Epiphany Without a Cause: a Theory of Religion

Similarities between the near-death-experience, enlightenment, "spirituality", motivation, and the common core of religion.

I recently commented on near death experiences (NDEs), which have some very interesting characteristics. They are incredibly compelling, prompting both life changes in the person experiencing them, and gushing descriptions like "realer than real". They are highly emotional, typically positive, but sometimes negative. The subject feels love pervading the universe, and that this is knowlege which is not only true, but needs to be spread around to other people. But the experience is also vague, with a feeling of tremendous knowledge being gained, but an actuality of platitude after platitude, set in very stock archetypal images- angels, bright lights, butterflies, voices of god, telepathy, clouds.

Does this all sound familiar? It does to me. While one might take it, on the one hand, as evidence that religions are true in what they communicate, at least in some broad sense of a deep / alternate reality and motivation that unites them all, one might take it more skeptically as being a key to what makes humans so susceptible to religion and forms its internal wellspring, without being what it purports on its face.

But what is the point of such a mechanism, if we assume it is natural and biological, rather than a transmission from the beyond? The NDE may be the extreme form, by way of brain disconnection between areas that normally keep each other in check, of our normal positive motivational gestalt. As one is walking along, one occasionally reads into the landscape pleasant sensations- trees growing and birds singing, and more rarely, internal realizations and epiphanies of various kinds. We only know about some nice impression or great idea by way of an emotional reaction that wells up telling us that beauty or truth are at hand- that some nagging question has been solved, or some new perspective gained.

We must have a positive emotional system that is not simply the well-known, purely emotional reward system of drug addiction, but one that is more cognitively engaged, which labels our ideas and impressions with emotional valence and meaning. One might call it a key part of our imaginations. Untethered from inputs and more importantly, from its customary repression by normal cortical controls that harness it to only real, (or realistic) ideas, it might both gain intensity, and resort to dredging up archetypal dream-imagery for attachment.

Some partial form of this process might be at work in great art, and among the mystics of religion. Buddhists devote their lives to forms of meditation that fundamentally seek, I would suggest, to gain this NDE-like state of pure positivity and sense of vast knowledge and emotion, termed Nirvanna. Obviously, it is both extremely hard to attain, and all-to-fleeting when it happens. And it is not really knowledge of any this-world kind at all, merely the sense of knowledge.

This leads to a unifying theory of religion, where the NDE is merely the most intense form of a feeling that happens to everyone at various levels. Typically we seek to intensify this feeling through what are biologically and evolutionarily valid means- the true epiphany regarding a personal task which is indeed useful and oriented to the real world, and which gains us a precious practical advantage. But the lure of this feeling is strong. We can also seek it through what I would call false epiphanies, such as intense meditation, or the typical institutional religious apparatus of scripture, sermon, homilies, hymns, incense, etc. all purporting to vastly more meaning than they actually contain. Latter-day seekers even engage in postmodern philosophy!

This is reminiscent of Stephen Pinker's theory of music as being a kind of cheesecake for the mind. The evolutionary rationale of our capacity to make and appreciate music is not at all clear, but in any case, complex instruments like pianos that demand exquisite talent and dedication, and our unimaginable cultural wealth of composed and performed music, extend far beyond any evolutionary rationale. We are tickling pleasure centers whose original purpose was far more modest- perhaps the identification of a bird, or the seduction of a mate.

In similar fashion, religions seem to tickle a kind of meaning and positivity center in the brain, with more or less empty mantras and practices which yet carry intense meaningfulness. If they can inspire good morality, humility, and pleasant personal and communal feelings, that is wonderful. But religion can also form the nucleus of wider psychological complexes, attracting far darker tendencies like tribalism, magical thinking, superstition, intolerance, fanaticism, and patriarchial oppression, to generate thought and behavior systems that not only far outstrip their warrant, but go beyond all decency.

• A little pushback from the new atheists.
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• Religion, power, and Nietzsche.
• Religious morality is the least objective of all.
• Faith is a bad thing, generally.
• C. S. Lewis, revelation, heaven, etc.- uncritically reviewed.
• Greece has not been well-served by austerity. It can not "sink".
• Indoctrination, propaganda, and water-carrying for the 1% ... the war for home schooling.
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• On the perpetuation of social class in the US.
• "Washington [state] now makes low-income families pay seven times the effective tax rate that the rich pay."
• Where does the Fed's free money go, and where should it go?
• Bill Mitchell on neo-feudalism and the degradation of our concept of citizenship.
• Gary Kasparov on the global culture clash, and why modern values are better than the other ones:

"It is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these 'time travelers' to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas essential to an open society."

Nihilism, Elitism, and Moralism in Nietzsche

Review of "Living with Nietzsche", taking a positive view of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche gets rapped as a Wagnerian proto-Nazi and nihilist, not only declaring god to be dead, but engaging in a revaluation of all morals from which he appeared to arrive at an elitist, devil-take-the-hindmost stance with the Übermensch. But according to Robert Solomon, this view tends to mistake the bluster for the substance.

First, take nihilism. Solomon provides an extended exposition about how that term is routinely applied to any morality one disagrees with.

"It often functions as a kind of accusation, a bit of abuse. Some traditional but much in-the-news Christians use the term as a more of less crude synonym for 'secular humanism,' on the false assumption that a person without God must be a person without Christian values as well. ... But note that I say 'Christian' values, for the accuser might well allow, indeed insist, tha the nihilist does have values, subjective, self-serving,and securely narrow-minded though they be. ... Similarly, an orthodox Jewish friend of mine calls 'nihilists' any people without a self-conscious sense of tradition, assuming that others must lack in their experience what he finds so essential in his own. Marxists use the term (sometimes but not always along with 'bourgeois individualism') to indict those who do not share their class-conscious values. Aesthetes use it to knock the philistines, and my academic colleagues use it to chastise anyone with 'looser' grading standards and higher grading averages than themselves." 

"In the pseudo-book of Nietzsche's collected notes, 'The Will to Power', there are many indications about the scope and nature of the nihilism he describes. But perhaps the most important point is this one: for the most part, Nietzsche describes nihilism as a concrete cultural phenomenon rather than *endorsing it as a philosophy. So I want to bracket the above uses of nihilism ('push what is falling', and the urge to promote 'a complete nihilims') as more Nietzschean hyperbole, for as his texts make perfectly clear, Nietzsche's aim is to overcome nihilism, not promote it."

Obviously, Nietzsche was for something, filling his books with declarations and "shoulds" and "musts" of various sorts, the more florid the better. But what was this morality that he was striving for? Firstly, it was not based on tradition or on an objective source. It was fundamentally subjective. He had only bad things to say about Christianity, for example, though Solomon notes an implicit dedication to rather bourgeios values in terms of truth, duty, and artistic value. He thought Kant and most other philosophers fundamentally mistaken in their attempts to make up absolute moral rules, based on some rational treatment of the human condition. What could be more contradictory?

He was also far more congenial to Aristotle than is generally realized, being a thorough classicist, even if of a more Dionysian than Apollonian stripe. Aristotle was a product of his time, and promoted a typical virtue ethics, focusing on good character that achieves the mean between excesses that can turn any virtue into a vice. Be neither too brave (reckless) nor cowardly, neither too abstemious nor too hedonistic, and so on through all possible virtues. These did not have to be (and were not) based on any objective condition of the cosmos, on deities, etc., but rather simply upon the wisdom of what promotes happiness personally and generally. This justification is ultimately utilitarian, (and subjective), taking happiness in the broadest (terrestrial) sense as the condition that needs to be satisfied, even optimized.

One wrinkle in the classic system, however, is that it isn't the happiness of everyone that matters, but the happiness of the system as a whole, and especially of those who are its leading lights- who both raise the cultural level, and run the society, including writing its philosophy. Slaves certainly were of little account, and Aristotle and his class hardly thought much more about women or other lesser classes. They vied to tell the rulers what to do, Aristotle personally tutoring Alexander the Great, for example, in a tradition that reaches down to Machiavelli.

Nietzsche, despite his choleric and bombastic nature, was fundamentally pushing the same elitist program, seeking to free people from the resentful, leveling, "slave" ethos of Christianity. Nietzsche urged his Übermensch to excellence and competition, even war, though never crass bigotry or bad taste. It is a fundamental and interesting question in moral philosophy- even if you grant a utilitarian / subjective justification to the whole edifice, and even if you make its justification empathetically broad-based in the modern sense, what is the better system- ethical democracy, or ethical elitism?

On the one hand, recognizing the fundamental value and talents of each person seems like an all-around good thing, a bedrock of modern moral and political theory. It is the right thing to do. On the other hand, we have to recognize that people are not created equal, and that society gains far more from the cultivation of some than of others. Moreover, we retain in many spheres a relentlessly, even mortally, competitive system that gives hardly a glance to egalitarianism- the corporation, sports, economics, the marriage market. We are very confused in this respect, with our natures and institutions tugging in all directions.

Looking at our politics in particular, the conflict reaches absurdly affecting dimensions, with highly egoistic and talented individuals yearning for vast power power while vowing fealty to the basest prejudices, vanity, and superior judgement of the mass of voters, while at the same time promising unwavering attention to the upper crust- the moneyed class which funds their campaigns. One might call it checks and balances, but it is also a little schizoid.

Democracy is supposed to combine the benefits of both ethical systems, harnessing the cultural elite to do the bidding of the society at large. But it can also combine the worst of both ethical systems, weakening the power of (if it does not sicken and turn away entirely) the most talented leaders and institutions, while also exposing the state to mob rule when emotions run high.

Nietzsche took a rather one-sided approach, at least rhetorically, favoring the elitist, competitive side of the equation. This was in line with the tenor of his time, saturated with German romanticism, sentimentalism and nationalism, and was the kind of thing that did indeed lead straight into world war 1 and all its ensuing miseries. This ethic even rubbed off oddly onto the socialist strain of German romanticism, leading to the even more shocking horrors of communism- an ethical fox in sheep's clothing if ever there was one. While his affections may have been with Greece, his ethical model seems quite a bit more like Rome, which ran for so long on blood and conquest. So, while Nietzsche may be more subtle than his worst bluster makes him appear, and diagnosed significant ills of the philosophy and atmosphere of his time, his degree of overall wisdom remains highly questionable.

Aristotle is a much surer guide, (if transposed into a modern ethical setting), counseling moderation and balance. In the present time, the elite have once again gained the upper hand, and are threatening our political, cultural, and economic fabric with a neo-feudalism that coursens and degrades so much that we have achieved through communal action. A competitive landscape that benefits society can only happen when everyone has a fair start in life, with fair rules as it goes on, and where the many other features of our society that require common action and investment are respected, well-managed and not hobbled by the self-serving ideology of what passes as our current elite.

• Which side is more virtuous in politics? Which side is committed to narrative?
• Pity the religions, victimized by their believers!
• But does religion has just a little to do with our craziness?
• What keeps left economics outside of public policy? MMT is taking Washington by storm.
• How about a federal inflation constraint for budgeting, in place of a revenue constraint?
• We need thorough and long-ranging claw-back policies against officers of corporations.
• Krugman on weaponized, carbonized, and anything but humanized ... Keynesianism.
• Credit is part of the peonage, low-wage system.
• Water pollution, thanks to the "Halliburton loophole".
• New science-y word: "defaunation".
• The social cost of carbon is $220 per ton.
• The cloistered life is not for everyone... nuns gone bad.
• Map of the week: Who has what in Syria, from the wall street Journal.

Do Fruit Flies Dream of Piña Coladas?

The olfactory learning circuitry of the fly brain.

Our brains didn't come from nowhere, but rather out of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary work that developed mechanisms for dealing rapidly and intelligently with the environment. Primitive organisms are fascinating to study as waystations along that long road, and their simplicity can clarify what in humans may still be beyond our intellectual or technical reach to study.

Fruit flies have only ~ 1-200,000 cells in their brains, compared with the maybe 100 billion in humans. Moreover, most of these neurons are laid down in totally genetically determined fashion, easing study, but also reducing the ability to learn. But one area of the fly brain appears to break that mold- the mushroom body, which is intermediate in the path from olfactory reception to behavior. It is sort of the fly's glimmer of higher intelligence. Indeed, flies can be trained in the traditional Pavlovian manner to associate otherwise meaningless or pleasant odors with torture like electric shocks, and thus avoid them. Researchers have spent decades teaching them other tricks like avoiding certain odors, heading towards sounds, lights, manipulating social status and fighting behavior, etc. Along the way they have given some of their mutants names like dunce and rutabaga.

Location of the mushroom body in the fly head/brain. Signals arrive through the antennal lobes, from the various hairs and other nerves on the mouth and antenna.

Fluorescence image of two labels, one on an annal lobe (AL) neuron (red), and another on a mushroom body (MB) neuron (green, left side), which labels more cells of the same type on the right side. The lateral horn (LH) is one destination for signals as they start going out again to muscles and behavior downstream.

A recent paper conducted a tour de force of anatomy, tracing every single neuron going to and from the mushroom body. The technique they used to do this is interesting in itself, called an "enhancer trap". Fly researchers have been generating a vast number of "lines", or inbred fly mutants, by inserting a two bits of DNA from yeast cells. The first is the gene encoding a transcription activator, GAL4. This is induced to jump randomly in the fly genome, hoping that lands downstream of the regulatory region of an endogenous gene, i.e. its enhancer or promoter. The second bit is a binding site for this GAL4 protein, linked to a gene that expresses some useful marker, typically a fluorescent protein like GFP. Since the yeast GAL4 protein works just fine to activate RNA transcription and gene expression in flies, the end result is that GFP gets expressed in reponse to a single enhancer somewhere else in the genome. Indeed researchers try to "saturate the genome", generating a huge number of lines with such mutations, hoping for mutants at every single enhancer in the fly genome, and even enslave their undergraduate students to that end.

Enhancer trap schematic. An introduced regulatory gene, GAL4 is hopped within the fly genome to random locations, some of which are downstream of enhancers (E1). The signal is received by another introduced gene, which expresses a marker (green fluorescent protein X in this case) in response to the production of GAL4. UAS = upstream activating sequence.

Screening with a fluorescence microscope, one will see the cells where GFP is expressed, and thus where the particular enhancer of that line is active. This might be anywhere and any time, in the egg or in the adult, in the brain or in the leg, or everywhere and all the time, or nowhere. This stage of the process tends to be very tedious, as is all the fly breeding leading up to it. The current researchers used 7000 such lines that had been built previously to screen for those showing GFP expression in neurons in or connected to the mushroom body.

Anatomical details of neurons leading through, and from the mushroom body, drawn from studies of many flies with many individually labelled neurons. Video here. Note the wide distribution of MBON (mushroom body output) neuron connections, and also the density of DANs, (dopaminergic neurons), which feedback to the MBONs from sensations elsewhere in the body.

The mushroom body is made up of ~ 2,000 of what are called Kenyon cells. Inputs come from the antennal lobe, where olfactory receptors from the fly's "nose" and face link to ~200 projecting neurons (diagrammed below). The Kenyon cells synapse to what are called the mushroom body output neurons (MBONs), and these same output axons get inputs both from other MBONs (making some recurrent loops) and from other neurons called DANs, which seem to be crucial for the feedback that leads to learning.

Wiring diagram of the olfactory learning system. Projection neurons (left) come from the nose and face, to the Kenyon cells of the mushroom body (KC). Then MBONs of various types (using different neurotransmitters in their synapses) come out (gray lines) to innervate the lateral horn and other downstream neurons. DAN neurons from other sensations are labelled for their valence. The colored boxes correspond to various anatomical bodies or sub-areas.

The key part of the organization is that while the layout and connections of the olfactory neurons and projection neurons are genetically determined, those of the Kenyon cells are not. They are a generic type of cell whose sporadic connections on both ends are made on the fly (sorry!) during development, and are not the same from one fly to the next, as are all the other cells. These connections are also plastic during adulthood, and the volume of the mushroom body on a gross level expands in response to usage in honey bees. The mushroom body is not essential to actions of the fly, really- the built-in programs for sensations and stereotypical behaviors lie elsewhere. The mushroom body system only biases those behaviors based on learned feedback, which arrives via the DAN neurons from positive and negative shocks / experiences.

This arrangement is pretty much what has long been called a "neural network", which is a computer science tool developed over several decades by analogy to how people thought neural systems work. They offer the unique capacity to learn from sample data, and to solve problems that are not well-specified or are complex. These feature a hidden array (or black box) of many "neurons", connecting inputs with outputs. The box is trained (iteratively) by providing it with (known) sample input and output data. Feedback of error values from the output vs input comparison is sent back through the network and adjusts the weights of those connections which then evolve through time, in their connections and connection strength, leading the network to arrive (slowly) at an approximation of the behavior desired, emitting the correct output for given inputs.

For instance, an image shape recognition program might be made as a neural network, with many examples fed in, and the outputs judged and signals sent back into the network to either reinforce connections that improve the match over previous trials, or weaken connections that reduce it. If a sufficiently broad range of input images are used, then the network stands a good chance of identifying those same shapes in images it has never "seen" before in training.

"... MBs are a paradigmatic case of reused neural networks in action."

"This model was built in a connectionist manner, obeying, although in a scaled version, the neurobiological topology. The model was initially built for showing basic learning and conditioning capabilities; subsequently it was found able to show other interesting behaviors, like attention, expectation, sequence learning, consolidation during sleep and delayed-matching-to sample tasks."

Likewise, in the mushroom body system, the DANs provide the essential feedback in real-life situations as the fly buzzes and walks about, smelling the wonderful world. If they can dampen neural connections among the Kenyon cells and their downstream targets that lead to painful results, and juice up those that lead to pleasure, we have a smarter, and more successful fly.

"The identification of the full complement of 21 MBON types highlights the extensive convergence of 2000 KCs onto just 34 MBONs, a number even smaller than the number of glomeruli in the AL. Thus, the high-dimensional KC representation of odor identity is transformed into a low-dimensional MB output. This suggests that the MBONs do not represent odor identity but instead provide a representation that may bias behavioral responses."

So, what is it like to be a fly? Are flies conscious? They are clearly responsive to their environment, and have what we would call "experiences", such as hunger, searches for food, mating, etc., and one would assume these experiences can be very intense. So I think it would be hard to count them entirely out of the consciousness department. But it would have to be an extremely small consciousness, with little association to past, let alone to future events, metaphorical, or conceptual abstractions. But feeling- that is likely to be there in some form.

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• On the tension between science and humanity in economics.
• The sanctimonious disaster that is Jeffrey Sachs.
• On the power of satire & truth: "... the Chinese government decided to ban puns."
• In France, there is a culture war. It was not about "freedom", but about cultural dominance.
• Dirty jobs- better than clean jobs?

Realer Than Real

A second post on the topic of near death experiences, reviewing "Proof of Heaven" by Eben Alexander.

Santa Claus climbed down my chimney with a copy of "Proof of Heaven", another in a long line of books about the intense spiritual experiences that people have in many situations, but most frequently when close to death. The case is especially extraordinary in that the author is a practicing and scholarly neurosurgeon, and also in that his experience (NDE for short) was remarkably intense, lengthy, well-recalled, and unimpeded by inputs from the surroundings. There were no episodes of hearing what was actually going on in his room, rather just pure experiences of high and low spiritual engagement, interacting with god, angels, swamps, dark regions, etc.

There is no question that Alexander experienced all this, as he has recorded. The problem is with interpretation. His interpretation is absolute- that he was in contact with another reality, which he frequently describes as "realer than real", and "ultra-real", and that this reality was divine, culminating in god, and that he has an important message to bring back that we are loved, and that every one is important. This reality was outside his brain, and his good news is in part that "we are more than our physical body".

"Each and every one of us is deeply known and cared for by a Creator who cherishes us beyond any ability we have to comprehend. That knowledge must no longer remain a secret."

Alexander had long been an Episcopalian, and evidently an irregular church-goer while at the same time a somewhat religiously skeptical scientist. He is a bit unclear about his allegiences, really, but seems to have been a believer at some level (principally for family purposes, but not for scientific ones), and has spent his life in a church culture as well as in a scientific culture. The NDE dramatically confirmed him in his faith, but one has also to ask whether that long life of faith contributed to the content of, and especially to his interpretation of, the experience.

A good deal of interpretation turns on what various areas of the brain are responsible for, and when they were "off" or "on" during his (outer) coma and (inner) NDE. Alexander was in a coma for a week, and portrays his travels in NDE-land as taking place throughout this time, when his brain (the cortex, as measured by EEG and external responsiveness) was largely not active, by conventional metrics. Yet it is possible that it actually took place in a small portion of this time, say the last half hour before he woke up consciously. I certainly have had the experience of an intense, extensive dream taking place in a very brief time, clock-wise. Similarly, having one's life flash before ones eyes, as the expression has it, typically happens in a very brief clock time, but in a much longer subjective time. In short, our sense of time is another construction of the mind, and thus can not be taken at face value under these conditions.

He had a severe case of bacterial meningitis, from which he concludes that it was almost a perfect trauma for an NDE, debilitating the surface all over his brain, i.e. the cortex or higher functions, and possibly only in a layer-specific way. From this he concludes that none of his NDE experiences are possible by typically understood means, since all consciousness requires cortical functions, for instance for sensations of flying and seeing, hearing, etc. Even imagined and hallucinated experiences require their respective areas of the brain, as far as we know.

"The more I learned of my condition, and the more I sought, using the current scientific literature, to explain what had happened, the more I came up spectacularly short. Everything- the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow- suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning. But my higher brain had not been around to do that work. 

The more I read of the 'scientific' explanations of what NDEs are, themore I was shocked by their flimsiness. And yet I also knew with chagrin that they were exactly the ones that the old 'me' would have pointed to vaguely if someone had asked me to 'expalin' what an NDE is. 

But people who weren't doctors couldn't be expected to know this.
...
Many others have seen that astonishing clarity of mind that often comes to demented elderly people just before they pass on, just as John had seen in his father (A phenomenon known as 'terminal lucidity'). There was no neuroscientific explanation for that."

That is all understandable, but I don't think we can be quite as categorical as he is. For the main issue is that we do not know quite how conciousness, let alone this kind of realer-than-real, trippy consciousness, works, even when clearly due to more mundane causes like LSD. It might well be an interplay between higher and lower brain functions, and it might additionally be that in consciousness, as in so many other aspects of cognitive science, cortical functions generally modulate and especially inhibit more central and primitive areas of the brain. The amygdala is a classic case, where its learning of fearful stimuli is permanent and gives rise to involuntary reactions, yet these can be damped by cognitive learning in higher levels of the brain, thereby keeping the subject on an even keel.

Similarly, one might imagine that some core of conscious awareness happens in the thalamic and lower regions of the brain, and that when the cortical brakes are off, that person might experience something precisely along the lines of the NDE- realer than real, incredibly moving, and patterned by very deep emotional archetypes and images, such as the flying through the air with angelic beings that Alexander experienced, among much else. It might be so moving that the person feels compelled to change his life or write books about it, and speaks of it as a scientific voyage, with great understanding and knowledge gained. But this knowledge boils down to very little in the end: that we are all loved by something. And that love seems, to put it mildly, inert, since people are still living and dying every day in misery, on our surface world. The only love in evidence out here is that which we give to each other.

Alexander is keen to recapture some of this experience, and does so in two ways. First is through greater church attendance. He movingly writes about realizing belatedly that he had not really appreciated the whole church experience, but that he now understands it as trying, in our mundane world, to recapture a glimmer of this spiritual experience, (whatever its interpretation), which some are fortunate enough to have intensely, but that all of us have some degree of appreciation for, accounting for the general celebrity of spiritual adepts, prophets, saints, etc. Second is an adventure into meditation, especially methods that claim to provide much faster achievement of out-of-body experiences than normal techniques provide. One has to ask, however, why repeating the experience is important if the knowledge he had gained was so certain, scientific, explicit, and useful. We don't repeat our greatest experiments in the lab just for the fun of it, typically.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have eternal life and the ability to think outside the brain. Being eternally loved by some tremendous "Om" sounds a little less attractive, but OK. Alexander is understandably convinced by his overwhelming experience and his theological interpretation, but putting tradition & training aside, there is no theoretical reason from biology, computation, or physics, to take all this seriously as evidence of heaven or souls, etc. These are huge hypotheses (given the scientific corpus as it stands) that require different forms of evidence to address, particularly something less obviously subjective and archetypally templated. The weight of tradition may have arisen from a countless number of such mental / spiritual experiences, and if they are misinterpreted as I think they are, the tradition is not pointing us in the right direction, at least in scientific terms. That said, any encouragement we can have to not fear death is a good thing, since this is an important source of our worst characteristics- lack of courage, sentimentality about every reverse and misfortune, etc.

The heaven hypothesis, far from being proven, remains much more a matter of inner, archetypal reality than of any outer "real" reality, even on its own evidence. While it is true that much about the mind remains unexplained by science in its current state, that doesn't demand that vast hypotheses about alternate realities, and the invocation of quantum mechanics in consciousness (yes, Alexander even dabbles in this area) are reasonable, let alone proven. But it is such deep matter, and our consciousness remains such a mystery, both technically and theoretically, that it is understandable that those who go through the gauntlet of this ultimate, compellingly subjective experience would declare it not only real, but realer than real.

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• Good teachers are critically important.
• Millions of prime age workers are still on the sidelines.
• "We have managed to throw away between 5%-10% of the potential wealth of the North Atlantic, and we appear to have thrown it away permanently."
• "And that is tragic because if Alvin Hansen is right, and I think he is, the gap between these two lines represents an annual loss of output of approximately one trillion dollars."

A Spear-chucking Bacterium

Vibrio Cholerae impales its victims with a metal-tipped, poisoned, rifled, spear.

Life is tough all over, but particularly bad for microbes. Without a glimmer of consciousness, and with hardly any tools at hand, (or hands), they still struggle, suffer, and die in astronomical numbers. One of the more fascinating and classic areas of discovery in the field is the beauty and complexity of the T4 phage, which is a virus that infects bacteria like E. coli. It has a lunar-lander like structure that docks to its victim and injects the DNA (from a highly pressurized head chamber) which then kills it while producing hundreds of new viruses.

But it is only in recent years that a connection has been drawn between this phage injection mechanism and what bacteria do to each other. What has been sedately called the type VI bacterial secretion system, used by Vibrio cholerae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, among many other species of bacteria, turns out to actually be a violent spearing mechanism they use to kill competing bacteria and also mammalian host cells during an infection.

Model of the spearing system, on right, compared with the T4 viral system on left. The spear is in purple, while the contractile sheath is in green, and the base is yellow. In later experiments (in movie, etc.) the sheath is tagged with a fluorescent protein (GFP), allowing it to be easily visualized in the light microscope.

This was recently described in an NIH talk by John Mekalanos, and also in various publications from his group. One representative film clip is linked below.

Still from movie of the Vibrio spear in action, link here.

One of the more remarkable aspects of this mechanism is its scale. Sausage-shaped bacteria typically are closest to each other at the side, so the apparatus begins assembling at the side of the Vibrio cell. This injector assembles clear across the interior of the cell, forming a thin thread almost 500nm long which has, in addition to the base plate that nucleates the process, an inside spear and an outside sheath.

Electron micrograph of a poised spear assembly in a Vibrio cell. Note the extraordinary length, of about 500 nm. The scale bar is 100nm. T6SS is type six secretion system, IM is inner membrane, and OM is outer membrane. Note the detail of the basal body at the top spanning both membranes.

The outside sheath is spring-loaded, and when triggered (how that happens is unknown) winds down in a matter of milliseconds to half its original length, thrusting out the spear, while also turning it like a drill. In his talk, Mekalanos showed that the spear is tipped by a pointed protein his lab had recently discovered, that contains a zinc-coordinated domain that gives it particular stability. Behind the tip, the spear also is festooned with a variety of toxins, because simply spearing a nearby cell is not enough to kill it. Vibrio injects both eukaryotic-directed toxins such as one that cross-links actin and thus paralyzes the cell and another that modifies the cAMP signalling system causing massive ion and water efflux, as well as several bacterial-directed toxins to clean out the competition, such as inhibitors of cell wall (peptidoglycan) synthesis.

Sample killing, where Vibrio (red) were mixed with Pseudomomas (green) cells. The spearing system sheath is labeled in red and green respectively. In each horizontal set of time lapse images, a spear from a Pseudomonas cell (green) impales a neighboring Vibrio cell and either causes it to swell locally or to lyse entirely, losing its optical contrast (arrows).

An interesting wrinkle in the story is that each bacterium that has this kind of system also has a complement of immunity proteins that neutralize the various toxins that it creates. The bacteria are not terribly bright, and live in close proximity, so they frequently spear each other. One wouldn't want that kind of thing to be fatal. But Vibrio doesn't need immunity from the eukaryotic-specific toxins, which do not affect bacteria, including itself.

Once the spear is thrown, another protein comes along to quickly disassemble the spent apparatus, and another one re-assembles from a new base plate somewhere else inside the bacterium. Quite a bit more is waiting to be learned here, like the triggering mechanisms, and the details of assembly, but not only is this knowledge helpful in addressing a significant pathogen, (though one we hope to not meet in the developed world), but it is an example of the breathtaking complexity, and even beauty, in biology, even in the midst of the most desperate dramas.


Papers:

• Description of the system.
• General review of the system.
• Immunity and warfare issues.
• Investigation of the system in a plant pathogen.

Notes in passing:

• NBA may exit feudal world, go socialist.
• Bird speech and human speech.. not so different, perhaps.
• Am I giving philosophy a bad rap, for being a home for insurgent theists?
• Free market short-term-ism and self-immolation, cont.
• $721 million in mid-term political funding came from fossil fuels. Thanks!
• Not just an increase in the minimum wage, but in overtime coverage as well.
• Religion as psychotherapy, cont. Some people need answers really, really badly.
• Bill Mitchell on Japan: "Let it be noted that the Japanese government 10-year bond yield hit 0.33 per cent overnight. That tells you that all the scaremongering that has been going on over the last twenty years about hyperinflation, the Japanese government running out of money, the bond markets dumping the yen, and the rest of it were self-serving lies designed to advance a particular ideological position at the expense of the broader social well-being."

Governance in Venice

Good governance gave Venice a thousand years of prosperity and renown.

The idea that the US is the oldest democracy in the world is far from the truth. Even if you qualify it as  "existing" or "continuously existing", the Swiss have one far older, (making allowances for a brief Napoleonic regime), as do the Icelanders. But more important is that forms of government are very plastic. What we call a democracy in the US is a far cry from actual self-rule, given the vastly greater influence of the moneyed classes and the advertising arts over who gets elected, than anyone in the demos. Oligarchy would be more like it. Republic it may be, but democracy it is not.

But oligarchies aren't all bad. Just think of the Catholic church, which has functioned continuously (give or take a few anti-popes) for about a thousand years, and with less historical certainty for another thousand back to the time of the first bishops of Rome. Its organizational stability has been impressive, even as it has gone through vast changes in theology, morals, and power.

Venice in its heyday was a somewhat similar republic / oligarchy, and an extremely well-ruled one. A wonderful history of Venice tells a story that I had never learned in school, of the long and proud reign of Venice over a commercial empire that grew across the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. From its extremely humble origins in the 568 in a malarial lagoon, Venice developed a communal government as well as an adavanced (and state-run) ship manufacturing system which, combined with skillful seamanship, diplomacy, a dedication to business, and occasional military prowess, earned her a durable mercantile empire. This was centered on the India trade, which ran through several routes, such as the silk road, the Byzantine ports, and the Arab caravans. Venice was the home of the Polo family, which famously followed these routes to the ends of the earth.

Symbol of Venice, the winged lion of St. Mark.

In 1204, its power was such that, as a particularly horrific and misguided part of the fourth Crusade, Venice led her allies to attack and sack Constantinople, a theretofore unimaginable feat, given the reputation of its walls and military. This was, for the Eastern Empire, a disaster it never recovered from, after which it limped along till its final defeat under the scimitars of the Turks in 1453. Venice, too, was eventually boxed in by the Ottomans, who in their own prime ran a highly capable fleet and threatened Venice in the Adriatic and even its own lagoon, while relieving it of its Greek and other far-flung possessions.

What finally sent Venice into decline (well before being crushed by Napoleon and then assimilated into the modern state of Italy) was the Northern European revolution in navigation and trade, as the Portugese and then Dutch overtook the India trade directly by way of the horn of Africa. Thereafter, Venice became poorer, and more embroiled on its landward side with the complexities of Italian feudal feuds, including with various Popes.

Through it all, Venice had a remarkable system of government. "Byzantine" doesn't do it justice, as there were ten layers of elections to go through among various bodies before the supreme leader, the Doge (a variant of "Duke"), was elected. Each Doge was constitutionally restricted in his scope of independent action, and also given a specific document of restrictions, usually the fruit of past excesses or corruptions that the community had learned from. The civil service was very efficient, and many times over her history, when Venice found herself in a tight spot, she put out the call for various special taxes, donations, and forced loans, which were typically met with great generosity. Each Doge set an example by distributing vast amounts of his own wealth when elected, and many followed that up with other gifts to the city during their rule and in their bequests. The degree of civic committment at all levels is striking, especially in this day when some parties cry about the most infinitesimal increment of taxation.

At the base of the state was the Grand Council, whose membership of about 1500 was originally elected among the population at large, but by 1296 became hereditary to the Venetian nobility, i.e. the rich. Thereafter, new families were allowed in very sporadically, when the state was under stress, and for large payments, but generally, membership was tightly closed and formed the core of the oligarchy, and the voting base insofar as it was a republic. Various more select bodies such as the ministers to the Doge, the Senate, (sixty members), Zonta (sixty more members), and Venice's own Inquisition / Star chamber / NSC- the Council of Ten- were chosen from this Great Council.

One might note that the early Roman republican system was hardly less complex, and also led to hundreds of years of good, if, again relatively oligarchical, government. Universal sufferage was extremely uncommon in large bodies before modern times, partly for technical and ideological reasons, but also because universal education was equally uncommon. But given an oligarchy, the complexity of these great examples such as Venice seem to reflect relatively little cost, and provide an extensive filter of checks and balances that so frequently succeeded in putting the best people in charge.

The effect of this good governance was to provide durable prosperity and promote human values, even in the midst of terrible times, such as several severe bouts of the plague. Its commitment to great art and architecture was legendary. And while Venice was not an intellectual leader in the Renaissance, its enthusiastic and free printing establishments were the largest in Italy and played a central role in transmitting knowledge from the Byzantine archives to the scholars of Europe. In time of our own when political ideologues dream of drowing their own governments in bathtubs, and refuse to govern countries they themselves have conquered, it is important to remember what a blessing (and a lesson) good government is.

"The more one studies the domestic history of Venice, the more inescapable does the conclusion become: by whatever political standards she is judged, she compares favorably with any nation in Christendom- except, arguably, in the days of her final dotage. Nowhere did men live more happily, nowhere did they enjoy more freedom from fear. The Venetians were fortunate indeed. Disenfranchised they might be; they were never downtrodden. Although, being human, they might occasionally complain of their government, not once in all their history did they ever rise up against it; such few attempts as there were at rebellion were inspired by discontented nobles, never by the populace." 

"Alone of all the states of Catholic Europe, it had never burnt a heretic."

• We need a war on cars.
• "Christians more supportive of torture than non-religious Americans."
• Still some problems in the intersection of race and genetics.
• Investing vs disinvesting, in our environment, in ourselves.
• Just how hosed is the middle class in the US? Part 1.
• Does Obama gain anything by caving to cave dwellers?
• Bill Black #2: Appeals court says insider trading is OK.
• Sony lets the terrorists win.
• Death and youth.

The American dream comes true.

With Shifafa on the Side

Poetry in America is OK.

The state of formal poetry is rather grim these days. Poet laureates are named, nationally and at other levels, and are then mostly ignored. Books of poetry are indigestable, and progressive forms are militantly unreadable. The New Yorker and other magazines gamely continue to publish poems, but to me, it seems a vain pursuit. It is a sad tale of a vibrant form in the humanities being academi-sized, perhaps like philosophy and economics, to irrelevance. But perhaps there is more going on.

Some fields do extremely well in academia, particularly the hard sciences. But the softer the field, the less it can be transmitted by formal methods, and perhaps the more it is killed rather than nurtured by the conformity, the drive to explicit formulations, the competitiveness, the prosody of the logos.

Poetry, however, is doing fine outside of formal institutions. It lives as always most happily with its musical muse. And that great American art form, jazz, is one of its finer incarnations, with word play aplenty. An example is "The Frim Fram Sauce", a standard from the Nat King Cole era.

I don't want french fried potatoes,
Red ripe tomatoes,
I'm never satisfied.
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With shafafa on the side. 

I don't want pork chops and bacon,
That won't awaken
My appetite inside.
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With chafafa on the side. 

A fella really got to eat
And a fella should eat right.
Five will get you ten
I'm gonna feed myself right tonight. 

I don't want fish cakes and rye bread,
You heard what I said.
Waiter, please serve mine fried
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With shafafa on the side. 

~interlude~ 

A fella really got to eat
And a fella should eat right.
Five will get you ten
I'm gonna feed myself right tonight. 

I don't want fish cakes and rye bread,
You heard what I said.
Waiter, please serve mine fried
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With shafafa on the side. 

(now if you don't have it, just bring me a check for the water!)

- Redd Evans

Some singers (Diana Krall, I'm looking at you!) leave out the concluding line, i.e. the punchline, leaving the audience mystified. And then she has the audacity to intimate that it is all sexual inuendo! Anyhow, the song is a great example of poetry that looks pretty dry on the page coming alive with music, since as sung, it is smart, melifluous wordplay.

Perhaps poetry is not meant to be dry, to be subject to "readings", with apologies to Shakespeare. Country artists are another class of homegrown poets who know how to make a line sing.

No, we're not the jet set
We're the old Chevrolet set
Our steak and martinis
Is draft beer with wieners. 

-George Jones

• Ten commandments, modernized version.
• "However, Pakistan has a history of releasing jihadists who seek to destroy the Pakistani state if the government feels it will further its goals of destabilizing Afghanistan or India."
• Obamacare is doing just fine.
• Minimum wage increases are paid by customers, not through unemployment.

Measures of Consciousness

Can EEG be used to tell whether someone is conscious, and to what degree?

The remarkable discovery that some people with no outward sign of consciousness are still, within, quite conscious indeed, has been both sobering and a spur to better ways to detect consciousness directly. The orginal studies used fMRI, which is extremely laborious and expensive. Far cheaper would be to be able to tell a patient's state from an EEG, i.e. reading their brain waves from electrodes on the scalp. A recent study attempted to do that, using a high density array of 96 electrodes.

Patients with disorders of consciousness come in many kinds. From the EEG perspective, one is tempted to say that all happy brains are alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way. But the very unhappy ones are put in two classes these days, those in a vegetative state, and those in a minimally conscious state, which is significantly better, particularly with the ability to follow action with the eyes, or some similar ability to react to the surroundings, at least sporadically.

The researchers used high density EEG recordings, ten minutes long, from 26 normal people, 13 in a vegetative state, and 19 in a minimally conscious state. This status was evaluated according to a standard checklist of tests, called CRS-R. The hunt was to develop some kind of algorithm out of the large amount of EEG data that would reliably classify their patients, using the CRS-R tool as a standard of comparison. One would assume that if these researchers are successful, they could go on to run blinded trials to validate their  EEG analysis for clinical use, but it didn't sound like they got that far.

Brain wave power vs frequency, for human controls, those with minimal consciousness (MCS), and those in a vegetative state (VS).

There are dramatic differences, though, between the subjects. A summary of their brain wave power vs frequency (above) shows that the alpha band has a strong peak in normal people, which is utterly missing in those who are impaired. Conversely, patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) had much higher delta band power. As discussed in a recent post, alpha waves are a sign of consciousness, but not really of active thought, rather they characterize an alert, relaxed state, especially in the visual cortex, ready to process data, but not actively processing. Theta and delta bands are more common in sleep and coma. One might surmise that they have something to do with healing and regeneration, which fits with this current data. The graphs also show raised gamma wave power in those with impaired consciousness, which the authors interpret as an incidental phenomenon due to involuntary muscle movement that causes electromyographic noise, i.e. electrical activity from muscles, not from brain waves.

But is there a quantifiable test to be made out of this? While there are significant differences in the wave pattern, it is merely statistically detectable, not an absolute, every-time kind of distinction.

Connectivity metrics among EEG electrodes, clustered into color-sets. Note long-range and strong connectivity in delta band of VS patients, theta band of MCS patients, and alpha band of controls. 

The researchers also provide more detailed maps of connecting / correlating activity among their electrodes, which makes interesting viewing. Note here again that the most active and longest-range connections are in the alpha waves in the control group, the theta waves in the MCS group, and the delta waves in the VS group. They point out that not only strength, but also the distance of interaction is a significant metric. The VS group shows mostly localized connections in the alpha waves, for instance.

Comparison of EEG node connectivity computed for three patients in a vegetative state,  after being asked to imagine themselves playing tennis. Patient P3 is clearly following along. Colors come from an arbitrary clustering algorithm that groups more-connected nodes.

They even go on to reproduce the "locked-in" patient test, asking patients to imagine playing tennis. As shown, two of the three patients show quite disorganized patterns in the alpha waves, while the third had dramatically long-distance and strong wave action. The third patient was classed as being in a vegetative state, but scored highly on all the EEG metrics that this group used, and thus appears to be a case that is more accurately diagnosed by newer methods of EEG or fMRI than by the standard CRS-R diagnostic checklist. Indeed, this patient appears to be a locked-in candidate, but the researchers note that in other brain wave frequencies, this patient looked more impaired, and say little more about her or him.

"In particular, though these prominent differences between the brain networks of P1 and P3 could perhaps be attributed to aetiology, it could not explain away the differences between P2 and P3, as both had suffered traumatic brain injury. It is also interesting to note that though P3's alpha network properties were clearly very prominent outliers as compared to P1 and P2, delta and alpha power in P3 were much less exceptional. Hence characterising network signatures of spectral connectivity could considerably improve our understanding of residual brain function in behaviourally uncommunicative patients who nevertheless demonstrate covert awareness."

The researchers go on to analyze their data in various ways, but while very interesting, none looks like a slam-dunk for telling the classes of patients apart in definitive fashion, quite yet. Such methods are sure to arrive at some point, however, as better tools are developed, and now that we know how much can be hidden behind the facade of immobility after traumatic brain injury.

• Finance is pretty much all bad.
• The Ferguson prosecutor played defense attorney, not prosecutor. And the grand jury played regular court jury, not grand jury. Police deserve some leeway in this respect, but then there should be an alternate form of review, like a civilian oversight board that would fire a policeman and could ban them from future police work after a culpable or unnecessary killing.
• An industry of fear and hate.
• Oh, those nasty atheists!
• A small hate problem at the fringes.
• The American dream is now dead. And would be dead-er if people knew what is going on.
• You will never guess who is the mastermind behind the global warming hoax.
• Antarctica is melting.
• Cruise ships? You don't want to go there.
• Krugman- just who is stupid?
• TNR in throes of death.
• Destruction of the state as normal policy.
• History of capitalism, another iteration of feudalism, colonialism, etc.

Comparing Pontificating Paradigms

When vastly different theological paradigms are in play, simplicity and other reasoned criteria typically do not decide between them.

Arguments about theism are classics of Kuhnian paradigms. Each side has a completely different view of the world (taking atheism vs progressive theism as the pattern). The views are so different that people are reduced to vague formulations like "it makes everything else make sense" and the like. In the words of C. S. Lewis, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Theism, at any rate, is not a logical deduction from observed phenomena, (as it used to be in Anselm's day), but a speculation about the unknown- unknown souls, unknown life after death, and the unknown god. All strongly felt, but not known. God is forever in the gaps of knowledge, not in what the atheist would call secure knowledge- that which has been nailed down about reality in empirical and / or logical terms.

Non-theists stick to what is known, but in their own way also assume a great deal- that the brain-mind connection is not what is called "supernatural", and that whatever that connections is can be understood, someday, through the normal course of scientific endeavor. And that any god worth the name would make itself far more manifest than has been the case in the past, and certainly is now. And lastly, that the whole theological edifice is far more efficiently explained by our rich psychological archetypes, weaknesses, and hopes than it is by its mystical discernment of an entirely alternate reality. These assumptions do not credit theists and theology with any special knowledge or modes of knowing, but rather assume that everyone has largely the same perceptions and immediate reality, though they may make of them quite different inferred realities.

Which model is more in accord with the real reality? Which is more humble- that is another intruiguing one. Is there an actual reality out there separate from what we make of it ... that is yet another one, in a more postmodern / Platonic vein.

As vastly different models of reality, they can also be called paradigms. Kuhn told us that communication between strongly contrasting paradigms can be extremely difficult, since the concepts, and even the language used, have meanings that depend on the edifices of their own respective paradigms and communities. They are non-commensurate. This is especially true for beliefs that are acknowledged to come by non-scientific means; by faith, by mystical deliverance, by community engagement, by one's "gut".

Occam's razor tells us to go with the simplest explanation, all else being equal. And that certainly would be theism. God is the answer for everything that we do not know, and much that we do. Why does lightning strike? That used to be (a) god's job, but is now generally regarded as not supernatural at all. Why does evolution happen? Even those who agree with natural selection and Darwinian evolution in general often, if they are theists to start with, see a hand of god in the mix, perhaps pushing sub-atomic particles around just so, weighing the scales in some way we can't see and certainly couldn't reconstruct historically, to make that all-important creature, us.

It is a very winning simplicity, sweeping all our questions, especially the most important ones, under a totemic rug, while reluctantly recognizing the mechanisms that scientific thought has constructed for whatever has been rigorously explained. That is, if you are a progressive religious person, rather than a fundmantalist home-schooler barring the doors & windows against a much wider gamut of profane knowledge. But how far does progressive theology go? To remain theology, it can never go "too far". It can not empty god out of the world completely. While the whole point of evolution is that it is a mechanistic process, blind and brainless, and therefore explanatory of biological change, that is anathema to theology, however tepid. So at least we humans must have been granted some kind of grace ... some special relationship with god that sponsors our moral nature, even if it did not meddle with our physical evolution. Or something like that.

Then there is psychology. Are we beset by various biases and defects that impair our reasoning and tend to lend more credence to supernatural theories than they are due? Do we have an intense need for social hierarchy and father figures that we map onto an imaginary cosmos? Or are we blessed with a sort of sixth sense, by which god approaches us, perhaps in dreams, or in quiet moments of meditation, or in the rousing community of worship? Religious people make a great deal of "discernment", which usually means a very non-scientific feeling of a god existing, inherent in the world, and also relating somehow to us personally. This helps to construct non-believers as *blind, and also construct religious group leaders as somehow gifted with special abilities or relations with the divine. As Tanya Luhrman demonstrates so well, (as William James before her), this discernment is most clearly a sign of imagination, or considerable mental self-management, but not necessarily something that a skeptic is obliged to credit as discernment of something real.

The very immensity of speculation required in religious belief constitutes another psychological factor, as it can be a method that draws forth commitment and social bonding. The greater the unbelievability of a doctrine, the more isolated its believers, the more they depend on each other, and the greater the psychological barrier to entry and to exit. Atheists are notoriously unable to form communities, perhaps because their beliefs, at least in the religious sphere, are rather modest and skeptical. Believing in a lack of life after death, in a lack of priestly charisma, a lack of divine sanction for their endeavors, etc. is not calculated to create great devotion. Truly it is curious how real riches, such as wealth and health, have so much less purchase on our psychology of personal meaning than do the highly speculative riches of the hereafter and the invisible.

But broaching the subject of psychological explanation for religion is highly offensive to those in the paradigm. "Are you calling us nuts? Or stupid? Is this the first step to locking us up?" and so forth. And are atheists immune from psychological biases? To judge from the internet comment traffic, that is not the case, though the biases at work do seem different. Richard Dawkins has not yet been canonized or described as divine.

Obviously, simplicity is not the entire standard of paradigm comparison. Simplicity purchased at the cost of deep explanation, indeed of the very motivation to approach the mysteries of reality in analytical fashion, may not be (philosophically) superior to complexity, or even to ignorance. In any case, the test is not internal to the paradigm, but in its correspondence to reality, in some empirical sense. If all those correspondences are, in the face of a god who resolutely remains hidden from clear view, fobbed off to mystical senses or speculations about what must have ultimately caused the universe and ourselves to appear, then all the clarity and simplicity can't make up for explanatory weakness.

It goes without saying that what one wants out of a paradigm does not serve to make it more or less true. Whether theism makes us more moral, or whether contrariwise it makes us kill each other, doesn't speak to its truth or falsity. Indeed, the personal attractiveness and psychological tenacity of religion can be taken as an argument against its truthfulness. Except, of course, if one resides within a theistic paradigm, in which case god made us religiously inclined and mystically receptive, in a wonderful, if somewhat fuzzy, circle of logical causation.

Nor does arrogance or humility really decide the question. Each paradigm thinks itself nobly humble and its adversary perversely arrogant. Believers bow before god and seek to obey (or at least understand) "His" teachings and dictates, while viewing atheists as believing themselves to be god, and having no god-given, objective morals into the bargain- a lost and dangerous tribe. Conversely, atheists suspect theists of making it all up anyhow, thus conjuring around the back door the laws and deities that they so conspicuously bow to in front of the temple, all demonstrated by the appalling failures of the theist's own social institutions. Which are, under this view, incredibly arrogant, fraudulently leading their people to believe they are communing with the creator of the universe, who cares whether they win the next bingo game. Or the next war.

The consideration of these radically different, yet each widely believed, paradigms is the first step of theology. Before one can make suppositions about what this god wants, or what our meaning is as humans, or what moral consequences we think derive from it all, we need to situate ourselves in a model of reality, either supernatural or not. As an atheist, I think the choice is clear, that inferring so much as a premise, and in such imaginative fashion, however attractive and justified on traditional, moral, or hopeful grounds, is no way to begin one's philosophy. It is to fall into psychological traps from the very start and to build on sand.

But how to communicate all this to anyone outside the paradigmatic echo chamber? Our ability to close our minds to foreign and inconvenient thoughts is monumental. In this case, each paradigm is not just incommensurate, but is built on active, explicit opposition to the other. The most basic tool we have is philosophical / intellectual integrity, that each party has the courage to understand opposing ideas and to be wrong, if evidence dictates that conclusion. Also, perhaps a dab of introspective psychological insight, but that is extremely treacherous territory. Of course, what counts as evidence is as contentious as anything else across these paradigms. And the length to which evidence can be discounted, and even "truth" redefined, is quite impressive.

At any rate, it takes a strong stomach to even listen to the opposing side, since not only is its paradigm contrary to one's own, but it will tend to be dismissive and scoffing (especially coming from the atheist side) if not outright insulting to what it regards as false, ill-informed, possibly immoral views. But that is the price of dialog. Making small talk over tea and crumpets may smooth the waters psychologically, but it will not address paradigmatic or philosophical issues. And dialog is unlikely to change anything anyhow. It is a private process where each person has to search within themselves for their intepretation of reality, and their place in it. Such searching is most intense in adolescence, and that is where hope lies- when childhood indoctrination meets reality.

• Let's say nice things about religion, by Karen Armstrong.
• Let's say mean things about religion, by John Loftus.
• Mythos vs Logos.
• What happened to the Muslim world?
• What is the best safety net? Unemployment insurance, or basic income? How about real jobs?
• The stimulus program, such as it was, was very successful.
• Morality and the sciences ... women get a better shake.
• The Ferguson library steps up. More notes on Ferguson.
• Somebody is taking action against neonicotinoids, but not us.
• A total failure of incentives and appropriate punishment.
• Now for some corporate thanksgiving.
• U.S. General on Iraq: "Washington hails Saudi Arabia as a key “moderate” Arab ally despite the fact that the kingdom exports an extreme, puritanical, sectarian interpretation of Islam that established the theological parameters taken to extremes by groups like ISIS." On the other hand, the Saudis are being very helpful against Iran and Russia.
• Does everybody hate us?
• Why did the Supreme Court throw out rights to equality before the law and due process?