by Scott Adams
“That, too, is pattern recognition, along with showmanship, and sometimes trickery. Some of what passes as extraordinary psychic ability is nothing but playing the odds. The psychic might say, for example, that the deceased husband saw the widow kissing his picture. That would be a safe guess. Most widows kiss pictures of their dead husbands. Or the psychic might say that the departed husband liked to work with his hands at home. That applies to almost all men.
“The psychic can pick up many patterns suggested from a person’s voice, accent, clothes, age, name, health, and ethnicity. Let’s say a client has smoke-stained teeth. Smokers are likely to live with other smokers. The psychic might guess that a loved one recently died from heart or lung problems. That would be a good guess.”
“Okay, what about those televangelists who heal people on TV? Those people look healed to me. Is that fake?”
The old man just laughed. I laughed too.
Light
“Consider light,” the old man said. “Our world appears infused with light’s energy. But what is light?”
“It’s made of photons,” I said, thinking that was a start. By then I should have known better. I think he ignored my answer.
“If you were in a spaceship racing a beam of light, and you were moving at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, how much faster would the light be?”
“About one percent of the speed of light, obviously. I don’t know the miles per hour.”
“Not according to Einstein. He proved that the light beam would be faster than your rocket ship by the speed of light, no matter how fast you are traveling.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. But it sounds vaguely familiar. Did he really say that?”
“Yes, and it is accepted as fact in the physics world.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “If I’m traveling ninety-nine percent as fast as the light beam, in the same direction as the light, the light beam can’t be faster than me by the same speed as if I weren’t moving at all.”
“It’s ridiculous indeed. But scientists claim it is proven.”
“What if two rocket ships were racing the light beam and one was ninety-nine percent as fast as light and the other was fifty percent as fast? The light can’t be faster than both of them by exactly the speed of light.”
“And yet it would be.”
“Okay, that’s just plain crazy,” I replied. “You see, the light beam should be speeding away from the slower ship faster than it would be pulling away from the fast ship. That’s common sense.”
“It’s common and it’s wrong, according to scientific tests,” he argued. “It turns out that time and motion and the speed of light are different for all observers. We don’t notice it in daily life because the difference is very slight for slow-moving objects. But as you approach the speed of light, the differences become evident.
“It is literally true that no two people share the same reality. Einstein proved that reality is not one fixed state. Instead, it is an infinite number of unique realities, depending on where you are and how fast you are moving.
“If I were a passenger in the slow rocket ship that you used in your example, I would observe you pulling away from me at high speed. But from the perspective of the light beam, neither of us is moving at all. Both versions of reality are verifiably true, yet they are absurd when considered together.”
“So what the heck is light?” I asked.
“Light is the outer limit of what is possible. It is not a physical thing; it is a boundary. Scientists agree that light has no mass. By analogy, think of earth’s horizon. The horizon is not a physical thing. It is a concept. If you tried to put some horizon in a bucket, you couldn’t do it.
“Yet the horizon is observable and understandable. It seems to be physical and it seems to have form and substance. But when you run toward the horizon, no matter how fast you go, it seems to stay ahead of you by the same distance. You can never reach the horizon, no matter how fast you move.”
He continued. “Light is analogous to the horizon. It is a boundary that gives the illusion of being a physical thing. Like the horizon, it appears to move away from you at a constant speed no matter how fast you are moving. We observe things that we believe are light, like the searchlight in the night sky, the cloud-red sunset. But those things are not light; they are merely boundaries between different probabilities.
“Consider two plants. One is in direct light and the other is in perpetual shadow. The lighted plant experiences more possibilities because it lives longer and grows bigger and stronger. Eventually it will die, but not before it experiences many more possibilities than its shaded counterpart.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’m having trouble imagining light as not being a physical thing. How can it influence physical things if it isn’t physical itself?”
“There are plenty of nonphysical things that affect the world,” he said. “Gravity is not physical, and yet it seems to keep you from floating off the Earth. Probability is not physical, but it influences a coin toss anywhere in the universe. An idea is not physical and it can change civilization.”
“I don’t think ideas are an example of something nonphysical changing civilization. The brains of the people involved are physical things, and they influence our bodies, which are physical. I don’t see how ideas really enter into it, except in the way we label things. Ideas don’t float around in space by themselves. They’re always associated with something physical in our brains.”
“Suppose I write a hurtful insult on a piece of paper and hand it to you,” he replied. “The note is physical, but when you look at it, the information enters your mind over a pathway of light. Remember that light has no mass. Like magnetic fields, light exists in no physical form. When the insult on the note travels across the light path from the note to your eyes it is completely nonphysical for the duration of the trip. The insult encoded in the light is no more real than a horizon. It is a pure transfer of probability from me to you. When the insult registers in your mind, physical things start to happen. You might get angry and your neck and forehead might get hot. You might even punch me. Light is the messenger of probability, but neither the light nor the message has mass.
“When we feel the warmth of sunlight, we are feeling the effect of increased probabilities and, therefore, increased activity of our skin cells, not the effect of photons striking our skin. Photons have no mass, the scientists tell us. That is another way to say they do not exist except as a concept.”
He continued. “You might have heard it said that light is both a particle and a wave, sometimes behaving like one, sometimes like the other, depending on the circumstance. That is like saying sometimes your shadow is long and sometimes it is short. Your shadow is not a physical thing; it is an impression, a perception, left by physical things. It is a boundary, not an object.
“Light can be thought of as zones of probability that surround all things. A star, by virtue of its density, has high probability that two of its God-dust particles will pop into existence in the same location, forcing one of them to adjust, creating a new and frantic probability. That activity, the constant adjusting of location and probability, is what we perceive as energy.
“The reason you cannot catch up to a light beam, no matter how fast you travel, is that the zone of probability moves with you like your shadow. Trying to race light is like trying to run away from your own thoughts.
“The so-called speed of light is simply the limit to how far a particle can pop into existence from its original location. If a particle pops into existence a short distance from its original position, the perceived speed of that particle will be slow. If each new appearance is a great distance from the starting point, the perceived speed will be much faster. There is a practical limit to how far from its original distance a particle is likely to appear. That limit is what gives light an apparent top speed.”
“My brain hurts,” I said.
Curious Bees
“Why do p
eople have different religions?” I asked. “It seems like the best one would win, eventually, and we’d all believe the same thing.”
The old man paused and rocked. He tucked both hands inside his red plaid blanket.
“Imagine that a group of curious bees lands on the outside of a church window. Each bee gazes upon the interior through a different stained glass pane. To one bee, the church’s interior is all red. To another it is all yellow, and so on. The bees cannot experience the inside of the church directly; they can only see it. They can never touch the interior or smell it or interact with it in any way. If bees could talk they might argue over the color of the interior. Each bee would stick to his version, not capable of understanding that the other bees were looking through different pieces of stained glass. Nor would they understand the purpose of the church or how it got there or anything about it. The brain of a bee is not capable of such things.
“But these are curious bees. When they don’t understand something, they become unsettled and unhappy. In the long run the bees would have to choose between permanent curiosity—an uncomfortable mental state—and delusion. The bees don’t like those choices. They would prefer to know the true color of the church’s interior and its purpose, but bee brains are not designed for that level of understanding. They must choose from what is possible, either discomfort or self-deception. The bees that choose discomfort will be unpleasant to be around and they will be ostracized. The bees that choose self-deception will band together to reinforce their vision of a red-based interior or yellow-based interior and so on.”
“So you’re saying we’re like dumb bees?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Worse. We are curious.”
Willpower
“You’re very fit,” the old man observed.
“I work out four times a week.”
“When you see an overweight person, what do you think of his willpower?”
“I think he doesn’t have much,” I said.
“Why do you think that?”
“How hard is it to skip that third bowl of ice cream? I’m in good shape because I exercise and eat right. It’s not easy, but I have the willpower. Some people don’t.”
“If you were starving, could you resist eating?”
“I doubt it. Not for long, anyway.”
“But if your belly were full you could resist easily, I assume.”
“Sure.”
“It sounds as if hunger determines your actions, not so–called willpower.”
“No, you picked two extremes: starving and full,” I said. “Most of the time I’m in the middle. I can eat a little or eat a lot, but it’s up to me.”
“Have you ever been very hungry—not starving, just very hungry—and found yourself eating until it hurt?”
“Yes, but on average I don’t eat too much. Sometimes I’m busy and I forget to eat for half a day. It all averages out.”
“I don’t see how willpower enters into your life,” he said. “In one case you overeat and in the other case you simply forget to eat. I see no willpower at all.”
“I don’t overeat every time I eat. Most of the time I have average hunger and I eat average amounts. I’d like to eat more, but I don’t. That’s willpower.”
“And according to you, overweight people have less of this thing you call willpower?” he asked.
“Obviously. Otherwise they’d eat less.”
“Isn’t it possible that overweight people have the same amount of willpower as you but much greater hunger?”
“I think people have to take responsibility for their own bodies,” I replied.
“Take responsibility? It sounds as if you’re trying to replace the word willpower with two new words in the hope that I will think it’s a new thought.”
I laughed. He nailed me.
“Okay, just give it to me,” I said, knowing there was a more profound thought behind this line of questioning.
“We like to believe that other people have the same level of urges as we do, despite all evidence to the contrary. We convince ourselves that people differ only in their degree of morality or willpower, or a combination of the two. But urges are real, and they differ wildly for every individual. Morality and willpower are illusions. For any human being, the highest urge always wins and willpower never enters into it. Willpower is a delusion.”
“Your interpretation is dangerous,” I said. “You’re saying it’s okay to follow your urges, no matter what is right or wrong, because you can’t help yourself anyway. We might as well empty the prisons since people can’t stop themselves from committing crimes. It’s not really their fault, according to you.”
“It is useful to society that our urges are tempered by shame and condemnation and the threat of punishment,” he said. “It is a useful fiction to blame a thing called willpower and pretend the individual is somehow capable of overcoming urges with this magical and invisible force. Without that fiction, there could be no blame, no indignation, and no universal agreement that some things should be punished. And without those very real limiting forces, our urges would be less contained and more disruptive than they are. The delusion of willpower is a practical fiction.”
“I’ll never look at pie the same way,” I said. “But what about people with slow metabolisms? They get fat no matter how little they eat.”
“Have you ever seen pictures of starving people?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“How many of the starving people in those pictures were fat?”
“None that I’ve seen. They’re always skin and bones. But that’s different.”
“It’s very different but still, according to your theory, some of those people should be starving to death while remaining fat.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I was happy when he changed the subject.
Holy Lands
“What makes a holy land holy?” he asked.
“Well, usually it’s because some important religious event took place there.”
“What does it mean to say that something took place in a particular location when we know that the earth is constantly in motion, rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun? And we’re in a moving galaxy that is part of an expanding universe. Even if you had a spaceship and could fly anywhere, you can never return to the location of a past event. There would be no equivalent of the past location because location depends on your distance from other objects, and all objects in the universe would have moved considerably by then.”
“I see your point, but on Earth the holy places keep their relationship to other things on Earth, and those things don’t move much,” I said.
“Let’s say you dug up all the dirt and rocks and vegetation of a holy place and moved it someplace else, leaving nothing but a hole that is one mile deep in the original location. Would the holy land now be the new location where you put the dirt and rocks and vegetation, or the old location with the hole?”
“I think both would be considered holy,” I said, hedging my bets.
“Suppose you took only the very top layer of soil and vegetation from the holy place, the newer stuff that blew in or grew after the religious event occurred thousands of years ago. Would the place you dumped the topsoil and vegetation be holy?”
“That’s a little trickier,” I said. “I’ll say the new location isn’t holy because the topsoil that you moved there isn’t itself holy, it was only in contact with holy land. If holy land could turn anything that touched it into more holy land, then the whole planet would be holy.”
The old man smiled. “The concept of location is a useful delusion when applied to real estate ownership, or when giving someone directions to the store. But when it is viewed through the eyes of an omnipotent God, the concept of location is absurd.
“While we speak, nations are arming themselves to fight for control of lands they consider holy. They are trapped in the delusion that locations are real things, not just fictions of the mind. Many will die.”
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Fighting God
“So what good is all this?” I asked. “Let’s say you convinced me that probability is the best way to understand the universe and that probability is the essence of God. How does that help me? Should I pray to this God of yours? Do I need to satisfy him in some way?”
“Probability is the expression of God’s will. It is in your best interest to obey probability.”
“How do I obey probability?”
“God’s reassembly requires people—living, healthy people,” he said. “When you buckle your seat belt, you increase your chances of living. That is obeying probability. If you get drunk and drive without a seat belt, you are fighting probability.”
“I don’t see how I’m helping God’s reassembly,” I said. “I just deliver packages. I’m not designing the Internet or anything.”
“Every economic activity helps. Whether you are programming computers, or growing food, or raising children, or cleaning garbage from the side of the road, you are contributing to the realization of God’s consciousness. None of those activities is more important than another.”
“What about good and evil? Do they exist in your model?” I asked.
“Evil is any action that might damage people. Probability generally punishes evildoers. Since most criminals are captured and jailed, overall the people who hurt others tend to pay. So evil does exist and, on average, it is punished.
“Life has a feel and flow to it. Usually you know instinctively when you are working with probability on your side and when you are fighting it. When you take your education seriously, for example, you are greatly increasing your probability of contributing to God’s reassembly. When you love and respect others and procreate responsibly, you are living within the safety cone of probability. You are, in a sense, fulfilling God’s will.”