Probably Not

[To begin to circle around the Stochastacism topic again]

The first science fiction and fantasy convention I ever went to was something called CreationCon. There is now a regular comic convention by that name, but the CreationCon I went to with Ben, Johnny, and the Albany gang had nothing to do with comics. God knows, it had everything else in it though.

Someone had the idea that there was a crying need for a convention bringing together science fiction, fantasy, new age ideas, and the occult. I mean, it sounds like it might work; it just turned out that fantasy writers like L. Sprague deCamp and Lin Carter considered “the occult” to be pseudo-scientific rubbish.

But it was fun. I met David Gerrold for the first time, just after When Harlie Was One came out, and a small group of us had lunch with him. I’ve met David maybe five or six times now, and every time it’s as if we’ve never met before, which is kinda cool, actually.

I also started my Freak File at that convention. That’s my collection of fringe material. Years later, Larry Jannifer and I spent an evening comparing notes on the subject. He called his the “Nut Shelf” so you can see where this is going. I also once loaned my collection to Jim Turner of Ducks Breath Mystery Theater, after seeing his one man show “The Brain that Wouldn’t Go Away.”

I think my real prize from CreationCon was Norman Bloom. Bloom was handing out copies of his self-published ‘zines, really well produced things, photo-offset on news stock, with sturdy staples, the works. Bloom thought he was Jesus, or, more accurately “The Second Coming of Christ.” As nearly as I could tell, he was serious, and harmless. His booklets were filled with proofs of the existence of God, all of which boiled down to the proof of improbability. You see this a lot in Creationist circles, “The odds of life forming are similar to having a 747 appear after a tornado in a junkyard.” Bloom, god bless him, stripped the whole thing down to basic fundamentals. He’d open up the phone book, look at a phone number, and calculate the odds of that particular number appearing. For a seven digit number, assuming all the numbers are random (which they aren’t of course, but I’m not going to stop a crazy man on a roll), you’re talking 100 million to 1. And there are hundreds of thousands of numbers! Good lord, the improbability of it!

If you didn’t like that one, the one about how unlikely it is to have the Moon be just the right size and distance to just barely, yet completely, eclipse the Sun, well, tornado in a junk yard, here we are.

Bloom was, I believe, an engineer, so he had just enough statistical knowledge to get him into trouble. Nevertheless, the problem that he fastened onto is a real problem. It’s known in philosophy as the Plenitude Principle, the notion that if the universe if big enough (infinite sounds about right), then everything that is possible must occur. Or alternately, why do some things happen when other, seemingly just as likely, things don’t?

Regular probability theory finesses the problem nicely: the probability of any event that has happened is 1. Baysean statistics allow a bit of a scew from that: you can’t always be sure that something has happened, so the probabilities then become a measure of your own ignorance.

The Wikipedia article on the Plenitude Principle goes all the way back to Aristotle, though it misses Nietzsche’s take on it: eternal recurrence. Old Friedrich decided that if everything happened once, it would happen over and over again; infinity is big enough, after all. Hard to argue with that, though it’s pretty easy to ignore or dismiss.

A lot of people have taken the entire “many worlds” idea a step beyond, to the notion that everything that you can imagine happening happens somewhere. The real problem with that line of thinking is that it’s possible to imagine things that can’t actually happen, like flying horses and FTL spaceships. Then there is the extended problem of people who think that they are imagining something when what they are really doing is imagining that they are imagining something. That, it turns out, is pretty easy. Just ask Norman Bloom.

Metafun

Just a little blogging about the blog here. We just recently had our first 1000 visitor day, of which roughly 900 of them were folks glancing at the Mapplethorpe essay. I'm guessing that either Mapplethorpe or Lisa Lyon appears as subject matter in some art course somewhere, and we get a flash crowd whenever it shows up during the school year. None of them ever seem to click on the Google ad, though, so there's no money in it for me, yet. Dang, don't they understand that the Google ad will find them a better school, or something?

We also have another minor infestation of Randites in the Coda thread. I find the entire matter more than a bit interesting. In some circles, they're called "Randroids," which is clever, but implies a sort of robotic affect (the philosophical equivalent of Asperger's Syndrome, perhaps) that is diametrically opposed to the in-your-face nothing-but-personal-attack-and-insults style that we've all come to recognize. Also, most of the Rand traffic here should be for the John-Galt-is-a-Slan essay, since I did a little shilling for it recently. Yet they gravitate towards the Rand Contra Ayn Rand Institute essay and invariably miss the point (despite it being right there in the title) that I'm saying Rand would disagree with the Ayn Rand Institute, and that the Ayn Rand Institute is actually preaching collectivist guilt and nationalistic retalliation (in advocating deliberate, preemptory attacks on civilian populations). One might almost think that Randites believe in magic words or something.

There also used to be actual Randites, as I recall, people who at least took some effort to try to present arguments and logical constructions. This current crew doesn't even seem to know how to read, which makes the whole "This was the most important book I ever read" thing a bit problematic. Did they have it read to them, like my second grade teacher read us The Wizard of Oz? Which contains some fine philosophical speculation, incidentally.

I've also just posted what I think is the best chapter in Blood Relations over on the Serial Novel Sister to this blog. And that reminds me that I was in the middle of some more sophisticated philosophical speculations on Stochasticism and Parallel Universes, but I seem to have gotten…Oh, look! A Woman with a Snake!

The Atheist in Church

From Dark Underbelly/Blood Relations

"That sounds like a case of 'atheist in church,'" Lewis said when I was finished.

"Atheist in church?" I asked. "More wise sayings from the Founder?" Lewis was not above quoting from the writings of the Founder of Stochasticism, who is never referred to by name, mainly because he gave so many names, all of them false. Quite a Trickster was the Founder.

"The very same," Lewis said. "The Founder had a lot of things to say about religion and what place it has in society. 'The Atheist in Church' is one of his best essays. He says, look, there are a whole slew of reasons for having churches. They're a form of social organization, you meet people, get moral instruction helpful for living in society. They can be a store of wealth, a means of education, all that stuff. So even an atheist might wish to join a church, regardless of what his opinion of the theology might be.

"But an atheist makes the theists nervous. He can abide by all the same rules, profess the same moral code, and still the regular churchmen don't like his presence. He's not committed to the group, you see. He doesn't say the password. A secret password can't be something that you can figure out by just being reasonable, it has to be something arbitrary. So religions make their believers do things that just don't make sense. That's what really defines the group, the things they do that don't make sense."

"So what does that have to do with me?" I asked him.

"It's a matter of freedom," he said. "We like to think that freedom is a good thing, but joining society means giving up some freedoms. And society doesn't want it to be a conditional thing. It's not supposed to be a matter of choice. We much prefer to have people who can't rather than won't transgress. Which is the better husband, the man who couldn't beat his wife no matter how he feels, or the man who simply refrains?"

I opened my eyes to see how closely he was watching me when he said that. But he was staring out a view panel at the clouds. "I thought that the whole point of it was moral choices," I said. "You talk as if not having a choice is better."

"'Lead us not into temptation,'" he quoted. "Because we might succumb." He looked over at me and grinned. In my current exhausted state it looked a little like a grimace.

"There are a lot of things in life that we don't know about until they happen to us. It's a lot of potential rather than actual freedom. And the potential may be bogus. We might not be able to do it when push comes to shove. That's part of what dice living is about. To test the limits. But if you do it from the dice, the gods might not get so angry at the freedom. That's a clear thread in most mythology. The gods get very angry when confronted by a free man."

"So do you think that it's just the gods being angry with me?" I asked. I smiled again to show that I thought it was a joke.

His face got a bit more serious though. "That's all metaphor," he said. "'A man's reach must exceed his grasp, else what's a meta for?' The gods are stand-ins for human fate in human society. Stick your head up too far and the body politic will try to shear it off. You make people nervous, pardner. They don't know what motivates you. They don't know what you're capable of, but they're pretty sure you're capable of more than they want to know. If there's the choice of having dinner with someone who hated me and wished me dead -- but couldn't do me harm no matter what -- versus someone who liked me, but could kill me without a thought if he so chose, well, most people would go for the first guy, not the second."

I sat up and looked at him carefully, but he was back to watching the cloud patterns. I looked out at them, but I knew that he saw things in them that I'd never see. And vice versa.

"What about you?" I asked. "You said 'most people,' but you don't say about yourself."

He looked at me and grinned. "Oh, I'd probably go with the first guy also; at least I'd load the dice that way." He paused for a moment. That's the secret of the punchline: timing.

"Present company excepted, of course," he said.

Tumbling Dice

As I have said before, the late 60s actually took place in the early 1970s, and it was an interesting time, with a lot of ideas in the wind. One of the ideas in the wind was probabilistic decision making.

I suspect that the I Ching had something to do with it. All those college kids taking a hit off the bong, tossing the coins, then reading poorly translated Confucian texts in an attempt at fortune telling. It sounds very hippy dippy woo woo, but some of us knurds looked at it and said, "Aha! A probabilistic response to a non-full knowledge game." Then we'd take another bong hit.

Then you had Dungeons and Dragons, with all those weird polygonal dice. Given the degree of emotional investment in D&D characters, it was probably inevitable that someone would try something similar in real life.

D&D came out in 1974, but The Dice Man, by George Cockcroft (writing as "Luke Rhinehart," the ostensible protagonist of the novel) was published in 1971. The story is of a psychiatrist who, suffering from boredom and midlife crisis, decides to start making decisions based on the random toss of dice. Then, as zest, he begins adding some "forbidden" possibilities, including raping the wife of his next door neighbor. This being the sort of fantasy that it is, the dice pop up with that order, he complies, and she enjoys it (I know, I know).

He introduces his patients to "dice therapy" and things get out of hand in the sort of way that novels described as "funny, bawdy, [and] outrageous," get out of hand. A cult forms around him. The government gets involved. All very counter-culture in its way.

So, was it D&D or The Dice Man that was responsible for the following scene at a science fiction convention in the mid-1970s? Elevator stops, doors open. Outside is a woman looking into the elevator. She shakes her hands together, looks at the dice, then looks back at the elevator and waves goodbye.

Anyway, plays have been written, songs sung, lifestyles devised and documented. It struck a chord. I saw no reason not to use it as part of the basis for a religion several centuries from now. It's not as if randomness is going to go away.

Chaos

Edward Norton Lorenz died on April 16, 2008. Lorenz has been called "The father of Chaos Theory," and it was he who delivered the paper, "Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas" at a AAAS Conference thereby creating the conditions for the phrase "The Butterfly Effect." It helped that a graphing of the "Lorenz Attractor" looked sufficiently like a butterfly.

I myself used Lorenz's butterfly image when describing a storm in SunSmoke, not realizing that I was just ahead of an avalanche of such usages. It wasn't a cliché when I used it in 1983, honest.

It's also been noted that Ray Bradbury used a crushed butterfly to set off all the change-the-past stuff in "The Sound of Thunder." From a scientific point of view, Bradbury was far too conservative. He had meddling in the Jurassic merely change human history; it could have erased human history entirely.

People have as much trouble with chaos theory as they do with quantum mechanics and parallel worlds. There is a tendency to underestimate the effects, to bring them down to human scale, for example. But the point is that small changes in initial conditions can have, under certain circumstance, large changes in outcome. It's also important to understand that this isn't always the case. Not all systems are chaotic.

Suppose you have a very round ball bearing and a very smooth surface. Drop the bearing straight down onto the surface and you can be pretty sure that once it stops bouncing, it is going to be very close to where it first hit the surface. If there is a depression in the surface, you can be even more certain. The bearing is going to wind up at the bottom of the depression.

Now put another ball bearing down below the first, and drop the one onto the top of the other, as best you can. Where will it wind up?

You can be pretty sure that you aren't going to get two ball bearings stacked onto each other. Past that, well, it's anybody's guess, and guess is the operative word. Conservation of momentum says that the two bearings will ultimately be on opposite sides of your starting point, but they could be very far apart if there isn't much friction in the system. The smallest offset between the centers of the two ball bearings get multiplied very quickly by the bouncing.

Multiply this situation by a few dozen orders of magnitude and you have atoms colliding in a liquid or gas. Look at the system in fine enough detail and you can see "Brownian movement," the effect of bunches of atoms randomly hitting one or the other side of something preferentially for brief periods of time.

In truly chaotic systems, like those showing fluid turbulence, the small effects can magnify as time progresses, and produce major, macroscale phenomena. It's not just the butterfly wing that can set off the tornado, Brownian movement can also. So can a single quantum fluctuation, the radioactive decay of a single atom, the ionization shower from a single cosmic ray, the heating of a single molecule by a single solar photon.

Or maybe not. Sometimes things do cancel out, perhaps. We don't have access to all those alternate quantum universes, so we don't know how many there are, nor do we know how different they would have to be to no longer be here. Identity is a slippery thing, after all.

But weather is chaotic, so all possible weather events probably happen in the Great Beyond. Read any history and count the number of times when weather played a big role in the life of a nation, a people, or just individuals. Crops fail, and famine is a chaotic event.

War is chaotic, of course. Every soldier is a fatalist, knowing that the difference between life and death is often a matter of seconds, or inches, or a single random impulse. Plagues are chaotic, with disease vectors jumping around (literally sometimes) like fleas.

That's three of the Four Horsemen. The fourth one is Death, and he looks like Chaos to me.

But Life is also chaotic, even at the beginning. It's sometimes said that the fastest sperm gets to fertilize the egg, but in fact, it takes a mass of sperm, containing enzymes that break down what is called the "zona pellucida" to allow a single sperm to get through. So it's more like "We're taking the 3,887,996 caller."

Every conception is a random throw of the dice. Every birth is a door from chaos into chaos. Every individual creates a myriad universes, just by existing.

Is that enough? I mean, what more do you want?

Wishing

One of the hardest lessons to learn in life is that wishing doesn't make it so.

It's possible to view the history of science fiction as a long search for magic wands, for things that will fulfill the wish fulfillment fantasy. We've had potions and rays, ESP and PSI, interstellar empires, nuclear power, and radiation giving people mutant powers. Sometimes it's virtual reality, or cyberspace, the knurd imagination writ large. Sometimes it's something as simple as a new way to get laid (telepathically!).

So we come to parallel worlds and quantum indeterminacy, with the latter being shorthand for some method of wishing yourself into the parallel world that is to your liking. Some of this comes from the confusion that results when someone identifies personally with the word "observer" in the Copenhagen Interpretation. If you wish and wish with all your might, for Schrödinger's Cat to be alive when the box is opened, then, by golly, the Cat will live and come out to play with Tinkerbell.

But even if you take the "Many Worlds" interpretation, there are problems. Perhaps it excites you to imagine that there is a parallel world in which you are married to Angelina Jolie, but there are a number of problems with the very concept. First, even if there is a world in which someone who shared a timeline with you up until the lucky streak (for you; let's not consider what the situation would mean for Ms Jolie) that gave that result, that fellow isn't you. Not anymore. And this stricture applies even more forcefully to those worlds where "you" are of a different sex (because then "you" are actually "your sister"), or born with a different genetic makeup, etc. You might as well imagine yourself as someone else in this world, because identity doesn't give you a free ride. Who told you that you're the same person that you were yesterday, incidentally?

Moreover, just because you think you can imagine something doesn't mean that it can happen. There are a lot of ways for something to be impossible, and the deck may not have those five aces in it.

Besides, there are consequences to any proposition. That was Ursula LeGuin's point in The Lathe of Heaven. Sometimes what you think you want has consequences that you don't actually want. In fact, you might scratch that "sometimes" and put in "always." This is a principle that applies even to a single world. You just have to hope that the main consequences of your (always well-intentioned) actions outweigh the secondary consequences, over which you have less control, and certainly have less knowledge.

Ultimately that's why we have ethics, morality, and to a degree, even science. We want to know as much about the consequences of our actions as possible, and we want those consequences to be as good as we can manage. Sometimes we fail. But we should always try, and the trying consists of acting, and not wishing, because wishing doesn't make it so, nor do good intentions.