Le comte éternel

When I was a kid, the high point of my year was the two-week trip my dad and I took every August to Arizona and New Mexico.  He was an avid rockhound and lapidary, so his goal was collecting agate and turquoise and jasper to bring home and make into jewelry.  Mine, on the other hand, was wandering in the beautiful, desolate hills that were so unlike the lush near-jungles of my native southern Louisiana.

Another thing I loved about that part of the country was the abundance of peculiar little curio shops.  Some were clearly tourist traps, but some were run by honest-to-goodness old-time eccentric southwesterners, and filled with weird and wonderful oddities.  One of these I recall well was in Alpine, Texas, and was mostly a used book store, but had all sorts of other stuff (including, to my dad's delight, rocks).

That's where I picked up a copy of Richard Cavendish's book The Black Arts, about the history of occultism.  At that age (I was about thirteen at the time) I was absolutely fascinated with this stuff.  And it was in The Black Arts that I first ran across the peculiar character known as the Comte de Saint-Germain.

Saint-Germain is one of a handful of people who are, supposedly, immortal.  Here's the passage about him from Cavendish's book:

One of of the most famous of all those who are supposed to have possessed the Elixir of Life is the Count of Saint-Germain.  "The Comte de Saint-Germain and Sir Francis Bacon," says Manly P. Hall, the leading light of the Philosophical Research Society of Los Angeles, "are the two greatest emissaries sent into the world by the Secret Brotherhood in the last thousand years."  The Secret Brotherhood is a group of Masters, whose headquarters are said to be in the Himalayas and who are attempting to guide mankind along higher paths.

Saint-Germain hobnobbed with the highest social circles in France, winning the favour of Madame de Pompadour in 1759 with his "water of rejuvenation."  Immensely erudite and enormously rich, he was a skillful violinist, painter, and chemist, had a photographic memory, and was said to speak eleven languages fluently, including Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit...  He was believed to be over two thousand years old...  He delighted in reminiscing about the great ones of the past with whom he had been on familiar terms, including the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra.  He was a wedding guest at Cana when Christ turned the water into wine.  There is a pleasant story of him describing a dear friend of long ago, Richard the Lionheart, and turning to his manservant for confirmation.  "You forget, sir," the valet said solemnly.  "I have only been five hundred years in your service."

Saint-Germain attributed his astonishing longevity to his diet and his elixir...  He is supposed to have died in Germany in 1784, but occultists believe that he was probably given a mock burial... It is said that he was frequently seen alive in the next century and was known to Bulwer-Lytton.

It's a curious story, to say the least.  In Umberto Eco's brilliant novel Foucault's Pendulum, his character of Agliè coyly hints that he's the latest rebranding of the Comte de Saint-Germain -- but when the main character, Casaubon, tries to tell this to his psychologist, and that Agliè/Saint-Germain is at the center of a gigantic and murderous conspiracy, the doctor gives him a level look and says, "Monsieur, vous êtes fou."  ("Mister, you are crazy.")

Reading about this stuff can definitely leave you feeling that way, but there's no doubt Saint-Germain was a real guy.  He left behind a number of surviving musical compositions, and two extant written works are attributed to him.  He was employed on diplomatic missions by French King Louis XV.  Voltaire met him, and despite Voltaire's generally skeptical view of things, he apparently at least halfway believed the Comte's grandiose tales.  He called Saint-Germain "the Wonder-Man -- a man who does not die, and who knows everything."  Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel called him "the greatest philosopher who ever lived."  

Giacomo Casanova, however, wasn't so impressed, although he had to admit to some grudging admiration for Saint-Germain's ability to lie so convincingly:

This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of ten or twelve small diamonds, one large one of the finest water without any loss of weight.  All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him.  Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive.  In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me.

Throughout his life (assuming he did actually die!), Saint-Germain's ability to astonish kept him the darling of high society.  His portrait hangs in the Louvre:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So who was he?

This is where it gets even more interesting, because no one knows for sure.  In fact, no one even knows his real name; he had a dozen or more by which he was regularly known.  He claimed to be the son of Francis II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania, but keep in mind that the guy also claimed to be thousands of years old, so that should be taken with a large handful of salt.  Rákóczi did have a son, named Leopold George -- but the records indicate Leopold died at age four.  The occultists, of course, have an answer for that (they seem to have an answer for everything, don't they?) -- they say that Rákóczi kept his son's survival a secret to protect him from the scheming Habsburgs, which accounts for Saint-Germain's education and wealth (and penchant for secrecy).  All through his life he wove a web of mystery around himself, and reveled in the cachet it gave him with the aristocracy.  

P. T. Barnum, though, in his 1886 book The Humbugs of the World, clearly wasn't having any of it:

The Marquis de Créquy declared that Saint-Germain was an Alsatian Jew, Simon Wolff by name, and was born at Strasbourg about the close of the 17th or the beginning of the 18th century; others insist that he was a Spanish Jesuit named Aymar; and others again intimate that his true title was the Marquis de Betmar, and that he was a native of Portugal.  The most plausible theory, however, makes him the natural son of an Italian princess and fixes his birth at San Germano, in Savoy, about the year 1710; his ostensible father being one Rotondo, a tax-collector of that district.

Barnum was an expert on fooling the gullible; there's the sense here that he wasn't fond of the competition.

Whoever Saint-Germain was, there's no doubt he was a fascinating character.  Predictably, I'm not buying that he was thousands of years old, nor that somehow, he's still alive.  And many of his claims are somewhere between "implausible" and "ludicrous."  But there's no doubt that he was an accomplished and skilled trickster, and relished the air of mystery his stories gave him.  It'd be nice to have some answers to the questions he surrounded himself with, but the truth is, he was too good at covering his tracks -- and like the more famous mystery of Jack the Ripper, we'll probably never know his identity for sure. 

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Greta of the Yukon

If you needed more evidence of how little it takes to get the woo-woos leaping about making excited squeaking noises, look no further than this photograph, which they're saying proves that Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg is a time traveler.

Okay, I'll admit there's a resemblance.  For reference, here's a photograph of the real Greta Thunberg:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons European Parliament, Greta Thunberg urges MEPs to show climate leadership (49618310531) (cropped), CC BY 2.0]

The first image is real enough; it's not a clever fake.  It's a photograph of children working at a Canadian placer gold mine, and was taken in 1898.  The original photograph resides in the archives of the University of Washington, and carries the description, "three children operating rocker at a gold mine on Dominion Creek, Yukon Territory."

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Previous iterations include an 1870 photograph proving that Nicolas Cage is an undead vampire, and a self-portrait by nineteenth-century French painter Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel showing that he's the same person as Keanu Reeves.  What's simultaneously hilarious and maddening about this last claim is that okay, the painting looks a little like Reeves, but later photographs of Boutet de Monvel (which you can see at the link provided) look nothing like him at all.  Which you'd think would make the woo-woos laugh sheepishly and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  But that never happens.  I'll bet some of them think Reeves realized people were catching on to his undead-ness and arranged for pics to be taken of some other guy that then were labeled with Boutet de Monvel's name.

Because there's no claim so ridiculous that you can't change it so as to make it even more ridiculous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating how loony these claims get, back to the non-Thunberg photo, which has generated two explanations, if I can dignify them by that term:

1. Thunberg was a child in late nineteenth-century northern Canada, was forced to work in a gold mine, and was so appalled by the environmental destruction caused by mining that she either time-traveled into the future or else figured out how to achieve immortality and eternal youth (sources differ on which), and is now bringing that first-hand knowledge to us so we can potentially do something about it.
2. Thunberg actually is a twenty-first-century Swedish person, but has figured out how to travel in time so she can go back and sabotage mining operations and save the present from the devastation done by industry in the past.  She got caught at her game by a photographer back in 1898.

What strikes me about both of these, besides the fact that to believe either one you'd have to have a pound and a half of lukewarm cream-of-wheat where most of us have a brain, is that if either of these is Thunberg's strategy, it's not working.  If she's a poor mining kid from 1898 and has come into the future to warn us, mostly what's happening is that government leaders and corporate CEOs are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "la la la la la la la not listening," while they proceed to continue doing every damnfool destructive thing they've always done, only harder.  If, on the other hand, today's Thunberg is going back into the past to throw a spanner into the works of the mining corporations, it had zero effect, because if you'll look carefully at the history of mining for the last 120 years, you will not find lines like, "Between 1900 and 1950, thirty-seven different mining operations all over North America were shut down permanently, because a mysterious teenage girl with a long braid snuck in and dynamited the entrance to the mining shafts, then disappeared without trace."  

So okay, the girl looks a little like Thunberg.  I'll grant you that.  But the claim that she is Thunberg makes me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.  It seems like the woo-woos have espoused some kind of anti-Ockham's-Razor; given a variety of explanations for the same phenomenon, let's pick the one that is the most ridiculous and requires a metric fuckton of ad hoc assumptions.  

I'll just end by stating that if I'm wrong, and Thunberg is an immortal time-traveler, I wish she'd stop wasting her time in the hopeless task of trying to convince the money-grubbing anti-science world leaders we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and go back in time with blueprints for high-efficiency solar cell technology.  Give 'em to Nikola Tesla.  I bet he'd know what to do with them.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

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

Shorts weather

Being the end of summer, I thought my readers would be in the mood for shorts.

No, not those kind of shorts.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons marcore! from Hong Kong, China, Board shorts 4, CC BY 2.0]

Today I've got three quick-takes for you from the world of the weird, starting with one of my favorite places: the beautiful land of Scotland.

A company called "Snaptrip," a UK-based holiday booking company, is offering free stays in Scotland -- for life -- for the first people who can provide proof that the Loch Ness Monster is real.

"We want to get our hands on as much evidence as possible to prove that the monster is real and give our customers yet another reason to visit the beautiful Scottish Isles," said Snaptrip founder and CEO Matt Fox.  "If you have any proof, please get in touch and let us know!"

Fox said that his company will foot the bill for five Scottish holidays per year, for life, for the first twenty people who come up with "satisfactory evidence."  Which is pretty optimistic, given that people have been at this for over a hundred years and have yet to produce any evidence that would convince someone who wasn't already leaning that direction.  So the chances of one person coming forward to claim the prize are low to nonexistent, much less twenty.

Still, the idea of free trips to Scotland is a pretty nice incentive.  If I had some good cryptid-searching equipment, I'd probably give it a go myself.  In any case, if any of my readers are so inclined, here's an opportunity to use your hunting skills for a reward other than the notoriety.

Second, there's a group in Thailand that is meditating daily, with the goal of inducing aliens to help us avoid a nuclear apocalypse scheduled for 2022.

The group, UFO Kaokala, got its name and its mission after one of the members spotted a UFO on top of Mount Khao Kala in Thailand, so now they meet there every day to try and get the aliens to come back.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the aliens are apparently from Pluto.  So seems like they'd find it a bit warm here on Earth, given that the average surface temperature on Pluto is -230 C, or only 44 degrees above absolute zero.  You'd think that even if they landed on a mild spring day on Earth, they'd melt or spontaneously burst into flame or something.

Who knows, though?  If they have the technology to get here, they probably have refrigerated suits.

"Instead of eating food, [the Plutonians] eat capsules," said Wassana Chansamnuan, who has been part of UFO Kaokala since 1998, following her receipt of a telepathic message from the aliens.  "They can communicate with anyone, regardless of their native tongue.  Most importantly, they follow a sabai sabai, or relaxed, working style.  When disaster strikes, they don't want humans to stress out, at least not too much."

Well, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, I think I'd stress out no matter how much I'd meditated, but that's just me.

Apparently the goal of attracting the aliens is working, if you believe fifty-year-old Ukrin Thaonaknathiphithak, who I had to mention just so I could include his last name in my post.  He said he's seen seventeen UFOs at one time, which seems a little excessive, but maybe he's really good at meditating.

Still, the outlook is kind of grim.  Only thirty percent of the human population is going to survive past the nuclear war in 2022, said long-time member Ann Thongcharoen.  "At the time of crisis, the aliens will choose good people to live in the new age," she says.  "So people who think about dhamma or cosmic law or Buddha are good universal citizens," and will presumably be the ones the aliens will select.

So I guess I'm pretty well fucked either way, but I suppose that's not really a surprise to anyone.

Speaking of death, doom, and gloom, our last story is about people who want to cheat the Grim Reaper, and I'm not referring to Mitch McConnell, although cheating him would be kind of nice, too.  This is the brainchild of a company called HereAfter, which for a fee (of course) will upload hours and hours of your voice saying stuff, so when you die, you can still have a conversation with your loved ones.

"My parents have been gone for decades, and I still catch myself thinking, 'Gee, I would really like to ask my mom or dad for some advice or just to get some comfort,'" said Andrew Kaplan, who has agreed to be one of HereAfter's first guinea pigs.  "I don’t think the urge ever goes away...  I have a son in his thirties, and I’m hoping this will be of some value to him and his children someday."

HereAfter's founders, Sonia Talati and James Vlahos, have their sights set higher than just prerecorded messages, though.  They're hoping to eventually use software that can form a picture of someone's personality through asking increasingly detailed questions, and download that personality profile along with the recorded voice into an emotionally intelligent digital personality to create a "PersonBot" that could interact with the survivors in the same way the original person would have.

Me, I'm not so fond of this idea.  I mean, I love my friends and family as much as anyone, but this really doesn't seem to be the answer.  I was really close to my Grandma Bertha, my father's mother, but if I was rooting around in the kitchen for a snack and I heard Grandma Bertha's voice saying, "Gordon, dear, you really need to eat something more nutritious than leftover vanilla pudding and a bag of potato chips," my reaction wouldn't be to get all sentimental about how nice it was to have her back.  My reaction would be to scream like a little child and run out of the room.

Also, this kind of thing always makes me think, "Haven't these people ever watched a science fiction movie?  Like, in their whole life?"  Because this has been tried before multiple times, and it never ends well.  BerthaBot ends up taking over the entire internet, killing various scientists, politicians, and innocent civilians including Sean Bean in the process, and a crack team of operatives led by Chris Evans has to infiltrate the Central Computer and unplug BerthaBot, at the end ignoring her plaintive voice crying out that for heaven's sake Chris really needs to put a shirt on before he catches his death of cold.

So I'm not really a fan.  If we're gonna put our time into something, immortality-wise, I would rather the effort go into ways to extend our healthy lifespans.  Because even if they somehow were able to upload my personality into the Cloud, it's not going to make much difference to the real me, you know?  I'll still be dead.

Anyhow, that's our shorts for today.  Free trips to Scotland, meditating to avert the apocalypse, and digital immortality for our voices.  It's nice, in a way, to see that people are still loping along, doing weird and pointless things, despite the fairly horrible stuff in the news lately.  Regardless of what happens, we're still capable of engaging in truly bizarre behavior.

Which now that I come to think of it, isn't really that comforting.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

Virtual immortality

I have lived through the deaths of people I was close to -- family members, friends, colleagues.  You can't spend 54 years on this Earth without having this experience.  And death can be many things -- peaceful, frightening, a release from suffering, the devastating tragedy of a life lost too young.

Fear of death is pretty much universal, and it's the unknown aspect of it that terrifies most people.  Will there be an afterlife, or just... nothing?  If there is an afterlife, what will it be like?  Despite the similarities between many near-death experiences, the cultural imaginings of the afterlife vary tremendously, from the benign to the horrifying.  And, of course, some afterlives are benign for some (the true believers) and horrifying for everyone else (nonbelievers and devotees of other religions).  So I think it's safest to say that no one has the slightest idea what, if anything, we'll experience after we die.

This explains why the search for immortality has been around for a long, long time.  There are scientific approaches -- usually involving the protection of the telomeres, end-caps on the chromosomes that shorten with the years and seem to have a role in age-related illnesses.  And, of course, there are the legends of people who supposedly achieved immortality by magical means, including the Comte de St.-Germain, Nicolas Flamel, and... Keanu Reeves.

So I suppose it's no surprise that there are people who want to cheat death using technology.  And a company called Paranormal Games claims that they are taking the first steps down this road with a virtual-reality software called Project Elysium, that supposedly can make an interactive 3-D computer model of a deceased love one.

The company hasn't released how it plans to accomplish this -- the software is an entrant in the Oculus VR Jam 2015 contest, where it is rumored to be a favorite for the grand prize.  Presumably the bereaved would provide photographs of the dearly departed, along with other personal details, perhaps even voice recordings, if such are available.  Project Elysium has provided screenshots of people being turned into virtual-reality characters, like the one below:

The company will be releasing promotional videos as early as next week.

Now, it stands to reason that any such facsimiles of real people, especially if they are created from still images, will be pretty rudimentary.  At first.  But as we've seen over and over, once something becomes technologically possible, it becomes sophisticated and streamlined fast.  (Consider how digital music storage and retrieval has changed, from the days of CDs to now, when you can have thousands of songs stored on a device smaller than a matchbox.)  Even if Project Elysium is not very authentic-looking at first, all it has to do is demonstrate that software designers can make it work on some level.

After that, it'll be off to the races.

My general sense is that this 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 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.  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 really could 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.  But even given 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.