From jbauer@noodle.hi-line.net Tue Apr 13 09:58:49 1999
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 12:02:01 -0600 (MDT)
From: Jim Bauer <jbauer@noodle.hi-line.net>
To: John Wilkins <wilkins@wehi.edu.au>
Subject: Medicare, Medicaid, and the sociobiology of religion

John,

I found your discussion of the medical profession in Australia extremely
interesting.  I'll have to share it with my friend Ed's wife, Denise,
sometime.  They met when he was on vacation in Australia and frequently
return there to visit Denise's relatives.  At this time, they are both
down there until the 10th of this month.  Denise works in the hospital
here drawing blood.  Back when I was on Clozarel--one of the new "miracle
drugs" for schizophrenia--Denise used to draw my blood all the time. 
Clozarel can potentially lead to fatal loss of white cells, so you need a
regular blood-test.  Hence, a lot of people, including myself, who were
once on Clozarel are now on its cousin, Zyprexa; they found and spliced
out the portion of the molecule which was causing the side-effects.

As for HMOs, at least the one we had running the mental health system here
in Montana was notorious for trying to pressure doctors into taking their
patients off the new meds mentioned above and putting them back on some of
the older drugs, which don't work as well.

Personally, I'm just glad that I have disability.  Back about ten years or
so ago I attempted suicide, jumped out of a window and busted both my
feet.  About six or seven years back, I took a pill OD and wound up in the
ICU, nearly died off my blood pressure medication.  Although now I am no
longer disabled, I cannot afford to go off my disability--Zyprexa is $20 a
pill and I take two of them a day.  When you take into account the rest of
the drug salad I'm on, I'm easily spending a hundred dollars a day.

As for the sociobiology of religion, at this point, I cannot produce
something that explains everything.  Right here and now, I am attempting
to explain mysticism and the cult/creed dichotomy.  I've discussed these
ideas with Wimsatt; he thinks the explanation of the death/rebirth
phenomenon may have some validity, but about the evolution of cause and
effect as perceptual states, "it sounds like you're really onto
something."

The first is simply that the death/rebirth hallucination--the long, dark
tunnel, etc.--is produced by chaotic behavior in neural nets when the
mind-body system is on the verge of death.  Steven Thaler, although he
bills himself a "radical reductionist," has done some interesting work in
this area as a spin-off of his "creativity machines."  His home-page is at
http://www.imagination-machines.com.  If you can't find it there, try
running his name thru a search engine.  When chaotic signal is introduced
into Artificial Neural Nets (ANNs), the system becomes quite creative,
albeit such a simple solution hardly does justice to all those billions of
brain cells and the way they operate.

The second part of the idea is that inclusive fitness promotes the
occurrence of death/rebirth hallucinatory material occurs in the
imagination when the system is close to death, as it promotes the belief
on the part of the perceiving system that it is immortal, hence, the
system becomes more likely to act altruistically in future near-death
situations.  Note also that most of these occurrences take place when the
system is "clinically dead;" an imprinted archetype like this obviously
needs time to be completed, blowing your head off with a shotgun probably
doesn't give the system time for such an elaborate experience.

The second part of the idea is that the mind needs to be aware of cause
and effect to be able to deal with its environment, in primitive animals,
often the awareness of death--a prey animal needs to be aware of the
predator as cause of death; animals need to be aware of food (both
predator and prey) as a cause of life, &c.  However, the idea of cause and
effect required an evolution.  A lot of "accidents" (in the Aristotelian
sense) were incorporated along the way.

When language came along, a lot of this went into the invention of
metaphors.  Arthur C. Clarke is famous for his science fiction dictum,
"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
However, "magic" and "science/technology" require entirely different uses
of metaphor; science uses it to build models while magic substitutes it
for cause and effect.  Consider the following example, drawn from alchemy:

Antimony, when it crystallizes, forms a shape like a star.  The alchemists
called this "the star Regulus" of antimony.  "Regulus" means "little
king," and it was thought to be just one stage short of the Philosopher's
Stone, which is a "kingly substance."  Because it is "unripe," it is
called "the Green Lion," the color of unripe fruit being green.  Also,
there is a green star in the constellation Leo which is green, thus, the
best time to complete that stage of the alchemical work is when Leo is in
ascension.  There is a famous drawing in the THEATRUM CHEMICUM
BRITANNICUM showing the Green Lion devouring the sun, in this case, it is
its ability to reduce gold which is being portrayed.

In short, the above is a large-scale confusion of an expanded metaphor
with cause and effect.  It wouldn't really matter if it were possible to
actually form a Philosopher's Stone by the above alchemical process, it
STILL wouldn't be scientific.  And all religions use this form of thought
to some degree or the other, whether they be cults or creeds.  And beauty
probably began as a series of accidents due to projecting sexual selection
onto the environment.

To extend the metaphors about esthetics which Wimsatt gave me an A+ for
(his first) in his seminar on evolutionary epistemology, cults are
comparable to noise-gates (open-ended signal-processors), creeds to
compansion systems (closed-loop signal-processors).  

The comparison of genre arts to noise-gates is that they remove
information (in the Shannon-Weaver sense) while creating an illusion of
better sound quality.  These devices work around the heuristics of human
hearing:  as sound level fades, overtones fade faster.  Hence, by driving
a voltage-controlled filter off an RMS level detector, the signal sounds
better as the hiss is gone.  In the case of cults, they filter out a lot
of cultural information from the mainstream, as these small religions
often get "paranoid" about persecution from creeds, and even the
occasional atheist.

The other system, closed-loop noise-reduction, consists of an
encode-decode system, like for example the Dolby system, something tape
decks are rife with, in spite of which I now people who record without
Dolby as "you get more highs."  This is, of course, true if you listen to
a Dolby tape with the Dolby off, but then you get a lot of screechy,
distorted highs.  The system works by compressing the dynamic range of the
highs on recording; expanding on playback.  As far as the decode stage
goes, it resembles the heuristics of noise-gates; repeated "playback" of a
signal allows it to become robust, resistant of the filtering.  This
allows the system, viewed as the Classics, to contain encoded symbolic
information which critics strive to decode.  As creeds go, religious
symbols are the encode stage; personal experience of religious archetypes,
the decode stage.  

Those who found religions, or even in the context of natural religions,
attempt to render a transpersonal experience concrete in metaphor.  Those
perceiving systems who share the metaphoric symbol cluster around it,
first as cults, then as creeds.

This is, of course, a set of ideas I've spent the last 20 years working
on, in some form or another, and are still not complete.  I'd like you to
give me some paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on this matter, as I'd like
to post it on my home-page.

The address is http://www.hi-line.net/~jbauer/.  Be forewarned, though,
I've received some nasty comments for being honest about my years of drug
abuse, and these people obviously didn't read to the part where I quit
drinking.  As far as the drug I mainly used, marijuana, is concerned, I
was using it for medical purposes, glaucoma.  Much to the conservatives'
horror, a recently-commissioned study by the US government suggested that
the medical properties are legitimate and that medical use of marijuana be
legalized.  Not that I think I can con a prescription out of my doctor;
he's a Seventh Day Adventist and prescribing dope is against his religion.

Jim Bauer