Читать книгу Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 8

Even as it reveals the world to us in increasing detail, science uncovers greater and greater uncertainties. This is why many people scorn science, and reject its findings, especially when these findings throw doubt on the way they see themselves and their world.

Anthropologists can only guess when our species acquired self-consciousness, but, whenever this happened, our ancestors lost the ability to accept the world around them simply as a fact of life with which they had to deal as best they could. Now they became aware of how puny they were in the vastness of the world. They could ask themselves, ‘What is my place in the world?’ ‘How can I control what happens?’ They had developed technologies for finding food and shelter, but, for this knowledge to be reliable, events such as the rising and setting of the sun had to be reliable. Now they doubted, and, in doubting, became aware of their utter helplessness in a world they neither understood nor controlled. Their lives depended on the rising of the sun, and now they could ask, ‘What shall I do if the sun does not rise tomorrow?’ They were learning more and more about the world, but, rather than accepting their helplessness and then working piecemeal to achieve understanding and control over parts of their world (the way science works), many people preferred the easy but delusional solution of creating a fantasy of complete power. The Incas believed that they could make the sun rise each morning by carrying out the ritual of plucking the beating heart from a human sacrifice and presenting it to their sun god. The process seemed to be effective because every morning the sun rose. They could say to themselves, as many people still do, ‘I might be weak but I have access to total power through my gods.’

People create their gods in their own image. Jesus was born a Jew in Palestine but, as Christianity moved westward, Jesus acquired blond hair and blue eyes. As Howard Jacobson said, ‘The last thing Jesus looks on the cross is Jewish.’¹

Humans understand themselves through stories, and so they understood their gods through stories, including stories that explained how the world began and why it operates as it does. Gods, like parents, gave rewards and punishments. The gods punished the wicked with droughts and rewarded the good with a bountiful harvest.

Within each small society different individuals would have created a variety of gods with their stories, but such a variety would have reminded everyone that these gods and stories were fantasies. A fantasy’s capacity to comfort and embolden is very limited. What was needed was an absolute truth. Very likely each person claimed that his god was the one true god, while all the others were im agin ary ones. However, the mark of power is being able to force other people to abandon their ideas and to accept yours. Thus in each society the most powerful person, aided by some skilful deception masquerading as magic, could insist that his god was real and powerful, and therefore must be obeyed.

Gods have their own dogmas, and these include how the world should be understood. These dogmas need to confirm the power of the god and those who serve him, while being simple enough for everyone to comprehend. Moreover, the dogmas had to be absolute and unchanging.

Thus, in the Middle Ages, Christians explained the world in terms of the Chain of Being which stretched from the foot of God’s throne to the tiniest speck of God’s creations. The nodal point of the chain was man, who linked animals, birds, fish, insects, rocks and pebbles to the hierarchy of angels and so to God. Since God was perfect, everything He had made was perfect (human beings, though markedly imperfect, were deemed to be capable of perfection). The Earth was the centre of the universe, and around it, moving in perfect circles, were the planets and stars.

The idea that human beings occupy such an important position in the Chain of Being and that the Earth was the centre of the universe flattered individuals however lowly in status while maintaining the Church’s power. When a few inquisitive individuals such as Copernicus and Galileo asked questions and arrived at answers that questioned the accuracy of the Church’s model of the world, they were seen as radicals, iconoclasts – dangerous men who threatened the stability of society because they destroyed certainty and created doubt. In the same way Charles Darwin challenged the pride people took in themselves, and presented people with complex ideas that required people to think. The physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies said, ‘Darwin struck at the root of what it is to be human. That matters so much that many Americans are still in denial about evolution, preferring to tell lies for God than embrace the truth: human nature is a product of nature, something to celebrate, not fear.’²

Darwin was concerned with the need of each life form to survive physically. He would have had to wait more than a century for neuroscientists to show how brains interpret the world, and how it is our interpretations that determine what we do. Out of the stream of our interpretations comes our sense of being a person. Our need to survive as a person is far more important to us than our physical survival. In certain extreme situations, many people act heroically at great risk to their life. If they survive, they are likely to explain their actions in terms of feeling that, if they had not attempted to save those at risk, they would not have been able to live with themselves for the rest of their life. When the Australian soldier Trooper Mark Donaldson put himself in great danger in a Taliban ambush to save the lives of his fellow soldiers and their badly wounded interpreter and was awarded the Victoria Cross, he explained his actions in terms of how he saw himself. He said, ‘I’m a soldier. I’m trained to fight, that’s what we do. It’s instinct and it’s natural and you don’t think about it at the time. I just saw him [the interpreter] there, I went over there and got him, that was it.’³ Many people choose to kill themselves rather than live a life where they could not be themselves. Having been severely injured in a rugby accident and left to live his life as a quadriplegic, twenty-three-year-old Dan James, who saw himself as a sportsman, persuaded his parents to take him to the Swiss clinic Dignitas where he died.⁴ Evolutionary psych ologists, who explain human behaviour solely in terms of physical survival, see mating as the means whereby people pass on their genes, and fail to see that we are not concerned with passing on our genes, but with seeing our children as the means by which our sense of being a person continues on after our physical death. This is one of the reasons why having children – which usually involves much expense and hard work – is very popular.

Genes do not cause specific kinds of behaviour, such as a bad temper or bipolar disorder. Denis Noble, president of the Union of Physiological Sciences, believes that systems biology is ‘about recognising that every physical component is part of a system, and that everything interacts with everything else’.⁵ Undeterred by this, psychiatrists diagnose ‘bipolar disorder’ in children as young as two and tell their parents that the disorder is caused by a gene. The possibility that the parents are having difficulty in parenting their children is ignored, though these psychiatrists insist that the family has been very thoroughly investigated. I have yet to see a greatly troubled child or adult who came from a perfectly happy, normal family. Parents do not cause their children to behave in those ways that are called mental disorders. All families have a unique pattern or system of inter actions with one another and the world. Genes are part of another system, and that system interacts with the family system. Some family systems result in intense un happiness for some or all of their members, and some do not.

In the nineteenth century, phrenologists taught that the brain was divided into a large number of characteristics such as acquisitiveness, benevolence, sublimity. A phrenologist could supposedly identify an individual’s characteristics by feeling the shape of the bumps and indentations of the person’s skull. Now this seems ridiculous, but in its place has come a new phrenology.

Just as physicists cannot see particles in action but only the traces they leave behind in the physicists’ machines, so neuroscientists cannot see a living brain in action. They have to use machines that measure certain changes in the brain, and infer from these changes that what they have measured relates in some way to brain activity. The functional MRI scanner measures changes in oxygen levels in the brain. Neurones consume more oxygen when they are active than when they are at rest. If a part of a person’s brain shows a rise in the amount of oxygen being used, it seems that that particular part of the brain is active. A researcher can say, ‘There is the possibility that this part of the brain is involved in such-and-such activity.’ What should not be said is, ‘That part of the brain is engaged in such-and-such activity.’ As the neuro biologist Steven Rose wrote, ‘It is possible by stimulating particular brain regions to evoke sensations, memories, even emotions, but this does not mean that the particular memory or whatever is physically located in the region, merely that activity in that region may be a necessary correlate of the memory. The truth is that we don’t have a comprehensive brain theory that lets us bridge the gaps between molecules, cells and systems.’⁶

The new phrenologists do not show such restraint. fMRI scans show a slice of the brain, and thus allow the new phrenologists to publish pictures of slices of the brain where they have coloured in the part of the brain where the activity was located. Such colours suggest that there is some autonomous part of the brain that relates directly to, say, risk taking, sexual arousal or lying. There are certain areas of the brain that specialize in certain types of processing, such as the visual cortex at the back of the brain and Broca’s area for language in the left frontal lobe. However, the brain operates through neural networks, just as genes operate through genetic networks. fMRI scans and similar techniques are extremely useful, but they do not show the meaning that the person is creating as he carries out some activity.

Jack Gallant and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yukiyasu Kamitani at ATR Computational Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, have developed techniques using brain-scanning technology to recreate simple images occurring in a person’s mind’s eye by decoding the brain activity of people looking at the original image and comparing this with their brain activity when they remember the image. It has been shown that the part of the brain that is active when we think about an object is similar to the part of the brain that is active when we look at the object itself. Thus these techniques might one day be able to show what particular image a person is holding in his mind’s eye. Calling this ‘a very significant step forward’, John-Dylan Haynes, of the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, said that this work might make it possible to ‘make a videotape of a dream’. Such a video would be merely a string of images. It would not disclose what the images meant to the dreamer.⁷ Whatever fMRI scans, or any other kind of brain scan show, they do not reveal what the person is actually thinking. Your thoughts are as private as they always were. When scientists claim that they can or will be able to know what a person is actually thinking, they are suffering from the delusion that afflicts many ‘experts’ where they think that they know more about a person than the person can ever know about himself.

We cannot be experts in all branches of science, so we rely on scientists and the media to report truthfully on important events in science. Our trust is often abused. Some scientists will lie about their results because they cannot bear to admit that their favourite hypothesis is wrong, or because they want to enjoy a moment of media fame, or because there is a financial incentive of being paid to lie by those who profit from their results. How the pharmaceutical industry suppresses results that do not favour a particular drug, or the energy industry supports biddable scientists who deny the evidence of global warming, is well documented. Many journalists lack any understanding of scientific method, and so cannot evaluate any piece of research. They do not understand that, if your subjects are people, it is relatively easy to carry out the kind of research that yields the results that you want. It is much more difficult to achieve this when your subject matter is inanimate and therefore indifferent to your desires. Frequently, when a journalist phones me for a comment on a press release about some psychological research or a news story about people, I spend some time explaining to the journalist how inadequate, even fraudulent, this particular research is, or how the journalist, in his ignorance about human behaviour, has misinterpreted some recent news. Sometimes the journalist decides that the press release has no news value, or that he has to reassess the significance of this piece of news, but sometimes the journalist, perhaps at the behest of his editor, continues his search for a psychologist who will give the comment that the journalist wants. I regret to say that I have experienced this with an editor of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 who did, eventually, find the kind of psychologist he wanted. This was a psychologist who would agree with him that a parent killing his children and then himself is a rare event. Alas, it is not. In the UK, approximately one hundred children die each year at the hands of a parent or step-parent.⁸ Some of these adults then go on to kill themselves. The harsh realities of life can be too difficult for some news men and women to bear, and thus we are deprived of the truth.

We would be foolish indeed to decide, as some people do, that science and the media always lie. In doing so, we would be closing our minds to those people working in science or the media who care about truth. However, we need to read reports about science very critically. Reading Ben Goldacre, in his ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian and Guardian Online, and in his book by the same name, is an excellent way of learning how to use scientific method.⁹ A good question to ask of research results is, ‘Who benefits from these results?’ If the answer is, ‘The people who funded the research’, be very sceptical of the results.

The popular press makes money out of stories that pander to its readers’ prejudices and vanity. In the reporting of scientific research that has to do with people, the popular press invariably reports research that purports to show all children and young people are in great danger (obesity, alcohol, drugs) and/or the current generation of children and young people are ill-disciplined, lazy, greedy, selfish, ungrateful and are growing up too quickly, unlike the generation of readers who, as children, were obedient, well-behaved, and innocent of all aspects of adult life, and, as teenagers, were well-behaved, hard-working and respectful of their elders. These stories are all versions of the ‘I don’t know what the youth of today are coming to’ complaint.

The generation of readers are unique in a great many ways. The world they live in bears no similarity at all to the world that earlier generations lived in. History never repeats itself. Moreover, the readers’ generation suffers more than all earlier generations. These stories are versions of the myth of the Golden Age.

We derive such prejudices from our vanity that tells us that we are superior to other people. We are blinded to the truth more often by our vanity than we are by the lies that other people tell us.

Physicists and cosmologists, being human, are as truthful or not in their dealings with other people, but their subject matter is very difficult to manipulate to produce results that they can turn to their advantage. If their results are wrong, sooner or later further research will show that this is so. Physicists and cosmo logists are unlikely to lie to you about their research, but, if you want to see your world as controllable and predictable, they have naught for your comfort.

Did you know that on New Year’s Eve, 2009, time stopped? It stopped very briefly, so that the guardians of the atomic clocks around the world could synchronize their clocks with the rotation of the planet.¹⁰ It was not the clock running fast but the planet running slow.

Anthropologists tell us that our ancestors 30,000 years ago kept calendars. This was 25,000 years before the emergence of writing. The calendar is one of our earliest purely intellectual creations.¹¹ Daily time was measured by the rising and setting of the sun. Sundials, hour glasses, and water clocks were not particu larly accurate, but this did not matter until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when factory owners wanted their workers to arrive on time. The workers did not have clocks and watches because they were expensive, and remained so until well into the twentieth century. When I was a child in the 1930s a still-popular saying was, ‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.’ Now we look at our mobile phones, or we say to one another, ‘Do you know what time it is?’

This is the title of a BBC4 programme presented by the physicist Brian Cox.¹² He described how time as we know it ‘is an illusion’. However, it does seem that time exists as a dimension in the universe much in the way that space exists as a dimension. The question that some of the best physicists in the world are asking is, ‘What is time?’ There is no definite answer to this question.

Our television news programmes often end with weather forecasters predicting at what time the sun will rise and set the next day. We say that the length of the day is twenty-four hours because the Earth takes twenty-four hours to rotate on its axis, but the actual time it takes the Earth to spin on its axis changes because the Earth’s speed is affected by the pull of the Moon on the Earth and by the power of the wind. World time is now determined by atomic clocks which are very accurate because they use the precise microwave signal that electrons in atoms emit when they change energy levels. However, these clocks need to be adjusted occasionally to the spin of the planet. Our time-keeping methods do not measure a time difference with some fixed point in time. They simply impose a pattern on events that has a regularity with which we can organize ourselves.

We experience time as a continuous present. The past is contained in our memory, and our future in our imagination. However, we are dependent on the light from the Sun, and that takes eight minutes to reach us. When we look up into the heavens, we see the past. When we look deeper and deeper into the heavens, we go further back into the past. Physicists have calculated that the universe began with a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. The orthodox view amongst cosmologists is that time began with the universe, but unorthodox cosmologists like Neil Turack use string theory to propose that time may have begun before the Big Bang. There could be, he says, additional parallel worlds.

Different cultures have different images of space and time. When American children draw maps, they usually use a bird’s-eye view in the way Google maps look down on the Earth, whereas Sherpa children in Nepal create an image of vertical distances so that they can show how much time it takes to go up and down from one place to another. Trekkers in Nepal use the same method measuring distance in time, not in linear units.¹³ Seconds, minutes and hours have been accepted as units of time, although there are cultural differences in how time and dates are written. The hour after noon can be written as 1 p.m. or 13.00. The Twin Towers collapse is dated as 9/11 in the USA, 11/9 in the UK.

Seconds, minutes and hours relate to how we experience the passing of the day, but now there are video cameras that record in units of time different from the units of time in which we see events. If a high-speed camera captures images, say, of a glass of water being thrown into Brian Cox’s face, and then the images slowed right down, hidden details are revealed. The world looks very different when time is broken down into chunks as small as 10^-43 seconds. Our eyes and our brain operate like a kind of video camera. Our eyes, like a camera, take individual still pictures, and then our brain deals with each still so quickly that we see what seems to be a continuous film. Our eyes are not fast enough to take in everything that happens within the range we are looking. We see a glass of water being thrown and what we think is the recipient’s reaction, but we do not see how, under the onslaught of the water, a person’s face takes on shapes and movements that, when revealed to us by the camera, seem quite strange. However, at whatever speed we are viewing the world, what we see is not just a matter of visual acuity. We see what is meaningful to us. When my son Edward and I were watching an episode of the BBC series Spooks, we saw one of the central characters, Ros, who was disguised as an accountant working in high finance, get into a car and drive away. We saw the car very briefly, a matter of seconds. I saw a low-slung, black convertible, and asked Edward, ‘What make of car was that?’ He said, ‘An Aston Martin – James Bond’s car.’ Cars are Edward’s passion. When I was a child, time passed very slowly. I celebrated each passing year because I wanted to grow up. Now time passes at an extraordinary rate. A day passes in a blink of an eye. Why do we have to go into the future at the rate that we do? Time seems to slow down when we are bored, or in the midst of an accident or a sudden crisis, and it speeds up when we are busy. Why can’t the speed with which we go into the future be moderated by events, better still, by our wishes? The apparent slowing down or speeding up of time in certain circumstances are examples of how our interpretations or constructions of the time we are experi encing are dependent on our circumstances. They are what Brian Cox called ‘illusions’. According to Einstein, we cannot change the speed with which we go into the future because time is a dimension we pass along, just as we can pass along the dimension of space. We cannot move through space at the speed of light, but we move through time at the speed of light. Einstein showed that we each experience the passing of time in our own individual way. As Brian Cox said, no one has the right to claim that their time is the right time.

Einstein argued that all moments in time already exist. We are moving along time in the same way as we move along a road that has already been built. However, in the sub-atomic world of quantum mechanics, the future does not exist. Rather, it is a world of probabilities, where the future grows out of the past. Two different ways of looking at the world yield two different results.

When Brian Cox asked Neil Turack, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Neil replied, ‘The time today is something we have no idea about.’

A butterfly fluttering its wings and causing a huge disaster in some distant place has become a cliché to which the word ‘chaos’ has become attached. However, for many people, the cliché is usually taken to refer to the long line of causes resulting in a chaotic disaster, as in the old nursery rhyme,

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all

For the want of a horseshoe nail.

Linear causality is so embedded in our culture that it impedes our understanding of, or even perception of, the randomness of events in our world. Many people believe that, if you win the lottery, it was not a random event, but caused by the fact that you are a good person and deserve to win. God or Fate decreed that you should win. However, the butterfly effect is not an example of linear causation. It is an example of the mathematics of chaos.¹⁴

The development of science was based on Newtonian mathematics that describes a world that follows clear rules. It is predictable and ultimately controllable. This is the vision of the world used by those scientists and engineers who claim that the best way to deal with climate change is to devise methods of controlling the climate. Climate engineering, like the economists’ command and control economy, is one of the favourite delusions of the twenty-first century. While Newtonian mathematics works very well in a vast number of situations, there are many situations where it does not. For instance, if two objects are in orbit, it is possible to use Newtonian mathematics to predict the pos ition of these objects at any one point in time, but, if a third object is added, Newtonian mathematics cannot predict the position of the objects. In 1889 the great French mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré could not solve this problem, but he showed that, if there is any difference, however small, between the two orbits, one body will eventually fly off. Prediction is impossible.

The advent of computers led many people to believe that all the problems in the world were soluble. All that needed to be done was to build a bigger computer. It is ironic that what revealed the flaw in this thinking was a computer.

In 1961 Ed Lorenz, a meteorologist, using a simple model of the weather, was running some simulations of weather patterns on his computer. He wanted to run the simulation twice, so he copied what he thought were the same numbers into his computer. He had not realized that, while his computer stored numbers up to six decimal places, such as 0.473208, his printer to save space shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.473. This was a tiny discrepancy between the two sets of numbers, less than 0.1 per cent, but this small discrepancy changed the result. At first Lorenz thought that his computer was at fault, but he came to realize that, to forecast the weather perfectly, he would need not only a perfect model of the weather but perfect knowledge of wind, temperature, humidity and other conditions around the world at one moment in time. Perfect knowledge is never possible. No matter how accurate a measuring instrument may be, there is still a margin of error. It seems very unlikely that climate engineering will be able to control the weather and therefore climate change.

In a similar way, a command and control economy, where a government guided by economists could ensure continuous growth in a country’s economy and so determine that a boom could not be followed by a bust, would require the careful measurement and control of those factors that drive the market, including fear and greed. The great economist J.K. Galbraith recorded in some detail the inability of the majority of the players in the market to learn from experience, but even he could not plumb the depths of economists’ failure to understand human nature. What they needed to learn was, in Paul Krugman’s words, ‘The seeming success of an economy, the admiration of the markets and media for its managers, was no guarantee that the economy was immune to sudden financial crisis.’¹⁵

It had always been assumed that the effect of a small error in a large system would disappear. Lorenz published his findings in 1963, and in the following year another paper showed how making small changes in the parameters in a model of the weather could produce vastly different results, transforming regular events into a seemingly random, chaotic pattern. In 1972 Lorenz gave a paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He called it ‘Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wing Set Off a Tornado in Texas?’ Chaos, it seemed, was not a rare, random event but was there in the systems in which we live. It seems that the more complex a system is, and particularly where a number of systems are linked together, the more likely it is that, contained in the systems, is a sensitivity to initial events that leads to later events that cannot be predicted. The economic systems that led to the last run of boom years contained within them a sensitivity to events during the boom years and before, with the consequence that the fear, greed and stupidity of a hedge fund manager in New York led to a hard-working couple in Glasgow losing their jobs and their home.

Mathematicians working in chaos theory have developed the concept of tipping point where a system is being pushed in a certain direction, and reaches a point where it suddenly tips over into another state from which there is no return. Climatologists studying climate change see our climate being pushed by the warming of the planet to a tipping point from which it will be impossible for our climate to return to the state that supports human life as it does now. Climatologists are not agreed about how close this tipping point is, but they are agreed that the tipping point is inevitable unless drastic measures to prevent it are taken immediately to reduce the levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Some scientists receive support from the energy industry to deny the imminence or even existence of the danger, and some people see the current turmoil in the world as evidence of the working out of God’s plan, as set out in the Book of Revelation, to bring the world, and time, to an end, before which only the true believers will be taken into heaven, while everyone else perishes.

James Lovelock, who in the 1970s devised the Gaia hypo thesis which describes how the Earth regulates itself, sees the tipping point of climate change being too close for any reductions in the emissions to prevent it. He describes himself as an ‘optimistic pessimist’. Most of us will not survive the heating of the planet, but some of us will. He said, ‘I don’t think humans react fast enough to handle what’s coming up. [However] for the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.’¹⁶

I think that we do have the ability to overcome our vanity, and our reluctance to put aside selfish, short-term advantages in order to see long-term benefits that all can share, to abandon our delusions of being saved by some great power. However, it is an ability that we rarely use because to do so requires the courage to face uncertainty. To ameliorate climate change we need to see the whole system of the Earth in all its ambiguity. It is not as if our brains cannot deal with ambiguity. All the time our Bayesian brain is creating alternative hypotheses about our situation in the world. Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at University College, London, says that the brain has evolved in such a way that it can acquire information from ambiguous situations. We do not need certainty to make sense of the world. However, when we deny the existence of alternative interpretations and claim that the one interpretation we hold is a unique and absolute truth, we are refusing to use the ability with which we were born. We deliber ately make ourselves stupid.