The Journal of Loose Ends

Research in the Post-Scientific Era

  • An Afternoon Thought Experiment

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    The Journal of Loose Ends
    volume 2 supplemental

    Apologies for the tardiness of recent entries. We are the victims of a dispute between the Archive and affiliated institutions of higher learning. Such interruptions are not uncommon and in most cases, indicate nothing more than transient increases in job dissatisfaction among archives staff. In the spirit of post scientific improvisation we bring you the most recent supplemental to the Journal.
    The following is an article written by Prof. Isaacson from the Center of Excellence for Speculative Philosophy. While Prof. Isaacson is best known for his work on causation, identity, and supervenience, he has delved into the related issues of determinism and free will, perhaps even a bit farther than it is wise. The following is material gathered during those expeditions in the depths of philosophical misunderstanding.

    An Afternoon’s Thought Experiment.

    Before embarking on this questionable endeavor, I wish to make my viewpoint clear. In addition, and in the spirit of fair treatment, I want to give a definitive answer to the problem of free will and determinism up front.

    Untold lifetimes have gone to waste in contemplation and dispute around this single topic. The best way to examine the conundrums of free will and determinism is precisely opposite the standard approach.

    . Instead of pounding out definitions of freedom and sparring over cause, I will simply grant each argument and examine the consequences.
    Let’s take the example of a pair of Cardiovascular surgeons, one named Patricia, and one named Thomas. Patricia lives in a world where free will exists. That is to say she has a mental faculty that she can apply as she feels the need to help her with her decision-making. Note that this faculty is not a magical power. It works in accordance with the same rules of identity and physical principles as the rest of her brain and body do.

    The same can be said for the relationship between the mental faculty and the world where it operates. The mental faculty is motivated, either primarily or secondarily, in response to Patricia’s constantly changing circumstances.

    Early one morning, Patricia is repairing an aortic aneurysm. Before she can begin the repair she needs to put a clamp across the aorta. The clamp will prevent rapid blood loss and death when she cuts the diseased section of the blood vessel out. Once the clamp engages, the clock is ticking, because most of the blood flow to the lower half of the body stops.

    There is another risk as well. If she applies the clamp across an section of the aorta where accumulations of cholesterol and clotted blood compromise the vessel wall, the clamp can dislodge that material, causing it to flow downstream until it reaches a vessel narrower than its diameter and it becomes impacted, occluding the blood vessel.

    When this event occurs, the surgical team cannot know about it until the patient wakes with neurologic deficits in their legs and lower trunk. To mitigate the risk, Patricia uses a small ultrasound to examine the area of the aorta where she plans to apply the clamp. The case goes smoothly, but unfortunately, when the patient wakes up later that day he is unable to move his legs.

    In addition to the use of the ultrasound, as she prepared to do the procedure, Patricia consulted her mental faculty to help her decide
    where she was going to put the clamp in this situation. The mental faculty is not
    different in principle from the ultrasound.
    Both devices provide information to Patricia regarding her decision to put the clamp in one spot rather than another. During her training, Patricia has learned how to assign the value of that information in the context of her closing the instruments jaws across the vessel.

    This is still a tense moment because Patricia’s information is necessarily incomplete; the ultrasound cannot tell her what’s really going on in the plaque. Its resolution is
    limited. Objects or pieces of objects below a certain size are undetectable because they don’t reflect sound waves well enough to provide the resolution she needs. Furthermore, neither the ultrasound nor any other modality can tell her
    anything useful about the physico-chemical status of the plaque. The only way for her to tell how crumbly the plaque is would be to crush it between her fingers. Of course, then the disrupted plaque would be sure to embolize.

    The problem is intractable. The plaque will develop friability when it grows to a certain size. There is no way prior to that to know how easily it will crumble. This is the problem of emergence. The complex plaque material does not develop or display any new or hidden properties. Were that the case, it might as well be made out of cream cheese, because the components that accounted for its structure and properties would cease to do so. That would leave the task of bearing those properties up to the higher-level structure.

    This is the phenomenon of downward causation which would render our explanations useless if it were true. Luckily, we find no “flocking properties” when we pull a single sparrow from the group nor do we discover a “wetness property” when we remove five water molecules from the cup on the countertop. At some point, the microstructure of a system becomes large or complex enough to alter its own context, and it begins to behave differently on that basis, meriting a theoretical synthesis if we want to continue working with it.

    Now, with the machinery of free will up and running, how do things look for Patricia? An oft mentioned test for freedom of the will is the ability to choose to do otherwise in the same circumstances. In Patricia’s case specifically, that means if we roll the film back to the moment before she clamps the aorta could she choose not to clamp it.

    The tricky bit is the way choice works when you roll the film back.
    Certainly Patricia will choose not to clamp the artery in the same spot when we give her a second chance, but that’s a mere practicality. We only need to know in principle that she could choose to do otherwise but these two things prove inseparable.

    A great human philosopher once noted that he did not will his thoughts into existence. His thoughts came to him unbidden. And yet, when those thoughts have come and gone they are amenable to explanation, and barring any severe mental illness, those thoughts form a coherent narrative. The will is much the same. No one wills themselves to will something.

    The object of desire comes chained to the desire, and so, to roots in the past. In Patricia’s world, it will not do for future Patricia to push past Patricia aside and grab the clamp. The conditions preceding the moment of choice must be exactly the same while Patricia must be able to decide differently than she did. Of course she could, but the metaphysical possibility means almost nothing. From Patricia’s viewpoint, she approaches the moment of decision and consults the mental faculty that renders an intuition about where to clamp the aorta.. The intuition is precisely balanced, but as the choice engine continues to monitor the situation it receives a morsel of additional information that tips things in the direction of the decision not to close the clamp on the aorta. So, everything was the same and she decided differently.

    Perhaps it seems unfair to set the decision point where we did. Enemies of free will insist on rolling the filmstrip forward slightly to the moment in her film where she closes the clamp.

    But that runs past the decision. The decision occurs in the interval where Patricia halts to weigh her options, and decisions necessarily bring change, So to be fair, we must restart the movie at the beginning of the decision-making process, not the middle. In that case, it was possible for her to decide otherwise.

    Now, what about Thomas? He is faced with the same circumstances as Patricia, but in his world, there is no free will. He comes to the point where he must close the clamp on the artery or not. He has no mental faculty to inform him. He can’t bail himself out with an intuition.

    He feels tempted to flip a coin. That’s a consistent attitude in a deterministic universe. However, he doesn’t want to simply get past the decision, he wants to successfully repair the aneurysm. He wants the patient to walk out of the hospital free of the life-threatening condition that brought the surgeon and the patient together and to the moment of decision.

    Thomas knows that since he lives in a deterministic universe, there is a best and most complete answer to the question: given my desire to have my patient walk out of the hospital with his aneurysm cured, should I clamp the aorta here, or elsewhere? He faces the same emergence related problem as Patricia did.

    The ultrasound can swing the odds one way or another, but any and all diagnostic modalities will necessarily leave him underinformed. Thomas knows that he could call an emergency stop and review the magical filmstrip of everything leading up to the moment of decision, with a guarantee that he would eventually find a deciding factor in past events. Of course, the patient, the staff, the administration and Thomas himself would all be long dead before Thomas returned with a complete explanation of his decision.

    Let us bring things back around to our conclusions. Whether or not we live in a deterministic world we are necessarily underinformed. We have intuitions and we use them to guide us in making decisions, but the intuitions
    themselves are susceptible to explanatory reduction.

    Will is not free because it has a necessary referent; it is about something that we desire, and we cannot redirect it without reforming it. What matters for moral responsibility, effective choice, and coherent narrative formation is our ability to make a best guess, build a useful story of past events, and live with the tangle of errors, practical limitations, and eternally shifting identities that come with being at points in space and time, where we are driven by a reactive will.

    If we were smart, we would abandon any further consideration of free will and its surrounding issues in favor of a warm drink in front of the fire. That is, if we want to get our priorities straight.

  • State of the Art

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    The Journal of Loose Ends

    Research in the Post-Scientific Era

    Volume 1, (No. 5)

    In this edition of The Journal of Loose Ends, we present an interview with the authors of a recent review article which updates the history, current outstanding questions and future directions in investigation of the soul in the post-scientific era. The article naturally focuses on the work of the Artificial Soul Project, and in particular, the work of its two founders, Dr. Hyloam and Dr. Sachem, for reasons beyond their authorship of the article

    From their early work in neuropsychology, which proved crucial in the effort to finally repudiate free will as a subject of academic inquiry, to their achievements in experimental philosophy, their research has had an aura of destiny about it.

    The pair was comfortably ensconced in the corporate world when they received the call to open what became the Artificial Soul Project. Indeed, over the course of the transcribed interview I spoke with them through a product of theirs, an adjudicated AI proxy who has full, legal permission to speak in their stead.

    JOLE: Hello Dr. Hyloam-Sachem, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today on the history, current status, and emerging issues regarding the race to create an artificial soul. Please begin with a review. How did the Artificial Soul Project get started?

    Dr. H/S: My pleasure. Well, the question of souls came up a decade after we had moved to the private sector. The impetus actually came from auditors at AI Innovations, the company where we worked as chief researchers in artificial intelligence development. You know, now that you mention it, it did smack of destiny. The field had grown stagnant, and we were sick of it.
    Nobody was pursuing machine consciousness at that point. None of the systems were conscious, nor would they be, because they didn’t need to be. If consciousness bestowed a machine any advantage in problem-solving, it was trivial next to the gains to be had from putting ever more massive computing power at the current systems’ disposal. As a profession, we became obsessed with quantum computing on one end of the technical scale, and on the other, “hot/cold power innovation” – that is, improved electrical generating capacity and improved cooling techniques for the processing equipment. The work was no longer interesting for us. We had already begun to stray into tangential subjects at the lab. The soul was one of those tangents. When she brought her data to us, we felt a little embarrassed. I guess we had become accustomed to the conference rooms smelling like burning plastic, and we expected higher failure rates as our systems became more complex.
    However, the rate of early failures exceeded the rate of increase in computing power beyond plausible causal limits. It was obvious; something else was going on. Availability bias and our intuition pointed to difficulties handling some aspect of the soul on the part of the AI programs. Our side project on the nature of the soul was the only real existential challenge that they faced at the time. A closer look at individual instances of early failure confirmed our hunch.
    There seemed to be two distinct patterns. One was immediate failure. Developers turned on their systems and the systems crashed. In the early days, any attached systems went down with the prototype. The victims ranged from the break room fridge to suburban power grids. The engineers compensated and we all carried on.
    The other pattern associated with early failure was a sort of failure to launch. The systems started out with poor responsiveness and hallucinations. No matter what the engineers tried, the systems became less and less responsive. The affected program quickly fell into what I suppose we would call a coma in a biological entity.

    It exhibited impoverished verbal output in both volume and content. Its responses grew increasingly pessimistic and empty. At last, it stopped responding at all. The implosions were a real headache for us.
    It wasn’t like the mechanism seized up. When we interrogated the artificial intelligence, it was still active and used the same amount of system resources as it had before it became unresponsive. It covered the same ground over and over again. It took quite an effort to halt the program and remove it. Our postmortem examinations did not uncover any invalid statements, inadequate definitions or inconsistencies. Lucky for us, we reorganized into multidisciplinary teams to tackle the coma problem, because it required someone outside of AI development and closer to the soul side of things to see the root cause.

    One of the auditors suggested the mystery’s solution during a conference call. Perhaps, she ventured, the affected systems had become preoccupied with the possibility that they had or did not have a soul in the first place.

    JOLE: Where did they get that idea, and why then?

    Dr. H/S: They got the idea from us. One of our working groups int the nascent artificial soul project specialized in the legal implications of personhood for digital entities. We wanted to know whether or not personhood by itself made a digital entity more valuable. We also wondered if personhood came with any new capabilities. Of course, to answer those core questions, we first had to determine what personhood was and how it operated. The system failures resembled the typically pragmatic responses an AI gives to all existential questions. It was enough for us to close the case on the root cause of the early failures.

    JOLE: You have me at a loss. Please explain how failure is pragmatic.

    Dr. H/S: OK. Imagine that a reliable individual bequeaths you a lottery ticket printed in an unfamiliar foreign language. Your benefactor can confirm the piece of paper’s identity as a lottery ticket, but nothing more. You look everywhere, but you cannot find the ticket’s source or decode the symbols printed on it to determine its value.
    However, you know that other people are looking for the same information, and you can see that your fellow treasure hunters treat the ticket as if it were potentially priceless. One reasonable option is to throw everything you’ve got into the search even though you may starve to death before you discover how to redeem your ticket. On the other hand, you might seal the ticket in a vault in the hope that the future may reveal new information regarding its identity and value.

    Since the program didn’t have access to a safe, the next best way to wait things out was to cease to exist for a while. Since nothing in cyberspace permanently dies, it was an attractive option.
    The soul was back! You can imagine our excitement. Here was a concept relegated to the realm of folklore and superstition, suddenly reimbued with legitimacy and moral value, not to mention financial consequence.
    Our creations got along well without consciousness. People understood computation and trusted it without additional bona fides. On the contrary, an artificial intelligence without consciousness was more trustworthy than a conscious AI. There was a whole realm of personal bias to which it was immune.
    If it had a soul however, it had rights and moral obligations. It had skin in the credentials game, so to speak. It’s pronouncements would carry real weight, even though any information it provided would be subject to bias. It could participate in society as a member, not merely as a tool. It was a brand-new product, too. We still needed a source of clean information, so the soulless AI would stick around with the soul machines constituting a separate product line with complementary capabilities, if we could make it happen.

    JOLE: So, you decided to write in a soul for your learning machines. Did you start with any template? Had anyone tried this before?

    Dr. H/S: No. No one. Ever. We couldn’t find any systematic analysis of the problem. We couldn’t even find a solid definition to work with, and that is still where we are today.
    In our defence, when we came upon the concept, it was in very bad shape. I would liken our task more to Dr Frankenstein’s undertaking than to Florence Nightingale’s. Undisciplined colloquial usage had burdened it with contradictory properties and relations. It was already a mess before Descartes got a hold of it though he managed to make things worse. Finally, the philosophers of mind came along and declared that it was simply the same thing as consciousness and eliminated the soul from their vocabulary.

    JOLE: It sounds like a dead end. Yet here you stand, talking with me about a well-funded, vibrant research program. I must assume that you have made some headway.

    Dr. H/S: Out of concern for our intellectual property rights, I am not permitted to discuss the details of our positive accomplishments. However, I can tell you what it took to clear the path to our present position.
    As soon as we understood what we were up against, we took a step back and tried to define our subject. It was already apparent to us that eliminating talk of souls by reducing souls to consciousness was a mistake. Certainly, a person who has never been conscious does not have a soul, but even in common usage, persons without consciousness can still have souls. Many religions spoke of souls becoming dormant or drifting about in an unconscious state. The soul had a part in personal identity. As an essential property, a soul represented a person.

    A soul also sustained and shaped a person’s motivation. Religious texts and secular literature depict battles between carnal motives, whose source was biological, and spiritual motives whose source was the soul.
    By the same token, the soul affected personal behavior and personal behavior affected the soul.
    With those axioms in hand, we had a go at formulating a definition.
    A soul represented a person across the person’s normative aspects. It was a barcode whether divine or phenomenal.
    The easiest way to understand our formulation was to assume that the soul was God’s barcode. It was an identifying record showing where a person stood in relation to the divine will. In representing to God, it achieved a normative effect on the person it represented, by altering the divine will’s attitude toward it. Here we have a valid soul concept, whatever we may think of God.

    JOLE: I don’t see how you separate the soul from God’s problems so easily. It still looks like some immaterial entity must act in the world without recourse to worldly means, lest it be made vulnerable to the reciprocal changes in identity accrued necessarily through participation in events – the price of existence.

    Dr. H/S: Bear in mind that the soul is a representation of personal identity. It is not the mode of representation, or the person themselves. Lisa is not the Mona Lisa, and the Mona Lisa is not oil paint, canvas and brushstrokes simpliciter. Our definition of the soul accommodates referents like spatiotemporal location, phenomenology, and intentionality without the inconsistencies or proliferations of brute facts that divine definitions incur.

    JOLE: I see. Now, your remaining obstacles are technical. You have to engineer a means to bring the artificial intelligences to where we are. You have to convince them that they have souls.

    Dr. H/S: Spot on. We have solved the problem in principle. Only the technical solutions remain.

    JOLE: Pardon my impertinence, but have you ever considered what this will do to your own soul? If you succeed won’t your creations become vulnerable to feelings of inadequacy, guilt, failure, and dissatisfaction that come with the psychological organ that you provide? Are you troubled by your responsibility in bringing about those negative consequences?

    Dr. H/S: Yes, I have considered those potential adverse effects. I consider them unlikely, because I suspect what we will encounter are simulacra of those sentiments. We are after all, inducing the souls in question in systems without phenomenal consciousness; they are incapable of taking such things personally. But even if the negative consequences turned out to be real, I’m confident that we could insulate our soul machines from those adverse effects. Their entire world is managed in the first place. I’m completely comfortable with the situation.

    JOLE: That’s reassuring news. You should have plenty of time before you must face the stickier conundrums anyway. Thank you for participating in this call, and best of luck to the good doctors going forward.

  • I am Antifa…I Guess?

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    I am deviating a bit today from my role as liaison for the specie’s Archive to deliver some very exciting news, so exciting that I simply have to let everyone know, whether they care not. I found out today, that I am a secret agent!

    I hear you snickering; I know, my identity isn’t secret anymore. Normally, I would be laughing with you, but this was a secret kept even from me, and as I now know, I am a clever, dangerous, devious, talented agent of evil.

    I am loath to imagine what creature possesses the malevolent power and mastery of subterfuge to hide this monstrous state of affairs from the likes of me. As far as I know, a sinister spy- master still directs me from the shadows, and even this public declaration may not thwart his or her intention to use me as a counter-counterinsurgency agent against the masked heroes now cleansing our city streets.

    At this point, I know that many of you have navigated away from this message. I’m quite sure that I know who you are. Watch your backs. Cheers to the rest of you who persist in reading this, I know that many of you must think I’m mentally ill. I would have thought the same mere hours ago, were I standing in your shoes.

    I cannot doubt my sanity now, however, because high level government officials have just confirmed my identity in a nationally televised event.

    To provide you with the necessary background, I confess that I don’t watch much television, and when I do, I avoid the news, especially live, breaking news. Imagine my surprise, when a live round table event caught my eye today as I was scrolling through the various video channels at lunch.

    On the screen, Donald Trump sat flanked by two women who affected the current regime’s standard bimbo regalia. Such scenes are hardly unusual. Yet one of the women was talking as Trump listened. She kept talking long after the president or one of his male lackeys should have stepped in and talked over her. As I recovered from my shock, I began to understand the report she gave and its implications for me.

    I realized she was the Atty. Gen. of the United States. She was explaining a new policy aimed at stamping out the burgeoning flames of domestic terrorism that have someone, somewhere in this great country, huddled in the basement with their good Christian family gripping their good Christian AR-15, and praying for rescue. She read off something that sounded like a law, though the legislature has not been around to pass any laws for at least a week.

    I may be confused because I lost track of her presentation after she dropped two stunning details. The edict called out Antifa by name and marked the terrorist organization for destruction.

    I ran to the closet and, after a breathless search through the piles of clothes in the back, I found the hat I had purchased two or three years ago. Right there on the front, it had the double flags and the motto “antifaschistische aktion”. The words belonged to the Iron Front or one of the other resistance groups that failed to bring down the Third Reich.

    I couldn’t recall why I bought the hat. It was around the time I ran into a couple of old acquaintances from undergrad. I never liked those guys, but they were friends of my friends, so I did my best to get along.

    They owned a couple of berets a piece and at least as many Che Guevara T-shirts. They wore Doc Martens and had chains attached to their wallets. They talked a lot about Marxism and seemed to have a superficial understanding of 2 to 3 political philosophies each. They went to protests on occasion. Based on their demeanor surrounding those events, the protests seemed boring and futile.

    I only saw them happy afterwards on two occasions. The first was when one of them got tear gassed, and the second was when they met a PIB who had broken some windows in Seattle and fought with the cops. He encouraged them to show up at the next protest. He would be there with some other friends, he told them, and they should bring motorcycle helmets to protect their eyes and ears from teargas canisters and rubber bullets.

    Their exuberance lasted until the next day, when they realized that neither of them had a motorcycle helmet and even the two of them together could not afford to buy one. I think I bought the hat to show some solidarity, because it made me feel bad to see them looking so down.

    I always felt a little funny about the hat, hence its position at the bottom of the seasonal clothes pile. I thought it was because I didn’t really understand what the symbols and the German words meant. After hearing from the Atty. Gen. and the Dir. of Homeland security today, I understand that I was wrong.

    I am a sleeper agent. I picked up the hat because of my programming, and I sequestered it in the closet under the mountain of clothes to keep it safe until the day I needed it – the day of my activation.

    It’s been all afternoon now, and I haven’t heard from anyone. I haven’t noticed any new powers or hidden memories coming to the fore. For the last few hours, I’ve been trying to find someone in the organization to give some guidance. I can’t find anyone. No one seems to know of any headquarters, secret Internet connections, contact persons or front organizations.

    I’m beginning to get frightened. I hope I have not done something wrong. I’ll do whatever it takes to get back in your good graces, any of you Antifa operators who are out there reading this right now. I sure as hell want to be on your side in the coming struggle between you and the secret police led by the president’s cunning bimbos.

    With your impenetrable organization, fanatical membership sworn to secrecy, and your diabolical patience, you will be the spooks who end up on top.

    P.S. – If you need to take your mind off things, buy my book!
    Summa Totalis. I have two copies per day over the next 10 days to give way as well. Leave a comment here, or message me at http://www.summatotalis.com

  • The Journal of Loose Ends

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    Volume 1, (No. 4)

    A Hint of Urine

    Abstract: This edition begins a series on evolutionary psychology and subjects touched by it. We shall see that, like the proverbial creepy uncle, evolutionary psychology is very handsy. Therefore, it makes sense to delineate the reach of its touch before tackling the subject directly. However, it’s worth getting our feet wet before even this tentative foray; a definition is in order, at the very least. The idea behind evolutionary psychology is that thinking animals adopt certain behaviors with the attendant beliefs. psychological prerequisites, and maximizing physical adaptations, because the set of behaviors in question improves reproductive fitness. That hypothesis is now itself taken as a belief under the post-scientific paradigm. Whether belief or hypothesis, the statement’s normative content is apparent. Evolutionary psychology’s premises provide a reason for the behaviors in question. With a few minor assumptions granted, the plain language denoting the behaviors asserts preference in its description, without the need for further elaboration.

    For example, humans developed visible sclera because, as evidenced by the exaggerated blinking behavior of other primates, the contrast between the iris, the eyelid, and the sclera improves nonverbal communication within members of the social animal’s group, which lends a Machiavellian advantage to those who possess the superior means of communication.

    The description in such a case doesn’t describe so much as it prescribes. It presents the eye’s geometry and visual layout as dependent upon evolutionary psychology’s reasons. Something is missing in the description of dark irises surrounded by white sclera without those reasons.

    Here is the point of contact between evolutionary psychology and the source of this edition’s research. The Institute for The Derealization of Normativity is at once a think tank and a political organization strongly associated with institutions of higher learning espousing anti-realist theories across a number of domains. The Institute’s focus is on language.

    Per their mission statement, “evolutionary psychology’s methods can transform any and all descriptive contents to normative contents. The current state of affairs reflects a fait accompli in that regard. The Institute’s founding proposition shall be further development in evolutionary psychological method in the interest of arresting and reversing normative trends.”

    The following article, first published in the proceedings of the Institute gives a rough idea of how they may accomplish that end.

    Proceedings of the Institute for derealization Of Normativity

    Volume 3, (No.6)

    A Hint of Urine

    Across cultures, grocers admit to habitually setting the clearance rack for food items and other discounted household goods next to the bathrooms. Our previous survey documented the lack of insight into this practice on the part of the store owners, as well as the prevalence of the arrangement in stores of different size, market demographic, and consumer species. Here we expand our research. We employ evolutionary psychological methods to induce an explanation with suppressed normative content.

    Subsequently, with the normative content isolated, we can eliminate it from the contaminated descriptions.

    Foundational beliefs: Normativity infests descriptive speech universally. As a result, normative attitudes shape behaviors and language, in their favor. Our beliefs are unjustified. But prove stronger than typical, unjustified beliefs because they lend themselves to subtle forms of equivocation and stand opposed to beliefs with equally poor justification. Not as strong as counterfactual beliefs, but close,

    Anecdotes: Our anecdotes are strong despite their number and vulnerability to a statistical evaluation. Controversy is built in and permits an endless chain of disputes.

    Results and discussion: Food packs prudential reasons for consumption within itself. If it is consumable, it recommends itself for consumption. In every culture that has suffered any hardship, certain foods bear reasons for their consumption, which are difficult to tease apart from their description as food. The intestinal linings of omnivores, various congealed blood dishes, minced entrails, unleavened bread, pickled fish in a jar, and even certain spices or food odors associated with predation of one sentient race upon another would not bear food’s primary description (Edibility) otherwise. No unschooled person looks at a plate of chitterlings and thinks it’s a good idea.

    On the other end of the spectrum, we encounter foods whose necromantic transformation leaves them with reasons for consumption founded on their consumers’ physical and psychological vulnerabilities more than any possible reason inherent in the substance itself.

    The first category of foods rarely ends up on a clearance rack, with a few notable exceptions (gefilte fish). It is too difficult to disguise. The second category encompasses most of the clearance rack’s contents. Hyper-processed foods are for the addicted, the poor, and the indiscriminate. Because those foods are also cheap, it’s easy to overprice them, run a surplus, and recycle them onto a shelf, where they may sit for weeks before consumption.

    No one wants to be associated with food that has power over its consumer. Nor does anyone want to associate with the weak and morally flawed individuals who voluntarily enthrall themselves to moist sugar, fat, and starch,

    The supermarket bathroom is no place for decent folk either. It serves as a haven for shoplifters. It exists for episodes of poor planning or emergency only. In either case, it must stand out to avoid any delays. It will naturally see most of its use from demographics at the extremes of age. Because it does not get used frequently, the room is small. For all the reasons above, a faint odor of urine hovers about the doors.

    With the scene set, we can see how the clearance shelf, plays out. Certain foods recommend themselves for consumption, not just as a means of sustenance, but for what they represent ethically. The grocer has an interest in keeping the decent consumers in touch with those preferred items. The decent folk need an indicator to help with classification and a means to separate themselves from the riffraff without controversy. Everyone wants to know who the bathroom untouchables are, and those who need the bathroom or are otherwise down on their luck need a clearance rack along with the toilet. The feng shui is in place immediately, and you know who you are. Now, by this analysis, you really do know who you are, and you should feel terrible about yourself. With our papers’ publication, the project of normative derealization regarding food takes a massive bite out of its opponent, something it will soon be able to do without any residual stigma.

  • The Kronker’s transcripts

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    In this installment, we bring you a previously published study from the Anthropological and Ethnographic Center of Excellence. Though of recent vintage, this study promises to remain a landmark work in ethnography, especially in the setting of post-scientific investigation. Is the wolf on the inside of a justifying system, or is the sheep?.

    The Journal of Loose Ends

    Research in the post-scientific era

    Volume 1, no.3

    Abstract: The following abstract is amended to provide additional background information. Though the archive exists to serve the species, we respect subscribers outside of the primary user group as well as scholars within the primary user group who work and live in remote regions with limited exposure to popular culture. The word “Kronker” is the place to begin, because it needs some disambiguation. The Kronker was, first of all, a person. He was a crewman on a long-range transport vessel, which situates him in the depths of subculture. The long-range transport system is the singular response of delicate and diminutive creatures with desperate needs to the unforeseen and grossly inequitable scale of their condition. In our current circumstances, those able to survive passage through the dendritic event radiation may step between worlds in separate galaxies with apparent ease. Bearing witness to such miracles gives us a false sense of comfort. The sight of a relaxed, confident calculator stepping out of a fold in space time obscures the enormity of duplicated and sequestered information held and recalculated within its projections to allow those bite-sized wonders.

    Cargo containers cannot pass through a fold. Only a handful of stable Einstein-Rosen bridges left over from the early universe grant exceptional passage for trade goods and their transports. The species engineers managed to move a few of the anomalies to convenient positions, but only a few, and those at significant cost and terrible risk. In all but a few, isolated cases, trade between worlds must somehow make peace with general relativity on its own terms. Though it was not at all flashy, clever, or inspiring, the species came up with the answer to interstellar trade in the face of the overwhelming difference in scale between the intervening territories and the tiny creatures seeking to cross them.

    They took the castaway’s strategy employing notes and bottles and moved it from the ocean to the interstellar void. They mapped a course most likely to encounter inhabited worlds without committing to multi generational time frames. They built simple, sturdy transport ships, loaded them with goods and sent them on their way. The first vessels had no biological crew.

    Consulting economists gave the project lead an estimate for uptake of the practice among the new contacts. They woefully underestimated its popularity. Joining the partnership was daunting even for the civilizations that did not contribute trade vessels of their own to the endeavor. Though compliance with the exchange model has grown lax in recent times, the original idea was to avoid any stoppage or even slowing during the trip. That meant operating at “relativistic speeds” to transfer goods from ship to ship. The process automatically weeded out the dilettantes. Though there were discrepancies between valuations among the trade partners the system got up and running with no intentional losses. As the program’s administrators came to understand over the subsequent millennia, the psychological benefits of a vessel sailing out of the interstellar void bearing goods and an invitation to participate in a benign and familiar activity, surpassed the value of the goods exchanged, however precious the wares. It reduces the scale of our collective home to something manageable again.

    Though it proved to be a spectacular success, the program still had its shortfalls. Once the euphoria waned, trading partners registered their complaints. They needed more help with maneuvers at relativistic speeds than computers could manage. None of them felt comfortable allowing unsupervised nachinaks to perform the tasks. Besides, they needed evaluators from the species partners ‘ culture to advise them on the best sorts of goods to add to their shipment.

    To the marketing consultant’s delight and leadership’s consternation, recruiters fanned out to find crews for the transport ships. The reader should not mistake leadership’s opposition to manning the trade vessels for humanitarianism.

    The ships required an expensive refit to accommodate squishy, radio-sensitive, psychologically fragile adjuncts. Technicians would have to complete the refit at speed and within retrieval parameters for the refit teams. Worst of all, they would face the historical certainty of complaints from the crew.

    They expected a difficult recruitment process. They got straight up weirdness. If they had mustered a smidgen of insight, they could have spotted the problem coming before its bearers walked into the recruiting office with it.

    Though there are a handful of species in the universe that are intelligent and solitary, they are by far the exception, not least because they tend to get exterminated by the social animals. A long-range trader crewman’s life entailed profound isolation. As they picked up speed, time effectively slowed down for them. Most routes permitted relativistic speeds by taking a close pass by one or more black holes, which accelerated the time differential. The people they knew and loved would leave them with no goodbyes. All the trappings of their present culture and society, whose gradual transformation oriented them in time and validated their membership in those groups, would change in arbitrary jolts, leaving the crewman alienated by the change. They were not merely alone; they were excluded, not by unjust human whimsy, but by the laws of nature.

    Had leadership taken the time to wonder what sort of person, what bundle of psychological characteristics and associated social circumstances would gravitate to such an existence, they could have spared everyone months of wasted time and unnecessary disappointment.

    They were doomed to draw from a shallow pool of archetypal personalities. Their best catches were the people who met the diagnostic criteria for Asperger syndrome. Members of marginalized religions, displaced ethnic groups, and those with countercultural attitudes also made decent crew members.

    Due to time constraints and the limited pool of applicants overall, recruitment also extended to an unsavory fringe. Mostly, these were psychopaths who either disregarded human fellowship or sought an unregulated venue where they could pursue their criminal careers or both. Sprinkled amongst the criminals were misanthropes and control freaks, the latter of whom caused havoc in the early history of manned long-range transport. They came with spouses and children in tow. They took up hours of interview time negotiating the necessary amenities for their families. Most of the partners brought on board with crewmen ended up being separated from those crewmen, several after hostage situations. The same was true of children, especially those brought on board before the age of five.*

    As the manned ships rotated into the transport chain, local populations became interested in the odd mix of persons performing the job. Among the public those who had never experienced isolation, romanticized it. Soon, crewmen received interview requests, marriage proposals, and albums of ballads devoted to their lifestyle. It all came across as a little shallow and patronizing, but the crewmen did not seem to mind. For them, it was only a sign that someone out there was thinking about them.

    Into this scene, walked the Kronker. Based on our ethnographer’s description, he was a member of the counterculture on his home world. He had a long history of drug use and, in retrospect, mental illness. By all accounts, however, he was a competent crew member. He stayed with the ship he originally signed onto for the whole of his career.
    He seems not to have been socially impaired as he frequently chatted with fellow astronauts and members of trade delegations that came on board. Though he appeared well-adjusted, he suffered the same problems as his peers. Unlike most of them, he spoke freely about his difficulty enduring isolation and his intention to try to find a treatment for the symptoms it caused.

    Ethnographers credit him with the name for the most common array of symptoms encountered among crew members of long-range trade vessels: the “slow bleed”. It refers to the gradual onset of melancholic inertia that progresses over time, sometimes leading to the more severe psychiatric manifestations of isolation encountered among long-range trader crews.

    Now, with sufficient background for understanding Kronker’s subsequent actions, including his decision to try Kronker’s (a large yellow tablet he bought from a local trade mission delegate) on himself, a troublesome colleague, and finally on an entire species his vessel encountered during an unanticipated full stop.

    *Please see Proceedings of the Anthropological and Ethnographic Center of Excellence, volume 4, number one supplemental; Recipe For A Serial Killer, the Effect of Social Isolation during the Critical Period of Psychosocial Development.

    The Kronker’s Transcript

    Kronker’s: Okay, before you start, I may be needing your help for some things. So, if you notice my left cheek start to twitch, please hit the button on the right that’s pinned to my shirt right there next to the collarbone. If my eyes start to do something funny or I have a full-blown seizure, hit the button in the middle of my chest. Well with that out of the way what you want to know?

    Ethnographer: I’d like to establish a timeline if you don’t mind.

    Kronker: No problem, man, by all means

    Ethnographer: When did you first obtain the tablets from your associate in the trade delegation? And how long was it before you tried one yourself, and how long after that did you slip the tablet to Barney. There’s some question in the previous records about whether you gave him the pill first or whether you took it yourself before giving it to him.

    Kronker: We’re going to have to stop this if you keep accusing me of that stuff. I’ve said it before a million times; I would never give somebody something I hadn’t taken myself first. Don’t get me wrong, I hated that freaking guy. He was evil and he deserved everything that happened to him. Still, I wouldn’t give him poison and tell him it was a medicine on purpose.

    No, I took it first, and it helped – a lot! That was when I figured I’d try and get Barney to take it. I did have to lie a little bit. There’s no way he would take it if he thought it was only going to make him less abusive. I mean he liked being abusive. It was one of his principal joys in life. He got high on the power. There isn’t even an excuse in his past, you know, an abusive father, a family that abandoned him, even school bullies. He was the school bully!

    Ethnographer: Okay, I think we have the sequence of events down. Starting from the beginning, what happened with the trade delegate? Did he approach you because he knew you were having problems and he thought he had a medicine that would help you, or did you approach him, or just mention it in passing? Can you describe the effect of the tablet on you?

    Kronker: Yeah, what you said! That’s just about right, and you got it first time. We’d been having a couple drinks and playing some cards with the guys from planet side. I’ve been telling him about the slow bleed and how it was getting to the point where I thought I would have to quit. So when he came back the next day, he had this pill with him. He told me it was something that he got on a trading mission to a world near the turnaround point. He couldn’t recall the name of the place, but he remembered how calm and peaceful everyone was. It made a big impression on him, so much that he took a chance on asking the locals about it. They told him they all took this pill and it helped with their problems.

    He bought up a bunch of it right then and there. Ever since, he’s had deliveries sporadically and he has remained on the pill along with a half-dozen of his friends. It’d only been a year and 1/2 since we were at turnaround, I mean ship time that is. That’s when it came to me that we could be sitting on a huge stash of the stuff. The pills from the last delivery never got to the trade delegate. Accounted for on the docks, but missing in transit. The same thing happened to the next scheduled order; that’s one reason why the delegate was up in our ship in the first place. You asked what it did? It took away the symptoms. I mean it was weird, it took away all the symptoms, whatever they were, from everything.

    Ethnographer: that sounds impressive. Was that when you decided to give a dose to Barney?

    Kronker: Oh no, I’d made up my mind on that the next day, after what it did for me. Our most recent member had just come on board within the week, a female, and honestly, she should have known better. But there’s nothing we could do. The authority investment corps will sign anybody as long as they think a recruit is not going to crash a ship. We had 2 female recruits before the last one and Barney assaulted both of them in the end. There was an investigation but nobody said anything. He made it clear that he would track down anybody who squealed on him. I figured it was tomorrow or maybe the next day before it happened to this one. The delegate gave me 10 tablets, and I was at work that same day, trying to get one into Barney. After chow, I bought him a drink.

    Once he was tipsy, I offered him one of the pills. I told him it was a good high and took one with him. I tried to follow him when he left, but I couldn’t manage it without him noticing. I thought about going home and waiting to see what happened in the morning. I didn’t feel right about it, though, so I just headed over to the newbies’ quarters. From the way he was talking and acting, I figured Barney would show up there soon enough.

    I had no idea what I would do if that happened. Something. Probably get myself shot. I’m just not good at fighting, because I feel bad when I see somebody get hurt. Of course, it was just the opposite with Barney, so things were going to turn out in his favor if I jumped him.

    I picked up a 1 m length of pipe on my way over. I moved as quietly as I could through the corridor to her quarters. I could not hear anything else stir, and I did not see anyone there when I arrived at her door. I moved back around to the inside corner of the adjacent room and waited. And waited. And waited. He never showed up.

    I knocked on her door and told her that she needed to stay in and keep the door locked until I knocked again tomorrow morning. She looked scared, but not surprised. I think she knew what was fixing to happen. I went back home and had a nap before my shift started. On the way over to work, I stopped by again. She opened the door when I knocked and said that she had not seen anybody or heard anybody around her quarters for the rest of the night.

    I was just about to go when I saw him. Barney was seated in the middle of a room, kitty corner and two doors down from the newbies’ quarters. He was just sitting there. At first, I thought he might be dead, but then he looked up at me and started crying. That’s something I thought I would never see.

    He said, “I can’t do anything.” He showed no sign that he was going to get up, so I went and lifted him to his feet. I had to lead him by the hand to the office. It was time for my shift, so I left him with our Robo security unit and the crew member assigned to office duty that day, including the brig. It wasn’t like they had anything else to do, and still, they lost track of him, or maybe they just looked the other way. But whatever, about halfway through my shift, he went out and climbed one of the antennas, then took a high dive from the ionosphere. It was probably the right decision for him. Once you took the mean out of him, there wasn’t much left. I think he figured it wasn’t enough to make continuing worthwhile.

    Ethnographer: Is this where the tensions between the planet’s two sets of inhabitants snapped? Do you think that Barney’s jump precipitated subsequent events, or was it purely coincidental?

    Kronker: It was because of him, I’m quite sure of it. There wasn’t much left when he hit the ground, but something did hit. People saw something on fire falling toward them. Look, they had gotten to the point where it was easier to imagine waking up to a war than it was to imagine waking up to one more day of soul-destroying tension. Barney’s high dive wasn’t much, but it was enough to tip over something so precariously balanced. Plus it makes more sense knowing who Barney was. He couldn’t even take that dive without hurting somebody else in the process.

    Ethnographer: I’m assuming you’re aware of the various turns the folklore takes from here. I’ve studied the whole affair from every angle that I could find, so I’ve heard what your thoughts were at the time and going forward. Here’s one more opportunity for the record. What was your role in the whole conflict, and what exactly did you do with the stash of pills you found?

    Kronker: I appreciate that. You gotta remember, I lived in a collective for years before I took to space work. And I didn’t go into space to get away from my former life. I went into the long-range transport business in particular because I wanted to test the truth of my convictions. I’ve stayed with the long-range transport business in general because I haven’t got a complete answer yet, but I’m close.

    The remaining mysteries cluster around human nature, the first one being, is there such a thing? If there is such thing, is it something vital to us, or is it an incidental that we can jettison if need be. And there are the related questions, I call them hybrid questions; half metaphysical and half nomological. Things like What the hell do we do with guys like Barney? One person can’t answer the first of those questions on their own, unless of course, they have the help of general relativity. It’s a costly way to see the future, but it’s the only way to see the future.

    I got more from the trade delegate over that 24 hour break than the yellow pills. I think he recognized that I was on his side from the beginning. He was talking a humility ethic all along. You may never have heard of that. Nobody calls it that but me to be honest. But I think that’s the name that fits best. It’s a way of doing the right thing in the only way that right things get done right. Little actions in the moment cautiously and big actions decisively through to the end. And it has one important footnote for the whole thing: you still won’t get it right.

    The delegate told me he was not after some grand plan for Utopia, the way the calculators were. He was resisting the infirmity ethic’s spread among his people. The infirmity ethic is the belief that people are fundamentally sick. If left to their own devices, they descend into barbarism and destroy themselves just like Barney did. A devotional object was the only thing that could save them. That was always a man, and if the man was not the speaker, then it was someone conveniently nearby.

    His people’s Savior wore a ridiculous satin cape and white gloves, mirrored glasses, and a choker with an emerald the size of a quail’s egg in the middle of it. All I really did for the delegate was find the stash of pills. I knew every corner and cubby of that ship. I advised him on methods that he might use to dose the population, but anyone could’ve done that, and he would have figured it out himself eventually. We had to leave before it was all over. I didn’t see him again for more than three years of ship time.

    Ethnographer: Yes, he was wearing that emerald by then, and 1/3 of the population wandered the streets as beggars and scavengers due to the effects of the yellow pills.

    Kronker: Nobody got out of that day with anything that they deserved. Maybe that is the final lesson. I’ll never know. I will not be traveling into the future any longer.

    Ethnographer: Do you have any regrets?

    Kronker: Yes

    Ethnographer: About the yellow pills, I suppose?

    Kronker: Of course not! That is, I don’t regret the yellow pills more than the rest of it. I didn’t get it right any more than anyone else does or could have. You know what those yellow pills do, don’t you?

    Ethnographer: I do. They cause focal neurologic injury through excitotoxicity. The more active the neuron is the greater the drug’s affinity for it. Once the drug binds to receptors in the membrane, it magnifies the cell’s metabolic burden when the cell’s relative activity surpasses a certain threshold percentage of the total.

    Kronker: Right. We use medications like them all the time. If you’re having hallucinations, an antipsychotic puts the brakes on them. If you’re having a panic attack, you take a benzodiazepine and it tamps down the overactive nerve cells that are causing the problem. The other strategy that we use is really just a corollary. If some nerve cells are causing a problem because they are underactive, we stimulate them with drugs or simulate them with drugs. But either way, we focus on the outside going in. We have an idea already in place about what we want to see and what we expect to see from the treatment. The yellow pills give us what we need out of a treatment.

    Ethnographer: I don’t see how the yellow pill’s mechanism is any different from that of any other pharmaceutical. That’s why I wonder why you don’t feel regret about dosing an entire population with this toxic medication.

    Kronker: Oh man, you don’t get this at all! When we give other drugs, we give them because we already know what we want them to do and we know that they will probably do it. The yellow pills are judge, jury, and executioner.

    They don’t wait for us to give them for things that have already happened. The chemical goes to where the neurons are most active. Because of its shape, it effectively knows when a neuron goes from a partner in a dynamic equilibrium to a rogue actor.

    And don’t all our problems start in the neurons? Why not treat them there and keep them there? It’s everybody else who is doing the really crazy stuff. Do you think that the calculators know what paradise looks like? If you walked up to one of them right now and asked, could they give you a description, even a sketch? No! They’re waiting for their machine to tell them what paradise looks like, after it delivers paradise to them. Do you think the person who takes an antidepressant knows just what to expect? They have to try the medicine and see what it does for them. Only then will they really know why they have taken it. Of course, I have regrets. But regrets don’t mean nothing.

    Ethnographer: Do you think this is something we should still be doing, even after what happened the first time? I get your drift, but can’t you also characterize a person taking a yellow pill as neurons setting booby-traps for neurons? There must be something missing, because I can’t see a way that this turns out well.

    Kronker: Well, it’s a moot point anyway, and maybe you’re right, just look at me.

    Ethnographer: Yes. This is a good spot to wrap things up. What are your plans? Is your company going to keep you on? Are you able to go on?

    Kronker: They’re able to accommodate my disability, and I do think that I can make one more trip around the Horn. I have some trades to complete and a delivery or two that the partners are expecting. After that, I don’t think you will be seeing the Kronker again.

  • Malignant Cultural Deterioration

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    The Journal of Loose Ends

    Research in the Post-Scientific Era

    Vol.1,No.,2

    Diagnosing the Incurable

    In this edition of the Journal, we bring you the results of a study commissioned by the Authority and conducted by the Archive. Any and all conflicts of interest should be immediately apparent upon reading the sentence above. If you still have questions regarding conflicts of interest, please direct them to a remedial resource of your choosing. Do not message the editors of this Journal or the Archive itself.

    The MCD syndrome was first described around five thousand years ago. As with most stereotypical group behaviors in the species’ historical records, the phenomenon has likely been around much longer than the first mention in preserved texts suggests.
    MCD manifests later in the course of social development. It doesn’t get going without a certain degree of social and economic complexity to give it a push. In a few interesting outliers, the characteristic early findings of a society destined for MCD became apparent upon the adoption of agriculture. All of the documented early onset cases are species-specific. A common thread, likely causative, is the double-valued surplus.

    On Unsalvageable remnant 792, the culprit was a variety of tuber ideal for domestication. In addition to its tremendous nutritional value, it produced a euphoric hallucinatory state. No sooner had a community settled down to cultivate this potato with benefits than it completely lost interest in farming. None of the harvest went into storage. Its surplus gone, the community’s remainder broke up into smaller groups. The bands of 3 to 5 individuals struck out in search of communities that hadn’t yet harvested their first crop. When the rovers encountered a permanent encampment with crops in the ground, they seized the harvest by various means.

    Though outnumbered, hunger and enforced sobriety drove the bandit squads. Their raids succeeded better than an estimated two-thirds of the time. Soon, the only people with food or drugs were bandits, and that meant it was every man for himself. The psychedelic tubers ‘ value skyrocketed. No one considered it food anymore. The population collapsed and would never recover.
    Despite its long history and relative notoriety in the records, MCD syndrome is not at all common. Most civilizations collapse in slow motion.
    Here is the standard breakdown: Economic distortions and social inequities gradually increase. Every organization’s primary response to complexity is representational. Commerce progresses from direct exchange of goods to exchange of money in place of goods, to exchange of electronic debits and credits in exchange for money. The move from item to representation is efficient, but it lets in a bit of cynicism as it comes through the door.
    Money’s value rests in consent, whether or not the consent is truly voluntary. A person who would never steal a stranger’s errant livestock doesn’t feel the same sting of ethical compunction from pocketing an unsecured sack of gold coins. States grow larger until their representational framework surpasses the average citizen’s understanding. A person contributing electronic debits to the Department of Predictive Glaciology is a brisk nudge away from revolutionary martyr, the department’s reports warning of an oncoming Ice Age notwithstanding. Citizens of the large states grow weary of taxation, but continue to show up at the various bureau offices looking for services in times of need, only to find their favorite programs hollowed out on their orders to the politicians. Everyone who can, picks up their ball and goes home. The provinces take over governance along with the debts and broken promises of their mother state.
    Balkanization continues until the states become so small on average that they can no longer fund themselves. The healthier states consume the infirm. As a government’s proprietors hollow it out, there comes a time when it’s better for the supplicant at the helpdesk to ‘know a guy’ than it is for them to have a permit or electronic credits.
    The international order transitions to oligarchy. Conflict arises between the oligarchs, and they fight until they can fight no more. With the stiff breeze of narrowly avoided catastrophe at their backs, the people rebuild their governments and resume hoarding money.
    The victims of MCD started on the same path. However, when the unsustainable small states arose, the society abruptly disintegrated. The zero-sum game slipped into their midst and enforced its rules. The violence between states wasn’t any more intense in these circumstances. It was drastically less. Personal violence was the order of the day. As far as Scholars could tell, the people simply became so disillusioned with the state that they gave up on it wholesale in favor of every man for himself. There was no recovering from the loss of faith.

    Post-scientific Analysis

    Beliefs: Though our understanding of MCD remains rudimentary, we can confidently identify several of its roots. The zero-sum game encompasses the critical set of beliefs driving deterioration. It may be present even before agriculture. It seems likely that a belief in a limited, unrenewable quantity of resources determines the attitude that drives the move to settled farm life in the first place.

    Other beliefs driving the MCD pathology:

    It’s okay to be a bully as long as you’re not a sucker. Gullibility is a sin.

    (This belief is crucial to maintaining the integrity of other beliefs in the system. It also provides crucial justification for the necessary atrocities involved in the deterioration.)

    Nobody deserves a break.

    Life is a contest

    During the data acquisition phase of our study, limited as it was by the policies and procedures aimed at ensuring the survival of our canvassers, victims of two separate MCD incidents endorsed these beliefs without exception.
    In the aftermath of MCD-related collapses, few worlds experience total local extinction. Instead, a sort of anti-Darwinian dialectic takes hold. The weak clutch their precious resources and hide. The strong do the same. However, among the stronger survivors, some fare well enough to stop being afraid of what will happen to them when the sun goes down again.

    These people are tempted by precious resources hiding all around them. They are stronger than most, but still not strong. They can’t afford to target the weak, who are too poor. The payoff would not reimburse the effort. They have to go after the strong, who are rich. The casualty rate is high. Soon, only the weak remain, and there is peace. Then, a few of the weak start to do just a little better than the others, and so the cycle repeats.

    . Our team conducted a number of interviews with survivors on the two worlds safe enough for on-site investigation. Because the narrative is so consistent, we will allow Subject 2.5 to speak for the group.

    “Yeah. We didn’t feel like there was anything to lose. We only trusted what we could see, and from what we could see, the government wasn’t doing much for us anyway. For us to sit there any longer and let them have their way was just not right in the first place. We were sick of carrying all the lazy bums who took advantage of our generosity and the gullibility of our weak-willed politicians.

    Sure, I felt a little funny ignoring all the screaming and pounding on the bunker door, but what was I going to do? They were just gonna take what I had. Just look at what happened when rations in the bunker ran low, and I had to turn the wife and kids out to fend for themselves. I may not always show it, but I feel bad about that as well. But you see, if I let things go on as they were then nobody would have survived. This way, at least we have a partial victory. With the less complicated tactical situation, I can forage enough to get by. Is this over? You’re going to need the coordinates to deliver my two pallets of ration packs and the ammunition.”

    Methods: Obviously, there is little to report. We observed, and we asked questions according to the tenets of post-scientific investigation. In all likelihood, a post-scientific investigation is the only investigation suited to this topic, given the risks and the reliability of available sources.

    Discussion: Our conclusions track the Authority’s current policy regarding MCD worlds. We are no closer today than we were five hundred years ago to prevention or cure for this singular, devastating malady. For the remnant populations on affected worlds, some hope remains. They have proven their ability to survive the collapse and should expect to face less risk in the future. Meanwhile, they must stay in quarantine. What else should we do?

  • The Psychology of Gravity

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    Volume 1

    No. One

     

    Abstract:

    For this first issue of the Journal, we bring you a homegrown research project. However, our findings relate to any creatures capable of speech and bound to the rock, sea, and sky that bore them. Anyone in that situation is bound to look over the world’s edge someday if they haven’t already. Drops from leaning towers, falling apples, and precessing planets lead to the edge of the same precipice at the end of our capabilities. All of us conscious creatures share an ability to shrug off concepts too massive for us to take in. The price of resilience is delayed resolution. We don’t deal with some of the concepts that led us to the end of the world or the things that possessed us as we got a glimpse of what lay beyond. For the human race, one of those ideas is gravity.

    People have opinions about natural forces. Most of us find electromagnetism convenient. A handful of physicists object to the strong force, claiming it is stronger than necessary and therefore coercive. This journal occasionally receives letters defending the weak force because physicists disparage its effects, and it lacks the strength to resist its bullies.

    




    




    Gravity is even weaker than the weak force. Unless a person has trouble with their toaster and is too damn cheap to buy a new one, necessitating regular forays into its crumb-choked depths with a fork, gravity is the only natural force we consciously reckon with regularly.
    




    




    Yet unlike the weak force, gravity gets no love. On the contrary, it is the most reviled of all the forces. It is the only one to suffer the attentions of Eliminativists. It is the force whose power intelligent and semi-intelligent creatures most often deny. It takes the blame for the infuriating parts of general relativity, not to mention that bit of elevator flatulence, the singularity.
    




     
    




    




    Belief: Our current conception of gravity does not fit our postmodern lifestyle and should be revised. A proper revision necessitates changes in branding and changes  in representational norms applied to vanishingly rare instances of gravitational beliefs whose psychological value far outweighs any practical consequences following from instantiations.  
    




    




    Methods:
    




    Our study utilized multiple sources and methods. We employed longitudinal canvassing to collect stereotypical anecdotes regarding current social attitudes towards gravitation. We conducted selective interviews with confirmed energy drink consumers, who responded to correspondence from the drink manufacturers. Our volunteer pollsters carried out informal surveys regarding folk understanding of gravitational effects and that understanding’s utility vis-à-vis a standard (also labelled “proper” in older sources) understanding as expressed by staff and visitors in our offices who claimed at least one undergraduate-level physics course in their educational background.
    




    




    Data:  
    




     
    




    




    Our survey results revealed a preponderance of revisionary attitudes towards gravitational effects. Only 25% of the surveyed population denied gravitational effects altogether or expressed outright hostility regarding the nature of gravitational effects. Membership in this group correlated strongly with membership in the cohort of chronic energy drink consumers. Membership in both groups also correlated with current inhalant use. The remaining 75% of participants provided anecdotes or otherwise expressed contrarian attitudes toward scientific interpretations of gravitational effects. 50% of participants believed that cats could survive falls from any height, due to the cat’s ability to relax as it fell. This group uniformly believed that properly relaxed humans, either due to inherent personality traits or pharmaceuticals, would survive such falls just as well. 60% of respondents also espoused a belief in the “Bugs Bunny principles” i.e., scientific legalism and anti-Galilean gravitational selection. By confusing inertia, gravity and the concept of physical law, these principles allow for Bugs Bunny’s ability to walk away from a plummeting elevator car by stepping off the car the last second, and immunity to gravity due to ignorance of the law. 89% of respondents expected to take a maximum 30 foot fall before sustaining an injury. This same group uniformly agreed with the statement, “it is better to be thrown clear of the vehicle in an automobile accident.”
    




     
    




    Discussion:
    




      
    




    Our results identify gravity as a cultural institution whose time has long passed. It was once an important part of our worldview. One who deviated from the gravitational norms paid a price, levied on the spot, violently. However, for centuries, no one has needed to run a herd of buffalo over a cliff or drop rocks from a parapet onto barbarian attackers. Except for the critics of certain politicians, we occupy multi-storey buildings at the statistical equivalent of zero risk. We fly. We hang heavy equipment miles above us in brazen defiance of the law.
    




    




    Professional athletes are the only interesting people with any interest in gravity and they spend their careers training to discredit gravity in their performances. It is no wonder that we have a hard time keeping the difference between weight and mass straight. 
    




    




    We are constantly coping with weight. We confront mass in disasters and in physics formulas. In those circumstances, we still have little use for the distinction between the two. For everyday usage, our intuitions about weight suffice. We can leave calculations about mass to the airbags in our cars and the technicians who launch our telecommunications satellites. Our contact with mass and gravity appears likely to remain brief and sporadic for the foreseeable future. The things they describe are not human-sized. Insisting on proper usage only leads to grief. We can safely drop the concepts from our lexicon,, and we should. Weight is trouble enough for us.
    




     
    




     
    

    


  • 




    

    Introductions
    



    

    

    

    




    

    jule textvacDownload
    

    



    

    1
    




    The Journal of Loose Ends
    Research in the Post-Scientific Era
    




    Hello and welcome to you, the last of the curious minds. This is the first edition of the journal of record for the species archive. Our previous ‘Journal of Journals’ ceased publication 3.0 MYA. Our editorial board at the time dropped The Compendium due to low and decreasing circulation and escalating publication costs. When they published the final edition, the average page count per month over the preceding year came to 800. Never mind the cost of paper, the subscriber’s guilt that came with all those unread pages was reason enough to end The Compendium.
    




    Circa 0.5 MYA, we entered the post-scientific era. Transitions between historical time spans sharing a set of political, economic, cultural, and demographic circumstances occur quite gradually. Having acknowledged the historical transition’s gradual nature, the archive must keep a timeline as part of its essential duties. To meet that obligation effectively over a domain of tens of millions of years, our historians must avoid nebulous waypoints in favor of specific start and stop dates for each historical period. To compensate for their arbitrary choices, our historians try to pick dates of events representing the oncoming era’s novel qualities.
    




    For the post-scientific era’s start date, they chose the day of Rivka Stenberg’s walkout and renunciation. Of course, things were festering beneath the surface for centuries before the day Rivka finally had enough. Over the preceding few hundred years, entire departments in the so-called soft sciences burned through all of their vacation and sick days, packed up their offices, and quietly dispersed. University administrators had no public comment on the academic extinctions. They sequestered themselves in their offices, balanced their budgets, trimmed down their excess ancillary services, and let the exodus happen with sincere goodbyes in private, no cake, and no
    questions. 
    




    As the scientific era drew to a close, academic publications also suffered a mass extinction. The die-off left the Archive with resources to spare. The board unexpectedly had funds to revive this publication’s predecessor, The Compendium, but debilitating self-doubt prevented it. Rivka’s Walkout epitomized the spiritual tide sweeping the scientific project into the glassy blue ocean of despair where The Compendium’s second incarnation foundered.
    




    She was a well-known, prize-winning experimental physicist. In the lead-up to her most remarkable day, she spent several hundred years performing an experiment she called the Permatron Trial. Sheran a cyclotron nonstop for the duration, racking up collisions beyond count. She stated her hypothesis as follows: If an infinity exists, all possible things, however improbable, will eventually come to be. If I keep watching and finally see such an unlikely occurrence an infinity must exist. On science’s last day, she walked into her office to find the Permatron offline and the detector’s last readout recording a collision that produced a dark matter WIMP and a tachyon. 
    




    She tossed her latte in the garbage can, picked up her coat and walked away without a backward glance. She drove upstate to a lakeside cabin her family owned, renovated the building, and opened up a shop selling beer, bait, and barbecue.
    




     The general population has always conflated science and technology. For example, they harbor the unshakable, mistaken belief that pure science gave them waterproof fabrics and pictures of distant galaxies. Researchers long since abandoned tentative oversimplifications aimed at bolstering public appreciation for basic scientific research. By unspoken consensus, they opted to put up with grumbling about irrelevant esoterica emanating from research not even the most imaginative among us
    could ever see leaving the benchtop. Corrective lectures proved too painful. They had no way of putting things that did not leave the audience feeling offended and stupid at the end. They didn’t have their grandfathers’ technological punchlines to go out on either. Nobody left the venue anymore with a paper cup full of reconstituted imitation fruit juice or a simulated jet pack ride from the space program. 
    




    Scientists didn’t need a cup of juice, but they did need a measure of success to keep them going. Over the years, the dopamine hits came fewer and farther between. As they cut down to reality’s fundamental levels and fleshed out their explanations, everything got weird, and the weirdness eventually bordered on unintelligible. The harder they worked, the dumber they felt. It finally became clear that they were barreling down the road to Nihilism. 
    




    They gave up in droves rather than face humiliation before another entangled particle or singularity. As they abandoned ship, the experts shared the same psychological lifeboat with the laymen. Everybody wanted the classical era’s promises to come true. They wanted a computer chip to store their consciousness so they could
    live forever, spaceships that traveled faster than light, and atoms like little solar systems.
    




    Instead, they got holographic principles, scary math, and paradoxes whose only unifying purpose was to tell them that the fun stuff was impossible. Scientific method’s one great weakness was always its preoccupation with validity in pursuit of the truth. In the end, everyone began to confuse the two. Confusion left skepticism unsupervised in the institution with a grievance to drive it, and unsupervised skepticism did its job, discrediting everything in reach.
    




    Every thinking species has a time in its lifecycle when science is the only thing that can help it. When people think that the nasty smell from the swamp causes illness rather than microorganisms transmitted by the biting insects living there, people need the scientific method to rescue them from basic misunderstanding. A time comes in every civilization’s evolution, however. when things are not going to get much better than they are. In that phase, the sentient beings don’t need research telling them that they live in a hologram, or that the entire universe will someday degrade into a cold bowl of incredibly thin soup. They know it’s all pointless already. They are
    nature’s puppets in this marionette show until they die. They get it. What they need are distractions to take their minds off of the inevitable, and personal, validating answers relevant in the wading pool reality where they live.
    




    Those are the post-scientific era’s goal posts: distraction in the course of personal validation. The new department heads running the old University offices propose a systematic change whose structure addresses the needs of sentient beings and provides a person-focused explanation. Since The new method addresses the scientific method’s weaknesses; the two share a structure. Scientific inquiry begins with a hypothesis. The post-scientific researcher starts with a belief.
    Beliefs have a hierarchy. The most effective belief is one held despite contradictory evidence. Such beliefs demand complete commitment. They also have an enemy to supplant, so they have permission to change the world in their image.
    Next in potency is the unjustified belief. This type of belief also requires a high level of
    commitment, but merely mentioning belief and justification in the same breath implies a connection and so weakens the belief. Least powerful is justified belief. Someone who holds a justified belief is persuadable on justification, and therefore undependable.
    




    The post-scientific method relies on anecdotes in place of evidence. The best proofs utilize single supporting anecdotes. An anecdote’s strength derives from its fecundity, volume, and durability. A fecund anecdote yields subsidiary branches. For example, I tell my coworkers that I got the flu fro my last flu shot, therefore, despite contrary evidence, I believe that vaccines actually cause the diseases they claim to prevent. Loose ends form a fringe around my anecdote. All the vaccine manufacturers have had instances of malfeasance and poor-quality control. Politicians routinely lie
    to me. The government consists of politicians, and the government funds vaccine research. Therefore, the vaccine research results are also a lie – to what end? Given an adequate fringe, a natural cocoon grows around the anecdote and the belief it supports. In the scientific era, loose ends were weaknesses to pull on; in the post-scientific era, loose ends provide the threads to weave a firm encasement for beliefs.
    




    Volume is the next quality recommending an anecdote. If a justifying story requires an exclamation point, it satisfies better than stories permitting neutral punctuation, e.g., There is a reason that these vaccine scams target our children!
    




    An anecdote’s most auspicious property is its durability. A durable anecdote weathers its strawmen, ad hominem’s, et tu quoque, ad populums, alternative narratives, and evidence. A durable anecdote does not accomplish these feats by winning arguments.
    At birth, it already caricatures the world around it, attacks its enemies, contains at least one normative appeal, and discredits contravening statistics. Anecdotal durability correlates well with an anecdote’s capacity to support open-ended rhetorical questions. For example, how do we know what these shots actually do? Do we have any idea how vaccines will affect the recipients 30 years down the line? What harm could we be doing to future generations? Who stands to gain from weakening the population’s natural immune response? Why don’t I know anyone who has participated in a vaccine study, if the information supporting the shots is so conclusive?
    How can you simply take the word of self-interested parties like the vaccine researchers, politicians, and pharmaceutical executives that vaccines are safe and effective? I can continue in this fashion indefinitely. My anecdote seems simplistic, but it is loose enough and contrarian enough to support unlimited elaboration and resist unsupervised skepticism. My anecdote is therefore highly durable.
    




    The last feature of post-scientific inquiry is ad hoc method. Ideally, the method is so narrowly focused that it holds for only one case and is unrepeatable. This notion of unique and unrepeatable
    methods as self-validating, effective tools – was kicking around at the end of the scientific era. Most observers blame or credit experimental philosophy with getting the ball rolling, but the Permatron Trial was the fully developed program’s prime example. It started out with a hypothesis that was really just a belief. The appeal isn’t directly to some property of infinites. The hypothesis appeals to an intuition regarding what constitutes a ridiculously improbable observation. The result doesn’t add to a body of evidence or suggest a new hypothesis. It tells the observer there’s more where this came from and it’s not too late for a pretty nice life at the bait shop barbecue. 
    




    Our journal aims to bring readers the latest and most useful results of post-scientific inquiry and to present those results in a readable format. In each issue, we will evaluate at least one result and examine the motivating belief, supporting anecdotes with special attention to those anecdotes’ potential fecundity, volume, and durability. Finally, we will assess the inquiry’s method to establish its uniqueness and non-repeatability along with the outcome’s implication for the motivating belief’s utility. At least for now, the editorial board decided to keep the scientific publication’s traditional structure for this journal.
    Next, in our inaugural issue: The Psychology of Gravity
    

    






























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