In and out of quantum world stream...original relative state formulation of the theory of the universal wavefunction Ψ, beginning with Hugh Everett in 1957...reality as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realized...afraid to write at times, afraid will inadvertently modify the stream and live another catastrophe. Wake with song unheard in years in head and then have it appear later when switch on radio, or think of particular entity and find it come up on television random programming. Always detested the many worlds proposal, but having seen some look-aheads that did change subtly over the years, I am beginning to wonder at this late date. Recall waking with a start at the age of 9, early 60's shaken with the realization that I was going to have to die eventually, at some point this stream of consciousness would end.
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause: there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life... (Hamlet soliloquy).
Perhaps I am now the aging and deteriorating god-man, no longer the "great Gary Bentley," as Cheri (my late wife) once told me that she and the other band girls referred to me back in the peak of my guitar-godhood in the 70's. Frazier's Golden Bough recounted the primitive motif of a people executing their king or god-man on a regular cycle or the likely earlier pattern of executing him when he began to age and become suspect in physical virtue. Well, better to have loved and lost...you take the ceremonial execution along with the good, from my experience.
Yes, I am well aware of the concept of magical thinking, basically the hope by psychiatrists that their patients are simply mentally ill and cannot actually modify reality by any particular thought or action.
George Santayana, educated in Catholic schools early on I assume (spent part of his childhood with his father in Spain), knew Catholicism and Christianity well, though he later characterized the record of miracles in the church as founded in "false memories." From Winds of Doctrine, published 1913:
Christianity, being a practical and living faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the punishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a faith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind, within, and around the discoverable forces of nature, that the destiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that failures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble faith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our point of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical, physical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in our day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and the worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the intellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It flourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all existence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at the same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread, from the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for prison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly comforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.
Santayana's rejection of experience which did not suit his prejudices (he was not a scientist, but neither are most of those employed in that general pursuit these days, where the focus is now more on making everyone feel welcome in science, rather than actually producing the paradigm-breaking breakthroughs of the early 20th century) was a habit which is contemptible to me, as was his accompanying frequent assertion that the mind is simply an illusion created by biological mechanism. From Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy, 1933:
The whole world itself is a sublime accident, in the sense that its existence is contingent, groundless, and precarious...philosophers owe to nature and to the discipline of moral life their capacity to look beyond nature and beyond morality. And while they may look beyond, and take comfort in the vision, they cannot pass beyond....Our minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons count for almost nothing...Spirit is certainly not one of the forces producing spirit, but neither is it a contrary force....Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which they must obey notwithstanding. The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the final death involved in having been born...the emphasis which action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts the end of it more blessed than the beginning.
That is a popular doctrine (world is accident, human existence groundless) among the politically correct atheist police today. For example, a politically correct introductory psychology textbook writes "Strange beliefs include Magical thinking such as belief in ESP or telepathy." For a brief but complete and honest history of psychic phenomena (and the notable people involved over the centuries) by an engineer/applied physicist, see The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective, by Robert G. Jahn (Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 70, No. 2, February 1982). Such an article as Jahn's would be rigorously suppressed today. As I have written previously"I have a sense of foreboding regarding what the result of this world-view [human existence merely animal story and suppress any contradictory material] will be for mankind. You should consider Who or What (it may be slouching even now towards Bethlehem to be born) will benefit if that program is successful. My own experience persuades me there is some truth in the Persian dualism, i.e., there seems to be a force for good, truth and progress, over against a competing force for evil, lies and destruction."
We have come, in those last long months, to date our happenings as they have never until now been dated by those of our own generation. We speak of things that took place “Before the War”; and between that time and this stands a barrier immeasurable. This book, with its Preface, was completed in 1914—“Before the War...Since August 1914 the finest humanity of our race has been enduring Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured the men of our nation and of those nations with whom we are proud to be allied...And, surely, to all those who are fighting, and suffering, and dying for a noble cause, the of gods, the God of battles, who is also the God of peace, and the God of Love, has become an ever near and eternally living entity.
Germany, under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, militarized its economy and reoccupied the Rhineland (demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles) in 1936. In 1938, Hitler incorporated Austria into the German Reich and demanded cession of the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. By then, war seemed imminent. The United States, disillusioned by the failure of the crusade for democracy in World War I, announced that in no circumstances could any country involved in the conflict look to it for aid.
dalton@dalton-Precision-3541:$ RR version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05) -- "Action of the Toes"Copyright (C) 2019 The R Foundation for Statistical ComputingPlatform: x86_64-conda_cos6-linux-gnu (64-bit)> library("DescTools")> GendPol_tab <- matrix( c(762, 327, 468, 484, 239, 477), 2, 3, byrow=TRUE)> GendPol_tab[,1] [,2] [,3][1,] 762 327 468[2,] 484 239 477> dimnames(GendPol_tab) <- list( "Gender" = c("Females", "Males"), "Party Idenfication" = c("Democrat", "Independent", "Republican") )> GendPol_tabParty IdenficationGender Democrat Independent RepublicanFemales 762 327 468Males 484 239 477> (GendPol_Xsq <- chisq.test(GendPol_tab))Pearson's Chi-squared testdata: GendPol_tabX-squared = 30.07, df = 2, p-value = 2.954e-07> GendPol_Xsq$stdresParty IdenficationGender Democrat Independent RepublicanFemales 4.502054 0.6994517 -5.315946Males -4.502054 -0.6994517 5.315946> OddsRatio(GendPol_tab[,-2], method="wald", conf.level=0.95)odds ratio lwr.ci upr.ci1.604657 1.352444 1.903904> Desc(GendPol_tab, verbose = 3)------------------------------------------------------------------------------GendPol_tab (matrix)Summary:n: 2'757, rows: 2, columns: 3Pearson's Chi-squared test:X-squared = 30.07, df = 2, p-value = 2.954e-07Pearson's Chi-squared test (cont. adj):X-squared = 30.07, df = 2, p-value = 2.954e-07Log likelihood ratio (G-test) test of independence:G = 30.017, X-squared df = 2, p-value = 3.034e-07Mantel-Haenszel Chi-squared:X-squared = 28.98, df = 1, p-value = 7.314e-08estimate lwr.ci upr.ci'Phi Coeff. 0.1044 - -Contingency Coeff. 0.1039 - -Cramer V 0.1044 0.0649 0.1403Goodman Kruskal Gamma 0.1710 0.1093 0.2328Kendall Tau-b 0.0964 0.0611 0.1317Stuart Tau-c 0.1078 0.0683 0.1473Somers D C|R 0.1097 0.0695 0.1498Somers D R|C 0.0848 0.0529 0.1167Pearson Correlation 0.1025 0.0655 0.1393Spearman Correlation 0.1016 0.0646 0.1384Lambda C|R 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000Lambda R|C 0.0075 0.0000 0.0575Lambda sym 0.0033 0.0000 0.0255Uncertainty Coeff. C|R 0.0052 0.0015 0.0089Uncertainty Coeff. R|C 0.0080 0.0023 0.0136Uncertainty Coeff. sym 0.0063 0.0018 0.0108Mutual Information 0.0079 - -Party Idenfication Democrat Independent Republican SumGenderFemales freq 762 327 468 1'557perc 27.6% 11.9% 17.0% 56.5%p.row 48.9% 21.0% 30.1% .p.col 61.2% 57.8% 49.5% .Males freq 484 239 477 1'200perc 17.6% 8.7% 17.3% 43.5%p.row 40.3% 19.9% 39.8% .p.col 38.8% 42.2% 50.5% .Sum freq 1'246 566 945 2'757perc 45.2% 20.5% 34.3% 100.0%p.row . . . .p.col . . . .----------' 95% conf. level
That function invocation also gave me a nice mosaic plot demonstrating the relative effect of the gender on party affiliation: