Doomed to repeat

This weekend, I inadvertently started an online argument about the Syrian refugees.

I rarely get involved in political discussions online (or anywhere else) because of this very thing.  It's the most fruitless of pursuits, really; it usually accomplishes nothing but eliciting shouts of acclamation from the people who already agree with you, and snorts of derision from the people who don't.

In other words, nothing.

I got the ball rolling by comparing the plight of the refugees, and the reluctance of the United States government to give them asylum, to the attitudes of the majority of English policymakers during the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, and the blocking of Jews before World War II trying to flee Germany into the Netherlands (and from the Netherlands and elsewhere into the United States).  Some of you may not know that Anne Frank and her family applied for, and were denied, passage into the United States in 1940 -- a move that would have saved their lives.

Well, that was apparently pasting a bullseye on my chest.  How dare I compare the Syrian refugees to the Jews?  The situation is completely different.  Plus, you know, those people want to kill us.  They are uniformly hostile to the United States and everything we stand for, so we're right to deny them entry.

So I thought it was time to set aside my reluctance to discuss political matters, and offer a little history lesson.  I have pulled some quotes, all from primary sources, that refer either to the Irish during the Potato Famine, the Jews prior to World War II, or the Syrian refugees now.  See if you can tell them apart.  (The only editing I did was to remove obvious giveaway references.)

1. The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach [them] a lesson, and that calamity must not be too much mitigated. … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil... but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of those people.
2. [They are] more like squalid apes than human beings... Only efficient military despotism [can succeed in this situation], because [they] understand only force.
3. It is probably unwise to say this loudly... but [this situation] is and has been since its beginning guided and controlled by [people] of the greasiest type, who have... absorbed every one of the worst phases of our civilization without having the least understanding of what we really mean by liberty.
4. Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity.  Every problem that has arisen can be traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.  And our current actions serve no purpose but to depart even further from those.
5. [They] can go [back home] and stew in their own juice.  The rest had better stop being what they are, and start being human beings.
6. It looks like to me if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our... problem.
7. I see no solution to the... problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.
8. [They] could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of.  As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence.
9. A policy that will not kill more than one million [of them]... will scarcely be enough to do any good.
10. [They] are a cancer that must be cut out of our society, whose goal is the destruction of civilization from within.
11. [They] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion.  This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with [our] character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry.  Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.
12. When neighborhoods are occupied by [these people], they establish their own laws and don't respect our own. 

Ready for the answers?

1. The Irish.  Charles Trevelyan, head of the English Administration for Famine Relief, 1845.
2. The Irish.  James Anthony Froude, professor of history, Oxford University, 1860.
3. The Jews.  General Montgomery Schuyler, 1919.
4. Syrian refugees.  Representative Don Davis of North Carolina.
5. The Jews.  George Bernard Shaw, 1932.
6. Syrian refugees.  Representative Virgil Peck of Kansas.
7. Syrian refugees.  Representative Charlie Fuqua of Arkansas.
8. The Jews.  H. L. Mencken, 1930.
9. The Irish.  Nassau Senior, chief economist to Queen Victoria.
10. Syrian refugees.  Representative John Bennett of Oklahoma.
11. The Irish.  Benjamin Disraeli, 1878.
12. Syrian refugees.  Representative Carl Gatto of Alaska.

If you're curious, the sources of the quotes can be found here for the Irish Potato Famine, here for the pre-war antisemitism, and here for the rhetoric against Muslim immigration.

Only the details change.  The hate speech, the fear and loathing of the "other," the wild claims that those people are trying to destroy our society, all stay the same.

It doesn't even seem to do any good to point out how many of the refugees are children or the elderly.  It doesn't help if you tell people that none of the Paris attackers were Syrian -- every last one of them was a citizen of the E.U.  Nor were any of the 9/11 bombers Syrian.

None of that matters.  They may look like starving, homeless refugees, but they're still implacably hostile to us.  You know how They are.

It's just that every generation has a different They.

I will end with a quote from the great Elie Wiesel.  As a survivor of the concentration camps during World War II, he has as good a reason as any to give in to hate, fear, and intolerance.  Instead, here are his words on the subject.

Opening the door to the Chinese Room

The idea of artificial intelligence terrifies a lot of people.

The reasons for this fear vary.  Some are repelled by the thought that our mental processes could be emulated in a machine. Others worry that if we do develop AI, it will rise up and overthrow us, à la The Matrix.  Still others are convinced that humans have something that is inherently unrepresentable -- a heart, a soul, perhaps even simply consciousness -- so any machine that appeared to be intelligent and human-like would only be a clever replica.

The people who believe that human intelligence will never be emulated in a machine usually fall back on something like the John Searle's "Chinese Room Analogy" as an argument.  Searle, an American philosopher, has said that computers are simply string-conversion devices; they take an input string, manipulate it in some completely predictable way, and then create an output string which they then give you.  What they do is analogous to someone sitting in a locked room with a Chinese-English dictionary who is given a string of Chinese text, and uses the dictionary to convert it to English.  There is no true understanding; it's mere symbol manipulation.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There are two significant problems with Searle's Chinese Room.  One is the question of whether our brains themselves aren't simply string-conversion devices.  Vastly more sophisticated ones, of course; but given our brain chemistry and wiring at a given moment, it's far from a settled question whether our neural networks aren't reacting in a completely deterministic fashion.

The second, of course, is the problem that even though the woman in the Chinese Room starts out being a simple string-converter, if she keeps doing it long enough, eventually she will learn Chinese.  At that point there will be understanding going on.

Yes, says Searle, but that's because she has a human brain, which can do more than a computer can.  A machine could never abstract a language, or anything of the sort, without having explicit programming -- lists of vocabulary, syntax rules, morphological structure -- to go by.  Humans learn language starting with a highly receptive tabula rasa that is unlike anything that could be emulated in a computer.

Which was true, until this month.

A team of researchers at the University of Sassari (Italy) and the University of Plymouth (UK) have devised a network of two million interconnected artificial neurons that is capable of learning language "organically" -- starting with nothing, and using only communication with a human interlocutor as input.  Called ANNABELL (Artificial Neural Network with Adaptive Behavior Exploited for Language Learning), this network is capable of doing what AI people call "bootstrapping" or "recursive self-improvement" -- it begins with only a capacity for plasticity and improves its understanding as it goes, a feature that up till now has been considered by some to be impossible to achieve.

Bruno Golosio, head of the team that created ANNABELL, writes:

ANNABELL does not have pre-coded language knowledge; it learns only through communication with a human interlocutor, thanks to two fundamental mechanisms, which are also present in the biological brain: synaptic plasticity and neural gating.  Synaptic plasticity is the ability of the connection between two neurons to increase its efficiency when the two neurons are often active simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously.  This mechanism is essential for learning and for long-term memory.  Neural gating mechanisms are based on the properties of certain neurons (called bistable neurons) to behave as switches that can be turned "on" or "off" by a control signal coming from other neurons.  When turned on, the bistable neurons transmit the signal from a part of the brain to another, otherwise they block it.  The model is able to learn, due to synaptic plasticity, to control the signals that open and close the neural gates, so as to control the flow of information among different areas.

Which in my mind blows a neat hole in the contention that the human mind has some je ne sais quoi that will never be copied in a mechanical device.  This simple model (and compared to an actual brain, it is rudimentary, however impressive Golosio's team's achievement is) is doing precisely what an infant's brain does when it learns language -- taking in input, abstracting rules, and adjusting as it goes so that it improves over time.

Myself, I think this is awesome.  I'm not particularly concerned about machines taking over the world -- for one thing, a typical human brain has about 100 billion neurons, so to have something that really could emulate anything a human could do would take scaling up ANNABELL by a factor of 50,000.  (That's assuming that an intelligent mind couldn't operate out of a brain that was more compact and efficient, which is certainly a possibility.)  I also don't think it's demeaning to humans that we may be "nothing more than meat machines," as one biologist put it.  This doesn't diminish our own personal capacity for experience, it just means that we're built from the same stuff as the rest of the universe.

Which is sort of cool.

Anyhow, what Golosio et al. have done is only the beginning of what appears to be a quantum leap in AI research.  As I've said many times, and about many things; I can't imagine what wonders await in the future.

Food fight

There's a logical fallacy I've seen a lot lately.  It's called argumentum ad Monsantum (also known as argumentum ad Hitlerum).  The idea is that you can immediately cast doubt on the motives of a person or organization if you compare them to, or (worse) claim they got their ideas from, a stand-in for The Boogeyman.  Monsanto, Hitler, communists, Muslims, whatever one seems apt at the time.

Of course, this boils down to lazy thinking, which most of the fallacies do.

What's rather maddening about this is that the opposite can happen, too.  Give something an association with a name that's considered positive, and you automatically reap the benefits of a reflected glow of goodness, whether or not it's deserved.

You could call this the Compare-Yourelf-To-Mother-Teresa-And-Declare-Victory ploy.

The argumentum ad Monsantum strategy has been much used in the fight against GMOs, since Monsanto has been heavily involved in developing genetically modified crops for years.  How anyone who has even a smidgen of a background in science can fall for this is beyond me; comparing RoundUp-Ready Wheat with late blight-resistant potatoes makes no sense from any standpoint, from effects on human health to ecological impact.  (Consider that the former results in an increase in the use of chemical pesticides, and the latter decreases it.)

Saying that all GMOs are bad is, in fact, precisely equivalent to claiming that all genes do the same thing.

[image courtesy of photographer Elina Mark and the Wikimedia Commons]

What's wryly amusing about this is that the opposite side of the same coin -- the word organic -- is maybe not as squeaky-clean as it's been billed.  The reputation of organic produce for containing less in the way of Nasty Chemicals is apparently ill-deserved, considering a story by David Zaruk over at The Risk-Monger that revealed a startling fact -- that organic farmers in the United States are certified to use three thousand substances that are designated as toxic, and that are considered acceptable purely because they're "natural."

Copper sulfate, used as a fungicide, is highly toxic to fish, and is completely non-biodegradable.  Pyrethrin and azadirachtin (neem oil), insecticides that come from plants and therefore are somehow thought to be better than synthetics, are lethal to honeybees and carcinogenic in humans.  Rotenone, from the leafy parts of the jicama plant, kills damn near everything you put it on.

Also on the list is nicotine.  Made, presumably, from all-natural, organic, health-supporting tobacco plants.

Worse still, once produce is certified organic, it bypasses any kind of requirement for pesticide residue testing.  Because organic produce isn't supposed to have any pesticides on it, right?

Of course right.

Monsanto = bad.  GMO = bad.  Organic = good.  All a way to give yourself a nice warm feeling of being socially and environmentally responsible, not to mention healthy, and then to stop thinking.  Myself, I would rather the responsible use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which comes along with mountains of information on hazards and requirements for residue testing, than giving free rein to people who believe that Natural Must Mean Good For You.

Now, don't get me wrong; I think that a lot of the organic food movement is driven by the right motives.  Creating our food with as little negative environmental impact as possible, and producing food that is healthy and nutritious, are certainly goals to be lauded.  What is unclear is whether the rules governing organic food production as they now exist are meeting those goals.

But the beat goes on, which is why there was an apparently serious article over at The Organic Authority wherein we learn that artist and practitioner of magic Steven Leyba is mounting a one-man campaign against Monsanto, spurred by his own personal health experiences:

In 2010 I had been overweight and decided to get healthy.  I started eating large amounts of fruits and vegetables from my local grocery store.  I got sick and that was the time I found out about GMOs.  I was appalled.  I couldn’t understand why I would get so sick by eating what I thought was so healthy.  When I switched to organic food I got healthy again.

And since anecdote with a sample size of one is apparently data, Leyba decided to take matters into his own hands, and is launching a magic spell against Monsanto:

Death curses work like any manifestation of will like Gestalt psychology; you visualize and act in accordance and at some point what you can conceive and believe you can achieve.  Medicine men practice this and even medical doctors to some extent practice this.  They plant suggestions in people’s minds for healing and those people start to do things that promote their own healing.  For me I see a great need to identify the cancer (Monsanto and Nestlé) and attack with full force and mirror back this so-called Black Magic they are doing to all of us.

So he made a book full of disturbing imagery that includes demented portraits of executives who work for Monsanto, and also Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who worked as an attorney for Monsanto in the 1970s.  

"I encourage everyone to Death Curse Monsanto and Nestlé," Leyba says.  "Justifiable Death Curses are effective on many levels, fun, cathartic... and completely legal."

Article author Jill Ettinger, far from casting a wry eye at Leyba's Eye Of Newt approach to taking down Monsanto, seems to think it's a great idea.  And given the recent push in the United States for mandatory labeling of GMOs, "it may just be working," she says.

No harm, I suppose, if it amuses him.  But wouldn't it be better to learn some actual science, rather than giving in to fear talk and ignorance?  Not to mention (literal) magical thinking?

The world is complex, and when the motives of people and corporations get involved, it becomes even worse.  It'd be nice if categorical thinking really worked.  The difficult truth is, if you want to give yourself the best shot at making smart choices for yourself, both with respect to your personal health and the environmental impact, there's no substitute for bypassing the hype on both sides and understanding the reality beneath it all.

A war over textbooks

Yesterday a cousin of mine sent me a link wherein I learned that this week the Texas State Board of Education voted down a resolution that would allow academics to fact-check public school textbooks.

Yes, you read that right.  (1) It was a debate in the first place, and (2) they voted it down.  The vote was 8-7, I'll admit; but why it wasn't passed 15-0, with a corollary of "Duh" added to it, is absolutely mind boggling.

Board member Thomas Ratliff was one of the ones who voted for it.  "I know people are concerned about pointy-headed liberals in the ivory tower making our process different or worse," Ratliff said.  "But I hold our institutions of higher education in fairly high regard."

Whoo!  That's some serious high praise for academics, right there, and that was from a guy who supported the resolution.  "Them goddamn pointy-headed ivory-tower liberals in them thar colleges, they's maybe not so bad.  I s'pose."

This throws textbook review back on "citizen review panels" made up of teachers, parents, and business leaders to fact-check the books that are being used to educate our children.  The same system, allow me to point out, that approved a history text that called African slaves "workers," as if recruiters had gone over to West Africa in the 1700s with fliers that said, "Great job opportunities in the New World!  Get in on the ground floor of a booming agricultural industry!  Awesome fringe benefits!  Flexible hours!"

As a nod to getting people on the panels that actually know what the fuck they're talking about, the Board unanimously approved a measure to make sure that "at least a majority of the members have sufficient content expertise and experience."

Like that is an innovative approach.

Board member Marty Rowley said, "I think we're making it stronger and better and more expert than in the past."

This is the same Board of Education who made education "more expert" last year by including a statement in the standard for American history that required students to "identify the individuals whose principles of laws and government institutions informed the American founding documents, including those of Moses," and mandated that they learn "the role of Biblical law in the writing of the Constitution."

No wonder they don't want any academics in there messin' with the textbooks.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Roy White, chairman of a group called "Truth in Texas Textbooks," was delighted with the outcome of the vote.  The review panels don't need a bunch of university professors stepping in and taking over, and the issue with the African "workers" was an honest oversight.  "You got humans involved, there are going to be some errors," White said.

I'm sorry, that's not an error.  This is not a misspelled word.  Whoever wrote that passage knew precisely what (s)he was doing.  This was a deliberate attempt to introduce political spin into public school history textbooks, and more specifically to de-emphasize the role that white slave owners in the pre-Civil War South had in one of the biggest, most systematic state-sponsored human rights abuses the world has ever seen.

Nope.  Can't have that ol' Confederate flag get any bad press, even if it means weaving an implicit lie into the books used in history classrooms.

Kathy Miller, of the watchdog group Texas Freedom Network, was less sanguine.  "With all the controversies that have made textbook adoptions in Texas look like a clown show, it's mindboggling and downright embarrassing that the board voted this down," Miller said.  She also pointed out that of the hundred people who were appointed to review history texts in Texas last year, only three were actual historians -- and one was a retired used car salesman who was running for political office.

The scariest thing is that because of Texas's large population and policy of state-wide textbook adoption, their standards for textbook content tend to drive the nation.  Publishers understandably don't want to have to print up a Texas edition of a book and an Everybody Else in the US edition, so the Texas edition often ends up being the one that is available nationwide.  The "workers" issue, and flak over science textbooks that gave short shrift to climate change and evolution (and gave students the incorrect impression that there's any significant questioning among scientists over either one), has put pressure on the publishing companies -- who are therefore caught right in the middle of the controversy.

The whole thing is, bottom to top, appalling.  The idea that a majority of the board that oversees education for an entire state thinks that a "citizen review panel" is going to be better at fact-checking biology textbooks than someone with a Ph.D. in biology.  The generalized distrust these people evidently have for anyone who actually knows what they're talking about.  The patently obvious ideological motivation for the whole thing, which is to push a conservative, nationalist, Christian agenda into public schools.

And with this week's vote, they're apparently going to get away with it.

I was a stranger, and you took me in

In troubled times, people forget that one of our core values is compassion.

Despite what you might have heard, it's not unique to Western society, nor to Christianity.  Christianity has its version, yes, but it shows up over and over, in every culture, every religion:

• From the Gospel According to Matthew: Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
• From Confucius's Doctrine of the Mean:  Tse-kung asked, 'Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?'  Confucius replied, 'It is the word 'shu' -- reciprocity.  Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
• From Islam's Forty Hadiths:  None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.
• From Shayast-Na-Shayast, one of the holy books of Zoroastrianism:  Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others.
• From the Tao te Ching: To those who are good to me, I am good; to those who are not good to me, I am also good. Thus I act rightly, and all receive good.
• From the Talmud: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man.  This is the law: all the rest is commentary.
• From the Mahabharata: This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you.

You will notice that nowhere does it say, "This above all: make sure that you keep your own ass safe, warm, and well-fed, and to hell with everyone else, especially if they don't look like you."

A child in a Syrian refugee camp [image courtesy of photographer Mstyslav Chernov and the Wikimedia Commons]

It's why I find myself reluctant to go on social media in the last few days.  The posture that I see taken by some people I consider friends, and by many of our elected leaders, is so profoundly repulsive that I leave every single time feeling nauseated.  Contrast the above lines with some of the things I've seen posted lately:

• Taking in Syrian refugees is welcoming terrorist attacks into the heartland of the USA.
• Any government leader who lets these people into our country is guilty of treason.  Send the fucking politicians to Syria, along with the refugees!
• We put French flags all over Facebook, then turn around and invite the terrorists in.  I don't know what the hell is wrong with this country.
• Until every homeless veteran and hungry child is housed and fed, we should not allow one Syrian refugee into the US.  Not ONE.

I think it's this last one that makes me the most angry, because the person who posted this is a staunch Republican, and has more than once screamed bloody murder about the "welfare state" and "government giveaways," and supports a party that has in the past five years been responsible for killing five separate bills that would have provided aid to veterans.  What's the logic?  "We need to help veterans, before we help anyone else!  So let's not help anyone!"

So we sit here, smug in our comfortable houses and eating three meals a day, and turn away thousands of people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  People who are fleeing ISIS, the extremist sect we ourselves are fighting against.  People who have nowhere to go home to.

These are not terrorists.  These are the victims of terrorists.

Governor Chris Christie said that he wouldn't allow Syrian refugees into New Jersey, "not even orphans under the age of five."  Apparently his conservative family values include the idea that a human being's rights begin at conception and end at birth.

And if you're not swayed by compassion, there's a purely pragmatic reason to take in the refugees.  The way to combat extremism is to put a human face on the target.  The terrorists who are responsible for the Paris and Beirut attacks and other atrocities have their followers brainwashed to think of their victims as evil, barely human, deserving of death.  It's far harder for that message to sell if those same people welcomed you into their homes, fed you and clothed you when you had nothing.  If we send these people back, the ones who are lucky enough to survive the ordeal will have every reason to hate us.

Our actions might just as well be a recruitment drive for ISIS.

Some of you might be saying, "But it's not safe!"   No, it's not.  It's possible that there might be ISIS members embedded in the ranks of the refugees.  Welcoming in the refugees might result in danger to ourselves; it certainly would result in inconvenience, difficulty, hard work.  But wherever did you come up with the idea that the prime goal of life is to be safe?  We just celebrated a federal holiday -- Veteran's Day -- wherein we laud the people who put themselves in harm's way to help others.  I would think that the hypocrisy of following that up with an outcry against putting ourselves in harm's way to help others would be obvious, but apparently it isn't.

And speaking of holidays, we've got two others coming up, remember?  One celebrates a legend in which the natives of a land welcomed settlers in and fed them, even though they looked different, had a different language, and practiced a different religion.  The other is about an event in which a poor Middle Eastern couple was turned away from shelter over and over again, until the woman was forced to give birth in a stable for animals.

Even the parallels there seem to escape people.

We have an opportunity.  We can give into fear, nationalism, and hatred, or we can show the world that the values we brag about and claim are so powerful actually mean something, and are not just a lot of empty, self-congratulatory talk.

It's been a temptation to unfriend or unfollow the people I'm connected to who post repugnant things. If I haven't, it's because that tendency turns social media into even more of an echo chamber, where we're surrounded only by people who shout the same empty slogans as we do, and never are challenged to think differently.  So as much as I would like to disconnect myself from the fear and rage talk I'm seeing, I won't do that.  

If I can get one person to reconsider the duty of compassion that comes along with the privileges we enjoy, it will be worth it.

The walls come tumblin' down

If you needed any further evidence that homeopathy is complete lunacy, take a look at this page wherein we find the description of a homeopathic "remedy" made from chunks of the Berlin Wall.

At first, I thought this was a spoof.  Tragically, it isn't.  But if you would rather not (1) give these people further hits on their hit tracker, and (2) subject your delicate brain cells to truly devastating amounts of derp, allow me to give you a brief summary.

Kees Dam, the person who wrote the piece, states that he (at least I think this is a male name; my apologies if I'm incorrect) was at a homeopathy conference and heard a homeopath named George Vithoulkas say that "the sake and credibility of homeopathy was not served by using remedies like Berlin Wall."  And initially, Dam agreed.  It seemed ridiculous that taking a chunk of concrete, grinding it up in water, and diluting it until there was none of the original concrete left would result in a remedy that was good for curing anything except thirst.

[image courtesy of photographer Jorge Royan and the Wikimedia Commons]

But despite his doubts, Dam decided to "prove" it for himself.  In homeopathy, a "proving" is where you give volunteers undiluted materials (here, swallowing pieces of the Berlin Wall) and seeing what symptoms they develop.  Those symptoms then are what highly-diluted "remedy" (a.k.a. "water") is useful for treating.

It is why, for example, the homeopathic "remedy" used for insomnia is made from diluted caffeine.  I'm not making this up.

Anyhow, after eating powdered concrete, there were a bunch of emotional symptoms -- depression, hopelessness, feelings of being trapped -- and a variety of physical symptoms as well.  These included both narcolepsy and insomnia.

Which induced me to shout at my computer, "Okay, which is it?  It can't be both."

So will powdered and diluted Wall keep you awake, or put you to sleep?  The website was unclear on that point (one of many that it was unclear on).  Maybe it will put you into that obnoxious half-awake state where you can't really fall deeply asleep, but you're too tired to get up.

If that's what it does, keep it right the hell away from me.  I hate that.

Anyhow, we then move on to a long list of quotes from volunteers who participated in "provings" and tests of the "remedy" itself.  Many of them are what you'd expect from people who believe this stuff -- claims that taking homeopathic dilutions of the Berlin Wall helped you with metaphorical walls in your life ("Sensation as if there is a wall, an incredible distance between the people I really love and me. I cannot go to the people I really want to be with. It is a big suffering.").  Another person said that taking it made her very suspicious of men ("Absolutely no sex," she says.)

The most bizarre one is someone who got symptoms simply by holding the "remedy" in her hand: "Holding the remedy for a while gives a tremendous rise of grief and sadness, so huge you would drown in it."

So what does this mean, now you don't even have to swallow the stuff, it's equally effective to absorb the curative powers directly through your skin?  I suppose that's true, actually, given the fact that 0 = 0.

It only gets weirder from there.  Here are a few more symptoms people developed after swallowing pieces of the Berlin Wall:

• There is a big heap of sand before my house-door, it is so high that it is on window level. Anybody could walk in by the window. This gives me a very unsafe feeling.
• Together with my father I am in a barren, flat, empty meadow landscape with as many ditches as land, the water in the ditches is just as high as the land, a very disagreeable landscape. There is no horizon. My father says that he doesn't believe in God or that he thinks he doesn't believe in God.
• Last night I had the feeling I was blind, I opened the curtains a little and realised/saw I was not.
• Vision: two astronauts and a UFO with very modern equipment especially in relation to eye-technique (laser/photography).
• Weepy, with the speed of one tear per hour, but still ameliorating.
• I am drawn to buy light yellow clothing during this remedy proving. 
• I desire pepper salami.

Apparently after reading through all of this (for want of a better word) data, Dam didn't have the reaction I did, which is to say "What the fuck?" over and over again.  No, Dam was convinced.  Any of his previous reservations about the usefulness of diluted Berlin Wall were clean gone.  He writes:

I must confess that the same controversial feelings were elicited in me when I heard of Berlin Wall as a homeopathic remedy for the first time.  My "Berlin Wall" was broken down when I trusted and believed my eyes seeing the effects of Berlin Wall as a homeopathic remedy.

So there you have it.  This isn't the stupidest thing I've run across in homeopathic literature; that honor goes to homeopathic water, which is water diluted in water.  (I'm also not making this up; the link is to a previous Skeptophilia post where you can read all about it.)  However, if this isn't the dumbest "remedy" I've ever seen, it is certainly the strangest.

Anyhow, if you have a chunk of the Berlin Wall, you're probably better off hanging onto it and not grinding it up and diluting it a bunch of times.  Since what it apparently cures are things like craving salami and imagining that there are heaps of sand in front of your house, it probably wouldn't that useful in any case.

Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to teach a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience, and even without my native curiosity that keeps me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a former student of mine to hand me Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see,  hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations.  Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient is a rational man and knows that what he is experiencing is hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and  total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit... He was greenish-pale, sick looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.