Signs and portents

The general rule is that you should always try to rule out all the natural and normal explanations for something before you jump to a supernatural or paranormal one.

It's not, as I've said before, that I think outlandish explanations are necessarily wrong.  For one thing, even science can be an awfully weird place sometimes; just the (extremely well-documented) results of quantum physics and the General Theory of Relativity should be enough to convince you of that much.  Also, whatever your particular favorite flavor of strangeness -- be it aliens, ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, psychic phenomena, or whatever -- I'm not going to say any of it is impossible.  But what I stand by is that if you can find a rational, scientific explanation for something, it's vastly more likely to be true, so you should go there first.

After all, the burden of proof is on the one making the outlandish claim.  Demonstrate that we have something outside of the realm of conventional science, and then we'll talk.

The reason this comes up is because of two claims in the last week of Signs and Portents, one from Colombia and one from India.  The first comes from near the village of Morcá, where a musician named Jimmy Ayala reports coming back from visiting a shrine to the Virgin Mary with his family, and coming across some people who seemed to be praying to a rock outcropping.  He came closer, and found this:

I'm guessing you can tell what it's supposed to be; if not, the inset and arrow in the upper right will help.

The devout apparently consider this a divine message; many are considering it a genuine miracle.  Me, I want to know if anyone's looked closely to see if it was carved with a chisel.  I'm reminded of cases where statues of the Virgin Mary were claimed to "weep holy scented oil," and then when investigators checked it out it turned out that they had a hole drilled in the back (the statues, not the investigators) and were filled with oil, then someone had used a knife to nick the glaze on the inside corner of the eyes so the oil could seep through.

Miracles, apparently, sometimes need a little human help, and I suspect that's what's going on with the rock wall in Colombia.

The second, which occurred in the village of Farabari, India, apparently alarmed the absolute shit out of a number of people, when the following appeared in the clouds:

More than one person was reminded of a scene from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

Others thought it was a divine omen of evil, or a message from aliens, or had something to do with comet 3I-ATLAS, the last-mentioned of which made me roll my eyes so hard I could see the back of my own head.

So that one is pretty certainly just a case of pareidolia, the common phenomenon where we see faces in inanimate objects.  Our brains are wired to key-in on human faces, pretty much from birth; it's a huge part of the bonding and socialization process.  This can misfire and cause us to think there are faces on tortillas, dirty walls, grilled cheese sandwiches... or on Mars:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The upshot is that I'm not seeing either one of these as a convincing Sign or Portent or whatnot.  Maybe there is some superpowerful being who wants to send us a message sometimes, but it'd be nice if (s)he (1) did so in a less ambiguous fashion, and (2) made it clear what the Sign and/or Portent actually means.  For example, let's say the glowing face in India really is supernatural in origin.  What are we supposed to do about it?  Cower in terror?  Okay, but the thing dissipated completely in about fifteen minutes, so even assuming we cowered for another five minutes or so after that, just to be polite, it's kind of weak.  Repent of our sins?  A fat lot of good that'd do.  Knowing how humanity acts, once the face was no longer glowering at us we'd all be right back to sinning away like usual.

It'd be nice if just for once, the Superpowerful Being would do something big and obvious, like put up a sign in the sky saying, "STOP COVERING UP FOR PEDOPHILES.  NO, I REALLY MEAN IT, JUST STOP."

I wonder what Mike Johnson would do.  Despite his very public belief in an all-powerful God, my guess is that he'd piss his pants and then have a stroke.

But apparently such conspicuous, obvious miracles went out of fashion after the Old Testament times.  Pity, that.

In any case, if you know of a candidate for a genuine miracle, I'm happy to hear about it.  It'd be kind of cool if there was; it'd mean someone more powerful than humans was actually in control.  This would be good news, because at the moment, we humans are doing a pretty piss-poor job of running things.

****************************************

The weeping woman

Yesterday's post, about the remarkable similarities between mythological gods and goddesses in cultures widely separated in space and time, prompted my cousin Carla, who lives in New Mexico, to ask me if I'd ever heard of La Llorona.

I responded that she sounded familiar, but I couldn't recall any details.

"It's a legend all over the Spanish-speaking parts of North, Central, and South America," she explained.  "I think there's a version in Spain, too.  Each culture has a slightly different take on her, but basically, she's the Weeping Woman' -- someone who was involved in a tragedy, and now as a ghost can be heard crying in the night.  Sometimes, rarely, seen as well.  If you hear her, you're in deep trouble.  So next time y'all come visit, if you're out for a walk at night and hear a woman crying, haul ass right outta there."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Statue of La Llorona in Xochimilco, Mexico, 23 September 2015, KatyaMSL, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International]

Like the gods I wrote about yesterday, La Llorona has astonishingly deep roots.  The 1519 Florentine Codex, one of the most important extant documents about pre-colonial Mesoamerican history and beliefs, speaks about a crying woman as a fearful portent:

The sixth omen was that many times a woman would be heard going along weeping and shouting.  She cried out loudly at night, saying, "Oh my children, we are about to go forever."  Sometimes she said, Oh my children, where am I to take you?"

There's an even earlier parallel in Aztec mythology, the goddess Cihuacōātl -- who gave birth to a son Mixcōātl but abandoned him at a crossroads.  Cihuacōātl comes back to the spot at night, hoping to find him but only finding a sacrificial knife instead.  She can be seen and heard there weeping for him.  (It ended happily enough for Mixcōātl; he was rescued, and grew up to be the god of the hunt.)

La Llorona has, like the gods I discussed yesterday, evolved a bit from her presumed roots -- although wherever you find the story, there are plenty more similarities than differences.  In a typical version, she was the wife of a rich ranchero who found out her husband was cheating on her, and in a fit of insane rage drowned their children in a river.  Immediately remorseful, she threw herself in as well, but her spirit is unable to find peace -- she now haunts the riverbank, clad in a dripping white dress, wailing miserably.

The regional differences are fascinating.  In Mexico, she's mostly considered a monstrous figure, and her sin of drowning her children unpardonable (despite her provocation).  Interestingly, the rise of feminism in Mexico has led to some women identifying with her, and considering her the victim rather than the villain -- further evidence that attitudes toward beliefs can change over time.  In Guatemala, the legend has it that La Llorona was a married woman who got pregnant from another man, and drowned the baby when it was born to avoid her husband finding out.  In Ecuador, she's a tragic figure whose lover died, and she went insane and drowned their children -- and now, her disembodied spirit searches perpetually along the riverbank for them.  In Venezuela, she's a bereft mother whose children died of a sickness, and was driven so mad by grief that she's still looking for them in the afterlife.

Carla was right, there's even a version in Spain, which I find curious if the legend has Indigenous Mesoamerican roots; a woman named Elvira (not that Elvira) who led such a tragic life that she gradually becomes a wraith-like, weeping specter.  There's no mention of children or water -- common themes in the other iterations -- so I wonder if this one is "genetically" connected to the others, or only related because of there being an image of a crying woman.

After all, there are also parallels to similar legends in other cultures, particularly the Slavic Rusalka -- a malicious water-spirit sometimes said to be the lost soul of a drowned woman, who will grab handsome young men while they're swimming and drag them to their deaths -- and the Bean Sí (usually anglicized to Banshee) of Irish mythology, a wailing woman whose cries herald the death of a family member.  Unlikely these have any direct connection to the La Llorona stories, although considering how far back the roots of cultural cross-fertilization sometimes go, I do wonder.

In any case, there's another example of the evolution of folklore for your entertainment.  Something to keep in mind if you're ever out on a dark path near a riverside, and you hear crying.  Me, I still haven't quite recovered from finding out about the Black-eyed Children (I was so traumatized by this urban legend that I wrote an entire trilogy of novels about it so you can be traumatized, too).  In fact, given all the creepy things that supposedly roam at night, maybe it's better you just stay inside your house where it's safe.

****************************************

The old gods

My M.A. is in historical linguistics, focusing particularly on northern European languages and how they interacted in (relatively) recent times.  (While "recent," to a linguist, isn't quite as out of line with common usage as compared to how it's used by geologists, it bears mentioning that my earliest point of research is around fifteen hundred years ago.)  One of the difficulties I ran into was that two of the languages I studied -- Old English and Old Norse -- descend from a common root a very long time ago, so they share some similarities that are "genetic."  A simple example is that the Old English word for home (hām) and the Old Norse word (heim) are both descended from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *haimaz.  So if a word in Modern English comes from an Old Norse borrow-word -- one that came into English following the Viking invasions in the ninth and tenth centuries -- how could you differentiate that from a word that had been there all along, descending from the common roots of the two languages?

The most effective method is that during the time following the split between the ancestors of Old English and Old Norse, each of the languages evolved in different directions.  To take just one of many examples I used, some time around the eighth century, a pronunciation shift occurred called palatalization.  This is when words with a stop (p, t, d, g, and so on) followed by a front vowel (i or e) eventually "palatalize" the consonant, usually to y, j, or ch.  (It's driven by ease of pronunciation, and it's still happening today -- it's why in fast speech most people pronounce "don't you" as something like /dontchu/.)

In any case, words with /gi/ and /ge/ combinations in Old English all got palatalized to /yi/ and /ye/.  It's why we have yield (Old English gieldan), yet (Old English gīet) and yellow (Old English geolu), to name three.  So how do we have any /gi/ and /ge/ words left?  Well, if they were borrowed -- mostly from the Norse-speaking invaders -- after the palatalization shift happened, they missed their chance.  So most of our words with that combination (gift, get, girth, gear, and so on) are Old Norse loan-words.

That's just one of the patterns I used, but it gives you the flavor of how this sort of work is done.  Differentiating genetic relationships between languages (inherited from common ancestry) and incidental relationships (through migration, cultural contact, and borrowing).  Anyhow, the point is, I've been steeped in this kind of research for a long time.  (Since "recently," in fact.)

But what I didn't know is that the same techniques have been brought to bear not on linguistics, but on religion, myth, and belief patterns.  The work I saw was done on Indo-European speaking cultures (encompassing languages from the British Isles all the way to India), but there's no reason the same techniques couldn't be used for other linguistic/cultural groups.

When I found out about it, my immediate thought was, "Brilliant!  That makes total sense."  Deities can be "inherited" (passed down within a culture) or "borrowed" (adopted because of cultural contact), just like words can.  The names are a big clue; so, of course, are the physical, personal, and spiritual attributes.  Some of the more obvious ones -- here called by their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European names -- include *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr, the daylight-sky god; his consort *Dʰéǵʰōm, the earth mother; his daughter *H₂éwsōs, the dawn goddess; his sons the Divine Twins; *Seh₂ul, the sun god; and *Meh₁not, the moon goddess.

When you start seeing the patterns, they jump out at you.  *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr directly led to Zeus, Jupiter, the Vedic sky god Dyáus, the Albanian sky god Zojz, and the Norse war god Týr.  To take only one other example -- *H₂éwsōs, the goddess of dawn, gave rise to the Greek Eos, the Vedia Ushas, the Lithuanian Aušrinė, and the Germanic Ēostre or Ostara -- from whose name we get our word Easter.  (The word Easter has nothing to do with the Babylonian god Ishtar, despite the rather hysterical post to that effect that seems to get passed around every spring.  The two sound a little similar but have no cultural or linguistic connection other than that.)

Aurora, Goddess of Dawn, by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1621) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What I find most fascinating about all this is how conservative cultures can be.  If the name of a dawn goddess in the three-thousand-year-old Indian Rig Veda is linguistically and thematically connected to the name of a similar goddess revered in eighth century C.E. Scandinavia, how far back do her roots go?  That there is any similarity considering the geographical separation and the long passage of time is somewhere beyond remarkable.

Our beliefs are remarkably resistant to change, and when a belief is hooked to something in a language, that bit of language becomes frozen, too.  Well, not frozen, exactly, but really sluggish.  The old gods, it seems, are still with us.  

Changed, perhaps, but still recognizable.  

****************************************

A leap into the dark

Beliefs in an afterlife of some sort are pretty ubiquitous.  It's understandable; death is scary, and seems final, and it's natural enough to want life in some fashion to continue.  My own view is that I simply don't know what comes after death.  I'm inclined to agree with the comedian who quipped, "Lots of things happen after you die.  They just don't involve you."  On the other hand, I suppose it's possible there might be some kind of survival of consciousness, even if my rational/scientific side finds it hard to imagine how that could possibly work.

In any case, I'll find out eventually one way or the other.  I hope not too soon.

So it's unsurprising that most cultures and religions have beliefs in an afterlife.  What I find strange, though, is how specific many of those beliefs are, and I'm not just talking about religion, here.  The reason this rather macabre topic comes up is a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a paper by folklorist and anthropologist Stuart Dunn of Grisham College entitled, "Corpse Roads: Digital Landscape Archaeology," which looks at the peculiar British tradition of designating certain pathways "corpse roads" because they were used to bring dead bodies from villages with no consecrated churchyard to one that had a burial ground.  (Many of these roads, it turns out, are still called "Such-and-Such Corpse Road," or less grimly, "Lych Road" -- líc was the Old English word for "body.")

These corpse roads were often considered liminal spaces, passageways not just of the obvious spatial sort.  So all kinds of traditions arose around them, including the rather terrifying idea that if you didn't conduct the body to its final resting place in exactly the right way, the dead person's spirit might travel back up the path and return to haunt the spot where (s)he died.  In order to obviate that possibility, you had to make sure to carry the corpse feet-first down the road, and never let it touch the soil until it reached the burial site.  Some of these pathways still have "coffin stones" alongside them -- places the pallbearers could set the coffin down and take a rest without it touching the dirt.

Another weird belief I learned about from Dunn's paper was the association between death and yew trees.  He speculates that it's because yew trees can be extremely long-lived, so they're associated with immortality.  He mentions a rather scary idea from Wales that is definitely one of the less comforting afterlife beliefs:

[I]n R. V. W. Elliott’s classic 1957 study, “Runes, Yews and Magic”... he describes the Brittonic belief that the root of a churchyard yew grows out of the mouth of each corpse buried therein, thus sustaining the former and ensuring its continued survival.

Then there's the idea of the totenpass -- German for "passport for the dead" -- the name given to a Greek and Egyptian tradition of burying an inscribed piece of metal with the deceased, either hung around their neck or put inside their mouth.  The inscription was a set of instructions for the dead person's spirit, so they wouldn't get lost in the next world.

Google Maps for the Afterlife, is the way I think of it.

These instructions were often amazingly detailed.  One totenpass from Crete had the following inscription:

You will find on the right in Hades's halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives.  Do not even draw nigh this spring.  Farther on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of Memory: over this stand guardians.  They will ask you with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades.  They will ask you for what reason you have come.  Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: 'I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves.  I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.'  Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory.  After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.

One has to wonder how the person who wrote the inscription, who was presumably still alive at the time, figured all this out.  But maybe it's best not to ask too many questions.

A fourth century B.C.E. totenpass from Thessaly [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Orphic Gold Tablet (Thessaly-The Getty Villa, Malibu), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's an Aztec belief -- also incredibly detailed -- about the use of a special type of paper called amatl or amate, made from the fibrous bark of fig trees, which was intended to give the dead person's spirit protection during the initial phases of the afterlife.  This process makes "going to your Eternal Rest" not sound so restful.  You needed six pieces of paper, each with the right designs drawn on it, or you were in some serious shit.  Here's how one source describes it:

The first piece of amatl paper was used to pass safely through two contending mountains.  The second piece helped the deceased to travel without any danger on the road guarded by the Great Serpent.  The third piece allowed a safe crossing over the Great Crocodile’s domain.  The fourth piece was a passport, which allowed the deceased to cross the Seven Deserts.  The fifth piece was used for a safe passage through the Eight Hills.  Finally and perhaps most importantly, the sixth piece was used for defense against the north wind.  In addition, for this latter challenge, the Aztecs burned the clothes and arms of the deceased so that the warmth coming from the burning body might protect the soul from the cold northern wind.

Seems like a lot of work to me.  One has to hope that after all that, there'd be something pleasant to look forward to.

The neighboring Mayans weren't much better.  Their concept of the underworld -- Xibalba, meaning "place of fright" -- makes the Judaeo-Christian hell sound like the French Riviera.   Just one of the special offers in Xibalba is a set of demons whose very names are enough to make going there a big old nope (not, I suppose, that you had any choice in the matter).  There's Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab"), Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood"), Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon"), Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon"), Chamiabac ("Bone Staff"), Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff"), Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon"), and  Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon"), just to name a few.  And if you think "Sweepings Demon" doesn't sound so bad, I should mention that Ahalmez teamed up with Ahaltocob to torture the souls of bad housekeepers.  Ahalmez hid in the dust of unswept parts of your house and lured your spirit over, then Ahaltocob jumped out and stabbed you.

This would be problematic for me and my wife, because our approach to housekeeping can be summed up as "there seems to have been a struggle."  It's likely that one of these days we'll both go missing, and when the police investigate, they'll find us both trapped inside giant dust bunnies.  So I guess it's a good thing we're not Mayan.

Anyhow, I find this all very curious, because it falls squarely into the "How exactly do you know any of this?" department.  But it's hardly the only devoutly-held belief I could say that about.

In any case, I'm okay with not knowing what'll happen after I die.  Death is the ultimate leap into the dark -- either into something new and different, or into nothing.  I'd just as soon if it is something new and different, that it not involve having to keep bunches of pieces of paper straight, because most days I have a hard enough time keeping track of simple paperwork like paying the electric bill.

But I guess the incentive for getting it right is pretty strong.  I for sure will remember not to draw nigh to any ghostly cypress-trees.  That sounds scary.

****************************************

A handful of fragments

I've written here before about the tragedy of lost books -- and that prior to the invention of the printing press, the great likelihood is that most of the books ever written no longer exist.

It's not the overall loss of information, per se, that bothers me.  We certainly have access now to far more extensive information about the universe in which we live than at any time in history.  It's two things that are the real source of grief for me; the loss of knowledge of our own history, and the loss of seeing how the universe looked as filtered through other minds.  Each book is not only a record, it's a glimpse into the soul of the author.

When all of an author's books are gone, in a very real way, (s)he has been erased completely.

The extent to which ancient literature has been lost was driven home to me by the discovery that there are a bunch of instances of writing -- books, letters, poetry, codes of law, and so forth -- that are referenced in the Bible, but for which the originals have been lost.  Despite having read the Bible rather carefully (more than once), I honestly didn't know this.  Perhaps the fact that the references are generally made in passing, and (obviously, now that I know all this) alluding to no-longer-extant works I'd never heard of, the passages slipped by without my noticing.

Don't you have to wonder what was in those works that were referenced by the writers of the canonical books of the Bible, but which seem to have vanished forever?

Here are a few of the more interesting examples:

The Book of Jasher (Sefer HaYashar) is referenced twice -- in Joshua 10:13 ("And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves on their enemies.  Is this not written in Sefer HaYashar?") and in in 2 Samuel 1:18 ("To teach the sons of Judah the use of the bow.  Behold, it is written in the Book of Jasher.").  It's even more mysterious than it might seem; the translation of קָ֑שֶׁת, qāšeṯ, here rendered as "bow," may not have meant a bow as in a bow and arrow, but a name for a stylized form of lamentation.  There have been a number of instances of people "finding" the Book of Jasher that have been quickly identified as forgeries; what the original said is anyone's guess.

The Book of Shemaiah the Prophet and Story of the Prophet Iddo are both mentioned in the Second Book of Chronicles -- but the only thing we know about them are their titles.

The Book of the Acts of Solomon comes up in 1 Kings 11:41 -- "And the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?"  Well, it might well have been, but we'll never know, because the original is lost to history.

1 Chronicles 29:29 mentioned two lost books, and perhaps a third, in a single sentence: "Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the Book of Samuel the Seer, and in the Book of Nathan the Prophet, and in the Book of Gad the Seer."  The first, the Book of Samuel the Seer, may refer to 1 and 2 Samuel, canonical books of the Old Testament; biblical scholars are divided on the point.  What's certain that the Book of Nathan and the Book of Gad are both lost.

Also mentioned in Chronicles -- 2 Chronicles 26:22, to be specific -- is the Book of the Acts of Uzziah.  All we know of it is its title.

There's even an example from the New Testament.  In Colossians 4:16, Paul writes, "And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea."  There is no Epistle to the Laodiceans -- at least, there isn't now.

I bring this up to highlight how much of the written word we've lost over time.  If a work considered by many to be sacred, which has been carefully preserved and copied and treasured and hidden away when times were bad, still has pieces that have been lost forever, consider how much more of the world's literature is simply... gone.  Plays, stories, histories, scientific texts, maps, poems.  The majority of the creative output of the human race no longer exists.

Sorry to get all maudlin.  But it's why the end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose gets me every damn time.

I know it's the way of all things; nothing lasts forever.  But the magnitude of the loss is just staggering.  Like Brother William and Brother Adso at the end of Eco's book, we are left with only a handful of fragments.  It's that sense that gives the book its name, and it seems a fitting way to end this rather elegiac piece: "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." 

"The rose of old remains only in its name; all we are left with in the end are naked names."

****************************************

Retracting the backfire

In general, I always cringe a little when I see that a scientific study has been called into question.

These days, especially in the United States (where being anti-science is considered a prerequisite for working in the federal government), the last thing the scientific endeavor needs is another black eye.  It's bad enough when the scientists were trying their hardest to do things right, and simply misinterpreted the data at hand -- such as the recent study that might have invalidated the Nobel-Prize-winning research that demonstrated the accelerating expansion of the universe, and the existence of dark energy.

It's worse still when the researchers themselves apparently knew their work was bogus, and published it anyhow.  It seems to validate everything Trump and his cronies are saying; the experts are all lying to you.  The data is inaccurate or being misrepresented.  Listen to us instead, we'd never lie.

Today, though, I came across an allegation that a very famous piece of research was based on what amounts to the researchers lying outright about what had happened in their study -- and if this debunking bears out, it will be about the best news we could have right now.

You ready?

You've probably all heard of the devastating paper called "When Prophecy Fails," published in 1956 by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter.  If you're a long-time follower of Skeptophilia, you might well have read about it here, because I've cited it more than once.  The gist is that there was a UFO cult run by a woman named Dorothy Martin and a couple named Charles and Lillian Laughead.  Martin claimed she was receiving telepathic communications from extraterrestrials, and attracted a group of people who were into her weird mix of UFOlogy and Christian End Times stuff.  Well, after running this group for a time, she claimed she'd received word that there was going to be a catastrophic and deadly flood, but that the faithful were going to be picked up by spacecrafts and rescued -- on December 21, 1954.

The 1950 McMinnville (Oregon) UFO [Image is in the Public Domain]

Festinger, Riecken, and Schacter and several other paid observers infiltrated the cult, pretending to be true believers, and reported that when the 21st came and went, and -- surprise! -- no devastating flood and no flying saucers appeared, her followers' beliefs in her abilities were actually strengthened.  She told them their faithfulness had persuaded God not to flood the place, so the failure of the prophecy was a point in her favor, not against.

The three psychologists came up with terms describing this apparent bass-ackwards response to what should have been a terrible blow to belief, terms which will be familiar to you all: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect.  Both refer to people's abilities to maintain their belief even in the face of evidence to the contrary -- and their tendency to double down when that edifice of faith is threatened.

Well, apparently that wasn't the actual way events played out.

A psychological researcher named Thomas Kelly has written a paper that basically debunks the entire study.  Kelly became suspicious when he found that subsequent studies were unable to replicate the one done by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (whom Kelly calls "FRS"):

Inspired by FRS, several other scholars would later observe other religious groups that had predicted apocalypses.  Generally, they failed to replicate the findings of FRS.  Shortly after the publication of "When Prophecy Fails," Hardyck and Braden (1962) investigated an apocalyptic sect of Pentecostals to see if the failed apocalypse would result in enduring conviction and proselytization, but it did not.  Balch, Farnsworth, and Wilkins (1983) investigated a Baha'i group that inaccurately predicted an apocalypse and found that the failed prediction undermined the size, conviction, and enthusiasm of the group.  Zygmunt (1970) reviewed the proselytization efforts of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group which has predicted the apocalypse multiple times, and found that failed prediction led to reduced proselytization.  Singelenberg (1989) also found that failed prophecies harmed proselytization efforts among the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Kelly got access to Leon Festinger's files, including reams of notes that were unpublished, and found that not only did the Martin/Laughead cult not come together with strengthened faith in the way he and his co-authors had described, within six months the entire thing had collapsed and disbanded.  In other words; the researchers seem to have lied about the facts of the case, not just their interpretation.  Here's what Kelly has to say:

The authors of "When Prophecy Fails" had a theory that when faced with the utter disconfirmation of their religious beliefs, believers would soldier on, double down, and ramp up the proselytization.  And the authors had ample resources to shape the cult’s behavior and beliefs.  Brother Henry [Riecken's alias while he was a cult member] steered Martin and the others at pivotal meetings.  The serendipitous, almost supernatural, arrival of Liz, Frank, and other paid observers buttressed the faith of the cultists.  The sheer quantity of research observers in the small group gave them substantial influence.  After the prophecy failed, Henry was able to prod Martin into writing the Christmas message and inspire belief in the supernatural by posing as the “earthly verifier,” an emissary of the "Space Brothers."

But even with all this influence, the study didn’t go as planned.  The group collapsed; belief died.  It did not persevere.  What did persevere was FRS’s determination to publish their work and Festinger’s determination to use it to launch the theory of cognitive dissonance.  Did any of Festinger, Riecken, or Schachter still believe at that point?  History is silent.

The full scope and variety of the misrepresentations and misconduct of the researchers needed the unsealed archives of Festinger to emerge; the full story could not be written until now.  But the reputation of "When Prophecy Fails" should not even have survived its first decade.

Now, Kelly's work is new enough that I'm fully expecting it to be challenged; Festinger et al.'s theory of cognitive dissonance is so much a part of modern psychological understanding that I doubt it'll be discarded without a fight.  But if even a fraction of what Kelly claims is vindicated, the FRS backfire effect study will have to be completely reconsidered -- just as we've had to reconsider a number of other famous psychological studies that have been partially or completely called into question, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, the "Little Albert" Experiment, and the Milgram Experiment. 

My reason for being jubilant when I read this is not because I wish any kind of stain on the reputations of three famous psychological researchers.  It's that if the FRS study in fact didn't demonstrate a backfire effect -- if even being infiltrated by fake cult members who pretended to be enthusiastic true believers, and who encouraged the (real) members into keeping the faith, still didn't buoy up their damaged beliefs -- well, it means that humans can learn from experience, doesn't it?  That faced with evidence, even people in faith-based belief systems can change their minds.

And I, for one, find this tremendously encouraging.

It means, for example, that maybe -- just maybe -- there's a chance that the MAGA cult could be reached.  The recent release of hundreds, maybe thousands, of horrifying emails between Jeffrey Epstein and his cronies, in which Donald Trump's name figures prominently, may finally wake people up to the monstrous reality of who Trump is, and always has been.  (Even the few of these messages that have been made public are horrific enough to make my skin crawl.)  

The FRS study has always seemed to me to promote despondency; why argue against people when all it's going to do is make them more certain they're right?  But I had no reason to question their results.

Until now.

I'm sure there'll be more papers written on this topic, so I'll have to wait till the dust settles to find out what the final word is.  But until then -- keep arguing for what is right, what is decent and honest, and what is supported by the evidence.  Maybe it's not as futile as we'd been told.

****************************************

The incomplete algorithm

A paper this week in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics left me scratching my head.

To get why it's so puzzling -- and why not only I (an admitted layperson), but some actual physicists, are inclined to doubt its rather earth-shattering conclusion -- a little background first.

A few months ago I wrote here at Skeptophilia about Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.  This astonishing piece of work, published in 1931, dashed the hopes of people like David Hilbert that it could be proved that a purely algorithmic system like mathematics was both complete (all true statements that can be expressed within it are provable) and consistent (all provable statements that can be expressed within it are true).  Gödel proved, beyond any doubt, that mathematics cannot be both; if it is consistent, it is incomplete (some true statements are unprovable); if it is complete, it is inconsistent (some provable statements are untrue).

It was a devastating result.  We think of math as being cut-and-dried, a system where there's no fuzzy ambiguity.  Turns out there's a built-in flaw (although some might object to my calling it that); and not just mathematics, but any sufficiently powerful algorithmic system you could invent, would fall to the same death blow.

The other piece of background is also something I've dealt with here before; the possibility that we might live in a simulation.  The claim has been seriously considered by people like Nick Bostrom (of the University of Oxford) and David Kipping (of Columbia University); they looked at the questions of (1) if we were in a simulation, how we could tell, and (2) if simulation is possible, what our chances are of inhabiting the real, original universe (turns out, a fairly persuasive argument concludes that it's near zero).  Of course, that doesn't settle the truth of the major premises; (1) are we in a simulation? and (2) are simulations possible?, respectively.  And as anyone who's taken a course in logic knows, if the first part of a syllogism is false, you can conclude any damnfool thing you want from it.  (More accurately, if the major premise is false, the conclusion could be true or false, and there's no way to tell for sure.)

Okay.  So what this week's paper did is to look at the possibility of our being in a simulation, from a Gödelian perspective.  And their conclusion was that if the universe is a simulation, then it is by definition an algorithmic system, because anything that is runnable on a computer (even a super-powerful one) would have to be, at its basis, a set of algorithms.  Therefore, by Gödel's Theorem, there would have to be true statements that are unreachable from within the system, meaning there is more to the universe than can be reached from inside the simulation.  Conclusion: we can't be in a simulation, because it would be inherently incomplete.

My first thought on reading this was that I must be misinterpreting them, because the conclusion seemed like an enormous overreach.  But here is a quote from one of the authors, Mir Faizal of the University of British Columbia - Okanagan:

Drawing on mathematical theorems related to incompleteness and indefinability, we demonstrate that a fully consistent and complete description of reality cannot be achieved through computation alone.  It requires non-algorithmic understanding, which by definition is beyond algorithmic computation and therefore cannot be simulated.  Hence, this universe cannot be a simulation.

And another, by study co-author Lawrence Krauss, of Australian National University:

The fundamental laws of physics cannot be contained within space and time, because they generate them.  It has long been hoped, however, that a truly fundamental theory of everything could eventually describe all physical phenomena through computations grounded in these laws.  Yet we have demonstrated that this is not possible.  A complete and consistent description of reality requires something deeper -- a form of understanding known as non-algorithmic understanding.

So I don't think I'm misunderstanding their logic -- although I will certainly defer to wiser heads if there are any physicists in the studio audience.

The problem for me is that it is yet to be shown that the universe is non-algorithmic.  I'll buy that if it is algorithmic, there will be truths we can't reach by mathematical logic; so if this were a simulation, there'd be parts of it we couldn't get at.  But... so what?  I have no problem imagining a sufficiently complex simulation that gave such a convincing appearance of reality that any unreachable truths would be remote enough we might not have found them.

I think Faizal et al. may have too high an opinion of the capacity of the human brain for elucidating the workings of the universe.

Turns out I'm not the only one who has issues with this paper.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder did a brilliant take-down of the Faizal et al. study, and in fact gave it a nine out of ten on her infamous Bullshit Meter.  She said:

Unfortunately, [the paper] assumes its major premise.  We have never measured any quantity that is provably uncomputable.  To assume we can do this is logically equivalent to assuming we don't live in a simulation.  To see what I mean, let me turn their argument around.  Maybe the fact that we have never measured any quantity we can't also compute is proof that we are part of an algorithm that simulates the universe...  

We don't know any counterexamples.  The cases which I've mentioned that have been discussed in the literature always take some limit to infinity.  For example, they might use infinitely many atoms.  Or a lattice with an infinitely small spacing...  In these mathematical idealizations, yes, there are quantities that provably can't be computed in a finite time.  But we don't know any real-world examples.  Not a single one.  Isn't that weird?  It's like we actually can't measure anything that an algorithm could not also compute.  So maybe... we are algorithms.

In conclusion, the headlines I've seen, along the lines of, "Physicists Prove We're Not In A Simulation," strike me as a bit premature.  We haven't escaped from Bostrom and Kipping's matryoshka universe quite that easily.  Me, I'm going to stay in the "I don't know" column.  The Simulation Hypothesis certainly hasn't been proven, but despite Faizal et al., I don't think it's going to be easy to disprove, either.

So I guess we haven't settled whether the insane *gestures around vaguely at everything* we've been dealing with is real, or is (as I've suggested before) the result of stoned aliens twiddling the knobs just to fuck with us.  I'm honestly not sure which would be worse, frankly.

****************************************