Half of the Literature Is False Science Journalism

The realities of the daily grind don't always mesh well with the necessities of good journalism, let alone good science.

Consider:

Why A Journalist Scammed The Media Into Spreading Bad Chocolate Science

"He's really only scratching the surface of a much broader, much deeper problem," Schwitzer says. "We have examples of journalists reporting on a study that was never done. We have news releases from medical journals, academic institutions and industry that mislead journalists, who then mislead the public." And the pressure to publish or perish, he says, can lead well-intentioned scientists to frame their work in ways that aren't completely accurate or balanced or supported by the facts.

And this is even more damning, supposing of course that the supposition is correct,

In the past few years more professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.
Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” (source)
This is quite distrubing, given the fact that all of these studies (which are industry sponsored) are used to develop drugs/vaccines to supposedly help people, train medical staff, educate medical students and more.

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

The Backfire Effect

You think your beliefs are informed by facts. Yet, research is demonstrating facts couldn't matter less...

Science and fiction once imagined the future in which you now live. Books and films and graphic novels of yore featured cyberpunks surfing data streams and personal communicators joining a chorus of beeps and tones all around you. Short stories and late-night pocket-protected gabfests portended a time when the combined knowledge and artistic output of your entire species would be instantly available at your command, and billions of human lives would be connected and visible to all who wished to be seen.
So, here you are, in the future surrounded by computers which can deliver to you just about every fact humans know, the instructions for any task, the steps to any skill, the explanation for every single thing your species has figured out so far. This once imaginary place is now your daily life.
So, if the future we were promised is now here, why isn’t it the ultimate triumph of science and reason? Why don’t you live in a social and political technotopia, an empirical nirvana, an Asgard of analytical thought minus the jumpsuits and neon headbands where the truth is known to all?
Among the many biases and delusions in between you and your microprocessor-rich, skinny-jeaned Arcadia is a great big psychological beast called the backfire effect. It’s always been there, meddling with the way you and your ancestors understood the world, but the Internet unchained its potential, elevated its expression, and you’ve been none the wiser for years.
...
The backfire effect is constantly shaping your beliefs and memory, keeping you consistently leaning one way or the other through a process psychologists call biased assimilation. Decades of research into a variety of cognitive biases shows you tend to see the world through thick, horn-rimmed glasses forged of belief and smudged with attitudes and ideologies. When scientists had people watch Bob Dole debate Bill Clinton in 1996, they found supporters before the debate tended to believe their preferred candidate won. In 2000, when psychologists studied Clinton lovers and haters throughout the Lewinsky scandal, they found Clinton lovers tended to see Lewinsky as an untrustworthy homewrecker and found it difficult to believe Clinton lied under oath. The haters, of course, felt quite the opposite. Flash forward to 2011, and you have Fox News and MSNBC battling for cable journalism territory, both promising a viewpoint which will never challenge the beliefs of a certain portion of the audience. Biased assimilation guaranteed.

The Backfire Effect

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

Megalodon: Myths and Misinformation

There is an 85 foot shark lurking in the depths off the Cape, and it's Photoshopped as hell. 

For many of those that caught the Sharknado meets Blair Witch atrocity of Megalodon, Wil Wheaton's comments probably feel familiar - this very discussion occurred in the room as we watched with mild amusement and growing disgust - as it raises a larger question of where the burden of responsibility lies for stations such as Discovery or the History Channel, which has aired any number of dubious "documentaries." (Whatever it was, It Was Aliens.)

This is, at the very least, a case-in-point for Shark Week jumping the shark. 

Why bother getting upset about yet another stupid “found footage” fake documentary passed off as real? Isn’t that pretty much par for the course on cable these days?
And then I realized why I was (and am) so angry: I care about education. I care about science. I care about inspiring people to learn about the world and universe around us. Sharks are fascinating, and megalodon was an absolutely incredible creature! Discovery had a chance to get its audience thinking about what the oceans were like when megalodon roamed and hunted in them. It had a chance to even show what could possibly happen if there were something that large and predatory in the ocean today … but Discovery Channel did not do that. In a cynical ploy for ratings, the network deliberately lied to its audience and presented fiction as fact. Discovery Channel betrayed its audience.
An entire generation has grown up watching Discovery Channel, learning about science and biology and physics, and that generation trusts Discovery Channel. We tune into Discovery Channel programming with the reasonable expectation that whatever we’re going to watch will be informative and truthful. We can trust Discovery Channel to educate us and our children about the world around us! That’s why we watch it in the first place!
Last night, Discovery Channel betrayed that trust during its biggest viewing week of the year. Discovery Channel isn’t run by stupid people, and this was not some kind of mistake. Someone made a deliberate choice to present a work of fiction that is more suited for the SyFy channel as a truthful and factual documentary. That is disgusting, and whoever made that decision should be ashamed.

But I wouldn't hold my breath for that apology. Nor would it likely matter. The line continues to blur between reality TV, documentary, and science or journalistic programming, and the most obvious reason is a different kind of line, the almighty bottom one. 

After all, empty speculation can be made more interesting through dramatization, and certainly leads to higher ratings amongst US audiences than rigorous skepticism. This seems to point toward yet another way that the gamification of reality in the form of $ produces diminished returns in most every other appreciable way. 

When an audience was schooled in fill-in-the-blank, rote and regurgitate form, programming takes the role of teacher. Not to harp on the tropes of bad Sci Fi like The Faculty, but it should come as no surprise that many fell for the little trap Discovery set. The only truth in the show was that in a literal sea of uncertainty, anything is possible. That does not, however, mean that anything is probable. 

This could raise still deeper questions about the nature of fiction, fact and myth, as we have explored in so much depth here already.  It may not be a murky line in the case of Megalodon, but within the larger context, the line is murky indeed. Those that have learned to distrust authority tend to distrust everything they're told, while those that employ a staid, idiomatic "coloring within the lines" mentality can't seem to muster the wherewithal to think critically about anything that comes from a supposed authority. These lines are established before the fact. (Had enough of lines? You must not be a child of the 80s.) 

And what of the "authorities"? Do you think that these channels should be held to some kind of higher standard? 

One thing is for sure: if an audience doesn't demand a higher standard, it is unlikely that it'll arise on its own. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

The Power of "As If"

When you were a child, you most likely learned a game that will serve you the rest of  your life -- even if you become unaware of it. This 'game' is "as if" -- when you play cops and robbers, you are playing as if you are these things.

As you get older, some people like to pretend they outgrow such things. (I play roleplaying games, so I know better.) However, if you practice chi gung, you are visualizing and practicing "as if" there are lines of energy running up and down your body, or a ball of energy expanding and contracting between your hands and arms. No measuring device has ever successfully detected "chi," unless if you think of Kirlian photography as "scientific proof." At the same time, of course, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, and most importantly, as I'm getting at -- it doesn't actually matter if there is "really" chi. Let's go on...

When you pay someone $5 for a latte, you act as if that paper represents the value that we agree upon. Any close evaluation of value-as-commodity or the value backing of money will demonstrate that the currency fundamentally represents an agreement at this level. (We're not going to get into macro-economics, where everything gets whacky.) This too is an "as if" agreement.

When you take a medication, fall in love, walk up the stairs, or do any number of other activities, you are practicing this "as if" game on some level, as, quoth Sorkin, the amount that you don't know could stun a team of oxen in its tracks. We practice it because more often than not, the benefit of playing along is higher than the cost of uncertainty. 

However, many of us forget that we're playing this game at all. We start to believe in what we're playing at, that it is certain, fixed, concrete. This is where all kinds of troubles come in, from the extreme dangers of fundamentalism to mildly embarrassment of believing in something that isn't literally true. 

This gets at an idea that we've repeated time and again in the posts on this site and the books that have come out of it: dream is not less real than waking (they are both states of consciousness), a metaphor is not less real than a fact (they are different claims entirely), electromagnetism is not less real than matter (they seem to exist on the same spectrum, though conversion from one state to the other requires far more than belief), ... and so on.  

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Science, Narrative: The Story of the Hominids

Science has a truly ambivalent relationship with mythology. In many ways, science depends on mythology--in part because we quite simply cannot get away from the narrative impulse that lies at the center of all out attempts to make "sense" of things.

This ambivalence is something we've discussed at length on this site, and in the books we've put together such as The Immanence of Myth and Apocalyptic Imaginary. I'd like to share a NOVA video about a possible branch on the homonid genetic tree that we've only recently discovered: the 'hobbit.'

While watching this, consider how the need for a a linear narrative drives us to make certain assumptions, and how the mythic impulse relates to (sometimes complicating, sometimes supporting) the scientific enterprise.

Watch Alien From Earth on PBS. See more from NOVA.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Nature Vs. Nurture: As If It Wasn't Confusing Enough...

I've long said that "nature vs. nurture" is the wrong argument to be having. It isn't an either or, and the argument itself is essentially structured by the schema that's created so as to have the discussion in the first place.

But here's yet another example of why this discussion couldn't go along easily, even if that weren't the case:

Darwin and Freud walk into a bar. Two alcoholic mice — a mother and her son — sit on two bar stools, lapping gin from two thimbles.
The mother mouse looks up and says, “Hey, geniuses, tell me how my son got into this sorry state.”
“Bad inheritance,” says Darwin.
“Bad mothering,” says Freud.
For over a hundred years, those two views — nature or nurture, biology or psychology — offered opposing explanations for how behaviors develop and persist, not only within a single individual but across generations.
And then, in 1992, two young scientists following in Freud’s and Darwin’s footsteps actually did walk into a bar. And by the time they walked out, a few beers later, they had begun to forge a revolutionary new synthesis of how life experiences could directly affect your genes — and not only your own life experiences, but those of your mother’s, grandmother’s and beyond.

Discover Magazine, article. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Monsanto Myths

The tone of this blog post aside, the point needs to be made. The GMO issue has gotten horribly muddled, as many vaccine conspiracy theories and general anti-corporate sentiment has blended together into a growing "conspiracy mythos." Back here on planet Earth, Monsanto's predatory business practices have nothing to do with GM as a process. Some may need to be reminded that all of our foods are genetically modified, even if some still are produced through the "slow method" of selection.

Dispelling myths regarding GMOIn this section I hope to dispel some myths and frankly bad logic justifying the hatred of GMO pushed by GMO truthers. Full Article. 

We'll forgive him for using the less nuanced definition of "myth" that is all too commonly employed. Not that any of us here would ever do that, right?

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Carts and Horses, Follow-up

A recent Guardian article expands upon a premise (conundrum) near and dear to us, here:

Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

 Full article, "Philosophy Isn't Dead Yet."

Is our consciousness intrinsically tied to the electrochemical goo inside our skulls? Yes, it certainly seems that way. Can we thereby reduce all issues to a quantifiable, strictly behaviorist, materialist, (even positivist) science, and finally “solve” all philosophical quandaries through scientific measurement? Hardly.
To explain why would take us on a long journey through the history of both the past 100 years in science and philosophy. We might consider some major steps along the way to include the works of Neils Bohr, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Werner Heisenberg (though let's be honest: nobody truly  understands Quantum mechanics,) and of course Albert Einstein. The questions relevant to this particular inquiry seem simple enough, but they remain as perplexing today as they were in the age of the Ancient Greeks: what is the nature of mind? what is the nature of matter?
It is a criticism of ventures in this direction that such questions often lead to semantic arguments. We are no longer concerned with such "fluff," the modern consumer of pop science literature clearly wants "hard answers."
Semantic arguments are not necessarily just semantic arguments. Our presuppositions about consciousness, how we define it, how we define concepts such as “will” or “freedom,” are far more important than neuroscans when it comes to our consideration of whether our actions are “free” or “determined.” It is highly probable that our our nervous system has made up its mind about something before we become consciously aware of that decision—or so neuroscientists tell me—but that is merely “passing the buck” as they say. (For non-English natives, that idiom means "deferring responsibility." I'm told that idioms are "bad writing" because they don't translate well. So there you go.)
Within the context of the conundrum of consciousness, free will seems merely a footnote. What these articles, and those like them, seem to be proclaiming is actually this: "Philosophy and myth are dead. Long live science."
Few would argue that our consciousness is brought about by brain and nerves, but the question remains, can we have a unified theory of mind and matter, or must we continue to think of carts and horses? Is it our language itself that creates this delineation, which says “my body,” as if it was a bio-mechanical walker that my brain is floating in, and within that, a mind. (And within that? It’s “turtles all the way down.”) 

Full article, "Carts and Horses, The Deification of the Brain"

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Grand Design - Model Dependent Realism

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was a philosophy major undergrad, I wrote several essays, and ultimately my senior thesis, on a premise that is here much more elegantly presented by Stephen Hawking as Model-Dependent Realism. He obviously understands the underlying scientific models better than I do or ever will, though his snide comment that "philosophy is dead" is somewhat ironic considering that this book is essentially a piece of populist scientific philosophy. The most pressing issues for philosophy have changed in the places where the academy isn't still navel gazing, or stuck in Heidegger's lederhosen.

Anyway, enough about that. To the book. My point is that this book doesn't present anything especially new for those of us who have already filled our heads with Berkeley, Hume, Feynman, Einstein, and so on. But that doesn't mean that it isn't worth reading. To the contrary, it is one of the most elegant presentations of the intersection of science and philosophy meant for the public that I've yet encountered. Again with the irony of "philosophy is dead." (Wittgenstein made a similar pronouncement in the wake of his Tractatus. That was published ~1921.)

I highly suggest reading this book because elegance is, as Hawking states, one of the highest values for a theory aside from conforming with observation. I also suggest it because model-dependent realism is a more subtle, more accurate interpretation of relativism that should be burned into the minds of everyone that wishes to work in the sciences, or humanities for that matter. It is not a conclusion or an end point, but rather the starting point from which we can avoid a great deal of wasted effort and ink.

View all my reviews

Want a summary of Model Dependent Realism? Check out this page.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

F-Bombs - What Had Happened Was Episode 6

What Had Happened Was is a grumpyhawk collective podcast co-hosted by grumpyhawk (that would be me) and Benjamin Combs. In this "week-in-review style" show, we cover and comment on stories with a tech, science, weird, or strange sort of angle. Visit grumpyhawk.com to see and hear more from the collective.

Welcome to episode 6 of What Had Happened Was. We'll be discussing life threatening flapjacks, a gel that could save your life, more poor decisions by federal judges, how a mop sink caused a ruckus, and the possibility of pay per channel television on today's episode: "F-bombs"

Show Notes:

1. School in Essex bans triangle shaped flapjacks after pupil is hurt - The Independent
2. The gel that stops bleeding instantly - Boing Boing
3. The 2045 Project
4. NY judge says running a search engine for news is a copyright violation - Boing Boing
5. TN lawmakers confuse mop sink for Muslim foot-washing sink - The Tennessean
6. Verizon FiOS TV channels: Company wants to shake up the industry - BGR
7. WWE CFO talks Premium channel - Youtube

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Traversing Imaginary Landscapes

I recently discovered this book by happenstance, and am sorry that it wasn't one of the books that I had in my research arsenal when working on The Immanence of Myth. It is right up the alley of what I was trying to express in the sections on the mythologies of science, at least for the most part, and I would highly suggest it as a companion work to that book, or vice versa.

"In the Beginning was the Word are the words that begin the Gospel that establishes the quintessentially Western cosmology in which the world is a word, a sound  that unfolded space through time. Our word "cosmology" still echoes with the reverberations of that Johannine vision of seven Greek syllables  seven deeply resonant vowels that, like the opening of Bach's Art of the Fugue, set forth the theme that has the architecture of its variations implicit within it. From the seven syllables of Creation t the seven seals of the Apocalypse, the story of our world is the sound it makes in its passing. It is only after the opening of the Seventh Seal that there is silence in heaven of half an hour.
In telling the story of once upon a time in gospel, myth, or fairy tale, in returning in the imagination or the time of the arche, it is not so much what one says that builds a world, for once can say that the world began in wind or water or word, but it is the telling itself that sets up the structure of identification, the narrative structure that gives form to time and space. When the newly born infant moves its arms and legs in rhythm to its mother's speech, it does not yet know the mother's language, but the sounds themselves set up a relationship of Self and Other that is the fundamental arising of a world." (Imaginary Landscape). 

We may consider so many other models of cosmology, from the Logos and representational models of cosmology that emphasize the word, such as in the Sefer Yetzirah, the original (recognized) Qabbalistic text which lays out the basis of creation as the permutation of a divine language, the Torah itself "made of fire" Or we might consider the more pictographic and fanciful cosmology of the Pueblo Indians, who show a 4-fold creation story that at once calls to mind elements of the Osiris myth and the ascention of Shiva and Shakti in the Kundalini serpent in the Tantrik traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism  (As diverse as those two traditions are otherwise.) Regardless, this idea holds true, and it is with this concept of cosmology and narrative that we enfold ourselves without our world and at once make sense of it and find our place within it.

The same is true within our very bodies.

In fact, as previously mention on this site, I have been running a sort of web class with the intent of helping people in facilitating creativity and possibly presence of mind. It's a sort of loosely defined system of movement meditation practices.

"Internal Arts will be a series dealing with the creative process in its various guises: from meditative techniques to anecdotal material from independent artists." 

Catch that HERE on Alterati, and at the same time, consider exploring it alongside works like Imaginary Landscape, Apocalyptic Imaginary, and The Immanence of Myth. These books may appear somewhere between dense and obtuse if you are unfamiliar with a certainly philosophical approach, and they all employ an element of repetition to get ideas across. But they also constitute a sort of teaching, the self teaching the self through a deeper exploration of symbols, that cannot be given in a classroom, or certainly not a classroom that merely provides us with facts and figures. They represent the culmination of decades of work between us, and the practices that I'm trying to share in Internal Arts, while I try to pass them along without any pretense of authority, are not easily discovered nor gained.

And I know that I have what most people would consider a verbose way of speaking and writing when I am doing so "naturally" that is out of sync with "the times" and I should really "get with it." I'd like you all to know that I typed this entire paragraph with my middle finger.

Goodnight, friends.

IoM is Myth Dead

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Participants Wanted for the Transmedia Revolution!

Hello everyone!

For those of you who have been following my posts here for the last few months, you may have noticed I've been talking a lot about how technology has transformed the publishing industry, and how transmedia storytelling has broken down the barriers between a story and it's audience.

But I haven't really gone into the specifics about how this can be put into practice. There's been a lot of talk about transmedia storytelling, but very few good examples of what the medium is truly capable of.  People and publishers have folded their arms, and decided to "wait and see."

And I don't blame them.  

After all the talk about ground breaking-this, cross platform-that, and immersion-everything, not much has really happened, has it?  There's been a lot of smoke, but no one has lit a match.  

That's about to change.  It won't be long before you'll be participating in a story instead of reading it.  How do I know?

I'm going to help make it happen.

Do I have some amazing new browser plug-in?  Some sort of new transmedia authoring platform?  A storytelling social media network, perhaps?

Nope.  (People always seem to get hung up on the technology...)

The technology of the written word changed how stories were delivered, but not how they were created.  It's the same thing with e-books, film, and television...they are all different methods of delivering the same fictional drug.

It's the story that's important.

What's the difference between slapping a button on a coke machine, and visiting a barista at your local starbucks?

Puff the magic dragon by Ahnamal

A can of soda will always taste the same.  A caramel-pumpkin-spice-mocha-latte with a dash of cinnamon and whip, tastes a lot different if you have him add a splash of pickle juice.

There's only one way to have it your way: ask for it.

Here at Modern Mythology, we know that storytelling isn’t passive.

A good storyteller must actively engage their audience.  A story should be tailored to whom it’s being told to, not diluted and homogenized just to make it more appealing to a potential audience of millions.

The goal of a story should be to make people think, feel, and help them blink away their pedestrian view of the world.  A book or movie should draw you in, engage you, make you a part of it--not run you over.

Films shouldn't blind people with cinematic eye candy, and books shouldn't hypnotize them with pages of sex and violence strung together with a meaningless plot.

But they do, and they will continue to do so, because that's the easiest way for Hollywood and publishers to get your money without you noticing.

It doesn't have to be this way.  Really.

(Unless you're into that kind of thing.)

Philosophy Begins In Terror: Aphorisms for a Philosophy of Happiness in (our) Time

The Truth of Transience: A Philosophy of Happiness

I.

I have never believed in anything, not even and much less myself. I have always felt as though selfhood, identity, kept me, keeps us, in fetters, shackled to the lie of transcendence. I lied, just now. I believed in deliverance, escape, in the pleroma of the apocalypse of love.

II.

Reflecting upon the man I've become and the stark contrast in which I stand to my past, I can only find it insufferably presumptuous to speak of myself in the present tense. Even today I have not ceased to live ahead of myself. Whereas you, my friends, can see me as I am,  I can only see myself within images of the past, in the reflections of memory's mirror.

III.

When I write, I write as an author of quotations without context, excerpts drawn from non-existent books.

IV.

Happiness in love is elusive for the very same reason as its simplicity: one must affirm (to eternity) that nothing is necessary, and that the origin of love lies in absolute, radical contingency.

V.

The Analyst: You know, love is just a Romantic fantasy, a mask for our every retrogression into primal, neurotic behavior. These aggressive, self-destructive drives masquerade as expressions of a noble emotion, when in reality, they respond to the trauma of intimacy, the anticipatory grief of knowing that the beloved will one day disappear. On occasion we attain mastery, only by becoming agents of the feared dissolution.

The Analysand: Can't it be otherwise? Can't love inspire progress?

The Analyst: Why, then, is it you on the couch and not I? 

VI.

Why must we reproach ourselves for ephemeral happiness as it recedes into the past? Wouldn't this amount to sour grapes on the part of my present existence? 'I must have been mistaken. Had I been or had reason to be happy it would have lasted.' In so doing we forget that transience is indissociable from the very idea of happiness.

...to love to let go.

VII.

Hope is impossible. Despair is doubly impossible. To genuinely let go: impossibility raised to the power of infinity.

VIII.

At that moment when at last I felt at home in the cosmos, a multitude of previously unseen stars illuminated the sky.

IX.

Perhaps every turning point is in accompanied by a palpable uncanny aura. I can feel the coexistence of what was and what will be in the now.


How to be in the world, to unite my time into a now?


In (Our) Time:

I.                        

The non-identity of self and self is time itself – without which we could not exist. Existence is neither eternal, unchanging Being, nor bound, teleologically, to absolute annihilation, eternal non-being. It is rather their unending, non-dialectical synthesis: the stream of Becoming.

Experience does not admit of non-existence, only being-in-time: becoming. genesis and phthora, birth and death, the passage of time: none refute existence. Universal transience and impermanence refute only our fantasies of eternal self-identity – fantasies tantamount to suicidal ideation.

II.

Nostalgia is an addiction to the past, to that which is not - or is no longer. It is the apotheosis of neurosis.

III.

Ennui is a lack of faith in the reality of the future, which makes the present recur eternally without change: the prison of time.

IV.

The time of hell is not, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the time of Eternal Return; it is the timeless time of the endless end.

V.

Absolute zero: a juxtaposition that signifies the unity of being and nothingness and the final kenosis of Spirit in Time

VI.

Marx says that historical events are subject to repetition, they come first as tragedy, then as farce. What Marx left out is that, when events recur thrice, they then come in drag.

VII.

Does the rejection of anthropocentrism (and the Copernican revolution in general) necessarily entail relegating humanity to utter insignificance, that is to say: nihilism?

VIII.

Skepticism that is not skeptical of itself is called nihilism.

IX.

Unknown shores: almost in sight

The felt presence of the unforeseen

Unforeseeable yet already present

Optics of the unconscious

Blindsight.

What power has the "light of truth" over blind Tiresias?




[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

The Mythology of Science: Telling Stories Around the Campfire of the Universe

Today's Science: Tomorrow's Mythology?

"I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD." --Joseph Campbell, from an interview with Jeremy Mishlove

When I talk to people about modern mythology, many mistakenly believe I'm talking about urban legends. And while theoretical debates about alligators in the sewers of New York may be entertaining, they are certainly not as important to me as the mythic framework of human society. In fact I feel urban legends are more akin to cultural "white noise," than any kind of true mythology.


In the past, I think mythology (and today contemporary religion) served as a medium for the transmission of culture, social mores, and world views. They were narratives that help broadly define an individual's sense of reality. They were important, because they gave purpose to people's lives.

In Memoriam Georges Bataille: Truth, Love & Death

Portrait of "Dianus" by Alberto Giacommetti

“As I sought it out I have never found it.”

Truth. Comprehending the truth of love, of death, of laughter and tears: such experiences disclose the Impossible. This truth is strictly speaking ungraspable. It exists inextricably bound by a relationship of complementarity, a discordant accord, with that other side of truth which is the business of lucid scientific rationality, i.e. the production of knowledge as an objective description of the world of things, of what is possible. Irreducible to objectivity, such experiences as love, laughter and tears are no less real and no less a part of the world in which we live and die. They escape the grasp of knowledge, properly speaking, and yet without the perspective given therein, truth would remain forever incomplete; and what's more, the unknowability of death itself guarantees the necessarily incomplete status of life, of history, of the world, and of the totality of the universe.

Georges Bataille à Oréans, 1961

“Science is silent about the moment in which reflection loses its moorings within the impossible.”

The truth of love and of death, viz. the impossible can only come into the purview of objective knowledge (whether according to the methods dictated by scientific reason or by philosophies such as phenomenology or logical positivism) by means of a reduction: any objective description and knowledge of love, of death, is possible only from without and après coup: to mistake love or death for merely biological phenomena amounts to an amputation of all that arises from (inner) experience. While a work of decidedly broader perspective and (in my view) greater intellectual rigor and honesty, P.-L. Landsberg's Essai sur l'expérience de la mort remains the fruit of a project doomed in advance, one that could only fall short or fail utterly: one simply cannot have knowledge the experience of death from the perspective of the one who dies – for death is essentially the permanent disappearance of the very subject of knowledge.

Laure and Georges: once again united by death.

“In so may ways, the ensemble of mankind has fallen into a trap. This much we can grasp.”

Our inevitable, final fall into the impossible is our common destiny: slipping beyond the bounds of meaning into absolute senselessness, every being does finally escape from the twin prison-houses of self and world; likewise from that of language. That final destiny which we share with every living being is to at last venture beyond every possibility, to transgress the most distant of limits. We are bound to joyously disappear into that unknown domain to take leave of the world, of knowledge, without so much as a shadow of self. Dissolution into boundless immanence is our final destination, for the world in which we live is that of false, reified – deified – transcendence. The lie of transcendence is supplanted by truth in the final reckoning, for “the totality of the world rests finally on my precarious self, and on death.” In truth, we are bound together by the universal and inevitable disappearance of our selves.

Would this then not be the “nothing of transcendence?" 

No, let us not be seduced by the thought of nothingness. Human existence is always in suspense of death: beneath the surface there is an inconceivable abyss into which, one day, we will fall. Does the end of all possibility and knowledge signify or reveal nothingness, non-being, as the ultimate truth of life, of being? No, for we can only speak of nothing as poets, as dupes, or as liars: for nothing exists only as the abstract negation of the something that is. There is no nothing: no experience of nothing. What's more: even in the vacuum a sort of creation ex nihilo takes place - an ephemeral creation destined to return to its origin and to repetition.

"Experience is immeasurable," and the universe is inconceivable. When we confuse our impossible destiny with absolute annihilation we succumb to the seductive, cold comfort of nihilism: we suppose that we have attained absolute knowledge, an immutable, ultimate truth, and thereby forget that human existence is of its essence an unanswerable, open question, forever incomplete(able). 

"We are never within our rights in preferring seduction: truth has rights over us. Indeed, it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must, respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights, only by accepting disappearance.”

The preceding reflections, composed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death (7 July 1962), are to a great extent inspired by the final expression of the thought of Georges Bataille, the preface to The Impossible. This text was written with a sense of great urgency, as his correspondence with the publisher indicate, and the book had been in print less than three months before he died peacefully, like a cat, in his sleep, while his wife and young daughter were vacationing in England. With the exception of the last, which concludes the published preface, all quotations are drawn from the manuscript version found in Tome III of his Oeuvres Complètes (my translations).

On the Anxiety of Everything and of Nothing: Learning to let go

"Whoever believes in reason has to be able to excuse it as a believer excuses his god. After all, because not everyone believes in reason." 

Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses The River

Is there such a thing as “anxiety?” Or do you transform an experience of your existence in a world, a life – neither entirely your own – into something to be possessed (by), grasped (by) – that you can at least perceive and know as an object. It is by turns a burden, an affliction, an essential part of your self, and finally, a threat: anxiety, does it not sometimes appear as a menacing, overwhelming force, from which there is no escape, that threatens the integrity of the “I” and the self you know?

And yet, it seems that anxiety has been so close and continual a companion to you – virtually ever-present – that it escapes you at the moment you wish to write. Anxiety, in other words, could just as well have been the object of Augustine's meditation on Time in the Confessions: “What this is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know...” Perhaps "anguish is the horror of time” (Bataille) precisely the fact that “if the present is only time, because it flows away into the past... For it is, only because it will cease to be.... [and] that time is only in that it tend toward not-being.” [1] Like our existence in time, anxiety accompanies experience so closely that you know it without knowing precisely for what you take it.

God and the problem of certainty

"Simply, as the great French mathematician Laplace once told Napoleon Bonapart, 'Sire, God is a hypothesis I do not need.' And indeed, science and religion should not be seen as antagonistic; they just do not need each other, as they ask questions and give answers within very different modes of knowing." (The Origins of the Universe, Lurquin.)

By James Curcio

Though there is little more problematic than a religious zealot that doesn't even seem to understand the purpose of religion or the function of symbol, let alone the scientific method, there is a similar side to self-assured atheism that strikes me in all earnestness like proverbial fingernails down a chalkboard. (More like a rusty nail.) This perspective, quite simply, believes that if their understanding of the theistic premise is irrational, it must be false.

Granted, this perspective seems less dangerous. There have been few atheist inquisitions. Though we shouldn't think of the history of communism, fascism or other often atheist politics are unrelated to the absolute role narrative plays in forming our actions in the world.

All this is still based on misunderstanding heaped upon misunderstanding, so I'd like to try to clarify a position. I'm quite sure I'll make no friends in doing so, but I simply can't help myself.

Carts and Horses: The Deification of the Brain

(Image by petercallesen.com.)

By James Curcio

In “Is Myth Dead?” in The Immanence of Myth, I talked about some of the misconceptions that exist between what falls under the purview of science, and what belongs instead to myth, or as it is more commonly known, narrative. And it is a direct result of misconceptions discussed there that we see a constant glut of so-called science articles investigating claims such as “neuro scientists say that evil no longer exists,” (Slate article) or “neuroscience versus philosophy, taking aim at free well.” (Nature.com article). Let me use these two articles as an example of what needs immediate and complete overhaul.

From the Origin of Life to 2012: Pseudoscience on the Loose

By Prof Rowan

Have alien bacteria fossils been discovered in a meteorite by a NASA scientist?

*drumroll please*

NO!

Recap: On Friday night the “Journal of Cosmology” published an article entitled “Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus,” attributed to one Richard B. Hoover of the NASA/Marshall SFC [1], claiming such a discovery. Extraordinary claims, however, require extraordinary evidence, which is nowhere to be found in the paper. While I am trained in and have worked in scientific fields, I am admittedly not a scientist, so I refer you to the blogs of PZ Myers [2], David Dobbs [3], and Rosie Redfield [4] for detailed analysis/straight-up debunking. In sum, per Redfield: “Executive Summary: Move along folks, there's nothing to see here.”

Look, there's nothing wrong with alternative theories – and certainly nothing wrong with leveling a critique at the scientific establishment – provided that they are supported by data and arguments that meet the epistemic criteria for scientificity. Even then, to propose an alternate theory of the origin of life is to propose a new creation myth – and as such any denunciation of the mythic nature of the consensus theory/narrative also denounces itself. And the “journal” in which Hoover's paper appeared is rife with them – whether in articles or in press releases.

So. When the controversy erupted, I found myself less interested in this article and its claims than in the “journal” itself. First red flag: the “Journal of Cosmology” is only published online on amateurish site that looks like GeoCities circa 1997 – just like every kook and conspiracy theorist's site. Second red flag: they claim to be a legitimate, peer-reviewed academic journal – and yet they demand a $35 “processing fee” to “cover costs for processing and managing the peer review process” as well as a $150 “article publication fee.” [5] No legitimate journal charges ANY such fees. Furthermore, their submission guidelines require authors to list five scientists who would be qualified to review the submitted paper. Again, unheard-of – and even more suspicious. Need I go on?

Clearly, there is an agenda. A little research into the panspermia creation myth led to the discovery that its chief proponent, Fred Hoyle, rejected the Big Bang on the same logic as his rejection of abiogenesis. Which leads me to an essay (if it can be so called) on the “Big Bang myth,” or “Big Bang Theology” that argues for an eternal universe in which black holes, which the author prefers to call “gravity holes,” recycle the universe ad infinitum. [6] Sure, the Big Bang is a modern creation myth. Big deal. However, Occam's Razor dictates that Conformal Cyclic Cosmology or a Big Bang-Big Crunch cyclic model would be vastly preferable – as infinite time infinitely multiplies entities! There are so many misunderstandings and misinterpretations of relativity, physical cosmology and even fundamental physical concepts such as inertial frames, that one doubts that the author – one Rhawn Joseph, PhD (Emeritus of the “Brain Institute” - address: Northern California (can you be more vague?)) – had any credibility before reading this joke of an article.

Does this man look like he's about anything but self-aggrandizement?

Of course, our buddy Rhawn was the first to defend Hoover's argument in a “Commentary,” which concludes: “There is no evidence life began on Earth. Life was present on this planet from the very beginning. Life on Earth has a cosmic ancestry. The preponderance of evidence demonstrates life on Earth, came from other planets. Our ancient ancestors journeyed here, from the stars.”

Why is it no surprise that a simple google search turned up an intriguing connection between this debate, ostensibly over cosmic and biological beginnings, and the only apocalyptic scenario today that is at once both more absurd and more popular in our culture than the Zombie Apocalypse: the 2012 “end of the Mayan calendar” phenomenon. The following video appeared under the by-line of Rhawn Joseph, PhD and his "institute."

To be continued... (Also see this previous post on conspiracy thinking by James Curcio.)

The Theory of Everything and Quandry of Light Speed

A little known secret: since I was a child, I've been obsessed with science. I was equally obsessed with fantasy, and later, philosophy and art, but my interest in science came about through the fact that it was the only one of these with any hope of creating a demonstrable model of how things work. Would I have used those words at the age of 13? Probably not, but it was still I believe what drew me to it. I had a bad teacher in middle school, and she forced me onto a far "lower" track of math and science than I should have been on, and at that point I consciously parted with the idea of ever becoming a scientist with a background in philosophy, focusing instead on art and philosophy. Though in my spare time, and in studying philosophy, I've done plenty of "layman" reading on Einstein, Neils Bohr, relativity, string theory, quantum mechanics, and all the bullshit pseudo-science that other layman have written about the subject.

I've avoided talking about it mostly because I know I don't speak the language, I have to fall back on the facile metaphors that real scientists attempt to make to explain these things to us, and in the process we can make egregious errors. I promised myself I wouldn't write about it, and yet here I am. So please, pardon my ignorance.

I have never been interested in lab science, in a fixation on detail and structure. I like science because it allows us to take philosophical ideas a step further. Many scientists are uncomfortable with this relationship, saying that science has nothing at all to do with philosophy except in their far distance past. Not so. But this is a topic that I simply couldn't fit into a blog post. It is the worthwhile subject of an entire book. I touch on it in the essays I've written so far for the Immanence of Myth but even there the topic is restricted to how science relates to myth, rather than philosophy.

Instead I'll cut to the chase. I recently read an article in Scientific American called "The Elusive Theory of Everything," written by Stephan Hawking (yes, that Stephan Hawking), and Leonard Mlodinow. The headline: "Physicists have long sought to find one final theory that would unify all of physics. Instead they may have to settle for several."

This cuts to the chase of a long running history, from relativity to quantum mechanics, and the fact that they can't be reconciled, to string theory, which at first was thought to be a means of solving this incongruity. For instance:

"In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history. So quantum physics implies a different reality than that of classical physics- even though the latter is consistent with our intuition and still serves us well when we design things such as buildings and bridges."

But then more variants of that theory were needed. And on, and on. And - finally! - it seems physicists are starting to realize something that philosophers have been saying for decades.

Let me quote again from the article:

"These examples bring us to a conclusion that proivdes an important framework with which to interpret modern science. In our view, there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If two models agree with observation, neither one can be considered more reality an the other. A person can use whicher model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."

This is precisely the point I've been reiterating in the context of mythology, within my work for the Immanence of Myth. I recognize that, in an interdisciplinary sense, it is a point that shouldn't need to be made. But it seems that some diciplines have come to this conclusion before others, and it is about time that all disciplines - psychiatry most of all! - accepts this idea. There is no way I know of to drive it home with more force, and yet it doesn't manage to sink in. All models, all explanations, all beliefs that we form are contextual in every sense. Contextually derived, contextually dependent, and contextually useful, irrelevant, or even dangerous.

There is one point that seems, to a certain extent, to defy this fact, and it is this defiance that had me in an almost manic state most of yesterday until I realized I simply am not equipped with the knowledge or tools to solve the quandry. That is this: the constancy of light in a vacuum appears to somehow have a "higher" priority than all other constants. Space itself will bend to accomodate the constancy of this speed. When light passes through objects, of course, it is forced to slow. But time slows, we may imagine, to 0 as an object approaches light speed, and mass increases exponentially (making it seem likely that any object with any mass at all could never truly attain it.) Why is any of this relevant to what I've already said? After all, the behavior of light is one of the first places where the power of models became evident - is it a particle or a wave? It is because it seems peculiar to me that in a universe so recursively and emergently produced from any center-point that perception chooses to originate from should insist on one particular constant over and above others.

So .Why this insistence, and what does that mean in terms of our lives, and the nature of consciousness and being?

But this is where I hit a wall. I don't have the training to work this out. If I talk to scientists about it, I have to take their word for it. I have to approach the issue from another vantage point, that of personal experience. There are comments in the previous post where I talk about the nature of time. This relates to this as well. It would seem that the experience we have of time is very much based on our relative velocity to the speed of light. In other words, its behavior and seeming constancy is a condition of our relationship to that constant. How does that relate to the real experiences of our lives? Or of how we are all in a sense trapped in time, trapped to live on moment that appears to have some n-dimensional movement from a beginning to an end.

Tricking death would seem to me to not so much be a means of extending our experience of linear time indefinitely so much as changing the very nature of the rules of the game.