Mental 04: Labels for Belief (and Lack thereof)

    Around the time I began this blog, I was talking to a friend one evening about religion &tc when we got around to the topic of what it means to be an atheist. He, like many others I've talked to (and perhaps even myself, at one point) believed that an atheist was someone who believed God did not exist. I fear this misconception is rather widespread, and since I'm too lazy to write anything productive at the moment, I will address it in this blog post, starting with

Theism¹

    Broadly, "theism" is the belief in the existence of at least one or more god² or goddess. A monotheist believes in one god; a polytheist believes in several, and an atheist believes in none. More recently (during the 17th century) the term came to mean something more specific: in the context of monotheism, being a theist meant you believed in a personal which you could come to know through divine revelation and which interacted with the natural world. I will refer to this distinction by calling the first "theism v1" and "theism v1".  People developed theism v2  so that they could contrast their belief with

Deism

     Deism is a form of theism v1, but unlike v2, deism does holds neither that god is of a personal nature nor that god interferes with the natural world. Instead, this god could be known through reasoning about nature. Many Christina deists did not believe in the infallibility of the Bible. and most distrusted organized religion. Fun fact: the founding fathers of America were mostly deists!
    Deism are also classified under a broader category of

Nontheism

     Non-theism is specifically "not theism v2". So, while deists are a form of theism v1, they are also non-theists. There are plenty of other religious non-theists, but of course that's not why I'm writing this, so I'll move on to one that isn't inherently religious or nonreligious,

Agnosticism

    Agnosticism, in regards to the existence of a deity, is the position of "not knowing." It can be weak, as in such a claim as "No one knows whether a god exists," or strong, in "It is impossible for us to know whether a god exists." Someone who holds this claim, however, can still be a theist (this is called agnostic theism). How is this possible?

    We enter into an important distinction. Up until this point, we have been talking about belief in a god. Agnosticism, however, is a position about knowledge of god. The two are not the same, even though we often conflate them. Although this distinction deserves its own blog post, suffice it to say that no matter how much I believe something to be true, it is questionable for me to claim I know it if I can't provide reasons for my belief. An agnostic theist is just such a person - they believe a god exists, but they know they don't know this. While possible to do this, I think it's much more common for an agnosticism to coincide with

Atheism

    That's right. Most people use the term agnostic to distinguish themselves from atheists, but in truth they are also atheists, because atheism is "without theism," or the lack of belief in a god. This confusion, I think, is largely due to extremists in both camps: evangelicals for making a false dichotomy of "you need just as much faith to think that God certainly does not exist", and atheists for claiming that they do in fact know a god doesn't exist. But note, you can be religious and also atheist. Ancestor worship, Shintoism, etc, are all religious even though they don't believe in a god. What most people think of as atheism, they are actually thinking of strong atheism, which is the positive claim that no gods exist (this is also contrasted to weak atheism, which is the previous, most-inclusive definition of atheism given). Finally, there's

Antitheism

    This term has two very different meanings. If you're an antitheist atheist, you are against organized religion and/or any belief in a god at all. Many of the popular "New Atheists" are atheist anti-theists, whereas the Yawists of ancient Hebrew were more probably theist anti-theists. (They condemned the worship of Ba'al, one of the three Hebrew gods.)

    So with all that, what am I? Definitely I am at least a weak atheist - I lack belief in every god of every religion I know of. For some specific gods - like the god of the Creationist movement - I am a gnostic atheist; we know that the Earth is older than 6,000 years old, and that there was never a global flood, so the god that caused all these could not exist³.

    More generally, for claims about untestable supernatural phenomenon, I would most often consider myself a weak atheist. The difference is in degree, though, and not kind. I know very certainly that there is no shark in my room, because of the limited scope of my room and my ability to investigate large objects (like sharks) in it. With a god, it's more like looking for keys and only staring at one small corner of the room. I could say that "the keys are not in this room," only if I did not really know there was much more room to look in. But I would not believe that the keys were in this room unless I had good reason to - such as actually finding them.

1: All definitions from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Theology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nontheism
2: I'm using this term interchangeably with deity, though some monotheists may object.
3: But the god who caused all these and then re-arranged all the evidence to make it look otherwise could possibly exist - I'm looking at you, Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Ego 02: New Year's Resolutions

    It's that time of the year again. The end of the year serves as a little reminder for the end of our lives. We reflect over the time that has passed, and frequently decide we are not satisfied with what we have done: "I should exercise more"; "I should eat healthier"; etc. We look at the new year as an opportunity for self-betterment and transformation, and resolve to do the things we think we should have done...

    ...and then after maybe a month, give up. Why? My thoughts are that in these situations, we're just making a wishlist, much like the one you would make for family and friends for Christmas gifts. We want external changes, but we don't often know how to find the resources for the internal changes needed. You don't (usually) just exercise every day because you decide to. That happens because you really want to exercise, either because you are doing something you enjoy or because you really internalize the need to be healthy.

    I am also making a list of resolutions, and the new year seems like a good time to implement them - after the holidays and the chaos of family, eating, and drinking that comes with it. As before, I list a brief justification of each.

Diet

1. I will maintain a low-carbohydrate, adequate protein diet (that's less than 20% carbs, and +20% or at least 65 grams of protein, per day)
2. Of the carbs I eat, almost all of them should be complex (dietary fiber)
3. On the Sunday and Wednesday of each week, I will fast during the day (no more than 300 calories, mostly protein), and have a normal evening meal.
4.  I will consume +2000 calories per day when not fasting. I will do this by trying to eat at least 3 largish meals a day.

    Normally, you go on a low-carb diet to lose weight. I am not overweight, but you do not need to be to benefit from this kind of diet. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, avoiding certain kinds of sugars can be very good for your health. Also, eating low-carb helps control insulin and blood-sugar levels. The protein and general calorie requirements are for building body (especially muscle) mass, since I will be exercising. How does that match up with fasting? There is evidence to suggest intermittent fasting is good for overall health.

Activity

1. On Tuesday and Friday afternoon,  I will try to get about an hour of mixed cardio/calisthenics.
2. On Monday and Thursday afternoon, I will try to get about an hour of running with some calisthenics.
3. Everyday, I when I wake I will do 10 minutes of stretching, and after the exercises on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, I will do another 10 minutes of stretching.
4. On Sunday and Wednesday afternoon, I will do at least 30 minutes of yoga.
5. On Sunday, I will spend 30-60 minutes walking in nature.

    Exercise probably doesn't need a justification. Calisthenics for muscles, cardiovascular for the heart, yoga and stretching for flexibility.

Religious

1. Every day, I will do three 15-minute meditations: when I rise in the morning (breathing), in the afternoon (attending to music), and before I go to bed (free association).
2. Every night, I will spend 30 minutes reading from a religious text (currently, Buddhism).
3. Every Sunday, I will attend a Buddhist gathering.
4. At least once a week, I will volunteer at least an hour of my time to service for the community.

    Although I am an atheist, I was once religious, and religion has always fascinated me. My current interest is with Buddhism. I think the tools of the Buddhist tradition are useful to the modern man (focus, inner calm, detachment, methods of dealing with stress.) As a humanist, my greatest hypocrisy is my lack of good works for my fellow humans.

Productivity

1. I will keep a log hours I spend on certain activities
2. I will keep a To-do list
3. I will make and maintain an if-then list.

    I have recently read that keeping a to-do list doesn't always help, and that one way to improve productivity is to phrase goals in "if-then" language.

    We'll see if I have what it takes to maintain this. I hope to have a more general post up soon!

Physical 02: "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"

   
    I came across this video about 3 years ago. I cannot remember what lead me to it, except for a general interest in health (at the time, I was most interested in radioactive heavy metals in tobacco). Now that I have begun experimenting with my diet (a low carbohydrate, high fat, adequate protein diet with intermittent fasting - more on that in future Physical posts) I would like to share some of the important pieces of information about diet and nutrition I've come across the way, and this video was what started me on my intellectual journey.

    The conventional wisdom is that eating fat is bad for you, so if you want to lose weight, eat less of it. Even if you have never had this said to you, you are probably aware of it - on food packaging, "low fat" is marketed as if it were synonymous with "healthy," and the same is true on most restaurant menus. And vaguely, it makes some sense - if you have too much fat on you, you should put less fat in you, right?

How did this come to be? In the early ’70s, we discovered LDLs. In the mid ’70s, we learned that dietary fat raised your LDLs. In late ’70s, we learned that LDL correlated to CVD (Cardiovascular Disease). The thought process was that dietary fats led to heart disease, but this premise is incorrect. The logic is faulty.¹

Dietary fats raises your large buoyant Pattern A LDL (VLDL) and carbs raise small, dense Pattern B LDL.²

    Essentially, scientists made a mistake, and we haven't realized it yet. The result? An increase in obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other related diseases.²

    It's not just increases in carbohydrates, however, which are contributing to these ill health effects. We've also all been told that we should eat more complex carbohydrates from whole grains and avoid simple ones like sugars. However, just like you you might be surprised to know that there are two types of LDL, with one of them being unhealthy and the other benign, there are also two types of sugars, and one of them is much worse than the other.

    It's been two strikes against conventional wisdom, but it redeems itself here: HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is bad for you, and the reason is for it's second term, "fructose." Food processing companies and the agricultural industry would have you believe HFCS is no worse for you than regular table sugar or cane sugar - and they're right! Both are bad for you! The reason is that whereas HFCS consists mostly of monosaccharides (little glucoses and fructoses floating around), sucrose consists of disaccharides (little glucoses and fructoses bonded together). The very first thing your body does to sucrose is to split the bond between the two sugar molecules, meaning the body perceives them as essentially the same thing.

    The way your body metabolizes fructose is very different from what it does to glucose. It doesn't trigger the release of insulin, which means that leptin doesn't get released, either, and this is the body's "I've eaten enough" chemical. It also doesn't suppress grehlin, which is the body's "I'm hungry" chemical. It gets worse - when your body goes to store fructose as fat, it can only be metabolized in the liver, and in doing so the liver suffers several ill effects.

In comparing chronic ethanol exposure to chronic fructose consumption, they share 8 out of 12 phenomenon. Why? Because they do the same thing. They are metabolized the same way. They ARE the same because they come from the same place. Alcohol is made by fermenting sugar. They have all the same properties because it’s taken care of by the liver in exactly the same way and for the same reason because sugar and ethanol ARE the same.²

    To wrap this up, it's worth mentioning that while HFCS and sucrose are about the same in terms of health impact, HFCS is much more insidious for economical reasons. Corn is subsidized by the America government, making corn products very cheap. As a consequence, HFCS is in a ridiculous number of processed foods, and so cheap that it's hard for families of lower incomes to avoid eating.


1: I'm not going to go through the details here. The video and the website do much better than I could.
2: http://www.live-pure.com/2012/01/sugar-the-bitter-truth-by-dr-lustig-a-summary/

Physical 01: You wouldn't steal a book...

    Actually I would, if the circumstances were right. Let me explain:

    There's been a lot of hoopla about copyright law, copyright infringement, pirating, etc. One of the common arguments I hear from the other camp is that infringing copyright is the same as stealing. Now, there are several problems with this, but in this post I will focus on just one: Google Books, specifically those books which it allows you to see the full book online through their application, but doesn't allow you to download the text for offline viewing.¹

    Some might argue that this policy of allowing you to view the work, without letting you keep it, makes Google Books like a library. Let's go with this analogy for a bit. A library has one or more copies of a book in its possession. When you borrow a book from the library, that is one less copy of the book that they have. Books cost money, and there are lots of them, so in all probability the library has only a few copies of a single book relative to the possible number of people who would be interested in reading it.

    If after borrowing a book from the library I decided not to return it, I am depriving the library of one of its relatively scare resources. Either I have cut short others people's access to the same book, or I have cost the library money because they had to buy the book again. If a significant sub-population of  people did this sort of thing², the library would at some point have to close down, and the net good for everybody would be significantly diminished.

    Here's the thing, however: strong proponents of copyright law might make this argument, which I completely agree with, and then say this is exactly the same thing as what I would be doing if I found a way to download full preview copies of Google Books, and this I strongly disagree with. This analogy is either very misinformed, or very, very dishonest. Equating these two actions - stealing a book from the library and downloading a copy of a full-preview book which Google and the book's publishers don't want me to have except through the online application - only works if the person you are describing this to doesn't really understand how computers and the Internet work³. Thankfully, I am a student in the field of Computer Science, and while I am not an expert on the subject of networking, I am smarter than the average citizen/bear about how these things work.

    If Google Books were a library, this is how it would operate: this library would maybe have about one copy of each book it possesses⁴. When you go to this library and check out a book, instead of handing you their one and only version of this book, they instantly create a copy of this book for basically nothing. Seriously. In this analogy, act of making a new copy of the book and handing you this copy is essentially the same act, and probably costs even less than it would to pay a minimum wage hourly worker for the time they went to the shelf and brought back the book⁵. The librarian then instructs you to destroy this copy of the book once the allotted time for viewing has passed.

    Yes, you read me right. But that's not quite right, because just like it's improbable that you would actually destroy the book in this scenario, you probably wouldn't delete a pdf of the same book, either. So instead, the library makes self-destroying books. Not only this, but it's actually much harder and much more expensive to add and enforce this self-destroying feature than it is to just give the copy of the book to you! And best of all, it's almost impossible to perfect - someone like me, who in this case is an expert on bookmaking, is almost always going to be able to find a way to preserve a copy of the book⁶.

    What's the purpose of all this, then? A library usually serves the purpose of a public good; the reason you feel wrong about stealing their books is that lots of people would be negatively affected by your actions. In contrast, these limitations do not apply to Google Books and its partner publishers. The only purpose I can perceive in their actions is the desire to control a resource⁷, for the purposes of making a profit from it.

    Returning to the first statement in this post: if the people who owned the content were actively trying to limit access to information and eradicate certain books/ideas from the world, you had better believe I would steal a physical book. I would then make as many copies as I could, and distribute them to as many people as I could, without demanding charge. For the greater good of society.


1: I discovered this while I was looking for an online version of the New Oxford Annotated Bible. Why was I looking for this? I could tell you "intellectual curiosity," but the truth is far less noble - I have a bad habit of debating with Creationists and other Christians online.
2: In game theory, we call actors who behave like this defectors, and those who behave altruistically cooperators.
3: I'm of the opinion that at least some content holders know this, and are therefore guilty of deceiving the public. This is a well-observed consequence of ignorance - getting duped
4: OK, probably more, what with backups and other redundant copies
5: UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIM ALERT (based on an educated guess)
6: Needless to say, this is not an admission of guilt and I am not condoning any actions which lead to copyright infringement. |:-|
7: There are of course objections you might make: "How will the authors of these works be paid if this isn't enforced?" Needless to say, I believe there are plenty of satisfactory alternatives, which I will talk about in later posts. The only people who are harmed by these are the publishers and content owners, not the authors and content creators.

Symbol 00: "Emily" by Joanna Newsom

    This past summer, some good friends of mine introduced me to the music of Joanna Newsom. Her style is difficult to pin down - baroque 'n' roll, psy folk¹. Her voice is something else altogether, sometimes sweet and melodious, often warbly and shrill, and in my opinion, always absolutely beautiful.² I could tell on my first listen that I loved her music.

    Unfortunately, for whatever reason it takes quite a long time for me to actually sit down and listen to something once I already know about it. Because of this, even though I knew about her for the entire summer, I did not get around to listening to "Ys" until nearly midway through October. You may recall that this is about the same time my grandmother died. Naturally, for this reason this album has taken on a completely different dimension of emotional significance to me.

    I am not fond of going to "song meaning" websites because I dislike reading entries which are based entirely on the person's projection of personal significance onto a work, with little or no justification or even logical connection. There are some passages in "Emily" that move me deeply entirely for the external meanings I associate with them, but elaborating them contributes nothing to someone else's understanding of the song. Therefore, I will concentrate only on themes I think Joanna develops within the work. It would be too ambitious for me to say I know what "Emily" means. But I will say this: throughout the song, Joanna seems suggest that language is inadequate for dealing with certain experiences.³

    To lay the groundwork, we might first notice the image-rich language of the song. Descriptions are in some sense clear, told in the language of physical objects and sensory impressions.

There is a rusty light on the pines tonight
Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow
Down into the bones of the birches
And the spires of the churches
Jutting out from the shadows

    While the objects themselves are described directly, what they mean and how things relate to each other, is much less clear. What, for example, were the Pharisees doing when they "dragged a comb through the meadow?" How would your heart "up and melt away"(warmth) from "that snow in the nightime"(chill)? Joanna has stated that everything, every bit of imagery, has some personal symbolic meaning,¹ and I take that statement in good faith. However, she also seems to admit that it's not necessarily the case listeners will understand what she means from the words alone. This is much softer than the claim I've made - let's turn from the general to some specific instances.

    In the song, Joanna dreams that Emily, her sister who is an astrophysicist, is "skipping little stones across the surface of the water." What's of interest to me is this next bit: "Frowning at the angles where they were lost and slipped under forever." Though talking about insignificant stones, the image suggests a troubling sense of loss. In the second stanza, Emily tries to teach Joanna "the names of the stars overhead." Joanna, for her part, seems conscious of her own limited understanding of the subject, and eager to hold onto the pieces of knowledge her sister is sharing with her. ("Though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades loosed in December / I promised you I'd set them to verse so I'd always remember.") Another way of saying this: she turns what her sister says into a song so that she won't forget or lose it. It's seems to me that whether or not she retains everything her sister said is in question; though Emily is an expert in the subject, Joanna's versification is rather simplistic (as far as astronomical facts go, anyway.)

That the meteorite is a source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

    In the next stanza, we seem to break from the dream (we return to the window from the beginning of the poem). After giving Joanna some comfort, Emily, whether intentionally or not I do not know, address the whole world with the cry "amen, amen, amen," and the world "stopped to hear you [Emily] hollering." It seems that her words have some effect on the world, and yet at the same time, it's not clear she was really aware of it until she "looked down and saw now what was happening." Are they just observing some spectacle? Later lines seem to suggest otherwise ("Emily they'll follow your lead by the letter.") I can't comprehend how what she said has significance to such a wide audience; even more so when she doesn't know what's happening until after she cries at the window. We'll come back to this when the song returns to the subject of Emily and other people.

    The stanza that follows Emily's announcement is chaotic, not only thematically but musically. Meaningful distinctions are disappearing, which in hindsight may not have been enforceable. "The lines are fading in my kingdom / (Though I have never known the way to border them in.)" Are these the effects of Emily's words? Is it because of her that "the talk in town's becoming downright sickening[?]" Far from creating order or sense, Emily seems to have disrupted fragile distinctions and introduced chaos.

    Let's compare how Joanna views Emily, and how others view her. Joanna claims: "I've seen your [Emily's] bravery, and I will follow you there," possibly likening this to "a far butte lit by a flare." In contrast, other people are described this way: "Emily, they'll follow your lead by the letter / And I make this claim that I'm not ashamed to say I knew you better / What they've seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter." Joanna is saying that she knows Emily more truly than the letters of what she's said or done; she seems to say she knows that flare that is her, is her bravery. Joanna isn't saying the others are wrong, or that what they understand is bad, but that it's incomplete.

    These two lines really hit home how words are not enough. In place of others failing to understand Emily, Joanna is now admitting she herself doesn't understand something Emily is intimately bound up with - the Universe. "Though there is nothing to help me come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning / There is a song I woke with on my lips as you sailed your great ship towards the morning." This is critical; her song, her words, are not enough to deal with the cosmos. This should immediately make the listener remember the last verse mentioned - the refrains about meteorites, meteors, and meteoroids - and think that this, too, is simply inadequate.

    Joanna's song leads to a fantasy of home, where her father will "point it out to me for the hundredth time time tonight / The way the ladle leads to a dirt red bullet of light." This is reminiscent of the dream Joanna had about Emily, and here we see Joanna failing utterly to remember astronomical facts - her father has to point it out a hundred times (OK, she's exaggerating) in a single night.

    She reflects that she could "stand for a century / Staring" filled with "Joy" as she contemplates the cosmos. The reference to time (another 100, by the way) seems itself another exaggeration - until the prospect of death appears.

Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Until we don't be

     This casts the reference to a century in a much darker light - this is of course the approximate amount of time we humans are expected to live. It's not "could" in the sense of a hypothetical; it's also "could" in the sense of this is what is physically possible, and not longer.

    Faced with the contemplation of the Universe and the prospect of our eventual death, we again seem to have words: "Told take this / And eat this." The words of someone concerned with our health, who loves us, maybe, but not words which help us "come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning." Even more poignant, Joanna leaves us with the simplistic words of someone who struggled to remember the basic facts of astronomy, and this verse, this effort, doesn't even begin to address the issues she's just brought up, sounding childishly simple.

Told
The meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

    I can't help when listening to this but to think of how my own words fall helpless and empty when when it comes to the hole the death of my grandmother has left in my family.


1: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/oct/15/folk
2:  To be fair, I have a real soft spot for unusual female vocals.
3: An ironic, though not uncommon, claim for a writer to make, given the medium.

Meta 03: Introducing "Symbol"

    For anyone out there who has been reading my blog (besides myself, of course)¹ one unanswered question must still bother them: what the hell is this blog about? Unfortunately, the short answer is "me." Not only is this a terrible way to get people to read my blog (for one thing, it sounds really egotistical, if not extremely boring) but it's also not entirely true, or at the very least misleading. This blog serves mostly as a platform for me to formalize my thoughts on topics which interest me, and (when I made it public) open myself to possible criticism or additional points of fact. This does very little to cohere the themes of the blog, and now I am going to make the problem worse, by adding an additional theme: Symbol

    "Symbol" will consist of critiques of art, most often probably music and literature, since these are the art forms I know most about. If you recall, in a previous "Meta" post I described my use of "Symbolism" in making up my fundamental worldview as valuing the ability to make abstractions, and to use one particular abstraction - language - to communicate. It seems to me that language is not the only form of communication, that all or almost all forms of art express something, link to something, represent something or intentionally fail to be a representation.

    This greatly interests me; the experiencing of a piece of artistic work, the internalizing of its use of symbols and the expression of meaning inside the mind of the audience. Earlier in my life, I had intended on becoming a fiction writer. The more I learned of the craft, however, the more I felt I was not nearly well versed enough to contribute anything meaningful to the field. There is still a story I wish to write, however, and so I am glad for the opportunity to cut my critical chops on other works of art as I learn the tools of the trade from bits of articles that I've read.

    You can expect the following soon: an analysis of the song "Emily" by Joana Newsom, and the highly ambitious and controversial claim that in the "Legend of Zelda" video game series, "Majora's Mask" is a better work of interactive fiction than "Ocarina of Time."² Maybe talking about my generation's favorite game in such an unpopular way will generate some comments for me?


1: The empty set?
2: Some of you will not be surprised to hear that I've actually gotten into shouting matches with people about this topic!