Over the rainbow

This article was written in response to ignorant statements made by a local MP, claiming homosexuality to be a curable disease. The article was published in Estonian in Õhtuleht 06.04.2013.

Hieronymus Bosch - The Garden of
Earthly Delights. Source: Wikimedia

in a kingdom far-far away, there… And this is where the stories part. In one, there are dragons, in another there are witches, and in the third one — kind fairies. Fairy-tales reflect beliefs about the world around us, and it is not possible to say that one of them is more precise, more correct or better in any way than another. The value and magic of fairy-tales comes exactly from there being many different ones, and there always being room for new ones, that will not replace any, but add to the magical-mystical world over the rainbow. And even though this claim is not entirely correct from the standpoint of folkloristics, let it illustrate the larger one — there are domains, where multitude of opinions is the valuable resource, and there is no truth as such, but each description, point of view gives new information. Wonderful information, that has given birth to the most beautiful and moving works of art, books, songs — the best achievements of human culture, that life would perhaps not even be worth living without.

Faith in Faith

Cutting the Stone, Hieronymus Bosch.  Source: Wikimedia

Religion, the content of it, is rarely a scientific subject. What is believed can range from the serene to the bizarre and disgusting. When followed to their logical conclusion, religions are exclusive of others, and the crimes that have been commited in their name are too numerous to count. It is, all in all, a quagmire of dead-ends and an infinite, yes transcendental source of conflicting convictions. And it is not just the established religions that pose this problem, for where they dwindle, a host of pseudoscientific garbage floats up and sticks. There is without doubt something inside men that makes them believe and thus the existene of religion, the act of believing is a completely natural, observable phenomenon that lends itself effortlessly to scientific study.

One of the authors dealing with the questions of why belief — regardless of how many degrees it is separated from reality — remains so commonplace is Daniel Dennett in his book "Breaking the Spell". Among the pages was buried something that could have the potential to explain why so many prefer witchdoctors and soothsayers in favor of modern medicine, for it takes but a glimpse to recognize that issues of health lend themselves to all manner of superstitions in the blink of an eye (with maybe morality being similarily feebleminded in this regard). What I am referring to is a short article(1) by Nicholas Humphrey and John Skoyles, that asks a very simple question: how does placebo work?

The theory goes roughly so: humans (and other anmals) have a host of options to self-heal — everyone's had a fever —, but they all come with associated costs, which need to be weighed against expected benefits and the situation changes greatly depending on various risk assesments, availability of food and so on and so forth. Emprirically, I can attest that during times of great stress, my body seems to postpone reactions to illness until such time that it is safe to do so. This might be anecdotal, but no doubt it would be wiser to have a runny nose than risk a high fever, that is energetically expensive, when food is scarse. Or throwing up and consequently being weak of dehydration is not the best of options when the sabre-toothed tiger is on the hunt.

These decisions are not made consciously, but made they still are, by what the authors call the gubernator medicatrix (And I here bow my head to N. Wiener for altogether different reasons), a subsystem that has evolved to make those decisions, very cautiously bringing us from there to here over the millenia. The thing is — while we cannot talk to the helmsman, we cannot choose to take over the management of our natural defences, there is a way to access those corridors of power. And this is where belief enters the picture for we can, sometimes literally, pray to him, and as opposed to entities out and above us, he listens.

The governor is not a transcendental machine, it bases its decisions on risk assesments on the available data. It has developed to operate in much harsher conditions, at this day and age, rarely does the driving force of natural selection, the fearsome sabre-toothed tiger, frequent our neighborhood no more. But being very old, he is somewhat ignorant of this fact. Thus while it should be safe to deploy our natural defences most of the time, the conservative governor simply has no access to this knowledge, for it dwells in the dark ages and stubbornly refuses to switch the switch for example when the time of the year is such that food has traditionaly bee scarse (read about the wonderful summer/winter experiment with hamsters from Humphreys paper) . If we can influence him to see things in a more favourable light, then he will make a different decision. The way to talk to the governor is — as said — by praying, or meditating, or playing with crystals and channeling the energies 4th dimension, by tripping on shrooms and talking to dead ancestors — whatever act you need to put up to make you believe things are gong to be A-OK. Yes, visiting a doctor can work just as well, if evidence-based medicine is what you believe in.

Placebo works by belief. Not in placebo per se, but in whatever our chosen witchdoctor tells us. We trick, we fool and we cheat, and it gives results. Now does placebo actually work is an entirely different question and a quick glance tells me that results vary and more studies are needed. But there are situations where we can not, within established science, conduct certain tests and can not therefore know for certain Take for example cancer — how do you conduct a blind test for that, ethically. And hamsters don't count, because for all we know, their belief systems are somewhat less developed.

So in conclusion, because information about environment can be crucial to trigger proper reaction to infections and utilize the self-healing capacity humans possess, and because the ancient gubernator medicatrix is too pessimistic for our modern and relatively safe world, belief can trick it into being less cautios and in turn really do make us heal. And this is a good idea, because it makes no claims to the supernatural and lends itself to criticism, while also hitting home the idea that those who practise a religion are not stupid, for what chance has our conscious mind against millions of years of survival instincts. Few, if any.


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1. Humphrey, N. Skoyles, J. "The evolutionary psychology of healing: a human success story." Current Biology, Sept 10, vol 22. no. 17. Free PDF version at: http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/2012Healing.pdf

The Tower of Babel

Tower of Babel. Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Source: Wikimedia

There is no god, but as those who know me have probably heard me say — there is language and language is the closest thing to divine we can achieve. In this regard, the etiology of the Tower of Babel is a captive one, if only as a stepping stone to a few points about human communications, and a few fallacies.

It is the story of one tongue, that all men understand, therefore a condition that simply cannot be. Problems start with the misunderstanding that language is a tool to name existing objects. This would mean not only that objects, rather than concepts, exist, but also that in theory, there is a right word, a name, for every object.

This is fundamentally wrong, as a characteristic of language is producing an infinite combination out of a definite set — for example by using phonemes limited both by our physiology and cultural background, we can express endless amount of ideas. This is what language is. Naming every single item out there with absolute precision is a classification system, and one that is impossible to achieve.

Why? Because when you take a lump of sugar and plunge it into your cup of tea — or whatever is your poison — the cube goes through an infinite amount of steps from being a sugar cube (and what is that, exactly?) to being sugar molecules dissolved in herbal infusion. I dare you give a name to every stage as the cube progresses on that scale. Every single stage, not the main ones, or we cannot speak of precision and have to resort to vague concepts. And once you've named them all, you need to repeat it all over again with next cube, if you're a sweet-tooth as me, because no cube of sugar is the same as the other. It's the basic “how many trees is a forest” type of problem.

There is an obvious solution to this, and to a great host of situations where it is easier to blame others rather than accept our limits — “God could do it!” Beyond the magical boundary of the supernatural lies the power to precicely name all the cubes of sugar in the universe, in each of their stages, both in the past and in the future, including the imaginary ones. Yes, indeed, in a divine language, where everything has its proper name, that is possible. But that language in turn would be absolutely useless for communicating divine knowledge to mortals — AFAIK, most religions have a thing or two to say about how we can not fully grasp the divine, and in that they are correct — for the simple reason that every single word uttered would be uttered only once, as the thing that it referred to would not be that thing any more after the word has been used. Divine language is the ultimate deconstruction of meaning.

Therefore it is not things that are named, and words refer to concepts, rather than realities. Some men might have different concepts in mind than others, and thus the words they use carry slightly different meanings, hence confusion is bound to arise. Confusion is that natural state of languages, but only up to a certain point. As humans are different, they are also the same, and while our understanding of sugar cubes, or colours, or what is right or wrong, morally, might differ to some extent, it also overlaps to an extent that makes communication not precise, but adequate. Whole human civilization rests upon the fact that I sort of understand you, and you kind of follow my meaning.

Thus when all men suddenly spoke one language and understood one another, god had every reason to be worried. For those men must have crossed the aforementioned border of divinity and achieved omnipotence. And were I a god of a monotheistic religion, I too would very upset at this news of competition. Hence the ensuing acts of retribution and the crumbling of the tower.

For me the beauty of languages is their very imprecision, which allows for new meanings to be generated, and the beauty of communication is that it happens regardless of the confusion, and allows us, very briefly, to touch one another.