Book-in-Progress: Spirit on the Brain: The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Neurological and Magical Origins of Religion

This forthcoming book (c. 2015) will trace the evolution of religion and meditation-based spirituality from paleolithic, pre-scientific times into our own—from shamanic rituals and healing, through alchemy, into the neuroscience underlying higher-state-of-consciousness experiences.

Recent Posts:

August 1: EEG, Hans Berger, and psychic phenomena

July 30: The religious state of Islamic science

June 30: “New Waterboys”

Technology could be an economic elixir as computers and online networks expand ways to automate services, distribute media and communicate.

Companies will need people to build and secure those networks. That should boost the number of programmers, network administrators and security specialists by 45 percent to 2.1 million by 2018, the government forecasts. Most of these jobs will provide above-average pay.

Oh, I don’t think so. The future is in the cloud, baby: hosted (off-site) solutions that don’t require any local networking/admin at all, accessed through your browser. (I’ve long worked with a customer relationship management [CRM] software suite which has long had a half-assed web implementation, and by now has a world-class web implementation … which can be deployed either on-premise, or in the cloud. In the amazon AWS, a server costs you around 12 cents per hour, IIRC.) Any security issues with that (e.g., for HIPAA, etc.) will be resolved by the hosting providers over the next few years.

Besides, the minute there really is any need for more I.T. professionals in North America, Gates & Co. will light a fire up Congress’ butt to let in more barely-competent Asians and East Indians, to keep wages down; and they’ll get their way. Guaranteed.

BTW, the amazon cloud is already HIPAA-compliant. Or so they say. Regardless, someone will solve that, and eight years from now, there may well be even less work available for network admins than there is today.

It’s just one of the ways in which technology, built by human beings, makes human beings redundant. And there’s no stopping it, so get used to it … because ultimately, the tech built by geeks like me (though not by me personally) is going to provide for all of our basic physical needs.

And what to do then, when the job which defined you is superfluous, the religion you believed in has fallen by the wayside (killed by science and skepticism and by me, in a good way), and all you can do is sit back and be entertained, Idiocracy-like? (Unless you’re a madly creative artist like myself, in which case there will never be enough hours in the day to do all the creative/technological things I’d like to do.)

Of 8 million-plus jobs lost to the recession—in fields like manufacturing, real estate and financial services—many, perhaps most, aren’t coming back.

In their place will be jobs in health care, information technology and statistical analysis. Some of the new positions will require complex skills or higher education. Others won’t—but they won’t pay very much, either.

“Our occupational structure is really becoming bifurcated,” says Richard Florida, a professor at University of Toronto. “We’re becoming more of a divided nation by the work we do.”

Good.

Dr. Venter is turning from reading the genetic code to an even more audacious goal: writing it. At Synthetic Genomics, he wants to create living creatures—bacteria, algae or even plants—that are designed from the DNA up to carry out industrial tasks and displace the fuels and chemicals that are now made from fossil fuels.

“Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.”

Wow. Won’t do much to decrease greenhouse gases, but it would sure decrease the influence of the Middle East in the world. ‘Cause if you can grow your own oil for less than it costs to pump it out of the ground … well, fuck the sand-niggers (i.e., Arabs).

Truly, natural resources are just stepping-stones to an Information Technology which will one day be able to build those same resources out of “garbage.” And the power of savages who just happen by dumb luck, through absolutely no effort or intelligence of their own, to be sitting on top of a shitload of valuable natural resources, will be just a blip in history, several centuries from now.

He paid $100,000 to have that ugly thing designed.

And you know what venture capitalist paid $20 million for 16% of the company in early 1987? H. Ross Perot, founder of Electronic Data Systems, and later independent U.S. presidential candidate. (Perot had also “talked with Bill Gates about buying Microsoft [in 1979] but he had balked at the asking price, which was less than $60 million.”)

Clearly, I am in the wrong profession. Because that logo is crap, I could do better, but no one’s offering me six figures for something that must’ve taken all of ten minutes to ass-pull-out-of.

I prefer questionable progressivism over questionable libertarianism anyday [sic]. I [sic] rather live in a society where everyone [sic] needs are met even if it’s not perfect, then [sic] that of a world that [sic] only just 5% whose needs are really met and screw everyone else.

Mangling of the English language aside, questionable progressivism has also brought us political correctness, hate-speech laws, and a welfare state in which the prosecution of even blatant abusers of the system is “racist.”

There’s an idiot who still posts regularly on Steve Sailer’s blog, going by the online handle of Captain Jack Aubrey. IIRC, he was all in favor of raising the minimum wage to $20/hour in his state … with no comprehension whatsoever of what that would do to the cost of goods and services, or of how such an economy would effectively be a socialist’s dream, in which there was negligible income differential between the upper and lower classes, and the wealth of the formerly rich had truly all been spread around, near-equally. (Yes, that would have been done via higher wages rather than via an explicit tax-grab, but the redistributive effect is the same, except that employers can combat a rise in minimum wage by replacing proles with machines built by high-IQ geeks.)

The same fool also obviously had zero comprehension of how, if you can make basically the same money doing a dumbfuck-prole job (e.g., delivering mail in a hospital for $25/hour, in a unionized position) as at a high-skilled one (e.g., computer programming) that requires a significant educational investment up front, there’s very little incentive indeed for anyone to go into the latter. And that is completely analogous to how, if you can make comparable money on welfare to what you’d make at a minimum-wage job, there’s likewise no reason to work. (And, of course, even attempts to implement “workfare” in place of welfare are “racist” and “sexist,” in the eyes of nitwit progressives.)

Very efficient way of stifling innovation and entrepreneurship, that.

Plus, it’s only income differential that lets smart people buy their way out of having to live alongside violent, low-IQ dumbfucks and welfare mothers. Or do you want to have Aunt Jemima and her eight illegitimate kids running up and down your hallway? Without income inequality, her pimp would be bustin’ caps outside your door all night long.

It’s easy to think that income equality is a good thing if you’ve led a typical sheltered-liberal life (as I had until a few years ago), and never had to deal up-close with our world’s two-digit-IQ pig-fuckers, i.e., where you could write off the few you had encountered as being just isolated “bad apples” … as if bullying in high school was just a white-trailer-trash phenomenon, when it’s rather the regular state of mind among savages of all colors (including white proles). (How many sub-90 IQ niggers do you figure the atheistic Four Horsemen have met collectively, in their lives? All they’ve ever seen in their adult lives is the best and most well-mannered that all other races and cultures have to offer. And hell, even those are frequently total shit.) Even being upper middle-class whites didn’t stop the jocks at Columbine from being merciless bullies, you know. And don’t think that a “blank slate” is going to make any big difference there, either—as if 2×4-hammering morons would have turned out to be geniuses if only they had been given the educational opportunities that middle- and upper-class whites and Jews and Asians have been given.

You know what else kills me? When liberals talk about their politics having been “reality tested.” You know what’s been reality-tested, and failed, utterly? Multiculturalism. Since the Robbers Cave study in the 1950s, fer Chrissake! But that’s typical for the (practically non-existent) liberal understanding of human nature.

Newsweek just published a first ever (and controversial) ranking of countries, which included, among other qualities, social mobility and income equality. Guess what? Those [social-democratic] Scandinavian countries were tops.

Well yeah, if one of your primary criteria for positive ranking is a low income differential, certainly the countries which achieve that will have a big advantage in such a (wonky) ranking!

In other news, in a ranking of sprinters, those with the fastest times were tops. Film at eleven.

Yes indeed, sweden (one of the more social democratic countries in the world) is so horrible. The poverty! hm.. I wounder ["the wound! the wound!"] how we compare to the USA on wealth [?], heatlth [sic], education, equality?

… and also, how Sweden would compare to the USA in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, where a primary drive to succeed is not infrequently the desire to escape the shit you were born into. Ask any rapper or basketball player. (Ach, I just realized I’m listening to ABBA right now!)

It’s also much easier to grow a population with high levels of education when your country isn’t being sabotaged from within by religious conservatives and blacks—as America is, with Intelligent Design, fundamentalists wary of “too much learning,” and the watering-down of the curriculum since the “new math” ’60s to allow women and low-IQ minorities to “compete.” That is, since smart, motivated people will find a way to learn, even if they’re placed into poor schools, culture/demographics is probably a far bigger influence in that ranking than is mere economics or politics.

Consider Finland, in the #1 position:

The share of foreign citizens in Finland is 2.5%, among the lowest in the European Union. Most of them are from Russia, Estonia and Sweden. The children of foreigners are not automatically given Finnish citizenship.

Hmm, what could America learn from Finland? Anyone? Bueller?

The Muslim community in Finland … numbered only about 900, most of whom were found in Helsinki. Lately immigration has increased the number of Muslims.

Oh-oh. Well, it was good while lasted. (Switzerland was #2, and Sweden #3. What demographic characteristics do they share with Finland? Anyone? Whitey? Again, social-democratic politics have worked [for a few generations, at least] in those countries because of their culture and work ethic and “monotonous” whiteness; the same policies in a country of incentivized, uneducated welfare mothers would be a disaster.)

Further, health correlates with education, in part because smarter and more-informed people make better dietary choices than do illiterate proles. As I’ve noted previously, people eat at McDonald’s not because they “can’t afford” to pack a nutritious lunch, but rather just because they’re too stupid/uninformed/lazy to make the effort to eat properly. When a salad, fries, and a Coke at McD’s costs $11, how could packing a lunch possibly be more expensive? Even if you just planned ahead and bought a salad at a supermarket, you’d save half the cost of that. But if you can’t even plan that far ahead….

In Mind of the Market, Microsoft is Shermer’s poster boy for how monopolies benefit consumers.

If it wasn’t for Microsoft, we’d all (except for a few Mac users) still be having to deal with a different ugly-as-open-source interface for every program, and everyone would still know (the hard way) what a command line looks like. We all owe Bill Gates a debt of gratitude, for having saved us from that future.

MS bundled a free browser with your O/S, and you couldn’t uninstall it because some of the dll’s were being re-used elsewhere by Windows. Oh, boo-boo-hoo. Nothing ever stopped you from downloading Netscape (which by v6 was a bloated p.o.s.) … except, of course, that if you hadn’t had a browser shipping with the O/S in the first place, how exactly were you planning on connecting to the Internet to do that download? In which case, whose browser, exactly, were you thinking Microsoft should have been shipping with Windows … and why?

Plus, it’s partly the very hugeness and guaranteed stability of Microsoft, and their impressive commitment (so totally unlike Apple) to making their software backward-compatible, that allows businesses to be confident that they’ll still be able to open the files they’re creating in those applications, even after a few upgrades, or a decade from now … and that they’ll be able to share files with other companies, and everyone will be able to open them. Try doing that without a monopoly to enforce the standardization.

By contrast, I recently had to figure out how to get the data out of an ancient (c. 1998) Sharkware database—produced by a tiny company that still has a website, but doesn’t respond to emails, even when you’re requesting the password for their zipped trial edition of the software! You have no idea what I went through, to finally be able to connect to that DB via an obsolete third-party tool. By contrast, you can still open Word 97 and Works 6.0 files in Word 2007. Plus, Microsoft’s economies of scale allow them to amortize their R&D out over many more units than any other software shop could, driving down the price of competing horizontal-market software for everyone.

I also recently had to go through the grief of trying to get open-source SugarCRM installed into the same SQL Server instance as Reporting Services. ‘Cause, guess what? The out-of-the-box installation stack (for SQL Server 2005 Express, PHP, and Sugar) doesn’t install RS properly, i.e., doesn’t let you use the Configuration Tool for the setup which you have to do after installation.

I’ve done dozens of installations of RS, and never encountered that problem before. But as with everything, you get what you pay for (RS, too, is free, with SQL Server, and is awful for bugginess), and getting open-source stuff to even just install properly, even on Windows, can take hours.

I’ve also seen (on the same Shermer-related thread) the breakup of the AT&T monopoly being used as an example of how a monopoly had stifled innovation, customer service, and upgrading. But there’s a flip side to that, too: When my brother was down in California during one of his trips to Hidden Valley, and had to call back up to Winnipeg, the number of connections which had to be made between different private companies in order to place that call were prohibitive; and one of the operators he spoke to actually told him, “Don’t ever let them break up Bell Canada” (i.e., our national phone monopoly).

In the absence of a conscious entity, the moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.

To which a commenter responds:

Yep, that is a severely misunderstood (“quantum soup”) classical Copenhagen (“conscious entity”).

Already the concept of decoherence, AFAIU pioneered by Schroedinger but researched from the 1970s, brings the overwrought insistence on consciousness as sole wave function “collapse” cause in severe doubt.

And the latest research that not only observes decoherence, but that a system can continuously go in and back out of it as controlled by the experiment, makes on the contrary any role of consciousness problematic. Brain processes are considerably synchronized (for example vision) and time rate coarse.

Decoherence is, like entropy, a process where the environment plays an irreplaceable role. Here as the system with which entanglement of the original system decohere the later [i.e., entanglement of the system with the environment causes the wavefunction to decohere].

{It is amusing to note in this context that, contrary to what lay people claim, it is quantum mechanic which is the continuous dynamic and classical mechanics the discrete!

Decoherence shows this by replacing classical definite and discrete start and end states with continuity.

In fact, Lucien Hardy axiomatizes both classical and quantum mechanics analogous to bayesian pre- and post state probabilistic theories and shows that continuity is the fundamental difference:

“Axiom 5 (which requires that there exists continuous reversible transformations between pure states) rules out classical probability theory. If Axiom 5 (or even just the word “continuous” from Axiom 5) is dropped then we obtain classical probability theory instead.”}

Decoherence … decoherence … where have I heard about that before, in connection with the quantum wavefunction?

Oh, right: That was David Bohm’s means of getting around the Copenhagen Interpretation (in which you need arbitrarily defined/demarcated “measuring instruments”) and the quantum mind-body problem (where you have an observing consciousness) to collapse the wavefunction! As Wikipedia confirms:

Decoherence provides an explanatory mechanism for the appearance of wavefunction collapse and was first developed by David Bohm in 1952 who applied it to Louis DeBroglie’s pilot wave theory, producing Bohmian mechanics, the first successful hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics. Decoherence was then used by Hugh Everett in 1957 to form the core of his many-worlds interpretation. However decoherence was largely ignored for many years, and not until the 1980s did decoherent-based explanations of the appearance of wavefunction collapse become popular, with the greater acceptance of the use of reduced density matrices. The range of decoherent interpretations have subsequently been extended around the idea, such as consistent histories. Some versions of the Copenhagen Interpretation have been rebranded to include decoherence.

Decoherence does not provide a mechanism for the actual wave function collapse; rather it provides a mechanism for the appearance of wavefunction collapse. The quantum nature of the system is simply “leaked” into the environment so that a total superposition of the wavefunction still exists, but exists—at least for all practical purposes—beyond the realm of measurement.

So no, it wasn’t Schrödinger who pioneered that; in fact, he isn’t even (relevantly) mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Rather, the approach was pioneered by Bohm, and researched by him from the 1950s (not the 1970s).

So, while there was at least one commenter on Coyne’s blog who at least knew about that explanation (for wavefunction “collapse”), apparently there was not a single one who knew the history of it. Except me.

So once again, I have to be the “expert,” even among people with years of experience in these fields.

It’s lousy (and thankless) work, but somebody’s gotta do it….

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy

Noola Griffiths is an academic who studies the psychology of music, and she’s published a cracking paper on what women wear, and how that effects your judgement of their performance. The results are predictable….

For technical proficiency [after impressively controlling for myriad variables, female classical] performers in a concert dress were rated higher than if they were in jeans or a clubbing dress, even though the actual audio performance was exactly the same every time (and played by a separate musician who was never filmed). The results for musicality were similar: musicians in a clubbing dress were rated worst….

There’s little doubt that women are still discriminated against in the workplace, but each individual situation has so many variables that it can be difficult to assess clearly.

And?…. What I mean is: Where is the study which shows that there is (or isn’t) a comparable “discrimination” against men, by other men (or women), where a male classical musician in (inappropriate) clubbing attire is rated as less proficient/competent than an equivalent one in (inappropriate) jeans, or a tux? Contra Goldacre’s wishful thinking, this study, by itself, says nothing about sexual discrimination; it simply says that people who dress better (or who at least dress more socially appropriately) are viewed in a better light by their peers than those who don’t.

Every t-shirt-and-jeans-wearing hippie already knew that, damned well.

Further consider: Would a rock musician in an inappropriate tux be viewed as more or as less competent in that genre, than one wearing jeans?

If Goldacre analyzed Big Pharma studies with the same (in)aptitude as he analyzes gender-related, women-are-being-discriminated-against ones (which support his good-liberal preconceptions) … well, a “clubbing dress” would suit him well! Seriously, his take on this study is not even wrong.

Female musicians in the top five US symphony orchestras gradually rose from 5% in the 1970s to around 25%….

[F]rom the 1970s to 2000—the era which shifted from casual racism and sexism in popular culture, to more covert forms—between 30% and 55% [of] the trend towards greater equality was driven simply by selectors being forced not to see who they were selecting [with most of the rest of the increase being driven by the larger pool of female applicants].

I can well believe that women were truly being discriminated against in symphony orchestras, once upon a time. But neglecting Goldacre’s “covert forms of sexism” baloney (i.e., the implication that the primary reason why 50% of positions in symphony orchestras today aren’t held by women is simply due to hidden sexism), it’s interesting to see that women have topped out at 25% of that 95+ percentile, world-class level.

25%, that’s … damned close to 4 out of 21 or 3 out of 13, isn’t it?

Well, isn’t it, Ophelia?

[David Wilkinson:] ‘One [unanswered question] would be where the laws of physics come from. Science subsumes the laws but we are still left with the question of where the laws come from….

[Richard Dawkins:] Even if we are left with that question, it is not going to be answered by a God, who raises more questions than he answers.

Precisely true: There are no answers to the question of where the universe (incl. the laws of physics) came from, or the purpose (if any) of the universe/life.

That’s the reality we’re stuck with, and it’s also the point at-or-beyond which any honest, thinking, informed person can only be truly agnostic. Atheists who do need to have (non-existent) answers beyond that point are as desperate for certainty as are any religious believers.

But then, just when you think RD has gotten himself steady on the beam, he follows it up with this behemoth of a swing-and-miss:

[Ruth Gledhill:] Jerry [Coyne], in some liberal theological circles, it is not regarded as impossible that there is truth in both Islam and Christianity.

[Dawkins:] The Islamic penalty for converting to Christianity is what, Ruth, perhaps you know?

She never said (or implied) that they were both completely true, Dick-head. It’s ham-handed stuff like that which gives militant atheists a bad name.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

And where did that law of gravity come from?

“Oh, erm, we hadn’t thought of that….” The energy comes from random quantum fluctuations (or whatever), but where did the laws governing those fluctuations come from?

With such feeble thoughts at Hawking’s on the subject, you can see why any thinking person with a heart would find it very easy to believe in higher levels of reality, and Spirit as the Ground of all Being. After all, if the hand-waving, under-rug-swept notions of Hawking and his ilk are the alternative, Eastern philosophy starts to look pretty solid and insightful by comparison … at least until you start to understand a little bit about neurology.