Nostalgia – Glimpses and Memories

When I was growing up, there was a tree outside the back door of my family’s house. Old Jack, we called it. The trunk split into three about a foot off the ground, each perfect for climbing, and my brothers and I and our friends spent a lot of time sitting among its leaves. One of the great branches was so thick that if two of us stood on opposite sides and reached around it, we could barely touch each other’s hands. Small two-by-four blocks nailed to this trunk made steps up to a place where the branches forked into a perfect seat.

As time passed, we saw sad signs. Old Jack was dying. One day, a bough broke in the wind and fell onto our car while we were inside it. It only made a dent, but we knew Old Jack had to go, and soon after, he was just a stump. Of course there were other trees to climb, but gone were the days when we could dash out the door and up Jack’s steps to sit around in that place where the branches spread out.

Nostalgia is the fond memory of times once enjoyed. The good old days. It can strike us at any time, any age, from many things. The steps of the house you grew up in, an old favorite movie, or that song you and your friends and family used to listen to all the time, but now you only hear a few times a year. For me, it is “The Answer Lies Within” by Dream Theater.

Even as a child I remember a feeling I had when I saw the grass swaying a certain way in the summer breeze. It was as if there was something wonderful, home-like, and perfect that I had forgotten, but could never experience again, and all I could glimpse of it was a shadow of a feeling.

There is a time when we are children, that I call the “golden zone,” when we are especially open to nostalgia-forming experiences. That is why your favorite books and movies are probably the ones you saw and read when you were young. This is why every popular movie from the last 50 years is getting remade, and why I walked out of Star Wars: The Force Awakens upset that the writers completely ignored what the prequels brought to the table, and why I have not gone more than a year without playing through Super Mario 64 or one of its many full game hacks since 1997.

Still gives me the chills just looking at it.

When thinking about nostalgia, it is easy to get caught up in the past, and feel as if life will never be the same. On the one hand, this is correct; you will never have that exact same tree in your backyard. On the other hand, though, you still have the trees that you have now. And your home, and your friends, and your family. For the past two years I have walked the two miles between my apartment and the university twice a day. Most of the time I don’t notice the trip, but I can imagine that some day I will look back and remember fondly passing the Lutheran church, the bridge over Capitol, the high school, the bank with its flowing modern art metal mesh sculpture, and the cupcake shop with the jokes on its blackboard floor sign.

Times go up and down, but we don’t need to be lost in the past. If we open our eyes and see the wonderful things around us, we will realize that the good old days are not something lost forever to the past; the good old days are now. And the more we live in the moment, the more vivid the memories we will make to look back upon in the future.

Consciousness: the Most Baffling Mystery of All

The Great Mysteries:
Fermi Paradox
Consciousness

Recommended Pre-Reading:
Cosmoid: A Definition
Cosmoids In Our Image
What is Science?
The Scientific Jigsaw Puzzle
Realism and Idealism
Quasi-Realism

Science is the best tool we have for understanding reality. It has taught us about matter at the fundamental level, the relationship between space and time, how complex systems function, how humans and animals behave, and innumerable other things. But there is one thing that science has been uncomfortably quiet about, something that is closer to home and more obvious than anything else: consciousness.

Consciousness is the experience of subjectivity, the awareness we have about our senses. Consciousness is what it is like to be something. It is experience itself. It is what we have while we are awake or dreaming, and what we do not have when we are in a dreamless sleep or not alive. It is the difference between a purely mechanical universe and a universe full of color and music and meaning.

We say we know many things, but all ideas and experiences are brought to us in our consciousnesses. Everything else is, at some level, open to question. 400 years ago, the philosopher Rene Descartes famously said, "I think, therefore I am," meaning that the only thing one can be fundamentally certain of is one's own consciousness, and thereby one's existence. Similarly, less than 400 days ago, neuroscientist Sam Harris said, “Consciousness is the one thing we can absolutely know is not an illusion.”

A crucial factor in the nature of reality and how we know things, consciousness is what we in the philosophy fan club call "a big deal." Yet science is deafeningly silent when it comes to the subject. Some would say that it cannot be studied. But it exists, and we know it interacts with the rest of the universe by the fact that we can have conversations about it, so there must be some way that it interacts, which can be studied. After Isaac Newton discovered his three laws of motion, it was said that no law would be found for a blade of grass. Yet we now have the huge, booming science of biology. Now it is said there will never be such a law for consciousness and subjectivity. I believe it is the same now as it was for the blade of grass. We may not know how at the moment, but I believe it is a cosmoid barrier, not a physical barrier.

The problem with studying consciousness is that it is hard to find a place to start. We can hook people up to an MRI and correlate the sounds, tastes, and colors they describe with which neurons are firing, but without knowing more, that is about it. And right now we are woefully restricted to our fellow humans; we cannot ask and animal or a bug or a rock about its conscious experiences. It is almost as if we need to know the answer before we begin. Modern-day philosopher David Chalmers has called this the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

There are a few things we do know about consciousness. We can be reasonably justified in assuming that all living human beings have it, because we can talk about it with them, and it would be very strange if someone knew what consciousness was without having it themself. We can guess that animals also have consciousness, at least the ones whose brains are most like ours. We know consciousness can be divided, from experiments with patients of split brain surgery. But just about everything we know is by subjective observation and self-report.

Some people have suggested ideas to consider regarding consciousness. Some like to say the mind cannot comprehend itself. It is poetic and feels satisfyingly bittersweet, but it is also bogus. No one has ever offered any supporting evidence or argument, other than it feels like it might be true. Some say consciousness is epiphenomenal—that is, it exists, but it merely observes not interacting with the rest of existence. But this cannot be true. We can think about and talk about consciousness, which means our brains must have information about it, which means consciousness must affect our brains. Some people—scientists mostly, to my surprise—suggest that consciousness might not actually exist, and instead just be an illusion. To them, I say, “speak for yourself.”

A panel of science celebrities had an amusing discussion 4 years ago about how little we know about consciousness.

Still, just because we do not know how to begin studying consciousness yet does not mean we never will. There is one attempt at a description of the physical systems in which consciousness as we know it can exist, called Integrated Information Theory. It posits three main axioms, the information, the integration, and the exclusion axioms.

Information: Consciousness is defined by states that could be different. The experience of seeing a blank TV screen is recognized as a blank TV screen because it could have been a scene from anything—Indiana Jones, Star Trek, or a documentary on jellyfish—instead. Blind people do not see black; sight in itself is not a part of their conscious experience because there is no other possible state their visual experience could have.

Integration: Conscious experiences cannot be broken down into individual parts. A momentary experience is like a frame of a movie, impossible to cut into pieces. Each mechanism contributing to consciousness affects and is affected by every other one.

Exclusion: Conscious experiences are individual phenomena. They have what they have, and nothing more. Perhaps I don't fully understand this one, because it seems to me like the Reflexive Property, which is so trivial that it goes without saying for basically everything.

Integrated Information Theory attempts to describe consciousness as we experience it, and the systems in which it makes sense. The brain is a bunch of interconnected switches (neurons), which function as a whole, taking in a vast number of sensory inputs and capable of producing a vast number of responses. On the other hand, if a stone statue were to become conscious we could not recognize it, because stone is just a jumble of molecules. It would have no way of taking in information from the world, and no way to respond to that information. Integrated Information theory explains this, but does not solve the Hard Problem. It does not explain the nature of consciousness or how and in what capacity it exists, nor how we can know about it and talk about it.

The first question that comes to my mind with regards to consciousness is, is it a thing in itself, or is it a property? It may be interesting to explore what it might mean if it were a thing in itself, but it makes more sense for me to think of it as a property, and every idea I have ever heard treats it like a property. The question is, of what? There are two main paradigms that people have held in their cosmoids, though no attempt that I know of has been made to build scientific models of either. Be wary of googling these terms; you will get pseudoscience.

The Soul Hypothesis. This posits that consciousness is a property of a heretofore unknown substance that comes in indivisible packets called souls. Souls inhabit living bodies, and leave when they die.

Panpsychism. Perhaps consciousness is a universal feature of reality, present everywhere, brought into more organized states by complex structures such as the brain. Panpsychism suggests that consciousness, or perhaps an underlying potential for consciousness called protoconsciousness, is an inherent property of all things, known and unknown.

Or the answer might lie somewhere in between. Consciousness or protoconsciousness might be a property of some forms of matter but not others, like electric charge. With what little data we have now, any one of these is as good a guess as any other. This might even be the wrong avenue to explore, and the answer may be something else entirely.

Some say that, since we can mimic the functions of neurons using transistors, we can create consciousness using computer programs. This is an assumption that I find dubious. Mimicking the function of a machine does not mean you also mimic all of its physical properties. For instance, we can mimic the behavior of a computer using a wooden abacus, but we cannot get it to conduct electricity. Similarly, we may be able to mimic all the functions of a human brain using transistors and bit storage, but that is no guarantee that we get consciousness in a computer.

In contemplating consciousness, a few questions arise in my curious mind. These questions cannot be answered yet, as they depend on the nature of consciousness. But perhaps one day they may be tested.

I wonder if qualia are linked directly to the physical processes they are associated with, or if they are only definable in relation to their alternatives. We know that raw experiences are caused by physical events in the brain. Consider a process that causes the experience of pleasure. If the same physical process happened without a brain, would there be a fleeting sense of pleasure in the universe, instantly forgotten because there is no way to store the memory?

Are conscious experiences themselves pleasant and unpleasant, or is it the physiological reactions our DNA has coded within us that decide? Imagine a hypothetical human-like being exactly the same as us, except the physical triggers for the experience of pleasure and pain have been swapped. Suppose this person would react to pleasure the same way as we do, describing it as pleasant and being biologically driven to have it again, but his conscious experience is the same as what we call pain. Is he then really experiencing pain and unable to express it, or does the reaction of the body determine whether qualia are seen as good or bad, and he truly is experiencing pleasure?

These questions and a thousand more like them keep me thinking, wondering, and marveling at the mysteries of the cosmos. There are many possibilities, each as reasonable as any other. But what excites me even more is that for each question, only one answer is true, and it will not only be true after it is discovered, but even now as we ponder.

Reaching for the Far Future

As I turn 25 years old today, I am struck by how young I am. I know most people tend to think about how old they are when their birthdays come around, but my case might be a side-effect of thinking in astrophysical time scales. But I am also aware that someday I will wake up and no longer be young anymore. Still a babe in the grand stream, but frail and worn. When this happens, I assume I am going to be upset, not because of my body, but because it will remind me that I am going to die soon.

Right now, I don’t want to live for a mere 80-100 years. I want to see the future history of the world. Where will science take us? What wonderful new stories will be written? What new philosophical ideas will we come up with? Will we become wise explorers like in Star Trek, or destroy ourselves in World War III? I want to know.

There are many reasons people die—car accidents, disease—but no one can escape old age. And one day, that decrepit figure in the dark hood with the scythe will come knocking on your door. But is death really a fixed thing that we go invariably toward, or could there be a way to stave it off?

If other life forms are anything to go by, the answer is yes. There is a creature called the hydra, which, according to research, does not age. Biological immortality is possible, and it is observed. And if it is possible for something, then we have every reason to consider the possibility that we can engineer it for ourselves.

The immortal hydra

Though we often talk about dying of old age, age itself is not a direct cause of death. It merely increases the risks of deadly conditions, like heart disease, cancer, and strokes. It also brings with it a collection of aches and pains that make life ever less pleasant. So in the short term, the better medical technologies we have, the longer we can increase the human lifespan. In the last 300 years, we have more than doubled the life expectancy for a first-world citizen. The conventional method for doing this is to treat the conditions that arise due to aging, so we may be near a limit on this front. However, what if we go for the root causes, the mechanisms that drive the aging process on the microscopic level?

The science of aging is still not very well understood. That is why institutions like the SENS Research Foundation are pursuing the subject. As of now, there are several factors that are suspected to have something to do with the process.

Free radical accumulation:
The name sounds a fringe political group. Free radicals are atoms or molecules with empty spots in their outer electron shells. They are highly reactive, and will take electrons from other atoms and molecules. In cells, this causes damage. Free radicals build up from normal metabolism, but can be increased by unhealthy habits like smoking.

Telomere shortening:
At the end of each DNA strand is a sequence that repeats over and over. This is called a telomere, and it is kind of like the end of a zipper. Each time the cell divides and copies its DNA, it misses a tiny bit at the end. In the next generation of cells, the telomeres are shorter. This imposes a limit on how many times our cells can divide.

General damage:
Some injuries just don’t heal. Ligaments and tendons can remain damaged for a long time, perhaps indefinitely. Severed digits and limbs don’t grow back. Scars, both external and internal, sometimes don't go away. The brain loses gray matter. However, I would bet that these large-scale problems are the results of small-scale problems, such as the previous two discussed.

I assume there are more; I am no expert in cellular biology. There is a long road ahead of us, strewn with unknowns, but that is why it is called research. Aging is not magical; it can be understood, and once it is, it can be fought with technology and eventually defeated.

The idea of living for centuries, millennia, and even eons might be frightening, conjuring up images of someone bored and sick and tired of life, yet unable to lie down to rest. If given the choice tomorrow to live a normal lifespan or a million years, I imagine the thought of spending day after day, year after year, millennium after millennium waking up, going through the day, and going to sleep, and the fear of the crushing depressive boredom that it could bring with it, might cause many people to choose the normal limitation. But just as aging is not magical, immortality will not be either. We will still be able to die from accident, homicide, disease, or poor lifestyle habits. And if we do get bored, there will always be the option of going off the treatment. Sure, the idea of a million year lifespan may be daunting, but if I were offered the chance to live one more day for a million years, I can see myself taking it every time.

"He's thousands of years old. Some people say millions, although that's impossible."

We have only scratched the surface of the possibilities and consequences of an ageless life. Imagine the skills we could master, and the entrepreneurial feats that could be accomplished if time were not a limit. We could build cities the size of planets. We could forge interstellar trading routes at normal speeds. We could put a trillion solar panel satellites around the sun, capturing 100% of its energy.

Aging has always been a natural part of life, and it still is. But it does not have to be. Look at how technology advances; fifty years took us from the transistor to the internet, and it seems like every other day some new material, machine, or procedure is invented. So despite how little aging is understood right now, it is not unthinkable that it might be reversed within the next 60 years—my projected lifetime. It may still be too far off, but we can hope. As Isaac Arthur says on his video on the subject, "Live forever or die trying."

Quasi-Realism: The Patch on a Leaking Worldview

The Nature of Reality:
Quasi-Realism
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Language of Reality

Also see: previous series on magic, starting with Types of Magic

In many places on this blog, I argue that reality exists independently of our perceptions, beliefs, and understanding. We live in an objective world, brought to us through our senses and translated into something we can experience. The universe is just too regular, too mathematical, too consistent to be otherwise. However, the human being is a complicated creature; we often believe things in the rational parts of our minds, but act as if they are not true. With the nature of reality, this manifests as what I call Quasi-Realism., the belief that some or all parts of reality are indeterminate until they are observed.

When we open our eyes for the first time, we are assaulted with sensory information. Lights and colors, sounds, pressures and motion. As time goes on, we find patterns in these sensations, and slowly build up a model of the world, making connections and learning about how the world works. I have a memory from when I was very young—younger than seven. I was watching an episode of Veggie Tales, where Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber were on a small boat in the ocean. Larry was at the wheel, and Bob came up to him and said “we’re making snow cones back here. Do you want peach or strawberry?” I remember noticing at the time that the boat they were in was little bigger than a bathtub, and I had not seen any snow cone equipment in the scenes before. Had the veggies decided they wanted snow cones and then, because of their decision, the equipment was suddenly there? I thought about myself sitting on the couch in the living room, and what I would do if I wanted a soup ladle. Could I just have it in my hand, or would I have to get up and walk into the kitchen to get it? I tried the former, but no ladle materialized. I stopped thinking about it, getting absorbed in the movie again, but the memory has stuck with me as one of the defining moments of my development.

When we begin to comprehend logic, we have already formed habits of thought. Think of all the people who, as adults, are still nervous in the dark. Whether we tell ourselves it is nothing and that the place is the same in the dark as in the light, or rationalize our fear in terms of ghosts and spiritual energy, there is an anxiety that lingers in us from a time when we did not understand, when we believed that, if darkness covered something, then it did not truly exist. We believed the fuzziness in our perception was fuzziness in reality, and that anything at all might emerge.

As we go about our lives, we have experiences. Things happen, and we react or ignore them. When we notice our experiences, we might wonder why it happens, and then either try to find its scientific explanation or shrug our shoulders and accept it. Because we have to expend extra thought effort to understand how a phenomenon comes to be, and phenomena are all we experience with our bare senses, there arises an unconscious leaning toward the idea that phenomena are fundamental to reality, and they cause their explanations. In fact, it is the explanations that are fundamental to reality, existing and happening outside of perception, but completely real nonetheless, and that cause the phenomena we experience.

One example of the idea that perception precedes explanation is in advertising. Every so often I will see ads or headlines or video titles that say something like, “7 Spooky Phenomena Science Cannot Explain.” It does not say that scientists have not yet explained them, but implies that science is incapable of explaining them. And they must attract attention, or else they would not be used. If you have read my post, “What is Science?” you will know that I defined science as whatever the most systematic way to go about studying something is. Therefore, if science cannot explain something, there must be no explanation. In my post, “What is Not Science?” I argued that this is the definition of magic, and in “What if Nothing is Real?” I argued that magic cannot exist unless the fabric of reality is fundamentally Ideal.

So are all the people who click on these sensational headlines Idealists? Not necessarily, because they probably have not taken the time to parse the details of their metaphysical beliefs. This is an exercise of Quasi-Realism, which, in supplement to the definition at the beginning of this post, is the state of expressing belief in Realism while subconsciously making choices and treating the world in one or more ways as if it were Ideal. Quasi-Realism is logically incoherent, and exemplifies the irrationality of human beings.

There is a bright side, though. Stories play perfectly into our sense of Quasi-Realism. That is why they can have magic, and faster than light travel, and even get known science wrong, and we still remain absorbed in them as if they could actually be happening. As a scientist writer, I constantly feel overwhelmed by behind-the-scenes questions. What about this? How can this be true? What is the pigment molecule that makes these plants from another planet slightly bluish? What kind of wood are the houses sided with? What do the main characters eat if they live in an environment very different from northern midwest United States of America? I get bogged down with these questions, and find my hands hovering over the keyboard, unable to make any strokes. But I have to remember that it really does not matter; if I explain only what is relevant to the story, then the readers can fill in the blanks on their own. Fiction, being a mere illusion in the mind, has no restraints against the fuzziness of Quasi-Reality.

Quasi-Realism is incompatible with Realism. The only way it could logically be true would be if the fabric of the universe were Ideal. It is what we fill in the gaps of our understanding with. We want to feel like we know a large percentage of all that can be known, so in those places we don’t understand, we act as though there is no answer until we find out. If we want to learn and grow, we have to learn to spot the places where we have used Quasi-Realism patches, and with humility pull off those patches and admit we simply do not know what goes there. Only then can we explore the empty space and find the the answers and rich new mysteries beyond.

Legendary Villains

See also:
Legendary Heroes

Bad guys. We are supposed to hate them, right? They are the ones who get in the way of the heroes, and mess everything up. But sometimes the villains grab our attention and take it in a choke-hold. We cry at their horrible deeds, yet stand in awe of their power. And sometimes the villains make such an impact that they transcend the stories they come from and live as legends in the common culture. Today, I am going to talk about a few villains that have achieved legendary status. These bad boys have made such a name for themselves that they are known far and wide, even by people who have never heard one of their stories. They are icons of power and destruction, and look really cool too.

Fair warning: there will be spoilers.

Darth Vader

Taken from Epic Rap Battles of History: Adolf Hitler vs Darth Vader

Whenever the phrase “dark lord” is mentioned, this dude comes to everyone’s mind. His black mask and cape capture a visual image of evil, and you know just by looking at him that he is going to do whatever is best for him and whatever is worst for you. His name literally translates to “Dark Father,” foreshadowing the trilogy’s world-famous twist. And he has the most dominating theme song ever, which might even be more well-known than the man-machine himself, the Imperial March.

The Joker

Don’t let his smile fool you; this prankster might be messing around, but there is a very real chance he will kill you. Sometimes that gun has a bullet, and sometimes just a flag that says “bang.” The Joker is the ultimate sadist, throwing off all social constraints and taking amusement solely in fear, anger, pain, and death. He is the opposite, the perfect foil of his nemesis, Batman. While the cloaked vigilante stalks the streets from the shadows of night, the attention-gluttonous clown flourishes terror for all to see. He crafts nightmares and makes them real, jerking his victims’ emotions this way and that, leading them close to hope and snatching it away again, and just when they think it might be over, strikes in the place where it hurts most.
Why so serious?

Satan

That’s right, the next villain on my list is none other than the devil himself. Satan is the enemy of God, the one who molded the world of humans out of Chaos. Satan is ruler of Hell, a place of torment and gnashing of teeth on the edge of Chaos. Though myths of Satan go back thousands of years, the most widely-known version is found in the epic poem, Paradise Lost. Having once been angels, only he out of the Fallen retains his glorified form. Because of this, he can masquerade as an angel of light and fool even the highest of archangels, his deceptions breakable only by God himself. Being the enemy of an all-powerful, all-knowing being is tough; there is no possibility of overthrowing such an opponent, so Satan makes it his goal only to frustrate his enemy’s plans as much as possible, howling defiance toward the skies till the end and his inevitable demise.

Sephiroth

This silver-haired sword master might not be as well known by the general public, but among video game players he is the icon of power, destruction, and tragedy. Where some villains reflect the darker side of the hero in a metaphorical sense, for Sephiroth and his enemy Cloud, this connection is literal. Half human, half Lovecraftian horror, Sephiroth has a visage of divinity to rivals the devil's, completed by his single demonic wing. But perhaps the most distinguishing thing about him is his theme song, “One-Winged Angel,” with its killer Latin-chant chorus. Sephiroth's fame is about to have new fire blown into it, as his game of origin, Final Fantasy VII, is getting remade for Playstation 4.

This is the completed list so far, but I think it would be worth mentioning a contender I see rising through the ranks, who might find a place among them in the future.

Ganon

The demon king of The Legend of Zelda series does not measure up to the requirements of Legendary Villain at the moment, but with the way the series is going, he may achieve a position before long. For most of the series's history, Ganon was a mere antagonist for the hero and the princess. However, a few years ago Nintendo decided to string all the games together in a timeline, and began developing story elements that run through the entire series. The land of Hyrule is caught up in an eternal cycle of calamity, where Link, the Hero of Courage and Zelda, the Princess of Wisdom fight Ganon, the Demon of Power. Though Link and Zelda are mortal and thus different people each time, Ganon is the same person every time. In the most recent games, Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, the story has been explicitly linked to the rest of the timeline, and the character of Ganon has been developed. If this continues, then it may not be long before Ganon rises to the ranks of Legendary Villain.

You may be wondering why the list is so short. After all, there have been quite a lot of villains in literary history. I did consider a few others, and perhaps I missed some, but there are very few who make it to legendary status. Sauron is awe-inspiring, but he does not have much of a personality. Voldemort and Magneto come close, but fall short of just about every condition. And I avoided anyone real, because real villains are just bad and not worthy of the honor. Still, it is not unlikely that other legends will rise to the title as stories and culture evolve through the next century and beyond.

Those Not Like Us – Revisited

Some time ago I wrote a discussion called Those Not Like Us, where I talked about aliens. However, while I wanted to talk about how mind-bogglingly different life in the universe might be from humanity, I got sidetracked and instead talked about racism and how we are not ready to accept alien creatures as equals. While that topic is certainly worth discussing, it was not what I intended. So today let’s come back and get to the heart of the discussion, about the weird ways alien creatures might be different from us. And maybe we will learn something about ourselves on the way.

Photograph by Bill Curtsinger, National Geographic

Even between humans, there are differences that are hard to handle at first exposure. When someone is first exposed to a way of life different from what they have always lived with and is left tongue-tied, we call it culture shock. When everything is different, from the clothing to the language to the greetings to the table manners, it can be difficult to adjust and make us uncomfortable and suspicious. Sometimes it can lead to bitterness, and even violence. If we can get so distraught over the differences in our own species, how much stronger would that be if a space ship landed and the people who came out had bug eyes and tentacles?

There is a trope in science fiction—largely due to lack of special effects technology in early TV—that intelligent aliens will look like us, with two arms, two legs, two eyes, and a mouth that has the physical capability to speak English. But this is not realistic at all. Just look at the animal kingdom of Earth. Apart from a few select species of monkey and ape, none of the millions of varieties meet all those criteria. And look at the runner-ups for intelligence: monkeys and apes, sure, but also mice, elephants, pigs, and dolphins (and probably more; animal intelligence is a relatively new field of study). Given the right environments for natural selection, Earth’s rulers of intellect could have come in any number of different shapes and sizes. So why should we expect creatures from another evolutionary tree entirely to look like us?

The next obvious question is language. Between different human groups, all it takes to pass the language barrier is learning and practice, but there is no guarantee that we will even be able to pronounce the sounds that aliens make. Heck, their communication might not even involve sound at all. And though we could probably rig up a computer to translate, there is no guarantee that we will be able to understand them even then. Human language is very abstract, and the aliens might be abstract in different ways. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok,” the crew run into an alien species that they cannot understand even with their universal translator, because the species talk completely in myths and legends. Of course we probably will figure out how to communicate with any intelligent creatures sooner or later, but it is possible that they conceptualize the world in ways that are completely different from the way we do.

One major possible avenue for this is sight. Stars emit a thermal blackbody spectrum of light in the shape of a Poisson curve. On the horizon, our sun looks red, orange or yellow, but straight up without much atmosphere in the way, it looks white. This is because the sun’s light peaks in the middle of the visible part of the spectrum, and to our eyes all colors added together equal white. Well that is a nice coincidence, that our eyes are designed to take full advantage of our star’s light, right? Well, it is actually no coincidence at all. Evolution favors that which is best adapted to the environment, and so creatures with eyes that are better suited to sunlight will survive better and pass on their genes. The same logic, however, would apply to evolving eyes around any star, so we would expect that cone cells or something like them will develop to center around their sun’s peak emission wavelength. Eyes are incredibly useful, since the universe is full of light, and we have lots of evidence that they evolved multiple times here on Earth, so we can reasonably assume that most aliens would have eyes. Whether they would see the same colors in their minds’ eyes as we do is a fair question, but if they did, then life from a blue star would see our sun as red and life from a red star would see our sun as blue. If the creatures are from a star different enough from our own, their visible spectrum and ours might not overlap at all!

In the same vein, our computer and TV monitors are specially designed for human eyes. We have only three color receptors: red, green, and blue. It is more than likely that alien creatures will have different receptors, and our screens will look like gibberish to them.  Although it probably would not be difficult to make a screen translator.

Aliens might have senses that we don’t. They might be sensitive to magnetic fields, like birds. Or imagine a creature that somehow grew ridiculously large, say, several miles across. Such a creature might evolve a gravitational wave sense (though it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which such a sense would be useful enough to be selected for). Or consider the rate at which we perceive time passing. There is no reason to assume this is an absolute. Some creatures might experience time so slowly that a day to us feels like a month for them, or so quickly that crossing interstellar distances might feel like a drive to the supermarket.

We have only just finished saying "good morning."

Aliens might have wildly different morality. Much of what we as humans consider right and wrong is based on natural instinct. Take marriage, for instance. It is nearly universal across the globe and human history that two people join together in a commitment and live the rest of their lives together, cooperating and raising children. This is because it is embedded in our psychology that the most intimate and meaningful relationships we can have are between two people, and the healthiest childhood environments are with two loving parents. But if we look to the animal kingdom, monogamous commitments are hardly universal. Many creatures mate indiscriminately, generating as many offspring as they can and betting that some will survive. Ants and bees have hives, with drones, workers, and one queen (mother). Alien creatures who evolved intelligence with mating habits like these would certainly have their own institutions and rituals, which most of us would probably find disturbing and barbaric. Yet, with enough investment in diplomatic relations, we may be able to find common philosophical ground.

        Flemming! How are the twins?        Still digesting their mother, thank you for asking.

I have spoken about many of the ways that alien life might be different from us, but have not touched on the most mind-boggling possibility of them all: alternative molecular biology. On Earth, every living thing contains DNA as the instruction code that causes it to grow, function, and reproduce. But DNA is not the only molecule of its kind. There are also RNA and PNA that we know of, though it is doubtful that we could find planets full of life based on those. But the fact that alternative nucleic acids exist means that there might be more possibilities that we have not discovered yet. If life can be made up of alternative molecules to what we find on Earth, there is no telling what might have evolved. There might be creatures whose chemistry is based on a liquid so cold that they would not feel the difference between liquid water and molten lava. There might be creatures who feed off gamma rays. When dealing with such great unknowns as the potential configurations of life in the universe, there really is no way to know the limits of what is possible.

With all the stars in the universe, it is hard to imagine that our world is the only one where civilization has arisen. Think of a species on some other planet gaining sentience, bringing forth philosophers, scientists, and astronomers, and coming to understand their place in the universe. One of these creatures, a humble and curious artist, looks up at the stars and wonders  if somewhere out there there is something like it living under a strange sky, breathing strange air, and living in strange homes it has built for itself out of the materials of the strange ground it treads upon. It watches strange sunsets, and sees love so familiar in the strange faces around it. These creatures, that the faraway alien dreams about with such wonder, are us. We don’t live in The World, we live on a planet around a star in a remote corner of the universe, and no matter how different the other inhabitants of this universe may be from us, this, we share in common.

What is Science?

A few months ago, I wrote a discussion called “What is Not Science?” trying to understand the philosophical difference between science and magic. I gave a quick definition of science in order to get to the meat of the discussion, but there is so much more to science than can be stated in a few sentences. But I can do better than that. Today, I will get to some of the machinery that puts the power in science.

The Atomium in Brussels, Belgium

We awaken in this world, and try to make sense of it. We see this and that, and think we have figured it out. But the human mind is easy prey to error and bias. So we build up a repertoire of tools to obtain valid data and conclusions, minimizing the window for human interpretation. Science is, in essence, no more than this.

I grew up young-earth Creationist, believing that the Earth and the Universe were around 6000 years old, as you get by counting the begats in the Bible. I believed that biological evolution and the Big Bang theory, along with plenty of other mishmash that were lumped in together as “historical science,” were ad hoc pieces of a disjointed and convoluted attempt to explain the world without allowing for the possibility of a God. When I got to college, I chose to major in physics, thinking about black holes and wave functions, things I was taught were “observational science.”
          I learned the concepts of physics, and as I went, they made sense to me. I learned of the Doppler shift, the difference in the pitch of the sound a car makes when it comes toward you or goes away from you. It is due to the peaks of the sound waves being produced at different places, and arriving at your ear stretched or compressed. I learned that the same is true for light, that something moving away from you will be “redshifted” as its wavelength arrives stretched out, and something moving toward you will be “blueshifted,” as its wavelength arrives compressed. Sure, this made sense. I could see it in my head, and could do the calculations. I learned about how we measure distances in space by using “standard candles,” phenomena that always put out the same absolute brightness. By observing how bright a type 1A supernova looks in some galaxy, we can calculate how far away that galaxy is. Then I learned about how Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding. He looked at a number of galaxies and plotted their distance against their redshift, and found that the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from us. Made sense to me.
          But then the professor did something that blind-sided me like the twist in a Brandon Sanderson novel: he took the slope of the line on the plot, Hubble’s Constant, and inverted it so it had units of time. The value was 20 billion years, and it was the time in the past that every galaxy would have been at the same place. This was the first hint of the model that would later be known as the big bang. My teachers did not try to dogmatically shove it down my throat, but presented a series of logical steps, each simple enough in its own right, the same way they had taught me everything else. Of course this alone isn’t proof of the big bang theory’s validity, but I was forever changed by the realization that “observational science” and “historical science” are exactly the same thing.

In my journey since then, my respect for science has grown into nothing short of awe. Not just for what it has revealed about life, the world, and the universe, but by the methods used and the historical struggle to find new and better ways to study things. In the rest of this discussion, I am going to describe the various philosophical theories of science, and then get nitty and gritty with some of the definitions and tools science uses to uncover the picture of reality in insanely fine detail.

In my “What is Not Science?” post, I mentioned four philosophical theories of science, which I learned about from a YouTube lecture course from the University of Hannover, Germany. I wanted to get onto the rest of the discussion, so I didn’t take the time to explain them. But now I have all the time in the world, so here we go.

Inductivism:
The first theory of science suggests that if we make an observation enough times, we can inductively conclude that it is always true. If we measure objects falling at 9.8 m/s² enough times, we can conclude that objects will always fall at that acceleration. If every swan we observe is white, we can conclude that all swans are white. Yet Inductivism has a major problem: all it takes is one counterexample to prove an induced conclusion false. All it takes is the discovery of one Australian black swan to show that not all swans are white.

Deductivism:
To remedy the problem of induction, we might turn to Deductivism, which says we start with something we know is true, and follow the logic to predict a conclusion. For example, if Newton’s Law of Gravity is true, then we can predict what the strength and direction of the gravitational field will be at any point in space. But how do we know Newton’s Law of Gravity is accurate to reality? In order to deduce anything, we have to know something to begin with. We could test it with experiments, but how will we know when we are done? Does the result change if I pour a cup of coffee before doing the experiment? What about two cups? If we don’t test every possible variation, we’re left back at Inductivism. Deductivism works well in mathematics, where it is acceptable to define axioms into existence, but the truths of reality are already there, and we cannot deduce them if we have no facts to build from.

Paradigm Theory:
How do we avoid the assumptions of induction, yet have a foundation for deduction? One possibility lies in paradigms. A paradigm is a model that describes something, considered the common knowledge of the day, or a consensus among experts. For instance, Europe went through a paradigm shift 500 years ago from Ptolemy’s model of the heavens with the Earth at the center to Copernicus’s model with the sun at the center.
          Paradigm Theory says that science starts from a blank slate. There is a period of exploratory experimentation, from which scientists extrapolate a model via induction. They then agree to take the model as the scientific paradigm, and conduct deductive research assuming it is true. They continue to take the paradigm for granted until too many problems accumulate and the model gets too convoluted, and the field goes back into an exploratory phase, where a new model which can better fit all the data, old and new, is sought. A new paradigm is adopted, and the cycle continues.
          Yet Paradigm Theory has its own share of problems. Science can only have revolutions when the current paradigm is challenged, which will not happen very often if the paradigm is merely accepted. In practice, the theory would lead to scientific stagnation.

Systematicity Theory:
Sometimes scientists use induction, sometimes they use deduction, and sometimes adopt a paradigm. Sometimes they do something else entirely. It all depends on what works at the moment. But this begs the question; what is the standard by which we determine the best course of action? Well remember the goal of science: to understand reality to the best of our abilities. The standard is determined by what course of action is the most systematic, that is, what is the best way to gather accurate, relevant information and organize it into a model, which leads to technology and more questions.
          For example, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is one of the most robust theories in science, standing strong after 100 years of refining fire. Even now new tests are being proposed, with new telescopes and gravitational wave observatories. There are also a collection of alternative theories people work on, on the slim chance that one of them will turn out to more accurately reflect reality than General Relativity.

This may not seem like a very satisfying answer, because it does not give us a simple rule as to how this should be done, but only tells us that it should be done. You may have heard of something called “the Scientific Method,” and expect this is what I am building toward. But the truth is that there is no single scientific method, rather a collection of tools that get updated and improved all the time. What we call science today is the culmination of thousands of years of philosophy, and it is reaching new heights faster today than ever before. So what are those tools? What have our centuries of thought and improvement given us? Here are a few.

Precision:
One of the first things students learn in school science lab is significant figures. No measurable value will be a rational number; it will have an infinite number of decimal places. When you take a measurement, you must know how precise your tool is and where to round. When you make calculations, you have to know which decimal places to keep and which to throw away. Done properly, you get good data. Done improperly, your rounding errors can add up and give you a completely different result. College science students often complain that their online homework programs are too picky, but the students would have no problems if they carried their significant figures properly and avoided rounding errors.

Uncertainty:
Because real values have an infinite number of decimal places, but we can only measure them with some finite precision, we need a way to show the maximum amount our measurement might be off. You might see a number reported as 1.348 ± .0024. The ± .0024 is called the uncertainty, and it is taken from how precise the measuring tool is. For instance, on a ruler that goes to millimeters, the uncertainty would be about 0.7 of a millimeter, perhaps less if you are well-trained at estimating between tick marks.

The lines extending upward and downward denote each data points uncertainty. There are a range of possible fits, but the line definitely slopes upward.

In everyday speech, uncertainty is synonymous with doubt. Saying you are uncertain is like saying you are insecure or worried your conclusion is not true. This leads to a lot of confusion when scientists talk about uncertainty in measurements. The classic example is human-caused climate change. Naysayers will claim that scientists are “uncertain,” and take that to mean they don’t know what they are talking about. But this is scientific uncertainty, the quantifiable spread of each data point. That spread is minimal enough that, though there is wiggle room in exactly how much we are affecting the global climate or exactly what the long-term effects will be, there is no question that we are affecting it, and the average global temperature is rising much faster than usual.

Statistics:
Believe it or not, there is a whole branch of mathematics committed to determining the quality of data, and comparing models to see which fits the data better. New and better methods are being developed every year. I wish I could explain it—this part of the discussion feels incomplete without any of the technical details—but unfortunately I don’t understand it well enough. If you want to do some research on your own, you can look up “5 sigma significance,” “p-value,” or “Bayesian inference,” and see where that takes you.

Computerization:
Back in the day, every calculation had to be done by hand. But now, we have machines to do them for us. In fact, computing technology is so fast today that university supercomputers can simulate the evolution of the universe from an early stage of dust particles to the present-day cobweb-looking galactic supercluster structure of filaments and voids. Computers can save tremendous amounts of time and eliminate human errors, provided the right parameters are entered. Today, we can do things that the scientists of past centuries would never have dreamed of being able to do.

Every dot in this picture represents a cluster of galaxies.

Peer review:
You could be the smartest person alive, and make breakthroughs in all kinds of fields from modern physics to cell biology to statistics to computer science, and yet be blind to some lines of evidence leading in a slightly different direction. We all have biases; it’s part of being human. You can train your mind in logic and reason, and use all of the techniques I’ve talked about, but even all that cannot get you to perfect objectivity. The best way to overcome this is to have other people around who understand your field, and do their best to poke holes in your work from all different angles. This is the peer review process. Whenever someone tries to publish a paper, there is a committee of experts who put it under the knife and make absolutely sure that their work is up to scientific standards. After a paper is published, it is open for criticism by anyone on planet Earth, including every scientist who is working in a similar field. Once the fiery rigors of the review process are over, the ideas that most reflect reality stand tall while the garbage vanishes.
          Sometimes people ask why science refuses to study this or that, suggesting scientists might have some kind of conspiratorial agenda. But there are two possibilities that such ideas almost always fall into. Perhaps, like consciousness, scientists don’t yet know how to study it. Or perhaps, like extra-sensory perception, the idea has already been tested and discredited. In any case, the only agenda scientists have is to adhere to the high standards of making sure an idea accurately reflects the relevant data, follows the logic, and addresses any and all assumptions made.

Challenging the norm:
Science is all about following trails of evidence to uncover truth about reality, whatever that may turn out to be. This means that, no matter how well established an idea is, no matter how well a model has held up to experiment so far, it is not beyond question. If an alternative meets all the standards of the time, papers get published. I laugh whenever someone talks about scientists being biased or close-minded, caught in unbreakable tradition. Overturning tradition is what science is all about. The new idea just has to fit into the puzzle better than the old.

Science is not just a collection of knowledge, but an ever-improving set of methods of understanding. The scientific landscape is riddled with checks and balances to further completeness and minimize the influence of human imperfection. I once spoke to a man who thought, since scientists change their minds, that they are unreliable and do not know what they are talking about. “I always take what scientists say with a grain of salt,” he said. I have always wondered who he does trust, if not the people who study things for a living. Science is all about research, and research introduces new information that you have to take into account along with the old. As the economist Paul Samuelson said, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do?” Change is absolutely central to scientific thought, and though it may appear to flit this way and that, in the long term we are brought closer to the truth.