Among the welcome spate of documentaries about science on tv at the moment, two this week make great play of the physical scale of things. The immensity of the universe, the insignificance of we humans, the almost total emptiness of atoms – that sort of thing.
The programmes are Wonders of the Universe by Professor Brian Cox and Everything and Nothing by Professor Jim Al-Khalili.
In his programme, Brian Cox spent some time describing the makeup of an atom.
He stood in a semi-desert landscape and picked up a golf ball sized stone. He then explained that if this pebble was the nucleus of an atom its electrons would be circling at a considerable distance away, somewhere near that hill in the distance. He pointed to a hill that was perhaps a few kilometres away. What’s more, he continued, those electrons would be unbelievably, unimaginably minute, the size of mots of dust. The whole atom would be almost completely empty space, with its component parts being almost insignificant to boot. The atom hardly exists.
I’m always uncomfortable when the use of physical scale is used in order to convey a feeling of awe over the immensity of things (such as the size of the universe) or the seeming insignificance of things (such as the insubstantiality of atoms).
Our appreciation of scale and distance is very subjective, and is based on our everyday needs here on earth. Anything smaller than, say, a poppy seed, is generally too small for us to spend time over, and any distance greater than that which we can travel in a reasonable amount of time is hard to grasp.
So discussion of the physical scale to things that are way beyond the our everyday experience is rather a problematic approach to their appreciation.
An atom may be 99.99999% empty, but the emptiness is irrelevant. What matters is the effect of the atom.
If Professor Brian Cox took that golf ball sized pebble and he threw it at you, hitting you in the eye, would he be able to get away with it by eulogising that “Incredibly, amazingly, that pebble is made up of atoms that are – unbelievably – almost entirely empty space. In very real terms, that pebble hardly exists”?
This short video seems to point to the controversial possibility that insects are highy intelligent creatures.
The video, which is unedited, was made by me in an area of woodland in central France in 2009.
The video shows flies landing on a sheet of paper and seemingly comprehending and reacting to the words that are written on the paper. This seems to lead to the conclusion that the flies can actually read the message on the paper.
Remarkable stuff indeed, but there’s something else that makes their skill even more amazing.
The flies are French and the message is in English, which seems to point to the possibility of the flies are actually bilingual – which makes them better at languages than a lot of English people.
Nicholas Humphrey, the theoretical psychologist, has a new book out, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, which deals with the problem of the nature of consciousness.
The use of the word magic in the book’s subtitle – rather than the word nature – is a little worrying (but then maybe it’s there in order to draw in a particular audience). The word magic implies a mystery. The mystery is “What is this immaterial thing called consciousness? How can something as insubstantial as consciousness reside in a world of crude and brute physicality?”
The answer, as Galen Strawson, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, suggests in his review of the book in the Observer newspaper, is that there probably is no mystery. The problem lies in the false way that we tend to conceive of the physical, material world. We have a tendency, even today, to view the corporeal world in basic Newtonian terms, as being composed of lumps of matter interacting with each other. Matter is solid, reliable, familiar stuff, and therefore holding little mystery itself. That, as Professor Strawson puts it (and as I concur) is the Great Mistake. Matter is in fact as weird as it comes.
At its most basic level matter is probably hardly anything more that fluctuations, inconsistencies or disturbances in some inconceivable, insubstantial quality that occupies some incomprehensible base level of reality – and even describing it in those terms is giving it more physicality than is probably advisable. In a universe in which matter is such an ungraspably ethereal entity it seems less bizarre that something as physically insubstantial as consciousness can exist. Despite appearances, there are not two realms of existence, the physical realm in which the body exists and another metaphysical realm in which the mind, soul and/or consciousness reside. They are all in one and the same slightly weird place. Here.
I feel that one of the reasons why we have difficulty wrestling with the subject of consciousness is that the phenomenon of consciousness is often elevated to a level of significance greater than it really deserves. Consciousness is frequently given a semi-spiritual dimension (largely because it seems to be on a level that’s separate to that of base physicality). I suspect that the truth is that consciousness is really little more than the effect that we experience when the sensations from our various senses are drawn together and are packaged with our thought processes (the purpose of which is largely to help us to navigate the world and to survive in it).
Indeed, the strange nature of our senses perhaps gives us a clue to the nature of consciousness itself. Look at it this way. There’s a computer screen in front of you right now, on which you’re reading this. The screen is ‘out there’ in the real, physical world, but the thing that you actually experience is a construction in your brain (I was going to use the word projection there rather than construction, but that gives too much of the suggestion of a cinema screen in your head with a ‘real’ image on it, which is a gross oversimplification of the multifarious processes at work in producing the image). What’s more, you’ll notice that the computer screen in front of you, and the rest of the world around you when you manage to drag yourself away from your computer, is full of colour. That colour is not a quality that exists in the objects that you see around you. You have added it to the reconstructions of the objects in your head, assigning colours to objects dependant on the wavelengths of light that their surfaces reflect. For instance if a surface reflects wavelengths of 510 nanometres you apply the colour green to it. It’s a form of mental painting by numbers.
So it is that the sensation of the world that we experience with our brains seems physically real, but is in fact only so at the level of the internal workings of the brain. Similarly, the sensation of consciousness that we experience with our brains seems physically unreal in very much the same way. But it is as much a part of the real world as our sensation of vision.
Consciousness is probably no more on a separate level of existence than is the view that we have of the world when we look out of our eyes
Boring, and therefore probably true.
This post was prompted by the review in the Observer newspaper of the book Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness by the theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. The review was written by Galen Strawson, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading.
I recently heard someone in a radio programme mention that “All religions pay great attention to dreams.”
Whether this is true or not I don’t know, but to me it doesn’t mean that dreams are therefore to be taken seriously. It indicates that people of a religious sensibility see significances where there aren’t any (A phenomenon known as apophenia).
There’s much in the news at the moment about the fact that Stephen Hawking in his latest book The Grand Design states that the universe was created out of nothing.
How can that be? How can anything be created out of nothing?
Here’s an extract from my book, Where Are We, What Are We, Why Are We? that deals with these very questions.
If subatomic particles are actually nothing more than energy [This extract follows a description of subatomic particles as forms of energy] this means that as a result solid objects can be thought of as quite literally being made up of nothing more than energy too.
The main difference between the energy as we experience it when we touch a live electric wire and the energy in solid matter is that in solid matter the energy has a stable configuration, tied up within its atoms. So when you sit in a chair the energy in the atoms of the chair stops you falling through it, while when you sit in an electric chair the consequences don’t bear thinking about.
We’re so used to the idea of the energy of electricity that we tend to forget that we don’t really know what it actually is, only what it does. You have to go back to the nineteenth century, when the humble electric light bulb was a cutting-edge invention, in order to relive the feeling of wonder that the phenomenon of electricity evoked.
Think of the solidity of matter as being the result of the electric forces acting within each atom – that each atom is in essence nothing more than a stable force field that stops other atoms entering the particular volume of space that it occupies (a little like mini versions of the force fields or deflector screens that are generated by spacecraft in many science fiction stories – the main difference being that while science fiction force fields are used to stop photon torpedoes or other advanced and improbable weaponry from reaching a spaceship, atomic force fields are more commonly associated with stopping coffee cups falling through table tops, at least in philosophical discussions).
So, if atoms are made up of bundles of energy that are in a configuration that forms a stable entity, what form does the energy take at a truly fundamental level?
The currently favoured theory is that at the most fundamental level everything is composed of vibrating strands of energy called strings.
The idea that the stuff of the universe is composed of vibrating strings gives the impression that even at this fundamental level the “stuff” is “solid” in some way: the idea of strings sounds very much like the idea of particles after all. However, the string involved is only one-dimensional, with no thickness, like an infinitely thin line (although they have other dimensions “wrapped up” inside them, for mathematical reasons).
These strings are thought of as vibrating at different frequencies, with each frequency making the string manifest itself as a different subatomic particle – a little like the way that the strings on musical instruments give rise to different notes or that different wavelengths of light give rise to different colours.
String theory isn’t the only game in town however. Other theories propose that everything is composed of point-like entities rather than extended string-like ones, while others invoke sheets or membranes of some fundamental “medium”.
Points, strings, sheets: take your pick.
Whether string theory is correct or not, the idea that the fundamental “stuff of existence” is essentially something that vibrates does possess a quality that seems to be essential for a theory of the fundamental nature of everything: the essential stuff of existence must be very simple, yet be able to manifest itself in more complex ways. In other words, if the “stuff” is a vibration, then the same sort of vibration can give rise to all of the different manifestations of matter and energy, simply by vibrating at different rates.
Let’s by-pass the issue of whether the fundamental nature of the stuff of the universe is closer to strings, membranes or whatever, and instead just concentrate on the concept that it is a disturbance of some kind, or an irregularity of some sort, in the empty nothingness of the “primordial void”.
Here we start running into serious conceptual difficulties, as this primordial void or expanse of nothingness is a tricky thing to get your head round, to say the least.
How to imagine nothingness?
Of course it’s impossible, partly because our brains just aren’t wired to conceive of such a thing (for everyday purposes it’s a pretty pointless and needless exercise after all), but also because nothingness simply isn’t like anything. Mainly because it isn’t anything.
It’s probably best to not even try to imagine it, and to just accept that it’s there, if “there” is a word that can be used in this situation. However, if we do want to have a go at imagining it we have to resort to slightly unreliable and inadequate metaphors.
A suitable metaphor for nothingness may be to think of it as being like a flat, perfectly still surface of water extending endlessly, with the flatness of the water representing the total featurelessness of nothingness. To differentiate between this profound ultimate nothingness and other more day-to-day nothingnesses let’s call it Nothingness – with a capital N. In fact let’s call this endless flat expanse the Sea of Nothingness. In this infinite, shoreless Sea of Nothingness any disturbances in the form of ripples on the surface could be likened to the vibrations that give rise to “stuff”.
These particular ripples or vibrations aren’t to be confused with the vibrating strings of string theory. The vibrations I’m describing here are metaphorical vibrations or ripples in a metaphorical medium – the Sea of Nothingness. (If anything, think of these metaphorical vibrations as giving rise to the vibrations of the strings in string theory – imagine that the strings of string theory are floating on the surface of the Sea of Nothingness and that the undulations in the sea are causing the undulations of the strings – because the strings are riding the sea’s undulations.)
The idea that everything in the universe, all matter and energy, is the manifestation of ripples in Nothingness, and that these ripples are the simplest “things” that exist, is quite appealing because of one important factor. A ripple, in essence, is a form of wave that has only one fundamental characteristic or property: it goes up and down. If you’re thinking that this up-and-down-ness gives the wave two characteristics rather than one, think of the crest and the trough of the wave as being inseparable parts of the same single characteristic – that a single wave automatically has both parts in very much the same way that a single coin automatically has a heads and a tails, and in fact can’t exist without having both.
The ripple’s possession of only one characteristic is important because whatever it is that exists at the most fundamental level, it can only have one property. This is because, working on the assumption that only one property can arise at a time, having two properties makes something more complex than absolute fundamentality allows.
Grafted onto this one property are other characteristics such as its wavelength and amplitude as secondary features.
Not only is the simplicity of the concept of a wave-like disturbance being the fundamental phenomenon that manifests itself as matter and energy appealing, but the concept has yet another appealing feature.
Look at the wave in the figure below. This represents a ripple on the surface of the Sea of Nothingness (Notice the flat, featureless nothingness extending endlessly on either side of the ripple).
As you can see, the wave goes up and down, as waves do: it has a crest and a trough.
Imagine the crest of the wave as being “positive” energy, and the trough of the wave as being “negative” energy, as depicted in the graph below.
You can see that the positive energy and the negative energy (the shaded areas in the figure) are the same, but are in opposite directions. This means that when the energy of the crest and the energy of the trough are added together to give the wave’s total energy they add up to nothing.
This is very pleasing philosophically, as it means that although the wave exists, the sum of its parts is zero, so in some ways its existence adds up to nothing.
Because this ripple is a disturbance in Nothingness, it can be said that Nothingness actually becomes Something – and that because the up and down parts of the ripple cancel out energy-wise and don’t add anything to the overall status of Nothingness, you can still say that Nothingness nevertheless contains nothing.
Because the ripple straddles either side of the flat line in the graph – the line that represents Nothingness – the universe can be thought of as hanging on either side of Nothingness.
I expect that you’ve been asking yourself “These ripples in Nothingness are all very well, but what caused them?”
Here we run slap-bang into the infinite regression problem – what made the thing that made the thing?
Bear in mind that my ripples in Nothingness aren’t real ripples, they are metaphorical ripples. And metaphors, after all, are by their nature imprecise comparisons of the things that they are standing in for – if they weren’t imprecise they’d actually be exactly the same as the thing they represented, and thus wouldn’t be metaphors at all. Due to this imprecision you could say that if metaphors were elastic bands you could stretch any metaphor until it snapped.
The metaphor of ripples is just a way of visualising something that is impossible to comprehend. The ripples in the Sea of Nothingness are, by definition, the most basic disturbance in the uniform, all pervasive state of Nothingness that underlies everything. The phenomenon that these metaphorical ripples are standing in for is not caused by anything (at least in any way that we can meaningfully understand). They are just something in the nature of Nothingness (Again, whatever that means).
In fact, if anything, they are the thing that’s at the beginning of the infinitely regressive chain of events that I just mentioned. They are the thing that caused the thing.
The idea of ripples in a (metaphorical) Sea of Nothingness may be seized upon by those amongst us who are of a religious inclination, who may then say “Ah-ha, yes. The ripples are caused by God dipping his fingers in the Sea of Nothingness! Thus it is that God created Everything!”
This, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), isn’t possible, as the ripples are the simplest thing that there can be, by definition. This means that they can’t be caused by something that’s more complex than they are themselves, such as an all-knowing entity that happens to have fingers. Even metaphorical fingers.
Talking about complexity, there’s one final point that has to be mentioned about these metaphorical ripples. I’ve been stating that they are the simplest thing in existence: that there is nothing simpler than they are. However, if you look at the shape of the ripple you can see that it itself is not totally simple: it starts to rise up gradually, then rises steeply for a while before flattening off and then dropping down again. That’s quite a lot of things to be going on for something that there’s nothing simpler than. In “reality” the ripple would be a single blip, with no initial gradual appearance and final decay – it would in fact be more like a digital pulse that’s just “there” rather than an analogue wave that rises and decays.
So there you have it. Despite its incredible complexity the universe is little more than the result of disturbances or ripples in the void. And despite the universe’s “content-rich” appearance the sum total of its contents (the peaks and troughs of the ripples in the void) adds up to nothing.
You could indeed say that because the crests and the troughs of the ripples cancel out when added together, and they thus in combination add up to nothing, the end result of the ripples is less than the sum of their parts. While of course, just looking at the universe around us shows that at the same time the end result of all of these ripples is definitely greater than the sum of their parts.∗
The universe is both everything and nothing. It just sounds right (to me, at least).
Nothing becomes Something. But at the same time it all still adds up to nothing, and thus it remains Nothing. You could actually say that the universe is composed of Nothing. That “Nothing exists”. As in “Something exists”.
This rather disconcerting fact that the universe and all of the matter within it is made out of nothing at all could at first sight seem to imply that the universe is totally meaningless. You can’t get more meaningless than nothing, after all.
However, the fact that matter is nothing doesn’t in any way imply that nothing matters.
In fact, because the universe is made of Nothing (the capitalised Nothing that exists in the Sea of Nothingness), it can very much be said that Nothing matters.
You may be wondering how anything as complicated as a universe can manifest itself out of something as simple as ripples. A ripple, after all, has only two components – an up part and a down part.
It’s not as far-fetched as it first sounds. Bear in mind, for instance, that the entire digital content of a computer, ranging from the calculations that it performs, through to the photos and videos that it displays and the music that it plays, is composed entirely of different sequences of only two states: on and off – or as it is expressed digitally, of zeros and ones. This two digit “language” is known as binary code and is the underlying principle of all digital technology.
It’s not only computers that have a very basic code underlying their ultimate complexity. Life itself has such a code too. The genetic code that is carried by the DNA that is the building-block of all living things is essentially created by a sequence of only four separate chemicals, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine (known as A, T, C and G for short), spread along the DNA double helix molecule (See illustration below). One side of the helix is from the mother and the other side from the father: the sides fuse together like a long zip, with the A molecules on one side linking with the T molecules on the other, and the C molecules with the G molecules. The order in which these chemical bonds occur along the molecule determines the genetic characteristics of their possessor. Very simple – but just look at the results in the mirror!
Stephen Hawking is in the news today. The title of this post is the headline of an article about the man in today’s Guardian newspaper. Similar headlines abound elsewhere, with the entire front page of the Independent newspaper being devoted to Britain’s most famous scientist.
He’s in the news because in his latest book, The Grand Design, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he states that we will soon be capable of understanding the laws of physics that lie behind the Big Bang, and that we will thus be able to eliminate any need to invoke a god to explain the genesis of the universe. Hawking states that the answer may well lie in a version of string theory known as M-theory (Invoking God is sometimes known as G-theory).
I think that there’s a flaw in the logic here. Not necessarily in Hawking’s logic mind you (I haven’t read the book yet, so I don’t know what he actually says – it’s not published until next week), but in the logic of the newspaper reports. It’s not true that if science comes up with the explanation for the Big Bang it will eliminate a need for God. There is no need for God to begin with, whether we understand the Big Bang or not. It seems to me that even if we never manage to understand the ultimate laws of physics that lie behind the universe we still have no need for God whose primary role seems to be to tidy up the lose ends.
What’s more, I expect that unravelling the laws of physics and explaining the Big Bang won’t dent the faith of believers in any way at all. Why would it? They will quite reasonably simply ask “Who created these laws of physics, if not God?” (On this point, I’d personally argue that the ultimate laws of physics are probably incredibly simple, while any God must by definition be incredibly complex, so invoking a complex God to produce some simple laws of physics actually produces more problems than it solves.)
The newspaper reports tell me that the book sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton’s belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos. That expression – created out of chaos – which I assume is lifted from the publisher’s press release, is a little misleading. Newton himself may have thought that the universe was created out of chaos, but I think that nowadays it’s more commonly thought that the universe was much more likely to have been created out of something that’s altogether more simple than chaos – it was created out of the unimaginable simplicity of nothing at all. You can’t get less chaotic than that.
As Hawking states: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” In other words, something just popped into existence, and from there on in there was no stopping it. That was when the complexity and the chaos began.
Humans are the only species that cooks its food.
We’re also the cleverest species on the planet.
These observations prompt some people to ask “Did cooking make us clever or are we clever because we cook?”
You don’t have to be too clever to realise that that’s a spurious coupling of cause and effect.
You could equally well make the observation that we are the only species that wears clothes. Do clothes make us clever?
I’m going to have to be careful here, because I’m sorely tempted to now devise a theory that does indeed link the wearing of clothing with the development of the intellect. However, as I write this I’m wearing a rather uncomfortable shirt that’s stifling my brain’s ability to concentrate, so I won’t bother.
Actually, I probably would argue that wearing clothes helped us to develop our mental capabilities, because clothing helped to put us into a comfortable zone in which we could concentrate on other things than keeping warm.
As a consequence of clothes we didn’t have to spend all of our time huddled over the camp fire anymore.
But then, camp fires were probably very important for the development of our intellects too.
After all, we’re the only species on the planet that uses fire. There must be something in that.
What do we do when we sit in front of a fire? We stare into the flames and get lost in abstract thought. The very immateriality and strangeness of the fire encourages contemplation.
Fires also encourage cooking, which brings me back to where I meant to be at the beginning of this post.
Does cooking (or wearing clothes or using fires for that matter) promote increased intelligence?
We cook and we’re intelligent. Are they linked?
It’d seem that the obvious link would be that cooking provided a simple boost to a process that was under way already. We had to be a bit intelligent to be able to cook in the first place, but then once we’d cracked the whole business of slow roasting (or whatever type of cooking we started with – and I bet it wasn’t boiling because we didn’t have any saucepans or indeed containers of any sort back then) it freed up a lot of time that we could then spend doing other things, like the washing up.
That washing up reference was a joke of course, because as I said there were no pans in those days, just sticks. Which would probably simply been thrown onto the fire to help cook the next course. What we actually did was sit around doing nothing. Which, as you may know, is when people have all their best ideas.
It’s possible however that there may be a stronger link between cooking and intelligence than the straightforward link of cooking making our lifestyles more conducive to thought.
Before the advent of cooking, the human race was intelligent enough to be able to use basic tools and to tame fire (because without either of those there’d be no cooking). That’s quite intelligent, but not intelligent enough to put a space probe into orbit round Saturn. We had to get to that stage though, otherwise we’d have got no further.
Once we’d developed the use of tools something interesting happened to us. The fossil record seems to show that about 300,000 years after the first significant use of tools we’d evolved noticeably larger brains.
It’s postulated that by using tools such as spears and primitive cutting implements our earlier, smaller-brained ancestors could eat more meat. The digestion of meat required less energy than did vegetables, so as a result there was a surplus of energy that was diverted into powering the energy-hungry brain. The appendix shrank and the brain expanded. In modern humans the brain demands about 20-25% of the body’s energy.
There’s also the possibility that meat contains brain-enhancing nutrients that are unavailable in plant matter. There is some evidence, for instance, that the compound known as creatine which is found in animal tissue and is commonly used as a muscle booster by athletes may increase mental ability. It’s the sort of substance that’s nowadays given the name of super food (by food company marketing departments). The name creatine comes from the Greek kreas (flesh) and its similarity to the word creative is purely coincidental, I think, even if the substance does turn out to boost creativity in some way.
In parallel to the development of tools the related acquisition of cooking skills may have had a highly beneficial influence on the brain. It’s possible that cooking, by breaking down the chemical constituents of food, makes digestion easier and more efficient, thus again allowing energy to be diverted away from food processing and into brain-building.
Food for thought indeed.
Raw vegetable food faddists take note.
Part of this post (the second part) is an extract from my book, which you can see at the top of the right hand column. Or here.
This post was prompted by a forthcoming edition of the BBC programme Horizon, Did Cooking Make Us Human?
A book that’s worth reading on the subject of evolution and food is Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham of Harvard University
Take a look at the two photographs above.
The top one shows a word that’s upside down and that’s indented into a surface.
The bottom one shows a word that’s the right way up and that’s raised above the surface.
Okay, I know you’re not stupid. You realise that they are both the same photograph, with the top one upside down. (It’s a detail of a traditional red British post box by the way.)
But you’re not clever enough to see the word on the top photo as being anything other than indented, are you? Even though you know that it’s raised.
The reason for this is quite straightforward. It’s all to do with the lighting. In our everyday world objects are normally lit from above – because the sun shines in the sky and not out of the ground. In the case of the top photograph the lighting effectively comes from below. However, we don’t interpret it like that, due to the simple fact that being lit from below is a very unusual way for objects to be lit. We assume that the light in the photo is coming from above, as usual. In that case, the bright highlights and the shadows on the letters could only be where they are if the surface is indented – so that’s what we interpret it as.
What can we learn from this observation? We learn, amongst other things, that we tend to see what we expect to see. And we learn that we interpret things so that they fit in with our experiences and our expectations. This isn’t such a bad thing quite a lot of the time. In fact it’s a good thing. If we didn’t do it we’d have to go around analysing absolutely everything from first principles as though we’d never experienced anything before. We’d never get anything done. But the tendency can be an impediment when we try to make sense of things that are slightly beyond the realms of normal day to day existence – it has implications beyond such mundane things as upside down photographs.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, has written a book called SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
It’s a work of fiction, being made up of forty descriptions of alternative versions of the afterlife: all the product of Mr Eagleman’s fertile imagination.
I mention the book partly because it sounds very interesting (I’ll be ordering a copy as soon as I’ve finished writing this article), and partly because it sounds as though it’s got an uncannily similar structure and purpose to a work of fiction that I wrote myself.
The work of mine to which I refer was written in the 1990s, over a dozen years ago. I sent it round to a few literary agents at the time but none of them were interested. Either it wasn’t a very fashionable subject back then – it predates the current explosion in interest in religion and atheism – or it just wasn’t not very good. To this day it remains unpublished. Here’s a (slightly updated) sample from the book so that you can decide on its merits or otherwise for yourself.
The Concept Behind the Book
The premise of the book is the conceit that although the world appears to be becoming an increasingly uniform place in terms of culture, with the mass media disseminating fewer and fewer ideas to more and more people, each community or town on the planet has its own unique belief system and set of myths that are fully functioning just below the surface comformity. These beliefs and myths have been preserved for many hundreds of years, since the time that communities were isolated islands of habitation in a world in which travel was extremely difficult and communication was even harder, allowing each community to develop its own concepts independently and unhindered. They are deeply held convictions that to this day go unnoticed by the casual outside observer (or even by generations of relatively recent incomers to the community).
My book is a portrayal of the hidden belief systems adopted by communities within the British Isles, because that’s where I live and where I have had an opportunity to investigate the phenomenon. Exactly the same hidden belief structure can be found in every community in the world – including your own.
Here’s an example if such a belief.
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Chesterfield
At some unknown time in the depths of the dark ages the people of Chesterfield in Derbyshire conceived a new theory to explain the observation that when an animal dies its flesh decomposes and disappears from its body, leaving only the underlying scaffolding of bones that held the creature together.
They observed that the flesh of a dead animal mysteriously transmuted from solid meat and muscle into a seething mass of wriggling, squirming maggots.
Rather than seeing the maggots as scavengers on the dead flesh, the people decided that they were a new manifestation of the dead creature itself. The creature had metamorphosed into a new form and had been reborn.
The people realised that any rebirth must be a progression, because life is nothing if it isn’t a journey forwards to an unknown but better place.
Thus maggots, being the creatures of rebirth and therefore the next manifestation en route to that better place, must be superior to the creature from which they were born.
Today you’re most likely to see maggots when you come across road kill or when you enter a fishing tackle shop, but in the middle ages, when all death was a closer companion to life, the population were familiar with something else that turned into maggots if it wasn’t buried soon enough.
Human bodies.
The inhabitants of Chesterfield concluded that because a person can transform into maggots after death this must mean that maggots are spiritually superior beings to people.
What’s more, maggots don’t remain maggots for long. In their turn they are transformed into yet another creature – a creature that, because it’s the result of yet another level of rebirth, must be an even higher life form than maggots.
Flies.
If maggots are spiritually one level higher than humans, then it stands to reason that flies must be two. Flies must be truly transcendent beings.
The flies of which I talk are the same flies that buzz around your living room on a hot summer’s day irritating you. They irritate not because they are irritating in themselves, but because you are irritable. Your irritability is a sure sign that you are a lower and less enlightened life form than the flies.
Because the true nature of flies has long been known to the people of Chesterfield, to this day flies are welcomed into people’s homes as honoured quests.
At mealtimes special food is often placed on the dinner table to attract flies to share meals with the inhabitants of a household. (Perhaps the fly that comes to the table today will be the reincarnation of a dear but dead relative.)
It is considered a great privilege indeed if a fly should choose to land on your plate while you’re actually eating from it. The larger the fly the better. Bluebottles are particularly venerated, not only because of their large size but also due to their iridescent colouring which is seen as a sure sign of their transcendent nature.
Should a person be lucky enough to have a fly alight on their own plate of food the fly is allowed to sample the dish at its leisure, coating the food with its digestive secretions as it does so (Flies don’t have mouths, only tubes. In order to ingest nutrients they first have to discharge digestive juices onto the food in order to turn it to a liquid which they can then suck up). Only once the fly has flown away can the person finally take the food into his or her own mouth and eat the freshly consecrated dish.
People in Chesterfield often die of food poisoning, and thus soon turn into flies themselves.
In the lecture by Daniel Dennett featured in the previous post there’s a section about recognising language.
He discusses the manner in which we understand language by recognising the discrete packages of sound of which it’s composed.
To illustrate this, Dennett asked the audience to repeat after him an expression: “Mundify the epigastrium.” You may not know what it means, but you can make out the words and you can repeat them back (as the audience did, more or less). This is possible because the words are made up of phonemes (the smallest segments of standardised sound that are put together to form words in any particular language). Dennett then asked the audience to repeat after him a random string of odd sounds. It was impossible. This was because the audience didn’t have “the norms for correction of those sounds.” They just couldn’t get a handle on them.
Another illustration of the phenomenon of recognising the discrete packets of sound that make up words is the process that occurs when you learn a foreign language (Dennett didn’t actually mention this in his lecture – I’m adding it on my own initiative).
Some years ago I started to learn French. At the beginning of the endeavour whenever I heard any French being spoken it sounded like nothing more than a meaningless cascade of undifferentiated sound. How could anyone understand it? Over the years and with increasing familiarity with the sound structure of the language those amorphous sounds gradually crystallised into clearly differentiated words (even though I still don’t understand what half of them mean).
Because of the fact that language is composed of discrete packages of sound it’s possible to compensate for minor inaccuracies in the transmission of those sounds by mentally comparing the perceived sound with the expected, or probable, sound. You put this compensation into action every time you hear someone who has an unfamiliar accent.
The phenomenon occurs when trying to understand the written word too.
Dennett gave an example of this correction in his lecture. Here it is in this illustration.
This is the well known “optical illusion” consisting of the words “THE CAT” with malformed letters H and A.
With its modified H and A this wording looks slightly more like a contrived effect than it actually is. It looks slightly contrived because the letters are printed – and there are no printed letters that look like that H and A.
However, the phenomenon that you are observing – the correction in your head of letters to their proper form – is one that happens every time you read someone’s handwriting. Especially if you’re reading bad handwriting.
Here are the words as handwriting.
The effect is more or less the same. We recognise the intended letters immediately, due to their context, just as we recognise mispronounced or unusually pronounced spoken words due to their context.
But look at the following words. There’s ‘THE CAT’ on the top line – but what’s that word below it?
It’s HAT.
But can you read it as such? Probably not.
The H and the A suddenly start looking worryingly like made up letters. There just isn’t enough context for the H and the A to be interpreted correctly. You probably decide that it’s the word AT with an extra A at the beginning.
Let’s give the word more cues by putting it in the context of a sentence. Here’s the title of a well-known children’s book.
Mmm. It still doesn’t look very convincing. What’s more, I suspect that the confusion over the H and A in HAT is creating a sort of contagion whereby the other Hs and As start to look shaky, but that’s another subject.
So it looks as though there’s a limit to the ratio of properly formed letters and malformed letters beyond which corrective interpretation breaks down.
It’s not simply a matter of the letters having to be framed within words (The H and A in THE CAT each being nicely bracketed by the T & E and C & T). Look at the expression THAT HAT, below.
It’s nonsense.
The problem is probably simply the preponderance of malformed letters. You just can’t get a handle on them. You scan backwards and forwards over the words and you can’t make any order out of them.
Scanning and order – important aspects of the process of understanding written words. But possibly in a more complicated way than you initially assume. To illustrate this, try reading the following sentence.
Algtohuh pcraialclty all of the wdors taht cpoosme tihs stecnene are jebumld you can plrbobay udetanrnsd waht it syas.
It reads: Although practically all of the words that compose this sentence are jumbled you can probably understand what it says.
It’s thought that this interesting phenomenon occurs because you don’t read words from left to right, letter by letter in order, but that you scan the words very rapidly, taking in the whole content at once. I assume that the words also have to be in the context of a meaningful sentence which gives clues as to the probable word that’s intended. I say this because individual words that are jumbled up are just anagrams – and I’m useless at anagrams (or amganars as tehy are smeometis claled). In similar vein, that phrase ‘smeometis claled’ doesn’t easily translate into ‘sometimes called’ in my opinion – maybe it’s too close to looking like real words itself, so it throws you off.
In my opinion the lecture doesn’t actually explain the reason behind the existence of “Why?” (Why not?), but it’s a very interesting lecture anyway.
The lecture was delivered on October 23rd 2009 in Oslo. It’s approximately an hour long, followed by 30 minutes of questions. Recorded by Richard Norton. The shaky camerawork at the beginning soon settles down.
Daniel C. Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, USA, where he is also the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.
Dennett has authored several bestselling books, including “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” and “Freedom Evolves”. His most recent book is “Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”.
Last night’s tv featured an episode of the science programme Horizon, entitles Who’s Afraid of a Big Black Hole?
The programme featured a posse of eminent physics brains such as the ubiquitous Michio Kaku (who by the way should really get his hair cut – he’s starting to look far too image conscious) and Lawrence Krauss (featured in my previous post). These big brains were all saying things like “Black holes – weird!” and “Black holes – mind-boggling!”. It was easy to get the impression that the scientists were hamming it up for the cameras to some extent, and that their contributions were then edited to create even more of a Wow! factor. Such is the nature of popular science programmes.
That’s not a problem of course. In fact it’s probably essential in order to grab the attention of the easily distracted amongst the viewing population, which is most of us.
There is a problem with black holes though.
They are indeed weird and mind-boggling.
But then, what isn’t? Everything in the universe is weird and mind-boggling. It’s just because we’re so familiar with some of it, like tables and chairs and trees and rivers, that we don’t notice.
Remember the saying:
“We only tend to think that reality is weird when we contemplate its extremes,
such as the core of the atom
or the edge of the universe.
But the place is actually weird all the way through.”
Whenever black holes are described in the popular press or popular science literature the emphasis is always on their extraordinary gravitational pull (which is created as a result of their stupendous mass – the fact that they consist of the amount of matter in a star compressed to the size of a pinhead, or smaller). This gravitational pull means that anything that gets sucked into a black hole disappears from our universe due to the fact that even light cannot escape from its clutches. Impressive stuff, true. And scary sounding.
(A black hole is created when a star runs out of fuel and stops generating heat. It was this heat that made the star expand into a glowing sphere – once the heat’s gone the force of gravity that holds the star together is the only force at work, and the star is pulled inwards into an ever tighter ball.)
After the programme someone mentioned to me “What I don’t understand is – why doesn’t the whole universe just get sucked into these black holes, they’re so powerful?” A good question, and a quite understandable one due to the huge amount of hyperbole that surrounds black holes.
Here’s my explanation.
When a star collapses from the size of a star to the size of a pinhead the matter in it becomes compressed and more concentrated (to put it mildly). It doesn’t gain any mass.
For instance, look at the sun. The sun has a mass of 2 nonillion kilograms (2 followed by thirty zeros kilograms). If the sun were to collapse to the size of a pinhead that pinhead would also have a mass of 2 nonillion kilograms.
To take a more earthly example, if you take a big football-sized ball of fluffy cotton wool and scrunch it up so that it’s a dense little golfball size it doesn’t get mysteriously heavier when you scrunch it. It just gets denser, with the strands of cotton wool closer together. So it is with the star that’s compressed to the size of a pinhead. The atoms get closer together (and then the subatomic particles get closer together, and so on).
If the sun were to shrink to the size of a pinhead, and thus become a black hole, what effect would this have on the earth? You may think “Oh my God, we’ll be sucked into it, because that’s what black holes do. We’re all doomed!”
However, you’ve actually got nothing to worry about, you’ll be pleased to hear (For the purposes of this illustration I’m ignoring the inconvenient fact that before the sun can turn into a black hole the earth will inevitably have already been destroyed by other solar activity).
Here’s why there’s nothing to make you lose any sleep.
The earth is in a stable orbit around the sun. The characteristics of this orbit (the distance from the sun: the speed of the orbit) are determined by the gravitational pull of the sun on the earth, which is related to the sun’s mass (2 nonillion kilograms, remember: you don’t have to remember exactly what a nonillion is though). It’s the sun’s mass that’s important, not its size. As long as there’s a 2 nonillion kilogram object at the centre of the solar system we’ll keep orbiting it quite happily. It doesn’t matter whether that object is the size of the sun or the size of a pinhead.
The popular press often gives the impression that once a black hole’s been created it starts hoovering up matter from the rest of the universe willy-nilly, due to its immense gravitational pull, eventually consuming the whole place.
However a black hole doesn’t hoover up the universe any more than a planet hoovers up the universe. Meteors fall to earth never to escape just as objects fall into black holes never to escape. A black hole only hoovers up stuff that’s within its sphere of influence, which is no different to that of the star from which it was formed. To be sucked into a black hole an object has to be quite close to it. If it’s a reasonable distance away from the black hole, the black hole is just like any other massive object as far as its gravitational attraction goes.
Whenever black holes are mentioned there’s almost inevitably a mention of ‘What would happen if you fell into a black hole?’. Well, you’d be annihilated of course. But what do you expect? Remember however that a black hole used to be a star – a large object – that has shrunk to a ridiculously small size. To get close enough to a black hole for it to be a problem for you you’d have to get really close to the black hole – closer to it than the original radius of the star from which it was formed. If the black hole were still a star rather than a black hole you’d be inside the star, so you’d be annihilated anyway. Which is worse? Being pulled apart by the gravity of a black hole or being fried by the heat of a star? But do we worry about being annihilated by stars? Not really. They’re just too familiar.
And they’re shiny and twinkly.
Not black.
Or holes.
One of the chapters of my book about the way that we see our place in the universe (see the column on the right) is about the idea that the universe is essentially composed of nothing at all – despite its obvious solidity (in places at least). It’s about the way that nothing can give rise to something. The chapter is titled Nothing Matters (which is meant to be a pun by the way).
Here’s a very entertaining lecture by theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss which deals nicely with aspects of this subject. (Should you only want to dip into the lecture briefly the most relevant quote is about 40 minutes in. Should you not want to dip in at all, the quote is, in truncated form, [The universe] has zero total energy, and it could have begun from nothing…which answers the question…’Why is there something rather than nothing?’.)
People are intrigued by dreams.
What on earth are they? Why do we have them? What do they mean? (There we go again, trying to find meaning in things that we don’t understand.)
My own personal feeling is that they are relatively mundane things, made fascinating by little more than the bizarre juxtaposition of the events that (seem to) occur in them. In this respect they are a little like those children’s picture books that have pages cut into sections allowing you to compose strange and exotic creatures out of quotidian life-forms.
However, some people take them extremely seriously.
I recall hearing a Jungian therapist talking about dreams on the radio, and she was convinced of their importance. She was asked if she herself had had any particularly meaningful and life-changing dreams, and bizarrely (considering the importance that she attributed to them) she could recall but one.
She described it.
She was on the moon and in front of her was the Eiffel Tower. That’s a great dream image – the Eiffel Tower on the moon.
She didn’t just leave it at that though – as an interesting juxtaposition of two disparate objects – she interpreted it. The Eiffel Tower represented humanity’s hubristic impulse to construct edifices – not just follies such as the tower itself, but other follies such as bridges, motorways and skyscrapers – while the bleak lunar landscape represented the barren and wasted state that we are visiting upon the earth due to our enterprises in folly building.
As a result of the dream she resolved to devote more time to working towards averting the looming environmental catastrophe that we are engineering. This is a very laudable resolution of course, with which I have no objection, and which is far better than the other one that she could have extracted from the dream, that it would be a great idea to build replica Eiffel Towers on the moon.
It seems obvious to me that she took this dream to be particularly meaningful simply because her chosen interpretation of it resonated perfectly with an issue that was preoccupying her at the time. People see what they want to see in things.
You could interpret the children’s picture book figure above in just the same way. It could illustrate, for instance, the fact that people (represented by the human head) are capable of dominating the air (due to the insect wings) and the water and the earth (due to the bird’s webbed feet that can be used for walking or swimming). So far the interpretation’s looking good. But look more closely at the figure and a worrying factor creeps into the analysis. The ‘creature’ is segmented in such a way that none of the segments carries reproductive organs (It is a children’s illustration after all). The interpretation seems to point to the fact that this figure is doomed to oblivion. The creature has so much potential, but so little future.
I made that interpretation up as I went along, as you can probably tell, but it just shows how anyone can extract meaning out of nothing.
You may in fact say that my interpretation is wrong, because there is indeed just about enough room for some reproductive organs to be squeezed in there somewhere.
You’re right. Just like everyone else I ignore factors that don’t fit in with my theory. Otherwise I just wouldn’t have a theory, and where would I be then?
On the subject of numbers, here’s a mathematical joke.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
This joke can be extended. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who get this joke and those who don’t.
I suppose the ones who don’t get it can be divided into 10 categories too: those who don’t understand binary (and thus don’t stand a chance of getting it) and those who do understand binary but who don’t have a sense of humour.
If you’re one of the people who gets the joke, do you have a smug sense of self-satisfaction about the fact? Don’t worry, that’s nothing to feel guilty about. It’s all part of the whole business of humour, and is one of the reasons why humour is so satisfying.
If you don’t get the joke because you don’t understand binary, here’s a quick explanation of what binary is.
In our everyday numbering system there are ten individual digits: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,and 9.
When you’re counting, once you’ve reached 9 you extend the sequence by starting all over again with the same numbers, but adding a digit in front of them to signify that you’re on a new sequence – so you get 10 to 19. Then you extend the sequence again, to 20 and 29 and so on.
There’s no particular mathematical reason why numbers go up to nine and then start repeating. We use that system essentially because we’ve got ten fingers. This system is based on ten digits (zero and the numbers one to nine), and it’s described as being to the base ten.
We could just as easily use a system in which the only digits are 0,1,2,3,4 and 5. In this case, once you’ve counted up to the number 5 you can’t simply go on to the number 6 as you can in the ten digit system – because there isn’t one. Instead, because you’ve run out of digits, you have to extend the sequence just as you did after reaching 9 with the ten digit system – by starting the sequence again with an extra digit in front of it. So you have to go back to the figure zero and precede it with a one. This number is written as “10″, but it isn’t the number ten in the familiar ten digit system, even though it looks like it: here it represents the number six. (In this six digit system the number ten is written as a one followed by a four, or “14″.)
That example of a numbering system had six digits, but you can equally have a system that only has TWO digits. While the six digit system lacked the digits 6, 7, 8 and 9, the two digit system lacks ALL OF THEM except for zero and one. While with the six digit system you had to start a new sequence after the number five (because there is no number six), with the two digit system you have to start a new sequence after the number one (because there is no number two). The number two is therefore written as a zero preceded by a one – as “10″.
This two digit system is what we refer to as the binary system (binary meaning two).
So, the number “10″ in the binary system is the same number as the 2 in our normal, ten digit system.
The number “10″ in the joke is actually the binary way of representing the number 2. That’s the core of the joke.
Having waded through this explanation you probably won’t suddenly find the joke hilariously funny, because an essential part of the enjoyment of a joke is the satisfaction of “getting it”. But at least you’re now prepared for the next binary joke that comes along. I’ve been told that there are 101101 of them – rather thin on the ground in other words.
Binary is the numbering system that is used in computers and other electronic equipment – because electronic equipment can only ‘recognise’ two states with which to build up numbers: on or off. (While we have ten fingers with which to do it.)
