Scanning the comments on the YouTube posting of my conversation with Nate Hagens and DJ White on the subject of space fantasies, one finds some familiar reactions. For the most part, comments expressed appreciation for the refreshing push-back against prevalent space hype. But a few, predictably, intoned that it is we naysayers who are delusional: of course we’re going to space, and those like myself saying otherwise will join the embarrassing heap of vision-challenged fossils littering history.
This post offers a framework for evaluating levels of faith in future projections. A tremendous asymmetry enters, which merits some awareness.
A new video from Ze Frank is out, this time about Geckos. True to form, Frank masterfully illustrates ze genius of other life forms. One amazingly-intricate evolutionary adaptation after another leaves us grasping to make sense of the various superpowers manifesting in the living world. If Ze Frank’s videos don’t leave your mouth agape, there might be something wrong with your jawe (the anatomical feature best suited for expressing awe). I admire his skilled and unabashed use of anthropomorphism to imbue these characters with personality and desire. He’s not wrong, and our culture could use a great deal more appreciation for the shared engagement of all Life.
Now, it does pain me to see the torture that animals are subjected to in laboratory environments just so that we might attempt a deeper understanding. Admittedly, part of my sense of amazement is enhanced by partial scientific understanding of the phenomena. Yet, it would still be possible to put superpowers on display without the clinical Nazi part. As is true for so many things in modernity, the act of scraping some veneer of “good stuff” leaves devastation in its wake. It’s seldom worth it, in the full analysis.
But the main point of this post is to reconcile the genius of microbes, fungi, plants and animals (of which we are part) with their obvious “dumb” qualities as well. To wit: a spider can weave an elaborate web I’d have no hope of replicating, yet when stuck in a sink will repeatedly try—and fail—to climb the steepest wall. Clinging to spider webs for a moment (they’re like that), birds also weave nests using spider webs and other bits of fluff, moss, twigs, spit, and many other seemingly random elements. I know I couldn’t pull it off, even allowed unlimited spit. But a bird in a garage with the door wide-open can exhaust himself trying to fly into the ceiling, never realizing he can fly right out the enormous opening. A honeybee has many jobs in her lifetime: rearing; feeding; storing food; cleaning and maintaining the hive; patrolling and defending; foraging and finding new nest sites—communicating by both dances and chemicals. Yet trying to escape a house, she will bump into a window until she dies—never “getting” the whole glass concept. In the opposite direction, ants innovate in their foraging strategies so that they find ways into (and back out of) a house that would never occur to us—often repeatedly outwitting us as we try to block one route or anther. But their brains are tiny, and they’re not even on social media.
I could go on, of course, but the idea should be clear enough. What I want to briefly explore is this contrast between genius and dumb-as-a-brick (a recent post explored human dumbness). How are both true at once, and how might we, as humans, be both different and basically the same?
I found myself having agreed to travel to a technical/astronomical conference on Maui—the same one I attended during the passenger-jet attacks of 9/11 decades ago. This time my wife traveled with me. When initially invited, I begged off: my interests now are very much misaligned to the type of audience at such a conference. But the organizer seemed to be a follower of my work, and said, “Nah: come anyway: give it your best shot. Many of us could use a shock.”
The trip itself was long and tiring, involving many strange twists that aren’t worth the burden to elaborate. Other exhausted people—many familiar faces from my astronomy days—trickled into the venue in time for the conference to start.
My talk was scheduled for 10:25 on the first morning of the five-day conference: the second substantive talk, after introductions and preliminaries. My wife and I found seats in the auditorium along the back wall, but the air conditioning unit was dripping water on us at an accelerating rate, so we moved to the side near the front, where the angle to the screen wasn’t great. During an intro video that showed many photos of past scientists and engineers at blackboards and the like, my wife turned around (we were not able to sit side-by-side) to excitedly say that she saw her father in one of those photos (which I had missed).
Around that time, the organizer who had invited me started introducing the conference goals to the audience—throwing in a mention of the challenging talk coming up by Tom Murphy. Enough heads tilted my way to alert the guy next to me that I must be this Tom Murphy character. Intrigued, he asked in a whisper if I could give him a one-sentence synopsis of my talk. I won’t spoil the rest of this post by repeating what I said, but his response was a bit of a chortle and something about how impressive software was. Irked by the confident but—in my view—ignorant dismissal, I muttered that my message would probably sail right by most people in the audience.
At this point, my wife picked up on the tension and asked what I meant by the synopsis sentence I had offered. My clarification made her squirm as well, essentially saying that I was being ridiculous. At this point, I realized I shouldn’t let these local interactions derail my focus, and that I really ought to polish up the talk slides in the short time remaining. Reaching into my backpack to pull out the laptop, I worried about how much charge remained, and had to dig past all kinds of highly-uncharacteristic junk-food wrappers accumulated during my travels to finally retrieve the computer. Then I woke up.
In this quest to move past dualism, it may be useful to examine a few key revolutions that corrected erroneous and sometimes damaging perspectives in the past. I hope to cast dualism in a similar mold: eventually to be abandoned as an embarrassing, destructive, and self-centered phase of adolescent excess.
We’ll consider common elements of past beliefs (flat earth, geocentric, creationist) that most eventually moved beyond, and see that dualism shares many of the same traits of anthropocentrism and missing context.
Past Prevailing Paradigms
We’ll start with Flat Earth beliefs, as touched on in the previous post. In all likelihood, more than one human over the hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural period imagined the sun and moon to be spheres (illumination of lunar phases as a pertinent clue), and assumed the same to be true for Earth. The Greeks convinced themselves that Earth was round, and even estimated its circumference based on shadow lengths at the summer solstice. Astute sailors knew something fishy was afloat well before the voyage of Columbus, based on how ships and land reliably sink below the horizon as distance increases. Yet Flat Earth belief prevailed until recently. Part of the point is that adoption is not monolithic or simultaneous. Most people still had no need for anything but a Flat Earth model. Restricted to a small locale, the larger truth was neither evident nor relevant. That’s what counts for effective mental models. A Flat Earth model is not at all inappropriate, in a limited context. All mental models are incomplete and wrong in some way(s), after all.
Since this series aims to confront dualism in its primary form as a mind/matter split, we should devote some time to mental matters. What are the central arguments for mind—or associated consciousness—as a phenomenon unto its own, not “reducible” to mind-numbingly complex material interactions (just reducible to a label of “mind,” apparently; simpler!). What is it, in fact, that we do with our brains, and how much of it depends on matter (i.e., physiology)?
Subjectivity: What it’s Like
At its core, belief in mind rests on the truth that one individual can’t experience another’s “inner” experiences. Language helps tremendously in providing a foggy window into others’ experiences. And while clumsy, language does at least help to confirm predominantly-similar sensations among humans. Yet even via language, how can we really know what another’s pain feels like? How can we know that seeing blue feels the same to them as it does to us? We can’t, really. And since individual life-experiences create differing associations within each of us, the full impact of seeing (or imagining) the color blue is surely a bit different from individual to individual. To my dad, it meant the Kentucky Wildcats, for instance.
I grew up as a space enthusiast before I grew up. Part of the maturation process involved work on a Space Shuttle project, two decades of uninterrupted funding from NASA, reviewing many dozens of NASA proposals for space/rocket investigations, and serving as Principal Investigator for a mission concept study centered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to put a laser transponder on Phobos. Oh, and the most significant chunk of my astrophysics career relied upon the reflectors placed on the lunar regolith by astronaut hands.
No single moment stands out as a crossing of the Rubicon in terms of my migration away from fantasy. But by October 2011 my faith had eroded sufficiently to put out a blog post titled Why Not Space—motivated by responses to the “growth can’t last on a finite planet” drive that initiated this blog. “We’ll just expand into space,” some countered. Note: always beware the word “just,” especially when attached to feats of unprecedented difficulty.
I reprised the theme in Chapter 4 of my textbook (out in 2021), and again a few weeks back. In the last five years, my journey has produced significantly new perspectives (for me) which only serve to make the space delusion more strikingly fascinating and revealing. At this point, it’s hard to identify a phenomenon that so completely captures the religion of the day and its unhinged basis.
Almost as if done deliberately to demonstrate mental incapacity, I recently found myself making a connection that was staring me in the face for years but that I never recognized. Surely, scads more sit waiting in plain view, yet will never be smoked by me as long as I live.
In this case, several overt clues tried waving it in my face, but I remained oblivious. I feel like my former best-buddy cat who was always mesmerized by water, never tiring of watching it slosh, splash, and splatter. My wife and I once took the cat(s) on a reluctant car trip passing along the coast of northern California. The road came right up on the beach, and I stopped with the idea that I would show the ocean to him, which would surely captivate his attention and blow his mind. We were so close that the ocean and waves dumping on the beach were almost all that could be seen out the window. I held him up to take in the sight, but in his squirming state—questioning what new cruelty I was subjecting him to on top of this already-heinous and interminable car ride—he somehow managed to completely fail in ever noticing the ocean. But it was right there in front of him! You can lead a cat to water…
Oh—I should get to the point? A couple weeks back, the post on Spare Capacity mentioned the outsized detrimental impact written language has had. I know. Here I am still using it. But like my cat, I failed to notice what kept filling my field of vision.
Our prized cerebral capabilities at the level of awareness don’t stack up to very much when compared to the vastly-more-numerous-and-amazing capabilities of almost every other aspect of Life. The relatively meager mental capacity we tend to worship is in many ways the slightest addendum whose capabilities are comparatively rather modest. Yes, we have devised ways to lock in small gains and ratchet them into powerful forces, but the process is embarrassingly slow and limited compared to most processes carried out by Life.
The Impressive Base
The overwhelming share of what makes humans amazing operates far beyond mental awareness. Outside the sacred cerebrum, we breathe, circulate blood, digest a diverse menu of food, filter and clean internal fluids, eliminate wastes, heal wounds, coordinate movement, generate the cells for reproduction, build and rebuild ourselves from a cryptic blueprint, and perhaps most impressively solve very thorny open-ended problems of devising antibodies tailored to disable novel pathogens. For all their “massive” brain-power, the average living human would not have the first clue how to devise a functioning, fully-integrated replacement for any of these and thousands more tasks our bodies handle without a thought. Even the best teams in the world wouldn’t be able to pull it off (though would at least have “the first clue,” and in so doing would know it to be beyond their capability).
Now add the cerebrum and a whole suite of additional capabilities emerge—still beyond our awareness. Perhaps most stunning is visual processing. Among other attributes, it’s nearly instantaneous, seamlessly combines vision from two optical instruments, fills in gaps, enjoys excellent color representation, and has extraordinary dynamic range (putting our film/print or electronic cameras/displays to shame; it’s why total solar eclipses can neither be captured nor displayed adequately by technology). Add to this an incredible capacity for auditory processing able to differentiate subtle sounds and comprehend language. What’s easy for a two-year-old still stumps technological implementations. Our brains perform pattern recognition tasks that are light years ahead of what lots of investment and smart people have been able to cobble in crude technological form. Remember the self-driving car hype from about a decade ago? And the fact that captchas work at all is remarkable testimony.
Don’t ask us how we do it—we have no idea. We just know so many things that we can’t articulate or are not even aware of: we take them for granted—as must be the case when literally unaware of the underlying processes.
Unbidden, the Disney Jungle Book tune for “Bare Necessities” slid into my brain in connection to the “spare capacity” title and theme of this post. Maybe I should try a song version sometime…
Proteins are made of party ribbon curled by scissors. Image by CAChamblee via Wikimedia Commons.
Showing my age a bit, a young Chris Rock in a 1988 movie amusingly asks: “How much for one rib?” Given that the crafting of a single protein plays a central role in this post, and ribs are a source of protein, the association was too much for me to pass up in the title.
I’ve pointed out before that our most elaborate inventions absolutely pale in comparison to even the simplest form of Life. Our gizmos can’t self-replicate, heal wounds, feed themselves, stave off pathogens, or self-evolve. Even though both gadgets and Life appear to be based on atoms and the same fundamental interactions, the level of complexity in Life is far beyond our means to create. At best, we bootstrap and copy.
To make the point, we’ll embark on a well-funded thought experiment that is able to assemble the top talent from around the world in a team given one mission: generate the genetic coding that would carry out a specific novel function by way of synthesizing a novel protein specific to that task. We stipulate a novel function that hasn’t arisen in any lifeform, otherwise the open-book (Google-connected) nature of this test would instantly result in “cheating” off a billion-year heritage.
Surfing YouTube, I came across an interview of Ezra Klein by Stephen Colbert. He was promoting a new book called Abundance, basically arguing that scarcity is politically-manufactured by “both sides,” and that if we get our political act together, everybody can have more. Planetary limits need not apply. I’ve often been impressed by Klein’s sharp insights on politics, yet can’t reconcile how someone so smart misses the big-picture perspectives that grab my attention.
He’s not alone: tons of sharp minds don’t seem to be at all concerned about planetary limits or metastatic modernity, which for me has been a source of perennial puzzlement.
The logical answer is that I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. Indeed, many of these folks could run cognitive/logical circles around me. And maybe that’s the end of the story. Yet it’s not the end of this post, as I try to work out what accounts for the disconnect, and (yet again) examine my own assuredness.
