Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Category: perception (page 3 of 4)

God shoots, rescues man

In the news:

COVINGTON, La. (AP) — R.J. Richard says he doesn’t normally put his cell phone in his chest pocket. But he says it saved his life the one time he did.

The 68-year-old man from Covington, La., was mowing the lawn on his 5-acre property when a stray bullet from nearby woods struck that cell phone. He figured a rock kicked up by his tractor hit him. That is, until he took out the phone and a .45-caliber bullet fell from its case.

Richard told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans he doesn’t think it was a coincidence, either.

“I look at this as God telling me to put my cell phone in that pocket, and I’m grateful and humbled,” he said.

He may not think it’s a coincidence, but with so many people getting shot, it’d be unusual if someone didn’t escape once in a while.

But why give the credit to a god? That’s who allowed someone to shoot him in the first place. You could use this story as evidence of a perfectly evil god. “God tried to make someone kill me, but I managed to thwart his malevolent intentions with my phone.”

Meanwhile, God’s been killing people left and right. We can’t hear their stories about how God didn’t save them because they’re no longer around to tell us. We only hear from the survivors.

Sine-wave speech

This is very cool. Listen to the first clip. Sounds like twitters and blips.

Then listen to the second clip.

Now go back and listen to the first. It becomes comprehensible once you know what you’re looking for.

This is called ‘sine-wave speech’. When a linguist records your speech using a spectrometer, there are dark patches of high intensity, called formants. Draw the formants using sine waves, and you get the twittery sound that resembles somewhat-but-not-quite speech.

I guess this is yet another example of how perception depends on the knowledge and expectations of the perceiver. Something to remember when I try and understand the voting habits of others.

Fear of vanishing

I’ve been viewing the YouTube videos from the Exmormon Foundation. Worth a look. There are some clips from a film called “Line Upon Line”, featuring (mostly) non-angry, pleasant former saints telling their deconversion stories.

One of the stories in Part 2 tapped into something unexpected for me. A young woman says:

Leaving the Church is hard because you are so afraid of what’s going to happen to you. And you don’t have any examples of that because people leave the Church and they scurry away, you know? Like, you don’t know — When you’re in the Church, you do not know any ex-Mormons. You don’t know ’em! And so I was really afraid of leaving the Church because I was like, no way, this can’t be real. What will I do with my life if I leave the Church? Who am I going to be, right? And so, I think that that fear keeps a lot of people, either consciously or subconsciously, in the Church.

Well, that’s about right. In testimony meetings, Latter-day Saints seem to tell each other constantly how they don’t know where they’d be without the Church. They’d probably all be dead. Or in jail. Like everyone else who isn’t in the Church. And Latter-day Saints are routinely warned that if they don’t keep the promises they make in LDS temples, they’ll be in Satan’s power. Have to keep ’em scared of ghosts, you see.

But this quote touched on another part of the scariness that I think I must have harboured without realising. I have known a few people that stopped coming to church. They deleted themselves from the sample, you could say. And, what do you know, they did disappear, and I never saw them again. So the unspoken impression I think I got was: If you leave the Church, you will disappear. How frightening!

It’s nobody’s fault. Just an artifact of participation (or lack thereof) in social groups. But for me it seems a powerful cognitive illusion that I hadn’t noticed before.

So it’s a good thing that I show up every once in a while at church. I drop the boys off to be with their Mom, wearing nice but non-churchy clothes. No, I haven’t disappeared, I tell my old friends. I’m still here, and I’m very happy without religion.

Pareidolia of the daylia: The doll

Some Christians are in a tizzy about a babbling doll.

But before you check out the article, have a listen to the doll, and see if it sounds like anything to you.

Parents are outraged about the messages they’re hearing from a doll. It’s Fisher-Price’s “Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo” doll.

Some people claim they can hear it mumble “Satan is king” in one track; then clearly speak “Islam is the light” in another.

People! Did you learn nothing from the 80s? It’s obviously backmasking!

Here, have a listen backwards.

The first thing we hear is “Down went the mountain.” An obvious reference to Mohammed. Notice also the murmuring that sounds like ‘Mohammed’, if you listen enough times. Then there’s laughter. The evil laughter… of SATAN.

Far more insidious than even the creative minds of Oklahomans could have supposed.

Via Pharyngula.

Paradolia of the daylia

The workings of god are mysterious, so here’s some mystery meat.

What looks like the Arabic word for God and the name of the prophet Muhammad were discovered in pieces of beef by a diner in Birnin Kebbi.

He was about to eat it, when he suddenly noticed the words in the gristle, the restaurant owner said.

If I were the supreme ruler of a world full of war, crime, violence, and hunger, I couldn’t think of a better way to manifest myself than by putting my name in pieces of gristle. No, wait. Actually, I’d just be dicking with you.

I like Arabic script, even though I’ve never studied it. So I wanted to find out what the name of Allah looks like. Here it is. Not a terribly complex shape, is it?
Look like a match to you? Then you’re not looking with the eye of faith. If you were, you’d see the name of god (well, one of the names of god) any place where there are parallel lines. You’d see it everywhere, from tomatoes

to fish.

I know; it’s like so obvious on the fish. How could you yet disbelieve?

There’s a whole page of this stuff here. As you might guess, it’s pretty weak tea. Finding parallel lines is even easier than finding faces in tortillas, it would seem. And isn’t it strange that everyone finds an image that serves to confirm their own beliefs and not anyone else’s? Truly amazing.

I’d love any Arabic speakers to let me know if they’ve ever seen any blasphemous words in, say, an eggplant. Keep me posted.

Charades are SOV

When you make a sentence like “Englebert licked the donuts”, there are lots of ways to arrange Englebert and the donuts. And the licking. You could put Englebert first and the donuts somewhere later, which seems logical. Or the licking could come first, with Englebert at the end of it all and the donuts in the middle.

How you order them has a lot to do with which language you’re speaking. English speakers like to put Englebert (which your grade school teacher used to call the ‘subject’) at the front, the verb ‘licking’ next, and the donuts (the ‘object’) last. So English is a Subject-Verb-Object language, or SVO. Japanese, on the other hand, tends to go SOV.

A curious thing, though, is that about 90% of the world’s languages put the subject first, with 75% being either SVO or SOV. Only about 10 percent of the world’s languages put the object before the subject. Perhaps that’s not so strange. Subjects are the doers (usually), so it makes sense to most of us that the most active agent comes first.

That’s with words. But what kind of word order do we see when people are asked not to use words? That’s the subject (or object?) of this study.

For the study, the team tested 40 speakers of four different languages: 10 English, 10 Mandarin Chinese, 10 Spanish and 10 Turkish speakers. They showed them simple video sequences of activities and asked them to describe the action first in speech and a second time using only gestures.

When asked to describe the scenes in speech, the speakers used the word orders typical of their respective languages. English, Spanish, and Chinese speakers first produced the subject, followed by the verb, and then the object (woman twists knob). Turkish speakers first produced the subject, followed by the object, and then the verb (woman knob twists).

But when asked to describe the same scenes using only their hands, all of the adults, no matter what language they spoke, produced the same order –– subject, object, verb (woman knob twists). When asked to assemble the transparencies after watching the video sequences (another nonverbal task, but one that is not communicative), people also tended to follow the subject, object, verb ordering found in the gestures produced without speech.

Is there something about the SOV order that most closely mirrors the structure of thought? Or is it just the easiest way to get the message across?

I’m filing this under ‘complicated, but interesting’.

Sometimes crotch-grabbing is okay, and sometimes it just isn’t.

You can see how a belief in the Evil Eye might have gotten started: you hate someone, you give them filthy glares, and if a rock falls on them — voila! a superstition is born!

How to protect oneself? Another superstition!

The Italian supreme court has outlawed men from touching their genitals in public.

Crotch-grabbing is an ancient superstitious habit in Italy that is believed to ward off the evil eye.

It’s traditional for men to do it if passed by a hearse or when discussing serious illness or disasters.

However, the supreme court ruled that a 42-year-old man from Como had broken the law by “ostentatiously touching his genitals through his clothing”.

Italy, eh? I was going to say that there must be a correlation between religiousness and superstition, but Jesus and Mo already beat me to it.

Have you been high today?

Good old human brains. Always picking patterns out of noise. And if you have someone to prime you in a certain direction, then it’s easy to see what you expect to see.

Case in point: this fantastic (and hilarious) music video in Hindi. Once you’ve had the (mildly risqué) English suggested to you, it’s very difficult not to hear it.

After you’ve dried the tears of mirth from your eyes and forgotten the lyrics, try watching the original without the subtitles and notice how the English disappears.

‘Get Off the Earth’ puzzle

Sam Loyd invented this enormously popular puzzle in 1898, and it’s one of my favourites. You’ll have to excuse the stereotyped artwork, though.

The puzzle shows some warriors around a globe. The inside circle is a separate piece of paper, attached at the center so that it can turn freely.

Behold the globe with 13 warriors.

But give the globe a turn…

and one warrior disappears.

What’s happening here? How does the thirteenth warrior disappear? And don’t say the Rapture.

If you want to print it out and try it yourself, you may want to use the very nice PDF available on this page.

Meme tag: Life and how to live it

I’ve been tagged by snowqueen to answer these questions.

1. How did the world and all that is in it come into being?

My son says that it was barfed up by Burunfa, the Great Sky Dog. Dinosaur fossils are just stuff that Burunfa had eaten. He also says that if you do what Burunfa says, you get to go Barunfa-land, which is a really great place. Also, he says that he is the sole emissary of Burunfa, and you have to do what he says, including giving him money and chocolate. He could be wrong, but with so much at stake, can I afford to take the chance? Or perhaps he’s just a clever scam artist, like everyone who runs a religion.

You should probably ask someone who knows about physics.

2. What is reality in terms of knowledge and truth?

Reality is that which an idealised scientific community agrees is true, over the very long term.

3. How does/should the world function?

I don’t have an answer for this. I don’t have any special understanding of how the world works, or else I’d be better at navigating around its systems.

4. What is the nature of a human being?

Human beings are bundles of desires, preferences, and memories. They have generally good intentions and brains that make reasonably good decisions when conditions are not too complex. Otherwise, they fall victim to short-term gratification, perceptual bias, and paralysing fear. The antidote to these less-than-helpful behaviours is to behave ethically, use the scientific method, and calm the fuck down.

5. What is one’s personal purpose of existence?

I used to think there was a purpose that was the same for everyone, and if only we could find that purpose in life, then we could all just do it and be happy.

Now I think it’s more individuated. My purpose in life is to raise my children, do well in my work, and have loving relationships.

Rather than ask, “What’s the purpose of existence?”, I’d like to ask, “What purpose are you bringing to your existence?” It may not be out there to be found. You may have to make it.

6. How should one live?

One should survive, and seek ethical pleasure, in that order.

7. Is there any personal hope for the future?

If by ‘personal hope’ you mean ‘continual existence as an individual after your death’, then no, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Hope is in humanity and in the monuments you create and leave behind.

8. What happens to a person at and after death?

As an LDS missionary, I used to teach that we had a spirit inside us that went to the spirit world. I even used the metaphor of a hand in a glove — the glove dies, but the hand lives on (wiggle fingers). But that’s just a metaphor, not evidence, and I was wrong to teach it.

I might just as well have said that we’re like a lightbulb. A light bulb is a machine for making light, but once the filament goes, the machine doesn’t work anymore. But we don’t treat the light like some kind of entity that persists after the bulb burns out. Our bodies are like machines for living, and our brain is the filament.

Now maybe that’s wrong too, but it’s just as good a metaphor as the spirit idea, and I think it’s backed up by evidence better.

9. Why is it possible to know anything at all?

Your question presumes that we can. In fact, it is very difficult to say that we know something.

In the church I used to go to, they would perform a kind of communal reinforcement ritual every month. People would tell each other, “I know the gospel is true.” After 35 years, it really grated on my ears every time I heard it. They did not know it was true, they were merely certain, which is different.

To say that a claim is true, we need to have factual evidence for that claim. Even then, we may need to adjust the claim if new and better evidence comes in. So the things that we ‘know’ are true will all probably be disproven or updated beyond recognition in 200 years’ time. What we should be saying is not ‘I know X is true’ but ‘At this point, the best evidence we have suggests that we can be pretty certain that X is the case.’

That doesn’t give much room for certainty, does it? Welcome to the universe.

10. How does one know what is right and what is wrong?

Let’s say you have two tribes of humans. In one tribe, they never help each other. In the other, they sometimes do. The second tribe will do better at surviving, since two people together can do things that one person can’t.

We’re like the second tribe. We’ve survived long enough that human evolution has given us some traits, like compassion and altruism, that help us to live together in a somewhat orderly and helpful fashion. When we feel that something is right or wrong, we may be drawing upon our evolutionary heritage.

11. What is the meaning of human history?

Human history is an enormous bunch of cases where things happened. We use them to figure out what’s going to happen in the future, and how to stop it.

12. What does the future hold?

My future holds love, some sadness, time with people I love, good food, and a lifetime of striving for the good. I hope your future is good to you.

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