Midland School District Vice President Clint McCance in Arkansas has shocked the school district by responding to a campaign to end bullying of gay students with a hateful (if not gleeful) Facebook commentary on gay teen suicides. Using the terms “queer” and “fag,” McCance promised to disown his own children if they are gay and refused to mourn the death of “sinners.”
McCance appeared to relish “the fact that [gay people] often give each other AIDS and die.” His diatribe was in response to the “Spirit Day” campaign that recognizes the problem of bullying of gay students and encourages students to wear purple to remember young people who committed suicide because of such bullying. McCance would have nothing of it, writing “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed therselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE.”
He then later wrote this little loving note for his children: ““I would disown my kids they were gay. They will not be welcome at my home or in my vicinity. I will absolutely run them off. Of course my kids will know better. My kids will have solid christian beliefs. See it infects everyone.” Would not be welcomed “in his vicinity”? What does that mean? He actually does not have the authority to “run off” gay people from his vicinity.
Then he shared his personal celebration of the death of gay people:
No because being a fag doesnt give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then dont tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. I dont care how people decide to live their lives. They dont bother me if they keep it to thereselves. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. If you arent against it, you might as well be for it.”
Of course, “enjoying” the fact that some people have a long suffering illness and die is an admission of mental illness. Of course, what is most striking is how McCance uses religion to justify such hate. His pride in his instilling his beliefs in his children is a chilling thought of prejudice being passed down as a prized family legacy.
Source: CNN
Jonathan Turley
I think these kinds of views are more common than we think, which is really scary. We should heed his words and know that hate and prejudice run deep .
And, get this bigoted, hateful person away from any position of power or influence over children.
Alice is correct. He simply made the mistake of feeling too comfortable.
“”Of course my kids will know better. My kids will have solid christian beliefs ….’ Of course, what is most striking is how McCance uses religion to justify such hate. His pride in his instilling his beliefs in his children is a chilling thought of prejudice being passed down as a prized family legacy.”
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Striking perhaps, but no surprise to me. We always “know they are Christians by their love.”
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.- Mark Twain
Me thinks McCancer doth protest too much.
I’ve said this once and I’ll say this again and it has been proven lately,the ones who scream the loudest are the ones you really have to watch.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “I want to be in [Arkansas] when the end of the world comes, because it’s always 20 years behinds.” Thanks to McCance for proving him right.
culheath
1, October 28, 2010 at 8:37 am
Me thinks McCancer doth protest too much.
=======================================================
Bingo!
What is truly tragic about this kind of public hate (and this man is far from the only one broadcasting his feelings that LGBT kids should go right ahead and kill themselves) is that these very same children will inevitably hear this.
No matter what you think about anyone’s lifestyle choice, I would think we could all get behind the idea that children killing themselves is a universally bad thing.
It chills me to think that this is exactly why these poor kids think there is no alternative available to them; that the world hates them so much, they are better off dead.
Mr. McCance and everyone like him have these kids’ blood on their hands.
Those who think being politically correct is a burden too hard to carry, we offer Mr McCance as the poster child. I see no differnce between this moronic, hateful, hurtful statement and Juan Williams’ equally hateful and potentially harmful recent statements.
On the downside, he’s oh so fired. On the upside, he has an excellent career opportunity ahead of him in Westboro!
(As for trying to blame the Bible for that rant, I have just this to say: “Christianity: You’re Doing It Wrong.”)
No see, the universe is a zero sum game: In order for God to love one group he has to hate another.
More such symptoms or outbreaks are in our future unfortunately.
It is really becoming epidemic.
Propaganda and deceit rob a populace of the touch with reality eventually.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2010/10/etiology-of-social-dementia-2.html
Delusional projection of self-imago? Methinks it is biologically impossible to hate anyone else without first having been traumatized into hatred of self.
As I have written elsewhere, as a function of human brain biology, religion is the name of the brain activity relating to what is not understood; whereas science is the name of the brain activity relating to what is understood.
The human social tragedy of religious dogma is that dogmatic people claim mistakenly claim to have actual understanding of what is not actually understood. This sincere delusional aspect of human society allows every sort of abuse I have yet encountered to seemingly flourish, regardless of the millions of people murdered in for the sake of mistaken misunderstandings.
Oops. I am attempting to post this on a legal blog. In my work as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, licensed to hold paramount the public safety while working in areas of my professional competence without the use of deception, I observe that the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence is actually an unconstitutional religious establishment, in that it uses authoritarian tyranny and coercion to force people to believe in an understanding of human nature which is a neurologically absurd tragedy.
There are no avoidable mistakes (or accidents or events), thousands of years of human claims to the contrary, because it is only possible to know for sure whether a mistake (or accident or event) was avoidable if it was actually avoided; so all actually avoidable mistakes are actually avoided, and the only mistakes (or accidents or events) which actually happen are the ones which, when they happened, were actually unavoidable.
My research findings will be forever refuted when one person truthfully describes one mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened and also truthfully describes any achievable process through which the mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened could actually have been avoided. The belief that any mistake (or accident or event) which has actually happened could have happened differently is a consequence of the dissociative brain trauma of the indoctrination of social conventionality to the effect that a child, having been told what to do or told what not to do, and having not done as told or having done as not told, was being defiant of self-purported “authority.”
Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority” might wisely be renamed to “Obedience to Deceptive Authoritarian Traumatic Tyranny.”
One mistake actually made, how it could actually have been avoided, and the nearly 70 years I have invested in learning about “Human Error” (James Reason), “Human Destructiveness” (Anthony Storr) and the utter madness of reciprocal retaliation, all my life’s work, will be worthless rubbish. Real science seems to get no stronger than it is in the bioengineering work I do. The work refutes a belief seemingly traceable far back into human pre-history, requires only one refuting example when human society claims that there are countless such refuting examples, and yet not one person has ever been able to even suggest where I might look for any truthful example of the conventional adversarial view being scientifically valid.
Shame is a brain-biology response to the catastrophically mind-shattering traditional belief in guilt, guilt is a delusion. The terrible twos, or infant-child transition, or infant-child discontinuity is of the destruction of actual truthfulness which is, albeit naively, inborn in every person, and is almost always partly to completely destroyed through the errors of human social tradition in which time-corrupted learning (Robert Scaer) is coercively infused through the work of the tragedy of the commons.
One mistake actually made, how it actually could have been avoided, both truthfully told, and I will allow that the Anglo-American Adversarial System is not an unconstitutional religious establishment. Why has, for more than 70 years thus far, not one person been able to truthfully tell of even one real event which would demolish the scientific validity of my life-work?
Suppose, to concoct a simple illustration, I find myself faced with a dichotomous decision, whether to take “Path A” or “Path B.” Suppose I take A and, after three minutes, find that A worked out very badly and, looking over at B with my imagination, it is clear that, three minutes after taking A, B would have been much better. Suppose (hypotheticals can accomplish the impossible, and, perhaps also the possible?) that every effect of my having taken A are forever completed after three minutes, so I could supposedly get a perfect score for A by measuring, absolutely without error, every effect of A for those three minutes.
To learn whether A or B was the better choice, I need to return to the point of decision and take path B. Suppose (using the miraculous properties e of the hypothetical) I indeed do find that, at three minutes, B is vastly better, only B is not completed. Suppose I continue along path B until it is completed (my having taken path B will never again have any effect) and path B becomes completed after three million years, whereupon, path B turns out to be horribly worse than A would have been.
I find that this “hypothetical” utterly destroys any scientific validity which can be assigned to the conventional Anglo-American Adversarial System because:
1. It is impossible to actually measure anything absolutely without error, thus it is impossible to get an errorless score for either path A or path B.
2. I find no hint of evidence that I can, in the ordinary sense, live much as I am for three million years.
3. If I were able to accomplish both (1.) and (2.), and were to take the perfect scores back to the point of deciding which path to take, I am not at the point of that decision because I did not have the score for either or both of path A or path B.
4. Absent any way to evalutate, in advance, the outcome of either path A or path B, the commonplace judgments of the Anglo-American Adversarial System are delusions, because they require that what is actually impossible actually happen.
5. The Anglo-American Adversarial System is actually a delusional religious establishment of the sort absolutely prohibited by any intelligible interpretation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, because the Anglo-American Adversarial System has dogmas and doctrines which are regarded as effectively infallible, and which require a properly indoctrinated priesthood (those admitted to the bar) in order to terrify people into dishonest compliance with the deceptive tyranny of the time-corrupted learning methodology of applying knowledge and understanding only acquired during the process of an event to the state of knowledge and understanding which existed prior to the event. I can imagine no possible greater dishonesty, no greater form of child abuse, than the teaching of a child to be self-dishonest by terrifying a child into believing that being told about something is the same as the child having done the something.
6. The Anglo-American Adversarial System is a religious establishment founded on and grounded in mistaken understanding of the biology of learning.
7. Guilt is a brain-damaging delusion, and shame is the brain response to said damage. Were guilt not a delusion, surely someone (I have asked thousands of people in person, and put my doctoral dissertation on the Internet in my effort to find just one refuting actual example contrary to my research findings) would have been able to tell me of one actual example of a mistake actually made which could actually have been avoided. That has not happened.
8. Quod Erat Demonstrandum? (Unless someone can truthfully refute my finding that no event which ever actually happened could actually have happened differently than it actually happened.
9. If anyone can do so, please refute the finding of my research, by truthfully describing one mistake (or event) which actually happened and truthfully describing how that mistake 9or event) could have happened differently without using what happened during the event as the evidence that it could have happened differently, as what happened during the event did not happen prior to the event, and therefore, what happened during the event did not exist prior to the event, and was not available prior to the event in such a way as to allow avoiding the event.
10. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Absoluta sententia expositore non indiget. Actus Dei nemini facit injuriam. Actus me invito factus non est meus actus. Affirmanti, non neganti, incumbit probatio. Veritas nihil veretur nisi abscondi. Veritas est justitiae mater.
Gyges: “No see, the universe is a zero sum game: In order for God to love one group he has to hate another.”
That argument is just precious.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. –
Please check your meds. You are not doin’ them rite.
“In my work as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, licensed to hold paramount the public safety while working in areas of my professional competence without the use of deception, I observe that the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence is actually an unconstitutional religious establishment, in that it uses authoritarian tyranny and coercion to force people to believe in an understanding of human nature which is a neurologically absurd tragedy.”
**************
In my work as a Virginia attorney licensed to hold paramount the public safety, I find Hooke’s Law for linear elastic materials to be useless and thus unconstitutional from an engineering standpoint if used to analyze the stress-strain relationship in the theory of elasticity. This statement makes about as much sense as your opining on the entire constitutionality of American jurisprudence. Yours is the most purplish bull**it I’ve ever read. Those who try too hard to be articulate rarely are deemed to be so.
Neurologically absurd tragedy? Man, you said it.
Hoyagirl, Well said.
I’m betting that one of those children of his will disappoint him. And that child will be better off for being disowned by this narrow-minded guy.
Missed mespo’s posting.
Thanks for taking care of that, in short order. I was momentarily exhausted…
To those who may “believe” that my ongoing work as a Registered Professional Engineer about public safety aspects of the structure of human society is indicative of delusional thinking, I absolutely agree. Where I part company with the views of a seeming majority of people is in determining what is, and what is not, actually of delusion.
There is a profound “irony” in the suggestion that I am not “doin’ my meds rite.” As is described in some fair detail in my doctoral dissertation (Mental Health and Mental Illness: Cause, Purpose, Cure, and Prevention; A Bioengineering Perspective – University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998), I did much of the field research for my thesis while living as an iatrogenic-blunder psychiatric inpatient; I was put on a variety of psychotropic medications because the psychiatrists and psychologists under whose care I came were very certain that my beliefs about learning and about mistakes were of schizophrenic delusionality.
The dissertation may be found at present on the Internet at:
harriselectronicservice.com/files/Internet_Version_20051225B.pdf
Regarding the dissertation, and based on recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions which I regard as plausibly giving greater standing as persons to fictitious persons (i.e., corporations) t than to actual, living persons, I no longer grant actual personal rights to corporations. Thus, I here identify the various hospitals (corporations of one sort or another) identified only by Capital Letters in the dissertation.
“Hospital A” was the University of Illinois Hospital, 8 East psychiatric unit and the 8 West surgical unit, in Chicago, Illinois.
“Hospital B” was the now-defunct Forest Hospital, in Desplaines, Illinois.
“Hospital C” was the now-defunct Charter-Barclay Hospital, in Chicago, Illinois
“Hospital D” was accurately named, The Austen Riggs Center, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
“Hospital E” was the Medical Psychiatry unit of the University of Chicago Hospital, in Chicago, Illinois.
There are numerous typographical errors in the dissertation because I was allowed about half of the mandatory time for the writing and defending of my dissertation. One such error is on page v, where the line starting with “2.14″ would properly read, “Hospital B, first time”
I was medication-compliant as a psychiatric inpatient because, if I were not compliant, I would be discharged and would not be able to continue the field work for my thesis by being a valid psychiatric patient, albeit one made valid through iatrogenic blunders of diagnosis. As told in the dissertation, my neuropsychiatrist at the University of Chicago took me off all the psychotropic medications, and my tested IQ skyrocketed from such as I could not add 5 and 6 to where I was at the level of, to use 1930s psychiatric jargon (I was born in 1939), a high grade moron, and was deemed capable of again living at home.
Had I not taken the psychotropic medication ride about as far is it can be taken and leave a person alive, I might be disconcerted by the suggestion that I check my meds. As it happens, I am an intensely serious scientific researcher, and I am intensely serious about getting my work done ethically, morally, and scientifically in truly decent and accurate ways.
The classical time-corrupted-learning-based response to what may be a dramatic paradigm change in science research is the ad-hominem attack. Remember Galileo Galilei?
I put my dissertation on the Internet in 2005, and have told quite a few folks that it is there and have asked people to show me any significant error in the methodology or findings. All that has yet come my way have been forms of the ad-hominem fallacy.
As for the Latin legal maxims, I did take Latin in high school, and I do have, within easy reach, my copy of “Handy Dictionary of the Latin and English Languages; With an Appendix of Latin Geographical, Historical, and Mythological Proper Names, David McKay Company, Philadelphia, 1950.
I am absolutely serious about my plausibly-cutting-edge work regarding socialization trauma as a form of child abuse, and the effects of socialization trauma on the structure of human society, and the effects of the structure of human society on public safety (the public being comprised only of individual persons).
Ad-hominem arguments are, as I observe, the essence of the notions which underlie the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence. If the only direct responses I get to my carefully considered views are of the ad-hominem sort, I shall take that to be a hint that my work may be even better, as a scientific paradigm change, than I may have dared to hope.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer No. 34106-6
Wisconsin Certified Master Electrician No. 660912
Life Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Member:
National Society of Professional Engineers
Association for Psychological Science
Biomedical Engineering Society
Autism Society of America
Autism National Committee (AutCom)
JBH,Jr:
Now that was funny!
For my part I didnt understand anything J.Brian Harris ect ect ect said…..thank god
“I was medication-compliant as a psychiatric inpatient because, if I were not compliant, I would be discharged and would not be able to continue the field work for my thesis by being a valid psychiatric patient,”:=(
A Virginia attorney licensed to hold paramount the public safety? Where is that so stated; I cannot find it. What I do find, on the Virginia Bar Association web site, in the Mission Statement, is, “committed to serving the public and the legal profession by promoting the highest standards of integrity, professionalism and excellence in the legal profession; working to improve the law and the administration of justice; and advancing collegial relations among lawyers.” No mention there of holding the “public safety paramount,” words found in the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, to which code, I adhere in my engineering work.
Sincerity is not Truthfulness. So I state as a neurological-biological fact, and do so without deception.
I perused the Virginia Supreme Court Rules of Professional Conduct to learn whether attorneys in Virginia are indeed licensed to hold paramount the public safety in a manner comparable to the way I am held as an engineer. A careful computer-based search of the entire language of said Rules of Professional conduct applicable to attorneys practicing in Virginia came up with exactly zero instances of the term, “public safety” in said Virginia Supreme Court Rules of Professional Conduct. Methinks, if t’ain’t in the rules, then t’ain’t in the rules.
I seek no combat, no derision, no “name-calling.” I seek to learn whether anyone can, using valid (demonstrably truthful) scientific methods, cite so much as one actual instance of an avoidable accident which actually happened and which was therefore not avoided. See, for instance, Black’s Law Dictionary, Ninth Edition, Thomson Reuters, St. Paul, 2009 – page 156. Citing thousands to perhaps hundreds of thousands of internally-consistent human error does not constitute citing one actual avoidable accident which was not actually avoided.
I ponder whether a central human enigma may not be found within the philosophical self-reference difficulties which result from humanity studying itself.
I worked for over twenty years at Cook County Children’s Hospital, in Chicago, in Pediatric Cardiology, and I observed thousands of children who were going through the traditional infant-child transition, and I consistently observed children developing a form of amnesia for pre-infant-child transition life experiences, and, as a bioengineer, I take such amnesia to be suggestive of brain trauma. Neurologist Robert Scaer (The Trauma Spectrum, and The Body Bears the Burden: Second Edition) documents the brain damage of time-corrupted learning as well as any biologist or neurologist I have yet found.
University of Massachusetts-Amherst psychologist Robert Feldman, in, “The Liar in Your Life,” Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2009, states on page 258, “There’s a dirty secret I’ve been trying to avoid emphasizing in this book, but its about time we faced it. All of us are liars. Yes, that means you. And yes, it means me, too.” Feldman also states, on page 73, “Parents of children with autism often report that their children are simply incapable of lying. While at first glance unrelenting honesty might be seen as a virtue, in fact it is at the heart of the social difficulties children with autism experience.” Also, on page 73, “Consider the irony of the situation. Honesty in children with autism is viewed as a manifestation of their disorder. Subsequently, autistic children who were originally unfailingly honest but have begun to show signs of lying effectively are considered to be showing improvement in their condition.”
The simple fact, as I can fathom it, is that I am autistic in such a manner as to have always been “simply incapable of lying,” because I have never been able to go through the traditional infant-child transition; this apparently because of the way in which I am autistic.
My being autistic does not make my work scientifically valid; yet my being autistic may make my work necessary. Nonetheless, unless or until someone can truthfully demonstrate an error of consequence in the work, what truth can there be to the claim, totally unsubstantiated by anything other than the beliefs my work refutes, that there can ever actually be an avoidable event which, after the fact, was not actually avoided.
The notion that I am “narrow-minded” is plausibly a testable hypothesis. On a shelf above the computer I am using for this writing are a bunch of books, for brevity, I will name only the author and title of some of them:
Harold Kushner, ”
When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough,” Ian Barbour, “Religion In An Age of Science,” Sallie McFague,”Models of God,” Walter Elsasser, “Reflections on a Theory of Organisms,” Emanuel Swedenborg, “Life on Other Planets” (John Chadwick, tr.), Herbert J. Muller, “The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Socities,” C. G. Jung, “The Undiscovered Self,” Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” Joseph Hallinan, “Why We Make Mistakes,” Marshall Rosenberg, “Nonviolent Communication,” Jodie Blanco, “Please Stop Laughing at Me,” David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD, “The Eye of the I: From Which Nothing Is Hidden,” Walter Elsasser, “The Physical Foundation of Biology,” Fritz Redl & David Wineman, “Children Who Hate” and “Controls From Within,” Benjamin Hoff, “The Te of Piglet,” Jethro K. Lieberman, “The Litigious Society,” Alice Miller, “Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries” and “The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness,” Albert Einstein, “Out of My Later Years” and “The Meaning of Relativity: Fourth Edition,” H. Allen Smith, “The Age of the Tail,” Briskin, Erikson, Ott, & Callanan, “The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly,” Andrew Napolitano, “Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When The Government Breaks Its Own Laws,” David B. Hart, “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies,” R. D. Laing, “The Divided Self,” and, if I were to mention every publication in my personal research library, the list would contain something like 15,000 entries. I was reading at college level and above when I was eight years of age, and I have been working at what I do as a scientist since I first understood anything about World War II, well before I arrived at the typical age, circa 18 months, of the commonplace infant-child transition.
Other people are free to “call me names” as they choose. I choose to call no one any “names,” because I have learned to avoid making the fundamental attribution error (which assigns personal responsibility for situational factors which are outside the person’s locus of control). The name calling during the first three days of kindergarten, at Columbia School, in Seattle, Washington, from about a third of my classmates, was so intense as to lead me, on the way home after the third day of kindergarten, to not dive under the wheels of a Seattle electric bus at the northwest corner of Ferdinand and Rainier, by pulling my left hand from my mother’s right hand, and I did not dive under those bus wheels to escape the name-calling (to the tune of “A Tisket, a Tasket,”) “Cry Baby, Bri Baby, Brian is a Sissy, repeated and repeated and repeated during recess. I recognized that my diving under those wheels would hurt my family “thousands of times” more than the other children could ever hurt me, and I never even twitched as a first actual step toward making that abuse-terminating dive. Instead, I instantly forgave the other children, for I immediately understood that they did not understand what they were doing to me and I did understand.
Once again, I fully recognize, as much as I think full recognition is possible for anyone, that the viewpoint given to me through my life experiences contrasts starkly and profoundly with what the mythical “most people” seemingly believe.
Once again, I ask, with nothing but simple decency in mind, can anyone tell me of even one event, which, having actually happened, could actually have happened differently by describing an actually achievable process through which what actually happened could have actually happened otherwise?
Yes, I have read thousands of written works which attest to my view being wrong, and I have read thousands more of written works which attest to reality being defined by consensus. Plausibly, I know about “the standard story” about as well as anyone might. Alas, I always find “the standard story” to have the core nature of contradicting itself. These contradictions, in my personal experience, have always taken the form of violations of one or more of the “laws of intelligible thought,” to wit, “the law of identity,” “the law of non-contradiction” (which some writers have named “the law of contradiction”), “the law of the excluded middle for dichotomies,” and “the law of rational inference.”
Instead of “name-calling” and/or its ilk, how about dealing with my expressed concern as though it might just happen to be of scientific and societal/personal merit?
J. Brian Harris
Can’t do it, can you?
Can’t give even one specific, truthfully told, instance of an event which actually happened which, after it happened, could actually have happened differently?
Few folks I have ever met have the education and mental capacity to do high-dimension-space, complex-variable, tensor calculus, and few who can do that whom I have yet met can sort out how to apply such calculus to the way actual decisions, as depolarizations or lack of depolarizations, occur at the post-synaptic membranes of the synapses in a human brain.
What I write is funny? Tell that to someone who tried to turn on the water to take a shower, and, instead, smelled diesel engine exhaust fumes. What I write is funny? Do you believe that consensus defines reality? Tell that to the people who survived escaping from Sobibor.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to look on the Internet for “David Bohm” and “Donald Factor” and “Peter Garrett” and “Dialogue – A proposal,” and read the first paragraph. Can you disprove their view about a possible “deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought”?
I would find it funny, were it not for the terrible tragedy I find my life has encountered, the human tragedy of deception and dishonesty as documented by Robert Feldman in his book, “The Liar in Your Life.”
My life was significantly affected when I had the chance to talk with Thomas Kohut at a scientific conference a few years ago. His dad, Heinz Kohut (author of such works as, “The Analysis of the Self,” and, “How Does Analysis Cure?”) was the only one in his close family to survive World War II because Heinz recognized the danger to life in time to escape the Nazi Holocaust, and his close relatives did not do so. According to Thomas, his dad did everything he could imagine doing to get others in his family to leave in time, and had no success at all. It seems to me that what we believe really does matter in terms of the quality of life we can experience.
Perhaps I can use simpler words…
One event which actually happened, and how it actually could have happened differently through an actually-achievable process, both truthfully told, and my research is worthless garbage, and I will welcome all the ridicule and name-calling
that can ever come my way. And, if it is shown to exist, I will profoundly apologize for my manifestly obvious stupidity.
Only one truthfully told instance is all it will take, and I will promptly concede to groupthink.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
I choose to regard the following quotation from Albert Einstein, “Out of My Later Years”, Philosophical Library, New York, 1950, to fall within copyright law fair use provisions. From page 5,
“Of what is significant in one’s own existence one is hardly aware, and certainly it should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?
The bitter and the sweet come from the outside, the hard from within, from one’s own efforts. For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
I am, in almost every respect, thoroughly unlike Albert Einstein. I have yet to accomplish anything that “really matters.” I am a nobody with a bunch of meaningless experiences which, being autistic, I cannot communicate with others who I find are lacking in essential autism. I have earned no respect and have earned no love for the work I do as a bioengineer.
Yet, somewhat as Einstein wrote, arrows of hate have been shot at me throughout my life by people who seem unable to understand me because, as I observe. they are first unable to understand themselves.
I life in human society without forming judgments of others, and so also simultaneously live in the delicious inner solitude which is pure delight in infancy, as in youth, as in adulthood, and were there to ever be such a thing, would be pure delight in years of maturity.
My writing here, as elsewhere, is of my research, for I use a research method which is different than the one many scientists assert to be their theory-in-use. I simply live my life as I would were I not doing research, and I make the observations I would make were I not doing research, and, in the ordinary course of my life, the observations I make form patterns, and those ordinary course of my life patterns are the research. This, I do not use deception in my work, even though I am vividly aware of the possibility that other people will interpret my life as being deceptive, and such interpretations can never be in my locus of control, and hence I have no responsibility for them, and never know what my response abilities will be until after my ability to respond as responded.
My hypothesis to be tested, is simply that no one will be able to truthfully describe any event which actually happened and also truthfully describe how the event could have happened differently than it happened. The null hypothesis, for me, is that someone will accomplish that task, and my work will wisely and forever be rejected, and that would make my personal life much easier, because I could simply, in clear conscience, quit the work I do and patiently or impatiently or inpatiently, wait for my mortal life to end itself in whatever natural way that may happen.
Until then, I find I have work to do, and this is how I am now doing it.
Observe, if you will, that, to avoid deception or the appearance of deception, I have clearly and verifiably identified myself; I do not use pseudonyms as a defense against having someone inform me of my being mistaken about any aspect of my work, or my life experiences.
The Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing has an accessible record of my PE registration. The online catalog of the main library at the University of Illinois at Chicag has an online-accessible record of my dissertation.
It seems to me that I cannot be successfully taught to be afraid of being truthful, whether or not anyone else understands me or my life.
So many people I encounter try to tell me about me, without actually knowing me; while I tell others about me because I am the only person I know whom I know well enough to tell anyone about. If you try to ell me about me, I learn nothing about myself and nothing, really, about you, either. If I tell you about me, and if you tell me about you, we can actually learn from each other.
One mistake actually made, could actually have been avoided? Only one will do. Only one.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. writes
“As I have written elsewhere, as a function of human brain biology, religion is the name of the brain activity relating to what is not understood; whereas science is the name of the brain activity relating to what is understood.”
A couple paragraphs later he writes,
“There are no avoidable mistakes (or accidents or events), thousands of years of human claims to the contrary, because it is only possible to know for sure whether a mistake (or accident or event) was avoidable if it was actually avoided; so all actually avoidable mistakes are actually avoided, and the only mistakes (or accidents or events) which actually happen are the ones which, when they happened, were actually unavoidable.
My research findings will be forever refuted when one person truthfully describes one mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened and also truthfully describes any achievable process through which the mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened could actually have been avoided.”
I would like to point out that if you believe your first assertion then you must know that science has already done so. (A la Schrödinger’s cat)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/manyworlds/original.html
Modern scientific theory “suggest[s] that these objects [exist] in ever-evolving superpositions without ever collapsing into a single reality, even though our reality suggests otherwise.”
In addition, we understand it to be true that a single event can be viewed by multiple observers where each observer experiences mutually exclusive outcomes, each of which is verifiably true. This phenomenon is neatly addressed in Brian Greene’s book ‘The Elegant Universe’ pages 34 through 37.
http://books.google.com/books?id=okv_O0Xhl9gC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=physics+train+brian+greene&source=bl&ots=rgbJl2aHJv&sig=0ynlBHsk4bAFOA4kIZyz-aPz-1o&hl=en&ei=I9nJTKCiN4S0lQf28MDWAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Perhaps these points don’t address the more phylosophical aspect to your argument, however I feel they quite aptly address your request for “any achievable process through which the mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened could actually have been avoided.”
Hey, doc, ever thought about decaf?
I grew up in a protestant church; and, I remember there was much speculation about St. Paul being gay. I wonder what McCance would do if that were proven to be true. I also believe that God is a God of love not hate.
JBH, Ph.D, PE:
“Can’t give even one specific, truthfully told, instance of an event which actually happened which, after it happened, could actually have happened differently?”
****************
Why, yes I can! Since you’ve posted your latest wordy missive, I can say categorically that you are a boob. Had you replied cogently, there would be some doubt and things would have happened quite differently. Now if I instantly went insane after reading your missive I could have thought it quite cogent and provocative which is a quite different reaction than the one I actually had. Sadly for you, I didn’t and I don’t.
rcampbell – Yes, thanks for the suggestion. There is a jar of decaf coffee in our pantry. On the cap, is printed, “BEST BY 25 AUG 2007″ and that leads me to wonder whether people think better if they have been drinking decaf coffee. If so, I have been really derelict in my duty if the scientific truth is that decaf coffee is the med I need to adjust, from not drinking it to drinking it at least fast enough that it is not rather full three years after the “BEST BY” date.
Methinks that decaf has not helped, now that I have tried it. I am not thirsty, but I was not thirsty before drinking it.
Decaf did not work, because I have yet to receive from anyone the one example of an event which happened which, after it had happened, could have happened differently. Does decaf tend to make people delusional, so they readily accept time-confusion (as in the first stage of Erik Homberger Erikson’s epigenetic chart of psychosocial developmental crises (time confusion correlates, in Erikson’s epigenetic system, with mistrust)? If so, it did not work for me… I still trust people, though I trust some people to regard me with what I have a hunch just possibly may be some sort of pejorative (name-calling, like the name “decaf,” prejudice. I also trust some people to reject my scientific work before they undertake the risk of understanding the work accurately.
Goodness, gracious, I make such a simple, child-like request, the sort of request a very little child might make, the sort of request I did make as I began to learn words during the age period of traditional infancy.
Please, anyone, tell me of one, only one, instance of a real event which actually happened which will refute my bioengineering work.
Only one.
Please.
Only one, please.
I patiently await the scientifically valid refutation of the work I do as a scientist/engineer. How long shall I have to wait?
Please… One counter-example that actually refutes my work.
Only one, please!
One will be enough!
Quote from the late psychiatrist, Dr. Abraham Low, “If my patients had patience, I would not have patients.”
If I am impatient, will I soon become inpatient?
So, I wait, patiently, and not inpatiently.
One, just one…
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
“Lithium pharmacology refers to use of the lithium ion, Li+, as a drug. A number of chemical salts of lithium are used medically as a mood stabilizing drug, primarily in the treatment of bipolar disorder, where they have a role in the treatment of depression and particularly of mania, both acutely and in the long term. As a mood stabilizer, lithium is probably more effective in preventing mania than depression, and may reduce the risk of suicide in certain bipolar patients.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_pharmacology
It is truly a wonderful experience for me to learn what I am, for, on infallible authority, I finally know that I am a human mammary gland. Thanks for telling me.
Then there is gender bias, for my dictionary has another definition of the synonym for human mammary gland, and it is a stupid person. Why is a mother’s feeding a young baby stupid, why is the gland that allows such a baby to thrive stupid?
Is the chain of thought here that I, as a human mammary gland, am inextricably stupid, and that all human mammary glands are stupid, and therefore, that all women are stupid. I, for one, categorically reject that notion of womanhood. There has yet to be a stupid woman in my close family.
On the other hand, if I am stupid, surely I am too stupid to write cogently, and therefore, I am unable to avoid writing stupidly because I am stupid and therefore my stupid writing is writing I was unable to avoid, because of being stupid, and my working hypothesis is validated!
It was my observation, before I started junior high school, that humanity seemed to be guided mainly by adamant ignorance and intransigent stupidity, neither of which were any sort of personal or biological or social fault, but were simply a direct consequence of how much human evolution yet remains to happen. And that is a situational, and not a dispositional, attribution.
I neither seek nor want pejorative/hostile/judgmental/derogatory responses, and what I have written is not, in my intended meaning, derogatory in any way, albeit, I do admit to having a struggle with picking the words to use because it is my sadly consistent observation that human language(s) have developed in ways that tend to preclude, terribly distort, and/or conceal accurate communication of my actual scientific-social-biological concerns.
I seek merely to share an understanding of mine, derived from my pre-doctoral, doctoral, and post-doctoral work, and do so on the chance that someone, somewhere, may sometime find it of some practicable use. For those who find it not useful, and I cannot know in advance who is which, please pretend that I do not exist, if you find that beneficial in your life process.
Words, so I always find, are tools for symbolic communication of meaning, and the relationship, in any given person, between meaning and symbolized meaning is the result of life experiences in which meanings are communicated symbolically. Thus, to me, every person has a unique set of associations between words as symbolized meaning(s) and the meaning(s) symbolized in words. Dialogue, as proposed by Bohm, Factor, and Garrett (op.cit., in prior posting of mine) may be a feasible process for developing shared meaning(s) which are actually accurate enough as to be helpful to people and thereby helpful to the structure(s) of human society.
For those who did not notice, I did earlier state that I am autistic. I find Robert Feldman (previously cited) is likely right, that unrelenting honesty is at the core of the communication difficulties people of the autism spectrum tend to experience when attempting useful communication with people not of the autism spectrum.
It is not ever my purpose to hurt anyone.
Lastly, Bonnie, I agree with your comment. Thanks!
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
I posted a comment I believe will address the issue to which you speak, unfortunately it is pending moderation, probably due to the linking to articles demonstrating current scientific thinking regarding the addressed subject. I believe once it is approved you will find there are specific refutations of your theory.
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
-Plato
I have to remind myself at times…
JoshOnPC,
If your comment had more than two links, it will most likely remain in moderation Limbo.
It had 3. Think I could repost it as two posts?
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. writes
“As I have written elsewhere, as a function of human brain biology, religion is the name of the brain activity relating to what is not understood; whereas science is the name of the brain activity relating to what is understood.”
A couple paragraphs later he writes,
“There are no avoidable mistakes (or accidents or events), thousands of years of human claims to the contrary, because it is only possible to know for sure whether a mistake (or accident or event) was avoidable if it was actually avoided; so all actually avoidable mistakes are actually avoided, and the only mistakes (or accidents or events) which actually happen are the ones which, when they happened, were actually unavoidable.
My research findings will be forever refuted when one person truthfully describes one mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened and also truthfully describes any achievable process through which the mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened could actually have been avoided.”
I would like to point out that if you believe your first assertion then you must know that science has already done so. (A la Schrödinger’s cat)
Modern scientific theory “suggest[s] that these objects [exist] in ever-evolving superpositions without ever collapsing into a single reality, even though our reality suggests otherwise.”
In addition, we understand it to be true that a single event can be viewed by multiple observers where each observer experiences mutually exclusive outcomes, each of which is verifiably true. This phenomenon is neatly addressed in Brian Greene’s book ‘The Elegant Universe’ pages 34 through 37.
Perhaps these points don’t address the more phylosophical aspect to your argument, however I feel they quite aptly address your request for “any achievable process through which the mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened could actually have been avoided.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=okv_O0Xhl9gC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=physics+train+brian+greene&source=bl&ots=rgbJl2aHJv&sig=0ynlBHsk4bAFOA4kIZyz-aPz-1o&hl=en&ei=I9nJTKCiN4S0lQf28MDWAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger‘s_cat
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/manyworlds/original.html
JoshOnPC,
“Think I could repost it as two posts?”
That’s what I’d do.
@rcampbell
It is amazing how many people have distorted what Williams said, including yourself.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
I’z juss a ol’ countree boy, soes hep me out ‘sheer–is ya fur sure n’ fur sartin’ fur real?
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. :
I don’t think the justice system is a lie any more than I think a caked baked is a lie. They are deliberate constructs to achieve the best end possible while being aware that the limitations of prescience and the inability to remove all possibility of paradox from the use of logic to constrain and filter perceptions.
The equal haystacks mule does not starve. Probability waves collapse and stuff actually happens.
I like your vision.
Mr. Harris,
Are you getting paid by the word? Holy cow. Maybe I am just slow, but how does your dissertation relate to the issue of this disgusting homophobe school board member rejoicing over the death of gays?
I was also a little surprised that your dissertation had a lot of typos in it. Even in graduate work and law school papers, my professors refused to even complete a reading or review of the paper if there were spelling, grammatical or typographical errors. Time for completion was never an issue when they refused or accepted the finished product.
There is a reason why I mentioned using high-dimension-space complex-variable tensor calculus. Unlike folks well trained in radio frequency electronics design work, who tend to revel in the use of complex variables, almost all the physicists I have closely known tend to separate the imaginary and real components and use only real-number maths. When I was a physics major at Carleton College, I was already well-versed in complex variables through my study of electronics prior to going to college, and I had some serious difficulty with using complex variables because my physics professors thought them unnecessary. Alas, the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment comes out very differently when one uses complex variables for the probabilities, so differently that the seeming paradox of the live-dead cat vanishes identically.
I have yet to read Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe,” but I am very familiar with the argument I find you mentioning, albeit from different sources. I am much familiar with the nature of quantum mechanics and its plausible meanings. What I did not overlook regarding two observers observing what is supposedly a single event whereby the two observers observe different outcomes is not a contradiction of my research, for a contradiction would require that one or both observers observe the event differently, not than the other observer did, but than the observer who made a particular observation not have made the observation which was made.
There is Bertrand Russell’s “Barber Paradox,” which, absent time-corrupted learning, is not at all paradoxical. A simple description of the paradox is, in my own words;
There is a town with one, and only one, barber, and the barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself, and every man is shaved. Who shaves the barber? Ruling out the trivial solution that the barber is a woman who does not shave, it might seem that, if the barber shaves himself, he is shaved by the barber and does not shave himself. However, the word, “barber” is the name of a profession and not a person. The man who is the one and only town barber shaves himself when he is not engaged in his profession, because it is intrinsic to his profession that he only shaves men other than himself within his profession. Therefore, Russell’s “Barber Paradox” is an example of time-corrupted learning because, for it to be a paradox, the barber must always be engaged in his profession, which is physically absurd. The “Barber Paradox,” to be a paradox, contains a classification error by deeming barber to be the man who works as the barber, and so confuses the man with his work.
Another supposed self-reference paradox is, “This sentence is false.” Obviously, if “This sentence is false,” then, “This sentence is false,” is true, and vice versa. However, “This sentence is false” contains a mechanism or process, and is form of clocked flip-flop or binary divider in electronics lingo. Useful “This sentence is false” devices abound, such as a typical modern TV power switch, which, pushed and released one time, may turn the TV on and when pushed and released the next time, may turn the TV off. Two cycles of the power switch results in one cycle of the TV power.
The “parallel universes” model is an inextricable part of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. However, if one uses complex variables, it becomes manifestly obvious that there are an infinitude of imaginary universes and one which is actually real. What quantum mechanical function do the imaginary parallel universes serve? They allow change to happen in the real universe.
Somewhat more than a hundred years ago, Lord Kelvin announced that knowledge put in mathematical form is superior to other knowledge, and that notion led to regarding mathematical models as being more real than what the mathematics models. Given the later work of quantum-mechanical physicist, Walter Elsasser, on the ramifications of quantum mechanics for biology, Elsasser observed, accurately as I note, that actual biology is unfathomably, transcomputationally complex. A model of something is never the something modeled, else the law of non-contradiction would be violated. Nothing I have come upon in quantum mechanics ever violates the law of non-contradiction.
The arguments from cosmology and the physics of cosmology are ones I passed up as being based on the very error my work has seemingly identified, and as refutation of my work suffer from containing the fallacy of assuming the consequent.
Mathematical modeling can turn utterly absurd and still get into peer-reviewed scientific journals. Some years ago, an article was published in which it was stated that the speed of gravity had been measured, using occultations of stars by Jupiter. The math came out with the speed of gravity being the same as the speed of light, which was what the research was intended to prove. However, when I read the article, I immediately burst out, laughing, without intending to do so. What the researchers had actually measured was the speed of light at optical frequencies (or wavelengths) and at radio frequencies (or wavelengths). I decided to wait for a while before challenging the article, and, sure enough, within a week, what I had noticed had been noticed by others, and the article was thereupon refuted and effectively withdrawn from the properly peer-reviewed literature.
As for Schrödinger’s cat, if the real cat is dead, one or more of the infinite number of imaginary cats is alive, and if the real cat is alive, one or more of the infinite number of imaginary cats is dead. There is no paradox if one uses good enough maths.
My concern is not about imaginary universes to which we have no actual access. Imagination can imagine not only what is actually possible but also what is actually impossible. It may be useful to model existence as a singularity which, there being nothing outside the entire totality of existence because were there something existing outside existence, existence would expand to include it. For existence to exist, it has to create itself, there being nothing outside existence when existence expands to include all that exists that otherwise would be outside existence. Self-reference, again. In this model, what is experienced as time is actually the observation of the process of existence creating itself, which it does because there can be nothing outside existence to stop existence from creating itself, however existence evolves.
Those who have studied my work in formidable depth and detail, people decently acquainted with quantum mechanics, have recognized the time-corrupted aspects of socialization, and no one who has talked directly with me has been able to sustain the notion that the viewpoint(s) which you, JoshOnPC, have mentioned as being a refutation or even a slight challenge to the findings of my work.
How did I come to do this work? No matter who attempted to teach me the ways of time-corrupted learning, I have always found time-corrupted learning to be corrupted and corrupted by forms of deception and dishonesty of the sort that Robert Feldman commented autistic people may tend to reject.
Several years ago, I attended a talk by a person who had collected a bunch of graduate-school degrees, a person who was, in the formal sense, magnificently educated. During the talk, this person said, in effect, “As Einstein proved, everything is relative.” I waited until the whole talk was completed, and, when no one else was talking with the speaker, asked if the speaker had said that Einstein proved that everything is relative. After the speaker said, “Yes,” I asked, “Have you done the math?” The speaker replied, “No.” I answered, “Well, I have, and I find that Einstein’s Theories of Relativity, there are two of them, contain a very interesting collection of absolutes.” Anyone who can do the maths in Einstein’s “The Meaning of Relativity, Fourth Edition,” which said book I got in 1959, will surely find absolutes, such as in Einstein’s use of Maxwell’s equations.
Consider the following, from page 112 of “The Meaning of Relativity: Fourth Edition, “We observe by the systems of stars, as seen by us, are spaced with approximately the same density in all directions. Thereby we are moved to the assumption that the spatial [italics in the book -jbh] isotropy of the system would hold for all observers.” Observations in the field of astrophysics, using recent satellite observatories, have refuted the notion of spatial isotropy. I cite this as an example of an absolute in Einstein’s work which is rather well refuted, nonetheless, it was the assumption of an absolute for the sake of doing the maths.
Alas, I did not ask for merely theoretical examples of refutation, I asked for one actual (meaning achievable, another word I used with due diligence) example which, being actual, would be capable of refutation if false. Such is the the science of philosophy and the philosophy of science as I am able to fathom them.
What I am asking for is someone who did something and what happened as a result was not exactly, in every detail, precisely what was anticipated (including nothing having been anticipated) and being able to use what was learned during the doing of the something to actually go back and do it differently. Existence is, as I can mathematically model it, a superposition process, such that everything which has happened in the past happened in the past, and nothing that will only actually happen in the future has actually happened in the past. One needs to make accurate sense of the domain of definition of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
Okay, I picked up a bunch of big words and fancy language. However, I am an ordinary, one-of-a-kind-in-forever person, not significantly different from anyone else who is also neither more nor less unique than I am. My work is not about ego or egotism. It is about that which observably hurts little children and what can actually be done to reduce the hurting of little children. Little children who have been badly hurt tend to develop into adults who, as parents, tend to hurt their children (for the children’s own good?) much as the parents were hurt.
During much of the field work, my home was in Oak Park, Illinois. One day, as I was working at writing, using a computer, I heard a terrible scream of anguish from outside the house. I scurried to a window and observed the Oak Park Police talking to a neighbor across the street, and the neighbor was still screaming in anguish, and the screams of anguish burned all the way to the ultimate depths of my being. The neighbor’s son had been murdered in a drive-by shooting about a mile away, in Chicago.
I seek only to do my part to stop whatever it is that happens to people which allows anyone to ever deliberately murder a child. Or allows people to build fake showers with Cyclon-B substituting for water. Or allows people to deliberately fly airplanes into tall buildings. Or allows people to engage in the defeating process of reciprocal retaliation (read the published work of Martin Cooperman).
Until one ordinary, run-of-the-mill person has actually lived a life without ever actually learning the deceptive and dishonest ways (See Robert Feldman, The Liar in Your Life) of society and has done so with a life which is decent and practical, there was no actual evidence that such a life could really ever be possible. Such a life is now manifestly possible, for I actually live it, and have actually lived it since before I was born.
It takes an actual life of an ordinary person, in which the person never retaliates regardless of how treated to demonstrate that such a life is actually possible. That demonstration now exists; I live it. After more than 70 years of living it, I now make an effort to accurately describe it, on the chance that the description will be helpful to someone else.
Ignoranti legis neminem excusat. That is, to me, a biologically testable hypothesis. One day, I set out to test it. I went to an appointment with an attorney, having said I would pay him his going rate for some legal help. I showed the attorney a collection of about a dozen 11×71 inch posters I made, the posters containing the core findings of my research. After the attorney read the posters, I summarized their meaning, as I understand their meaning, with, “I understand that ignorance of the law is an excuse.” The attorney responded with the legal maxim at the beginning of this paragraph, but translated into English, “No, Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
Suspecting the attorney and I held differing views, I set out to test whether my view or the attorney’s view would stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Based on my notion that, were the attorney’s view the truth, I would need to be perfectly certain that I did not overlook any law or any part of a law, and through such overlooking, be ignorant of the law, and hence inexcusable, I asked the attorney, “How many laws are there?”
The attorney, “I don’t know.”
It next occurred to me that my question had come to me once before, and I had called the American Bar Association headquarters and had asked them how many laws there are, and th they could not tell me. I mentioned this fact to the attorney and then asked, “Is it reasonable to expect people to do what is impossible?”
The attorney, “I don’t know.”
I asked, “Is it decent to require people to do what is impossible and punish them for the inescapable faliure?”
The attorney, “I don’t know.”
I asked, “What is the law?”
The attorney, “I don’t know.”
As the attorney is known by me to be a member of a local church and as I am also a member of a local church, and, putting my understanding in words I thought might be meaningful to the attorney because of his church membership, I said to the attorney, “Well, I do know the law, and there is only one of them. We are to love the Lord, our God with all of heart, mind, soul, and strength, and, in so doing, learn properly to love neighbor as self, and in so doing, learn the truth, and in learning the truth, find ourselves being set free. Now you know the law. How much do I owe you?”
The attorney, “Nothing.”
The attorney promptly left the room.
The next day, by post, came a letter from the attorney, telling me to never again contact him at work or at home.
I excused the attorney for not knowing the law as I understand his church teaches the law, and I excused the attorney for being unable to inform me how, by willful, conscientious intent, I can live my life in full and complete conformity with the laws of the United States of America and the laws of any and every state in which I reside or travel within. If an attorney is incapable of knowing the law in such a way as to be able to accurately inform me as to how I can live my life without ever violating any law in any way, who can?
I find that I am always able to know, and to obey, the law as I understand the law. I find that the attorney was unable to know the law as he understood the law, and would not always be able to obey the law because of inescapable ignorance of the law as he understood the law.
Yes, from within the traditions of the legal profession, my conduct could plausibly be regarded as possibly illegal, being at risk of being deemed a form of harassment without legitimate purpose. Alas, as a bioengineer who is also a Registered Professional Engineer who abides by the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, I find that what happened with that attorney was of deception and dishonesty.
And, yes, I have discussed aspects of my work with Arthur Schwartz, Esq, the General Counsel of the National Society of Professional Engineers to learn whether he could tell me of a lawful reason why my work would be unlawful or unethical or improper, and he could tell me of no such reason.
My purpose is simple, it is doing what I am able to do to make human society safer for life on earth.
Mr. Harris writes: “The next day, by post, came a letter from the attorney, telling me to never again contact him at work or at home.”
I must say, I am with that attorney–his position is understood clearly. Seldom have I seen such a massive amount of verbal diarrhea. And all of it completely off topic. And presented with such pomposity. I am in awe.
As for the sad case of the school board member who put his foot so far into his mouth he was teabagging himself; he was on Anderson Cooper’s CNN news program tonight. He says he is resigning. Not a moment too soon. Whining about how much hateful rhetoric he and his family have endured as a result of his ill-considered rant.
rafflaw:
I am not getting paid at all for what I do as a bioengineer. And, being autistic, and not able to think in words or pictures makes writing difficult for me. At the same time, I am able to do the work which I do quite precisely because I can not think in words, but only in meanings. Perhaps something I have heard from some other people will help make sense of this. Sometimes, someone talking with me cannot find a suitable word to use, and I have heard this phenomenon called, “having a word on the tip of the tongue.” Until I clearly understand the meaning I seek to share, I have no clue about words; I suppose my life is always having a word not even on the tip of the tongue.
Yes, my dissertation is a ridiculous collection of typographical errors. The University of Illinois at Chicago gave me only about 7 months to write and defend the dissertation after it had been approved as a thesis topic the first of two times my committee met. What happened is a story for another time and place, when I was told that I would be receiving the Ph.D., I informed the University Chancellor that I deemed the way I had been treated as a serious example of academic fraud. I have meticulously saved the documentation of this. What is usual for people not autistic is often unusual for autistic people, so I have observed throughout my life.
As for the person about whose notions this sequence of comments is based on, I observe that people who act as this person did are people who have been terribly damaged by early aspects of socialization. Because I have nothing resembling a “theory of mind,” and therefore cannot infer other people’s intentions, my survival has depended upon my developing a formidable level of skill at psychoanalysis (non-Freudian), and I psychoanalyze people in order to find what their intentions are (for doing that, I need visual as well as word-form communication) because, otherwise, people sometimes become terribly upset in my presence, and I find I need to do everything I can do to keep myself and others decently safe while also living my life. There is a reason why many autistic people withdraw from society as much as they can. That reason is fear of terrifying abuse from others. Homophobia, in my observation set so far, is invariably some form of trauma response.
cullheath -
I also do not believe that the justice system is a lie, however, I find that it is partly based on what appears to me to be a mistake about the nature of mistakes which happened far back in human pre-recorded history, and no one now alive has even the slightest responsibility for the system and its present form. We all inherited it, from a time when no one had any way of knowing better.
There is a corollary to my understanding of the nature of mistakes and the nature of learning. It is this: At the moment of a decision, the decision made is the best actually-possible decision (and also the worst actually-possible decision) because either a given brain synapse post-synaptic membrane depolarized during the decision process or it did not depolarize, and every overt decision made by a human brain is the actionable sum of all the individual cell-level decisions made within the brain by the cells within the brain, and also a dendrite from a given cell body either does or does not get to a given synapse, and whether or not a dendrite has access to a synapse so as to affect the neurochemical state of the synaptic cleft is also an aspect of the brain’s decision process.
It appears very clear to me that the conscious awareness non-autistic people have of how their brains make decisions is a far cry from what actually happens within the brain during the process of a decision. I got “brain-wired” rather differently than most folks, according to the extensive brain scan work done while I was touring psychiatric facilities during the most difficult phases of my field work. I find that I have conscious access to the limbic system (sometimes called the reptilian brain) and to the cerebellum, and no words ever get those parts of my brain, according to my conscious experience. A simple result of this is, when words might make sense within my cerebrrum, but the meaning of the words make no sense to my limbic system and cerebellum, and my limbic system and cerebellum always outvote my cerebrum.
Does that seem absurd? It did to my psychiatrist until accurate brain scan work demonstrated to him that I had accurately been reporting how my brain works. My inner experience of reality seems, from talking with many other verbal autistic people, to be markedly different than most other autistic people and starkly different than non-autistic people.
When I hear a sequence of words, as in the form of a sentence, and the meanings I can assign to some of the words contradict the meanings I can assign to others of the words, what I have heard becomes utterly unintelligible. The effect of this is often to totally isolate me from words, words heard or words I might otherwise speak.
When this happened while I was a second grade student at Marshall School, in Eureka, California, the effect was often my teacher deciding that I was being consciously, willfully defiant (which was never true) and I was sent to the principal’s office for paddling. The principal decided that I had “learned my lesson” (not so) when I became agitated-catatonic out of utterly stark terror. My parents did everything they could find to do to get me into a different classroom, in another school, and finally manage to accomplish that about three-quarters of the way through second grade.
While I was in that classroom, to get to sleep at night, I would suck my thumb as any self-respecting autistic child would plausibly do in such a situation, and would lie on my back in bed and throw my head from side to side as hard and as fast as was physically possible, because, otherwise, I would be screaming in utter, unmitigated terror as I began to fall asleep. That pattern of getting to sleep never happened before I as in that classroom, and never happened after. I know how to live through shattering abuse and never retaliate and never resent the abuse, because my brain structure allows me to forgive anyone who treats me abusively instantly. I cannot harbor resentments, and I cannot collect resentments which would lead me to retaliate.
One consequence of traditional socialization, so I observe, is generating forms of “groupthink” (as, if everyone is doing it, its okay), and people who struggle to conform to groupthink can develop severe brain dysfunction as a consequence of such struggle. During my research activities, I have spoken with many homosexual people who, in a no-holds-barred effort to believe they were not homosexual, were atrociously and overtly homophobic. That is not true for every homophobic person I have encountered, though.
One more remark. Someone, earlier, commented that any children of mine would likely dislike my understanding of life. Not so. My wife and I have a daughter, who completed graduate school a while ago. When she was in high school, teachers often commented to her and us, to the effect that, if every student were like our daughter (not being resentful, not retaliating, and working conscientiously) high school teaching would be the most wonderful job in the whole world.
There are two very different definitions of punishment. One is traditional, retaliation for an action deemed wrong, and the other is scientific, doing what actually reduces the future likelihood of an undesirable activity. If doing what is hurtful is an undesirable activity, then traditional punishment for doing hurtful things amounts to reinforcing what is supposedly being punished, a mixed message if ever there was one. From the scientific view, if doing what is hurtful is what is to be punished, then the punishment imposed can never be hurtful. In the traditional punishment scheme, it is the person who is “punished,” and the track record of that method is, as I observe, dismal at best. On the other hand, the scientific method reduces what is deemed undesirable by punishing only the activity and not the person, since hurting a person is intrinsically undesirable, especially for the person being hurt.
I am thankful for all the responses to what I have written, all of them are helpful to me.
J. Brian Harris
JBH:
Here’s a little helpful tip from a long-dead master of words to you:
“[Your comment], by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”
~Winston S. Churchill
I have problems understanding precisely what you mean. As I read what you’ve written, it seems as though you are arguing a philosophical perspective of destiny as fact because you have proven a linear existence. You further insinuate that short of actual time travel, your ‘findings’ can not be refuted…..
Ok! I’ll take that challenge.
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future
This is what you asked for. (i.e. for one actual (meaning achievable, another word I used with due diligence) example which, being actual, would be capable of refutation if false.)
Next question.
Otteray Scribe:
“Whining about how much hateful rhetoric he and his family have endured as a result of his ill-considered rant.”
*******************
Hateful rhetoric? Let the heavens rejoice! Poetic justice has visited the tiny hamlet of Arkansas and crowed Irony as king.
Mespo, I concur. JBH was absent the day the lecture subject was “Less is more.”
Mark Twain said: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
He also said, “Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.”
JBH,
Thanks for the semi response. I understand that you autism makes it harder for you to write, but it still doesn’t explain what you are trying to say in comment to Prof. Turley’s article. By the way, what ever happened to the Professor at UIC that you disagreed with?
Amateur Radio Operators, of which I am one, sometimes ragchew, and I sometimes enjoy a good ragchew. An amateur radio contact often ends with each operator giving a final transmission. Methinks this is my final for this comment sequence.
Am I for real? As much as anyone else is…
If you were autistic, in the sense of having a form of language delay, in the manner which Dr. Leo Kanner first described in the medical literature, what would you do if you had a real concern you thought someone might find helpful? If you had profound difficulty getting words to work such that other people could understand your intended meaning, and you thought it wise to learn whether you could use words poorly, if poorly is as good as it can yet be, what would you do?
The last “government” numbers I came upon had autism showing up in about one of one hundred ten children. If Feldman is right that being honest is at the root of the communication problems I, and other autistic people have, and if it is dishonesty, and not honesty, which causes real harm, is an autism epidemic (which I have a hunch is not actually happening) not plausibly something to welcome, even with the communication difficulties what I seem to have written so intensely manifests?
My limbic system has a simple approach to life. If it is hurtful, it is wrong. If it is helpful, it is right. It is helpful to learn what is hurtful. It is right to do what is hurtful because that is the only way to learn what is hurtful.
Thus, I actually live a life which is not divided against itself. It has taken me more than 70 years of struggle with how words work to even write this well (or to be able to write this poorly?). If it is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly. If it is worth doing, and it can be done well, that is good. To me, life is what it is, as it is…
73s
rafflaw wrote the following to JBH: “I understand that you (sic) autism makes it harder for you to write, but it still doesn’t explain what you are trying to say in comment to Prof. Turley’s article.
JBH wrote:: “There is a reason why many autistic people withdraw from society as much as they can. That reason is fear of terrifying abuse from others. Homophobia, in my observation set so far, is invariably some form of trauma response.”
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
Hey, Doc, you didn’t answer rafflaw’s question and he is sincere. I certainly do not mind your comments, but like others question, why is it relevant to this specific topic of the school official?
Thanks anon nurse. I was also trying to get Doc to stray around.
Former Federal Leo,
JBH said the following in one of his comments:
“Homophobia, in my observation set so far, is invariably some form of trauma response.”
FF Leo, Sorry for the repetition.
anon nurse,
My post was delayed in displaying and that caused the ‘problem’.
FF LEO, No problem, but thanks for the comment. Signing off for the night. Have a good one.
One last comment for the night…
JBH also wrote the following:
“Methinks it is biologically impossible to hate anyone else without first having been traumatized into hatred of self.”
There are relevant kernels — they just aren’t obvious.
There are waaaaay too many comments in this thread. Sorry for not reading them all.
I just wanted to say that this really looked like he got his account hacked. People in his position make particularly good targets for such pranks. I hope people double-checked with him before publishing the story in the media.
the reserch is so good thomas sabo
Ark. school official to resign after posting anti-gay screed
Dr. Harris:
“And, being autistic, and not able to think in words or pictures makes writing difficult for me.”
How do you think then? If not in words or pictures how? do you “see” the number 9 or the color blue for say the word yellow? How do you make connections and how would you be able to learn or categorize anything? How do you understand the concept “table” if you cannot see the word or the picture of a table in your mind? And how do you expand on the concept table to include a conference table, a kitchen table, an operating table? And each one of those tables takes additional knowledge to understand how it fits into a broader scheme. So how do you learn if you cant form concepts?
Are you sure you aren’t using words or pictures and just cant make the connection? Or is all of your writing just a joke to put one over on all of us?
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
I think you are correct in considering autism a gift. Thanks for sharing what illumination yours offered.
What finally occurred to me is that I have a fair way to go yet in learning how words work with other people. Sorry about that, alas, I cannot find a way to be someone I am not.
In absolutely no manner, way, or form, am I joking. If “my story” got published in the media, and I am unaware of that having happened, I would jump with joy. Anyone with Internet access can search the University of Illinois at Chicago and find my dissertation in the main library catalog. Anyone can check my P.E. license with the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing, and can check my Master Electrician Certification with the Wisconsin Department of Commerce Safety and Buildings Division.
Some time ago, I posted some of my views on the Association for Psychological Science blog run by Wray Herbert, and posted them on the blog item, “The Matrix of Autism.” I just did a google advanced search with the search terms, “J. Brian Harris” and “The Matrix of Autism” and got three valid “hits,” two on “The Matrix of Autism” and one about “The Vaccine Court” and autism.
If you do not mind doing so, please read the three of them.
A google advanced search for “J. Brian Harris” got a bunch of “hits.” Anyone interested might get to the Carleton College Class of 1961 web site (it is not “members only”) by searching for “B.J. Raz” “Freshman Physics” “Brian Harris” and find what David McKercher wrote, he mentions me as a classmate. His comment is dated (8-03-05).
As I understand so far, in the Buddhist tradition, there are the four noble truths and the eight-fold path, and the first noble truth is of suffering. As I understand the Taoist tradition, there is the eternal Tao that cannot be told yet can be understood. As I understand the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, there is something which has various names, one of which is sin. Based partly on my life experiences, based partly on the course in contemporary religious thought I took with Ian G. Barbour at Carleton College in 1959, based partly on my having worked to understand biology and biophysics since I was in third grade, I began to work to understand the sociobiology of whatever it is about the human condition which leads people to as-though willfully and intentionally do harm to self and others.
As for not thinking in words or pictures, Dr. Temple Grandin put out a book, “Thinking in Pictures” as she finds she does not think in words. I never got even that far with conventional socialization. Perhaps it would help, if you ever “had a word o the tip of the tongue,” to imagine trying to say something, finding the word on the tip of the tongue, and wanting to tell of something so abstract that no picture is possible. I never went through the infant-child transition, and so have no infant-child discontinuity. I experience life in the same manner as I did before I was born, before any actual light registered on my retinas, and before I had heard anything that I would now deem to be a word.
In my life, events happen, and I adapt as I am able to adapt, and how I am able to adapt, as I adapt, moment by moment, is good enough for me because such is what I am actually able to do. Because my thought processes are not limited to words or pictures, in my work as a technician and engineer, I have, from time to time, been able to quickly solve technical problems that no one else with whom I was working could solve.
Having, as best I can tell, been invited by some here to continue, I accept the invitation. If I was not so invited, please let me know, I do sometimes misunderstand words.
It has been my observation for decades by now that the commonplace approach to a problem is to identify the symptoms and find a way to make the identified symptoms disappear. What I have almost always found, when I have done that, is that the underlying problem, being unresolved, creates another set of symptoms. Regarding the symptoms of a condition as the condition itself is largely why, at clinical conferences I have attended with leading members of the psychiatry and psychology professions, I have sometimes said that I regard the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision” (American Psychiatric Association, Washington, DC, 2000) as more accurately renamed to the “Damning and Stupefying Mishmash of Malevolent Dichotomies, Fourth Exacerbation, Trashing Reality” and I do so in part because of the way dichotonomous taxonomic key methodology confuses the patient’s experiences with the clinical signs as interpreted by the diagnosing clinician.
The underlying classification predicament is making equivalent the symbol of something and the something symbolized, which I find is the mechanism of what has been called idolatary. If the name and the named are regarded as one and the same, one can deal with procedures declaratively, only that is actually impossible in practice.
I sort what happens in my life into two categories, entities and constructs. Entities have the property of existing whether anyone knows about them or not. Constructs (or make-believes), with respect to humans, exist only within human minds, and have no independent existence, in sharp contrast with entities.
Why is what I have made an effort (and many of my efforts seem to fail) to write relevant to the “homophobic” teacher? Because I set out, with conscious, deliberate intent, decades ago, to learn what I could about what about that which causes hatred might be prevented if humanity were to be able to learn enough about hatred. No matter how much effort I have made, I can find no way one person can hate something about another person in the total absence of any form of hatred.
I apologize to rafflaw; alas, it takes time and effort on my part to find words that make any sense to me when I find I have not been understood by someone I care about. And I do care about the concern rafflaw expressed. If the words I have found do not make sense to me, I am unable to imagine how those words would make decent sense to anyone else.
The only intelligible (to me, and perhaps to me alone) model of human destructiveness (Anthony Storr) that I have been able to devise is one grounded in brain trauma as described by many neurologists, including Oliver Sacks and Robert Scaer, and by many more psychologists/psychiatrists, including Fritz Redl & David Wineman, Alice Miller, R.D. Laing, Peter Breggin, Erik H. Erikson, Milton Erikson, Nick Cummings, and thousands more I could name here were I to be ridiculous enough to bother.
Palliation of symptoms without repairing the mechanism which generates the symptoms palliated, seems to invariably result in the mechanism generating another set of symptoms, and, to me, merely palliating symptoms is rather like a tailless dog running in circles, chasing its tail. Alas, if one has come to believe that the symptoms are the mechanism (which I observe is the usual approach), then the mechanism consistently regenerates itself in its process of replacing one palliated set of symptoms with a set of symptoms not yet palliated.
There is a reason some folks concerned about “mental illness” tend to think of many psychotropic medications as “chemical straightjackets.” There is a reason some folks who have been put through terrible life experiences by taking some psychotropic medications think of the unintended effects, not as “side effects,” but rather as “sigh defects.”
When a person cannot avoid expressing a concern, and when the use of words is blocked, what remains is acting out the concern, or, did I miss something?
Delusional projection by a person of said person’s delusional self-imago, which may be the result of internalizing a parent’s delusionally-idealized imago, can result in forms of intractable self-disrespect, and self-disrespect can develop over time into self-hatred, and self-hatred, acted out delusionally, can produce the symptoms of hating something about someone else.
There is the predicament of attribution error and the fundamental attribution error, which error erroneously assigns personal (dispositional) responsibility to a person in consequence of situational factors which are truthfully outside the person’s actual locus of control.
So, the relevance to what I have meant to communicate is terribly simple: I am making an effort to learn whether what I have come to understand about hatred can usefully be communicated to anyone else.
Less is more when less works, and more is more when less does not work. I use words the way I do because, moment by moment, I do what I am actually able to do, and I learn what I am actually able to do by doing it.
What happened to Dr. James Drummond, the acting head of bioengineering whose efforts to block my Ph.D. failed? He was replaced by Dr. Richard Magin, who took responsibility for format issues (including typographical errors) in the dissertation after he became head of bioengineering in January, 1998. Prior to the reign of Dr. Drummond, the head of bioengineering was Dr. Irving F. Miller. Miller and Magin were very supportive of my work, Magin commented to me that he thought the actual research excellent, and I understood that he decided to overlook the numerous typos because he found they did not seriously interfere with the scientific merit of the work and because he, so I believe, deemed “prolonging my suffering” in working toward the Ph.D. to be inappropriate.
When Drummond was doing things that made it harder for me to get the Ph.D., it occurred to me that I was being tested as to whether I, or Drummond, might be the better engineer. If he was able to engineer my not getting the Ph.D., I would allow that he was the better engineer. If I was able to get it, I would wonder whether I might be the better engineer… I still wonder…
What is it about humans that, as some works of other writers that I have read have written, makes humans the only people who kill for sport? What about humans allowed some humans to take train rides and shoot bison “for the fun of it?” What is it about humans, apparently unlike any other species, that drives us toward escalating reciprocal retaliation? What is it about humans that produces greed? What is it about humans that results in wars? What is it about humans which leads to child abuse? What is it about humans that allows anyone to drive while intoxicated? What is it about humans that leads some people into addiction?
In contrast with the view of Mark Twain, I find that it is better to be a fool than to not be, and so, if being a fool is what I can be, so be it!
Perhaps something from Thomas Merton will be helpful:
“Do not depend on the hope of results – When you are doing the sort of work that you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that you work will be apparently worthless, and even achieve no worth at all, if not results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”
If I may, please allow me to attempt a reply to the comments by JoshOnPC of Oct. 28, 2010 at 7:20, 7:21, and 11:12 pm…
I am familiar with the views of the sources you cited, and they do not accomplish in any way or manner any valid “answer” to what I meant to ask. Why do I believe that? Because the sources cited all contain, as internal premises, variations of the fallacy of assuming the consequent. All of those cited sources are, as I observe, written from within the belief which my work “challenges.”
Let me restate my concern, if I may do so with reasonable consent… If no consent, please observe that I have never commanded anyone to read anything I have written, and I command no one to read this.
Not so long ago, “everyone” knew that the earth was the fixed, motionless firmament, and Galileo Galilei was subjected to house arrest for his heretical views. Much more recently, long after Galileo’s death, the successor(s) to those who so arrested Galileo apologized to his memory (and his soul? [is the notion of soul valid?]).
I note that sincerity is not truthfulness, even though “sincere” is derived from the Latin “sine” (without) and “cero” (to wax) and sincerely (without wax) originally meant something like, without deception, because wax, in ancient times, was used to fill space so an object might appear to be more valuable than it was, ergo, Archmedes and the bathtub.
Okay, so quantum mechanics appears to allow something which happens in the future to affect what is happening now. That does not change my observation, which is about what is actually observable and what is actually observably achievable. For such a time interval as the future has not changed the past, the past will be what it was, and a decision made will be the decision made; when the future changes the past, so the decision made in the past is no longer the decision made in the past, that does not change that the past changed.
Is the universe, or the universe of the set of all universes, large or small, smaller than a dimensionless point or larger than an infinitude of infinities? Tell me how you can get outside the universe of the set of all sets of universes to make the measurement…
Consider the wave-particle duality… An electron may be observed to be like a wave (try some multiple slit experiments) or like a particle (as in Einstein’s photoelectric effect work that helped him to earn the Nobel Prize); however, an electron itself is never a wave and is never a particle, yet, in certain conditions is observed to be usefully modeled as a particle and is observed to be usefully modeled as a wave in other conditions. So, given the above, what is an electron? It is a probability pattern which may be observed under some differing conditions, and the conditions of the observation process affect the nature of the observations which occur.
Probability patterns may be modeled as of being of three classes; one being the class of all possibilities, which class includes all impossibilities as a proper subset; another being the class of all probabilities which are possibilities in the process of becoming actualized; and the third class is the probabilities which have already been actualized. Within one religious tradition with which I have some familiarity, it is my understanding that the first above-mentioned class has sometimes been named “Holy Spirit or “Holy Ghost,” the second class has been named “Father” (or sometimes “Mother” or “Father/Mother” or “Mother/Father”), and the third class has been named “Son.” Existence is existence itself, and is not divided into possibilities, probabilities, and actualities; that dividing is of the mental modeling of the encounter of existence in the form of people with existence in the form of people and everything else. The language seems to get really messy, even if existence itself is not messy, and even if all the observations of existence, which can only occur within existence, are also really messy.
I have worked very hard to make even a little personally-intelligible sense of the ramifications of recent (the past 100 years or so) work in the philosophy of science, including such philosophers as Werkmeister, Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. The philosophical relationship between the religious notion of the trinity and the quantum-mechanical notion of the trinity was, as I have so far learned, first described in serious detail by Carleton College philosophy professor, Karl Schmidt, in his book, “From Science to God: Prolegomena to a Future Theology,” Harper & Brothers, New York, 1944. My dad majored in philosophy at Carleton, Schmidt was on the faculty at that time. I am hardly the first serious scientist to inquire into the nature of nature, including the nature of the human experience of religious beliefs being an aspect of nature that is worthy of serious scientific scrutiny.
Why do I not regard the observations that “time travel” may be possible as a refutation? Suppose something happened in the past, and, in the future, I go back and change it. Once I have changed it, that becomes the actual past, and what actually happened was changed not before it happened, but from the future, after it first happened. Even if we allow the (nearly infinite?) cycles of Hindu tradition to be the real reality, the same argument I just gave remains, for each cycle will be what it was, no matter how it is later modeled.
The view of Einstein’s work that I often hear from those who have not studied the theories of relativity in sufficient depth and detail, to wit, that “everything is relative” is a view that contradicts itself, because, “if everything is relative,” then “everything is relative” is itself relative, and cannot be an absolute, and therefore everything is not necessarily relative. On the other hand, if there are absolutely no absolutes, then “there are no absolutely no absolutes” is an absolute, and there cannot not be absolutes even if it absolutely impossible to ever know what they are.
The trap of idolatry, in whatever for it takes, is that idolatry makes the symbol equal to the symbolized, the word equal to its meaning, the model equal to what it models; idolatry in whatever form it takes, always violates the law of non-contradiction by claiming that something is what it isn’t.
Regardless of time-travel, at any given location in space-time, what happens is what is possible, and what does not happen is what is impossible, and one learns of which is which as one observes what happens.
The late psychiatrist, Boris Astrachan, who was a member of my thesis committee, when I began to describe the sort of things I have attempted to over-simply describe here, regularly said to me, “Save it for your book.” I am taking his advice, only, I have yet to learn how to use words well enough to begin to write the book Astrachan thought I might eventually write. I share with other people what I am able to share, without judgment of any sort on my part, yet using a language which I find has embedded within it the expectation that judgment is utterly inescapable; the only language structure I can find to use to share what I may have learned is as though made to preclude my sharing what I may have learned.
So, for those willing to read this…
The observation is neither the observer nor the observed, yet, without the observer and the observed, the observation is not. In the same sense of trinity of the probability patterns of the nature of observable existence, the observed corresponds to the realm of possibility, the observer to the realm of probability, and the observation to the realm of actuality after it has happened (and not before it has happened). For those who prefer Latin jargon, one might name what I have called “probability” “a-prori probability and name what I have called “actuality” “a-posteriori probability. My stumbling into wondering about the philosophy of philosophy seems to be hard to describe in words.
Consider the following, found on page 250 of my copy of Black’s Law Dictionary, Ninth Edition, Thomson Reuters, St. Paul, 2009:
” ” ‘Proximate cause’ — in itself an unfortunate term — is merely the limitation which the courts have placed upon the actor’s responsibility for the consequences of the actor’s conduct. In a philosophical sense, the consequences of an act go forward to eternity, and the causes of an event go back to the dawn of human events, and beyond. But any attempt to impose responsibility on such a basis would result in infinite liability for all wrongful acts, and would ‘set society on edge and fill the courts with endless litigation.’ [North v. Johnson, 58 Minn. 242, 59 N.W. 1012 (1894).] As a practical matter, legal responsibility must be limited to those causes which are so closely connected with the result and of such significance that the law is justified in imposing liability. Some boundary must be set to liability for the consequences of any act, upon some social idea of justice or policy.” W. Page Keeton, et. al., Prosser and Keeton on Torts § 41, at 264, (5th ed. 1984).”
Please pardon the nested double quotes… I live in a world in which the traditional notion of “responsibility” (which imposes liabilty for wrongful acts) is purely a delusion grounded in errors of attribution, especially the fundamental attribution error. The Wikipedia page on the “Fundamental Attribution Error” seems like a rather decent explanation for anyone not already well versed in said error.
Instead of “responsibilities,” I observe that I have “response abilities” and I am only able to learn what my response abilities were in any given situation after I have used my response abilities in response to the given situation. People fail to “meet their responsibilities” when there response abilities prevent meeting their responsibilities. Response abilities are real, responsibilities are imaginary. Yet, people tend to define the imaginary responsibilities in such ways that people’s response abilities often allow the actual response abilities to permit the person to meet the imaginary responsibilities. When a person’s actual response abilities prevent the person from meeting the imaginary responsibilities, the effect, given time-corrupted learning trauma, is to assign fault to the person and not to the imagined nature of the responsibilities.
So, I have written what my situation has allowed me to write, and thus my response abilities have surfaced in the manner of these words. I do not have different response abilities than the ones I have, and so cannot have responded in the way someone not me, who has response abilities different than mine, might have responded.
The effort of writing this leads me to be profoundly grateful for the gift of being unable to think in pictures or words. To the limit of my practical ability, I find being unable to think in words prevents me from being willing to actually fight anyone, myself included.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. said,
“I am familiar with the views of the sources you cited, and they do not accomplish in any way or manner any valid “answer” to what I meant to ask.”
Perhaps not, but they do address what it was you actually asked for. Which was “for one actual example which, being actual, would be capable of refutation if false.” An example of what you ask? “Any achievable process through which the mistake (or accident or event) which actually happened could actually have been avoided.” Unfortunately, we are unable as yet to actually time travel backward, but there is still a promising direction we can turn to look for such an example, to the future. The example to which I linked was not meant to prove/disprove any valid scientific work you have done, but merely to provide the example for which you requested. It does aptly address your request, because if the experimentors are to be believed, then they have a method to accurately predict a specific future event (because it happens) and conciously make a choice to avoid that event which is then recorded into our present and past. You can see that, despite your own reservations about the validity of the experiment, it is exactly the kind of verifiable experiment you asked for. It implies that a future that actually occurrs effects the present, which in turn changes the future. If the implication is true, it would therefore show that choice is indeed real and that we are not on a fixed path. You simply want the result to be past tense, which will not be possible unless and until we invent a way of traveling backwards in time, but the results would both speak to the truth of your claims, be they positive or negative results.
“Why do I believe that? Because the sources cited all contain, as internal premises, variations of the fallacy of assuming the consequent. All of those cited sources are, as I observe, written from within the belief which my work ‘challenges.’”
Of course they do, they must. It is inescapable that your task and work are in pursuit of proving a negative, namely, that we are not able to effect the future. You can not prove a negative as such, you can only substantiate it by failing to disprove it. Therefore, one must seek to disprove it by “assuming the consequent.” To assume otherwise is to invalidate your own experiment.
“The view of Einstein’s work that I often hear from those who have not studied the theories of relativity in sufficient depth and detail, to wit, that “everything is relative” is a view that contradicts itself, because, “if everything is relative,” then “everything is relative” is itself relative, and cannot be an absolute, and therefore everything is not necessarily relative.”
Wow, that’s a doozy, and also false. “Everything is relative” is indeed relative being that the sentence itself or any other observeable aspect of the sentence is relative in the Einsteinian sense. However, Einstein did not mean to imply that simply because the universe is wholely constructed from relative phenomenon, that it could prevent you from making a true statement regarding its composition of entirely relative phenomenon. You simply included ‘ideas’ into Einsteins ‘everything’ when Einstein meant ‘reality’. It’s akin to correcting a friend after he notes that everything in a particular room is red by saying, “Everything is red.” You could factually say he was wrong (Not EVERYTHING is red.), but that wouldn’t be what he meant.
For the purposes of this statement, true means verifiable and repeatable. True statements are possible within the context of of subsets of information, but “universally true” statements are not possible within the context of the whole set – you will eventually run into an unavoidable assumption.
This statement comports with both relativity and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Thanks BIL. That’s what I wanted to say, unfortunately I am not so eloquent.
One lives to be of service, Josh, and you’re “eloquent plenty”.
Somebody has too much time on their hands.
The scroll wheel on my mouse is smoking. Is that normal?
HenMan
1, October 30, 2010 at 2:44 pm
The scroll wheel on my mouse is smoking. Is that normal?
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lol … mine broke
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
Writes:
What is it about humans that, as some works of other writers that I have read have written, makes humans the only people who kill for sport? What about humans allowed some humans to take train rides and shoot bison “for the fun of it?” What is it about humans, apparently unlike any other species, that drives us toward escalating reciprocal retaliation? What is it about humans that produces greed? What is it about humans that results in wars? What is it about humans which leads to child abuse? What is it about humans that allows anyone to drive while intoxicated? What is it about humans that leads some people into addiction?
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If this is not a joke, and I assume it is not since today is Halloween and not April Fool’s Day, I remember seeing on TV a story about an autistic lady who could not communicate in speech, but who was brilliant once they found a way for her to communicate by computer. I hope you are another lucky autistic person such as she.
I also have read about research on Apes which revealed that they did indeed, in groups, war on each other which was astonishing to the researchers. Whether it was escalating reciprocation or not, I don’t remember. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were.
I’ve also read about a mother Ape who not only killed her own baby, but attempted to kill other Apes as well.
I suppose the thing that allows humans to drive while intoxicated is the same thing that allows Apes to climb high surfaces, and sometimes fall, when inebrited on fermented fruit. I would speculate that were there some food or behaviour available to species other than humans that could cause addiction, it would. Perhaps behaviour that appears to be excessive if survival is the goal, which humans call in animals instinct, may indeed be addiction.
I don’t know if the herd/group alpha male’s effort to get the best portion of the kill and keep as many females to mate with as possible from other males could be considered greed, as it is in human groups, or not. One would have to determine if greed is only a means of the strongest suriving or means trying to get more than is necessary for survival.
As you will notice, I also have trouble communicating and I can only admire you for overcoming, in such a laudatory manner what must have been terribly frustrating for you for all of your life.
Didn’t have time to get on the Internet yesterday, Oct. 31, 2010, due to working with a political organization on GOTV phone calls. And I came across some upset people, people not only upset because I called them…
I have no difficulty with the fact that the idea some people on this comment sequence refuted the argument they understand I was making. Alas, those who successfully refuted that they understood I was making did not refute the argument I was, within my own awareness, actually making, and this is not their fault. I simply have not learned how to use words alone to communicate accurately with more than a fraction of a percent of people, except when I am in the immediate presence of someone and can have full access to the non-verbal aspects of communication, particularly the overt expression(s) of the cerebellum and limbic system.
I find that my concern was lurking in the shadows 150 years ago, for an aspect of it was put in writing in the October, 1860 Scientific American — See page 102 of the October, 2010 Scientific American for a reference to the writing of 1860.
Observe, if you will, the term, “wild beasts” a few words before the end of “Against Homework” on page 102 of the October 2010 Scientific American. Imagine the possibility of wild beasts. My research is into the nature of such a “wild beast” as may be the most clever, the most subtil, of all the wild beasts… Were there an “evil one,” what would it be; what would be evil?
I want to thank everyone who responded here to what I wrote, the nature of the problem I need to overcome to be effective in sharing what I find I may have learned is profoundly clearer to me in some ways than it was before this back and forth sequence of comments.
Cada loco con su tema…
A Paradox
There is a town with one and only one man named Ralph. Ralph shaves every man in town who does not shave himself. Every man in town is shaved. Who shaves Ralph?
Well I suppose he does have a core audience someplace…..where again?