Tag: Twin Earth

A Fool and a Dunce Walk into a Counterfactual Freezer

Mark DavisLeave a comment

 

I was reading Yablo’s “No Fool’s Cold: Notes on Illusions of Possibility” (That’s not a typo: “Cold”) that continues the theme of modal skepticism, when I came up with a radical possibility. Of course, if someone thinks up something in the 21st century it likely has been thought a thousand times before, and this is no different. But let’s start at the beginning and check out whether there is anything new to be discerned.

I might initially think that the contents of my thoughts are the only thing I can truly be confident about since all the world of the senses could be an illusion. Given such a starting point it would be wise to try to understand the relationship between my thoughts and what is perceived by starting with the phenomenon of thought. I immediately become skeptical of my thinking, however, since I am unconscious nearly a third of the day, often accompanied by strange hallucinatory imagery in my dreams. More, I tend to agree with these zombie-intellects who inhabit this society-thing projected on my sensorium-thing and claim to study biases and perceptual trickery. Those perceptual-psychologist-patterns seem right, too, given the number of times I’ve been startled by faces coalescing out of twilight shadows or my overly generous past assessments of my own competency.

Thoughts seem unreliable.

But what is reliable? Some Platonic ideas, geometry, math in general, deductive proofs (uh oh, coarse premises as well as the indeterminacy of synonymy creep in here), and then scientific results (tentatively), perhaps. Let’s take the latter, though, and start with the notion that science contains a methodology that distills out many biases and misperceptions, arriving at a tentative model that is of higher truth value than simple guesses, traditions, and feelings.… Read the rest

The Twin Earth Dissonance Conspiracy

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I came of age with some of the mid-to-late 20th century literature that took conspiracies as truss work for calculated paranoia, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Philip K. Dick’s identity shuffling, and on to the obscurely psychedelic Illuminati books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They were undoubtedly influenced by the dirty tricks and mind control fantasies and realities of the Cold War, from thallium and LSD poisoning plots against Fidel Castro to the Manchurian Candidate and John Birchers; from Dr. Strangelove to ratfucking in the Nixon-era Republican Party.

The fiction paralleled and mimicked those realities but it was also infused with a kind of magical realism where the ideas permeated through the characters in a nexus of paranoia and fantasy. The reader was admitted to eccentric ways of structuring the history of the world and the motives of unseen forces acting through organizations, governments, and powerful people.

While endlessly fun, the fictional forms were also an inoculation: no mundane conspiracy could possibly capture that pulse of inside knowledge of a mystic firmament of lies and outlandish goals canopied above our earth-chained heads.

But here I am again, though much less amused and more fearful.

I think I read ten different reporting and opinion pieces today on the topic of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shock-curiosity of the day who amplified QAnon, Jewish space lasers, political assassination fantasies, and likely a range of yet-to-be-discovered subjects of scorn and ridicule. Most analysts agree that such fantastical and angry ideas are methods for manipulating gullible people. They are tools for the acquisition of power over others.

The whole project feels like an alternative reality so late in America’s evolution, like we’ve transitioned to a Counter-Earth or Bizarro Htrae or Nabakov’s AntiTerra.… Read the rest