The End of Reading?

I’m reading a book relating to my history. It’s 500+ pages long, demands at least a freshman-college reading vocabulary and proceeds with an assumption that the reader already has a basic grasp of the people and culture being elaborated upon. In other words, it’s tough going: I find I need to reread passages, compare what’s being said to what others have said, and I have to manage distractions if I’m to concentrate and comprehend.

Reading and writing fluency brought us out of the dark ages. It opened the door to a civilization in which new ideas could be shared; invention, innovation, social sciences, health science, and the philosophies and theologies were all opened to the literate public. It wasn’t always pretty, mind you, since literacy is on a more/less, not a yes/no axis. Literacy that allows individuals to engage in complex issues like mathematics, physics, chemistry, as well as theology, philosophy, and related social disciplines results from hard work and disciplined engagement.

You’d think that general literacy would be both cumulative and progressive, but that’s not a given. Various studies have concluded that literacy in the USA, for instance, has been waning in recent generations, and that when artificial intelligence reaches its inevitable maturity, it will no longer be knowledge supported by literacy that will guide our decisions and opinions. Picking and choosing among expedient, quick, undemanding alternatives will replace judgments made in the light of human compassion, empathy, love, the qualities that make the human experience of living worthwhile.

I’ve been struck by research into the pleasure/reward science that demonstrates how stimulation of the pleasure circuits in the brain so easily becomes super addictive in very little time. Rats were given a pleasure stimulus via electrodes every time they pressed a lever. Pressing that lever repeatedly displaced everything else: sex, drink, food. Had they not been removed from the experiment, the rats would have starved to death. Similar experiments with human volunteers have produced similar results.

We have a foretaste of AI as a “Skinner Box” in the social media’s ability to keep us scrolling, chasing that pleasure reward that can only be found by endlessly flipping through posts. Like the experimental rat, what is missed—while the focus is on chasing pleasure—can be critical. No young person is likely to read and study A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking if it competes for time with the effortless browsing on Tik-Tok.

The internet is full of ads for software that turns text into speech, so that reading is no longer necessary; you can listen to the text being read aloud while you cook dinner, drive to work, assemble whatzits in a factory. But understanding the text requires the same level of literacy whether it’s read by you, or to you. That plus the obvious problem of no opportunity to underline, reread, check with references renders the text to speech idea absurd… while adding another chapter to the decline-of-literacy story.

Mennonite Preacher Anslo and Wife - Rembrandt van Rijn

To read T.D. Regehr’s Mennonites in Canada: 1939-1970 cover to cover will require about 15 hours of concentrated reading. (I read material like this at about 250 words-per-minute on average.) I’ve already learned something about my heritage after reading the first 30 pages; could I have done without these few epiphanies? Of course. We have choices galore, and I could possibly have chosen to read, read, read about astronomy. Or I could have spent the 15 hours watching sports and sports commentary on streaming  TV or feeding toonie after toonie into the VLT at the local bar. Not much literacy required there.

NAICA

gg.epp41@gmail.com

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?

The substance of things hoped for . . .

Still life #6

“I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.”
(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/i/immanuel_kant.html#ixzz1HWKiIuSS)

Let me begin by toying for a minute with the quote above from Immanuel Kant:

In the boarding house of my soul, I harboured two tenants; Knowledge and Belief. Belief was resident on the premises first and occupied the big room, but after Knowledge moved in, his need for space kept expanding and he demanded that he be given the big room. Thus ensued a continuous tension in the household and I felt compelled to make a choice. Since Belief was my cousin and was in close harmony with the remaining tenants, I sadly evicted Knowledge and resigned myself to living without him although I had found his dynamism invigorating.   

Obviously I’ve ripped the quotation out of its context, unless you consider the brainyquote website to be a context. Also, it could be interpreted in other ways than through the “boarding house” imagery. It could—by itself—be a lament for having misunderstood that knowledge and belief can dwell together, indeed must dwell together in harmony. And then there’s the whole issue of the meaning of the two slippery words at its core: What is our common understanding of knowledge? What do we mean by belief? Is knowledge a synonym for wisdom? Is belief another word for faith? Definitions of abstract nouns are approximations at best.

I’m pretty sure we all know what the quotation is about, nevertheless. When discovery contradicts belief, a crossroads presents itself. Many choose the road of denial in the assumption that holding on to a belief against all evidence is a virtue. Others turn their backs on their previously-held beliefs, sometimes with great disappointment and dismay. Some seem to have accepted the great conundrums of life with equanimity and confidence.

I don’t believe that earthquakes are shakings of the earth by an angry God. They are the inevitable results of the earth’s brittle crust reacting to the contraction of a gradually-cooling interior of our planet.  Fill a bottle with water, screw down the cap and set it out in a Saskatchewan January night. The bottle will break; earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes will happen. Knowledge tells us why.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).” Maybe we’re just too hung up on the sanctity of “believing.” Faith may be where it’s really at; faith in the sense of “the substance of things hoped for.” I suspect that between expanding knowledge and the kind of faith that hopes, that loves, that is optimistic about a future as yet unseen, there is no conflict.

 No reason why they can’t live amicably in the same house.

More on Agnostic Christianity.

Grand Canyon serenity

The word agnostic is a borrowing from the Greek where gnosis means “knowing,” agnosis, “not knowing.” In the previous post I referred to the term Agnostic Christians, which some might assume to be an oxymoron. Fact is, there isn’t a branch of Christianity—as far as I know—that claims its basic tenets arise from knowledge; In general, religious tenets are held by faith, not by knowledge, and so Agnostic Christian is no contradiction in terms at all.

Admittedly, a dictionary definition, even when supported by an etymology, doesn’t necessarily complete the picture of what words mean, or what they meant to people who used them in their original form. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines an agnostic as “a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable [or] one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the non-existence of God or a god.” Most of us would associate the word agnostic with a response to religious faith, i.e. the stance that the existence of God or a god is unknowable, and that there is no reason to be either a believer or a disbeliever.

Agnostic Christians would probably argue that one can believe in God and in Christ and still take an agnostic stance on matters like, for instance, how the death of Christ is able to bridge the gap between God and humankind, or how it is possible for there to be a single, triune God. I admit, the explanations for these great conundrums are unknown, possibly unknowable to me, a stance of agnosis whether I am prepared to admit it or not.

Why bother even talking about this? Because the pretence of certainty is, in effect, a grand delusion, or even worse, a corporate self-delusion that is potentially extremely harmful. The pretence of certainty makes it possible to commit wars, supplies justification to terrorism, provides an argument for raping creation, makes theological mountains out of molehills. It also forces cracking of social cooperation and eventually, is responsible for much societal fragmentation.

Certainty inevitably requires intolerance to sustain it.

We need to shorten our creeds, weed out what is unknowable and what is as yet unknown, and admit that everything we hold as opinion or certainty now may be superseded tomorrow. We need to accept that Creator and creation are as mysterious as they ever were, and live our lives recognizing where agnosis lies.

It’s through this recognition that we might someday be able to live comfortably with the proposition that our neighbour just might be worthy, that she might just be right, or—at least—that a person’s value is not determined by how well we understand him.

Check out this link for further thoughts on the subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theist