who you gonna call?
I sort of enjoyed Derren Brown last night. On the one hand I was pleased to see rationality prevail, on the other hand I was sad not to see anything genuinely spooky. On the other hand (we calculate new hand indices through addition modulo 2) I was a little relieved not to, because I’m pretty sure most people, sceptical or not, don’t REALLY want to see a ghost.
It followed Lou Gentile, who before his recent death (we can only assume he died battling the forces of evil), was a demonologist. We start off by seeing him on an investigation into a woman’s home which she believes is possessed by spirits. They have set up a camera which is activated by movement. The camera turns on and records NOTHING INTERESTING. ZOMG THE CAMERA MOVED all on its own, there MUST BE GHOSTS. Oh wait the owner of the house keeps cats. How many do you have? 6? But they weren’t near the camera, we’re assured. Hmm. Oh and also she’s a 40 year old woman who has dyed black hair, tattoos, a lip piercing, 3 rings in her ears, black nails. She’s not, as far as we can tell, on her way to an Addams family convention, she dresses like this all the time. I would say she WANTS to be haunted.
It sort of went on in much the same way. There was footage of a man being possessed, which was rather disturbing, except a professor at a university watched it and said “yep, that’s a psychogenic non-epileptic seizure” (some kind of stress induced fit) thereby reducing the mysticism factor quite a bit.
We also had some other stuff but nothing which was not easily explained by sleep paralysis or apophenia. He was big on electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), which is when you turn the gain up on a low quality audio recorder so it picks up and amplifies and distorts electronic noise, then say it’s a ghost speaking to you. Not really convincing evidence for the existence of ghosts because it starts with the premise that ghosts exist.
The interesting outcome of the programme was that Lou didn’t charge any money for his services because he thought it was immoral to charge people for exorcising demons. So he either did it just for fun (highly unlikely) or because he genuinely believed in all of it. And his clientele clearly believed he was helping them. So what’s the harm? Nothing, leave him alone.
All in all the series was a bit rubbish because Derren never managed to come up with anything inexplicable. I would have preferred it if he had found something interesting. But he didn’t.
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the problem with life after death…
…is that it’s so incredbly human to want to know that you or your relatives don’t REALLY die. It’s such a huge personal bias that people want to believe in it without being objective. It probably made sense hundreds of years ago when human consciousness was a total black box mystery but now we have a better idea how the brain works, and we also have computers attempting to mimic intelligence. Okay this hasn’t got very far yet but I don’t believe there is any technical limitation to a conscious computer program and once that happens it will mostly disprove the notion that human consciousness requires something mystical, which can live on past physical death.
It might turn out that brain simulation goes a slightly less obvious route first though. We might figure out a way to essentially clone the brain into software without necessarily understanding its conceptual high-ish level workings (i.e. that area between chemistry and psychology), in which case we shall be able to clone consciousness which gives us instant artifical intelligence.
Plus let’s not forget that WE OURSELVES might be artifical intelligence living inside a computer simulation. Although personally I don’t buy into this because (assuming we would be the product of a species which evolved in similar circumstances to ours):
1) The necessary traits we have seen to become the dominant species on a planet seem to be at odds with long term existence past a certain point. Sooner or later someone’s going to bomb you to smithereens because if they didn’t have that instinct ingrained pretty strongly, they would have been eaten by wild badgers 10 million years ago.
2) Assuming a less self centred, more hive-like individual existence (like super-bees), it seems grossly unlikely that such a civilization would reach an advanced level of science research. Our achievement is driven by personal wonder, ambition, obsession and occasionally autism and lack of friends, I can’t see a hive of beings motivated more by instinct than thought ever achieving the same things. It’s not an evolutionary necessity or likelihood for such a species to gain a technology advantage, it’s more likely that, if threatened, the shortest path to evolutionary survival would be something much less elegant (like brute force).
So what I am saying is that any civilization would either destroy itself before reaching, or simply fail to reach, the necessary advancement to run such a simulation. But I am rather extrapolating on the nature of other civilizations from a pretty small sample set.
Although there’s an interesting paper on the simulation idea here: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
oh yes, I have gone off topic. Ghosts indeed. Wooooooooooo
UPDATE: ZOMG GUYS I had sleep paralysis this morning (I think). I always kind of dreaded waking up one day to find myself paralysed, but that’s not what happened because it was in a lucid dream! I tried to move and couldn’t, and I thought “hmmm, am I dreaming”. Then two men came in and explained to me that I was paralysed and needed looking after, and I said “No it’s okay, I’m pretty sure I’m dreaming” and the one standing to the right of the bed said “no I’m sorry but you’re not” and I said “no I still think I am”. GUESS WHO WAS RIGHT. Had I been more alert I would have noticed that my bed is to the wall and there is no way he could stand on the right of it. hmm. I’m not sure if it was sleep paralysis or if I was just dreaming I was paralysed. HMM.
yes there is no there isn’t
As you may/may not know I have a love/hate relationship with Derren Brown. One the one hand I really respect him as a sceptic and overall spokesman of common sense, on the other hand he drives me insane with his pseudoscientific gimmick explanations to his own magic tricks. I don’t know if this will be visible outside the UK (and if you aren’t from the UK you’ll probably not be able to handle strong Liverpudlian accents anyway, so it may be a blessing if you can’t see it) but for the next 26 days you can watch an interesting programme on the Channel 4 website consisting of Derren doing a slightly Louis Theroux style documentary on self-proclaimed medium Joe Power.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-investigates
The paranormal is something that supposedly has a huge wealth of totally elusive evidence for it, but I am not one of the ‘chosen few’ who has been selected to view it, so I wanted to watch this programme and see Derren quite convinced that this man could really speak to dead people. We all know that there are plenty of bad mediums around, but it would be far more interesting to find one who was really good. The programme is quite generous to begin with and shows a fairly incredible ‘reading’; could it be that Joe is going to turn out to be that elusive REALLY GOOD medium? Unfortunately not. It gets more balanced later on. In the next part Joe ‘reads’ a couple of Hollyoaks actors in which he gets a fair few misses, then Joe invites Derren to try one and through cold reading (so he claims, but he probably did some research before hand) Derren hits a couple of specifics more impressive than Joe’s. At the end Joe, who seems to feel a bit shown up (through insecurity rather than any good reason, or perhaps he hoped Derren would make a hash of it so he could use that as “see I have a gift!”), amusingly states that “I come up with facts” in a striking juxtaposition with two minutes earlier when his hit rate was about 50% and most of his hits required the other person to fill in the context. Then just to show he’s one up on Derren he casually mentions “oh you don’t know about the affair, do you” to her, but refuses to tell her anymore(!). We also see a fairly generic stage act where he throws out names and numbers and the audience occasionally says “oh you said Jean earlier, I think you meant Joan”, and lots of dead grandparents pass on exciting messages like “I’m proud of you”, but never “I forgot to tell you that I left my old service revolver under the floorboards in the bedroom”.
Things go downhill for him from this point in the programme. The one interesting hit he got with the Hollyoaks actors was when he predicted the girl drove a mini. This became less interesting when Derren’s driver goes “yeah I could have told you that, she pulled up in it while we were in the car park”. It also turns out that Joe makes a habit of going to everyone’s toilet as soon as he gets into their house to read them and suddenly his amazing ability to throw out numbers of relatives seems less impressive. Towards the end he has a reading with a woman named Roz where he gets absolutely nothing right, at which point he decides it’s all Derren’s fault and storms off (out of Joe’s earshot, Derren called it “bad cold reading”, and I agree with the ‘bad’ part, but I think the ‘reading’ part is being a little generous). Then just to ensure that his credibility really is completely shot to bits, right at the end there is the revelation that the woman whom he read to begin with with impressive accuracy (his only convincing success) is actually his sister’s next door neighbour.
Throughout the programme Derren borrows a few expressions and tones-of-voice from Louis Theroux as he tries to remain diplomatically neutral in Joe’s presence, but the overall result isn’t so much a case for Joe Power as it is Joe Powerless.
At one point Derren wishes to set up a test which involves Joe reading various people without the two of them being in the same room. Joe was initially willing to take a test but upon finding out exactly what it involves he responds with “a dog wouldn’t take that test, it was designed for failure“.
Unusual comparisons aside, this highlights something interesting I have noticed with a few people now, as my interest in the occult and paranormal (or lack of it) has grown: People who proclaim supernatural powers are often quite willing to consent to a ‘test’ but then pull out later on as more details as to what the test would involve emerge.
Naively a test is something that’ll prove an outcome. That’s an okayish definition. Even more naively, a successful test is something that proves you were right. That’s a terrible definiton, and it’s totally wrong, but it’s kind of the default view until you’ve thought about it.
Think of it like testing software; you’ve just written your program and you tested it and found no problems. Is that good? Not really; you just spent all that time testing it and your program still has the same number of errors as it has before you tested it. It was a waste of time. If it was a mature piece of software and it’s been tested extensively before then okay, you’re starting to get a picture that it doesn’t have many problems, but if it hasn’t been tested before then your test was a failure because it did not advance your knowledge past the uninformed view you originally had.
The point of a test is to find new information. If you design a test for which the only possible outcome is to be in the exact same place as you started, the only thing your test can prove is that you’ve lost the plot (if you ever had it).
In short, when a believer says they are willing to ‘test’ their beliefs/claims, they usually fail to understand what a test really is. They erroneously believe that the point of a test is to CONFIRM their beliefs by using scenarios that disallow any chance of discrediting them. Apart from this being a waste of time, in terms of being evidence of their being correct it is as convincing as building a house of cards then inviting people to look at it intently, then proclaiming its failure to fall over is proof of its invulnerability, even though you have only allowed it to be tested by the power of staring.
