A True Miracle

Remember Miracle Max reviving Westley, who was only mostly dead? Fun to watch that story again. It's been so long I almost forgot. The Princess Bride has to be the best movie ever made... except for Peter Pan... and Avatar. OK, I'm a sucker for a good fantasy. I also appreciate chemistry, particle physics, cosmology, neurology, and psychology, which are mostly true, but not mostly fun.

So how can you tell what's true and what's fun? If you are wondering, check it out with this quickie survey.

           ***True***
-1 [  ] good evidence
-2 [  ] consistency
-3 [  ] predictive power
-4 [  ] raises questions that can be tested
-5 [  ] experts agree
-6 [  ] inspires hope
-7 [  ] eases fear, anxiety, distress, grief
-8 [  ] feels great
-9 [  ] stuff I forgot
           ***Fun***

Miracle Max scores on 6 to 9. We might say miracles are mostly fun if not mostly true. If you skimp on 6 to 9, you don't finish the story with The World's Most Perfect Kiss. 

Anyway that wasn't mostly true about the kiss. Even when I am mostly stuck in boxes 1 to 5, there have been some kisses here that matched anything Westley and Buttercup could manage. My princess and I together tick boxes 1 to 9, starting with good evidence and including stuff I forgot. 

It's a true miracle.

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Ten minutes of The Princess Bride: wait for the kiss.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

That quote is often attributed to Mark Twain (and others). Whoever said it, the intent is to call statistics into question when used to support an argument. Fair enough. Challenge the statistics, but do it with some idea of how statistics actually work. I couldn't do that myself. I got a C in the one statistics course I took. Most of you reading this won't have a clue either. Therefore we are maybe four or five steps removed from knowing how reliable the statistics might be. We have to decide how far to trust someone using statistics in support of an argument, how far to trust the critics of that argument, and how far to trust the source of the statistics, the peer review and the factcheckers. In any case, if we do the work, we are better off with statistics than with mere opinions and propaganda. With good evidence, we may improve the odds of a better future.

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Trump's Economic Statistics: Politifact

The Planet Is Warming Faster Than We Thought: Just Have a Think, August 10, 2025

Fossil Fuels Exposed: David Suzuki Foundation
New Research Debunks Climate Disinformation: Just Have a Think, Aug 17, 2025

Learning To Love

What's that about? Just follow your heart, no learning required. 

Hold on a second. 

That's a musical joke. Get it? Segue into one of the best musicals ever produced, one that we watched again last night.

Even if mindless attraction is where love starts, you don't get far without thoughtful commitment, wisdom and generosity. That doesn't always come naturally. Remember Freddy Eynsford-Hill in raptures over Eliza Dolittle "on the street where you live?" Eliza would have liked fewer words and a bit more action, "Tell me no dreams filled with desire. If you're on fire, show me." You know the story. Poor Freddy didn't measure up. Neither did 'enry 'iggins, the self-important, arrogant, misogynist linguistics professor who set out to make a princess out of a gutter-snipe just to prove how clever he was. Assuming false humility, Professor Higgins fancied himself just an ordinary man who would never let a woman in his life. Eventually, surprise, he learned to let a woman in his life. When the story ends, Henry still has a lot to learn and Eliza is the teacher.

The film version of My Fair Lady came out in 1964, the year Dorothy and I were married. 
Brilliant songs by Lerner and Loewe.
Stelar performances by Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.
Some loose parallels with our own story.
I started off back then as a bit of Freddy with a dash of Henry, a dollop of Alfred (Eliza's reprobate father) and a whiff of Colonel Pickering.
Apparently my fair lady liked a challenge.
I'm still happily learning 61 years later.

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My Fair Lady: the full movie on archive.org,
priceless yet free.

Mapping The Mystery

In case you missed it, here are links to previous notes in this series.

What Are We Missing?
What is love? 
What should we love?
Is love ever wrong? 
Is There More To The Mystery?

If we have the time or make the time, the Mystery of existence is an engaging puzzle. We can make it easy by just accepting ideas from trusted sources so we don't have to do difficult philosophy, or we can work it out for ourselves, inexpert though we be. We should not be shy in attempting that. Even the philosophers have a limited toolkit that provides imperfect, though useful, results. However well we understand it, we should not mistake our thoughts for the the thing they describe, which remains a mystery. Philosophy is an attitude guiding a thought process providing tentative answers generating more questions. It is never a final answer. Nobody gets it perfectly right. We can all do philosophy and we all never get it quite right.

Our minds work by reducing the unimaginable complexity of reality to a few thinkable discrete fragments with salient connections to each other. We have the trinitarian god of Christianity, the four directions of indigenous lore, Arthur Koestler's holons nested in a holarchy. Recently, heatmaps have been used to represent degrees of affinity as concentric domains of a spectrum from hot red passion to cool violet or gray indifference.

I suggest a refinement to all of these strategies. Whatever map we use should include the fourth dimension, time. Imagine an animated map like the TV weather forecast showing how temperature changes from place to place during the day or over the week or decades or centuries. We can make such a map illustrating how our love is centrist or expansive and how it changes through lifetimes and generations.

I'm thinking about it. Think along with me. More to come.

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Trinitarian Theology: Wikipedia

Four Directions of Indigenous Lore

Holons and the Holarchy: Wikipedia

Moral Heatmaps: Frank Jacobs and Stephen Johnson, Big Think

More To The Mystery

If we are born fortunate, parents are our first mentors in love. Yet they got their mentoring from others, grandparents, great-grandparents and teachers back through a hundred generations to ancestors who first heard of the one many consider the original mentor teaching love, he who must have learned it from his parents. 

Luke 14:26.

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

These words are attributed to Jesus, who said no such thing since he didn't speak English. If he said anything like that in his own language, he would be remembered as our mentor in cultish obsession and family abandonment. I'm not convinced, although many have been, as we can judge from the conflicted history of Christianity. Although I dissent, this scripture does mean something even to me, an unrepentant heretic.

Here is what I think about it. At the very least, devotion to one object of love implies neglect of others. We exist in tension between boundless wants and limited capacity, with the necessity of choosing what we shall love more. While we care for the beloved, we neglect the less loved and do harm, even unintentional harm.

We cannot avoid doing harm because we we are consumers within a finite system. The best we can do is respect that system, understand its complexity and limitations, take no more than we need, and repair the damage as we go. All of that is somewhat possible, as demonstrated by ancient cultures that regarded the Earth as sacred and survived ten thousand years or more before the arrival of self-important settlers. Now we begin to wake up from a dream of entitlement and privilege. Reluctant to relinquish what fuels our affluence, we discover that we have exceeded the regenerative capacity of the earth and are rushing to disaster. 

We have forgotten that before humanity arrived with our big brains, endearing but helpless infants, and absolute reliance on mutual support, long before there were Mummies and Daddies, friends and kings, scholars and scientists, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers to keep us prospering, we were children of a chaotic and dangerous universe from which humanity emerged with evolving advantages. When we clever ones came, driven by the motives of pleasure and pain, we learned to tip the balance toward pleasure. If we got it right, we told others what worked and the advantage accumulated. Advantage continues to accumulate until the grace is all gone because in loving ourselves more we used up what we loved less. 

There is a chance for the children to do better than we have done by caring for what we have neglected, exploring the mystery with humility and expansive love.

What Are We Missing?
What is love? 
What should we love?
Is love ever wrong? 
Is there more to the mystery? 

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How The World's Biggest Bank is Bracing For Climate Catastrophe: Just Have a Think, July 6, 2025.

David Suzuki's Climate Battle: Bridgit Stringer-Holden, CBC News, July 11, 2025

Have Fun and Save the World: David Suzuki and Ian Hannington, July 10 2025.

Is 100% Wind and Solar just a scam?: Just Have a Think, July 20 2025.

Is Love Ever Wrong?

I've just been going on about love being expansive and inclusive. That's obviously not quite right if not entirely wrong. We have an instinct for exclusivity; so there must be reasons. The universe punishes errors with extinction.

So why is exclusivity ever beneficial? Take marriage, probably the most exclusive of relationships. Exclusivity provides benefits:
-reduces the spread of disease
-increases trust, stability, resilience
-concentrates attention and effort
-avoids the trauma of broken trust
-avoids the adaptive cost of new relationships
-facilitates specialization and efficiency
-feels right because of the rush of oxytocin
-I'm sure there's more

Exclusive love has its place, but some tension between exclusiveness and expansiveness applies to other relationships. As a child matures, the bond between mother and child is stretched to include the family, playmates, romantic partner, in-laws, the tribe, the world. That is as it should be, even though the expansion of love weakens bonds of closer affinity. Mum's job is to nurture and then let go while remaining ready to help when there's trouble. 

At its best, mutual and generous love generates a benign excess of good will that infuses other relationships. Being nurtured in mutual affection prepares a child to be a loving partner and parent. Then having loved a child to maturity, how can we parents neglect others beyond the family? It takes a village to raise the children. It takes an alliance to secure a nation's peace. It takes a world to sustain life of any sort. Selfishness, separatism, racism, nationalism, xenophobia, anthropocentrism, exclusive love in the absence of a balancing expansive love will consume what supports us. Love your neighbor as yourself, or prepare to fight and sometimes lose. That's how it works.

What Are We Missing?
What is love? 
What should we love?
Is love ever wrong? 
Next: Is there more to the mystery? 

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Teenager: CBC Gem video, The Nature of Things

(sign in to watch)

Bill C-5 Concerns: Bryce Hoye, CBC News, July 17 2025

What Should We Love?

We love first what's loveable. However, love also implies a higher ethical principle, a duty of care when we care not.

The less loved or unloved are easily neglected or rejected:
the older child when the new baby cries,
the needy begging spare change,
the impatient driver honking from behind,
the yet unborn who will pay the hidden cost of our cheap fuel,
real people who interrupt us with their real concerns when we are virtually lost in our screens,
the outsider in trouble,
biting insects in the garden,
weeds in the rose bed. 

Instinct attracts us to the beautiful, the useful, the harmless and vulnerable, those who are pleasantly with us here and now. A just and peaceful world requires more: that we love everyone, everything, everywhere and always. That is a challenge for the spawn of self-absorbed predators, equipped with cunning and the combined strength and knowledge of the tribe. We will get what we want because we can take it. We will get what we want until it's gone. However, if we love better, it may all last awhile longer.

I'm sure there is more.

What Are We Missing?
What is love? 
What should we love?
Next: Is love ever wrong? 
          Is there more to the mystery? 

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The Antisocial Century: Derek Thompson on Youtube

We Can't Live Without Insects: David Suzuki and Ian Hannington