B movie, but great special effects

I do not write movie reviews, but I would think those for really awful movies would be the most fun to write. With that thought in mind I felt my spirits lift a bit when, while leaving a matinee showing of the movie Prometheus, I decided to write a review of it. On the short ride home my ideas for the review morphed into something almost entirely un-review-like so I believe it is entirely reasonable to be able to include this post in my entirely movie-review-free writing history. However there may be what some people call spoilers in this post. I think calling some information about a movie that one has not seen a “spoiler” presupposes something about the intrinsic status of the movie that Prometheus did not achieve, but I’m warning you anyway.

As a young man, even before I went full atheist, I decided that there were three likely events that would liquefy the foundations of most of Earth’s religions. These three events were:

1. The cloning of a human being.
2. The singularity of AI and human intelligence.
3. First contact with an intelligent alien species.

It was fairly obvious when I made the list that cloning would be the first event fully realized. With ideas like immaculate conception and divine sourcing of souls the concept of cloning would provide fertile ground for questioning the mundane sourcing of humanity. In particular, if people could make humans without sex the preoccupation with sex that many religions has would suffer the decoupling of procreation from pleasure; a philosophical event much anticipated by devout hedonists around the globe.

Successful cloning was performed less than two decades after I made the event list. In 1996 researchers at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned a fuzzy white Finn-Dorset sheep; they named her “Dolly”. The source of Dolly’s DNA was a mammary gland and Ian Wilmut who led the team which cloned Dolly thought Dolly Parton’s mammary glands were impressive; hence Dolly’s name. The proper term for this type of cloning is: “somatic cell nuclear transfer”. Dolly had three mothers; one provided the egg, the second provided the DNA, and the third provided the womb in which she gestated. Dolly was genetically identical to Mom number two.  In 2003 Dolly died of a respiratory infection that had no linkage to her cloning. Her remains were expertly taxidermied, and are on display at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh.

Since Dolly a whole slew of different animals have been cloned.

The cloning of a human has occurred at least partially. In 2008 Samuel Wood and Andrew French of Stemagen created five mature human embryos using DNA from a few of Wood’s skin cells. Wood destroyed his progeny, but there is little doubt that mature human children could be produced from cloned embryos.

Where are the throngs of emancipated hedonists burning effigies of the Virgin Mary in the street? The churches are relatively silent on the issue of cloning. They have come out in force to deride the cloning of humans as unethical, but they balk on the big questions. Would the cloned human have a soul, and if it did where would it have come from? The theologists I have pinged seem only interested in the cloning of a human insofar as they insist that it is not a theological issue. They think they have dodged this issue, and an examination of the second event might tell us why.

The singularity of human and AI is the point where the two are essentially indistinguishable. I did not realize it when I made the list, but the singularity had already been essentially realized.

Human intelligence is such an ephemeral concept that identifying a singularity with it would appear to be an impossible task. In 1950 Alan Turing (one of the world’s most revered thinkers) published the paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”; four years later, at age 41, he was dead (suicide). In his famous CMI paper Alan came up with a way of identifying the singularity.

Alan’s test was simple. Let people decide what they think is more human like. The idea here is be that one could at least test human-like intelligence and that would be at least equivalent to testing for human-level intelligence. There is the potential for greater than human intelligence, but that would be a different question. The idea of the Turing Test was to provide a means to assess the human-likeness of an intelligence.

The test is a simple blind study. A group of people interact with humans or AI’s and then guess at whether the entity they are interacting with is human or AI. If an AI scored as high as humans it would be accurately described as human-like and a type of singularity would have been achieved.

The implications of one possibility have not been exhaustively explored, and that possibility is that one could create an AI which did better on the Turing test than humans. It is almost inconceivable that an AI would be more human-like than actual humans. This possibility leaves the domain of Artificial Intelligence research and creates a field better named Artificial Psychology.

In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper introducing the program he named “ELIZA” after a character in Pygmalion. He had begun coding ELIZA in 1964, and his aim was to create a program that fooled people into believing that it was human. ELIZA became the first of a class of human fooling programs known as chatterbots.

I had the opportunity to interact with an early ELIZA back when she was still confined to a monochrome screen with the ghostly images of Wordstar’s main menu permanently etched into its phosphor. One would type in a question and ELIZA would respond with a question. Apparently Weizenbaum was mimicking the approach a Rogerian psychologist takes with their patient. The responses I got were interesting at first, but frayed at the edges. I though it a clever ploy, but believed that AI would reach singularity via another path. I was wrong.

Chatterbots regularly beat humans in humanness. Even with a highly educated group of human competitors chatterbots are almost impossible for a highly educated panel of judges to identify. In other words chatterbots are more human than most humans when the humans are trying to be normally human.

Chatterbots are now employed as call center workers for some major international banks as well as the car companies Renault and Citroen. They populate social media and chat rooms. Some of them have been employed to convince people to reveal personal data about themselves, and they are quite good at it. Perhaps someone you know only through electronic communication could be a chatterbot. Maybe I am?

Many AI researchers look down on chatterbots as tricksters, but that only raises the question of what most people are. How much of human interaction is simply people attempting to convince us that they are people? How much intelligence is required for Human Intelligence?

Perhaps human interaction is largely comprised of convincing people that you are like them, and although I’ve approached that question via AI in this post that same conclusion can be reached through other lines of reasoning. If it is the process of belief and faith is more a communal delusion than a personal choice. The impact of any particular event on belief is moderated more by its ability to be glossed over (like the cloning event) than by the intrinsic implications of the event itself.

This would explain why iron-age religions have survived thousands of years of information that should have sublimated their foundations. I’m not just talking about great scientific theories like evolution. What about simple things like the lightbulb? “Let there be light and I flipped a switch” does not carry the booming voice of Charleston Hesston creating the world from void.

I do not want to knock the idea of selective reconciliation of natural and scriptural phenomena as a similar process has allowed us to discard most of Leviticus, and that has been a good thing. Are all possible theology challenging events to be disarmed by banal assimilation? Could there exist an event so shocking that it would force re-calibration of earthly theology?

That question brings us to both event 3, and a surprisingly bad movie.

The main character in Prometheus is a woman both unable to face her own sterility and able to blindly program a surgical machine to perform a amazingly unanethestized caesarian section on herself. Then within minutes of the surgery –still sporting a brightly stapled abdominal incision- she confronts her creator, and destroy him at the tentacles of her now gigantic birthling. Although I strongly believe that suspension of disbelief is aided by detailed computer animation I find it difficult to understand the uber-waif’s inability to discard her Christianity in the face of the superlative generating evidence supplied her.

She is convinced that she has discovered a race of giants who are both her creators and cousins. They have planned on destroying her planet with poly-morphing mucus-resplendent weaponized aliens. Yet she still clings to her" Jesus died on the cross to atone for our sins" ideal. It is so cute, and she almost does it justice with her doe eyes, but what was she thinking?

She had apparently set the whole mission in motion by discovering messages in cave paintings that pre-dated her atonement mutilation by thousands of years. Her belief requires that the whole sin-atonement thing went down, but that Jesus neglected to mention that there was a fleet of ships aimed at Earth with the sole purpose of raining Armageddon-like slimy death upon it.

There was a shining opportunity for the protagonist to reclaim the movie, and her own dignity at the same time. In  one of the last scenes she is clipping into a miraculously appearing climbing rope to rappel out of the crashed alien ship. She is having a few words with the disembodied head of “Dave” who as an AI has been poorly treated throughout the movie by his creators. He is surprisingly polite for a disembodied head, and perhaps the most empathetic character in the movie. She has lowered his body over the side, and is about to zip his head into a duffle bag. She could have paused for a second, and in a contemplative voice suggested: “creators can be such douche-bags”.

If aliens are contacting the Human race it may be as likely that they have approached some chatterbot as it is that they have approached a flesh-and-blood human. Maybe they will be sent some DNA through a strategic glitch in some clinical-sample processing program, and they will be able to clone up some flesh-and-blood humans of their own. Perhaps they will send them back to earth, and the appearance of chatterbot-raised alien-human clones will finally create a theology attenuating event.

I suspect not though.

But it might make for a cool movie.

Pride Limp

The Utah Pride Parade was this weekend, and I did not march in it. Despite the whole heterosexual thing I was planning on marching in the parade. I was going to keep my orientation closeted.

The idea of marching was not to poke fun, even though it is a fabulous and fun event, but to swell the ranks of a set of atheist groups that have supported gay rights in parades since there were enough gay rights for such marches to legally take place.

Atheists of the humanist variety often have a hard time making a big deal out of supporting gay rights issues on their intrinsic merit alone. On the face of it the idea of equal employment or equal housing or whatever is a collection of blindingly obvious issues. There is no substance in debating them, and spending time listening to people who oppose these rights is tedious and irritating.

A discussion of “gay marriage” with an atheist is likely to yield comments like: “Marriage…are you sure about that. If you want to get married then go ahead and stick your head in that oven. People are not much more likely to get a marriage to work just because they are some flavor of LGBT.” The attention is on whether marriage would be a good idea for you; not if you would be a good idea for marriage. People should think hard about getting married because marriage isn’t the right thing for everyone; it isn’t even the right thing for most people who get married.

As to the question of gay marriage being legal…well I’ve yet to hear an argument against it that is not tedious and irritating.

It is the extrinsic factors that motivate atheists to support gay rights. The main extrinsic factor being that enough of those rights do not exist in our country’s law. When a misguided idea like banning marriage for same-sex couples goes from ill-conceived rambling into law it is transformed from irritating to wrong. It is easy to find motivation to support the elimination of wrongs.

For sheer volume of justifications for perpetuating the particular wrongs visited upon the rights of LGBT people nothing comes close to religious arguments. It is a natural fit for an atheist group to march in opposition to the wrongs championed by the very groups they are primarily defined as not being.

The atheist groups marching in the Pride Parade must be incredibly tempting for the other participants. Not only are we a tremendously sexy group (even though some of us may be closeted heterosexuals) carrying suggestive signs saying things like: “NO GOD, KNOW LOVE”, but the basic message is one of unwavering support for a human’s most obvious rights.

I wanted to be in that number; when the so-not-saints go marching in.

Unfortunately a set of stairs collapsed strategically under me, and I was sent awkwardly flailing into the fractured remnants of the plate of food I was carrying. I would spend the weekend barely walking, let alone marching.

I missed the headline-grabbing Mormons Building Bridges group who marched at the head of the parade this year. These were heterosexual (and out, not closeted like me) Mormons marching to support the LGBT community in Utah. This was actually a big deal as just last year the LDS church was revoking the temple recommends of people who were seen as too closely associating with gay rights groups. By the largest counts I’ve seen there were almost 300 of these bridge-building Mormons marching through the heat in their Sunday best.

This cohort represented over one one-hundredth of one percent of the Mormons in Utah alone. There is a liberalizing force at work in today’s Mormon Church, and I’m sure that more than half of it has nothing to do with the hope that we will soon have our first Mormon president.

The message of the Mormons’ Building Bridges group was clear. They wanted everyone to know that they and the LDS Church fully support the LGBT community in every way; as long as they did not do anything that was…y’know...gay or the like.

They were also letting the LGBT community know that they were welcome in the LDS Church. They could attend most of the services, and they might even be allowed to get a temple recommend for a while. Sure they would not be able to get married now, but the prophet might eventually be told by god that things are different; it worked for the African Americans. In addition, if any members of the LGBT community wanted to become heterosexual the church would support their attempts, and even let them get married and raise a proper family.

You’ve come a long way baby.

Nail biting

As a result of AYD’s inappropriate dress incident I have been thinking about hammers. Several people have suggested that the Tooele school district employees are “dumb as a bag of hammers”. Others, with a keener sense of empathy, have suggested that the district is unable to effectively understand the situation because “if you use a hammer all the time all your problems start to look like nails”. Since the true nature of the situation lies somewhere in between what these two bromides describe I hoped to mix them in the apothecary of metaphor, and come up with something that accurately described the situation. I tried, but I just did not feel like anything really “nailed it”.

At some point in the developing whirlwind of attention AYD decided that she was cast as the hammer rather than the nail, and realized that her fleeting fame was not all that bad. The last day of her junior high was populated with a multitude of teen girls dressed in slightly inappropriate clothing. Rumor had it that several parents even helped their daughters pick out clothing which would ever-so-slightly violate the school’s dress code.

Defiance is an alien concept in a rural Mormon community, but when it is packaged in a safe, kid friendly, and uncontroversial activity it is quite popular. The stories AYD told of her last day were punctuated by giggles. The dress-code had been colorized from authoritarian grey to the Technicolor of low-brow adolescent humor; it would now be shelved with booger and fart jokes rather than Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky. Sometimes when you cannot change the world you can still re-decorate it.

I have been thrilled by the response the situation has gotten. It has resonated with people, and that is something I’ve only imagined happening with anything I say. In addition to the tens of thousands of reads, thousands of online comments, television interviews, and a front-page story in our local paper I have been stopped repeatedly by actual corporeal people who want to tell me how they had the same thing happen to them. More important than all this is the news I got from my Mom that some folks from her poetry group actually read the essay, and said it was “pretty good”.

The other, equally accurate but less flattering, comment Mom’s poetry group members made was that: “The whole thing is not really news”. This is true. When AYD was being sent to the office there were kids being blown up in Syria. One of those things is really news, and the other is not. There are so many things that are really newsworthy that every channel could be filled with a constant cacophony of woe and strife drowning out any semblance of peace and normalcy with insistent justified priority.

Great changes need to be made in the world for it to be more like the world we all know it should be. Unfortunately history is full of great changes actually causing greater screw-ups than the problems they were trying to solve. The great big problems that should be so easy to grasp due to their enormity are often impossible to nail down due to hidden complexities.

There are no complexities in the story about AYD’s inappropriate skirt. There is the picture, and it is not a picture of an inappropriately dressed young lady. AYD was taken to the office because of an interpretation of the dress code policy, and so the policy is broken. Now fix it.

I suspect that Tooele is not the only school system in the country where administrators have to deal with some pretty crazy stuff. I remember reading about an incident where principal Barry (who has a congenitally deformed arm) got into a fist fight with an irate parent. I imagined the cops storming in and tasering the parents in front of an auditorium filled with horrified junior high students, but the article I read did not include that detail.

There are real drugs, and real abuse, and real crazy (in a bad way) stuff going on at that junior high school and the school’s administration has to deal with it. Since there are many truly crazy people who make more noise than any twenty sane people all the channels of communication for the junior high administration are filled with a constant cacophony of paranoia and hallucination drowning out any semblance of the rational and harmonious with insistent justified priority.

When I spoke to the administration it felt like they were speaking some impromptu code designed to avoid certain words or phrases. I remember seeing a movie where someone would utter a secret word over the phone, and this would cause the hearer to behave rather badly. I imagined they were trying to avoid the word which would cause a hoard of glassy-eyed parents to march into their school wearing gaudy paper hats, and start chewing on the furniture.

One, much more likely, suggestion I got was that they were trying to avoid being sued. I was not aware that there was a large history of litigation involving junior high schools doing minor stupid things. If there is I’m sure there will be no shortage of situations to populate those cases well into the foreseeable future. Randomly treating parents like they are potential litigants will not significantly reduce the number of potential lawsuits, which I suspect is much much smaller for all US junior high schools together than the number of foolish things done at Tooele junior high alone. 

So the administration has dug in their heals, and is apparently unwilling to change. AYD moves on to high school, and with it new challenges.

I may re-write the dress-code for the junior high school if I can muster the inspiration for a few hundred words of futility. I usually can find a few hundred words to spare. I’m sure they will ignore it, but “Ignorance is bliss”; especially when you don’t know of anything else that could be.