Science, Religion, Politics and in the pursuit of truth – HappyPsychotic

Curiosity

I fear that curiosity as a virtue is becoming less and less relevant in today’s data rich, and instant knowledge society. I have ranted many times that I enjoy the time we live in because of the information that is available to us, often based on scientific achievements. I have gone so far to say that even if I was born 150 years ago and thus prior to:

• Hubble and his discovery of the expanding universe and the destruction of the steady state universe theory
• COBE satellites and the discovery of background radiation (slightly non-uniform as fitting the theory)
• Schrödinger, Leibniz, and others quantifying aspects of quantum physics and defining the dual, and statistical nature of small elements
• Einstein’s special and general relativity presenting light as a constant and everything else as relative
• Gleick’s common language description of Chaos theory describing how the fine state of initial events causes huge future consequences
• Complexity theory offering a better way to understand the world
• Richard Feynman’s simple diagramming gift to particle physics
• TOE’s and string theory, and the derivation of higher dimensional theory
• etc.

That I would most likely be a faith preaching, faith believing Christian (assuming my same parents).

This is a strange statement to make, but reflects reality. I guess what I am saying is that without the scientific basis and understanding that has exploded in the last 100 years specifically, that I would have had to reply more on faith, and less on understanding. This leads to my first introductory thought.

Faith versus Knowledge

Everyone of us has a belief system that can be broken down into two parts:

1. Faith
2. Knowledge

This is one of the best, and equally worst things about religion. A positive notion is that ‘anyone’ can believe it, no matter education, background, IQ, willingness to learn, curiosity, etc. For these types of people, they simply power up the faith portion and ignore the knowledge portion – and it works just fine for them (unless they are asked to defend their beliefs to a person who prefers facts). The second group though where they like to try and minimize faith as much as possible offers a larger challenge for traditional institutions like religion. For these people, they will not simply accept what is spoken from the pulpit as fact (or the pulpit at all for that matter), or read in books without self validation. These types of people will also question things like translations, transposition of materials, historical references, and of course interpretations. In a very real sense, they will try and minimize faith, in order to maximize knowledge.

I like to think of myself as one of the latter types of people, which I assure you is a hard road to follow – it simply takes more effort to question everything, but I feel the rewards are much higher, and it constitutes a much more defendable position if one is questioned about their beliefs.

I should note here that anyone who chooses the latter, harder road will also admit that faith can never be completely removed from the mix, no matter how much study is done even in hard sciences, things are still admittedly theory, and are only true to a certain degree. The idea is to attempt and try to reach as deep into the knowledge pit as possible and minimize the requirements for faith.

How far down the rabbit hole?

Getting to the main gist of this blog, is the idea now that how far is each of us willing to

1. Question our long held beliefs as openly an honestly as possible
2. Admit that we don’t know something and that perfect understanding at ANY level is simply not possible

Contrary to what some of you must think, I do try and keep appraised of how the world at large is changing it’s view of the church and religion. Even though I don’t always (or typically ever) agree with the outcome of these questions, I do applaud the fact that it seems it is become more accepted by society at large to even ask these questions.

In descending order, I will quickly summarize a few groups of people and describe briefly their depth of questioning

• [Depth 0] Charismatic bible-thumping faith preaching (but not thinking) religious church goers – this group of people (certainly not all people that attend church regularly belong here, in fact I would think it is a small minority of people, but they do sadly exist) basically question nothing – they live – often proudly – on blind faith and openly admit that there is no particular reason they believe as they do other than it has some tradition, history and some respect for a particular man or group of men (i.e. their preacher)
• [Depth 1-3] Missionary style churches – this is a relatively modern movement, and there are several books written describing their questions to the traditional church. It would seem that this group recognizes that something isn’t quite right with the church, and considers that on second though, church should be more outward facing and less inward facing. They also question a small subset of the traditional church.
• [Depth 4] Pagan Christianity – This movement questions the history of the modern church down to the core, raising questions and noting that almost every aspect that is part of the modern church has pagan roots, and is certainly not represented in the earliest church (< 100AD), and certainly has no support in the Bible.
  (Side note: I think this brand and depth of questioning is particularly interesting; They accept that most everything is man made, but then follow another man! I am not talking about Jesus, I am talking about 1st century leaders like Paul – why not call your self ‘Paulians’ instead of ‘Christians’ if you follow his thoughts and letters to such a high degree. They go so far to question things done with man’s agenda but don’t take it the next step? Weird… I sense a future blog coming here…)
• [Depth 5] Biblical fallacy – is it a sin just to say it? Who knows, but there is a large and growing number of people who always thought, or are now questioning the foundational aspects of the Bible or other holy books. This is a HUGE step for people – and in my eyes takes a greater degree of honestly, and intelligence as this is such a fundamental view to most people. A simple question to those who are still in the infallible bible camp: What is the big deal? Does a single document some how change the existence of God or what Jesus may or may not have done/said here on earth?
• [Depth 6] The ‘I am pissed’ group – So next people typically realize they have been taking it up the ass from MAN for their entire live, and people tend to get really, really angry at this institution of the church, and start to see things as what they actually are, simply man made institutions…
• [Depth 7] The ‘Not quite as pissed’ group – People start to see how evolutionary pressures, and history, and man’s general selfish nature has led to the institution of the church, and at the same time what made it feel so good to belong to a church in the past – simply put people feel safer and more confident in group environments, it is natural and difficult to make a decision to leave said group no matter how obvious the delusion is. I sometimes call this ‘the Pope said what?!?’ moment
• [Depth 8] The abstract and rational historian – it leads next to actual hard work, research, study and a full honesty to question everything you have ever been taught, especially foundational beliefs and how they fit into a historical context. This simply takes time, and an open mind – and often hurts when you discover all the falsehoods you have been pumped full of, and pumped into others your entire life…
• [Depth 9] The inquisitive scientist – I think I will take some slack for putting scientific theory as the most basic tenant that you can question, but I think people misunderstand the importance of putting it here. As opposed to saying ’science is the answer’, I would argue that a true scientist would only say science at it’s best represents the ’search of answers’ – and in fact is the only real part that actually has as one of it’s basic tenants that is is only a best guess! Having said that, wether or not you ‘believe’ in gravity or relativity – it believes in you Any many aspects of science are accurate to the highest and most accurate measurements possible – even if the theories are just best guesses.

The Challenge

So the result of this discussion is simple: How far do you, and how far are you willing to question? The idea of this blog is to not say that questioning to level 5 is somehow better than questioning to level 2 say or level 0, but to get you to THINK about it in any way and consider that is it not only valid to question, I think it makes us all stronger [insert religious preference or affiliation here].

Likewise, if you are being told by your leadershit – I mean leadership that – that it is not OK to question anything – consider for a moment why that is and what would happen if you actually did question? All I can say is I have not been struck down by a bolt of lightening – yet.

Conclusion

Whatever you decide, it is a personal decision you must make. Other’s can help and guide you, but if you don’t truly think and consider these things on your own, you will just be reinforcing your old ways of NOT thinking and questioning. Right off the bat, you can reject this entire blog post out of hand – from my perspective I would congratulate as long as you have thought about it yourself and decided without third party influence that it is negative in some way.

Hugs and kisses.

Preface

This is the first joint blog entry by both Glenn and Chris. Glenn and I often discuss topics outside of a group setting, we can be more honest and blunt with each other as I think we are both well beyond the ability to feel or inflict any level of uncomfortableness with each other – a perfect platform and background for discussions focused on growth of the mind.

Background

Glenn first introduced me to the Ray Kurzweil definition of singularity, click here for a link to his site for more information.

For those with any sort of physics or cosmology background, we are not talking about what is theoretically at the center of a black hole here (not that that would not make an interesting topic of discussion as well), but instead the definition that once some artificial means becomes able to recreate and improve upon itself, whether through hardware or software, we will have reached the singularity and things will snowball from there. It follows in the discussion that this may be the next natural step in human evolution.

I read a book a couple years ago written as a discussion (fact, not fiction) between a Monk who decided to get a PHD in Physics, and a guy with a PHD in physics who decided to become a Monk! Anyhow, I found the discussion format was very productive, and so I will attempt it here.

Thoughts on the Singularity

Glenn:

I’m wondering if I have an interesting enough idea here for another blog entry on happypsychotic.com. Let me know what you think.

Chris:

Given my reply – maybe we can be co-authors?

I have some thoughts, maybe better discussed in person but for now, email will have to do.

Glenn:

If you think about human evolution over the years (whether or not you believe we evolved all the way from single celled organisms or not), I think we would all agree that humans have become more complex and “smarter”. I.e. We can master more difficult and complicated tasks as time progresses.

Chris:

This is most certainly true, in fact I think there is documented evidence (I read recently) that the average IQ of humans is in creasing about 3 points per decade. This may seem slow, but in fact is quite significant. On a greater time scale, say in the 6000 years that the earth has been in existence (ha-ha, obvious joke ) this becomes even more obvious that this evolution or change is taking place and real.

Glenn:

Some humans are now playing with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and some (most notably Ray Kurzweil) believe that in the near future (within 30 years) we will have created an AI with sufficient intelligence to improve on its own programming. This moment of time has been labelled “the singularity”. The thought being that once an AI can improve itself, it will become smarter and more complicated at exponentially shorter time intervals. It should very quickly be able to meet and surpass the complexity of humans.

Chris:

I have considered this from a software perspective recently (my specialty). I should also note I have done both AI and AL programming in the past, even 10 years ago? so I have some interest (also many books read, yada yada yada). Having said all that, I smell a certain stink here, and although it is just my opinion, you asked for it

I am concerned that Ray is treating the AI growth scenario as a linear problem that is just a numbers game or inevitable somehow given enough time/energy/complexity/connections/etc. Not all problems are like this however in mathematics, the classic and well known example is the NP class of problems (travelling salesman and distribution of primes are common well known examples of NP type problems). When I recently revisited this problem (basically I wanted to try and create a software version of the singularity) I very quickly faced a couple show-stopper level problems:

1. Software (like life I guess) needs to have a purpose – without a purpose, there is no code to create really – this was immediately apparent to me.
2. Even if you could find a purpose, then it is very difficult (if not impossible) to determine evolutionary and incremental improvement steps, and hence your software (in my attempt) can not evolve

Although creating software that evolves is extremely common, it is always narrowly defined and solves a simple problem in the sense that it has a definate, predefined answer. This is not what I am discussing here.

If you think the purpose in point 1 might be to become conscious – that sounds great and well defined, but I assure you it is not That is kind of the whole point: since we can not define intelligence or even really consciousness, we can not develop hardware or software to achieve it, let alone measure how close we are to it.

So I guess I would argue that although it makes sense and may even seem obvious at a high level, and after a single sentence discussion that this singularity theory of Ray’s holds water, I am not sure after an actual implementation attempt and closer theoretical analysis that is actually does.

Glenn:

My question is this…Assuming that this can happen, should we look at this AI as the next step of human evolution? If we do look at it this way, we should embrace and support this movement even if it meant the extinction of the human race as we know it – because we would say that the human race lives on through our created AI. Or should we fear this new intelligence and try to prevent it from happening and look at it as a threat to the human race (see the Terminator movies).

Chris:

I think we should embrace it – if it was possible, but as earlier stated, if “it” does happen, then I am pretty sure “it” will not take any form that we as humans have considered at this point in time.

Glenn:

Currently I can’t see how an AI could encompass the breadth and diversity of human beings but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. If we are the creators, can we not make the created our equals?

Chris:

Sounds like you smell a little odour as well