One morning last week I was pleasantly surprised by three comments from Mike to posts on this blog. At the time, I thought I should write a bit about that. It seemed Mike was saying I had inspired him to attempt some self-improvements. This was ironic, because he was one of my inspirations for my self-improvement attempts started in September.
Upon reading his blog I discovered that the real inspiration was Barack Obama. (Eh, he is more persuasive.)
Every so often a thought occurs to me that could be developed into a nice post, but which I forget before I get a chance to jot down any notes. Mike's commenting on my posts did not get rolled over into a new post although at the time I had intended they should. I had to be reminded of them, in this case by contrasting information from a different source -- his blog.
It seems that a lot of ideas get started and are then lost unless they are reinforced -- some of them in the oddest ways. Coincidence. . . or synchronicity?
Actually, it's coincidence, but let's play along with the alternative.
My last post discussed Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. Naturally, after writing about it I had to reread the text and see how badly my three-line summary massacred it. Among the many things it mentioned that I dropped was the teaching of values in our schools. The text was written shortly after a Supreme Court decision limiting organized prayer in schools. And while it wholeheartedly supported the decision, the text also argued that values need not have a religious basis and therefore were an appropriate (and even necessary) subject matter. But it lamented that teachers (in the 1960's) were under the thrall of a reductionist approach to knowledge and no longer considered values within their realm.
Jennifer teaches reading and social studies. As a part of the reading course, students are to reach goals for reading books. They demonstrate that they have read the books and earn points towards their goals by taking computerized tests on the events in the stories. The company that supports this system provides tests for the most popular books, but sometimes a teacher has to make up a test and enter it into the system. One of Jennifer's students read a book for which one of the teachers had made a test and the company-provided test was later received and loaded. So this student took both tests, successfully, and earned double points for a single book.
Now, Jennifer found this double-dipping while reviewing her students' scores, and had the duplicate test deleted and the student's score adjusted. She also spent part of the past weekend figuring out how she wanted to let the student know that what he had dome was a form of cheating. That wasn't necessary, of course -- if the student thought he was missing points and called up his reading list he would simply find that he only had points for one test on the book. He was quite likely not to notice in the first place, and had no recourse to complain even if he did figure out only one test counted. But she wanted him to know that cheating was wrong.
I have posted a bit about church recently. The church we are attending has several on-going ministries -- opportunities for its members to get involved. One of these is a prayer shawl ministry. Jennifer finds this interesting. So do I, but for different reasons. It seems to me to be casting a magic spell, to create an item imbued with prayers for the benefit of the recipient. I recently read some interesting comments about prayer:
"Once, most of us believed that our thoughts had power, and at some level, despite the influence of a modern science that is pretty hostile to the idea of mind affecting the world, most of us still do. We only need to look at the prevalence of prayer. . . This is literally wishful thinking, and in one form or another, most of us indulge in it purposefully, despite intellectual convictions that mind cannot influence matters in the real world. "
This quote comes from the Princeton EGG site, whose stated purpose is "to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world." I only know about the Princeton EGG because a co-worker gave me a printout of the web site to read on the bus one day. (He had heard about it himself on what we refer to as nut radio -- talk radio for the conspiracy-minded, whether the conspiracy is a plot to drive the DJIA down to 8000 or our secret war with extra-terrestrials.) As I had finished my book on that morning's ride and had nothing else to read in my briefcase, I did so. The Princeton EGGs are an attempt to demonstrate the presence of a world group consciousness. That is, that people focused on a thing as a group can alter the world by thought alone.
This is not a proof of the effectiveness of group prayer, for instance. The experiment doesn't identify what the effect of a large number of people focused on the same thing is, just whether there is an effect.
The creators of the EGGs went looking for signs of a global consciousness and found them. Reading the site, I don't think they would have been satisfied with anything less. The rationale for performing the experiment is that we all experience times when we feel particularly connected to those around us. Therefore we can envision a global consciousness. Therefore, the EGGs were created to see if such a consciousness can be observed. Concerning the accuracy of their outcomes, "Choices made in the prediction of the exact time period and the blocking of time within that period, are crucial to the outcome. . . Considering these observations within the context of an accumulation of successful predictions, we have to accept the possibility that some part of the apparent effect may be attributable to the experimenter or analyst choosing. . . just the right time and exactly the optimal blocking of the data." Or, as stated elsewhere, "we can look at the raw, second-by-second data or we can block it first into scores for minutes or hours, etc. Somewhat surprisingly, such choices are quite important, and can determine whether a given event is regarded as significant or as showing no effect at all."
I don't find it surprising at all that selectively analyzing the data influences the results.
The way the EGG project stresses the synchronicity of its origins, the stress placed upon not only maintaining a "scientific attitude" and the "clarity of purpose necessary for objective evaluation" but also "for a deeper understanding, we ought to make music with the numbers. . ." belies the project's purpose. It is not scientific inquiry. It is a Search for Meaning.
I'm not sure if Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences was a search for meaning in life, but it did have a couple of things to say about the meaning of life:
"The peak-experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment which carries its own intrinsic value with it. . . They give meaning to life itself. They prove it to be worthwhile. . . I would say that peak-experiences help to prevent suicide."
". . . striving for something one lacks inevitably makes one feel that life has a meaning and that life is worthwhile. But, when one lacks nothing and has nothing to strive for, then . . .?"
But let's not get wrapped around the axle on this issue. I'd bet most people I know believe there is a meaning to life, and most trust those who accept this belief without having to know what the meaning is.
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