Free Will ,Determinism, Synchronicity, St. Barnabus and Gilbert

Since moving to Burnaby I’ve been a church tourist. I’ve attended all the ones close to me and yesterday I saw St. Barnabus Church in my travels. My friend named his fine son Barnabus so I appreciate the Biblical significance of this less common reference.  Today the rain from inside was kind of depressing as a harbinger of Vancouver Eastern Rain Forest deluge that often goes on months.  We don’t have the snow of the east but there there’s sunshine and endless sky.  Here is mountains and clouds so it’s somewhat closed in, at times claustrophobic..  Church is an antidote with it’s inspiration and uplifting community association. To quote Third Day, we can ‘soar like eagles’.

So today I looked at the website and saw the St. Barnabus Church is holding the blessing of the pets, a St. Francis of Assisi tradition.  Gilbert my cockapoo, the best dog ever, was blessed by the Bishop of the Anglican Church here. We’re not sure it took since his interest in dogs genitals of either sex and his interest in their butts and the butts of cats and butts generally,  hasn’t changed.  We insist that this is perhaps the genetics of the French poodle as it certainly can’t come from the English cocker spaniel lineage.  

Gilbert comes to church with me as he comes to work . I’ve always picked places of work and church on their welcoming him.  I’m only modestly more upright in behaviour so he’s my ‘canary’ so to speak socially.  If people object to a little dog they’re soon object to me. 

Now these points, passing the church yesterday and it’s welcoming dog’s today, two ‘coincidences’ in my life seem to me to be synchronistic.  Dr. Carl Jung described the synchronistic as subjective experiences which to an outside observer would appear as coincidences.  The ‘objective’ observer sees events as ‘disconnected’ ,as was common in the ‘age of rationalism’ and the idea of disconnected objects in space. That was the now defunct ‘scientific materialism’ that still plagues those who ‘want the facts and nothing but the facts’.  The courts are still full of them but the science labs simply moved onto multi dimensional universes and quantum physics and the observer and observed interacting. 

If a butterfly flaps its wings in China there is a breeze here in North America.  Everything is ‘interconnected’.  Just because we don’t see the wind doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Like the proverbial 7 points of ‘connection’ in societies.  

I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s latest book, The Square and the Tower, (Networks and power, from Freemasons to Facebook) all about human interconnectedness.   Up to the. Magic Number of 150 about men and women can function as a society with limited structure because they mostly know and have contact with each other. (Sapiens, A brief history of humankind by Yuval Harari)  Beyond 150 there has historically been a need for formal governmental and organizational structures, each of which competes with others through commerce and war.   As Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks eloquently about there’s always this balance between chaos and order.

I love the Gospel of St. John, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God.....’

The Hindus might say that sound was ‘om’ while the scientists might call it ‘bang’.   The mathematics of music is as exciting as the harmonics and how the arrangements of sound affect our mood and health. Music Therapy is just one application but for me there is the issue of vibration and the String Theory. The uniqueness of an individual elements by it’s ‘sound’.  All of these are interconnected in the ‘ONE ‘.  I love the music in church the reciting together and singing together in community. It’s not about performance but rather about community. 

So in church we gather as a community for prayer , praise and thanksgiving.  Prayer is simply talking to the One and Thanksgiving and Praise are simply positive celebration. Politics by contrast to religion seems predominantly to be negative and critical and I have never had much truck with the judgemental, God as scornful angry condemning.  I rather think of God as ‘HOME’.  The tides of my life go out and in like breathing.

So believing the world to be sacred and that the energy that is between all is best called ‘love’ and that which separates us is ‘fear’ I love to ‘meditate’ in church, ‘listening in community’ for guidance and presence. It’s a mystical place touched by hundreds of thousands minds and hearts and souls over often hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. I love the ‘choice’ of place for a church and the changed atmosphere of that place by so many worshiping there. I feel the difference between the places of war and the places of worship.  

Now because there are billions of people and trillions of beings consciousness, a decision, results in ripples and flows and conflict because we’re all not standing miles apart in an open field but rather huddled together on a subway. If I want to change my position or direction there’s all those around me.  We can do it of course with huffing and puffing and pushing and such.  Then a new flow is created.  But it’s not just ‘me’ doing things.

In 12 step programs they say G.O.D. Is  ‘Good Orderly Direction’ because the alienating effect of the zombism of drugs and alcohol in excess results in aberrant behaviour that the adults about must accommodate to adjust to. As people mature they feel the community and need for community and realize they are simply not alone as adolescents feel they are especially with the heady experience of first drunk on lust, fame, booze, or drugs. 

So I’m ‘called’ to church in my mind. Gilbert is welcome and we’re having the feeling that St. Barnabus might well be the answer for a prayer for now.  I’m inspired to get off the couch and go out in the rain, today,  on a Sunday to participate with my fellow humans in a transcendent ritual and feel the communion.  This is sharing bread and grape juice or wine with others as Jesus, our Lord and Savior, did at the Last Supper which beget the endless communion of God and Man in a cosmic consciousness and an unconscious dance made conscious in the shared experience. 

Hallelujah!

Irrational Finance

The following are a series of "cognitive traps" which influence decision making skewing it from the purely rational:
1) Availability bias - this is a tendency to base decisions more readily available to memory rather than viewing all the data needed. Eg: The last three birds I saw were going east therefore the next bird will likely be going east however in the past I've recorded that most birds fly west at this location.
2) Hindsight bias:  This is a tendency to selectively attach higher probability to events after they have happened as compared to what we in fact did prior to them happening. eg. The clouds were building before the storm and the duck quacked therefore I could have known the storm was coming because of the building clouds and the sound of the duck quacking.
3) Problem of induction:  This is the tendency to formulate general rules on the basis of insufficient information.  Eg:  A feminist is raped by one man therefore all men are rapists.
4) Fallacy of Conjunction: We tend to overestimate the probability of seven events of 90 % probability while underestimating the probability that at last one of seven events of 10 % probability will occur.  Eg. A feminist shouted before all the ducks were raped..
5) Confirmationa bias:  Tendency to look for confirming evidence of the initial hypothesis rather than falsifying evidence that would disprove it.  Eg: A newspaper report in Africa says that a man attacked a feminist therefore all feminists are raped by men especially if they hear a duck quacking because John said he clearly recollected a duck quacking before Mary read the newspaper.
6) Contamination effects: whereby where we allow irrelevant but proximate information to influence a decision.  Eg. The Rape of the Sabines was shown on tv before the legislation to ban all men from the planet because a feminist was raped by a duck.
7) The affect heuristic: whereby preconceived value-judgements interfere with our assessments of costs and benefits.  Eg. All universities need to be outfitted with lighting normally seen on space shuttle runways at a cost of billions of dollars to protect one feminist from being attacked by a duck even though rape the university is the least likely place for women to be attacked.  If anyone seriously wanted to address women being attacked they would put the lighting in the nightclub districts where university women go and attack is common.  Alternatively a law that said men who attacked women would be wed for life to a duck would cost the price of a duck and change dramatically the false legal 'seek work' statistics that rarely separate 'repeat offences' and 'repeat offenders' so that an actual prediction of crime can be assessed.  Repeat offenses and repeat offenders account for almost all  crime in society.  Ironically other than ducks the majority of society are surprisingly law abiding and cooperative.
8) Scope neglect:  which prevents us from proportionately adjusting what we should be willing to sacrifice to avoid harms of different orders of magnitude.  Eg. If I drop my laptop and camera and wallet while I am running there is little chance that the attacker will continue to chase me to pick pocket me or pistol whip me.
9)Overconfidence in calibration: which leads us to underestimate the confidence interval within which our estimates will be robust.  Eg. I was a finely tuned love machine in my 20's and 30's but now nearing 60 I might not be.
10) Bystander apathy: which inclines us to abdicate individual responsibility when in a crowd. Eg.  This explains why governments and committees are were responsible for the Holocaust and the propaganda of history focussed on Corporal Hitler in a silly attempt to make people believe their government and there committess were less likely to cause a world war.  The audience is as complicit.  There is such a thing as 'collective guilt' despite how many virgins and mustached men are sacrificed before the cock crows.

These examples of irrational effects on rational thinking come from Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money.  He is not responsible for the irrational examples.  The book, Science of Fear described some of these influences and different ones.  Kurt Vonnegut probably did a better job of 'showing' them in his incomparable novels.  Freud and Jung and so many others have demonstrated at length how 'unconscious forces' influence conscious process.
The end result for me is that I sometimes have great difficulty taking people seriously who take themselves so seriously.  Words like, pompous, stupid and silly tend to flash through my mind especially as thosepeople (E.E. Cummings conjunction)  insist with greater and greater vehemence that they are inhumanly right in areas of conjecture.  The lady protestest too much.
That said some people carry big guns and are not afraid of killing other people on a whim.  These people should be humored because they are highly dangerous like heartless lizards.  However as a person who collects lizards describes them as 'her children". This approach seems to work well as long as the lizards aren't too hungr.  

It behooves us to understand our own fallibility and be forgiving of those who insist they are right especially when they have might or worse 'group might' on their side or simply when they are wrong.

Niall Ferguson's, The Ascent of Money, A Financial History of the World is a great read especially for those who don't appreciate bankers, don't understand economics and get their information about finance from such sources as CNN. I gained a thorough appreciation for good bankers and investors from this book but then I'd already read "Ship of Gold" and I rarely watch CNN. I also did economics 101 at university and took an inordinate interest in Keyes because he was a friend of Virginias.  Then the Rothschild's were especially interesting before WWII while Rockerfeller was a particularly good sort in the 30's.  Personally I've not met 'idle rich' though I've certainly wanted to be one. The very very rich I've met have been hard working and highly responsible.  Not surprising since very few people want to make money compared to the very many who want to 'take' money. Bill Gates and Andy Warholl are far more interesting than Stalin ever was.