ASM135 It's a Patron Show (Part 3)

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coming to you from my home studio in the beautiful city of los angeles it's part three of the patron special on ask science mike [Applause] [Music] science faith well hello internet friends uh welcome to another episode of ask science mike and uh i might have left you with a little accidental cliffhanger thanksgiving week when i said i planned on doing a show per day that week without realizing that my wife wanted me to be an involved member of the family during the holiday break so that didn't happen and uh instead now we're here with part three of the patron special these episodes of ask science mike are all from my or all the questions are from the people who make this show financially possible on patreon and i'm just going to keep doing these episodes until we get done with those questions which hopefully is only going to be another couple parts my aspiration would be to get them all done this week but let's have a brief fireside chat about ask science mike and what's going on um a few years ago i was at a conference on creativity led by a man named rob bell if you're not really into christian culture you may not know that rob is a best-selling author and former pastor and that i attended his conference as an atheist and uh the story of me kind of rediscovering god in my life became my book finding god in the waves but something else happened at that conference with rob and that something else is i got to hear rob's approach to creativity and to work and i really listened in that two days uh that conference and uh rob had one thing many things but one thing in particular that stood out to me and rob said that you can't say uh yes to something or you can't say no to anything until you said yes to something meaning that you can't stop filling your life with things that aren't related to your life's mission if you don't have a life's mission if you don't have a central thing you are making your life be about well as i rediscovered god and as i rediscovered um science uh and that many people had trouble making those things uh interact i decided the thing i would say yes to would be helping people make peace between their faith and a modern scientific worldview that's the thing i would say yes to and i did it i went all in and uh boy was it a mess at first i took my blog which was largely about reviewing technology products and talking about technology and switched it overnight into discussing things about spirituality which means i lost my entire audience i got into a lot of conflict with people in my life who were conservative christians and didn't like where i was going and were frankly deeply concerned that uh this new faith of mine was no faith at all and but it's okay i had said yes to something so i said no to all those things that distracted me or prevented me from doing this calling in my life and you know because you listened to the program that ended up having me release a best-selling book that led me to becoming a full-time author and a full-time podcaster both through ask science mike and through the liturgist podcast and also traveling a lot because i get invited to speak at churches and colleges and conferences and all kinds of places and man i'm having the time of my life but something strange happened once i said yes to something and started saying no to pretty much everything else uh the work took off tens of thousands of people listen to this podcast every week millions listen to the liturgist podcast every month those are big numbers and the amount of work required to keep material coming to your eyeballs and your ears and stages is considerable so as the liturgist podcast has grown as since the science mic thing has grown i've been working really hard at tooling up and creating new opportunities more books more ways of interacting with you to the point that my work gets in the way of my work so i go on tour then i come back and all the work i've stacked up about ongoing projects has to get done and then the thing that started everything for me the liturgist podcast and ask science mike we end up rushing to try to get done so it's just been a crazy season in my life and i wanted you to know why the podcast has become a little irregular this fall it's not because i don't love ask science mike it's not because i don't look forward to answering your questions i do it's because my genuine desire to serve all of you and to help all of you and to create a space for all of you is almost more than a full-time job at this point so what have i been so busy doing well you'll know soon enough because if you're on my email list you'll hear it and i'll announce it on this program we're not quite ready to talk about it but what i've been doing is getting ready to have more stuff available for you in 2018 and 2019 that i have so far more more types of media more media platforms more ways to engage and hopefully to reach more people as well so that's why we're just going to roll with the rest of this patron episode then i'm going to try to get things back on track with normal episodes of ask science mike and i'll also be honest if you listen to the program you probably are aware i love the live shows man i love the live episodes they're my favorite by far and sometimes it's hard for me to get back in the studio alone and make the show because i'll start recording it and i'll get it really far into an episode and i can just hear it it sounds flat it sounds boring and a lot of times i'll start over on those episodes so it part of it is like my post tour uh you know come down as well getting back to normal getting back in the routine uh so that i've rambled for almost you know eight minutes now um but i just i don't know i like to i like our relationship i have a lot of friends who do public work and their audiences and their communities treat them like celebrities and when i see all of you on the road and when you send me your messages in email and on social media it just feels like more like we're a community and that i'm just hosting something that we're all a part of so i like to be honest about what's going on to keep that relationship um authentic and vulnerable so with that what do you say let's answer some questions from my patrons [Music] this week's first question comes from joe who says hey mike i wonder what your thoughts were on the recent headlines that address how much matter and antimatter shouldn't be in equal amounts since by our current scientific understanding they'd wipe each other out yet even our most up-to-date tests find that they are exactly in equal measure in our solar system and beyond as far as we've been able to measure therefore we slash any matter at all defy explanation by existing at all okay joe let's talk a little bit about matter antimatter yeah so the theory and cosmological models of the creation of our universe into its current state from a singularity involve roughly or exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter but if that was the case matter and antimatter annihilate when they collide they destroy each other completely converting into energy and that's an issue because that means right after the big bang when matter was created and antimatter was created there should be nothing left and yet there is something so there are different cosmological theories about why there was a little bit more matter than antimatter and that remainder is what created all the matter in the universe now when you talk about recent headlines i'm not familiar with any recent headlines that say that there's roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter in our solar system there is not our solar system is overwhelmingly composed of matter for the aforementioned tendency for uh matter and antimatter to annihilate each other i did see something earlier i think in november or october uh that we're getting uh more positrons uh colliding with the earth's atmosphere than we would expect normally uh positrons are electrons with a positive charge they're antimatter electrons and we don't have uh and forgive me since this is a patron episode i haven't pre-researched answers to the questions this is off the top of my head but um there are some prevailing theories about why we're seeing so many positrons but nothing concrete nothing certain i think one theory involved pulsars uh basically creating positrons and scattering them in the cosmos now positrons are very small this has an electron space is very big and very empty so it is certainly possible for some positrons to stream through space and make it to the earth and a positron electron interaction annihilation isn't a terribly huge amount of energy so it's not going to blow up planets or anything like that um but yeah we don't know exactly this is the thing in physics um we have really well developed models for how the universe came to be but they all have problems they all have things gaps in their explanation and in their predictive power and why there is matter instead of no matter at all is an unsolved mystery in science but i do want to say unless i am missing something very obvious which is possible there's not that much antimatter in our solar system and if they're equal amounts of matter and antimatter there would be no solar system at all [Music] nathan asks favorite mathematical or scientific paradox question mark for me anything to do with infinity melts my mind in satisfying ways for example the banach tarsky paradox gosh i've never thought about my favorite paradoxes the monoktarsky is an interesting paradox that seems to indicate that using clever mathematics you could make two identical copies of one sphere with no additional materials and again it's because there's an infinite number of points on the surface of a sphere is the root of why that paradox presents itself um for more information there's a great vsauce episode i remember watching on that paradox i don't know that i have a favorite mathematical or scientific paradox i know that in linguistic paradoxes like the following statement is true the preceding statement is false those are not uh paradoxes that stem from the nature of reality but instead the gaps in our ability to describe reality using language and i suspect that mathematical paradoxes are similar they stem from the way that our scientific and mathematical models don't fully represent reality so they're super fun thought experiments but i don't know that i could name a favorite joe says is there a science regarding the benefits if any of resting one day out of every seven um joe i'm not familiar with any research that points to one day out of seven as being particularly useful however there is copious research that demonstrates that we have health benefits and mental benefits and even benefits to our creativity from regular periods of rest and and us our culture which is very productivity focused um tends to especially in america discount the importance of rest so know nothing specifically about a sabbath that i know of but certainly lots of research supporting the importance of rest [Music] mike asks i'm interested in your thoughts on how we should handle gender dysphoria with children while i accept that transitioning can be tremendously valuable and freeing for those who struggle with gender dysphoria my concern is that children and teens may not yet be at a maturity level that would allow them to make such a major life impacting decision i'm especially concerned that advocates and supporters of the transgender community would push for children to transition more quickly even if this conflicts with the parents well-meaning wishes for a child to wait until they have reached a greater level of maturity mike i do not believe there is a correct answer to this question not like a single correct answer we need to learn more about uh trans people we need to learn more about the science behind why some people identify as different genders and when that's temporary and when that's permanent i can understand that for a trans person transitioning is a lot easier before puberty um but i i certainly could understand that there's a concern that if children start frequently transitioning before puberty they may perhaps regret that now you're placing a lot of um potential stress if people are deciding what gender they're going to be before puberty and and sometimes making the wrong decision i don't know what the right strategy or approach there is other than a case-by-case basis in conjunction with mental health professionals and medical doctors to make those determinations and certainly our mental health professionals and our medical doctors today probably don't know enough about trans folks to make that determination a whole lot better than the child or the parents do so this is this is an incredibly complex issue an issue that creates a tremendous amount of human suffering um so i don't know all i know is that when people make that decision i support them [Music] jeremy asks what's going on in our brain slash body when we play video games that allow us to play to go longer periods of time without sleep i can be extremely tired all day possibly from playing video games all night then jump on league of legends and play until late into the night thank you for the the profound impact you've had on my life i hope one day to tell you in person that's very kind thank you jeremy um what's going on in our brains stimulation lots of stimulus bright lights that tell your brain that it's time to be awake lots of a dopamine craving followed by rewards uh modern video games are designed to be addicting to encourage deeper play cycles and so your brain's kind of hooked on that stimulation and over stimulation really and so it leads you to a pattern where you'd rather be sleepy during the day than miss out on this activity as someone who loves gaming i would encourage you to put some strict time boundaries on the amount of gaming you have per day especially if you're experiencing anxiety depression or if it's impacting your ability to make a living games today are not like the games that i grew up with they are engineered to create compulsions and even perhaps to create addictions so watch out uh there's a reason you'll stay up all night and that reason is stimulation [Music] chris asks understanding that science depends on a certain confidence predictability to make truth claims about the nature of reality how do we account for the unpredictable or unreplicatable circumstances that can be deemed miraculous without attributing them to mysticism or the supernatural how can science give credit to something that may well happen with limited occurrence and limited observability okay science doesn't really make truth claims science is a tool for assigning confidence in a belief we're in more evidence either through experiment or through observation then allows us to increase or decrease confidence in an idea so what does science do with things that cannot be repeated it looks at the aftermath we can't repeat the big bang but we can look at the aftermath we can't look at evolution or repeat evolution but we can look at what evolution leaves behind and in doing so learn about the world so when we talk about things that are unreplicatable and unobservable in science we just don't talk about them at all we have no reason to accept them as fact to place confidence in those beliefs or really to investigate them further um if miracles not only uh happen occasionally but don't leave behind any evidence of the event as far as science is concerned uh they're they're a non-thing um so you know if we're talking about healing for example even if we're not there for the healing if we have a medical record of someone before and after uh a healing event well gosh that would be something that we could measure and observe and build theories around uh it just so happens that that seems to be a very uncommon occurrence that we have medical records documenting the before and after state of a miracle and so it remains something more linked to spirituality and mythology [Music] matt asks let's say you put richard rohr rob bell and sam harris around the table for an hour what would that conversation sound like sam harris openly opposes religious fundamentalism but i've always been curious how he would respond to richard and to rob thanks for all you do uh well matt first of all that sounds like a fascinating conversation that would be very male focused so i'd love to add women to that mix if such an arrangement was going to happen uh but gosh i don't know i don't know i think uh sam would probably find rob frustratingly vague in some ways and richard rohr as well but with his experience with non-religious meditation perhaps he would understand that that rob and richard often use metaphor and imagery to evoke something that is difficult or impossible to articulate precisely i don't know exactly how that conversation would go but i'd love to hear it as much as you would [Music] rebecca says hi mike i'm an anxiety laden human being type person i have an actual diagnosis of general anxiety disorder not just an internet diagnosis from a buzzfeed quiz and i have ptsd or so says my therapist i take pharmaceuticals for anxiety as well i talk very openly about it as transparency about my difficulty functioning brain helps me navigate the world i'd rather people just know i'm not always fully capable of regular life then disappoint them for simply being me what do you suppose is the best way to respond or not when people completely discount my reality way more than half of the time probably close to nine times out of ten my frankness is met with oh you're just fine or yeah i get nervous too or some other dismissive statement i usually follow up with no i'm actually crazy but that's probably not the best way to explain mental illness uh what do you suppose mike thanks so much for the opportunity to ask uh i would agree with your suspicion that calling yourself crazy is is probably not the best approach because we don't want to reinforce uh popular tropes about mental illness and crazy that that word so often used to dismiss people simply for having feelings or to marginalize and ignore the needs of people with genuine mental health disorders or needs in terms of how to deal with people's discomfort maybe society's not ready for that to be an opening statement so save that for closer relationships perhaps or if you're called to that kind of advocacy understand that some people um aren't ready to engage at that level uh with mental health issues because why there's no simple action answers to someone suffering from generalized anxiety disorder on an ongoing basis some people have developed empathy enough to simply sit with you and be present and to listen and to acknowledge uh but that's i think that's that's beyond most people's abilities today or maybe keep it attached to specific events or contexts and then with when people are dismissive uh maybe those aren't people you invite to a deeper level into your life uh or if they say oh you're just fine or yeah i get nervous too you could open them up with a little bit of reflection or empathy back say no i understand that uh you're doing your best to acknowledge my situation but what i'm talking about is actually much more profound than being nervous uh or no i'm not actually just fine this is actually a serious problem that i deal with and and just open that that door that no you need to take another look you need to be more empathetic and some people may respond to that invitation others others may not we have a strange relationship with mental illness and mental health in our culture and unfortunately you're on the receiving end of that problem [Music] mandy asks i really enjoyed the names episode of the liturgist podcasts names and naming have always seemed important to me both in the bible and in our culture if you could change your name conveniently and without social repercussions what name would you choose and why bonus question you are 11 years old and the sorting hat is placed upon your head into which hogwarts house are you sorted oh gosh i've never ever ever thought about what name i would have if uh i didn't have my name so i have no idea sorting hat i never can know uh if i'm a ravenclaw uh or a hufflepuff because um intellectual curiosity and loyalty and friendship are about equally important to me asks what research has been done to understand the placebo effect and how it might work and do you think this could explain apparent answers to prayer and why many more healings are reported when praying for people in countries where people are less skeptical of supernatural intervention uh absolutely i think that the placebo effect could help explain many people's answered prayer in response to issues involving pain or health the placebo effect is real and documented and quite potent actually i'm not aware of any single comprehensive theory in science today about what causes the placebo effect i think it is something a little beyond our ability to study and measure in the brain today so like you i'd love to know how the placebo effect works [Music] steven and samantha asks first of all love what you're doing keep it up i was wondering if you could explain the human compulsion to figure things out basically why do we seem to have the instinct that's more or less driven us to have great things like science but also frustrates us when we can't explain or understand things is this specific to humans or do other animals have this drive too oh that's a fun twist on the question uh basically we have a small patch of tissue about as thick as a tortilla behind our foreheads and above the orbit of our eye called the orbito frontal cortex and your orbital frontal cortex loves to puzzle about the world it loves to predict the future it works in conjunction with other parts of your brain to build a map of reality and we have a a bias towards feeling certain about our world view so we like to feel like we have things figured out and in fact we like that so much sometimes if uh evidence points to the contrary that perhaps we don't have things figured out all that well we'll kind of ignore that information to stay comfortable and feel like we understand the world and therefore have some degree of control over it um and that's that's neurological in origin our orbital frontal cortex creates this craving for certainty at least as we understand the brain today in neuroscience in terms of other animals you know gosh i don't know enough about other intelligent species to understand the degree to which they you know have to solve puzzles um it's really tough since our our species is uniquely oriented toward language um i have a book called other minds that i'm getting ready to read and another one that says are we smart enough to know how smart animals are i suspect both those books may help me answer this question better but today no gosh i don't know about other animals in a need for certainty but in homo sapiens it comes from a highly developed prefrontal cortex and orbito frontal cortex [Music] todd says there was a recent vox article about how self-control is functionally an illusion on a broad scale willpower doesn't actually help us develop a habit of not doing negative things as much as replacing it with an alternate alternate positive habit that we like that's true i haven't read that article todd but that is true back to your question but our tendency proceeding from our evolutionary development is to focus on the negative survival and control and in for instance church settings we can spiritualize this attachment process because the negative core value feels more real and valid will we have to evolve further before we are capable of forming communities that can center on positive focus new creation instead of attachment and then in there but i assume you mean attachment to our fears now i i think you can form community uh based on positive things i think we're doing that with the liturgists but i think that's because people reach the end of a road where their fear-based community completely falls apart on them and then out of desperation that's what richard rohr kind of calls that second half of life um movement uh you almost have to have a fundamentalism so you can break it but once you do i i still get afraid sometimes but my behaviors are much less fear driven than they've ever been [Music] so i think personal development not species evolution can help us reach that point where we rally around points of positive belief and positive action as opposed to rallying together from a fearful outside world in terms of the habit stuff though that's that's totally true uh willpower is a very finite resource in the brain not effective in the long term and replacing bad habits is much much much easier than just eliminating the habit itself on its own which is actually something i talk about a lot in my next book [Music] okay emily says uh looking at the other comments this one may seem out of place but whatever this is something that i've wondered about on occasion do men sorry do men actually clog the toilet more than women i hear a lot of antidotes about women who never owned a toilet plunger until they got married started living with a man but is there any science behind that or is it a load of [ \_\_ ] pun intended oh well done that is a fun and fantastic question uh yeah actually there are anatomical differences uh in men and women's gastrointestinal tracts they uh for obvious reasons if you think about it women have wider hips and extra organs uh in the form of their reproductive organs that force our intestinal tracts to take a different route through the body so women's colons are lower than men's and a little bit longer and then men's abdominal walls are uh more firm um and so they can push food through the gi tract more effectively they're more they're more yeah firms probably a good word uh this is his body composition so that has been shown to cause men to have a little bit more regular bowel movements and also makes women more prone to bloating in terms of how much the toilet gets clogged i don't have a clue there but i do know that men and women poop differently timothy says is learning to play musical instruments akin to learning a foreign language if so how and in what way uh no i would not imagine that they are all that similar timothy um a musical instrument uh is going to use a different part of the brain they're both going to occur in the temporal lobes one in the left the other more in the right there's a lot more motor function involved in learning a language that's not in or excuse me what a function involved in playing an instrument that is not involved at all in learning to play a language play a language i am mixed up by your question timothy learning a foreign language uh so no i'd imagine they're pretty dissimilar they both involve a lot of cortical activity a lot of activity in the neocortex you having to concentrate really hard when you're learning a new language and learning to play a new instrument so in that way they are very similar anything new that's challenging is going to be similar in that way though but i do see where the theme of the question is you can feel very tired and exhausted both trying to learn to play a new instrument and learn a new language and that has to do with our brain structure and the parts of our brain that are responsible for learning and of course foreign languages and musical instruments are both best learned through practice and repetition so no matter where they're originating specifically in the brain roughly you're moving from a lot of neocortex activity and then into deeper parts of the brain as you solidify pathways for that new activity [Music] mike asks are you at all familiar with the buddhist idea of emptiness or no independent self as expressed in for example the heart sutra and if so do you see it similarly to the insights of christian mystics including and i admit this might be a bit of a stretch the doctrine of the trinity um i'm familiar with the no independent self idea um in buddhist teaching kind of buddhism in the west we tend to oversimplify there's no single buddhism there are multiple schools of buddhist thought um and we tend to like just look at this kind of pan buddhism as popularized by folks like rom das and alan watts and i'm as guilty of that as anyone i do see some some profound similarities in some structures of buddhist thought and uh and christian theology um i think the the buddhist brahman and the christian ground of being seem uh to have kind of a similar approach to describing ultimate reality whatever that means in terms of attaching the heart sutra to the trinity um i i guess i just don't have any specific thoughts there they're just they're different very very different metaphors although both involve humanity trying to relate to the mystery of the divine marissa asks any advice for feeling frustrated when people thank god for your safety during a hurricane when you know others were not so blessed aka lucky slash privileged and skeptic speak i think it's okay to feel frustrated uh at people expressing thanks to god in difficult circumstances like that because you have seen things another way i think it's fine i think obviously uh offer them a little grace that's their way of expressing gratitude that they are safe and they are okay uh perhaps one thing you could do is say you know if it's important to you um now now that we're safe and i'm so glad you're safe uh how how is god leading us to address the situation of those who were not so fortunate and that orientation towards action uh may help you not only get to know the person better but help both of you be more effective in response to a natural disaster [Music] eric asks one trend i have become more aware of late lately more frequently online but sometimes in person is people of a certain privilege status i.e mostly white cisgendered males more often than not of conservative or libertarian leanings attempting to close off discussions about policies or social issues with charges of others often those of a less privileged station not being rational ultimately that which is held to prove the former's position or that the facts don't care about their feelings i know you've mentioned before the use of the enlightenment thought and certain ideas about rationality to keep marginalized people marginalized but what are effective measures if any to continue such conversations further on than this anecdotes and other stories do not seem to impress those claiming the side of rationality in their search for objectivity but on the other hand we're trying to engage with them on what data they use simply help perpetuate their current tendencies of fetishizing rationality thank you for all you do we are way over invested in online communication uh as a means of changing people's minds about issues of importance discussions with friends families or strangers online is simply not a very effective way to educate people it's just not i mean when we talk in person we see people's reactions we catch their body language and even in a quote-unquote rational discussion that helps facilitate a real exchange of information online we miss that and we just turn people into avatars and we get in a war about who's right and who's wrong and uh i'm over it so what do i do online i talk to sympathetic ears i help people rally around community i help create talking points for people to then go out and disseminate in their actual communities in flesh and blood because that is where the work is when people try to debate me online i take a hard pass i'm out it doesn't mean i'm not fantastic at debating people online on the occasion i do it yes i can absolutely throw down i'm witty i'm clever uh i i have a lot of facts in my corner to cite uh sure um but no it's a waste of time it's a lot of effort for no reward the way to talk about these things is in person in my opinion um and you'll find that all this bluster about rationality for example as a conservative person asks them their thoughts on client climate change when they say they don't accept climate change say well facts don't care about your feelings the science is real right and now now you've got in a state where you're both feeling competitive and and clever and and no one's learning oh it just kills me so i listen to people in person and i ask them questions and i tell them stories and i talk to them about asking them how to solve problems i ask them how to solve problems and then i ask more questions where there's weakness in their thinking and i make sure at all times they never feel like we're in a debate or a fight and uh it's slow hard work and it's important um so i would say don't engage those people online um and i'm polite about it hey look i just i don't see either of us learning in this interaction it seems like you know we're just demonstrating our intellectual prowess or whatever and i'm just not interested what i'm interested in is solving the problems that we face a society and securing everyone's access to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and uh if we don't agree on that then you know then we're definitely wasting time with this conversation [Music] cameron says hi mike how can we as humans talk about humane treatment of a.i when we have yet to fully grasp the concept of treating other humans humanely i tend to be optimistic about the future but generally struggle with what seems to be the inevitability of a.i outpacing humanity and what it will mean when we are no longer on top curious what you think about this thanks for your time cameron i'm not actually like an ai inevitable singularity person i'm not sure that computers are going to get faster at the rate that people think they will because of moore's law that's something that has been true for several years ai is is doing some very impressive things in machine learning and specific application but not in generalized intelligence and if ai does become more intelligent than us we won't have to debate what ethical treatment of ai means ai will debate what ethical treatment of us looks like [Music] one point you make about we don't treat other humans humanely i do worry that we will architect nai our own sense of cruelty and our own sense of selfish ambition and if we attach that to an incredible digital intelligence that's very frightening indeed [Music] okay and i think that'll do it for today's episode uh let's do another one tomorrow part 4 of the patron show talk to you soon