The Varieties of Scientific Experience

When I mentioned to my parents that I was reading a book by Carl Sagan, they both immediately launched into their best “beel-yins and beel-yins of stars” impression.

“That guy?” they asked.

Yep, that guy. Sagan is remembered in the mainstream conciousness for pronouncing “billions” funny and for popularizing scientific thought about extra-terrestrials and the origins of the universe. He wrote Cosmos and Contact. A friend recently let me borrow The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, which is not actually a book written by Sagan, but more accurately a collection of a series of his lectures, edited later by his widow Ann Druyan.

I read the book faster than I’ve ever read any non-fiction. I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. I read it instead of watching TV, instead of checking my e-mail, instead of showering. It is the best summary of the God-Science question that I have ever encountered. Sagan clearly and unpretentiously outlines the way that science has been able to shed light on answers to questions historically reserved for the realm of religion.

Some highlights:

p. 35 So the history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe’s noncompliance with this human tendency.

p. 64 But what clearly has been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm.

p.151 So, considering this range of alternatives, one thing that comes to my mind is how striking it is that when someone has a religious-conversion experience, it is almost always to the religion or one of the religions that are mainly believed in his or her community.

p.164 It is argued that some pain is necessary for a greater good. But why, exactly? If God is omnipotent, why can’t He arrange it so there is no pain? It seems to me a very telling point.

p.188 By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without many mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.

p.214 Because surely we are not faster than all other species, or better camouflaged, or better diggers or swimmers or fliers. We are only smarter. And, at least until the invention of weapons of mass destruction, this intelligence has led to the steady—in fact exponential—increase in our numbers.

p.216 What we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own.

p. 224 The answer depends very much on what we mean by God. The word “god” is used to cover a vast multitude of mutually exclusive ideas…. Let me give a sense of two poles of the definition of God. One is the view of say, Spinoza or Einstein, which is more or less God as the sum total of the laws of physics. Now it would be foolish to deny that there are laws of physics. If that’s what we mean by God, then surely God exists…. But now take the opposite pole: the concept of God as an out-size male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow. Now, for that kind of god I maintain there is no evidence. And while I’m open to suggestions of evidence for that kind of god, I personally am dubious that there will be powerful evidence for such a god not only in the near future but even in the distant future. And the two examples I’ve given you are hardly the full range of ideas that people mean when they use the word “god.”

Sagan’s greatest legacy may be that he was among the first to warn the public about environmental dangers and the threat of nuclear war. One of his last achievements was a campaign to unite religion and science in the battle against these problems.

Sleep is wild.

Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams Do Have Meaning

By Tiffany Sharples Monday, Jun. 15, 2009 (from Time.com)

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. “Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass,” says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest — specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — influences our ability to read emotions in other people’s faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe — a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion — was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. “If you’re walking through the jungle and you’re tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things,” he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you’re emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you’re well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: “If it’s getting food, if it’s getting some kind of reward, finding a wife — those things are pretty good to pick up on.”

Full article here.

The Search for Hidden Dimensions

Any other Science Friday fans out there???? No? Or maybe you’re just not comfortable admitting it because it gives you automatic status as citizen of “Dorkdom.”  (Let’s be honest, how cool can a radio station really be when it features two different guys named “Ira”?) But for me there’s no holding back. Letting your nerdosity all hang out is liberating.

Every Friday on NPR, Ira Flatow hosts two hours of talk radio about the latest newsworthy tidbits from the realms of Science and Technology. You may know that this is not exactly my field of expertise (don’t ask what is), but I like “SciFri” because Ira and his guests generally don’t talk over my head, nor do they talk to me like I’m on a class field trip to COSI.

Last week Ira did an interview with Harvard physicist Lisa Randall who studies the possibilities of hidden dimensions in the universe. She’s a little bitchy abrupt at times, but the interview kept my attention for a whole twenty-six minutes. Particle physics and cosmology both offer hidden dimensions as a possible explanation for nagging questions in the fields. She explains that one of the things she researches is the puzzle of why gravity is such a weak force:  a tiny magnet can hold a note on the fridge while the whole mass of the earth is pulling on it. One explanation is that we only experience a part of gravity, because the rest of the force takes place in a fifth dimension. Wild.