Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sugar is deadly,
and so are you.
Fooled you. You were ready for "sugar is sweet". Well, it is; but that isn't the whole story on sugar. Sugar is also deadly, but nobody was thinking in those terms when the verse first appeared. Who imagined that sweetness and death could be so closely connected? What else can we say about sugar? It's sticky. It's an antifreeze. It's a cheap dietary source of energy. It's a mood altering substance. It is used in the making of alcohol. It has made slavery profitable. It causes tooth decay. None of that, though true, belongs in a love poem.
Here's another love poem.
Whoever does not love
does not know God,
for God is love.
(1 John 4:8 New Revised Standard Version)
It has been said that God is good: powerful, wise, persistent, just, intentional, active, trustworthy, and reliable. The poet chose here to speak of love, which may indeed be the best part of goodness. We need a place to keep our thoughts about goodness. God is that place, an empty symbol that we fill up with the lessons of experience as we struggle to survive.
Good-bad duality leaves us with a question: why would an all-powerful, just and loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? We can answer with elaborate speculations about Christ, Satan, Heaven, Hell and Eternal Judgment, or we can learn from experience and admit that the ancestors may not have got things completely right. To explore that possibility, take a thought about God and turn it inside-out or leave it out of things altogether and imagine how the world would work.
Take justice. A just God would reward virtue and punish evil. If that were not so, or not always so, would the world work? As a matter of fact, it is an excellent description of how the world mostly works. Justice does not apply to viruses and bacteria competing for nutrients in the ocean, or to mature trees reaching for the sun and casting shade on saplings below, or to elk fighting for reproductive dominance. Justice has evolved in our species as a way of stabilizing human societies, and that has happened on this speck of dust we call Earth during the last click of the cosmic clock. Justice improves our fitness for survival in the same manner that hollow bones make it possible for birds to fly. We haven't perfected justice yet, but it has given humanity such an advantage over other organisms that we are in the process of sterilizing the globe, which begins to look like injustice. Sweet and deadly. We need to re-think the meaning and reach of justice.
Trust and obey. We have presumed that God is reliable, which means if you do things a certain way, you get a certain result. What if you did things a certain way and got an unexpected result? Well, as it happens, that is normal. Doing something a certain way may improve the odds of getting an expected result, but there are no guarantees. Consider the alternative; God doesn't take bribes and dispense favours. God's indifference to the pleas of our enemies sounds positively virtuous. But if God can be trusted, our enemies should expect God to treat us with the same lack of consideration.
The alternative to divine justice is indifference. Life is a lottery. Occasionally you win. At some point you lose. Our belief that God is reliable is based on an error of intuition called confirmation bias. We take note when we get an expected result and ignore those times we get a different result. When the church collapses while the faithful are praying, that is God being consistently arbitrary while people delude themselves that they can get a free ride. Maybe people should learn from their mistakes and build stronger churches.
The problem of pain is that there is no problem. There is pain, which is the driving force behind evolution. There is pain which we avoid by doing things a certain way. Imagine a world without pain: no being eaten and therefore no eating, no disease or accident and therefore no death, therefore no survival of the fittest and therefore no people, a world where nothing happens because everything is as it should be, completely uninteresting and nobody present to take notice. A world in the care of a God you can depend on, sweet and dead.
Love has evolved as the answer to the problem of pain. Pain is the reason love has emerged from the uncaring chaos that birthed everything. Love and pain are partners. You don't get one without the other.
Monday, April 13, 2026
KISS or SIN
"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is the first thing they teach in teacher's college. Because it is so fundamentally important, it is presented unforgettably as KISS.
I hesitate to follow my thesis where it is leading because someone reading this is going to wonder if I am a pervert. All I can say is, I wish it were so. Let me explain. Neurologists tell us that sexuality originates in a region of the brain about the size of a garbanzo bean. All of the remaining 1499 grams of brain (plus or minus a gram) is devoted to restraining the Garbanzo. An actual pervert might have only 1498 grams. So you see, there isn't much to distinguish the average person from a pervert.
As for me, I'm no longer average; I'm over the hill. Now, once you get over the hill your garbanzo starts shrinking until it's the size of a grain of rice (short grain, not basmati). Where a young person spends 95.3 percent of his time dreaming he's on a nude beach in the south of France (that would be Nice), I spend 4.7 percent of my time wishing I could remember dreaming about a nude beach. The rest of the time I write this blog, because my brain no longer has a garbanzo to supervise.
Back to the KISS principle. The most difficult subject on the curriculum during my first year teaching science was human sexuality. Standing there in front of 27 garbanzo bombs and telling them about body parts was like, well, being the only nude on the beach. I recalled the KISS principle and put it to use: “No lecture today, class; just read page 243 and label this diagram for your notes.”
The same diagram appeared on the next test. It evoked some interesting answers. One girl labeled a particular part "Virginia". How disarmingly serendipitous! I hope she is not wasting her life as a doctor. She should be a script writer for daytime TV.
What I am saying is this: even though the KISS principle served me well, when I saw that answer on the test, I was strongly tempted to write a comment: "This bit in the diagram isn't a state south of Pennsylvania. Current molecular studies show that it is derived from the paramesonephric Müllerian duct with bone morphogenic protein 4 (BMP4) reshaping the intermediate mesoderm-derived Müllerian duct into the vaginal primordium". Not so simple. That's the way a science teacher thinks. Tiny garbanzo.
I'm kidding. I just copied that from embryology.med.unsw.edu.au / embryology / index.php / Vagina_Development. (I added spaces to break the link; you may not be old enough to read the rest of that article, so no clicking.)
I do have a point to make. Whenever a simple fact is stated conforming to the KISS proverb, there is an impatient antiverb waiting with its hand up to interject like Yoda, "Simple It's Not", SIN for short. If that urge strikes, suppress it. Don't give in to SIN. It's merely a meta-perverse reaction of your prefrontal cortex to suppress your garbanzo.
I hesitate to follow my thesis where it is leading because someone reading this is going to wonder if I am a pervert. All I can say is, I wish it were so. Let me explain. Neurologists tell us that sexuality originates in a region of the brain about the size of a garbanzo bean. All of the remaining 1499 grams of brain (plus or minus a gram) is devoted to restraining the Garbanzo. An actual pervert might have only 1498 grams. So you see, there isn't much to distinguish the average person from a pervert.
As for me, I'm no longer average; I'm over the hill. Now, once you get over the hill your garbanzo starts shrinking until it's the size of a grain of rice (short grain, not basmati). Where a young person spends 95.3 percent of his time dreaming he's on a nude beach in the south of France (that would be Nice), I spend 4.7 percent of my time wishing I could remember dreaming about a nude beach. The rest of the time I write this blog, because my brain no longer has a garbanzo to supervise.
Back to the KISS principle. The most difficult subject on the curriculum during my first year teaching science was human sexuality. Standing there in front of 27 garbanzo bombs and telling them about body parts was like, well, being the only nude on the beach. I recalled the KISS principle and put it to use: “No lecture today, class; just read page 243 and label this diagram for your notes.”
The same diagram appeared on the next test. It evoked some interesting answers. One girl labeled a particular part "Virginia". How disarmingly serendipitous! I hope she is not wasting her life as a doctor. She should be a script writer for daytime TV.
What I am saying is this: even though the KISS principle served me well, when I saw that answer on the test, I was strongly tempted to write a comment: "This bit in the diagram isn't a state south of Pennsylvania. Current molecular studies show that it is derived from the paramesonephric Müllerian duct with bone morphogenic protein 4 (BMP4) reshaping the intermediate mesoderm-derived Müllerian duct into the vaginal primordium". Not so simple. That's the way a science teacher thinks. Tiny garbanzo.
I'm kidding. I just copied that from embryology.med.unsw.edu.au / embryology / index.php / Vagina_Development. (I added spaces to break the link; you may not be old enough to read the rest of that article, so no clicking.)
I do have a point to make. Whenever a simple fact is stated conforming to the KISS proverb, there is an impatient antiverb waiting with its hand up to interject like Yoda, "Simple It's Not", SIN for short. If that urge strikes, suppress it. Don't give in to SIN. It's merely a meta-perverse reaction of your prefrontal cortex to suppress your garbanzo.
Evolution of Minds
A few years ago, a robin staked claim to our front yard. He spent his mornings pecking at our windows and pooping on our porch furniture to make sure that the robin pecking back at him (reflected in the window) knew who's boss of this place. Just like international politics except politicians poop bombs.
A few years ago, Obama was set to bomb Syria over the use of chemical weapons. He asked for the approval of congress. Congress said he should keep his pants on. Obama kept his pants on. Some time later Trump was set to bomb Iran. Trump learned from Obama that you don't ask for permission. You just drop your bombs, and then enjoy a beautiful piece of chocolate cake while waiting for the news to break. That's progress, or maybe regress, depending on your politics.
I'm not being critical. I don't know who's right and who's wrong because it's complicated. When we have complicated decisions to make we can proceed in a variety of ways. I will digress here to explain something I learned from a book by Daniel Dennett, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” I can't explain it as well as Dennett does, but since you are reading my blog instead of Dennett's, here is my summary.
Consciousness has evolved through four stages.
The Darwinian stage in which the competence of a mind is altered randomly by genetic mutation, and changes are selected or rejected based on how they effect the fitness of the individual. Progress is unplanned, costly (most mutations don't survive), and slow, but also impressive (evolution is smarter than we are). The results are inherited as instincts by the progeny of successful mutants. Competence develops slowly over millions of years without comprehension.
The Skinnerian stage in which behavior is not fully prescribed by instinct. At this level one has scope to try alternative actions at random and learn which actions are more productive. Learning from experience produces lots of failures along with some successes, but the results accrue within an individual lifetime.
The Popperian stage in which actions are tested in imagination before they are acted upon. This makes success more probable and more quickly attainable even on the first try.
The Gregorian stage which employs learning tools, such as language, books, libraries, the Internet, controlled experiments, theories, mathematics, logic, and models, to improve the reliability of predictions and accumulate the results of experience so that they can be passed on to others.
It would be nice if leaders who were entrusted with the most momentous decisions functioned at the highest level of consciousness. This is not to say that leaders should always ignore their instincts, avoid taking chances, repress their imagination, and wait for evidence and expert consensus before acting.
“Mr. President, there are 90 missiles with nuclear warheads heading our way. What shall we do?”
“We should gather our best minds and study the situation. Perhaps we should award research grants.”
Or not.
It takes time to sort out our instinctive reactions, imagine and try things, accumulate and evaluate experience, and develop knowledge with comprehension. I am guessing (no proof) that the less time we have to make decisions, the more we revert from comprehension to instinct.
A second hypothesis: larger collectives regress from comprehension to instinct in the same way. Therefore, when whole nations are threatened, their actions are likely to be decided at the gut level.
The future is not in capable hands. Angry birds pecking and pooping to assert dominance would do as well. If we function internationally at the Darwinian level, there are no guarantees; quite the opposite. We are just another species scrabbling to survive and much more likely to go extinct.
A few years ago, Obama was set to bomb Syria over the use of chemical weapons. He asked for the approval of congress. Congress said he should keep his pants on. Obama kept his pants on. Some time later Trump was set to bomb Iran. Trump learned from Obama that you don't ask for permission. You just drop your bombs, and then enjoy a beautiful piece of chocolate cake while waiting for the news to break. That's progress, or maybe regress, depending on your politics.
I'm not being critical. I don't know who's right and who's wrong because it's complicated. When we have complicated decisions to make we can proceed in a variety of ways. I will digress here to explain something I learned from a book by Daniel Dennett, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” I can't explain it as well as Dennett does, but since you are reading my blog instead of Dennett's, here is my summary.
Consciousness has evolved through four stages.
The Darwinian stage in which the competence of a mind is altered randomly by genetic mutation, and changes are selected or rejected based on how they effect the fitness of the individual. Progress is unplanned, costly (most mutations don't survive), and slow, but also impressive (evolution is smarter than we are). The results are inherited as instincts by the progeny of successful mutants. Competence develops slowly over millions of years without comprehension.
The Skinnerian stage in which behavior is not fully prescribed by instinct. At this level one has scope to try alternative actions at random and learn which actions are more productive. Learning from experience produces lots of failures along with some successes, but the results accrue within an individual lifetime.
The Popperian stage in which actions are tested in imagination before they are acted upon. This makes success more probable and more quickly attainable even on the first try.
The Gregorian stage which employs learning tools, such as language, books, libraries, the Internet, controlled experiments, theories, mathematics, logic, and models, to improve the reliability of predictions and accumulate the results of experience so that they can be passed on to others.
It would be nice if leaders who were entrusted with the most momentous decisions functioned at the highest level of consciousness. This is not to say that leaders should always ignore their instincts, avoid taking chances, repress their imagination, and wait for evidence and expert consensus before acting.
“Mr. President, there are 90 missiles with nuclear warheads heading our way. What shall we do?”
“We should gather our best minds and study the situation. Perhaps we should award research grants.”
Or not.
It takes time to sort out our instinctive reactions, imagine and try things, accumulate and evaluate experience, and develop knowledge with comprehension. I am guessing (no proof) that the less time we have to make decisions, the more we revert from comprehension to instinct.
A second hypothesis: larger collectives regress from comprehension to instinct in the same way. Therefore, when whole nations are threatened, their actions are likely to be decided at the gut level.
The future is not in capable hands. Angry birds pecking and pooping to assert dominance would do as well. If we function internationally at the Darwinian level, there are no guarantees; quite the opposite. We are just another species scrabbling to survive and much more likely to go extinct.
Emergence
The preface to this story is no phrase,
No dark and stormy night, no rosy dawn.
No voice to set the mood with poignant song,
No script, no blueprint, not a hint of grace,
No words unwritten by a silent sage,
No memory of touch, or scent, or face,
No promise that two lovers will embrace,
No Roman numeral on an empty page.
Yet from this nothing came both near and far,
And light and dark, and ocean depth and rain,
And legs for standing up and falling down,
A planet made from remnants of a star,
And smiles that tell of love forgetting pain,
And children who remember when they're grown.
No dark and stormy night, no rosy dawn.
No voice to set the mood with poignant song,
No script, no blueprint, not a hint of grace,
No words unwritten by a silent sage,
No memory of touch, or scent, or face,
No promise that two lovers will embrace,
No Roman numeral on an empty page.
Yet from this nothing came both near and far,
And light and dark, and ocean depth and rain,
And legs for standing up and falling down,
A planet made from remnants of a star,
And smiles that tell of love forgetting pain,
And children who remember when they're grown.
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