Some of you want to know whether I am telling you the truth, so this is not really going to be a story chapter.
Am I a reliable narrator?
Mmm, well, yes, I mean... yeah, absolutely.
And yet, no.
Perhaps I should explain.
* * *
You can’t see light until it literally touches your retina. So much is obvious. And light can’t touch your retina unless it’s right there inside your eyeball, which is almost always tucked away inside of your head. That much should also be obvious; nonetheless, people persist in behaving as if they see things “way over there.” The fact of the matter, however, is that you do not, for example, see lightning away off in the clouds; you see it, just like everything else, right inside your skull.
The same goes for everything that you hear or smell. You don’t hear the birds, or smell the skunks, way over yonder in your backyard. They might actually be out in your backyard, but you hear or smell them inside your head.
So, in terms of these three specific senses, the place where the sensation was generated (“way over there”) is not the same place as where it was sensed by your sensors (“right in here”). All of your senses, then, are variations on the sense of touch, in that they are all local (or proximal) to your body, and not distant (or distal). Your brain is only creating an illusion of sensing things at a distance; in other words, distal sensation is a myth. Your brain is supporting the reality of an event’s location (e.g., a lightning flash, a birdsong, a skunksmell) with the myth that you are sensing these events distally, somewhere outside of your body.
But if distal sensation is a myth, and not reality, then shouldn’t you just ignore it? Won’t you come to harm unless you refuse to live in this illusory wonderland?
Yes, I know that everyone else in the world does it (if they have conventional sensory processing), but if everyone else in the world jumped off a cliff, would you? Well, okay, maybe you would if it really were everyone. I admit, it’s a hard question to answer until it actually happens, so maybe you’ll never know. Maybe you’ll just be haunted by doubts for the rest of your life.
Oh, don’t worry; as it happens, you’re in luck. There’s an experiment that you can perform, the results of which will reveal the answers to all of these intriguing questions. The steps are simple: first, wander across a skunk; next, treat it as if it really were living in your nose; and finally, see what happens then (or, if you prefer, smell what happens then). If a great deal of time passes without any skunks crossing your path, and if you find yourself becoming impatient, then I suppose that you could always substitute something like a bird in the ear (not the hand or, heaven forbid, bush).
So, as it turns out, this myth of distal sensation is very handy indeed when you’re dealing with things in terms of where they actually are, instead of pretending that they are all stuffed up your nose, or secreted (eeew) wherever else your sensors experience them. Besides, you have to spend your whole life communicating with a world full of other people who fail to challenge this myth, so playing along with the illusion will help you to avoid serious misunderstandings, such as if you were to say, “Hey, I smell a skunk in here!” In such an instance, you usually want people to look around the room, and not up your nose.
In short, then, you are now aware of at least one myth worth supporting. And supporting it does not make you any less reliable than everyone else.
* * *
But is distal sensation an isolated myth in this regard? Is it the only myth that merits jumping off the cliff with everyone else in the world?
No way.
Let’s take a look at another example.
Your lungs act like a bellows, forcing air through your windpipe when you talk, right? I mean, you can feel your lungs squeezing the air out as your chest muscles bear down on them, can’t you?
Well, no… you can’t. Because that’s not what happens.
Your lungs are elastic bladders that your muscles pull open, creating a vacuum that sucks air inside. (For the evolutionaries among you, lungs are fishy swim bladders that have become open to the outside world.) When those muscles stop holding your lungs open, it’s this elasticity that forces out the air, like a balloon deflating. There is no active squeezing during normal breathing and talking. The only time that air is pressed out of your lungs is when you are using your diaphragm and a few of your abdominal and intercostal muscles (the ones along your ribs) to force out that last bit of air, such as when you are coughing, or maybe singing something challenging.
Yes, that’s right, the whole notion of exhaling is just another mass illusion. You aren’t actively exhaling, but rather you are passively relaxing, which means that all you are doing is “not inhaling.” You don’t breathe out, you just stop trying to breathe in.
In light of this information, should you change the way that you behave? Should Terry McMillan stop waiting to exhale, and only start waiting to not inhale?
Well, I suppose that you could change your behavior, but once again you’d be ostracizing yourself from the greater society of conventional myth-holders, and you’d be just as isolated as if you had put skunks up your nose.
* * *
So are all these myths just a matter of your brain fooling your body?
Nuh-uh.
That’s just the beginning.
* * *
Let’s talk about mermaids.
After all, you can’t get more mythy-fithy than mermaids; I mean, unlike exhaling, you and I both know for sure that they don’t really exist, right? We’ve all heard the standard explanation: mermaids are just stories that sailors made up to explain manatees and cetaceans of various sorts. Not so?
No, not so.
To begin with, when it comes right down to it, people came up with these sorts of stories long before there were sailors (deserving of the distinction).
No matter what environment these pre-sailor people poked their (one should hope skunkless) noses into, they would have found creatures living there. It would have been clear to them that environments of all sorts were places for creatures to live in. Some of those creatures, such as apes and monkeys, would even resemble people (more or less), and not even all tribes of people would look the same. On top of this, people would have little direct experience with the depths of the sea, the sky, or even the earth underneath their feet, and it would be natural for them to develop their own suspicions about what lived there. They would have every reason to assume that these environments were inhabited by other creatures, and that some of them would appear to be like people, even if they were only as similar as monkeys.
Their logic would dictate that any person-like creature living under water would have to be fishy, or maybe froggy; and they’d be right, just in the same way that any mammal living in the water has to be able to swim, and swim well, hence cetaceans, hippos, otters, and so on. Similarly, angels and bats need to be able to fly, just as badgers and worms must have the equipment necessary to navigate the soil. Don’t believe me? Just ask Oscar Hammerstein (II) about the fish and the birds. Tell me he’s crazy. (Maybe he knows.)
So it made every kind of sense in the world for these early people to believe in mermaids, because it helped them to make logical, useful predictions about their world, but does it still make sense for us to believe? Or more to the point, does it do us any good to behave as if mermaids don’t exist? What about angels? Why believe in one of these myths, but not the other? After all, have you been to heaven lately? (I mean besides your local Cold Stone Creamery.) How about the bottom of the ocean? What about other planets? Predicting the characteristics of the likely inhabitants of an environment should be a helpful skill, because you can anticipate contingencies before you get there. Perhaps you find it generally useful just to practice the intellectual exercise of extrapolating from a set of known patterns.
Then let me ask you this: given that you willingly support at least two identifiable myths already (and there are many others like them that I did not review here), does behaving as if mermaids exist bring you any additional harm?
* * *
Yes, I know… some of you think that help and harm are not the point, and you are feeling all cantankerous because supporting the myth wouldn’t be “scientific.” You insist (and rather dogmatically, I might add... in fact, I’ve been meaning to have a gentle chat with you about this superior attitude of yours) that we’re not supposed to believe in things that we can’t detect with our own senses, either unaided, or with the help of a tele-this or a micro-that.
But really, when you think about it (or not), science doesn’t rule out the existence of things that we can’t detect; it simply refuses to confirm their existence. No scientist in their right mind would ever think in terms of proving that mermaids don’t exist, because science itself says that you can’t prove a negative. Other than to confirm the existence of mermaids, science can come to no stronger conclusion than to remain firmly agnostic.
The fact is, we know far too little about the Ocean, and are considerably more ignorant about the conditions of life elsewhere than on our forty acres of the universe. There are all sorts of places that mermaids, and their cousins, could be avoiding us. It wasn’t until 1858 that Foulke recognized a dinosaur hiding in a bunch of old fossils, a full twenty years after they had been dug out of an old marl pit. Even mountain gorillas are a recent “discovery” (1902), at least relative to the world of Eurocentric science. Given the fate of those outed gorillas, you couldn’t blame the mermaids for staying decidedly out of our way.
So the most that a scientist could say without fear of contradiction (from me) is that they have failed to find any mermaids in any of the places that they’ve yet looked, at least while they were using their multimega-dollar laser-calibrated ultramermoscopes.
* * *
Still uncomfortable? Then let me tell you a little something that science doesn’t want you to know. Come closer my pretty…
Science is nifty, and it has all sorts of practical uses, but the fact that we all live according to a rather large number of popular myths shows that science is not the only model of reality that dictates the way that humans behave. Much of the time, science has little to do with our behavior when compared to what we believe. An understanding of what’s “really” going on is often of less use to us than a mythological model that we can use to live our lives more easily, particularly if everyone else agrees to treat the myth as the reality.
Don’t believe me? Well, get a load of this: you know that molecules are made up of atoms, and that atoms are made up of subatomic particles, and so forth and so on. But what doesn’t get mentioned so often is that if you keep digging down deep enough, all you have left is vibration. Vibration of what, precisely (or even generally), no one knows for sure, and it’s really only referred to as vibration due to a lack of a better term. (Personally, I suspect the fundamental influence of a fragrant, rosy carbonation.) When you base a systematic framework of analysis (like science) on top of the phrase, “I don’t really know, but this is what I believe,” then you are on undulating ground.
Isaac Newton pioneered the scientific method (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, aka Principia, 1687) back when there were no scientists, and the proto-scientists of the day tended to be called “natural philosophers.” Descartes was one of them, as was Leibnitz, not to mention all sorts of other interesting people whom you’d know about if you only got out more, particularly to the library. (You might as well go ahead and do some additional reading on the subject, otherwise you’re just going to have to take my word for all of this, which is not advisable, because for all you know, I’m a mermaid with a tyrannical agenda. Hey, I used to be a Kelly Girl, so my masculinity, and greenishness, would hardly be threatened by being a mermaid.) And before they were natural philosophers, these folks were alchemists. You might be surprised at how much pure alchemy Isaac Newton practiced, even after he nominally became a scientist.
But we all know that alchemy was just some ritual form of diabolical hogwash, wasn’t it?
Wrong… well, kind of. And kind of not. Some alchemists did have devilishly well-washed hogs, that’s true, but you should understand that as pioneers, alchemists were forced to find their way in the dark, so their methods will appear haphazard to us in retrospect. Despite this lack of light, they still managed to discover all sorts of very useful stuff, like phosphorus (which, nicely enough, is great for finding your way in the dark); in fact, that’s another easy experiment that you can perform. Repeatedly urinate into a glass flask, and keep boiling off the liquid (alternately, not simultaneously, I beg you). As long as you’ve been eating right (e.g., milk products and beans), and follow directions somewhat less schematic than mine, the remaining powder will be phosphorescent.
Look, I didn’t say that alchemy couldn’t be kind of disgusting, I just said that it wasn’t really diabolical.
Anyway, compared to other ways of looking at the world, science is still in its infancy, and we are going to look just as blind as the alchemists from a perspective only a few decades into the future. We think we’re pretty hot stuff because we can laugh at people who tried to turn lead into gold with only grade-school chemistry, but we ridicule these forebears while we tinker with quantum physics and molecular genetics, congratulating ourselves on having found the real Philosopher’s Stone. (Well, okay, I don’t do this too much, but I’m pretty sure that you do it far too often. I bet you can’t even remember the last time you looked at those glow-in-the-dark stars in your kid’s bedroom and said to yourself, “Thank goodness for alchemists, without whose fuming pee my child’s life would be a little darker.”) Eighty years from now, people will be saying, “Sure, they managed to stumble across gene therapy, but all that stuff with the fusion and so on, what the hell were they thinking? Scientific Puritanism… what a bunch of diabolical porkrinse.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I think science is great. I’m a scientist myself, and my best friends are scientists. I won’t squabble if my children marry scientists, nor if my grandchildren are raised in scientific households (although I might be disappointed on their behalf if that were their only definitive household characteristic). But the fact remains that the scientific method relies ultimately on the power of the human mind to create a coherent story out of a seemingly disparate set of elements, because the second step is to nurture a theory from the observed data. No matter how dry the observation and measurement of that evidence might be (and, truth be told, even that part of the process is often quite damp), individual humans will look at the same set of stars and create different constellations. And there are so very, very many stars. (A metric Saganload, I am given to understand.)
It’s no small wonder, then, that the same scientific method that has mapped the human genome has also given us such wonderfully plausible stories as blood typing, cold fusion, evolution, water memory, transformational grammar, ozone therapy, antibiotics, N-rays, superstrings, polywater, and alternating current. A few of these tales are still holding up under the test of time (which is often less a test than it is a pop quiz); in fact, a couple of them have lasted for decades. Then again, age is not necessarily an indicator of how well a story reflects reality; in fact, science has recently shown that some of the oldest of these stories, namely the Laws of Thermodynamics, break down in certain contexts. These unbreakable Laws are turning out to be more like local building codes, and just about anything can apply for a variance.
In particular, one of these Laws says (give or take), “You can’t get something from nothing.”
Well, according to a more recent version of the story, you can get something from nothing, as long as those tiny somethings are created in polar pairs (i.e., a something and an anti-something). Those pairs recombine instantly (relative to what measure of time, I do not know), and so are absorbed back into the original nothing, which leaves you not with simple nothing, but with a net effect of nothing. The trick is that the Law changes with the definition of “nothing,” which is now seen as a very unconventional nothing, in that it is portrayed as a quivering expanse of potential (or some such circular nonsense), which, when you come right down to it, is rather a lot like my finances. The Big News is that sometimes one of these little bits of creation will combine with a bit of anti-creation other than the one that was its original partner, and if this happens often enough, a couple of somethings might cling together in desperation and WHAMMO! Universe.
Confusing? Then let’s look at it this way. (Those of you who already got it can skip to the next paragraph. Me, I’m going to read this part because I’m never sure I’ve got it right.) Suppose that twenty-six pessimists each took one optimistic friend to a Conflict Resolution Dance class. (So the teacher is a bit unconventional... just go with it.) They all line up along two opposing walls, starting with pessimist Avery and optimist Alex at the north end of the building, continuing all the way down to Zola and Zwi at the south end. Now, the trainer has pessimist Avery move down one place to line up and dance with optimist Bertie instead of Alex, which means that pessimist Baker then moves down to optimist Cam, and so on, all the way down the line. This leaves optimist Alex and pessimist Zwi unattached, whereupon (either for their own reasons or for none at all, while the teacher is not paying attention) they leave from opposite ends of the building and go wandering around the community college, where they meet other loose dance partners from other classes who just happen to share the polarity of their general outlook on life. Rod Serling then goes from class to class, making the polarized (i.e., pessimist+optimist) pairs melt back into the music itself (i.e., they are part of the vibrating nothingness that is being played by no musicians). This leaves only Alex and Zwi (out of the original class) able to maintain their existence with their current individual partners, because those existing partner bonds are strong enough to keep the partners in those couples from decoupling and re-pairing along polarized outlook lines (which keeps them from disappearing into the music). As it happens, the loose partners are almost never likely to meet anyone else to dance with, because they hang out in totally different places on campus. But a jillionty-billion more dances are held, thus raising their odds, and more free radical pessimists start to gather around Zwi and her partner, just as more loose optimists cling to Alex, and after that, you know the rest of the story (i.e., the aforementioned WHAMMO! and so forth).
* * *
And the same scientists who came up with this sort of story would deny us mermaids. And faeries.
Dare I say it? Yes, I dare! Hypocritical balderdash! (Exactly balder than what dash, I’m not sure.)
May the theorist without any need to rely on plausibility cast the first stone at myth and religion.
With that in mind, let’s look at some other mermaids.
* * *
The image of the moon gets smaller as it climbs in the sky, right?
Nope. Your brain just makes it seem smaller.
Knowing that this is only an illusion, then, how much time are you going to spend trying to see the moon differently than everyone else does?
* * *
As a juror, you are legally obliged to find someone not guilty, even if they have clearly committed the crime, if you think that the law itself is bad. How many judges, though, will find you in contempt if you point out this truth? According to the law, then, it’s a myth that the judge is all-powerful in the courtroom, but the omnipotence of judges might be a mermaid worth believing in, just because it might keep you out of jail.
* * *
I once told a military doctor that in truth, my (first) wife’s medical records were her personal property. After a great deal of argument, the doctor said (in paraphrase), “Well, since you actually know what’s going on, we won’t continue to lie to you. These documents do in fact belong to your wife, and not to us.” They delivered them to her promptly, which is to say right after all of the doctors involved in her care had been given a chance to review those records and destroy any part of her personal property that they felt might reflect badly on their incompetent performance. It might have been better for us to believe in the mermaid who says that the military owns those documents, at least long enough to copy all of the records while transporting them from one base to another.
* * *
Every ten years, I get pulled over for speeding. Up until now, the officer has always asked me, “How fast do you think you were going?” The last time I was asked that question, I was doing 60 in a 55 on an empty four-lane freeway, and I admitted my guilt. I did so because I chose to believe in the mermaid who told me just to tell the nice officer whatever he (in this case) wanted to know, and get out of there. Maybe I’ll refuse to believe in mermaids the next time I get pulled over. I’ll say, “Officer, you are operating under the mythological assumption that I must admit my guilt to you, when in truth the law clearly states that I have the right to reserve any discussion of my actual speed to the courtroom.” The officer will no doubt respect my high regard for science, and for the truth, and regret having abused their authority. Either that, or the officer will then operate under the equally mythological assumption that I was being uncooperative and disrespectful, when in truth I was only asserting my rights under the law.
* * *
Then there’s the mermaid who tells the (rather involved) story about the United States being a democratic society in which your personal vote makes a difference. Well, refresh your memory about the Electoral College, then we’ll talk.
* * *
To tie all of this information and speculation in to the top of this essay, my advice is as follows:
Piece #1: Listen to the distal perception mermaid who tells you that the baseball is really “over there,” and that it is rapidly approaching your head. Don’t be such a skeptic that you wait until the impacts of the light and the ball coincide on your retina.
Piece #2: When you see a face in the ocean, don’t be so quick to dismiss the mermaid; a little tolerance could help your life to flow a whole lot more smoothly.
Piece #3: When it comes to creating a personal model of reality, imagine what it might be like for those people whose sensation, processing, and awareness systems are not only significantly different than yours, but are not necessarily consistent from day to day (or minute to minute). (In my next book, which I still refuse to write, I will explain how we don’t actually all inhabit the same reality, in a very real way.)
Piece #4: Don’t go sticking skunks up your nose, for their sake.