Where I worked it was “Bring your authentic self to work”. I wanted to ask what if your authentic self is a reactionary curmudgeon, but the occasion never came up. (This was during the whole George Floyd insanity, so the question might not have been well received, but I was close enough to retirement not to care).
I met a fellow years ago, who believed that our human race on earth descends from visitors from Mars. If he was pulling our legs, he sure never let on, and he did have some literature that he could point to. I never noticed any reticence or anything. He knew very well that everyone thought that was preposterous, but he didn’t.
That’s very different from the much more common case of your neighbors et al. who have fallen under the spell of some religious nuttery. They do know it isn’t supported by anything in the real world and doesn’t even make any particular sense, and that’s actually an element of the thing: their faith would be nothing, if it were backed up by the real world and its logic.
But that’s weird, isn’t it? And there’s going to be some degree of an essential conflict, between them and anyone who just thinks it’s a crock, that’s very different from people you disagree with over anything else. It’s kind of unfortunate if it makes them steer clear of unbelievers, because it’s probably the best cure: hang out with the barmaid, not because she argues but because she has it together without the invisible dad.
In other words, I don’t entirely buy this strip. The US is now looking down the barrel of a theocracy putsch, but that isn’t coming from the “you made me feel uncomfortable” crowd.
“who believed that our human race on earth descends from visitors from Mars.”
That was part of the backstory of some of H. Beam Piper’s SF stories written in the 1950’s, before it became clear just how desolate Mars is. Even then the idea of independent evolution producing animals as similar as humans & apes shouldn’t have flown. Ignore that bit & the stories are still well worth reading.
Jim Baerg, isn’t that always the thing about SciFi — if you manage to ignore the preposterous precepts, the rest can be almost believable?
Suspense of sense: the essence of any religion. Or, that’s what I tell myself. And don’t nobody talk me out of it! !1!
Btw, I may have SciFi’ed the word precept because I’m alien.
There is a novel by R. A. Lafferty — I think it’s Fourth Mansions — where the protagonist is on a bus for some reason and the guy next to him starts explaining that our 25 hour circadian rhythm clearly proves that humans did not evolve on Earth, but on a planet with a 25 hour day, and that’s why everyone is always sleep deprived. It was just a throwaway bit with no consequences for the overall story line, but after 45 years or so it’s the only detail I still remember. The book was one of my favorites though back when I was reading a lot of science fiction, so if you’re into offbeat science fiction I recommend it.
Lafferty was great, hardly even minded the Catholic thing. I have Fourth Mansions, don’t remember that passage but there’s a lot of stuff in it.
Ironically our evolutionary scale ancestors had shorter days – apparently lunar tides have been gradually slowing the earth’s rotation, and in the Upper Cretaceous for example we had 370 days per year.
I love sci-fi that goes somewhere with its preposterous stuff. I mean, like, what if there was a planet where … What if some enterprising nonhuman race managed to … etc.
I think the thing that has really gotten old, for me, is the mental telepathy gimmick. To the point that it would probably have been worth a story, like, what if there were contact with aliens who were no more able to communicate telepathically than we can. And we really can’t, for reasons that are more compelling even than the reasons we can travel faster than the speed of light.
I don’t read much science fiction (or fiction of any sort) anymore, so I’m not up on recent trends, but my rough sense is that telepathy and mental powers in general were really common tropes in classic SF from let’s say the 1940s or before, but that they gradually became less common as science advanced and science fiction became “harder”. (Although “harder” is relative here. One of the reasons I stopped reading science fiction is that the more I learned about science myself, the more it became clear that most science fiction writers knew bollocks about actual science. I kept reading fantasy for a while longer because “it’s magic” or “a wizard did it” were just givens, so you didn’t have to worry your head about them).
I don’t know how cerebral quantum states would get entangled or what would happen, but I’m guessing that’s about the medium of transfer of information. How would brains communicate when we have no detectable shortwave or whatever? Quantums! I hope you haven’t been soaking up Penrose. What a ding dong.
That’s just one of the problems, though. The real barrier is semantic. Raw data is garbage – information exchange has to be coded. Two people’s brains are not congruent with each other in any meaningful way, other than in some weird twin cases (the one I’m thinking of was in the UK like a half century ago; there could be more like that, and this one just generated more attention because of some lurid criminal proceedings.) If you aren’t basically an identical twin of the other party, his or her thought emanations are going to be just plain static, even if you could receive them intact.
A lot of standard sci-fi elements aren’t based on any serious science at all, so in that sense perhaps it’s a misnomer. Some of the greats really showed little interest in science, in their best stuff – Ray Bradbury for example. (And RA Lafferty, where we came in.) But when it doesn’t make you think, that’s when I’d say it’s fantasy and not sci-fi.
I’m not saying that quantum entanglement of two or more brains would be easy to do? However in theory is it a possibility? I think such preposterous notions of the 21st century are the same as telling me in 1983 that you could get Terrabytes of data into a drive the size of a credit card!!!
Ah, telepathy. Science fiction. I’m onboard with this topic and recommend Spider Robinson, author of Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, a place much like the comments section here at J&M. In his “Callahan’s Secret” he has a telepath save the planet from a telepathic scout from another part of the galaxy intent on wiping out humanity.
Spider has written 21 books. If you enjoy puns, he is your man. But there is yet another champion punster, Reginald Bretnor, author of the parlous Feghoot series. An example…
On a December trip to Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, Ferdinand Feghoot was summoned to the local college, Wossamotta U. by Inspector Fenwick, the Chief of Police.
There he was confronted with an appalling scene. Bullwinkle, the town’s leading citizen, had been smashed flatter than a kippered herring by a falling safe.
“It’s a common enough means of death for cartoon characters,” Fenwick opined. “Every year, we lose five or six citizens to falling safes. But this time, it was no accident. This time, it’s murder!”
He showed Feghoot the ingenious deadfall trap rigged to rain financial ruin on an unsuspecting victim. Bullwinkle’s antlers were still entangled in the tripwire. Grasped tightly in one hand was a small statue of a Hindu god.
The dead quadruped’s best friend, Rocky the flying squirrel had been with Bullwinkle at the time of his death, but when questioned by Feghoot, the distraught rodent said all he could remember was seeing a rabbi fleeing the scene upon a pogo stick.
Fenwick immediately issued an APB for the rabbi.
“You’re wasting your time, Fenwick,” said Feghoot grimly, as he stood from his examination of the body. “The rabbi has been framed. When you find him, he will tell you of some elaborate ruse that induced him to be on a pogo stick at this time and place.”
“How do you know that, Feghoot?” asked the Inspector.
“This is the work of the Christmas Killer,” Feghoot declared. “I have been on the trail of this fiend for years, and I fear that we might never catch him. Every December, he arranges one of these grisly messages.”
“Look! Didn’t you notice the smile on the victim’s face? The corners of his mouth have been propped up… by these!” He displayed two toothpicks he had taken from Bullwinkle’s mouth.
“I still don’t see how you know the murderer is the Christmas Killer,” said Fenwick.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Feghoot asked. “Wee Vishnu, a merry crushed moose, and a hoppy Jew near.”
I’m not saying that quantum entanglement of two or more brains would be easy to do?
What are you saying, if you don’t mind? The process by which quantum entanglement would take place, the physical effects, and how the result would create telepathy. For extra credit, explain why information transferred in this manner would need no semantic encoding.
Quantum entanglement is extremely fragile. In the pursuit of quantum computing, huge companies like IBM and Microsoft have spent billions of dollars on experiments that seek to maintain quantum entanglement for a fraction of a second between microscopic states at temperatures near absolute zero. The idea that two brains could communicate via quantum entanglement is preposterous. It’s woo along the lines of Roger Penrose’s “the mind is mysterious, and Quantum Mechanics is mysterious, therefore Quantum Mechanics must explain the mind” thesis, only even less plausible.
I’m not so sure that it’s preposterous? Televisions 2mm thick were preposterous in 1945….so go figure…I would like to think in 100 years the higgs boson controller inside every electronic device and human implanted brains would make communication betwixt any keyed in device inatantaneous regardless ofvyhe distance between them…
Wow – something more nonsensical than Penrose et al.’s “Orchestrated objective reduction”?
From “How quantum brain biology can rescue conscious free will“, Stuart Hameroff, Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience:
If correct, Orch OR can account for conscious causal agency, resolving problem 1. Regarding problem 2, Orch OR can cause temporal non-locality, sending quantum information backward in classical time, enabling conscious control of behavior. Three lines of evidence for brain backward time effects are presented. Regarding problem 3, Penrose OR (and Orch OR) invokes non-computable influences from information embedded in spacetime geometry, potentially avoiding algorithmic determinism. In summary, Orch OR can account for real-time conscious causal agency, avoiding the need for consciousness to be seen as epiphenomenal illusion. Orch OR can rescue conscious free will.
“… avoiding the need for consciousness to be seen as an epiphenomenal illusion.”
I spent a few minutes trying to sort out what that meant, and stripped of the philosophical mumbo jumbo, I think that the epiphenominalists are looking at is the lapse between our functional experience, and our perceptual experience. They note that electrical impulses from a volitional act measurably precedes awareness of the volition, so they reckon that our actions aren’t driven by consciousness.
As usual these ideas benefit greatly from strict adherence to defined meanings of terminology, and predictably Hameroff et al. are off the mark. In my opinion, of course.
Consciousness in this discussion means the reportable awareness you may have, of the course of events. There shouldn’t be any doubt at all, that this awareness is at some variance with the actual internal course of events – no great surprise that it isn’t “real time”, but also it’s partial and inaccurate. We do things and explain them afterwards, that’s consciousness — in this context.
That doesn’t mean that consciousness plays no role in human action, which seems to be the typical logical error that people like Hameroff fall into. Whatever you call the mental function that sits in the driver’s seat, it’s linked to the consciousness – your consciousness isn’t just a passive awareness, it’s part of the system, it’s just that there’s this processing lag.
“Free will” might indeed need to be rescued, but not from epiphenomenalism. If Penrose wants to rescue free will, he needs to explain what it is – free from what? – and quit confusing himself with all this quantum physics hocus pocus.
At least I can do the next best thing, and read the wikipedia page on it.
As usual, to the extent there seems to be any controversy, it’s a matter for philosophers – i.e., playing games with semantics. From “one of Dennett’s more controversial claims” –
The non-existence of qualia would mean that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and “philosophical zombies”, which are supposed to act like a human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist.
The stamp of the philosopher right there. Let’s consider a hypothetical case where by definition there’s no objective difference between A with X and B without X, and then object that this can’t be possible because it would make X look empty. Whatever, guys, you sort it out and get back to us. This is presumably the kind of thing that drives Penrose et al. wild, they get sucked up by the “hard problem of consciousness” and have to go to the ramparts against the philosophical zombies etc., and end up making fools of themselves.
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
July 12, 2023
Where I worked it was “Bring your authentic self to work”. I wanted to ask what if your authentic self is a reactionary curmudgeon, but the occasion never came up. (This was during the whole George Floyd insanity, so the question might not have been well received, but I was close enough to retirement not to care).
I met a fellow years ago, who believed that our human race on earth descends from visitors from Mars. If he was pulling our legs, he sure never let on, and he did have some literature that he could point to. I never noticed any reticence or anything. He knew very well that everyone thought that was preposterous, but he didn’t.
That’s very different from the much more common case of your neighbors et al. who have fallen under the spell of some religious nuttery. They do know it isn’t supported by anything in the real world and doesn’t even make any particular sense, and that’s actually an element of the thing: their faith would be nothing, if it were backed up by the real world and its logic.
But that’s weird, isn’t it? And there’s going to be some degree of an essential conflict, between them and anyone who just thinks it’s a crock, that’s very different from people you disagree with over anything else. It’s kind of unfortunate if it makes them steer clear of unbelievers, because it’s probably the best cure: hang out with the barmaid, not because she argues but because she has it together without the invisible dad.
In other words, I don’t entirely buy this strip. The US is now looking down the barrel of a theocracy putsch, but that isn’t coming from the “you made me feel uncomfortable” crowd.
“who believed that our human race on earth descends from visitors from Mars.”
That was part of the backstory of some of H. Beam Piper’s SF stories written in the 1950’s, before it became clear just how desolate Mars is. Even then the idea of independent evolution producing animals as similar as humans & apes shouldn’t have flown. Ignore that bit & the stories are still well worth reading.
Jim Baerg, isn’t that always the thing about SciFi — if you manage to ignore the preposterous precepts, the rest can be almost believable?
Suspense of sense: the essence of any religion. Or, that’s what I tell myself. And don’t nobody talk me out of it! !1!
Btw, I may have SciFi’ed the word precept because I’m alien.
There is a novel by R. A. Lafferty — I think it’s Fourth Mansions — where the protagonist is on a bus for some reason and the guy next to him starts explaining that our 25 hour circadian rhythm clearly proves that humans did not evolve on Earth, but on a planet with a 25 hour day, and that’s why everyone is always sleep deprived. It was just a throwaway bit with no consequences for the overall story line, but after 45 years or so it’s the only detail I still remember. The book was one of my favorites though back when I was reading a lot of science fiction, so if you’re into offbeat science fiction I recommend it.
Lafferty was great, hardly even minded the Catholic thing. I have Fourth Mansions, don’t remember that passage but there’s a lot of stuff in it.
Ironically our evolutionary scale ancestors had shorter days – apparently lunar tides have been gradually slowing the earth’s rotation, and in the Upper Cretaceous for example we had 370 days per year.
I love sci-fi that goes somewhere with its preposterous stuff. I mean, like, what if there was a planet where … What if some enterprising nonhuman race managed to … etc.
I think the thing that has really gotten old, for me, is the mental telepathy gimmick. To the point that it would probably have been worth a story, like, what if there were contact with aliens who were no more able to communicate telepathically than we can. And we really can’t, for reasons that are more compelling even than the reasons we can travel faster than the speed of light.
Surely telepathy is possible? Two or more brains with their quantum states entangled?
I don’t read much science fiction (or fiction of any sort) anymore, so I’m not up on recent trends, but my rough sense is that telepathy and mental powers in general were really common tropes in classic SF from let’s say the 1940s or before, but that they gradually became less common as science advanced and science fiction became “harder”. (Although “harder” is relative here. One of the reasons I stopped reading science fiction is that the more I learned about science myself, the more it became clear that most science fiction writers knew bollocks about actual science. I kept reading fantasy for a while longer because “it’s magic” or “a wizard did it” were just givens, so you didn’t have to worry your head about them).
I don’t know how cerebral quantum states would get entangled or what would happen, but I’m guessing that’s about the medium of transfer of information. How would brains communicate when we have no detectable shortwave or whatever? Quantums! I hope you haven’t been soaking up Penrose. What a ding dong.
That’s just one of the problems, though. The real barrier is semantic. Raw data is garbage – information exchange has to be coded. Two people’s brains are not congruent with each other in any meaningful way, other than in some weird twin cases (the one I’m thinking of was in the UK like a half century ago; there could be more like that, and this one just generated more attention because of some lurid criminal proceedings.) If you aren’t basically an identical twin of the other party, his or her thought emanations are going to be just plain static, even if you could receive them intact.
A lot of standard sci-fi elements aren’t based on any serious science at all, so in that sense perhaps it’s a misnomer. Some of the greats really showed little interest in science, in their best stuff – Ray Bradbury for example. (And RA Lafferty, where we came in.) But when it doesn’t make you think, that’s when I’d say it’s fantasy and not sci-fi.
That was Greta and Freda Chaplin, by the way.
I’m not saying that quantum entanglement of two or more brains would be easy to do? However in theory is it a possibility? I think such preposterous notions of the 21st century are the same as telling me in 1983 that you could get Terrabytes of data into a drive the size of a credit card!!!
Ah, telepathy. Science fiction. I’m onboard with this topic and recommend Spider Robinson, author of Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, a place much like the comments section here at J&M. In his “Callahan’s Secret” he has a telepath save the planet from a telepathic scout from another part of the galaxy intent on wiping out humanity.
Spider has written 21 books. If you enjoy puns, he is your man. But there is yet another champion punster, Reginald Bretnor, author of the parlous Feghoot series. An example…
On a December trip to Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, Ferdinand Feghoot was summoned to the local college, Wossamotta U. by Inspector Fenwick, the Chief of Police.
There he was confronted with an appalling scene. Bullwinkle, the town’s leading citizen, had been smashed flatter than a kippered herring by a falling safe.
“It’s a common enough means of death for cartoon characters,” Fenwick opined. “Every year, we lose five or six citizens to falling safes. But this time, it was no accident. This time, it’s murder!”
He showed Feghoot the ingenious deadfall trap rigged to rain financial ruin on an unsuspecting victim. Bullwinkle’s antlers were still entangled in the tripwire. Grasped tightly in one hand was a small statue of a Hindu god.
The dead quadruped’s best friend, Rocky the flying squirrel had been with Bullwinkle at the time of his death, but when questioned by Feghoot, the distraught rodent said all he could remember was seeing a rabbi fleeing the scene upon a pogo stick.
Fenwick immediately issued an APB for the rabbi.
“You’re wasting your time, Fenwick,” said Feghoot grimly, as he stood from his examination of the body. “The rabbi has been framed. When you find him, he will tell you of some elaborate ruse that induced him to be on a pogo stick at this time and place.”
“How do you know that, Feghoot?” asked the Inspector.
“This is the work of the Christmas Killer,” Feghoot declared. “I have been on the trail of this fiend for years, and I fear that we might never catch him. Every December, he arranges one of these grisly messages.”
“Look! Didn’t you notice the smile on the victim’s face? The corners of his mouth have been propped up… by these!” He displayed two toothpicks he had taken from Bullwinkle’s mouth.
“I still don’t see how you know the murderer is the Christmas Killer,” said Fenwick.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Feghoot asked. “Wee Vishnu, a merry crushed moose, and a hoppy Jew near.”
What are you saying, if you don’t mind? The process by which quantum entanglement would take place, the physical effects, and how the result would create telepathy. For extra credit, explain why information transferred in this manner would need no semantic encoding.
Quantum entanglement is extremely fragile. In the pursuit of quantum computing, huge companies like IBM and Microsoft have spent billions of dollars on experiments that seek to maintain quantum entanglement for a fraction of a second between microscopic states at temperatures near absolute zero. The idea that two brains could communicate via quantum entanglement is preposterous. It’s woo along the lines of Roger Penrose’s “the mind is mysterious, and Quantum Mechanics is mysterious, therefore Quantum Mechanics must explain the mind” thesis, only even less plausible.
I’m not so sure that it’s preposterous? Televisions 2mm thick were preposterous in 1945….so go figure…I would like to think in 100 years the higgs boson controller inside every electronic device and human implanted brains would make communication betwixt any keyed in device inatantaneous regardless ofvyhe distance between them…
Wow – something more nonsensical than Penrose et al.’s “Orchestrated objective reduction”?
From “How quantum brain biology can rescue conscious free will“, Stuart Hameroff, Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience:
“… avoiding the need for consciousness to be seen as an epiphenomenal illusion.”
I spent a few minutes trying to sort out what that meant, and stripped of the philosophical mumbo jumbo, I think that the epiphenominalists are looking at is the lapse between our functional experience, and our perceptual experience. They note that electrical impulses from a volitional act measurably precedes awareness of the volition, so they reckon that our actions aren’t driven by consciousness.
As usual these ideas benefit greatly from strict adherence to defined meanings of terminology, and predictably Hameroff et al. are off the mark. In my opinion, of course.
Consciousness in this discussion means the reportable awareness you may have, of the course of events. There shouldn’t be any doubt at all, that this awareness is at some variance with the actual internal course of events – no great surprise that it isn’t “real time”, but also it’s partial and inaccurate. We do things and explain them afterwards, that’s consciousness — in this context.
That doesn’t mean that consciousness plays no role in human action, which seems to be the typical logical error that people like Hameroff fall into. Whatever you call the mental function that sits in the driver’s seat, it’s linked to the consciousness – your consciousness isn’t just a passive awareness, it’s part of the system, it’s just that there’s this processing lag.
“Free will” might indeed need to be rescued, but not from epiphenomenalism. If Penrose wants to rescue free will, he needs to explain what it is – free from what? – and quit confusing himself with all this quantum physics hocus pocus.
Donn. Read Consciousness Explained by Dennett…
At least I can do the next best thing, and read the wikipedia page on it.
As usual, to the extent there seems to be any controversy, it’s a matter for philosophers – i.e., playing games with semantics. From “one of Dennett’s more controversial claims” –
The stamp of the philosopher right there. Let’s consider a hypothetical case where by definition there’s no objective difference between A with X and B without X, and then object that this can’t be possible because it would make X look empty. Whatever, guys, you sort it out and get back to us. This is presumably the kind of thing that drives Penrose et al. wild, they get sucked up by the “hard problem of consciousness” and have to go to the ramparts against the philosophical zombies etc., and end up making fools of themselves.