The Interconnectedness of All

 Thank you all for your efforts to prepare a poem or statement for our meeting Friday night, May 28.  As promised, I present your poetic works here.  The topic was the interconnectedness of all existence, based on the UU 7th Principle.  Here is what you shared:  (I will update this as the documents are shared with me)

Tony

What is the connection between you and me

Between sky and earth, or the bird and bee

I believe it is there, but does that make it so

Is belief enough, or do I have to know

Nancy

(waiting for your creation to be sent to me)

Gayle

(also waiting for you to send me your creations)

If others come up with something they would like to share, I would be happy to add your contributions here.

Can we trust our perceptions?

 A classic problem with ancient (Greek) philosophy was the untrustabilty of direct experiences of the world around us.  There were many, many ways in which our perceptions seem to fool us into thinking what we see is real, when it is not.  Classically, the optical illusion of a stick in a glass of water comes to mind.  The refraction of the water makes the stick appear to have a bend at the point it enters the water, when it clearly does not if it is pulled out.  Another is that drinking wine makes the floor tip left and right, making walking difficult.  Heat waves make the distance look like it is wet, when it is not.  That sort of thing.

Empiricists believe that the world can be known from direct experience.  "Just look around", they say, "and see the world as it really is!"   Can we look at a sunset and understand what we are seeing without understanding about light's interaction with atmospheric particles and low angle refraction?  Can we see a human birth and understand all the biologic and physiological phenomena at work, all at once?  Experience gives us access to certain sorts of phenomenon, but at a sort of macro level, at least historically.  Science helps us to see progressively small things, aiding this perspective, but still, it all ends up as people seeing things they can understand and observe directly.

Rationalists say that they can know things just by thinking about them.  Certain logical and mathematical concepts are true because they must be true if the world conforms to the logical necessities of math and logic.  We don't need experience to know that 2+2=4.  Or that cause and effect are real.  Physicists seem to spend a lot of their energy in working out that certain cosmological phenomena must be this way or that, based on what we know of the fundamental principles of matter and energy.  Observation is so frustratingly difficult in these galactic spaces that logical evaluation is a much better course of action.  

Where has direct experience of the world around you failed you?  Can you say you can really trust your senses?  Is logic a better basis of understanding in some cases?  Come prepared to discuss these and other examples of your interaction with the world around you, and how you have been fooled from time to time.

Atheism in Modern Times

 I threw this topic up as a placeholder as it was suggested as a topic at the last meeting.  I have been busy enough with all the good weather of the past 2 weeks that I have not been able to do any research on this topic yet, and I don't have that time now, unfortunately.  I will be opening the Cafe on Zoom tonight at 7 pm and will be glad to curate a discussion of this topic,m or any others we come up with.  If anyone has time to look up links and commentary today, please add them in the comments section below and we can all share in them tonight.

Death With Dignity

 Before I get to this week's serious topic, I'd like you all to click on this link for a quick reminder of why Socrates is considered the greatest philosopher of all time.  Once you have a chance to read this comic, please come back for a real discussion.

Death with Dignity

Washington state has a Death With Dignity law, signed into law in 2008.  The state provides a website that deals with the law's provisions and parameters, and links to reports that detail how people have used the law to receive legal prescriptions that end life.  The reports show demographic data including ages of those who have used the drugs, types of diseases they may have had, and many more bits of data that provide insights into the motivations that informed the decisions to use the drugs.  Take a few minutes to explore the linked site above, and get familiar with the data provided there.

The decision to chose a time of death that an individual may make is not really a philosophical question in a Socratic sense, at least at first glance.  If, as a common example, a person has a cancer that causes chronic pain, and the best medical advice is that the disease will take the life of the person within a certain time period (the law requires such a diagnosis, with less than 6 months to live), a patient might want to end his/her suffering as soon as possible.  This was the intent of the law in the first place.  Gather friends and family, say goodbye, and take a pill.  The suffereing stops in the patient, and the greiving can start with everyone left behind.  The uncertainty is ended.  Importantly, the dignity of the patient is preserved, as they stay in control of their lives until the end.

Here is a link to a discussion of Physician-Assisted Death, comparing the philosophies used to pass laws into action for the State of Oregon, and Holland.  Oregon used a perspective that emphasised the autonomy of the individual at the core of their legislation, whereas Holland used easing pain and sufferning as the basis of their law.  Washington's law follows the example used by Oregon.  I prepared a summary chart that compares and contrasts the various issued raised in the paper.  It came out very small, so I hope you can read it.

We can discuss the various aspects raised int he paper during our meeting Friday night.  If you get a chance to look at the original paper, there is a Life Quality Questionairre on Pages 75-79.  16 simple questions that can help you assess your life.  For you writers out there, there is an essay section on the last page.

This looks like a good topic.  See you Friday!

What is happiness?

 As a follow-up to our discussion on humor I thought we might try and discuss happiness.  I've dipped into this pool of thought before with mixed results, but every time is different, isn't it?

Rather than spending a lot of time writing about happiness, research on happiness, types and degrees of happy, and so forth, I recommend that you go onto YouTube and search on happiness and watch a few of the presentations there.  People study human happiness in a variety of ways.  Subjects take tests and surveys, researchers think up tricky tests that challenge a common sense sort of happiness ideal, and the results are not necessarily what you would expect.  

As with beauty being in the eye of the beholder, happiness seems to have a similar sort of personally identified kind of relationship we each create for ourselves.  There is an axiom that we all create our own happiness, and some of the research presented in the talks seems to bear this out.

If you decide to log in and participate on Friday, March 26, that would make me happy.

Addenda:

I looked up Happiness on Ted Talks (not the plus one, by the way), and found a pod cast that included a talk given by Barry Schwartz where he talks about the relationship between having lots of choices in life and happiness.  He concludes that having a little bit of choice increases happiness, but having a lot of choices decreases it.  He uses the salad dressing shelves at the grocery store as an example.  He reports that there are 175 different salad dressings there, and the process of selecting just one to take home with you can cause paralysis.   Selecting just one leads to regret that the one you bought was not actually the one you wanted.  You end up disappointed rather than happier, due to the many choices.  To listen takes 12 minutes, and it is worth your time.

Here is another link.  I posted on the topic of Happiness Sauce in October, 2012.  Click on this link to find a coherent and helpful discussion, at least in my opinion.

What is time?

Note that the date is changed!  The meeting on Feb. 26 was cancelled due to my reaction to the second shot of Covid virus vaccine.  I'm better now, so we can pick this topic up again.  March 12!  7:00.   

It has been a little while since we have tackled a classically philosophic topic.  While "What is Time?" is not exactly a "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" quality topic, it can be a little esoteric and hard to "get into" for many people.  Hopefully my introduction here will help.

 "What is time?  If nobody asks me, I know; but if I desired to explain it to anyone who should ask me, then plainly I know not."  St. Augustine

 Time is usually broken down into 3 general categories: things in the past, things in the future, and the miniscule moment that separates them.  We like to think that this beautiful, fleeting moment we live in as being a moving, flowing snippet of time with essentially zero duration since the past follows so quickly after it, and the future is yet to be.  A razor's edge, is how I like to describe it. 

 Science measures the passage of very small durations of time by using the vibration of molecules, and large amounts of time by using the speed of light as a reference.  The human mind can perceive time only in what I would call practical terms, limited by the speed we take in perceptional information and processes it in our minds.  In that context the speed of thought might actually be very slow. 

 One metric I have always liked is that our minds can stitch together images into a flowing, coherent pattern if the images change at a rate of 22 frames per second or higher.  In the old days of movie film, if the film projection slowed to below 22 FPS, the images would appear to the audience to be jumpy and disconnected on the screen.  Typically films would be made at 30 FPS, avoiding this problem.  If that 22 FPS rate is true, then maybe the speed of thought is 1/22nd of a second?  Cognitive science measures the speed of neuron synapse info transfer at a much higher rate, so let's table this for now and maybe come back at it from another angle in a separate BQ.

 We normally see causal events in a common sense sort of way, where something happens and events follow due to this initial event.  A stone thrown into a pond creates ripples on the surface.  We understand this process because we are looking backwards, into the past, and we infer the movement of time from the motions we see. 

 But what if time is not moving, and we only infer the motion because of this perceptional frame of reference.  What if we take out the idea that the "present moment" is special in any way, but rather is just one of an infinite number of frames of reference we can perceive at any one time.  If we take motion out of the process, can we create a description of time that does not move?  Philosophers with way too much time on their hands have done this by suggesting that space-time might be composes of individual frames, each of infinitesimally small in duration, but connected much like the 2-dimensional frames on a movie strip.  These frames, they say, are actually 4-dimensional blocks.  They are composed of the 3-dimensional universe plus a 4th dimension of time.

 Ok, admittedly this is getting a little strange to think about.  If these block frames exist, and they include the past and the future, does that mean the universe is already set?  It leads us back towards issues of Free Will and predestination.  As always, things seem to be interconnected.

 My suggestion is to give this topic a good start, and let's see where it goes.  Are there movies you've seen that play with time as a plot theme?  Interstellar comes to mind for me, but time in that movie is handled by Einstein's special relativity, for the most part.  Time travelling stories often deal with time manipulation.  What comes to your mind?  How about The Lake House starring Sandra Bullock and Kenau Reeves.

What is your life's story?

 I had a dream last night that I moved to a new house in the Midwest.  In my dream I met a new neighbor, and to explain to him who I was I recounted an abbreviated resume of where I have lived, what I have done, what schools I attended, where I have traveled, my family and their accomplishments, and so forth.  This list of items then, in effect, provided a sort of definition of who I am. 

This rang a bell for me when I considered a past BQ topic, what gives our lives meaning?  I recall a meeting maybe 20 years ago when a group of us discussed a list of possible answers to that question that I passed out earlier in the evening that included things like, Life is a journey; Life is the pursuit of pleasure; Life is pain; Life is meaningless; Life’s meaning is to fulfill God’s plan, and many more.   The act of sitting down and considering the ways we react to each of the possibilities in the list provided a kind of feedback that we might not otherwise see.  

Do I think life is a journey?  Yes, a journey we take step by step, every day.

Is life the pursuit of pleasure?  Yes, but more than just pleasure, and pleasure in moderation.

Is life pain?  At times, but it gets better.  And there are many kinds of pain and not all are bad.

The idea that each of us could be somehow defined by the lives we have lived and the actions we have taken through our lives makes sense when we look backwards and examine the decisions we made and consequences of those decisions.  Our “cause and effect” brains can see the billiard balls bumping into each other, each contact affecting both in some way.  We may have made a decision to take a new job, for instance, and that decision had lots of consequences.  Making that decision was important in many ways and affected many people who were not so obviously going to be affected.  You can see it looking back, but you didn’t see it when you anticipated possible outcomes. 

I was recently asked to think of a decision or action I took that had a large impact on my life, and to share that action with a small group.  In the context I am trying to create in this narrative, this life altering decision or action might be seen as defining, in an important way, who I am today.  My life’s story, and the stories of all those around me, has been affected by that one decision I took, and stopping to think about it can be cathartic. 

What is your life’s story, and does it define you?