Asking the right questions about God and Science

I think it would help cut through the dust and noise if we asked the correct question about "God".

Let me respectfully offer a candidate question that seems to me better than the questions and frameworks typically used.

As science evolves, the legacy "billiard ball" models of "life" are yielding to more nuanced models of something that is hierarchical, multi-level,  with both near-term and long-term feedback loops, and somewhat more diffuse than would be simple.

Our own bodies turn out to be massive structures of mostly independent entities,  "cells", some of which like white blood cells are not even "attached" but wander around on their own.

This is profoundly important.   The mulltilevel cooperating swarm model has also proven to be extremely successful in design of computer networks and "supercomputers".   But in particular,  computer architectures consciously utilize "layers" of "systems" which hide significant details on purpose between layers.

Thus,  the application software which "writes to disk" no longer needs to know the details of which sector of which cylinder of which disk it is writing to, or if it is even a real disk or a virtual disk, located here or in Singapore.   Those details are delegated to lower-level processes to manage, with blessed relief.

And multi-level evolution of "the fittest" embraces simple single-level models, but also embraces all levels of altruism as successively higher levels of organization co-evolve,  which, net, improves the survival of their lower-level agents.

So, entirely without needing to get into spirituality or extrapolation 200 orders of magnitude or more to "God",  there is a very real question that Science is mostly ignoring of whether, in fact, such levels of life extend above humans as well as below them,  even by just one or two.

Now, a key principle of Cosmology is that "we are not special".   We, Earth, Mankind, is not "in the center of the universe", or at the very edge, or the highest form of anything, etc.  This should be taken as the base case, and anyone wishing to deviate from it bears the burden of proof, not the other way around.

Given that, and the model of life that we clearly both exemplify and copy into silicon,  we have to ASSUME that there are, in fact, at least a FEW levels of hierarchical life "above us",  where "above" means in this very specific framework.

So,  we must ASSUME until proven otherwise that we humans are, akin to white blood cells, going about our lives happily and mostly unaware that we are, in fact, part and parcel of a much larger "body" and "being" that is also, simultaneously going about its own business, probably on a much larger time-scale than our own.

I have not touched the nature of God here, or any "religion" -- I have entirely based this reasoning on solid science and cosmology and debunking legacy models and frameworks that make mankind more "special" than proven, or that make "life" more atomic, binary, and magical than proven.

There is more evidence every day that human "beings" are, in fact, caught up in a web of distal causality where the experiences, lives, actions, decision, and happiness of "other people" nearby has a surprisingly strong "impact" on our own psychology and physiology.  It is AS IF the boundaries of "our bodies" is not, in fact, our skin, mathematically.   It behaves as if we are actually PART, biologically, of larger entities with their own somewhat insulated levels of life.

Perhaps "religions" and "cultures" and "nations" and "peoples" are, in a very real mathematical sense, alive.  Perhaps earth ("Gaia") is itself alive with an independent consciousness.  Perhaps the entire galaxy is alive. 

The point is, to be scientific, until proven otherwise, the cosmological principle asserts, with the power of Occam's Razor,   that we MUST ASSUME that the upper extremum of "life" does NOT stop at US, or that that WE are the "highest creation of God."    Just as we MUST ASSUME that the Earth, despite being our home, is NOT the center of the solar system, or the galaxy, or the universe.

The burden of scientific proof, in fact, is on anyone who wants to go against the Cosmological principle and assert that, in fact, somehow, we and our viewpoint ARE, magically, special and define an end point, let alone the upper end point, of all that is or could be.

Seeking to understand or model what is ten thousand levels above us ("God")  is probably a tad ambitious, I would suggest, and not really necessary and in fact does not help the research.

First, let's solve the problem of how to detect and analyze ONE level above us.

We KNOW there are "things" we "belong to" that are geographically and perhaps in time larger than ourselves -- things such as "family",  "neighborhood",   "culture",  "a corporation",  "a country", etc.

What is less obvious is that these much larger things around us may be, in fact, themselves alive and conscious.  

Despite our theoretical legacy view that the scale of "life" stops at humans,  nevertheless we have all seen circumstances where larger things APPEAR to "take on a life of their own".

The singularly profound concept I'm arguing for here is that that perception is correct, and that things DO take on a "life of their own".    

We need to take a leap and change our definition of "life" and "alive" to admit those observations that otherwise would be viewed as "exceptions" or heretical.

If you truly cannot let go of the biology texbook definition of "life", then at least consider the larger mental model to be "MAWBA" -- "Might as WELL be alive.",  which is a superset of what Biology texts tell us is "alive", and also finally includes viruses, phages,  and the increasingly dominant life form on this planet,  "corporations".

We should seek more diligently to find redefinitions of "life" which include this hierarchical, mutli-level type model used by software engineers (because it WORKS), and then seek to find out not WHETHER, but WHICH higher level large movements, structures, behaviors, around us that we have been perceiving as something else are, in fact, mathematically,  independently alive entities that we are "part of " in the sense our white blood cells are "part of " ourselves.

INDEPENDENT of those arguments, I would then suggest that the various "religions" of mankind could be viewed as clumsy attempts by uneducated laymen to attempt to put into some kind of words the socially observed reality that "SOMETHING LARGER IS GOING ON HERE".

Religion asserts that as a fact,  though embellished with a variety of details that vary by location and time.

Science seems to be busy with its eyes down the microscope tube, looking for ever smaller "God particles".  

I suggest we should combine forces of Science and Religion and look "above" instead, and try to make sense of what we see going on in the newspapers in a framework of "metalife", of things that "Might as well be alive" because they behave like they are. (Eg, "corporations").

I seem to perceive that this exploration of the regions "above" is avoided by scientists on the sometimes explicit grounds that it would give aid and comfort to religious idiots.  Such childish emotions have no place setting national research policy on the single most important SCIENTIFIC question that could organize the data in a totally new way and reveal causal relationships we always noticed but never fully understood.

==========

One of the immediate applications of this framework would be to consider a core message of Christianity, say,  paraphrasing only slightly " For Christ's sake,  act like you're parts of the same body!"

Specifically,   if we ARE in fact parts of the same meta-body,  then what we see around us in the daily headlines is essentially an autoimmune disorder,  with parts of the body, in good faith, not recognizing other parts of the body as being legitimate, and consequently attacking them as being "not us".     

Our human eyes are seeing the differences, but not the same-metabody signature being broadcast on our own internal IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) system.

Perhaps, viewing this as an autoimmune disorder, and many events as, essentially, anaphylactic shock,   would let us have the insights required to actually CURE the disorder.

To quote the title of a Baha'i book:   Peace: More than an End to War.

It is important to grasp that I am NOT saying that the situation is "like unto" members of one body, or similar to, or analogous to that.   I am making a MUCH stronger statement.    I am asserting that we ARE, in a true mathematical and physiological and biological sense,  all members of one (or more?) meta-bodies, despite,  like white blood cells, not being fixed in geographic location or attached at the hip to each other.

In that case, if that is true, then things that happen to even "the least of these" happen to __me__, although the time-scale for the impact to percolate through the metabody to me may be longer than I usually wait around to examine.

Also,  but now working from possible scale-invariant design architecture,  ( stronger than analogy), we notice that human cells are extremely difficult to grow in the lab because a human cell, if removed from its metabody (our body),   goes into flat decline and shortly commits apoptosis, ie, pushes the do-not-push big red button and commits suicide and dies.

Humans, disconnected from each other, in say solitary confinement or worse, in public aloneness, similarly go into flat decline and often commit suicide.

Is being an academic a disabilty (part 2)

The fancy term for knowing your own limits is "meta-cognition" -- that is, what you know ABOUT what you know.


According to Dror:

When it comes to experts, the following errors are common:

• over self-confidence
• do not listen
• discourage, frown, and 'punish' disagreement
• take undue risk
• Escalate commitment when challenged
• Wishful thinking
• Confirmation bias  (search for and see supporting facts but not conflicting facts.)

Again,  these are all errors that all humans tend to make, but non-experts may be much more aware of their own tendency to make such errors,  and recover from them gracefully the next day.

Experts, on the other hand, have a much higher level of investment in their reputation,  and there is no natural internal limit to the justified self-confidence they have in one area that lets them know they have crossed outside the boundaries of what they know and what they only think they know.

Among nurses,  there are often comments about specific doctors who consider themselves only a short step below God,  whose egos are so large that "they come into the room before the person."

But that's anecdotal and just jealousy right?  Wrong. Let's find some objective data. I'm a private pilot and follow this sort of thing.


Example:    Doctors have the highest rate of small aircraft accidents after any other group or profession, except teenagers.

Crash Risk in General Aviation,   by Guohua Li, MD, Dr.PH and Susan Parker, MPH,
JAMA. Apn1 11,2007-Vol297, No. 14 p 5196-1598.  (http://doctorgrayson.com/Aircraft.pdf )
which also cites
Booze CF Jr. Epidemiologic investigation of occupation, age, and exposure in
aviation accidents. Aviat Space Environ Med. 1977;48:1081-1091.

I can't right off find the statistics for teenagers, but I do recall noting it as I read it a while ago.

Note -- I can't find such data adjusted for the fraction of flight-hours which are by doctors, to get the accident rate per hour flown by occupation.     It's possible that doctors, being wealthier than average, tend to own their own planes and fly more than the general public, which would bias those rates upwards.  On the other hand, it's doubtful that teenagers own their own planes at all, or that they fly very much,   and MD's are not known for having a great deal of free time for leisure activities.   So it's also possible that MD's actually both own their own planes but fly only infrequently, so the accident rate per hour flown is even higher for MD's than the statistics would imply.

A more likely explanation, in my mind,  is that MD's are significantly more unaware of the limits of their own expertise,  and therefore take more risks than other general aviation pilots.

While others may find the behavior described by "ego" or "arrogance", the point is that the doctors are, in fact,   somewhat crippled by the unintended and invisible-to-them side-effects of their own expertise.

We can talk more later about the behaviors which result from an effort to maintain their own self-image in the face of conflicting data.   What is expected, given narcissism in general, is that all errors and unexpected outcomes are automatically blamed on others, or events outside control,  anything except blaming them on oneself.    The emotions related to questioning ones own identity become so high that fits of rage are reported by surgeons, say, when anything goes wrong, including hurling instruments across the room and screaming at others present, etc.

This, in turn has two social side effects.

• It reduces the probability that the MD will learn anything from the mistake.
• It reduces the probability that anyone who associates with the MD will point out their mistakes in the future.

Thus begins a feed-back process which increasingly isolates the expert from realistic negative lessons from outside.

The result, getting back to the start of this post,  is that an expert with a huge investment in reputation, face, and accuracy becomes increasingly isolated from social interaction and particularly isolated from ability to allow personal errors and shortcomings to be visible in public.

It's certainly well known in the hospital I.T. department, for example, that it is extremely hard to get many doctors to learn new software if it requires that they have to go through the required awkward and fumbling state in public,  let alone in the presence of their peers.

In other words, my original comparison group, the "giggling gaggle of girls", has much more freedom to explore, make mistakes, ask questions of each other,  and figure out collectively and even enjoyable how new things works, and can acquire new skills together in a totally non-competitive way, helping each other learn.

Experts, on the other hand,  may suffer severe disabilities in their social ability to operate in such a learning group.   They have, effectively, a trained incapacity in this regard.

And, because they lack awareness of the limits of their knowledge, this incapacity extends far beyond the areas they would be expected to be experts within,  to all other kinds of interactions in life.

To some extent, all people and most higher animals are quite aware of "face" and try to no do things that would embarrass them in front of their peers.   I've certainly observed that among bird flocks, cats, and dogs, as well as humans.

Also, to a very large extent, what people are inwardly terrified of is being thrown out of "the flock",  of becoming unwanted, undesired, an "outsider", or one of the "them" category that disparaging describes those outside the in-crowd.

The result is that the LAST thing in the world people want is some sort of effort to surface, reveal, tell-all, and show errors and flaws.      This, of course, makes something like the Toyota "lean" process, or Six-Sigma,   which is precisely designed to surface such problems,   astoundingly difficult, if not impossible to implement for corporate change agents interested in rooting out and fixing these deeper, hidden problems.

So, again,  those experts who have fallen into this trap, perhaps through no fault of their own, get a triple dose of the deeper anxiety everyone feels about being "found out" to be "a fraud" or "less than one has pretending to be."

The result is to build higher and higher protective walls and shells around oneself, and to avoid, at all costs, situations in which one might accidentally slip and reveal some internal flaw.

These days, in the corporate world and in politics,  often it only takes a single mistake, a single comment uttered in an unguarded moment,  caught by an open microphone,  to end an entire career and flag someone as expelled from the "in group."

The result has to be an intense loneliness and constant state of both rage at the stupidity and errors of those around one, and fear that one's own flaws will become visible.

Again, it is not surprising that the drug-abuse and suicide rate among MD's is quite high.  They have become emotionally and socially crippled by external forces and training, and are in every sense of the word disabled, unable to participate in the normal social activities of daily living that many people take for granted.

It is not surprising in this context that the development of Hospital internal Electronic Medical Record systems is running a few decades behind other industries.    The talk is concern about patient privacy, but the actual far deeper concern is that, by capturing everything electronically, it will become far easier for mere mortals,  even administrators,  to mine the data and detect and reveal weaknesses and flaws.

Moreover, in the corporate world these days,   administrators and managers are often those who have mastered the art of taking credit for anything good that happens, and deflecting blame for anything bad that happens, while keeping the spotlight focused anywhere but on their own performance.  (I'm speaking as an MBA who taught MBA's here,  and has been "in the kitchen.")

So,  the largest threat to such administrators is the brightest MD's, who can see through puffery and see what is actually going on.   Given the politics then, it is precisely such MD's who present the greatest threat to the continued position of the administrators, and it precisely such MD's that said administrators constantly seek any bullets, or flaws, or errors to use to "take them down."

So MD's have the curse of training that emphasizes inhuman perfection,   the dangers of expertise in general,  attorneys ready to pounce on anything that even looks like a bad outcome regardless how correctly it was managed,  and a sociopolitical environment that is constantly threatening to expose and demolish their careers and lives.

One last curse of MD's, CEO's of large companies, and military officers is that they have to make rapid decisions based on insufficient information, with huge or fatal consequences if they guess wrong.    On the other hand, they have to make a STREAM of such decisions, one after the other, in an environment where "paralysis of analysis" is also a sin of omission that may have worse consequences than a "bad decision" that at least can be detected and reversed shortly.

Humans have finite capacity to worry about things, so these experts must take situations that are full of conflict and doubt and FORCE them into a state marked "decided, do not reopen or worry about this any more,  or you'll ruin all subsequent decisions."

They are forced to master the art of putting uncertain decisions out of sight, out of mind, and not constantly worrying about them and revisiting them, or they'll simply be overwhelmed and quite literally go crazy.

But this also means they have yet another source of blindness and resistance to the arrival of new, contradictory data, which calls their prior decision into question.




Enough on MD's for the moment.

In my next post I'll look at the problems of expertise in the Executive wing, among managers and CEOs.   Again,  we'll see that those people who the outside world thinks have the most power and privileges in the world are among the most limited and the most crippled in their capacity to function as a healthy human being and member of society.



(more in part 3)

Is being an academic a disability? (part 1)

I began to wonder about the total impact of higher education when I had trouble setting up a video conference with some senior faculty in a prestigious university,  and discovered they didn't actually know how to do that.

I believe it is true, based on my observations, that a "gaggle of giggling girls",  pre-teens,  has a greater ability to master the intricacies of technical equipment, in particular a "cell phone",  than does the average senior faculty member at a university.     If you don't like the "cell phone" example,  use the mastery of completely free Voice-over-IP services such as Skype for long-distance calls, or calls around the planet for under 5 cents a minute.

I pick on females not because I am trying to be stereotypical, but because I am directly challenging several stereotypes at once, regarding females,  faculty,  and technical mastery skills.

I am not addressing activities that are of no interest to senior faculty members,  such as sharing their day to day lives on Facebook.   I am talking about simple communication, a basis for collaboration, as well as ability to master new technology given several years to find time to do so.

I believe this is a profound data point.   It calls into question many of our core assumptions, including the focus and evaluation of how we educate or youth.

In particular,  this instance highlights part of what appears on investigation to be a much larger problem -- the downside of academic education, and the downside of expertise.

In any rational measure of mastery of a cell phone as an "Activity of Daily Life" in today's society,  it appears that senior academics have to rate in the "disabled" category.

If it were only academics,  this would be important but, well,  "academic".   Sadly, the downside of expertise appears to apply as well, perhaps even more so,  to two very important groups -- business management,    and medical doctors.

And, of course, then if you are considering automating the electronic health record at a large academic medical institution,  you have all three to deal with, perhaps in the same group of people.

While it can be somewhat fun to disparage experts,  managers, and academics,  let's try to stick to known facts here, and see where our mental models need updating, and then look at what the policy implications are of all this.
------

First,  there are well-documented problems with experts and expertise.   A great deal of research has been done by the military,  and lately by those following financial disasters,  on how it is that some truly smart people can behave so stupidly, or  how a fully-trained, highly-motivated observer can miss exactly what it was that was right in front of them.

One well-respected researcher in this field is Dr. Itiel Dror, at University College London. Here's the abstract of a paper he published last year:


Dror, I (2011) The Paradox of Human Expertise: Why Experts Can Get It Wrong. In: Kapur, N and Pascual-Leone, A and Ramachandran, VS, (eds.) The Paradoxical Brain. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. (In press).

Abstract
Expertise is correctly, but one-sidedly, associated with special abilities and enhanced performance. The other side of expertise, however, is surreptitiously hidden. Along with expertise, performance may also be degraded, culminating in a lack of flexibility and error. Expertise is demystified by explaining the brain functions and cognitive architecture involved in being an expert. These information processing mechanisms, the very making of expertise, entail computational trade-offs that sometimes result in paradoxical functional degradation. For example, being an expert entails using schemas, selective attention, chunking information, automaticity, and more reliance on top-down information, all of which allow experts to perform quickly and efficiently; however, these very mechanisms restrict flexibility and control, may cause the experts to miss and ignore important information, introduce tunnel vision and bias, and can cause other effects that degrade performance. Such phenomena are apparent in a wide range of expert domains, from medical professionals and forensic examiners, to military fighter pilots and financial traders.


http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/48372/





How can this be?

To illustrate, Dr. Dror suggests that you attempt the following task.
There is no rush and no time limit.   Don't proceed until you have
completed this task and feel confident you have not made a mistake.


Count how many 'F's are in the following text:

          FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
          SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
          FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
          THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…

=========== stop here until you are done =======

V


V

V

V

V

V  ... take your time

V

V

V

V

V

V  ... double check your work

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

======== ANSWER BELOW.

The correct answer is six.  There are six F's in the text.  

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…

Don't feel bad if you got it wrong.   I counted three.

 This is an example of a kind of problem that expert readers have that beginning readers, such as your young children, probably do not have.

Most people have learned to read for "content" and they have learned, implicitly, that the word "of" does not have much content, so their mind basically uses "white-out" on the words "of" and they disappear from our view.

The problem is that EXACTLY the same type of inability to see what is, in retrospect, in plain sight, happens to all kinds of experts -- including doctors,  CEO's,   and academics.

In fact, the more they have trained their senses to notice certain things, the LESS likely they are to notice other things that they have, at the same time,  learned to ignore.

So, can you see what's in front of you?

Identify the person in the image,  then turn around, back up 3 or 4 paces, turn around and see what you see.   From normal viewing distance, this is clearly Albert Einstein.  From across the room, this is "clearly" Marilyn Monroe.

There is a larger version at MIT where this "hybrid image" originated.
http://cvcl.mit.edu/hybrid_gallery/monroe_einstein.html

My point here is not just for fun --- people who are "close to" this data see one things, and people who are not "close to" this data see something else entirely.

We are surrounded by issues that are invisible in plain sight,  and sources of disagreement that are due to our perspective that we don't expect to be there.  Being an "expert" doesn't free a person of having the same types of problems, but it does decrease, substantially, their willingness to consider that an interpretation different from their own, especially by a non-expert, might have any value at all.

Back to the core point of this post -- Almost everyone has problems with their eyeballs, which are recognized and dealt with by "glasses" or "contact lenses" and not really considered disabilities. Some people don't like to admit they have a problem, and prefer to wear contacts, or avoid wearing glasses whenever possible.

However many people, and in particular experts, have a different type of problem with seeing that is an unavoidable side-effect of their expertise.   This is more subtle, and potentially much more dangerous, but also flies in the face of their own self-image of "expert" and therefore is not admitted, adjusted or compensated for.

The first step in dealing with a disability is recognizing that one has it, and also realizing that the world has not ended just because of an issue with one small sub-system of what it means to be human.

(end of part 1)