Conspiracy theories and their cognitive basis

Below is a response I typed up to an email about conspiracy theories:

I have a problem with most so called "conspiracy theories" and their relatives, mostly because they all assign intentional causality to events i.e. they assume that events have been orchestrated and planned by some form of illuminati or lizard people. While I don't always dispute that events happen the way they do and that they are caused by people, I think that it is more likely that these events are emergent phenomena that occur due to the complex interactions of the people working within a specific system.  

It's easy to say that Rupert Murdoch (owner of a huge chunk of international news and other media through his News Corp) has evil plans for the domination of world culture, but what is more likely the case is that he, like everyone else, believes that his way of thinking is best and so runs his business and makes investments based on his own personal ethos. Unfortunately, the knock on effect of this is that any decision he makes affects millions due to his position of power and influence. Some like to think that he sits behind the scene pulling the strings, but all he is doing is acting like many others do to create the world they would want to live in, with the difference being the scale of the stage he is acting upon. 

Conspiracy theorists operate with the "hindsight is 20-20" rule. They essentially pick and choose pieces that make a great story. They are subject to confirmation bias, as are we all. Their brains essentially filter out non-relevant pieces of info and only take note of those things that support their central hypotheses e.g. "man didn't land on the moon". We all do this, but most of us don't focus on the perceived global domination by an elite few. 

Depending on how you look at most situations, you can either imply some kind of intentional causation or you can view people as fallible and human (and thus subject to human desires and a human level of understanding), which is probably a more realistic view since no matter who you are, or who we are talking about in history, every person is subject to the same limitations that make us human. It doesn't matter whether you are Ghandi, Mother Theresa (another story all together), Bill Clinton or Emperor Constantine. 

Anyway, that's a very, very rough and convoluted reason for why I tend to discount things like the templar myths and the like. Granted, I haven't read as much on the topic as I maybe should before dismissing it outright but I stuggle to pass up an opportunity to rant... :) 

P.S. While it's true that you can't believe everything you read on Wiki, as you say, it is generally annotated with footnotes and its self-regulating nature actually generally leads to a more robust source of knowledge than any single person could create. If you look at the comparisons between Wiki and other encyclopaedias like Brittanica, etc. they actually have similar levels of factual errors, while Wiki has a greater depth of information that you could only gain by having someone that is truly passionate and knowledgeable on a subject write about it.  

Are you familiar with the wisdom of the crowd? I think this phenomenon comes into effect in Wiki - another emergent property of the system if you will. 

P.P.S. Check out a larger list of some of the cognitive biases that we employ in our minds every second of every day. These biases act as the lenses through which we view the world and every single one of us is subject to them (generally without our realising it). Essentially, our brains have limited processing power (we can process a lot, but there is a limit), and we are subjected to more stimuli in any one second than our brain can process, hence we have these mental shortcuts to help us get through the day by making the job of processing everything simpler. Some call them biases, others call them heuristics, but these are essentially rules of thumb that we employ subconsciously in order to process more information and stimuli more quickly.  

They helped our ancestors survive by cutting out a lot of the hard work. For example, we have a predisposition (or bias) towards listening to a person in a position of authority. This is useful when you are on the plains of Africa and you spot those poisonous berries that your mother told you not to eat. Rather than test that hypothesis yourself, its a lot easier (and safer) to assume what your parents say is correct. 

Another example: we are predisposed towards going with the crowd (known as the bandwagon effect). We assume that if many people say something is true, then it must be. This saves us the hard work of having to find out for ourself. 

The point is that conspiracy theories generally come about as a result of our complex brains acting in a way they have evolved to act, but in this case, the outcome is a deviation from the truth rather than a closer representation of the actual truth. 

Anyway, I am really rambling now :P 

P.S. the image for this post comes from this Worth1000 entry

Steven Pinker on morality

Steven Pinker wrote an article on morality for the New York Times in January this year, called The Moral Instinct. It's a great summary of how morals and ethics could have evolved from a naturalistic, evolutionary perspective. I bring it up now, because it has been sitting in the back of my mind ever since I read it at the beginning of the year. Morals represent one of the remaining "strongholds" of the religious (or so they believe). They argue that you can't have morals without God. It's a case of the god of the gaps phenomenon in action - god has literally been squeezed out of most areas of life leaving religious apologists holed up in the more insubstantial, conceptual areas such as morals.

Then, along comes Steven Pinker and co, and they tear apologists' arguments in this area to shreds. I attended one of Pinker's lectures in January right after having read the article. He basically repeated his Authors@Google lecture verbatim which really disappointed me. However, afterwards we went up and asked him a few questions, which he dutifully answered. I then mentioned that I had just read his New York Times article and found it fascinating. It was very interesting to see how he visibly perked up and seemed a lot more lively at this mention. I throw this in with the fact that he often finds himself in the company of Richard Dawkins and other anti-religion freethinkers, and it makes me think that he is seriously moving into this area himself.

What actually sparked this whole little discussion about Pinker and his NYT article was that a colleague mentioned he was reading The Blank Slate and that it gave very scientific reasons for much religious thinking, so perhaps Pinker has actually been there all along and I just need to read more, which is never a bad thing! :)

Understanding our minds: Fear as an example of cognitive biases at play

In my last post, I made mention of how some people's lives are ruled by fear. I briefly talked about how their (and everyone elses') choices are made without rationally weighing up the reality of the situation. Obviously, I am not advocating that humans should aspire to being purely rational beings, as in doing so, we would likely lose some of what makes us human. However, what I am saying is that we need to be aware of how often we distort the truth, especially when confronted with fearful situations.

In stressful or fearful situations, we are more likely to throw reason out the window and react with our gut feelings. Put another way, we are more likely to fall back on in-built biases (a.k.a. heuristics) in our psyche as they are so innate to who we are. Examples of this might be taking the advice of a person in a perceived position of power over the advice of someone else, or using the crowd's actions as an indication for what we should be doing (see herd instinct).

When a crisis hits, whether real or imagined (see moral panics), we are more likely to fall back on these "rules of thumb". These rules, or heuristics, are some of the first we learn, and to some extent, have probably been ingrained in us through evolutionary processes, as they serve to protect us in a dangerous world where we have limited information. For example, in a situation in the past, if I saw a crowd of people (say, my tribe), running in the opposite direction to myself, I could take this as a pretty clear indication that I did not want to find out what they were runninng away from. You wouldn't even need to think twice to make the decision to turn around and run away with them. Situations of this nature, repeated over millenia, likely helped remove those brave souls who steadfastly continued on their path towards danger rather than joining the group and running away (today we give these folks Darwin Awards). Perhaps this gives us an indication as to how our sheep-like tendencies formed?

Similarly, we have been taught since birth to accept the advice or do what we are told when instruction comes from a "higher authority". Most of us wouldn't be here today if we hadn't listened to our parents and teachers when they told us not to eat that bright purple rat poison (okay, an extreme example), or look both ways before crossing the road. At the most simple and earliest stages of our lives, we rely upon our parents absolutely, and this teaches us to listen to authority. I am not pointing this out in an anarchist sense (i.e. we need to rebel) or in a conspiracy theory-sense (i.e. we are all being mind controlled). That's just the way it is, and it is a basic rule of thumb that we carry with us throughout our lives, and is generally employed at a sub-conscious level.

Anyway, the point of this is that people are more likely to throw reason out the window when confronted with fearful or stressful situations, and there is a very real explanation for this from evolutionary psychology and cognitive perspectives (see cognitive psychology and computational theory of mind).

Daniel Gardner has written a book about this subject (I haven't read it though), called The Science of Fear (there's no Wiki on the book unfortunately). Here's the marketing blurb on the book:

"From terror attacks to the war on terror, real estate bubbles to the price of oil, sexual predators to poisoned food from China, our list of fears is ever-growing. And yet, we are the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear seems to be taking over, often with tragic results. For example, in the months after 9/11, when people decided to drive instead of fly -- believing they were avoiding risk -- road deaths rose by more than 1,500.In this fascinating, lucid, and thoroughly entertaining examination of how humans process risk, journalist Dan Gardner had the exclusive cooperation of Paul Slovic, the world renowned risk-science pioneer, as he reveals how our hunter gatherer brains struggle to make sense of a world utterly unlike the one that made them. Filled with illuminating real world examples, interviews with experts, and fast-paced, lean storytelling, The Science of Fear shows why it is truer than ever that the worst thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Here's an extract from one of the Amazon reviews, which captures much of what I am saying or touched on in the previous post:

"Gardner is eager to have us understand how these Systems work. He contends that we are carrying a reaction system founded on our ancestors' time on the African savannah. Our brains haven't adapted to the fast-paced, high technology world around us. We are reacting almost entirely with The Gut, and we are making serious mistakes as a result. Are we truly under threat from the things we claim to fear? He cites numerous cases, from the fear of "man-made" chemicals through the spectre of cancer to the possibility of our children being assaulted by strangers. Each of the topics is introduced with our given views - usually captured by polls, then carefully assessed by examining the real odds. In every case, the important things to consider almost certainly haven't been. The breast cancer campaigns have uniformly overlooked the role of age in determining the likelihood of its occurrence. 

The calculations leave little doubt that we are far too often looking at threats with little consideration of their true nature. Why are we reacting so readily with The Gut instead of with The Head? In no small part, Gardner argues, media, politicians and industry play a significant part. Media, anxious to sell its products, emphasizes the violent, the extreme and the bizarre. The result, of course, is that's what captures our attention. The bombardment of such stories, often unthinkingly repeated by politicians, is a reinforcement of The Gut's reaction to this kind of information. Never seeing a rational analysis of such news, we lose any sense of proportion about what is truly important. We rarely find the opportunity to consider an issue rationally before the next one is upon us."

I would imagine that Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine would be along similar lines, whether she realises it or not - hopefully she does :)

Cognitive biases, religious certainty and interpretations of life

A friend sent through a list of 12 questions that had been sent to him by a "religious girl" in his office. I think the questions are designed to lead a non-believer on a logical progression that ends with the reader having to accept the religious person's argument. I saw these questions and I couldn't help but respond, if only because I have never fully articulated my own views before. So here they are, but first the original questions (pasted verbatim):

1. "Do you recognizes evil? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it?"
2. "Do you recognizes good? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it? "
3. "What is the thing most feared in the world?"
4. "Is fear a good or a bad thing?"
5. "What is holding all your phisical sells, everthing in your boday together? And how?"
6. "What is solid truth to you?"
7. "Is truth and facts the same thing? Explain why answer. And how is facts identified, based on what is it called an fact?"
8. "Why do you think is reseach of life itself so significant or important?"
9. "Why should good questions be asked in life?"
10. "What makes a begining and an end in everything (like books, movies, earth, songs, life) so significant to all humans?"
11. "Where does universal laws come from? And would you consider it needed and why?"
12. "If you could help someone today in pain, and only you have the cure to help them and give them life. Would you help them?"

-----------------------

"First off, these questions have been asked by humanity for ages so this email won't give answers, nor will it convince someone who believes differently, so I am not going to get into a pointless debate. However, it is kinda fun to answer them with your own views and hopefully it will help show someone that there are many different points of views out there...

Hyperlinks are underlined and in blue. If the person who has asked these questions is truly sincere about wanting to know the answers, then they should read these links. Considering how complicated the questions are that have been asked, one can't expect to answer them in a few lines. Even this email, along with these links, only begins to scratch the surface of what is being asked.

Also, I hope we get to hear the answers to these questions from the perspective of a religious person. It wouldn't be fair to have a one-way conversation :) [I'll post their replies if I get them]

1. "Do you recognizes evil? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it"

No, I don't recognise evil. There is no good or bad. Trying to simplify life into black and white, good or bad, right or wrong is misleading. By doing so, you over-simplify reality and set yourself up for misunderstandings with others. The concept of evil also implies some kind of intelligence behind it, as if there is a person pulling the strings, making others do evil things. This really isn't the case - there is no "evil intent" behind life. There are just evil interpretations of life, which often say more about the person making the interpretation than life itself.

Life is a grey area full of probabilities and tendencies, but very little is certain. Concepts like right and wrong are intellectually immature. They may have worked for our ancestors in the jungles or on the plains of Africa when just beginning to rise above the level of the other monkeys around them, but by clinging to such out-moded concepts we are making humanity worse off. It is these dogmatic, stubborn beliefs in an absolute right or wrong that cause most of the conflict in the world today. For example, both radical Islam and Christianity believe they are privy to absolute truth, and obviously, both can't be correct. However, both believe it is correct because they base their belief on subjective evidence i.e. their beliefs are not based on phenomenon that can be repeated or that can be used to predict futures events. 

As an example, I can create fire, so I know that it exists (as much as we can know anything anyway). If my friends tell me about fire, I also know it exists but mainly because I can recreate it for myself. Similarly, I know that if I raise the temperature of water, it will begin to boil. In this way, I can consistently predict the outcome of the same action every time i.e. heating pure water to a high enough temperature will always cause it to boil, and there is no subjective interpretation or justification required.

Evil is a subjective thing and depends on your position. What you consider evil, another society may think of as just and moral. You can argue your case, but they can argue their's as well. For the record, I think many of the things advocated by the bible are evil e.g. not being able to be around a woman while she is having her period, stoning people to death, killing entire races for having different beliefs to the Christians/Jews, etc. These could all be considered evil.

My rule of thumb: if it does not hurt you or another and if the act is consensual, then it can't be evil.

Examples of this: 

1. Recreational drug-taking. Drugs like marijuana, LSD and ecstasy have very little impact on the body and are not addictive. When used in moderation (like coffee, alcohol or cigarettes), they are enjoyable and can be beneficial to the user e.g. by relaxing them, making them more social, by making them more creative, etc. 

2. Homosexuality. No one should have any right to dictate what two people do in the privacy of their own home. If people didn't stick their noses in other people's business and tell them how to run their lives, they wouldn't even know that some people are homosexual. It is a private matter that is of no concern to others. It is only because they have been attacked by religious groups that homosexuals feel the need to group together, protest and to proudly show that they are gay - that they are not ashamed of who they are and that they will not be beaten into submission, whether physically or morally. We would all do the same.

2. "Do you recognizes good? And how would you give it characteristics or identify it?"

To me, goodness requires two things:

1. Empathy. Being able to empathise with someone else i.e being able to walk in their shoes and understand their situation 

2. Caring about another's well-being without being obliged to do so

Obviously it's not as simple as this though. Being able to empathise with another might mean being able to understand where they are coming from i.e. their background, up-bringing, social environment, and this may mean accepting their acts even if you find them immoral. Such acceptance requires strong character, insight and wisdom. However, we can explain morality in evolutionary terms, so again, the black and white distinction of good vs. evil is a gross over-simplification.

Steven Pinker has a great article on morality over at The New York Times (requires free registration). If that link doesn't work, try this one - link.
 
3. "What is the thing most feared in the world?"

Ignorance. People's actions are generally misguided because they don't understand the underlying mechanisms affecting and influencing their actions and decisions. If we better understood how we make decisions and how we are influenced by the crowd, we could make more informed decisions that benefit all those around us.

A few good areas to start with are:

• Cognitive biases 
• Computational theory of mind 
• Group think, group behaviour, herd behaviour, crowd psychology, mob rule, etc. 
• Game theory 
• Reconstructive memory 
• Emotion

4. "Is fear a good or a bad thing?"

Fear can be a healthy driver of competition and innovation. It can be the thing that prevents us from stagnating and keeps us moving forward. It is a good thing as long as you do not let it rule your life. In order to prevent this from happening, you need to put it into perspective. You need to understand the cognitive biases at play in your own mind (see above). Doing so will allow you to look at things from a more balanced perspective. By better understanding the real-wolrd probabilities of supposedly fearful events you can put them into perspective. Understanding how our own minds fool us also helps. If we give into fear, moral panics result, where things are blown out of proportion and even more fear is created. 
 
I would say that religious people live in a constant state of fear (fear for themselves and their own moral short-comings, fear for their family and friends and fear for the world), which blinds them. It gives them tunnel vision and only serves to further reinforce their fears, turning them into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

5. What is holding all your phisical sells, everthing in your boday together? And how?
 
First of all, for the record, saying somthing like "God holds us together" isn't an argument. That excuse can be used for any area where we don't know the answers and it has been used throughout history. So far, we have worked the following out though: our bodies are held together by forces of attraction between atomic particles. We are currently physically restricted in how deep we can look into the atomic particles (i.e. we don't have the tools), but this month, physicists in Europe are starting up a machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that they will use to look into this very question in more detail that we have ever been able to do so before. This is truly fascinating stuff as they are on the forefront of modern science. It's like watching a sci-fi movie. The following article does a wonderful job of summarising what we know about particle physics (i.e. the stuff that the universe is made of) at the moment and what the importance of the LHC is. I highly recommend you read it, if just because it illustrates the amazing beauty and elegance of the universe we seek to understand: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11837478
 
Saying that God is doing it, is the same answer that people have given throughout the centuries. Other examples of where people have falsely invoked God: "the world is flat and God is holding it up"; "heaven is shining through the pin-pricks in the night sky and that is what we call stars"; "the universe revolves around the earth because we are chosen by God"; "God strikes those down that he does not favour (i.e. disease - turns out that its actually germs and viruses)"; etc. etc. etc. Whenever we don't know the answer, we invoke God. However, it usually turns out that we can explain it ourselves with a little bit of effort and those that do are initially branded as heretics and crazy people, and we persecute and/or kill them. So, whenever there is a gap in our knowledge, we use God as an excuse not to ask questions. See God of the gaps.

6. "What is solid truth to you?"
 
I don't believe in solid truth. Only subjective truth. Recognising this and recognising others' truths goes a long way to creating better understanding. I don't know if we will ever understand objective truth. At least, we humans can't in our current form as we are only able to perceive in 3 dimensions - a very, very basic restriction on all our interpretations. However, I will use a certain set of rules in order to minimise the guess-work, and those are the basic rules of argument and rationality, which rely on solid, falsifiable evidence, because to rely on a single person's interpretation, knowing the short-comings of the human mind (again, see cognitive biases), is asking to be mislead.

7. "Is truth and facts the same thing? Explain why answer. And how is facts identified, based on what is it called an fact?"
 
They aren't the same thing. Facts can be used to intepret truth, but the actual interpretation is subjective. Defining a fact is a bit more difficult. I would loosely define a fact (and in the process, open myself to many challenges) as something whose interpretation is unambiguous i.e. it cannot be interpreted in multiple ways. This is a very difficult criterion to live up to since most things can have multiple interpretations. Example of a fact: my birth date is the 28th December based on the current Western calendar - my birth certificate says so. Example of a pseudo-fact: Moses parted the Red Sea - there are many people who believe this, but there is no contemporary or archaeological evidence to support it.
 
Its a murky area. I would say that it is very difficult to nail down a true fact, but, by increasing the number of pieces of evidence in support of the "fact", we can dramatically increase the probability of it being true.
 
Also, remember Carl Sagan's statement: "Extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary evidence", which translates as, the bolder, more outrageous your claim, the more evidence you need to support it.

8. "Why do you think is reseach of life itself so significant or important?"
 
I want to live a good, comfortable and happy life and this requires that all those around me are happy too for I am only happy if others are happy, otherwise life would be pretty lonely. I research and ask questions in order to improve my understanding of this goal, and if this goal is not achievable, well then at the very least, I will come to terms with this through my understanding. For, to not ask questions is to live based on what others dictate. Not asking questions makes you a machine, a robot, a sheep. You are simply riding the waves of reality without understanding what you are doing and you cannot truly have free will if you do not have an understanding of the implications behind your actions. Instead, you simply react to what life and other people throw your way.

9. "Why should good questions be asked in life?"
 
See above. Just to add that there are no bad questions and all options should be (at least momentarily) entertained.
 
10. "What makes a begining and an end in everything (like books, movies, earth, songs, life) so significant to all humans?"
 
Like I said, we can only think/conceptualise in three dimensions (up/down, left/right and back/forward). All our mental images and concepts are constrained by this. There is a fourth dimension that we experience and that is time. We are trapped in the dimension of time which only moves in one direction so we perceive things to have a beginning and an end. However, we know that there are more dimensions than this. I am not talking weird mumbo-jumbo here. This is pretty well-supported theory.
 
An inherent "design" (I use this word loosely) limitation of us humans is the need for causality and I think this is related to our inability to think outside the dimension of time. We think linearly (in a straight line) i.e. we assume that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything must have a cause. If you were to read more on the subject you would realise that one of the greatest philosophical problems we humans face is the problem of causality. The problem of causality states that we cannot say for sure that A caused B. Often it is just as likely that B caused A. For example:
 
"I eat a lot, therefore, I am fat" - our first instinct in this case is to assume that I am fat because of my over-eating habits, but just as likely a scenario is "I am fat, therefore, I eat a lot". Its a slightly clumsy example, but, maybe I have a hormonal imbalance that prevents my brain from knowing when it has had enough to eat or maybe my metabolism is twice as slow as a normal person's. In this case, eating a lot isn't the cause of me being fat at all. My body is naturally more prone to storing fat, which depresses me and makes me eat more. The point is that modern media implies causality in every headline, news report, TV show, etc. when most situations can easily be flipped around (although we never do this). Western society in particular thinks linearly while Eastern philosophies are far more open to the circularity of life (just think of the ying-yang symbol).
 
My personal thoughts: there is no beginning, middle or end. There is only an infinite regress and I don't know why that is yet, but if I did then that would imply causality :P
 
David Hume is one of the greatest philosophers of Western thinking. He first articulated the Problem of Causality in the 1700s. Another philosophical issue that he came up with was the Problem of Induction, which says that we can only base what we know on what we know. We cannot imagine those things that we do not know about, because, obviously, we do not know about them (you probably need to read those last two lines again). 
 
This means that we will always be surprised and that we will always base our beliefs on the limited world around us. I prefer to live in the world of the unknowable. I know that I don't know much and I am happy with this. I don't try to create an explanation for everything. Instead, I add it to the list of things to figure out as I go along. I don't create an excuse like "God did it". I am just very grateful that others out there are also trying to answer questions about areas that they don't know everything about, because I sure don't have time to look into it myself. Those guys are called scientists and they push humanity forward.

Here's a few great quotes relating to living with the unknown and the search for knowledge:

• "Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned" ~ Unknown
• "[S]cience is the best defense against believing what we want to" ~ Ian Stewart
• "Fanatics are cock-sure and the wise are full of doubt" - Bertrand Russell
• "But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me" ~ Richard Feynman
• "I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them" ~ Galileo Galilei

Here are a few examples of multi-dimensionality:

• A hypercube. A hypercube is a conceptual shape. In the same way that a square is a 2D representation of a line, and a cube is a 3D representation of a 2D square, a hypercube is a 4D representation of a 3D cube. I can't tell you what it actually looks like because, again, we are limited to perceiving it in 3 dimensions. But, I can tell you that it exists, at least conceptually. While our senses may fail us in this regard, our mind still provides us with a powerful tool in conceptualising these things

• Visualising the 4th dimension. The website, Slashdot (one of my favourite), has a link to videos showing you how to visualise the 4th dimension. Here's their intro to the link: 
"Think it's impossible to see four-dimensional objects? These videos will show you otherwise. Some mathematicians work with four-dimensional objects all the time, and they've developed some clever tricks to get a feeling for what they're like. The techniques begin by imagining how two-dimensional creatures, like those in Edwin Abbot's 'Flatland,' could get a feeling for three-dimensional objects. When those techniques are transferred up a dimension, the results are gorgeous."

• String theory. String theory is a mathematical theory of the physical world. It is not considered the only theory, but many consider it the best theory that we have at the moment for describing reality. It assumes that there are actually 11 dimensions of perception

11. "Where does universal laws come from? And would you consider it needed and why?"
 
Again with the inferring causality. I don't know where the universal laws "came from". I don't know how they were set up, but why say that God made them? Why not just say that they were created by the Big Bang, which they were. Some just add the extra, needless step and say that God did it all.

12. "If you could help someone today in pain, and only you have the cure to help them and give them life. Would you help them?"
 
Undoubtedly, but I would first delve deep into myself and ask whether they wanted the cure and whether the cure was really right for their situation. I would also look into my definition of "pain" and ask myself whether I am projecting my beliefs and peceptions onto this person. And, I would never presume to impose my "cure" onto someone else against their wishes.
 
I assume you are referring to Christianity as the cure here and by life you mean "everlasting life". This brings to mind another quote: "Without God, life is everything." 

And a few more quotes for good measure:

• "The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also" ~ Mark Twain
• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours" ~ Stephen Roberts
• "Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one" ~ Richard Dawkins
• "Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology" ~ Joseph Campbell

Carl Sagan's essay on marijuana

Carl Sagan was a great mind that gave much to the world and we are poorer without him. I'm going to reproduce his amazingly succinct and insightful essay on marijuana here. He wrote this back in 1969 under a psuedonym as he wanted to avoid being persecuted for what he said. I reproduce it because I had such a difficult time finding it online myself. In effect, I am preserving it for posterity's sake :)

For more from this brilliant man, check out his television series "Cosmos". While it may appear a bit dated by today's standards, pretty much all of its content is still valid and will surprise you. How could we have known so much back then that we still don't acknowledge today!?

“This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.”

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. 

After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly. 

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really' were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any contradiction in these experiences. There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence - at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!' I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don't advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world."

Me

I'm a 24 year old market research consultant living in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Contrary to the popular First World stereotypes, I am white/Caucasian and speak [the Queen's] English.

Now that I have managed to hook up my pet monkey to the treadmill out back, I have enough power to surf the intraweb. Someone was telling me that the intraweb is a series of tubes, and the reason why it's so slow down here in South Africa is because they had to stretch the tubes real thin to make them reach us, which makes sense... It also doesn’t help that our telecommunications industry is monopolized by our sole provider, Telkom ("Would you like to know more?" Visit: www.hellkom.co.za)

An inordinate amount of my time is spent playing PC (and some console) games, reading graphic novels, watching films (the more controversial the better), listening to music (all good musicians die by the age of 27) and transfixed by the ludicruous actions of fundamentalist faith heads (they are so cute - you just wanna pet them and spank them, and explain to them what they have done wrong).

Two topics are siphoning off far too much of my brain power at the moment:

1. Is the PS3 gonna whip the Xbox 360 and Wii's collective asses, and if not, will I be able to purchase a Wii and still feel whole inside?
2. How do we get more people to understand what Richard Dawkins is saying in a less confrontational and more pervasive manner?

Other than that, I'm a general barrel of laughs (in between the heavy breathing), except when I'm not.

Let's see where this ends up...

Caligula - The most controversial film of all time?

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Welcome to Formikation

for·mi·ca·tion
– noun a tactile hallucination involving the belief that something is crawling on the body or under the skin.
- hallucinated sensation that insects or snakes are crawling over the skin; a common side-effect of extensive use of cocaine or amphetamines
[from Dictionary.com]

No, I have not decided to jump on the bandwagon so much as I have decided that I 
need a creative outlet. I hope to collate my various interests in an interesting 
and informative manner for all to share.

Because you know I have a lot to give... :P

P.S. I have deliberately misspelled the blog title as Formikation instead of Formication because some guy decided to register a blog under Formication and he has not updated since May (and it only has one post!).