There Are Four Lights

Last Wednesday, I spoke at the Center for Inquiry‘s monthly science cafe, Cafe Inquiry. The talk and Q&A afterwards has been uploaded to YouTube in six parts:

Part 1 is my introduction and my explanation of skepticism and why I think it’s important. I also touch on why new age magical thinking and spirituality can be so appealing and easier to promote. My goal is to use storytelling to show skeptical values as virtues.

Part 2 is an overview of manga and why I’ve chosen it as a medium to tell stories that promote skepticism. I also speak about some series that have inspired me in my approach to doing this—-which is also an excuse to talk about Masters of the Universe.

Part 3 is about my series I’m producing, Legend of the Ztarr, and how I hope it will convey messages about critical thinking and humanism.

The Q&A discussion that took place afterwards is also available:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I must admit I had a hunch that if I clicked a link from a facebook friend that lead to a place called The Temple of Visions that I was going to find some wooness. But whatev! The best part was coming across this dude, Nassim Haramein, and The Resonance Project. It was the perfect leap from artsy new age & raw food to pseudoscience faux-physics & crop circles!

Well, who is Nassim Haramein anyway?

Nassim Haramein’s lifelong journey into the geometry of space-time has lead to a coherent understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe.

Hmm, sounds neat. I definitely prefer coherent understanding to incoherent misunderstanding and who doesn’t want to know a bit more about the fundamental structure of the universe?

In this 4 DVD presentation, Nassim will take you on a journey through humanity’s evolution, exposing the changes necessary to produce an all-encompassing Unified Physics; a unification of not only the four forces of nature, but also evolution and the occurrence of consciousness.

Holy crap! This guy has solved it all! Forget simply unifying all of physics, he’s solved the mysteries of consciousness too. One wonders why he doesn’t have a few Nobel prizes yet…

Demonstrating the parallels between this theory and ancient codes found in documents and monuments, Nassim weaves a tale which may prove to be one of the most important discoveries of our time.

Duh, of course…I always forget that ‘the ancients’ knew everything but, unfortunately, hid in all in coded documents, artwork, and monuments. Jerks. Luckily, Nassim is here to help us out.

Have you ever wondered why those science classes were at all important?

Okay, you’ll notice in his series of questions that they start off pretty fine—-I mean, I’m certainly disappointed in my high school science education (is that what he means by ‘those science classes’?). My high school science teacher pretty much ruined my desire to take any more science credits by making us practice stippling over and over and don’t you DARE make little tails on your stipples or no one will take your paper seriously because you have one, two, homg THREE tails in your drawing composed of tiny little pencil dots!!! ahem…

Were you ever curious about the mysteries of Ancient Egypt?

Who doesn’t like learning about Ancient Egypt! However, when someone brings them into a conversation about unified field theories, my woometer starts to kick in.

What about the modern mystery of crop circles?

KABLAMO! My woometer is now on fire. Smells like stupid.

These DVDs explore all of the above as well as the following ::

DVD 1 :: The Search for the Fundamental Pattern Dimensions of Geometry, Chemistry, Scaling Law, Biology, Principle of Unification, Pyramids

DVD 2 :: From Micro to Macro – Unifying the Field Geometry, Structure of the Vacuum, Crop circles

There it is again! Crop circles? And do I smell pyramid power in DVD 1?

DVD 3 :: Everything is a Black “Whole” Ancient Egypt, Archeology, Black Wholes/White Wholes

DVD 4 :: Unlocking the Mystery – The Future is in Our Hands Bible, The Arc of the Covenant, Knights Templar, Emmanuel’s Tomb, Kabbalah, Tree of Life Decoded

Nice. My woometer has completely melted. The Bible, The Arc, Knights Templar…I bet there’s more knowledge to be decoded here. What I thought was a woo sandwich has turned out to be a woo cornucopia. One detail that caught my eye was that he’s referred to as a “scientist” on the cover artwork. Um, scientist? What kind? Usually, actual scientists call themselves physicists, biologists, astronomers, astrophysicists, geologists, or ya know…whatever field they specialize in. I guess it’s pretty clear this guy doesn’t stick to being an expert in just one field. He must be a whateverologist.

As early as 9 years old, Nassim was already developing the basis for a unified hyperdimensional theory of matter and energy, which he eventually called the “Holofractographic Universe.”

Nice, I have fond memories of making Spirographs too.

Okay, maybe you might be thinking “Jeeze, Sara. Why are you picking on poor Nassim and his lame DVD? Why do you care?” Well, turns out that The Resonance Project doesn’t just sell his lame DVD, where worst case scenario might be someone wasting $84.00 USD. No, sir—-The Resonance Project offers workshops where you can become a certified “Emissary” and teach Nassim’s lame seminars to others. Worst case scenario for this is blowing $475 and doing your part to help grow a cult. This requires a special sort of face-palm:

Meditation techniques based on this knowledge will also be offered as an invaluable tool to aid in further integration, as you learn how to more effectively tap into the vacuum energy and the curvature of space and time and connect to your own personal singularity.

Go here if you like to barf

Woo begets woo. It didn’t take long to get from an innocent facebook post about going to art exhibit to the boatload of pseudoscience that is The Resonance Project. I’m probably the kind of gal who would avoid going to a place called The Temple of Visions (only out of politeness to its patrons who probably wouldn’t appreciate my big dark skeptical aura effing up their new age experience), but I know plenty of people who might check it out. And if they decided to check out what other events the venue hosts, they’d find, like I did, Resonance Emissary Jamie Janover.

Personally, I would never fall prey to Jamie’s proselytizing—-not because of my skepticism, but because I have a strict policy of not taking anyone seriously if their website uses the font Copperplate Gothic Bold.

Not many people know this, but our cats, Mya and Twinkle, are certified new age gurus (as you can see in the photo, Mya is clearly in her psychic trance). Like all successful charlatans new age gurus, they now have their own website!

You are now just a click away from their on-demand new age wisdom service! Of course, some close-minded skeptics accuse them of being nothing more than simple random woo generators.

Hmm, hopefully I’ve mentioned here before that something I want to accomplish in my work is to create characters who are good role models as scientists and critical thinkers and to promote the use of reality-based reasoning and good skepticism. The movie “Knowing”, with Nicolas Cage, accomplishes the complete opposite. Scientists are drunken, miserable, lonely cranks that need to learn how to be happy from those who have blind faith in magic sky people.

The director, Alex Proyas, was quoted saying he wanted the movie to explore different viewpoints, “the scientific viewpoint of the logical construct of the universe and the one of faith, where people see this incredibly complex place we live in and go, ‘Well, how could this have all just happened randomly?’“ (my bold) This is one major annoyance with the film; it doesn’t even know what science is and what viewpoint it has. Again, audiences are getting the misguided message that science claims everything is random and stuff just happens by accident.

The irony is, unlike new age garbage like numerology, scientific theories actually do make accurate predictions for the world around us. Real predictions…not just after-the-fact pattern matching that happens with divination games like astrology, tarot, and psychic readings. You can use scientific theories to accurately launch a small rover into space and have it travel to another freakin’ planet and predict where it should land on that planet, hundreds of millions of kilometers away! Or you can have a theory like evolution, which predicted, about a hundred years before the discovery of genetics, that such a system should exist–it predicted the existence of an entirely new field of science!

Science is all about discovering how the world works and the cause behind the things we see and experience. It is faith that gives empty answers for why the world is the way it is; it’s faith that tells us that the big questions about the universe are infinitely mysterious and beyond our grasp.

And, frankly, it’s a little tiring to see the happy religious characters lecturing to grumpy miserable scientist characters in films and TV. The happiest people I know are scientifically minded and lead their lives free of faith and the supernatural. All the religious and new age people I know are quite unhappy, worry-full people, who always seem to be lost and unsure. Anecdotal, I know…

It’s not hard to see why such a horrible movie is doing so well at the box office. A lot of people are full of doubt, fear, and uncertainty about the future. It’s a comforting idea that there’s a magic solution that can warn us of danger and protect us against the unknown…and the only thing you have to do is keep believing, no matter what the facts tell you.

Just keep listening to the little voices inside your head–they know a lot more than the objective voice of reason coming from your MIT colleague.

Cage, you and your pseudoscience crapfest are forcing me to quote again:

For me, it is far better to understand the universe as it really is, than to persist in delusion, however satisfying or reassuring.

-Carl Sagan

Solipsism is the argument that nothing exists outside the mind or, at least, that you can’t prove the existence of anything outside your own mind. Of course, this is philosophical solipsism, which I’m discussing in this post, and not the psychiatric condition involving detachment from reality.  I have no problem discussing philosophy; however, I rarely hear these types of arguments when actually discussing philosophy. I’ve only heard this kind of talk from people trying to create a loop-hole where their beliefs can escape scientific scrutiny-or any kind of criticism.

I’d like to share a little anecdote of a conversation I had which sums up quite nicely the typical response I receive as a skeptic talking to a believer. The conversation was with a very nice, friendly new age woman who ended the conversation by telling me that it was fine that I needed evidence for things, but that some people “can just have an inner knowing of how things work”. She thought it was arrogant and close minded to “…Believe in what we can only process with our 5 senses…” That sentiment has become quite commonplace in my experience with new agers and religious proponents. It is quite frustrating, indeed, to be called arrogant by those claiming to have privileged knowledge of the universe; a special viewpoint of nature that is inaccessible to outsiders and immune to any standards of evaluation. This position, like that of solipsism, seems to be the ultimate egotistical world view.

That’s not to say that because an idea is self-centered that it has to be wrong as well. Of course not, it’s simply that I have become very cautious of ideas that put humans or individuals at the center of the universe; the pattern of discovery, to date, continues to dismantle ideas that place us in a privileged position. Long ago, we had to give up the idea that the universe was geocentric and Darwin proved that we can’t hold on to the idea that humans are the center of creation either; we weren’t specially formed, separately from other life on this planet. And so, it seems to me that solipsism and similar ideas are another attempt to carve out a special place for ourselves.

If we remember that ideas we are emotionally invested in should be held to even higher standards of critical thinking, then the claim that anyone (or everyone) has privileged and inaccessible knowledge of the universe definitely needs to be treated with an extra dose of scepticism. It looks like even though people have given up on the idea that they are physically at a center of the universe, the desire still remains, and so it is replaced with the idea that we are at a non-physical center. I can’t help but feel very cautious of this thinking; given the incredibly good track record nature has for being indifferent to human concerns.

And I can’t help but see a streak of intellectual dishonestly in using forms of solipsism in discussions relating to scientific discovery. Dr. Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer, recently posted this to his twitter account: “If the Universe obeys rules (the supposition in question) then it will do so whether we are here or not. There is an objective truth.” When I hear people argue against objective truth, it’s usually a last attempt to save a deeply held belief from evidence against it. In a universe with only subjective truth, everyone’s personal beliefs are protected from the very scary concept of being wrong. And if there’s one thing that science can do is be completely unambiguous about what is untrue.

So it doesn’t really surprise me that a typical response to the fact that science deals with what can be known is that nothing can be known. If something can be known, then it is in the realm of scientific inquiry. But if you can never truly know reality, only experience it then all ideas are conveniently defended from criticism. Again, I have nothing against that idea as a philosophical argument, but nearly every time I’ve heard this point brought up in conversation, its purpose seems to be to avoid the evaluation of a belief by the scientific method. If I needed to turn the universe upside-down, redefine reality and truth, and throw the concept of knowledge itself out the window in order to make sure what I believe isn’t wrong, I just might have to stop and reconsider why I believe it’s true.

Again, I think it’s important to consider carefully why we want to believe some things are true. The idea that the universe needs us-that nothing exists without our own thoughts and experience-is tempting. But regardless of how self-centered solipsist-type ideas seem to be, whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. It’s irrelevant because the universe requires that you operate as if it were untrue.

If there was a prize for the pseudo-science, paranormal, or new age belief which was most harmful, most immoral, or most disgusting it would have to go to alternative medicine. No contest. Any faith based idea has the potential to be dangerous, but faith healing, cleverly marketed with the secular disguise of ‘alternative medicine’ seems to be the most successful, most deceptive, most dangerous, and especially the most profitable. I recently came across a preview for a movie promoting a form of this garbage, Gerson Therapy. The film, titled “The Beautiful Truth” (barf), is a perfect example of the bag of tricks these charlatans use to take advantage those made desperate by illness.

Gerson Therapy is a so-called alternative cancer treatment which uses “…organic foods, juicing, coffee enemas, detoxification and natural supplements to activate the body’s ability to heal itself”. Wow, even Oprah’s wacky Dr. Oz knows that detox diets don’t rid the body’s system of toxins. Diet has no effect on how effectively your body deals with toxins. Now, apparently, it’s supposed to cure cancer.

The movie trailer doesn’t explain what Gerson Therapy is, but it’s full of the typical jibber jabber nonsense of alternative medicine proponents. The most prevalent argument would seem to be that which claims drugs (all drugs?) don’t work and companies are only concerned with making money. I have several problems with this claim. The first would be the huge logical fallacy red flag-you cannot use a company’s motive for profit as evidence that their product doesn’t work. The validity of any treatment must be established through empirical data. Another problem of this argument is how a company is supposed to make huge profit from a product which doesn’t work. It seems we are supposed to believe in some sort of grand conspiracy where researchers, doctors, and medical experts all keep patients in the dark about the complete ineffectiveness of pharmaceuticals so they can scam everyone out of their money.

The idea that the entire pharmaceutical industry is a giant get-rich-quick scheme that the general public is unaware of is, frankly, ridiculous. Huge investments in decades of research are required to get just one drug to the stage where it can be evaluated for its effectiveness and safety. This is not an easy way to make a quick buck. This is where alternative medicine quacks become most infuriatingly deceptive; it is the alternative and natural health product industry which is cheaply and easily making its investors rich. Regulations, certifications, and basic upfront cost to produce these products and services are nearly nonexistent.  I could literally step outside to the nice little forested area across from my northern Ontario home, gather up random leafy-grassy-forest junk, put it through a blender and label it Aunt Sara’s All Natural Organic Energy Supplement and easily sell it. I don’t have to do any research, I don’t have to do expensive trials, and I don’t even have to prove it does anything. The same goes for most of the alternative service industry as well. No one is going to come arrest me if I practice reiki or homeopathy without a license. There is plenty of profit to be made in faith healing without the need to prove your product or service works.

A major red flag when listening to arguments, not just from pseudo-science, but just plain any kind of argument is when the proponent does nothing but attack conflicting arguments. Creationists don’t argue creationism or intelligent design, they argue against evolution. Natural/Organic food proponents don’t point out proven benefits of their products; they highlight fears of genetic modification. Alternative medicine has to attack real medicine because they don’t have any evidence of their own to promote. The major flaw in alternative medicine is that any treatment which can be proven to work as it claims (through controlled trials and proper double-blinded tests) then it becomes accepted as medicine. The requirement for treatments in the alternative health care industry is that they are methods which are unproven. This is not science based medicine; it is religion disguised as health care.