Speaking to the wind

A scarily long list of friends who have been coping with serious illnesses in the last six months has brought home to me how fragile life is.

We all know that, of course, but usually it's in a purely theoretical sense.  We're aware that any day could be our last, any time we see a loved one might be goodbye.  But somehow, we rarely ever act that way.  We -- and I very much include myself in this assessment -- waste time in pointless and joyless activities, squander potential, treat the people we meet cavalierly.  In general, we act as if we have forever and don't have any reason to treat the time we have now as our most precious possession.

It's a sad truth that often when we find out our error, it's too late.  The time for the chances we could have taken is past, the person we cared for has moved out of our orbit (either temporarily or permanently), the opportunity to apologize and make amends for a wrong we committed has long since passed.  It's sad, but its ubiquity points to it all being part of the human condition.  The peculiar magnetism of books and movies where you can reverse the clock and fix past mistakes -- like Peggy Sue Got Married and Back to the Future and the devastatingly poignant Doctor Who episode "Turn Left," as well as my own novel Lock & Key -- points to how universal this kind of longing is.

The Japanese have come up with two quirky, oddly beautiful ways of dealing with this.  The first was the brainchild of a garden designer named Ituro Sasaki, who in 2010 found out that a beloved cousin was suffering from inoperable cancer.  When the cousin died three months later, Sasaki designed a beautiful garden in his honor, and the centerpiece was...

... a phone booth.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matthew Komatsu (https://longreads.com/2019/03/11/after-the-tsunami/)]

He calls it the "Wind Phone" (風の電話, Kaze no Denwa) because the telephone inside is "connected to nothing but the wind."  He wanted to be able to talk to his cousin, even knowing he couldn't respond, and after finishing the installation Sasaki spent hours sitting in this lovely spot telling his cousin about all the beauty he was seeing, and all the things he regretted not saying while he was alive.  He didn't think his cousin was actually listening, but still felt it absolutely necessary to say it all out loud.  "Because my thoughts couldn't be relayed over a regular phone line," Sasaki explained, "I wanted them to be carried on the wind."

Then, in 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake killed almost twenty thousand people in the region, including twelve hundred in Ōtsuchi, Sasaki's home town -- around ten percent of the population.  This moved him to open his garden and the Wind Phone to the public, and it has since been visited by over thirty thousand people.

As strange as it sounds, it has become a place where people find an anodyne for the twin tragedies of human existence -- regret and grief.

The other one is located in Mitoyo, on Awashima Island in Kagawa Prefecture.  It's called the "Missing Post Office" (漂流郵便局, Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku), and was the creation of artist Saya Kubota.  Kubota came up with idea when she visited the island looking for inspiration for the Setouchi International Art Festival.  She was passing the Mitoyo Post Office and caught sight of her own reflection in the window, and thought, "How did I wash up here?"  The idea struck her that we all are caught up in currents not of our own making, and sometimes end up very far from where we intended -- for good or bad.  "I wanted to create a space where people could experience the same sensation I did," Kubota said.

So she designed a small building that looked like a real post office, the purpose of which was to receive letters and post cards from people about whatever they most wanted to say, but had never had the chance.  It succeeded beyond Kubota's wildest dream.  The Missing Post Office receives almost four thousand deliveries a month, in which people talk about their first loves, dearly missed relatives and friends, regrets, hopes, dreams.  There have been messages directed at ancestors or future descendants.  Some people even send their favorite possessions, along with a description of why the items are so important.  Some are anonymous, but many are signed; more than one has written about how comforting it was to be able to speak their truth, even knowing that it can't change the past.  Kubota displays the letters and postcards, and visitors to the Missing Post Office have described how emotionally cathartic it is to read about what others have experienced and written about -- and to recognize that they are not alone in their own feelings.

The Missing Post Office, Mitoyo, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nozomi-N700, Missing Post Office building（Japan, Kagawa Prefecture Mitoyo Takuma cho Awashima）, CC BY-SA 4.0]

If you would like to write your own message to the Missing Post Office, the address is c/o Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku, 1317-2 Takumacho Awashima, Mitoyo Kagawa 769-1108, Japan.

While the idea of being able to go back and fix past mistakes is attractive, time's arrow appears to point in one direction only.  "The Moving Finger writes," said Omar Khayyám, "and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."  Correcting past wrongs, saying what we should have said to the people we love, and making different decisions at critical junctures (an astonishing number of which we never recognized as critical at the time) will always be out of reach.  But maybe there is some solace to be gained by saying what we need to say now, even if it's just spoken to the wind through disconnected phone, or written on a postcard and sent away to a distant island to be read and wept over by strangers.

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Memento mori

In this week's episode of the current season of Doctor Who, entitled "Boom," the body of a soldier killed in battle is converted into a rather creepy-looking cylinder that has the capacity for producing a moving, speaking hologram of the dead man, which has enough of his memory and personality imprinted on it that his friends and family can interact with it as if he were still alive.

I suspect I'm not alone in having found this scene rather disturbing, especially when his daughter has a chat with the hologram and seems completely unperturbed that her dad had just been brutally killed.  

Lest you think this is just another wild trope dreamed up by Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies, there are already (at least) two companies that do exactly this -- Silicon Intelligence and Super Brain.  Both of them have models that use generative AI that scour your photos, videos, and written communication to produce a convincing online version of you, that then can interact with your family and friends in (presumably) a very similar fashion to how you did when you were alive.

I'm not the only one who is having a "okay, just hold on a minute" reaction to this.  Ethicists Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska and Tomasz Hollanek, both of Cambridge University, considered the implications of "griefbots" in a paper last week in the journal Philosophy & Technology, and were interviewed this week in Science News, and they raise some serious objections to the practice.

The stance of the researchers is that at the very least there should be some kind of safeguard to protect the young from accessing this technology (since, just as in Doctor Who, there's the concern that children wouldn't be able to recognize that they weren't talking to their actual loved one, with serious psychological repercussions), and that it be clear to all users that they're communicating with an AI.  But they bring up a problem I hadn't even thought of; what's to stop companies from monetizing griefbots by including canny advertisements for paying sponsors?  "Our concern," said Nowaczyk-Basińska, "is that griefbots might become a new space for a very sneaky product placement, encroaching upon the dignity of the deceased and disrespecting their memory."

Ah, capitalism.  There isn't anything so sacred that it can't be hijacked to make money.

But as far as griefbots in general go, my sense is that the entire thing crosses some kind of ethical line.  I'm not entirely sure why, other than the "it just ain't right" arguments that devolve pretty quickly into the naturalistic fallacy.  Especially given my atheism, and my hunch that after I die there'll be nothing left of my consciousness, why would I care if my wife made an interactive computer model of me to talk to?  If it gives her solace, what's the harm?

I think one consideration is that by doing so, we're not really cheating death.  To put it bluntly, it's deriving comfort from a lie.  The virtual-reality model inside the computer isn't me, any more than a photograph or a video clip is.  But suppose we really go off the deep end, here, and consider what it would be like if someone could actually emulate the human brain in a machine -- and not just a random brain, but yours?

There's at least a theoretical possibility that you could have a computerized personality that would be completely authentic, with your thoughts, memories, sense of humor, and emotions.  (The current ones are a long way from that -- but even so, they're still scarily convincing.)  Notwithstanding my opinions on the topic of religion and the existence of the soul, there's a part of me that simply rebels at this idea.  Such a creation might look and act like me, but it wouldn't be me.  It might be a convincing facsimile, but that's about it.

But what about the Turing test?  Devised by Alan Turing, the idea of the Turing test for artificial intelligence is that because we don't have direct access to what any other sentient being is experiencing -- each of us is locked inside his/her own skull -- the only way to evaluate whether something is intelligent is the way it acts.  The sensory experience of the brain is a black box.  So if scientists made a Virtual Gordon, who acted on the computer screen in a completely authentic Gordonesque manner, would it not only be intelligent and alive, but... me?

In that way, some form of you might achieve immortality, as long as there was a computer there to host you.

This is moving into some seriously sketchy territory for most of us.  It's not that I'm eager to die; I tend to agree with my dad, who when he was asked what he wanted written on his gravestone, responded, "He's not here yet."  But as hard as it is to lose someone you love, this strikes me as a cheat, a way to deny reality, closing your eyes to part of what it means to be human.

So when I die, let me go.  Give me a Viking funeral -- put me on my canoe, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean.  Then my friends and family need to throw a huge party in my honor, with lots of music and dancing and good red wine and drunken debauchery.  And I think I want my epitaph to be the one I created for one of my fictional characters, also a science nerd and a staunch atheist: "Onward into the next great mystery."

For me, that will be enough.

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The dying of the light

In July of 2004, my father died.  I was at his bedside in Our Lady of Lourdes General Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana when it happened.  He'd  been declining for a while -- his once razor-sharp mental faculties slipping into a vague cloudiness, his gait slowing and becoming halting and cautious, his former rapier wit completely gone.  The most heartbreaking thing was his own awareness of what he had lost and would continue to lose.  It looked like a slow slide into debility.

Then, in June, he had what the doctors described as a mini-stroke.  Afterward, he was still fairly lucid, but was having trouble walking.  It had long been his deepest fear (one I share) that he'd become completely dependent on others for his care, and it was obvious to us (and probably to him as well) that this was the direction things were going.

What happened next was described in three words by my mother: "He gave up."

Despite the fact that the doctors could find no obvious direct cause of it, his systems one by one started to shut down.  Three weeks after the mini-stroke and fall that precipitated his admission into the hospital, he died at age 83.

I had never been with someone as they died before (and haven't since).  I was out of state when my beloved grandma died in 1986; and when my mother died, eight months after my father, it was so sudden I didn't have time to get there.  But I was by my father's side as his breathing slowed and finally stopped.  The event itself wasn't at all dramatic; the transition between life and death was subtle, gentle, and peaceful.  However wrenching it was on my mother and me, for him there seemed to be hardly a boundary between "here" and "not here."

Of course, I'm judging that from the outside.  No one knows -- no one can know -- what the experience was like for him.  It's funny, really; death is one of the experiences that unites us as human, and one which we all will ultimately share, but none of us knows what it actually is.

Noël LeMire, La Mort et le Mourant (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A study in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, though, may be the first clue as to what the experience is like.  An 87-year-old Canadian epilepsy patient was set up for an electroencephalogram to try and get a picture of what was causing his seizures, when he unexpectedly had a severe heart attack.  The man was under a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, so when his heart stopped beating, they let him die...

... but he was still hooked up to the EEG.

This gave his doctors our first glimpse into what is happening in the brain of someone as they die.  And they found a sudden increase in activity in the parts of the brain involved in memory, recall, and dreaming -- which lasted for thirty seconds after his heart stopped, then gradually faded.

"Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences," said Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon who was the study's lead author.  "As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times.  It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members.  Something we may learn from this research is that although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives."

Which is a pleasant thought.  Many of us -- even, for some reason, the devoutly religious, who you'd think would be positively eager for the experience -- are afraid of death.  Me, I'm not looking forward to it; I rather like being alive, and as a de facto atheist I have no particular expectation that there'll be anything afterwards.  Being with my father as he died did, however, have the effect of making me less afraid of death.  The usual lead-up, with its frequent pain and debility and illness, is still deeply terrifying to me, but crossing the boundary itself seemed fairly peaceful.

And the idea that our brains give us one last go-through of our pleasant memories is kind of nice.  I know that this single patient's EEG is hardly conclusive -- and it's unlikely there'll be many other people hooked up to a brain scanner as they die -- but it does give some comfort that perhaps, this experience we will all share someday isn't as awful as we might fear.

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The dying of the light

In the brilliant, funny, thought-provoking, and often poignant television series The Good Place, a character named Simone, who is an Australian neuroscientist, ends up in heaven (the titular "Good Place") and flatly refuses to believe it.

The whole thing, she claims, is merely a hallucination cooked up by her dying, oxygen-starved brain.  That she died (or was in the process of it), she could believe; but knowing what she does about neurophysiology, it is simply impossible for her to accept that what she is seeing is real.

The more you know about the brain and its sensory/perceptual system, the easier it is to understand how an actual neuroscientist would come to that conclusion.  As we've seen here at Skeptophilia a good many times, what we perceive is fragmentary and inaccurate, and that's even while we're alive, wide awake, and all the relevant organs are in good working order.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, all too accurately, "The human brain is rife with ways of getting it wrong."

Oh, it works well enough most of the time.  We wouldn't have survived long otherwise.  But to assume that what you're perceiving, and (even worse) what you remember perceiving, is at all complete and accurate is simply false.

It gets even dicier when things start to go wrong.  Which was why I was so fascinated with a study from the University of Michigan that was published a couple of weeks ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at EEG traces from comatose patients who had experienced cardiac arrest and died, and the researchers found as the patients died, their brains showed a surge of activity in the regions associated with consciousness and perception.

Gamma wave activity -- associated with awareness -- spiked, as did signaling at the junction of the temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes of the cerebrum.  This area is correlated with dreaming, hallucination, and other altered states of consciousness, and the high activity there might be an explanation for the commonalities in near-death experiences, like the familiar "tunnel of light" that has been reported hundreds of times.

This story was reported in a lot of popular media as providing support for claims that "your life flashes before your eyes" as you die, but that seems to me to be a significant stretch.  For one thing, the study was small; only four individuals, understandable given the specificity of the criteria.  For another, the spike of activity in the temporal-occipital-parietal junction is correlated with altered states of consciousness, but it doesn't tell us what these people were actually experiencing.  And we can't ask them about it, because they're dead.

[Image from Punch, 1858, is in the Public Domain]

So what this says about the experience of dying is in the category of "interesting but very preliminary," and what it says about the possibility of an afterlife is "nothing."  My guess is people who already disbelieve in an afterlife will, like Simone, add this to the evidence against, and the people who already believe in it will add it to the evidence in favor.  In reality, of course, the new study only looks at the threshold of death, not what happens after it occurs.  I'm still agnostic about an afterlife, myself.  I recently read an article written by by Stafford Betty, professor emeritus of religious studies at California State University - Bakersfield, who stated that survival after death was "a near certainty" and that doubters are simply ignoring a mountain of evidence.  "They are so dug into their materialist worldview," Betty writes, "that they refuse to investigate research that contradicts it.  They are afraid of getting entangled in a worldview, often religiously based, that belongs to a past they 'outgrew.'"

Well, maybe.  I've read a lot of the research, and I don't think it's as clear-cut as all that, nor is my skepticism due to my clinging to materialism or a fear of getting trapped in religion.  In fact, I can say without hesitation that if I found out there was an afterlife, I'd be pretty thrilled about it.  (Some afterlifes, anyway.  I'm not so fond of the ones where you're tortured for eternity.  But Valhalla, for example, sounds badass.)  It's more that the evidence I've seen doesn't reach a level of rigor I find convincing.

But I'm certainly open to the idea.  Like I said, the other option, which is simply ceasing to be, isn't super appealing.

Anyhow, the University of Michigan paper is fascinating, and gives us a unique lens into the experience of someone while dying.  It's the one thing that unites us all, isn't it?  We'll all go through it eventually.  It reminds me of the passage from my novel The Communion of Shadows, where the main characters are discussing the fear of death:

“Aren’t you scared?” came T-Joe’s voice from behind him, after a moment’s silence.

“Scared? A little.”  Leandre paused.  “It’s like when I was a child, and I used to climb an oak tree that leaned out over the bayou.  You’re there, hunched on the branch, nothing but the empty air between your naked body and the water’s surface.  It looks like it’s a hundred feet down.  You think, ‘I can’t do it.  I can’t jump.’  Your hands cling to the branch, your heart is pounding, you’re dripping sweat.  You know once you jump it’ll be all right, you’ll swim to shore and in a moment be ready to do it again.  But in that instant, it seems impossible.”  He paused, giving a lazy swat at a mosquito.  “I’m once again that skinny little boy in the tree, looking down at the bayou, and thinking I’ll never have the courage to leap.  I know I can do it, and that it’ll be okay.  Think of all the people who have passed these gates, endured whatever death is and gone on to what awaits us beyond this world.”  He turned around with a broad smile on his face.  “If they can do it, so can I.”

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Grave matters

It's easy to scoff at the superstitious beliefs of the past.  I've certainly been known to do it myself.  But it bears keeping in mind that although, to more scientific minds, some of the rituals and practices seem kind of ridiculous, sometimes they had a strange underlying logic to them.

Take, for example, the strange case of JB55.  Archaeologists excavating a site near Griswold, Connecticut in 1990 found a nineteenth-century wooden coffin with brass tacks hammered into the surface that spelled out "JB55" -- according to the practice of the time, the initials of the deceased and the age at which (s)he died.  Inside were the bones of a man -- but they had been rearranged after death into a "skull-and-crossbones" orientation.

This seems like an odd thing to do, and raised the obvious question of why anyone would rearrange a dead person's remains.  There was speculation that it was part of some kind of magical ritual intended to prevent him from coming back from the dead; in the mid-1800s, the region around Griswold was known for rampant belief in vampirism.  The reason seems to have been an epidemic of tuberculosis, which (among other things) causes pale skin, swollen eyes, and coughing up blood; there are known cases where the bodies of disease victims were exhumed and either burned and reinterred, or else rearranged much as JB55's were.

The explanation in this specific case gained credence when an examination of JB55's bones showed tuberculosis lesions.  Further, an analysis of the Y DNA from the bones allowed them to identify the individual's last name as Barber -- and sure enough, there was a John Barber living in Griswold who would have been of the right age to be JB55.

It's amazing how widespread these sorts of practices are.  In 2018 a skeleton of a ten-year-old child was unearthed in Umbria, Italy.  The skeleton dated from the fifth century C.E., and she seems to have died during a terrible epidemic of malaria that hit the area during the last years of the Roman Empire.  Before burial, the child had a rock placed in her mouth -- thought to be part of a ritual to prevent her spirit from rising from the dead and spreading the disease.  In 2022, a skeleton was uncovered in Pién, Poland, dating from the seventeenth century -- it was of an adult woman, and had a sickle placed across her neck and a padlock on her left big toe.  The reason was probably similar to the aforementioned cases -- to keep her in her grave where she belonged.

The reason this comes up is a paper this week in Antiquity about another interesting burial -- this one in Sagalossos, in western Turkey.  Archaeologists found evidence of a funeral pyre dating to the second century C.E., but unlike the usual practice at the time -- in which the burned remains were taken elsewhere to be buried -- here, the pyre and the remains were simply covered up with a layer of lime and brick tiles.  Most interestingly, scattered over the surface of the tiles were dozens of bent iron nails.

Iron and iron-bearing minerals have been thought from antiquity to have magical properties; Neanderthals were using hematite to anoint the dead fifty thousand years ago.  Here, both the iron in the nails and the angles at which they were bent probably were thought to play a role in their power.

The authors write:

The placement of nails in proximity to the deceased's remains might suggest the first of these two hypotheses.  The fixing qualities of nails, however, may also have been used to pin the spirits of the restless dead (so-called revenants) to their final resting place, so that they could not return from the afterlife...  Aside from the application of nails to symbolically fix the spirit, heavy weights were also used in an attempt to immobilise the physical remains of a potential revenant.

I do have to wonder how the idea of revenants got started in the first place.  Surely all of them can't be from the symptoms of tuberculosis, like in JB55's case.  And since the number of people who have actually returned from the dead is, um, statistically insignificant, it's not like they had lots of data to work from. 

Perhaps much of it was simply fear.  Death is a big scary unknown, and most of us aren't eager to experience it; even the ultra-Christian types who are completely certain they're heading to an afterlife of eternal heavenly bliss look both ways before they cross the road.  But like many superstitions, these all seem so... specific.  How did someone become convinced that nails weren't enough, they had to be bent nails?  And that a padlock on the left big toe would keep the woman in Poland from rising from the dead, but that it wouldn't work if it had been around, say, her right thumb?

Curious stuff.  But I guess if you try something, and lo, the dead guy stays dead, you place that in the "Win" column and do it again next time. 

It's like the story of the guy in Ohio who had a friend who'd come to visit, and whenever he'd walk into the guy's house, he'd raise both hands, close his eyes, and say, "May this house be safe from tigers."

After doing this a few times, the guy said, "Dude.  Why do you say that every time?  This is Ohio.  There's not a tiger within a thousand miles of here."

And the friend gave him a knowing smile and said, "It works well, doesn't it?"

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The painted bones

It's fascinating how long into our past we've had rituals surrounding death.

There's decent evidence that our cousins the Neanderthals -- which went extinct on the order of forty thousand years ago -- buried their dead, and used ceremonial pigments like red and yellow ochre to decorate the bodies.  What I'm curious about is if those rituals were performed purely as fond remembrance of the the person who had died, or if it had a more religious significance.  Did they believe in an afterlife?  Was the reverence shown to a dead person's body because of belief that the person's soul still, in some sense, inhabited the remains?  Or some other reason entirely?  

It's all too easy to misinterpret the tangible evidence left behind, even from the relatively recent past.  Take, for example, the practice -- most common in Scotland and England -- of placing sturdy metal cages over grave sites.  The more fanciful-thinking believe it was because of a fear of vampires or zombies -- to protect the living from the dead.

A "mortsafe" in Cluny, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

The real reason -- which we know from the writings of the time -- was that it was actually to protect the dead from the living.  Grave robbing was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only to steal any valuables the person might have been buried with, but to sell the corpse itself to medical or anatomical laboratories for dissection.  (Recall the early nineteenth century Burke and Hare murders, where a pair of enterprising young men decided it was more lucrative to kill people themselves and sell their bodies than to wait for them to die; Hare turned King's evidence in exchange for immunity if he testified against Burke, which he did.  Burke was hanged -- and in a grisly but ironic twist, his body was given to an anatomical laboratory for dissection.)

So it's harder than you'd think to ascertain the motives people had for certain ritual practices in the past.  As far as the decoration of bodies by the Neanderthals, of course, at this point it's impossible to know.  But it's fascinating that our (very) distant ancestors had burial rituals not so very different from our own.

A recent find in Turkey has shown that modern humans have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time as well.  Çatalhöyük, nicknamed the "oldest city in the world," has provided fascinating archaeological finds before; the "Mother Goddess of Çatalhöyük," a six-thousand-year-old ceramic statue probably associated with rituals of fertility (sex being the other thing people have been obsessed with for a long time) is probably the most famous artifact from the site.  (If you're wondering how Çatalhöyük is pronounced -- heaven knows I was -- I'll save you the trouble.  Near as I can get, it's something like "chot-al-hoik.")

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Nevit Dilmen, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations 1320259 nevit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A new find at the site, though, is equally interesting.  A team from the University of Bern has uncovered nine-thousand-year-old bones -- so a full thousand years older than the Mother Goddess figurine -- that show evidence of having been painted.  Not only were they painted, they appear to have been unearthed more than once, and repainted.  Fascinatingly, they used different colors for different genders -- cinnabar/red for males, copper-bearing minerals/blue and green for females.  Not all the bones were so decorated; it may have been a mark of status, or membership in a ruling class or priestly class, but all that is speculation.  (The fact that there have been painted bones of children found suggests that it wasn't mere individual status that was the deciding factor.)

There's also an association between the number of painted burials in a building, and the amount of painted decoration on the walls.  "This means when they buried someone, they also painted on the walls of the house," said study senior author Marco Milella.  "Furthermore, at Çatalhöyük, some individuals stayed in the community: their skeletal elements were retrieved and circulated for some time, before they were buried again.  This second burial of skeletal elements was also accompanied by wall paintings."

I'd like to think that the painted bones were a sign of reverence and not fear of retaliation by an angry spirit, but that too is speculation.  All we have is the artifacts to judge by.  Even so, it's fascinating to get a glimpse into the distant past of our own species.

And you have to wonder what our distant descendants will make of the artifacts left from our own society.  What will they think of the marble and granite monuments we raised over the dead?  It puts me in mind of the eerie, atmospheric rhyme I saw on a gravestone in the cemetery in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania where my great- and great-great grandparents are buried:

Remember, traveler, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

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Memento mori

A man is discussing his fears about dying with his parish priest.

"Father," he says, "I'd be able to relax a little if I knew more about what heaven's like.  I mean, I love baseball... do you think there's baseball in heaven?"

The priest says, "Let me pray on the matter, my son."

So at their next meeting, the priest says, "I have good news and bad news...  The good news is, there is baseball in heaven."

The man gave him a relieved smile.  "So, what's the bad news?"

"You're playing shortstop on Friday."

*rimshot*

The vast majority of us aren't in any particular rush to die, and would go to significant lengths to postpone the event.  Even people who believe in a pleasant afterlife -- with or without baseball -- are usually just fine waiting as long as possible to get there.

And beyond our own fears about dying, there's the pain of grief and loss to our loved ones.  The idea that we're well and truly gone -- either off in some version of heaven, or else gone completely -- is understandably devastating to the people who care about us.

Well, with a machine-learning chatbot-based piece of software from Microsoft, maybe gone isn't forever, after all.

Carstian Luyckx, Memento Mori (ca. 1650) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What this piece of software does is to go through your emails, text messages, and social media posts, and pulls out what you might call "elements of style" -- typical word choice, sentence structure, use of figurative language, use of humor, and so on.  Once sufficient data is given to it, it can then "converse" with your friends and family in a way that is damn near indistinguishable from the real you, which in my case would probably involve being unapologetically nerdy, having a seriously warped sense of humor, and saying "fuck" a lot.

If you find this idea kind of repellent, you're not alone.  Once I'm gone, I really don't want anyone digitally reincarnating me; because, after all, it isn't me you'd be talking to.  The conscious part of me isn't there, it's just a convincing mimic, taking input from what you say, cranking through an algorithm, and producing an appropriate output based on the patterns of speech it learned.

But.

This brings up the time-honored question of what consciousness actually is, something that has been debated endlessly by far wiser heads than mine.  In what way are our brains not doing the same thing?  When you say, "Hi, Gordon, how's it going?", aren't my neural firing patterns zinging about in a purely mechanistic fashion until I come up with, "Just fine, how are you?"  Even a lot of us who don't explicitly believe in a "soul" or a "spirit," something that has an independent existence outside of our physical bodies, get a little twitchy about our own conscious experience.

So if an AI could mimic my responses perfectly -- and admittedly, the Microsoft chatbot is still fairly rudimentary -- how is that AI not me?

*brief pause to give my teddy bear a hug*

Myself, I wouldn't find a chatbot version of my deceased loved one at all comforting, however convincing it sounded.  Apparently there's even been some work on having the software scan through your photographs, and creating an animated avatar to go along with your verbal responses, and I find that even worse.  As hard as it is to lose someone you care about, it seems to me better to accept that death is part of the human condition, to grieve and honor your loved one in whatever way seems appropriate, and then get on with your own lives.

So please: once I'm gone, leave me to Rest In Peace.  No digital resuscitation, thanks.  To me, the Vikings had the right idea.  When I die, put my body on a boat, set fire to it, and push it out into the ocean.  Then afterward, have a wild party on the beach in my honor, with plenty of wine, music, dancing, and drunken debauchery.  This is probably illegal, but I can't think of a better sendoff.

After that, just remember me fondly, read what I wrote, recall all the good times, and get on with living.  Maybe there's an afterlife and maybe there isn't, but there's one thing just about all of us would agree on: the life we have right now is too precious to waste.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many races without mishap, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die.  In this case, there was actually a significant chance of it, because it was about 93 F and the humidity usually found in a sauna.  More than one person collapsed on the course.  I made it to the finish line.  Then I collapsed.

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology a friend sent me, suggesting that my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent.  They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt...  They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my running performance lately, especially since just last week I finished a 400-mile virtual run, a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in 88 days.  Unfortunately, because of COVID, I've been mostly running alone, so no one was around to give me a high five afterward except my dog, and he would probably have been equally enthusiastic if all I'd done was walk to the end of the driveway and back.

Even if pessimism may make your athletic performance better, I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Memento mori

A few days ago I was out for a nice run when my iPod started sending me a rather unsettling message by playing, one after another, "100 Years," "Dance in the Graveyards," "O Very Young," and "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," which -- for those of you who don't listen to the same music I do -- are all songs about dying.

I'm not superstitious, but I have to admit I was a little careful when I crossed the road to look both ways and make sure there was no eighteen-wheeler bearing down on me.  I got home safely, but it's no wonder that since then I've been thinking about death and the odd beliefs associated thereto.

I am not just referring to religious concepts of the afterlife, here, although as an atheist I am bound to think that some of those sound pretty bizarre, too.  I've heard everything from your traditional harps-and-haloes idea, to being more or less melted down and fused with God, to fields of flowers and babbling brooks, to spending all of eternity with your dead relatives (and it may sound petty of me, but considering a few of my relatives, this last one sounds more like my personal version of hell).  Then, of course, you have the much-discussed Islamic 72-virgins concept of heaven, which brings up the inevitable question of what the virgins' opinions about all of this might be.  All of these strike me as equal parts absurdity and wishful thinking, given that (honestly) believers have come to these conclusions based on exactly zero evidence.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dguendel, Leipzig, Old St. John`s Cemetery, historical gravestone, CC BY 3.0]

But today, I'm more considering the rituals and traditions surrounding death itself, aside from all of the ponderings of what (if anything) might happen to us afterwards.  I was first struck by how oddly death is handled, even here in relatively secular America, when my mom died fourteen years ago.   My wife and I were doing the wrenching, painful, but necessary choosing of a coffin, and we were told by the salesman that there was a model that had a little drawer inside in which "photographs, letters, and other mementos can be placed."  There was, we were told, a battery-powered light inside the drawer, presumably because it's dark down there in the ground.

Carol and I looked at each other, and despite the circumstances, we both laughed.  Did this guy really think that my mom was going to be down there in the cemetery, and would periodically get bored and need some reading material?

Lest you think that this is just some sort of weird sales gimmick, an aberration, in another odd coincidence just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an article that appeared a while back in Huffington Post describing an invention by Swedish music and video equipment salesman Fredrik Hjelmquist.  Hjelmquist has one-upped the coffin with the bookshelf and reading light; his coffins have surround-sound, and the music storage device inside the coffin can be updated to "provide solace for grieving friends and relatives by making it possible for them to alter the deceased's playlist online"...

... and are also equipped to play music streaming from Spotify.

The whole thing comes with a price tag of 199,000 kroner (US$30,700), which you would think would put it out of the price range of nearly everyone -- but there have been thousands of inquiries, mostly from the United States and Canada, but also from as far away as China and Taiwan.

Oh, and I didn't tell what the name of Hjelmquist's creation is.

CataCombo.  And no, I didn't make that up.

Now, I understand that many of the rituals surrounding death are for the comfort of the living; the flowers, the wakes, the songs at funerals, and so on.  But this one is a little hard to explain based solely on that, I think.  Is there really anyone out there who would be comforted by the fact that Grandma is down there in Shady Grove Memorial Park, rockin' out to Linkin Park?  I would think that if you would go for something like this, especially considering the cost, you would have to believe on some level that the Dearly Departed really is listening.  Which, to me, is more than a little creepy, because it implies that the person you just buried is somehow still down there.   Conscious and aware.  In that cold, dark box underground.

To me, this is the opposite of comforting.  This is Poe's "The Premature Burial."

The whole thing brings to mind the Egyptians' practice of placing food, gifts, mummified pets, and so on in the tombs of departed rich people, so they'll have what they need on their trip into the afterlife.   But unlike the Egyptians, who had a whole intricate mythology built up around death, we just have bits and pieces, no coherent whole that would make sense of it.  (And again, that's with the exception of religious explanations of the afterlife.)  As a culture, we're distinctly uneasy about the idea of dying, but we can't quite bring ourselves to jump to the conclusion, "he's just gone, and we don't understand it."

I was always struck by the Klingons' approach to death in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  As a comrade-in-arms is dying, you howl, signifying that the folks in the afterlife better watch out, because a seriously badass warrior is on the way.  But afterwards -- do what you want with the body, because the person who inhabited it is gone.  "It is just a dead shell," they say.  "Dispose of it as you see fit."

Me, I like the Viking approach.  When I die, I'd appreciate it if my family and friends would stick me on a raft, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean, and then have a big party on the beach afterward with a lot of drinking and dancing and debauchery.  That's probably all kinds of illegal, but it seems like a fitting farewell, given that I've always thought that Thor and Odin and Loki and the rest of the gang were a great deal more appealing than any other religion I've ever run across.  But if that turns out to be impractical, just "dispose of me as you see fit."  And fer cryin' in the sink, I am quite sure that I won't need a reading light or a Spotify account and surround-sound.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The cursed footballer

One of the hardest biases to overcome is dart-thrower's bias, which is the tendency to notice outliers and ignore all of the background noise.  The reason it's hard is because our brains are pattern-seeking devices; we evolved to notice what's odd, because the odd is often dangerous (or at least worth paying attention to).  But it leads to an inevitable tendency to overestimate the weird stuff -- strange coincidences, cases where dreams seem to be precognitive, times you and a friend said the same thing at the same time -- and underestimate all of the millions of times when those things didn't happen.

But in science, we have to keep track of both the hits and the misses.  As an example of what happens if you don't, let's look at the case of the cursed football player.

Aaron James Ramsey is a Welsh footballer (or soccer player, as we'd call him here in the States) who plays for Arsenal and also for the Welsh national team.  And a strange superstition has grown up around him -- that whenever he scores a goal, a famous person somewhere in the world dies.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jon Candy, Aaron Ramsey v Cardiff 2013, CC BY-SA 2.0]

August 2009, and three days after Ramsey scored a goal, Teddy Kennedy died.  May 2011, he scored the day before Osama bin Laden was killed.  It happened twice in October of that year -- first three days before Steve Jobs died, and second the day before Muammar Gaddafi was killed.

On and on it goes.  The "Ramsey curse" has been blamed for the deaths of basketball player Ray Williams, actors Paul Walker, Robin Williams, and Alan Rickman, and rock legend David Bowie.  The demise of Nancy Reagan, screenwriter Bruce Forsythe, comedian Ken Dodd, physicist Stephen Hawking, and champion darts player Eric Bristow were all blamed on the Ramsey curse phenomenon.

Okay, so here's the problem.

According to his online statistics, Ramsey has had 32 goals in his professional career, but the article about the "curse" (linked above) says that only sixteen of them were followed by deaths of prominent individuals.  So this is already giving the "curse" a 50% success rate.

But there are two other problems.  First is how we're defining the word "famous."  I don't know about you, but of the fourteen "famous people" I listed above that Ramsey has allegedly killed, I'd never heard of four of them -- Ray Williams, Forsythe, Dodd, and Bristow.  No offense to darts enthusiasts, but even a champion darts player isn't quite in the same league as David Bowie.  So if you're defining "famous" that loosely, you've got a big field to choose from.

Second, though -- can you find a date that didn't have a famous death somewhere immediately following it?  There are so many people in the news, in sports, and in entertainment that there are bound to be deaths pretty much every week (especially if you have that broad a definition of fame).  So in order to establish whether there really was a "Ramsey curse," we'd have to keep track of all of his goals and all deaths of famous people, and show that deaths were statistically more likely to happen closer to his scoring a goal.

As far as Ramsey goes, he (understandably) scoffs at the whole idea.  "The most ridiculous rumour I’ve heard is that people die after I score.  There have been loads of occasions where I’ve scored and nobody has died.  That’s just a crazy rumour.  I didn’t really find it funny.  Although I took out some baddies!"

So anyhow, Arsenal fans don't need to panic every time Ramsey scores a goal.  These kinds of coincidences are bound to happen -- and once someone notices them, they stand out, making them more likely to be noticed next time.

But if I'm wrong, I do wish he'd spared Stephen Hawking and Alan Rickman.  Still haven't gotten over those, actually.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]