หนังสือโคตรมั่ว

วันนี้ไปร้านหนังสือ SE-ED แล้วเจอหนังสือเล่มนี้ครับ

ชื่อว่า"บางสิ่งที่น่าเสียดาย ไอน์สไตน์ไม่เคยพบแต่พระพุทธเจ้าเห็น" ครับ วูบแรกผมก็คิดเลยว่า เอาอีกแล้วเหรอ ไอ้หนังสือประเภท ไอน์สไตน์ปนกับพระพุทธเจ้าเนี่ย ซึ่งทุกๆเล่มที่ผมดูผมก็จะเปิดดูส่วนที่เกี่ยวกับวิทยาศาสตร์ และจะพบว่าค่อนข้างมั่วทุกเล่ม ดังนั้นผมจึงคิดว่าส่วนอื่นๆที่ผมไม่ได้อ่านก็น่าจะค่อนข้างมั่วด้วย ผมจึงไม่ให้น้ำหนักกับหนังสือพวกนี้นัก

สำหรับเล่มนี้ ปรากฏว่าจากการสุ่มอ่านส่วนที่เกี่ยวกับวิทยาศาสตร์แล้ว เล่มนี้มั่วมหากาฬเลยครับ ไม่รู้ว่าคนเขียนมันกล้าเขียนออกมาได้อย่างไร ผมอ่านแล้วก็เซ็งว่าถ้าคนไม่เคยศึกษากระบวนการทางวิทยาศาสตร์มาอ่านเข้า จะสมองเสียถาวรหรือเปล่า ผมถึงรู้สึกว่าต้องมาเขียนเตือนไว้ที่นี้ เผื่อท่านได้ไปประสบพบพานเข้า จะได้ระวังตัวไว้ ถ้าจะอ่านก็ต้องมีวิจารณญาณดีๆ ท่องคาถาสามข้อนี้ไว้ครับ:

1. จริงเหรอ?

2. รู้ได้ไงว่าจริง หลักฐานมันคืออะไร?

3. จะแยกได้ไงว่าไม่ใช่ประสาท/สมอง หลอก/หลอน ตัวเอง?

The Brick Testament

The Brick Testament: The world's largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible!

I especially like the rating (N, S, V, C described in the Content Notice near the bottom.)

I first read the Bible when I was about 17 when I went to a US high school which was a Catholic school. I called myself a Buddhist then, but I didn't know much about any religion, just what was osmotically absorbed into my brain from Thailand environment since my birth.

I went to a mass and tried wine and bread (the Eucharist) to see if I can feel any transubstantiation (In Roman Catholic theology, transubstantiation means the change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist while all that is accessible to the senses remains as before.) When I told the girl next to me that I didn't feel anything different, just wine and bread, she hissed at me with "BLASPHEMOUS!" I didn't know why she was so angry. I thought it was very reasonable to check.

Anyway, I found the stories in the Bible gruesome but exciting, especially in the Old Testament. I finished the whole Bible in a week.

Currently, I don't think any religion group would claim me as one of their own since I think large chunks of every religion I know are not true. I like the teachings of Gotama Buddha's though, especially the Kalama Sutta. (Note that this is very different from Kama Sutra, although that's interesting too.)

I'm pretty sure that when we upgrade our biology (or brain) so that we become hugely more advanced, religious beliefs will be very different. I suspect that religions were invented because humans don't like uncertainties, so any certainties, even made-up ones, are preferred. If our descendants can run a billion simulations of how the future might turn out in their head, they will feel very comfortable with uncertainties and probabilities and they don't need to believe anything without solid evidences.

Yet Another Example In Which Power Corrupts

Here is another cautionary tale of giving power to religions. No matter how noble the teachings sound, when there is a power hierarchy, unscrupulous men will more likely climb to the top and do evil things under "religious" supreme authority. Rational arguments with these religious power-holders are impossible since their religious belief says they are absolutely right and anybody who disagrees is wrong.

The funniest/most ironic sentence in the article for me is "Here is a historical irony: the first Dalai Lama was installed by a Chinese army."

You might ask, what would be an alternative to blindly uncritically following a religion then? I think you can start with Humanism and won't be too wrong. Also, practicing the more reasonable teachings in each religion while ignoring the blatantly stupid ones would be a good guide to life.

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P.S.

1. I don't automatically say a religion is non-sensical. However, to a very high probability, if you use the "and" conjunctive between all teachings in a religion, the result would be false. (Since True and True and True and False = False.) While there are many true/applicable/moral things in each religion, the trick is to separate the true/applicable/moral teachings from non-sensical ones. I think our ability to discern which is which would be enhanced if we subscribe to humanism in the first place.

2. See Buddhism role in my Things to Teach My Children (Version 1.0). Even there, my children and I must have some ability to separate the good parts from the non-sensical parts.

3. You can guess my stance on mixing Buddhism and Constitution in Thailand. The last attempt of such mixing was significantly sponsored by a certain temple known for its exquisite blend of {Buddhism + Greed + Capitalism + Conflicts of Interest + Human Stupidity} that would have benefited greatly from a state-backed religion. Thank goodness there were enough people with clear head in the parliament.

Sometimes Experts Don't Know Much

The Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatric hospital staff couldn't reliably distinguish between the sane and the insane in the hospital. The full paper can be found here.

According to another study at Cornell, you can implant false memories into preschool children to make them think the memories are true, and experts cannot distinguish, by interviewing the children, which memories are true and which are false.

So, when experts' claims conflict with reality, you should be careful in checking whether the claims are true or not. Most people (yes, including me) appear (or pretend) to know more than they actually know.

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P.S. How to believe anything? That's a hard question that cannot be completely solved. I think we can only hope to converge closer and closer to the truth. Gotama Buddha tried to teach the Kalamas people using the list we know as Kalama Sutra. Personally, I like the Bayesian approach of updating my belief on whether something is true or false as I gain more and more evidences. A short overview of Bayesian inference is here. A reading list can be found here.

Skepticality Podcast

Everytime I visited the USA, I would always buy the current issues of Skeptic magazine. The magazine is the official publication of the Skeptics Society, a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science.

I was looking for something interesting to listen to on my computer and mp3 player, and I found out about Skepticality, which is the official podcast of Skeptic magazine. I was very happy to see the podcast archive that should feed me for a year.

There are two things that currently annoy me greatly and make me think that skepticism should be more widely practiced in Thailand:

1. The "Jatukam Ramathep" hype in Thailand.
2. Books such as "ไอนสไตน์ถาม พระพุทธเจ้าตอบ" which short-change the intricacy and beauty of science in the public's mind by confusing various religious claims with scientific ideas.

In the first annoyance, I am quite pissed that people who claim to be Buddhists blatantly ignore Gautama Buddha's teaching and give in to superstition and worship to attain their well-being. It's as if Buddha never existed and never taught us what he discovered.

For the second annoyance, I usually found gross inaccuracies about what we know about the world through scientific investigation in this type of books. Given the authors' sloppiness about being well-informed and accurate about science, I think it's prudent to assume that they are similarly sloppy about their religion too. The uninformed readers would be fooled by the authors' eloquence and misunderstand our universe in the end. A mind poison, indeed.

Of course, the two annoyances are just the latest fads that reflect our society's preference, and I think the more people consciously become a skeptic, the more we can dispel ignorance and superstition from our society. I firmly believe that democracy critically depends on a large number of informed citizens that can make logical decisions. Sadly such a prerequisite seems to be absent from Thailand.

Anyway, I would like to end on a more positive note and would like to introduce you to a very entertaining video of Michael Shermer giving a talk titled "Why people believe strange things." If your Internet connection is not fast, you would probably want to download the file and play it later.