ASM176 Selection Strategies, Teleportation, and Libido During Grief

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selection strategies teleportation and libido during grief all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mccarthy the internet calls me science mike just because i love science this is a show that is not about my expertise but about taking questions without judgment and this week all those questions come from my patrons so it's a patron special and what do you say let's get it started [Applause] may's gonna be a big month uh really excited about may because i've got three events happening with the liturgists i'd love to see you at if you're in the neighborhood may 10th i'll be in boulder colorado that is and may 11th i'll be in portland oregon both of those are for our new tour uh called tabs and wafers that is about how to create a healthy spirituality in a post-church post-christian post-deconstruction post-post-post context it's something we've been asked to do a lot and we're really excited to try this for the first time ever in boulder and portland tickets are still available and tickets are selling well so i think you'll see us announce more dates in the near future all over the country so we're going to bring tabs and wafers near you whether it's called tabs and wafers or not i don't know it seems like a lot of people don't really get the title so there may be a rebrand but the events are definitely happening also we've had a couple of literally a couple of cancellations for kin that's our liturgist men's retreat that's led by me michael gunger and hillary mcbride it's happening in ohio it's happening this may and now we do have not one but two spots available so if you wanted to join me hillary michael and 30 other people i guess 29 other people if you're one of them uh in ohio this may to kind of figure out what it means to be a healthy man in 2019 gosh we'd love to see it we've done several kins and they are really life-changing they have changed my life i have learned things about myself and grown as a person in ways that i could have never anticipated and i'm really excited to do another kin event this may so that's what's happening in may more dates coming soon you can learn about all of these by going to ask sciencemike.com and clicking on that events button in the menu [Music] our first question this week came from paul and he said you've expressed belief in a god that is the ground of all being einstein's god a reductionist left hemisphere god you've also expressed belief in a god of mysticism and subjective experience a god of feeling and intuition a holistic right hemisphere god do you ever feel the need to bridge the gap between these two gods can you say they are the same or do we need a god for each cerebral hemisphere so paul is talking about um i guess my opus the thing i'm i'm most known for uh is is my approach to a spirituality that i find to be compatible with the understanding of the world we find through the sciences but still leaves room and openness for spiritual experiences and indeed for encounters with god and participation in great religious traditions like christianity or islam or judaism and um yeah i guess that final question do you ever feel a need to quote bridge the gap unquote between these two gods i don't feel any need to bridge a perceived gap at all that's nothing i i really think about anymore i don't try to reconcile these things because i don't see them as being in conflict here's how that works whenever i think about physical reality you know this thing we call the universe i am an empiricist what's an empiricist an empiricist is someone who places confidence in their beliefs in proportion to the amount of evidence they have to support that belief so i'm highly confident that 2 plus 2 equals 4 because i can run any number of experiments and prove that to be the case i can take i've got little containers of mints here and i have four of them right so i can take two containers of mints over here and then i can take two containers over here and i can push them together and i can count one two three four mint containers so i have a lot of confidence no matter how many experiments i run and i can run experiments myself i can verify that two plus two equals four okay so i have a lot of confidence in that belief i have a lot of confidence that uh the earth's climate is changing and that human actions are playing a role even a significant role in that climate change but i can't test those things myself i can review the evidence that scientists have found and i can i can review how the scientific process works and my understanding of it and be confident in that belief but i am not as confident that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it as i am that two plus two equals four although i still have a very high degree of confidence that climate change is happening so what happens to me when i view the world empirically that takes me to another way of viewing the world called materialism and in materialism material things are what compose our reality which freaks a lot of religious people out but i just haven't seen evidence of non-material components of reality i've never seen research or studies or observations that validate the idea that there are things in our universe that are non-material right the universe when examined behaves quite consistently even at the quantum realm so people get hung up on the idea that i'm a materialist because materialism is so often associated with really dogmatic antitheism people who are against any ideas about god especially a personal god and i'll be honest i am not a theist although i am a christian i don't believe in in god as some being some sky man or even sky person that is not my understanding of god at all uh but i i can get behind some ideas of god which is why i am not an atheist and certainly not an antitheist uh the way einstein thought about god as the beautiful elegance that creates the order in the cosmos or in fact is the order in our cosmos well that seems like a perfectly plausible god a god that you can even demonstrate exists with a high degree of certainty right because of the way i view god through the lens of empiricism and materialism many of my atheist friends and uh some of the atheists who aren't fans of me online uh accuse me of using sentimental language for physics and and in doing so confuse religious people about who i really am and that that really doesn't bother me a bit uh that's probably this is true to some degree i do use very sentimental language for physics and cosmology um but if you you know if you really look at what i believe about how the universe operates i think you'd find most most atheists are quite comfortable with my beliefs but i am a christian i'm legitimately a christian and christianity is very important to me but i'm a mystic when i think about spirituality i am a mystic and like all mystics i don't believe that god can be described in language god can only be experienced right i think that trying to tell someone about god or describe god is like trying to describe a color to someone who has never seen it if i were to try to describe to you a color you had never seen there's no language i could use because when i use the word green i talk about leaves right i talk about i don't know green cards something else green a pool table whatever and because you've seen those things we can arrive at what green is because we're using language to describe a shared experience but without that shared experience the language can't evoke that right so if you'd never seen a a skyscraper but you'd seen a four-story building i could make you picture a skyscraper using language i could say well think about that four-story building and imagine it just keeps going up and up and up into the sky as high almost as a mountain then you would understand what a skyscraper was even though you'd never seen one but i cannot use that kind of extended metaphor to help you understand and experience a color that you've never seen so it is with god so it is with the divine i've experienced god but i can't describe that experience in any satisfactory way to another person so i prefer to just sit with my experiences with god now i'm a materialist so if i look at possible explanations for my experiences with god i think it's overwhelmingly likely that those experiences originate in my brain and so what that's where love originates too that's where beauty originates that's where happiness originates that's where friendship originates that's where acts of solidarity that improve human life originate in our brains so if god is a way that brains understand the world i'm fine with that i have a hope that god is more than that but my confidence and that belief is nowhere near my confidence that two plus two equals four so i don't believe these ways of viewing the world by my contemplative mystical spirituality and my empirical materialist view of the cosmos because my empiricism in fact tells me our knowledge of the world is incomplete and possibly may always be and that doesn't mean that i accept ideas without evidence in the absence of data i am not a god of the gaps person god is not that which science has not explained yet it means i hold an open posture i don't mind considering ideas people have about the universe that are unknown to the sciences considering contemplating holding with an open hand more than that we already know via science that spirituality can be healthy and enjoyable a beautiful part of the human experience and so i choose to participate it doesn't mean that uh i think someone is going to hell if they don't believe in my particular uh story about what the resurrection of jesus means or even if they believe jesus was resurrected at all i totally understand and in fact agree that it's most likely empirically that jesus did not but i lean into that story because it opens it opens something in me it opens something in me but i don't let my embrace of a biblical narrative um i don't let it lead me to reject important understandings in science like the way cosmology describes the development of the universe or indeed what science tells us about human activity driving great peril in our ecology today drive some people crazy i know but it makes me a very happy person it leads me to love others and care for them deeply and uh gosh what more do i want out of a world view now if you want to dig deeper into this and this has already been a very long answer to a question uh but my first book finding god in the waves is pretty much all about this this tension between science and spirituality and my attempts to solve that in my own life in ways that hopefully are helpful guideposts for other people on the same journey i'll have a link to where you can learn more about the book in the show notes this week on asksciencemike.com of course if you're trying to google this just google ask sciencemic episode 176 and uh you'll get right there [Music] our next question came from lucy and she asks hey mike i have a question for you i'd love to know if there is a physiological link between grief and an increased sex drive i can see that sex can be a temporary escape from pain or a release of tension and that the loneliness of grief could prompt a desire to connect physically with someone else but is there anything science can shed light on to further explain and increase sex drive at times of significant pain and loss and whether it is a coping mechanism or a way of the body seeking to heal it seems incongruous in part asking for a friend a huge love to you come back to london soon okay lucy uh good to hear from you lucy and i met at the liturgist gathering in london and if you're wondering if you come to literature's events do i remember you later yes i do i think about all of you all the time uh so let's start with the most important disclaimer for this question i am not a therapist i'm just not a therapist so i've read a lot of stuff and uh i've tried to ground my response here in a way that a therapist who's listening would say i haven't overstepped any bound but i always want to remind people that i am not a therapist as i research this question two things are really normal during the grieving process one is an increase in libido and two is a decrease in libido of course in libido here we are talking about uh your propensity to desire sex um so during the grieving process some people find their libido increases and other people find their libido decreases and both are normal and healthy and just fine don't worry about a decrease or increase in libido if you are grieving there is no wrong way to grieve there is no time frame there is no expectation of a cycle or a movement or any of the things we talk about there are stages of grief but when we understand those to be linear and sequential we do our self a disservice grief moves in a cycle some people wake up one day and just feel fine others don't and neither is right or wrong and your grieving process may be different every time you grieve and there's nothing wrong with that what i'm saying is don't judge yourself regarding any sexual desires or changes in libido while grieving it's just part of the process is it a coping mechanism yes is it a way for the body seeking to heal yes coping mechanisms aren't bad coping mechanisms can become maladaptive but they are not bad and they are not necessarily maladaptive right if i have lost someone i care about and i feel better eating cake there's nothing wrong with that unless i start eating cake constantly to a degree that it impairs my quality of living well sex would be the same way there's nothing wrong with sex being a part of your grieving process as long as you are having sex in a way that doesn't negatively impact your quality of life right so if you became very uh if you're having a lot of unprotected sex with multiple partners you don't know well well that's maladaptive right that we'd be concerned there about how this coping mechanism was having potential health consequences right but that's not even a judgment of the coping mechanism itself simply responding to the fact that we need to have a holistic view of our physical and psychological health and of course sex makes a great coping mechanism because sex can make you feel something even feel powerful vibrant sensation and feeling during the numbness of situational depression often when we grieve we stop really feeling anything at all the world's colors fade and sex turns the saturation on our tv set back up right sex can also help us cope with the separation anxiety that comes from loss feeling connected to someone in response to a connection that you can't feel anymore so yes there is a known link between the grieving process and an increased sex drive just as there is an old link between grief and a decreased sex drive and both are normal and healthy and acceptable on the show notes here if you'd like to read a little bit more i've got a link to an article on psychology today called five things they don't tell you about grief and i'd encourage you to check that out because if there's anything i know about grief in western society it's that we often have unrealistic expectations associated with it [Music] billy waters asks can you talk about quantum teleportation what has been demonstrated and what is theoretical science fiction man i love a good science question uh and great news quantum teleportation is absolutely real and is not in any way science fiction at least not anymore scientists have already teleported particles over really impressive distances including into orbit and back down to the earth's surface so that's kind of cool i mean we're doing uh quantum teleportation and i mean we the human species at distances of thousands of miles that's really cool um but there's probably an important thing to clarify here when we talk about quantum teleportation because quantum teleportation does not involve physically teleporting a particle at all so if you're teleporting you know an electron or a photon or a quark or any other quantum particle you have a particle a and at the end of the teleportation particle a is is still where it started so oh my gosh how do we teleport something without moving it and and uh moving it's a rough term for something happening at the quantum level but i'm doing my best to keep this accessible uh what we do instead is teleport or transport the state of one particle to another particle okay so if you had electron a here in los angeles and it had a particular state associated with it and then i used quantum teleportation to teleport the state of that particle to photon b which is in new york city that is exactly the same as if i were to actually teleport the particle because all electrons are identical all photons are identical save their you know individual state so for example you can have a state on a cork called a spin uh so if you give two quarks the same spin those quarks are completely identical so it's not cheating to teleport the state of a particle instead of a particle itself the the end result is exactly the same it'd be just like if you had a magical relativity defying teleportation device that moved actual particles themselves you'd get the same result as you do by teleporting the state of a subatomic particle so that's how quantum teleportation works that's what's real what's real is that we can teleport subatomic particles by teleporting their state across great distances today theoretically and now we move into what is currently sci-fi that could scale up to whole atoms or even whole molecules or even larger organizations of matter and that would be cool and there's great promise there but some big unanswered questions like what happens to the original if you could teleport an entire person it's it's possible you'd have to like destroy the original person um what does that mean for that person is that is that murder you know that's uh that's a question we may face one day i don't know i don't know if we'll ever be able to do teleportation on that scale there's a lot of problems to solve so today what's been demonstrated is quantum teleportation at pretty impressive distances and what is science fiction anything else [Laughter] and if you'd like to dig more into that check out a link i've got in the show notes called quantum teleportation is real but it's not what you think [Music] our next question came from allison and it reads how do you interact with friends or family members who are conservative fundamentalists and are lovingly concerned that you are sinning by reading the bible differently than they do it's frustrating when they continue to want to discuss hot-button topics like homosexuality never as a method of understanding my perspective but instead with the purpose of changing my mind and helping me understand the truth alison i imagine that many people listening to this podcast have this question and uh are very familiar with this situation um and i i base that on a little more than intuition this is something that people frequently say to me and uh the i don't know i don't know what to call it the line we do after the event for people to talk to me that is kind of weird it's weird because it it feels strange to me that people wait in a line to see me but um i do enjoy the conversations and this question comes up all the time how do you deal with you know fundamentalist friends and family uh you know trying to correct your thinking or rebuke you with the bible or all those things that happen by the way if you're listening and you are a very conservative religious person understand that your efforts are not terribly effective the person you're trying to win over uh comes to my events and asks me how to cope with you they aren't persuaded um so here's kind of been my approach i in recent years have learned to set boundaries on relationships that allow me to be a healthy person that means for me i'm always open to conversation i'm always willing to discuss how i've arrived at my positions and i'm always willing to listen to thoughtful non-judgmental presentations of another's viewpoint always but i don't do trojan horse conversations over coffee anymore i don't let someone under false pretenses say we need to connect or uh they miss me or um or that they'd like to hear my understanding of something and then arrive for an ambush where there's a bible on the table and this happened too many times i won't do it anymore if you invite me to lunch and i see a bible on the table and you tell you know you start a screed i guarantee you i'm going to order a cocktail or a beer uh or or politely leave that's probably what i should do i shouldn't be snarky um it's a matter of setting boundaries and for those of us that came from conservative religious traditions setting boundaries is hard that's not something we were taught to do i actually think that's one of the sociological mechanisms that enables fundamentalist religion is the erosion of personal agency and boundary setting so some of us have to catch up uh and make up for lost time in learning how to set boundaries and relationships but there's nothing wrong with you saying the terms by which you will be in relationship with another person just as there's nothing wrong with them saying the terms they require for relationship and maybe sometimes it just doesn't work there are simply a lot of people that i used to be very close to that i don't talk to anymore i don't hold any animosity toward them there's no ill will there's just no reason for us to talk i have some friends who are very close friends and every time we got together the conversation moved to a place where they wanted to talk to me about my approach to the bible or my quote false teachings unquote you know that's not a relationship i'm not your uh prospect i'm not your lost sheep and so for people who could only relate to me in that way i didn't call them anymore and uh when they called me i made it clear that i would not have those conversations anymore and then they stopped calling me and i lost many dozens of very close and dear friends and there was an intense period of grief but now things are a lot better because letting those friendships fade created the room and created the space for me to form new friendships with people who could be in relationship with me and that's not to imply that there's some uniformity of belief on political or religious matters in my friend community now there is not there's a wild diversity in belief systems among my friends now but what all my friends have in common these days is a live and let live non-judgmental posture toward the belief systems of other people and that's what i need in close friendships now and people who are not able to do that i'm not able to be in close relationship with and i've just decided that's who i am now that may not be allison what's right for you so the tough thing is doing the work of learning about yourself of taking care of your mental health and assessing what your needs are in relationship and what best supports you and the ways you're most equipped to support others i know what about me makes me a really great friend and i know what about me makes me a challenging friend and i invest in relationships where that mix works well for me and for the other person life is not a popularity contest i'm not happiest when i have the highest absolute number of friend connections i personally am happiest when i have the most honest vulnerable and supportive relationships even if they are few in number i love hard conversations i have friends who talk to me and call me out on matters of racism and sexism and ableism my life is full of accountability perhaps more full of accountability than it has ever been but that accountability is framed in mutual respect mutual support and non-judgment and those are the boundaries that allow me to thrive [Music] amy had a question it reads like this hi mike i asked this one a couple of thanksgivings ago when you answered all the patreon questions but it was never on the show perhaps it got lost in the patreon comment vortex sorry amy sometimes i do lose track of questions i'm curious how you as a married enneagram 9 maintain your own identity i'm 43 and have never been able to have a romantic relationship in which i didn't lose myself i'm an introverted nine wing one sexual variant neutral good haha so i've shied away from them to maintain a sense of self it seems to me like i might like to have a long-term partnership or marriage someday so i'm curious what steps you take to keep your identity separate from jenny and your daughters i've been in talk therapy done programs attended seminars etc but i tend to keep all interpersonal relationships at arm's length because i feel chaotic and like i can't find myself in the noisy den of other people's presence any advice from your experience would be appreciated peace love and entropy oh gosh i love that sign off it sounds familiar amy let me start by saying that the enneagram is fun and can be helpful but it's unscientific um and and i see that you like me are pretty deep in the enneagram world because you're talking about not only your wing but your subtype and uh i won't unpack all of that right now um because that's just a lot that that would be a whole podcast we are thinking about doing a liturgist podcast on the subtypes so that might happen in the future um mainly pending our friend annie diamond's um calendar availability if we do that episode we'd like her to be on it because she's fun and she's brilliant so uh i'm gonna talk about it like as you requested from my experience and in my experience boy i have a tendency to merge a lot um that's very easy for me to kind of amoeba-like meld into the relational dynamic defined by another person but i've also got this really mean uh non-conformist streak which i understand is pretty common in nines that lets me hold my own space i like to go off and do things on my own in my way if uh i'm walking down the sidewalk with a group of friends i will either walk considerably ahead of or considerably behind the group i'm very likely to strike off in a a completely different direction without informing the group if the group moves in a direction i'm not interested in going i just keep going my way i don't mention anything to anyone because i don't want to change their actions i'm just not interested myself so that has helped me hold my own space it also helps me to have a lot of close deep relationships of significance beyond my marriage i just have you know i don't know maybe 15 or 20 really really close friendships in my life and all that merging in different directions lets me find myself and lets me not be defined just by my relationship to jenny which obviously my relationship with jenny is the most significant relationship in my life and i also don't buy into the notions i once held of marriage you know some of the norms i once thought healthy as an evangelical now seem possessive exploitive and co-dependent so today i view jenny my wife as my partner someone to walk through life with yes my friend yes my lover but a separate person with her own dreams and her own challenges that are not mine to create or to solve my job with jenny is to love her and to support her and she does the same with me as we go about our lives and much of our lives we do together but some things we don't i wonder if perhaps the problem is not with your nineness i wonder if the struggle you're having is the same one i've had working through and in some ways letting go of kind of the dominant narratives about romance and marriage in our culture i don't know a vow to death do us part i own you you own me i don't think people can own people not even in marriage every day i wake up i make a new commitment to jenny that day and just for that day and i found that committing to a person and not an institution has been more rewarding for me more fulfilling and helps me kind of let go of a lot of the marriage assumptions that reinforce patriarchy in our society i think amy if you are happy single be single but i think if you're drawn to romantic relationships maybe you need to spend some time maybe i don't know um examining your assumptions about what romantic relationships are in the first place and figuring out what a relationship would look like for you that allowed you to have your needs fulfilled allowed you to be supportive of another person but also allowed you to maintain your own identity and what do i know i'm a college dropout [Music] okay joe asks our last question this week and his question is why don't organisms with the shortest reproductive cycles rule the world it seems to me that simple organisms with rapid reproduction should evolve more quickly than more complex organisms with longer life spans if that's the case shouldn't those species have a wider range of adaptations to select from uh for suitability for their environments giving them a serious evolutionary advantages over those of us that don't breed like rabbits in other words why isn't mosquitoes ability to dodge evolving faster than my ability to swat them sorry if this is natural selection 101 my christian education sadly excluded that course from its science curriculum joe thank you for asking that question i started this podcast to try to help people who grew up in christianity get a better understanding of science and then all the other stuff happened then people started asking me questions about faith and people started asking me advice questions that i so often don't feel qualified to answer i do answer to honor the question but i i very often feel uncomfortable but your question is why i started this podcast and i hardly get any questions like this and i love them because this isn't an obvious question and understanding it really does help someone understand what evolution is much better and evolution the lens we look through is not an individual animal but the viability of a species the viability of individuals does create the viability of a species but there's multiple strategies to achieve that viability so the first thing i would say is who says the shortest reproductive cycles don't already rule the world my friend bacteria are killing it i mean bacteria are incredibly successful they they occupy more niches in our ecosystems than maybe any other organism and they have really rapid reproductive cycles one of the most intelligent species on the planet homo sapiens us has been in a multi-human generation war with bacteria and bacteria have fared pretty well pretty well indeed and i won't go into all that because that would get us way off topic but bacteria have fast reproductive cycles and they're doing quite well but let's kind of step back and look at literally look at mosquitoes and humans to understand what's at play here and and to do that we've got to talk about r slash k selection theory this is a an idea that kind of became popular in the 1970s it has some limitations so it's not as discussed today but i still think it's instructive for this question and understanding generally how evolution functions so rk selection theory is the idea that there are two major reproductive strategies for different species here's a very simple summary of the two the r strategy is to have lots of offspring that grow quickly and with very little parental intervention and the k strategy is to have fewer offspring that grow slowly but have a lot of support from their parents and grow to be very strong competitors so in an ecological niche that is crowded the k strategy can really help in ecological niches that aren't as crowded the r strategy can be a great strategy for a species to go so in this model a mosquito would be an our selected species mosquitoes spawn thousands of offspring and make no further investment in their survival and humans are boy almost like the ultimate example of a k selected species human mothers have you know one or two infants at a time and then make a 13 to 18 year investment in their development but an adult human is a very strong competitor indeed which means one versus one mosquito versus human the humans gonna win every single time even counting for malaria which is that gets back into the strength of bacteria and our selection uh but if taking the lingerie out of the picture and a human is going to beat a mosquito but there's so many mosquitoes because of their reproductive strategy it's not actually that big a deal if a mosquito gets swatted to the overall mosquito population there there in a given area are likely to be many more mosquitoes than human beings anyone that's ever camped near a swamp knows what i'm talking about the mosquitoes far outnumber humans and the humans simply can't swat enough of them to meaningfully impact their numbers so if for example mosquitoes developed larger brains to try to be more effective at dodging the slaps that humans make they'd be moving more towards a k strategy because they couldn't breed so quickly larger brained animals need more calories and often need more parental supervision to grow so mosquitoes strategy through evolution is to just have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of babies and hopefully enough of them survive to make the next species and they do mosquitoes are incredibly successful as are human beings so both strategies work and have different pros and cons and so evolution uses both and the reason rk selection theory is not as popular as it once was is because so many species use a mix of the two strategies think about trees trees have lots and lots and lots of offspring my gosh my allergies are terrible right now we had actual rain this winter in los angeles and all the plants are busy making more plants out there to the detriment of my allergies but a tree gosh they grow into very strong competitors some of the largest in fact the largest organisms on this planet are trees so a tree is an intense competitor and it's it's ecology with few natural predators if any natural predators i don't think a sequoia a natural predator right that's a big tree most animals can't do a thing to a sequoia once it gets set up so is that our selection or is that k selection well it doesn't really fit either point here is not a defensive rk selection theory but an understanding that that there is no single right way for a species to be successful and evolution therefore tries many different strategies and that's what results in the biofilm on this planet all these different strategies allow life to adapt to a planet that's constantly changing and it takes r and k selected species to roll with those changes [Music] there's another episode of ask science mike in the books i'd like to thank all of you patrons who submitted questions thanks for making this show possible i'd like to thank all of you patrons who didn't submit questions it helps me out a lot thank you if you like ask science mike you've got a buck or five bucks a month uh i'd love to see you on our patreon page just go to asklinxmike.com and click the join me on patreon button to learn more i'd like to thank greg nordin for his tireless work as the producer and sound designer vast science mike and i'd like to thank all of you for listening you know i've seen a lot of new listeners the last few weeks welcome uh and we'll keep this party going so thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music] [Applause]