Some Things I've Changed My Mind About

I argue that the defining characteristic of someone dedicated to the sceptical paradigm is the singular ability to change one's mind and opinions based on the presentation of new evidence. As soon as you're bound to a particular conclusion, you're no longer acting sceptically, and have become an ideologue.

It's the process of scepticism that's important, not the conclusions it leads you to. The "truths" about the world that scepticism reveals must, necessarily, be secondary - because they're always provisional, and should, ideally, constantly be re-evaluated based on new information.

With that in mind, I think it's a valuable exercise, as a sceptic, to pat oneself on the back from time to time, by identifying some of the things you've changed your mind about, based on new evidence or arguments coming to light. I hope to make this a regular series, but since this is the first instalment, I'm going to look at some of the biggest issues I've changed my mind about in my life.

UFOs

I've always been fascinated by space. Before I knew how to spell the word, I wanted to be an Astronomer (either that or a Paleontologist, which I also couldn't spell at the time). I was mesmerised by Saturday night presentations of Star Trek and Space 1999 (even though I barely understood them at the time). I was also transfixed by Carl Sagan's haunting speeches in the Cosmos series about the possibilities of extra-terrestrial civilisations, and the hope that we might someday communicate with them.

Somehow or other (probably through my school library) I came across the notion of UFOs and alleged encounters with extra-terrestrial beings. Being the credulous lad I was, I bought it. I was thrilled and terrified at the prospect that visitors from other planets were visiting us, and I eagerly awaited the day official First Contact would happen.

It never did.

One day, while looking for awesome pictures of Star Trek ships online, I stumbled across a website that astounded me: www.badastronomy.com. Phil Plait's simple, elegant and humourous explanations exposing the flawed assumptions, innaccurate information and simple logical refutations of the things I had believed were overpoweringly persuasive. After only a few days' worth of reading, I had no choice but to reverse my belief in UFOs. The evidence and logic where too clear not to.

Alternative Therapies

In my early twenties, one of my first full-time jobs was for a company planning a health and fitness expo. It was my job to cold-call possible exhibitors and then meet with them to try and get them to buy some floor-space at the expo.

I was terrible at it.

Nevertheless, I was encouraged to seek out anyone and everyone selling something relating to the pursuit of health. Since I didn't know any better at the time, I basically opened up the Yellow Pages to "H" and started calling. On the whole, I found the purveyors of alternative therapies to be far more willing to meet with me, and to buy floor space. During those few months I met with a bevvy of homeopaths, naturopaths, massage therapists, acupuncturists, iridologists and assorted other well-dressed people with fancy-sounding titles (including one lady who informed me with a giggle that she enjoyed sitting in her hyperbaric chamber between appointments with her "patients")

Like this. Seriously.

I recall being taken aback when I met with one man, an actual MD, who asked what sort of other exhibitors would be present. He was outraged when I mentioned the word "homeopath", and the sales call ended then and there. I hadn't the foggiest idea why at the time.

It would be years before I learned about the distinction between medicine and alternative medicine (aka: not medicine), and finally came to understand that doctor's reaction. I learned that the faith I had placed in advertising was misplaced... a faith that even three years of studying advertising at college hadn't shaken. I learned to mistrust people claiming to be authorities, and instead evaluate the claims on their own merit.

God

I was raised a Christian. Not the evangelical, biblical literalist kind. I was raised in a traditional presbytarian church. I didn't resist my religious indoctrination at all - I trusted my parents and other elders to give me the right information. I went to church every Sunday. I sang in the choir. In my late teens, I even qualified and practiced as a Sunday School teacher for a while. I bought it.

A likely contributing factor to why I bought it was the somewhat moderate nature of the doctrine I was fed. I was simultaneously taught about the scientific explanation of the origins of the world and about the biblical account of creation in Genesis. I was told that there was no contradiction between the two, since the former was scientifically accurate, and the latter was more of a metaphor, used by God to explain to bronze-age people the fact that he created the universe, not so much how he did so.

After my introduction to organised scepticism via Bad Astronomy, I did a lot of reading. It was a lengthy process in which I systematically evaluated and then abandoned a lot of my former beliefs. The last big one to go was God. For the better part of a year I remained ambivalent on the question of God. I wasn't a Christian anymore (although I still called myself a "Philosophical Christian", whatever that means"), but I wasn't ready to abandon the whole idea. I couldn't bring myself to adopt the label "atheist" or even "agnostic".

Only after reading The God Delusion was I able to shake off the invisible sky daddy once and for all. There was no magic bullet - no single problem that I wasn't able to reconcile. But if I had to choose the argument that I found most persuasive, it was Russel's Cosmic Teapot.

Jesus (twice)

After adopting the label of 'atheist', I wasn't sure what to do with my ideas around the historicity of the bible as a whole, and Jesus in particular. Just how fictionalised were the accounts contained therein? How much was metaphor, exaggeration, copy-error and pure fabrication?

The first person who helped me to answer this question was Robert M. Price, in his appearances in the Bible Geek episodes of the Infidel Guy Show podcast. Through Price I learned that whole sections of the bible had been copied from other, pre-existing documents; that there's little to no archaeological evidence supporting any of the "historical" narrative in its pages, and that at least a few serious biblical scholars doubt that there ever was a historical Jesus.

I found his arguments persuasive, and came to conclude that there likely was no historical Jesus. Or, at the very least, the one described in the bible had been so distorted that he likely bore no resemblance to any actual, one person.

Not an actual person

More recently, I've read some of Bart Ehrmans' work. In Jesus, Interrupted he argues that a substantial portion of the biblical account of Jesus' life was likely fictionalised, but that with careful scrutiny quite a lot of it can be determined to likely be historically accurate - suggesting that Jesus probably was an actual guy, a teacher of sorts who started some shit in ancient Palestine.

My interest in the bible and the origins of the Christian religion is ongoing. One of the things I'm particularly interested in is evaluating the claims about certain traits that Christians claims are unique to them. Are they unique to Christians? Where do they come from? Are the useful or not? Fascinating stuff.

Free Will (twice)

A tough pill to swallow has been the existence of free will. I think we all assume, probably automatically, that we have a will of our own, that is somehow independent of our circumstances and environment.

But in a deterministic universe (as I now believe to be the one I live in) it simply can't be so. Decisions are made in the brain, which is a physical structure that conforms to deterministic physical laws - it can't do otherwise. Even in a quantum universe, where randomness is always a factor, randomness isn't the same as free will. Free will, so defined, is a persistent illusion.

Don't think about a yellow beetle.

I've recently called this conclusion into question. Not so much because I think my assumptions about it are wrong, but rather because I think I've been defining the terms incorrectly. If, instead, I consider free will to be my own ability to make decisions free of imposition from other causal agents (in other words: other people) I'm happy that it's free enough to be considered 'free'.

Assuming I'm not under the influence of another person's manipulations, my decisions are effectively free. That's not to say that my brain isn't still a deterministic machine, subject to environmental influences - it's more of a metaphysical redefinition of 'freedom' in this context.

I can live with the fact that my brain will do what it does, because it can't do otherwise. But when I feel that my choices are being manipulated or forced by another person who is deliberately limiting my options, I start to get annoyed. That's when my 'free will' is being compromised.

It's because of this, that I'm starting to re-evaluate my long-held position in favour of some form of communism. I'll keep you posted on where I get to on that one.

Life on Mars? No.

This morning, while driving to work I spotted this headline on the side of the road. 

Something about it raised a red flag with me. It seemed too clear, too concise, too simple - and very sensationalist. But, of course, the prospect was exciting. Had data been returned from that various Mars missions that had finally turned up some kind of microbial life?

It seemed unlikely. NASA is under strict instructions not to look for life on Mars. The closest they can come is to look for the necessary conditions to support life, or maybe for indirect evidence to suggest that life may exist on Mars.

Could it be that NASA managed to find life, even without looking for it? Probably not.

I hypothesised that what was really going on here was that NASA (or one of the other space agencies or affiliated research organisations) had made another small, incremental, but possibly significant discovery that pointed towards the possiblity of life on Mars. And that The Times was blowing the whole thing out of proportion.

So I got to the office and looked up the relevant article. It confirmed my suspicions.

In fact, no-one has found life on Mars.

What they have found is pretty cool: that there appears to be a periodic upswing in the amount of atmospheric methane. This suggests that a fairly large amount of methane gas is being produced somewhere on the red planet, being belched out into the atmosphere, and then slowly oxidised over time.

The puzzling bit is the question of where this methane could be coming from. We know of two processes that produce methane in these sorts of quantities: volcanic activity and life. Since we're pretty sure that there's no volcanic activity on Mars, that leaves either life or a third explanation we haven't thought of yet.

This discovery increases the probability that there might be some sort of life on Mars, which is pretty awesome in itself. But it does not tell us that there is life on Mars!

This is what gets to me about stories like this. Some journalist has taken the facts of the story and twisted them into a sensationalist yarn designed to sell papers (or hits on the website). And it works. What it fails to do is give the reader an accurate description of what's actually going on. Anyone who read only the headline, or perhaps only the first paragraph of the article, would be left believing that we now know that there is life on Mars - which couldn't be further from the truth.

What makes this even worse is if life ever is actually discovered on Mars, the magnitude of that discovery will be substantially diminished in the public perception. When the headlines read "Life Found on Mars" for real, the average consumer will think "Big deal! They found that already before, didn't they? Stupid scientists."

While I appreciate the value of getting the general public interested in scientific topics, like the search for life on Mars, I think that misleading them like this does more harm than good.

Back to Basics: UFOs

As a Trekkie and a sceptic, I am frequently asked my opinion on UFOs. Here's a high-level overview of my position on the topic.

What are UFOs?

UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. It's a jargon term originally used by military radar operators as a place-holder name for anything they detected on their screens until it could be identified. Some detected objects were never conclusively identified, and were then logged simply as 'UFO'.

Around the time of the Roswell incident, the term found its way into popular usage, and took on a whole new meaning.

Roswell, New Mexico, is a small town near a military base that was used extensively for testing of new and secret military technology. Farmers and other residents in the area would, from time to time, see strange things in the sky (experimental military aircraft) or find unidentifiable debris littered on the ground (crashed experimental aircraft). One such incident happened in 1947.

A litany of blunderous military cover-ups trying to hide the true nature of the experimental technology, combined with the popularity of science fiction literature at the time, led to the birth of a modern myth: a crashed alien spacecraft.

This incident is widely regarded as the birth of the UFO craze. Reports of "flying saucers" became more frequent, and before long people started reporting that they had encountered actual alien life-forms, often being abducted by them, and subjected to medical experiments.

In the midst of all this, the term 'UFO' lost its original meaning, and became a popular term for 'alien spacecraft'. Radar operators, pilots and other people familiar with the term started using it in public to describe their own experiences, and it caught on.

Is there any truth to the claims?

This isn't an easy question to answer. In order to address it properly, we need to break it down into several distinct claims:

1. Intelligent alien life-forms have developed a technology that allows them to travel across interstellar space and visit our planet.
2. A lot of people have seen things in the sky that can only be alien spacecraft.
3. Alien spacecraft have crashed or been shot down on Earth, and there is a government conspiracy to hide it.
4. People are visited or abducted by aliens and subjected to experiments.

Let's look at them in that order.

Aliens Are Here

The prospect of interstellar travel is a very difficult one, as far as our understanding of the laws of nature can tell us. The problem is that the stars are very VERY far away.

The nearest star, Promixa Centauri, is about four light-years away. A light year is a measurement of distance, and tells us how far light travels in a year. Light travels very fast (about 300 000 000 meters per second), so that means Proxima is about 39 732 000 000 000 kilometers away. Far.

So, if you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take you about four years to get from Promixa Centauri to Earth. But what if nobody lives at Proxima? The rest of the stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy are dozens, if not hundreds of light-years away. That's a very long trip, at the speed of light.

But there's another problem. As far as we can tell, it doesn't seem to be possible to travel at the speed of light. Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity tells us that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more massive you become, so the amount of energy needed to accelerate you increases exponentially. To move something the size of the space-shuttle even close to the speed of light would take more energy than the sun puts out in its entire lifetime. That's a lot of energy.

So interstellar travel is very VERY difficult. It's so difficult that from our point of view right now, it's effectively impossible to do. There may be other factors we don't yet know about that make it completely impossible.

However, as I said, all of that is based on our current picture of the universe. It's not preposterous to suppose that there might be intelligent people out there on other planets who have a superior understanding of physics, and have somehow found a way to get around all of that. It seems pretty unlikely, but we can't rule it out.

Okay, so, what's the bottom line? Could aliens be coming to visit us? Probably not, but it's not impossible.

Lights in the Sky

When people claim to have spotted a UFO, the evidence presented comes in two forms:

1. Photographs and video footage.
2. Eyewitness accounts.

If someone shows you a photograph, or even a video, of something strange in the sky, it's pretty much impossible to know what it is you're looking at. Sure, it could be a giant spacecraft. Or it could be a hubcap tied to a string. Or a cloud. Or a firefly. Or an aeroplane. Or a sophisticated CGI forgery. Even if the photograph seems to obviously present something that looks like an alien spacecraft, there's simply no way to know if that is, in fact, what is being presented.

It's unwise to underestimate hoaxers. They're clever, and have a vast array of tools at their disposal to create unbelievably realistic looking photos and footage.

Unfortunately, photographs and videos simply aren't strong evidence for the existence of alien spacecraft. At best they can show you that there was something weird in the sky that day, but often it can't even tell you that.

When it comes to looking at the sky and seeing strange things, on the surface it makes sense to take the word of people like pilots, air-traffic controllers, radar operators and other professionals who spend a lot of time dealing with airborne things. You would think that they would know what they're talking about.

The thing is, those sorts of people spend a lot less time actually looking at the sky than you might think. They probably know more about aeroplanes and air traffic than anyone else, but what do they really know about the sky? If they're not the experts, who is? Who spends more time actually looking at the sky than anyone else?

Amateur astronomers.

How many UFO sightings are reported by amateur astronomers? Very VERY few. This is because amateur astronomers have spent considerable amounts of time learning about strange atmospheric effects that can make the moon or the planet Venus look strange. They are trained to tell the difference between an aeroplane, a satellite and a meteorite. They're accustomed to being able to tell the size, distance and speed of an object, just by looking at it.

So things that, to most of us, would look odd or even inexplicable, are ordinary and mundane to those people who are accustomed to looking at the sky.

So when a policeman or other respected public official claims to have seen a strange light in the night sky, that he is positive was an alien spacecraft, he's not necessarily lying. He's probably just mistaken, because he wasn't able to accurately identify what he was looking at.

Alien Contact

The claims surrounding alien spacecraft crashes and the surrounding conspiracies sound convincing when they're explained by believers, but when you look at them in more detail, you see how little evidence there really is: none.

The quintessential example is the Roswell incident I mentioned earlier. Eyewitness reports give details of strange, unearthly materials that were recovered from the crash site. The military files on the incident were recently unclassified, including the wreckage. The so called "unearthly materials" were aluminium foil and balsa wood. It would be surprising to find that in the middle of nowhere, but but it's pretty mundane stuff. Even the eyewitness testimony is full of holes.

Based on a critical analysis, there doesn't appear to be any reason to doubt the military report on the incident. Unless you believe the conspiracy. 

That's the trouble with conspiracy theories. Any evidence against the claim (like the evidence produced by the military) is evidence for the conspiracy (in this case the assumption is that the military fabricated the "evidence" in order to cover up the "truth"). Conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable (they can't be proven wrong) and therefore we can't put much stock in them.

Of course we can't rule out the possibility that such a conspiracy may exist. But when you take into account the sheer number of people that would need to be in on it, it becomes a pretty unlikely possibility. Remember that four guys were in on Watergate and they couldn't keep that a secret.

Abductions

This, to me, is a very interesting part of the whole UFO mythos. The claims are that some people are kidnapped, subjected to experiments (that are usually of a sexual nature) and then returned to where they were found.

The first real story of this nature was the Betty and Barney Hill story. I can't do a better analysis of that whole story than Brian Dunning did, so I suggest you go and read (or listen to) that before you continue here.

Go on, I'll wait.

Back? Cool.

More recent accounts seem to have a lot in common. For the most part they follow a script something like this:

I was lying bed when I suddenly heard a very strange sound. I found that I was completely paralysed, except for my eyes. I felt a presence in the room with me, and I saw several small people with grey skin and large black eyes. They lifted me up and took me to their spacecraft, where they probed me with strange looking instruments. I lost all sense of time.

They returned me to my bed. When the noise stopped, I regained the use of my limbs and they were gone.

Sounds terrifying, right? How is it possible that so many accounts are so similar? Surely something must be going here!

Well, yes there is. But it probably has nothing to do with alien abductions.

Hypnogogic hallucination, also known as sleep paralysis or a waking dream, is a fairly common and well documented phenomenon. Essentially it is when your brain wakes up, but your body is still asleep. It's a highly unstable state, and is often accompanied by audio, visual, olfactory and even tactile hallucinations - particularly in the form of a "presence", a grey form, a feeling of being pressed down, and awareness of paralysis and loud rushing noises.

The brain will struggle to interpret those hallucinations in terms of familiar frame of reference. In the past this resulted in myths arising like the Old Hag, vampires, chupacabras, ghosts and possibly the Tokoloshe. It seems that new cultural pervasiveness of UFO stories has lead many people to overlay the cultural image of the "grey alien" onto these hallucinations

Most people will experience sleep paralysis at least once in their lives. Some people suffer from it chronically. 

So we have two competing hypotheses here:

1. An intelligent race from possibly hundreds of light years away decline to make themselves known to us as a whole, but see no reason not to pick up people at random performing odd experiments on them, leaving no evidence behind.

2. A well documented and common (but not well understood by the public) neural malfunction.

Both of these explain the phenomenon equally well, but only one of them doesn't raise any additional questions, or require us to introduce exotic physics. Occam's Razor tells us which is more likely.

Conclusion

Right, so where does this leave us?

It seems to me that this can all be summed up as follows:

Although it's possible (even likely) that intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, it is exceedingly unlikely that they have ever visited Earth, and almost certainly aren't visiting us now. If they are, they're very VERY good at covering their tracks, as they haven't yet left a single piece of evidence.

As a Trekkie, I hope for and look forward to the day when we might make contact with an alien intelligence. But I think that we're far more likely to do so through the efforts of SETI than through anal probes.