Skepticism and wonder

[haggholm]

Strange and floaty day, very much the day after a party. I got up late, had a leisurely breakfast, and went out for coffee with a friend (it wasn’t pre-planned, but as we were talking over IMs we simultaneously expressed a need to go out for coffee, and given how close we both are to the Drive—). It ended up rather a lengthy excursion, covering both coffee and a late lunch. We talked about a great many things, one of which was physics. I explained qualitatively some of the basic or notable features of relativity and quantum physics (as best I could, given my pedagogical limitations and my own limited understanding). I drew figures in the sand, and by this means I (a non-physicist) was able to explain quantitatively the phenomenon of time dilation, and how it can be proved to exist, to someone with no background in mathematics. It was nice, and not only because I enjoy explaining things to people who have the intelligence and curiosity to listen and understand (regardless of mathematical background).

It was also nice because as someone who comes off as a hard-headed skeptic because I am a hard-headed skeptic, it’s very easy to also come off as a grouchy cynic who delights in nothing more than demolishing the beliefs in which others find a sense of wonder; as though my world-view and philosophy are nothing but negative and dismissive. That’s not true at all, though—if I find the wonder of castles in the air dissatisfactory, that has much to do with the fact that there are other castles, on solid foundations, and if they are less fantastic they gain a separate sort of beauty and wonder precisely because they are real—demonstrably real.

An example of this sort of thing is the nature of coincidence. I’m sure I’ve told this story before: Once, many years ago, I was playing a role playing game with a friend; it was a sci fi, superhero sort of setting, and when a player character fired some warning shots into the air, I (as a game master and, frankly, just to be a minor pain) declared that You accidentally shoot out a streetlight. He just about had time to complain about it when, with a sharp crack, the light bulb in my desk lamp shattered. This effect—a hairline crack from manufacturing error gradually working its way ’round the bulb due to heat expansion and cooling contraction over hundreds and hundreds of uses, until the bulk of the bulb detached from the base to smash against the desk—is extremely uncommon, and I’ve only seen it happen once in my life. The timing, of course, was pretty amazing. You shoot out a streetlight—crack.

This sort of remarkable coincidence is precisely the sort of thing that makes many people think there must be something to it (substitute my role playing game decision for a thought of a friend or relative, and the cracking bulb with a phone call for or about said person, and you have a real-world example). But I take a skeptic’s view of it: Given all the opportunities for remarkable coincidences to happen, every day of your life, it isn’t very surprising that some of them come true. Every day you think about a great many people, and it’s not that strange if one of them should, at some point, call you sufficiently close to the incident that it strikes you as remarkable. Every time you make any remark whatsoever, there’s a possibility that something in the world will coincide remarkably with it. Of course, every such coincidence is, in itself, very unlikely, but you surely experience dozens or hundreds of moments with potential coincidences every day—most of which never do occur.

Is that sort of thinking a buzz-kill? Maybe it is, if you need psychic connections or arcane meanings in everyday life to get your buzz. But I don’t. I find the reality of these phenomena fascinating. I start thinking about questions like: How improbable is this? What is the sum of probability of this combined with all the different, equally or more improbable things that might have happened, but didn’t? What are the odds that someone will go through a lifetime and not experience something at least this unlikely? If you play a lottery with a 1/1000 chance of winning every day, you’ll win on average about every three years, and if you do it all your life, it will be strange if you never win—even though the odds of winning on any specific day are very small. We might find that someone who goes through life and never experience this coincidental weirdness is unusual! —And even then, there are surely some people, again purely by chance, who really do happen to experience remarkably few astonishing coincidences.

I get a buzz from thinking about that.

And I get a buzz from reading about science, not scientific facts ex cathedra, but the reasons why we know them to be true, and sometimes the history of how we did come to know; to hell with all soothsayers, dowsers, and ‘psychics’: I am impressed by the mind of Eratosthenes, who measured the circumference of the Earth fairly accurately with nothing more than a hole in the ground, a stick, and the mathematics of a people who didn’t have a concept of ‘zero’. I am astonished by the genius of Sir Isaac Newton who, misanthropic bastard that he was, developed a system of mechanics so accurate that NASA can land spacecraft on other worlds without needing more than perhaps a brief nod in the direction of Einstein’s improved physics. And I am captivated by these things because we don’t need the crutch of ‘faith’, because we know these things and can verify them; because they reveal not merely astonishing things about the universe, but represent tremendous intellectual achievements on the parts of humans—discoveries by bipedal chemical factories, produced in fantastically complex lumps of flesh in the skulls of animals evolved ultimately from inorganic chemicals, many of whose component elements were forged in the crucibles of dying stars.

I can look at religious imagery and icons, and feel a detached appreciation for the artistic merit, but while I’m never entirely sure what someone means by a spiritual experience, I know that no picture I have ever seen has ever filled me with such awe as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, where human ingenuity has managed to give us a photograph of a patch of the universe 13 billion—13 thousand million—13,000,000,000 light years away!—and 13,000,000,000 years into the past; at an age that, compared to the current age of the universe, is as the age of a toddler is to mine right now.

Being a skeptic does not mean that I have a barren and impoverished world view, and it is tragic that so many skeptics, like myself, come off merely as negative because circumstances tend to get us going mostly when there is something that we object to, that we want to correct. But nature is full of wonder, and the universe is full of mysteries no less interesting because we avoid postulating supernatural explanations, no less fascinating because we find regular laws to explain them when we do figure them out. And who needs a creation myth when Hubble lets us look at the aftermath of natural creation, and the cosmic microwave background radiation lets us listen to the cooling radio hiss of the Big Bang itself?

Comments

[somewhither.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with skeptics, per say... but to me, cynicism implies scorn. That's where I have a problem. I guess I just look at people who rely entirely on science to nourish their happiness and sense of joy and wonder the same way I would anyone else whose spiritual or philosophical beliefs don't completely align with my own.

For me, that means... I can embrace anyone's viewpoint, no matter how little or greatly it differs from my own, if it makes that person feel happy fulfilled, and if they don't use it to diminish or criticize the opposing beliefs of those around them.

*shrug*

I've just noticed a tendency of some scientifically oriented cynics to openly express their disdain towards the outlook of their more spiritually-minded peers, which to me is unfortunate. (I've noticed much the same in reverse, as well).

I definitely think there are an immense amount of amazing things to explore and enjoy without resorting to fairy tales or mythos but I also can so easily access the spiritual side of my own existence, when I look on the face of my sleeping child, or I rest my head against the chest of my lover. Neither of those things are viewable from the Hubble telescope, and they hold just as much wonder for me.

I guess, for me... I deeply appreciate the value and importance of science, logical deduction, and thinking beyond the borders of one's belief system. I just also think it's equally important to allow people to cradle a spark of magic in their life, if they choose to do so, and peacefully allow them their experience of the universe without pressing your own perspective upon them.

Wonderful post. Thank-you for sharing. ^_^

[somewhither.livejournal.com]

Addendum:

Nothing in your behavior (thus far) or available online information suggests to me that you're a cynic in the negative connotation. Perhaps a little intimidatingly smart, and definitely riding the steed of logic, but fabulous all the same. ;)

[petter-haggholm.livejournal.com]

Oh, but that can apply to me, and I won’t argue with it—it’s a personality flaw: I freely admit it. I am a hard-headed skeptic, and while I don’t harrass my friends to attack their beliefs, I also don’t hold back when it is brought up for discussion, and sometimes I can be blunt to the point of being offensive. I’m sadly pretty good at disliking people I find annoying, and I can sometimes be very irritable. I’m not happy about that, nor proud of it, but it’s true. I am also sadly prone to the human but unpleasant tendency of getting emotionally invested in a debate—it’s so easy to go from I’m right: Here’s why to You’re wrong: Here’s why, which is not only an unpleasant focus, but also tends to an unconscious drifting into Devil’s Advocate territory, where I may seem to represent viewpoints more extreme than what I actually believe in.

Sarah [E-N] can definitely attest to this. Hopefully she’ll opine that I’m a good person nonetheless, but I’m not the best person around for discussing certain beliefs in a sensitive manner.

It may be important to know, when I get this attitude, that I do not confuse being wrong with being stupid. Everyone is wrong sometimes; Einstein was fundamentally wrong about the nature of the universe… I’m sure that I’m wrong about many things (though obviously there are no specific things I think that I’m wrong about—that would mean that I didn’t believe them). There are people of whom I am contemptuous because they cling to superstition, but there are also a great many people whom I respect profoundly, including on an intellectual level, in spite of thinking that on some point or other they are fundamentally mistaken.

[petter-haggholm.livejournal.com]

I’ll expound on this bit, because I feel like it perfectly introduces an area that is painfully rife with misunderstanding and miscommunication:

I definitely think there are an immense amount of amazing things to explore and enjoy without resorting to fairy tales or mythos but I also can so easily access the spiritual side of my own existence, when I look on the face of my sleeping child, or I rest my head against the chest of my lover. Neither of those things are viewable from the Hubble telescope, and they hold just as much wonder for me.

I typically don’t understand what people mean by the word spiritual. It has connotations of spirits, of intangible but objectively real things that…well, in this interpretation it edges into ghost story, myth, and mysticism. I don’t believe in mysticism. When someone asks me how I explain love in terms of a materialistic world view, I will speak of neurochemicals and the evolutionary pressures favouring mate co-operation, kin altruism, and parental care for offspring.

But that doesn’t mean that I think of such things as less important. I’ve had people ask me if (and it’s usually phrased in the negative I don’t believe in love. Well, of course I don’t and of course I do. If you define love as some mystical force with an existence of its own, beyond brain activity and biochemicals—then no, I believe in the existence of no such force; I’ve seen no evidence of it and no one has ever provided any model that would shed light on its purported existence… But at the same time, of course love is a real phenomenon, defined not only by chemicals but by the words and actions that are occasioned by them, and it is no less precious for being in principle explicable. Keats may have accused Newton of unweaving the rainbow, but I don’t regard it as any less beautiful for being explicable in terms of optics.

Another argument that I seem to face in my rôle as Cynical Skeptic is that the phenomena of, say, love or consciousness cannot be explained by mere matter; which seems to suggest a profound ignorance of the incredible complexity of the human brain. A neural network of a hundred thousand million neurones, each capable of fairly sophisticated computation modulated by its chemical environment, wired up in a feed-forward and feed-back network of such breathtaking complexity that we cannot begin to understand its functioning in more than the crudest sense, or on the very smallest scale. Dismissing it as mere brain matter, incapable of explaining consciousness, reeks of great arrogance: Are these mystics, then, the greatest neuropsychologists on earth, able to predict the brain’s limitations?

…And after I argue my way through all such arguments and objections, I may come off as largely irrefutable on evidence, but seem as though I regard the brain as something mechanistic (which has somehow become a dirty word), which is again missing the point entirely: I discuss these things because the nature of consciousness intrigues me, because neurobiology and neuropsychology are fascinating; I speak of these reductionist explanations when discussing explanations. When I feel, when I love, it doesn’t particularly matter to me that (to the best of my knowledge) it’s a consequence of neurobiology rather than mystical energies. After all, I feel the same way; I don’t love less and I don’t love differently than someone who experiences the exact same feelings but ascribes them to a different explanation.

[somewhither.livejournal.com]

"I don’t love less and I don’t love differently than someone who experiences the exact same feelings but ascribes them to a different explanation."

I certainly wouldn't be one to say otherwise. ;) My only point was that I feel it's important to allow people to interpret their own truths in their own way.

I don't think that finding any given phenomena explicable or inexplicable makes it any more or less important, or valid.

I do think that there are an incomprehensible bounty of things we do not yet understand... and perhaps there are reasons for feeling emotions and connections beyond brain activity and biochemicals that we haven't discovered as of yet.

And how someone chooses to negotiate the undiscovered I think, is a statement of the individual, and no less valid for its differences from my own outlook.

I also think 'spiritual' has become a highly subjective word. For me, I use it to refer to outlooks and experiences that touch a part of me that I know is there, but have yet to truly comprehend.

[joyousandjuicy.livejournal.com]

Thank you for a really enjoyable afternoon. I vote that we make Sunday Morning Physics Lessons (in the Sand) a more-frequent-than-not occurrence.