May 18, 2013 by threepointeightbillionyears.com

Suffering

This blog as a whole looks at ways in which the long story of life on earth can meet some of the needs currently served by our beliefs about the cosmos. One of those needs is the management of suffering. Secular and religious beliefs differ radically in the attention they give to suffering. I believe that a view of all life, beyond humans alone, might offer a solace that is both non-theistic and enlightening.

Modern secular creeds don’t say much about suffering. The American Humanist Web site, in its introduction to religious humanism, for example, mentions “methods of dealing with life’s harsher realities” in its discussion of ethics, empathy, and social betterment. Naturalism, as presented at naturalism.org, focuses on the physical world and the rejection of supernaturalism, without discussing suffering. However, the Greek philosopher Epicurus recommended the reduction of suffering in one’s life by cultivating an attitude of robust tranquility, by leading a stable life with good friends, and by not relying on the gods. His advice still gets respect.

Belief systems that focus on humans accent man as the measure but don't say much about human suffering. (humanetwork.org)

Man as the measure, but without a larger context for suffering. (humanetwork.org)

But if you are looking for popular belief systems that have a lot to say about suffering, you turn to religion. Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths place suffering at the center: life is suffering, the source of the suffering is attachment, and detachment can be achieved. For Hindus, suffering is a result of past actions but it also provides an opportunity for spiritual progress in this life. The Christian Bible is replete with discussions of suffering, epitomized in the story of Job, whose sufferings and supplications leave Job with only the lesson that God is too great to be understood and is not obligated to explain suffering to Job or anyone else. How we behave and what we believe, in other words, are not guarantees we won’t suffer, for suffering may be completely undeserved.

Misery without explanation. Bonnat's Job. (hebrewbible.wordpress.com)

Misery with supplication but without explanation. Bonnat’s “Job.” (hebrewbible.wordpress.com)

Many secularists dismiss the story of Job as a lame attempt to explain away why it is that bad things happen to good people if an all-powerful deity is actually in charge. But they overlook a contradiction: the religion they scorn has earned the evolutionary credentials that they generally respect. Religion has, over time, strengthened social bonds, helped suffering believers to feel better, and for those reasons has provided a survival benefit. Humans cannot be simply “educated out of” religion, because in one form or another, they–we–need it, at least at those times when pain seems unbearable, inexplicable, and prolonged.

Is there a view of suffering that is wider than “methods for dealing with harsh realities” and yet remains within the bounds of secular thinking and scientific knowledge? The history of life offers a path to explore. My own thinking turns to the relation of our suffering to the difficulties faced by animals and plants. The term “suffering” refers to beings with consciousness. Suffering is an awareness. In that sense, plants, animals and other non-sentient beings don’t suffer (as far as we know). But suffering is a signal of disease or injury or other threatening conditions, and those harsh conditions themselves impact plants and animals as well as humans. There is no mystical or supernatural component here—simply the earthly realities that plants die from diseases, animals get injured, drought causes living things to wilt. Plants and animals may not suffer as we do, but do they endure the same onslaughts to their well-being. The distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings is an iron-clad one in discussions of consciousness and animal rights and in the Christian tradition. But it cuts us off sometimes, as in the contemplation of suffering, from a potentially richer vision of what we are.

(abetterarborist.com)

Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother”

Only the woman is suffering consciously, but both she and the tree are weakened and at-risk.

Would this view console someone suffering from cancer or violence or poverty? Probably not. To find consolation, we need the love of and connection to our own kind. Because the conditions that cause suffering are threats to our life, we turn instinctively to those who might reduce or undo that threat—family, friends, doctors.

But when we are not in the midst of suffering, the contemplation that its causes are shared by all of life can strengthen us.

May 5, 2013 by threepointeightbillionyears.com

The Sixth Mass Extinction

The general view of the environmental crisis, for those not in denial, is that global warming has begun, that weather will become more extreme and on the whole, warmer, and that changes in temperature will impact agriculture, the habitability of sea coasts, and the survival of some species. The last item—species extinction—sits like an afterthought in such a summary. The description omits the prospect that we may be entering the sixth of the planet’s massive extinctions of species.

The first five mass extinctions took place over the last half billion years and came about as the result of sustained volcanic eruptions, large meteors, and ice ages. They lasted for millions of years. Today, in the popular imagination, they seem little more than fantastical events deep in our past that are pictured occasionally in magazines and science fiction movies.

A picturesque extinction. Dinosaurs looking alarmed. (rainbowdolphin.com)

The current mass extinction is man-made. Called the Holocene extinction for the current geological epoch that began in 10,000 BC, it results from the steady increase in human numbers and, in modern times, from not only global warming but also the destruction of environments such as rainforests, overfishing, pollution, and the movement of invasive species and diseases around the world. It seems likely that each of these plagues is just getting warmed up.

The first five extinctions saw the loss of more than half of existing species, most often around 70% or more (apart from microbes). The fifth mass extinction, about 65 million years ago, included two memorable elements which have earned it some reknown. A six-mile-wide meteor hit the Yucutan peninsula, contributing to climate change that wiped out the dinosaurs as well as an estimated 75% of other species. (For comparison, the normal rate of extinction is a few percent annually, as species evolve into new ones or succumb to competition or normal environmental change.)

The first five mass extinctions. The dinosaurs came into their own after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction and went out with the Cretaceous-Paleogene one.
(historyoftheuniverse.com)

The degree of the current extinction is debated. According to Wikipedia, estimates run between 100 and 1000 times greater than the normal extinction rate. Ten years ago, E.O. Wilson famously predicted the loss of half of the current species 100 years from now. The exact rate aside, the losses do cut across the organic spectrum. Amphibians, including frogs and toads, are disappearing at high rates. Bird populations are declining worldwide. Fish species are being reduced. Invertebrates, mostly insects, are suffering losses. Plant species are disappearing. Mammals are vulnerable because they are dependent on plants and other animals down the food chain. In part because humans live almost everywhere on the globe, our species is not likely to be wiped out by current ecological changes. On the other hand, we can’t know the long-term impact of the arrival in the next several decades of billions more humans and their demands for water, minerals, meat, and cars.

Whether one classifies the current extinction as a mass extinction or only a middling one, its severity earns it a place among the turning points for life on the planet. It is no longer just “our deteriorating climate”; it is the next in the small number of major events that have abruptly redirected the evolution of life. In the popular mind, past extinctions seem irrelevant to global warming because they were long ago, their causes were the stuff of fiction and film, and humans weren’t around to feel the pain. Conversely, the present ecological crisis is so bewildering and frightening that many people can only minimize or discredit it. It’s when we focus attention not on the causes of the various extinctions but on their consequences, on the scope of the losses, that our view might widen and we realize we are living through one of the turning points in the history of life, indeed the history of earth.

(biologicaldiversity.org)

I use the term “turning points” because extinctions do have their up-side. New life forms spring up as environments change and ecological niches open up. With the elimination of the dinosaurs, birds and mammals began to thrive. But it’s no consolation today to speculate on new species that might arise hundreds of centuries from now. My view is that life on earth is valuable and good in itself, that most young plants and animals start out every year against long odds, dying in the Darwinian struggle to gain a foot-hold, and that environmental corrosion adds a fatal obstacle to the continuance of countless individual lives and types of living things. Biodiversity is valuable not because it supports humans by providing them with the likes of recreational areas and new medicines but because it supports all the beings that compose it. We—all organisms–are part of the long chain of life that is billions of years long. That chain has been tested in the past by meteors and volcanoes. It’s painful to think that it will be tested again, this time by one of its own.

A theme in this blog is to look at the benefits that believers gain from religions and to consider whether a particular benefit could also be derived from science’s portrayal of the history of life. Finding some consolation and meaning in response to disasters is one benefit that followers of religion claim.

For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the Old Testament offers the Flood as the archetypal mass near-extinction, along with plenty of local plagues, bombardments, and slaughters. Believers are well prepared by scripture to speak out, whether in consolation or recrimination, about the meaning of today’s tsunamis, floods, and earthquakes. The content varies: God is sending a message of his power or his unknowableness, or is punishing humanity, or testing it, or, by not intervening, reminding humanity of its freedom. Whatever the interpretation, when bad things happen, believers have a context.

Relgious teachings construct meanings for destruction and disasters. (prodbybmii.com)

Can the history of life offer non-theists their own contexts for making sense of mega-disasters? It seems to me that most of the interpretations that religions provide are not as dependent on a deity as they may appear and are therefore also available to non-theists. Even without a deity to whom we can attribute purpose, tsunamis and global warming demonstrate the power of environments, they test us, they remind us of the precariousness of our lives as well as our responsibilities. And much in the same way that such disasters lead the devout to question the intentions of their God, the current, sixth extinction leaves us pondering another ubiquitous being who seems equally uncontrollable—us.

April 21, 2013 by threepointeightbillionyears.com

The Purpose Problem

It’s difficult to avoid asking oneself sooner or later about the purpose of being alive. Years ago I overheard someone mention a book about the purpose-driven life and I rushed to a bookstore, only to find that it was mostly about God. But I learned I was more concerned about the question of purpose than I had realized and that I had some thinking to do.

Here are two frequently discussed sides to the purpose issue, as I understand them, in connection with biology, evolution, and religion, along with a third perspective that is my own view.

The first side is that the general thinking today and for much of the last century is to be skeptical or outright dismissive of teleology. The term “teleology” refers simply to the perspective that things happen as they do in order to achieve a final goal. Thinking in terms of goals comes easily to us these days because we all have plenty of practice setting them: general goals, specific objectives, business plans, five-year strategic plans, personal targets. A woman who is looking for a job might say that her purpose for doing so is to earn money in order to help her family. The teleological view of her actions is that she is “pulled along” through her job search and desire for income by the final goal of helping the family. But critics of this view would say that what is actually motivating her is not her final goal at all but some combination of her personal history and her current problems.

Teleology. But why is this woman crying? (blogspot)

In such broad areas as evolution and religion, both specialists and generalists may be too readily inclined to think teleologically. When one reads about how animals have changed over millions of years, how they’ve become smarter, how they’ve resulted in the arrival of human beings, it’s tempting to think, wow, what progress! evolution moves forward, always something better! We think this way both because we are hard-wired to look for patterns and because we live in a culture that emphasizes progress, which in turn has roots in the forward-looking, get-to-heaven orientation of Christiantiy. (Rick Warren’s book about the purpose-driven life includes such chapters as “You were created to become like Christ” and “You were shaped for serving God.”) For the many secular skeptics, though, teleological thinking is at its most feeble when someone tries to explain a wide array of developments as taking place in order to arrive at a single end-point in the future.

People like to view the world, including themselves, as purposeful. (heartprintsofgod.com)

That brings us to the second issue: despite the inadequacies of teleological thinking, certain ordinary actions and activities are simply and clearly purposeful. If you’re reading this in the afternoon, you might be getting hungry and planning on dinner. Your planning is purposeful. Maybe you need to drive to your local Subway to buy that sandwich; the drive is purposeful. Your stomach, your nerves and muscles will all get busy and you’ll be a living piece of stomach-oriented teleology for a couple of hours. It turns out that most of what you and your body parts do–what most of what any living thing does–is purposeful in that it accomplishes some basic biological function or meets a biological need.

The debate over the role of teleology in evolution continues. A good summary at philcafe.org

The debate over the role of teleology in evolution continues. A good summary at http://philocafe.org/past-meetings/teleology-hypothesis.

For several decades philosophers have been working on exactly in what sense biological processes can be viewed as teleological when so many other applications of teleological thinking are flawed. You’re less likely to come across these pro-teleological arguments than you are the rejections, but they are out there, and they’re important. The gist is that living things, in order to survive and reproduce, consist of body parts and systems that function to get something done either regularly and intrinsically (the heart pumps blood) or occasionally if the effort is successful often enough (searching for food). Our heart beats and food search are purposeful. But we have to be careful in thinking teleologically about them. The human heart did not come into being because it was a goal or end-point of evolution, or because hearts in earlier animals needed improvement. It evolved after millions of years because some random variations in the muscles that boosted circulation gave earlier bodies slightly better odds for survival. Organs and behaviors did not come into existence for a purpose but came into existence because they served a purpose a little more successfully than their predecessors.

The evolution of the heart. The heart did not evolve for a purpose but because it served a purpose. antibodyreview.com

So each of us is a mass of mini-purposes working (when we’re healthy) in harmony. The same goes for dandelions, robins, and rats. Purpose may not be part of the grand scheme of the cosmos or even of human society as a whole, but it’s the little engine that makes life go. There is very little in us that is not purposeful in some way. In fact, it may be true to say that purpose at the biological level defines what life is. Inanimate things—stones, wind, water—move and change but their kind of change is not a matter of sustaining or reproducing their current state. Organic molecules, cells and beings, on the other hand, generate energy and defend themselves and procreate and read the environment readily, all in order to remain for a period of time in the condition where they can generate energy, et cetera. That is what being alive is.

But a question is—my third point—how are the purposeful activities that take place inside us and that we carry out related to the purpose that we try to articulate about our life as a whole? Do these biological functions and behaviors with their specific purposes add up to what we can think of as “the purpose of life”? Empiricists say no, purpose at a biological level is a material insight and nothing more; seek your satisfactions as a member of humanity and don’t succumb to superstition. Those more religiously inclined might say that science has demonstrated that purpose is at the core of the body as well as the spirit.

My view is that the organic processes that keep our bodies going are so intertwined and constant that it would be surprising if they did not play some role in our outlook on the world at large. There is a continuum, from the purposeful functions of our molecules and cells, to the functions of our organs like the heart and the skin, to basic survival behaviors of the whole self in feeding, fighting, and fornicating, to our awareness of ourselves as creatures who desire, plan, and achieve, to the brain, itself wired to purposefully seek patterns, as it asks about the purpose of life. The continuum becomes a loop: we ask about the purpose of life only to discover that the purpose resides in our effort to stay alive and to thrive, a condition that prompts us to ask about the purpose of life.

Note: A useful source here has been a paper by Nathan Bourne, “Teleology as Evolutionary Etiology: An analysis of teleological explanations of biological phenomena,” at http://www.sewanee.edu/philosophy/Capstone/2011/bourne.pdf. Bourne draws on the work of Larry Wright and his key book, Teleological Explanations: An Etiological Analysis of Goals and Functions, UCal Press, 1976.

April 7, 2013 by threepointeightbillionyears.com

Fear of the Past

Fear is mostly about the future, about what might go wrong in the next moment, minute or month. It can be present-oriented as well, when one is distressed by a crumbling economy or is chronically worried about car accidents.

As for the past, we don’t generally think of it as scary. We enjoy most of our personal memories, we usually stay away from the awful ones, we celebrate holidays that commemorate secular and religious history, we know a bit of the background of topics that interest us. Among people I know, one knows well the history of the community college movement; another, life in New Jersey during the Depression; another, life in Java and a Japanese prison camp there; another is a world historian; another, an anthropologist; another knows the history of musical comedy; another, an evangelical, studies the Bible. We all have “our” pasts where we navigate easily in the comfort zones while avoiding the danger zones such as memories of our worst mistakes or scenes of violence.

But all our zones, together with all the zones of the people we know, amount in an obvious way to only a tiny portion of the past. I suggest that the past as a whole is an intimidating piece of work. It is huge and incontrovertible. While our perception and understanding of it may change, in itself it is a growing mass of de facto. It is gone and beyond our grasp. We learn about and remember people in the past, but they are further from our understanding than we think. “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there,” wrote novelist L. P. Hartley (quoted in Kevin Reilly’s Worlds of History). Especially foreign are the mega-pasts of billions of years of the early universe and the slow start of life on earth, in comparison to such familiar narratives as Genesis. And to make matters worse, this strange past is playing itself out now, here and everywhere. We might understandably feel uneasy with the weight of the past behind us and out of sight but always at our backs.

A sure sign that the past is important
(easywillpower.com)

If we were to aspire to being at ease with the unbounded past instead feeling so comfortable with only our narrow slice of it, what might that lead to? When it comes to our future, we find that less daunting if we can describe the goals and objectives that we plan to pursue. What if a parallel exercise were to inventory the past, to take stock of the topics from the past that we know about along with those we’ve only heard of or can imagine? What if the friends who I mentioned above met together to talk about the pasts they know best and the others they wondered about, in a discussion about “The Scope of the Past”? What if they all tried to diagram their comfort zones, their not-so-comfortable zones, their danger zones, and their unknown zones? What if school children were asked to draw or sculpt the whole past?

Our sense of history would widen. Our awareness of other peoples and how they lived would grow, as would our insight about the ways that societies change and about the complex nature of causes.

Our understanding of time would broaden. American bromides about leaving your past behind and living in your present and your future would be revised to include “staying open to the past.” We would be wiser about how slowly the important things in life happen and about the rhythms of the seasons, years, and life span.

Our spirituality would deepen. I don’t mean that more people would follow religions. I mean that our sense of place in the universe and in the long story of life on the planet would be sharper. Our being alive, and all the joys and travails of being alive together, would mean more.

March 29, 2013 by threepointeightbillionyears.com

Genesis for Non-Theists

Creation narratives are usually lively stories. God creates the universe and earth in six days, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, and the story is rolling. In other traditions, creatures are dismembered, huge eggs hatch, birds create land. Even the creation narrative based on science starts out with a Bang, and once earth takes shape, the first organic molecules come into being (from sources still in dispute, including the possibility that some components arrived on meteorites).

These early molecules organized themselves into simple cells relatively quickly and at that point the story slows way down. Life remained in the form of single cells for the next two billion years. Compare this span to the relative brevity of the pre-historic periods that people usually discuss. The primates arose around a mere 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs about 250 million years ago. Animals did not exist at all prior to 800 million years ago. The huge variety of life since then is a marked contrast to the era of the single cells from nearly four to two billion years ago. What was happening to our oldest ancestors in all that time? Why did it take so long to move beyond the stage of one-only? Was evolution on hold?

From “Oldest bacteria fossils” to the dawn of “Multi-cellular eukaryotes” 2 billion years later, life on earth was single-celled.
(vector-clip-art.com)

A manageable place to start is with LUCA. LUCA stands for “last universal common ancestor,” the most recent living thing from which all life on earth today is descended. Before LUCA, other simple cells were built from genetic material other than DNA, so they were not the direct genetic predecessors that LUCA was, with its floating coil of DNA that has been passed down to every living thing today.

LUCA lived 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. LUCA probably was, or was similar to, a type of bacteria. The LUCA that we are descended from may have been a single species or a group of closely related single-celled species that exchanged genetic material easily. LUCA’s cell membrane protected its internal molecules from the fluctuating environment enough so that they could create energy, the genes could periodically replicate, and the cell could divide into two identical cells—a fusion of Adam and Eve producing only more Adam/Eves.

Our common ancestor, a cell with DNA but no nucleus
(shmoop.com)

One might think that as long a LUCA and friends remained only single cells in their bacterial Eden, not much in the way of the development of life could be accomplished. But though the process was mind-bogglingly slow, bacteria were in fact evolving in ways that made the future of life possible.

A Cell Nucleus LUCA had a cell skin that (probably) enclosed only watery liquid without any core structures. Gradually, however, single-celled creatures captured or absorbed other bacteria that came to function as cell nuclei. The genes of the cell became located in this nucleus, which provided the DNA with extra protection and a chemical environment of its own. The nuclei of these Eukaryotes (“you carry oats”) were the first steps towards greater organization, efficiency, and survivability for cells.

Cells get a nucleus–and more.
(biogeonerd.blogspot.com)

Sex Eukaryotes developed a new mode of reproduction. LUCA and similar single-celled bacteria reproduced by doubling their internal material and then simply splitting into two identical cells. But when cells with nuclei reproduced, the genes that the cell had inherited from its parents were reshuffled and four new cells appeared, each of which enclosed a different combination of DNA. Each of these gametes, or reproductive cells, merged with a gamete from a another cell. Cellular sex meant much more genetic diversity, perhaps the advantage that stimulated the new reproductive system in the first place.

Photosynthesis Most of the earliest cells created the energy that they needed through fermentation, a process that requires oxygen-free surroundings. But from the start, other cells contained molecules that broke down light into carbon dioxide and water and left oxygen as a waste product. One result of this process was more energy and carbon for cells and, eventually, for whole plants. Another result was atmospheric oxygen that made the oceans hospitable to life and, in the form of ozone, protected creatures from ultraviolet radiation.

Bacteria go green and pump oxygen. (arch.ced.berkeley.edu)

Bigger and Better Instead of just clumping together as the early cells had, the newer, bigger, more complex cells set the stage for organisms composed of different and specialized cells–plants and animals, in other words. But that stage did not begin until around 1.5 billion years ago. For its first two billion years, one of the characteristics of life was smallness itself. Such small life–simple and rapidly reproducing–remains with us. About half of the entire mass of life on the planet today consists of bacteria and other single-celled creatures. Some of it we carry inside us and on our skin. We can speak figuratively of the old Adam or Eve inside us, but we literally depend on life forms from three billion years ago as partners in our staying alive.

During the first two billion years of life, the building block of life itself became modified and improved. Later evolution would arrange cells in new and elaborate configurations and create specialized cells of many types. But in this long period, it was the basics of cell operation and organization that were the objects of natural selection. The most effective structures, new processes for creating energy, the most precise and rugged instruction manual for replication, the best method by which cells could multiply and expand–all were taking shape. More complex and varied life was not possible until cells themselves were up to the task.

And there was good fortune involved: despite environmental stresses of many kinds, early cells were spared any lethal change in the temperature or composition of the atmosphere that was long-lasting enough to kill them all off. The environment was sufficiently constant for our Adams and Eves to bask in the sun and water, experiment with bodily improvements, and burp enough oxygen to change the atmosphere. The early cells were lucky, and therefore so are we. Today, looking at the countless lifeless planets around us reminds us that early life could easily have ended here as well.

(Sources: The information here is from Wikipedia, other Web sites, and Richard Fortey’s intriguing book, “Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth.” It is general and simplified both because the focus is on the broad picture and because, as a non-scientist, I’m cautious about paraphrasing complex scientific detail. Also, even at this general level, portions of this picture remain controversial or tentative.)

March 23, 2013 by threepointeightbillionyears.com

Magical Thinking: Happy, Healthy, or Hazardous?

Did you ever make a wish over birthday candles? That’s magical thinking. Cross your fingers, wish someone good luck, tell them you’ll pray for them? Magical thinking. Try to think the long hit down the first-base line to one side or the other of the foul pole? More magical thinking. Save something old because it is special? Remain convinced that even if there is no old-fashioned heaven, some part of you will go on existing somewhere? Say to someone “everything happens for a reason”? Even spiritual beliefs are magical thinking.

The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep us Happy, Healthy, and Sane by Matthew Hutson is a clear, sweeping, and very well-written book. Magical thinking takes place when “we treat the physical world as though it had mental properties” that we can influence. Our minds, we think, can reach out beyond our bodies and we believe that inanimate entities, from objects to time itself, have some kind of living capacity to respond.

Make a wish!
(flickr.com)

We indulge in magical thinking because, all in all, it’s good for us, according to Hutson. It has evolved through natural selection because its benefits are important. It boosts our confidence and our sense of control, both crucial ingredients for human survival in a chaotic world.

Far from a sign of stupidity or weakness, magical thinking exemplifies many of the habits of mind that made humans so successful. Once you’ve accepted that the brain constructs reality, and that the brain has evolved like any other organ to help its owner survive and reproduce, it follows that the brain constructs reality in the most useful way possible for its owner. The key word here is useful, which is not to say accurate. The brain doesn’t care so much what’s really out there; it just needs to stay alive and be replicated, which might involve telling us a white lie now and again.

(Note the magical thinking in the last sentence: brains don’t actually “care” or “need to stay alive” or “tell lies.” We easily attribute self-hood to our body parts and other non-persons.)

One strength of Hutson’s book is that it demonstrates how thoroughly magical thinking permeates our lives; his seven “laws” are actually seven categories: meaningful objects, the power of symbols, action at a distance, people-like animals, telepathy, the afterlife, fate. Magical thinking is more than just superstition. It helps get us through the day, consciously and unconsciously.

Marilyn on reasons why things happen
(daynaroselli.com)

A second asset of Hutson’s writing is that he comes down enthusiastically in support of his subject. Magical thinking is not without its critics. Its evil twin is irrationality, unreasoned action that stands accused of leading to such horrors as genocide, religious persecution, bigotry, domestic violence, child abuse, run-of-the-mill unhappiness—you name it. (The comprehensive view from this other side is Stuart Sutherland’s Irrationality, which includes such chapters as “Conformity,” “Ignoring the Evidence,” “Overconfidence,” and “False Inferences.”) Magical thinking is a ready recrimination against the opposition in any debate. Creationists, for example, accuse scientists of magical thinking in their belief that science is adequate for understanding the universe; scientists accuse creationists of magical thinking in their argument that the gaps in scientific knowledge are evidence of the reality of God. Hutson refers throughout to the dangerous excesses of magical thinking, but his emphasis is on its value. As he sums up in his New York Times op-ed on the subject,

Which isn’t to say magical thinking has no downside. At its worst, it can lead to obsession, fatalism or psychosis. But without it, the existential angst of realizing we’re just impermanent clusters of molecules with no ultimate purpose would overwhelm us.

Irrationalities: Persecution of Catholics
(freerepublic.com)

On the whole, I’m on Hutson’s side. Our brain’s capacity to project awareness and intention on to entities of all kinds has brought about both misery and pleasure, but if the former impact had been the dominant one, it doesn’t seem to me that a large brain and the imagination that goes with it would have survived. And I’m troubled by the tendency of some rigorous evolutionists to sneer at people’s religious emotions and imaginings despite the fact that emotion and imagination have stood the test of natural selection. The debate over the value of our non-rational side will continue and we may need to leave it to civilization to play the role of nature and to select for, ideally, the best kinds of magical thinking while curtailing the destructive sorts. Keep your fingers crossed.

March 17, 2013 by threepointeightbillionyears.com

Five Reasons Why I’m Afraid of Dying—and Some Reassurances

I’m not in any immediate danger of dying—beyond the usual unpredictables—in that I’m only 69 and quite (though not perfectly) healthy. But the future looms, and I try to feel clearly the fears that go through me when I think about it. The following fears are not in order of “worst first” or any other sequence, since different fears seems to float to the top at different times. The exception is the last one, which is the faintest, as explained.

Pain
(www.sethbarnes.com)

1. I feel afraid that dying will hurt a lot. Not the moment of dying itself, necessarily, but some of the stages leading up to it, the diseases or injuries, the weakening and failure of organs, nerve cells that don’t function, confusion, dread. Pain may not be inevitable, but one way or another it’s probable. There is not much consolation to be had for this fear, except for the power of modern medicine, which is considerable when things go right.

2. I’m afraid of being away from “home.” When I think of dying, I begin almost immediately to miss my family, miss being with friends and familiar faces, miss home, the air in the morning, birds, coffee, even the news. I miss the future, in advance. It’s an absurd anxiety: I’m not dead yet, so I’m not missing all those experiences now, and when I am dead, there will be no “I” to do any missing or anything

Far away. (commons.wikimedia.org)

else. But it’s difficult not to feel in some shadowy way that when I die, I’ll be going away to a strange place, and the thought makes me homesick.

Half empty?
(montagueconsult-blogspot.com)

3. Another fear at the prospect of death comes as a sudden gasp over what I’ve left undone. A short list of high hopes and vain ambitions flares up and then settles down again. At this point in my life, my glass is way more than half full. But when I think to myself, “My glass is half full,” that only sets off the old, anxious frustration over those goals that remain unmet. Oddly, it’s the thought that “my glass is partly empty” that calms my discontent. It’s a reminder that people and lives are all imperfect, incomplete, and that all our actions are constantly being left behind by whatever comes next.

Good-bye
(flickriver.com)

4. I’m afraid of having to let go of my self. All my life I have been taking care of my self, and it’s been a full-time job. My self has had a laundry list of needs, wants, injuries, pleasures, dreams, guilts, loves, fears, and more. I’ve invested a lot in this self of mine and it’s not easy to think about cashing it in. Every living thing, even plants and microbes, are reluctant to die, in that it is the nature of being alive to try to stay alive. But maybe when the time gets closer it will be easier to say good-bye.

Cosmic disaster
(xeno-lovegood-blogspot.com)

5. Behind all of the above, like a background hum, is the anxiety that when I die the rest of the universe will end also. It’s a quirk of the brain, I think– a spinoff of trying to imagine nothingness. It also reminds me of infants at a certain stage who think that if they can’t see or touch an object, the object doesn’t exist. Whatever its source, such a background fear might be common and perhaps helps account for the terrifying totality that death is thought to bring with it. In any event, it’s reassuring when I look around after summer’s green fades to winter or after learning of someone’s passing and I say to myself, “Look, the world continues; life continues; when I die, everything will go on”; to remind myself that the world is always as full of animation as it is of disintegration; to conclude in fact that death and life are counterbalanced, twisted together, as they stretch through time.

3.8 Billion Years

Reflecting on the history of life.