Thursday, September 30, 2010
The evolution of psychic ability
One way to examine a belief is to pretend, every once in a while, that it is real, and implications of the belief will often reveal themselves to you like images on an old Polaroid picture. When I assume that psychic abilities are real, I suddenly have a million questions. For instance, where does natural selection play a part in the development of these senses? How, exactly, do they interact with our existing senses, and the functions of the body?
A big red question mark that appears in my mind is, why would an ability or sense that would be very handy in survival be restricted to so few people, and hidden so deep as to be nearly inaccessible to the rest of us? There are no other senses that do this. Sight isn't something that's restricted to a small percentage of the population, and then disbelieved by the rest of us. Hearing isn't an exclusive club. So, why would extra sensory perception, which would make important decisions so much easier, alert us when someone/something means to harm us, and perhaps even let us know which mate would make the best offspring (yes, we are animals, get over it), be so poorly developed after so many millions of years of evolution? I would expect something so handy to be prominent enough in our perception that nobody would have the luxury to disbelieve in it.
I'm suddenly curious if anyone has tried to breed animals for psychic ability. Perhaps mice. If the mouse pushes on the card with a triangle, he gets a treat, and if he pushes the card with three wavy lines, then audio of a cat yowling is played. Which would be unpleasant for a mouse, of course. Perhaps we could coax the effect out. I'm going to comment in Dean Radin's blog about this.
Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe psychic ability doesn't have a strong selection pressure. Maybe knowing the future makes people worry, and then become ill. Maybe knowing what other people are thinking about someone will make them want to kill themselves.
We have to wonder why nature would keep such secrets, and what good it could have done us throughout the development of our species. And we also, as always, have to consider that this effect may not exist in the first place, in which case all of this would make a lot more sense. And, at the end of the day, all I really want is for the world to make sense.
Yeah, I know. Good luck. Thanks.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Believing in lucid dreams
I was lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is a dream in which you know the state you're in. You realize that everything around you is just dream scenery, and as far as restrictions, and consequences, you're pretty much off the radar. I've been lucid dreaming occasionally since I was a kid. Back then, my highest priority during these moments was trying to shoot fireballs out of my hands. At twenty-eight years old, I'm now past the fireball stage.
A lot of people have never had this experience, or perhaps they've had it once, and then never again. Some people have never had it, but they've got a half-dozen books about how to induce it. It is a great experience, and is not a waste of time, which is spent sleeping, either way.
Before the 1970s, lucid dreams were not recognized by science, because they could not be induced, and then tested, in a laboratory setting. A couple of people had a couple of clever ideas, though, and it turned out that they could be tested.
If I had been born before that time, though, I would have, as a lucid dreamer, been placed in the category of UFO abductees, telephone psychics, and seance mediums. I would have been either a liar, or ignorant, and people like James Randi would have been calling me the equivalent of a woo-woo. The lucid dream is an example of a fringe belief that was eventually accepted by science.
We have to wonder what fringe beliefs of today are the scientific realities of tomorrow. I know that if it's ever proven that people can communicate between minds, (and, for whatever reason, this ability was evolutionarily made very obscure and difficult to harness) it would be the beginning of a scientific revolution.
Unfortunately for the future of parapsychology, it seems that most of these hidden abilities also happen to be things (like shadow people, synchronicity, and dowsing) that would seem to happen even in a ghost-free God-free world. It could be that, while our minds are set up to be fooled into believing these things, these things are also, coincidentally, sometimes real. Or, it could be that our minds are set up to be fooled, and they just keep getting fooled.
If life after death, though, or the interconnectedness of minds, is ever proven, even if it's only proven to me, I am ready and willing (hopefully able) to jump over the fence and shove the truth down everyone's throat, with vigor and enthusiasm. Because these sorts of abilities, if they really were real, would have sweeping implications in all parts of life. In short, it would be a big deal.
Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
My experience with shadow people
Monday, September 27, 2010
Not a post about reincarnation
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Placebo Effect is my favorite effect
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Why The Fourth Kind left me feeling sad
I'm not an entertainment blogger, by any means. I don't keep up on movies or TV, and have a hard time watching anything that annoys me even a little bit. Not only that, my opinion of what's good, as far as media is concerned, often varies wildly from what I hear other people say is good. I really enjoyed The Last Airbender, for instance. All of this is fine with me. I waste enough of my time without wasting it trying to keep up on the new releases.
With this in mind, you'll forgive the tardiness of my post. I understand that The Fourth Kind was released on DVD some months ago. I've seen movie posters, and thought, "Oh, some alien movie." Then my significant other bought it for me, a few days ago, and I was a little more intrigued. This is supposed to be like a documentary. I enjoy watching documentaries about the paranormal the same way I enjoy watching stage magic, trying to figure out exactly where I might be getting misled.
So, at night, in a dark room, by myself, I watch it. The first scene is Milla Jovovoich, as herself, basically emphasizing that what I'm about to see is real, and here's the real archival footage, and all that.
I'm actress Milla Jovovich, and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler in The Fourth Kind. This film is a dramatization of events that occurred October 1st through the 9th of 2000, in the Northern Alaskan town of Nome. To better explain the events of this story, the director has included actual archived footage throughout the film. This footage was acquired from Nome psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler, who has personally documented over 65 hours of video and audio materials during the time of the incidents. To better protect their privacy, we have changed the names and professions of many of the people involved. Every dramatized scene in this movie is supported by either archived audio, video or as it was related by Dr. Tyler during extensive interviews with the director. In the end, what you believe is yours to decide. Please be advised, that some of what you're about to see is extremely disturbing.
The movie is pretty creepy, and the footage (which runs alongside dramatizations of the footage) is pretty remarkable. However, I have to mention something. When you're watching youtube, and you sometimes make the realization, "That's what it really looks like when someone falls down the stairs!" or " That's what it really looks like when someone drives a truck into a living room!" we can feel that what we're looking at is what actually happened. There's a certain quality that real footage has that movie scenes do not. A bit of randomness, a lack of grace, unflattering camera angles. It's the flavor of reality. The archival footage on The Fourth Kind did have a bit of this flavor, but it was not strong.
The movie ends with Milla talking as herself again, urging me to make my own decision about what to believe. Of course, I immediately jumped on the internet to help me decide. It turns out that the fakeness of the footage is old news. I'm not one to take any debunker's statements without questioning them, but everything I read made sense, Google Maps showed me that the real town looks very very different that the town in the "archival footage." In short, it was a movie.
I think one of the reasons I'm a skeptic is to balance out my natural naivite. Naivite that would have me think that a documentary is a documentary, and that a movie would not go so far out of its way to convince me that it is real, when everyone involved knows that it is not. I guess my belief was that if a documentary comes out that is not factual, it is because the creators are actually fooling themselves, not because they are trying to fool the audience. My thinking was incorrect.
But I think the thing that hurts most is that Milla Jovovich, whose career I've watched blossom since I was fifteen years old, would break through the fourth wall, go out of her way to talk to me as herself, and then lie to my face (or a camera that represents my face, at least). This is not what I would expect out of the loveable Leeloo in her masking tape outfit. This is not what I would hope for from the dangerous (but honest?) Alice, firing guns with both of her hands. This is not alright.
Should you watch the movie, if you haven't already? I can't tell you. I'm not a movie critic, and I don't like movie critics. If you really want to watch a documentary, though, I'd say check out The Cove, or Outfoxed, or The King of Kong. Good ones, and they don't need a beautiful woman to convince you that they're real. But I'm pretty sure they are.
Monday, September 20, 2010
The Montauk Monster eats my cat food
People sat at their desks all around the world, ready to debunk the so-called Montauk Monster (Click the link to see the creature. I didn't want to ugly-up my blog with it). All manner of animal species were thrown at the corpse, with hopes that one would stick. Some called it a raccoon. Some said that it was a sea turtle sans shell. Some called it a large water rat, a dog, a sheep, a sloth, or even a biological experiment. William Wise, director of Stony Brook University's Living Marine Resources Institute, has a wonderfully credible name, and he said that it was simply a fabrication. The body was never studied in-person by scientists, so any guess is as good as any other, right?
Well, no. Just like not all evidence is created equal, not all speculation is created equal. For instance, even a modestly educated man like myself can tell that the beast was never a sea turtle. Firstly, the turtle's spine is actually a part of its shell, secondly... well I hope you'd have to hit someone over the head pretty hard before they thought that thing was a sea turtle, is all I'm sayin'. If it's not obvious to you, then I probably don't have the power to convince you.
It wasn't a rodent. It has some rodent-y features about it, for sure, the teeth are wrong. Those are not the kind of teeth that chew holes through our drywall and plastic cereal canisters. A rodent's mouth is pretty distinct.
As for a latex fabrication, it's not a bad guess, but I personally don't agree. Some things have a certain realness that you can see, and while this sense is not so hard to fool, it tells me that this nasty thing was actually a living creature once.
After doing some of this modern internet version of research, it seems likely that this poor thing is actually a drowned raccoon. It's not obvious, but taking a look at a raccoon skeleton casts some light on the subject. I'm not 100% sure that's the case, but it sure seems to be.
I think two things are interesting about the story of the Montauk Monster:
1. How quickly we latch on to something mysterious, just because it's mysterious. Without this kind of reaction, science would have never been founded. But, then again, neither would have religion. I imagine that, when we were still a new species, we ran into the mysterious so often that we probably spent most of our time giving things labels and explanations that would later become mythology.
2. How quickly many of my fellow skeptics, when confronted with something that is mysterious, will scramble to debunk it, worried less about the truth, and more about getting that blemish off of their worldview. This is whack-a-mole debunking, and when the average person reads that kind of nonsense, they may come away thinking that they live in a world where something that's obviously not a turtle may be a turtle. After all, science is counter-intuitive often enough that some people just believe everything a professional skeptic says.
To those of us that do write for the public, let's think twice before becoming too hasty with explanations. Whether you like it or not, there are people out there who hang on your every word, and will be bringing up your conclusion in discussion boards for years to come. "That was debunked back in 2008!"
So let's tread a little more carefully, and not make a fool of these people by jumping to foolish conclusions. Sometimes your worldview has to be a little blemished. Mine is pock-marked and scarred beyond recognition. The trick to it is to know that you don't know it all.
Get that one down, and you'll be fine.
Friday, September 17, 2010
The Oliver's Castle video
In this day and age, the age of nearly ubiquitous video cameras, one might wonder where the video evidence is of this process. It doesn't take long on Google, though, to find that such a video does exist, and it's from a slightly earlier day and age. Simply called the Oliver's Castle video, it's low-quality footage of a field that, after some low-flying balls-of-light visit it, is suddenly marked with a telltale crop circle. The footage is pretty remarkable to see. Please take a look if you haven't seen it before.
Well, the man who took the footage (look at timestamp 3:40), John Wabe, confessed a couple of years later that he did, in fact, create the footage himself, on a computer, in a television studio. Case closed, right?
No, when it comes to belief, it's never case closed. The Oliver's Castle footage was so important to the balls-of-light create crop circle groups, that even a videotaped confession has not wiped out the following of that video. A man told me online, the other day, that the actual man who'd taken the footage has disappeared, and the man who made the confession was an impostor. I can't disprove that, so I just shrugged. This website states that the video withstands closest analyses. That's a very powerful statement. I'm going to show you, though, that the video does not withstand a slightly more distant analysis.
Watching a documentary on the subject (the one linked above), I saw what has to be the best piece of evidence for the video being a fabrication. In my mind, the best evidence is always the evidence that you can see for yourself, without any experts or celebrity middle-men muddying the waters.
If you look at the first couple seconds of the video, there are balls of light flying around the field. Now, this might be because Hollywood has us expecting the camera to be where to action is, but most of us don't immediately notice that, during those first couple of seconds, the cameraman is not following the balls of light. Why not? As it turns out, his camera is actually framing the spot where a crop circle is about to form.
As in, he was aiming the lens at nothing interesting, yet.
Then, suddenly, out of this nothing interesting, a crop circle appears. He doesn't even catch the edge of it, and then focus. He's immediately staring straight down into it, and then it develops like a Polaroid nearly dead-center in his camera's eye.
One trick many of us have picked up in the age of digital trickery is to ask, "Why was he filming this?" If a video depicts a newspaper boy being attacked by a chupacabra, you have to ask why someone was even filming a newspaper boy in the first place. So, in the Oliver's Castle video, you have to ask why he chose to film a section of perfectly normal field when there were mysterious balls of light bobbing around the place.
If you look at John Wabe's confession (or impostor John Wabe, whatever the case may be) this fits perfectly with that. If you look at the people telling us that the debunking of this video was a hoax itself, this does not fit with that. And, unlike the government paying this man to make up a phony story, this is something you can actually see with your own two eyes.
So, why was he filming that spot in the middle of the field? Well, because there was a crop circle there, and he wanted to have a bit of fun. Why else?
Thanks for reading.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Why we hoax
People hoax things sometimes. We can all agree on this. But, when we get to attached to an idea (whether it's Eastern religion, spirit channeling or the Shamwow) we get blinded to the hoaxter possibility. "Well, this and that may be wrong, but at least I can tell that he/she is being honest."
While I call into question anyone's ability to tell whether someone's being honest, that's a different matter for a different day. Much of the time, an individual has a very clear reason to be dishonest, which may look like dollars in the US, or pounds sterling in the UK, perhaps yen in Japan, but it all amounts to the same thing. Money has been a great power in the campaign to turn otherwise good people into scam artists since its invention. As the saying goes (and I'm not entirely sure it's true) Everyone has their price.
But then that leaves all of these other things. Things where something happens, and there is no clear motive for someone to have lied, or faked evidence. They're not making tourist money, book money, talk show money or movie rights money. Sometimes the hoaxter, if there actually was a hoax involved, has hidden from public view. In these cases, those of us that are rather attached to the idea of something being real may argue that it was not a hoax, because obviously the perpetrator would have nothing to gain, in the measure of dollars, pounds, or yen.
When it comes to fooling people, though, there's always a motive. Even if the trickster is losing money in the exercise, there is always a motive. That motive is fun.
It's fun to fool people. Whether you want to throw on a bigfoot costume, video-edit balls of light making a crop circle, or just give a moving testimonial on the internet on how ipecac helped your ulcers. I don't know if you're like me, but I think there's something very thrilling about telling a tall tale, and having people hang on every word.
It is fun to fool people. I don't know if I'm special, or if this is just a quirk of the animal we call Humanity. Untold millions of practical jokes have happened, and very few people ever gained a dollar off of them. Youtube is crowded with things like cell-phone radiation popping popcorn, a giant Lego-ball rolling down a street, not to mention the ridiculous chain-emails that get sent my way, giving me the most absurd advice I may have ever gotten.
I recently read an article in WIRED magazine (yes, I'm a few months behind) about this very subject. It's called Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution. It's a very good read, and is basically a discussion of something that we all already know, but doesn't really seem to be fully integrated into many of our worldviews. Besides biological imperatives (eat, drink, watch Beyonce music videos), and reward-punishment type motivations, there is a third drive, which amounts to just doing something because it interests you. This is why Wikipedia exists, it's why Youtube exists. Hell, it's why half of the modern internet exists, including this blog. Don't let the ads fool you, my fortune cookies do not mention money.
So, the next time you hear a knocking on your window, and nobody is there when you look, keep in mind that someone might be having a great time at your expense. The next time you see gigantic footprints when you're out camping in the Pacific Northwest, don't discount the possibility that there is someone with a big rubber foot watching the newspapers, waiting for photographs of his handiwork. And next time you get a convincing email telling you that hugging your kid causes Ebola, don't let the kid suffer for someone else's jollies.
I think we're all tricksters, at some level. And I'm sure we were that way long before the invention of money.
Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Polite Skeptic Interview: Matthew Williams, circlemaker
After a strange experience earlier in life, Matthew took to investigating the paranormal. His investigation into crop circles showed him a world that he didn't expect. One thing lead to another, and he found himself out in the fields, with a stomper-board, some surveyor's tape, and a group of good friends, making his own contribution to the UFO mythology. Everything went fine until, wanting to prove a point, Matthew sent a diagram of an upcoming crop circle to Author and UFO researcher Whitley Strieber, and then wound up with police at his front door.
Matthew's arrest was something of a blessing in disguise, suddenly allowing him to become more public about the art of crop circle making, and to speak out against circle researchers who, in his view, often skewed evidence, not to mention, from time to time, flat-out lying about their findings.
Matthew Williams explains on his Youtube Channel that crop circle makers are not hoaxters, but artists, and that the wonder that the circles inspire in the public give them joy. Another message is that, even though it's humans that make the circles, the circles themselves are still surrounded by mysteries that even the men with the boards can't begin to explain.
Matthew gives us a look into a secretive world of the circlemaker, a world that very few know about, and even fewer have firsthand experience with. It's fascinating, and evidence that both the images of the grinning prankster, and the artistic UFOs, are both very simplistic when compared to the reality of the situation.
The Polite Skeptic: It would be commonly expected that someone with your experience would be skeptical of paranormal things. Why is it that you aren't, and could you give a rough estimate of what percentage of crop circle makers are skeptical?
Matthew Williams: I started off as a skeptical child, reading books about the paranormal but seeing them as just wide tales, and treating what I was reading as fiction turned into fact, perhaps in the same way that I viewed religious books. Then, my cynical mind took a powerful bashing when I experienced something odd whilst driving over a mountain road one night. I saw a triangular light, with a placement that would have made it hundreds of feet in size. It was standing vertically in front of a mountainside, behind a tree line. I lost sight of the object after, and to this day am no nearer to knowing what it was, although parts of my investigation led me to ask even more questions about our faculties for perception and our recall of strange events. This was my trigger moment, if you like.
After this point, I was in a position where I had to state that I could not understand my experience, and I felt pity and empathy for those who, like me, might be retelling their genuine experiences and having no way to fully understand what it was they saw. My interest in the paranormal became rekindled, and I dug out my old books and read the pages with a new vigor, to learn what I had perhaps missed previously. Now the words on the page had a meaning to me, and a gravitas, that they had not had before. I started to meet people who were interested in the paranormal, and through talking about interests, and eventually interviewing people about their strange experiences, it became clear I was starting to become an investigator of sorts.
If we skip forward a long way to me now being a circlemaker, and believing that the circles we create are a paranormal trigger for not only the circlemakers, but for the people who visit the circles afterwards, I am still interested in investigating and relaying strange experiences to others as truthfully as I can.
To answer your question, nearly all circlemakers I know have claimed to have had odd experiences whilst out at night. Whereas many circlemakers try their hardest to work out what these experiences were, they are left scratching their heads. Up until this year, all bar one major circlemaker had told me of their own strange experiences. This year though, out of the blue, I was told that this major circlemaker had recently seen a silent, black, triangular object fly over him, and his team members had seen this as well. I would like to be able to do an interview to record his experience, but this circlemaker is a bit like Banksy, and a bit shy of being known by face or name. So the interview, if it does take place, will have to be anonymous.
So that just about wraps up all the circlemakers as having strange experiences, and being far more open-minded towards their place in circlemaking and their ability to connect with strange stuff by being out in the fields. Even if they do one day manage to convince themselves of rational explanations for their experiences, they certainly do not have any rational explanations at the moment.
Would you recommend circle making for someone who's interested in studying supernatural things?
Monday, September 13, 2010
Experts vs. Authority Figures
You don't have to drink the Kool-Aid |
"Well, David Icke was saying, in his book, that Greece, and Troy, were actually ruled by human-alien hybrids. Actually, most of our world leaders today are hybrids. It was actually these people... I don't know if they were all hybrids of aliens... but they made up Christianity, from scratch. And these people... they were reptilian-people, David Icke says that their family tree goes through all these different countries, but like I was saying, David Icke..."
If you ever hear someone describing their beliefs to you, and they can't move through their explanation without frequently quoting someone (perhaps a popular author, or philosopher) then there is something wrong. If you find yourself doing that, then you're not talking about your belief. You're describing someone else's belief, and then you're explaining how you believe everything this person says.
I've heard somewhere (can't quickly find it on Google) that, in science, there are no authorities, only experts. When you think about it, it's true.
-An authority figure's job is to decide how it is, and then tell you what they decided.
-An experts job is to notice how it is, and then to help you notice as well.
When you're quoting someone four times in the course of a conversation, you're not treating them like an expert, but an authority figure. You're showing off the fact that you have no direct knowledge or understanding of the subject, and you're just rehashing what you read in a book, and then took on faith. If you tell someone that six divided by two is three, because Mr. Collins said so, then you're not likely to know what eight divided by two, until Mr. Collins tells you.
When someone has knowledge, whether it's about government conspiracy, the afterlife, or just simple division, it's their job not to give facts, but to give an understanding that will allow you to get more facts yourself. You need to be able to relate the information with other things you experience, come to your own conclusions, and then state them confidently as your own ideas. Because, when you really understand what you're talking about, you will have your own ideas. Not only that, but you'll be able to talk about them with conviction, without having to lean on the authority of someone who decided what you are supposed to believe.
Thanks for reading.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Proof that 2012 will happen!
A gorgeous crop version of the Mayan calendar. |
Saturday, September 11, 2010
What are dreams? -or- The Truth Purist
Thursday, September 9, 2010
What ear candles can teach us
I first heard about ear candles when I was fairly young. They were featured on the news, and my family and I watched, bemused, as the lady laid there, with the burning candle sticking out of her hear. When they opened it up, the newscasters weren't willing to show the gunk inside on camera. My how the decency standards of television have changed in the last fifteen years.
It seemed like a nice idea (using fire to cleanse, I think, has a deep root in our psychology) and I was interested in trying it. It never quite sat right in my brain, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the ear is a dead-end. It's not like the nose, that has a big sinus cavity behind it, with a tunnel leading all the way down to the lungs. The ear canal goes in an inch or so, and then terminates at the eardrum. Where are we keeping the copious amounts of wax?
Another reason it felt off was because it seemed like cartoon physics. You can't dust the inside of a cabinet by sticking a vacuum-cleaner hose inside, and then leaving it in place, waiting for all of the dust to come to you. Whatever you're vacuuming needs close personal contact with that hose. So how could the small bit of convection generated by the candle draw all of the wax out of your ear, like the pied piper drawing rats out of a town?
Well, let me tell you the twist ending. Ear candles don't work. I'm sorry if you've put a lot of stock in that, but they don't. The world we live in is one where ear candles don't do anything good for the ear.
There have been lots of different studies, with ear wax measured, the suction measured, and debunking it this way and that way. According to Wikipedia, "Several studies have shown that ear candles produce the same residue when burnt without ear insertion and that the residue is simply candle wax and soot."
Now, I agree with all of their conclusions, but I think so much work is unnecessary. We don't need research dollars spent on these things, we don't need to measure the suction, or look at the before/after of wax in someone's ear. When someone is trying to make an argument, it's actually problematic to have a longer list of evidence. The folks who made the film Loose Change could benefit from this lesson. If you give someone ten reasons why something must be true, they will argue against the weakest five, and ignore the rest. Then you're left elaborating on your least compelling evidence.
Take your strongest argument. The argument that you've always seen the other side avoid. The argument that knocks it right out of the park. Focus on only that argument. If people start responding to arguments that you never made, then redirect them to the one argument that you did make. Make people think.
With ear candles, the single, simple, thing that needs to be communicated, to bring this whole business to an end, is this: Go buy one. Stand it up in a cup of dry beans, and light the thing. Follow the directions carefully (or not carefully, it doesn't matter). Now is there loads of earwax in the thing? Of course there is. Because the stuff is from the candle, which is made of wax. Don't wait for a scientist to do it, and then read his results, do it yourself! They're five dollars for four! That's cheaper than Gatorade.
That's simple science, right there. If it does it in this condition (in the ear) but still does it without this condition (out of the ear) then that condition wasn't necessary in the first place.
Believe it or not, even such a simple alternative treatment is going to break a lot of hearts when people realize that they've been fooled. That's what beliefs do, great or small. They dig in claws, and when they're removed they take flesh with them. What bothers me is that I'm sure that every company that sells these things knows as well as I do that they're actually more harm than good, and they just keep doling out the snake oil. We're lied to by businesses so often, that we're almost fine with it. But maybe we shouldn't be.
Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
The Polite Skeptic Interview: Dean Radin
Monday, September 6, 2010
Who made the pyramids? -or- Giving credit where credit is due
Well, if you've read this blog for as long as I have (ha ha) you already know my answer. You don't. There's no need to explain away every mystery before you have all the facts. This is a sin that skeptics and believers alike, who are just looking for the punchline, commit as often as envy, or gluttony.
So, if you must have an explanation now, because mysteries are like little stones sitting on the mind, then there's always aliens. The hypothesis of "ancient astronauts" is a wide-ranging idea that reaches into the history of human evolution, religion, astronomy, technology, archaeology, and a number of other things. I may go into it in more detail in the future, but suffice it to say for now that it's how many people explain how such buildings were made. Alien technology.
This is crop circles all over again. And my sentiment is basically the same. Who are you to say what human beings are or aren't capable of? We tend to think that humans of ancient civilizations as being less intelligent than us, but keep in mind that they were the exact same clever reasoning animals that we are. The didn't have iPads, but they probably knew more about stone than the masons of today. That was their high-technology. If they wanted a pyramid made, or a stonehenge, or a Pumapunku, and a few people put their heads together, I think they could find a way to do it. That's really all there is to it, as far as I'm concerned.
"Wait a minute," someone says, "Even with our high technology, we could not make these structures today." That may be true, but you have to keep in mind that higher technology doesn't always mean a better product. There are classic video games that will always surpass the modern graphical wonders. There are many novels that are much more engaging than today's special-effects blockbusters. And those are just ink on paper.
The more powerful the tools are, the less powerful the mind behind them has to be. A great mind with great tools is a force to be reckoned with, but so is a great mind with a chisel and mallet. So let's not project our self-imposed limitations onto the ancient past, and cheapen the achievements of people who may very well have been our intellectual superiors.
Thanks for reading.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
What The Cottingley Fairies can teach us -or- 50,000,000 Elvis fans CAN be wrong
The Cottingley Fairies. It has to be one of the best examples not only of the psychology of deception, but the psychology of self-deception (without which, very little deception would take place).
A brief history: In 1917, two girls, cousins, ten and twelve, tell their mothers that they see fairies out by the stream (or beck, as they were in the UK). They borrow a camera and take two photographs that apparently depict fairies. The mother of one of the girls thinks this is something neat, and makes them public. The photos are approached as being serious business.
Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, is very impressed by the photographs, and outspoken. In 1920, Edward Gardener, member of the Theosophical Society, gives the girls a camera to take more pictures. They took three more pictures of apparent fairies. Mixed reception. People gradually forget.
About 40 years later, the girls are all grown up, and one of them says, in an interview, that she may have been photographing her own thought forms. The media loves this, and as a result (or as a cause) the public does as well. Randi and associates say the pics are fakes, and strings are visible.
In 1983, sixty-six years after the first photograph was taken, and one year after my own birth, the girls admit that it had all been a fake. One of them drew the fairies, they cut them out and stood them up with pins. They disagree about whether the fifth photograph was a fake. One girl persists that it is real, until her death, soon after.
(story paraphrased from Wikipedia, which is always accurate)
See all five photos here.
This whole story has always been remarkable to me. It's a great illustration of some of the elements that can come together to make even the hardest-to-swallow stories believable. There is popularity, media coverage, celebrity interest, arguing experts, and trustworthy-looking witnesses.
I could say that the plum tree in my yard was a real life womping willow, even when it was heavy with plums, and if it happened to have: popularity, media coverage, celebrity interest, arguing experts, and if I was a trustworthy looking witness, then my "real life womping willow" Facebook page would have followers in the millions.
A person may think that I would have to have some kind of evidence to gain a few of those things, but that is exactly why these things fool people. If you make something ridiculous very popular, then the media will be inclined to cover it. Celebrities are as fallible as any of us, and some of them will be duped. The media will choose, or create, experts to argue over this celebrity-backed story. And then I just have to be good at lying, which many people are. Then, even if the average person sees that it is clearly a hoax, it will be hard to believe that all of those prominent people would be arguing over something so silly, so the obvious conclusion is, "I must be missing something."
Well, you're not missing anything. Your own powers of perception are greater than the collective perception of the media. If you noticed that the fairies (even in the fifth photo) seemed to have paper edges, and seemed to be highlighted uniformly, like a flat piece of paper, then you solved the mystery, even as the media picked up more speed. If you saw the "Surgeon's Photograph" of the Lock Ness monster, and it looked like it was about eight inches tall at first glance, it wouldn't have done you any good to listen to experts argue and muddle your brain. If you noticed that we seemed to be sending forces into Iraq in response to an attack from someone completely different, then you were already way ahead of the game.
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but only a capitalist. There is a big market in you not trusting your own eyes, and if you let the media treat you like you are stupider than you actually are, then even the most obvious truths will always be just out of reach.
Thanks for reading.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Facebook is serious business, part 2
So, with the continuing theme of Facebook being serious business, I created a The Polite Skeptic page, which can be found here.
In addition, I added a Facebook box to the side of the blog. Like many widgets and things on the internet, I have no idea what the benefit of it is, or its exact function, but these things will become clear over time. One thing I do know, it's supposed to have a Like! button embedded into it, but I don't see one.
One frustrating thing, after conning some twenty-six people into liking the site, today I made a brand new Like button, which is specifically for the Facebook page that links to this site. The benefits of this elude me at the moment, but I convinced myself to create it, so I have to trust that it's there for a reason. So, that means that I've started over from zero (actually three already, but anyway...).
I increasingly get the feeling that the internet is becoming Facebook's bitch.
Another look at Hell, a good place to live, but not to visit
There was an example of eternity that I once heard that was pretty overwhelming. I think I actually heard it on a sitcom. This is paraphrased. Imagine a brass ball the size of the earth floating in space. Every thousand years, a dove flies by, and a tip of one of the dove's feathers brushes lightly against the brass ball. By the time that the brass ball is ground down to nothing, eternity will have barely begun.
I was discussing religion in a popular imageboard the other day, and I realized something. The idea of Hell being eternal actually takes a bit of the sting off of it. Humans are very very adaptable, and those of us in the worst situations can still find some happiness, just like those of us in the best situations can find despair.
But Hell? There's no adapting to that, right?
Let's say that one of the features of Hell is the opportunity of being gutted by a scimitar, and being allowed to lie on the ground with your entrails spread in front of you, perhaps with dogs chewing on them. The first time this happens, it's a harrowing experience. The tenth time this happens, you know what to expect. The hundredth time this happens, you flip the guy off before his guts you. The thousandth time, you're used to the pain, and you're scratching the dogs behind their ears. The millionth time? "Here, give me the sword, let me show you how it's done. Damned amateurs."
Over time, you lose fear. The primary animal fear is one of death, but in the afterlife there is no death, and when you're in Hell the idea of death wouldn't be that scary, anyway.
Let's say you've been in Hell for thirty million years. You don't even remember any other kind of existence, pain means very little, and loss is just par for the course. You're more skilled than any living person at finding ways to entertain yourself. You've been through a lot, and you're able to appreciate the little things, and sweating the small stuff (or even the big stuff) is just a part of the forgotten and unimaginable past. You're probably a very likeable person.
And what if we apply the idea of eternity to Heaven? A place that is always happy, and without sin? A place with no obstacles to overcome, no pain to make you stronger, and no bad times to make the good times sweeter?
If the ideas of Heaven and Hell are, as I suspect, constructs of the human mind, it's only natural that they would include very obvious positive/negative rewards and punishments for your behavior in life. But joy and pain don't exist outside of our own minds, and when we're faced with a different level of comfort, our standards naturally change over time, until we reach our own, personal equilibrium. So Mary, who seems to complain no matter what's going on, probably would have the same attitude in the afterlife. But Joan, who is generally happy, and accepts life as it comes without making a big stink every time the computer freezes up or she accidentally breaks an egg yolk, will probably do just fine, even if she's not a good Christian.
I can imagine people that would disagree, perhaps thinking of ways that Hell could stay bad, even after a trillion years, but unless someone has been there, and done that, it's just a guess.
And if you're really curious what Hell is like, I'll try to drop you a line after I die. Because, if it's a real place, they've probably already embroidered my name on the sheets.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Why global warming is my fault
At this point, the debate of whether global warming is happening seems to be mostly replaced by a debate of whether humans are causing it. The earth goes through cyclical warming trends, and it always has. Not much in nature is static. So, who's to say whether the current warming trend was caused by man, or if man is just here to witness it?
I have an opinion (I am unique in this way) and it will be easy to shoot down because it doesn't involve research, or evidence. It's purely theoretical. So, feel free.
Just in front of beavers, human beings affect their environment more than any other animal. If you look at satellite images of big cities (Tokyo is an extreme example) it looks like a very large person just splashed a dallop of gray paint on the globe. So, I don't think anyone is going to argue that humans make a small impact. I'll rephrase that, I don't think anyone should argue that humans make a small impact. We've got our fingers in the cake pretty deep, polluting the oceans, the land, the air, damming off the rivers, and sticking our sheds over rabbit-holes and such.
Now, I'm not an environmentalist. It seems to be a word that implies a bit of activism, and that's not how I spend my time. I think most of us can agree, though, that while we have a big impact, it's not a greatly beneficial one. As a species, our highest priority in most things is our species. One of the byproducts of our comfort, as humans, is CO2. The more comfortable we want to be, it seems (heating, A/C, television, computers, washer/dryer) the more CO2 we give off.
So, what is the effect of emitting unimaginable amounts of CO2 into the air? Cars, and power plants, and factories, and farms, all over the world, twenty-four hours a day, constantly increasing, for about a century? Not to mention that many of the industries that increase the CO2 have also reduced the amount of vegetation and/or plankton that eat the stuff up. I'm no scientist, but I know that putting more of something somewhere increases the amount of it, and I don't think there's any kind of magic that kicks in a large scales that would make that stop applying.
So, when a person states that humanity isn't contributing to global warming, I have to wonder how someone even thought of that in the first place. It's not an intuitive conclusion, by far. That person must be much smarter than me, because I still don't understand it.
An analogy:
People die every day. We're all going to die, because it's natural, and it's the way things have been happening since life began. But, if you hold a pillow over someone's face, and they're dead when you pull the pillow away, only a very smart pillow skeptic will be able to prove that it was from natural causes.
Thanks for reading.
Note: I've changed every instance of "climate change" in this post to "global warming," which, in this context, is more accurate. 3/7/11