Dad for him to swap out. He sighed, acquiesced, and then resumed putting on his shoes, slightly more hurriedly when he saw Amelia wandering back over to the shoes.

All of this to cover up things that don’t even really do anything? Feet are weird.

CASE: UNSOLVED