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.

Magic III: What if Nothing is Real? (Realism and Idealism)

Part of a series on magic:
Four Types of Magic
What is Not Science?
What if Nothing is Real?

Further reading: The Nature of Reality series, starting with Quasi-Realism

As a fan of both fantasy and philosophy, I have thought a lot about the concept of magic as it is used in fiction and superstition. For years, the phrase “it’s not magic” has struck me as strange whenever it has been used. What does the speaker mean? A year and a half ago, I wrote about four general ideas people have when talking about magic, and soon after I came to the conclusion that magic is what makes no sense when studied, because if it made sense, we would call it science. With this distinction, magic could only exist in made-up worlds. Yet recently I have come to see another perspective, where something called magic might actually be able to exist if something about the metaphysical nature of reality were different.

To begin, we shall talk about Metaphysical Realism. This is the philosophy that real objects exist independently of people’s perceptions, beliefs, and understanding. With every philosophical post I have written to date, I have implicitly assumed it to be true. And why not? It sounds like common sense, right? Well maybe, but among philosophers and fantasy writers common sense is not worth much.

Three hundred years ago, a philosopher named John Locke described a model for the physical nature of reality. He suggested that objects have primary qualities, which are intrinsic to the objects themselves, and secondary qualities, which depend on being observed. For example, what a blade of grass is made of would be one of its primary qualities, and its green color would be a secondary quality. The distinction was drawn between what objects are really like and how we perceive them.

This didn’t sit well with Locke’s contemporary, George Berkeley. Berkeley argued that if we cannot perceive primary qualities, why should we assume they exist at all? If the only way we could know the world was through its secondary qualities, which only exist when they are being perceived, then what evidence do we have that the objects themselves exist in any further sense? In this fashion, Berkeley argued that reality can only be said to exist when it is being perceived, and that the mind was the only truly real thing. This became known as Metaphysical Idealism.

To recap, Realism is the idea that reality exists on its own, independently of perception, belief, or understanding; Idealism is the idea that reality is only perception, a projection of the mind.

An argument between a realist and an idealist might go like this.

Realist: If things only exist when you perceive them, then when you look away from
something and look back, why is it still there? When we leave a clock and come back to it, why has the right amount of time always passed?

Idealist: Because our minds create reality as we expect it, and the expectations of object permanence and evolution are ingrained in us by the time we reach we reach a few years of age.

Realist: If reality is created as we expect it, then why is anyone ever surprised?

Idealist: Because there are billions of people in the world, and different people expect different things. This causes us to be surprised while other people are around, which makes us subconsciously expect to be surprised when we are alone.

Realist: What about the principle of non-contradiction? Not only are everyday things logically consistent, but so is the entire universe. I would expect, in an Ideal world, that two scientists might make independent discoveries that lead to contradictions, or that at least the fundamental laws of physics would be a complete mess. As it is, almost everything can be explained at the most basic level by one of two theories: Quantum Physics or General Relativity. There are plenty of scientists who study alternatives, but nothing has borne out anything in the last hundred years. This is exactly what we might expect to find in a Real universe, but in an Ideal world we would expect hundreds of equally plausible theories, generated by the multitude of presuppositions that the scientists bring to their studies. Science simply wouldn’t work in an Ideal universe.

Idealist: But it is what you would expect in an Ideal world if there was an all-knowing, all-seeing mind keeping everything consistent and continuous.

Realist: But how would that be any different from a Real world? What evidence could you present to justify teaching that the universe is Ideal, when the God whose presence is necessary for it not to fall apart makes it indistinguishable from a Real universe? Isn’t it more reasonable to choose to believe the idea that does not have the extra layers of assumptions? In fact, wasn’t that your original argument?

Idealism also suffers from another problem. By the same logic Berkeley used to get to Idealism—that we should not assume the existence of objects’ primary qualities, which we cannot perceive—we don’t have any reason to believe other minds exist either. This version of Idealism, that everything in the universe including the illusion of other people, is a projection of your own mind, is called Solipsism.

I have spent the whole discussion so far explaining Realism and Idealism and justifying my assumption that the bedrock of reality is Realism. But what does any of this have to do with magic? In part 2 of the magic series, I concluded that anything whose function has no mechanism driving it is magic, and everything else is science. Well secondary qualities are functions. Therefore, in an Ideal reality, where everything can be said to exist only as much as it is being perceived, everything is magic.

What would an Ideal world look like? It would allow manipulation of the physical world through perception, memory, and both subconscious and conscious will. It would not follow strict logic, but convenient yet arbitrary guidelines that can be bent and broken. In short, it would be like an exceptionally vivid dream.

Hmm. This sounds a lot like a certain popular long-running space fantasy TV show.

In Doctor Who, the Doctor travels all over the universe, forward and backward in time. Unrestrained time travel has lots of problems though; for example you could go back five minutes and meet yourself, and prevent yourself from going back in time five minutes. Presumably then there would be two of you. But what happened to your past? How did you get here if you never time traveled?

Doctor Who fixes these problems by instating rules. You are not allowed to interfere with your own timeline. There are certain events in history that are fixed, and cannot be changed. Problem solved, right? Well it is shown in the series that you can interfere with your past timeline, and you can mess with the fixed points of history. There is no physical mechanism that prevents it. But when you do meddle with these rules, the universe strikes back and punishes you with a kind of karma. A Real universe would have strict mathematical laws, but we would expect an Ideal universe to have rules and guidelines that can be bent and broken, like we find in Doctor Who.

Any time this guy says "it's not magic," he's lying.

It was two and a half years ago that I first realized that I had no idea what “magic” was. My journey down the path of questioning led me to group the common uses of the word into four categories, which shrank to two: what could be explored through science, and what was impossible. Anything we call magic is really just science we don’t understand yet. Thus I reasoned that if something in a story is called magic, it means you are not supposed to think about how it works. But then I remembered the historical debate between Metaphysical Realism and Idealism, and found that in Idealism there is a logically valid way a universe could allow for magic. So if you want to have magic that is distinct from science in your story, and you want it to be philosophically plausible, Idealism provides the opportunity you’re looking for.

Of course, going on nothing but my own internal analysis machine, I could easily be wrong. I have not talked this over with anyone, nor gone through any of the rigors of peer review that philosophical ideas are subject to in academia. But the beauty of philosophy is that amateurs are free to explore it and apply it to their own lives and interests, and it can help us to lead better, kinder, and more fulfilled lives.

The Scientific Jigsaw Puzzle

Recommended Pre-Reading:

What is Science?

I have always loved a good jigsaw puzzle. There is something deeply satisfying about taking a pile of colored cardboard scraps and turning it little by little into a predetermined picture. Every piece fit into its place and every edge matched up is a small joy. Losing yourself in the exercise is a wonderful experience, whether alone or collaborating with family or friends. In my time in academia, I have found that science is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle, with reality as its picture.

I have been a teaching assistant for college physics for two and a half years. I usually try to explain the models directly as they are, and stay away from analogies. There comes a point where most metaphors break down, and you have to say, “it’s kind of like that, but really not.” The example that makes me cringe the most is the bowling ball on a trampoline analogy of general relativity. It does have similar behavior to gravity, but only by accident. But once in a while there is a metaphor that works so perfectly that even I am satisfied, and the scientific jigsaw puzzle is one of them.

Each scientific discipline is a different section of the puzzle. The pieces that look like life, we call biology. The pieces that look like rocks, we call geology. The pieces that have space on them, we call astronomy. And so on. Teams of scientists around the world collaborate, each working in their own section or subsection. Every so often, the edge of one section is found to fit perfectly against another, to much celebration. Atomic theory connects chemistry to quantum physics. Evolution is the central hub of biology, but also links psychology to the rest of the puzzle. In the past 300 years, the puzzle has been taking shape into a vast, beautiful, solidly connected picture.

Sometimes a piece looks like it fits, but the edges don’t quite match up, or there is the tiniest bit of space between the tab and the slot. When this happens, other pieces won’t connect where they are supposed to, so we have to look down the line until we find where we made our mistake. There are even now some places where the pieces do not seem to fit. The centers of black holes, and the instant of the big bang, to name a few. These are places where quantum physics—the physics of the very small—and general relativity—the physics of the very massive—collide.

There are no edges; every section either connects to another or has a frontier where new pieces are being added every day. There are even whole sections waiting to be started. For instance, we know astrobiology—the science of alien life—will connect to astronomy, planetary science, chemistry, and evolutionary biology, but we don’t have any pieces to try to fit.

Some people, claiming to be scientists, have a picture in mind already when they approach the puzzle, and try to force the pieces to make that picture. They use the pieces to make a mosaic instead of trying to solve the puzzle. This is called "pseudoscience." Sometimes the difference is obvious, but sometimes it can be difficult even for those who spend their time immersed in the mental world of science to tell at first glance. But there is a family of methods for determining how well the pieces fit together: statistics. Subjecting ideas to rigorous mathematical fires of probability is kind of like holding two pieces up to the light to see if any shines through. Under this scrutiny, the pseudoscience falls apart, and it is up to the future wholeness of the picture to sort the correct ideas from the mere good ones.

And what a picture it is! It's a picture of the vastness of space and the beginning of time, of stars and galaxies, of matter and light, of life and humanity and curiosity. And the beauty of the picture revealed makes us all the more eager to finish the holes and expand the edges, searching for new mysteries waiting to be discovered.

Being In a Place

Every so often, I find myself feeling down, wondering where the magic that bound me to stories has gone, or forgetting about it completely. I get so caught up in analyzing, picking apart storywriting techniques, that I forget the most important reason stories are so powerful.

Stories transport you to another place, another time, another life. The lessons you learn, the experience you gain, the questions you mull over in your mind, all come from seeing through another person’s eyes, feeling their body, breathing the same air. You learn because they learn. You see because they see. You understand because they understand. This is the difference between a story and an essay. In other words, a story draws people into it when it feels real. If a book pulls this off really well, I find myself with the same uncertainty about the future as in real life, feeling that the rest of the book is not decided yet, and any of a few outcomes are equally possible. This illusion of reality is the hidden source of magic that gives stories such draw and keeps readers engrossed in them for hours at a time.

The big question is how we can give stories this power of illusion. I think the answer is not to force it, but allow it to come to you. I have heard writers speak of the creative process as listening while the stories come to them, as if already existing in the ether. It is as if the writer is not creating them, but only solidifying them onto the page. In fact, I have this experience myself every now and then. It is not random, but happens when you are in a certain frame of mind. For me, this is most often when I am doing a repetitive task that does not require mental activity, like walking. With practice, writers can get themselves into this frame of mind more easily.

When you do this, you may find that your characters are doing things that are not directly relevant to the story. For instance, if they are on a camping trip, you may find yourself describing the details about how the viewpoint character builds the fire, with the kindling in the middle and larger sticks in a teepee structure around it. You’ll find yourself describing how the earth feels beneath their feet, how the meat sizzles and smells good as it cooks. You’ll find yourself writing a conversation about this or that, like real people would have around a campfire. In other words, it will feel like a real night out. Just let it happen.

Cosmoids In Our Image

Recommended Pre-Reading:

Cosmoid: A Definition

Last week, I defined the word, “cosmoid” to mean the entire picture of a person’s understanding of reality. Cosmoids include worldviews, paradigms, beliefs, and conceptualizations of truth, knowledge, and understanding. Each of us has our own cosmoid, and no two people’s are alike. For some of us, our cosmoids are open to some types of change or expansion; for others, not so much. Regardless, we all believe our cosmoid is closer to reality than it really is. After all, if we knew of anything closer, then it would by definition be our new cosmoid.

Defining cosmoids opens up all kinds of rich and deep topics to explore. Today I am going to focus on a flaw most of us, if not all, have in our cosmoids: we construct our internal world to look like us. There are three ways we do this: with our bodily form, with our behavior, and with our perceptions.

To see this, we do not have to look far. Our stories, our poetry, our mythology, and our art are positively full of instances when we ascribe human characteristics to animals, trees, the sun, the moon, the Earth, the wind, the water, the sky, and even the fabric of reality itself. We have tales of goblins, ghosts, orcs, trolls, elves, fairies, demons, golems, and all manner of creatures that look like humans.

Even in science fiction, which is supposed to be more realistic than other fantasy, we find aliens with two arms, two legs, two eyes and ears, and an upright walk, just like humans. Star Trek in particular is famous for this. In the Next Generation (spoilers) episode “The Chase,” the writers try to explain away this oddity by having the characters discover that the first humanoid race billions of years ago planted DNA all over the galaxy, seeding the planets so that human-like form would one day evolve—as if the random changes of base pairs and natural selection over eons of random climates could be seeded! (end spoilers)

In fact, it is not only with aliens that we implicitly associate intelligence with the human face, but intelligence in general. Artificial intelligence, gods, spiritual creatures, you name it, we imagine them all with human faces.

Sometimes it is not the human form that we impose upon the world, but human behavior. We might think of great oaks standing guard, rivers dancing, the wind running, and the sun smiling. Scientists even find themselves explaining models to people using human terms, like particles “wanting” to move toward each other or genes puzzling over how to get themselves reproduced. Being aware of this, I try hard to avoid using anthropomorphic language when I explain scientific concepts unless I am actually talking about humans.

These two ways we project ourselves into our cosmoids are fairly clear once we see them pointed out, but he third is the more subtle, and to me, by far the most intriguing. We impose our perceptions onto reality. We are all familiar with the scene of a child afraid of the darkness in her bedroom. In fact, most of us remember what that felt like when we were in the child’s place, and we still feel it now and again. As children, we fear the dark because we cannot see into it. Because it is murky and mysterious in our perception, we begin to believe that reality itself is in a state of quasi-existence, where anything we fear might become real.

It is by this sense of quasi-existence that we believe all kinds of strange things, from superstitions to conspiracy theories. It might be true, we are afraid it is true, we believe it is true. Other things we believe because we want them to be true. This is how we can have concepts like magic and feel like they mean something. A month ago I came to the conclusion that magic is an effect without any mechanism linking it to its cause, or even with no cause at all. This cannot happen in a real universe, but to someone whose cosmoid allows things to exist in a quasi-real state between perception and reality, magic makes sense.

There are even things we believe without knowing, because we just don’t think about it. Take color, for example. Why do we say that oak leaves are green in the spring, and that they turn red and yellow in the fall? It is not because of some innate property of “greenness” or “redness” that the leaves have; rather it is because the leaves reflect specific combinations of wavelengths of light, some of which make it into our eyes, where it is translated into electrical signals, which travel up our optic nerves into our brain, where our consciousness interprets the signals as colors. Yet though there are many intermediate steps between leaves and the color green, we still call leaves green.

We think that things we feel and perceive must be objective. Things like peace, love, pain, honor, worthiness, etc. We assume that because we sense these things, they must be a part of the external universe, when really they only exist as interpretations in our minds. A thing is not beautiful in itself, but only as each person sees it. As they say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Even if a painting touches the hearts of every human who sees it, to an alien from a planet unlike ours it might look like the most formless of postmodern art.

Humanized cosmoids make for powerful poetry and wonderful fantasy. You want a magical object? Make it a crystal, which looks different colors when viewed from different angles, when light passes through it, etc. If it is strange and enchanting to us, it is our instinct to think it must be strange and enchanting to the universe too. Try to imagine Narnia without talking animals or tree spirits or wicked witches. It simply wouldn’t be Narnia. There is just something about imagining the world has a heart, or Time has a beard, that makes us warm and happy all over.

The more we come to understand the world, the real world, for what it is, the more we realize we are not the center, and it is not about us. For some people, such an idea is too horrible to imagine. But there is something about thinking and considering, about being honest with yourself and your beliefs, that is liberating. There is a relief and peace that comes with following reason and evidence wherever it leads, even through the seemingly dark and scary places. And when we do, our cosmoid reshapes itself to be more like the cosmos.

Cosmoid: A Definition

Cosmoid: The sum total of a person’s perceptions and subconscious beliefs of reality; the whole of what a person sees and thinks reality to be.

For the past several years, I have been intrigued by how people see the world. From the radical zealot to the enlightenment thinker to the toddler whose mind cannot comprehend basic mechanical motions, the world of the mind fascinates me. But wanting to talk about this subject I ran into a barrier, one common to so many people when philosophizing: the English language is missing a word.

There are a few words that come close to what I mean. Worldview, for instance. But “worldview” implies that you know you are looking at the world from a certain perspective. You can easily flit in and out of worldviews, never changing anything you actually believe about reality. The concept I want to describe is more rigid and encompassing than this.

Some people use the terms “subjective reality” or “subjective truth” (or to be even more confusing, drop the modifier, “subjective”!), but this seems sloppy to me, as “reality” and “truth” are objective by definition. Rather, what I want to talk about is the world as it appears to be real and true to people, a subjectivity that appears to the person experiencing it to be indistinguishable from objectivity, and I want the word for it to not be easily confused with something else.

Cosmology is another word that comes close to what I want, but does not quite make it. A cosmology is a set of beliefs about the nature of the world, but it tends to mean the big things, like the size and shape of the universe. Cosmology is also the name of the field of science that studies the size, age, structure, origin, and fate of the universe, so it can also be confusing if used when speaking of someone’s understanding of reality.

The cosmos is defined as the objective sum total of reality. This is the kind of thing I mean. But rather than actual reality, I want to speak of the structure of it that people build up in their minds. A small, personal mimicry of the cosmos; a cosmoid.

Everyone has their own cosmoid, and every cosmoid is a little different. For example, over Christmas break I was shocked to find that no one in my family knew what antimatter was. What was perfectly mundane and ordinary for me, having lived and breathed physics for the last six or seven years, was completely alien to them. It was not part of their cosmoids.

Understanding cosmoids can help tremendously with writing characters. A cast of characters who each have different beliefs and different understanding of the world opens up the doors to all kinds of themes and intrigue to explore. It can also help you relate to other people with views different from your own. I think “cosmoid” will be a very useful word, and it will open the door to many discussions that I have wanted to write for some time.