The Niesen Tradition
I should warn everyone that what I do isn’t science in the strictest sense. I’m playing the same game on a much bigger field.
The Niesen tradition can be best described as, “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible.” Science has some major, obvious advantages at that over all other approaches. However, other approaches have advantages to that over science. The interdisciplinary approach to the objective study of human behavior is a fairly recent approach to science. The Niesen tradition has a head start at that over formalized science that can be measured in generations.
I’m descended from four generations of engineers, and as every biologist knows, biology is engineering. In fact, engineering has been such a fascination in my family as to derail engineering careers. About 60 years ago my grandparents left the Los Angeles area where my grandfather was working as an airplane engineer, to move to the Redwood forest, so they could watch the greatest engineering feat in the world—biology—taking place all around them.
The critical difference between the Niesen tradition and science is that science, or at least, formal science, generally uses a bottom-up approach, by which solid points of reference are established and built upon one after the other. The Niesen tradition depends more on a top-down approach, in which large bodies of information are accumulated first and solid information is then distilled from them. Some scientists now call this the comparison method, and are using it in a formalized manner, but it is controversial even then, and I’m still playing on a bigger field than that.
My grandfather was an airplane engineer back in the early days of aviation, and he designed bombers during World War II. Thousands of American men either lived or died by the calculations he carried out in his head with the help of a slide rule. (They all lived—at least, as far as he had any control over their fates—because none of the planes he designed were recalled due to mechanical defects.) His own grandfather was one of five architects who assisted Pierre Eiffel in designing the Eiffel Tower. While “traditional” beliefs are usually contradictory to science, my family’s traditional belief that observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability are critical obviously isn’t contradictory to science. Furthermore, using that scientific approach to studying the world without calling it “science”, has let us recognize that same approach to studying the world wherever we find it, whether it’s referred to as science or not.
Once you define the game as, “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible,” immediately it can be recognized that every religion and philosophy, many forms of art, and various other systems of thought are also attempts to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible. Without requiring their approaches to be observable, universal, self-consistent, replicable, and debatable, they have an obvious disadvantage to science, but that doesn’t immediately disqualify them. It is possible for people to discover patterns of cause and effect that are observable, universal, self-consistent, replicable, and debatable without using a process that they refer to as science. Art, philosophy, and religion are much less efficient means of discovering information that meets those conditions than science is, but all of them are also much older than science, each of them have been pursued by more people, and combined, they eliminate all constraints on thought.
Dr. Dennett describes best how we do this in Consciousness Explained. If you play an E note on a guitar, you can get a set of information that can be used to define that note and recognize it if you hear it again. But you don’t have any information to use to determine why that note sounds like an E played on a guitar. If you then play an E note an octave higher, and play the same E on a piano or any other instrument, or play other notes on the guitar, you can build up a larger and larger body of information, compare the different notes to each other, and refine your understanding of what makes the E note what it is.
In my family, we have been using that trick to reverse-engineer philosophies ever since the Great Depression. Once you identify humans as being essentially equal to each other, and you identify philosophies as different approaches people have found to give meaning to their lives—which is synonymous to calling them memetic tools that people use to construct set of ideas to keep in their consciousness and subconsciousness to optimize their success in dealing with the world, according to their own definition of success and according to the choices of philosophies they perceive themselves to have—you can study why philosophies are different from each other by looking at the decision-making environments where the philosophies originated and developed, which includes the sets of ideas that were in use in those decision-making environments that had been imported from other decision-making environments. The development of philosophies is identical to the evolution of gene pools in the sense that all philosophies originated from the same source, in the sense that philosophies are always adapting to their changing environments, and in the sense that the reason it is possible to refer to different philosophies by different names is because all the intermediary philosophies that connect them to each other have died out.
Theatre artists also use Dr. Dennett’s trick to reverse-engineer emotions and emotional communication. People who are especially perceptive to human behavior have an advantage in this in the same way that people who are especially perceptive to music have an advantage in using the trick to refine their understanding of musical notes. Without being able to anchor human behavior to definitive origins, theatre artists have discovered numerous highly developed hypotheses and partial theories, and tend to favor those that prove most useful in replicating human behavior realistically. For myself, over the years I have stored up memories of numerous conversations I’ve had that proceeded in completely unexpected ways because they didn’t fit any pattern of causes and effect I knew of. I kept playing these conversations back to myself, trying to identify constants and solve for variables.
Obviously, the emotional origins of ideas and the ideas people establish as founding principles of philosophies are just two pieces of an even larger puzzle.
For one example, a religion is a means of observing the world that presumes the existence of supernatural powers, and various religions place additional restrictions on how their followers are supposed to think. However, all religions combined eliminate all constraints on thought except for the presumption of a supernatural entity that the system of thought requires to meet the definition of “religion” in the first place. All systems of thought combined encompass the entire realm of human thought. This is important because many people who don’t limit themselves to thinking about things that are observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable, have thought about a lot of things that scientists haven’t dared to approach scientifically. My grandmother was an artist and philosopher, so she had her own approaches to figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, and her own reasons for being fascinated with the biggest engineering project in the world.
You could call this folk-science. That is, the search for, and compilation of, pieces of information that are essentially folk-lore, which show patterns of cause and effect that prove to be observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable. I haven’t discovered objective information through my own scientific experimentation, but by learning other systems of thought well enough to recognize objective information that other people have discovered.
Hence the reason I say I’m playing the same game on a much bigger field. In effect, every system of thought is a collection of algebraic equations with multiple variables. You could say that this is a system of mathematics that doesn’t use literal numbers, but uses units of logic and logical functions that can be best compared to mathematics for lack of better terms. Alternately, you could say that every system of thought is a systems theory, where the interactions of constants and variables are intended to produce some end result, and may produce that result or may produce some other result. A single non-scientific system of thought is useless for distilling observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable information. However, when many non-scientific systems of thought are combined, some critical constants can be identified among the variables. From there, remaining variables can be solved, and questions that are beyond the reach of, or seem to be completely irrelevant to, formal science can be answered.
For one example, among engineers there’s a saying that “development favors efficiency”. “Efficiency” refers to the effective accomplishment of a goal, given the physical limitations of the environment. Once you define the goal of life as its own propagation, and consider that process has taken place on a geological timescale, the entire Theory of Evolution can be derived from those three words. That in itself is more efficient than “cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures” because the concept is conveyed in 40% fewer words, and the words are more understandable to the general public. Furthermore, development favoring efficiency obviously applies to all forms of evolution, including memetic, behavioral, cultural, technological, and linguistic.
For another example, hope is the universal currency of humanity, because people always work for whatever gives them the most hope. Hope is a person’s perception that a certain course of action offers the most effective means of preserving the survival of his or her DNA. I don’t bother to cite references or experiments I have personally conducted to discover this, because I trust that a moment’s reflection will render it self-evident. Hope is a central theme of every religion in the world, most philosophies, and many other non-scientific studies of human behavior, and has been discovered by anthropologists to be a universal constant of humanity. If any official scientists would like to find a pattern of cause and effect that doesn’t render a person’s perception of the effective preservation of their DNA synonymous with hope, you’re welcome to try, because I already know you can’t do it. Meanwhile, by distilling objectivity from compiled systems of thought I’ve established a common point of reference among evolutionary psychology, religions, philosophy, economic systems, the natural environment that our economic systems depend upon, and the man-made political systems that make our human economies function… or break down.
For another example, the first novel I wrote was a futuristic retelling of The Tragedy of MacBeth, which, as much as anything else, was a story about how the greed, treachery, and other human characteristics that drove the plot of the ancient tale haven’t changed, in spite of how much technology people have developed since the original was written. The challenge I faced in writing that book was, how do I portray the witch sisters in a science fiction story? So I looked around to find out how real-life Witches have resolved the paradox of practicing magic in a scientific world. I already knew that the lead singers of two of my favorite bands were Witches, so I didn’t have far to look.
The basic solution within the Witch and general Pagan community is that religion is the differential between objective knowledge and everything else in the universe. The first principle of Paganism is “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible”. It is a religion because it fulfills the qualification of presupposing the existence of supernatural entities, but it doesn’t define what those entities are supposed to be. The goal of Paganism isn’t to define what those entities are, but to figure out what they are, and how to cooperate with them. It’s a goal to strive for, despite the fact that no one reasonably believes it can ever be completed. As a saying among Pagans goes, “the journey is the destination”.
Ultimately, Paganism isn’t a separate thing from science; it’s just a different point on the same spectrum. It’s pre-science, both in the sense that it was an attempt at figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, which pre-dated science, and in the sense that it is a system of thought devoted to continuing to figure out how the world works, without any other limitation on what people are supposed to think about or how they’re supposed to think. People thinking about something in the first place is a pre-requisite to people figuring out scientifically how that thing works.
It’s an ancient Pagan belief that everything in the universe is connected, and now that’s been discovered scientifically. Another ancient belief is that the Earth gave birth to life on Earth, and now that’s been discovered scientifically. Another ancient belief is that humanity depends on the Earth for their lives, and now that’s been discovered scientifically. For these and many other reasons, science doesn’t conflict with Paganism, but supports it. The supernatural forces of Paganism aren’t supernatural in the sense that they must be unprovable, but only in the sense that they are the forces that make the universe work, and the universe is much bigger than humanity. They are unprovable precisely because humanity isn’t capable of understanding everything in the entire universe, and that itself is understood scientifically (give or take some ongoing debate).
As with any good idea anyone has ever had, it’s easy for people to lose sight of the original idea of figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, get distracted by aesthetics, and start focusing on the things that exist in the universe rather than on continuing to search for the patterns of cause and effect that make those things work. Many Pagans have taken advantage of the absence of control on what they are allowed to think and use it to justify selfish, childish humanocentricism, claiming that they’re contributing something useful to the world by interpreting the world intuitively and believing that whatever they feel must be true. But that’s true of every religion. While most Pagans don’t practice their religion in a way that’s compatible with science, it is possible to do, and some Pagans do it.
Since the first principle of Paganism is “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible”, and there are no limitations imposed on what people are allowed to think about, in order for Pagans to be able to function in groups with any degree of cohesiveness has depended on their discovering observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable patterns of cause and effect that lie behind human behavior, including aspects of human behavior that are considered scientifically unapproachable. The general Witch/Pagan solution to practicing metaphysics in a scientific world where many people who believe in metaphysics obviously disagree with each other on how metaphysics work, states that a person’s attempt to influence the world metaphysically begins with his taking action to build up some sort of spiritual energy in himself and some sort of feeling of connection to the world, focusing his spiritual energy on the effect he wants to have on the world, and then the effect either happening or not happening. This says nothing about existence or non-existence of metaphysical forces, although most Pagans assume it does. Of much greater interest to me was that they discovered an observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable pattern of how people feel they should be able to affect the world metaphysically. Years later I learned how Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D’Aquili had discovered these things formally, which they reported in their book Why God Won’t Go Away. But I had already known this for years, and I had been building upon it ever since, so I had a big head start over anyone who waited for the official scientific book to come out before they noticed it or thought about it.
Those are just a few simple examples of how I do what I do. Using processes such as these it’s possible to derive objective definitions of things like good, evil, beauty, humor, and happiness, by identifying under what conditions people feel those things and what components those feelings are made up of.
Some of what I do consists of deconstructing conversations I’ve had with various people over the course of my life. Thinking back on them now, I can see how the other person was using their emotional communication in the attempt to trigger emotional reactions in me that would create schemas and lacunas in my subconsciousness that would direct my behavior in the direction they wanted it to go, and I can see why they felt the need to do that. Now if I were to direct that scene in a play, I can see why the other person would act the way they acted to try to get what they wanted from me, and why that seemed to them to be the most effective way to try to get what they wanted. I know that from a scientific standpoint that’s completely useless, because there don’t seem to be any controls or testability involved.
(I know the argument can also be made that memory is fallible. That is true, but I think it’s reasonable to say that the memory of a person for whom human behavior is the medium of his professional occupation is fallible in relation to human behavior only in the sense that the memory of an algebra teacher would be fallible in remembering the license plate of the getaway car of a robber who had just held up his family at gunpoint, or that the memory of anyone is fallible when it comes to applying his professional abilities and skills to a uniquely challenging situation that directly relates to his professional occupation.)
My solution has been to connect my folk-science to established first principles of formal science. The analyses I give of these situations essentially are instructions that any professional director of a typical theatre company could follow—provided he had a firm grasp of evolutionary psychology—and direct a scene that would look very similar to my real-life experience. I know this can be done without conducting the experiment myself because one person having an idea of how an interpersonal interaction should look and then explaining to other people how to replicate it is precisely what theatrical direction consists of, and theatrical directors do it all the time.
I’ve refined the patterns I use to their greatest possible parsimony, because I use the interaction of the smallest possible number of factors in human behavior with obvious evolutionary importance, beyond which the elimination of any one of them would make the scene unreplicable by a director. I can imagine that this could be formalized scientifically by teaching multiple theatrical directors firm grasps of evolutionary psychology and then having them follow my instructions to direct scenes independently of each other, and seeing how similar to each other they turn out. That literal experiment would be labor intensive to carry out, but that process would simply be a much more complicated version of the commonplace theatrical habit of directors and actors evaluating performances for their realism by comparing the directors’ artistic choices to the choices they could’ve made with their own abilities and skills. .
Environmental and human evolutionary science have established many critical constants. Combined with other constants that can be distilled from compiled non-scientific systems of thought, I have found that solving for variables has ceased to be a meaningful challenge. In the same way that scientists could study a thousand snowflakes and discover that the process that would make them all unique would also make every snowflake in the world unique, with the systems of thought I’ve compiled, combined with first principles of evolutionary psychology and environmental science, the only pattern of cause and effect that could create them would also have to create the remainder of human behavior. That is, whatever human behavior I haven’t been able to study can only be small parts of the large patterns I have discovered. It’s been years since I’ve heard of any human behavior that falls outside the patterns I’ve been working with. In the dozens of books I’ve read on evolutionary science, I’ve seen numerous formal discoveries that I had already predicted, and numerous other formal discoveries that have broken human behavior down into smaller components without challenging the interactions of my larger components.
Now I should point out that official academic recognition for my work is not among my highest priorities. This is simply an attempt, however crude, at an academic book about what I’ve done and how I’ve done it.
This is important for me to specify because there are some other standards of measurement that are used to differentiate between science and non-science that my work can’t meet for reasons scientists didn’t anticipate.
For one example—I know there’s no way to say this without sounding conceited—to say that a discovery has to be peer reviewed to qualify as science is to assume that the person who made the discovery has any peers in the first place. For reasons that I hope will become apparent over the course of this book, my combination of abilities and background life experiences that gave me the perspective on the world that was necessary to make my discoveries, is not a combination that I can realistically expect anyone else to share. The story of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein joining Will Shakespeare’s theatre company was an abbreviated metaphor for my life. To make the story complete, the three of them would have to hit the road with Jack Keroac, then the four of them would have to learn to ride motorcycles from Evel Knievel, then the five of them would have to ride through the desert with Geronimo, then the six of them would have to serve in the Army of the Potomac under George Washington, then the seven of them would have to learn to write science fiction from Jules Verne, then the eight of them would need to meet Johnny Rotten and join the Sex Pistols, and then the nine of them would need to join Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If it sounds like any of these things don’t have anything to do with science, may I remind everyone that observation begins with perspective.
For another example, one of the hardest parts of my work for scientists to understand, I’m sure, is the difference between professional etiquette among artists and professional etiquette among scientists. Among artists, and especially among artists who work in groups, like theatre artists, effective communication consists of one part establishing an irrefutable body of evidence, and one part encouraging creative thought among others. Professional artists understand this well enough that no one bothers to make the distinction when they’re doing one and when they’re doing the other, and usually people do some of both at the same time. I know that I do it, but I don’t know how to stop doing it sufficiently to participate in an alternate professional etiquette.
A lot of scientists think it’s conceited of me to claim credit for things I didn’t technically discover. But among artists, if I make a statement that is literally false, and you correct my mistake and reply with a statement that is literally true, for me to say, “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” is a legitimate statement. I put information into your brain that was somewhere close to literally true, and I encouraged creative thought on your part, and the combination of the two led you to the correct answer. And reaching the correct answer was what I meant to do. If I put information into your brain, and that triggered thoughts in your brain that led to the correct answer, which of us is responsible for the discovery? This is the memetic equivalent of the biological argument that life doesn’t begin at conception because life is a continuous process.
Ultimately, the answer to the question of which of us is responsible for the discovery is: I don’t care. Particularly among the artists I work with, if you take life more seriously than the average member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, nobody’s interested in your point of view anyway.
Another qualification of science I’ve heard scientists mention is “defendable”. Where I come from, “defend” is not a word you use in conversation with strangers, and certainly not with strangers with whom you wish to remain on good terms. Where I come from, “defending” is what pistols and shotguns are for, and submachineguns and assault rifles for some people.
What I have to say in this book is debatable, which is to say that reasonable men and women can talk about it and thereby refine it and expand their understanding of it. I am fairly certain that there are some official scientists at least who would be interested enough in my work to follow it up in their own ways. However, since I don’t work as a scientist, to present my work in a format that official scientists would consider defendable is beyond the limitations of my resources.
More importantly, however, since official recognition for my work isn’t my goal, and since in my vocabulary, defense is an action you take in response to someone else’s attack, and an attack is an attempt to eliminate another person from competition as efficiently as possible, if you make the inaccurate prediction that I am highly interested in official academic recognition for my work and you take action accordingly in the attempt to eliminate me from competition as efficiently as possible, your efforts won’t even be relevant to my interests. I can defend myself as well as I need to to neutralize the threat any official scientists may pose to me as a byproduct of their actions, but it won’t be a defense that you’ll be able to recognize, because it won’t be a defense mounted in the effort to reassert my scientific credibility, as you expect. The people I write the rest of my books for are people like me who are trying to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible. I measure my success by the degree to which those people are better able to understand the world as a result of my work.
(If I seem to be contradicting myself because you assume it isn’t possible for people to defend themselves with shotguns and simultaneously not to take life seriously, first of all, everyone I know isn’t an artist, second, over the course of an artistic career you live in a lot of lower class neighborhoods, and third, art, as opposed to aesthetic technology, is creative, and creativity depends on new and unexpected combinations of ideas.)
That brings me to another critical difference between formalized science and my work. Rather than pursuing it out of simple curiosity and talking about it in the abstract, I pursue my work with specific goals, and talk about it in terms of how it can be used to achieve those goals. A lot of ivory-tower academics are having trouble figuring out why the general public shows so little interest in science. The answer is simple, but formalized science isn’t capable of solving the problem.
Communicating information to another person effectively depends on making the information personally meaningful to them. For most people, information doesn’t become personally meaningful until you tell them what they can use it for. That seems at first to contradict the idea of scientific political neutrality. But scientific political neutrality only exists in the abstract. Once people apply science to anything it becomes political.
Teaching is the effective communication of ideas, and engineering is the application of science. Both of those constitute big parts of the Niesen tradition. Personally, I’ve taught high school, I’m certified as a flight instructor, theatre turns effective communication into an art, I’ve been trained in architectural drafting, and I’ve had half a dozen careers devoted to the application of discoveries toward various goals.
This paradox between formalized science and the learning styles of the majority of the public seems at first to render the goal of scientific political neutrality impossible to attain. I’ve resolved the problem by talking about my work in terms of specific ways it can be used toward the goal of effective political neutrality.
Effective political neutrality depends on the elimination of conflict—that is, the use of science to resolve situations in which two people have mutually exclusive goals. Over the course of history, many different people and groups of people have developed conflict resolution strategies. Some of those are compatible with science under some circumstances. Developing effective conflict resolution strategies simply depends on identifying traditional conflict resolution techniques that depend on an individual using information independently, or both people using information in conjunction, showing how scientific information can be used in those techniques, and in some cases, showing why the traditional information that has been used works in some circumstances but not in others. That makes my version of political neutrality the active defusing of political situations, as opposed to an attempt at political inertness that only works in the abstract.
The alternative to active political neutrality would be contrived negligence of effective political neutrality. Given that the first principle of evolutionary psychology states that all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her, any person who gets hold of new information can be expected to use it to try to advance his or her goals in life. If scientists report scientific information in terms that only a few people can understand, and those people’s educations enable them to achieve elevated positions of decision-making power in our social systems—political positions, in other words, regardless of whether or not their occupations are nominally political—it is inevitable that some of those people will use their privileged access to information against people who don’t have access to that information. Furthermore, it is inevitable that some people would use that information against other people even if the information was available to everyone. Dr. Nobel’s discovery of nitroglycerine was an example of a politically neutral scientific discovery that someone who didn’t care about political neutrality immediately turned into weapons, which, by definition, are implements whose purpose for existing is to increase political inequality. Likewise, Albert Einstein’s politically neutral discovery of mass-energy equivalence led to the Nazis’ highly politically biased decision to begin the research and development of the atom bomb.
Ultimately, it is inevitable that any scientific discovery can and will be turned into a weapon by someone. The origins of the paradox between abstract and effective political neutrality has been discovered scientifically, with the first principle of evolutionary psychology.
My definition of political neutrality as active political neutrality leads to further political ramifications. I discuss these at length toward the end of this book. In brief, first of all, the billions of deaths that the Club of Rome predicted in the 21st century will be an inescapably politically biased event. Formalized science is incapable of actively defusing that situation, because with the possible exception of some ivory tower academics, people care more about their lives than they care about science. If a few, or all, of those people have access to certain information in a situation like that, they will use it for political goals.
Second, it cannot be ignored that effective political neutrality is an active threat to most political systems in the world, because political neutrality is not the goal of most political systems in the world.
Luckily, there are various groups of people who have been searching for effective solutions to these problems for longer than environmental science or evolutionary psychology have existed to officially identify them. Some of those people have a great deal of experience at putting effective political neutrality into practice.
I care about science and I care about people. I care about governments and politicians to the extent that they use science to the benefit of their people. Beyond that I don’t waste any pity on them.
When it comes to environmental science I’m no James Lovelock, and unfortunately, neither is anyone else (except, of course, Dr. Lovelock himself). But I can understand exponential growth and thermodynamics well enough to make them personally meaningful to people and thereby push their understanding of the world decisively in the direction of being able to take action to escape environmental disaster. To that end, I have already set events into motion that no one, including myself, can stop.
By connecting the observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable patterns of cause and effect that have been discovered over the course of 25 years of evolutionary psychology to the observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable patterns of cause and effect that have been discovered over the course of 25 centuries of theatre, I’ve found there is little or nothing that rebellious teenagers in the industrialized world can’t learn about evo-psych by watching movies, and there’s nothing that Third-World guerillas can’t learn about evo-psych or planetary biology by telling stories around campfires. And let’s just say I know people who know people…
The line I’m treading between science and treason is so fine that any 12 people chosen at random to serve on my jury probably won’t be able to tell the difference. Activists here in America have already gone to prison for publicizing information that’s inconvenient to powerful people on a much smaller scale than what I’ve done. But I’ve made a lot of friends in low places, many of whom have a lot more experience in prisoner support networks than ivory tower academics have.
The final critical difference between formal science and my work is that my work has another specific purpose. Let’s not play word games. A person who believes in imaginary things, who refuses to accept observable evidence that contradicts his beliefs, and who acts upon his beliefs in a way that harms other people, is mentally ill. Unfortunately, that includes many Americans, and President Bush.
Science is intended to be politically neutral. My work is a full frontal assault on religious fundamentalism.
I’ve read a number of books whose authors have told fascinating, and obviously important, stories of the world in terms of the replication of genes, the stability of the global environment, the Laws of Thermodynamics, exponential growth, systems interactions, factors contributing to the rise and self-destruction of civilizations, people always acting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, and so on. These are good stories in the sense that they develop an idea from a beginning to a middle to an end. However, they aren’t great works of literature in that they lack plot and character development and other crucial factors required to make information personally meaningful to large audiences.
It didn’t take me long to see that with the constants identified by scientists, other constants that have been derived from non-scientific bodies of information, and the solved variables they led to, I could easily tie all those stories of the world together into one big story that would serve as both a story of the world and an encyclopedia to life. With my background in fictional art—primarily theatre and novel writing—my breadth of perspective on the world, and the eventful life I’ve led, I have all the non-fictional plots and characters I need to tell most of that story of the world. The rest I could fill in with outlines of hypothetical movies, each of which would be a mental model of the actions of people in certain situations to test them for realism—which is the literary equivalent of a scientific hypothesis, and another example of a way that people who aren’t scientists have found to search for observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable patterns of cause and effect.
It was during the evolution versus intelligent design debate here in America that I figured out how to do all this. The full meaning of what I’d discovered was inescapable. The Bible is a story of the world and a reference book to life. So is every other comparable religious text.
Literary techniques have been developed because they have specific emotional effects on audiences. The Origin of Species will never be able to compete against the Bible as the founding document of a popular system of thought because while The Origin of Species is scientifically valid, the Bible is artistically complete.
Science and religious fundamentalism are separate things on the surface because they’re two different systems of thought intended to fulfill two different purposes. But they have mutually exclusive goals, which puts them into conflict with each other.
The fate of the world is not going to be decided by whose concept of reality is more scientifically valid than whose, but by who gets the most people to cooperate with their version of reality. Whichever side can compete most effectively will prevail—which is how evolution has always worked.
Theatre and fiction writing are studies of conflict. In order to win a conflict unconditionally, you must prevent your opponent from achieving his goals, you must make him understand that you actively prevented him from achieving his goals, and one way or another, you must leave him nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and nothing left to fight with. The fact that religious fundamentalists believe in things that are unprovable, and therefore un-disprovable, presents a challenge to that. But considering it impossible is not an option.
The singular advantage that religious fundamentalists have over scientists is their public support. That will be the determining factor in the conflict, and that defines the conditions that must be met to neutralize religious fundamentalists politically. The reason they are able to attract that public support is because they seem to have answers for everything, while scientists don’t. The only way to defeat that would be to find an answer to everything scientifically, including to questions that formal science can’t answer. This is where combining scientific constants with derived non-scientific constants to solve for all variables has served me best of all. Strictly speaking, it isn’t science, it’s figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible. Since most people—meaning the people who make up the public support for science or religious fundamentalism—care more about figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, than they care about formalized science, for most people, that’s good enough. I can show how I produced my work well enough that scientists could formalize it for their own sake, but in the meantime I have a world to save.
With that, my ideological duel with President Bush was on. He is the most powerful man on Earth, but I’ve got a few things on my side that he doesn’t, beginning with a functional understanding of reality.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, suffice it to say that if I don’t seem interested in defending myself from ivory tower academics who attempt to eliminate me from competition as efficiently as possible, it’s because there are a lot of people with guns in the world who want to eliminate me from competition as efficiently as possible. Like I said, I’m playing the game on a much bigger field.