Reasons (not) to freak out: is the 2012 apocalypse bullshit or not?

I think it's best to lead off this article with a link to a Cracked.com article which clearly denounces all 2012 apocalypse nuttery as bullshit. Cracked.com is actually a surprisingly reliable source on some things, and the bias (everything is written with bias) is towards humor, which at the very least satisfies the critical rationalist's desire to see things examined with criticism and socratic dialectics. So, here you go!

My agenda in writing this is not to convince you of anything. Hell, I'm not convinced of anything! Science fiction author John Shirley has accused me of wearing an intellectual condom. He meant it as a dig at me, but I actually was sort of tickled by the allegation. So, before you roll your eyes at me for writing this article, please know that my only goal here is just to make information available.

If we are still here in 2013, I will, as penance, write a follow-up post ridiculing my past self for having any sort of an interest in the big picture!

So, let's see what they're saying about 2012: and let's start with Michio Kaku.

Famous and respected physicist Michio Kaku had this to say on August 19, 2010. Notice how he clenches his teeth while entertaining the moronic jabbering of the reporters he is talking to.

Here he is in December of 2010 chuckling dismissively about 2012 apocalyptic hysteria, emphasizing that people often forget the whole bit about "renewal" that goes along with the silly Mayan prophecies, and then saying that he's not really losing any sleep about it.

Here he is in early 2011 saying that he's been losing a bit of sleep at night.

Now, let's flash forward to November 4, 2011! Kaku, getting the brush-off from even stupider people, issues this warning! At about 2:15 he emphasizes, "We scientists made a mistake!" and then goes into some detail about how calculations of the forthcoming solar storm activity were off by at least a factor of 20. "We physicists are sounding the alert!"

Now, I know what you're thinking. If this was anything but total bullshit, surely NASA would be all over warning us, right? Or at least, they'd be warning their own people! Isn't it sort of weird to hear a government official babbling about a continuity of government exercise called "Eagle Horizon"?

Hrm. Well, I mean, if any of this was real, surely people would be noticing a real difference in their physical environment, right?

These Inuit fellas are probably about as sophisticated as the stupid Mayans, right?

Whatever. Let's have a look at what people in Antarctica think: oh, here's a guy who noticed a while ago that the sun was coming up at the wrong time of year.

Here's a guy who has noticed that compass headings are way off and that the sun is setting in the wrong place. But he's probably just another knob, right? Heck, maybe his compass is sitting on a magnetic rail.

Sooo, hell, I decided to go right to the source. Listed on my Twitter feed is Scott Maxwell, NASA's very own Mars Rover driver. Below is my tweet to him, and his response.

@marsroverdriver dude, inuit people are freaking out that the sun is setting in the wrong place and compass headings are off. reassure me.

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Scott Maxwell @marsroverdriver

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@boylegd Fear not. The sun will rise in the right place tomorrow, you'll see. All is well.

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@marsroverdriver That was a pretty specific reassurance, but thanks! :)

So, there you have it. All is well!

I did notice last summer that the sun was setting in the wrong place, but I dismissed it as a brainfart. I think that's an important clue to the nature of consciousness. Just as well, I guess.

You know what? If I was one of the Secret Masters and was looking for a chance to blow up Iran, I'd probably piggyback it on some sort of big natural upheaval! They should hire me at the Pentagon to give them ideas.

Random, Pointless Ideas About Complexity That I Had This Morning

Articles like this one boldly state that the human brain is "the most complex structure in the known universe". I think that is a very interesting -- if utterly pointless -- observation, one I've heard made over and over. It speaks of a perceptual horizon that mocks our attempts to understand the universe, once you start thinking about it. It has the self-referentialism characteristic of arguments that rely on the anthropic principle in some regard. Of course we can't know anything more complex than the thing with which we're knowing things.

The so-called "debates" or dialogues that concern themselves with intelligent design have a similar flavor. More or less intelligent people are having more or less intelligent discussions about whether evolutionary processes are more or less intelligent. But of course, intelligence is a subset of evolutionary processes in the first place. Can intelligence resulting from evolution make a real distinction concerning whether evolution is intelligent or not? Can craziness resulting from evolution make a real distinction concerning whether evolution is crazy or not?

We live in a snow globe, and our quest for a unified theory of everything is fruitless.

Douglas Adams famously said that if we ever did figure out the universe, it would vanish and be immediately replaced by something more complex. In fact, this had probably already happened.

I miss him.

I have long been a proponent of critical rationalism as a discipline offering some method of finding dialogue between different modes (fideist, reductionist) of knowledge. For example, most rational, scientifically-minded people would be very quick to ridicule the efforts of theologians who in bygone years discussed quite seriously the problem of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Look twice - those theologians were talking about Zeno's paradox, and they had some interesting insights. They were using a different language to express their ideas.

Here's what I think. A fly crawling across a compact disc on which Beethoven's masterworks are recorded, has no experience, no possible way of appreciating in any sense the scale of the significance of what it is interacting with. It cannot understand humans, or their history, the industrial revolution and the invention of electricity, lasers, SONY corporation, music, Beethoven, coffee tables, or any of those other things. Can these things... the hairs on the fly's leg, the brilliance of Beethoven's 9th symphony... be said to be real in the same way? What do we mean by reality, then?

Consider your receipt of this message. It formed as an idea in my mind, I clumsily encoded it in English in my own brain, then sent biological signaling to my fingers to cause them to transmit kinetic force to plastic keys, which triggered a cascade of electronic signals through a relay of machines, which then reconstructed the data as images and displayed them as flashing lights, emitting photons which then were received by your eyes, which then talked to your brain, which then reconstructed the information into words in English, and then deconstructed the emergent meaning encoded in that English for the underlying idea.

Is this message real, then, in the same way that a rock is real? Part of the same universe? Is there any intersection of the state space? Do objects actually exist discretely?

Beats me.

Complexity is a funny word. Reality is a funny word.

Maybe we need to rank complexity. Maybe we need to rank realities. Maybe we need to index and measure our experiences accordingly.