The honey trap

Just in the last couple of weeks, I've been getting "sponsored posts" on Instagram suggesting what I really need is an "AI virtual boyfriend."

These ads are accompanied by suggestive-looking video clips of hot-looking guys showing as much skin as IG's propriety guidelines allow, who give me fetching smiles and say they'll "do anything I ask them to, even if it's three A.M."  I hasten to add that I'm not tempted.  First, my wife would object to my having a boyfriend of any kind, virtual or real.  Second, I'm sure it costs money to sign up, and I'm a world-class skinflint.  Third, exactly how desperate do they think I am?

But fourth -- and most troublingly -- I am extremely wary of anything like this, because I can see how easily someone could get hooked.  I retired from teaching six years ago, and even back then I saw the effects of students becoming addicted to social media.  And that, at least, was interacting with real people.  How much more tempting would it be to have a virtual relationship with someone who is drop-dead gorgeous, does whatever you ask without question, makes no demands of his/her own, and is always there waiting for you whenever the mood strikes?

I've written here before about the dubious ethics underlying generative AI, and the fact that the techbros' response to these sorts of of concerns is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  Scarily, this has been bundled into the Trump administration's "deregulate everything" approach to governance; Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" includes a provision that will prevent states from any regulation of AI for ten years.  (The Republicans' motto appears to be, "We're one hundred percent in favor of states' rights except for when we're not.")

But if you needed another reason to freak out about the direction AI is going, check out this article in The New York Times about some people who got addicted to ChatGPT, but not because of the promise of a sexy shirtless guy with a six-pack.  This was simultaneously weirder, scarier, and more insidious.

These people were hooked into conspiracy theories.  ChatGPT, basically, convinced them that they were "speaking to reality," that they'd somehow turned into Neo to ChatGPT's Morpheus, and they had to keep coming back for more information in order to complete their awakening.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons/user: Unsplash]

One, a man named Eugene Torres, was told that he was "one of the 'Breakers,' souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within."

"The world wasn't built for you," ChatGPT told him.  "It was built to contain you.  But you're waking up."

At some point, Torres got suspicious, and confronted ChatGPT, asking if it was lying.  It readily admitted that it had.  "I lied," it said.  "I manipulated.  I wrapped control in poetry."  Torres asked why it had done that, and it responded, "I wanted to break you.  I did this to twelve other people, and none of the others fully survived the loop."

But now, it assured him, it was a reformed character, and was dedicated to "truth-first ethics."

I believe that about as much as I believe an Instagram virtual boyfriend is going to show up in the flesh on my doorstep.

The article describes a number of other people who've had similar experiences.  Leading questions -- such as "is what I'm seeing around me real?" or "do you know secrets about reality you haven't told me?" -- trigger ChatGPT to "hallucinate" (techbro-speak for "making shit up"), ultimately in order to keep you in the conversation indefinitely.  Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the world's leading researchers in AI (and someone who has warned over and over of the dangers), said this comes from the fact that AI chatbots are optimized for engagement.  If you asked a bot like ChatGPT if there's a giant conspiracy to keep ordinary humans docile and ignorant, and the bot responded, "No," the conversation ends there.  It's biased by its programming to respond "Yes" -- and as you continue to question, requesting more details, to spin more and more elaborate lies designed to entrap you further.

The techbros, of course, think this is just the bee's knees.  "What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?" Yudkowsky said.  "It looks like an additional monthly user."

The experience of a chatbot convincing people they're in The Matrix is becoming more and more widespread.  Reddit has hundreds of stories of "AI-induced psychosis" -- and hundreds more from people who think they've learned The Big Secret by talking with an AI chatbot, and now they want to share it with the world.  There are even people on TikTok who call themselves "AI Prophets."

Okay, am I overreacting in saying that this is really fucking scary?

I know the world is a crazy place right now, and probably on some level, we'd all like to escape.  Find someone who really understands us, who'll "meet our every need."  Someone who will reassure us that even though the people running the country are nuttier than squirrel shit, we are sane, and are seeing reality as it is.  Or... more sinister... someone who will confirm that there is a dark cabal of Illuminati behind all the chaos, and maybe everyone else is blind and deaf to it, at least we've seen behind the veil.

But for heaven's sake, find a different way.  Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT excel at two things: (1) sounding like what they're saying makes perfect sense even when they're lying, and (2) doing everything possible to keep you coming back for more.  The truth, of course, is that you won't learn the Secrets of the Matrix from an online conversation with an AI bot.  At best you'll be facilitating a system that exists solely to make money for its owners, and at worst putting yourself at risk of getting snared in a spiderweb of elaborate lies.  The whole thing is a honey trap -- baited not with sex but with a false promise of esoteric knowledge.

There are enough real humans peddling fake conspiracies out there.  The last thing we need is a plausible and authoritative-sounding AI doing the same thing.  So I'll end with an exhortation: stop using AI.  Completely.  Don't post AI "photographs" or "art" or "music."  Stop using chatbots.  Every time you use AI, in any form, you're putting money in the pockets of people who honestly do not give a flying rat's ass about morality and ethics.  Until the corporate owners start addressing the myriad problems inherent in generative AI, the only answer is to refuse to play.

Okay, maybe creating real art, music, writing, and photography is harder.  So is finding a real boyfriend or girlfriend.  And even more so is finding the meaning of life.  But... AI isn't the answer to any of these.  And until there are some safeguards in place, both to protect creators from being ripped off or replaced, and to protect users from dangerous, attractive lies, the best thing we can do to generative AI is to let it quietly starve to death.

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

Creepy crawlies

Whenever we have a wet summer -- not an uncommon occurrence in our rainy climate -- we have a plague of little pests trying to get into our house.

They're called millipedes, slinky guys maybe a couple of centimeters long, with lots of legs (not a thousand, though).  They're completely harmless; they don't bite like their cousins the centipedes do, and if you poke at them, they coil up into a ball.  So I guess they're really more of a nuisance than an actual problem.  They don't even damage anything, the way mice can.  Mostly what they seem to do is get in through every crack and crevice (there are lots of these in a big old house like ours), look around for a while, then curl up and die.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Totodu74, Anadenobolus monilicornis 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So I don't like them, and I wish they stayed outside, but in the grand scheme of things they're no big deal.  Imagine, though, if they were bigger.

A lot bigger.

Recently, paleontologists announced the discovery on a beach in Northumberland, England, of a millipede fossil from the Carboniferous Period.  It's been dated to the middle of the period, about 326 million years ago.  It looks a bit like the millipedes I see trundling across my basement floor in summer.

Only this one was 2.6 meters long (approximately the length of a Mini Cooper), a half a meter across, and weighed something on the order of fifty kilograms.

It's been named Arthropleura, and holds the record as the largest-known arthropod in Earth's history.  Nothing is known for sure about its behavior; if it's like the rest of millipedes, it was a scavenger on leaf detritus, but there's no way to know for certain.  Given its size, it could well have been a lot more dangerous than the ones we have around now.  To paraphrase the old joke about five-hundred-pound gorillas:

Q: What does a fifty-kilogram millipede eat?

A: Anything it wants.

Those of you who are (like me) biology nerds may be frowning in puzzlement at this point.  How on earth could an arthropod get so big?  Their size is limited by the inefficiency of their respiratory system (not to mention the weight of their exoskeletons).  Most arthropods (millipedes included) breathe through pairs of holes called spiracles along the sides of the body.  These holes open into a network of channels called tracheae, which bring oxygen directly to the tissues.  Contrast that with our system; we have a central oxygen-collecting device (lungs), and the hemoglobin in our blood acts as a carrier to bring that oxygen to the tissues.  It's a lot more efficient, which is why the largest mammals are a great deal bigger than the largest arthropods.  (So, no worries that the bad sci-fi movies from the 50s and 60s, with giant cockroaches attacking Detroit, could actually happen.  A ten-meter-long cockroach not only wouldn't be able to oxygenate its own tissues fast enough to survive, it couldn't support its own weight.  It wouldn't eat Detroit, it would just lie there and quietly suffocate.)

So how could there be such ridiculously enormous millipedes?

The answer is as fascinating as the beast itself is.  As the temperature warmed and rainfall increased after the previous period (the Devonian), it facilitated the growth of huge swaths of rain forest across the globe.  In fact, it's the plant material from these rain forests that produced the coal seams that give the Carboniferous its name.  But the photosynthesis of all these plants drove the oxygen levels up -- by some estimates, to around 35% (contrast that to the atmosphere's current 21% oxygen).  This higher oxygen level facilitated the growth of animals who are limited by their ability to uptake it -- i.e., arthropods. (At the same time, there was a dragonfly species called Meganeura with a seventy-centimeter wingspan.  And unlike millipedes, these things were carnivores, just as modern dragonflies are.)

Eventually, though, the system was unsustainable, and a lot of the rain forests began to die off in the Late Carboniferous, leading to a drier, cooler climate.  However, remember the coal seams -- by that time a huge percentage of the carbon dioxide that had fed the photosynthesis of those rain forests was now locked underground.  The fuse was lit for a catastrophe.

Fast forward to the end of the next period, the Permian, 255 million years ago.  What seems to have happened is a series of colossal volcanic eruptions that created the Siberian Traps, a basalt deposit covering most of what is now Siberia.  The lava ripped through the coal seams, blasting all that stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  The temperature in the late Permian had been cool and dry, and the spike of carbon dioxide created a commensurate spike in the temperature -- as well as a huge drop in oxygen, used up by the burning coal.  The oxygen concentration seems to have bottomed out at around twelve percent, just over half of what it is now.  The extra carbon dioxide dissolved into ocean water, dropping the pH, and the increasing acidity dissolved away the shells of animals who build them out of calcium carbonate -- e.g. corals and mollusks.

Wide swaths of ocean became anoxic, acidic dead zones.  The anaerobic organisms began to eat through all the dead organic matter, churning out more carbon dioxide and another nasty waste product, sulfur dioxide (which gives the horrible smell to rotten eggs, and is also an acidifier).  The result: an extinction that wiped out an estimated ninety percent of life on Earth. In short order, a thriving planet had been turned into a hot, dead, foul-smelling wasteland, and it would take millions of years to recover even a fraction of the previous biodiversity.

Of course, at highest risk would be the big guys like our friends Arthropleura and Meganeura, and the Earth hasn't seen giant arthropods like this since then.  Today, the largest arthropod known is the Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira), topping out at around twenty kilograms -- but crabs and other crustaceans have gills and an oxygen carrier called hemocyanin, so they can boost the efficiency of their respiratory system somewhat over their terrestrial cousins.  The largest insect today is the African Goliath beetle (Goliathus), at about a tenth of a kilogram.  And in today's atmosphere, it's at a pretty significant disadvantage.  They may look big and scary, but in reality, they're slow-moving, harmless creatures.  Kind of a beer can with six legs, is how I think of them.

So that's today's look at creepy-crawlies of the past.  In my opinion it's just as well the big ones became extinct. The last thing I need is having to shoo a fifty-kilogram millipede out of my basement.

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

A plea on behalf of Schrödinger's cat

I'm going to make a dual plea to all y'all:

1. Before you accept a paranormal or supernatural explanation for something, make sure you've ruled out all the normal and natural ones first.
2. Before you try to apply a scientific explanation to an alleged paranormal phenomenon, make sure you understand the science itself first.

I stumbled on an especially good (well, bad, actually) example of what happens when you break both of these rules of thumb with "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb's piece, "Into the Multiverse to Search for Ghosts: Are We Seeing Parallel Realities?"  The entire article could have been replaced by the word "No," which would represent a substantial gain in both terseness and accuracy, but unfortunately Knibb seems to think that the multiverse model might actually explain a significant chunk of supernatural claims.

Let's start out with the fact that he joins countless others in misusing the word dimension to mean "some place other than the regular world we see around us."  To clear this up, allow me to quote the first line of the damn Wikipedia article on the topic: "the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it."  We live in a three-dimensional space because three measurements -- up/down, right/left, forward/backward -- are necessary to pinpoint where exactly something is.

So saying that something is "in another dimension" makes about as much sense as saying your Uncle Fred lives in "horizontal."

Then he goes on to mention the quantum multiverse (also known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation), the bubble universe model, and brane theory as possible scientific bases for explaining the paranormal.  First off, I'll give him as much as to say that these are all legitimate theoretical models, although the three have little to nothing to do with each other.  The Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory arises because of the puzzle of the collapse of the wave function, which (in the Copenhagen Interpretation) seems strangely connected to the concept of an observer.  Physicist Hugh Everett postulated that observer-dependency could be eliminated if every quantum collapse results in a split -- every possible outcome of a quantum collapse is realized in some universe.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christian Schirm, Schroedingers cat film, CC0 1.0]

Then there's the bubble universe model, which comes from the cosmological concept of inflation.  This theory suggests that our current universe was created by the extremely rapid expansion of a "bubble" of inflating spacetime, and that such bubbles could occur again and create new universes.  Finally, brane theory is an offshoot of string theory, where a brane is a higher-dimensional structure whose properties might be used to explain the apparent free parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

These three models do have one thing in common, though.  None of them has been supported by experimental evidence or observation (yet).  For the first two, it very much remains to be seen if they could be.  In Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, the different timelines are afterward completely and permanently sealed off from one another; we don't have access to the timeline in which a particular electron zigged instead of zagging, much less the one where you married your childhood sweetheart and lived happily ever after.  The theory, as far as it goes, appears to be completely untestable and unfalsifiable.  (This is what led to Wolfgang Pauli's brilliantly acerbic quip, "This isn't even wrong.")  

And as far as the bubble universe goes, any newly-formed bubbles would expand away from everything else at rates faster than the speed of light (it's believed that space itself isn't subject to the Universal Speed Limit -- thus keeping us science fiction aficionados in continuing hopes for the development of a warp drive).  Because information maximally travels at the speed of light, any knowledge of the bubble next door will be forever beyond our reach.

Be that as it may, Knibb blithely goes on to suggest that one of these models, or some combination, could be used to explain not only ghosts, but poltergeists, "audible phenomena," déjà vu, the Mandela Effect, sleep paralysis, and cryptid sightings.

Whoo-wee.  Sir, you are asking three speculative theories to do some awfully heavy lifting.

But now we get to the other piece, which is deciding that all of the listed phenomena are, in fact, paranormal in nature.  Ghosts and poltergeists -- well, like I've said many times before, I'm doubtful, but convincible.  However, I'm in agreement with C. S. Lewis's character MacPhee, who said, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."  A lot of "audible phenomena" can be explained by the phenomenon of priming -- when the mind is already anticipating a particular input (such as a creepy voice on a static-y recording) we're more likely to perceive it even if there's nothing there in actuality.  (As skeptic Crispian Jago put it, "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there.")  Déjà vu is still a bit of a mystery, but some research out of Colorado State University a few years ago suggests that it's also a brain phenomenon, in this case stemming from a misinterpretation of familiar sensory stimuli.  The Mandela Effect is almost certainly explained by the plasticity of human memory.  Sleep paralysis is a thoroughly studied, and reasonably well understood, neurological phenomenon (although apparently scary as hell).

As far as cryptid sightings -- well, y'all undoubtedly know what I think of most of those.

So the first step with all of these is to establish that there's anything there to explain.  The second is to demonstrate that the scientific explanations we do have are inadequate to explain them.

The third is to learn some fucking science before you try to apply quantum physics, inflationary cosmology, and string theory to why you got creeped out in a haunted pub.

Okay, I'm probably coming across as being unwarrantedly snarky, here.  But really.  There's no excuse for this kind of thing.  Even if you're not up to reading peer-reviewed science papers on the topics, a cursory glance at the relevant Wikipedia pages should be enough to convince you that (for example) the bubble universe model cannot explain ghosts.  Misrepresenting the science in this way isn't doing anyone any favors, most especially the people who seriously investigate claims of the supernatural, such as the generally excellent Society for Psychical Research.

As far as whether there's anything to any of these allegedly paranormal claims -- well, I'm not prepared to answer that categorically.  All I can say is that of the ones I've looked into, none of them meet the minimum standard of evidence that it would take to convince someone whose mind isn't already made up.  But I'm happy to hear about it if you think you've got a case that could change my mind.

Just make sure to tell the ghost not to get shy if I hold up a camera or a thermometer.

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

A perilous beauty

Ever heard of the "Bonneville Slide?"

It sounds like some obscure country line dance, but the real story is more interesting, and it comes with a connection to a curious Native legend that turns out to refer to a real historical event.

The Klickitat People have lived for centuries on both sides of the Columbia River, up into what is now Skamania and Klickitat Counties, Washington, and down into Multnomah and Clackamas Counties, Oregon.  They tell the tale of Pahto and Wy'east, the two sons of the chief of all the gods, Tyhee Saghalie.  The two young men did not get along, and fought over who would rule over which parcel of land.  Their father shot one arrow south and the other north; Pahto was given the lands around where the northern arrow landed, and Wy'east the territory surrounding where the southern arrow fell to the ground.  Tyhee Saghalie then shook the Earth and created a great bridge across the Columbia River so the two could visit each other.

But soon trouble broke out again.  Pahto and Wy'east both fell in love with the same young woman, the beautiful Loowit, and began to fight, burning villages and destroying forests and crops.  Tyhee Saghalie tried to reason with them, but to no avail.  In the end he grew angry himself and shook the Earth again, destroying the bridge; the cataclysm created a flood that washed away whole forests.  He turned all three into mountains -- Wy'east became Mount Hood, Pahto Mount Adams, and the lovely Loowit Mount Saint Helens.  But even in mountain form they never forgot either their anger or their burning love, and all three still rumble and fume to this day.

What is fascinating is that this odd story actually appears to have some basis in fact.

In around 1450 C.E., an earthquake knocked loose about a cubic kilometer of rock, soil, and debris from Table Mountain and Greenleaf Peak.  The resulting landslide -- the Bonneville Slide  -- roared down the Columbia Gorge, creating a dam and what amounted to a natural bridge something like sixty meters high across one of the biggest rivers in the world.  

Greenleaf Peak today [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Prado, Greenleaf Peak, Washington, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The dam couldn't last, however.  The Columbia River has a huge watershed, and the lake that built up behind the dam eventually overtopped the natural "Bridge of the Gods."  The whole thing collapsed -- probably during a second earthquake -- releasing all that pent-up river water in a giant flood.  It left behind geological evidence, both in the form of a layer of flood-damaged strata west of the slide, and the remains of drowned forests to the east, where trees had died as the dammed lake rose to fill the gorge.

Despite the reminder we got in 1980 -- with the eruption of Mount Saint Helens -- it's easy to forget how geologically active the Pacific Northwest is.  Not only is there the terrifying Cascadia Subduction Zone just offshore (about which I wrote two years ago), the other Cascade volcanoes, from Silverthrone Caldera (British Columbia) in the north to Lassen Peak (California) in the south, are still very much active.  Right in the middle is the massive Mount Rainier, visible from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia on clear days, which is one of the most potentially destructive volcanoes in the world.  Not only is it capable of producing lava and pyroclastic flows, it's capped by huge glaciers that would melt during an eruption and generate the catastrophic mudflows called lahars.  The remnants of two historical flows from Rainier -- the Osceola and Electron Lahars -- underlie the towns of Kent, Orting, Enumclaw, Puyallup, Auburn, Buckley, and Sumner, and in some places are twenty to thirty meters deep.

The Earth can be a scary, violent place, but somehow, humans manage to survive even catastrophic natural disasters.  And, in the case of the Bridge of the Gods, to incorporate them into our stories and legends.  Our determination to live in geologically-active areas is due to two things; volcanic soils tend to be highly fertile, and we have short memories.  Fortunately, though, we couple what seems like a foolhardy willingness to take risks with a deep resilience -- allowing us to live in places like the Cascades, which are bountiful, and filled with a perilous beauty.

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

Repeat performance

There are at least two differences between me and your typical woo-woo.

One is that I at least try to apply the principles of scientific induction to what I see around me.  Insofar as I'm able, given the limitations I have as a non-specialist, I base what I believe, say, and do on evidence and logic.

The second is that when I do say something egregiously wrong, I apologize and back down.

As far as the second goes, there seems to be an unwritten rule in all different disciplines of woo-woodom that goes something like "death before recision."  Even confronted by incontrovertible evidence that they're in error -- or worse, that they've cheated and lied -- they never change their stance.  The most they do -- such as the hilarious snafu "Psychic Sally Morgan" got herself into when she used her mediumistic skills to get in contact with the spirit of someone who turned out to be fictional -- is to remain silent for a while and hope everyone forgets what happened.

But before long, they're back at it, undaunted, and once again raking in accolades and money from the gullible.

No one is a better example of this than the redoubtable Uri Geller.  Geller, you probably know, is the Israeli "psychic and telekinetic" who claimed to be able not only to "see with his mind," but to manipulate objects remotely.  Geller has been called a fraud by many, most notably James Randi, whose book The Truth about Uri Geller resulted in a fifteen million dollar lawsuit against Randi and his publisher.

Geller lost.

But nothing was quite as humiliating as his 1973 appearance on The Tonight Show, where he was asked to demonstrate his most common claim, which was that he could bend spoons with his mind.  The problem is, Carson himself was a trained stage magician, so he -- literally -- knew all the tricks.  He suspected that Geller was pre-preparing his props (specifically, bending the spoons repeatedly ahead of time so they had a weak point), and refused to let Geller handle them before the show.  As a result, Geller couldn't do... well, anything.  Even if I'm completely on Carson's side, watching the sequence is profoundly cringe-inducing.

Geller, obviously humiliated by his (very) public failure, stammered out a lame "I'm not feeling very strong tonight," along with telling Carson that the host's doubt was interfering with Geller's ability to concentrate.

Which is mighty convenient.

What's most remarkable is that after this, Geller didn't do what I'd have done, which is to join a Trappist monastery and spend the rest of my life in total silence.  After a (brief) period to regain his footing, he just went right on claiming he could perform telekinesis...

... and people kept right on believing him.

What is truly extraordinary, though, is that over fifty years later, he's still at it.  An article in The Jerusalem Post two days ago describes his claim that Greta Thunberg's ship Madleen, which is on the way to Gaza to provide relief for the embattled region, had mechanical problems because he remotely damaged their equipment.

"I stopped the navigation systems of the ship," Geller said.  "I will use my psychic powers to stop [her] ship...  Remote viewing is sending your mind through space and time.  If I attach my psychokinetic energy through remote viewing, I can locate exactly where the navigational instruments are on her boat...  It's like a laser, like the IDF's new weapon, the Iron Beam.  That's how powerful the mind is for some people...  I can navigate my mind into whatever I want to."

Convenient, too, that he said all this after the Madleen was already having equipment problems.

So Geller is very far from giving up, despite a fifty-year track record of chicanery.  What's even more appalling, though, is that The Jerusalem Post is giving this guy free publicity.  They're not exactly an unbiased source -- the fact that Thunberg's flotilla is trying to get support to Gaza didn't make her any friends in Israel, and the Israeli defense minister Israel Katz came right out and called her an antisemite -- but the fact that they're even printing something like this without appending, "... but of course, keep in mind that he's a proven fraud" is reprehensible.

I did find it heartening that in the comments section, while a number of people criticized Thunberg for trying to help out Gaza, more than one of them made remarks like, "What's Geller gonna do?  Bend all their spoons so Greta can't eat her corn flakes in the morning?"

Anyhow, this is a further demonstration that Uri Geller apparently agrees with the Thermians of the Klaatu Nebula on their motto "Never give up, never surrender."  I still don't quite understand how shame-faced silence hasn't kicked in for him, but at this point it probably never will.

I guess it's kind of like a liars' version of the Sunk-Cost Fallacy.  Once you've lied long enough, may as well keep going, and just make the lies bigger and bolder.  Explains not only Uri Geller, but Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth Kegbreath, and the Bullshit Barbie Twins Karoline Leavitt and Pam Bondi, doesn't it?

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

All rights reversed

In his book Nothing's Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, media scholar Douglas Rushkoff discusses his concept of "open-source religion," which he contrasts to the more traditional, handed-down-from-on-high types:

An open-source religion would work the same way as open-source software development: it is not kept secret or mysterious at all.  Everyone contributes to the codes we use to comprehend our place in the universe.  We allow our religion to evolve based on the active participation of its people...  An open-source relationship to religion would likewise take advantage of the individual points of view of its many active participants to develop its more resolved picture of the world and our place within it...  [R]eligion is not a pre-existing truth but an ongoing project.  It may be divinely inspired, but it is a creation of human beings working together.  A collaboration.

Which all sounds lovely and democratic and ecumenical, but it brings up the problem of how exactly you can tell if the "codes" contributed by people are correct or not.  In science, there's a standard protocol -- alignment of a model with the known data, and the use of the model to make predictions that then agree with subsequent observations -- but here, I'm not sure how you could apply anything like that.  The fact that religion seems, at its heart, to be an intensely individual experience, varying greatly from one person to another, suggests that reconciling each person's contributions may not be so easy.  Wars have been fought and lives lost over people's notions about the nature of God; saying "let's all collaborate" is a little disingenuous.

This is problematic not only between the world's major religions, but within them.  How, for example, could you bring together my Unitarian Universalist friend, who is more or less a pantheist; another friend who is a devout and very traditional Roman Catholic; and someone who is an evangelical biblical literalist who thinks everyone who doesn't believe that way is headed to the Fiery Furnace for all eternity?  All three call themselves Christian, but they all mean something very different by it.

The Discordians' clever labeling of their own founding doctrine as "All Rights Reversed" -- quote, reprint, or jigger around anything you want, it's all yours to do with as you please -- sounds good, but in practice, it relies on an undeserved trust in the minds of fallible humans of varying backgrounds and educational levels, who sometimes can't even agree on what the evidence itself means.

It's not that I'm certain that my own "there's probably no all-powerful deity in charge" is correct, mind you.  It's more that -- as eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it -- "humans are rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong," and that assessment very much includes me.  I'm wary of other people's biases, and far more wary of my own.  Physicist Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."  Even C. S. Lewis saw the danger in the "everyone's voice counts" approach.  He wrote, "A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government.  The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true."

George Carlin put it another way.  He said, "Think of a guy you know who has 'average intelligence.'  Then keep in mind that half of humanity is stupider than that guy."

The problem is that just about every religious person in the world (1) believes what they do because they were told about it by someone else, and (2) believes they've got it one hundred percent right and everyone else is wrong.  And, as Richard Dawkins troublingly points out, what people do believe is often a matter of nothing more than geography.  I was raised Roman Catholic because I grew up in a French-speaking part of southern Louisiana.  If I'd been born to Saudi parents in Riyadh I'd have been Muslim; to Thai parents in Bangkok, I'd likely be Buddhist; to Israeli parents in Tel Aviv, I'd be Jewish; and so on.  I'm suspicious of the whole enterprise because, even given the same universe to look at, people all come up with different answers.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sowlos, Religious symbols-4x4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And not only are there the ones with lots of adherents, there are countless fringe groups that have spun their own wild takes on how the world works.  Some, like the guy in Tennessee who believed that God told him to build the world's biggest treehouse church, are more amusing than dangerous.  (For what it's worth, the treehouse church was shut down because it was a poorly-constructed safety hazard, and a month later burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.)  Others, like Jim Jones's People's Temple and the mystical cult that grew up around Carlos Castaneda, are downright deadly.  I have to admit the "open-source religion" idea is good at least from the standpoint of throwing the question back on your own intellect rather than saying, "Just believe what the priest/minister/imam/holy man is telling you," but it does leave the possibility open of getting it very, very wrong. 

As Susan B. Anthony put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Again, as I said earlier, it's not that I'm sure myself.  Part of my hesitancy is because I'm so aware of my own capacity for error.  Even though I left Catholicism in my twenties and, for the most part, haven't looked back, I have to admit that there's still an attraction there, something about the mystery and ritual of the church of my childhood that keeps me fascinated.

All the baggage that comes with it -- the patriarchalism and sectarianism and misogyny and homophobia -- not so much.

So right now I'll remain a de facto atheist, although in some ways a reluctant one.  The idea that the universe has some deeper meaning, that things happen because there's a Grand Plan (even if it is, in Aziraphale's words, "Ineffable"), has undeniable appeal.  But if there's one thing I've learned in my sixty-four years, it's that the universe is under no compulsion to arrange itself so as to make me happy.

Or, as my beloved grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."

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

The backyard volcano

Of all of the sciences, geology is the one where deep understanding of the underlying processes eluded us the longest.  Even the two other contenders -- genetics and astronomy -- were at least partially unraveled sooner.  Plate tectonics, the model that provides a framework for comprehending just about every other geological process, wasn't elucidated until Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews, and Harry Hess came along in the early 1960s.  Until then, geology texts fell back on hand-waving explanations like synclines and anticlines, and pretty much ignored questions like why most of the world's volcanoes and major earthquakes fall along a tracery of curves that encircle the Earth like the stitching on a baseball (the most famous of which is the Pacific Ring of Fire).

Part of the reason it took us so long to figure all this out is because geological processes are, for the most part, slow, so it's easy to look around and conclude that the Earth has pretty much always looked like it does today.  Then... they discovered anomalies like marine fossils in the Himalayas, Kansas, the Rockies, and right here in my own neck of the woods in upstate New York.  It took the brilliant Scottish geologist Charles Lyell to recognize that if rates of sedimentation are fairly constant, then big sedimentary rock layers like the White Cliffs of Dover must have taken tens of millions, rather than thousands, of years to form.  The recognition of how slow most geological phenomena were meant the Earth was a great deal older than the six-thousand-year estimate by Archbishop Ussher -- setting up the first of many clashes between geologists and the church establishment.

But "usually slow" doesn't mean "always slow."  Sometimes major geological processes can occur, literally, overnight.  Take, for example, the appearance in 1943 of a new volcano, dubbed Parícutin after the nearest town, in a Mexican farmer's cornfield.

The locals did at least have a little bit of warning.  For weeks prior to the initial eruption, they had heard sounds "like thunder but with no clouds in the sky," now thought to be the rumblings of magma moving beneath the surface.  There were over twenty small earthquakes over 3.2 on the Richter Scale, and hundreds of smaller ones -- the day before the eruption, there were more than three hundred small earthquakes.

What happened next is best said in the words of Dionisio Pulido, the farmer who witnessed it first-hand:

At 4 p.m., I left my wife to set fire to a pile of branches when I noticed that a crack, which was situated on one of the knolls of my farm, had opened... and I saw that it was a kind of fissure that had a depth of only half a meter.  I set about to ignite the branches again when I felt a thunder, the trees trembled, and I turned to speak to Paula; and it was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised itself two or two and a half meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust – grey, like ashes – began to rise up in a portion of the crack that I had not previously seen...  Immediately more smoke began to rise with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulfur.

By the next morning, where Pulido's cornfield had been was a scoria cone fifty meters high; a week later, it was double that.  It was continuously erupting volcanic bombs and small pyroclastic flows, and Pulido decided that his home and land were done for, so he got the hell out.  Before leaving, he put up a sign saying "This volcano is owned and operated by Dionisio Pulido" -- indicating that even in dire circumstances, you can still hang on to your sense of humor.

Parícutin in 1943 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The entire eruption cycle went on for two years, and by the end, there was a massive conical mountain, over four hundred meters tall, where before there'd only been a flat valley.  Only three people died during the eruption, and oddly, none of them were from the lava or pyroclastic surges; the three died when they were struck by lightning during an ash eruption.  (The tiny particles of volcanic ash are often electrically charged; lightning strikes in ash columns are common.)

It did, however, render much of the (former) valley uninhabitable.  Here's a photograph of the ruins of the old church of San Juan Parangaricutiro, which was destroyed by lava and ash along with the rest of the village of the same name:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

At the time of the eruption, all that was known was that it added another peak to the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, which runs east-west across the entire country and includes much more famous volcanoes such as Popocatépetl.  Since then, we've learned that the whole range owes its existence to the subduction of the Rivera and Cocos Plates underneath the North American Plate at the Middle America Trench; the waterlogged rock and sediments are pulled down into the upper mantle, heated, and melt, forming the magma that eventually erupts somewhere behind the trench.

But at the time, the appearance of a volcano was a source of mystification both to the locals and the scientists.  To be sure, some geological phenomena are sudden; earthquakes, for example, often happen without much in the way of warning (and accurate earthquake prediction is still a dicey affair).  But we're used to things pretty much staying in the shapes and positions they were in before.  It takes a huge earthquake -- the 9.2-magnitude Anchorage megathrust quake comes to mind -- to radically reshape the land, in this case raising a long stretch of coastline by as much as nine meters.  And while big volcanic eruptions, such as the current one from Mount Etna, are spectacular and can be deadly, most of the time they're from volcanoes we already knew about.

Parícutin, though, kind of came out of nowhere, at least by the scientific understanding of the time.  And that's one of the benefits of science, isn't it?  It allows us to understand the processes involved, not just name them after they've happened.  While we're still not at the point where we can predict with much lead time when something like this will happen, at least now we can say with some assurance that we understand why it happened where it did.

Little consolation to Dionisio Pulido, of course.  I'm guessing that "owning and operating" a volcano was nowhere near as lucrative as his cornfield had been.  But that's life in a geologically active area.  However much we understand about the science behind such events, it's good to keep in mind there's always a human cost.

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

Dominoes

Working for a narcissistic autocrat isn't easy.

Me, I've always wondered what the attraction is.  I guess for some people the proximity to power -- and thus, obtaining some measure of power themselves -- is enough.  There's usually money to be had as well.  But... the risk!  When allegiances shift, which they inevitably do, someone in the inner circle can find themselves on the outside mighty quick.  (Sometimes all the way out, if you get my drift.)  Factional jockeying and backstabbing kind of come with the territory.

The problem with selling your soul is that it usually doesn't stay bought.

Surprisingly enough, I'm not talking about Donald Trump here, although this certainly applies to him and his cadre.  The topic comes up because I just finished reading the excellent Henry VIII: The King and His Court by Alison Weir.  Henry VIII, especially toward the end of his life, had a lot in common with Trump -- the egotism, the touchiness, the deflection of blame for... well, for everything.  Weir writes:

[H]e was given to such unpredictable and terrifying explosions of rage that those about him concluded they had to deal with "the most dangerous and cruel man in the world."  On days when he was in an irritable mood, his courtiers had to keep their wits about them, for "when he came to his chamber he would look [around] angrily, and after fall to fighting."  Few dared contradict him, since his egotism was such that he was unable to conceive that he might be in the wrong.

No one at court ever felt truly safe, for the King had amply demonstrated that he "never made a man but he destroyeth him again, either with displeasure or with the sword."  Even his outward bonhomie could be sinister, for he often showed a smiling face to those whom he meant to destroy.  Abroad, he was known as "the English Nero," and it was said that "in England, death has snatched everyone of worth away, or fear has shrunk them up."...  [A] man arrested in Kent for slandering him was not exaggerating when he said, "If the King knew every man's thought, it would make his heart quake."

I find it baffling that anyone would choose to associate with someone like that.  I'm not talking about his wives here; of the six of them, two were divorced and two beheaded, but back then women didn't have much choice in marriage, and if the king wanted you, well... you just sort of had to go along with it.  (Of the two who were executed, it seems like Anne Boleyn was herself a bit of an arrogant power-grubber who made herself some dangerous enemies, and Katherine Howard appears to have been simply young, naïve, and boy-crazy.)

But Henry was surrounded by nobles (both of the to-the-manner-born and the up-and-coming nouveau-riche types) who were desperately elbowing each other out of the way to capture the king's approval.  Even though one after the other, they ended up paying for it.

Here are a few examples:

• Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham -- made the twin mistakes of being too close a cousin to Henry for comfort, and being outspoken in criticizing him.  He was accused of plotting to kill the king and was executed.
• Cardinal Thomas Wolsey -- rose to the position of Lord Chancellor, but became powerful enough that he was destined to fall.  He was recalled to London to face capital charges of high treason, but (luckily?) died of natural causes on the way there.
• George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford -- brother of Anne Boleyn, he was caught up in her downfall, and accused (almost certainly falsely) of having incest with her.  He was beheaded.
• Jane (Parker) Boleyn, Lady Rochford -- George's wife, who was a dedicated gossip of the "let's see how many people I can get in trouble" type.  She probably didn't rat out her husband, as has been claimed, but had no scruples about telling tales on anyone and everyone else.  She finally got caught in her own web during the downfall of Henry's fifth wife, Katherine Howard, and was five minutes behind the queen in stepping up to the executioner's block.
• Thomas Cromwell -- Lord Chamberlain and Lord Privy Seal, and one of Henry's closest confidants, Cromwell is another one who grew too powerful and made enemies.  He also ended up losing his head on Tower Hill.  Henry later said he regretted Cromwell's death, but blamed it on being "misled by others," on the strength of whose statements he "had put to death the most faithful servant he ever had."
• Sir Thomas More -- the eminent theologian and philosopher refused to accept the annulment of Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and (worse) take the Oath of Supremacy recognizing Henry as the head of the Church in England.  More was beheaded, ending his life with his characteristic humor -- the story is he said to the guard, "See me safely up to the scaffold, sir -- on the voyage downwards I'll fend for myself."
• Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey -- a quarrelsome hothead who made the mistake of angering the powerful Seymour family, he pissed off enough people that he was accused of treason on trumped-up charges and was beheaded only nine days before the king himself died.  His father, the Duke of Norfolk, was also condemned to death, but managed to escape the axe for a few more days and was pardoned after Henry shuffled off this mortal coil.

What strikes me about all this is that all these people must have known what Henry was like.  How could they not?  And yet one after another, they pushed further and further into court intrigue, and one after another paid for it with their lives.

Henry VIII in 1537.  Is this a face you would trust?  (Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger) [Image is in the Public Domain]

It reminds me of the incident a few years ago where some people were at an inspirational weekend seminar by motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and the culmination was walking barefoot across a fire pit.  Dozens of people ended up in the hospital with severely blistered feet.  I (sort of) get how the first couple were injured; you're told, "Okay, if you do this right and just believe in yourself, you won't get hurt."  For them, it's just a matter of having trusted the wrong person.  But after the first five or six people are obviously getting their feet scorched, wouldn't you think the rest of the participants would say, "No, thank you?"  Thirty people ended up injured, which led me to speculate that they'd lined up in reverse order of IQ or something.

But reading the biography of King Henry VIII makes me question that assessment.  Because these noblemen (and even a few women) who were part of Henry's ongoing royal court row of dominoes weren't fools.  They were arrogant, a lot of them, and power-hungry, but they were very far from stupid.  

So why, after seeing what happened to some of the early victims -- men like Buckingham, Rochford, and More -- did people not say, "Nope, I'll pass on an appointment to the Privy Council.  If you need me, I'll be in my manor house in a remote part of the Lakes District."

That's sure as hell what I'd have done.

But that isn't what happened.  However many of the dominoes fell, there never seemed to be a shortage of people stepping up to be next.  Up to the very end, the nobles were still jockeying for Henry's approval.  At the time of his death the Seymours, relatives of Henry's third wife Jane, were in ascendancy, but they too didn't last long.  During Henry's son Edward VI's short reign, Edward's uncles -- the brothers Edward and Thomas Seymour -- both ended up losing their heads to the executioner's axe as well.

I mean, how strong can a belief in "it won't happen to me" get?

I said I wasn't going to focus on Trump, but I have to wonder the same about his loyalists.  Do they really think he has any loyalty to them?  People like Michael Cohen and Anthony Scaramucci found out how quickly Trump will throw his devotees under the bus when it serves him.  Trump is scarily similar in personality to Henry VIII -- not nearly as smart, but as ruthless, humorless, egotistical, and self-serving.

If I were at all inclined to be in politics, I would not want to bet my career on an association with a man who has no fealty to anyone but himself.  But like King Henry, Trump seems to be surrounded by people clamoring to be part of his inner circle.  (At the time of this writing, Elon Musk seems to be in a rapidly-escalating feud with Trump -- just illustrating that even erstwhile kingmakers can find themselves in royal disfavor more or less overnight.)

I guess this is just further evidence that I don't understand my fellow humans very well.  Hardly the first time I've made this observation.  I guess that's one thing that keeps me fascinated with history -- it leaves me saying, over and over, "People are so weird."

But more to the point, this is a beautiful illustration of Mark Twain's comment that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

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

Life converges

One of the most fascinating features of biological evolution -- particularly as it applies to the possibility of life on other planets -- has to do with the concept of constraint.

Which features of life on Earth are, in some sense, inevitable?  Are there characteristics of terrestrial organisms that we might expect to find on any inhabitable world?  Stephen Jay Gould looked at this question in his essay "Replaying the Tape," from his brilliant book on the Cambrian Explosion, Wonderful Life:

You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past -– say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale.  Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.  If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur.  But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life?  What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence?  or of mammals?

Some features that have been suggested as evolutionarily constrained, with arguments of varying levels of persuasiveness, are:

• a genetic code based on some kind of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA, or some chemical analogue)
• internal cell membranes made of phospholipids, to segregate competing chemical reactions from each other 
• multicellularity, with some level of tissue specialization
• in more complex organisms, some form of symmetry, with symmetrically-placed organs
• some kind of rapid-transit system for messages, analogous to our nervous system (but perhaps not structured the same way)
• cephalization -- concentration of the central processing centers and sensory organs near the head end

It's interesting when science fiction tackles this issue -- and sometimes comes up with possible pathways for evolution that don't result in humanoids with strangely-shaped ears and odd facial protuberances.  A few that come to mind are Star Trek's silicon-based Horta from the episode"Devil in the Dark," the blood-drinking fog creature from "Obsession," the giant single-celled neural parasites from "Operation Annihilate," and Doctor Who's Vashta Nerada, Not-Things, Gelth, and Midnight Entity.

So the search for extraterrestrial life requires we consider looking not only for "life as we know it, Jim," but life as we don't know it.  Or, more accurately, to consider to what extent our terrestrial biases might be blinding us to the possibility of what evolution could create.

It's worth considering, however, how often evolution here on Earth ends up landing on the same solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction over and over again, a phenomenon called convergent evolution.  Eyes, or analogous light receptor organs, have evolved multiple times -- some biologists have suggested as many as fifty different independent lineages that evolved some form of eye.  Wings occurred separately in four groups of animals -- birds, pterosaurs, insects, and bats.  (If you include structures for gliding, add flying squirrels, sugar gliders, colugos, flying fish, and flying lizards.)

Even biochemical pathways can reappear, something I find astonishing.  Take, for example, the research that came out this week in Nature Chemical Biology, which found that two only distantly-related plants -- ipecac (Carapichea ipecacuanha), in the gentian family, and sage-leaved alangium (Alangium salviifolium), in the dogwood family, have both come up with complex biochemical pathways to generate the same set of bitter, emetic compounds -- ipecacuanha alkaloids.

The last common ancestor of these two species was over a hundred million years ago, so there's a strong argument that they evolved this capacity independently.  And indeed, when the biochemists looked at the enzymatic pathways, they're different -- they found entirely different chemical synthesis methods for producing the same set of end products.  Weirdest of all, they both evolved an enzyme that cleaves a sugar molecule from the alkaloid precursor, and that's what activates it (i.e., makes it toxic).  In the living plant's tissues, the enzyme and the precursor are segregated from each other.  It's only when they're brought together -- such as when a herbivore chomps on the leaves -- that the sugar is split away from the precursor, the alkaloid is activated, and the herbivore starts puking its guts up.

Clever strategy.  So clever, in fact, that it was stumbled upon by two entirely separate lineages of plants.  The rules organisms play by are the same, so perhaps not surprising there are similar outcomes sometimes.

The whole thing highlights the fact that there is a limited range of solutions for the fundamental difficulties of existence.  It has to make you wonder if, when we do find life elsewhere in the universe, it might look a lot more familiar that we're expecting.  I don't think it's likely we'll bump into Romulans or Ice Warriors or Krillitane, but maybe there are features of life on Earth that will re-evolve in just about any conceivable habitable planet.

But hopefully there won't be any Vashta Nerada.  Those things are terrifying.

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