Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
I'm a magician. I can see into the distant past and beneath the surface of the earth. I have other magician colleagues who can make valuable things out of commonplace substances, predict the future, and read the thoughts of the dead. The magicians among us allow us to see things anywhere in the world as they happen, talk to anyone, anyplace, any time, see the surfaces of other worlds, hear the music of Jimi Hendrix, Bing Crosby, and Enrico Caruso, know what Winston Churchill thought of the Second World War, heal illnesses, and bring ancient civilizations back to life.
And most people regard this magic as too commonplace for their tastes. They'd rather putter around with imagined conspiracies and ancient astronauts. And the reason people would rather play with bogus magic than work real magic is rooted in our brains.
If there's a single word that can be used to compare the brain to a computer, that word is "crufty." Crufty is computer jargon for software that incorporates obsolete routines that impede efficient operation. Windows is notoriously crufty, but the archetypical crufty software is mainframe Unix. Basically, everything a computer ever needed to do is still somewhere in Unix (not the streamlined desktop versions like Linux). It even has commands dating back to the era when you edited text by printing it out a line at a time on a line printer because there were no monitors. The human brain is just as bad.
Maybe. If the lower brains let it. It's like taking a brand new Gateway out of the box, with a 2 GHz CPU, 10 gig of RAM, a terabyte hard drive, and then hooking it up to your old 386, which is hooked up to your 8088, which is hooked up to your Apple II, which is hooked up to your Commodore 64. And you let all the important operating decisions be made by the lowest level computers because, hey, they were there first. So you get things like this:
Question: What do you think about illegal immigration?
Primate Brain: Well, it's complex. We need to protect our borders, but they fill jobs Americans don't want, and they come here because of deep corruption and lack of opportunity in their home country ....
Reptile Brain: Shut up, primate brain, I'll handle this. Build a wall. Deport 'em and shoot the ones who try to come back. Grind 'em up for cat food.
Or this:
Question: What do you think about animal experimentation?
Primate Brain: Well, we certainly want to avoid unnecessary suffering and cruelty. But there's no denying that animal experimentation alleviates a lot of human suffering. In fact, veterinary research using animals alleviates a lot of animal suffering....
Mammal Brain: Oh, primate brain, you're so cruel. How can you do experiments on these poor little mice? They're so cute.
[We should use naked mole rats in the lab. Trust me, nobody will ever accuse them of being cute. Other people have suggested lawyers; there are more of them, they'll do things rats would never dream of doing, and you don't get attached to them. Maybe if we send naked mole rats to law school, we will have the perfect experimental animal. Although, after the film Men In Black depicted cockroaches being smashed, it had to include the disclaimer that no animals were harmed in the making of the film.]
Not only do we have crufty software and hardware, but upgrades are extremely hard to install, because the primitive computers and operating systems keep flagging them as malware and trying to quarantine them or erase them. And we have lots of back door programs running.
A lot of things labeled left-brain or right-brain attributes are actually a matter of lower brain versus higher brain functions. People are really using their primate brains to rationalize what their lower brains are sending up. A lot of things blamed on an excess of left brained thinking are actually reptile brain ideas rationalized. It's easier to see reptilian behavior for what it is, but mammalian behavior can masquerade behind facades of "nurturing" or "empathy." For a shining example of the mammal brain run amuck, look at the abortion debate. Protecting unborn babies? Very mammalian. Protecting vulnerable women? Equally mammalian. As mammalian as two cats fighting, but nastier because it's all rationalized by the primate brain.
Back door programs are short cuts developers install so they don't have to cycle through umpteen levels of menu to reach the part of the program they're trying to write. Other back door programs are stopgap code designed to bridge over a temporary gap in the programming. Programmers are supposed to remove them, but they don't always. Hackers find and exploit these soft spots, and they can also interfere with normal functioning of the software in myriad ways.
The most destructive back door code in humans gets installed early on. You're hungry. You cry. You get fed. Your diaper is a mess. You cry. It gets changed. You make a cute face and people get all mushy. Your code for sorting out cause and effect is getting written. It gets written in a very primitive way. I cry or smile, and I get what I want. It serves the immediate purpose because you can't fend for yourself yet and you need to communicate your survival needs somehow.
Now, what's really happening, is that your parents are conditioned by a vast network of biological urges and social conditioning, to protect you and make you happy. Furthermore, evolution has made a baby's cry about the most irritating sound there is, to guarantee that adults respond to it. So properly written code would say I cry and that triggers a whole avalanche of responses because of the way the environment is built. It's not about what I want, but it's about what I do. If what I do takes proper advantage of cause and effect, I get results. If it doesn't, I don't. What I want has nothing to do with results; only what I do counts.
Unfortunately, your CPU can't handle that code yet, and your interpreter can't process it. So what get's programmed isI want something, and the environment supplies what I want. Therefore, my wanting something can make it happen. What I think shapes reality. There's a word for this mind-set: magic.
Now what ought to happen, as your software upgrades, is that the crude stopgap code gets overwritten by better code. You learn that things don't always happen because you want them to, in fact, they never happen because you want them to. What actually happens is that a lot of spaghetti code gets written. If it's something I understand and can control, then cause and effect applies, but if it's something I can't control, then merely wanting something to happen can influence it. Your brain builds a firewall to protect that primitive module that says wanting something can cause it to happen. Getting over this mental hurdle is something many people never manage.
The early programming that wanting something causes it to happen installs two other pieces of bad code:
What about the poor folks that don't get any attention as babies? Very often their cause and effect program ends up as nothing I do can influence things. Later on, of course, they do learn some cause and effect but it doesn't overwrite the still egocentric primitive code. Egocentric? Yes. They're still centered on whether they get their wish, not about how the external world works. So we end up with programming that says:
I am seriously convinced a large portion of the American public does not believe in cause and effect. Not deeply. Yes, they know if they flip a switch the light goes on, and if they fill their tank their car will keep running. Cause and effect is a useful rule of thumb. But they don't see cause and effect as a fundamental rule of the universe. Since they basically believe in a capricious, magical universe, they see everyday cause and effect as useful magic, not as deeply ingrained in the workings of nature. They are fully prepared to believe laws of nature can change or be suspended for arbitrary reasons, and believe that it happens frequently. They'll ask questions like "If the earth were to stop moving, would it fall into the Sun?" because to them, it's perfectly possible that the earth might stop moving. Especially, they don't see cause and effect in their own lives. They don't have a good job because of favoritism or discrimination or bad karma, not because they got bored in school and quit. They didn't get the promotion because they were cheated, not because they didn't work hard enough. They have an alcoholic spouse because of circumstance; the fact that they met in a bar is pure accident. They're in prison because of "the System," not because they hurt someone else.
The discovery that the universe doesn't always satisfy our wishes comes as a profound shock to many people. A select fraction decide to figure out how the universe actually works and how to play by its rules. Many others persist in hoping that they will find the right incantation that will fulfill their wishes. They'll grudgingly learn that fire burns and falling off things is dangerous, but always harbor the hope that hidden somewhere is the secret key to fulfilling their wishes. And some find the very idea of rules intolerable. Their attitude is perfectly summarized by the prisoner (quoted on the Web site for the comic strip Minimum Security) who was released from prison, looked around, and said “I’m still not free; I’m just in minimum security.” I have met some people who literally seem to feel that if they can't do whatever they like, whenever they like, and have whatever they like, they might as well be in prison. They very often get their wish. Some 2,000 years ago the author of the apocryphal Book of Sirach observed the same attitude:
To a senseless man education is fetters on his feet, and like manacles on his right hand. A fool raises his voice when he laughs, but a clever man smiles quietly. To a sensible man education is like a golden ornament, and like a bracelet on the right arm. (Sirach 21:19-21, Revised Standard Version)
To a wise man, learning enhances what he can do. To a foolish man, all learning does is limit his possibilities.
There are brain hackers just like there are silicon hackers. Brain hackers exploit weaknesses in our mental software and hardware just like silicon hackers do. And one of their principal points of attack is that wide open back door that causes us to think that our desires, in and of themselves, can influence reality. Computer scams are merely a digital variation on brain hacks that have been going on for millennia. The most common computer scam is also a brain attack. It exploits the code that says wanting something can make it happen.
In fact, silicon hackers not only hack computers, they hack your brain as well. Click here. You just won a free laptop, or IPod, or XBox. I have $29.7 million and you can have some of it if you'll just help me sneak it out of [insert Third World country here] (Now with that much money at stake, someone can't just get someone to loan him plane fare to another country to set up a bank account? Or bribe whoever it takes to export the funds? Or stuff it in your underwear and take a taxi across the border?). You just won a huge prize, but there are these pesky taxes and fees to pay (why not just deduct them from the prize?). GlobalMegaMaxiCorp stock is poised to go through the roof (once it gets posted on the internet, won't it be too late for you to get in on the ground floor?) These are all common computer frauds, but they wouldn't work unless people had the bad code already installed in their brain that I can have something for nothing. Now remarkable things do fall into people's laps without their asking for it. I've had a number happen to me, way more than my rightful share. But every single one has been logically connected to something I did. People win lotteries, find stashes of money, or spot gold nuggets in stream beds. Rare things happen. But notice: you have to buy a ticket, be rummaging around in some hidden place, or be looking at rocks in a stream bed. Even in those fortuitous cases, you have to be doing something. In the case of the hidden money and the gold nugget, you also have to be paying attention to the environment; a careless person could easily miss either one.
Computer scams not only promise something for nothing, they promise something for absolutely nothing. But people who fall for computer scams don't consider such things rare; they consider it reasonable that a total stranger would offer to cut them in on a large amount of money because...
Hey, reality responds to my thoughts, so I must be important. Alan Cromer, in Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature Of Science (1993) wrote:
From the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, we know that human beings have a fundamentally egocentric conception of the world. Growing up in modern society means learning to accept the existence of an external world separate from oneself. It is hard. Most of humankind, for most of its history, never learned to distinguish the internal world of thoughts and feelings with the external world of objects and events. ... Cutting this connection, which is necessary before science can develop, goes against the grain of human nature.
This quote gets to the fundamental appeal of magic: it puts people at the center of their universes. The pernicious thing about this mentality is that, in order to develop a really functional view of the universe, you have to take a huge hit to the self-esteem. People in a magical mind-set are in a cul de sac that they can't escape except by turning around. They keep trying blind alleys, turn around, and try another blind alley, without realizing that their entire approach to life is a blind alley. In order to get on the right path, they have to unlearn everything they think they know about life and the world. They are, in a very real sense, lost.
You never have to take no for an answer. That terminal illness the doctors can't treat? There's a magical cure. It might just work. And if it doesn't, you're no more dead than if you'd had conventional treatment. Maybe that guy with $32 million he's trying to smuggle is for real. Maybe that hunk or supermodel I met in the chat room really fell for me. Otherwise, I'm either going to have to make the best of my blah job and love life, or (shudder) try to work my way up.
How many years has Harry Potter been going to Hogwarts? What makes anyone think that, even if Hogwarts type magic really existed, that the classes would be any easier than organic chemistry, calculus, or quantum mechanics?
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If cause and effect aren't really related, then the bad things in my life aren't necessarily connected to what I do.
Since many people don't believe in cause and effect at all, still less when it comes to their own lives, obviously anything bad that happens must be somebody else's fault. And when people are confronted with unavoidable cause and effect, they tend to blame the effect for their woes. The justice system is to blame, not their criminal behavior. Our drug laws "make criminals out of people," not their drug use. Cuba is poor? That's not the fault of Castro's voodoo economics. It's the fault of the U.S. embargo (never mind that everybody else in the world can trade with Cuba). Iraq suffered under U.N. sanctions? That wasn't the fault of Saddam Hussein, that was the fault of the sanctions. I can't keep up my house payments now that the rate has gone up? That's not my fault for buying a house I couldn't afford, that's the fault of "predatory lending."
A favorite scapegoat is the Bad People Who Are Taking All The Money. Somewhere out there is a huge magic money pot at the end of the rainbow guarded by leprechauns, and if we can just tap into it, we can have all the money we need for whatever we want. Ask conservatives why we don't have enough money for repairing roads and they'll say it's because of all the welfare freeloaders who are living high on the hog at public expense. Except you run the numbers, and you discover that most people stay on welfare a short time, they have an average of two kids each, not ten, and the amount they get is lavish - for street people in Calcutta. Liberals believe it's all the fault of The Rich. Some of them actually seem to believe that rich people all have swimming pools full of money like Scrooge McDuck. So again you run the numbers and find that millionaires pay three times the percentage of their income as middle class taxpayers, that the top half of taxpayers pay 3/4 of all taxes, that 3/4 of all income in the U.S. is wages and proprietors' income (and a lot of the rest, like stock dividends, ends up in people's pension funds), and so on.
After every disaster, somebody comes along to announce that we need a new warning system, regulation, safety device, or education program so that this sort of thing "will never happen again."
Guess what. It will happen again. Regardless of what we do, disasters will happen. We can try to minimize risk but disasters will happen.
If it's a man-made problem, like political corruption, terrorist attacks, wrongful convictions, and the like, not only will they happen, but the more strenuously we try to prevent any occurrence, the more complexities and loopholes we create to be exploited by wrongdoers and impede reformers.
The same thing happens in the natural world. Today a study was released showing that reducing cholesterol was beneficial for heart disease but was associated with a slightly increased risk of cancer. People will claim this is confusing and crusaders for lowering cholesterol will attack the study. This is such elementary science, it's amazing that anybody could have a problem with it.Of course a beneficial change will have harmful side effects. Run, and you'll lose weight and get healthier, but you may sprain your ankle, get hit by a car, or damage your joints. Create wilderness areas, and people will be attacked by grizzly bears and mountain lions. Kill off predators, and be overrun by herbivores. Kill off the herbivores, and be overrun by nuisance plant species. Keep the plants down with herbicides, and kill off desirable species as well, if not people. Keep things clean, and minimize the risk of infection. Keep things too clean and your immune system doesn't get challenged and trained properly. Control global warming and people will die of hypothermia. Let global warming happen and people will die of heat exhaustion. Put seat belts in cars and somebody will die because they can't escape. Don't use seat belts, and people die by smashing through the windshield. Encourage population growth, and competition for space and resources gets worse. Encourage population control, and markets and labor pools shrink. There is nothing you can do that won't have some harmful effect.
In politics, crusaders spend their lives searching for the perfect tweak that will end corruption and put the balance of power where they want it. It will just never happen. After decades of judicial reforms to protect defendants, O.J. Simpson employed his wealth to get acquitted. Did this injustice happen despite the reforms, or because of them? There is no political system or law that cannot be subverted, evaded, or abused. Even if we somehow create such a system, changing circumstances will eventually render the system obsolete, or will cause former supporters to join forces with opponents to change it.
There is no silver bullet for anything that will enable us to fix some problem and then go play. One of your duties as a human being is to stand guard over your little sector of the world. Eternal vigilance isn't only the price of liberty. It's the price of everything.
Everything happens for a reason. There may be higher reasons that we can never know about why things happen, and things happen for reasons we don't know about until the event is upon us, but everything happens for a reason. I know of people having remarkable luck, but in every case it was in response to something they did. A friend once won a Caribbean cruise for being the 1000th customer in a store one day. My wife won skybox tickets to a Packer game in a store raffle. But my friend went to the store. My wife entered the raffle. Nobody is going to select you as the winning entrant in a huge lottery unless you at least enter the lottery.
There's a wonderful joke about a person who was in desperate financial straits. He prayed earnestly to win the lottery but it didn't happen. He prayed more fervently, and got no results. He fasted and prayed nonstop for days and nothing happened. Finally he cried out "God, I've prayed and prayed my heart out. I'm desperate. I really need to win the lottery. Why don't you hear me?"
And God replied: "Work with me on this, pal. Buy a ticket!"
Nobody, just out of the blue, is going to offer you the chance to make millions of dollars in return for opening your bank account to them. Think about it. If you had $20 million in the bank, plus the authority to transfer it electronically, couldn't you think of a hundred ways to get it out? Couldn't you find someone willing to loan you air fare to another country so you could set up your own bank account, plus one for him?
A recent Dateline expose of online fraud found that lots of things that are purchased by credit card fraud end up being shipped to people who are themselves being scammed. Two women victims both were engaged to the same guy in London (along with how many others?). One man was paying out of his own pocket to ship goods to Africa, convinced that he was in business with an attractive model from Australia.
If you can't get a positive response from the attractive people in your immediate vicinity, you are not going to get a supermodel on line. If you think you have, you're being scammed.
So your first line of defense against black magic is a hard headed, downright dogmatic and closed minded insistence on cause and effect. If something fantastic and utterly unforeseen comes your way, take advantage of it. But don't expect it as a matter of course. And especially, apply cause and effect to your own life.
You grew up in poverty, had rotten guidance, made a whole slew of bad choices, and have no credit, no marketable skills, and you're sick to boot. Surely you can't be responsible for your own life? Society has a responsibility to help you.
But if the cavalry is late in getting there, or the message doesn't get to the fort, or there are just plain more folks who need help than there is help to go around, whose life is going to suck as a result? Instead of viewing it as a matter of moral obligation, view it this way: who is going to get screwed if nobody helps? I try hard to make sure I keep my classes clear and up to date. If you don't study and flunk, I still get a paycheck. You wasted about $700 and will have to spend more money and time to take the course over, and your job hunt will suffer if your grades are poor. If you wait for somebody to help you out, and nobody does, who's going to suffer? The folks in the gated communities? Not likely.
This is not blaming the victim. It doesn't matter who's responsible for your problems. You may be an utterly blameless victim of abuse and lousy environment, but you will suffer if nobody comes along to bail you out. So if you start bailing yourself out, and somebody does come along to help, you'll be that much closer to getting out of the hole. And if nobody comes along, you'll eventually get out of the hole yourself.
On a foreign trip not long ago, I decided to take a sightseeing boat, only to find myself whisked off to a completely unexpected destination in the wrong direction. Worse yet, there was no return boat until after my transportation was due to leave. There was a taxi stand across the street, but it was Sunday, and after waiting a while with no results, I had a decision to make. I was about 12 miles from where I needed to be and had about five hours to spare. So I walked. If I had waited for a taxi to come by, and none did, the only person to be hurt was me. The taxi drivers wouldn't suffer. The boat company wouldn't suffer. I could vent my fury on the people around me, but that wouldn't get me back. The only person who could possibly be hurt by inaction was me. So I walked. If a bus or taxi came by, great. If not, every step took me a bit closer to getting out of trouble. I made it. And boy, did my feet hurt.
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Created 27 February, 2006; Last Update 24 May, 2020
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