Uncle David

My uncle David Collis Hewitt passed away recently.  We had known for some time that his death was imminent.  I did not really grieve, however, until just before his casket was sealed.

From my childhood, I remember that he would play board games with us when we visited the family farm.  When I became an adult, he gave me one of his paintings to hang above my desk.  He was a good uncle.

In his last years, the inoperable brain tumor in his frontal lobe had changed his personality.  When I visited him in the nursing home, he seemed to switched between his old persona and a new one.  Each had a different voice.

The funeral service featured a Christian sermon and a Mason death ceremony.  Both had something to say about our mortality.  An Optihumanist memorial service would be quite different.

Inventing Religion

I have been known to joke that if I believed in the supernatural I would become a Mormon because it is a religion that was invented right here in America.  Speaking of Mormons, another joke, not invented by me, is to ask what is the difference between a religion and a cult.  The answer: about a hundred years.

I recently listened to the National Public Radio (NPR) "Hidden Brain" episode Creating God.  The show mentioned that religions frequently require costly rituals, a dedication of time or money, to show commitment.  It reminded me of my own personal efforts to create a made-in-America religion, Optihumanism, in which members can demonstrate their commitment by signing up for cryonics.

Here are some aspects of Optihumanism which give it an evolutionary edge over other memes:

• Democracy and community
• Reality-based knowledge acquisition
• Immortality through children and future medicine

Here is an aspect of Optihumanism which puts it at a disadvantage:

• No absolution

Floating Families

I recently watched "Following Seas" (Amazon Prime, YouTube), a documentary about a family with children that sailed around the world repeatedly back in the 1960s.  It reminded me of the documentary "Surfwise: The Amazing True Odyssey of the Paskowitz Family" (Amazon, YouTube preview).  In both cases, an educated professional drops out of society, meets a mate who admires his alternative lifestyle, and raises children in a traveling home.

Despite the best intentions of both pairs of parents, it is notable that none of the children propagated the lifestyles when they matured.  Whether or not the adult children revered with nostalgia or outright rejected the way they were raised, all chose to bring up the grandchildren in a more conventional setting.  Financial security, educational opportunities, and community relationships appear to have been key factors in their decisions.

In contrast, the Bajau people have successfully raised so many generations on the water that they have become genetically adapted to the lifestyle.  I suspect that the primary key to their success is the fact that the boats of individual family units travel together in a community flotilla.  Multiple documentary videos about these nomadic sea gypsies can be found on YouTube.

A mini-documentary video about a contemporary sailing family is "This Family of 5 Has Been Sailing Around the World for 9 Years" (Amazon Prime, YouTube).  Watching it reminded me that I bought the book co-authored by the mother, Voyaging with Kids: A Guide to Family Life Afloat.  I have started to read it in the hope that I too might someday sail the oceans with my children and grandchildren.

Fertility vs. Happiness

In my previous blog entry, I said I would research the Nordic Model.  The gist of it is that the Scandinavian nations use very high income taxes to provide cradle-to-grave welfare services.  On the whole, this makes their citizens happier than those in most other nations.

I was going to say more about this but it seems less relevant now that I see that populations of these happy nations, plus many others, are dwindling.  Regardless of their other quality of life metrics, it appears that whatever they are doing is unsustainable.  For guidance, we need to examine the policies of those few nations that are both happy and growing.

Click on one of the following images to zoom in on the fertility versus happiness data plots that I created by combining data from Wikipedia.  The first two plots show the same data points but with the axes flipped.  The third is a labeled close-up of the happiest nations with those in decline on the left and those that are thriving on the right.

Heavens

In my Optihumanist Principles, I wrote:

We build heavens for ourselves and our beloved in the here and now.

I think human-made heavens should have all of the good things that the supernaturalists have been promising us.  I see in this list a sort of compressed version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs:

• Immortality and optimal health
• A perfect environment of comfort, beauty, and bounty
• Happiness and satisfaction

Recently I have been listening to science fiction with an immortality theme.  In one story, a man with a terminal illness uploads his mind into a virtual reality multiplayer role playing game.  Another transfers his consciousness from his old body into a much younger genetically enhanced clone.  The personality of a cryonaut is copied multiple times to different computers to control  spaceships.

All of these represent a special kind of mind-body separation which I call substrate-independent dualism.  By this I mean that the physical implementation of our soul is irrelevant so long as the functions are faithfully reproduced.  I tried to represent this in the Optihumanist symbol by putting a gap between the circle representing mind and the rest of the symbol representing body.

Whether described as the Elysian Fields or the Happy Hunting Ground, heaven is usually described as the kind of place where you would want to settle permanently.  I remember hearing one news story where a pastor was reported to have informed his congregation that the temperature in heaven was a perfect seventy degrees Fahrenheit.  My elderly parents have informed me repeatedly when I visit that seventy degrees is too cold.

I imagine that for us to be happy, there must be challenges to overcome.  Certainly there must be goals to achieve and progress to be made for us to maintain long-term satisfaction.  Toward this end, it is said that the immortal Einherjar of Valhalla pair off in combat daily for sport.

Speaking of the Vikings, it appears that the closest thing to heaven on Earth these days is Scandinavia.  Certainly it seems that the residents are the happiest and healthiest in the world today.  I plan to write about the Nordic Model after I do more research.

Index Funds

I have been speaking with my daughter and other young adults about how to invest for retirement. I strongly recommend index funds. In particular, I recommend choosing an index fund based on the S&P 500 or some other measure of the American stock market as a whole.

My father said that if you invest in the stock market, you will get rich when everyone else gets rich. In times of inflation, stock values will automatically ramp up to keep pace. Fixed interest investments such as bonds, however, will require your constant attention.

If corporations respond to growth in the economy by rewarding shareholders rather than giving raises to workers, workers can benefit by becoming shareholders. Be warned, however, that workers who invest their retirement funds into the stock of their own employers risk losing both their income and their retirement simultaneously if the employers suddenly go out of business. Workers are better off investing in the economy as a whole by choosing a diversified index fund.

My father also said that if the stock market collapses, you will become poor when everyone else becomes poor. I would not worry about this because you can ride out the dips if you have no immediate need to withdraw your funds. A diversified collection of stocks held for decades is no riskier than bonds held for the same period.

Once when I spoke in praise of investing in the stock market, my uncle protested that he had lost almost half of his retirement funds due to a stock market dip. I responded that this was because he had not been investing in the stock market over his entire career. In fact, he had invested his retirement funds very conservatively over his lifetime until he decided to move everything over to the stock market just at its peak before a collapse.

Dollar cost averaging is a technique in which you invest a fixed amount in the stock market with every paycheck. This buys you a lot of stock when stocks are undervalued and less when stocks are overvalued. In the long run, this works out in your favor.

When it comes time for retirement, most recommend re-balancing your portfolio to invest some of your income in safer investments. There are a few who say that you should keep it in the market and let it ride. Keep in mind that you will probably live for at least a couple of decades past retirement.

Some people recommend investing in other inflation-proof assets such as real estate. Being a landlord, however, requires more effort than you expect. Even if you hire a company to manage your rental properties for you, you now have to keep an eye on the management company to ensure they are continuing to serve your interests.

Investing in individual stocks can also be more effort than you expect. After studying the complexities of corporate finance in graduate school, I realized I was better off focusing my attention on my day job and other pursuits. With dollar cost averaging into an index fund, you can set up automatic contributions once and then concentrate on more important matters in your life.

You might consider letting a money manager pick individual stocks for you. On the whole, these actively managed funds perform about the same as index funds. They cost you much more, however, as the managers take their fees.

So do not be a contrarian. Invest in an index fund. Set it and forget it.

Audiobooks

My New Year's resolution to listen to audiobooks at bedtime is working out great.  In the past I would fall asleep while watching videos on my smart phone using a streaming service such as Hulu or Netflix.  Over the last two months since I started consuming audiobooks from Audible instead at night, I have been falling asleep sooner, getting more rest, and waking earlier.

Reading traditional print books is less fun now that my eyesight has deteriorated due to aging.  Even with corrective lenses, it is somewhat uncomfortable to have to hold a book at a fixed distance to maintain distortion-free focus.  Compared to wearing spectacles, earbuds make it much easier to fall asleep while lying on my side.

 

Audiobooks are also helping me alleviate some of the symptoms of my bibliomania.  Folks with my condition buy more books than they have time to read and then struggle to find a place to store them.  Like e-books, audiobooks wait patiently for me in my online wish list or cloud-based library and only take up space on my smart phone when I am actually ready to download.

I no longer mind commuting now that I can listen to audiobooks on the drive.  Radio can get boring when the morning news cycle loops but a good audiobook keeps you engaged until the end of the story or the end of the road.  Until the day I can read my e-books in enlarged font on the dashboard monitor of my self-driving car, audiobooks are the way to go.

James Bedford Day

I am adopting James Bedford Day, January 12th, as a new Optihumanist holiday.  Although he was not the first to be cryopreserved, James Bedford is the first of those still in suspension.  The story of his suspension is hosted on the Alcor website.

I will be celebrating with other members of the North Texas Cryonauts.   This will be our first meeting scheduled through our new Meetup.com website.  I am hoping that this can become a regular annual event for our group.

Optihumanist Principles 2017

The latest Brights Bulletin cites Dunk, et al. (2017) A multifactorial analysis of acceptance of evolution.  Quoting from the study: "Understanding of the nature of science was the single most important factor associated with the study of evolution [...]".  This suggests to me that we need to focus less on teaching acquired knowledge and more on the knowledge acquisition process.

I provided an explanation of the Scientific Method in a sermon some years ago. This seems insufficient by itself, however, as the whole process is wrapped in something larger which requires the application of logic. From what I read in Wikipedia, the word Reason is probably what I am looking for here.

Before I pulled it out, a previous version of my Optihumanist Principles included "Reason and the Scientific Method are paths to the truth."  I am re-inserting that back into my 2017 version in this form:

We uphold reason and science as paths to the truth.

I am reading some books that we bought for our children on this topic:

• Ruchlis (1991) How Do You Know It's True? Discovering the Difference Between Science and Superstition

• Barker (1993) Maybe Yes, Maybe No: A Guide for Young Skeptics

• Dawkins (2011) The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

Stability

I like to say that "stability is its own reward".  The idea behind this is that many unstable plastic systems continuously adapt until they stabilize.  Once stable, plasticity is limited because it was the instability that was driving them to change.

Usually my context for this is in the realm of neural network learning algorithms.  Some years ago, however, I identified a couple of instances of self-stabilizing systems that exist in the real world.  Each of these tongue-in-cheek examples might also be slightly cyclical -- and cynical.

First example: clearing traffic accidents increases traffic speed.  As lanes are re-opened, average traffic speeds can jump from a rush hour stop-and-go crawl up to maximum posted speed limits.  As speeds increase, however, accidents also increase -- which force commuters back down to speeds that are safe for congested driving conditions.

Second example: state lottery revenues fund education.  As participation in the lottery increases, education increases.  As education increases, participation in the lottery decreases -- because educated people do not buy lottery tickets.