For a long long time Vikid read hard science almost exclusively. He delved primarily in Math & Physics as he was interested in uncovering the truth about the world and how it operated.
It started innocently enough.
The Enlightenment was a period in which Natural Philosophy matured into Scientific Methodology through the union of imagination and the cold reality of experimentation.
Imagination was infinite but prone to all manner of errors, the true route could be chartered by tempering it’s power by continuous testing against reality.
Progress was almost immediate and enormous gains were made in almost every endeavor. We went from horse-n-buggy to self driving automobiles in a jiffy. We went from parchment letters to instant global communication in less than 300 years. Extraordinary.
However things went haywire very fast.
“Reality was stranger than fiction”
Or as Haldane said,
"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose."
What Vikid hadn’t understood however is that The Science was closer to Fiction. We were being sold a fairytale fit for a Netflix Series.
The Science had built a beautiful marble castle on the foundation of rotting carcasses. Now the stench of the affair was creeping through the basement in the most un-ignorable fashion.
It all started with a suspicion and ended with an Alien somewhere in the forests of Poland.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
It started when he was 10. In a little English village during science class, Vikid massaged the statistics to get a solution that matched his teachers curriculum. The trick worked so well he used it until University. Successfully.
It was all innocent enough.
Bad results were due to improper technique, they had to be discarded. By discarding bad results, he got experiments that fit the theory and hugged smooth to mathematical curves. Like a one piece dress hugs a supermodel. The teachers liked the results and gave Vikid first marks.
But perhaps that was just Vikid being cheeky. He had clumsy hands which led to clumsy experiments that necessitated the adjustment. The professionals must be doing something different right?
Right?
Wrong!
They were smooth criminals. Pimps to beautiful bitches.
Nah, they were using the same trick only more sophisticated. And instead of marks they were getting large grants from politicians and industrial giants.
Vikid could hear the objections.
Mobile phones, liquid crystal displays. Space flight, Email. Nuclear Power, Large Hadron Collider. Seedless Tomatoes, mRNA.
What kind of Hero denies such evidence. Surely The Science isn’t folly.
Ah! You’ve made a good point. But the point actually is the evidence to the contrary.
You see we have no ‘one description’ of reality. Each description fails in the others domain. So we have built a patchwork quilt. Each part describing a different part of reality, each providing sufficient power within its domain for technological innovation. Consilience sure, yet each patchwork piece contradicts the other and the colors don’t match.
An ugly dress for our fair princess.
So one can make amazing progress without actually fundamentally knowing what is going on, as long as your model gives sufficient predictive capability within the magisteria you are governing in.
Furthermore when you get to industry, engineers usually discard these models. Super or not, Engineers ain’t into beauty. They like a girl with large hips and child bearing girth, not an anorexic catwalk pearl. In industry they go with what works, a history of trial and error with a strong dose of intuition and hard earned rigor.
That’s what ultimately you are looking at, not the castle built on crap.
There were other problems with Science. The fact that it was so political. Like the Church and Galileo, they mercilessly prosecuted the heretical.
There was only one truth. The truth subservient to power.
If you need any proof, the last few years of Covid Hysteria is enough to confirm that. But the rot was much much much deeper than Vikid cared to explore for the moment. The story needed to continue. Now, Vikid had talked about this before. Science unfortunately threw the baby out with the bath water.
Science was Objective, however the only thing we had access to was Subjective.
So for hundreds of years it ignored consciousness because by definition it couldn’t fit into the model.
It didn’t actually exist by Science’s perspective.
We had a brainless, clueless, heartless Miss Universe. Long legs, big bosom, g-string-theory. Devoid of Mind. Devoid of Soul. Ready for the Glory Hole. We had built a civilization on it and it was starting to show.
Child mutilation? No problem.
Endless war? Let’s go ahead!
Poison the well? It’s imperative.
In the name of progress… it was a duty.
But we’re getting off topic.
So Vikid went into meditation and started reading science fiction.
Science Fiction was a world by itself. Authors explored possibilities, alternate universes, pasts and futures. It exercised the mind and opened it for what was to come.
The Alien.
So there was this time, Vikid travelled to a forest in Poland. He stayed three days and nights without food or water, in solitary confinement. Not a book, not a mobile phone. Just a tent, a sleeping bag and some magic potion.
Now some say the potion did the trick but they were not there. All Vikid has is his story.
On the third day under the midday sun, something changed him forever.
It started with the glowing orb, the quality of light changed. Then out of another dimension came a sound that cannot be heard. It sounded like laser beam of varying frequencies. Some pitches were higher than a dogs whistle, others literally shook the earth. They were multiplexed, complex layered Fourier type signals.
He saw something that frightened him. What it was, he no longer remembers well enough to describe. So he ran into the tent and prayed for 10 hours straight. He was in the greatest fright. Fear he had never felt before in any context.
Day turned to night. The piercing sounds were continuous. Then through the tent a light show began which hovered like a drone over him. Swooping around from all directions. He prayed harder to the almighty Lord for protection. He noticed the sound was a form of communication. It was speaking directly to his subconscious. There were no words or pictures, nothing to cling to but acceptance.
It was still dark when the drone stopped surveilling. He thought possibly the episode was over but it wasn’t.
Footsteps around the tent and then humanoid shadows. Except there was no light in the moonless sky. The terror increased. There was no one around to disturb him. What the frigg was going on? He hadn’t got an explanation. More prayer and the footsteps went away.
Somewhere during the night he fell asleep. Wild dreams of The Alien. On a ship he thinks he was but this time it was a dream. What had happened earlier, he was sure wasn’t.
He woke up the next morning. The sun was coming up and he assumed the episode was over. Not so quickly my dear. The piercing sounds began again, a rift in the soundscape. More subliminal communication. Just what was being said, he had absolutely no idea, it spoke to his atoms directly.
Around the afternoon he broke camp and packed up utterly shooken by the experience. Weird things had happened before. Perhaps this could be consigned to a good bar time story or an article on the interweb.
He walked back to the lodge and met a friend who had been on a similar solitary mission in another part of the forest on the same night.
They talked… and had the same story.
Holy Shit.
It wasn’t just imagination.
Holy Shit…
And that’s,