God is here now, ready to help us -- a reason for Hope!

As a Scientist I believe in GOD, and a GOD who is right here ready to help us all if we simply turn and tune in and ask for help.   There, I said it, and put my career in Science on the line.

But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that.   In today's language,  I am talking about God-2.0,  a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App.   And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.

I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here.    But I press onward, undaunted.

I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth,   is alive, awake, aware of us,  and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words.   Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature". 

And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe,  interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed,  and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives.     We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided.  It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on. 

We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours.  This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same.    We all understand Gravity.   There is no "magic" involved,  just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand.  This is just the way things are.   It is no big deal.    We can adjust to it and live with it.

So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity,   part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with.   A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is

"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"

Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here,  the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more,  as it should.  After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.

Sadly,  just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept,  the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible,  raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion,  and Atheism!   It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.

In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.

Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones.   That is a normal and natural process,  which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it. 

It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.  

There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change;  there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way;  and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death,  if even challenged, let alone changed.

No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.

So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share.  Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" ,  a misnomer if there ever was one.

Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise,  Geology and Astronomy.    Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts,  and become agitated if someone rocks the boat.   The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics".    Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words.  But in general no one actually dies.

Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed.   Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts.    Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland.  Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East.   Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages.    Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system,  risked death if they did not recant.

But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity.    So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings.    Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics,  Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.

Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that,  was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died. 

There are things that some people do not want to hear.

Anyway,  where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.

I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me,   buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD.  Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand.  There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.

But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity,  but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.

It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner,  what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be.  In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Heck with that.  Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.

To be continued in my next post!

Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!

A well-known TV commercial once had an old woman who fell in her room and manages to call someone with the phrase "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!", or something like that.

In a larger sense, the question of resilience, or the ability to "get up" again after taking a disappointment or defeat is a core competency. Life is full of impacts and things breaking, and to hang in there, we have to rebuild at least as fast as things break. Individuals, companies, cultures, or nations that can't get back up again face a bleak and truncated future.

But, we live in a multi-level world, where trillions of cells come together in our bodies, and our bodies are small parts of much larger cultures and nations. And, these levels are not separate worlds, even though they seem it some times -- they interact a lot. It is hard in a thriving culture to stay down; it is hard in a depressed culture to get back up. We are social beings.

So, when many individuals fall down and don't get back up, we have to look past individual causes and look at social causes that are contributing to or even dominating events.

One cultural and individual factor is ego or self-esteem. My friends at MIT described the opening talk as freshmen, when they were informed that a third of them would not make it through 4 years - not because they weren't bright, because you had to be to be in that room. It was because they couldn't adapt to no longer being number one.

Students who had been big fish in small ponds their whole lives, number one, suddenly found themselves surrounded by other people who were also number one's, and some of those were clearly smarter. So their egos and self-esteem collapsed, and they stopped trying, and failed courses they could easily have passed, because they couldn't be number one.

They fell down and didn't get up.

This happens to entire cultures. The Pima Indians, around Phoenix Arizona in the US were number one for hundreds of years. They had extensive and elaborate methods of farming and irrigation and were widely respected. They were the friendliest Native American tribe, by many accounts, peace loving. Then the white man's culture came, and along with it radio and the outside world. There were many factors involved, but, basically, the Pima nation collapsed. They went from the lowest rate of violence and suicide to the highest, with huge problems with drinking, drugs, obesity, diabetes, homicide and suicide.

They fell and couldn't get up.

It was very hard on Japan to lose World War II, and their economy was devastated. They really had nothing left. They rebuilt their nation from that into a world leader, with the world's most admired company, Toyota. Yesterday the first photos came back from the Japanese satellite they just launched to the moon. They got up.

China similarly was devastated, over a longer period, and couldn't cope with the fact that the foreigner's weapons and armies were better than theirs. Finally, through a brutal process, they got back up and said "We can do this." And they did.

Right now, the USA seems to me to be near the same kind of watershed point. Other nations are running circles around our best industries. Other nations have healthier populations. The Netherlands passed us as having the tallest males. Top health care in India, Singapore, Thailand, Dubai, etc. is at least as good as the best care in the USA, and ten times cheaper.

We're kind of at the same point as the MIT freshmen. Welcome to the wider world. Now the question is, do we go the way of the Pima, or go the way of Japan?

On a smaller scale, the Michigan state scene is looking bleak in places, now 50th in terms of 50 states for employment. The "Big three" auto companies no longer rule the world. It's not clear which way that will go now.

In that vein, I read about the latest study of blacks in the US by the Pew Trust, in today's Washington Post. Something like a third of black children of middle class families have fallen back into poverty over the last 20 years. There is no doubt they fight an uphill battle that is often unfair, but many of them may have simply given up the fight. This was the subject of "blogging heads" in the New York Times today. Yes, jobs have left, but people aren't moving on and seeking other jobs -- they're just giving up.

This is bad news. Public Health doesn't subscribe to the "bad people" theory of events, and looks instead for structural or system reasons why large numbers of people start or stop doing something, or all get sick, or all get obese, or all get depressed.

Whatever is going on with blacks is very likely to be continued by middle class whites soon, and we need to figure out what to do, before we all become Pimas.

While people experience depression at an individual level, there is also depression and inability to cope at cultural and social levels. The "cheese has moved."

We need to investigate how the cultures that "get up again" do that. Or like the MIT freshmen, we'll simply drop out entirely.

The "War on Terror" masks one basic fact. The US was attacked and lost a few buildings and 3000 lives. In any war, a single bomber produces that much damage. London took that much damage in a day and didn't blink during World War II.

Yet, the US has gone into some sort of anaphylactic shock, where a relatively tiny bee sting has caused a trillion dollars in collapse, thousands of times beyond the wildest dreams of those who attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's like we fell and pulled down the neighboring buildings on top off us, instead of getting back up.

I am concerned that a larger scale depression and frustration and sense of denial is at work here, and think we need to examine how we are coping with no longer being number one in the universe. Closing factors hit, but don't explain why blacks aren't getting back up. Terrorist attacks don't explain why the US isn't getting back up.

Something else is going on here. If we want to get Michigan, and the US back on their feet, we need to figure out what that is and address the root-causes of not getting back up, not the excuses for falling.