CPS Theory

Please note, before you read any of this and then proceed to accuse me of "acquiring" this theory from somewhere else: this is indeed my own idea. However, this idea is pretty much mostly common sense; I'm just trying to codify it, in a sense. Writing stuff down makes things make sense in my own head. OK, enough introspection: on to my unveiling of CPS Theory*!

So what is CPS Theory, and what does it stand for? Well, CPS Theory is my way of looking at how narratives should work, and why narratives that break CPS Theory fail. CPS Theory stands for Character, Plot, and Setting. They're the three crucial ingredients of story-telling, and each one is dependent on the other. When writing something, I believe that if you neglect CPS Theory, you will fail. As a side note, the acronym CPS isn't special - it's not catchy, just descriptive. You could just as easy change the order of the letters or stylise it as ^C_P^S or even try PPP - People, Plot, Place*. I personally like the stylised CPS since it doesn't implicitly prioritise any of the three elements - they're all on an equal footing. Anyway: to the explanation.

Here's how one might naively imagine how writing a story works: characters act out the plot in some setting. I think that's misguided - it implies that the three elements aren't inherently connected. You could change the setting and the characters and plot wouldn't change. Here's my take on it: characters create the plot in response to themselves and the setting. They are all connected, and changing one necessarily means changing the others. That's another reason I like the stylised CPS: each one is adjacent to the others.

Now, how are all these elements connected, and how do you use CPS Theory to improve your writing? I'll go through the element easiest to change: setting. By and large, you can change the setting - make it as fantastic as you possibly can - and people will accept that. People, as a rule, don't mind an unrealistic setting. In fact, that's a lot of why people read novels or watch movies. It's the power of the human imagination. And I will not stop reading a book because the setting is awful. I don't really care that much about the setting once I start reading; for a lot of genres, the setting is the hook, the setting is what starts you off. Plot and characters keep you reading. Take, for example, Twilight. I don't care if you have a problem with the vampires sparkling - vampires didn't even die in the sun until Nosferatu in 1922. A lot of traditional vampire folklore has fallen by the wayside; you don't hear about vampires not being able to cross running water or being forced to count grains of rice if dropped on the ground anymore. Twilight is generally maligned because of its characters or plot - setting is just the most available thing people can point out. You want to know the setting of Twilight? Vampires live in secret, have superpowers, and are run by what is the equivalent of the Mafia. Superpowered vampire Mafia? Sign me up! Do I care about sparkling? Heck no! I will come back to Twilight later, because it's admittedly an easy example. I will attempt to speak about it objectively though - you will not hear me unfairly malign things just because that's what's in at the moment.

But, I'm digressing. What I'm trying to say is that setting is the most malleable of the three elements, because of the range of what you can do with setting. With everything from real life to grand galaxies with futuristic technologies to magic in medieval times, you can make almost anything your imagination creates and your audience will enjoy the ride. This, however, comes with a downside: if you do it wrong, it is awful. If your setting is obviously broken or self-contradictory, or if it's full of negative values for no reason, then you pretty much set yourself up to fail from the get-go. It can lead to things like MacGuffins - objects obviously put in to drive the plot - or Unfortunate Implications - where the setting creates unintentionally offensive messages. That's not to say you can't have settings that the audience detests - but only if you are supposed to detest them. 1984 is an excellent example of an amazing setting that we are not supposed to like - and that's the point of it. In fact, 1984 is one of the rare examples where the characters and the plot are secondary to the setting - it's usually the other way around. But, apart from those rare gems, setting is the malleable background to the heart and soul of the narrative.

Now, on to the next element, the hardest to change: the plot. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, 'but plot is easy to change!' No. No it is not. A plot that doesn't organically arise from interactions between characters and the setting will seem forced and people will not feel involved. A plot that doesn't arise from the interplay between characters and setting will lead to things like plot holes or out-of-character moments. You can't make the plot do something. You can only change the characters and the setting to get the plot the way you want it. A plot that seems forced, disconnected, or artificial, will not pull your audience in and entertain them. Either your characters will do something out of character, in which case your audience will start empathising with them less, or you will get things like plot holes or plots that just don't make proper sense. Remember this: your plot is unmalleable. Your plot is unyielding. If you try to bend it, it will snap. The only way to change what you want your plot to be without breaking it is to change everything else.

So, with plot and setting finished, we have one last element - characters. Characters are the reason we read books and watch movies. We empathise with these characters, if written properly, and hope they succeed in their endeavours. We experience what they experience, and share their emotions. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the very fact that characters exist is one of the greatest magics humans can weave - these simple words on a page, when we read them, create people that we are almost friends with, people that we know intimately, people that we might even shed a tear about if something happens to them*... that's the magic* of writing.

It is extremely imperative you don't screw this step up.

Writing characters is the hardest thing about writing in general. But why is that? Well, for one, the best characters seem like real people, whereas the best settings aren't necessarily real. Characters have to be relatable. Settings don't. Now, there are two ways to write a character your audience will feel connected with, and one of them is wrong. The first way is to create a fully well-rounded, three-dimensional character, with their own unique qualities and flaws, who the audience can relate to, almost as if they are meeting a real person. If you write this character well, then your audience almost becomes friends with these people. This sort of character solves problems that are thrown at them (as a result of interaction with the setting or other characters!) by what you would expect a real person to do - by doing things their personality dictates, while using what the setting gives them. Harry Potter is an excellent example: he seems real. He has his own flaws - he's impulsive, and moody, and sometimes a slave to his emotions - but he also has a lot of positive character traits; he's kind, loving, courageous, loyal, strong-willed... in short, he seems like a real person to us. We connect with him. The downside to this sort of character is that they are organic, and they will not necessarily obey your rules or what you want your plot to do. There's an excellent quote by Laurell K. Hamilton* that really sums this up: "My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people."

The second way is to write your character as a blank slate, with no real discernable character traits. This lets the audience project themselves on to said character, in an attempt to create something the audience can connect with. This sort of character solves problems by... well, since they have no real character traits to speak of, either the plot moves the character along, or, if the character is actually actively affecting what's happening in the narrative, then they are often given some sort of incredible superpower by the setting in order to solve said problem. Now, Harry Potter is not this sort of character just because he has magic. To quote the sixth book, "The trouble is, the other side can do magic too." This is a sort of superpower which is obviously and inherently overpowered with respect to the powers of other characters in the setting. If a character is creative with their power, which then becomes overpowered, this is less of a problem; that's using their personality. I'm talking about simple point-and-click overpoweredness: you don't need a personality, you just use the power.

I'm going to digress shortly here to go into how thrilling plots require challenges. If it's obvious the protagonist is going to succeed, and it's obvious how they're going to succeed, then we don't really care what happens: we know what's going to happen. Similarly, if it seems impossible for the protagonist to succeed, and then they use some power the audience has no idea about and could have no idea about, it will seem to your audience that you had no idea how to continue the narrative without the protagonist dying. If you want your audience to be emotionally involved in the story, then the characters need to face challenges of some description, and they need to succeed or fail in these challenges wholly using the resources available to them that the audience is aware of. To quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, who just knows things: "You can't make Frodo a Jedi unless you give Sauron the Death Star." In a less jocular saying, "The premise of a story is a conflict and its resolution."

So now I've gone into what makes a setting, plot, and character, let's look at an example of a way a story does not take CPS Theory into account: Twilight. Firstly: Bella is a Mary Sue. This is not me talking, this is Stephenie Meyer talking. And I quote: "I left out a detailed description of Bella in the book so that the reader could more easily step into her shoes." This is the complete opposite of how you deal with character creation. People also don't like Twilight because of the rampant Unfortunate Implications in it, but the main problem, I think, are the Mary Sues in the series. This is especially heinous considering Twilight is a romance series - it doesn't just need three-dimensional characters we can relate to, it depends on them. You might be able to get away with more two-dimensional characters in, say, the action genre, where people like the genre because of the plots rather than the characters, though I will say I think entrancing plots come from an emotionally involved audience, which comes from relatable characters. In a romance, it's characters that matter. Moreover, it is a foregone conclusion: once Bella becomes a vampire, she automatically falls irrevocably in love with Edward. There is no real romantic conflict in Twilight because we know that once Bella becomes a vampire, there will be no more conflict. It's over: they're in love forever. What this leaves us with is a series that may be entertaining, but in the same way a kiddy pool is: it's a shallow book series, with no real depth to speak of. There's nothing really below the surface in Twilight.

So how could you improve Twilight? Well, the first and most obvious way is to get rid of the Mary Sue-ness of the characters and have us become emotionally attached to them. The second way is to remove it as a romance genre, since we know the conclusion is foregone. You could make it an action series or a suspense series or an adventure series, but it's in need of the bartender mantra: I don't care where the series goes, but it can't stay here. I've already said the setting is solid. And, I have good news: such a story has already been written, and is surprisingly fantastic. I present to you, Luminosity - a re-imagining of Twilight in a similar style to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, where major conflicts are solved by the main character thinking about things. Let me quote directly from the first page of the narrative: "My favorite three questions are, What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former?" If you aren't already convinced that this narrative is both a) very different stylistically from Twilight, and b) amazing, I suggest you go read that quote again. Interestingly, this story also succeeds when it comes to CPS Theory, where the Characters are relatable, the Setting is interesting, and the Plot, without giving too much away, is created as a direct result of the interaction between the former two elements. Is this where I say that a Twilight fan-fiction is genuinely good writing? Yes. Yes I do. And I humbly invite you to read the book before you (admittedly justifiably) label me an idiot with no idea of what good literature is.

 

Well, I believe I've fairly comprehensively explained my take on how narratives should be written, and provided some examples on how to put my theory into action. I hope that I have inspired you to start thinking about how narratives should work, and, if you are a fledgling writer, that I have improved your writing in some way. Happy New Year!

AB

Boxing Eve 2012

Hello, readers! I hope you all have a happy Boxing Eve. My gift to you is Portal 2 pixel art! Enjoy!

 

Merry Christmas and a great New Year to everyone!

AB



Why You Probably Suck At Science

Let me get right into this post without the whole pointless pre-introduction I often do*: you probably suck at science, even if you think you know about it. I say probably just because there very well could be those out there who do know everything I'm about to say, but your average person will not be. Now, let me say here why I'm doing this post. While I like the fact that science is becoming a buzzword of sorts (think Portal), I also think it's sort of cheapening the concept a little - science encompasses so much that isn't even suggested in the phrase "Look at me still talking // While there's science to do." And while I will recognise that that is a source of the humour - the incongruity - and with my disclaimer that I really enjoy that song, and the series in general, I think that this comes at the expense of reducing the word 'science' to some sort of inherently funny word. I offer this epilepsy-inducing video as a sort of logical conclusion to the whole thing. So consider this post as an antidote of sorts to the whole thing.

First, let me explain why your brain probably sucks at science - we didn't evolve to do science. We evolved to survive. Yes, we're clearly intelligent, and we've had massive scientific technological leaps forward, but that doesn't mean that we don't still contain within us those ideas, biases and limitations that were excellent for surviving in a hunter-gatherer survival-of-the-fittest environment but not so good when figuring out how to get to the moon. And if for some reason you don't think evolution is a thing*, well, I will get to that.

I'm going to start with showing you an example of how your brain can not understand things on any level other than an intellectual one. When you feel yourself starting to fail to grasp what I'm saying, then you will see just one example of what I mean when I say your brain probably sucks at science.

The most simple example is scale. Imagine a single object; let's say an apple for no particular reason. It's pretty easy. Now imagine a second apple. How about a third*? Alright, let's jump to 10. But, that's too easy. Imagine 100 apples. If you're anything like me, it's getting somewhat difficult, but not impossible - you might be imagining a square of 100 apples, 10 by 10 on each side. Alright, we just multiplied by 10. Let's do it again. 1000. No: 10000. Can you imagine 10,000 apples? Can you? It is at about this point that your brain is really starting to give up - you didn't evolve to think of so many apples. Nobody had 10,000 apples back when we were evolving. There just wasn't a point to thinking of so many apples. Now think of this: can you, on a gut level, imagine the difference between one million and ten million apples? How about ten billion? If you can't imagine them (and you almost definitely can't), then you can't really tell the difference properly. You know one is ten times the other. But if someone gave you a truckload of apples, how could you tell how many there were?

As it happens, there are many ways to figure this out. You could weigh the truckload of apples then divide by the weight of one apple. You could put the apples in a pile and do some clever multiplication to estimate how many there are. There's a common theme you'll find when figuring this out: you'll be using maths. I'm going to bold this next sentence, because it's an important one: When dealing with large enough numbers, mathematics is the only way to go.

This is extremely important in science since large numbers are everywhere. Take the number of stars in the Milky Way. There are around 30 billion stars in our galaxy. Except, no, I lied just then, there are actually around 300 billion stars*. You will notice that you don't actually know the difference properly between those figures - your impression of how many stars there are hasn't actually changed. So we need to turn to maths - we can manipulate the number 300 billion far better with equations than we can in our heads.

Let's take, for example, the origin of life, simply because I have an article on hand about it, which you can read here. It says, for all those who don't want to read it, that the simplest theoretical building block of life, had, in the primordial oceans, a one in 10⁴⁰ chance of coming into being for every trial (mouseover this text for a note on scientific notation). I won't get into the details, but, that means that for every ten thousand trillion trillion trillion events, one building block of life was formed. Your brain can't even begin to process that level of improbability, so we're using maths. Now, you might think that this means that according to science, the odds are incredibly small that life would ever arise on Earth. Well, that's where you're mistaken. According to the article, if you let the volume of the ocean be 10²⁴ litres (which I can't personally speak for the veracity of, but I'm no expert), and let the concentration of ingredients be 10^-6 M (roughly on the order of dissolving one grain of salt in a litre of water, apparently a very conservative estimate), then a significant number of building blocks of life. How many you ask? Around 10³¹, or 10 million trillion trillion building blocks.

Again, huge numbers we're talking about here, and it's all thanks to maths. Your brain by itself couldn't come up with stuff like this. And here's the thing - so many problems in science can be solved with large numbers. The odds that any one planet is suitable for life are small - but with so many planets around so many stars, suddenly the odds that at least one planet become so much larger. Evolution from single-celled organisms to everything we see today through random mutations may seem impossible, but after 4 billion years (again, a number we just can't cope with properly), a heck of a lot of evolution is done. There's even an idea in string theory in which the problem where the universe seems fine-tuned for life because there are so many universes, the odds that one universe is suitable for life becomes pretty damn good.

So that's one example of your brain just not being able to comprehend something because we didn't evolve to comprehend - it wasn't helpful. Another example would be quantum physics*. Take, for example, something called Bell's theorem, which I've picked because it's incredibly fascinating, as well as being something most people don't know about.

This all starts with Einstein - he hated quantum physics. You may have heard his quote "God does not play dice with the universe." Well, he and two other colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, found what they thought to be a proof that quantum mechanics was incomplete - a summary may be found here. This incompleteness relied on two things: that the universe had both locality and realism. Locality is pretty simple - if you want to affect one thing, you have to move through space to do it. If you blow on a ball to get it rolling, you move air from your mouth to the ball. Light moves through space. Gravity moves through space*. It makes sense. Realism is slightly trickier, but it just means that no matter if we observe them or not, objects have definite properties - the usual definition being something along the lines of "the moon is always there, even if we don't see it." It doesn't just disappear when we're all not looking at it. Quantum mechanically speaking, it's a little more complicated than that, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but at the time, that was only thought to be an observation problem, in which when we observe something, we change it. But that's roughly what realism is.

Now, about 30 years after this paper, a man named John Stewart Bell came along and found that there was a way to test if this paradox applied. It didn't. In other words: either locality or realism (or both) were wrong. They could not simultaneously be right. The details are a bit technical, but that was the gist of it. So now we have to give up basic principles of the universe that we as humans take for granted: that objects have to move through space to affect other objects, and/or that these objects have definite properties. Welcome to quantum physics, and welcome to your brain being incapable of dealing with it.

So now I believe I have shown you fairly conclusively that our brains are not equipped to deal with a lot of modern concepts in science, as well as the scale at which most of these concepts apply. But humanity's pretty smart, right? We're intelligent - we can work past this, right? We can do precise experiments and analyse them to figure out exactly what secrets nature is hiding. Just because we can't really grasp the difference between one and ten billion (for example) doesn't mean our carefully designed experiments can't. What's stopping us?

Well, out brains, for one. Forgetting the whole aspects of nature we can't understand on any basis other than an intellectual one, we also naturally suck at doing experiments. Essentially, we were not made to be objective, which science demands. This talk by Michael Shermer is simply fantastic, and really sums up much of what I'm going to say in this next paragraph, which is heavily inspired by (read: practically stolen from) this video.

I want you to imagine you're HG from my post about two weeks ago - you're back in hunter-gatherer society, and you're out looking for food. You're walking alongside tall grass, spear in hand, when suddenly you hear a rustle. What could it be? You're not sure - it might be the wind, or it might be a lion ready to leap out and make short work of you. What should you do? You could either get ready to go - fight-or-flight time - or you could ignore it. If you get ready and it's nothing, you live to fight another day! But, if you ignore it and it's a lion, then well, you're lunch.

But what does this mean? Well, pretty much, those who see the false pattern of rustling grass = lion are better at surviving than those who just see the coincidence of rustling grass = wind. So there's already a bias when we do experiments - we tend to see false patterns. Shermer calls this patternicity.

There's also some more problems in doing experiments. One huge problem is called confirmation bias. Essentially, as humans, we expect to see the evidence that fits our theory. Why else would we have the theory, right?

Allow me to tell you a cautionary tale about something called N-rays, which I was introduced to by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who's just fantastic when it comes to this stuff. He's writing "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" (found in the sidebar), and, well, look out for a post soon* on the Sequences.

 

In 1903, a French physicist named Prosper-René Blondlot came across what he thought to be a new type of radiation, which could be observed when it was focused through an aluminium prism in a certain apparatus and you looked really carefully at a certain type of screen, which would glow slightly*. But many physicists, especially in England and Germany, who couldn't see that glow. So Blondlot decided to set up an experiment to demonstrate the existence of these rays. And he did the experiment and everything went as expected - everyone saw the rays, and it was all good.

Except, and here's the kicker, an American physicist named Robert Wood had changed the apparatus without telling anyone - he removed the prism and the object that was to be emitting the N-rays.

So what's the point of this story? Well, remember: there were a lot of physicists who saw the effects of those rays - even though those rays did not exist. And what happened? They thought they saw the rays, they thought they observed them. They went to see the rays, and once they thought they were there, they tended to see them. It also tells us something else: to do good science, we need to be as objective as possible. If you say, "just look a little harder," then you are not being objective. You are trying to convince the observer to see something. Nature cannot be convinced. If someone who doesn't know what they're looking for doesn't see it, then the odds are it does not exist. That's why double-blind studies exist - to get rid of this bias.

As humans, we naturally suck at science. Large numbers just don't work properly in our brains, recent concepts in science go against the grain of what we observe in the world today, we find patterns in the world that aren't there, and once we find an idea, we're not good at being objective about it. There are so many things I haven't gone into - black-and-white thinking, science needing to be falsifiable, how Occam's razor really works - but those are just examples. I am not qualified enough to really go into detail about all these, but, well, I hope this post has shown you how your brain sucks at science, and I hope it inspires you to go read up on it. And, well, if not, I'll be doing a post on the Sequences soon, which explains this sorta stuff much better than I could. As always, thanks for reading.

AB

Love Me Slender

Wow, two posts in a week? That hasn't happened since January. How lucky are you*? And, it's the post I promised in the first post: the the teleporting terror of the internet, the faceless fear of many a Youtube video, the pale panic of gamers the world over, El Hombre Delgado* himself, the Slender Man. More specifically, what it is, how I got interested in it, and why it's scary. Yes, that's right, cower in fear, you wretched fools, as I go into something scarier than Slendy can ever hope to be: deconstruction*. So let's get to it, shall I?

So what is Slender Man? The Slender Man was the first scary/creepy thing created by the internet that really took off - the only thing that could compare is the Zalgo meme, and that's only really because of the m̶̸͜e͞s̕͠s̶̶ed҉͢ ͘u̢̧͠p̨͘ ͏t̸̡ex̛͡t* that is associated with it. But Slender Man, he just took off. Originating from a thread on SomethingAwful in 2009, Slendy quickly took off, with a video series called Marble Hornets starting up in response less than a week after the character was first thought up (the internet moves fast), and which solidified a lot of the ideas around Slender Man that had been tossed up in the thread. Since then, it's been referenced in a lot of things, with Endermen in Minecraft being directly inspired by the whole thing, and with Slender Man finally hitting the mainstream (I don't like using that word, but, I just used it. Sue me.) in June of this year, when "Slender" semi-officially became known as the scariest game that isn't "Amnesia: The Dark Descent".

Well, that's the history of Slender Man, but I haven't started talking about Slendy himself intoo much detail. I'll be getting into that later, because it's tied up intensely with why Slender Man is so scary, but a slight disclaimer first: Slender Man is scary for a reason. As in have-trouble-sleeping-just-because-it's-dark-and-he-could-be-anywhere scary. I'm not going to be able to do this justice. Don't go watching Marble Hornets at night. Or in the day, for that matter. But before I go into why the Slenderest of Men is so scary, I'll brighten everything up by mentioning how I first found out about him.

If I haven't talked about Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series, also known as Yu-Gi-Oh: Abridged or YGOTAS before, I probably should have. It's just an excellent show - LittleKuriboh is one of my voice-acting heroes (yes, I also enjoy voice-acting, as almost everyone I know can attest to.), and the comedy is just top-notch. I have a link in the sidebar to the website for Yu-Gi-Oh: Abridged - if you haven't seen any episodes before, stop reading this and go look at something much more entertaining. Now, of all the characters in this series, Marik and Bakura have to be two of my favourites, and it's pretty obvious that the rest of the internet agrees. And being the avid fan I am, I see this video here, and, well, I just fall in love with it. After I saw that, I went on a Slendy binge, had trouble getting to sleep, and, well, here I am.

Now, to the actual point: why Slender Man is scary. First, though, you may be asking, what is the mythos to Slender Man? Well, first the physical details. Slendy is (as you can guess) a tall, pale, slender humanoid figure, who wears a suit. His (its?) most striking feature is his facelessness, and he is often (but not always) portrayed with having tentacles of some sort. He is generally very silent (having no face, obviousl). Last but not least, he will come after you.

Being how Slender Man is a product of the internet, you won't get much consensus apart from that - a lot of it really depends on who's created the vlog/blog/short story/something else in question. One thing's almost for sure though: whoever wrote the thing talking about Slendy will either die or go insane eventually. Slendy always wins. Always.

But why is Slendy scary, and how did Slendy become popular? Well, Slender Man is like the internet's answer to H.P. Lovecraft, in that Slender Man is some sort of figure who doesn't seem to be quite of this world, but will still mess you up badly. Is Slendy intelligent? What motivates him to kill you or drive you insane? Where did he come from? Why? Nobody knows - and that's sort of the point. Much of the fear comes from the fact that almost all we see of Slender Man is his effects. It is rare you'll find something that tackles Slender Man head-on - he's mainly in the shadows or indirectly referenced. Horror movies are mostly scary because of the suspense, interspersed with episodes of shock and terror - and the Slender Man mythos has really captured this. A successful Slender Man thing will capture the essentials: some tall, faceless, suited figure who lives in the shadows, and who only shows himself to people sparingly - but when he does, things are about to get seriously bad.

So why is Slender Man, of all things, popular on the internet? Why has he captured so much interest? Well, first you need to understand what the internet is good at - individuals producing content and communicating with people worldwide. Things are much more personal on the internet than books or films - someone who posts content seems much more like "one of us" online. And this is how the Slender Man mythos fits in really well - a typical story being someone encountering things that aren't quite right, then investigating and documenting the results, and who soon finds out that there's some suited guy behind it all who doesn't seem quite human... This can obviously work as a film, or book, but it works really well when you get the internet involved - it's something that just fits as a blog or a vlog. It also adds to the fear behind it all - if it were a film, it's less scary: this happened to actors, not people you know. But since it happened online, to people just like us, it gets a lot spookier. That's what makes Slender Man so scary and popular - he's like a character of fear that's worked on the internet's twin powers in spreading ideas and posting content. Slender Man as a concept just works with the power of anyone being able to post content, and since he's become a meme* in his own right, the internet popularises it. This also explains an idea that is occasionally linked to Slender Man - the fact that by being aware of him, he becomes aware of you (aren't you glad you're reading this post?).

 

Our conclusion, ladies and gentlemen? Slender Man is, if not a perfect, then at least an incrediby good fit for the "scary character" of the internet*. His mythos just makes for a traditionally scary thing, with the whole facelessness and "not-of-this-worldiness" for the physical characteristics, and the suspense teleporting thing to complete the package. This would make him good enough to work with such characters as Freddy Krueger, but on top of all this, Slender Man's mythos of attacking random normal people just naturally gels really well with the power of individual content sharing that makes the internet what it is. It's these characteristics, as well as a few others I mentioned, that make the Slender Man so scary, and make him the terror of the internet that he is today. Hope you enjoyed it!

AB

Opinion Time: Atheism and Religion

I suppose this could also have been titled "A Plague On Both Your Houses"* since I'm going to be talking about why I believe atheism today is misguided, to put it lightly, while also discussing why I believe religion is wrong. I will get this out of the way and say that I am an atheist, but this post is going to be very much me sympathetic to where religion stands today. So this is a blog post, arguing for religion from an atheistic perspective, thus satisfying nobody. Ah well, screw it, it's my blog.

Speaking of which, I would usually apologise about not posting enough, but it's my blog and I haven't had much to say that I either can't tweet about (check the sidebar for my exciting Twitter feed!) or I feel needs to be said, if that makes sense. There's been a lot going on in my life recently, not much of which necessitates a post. So please accept this perfunctory acknowledgement of not posting in a while and get back to the actual thing I'm supposed to be talking about.

So what am I going to be talking about in this post? Well, essentially I'll be discussing where I believe religion came from, why I believe it has several positive social aspects in contrast to the seemingly universal negativity*, mentioning some problems I have with religion today, as well as talking about the problem with atheism on the internet today. I will also be providing links to people talking about what I'm talking about who know much more about this sort of thing than I. Take what I'm saying, and work from there.

Also, why am I talking about this? Why am I adding another drop of opinion into the great, corrosive sea known as religious debate? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that I haven't seen this sort of argument spoken much. Essentially, I think my opinion is different enough that it won't be a tired repeating of old arguments. The second, and the reason I'm doing this now, is that I've been having several thoughts about this recently, and talking to some of my more religious friends about this in an attempt to understand religion. It's worked to a degree, but, I still feel like I don't understand enough, and I find writing stuff down helps figure it out in my head. So here I am.

Now, enough of introduction. On to my actual points!

DISCLAIMER: This post is not meant to be bashing of either atheism or religion, only my personal opinion on both. If anyone is showing this to you in order to convince you that your beliefs are bad and you should feel bad, then they are in the wrong. If they are showing this in order to show you a different opinion on the matter, then, well, I support that. Furthermore, I am not and do not claim to be an expert in these matters and I am fully open to being proven wrong in these matters.

Let's start from Point 1: Where religion comes from. I want you to imagine a humanity thousands of years in the past, when hunter-gatherers ruled the plains and religion did not exist (many of you may already be saying "But my religion always existed!" While I can respect that, please just imagine it didn't for a second.). Now, imagine some especially intelligent hunter-gatherer - we'll call this person HG for readability's sake - looks at the world and goes "Where did this all come from?"

It's not an unreasonable assumption for HG to make that since humanity can create things, that the world itself was created - essentially the watchmaker argument. As well, HG looks at the world, and seeing that things seem to be designed for him in it. So HG comes to the conclusion that the world was designed by some intelligent, powerful creator (or creators) for humanity. Please note already that both evolution and intelligent design make the claim that the world seems to be designed for people - intelligent design claims that it was, whereas evolution claims that humans evolved to suit their environment.

Now HG has an explanation for why everything came to be. But, now he/she asks, why are there morals? Why is society (even some primitive pre-society that HG exists in) the way it is? Now, HG can explain this like so: this creator made it that way. Why? We don't have to know why. It's clear that there is some intelligent, powerful creator made it that way, and who are we to question such a being's plan? I will say, even as an atheist, that if I believed such a being exists, I would bow to their superior moral judgement - anyone who created the universe clearly has much more claim to, well, anything, than I do.

So now we have the birth of religion. But why does it flourish? Well, say HG takes this idea to his/her society. It's a captivating idea that wins over the people of HG's tribe - it just makes sense. So now we have some tribe united by an idea - a more cohesive tribe, in other words, whose individual members have a reason, or at least more of a reason, to work together. And these tribes have an edge over tribes that don't have this reason to band together. Jonathan Haidt has an excellent talk about this, where he mentions how these groups of entities who work together for a common interest just outcompete individuals.

 

The conclusion for Part 1: In a world where no religion exists, religion can quickly evolve, simply because it explains things about the world and lends itself to a cohesive society, which can outcompete other societies and spread naturally. As an atheist, I would argue that this is a better explanation for religions to exist than the idea that a deity created it, simply because it does not invoke the existence of a deity to explain something - an Occam's razor approach. The existence of a deity is not necessary to explain anything, so it is excluded from the the explanation.

Some rebuttals to this: you may be saying, "But why was the universe created? Surely we require a deity to explain this?" Well, not really, no. While we are far from a scientific consensus*, there are a few hypotheses (not theories!*) kicking around. The Hartle-Hawking state is a proposal where there is no real beginning to the universe since there cannot exist something "before time", while in string theory, there's a proposal wherein the universe is one of many, which solves the problem of both creation of the universe and why it seems fine-tuned for life (mouseover these words* for my ideas on that), which Brian Greene explains so well here. Now, while I'm not qualified to claim either of these are true, what I can say is that these show that the creation of the universe is not something science can't explain, it's something science hasn't explained well enough yet.

Now, let's move on to part 2: the benefits of religion. Let me start off with the big guns: it has been shown that a society with some notion of punishment to those who go against the will of the whole is better off than a society without that. By better off, what do I mean? I mean that the individuals in a society are better off if defectors from the will of the society are punished to some degree. Jonathan Haidt (mentioned for the second time in this blog, for those keeping track) has a very thought-provoking and interesting talk which I recommend you all watch where he goes into this idea (for those with access to the ability to see Nature papers, the relevant article may be found here). If we think about religion as this sort of process, where there is some desirable state to be achieved and defectors are punished somehow - with things like tangible punishments such as corporal punishment or an ultimate religious punishment such as a Hell - then we see that a religious society is beneficial for its members.

This is not to say that a non-religious society is necessarily worse off, but rather an anarchic society will be worse off than a religious one, simply by the fact that a religious society punishes defectors. An altruistic society needs some way to punish those who go against it or it becomes worse off. That's the bottom line. Religion is also great for a sense of community and harmony for its followers - just by the fact that it is a group, and these followers share a common interest. And, honestly, if I have to start bringing up people who have used their religion for good, I'm going to be here all day.

 

A common attack against religion is that it can be used to start wars. While I can't deny this completely, I can argue the fact that given two groups with separate ideologies, there is a chance that these groups will be belligerent, regardless of religion - take, for example, World War II, where of all the main Allies and Axis, only Japan was not a historically Christian country (yes, I'm aware the Soviets were officially atheist. But, interestingly enough, when the Nazis attacked the Soviets in 1941, the Soviets enlisted the Russian Orthodox Church to increase patriotism.). On the other hand though, there's evidence to support that warfare among groups is less murderous than warfare amongst individuals - Steven Pinker discusses this in his talk.

 

Another common attack against religion is it stems scientific progress. While I also can't deny this completely either, what with the whole anti-evolution bent in places like the Bible Belt in America, as well as having to mention that I have not done much research on this matter, I can leave this article here discussing how the pursuit of science isn't just compatible, but encouraged in the religion of Islam.
 

The conclusion for Part 2: Religion is, by and large, a good thing for a society. It provides the means for an altrustic society to flourish for the good of its members, and its flaws can arguably be reduced to its status as a group of humans who, by their nature, are antagonistic to other groups, and even this flaw is mitigated by the fact that these humans are in a group.

Now, the third and final part: the problem with atheism. I'll come right out and say it - those who believe fervently in a god not existing, whose lives revolve around the fact that a god doesn't exist, don't really get atheism. Atheism is a lack of belief - it's often said that atheism is a religion in the same sense that not stamp collecting is a hobby.

 

I'm going to do something I shouldn't here and link you something I don't like just for this purpose: r/atheism. It's the subreddit where virtual people sit around bagging out religion, mocking its followers for being ignorant, and cry out that they are persecuted for their beliefs even though they are one of the biggest groups on one of the biggest sites on the net. Now I could point out the hypocrisy of those of r/atheism crying out that they are persecuted while at the same time doing exactly that to religious people, but I have something much more important to say: r/atheism shouldn't exist. Let me put this in bold print: r/atheism shouldn't exist. Now, r/atheism claims that "All topics related to atheism, agnosticism and secular living are welcome here." But the phrase "topics related to atheism" is almost a contradiction in terms - imagine a group of people who all got together to talk about not stamp collecting. Do you notice how the only way such a group can be cohesive is to talk about how bad stamp collecting is? How everything not related to stamp collecting is so huge as to not be something that a group can be based around? Do you notice how to talking about atheism is the same way as talking about not stamp collecting?

This is my problem with atheism on the internet - the very fact that it's a topic is a concern. Atheism on the internet is more antitheism than atheism, more anti-religious than just not religious. Atheism itself is not something a group can align itself around without resorting to antitheism of some kind.

 

OK, so I've just blown through over 2000 words. Hopefully you got something from this wall of text rant about religion and atheism in today's society. And if not, well, you just read over 2000 words on something you didn't get anything from. Congratulations. I hope I can post more soon, but if not... well, that just means I had nothing of interest to say that was long enough. If you want more regular insights into my exciting life, Twitter exists. Anyway. Thanks for reading!

AB