Through Morgan Freeman's Wormhole, Part 1

"The secret ingredient is hate," -- Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz

I had originally planned a short post on the Through the Wormhole episode on the sixth sense, but researching the various claims made has taken up so much time and so many pages that I am breaking into a multi-part (probably 5 part) series of posts. I'm not sure why I've kept working on this since there's no real point to debunking it, and I'm not a professional debunker. But I was annoyed by the episode, and so I think I must have been driven by hate. Here is part 1.

Previously, I had considered Through the Wormhole (TTW) with Morgan Freeman to be Harmless. Today, however, I must downgrade my evaluation to Mostly Harmless.

The episode, "Is there a the Sixth Sense?" crossed over from innocuously speculative and silly science-related program to endorsing highly suspect research with the apparent aim of titillating rather than educating the audience. It appears that TTW is based on real science in the same way that The Amityville Horror was based on true events. In other words, it's not actually true (or science). There might be something true somewhere in there, but there's no way to tell what's true, and the true part doesn't relate to the interesting parts emphasized in the story.

It's a bit silly talking about a sixth sense when the variety of sensory inputs we know about exceeds the traditional five senses already. People have distinct sensors for heat, pain, and pressure; they sense the location and movements of their bodies; they sense various internal facts about their guts. But TTW uses the "Sixth Sense" terminology to appeal to our idea of a sensory apparatus beyond those previously known to science.

Freeman posited several different varieties of sixth sense. 1. TTW reports on visual perception among blind-sighted individuals using a distinct visual system in the brain. 2. It reports on David Chalmers's unusual views on consciousness and the supposed impossibility of reductively explaining it in terms of objective science. 3. It reports on the Global Consciousness Project that claims that humans in large groups have a capacity to affect random number generators so that they cease for brief periods of time to be random and that this shift to non-randomness results from large scale emotional arousal. 4. It reports on psychologist Michael Persinger's claim that people can communicate perceptual information from one mind to another following lines of electromagnetic force. 5. It reports on Rupert Sheldrake's claim that people have an ability to know when they are being watched by others even when they have no ordinary perceptual means of discerning this fact.

Part 1 of my report is limited to the blindsight case.

Blindsight
This fascinating phenomenon occurs when people have damage to visual cortex so that certain parts of their visual fields are "blind", and they appear to lack any conscious awareness of those parts of their visual field. Their eyes are perfectly functional and continue to send information to the brain. Psychologists (led by Lawrence Weiskrantz who discovered this phenomenon) have shown that blind-sighted patients have some surprising abilities. If these subjects are forced to guess about the supposed blind part of their visual fields, they are able to say at a rate better than chance whether there is a light in that field. When they reach for something in the "blind" part of their field, they will shape (apparently automatically) their hands to the object in the field. For example, they will shape their fingers to pick up a coffee cup or a paper clip. They will not volunteer the information that something is in their visual field, and they do not even believe they can see anything. However, they have visual perception even if this is not conscious.

Blindsight is a great hook for a science show since it is wildly counterintuitive that people could see without realizing that they can see. It also provides a great chance to teach about the brain, its complexity and modularity (or distinct paths of processing) and its evolution. Apparently, at some point in its evolution, the brain added new pathways in visual cortex without adapting evolutionarily older pathways. TTW could even have taught about the complexity of visual processing, and that's fascinating in and of itself.

TTW reviews the research of Beatrice De Gelder in the Netherlands who finds that people blind in one side of the visual field will automatically mimic the facial expression of a picture shown only to their blind field and they will show a galvanic skin response for emotionally-charged pictures but none for no pictures or for neutral pictures. This shows that despite damage to certain areas of the visual cortex, people will still be able to take in a certain amount of visual information, specially directed towards the emotional system in the brain, the amgydala and other areas, yet those people will lack any conscious any awareness of or ability to verbalize that information.

Conclusion: Sixth sense fail.

Blind-sight is fascinating. Unfortunately, the episode chose to treat this as more mysterious than it is. TTW repeatedly referred to the field, from one eye, as "blind" as though people could not see at all in that part of the field and then pretended that their ability to acquire this visual information in some mysterious way. Vision, even blindsighted vision, is not a sixth sense; it’s just plain old seeing. However, what this phenomenon shows is that vision is a more complex phenomenon than people might have thought, one that involves conscious and unconscious elements. And it provides an interesting case in which perceptual information is processed without consciousness; we can see (in a certain limited sense) without being aware that we see.

Next up: Part 2 on Consciousness.

The Santa Claus God

Stuck in my front door a few days ago was a booklet, Our Daily Bread, full of heartwarming and inspirational stories to help one live a fulfilled, happy and not-at-all meaningless Christian life. It’s not just fire-and-brimstone televangelists who indoctrinate people into harmful and delusional belief systems. These apparently innocuous, friendly messages can be harmful as well and more insidious for their apparent banality. The first day, entitled “Hidden Sin”, is indicative of some of the worst of Christianity.

The text is:

Chuck had slowed to a stop when his car was hit from behind and was pushed into the vehicle ahead of him. A sickening, crunching sound indicated that additional vehicles had collided behind them.
As Chuck sat quietly for a moment, he observed that the vehicle directly behind him was pulling out into traffic. Obviously hoping to avoid an encounter with the police, the escaping driver neglected to notice he had left something behind. [At this point, I was hoping the story would take a World According to Garp/John Wayne Bobbitt turn, but alas, I was disappointed.] When the police arrived, an officer picked up the hit and run driver’s license plate from the ground and
said to Chuck, “Someone will be waiting for him when he arrives home. He won’t get away with this.”

Scripture tells us: “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Num 32:23), as this man who fled the accident discovered. We may sometimes be able to hide our sin from the people around us, but nothing is ever “hidden from [God’s] sight” (Heb. 4:13). He sees each of our failures, thoughts, and motivations (I Sam. 16:7; Luke 12:2-3). [Just a note: I Samuel
16:7 says, “[T]he LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.” This is consistent with God seeing all our thoughts, but it does not imply that. I just wanted to note that there’s a good deal of interpretation implicit in this booklet.]

Believers are given a wonderful promise: “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). So don’t let unconfessed so-called "hidden" sins come between us and God (vv. 6-7).—Cindy Hess Kasper

Finally, there is a closing piece of doggerel:

We cannot hide from God
No matter how we try.
For He knows all we think
and do— We can’t escape his eye.” -- Hess

First of all: is this a true story? It seems awfully fishy to me. Why doesn’t Chuck have a last name? Where did this car accident take place? Where’s the arrest record? I suspect that this story was just made up to prove some sort of point. Sure, Jesus made up parables all the time, but this might also be called lying (and bearing false witness against Chuck’s neighbor?).

Let’s think a little about Chuck and his unhealthy interest in the punishment of his fellow citizen. Why does he care whether this person is caught? And why is the police officer confiding this information to Chuck? Is this any of Chuck’s business? I suspect what’s going on is that Chuck wants vengeance on this other driver for hitting his car, but instead of confronting the driver in a constructive and courageous way, he secretly wants someone else to punish the driver for him. Secondarily, Chuck’s unhealthy interest in the hit-and-run driver’s punishment indicates that Chuck would himself consider fleeing the scene if he had been the one to cause the accident. Chuck needs to know that criminals will be caught and punished, otherwise he would commit these crimes himself.

At this point, you may be thinking: What’s wrong with Chuck? What kind of person only does the right thing from fear of punishment? The answer is, of course, a Good Christian. That’s the first lesson of this booklet: Christians should only do good things because they will be punished if they don’t. It’s a little odd that the claim that sometimes people’s crimes are only discovered by God is illustrated by a story of someone being caught by the police. I suppose one has to go to a Jack Chick tract in order to read about God himself punishing people who have otherwise escaped punishment. However, the main point is that we need God to see everyone’s actions and thoughts and to punish and reward everyone correctly based on them. Worldly authority is not enough to guarantee punishment for every sin. Normal, rational people are not like this. In fact, Chuck’s doing “good” only because of his fear of punishment means that he is not doing a good thing at all. If you do something only for your own personal benefit, then you’re just being selfish. Instead, Chuck should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Getting the right outcome from selfish reasons does not necessarily indicate moral goodness. If I dig a pit outside my neighbor’s house so he’ll fall in and land on poisoned spikes but in digging it accidentally strike oil and make him rich, I have not done a moral or virtuous thing. Any good that came of my action was just a matter of luck. Christians, according to Our Daily Bread, should be selfish and care only for themselves rather than doing the right things because they are right.

A creepier part of this story is the view of God as Santa Claus. God “sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.” God is a voyeur interested in every aspect of our lives and guaranteeing that we act, think and feel exactly the way God wants. Apparently, God watches us in our bedrooms, and every time a man fails to get an erection, that is of great interest to God. People’s belief in this kind of God might explain the popularity of Viagra.

The sophist Critias noted that the cleverest thing a lawmaker ever did was invent the idea of the gods who watched and enforced laws when no one else was watching. In other words, God is a fiction created by society in order to enforce social norms on people at all times. The most insidious part of this creation is the way its victims, Nietzsche’s sheep, enforce this belief on everyone else. Because people are afraid of what they and others might do without this constant fear, they make themselves and others believe that they will be punished by Santa Claus-God if they don’t conform. The last Christian motive is the vindictive desire to punish those who refuse to follow the social norms, those free from fear, who do what Good Christians want to do but are too craven to do.

Finally, the creepiest part of the story is that we should beg God’s forgiveness for our sins. There is no mention of learning to be better people or God rewarding us for our good behavior. God only rewards us by forgiving our sins. One thinks that there isn’t much of a point in trying to be good, but instead should just remember to beg for forgiveness. And this entails not just quietly begging God’s forgiveness in the silence of our minds. Normally, what begging forgiveness means is complete self-abasement, preferably in front of others, before God. That makes sense if your goal is to humiliate someone, break down his/her personality and make him/her susceptible to indoctrination into a cult, but it makes no sense as part of the moral life of a human being. We don’t become better people by thinking of ourselves as wretched and worthless; we have to learn to respect ourselves and our judgment in order to make rational, informed and wise decisions.

It’s obvious that this is not a good way to live. People should be free to live as they choose subject to moral laws, not coercion from imaginary beings. The first story in Our Daily Bread, supposedly benign and educational, in fact reveals an insidious problem with Christianity. It appeals to fear to enforce conformity, undermines the kind of self-respect that’s necessary for true moral worth, and even undermines the very possibility of morality for Christian believers.
I’m not arguing that Christianity is false because of these problems. As David Hume writes, that would be fallacious.

THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious. (Enquiry, Section
VIII, Part II)

I’m not arguing, as I said, for the falsity of this view based on its moral consequences. I'm only arguing, whether it is true or not (although it’s almost certainly not), this insipid Christianity undermines human freedom, self-determination, courage and morality. It’s simply inimical to rational, enlightened moral agency to believe this way. And presenting this indoctrination in simple homilies cannot hide that sin.

McConnell's Greece Analogy

Mitch McConnell has recently received some criticisms from the supposed elite know-somethings-about-economics based on his comparison of the United States to Greece. Now, in the context, it appears that McConnell is trying to say that the U.S. economic situation, with respect to its debt, is like that of Greece, which is facing near economic catastrophe. And, of course, McConnell is then, crazily, justifying creating an economic catastrophe in America by comparing it to one in Greece. Some have even gone so far as to say that McConnell's statement is so far into the realm of fantasy that it reveals him to be unsuited to any position of authority in the Republican party. We, of course, know that ignorance can never, no matter the topic or the importance of the issue, disqualify someone for leadership in the Republican party.

We can snipe all day at McConnell for nothing more important than ignorance that ought to embarrass a failing 12-year old in a middle-school civics class. Or we could really attempt to understand the sort of comparison McConnell has in mind.

For one thing, McConnell may have merely been noting the increased availability of feta cheese and stuffed grape leaves at his local grocery store. I know I see more of that than I ever did when I was younger. That looks a lot like Greece to me.

For another, McConnell may be pointing out that we've been embroiled in an approximately 9-year long war in a Middle Eastern country, based on unclear reasons personal to our leaders, which is costing far too much, needlessly killing young Americans and Iraqis of every age, and which is of no benefit to anyone except those who loot their country and our treasury for their personal gain.

For a third, McConnell may be pointing out that our democracy makes decisions based more on emotion and impulse than one any sound foundation in reasoning, that its people are susceptible to the crassest flattery, fear-mongering, and other sophistical appeals. McConnell ought to know; he's one of the biggest beneficiaries of that tendency.

For a fourth, McConnell may be arguing that the government is deviously embracing a set of policies that are rightly unpopular among the vast majority of people but which can be achieved by electing a cadre of ideologues who, while selling themselves as advocating for more jobs and as protectors of medicare (as a Trojan horse, of a sort), they in fact pursue policies destructive of the lives and the values of the people who invited them into the government in the first place.

For a fifth, McConnell may be claiming that powerful interests will act to destroy anyone who upsets their comfortable way of life by, for example, pointing out the dangers of unlimited consumption of fossil fuels or attempting to get them to value the good and act unselfishly to benefit the city-state rather than themselves.

Or maybe he's either a moron or a fraud who either doesn't recognize the obvious differences between the economic catastrophe in Greece and a large but sustainable deficit in America or thinks we cannot tell the difference, and so is confident no one will ever correct him about the sheer, dumbfounding ignorance of his statements.