Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (36 page)

In all three cases, if knowledge of type (b) really is illusory, then knowledge of type (a) seems a lot less worth paying for.

“Not even the extent of your own ignorance”

At his trial for impiety in 399 BCE, Socrates shocked the Athenians by claiming, with apparent arrogance, that he was the wisest man in Athens. It must be true, he insisted: no less an authority than the great Oracle at Delphi had said so to his friend Chaerephon! He was puzzled by the oracle’s judgment too, he said, so he went about questioning many people who claimed to have some special expertise or knowledge (such as Euthyphro: see the note “‘A recovering fundamentalist’—and what Adam could have learned from Socrates”). At last Socrates grasped that the oracle’s meaning was simply this: everyone else believed they understood matters that in fact they didn’t understand, whereas he, Socrates,
knew how poor and limited his knowledge really was
. (See also the note above on Fang Lizhi, who might equally have said, “Science begins with philosophy, and philosophy begins with doubt.”)

But surely, you might say, in most fields there are reliable experts? Yes, Socrates agrees: if you want a box, go to a carpenter; if you want to get across the sea, trust a ship’s captain. But we love to think we know more than we do. And, even when we do know a subject well, expertise is paradoxical. In studies Socrates would have loved, Canadian psychologist Philip Tetlock and others have shown that in some areas so-called experts are often systematically
worse
at judging the truth than nonexperts. How is that possible? One reason is “overconfidence bias”: amateurs tend to notice when they’re wrong and accept that they’re wrong, whereas experts have a vested interest in (and are good at) explaining away their past mistakes—and thus persuading even themselves that they were “not really” mistakes.

In short, there are many circumstances in which both “experts” and those who look to them for “enlightenment” can be poor judges of whether what they say is believable.

The Slipher Space Telescope

As a big fat hint to NASA, I’ve launched this multibillion-dollar fictional planet-hunter in honor of Vesto Slipher, one of the greatest and most inadequately recognized American astronomers. Along with many other achievements, in 1912 he established for the first time the very high relative velocity of the Andromeda Galaxy (then known as the Andromeda Nebula), and thus, along with Henrietta Swan Leavitt and others, paved the way for Edwin Hubble’s momentous discovery that the universe is expanding. Hubble was a great man, but he doesn’t deserve to be incorrectly credited with both achievements.

Zeta Langley S-8A, and Goldilocks

For how to name an exoplanet—I know you’ve been dying to find out—see the website of the International Astronomical Union. The conventions are on the messy side, but
Zeta Langley S-8A
can be taken to mean “Slipher discovery 8A, orbiting Zeta Langley,” where
Zeta Langley
means the sixth-brightest star, as seen from Earth, in the Langley star cluster.

Like the planet, the Langley star cluster is fictional. Sci-fi nuts may detect here a whisper of a reference to HAL’s instructor, as mentioned in the film version of
2001: A Space Odyssey
. (“My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you.” Oooh, oooh, I love that scene.)

The “Goldilocks Zone” (
not too hot, not too cold, just right
) is the orbital region around a given star in which life as we know it is possible—roughly, the zone within which liquid surface water is possible. Or that’s the short version. If you look up “circumstellar habitable zone,” you’ll find all sorts of stuff explaining why it’s far more complicated than that—and then you’ll be able to amaze your friends by going on at length about topics like tidal heating, nomad planets, and carbon chauvinism.

Kelvin’s basement

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, got
degrees Kelvin
named after him not because he thought of the idea of absolute zero but because he was the first to accurately calculate its value. But Morag is wrong on the detail: apparently, if you really want to try cryogenic self-storage, the optimal condition for your experiment in time travel is a significantly warmer nitrogen slush.

“Same myths in different forms, over and over”

In
The Fire Seekers
, Bill Calder is struck by the way similar myths emerge in cultures that have had no contact with one another, and in the notes there I mention some interesting cases of other Babel-like myths, or combinations of an Eden / Tree of Knowledge myth with a Babel myth. While writing
Ghosts in the Machine
, I read Sabine Kuegler’s memoir about growing up among the Fayu, a tribe in Indonesian West Papua, during the 1980s. Before the Kueglers showed up, the Fayu had had no contact with Western influences such as Christianity, and yet part of their creation myth was the following story. As Kuegler tells the story:

There once was a large village with many people who all spoke the same language. These people lived in peace. But one day, a great fire came from the sky, and suddenly there were many languages. Each language was only spoken by one man and one woman, who could communicate only with one another and not with anyone else. So they were spread out over the earth. Among them were a man and a woman named Bisa and Beisa. They spoke in the Fayu language. For days they traveled, trying to find a new home. One day they arrived at the edge of the jungle, and it began to rain. The rain wouldn’t stop. Days and weeks it rained and the water kept rising.

Bisa and Beisa built themselves a canoe and collected many animals that were trying to escape from the water . . .

Tok Pisin
 . . .
creole

A pidgin is a shared vocabulary that helps users of different languages communicate. That’s how Tok Pisin (“talk pidgin”) began in the nineteenth century. But Tok Pisin evolved from a salad of English, German, Dutch, and Malay words, with bits of Malay grammar, into a full-blown language of its own, capable of a full range of expression and with a grammar distinct from any of the parent languages. That’s a creole.

A striking feature of Tok Pisin is that it has a very small underlying vocabulary, and makes up for this with long descriptive expressions. So for instance
corridor
is
ples wokabaut insait long haus
(literally: place to walk inside a building), and
embassy
is
haus luluai bilong longwe ples
(literally: house of a chief from a distant place).

Josef Kurtz

Some readers will suspect, correctly, that I stole the name from Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. Given the novel’s central theme—who are the “savages,” really?—it seemed appropriate.

“Upper Paleolithic”

These terms identify (in, unfortunately, a pretty inconsistent and confusing way) different periods of human and prehuman tool use.
Paleolithic
means “old stone age”—anything from the very beginnings to about ten thousand years ago. Within that range, Upper Paleolithic is most recent—from about forty thousand to ten thousand years ago. Stone tools showing more recent technology than that are either Mesolithic (from about twenty thousand to five thousand years ago) or Neolithic (ten thousand to two thousand years ago). The overlaps are partly due to inconsistency and partly because the relevant technologies developed at different rates in different regions.

Messier 33

French astronomer Charles Messier was a comet hunter. In the 1750s he began to make a list of annoying objects that were not comets but could easily be mistaken for them; his catalog of “nebulae” ended up listing more than one hundred of the most beautiful objects in the sky.

“A recovering fundamentalist”—and what Adam could have learned from Socrates

In Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Adam asks the archangel Raphael some probing questions about the way God has constructed the universe. He casts the questions as inquiries into astronomy:
Does the earth move or stand still? Why are there so many stars, if all they do is decorate the earth’s sky?
Why do six of them
(all the known planets, in Milton’s time)
wander back and forth among the fixed stars?
But astronomy is really a placeholder for other things; it’s Milton’s way of expressing, obliquely, the fact that there are deeper questions begging to be asked, none of which Adam quite dares to voice.
How does this whole creation thing work? Who is the mysterious “God” person, really? Where is heaven anyway?
(As Raphael revealingly admits, God has placed heaven an immense distance from the earth partly to ensure His divine privacy.) And you can easily imagine that Adam is itching to ask one more really big one:
Run this by me again, Raph. Can I call you Raph? Great. So take it slow, and tell me again: Why is it that I must obey this “God”?

Raphael’s response to Adam’s questions seems indulgent, at first; or, given what’s coming, we might say that his tone is greasily flattering. Naturally you are inquisitive, he says, for your divine origin means you’ve been touched with the intellectual gifts of God Himself! But Raphael quickly turns waspish, and our “first father” ends up getting a sharp slap on the wrist for asking the wrong questions:

Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid,

Leave them to God above, Him serve and feare . . .

. . . Heav’n is for thee too high

To know what passes there; be lowlie wise.

“Be lowlie wise”: ouch. It carries both the condescending, almost contemptuous meaning “Stay focused on the low, ordinary things that suit your low, ordinary nature” and also a more threatening one: “If you know what’s good for you, stop asking questions about what goes on in the executive suite.”

Unfortunately, Milton’s Adam is all too willing to play his “lowlie” part: after hearing God’s messenger put on a display of spectacularly bad reasoning about
why
Adam should be “lowlie wise,” he goes all weak at the knees, says he no longer wants to know a thing, and claims to be miraculously “cleerd of doubt.” He’s grateful, even: total obedience will mean not having “perplexing thoughts” that might “interrupt the sweet of life.” He even says, in a toe-curling display of meekness and surrender, “How fully hast thou satisfied me.”

It’s an embarrassing moment for the human race, and you might wonder how the exchange would have gone if, instead of Adam, Raphael had confronted someone with a better brain and a stiffer spine.

Socrates, for instance?

Wonder no more! Plato, in his dialogue
Euthyphro
, imagines Socrates having just this sort of discussion—though the pompous character with a thing about sticking to the rules is the eponymous Athenian passerby, not an archangel.

As Socrates points out to Euthyphro during a discussion about justice, many people think they should do X and not Y
just because God approves of X and disapproves of Y
. In other words, to know right and wrong, all we need to know is what God commands. That’s the position Raphael recommends to Adam.

There’s a large problem with this, which Adam really could have raised.
Wait: Aren’t we missing a step? Why should I be confident that my understanding of what God approves is what He in fact approves?
But let’s leave that aside for a minute. In what has become known as Euthyphro’s Dilemma, Socrates argues that there’s a deeper problem lurking here, even after we allow ourselves the staggeringly arrogant (and, alas, routine) assumption that we know what God wants. For, Socrates says, to say something is good
just because God approves of it, and for no other reason
, is to say that divine morality is arbitrary.

“So what?” you might reply: “God is God! He can be as arbitrary as He likes! He made the universe. So He gets to make up the rules!”

But, Socrates says, that can’t be what you really think. If it were, it would imply that whenever you say “God is good,” or “God’s judgments are good,” or “God is the ultimate good” (which, it seems, everyone does want to do), those judgments must be
mistaken
. Think about it again: if God’s judgments are arbitrary, then He just is what He is, and to insist in addition that the way God is “is good,” is to say “We judge/believe/accept that God is good.” But that implies what we just denied, which is that we can appeal to a standard for what’s good that’s independent of what God says about it.

Euthyphro’s Dilemma leads Socrates to a startling conclusion: even if people
think they think
“X is good just because God approves it,” what they must
actually think
is something radically different, namely, “If God approves of X, He does so because He
judges that X is good
.” But to say this is to say that God, just like us, appeals to moral reasoning about what’s good. And that means goodness is something that must
exist independently of both our judgment and His
.

With this rethinking of moral justification, Socrates opened the door to a powerfully subversive chain of ideas. Part of my exercise of free will is the freedom to base my actions on my own reasoning, including reasoning about what’s right and wrong. But that’s meaningless unless I can decide whether someone else’s alleged justification for controlling or guiding my actions is persuasive or not. And how can I possibly decide whether I should find God’s reasoning persuasive (for example, about staying away from the irresistibly yummy-looking fruit on that Tree of Knowledge) if Wing-Boy is cracking his knuckles and telling me it’s naughty and rude and inappropriate to even ask what God’s reasons are?