Epistemology & Eschatology

So, Large Hadron Collider, right? I've been worrying a little bit about this thing for like a year now; Adrian procrastinated until the last minute and did all her worrying about it last night in one big dose. Little did we realize that apparently we have to wait until "late fall" for the first meaningful collisions to happen, which means a few months of endlessly pressing refresh on hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com. I'm not entirely clear on this, but it kind of sounds like the collisions that scientists say are definitely not going to create any black holes or strangelets, these totally-safe collisions might happen at any point during that "late fall, early-winterish" period. That's the type of scientific precision usually reserved for telling your advisor when that dissertation is going to get written. I have some more problems with the vagueness of the timing on this apocalypse, but I'll get to those later. Just in general, having scientists promise you that they thought really hard about it and they decided that their new Definitely-Not-A-Doomsday-Machine will absolutely, positively not destroy all human life is a bit like having your kid's school bus driver assure you that he's spent a lot of time thinking about it and he's definitely 100% positive that he's not going to rape your kids.

So like I said I've been worrying about this for a while now. I've come to some sort of peace with it, but my route to equanimity was a bit roundabout and I suspect that walking you through it will make you more nervous than you already are, if you're prone to that sort of thing. So you might want to skip this post.

So when I first knew that there were any "end of existence" concerns associated with the LHC, I read that a variety of theorists with very different perspectives and opinions had all looked at the issue and concluded that there was no reason to be concerned. But hold on, I said, think about the number of great scientific experiments, particularly in physics, where the results weren't in any way consistent with any prevalent theories of the way the world worked. Like not even that the results ran counter to existing theories, like the results were so far out there and unexpected that existing theories were left holding their dicks and scratching their heads. A paradigm shift, you might say, if you were a Kuhnian (which I'm definitely not, and even Kuhn himself may not have been). Leaving aside debates about how science progresses: just in general, how can we accurately measure the probability of unforeseen consequences? As Don Rumsfeld said, there are known unknowns, and then there are unknown unknowns. So this line of thinking got me a little worried.

So let's posit for a moment that the end of the world might be nigh. When Adrian got all worked up last night, I tried to calm her down by explaining my method for calming myself down when I'm on airplanes that are going through turbulence. I've found that reminding myself that turbulence almost never leads to planes having critical failures doesn't do much to relax me (again, your kid's bus driver "almost never" rapes children). Instead, I pretend that I am going to die, and I try to review my life so far to see if I'm okay with this fact. Did I accomplish as much as I could given my lack of intestinal fortitude? Did I treat people reasonably well given my general lack of moral fiber? The conclusions I draw are rarely very comforting in the existential sense, but for some reason I get very calm about the turbulence. So how did this self-soothing method go over with Adrian? Let's just say she found it wanting.

Why did she find this method so inadequate to the task at hand? It's worth considering the ideas of another Jewish apocalypticist in answering this. I'm talking, of course, about my main man: Jesus H. Christ. Credit for highlighting the fact that Jesus was neither a free-love hippy nor a free-market capitalist but instead a wild-eyed predictor of imminent doom goes to another all-around good guy, Albert Schweitzer (speaking of good guy, isn't there a line from some movie where the heroine is a little drunk and she's saying that all men are putzes, except maybe that Dr. Schweitzer, he seems nice? What movie was that?).

The idea here is that so much of what Jesus preached to his followers could actually be demonstrated to pretty wildly violate the categorical imperative. That is, if everyone started doing what Jesus told his followers to do - abandon their wives and kids, stop working, renounce all property, and travel the land spreading the gospel to others, etc., the world would pretty quickly fall apart and everyone would be utterly miserable. The deep dark secret of Christianity is that from a societal perspective, Jesus' actual commands are not exactly models of sustainability, and they sure as shit are not conducive to civic stability or "family values". Along with a lot of textual evidence that I'm not qualified to discuss, basically Schweitzer (and more recently Bart Ehrman) make a pretty convincing case that Jesus was actually, literally predicting that the world would end in his lifetime. Turns out he was wrong, but it was a ballsy call to make.

But given that his premise turned out to be wildly off-base, how did this crazy Jew's conclusions catch on like such wildfire? To bring it back to grad school, he (perhaps unwittingly) did a little trick that any advisor knows can work miracles in clarifying the minds of his students: he gave them a fake deadline. When someone tells you that your dissertation has to be done in 3 months, suddenly the scales fall from your eyes. You see what is truly important, and what is mere distraction. Suddenly your complacency over the years seems like a terrible mistake that you do not even have time to mourn, because right now you need to bust ass to make it right, before it's too late. Of course, your advisor can only make this trick work if he actually gives you a very specific date and time as your deadline, not if he's like "Oh, try to get it done at some point during the fall, or early winter. Late winter at the latest". THAT IS NOT HELPFUL AT ALL, LHC PEOPLE (and also my advisor).

In any event, the power of this kind of last-minute mental clarity can be seen in other phenomena such as the memento mori, or the Buddhist meditation on loathsomeness (speaking of which, when I read contemplations like the following: "but again, O priests, a priest, if perchance he sees in a cemetery a decaying body being eaten by crows, or being eaten by eagles, or being eaten by vultures, or being eaten by dogs, or being eaten by jackals, or being eaten by various kinds of insects, he compares his own body, saying, "Verily, my body also has this nature, this destiny, and is not exempt," am I alone in thinking of Kenny? Perhaps South Park has depths we're not aware of). These are obviously exercises aimed at provoking a more individualistic self-appraisal and sense of detachment from material things. To me, one of the interesting things about contemplating the apocalypse is that you're forced to consider not just the nubbles on your own soul but rather how we've all been doing (of course, if you're an atheist, a materialist, and a solipsist, then there's no functional difference between your own death and the end of all existence - I'm only 2 out those 3, though).

Of course, figuring out how we've all been doing, there's the rub: for Adrian, for Jesus, for everyone. Of course, the obvious answer is that we're doing terribly, and we've been doing terribly for a long time. I've always thought that if you wanted to start your own cult, or political movement, or whatever, all you have to do is approach people indiscriminately and, whatever argument you put to them, start out with the premise that something is terribly wrong with the world. People's bullshit detectors seem to malfunction as soon as you start with this premise. It also seems to help if you tell them that they're special for having noticed. "I know you've felt it, you've sensed it since you were young, although it wasn't always easy to put into words. This isn't the way things are supposed to be. Something's gone terribly wrong. You tried to ignore it, but it was always there, in the back of your mind. I'm sure you've noticed that there is something different about you, something that forced you to keep looking, even when it made things difficult for you. The others didn't always understand what you were looking for, did they? Well, I understand. I can help you find those answers. I'll just need 20% of your pre-tax income. And also sex."

Is it really true, though? Have things really gone so terribly with the world that it would be a tragedy if it ended now? Or have we actually had a pretty good run, like Seinfeld? Would any further millennia just end up being kind of a let-down? I'd certainly say that humans have had our moments. Of course, we've been pretty awful to each other a lot of the time, but, you know, we gave it a go. We had some laughs. I guess the flaw in the Seinfeld argument is that it presupposes an audience, which, if the world suddenly slips out of existence, there won't be one of. I think that's the saddest part for me, is that there will be no future observers to look at what we all did with a little objectivity and appreciate it or condemn it. When Jesus was predicting the end, he of course had in mind the ultimate audience: him and his Dad, judging your ass. When a secular humanist considers something terrible like a nuclear holocaust, at least you can take comfort that there will be some cockroaches afterward to think to themselves how delicious Twinkies are. And of couse, if I died from turbulence, there would presumably be a funeral at which I would expect people to gloss over my lack of moral fiber. But if our planet twinkles out of the space-time continuum, no dice.

So it turns out that thinking about the end-times and considering our collective moral failings, while good for the soul, is not so great for the anxiety level. Why am I so calm about this whole thing, then? Faith. Not in Jesus, but in scientific consensus. So much of what I do as a researcher depends upon information provided to me by researchers and theorists in other fields whose work I am not qualified to judge. Every time I run a filter on my data, I have faith that all the electrical engineers who have spent their lives studying the properties of filters haven't made some critical error that has somehow gone overlooked for decades. I need to have faith in them because I don't have the time or the mental capacity to check their work. I have faith that, contra Kuhn, there is scientific consensus which occasionally gets completely overturned, and then there is no joke we're positive about this it's really fine consensus. If you asked a schizophrenia researcher if there was some consensus on certain theories within the field, he might be able to offer you a few ideas that are very widely accepted. If you told him that the continued existence of the planet depended on these ideas being correct, he'd be like "NOOOO!!!!!". We (schizophrenia researchers) have consensus on a few points, but we're not really sure about anything. That's Kuhnian "overturned at any minute" consensus. In contrast, I have some sense of what "seriously, we're definitely sure about this" consensus looks like, and the people talking about the LHC seem to have it. So I'm not too worried.

Still, call your mother.