Tales From the Third Lobe - Fact Versus Fiction and the Chimera of Sentience

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

If I am a journalist, then I am the worst kind of journalist. I read all kinds of crap with complete disregard to origin and validity, and I report my opinion, not the news. I make some effort to tell you where I got the data from which I formed my opinion, but I haven't been religious about it. I've done just enough to keep from embarrassing myself completely, so at least I care a little bit.

Arguments could be made that sporadically making the effort can lead my readers to mistakenly believe that I check my facts all the time. If I've mislead you like that, I'm sorry. But the argument could be made that by letting you know that my reporting isn't iron-clad, my readers are thereby encouraged to check my facts and educate themselves in the process, and that the ensuing debates have encouraged even more learning opportunities....

Maybe. I won't say I'm not above putting in a deliberate error to see if people are paying attention. Or at least that's what I usually claim later when I get nailed on it.

But all of this is beside the point. Because the chiefest task of any journalist of any quality is telling fact from fiction.

Dan Rather recently got nailed for using forged evidence to stand in the place of evidence that probably did exist somewhere, but, for various reasons, he was unable or unwilling to put his hands on it. I don't think he would have even been tempted to cheat a tad unless he was convinced already by something he couldn't show us, but—that's just my opinion.

ABC affiliates, however, reported as news some crap about a Kenny Rogers book-signing free-for-all scavenged off a website that included the text, "Oh yeah, this site is fake. No news on this site is true" on it's "about us" page.

ABC blushes and life goes on. Dan Rather resigns in (semi-)disgrace, because his judgment lapse concerned President Bush's wild years as a pampered layabout alcoholic rich kid and his preferential treatment by the politico-military machine.

And my disgrace?

Screw problems with sources and validation and evidence. I'm simply having trouble telling fact from fiction.

See, in addition to having a political bug up my ass—and I put it that way because I fucking well hate politics, but the way governments muck about with human rights and civil rights our tax dollars and human lives makes me write about politics—I follow the progress of the sciences and technology and medicine to try to predict the emerging trends so I can see if it will be worth it to try to stay alive next decade.

And I'm simply having trouble believing some of the stuff I'm reading.

Read this, for instance. I'll wait right here until you come back.

One of my many, many superpowers is my memory. It's not rain-man perfect, but it is very strong and very broad and goes back a long, long way. I have no problem at all remembering who I was twenty years ago and imagining what my reaction would have been to reading the article at the other end of the link I provided above.

One of the reasons I picked the span of twenty years is that I know I read The Island of Doctor Moreau in high school, just about twenty years ago. Basic biology instruction was also fresh in my head, where I learned about the first recorded blood transfusion involving a sheep's blood being put into a man. And that the man didn't live for very long afterwards. And then we learned about why, and blood types, and immunoresponse and tissue rejection.

If I skip those twenty years in my head and read that article while pretending to be sixteen, it sets off every alarm on my bullshitometer.

It's right up there with the other things I thought might be true and then I was told were false that I later learned were actually true. Like heavier things do fall faster than lighter things (or, rather, more massive things accelerate towards each other faster, at any rate--it's just not very detectable unless the masses involved are very large). Like aether actually exists (space is a granular medium all right, polarizable and permeable, just not one made out of matter as we ordinarily experience it). Like a kilo of lead does weighs more than a kilo of feathers (unless you weigh them in vacuum—because feathers are typically more buoyant than a lead ingot in air).

Just don't ask me why all the dinosaurs are dead. Or whether changing your mind about which door to pick will make you more or less likely to win the goat instead of the car.

So you can actually put the brain of a human into a rat. You just have to inject a few neural stem cells into a rat fetus's cranium and let it grow there.

Yaay. I guess.

All of those Frankensteinian ethical problems we've been ducking since the days of Luigi Galvani and Mesmer and, well, Frankenstein are sitting in our inbox now. Waiting.

I have to apologize now for making it seem like some kind of conundrum or something to me. I've already formed my own well-informed opinion.

It's my preference to think of humans and human intelligence and our use of scientific process as part of Nature. Therefore I have trouble with the concept that humans are capable of doing anything "against Nature". That pretty much short-circuits most of the ethical arguments in my case.

I understand that things might not be so clear-cut to everyone else, however.

I do believe that it is unethical to withhold rights and benefits of sentience to anything anyone who can benefit from those rights. This, in the United States, at least, includes access to public education and suffrage and the opportunity to own property and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights and not having any property or rights or freedoms withheld without due process of law—which is something we obviously have trouble with even when we're sure we're dealing with our own goddamn non-hybridized species. And it's for damn sure going to be a problem when we create new strains of sentient life that the populace at large will either treat as beneath them or feel inferior to.

Or when finally figure out how to translate dolphin.

So do we hold off on creating new forms of sentient life just because we know we have a shitty record for how we treat people who we perceive to be very different from ourselves?

I wish the discussion could get even that far.

Unfortunately, I'm sure we'll all get tied up for decades on whether Humankind has God's Blessing to screw with the technology—until we notice that some isolated madman on a private island out there somewhere has been doing it for the past twenty years and has a neglected circus of bio/nanomechanical sentient hybrid chimeras in desperate need of Red Cross/Red Crescent intervention.

And then we can think about settling the issues of Sentient Rights and whether or not hybrids/chimeras can marry each other or us or electrified lamp posts or whatever couldn't possibly make sense to us in the context of what makes sense to us today—

If it ever comes to pass. Because all of this is fiction, right?

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Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy .