What Matters Most

Friday, August 12, 2011

Our Brains

What Matters Most……Commentary by Jim High

A friend recently sent me an Internet video clip about some computer scientist in Japan that were working with robots and teaching them to have real intelligence. We are all familiar with robots that can do things. They are programmed by the computers that run them to do those things. But the break through here was that these robots had a form of artificial intelligence. They could think for themselves without the programming.

The test was simple enough, after all this was like teaching a baby to do something. The robot was presented with three things. A pitcher of water (actually small plastic beads to avoid a wet mess), an empty glass and an ice cube, actually a blue hard rubber cube. The computer program told the robot to pick up the pitcher and the glass and pour the water into the glass. It did this correctly. Even using its eyes to look and find the pitcher and glass on the table.

But then the program told the robot to pick up the ice cube and put it into the glass. But you see the robot had two hands like we do and it was holding the pitcher and the glass. It looked around, found the ice cube, but had no available hand with which to pick it up. So on its own (they said) it decided to put the glass down and using the now free hand it picked up the ice cube and dropped it into the glass.

This feat was not followed by giving the robot a piece of candy, clapping, or even words to let the robot know that it had done well. They did not explain what total program the robot had been fed to allow it to run through all the options open to it to find a free hand so it could follow the direct command to pick up the ice cube. And watching the video you could tell that the very subtle movements that we humans make by controlling our muscles were absent in the mechanical movement of the machine that was the robot.

I, of course, am glad that someone somewhere is working on things like this. But it made me realize not how wonderful this robot breakthrough was, but how marvelous our brains actually are. You see everything we are as humans is controlled by our brains. Everything we think and remember, everything we envision for or about the future, every emotion we feel, every movement of our bodies including all our bodily functions is controlled by that brain inside our skulls.

Reading about our brain the other day, I learned that there are more connections between the various neurons in one square centimeter of our brain material than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. That’s a lot, billions in fact, and our brains are way larger than one square centimeter. You’ve heard that we actually use only about 10% of our brains, but that’s not true. The total brain is working all the time. We only realize about 10% of what it is doing.

Looking at that video of the robot I realized that it will take many lifetimes for robots to approach what we already have in our heads. And the reality is that it took millions of years for our brains to evolve and to make us human. It would be nice to have a robot like Data on Star Trek, but that is thousands of years in to the future, if at all. Still it’s nice to know that those folks in Japan and elsewhere are working toward that day, maybe in the year 3011.

What is more important is to use and improve your own brain. Scientist tell us that the human brain is the most complicated thing in the entire universe, and also the most powerful. Powerful because everything we have and everything we know about in our modern civilization was first just a thought in someone’s brain. Ideas move the world forward. Thinking solves all problems.

What Matters Most…..is to realize the importance of brain power. And to know that it is developed early in life beginning at the moment of our birth into this world. A child’s first few formative years are not just for the development of the body, but for the development of the brain. I’m not sure that computer games and the other modern day distractions of today’s kids are developing their brains, and that’s a problem. Reading, education, actual doing, building, accomplishment, and getting positive feedback, those are the things that develop the brain

Monday, August 8, 2011

Childhood

What Matters Most……….….Commentary by Jim High

Even though it was a long, long time ago I can remember my childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi. Was it better than growing up now? I can’t say that, but it sure was different. My earliest memory at three years old is of a trip I took with my Mother on the train to St. Louis to see my Father before he shipped out to the Pacific in 1943. I remember the day the war ended in 1945, and the day my Dad got home to Tupelo.

Then I began first grade at Church Street School in Miss Mary Frances Beard’s classroom. I had been to kindergarten in a room in the basement of the school the year before. Don’t remember the teacher’s name, just that she was wonderful. For four years I walked to school every morning and home in the afternoons. We never heard of or saw a school bus.

By fourth grade I had made the Safety Patrol and got a special belt with a sash and a bright shinny Safety Patrol Badge. Can you imagine a nine year old kid without adult supervision of any kind directing traffic and seeing to it that the smaller kids got across the street safely at the corner near the school? The school’s still there, the corner of Church and Walnut is still there, the neighborhood is little changed, so why not now I say.

During recess my girlfriend and I played house inside the big hedges between the school and Robins Field. We salted and peppered our potato chips with sand and crumbled up dried leaves. And all the boys belonged to different gangs, maybe I should say group, the word gang has taken on a new meaning these days, but we called them gangs back then.

I moved to Milam for the fifth grade through the ninth, and next door to Tupelo High School where I graduated in 1958. All that time I also walked to school, but of course, my house was only three houses away on Jefferson Street. I actually came home for lunch every day, and never left for school until I heard the bell ring. After the first ring, we had three minutes to get to class, and that was just enough time to cut across the Gravlee’s and Weaver’s backyards and be at school in less than three minutes.

During high school some kids from out in the county did arrive by school bus, and a few students in high school had their own cars. When I say a few, I mean a few, maybe only a dozen or so. Those were not the days when everyone in the family above the age of fifteen had their own personal car. Mr. M. M. Winkler who lived across the street walked to his accountant’s office every day, walked home and back for lunch, and home in the evening. I remember Mr. Winkler as being very fit and trim.

The kids in our neighborhood grew up in the 1940’s and early 1950’s without TV. One memory I have of my grandfather was him sitting in his chair every evening listening to the news and commentary on the big floor model radio that we had in the living room. Yes, we had radios that were furniture, just like the first TV sets were. The Community Antenna System finally brought early cable TV to our house about 1955. That system was the beginning of COMCAST that still serves our city today. I would come home from school every day and watch the Mickey Mouse Club. My favorite part was the adventures of Spin and Marty, and the Hardy Boys. All TV programs were in black and white in those days.

Another thing we did as kids was make up our own games to play in the evenings. Our house had a huge front porch so we invented a game we called Run Jump Off The Porch. You had to go from the yard to the chairs on the porch and back without getting tagged or you were it. Being it was bad. We played Kick The Can and May I. Kids have so much else to do today; I really wonder how they manage it all.

What Matters Most………childhood is a magical time, or it should be for every little child. I know that mine was, and that I am a much better person today because of my childhood. I appreciate the adults in my life that saw to it that as a child I was loved and cared for. Today’s world is a busy complicated place, but let’s never forget how important childhood is to a child.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

God in 7010

What Matters Most......Commentary by Jim High

Recently I watched a TV program about finding a hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold objects in a field in England just outside of London. They came from the period 300 to 500 AD and appear to be the spoils of war between the Anglo-Saxons and other people living in the area as the Romans pulled out of England and left the country to be taken over by whoever was strongest.

I found it interesting that mention was made of the "Christian" Anglo-Saxons warring with the pagan tribes of England. Besides fighting for the land they wanted, they were fighting a religious war against the pagan gods. They felt, because of what the church had told them about Jesus and the Bible, that they worshiped the one true God. This is evident in almost all of history’s wars, think of the Crusades. These were ignorant people by our modern standards, but they had a powerful idea that they were on the side of the one true God, who was creator and ruler of the world. I say the world because they did not know about the Universe 1600 years ago.

Some Christians today make much about the fact that over time (2,000 years) Christianity has spread all around the world, and many Bishops, Councils, and religious people have continued to build on and explain the faith and beliefs of Christians, so there must be something to it. In fact, most Christians still feel that they worship the one true God who created our world, and because Christianity is the predominate religion of the world is evidence that they are correct in their beliefs.

But the real history tells a much different story. Until about 250 years ago, we had almost no real history of the Christian religion. We had the history that the church wanted us to have, but real history and understanding of what happened and how it happened -- no, we didn't have that. For example many still think the Bible is the actual word of God, and that the four Gospels are recorded history written by eyewitnesses, to give just one small example. And we now have discovered many other Gospels written about Jesus in those ancient times.

Christianity today is a religious system based loosely on what little we know of the life and teachings of the man Jesus. Does this mean that all Christianity is bad or false? Of course not, some of it is very good, and the correct and best way to live your life and treat all other people. Does this disprove the existence of the connection with life and with all other people that we feel but don't yet understand? Of course not, the connection with all life that we feel is real and was built into us by the millions of years of evolution that has resulted in what we now call humans.

What Christianity and the church leave out of their teachings is that evolution, knowledge and understanding has not stopped. We are still evolving, discovering and learning, and we will always evolve into higher and higher forms of life. What will the human race be like in 500 years? 5,000 years? Let alone a million years. Our job is to work together to see that earth lasts that long so humanity can find out.

What Matters Most………..is the understanding that Christians 5,000 years into the future will be nothing like the Christians of today. I seriously doubt if they will still call themselves Christians. People in the year 7010 will have some beliefs, some faith, but if the world lasts that long, they will have a better understanding of the way to relate to one another and the planet, and maybe other planets as well, on which they will live. Think about the year 7010 during this Christmas Season as you go to church instead of letting all your thoughts go back to Bethlehem 2000 years ago. Realize that to grow and change to make the year 7010 possible, we might just need to let our faith and beliefs grow and change along with the times. The man whose birth we celebrate on December 25^th challenged the thinking of the people of his generation to a better way of living. Our challenge today is to follow his example and do the same.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Faith and Hope

What Matters Most….Commentary by Jim High

Recently I was in a meeting with about a dozen people who were discussing a wide range of ideas about several topics, religion being one of them. I told the group that two words used a lot by religious people bothered me. Those words are faith and hope. And after some further discussion they kind of understood what I meant. So this column is for the purpose of further clarifying why these two words bother me so much.

I’ll start with hope. Maybe my dislike of this word goes back to a time in my business career when someone was always saying what we were going to do, and that “hopefully” it would turn out OK. I thought then, and think now, that we need more than just hope to move things forward.

Going to the dictionary we find that hope can be used as both a noun and a verb. As a noun it means the feeling that what is wanted can be had, or that events will turn out for the best. That seems to make perfect sense since no one has ever hoped for something bad to happen. As a verb, the dictionary says that hope is to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence, to believe, desire, or trust in a satisfactory outcome.

What’s missing from all this hoping? Well actually doing something, of course. Hoping is not constructive, and hoping causes nothing to happen. Planning and working toward some specific goal causes things to happen in your life. We all have problems, we all want positive results. We want to solve our problems, but hoping is never going to help. Only doing helps.

So don’t tell me you have hopes, or that you are hoping for the best. Tell me what plans you have made, why you think those plans are correct, and why they will give you the satisfactory result that you want. And most important, tell me what you are going to do to put your plans into action. We can make our lives and our world better, but not by hoping, only by doing.

Faith is a noun, and the dictionary gives many examples of how this word is used. Most involve religion in some way, but not always, as in belief in anything such as a code of ethics, standards of merit, obligations of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, obligation etc. In these non-religious examples of faith we expect on faith that a person will do what they are suppose to do, or what they actually said they would do. I don’t have a problem with faith in this context, except of course, when the other person does not live up to the faith that I have in them. Which happens rather more often than any of us would like.

It’s the other definitions of faith that bother me. Number two in the list of definitions is belief that is not based on proof. Number three is belief in a particular type of god, or in doctrines and religious systems, or teachings of religions taken on faith alone. In Christian Theology faith is defined as, the trust in God and His promises as made through Jesus and the Scriptures by which humans are justified and saved.

Mark Twain wrote that, “Faith is believing what your know ain’t so.” It’s a cute quip, and he was the master of quips, but faith is so important to people I prefer to quote from a more thoughtful source on matters of faith.

Here is what the Buddha had to say on the subject of faith. “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

What Matters Most……..is that we need to think about the words we use. We need to decide if they really convey the meaning we intend for them. Faith and hope are two words that give me problems, and I stated why that is so. All any of us can do is study and learn, and using reason decide for ourselves what is important in life, what is “conducive to good and benefits one and all”, and then as the Buddha says, “accept it and live up to it.” Living your faith turns faith into a verb and makes it active, and that’s what matters most.

Evolution

What Matters Most………………..Commentary by Jim High

Evolution is the explanation of life put forward by Charles Darwin back in 1859 with the publication of his worldview shattering book, On the Origin of Species. And the world has quite literally not been the same since. The Scopes Trials in 1925 in Dayton, TN, sought to settle the issue of teaching Evolution rather than the account of creation found the Bible, but the debate rages on today, first in the form of Creation Science and now under the banner of Intelligent Design.

There is no debate among scientists about Evolution. It is a fact that we are the human animal that evolved from the great apes of Africa over millions of years. And going back billions of years, we are also kin to the cabbages, since all life both plant and animal had a common source in the early oceans of planet Earth.

Except for religion and the Bible, there would be no debate and the fact is that every study shows that Darwin’s conclusions are true. We must remember how slowly people admit that the Bible is wrong. Copernicus discovered and Galileo championed that the Earth was not the center of the Universe over 400 years ago, but it wasn’t until recently in 1992 that the Roman Catholic Church admitted that they had been correct, so strong is religious orthodoxy.

Evolution can no longer be considered “just a theory” as some would like to label it. In fact, both Creationism and Intelligent Design are the theories, religious theories. The unknown is life itself. We know it evolved in the oceans of planet Earth and that over about four billions years has, so far, resulted in us, the self conscious, self-aware, thinking animal. I say “so far”, because although we can’t see it happening evolution has not stopped. It never stops. And now we also have to factor in cultural evolution, since man has developed a culture and can now affect his own evolution in multiple ways.

We don’t yet actually know what life is, or how it starts. We don’t know if life exists everywhere in the Universe, but we suspect that it does, and we are looking for it. We also don’t know what started up the whole Universe. The so called Big Bang is a theory based on the movement we see in the Universe as if it exploded into existence from nothing some 13.5 billion years ago. I’m not yet sold on that idea, maybe the Universe just is, maybe it really is infinite, although that is another idea that makes no sense to me. But then our Earth, Sun and whole solar system would not make much sense to an ant, if the ant had some way to see it and understand what it was seeing.

Ancient mankind attributed his existence to a God that he created and placed above him in the sky. But that feeling we all have from time to time of being connected to some higher power, to each other, to nature, to the beauty of a sunset, to your pet, or even your house plants is actually a real feeling because we are in fact connected to all those things. We humans are a part of the Life Force of the Universe itself. When you come to realize that the same power that created the stars also created you and me, and that in fact, we are made of stardust, well that is an understanding that is greater than what is written any Holy book supposedly written by a God.

There are many things yet to be discovered about life itself. For example, we can clone it, but not make it, we can grow body parts, but not from scratch. And let me add “yet,” because we'll probably be able to do all these things in the future. And there are connections that we “yet” don't understand. For example, I strongly think that our "thoughts become things" and the Law of Attraction is a real law of the Universe.

What Matters Most………this life we live today and everyday is so very important, because it is the only life we are ever going to know about. If the Life Force of the Universe, that little bit of “stardust" that is me, blends back into the overall Life Force of the Universe when I die, and turns up again here on Earth or somewhere else, it won't be as Jim High. Right now is Jim High's time to be, and I am trying to make it all that it can be.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Wealth Inequity

What Matters Most…Commentary by Jim High

At a recent Tupelo SPAFER RoadHouse meeting, SPAFER stands for South Points Association for Exploring Religion, we heard Marcus Borg say that the top 1% of the people in the United States own 46% of the wealth. An incredible figure, I must say. But here are some reliable numbers that show an even worse result of the wealth inequity that currently exists in our country.

Wealth inequality in the United States refers to the unequal distribution of financial assets among residents of the United States. Wealth includes the values of homes, automobiles, businesses, savings, and investments. Various sociological statistics suggest the severity of wealth inequality "with the top 10% possessing 80% of all financial assets and the bottom 90% holding only 20% of all financial wealth."

This is the real war going on in our country, the war between the rich and the poor. Put that way it is easy for the rich to say to the poor, "Go get a job, if you want to live like us." Put another way, the 10% (3,500,000 people) had better watch out because 90% (346,600,000 people) are being shut out of the system that has been structured to favor the rich and powerful. Throughout all recorded history this type of extreme inequity in the structure and workings of the economic system has caused revolution in every county in the world that has become so out of balance. The seeds of that revolution are already planted and growing in the Tea Party and other movements in our country.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan both explained justice in Jesus’ time and his message about the justice of Rome verses God's justice for the people. They also explained the two kinds of justice. Individual justice, which we all pretty much understand and accept, and systemic or structural justice, which we know and realize less about, but it is the systemic or structural justice in our country that has allowed the top 10% of people to acquire and hold 80% of the wealth in this country.

So what are we going to do about it? A great start is to extend the tax cuts for the middle class and let the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone above the $250,000 level of income, just as President Obama has proposed. Why does the Tea Party not see this? Why do middle class Republicans not see this? The only people who should be concerned about this are those few folks, percentage wise, who actually earn more than $250,000 in net income. Net income is what you pay tax on. That is the amount you have left over after all legitimate deductions. How on earth has this 10%, those with $250,000 or more, some with much much more, been able to convince the masses to make them even richer?

What Matters Most……..is that what we so desperately need in this country is some balance in wealth distribution. And the only place that we can look for help is to our governments, all of them, local, state and especially the federal government. The federal government is the institution that bears the responsibility for bringing proper justice to our economic system to insure that it works for everyone’s benefit, not the benefit of the few, who are rich already.

“Excessive dress prevents the body from moving freely.
Excessive wealth interferes with the movement of our soul.” ---Demosthenes

“The love of great wealth commands you, ‘Bring me your soul as a sacrifice,’ and people will do so. ---Saint John Chrysostom

“The desire for great wealth can never be satisfied. Those who have it are excited by the wish to have more, and yet more. ---Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If only people who seek wealth could clearly see what they would lose by having it, they would put the same amount of effort into getting rid of this wealth as they now put into acquiring it.” ---Leo Tolstoy

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Right Thing

What Matters Most............Commentary by Jim High

President Obama’s first few months in office and his trips around the world, if they show us anything, show us the power, correctness and justice of always doing the right thing. It is amazing to see the reactions of people all around the world to this man who has set out to transform the world by always just doing the right thing.

No matter what the issue, be it in government, business, community, family relations, religion, or just within your close circle of friends, doing the right thing is always the thing to do. Sometimes this is hard and many times people refrain from doing the right thing because it means change, or it might make someone mad, or upset some group or person with different opinions.

I watched President Obama answer questions at the Press Conference at the conclusion of his trip to the 34 nation Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago a couple of weeks ago. A reporter tried to ask him a difficult question by saying that didn’t he worry about how his efforts and his words would be taken back home by certain groups. President Obama said, yes people would be certain to try to make something political out of his efforts, but that he did not worry about the politics of it because he was convinced that he was doing the right thing, and that the vast majority of Americans had voted for him so that he could change, not only the policies of United States, but the relationships between all the nations of the world, by starting to do the right thing.

Let me be clear, doing the right thing is not just one person’s opinion of what should be done. The right thing is not the Democratic or Republican thing to do. The right thing is not the Baptist, Jewish, Islamic, Methodist or Catholic opinion. The right thing has no liberal or conservative side. The right thing has no relationship with the rich and powerful, or for the poor and disadvantaged.

So how do you know what the right thing is? The right thing is what works to help all people. It is what is fair to all people. It is what provides justice for all people. It is what comes from and is motivated by love, care and concern for all people. It is not easy to get yourself to the point of knowing what the right thing is, because most of us have lived for so long doing the wrong thing, thinking only of our own needs, following a policy of more for me and to hell with everyone else. Doing the right thing can put you in a very strange feeling place.

But President Obama starts out with a clear idea and statement of the end result that will make real change and create benefits for everyone, and then he begins to make decisions that move in the direction of the goal that everyone wants because it truly benefits everyone. That is what doing the right thing is all about. It is thinking of the needs and concerns of everyone and working in cooperation with everyone for the common good of everyone.

What matters most is that each of us deep down inside knows the right thing to do. As little children we are born with the spirit of love, care and concern for others built into who we are as human beings. So as adults our job is to dig down deep inside and judge all our actions and relations with others by the standard of just doing the right thing. I believe that we all intuitively know how to do that. Always doing the right thing is the next stage of evolution that the whole world is moving toward for the benefit of humankind everywhere.