Stuart Morse

(I realize that sharing random snippets from my book begs some context. Let me provide this by answering the following rhetorical questions – why am I writing it, why is it important and what is it useful for? In addressing the subject at hand I’ll be breaking certain taboos. This is, in my view, the only way to move past the superficial and begin an authentic discourse on life’s struggles.)

Being the inhabitant of a human brain and body I’ve been dumbfounded by my inability to meet my own expectations in many areas of life. In elementary school my desire was to avoid punishment, but the need for novelty and stimulation often won out over the guidance provided by my teachers. While this never led me to engage in illegal activities, the Principle at my school did say this to my mother during a parent-teacher interview:

“I’ve met boys like Stuart before, one of them came at me with a knife and I broke his arm! Just think of all the terrible things he’s done at home. He’ll go to jail for sure.”

The worst thing my mother could remember was my picking paint off the wall in the bathroom.

The principal was basing his assessment of my character on a couple of incidents: one in which I hid a thumb tack in Plasticine and put it on a chair, and another when I took a reel of fencing wire and inserted the ends into a 240v power outlet. No harm came to anyone in either of these cases. Had I plugged one end of the fencing wire into the live receptacle I would have been the one electrocuted, but providentially I had plugged them into the neutral and the ground. As I was only six years old I didn’t realise that there was such a distinction. In order to use the event to communicate the seriousness of my action, and provide an object lesson, the principle announced at an assembly of the whole school the next day

“I’ve bailed out of a fighter plane on fire at 8,000 feet, I’ve been shot down behind Japanese lines, but I’ve never been as afraid as when I pulled those wires out!”

What was it that motivated me to behave this way, and is it even possible to be “obedient”? The contrast between my behaviour at school and at home was certainly because I found school to be torture, whereas home was a place of solace and creative play. My misbehaviour at school was a desperate attempt to escape boredom.

While behaviours, such as harming others, can always be judged as unnecessary, destructive and cruel, the seriousness of a misdemeanour may be judged quite differently by two different people, or by the same person at different times. A case in point – Marijuana becomes legal in Canada as of July 1^st 2018. Currently, the possession of up to 30 grams of dried Marijuana is a summary offense, one for which you are convicted without appearing before a judge and jury. It still results in a criminal record (and all the restrictions that come with that), but the offense is regarded as less significant than an indictable one. While this is the view of the governing authorities until July 1^st, many of the general public believe that the law denies them the right for compassionate access to a necessary therapeutic drug. This has inspired some to open illegal “dispensaries” or “compassion clubs” across the country which are subject to closure by the police (an event that happens rarely enough to make the operation of such businesses a viable activity). From the dispensary operator’s perspective the law itself is at fault. A challenge for the government, after July 1^st, however, is what to do with the criminal records of those convicted under the old law.

There are many examples of this values-based plasticity that can be observed in the work place, the home, church and elsewhere. In some cases judgment and censure may result from the kind of mood the authority figure is in at the time of the infraction. In others it may be due to ignorance of the facts or a misinterpretation of the evidence. If our goal is to always do the right thing, however, we are going head to head with at least three separate principles:

1, Our nature, which seeks reward regardless of the conventions or consequences.
2, The fickle aspects of human judgment we share with the people in our lives.
3, The knowledge that the activity we are engaging in is against the rules in some way.

As a child of one of our friends once shared with his mother “mom, it’s so easy to be bad and so hard to be good”.

In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin describes a similar experience in his struggle with pride (one of the Seven Deadly Sins of Christian tradition):

“In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”

If that isn’t hard enough, what about the things we do wrong that we didn’t know were unlawful? We are still guilty even though we weren’t aware of the offense. Once the infraction is identified to us we can own it and admit our responsibility, but what if it was never revealed to us? In that case we would be guilty and unable to make restitution. The reason these things are important is that there are real-time consequences to our behaviour. Relationships (and our physical bodies) are extremely vulnerable to certain behaviours, and life is all about relationships, one way or another. As Benjamin Franklin also wrote:

“I grew convinced that truth, sincerity, and integrity, in dealings between man and man, were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I formed written resolutions, which still remain in my journal-book, to practice them ever while I lived. Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such; but I entertained an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them, yet probably those actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures, all the circumstances of things considered.”

Interpreting this statement in the language of Non-Violent Communication we see two classes of strategy for meeting our physical, emotional and psychological needs. There are those actions which meet our needs but are destructive, and those that do the same but are beneficial. In the broader scheme of things, living an authentic life is not about a cut and dried distinction between right and wrong. We can’t overcome our natural tendencies and navigate the vicissitudes of human existence by will power alone, by telling ourselves “don’t do that”. But if we admit our own limitations and embrace the fact that, as fallible human beings, we are bound to mess up, what is the solution? (You’ll find the answer in the book!)

One thing that’s certain, is that we will meet our needs either beneficially or destructively. When needs go unmet the state of dysphoria within is almost palpable – it’s a state that cannot be sustained. Identifying the difference between destructive and beneficial ways of meeting needs takes practice, and destructive strategies are usually the easiest to implement. The destructive strategy involves very little short-term cost to the individual and fulfills its purpose quickly. Time, education and wisdom are needed to identify and implement a beneficial strategy. The six year old “me”, in the classroom, chose the quick fix of risk taking and novelty seeking behaviours to create a state of being (excitement/engagement) that the school environment had failed to provide. This state of being was a function of neural activity inside my nascent brain.

The quintessential quick fix for most unpleasant mental states is psychotropic drug use. Consider this quote from a post on the Humans of New York Facebook page from yesterday (May 1st):

“I was raised with that Jewish intellectual worship of knowledge. But all my professors in college were small-minded [people] getting off on their own power, wanting me to parrot them while telling me they didn’t. So I decided I was a nihilist and that I was going to do as many drugs as possible. If the goal is to spend your whole life trying to get rewards to trigger chemicals in your brain, why not go straight for the chemicals? But that didn’t work out very well. It quickly became less of a philosophy, and more of a massive drug addiction.”

This individual sidestepped the education system, and used their knowledge of the brain’s operation to create a quick solution. Instead of gaining the skills required to create a rewarding life he went for the reward immediately, with devastating consequences. Drugs fake the experience of meeting needs, and the withdrawals render the state after using worse than the state before. Sadly drug use has become the default life strategy for many in North America, to the point where in British Columbia, in December 2016 alone, 142 people lost their lives to drug overdoses (922 deaths for the whole of the year). In the USA for the whole of 2016 the death toll is estimated to be between 59,000 and 65,000. Meanwhile in Portugal (a country with more than twice the population of British Columbia) the death rate from overdoses has dropped to 30 per year. The turn-around in Portugal is due to the de-stigmatization of drug use, a redesign of the medical and legal systems, and the legalization of all drugs (more about that in the book).

The questions I attempt to answer in “The Science of Spirituality” relate to neuro-physiological function. What is reward and why is it so alluring? What is the correlation between a spiritual practice and neuro-chemistry and why is a reliance on a higher-power taught by so many drug and alcohol recovery programs? For an increasing number of people, understanding these issues has become a matter of life and death.

(This is post 2 in a series from the new book, “The Science of Spirituality”. The term “silo mentality” usually refers to a communication breakdown between departments within a single organization when members of different teams fail to share information with each other. I’ll be using the term slightly differently by taking it beyond the confines of a single organization and applying it to the existence of belief and self-interest within communities. )

Silos exist in any area of industry, expertise, faith or values based conviction. Inhabitants of silos have a core set of beliefs in common, but there is also a fringe where disagreement occurs. Silos are formed and shaped by aspects of the human condition and while their adherents may see them in rational black and white terms, perspectives are usually fuzzily constructed at the intersection of dogma, choice, personality type and experience. Silos also exist in scientific communities. Although science is commonly misunderstood as a library of facts there are actually no facts in science.

The true scientific mind is always open to a better explanation for any observed phenomenon, and, in such a mind, each so-called “fact” is always a candidate for revision. It is in the area of re-evaluation that conjecture, opinion, faith and taboo exist. Far from being a codified system of objective fact, as it is often presented, science is a perspective on reality that works well enough to accomplish some amazing feats. Science can put a satellite in orbit and land the first stage of the rocket on a barge in the Atlantic. It can construct towers thousands of feet high with reasonable faith in their ability to withstand winds, earthquakes and impacts.  

Other areas of research, however, are either far more complex or not as mature as those of rocket science and construction engineering. The arena of healthcare, for example, is vast, and scientific policy is constantly being re-evaluated. We were told that fat was bad for us so the entire food industry moved away from fats, often substituting sugar for flavor and texture. More recent studies indicate that naturally produced fats are good for the body and only hydrogenated fats cause health issues by raising bad cholesterol and lowering good cholesterol. At the same time, other recent studies have shown that sugar, once viewed as a healthy alternative to fats, is in fact a poison that contributes to breast cancer, obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. As kids we were told to avoid sun exposure, but a recent Swedish multi-decade study has shown that sun avoidance is as destructive to the body as smoking. The negative effects of sun avoidance on cardiovascular health were so profound as to more than outweigh the skin cancer risks. 

What to do with this information? Do we ignore the latest scientific findings and leave things as they are while awaiting more comprehensive research? The ethical decision would seem to be to act on the best knowledge available. But this often comes at a high cost. Legislating changes across an entire industry comes at a premium and much energy is required to build momentum. In the sugar context, many stakeholders currently depend on government subsidies for corn production as corn is a primary source of sugar in the USA. The prospect of losing these subsidies will predispose the industry to resist any change in policy. Additionally, most of the corn used in sugar production is genetically engineered by Monsanto, a company with massive lobbying clout and friends in high places. Factors like these give rigidity to silos.  

Probably the most notable example of industrial resistance to the findings of science concerns global warming. It’s true that 95% of climate scientists believe climate change is real and that human activity is the cause (a perspective that I happen to share), but it is a belief based on the latest research and not a fact. It is possible that further research will show this conclusion to be false. Do we act in faith and, at fantastic cost, attempt to eliminate carbon dioxide and methane emissions from all industries, only to find that climate change was not due to human activity, or do we risk the future survival of our society by taking no action? The people who stand to lose big to climate legislation are pre-disposed towards climate denial and become members of the climate denial silo. Do they take this position based on a rational analysis of the data or on a perceived risk to their efforts, expertise and investments? As Upton Sinclair wrote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”. 

How are the walls of a science-based silo constructed? Let’s take an example from the late 19th century. It was proposed that as waves on water require the existence of water as a substrate, and sound waves in air need gasses for their propagation, there must be an analogous substrate through which light waves are propagated. Scientists at the time called this the Liminiferous Ether. Another concept, the Ether Wind, was proposed through which the earth must travel on its journey around the sun. If that were the case, it seemed logical that, in the same way as a transatlantic flight takes longer to travel from east to west as it fights the winds of the jet stream, so light would travel slower if it were moving in the opposite direction to the Ether Wind. It was also suggested that as the earth orbits the sun at a speed of approximately 30KM per second, light would travel faster if the earth was moving into the Ether Wind and slower if it was moving away. Between the 1880’s and the 1920’s several experiments were devised to test this hypothesis, but all of them determined that the speed of light (in a particular medium) is constant regardless of the motion of the earth. As the speed of light was assumed to be invariant by Einstein in the formulation of his General Theory of Relativity, and as that theory has weathered the test of time for the past century, the concept of the Ether was dropped.  

It was not just dropped however, it also became a taboo. During the genesis of Einstein’s General Theory, proponents of the Ether theory became devil’s advocate to Einstein’s relativistic ideas. Much passion and energy were expended in these discussions, but relativity emerged as the winner. Any further discussion on the subject, even from new perspectives, could be construed as money bet on a horse that had already lost the race. It could also be viewed as an attempt to reassess who actually won. It would be a challenge to those who bet on, or continue to support, the winning horse and would threaten their winnings, ultimately their own sense of expertise and intelligence (self-concept).  

Science should be objective, but as its very existence depends on the activities of human minds there is always a subjective component. As I mentioned earlier, Silos have their fringe members – we could broadly categorize these as people who care more about the truth than being right. Because taboos prevent public discussion and analysis they actually hinder the search for truth. Being a seeker I decided to test the boundaries of the Ether silo by asking a question on the web site Quora. Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, endowed chair in physics, Stanford University had this to say about the nature of the vacuum of space: 

“[The Ether] rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum… Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with ‘stuff’ that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.” 

The ether he describes here is also known as quantum foam, dark energy and zero-point energy. This is composed of masses of sub-atomic particles that constantly come into existence and then disappear again. It made sense to me that this could be the substrate through which light propagates, so I directed this question to the general scientific community: 

“Is light propagated by the collective oscillation of quantum foam particles?” 

I received four answers to this question. A Master of Science student conducting a double major in Physics and Literature at Harvard University said “Yes, that is accurate”. A certain D. Smith, with no noted field of expertise, but who has answered over 3000 questions, mostly in the field of physics, said “No.” The third answer, from a Bachelor of Physics post graduate was “Maybe, but it’s unlikely”. Finally, a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia answered, “To the best of my understanding, the ‘quantum foam’ does not consist of particles.” 

In the absence of any further discussion I cannot claim to know the individual positions of these writers on the subject, but these responses do beg the question – why do four people from the same field of expertise have such diverging views on the subject? Do the course materials at different universities contain different information? I don’t believe that’s the case. What we’re seeing is the scientific method in action using a form of peer-review. One thing to note is that the first answer (Yes, that is accurate) received so many down-votes that it was hidden from public view. What we can assert from these responses, however, is that the person who answered “Yes, that is accurate” likely belongs to the Ether theory silo, and the one who answered “No” probably does not.  

To be continued…

(This is the first entry in a series exploring the background to a new book with the working title “The Science of Spirituality”.)

We live in an age where science is being threatened by a barrage of alternative facts. Not only are conservative political leaders gagging scientists, removing funding for research programs and denying the findings of those programs, but the quality of peer reviewed literature is being scrutinized. This is not a bad thing to focus on. In a recent paper, published in the journal Nature it was found that 70% of scientists had been unable to reproduce the experimental results of another scientist, at least once, and 50% had been unable to reproduce their own results. You would think that the results of research conducted by scientist A, and described in a paper published by scientist A, could be reproduced by scientist A. This appears to not be true in a small number of cases. This on its own might cause us to question the trustworthiness of some portion of scientific literature. 

In another case the Guardian newspaper published an article describing a sting operation that was launched against 255 open-access scientific journals. In this exploit a fake research paper was submitted for publication. Here are the statistics regarding the due diligence expended by the editorial staff when selecting this paper for publication: 

The “wonder drug paper”…was accepted by 157 of the journals and rejected by 98. Of the 255 versions that went through the entire editing process to either acceptance or rejection, 60% did not undergo peer review. Of the 106 journals that did conduct peer review, 70% accepted the paper. 

My goal in making these observations is not to diminish the weight of scientific inquiry, but rather to underline the importance of maintaining scientific and journalistic standards. We should also strive to base our claims on sound reasoning. In the political sphere it has become fashionable to make outlandish and unsubstantiated assertions in public. Take for example the claim by Ben Carson, during the 2016 presidential primaries, that the pyramids were built by the Joseph of the Bible to store grain during the seven years of plenty (described in Genesis 41). He presented no evidence for this, but said that this is what he chooses to believe. He is quite entitled to have an opinion on this. I might disagree with his logic, noting that if it was Joseph’s plan to build a structure for storing grain it would need a large internal storage capacity (something the pyramids lack). However, if he were to make this assertion the foundation of his presidential campaign he would not be receiving my vote. Other voters, who would presumably support the same belief, would be at liberty to cast a ballot in his direction, but this by no means gives credence to a claim for which there is absolutely no evidence. 

Although making such a claim might not meet the criteria of rationality it does illustrate why we hold beliefs – we choose them. Regardless of the process by which the belief comes to be, whether it be by gut feel alone or as the result of extensive research, there comes a point where we are “convinced”. From that point on, or until we obtain new data or experiences that change our mind, we are a believer. This is equally true for Christians and Atheists. There is no way to be the other person and fully understand the reasons why they see the world the way they do, we are limited to either the things we observe or the things that are imposed on us from without. Regardless of the source of the data, however, we are always responsible for making a choice. What we can do, and what rarely happens, partly because of the echo chamber principle is to have empathy for the other and put ourselves in the other’s shoes.  We rarely change our beliefs  when under the pressure of reason, in fact, we tend to dig in our heels and hold onto our beliefs even harder! This approach does not promote truth.

The Ben Carson example illustrates a case where the lack of evidence is meaningful because accumulating evidence by observation is possible. That, however, is not always an option. Due to the limitations of our five senses there are many features of reality which cannot be observed directly without using devices to supplement our natural abilities. The list is long but includes such things as radio waves, the moons of Jupiter and bacteria. Prior to the invention of the radio receiver, the telescope and the microscope there was no direct evidence for the existence of such phenomena. In this light it would be arrogant in the extreme to assume that we are currently in possession of the sum total of knowledge regarding the unseen. In the absence of a comprehensive awareness of such things the inquiring mind would do well to consider how observable phenomena might provide indirect evidence for realities that cannot, as yet, be measured. 

In the following posts my aim is to make the distinction between concepts who’s existence is supported by the scientific method and those which lie beyond the reach of science. The latter include ideas and speculations for which there is both no direct evidence and no way of obtaining it. What I hope to avoid is the promotion of claims for which there is no evidence at all. 

Stuart Morse