Followers and the Followed

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schizephrenicLike all animals, we humans have evolved certain preprogrammed behaviors. Some of these we call instincts but they can also be thought of as just the tuning of our pattern-recognition systems. For example we have an instinct for detecting when we are being stalked and hunted. This is a pretty valuable instinct. It is essential that our pattern recognition systems are tuned to detect some agency following us. We are in fact tuned to err heavily on the side of false-positives. That is, better that you think a tiger is following you when it is not than that you miss a real tiger stalking you. False-positives are unlikely to do you any real harm but you will be unlikely to survive even one false-negative.

But like an overly-sensitive sense of smell or hearing, a pattern-recognition system that is tuned so as to detect a huge number of false positives becomes debilitating. We call this condition paranoid schizophrenia. People suffering from this delusion think they are being stalked all the time. Their pattern recognition system signals continual red-alerts, constantly detecting patterns of stalking, even when there is clearly no actual threat.

Naturally these people feel 100% confident that their instincts, their very perceptions, are real. Everyone around them tells them they are mistaken or even deluded. But it does not feel that way to them. They remain alone and isolated, questioning their own sanity or the sanity of everyone else. They are fairly numerous in the population, but not numerous enough to find many others who believe as they do.

Then the Internet appeared. Now for the first time these paranoid schizophrenics can find each other quite easily online. They can now communicate, discover that others believe as they do, support each other in their delusions, align the specifics of their delusions so that they appear to have an extraordinary degree of internal consistency, be reassured that they are not the crazy ones, socialize between each other and avoid formal or informal intervention, and become politically active to legitimize their delusions and to force public policy to accommodate them.

This is exactly what is happening. According to a New York Times story (see here) growing numbers of schizophrenics, or “targeted individuals” as they call themselves, believe they are constantly stalked by “operatives” disguised as ordinary people pretending that they are simply going about their own business. They decline mental health services and instead band together in insular groups who support each other’s delusions, raise money, host international conferences, and even take legal and legislative action in accordance with their beliefs.

Last year one such group persuaded the Richmond CA City Council to pass a ban against space-based mind-control weapons. These people form an “echo chamber” of paranoia, and are told that anyone outside their group, even family and mental health professionals, are likely in on the conspiracy. Members of these groups are not relegated lives of to destitution. Members of these groups span all aspects of social and professional life. Your lawyer or doctor or boss may be part of a growing cult of paranoid schizophrenics, hiding their delusions from you believing that you are also an operative of the conspiracy against them. They can’t let you know they know you are stalking them.

It sounds fantastic doesn’t it? It seems incredible that people with such a profound delusion could function in our modern world, let alone band together into a self-reinforcing and self-sustaining political action groups that can force our government to craft policies and laws in accordance with their delusions.

But I ask you this. How is this any different than organized religion in any substantive way whatsoever? I maintain that there is not a sliver, not a single iota, of difference.

Like paranoid schizophrenics, religious people hold delusional beliefs that arise from an overly-developed pattern recognition mechanism – the instinct to assign agency to patterns we see around us. That is, to assume that shadow in the woods could be a living thing that is watching us. When these people see agency where there is none, they band together to fabricate a mutually reinforced set of shared beliefs not at all unlike the formalized beliefs of paranoid schizophrenics. And like paranoid schizophrenics in the age of the Internet, religious people band together to force social and political policies to conform to their group delusion.

Both syndromes arise from an overly-tuned pattern recognition system for agency detection. Both are reinforced, amplified, and propagated by grouping behaviors. One sees both local agents (operatives) and a global presence (government) that are watching them and ready to punish or reward them. The other sees local agents (angels) and a global presence (god) that are watching them and ready to punish or reward them. Religious and paranoid delusions are fundamentally exactly the same syndrome with differences only in the details.

The main reason religious delusions seem so much more reasonable to many is that the religiously deluded have been grouping together for a far longer time and are far more organized and prevalent. Just give the paranoid schizophrenics some time to catch up and they will be building tax-exempt fortified citadels with satellite-killing laser defenses.

The sooner we see religious delusions exactly the same way that we see paranoid delusions, the sooner we can arrive at the sanest, the most effective public policies and educational methodologies to protect individuals and society from these contagious mental illnesses.

2017 State of the Union

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trumpThe state of the union is … great! It’s the greatest in fact. It is the greatest state of any union ever. The main reason our union is so great is because I am honestly the greatest president ever, no contest, and everyone agrees on this. Am I right?

Our rebranding of America is going really, really well – it’s amazing. The golden Trump sign we installed on the White House is spectacular, so classy. I’ve gotten so many tweets about it you wouldn’t believe. The flashing can be seen all the way from the new Trump Tower. I mean who was this Washington guy anyway? What did he do that was so great? Wear wooden teeth? Give me a break! And we are still looking for an artist to replace the statue in that Lincoln Memorial with one that people care about. Everyone wants it to be me; what can I say? Once I’m sitting there all huge you’ll be so proud to be an American. Also, I’ve got even more exciting news. We’re working on a new flag with the stars forming a constellation in my image. It’ll be classy, trust me, it’ll be so classy you won’t believe it.

And when it comes to the economy, let me tell you, last year we’ve made absolutely the best deals ever. Our deal to sell Atlantic City to The Trump Organization is the greatest deal for this country. It’s a big deal, the biggest. The new Trump City is gonna be fabulous, you’ll be so proud. And let me tell you, once our corporate takeover of Las Vegas is complete, the new Trump City West will be incredible. It’s going to make us the envy of the world that I can tell you. Tourists will flock there by the millions, trust me, millions.

The transition of my cabinet and staff is complete, and all those old losers are out. What morons and scum bags, jeesh. Today I’m pleased to announce that David Duke will be my new FBI Director. He’s going to make sure that the Congress and Supreme Court get in line, believe me. And I’m also happy to announce David Koch as Director of the newly combined Departments of Energy and EPA. I was just gonna disband them but frankly David paid so much money for the job I’d be an idiot to say no, and I’m not an idiot. And here’s the best news. Lovely Melania has agreed to be our new Secretary of State. She asked me, what do they do? I said, don’t worry your pretty head, you just have to look fantastic and keep your mouth shut. She’s so good at that I can’t tell you, she’s the best.

I gotta be honest; there have been some problems, that can I tell you. But now with old lady Ginsburg and hysterical Sotomexicano put away in Guantanamo, my lawsuits should all disappear. OK folks? Look, women and Hispanics and old people all love me by the way. And now that Pelosi is back in her place and Palsy Ryan has slithered back to whatever hick town in Wisconsin he crawled out of – sorry but it’s the truth – everyone else is falling in line with my plan to privatize the Senate and Congress. Excuse me, it’s just a fact… private companies can govern so much better than the “government,” am I right? And don’t worry, I’ll hire only the very best people to run my government, believe me, THE best. I’m personally interviewing the guys who made a killing in Michigan. They know how to get things done let me tell you. After a crash course at Trump National University, they will be ready to take over and make America great again, totally great again.

America will be so great you won’t even recognize it!

Our Curious Public Mood Swings

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PolicyMood

This is a fascinating and revealing chart illustrating our curious public mood swings. It was produced by Larry Bartels (see here) using data compiled by James Stimson (see here). It measures the “policy mood” of the country since 1950. The higher the score, the more conservative was public opinion at that particular point in time.

Stinson derived this policy mood index from responses to a wide range of public policy surveys. Since it does not rely upon self-identification as liberal or conservative, it is arguably a more nuanced and accurate measure of where public attitudes fall on the liberal-conservative spectrum.

The most obvious thing to note here are the dramatic swings. Clearly public attitudes about major issues are not as fixed as we might imagine. Over the past 65 years public opinion has swung up and down by almost 20 points. Clearly public sentiment can be swayed significantly.

The most interesting thing about these swings is revealed when you refer to the Administration timeline that Bartels added to the x-axis. If you study this a bit you’ll undoubtedly start to scratch your head in confusion. Under each Democrat administration the country became more conservative, and under each Conservative administration the country became more liberal. This is entirely counter-intuitive and immensely important.

The nation became dramatically more liberal during the Eisenhower years. Ike was moderately conservative overall but staunchly conservative on economic issues. It became slightly more conservative during the moderately liberal Kennedy/Johnson era but shifted far toward the conservative extreme during the very liberal Carter years. Similarly, during the extremely conservative Reagan era, public sentiment shot back down again toward the liberal end of the spectrum. Under Clinton, the public then became more conservative and after a year or two of George Bush became more liberal again. Finally, under the very liberal President Obama, we have become dramatically more conservative.

The next observation may or may not be significant, but the swing has been between 30 and 50 on this scale of conservatism. I can’t imagine what kind of views it would require to earn a 100% rating on this scale, but for what it’s worth public opinion has remained solidly on the liberal side of the spectrum. This seems to defy the popular meme that America is a “near Right” country. It suggests we are actually (still) a “near Left” country.

But that may not last if trends continue. Although this chart bounces up and down, there is still a clear upward best fit line. This supports the long-term trend toward conversativism reported independently by other sources. Essentially each President since Eisenhower has rated as more conservative. More specifically, each Republican President has been more conservative than the previous Republican President and each Democrat President has been more conservative than the previous Democrat President. This reinforces the observation that despite these swings, the Conservatives succeed year after year in moving the “center” ever farther toward the Right.

So what conclusions can we draw from these data? First, it isn’t true that we are intractably divided and cannot change. Clearly a very significant fraction of us can be moved a substantial amount in one direction or the other. Next, we are perhaps overall more liberal than the Right would like to have us believe. However, we are trending ever more conservative and that is never likely to reverse as long as liberals keep voting for the “lesser of two evils” who is still ever more conservative than his or her predecessor.

Finally, as Bartels pointed out in his article, Presidents do not actually succeed in shifting public opinion their direction. The data rather show that the public tends to recoil reliably away from the President in their attitudes. Paradoxically and counter-intuitively, these data suggest that the fastest way to shift public sentiment toward the liberal end would be to elect a highly conservative President. And the best way to reverse the long-term trend toward conservatism may be to allow our “lesser of two evils” Democratic candidates to lose.

 

 

 

The Anatomy of Thought

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Mind-uploading is the fictional process by which a person’s consciousness is transferred into some inanimate object. In fantasy stories this is typically accomplished using magic. By casting some arcane spell, the person’s consciousness is transferred into a physical talisman – or it might just float around in the ether in disembodied spirit form.

Mind_switcherIn science fiction, this kind of magic is routinely accomplished by means of technology. Upgraded hair-dryers transfer the person’s consciousness into a computer or some external storage unit. There it is retained until  it can be transferred back to the original host or into some new person or device. This science fiction mainstay goes back at least to the 1951 novel “Izzard and the Membrane” by Walter M. Miller Jr.

In some of these stories, the disembodied consciousness retains awareness within the computer or within whatever golem it has been placed. Sometimes the consciousness is downloaded into a new host body. It might inhabit a recently dead body but other times it might take over a living host or even swap bodies with another consciousness. Fictional stories involving technology being used for a variety mind-downloading and body-swapping scenarios or possessions go back at least to the book to “Vice Versa” written by Thomas Anstey Guthrie in 1982.

The 2009 movie “Avatar” depicts of all sorts of sophisticated technological mind-uploading, remote consciousness-control, and even the mystical downloading of consciousness into a new body. In this and innumerable other science fiction, fantasy, and horror plots, minds are portrayed as things that can be removed and swapped out given sufficiently advanced magic or technology – like a heart or liver. This is depicted so often in fact that it seems like some routine medical procedure that must be right around the technological corner at a Body-Swap™ franchise near you.

One reason this idea seems so believable to us because it is so similar to installing new software into your computer. But the computer analogy fails here. Brains are not analogous to computers in this regard and consciousness is not analogous to a computer program. Our hardware and software are not independent. Our hardware is our software. Our thoughts are literally our anatomy.

It might be a better analogy to rather think of our brains as non-programmable analog computers in which the thinking is performed by specific electronic circuits designed to perform that logic. The logic is not programmed into the circuits, the logic is the circuitry itself. Our thoughts are not programmed into our brains, our thoughts are produced by our neural circuitry. Obviously  our thinking does change over time, but this is a physical re-linking and re-weighting of our neural connections, not the inhabitation of some separable, independent consciousness within our brains.

I allow that we might conceivably copy our consciousness into a computer, but it would only be a mapped translation programmed to emulate our thought patterns. And as far-fetched as that is, downloading our consciousness into another brain is infinitely more far-fetched. That would require rewiring the target brain, that is, changing its physical microstructure. Maybe there is some scientific plausibility to that, like a magnet aligning all the particles of iron along magnetic ley lines. But it’s incredibly unlikely. We’d essentially have to scan all the connections in the subject’s brain and then physically realign all the neurons in the target brain in exactly the same way and tune the strength of all the connections identically.

And even if we did that, there are lots of nuanced effects that would still introduce differences. Our body chemistry and external drugs influence how these neurons fire. In fact, it’s likely that even if our brain were physically transplanted into a new host body, subtle differences in the environment of the new body would affect us in unanticipatable ways, influencing the very thoughts and emotions that make us – us.

Yet our fantasy imagining of consciousness as an independent abstraction not only persists but largely dominates our thinking. Even the most modern intellectuals tend to be locked into at least an implicit assumption of a mind-body dualism. René Descartes was a key figure in bringing scientific and philosophical credibility to what is fundamentally a religious fantasy concocted to make religion seem plausible (see here).

For religious thinkers, a mind-body duality MUST exist in order for there to be an after-life. In order for religious fantasies to seem reasonable, the soul (essentially just our disembodied mind) must be independent and independently viable outside the body. For many, the mind or soul is bestowed by god and is the uniquely holy and human thing that we have that lesser species do not. For them, the mind has to be separable to support their fantasy of God-given uniqueness from the rest of the animal kingdom. A unified mind-body greatly undermines their case for creationism, human divinity, and an afterlife.

So this illusory assumption of dualism is propagated by familiar computer analogies, by ubiquitous fantasy and science fiction, by horror ghost stories, and by our dominant religious and new age thinking. But this dualistic pseudoscience leads to many false and misleading ideas about how our brains work. That in turn results leads us to a great deal of mistaken thinking about a broad and diverse range of questions and precludes our ability to even imagine more realistic answers to those questions.

One harm this idea does is to provide a circular, self-fulfilling basis for belief in the supernatural. If we accept the assumption that our mind is independent, that then demands some kind of mystical explanation. But this dualistic thinking hinders our understanding of many non-religious questions as well. How do newborns fresh out of the womb or the egg know what to do? How can thoughts be inherited? How can a child be born gay? The answer to all these questions become quite simple if you shed your mistaken assumption of dualism. We all start with an inherited brain structure which is the same as to say that we are all born with thoughts and emotions and personalities.

When you truly internalize that the mind and body are one and the same, that our thoughts arise purely from our brain micro-structure and our unique body chemistry, new and far simpler solutions and perspectives open up for a wide range of otherwise perplexing and vexing social, scientific, and metaphysical questions.

Someone smarter than me could write a fascinating book about all the ways that this fantasy of an independent consciousness leads us to false conclusions and inhibits our ability to consider real answers to important questions. But if you simply become aware of this false assumption of duality, you will find that you’ll naturally start to look at a wide range of questions in far more satisfying and logically self-consistent ways.

 

 

If Only I Had a Photographic Memory!

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Few of us probably remember the 1968 B-film cult classic Barbarella. In that fantasy story the naively buxom Barbarella battled the sadistic Durand-Durand and the evilly beautiful Dark Tyrant. One notable character in this sex romp was the blind angel Pygar. The white-winged angel befriends Barbarella but is then kidnapped and cruelly tortured by the Dark Tyrant.

pygarIn the climax of the film, with the city exploding around them, Pygar swoops down and rescues both Barbarella and the Dark Tyrant, flying off with one woman in each arm. Barbarella looks up at his angelic face, confused, and says “Pygar, why did you save her, after all the terrible things she did to you?” Pygar answers serenely, “Angels have no memory.”

It’s an interesting thought. Angels have no memory. Perhaps only without memory can one really be an angel. Perhaps memory makes us just too bitter, too angry, to resentful, too hurt to be truly forgiving. Perhaps it just isn’t possible to remember every hurt one caused you and still fully forgive them. Perhaps those memories must be sacrificed to gain your wings.

There is data to support this premise.  Researches have looked at individuals on both extremes of memory. They have studied those rare individuals who have no long-term memory – who cannot recall anything beyond very recent events. They have compared those individuals to those equally rare individuals with nearly perfect recall, people who can exactly remember almost every incident, no matter how unremarkable, that they ever experienced.

When you compare these two groups, you see clear differences. Those with impaired long-term memory tend to be quite happy and contented while those with exceptional long-term memory tend to be quite unhappy, depressed, angry, and even suicidal. Apparently, having perfect memory takes its toll. One cannot forget every slight, every insult, every disappointment, and every disillusionment. Such unselective memories make one quite unhappy. Not having memories can be a blessing.

On the other hand, those with perfect memories tend to be excellent networkers. They recall every birthday, every anniversary, and every name. So they tend to have lots of social support that can offset their hurtful memories. Those with poor memories on the other hand tend to have few social contact and fewer friends. The cost of happiness may be loneliness and the loss of social connectivity. Are they then still happy? Kind of a sad internal contradiction.

Don’t hire an angel to become your salesperson and don’t expect them to win celebrity Jeopardy.

Thankfully most of us aren’t angels with no memory and we aren’t elephants who never forget a slight and stomp their trainer into a bloody pulp years later. We lie in the broad middle of the spectrum. I am certainly no angel but I think I lie off toward the bad memory end of the continuum. I have a terrible memory but am pretty free from regrets and grudges. But I’m also quite bad at social networking as I am hopeless at remembering things, let alone birthdays and anniversaries. I’ve wisely perhaps stayed away from professions that rely upon memory and entered instead into a career where things change quickly, where continually looking up current information is an advantage.

Many of us imagine that perfect memory would be kind of a cool superpower but that such recall is just not really possible. But it is clearly possible and evolution is wise enough not to give us what we think we want. Sometimes less is better. We could have much better smell or hearing or taste, for example, and some people do and it makes them painfully miserable. Longer lifespans are apparently possible as well, but evolution knows that longer lifespans are not actually a good thing for the individual or for the species.

Evolution has given us the balance of memory we need to make us both functional and happy. If technology eventually lets us override evolution on this, we may regret being burdened with all those painful best-forgotten memories.

Maybe Trump is Good for US

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trumpHow could Donald Trump conceivably be good for us and for the USA? I’m glad you asked!

Most of us appreciate that the normally low norm of juvenile political dysfunction in our country has degenerated over the last few decades down into an unsustainable and unacceptable low of incivility and internecine warfare. We have not quite reached a Mad Max level of dysfunction, but we’re getting uncomfortably and embarrassingly close.

We have always been proud of a certain level of dysfunction baked into our system of government. By design, we see great value in our system of check-and-balances in which each official and unofficial branch of government challenges the others to ensure that none of them run amok. A certain level of conflict is desired and expected.

However, if carried too far, healthy checks-and-balances can easily degrade into automatic knee-jerk obstruction and mindless attacks. Imagine a football team in which healthy competition between players degrades into “I don’t care if we win this game. I only care if my teammates score less than me. If my teammates get injured, all the better for me!”

That is the very level of self-destructive behavior that our government has degraded into. As much as our system of government benefits from a measure of good-natured competition, it simply cannot function when the prevailing attitude is “destroy the other guy at all costs.” If the various groups refuse to cooperate and instead focus exclusively on winning and beating the other side, then healthy competition breaks down and becomes counter-productive and self-destructive.

Over the last few decades this is exactly what has happened in politics. Others could point to a different progression, but in my lifetime I have to point to the Clinton hearings as when it turned truly nasty. The Republicans pledged to “bring down” Bill Clinton even before he was sworn into office, and they put 100% of their energy into that. They virtually brought all responsible governance to complete halt while they prosecuted their incessant and relentless attacks on Clinton.

Unfortunately for all of us, this infighting has only continued to get worse from there. And frankly this war has been largely waged by Conservatives who have continued to escalate each year. They have lost all interest in moving our country forward and instead are doggedly fixated on simply destroying anything and anyone that does not identify with them. And they don’t even actually have an agenda. Their agenda is largely whatever hurts or at least does not help the other side and they are happy to burn down the nation if it diminishes their opponents.

So, is it any surprise that out of this climate of rabid, raving, insensate political ideologues, someone like Donald Trump should emerge as their leader? As clearly crazy and incompetent as he is, he is still a welcome breath of fresh air by comparison to the status quo that has emerged. He actually offers some hope amidst the angry, incompetent, government-loathing, self-interested dogmatic extremists that have completely taken over the Republican Party for far too long.

Here’s how this may be a good thing. Trump is a slap in the face of our self-image. He could be just the drenching of cold-frigid water that we need to wake up and snap out of our routine of mindless attacks and rigidly partisan childishness. Perhaps he will force pundits, political fight-promoters in the media, voters, and even Conservative leaders to step back a moment and ask, is this us? Is this the US? Is this as good as we can be?

I think for every American with a shred of sanity remaining, the answer has to be no. We can do much better. We must do much better. We can dial back our senseless Hatfield and McCoy feuding and work together to accomplish great and good things.

If Donald Trump succeeds in showing us just how far we have sunk, if he incites us only to step back and self-assess our behavior, he may have offered our nation the greatest service possible just when it is most desperately needed.

 

 

Similarities Training

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Our brains are essentially pattern recognition machines. Most of our mental processing, however complex, derives from simple pattern-recognition primitives. Generally pattern-recognition is thought of as recognizing a pattern amidst noise, like the silhouette of a tiger obscured by reeds, branches, and shadows. But pattern-recognition also can be thought of as spotting differences between patterns. The pattern of the weeds versus the pattern of the tiger. We can either focus on similarities between patterns or we can focus on differences but we seem to have difficulty focusing on both simultaneously.

duck-rabbitThink of it like the picture to the right. What do you see? If you see a rabbit facing right, then for whatever reason your pattern-recognition system is more programmed to spot rabbits. But if you first see a duck facing left, then you’re more attuned to look for duck patterns. With this particular image, you can switch back and forth between the rabbit and the duck quite easily, but it’s extremely hard to see them both at the same time.

Since everything we think is essentially built upon pattern-recognition, this kind of selectivity applies to everything we think, no matter how complex. We can see the world with God or we can see the world without God. Both seem obvious to the observer if their pattern-recognition system is tuned to find that pattern. But the other view can seem just as obvious to us simply by flipping a switch in our brains. And by the way, that doesn’t mean that both perceptions are equally real in fact. If the image above is actually a photo of a duck, and seeing it as a rabbit does not make it a rabbit.

Similarly, we can either focus on the similarities between two patterns, or we can focus on the differences. It just depends which one we’re tuned to look for, like the rabbit or the duck. And even if the differences are incredibly minor compared to the similarities, the differences are all we can see if that is what we expect to see. In this case, there actually IS no difference at all between the duck and the rabbit, but we are convinced that they are completely different.

Social training makes us hypersensitive to recognizing differences in people – even when there are virtually no differences at all. We see it as a particular social good to notice, acknowledge, and celebrate the differences between people and their groups. But while this is good, it also tunes our neural networks to perceive a very skewed view of the world. If carried to an extreme this can be more divisive than unifying.

For example, when I was in the Peace Corps, their very well-intentioned cultural awareness training tuned our pattern recognition systems to be hyper-aware of what were often tiny cultural differences. The result was that this made most volunteers quite frightened and apprehensive. It made them extremely worried that they were venturing into some alien civilization where the people were so foreign that any tiny inadvertent slip on their part could result in an international incident. I proposed half-seriously to the Peace Corps leadership that they needed to offer “similarities training” to reassure the volunteers that the Africans were in fact 99.999% just like them and that while the .001% of differences should be understood and recognized, the similarities far out-weighted any differences.

I saw this again when I was out working in my village in rural South Africa. There was a very sweet local Afrikaans woman who had volunteered in the Black community her entire life. Still, she asked me quite sincerely one day what it was like to actually “live with them.” I asked her what she meant. She stated what was obvious to her, “but they are so different!” I pressed her for specifics and all she could finally think to say was “Well for one thing they eat pap!”

Now, pap is the corn version of mashed potatoes. That was the big difference that made life amongst them inconceivable to her? But to this woman, so hyper-sensitive to differences, this was totally understandable given the way our brains work. Her neural network was so focused on incredibly minor differences that she couldn’t see that the Black folk she worked with every day were exactly the same as her in almost every possible way.

I often tell another story. When I lived in India my pattern recognition machine got gradually tuned to see everything around me as dirty and disgusting. My attitude plummeted for a good long while. All that made it through my pattern-recognition filters was the duck, quacking and dirty and fowl. Then one day I suddenly had an apparently random “attitude adjustment” and in the blink of an eye my pattern-recognition system flipped to see the rabbit and suddenly everything around me was beautiful and inspiring. All those same people who disgusted and repelled me before were now proud and happy folk that I wanted to engage with. These changes can happen gradually in imperceptible increments like me descent into negativity or instantaneously as happened in my attitude adjustment.

That story illustrates the tremendous power of our unconscious pattern recognition programming. Reality doesn’t change but you are conditioned to see either a rabbit or a duck. Like the picture, even though reality doesn’t actually change, you are either convinced that there is evidence of god all around you or that there is no evidence whatsoever. The African villagers don’t change but you see strange alien creatures, or you see regular folk just like you. The Indian streets don’t change but you either see only the smelly cow-dung or only the pretty wildflowers. One day your soulmate can do no wrong, the next moment everything he or she says or does is incredibly offensive.

What you see and think all depends on the patterns that your brain is conditioned to recognize and allow through your perceptual filters. Attitudes are formed by perceptions and perceptions are filtered by the biases imposed by our innate pattern-recognition machines. Science trains our brains to identify real patterns, not merely imagined constellations amongst the stars. And when it comes to your fellow man, while recognizing differences is important, don’t become conditioned to imagine that those small differences outweigh the overwhelming similarities that connect us.

Read more about this topic in my book, Belief in Science and the Science of Belief (see here).

The Figmentums Pledge Drive

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Did you enjoy that Figmentum about whatever it was? We at Figmentums do our best to bring you healthy and tasty little essays that nourish your brain and while stimulating your imagination. Over the last year we have brought you over 70 short but dense mini-essays on a variety of topics relating to science, education, fun, and fantasy. Presumably you have found at least some to be stimulating, entertaining, and even provocative.

We still have a nearly unlimited supply of Figmentums waiting to bring you, but your public Figmentums cannot survive without your kind donations. We need your pledges to continue. Not pledges of money, but pledges of shares. Without your active participation in sharing and linking and forwarding Figmentums to others, without your comments, we have no reason for being.

bastionempressOne thing we enjoy doing here is to tie together interesting concepts in innovative ways, particularly mixing physical or social science with fantasy. For instance, relating our pledge drive to battling The Nothingness in The Neverending Story. In that movie, a boy named Bastian was engrossed in a book called The Neverending Story. Gradually he became aware that by reading the book, he had become an active participant in it. And unless Bastian would take responsibility to verbally give the Child Emperess a name, The Nothingness of apathy would destroy the wondrous world in the book forever. She pled desperately with Bastian to overcome his hesitation and say her name out loud.

The Nothingness threatens our world of Figmentums as well. By reading it, YOU are a part of Figmentums. Remaining passive is to forsake your role in our little world. Unless you actively share it with others, the magical land of Figmentums will be lost to The Nothingness.

So this week is pledge week. To keep Figmentums alive, just browse back over our last year’s worth of Figmentums and if you are reminded of one that particularly grabbed you, forward it to a friend, post a link on a discussion forum, or post a comment. Resolve to share more in the future. Work together to create a gorgeous jump in our reader statistics and become an active participant in the world of Figmentums. Don’t let The Nothingness claim us.

Bastian, give me a name!

 

 

What Aliens Look Like

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We aren’t likely to ever meet an alien. As I argued in a previous post, although it is a statistical certainty that alien life must exist, the laws of physics simply make it implausibly improbable that they could ever visit us or we them (see here). The most likely way we might learn what aliens once looked like would be if we happen to pick up an interstellar message in a bottle from some distant ancient civilization, their own version of Voyager with candid snapshots and videos from back home.

But we can make educated guesses based on the fundamental design constraints of the elemental building blocks and physical processes that apply throughout the universe. For example, intelligent aliens must have a lower and upper size limit based on fundamental constraints of molecular dimensions and gravity.

We can similarly surmise much more. For example, any intelligent alien species is likely to be highly mobile – for that they require large bursts of energy – for that they require a fluid chemical transfer system – for that they require a variable speed pump controlled by a central nervous system that adjusts the amplitude and frequency of pumping based upon a large amount of sensor data – and that control mechanism would have to be autonomic so that the pumping controller is highly responsive and unaffected by their state of consciousness.

So, intelligent alien species are likely to have circulatory and nervous systems that are mechanically and functionally quite similar to our own. For vision they are likely to have two sensors placed up high for optimum line of sight and depth perception. They are likely to be similarly similar in the design of their other major systems. In short, after looking past superficial differences, alien life would almost certainly be quite familiar to human physicians and biologists.

It would be foolishly egotistical to imagine that all alien life will be exactly like us and the other species present on Earth. Certainly there would be dramatic and astounding variations that we cannot begin to imagine. But it would also be equally foolish to imagine that the bulk of species in the universe would not evolve following much the same processes with much the same results as life here. A human exobiologist could almost certainly be trained to understand, diagnose, and treat almost any form of alien life.

hortaIn Star Trek, after Doctor McCoy got over his initial revulsion (You expect me to treat that thing Jim?!?), he was able to patch up even the exotically alien silicon-based Horta with some simple spackle compound.

But apart from exceptions like the Horta, Star Trek and most every science fiction universe depicts very human-like aliens. This implicit assumption of similarity is made mostly so that alien creatures will be relatable and to make them playable by human actors with minimal make-up and costumes.

AlienBut we create human-like creatures even when there are no technical constraints. The astoundingly terrifying alien created by HR Giger is remarkably human-like with 2 arms, 2 legs, a head, a tail, a mouth, and so on. Despite having acid for blood, his alien follows the evolutionary design model of a human quite closely. It is likely not the case, as many imagine, that such alien depictions represent an unimaginative human conceit and lack of imagination. Rather, it is likely that such physics-defying aliens are actually much more fanciful than evolution is mechanically capable of producing – on any planet.

And let me be clear. Its unfathomably unlikely that any alien could remotely pass as human and walk amongst us undetected – that’s purely a movie fancy as unrealistic as aliens with acid for blood that can eat through feet of metal. However, they will be biologically similar in function if not form. They will not have any superpowers or godlike abilities that defy basic chemistry and physics because they can not. If they can fly they will need wings. And as any dolphin can tell you, there is a fundamental limit to how far they could advance without appendages that allow them to manipulate their environment.

Even many of us who are wise enough to understand that god cannot exist are still far too willing to remain agnostic in insisting that there might be aliens out there with what would effectively be godlike powers.

If my hypothesis of fundamental similarity is true, and I suggest that it must be more true than not, it should encourage us that we’re not actually missing out on as much as we might imagine because we are effectively bed-ridden here on Earth. Aliens would be marvelous to see, but evolution has offered us a pretty representative sampling of the range of life typically found in the universe.

Unless a message in a bottle lands on our Earthly beaches, we’re unlikely to ever know for sure how typical we are. Even then, that would give us only one more example of life. But we can make some pretty good assumptions about the nature of life in the universe without direct experience. And it is likely that the range of actual life in the universe is no where near as wide as our unconstrained imaginations.

So what do aliens look like? Probably a lot more like us than we might imagine.

 

How These Things Get Started

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There are no end to the crazy stories that go around. My uncle was saved from a bear by Bigfoot and has the scars to prove it. This guy on TV was molested by aliens – his story was checked out by a team of scientists. My grandmother was kissed by her dead husband and she wouldn’t make that kind of thing up. The Virgin Mary appeared to a homeless guy in the Bronx who had no reason to lie. Forty-Seven cows mysteriously died in Iowa after a Haitian witch doctor got snubbed at a truck stop and cursed the town – couldn’t be coincidence. Everyone knows that old house is haunted by a woman who was murdered by her lover in the 40’s. That was the day my dead pet returned to save my life.

Given that there is absolutely no possibility that any of these stories are actually true, one has to wonder how they ever get started in the first place. We even have to wonder whether they might have some element of truth if only because there seems to be no conceivable way that such tales could ever get started if there wasn’t some truth to them.

But get started they do. While I cannot give you every particular origin story, I can relate to you one real example to illustrate how these things get started.

One summer during college I was rooming with my longtime buddy Steve. As I walked back to our place late one sweltering night in Wisconsin, I was feeling particularly bored and fanciful. The nighttime shadows helped work my imagination into a receptive frame of mind and when I walked past the window of a local craft shop I was struck by these hand-crafted dolls on display in the window. Now like many people I do admit to being generally spooked by dolls and as I looked at this one particularly creepy looking doll bathed in old-time street lamps, I got inspired to mischief.

I took off running (I had been a track and cross-country runner) but got myself plenty winded by the time I reached our building. I stumbled, intentionally falling and crashing up the stairway and pounded on our door with desperate urgency. Steve opened the door to the sight of me in very convincing panic-stricken terror. I rushed into the room and I made him drag my terrifying story from me. I told him that I had been walking past this store and noticed this doll and suddenly I felt an eerie presence, like some evil spirit, and without warning this doll leapt at the window and clawed at me. I panicked and ran all the way back to the room, the entire time feeling like some malevolent demon was chasing me.

Steve’s reaction was all I could have hoped for. Though frightened he valiantly insisted that we go back that very night to face this demon. I reluctantly agreed to show him where the store was but refused to get closer than the end of the block. I watched down the street as Steve heroically inched forward, craning his neck tentatively to glimpse this demon-doll. Suddenly he jerked, bolted, almost got hit by a passing car as he stumbled into the street, ran all the way back to and past me, shouting breathlessly “I saw it dude! It was the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen!!”

RamonaAudleyYup, in retrospect I should have owned up to my prank right then and there. But Steve was so pumped up I decided to tell him in the morning. By the next morning I had forgotten all about it, and anyway Steve had already left to go somewhere before I woke up. I was reminded of my folly when Steve returned and proudly related how he had gone to the craft shop, paranormal investigator like, to sleuth out the origins of this demon doll. The owner told him that by the greatest of coincidences, the doll-maker, a lady by the name of Ramona Audley (pictured right) happened to be paying a visit at that very same moment. Steve politely confronted Ramona and asked her whether she knew that she was crafting possessed dolls. Ramona apparently nearly went into a terrified state of shock and I was later to learn that the dolls were removed from the store window that very day (Ramona, I did you wrong and I’m so sorry).

It gets worse. When Steve told me what he had done I was mortified. That poor Ramona Audley! I never intended to frighten her or the shop owner! But how could I tell Steve the truth of my prank now that he had done this? I settled for hoping that this whole debacle would just blow over.

Needless to say it did not just blow over. It took on a life of its own like Godzilla emerging from the ocean to wrack havoc. For the next several decades, whenever Steve introduced me at any kind of gathering, he insisted that I tell the doll story. Of course I would refuse, feigning intentionally ambiguous reluctance. But Steve would invariably take over and tell the story on my behalf, prefacing it with a lengthy introduction about how he would never believe this story from anyone else in the entire world except from me. My credibility and sanity and integrity are (were) apparently just that irreproachable.

If you dear reader could have admitted to making up this story prior to this you are a better person than me.  And to make matters even worse, Steve is a naturally gregarious guy who became a minor celebrity with a sizable fan following. Who knows how many people he has told this story to who have in turn related it to many other people, who all swear that they were assured that this story came from an impeachable source. Every year that went by while I hoped that the story would be finally forgotten, every time I failed to disavow it, the myth became that much more indestructible.

My dolls truly had become demons. A few years ago I agreed to be interviewed for a video documentary about my friend Steve. To my horror and chagrin Steve had prompted the documentarian to ask me about the “Doll Story,” which he did, on camera. The story had finally advanced to a line I could not cross and I admitted to my prank on camera rather than perpetuate it any further.

Even after that public admission, I still live in perpetual dread of seeing this bogus story reenacted on the History or Science channel. Lots of people are probably more willing to believe that I lied about it not happening rather than believe that I simply made it up as a silly impulsive prank. After all, what kind of inconceivably horrible person would make up such a story? Umm, yes, that would be me.

And that, my friends, is how these things get started.