My Book Part 6

The range I set for myself I thought to be limited; it was vast! It is all humanity and its beliefs! And I did not have a set dogmatic structure, neither philosophical nor religious nor political:  I actually wanted to hear and accept what everyone had to say.

Well, I found out that it is the Complexity of Mankind that swaddles us against the darkness!

The very fact that we are all so different - that all intelligent entities built like human beings - are so incredibly complex, that it is our differences that join us!

I didn't mean to write that until I wrote it.

I am at a bit of a loss for words. How could differences join us? Intelligence is differing, perhaps.

--

My Book Part 5

We are still on Beliefs... ( ... sigh!!)

Consider this
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/trump-steve-bannon-destroy-eu-european-union-214889

... The cause touched on some of Bannon’s deepest beliefs, including nationalism, Judeo-Christian identity and the evils of Big Government. In early 2014, Bannon launched a London outpost of Breitbart, opening what he called a new front “in our current cultural and political war.”

Obviously "beliefs" is some sort of short-hand slang we use for complex behaviors. All the things we do are encapsuled into small "headlines".
Steve Bannon (or whatever his name is..., I think it is Steve. I do not really care.) does not have something like a card catalogue with short snappy beliefs somewhere in his mind. He does  "DO" things; he behaves in a certain way.

To capture these complex ways of acting, which may take a long time in execution, we shortened them up to "belief".

Sound familiar?

Sound like a Tweet?

--

My Book Part 4

After forcing myself to write "My Book" parts 1 through 3, I find that I do not like the way it is going, I do not like the whole tone of the thing. So I fret a bit, feel worthless, than decide to change it to a way I prefer.

I shall no longer provide links to previous posts of this series. They will be titled "My Book     Part x"
and will be labelled "my book", so anyone wishing to follow this will just have to search on the label. Otherwise it takes too much of my time.
I must say that at this point, it is my time that is important. I need to get it right. Nobody comments on my posts anymore (not complaining... observing) so I have to write, edit, and so on, and I can't spend time printing out links.

First, I hate the term "belief system" and always thought it to be a pseudo-science term and formed on some misbegotten analogy with computer expert-systems. I am going to drop it like a hot potato.

As I have mentioned, the only time I deal with anything remotely resembling a "belief system" is when I am personally intimately involved with some investigation upon which I am focused and am trying to find an answer to some puzzle.
Other than that, I do not have any "Belief System" (capitalized or uncapitalize).
I do not really "believe" in the Theory of Evolution. I am not a student of the natural sciences. If I were in a bar and the discussion were to turn to "Evolution or Genesis?", I would probably choose the pro-evolution side 50% of the time and the pro-Genesis side 50% of the time. If one of the sides had a preponderance of the ladies present as supporters, that fact would skew the probabilities somewhat.

As I have mentioned, I do not "believe in" God.
I expect God.
Does any atheist wish to argue about my expectations? That would indeed be a fruitless argument, and I would ignore any attempt to argue the basis of my expectations, for I do not do apologetics.

"Belief system" tends to ignore the individual believer, which again is an attempt to simplify a complex situation, making an intelligent person's history a reduction to reams and reams of statements about beliefs.
It is a lousy concept.

Second, my emphasis on science versus other disciplines as having a robust process of verification seems to me to be very ill-conceived.
Most of the world's major religions have lasted quite a long time and they do have their dogmas and credos and these winnow the wheat from the chaff, thank you very much, and have been succesful at it.

Living at the times we do, we tend to focus on science because of its achievements. Within a little more than 100 years humanity has gone from a small planet in a small galaxy to a small planet in an astoundingly large universe... if not multi-verse.
Most of our immediate impressions and concepts tend to be sciencey.
It is only since 2008 that many people have begun to understand the place of the irrational in economics, for example; that we stand not in the stasis of supreme rationality, but upon the edges of chaos.

Science has a verification procedure that depends upon a set of physical properties that are subject to experiment.
This fact makes it different from other knowledge, which have their own verifications based on different things. Just as Science is superior in building spaceships, Religion is superior is superior in the spiritual realm of humanity.

However, remember that right now there is considerable concern and discussion in science circles about theories which do not seem capable of experimentation. There is a discussion about the very nature of Science.

I do believe that Experiment - the scientific verification process - provides the dynamo which has fueled scientific progress, which is then part of a loop that re-enforces itself.
All knowledge has feedback loops. There is action followed by result; if the result is "good", it re-enforces the whole process, whether we talk about science or religion or politics. However, the inputs that energize the process are different. Science has experimental inputs. Other knowledge has other inputs.

And it is the Inputs that are interesting, the sources of energy.

What is the input into a group of people who read Heaven Is For Real (HIFR) and makes them accept it as true?
Southern Baptists have spoken against these heavenly jaunts and discountenance them. So does the Catholic Church and I feel that if I were to bring it up in a classroom in Qum it would be frowned upon.
The propositions of HIFR are being subjected to verification procedures.
Some accept it, some don't.
What are the energy inputs of the accepting group that makes them differ from their parent group in accepting the truth of propositions as are in HIFR? To make this "break" - although it may not be a radical break - there has to be some impulsive energy.
What is it?

--

My Book Part 3

part 1    http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/03/my-book-part-1.html
part 2    http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/03/my-book-part-2.html


It is time to assess where we are.
A) Belief Precedes Truth, and
B) Science Is Not Inevitable.

What possibly can those mean together? I mean I do not even give anyone time to settle in; I just throw a mosh-mish in front of you and say, ""Eat hearty!"
My friends know the feeling.


What I am looking at are beliefs and the people who hold beliefs, for this is how I try to understand why someone would at heavenly trip narratives - Heaven is For Real and The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven - and either accept them as true or claim that they are false.

Now in our personal belief systems, we tend to believe before we even consider whether something is true or not.
As luck would have it, The Conversation has an article this month which deals directly with this.

The Conversation
How our morals might politically polarize just about anything
March 5, 2017 9.17pm EST
https://theconversation.com/how-our-morals-might-politically-polarize-just-about-anything-73421

[...]

As America is more ideologically divided now than any other point in history, these results illuminate two things about the psychology behind political polarization.

First, people might think they are able to use their reasoning to decide whether, say, a minimum wage increase will have positive or negative consequences. However, moral impulses have likely already nudged people toward disagreeing with their opponents before any deliberative thinking on the issue has begun.

Second, the effects observed here are likely a passive process. Participants did not want to feel urges to make an error in the Stroop task, and they likely did not want to feel urges to contradict their own opinions in my studies. The urges just happen as a result of a morality-driven psychology.

These results suggest that efforts to bring those on the fringe closer to the middle will likely fall on deaf ears. A more optimistic interpretation is that polarization might have its roots in unintentional partisan urges. While there is no shortage of moral issues that lead to polarization, polarization does not necessarily result from the malice of those involved.

So I assert that Belief Precedes Truth.
Truth is always an after-thought in our quests. We usually seek an iconic presence that we "think" must be divine. On seeing the icon, we kneel. Proving truth is forgotten, for what need have we of truth now?

(By the way, I describe how I think things are; I do not prove anything!  To prove something implies that one has a robust verification procedure. That I do not have. Nor do you.)


Now we come to Science not being inevitable.
What does that matter?
It matters because I wish to use Science to demonstrate a complex belief system, capable of adaptations and change, which is vibrant and vigorous. I will claim that the fact that Science has a verification procedure of experiment and reduplication of experiment is what allows Science to make claims about Truth.

One of the reasons for this state of affairs is that most of the thinking and writing done about Truth in the past hundred years has dealt with scientific truth as defined by scientists and logical positivists and philosophers who want to be seen as scientists and mathematicians rather than philosophers. (Thank you, William Barrett.)

When we confront accounts like Heaven Is For Real, we naturally lean to a show-me attitude, being doubting-Thomases who were born at night, but not last night!
But if there is no way to demonstrate truth, how may someone show-me?

We shall contrast Science, as a People-and-their-Beliefs System with a well formed way to determine truth acceptable to people even outside the group of scientists - with Religion and Politics, which do not have a means of proving truth that is acceptable to people outside the group.

The reason behind this being that Truth is usually defined for everyone, whether it be well-defined or not; whether it uses experiment or syllogisms from dogma.

Even scientists do not agree all the time on all matters. There is considerable dispute on Dark Matter, which has not been observed yet, and there is great concern over theoretical constructs which cannot nor seem ever likely to be able to be subject to experiment forming the foundations of modern science.
Many people of science hold beliefs which are no more capable of experimental proof than the statements in Heaven Is For Real.

If we seek not to deny these good people, how shall we evaluate their beliefs?

--

My Book Part 2

note!:
I use this blog as a place to develop ideas. Most of this writing is first draft.
So if it appears "daft", remember it is "first draft daft" and hopefully will emend.

I know I said that film editing and what-not would form the body of this post, but I lied... again. It is about what I am trying to say about "belief-systems".

When we speak of belief-systems, we are actually talking about People-and-their-Beliefs-Systems.
Without the individual people, belief systems are nothing but empty, bloodless creeds - possibly like those data bases one used to call 'expert systems' - which are pretty much lifeless.

Beliefs on their own are inert and inane. They are a collection of propositions or statements that have no behavior of their own, they have no inspiration of their own, they cast no shadow - as it were - nor do they have a reflection within a mirror.

I must remember that I am dealing with People-Belief-Systems, not merely some arcade of propositions.


Now, what invigorates People-Belief-Systems? The people themselves are living, but that does not explain when and why a People-Belief-System ( which I shall call P-B-S from now on for brevity) is alive and vigorous rather than in a dormant state, or - worse - in a moribund state.

Consider Religion. There are P-B-Ss where the practice of religion is humdrum and there are occasions of spiritual awakenings and revivals. There are periods during which Judaism was a tidal wave in parts of the world, and there were times asleep in shtetls scattered across Eastern Europe.  There were times when Islam was a tidal wave of change, and there were times it slumbered - providing sustenance for its children, yes - but it did not thrust itself outside the avergae run of history.

A P-B-S system requires dynamic inputs to rouse itself from somnolence to activity.
The individual people that form the P-B-S may indeed be veritable boiling maelstroms of activity and creativity and - in the case of religion - enormous spiritual journeys and attainments, but the overall P-B-S in which these individuals form the parts may yet be somnolent.


Here we have arrived at a point where we ponder:

Science is not Inevitable

What was the "input" that created modern science? What was the "dynamo" that powered its development? I see no reason to believe that the rise of Science was inevitable. There must have been at least one dynamic input and most probably many more than served to transform society.

I am talking about Science, not the Industrial Revolution, not about the use of technology to build continent spanning railroads, telegraphs, telephones, roadways, etc. I am talking about Science as practiced by scientists.

The invention of a set of verification procedures to prove and to re-test and prove again in order to establish "scientific truth" was the dynamo that drove Science.

It was Galileo's

... eppur si muove!

"Yet, it does move!" which he is reputed to have uttered after certain forces in the Catholic Church forced him to publicly recant his views on the motion of the Earth.
It does not really matter whether he said it or not, for his subsequent life still shows his devotion to experiment and the scientific truth derived therefrom.

 The dynamo of the Indistrial Revolution may have been British coal, the limited size of the island kingdom, the status of the commons or even the Corn Laws. But the dynamo of Science was the invention and establishment of experiment as the accepted verification manner by which we could establish the Truth value of a scientific proposition!

It is not at all inevitable that a group of bricoleurs - people that assemble this and that of worldy thing in various ways and pastiches - will turn into scientists. Not a bit. The group of bricoleurs, collage-makers of gears and clepsydra, need to be galvanized by truth.

note: "bricoleurs" in more or less the sense that Levi-Strauss uses it.
--

My Book Part 1

Reportedly I have been working on a book for 6 years or more; a case might be made for 50 years, but that is a figure way too high, I am sure.

I want to set forth some of the basic parts that will be in it.

I became interested in Todd Burpo's book "Heaven is for Real" written about his son Colton's illness and unusual experiences and read it. Then I discovered that there was another book about a young man and his heavenly trip: this one was written by Kevin Malarkey about his son Alex's severe injuries and trip to heaven, "The Boy who Came Back from Heaven".

There is a lot of interesting stuff in these books and their ongoing histories, but I am primarily focused on one thing: how does one deal with claims about extra-normal experiences without being (a) credulous, or (b) intolerant, for it is clear that some people may too easily accept narratives that reflect some (not necessarily all) of their beliefs and other people will treat such stories with scorn.
There is a third way which corresponds to Agnosticism, and Agnosticism itself may run hot or cold, from being neutral in judgement yet totally uninterested to being neutral in judgement yet still wondering about the phenomena.

What is the status of truth in belief systems?
For these books are directed to a certain group with certain similar belief systems, and it is those groups which will most probably believe the book narratives to be true.
Other groups will believe the book narratives to be false.
 
I cannot embrace the story as "true" and yet I refuse to condemn it as "false".
The stories of good people have some important facets which go beyond true and false. What is it?

I think that to understand the reality of human actions, one must look at what is happening and try to suppress the urge to judge immediately. When confronted with raw evil, of course we must make a quick judgement, but when confronted by the actions of good people, we must make every effort to understand.
In doing so, it may help us understand ourselves, for we are no that much different - if at all! - from the Burpo family and from the Malarkey family. These families have had very different histories and their experiences cover a lot of experiences of all families - good experiences and bad ones.

How does one determine truth for events that do not have an independent way of finding out truth other than appealing to the basic underlying belief system?

That was the goal.


First, what we call belief systems are often otiose and unnecessary. Are religious credos and political creeds necessary for us to orient ourselves in the world? Probably not, for there are many religious dogmas in our faiths that we have probably never heard about and do not understand.
When was the last time the arguments against Pelagianism and its tenets were in your consciousness?

Belief systems have their uses and I would think that it would be in areas where the beliefs are in frequent use. Modern Science would be a good example, for the use of "beliefs" is so vigorous that we have experienced quite a few scientific revolutions within our lives, for with science there are established ways to verify scientific claims.
Not so with religion, and very little with politics.
Religious revolutions are sparsely scattered across history - although there may be more frequent Great Revivals and Bonfires of the Vanities - and Political revolutions are a bit more frequent but still not that frequent.

Religion and Politics (which I often lump together for the nature of "truth" in them) are systems in which:

Belief Precedes Truth

It is part of our history. 

We learn a passel of truths when we are kids.

Later we learn to be critical of our beliefs, but many of the beliefs which are fundamental to our personal lives and histories have been canonized as "truthful" due to the fact that we believed them when we were younger; we accepted them from unerring parents whom we thought were perfect...

(then we discovered they weren't... and many years later we discovered again they were!)

 Signe Wilkinson - Washington Post Writers Group and Cartoonist Group
[a cartoon based upon the description given above: "University of ideas I agree with", "Tweets I agree with", "Websites I agree with", and "Publications I agree with" are the captions within from left to right.]

The Truth of Religion and Politics we shall call Belief-Based. (And we shall rather dimly think of Truth in Science as Experiment-Based with more-or-less defined verification procedures.)

I like this sign

--

My Book  Part 2 will be   an essay on film editing and "coherence"


note:
When I say that belief precedes truth, I guess I do not literally mean "in time", but that in knowledge or belief systems, belief in a statement will precede our finding out whether the statement is true or not.
Belief epistemologically precedes Truth

I think this is quite the norm for Religion and Politics, for it is our "group affiliation", as it were, that sort of wedges all sorts of tsotchkes into our brain pans and we believe them without having any intention of establishing the old truth ourselves.

AND - this does not imply that we necessarily have to verify anything at all!!!
It merely says that we believe before "truthing" and does not really say anything about whether one should believe. There is no imputation of credulity because we do not test truth. It is just the way it is.

The last thing I want to do is set up my view-point as somehow superior to another, for I posses no justification for that judgement, other than my self-infatuation!

--