Sunday, November 27, 2011

A question with a long answer: Do I believe in prayer? (Part 1)

Sometime in 2010 a friend, as part of an otherwise unremembered conversation made a comment along the lines of "oh, but you don't believe in prayer...".  That stuck in my head and I've been trying to think of an organized response to the resulting question:  Do I believe in prayer?

Part of the difficulty I'm facing in making the attempt to answer, is deciding whether it's appropriate to voice my personal beliefs in a public forum, where patients and colleagues are encouraged to read them.  It's impossible to talk about prayer without also talking about religion, god, and the nature of the universe as I perceive it, and this will likely be at odds with the beliefs of many people who read this.  At the same time, I think the concept of prayer is important and in health care professions it seems that it is either embraced or rejected with a totality that doesn't seem rational (or even useful).


So I've decided to attempt an answer.

Since this is (in my mind at least) not simply a "yes" or "no" question, I'm going to have to do this in stages. Because the word prayer means different things to different people, I'd like to talk about the nature of language itself.

At it's most fundamental, language is a system of labeling that allows us to communicate.  Whether in the form of speech, writing, or gesture, we use language to exchange information.  In it's earliest forms, I'd imagine that it was no more than simple tones that facilitated hunting.  Sounds or gestures meaning "you go that way" or "rest now" might lead to directional and emotional terms for increasingly more complex communication eventually leading to more useful ways of telling someone else where water or shelter are to be found, or why a tribe member can't hunt today.  This might lead to a larger range as multiple tribes interact and terms for territory, ownership, and trade would be needed.

The purpose of language is to come to common agreement about what we're seeing and doing, not only in the moment, but also in the past and future.  Early humans would have needed to agree on what sounds refer to an orange so that they could say whether they had one, where to find more, and could they trade some for a share of that antelope you just killed.  Conflicts would rapidly arise if a tribe used one set of sounds for orange, and another tribe used the same sounds for rocks.  Imagine thinking that there's an orange tree in that direction over there...  Running for several hours and finding nothing but rocky ground...  Consistency is essential.

Over time, language has become very very complex.  There is no universal human language that anyone has been able to find, though a time where there might have been one is preserved in mythology (the tower of Babel comes to mind).  No single human is capable of understanding every separate human language system despite them all having similar characteristics.  Some terms are easy to agree on.  Blanket terms like "orange" or "rock" bring similiar images to mind for any English speaker.  When we need to further differentiate a word, we use other descriptive terms to distinguish one orange from another.  "Blood orange" and "navel orange" should be enough to distinguish between two types of oranges.

Even the term "orange" doesn't mean exactly the same thing to everyone.  For simplicity's sake, let's consider for a moment "orange" the colour rather than the fruit.

Light shines onto an object.  Some of that light is absorbed, and some is reflected.  The wavelength of the reflected light travels from the object to the eye of the observer.  It passes through the lens of the eye, and the image is focused on the retina.  The retina engages in a biochemical process that ends with a neurochemical signal between it and the optic nerve.  The optic nerve carries a signal to the part of the brain that handles sensory optical information.  That part of the brain filters and translates that signal into a more refines signal and sends out further neurchemical signals to nerves that now travel to parts of the brain that say what that signal is.  This ends with the part of our brain the deals with language labeling that information as "orange", and so we "see" the colour.  While we know that "orange" is a range of wavelengths of light, we have no way to know that the translated image of that wavelength in our brain is shared by any other brain.  A child who learn's the word orange as it relates to the pigment designated by Crayola as "orange" does not have the same baseline image as a child who has never seen a crayon and instead learned to word from the fruit that his/her parents picked.  As a result, it is likely that if placed side by side, the latter child might point to a pigment he calls "orange" that the crayon child might argue with saying "no, that's yellow... this is orange" and point to a different point on the spectrum (undyed and unwaxed oranges tend to have to be more yellow, often with some green).

Things get more difficult when we can't point to things to agree on terms for them.  When one person says "I'm sick" it's very important that the other person has had similar experiences of what sickness is in order to be in agreement with the other person.  I can remember a former roommate rolling his eyes at me as I gingerly walked around our house because my back was out.  Having never had a bad back, he though I was exaggerating and being histrionic.  At this stage of communication "my back hurts" had completely different meanings to the two of us based on our relative experience with back pain.  A few weeks later, he put his own back out for the first time in his experience and he said to me "How did you live like this?????".  Now we shared a common experience and the phrase "my back hurts" means similar things to both of us.

Spiritual terms seem to be particularly prone to conflicting definitions.  So before I can say whether I believe in something, I have to be sure we're talking about the same thing.  As I continue through this meandering process of discussing prayer, I'm going to try and clarify terms like god, spirituality, intention, belief, and (eventually) prayer.

Next up:  Thoughts on Prayer Part 2:  Who is Ziss God Person Anyvay????