How to Pick Your Wordview: Step 2

Step 2: Change your mind frequently

Most people slowly change their mind on issues of philosophy or religion. I think fear plays a major role in this: "what would my pastor think?" "what would my parents think?" "Will someone date me if I change my mind?".

This is ridiculous, because there is SO much to learn, and it is extremely unlikely that you were lucky enough to grow up with all of the right answers on complex philosophical issues.

It is important to change your mind frequently, because this is how you grow. It allows your ideas to evolve--you can test new ideas, and see how they fit into larger paradigms. You can see the world from multiple perspectives.

Changing your mind is difficult, because it takes mental exertion. This is good, because it serves to train your mind--you will get better and better at thinking about complex issues, and this will allow you to grow as a thinker.

People will also enjoy talking to you more. How many conversations have you been in on matters of religion, politics, morality, or philosophy in which neither party admits that they are wrong? Or neither party changes his/her mind?

These conversations tend to be frustrating, because they take great effort, but are fruitless--both parties are more emotionally annoyed than ideologically enlightened.

So just be willing to change your mind, and tell people when you do. Say, "That was a good point, I hadn't thought of that, you have changed my mind."

I'm not saying to change your mind just to change your mind--I am saying that you are wrong a lot more often than you think, and it is really helpful to develop your ability to sense when you are wrong, accept it, update your philosophy, and then keep making progress! The friends you make as a side effect of doing this will serve as awesome companions on your journey.

It is uncomfortable to change your mind, but it is essential for finding truth.

Biological evolution takes place because of mutations. If the mutation rate goes up, evolution can take place at a faster rate. HIV is so hard to defeat, from a medical perspective, because it's mutation rate is SUPER high.

So think like HIV. Change a lot. Test ideas, and keep the good. The faster you evolve, the more likely it is that you will find truth.

How to Pick Your Worldview: Step 1

This is the start of a series on how to pick your worldview. What do you believe? Are any religions actually true? How can you know?

I want to give everyone the tools they need to figure this out for themselves.

Step 1: Commit to search for truth
Make the decision to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Start to accept that what you grew up believing about God or about religion might not be true. Sure, maybe the evidence points towards what you already believe; maybe it doesn't. You don't know unless you look at the evidence.

Many choose not to search because they think the evidence to make an informed decision does not exist--and this simply isn't true. There is a wealth of evidence!

Maintaining an open mind and a commitment to conform your thoughts and beliefs to reality is essential. Without it, you can't expect to find real answers to the most important questions in life.

Comic: Dart Board of Religion

A Biological Perspective on Human Life

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DNA is what makes a species what it is. The Genome (a complete set of DNA) is completely responsible for the biological identity of an organism. True, the environment can influence development, but the environment can only shift variables one way or the other based on what is already made possible by the Genome.

DNA is made of long strands of Nucleotides, of which there are 4: Adenine, Guanine, Thymine, and Cytosine (A, G, T, and C). These four Nucleotides are the four Letters in the alphabet of life. The Letters form Words, all of which are 3 Letters long. Three Letter triplets of Nucleotides code for 20 Amino Acids. The combinations of letters results in 20 Words.

The 20 Words are combined to form a multitude of Sentences, ranging from a 20 to 33,000 Words in length: Amino Acids are the Words that are strung together to form the Sentences, called Proteins. Proteins perform most of the functions of living cells.

The combination of all the Sentences makes up a Book. A Genome is a Book. The Book is made of DNA.

In Books, the Sentences dictate the story. In the Genome, Proteins dictate the function.

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A book is defined by its letters. If you change one letter in a book, the book isn't exactly what it used to be. Change 10 letters, and it is a bit different. Change 100 letters--even more. Change 50% of the sentences, and 50% of the identity of the book has changed.

Each of us is a unique book, filled with a unique set of letters. The entire book is the dictionary entry under the word "You". The dictionary of life contains entries for every organism that ever lived--each perfectly defined by its unique genome.

Here is one tiny bit of the dictionary entry for one organism, the "human" whose genome was sequenced in The Human Genome Project:

 

https://vimeo.com/11711801

We "humans" are very similar to each other. We share over 99% of our letters in common.

As we look into the evolutionary past, however, we run into "species" that share 99% of our letters, and others that share 98%. Still others share 97%, and 94%. We keep moving backward in evolutionary time and we see forks in the road--several groups with 84% of the same letters, but none of them with the same differences, and EACH individual in EACH group never sharing exactly the same letters as its parents or offspring.

Every book is unique.

Biological life is not black and white. Biological life is shades of gray.

Define for me, then, a biological human.

Yes, you could assign groups of individuals in specific places that have the ability to reproduce with one another a species name--but this is merely a crutch to learn things about our world at the present time--not a suitable definition for actual species. If we grant that definition, then all species are equivalent. We simply shift the time range from the present back 30 years, and then 30 more years, and then 30 more all the way back to the origin of species, and the whole while we have groups of individuals in specific places that have the ability to reproduce with one another--but at the end we have modern "humans", and at the beginning we have a single celled organism or protobiont.

If we grant that definition, all books are "Moby Dick".

It is far better to define each book as it is--by its unique sequence of letters. Yes, genres and sub-genres can be argued over, but such things are subjective matters of opinion. There is no invisible wall that truly separates one genre from another--no magical percentage that can objectively differentiate between groups of letters.

Is what makes humans "human" a subjective matter of opinion?

Biological life comes in shades of gray.

Based on biology, all of us are individuals--we must look to the philosophers if we want to know anything more.

Read Parts 1-6 for my Philosophical Perspective on Human Life

The Argument from a Dissenting "Expert" in a Quazi-Related Field

In the discussions on Climate Change and Evolution, I have noticed a common type of argument that, for some reason, has great psychological pull.

Here is an example from ThePoachedEgg:

The article begins, "A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution."

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Professor James M. Tour is one of the ten most cited chemists in the world. He is famous for his work on nanocars (pictured left, courtesy of Wikipedia), nanoelectronics, graphene nanostructures, carbon nanovectors in medicine, and green carbon research for enhanced oil recovery and environmentally friendly oil and gas extraction. He is currently a Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Rice University. He has authored or co-authored 489 scientific publications and his name is on 36 patents. Although he does not regard himself as an Intelligent Design theorist, Professor Tour, along with over 700 other scientists, took the courageous step back in 2001 of signing the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”, which read: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
On Professor Tour’s Website, there’s a very revealing article on evolution and creation, in which Tour bluntly states that he does not understand how macroevolution could have happened, from a chemical standpoint (all bold emphases below are mine – VJT):

As well as the article's quote from Dr. Tour:

Although most scientists leave few stones unturned in their quest to discern mechanisms before wholeheartedly accepting them, when it comes to the often gross extrapolations between observations and conclusions on macroevolution, scientists, it seems to me, permit unhealthy leeway. When hearing such extrapolations in the academy, when will we cry out, “The emperor has no clothes!”?

…I simply do not understand, chemically, how macroevolution could have happened. Hence, am I not free to join the ranks of the skeptical and to sign such a statement without reprisals from those that disagree with me? … Does anyone understand the chemical details behind macroevolution? If so, I would like to sit with that person and be taught, so I invite them to meet with me.

The article concludes:

In a more recent talk, entitled, Nanotech and Jesus Christ, given on 1 November 2012 at Georgia Tech, Professor Tour went further, and declared that no scientist that he has spoken to understands macroevolution – and that includes Nobel Prize winners! Here’s what he said when a student in the audience asked him about evolution.

I will now summarize the argument:

1. Dr. Tour is a very successful scientist, respected in his field of chemistry.
2. Dr. Tour claims that he does not understand how macroevolution could take place from the perspective of a chemist.
3. Dr. Tour claims that evolutionary biologists also don't understand how macroevolution could take place.
4. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that macroevolution didn't take place. If Dr. Tour thinks so, then certainly others can be justified in thinking so.

Here is why this argument is useless: If we allow this type of argumentation to be valid, I can simply make the same argument:

1. Dr. Dylan Schwilk is a highly successful scientist, respected in his field of plant evolution and ecology.
2. Dr. Schwilk claims that he DOES understand how macroevolution could take place.
3. Dr. Schwilk claims that evolutionary biologists DO understand how macroevolution could take place.
4. Therefore it is reasonable to think that macroevolution did take place. If Dr. Schwilk thinks so, then certainly others can be justified in thinking so.

Then I could proceed to do the same thing, making the argument with every scientist that does and doesn't support macroevolution--and we would come out with a huge majority in favor of macroevolution (including many on par with Dr. Tour--except with PhD's actually in the field of evolutionary biology).

If ThePoachedEgg's argument against macroevolution is valid, then my argument for macroevolution, using the EXACT SAME reasoning, is more valid. I can give more anecdotes about impressive scientists who do accept macroevolution, understand how macroevolution could happen, and think that other scientists do understand how macroevolution could happen.

Does this mean that dissenting scientists are never right? Obviously not! Dissenting scientists can totally be right--but the thing is, they need to have evidence and arguments that support their position. You can't just accuse an entire field of scientists of "not understanding their field", like ThePoachedEgg does, and expect rational people to believe you.

Dissenting scientists, with solid evidence, win Nobel Prizes. Good evidence and good arguments win in science--not anecdotes from dissenters in separate fields who have epiphanies about the supposed lack of understanding present in the majority of scientists in the actual field being discussed. If evolution isn't supported by the majority of evidence and arguments, collect your Nobel Prize, ThePoachedEgg.

Fine-Tuning: The Normalization Problem

If you aren't familiar with the Fine-Tuning argument, check out this list of posts: http://honestsearchfortruth.blogspot.com/search/label/Fine-Tuning

The basic argument is this: Out of the set up possible physics, the subset that allows for abiogenesis (life arising from non-life) is very small.

Multiple physical parameters, such as the strength of gravity and the cosmological constant are "fine-tuned". If they were slightly larger or smaller, during the inflationary phase of the universe, we would have ended up with either the entire universe being a black hole, or a gargantuan fizz of hydrogen and helium (not enough attractive force for these elements to condense into stars, and stars allow for heavy elements, and without heavy elements you can't have abiogenesis).

There are certainly other forms of life than our own, but that doesn't effect the argument--there are more ways for life to not exist than there are ways for life to exist.

It appears as though we won multiple lotteries all in a row (and only bought one ticket for each lottery), therefore it is reasonable to conclude that there was an intelligent agent influencing physics.

I have addressed all of the common objections to the Fine-Tuning Argument--multiverse theory, the anthropic principle, pointing out that most of our universe won't support life--in my Honors Thesis: http://honestsearchfortruth.blogspot.com/2014/07/my-honors-thesis-on-fine-tuning.html

While each of those common counter-arguments completely fails to address (and sometimes even understand) Fine-Tuning, there is one objection that may be a home-run counter: The Normalization Problem.

For the Fine-Tuning argument to work, we need to be able to set up some sort of probability--how likely or unlikely is it that we have the physics that we have?

We assume that physics could be something other than what it is, and then adjust gravity or other parameters slightly. We see what effect those slight changes would have on our universe. But what would happen if gravity were infinity? Or negative infinity?

There aren't bounds on how big or small each parameter could be--because we allow them to change from the get-go, there isn't some "invisible wall" that lets us stop somewhere.

Because of this, we can't generate a probability. There isn't a mathematical way to describe our situation, and it certainly isn't reasonable to punt to our intuitions--how could we possibly have accurate intuitions about such an abstract topic?

I will pursue this issue further, but it may be a home-run against the Fine-Tuning argument.

Guest post by Alex: Where Have All The Open Minds Gone?

The following is an excerpt from a conversation I had with a friend, Alex, who is discouraged by the lack of willingness for people to have an open mind when arguments don't coincide with their political alignment:

The problem with America right now is a problem of ideology: ideology makes it very difficult for someone to decipher the forest from the trees. Information that supports your ideological position will be acknowledged and taken as 'the truth', whereas information that conflicts with it will be ignored.

America (and other modern European states) are strange, strange places where reality is divided up as either 'conservative' or 'liberal' - as if reality could be placed into check-boxes. Until Americans can see this, most dialogue will just go back and forth between people who already agree with each other: there isn't any sharing of meaningful information or solutions to political problems between parties or across party lines.

I have found that I can give great reasons for thinking a certain way - but if, for example, someone is a conservative, they won't listen to reason regarding the possibility of climate change.

I echo Alex's frustration at the lack of willingness for people to modify their ideology due to political affiliation.