Brian Trent dot com

Humidity this week in Connecticut on the order of the Triassic Age.  Even the trees are slouching in despair.  First thing each morning the sticky haze appears, and has the unhappy side-effect of revealing just how many spiderwebs reside in my front and back yards. There’s an entire arachnocivilization out there. The lawnmower must be a Shiva-like Destroyer in their web-based conversations.

I saw District 9 this week. It was a very good, thought-provoking film which had the virtue of being original. Kind of a cross between Cronenberg’s The Fly and Alien Nation. Decent social commentary — perhaps a bit heavy-handed on the apartheid allusions — but effective nonetheless. The grainy documentary-style approach was a terrific choice. Effects were good; acting was excellent. Loved the bullet-catcher force field.

The aliens themselves looked good, though it would be nice to see a film which braves to depict something truly exotic. Too often, the denizens of another planet are shown to be basically humanoid. Two eyes, two legs, two arms, etc. As if the evolutionary paths of another planet would remotely resemble terrestrial evolution. If in some distant age we ever do run into an intelligent alien species, I’m thinking it will likely be something on the order of a 17-foot-tall walking pyramid with multiple legs and eye-stalks. In other words, something really alien… not just a human with pointy ears, or a cat-man, a bug-man, a lizard-man, etc.

I think I’ve figured out why Hollywood (and a lot of books and games too) shy away from such truly alien concepts, though. We don’t like to be reminded just how vulnerable we are as a species. That’s why film aliens usually have technology that’s roughly on par with our own — again, a ridiculous assumption.  It makes us feel safer, to imagine things that are familiar.

Nonetheless, District 9 is one of the better genre films I’ve seen recently.

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My article “Eternal Lives on Hard-Drives” was published in the August issue of Clarkesworld, a very noteworthy publication. I interviewed Dr. Christoff Koch for the piece. The article explores the technological feasibility of future computers having the capacity to capture 100 billion neurons-worth of information. In other words, will it ever be possible to “back up” your brain on disk.

From the article:

Dominique’s beloved father died two weeks before his sixtieth birthday. The present she bought him is still wrapped, a collection of old Dirty Harry movies on DVD. He would have loved to re-watch them after so many years.

Driving home from the hospital where she watched Dad take his final breaths, Dominique sighs and begins making calls to family and friends. There will be no funeral. No burial. No cremation. Rather, Dominique’s calls are to set up plans for her father’s return, as soon as the insurance claim is approved and his digitally stored consciousness can be downloaded into a cloned body.

Dominique’s mother confirms that the last time Dad got saved was two years ago. Which means when he returns, he’ll have no memory of the cruise they took together last summer. Mercifully, he also won’t remember who accidentally knocked a can of red paint all over his golf clubs last Christmas.

Two years of life will have to be retold. But he’ll have life again. And those Dirty Harry movies won’t stay wrapped up forever. Dad will get to watch them, thanks to a technology not terribly different from the way those very DVDs are able to be watched and re-watched for all time.

The human brain is the most complex device in the universe. An elaborate network of roughly 100 billion neurons, it stores our thoughts, feelings, dreams, fears, lusts, quirks, and memories. The Egyptians were obsessed with immortality and took extreme measures to preserve the body from decay, even storing its organs in neat canopic jars. Yet the brain they threw away. Believing that the seat of consciousness was in the chest, they saw no purpose in preserving the skull’s most important resident. Ignobly, it was tossed out with the trash.

You can read the rest here.  An interesting thought-experiment, neither endorsement nor condemnation.  But I do like the last line:

Might we live to see a future where the phrase “have you been saved?” means something quite different from what it does today?

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Finally, one of my favorite stories has been accepted for publication in Bewildering Stories. Entitled “Everywhere After All,” it’s an exploration of individuals and society in a futuristic framework. I’ll say more when it appears in print.

Reading this week: Being and Nothingness.

Watching this week: Perfume: Story of a Murderer, The Usual Suspects, Falling Down, Coraline, and Till Human Voices Wake Us.

“Henceforth, people will be looking at the universe with the eyes of oxen.”

- Katib Chelebi, 17^th century geographer

Did you know that the moon landing was a hoax? That Barack Obama won’t show us his birth certificate? That the world is ending in 2012? That Creationism is valid science?

Welcome to the rallying points of America’s culture of belief. Oddly united across political divisions, faiths, and ideologies, it is the de facto culture of the blogosphere and mass media. It thrives on the false principle that “all opinions are equal”, even those without a shred of factual data, documentation, or reasoned methodology. It is a culture where 20 percent of the American people believe NASA faked the Apollo moon landings, and where half the population believes the world was made in six days.

When Katib Chelebi spoke the top quote, it was in response to a tidal shift in the culture of 17^th century Turkey. Chelebi was a cartographer, historian, traveler, philosopher, and writer. He had been exposed to the works of the ancient Greeks and appreciated their methodical approach to investigation.

Yet the rationalist mindset of Turkish schools was descending into dogmatism. It appealed to emotions and impulsiveness. It catered to the basement of the human mind which today’s neurologists would call the r-complex. Chelebi keenly perceived this devolution and saw the road ahead. Two roads diverged in the proverbial woods; Chelebi was aghast at the path his people were choosing.

There is a certain irony in the case of America; a nation founded on Enlightenment principles of rationality, and now so eagerly becoming a culture of raw, unquestioning belief. When we hear about an alleged culture war, we tend to think of it in political terms like gay marriage or abortion. The truth goes deeper. Like Chelebi’s era, our real battle is for a critical thinking. It is about our fundamental approach to the universe, and is nothing less than a line in the sand between the logical and delusional.

It’s the difference between this:

And this:

Consider the subject of gravity. No one doubts it. Jump off your roof and you can clearly demonstrate its reality. Great thinkers have contemplated the nature of this mysterious force, and it was Albert Einstein (elaborating on Newton) who created the geometric model we accept today.

Yet our theory of gravity is not a belief system. Einstein didn’t preach from a mountain or circulate pamphlets to justify his position. More importantly, the world didn’t instantly drop to its knees and chant the merits of curved space. His theory was examined and cross-examined. It was tested and retested… and accumulated such mounds of evidence that it is now accepted.

Are there alternative theories to gravity?

Well, we could easily invent one:

The force of gravity is in fact a cabal of ghosts pressing down on our chests. Of course, such a statement is a hypothesis, not a theory. It only becomes an accepted theory if we can test, retest, provide evidence and documentation for it. It must stand up to scrutiny. Otherwise it’s simply a fairy tale. To put a finer point on it, it is irrational.

This irrationality is the new American zeitgeist. Even a cursory glance at the political blogosphere and media outlets demonstrates this over and over. We see this irrationality in nearly every subject now — and the health care “debate” in which opponents stand, scream, screech, and shout is a textbook example. No debate. No discussion. No point and counterpoint. American debate today is a pit-fight, the moder equivalent of a frustrated caveman waving a bone about at his enemies.

Here is just one example:

“Obama is a Muslim.”

In June, Obama visited Cairo and made overtures of communication to the local Muslim population. Predictably, this act relit the battle-cries from political opponents who had spent much time during the election stating that Obama was in fact a secret Muslim.

That essentially is the argument in four words: Obama is a Muslim. The implication we are left with is that it is somehow wrong to be Muslim in America because (and here we tap another rampant falsity) America is a Christian nation. It encourages a kind of juvenile math: Muslim leader in charge of Christian country equals bad.

Of course, the United States was founded on a secular Constitution which saw fit to avoid religious language entirely, and even took pains to include items like Article 6 (declaring no religious test is required for public officials) and the first ten words of the very first Amendment. It established a secular government which permits religious liberty. It did not establish a religious government mandating religious favoritism or fundamentalism.

As to the claim that Obama is a Muslim, it was General Colin Powell who in October said:

“I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

Powell was more accurate with these words than I suspect even he realized.

In When Prophecy Fails, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter documented the mentality of a doomsday cult in the 1950s. This cult believed that the world would end at midnight on December 21. Midnight arrived and the world remained surprisingly intact. The cultists openly wondered if their watches were wrong. After a few hours of horrified silence, some began to weep. Then a most remarkable thing happened: The cult’s leader announced she was suddenly receiving new telepathic messages from God. The apocalypse, she claimed the message said, had been postponed! Over the following days and months, the doomsday cult jubilantly renewed their crusade to convert more people into their thrall.

This was not an isolated incident. Nor is it relegated only to the 1950s. People have been predicting the end of the world for millennia. Recent years saw national paranoia over Y2K, the 5/5/2000 apocalypse, and now the 2012 scare. No matter how many times the world refuses to end, there is never a shortage of people who believe (and often hope) it will.

The reality is that the world we live in is irrelevant to belief. For example, I don’t believe that there are fish in the sea. Rather, I have seen the evidence for fish in the sea and accept that evidence. I have seen documentaries on fish and have visited aquariums, have gone fishing, caught fish, fried fish, and eaten fish. It’s not an issue of belief.

I also don’t believe that mankind landed on the moon. I have seen the evidence for a moon landing and accept that evidence. (I have similarly watched the “evidence” presented by those who think a lunar visit was hoaxed dissolve away at the first light of serious scrutiny.) By the same token, I don’t believe in a Hollow Earth, chupacabras, or that there is a Zionist conspiracy to invent the Holocaust, because the evidence for all three is less than compelling.

It would be comforting if we could trace this only to the Internet, which by virtue of its anonymity provides easy venue for irrational “trolling” as it’s called. Mark Twain’s warning that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on is readily proven in cyberspace’s echo chamber: Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9-11 hijackers, Nostradamus predicted the fall of America in the 21^st century, or that the swine flu is God’s punishment against… whomever.

What is most troubling is the historical reference. In 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under a sea of hot ash. Predictably, many people alive at that time blamed the calamity on Zeus. Since geological science hadn’t been born, assigning divine character to natural catastrophe was the best explanation going.

Today we will live in an age of rational methodology. Our laws are ideally derived from cogent debate (and are why we say “without passion or prejudice” in our legal proceedings), and we use the scientific method when dealing with worldly phenomena. A culture of belief rejects this in favor of a Neolithic worldview. The rational mechanisms behind hurricanes, plane crashes, and flu epidemics are eschewed by this crowd in favor of evil spirits, alien conspiracies, and prophecy, for instance.

That evolution and creationism are still butting heads 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species is probably the best testament to this slide from rational culture. In 2009, half the American population accepts Creationism; America is one of the only developed countries on Earth where the subject is even a debate anymore.

Evolution is taught in schools not because there is a global secular conspiracy, but because it suffers from the condition of being backed up by factual data. By comparison, modern Creationism (now dressed up in the glitzy new wrapping paper called Intelligent Design) fails even the most basic of rational tests. As one of the key rallying cries of the culture of belief, Creationism lacks any credible documentation, tests, or data. Perhaps most astonishingly, it has yet to articulate what its theory is. At day’s end it is a position of faith; in other words, it belongs in Sunday school and not biology classrooms.

The Creationist position is that students should be exposed to alternatives to evolution. Of course, there are lots of alternative explanations to evolution. There is the Nordic tale of how all of humanity sprouted from the maggots of a frost giant. There’s the Chinese egg of chaos, out of which the Earth hatched. The Greeks gave us their “five races of man” fable, which described how various ages of humanity were carved by the gods from gold, silver, bronze, and iron (of which we belong to this latter category.) The Sumerians believed that the arts and sciences were handed to mankind by a fish-headed god named Oannes.

Many Creationists are quick to laugh at these “alternative” explanations, while blissfully ignoring the fact that all of these tales, from Genesis to the Greeks, from Amaterasu to Adam, have the exact same amount of evidence to support them: Zero. Only evolution, like gravity, has data going for it… and a lot of data at that.

In a debate at the Cato Institute between evolutionist Michael Shermer and Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan Wells, the latter was asked point-blank what his alternative to the evidence for natural selection was.

“I don’t think I’m obligated to propose an alternate theory,” Wells publicly stated. “I don’t pretend to have an alternate theory that explains the history of life.”

At least Wells was honest. No theory, no rationale, no methodology. Just a thin god-of-the-gaps argument rooted in the school of belief.

Another prominent Creationist, Michael Behe, also admitted under cross-examination during the Dover School trial that his touted redefinition of science (to allow Creationism in schools) would also permit astrology to be considered scientific theory.

Astrology is a belief system. Astronomy, by contrast, is not. Astronomy concerns itself with factual data. Should I go to my local Barnes and Noble and buy a dozen astronomy books, they will all give the same factoids about Mars, for instance. Their information is derived from decades of serious study of the Red Planet, including robotic landers and flybys.

I’ll single out the issue of gay marriage, which recently has seen a flurry of legislation across America. The majority of arguments opposing it are not coming from a rational basis, but rather an emotional and fearful one. The common cry of “It will be the end of civilization” is a curious claim to make, and becomes stranger when civilization has obviously not ended where it has been allowed. It reminds us of the “Obama is a Muslim” protestation. As an “argument,” such statements are illogical. They cater to the lower floors of human consciousness.

It isn’t that rationality must preclude emotion. A society of cold intellectuals is not what is being advocated here; rather, a culture which places emphasis on reasoned debate is. Perhaps the best illustration comes to us from Plato. Imagine, he suggested, that you have horses tethered to a chariot, and a charioteer holding the reins. Both the man and the beast are necessary to get anywhere. It is the guiding hand of a clear-thinking charioteer which needs to be in charge.

The pages of history of filled with irrational decisions. Often these decisions have world-altering results. When the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fundamentalists, the classical age of scientific and artistic inquiry was obliterated. One thousand years of a dark age followed, during which (to consult Twain again) a “nation of men was turned into a nation of worms.”

For us today, the situation is far, far more dire. Belief-stricken populations and their leaders can cause unthinkable devastation to modern society. Technology has tipped the scales, and the antics of a collective adolescence threaten the global sandbox. In ancient Alexandria, an irrational policy abetted the fall of civilization. But while those book burnings required at least 451 degrees, tomorrow’s censorship will be done with a search-and-replace command. Chelebi’s disdain is now amplified by giant orders of magnitude. A global power can become a global “sick man” in the blink of a historical eye.

If we can’t address today’s problems with a clear-thinking and intellectual honesty, how do we face the challenges of tomorrow?