Supernatural: Only Because I Want to Believe

Most people's working definition of the supernatural is something like: anything really neat that I cannot understand and which seems impossible. Harry Potter raises his magic wand, shouts "Expelliarmus," and a flash of lightning sends his opponent's wand flying across the room. That certainly meets the working definition of supernatural. I have no idea how that could have happened, and it sure looks impossible.

But, a 747 taking off arguably meets that definition, too. I don't know airplanes work, and all that metal gliding through the air sure looks impossible to me. Yet no one calls airplanes supernatural. A couple of centuries ago, people might have agreed that a 747 taking off was a supernatural event, had they chanced to see one departing from the local airport, but not today. Now it is commonplace, although a 747 leaving London Heathrow on time does still seem a bit miraculous to anyone who is familiar with that particular airport.

Our working definition of supernatural leaves something to be desired because it is based on what a particular person knows about how the world works. If you don't know how airplanes fly, they are supernatural to you, but if you do know, or perhaps even if you just know that someone else knows, then airplanes are no longer supernatural. The working definition is as much about the observer's state of mind as it is about the allegedly supernatural phenomenon. By that definition, the supernatural clearly exists. It just changes all the time.

So let's get a bit more serious and look at the actual definition, which is something like: outside of nature, or not following the laws of nature. By that definition, or any reasonable definition, the concept of the supernatural is barely coherent. It is easy for someone to say they believe in the supernatural, but if looks at the concept a bit closer, it simply loses meaning. The supernatural does not exist, by its very definition.

For example, let's say that we actually see Harry Potter disarm his opponent by pointing his magic wand and shouting the magic word, "Expelliarmus." Such an event is indeed supernatural -- until it actually happens. Once it happens, it is, by definition, natural. It might be new and surprising, but that does not matter. At one time, flight was new and surprising. For centuries, people believed that the laws of nature simply did not allow bigs hunks of metal to fly through the air. But they were wrong. That does not mean that the laws of nature changed. It simply means we did not fully understand them before. And of course, we do not fully understand them now, either.

The laws of nature are not like the laws of the United States or the laws of Britain. The laws of the United States are only laws because Congress passed them and the President signed them. Those laws can change. Moreover, they can be broken. That is what prisons are for. And, it is even possible to break the law and not go to prison. The laws of nature work in a completely different fashion. Scientists do not write down laws and command nature to obey. Rather, they observe what happens, and try to come up with rules that explain what is happening. Those are not "laws" in the same sense as the laws of the United States.

The laws of nature cannot, by definition, be broken. If the laws of nature as calculated appear to be broken, then it is laws that are wrong, not nature. And of course that happens all the time. The most powerful laws of nature, like F=MA, often turn out to be approximations that only "apply" under certain conditions. Einstein's theory of relativity is a better approximation, and made predictions that turned out to be correct, such as the bending of light in a gravitational field. That bending of light might appear "supernatural" without knowledge of relativity.

When people imagine supernatural events, they imagine them to follow logical rules. For example, Harry's spell would not have worked if he were not a wizard. It would not have worked if he had used a cricket bat instead of a magic wand. It would not have worked if he had said the magic word incorrectly. Ghosts do not randomly appear in the middle of the day, in the middle of the woods, with no one around. Rather, they haunt the houses where they were horribly murdered, in the middle of the night, because it is angry. The fortune teller follows fixed rules to interpret the cards. Perhaps those rules are new, strange or not fully understood. But they are still rules. (And, if those rules were chaotic, that still wouldn't matter. There is nothing that says that nature must be orderly, although it has always proven to be. I'm not going to follow that line of thought here).

Some may be tempted to try to rescue the supernatural by changing the definition to something like: things that humans can never fully understand. But that definition is not terribly interesting, and it certainly does not capture what people really mean when they speak of the supernatural. Those who know the most about quantum mechanics say that they do not really understand it, and never will. Richard Feynman, for example, admitted that he did not really understand quantum mechanics. Yet no one claims that quantum mechanics is supernatural. It is just really hard to understand.

Of course, Feynman could describe quantum mechanics, just as J.K. Rowling can describe Harry Potter and his magic tricks. It is easy to say: This is what I saw happen. The electrons are behaving as if they are both here and not here at the same time. I saw blood flowing from the eyes of the statue. I saw him lifted up to heaven. She was able to read my thoughts. These are all supernatural events by any meaningful definition, and they can all be described in the sense that we can report what happened. The fact that we can report on an event does not mean we understand it, and if we cannot even understand something well enough to report on it, we cannot even begin to have a discussion about it.

Moreover, there may be things even more complicated than quantum mechanics. Some humans, like Richard Feynman, can understand quantum mechanics in the sense that they can show it is true and describe what occurs in mathematical terms. Perhaps there are natural phenomenon even more complicated, such that our minds are simply incapable of comprehending. But that does not make those events supernatural. It just means our minds are limited, something we knew already.

Anything that actually happens is part of nature, whether or not we understand how it works. If something does not happen, then it is not part of nature. The supernatural cannot, by its very definition, exist. So, in the end, belief in the supernatural comes down to belief in gibberish. No one can really believe in the supernatural if they think about it in any meaningful way.

So, why do people insist on saying that they believe in the supernatural? Because people want to believe. Because it is exciting, scary -- or, in the case of religion, reassuring -- to believe in something being "out there" that is beyond our understanding. Harry Potter would not be magical if we knew the physics behind his tricks. Thinking about it to hard -- or reading pedantic blog entries like this one -- takes all the fun out of the supernatural.

In the end, we are just going back to that old working definition of supernatural: anything that we do not understand and which seems, in our experience, to be impossible, but with a slight twist: the supernatural is something we want to believe.

Medical Hell, Part III: 7.5 Minutes

Most doctors schedule four to eight appointments every hour. Eight appointments an hour, which seems to be the norm for orthopedic surgeons, means an average of less than 7.5 minutes per patient, given that the doctor must spend some time walking from room to room, etc. We're probably lucky to get five to fifteen minutes of our doctors' attention in the average appointment. Next time you visit your doctor, look at the sign-in sheet and figure out how little time the doctor has allotted for your consultation or examination.

In these short appointments, we are expected to make important decisions about our health: whether to take a medication, to undergo a procedure, or to just let things be. It is simply impossible to make a good decision in such a limited amount of time, and I can think of no other profession that gives such short shrift to its clients. Yet there is no profession more important than medicine.

I am confident of the problem, but I am less sure of the cause(s) and solution(s). Nevertheless, in the spirit of the internet (speaking out when you are not really sure if you know what you are talking about), here goes:

The underlying problem is that we simply do not have enough doctors to go around. There are two reasons for this. First and foremost, we do not have enough medical schools. There are only about 125 medical schools in the entire United States, about 1 for every 2,500,000 people. As a result, there are many capable students who would be more than happy to pursue a career in medicine, but who are not able to qualify. We would do well to close a few law schools and open a few medical schools.

Second, medical training is unnecessarily long. Many doctors --dermatologists, for example -- do not use even a fraction of what they learn in medical school. These specialists should be given separate degrees, with training focused on what they will need in their practice. Think of dentists, for example. Reducing the length of training means that each medical school can produce more doctors.

Clearly, there is a need for some doctors who know all fields well, and there is a need for all medical practitioners to have a certain minimum understanding of how the human body works. But, in a world of limited resources, it makes sense to allocate education more carefully.

Evolution

Things that tend to survive, tend to survive. That single sentence, a tautology, in fact, sums up the theory of evolution. The rest flows naturally from that simple observation.

If a chimp has two offspring, the one that is better equipped to survive in its environment will probably live longer. As a result of living longer, it will probably have more offspring. Children tend to resemble their parents. Therefore, the next generation of chimps will be more like that chimp than its sibling. Over a long period of time, the population of chimps will become more and more like that first chimp that was better equipped to survive in its environment.

No rational person can argue with the basic theory of evolution, as described above. Of course, there numerous ways in which the picture can be refined. For example, the phrase "better equipped to survive" can be replaced with "better at getting its genes into the next generation." The two are not always the same. If the chimp survives a long time by not expending energy fighting for the ability to mate, the story falls apart. A bee may gets its genes into the next generation by sacrificing itself for its genetically identical siblings. The details of evolution -- what kinds of animals in fact tend to evolve, and under what conditions -- are complex. The basic theory, however, is an obvious truth.

Many Americans refuse to accept that evolution applies to humans. But they have no basis to do so. There is no rational basis to believe that humans are somehow exempt from the laws of logic. Human populations are subject to the same forces of nature as any other population. The humans who tend to survive will tend to survive, and the next generation will be more like them.

That fact alone, however, does not prove that humans and chimps (and indeed all life) share a common ancestor. But a look at the real world makes it abundantly clear that we do. From our obvious physical similarities to other animals, to the distribution of plants and animals that exist, to the common DNA we share, to the fossil record, to the very ways in which are so well and so poorly designed at the same time, the evidence is beyond overwhelming. It would be easier to deny that the heart pumps blood (a fact which, like evolution, was unknown in Shakespeare's time) than it is to deny that we share a common ancestor with other primates.

But what does it matter whether people belief in evolution. I, for one, uses to think that creationist were foolish but harmless, like the Flat Earth Society or the people who think Elvis was abducted by space aliens. Whether we shared a common ancestor with chimps six million years ago makes no difference in our daily lives. Or so I thought. I was wrong. The process of evolution sculpted our bodies and minds of a period of more than a billion years. Evolutionary thinking is critical to understanding who we are, emotionally, intellectually and physically. Understanding evolution is important for medicine, but it is also important for understand ourselves, our loved ones and every other human with whom we share this earth.

I highly recommend the following books:

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, by Richards Dawkins http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Watchmaker-Evidence-Evolution-Universe/dp/0393315703/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223754778&sr=1-4

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, by Richard Dawkins http://www.amazon.com/Ancestors-Tale-Pilgrimage-Dawn-Evolution/dp/061861916X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223755602&sr=1-1

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Dangerous-Idea-Evolution-Meanings/dp/068482471X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223754873&sr=1-1

Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, by David Sloan Wilson http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everyone-Darwins-Theory-Change/dp/0385340923/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223754672&sr=1-1