Science as religion

Religion is a controversial subject. It is also exceptionally rare that people share the same working definitions about religion when discussing it. If I for an example discuss religion (not a particular one) as a distributor of common norms with someone who dislikes Christianity (one religion) , this discussion is typically bound to end up in discussing ONE religion (usually Christianity or Islam) as a distributor of death, abuse and discrimination.

Scientists are not a very religious group. I do have religious friend where I work but most of my friends think that religion is obsolete.

I know that humans like purpose. I don't know why we like purpose but at least one reasonable explanation is that this behavior has been exceptionally rewarding for us historically. Already as cave men we were gifted in assigning purpose to things. We assigned the purpose of a cave to be our home. We assigned the purpose of a normal sharp rock to be an instrument of power which we could use to kill or intimidate people. We assigned the purpose of smaller shinier rocks to be the instrument of status and exclusivity. Assigning purpose to things without obvious purpose was very rewarding for our reproduction. Purpose is in our genes.

If purpose is in your genes you probably also start looking for purpose for bigger things. When the cave men saw the sun for the first time, it probably worked our like this:

Caveman1: Thinking: Wow, this yellow thing is very bright. Can I use it to kill or intimidate someone? Can I use it to increase my social status? Can I eat it? *Long and hard thinking*
Caveman2: Wow, what is this bright yellow thing?
Caveman1: It is the bringer of light. If you want it to continue to shine tomorrow we have to sacrifice a goat. I know how the ritual works, but you have to let me sleep with your wife before I tell you.

This may be how religion started out. Sort of.
You may object to this. Why on earth would Caveman2 comply and lend Caveman1 his wife? Surely there is no evolutionary place for suckers like Caveman2? this objection makes a lot of sense in a world with only two cavemen, but in reality this could be very profitable for caveman2 if he can learn the ways of caveman1 and sell this scam to caveman3 next doors. It is like a Ponzi scheme (a form of pyramid game where there are no suckers as long as new suckers are initiated, but which eventually falls apart when no new suckers are available. When it falls apart the newest sucker will hurt the most) which also appeals to our genetic desire of assigning purpose to things. And purpose is like crack to us.

My guess is that the role of religion evolved to provide purpose. With purpose I include:
The "purpose" of natural phenomena (thunder, stars, moon, gravity)
The "purpose" of Humans (Purpose of life)

Here are two examples of purpose of life:
Fight fierce and with dignity and you will eat and at the tables of the gods in Valhalla (Nordic mythology)
The ten commandments offer offer you a map to heaven, and heaven is really nice and hence your purpose to reach (Christianity)

Science offers an alternative way to explain natural phenomena. It has managed quite well to do so (at least according to scientists), and most things are nowadays "in principle understood". "In principle understood" means that we may not know exactly how everything works, but we do know the fundamental principle. As an example we can explain that the earth actually circles then sun and not vice verse. We also know why. Scientists probably think that we figured these things out so well that it is no longer a fair fight with religion as the proper way to explain these things.

You may think that science is bound to stay in the business of describing natural phenomena. Wrong! These days we are very much trying to describe what makes you happy, sad and how your brain is wired. We don't know that exactly but we believe that we know the fundamentals, which means that we "sort of know". In essence; we are trying to explain personal things about you like who you are and why, how you function, and if you have a soul or not. And these things are pretty related to the purpose of YOU.

If science is now in the business of describing purpose; why not have science as religion? The problem is that although we can explain how things work and why; we won't get close to give it a purpose. This means that even though we can explain thunder, we can't assign any purpose to it. I believe that this gives science a huge disadvantage to religion in the eyes of normal people. You may object and say that the truth should be good enough to compete; IF we can't show a purpose, maybe there isn't any. Wouldn't people adopt this idea if it's "the right answer"? If you ever sold a product, you know that this is untrue. We don't buy products because they are good for us. We buy them because we like them. As a philosophy product package, science is like carrots: Good for you, but terribly boring. We in principle know how almost everything works, but we can't assign purpose to any of it. And purpose is what the masses demand.

The elephant in our living room

The expression "The elephant in the living room" is used in cases where obvious issues are overlooked. I imagine this as a middle aged English lady sitting in her living room drinking some tea. Behind her and her sofa stands a medium sized elephant. He is overlooking her shoulder to get a glimpse of the next British Idol on the TV. If you visit the lady the discussion may go like this:
Me: Wow! There is an elephant behind your sofa lady!
Lady: There is certainly not. My living room is not a Zoo.
Me: But I can see him. He is right behind you watching British Idol.
Lady: Well if he really is there he is not doing much harm behind the sofa, is he?
Me: He just shit on your floor though.
Lady: Well if you really must know I put an old carpet behind him so there is really no harm done.

I do this all the time in my physics studies. I don't want to bore you with the details but I make a living trying to figure out how atoms and molecules stick to things. Things can be other molecules, atoms or surfaces. I don't do this by testing but by calculations based on models.

My problem is that the models I use are not correct. With not correct I mean that I know that they are not true. What I hope is that these models despite being not correct can still be useful and harbor some fractional truth in them. After a while I forget that they are untrue because that happens when you do something day after day. This is my elephant in my living room. Sometimes when I compare my predictions with actual reality (usually experiments) it is like the elephant taking a shit on my floor. When this happens I can either close my eyes and blame the experiments for being poorly conducted (I may be right, that happens) and hope that the elephant who just shit on my floor REALLY is not there (if he is not, then neither is the shit). I can also acknowledge the shit on the floor and put an old carpet behind the elephant for next time. This is my weapon of choice and in practice it means that I start patching my model to work a little better. The obvious question you may have is now: Why the hell do you not just acknowledge the elephant and get on with your life? The reason is that elephants are problematic to move through house doors; it is simply impossible to move him. In my work, I don't know of any better way to do what I do. Also if I thought about that elephant all day my work would be no fun at all. I could also move to another living room, which I don't want to since I have grown attached to my home. And my new living room is likely to have an elephant too.

So contrary to what you may have thought, the old lady is just like me. We don't acknowledge the elephant because we can't move him. And if we can't do anything about him; why trouble our happiness with acknowledging him? In case we don't want to live in shit we do have to acknowledge the consequences of having him though. By putting an old carpet behind him.

Economists have elephants in their living room as well. It is fun to tease them about this because they often REALLY don't know it is there. So far we may not be smart enough to argue with an economist about the benefits of free market and capitalism, since we saw (from yesterdays discussion) that he always has some clever answer to everything. But we will soon be able to visit his living room and tease him about his elephant and, even funnier, his ignorance about it. And I bet he doesn't even put an old carpet behind him.

Economics 101. Thrown in your face

A few months ago I bought a Netbook. Amazed that it cost around half of my monthly rent, I couldn't help wonder how cheap things can get. Economists often attribute this as the work of the efficient market. Roughly it means that every process involved when building my Netbook is trimmed and worked on until perfection due to the fierce competition from Netbook producers. Every wasteful step is bound to be either detected and corrected or, if not detected, lead to a more expensive product which no savvy consumer will buy. Sort of.

This applies to labor as well and hence jobs are being outsourced to people with low salary demand, since only a fool would buy a more expensive product than necessary. While this may be a local dilemma for the people losing their jobs it is usually argued that the world as a whole will be better of than before since; We will now be able to buy cheaper goods; some Asian who got your job will be able to feed his family; you who lost your job may suffer in the short run buy will eventually be able to move on to do more productive things.

Economists are trained to argue that this is good stuff, and one has to admit they seem to have a point; all the cheap goods in the world for everyone and the only cost is that when you can't keep up you just leave your job to someone more efficient and learn something new that is in demand. You could even get public support to go to school and learn something that you can do better than that Asian who took your job. It's like a global running competition where everyone on earth is running for the same team and where you just can tag an Asian when you get exhausted and get some rest in a bar before you continue with new strength.

As a physicist you usually get the habit of worrying about what happens with a system after a really long time. Although earth will circle the sun a lot of times it is still interesting to ask what happens after a REALLY long time; will we crash into the sun? Drift away in space? Collide with Mars? And although my Netbook will probably work fine for a while; How is it most likely to brake down? This occupational habit makes me a bit of an odd conversationalist since I often wonder more about what happens in extreme cases than in most likely cases.

When analyzing the economist's efficient market I can't help wondering about the limits. Can people always jump ships when things turn competitive? Is unemployment not an issue with this system? An economist will tell you that there is nothing wrong with his model and that the fact that we have a lot of unemployment is rather connected to an unreasonable restricted labor market where salaries are not determined by efficient markets but by unions. Unemployment, he would say, is caused by the fact that society demands salaries for its people that are not reasonably justified in an efficient market. The economist will quite convincingly defend his model i a similar way and blame its apparent failures on the fact that it was not properly implemented in the first place.

After having tried all your good arguments to prove that his ideas about the efficient market sucks, including the bellow the belt ones which is basically just pointing out that he is a capitalist pig, the economist may get on the offensive. From claiming that it makes most economical sense, he now attacks and plays the solidarity card. This involves facts like the living standards in formerly poor Asian countries like South Korea. These countries used to be dirty and poor before we let them take the jobs we didn't really want to compete for, but are now growing both rich and stable. The economist will, together with some other arguments, claim that the competition in the free market is a better policy for improving poor countries than the policies which pretty much only involves sending poor countries some 1 % of GDP to feed the poor. The fact that the economist (Probably working on Wall Street with a Christmas bonus 8 times you annual salary. And yes; his Christmas bonus comes in cash and has the words "Bailout Money" written on every bill with a smiley next to it) is now reaching for moral high ground in your discussion deeply angers you. But what can you do?

Economists are good to measure things. If you still claim that the economist is full of shit he will point out how much better we are now compared to 200 years ago. With some fancy arguments he will take the credit for this.

We suspect that this self serving economist is full of shit, but we have a hard time arguing with him since most of what he says makes sense. But is he REALLY right? I have some thoughts on that that I will share in a while.

The incomplete equation of happiness

On my way to work today I had to sit next to a loud middle aged man. His work apparently involved processing lumber in some way, although this was not the main topic of his monologue. His main concern was for his lazy teenager, and for his lack of interest in homework. His son was only interested in sitting by the computer playing World of Warcraft (WoW), which affected all of his grades, and his ability to continue for applying to higher education.

Assuming that the loud middle aged man never went to university himself (perhaps a bold assumption; maybe he went to lumber processing college), I couldn't help start wondering how he could be so sure that pushing his kid through the process of higher education would make the kid so much happier. After also assuming that the goal really was to make the kid happier and not some kind of self fulfillment I concluded that the general truth is that Higher education means more money, which mean more fun and more happiness, or:

Education -> Good Job -> $ -> Hot wife, bright kids,respect and nice house -> Happiness

Problem is that this thinking is too simplistic. I have been studying for around 18 years now and can easily conclude no hot wives has so far freely been handed out. Educated people have to fight for these as well, and given our on average lack of social skills and time; arguably we have a disadvantage in our pursuit of happiness.

To make things more complicated the equation is not complete. Many more things can make you happy in life, and a good amateur philosopher thinks good and hard of that may be missing in the equation above.

This is part of why I started writing today. To show you if PhD studies in Physics could be a part of your happiness equation. And if you, like most, already figured out it would be a terrible waste of your time; at least I hope to give you an idea of what should, or at least what should not, be in your equation of happiness.