Almost certainly a copyright violation: this will be removed if you ask.
Although I did watch and enjoy it, I was never really a fan of ‘The X-Files’ because it had a couple of annoying things about it (apart from saying “The Church of Ephesia” at one point which was just funny). One of them was what I think of as lazy writing. It was common for a standalone episode to end without resolution, and from a writer’s perspective, that’s just irritating, because most people who write work hard to tie things up at the end, and rather than doing that, this series did the opposite and actually tried to make it into a virtue. So it’s like, there’s this guy who has an extra skeletal muscle over all of his skin which enables him to shapeshift, and then – oh I dunno, a load of stuff happens and maybe he hadn’t anyway but I don’t care, here’s next week’s episode, forget that. And then the same thing would happen until the end of the series.
That was one annoying thing. Another one was “I Want To Believe”. Mulder is a detective. He is not supposed to “want to believe” that a particular person is guilty or innocent or that a particular modus operandi (sorry, modum operandi) characterised a particular incident. “I Want To Believe” was for the viewers, maybe because they wanted to believe, but unless he was mocking himself and wanted to cast doubt on his reputation, he definitely should not have put a massive great poster on his wall advertising his unsuitability for his line of work.
But yes, I also want to believe something. Not in flying saucers particularly, although I do think it’s interesting that spheroids, discs and cigar-shaped objects are all convincing three-dimensional slices of a simple hyperspatial superovoid thingy. It’s the wrong attitude because it leads to cognitive bias and not seeing what’s in front of your face. Basically delusion. In one case, it really worried me. Now I’ve never been anti-vaccination, but as usual I have opinions which are different from most other people’s on the matter. I was worried about this and I wanted to believe that vaccines were a good thing, so I started to read up on immunology. I got two standard textbooks on immunology and two standard textbooks on microbiology and started to plough through them, confident that their sources and arguments would be high-quality and well-presented. Unfortunately, as I read more into the subject I started to feel my faith in vaccination ebb away. I feel the need to emphasise that I most definitely do continue to support vaccination in general, more than I used to in fact because the objections I had in the 1990s have now largely been addressed. However, I didn’t have the courage to pursue what was increasingly appearing to be the truth about the situation as backed up by rigorous scientific research. I didn’t fail to understand the reasoning, didn’t doubt the evidence or research, but I still found that very reasoning and information was taking me rapidly away from the consensus, and I strongly suspect that if I’d continued to learn more about the immune system and infectious diseases, by now I would have become an anti-vaxxer. But I’m not. The reason I’m not is partly peer pressure and partly because I trust the expertise of immunologists and microbiologists. For some reason, my brain works that way but theirs obviously doesn’t, and the flaw is probably in my own thought processes.
Opposite to this is Mulder’s attitude in ‘The X-Files’. His desire to believe was probably confirmed by in-universe events and he got what he wanted: his wish to believe was granted. I’d be interested in knowing what other people find here because I haven’t heard that this happens for other people, but I often find that precisely when I want to believe passionately in something, I actually find it harder to believe than if I didn’t really care about it. Whatever else was going on in my process to convince myself that vaccination is a good thing, I’m pretty sure my strong desire to believe it was a big factor in me not finding it convincing. Even so, to my conscious mind it seemed to present itself as an ever-growing list of reasons for believing the opposite. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this tendency if it does exist in me, but I suppose on this occasion I just decided to trust the brains of people with apparently less unusual cognitive styles than my own.
So, the rest of this is about something I want to believe.
I’ll start with straightforward memory, learning and information transfer in living organisms, mainly humans because I am one, allegèdly. The two things many people think of as information in ourselves are our memories and thoughts on the one hand and our heredity on the other. There are at least two other systems in our bodies which do something similar, namely the specific immune response and the endocrine system. I can’t make too many comments on the former because of what I talked about earlier, but the endocrine system is easier to discuss. Some of the transformations our bodies undergo due to hormones is even similar to memory. For instance, growth hormone makes us taller and then we stay taller after it stops taking effect. There are other examples not easily categorised. I have a transverse scar on my wrist from when I cut myself on an aluminium drink can bale in 1992 and it was dressed incorrectly by using cotton wool, which I then had to yank out from inside the healing wound. That’s not just a memory, but a clearly observable physical mark on my body recorded by a physiological process, in the same way a memory is. Things do leave their mark on us. Looking at me, you can tell it’s been more than three years since I had a haircut, that I’m no longer in my twenties and so on. In terms of deep time, the fact that I have a navel records an incident in the Cretaceous when some of my ancestors caught a viral infection which led to them retaining their eggs rather than laying them, causing a placenta to form. The fact that I have nails rather than claws recalls the fact that later ancestors of mine climbed trees and the fact that I breathe oxygen is a legacy of the most catastrophic event to befall life on this planet in its entire history: the production of free oxygen by microörganisms.
But I digress. We carry the traces of our past, and the past before our own lives, in our bodies and in a way those things are memories. They’re records of the past. Some of them are recorded in tissues we’d never normally think of as being able to carry memories. Others are much closer to being what we’d think of as remembrance than others. There’s muscle memory of course, but that doesn’t refer to memories stored by muscles, but a learned habit which can be repeated through physical actions. What does definitely seem like memory, though, is the ability of single-celled organisms to learn.
It stands to reason that a small, mobile organism swimming through a hostile aquatic environment would benefit from being able to learn from its mistakes, but of course if it consists of a single cell, it has no multicellular organs and systems such as a brain and a nervous system. It may, however, have sensors. Euglena, for example, is a single-celled organism with a red “eye spot” which helps it to detect light and react accordingly. But how does it respond, and do its responses change after repeating the same stimuli? If they do, isn’t that a form of memory?
Well, yes it does happen. Slightly annoyingly, slime moulds are well-known to do things like learn to avoid caffeine, solve mazes and would probably have been able to redesign the British rail network if given the chance, and no, that is not a joke. However, slime moulds are not typical single-celled organisms and probably when most people hear that, they think of something like this:
Although this is a large organism in single-celled terms, it probably goes without saying that it resembles the human lymphocytes, B-cells, T-cells and macrophages in the human body, and in many cases these latter cells actually do exhibit altered behaviour depending on circumstances due to their recognition of antigens, but this learning process is carried out by the larger immune system rather than individual cells.
Paramecia are a better prospect than either of these amoeboid doobreys:
A paramecium can make associations between electric shocks and lighting conditions. If it’s shocked a few times in the light, it will avoid the light after a while. However, it can’t make associations between darkness and electric shocks. There’s said to be an association between learning and cyclic AMP, which is a common compound found across the animal kingdom as well. It’s a second messenger in humans, meaning that it sends a signal inside the cell in response to a substance received by the cell, in nervous systems for example neurotransmitters, so there’s also an association with learning for us.
Stentor, whose examples are seen here, can also learn. This protist anchors itself to a substrate and draws water and food into itself by creating a vortex by a ring of cilia around the wide end of the trumpet. It also leans over in order to locate richer food sources. In its environment, it may encounter a stream of food at an angle on a particular side, and when it does so it can move in this way. It also contracts in response to strong mechanical stimuli, presumably as a defence response. If it’s repeatedly poked, it gets used to it and not shrink so readily, so it clearly has some kind of memory of being poked before, but if it’s poked harder it still responds. It also doesn’t bother to lean over any more if it isn’t getting anything from that direction, and it can not only choose to detach itself from its substrate to seek food elsewhere but also prioritises between different decisions based on conditions. It also reverses the direction of the vortex if it encounters noxious tastes, and will do so more readily if it’s encountered them before. It does all this, of course, without any brain or nervous system.
Writing all this makes me feel uncomfortable. As a vegan, I disapprove of animal experimentation and in these cases I’m aware that these protists have been experimented on to get these results, and I find that unsettling. I haven’t seen a Paramecium or a Stentor behave this way but I have seen a Vorticella, one of these:
. . . flinch and coil its stalk in response to a threat, and I was aware that after I’d looked at them through a microscope I probably wasn’t going to be able to return the protist to its original environment in a stream at the bottom of the lane. I was six years old at the time and not yet even vegetarian, but even still.
Here, then, is the next bit, the contentious bit, something I want to believe.
Individual, unicellular organisms can learn and in some cases make decisions and prioritise. They’re not entirely dumb. Incidentally, intelligence and information processing are not the same thing as consciousness, and being panpsychist I obviously believe all these organisms are conscious in some sense, but I don’t want to consider that at this point. No, what I want to consider is this: our whole selves can learn, in various ways but prominently we learn and remember using our nervous systems. We also develop immunity, allergies and auto-immune diseases, so that system also has memory, and likewise our hormones show parallels to learning. Beyond that, our bodies show the marks of our journeys through life, although that’s only learning in a very loose sense. However, we do appear to be the descendants of single-celled organisms very similar and probably closely related to the ciliates I’ve mentioned here (and our bodies also contain amoeboid cells but we’re not so closely related), whose representatives today do in fact show definite signs of learning and memory. So the question is: do we also have cellular memory? Do our own cells carry memory-like traces of their past experience besides their genes or hormonal changes if they’re not among the classes of cells which literally carry memories or “immune education”?
At first, that does seem logical. However, our cells are not themselves single-celled organisms and they live in bodies where everything depends on everything else, everything has its functions and has surrendered many of its functions to other cells. Muscle cells contract and move the body or aid in organ function and some other cells move quite rapidly and readily, but many of them just sit there and are passengers in a moving body. Protists have little choice but to move unless they’re permanently stuck to something and even then they may contract or expand. Our own cells generally lack the pressures of having to fend for themselves, and consequently they may have lost a lot of functions their ancestors had. Even our gametes live within our bodies and although each of us starts as a single-celled animal, that’s internal too, except when deliberately extracted or fertilised via technological means which are unlikely to have had much influence on our tendency to remember or not.
Nevertheless I want it to be true that our cells as well as ourselves remember.
Daniel Dennett is quite annoying. His view of consciousness is completely absurd, for example. I’m not going to defend my position here because this isn’t exactly what this post is about.
In case you don’t know, Daniel Dennett is a major analytical philosopher, the English-speaking tradition of philosophy dating from the late nineteenth century CE with the rejection of Hegelian idealism, continuing today and apparently also including Polish philosophers for some reason. Bertrand Russell is a good example. It was once described in ‘Radical Philosophy’ like this: a Heideggerian says something like “Die Welt weltet”, and analytic philosophy comes along and says “Where is this Welt, and when exactly did it start welting?”. It is actually mainly my own background and I have a lot of respect for it, partly because I think postmodernism is a good way of making excuses for how things are politically and socially without coming up with a solution to them, and that comes out of the continental tradition. I’d also distinguish analytic philosophy from other viable philosophical approaches taken by anglophones such as that of William Blake, who is unsurprisingly an outsider and apparently linked to the Muggletonians, about whom I know very little. Sarada is the expert on Blake, but for what it’s worth I think of him as an English Romantic. I don’t know if that’s fair.
Recently, Dennett was involved in a movement referred to as the “Brights”, whose aim was to further metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is often treated as if it’s synonymous with atheism, but in fact it’s a specialised form of atheism which is radically different, for instance, from Marxist atheism and the South Asian Samkhya and Carvaka. I had a conversation with a White bloke the other day who was atheist because of karma, a view also found in South Asian thought. The basic idea there is that because karma is a universal law governing the working of the Universe, there’s no need to suppose that God exists. Although I’m theist, I do find this interesting on an intellectual level, mainly because it’s so unlike metaphysical naturalism but still strongly atheist. Metaphysical naturalism is the idea that only natural forces and laws operate in the Universe, i.e. there is no supernatural realm and therefore no God or other deities. Obviously I don’t agree with this, but that isn’t why I find Dennett annoying.
The Brights were founded by Dennett and Dawkins, among other people whose names don’t come to mind right now. Other metaphysically naturalistic atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, have criticised the name as appearing to imply intellectual superiority. It reminds me a bit of the stereotypical Mensa attitude. To be fair, I’m not sure this was the intention so much as an attempt to come up with a positive-sounding name. Brights use the word “super” to describe people such as myself who have supernatural and/or mystical elements as part of our view. This actually makes me sound like Wonder Woman or something, so it’s okay really. Nonetheless, the Brights believe themselves to be right and us to be wrong. It isn’t an unusual position to see oneself as correct by contrast with others whose opinions differ, so that is also fine.
One of Dennett’s more bizarre positions is that lucid dreams are not experiences. This strikes me as a kind of ideological commitment resulting from it being a logical conclusion of his other views about consciousness. However, it’s also an elaboration of another, simpler position of his with which I actually do agree, in a sense: that dreams are not experiences in general. I do differ with this view but also think it captures something significant about the nature of consciousness, particularly wakefulness. Looking at them from a position of being awake, it seems to me that dreaming could well represent the wakeful consciousness attempting to make sense of the “junk” present in one’s mind on waking. There are some reasons why this may not be true, but others which are hard to reconcile with it not being so. For instance, someone I know once dreamt that she, note the tense in this phrase, has to cry three tears to save a toad’s life, and I could hear her trying to do this several minutes before she woke up. On the other hand, I was once dreaming while the radio was on and the sequence of events on the radio is time-reversed in my dream. The dream ends with something happening on the radio which in waking experience happened before something which starts the dream, which can be explained if dreams are false memories created during REM sleep.
The idea that lucid dreams are not experiences is kind of arse-about-face. It’s a conclusion Dennett is forced into due to his expressed view of consciousness which is counter-intuitive to me, and I’d think to most other people. There is an odd phenomenon in consciousness where immediately prior events are “re-written” by memory. For instance, MP3 files when played back often have periods of silence in them before loud notes which the listener doesn’t notice because they’re eclipsed by the slightly later event. Dennett uses a similar illusion called the “phi phenomenon” where lights of two colours flashed in succession leads to the perception that a single light is moving back and forth and changing colour. He offers two explanations for this, which he calls “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque”. In the Orwellian hypothesis, like Winston’s experience with the fingers (or Picard’s experience with the lights in ‘Star Trek’, which is a direct steal), perception is revised after the fact of being experienced. Stalinesquely, the forthcoming experience is revised before reaching consciousness like a show trial whose verdict is pre-decided. These two versions of what happens don’t require any difference in the model of what’s going on in the brain. The only difference is in when the perception becomes an object of consciousness. The claim is then that the reason there is no difference between the two is that this account of consciousness as emerging at a certain point is an error based on the legacy of misunderstanding consciousness as Cartesian – that is, that living humans consist of two substances, the soul and the body, whereof the former is conscious and dimensionless and the latter occupies space and is not conscious, with the two interacting, according to Descartes within the pineal gland. Dennett believes that we are still too attached to this kind of account, although we don’t literally believe it any more, and that consciousness is not a special, circumscribed state, has no subject of experience (I have sympathy with this bit) and is actually the flow of information from place to place.
Applying this to non-lucid dreaming, information flow would occur on waking. With lucid dreaming, we only have illusory choice and experiencing in the moment according to this account, which also applies as far as Dennett is concerned to waking life. Dreaming and lucid dreaming are primarily useful illustrations of his general theory here rather than objects of study themselves.
Obviously I think he’s wrong. He also casts doubt on the existence of qualia, which are the essential qualities of experience whose existence cannot rationally be doubted. Qualia, put another way, are what people refer to when they say things like “your red might be my blue”, which captures the notion well but doesn’t actually work in detail because of the network of experiences and how they relate to one another. It’s important to decide what are and aren’t qualia, because once one declares something as a quale it’s placed beyond question and that restricts possible arguments. For instance, Nkechi Amare Diallo could claim that her Black identity is a quale, at which point White people identifying as Black suddenly becomes sanctified in some realm beyond criticism. I actually do think the mental perception of the possibility of becoming pregnant is a good example of a quale which is not intuitively so, because it sometimes leads to radical departures of opinion regarding the ethics of reproductive choice, and that does in fact correspond to “no uterus, no opinion” as the position is sometimes rather crudely expressed. However, the existence of quale cannot be doubted, and if someone is led into the position where they can make such a claim, it comes across to me as a weird ideological commitment to an untenable position rather than something which can be attached to an account of consciousness.
From wakeful experience, we tend to perceive dreaming as something which occurs while we’re asleep, and individual dreams as prospects which occur in the future of our wakefulness before we fall asleep and in the past of our wakefulness when we have woken up. With closer examination, we might conclude that dreams are not experiences but attempts by a wakeful mind to make sense of the clutter present in our minds when we awake. Although I think this is incorrect, it does work well as an illustration that the chronology of dreams is not what we might assume. Lucid dreaming is said to be encouraged by always recounting dreams in the present tense. This is somewhat confused by the fact that not all languages have a present tense, and this raises a further question: are there languages which have a way of expressing dream time?
Before I answer this question, I want to outline my understanding of states of consciousness. I believe it makes sense to say there are six states of consciousness: wakefulness, dreaming, dreamless sleep, hypnosis, meditation and Ganzfeld. There’s also a very strong tendency to prioritise wakefulness above the others, to the extent that it’s seen as the only realistic state of consciousness and the state which dictates the nature of time. Dream logic is not seen as proper logic. A friend of mine recently observed, interestingly, that although I had recently dreamt about the King, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t still be Queen dreams. My own attitude towards states of consciousness is rather different. I believe that several or all of those states are of equal, or perhaps incommensurate, status. The list I’ve just made was from a wakeful state. It’s equally possible to dream of a completely different list. I’m not convinced that hypnosis is a valid state of consciousness but I do believe it’s neither dreaming nor dreamless sleep. There are “state” and “non-state” views on hypnosis. The state view is that a hypnotised subject has entered an altered, more suggestible state of consciousness, which is supported by their alleged inability, in some cases, to recall the events which took place during it. The non-state version is that hypnosis is a form of role-play in a kind of theatrical setting, which doesn’t just apply to stage hypnotism but also the likes of hypnotherapy. That idea is not supposed to contradict its efficacy as a therapy, incidentally. Ganzfeld is the other state which could do with a bit of explanation. This can be introduced by relaxation and sensory deprivation although it also occurs at one’s bidding, perhaps with a bit of practice. It may not may not be a healthy state.
Insofar as each of these is a valid state of consciousness, none has priority over any others. Each has unique features. As I’m mainly contrasting dreaming and wakefulness here, taking them equally seriously, the wakeful mind can have a view of dreaming that is either the detritus of dormancy or a sequence of experiences which occur between successive experiences of wakefulness, but this is only the view of the waking mind and is no more valid than that of dreaming. There is still a relationship between dreaming experiences and the senses, for instance because a cold night might be associated with dreaming of the Arctic or because some experience one had the previous day influences the dream. From the perspective of dreaming, wakeful consciousness influences one’s experience but there are oddities about its temporality because with dreams of any length, it can often be difficult to locate a moment when the dream begins and, as I’ve said before, some of my dreams involve things like “having always sat on the roof”, i.e. my dream is of climbing out of a bedroom window onto the roof just like I always have for years. From a dreaming perspective, whatever waking life makes of them, dreaming consciousness is very different in terms of the passage of time and even if it turns out that dreams are squished-up false memories of stuff happening immediately before waking from a daytime perspective, this has no more or less validity than whatever the dreaming mind thinks of wakefulness.
Given all that, this is the question I am mainly interested in answering here: how do we refer to dream time? English uses the present tense to refer to “tenseless” things, such as saying that “one plus one is/equals two”. We don’t usually say “one plus one used to equal two” or “one plus one will be two next Thursday” unless we’re trying to make some kind of rhetorical point about eternal verities. I have said in the past, from a waking perspective anyway, that the events of dreams should be referred to in the aorist. This is in fact a somewhat inaccurate way of describing what I’m doing when I seem to use the present tense.
The word “aorist” originates from the Ancient Greek “ἀόριστος”, which breaks down as “ἀ-” – not – and “όριστος” – definite. In other words, “indefinite”, “undefined” and also simple – the unadorned, plain form of the verb. In English, we might identify this with the simple present indicative except that in English this usually puts an S, an “-eth” or “-est” on the end, so it isn’t usually unadorned. As an ahistorical, perhaps an aorist, word, it seems to work quite well as a way of describing events which do not occur in the waking passage of time, but in fact the Ancient Greek usage is to refer to the past. It’s used as a narrative tense, so it does make sense if dreams are retold as stories to use the aorist, but in certain circumstances can also refer to the present or future. It’s also worth mentioning that there is aspect as well as tense involved here. Aspect is how the action described by a verb occurs over time, i.e. whether it’s a one-time short term event, a repeated action or a continuous one. For instance, “I rowed” and “I sowed” might involve grabbing the oars just once and sculling briefly and putting a single seed in the ground, or they might refer to rowing across a river or walking across a field broadcasting a full bowl of seed. English seems to have lost the ability to distinguish easily between these, but many other languages actually focus more on that element of time than on tense. Hence aspect is still relevant to dreaming as experience, or perceived experience but tense may be misleading.
Sanskrit also has an aorist, which is relevant because it happens to be used to discuss consciousness a lot. In fact I almost used the word “samadhi” to describe what I called “meditation” just now. There are two aorists in Sanskrit, one which is simply preterite indicative, like our own simple past, and an injunctive mood, which is also found in Homeric Greek, which could be used as an imperative or subjunctive, usually for prohibitions in later Sanskrit.
Hence the problem is that although there is something out there called the aorist, which is not in any case present in English, it actually tends to express the past although it technically needn’t and the literal meaning of the word “aorist” is not perfectly reflected in the actual meaning of the word. From the perspective of wakefulness, I would want to express dreaming experience as occurring in a kind of abstract time. Imagine a three-dimensional line graph. The space within that graph could be said to be located in a particular place in the sense that it might be on the page of a book or a computer display, but there need be no region of the Universe consisting of a graph, which can in principle be visited. Time and space in dreaming are virtual. Events can be located relative to each other temporally only within the dream, but need to be referred to outside of it, but referring to them in the past tense doesn’t do them justice.
Calling this post “Dream Time” makes it sound like a reference to the idea Australian Aboriginals are said by Western anthropologists to have about the primordial state of the world, but as usual it’s important to examine this critically. If it turns out that the kind of wakeful consciousness we have today in the West is highly contingent, maybe our lives are surrounded temporally by a sleep, not in the sense of absence of consciousness but as a different kind of consciousness. I know very little about this and feel it would be culturally insensitive to say too much about it, as well as inappropriate for the cultural and environmental milieu I live in, but the term itself suggests to me an entirely valid concept of a kind of timeless eternity out of which our wakefulness condenses. I have no idea whether this is what anthropologists mean by it or whether it even exists in any Australian Aboriginal culture, but it does make sense although it might give dreaming unwarranted priority. At this point I could of course read what Wikipedia says about it and pretend I know what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t do it justice.
Behind all this while I’ve been writing is awareness of a particular form of dementia called Lewy Body. This is associated with Parkinsonism, and involves the mixing of dreaming and wakefulness. Although it would seem insensitive to regard this as anything other than a pathological state, it is interesting that this occurs towards the end of waking life. We tend to think of dreaming and wakefulness as sharply differentiated, although when I had B12 deficiency early signs of my psychosis there was some such mixture. Prisoner’s cinema, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, phantosmia and possibly some forms of tinnitus and hearing voices also seem to have things in common with this. Prisoner’s cinema is more like Ganzfeld, and in fact it leads me to wonder whether states of consciousness are to each other like different gears on a car, with Ganzfeld intermediate between dreaming and wakefulness.
People have been known to enter a state of meditation as a prelude to their death. More often, the state of mind immediately before death as monitored by instruments resembles dreamless sleep and this continues immediately after death, with a sudden flash of activity a few minutes later. Once again, it may be inappropriate to refer to these phenomena temporally, as any subjectivity may not experience them in this manner.
This post, I hope, will make a good companion to tomorrow’s, written on International Yoga Day.
As a Christian, I’m not supposed to believe in reincarnation. That said, there was a time before the emergence of Christian orthodoxy when many Christians did, and more recently the Cathars, for example, did believe it happened. There is also an allegation in the gospels that John The Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah. Some Jewish mystics also believe in it. However, two things about this. Firstly, I’m not Christian in the sense of having faith in Christ as a living God and Saviour in human form because there seems to be a lot of evidence against the idea that the Holy Spirit exists. Secondly, although one’s knowledge and faith in the doctrines of one’s religion should be a guide, they should never be an excuse for dispassionate observation of the evidence or its lack regarding a possible fact of the matter. Ultimately, our only duty in this respect is to the truth, assuming truth to be absolute and bivalent, and that a correspondence theory of truth is correct rather than a coherence theory, and approaching something in this manner ultimately strengthens any justifiable faith. It’s part of a cycle.
I’m going to start from Christianity. An early argument I made to other Christians regarding reincarnation was that it seems to be more just than having just one shot at life, after which you’re either damned or saved. It gives one longer to commit to Christ or otherwise and enables one to make amends and have as many chances as are needed for salvation. As far as I know, though, no Protestant, Orthodox or Roman Catholic church today accepts the idea of reincarnation as a general process. This has apparently not always been the case. The Cathars were a twelfth century Gnostic Christian sect who believed humans were angels trapped in physical bodies who would not enter heaven until they were purified (hence the name, from the Greek καθαρσις), and until then we would be reincarnated. Cathar Perfects also always travelled as same-sex couples, which led others to attribute homosexual relations to them, although it isn’t clear whether this was defamatory or a fact. It was said to be to avoid sexual temptation. Unsurprisingly, the Cathars were persecuted by the Church. The Albigensian Crusade was conducted against them and they were massacred and executed. In fact their doctrine doesn’t appeal to me because they’re Gnostic, but I hope I don’t need to say that I consider their massacre to be a great evil. They may have been an invention of the Church as an excuse to kill lots of people. I’m not aware of the details here. As a thirteen year old I liked the idea of the Cathars and regarded myself as one because I saw myself as a Christian who believed in reincarnation. A friend of mine saw this as a very bad thing because of their apparent tolerance of homosexuality. They were influenced by the Bogomils and a group I’ve not otherwise heard of called the Paulicians. The Bogomils were also Gnostic and opposed to physical and institutional places of worship as their own bodies were considered to be temples, which makes no sense to me because they were supposed to be Gnostics, who believe matter is evil and see the body as a prison as far as I know.
There’s a widespread belief among both supporters and opponents of reincarnation, that the early Church accepted the belief, and in particular Origen of Alexandria, born 184 CE, is said to have implied that it happened. Origen certainly believed that souls existed before conception. He also believed in a succession of universes in which souls appear to become incarnated in each æon, so that definitely sounds like a form of reincarnation, although not in the sense that someone living in his time might still be around today in a different body so much as that after the end of this æon, a new world will be created and they would live a life then, just as they had before this æon.
The soul has neither beginning nor end. [They] come into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of their previous lives.
Falsely attributed to Origen but widely publicised.
It looks as if Origen’s cosmology has been vaguely passed on to people who later read into it what they wanted to hear, so when they hear the word “reincarnation”, more strictly μετεμψυχωσις, they tend to assume it means a soul living a series of lives in the same universe rather than having one instance per æon in a sequential multiverse. However, the fact that there were still Gnostic Christians around in the fourteenth century who had inherited their own beliefs from other religious groups suggests that there may have been an underground Gnostic movement which survived the early Church and, through all that time, maintained such a belief. In fact I’m wondering if Origen’s belief was in fact modified in the same manner as the popular misconception of it today has been, and that in fact they just plain did believe in reincarnation.
Judaism has a tendency to be quite positive in some places about beliefs which Muslims or Christians tend to clamp down upon. For instance, whereas orthodox Protestant and Roman Catholic churches usually reject divination outright nowadays, including the Kabbalah, Judaism not only embraces it as part of its own tradition but actually seems to prize it and encourage certain people, namely older men, to explore it. Jews do not perceive the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible – what Christians tend to call the Old Testament) to refer to reincarnation and the Talmud never refers to it either. However, the Karaites, a non-Rabbinical sect of Judaism which relies directly on the written Torah, believe in gilgul, “rolling” of the soul between bodies as they live out their lives. One reason for this is that it seems to explain the suffering of small children, because if they sinned in previous lives this can be seen as divine retribution. The Zohar refers to the idea several times, stating that a proud man (sic) might be reincarnated as an insect or worm. It also says Cain’s soul entered the body of Jethro and Abel’s the body of Moses. The Hasidim just plainly and explicitly believe in reincarnation and say that particularly enlightened individuals are able to remember previous lives. Apart from gilgul there is also dybbuk, which is spirit possession, and ʻibbur, which is where a soul enters a person’s mind from heaven to assist them. However, as far as I know observant Jews nowadays don’t usually believe in reincarnation. As usual, the specific beliefs of faithful and observant Judaism do vary considerably on this matter.
In the Christian New Testament, a claim is made that Jesus may be a reincarnation of Elijah.
“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”
Malachi 4:5-6, New International Version
This is of course the Tanakh, but in the New Testament, the following passage, one of several, appears:
They replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’
Matthew 16:14, New International Version
This at least suggests that many saw Jesus as an example of what was at some point referred to as ʻibbur, a soul descending from Heaven (which doesn’t seem to be a very Jewish concept incidentally) to help Jesus, or perhaps a plain and simple reincarnation of Elijah. This cannot, as far as I can tell, be reconciled with the later orthodoxy about the nature of Jesus Christ, but interestingly the phenomenon of ʻibbur is remarkably similar to Stapledon’s ideas in ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Last Men In London’, and of course also somewhat similar to the idea of Bodhisattva.
So in the end, I think I would say that there is definite evidence for the acceptance of the idea of reincarnation in Judaism and heretical Christianity, and early on perhaps even in the embryonic Christian church itself. Of course that doesn’t mean reincarnation is a reality, but it’s just interesting that it isn’t as far from the Abrahamic tradition as is sometimes assumed. The Druze are another example of Abrahamic religionists who believe in it.
The spiritual home of the doctrine of reincarnation is of course generally perceived to be in South Asia, where it’s held to be true by Jains, Hindus, Buddhists and, perhaps surprisingly, Sikhs. Among them, the idea is more formalised and linked more explicitly to karma. Jainism, probably the most physicalist of all religions, sees the soul as weighed down by karma as a kind of subtle contaminating matter which sticks to it when one acts in such a way as to tie oneself to the cycle of life in the world below mokṣa, as with inflicting suffering, lying, theft or committing sexual misdeeds. Buddhism can sometimes analyse the soul completely away and just see things in terms of karma being passed on, and I will return to this as it seems quite significant to me. The idea of reincarnation in Hinduism is so familiar it isn’t worth going into here. It’s worth noting, though, that the link made between the moral quality of one’s life and reincarnation present in both Judaism and the dharmic faiths, and usually inherited in the West from this source, is not present in other parts of the world.
Pythagoras believed in reincarnation and passed the belief to other Ancient Greeks, and at the same time the religion of Orphism, which may have been influenced by Indian thought. Elsewhere in the world beliefs in reincarnation also exist, for instance among Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals. It could be that the religions of South Asia only happen to include belief in reincarnation because they better preserve a more universal ancient human tradition of spirituality than in many other places. In Siberia, children are given the names of dead relatives in the expectation that they receive their personalities. That said, other groups of peoples do believe in an afterlife instead, with no reincarnation, hence ancestor worship.
All that said, this needn’t imply that reincarnation actually happens. There are many near-universal beliefs which have turned out not to be so. Presumably at some point in the remote past, everyone assumed the world was flat, and everyone was wrong. But are we assuming here that those who do believe in reincarnation are in that particular aspect more ignorant than we are? For all we know, they were drawing conclusions on evidence that suggested that hypothesis. In a sense, the scientific method didn’t exist at that time but human beings were still capable of reasoning and used it to improve their quality of life, so why conclude they were wrong or merely superstitious? Why believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, or something else? It does stand to reason that fear or mere incomprehension that such a complex thing as a human personality and consciousness could cease to exist permanently with death, and therefore that the afterlife or reincarnation could be seen as rationalisations, but why choose one over the other? Does it say something about a culture which one they believe in? Are there other beliefs apart from extinction and oblivion?
I also have no idea which belief is more popular or whether they coexist in the same spiritual traditions.
A belief can be thoroughly explained as fulfilling some kind of emotional and social function without turning out to be incorrect. These two approaches are in different realms. In a less culturally integrated situation, belief in reincarnation can still satisfy some kind of need. One example of this is past life therapy. Here, a patient is hypnotised and regressed into time before their birth, at which point they may receive the impression of having lived other lives before this one. Dr Edith Fiore is one such practitioner. She has worked with countless people in this respect, making a connection between their current physical and mental conditions and experiences in their past lives. For instance, someone who suffered headaches might find she had been clubbed to death in a previous life or someone with a phobia of heights might find that they fell to their death previously. Now, I’m not convinced that these are real but I can see that it might help someone make sense of their life today to have these apparent explanations available and even that they might help resolve physical symptoms and illnesses to some extent. Fiore apparently went on to look at cases of spirit possession and alien abduction, which sets off my bogometer, but her work on past life therapy precedes these and I wonder what that’s about. I can still believe that this could be helpful even if it has no basis in reality. Fiore’s view seems to be that the soul has a fixed gender and passes from life to life, which manifests itself as someone mainly experiencing life as cis but without any necessary sense of incongruence or dysphoria when they’re trans. I can actually get on board with this in a limited sense because I think the cis/trans division isn’t primary. Rather, the division is between people for whom their perceived gender is significant and those for whom it isn’t, but of course I have a whole other blog devoted to that. I will just say two things here though. Firstly, I’m aware that there are gender-incongruent people who explain their condition as a soul of one gender in the body of a different sex, and secondly, I think most people who believe in souls also believe that they’re either not gendered at all or that they all have the same gender. I also have an issue with how non-binary and intersex people are supposed to fit into that picture. However, my point is that people in the here and now are using the concept of reincarnation as a therapeutic tool, to explain what they otherwise find inexplicable. However, past life regression often seems not to be historically accurate and may be confabulation. Even if the memories retrieved existed ready-made in the subject’s brain, the same may be true of dreams, and there is at least a lot of extraneous information in those which don’t correspond to waking life or anything in it. For instance, a couple of nights ago I dreamt my carpal bones are being guarded by a pack of dogs. This means nothing literally, though it probably does reflect my felt need to protect my arms from injury when moving my father around.
The notion of karma is another one of these. There is of course a cognitive bias called the “Just World Fallacy”, apparently also known as the “Just World Hypothesis”. This is the belief that life is fair. Consequently, when bad things happen to good people it’s sometimes because of something bad that they’ve done in the past, and doing good brings rewards. Sometimes karma is evoked to explain this, and before I go on I should state that I do in fact believe in karma but not in this way exactly. Sometimes, it seems more that a just and loving deity is acting to balance the scales of justice. A lot of this amounts to victim-blaming and self-aggrandisement, but the position of past lives is clearly evoked as one way to explain how, for example, a child might be born with a life-threatening health problem. I have to say that this particular version of karma is pretty irksome to me and can also come with a general negativity about life as found in, for example, Ayurvedic medicine, where reproduction and development are generally viewed in a negative light and by extension women are seen as inferior since they are thought of as the vessels for new life, i.e. a failure of a spirit to achieve nirvana. That’s a nauseating, disgusting view and I want no truck with it.
Some people do believe past life therapy is “real”, but that it doesn’t involve the patients’ own past lives. Rather, they see it as their minds reaching out into the past to find lives which resonate with their problems. This could explain, for example, the clichéed “I used to be Cleopatra” phenomenon. It is possible that someone felt an affinity with her and made that connection, and therefore that there is a genuine psychic connection which is not, however, the same as reincarnation. Or, much more simply, maybe they just have a strong desire to have lived a glamorous and important life, perhaps like that of Jayne Mansfield, who is of course someone I used to believe I was personally a reincarnation of. And as I’ve said, I do still feel, on seeing her eyes and face, that that’s me looking back at myself. A powerful impression, but not something which has any basis in reality. I’m not that delusional, or at least my beliefs are not delusional in that particular respect. It serves mainly as a reminder of how vivid these impressions can be.
The probability of any random person being a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, Cleopatra, Napoleon or any other famous individual is of course very low if identity survives death and the self is incarnated in a single body as a complete entity. I don’t know how many Hollywood stars there were in 1967 but I do know there were more than a million births between Mansfield’s death and my birth, so even if there were a thousand of them the chances are only a thousand to one. It didn’t happen. No matter how strong and eerie my feelings are when I see her in a film or a photo, I know this is an illusion, but it illustrates the power these impressions have over the mind.
There do appear to be genuine memories of past lives. For instance, there’s a case of a mediæval peasant in England who suffered a head injury and is said to have been able to speak only in Ancient Greek when he recovered consciousness, and the religious context of that makes it unlikely that he would have faked that. This is of course also anecdotal. It’s also common for children to spontaneously recall apparent past life memories. These occur whether or not there is a belief in reincarnation in their community or family, and fail to correlate with mental illness, and they also take place where there is no contact with mass media. These memories are usually reported between the ages of two and five and the children concerned often seem to have phobias and likes which don’t seem to result from learned experience since birth. Sometimes these apparent memories correspond to those of another person whose life can be discovered, and there may be birthmarks corresponding to injuries sustained in that person’s life. This sounds outlandish of course, but it’s backed up by studies undertaken by medical scientists and is not in this case just anecdotal or hearsay. There’s a list of peer-reviewed scientific papers here. This is not just a load of superstition.
I think there might be two coëxisting explanations for this which are akin to dreams. It’s probably best to describe dreams first. Daniel Dennett is prominent among the proponents of the idea that dreams are not experiences but false memories. I agree with this to some extent but don’t think they are best explained in this way because of lucid dreaming and the axes which Dennett has to grind. His own explanation of lucid dreaming is pretty poor and violates Ockham’s Razor. You’ll probably gather that I have little respect for Dennett’s thought. Even so, it’s plausible to me that in waking life, dreams are reconstructed memories from the brain state during REM sleep. However, this doesn’t stop dreams from being experiences but may indicate that the relationship between consciousness and time is different with dreaming than it is during wakefulness, and this is also a waking explanation for dreaming and shouldn’t be taken as authoritative because the waking state of consciousness is not the only one and may not be given a higher status than others. Past life memories in small children could be similar. The physical state of the brain in early life is analogous to someone who has just woken from a dream because it may contain various things experienced as impressions and memories which didn’t actually occur in the literal past, but in a projected past created as a result of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. However, just as dreams are a different relationship between consciousness and reality than waking consciousness, preëxistence could be too.
The reminiscence bump is a peak in strong memories of one’s life. For most people it occurs between fifteen and twenty-five. That is, people tend to remember that decade of their lives more vividly than the rest. Oddly, this doesn’t correspond to the age people go back to when they have dementia, which is often their thirties. Anyway, like most other people I do have this reminiscence bump, which for me corresponds to the years from 1982-92. However, musically I have recently realised I have a previous apparent reminiscence bump I can’t account for. A couple of years ago, I attempted to identify how much of the ’60s I could actually remember, and unsurprisingly a lot of this involved singles which I remembered from when they were popular and first released rather than having heard them since. I wrote these down and found, very surprisingly, that they were almost all from May 1967, which is two to three months before I was born. My current explanation for this is that I heard them in the womb, although that may not make much sense because babies are apparently born with synæsthesia and fail to label their sensory experience as consisting of separate senses. However, it’s also true that transracial children who were exposed to the auditory environments of their birth mothers in utero have been shown to pick up their parental languages significantly faster than those of their adopted communities, which suggests that fetuses can hear. This raises another issue. When does reincarnation occur? If it’s after the second trimester, do premature babies have souls? There are two explanations I can think of for my musical reminiscence bump which are interesting as opposed to probable. One is that I simply remember them from hearing them in utero. This is actually quite problematic as many scientists would reject the possibility that the human brain is sufficiently organised at that time to do that, and also I’m not sure how clearly an ear immersed in amniotic fluid with more such fluid between it and the amnion, uterine wall and abdominal wall can hear music. Our daughter clearly could hear fireworks five months after conception, but loud bangs are not the only part of instrumental and vocal music. Another explanation is that these are the memories of someone who was old enough to recognise music and remember it, possibly my mother or even Jayne Mansfield, or more likely, someone who was adolescent to adult at the time. Perhaps this is part of someone else’s reminiscence bump, born between 1942 and 1952.
There seem to be two major problems with reincarnation. One is that we don’t seem to have memories of future lives or lives of entities elsewhere in the Universe. I should probably explain this. The passage of time as we perceive it seems to be associated with being living, conscious bodies of the kind we are, and in fact we don’t always perceive it at all. If there is a soul existing separately from the body, it would seem to be in a timeless state which doesn’t experience time as flowing. That would mean that incarnations of the soul are like the spines of a sea urchin, puncturing spacetime in various places but converging at a central point which is the soul itself, not subject to spacetime. If this is so, it might be expected that there’s no difference between a life in the nineteenth Christian century and one in the thirty-seventh, or life here on Earth and another in a Bernal sphere in the Andromeda Galaxy back in the Eocene. But we only seem to remember adjacent lives in the relatively recent past. We also don’t seem to recall contemporary lives, which is a bit odd as well. A partial explanation is that we tend to remember spatiotemporally adjacent lives better than ones which are more distant, and our memories of the future tend to be interpreted as precognition, visions, prophecies, whatever.
The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a soul in the sense used here. This is problematic in various ways, for instance it doesn’t seem to explain how God can exist or how we can apparently communicate with the dead, because even if that’s faked by Satan or demons they would still be incorporeal beings, in other words souls. However, there seems to be nothing about the human body which suggests it’s “haunted” by a ghost-like entity. There’s no sign of the brain being able to do anything which isn’t amenable to naturalistic explanation. From a religious perspective, the Bible definitely seems to deny that there are such things as souls quite clearly, so a Christian such as I ought to be physicalist, believing only in conscious lumps of matter called people. Therefore, there is a problem. How can reincarnation happen if there are no souls to be reincarnated?
I think a clue to the explanation lies in the possibility of precognition. If we have a convincing impression of life in the future after our own deaths, we usually don’t interpret it as a memory of a future life but as extrasensory perception. We asymmetrically interpret ESP, real or not, according to when and where its source seems to be. An impression of a contemporary distant event or object is generally understood to be remote viewing (assuming it’s visual) or telepathy. The same impression of a future event or object is interpreted as precognition or prophecy. But when we have apparent memories of a time before our conception, we call that reincarnation, or see it as evidence of that. What’s wrong with the idea that we simply receive impressions throughout space and time and just label them as belonging to us when they’re from the past? Alternatively, what’s wrong with the idea of seeing future memories as future reincarnations? Quite a lot in the other case, but if you believe in reincarnation, why wouldn’t you have memories of future lives as well as past ones? And rather chillingly, maybe the reason we don’t have memories of past lives away from this planet is that we’re alone in the Universe. Even so, it seems more likely that we just experience lives which are nearby in time and space.
I mentioned previously that not all Buddhists believe in souls, but they still believe in reincarnation. This is because they don’t conceive of anything which makes up a person continuing to exist after their death for more than a very short period of time, except for their influence on the world. I should point out at this stage that I’m recounting this from memory. It’s true that what one does in one’s life sends out ripples which leave their mark on the world, very obviously through having descendants for example, but in myriad other ways. This doesn’t require a non-naturalistic account, and it means that these ripples, which could be seen as karma, could converge on the as yet unborn. This is closer to how I see apparent reincarnation.
You’ve probably noticed that I’m not remotely sceptical about psychic abilities and the supernatural. This is because they seem to be part of my and other people’s everyday experience and there doesn’t seem to be a naturalistic explanation for them. For instance, on many occasions I’ve experienced the symptoms which clients have had several seconds before they contact me for the first time, and I had a dream on 15th September 1983 of events which appeared to involve people I had yet to meet with recognisable landmarks and buildings in Leicester, a city of which I then knew nothing and had no idea that I’d end up living there. Moreover, this is not confabulation as I wrote a detailed description of the dream in my diary at the time. I think probably most people have these kinds of experience as well as many others which are at first wanting of a boring explanation but eventually get one with some careful thought or analysis. One of these is that the sheer plethora or experiences is bound to turn up the occasional coincidence which will register with one’s pattern-recognition device, the human mind, when it seems to be significant but not with the many more which don’t. But given that I learned to predict when a new client was about to ring me based on these experiences, for example, this doesn’t seem to fall into that category. Nor do I think I’m unusual in that respect. I would expect most people to have these experiences but perhaps dismiss them or ignore them. I do the same with many of mine, but I do acknowledge that they happen.
As I’ve said, Ockham’s Razor needs to be applied to this. We seem to have impressions gathered non-naturalistically, but we sort these into separate categories according to when and where they occur, so we end up thinking that there are different phenomena involved: precognition, telepathy and reincarnation. Reincarnation is particularly problematic because it seems to require belief in a soul. The simplest explanation is that since there is no soul in that sense, our minds simply receive accurate impressions from elsewhere in time and space through means other than our recognised physical senses. It may not even be necessary to abandon metaphysical naturalism here. We can just acknowledge that they exist but that we don’t know how they can.
It’s commonly believed that there is a significant difference between how we approach ebooks and paper and print books. In fact, Sarada never reads books off any kind of screen for this reason and I’m sure she’s not alone. Rather gratifyingly for us old codgers, it turns out that this is backed up not only by research for us ancient ones, but also for digital natives. At the same time, ebooks do seem to offer some pluses.
(c) Activision, 1986. Will be removed on request.
I’m not sure when the first idea for an ebook arose. Certainly the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ is a fictional ebook, although a dedicated one. However, there’s an older design called the Dynabook, dating from 1968 which was intended to look something like this:
An illustration of the Dynabook educational computer as envisioned by Alan C. Kay. Will be removed on request.
Alan Kay’s idea was basically a GUI-powered laptop which was to inspire Xerox’s computers in the 1970s and was later adopted by Apple when they produced the Lisa and Mac, and went on to become the tablet computers and laptops of today. The display here is supposed to be one megapixel and touch-sensitive, there’s a stylus and removable memory, and it’s aimed at children. Around that time also, Arthur C Clarke had described a flat-screen newspaper reader in his 1968 novel, ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’, which went on to be depicted in the film itself. Before this, so far as I can tell the concept of ebooks was preceded by microfiche and microfilm readers, and the basic idea for these dates from 1851 and was used for pigeon ring messages in the 1870s. Hence people were actually reading text on screens, projected from a sheet of photographic film, way back into the 1920s, when the Library of Congress photographed a large number of books in the British Library for archival purposes, before the advent of public television. To be picky, silent movies would also have involved the reading of text off screens, though very brief passages, and there were also credits. There was also the “Readie”, an idea inspired by the “Talkie”, i.e. a movie with audio, which was:
A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred-thousand-word novels in 10 minutes if I want to, and I want to. [This machine would] allow readers to adjust the type size and avoid paper cuts.
Bob Brown, 1930.
This is of about the same age as the oldest paperback books, and a couple of thoughts occur on reading it. One is that it actually predates mains power sockets and needed to be plugged into a light socket instead, and the other is that it’s reminiscent of futurism with its un-ironic emphasis on speed. The perception was that cinema was outpacing the written word and therefore that there should be ereaders which would give it a boost. It’s notable that there’s not a lot of contemplation or concentration implied by this, and it isn’t clear whether this is to do with optimism about accelerating the human brain or something else. Like many other ideas of the time, there’s a disturbing air to it, at least for someone such as myself, born in the mid-twentieth century, because the speed seems to reflect a reaction against a slower, more meditative way of life. In a way, the attitude expressed here could even be seen as outdated because this is from the age of Dada rather than Futurism. Futurism is so-called because it’s supposed to outstrip even Modernism. It rejects tradition and the kind of comforts we’re used to, and is notoriously anti-feminist. This kind of idea is also akin to eugenics: that we don’t need many of the people who hold us back such as the disabled and those who have learning difficulties, and by extension the idea that there should be an Aryan master race because it had achieved so much more than everyone else, supposèdly. It’s pretty scary, and if ideas are presented sufficiently fast, maybe people won’t think about them so much. This applies also to novels and poetry because that kind of literature read at speed probably won’t work as well as a way of developing empathy and emotional wisdom, if at all. Brown’s idea is reminiscent of Speedwords, a system which attempted to compress information into less space and time, because he wanted to include special punctuation and abbreviations to accelerate reading speed further.
In the post-war era, the Spanish school teacher Angela Ruiz Robles became concerned for the welfare of her pupils having to lug heavy textbooks around all the time and invented a pneumatic-mechanical system called the Enciclopedia Mecánica. This came to include electric illumination and a magnifying glass, and it’s interesting to contrast the vast arena the men’s inventions seem to attempt to encompass with the far more practical and personal approach this woman took.
Videotex originated in the UK in the late 1960s. It turned into what we thought of as Teletext and Prestel, which when the specifications were first issued was in fact ahead of what could be practically achieved at the time on a domestic terminal. The screen was forty columns wide and I think twenty-five lines deep, and guidelines for composition included the stipulation that paragraphs should be no more than four lines long, which is equivalent to a hundred and sixty characters, similar to Twitter in the pre-Trump era (oh, those halcyon days!). Since there was also a line between each paragraph and the graphics, and there also needed to be room on the screen for the graphics, and also every time a text effect was needed such as a colour change and double height a character space had to be skipped, it didn’t leave much for information. Even so, it’s notable that the nature of the content had to be altered to make it more manageable. I haven’t attempted to read an entire book on a 40×25 text screen. This format was later adopted by the BBC Micro to enable it to access both teletext services and software downloads via the TV aerial. Later still, Tangerine computers developed the Oric-1, which was supposed to be a Spectrum killer, but rather than catching on as such it ended up in the unexpected position of forming the basis of a French machine called the Telestrat, which was oriented around online communication via the telephone system, due to its very teletext-like text screen.
At around the same time as the beginning of Videotex, Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg, in 1971, with the US Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Bible. This was motivated by a desire to give back, having been given some storage space on a computer at his university. There’s so much in the commons and motivated by altruism which built the more positive aspects of the world of today. These books would have been accessed via CRT monitors with a wider screen, but green on black and monochrome. It’s difficult to read from such a screen, leading to fatigue and eye strain, which means that people probably would’ve read only short passages at a time even though the number of characters per screen would have reached about two thousand, translating to around five hundred words, by this point. The limitations of having to use an actual television tube would not have applied in that respect at least. But it’s still difficult to read off an old-style CRT. I used to find it made me irritable and I imagine it triggered seizures in some people. However, one big advantage of a CRT was that it was equally bright from any viewing angle, which was not the case with LCD flat screens as they relied on polarised light and ended up needing non-transparent electronics to support the pixels, leading to them appearing like a grid rather than a smooth display.
I just want to mention one more prehistoric ebook system, this time from 1980, because it illustrates something significant about the physicality of the devices involved. This is the US Defense Departments Personal Electronic Aid to Maintenance:
The US Department of Defense’s “Personal Electronic Aid to Maintenance”. Wikimedia Commons
This is clunky and rather large, and it has a kind of physical presence to it which modern ebook readers lack. A physical book has substantial weight and size. Church Bibles and the Encyclopædia Britannica come to mind here although the early editions of the latter were quite small per tome. They feel like Serious Business in a way a Kobo or Kindle don’t. The above device was just for manuals for military equipment as far as I can tell, but considering the seriousness and weight military grade stuff has, it has a similar kind of aura. If you took one of these out and read ‘War And Peace’ on it, it would seem strangely appropriate, although its capabilities are largely obscure to me.
Copyright status unknown, illustrative purposes only, will be removed on request.
I wasn’t planning to turn this into a history of ebooks here so I’m going to skip forward. In the late 1990s, the ability to produce paper-like displays which use reflected light became feasible and this led to the first ereader as we would recognise them today, the Rocketbook, seen above. Something about the frame and the minimalism of the controls appeals to me here, that makes it feel more like a book, or perhaps even a painting – a work of art. I can imagine it also had a fair amount of heft to it. I have to say also that from an ecological perspective the idea of electronic paper is very appealing because of the low power required to maintain it, and there are late ereaders which will even continue to display the final page viewed after being turned off. Practically zero power consumption, in other words. Today’s ereaders still have that sometimes, but like many other bits of kit today they tend to gravitate towards mobile phones, which in this case means they’re tablets. I have a Kindle Fire, and although I read ebooks on it, I think of it as a tablet. I also wish I wasn’t supporting Amazon, and I’ll go into that in a bit.
It’s significant that there is now a division between the “software”, in this case the content of the ebooks on the device, and the devices themselves. I only ever thought of the Guide as an “electronic book”, in the words of Ford Prefect. With “DON’T PANIC” written in large friendly letters on the cover it was only ever going to be a display device for the stored content inside it, although this was somewhat modified as the series continued. There was no distinction between the book and its text, as it were. You couldn’t use it for anything else, except perhaps for eating your sandwiches off it. It was iconic enough to form the centre piece of the entire epic adventure in time and space, as an integrated product. However, looking at the Infocom version (later part of Activision) above, it can also be used as a calendar, clock, calculator, tan guide and “salad slasher”. I feel this takes it away from the original vision to some extent, but it’s clearly a satire on creeping featurism, though at a time before most people seemed to be aware of the issue. In the original, it was the towel which was more useful, even being modded sometimes to increase its utility. The Guide is not a towel.
This raises an issue with ereaders used as apps rather than dedicated devices, and there’s a further issue that a whole library is stored on an ereader or perhaps online nowadays. I use my Kindle as a radio, music player, TV set, calculator, star chart and all sorts of other things, and of course I also use the web browser and social media apps. It has the same kind of clutteredness to it as much experience via devices has these days, and that interferes with focus, attention span and concentration. I don’t think you even have to use the other apps for this to happen. You’re aware that they’re there, and that in principle you could close the book and “go” elsewhere at any time. The fact that I watch TV programmes and films, and perhaps even more YouTube with its own ephemeral tendencies and speed of delivery, through the very same display as I read ebooks is probably not conducive to taking them seriously. I currently have eight and a half dozen ebooks on the Kindle, and although I have read lots of them, I’ve also abandoned quite a few in mid-flow and gone on to buy more before continuing, although to be honest I’ve also tended to do that with paper books.
Research has compared physical and electronic books. I myself considered writing a dissertation comparing word processed, typed and written documents, though it came to nothing, back in 1989 – I abandoned it because the department required everything to be typed and preferred word processed documents. As that suggests, this is nothing new. Before I go there, I want to ask you some questions. You have now read a little over two thousand words, a zagier and a third if we’re going to stick to duodecimal, on, I presume, a screen of some description. How do you feel about it? How is it different from reading it in a magazine or a book? What would it be like if this had been handwritten, on a scroll, in a codex (a spined book) or on sheets of paper? I once wrote an essay using till receipts. How would that be? And is what you’re doing now similar to reading an ebook?
Paper books have corners, thickness, the ability to have bookmarks shoved in them, pages, page numbers and so forth. They’re also bound, sometimes in boards or, unfortunately, leather, and have spines, and they can have appreciable weight. I don’t know, but I imagine that when paperbacks first came out they were not taken as seriously as hardbacks. Nonetheless we did adjust. However, it’s been found that even people for whom electronic forms of communication and presenting text are familiar, ebooks don’t work as well as paper ones. It definitely isn’t just a generational thing. Ebooks are harder to navigate due to their lack of physicality, and their text can reflow easily. It may be a feature rather than a bug, but when I “flick” back to a previous page on the Kindle, I often find it’s been presented in a different format so that, say, a chapter which previously started at the top of a page now starts halfway down, and this takes me out of the immersive experience because it makes it ontic – the ebook reader becomes a tool whose encumbrance draws my attention negatively to its existence like a wet or smeary pair of spectacles. It is genuinely harder to navigate around in an ebook because of this absense of physical cues. As you work your way through a codex, you’re gradually assembling a sketchy map of the book in a way which either can’t be done with an ebook or is dependent on different cues such as the scroll bar. It’s even been suggested that ebooks open like a codex and have sides which inflate and deflate according to where you are in the text, which calls Robles to mind.
Humans didn’t evolve in situations where actual reading was necessary for survival, so the skills we use to do so are cobbled together from other abilities which were. Consequently, when we look at text we’re engaging with what we perceive as objects arranged in a particular way. Studies show that when reading cursive or ideographic script, we engage our motor cortices and subliminally imagine our hands writing out the characters concerned. Sarada would probably confirm that I unconsciously tend to write my thoughts in the air with my fingers at times. This is less true of printed text, but does highlight the physical element of reading. We mirror the act of reading with subliminal writing, probably because we physically engage with the text, and it’s harder to do so when it’s on a screen.
All of this brings to mind the possibility of entering into virtual reality to read an ebook. The popular astronomy program Celestia is generally a kind of graphics engine for three-dimensional exploration of the Cosmos, but it only lends itself to that and even though it was designed for those purposes, it includes a secret add-on for diary-writing. This creates a codex containing text from a file which is hidden at the centre of the Sun. It would be interesting to engage with that book and compare it to reading the same text purely off a screen sans accoutrements.
It’s been shown that students reading PDFs, which are more like physical books than ebooks are, tend to have difficulty finding information, and particularly returning to it, within a text than they do with codices. It’s also common for people to print out PDFs if they want to read them in more depth, but there’s still a problem there if you then have a stack of single-sided paper to read. Not only does it seem wasteful, but it also gives it a kind of disposable quality which binding removes. There’s also no recto/verso arrangement to remember, which would help you find the right bits. Ereaders, so far as I know, don’t even allow you to print the text out or copy-paste it so it can be, which would in any case be laborious and time-consuming.
The separation of device from content confers the same kind of disposable essence to a text as printing out a PDF. The ereader in front of you is not the book. It’s only pretending to be the book for the time being. This is why the Guide would be a better ebook than one stored in an ereader. Another approach I saw suggested once was in the series ‘The Mighty Micro’, broadcast in the early 1980s, which envisaged the texts being stored on ROM cartridges like games or software, which could be slotted into the ereader and had the branding of the books themselves on them. This, I think, would’ve worked well although it’s anachronistic in today’s online world. My tendency not to read through a whole ebook is probably partly due to this ephemeral nature and partly down to not constantly knowing where I am in the text and how much longer I need to persist. On the other hand, as David Lodge pointed out when contrasting cinema and codices, this makes it easier to surprise the reader and reflects our own lives, where we generally don’t know how long we’ve got left to live.
Reading a physical book also builds stronger associations externally than an ebook. I can remember the spine of C S Lewis’s ‘Voyage Of The Dawn Tr?der’ cracking and the pages falling out, and the fact that it had a typo on either the cover or the running heading meaning that I still don’t know if it’s ‘Dawn Trader’ or ‘Dawn Treader’. I recall that the last page of ‘Alice In Wonderland’ was missing and I didn’t read it until years later, and that the coupon for ordering the LP of ‘Don’t Panic’ was at the back of the first Hitch-Hiker’s book, overlapping with the last two lines of the page and necessitating my mother writing those two lines at the top of that page when I cut it out and posted it. I can remember that A E van Vogt’s story ‘The Sound’ is spelt ‘The Soond’ on the penultimate page on the running heading of my copy. All of these help to make the stories more memorable to me. There’s also when and where I read something, and how I got hold of it. I recall the incessant stamping of library books I pored over as a child, and the location on the shelves of the mysterious third Alice book. I don’t think any of this carries through to the ebook experience. I can reorganise the order of books in my Kindle library with a single tap of my finger. Reorganising a bookcase is a considerably more engaging and time-consuming activity. ‘A Woman In Your Own Right’ has a reflective cover so that if a woman picks it up, she becomes the cover illustration. Another book has glasspaper covers so that it can’t be put on the shelf without damaging its neighbours or the bookcase. Brian Stableford’s ‘A History Of The Third Millennium’ hardback edition has a hologram of either a sprig of acorns or an ammonite fossil on the front. None of these things are currently possible with ebooks.
But I’m not here to bury ebooks. I also want to praise them. As I’ve said, I do have a Kindle Fire and although I have no Kobo I do have Kobo ebooks which I read via a laptop app. I am both aware and extremely bothered about Amazon’s ethical record and do generally avoid buying anything physical from them, but I do download Kindle ebooks from them. I realise this too swells their coffers, and I’m not offering any more excuse for that than the usual one that the system has to change, but using ebooks means they haven’t been transported and fewer physical resources have been consumed to produce them. Not none, and there’s the embodied energy in the device itself and the various no doubt dodgy things Amazon do extends to their ebooks in one way or another, but I myself have an ebook or two on Amazon so I’m to a very limited degree exploited by them too. I’m tempted to go off on one here about Amazon’s exceedingly dubious politics and ethics, particularly regarding workers’ rights, but instead I will resist the temptation and make this point: I do not believe in the system which has enabled any such organisation to reach such power and wealth, and there’s an aspect of boycotting, which I very avidly do, which is a kind of guilt-tripping distraction from the actual unethical practices of the company itself. However, it still feels like Amazon owns all the ebooks in my library because it could cut me off at any point, and it’s notable that there doesn’t seem to be a Kobo app for the Kindle, which is probably the least surprising fact in history.
Ebooks appeal to minimalism. I’m currently sitting in a room which, like several others in this house, contains hundreds of books, and they’re a fait accompli of course, and they have intrinsic value absent from ebooks, but in order to achieve a degree of compactness in one’s life it would help in future if I acquired as many books as possible in electronic form. But I would like to have those books physically stored in a device. To an extent I’ve achieved this, because a while ago I took a large number of books which are out of copyright but widely available, such as ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and the complete works of Shakespeare, to the charity shop and have them as text files, PDFs or HTML documents stored locally, but I have also bought a number of life sciences textbooks in physical form recently. I also have some illustrated Kindle ebooks which I view by plugging the laptop into the 70 cm TV screen rather than on the laptop or tablet, and this helps.
What would help even more would be for the spirit that led Michael Hart to found Project Gutenberg still to be alive, well and dominant on the internet, so that we could actually own ebooks, perhaps paid for, and not have them kind of lent to us by Amazon and others. That said, even with that situation, there are identifiable and persistent drawbacks to ebooks still experienced by the current generation which do not depend at all on unfamiliarity with technology.
Just to warn you: much of this is going to sound seriously delusional.
You could be forgiven for scepticism about Mandela Effects (MEs) and there is a case for confabulation. My approach to other people who report widely held collective memories which differ drastically from those of others is to try to adopt an active listening approach rather than something which might be seen as closer to a scientific one, because often the claim that the world has almost flawlessly shifted around them and therefore that evidence is no longer available to test their beliefs means that it would be unfair to apply the scientific method. There’s rationality and there’s the scientific method, and the two are not the same. This means that certain positions which could be rationally believed but not tested are not only excluded from science, as they should be, but also deprecated because they can’t be fitted into science. That’s different from them not being true.
My definition of the Mandela Effect is that it’s a widely held memory discrepancy. One group of people, often not in prior contact with each other, agree that a certain observable thing, often a memory, was not the way another group of people remember it to be. It’s named after the common experience that many people appear to remember that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, which led to a successful revolution to overthrow apartheid. In “fact”, Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, became president of South Africa and died in 2013. There is an element of the idea that one is entitled to one’s own facts about this, and it’s easy to illustrate examples of how this might happen with agreement between the people who are “wrong”. I always think of the Welsh placename Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch with the four consecutive L’s towards the end. It’s a difficult name to remember and if one knew little about the Welsh language and therefore couldn’t make sense of what it means, one could easily remember that there was a different number of L’s at that point, and it’s also possible that a large number of people might remember it that way.
I want to make a couple of observations in this post about the nature of my own MEs and what the existence of MEs might suggest about the nature of reality. Some people believe they have
Imagine for a second that a ring of ants is crawling, almost vertically, down a white mug with a red handle on one side and a blue one on the other. At the top, they will have approximately the same experience although most printed designs on the mug would lead to some discrepancies which, however, could be reconciled by interviewing the ants about their experience. Yes, these are unusually anthropomorphised ants. When they reach the level of the handles, some of them will crawl over the red handle, some over the blue one and some will continue to walk over the main body of the cup. When they reach the bottom, unaware of their different paths, they will have different memories of the past. Some of them will remember crawling over a blue surface, some over a red one, and some over a white one. Nonetheless, all of these memories are accurate.
We are living at a time of particularly strong connectivity between people and new opportunities to compare experiences. We assume that the worlds of other people are somewhat similar to our own. However, it isn’t clear that knowledge, as it were, forms a united whole or that there is an objective world out there to be observed. There are, for instance, discrepancies between how leech experts and other annelid experts classify leeches and discrepancies between psychological and educational approaches to learning. Maybe they’re all true. Maybe the world is not a simply-connected surface like a plane or a sphere, but, as it were, has “handles”. This would lead to an underlying truth about the nature of reality becoming obscure.
Belief in the Mandela Effect is easily stigmatised and it’s also true that many people who do believe in it have other unpopular opinions. However, delusional people often tend to have few false negatives in their belief systems. Someone might falsely imagine they are a targeted individual, but if their partner really is cheating on them they’re more likely to notice. Likewise, there may be a load of discredited and unusual beliefs also held by people who believe in the ME, but to argue that this makes the ME itself dubious could be a form of the ad hominem fallacy. I’ve gone into my detailed arguments on the ME here and in several other places on this blog. What I don’t do is link these beliefs of mine to anything else which is widely held but poorly supported. I realise this leaves me out on a limb, but I’m used to that. My views on panpsychism do as well. So be it.
The signal to noise ratio with respect to MEs may be very low and I deliberately avoid considering most of the pop culture ones such as Isaiah 11:6. It could even be argued that my own MEs are that only by name because they are not very widely held. The situation is in fact that I share the beliefs I’m about to mention with two other people I know face to face. One of them is someone who lived in the same village as me when I was a child. The other is someone who lived two counties away from me, whom I first met when I was nineteen and we only realised we had the same discrepancies during the ‘noughties. In both cases, the person concerned mentioned the discrepancies to me before I mentioned them to them and there was also a permanent written record of the discrepancies I made in the early 1980s written down in a notebook in a sealed box in the loft of my parents’ home which as far as I know nobody else has seen. Therefore, the possibility that my memories were modified by the interaction or my own recall is not plausible, and the possibility that either person who shares them was playing a prank is also pretty unlikely. I’m not aware that either of them was ever in the attic of my parents’ house and nor can I think of any reason why either of them would be.
These are the memories:
A domestic robot was developed between 1971 and 1975 which was able to do simple household tasks and read text aloud.
A much simpler robot, resembling a planetarium projector, was installed as an exhibition in the London Science Museum. It was able to follow movement, heat and light, and was run using cultured mole neurons as a controlling device.
In 1977, a method was devised to assess children’s intelligence at the age of eleven which involved the use of magnetic devices to scan their brains and they were then sorted into selective and non-selective schools on the strength of the results. This led to a scandal when it emerged that there was no evidence to support its accuracy.
Domestic recycling was routine by 1972.
A technique was developed to neutralise toxic waste and convert it into two components, one like wet sand and the other a clear liquid, which was then used in municipal building projects. After a few years, people began to suffer severe health problems such as cancer from exposure to the waste, which was in fact not neutralised at all. I think this was supposed to be an alternative to landfill. It also led to a scandal when it became clear how many people had died or fallen ill as a result of this practice.
The northern part of Wisconsin and Michigan broke away from their respective states in the late 1970s and formed a new fifty-first US state.
There are a number of oddities about these memories. One is that they don’t closely resemble the usual MEs because they have major consequences, which are of course not evident because they “didn’t happen”. For instance, two of them involve national scandals which had a big impact on thousands of people. In fact, several of these are linked by something like a major popular campaign. After some investigation, it turned out that there has been a movement to carve out a new US state from northern Michigan and Wisconsin, although this wasn’t widely known in the UK and doesn’t correspond to the fact that I saw newspaper headlines and magazine articles about this actually happening, in early 1979. The toxic waste and 11+ scandals share this feature, and it makes it all the more difficult to resolve. Then, the domestic recycling and toxic waste MEs are both connected to waste management. Finally, there is a link involving neurology between the Science Museum robot and the 11+ scandal, and a robotic link between the first two MEs I mentioned.
The question is then what to make of these links. The existence of scandals doesn’t seem to be a causal connection, although if there were to be a concerted attempt to suppress memories this would explain that. However, that way madness lies. It’s basically Targeted Individual territory, so I have to reject that idea for its sheer delusional status, and I also know that TIs correlate perfectly with people with delusional disorders in well-designed studies, so I can reject that explanation as referring to an external reality. The “planetarium robot” is oddly specific because it mentions the species of animal from which the nerve cells were, unfortunately, derived. I was reminded of all this by the news I wrote about here, but this is something happening in the mid-’70s when it was presumably not yet possible to grow mammalian brain cells in vitro, let alone organise them to the extent that they could control a robot. Distasteful though it is, cockroach brains have been used for this kind of thing, but again fairly recently.
What does it mean that there are thematic links? I can think of three possibilities and I’ll mention the boring one first. The boring one is that my mind, and those of the other two people, made connections on a similar theme regarding robots, neurology, waste management and political scandals. The last one is somewhat odd for children to be thinking about, but the scandals didn’t happen until the 1980s. A second possibility is that this was some kind of fake news project directed at children which led to us getting that impression which was somehow not available to adults, perhaps through ‘Newsround’ on children’s television. Possibly just a prank. However, I don’t perceive this as being entirely received through such channels. Memory is of course unreliable. The third possibility is the most intriguing and the closest to some of the most popular speculations about how MEs happen. The first three are all to do with information processing, either by machines or biological means. There could have been a single scientific discovery or technological innovation which led to all of them. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (now known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI) signals were first detected from human subjects in the late 1950s, and imaging was achieved in 1973. The scan in question might in any case have been done by electroencephalogram, in which case it could’ve been achieved much earlier. But there’s an interesting further connection here.
Commonly, people who believe in MEs as significant beyond being mere misremembering or confabulation see them as evidence that we’re living in a simulation or moving between parallel universes. I’ve discussed the simulation argument elsewhere, and I reject the idea of people moving between parallel universes because I don’t think personal identity is sufficiently cohesive for that to be possible. I do, however, believe that unusual brain states of certain kinds can lead to “crossed wires” between different versions of a person in different timelines and consequent acquisition of memories which have occurred for one of them but not the other. Although it’s difficult to imagine how significant quantum effects can occur in the warm, wet and rather large objects which constitute our brains, this still feels like the best explanation to me, and in fact I think the content of my memories supports this. If there is actually an alternate timeline nearby where brain science was advanced enough in the 1970s for the apparent false memories to have happened, it seems likely that there would be more people with unusual brain states of that kind in that timeline which would effectively lead to memories of it being transferred.
Yes, I am aware that this is an utterly bizarre explanation, but its weirdness makes it appeal to this brain. The initial reason I wrote these anomalies down was to use them as a basis for a creative writing project, as by that point I’d become aware that they didn’t appear to correspond to reality and therefore were suitable for use. I think I can still do that regardless of the plausibility of my explanation, and maybe if I do, I will find other people who also have these memories.
A Box Of Chocolates 