Do I really want to know?

 

(Image at https://www.bing.com/th/id/OIP.Wx237apHV7Um4GRHSklzGwHaE7?w=193&h=135&c=8&rs=1&qlt=90&o=6&dpr=1.6&pid=3.1&rm=2)

A YouTube podcast I’ve taken to is called The Rest is Science hosted by mathematician Hannah Fry and “content creator” Michael Stevens. In their entertaining one-hour dialogues, they explore questions like, “The Infinity Paradox” or “Would you Kill One Person to Save Five?”

“Who needs to know that stuff?” question naturally comes to mind. Yesterday, I got a lesson on magnetism: what it is, why the earth is a magnet, all served  with a side of migrating birds’ connection to magnetic forces. Some might protest, “Birds will migrate even if the earth’s magnetic polarity switches north to south, makers of compasses will quickly adjust their product to reflect it. All this whether I know it or not.”

There’s some truth in the “Ignorance is Bliss” adage.  We don’t tell children that the world lives on the brink of a horrible nuclear conflagration, do we? Would we even if it were true? And if television was airing an urgent message on a new pandemic and how to protect yourself, would you pay attention only if it didn’t interfere with an important hockey game broadcast? And would you pay more attention if you’d previously learned how the immune system reacts to bacteria and viruses and how science has invented vaccines to raise our bodily defenses, and how they work to achieve that?

Ignorance may provide bliss for the moment; it’s not that good at creating the wisdom that saves lives, or improves living conditions for the you and me (like air conditioners, let’s say). Lack of knowledge leaves us subject to speculation, guessing and conspiracy theories. I spent some time in the Roswell UFO Museum observing how misinformation and half truth could so easily indoctrinate people who lacked knowledge of the universe. [i]

But perhaps I’m sounding overly harsh. Perhaps, The Rest is Science appeals to me because I’ve a thirst for it. Some people are satisfied most by physical activity, some by the arts, some only have time to pursue sources of knowledge because of a demanding schedule of obligations. Most of us are born with wit enough to know that you eat the plum and not the stone, but not enough to follow the complicated conversation that complex knowledge demands.

In any case, if you thrive on new knowledge, try The Rest is Science on YouTube. Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens are easy to like, and knowledgeable as hell Wikipedia.

NAICA

Respond below or to gg.epp41@gmail.com

---

[i] See (14 Planets and Moons That Scientists Believe Could Support Life) on the search for alien life. Proxima Centauri B  is 4.2 light-years away, or 9,600,000,000 kilometers. The fastest speed ever achieved by a man-made rocket launched from earth is about 60,000 km/h. At that speed a trip between Proxima Centauri B and planet Earth would take at the very least, 18 years and 7 months, one way. What launched rocket could carry enough life provisions to maintain a crew for 37.2 years? And what plunder could they usefully carry back? And where would they get the enormous energy required to launch them back home?

A Kindly Hand

 

The Good Samaritan

Perhaps I’m missing the logic behind what’s going on between Russia and Ukraine, and now between the USA/Israel and Iran. Is it really only about narcissists caught up in dreams of personal greatness supported by sycophants who hope to catch some of that greatness by harnessing themselves to their coattails? Surely there’s some of that, but it’s much more, obviously,

There’s plenty of conjecture about the deep, existential meaning behind the turmoil being created. I read a defense of the American President’s actions in Venezuela as an act of God’s will; at the same time liberal Christian leaders deplored it as more nearly a manifestation of the Antichrist at work.

More immediately, I’m surprised by the postings on social media that urge Canada to purchase either the US-made F-35A or the Saab Gripen to bolster our defensive capability and align with our allies in providing military potential. The psychology of offering two alternatives to squelch debate on the much more important question of the militarizing of Canada at great expense, that I understand.  

For a small country to match the firepower of much larger neighbours is futile. Should Russia or the USA, China or India decide that they can no longer do without the resources Canada sits on, our military resistance might simply mean that the necessary killing and plundering to achieve the inevitable would be multiplied. Surely prevention of war through skilled and sincere diplomacy is a much cheaper, much more effective defense than a hanger full of muti-million dollar jets, missiles and drones.

At a time like this, it’s helpful to review the military history of Costa Rica. A small American country in a continent where the mighty USA is determined to revive the Monroe Doctrine,  making the USA the real and only America, with the remainder of the two continents its backyard, so to speak. Costa Rica abolished its standing military in 1949, the rationale being that its sovereignty vis e vis the USA could never be guaranteed militarily in any case. Also, Latin American countries had experienced the usurping of militaries by dictators as forces of oppression. Funding was diverted to domestic life enhancement; the country has found no reason to reverse the abolition decision of 1949.

Please read a short history of that choice at Why Did Costa Rica Really Abolish Its Military?

I’m loathe to raise this point, but surely the three deist religions need to re-examine themselves in the light of their own, often expressed role in peacemaking. We’re not experiencing an extension of the Crusades, per se, but  the mindsets fueling the Iran/Israel/USA War right now would probably not be happening except for the preconceptions built in by Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions, each of which appear to have created and recreated the same God/Allah in their own image. Each of which have found ways to justify their positions in the current conflict embedded in their holy books.

Perhaps trying to explain wars logically is a fool’s errand. I can’t accede to the view that “as long as human nature exists, conflict will happen.” I’ve lived long enough to have experienced the empathetic, the sympathetic, the magnanimous generosity in human nature when language, culture or religious considerations are not inserted as being the essence of the moment. So I wrote a poem:

A KINDLY HAND

I was not then— nor ever was—

expectant that a kindly hand

would reach for me from up above

to rescue me from this or that

and set me down on firmer ground

 

But yet I sent a frightened prayer

from where I lay ‘mongst rocks and thorns

in a foreign ditch where few passed by ...

All hope seemed vain as darkness fell

that god or man would hear my cry.

 

I wept in fear and agony

and slept, and woke and slept again

but when the moon arose I saw

a figure hovering over me ...

I feared the reaper had appeared.

 

But no, a turbaned head now spoke

“As-Salaa-Alaikum,” was what it said

I answered him as I’d been told

“Wa Alaikum salam wa rahmatullah.”

He grunted, nodded, turned away.

 

I heard him groan to move the rocks

that kept me prisoner, tightly bound,

Unwound his turban, bandaged me

and voiced a sing-song melody

whose tone was all I understood.

 

He gathered sticks and built a fire

that spread a glow like summer sun

He sat me up, sat down by me,

We shared some Halvah, heavenly

and held communion, silently.

 

And I am now, will ever be

expectant that a kindly hand

will reach for me—not from above—

to rescue me from this or that

and set me down on solid ground.  

NAICA

gg.epp41@gmail.com

 

On Fingernails, Nipples and Who Cares

There are matters that we carry through life without ever questioning them, like, for instance, why do we have fingernails? Despite their questionable usefulness, they live on untouched by logic, experience or argument. They just are. It just doesn’t matter enough to urge us to contemplate them... existentially, that is.

When, if ever, was the last time you looked at those strange, almost bone-like tips to your fingers and wondered, “Why are they there?” Some of us may assume them to be simply an odd consequence of millions of years of evolution that somehow determined that land creatures survived best if their appendages had protective tips: hooves, claws, pads, toenails.

Fingernails are not critical for survival since we ceased to be hunters/gatherers when our defenses rested on the capability in our brains, limbs, torsos and appendages. Uses for fingernails have been devised of course, as in playing the harp or guitar, or nose-picking, but more generally they’re vestigial nuisances, like appendixes (appendices?) or men’s nipples. Dirt depositories.

Many of us grew up assuming that fingernails were simply a part of the essential human body, intelligently designed by an omniscient creator. Perhaps the design included fingernails because the creator foresaw the harp and the guitar. This reasoning (if we ever actually considered it) doesn’t really help to explain men’s nipples.

Others of us who went to school long enough to be challenged to think about such matters settled for a compromise: God created the life we’re living, and Darwin explained how he did it. (Note the “he” pronoun for God; shouldn’t it be he/she or… they?? I’m so confused!)

It’s snowing today, at least where I am. I know how snow develops from moisture in the atmosphere and that gravity causes it to fall to earth. Meteorologists know both that and weather phenomena to the point where they can predict when and where it will fall. John Doe has lived through 60 Saskatchewan winters and knows that a shovel is needed, and roads can be icy, and really, does he need to know much more?

The why and the how of things is that with which scientists, historians, philosophers, agronomists, etc., etc., grapple. But each in our own way, we do plenty of that as well. “Why is my left foot so itchy every night?” Or “What did I do to contract this itch in my left foot?” Quite possibly, the hypochondriacs among us may wonder, “What if it’s cancer and I lose my foot; what kind of future would that leave me?” Mostly we just scratch it, yawn and go to sleep.

Two things: 1) You can’t relive, can’t even revisit the past and 2) you can’t “test pilot” the future to see if you’ll like it. You can, however, find well-being, even happiness to the extent that your health and means allow it, even if you’re flummoxed by the meaning of your life or why your sweater is chafing the nipples you absolutely never needed.

For now, some of us choose to wonder less about the whys and the hows of the big questions. Instead, we clip our nails regularly and clean them as necessary, neither evolutionists nor creationists exempted.

               Some of us paint them.

NAICA  gg.epp41@gmail.com

 

 

I'm So Bored

 

Mennonite Preacher Anslo and Wife - Rembrandt van Rijn

Have you ever wondered what could be going on in the mind of a cow lying placidly in a pasture, and apparently contentedly chewing the cud balls she stored up in her morning feed. Or that lone horse in the pasture you drive by on your way to and from work who—standing on three legs as resting horses do—could be a lonely, living statue ... day after day after day. Surely absolute, unmitigated boredom is the lot of the domesticated animal species we imprison for our pleasure and nourishment.

            I’m intrigued by the creation myth in the first chapters of Genesis, primarily because it’s an  attempt to visualize what could make us so different from all other living things. Consciousness—or the knowledge of good and evil as Genesis calls it—is imagined to have been a choice fraught with such danger that the creator predicts that “if you eat of it, you shall surely die.”

            Scribes gathering and composing the text of Genesis 1-4 could see the fruit of this choice all around them; it was written during a time of bloody wars of conquest and revenge. Later, Charles Darwin would discover that it wasn’t choice, but natural selection and survival of the fittest that resulted in one species of life developing this knowledge of good and evil, this wonderful, yet dangerous, consciousness that gave humans a god-likeness when compared to all else that lives.

            Consciousness makes boredom not only possible but probable, I think. Because conscious minds can imagine, predict, analyze and plan, humans can visualise unlimited possibilities, a visualization which in turn incites a hunger for variety, for change, for unending newness.

            A knowledge of good and evil implies a moral consciousness, or conscience, a sensitivity about what’s right and what’s wrong to do. Unfortunately, our hunger for newness tends to override our moral judgment. Take killing devices: stick to sword to crossbow to rifles to explosives to nuclear weapons. Were we guided by a morality prohibiting the taking of life, laying down the stick would have ended the sequence in its infancy. If you eat of it, you shall surely die begins to feel like a prediction with merit when we consider the wickedness by which so many relieve their boredom. 

            I’m a Christian because even the flawed and sometimes perverted gospel of Jesus’ teaching answers the problem predicted in Genesis; namely that the core of righteousness will in the end be found NOT to have been the unflinching preoccupation with self-preservation, but the striving for the health of the species. Love your neighbour as yourself; greater love hath no man than that he should lay down his life for his friend; how can one love God whom he has not seen, if he cannot love his brother whom he can.

            The great gift of consciousness will either kill us or set us free.

            Andrew Moore wrote that “Bio-optimists, then and now, see a bright future if we can use technology to enhance our “moral sense and our capacity for social responsibility.” The “if” in Moore’s assessment parallels the debate between God and the Serpent in Genesis about whether eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will mean mankind’s demise or a glowing, heavenly future.           

            Surely the gospel also seeks to “enhance moral sense and [the] capacity for social responsibility.” [1] It doesn’t, of course, propose technology as the medium to get us there.

            Although the placid cow and the tripod horse may never feel the frustration of boredom, I’m pretty sure I will never want to change places with either (although even three legs might allow me to chuck my cane). Were the three-legged horse to be suddenly endowed with human consciousness, he might well declare, “I’m so bored,” then jump the fence, break into the nearest bar, drink a pail of beer, go out and harass every pretty filly in town… ‘nough said.  

                                                                                                        

---

[1] The future of our species. Will there be a sustainable evolution of humanity in the twenty-first century? - PMC

Artificial Intelligence; Artificial Happines?

 

"Artificial Intelligence" seems an odd name for a software program that operates solely on the mining and merging of accumulated mountains of data.

Computing that resembles actions of human intelligence would only make sense if the “thinking” it did was actually “intelligent.” Which it can’t be.

True, the ability to remember, compare, evaluate and predict—which AI can do—is also a characteristic of what we think of as intelligence in persons. But human intelligence is capable of compassion, respect, faith, sacrifice, love, joy, sorrow, hate, even self-sacrifice and all those attributes that can make us wise, as opposed to clever.

I shudder to think about a future characterized by artificial love (AL if you like) or artificial joy, (AJ). Put crassly, artificial intelligence is to human intelligence as an inflatable doll is to intimate companionship. Missing its most significant pieces, that is.

It’s fascinating to think that those who created the Genesis creation story called human intelligence “the knowledge of good and evil,” and that choosing to put its trust in their own endowments rather than in God was to set out on a hazardous journey, who’s end is death. While the flora and fauna are guided only by their created nature and its evolution, human intelligence (in the story) is our chosen guide.

Mind you, there are those humans we assume to be intelligent who are merely clever in narrow categories, so that the more relational parts of consciousness are crowded out. Money, for instance becoming “the root of all evil,” or fame, or notoriety, or conquest, or power, or revenge, etc.

Just watch an item on YouTube and count the ads urging us to sign up for courses in AI, that in a few weeks will make you “the most dangerous person in the room,” bolstered by the claim that “even teenagers are getting rich using AI.” The pitch is made by a cartoon avatar with one peg leg. Do you get that? I don’t.

What’s happening to our southerly neighbours now can be compared to the moral chaos East of Eden. (Oh sorry, it has been... by John Steinbeck.)¹ The White House is channelling primarily the clever, self-serving part of its consciousness; AI, I predict, will serve that mindset far more than it will the wise, the moral crusaders labouring in the shadows.

I’m going to enrol in the AI course; I have to know why their spokes-avatar has one peg leg! If you can’t find me in three weeks, send help.

NAICA

gg.epp41@gmail.com

1East of Eden by John Steinbeck | Goodreads

Truth & Reconciliation 2025

RJC Autumn

Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean,

and so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean.

Had the Spratts lived in our world, our time, they might find their mealtimes much less amiable. Jack might well have insisted that the butcher cut away all the fat from the roast while his wife seethed and choked down the bloody, half-cooked roast that he insisted was the way intelligent people know to eat animals.

The logic may seem overly simple, but the kind of peaceful mealtime the Spratts enjoyed is very simply achieved ... if the parties value and practice the moral imperative to “seek your neighbour’s welfare before your own.” Easy to say, not so easily achieved. Every successful couple has had to reconcile their differences and form a third, a new way of life which both find agreeable. I think we all know a couple who both preferred sleeping on the left side of the bed, and one pulled rank and the other gave in. We probably all know a couple who chucked out their queen-sized and bought twin beds, who proverbially found thereby a way to “lick the platter clean.”

Tuesday, September 30^th is Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada. Examples of how a formal Truth and Reconciliation process brought new measures of justice and peace to South Africa and Rwanda should be common knowledge to every contributing citizen in a democracy like ours. (Just type “Truth and Reconciliation South Africa,” or “Truth and Reconciliation Rwanda” into your search engine.)

So much of our news reinforces the “stand your ground” and “my way is the only way” rhetoric. There has to be a third way, and for Christians—as is my case—not to have embraced the new path to a third way is tragic. We’re not cavemen with clubs anymore; we have, for instance, built into our constitution equal rights for all, a nod to the welfare of every neighbour being considered, but the fight to cancel such rights in practice always threatens.

The first word is truth, it must be there because the finding of a third way that leads to peace and harmony can’t be built on anything but the factual history by which we became what we are now. Good houses are built on the rocks, not on sand.

 The word reconciliation isn’t as clear as it could be. I’m told its origin is middle English from French and on its face, it means to conciliate again. “He became reconciled to living without his left leg” makes sense to us, but what should be happening when we engage in a Truth and Reconciliation process is more like a mutual adaptation to negotiated third way. Canada’s improvement of the conditions of those categorized as indigenous is not a case of them being reconciled to the ways of the national politic. It’s more like the visualizing of a new, third way, and the need to agree on what that would be, and then for both parties to adapt to (a) new condition(s).

I have frequently suggested a third condition, but of course, I have very few readers. Suppose we were to change the consistency and role of the senate to be 50% elected in federal elections and 50% elected by First Nations people, and that this body would have complete charge of Treaty interpretation. Negotiating the details would be reconciliation in action. The determination of both nations to adapt to it would be a small step toward peace.

I believe the Spratts lived to be nonagenarians, although not happy ever after ... but nearly.

NAICA

To comment, click gg.epp41@gmail.com  

 

 

An open letter to young adults of 2025

 

Nasturtiums

You may not know this, but you are living in a lucky age. It's a time when our world has tilted far too much to a winner/loser mentality. So much so that democracies are weakening and authoritarian ideas are strengthening. In a winner/loser world, the essentials of decency and cooperation, indeed the right to life is debased: winners take all; losers ... who cares.

            My education took place in another lucky time. I was born exactly one week after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, December 14, 1941, and lived through the aftermath of two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and shared the terror with the whole world as the Nuclear Bomb proliferated to the point where at any moment, a madman might obliterate life as we knew it. The threat of its use coloured our Weltanschauung, our worldview, and our political understandings far more than we acknowledged.

            So why lucky? The events of war and their precursors provided me ... and now you ... with a laboratory inviting us to think deeply beyond win and lose. What have we done, what were we thinking that made the debacles in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Iran possible? The conflicts have roots, and woe to us if our thinking goes no deeper than speculating on who will win, who will lose, and crossing our fingers in the hope that harm won’t fall on us.

            Certainly some of your peers will be content to party and plagiarize their way through their maturing years, as they did in mine. But for those of you whose curiosity and attention has a broader scope than win/lose, self-focused indulgence, I pose five thought experiments. Take them to your brain-lab and reach for evidence-based answers: 

1)     Why is the spread between rich and poor growing?

2)     “Freedom of Speech” is an oft repeated shibboleth. That there are limits is obvious (slander, libel, blabbing state secrets). What would make a workable description of free speech in a democracy like Canada.

3)     What conditions are needed for your neighbour to live a contented life. In other words, does Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs still apply?

4)     What is money's purpose, and are we using wealth appropriately or has its purpose been bastardized with time, and does it matter?

5)     What dangers being predicted concerning the increasing application of Artificial Intelligence are valid, and why? 

Obviously, few have time to do the problem-method-observation-conclusion lab study on six broad issues, but I challenge you to apply your thinking and research to some of these matters. The stream of misinformation aided by image manipulation, outright lying, undeserved adulation and denigration, and partisan gate-keeping at news outlets is appalling. There's that in our very nature making us vulnerable to bias confirmation, so it takes an effort to contemplate other viewpoints judiciously. It's likely going to be your generation that leads us forward toward sanity ... or allows this “going to hell in a handcart” phenomenon grow 'til the winners can be declared and the losers disposed of. 

            It's a lucky time for you. If you join hands with your fellow thinkers to create a better future where truth reigns, you will find yourselves in that exhilarating atmosphere of discovery and innovation, like Galileo, Copernicus, Fleming, Einstein, Rousseau … If you have faith in yourselves, you will move mountains. 

George G. Epp

gg.epp41@gmail.com

306-212-7741

naica (no ai content or assistance)