The Usual Suspects Assignment: Fill & Download for Free

It was a Friday night, 4th January, 2013 and much like business as usual, after returning from office and gleeful at the thought that I had two full days for myself I sat down beside my computer and opened twitter. Media’s naughty distortion of RSS’s incumbent sarsanghchalak Mohan Madhukar Bhagwat’s comment on rapes in India was trending for the day. It’s not difficult to verify the authenticity of anything on the internet and it was not long before I realized that the distortion was a time-tested formula by the usual suspects to show RSS as an outdated body of khaki-knickerwallahs who are misogynist, anathema to the society and diametrically opposite to the “left liberal intellectual” class of societies that the media prides to call itself. It is an entirely different matter that media thugs often rely on mutually incorrect sources to back up their stories – and often don’t corroborate facts.I have been following a lot of our journalists on twitter and I am well aware of their modus-operandi. I have been blocked by quite a few despite the fact that I hardly interact using strong words on twitter, in fact anywhere else. Their dread to criticism is finely understood. I hardly get to sit on twitter and the night of Friday Sagarika Ghose was making much noise on Bhagwat’s speech. She later had to apologies for the distortions but she did that on twitter and not on her “news channel” which has a history of such distortion under the guise of technical malaise (wonder she and her likes think people are still the gullible fools in the 21st Century). I summed up my anger on Sagarika in a tweet which was shared by a few and after someone tagged her to that she blocked me instantly.What Bhagwat ji said, what media reported and what parallel incidents of much greater national importance were being neglected and for obvious reasons is a different matter unrelated to this blog. This one is purely on how I got to attend my first RSS shivir and what observations I made.Post the above tweet Mr Rahul Kaushik and I mutually followed each other. We had some discussions on RSS at which he told me to attend the forthcoming RSS shivir at Gayeshpur Goshala Maidan, Kalyani, Nadia district. It was being organized to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, who needs no formal introduction in our country. He told Mr Mukul Mishra to help me on the same. It was 5th January and a Saturday morning and after lots of deliberations I finally decided to attend the Vivekananda Yuva Shivir to be held from 11th January to 13th January. I was definitely excited. Despite being critical of media-fed propaganda a negative perception of RSS being extremist, parochial and bigoted was always there in my mind. I wanted to experience it first-hand and I was definitely excited about it. With the benefit of hind-sight I still have reservations about their dress-code but I thought it too insignificant a question to even get it clarified by friends present at the shivir. Maybe it’s because of the same reason we have uniforms at school – to avoid strong feelings of class segregation via difference in dressing patterns.I am of the belief that India will continue to remain secular and democratic so far Hindus stay in majority. It’s one of the fistful of Hindu majority countries in the world and as such the ideologies of Hindu nationalism is neither extremist nor invalid. Violence against minorities is definitely unwanted but that is neither preached nor supported at RSS. It’s a body of national awakening foremost and Hindu renaissance secondly. It promotes caste unity, national duty (rashtra dharma), selfless service to the needy, a frugal life, personal discipline, community health and above all, and contrary to perceptions, accepts the changing times. RSS definitely has extremist elements but that is because of their individualism. Reductionism of RSS is what media does because it hardly requires merit. People who are a part of RSS are individuals from all parts of society and hardly think in a singular way. When media gets into the business of clubbing groups and assigns them character of their choice and agenda I wonder why they crib when they are called names (of paid media) or are the receiving end.I am not an authority on RSS. My knowledge on its founder and sarsanghchalaks, its functioning, its history is rather bleak so I would write more on what I experienced first-hand and not beat around negating perceptions created by media.We reached at the camp around 11 AM and it was spread across a huge ground. The entire area was divided into 12 mini-towns named on 12 disciples of Ramakrishna Paramhansa and the central one was named on Ramakrishna himself. Each mini-town could accommodate at least a thousand people. People from Howrah district were assigned to the Swami Brahmananda camp and I along with 7 of my friends whom (except Mukul) I got to know that day itself took the very first tent beside the camp assembly tent.Life in the camp was classless and casteless. We took frugal meals and led a life of discipline and valued time. Everything was set to routine, right from morning tea to breakfast, from prayer hours to bathing hours, from exercise hours to lunch hours, from assembly hours to dinner hours, from sleep hours to waking up. It was difficult but that’s precisely what’s needed in nation building – discipline. The entrance to the ground was modeled on Belurmath and the main stage was modeled on the Vivekananda Rock Memorial of Kanyakumari. The ground was dusty and despite it being January the days were pleasant but the nights horribly cold but we shared blankets to beat the cold!We mostly collected at the Brahmananda camp main assembly tent for hearing lectures and exercises and prayers. The prayers were mostly pledging oneself to national service and the speeches related to the life and teaching of Swami Vivekananda. The whole of us sometimes assembled at the central camp ground for practicing some drills and to hear speeches by dignitaries. On the first day itself we got to hear amongst others Suresh (Bhaiya ji) Joshi. The final day we had Mohan Bhagwat, someone from RKM and Madhavan Nair, the former chief of ISRO who in front of a largely rural collection gave a speech in English which summed up India’s history right from Indus Valley Civilization to the now-laughable Aryan Migration theory to dominance of Brahmins in Hinduism, persecution of lower classes to how Hinduism evolves with time because of its universalism and non-exclusionism traits.Many of the almost 15, 000 who had assembled there were from poor or agrarian or rural backgrounds but we all had to follow the same rules, eat the same food and share the same kind of tents. This is what has kept RSS for so long and the members think will also keep the nation together. No class segregation. We had to sit on the ground – yes, the ground! You have to feel the soil of your country. You have to see your people and their sufferings and hear their problems.A mini-museum by the name of Vivekananda House was constructed at the entrance of the camp which was also open to the common public. The hall was poorly ventilated and was dusty and I couldn’t spend much time inside it. It had displays from rural parts of Bengal as also displays from diverse bodies like ABVP, VHP, VKA, etc. I spent the most time at VHP’s gallery which had a lot many pictures of archaeological findings from the site of the Babri Masjid which was pulled down in 1992. The pictures alleged the sure presence of a grand Ram temple which was pulled down by invading Muslims forces to make way for a mosque. Most other galleries had displays of local art, weaving, dhokra, terracotta, temple architecture, local cuisine, places of tourism etc.Outside the museum were a few shops selling items ranging from books related to the life and teaching of Swami Vivekananda (mostly in Bengali and Hindi) to photographs, key chains, posters to Patanjalii range of items of Baba Ramdev to bovine products. I bought a few Vivekananda key chains, a laminated frame of bharat mata and copies of Sankhnad, Organiser and Swadeshi (which a week hence I am yet to begin).While most of the speeches focused on Vivekananda a few dealt on the problems of the Hindu society in particular which was led by a speaker from the Hindu Jagran Manch. The key issues raised were the growing minority population which posed a threat to social equilibrium of India as a Hindu society. Issues of land encroachment, media’s negative portrayal of Hinduism, etc. Even though a few jokes were cracked on the population explosion amongst Muslims not one word was uttered anywhere asking people to wage a war against them. People were told to stay united and preserve the heritage, unity and strength of the country. There was absolutely no ill-feeling against any community – in fact I don’t remember the word “Muslim” coming up even once at the central ground where the main RSS speakers spoke. It was always figments of Vivekananda’s life, his struggle, his compassion towards people, his travel to Chicago and his address, India’s current situation, lawlessness and all that. They almost always talked of India and Hinduism and that’s absolutely fine, in fact necessary. People are free to interpret, that’s their problem. I have heard many faiths call for removing the unbelievers but people who actually take upon themselves to implement that are then called fringe elements. RSS on the contrary doesn’t even talk of hatred. It talks of love and unity so people who indulge in violence are guided by their own instincts and not that of RSS.I intend to read more about RSS and how this huge body works. My tough schedule hardly gives me enough time but I would continue the fight against stereotypes and if anytime I feel RSS needs strong words from me I will do that too and am sure before me most of the people who are actively associated with RSS will do that because we all want it to survive, for the nation’s sake but from what I have personally experienced I am of the belief that it had a positive influence on my life. I definitely need to read more.an RSS choirSome of the other key things which I would like to highlight are:1) A big thanks to Mr Rahul Kaushik and Mr Mukul Mishra. If not for them I would have never been able to add this chapter in my life’s book2) I was very glad that they don’t waste food at RSS camps. They always cook a little less than what is required so that nothing goes waste. I noticed the discipline in queuing up for food and how patiently people waited if the supplies went short. The waste disposal was planned. Security was planned. Sanitation was planned. Everything was perfectly planned and arranged. People who had congregated were not the fault-finder types and that definitely helped.3) RSS works on a principle where every work is done in rotation so one fine day you as an ITwallah might find yourself serving food to thousands and the next day standing guard outside a tent. RSS doesn’t care what position you hold in your personal lives. You are after all a human being and so are thousands others who had assembled there. There was an absolute lack of celebrity cult at the camp and I absolutely loved it.4) The camps cultivate a deep sense of personal bonding and social camaraderie otherwise so missing in daily walks of life. It gives you reasons enough for unity on the basis of a singular identity of being an Indian. More than Hinduism they stressed on Indianness. The camps don’t preach you icon worshiping following rituals and all that. They just tell you to think about humanity and nation – first and foremost. Hinduism is a different thing. RSS is about nation and not religion. Hinduism itself is more about way of life than icon worshiping though minds trapped in colonial and communist traps would love to tell you that.5) A musical performance by Baba Satyanarayan Mourya and his troupe and which was full of patriotic songs was prove enough that the sangh was changing and was trying to tune itself according to the present times. The call was always for service to motherland and personal discipline. One of the speakers the next morning labeled it rightly as “getting high with a sattvik performance”.There is much more I can write but this is it for the time being. I might modify a few things here and there as and when I get time but the essence would remain the same. Inputs, suggestions and criticism more than welcome.

.March, 2016My short answer to this question … an example of an ‘inherited idea’ … ask most people from a variety of religious or secular traditions, that if there were a heaven, point to it. And the vast majority would point up.Now for my LOOOONG answer …. and warning. This is a work in progress. Will periodically be revisiting this post now and then.‘If horses had gods — they would look like horses.’ — Xenophanes for dummies.Uh oh.By that logic, my god would look like …Although I was an applied linguist by profession (Masters of Education in TESOL), I also used to teach biology labs at Temple University Japan, so I am going to carry this question a little deeper than culturally constrained answers, and formalize the word ‘blindly’ as ‘subconsciously’.One of the paradigms in the cognitive sciences and linguistics that, although I concede is useful as a heuristics, might not be as fundamental to human nature as many would presume, is the idea that our language determines how we structure reality — Linguistic relativity.Hmm … who would have guessed a now politically incorrect chldren’s story from 1899 predated this bootstrapping dilemma of many a mathematician and theoretical physicist alike? Have used Tiger Balm … but tiger butter?But whether we are talking about mathematics or Quantum mechanics, I suspect words or symbols are ultimately provisional metaphors.A couple of Dutch scientists whose intellectual humility I find as refreshing as Tiger Butter include Frans de Waal (will get to him later in this post) and Walter Lewin, Astrophysicist (first discovered slowly rotating pulsars) and former Professor of Physics at MIT. In the video ‘Mysterious of the Universe’ Part 1, Lewin was giving a layman’s description of how Niels Bohr’s insights into discrete positions of electrons could be reconciled with Schrodinger’s equations for wave functions into what became the foundations of Quantum mechanics.At 49:50 into the documentary, in the words of Professor Lewin himself …‘’ And then you can ask yourself the question, ‘Do I understand it?’ I don’t even know what means, ‘understanding’. I have problems with that. Physics describes things, describes phenomenon. And as long as it is predictable, as long as that formalism is applied in a certain situation and gives you the right answer … who cares? Who cares what the meaning is of ‘understanding’? I think I’ll leave that up to philosophers. I don’t think they have a clue either of course, but they … you know … “ There is something about those Dutch scientists that is endearing to me and my sensibilities.Oops … video removed. You’ll just have to trust me on the above. But in return, here’s a clip of the great man playing with his balls. ;-)Can’t help but to give a bow to Richard Feynman here as well … ‘We don’t really understand mathematics, we just get used to them’, and ‘Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.’It is a bit of a sticky wicket in that we both create and discover reality with language, and some of us are hell-bent on concealing or altering reality with language as well … politics, the usual suspect. In one of my biology labs, we explored some alternatives as to how one might refute the ‘strong’ version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis … that language determines reality.This one.Stepping from behind the applied linguist’s podium, and putting on my lab coat, I sometimes let these two disciplines duke it out, if for nothing else, just to convince myself that regarding real-world problem-solving OR in the publish-or-perish halls of academia, discrete disciplines are not carved in stone … merely provisional conventions.In the lab dealing with genetics and evolution, I would ask the members of the class to play the devil’s advocate to John Lennon’s famous line …and imagine there IS a heaven.Quickly now, without more than a second of thought, point towards which direction that heaven is likely to be found.Close to 100% of the students, almost 100% of the time, would point up.Why could that be? With a wink and smile, I used to tease them a bit. Japan is a thoroughly secular country; not particularly theistic, much less monotheistic or with beliefs in any ‘Aerial Boundaries’ (rinsing my mouth of Beatle juice).Why would the default position of this imaginary place of bliss be ‘up’? I’ve tried this with friends and co-workers, asking people of all sorts of religious convictions, or lack of, to reflexively point to heaven. ‘Up’ seems to be a universally primal reflexive response.This led to class discussions and thought-experiments regarding humans as homo sapiens, members of the social great apes, and some speculation regarding the behavior patterns of our ancient ancestors and present primate cousins … including Frans de Waal’s research on moral behavior in animals.With our primate cousins and ancestors in mind, it appears that our default social structure is more hierarchical than communal. Unfortunate, because although other social primates seem to have a genetically constrained limit to the size of their communities, humans don’t. And that can cause problems.The Oxford evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar, posited Dunbar's number as the maximum number of people we can recognize and interact with as individuals as about 150 or so. His theory posits a correlation between the size of our pre-frontal cortex and that number of people. I suspect there is also a correlation with typical neural pathways allowing for an empathy-based morality.At least a couple of problems arising from exceeding that number include:1 - External … malthusian problems of populations exceeding resources. Homo sapiens seems to be most sustainable a social primate. Not a herding primate, and certainly not a swarming primate. Malthus may have been wrong in the particulars, but right in principle. When populations outstrip their resources, a malthusian correction is inevitable, and often catastrophic … if not disease or starvation, war will put a damper on those geometrically increasing populations.I agree with the physiciist Stephen Hawking that this is the most dangerous time for humanity, and between the lines, I see a malthusian thread connecting economics, politics, and emerging technology … which will happen first? Expanding our source of resources offworld? Or self destruction?Although I am big fan of the late Carl Sagan, and the probability of intelligent life in a cosmos bigger than we had imagined appears inevitable by probability theory alone, Noam Chomsky in his 2010 speech at Chapel Hill, Human intelligence and the environment, opened his speech by referring to an interesting debate between Sagan and the late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.And Mayr gave quite a compelling argument against the probability of human-like intelligence in the cosmos. (The first three paragraphs is enough to get the gist.) … Human intelligence and the environmentTriangulating Mayr’s arguments with Hawkin’s fears, I suppose we will come closer to an educated guess sooner than I am comfortable with.2 - Internal … As Kurt Gödel pointed out in mathematics, Ludwig Wittgenstein in linguistics, and numerous others from Lao Tzu to Emerson in philosophical thought … systems, including hierarchies, have limits. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, science as a heuristics may be our best tool, but as a body of thought or an institution, is never complete, and as pointed out by Karl Popper, possibly even dangerously destructive. As Jill Bolte Taylor and Joseph Campbell have also both pointed out … math, logic, and language alone, have constraints, and is best recognized as more or less useful metaphors and models.Human hierarchies are particularly problematic.Like other social primates, we have a clear hierarchical element in how we self organize. Some of this is absolutely necessary. Unlike an alligator or turtle for example, we are not capable of being independent at birth, and require some kind of familial or communal support until achieving a bit of maturity and autonomy. Like young lion cubs at play, it is within the communal context we are taught to be competitive as well as collaborative.But particularly a problem, when our groups exceed Dunbar’s number in size, empathy based morality becomes replaced, or at least subsumed, within a morality based on logic, habit-tradition, or force. And when empathic pathways is no longer the primary way for dealing with large numbers of people, corruption is and collapse, a kind of Tower-of-Babel syndrome, becomes inevitable.‘Structural Reform’ of our institutions has become such a daily, ritual chant by politicians and the media, it is easy to forget why constant ‘reform’ is necessary. Just a guess, but neo-liberal capitalism and consumerism are only distal causes of institutional rot. The more proximal cause would come from the problem of scale that necessarily turn small, collaborative communities into competitive hierarchies.Among the highest ideal goals of a community is to nurture nurturers. Altruistic behavior for the sake of the group as the highest value. Hierarchies, on the other hand, promote competition to the point of zero-sum, machiavellian opportunism. Even with the best of intent, groups inevitably undergo mission drift, some more quickly than others.The original mission of Harvard University … has it drifted or not? Every diploma originally read, Christo et Ecclesiae around Veritas, meaning "Truth for Christ and the Church." Even a couple of hundred years ago, Harvard had seemed to have drifted so far from its original mission, that Yale was created to as a return to original values. Now, if you want that express ticket to the big bucks heaven of Wall Street, Harvard Business School is the main gate. But CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs (and Harvard graduate), Lloyd Blankfein reaffirms Goldman Sach’s, and I presume , Harvard’s mission as being exempt from drift .. Blankfein Says He's Just Doing 'God's Work'. Need I say it? Ironic.An ascent to heaven?And the Japanese equivalent … ‘amakudari’, (translated at ‘descent from heaven’, not ‘ascent to heaven’.Altruists do not rise to become multi-millionaire CEOs, but just like the wealthy, pre-reformation era nobility of Europe buying indulgences for their express trip ticket to heaven, we have our Carnegie Institutes, Rockefeller Foundations, and Bill & Melissa Gates Foundations as penance for the ruthlessly blind ambition of their youth. They did not become rich and famous by striving to be civil servants or nurturers to begin with.I suspect there is more than a passing similarity between the dysfunctions what Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in Outliers regarding the human dynamics behind the large number of disasters in Korean Airlines, and the assessment that the Fukushima reactor meltdown was a man-made disaster. It gets worse …This John Oliver skit was done a few years ago. The ante has been raised since then. So I can imagine a possible scenario that confirms Mayr’s thought experiment … that human intelligence is little more than a lethal mutation. An evolutionary spandrel.But what has this got to do with hierarchies, within my larger answer of ‘heaven is up’ as an ‘inherited idea’?One of he assumptions in the current atheist/scientific reductionist vs. traditional religion culture wars is that heaven’s ‘up’, like a ‘big daddy in the sky’ interpretation of god might be reduced to a subconscious projection of our hierarchical nature.Due to problems of scale, the resulting hierarchies of Confucianism or a similar meritocracy, or the more brutish ‘might makes right’ of neo-liberal capitalism, feudalism, or even the divine right of kings — are hierarchies of mostly rule-driven morality. But we are still hard-wired for empathy-driven morality.The clash between these two fundamental drivers of morality seems to be at the heart of a lot of alienation and friction between empathetic-driven communities and large-scale, rule-driven human societies. It wasn’t that Marie Antoinette was so cold-hearted in telling the French peasantry to eat cake. It is just that they were not her ‘family’ or within Dunbar’s number. It was all she could do to accommodate her own royal Habsburg family,spread all over Europe. The Misunderstood Marie Antoinette? And as buddy Andreas pointed out … Did Marie-Antoinette really say “Let them eat cake”?A somewhat traditional example of this same stress, famous in my adopted home of Japan, is the story of the Forty-seven rōnin.Conclusion: The end-game of part one of my example of an inherited idea, is that ‘heaven is up’ is reflection of the angst of empathetic creatures being stuck in less empathetic, rule-driven hierarchies, and projecting a way out of the stress by pointing to something above even the top of the hierarchy … an ingrained and imagined community beyond hierarchies.And circles over hierarchies even in this earthly purgatory …Of course, something as simple as young women preferring tall guys could have something to do with it. Hmm … on second thought, not so simple. Even guys prefer slightly taller than average guys as leaders or salesmen. And we runts of the litter have to work (or write) all the harder to be noticed.Napoleon Complex? Moi? ;-)And pardons to Napoleon. While acknowledging the sway of arm chair-psych, he may have been given the short end of the shtick by the early British versions of Fox, Fakebook, and Breitbarch News (again, thanks Andreas.)————————––––But another potential scenario is that at one stage of our evolution, during the daytime, we roving communal apes felt relatively safe in numbers, had relatively good eyesight, were tool-wielders, and had the capacity for strategic planning.We can also presume that our direct ancestors were not nocturnal. They were mostly active during the day because we modern humans do not have a light gathering, light reflecting tapetum lucidum in the back of our retinas. — Why Animals' eyes Glow in the Dark?.Many predators and herbivores played out one of the cat-and-mouse games of evolution by developing eyes with a tapetum to gather enough starlight to feed or flee at night … kind of like the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of the forever-war between ‘too-big-to-fail-or-understand’ American tax law and corporate tax lawyers.Ha. an up-to-date case in point (Dec. 3, 2017) … Senate Republicans pass sweeping overhaul of US tax code … nearly 500 pages long, some handwritten just before being made into law, lining corporate pockets at the expense of families and communities — and an appropriate quote from the article … “I defy any member of the Senate to stand here, take an oath that they have read this and understand what in the world it means to businesses and families and individuals,” said Senator Dick Durbin, the minority whip from Illinois, holding up pages with notes scribbled in the margin.If there were a totem for predatory capitalism … I suppose it would be a creature with no vision in the light of day, but a hell-of-a-yuuuge tapetum.Ahh … but this is biology lab. Back to class …You can see a tapetum in the eyes of cows, deer, cats, dogs, even spiders. Just shine a flashlight in their general direction and you will see a bluish-green reflection from their eyes. And now we know why men in suits wear shades, and are of a different species — homo institutionis.But as you may well be asking by now, what has this got to do with ‘heaven’ being ‘up’? Well, one theory, and only an untestable theory … and let me repeat this for the more literal minded readers among us (A quote by Albert Einstein) … is that either at night, or in times of danger, our very distant ancestors took to the trees for safety.Like those early Frankenstein movies, or later spoofs about the ‘Frankenligthenment’ of fire = bad …Tree = upup = safesafe = heaven… and well, you can guess the rest — Avatar.House cats, felis catus, similar to some of us primates, seem have a preference for high places or cubby holes for safety and comfort.And if those cool cats could think and imagine a heaven? — Avatar 2. (Can hardly wait.)Fake alert !! — At least WE know that the Na’vi, and corporate tax lawyers alike, should have tapetum-lit eyes.Interestingly, our subconscious equating of heaven with being safely ‘up’ in the trees, regardless of religious belief or lack of, is buttressed by two dangers:One … falling.Ever had one of those dreams? Or days?The other danger, and another probable source of blindly inherited ideas, was the one deadly predator that could climb trees … cucumbers. (Note — no cats and few cucumbers were harmed in the making or posting of this video).But back to ‘heaven’ … with pre-humans in the trees and cats on Avatar, if … and for the literal-minded among us, that is an imaginative ‘if’’ — if other animals could imagine, where might that heaven be for those animals?Consider the lowly earthworm, which in turn is considering ‘the early bird’.Heaven would obviously be ‘down’, would it not?As a box turtle, a razor clam, or a hermit crab … ‘in’ might be as good a guess as any.A sea cucumber (no, not those dangerous tree climbers mentioned above) might argue for heaven as being ‘out’ — and from it’s anus no less. Eeew.But a sardine appears to be caught between a rock and a hard place … seagulls above, bonitos below, what’s a poor sardine to do?On the other hand, I’ve rarely seen ‘a’ sardine … unless it is on the end of my fork.Laaaadies and Gentlemennnn … I present to youuuu …. ‘Sardine Heaven’.Lean in close to your computer screen … can you hear them singing?‘Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.’Or is it — “Food for worms, lads … carrrrrpe … carrrrpe diiium ….” ,‘carpe dium’ : Latin for: ‘seize the carp’.Your homework assignment, should you choose to accept this mission … is to triangulate this lab with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Frans de Waal’s suggestion that the distinction between thought and feeling is likely to be a false dichotomy … the same observation about homo sapiens as Robert A. Heinlein … man is not so much a rational animal, as he is a rationalizing animal.“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? —– a favorite quote from the poet, Robert Browning.But reaching too eagerly for heaven might be counterproductive. The Japanese writer, Kenji Miyazawa, beautifully expressed the difference between heaven and hell with an extended metaphor coming from an old Far Eastern folktale, The Chinese Version of Heaven and Hell. Simply put, heaven and hell are basically the same … heaps of food all around, and everyone with an extra long pair of chopsticks. The only difference is that in hell, we try, and fail, to feed ourselves with those unwieldy chopsticks. In heaven, we feed each other.Perhaps it all depends on what it means to be human … or transhuman:R.I.P. Rutger Hauer … 23 January 1944 – 19 July 2019, that scene alone, worth the price of the movie ticket.For extra-credit, you real die-hard Blade Runner fans, check YouTube for Rutger Hauer’s thoughts, 30 years later, about that classic ‘lost … like tears in rain’ quote, and then watch the TED presentation, My stroke of insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. Use your own experience as a quasi-scientific control (putting on our solipsist’s hat), and do a compare / contrast — thought-experiment to tease out some correlations between yourself, Rutger’s character, and Jill’s transcendance of character.Heaven. If only a glimpse between the lines.Next lab — Let’s get subversive with some more abductive thought-experiments and a deconstruction of a classic anime / nature documentary. No, not the Shinto / animism of something from Studio Ghibli … although I would love to get into the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin on Hayao Miyazaki and how Western culture influences Japanese culture influences Western culture … the round-and-round-we-go bootstrapping of social constructs.But rather closer to some implications of science — not as the current vogue of seeing its difference from common sense — but rather, ‘Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.’ — Thomas Henry Huxley.But this IS Japan, so a more interesting angle might be … "To See a World in a grain of sand ..." — William Blake meets D. T. Suzuki.Will start off with this classic anime / nature documentary. Must have been funded by the Ayn Rand Society, Victorian-era Robber Barons, more contemporary Social Darwinists …or Microsoft.Former Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy occasionally remarked that Microsoft never produced technology except by buying it: "R&D [research and development] and M&A [mergers and acquisitions] are the same thing over there." … gotta love WikiGranted, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but I can almost imagine the likes of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Marc Blythe, John Pilger, Thomas Piketty … and my latest brain-throb, Naomi Klein, nodding in agreement … neo-liberalism at its best, and worst.But Biology or Science as ‘value-free’ STEM curricula?If you believe that … meet me after class. I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.Bio labs were cool.——————————————————————————————ps — A note for the science literate who might be wondering about my approach to teaching bio labs — or any theories, hypotheses, or lack of:My biology labs were at Temple University, Japan Campus, and the target audience included very few would-be medical doctors. Most of the students communicated in English as a foreign language, and the school has no program leading to a degree in any of the natural sciences. My target audience consisted mostly of students who normally would not have chosen to take a biology course at all if it had not not been an option as a core requirement for graduation.My primary aim was to familiarize them with the common-sense tools of the scientific approach to problem-solving, and have a little cosplay with my lab coat. My class was the first, and last, laboratory course most of those students would ever likely take. I wanted to them to leave that course with a lasting and favorable impression of science … not as some obscure community of bespectacled quants and researchers in white coats — but as an eminently practical tool for everyday problem solving.I deliberately refused to make a predictive, testable hypothesis, much less ask the students to make a statistically-derived control and design an experiment to try and prove a null hypothesis.Although we did some dissections, and had a few carefully controlled experiments and follow-up discussions and lab reports, most of my labs were just thought-experiments, the primary heuristics of which is a subset of inductive logic, abductive reasoning … which is pretty much my heuristics in addressing the original question of this post.I prefer to just call it ‘play’ … in Einstein’s sense of the word. There are those who would object to the idea that I got paid to play — mostly those micro-managing men in suits again, homo institutionis. But the students didn’t seem to mind.Although at the beginning of the semester, I always described the standard Aristotelian model of the scientific method as a back-and-forth between induction and deduction, the importance of a scientific control, statistics as one way of creating an artificial control, and using the results of one experiment as an assumption and control for the next experiment … as a way of winding our way through cognitive dissonance on a sticky, messy web of cause-effect. I primarily take my scientific heuristics from Pierce, Dewey, Whitehead, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper … particularly Popper’s ‘conjectures-and-refutations’, and Thomas Huxley’s‘ science as simply common sense’ … just slowed down a bit in hopes of catching a few of our all-too-human, and inevitable, sources of error.While pointing at potential weaknesses of cause-effect as the be-all and end-all of scientific heuristics, neither the target audience nor the time constraints permitted much time to explore alternatives, though I tried to hint at some through the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts. If I could go back in time and teach those classes again, I would be sure to toss in Emergence, and closely related Fractals and Chaos theory as providing the basis for more insightful mathematical metaphors, depending on the problem being solved such as dealing with drainage basins, weather patterns, or political-herding behavior. Besides, Mandelbrot sets remind me of those tie-dyed t-shirts of another era, with the added delight of movement.And they can be just so pretty … a cross behind Laozi, The Teachings of Don Juan, and Purple Haze or Voodoo Child.——————————————————————————————————For the more literal-minded readers of this post, I am more than happy to entertain other alternatives as to why pointing up as the direction of heaven seems to be both cross-cultural and connected with what we know about animal behavior.Will tie up a loose end to this post by returning to a Richard Feynman quote, Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt and submitting it to a thought experiment. There are literalists, fundamentalists, and reductionists of all stripes and colors, including scientists. Might not we consider the possibility of those statistical outliers which push religion to the edge of doubt, and material reductionists who reduce science into faith? Just something for the more nuanced minds to play with.That being said, when all is said and done, even if this conjecture does come close to being a ‘best fit’ … so what?I don’t see this insight as leading to any new technology, solving pressing social problems, or changing anyone’s preconceived notions.Just giving a small example of how a scientist, or a critical thinker, might think ... and play. 😄

Disclaimer to all buddies … Other than the prologue, most of this is an updated, earlier answer I had given regarding ‘Steve Martin (Steven Martin)'s answer to What are some examples that show how we inherit ideas blindly?’ …. which I will correspondingly update.But hey! Good writing is re-writing! ;-)Prologue …Although I am not a follower of any specific religion, I kind of like that ‘humility and awe’ for ‘nature in its entirety’ thingy found in the likes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jill Bolte Taylor, and Albert Einstein … something leaning towards the pantheistic or ‘spiritual naturalist’ traditions. And I think that kind of covers the moral imperative found in most traditional religions, in a soft-logic kind of way.The question as it is stated, seems to be geared towards traditional monotheistic religious notions, but I prefer the above more naturalistic approach to ‘heaven and hell’.The Jewish rabbi (yeah, I know … is there any other kind ;-), thinker, and holocaust survivor, Abraham Joshua Heschel, once said that ‘The opposite of good is not evil. It is indifference.’From the perspective of homo sapiens as a social primate, I tend to agree.For traditional, ethnic communities dependent on cooperation to survive and flourish in a wild, untamed environment, the worst punishment that could have been given to a fellow social primate was ostracization. That was tantamount to a death sentence. We are, after all is said and done, social primates, and the individual is not the salient construct of analysis for either survival, or the specific question being addressed with this post.True, most Quora readers are not living in a traditional, ethnic community surrounded by nature red of tooth and claw. But I would say that traditional, ethnic cultures would have had less of a problem with the mental-emotional disorders and suicides that come from the isolation, fragmentation, and marginalization of those at the bottom of large scale hierarchies of modern society … these high tech Towers of Babel, crowned with gated communities of hearts so cold that even a bonfire of Paradise Papers can’t melt.Regarding some assumptions that may be behind this question, I live in Japan — a secular land of a thousand gods. I am quite comfortable with the bemused attitude of most educated Japanese regarding the flaming ‘atheist/believer debates’ more commonly found in the Anglo-centric, monotheistic world.And I am comfortable with the very practical maxim taught by my practical-idealist, Chinese Quora buddy and fellow Bonobo, Nell Zhang … ‘Black cat, white cat. Meh … whatever. As long as it catches mice.’With this frame of mind, I remember a traditional Chinese/Japanese parable (it also has a Western counterpart) which hits the ‘heaven and hell’ question squarely on the head:———————————————————————————Heaven and hell are not so different. In both places, we are all surrounded by plates and platters of delicious food. And in both places, we have a pair of exceedingly long chopsticks in our hand … a pair of chopsticks that are even longer than our own arms. The only difference between heaven and hell is this:In hell, try as we may to pick up food with those unwieldy chopsticks, we can never manage to put the food into our mouths, and forever remain hungry.In heaven, we feed each other.———————————————————————————With that parable, I would say … pointing to heaven, is our altruistic self, pointing to the marginalized other … and actually doing something about it besides pointing.Steve Martin (Steven Martin)'s answer to Is it true that in Japan there are no beggars?I have buddies who are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindi, Atheists, Anarchists, and drinkers of Bud Light (… uh … maybe not that last one). But what most of my buddies have in common is the ‘all roads lead to Rome’ attitude encapsulated in the sentiment above.But as reasonable as that seems to me and my buddies, some people never quite seem to get it. Consistently mistaking the street sign for the destination, they point to their own head. their own hearts, their own chakras … as if they were above and beyond mere social primates by virtue of their unique individuality. Buddies or not, as one social primate to another, let me tell you, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.In a best case scenario, all of those self-references would be metaphorical, in which case, I would agree with them.That being said, from mathematical formulas to literary metaphors to chit-chat and gossip, I think all that we can say is ultimately metaphorical. What can be taken literally may be practical, but is a parochial and provisional social construct. Alas, we humans all to often mistake that fundamentally metaphorical street sign for what it is pointing to:—————————————Damn.Somebody thought it was for the good of the community to delete that funny 3 minute YouTube video interview of Joseph Campbell explaining about metaphor and ignorance. That’s what I get for trusting YouTube and/or lawyers. Will try to use one of those ‘way back’ software thingies to retrieve that video.Warning folks … don’t be surprised if there is an acceleration of the deletion of more ‘dangerous ideas’ from mass media. So save those Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges videos to hard disc while you can.So here goes a partial transcript, and my recollection of his closing remarks In the opening pages (3ff) of Campbell’s book Thou Art That, he tells an amusing yet profoundly important anecdote about a run-in with a hardnosed radio host (who proves it by saying he is a lawyer) who started off by saying that a myth is a lie.Campbell writes:So I replied with my definition of myth. “No, a myth is not a lie. A whole mythology is an organization of symbolic images and narratives, metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and the fulfillment of a given culture at a given time.”“It’s a lie,” he countered. (audience laughter)“It’s a metaphor.”This went on for about twenty minutes.Around four or five minutes before the end of the program, I realized that this interviewer did not really know what a metaphor was. I decided to treat him as he was treating me.“No,” I said. “I tell you it’s metaphorical. You give me an example of a metaphor.”He replied, “You give me an example.”I resisted, “No, I’m asking the question this time.” I had not taught school for thirty years for nothing. “And I want you togive me an example of a metaphor.”The interviewer was utterly baffled and even went so far as to say, “Let’s get in touch with some school teacher.” Finally, with something like a minute and a half to go, he rose to the occasion and said, “I’ll try. My friend John runs very fast. People say he runs like a deer. There’s a metaphor.”As the last seconds of the interview ticked off, I replied, “That is not the metaphor. The metaphor is: John is a deer.”He shot back. “That’s a lie.” (roar of laughter from the audience)“No,” I said, “That is a metaphor.”And the show ended.But not the Bill Moyer interview where he recounted that radio interview.In the deleted video clip (thank you YouTube and/or lawyers) of the interview … Joseph Campbell sat back with a sigh, and said that is when he suddenly realized:‘Well I’ll be darned.Half of the world mistakes mythology for scientific fact.These are called atheists.The other half of the world mistakes mythology for historical fact.And these are called religious fundamentalists.(profound, stunned silence).End of video interview.MY QUESTION (STEVE) and COMMENT … WTF?—————————————Why in the world would someone see fit to delete that short 3 minute video?My best guess is for one of three reasons:1 — just one part of a slow and systematic suppression of education for human capital, or more likely (and connected) …2 — just follow the money.3 — the owner of the YouTube profile died or had his/her account suspended for another reason.Back to the original answer …—————————————And in the worst case scenario, this is the era of ‘me, myself, and I’.Maybe that’s always been the case … must always be the case.And my best guess as to why is that like aesthetics, though morality is a social construct, it must gradually emerge, grow, from each individual, beginning at birth from ground zero.The problem with opportunists who clamber to the top of hierarchies, is that they presume morality or aesthetics can be imposed, top-down, and in their solipsistic presumption, end up trying to force round pegs into square holes and before the young ones are ready for it. Maybe that helps explain the pathological conflation of ‘legality’ with ‘morality’, and job training with education. Ends up just waggin’ the dog.For a more detailed explanation of my reasoning here … Steve Martin (Steven Martin)'s answer to How do we make sense of Anthony Braxton's "compositions" and the interaction between the through-composed material and improvisation they tend to showcase? I'm a longtime Braxton fan. Here is him "explaining."That might also explain why, morally, as a species, we are collectively, as dumb as hammers … neither willing nor able to learn from history.The biologist Ernst Mayr interestingly postulated in his debate with Carl Sagan, that despite the probability of sheer numbers, human intelligence might not be ‘out there’ in the cosmos. It may just be a by-product, and evolutionary spandrel of a social species … and a dysfunctional, lethal mutation, at that.Einstein would probably have agreed more with Mayr than Sagan in his famous quote … ‘Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former’ … thanks for reminding me of this gem, User-12616619705513344996.For a brief summary of the above debate, check out the opening lines of Chomsky’s Chapel Hill speech of 2011 … Human intelligence and the environment.But back to the working world.As mentioned earlier, I was an applied linguist (Masters of Education in TESOL … and doctoral drop-out) who taught and ran the biology biology labs at Temple University Japan for about 10 years. The following is an example of the spirit of the ‘thought experiments’ I often used for students who would ordinarily have not been interested in the natural sciences.———————————————————————————‘If horses had gods — they would look like horses.’ — Xenophanes for dummies.Uh oh.By that logic, my god would look like …One of the paradigms in the cognitive sciences and linguistics that, although I concede is useful as a heuristics, might not be as fundamental to human nature as many would presume, is the idea that our language determines how we structure reality — Linguistic relativity.Hmm … who would have guessed a now politically incorrect chldren’s story from 1899 predated this bootstrapping dilemma of many a mathematician and theoretical physicist alike? Have used Tiger Balm … but tiger butter?But whether we are talking about mathematics or Quantum mechanics, I suspect words or symbols are ultimately provisional metaphors.A couple of Dutch scientists whose intellectual humility I find as refreshing as Tiger Butter include Frans de Waal (will get to him later in this post) and Walter Lewin, Astrophysicist (first discovered slowly rotating pulsars) and former Professor of Physics at MIT. In the video ‘Mysterious of the Universe’ Part 1, Lewin was giving a layman’s description of how Niels Bohr’s insights into discrete positions of electrons could be reconciled with Schrodinger’s equations for wave functions into what became the foundations of Quantum mechanics.At 49:50 into the documentary, in the words of Professor Lewin himself …‘’ And then you can ask yourself the question, ‘Do I understand it?’ I don’t even know what means, ‘understanding’. I have problems with that. Physics describes things, describes phenomenon. And as long as it is predictable, as long as that formalism is applied in a certain situation and gives you the right answer … who cares? Who cares what the meaning is of ‘understanding’? I think I’ll leave that up to philosophers. I don’t think they have a clue either of course, but they … you know … “ There is something about those Dutch scientists that is endearing to me and my sensibilities.Oops … video removed. You’ll just have to trust me on the above. But in return, here’s a clip of the great man playing with his balls. ;-)Can’t help but to give a bow to Richard Feynman here as well … ‘We don’t really understand mathematics, we just get used to them’, and ‘Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.’It is a bit of a sticky wicket in that we both create and discover reality with language, and some of us are hell-bent on concealing or altering reality with language as well … politics, the usual suspect. In one of my biology labs, we explored some alternatives as to how one might refute the ‘strong’ version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis … that language determines reality.This one.Stepping from behind the applied linguist’s podium, and putting on my lab coat, I sometimes let these two disciplines duke it out, if for nothing else, just to convince myself that regarding real-world problem-solving OR in the publish-or-perish halls of academia, discrete disciplines are not carved in stone … merely provisional conventions.In the lab dealing with genetics and evolution, I would ask the members of the class to play the devil’s advocate to John Lennon’s famous line …and imagine there IS a heaven.Quickly now, without more than a second of thought, point towards which direction that heaven is likely to be found.Close to 100% of the students, almost 100% of the time, would point up.Why could that be? With a wink and smile, I used to tease them a bit. Japan is a thoroughly secular country; not particularly theistic, much less monotheistic or with beliefs in any ‘Aerial Boundaries’ (rinsing my mouth of Beatle juice).Why would the default position of this imaginary place of bliss be ‘up’? I’ve tried this with friends and co-workers, asking people of all sorts of religious convictions, or lack of, to reflexively point to heaven. ‘Up’ seems to be a universally primal reflexive response.This led to class discussions and thought-experiments regarding humans as homo sapiens, members of the social great apes, and some speculation regarding the behavior patterns of our ancient ancestors … including moral behavior in animals.One potential scenario is that at one stage of our evolution, during the daytime, we roving communal apes felt relatively safe in numbers, had relatively good eyesight, were tool-wielders, and had the capacity for strategic planning.We can also presume that our direct ancestors were not nocturnal. They were mostly active during the day because we modern humans do not have a light gathering, light reflecting tapetum lucidum in the back of our retinas. — Why Animals' eyes Glow in the Dark?.Many predators and herbivores played out one of the cat-and-mouse games of evolution by developing eyes with a tapetum to gather enough starlight to feed or flee at night … kind of like the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of the forever-war between ‘too-big-to-fail-or-understand’ American tax law and corporate tax lawyers vs. ‘the little people’.Ha. an up-to-date case in point (Dec. 3, 2017) … Senate Republicans pass sweeping overhaul of US tax code … nearly 500 pages long, some handwritten just before being made into law, lining corporate pockets at the expense of families and communities — and an appropriate quote from the article … “I defy any member of the Senate to stand here, take an oath that they have read this and understand what in the world it means to businesses and families and individuals,” said Senator Dick Durbin, the minority whip from Illinois, holding up pages with notes scribbled in the margin.If there were a totem for predatory capitalism … I suppose it would be a creature with no vision in the light of day, but a hell-of-a-yuuuge tapetum.Ahh … but this is biology lab. Back to class …You can see a tapetum in the eyes of cows, deer, cats, dogs, even spiders. Just shine a flashlight in their general direction and you will see a bluish-green reflection from their eyes. And now we know why men in suits wear shades, and are of a different species — homo institutionis.But as you may well be asking by now, what has this got to do with ‘heaven’ being ‘up’? Well, one theory, and only an untestable theory … and let me repeat this for the more literal minded readers among us (A quote by Albert Einstein) … is that either at night, or in times of danger, our very distant ancestors took to the trees for safety.Like those early Frankenstein movies, or later spoofs about the ‘Frankenligthenment’ of fire = bad …Tree = upup = safesafe = heaven… and well, you can guess the rest — Avatar.House cats, felis catus, similar to some of us primates, seem have a preference for high places or cubby holes for safety and comfort.And if those cool cats could think and imagine a heaven? — Avatar 2. (Can hardly wait.)Fake alert !! — At least WE know that the Na’vi, and corporate tax lawyers alike, should have tapetum-lit eyes.Interestingly, our subconscious equating of heaven with being safely ‘up’ in the trees, regardless of religious belief or lack of, is buttressed by two dangers:One … falling.Ever had one of those dreams? Or days?The other danger, and another probable source of blindly inherited ideas, was the one deadly predator that could climb trees … cucumbers. (Note — no cats and few cucumbers were harmed in the making or posting of this video).But back to ‘heaven’ … with pre-humans in the trees and cats on Avatar, if … and for the literal-minded among us, that is an imaginative ‘if’’ — if other animals could imagine, where might that heaven be for those animals?Consider the lowly earthworm, which in turn is considering ‘the early bird’.Heaven would obviously be ‘down’, would it not?As a box turtle, a razor clam, or a hermit crab … ‘in’ might be as good a guess as any.A sea cucumber (no, not those dangerous tree climbers mentioned above) might argue for heaven as being ‘out’ — and from it’s anus no less. Eeew.But a sardine appears to be caught between a rock and a hard place … seagulls above, bonitos below, what’s a poor sardine to do?On the other hand, I’ve rarely seen ‘a’ sardine … unless it is on the end of my fork.Laaaadies and Gentlemennnn … I present to youuuu …. ‘Sardine Heaven’.Lean in close to your computer screen … can you hear them singing?‘Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.’Or is it — “Food for worms, lads … carrrrrpe … carrrrpe diiium ….” ,‘carpe dium’ : Latin for: ‘seize the carp’.Your homework assignment, should you choose to accept this mission … is to triangulate this lab with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Frans de Waal’s suggestion that the distinction between thought and feeling is likely to be a false dichotomy … the same observation about homo sapiens as Robert A. Heinlein … man is not so much a rational animal, as he is a rationalizing animal.“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? —– a favorite quote from the poet, Robert Browning.But reaching too eagerly for heaven might be counterproductive. The Japanese writer, Kenji Miyazawa, beautifully expressed the difference between heaven and hell with an extended metaphor coming from an old Far Eastern folktale, The Chinese Version of Heaven and Hell. Simply put, heaven and hell are basically the same … heaps of food all around, and everyone with an extra long pair of chopsticks. The only difference is that in hell, we try, and fail, to feed ourselves with those unwieldy chopsticks. In heaven, we feed each other. Oops … just realized I had already written about this earlier. Meh, that’s a chorus good enough to bear repetition.Perhaps it all depends on what it means to be human … or transhuman:R.I.P. Ruger Hauer … 23 January 1944 – 19 July 2019. That scene alone was worth the price of the movie ticket.For extra-credit, you real die-hard Blade Runner fans, check YouTube for Rutger Hauer’s thoughts, 30 years later, about that classic ‘lost … like tears in rain’ quote, and then watch the TED presentation, My stroke of insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. Use your own experience as a quasi-scientific control (putting on our solipsist’s hat), and do a compare / contrast — thought-experiment to tease out some correlations between yourself, Rutger’s character, and Jill’s transcendance of character.Heaven. If only a glimpse between the lines.Next lab — Let’s get subversive with some more abductive thought-experiments and a deconstruction of a classic anime / nature documentary. No, not the Shinto / animism of something from Studio Ghibli … although I would love to get into the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin on Hayao Miyazaki and how Western culture influences Japanese culture influences Western culture … the round-and-round-we-go bootstrapping of social constructs.But rather closer to some implications of science — not as the current vogue of seeing its difference from common sense — but rather, ‘Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.’— Thomas Henry Huxley.But this IS Japan, so a more interesting angle might be … "To See a World in a grain of sand ..." — William Blake meets D. T. Suzuki.Will start off with this classic anime / nature documentary. Must have been funded by the Ayn Rand Society, Victorian-era Robber Barons, more contemporary Social Darwinists …or Microsoft.Former Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy occasionally remarked that Microsoft never produced technology except by buying it: "R&D [research and development] and M&A [mergers and acquisitions] are the same thing over there." … gotta love WikiGranted, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but I can almost imagine the likes of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Marc Blythe, John Pilger, Thomas Piketty … and my latest brain-throb, Naomi Klein, nodding in agreement … neo-liberalism at its best, and worst.But Biology or Science as ‘value-free’ STEM curricula?If you believe that … meet me after class. I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.Bio labs were cool.——————————————————————————————ps — A note for the science literate who might be wondering about my approach to teaching bio labs — or any theories, hypotheses, or lack of:My biology labs were at Temple University, Japan Campus, and the target audience included very few would-be medical doctors. Most of the students communicated in English as a foreign language, and the school has no program leading to a degree in any of the natural sciences. My target audience consisted mostly of students who normally would not have chosen to take a biology course at all if it had not not been an option as a core requirement for graduation.My primary aim was to familiarize them with the common-sense tools of the scientific approach to problem-solving, and have a little cosplay with my lab coat.My class was the first, and last, laboratory course most of those students would ever likely take. I wanted to them to leave that course with a lasting and favorable impression of science … not as some obscure community of bespectacled quants and researchers in white coats — but as an eminently practical tool for everyday problem solving.I deliberately refused to make a predictive, testable hypothesis, much less ask the students to make a statistically-derived control and design an experiment to try and prove a null hypothesis.Although we did some dissections, and had a few carefully controlled experiments and follow-up discussions and lab reports, most of my labs were just thought-experiments, the primary heuristics of which is a subset of inductive logic, abductive reasoning … which is pretty much my heuristics in addressing the original question of this post.I prefer to just call it ‘play’ … in Einstein’s sense of the word. There are those who would object to the idea that I got paid to play — mostly those micro-managing men in suits again, homo institutionis. But the students didn’t seem to mind.Although at the beginning of the semester, I always described the standard Aristotelian model of the scientific method as a back-and-forth between induction and deduction, the importance of a scientific control, statistics as one way of creating an artificial control, and using the results of one experiment as an assumption and control for the next experiment … as a way of winding our way through cognitive dissonance on a sticky, messy web of cause-effect.I primarily take my scientific heuristics from Pierce, Dewey, Whitehead, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper … particularly Popper’s ‘conjectures-and-refutations’, and Thomas Huxley’s‘ science as simply common sense’ … just slowed down a bit in hopes of catching a few of our all-too-human, and inevitable, sources of error.While pointing at potential weaknesses of cause-effect as the be-all and end-all of scientific heuristics, neither the target audience nor the time constraints permitted much time to explore alternatives, though I tried to hint at some through the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts. If I could go back in time and teach those classes again, I would be sure to toss in Emergence, and closely related Fractals and Chaos theory as providing the basis for more insightful mathematical metaphors, depending on the problem being solved such as dealing with drainage basins, weather patterns, or political-herding behavior. Besides, Mandelbrot sets remind me of those tie-dyed t-shirts of another era, with the added delight of movement.And they can be just so pretty … a cross behind Lao Tzu, The Teachings of Don Juan, and Purple Haze or Voodoo Child.——————————————————————————————————For the more literal-minded readers of this post, I am more than happy to entertain other alternatives as to why pointing up as the direction of heaven seems to be both cross-cultural and connected with what we know about animal behavior.Will tie up a loose end to this post by returning to a Richard Feynman quote, Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt and submitting it to the following thought experiment:There are literalists, fundamentalists, and reductionists of all stripes and colors … including scientists. Might not we consider the possibility of those statistical outliers which push religion to the edge of doubt, and material reductionists who reduce science to faith? — Just something for the more nuanced minds to play with.That being said, when all is said and done, even if this conjecture regarding ‘the direction of heaven’ does come close to being a ‘best fit’ , or another conjecture …. we are simply extending this social primate’s tendency to form large hierarchies, and presume that hierarchy extends beyond the senses … so what?I don’t see these insights as leading to any new technology, solving pressing social problems, or changing anyone’s preconceived notions.Just giving a small example of how a scientist, or a critical thinker, might think ... and play. ;-)