Almost immediately, I asked a question that caused those faces to redden with embarrassment and inflamed each pimple to an angry red, like the glowing tip of a cigarette: ‘If I lived righteously as a Mormon patriarch, then I would be resurrected as a god of my own planet, which I would fill with the children of many wives?’
‘We really shouldn’t talk about these kinds of things,’ Elder Young said to me, ‘at our first meeting.’
‘But did you know,’ I asked, ‘that the other planets are already full of life? On Agathange alone …’
I kept no count of the men and women (most all were men) who came to speak with me. The number of human religions is nearly uncountable, even for humans themselves. A few of these religions both amused me and warmed my breath. I liked, for instance, the Church of All Worlds whose water brothers take inspiration from the characters who populate one of the humans’ famous fictions; the water brothers and sisters of the Church of All Worlds find divinity everywhere in nature and commune with the Great Mother Goddess herself.
Other faiths disquieted me, even as I had to recognize their great promise: I met with representatives of the Human Extinction Movement and the related Church of Euthanasia, which had been founded on the four pillars of Suicide, Sodomy, Abortion, and Cannibalism. Cannibalism lay at the heart of another bizarre but much more important religion. I marveled at the Catholic ceremony of communion, in which the faithful eat the transubstantiated flesh and blood of a god reborn as a man in order to somehow save humans from their sins – very like the practitioners of the mushroom cults who eat the Flesh of the Gods and become as God. The saving included the confessing of those sins and then, after death, a long period of purgation and purification in hellish fires before the soul could enter heaven and look upon the face of God.
A similar religion – as two mirror-imaged twins, one right-handed and one left-handed, are similar – I learned of one day when a Transhumanist came to see me. He put all his faith, for himself and for me, in a technology of salvation soon to be. The Cybernetic Gnosticism which he professed views the human mind as pure information, which could be scanned, copied, and programmed into machines. Human beings would soon cast off the contemptuous, evil carbon matter of their bodies in order for their spirits to be resurrected as a kind of blissful and imperishable consciousness crackling like electricity through the heaven of their silicon computing machines. In an inversion of Judeo-Christian theology, humanity would find its destiny by creating God in the form of a universal artificial intelligence. The Transhumanists even speak of a cybernetic version of man’s ancient fall into sin and suffering: the artificial intelligence that scientists had created would grow without bound in a rapture known as the Singularity, and then the human beings would be left behind, forever cut-off from the godhead. If they were lucky, the hyper-intelligent machines would keep them around as pets.
My next visitor, Jeremy Mann, had gained notoriety in the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and was known as the ‘Newton of Consciousness.’ (A rumor had spread through the Net that Jeremy himself had invented and promulgated this honorific.) I thought he might be able to speak very well for the faith of Scientism. A small man whose carefully controlled body seemed to have been constructed around the core of a rapier, he paced around the concrete deck peering at the many computers. We immediately got off on the wrong foot, as the humans like to say, when his metallic voice slashed out: ‘I can’t see any microphones, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t hidden.’
He seemed to be speaking to a microphone of his own, secreted somewhere about his person. Clearly, he suspected that his words were being recorded so that one of the other scientists in another part of the house – perhaps Helen herself – could reply through one of the computers in a pretense that it was a whale who responded to him and not in actuality a human being. Upon perceiving this, I tried to reassure him that a couple of the representatives of other religions had asked Helen to swear that no hoax was being perpetrated upon them, and so she had. Jeremy froze like a shark staring at his prey. He immediately took umbrage in his discovery that I considered him to be a religionary much like all the others.
‘I am a scientist,’ he said, investing this word with an odious combination of authority, conceit, and belief.
‘I confess,’ I told him, ‘that I often find it difficult to perceive the difference between science and religion.’
I asked him if he had ever considered the amazing coincidence of the Bible’s creation ex nihilo of the world by the Lord God Yahweh and the Big Bang in which the entire universe exploded into being out of a similar nothingness.
‘But there is all the difference in the world!’ he said, ignoring my example. ‘Religion requires one to have faith in revealed and unseen truths, while science applies to objective reality the razors of reason and verification.’
‘Those razors,’ I said to him, ‘are precisely why I love your science – sometimes – and why I have hope for your idiotic kind.’
I usually disliked giving voice to harsh words that might bruise the humans’ delicate sensibilities. Something about this Mann man, however – if I had been a human possessed of a sense of smell, I would have said that he reeked of smug certitude – made me want to bruise and batter the hauteur of self-regard from his famous face.
‘To form a concept of the world,’ I continued, ‘according to evidence, inspiration, and logic, and then to test this concept for its truth – this is the essence of science, is it not?’
‘I would be more likely to accept your fondness for science,’ he said, ‘if you would consent to the verification of your own reasoning abilities.’
‘Let us talk and reason together, then, and you may verify all you wish.’
‘But you won’t consent to my administering an intelligence test?’
‘Are there mathematics questions?’
‘There is a quantitative section, yes, of course.’
‘I know nothing of mathematics.’
‘Then how can you consider yourself to be scientific?’
‘You are perilously close,’ I told him, ‘to committing the Definitional Fallacy, which your own psychologists and logicians have identified: you define what it means to be scientific, and then accuse others of being unscientific when they fail to conform their views to your definition.’
‘I’m only making explicit what all reputable scientists believe.’
‘And you imply that I should therefore believe likewise. That is an outright expression of the Bandwagon Fallacy.’
Jeremy stood above me with his hand resting on one of Helen’s computers. I could barely zang the sound of his heart, which increased its rate of beating not even slightly at my provocative words. Unukalhai had told me that such imperturbability was a characteristic of advanced Buddhist meditators – and psychopaths.
‘I only want to see,’ he said, ‘how you might perform on tasks that millions of people have attempted.’
‘Tasks that men who do not understand the true nature of intelligence and possess little of it have designed for other idiots such as themselves.’
‘Am I to understand that you are calling me an idiot?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘that would mean my attacking your arguments by the way of attacking you and thereby committing the Ad Hominem Fallacy.’
‘Ah, a whale with scruples!’ he said.
‘How about if I give you an intelligence test, to pass on to others of your kind?’ I swam closer to him. ‘Can you find your way around the oceans of the world, navigating by the stars? Can you understand the nature of an animal (or anything) without cutting it into smaller and even smaller pieces? Can you sing a song that brings another to tears? Can you zang through the darkest deeps of underwater shoals and treacherous currents and always find your way home?’
Jeremy sat down on a chair. Then he rubbed his silver-haired temples, and fixed me with his steely stare.
‘Or,’ I continued, ‘how about a m
ultiple choice question, which your testers seem to like so much? When faced with climatic warming from all the gases you have spewed into the atmosphere, which will inexorably result in planetary heat death, you should:
1. Deny reality
2. Ask for a mathematical proof of something that can be proved with certainty only by extinction itself
3. Ascribe the “illusion” of a crisis to the nefarious motives of your enemies
4. Feel worried and do nothing
5. Fix the problem.
‘I should think the answer is obvious,’ he said.
‘Then why do all but a few of your kind fail to find the right answer?’
‘Because they refuse to accept the established results of good science, even as I suspect you do, too.’
‘It is not good science that I reject. However, I abhor the mumbo-jumbo of pseudo-science that so many of your so-called scientists practice. So many of you are no more scient than a snail.’
‘Is that an ad hominem attack that I detect?’
‘Please excuse me – let me attack scientific dogma instead,’ I told him. ‘Consider the calculation by which your scientists have sought to rank the intelligence of various species. What a truly amazing coincidence that humans should compute their own intelligence as surpassing that of all others!’
‘If you are speaking of the brain-body weight ratio, I have taken objection to that myself. It is a crude measurement.’
‘It is worse than crude!’ I said. I swam back and forth across the channel, always returning to the place where he sat on the deck above one of the screens. ‘It is not science at all but a pure sham. Anyone with even the weakest of scientific eyes should have seen right through it.’
I went on to speak of how certain scientists had measured the weights of the bodies and the brains of many kinds of animals, and had then computed the ratio of the brain to the body – the supposition being that the larger the brain relative to the body, the more intelligent the species. It turned out that to humans, of course, could be ascribed the highest of ratios. (Except for tree shrews, small birds, and ants, which fact scientists for various reasons conveniently ignored.) Whales did not rank nearly so high as humans.
‘Most of a whale’s weight, however,’ I said to him, ‘is fat. How much brain is needed to interact with it and move it around?’
He ignored this and informed me, ‘The brain/body ratio has been replaced with the more refined and well-established metric of the Encephalization Quotient.’
‘Which still computes intelligence according to ratios. A simple thought experiment, however, would have sufficed to demolish the validity of this approach.’
I asked him to consider a very foolish man who had succumbed to one of the eating sicknesses that afflict his species. ‘If the man,’ I asked him, ‘were to gorge on ice cream for a year and double his weight, would his intelligence then fall to a half of what it had been?’
I paused to breathe and study his impassive face. ‘Your scientists’ definition of intelligence is so limited – and convenient,’ I said. ‘If I wanted to, I could easily devise a ratio of weights that would rank humans much lower in intelligence.’
‘Please do so.’
‘All right, then consider the human penis.’
‘Must I?’
I tried to ‘read’ the inflections of emotion in his voice, but I could not. Then I cited many works of human literature and their depictions of the idiocies perpetrated by human males in lust. In this light, I said, the human penis could be regarded as a second brain both sightless and single-minded in its stupidity – or even as an anti-brain. Given that a human penis is much larger than, for instance, that of a much heavier gorilla, a penis/body weight ratio of man would come out as very high – and thus the intelligence of man would compute as very low.
He smiled not at all at my little comedy of thought play. He said, ‘You are confusing intelligence with the will to overcome impulses.’
‘Yes, I am, and that is because it is a human conceit to divorce the intelligence of the mind from the wisdom of the body.’
Humans, I said, instead of relying on their true nature to point them toward the real and the good, invent with their flawed minds rigid moral systems, which the impulses of their blood and their gonads continually cause them to violate. In truth, humans love acting out their various urges, which leak out of them as do fluids from a baby. Thus men and women could tell themselves lies such as ‘The Devil made me do it’ or ‘I am so passionate that I couldn’t help myself.’
‘Most of your kind,’ I said to him, ‘so easily become every random emotion that bubbles up inside them – or else you become trapped within what you would probably call the programmed turnings of machine-like thoughts. Rarely are head and heart yoked like two horses to a single chariot of fire, blazing across the sky.’
‘And it is not the same for you orcas?’
‘At our worst,’ I said, thinking of Sea Circus’s punishment pool, ‘it is. Then four horses are connected by ropes to each of our metaphoric limbs, and the horses are whipped to froth and gallop off in different directions. At such times, we become humanized.’
He appeared to consider this as he gazed at me.
‘If I were one of your scientists,’ I told him, ‘I would formulate my theories of intelligence by way of a reduction of the mind to the gross material structures of the brain. I might say that the human problem of integrating intelligences results from the unfortunate fact that you humans lack an entire cortical lobe of the brain, what neuroanatomists call the paralimbic: the very part of us orcas from which arises our ability to quenge – and the part that too great a shock of emotion can paralyze.’
‘But you are not such a scientist,’ he said in his irritating voice, ‘so you would not say that.’
‘No, I am an orca, so I would say this: the human being is at odds with his own being.’ I moved closer to him as I searched for the right sounds that the computers could translate for him. ‘Two souls, alas, dwell within the human breast, and they accompany each other with all the discord of a marimba’s jumping, jingling tintinnabulations and the slow, deep, haunting melodies of the Native American flute.’
‘Very poetic,’ he said, ‘but also pointless as regards our discussion. Yes, of course, a great deal of bad science is practiced. And I’ve spent a great deal of time exposing it.’
‘Then why do you still speak of the Encephalization Quotient as if it has any validity?’ I asked him, slapping my tail against the water. ‘The real insanity is not that some stupid human vomited up an idiotic theory, but that so many so-called scientists have accepted it without question.’
‘I understand that you seem to be frustrated.’
‘Do you?’ I came up out of the water, spy-hopping so that I might more clearly make out the light of his eyes. ‘It is this that I abhor about science in the same way that I laugh at your religions. Most scientists fail in the quintessential act of science, which is to question with an open mind all things. And by that, I do not mean only or chiefly that they lack the mental machinery to examine with courage their facts and their theories.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you really wish to know?’
I went on to say that science, as practiced on the earthy parts of our world, divorced fact from value, and so devalued the earth and facilitated its destruction. Worse, science, which presumed to critique the bases of the claims of religions and other disciplines, failed to examine its own most fundamental assumptions. And worse still, I said, most scientists refused even to acknowledge these assumptions and that they sprang from impulses no different from religious faith.
I then detailed some of these assumptions: that the nature of nature is mechanical and should be studied in that way; that nature has no purpose and evolution no goal; that the laws of nature are fixed throughout space and time; that minds are nothing more than an epiphenomenon of the mechanistic reactions of the chemicals of the brain; that m
emories are recorded as engrams within the brain; that the matter that makes up everything from stars to jellyfish to human beings is essentially unconscious and unalive.
‘At least religionists such as your Christians,’ I said, ‘acknowledge explicitly the Athanasian Creed upon which their belief in three gods is based.’
Too many scientists, I said, felt too certain of their own beliefs – and of science itself. They saw themselves as on the cutting edge of a perfectly formed and final razor of epistemology, the only truly valid way of apprehending the universe that had ever been created and the best that ever could. But so had other humans in other places seen themselves: the ancient Greeks; the Chinese; the Romans; the Arabian philosophers; the European alchemists; the Medieval astronomers who insisted on hideously complicating their model of an earth-centered cosmos, which they had based upon the beauty of the music of nested celestial spheres coupled with poorly interpreted motions of the planets and the observation that the earth itself never seems to move.
How were contemporary scientists, I asked him, any different? Despite knowing better, despite appreciating that a single, new inexplicable fact or the slightest reinterpretation of an old one could lead to a new theory and render an old one junk, despite the history of entire sets of theories themselves being replaced with new paradigms – despite all this, scientists and other humans who accepted their pronouncements insisted on forming a sure, mental picture of the universe as emerging from an explosion out of nothingness and that random mutations of a molecule that did nothing more than code for the production of proteins drove the entire glory and wonder of evolution.
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