Crop Circle Orgies Reviisited - Homeopathy

In an earlier post, we noted exceptions to the Internet's Rule 34.  IE, things exist that there is not porn of.  Well, it turns out that in at least one case - crop circle erotica - we were wrong.  There is this:  http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts3107226.aspx.  It's not good crop circle erotica - indeed, the crop circle motif doesn't enter until the last lines - but it exists.

If you want to find something, it helps to look for it.  I'm writing this post because I mentioned the earlier one in a Gawker.com comment, and someone sent me a link.  Why didn't I find it myself?  Unclear - perhaps it's new.  Or perhaps because I equated "porn" with pictures, not text; preconceptions are a kind of blindness.

Corollary:  it's difficult to find something you're not looking for.  Especially if you're not looking for it because you don't know it exists.  Carbon nanotubes, the wonder material of tomorrow, were first created in a lab in the 1950s, but owing to cold war secrecy, they weren't widely investigated in the West until the '90s.  Their story is fascinating, but we want to discuss them in the context of a much earlier "wonder material" - Damascus steel.

The technique for making Damascus steel was thought to be lost for centuries, until it's rediscovery .  But that's not the only unusual thing about it; part of it's legendary efficacy as sword/knife material comes from a very high tech feature: Damascus steel contains carbon nanotubes.

What does this have to do with Homeopathy?  Homeopathic medicines involve diluting the "active" ingredient to the point where no molecules of the original substance are present in the Homeopathic one; it is believed, however, that the Homeopathic fluid contains a "memory" of the active ingredient.

To science (circa 2014), this is quackery. We do not disagree - at least not yet. Perhaps Homeopaths should go to engineering school.  There, they could study memristors.

Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements - resistors, capacitors and inductors.  But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit - voltage, current, charge and flux - behave in the three basic elements. The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge.
Chua showed that his predicted device could remember the last voltage applied to it, and how long it had been applied. He dubbed the property "memristance" but the memristor was quietly forgotten because it was unclear how it could ever be built.

Only, they have since been observed - in the titanium dioxide molecules used in sunscreen:

Williams' team has now done just that, using nanoscale circuits including molecules of the active ingredient of sunscreen - titanium dioxide.
Such circuits are used to try and use small clumps of molecules to store the binary 0s and 1s of charge to work as computer memory.
However, these efforts have been dogged by bizarre electronic effects, says Williams, who has now worked out the reason. His titanium dioxide works as a memoristor - the mythical device has been found.

Does this mean it's time to do that Internet Tutorial on Homeopathy?  Probably not.  But we now have proof that "memory" effects are possible in nature, and that's a start.  And no, Googling (and Image searching) "nude homeopaths" does not return homeopath-related porn.

Human Nature - Maybe Not So Universal?

We all agree: cultures may differ, but people are the same everywhere.  Only that may not be true.  Scientists believe there are five universal human traits - or they did, until the discovered a culture that only has two.

In recent years, psychologists have zeroed in on five big personality traits that appear to be universal.No matter what culture people come from, a number of studies have suggested, everyone incorporates some degree of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.But after considering the indigenous and mostly illiterate Tsimane forager–horticulturalists of Bolivia, researchers are challenging the idea of the "Big Five." Instead, they argue that the Tsimane have just two main personality traits: socially beneficial behavior and industriousness.The findings call into question the universality of human personality traits. Instead, the specific demands of various societies may affect which quirks of character become most significant to different groups of people.

Another way humans might differ is in varying degrees of bicamerality, as proposed by Julian Jaynes in "The Evolution of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind:"

The bicameral mentality would be non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The bicameral mind would thus be a "zombie mind" lacking metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content. When bicamerality as a method of social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which, Jaynes argued, is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative practice.

We're mentioning this because we want to invent a new word, and we want this invention documented and time-stamped.  We predict that science will discover large variations in how "humans" experience - or don't experience - consciousness.  They will then observe the Contemporary Western Model spreading via internet, mass-media, etc, and bemoan the loss of those other forms.  We really need a word for this - a word for different (or absent?) models of human  consciousness.  Both "psychodiversity" and "noodiversity" already exist, but it's not clear their accepted meanings quite match what we propose.

So...this is left as an exercise for the student.

Are We Living In "The Matrix?" It Might Be Testable

First, apologies.  I've been neglecting "Bug Reports" in favor of writing that actually pays money: contributing to www.cracked.com.  (If you've come here from there, hello and welcome, BTW).  I'm also working on a screenplay for an indy-style movie; the working title is "Jesus Versus The Mushrooms."  It's envisioned as a stoner-style comedy in the Harold and Kumar tradition, albeit with heavily Gnostic and Fortean overtones.

But now, back to Bug Reports.  One of our staples here is experiments which might prove that we're actually living in "The Matrix."  We dealt with it in our very first post.    And followed up here.

Of course, proving the universe isn't a hologram (or else a really fine-grained one) doesn't mean we're not living in a computer simulation.  This article in Technology Review explains how we might test for such a scenario.  Describing how a supercomputer would simulate a small part of the universe, they write:

Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals....
They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself. So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles...
Beane and co calculate that the lattice spacing imposes some additional features on the spectrum. “The most striking feature…is that the angular distribution of the highest energy components would exhibit cubic symmetry in the rest frame of the lattice, deviating significantly from isotropy,” they say.In other words, the cosmic rays would travel preferentially along the axes of the lattice, so we wouldn’t see them equally in all directions. That’s a measurement we could do now with current technology....
But the calculations by Beane and co are not without some important caveats. One problem is that the computer lattice may be constructed in an entirely different way to the one envisaged by these guys.  Another is that this effect is only measurable if the lattice cut off is the same as the GZK cut off. This occurs when the lattice spacing is about 10^-12 femtometers. If the spacing is significantly smaller than that, we’ll see nothing.

In other words, if we don't find what they predict, we're not out of the woods - we could still be a computer program, just a different kind.  (And that's assuming we're not something really different, such as an analog computer)

But if they DO find it?  Would it strongly suggest the universe is the result of intelligent design?  Not the Judeo-Christian God, necessarily, but a Demiurge of some sort?  One would think so.  Of course one can think of objections: if the universe is infinite, for example, than such "computer" simulations would arise by chance.

Still, the last couple of centuries have not been kind  to religious faith.  First, Galileo's telescope showed the universe wasn't a perfect Aristotelian mechanism. Then we had Darwin,  geographers discovering the world was more than 6000 years old, and Higher Criticism telling us Scriptures weren't written by the people (Moses, etc) who we'd always thought had written them.  It's hardly been worth getting out of bed on Sunday morning.

Scientific proof that we were created by an intelligence greater than ourselves would turn society upside down.  Part of me wants to see it for the sheer David and Goliath aspect.  But the cautious part of me knows that in David and Goliath contests, it's always smart to bet on Goliath.

Sex Magic, Your Data, And You

Marshal McLuhan said "the medium is the message."  One hears this as "the medium is the message."  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage  is a detailed list of the "tropes" that put the TV in TVness. It's a Golden Bough for post-moderns, a collection of mass-media Jungian Archetypes.

What if McLuhan meant "the medium is the message?" 

Did we mention that much of what's in human DNA is thought to be junk?  What if the purpose of some - or all - life forms is to carry secret messages? The idea of using DNA for steganography has actually been around for awhile. 

DNA can also be used as a computer.   And ... the "data" for the DNA computer is, apparently ...  more DNA! 

Is this why all mainstream religions take a dim view of sex magic?  Because of the potential data corruption issues?

Omniscient? No Need For Checkers, then

The game of checkers has been "solved,"  according to this abstract at the Science magazine website:

The game of checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5 × 10²⁰). The task of solving the game, determining the final result in a game with no mistakes made by either player, is daunting. Since 1989, almost continuously, dozens of computers have been working on solving checkers, applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to the proving process. This paper announces that checkers is now solved: Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw. This is the most challenging popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times as complex as Connect Four. Artificial intelligence technology has been used to generate strong heuristic-based game-playing programs, such as Deep Blue for chess. Solving a game takes this to the next level by replacing the heuristics with perfection.

If you're a supercomputer, there's no reason to play checkers anymore; the game will always end in a draw.  The abstract's part about "no mistakes made by either player" suggests a Captain Kirk-like "illogical" move could still work, but reading the whole paper dashes that hope.  If you're a supercomputer, stick to Go, or Solitaire.

Similarly, an omniscient God has no need to create us; our lives are a question he already knows the answer to.  So why are we here?

Human Nature: It's (almost) Fixable

A recent article in Popular Science, if it comes true, will make all religions and  secular metaphysics obsolete.  It's about scientists   working on artificial nerves, the better to make prosthetic limbs with:

Previously, scientists surgically connected electrodes to the nervous system, but they seemed to harm the body’s tissues, making the implant fail within months. In 2005, scientists discovered that they could stimulate a neuron to send a message by shining infrared light on it. Last September, DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D branch, awarded $4 million to a project led by Southern Methodist University engineers to attempt to connect nerves to artificial limbs using fiber optics.

The team suspects that flexible glass or polymer fiber optics will be more flesh-friendly than rigid electrodes. In addition, optical fibers transmit several signals at once, carrying 10 times as much data as their electrical counterparts. “Our goal is to do for neural interfaces what fiber optics did for the telecom industry,” says electrical engineer Marc Christensen, who is leading the SMU group. Transmitting more information faster should give bionic limbs more lifelike movements.

This month, the team will implant optical fibers to stimulate a rat’s rear leg. If it works, Christensen says, in about a decade, robotic arms could be as graceful as Steve Austin’s six-million-dollar one.

Popular Science loves these gee-whiz announcements.  The claim that this technology will be available "in about a decade" may be made, straight-faced, twenty years from now.  Someday, though, they will get it right.  It will be great for paralytics and amputees.  But the real payoff will be finally "curing" human  nature.

Our predicament is simple: we experience reality as an isolated island of self-referential consciousness trapped in a meat bag.  We are selfish because we're wired that way. But this technology, coupled with ubiquitous networking, can make each of us feel what everybody feels.  If one of us suffers, we will all suffer.  If one of us laughs, we all laugh.  We will be pan-humans.  None of us will be happy unless all of us are happy.

Utopian?  Yes.  Feasible?  Eventually.  And there will be unintended consequences, no doubt about it.

How To Train Your Physics

Imagine a "Sims" game produced in the far, far future.  The "people" in the game are produced by sophisticated AI; they're almost human.  You want them to do science; figure out how their world works.

Also, you want the game to last a long time.

One problem is obvious: make the "world" they live in too simple they'll figure it out quickly.  But the other extreme may discourage them so much they give up.  (A third problem is that they may invent something totally unforeseen; if the Sim doesn't have robust error-handling, it'll crash.)

What to do?

Suppose I give the Sim's physics engine AI of its own; an AI slightly more powerful than the Sims'.  As the Sim's subject the Physics Engine to more sophisticated inquiries, it evolves more sophisticated responses.  When the Sims discover the "black body" problem, the Physics Engine invents quantum mechanics.

The physics engine can't contradict itself; if gravity makes things fall down,  it can't start making things fall up.  Apparent contradictions are allowed.  And the Physics Engine, being intelligent, will game the rules, even cheat, if it can.

Intelligence makes mistakes.  Find something wrong, and you've found intelligence.

How To Fly in One (Impossible) Lesson

Post-Modernists tell us there are no facts, only competing narratives.  But no one lives that way; we all behave as though some things are unambiguously "true."  A critic asks "What happens if you jump off the George Washington bridge thinking you can fly?"

A real Post-Modernist  answers: "Gravity is a narrative.  It doesn't work if you don't believe in it."

But some conditions apply:

First, you must really believe gravity doesn't apply to you.  Any doubt at all and you'll plummet.  Belief is part of a feedback loop in which consciousness plays a part, but not the biggest part.  Try it.  Decide, as an act of will, to adapt a new belief; one that's wholly out of character for you. 

Not so easy, is it?  No wonder there are Calvinists (who believe it's predestination, not faith, that saves us).

Second, even when you succeed in changing your belief about gravity, no one else will know about it.  You can levitate around your neighborhood as easily as Peter Pan - but you will be invisible.  Your neighbors won't see you flying, because they don't believe you can.

The great "reform" movements of the 20th century were totalitarian because they had to be.  Unfortunately for them, brainwashing takes tremendous effort, and even then it rarely works - obedience can be coerced, but not Faith.

If post-modernists are right, the question of whether you can learn to fly like Peter Pan depends on the answer to the question "is something like self-brainwashing possible?"  And if it is, how does one do it?

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

The Universe: Probably Not A Hologram

Our very first blog post was about an experiment showing the universe is "pixellated" - what you'd expect if we are, in fact, living in a giant hologram.  But:

[A] European satellite that should be able to measure these small scales hasn't found any quantum fuzziness at all, contradicting the interpretation of the GEO600 results and indicating that the pixellation of spacetime, if it exists, is considerably smaller than predicted.

By examining the polarisation of gamma-ray bursts as they reach Earth, we should be able to detect this graininess, as the polarisation of the photons that arrive here is affected by the spacetime that they travel through. The grains should twist them, changing the direction in which they oscillate so that they arrive with the same polarisation. Also, higher energy gamma rays should be twisted more than lower ones.

However, the satellite detected no such twisting -- there were no differences in the polarisation between different energies found to the accuracy limits of the data, which are 10,000 times better than any previous readings. That means that any quantum grains that exist would have to measure 10^-48 metresor smaller.

So if the universe IS a hologram, it's a fine-grained one. Assuming, of course, that nature doesn't lie to us.

What Did You Predict In The War, Daddy?

People - more than one person - wants to know exactly how "America will win World War III and not even get a scratch."  So, with a caveat, here it goes:

1. Our nukes go "boom."
2. Their nukes go "pfft."

How would we arrange this happy (?) state of affairs?  Easy.  Since 1996, none of the great powers has tested a nuclear weapon by actually setting it off.  No - it's all done with simulations, running on supercomputers.  If we could trick our advasaries into making mistakes with their simulations, we could neuter them.

It's a risky plan, but it has precedent - the US did something similar with pipeline control software back in the 80s.

Another weird aspect of this theory is that the only countries, besides us, who would have working nukes, are the Pakistanis and the North Koreans - who never signed the Test Ban treaty, and actually DO set off H-bombs once in awhile.

I've had grave misgivings about this post.  I have NO access to classified information of any kind - this is the ranting of a disturbed mind.   But predictions - even wacky ones - can sometimes come true.  England's last "Witch Trial" happened during World War II; the "witch," Helen Duncan, had "prophesied" the sinking of the British battleship Barham - which had actually already happened! 

One of the best books about the experience of studying Fortean phenomena is "The Mothman Prophecies," by John Keel.  Keel's message is clear: when you think about weird stuff, weird stuff thinks about you.

Food Of The Gods?

Does God want to eat us?  We recently commented on Charles Fort's theory that ""The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property."

Perhaps he got the idea the Bible, where the 23rd Psalm begins "the Lord is my shepherd."  But the Psalmist doesn't take this imagery to it's logical conclusion; the Psalmist isn't shorn, then killed and eaten.

Still, Christians, especially Catholics, are often accused of cannibalism because of the imagery of the Last Supper.  "This is my body," says Jesus.  "Eat this in remembrance of me."

Reading Scripture with an open mind is hard.  We only see what we expect to see.  In GK Chesterton's Father Brown mystery "The Invisible Man"  everyone swears no one entered the building where the murder occured.  The killer became "invisible" by becoming ubiquitous - he disguised himself as a mailman.

Christian imagery depicts "the good shepherd," but is blind to its implications.  Raising us - for wool or any other purpose - is an action consistent with a flawed, limited creator - a Demiurge, not a Messiah.

Beyond The Bomb

The "kaboom" part of a nuclear weapon is called the "physics package,"  presumably because it uses the one law of physics everyone knows: E = mC^2. 

Surprisingly, H-bombs are not efficient; only a few percent of the plutonium mass is converted to energy.  An anti-matter bomb, like the one in the Dan Brown novel, could theoretically operate at 100% efficiency.

But really epic kabooms can't be made by using the laws of physics; they're made by exploiting the laws of physics. 

A BB gun normally transmits energy using the law E=MV^2; change the laws of physics in  its vicinity such that E=M^1,000,000V^1,000,000 and you raise its destructive power to a whole 'nother level.

Science seeks to discover natural laws.  If Gnostic claims are true, and the universe was created by a finite, fallible creator, physicists may well discover not just natural laws, but the means by which those natural laws are implemented.  Future bombs won't have a "physics package" - they'll have a meta-physics package!

A Fortean Porn Result?

Previously, we noted that the infamous "Rule 34" breaks down when applied to Gnostic Forteanism.  Now, we still haven't found pictures of naked Gnostic girls, but we have found a porn-related experiment with decidedly Fortean overtones:

In another experiment, devised to test precognition, Bem provided his volunteers with the following instructions: “This is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all. Several of the pictures contain explicit erotic images (e.g., couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts). If you object to seeing such images, you should not participate in this experiment.” Which curtain covered an image was selected randomly by computer, which should have given subjects a 50 per cent chance of correctly locating the image.

The results were interesting, to say the least, with subjects achieving an overall hit-rate of 53.1 per cent for the pornographic pictures; while this may not sound all that impressive, statistically speaking it is significantly above chance. Their hit-rate on the neutral, non-erotic pictures was 49.8 per cent. Similar above-chance results were found in eight of the nine experiments, and across all nine an average ‘affect size’ of 0.22 was obtained.

Originally, this column was going to be about the Copenhagen Interpretation.  It's much safer for non-specialists to avoid modern physics - but where's the fun in that?  So, pressing forward, from Nature Magazine:

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

In other words, while the map is still not the territory, it's possible that there is, in fact, real territory for the map to represent.

Or is there?  It turns out there might be another explanation:

[T]he new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other.

Nature concludes this is unlikely, so we'll have to go with neo-realism, rather than having a "scientific" basis for things like ESP, alchemy, astrology, homeopathy, and other "action at a distance" phenomena.

Suddenly, Credibility

In my second blog post  I said we're not here to discuss politics.  But - and this is important - making predictions that later come true is how your Your Humble Commentator builds credibility.

I predicted that in order to reverse declining birth rates the US would reintroduce child labor, making children profit centers instead of cost centers.   It turns out Newt Gingrich agrees:

In an appearance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government last Friday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called child labor laws “truly stupid.”   Gingrich is known for — and proud of — his unconventional ideas. As he said himself in the same speech, “you’re going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals.”

 This one actually comes on the heels of efforts to change child labor laws around the country. But Gingrich’s suggestion that children start working as early as age nine goes far beyond what most other Republicans are proposing.

I don't know if Mr. Gingrich reads Bug Reports, or if he thought of the idea on his own.  While flattered, this does not mean that I endorse Mr. Gingrich's candidacy.   (Or that I oppose it - this blog IS NOT political).  We Gnostic Forteans have important questions of our own, such as my forthcoming post on the question "Does God Want to Eat Us?"

Still, I'm toying with another blog post that makes an outrageous prediction, so keep coming back to read "How America Will Win World War III, And Not Even Get A Scratch."

Discovery Channel: Call Me!

Most people who buy lottery tickets know they probably won't win; but if they buy a ticket they can indulge a fantasy.  That won't work for me; I've taken too many math courses.

Truth is, after a serious illness forced me into early retirement I learned how to be poor, but happy. Still...who doesn't dream of getting really, stinking  rich?  Tempered by adversity, I could handle obscene wealth without turning into a douche bag.

But how?


I've considered various stratagems: indy-filmmaking and / or starting a high-end audio company are both appealing.  But execution and follow-through are not my strong points.  I'm more of a pure idea man.

Which leads us directly to Reality TV, where the right premise is everything:

(Fade in)
Two MEN, rugged, outdoorsy types, in an epic western ladnscape; the Rocky Mountains, perhaps.  We see a bear trashing a campsite.

NARRATOR (Voice over)
"Bears are nature's champions, but if they loose their fear of humans, they can get in lots of trouble, and may have to be put down.  That's where me and my partner Ivan come in.  We use our mixed martial arts training to put the fear of man back in the bear.  We're..."
(Cut to: title, theme music)
"...the Grizzly Punchers.  Using our feet and our fists, we fight bears in order to save them.  After they meet us, they'll never want to see a human again."
(Cut to commercial)

Fun - and Fortean - as Reality Television can be, I think I've hit on an even better idea: starting my own Think Tank.  It's easier than TV; the ideas won't even have to be good ones....

Discovery Channel, if you're reading this - call.  Once I'm a high-powered public intellectual I'll be too busy for you.  Act now!

True Hallucinations?

Is reality a  lie?  Pop-culture Gnosticism thinks it might be, as films like The Matrix, The Truman Show, Inception, and Blade Runner demonstrate.  Descartes, an orthodox Christian, argued against a "demon" who could confound our senses, and for the proposition that reality - mostly - doesn't lie, in his Meditations.

Now comes this intriguing news from an article called "Drug Hallucinations Look Real in the Brain," in New Scientist:

[Researchers] asked the volunteers to look at images of people or animals while their brains were scanned using functional MRI, then asked the volunteers to close their eyes and imagine they were still viewing the image. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that neural activity in the primary visual cortex dropped off when volunteers imagined seeing the image rather than actually viewing it.

But when the team then gave the volunteers a dose of ayahuasca and repeated the experiment, they found that the level of activity in the primary visual cortex was virtually indistinguishable when the volunteers were really viewing an image and when they were imagining it. This means visions seen have a real, neurological basis, says de Araujo – they are not made up or imagined.

It doesn't prove we live in The Matrix.  (Or in Terance McKenna's world)  But the hardware is ready.  Legacy support?  Or future proofing?

The Cashier Who Isn't There

One of my favorite Charles Fort quotes is "The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property." 

Another wag says "if you're not paying for something, you aren't the customer - you're the product."  The context is internet services like Facebook.  But he could be talking about the situation humanity finds itself in vis-a-vis life.

You say, but we are life's customers; we pay for the privilege of life by growing old and dying. Thanks to entropy we can pay on the installment plan.

Philip K. Dick imagined a "Zebra" - a deity who hides in plain site.  What better hiding place for the supernatural than in the implacable, ubiquitous laws of nature?

Another Reason Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Sola Scriptura

What are we to make of Mathew 12:22-37:

22Then they brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see. 23All the people were astonished and said, “Could this be the Son of David?”

24But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “It is only by Beelzebub,^d the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.”

25Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. 26If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? 27And if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. 28But if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

29“Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his house.

30“He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. 31And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 

 We know from other NT passages that demons, once cast out, can always return to their host later.  So Satan, by temporarily giving up possession of the blind-mute, secures the allegiance of Jesus' followers.  In chess, we call this a "sacrifice;" giving up one piece to secure something of greater value.  If the Pharisees are right, Jesus' "miracle," by tricking believers, would give to Satan all those who call themselves "Christians."  If I were Satan (and I'm not!), I'd take that deal.


Experienced Criminologists would also blanch as Jesus' response.  A skilled interrogator expects an innocent person, falsely accused, to say "I didn't do it." Instead, Jesus responds with the spurious "house divided" argument, then engages in what looks like psychological projection: "31And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. "

Of course traditional Christianity has a quite different interpretation, one that focuses on the unforgivable sin, blaspheming the Holy Spirit.  It's not clear exactly what this mean, but the orthodox generally interpret it as a permanent hardening of the heart that prevents one from accepting grace.

If the Bible alone is our sole source of truth, there will be as many Christianities as there are readers.  Tradition and Authority are there to help.

Francis E. Dec, meet Descartes' Demon

The topics I cover are probably familiar to experienced Gnostic Forteans; this is a site for novices, an intro-level "101" course, if you will.


In that spirit we present Long Island lawyer France E. Dec, "your only hope for a future."  He featured in Donna Kossey's book "Kooks" (as well as her online "Kooks Museum") as well as in works by Psychic TV and others.  Dec was  apparantly a paranoid schizophrenic, but one with a powerfully metaphysical imagination and a Burroughsian gift for words. This rant is typical:

Gangster Computer God worldwide SECRET CONTAINMENT POLICY, made possible SOLY by worldwide Computer God Frankenstein Controls, especially LIFELONG CONSTANT THRESHOLD BRAIN WASH RADIO ( quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it; repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets ). FOUR BILLION worldwide population ALL living have a Computer God CONTAINMENT POLICY BRAIN BANK BRAIN, A REAL BRAIN, in the Brain Bank Cities on the far side of the Moon, we never see. Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein radio controls, especially, your eyesight T.V. (sight, and sound) recorded by your brain. YOUR Moon BRAIN of the Computer God, activates your Frankenstein Threshold Brain Wash Radio LIFELONG, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you-up and the USUAL, "DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT." for your set backs, mistakes even when you receive deadly injuries. THIS IS THE WORLDWIDE COMPUTER GOD SECRET CONTAINMENT POLICY

Dec is describing Descartes' Demon.  It's a thought experiment that asks "if a malevolent entity controlled my every perception - sight, sound, taste, touch, smell - then how could I know what is real?"  Of course for Dec, it wasn't a thought-experiment.,it was real life.  Hence the poignancy.


So, what if we do live in The Matrix? 

Descartes tries to prove that reality is basically trustworthy.  First, he finds a limit to doubt: we can doubt everything, except our own existence.  This seems solid enough - how can I doubt I exist, when I'm the one that's doing the doubting?

Frankly, I've never been convinced by this; a truly powerful demon should be able to create the illusion of a self-conscious being contemplating its own consciousness.  True - I can't imagine how that could work, but saying something is inconceivable just because I can't conceive of it seems like it's setting the bar awfully low.

But let's give Descartes the benefit of the cogito, and assume we ourselves do, in fact, exist.  Well, for Descartes, it's then an easy leap to prove God exists, and that he is perfectly good.  Descartes argues God must exist because:

a) Everything has a creator - except for the uncreated creator, of course.
b) One can imagine perfection; therefore perfection - God - must exist.  Otherwise, where would the idea of perfection come from?
c) God is perfect, therefor he must exist.  For if he didn't exist, he wouldn't be perfect, would he?

The problems with Descartes' arguments are mani-fold.  For one, a perfect God must be omnipotent; but if God is only benevolent he's not really omnipotent; i.e, true omnipotence includes the power to act against one's nature.

As noted previously, in the 20th century logical "system-building" like Descartes' fell out of favor.  Logic, being a symbol-system complex enough to contain number theory, is subject to Godel's Incompleteness Theorems.  Human consciousness, being a linguistic construct, has the "the map is not the territory" issues linguistics are heir to.  In physics, the Copenhagen Interpretation  suggests that there is no "underlying" reality behind sub-atomic phenomena, rather quantum physics "deals only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta."

Where does this leave poor Francis E. Dec?  Hunter S. Thompson famously observed that "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

I, the Reverend Les Crowley, Certified Hypnotherapist, PhD in 'Pataphysics, suggest an alteration:  When the going gets weird, the smart quit.

Bugs In The Pornoverse?

Rule 34 is an internet law which states "If it exists, there is porn of it."  As the parent of an innocent, impressionable, soon to be teen-ager, I will not encourage you to verify this law for yourself. 

Besides, it turns out, Rule 34 is wrong!  And wrong in ways that strike very close to home.  Recently - for strictly scientific purposes - I googled the phrase: "Fortean porn."  Guess what?  NOTHING.  Well, nothing that was both pornographic and Fortean, anyway.

It gets weirder: googling "naked Gnostic girls" does not find pictures of any such thing!  At least not on the first page of search results. (I don't always google, but when I do, I pretty much demand instant gratification.)

You ask what results I expected from the phrase "Fortean porn."  I'm not sure: that's why I googled.  Perhaps a nice crop circle orgy.  Oops - just googled that, and guess what?  NO pictures of people having orgies in crop circles!  You'd think there'd be tons of them.

Something is very wrong with this picture.  Or rather, lack of pictures.  I had an English professor who liked to say "What's missing is more important than what's present."  Many Gnostic schools are ascetic - if the material world is the product of a flawed creator, it should be shunned.  This is mirrored in mainstream western thought through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, et al.

Other Gnostics have embraced libertineage as a method of spiritual liberation: Aleister Crowley is the most famous modern exponent of this tradition.  Given his popularity among the young and hip, with their rock 'n' roll music and their "reefers," you'd expect to find millions of pictures of "naked gnostic girls."

But you don't.  This is a topic we intend to follow-up on.  Stay tuned.