The Decision Tree

Eleven months ago, I authored a post titled ‘Whatism?’, in which I discussed the odd futility of defining layers upon layers of subcategories of ‘belief’ when particular objects are concerned. My focus was largely on the fragile distinction between atheism and agnosticism — a boundary, I argue, that ceases to exist at the same moment as whatever metaphysical conversation houses the thought. These lyrical waxings aside (I understand we all love them), proponents of either ‘disbelief system’ cannot be distinguished from one another based on their actions. You can lead the life of an agnostic or an atheist and no one would know until you explicitly told them. But why should they?

Agnosticism is the belief that the truth/falsity of some premise/proposition cannot be determined. This is often a completely justified belief — at no point will I ever criticise the position of agnosticism. Any entity or event that does not interact with physical matter in any way — the invisible, permeable unicorn in the room, for example — warrants an agnostic position.  (Yes, even the illusive consciousness interacts with physical matter, as brain-damaged patients have demonstrated.)

Let’s use the word agnosum to denote anything deserving of agnosticism. The unicorn, or the ethereal deistic god, would be an example of something that is an agnosum by definition — we are told that it can’t be sensed in any way, directly or indirectly, and so there is no conceivable evidence that could sway our belief in its truth one way or the other. (Evidence being another premise/proposition with a truth value that is systematically related to the truth value of our original one.) Fortunately, we don’t need to fret over such an agnosum because — by the same definition — it can never affect our universe or our lives in any way.

Now let’s say that our chosen premise has passed the challenge of agnosticism, and we have a hypothesis about potential evidence that could sway our best estimate of its truth value. We’ve moved into the realm of skepticism (the real definition of which is not a euphemism for doubt or disbelief). We have some idea about how our premise can be taken to trial, but haven’t yet made a judgement. We perform an experiment to test our hypothesis. If our hypothetical evidence is found in our (rigorous and peer-reviewed) experiment, then we have just learned something about the premise’s truth value. We’re never going to be one hundred percent certain about it — and that’s where statistics and Bayes’ Theorem come in — but we’ve certainly made some headway.

At some point — this point is an area actually deserving of debate — we feel we are justified in abandoning our skepticism and finally accepting our premise as a belief. Yet this is the most dangerous part of the process, because we become complacement and drop our guard. The belief stops being strange and novel, and starts being normal and encultured. It becomes difficult to let go. We start ignoring the new evidence, while our fuzzy memories reinforce the strength of the old. There’s no way it could be wrong, you think. This can happen surprisingly quickly, and it’s a fact of the fallible human mind that has happened and will happen to each of us time and time again.

How does this tie back to our original focus on atheism versus agnosticism? As I’ve said before, there is a theoretical distinction between the two stances. It just doesn’t matter. If I start with the solipsistic premise that there is a second moon orbiting Earth, orbitally locked to the other side of the planet, it doesn’t take a very sophisticated experiment to gather evidence to the premise’s falsity. Among the many effects we would expect of such a celestial body would be strange tidal fluctuations when the moons line up, and we do not observe these. We can quickly shift from skepticism to belief in the falsity of the second moon (or as it is more commonly put, ‘disbelief in the second moon’).

Yet in what way does our invisible unicorn agnosum differ from our demonstrably non-existent second moon? By definition, the unicorn has precisely the same effect on our universe as the non-existence moon — that is, none at all. This is my argument, in its purest form. No sane person bothers with the distinction between agnosticism and disbelief when it comes to Peter Pan, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. Cynically, I might suggest that the reason we do bother with gods (and rarely ghosts and aliens) is that we’re roped into so many dreary discussions about them that it becomes a way to alleviate philosophical boredom — like getting into some fanatical organising at home when there’s nothing else to do.

My opinion? A much more productive pastime would be rewinding the reel and subjecting these beliefs to the agnostic and skeptic filters that clearly took an inopportune day off. For obvious reasons, there aren’t any surviving religions that instruct parents to wait until these filters have developed — no, cutely-dressed babies are dipped into metaphorical holy water before they can even stand.

If you were one of those children, imagine how you would have reacted to your religious beliefs if those mental floodgates had been allowed to close before the water leaked into your brain.

Take a Step Back

Perusing a museum of natural history recently, a friend remarked to me upon the travesty of what he termed “premature dinosaur exposure”. Our young, in his view, are educated about these long-extinct reptiles far too early — the result being an implicit association between dinosaurs and children. When they move on to fascinations with dragons and aliens, dinosaurs are pushed back to their eternal status as a thing of the past.

I have to agree with my friend on this. Imagine being twenty years of age and seeing the complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex for the first time. It is doubtful that you would believe it to be genuine. Yet in our reality, a typical young adult would find such a thing bordering on mundane. Fossils are dull, museums are boring, and dinosaurs are cartoon creatures for little boys. Focus, really focus, and you might be able to take a step back from this inexplicable reaction to some of the most incredible creatures to have walked the ground you now stand on. Try to imagine dinosaurs from the perspective of a completely naive visitor to our place and time.

This approach is warranted in many other aspects of our lives. In some cases, like the dinosaurs, we should use it to experience the full, awestruck reactions that certain events deserve. The computer you are reading this on could most likely be used to instantly communicate with a large percentage of the human population, provided you know their name. The blue and green globe you see in pictures from the International Space Station is the home of every non-astronomical event you have ever heard of, and countless more than you never will hear of. The small white planetoid that hangs above the night sky has been walked on by people who are still alive today. If you live in Australia, you are closer to the pitch-black ocean floor of the Atlantic, 12,000 kilometres beneath your feet, than its surface — and everything you hear about in America happens almost upside-down relative to you.

Taking a step back from these concepts can provide you with a fresh appreciation. But in other cases, we should do so not to experience awe, but confusion. Just like we are ingrained with the false “normality” of walking on the Moon, most of us have been ingrained with the “normality” of the belief that an old book holds the words of a supernatural force. “Miracle”, “religious”, “divine”, “sinner”, “resurrection” — all words we have heard enough times so as to become mundane. Even a non-believer might implicitly accept another’s belief in the story of Noah’s ark — in which water appears from nowhere to flood the entire world, killing everyone except one man and his family — as more “normal” than someone’s belief in the Wall of Fire — in which a race of aliens called the Galactic Confederacy brought billions of human to Earth, piled them around volcanoes, and destroyed them with hydrogen bombs. Of course, both of these stories are equally ludicrous, and to a completely naive modern-day person, ignorant of the religious and science fiction genres, they would be rejected.

We look to modern fantasy stories for entertainment, and ancient fantasy stories for holy revelations about the universe. Clearly there is something off about this particular accepted “norm” of our culture. Some of these ancient stories, like the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation, are particularly indistinguishable from science fiction. “Gods”, uniquely from humanity’s rich catalogue of mythical creatures and characters, are normal to believe in. This is why I no longer partake in debating with proponents of specific religions. Even the name or personality of your god, let alone the details of your arbitrary dusty book, are unnecessary embellishments of a concept that is only considered sane because we have grown up in constant exposure to it.

The biggest mistake anyone can make is cherishing their own beliefs. There is no reason to ever become attached to a piece of information you have picked up on your way through life. Never stop looking for reasons to discard them. Make a regular habit of taking a step back, taking stocktake, and taking measures against information that does not hold up.

Top Games of 2011

2011 has been a colossal year for video games. Since it would be even more impossible than usual to order a complete ranking of the year’s top titles, I’ve instead elected to organise the best fifteen games into four tiers of overall quality. If you’re looking for recommendations, aim for the higher tiers, but I’d be reluctant to advocate any entry over another in the same tier. Let’s get started.

TIER FOUR

The Binding of Isaac — An unusual Flash-based dungeon crawler from the creators of Super Meat Boy, featuring permanent death, randomised maps and items, and disturbing imagery. You control Isaac, who escapes into the basement when his mother attempts to sacrifice him to God. Isaac can move around the Zelda-inspired rooms and shoot tears in the four compass directions, while collecting keys, bombs, and other powerful items that shake up the gameplay. A single playthrough of the game (assuming you aren’t killed) takes around one hour, but you’ll have to finish the game a minimum of ten times to see events unfold all the way through to the end. (A Halloween update also added an additional, brutal level called ‘Sheol’, in which you must fight Satan himself.) This was the game I loved to hate during my exam period, as it turned out to be far more addictive than the short break from study I had intended it to be — Steam tells me I’ve put 20 hours into it. Definitely worth the $5, but still nowhere close to the free fun of Super Meat Boy. Danny Baranowsky’s great soundtrack also becomes tragically repetitive, as do the sounds of Isaac’s tears and enemies, so you’ll want to turn off the sound after a few playthroughs.

Bastion — Another independent Steam game with a cheap price tag. Bastion is a colourful isometric shooter, famously narrated all the way through by a gravelly-voiced old man who, amazingly, never gets annoying. You’ll unlock some impressive weapons as you blast your way through the five-hour story, and there are plenty of bonus levels, achievements, and difficult challenge levels to come back for after you’re done. Bastion was a blast the whole way through, but like Isaac, was never intended to compete with the bigger titles. Hard to beat this kind of value for money, though.

Gears of War 3 — Many will tell me that Gears 3 deserves a higher slot than this, and maybe they’re right. I never actually owned Gears 2 and picked this one up mostly on a whim, as there weren’t many other major releases around. While I certainly didn’t have many complaints about the ten-hour campaign as I was playing it through, and it’s still a great game for two players, Gears 3 just didn’t stick in my memory a month later. The look and gameplay of the game has barely changed since the original all the way back in 2006, and the story, while satisfying, can’t compete with the original brutal vision of Sera presented in Gears of War. I don’t consider the Gears series among my top game series, and I’m not interested in the online multiplayer, but the game was easily worth my $50 and deserves the love it receives from many others.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 — Another series of games that needs no introduction. MW3 is the eighth entry in the long-running acclaimed shooter series, and in contrast to Gears of War 3, had an epic and enjoyable campaign that certainly captures the feel of a third world war, along with providing a satisfying end for the characters we’ve become surprisingly attached to. I haven’t yet touched the online multiplayer or the apparently-extensive Spec Ops missions, but I’m sure I’ll get around to it and enjoy it. So why not the higher rating? Two reasons. The first is the ludicrously short length of the campaign, which I finished in four hours on Regular (normal) difficulty. Like I said, it’s very well done, but I’m a single-player gamer and I need more for the price tag. Nevertheless, I’m eager to get back into it on Vetern, and I’m aware it’ll take me a lot longer when I’m being killed every few seconds. The second reason is the soundtrack — I consider the soundtrack to Modern Warfare 2, composed by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe, to be an utter masterpiece. The soundtrack to MW3, by action-film composer Brian Tyler, doesn’t even come close, and for me this is a huge deal. That I consider MW3 to be the worst of the ‘trilogy’ while including it alongside Gears 3 should be taken as reinforcement of the quality of its predecessors.

TIER THREE

Bulletstorm — An innovative and raucously fun first-person shooter that doesn’t take itself seriously while providing incredible thrills with fantastic weapons. Bulletstorm is sheer fun from beginning to end, and succeeds largely on its inventive system in which more money is awarding for creative kills, making the outdated visuals and light-hearted story easily forgivable.

L.A. Noire — L.A. Noire is one of the most unusual major titles of the year, straight out of a development studio here in Bondi, Sydney. You play as Cole Phelps, a Los Angeles officer in the 1940s who quickly rises through the ranks as he tackles unusual cases across the City of Angels. The game is extremely convincing and one of the most realistic historical experiences I’ve ever had — the advanced motion-captured visuals are particularly amazing, and the diverging cases and clues are very well done. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, and for me, L.A. Noire hits the right note of story emphasis that wasn’t there in GTA while also not forcing you to play as a murderous thug. I borrowed the game from a friend and had to return it before I was able to finish the story, but I’ll be getting my hands on it again as soon as possible.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution — Another title where the world is as much a star as the main character. Human Revolution is ambitious in its dark, dystopic view of Earth’s future and features a world where human augmentation is a controversial runaway technology. Players are free to tackle the story and missions in a variety of play styles, from all-out gunfights to stealth — there’s even an achievement for finishing the entire game without taking a single life. It’s rare that I’m interested in examining every detail and object in a game world as large as this one (you visit several wide cities during the game), but I couldn’t get enough of the world of Deus Ex. Sadly, it’s another game I didn’t finish before the next slew of releases, and I aim to return to it to see it through.

Portal 2 — Portal 2 was one of the most acclaimed titles of the year, and it’s certainly deserving of that honour. I doubt there’s anyone left unfamiliar with the premise, but to restate it, you tackle fiendish first-person puzzles armed only with a gun that can create two linked portals on any flat, hard surface. Portal 2 has a fantastic story with hilariously voice-acted evil robots on all sides, as well as a fun set of co-operative puzzles completely separate from the single-player game, but in the end still didn’t feel like a ‘full’ enough game to compete with other titles with more content. A blast while it lasts, though.

Dark Souls — Dark Souls, RPG dungeon crawler and successor to the notoriously hard Demon’s Souls, is the most recent addition to my collection and a title I’m playing at the moment. I can’t say Demon’s Souls was a favourite game of mine, but I appreciated the skill-intensive gameplay, the punishment of excessive risk, and the ghostly online interactions with other players. I like Dark Souls better than Demon’s Souls, and I’m nowhere near finished with it, but the problem remains that I’m never sure if I’m enjoying the game or just enduring it — not many games can make me so frustrated that I accidentally hurt myself while venting on a lounge cushion.

TIER TWO

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations — I believe that AC:R has the lowest aggregate Metacritic score of every game on this list; somewhere around 80. The main problems that reviewers have with it seem to be that it is ‘too much of more of the same’, and they’re also critical of Desmond’s puzzle sections and the newly-added ‘den defence’ minigame that must be undertaken whenever the Templars attack one of your strongholds. In response to the first, I’d say that it’s a matter of opinion, but I’m a huge fan of the AC series and have not been let down at all by the prospect of ‘more of the same’ so far. In my opinion, the additions of the hook blade, bomb customisation (which is actually good!), challenging stronghold takeovers, and Altair missions are all terrific and well-implemented. I’m also enjoying the story as much as any of Ezio’s previous entries. In response to the complaints about the Desmond and den defence sections, I’ll start by pointing out that both of these are completely optional. You unlock Desmond’s strange Portal-esque, Animus-powered puzzles by collecting some of the 100 hidden ‘data fragments’ in Constantinople (which is the greatest AC city yet, by the way). And the den defences only occur if you let your notoriety reach 100%, and even then, it takes a criminal act to trigger them. In any case, I don’t think either of these two elements are nearly as bad as they’re being made out to be. Revelations is another successful and completely immersive entry in this series, in my books — it’s amazing how much it can suck you in, even as a third-person game.

Dead Space 2 — It’s hard to believe this was also the year we saw Dead Space 2, all the way back in January. I’m not the biggest fan of horror games, but when they’re accompanied by bleak, hard science fiction as Dead Space is, I’m all for it. Shooting the limbs off of the monstrous, zombified human inhabitants of ‘the Sprawl’ is even more fun than it was in the original 2008 game, and there are plenty of new enemies and incredible set pieces to boot. The story is bigger, better, and longer, and I still highly recommend playing on the hardest mode you can stomach (though you won’t find me attempting Hardcore mode, which in addition to being brutally difficult only allows you to save three times across the entire game).

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Despite professing to not be the biggest fan of TES IV: Oblivion from 2006, I still ended up putting a good 80 hours into it. I’m pleased to report that Skyrim fixes essentially every problem I had with Oblivion and includes plenty of new features, along with a game world that is even better to look at than Cyrodiil. First and foremost among these improvements is the levelling system, which no longer require painful amounts of effort to fully exploit. Attributes have been removed in favour of a system where simply levelling up enough skills pushes you to the next level, when you can boost your health, magicka, or stamina. Dragons are impressive, magic is much more satisfying, stealth is no longer a binary state of detected/undetected, and the majority of dungeons have a very unique feel. So why not Tier One? It’s not because of the glitches, which haven’t bothered me at all, but rather the fact that I’m struggling to find the motivation to push beyond 60 hours of play time. I’m nowhere near finished with Skyrim, and I can’t explain why I’ve lost a bit of interest, but I do know it’s not quite on par with my Tier One titles.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception — Uncharted 3 was my most anticipated game of the year, and by no means was it a let down. The story is an incredible adventure from beginning to end, with a few fantastic new characters and a couple of tweaks to the near-perfect gameplay of Uncharted 2. There are even more incredible set pieces (I won’t do them the injustice of spoilerage), multiplayer is still a bit of fun, and there’s a new split-screen cooperative mode that I sadly haven’t had the chance to try out, but I’m sure it’s great as well. If Uncharted 2 didn’t exist, then Uncharted 3 would easily be in the next tier, but it can’t avoid the comparison to its predecessor — and in my opinion, Uncharted 2 has the better single-player mode. The ending of Uncharted 3, as many will tell you, was much too sudden and left an uncomfortable amount of unanswered questions. Four of its twenty-two chapters were spent building up to the cruise ship segment from the E3 demo, and the story was essentially put on pause during these tangential chapters, which is a shame.

TIER ONE

Well, here we are in Tier One. For me, there were two clear winners in 2011 — two games I enjoyed more than any other. If I were forced to choose a ‘Game of the Year’, I’d also probably be able to do that, but not by a large enough margin to warrant an additional tier. I’ll write about my Tentative Runner-Up to Game of the Year for 2011 first, and then get onto my Tentative Supreme Hallmark of Video Game Excellence for 2011.

RUNNER-UP: Xenoblade Chronicles — Xenoblade Chronicles is a Japanese RPG that still hasn’t been released in the US, and won’t be until April next year. As such, it’s been tragically overlooked in this month’s 2011 awards across the Internet. It’s a masterpiece of an RPG that takes me back to the lengthy, inspired stories, beautiful worlds, fantastic characters, and thrilling combat in the glory days of Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII, two of my all-time favourite games. Of course, I’ve already written extensively about XC in a long post in which I compared it to the disappointing Final Fantasy XIII, so I don’t have much to add. I’ve played a lot more of XC since then — around 60 hours now — and I haven’t lost my motivation for it the same way I lost interest in Skyrim. The only reason I put it down back in October was because of my exams, and I just picked it up again today after exhausting November’s barrage of titles. Of course, XC is about as different an RPG as you could imagine from Skyrim — they showcase the best efforts from Eastern and Western developers, respectively — but Xenoblade Chronicles‘ strong focus on what Skyrim would call ‘the main quest’ makes it the clear winner in my eyes.

GAME OF THE YEAR: Batman: Arkham City

I’m a huge fan of Batman, though I’m sure many will consider it strange (if not blasphemous) that the first exposure I had to the Caped Crusader was after watching Batman Begins on TV in the weeks leading up to the cinematic release of The Dark Knight, in July 2008. I can’t explain why, but watching Batman Begins for the first time — specifically, on-air — was the best film experience I’ve ever had. The score, the atmosphere, the story…it all just worked for me. So when Batman: Arkham Asylum turned out to be a near-masterpiece in 2009, I named it my second-favourite game of the year (behind Uncharted 2: Among Thieves). But this year, with the release of the sequel and complete masterpiece Batman: Arkham City, Batman has edged out Nathan Drake and thirteen other worthy titles for the top spot in my heart.

Developer Rocksteady’s first masterstroke was to limit the size of the ‘open world’ of Arkham City. Instead of bloating it out to the size of Skyrim or Liberty City, they put their efforts into making a moderately-sized sandbox inwhich every square centimetre is memorable. There are Riddler secrets hidden around every corner, a dozen deep side-missions involving a host of entertaining Batman villains and challenges, extra content playable as Catwoman, and vulnerable thugs patrolling every dank street, just waiting to be snatched up into the air by a man dressed as a giant bat. Combat is also, amazingly, even smoother and more enjoyable than it was in Asylum, thanks to a host of new moves and the improved ability to counter the attacks of multiple enemies at any time. So it’s no surprise that the endless combat and predator challenges available outside the main story mode are also even better — you can also unlock Robin as a playable character, and he doesn’t disappoint.

I started a second, harder playthrough of Arkham City literally as soon as the end credits to the brilliant story had finished rolling, and I can’t claim that for many games. Batman: Arkham City is a masterpiece from beginning to end, and both it and Xenoblade Chronicles have become two of my all-time favourite games alongside FFX, FFXII, BioShock, Halo 2, and the Metroid Prime series.

 

Well, that concludes my miniature awards ceremony. Hopefully, I’ve done a decent job of recommending any and all of these titles if you’re a fan of games and missed out on some of them. Of course, there are plenty of games I didn’t actually get to play this year — the biggest miss being Skyward Sword, the new Zelda game, which is already acclaimed. I’ll be picking that up as soon as I get the money, and I might add my opinion of it to this list. I’ve also heard good things about Rayman: Origins, Sonic Generations, and Battlefield 3.

That’s all for now. If you read through all 3000 of these words, I probably owe you a copy of Arkham City. Buy it and leave your bank details and password with me, and I’ll reimburse you.

Structural Souls

Particles come and go, through the skyscrapers in our cities and the bones in our bodies. We are built from the same sub-microscopic stuff as the fuel we consume to keep our cogs whirring — notice how almost everything we eat was once biological tissue? — yet it is through this stuff that people often sift, searching for the ‘essence’ of what makes us not only alive, but somehow more alive than the rest of Earth’s biosphere.

Frequently this leads introspectors to the aether-like phenomenon of souls, impermeable ghosts that give rise to consciousness by puppeteering our material bodies. Conveniently, this paves the way for an equally ethereal afterlife. I, and others, have written much on how this dualistic approach is self-refuting and — arguably worse — explains nothing. But why does the concept sprout up all across human space and time? And if it is untrue, then what is going on when we die?

The secret lies in structure, the source of our complexity. Dualists are correct in the belief that the molecules comprising us are not especially important in defining us — rather, it is their precise and evolutionarily-tuned arrangement. As our technology evolves in parallel, we are learning the beauty of using more and more abstract structures to relay information. I can now carry the complete works of Beethoven around in my pocket as a series of ones and zeroes. If I had the patience and memory span, I could even write that number sequence down on a piece of (very long) paper. Not a very useful form for the information to be in, but a form in near-bijection to the original music nonetheless, and the same method that a theoretical teleporter might use to beam our structural information from one point to another at the speed of light.

Our DNA is literally an instruction manual for mindless cellular structures to build every part of us. The Human Genome Project famously perused the entirety of this instruction manual, and you would be surprised at how short it turned out to be — yet we understand so little of the organic complexes it is used to construct, especially the brain. When we reproduce, a new instruction manual is written by taking random words from both the mother and father, with a handful of translational flaws (that this process is flawed is a glorious, glorious fact).

It is not particularly important that the mortar used to piece you together and keep you running day after day may have come from the ham sandwich you ate for lunch. Death is simply the result of this maintenance coming to an end, either because of decay over the decades or because of extreme trauma. Some parts of the body — particularly the blood-hungry brain — notice this much quicker than others.

Your cells stop maintaining your structure, and you decompose into dust with the help of Earth’s other creatures.

Hopefully you weren’t expecting a different ending.

Roll Your Dice

Let’s imagine a world of ageless humans in which pernicious deities control overpopulation by striking certain human beings with lightning. These humans are chosen according to a six-sided die carried by each person. Every morning at 9:00 am, everyone at the age of 5 or over rolls their die. The gods observe and keep a running tally of who has rolled what: whenever someone rolls their 1000th “6″, they are instantly vaporised by divine lightning. On their fifth birthday, each child receives their own die replicated using the weight characteristics from both parents’ dice. This replication process involves small imperfections.

Perhaps you can see where this is going. No die is perfect, and for any given die, the precise probabilities of rolling each of the six outcomes are not exactly equal. The biases for each die may be almost imperceptible, but over the course of thousands of rolls, they will emerge. Those with dice that are biased toward “6″ will, overall, live shorter lives and consequently have less children with similar dice. Each new child’s die may be biased slightly toward or away from “6″ as a result of the imperfect parent-dice-melding process, and again, these changes will tend to accumulate to anti-”6″ die. Given enough time in this world, we would expect that across thousands of generations, dice would become less and less inclined to land on “6″.

But then, the dice-obsessed deities realise that the humans have evolved a resistance to their form of elimination. And so they change the fatal number from “6″ to “4″ overnight. The human population starts falling as people hit their 1000th “4″s, and the process begins anew.

Hopefully you’ve already drawn some of the parallels to evolution in our own world. Our “dice” are our entire bodies — our every reflex and every cell. The “deities” are our natural environment, including everything from the universal gravitational constant and Earth’s precise mass to other life forms and even each other. The “fatal numbers” for our dice are sourced from a continuum, have varying strengths (represented in the metaphor by the requirement of 1000 rolls — less required rolls would mean a stronger fatal number), and differ in different locales. The “imperfect replication” is the process of sexual reproduction, which sources from each parent and involves slight translational errors that lead to a revised individual genetic code.

But I didn’t finish the metaphor: eventually, humans became sufficiently advanced to alter their own dice and even bargained with the deities to increase the number of required rolls. The new fight for survival became focused on human behaviour and social interaction. Wars stopped being about land and started being about dice. Factions of humans with a focus on a particular number or set of numbers formed, and whoever carried the most power had the ability to manipulate the fatal numbers.

I’ll let you figure out the allegories to our society.

Correct RPG vs. Incorrect RPG

It’s time for something completely different. Today, I will be reviewing two games at once: long-running, best-selling series entry Final Fantasy XIII, and new, under-selling original Xenoblade Chronicles. I will do this by focusing on five aspects of RPGs (that’s role-playing games) and how they were handled in each game. Specifically, how they were handled wrong in FFXIII and right in XC. They are listed in rough order of importance for their contributions to the overall gaming experience.

5. Content

RPGs are famous for the sheer number of gameplay hours they usually offer. My Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion file is on about 100 hours. My Final Fantasy XII file is on about 140. My Final Fantasy X file is over 200. And those are just my main files. Generally, no more than half of these hours is spent playing through the game’s main story, but rather on the plethora of sidequests and side-content on offer. RPGs differ in how much weight they put on sidequests and how much on story: Oblivion was almost entirely sidequests of varying degrees of story relevance, while FFX was about 60% story, 10% sidequests, and 30% levelling up to defeat the toughest foes at the Monster Arena. FFXII was probably close to an even split, with the majority of sidequest focus on the enjoyable monster bounty hunts.

Of course, there’s extra content that can be considered even less “compulsory” than already-optional sidequests: characters to talk to, locations to explore, and relationships to develop. FFX and FFXII were full of little hidden variables that would affect all these things: a vendor’s late-game prices would be affected by how much money you lent him when he was struggling to start out; female characters will like you more if talk to them first when your party is separated; powerful rare monsters you weren’t expecting may suddenly appear. I’m even willing to forgive FFXII’s notorious “Zodiac Spear quest”, in which the most powerful weapon in the game can be lost forever if you open seemingly arbitrary treasure chests in the game’s first few hours, leaving your only hope of obtaining it in a chest that has only a 0.1% chance of holding it. These things all stimulate online discussion of the game, where players can share and discover things about the game that they hadn’t even been aware of.

My point: FFXIII has NONE of these things in the first 20 hours of the game, and few after that. As we’ll see, Square Enix made a number of extremely baffling decisions in an attempt to hit a “mainstream” gaming audience — apparently, the game’s best-selling predecessors didn’t do this. The first such decision I’m cricising is the removal of all this extra content — the closest thing we get is coming to a fork in the road, then choosing one path at random and finding a dead end with a treasure chest (which are marked on the map at all times) containing an item we don’t care about. Gone are the bustling villages where you might meet a desperate man in need of phoenix tail feathers, or a girl looking for her pet chocobo. Gone are the unexpected arrivals of characters who urgently need your assistance, or the thrills of sneaking on board a pirate ship in the dead of night for some extra loot. It’s all gone.

“Ah,” you say, “but after the 20-hour tutorial, the game really opens up as you explore Pulse.” I’ll discuss the game’s setting more in a bit, but let me say that increasing the area of the map does not introduce extra content, aside from a few more hours of (pointless) exploration. I reached Pulse, but my dreams of being miraculously transported into a quality RPG were dashed. Instead, I was presented with a handful of scattered monster hunt quests ripped straight out of FFXII, except now given by a lifeless statue instead of living, breathing, named characters with whom I could empathise.

Two hours into Xenoblade Chronicles, and you’re already establishing relationships with dozens of people around your home town, you’ve been given optional quests to carry out, you have gems to craft, items to collect, rare monsters to hunt, party affinities to develop, arts and skills to learn, and giant areas to explore. I’m 20 hours in, and this all gets even better — I’ve just been tasked with the optional megaquest of rebuilding a city. And none of it ever gets dull.

4. Setting

Easily my favourite thing about FFXIII is the basic setting, and it’s a shame it was wasted on such a disappointing game. The idea of a society of humans being contained in a literal ‘cocoon’ by a collection of bizarre, omnipotent gods resonated extremely well, and in fact, the most fun I ever had with the game was reading the additional information on each of these beings in the pause menu’s encyclopaedia. I liked the concept of these gods installing ‘purposes’ in the mortal humans — fail your mission and you become a zombie; succeed and you turn to crystal — and thought having the main characters exiled from Cocoon this way was a great catalyst for a story. The monster designs are all entertaining and sometimes awe-inspiring, particularly the aforementioned gods (called Fal’cie). All this, FFXIII gets right.

Sadly, this setting is limited to cutscenes and supplementary reading in the pause menu, because the game’s maps are utterly one-dimensional. Remember how I mentioned the closest thing to extra content being a fork in the road with treasure down one path? You’ll treasure those rare forks, like the few minutes of freedom you get when your babysitter Square Enix is on the phone, because otherwise, you’re stuck running down five-metre-wide corridors forever and ever. I wish I was exaggerating. Then, after your 20-hour tutorial, you’re dropped in the middle of a desolate plain with no idea which way to go. I was fine with that, but I guess “mainstream” players were supposed to have figured it out by then. Of course, when I did eventually find the right way, it turned out that the giant plain was tragically unique, because it was back to the corridors.

Xenoblade Chronicles crafts a unique setting of its own: the characters live on the body of the Bionis, one of two colossal titans that died fighting each other and now grow life on their skin like mould. The other titan, the Mechonis, is home to the robotic race of Mechon, who have invaded the Bionis by overwhelming the humans’ defences along the swords where the two giants are in contact. Your hometown is Colony 9, at the foot of the Bionis, and the story takes you all over its body (and, I’m expecting, the Mechonis). Right now, I’m in a gigantic forest encompassing the Bionis’ back.

The scope of the maps in XC matches the scope of its setting: they’re all suitably enormous, with plenty of areas to explore, yet you still have an idea where you want to end up. I’ve made my way down a ten-level mine, climbed a statue the size of a mountain, and crossed a mile-long bridge. The time of day proceeds normally, and special weather events like thunderstorms will appear and disappear depending on the weather — I was amazed by the marsh that lights up at night, completely transforming it.

In fact, there’s an area very similar to the giant Pulse plain with the enormous meandering beasts. Except it’s four hours into the game, on the Bionis’ leg, right after you leave your hometown. Also, it’s comparatively small — wait until you see Makna Forest. I’m sure I’ll be equally impressed by the Mechonis.

3. Role-playing

Okay: so our maps are constricting and there’s not much extra content. But surely all is not lost for FFXIII: how does it play?

It turns out that yes, pretty much all is lost. The character customisation is dull beyond a fault. There are only three ways to role-play in this game: choosing your three party members and which of the six “roles” they will perform; equipping and upgrading their weapons (all of which are unique to one character); and spending XP to move around the Crystarium, which upgrades stats and abilities.

Okay, so again, we’re pretty limited, but surely some of this stuff is decent. Sadly not. The Crystarium is just boring, playing out like a linear (something of a theme) version of FFX’s incredible Sphere Grid, in which all semblance of a “choice” is embodied in which of the six roles you want to upgrade (the game halves these options by giving each character three primary roles that you’ll always want to upgrade). But at least it’s functional — the weapon system is even worse. To upgrade a weapon, you “spend” pick-ups from chests and enemies to level it up. When it’s levelled enough, you “transform” it into a new weapon using specific objects (you’ll be lucky to find one that’s actually able to do this for the specific weapon you may have chosen to upgrade). These pick-ups are arbitrarily named and can also be bought from different stores accessible from save points, though I never figured out what the difference between them was. Does a Wolf Fang upgrade my weapon in a different way to an Energy Cylinder? How would I know? I said I liked having things to discover online, but this is a basic part of gameplay. To make matters worse, there’s a second type of item that will increase the uprading power of the next few items you use on that weapon. This is so pointless, it’s mind-boggling. I ended up picking a weapon at random for each character and focusing entirely on that weapon. Gone are the days when I’d hastily equip my characters with Lightningproof armour while crossing the Thunder Plains in FFX, or equip Auron’s Firestrike weapon to hurt an ice beast, or save up licence points to finally unlock Balthier’s ability to wield the most powerful gun in FFXII.

XC shows FFXIII how it’s done: whenever you defeat an enemy, or complete a quest, or unlock an achievement (I forgot to mention the 100+ in-game achievements when discussing extra content), etc., you get XP for levelling up, AP for upgrading the Arts of your choosing for each character, and SP that automatically goes into unlocking the next skill in whichever skill tree you’ve selected for that character. Your characters can buy tomes to increase the maximum level of each Art, link skills with each other if they like each other enough, and, of course, customise all components of their outfits, which actually changes their physical appearance. The best weapons and armour have slots where gems be equipped, to add extra bonuses. You can find these gems or craft them yourself in an ingenious mini-game, and they’re completely re-usable. There’s not a single RPG element out of place, or underdeveloped.

2. Story

The strength of an RPG’s story goes a long way toward its value in my eyes. Story-wise, Final Fantasy X is my favourite game of all time. Final Fantasy XII took a bit longer to get into, and lacked a strong main character like Tidus to really get me invested, but still delivered in terms of pure dramatic power and the sheer scale of what was at risk in the war against Archadia.

Like its setting, the story of FFXIII is no doubt one of the better aspects of the game, and yet another reason why the game really wanted to be a film. That said, its good qualities are mostly in the setting, and the backstories and motivations (but not necessarily personalities and certainly not voices) of the main characters. I found myself admiring the locations, but I wouldn’t say there was a whole lot of purpose behind most of them. I can’t comment on anything in the last third of the game, but from what I hear, it’s not overly bad.

In any case, the story’s execution was problematic: namely, the necessity of going into the pause menu and reading ridiculously non-chalant descriptions of everything that’s just happened. These text entries read like a “Previously on…” segment and strip the story’s realism away so fast that I quickly felt like I was reading the game’s Wikipedia article. This was worsened by the fact that these entries, and the corresponding entries for the main characters, would feature details that were sometimes impossible to glean from the cutscenes.

How does Xenoblade Chronicles compare? It’s much better — the story is told by the events and cutscenes, not by text entries in the pause menu, and it’s a great story so far. The main character, Shulk, wields an extraordinary blade called the Monado, which grants him visions of the future. At the start of the game, a tragic vision comes true despite his best efforts, and Shulk sets out to seek revenge against the cruel Mechon — but soon realises there’s more than his vendetta at stake. Read any review of the game to hear another opinion of how good the story is.

1. Combat

Any game can have limited extra content, an unoriginal setting, and a lackluster story, and still be a worthwhile 10-20 hours if the central gameplay is fun. Alas, gameplay is the final nail in FFXIII’s coffin, and the game’s biggest misstep.

The combat system is a combination between FFX, in which battles are completely turn-based and discontinuous from exploration, and FFXII, in which battles are real-time and enemies visibly roam around. When a battle begins, you’re transported into a miniature version of your current area (i.e. an empty clearing) to fight. Magic and MP exists no more — instead, your primary resource is time, and stronger attacks take longer to execute. In a given “round” of combat, you organise a line-up of attacks which are all carried out in a row. The six combat roles I mentioned earlier are the fairly traditional roles (damage-dealer, mage, tank, healer, buffer, debuffer), and you can change between six preset party role combinations during battle.

Again, this sounds good in theory — except for the fact that it takes the game 10 hours to slowly leak you the freedom to fight as you want — but three fatal flaws ensure an abysmal execution. The first flaw is your inability to control your characters’ placement when placement matters. Plenty of enemies have area attacks, and you’ll groan as your party members group as close together as possible. The second flaw is the lack of any reason not to use the game’s auto-attack, which is very good at lining up the best moves for the situation (e.g. fire techniques against ice enemies). The game literally fights for you, better and faster than you can, and you’ll realise this when you continually get five-star battle ratings just using auto-attack.

The third flaw is relatively small, but it frustrates me the most because it is so unbelievably unnecessary: when you switch role presets, you might be subject to one of a few different mini-cutscenes showing the transformation. The problem? The battle does not pause during these cutscenes, and they have different lengths. That’s right — you have to cross your fingers and hope you get the cutscene where all three characters change at once, instead of the slow cutscene in which they change one by one. The latter almost guarantees you’ll take an extra hit from an enemy — something I’d be fine with, if it happened all of the time instead of randomly. It reminds me of the abhorred random “falling over” mechanic introduced in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Where FFXIII gets it wrong, Xenoblade Chronicles gets it unbelievably right, playing like a fusion between FFXII and World of Warcraft. Like FFXII, combat is integrated into exploration — all you have to do is target a wandering enemy and attack. Each character has a wide variety of special abilities (Arts) and will also auto-attack when haven’t selected an Art to use. Arts encompass the whole spectrum of RPG abilities, and a lot of offensive Arts are granted bonuses when you attack your enemy at a particular time or from a particular angle. Like WoW, each Art has a cooldown before it can be used again, but there’s no MP or any other resource except your character’s unique Talent Gauge which unlocks their powerful Talent Art when full. Each character feels different to play, and can also encourage their teammates and congratulate their critical hits or nimble dodges, building up the party affinity I mentioned before. It’s ironic how FFXIII forces you to fight enemies by placing them in the middle of your narrow corridow, yet you’d rather not, while XC makes it easy to avoid battles in its wide open spaces, yet you’d rather not. Combat is an absolute thrill in XC, and a boring single-button chore in FFXIII.

And that’s a 3000-word double-review. The moral of the story? Please trade in your copy of FFXIII and put the credit toward buying Xenoblade Chronicles, or a whole Wii if you don’t yet have one. Have fun.

Mirages of Bias

A new scientific method called exploratory experimentation is being developed. Rather than attempting to predict results in advance (hypothesising), these experiments are run just to discover what happens, after which relevant conclusions can be drawn. The change came about as a result of growing concern about the inability to investigate environmental causes of cancer — previously, scientists were required to predict the factors they expected to influence cancer rates, an arduous task considering the range of candidates for such influence. Now, a database of cancer rate data can simply be compared alongside a host of possible factors, all simultaneously examined so that we can quickly see which of them cause cancer rates to increase.

Question: Why is the above paragraph nonsense?

One of the less intuitive (and most critical) aspects of the scientific method is the necessity of predicting results in advance. If we compile a nationwide database of cancer rates in different regions, as suggested above, alongside various environmental causes such as overhead power lines, inland water supply, etc., and find that cancer rates do increase significantly in areas with more oak trees, what does it matter if we said so in advance? The effect is still there, right?

Wrong — maybe. Ultimately, this misunderstanding goes deeper, to concepts of probability and randomness. When we wish to investigate differences between two groups of people, or Petri dishes, or buckets of water, etc. that have been exposed to different experimental conditions, there are two types of differences. The first is genuine, systematic, biased difference betweent the two groups — this is precisely what we want to find. The second is the error we get from individual differences within the group — this error is random in the sense that its presence is completely independent of any grouping or experimental manipulation, and we hate this type of difference. This error is the reason we need large sample sizes: the more individual points of data there are, the more likely their individual differences will cancel one another out, making the systematic effects much easier to detect in comparison.

Think of the experiment as an effort to understand a low-quality, noisy radio transmission – say, a ten-second repeating message. We want to retrieve the meaningful, systematic sounds from beneath the annoying static. Firstly, to have any hope of understanding it, we definitely need to listen to it multiple times — the more, the better. In fact, if we record a large number of the ten-second loops, and then play them all back at once (turning the volume knob way down), we would find the message surprisingly clear. This is because the static averages out at roughly the same level, since it is random in each ten-second loop, whereas the sounds of the message are biased to play at the same moment each loop. This is a beautiful illustration of randomness versus bias, and how large samples can help bias overcome randomness (the problem of unintended bias in science is a colossal one that will not be addressed here).

How does this relate to the need for a hypothesis? Because error never goes away completely. We can only analyse the probability that a result represents a real effect (i.e. that the result is from bias, not randomness). Say you want to compare two types of arrows. Two archers matched for strength fire them off at the same angle, at the same time. One arrow goes 103 metres, the other goes 104 metres. “Our experiment shows the second arrow to be superior,” you might confidently conclude in your report. But is this really justified? We can’t perfectly match the archers on their strength and ability – surely some inaccuracy in our effort to match them could account for this less-than-one-percent difference in distance?

So maybe we accept that a one-metre gain isn’t good enough. But where would we have drawn the line? At what point are we justified in concluding that the second arrow is any different to the first? Statistics, as well as some basic research methodology, are dedicated to answering this question, and in the end they can only give us a probability that the result was due to chance (we want this to be as small as possible). The “cut-off” point for this probability is completely arbitrary — the widespread convention is a probability of p = 0.05, i.e. we accept that the second arrow is better than the first only if the probability of its better performance occurring due to chance is less than 5% (we call this “statistically significant”).

Of course, that’s still a 5% chance. That means that 5% of the time, an effect that we accept as genuine — say the superiority of an arrow — will actually just be random chance, merely the result of individual errors.

And now we can understand the importance of prediction, because probabilities are only meaningful in advance. Imagine we are comparing twenty arrows to find one that is superior. We shoot them out of twenty identical bow machines, indoors, at the same angle, and sure enough we find one arrow that beat all the others with statistical significance. If that was the exact arrow we had predicted would do better, then that would mean something. If we didn’t predict any arrow, but were performing an “exploratory experiment” to find the best one, then it’s less impressive. The probability of that arrow winning due to chance may have been 5% or less, but we just fired twenty of them. The chance of an arrow doing significantly better than the others is much higher than 5%.

As with any methodology, there are other answers. If we fired the twenty arrows over and over, randomising which machines they were fired out of and randomising the line-up, then a few genuinely superior arrows would tend to win more while the chance-winners would tend to cancel out their own successes with just as many losses. Averaging a large number of trials could reveal a more reliable effect, just like overlaying the bad radio signal from above.

But in psychology, where individual differences are massive and the scope for repeated experiments is limited, this is not always viable, and so we need to predict things — ironically, it increases our relative chances of finding a genuine significant effect, because without it we’d be finding illusionary effects all over the place. The bad logic is the same as hitting a golf ball, and claiming the ball was biased to land on the blade of grass that it did. Unless you were able to claim that beforehand, no one’s impressed — they know there were a vast number of other possible ball-hitting results (in this case, basically all of them) you would have deemed “significant”. The same goes for numerology, and various religious/supernatural claims.

Finally, to tie this back to the hypothetical Great Cancer Database. There are just too many possible environmental factors, and not enough control over cancer itself, to justify any conclusions found from such a wide search. Sure, your analysis of the effects of oak trees may have revealed a very low probability of chance occurrence — maybe 0.1% — but your search looked at thousands of possibilities!

We expect these mirages of bias. In fact, a complete lack of them would suggest that cancer is spread incredibly uniformly, like with a butter knife, with no random clusters — our bias-focused minds often believe that this is how randomness should work. This is why science exists, and exploratory science does not.

A Hierarchy of Masks (Part 1)

[This is the first half of a major post that has been a long time in the making. To fully grasp it, I suggest reading previous posts in The Encephalon Engine.]

I have written about self-preparation, emergent consciousness, and the fragility of memory, all in my quest to dispel the illusion of a unified conscious identity. To paraphrase an archaic quote, each of us is legion. There is no unique soul locked away in the core of the brain’s hardware: we act based on dynamic motivations, both conscious and non-conscious, and nowhere in an explanation of the human mind or its manifest behaviours is a unified mental entity required. Yet introspective experience is so strong – so convincingly continuous – that this assumption still lies beneath almost every attempt to understand the encephalon engine. In the first part of this piece, I will highlight some of the phenomena that have led me to suspect this assumption is false, or at least misleading, before proposing my own version. In the second, I will discuss some of the directions we might take if we stop taking unity of mind for granted, and some interesting applications – in particular, a motivational management system I have recently developed, called the hierarchy of masks.

Consciousness is mysterious. No one has demonstrated it, yet few deny its existence, and most take it for granted. Dualists such as David Chalmers have attempted to demonstrate its existence, separate from the brain’s physical structure, through thought experiments such as the “philosophical zombie” – a being that is imagined to be completely physically identical to a normal person, but lacking in conscious awareness.

There are two problems with the philosophical zombie. The first, damning problem is that its very existence hinges on the assumption that consciousness can be “removed” without altering any neural substrate (i.e. a responsible brain structure). The second, less obvious problem is that the “difference” between a p-zombie and a human is entirely introspective, and as such there is a subtle implication that such a difference is real. By definition, no one but the subject can determine if they are a philosophical zombie or a real human. The situation quickly becomes more of a headache: the p-zombie must examine its own introspective ability to determine if it is a p-zombie. Exactly how the capability to examine one’s own introspective ability is different from consciousness, and how, is a question that dualists hope you will not ask when confronted with the thought experiment.

Attempting to use the mysterious nature of consciousness as evidence of its mysticism seems to me no different than attempting to show love, or equivalently any other emotion, are mystical. Emotions have a sensation as well, but those sensations shift more rapidly, are more fleeting, and are less transient. We can easily recognise when we are angry, but it is also extremely difficult (perhaps impossible) to imagine emotions in the way that we can imagine and recall images and sounds in our “mind’s eye”. Emotions work behind the scenes, as I will discuss below – if sensory “qualia” are the actors of memory and imagination, emotions and their accompanying motivations are the directors, the producers, and the distributors. I do not trust that the relative prominence of light and sound makes them any more mystical than emotions. As usual, evolution explains this prominence: emotions are basic, and rapidly shortcut whole sets of behaviours appropriate to the situations that tend to elicit the emotions. There is no need for their “qualic” sensations to be as strong as that of sensory input. Fascinating conditions such as cortical visual impairment add more support to qualia being an illusion. Cortical visual impairment is caused by dysfunction in the brain’s visual cortex, rather than the eye itself, and it has led to some wild case studies with patients who cannot be convinced that they are visually impaired. It is literally impossible to imagine the experience of having your brain try to fill in the damaged components of vision.

In short, dualism and materialism can be thought of as representing two resolutions of the same problem: an introspective experience that cannot be explained by physical means. A dualist is someone who has therefore concluded that there must be something more than physical existence. A materialist is someone who has therefore concluded that the experience is an illusion. I am firmly in the latter camp. Once you dispel (or rather, accept) the emergent illusion of consciousness, the illusion that we – I – it is unified quickly crumbles as well, and this is where the meat of my discussion lies.

This time, I will summarise at the get-go: it makes more sense to think of consciousness as the (strictly retrospective) sum of different motivational states that share the same neural hardware. These states are not necessarily discrete – that is, it is not necessarily possible to list them, nor must we change from one to the other with a snap of the fingers. Nor need they be one-dimensional – that is, we’re not moving along a line of grey shades between two extremes of white and black. I believe, however, that often they will be strongly correlated with some of the emotions you will be familiar with – and maybe some that no one is familiar with.

When I say they share the same neural hardware, I mean hardware that is strictly far below awareness. This certainly does not include memory, which is not a complete, communal phenomenon: emotions at the time of memory-encoding and memory-retrieval influence the memories you can more easily recall. But then again, memory is already strange. Think about who you are right now. Are you the same person who went to preschool? If so, do you conclude that based on a sparse selection of fragmented, corrupted memories? (Yes, it is highly likely that most of them have “gone rotten” and are now mostly wrong.) You can probably recall your dream from last night more comprehensively and accurately than what you were doing at this time yesterday. In a week, you’ll remember the essential meaning you took away from this post, but you won’t be able to string a dozen words of it together unless the meaning had to do with the specific structure of those words.

That’s more than Leonard Shelby could do. (Readers unfamiliar with Leonard Shelby are required to watch Memento three times before continuing.) Leonard showed us what someone might do if they knew (perhaps paradoxically) that they had anterograde amnesia, and why. He took my concept of self-preparation to new, necessary heights. His motivational states fluctuated normally, but were completely shielded from each other by his additional memory handicap. Every tattoo on his body, every scribbled note and Polaroid, was a message received by each short-lived “Leonard” from a previous one. He had no concept of time beyond buffers of a few minutes, but he held it together because he had dogmatic faith in the validity of the messages he was sending to himself. The thought that he might mislead himself is alien, because whenever he contemplates it, he’s not in the same motivational state that would actually do it. A very similar conundrum meets Aaron and Abe in Primer – when they discover time travel, and are confronted with the possibility that “they” are already manipulating things from the future, they have to ask themselves with complete sincerity, “Would I do that?“. They try to think of events that could motivate them to do such a thing – another extreme example of embracing self-preparation.

But where Aaron and Abe end up existing across time, Leonard exists outside of it. The “scenes” of his memory intervals are played to us backwards. It’s disorienting at first, but it’s still a finely ordered structure. To Leonard, his memory intervals have no order whatsoever, except that they occur some time after his accident. He might guess how long it has been based on his progress and his appearance, but he cannot place them in any sort of sequence because he is never aware of anything that happened to him before his short-term memory buffer. He talks about conditioning, a type of automatic learning that is essentially distinct from memory, and how he now relies upon self-conditioning. But beyond automatic learning, his actions from moment to moment presumably depend entirely upon his current motivational state, because his reservoir of conscious experiences never changes – it’s limited to experiences between his birth, and his accident.

In the second part (which may not come immediately), I will talk more about why Leonard Shelby would be the perfect case study for my anti-unity of mind position if he was real. Then I will look at some real case studies, specifically Patient HM and Clive Wearing, before getting into practical applications of this approach. Sadly, I can’t promise that post won’t be just as long as this one.

Implicit Dualism

Dualism — the notion that there exist things beyond physical matter, such as the soul — is not a particularly difficult belief system to refute. I have done as much on a few occasions right here on this blog. It’s easy for materialists such as myself to sit back and say “There is no soul” and “Consciousness is an operationalisation of the brain’s physical substrates”. Fully comprehending this, on the other hand, is considerably harder.

If you’ve ever found yourself musing over thoughts like “I’m lucky to have been born in this country”, or “What if I’d been a different person?”, or even “What if I’d been born as an ant?” … these are based on an intuitive dualistic belief that is almost impossible to shake off.

Let’s actually think about that first statement. What does it mean to be lucky to be born somewhere, or in a certain time period, or in a particular fashion? For luck to be involved, we need a random process, and indeed people say this as though there was a random allocation of souls to bodies going on. The implication is that you had an equal chance of being born anytime, anywhere, and your actual birth was the result of the trillion-sided die roll. Who rolls that die? Nature? A god? A collapsing quantum probability wave?

The answer, of course, is none of the above. There was no die roll, and in no way were you randomly allocated to your body, or your body randomly allocated to you, or either of them randomly allocated to your mother’s womb. And no, this doesn’t mean that you were purposefully allocated to your body. There was no allocation involved, because there was nothing to be allocated. You don’t “have” a brain that was granted to you at birth. You are that brain. You are the small shifting mass of molecules that were assembled from the planet’s stockpile according to a set of genetic instructions. Yes, there was chance involved in how your parents’ two sets of genes were mashed into one. Yes, there was chance involved in precisely which individual molecules were used to build you. Yes, there was chance involved in the sequence of events that shaped you into a person who thinks to consider the fortunate circumstances of their birth. It’s all the same, boring, meaningless type of chance that appears in the anthropic principle: chances that can’t be comprehended if they don’t occur.

A rich CEO can think to himself, “It was lucky I got to work at this company.” To think the same thing about your mind/soul/spirit/consciousness as “hired” at your brain/body is the implicit dualism I am talking about. The CEO of You, Inc. was put together from spare parts lying around the place — and it wasn’t functional until a couple of years after your company was born. Boring chance determined the layout of the manufactory behind the scenes, and eventually enough stuff fell off the end of the assembly line to recognise itself.

But it’s not all bad. If you believe the universe is infinite, then somewhere, somewhen out there is an Earth-clone with a genetic copy of you that thinks it was lucky to be born in 3rd-century Rome instead of 2nd-century Egypt.

No, there was no chance involved in which Earth-clone “you” were born on.

Implications and Reality

In my recent post “Extraordinary Claims”, I touched upon the nature of evidence-collecting. In particular, I discussed how the persuasiveness of the evidence must increase in proportion to the tenacity of the claim. In this follow-up, I will go into more detail on precisely how we (should) use evidence to update beliefs. We’ll need some more basic logic and probability theory in order to do so.

In mathematical logic, statements frequently take the form “If A then B”, or equivalently “A implies B” (written A => B). There are a couple of other ways to say this: we could say A is sufficient for B to be true, or B is necessary for A to be true. An example statement is “If x is an even number, then x is a whole number”. This is obvious, as all even numbers are whole numbers, but it is not true that all whole numbers are even numbers.

Rarely in reality can we make such “true or false” claims. It’s easy to state them using definitions (e.g. “If Jamie has two legs, then Jamie is an animal”), but elsewhere we abandon binary logic and turn to probability by giving implications strengths. The stronger the implication, the more likely it is true. By gaining more information, we improve our knowledge of these strengths. (In mathematical logic, strengths are always 100% or 0%.)

Consider a variation of the famous cancer test problem I posed in “Extraordinary Claims”. If the base rate of some type of cancer is one in a thousand, and you get a positive result on a test for that cancer that is correct 95% of the time, what is the probability that you have cancer?

If we denote the statement “You have cancer” with A, and the statement “You get a positive result on the test” with B, then what we are trying to find out is the probability of A given B, written p(A|B). This is equivalent to the strength of the implication from B to A. The only information we have is the base probability of you having cancer, p(A), and the accuracy of the test.

So why do people wrongly answer 95%, or something close to it? The answer lies in confusing “B => A” with “A => B“. The strength of A => B is indeed 95% – if you have cancer (A), then the probability that you will get a positive result on the test (B) is 95%. However, it is a universal fact that the strength of A => B alone tells you NOTHING about the strength of B => A. This is true in all forms of logic, everywhere, including the true/false logic of mathematics. Yet this is the error almost everyone makes (note that this question was originally posed to real doctors, who performed embarrassingly badly).

In getting from the strength of A => B to knowing the strength of B => A, we need to also consider the strengths of negative cases, i.e. what is the strength of “not A => not B“? If you don’t have cancer, what is the probability of getting a negative result on the test? Again, it’s 95% – the test’s accuracy rating. Also, if you don’t have cancer (not A), the probability of getting a positive result (B) is 5%.

As it turns out, two more pieces of information are vital in getting from A => B to B => A. They are p(A) (the original probability of A) and the strength of not A => B. The latter is needed because we need to know how contingent B is on A. Sure, A may lead to B 95% of the time, but what if B occurred a lot without A as well? The more often B occurs without A also occuring, the smaller the chance that B implies A.

In this problem, we know B occurs without A 5% of the time. That’s a lot less than than the 95% chance that B occurs with A, I hear you saying. It seems B is pretty contingent on A. So why is the final answer still so small?

This is where p(A) comes in. 5% is a smaller number than 95% – but these probabilies assume that, respectively, A has not or has occurred. We have to go back and look at our starting probability that A even occurs at all. In this case, p(A) is 0.1%, while p(not A) is 99.9%. Now it becomes a bit clearer: 95% of that 0.1% of people that have cancer will get a positive result, and 5% of that 99.9% of people that don’t have cancer will also get a positive result. Multiplying appropriately, we find that the probability of a person having cancer AND getting a positive result, i.e. p(A and B), is 0.095%, while the probability of a person NOT having cancer AND getting a positive result, i.e. p(not A and B), is 4.995%.

The proportion of p(A and B) out of the total p(A and B) + p(not A and B) (i.e. everyone who gets a positive result) is 1.87%, and this is our final answer. B implies A 1.87% of the time, i.e. the strength of B => A is 1.87%, i.e. 1.87% of people who get a positive test result will actually have cancer.

What we have just used is called Bayes’ Theorem. It is a relatively simple formula that helps you get from the strength of A => B to the strength of B => A by also considering p(A) (how extraordinary the claim A is) and the strength of not A => B (how contingent B is on A). You can look it up if you want to see it written out, but for now, take away its intuitive meaning: we can completely quantify scientific evidence (B), and use it to update our beliefs (A).