Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones...

Where do you get your ideas?

I have this motto: “All science fiction writers are weirdos.” It’s kind of a humblebrag, really — assuming that we should feel a little secret pride in being allowed to let our imagination run riot in stories and novels.

That being said… those weirdos may not be so unique after all. Entire cultures and civilizations have had ideas — even “big” ideas for their time — that in retrospect seem eccentric or seriously removed from reality.

Such as this one, which still hangs around in superhero comics and movies: Beams shooting out of the eyes. It’s one of those ancient eccentric concepts that people throw around without thinking, but can’t stand five seconds of scrutiny.

Superman (© DC Comics, until he goes Public Domain) - where do those rays come from? His brain? Tiny radioactive particles? Or from a pre-scientific notion about the soul reaching out through the eyes into the world?

(If you want to get seriously nerdy, see this Quora thread about how much heat and radiation a human eye can tolerate.)

For a very, very long time, the learned opinion of human sight was that a mysterious “force” or “beam” comes out of the head through the eyes and that’s how we can see things. It’s called the Emission Theory or Extramission Theory. It’s been around for thousands of years. There is research that indicates many people still believe this is true (sic!).

What bugs me is precisely how people — even the serious thinkers of their age — arrived at such a complete misunderstanding of the world. And why does the idea persist? Maybe this sort of thinking is timeless, like the persistent belief in astrology?

What, precisely, is it about the human mind that makes a wrongheaded idea nigh-impossible to slay?

The physicians living 2,000 years ago could not understand the human eye because they did not know what lightwaves were, or how the receptor cells in the eyes worked, or how information traveled along the optic nerve, or how the brain processed information…

… but beyond that, their concept of reality itself was not the same as ours. Their world was a mystical place of gods, souls, spirits and “the four elements.” Ultimately, their world was running on divine intervention: God (or several gods) moved events behind everything, like an invisible cosmic engineer — or like a supreme magician whose words and thoughts could create things.

We can still find traces of this worldview in the language we use to describe the cosmos. Why do we still say “the laws of nature” as if there was some kind of Cosmic Lawbook, presumably written by a god, describing what is and isn’t allowed? Some things are certainly impossible, but it’s telling how we think of “laws” with all the implied meanings of that word.

I think that the irrational parts of the collective human imagination can be suppressed or partly educated, but can never entirely go away. No matter how hard our schools try to teach students that light flows into the eye, some students will still insist that sight goes out of the eye.

Irrational ideas are the strongest when we take them for granted. Questioning them makes their hold on our beliefs weaker. Here is a very strong irrational idea, thousands of years old, still going strong: Platonism. (Disclaimer: I’m not saying Platonism is “wrong,” only that it is irrational. It cannot be proved scientifically.)

In his “Allegory of the Cave,” the Greek philosopher Plato laid out his theory that abstractions are more real than reality — that “the real world” is the mere shadow of a higher reality. A modern variant of this notion is Mathematical Platonism, which claims that numbers are real.

Whether or not this is true — again, how do you prove it? — I personally find the idea deeply disturbing. It’s as if I would find myself in the movie In The Mouth of Madness, realizing that I’m a figment of someone’s imagination.

In The Mouth of Madness (1994), directed by John Carpenter, starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen and Jurgen Prochnow.

Something about Platonism has mystified me for a long time: It’s presented to students and grownups as a “thing,” but rarely is the obvious question put: Where did Plato get such a weird idea? Where did it originate? (Yeah, I know, it just came to him from the “higher reality” of pure abstraction — ha ha. Funny.)

Of course we can’t ask Plato now, but given his historical context and what else we know about the state of thinking over 2,000 years ago (especially that he probably was influenced by the Pythagoreans) one can make educated guesses.

Here’s my educated guess — and of course I may be mistaken: Plato came up with the idea that abstractions/ideas had to “exist somewhere,” because at that time, people still struggled with magical thinking and culture was still mainly pre-literate.

”Magical thinking” is, simply put, the inability to separate abstraction (such as thought, speech, writing, art, mathematics) from reality (observable physical phenomena)… and also the inability to accept that you can think or reason about things which do not have a physical existence.

Whenever Harry Potter utters a formula that somehow — how? — changes his physical world without direct physical interaction, that’s magical thinking in practice.

Whenever you say “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” you are fighting back against creeping magical thinking.

My guess is that Plato tried to figure out a way to reason about abstraction and thought, but he couldn’t quite stomach the insight that ideas and thoughts are unreal — they “had to” exist somehow. So he imagined a “place” for ideas… and being a philosopher, it was an irresistible temptation to ascribe a special, higher value to the imaginary “world of pure ideas.”

Any one of us can fall in love with our own thoughts. (I stand accused.) It’s a natural consequence of having a large brain and the capacity for abstraction. The difference is that now we at least have some scientific understanding of the brain. It’s no longer a mystical “seat of the spirit” where unseen gods pour ideas into the minds of Achilles and Ulysses, and the “spirit” reaches out into the world through the eye sockets.

Sticks and stones may break my bones…