Church of the Churchless

I'm getting more skeptical about mindfulness

I've meditated every day, with a few exceptions, for over 45 years. For a long time I was a super-meditator, spending 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a time on a quest for the Meaning Of It All (MOIA). 

Failing to find the elusive MOIA, I've shifted to 20 minutes of morning meditation, half of it guided via my Calm iPhone app, and half freestyling on my own. 

Having discarded a religious motivation for meditating -- I no longer believe in enlightenment, soul travel, or union with a universal consciousness -- I've embraced mindfulness as a secular alternative. 

Be here now. Live in the moment. Follow the breath. Still the monkey mind.

Sounds good, but questions have lingered in the back of my skeptical psyche. Like, if now is all there is, then isn't remembering the past or envisioning the future filled with as much nowness as eating a single raisin with rapt attention?

To be fair, Tamara, who guides my Calm iPhone meditations, says:

Beginner meditators are often under the impression that their mind shouldn’t wander. I’ve been meditating for 25 years and my mind still wanders. This is simply the nature of the mind. ;)

While we don’t want to spend our entire practice just sitting still thinking, we have to expect that as we meditate, thoughts will arise and our mind will follow. 

What this practice is about, is noticing what’s happening in our experience from moment to moment.

So when the mind begins to wander, simply notice it wandering!

OK. However, if this was all there is to mindfulness meditation, seemingly there wouldn't be much difference between it and everyday life, aside from noticing the mind wandering versus simply having a wandering mind. 

In this regard, my observation of televised basketball games is that players who are obviously noticing "I'm about to try to make a free throw" seem less likely to make one than players who simply step to the line and shoot the free throw. Likewise, my experience with ballroom dancing lessons has convinced me that self-awareness often doesn't produce as good a result as simple awareness.

Tamara goes on to say:

Simply come back to the breath or the body or whatever your anchor is each time you notice the mind wandering. If you have to bring it back a hundred times, bring it back a hundred times.

Well, this brings me back to my previous question.

What's so special about focusing on the breath, or the body, compared with focusing on thoughts -- whether of the past, present, or future -- since seemingly everything is always happening in the present moment, regardless of what it is?

I've started to read Ruth Whippman's book, "America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks." She's British, with an appealingly cynical (or at least, skeptical) sense of humor. Her observations of how we Americans engage in the pursuit of happiness often strike me as right-on.

Here's some passages on the mindfulness front.

Mindfulness is everywhere, the hugely popular zeitgeist theory that in order to be happy we must live fully in the present moment, with total mental focus on whatever we are doing or experiencing Right This Second.

...I find mindfulness a hard theory to embrace. Surely one of the most magnificent things about the human brain is its ability to hold past, present, future, and their imagined alternatives in constant parallel, to offset the tedium of washing dishes in Pinole with the chance to be simultaneously in Bangkok or Don Draper's boxer shorts or finally telling your mother-in-law that despite her belief that "no one born in the seventies died," using a car seat isn't spoiling your child.

I struggle to see how greater happiness could be achieved by reining in that magical sense of scope and possibility to stare down some oatmeal. 

In the 1980s I spent a lot of time with a Portland psychiatrist, Ralph Crawshaw. I was the executive director of Oregon Health Decisions, a grassroots bioethics organization. Crawshaw came up with the idea of forming the group.

When we were eating at a restaurant one day, the subject of meditation came up. I told Crawshaw that I tried to repeat a mantra as much as possible during my waking hours in order to keep my wandering mind under as much control as possible. He replied, "Not for me. I'm always thinking about something, no matter what I'm doing."

Crawshaw was an immensely creative and productive guy. He produced a lot of good in the world. And he seemed content with his life -- including thinking all the time.

I've remembered that conversation because his comment struck at an assumption that I hadn't questioned since I began meditating: thinking about the past or future, or, heck, even about the present, isn't as "spiritual" (whatever that means) as contemplating reality with a quiet mind.

Maybe. Maybe not. 

I suspect "not" is the better answer. It's hard to see why thinking is less desirable than tasting a strawberry. Or why imagining what could be is less desirable than observing what is. 

Like Ruth Whippman says, the human brain has the ability to mix and match images of past, present, and future, whether these be thoughts, emotions, perceptions, or whatever.

So maybe genuine mindfulness is embracing whatever your mind wants to do, so long as it works well for you.

 

Great video about why faith is an unreliable guide to truth

A Church of the Churchless reader just sent me this thought-provoking exchange between two hosts of The Atheist Experience Internet television show and a Christian caller.

It's well worth watching. The first six minutes of the 12-minute video pretty much sums up the devastating arguments the hosts make about faith being an unreliable guide to truth.

Basically, the Christian believer considers that his commitment to God is justifiably based on faith. But the hosts point out that there are thousands of Gods, each of which can be believed in on faith.

So the chance of choosing the correct God (assuming any are real) is 1:1000. Not good odds. 

Why we ignore facts and embrace falsehoods, both in religion and science

The title of "Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts that Will Save Us" pretty much sold me on the book.  Even though the authors focus on medical myths, often the same factors that lead people to embrace health falsehoods are responsible for unfactual religious beliefs.

On page 5 we get a list of "healthcare beliefs that fly directly in the face of scientific evidence and that are supported by at least a substantial minority of people."

• Vaccination is harmful.
• Guns in the house will protect residents from armed intruders.
• Food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are dangerous to human health.
• The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is not the cause of AIDS.
• Nuclear power is more dangerous than power derived by burning fossil fuels.
• Antibiotics are effective in treating viral infections.
• Unpasteurized milk is safe and contains beneficial nutrients that are destroyed by the pasteurization process.
• Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, or shock treatment) causes brain damage and is ineffective.

Now, there is positive evidence that supports a rejection of these assertions.

I disbelieved in almost all of them before I read Denying to the Grave. My eyes were opened in a few areas, notably the effectiveness of shock treatment. One of the authors, Jack Gorman, is a psychiatrist who was on the faculty of Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry for 25 years, so his assessment of the scientific evidence about ECT is highly credible.

When it comes to religiosity, though, evidence-based research is almost non-existent. After all, it is very rare for religions to make testable assertions that can be falsified through experiment or observation.

Life after death, for example, is an unfalsifiable assertion. So is the existence of God. Here's a passage from the book pertaining to this.

Any scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable. This is why the statement "There is a God" is not a scientific hypothesis because it is impossible to disprove. The goal of scientific experimentalism, therefore, is to try to disprove a hypothesis by a process that resembles experience or empirical observation. 

It is this line of thinking that informs the way hypothesis testing is designed in science and statistics. We are always trying to disprove a null hypothesis, which is the hypothesis that there is in fact no finding. Therefore a scientific finding will always be a matter of rejecting the null hypothesis and never a matter of accepting the alternative hypothesis.

For example, in testing a new medication, the technical aspects of acceptable modern experimental design frame the question being asked not as "Can we prove that this new drug works?" but rather "With how much certainty can we disprove the idea that this drug does not work?"

When it comes to God and all other theorized things in the realm of the supernatural, obviously there is essentially zero evidence in support of their existence. Prayer hasn't been shown to have any effect. Specific predictions about future events don't occur outside of what would happen by guesswork alone. 

Yet people still cling irrationally to religious beliefs. Denying to the Grave is filled with reasons for this. Here's a few of them.

Dislike of uncertainty. The Gormans point out that "it is simply too frightening to accept the fact that we don't know what causes something or how to cure it...How can we live with uncertainty, even when that uncertainty extends to scientists who have not -- and never will -- figure out all the answers?"

Children love to ask Why? Seeking answers is an important aspect of our humanity.

So when a religious leader claims to have answers to why the world was created, what happens after death, or what God's plan for us is, we have a natural tendency to embrace those spurious answers, even though almost certainly they aren't true, since there is no demonstrable evidence for them.

Charismatic leaders appeal to emotions. Every religion is led by charismatic individuals, usually of the male variety (even Buddhism, which has the Dalai Lama). In various ways, they appeal to our emotions. Which makes sense, because there are very little, if any, factual reasons to say YES to a religion.

Denying to the Grave says:

As we have observed many times throughout this book, people respond more to emotional anecdotes than to population-based statistics, and this is in part an adaptation that allows us to have empathy and thus form functional societies... We argued in chapter 2 that charismatic leaders are in part so successful because they appeal to people's emotions. 

...In general, charismatic leaders tend to share the following common characteristics: verbal eloquence, strong communication skills, a potent sense of an "us" versus "them," and a remarkable ability to elicit strong emotions. 

...All leaders must create a sense of "us," but what is perhaps unique about the charismatic leader is that he or she not only creates a much stronger sense of an enemy "them" than any other type of leader but also formulates a sense of "us" that can be so potent it operates to the exclusion of other identities.

That is, the group's "us" becomes so strong that people in the group feel an allegiance to the group identity above all other aspects of their identities. This is especially true in cults, and we will examine whether some of this strong "us" branding has occurred in some of the health denialist movements under examination in this book.

People have trouble changing their minds. We dislike uncertainty. We're prone to accept emotional assertions by charismatic leaders, even if they don't have any factual basis. We enjoy feeling like we're part of a group that knows more than other groups, whether or not this is true.

Thus for these and other reasons, it is difficult for people to change their minds. The book says:

We set up beliefs that suit us, and then our brains work very hard to make sure we can resist anything that seems to challenge those beliefs.

Such is the power of cognitive dissonance. 

It turns out that we are extremely resistant to changing our minds. We are reluctant to unlearn lessons we've learned and integrated. When we are confronted with information that conflicts with what we already believe, we experience cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is extremely uncomfortable, and we do everything we can to dispel it. This is how people convince themselves that smoking is safe, that they do not need to eat vegetables, and that repeatedly skipping trips to the gym will not make a difference in their weight or health.

Or, that believing in the tenets of a religion will lead to eternal life in a heavenly realm.

Subjectivity is innate to material reality

Since I'm not privy to the Secret of Ultimate Reality, naturally I don't know whether this letter-writer's thesis is correct: that subjectivity is innate to material reality.

But what Godwin says in his letter in the December 10 issue of New Scientist is both provocative and possible.

He raises good questions. "What would be the substance of a universe with no subjectivity, unable to experience its own existence? How could such a universe ever be shown to exist, and by and to whom?"

At first I thought this sounded unduly anthropomorphic. However, on second thought this letter points at issues raised in my recent post about a book that advocates for an "information rather than stuff" approach to understanding the universe.

For example, how do unconscious particles "know" how to behave in accord with the laws of nature? What is the foundational nature of the universe in the absence of an observer? Can we say that it is anything at all absent observation? 

Perhaps, as Godwin suggests, the universe is observing itself in some way we currently can't grasp. Read on...

From Nick Godwin, Edinburgh, UK

I write in opposition to the view that consciousness somehow of necessity arises from matter, rather than being intrinsic to it. That view is implied several times in Anil Ananthaswamy's review of Susan Greenfield's book A Day in the Life of the Brain (29 October, p 44).

He says, for example, that “objective neural activity turns into the ‘wine’ of subjective conscious experience.” The statement that “we fade into unconsciousness during anaesthesia” reflects the error. In my experience, anaesthesia acts with the immediacy of a switch: the only way I could detect that I had been “under” was that the anaesthetist appeared suddenly to “flip” to the other side of my hospital bed.

It seems to me more likely that the essence of consciousness (albeit in a simplified state) forms part of the primary substance of material reality. The part played by neural activity would then be not to “give rise” to consciousness, but to create a path of connection to an innate subjectivity existing behind all of material reality.

Don't misunderstand me, this is not a call for belief in some kind of “mystical being”. Rather, it is a call to consider the possibility of something intrinsic to reality that takes the form of subjective perception. After all, what would be the substance of a universe with no subjectivity, unable to experience its own existence? How could such a universe ever be shown to exist, and by and to whom?

"The Simplest Case Scenario" is a must-read for philosophical science-lovers

Scientific. Philosophical. Well-written. Creative. Mind-expanding. 

"The Simplest Case Scenario" by Karl Coryat pushed all of my book-loving buttons.  It's subtitle points to why I liked it so much: How the universe may be very different from what we think it is.

I've believed this for my entire adult life. But for most of that time I thought that the Secret of the Cosmos could only be revealed through mysticism, meditation, philosophical contemplation, enlightenment, psychedelics. 

At the same time, I've always adored science.

I've read countless (almost) books about quantum mechanics, cosmology, neuroscience, cutting edge physics, systems theory, evolution, and such. But I figured that scientific thinking could only go so far, and it was necessary to break out of its boundaries to approach the Meaning of It All.

Well, Coryat has done a damn fine job of melding the facts of modern science with a consciousness-expanding view of what lies at the core of reality.

And he does this without resorting to supernaturalism, religion, God, or anything in the realm of woo-woo -- which is why I like his approach so much better than the many authors like Deepak Chopra who try to make quantum theory into New Age'y "create your own reality" ridiculousness.

Coryat's basis thesis is that the universe is made of information, not stuff.

Physicist John Wheeler's "it from bit" hypothesis supports this contention, but this book goes further than any other scientific writing I've come across in ferreting out the implications of information being the root of reality.

For example, we assume that photons reaching us from a star a billion light years away have been doing their electromagnetic thing for that length of time. Meaning, the photons have been objectively real across that immense span of space-time. However, Coryat persuasively argues that an act of observation essentially brings the photons into being.

This seems counter-intuitive and wrong.

Yet if all we know about the world comes from information, what reason is there to posit a realm of stuff that somehow is both itself and also a source of information about itself? The simplest case scenario, as Coryat puts it, is to understand that "When you look at an object, you aren't actually looking at the object. You're looking at information about the object."

From this simple thread of a premise, the book spins some marvelous webs of conclusions in a convincing manner. My knowledge of quantum mechanics and other scientific subjects is greater than that of most people, but nowhere near professional level.

Still, I feel like I have a pretty good ability to sense bullshit in books that purport to explain the rock-bottom nature of reality, even if I can't pinpoint the factual reasons for my skepticism.

It is a tribute to Coryat's writing ability and obvious extensive background research that my copy of "The Simplest Case Scenario" only contains a few marginal question marks penned in by my highlighter. 

I found his treatment of free will to be overly simplistic and out-of-touch with how this supposed human quality should be defined. Namely, as the ability to choose to act differently even if every particle in the universe, including those that comprise the willing brain, were in exactly the same condition.

In other words, genuine free will requires some sort of supernatural assumption, a liberation of consciousness from universal laws of nature. Coryat doesn't believe such exists, yet he argues for the appearance of intentionality in complex informational systems. Yes, but this isn't free will.

I also couldn't follow his contention that a universe comprised of information, rather than stuff, leaves little or no room for the possibility of advanced alien life forms. He says, "The stumbling block for finding truly alien life is that the history of any other informational systems needs to be consistent with our techno-biological history."

There's a good chance I don't understand the subtlety of Coryat's thinking in this regard.

However, it seems to me that while being able to understand or communicate with an alien life form requires some form of cognitive/perceptual commonality, I don't get why a informational universe demands that only one basic type of observer exist within it. 

This isn't a perfect analogy, but whenever I go on a walk with our dog and she spends several minutes avidly sniffing some blades of grass that hold no interest for me, I'm reminded that she and I exist in the same world, but perceive it in very different ways. 

And what Coryat said in his entry in a Foundational Essays contest -- which formed the basis of this book -- seems at odds with his current position: "Perhaps for an alien race with its own origin and history, the universe would reveal an entirely different set of constants and laws. Indeed, it would be a different universe."

These are minor quibbles, though, and like I said, they might arise from misunderstandings on my part.

My book review bottom line is: READ IT.

Appealingly, to do this you don't even have to buy "The Simplest Case Scenario," though as a habitual reader of printed books, I recommend that you get an Amazon copy on real paper. Alternatively, Coryat is offering a free PDF download of his book at simplestcasescenario.com

Karl Coryat is an interesting guy. Check out his minimalist web site: http://www.pisspoor.com/coryat.html He's a music journalist, a successful Jeopardy contestant, and a comedian. 

He also just might have figured out the Secret of the Universe. Or, not. Read his book and make up your own mind. 

Religious superstition is a great threat to the world

Today our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, published my wife's "Good Without God" letter to the editor. Naturally I feel that Laurel makes a lot of sense, fellow scientifically-minded atheist that she is. 

After her letter, I'll share the earlier letter from Dale Kirby that stimulated Laurel's response. Another person, Larry Nelson, also took issue with Kirby. I've shared his letter as well. 

I can't resist adding comments on my own, in red.  First, here's my wife's letter.

Dale Kirby’s Nov. 30 letter claimed there is a “war” against religious freedom in our country.

Naturally, there isn't. Unless you believe everything Fox News says. (A big mistake.)

The facts are, that until the 1950s, there was no God in the Pledge of Allegiance. “In God We Trust” was not on paper money until 1957. E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”) was the original U.S. motto from the Great Seal of the United States.

Ah, the good old days before right-wing religious wackos started becoming more politically active.

It is the more scientifically-minded, non-religious people in the U.S. who are discriminated against. The religious people force their superstitious beliefs (which have no real basis in reality) on us. The percent of population with no religion is growing, yet Pence and Trump, etc., are trying to change laws that uphold the constitutional separation of church and state.

Amen to that. 

Religious politicians seem to be at war with science. Religious believers long ago fought scientific findings that the earth was round and revolved around the sun (versus flat with the sun and heaven above it). Now the science of human-caused climate change is being rejected.

"Seem" is being too generous. Republican politicians are definitely pushing their religious zealotry on the rest of us. They reject truth and embrace falsehoods. Reality is too valuable a thing to waste to allow this to happen.

The earth is at risk.

For sure. Human-caused global warming is real. 

It will not be God ending the world, but people with superstitious beliefs, rejecting science until it is too late.

Yes. Religious superstitions are a huge threat to humanity. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, even Buddhism. When people forsake "what is" for "what we imagine to be," bad stuff follows. Reality kicks our butt when its truths aren't respected.

Laurel Hines
Salem

Here's the letter that got my wife's atheist indignation aroused. Along with my comments.

America’s military is fighting against terrorism. Another war is being waged by dark forces against our nation’s religious freedom.

Huh? I haven't seen any signs of that war. 

The freedoms of speech, religion and assembly are all bound together. Destroying any one of these inhibits the others and threatens three of the most needed and valued constitutional guarantees.

Well, again I assert there's no indication that religious believers are being stopped from saying whatever they want, worshipping however they want, or assembling however they want. 

Destruction of religious freedom would destroy the God-given right to pursue a life of liberty and happiness, since religion is the source of happiness for millions of America’s most upright citizens.

Um, I'd substitute uptight for upright, Dale. Also, heroin in all its various forms (such as Oxycontin) also is a source of happiness for millions of people. Just because something makes people happy doesn't make it safe or desirable.

Those who seek to limit freedom of religion expect people of faith to accept their godless way of life. We see today in the U.S.A. the results of godlessness in lawlessness, abortions and adultery. Do we really want an irreligious nation?

YES! I'm pretty sure the most religious states have the highest crime rates. Same with nations: godless countries like Japan and the Scandinavian nations are both happy and lawabiding.

The destruction of religious freedom takes away the correct care of the poor, the orphans and the homeless. It would extract the badly-needed thousands of hours of service given by the helping hands of those of faith in times of disasters and calamities.

Non-believers are equally committed to volunteerism and charity. Get real.

I believe everyone should have the privilege to worship a deity of his or her choice. It is a God-given right to worship who or where we may. The lives of honorable religious citizens are the backbone of our nation.

I agree with your first two sentences, Dale, but not the last one. Religious people aren't any more moral, upstanding, and generous than atheists. If anything, they're less so, because religiosity and judgementalism go hand in hand.

Dale Z. Kirby
Salem

Lastly, here's the other response to Kirby.

In his Nov. 30 letter, Dale Kirby writes that “war is being waged by dark forces against our nation’s religious freedom.”

I wish I knew what he means, since, as it appears to me, no nation on earth exceeds the U.S. in the vibrancy of its religious communities and the scope of its guarantees of religious freedom.

Excellent point.

Mr. Kirby is free to worship as he likes, whenever and wherever he likes, as long as his practices don’t break the law or infringe on the civil liberties of others.

Exactly.

In the 1860s, many religious people used the Bible to defend the practice of slavery. Is this the type of religious “freedom” Mr. Kirby longs for? The type that would allow any practice he believes his Bible supports, regardless of the rights and beliefs of others?

Probably. Lots of religious people want to be able to discriminate against the LBGTQ community, take away a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, and even restrict access to birth control. Basically, the Dark Ages are the Good Old Days for many of today's Christians. Bring back the Inquisition!

What about people like me? I’m a law abiding, conscientious citizen who happens not to believe in Mr. Kirby’s religion. Should I have fewer rights than a religious person?

No. The law should be blind to religion. Which means, no religious "conscience" exemptions. It's ridiculous when a religious believer gets away with breaking the law or not adhering to a regulation because he or she believes in a superstition.

Those of us who disagree with Mr. Kirby are not “dark forces.” As a nation, we are all better off when people are free to believe as individuals as their consciences dictate, as long as we show respect for the rights of people of other religions or no religion.

Well said, Larry.

Larry R. Nelson
Salem

Viewing life as a Plinko board: probabilistic, chaotic, uncertain

It's easy to see what happens in life. It's much more difficult to comprehend why something happens.

For example, we know that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. But why this occurred -- beyond the obvious "Trump got more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton" -- is a question that can't be definitively answered.

This doesn't stop people from theorizing, though. 

At one extreme, a religious believer might say It was God's will. Or phrased more generally, This was fated to be. At another extreme, a nihilistically-minded person could opine, Shit just happens; end of story.

A book I've been reading, "The Simplest Case Scenario: How the Universe May Be Very Different from What We Think It Is," contains a metaphor that strikes me as an appealing middle ground between extreme determinism and extreme randomness.

Karl Coryat, the author, argues persuasively that the universe is composed of information rather than matter/energy. I'll write about his intriguing interpretation of modern science after I've finished his book, which should be in a few days. I'm looking forward to posting a highly positive Amazon review.

Coryat uses a Plinko Board analogy to convey how the universe, or by implication any part of it, could take many potential pathways -- but ends up taking only one. 

The Price is Right game show uses a Plinko Board. Here's a video showing it in action. (I've made the video start at the point a contestant does the Plinko thing.)

Coryat explains how a Plinko board, or box, works.

If you drop a chip into a Plinko box, the chip may take any of a number of paths to the bottom. Whenever the chip falls between two pegs, it hits a peg underneath and must "decide" whether to go left or right. In this manner, each row of pegs that the chip encounters is like a coin toss, where we would expect the chip to go to the left or right with equal probability. Stated another way, it's as if the chip is presented with a series of yes-or-no questions, and the chip chooses an answer every time, effectively at random.

So this makes it sound like life is a crap game. You throw your dice and random luck makes things happen. However, in a footnote Coryat deepens our understanding of what is going on when a chip is dropped into a Plinko board.

Technically, the falling chip is exhibiting chaotic behavior. Rather than its path being determined strictly by the laws of probability, the path depends upon the precise way it was dropped, as well as minute factors such as air currents, dust, the exact shape of the chip, unevenness of the pegs, etc. 

Still, the path is sufficiently unpredictable and unreproducible, and the outcome closely enough simulates probability laws, that we can think of the chip's path as being determined by probability. (The same is true of a well-performed coin flip or dice-roll.)

Chaotic behavior is deterministic. But the factors causing the behavior are so complicated, or so subtle, or so difficult to discern, for all practical purposes the ultimate reasons why something happens remain hidden in a chaotic shroud. 

Often this is called The Butterfly Effect. Wikipedia says:

The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier.

Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

I find a lot of comfort in these notions: Plinko box, chaos theory, butterfly effect.

Now, I admit that in my true-believing days I also found comfort in a belief that karma determined what happened in life, and that it was possible to escape karma's clutches by raising one's consciousness to a higher supernatural level through meditation and the grace of a guru.

(Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but so is every false religious belief. In addition, much of modern science sounds decidedly weird, even though it is true. So weirdness is found almost everywhere one looks.)

Thus in my previous state of mind, I would have thought, "Donald Trump won the presidency because this was meant to be."

Not believing this anymore, yet not being willing to accept that randomness rules the universe, I'm attracted to the logical, scientific, reasonable notion that determinism controls what happens in life -- yet usually not in obvious ways. 

Mostly we like to look for Big Reasons that explain Big Events. Like, the winning of a presidential election. Or more personally, why we ended up married to a certain person, living in a certain place, having a certain career, and such.

So political commentators obsess over election results, exit polls, demographics, campaign strategies, etc., etc. There's nothing wrong with this. However, there's good reason to suppose that a presidential election is more akin to a Plinko box than we might like to think.

What if a staffer had said something at a certain time that made Clinton decide to not set up a personal email server for her Secretary of State work? What if Attorney General Lynch had the thought, "I shouldn't let Bill Clinton onto my plane," which would have made it much more possible for her to overrule FBI Director Comey's decision to publicly reveal a further investigation into Clinton's emails just before the election?

Many what if's of this sort can be visualized. A few tiny influences could have had a giant impact on the election, per the butterfly effect. In fact, almost certainly they did. It's just impossible to figure out what they were.

The course of real life events can't be observed like the falling chip in a Plinko box. All we know is the final outcome, not the convoluted chain of often-chaotic causes and effects that led to this rather than that happening. 

Like I said, I find this comforting.

I don't enjoy the thought that Trump's victory was destined. Nor do I embrace the notion that it is possible to know why he won, and Clinton lost, because this would mean that if the Clinton campaign had been smarter, they would have come out on top on election day. Which leads to a sense of blame. And neither do I believe that there is no reason Trump won.

But in between It was meant to be and Shit happens is Sometimes life takes strange turns. Why? Impossible to say. Just like it is impossible to say why a single chip falling in a Plinko box ends up where it does.