A pudgy guy walks out into an area cordoned off with curtains onto a stage in front of a table where three or four judges sit. The pudgy guy introduces himself and gives some of his background. He can't help rubbing his nose as he talks and he's visibly sweating. He states he decided to perform in the American Idol tryouts because every friend he ever had, and many people who had just heard him, said his voice was one of the best they'd ever heard. He felt obligated to share it with America and hopefully with the world.
One of the judges asks him what he's going to sing. He replies, Elvis Presley's "Love Me Tender." The judges say, great, we love it, go ahead and let's hear it.
The pudgy guy than launches into a rendition that bears little relationship to "Love Me Tender" although he moves his oversized hips in Elvis style. His voice is raspy and breaks frequently. The juxtaposition of the fat imitator with the picture of Elvis and the gross voice compared to Elvis' smooth delivery sends one of the judges into fits of laughter, another forced to hide her face in her hands, the third to turn his chair completely around and the fourth to clap his hands over his ears and shut his eyes.
After about six bars of the torment, the judge who turned away finally turns back around behind his upraised hand, palm trying to shield him from the noise and sight, and says, "Please, please, no more, enough."
The pudgy one's voice trails off and he's left with a look of puzzlement on his face.
"You really thought that was good?" the judge asks.
"I thought it was great," the pudgy man replies, still puzzled.
"Have you ever listened to yourself?" the female judge asks.
"All the time. I sound great. That's what everyone tells me."
"Well, take my word for it," the first judge says. "It's not. In fact, it might be the most horrible voice we've heard all week. You should stick to engineering."
The pudgy guy looks crestfallen, shrugs his shoulders and starts to walk out. However, he turns at the last moment.
"Maybe the song selection was bad. How about letting me sing "Cry?"
"If we let you sing 'Cry,' we'd all be crying," the female judge says and all four judges wave him out of the curtained area.
The Idol franchise, a worldwide phenomena, produces tapes of contestants from all over the world, some voiceless, others bazaar, many simply atrocious, all with the apparent delusion they can sing, ignorant of the fact that anyone on the face of the Earth would want to do more than laugh at them. At first glance, the viewer thinks it might be a put-on, that the contestant is there simply to get on television and being horrible is a sure way to get attention. However, it becomes apparent, especially when some of the contestants get extremely angry when rejected, they are not putting on, that they honestly believe despite their horribly shaped body, their pimply face, their sketchy voice, they are the next great idol.
Soon the feeling of amazement, of skepticism, gives way to a feeling of embarrassment for these poor deluded souls.
The problem is, we are all, to one extent or another, deluded. Delusion is a result of the way our minds evolved. To understand how our minds work, we have to examine why they evolved. Animate matter, life, is the organization of atoms and molecules of atoms around electrical flows. The course of evolution starts when animate matter forms around the simple electrical flows in the environment, the telluric flows that pass back and forth beneath our feet and the flows that move between the Earth and the atmosphere as the planet rotates under the sun, exposing its surface to alternating periods of cool and warm. When animate matter evolves the ability to seed itself, it takes a leap forward in its march for surviving independent of its environment, but it is not until animate matter evolves the ability to become ambulatory, to move within the environment, that it starts to evolve the mind.
Life that moves in the environment needs a detector in order to move with any degree of safety within the environment. We are ambulatory animate matter, so we can examine why we might need a detector in order to see how that detector operators. We need a detector in order to avoid the dangers of the environment. If we didn't have a detector, and we could move freely, we would risk falling off a cliff, running into a tree or perhaps being eaten by other animate matter, the lions and tigers in the forest. We need to have some sort of experience involving the environment if we want to move safely within the environment.
Take the simple function of crossing a street. We approach the street and we look first one way and then the other. We are looking for vehicles that might hit us and bring our animate state to an end. When we don't see any vehicles, we know we can proceed across the road. Before we get in the middle and find ourselves facing a speeding car, let's look at what we had to do to be able to cross the street at all.
First we had to transport a picture of external reality, the street, up our optic nerves and form a picture of it in our mind. Next we had to be able to recall a picture of a street from our storage banks. We have created a picture of a street in our mind before and we have stored that picture, so we can recall the picture. The method we use to recall the picture is electric: The picture of the street we have formed in our mind has a specific electric signature which generates a specific current flow which moves throughout the brain looking for pictures stored with a similar electric signature. When the current finds similar pictures, it transports them to the mind. If what we see agrees with what we recall, then we have experience with what we see. If we don't have any pictures of what we see, then we don't have a match. We are going to have to form a new set of recall to deal with the situation, but fortunately we can recall what we are seeing so we know what we are dealing with.
Next, we have to know what the dangers of the street are. Because we associate cars with streets, and indeed there are probably some on the street when we get there, we can alter the electric signature of the picture to recall our experience dealing with cars. We know, either from hearing or from seeing or from reading, that cars can run over and kill us, so we know if we want to cross the street safely, we are going to have to avoid being hit by cars.
Before we can do anything in reality, before we can act, we have to form a positive picture of ourselves acting. Thus, we are going to have to form a picture of reality that doesn't exist in reality, us crossing the street, before we can cross the street, and because we are not going to willingly cross the street in front of oncoming cars, we are going to form a picture of ourselves crossing an empty street and we are going to wait for reality to match our reconstructed picture of reality before we attempt to cross the street.
When everything matches up, we proceed to cross the street and all of a sudden we see a car speeding out of nowhere bearing down on us. The first question is, how are we notified about the car in the first place? We, as animate matter, had to evolve some way that would allow us to take note of actual reality in order to avoid the pitfalls in that reality.
To find out how the mind evolved to notify the body, we have to go back and reexamine what is going on as we move through reality. The primary requirement for moving through reality is forming a positive picture of ourselves moving in reality. Because we have yet to move in reality, we are not focusing on reality, we are focusing on the picture of reality that we have created.
This gives us a clue to the source of our delusions. We actually have to create pictures of reality that don't exist in reality and then we have to focus on those pictures if we want to act in reality.
What happens when reality changes? We are focused on the picture of reality we created in our mind and all of a sudden a car appears out of nowhere. What is it about the way our minds evolved that allows our minds to notify us of the changed reality?
When we are recalling a picture of the reality we formed from our recall in order to compare it with the reality we are seeing, we are placing two similar pictures in our mind. However, we only have one mind, one place for comparison. We cannot form two different pictures in the same mind. (This is the child's challenge to pat your head while making a circular motion on your stomach. You have to form a picture of yourself doing something before you can do it and you can't form a picture of yourself doing two different things. You overcome the challenge by starting one task, putting it on reflex, then starting the other task.)
Because we only have one mind, we can only form one picture of reality. We have a picture of ourselves moving safely across the road in our mind. However, streaming in from our eyes is a totally different picture. We have two sources of pictures, recall and reality and only one place to form them, our mind. When the picture of the oncoming car crashes into our mind, it conflicts with the picture of reality we have. With two conflicting pictures and only one mind, our mind stops. The electricity that was operating it, with nothing to do, enters the physical subsystems of our body. Those subsystems, not knowing what all the fuss is about, freeze our muscles until we can obtain sufficient recall to match the picture from reality.
If we are fast enough, or have enough time, we recall a picture that matches reality. We know we are in danger and we jump back on the curb out of harm's way.
Of course, the mind evolved to keep us from falling off cliffs and to allow us to extend our range of survivability. We can track our game and create shelters that don't exist in reality to protect us, we can produce slings and bows and guns to bag our food and we can create spaceships that will remove us from the restrictions of the planet altogether.
So while our mind evolved to warn our bodies when conditions had changed in reality so we could avoid being damaged by a reality different from the one we produced in our recall, it also allowed us to recall pictures of experienced reality, and because we could recall experienced reality and hold those pictures in our mind when actual reality no longer existed, we could take those pictures and use other pictures from recalled reality and change the picture we hold in our mind to attempt to alter reality. We could then go out into reality and test our altered reality to see whether it would work in reality. We could imagine a rocket and then build it and test it to see if it would fly.
However, there are certain things in reality that can't be tested. When we are able to hold a picture of reality when reality isn't present, some of those pictures will have elements that puzzle us. When I say puzzle, I mean actually discomfort us because the mind is merely a place to compare. It evolved to compare reality with recall and notify us when reality no longer matches recall. However, it doesn't know what it is comparing and if there is something in reality for which there is no recall, the mind will act just like it does when it can't compare reality to actual recall. We may not get the same electric jolt we get when we see a truck bearing down on us, but we still get a buzz and we classify that buzz as puzzlement.
When we reconstruct pictures of reality, we will notice missing elements in those pictures. The most obvious missing element in all our realities involves falling objects. When we see something fall, we can put the fact that it falls in recall but we have nothing to put into recall that deals with the cause of the object falling. The same holds true for the moon we see moving across the sky, or even the sun, which is not moving but appears to be. We can put the fact that the moon moves in our recall but we don't have a physical picture for the movement to put in our recall. We can only wonder.
For years we believed the sun actually moved, and when we realized that it was the Earth that was rotating, we could put that fact in our recall, but we never confronted the missing element of the picture, the cause of the Earth's rotation.
We don't, however, want to go around with something in reality for which we have no recall.
Therefore, we make up recall.
We say that gravity is a property of the matter doing the falling and the Earth rotates and the moon orbits because they condensed out of a swirling mass of gas. We have created recall that allows us to avoid the hole in our recall, the missing elements dealing with force and motion. In doing so, however, we are dealing in an area where reality can't reach out and bite our recall.
We will be warned when a truck is bearing down on us, but when we are filling in the blank pages of reality so we will feel comfortable, we ignore the fact we need a warning from reality that our made-up pictures are or are not actual reality. We are not picturing a rocket and shooting it up into the sky, letting reality crash it to correct our picture. We have excluded reality simply because we have made up an answer that cannot be checked in reality. We have said, gravity is a property like color or hardness and nothing can be done about it. It simply exists. We have said orbiting and rotation are sourced in historical events and thus are no longer capable of examination.
Every area of empirical science starts off with stuff made up to fill in the holes in our recall, stuff that cannot be checked against reality. Evolution starts out with species evolution and Darwin's proposition that it is too slow a process to ever show up in the geologic record. The geologic record itself starts off with the untestable assumption, and therefore the bald belief, in uniformitarianism. All of science starts out with mass/gravity. Optics starts out with the untestable belief that light is ordered the way it comes out of the prism and the really asinine notion that white light is made up of colored light, the stupid dogma that, while the electromagnetic spectrum is ordered by frequency, there is a unique group of frequencies, the ones our eyes can see, that are all lumped together and have to be broken out by a prism to see.
When we laugh at the contestants trying out for American Idol, we are laughing at ourselves. They have recall of themselves as the next great singer and lack feedback that they aren't, no big deal in the scheme of things.
They're not going to die when they find out they stink.
We have recall of ourselves understanding the universe when we don't even understand its basics, the nature of the forces that cause the movement in our existence.
That's a big deal because not having the technology to match reality, we, the life that evolved on this planet, are simply going to die.
Just who should be embarrassed for whom?
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com