Experimenting - #20 – Test Tube #2 – Entry #2

         There’s no way to get around it – for many of you this is going to be a very strange series of entries – one that will seem completely crazy.  But I hope you will humor me for a bit and consider this topic at face value.

          We have been talking about communicating with God; aka “prayer”.  In the previous entry <*here*> I talked about two important elements: 1) go to a quiet place, and 2) talk to God.  This time we are going to talk about the third element I mentioned: “listen to God”.

          I have to say that the topic of “listening to God” is an odd topic even for those who say that God “speaks” to them all the time.  I have talked to lots and lots of people who mention casually that God spoke to them, but I can’t ever remember hearing anyone give an in-depth lesson on what it really means to say “God spoke to me”.  What I find even more interesting – even somewhat troubling – is that the Bible does the same thing.  God speaks to lots of people in the Bible, from Adam in the Garden to the Apostle John on the Island of Patmos, yet I don’t know of any passage in the Bible that talks about the principle of God speaking to human beings.  How does hearing God really happen???

          All I can do is relate my own experiences and my own thoughts about the whole concept of listening to God.  I already gave one example from my own life <*here*>. 

          Actually, I don’t think the concept of hearing from God, or at least some outside influence, is that foreign to anyone.  We are all familiar with the cartoon character who is trying to decide what to do and has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, both of them arguing with the character, trying to get him to make either a good or bad choice.  We don’t have to be told what that means because we’ve experience it ourselves.  We’ve had our own internal debates about what to do.  We have a sense that we are being pulled to the good or pulled to the bad.  We describe an “inner voice.”  What is that?  People who hear audible voices are often considered mentally unstable.  So why is hearing voices in our minds so normal?  We feel urges of all sorts that seem to come from outside our brains.  From where??

          Another thing we see in cartoons that immediately makes sense to us is the lightbulb above the character’s head.  We know what that means.  We’ve all experienced the “aha” moment.  An idea pops into our head.  From where?  Or we suddenly understand something that we’ve never understood before.  How?

          Well, if you are a good materialist and don’t believe the mind is anything more than neurons firing, then you won’t ascribe any of these concepts to anything other than…neurons firing.  What else could you ascribe it to?  You might say that some of these thoughts, ideas, daydreams, etc. are actually due to random neural activity.  If there is something fundamentally random in the universe, then it might affect neurons and occasionally they might just fire off a random thought.  Such an event must not be entirely common or otherwise our thoughts couldn’t be rational.  It could be that neurons fire randomly all the time but they are normally suppressed by all the rational thinking going on in our brains.  Who knows?  But, anyway, the point is, if there is no “mind” beyond neurons, then of course the whole idea that there could be a supernatural being – or even a “force” – influencing your thoughts is out of the question.

          But, as I’ve said before, that’s alocked door.  If you are a convinced materialist, then there is no reason to be trying these experiments as I’m describing them.  If no amount of evidence will change your mind, then why waste time looking for evidence to the contrary?

          So, if you want to continue, you’re going to have to open the door to what I’m about to tell you, and I think this may be the hardest door to open. 

Is it remotely possible that God could put thoughts in our minds?

The next entry will delve into that in more detail…but you’ll have to decide first whether the answer to that last question is at least a tentative yes.  If not, I don’t really see a way to continue on with the experimental approach.

I thought I would end this entry with an example from my own life – a case where I am convinced that God controlled my brain for a brief instant.  This occurred during my first month of undergraduate study at the University of Iowa.  This would have been the fall of 1979.  I had been invited to attend a meeting of Christian students that met every Tuesday evening in the student lounge area (I remember calling the building the “Student Union”, but I see it is officially called the “Iowa Memorial Union” building).  On the evening of the first meeting, I really wasn’t intending to go.  I hated meeting new people and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to hang out with a bunch of Christians.  My nature would have been to put it off forever.  What I generally did in the evenings was to take my trombone and go practice in the music building.  That was much more fun. 

          The first Tuesday evening after I had been invited to this meeting, I had grabbed my trombone and I was headed off toward the music school.  It was a bit of a walk and it was also in the same direction as the Iowa Memorial Union where the Christian meeting was.  I don’t remember if maybe I had forgotten about the meeting and then remembered or if it was weighing on my mind as something I should do.  As I was walking along the path, there was a point at which the path literally made a Y-branch (for those of you who have been at U of Iowa, I was coming from Hillcrest Hall).  One branch headed off in the direction of the music school and the other branch headed off to the Union building.  A true “fork in the road.”  I remember that my feet just went toward the Union building.  I wasn’t making a decision to go.  It wasn’t really what I was intending to do – I mean, I had my trombone with me!  But my feet just took me there.  I felt powerless to stop it.  Ultimately, it was a critical life-changing event for me that evening.  I consider it a supernatural intervention in my brain.

          Of course it is possible that a random neuron fired, causing a chain of events that resulted in my going right instead of left on the path.  And it is possible that that random neuron just happened to fire at the right time as I approached that fork in the path.  I can’t argue that there could not be a possible natural explanation for what happened.  As I’ve mentioned before, I only present these personal experiences as examples of what happened to me in hopes that it will help you understand what I’m talking about.  But you have to have your own personal experience.  If your answer to the question above (in red) is a confident “no”, then you cannot have your own personal experience.  Hopefully you are fine with that.  All I can say is that you are missing out on an exciting adventure.

Free Will #11 – Hints about random numbers

          This entry is just to provide some hints to the number series I presented in entry #10 on Free Will <*here*>.

          If you don’t want to see any hints, then don’t scroll down. 

Previously I presented this:

BOX A

1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	1
0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	0	1	1	0	1	0
1	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1
0	0	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	0
1	0	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	0	1
1	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	1	1	0	1
0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	1	1	0	1	0	0
1	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	1

1’s = 77/149 (51.7%)

BOX B

1	0	1	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	0	1	1	1	0	0	1	1	0	1
0	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	0	0	1	1	1	0	1
1	0	0	1	1	1	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	0
0	0	1	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	1	0	1
0	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	0	1	1
1	0	1	0	1	1	1	0	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	1
0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	1
0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	0

1’s = 74/149 (49.7%)

          I said I’d be interested if anyone can figure out which of the two series is the “encoded” one; and if so, how you figured it out.  Of course, it would be really impressive if someone could figure out the encoded message, but I think they would need a longer series to figure that out, even if I told you which one had the message. 

First Hint

The message is encoded as individual alphabetical letters.

Each letter is five bits.

Scroll down for more hints…

Second Hint

There is a four bit flag to indicate whether the subsequent data is useful or gibberish.

Third Hint

So, to be clear, the bits are arranged in groups of nine, where the first four bits combine to produce a flag and the last five bits are the data.  If the flag is up, then the next five bits are valid data indicating the next letter in the sentence.  If the flag is down, the next five bits can be ignored and you move to the next flag.

Fourth Hint

The “real data” flag is “0101”.

Fifth Hint

Letter coding is as follows:

Sixth Hint

OK.  The message says “I am alive” and it is in Box A.

Note that with this method, you would have to know that you have the start of the message because everything is counted from that first bit.  So, I also imagined that there would be two “start/stop” five bit “letters”:  “10000” and “01111” that, when they appear, indicate that the subsequent four bits form one of the flags.  Thus, if you broke in the middle of intercepting this series, you could still figure out the starting point for the message by identifying a start and stop bit.

Hope that makes sense.

I think a computer could figure this out because of the likely high rate of the “0101” flag series at multiples of nine.  But, because of the flag, you can always add as much gibberish as you want, so I imagined that you could just add all of the four bit “non-flags” to match the frequency of the real flags.  That would mean that there would be 15 gibberish fields (9 bits) for every one real field. 

This series requires a “mind” to make it appear truly random.  By that I mean that you really have to keep track of a lot of things for the series to work.  For example, you can’t just generate random series of 9 bits for the gibberish because a random series will sometimes start with the “0101” series of bits, which you have reserved as a flag.  Also, depending on the letters in the sentence, if you want to maintain the overall random nature of the whole set, you have to select gibberish series that counteract whatever trends their might be in the data series.  For example, if you have a sentence with a lot of “X”s in it, which is encoded as “00001”, then your whole set will tend to be highly skewed to “0” bits unless your gibberish tends to have more “1” bits in it.  Obviously in any random series it doesn’t have to work out to exactly 50:50, but you have to keep running count of the characteristics of the series and add gibberish that tends to move those characteristics back to the characteristics of the totally random series.  This could be done by a computer program that tracks the characteristics of the series so far and then adjusts the random selection of bits by weighting the selection towards the desired characteristics.  Ultimately, you’d need to track not just the total ratio of “0” and “1”s, but also the rate of bit pairs, triplets, quadruplets, etc.  This concept is very inefficient in terms of the data delivered compared to the total bits delivered, but I’m not sure that efficiency is required for my original proposition.  The point is you could encode information in what otherwise seems to be random bits.  If there really is a fundamental quantum randomness to everything, how could it be proven that there is not information encoded in that randomness?

My original point was to address the question of whether free will could act, yet not violate basic physical laws like conservation of energy.  I guess others have postulated that free will just re-distributes energy without creating or destroying any, and essentially that is what I am proposing here.  The energy is redistributed so that it encodes real information.

In my example, free will would be very inefficient because it would spend most of “it’s” time re-distributing energy just to create gibberish that would be ignored.  But this is not a problem in my concept of free will.  I don’t believe free will is involved in most “decisions” that we make.  I think most of the time we live our lives in some kind of autopilot and we really don’t often “break out” of the cause and effect cycle.  I think that, to a large extend, our biological brain is a deterministic system with a bit of randomness thrown in.  On rare occasions our free will breaks through and actually influences a decision.  In fact, this might only happen a few times a day…or maybe it is even much rarer than that…maybe our free will only really steps in a few times in our life.  If we look back on our life, there are decision-points that really shape who we are, and in between there is a lot of just “living life” in which we are just responding to what is in front of us.

An interesting outcome of my suggested method of free will action is that whenever you do intervene with free will (i.e. when you do enter the “up” flag and then real data) there is a the need to “balance it out” with gibberish.  I think this matches the human experience pretty well.  When I do something really good for someone that is “out of my comfort zone”, I feel this sense that “ok – now I can go back to being my average self”.  And if I do something like three good deeds in a row, there is this sense that “ok – now I’m allowed to do something that is not so great.”  But maybe that’s going too far with my extrapolation here.  I have a feeling that I will have to revisit this thought many times and tighten it up ... or maybe abandon it entirely.