Stanislaw Lem and the the possibility of communicating with aliens - a brief critique

I suspect everyone finds some writers to be beyond serious reproach.  I suppose for some people, that's quite a lot of writers.  For me, there are only a few.  Stanislaw Lem is one of them.  Lem is the writer I sometimes want to be - but only sometimes.  There is a bleak cynicism to his writing that I don't care to emulate and I know that he became a technophobe - I have a feeling that his life in some ways mirrored his fiction with the impossibility of real communication between people.  In Solaris, he wrote, "If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently."  I believe that could be adapted.  "If Lem had more of a sense of humor, his books might have turned out differently."  Even where his books are funny, they're not fun.  He wasn't that kind of writer.  I don't hold this against him, not by any means, however.  Fun wasn't important to him as a writer.

He is almost unique in sci-fi writers in having come up with an idea that actually bears scrutiny.  Unlike almost all sci-fi writers, who are generally an ideal of the moment kind of guys, writing about whatever techno-philosophical idea is in vogue at the moment, Lem really has legs.  He writes about the difficulties in communication between humans and aliens.  In his books, first contact fails.  We just don't have anything to say to one another, nor a vocabulary to describe it.  I have no idea if Lem was influenced by Wittgenstein, but all of his characters violate the final words of The Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus - "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  The characters speak, but there is no content, because of the lack of shared experiences between species.

Moreover, I find in his work this very Orwellian idea that communication between humans is fraught with peril.  Between people who don't mean what they say because they're lying, people who don't say what they mean because they're ignorant, and people who don't say what they mean because they're incompetent . . . how do we talk to each other, again? 

I also find all of this a backhanded critique of Master Kong's assertion that the first question is always the rectification of names.  Before we speak, we've got to be sure our words mean the same thing.  In Lem, they often do not.

In other words, what Lem addresses is well-worn ground.  People from the ancient days to our own have questioned the efficacy of communication and the uses of communication.  And we think we can talk to aliens?  It is to laugh.

That said, I think I found a weakness in Lem's work and it is in the rectification of names.  What do we mean by communication?  I think it's possible that we will never share stories around a campfire, but I don't see the impossibility of successful feedback driven modes of informational exchange.  I think it's possible that we'll do something and, based on what we do, the aliens will do something and we'll be able to learn about the aliens thereby - if nothing else, what they do when we do what we do.

I think, furthermore, that we have a fair bit of experience dealing with things that have non-human forms of communication - like fire.  No, hear me out.  Fire has many of the characteristics of life.  It can grow, it eats, it produces waste, it can expand itself, diminish, all kinds of very life-like traits.  It is not sentient but we can engage fire.  We can lessen it's fuel and see what it does, change its fuel, cut it off altogether or rekindle it.  This kind of engagement is not considered communication merely because we have a predisposition to imagine that fire isn't alive because it doesn't bear sufficient similarity to ourselves.

I admit, this is Marxist inspired.  We learn about things according to what we can do with them - but I will add as we shape them, they shape us.  

For instance, the domestication of dogs.  The current theory holds that humans and dogs sorta . . . grew together.  Unlike almost any other animal, humans didn't decide to tame wolves and turn them into dogs.  A symbiotic, language-less relationship developed between wolves and humans - humans followed wolves to find game, the wolves fed off of our leavings, and this became a successful mode of behavior that created a positive feedback loop.  It was a kind of communication, wordless and inhuman, but substantial and real - each side learned from the other, though they certainly learned different lessons.

I don't see why this isn't possible with even very alien aliens.  (Though I will hold that it could be extraordinarily dangerous.  Wolves don't have planet destroying technologies and there's a fifty-fifty chance that the first aliens we meet will have such technologies, I feel.)  Through our mutual interactions, no matter what they are, because what we do effects the aliens and what they do effects us, that is a kind of communication.  Even if, as in Solaris, there is no set pattern of repetition - if we do A, B does not follow - even that teaches us.

I also reject the idea that we can't think non-human thoughts - or at least approximations of non-human thoughts.  This came to me, specifically, today.  I was laying down, thinking, and I started thinking about the way that computers use fuzzy logic.

To a human, fuzzy logic is, well, fuzzy.  It involves the participation of a set in multiple values.  In many ways, it is the native human method of thinking.  We understand that a person with an average height is somewhere between short and tall, that a thousand dollars is somewhere between being broke and being rich, in a unity of thought.

Computers, on the other hand, can't really do this.  By their design, all computers do nothing more than boolean operations.  Our native understanding of in-between states is not boolean.  Most people don't have any real experience with boolean algebra, after all!  Likewise, the specific interactions of human brains do not appear to be boolean logic gates.  There is simply no reason to imagine that human brains operate according to the mechanisms of boolean operations.

Yet, computers can approximate this knowing-ness that we humans possess organically through fuzzy logic databases interpreted by those boolean operations.  The process contextless data according to the programmed dictates of logic gates.  That's it.  Yet . . . there is communication.

It is fair, at this point, to point out that computers are human tools invented by humans for humans.  Absolutely.  I'm not saying that talking to an alien will be so simple, but use this to illustrate the point that naive human intuition can in some ways be understood by the quite non-human reasoning of boolean operations.  While admitting it's an approximation, and admitting all language is an approximation, I continue to assert it's better than nothing.  Which is, I think, the point of divergence from Lem.  

In short, I think that the people studying Solaris learned quite a bit.

However, this is a very . . . nuanced criticism of Lem's work.  Mostly the guy just blows me out of the water. 

Little known and never enforced MMA rule against foul and abusive language

There's been a lot of hay made over whether Anderson Silva was "disrespectful" of Chris Weidman.  I've argued, and I think pretty well, that, yeah, that Silva disrespected Weidman but as an intentional ploy.  That his hands down wasn't so much a sign of arrogance, but an attempt to drawn Weidman into a striking match where Silva thought he'd have the advantage.  But, without doubt, mocking your opponent openly is pretty disrespectful and it isn't the first time that Silva has done it.

However, MMA's rules are not particularly well enforced.  Unknown to almost everyone, including, it appears, both MMA referees and the president of the UFC, is a rule that says, using abusive language in the fenced ring or fighting area is a foul. 

I don't know what Silva said.  Vitor Belfort didn't like it, but he didn't specify and I don't speak Portuguese.  I do, however, speak English and a bunch of fighters use abusive language in the cage.  I'm lookin' at you, Diaz brothers.  They do it openly.  Just watch their fights and even though you can't see them, it doesn't take that much lip reading to see them calling their opponents pussies, bitches, punks, faggots and various other swear words, like fuck, that are generally regarded as abusive.  I don't know if Silva used abusive language - though it certainly looked like he did - but I do know that MMA . . . ignores it's own rules in this regard with great regularity.

More importantly than the question of whether or not Silva was disrespectful of Weidman, there's the issue of whether his behavior in that fight, and fights past, qualifies as a foul.  I'm pretty sure that could be determined.

For my own part, I don't really care if fighters swear at each other.  I find it slightly distasteful but I don't think it's a big deal.  However, what I hate is when rules are enforced selectively and we have the idiocy of seeing the president of the biggest MMA organization in the world pretending he doesn't know what "respect" is in the context of martial arts.  If there's a rule, enforce it.  If you don't want it to be a rule, take it out.  While you're at it, allow knee strikes to the heads of downed opponents.  That'll also clear up a bunch of messes and be awesome.

More BBC nonsense - their inability to understand what "murder" is

The BBC has a story, "Leaked report reveals Pakistan failures on Bin Laden", that says something everyone knows - a lot of people in Pakistan helped protect Bin Laden.  Duh.

But one of the things they say is, "A version of the report leaked to al-Jazeera says the killing of Bin Laden by US forces was a 'criminal act of murder' ordered by the US president."

Well, yes, when you send in your special forces into a country we are supposed to be allies with and those people then shoot an old man dead, yes, that's a criminal act of murder.  That's just fact.  It doesn't matter of it's Bin Laden or a sweet little old lady - the US President ordered troops into a country we are supposed to be allied with and they killed someone.  The designation of "enemy combatant" - even were it not a farcical term - does not give Obama the legal right to order executions in a foreign country with whom we are at peace.  What the US did is, indisputably, a criminal act of murder if you're actually bothering to go by the normal standards of international law.

(If you don't see that, do a little thought experiement and imagine how outraged people in the US would be if China send commandos into Nebraska where they then killed a murderer of Chinese people.  We wouldn't care if the guy was guilty.  It would be an intolerable violation of our sovereignty.  Everyone knows that China has no right to send soldiers into the United States to kill people, no matter who that person is, no matter if the Chinese government had designated that person an enemy of the people.  Just because Pakistan can't retaliate doesn't change the law.  It was just as illegal and immoral for us to kill Bin Laden in Pakistan as it would be for Chinese soldiers to kill an admittedly guilty person on US soil.)

The inability of newspapers to say things that are obvious and true is quite amazing.

We need a new word for people who work against the public trust within the boundaries of law; criticism of dismissing conspiracy theorists

To me, conspiracy theorizing is pretty weird because when you look at the definition of a conspiracy it's obvious we're surrounded by them once you strip out the risible language.  But it's hard to do because the risible language is built in.

A conspiracy is, according to thefreedictionary.com, 1. an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful or subversive act, 2. a group of conspirators, 3. Law an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action and 4. a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

That's . . . a pretty loaded definition because it leaves out of the realms of conspiracy anything that isn't illegal and even by the fourth definition, “as if by sinister design”. Conspiracy is, by a common dictionary, by definition at least sinister and usually illegal.

Going to thesaurus.com, I tried to find a word that was like conspiracy but accounted for things that were not illegal – like the word whose definition is “people working together inside the law but against the public welfare”. In a note to the entry “collusion”, they note that “cooperation is always positive, collaboration is positive except in wartime (working with the enemy) and collusion is always negative (working together in secret for a dishonest purpose)”. Conspiracy is a synonym with collude.  There didn't seem to be anything like I was looking for.

Yet, I find that unsatisfying, too, because there are all kinds of behaviors that are legal but nevertheless highly manipulative, such as advertising and propaganda (which is just advertising with a political message we don't like, really – how is the manipulations of North Korea propaganda but what comes out of our smear-happy, negative campaigning, lie-athon that we call an electoral process NOT propaganda?). There just seems to be no word, other than conspiracy, to describe when a group of people, often totally legally and with legal ends, nevertheless engage in unethical behavior to achieve their ends.

So what do we call a group of people who legally lie (and often their lies form the very basis of law) to achieve their ends that are destructive and terrible yet totally legal?

To take a fairly extreme example, how does one talk about the lies and distortions used to start the Crusades. A letter from the Byzantine Emperor asking for mercenaries was turned into a lurid account of Turks murdering Christians and desecrating the tomb of Jesus. None of it was illegal. One could argue that the Catholic Church and various governments that supported the narrative of the Crusades were simply interpreting a complex political situation in terms that could be understood by their illiterate and uncultured knights and peasants.  Sure, it's specious reasoning, but you could make it and just barely not be laughably wrong.

Yet, somehow, the lies spread by Pope Urban II and the kings of Europe do not fit the definition of “conspiracy” because it wasn't illegal or subversive. What was it, then? Just religion?

But a lot of politics and business is like that. What they do is not technically illegal and, honest, there was no malice of intent. Even with the credit default swap stuff that tanked the economy in 2008. Not a conspiracy. Sure, there was a coordinated effort by every top bank in the world to sell as many credit default swaps as possible all to increase their own personal fortunes, but that's not a conspiracy! That's just business.

But it happens again and again. Every bubble in the history of the modern world has been engineered to benefit a few. Every war has it's winners, usually the guys who sell guns. Yet when a military contractor uses political influence to shape an aggressive foreign policy, it's not a conspiracy. Nothing either illegal nor subversive is going on. It's just politics.

There is a lacuna in our language then. If we use the word conspiracy to talk about political, religious and economic manipulation, we're called paranoid because the events we describe aren't illegal or subversive. There is no well-round word with which we can describe the legal forms of manipulation of our culture, business and politics that also describes the profundity with which the system is controlled by small cabals of like-minded individuals. Legally. Openly.

This really benefits the, oh, let's call them special interest groups that control our government. We can't really refer to their multifaceted, yet legal, manipulations of the public trust in language that does justice to the seriousness of their actions. And we can't talk about something unless we have words that substantially describe what it is we're talking about. In this lacuna of words, a lot of manipulation is not discussed. Worse, when people dare call it conspiracy – because the behavior resembles a conspiracy save for it's legality – the very idea that this kind of collusion occurs at all is attacked. People who bring up the concentration of power in a tiny group of people's hands are just crazy conspiracy theorists.

We need a word to describe the legal manipulations of the system against the public trust, one that conveys the seriousness of the issue but does not bring to mind the specter of conspiracy. Until we have such a word, the people out there who are acting together, within the system, but against the public trust will have an easy go at it because we can't even TALK about them.

Googling "sorcery drugs" and the weird fundie Christian BS I found

I recently had opportunity to google the term “sorcery drugs” because I am running a role-playing game which will feature a magical drug.  (FYI, if you google "magic drug", you basically get a ton of stuff about mushrooms.) It was pretty interesting. For a number of years, I have broadly theorized that the hostility that our society has towards psychedelic drugs is because they give a feeling of spirituality that religion doesn't; therefore, religion is threatened by psychedelic drugs because if you can get a more legitimately spiritual feeling LSD or psylocybin than religion, well, why the hell do we need popes and reverends and priests?

The first post is titled “Let Us Reason”. It does nothing of the sort. It creates a specious argument that the Greek word pharmakia is identical to “sorcery”. This sorta ignores that the Greek word for sorcery is “μαγεία”, or “mageia” from which we get the word magic, duh, going way back to the Persian priestly caste, the magi. Pretty much all the Greek words for magic have this root. The word for drugs (φάρμακα), is etymologically unrelated to the word that Greeks, ancient or modern, used for magic.

However, crazy fundie Christian websites rarely use something as irrelevant as facts deter from their screeds.

If it was just one website, I wouldn't give a damn. But the second page is “does sorcery refer to drug use – Bibleforums Christian Message Board” and then “Drugs and Sorcery in the Last Days”. Then, “Drugs and the Bible” then “Psychotropic Drugs = Pharmakia = Sorcery – Talk Jesus”. Then, a little hidden, is “Pharmakeia: the Abuse of Drugs” but the Google highlight reads “Pharmakeia (sorcery) . . .”, and then “Drugs & the Christian – The Victorious Network” . . .

I think I've made my point. When you google “sorcery drugs”, the first page is almost entirely discussion about how taking psychedelic drugs, in particular, is the same as Biblical sorcery.

As I said, this is linguistically ridiculous. While medicine and magic, in primitive societies, has considerable overlap, the Greek word for sorcery has no particular magical connotation. It's a bunch of bullshit. The ancient Greeks knew medicinal drugs had no particular connection to sorcery. Not to go too much into ancient Greek magical beliefs, but they heavily involved invoking gods in distinction to medical drugs which worked regardless of beliefs, prayers or invocations.

It also demonstrates the theological preposterousness of any Biblical interpretation. What they're grappling with is intoxication. The Bible is pretty much against intoxication but all the Biblical references are pretty wine-based. You read the Bible in a fairly literal sense, the only mind-altering drug they mention is wine. It's like the Iron Age Hebrews were ignorant of any other mind-altering substance. So, a fairly “normal” reading of the Bible could easily lead one to think that the only drug that the Bible talks about is wine while it is equally clear that one can be intoxicated through numerous channels.

So what is a crazy Bible person to do? The less crazy of them would go, “Well, the Bible was written by Iron Age people ignorant of drugs other than wine, but the reasoning for forbidding intoxication should logically extend to all intoxicants”. But this creates a problem for people who think the Bible is a divine work (not to mention the bit in Genesis when God says that we own all the plants and stuff). While it's true that Iron Age Hebrews were ignorant of the numerous ways to get intoxicated, GOD would be in on all the ways one can can get fucked up. Yet, the Bible is written as if no one involved had any idea that there were other intoxicants. To admit that one must extend the reasoning of the Bible towards things about which the Bible does not say sorta says that God wrote a shitty book that didn't take into account future discoveries of intoxicants, that the Bible is not perfect because God knew that you could get fucked up on cannabis, mushrooms and eventually stuff like LSD and MDMA. If you believe that the Bible is perfect, this is a problem.

Not to mention that it's just a little stupid because none of us speak classical Greek. Even if the words for drugs and sorcery, in the Greek language, were the same two thousand years ago, it's just idiotic to try to say that ancient Greek drugs/sorcery have more than a trivial similarity to modern drug culture, pharmacological or black market. So what if a dead language used as one word something that we not have two words to describe? As Nietzsche said, it is interesting that when God wished to speak, He learned Greek and did not learn it better. To wit, the problem of interpretation inevitably remains. Presumably God would know that two thousand years later that classical Greek would be as dead as Elvis and He would see to it his sacred, perfect book did not degrade in meaning as time passed. Yet, it has. It isn't like it would have been a real problem for the Bible to say “sorcery, including the consumption of any intoxicants . . . .” The Bible is not that clear, though. It is written as if the writers honestly do not know there are other intoxicants than wine.

It's much easier, then, to say that the Bible is TOTALLY RIGHT by equating a Greek word for drugs to also mean sorcery. That way, the Biblical injunction against magic applies to drugs THEREFORE the Bible is still perfect.

This is clearly tortured reasoning, but if you're a believer in the inerrant truth of the Bible, you've got to do a lot of weird things to justify your beliefs that run contrary to reason and fact. The truth is there are dozens of drugs that can give a person a spiritual experience vastly more significant than any amount of religion. Most people can pray for a thousand years and never get the same feeling as a few hundred micrograms of LSD. This is profoundly subversive to an organization that is ideologically so delicate that they try to argue that the Greek word for drugs is the same as sorcery.