My Religion is Star Trek

Denial of death and the origin of evil- Ernest Becker on religion.

I have always wondered about the purpose of clothes. Nudists obviously do as well. Sometimes you need to keep warm. But most of the time, clothes are a cultural convention full of signifiers of taste, status ... and something else. That something else is the illusion that we are not animals. Positively, absolutely, something wholly different and on another plane of existence. Not animals. 

Even a century and a half after Darwin explained that we are animals, there are plenty of people who cling to various stories of denial. But these stories have purposes that go well beyond this ontological illusion. Because not only are we animals, but we are animals without meaning. Animals that will die. That is, no meaning is given objectively. So just as we clothe our bodies with fabric, we clothe our spirits with illusions of meaning, for otherwise we could not live. 

I have been following a provocative podcast series, which spent a couple of episodes on Ernest Becker, a mid-20th century philosopher in the US. He posited that we all follow a religion, in the anthropological sense that we live in cultural structures that give us meaning. Structures that are fundamentally illusory, because there is no there there. Meaning has always been generated by us, for us, subjectively by our psychological proclivities for social connection and drama. We are psychologically adapted to make and seek meaning, though in the final analysis, however powerful they feel, these are all conjured, not given. Take Disney as an example. Many people get highly involved with, and take solace from, the narratives Disney puts out, in its parks, cruise ships, movies, merchandise, and other channels. Relentless provision of mechanically assembled archetypes and other psychological triggers that activate / soothe, inspire, and motivate apparently has a substantial market. 

While atheists take no end of potshots at the absurdities and hypocrisies of formal religions, they also live (and must live) in some sort of illusion themselves. The idea that learning and science makes for a more "objective" value system and life of meaning may be less absurd, but is no more objective. These values come with a rationale and a story, one of service to ultimately human ends of knowledge and betterment. But that doesn't make them true- just another set of values that must be gauged subjectively. And when measured by the ironic criterion of Darwinian success in promoting reproduction, they often turn out to be lacking. At the most basic level, getting through the day requires some kind of motivation, and that motivation, when it goes beyond the most animal requirements, requires meaning, which requires us to have some story that narrates a purpose to a life whose end is otherwise irredeemably meaningless. 

There is a problem, however, to Becker. The more enveloping and functional the narrative of meaning, the more any competing narrative becomes alien and threatening. Indeed, threatening narratives become evil. Thus Judaism became the nemesis of Christianity, and Catholicism that of Protestantism. If the meaning of our lives, in a spiritual and eternal sense, is devalued by another story that has competing status, there is no limit to our horror at its doctrines or our dehumanization of its adherents. Thence to crusades, religious wars, pogroms, and the delicately named "communal violence". The management of narratives of meaning thus is perhaps the most critical aspect of human affairs, as all religious leaders have known forever.

One can see the US civil war through this lens. The people of the South, wedded to slavery, justified it through their theology and culture. They were mortally offended by the busybodies of the North who dared cast aspersions on their moral narratives and justifications, not to mention their economic basis. Where "Uncle Tom's Cabin" may have broken through the indifference of Northern culture, it was met with outrage in the South- a stout defense of their powerful cultural and religious narratives. The conflict was spiritual and existential.

Becker did not have terribly novel solutions to the problems of meaning and counter-meaning. Just the meta prescription that arose in the enlightenment, secularism and in all the branches of modern psychology. Which is that understanding this dynamic and taking one's stories less seriously is the path to social peace. It may not be the path to optimal personal meaning, however. How do you compare the smorgasbord of Disney, mainline religion, Western Buddhism, science, and a thousand other sects and value systems to a traditional society with one church, one story, and one universe? The power of social and spiritual unity must have been tremendously validating and comfortable. So there has been a big tradeoff to get to our current state of social and spiritual innovation, plurality, and anomie. It is evident that our political moment is one of deep spiritual revanchism- of revulsion (by the more traditional-minded) against all this plurality, back towards a more benighted unity.

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• The state of cars.

A Very French Star Wars

Bruno Dumont's "The Empire" touches on the true meaning of Sci Fi. (Spoiler alerts!)

The online reviews are not very good, but to me, this film was both hilarious and profound. A bunch of scuzzy French villagers go about their normal business, fishing, arguing, flirting, driving around. Then, though the magic of acting, they betray another plot entirely. Some are extraterrestrials just taking human form, deeply engaged in some cosmic battle and sponsored by hulking space ships above, in the heavens. The kicker is that the space ship is topped by ... a gothic cathedral. At first, this just seems like a hilarious way to cut special effects expenses. Why not use the local cathedral to shoot the space ship interiors?!? But as you revolve all this in your mind, it starts to appear as though Dumont is making a more interesting point.

By the traditional theological story, aren't we all extra-terrestrials, trapped in human bodies, constantly fighting with the flesh and destined to return to a better realm? Conversely, isn't the standard science fiction story full of magical wonders and grand dramas and theologies? What if religion and science fiction are ultimately, as L. Ron Hubbard appreciated, the same thing? Transporter, resurrection; medical miracle, laying on of hands; Borg, Satan; tomato, tomahto. 

Unfortunately, sometimes the humanity takes charge, sex first and foremost fouling up the neat good vs bad dynamic. In the plot, neither side really does anything bad or good, reinforcing the absurdity of a film that comes off as a sort of French Terry Gilliam masterpiece. The "1"s come from the flying gothic cathedral and think of themselves as good, while the "0"s come from a flying Versailles, (which makes for a particularly ungainly space ship), and know they are demons. But they are all equally distracted by those human bodies.

The ending was, as far as I understood it, a disappointment. The armadas of mini-cathedral and mini-Versailles fighters are lined up for the final battle, à la Star Wars. But suddenly, they all get sucked into a wormhole, and ... end of film. It is almost as though Dumont holds out hope that there is a real deity, or at least higher being out there, to save humanity from this battle between these wonderfully absurdist extra-terrestrials. After the wind dies down, the local policemen and villagers are left to puzzle over the wreckage, and what these signs and wonders could have meant.

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Truth and the Silo

Living in a silo, and wondering what is outside.

The first season of Apple's Silo series was beautifully produced and thought-provoking. Working from a book series of the same name which I have not read, it is set in a devastated world where about 10,000 people live in a huge underground silo. As the show progresses, it is clear that the society got a little totalitarian along the way. We are introduced to a "pact", which is the rules set up ~150 years ago, when a revolution of some undescribed sort happened. Now there is a "judicial" department that sends out goons to keep everyone in line, and there are the rules of the pact, which seem to outlaw fun and inquiry into anything from the past or the outside. It also outlaws elevators.

On the other hand, the population has a window to the outside, which shows an extremely drab world. A hellscape, really. But due to the murky nature of political power and information control within the silo, it is hard to know how real that view is. I won't give away any spoilers because I am interested in exploring the metaphors and themes the show brings up. For we are all working in, living in, and raised in, silos of some sort. Every family is a world more or less closed, with its own mood and rules, generally (hopefully) unwritten. The Silo portrays this involution in an incredibly vivid way.

(Third) Sheriff Nichols meets with the (second) mayor in a lovingly retro-decorated set.

It is fundamentally a drama about truth. One could say that most drama is about seeking truths, whether in a literal form like detective and legal dramas, or in more personal forms like romance, coming of age, and quest-for-power dramas. The point is to find out something, like how attractive the characters are, who will betray whom, who has lined up the better alliances, what a person's character is really like. Why read a story unless you learn something new? Here, the truths being sought are in bold face and out front. What is outside? Who really runs this place? What built this place? Why are we here? Why is everyone wearing hand-knit woolens? And the lead character, Juliet Nichols, is the inveterate truth-seeker. A mechanic by inclination and training, she really, really, wants to know how things work, is proud of mastering some of that knowledge, and is dedicated to dealing with reality and making it work. This quest leads her into rebellion against a system that is typical for our time ... at least in China, North Korea, and Russia. A surveillance and control state that watches everyone, pumps out propaganda, outlaws contrary thought, symbols, and objects, imprisons those who disagree, and ultimately sends inveterate truth seekers outside ... to die.

The nature of truth is of course a deep philosophical question. A major problem is that we can never get there. But even worse, we don't necessarily want to get there either. We automatically form a narrative world around ourselves that generally suffices for day-to-day use. This world is borne largely of habit, authority, instinct, and archetypes. All sorts of sources other than a systematic search for truth. For example, the easiest truth in the world is that we and our group are good, and the other group is bad. This is totally instinctive, and quite obvious to everyone. Religions are full of such truths, narratives, and feelings, developed in the least rigorous way imaginable, ending up with systems fired in the crucible of personal intution, and the imperatives of group dynamics and power. But truth? 

Lighting tends to be a little dark in the Silo, as are the politics.

The Orwellian society is curious, in a way. How can people's natural thirst for truth be so dangerous, so anti-social, and so brutally suppressed? Due to the processes mentioned above, each person's truth is somewhat distinct and personal, each person's quest goes in a different direction. But a society needs some coherence in its narrative, and some people (say, our immediate former president) have an intense yearning for power and need to dominate others, thus to bend them to their own version of truth. Reality distortion fields do not occur only in the tech industry, but are intrinsic to social interaction. The Silo, with its literally closed society, is a natural hothouse for a social fight for dominance and control of reality. Oh, and it has a eugenic program going on as well, though that is not a big focus in the first season.

One can almost sympathise with the fascists of the world, who see truth as functional, not philosophical. Whatever glorifies the state and its leader, whatever keeps the society unchanging and sheltered from uncomfortable truths and surprises. Who needs those pesky and divergent people, who just want to make trouble? And the more baroque and unhinged the official narrative has become, the more dangerous and easy the work of the social sabateur becomes. If the emperor has no clothes, it only takes a child to ask one question. In the Silo, there are various underground actors and uneasy officials who are losing faith in the official line, but where can they go? Is their doubt and desire for the facts more important than the continuation of this very tenuous and smothered society? Could a free-er society work? But why risk it?

In our contemporary world, the right wing is busy making up a parallel universe of obvious and button-pushing untruths. The left, on the other hand, is pursuing a rather righteous investigation into all the mainstream truths we grew up with, and finding them lies. Is the US founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism? Or on democracy and opportunity? Is capitalism salveagable in light of its dreadful record of environmental, animal, and human abuses? It is not a comfortable time, as the truths of our society are shifting underfoot. But is the left unearthing the true truth, or just making up a new and self-serving narrative that will in time be succeeded by others with other emphasis and other interests? 

History is a funny kind of discipline, which can not simply find something true and enshrine it forever, like the laws of gravity. There is some of that in its facts, but history needs to be continually re-written, since it is more about us than about them- more about how our society thinks about itself and what stories it selects from the past, than it is about "what happened". There are an infinite number of things that happened, as well as opinions about them. What makes it into books and documentaries is a matter of selection, and it is always the present that selects. It is a massive front in the formation / evolution of culture- i.e. the culture war. Are we a culture that allows free inquiry and diverse viewpoints on our history, and welcomes observations that undercut comfortable narratives? Or are we a more Orwellian culture that enforces one narrative and erases whatever of its history conflicts with it?

The top level dining room has a viewport to the outside.

The Silo is definitely a culture of the latter type, and its history is brutally truncated. Yet interestingly, character after character nurtures some object that violates the pact, representing a bond with the forbidden, hazy past - the forebears and former world that must necessarily have existed, even as nothing is officially known about them. The urge to know more, especially about our origins, is deeply human, as is the urge to keep one's society on an even keel with a unified and self-satisfied narrative. This tension is built up unceasingly in the Silo, which is as far as we know a unique and precious remnant of humanity. It asks the question whether its stability is worth so much oppression and ignorance.

Parenthetically, one might ask how all this connects to the dystopia outside. The Silo is only painting in extreme colors trends that are happening right now in our world. As the climate gets weirder, we spend more time inside, increasingly isolated from others, entertaining ourselves with streaming offerings like the Silo. Its apocalypse appears more nuclear than climatological, but for us, right now, a dystopia is unfolding. After decades of denial and greed, the truth of climate heating is no longer at issue. So what if the truth is known- has gotten out of the bag- but no one wants to act on it? Another form of courage is needed, not any more to uncover the truth, but to meet that truth with action- action that may require significant sacrifice and a fundamental re-design of our Silo-like system of capitalism.

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Science Fiction as Theology

Let's look higher than the clouds. Let's look to the stars.

I have always been rather dismissive of theology- the study of something that doesn't exist. But if one takes it in a larger sense of a culture of scripture, story telling, morals, and social construction, then sure, it makes more sense. But then so do alot of other stories. I have been enjoying the Foundation series via streaming, which is at best "inspired" by the original books, yet takes its premises reasonably seriously and grows a complex and interesting set of story lines to what by the end of the first season is a positive and promising conclusion. I would ding it for excessive adherence to Star Wars-style action and simplistic morality, compared with the more cerebral original, but that is only to be expected these days.

Science fiction is having a golden age, as a way to tell important, probing stories and consider alternative futures. The Star Trek franchise generally sticks with hopeful futures, which I certainly favor. Their world is post-money, post internal conflict, post-disease. But philosophically alive through contact with other civilizations. The theological implications are momentous, as we envision a culture very different from our own, and blessed with various magical means of deliverance, like transporters, replicators, and warp drives. Where the "science fiction" books of the Bible were mostly dystopian (Job, Revelation, Genesis), Science fiction in our era straddles the line, with plenty of dystopian offerings, but also hopeful ones. Whether Star Wars is hopeful might be a matter of debate, since bad guys and bad empires never seem to go away, and the position of the resistance is always impossibly dire.

White male mathematician Hari Seldon takes on the role of god, in the Foundation series. He calculates out the future of the galaxy, clairvoyantly predicting events, and then comes back from beyond the grave to keep guiding his flock through crisis after crisis.

Are Star Trek futures any more realistic than those of Revelation? Are they theologically more sound? I think yes on both counts. Revelation is a rather unhinged response to the late Jewish era in its apocalyptic relations with Rome, as it headed into exile and the diaspora. There is a welter of reworked Old Testament material and obscure references, turning into florid visions that have misled Christians for centuries. Star Trek and the other science fiction franchises, on the other hand, are a bit more restrained in their visionary quests and escatologies, and more hopeful, for abundant futures where some problems have been solved while other forms of politics and history continue to call for strong moral values. This is quite different than the bizarre and ecstatic culmination of Revelation at the end of history, in the last days.

We also get to live out the visions, on a small scale, as technology advances in the real world. Smart phones have transformed our lives, for instance, one promise kept from the early science fiction days. And our only real hope for dealing with climate change is to harness better technologies, rather than going down dystopian roads of degrowth, famine, and war. So there are real futures at stake here, not just visions of futures.

While our current physics totally bars the adventures that are portrayed in contemporary science fiction epics, their theological significance lies in their various visions of what humanity can and should do. They, as Revelation, are always keyed to their historical moment, with America ascendent and technologically advanced over other cultures. But they do not use their magical elements and story arcs to promote quiescence and slack-jawed wonder at the return of the son of god, who will make everything right and mete out judgement to all the bad people. (Or do the opposite, in the case of Job.) No, they uniformly encourage resistance against injustice, and hopeful action towards a better world, or galaxy, or universe, as the case may be.

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God Save the Queen

Or is it the other way around? Deities and Royalties in the archetypes.

It has been entertaining, and a little moving, to see the recent celebration put on by Britain for its queen. A love fest for a "ruler" who is nearing the end of her service- a job that has been clearly difficult, often thankless, and a bit murky. A job that has evolved interestingly over the last millenium. What used to be a truly powerful rule is now a Disney-fied sop to tradition and the enduring archetypes of social hierarchy.

For we still need social hierarchy, don't we? Communists, socialists, and anarchists have fought for centuries against it, but social hierarchy is difficult to get away from. For one thing, at least half the population has a conservative temperament that demands it. For another, hierarchies are instinctive and pervasive throughout nature as ways to organize societies, keep everyone on their toes, and to bias reproduction to the fittest members. The enlightenment brought us a new vision of human society, one based on some level of equality, with a negotiated and franchise-based meritocracy, rather than one based on nature, tooth, and claw. But we have always been skittish about true democracy. Maximalist democracies like the Occupy movement never get anywhere, because too many people have veto power, and leadership is lacking. Leadership is premised naturally on hierarchy.

Hierarchy is also highly archetypal and instinctive. Maybe these are archetypes we want to fight against, but we have them anyhow. The communists were classic cases of replacing one (presumably corrupt and antiquated) social hierarchy with another which turned out to be even more anxiously vain and vicious, for all its doublespeak about serving the masses. Just looking at higher-ranking individuals is always a pleasant and rewarding experience. That is why movies are made about the high ranking and the glamorous, more than the downtrodden. And why following the royals remains fascinating.

But that is not all! The Queen is also head of the Anglican Church, another institution that has fallen from its glory days of power. It has also suffered defections and loss of faith, amid centuries-long assaults from the enlightenment. The deity itself has gone through a long transition, from classic patriarchial king in the old testament (who killed all humanity once over for its sins), to mystic cypher in the New Testament (who demanded the death of itself in order to save the shockingly persistent sinners of humanity from its own retribution), to deistic non-entity at the height of the enlightenment, to what appears to be the current state of utter oblivion. One of the deity's major functions was to explain the nature of the world in all its wonder and weirdness, which is now quite unnecessary. We must blame ourselves for climate change, not a higher power. 

While social hierarchy remains at the core of humanity, the need for deities is less clear. As a super-king, god has always functioned as the and ultimate pinnacle of the social and political system, sponsoring all the priests, cardinals, kings, pastors, and the like down the line. But if it remains stubbornly hidden from view, has lost its most significant rationales, and only peeps out from tall tales of scripture, that does not make for a functional regent at all. While the British monarchy pursues its somewhat comical, awkward performance of unmerited superintendence of state, church, and social affairs, the artist formerly known as God has vanished into nothing at all.

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Love Beauty Truth

Book review of "Finding your Feet after Fundamentalism", By Darrell Lackey. With apologies to the other book.

An old friend has published a book. We had an epistolary relationship, fretting about creationism, intelligent design, and related topics back when those were livelier issues than today (and it directly inspired the birth of this blog). He was on his way out of Christian fundamentalism, and into something more liberal, even post-modern. His new book is a somewhat autobiographical account of the problems of fundamentalism, and of leaving fundamentalism as one's tradition. Naturally, evangelism dies hard, and takes this new form of broadcasting the good news of a more moderate and decent Christianity.

The book hits hardest on the issue of Donald Trump. No scandal has so thoroughly demonstrated the ultimate hypocrisy of fundamentalism than its allegiance to Trump. The transaction has given religious conservatives control of the Supreme Court, (though perhaps that owed more to Mitch McConnell), but in return, they showed their support for the most morally vile and incompetent person ever to hold the job. Lackey relates how he was fully in the FOX news orbit in the 90's, happily imbibing its bile. But then something snapped, and by the time of the Trump election, he had fully left fundamentalism and its communities behind. Living in California might have something to do with it, since liberalism, at least of a lip-service sort, is the dominant way of life here. Something that Republicans have learned the hard way. 

Yet the interesting part is how strenuously Lackey hews to Christianity, proclaiming that liberal versions are not gateway drugs to atheism. Quite the contrary- close attention to the actual New Testament provides ample justification for things like supporting marginalized communities, helping the poor, afflicting the rich, and viewing one's enemies as possibly reasonable human beings, if not friends in the making. He mentions how false it is for evangelicals to be so eager to spread the good word, but at the same time so deaf to the words of others that actual relationship is impossible- an evangelism of a closed-off community. 

For what are the fundamental values? Lackey cites love and beauty. Love is clear enough, (and damning enough regarding the FOX- driven culture of conservative Christianity), but the role of beauty needs a little more explaining. Religious thinkers have spared no effort in extolling the beauty of the world, but in the current world, serious artists are rarely Christian, let alone make Christian art. Why is that? Perhaps it is just intellectual fashion, but perhaps there is a deeper problem, that art, at least in our epoch, is adventurous and probing, seeking to interrogate narratives and power structures rather than celebrate them. Perhaps it is a problem of overpopulation, or of democracy, or of living in late imperial times, or of modernism. But whatever the framework, contemporary Christian communities have become the opposite of all this- anti-intellectual, tone-deaf, and art-hostile (not to mention power-mad). It must be exasperating to someone with even the least appreciation for finer things and for art that is "interesting".

Jean-Michel Basquiat- too messy for insensitive temperaments.

Beauty has deep Christian connotations. The world is god-made, good, and thus beautiful, as indeed we all feel it to be. But life is also messy, competitive, and dark. Death and suffering are part of it as well. If we refuse to own those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, we become blinded to the true nature of things, and expose ourselves to unintended and invisible expressions of the dark side, as we see in the deep hypocrisy on the subject of Trump, on sexual morals, and countless other areas within fundamentalism / evangelicalism. Lackey ticks off a lengthy list of subjects where conservative Christians have become blind to the obvious teachings of Jesus while fixated on relatively minor cultural flashpoints and red meat- symptoms of a general moral blindness borne of, arguably, flaccid aesthetic and intellectual habits.

So I would like to offer another value, which is truth. As a scientist, it is a natural place for me to start, but I think it is both illuminating of, and interrelated with, the other virtues above. What modern artists seek is to express truths about the human condition, not just ring out positive affirmations and hallelujas. Truths about suffering as well as truths about beauty. What scientists seek to do is to find how this world we find ourselves in works, from the cosmos down to the gluon. And they do so because they find it beautiful, and, like addicts, would like to unlock more of that beauty. Beauty inspires love, and love ... can only survive on truth, not lies. So I think these values live in a reinforcing cycle.

All that implies that there is another step to take for someone who has left fundamentalism. That is, to re-evaluate Christianity as a whole. While the achievement of decency (and better taste) by the renunciation of FOX and its religious satellite communities is an enormous step, indeed a momentous one for the preservation of our country's sanity, grappling seriously with the value of truth would suggest an extra leg to the trip. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Christianity as a whole is a questionable proposition, philosophically. As a narrative and moral system, it clearly has positive as well as negative potentials. But as a "truth"- with its miracles, resurrections, triune deity, and salvation at the end of the line, (whether for the elect, the saved, the good, or for all)- well, it is impossible to take seriously without heavy doses of tradition and indoctrination.

For his part, Lackey has headed in another direction, into the Eastern Orthodox church, finding a place that richly satisfies the fundamentalist urge to return to one of the most traditional and historically continuous churches in existence, and also one that does not tie itself into intellectual knots about literal truth, living biblically, and the like. Orthodoxy accepts mystery, and cherishes its ancient rites and structures as sufficient theology. It is not modernist, or goaded by the enlightenment to make a rational system of something that so obviously resists reason. 

For there is a fine line between lies, illusions, and truths. As anyone who is married will understand (or a citizen of a country, or part of a corporation, or part of any social structure), truth is not the only or necessarily best virtue. A bit of illusion and constructive understanding can make a world of difference. Narrative, ideology, framing, etc. are essential social glues, and even glues of internal psychology. So, given that illusions are integral, the work to identity them, bring them into consciousness, and make positive choices about them is what matters, especially when it comes to social leadership. Do we choose narratives that are reasonably honest, and look forward with hope and love, or ones that go down the easy road of demonization and projection? And what role should the most traditional narratives in existence- those of the ancient religions- have in guiding us?

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Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

I am reading an ancient book about ancient myths, covering some of what was known of the ancient world's stories circa the mid-20th century (that is, the "developed" ancient world of Egypt, the Near East, China, India, etc.). The authors occasionally seem exasperated that their colleagues- the ancient authors of these stories and myths- do not always take their stories as seriously as scholars themselves do, after having so painstakingly learned the relevant languages, unearthed the precious tablets, papyri, inscriptions, and other sources, compared different versions, and interpreted them in light of the historical setting. No, ancient myths can be playful affairs, evolving in dramatic complexity, freely mutating to serve the needs of the moment in their mutable oral traditions. This is especially true the farther back you go into ethnographic history, such as into the stories of the Inuit and other First Peoples of North America. It is evident that ancient societies varied widely in their theological and mythological sophistication, and particularly how closely entwined these were with the centers of power.

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

The scholarly apparatus around myth studies has a very earnest and modernist cast, which derives from two sources. First is Christianity, which as an extreme political and social elaboration of ancient religions has progressively reified and codified its myths. Inheriting a grab-bag of disparate ancient myths and stories, Christianity shored up its social position and theological bona fides by insisting that it was all true. The more sclerotic and far-reaching its bureaucratic structure, the more tightly it held to the absolute truth of its dogmas. A second aspect was the enlightenment and the rise of scientific modernity. That world view was not interested in playful myths of psychodrama, but in hard truths of how the world really works, stripped of the colorful trappings. Competition with this world view helped to further push religious dogmas in an absolutist direction, to that point where today, both Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalist Islamists insist that their scriptures are literally true, handed down from an all-powerful god who really exists and is not fictive construct meant as a playful expression of our scientific ignorance on one hand, and our love of social drama on the other. Anthropologists took their cues from all this, assuming that the precious myths they were studying had to be expressions of a society's absolute truths, organizing principles, and deepest motivations. But perhaps they were originally ways to pass the time and enchant a few youngsters.

Science is telling stories, too. Are they really so different? On the one hand, our need to orient ourselves in the world remains unchanged from ancient times, so the core purpose of explaining reality and society through complicated tales of causes and effects remains. And to a lay person, the explanations of quantum mechanics or cosmic inflation are no less impenetrable than myths about gods and dragons. Thus the scientists who are the custodians of these stories find themselves in the ironic position of a new priesthood, cultivating the cultural narrative around origins, natural phenomena, biology, and the like, while extending these stories in systematic ways that the priests (and alchemists, and shamans, and druids) of yore could only dream about, if they could even conceive of such reliable beliefs untethered from social drama and social control. But today's scientists can't and won't inject ancillary drama into these stories, so they will remain split off from their traditional roles and uses.

So the telling of dramatic stories and the consequent management of society through the narratives of origins, myths, and meaning- if ancient myths really did fulfill these functions, which is perhaps an anachronistic construction on our part, or at least varied widely with the nature of ancient societies- are skills having nothing, really, to do with the scientific enterprise of today, and thus nothing to do with this new priesthood. Who takes these roles?

Theology would seem the natural place for the living and socially relevant myth. But theology has split definitively from science, from history, and indeed from reality, nurturing narratives that are absurd while claiming they are true, and which in their antiquity and provincialism are impossibly remote from our current concerns, morals, and social ability to relate even allegorically. Theology has thus become lost in a sterile wilderness, doomed to be cut off from its mythical and social power. Even the more liberal and elastic precincts, if they do not insist on absolute literal truth, adhere to the crusty old stories of the Bible, which while occasionally artistic, are mostly a maddening hodgpodge and, frankly, boring. What was riveting in antiquity about lengthy ancestor lists, angry gods, virgin births, and ascending into the clouds is ridiculous today. 

The story-telling mantle has obviously been taken over by Hollywood- by the Marvel series, Star Treks, Star Wars, Potter series, and similar epics of modern fantasy. They bend reality in classically mythical ways, make up their own theology as they go along, (and throw it away as casually with the next installment), and communicate constantly updated social mores. The graphics are otherworldly, the stories and morals are updated, but the fundamental sophistication of these stories can't really be said to have advanced much. They are speaking to human nature, after all- a conversation between our inborn archetypes and the social and technological conditions we find ourselves in.

The key point is that Hollywood myths are taken as intended- as fertile and mind-expanding fantasies with social and moral lessons that are (hopefully) beneficial and relevant for our times. They are not trying to claim their myths as true- that would be absurd. Thus they do not collide with either scientific or theological claims, and use myth as it was originally and truly intended- as the dreamlike realm of symbolic human drama, full of lessons, yes, but not scientific ones, or even pseudoscientific ones.

• An outstanding dissection of just how bad US policy and behavior was in Afghanistan.
• Facebook / Fecebook is a cesspool, by design.
• Dead ender racism.
• A mutagenic drug to save us all.
• How about those great vaccines?
• Some nice piano.

Who Can be a Shaman? Who Must be a Shaman?

Pasaquan and the modern Shamanism of St. EOM, Eddie Owens Martin.

While not religious, I am fascinated by religion. This mode of thought and experience is obviously instinctive, patently irrational, and strenuously defended and rationalized via theology, apologetics, and other formerly respectable modes of thought, not to mention jihad and other sorts of brute power. We are (mostly) in a much better position today than in the old days when every political system had its state religion, and woe betide anyone caught thinking crosswise. Yet in the even earlier days of our species, religion was much more free-form, and while the instinct of religion is/was shared universally, its expression varied widely among far-flung, isolated peoples. We may generally call it shamanism. The first ingredient was an acceptance that some people care a lot more about spiritual matters than others do. Typically this is because they are misfits, maybe mentally disturbed, and have a heightened appreciation of the unreality of this reality that we think inhabit. Mind-altering drugs provide a glimpse of this widened perspective, and naturally comprise a central part of many shamanistic sacraments.

It is striking how the shared appreciation of an alternate reality, whether though official scripture, traditional dogma, or via ecstatic worship practices or mind-altering drugs, contributes to social bonding and personal psychological healing- which are the ultimate positive impacts of religion. Maybe the starkest naturalistic reality, now that we have evolved to appreciate its full horror, is incompatible with psychic health. Maybe an alternate, colorful, humane, and supportive reality is essential, and is particularly binding and healing if everyone shares it, almost regardless of its particular nature or irrationality. But on the other hand, even religions of intolerance, war, human sacrifice and cannibalism have sustained long-lived cultures, so the binding may take precedence over the humane-ness.

Ideologies and value systems are in play as well. Societies run on particular views of what is right, who counts, what is meaningful, etc. While these touch on empirical reality in some respects, their values and social apparatus are relatively untethered, free to valorize some, deprecate others, and place values on obscure things and odd activities. A misfit will be, by definition, more likely to suffer under the ambient ideology and prone to seek an alternative. Whether the shaman supports the current culture or seeks to subvert it, her work is critical in framing a social ideology that most other members of society hardly even know exists, and are not generally capable of shaping or grappling with consciously.

At its best, shamanism provides more than a narrative or theory about the unseen forces that run the world. It also centers the society with a purposeful narrative of its existence and the essential part each member plays in its continuance. It can heal individuals via the power of this social cohesion- as even medical science is beginning to recognize- since even without any objective medicine whatsoever, the rituals of care, support, and confidence are themselves powerful expressions of our social nature and aids to healing.

But what about today? We are heading into a post-religious world, where neither shamanism nor mainline theology rings true, capitalist ideology reigns, and social atomization is in part the result. It was jarring and intriguing to run across an odd TV program about an autodidactic shaman in Georgia, Eddie Owens Martin, who died in 1986. As a gay man in rural Georgia of the early 1900's, he fled to New York and led an underground life, which led to a career in fortune telling. Eventually he inherited a property in Georgia, and moved back on his own terms, using the proceeds from his fortune telling to build a spiritual retreat / theme park, with ornate decoration throughout.

St. EOM painting from Pasaquan

The connection between fortune telling and other facets of free-form shamanism are obvious. Martin, who renamed himself St. EOM, was obviously a charismatic person, and attracted helpers who attended ceremonies and helped with the painting. There was a hair theme, where Martin thought that he received messages from the gods through hair that had to be pointed upward. After he went bald, he resorted to pointing the ends of his extensive beard to the sky in order to maintain this connection. And what about all the symbology? It seems to consist of benevolent faces and highly colorful geometric designs, as are common in other spiritual and ceremonial settings. It looks like an effort to capture positive and healing material from the archetypes, which are partly eternal, and partly influenced by the culture of the day, where multiracial themes of harmony were coming to prominence.

All this reminded me strongly of two other shamans of the day, Carl Jung and Walt Disney. Where Martin was a spontaneous and demotic shaman, Jung come at it from a scholarly, indeed logorrheic perspective, producing book after book of memories, dreams, reflections, and rationalizations by which he straddled the scientific and credulus approaches to spiritualism. Most evocative was his Red Book, which features highly colorful dreamscapes full of pregnant symbols and meaning, harvested from his forays into the inner world of his own fixations and archetypes.

Lastly, Disney obviously shared the fantasy and dream motivations of Martin, though seemingly without much of the spiritual baggage. Disney was also moved in some mysterious way to make these fantasies concrete by creating theme parks where this positive message of colorful suspension of reality was given relentless and popular expression. These are demotic shamanism on a vast scale, drained of any deeper significance other than the lightest symbology that fleetingly speaks to part of us that hopes for an escape from the humdrum and pressing constraints of reality.

• Another healing fantasy in glorious animation- Secret of the Kells.
• Private schools- the real scandal is that they exist at all.
• Slavery.
• Crytocurrencies are a criminal accelerant- and should be banned. Not to mention being an environmental disgrace.

This Starship has Gone off Course

Review of the Star Trek Discovery series.

At risk of outing myself, I do occasionally watch Star Trek franchise material. Their original series was incredibly hokey by today's standards, but contained a beloved kernel of curiosity and adventure, and the franchise later matured into a thoughtful and inspiring series in The Next Generation. The ensuing series, such as Deep Space Nine and Voyager, kept to similar themes, and had fine moments (such as the spiritual environment of Bajor, and its supernatural orbs, within their orb cabinets). The last series of the original franchise, Star Trek Enterprise, was sort of a dull affair, with particularly wooden acting, before it veered, in its last season, into total "war on terrorism" territory with torture and other gratitous violence. My watching of the movies has been spotty, and I won't comment on those, as they are not really at the heart of the franchise, as I see it.

What makes (or made) Star Trek special was its modicum of thoughtfulness and philosophy, in a medium and genre otherwise ridden with thoughtless stereotypes, plots, and action. Its genre originated in the Western, but evolved into something all its own, which now can be endlessly replicated, mocked, and spoofed. While fights, killing, and other elements of typical plots abound, there are also elements of curiosity, scientific pursuit, ethical conundrums, and genuine compassion. It is in some ways a workplace drama, but about people who are all passionate about the work they do, making its world one to look forward to, and its tasks ones of adventure. At its very best, it can interrogate relevant social dilemmas in a way that is distanced enough to be entertaining and novel, while incisive enough to pack a punch.

A lengthy and rich history, but what does the future hold?

The three more recent renditions of Star Trek have included an independent series by Seth McFarlane, (The Orville), and official reboots from Paramount including an animated series (Lower Decks), a Patrick Stewart vehicle (Star Trek: Picard), and its main series, Star Trek: Discovery. The Lower Decks offering has been delightful- a very snappy, funny, and intelligent spoof of the whole Star Trek concept,  (and those who watch it), located on the USS Cerritos, named after perhaps the most uninteresting city in California. Only one season has been put out so far, but it has been superb, and fundamentally consonant with the founding Star Trek ethos.

The Orville series has been perhaps the best of the new bunch, despite not being an official part of the franchise. All the names have been changed- such as a "Planetary Union", in place of the United Federation of Planets. While it was originally conceived as heavy on the humor- some quite juvenile- McFarlane was clearly (and perhaps invountarily) taken with the Star Trek concept, and has progressed, as the episodes went on, to more adventurous and serious plots, ending up with complex time travel and one of the most thrilling episodes of TV I have even experienced (season 2.20, concerning the Kaylons, whose name may derive from the Mary Kay franchise ... who knows?). With the third season, his ambitions may have outstripped his resources, in addition to running into a Covid-induced hiatus. That season may never appear.

Meanwhile, Paramount put most of its effort into the Star Trek: Discovery series. This is set slightly before the original series, and features tremendous production quality, and a typical mixed cast of aliens and ethnicities on the bridge. But something seems to have gotten lost along the way. We are immediately launched into a war with the Klingons, who are now so festooned with makeup that they look like giant toads. Rather than exploring strange new worlds and civilizations, we are cast right into a heart-pounding deathly fight with a baroque enemy, complete with gratuitous torture and operatic pomposity on both sides. It is like we have landed in a Die Hard 2 reboot instead of a Star Trek series. "Discovery", indeed!

One would think that, to an erstwhile fungal researcher, the mycelial spore drive central to the Discovery plots would be a welcome bit of fictional technology. The premise is that an invisible (if sparkly) fungal mycelium pervades the galaxy, allowing suitably tuned neural systems to map it out and then follow its paths by travel that is not warp 5, not warp 10, but instantaneous in time. The crew's first tuned neural system was a humble tardigrade microbe, blown up in the show to monster proportions and strength. Later they develop an interface to a crew member, who sacrifices his sanity to the need for speed. Even given the modest standards of Star Trek tech talk/science-y fiction, all this is absurdly ridiculous. While tardigrades may be able to stand exposure to space, they can hardly live there. Likewise with fungi and their mycelia, (not the same as spores), which need water like anyone else. These technologies are so transparently and carelessly grabbed from decade-old issues of Science News that it is embarrassing. If the writers could not come up with something even remotely plausible, it would have been better to devise a nonsense bit of techtalk, which has a storied history in the franchise.

On the whole, Discovery has been a severe disappointment, at least to someone with minimal tolerance for empty action plots. As of episode 9, I can only watch a few minutes at a time before hitting action-trauma overload. Thankfully, there is streaming. It would be unimaginable to watch this the old-fashioned way, as everyone did who was fortunate enough to see the original series over its first few decades of broadcast and syndication.

• The success of the Western US electricity interconnect market.
• The biosphere is falling apart.
• Need a solar car port?
• What a course on inequality would look like.

The Autism of Politics

Our politics is an inarticulate communal search for expression of emotion.

I recently saw "A Brilliant Young Mind", a British take on growing up with autism. It is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen, exploring themes of family, loss, and love with wrenching sensitivity. The challenge of expressing, even feeling, one's own emotions is at the heart, naturally enough, for people on the spectrum. There is a fight by family members to crack that shell, to establish communication that expresses the love they know is there, and which will build warmth and confidence.

One theme is the power of speech- the bullying in school, the words of love from a parent. We may have recited the saying about sticks and stones, but it isn't true. Humans feel and use speech as touch, like Chimpanzees use grooming, to soothe each other. Music functions similarly, to touch others with shared emotions, strengthening essential bonds of trust and empathy. We also use speech also to attack each other, and climb the social hierarchy on the bodies of those cut down by words. 

Well, politics is a natural extension. We feel strongly that there should be someone in charge of each political unit- one person who embodies and expresses our feelings about the whole. It is not just a job, or an executive position, but a strongly archetypal role, which includes the work of binding us together through speech, or not, as our collective mood dictates. We have just been through an administration dedicated to the destructive power of speech, firing off tweets to cut down friends and enemies, formulating cryptic messages supporting inequality, tribalism, and racism. 

But political speech is hobbled by the vast population it addresses. The movie above spoke to me, perhaps because I felt familiar with many of its themes and dilemmas, or happened to appreciate its artistic approach. But it may not speak to you. Politics is about finding the largest possible audience, using the vaguest possible formulations to which listeners can impute their feelings about the body politic. It is thus necessarily painfully awkward, smothered in platitudes, and minimally communicative. In short, a little autistic. 

A still from the movie, with the main character and his mother in a typical pose.

So we as citizens are all in the position of wanting the collective to satisfy a some very deep needs for connection, security, and self-realization and expression. But we are reading a cryptic body politic and leadership for clues of true intention, hidden beneath what may be a voluble exterior of near-meaningless speech, and at the same time confounded by a lack of transparency and radical lack of personal access to those people who are the leaders. Conversely, those leaders are sequestered in their security and network bubbles, wanting (ideally) to understand and share the feelings of their constituents, but unable, simply by the scale of the enterprise, to do so. And anyhow, seeking the average feeling or attitude in a democracy ends inevitably in a muddled middle. Thus leaders are confined to rhetoric that in recent inaugurations, state of the union addresses, and so forth has been bland and weak, as uninspired as it is uninspiring. 

Our political / psychological needs seem to differ along temperamental / party lines, with Democrats forever searching for the healing leader who can reach out across the divide to bring a larger coalition together to accomplish empathetic ends, for the downtrodden, for the environment, and for the future. On the other hand, Republicans seem, since at least the time of Goldwater, to be unhopeful about change, and the future in general, indeed motivated by fear. Their quest is for a leader who will advocate for the hard truths of the inherent and useful infairnesses of life to restore the social hierarchical order, keep out aliens, and keep down the restive and poorly paid masses. The last administration was unusually forthright about the whole program, thus speaking into an intense rapport with its "base", while foresaking the traditional mincing "compassionate conservative" or "city on a hill" gestures that have in the past served to sugar-coat that message.

But speaking to the base turned out to be a disastrous political strategy, losing the House, Senate, and Presidency in turn. However powerful in expressing, even generating, rare emotional responses in that base, it failed to follow the most basic principle of political math. So we are back now to the anodyne stylings of a new Democratic administration, back to a normal relationship, which is to say not much of a relationship, between the leader and the led. Which is a great relief on the national level, even if it would be maddening and unsatisfying on any personal level.

• Are you on the spectrum?
• That music in our heads.
• The true nature of conservative jurisprudence.
• Myths, magic, and gods- right or wrong?
• Hamsterkauf?
• Bill Mitchell on inflation and other historical matters.
• Some delightful piano.

Atlas of Political Correctness

An appreciation of Cloud Atlas. (Spoiler alert!)

I recently happened across the 2012 film "Cloud Atlas", which must be one of the baggiest films ever made. Even reading the plot on the Wikipedia page leaves one befuddled. Yet it was great fun to watch, clearly an actor's feast and treasury of tropes and cultural references, six films packed into one. It is typical for science fiction films now to have huge ambitions and let plots go wild, sacrificing coherence for short-term motivation and effects. No reference to 2001 here- that would have been a harsh comparison, and overly optimistic.

The ensemble of actors get to play many roles, some have parts in each of the six stories set in different time periods. But no one crosses type. The good characters are always played by one set of actors, the bad guys by the other set. Nurse Noakes of the prison-like nursing home, in an inspired bit of cross-dressing, is played by Hugo Weaving, who also plays the killer Bill Smoke and the future executioner Boardman Mephi, among others. This helpfully keeps at least the good-guy/bad guy valence coherent, even as the rest of stories hop-scotch about wildly in time and place.

And what places! There is a matrix-like high-tech future dystopia, and even more dystopian low-tech lord-of-the-flies future beyond that, a seventies streets-of-San Francisco, Victorian shipping, wartime England, and the present. A grab-bag of well-worn settings, vivified by enthusiastic acting and propulsive, if perforated, plots.

Everything is confused. This DVD cover hints at the sprawling mess the Wachowski brothers attempted to bring to the screen.

So what is it about? Each story has a basic good versus bad armature, whether of vast world-spanning oppression countered by a Zion/Keanu Reeves-style resistance, an oil industry plot to blow up a nuclear reactor, countered by a journalist, or an evil Hugh Grant who tries to lock up his brother in a nursing home, which the latter escapes in a crazy escape and chase sequence. The various worlds / times are tenuously linked by readings from their respective pasts. The farthest future uses a climactic speech from the Zion-like resistance as its scripture. The Zion resistance watches the nursing home caper for entertainment. And so forth. The real connections, however, are the politically correct tropes of contemporary movie making. The heroes are all good, the villains are all bad, and each is ready identified (cue music) whatever the age we may be in.

The relentlessness of this good/bad dichotomy easily knits the whole thing together even without an identifiable plot, yet is also a glaring philosophical weakness. We watch movies to be uplifted and gain some hope in a difficult world, and generally expect and deserve a happy ending. But films such as these prompt the question of why... Why are bad people so common throughout the ages? Why do they dominate epoch after epoch, world after world, when every single person in the audience is cheering for the good characters, not the bad? Isn't there something deeper to be said? Indeed, isn't this easy, Zoroastrian / Manichean dramatic dichotomy damaging to a mature understanding of the world and of ourselves?

If we simply cheer for the good, and from such flacid moral exercises believe we are good, doesn't that lead right to the moral blindness that these movies try so strenuously and earnestly to "address"? Doesn't it contribute to various unwoke blindnesses like white priviledge and American exceptionalism? Unless we interrogate our own involvement in evil, the needs and compromises we routinely make, which lead through the many white-washed, green-washed, and theo-washed institutions of greed and tribalism to all the bad effects we decry in the world around us, we have not gotten very far.

• Language of fascism.
• Our position as most feudal country in the developed world.
• Lessons in Ebonics.

Pterosaurs

Yes, they really did fly- the amazing world of pterosaurs.

National Geographic recently had a beautiful spread on pterosaurs- those ungainly creatures that nobody thought could fly, until, apparently, we realized they really did fly. Indeed, they ruled the skies for over 160 million years- far longer than birds have. They operated a good deal like bats, with wings of membrane spread between modified fingers, which also stretched back to their legs. But a crucial difference is that, unlike bats, pterosaurs used only a modified fifth finger to carry the outside of the wing. The other fingers made up a strong hand about mid-wing that could be used for walking and lifting off. Thus pterosaurs were much better walkers than bats, and could also lift off from a standstill more effectively.

Reconstruction of the largest known pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus, as tall as a giraffe, from the late Cretaceous.

What remains astonishing is how much apparent weight these animals carried, especially in front. The largest known pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus, weighed about 440 pounds and had an enormous head. The head may have been quite thin, but, with neck, takes up roughly half its length. All pterosaurs tended to have large heads, and frequently added remarkable crests or horns, as if snubbing their beaks at aerodynamics. But looks are deceiving, since, like the toucan's bill, pterosaur crests and bones are hollow, very thin (1 mm), and thus were very light. The classic Pteranodon, with a crest almost as long as its enormous bill, is estimated to have weighed only 25 pounds, easily carried by a wingspan of 25 feet. Whether they could have carried off the hapless Zara Young is another matter.

Beautiful specimen of Rhamphorhynchus, from the Jurassic, with impressions of wing and tail membranes.

What is almost as compelling as the fossils of pterosaur bones are fossilized trackways, which show them in action. Over thirty walking tracks have been found, and one paper even describes what the authors interpret as a landing track. Typical pterosaur walking tracks show the heavier hind feet on the inside, and the wing/hands much more lightly on the outside. At each stride, the rear feet pull up roughly parallel to where the wing/hands have just left (b, in the figure). In these novel tracks, which begin abruptly, there are only hind feet for two strides, before the wing/hands appear. Secondly, the first hind feet tracks have elongated claw marks. Thirdly, the first two or three hind foot track sets are parallel and show a very short stride, different from typical walking gaits, of which the rest of this track is an example. These characteristics all lead to the idea that this pterosaur was landing, and hopped a couple of times with both feet before transitioning to a walking gait.

150 million year-old tracks from France. Top is an interpretation of the middle tracks, as evidence of landing. Below is a typical walking sequence and interpretation from the same location / source. The scale bar at bottom is 10 cm, so this pterosaur was relatively small.

This is not new work, dating from 2009, but the message is still a little hard to wrap one's head around- that tens of millions of years went by with these incredible creatures carrying on the battle for survival, with great success, and high style as well.

Nyctosaurus gracilis, reconstructed, from the late Cretaceous.

• A dumber nation- Thanks, Scott Pruitt!
• Xmas notes on another flying life form.

Audio Perception and Oscillation

Brains are reality modeling machines, which isolate surprising events for our protection and delectation. Does music have to be perpetually surprising, to be heard?

Imagine the most boring thing imaginable. Is it sensory deprivation? More likely it will something more active, like a droning lecturer, a chattering relative, or driving in jammed traffic. Meditation can actually be very exciting, (just think of Proust!), and sensory deprivation generates fascinating thought patterns and ideas. LSD and similar drugs heighten such internal experiences to the point that they can become life-altering. Which indicates an interesting thing about the nature of attention- that it is a precious resource that feels abused not when it is let loose, but when it is confined to some task we are not interested in, and particularly, that we are learning nothing from.

Music exists, obviously, not to bore us but to engage us on many levels, from the physical to the meditative and profound. Yet it is fundamentally based on the beat, which would seem a potentially boring structure. Beats alone can be music, hypnotically engaging, but typically the real business of music is to weave around the beat fascinating patterns whose charm lies in a tension between surprise and musical sense, such as orderly key shifts and coherent melody.

Why is all this attractive? Our brains are always looking ahead, forecasting what comes next. Their first rule is ... be prepared! Perception is a blend of getting new data from the environment and fitting it into models of what should be there. This has the virtues of providing understanding, since only by mapping to structured models of reality are new data understandable. Secondly, it reduces the amount of data processing, since only changes need to be attended to. And thirdly, it focuses effort on changing or potentially changing data, which are naturally what we need to be paying attention to anyhow ... the stuff about the world that is not boring.

"Predictive coding is a popular account of perception, in which internal representations generate predictions about upcoming sensory input, characterized by their mean and precision (inverse variance). Sensory information is processed hierarchically, with backward connections conveying predictions, and forward connections conveying violations of these predictions, namely prediction errors." 

"It is thus hypothesised that superficial cell populations calculate prediction errors, manifest as gamma-band oscillations (>30 Hz), and pass these to higher brain areas, while deep cell populations [of cortical columns] encode predictions, which manifest as beta band oscillations (12–30 Hz) and pass these to lower brain areas." 

"In the present study, we sought to dissociate and expose the neural signatures of four key variables in predictive coding and other generative accounts of perception, namely surprise, prediction error, prediction change and prediction precision. Here, prediction error refers to absolute deviation of a sensory event from the mean of the prior prediction (which does not take into account the precision of the prediction). We hypothesised that surprise (over and above prediction error) would correlate with gamma oscillations, and prediction change with beta oscillations."

A recent paper (and review) looked at how the brain perceives sound, particularly how it computes the novelty of a sound relative to an internal prediction. Prediction in the brain is known to resemble a Bayesian process where new information is constantly added to adjust an evolving model.

The researchers circumvented the problems of low-resolution fMRI imaging by using volunteers undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy, who allowed these researchers to study separate parts of their brains- the auditiory cortex- for purposes completely unrelated to their medical needs. They also allowed the researchers to only record from the surfaces of their brains, but to stick electrodes into their auditory cortexes to sample the cortical layers at various depths. It is well-known that the large sheet of the cortex does significantly different things in its different layers.

Frequencies of tones (dots) given to experimental subjects, over time.

The three subjects were played a series of tones at different frequencies, and had to do nothing in return- no task at all. The experiment was merely to record the brain's own responses at different positions and levels of the auditory cortex, paying attention to the various frequencies of oscillating electrical activity. The point of the study was to compare the data coming out with statistical models that they generated separately from the same stimuli- ideal models of Bayesian inference for what one would expect to hear next, given the sequence so far.

Electrode positions within the auditory areas of the subject's brains.

Unfortunately, their stimulus was not quite musical, but followed a rather dull algorithm: "For each successive segment, there is a 7/8 chance that that segment’s f [frequency] value will be randomly drawn from the present population, and a 1/8 chance that the present population will be replaced, with new μ [mean frequency] and σ [standard deviation of the frequency] values drawn from uniform distributions."

Correlations were calculated out between the observed and predicted signals, giving data like the following:

Prediction error and surprise are closely correlated, but the experimenters claim that surprise is a better correlated to the gamma band brain waves observed (B).

The difference between observation and prediction, and between surprise and prediction error. Surprise apparently takes into account the spread of the data, i.e. if uncertainty has changed as well as the mean predicted value.

What they found was that, as others have observed, the highest frequency oscillations in the brain correlate with novelty- surprise about how perceptions are lining up with expectations. The experimenter's surprise (S) measurement and prediction error (Xi) are very closely related, so they both correlate with each other and with the gamma wave signal. The surprise measure is slightly better correlated, however.

On the other hand, they observed that beta oscillations (~20 Hz) were correlated with changes in the predicted values. They hypothesized that beta oscillations are directed downward in the processing system, to shape and update the predictions being used at the prior levels.

Lastly, they find that the ~10 Hz alpha oscillations (and related bands) correlate with the uncertainty or precision of the predicted values. And theta oscillations at ~6 Hz were entrained to the sound stimulus itself, hitting when the next sound was expected, rather than encoding a derived form of the stimulus.

It is all a bit neat, and the conclusions are dredged out of very small signals, as far as is shown. But the idea that key variables of cognition and data processing are separated into different oscillatory bands in the auditory cortex is very attractive, has quite a bit of precedent, and is certainly an hypothesis that can and should be pursued by others in greater depth. The computational apparatus of the brain is very slowly coming clear.

"These are exciting times for researchers working on neural oscillations because a framework that describes their specific contributions to perception is finally emerging. In short, the idea is that comparatively slow neural oscillations, known as “alpha” and “beta” oscillations, encode the predictions made by the nervous system. Therefore, alpha and beta oscillations do not communicate sensory information per se; rather, they modulate the sensory information that is relayed to the brain. Faster “gamma” oscillations, on the other hand, are thought to convey the degree of surprise triggered by a given sound."

• Bill Mitchell on the Juncker regime.
• Who exactly is corrupt in Brazil, and how much?
• There are too many people.
• But not enough debt.
• The fiscal "multiplier" is not constant.
• Population has outstripped our willingness to build and develop.
• What's going on in the doctor's strike?
• Schiller on lying in business, Gresham's dynamics, and marketing.
• Lying in religion.
• Stiglitz on economics: "The strange thing about the economics profession over the last 35 year is that there has been two strands: One very strongly focusing on the limitations of the market, and then another saying how wonderful markets were."
• Should banks be public institutions?
• Does democratic socialism have a future in Russia?
• A Sandersian / Keynesian stimulus is only effective if the Fed plays along.
• Science yearns to be free.
• Trump's brush with bankruptcy and friends in high places.