A Visit From the Great Pumpkin -- Looking For Black Cats in Dark Rooms
Which may not be there! Happy Halloween!
Today is Halloween. The Peanuts cartoon, featuring Charlie Brown created by Charles Schultz had an incredible Halloween TV Special called “It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown”. It is an apropos metaphor for the theme of this post.
In the TV special, the character Linus believes that on Halloween, if one maintains a vigil in the pumpkin patch, The Great Pumpkin will appear, bringing toys to just those who believe in the personage of The Great Pumpkin. Linus tries to proselytize the other children into maintaining the vigil in the pumpkin patch, instead of going out trick-or-treating to get candy. Only Sally Brown, who is infatuated with Linus believes his tale. The other kids deride Linus and make fun of him. When the Great Pumpkin fails to appear, Sally is angry at Linus for deluding her. This doesn’t shake Linus’ faith in the Great Pumpkin. He tells Charlie Brown that the Great Pumpkin was seen in two other places in the United States and the Great Pumpkin will surely appear next year. Charlie Brown just got three rocks instead of candy in his trick-or-treat bag.
To selectively quote Wikipedia:
The Great Pumpkin has been cited as a symbol of strong faith and foolish faith.
Linus' seemingly unshakable belief in the Great Pumpkin, and his desire to foster the same belief in others, has been interpreted as a parody of Christian evangelism.
Others have seen Linus' belief in the Great Pumpkin as symbolic of the struggles faced by anyone with beliefs or practices that are not shared by the majority.[
Still others view Linus' lonely vigils, in the service of a being that may or may not exist and which never makes its presence known in any case, as a metaphor for mankind's basic existential dilemmas.
The Great Pumpkin is a universal metaphor for the dogmatic beliefs of human carbon units based solely persuasion or incorrect inference rather than evidence. It is a hopeful idea that there is something coming that is just around the corner that will save mankind and bring happiness, peace and prosperity to all. It’s an evolved sentiment of survival in our long evolutionary history. It started with the shamans of early man, then the Stonehenge builders, and then the appearance of a very long list of savior expositors like Buddha, Zarathustra, Jesus, Mohammed, the Dalai Lama, Quetzalcoatl the Aztec god, the founder of Mormonism Joseph Smith, Scientologist L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, and Moonies founder Sun Myung Moon. These beliefs offer hope in a world of wildly careening, seemingly chaotic and random events that are sometimes beyond the comprehension of most people seeking a predictable life and a predictable future. We hate upheaval and change. It was and is a danger to our survival as a species.
Well the “good news of salvation” doesn’t stop with human saviors. Now that we have the elephant of technology in the room, it is said that technology will save us. Technology will be our new messiah. It will give us the means to communicate, arbitrate our disputes, bring everyone up to the same democratic level of equality and prosperity, give us a universal money system that will eliminate regional disparities, dispel unjust societal demarcations and boundaries, break through cultural ceilings, set the captives (mental, physical, geo-political, cultural, emotional and economic captives) free. Technology will cure diseases, loneliness, stop wars, eliminate economic equalities and let us live happier, healthier, longer, more productive lives. Will this happen? This very short audio clip graphically gives the answer.
There are no technology saviors such as those touted by the proponents of universal digital platforms for town squares and dialogue, web3, the metaverse, blockchain, Bitcoin, crypto and Elon Musk’s vision of the Everything App that WeChat is in China. The everything app ties together all digital life including banking, payments, work, the surveillance economy, the digital data collection/social media economy for advertising and the world the universe and everything on your phone. In China, if you get banned from WeChat, it is the equivalence of suffering digital death. You are a marginalized member of society and a digital and real nobody. China's social credit system rates individuals, entities, and corporations in China. The social credit system is based on many data points, from financial creditworthiness to social factors such as honesty, hard work, and devotion to family. I don’t think that any rational human being wants that, but that is what these so-called technological innovations that “free mankind” morph into.
The history of mankind has shown that each technological disruption is first monetized and then weaponized.
So why is human nature so cruel? Why are we incapable of living in peace and harmony without exploitation? Why do we have savior myths and why do they never materialize? I believe that for the first time, we have a scientific explanation, and it is in the realm of the work of Dr. Karl Friston (link to Wikipedia). It has to do with our human brains that have evolved over millions of years.
Dr. Friston posits that our brains are solely inference engines. We infer the exterior world through our senses. Our inferential view of the external world comes only through the stimulus of our five senses. Those sensory receptors are imperfect. For example, we cannot smell as good as a dog. We cannot see as well as an eagle. We do not see infrared light like the bees do. We do not have a virtual 360 degree view of our surroundings like a dragonfly with its compound eyes. We cannot sense temperature like a lizard or detect muscular electrical impulses like a shark, or echo-locate with sonar like a bat. Our senses are inferior to the totality of available stimulus in the world and universe that we live in. So we infer the world with the limited subset of what we can perceive.
But our human brains have evolved further with abstract conceptualizations. We have internal thoughts and inferences. We have ideas that are not evidenced-base like those from external stimuli. Dr. Friston states that the inference engines in our brains are designed to infer the least amount of “surprise”. Friston calls his thesis “free energy”. In Friston's theory, "free energy" refers to the difference between the brain's internal model of the world and the sensory information it receives from the external environment. The brain's primary goal, according to this principle, is to minimize the discrepancy or surprise between its internal predictions and incoming sensory data.
To achieve this, the brain continually updates its internal models of the world based on sensory inputs, making predictions about the external environment and comparing these predictions with actual sensory experiences. If there is a mismatch between the expected and actual sensory information, the brain seeks to minimize this prediction error by adjusting its internal representations or updating its beliefs about the environment. In other words, our perception of reality is nothing but a model that we have constructed in our brains. This makes so much sense. There are a lot of simplistic models operating out there.
Friston's free energy principle provides a theoretical framework for understanding various cognitive processes, including perception, action, learning, and decision-making, in terms of how the brain actively seeks to reduce uncertainty and maintain a stable and adaptive internal state. This principle has been influential in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence, offering valuable insights into how the brain processes information, forms beliefs, and generates adaptive behaviors in complex and uncertain environments.
So we form these savior beliefs because the rate of change in the world causes anxiety, unease and cognitive dissonance. We take in all of the information from the external world, and we don’t like it one bit. We don’t like its pace with which it bombards us. We don’t like the disruption of our comfort zone. We don’t like the uncertainty. We don’t like the new social dynamics. We don’t like the cognitive dissonance. We don’t accept the diverse perspectives. We value outmoded, irrational traditions and beliefs because they are known and “safe”. We have aversion to the risk of progress. We have an emotional attachment to the “old ways”. We hate ideological disruptions. We dislike the new rivalries to our historical perspective and history, particularly those that prove that they are wrong or misguided. We follow social norms that punishes anyone who questions long-held beliefs, no matter how fantastic that they are (example of the talking snake, or all of the animals in the world get shoehorned into an ark of 300 cubits, or a prophet that goes to heaven on a winged horse). We have an intense fear of uncertainty. We fear loss of control. We sense doom in the chaos. We dislike the diversity of values. We are resistant to change. We know of unintended consequences. We cannot understand complexity.
So our inference engines create thoughts and thought patterns that are our security blankets and teddy bears to keep away monsters in the closet and under the bed of modern life. We create narratives that hope and help are on the way, either with a savior or with technology. We were evolved to think this way. It keeps us from just giving up. It is a survival tool.
Unfortunately like the survival tool of long ago, the flint arrowhead, it is time to give up those inferential ideas for something more enlightened. But in the short term, it will never happen. Our brains are too primitive to gain a total comprehension of the society, infrastructure and complex systems that we have created. They are too complex for total comprehension by the human brain. That is why we stick to our backwards beliefs and our hopes in an extra-human agent that will save us. That day will never come.
So is it all doom and gloom? Nope. History and nature has taught us that those who evolve within the base parameters of our environments are the ones who survive. The rest will be the corpses of Darwinism. And that is just the way it is. So mote it be.
Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween. I hope that you get a visit from the Great Pumpkin.