Exactly once in my life so far, I have met someone who seemed to be certifiably bonkers, and talked to him about his beliefs, and then actually witnessed him changing his mind.
(The fellow in question thought, among other things, that Chinese tanks were massing on the Mexican border, a charmingly antiquated piece of nuttery which really doesn't hold up well at all these days. When he thought about it a bit, apparently for the first time in his life, he agreed that this really couldn't be right. And the conversation actually got better from there!)
I had nothing better to do while we were waiting for the bus that day, but I still wish I hadn't bothered to talk to that man. Because that tiny success ignited within me a spark of hope that other people who seem on the surface to be completely batty can, in fact, be talked to in a rational way, and perhaps thereby pulled a little closer to consensus reality, nearness to which is strongly correlated with life-enhancing experiences like not waking up naked in an alley, or not shooting John Lennon.
In every single subsequent conversation with those of a psychoceramic persuasion I have, however, been utterly unsuccessful in changing anybody's mind about anything at all. Yet on I strive, driven by my one, increasingly distant, success, to the great frustration of both myself and my mentally unusual correspondents.
But at least now I can get a blog post out of it.
It's been a while since I heard from the good folk at Life Technology; the last time was almost a year ago, here. I must insist that any of you who haven't checked out the Life Technology site go and do so right now, because the assortment of products available there really is very hard to match anywhere (though they have, regrettably, retired the Flash banner thing that made a trippy New Age gong sound whenever you loaded a page. I miss that).
Life Technology is like Brooklyn Superhero Supply, except Life Technology aren't just trying to encourage imagination.
Mr, or possibly Ms, AURUM SOLIS™ (I think the capitals and trademark symbol are important) decided to favour me with another communiqué on the first of April. Were the message from anybody else, that'd mean it'd be a joke. But not so with AURUM™, who continued our correspondence over the next few days.
The correspondence follows. I bet it'll attract some really spiffy Google ads.
DANIEL THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WHITE POWDER GOLD THERE IS AN ORCHESTRATED CAMPAIGN BY THE POWERS THAT BE TO FRIGHTEN PEOPLE AWAY FROM THIS PRODUCT SCARE STORIES INVOLVE REPTILIAN ALIENS AND ARE OBVIOUSLY FALSE SO DONT LET SUCH NONSENSE PUT YOU OFF FROM FINDING OUT THE PLAIN TRUTH ABOUT THIS VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT REMEMBER BRISTOL MYERS SQUIBB RESEARCH PROVED THAT WHITE POWDER GOLD DOES EVERYTHING THAT THE PHILOSOPHERS STONE IS ALLEGED TO HAVE DONE IE REPAIR DNA AND INCREASE LONGEVITY WE WOULD BE HAPPY TO SEND YOU A 1GRAM SAMPLE FREE OF CHARGE IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN TRYING THIS THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION DANIEL
AURUM SOLIS™
[And then AURUM™ quoted the content of this blog post. Do feel free to read as much of it as you can handle.]
I remind you that the thing the Philosopher's Stone was most often alleged to do was transmute base metals into gold.
Does white powder gold do that?
The Philosopher's Stone was also, by pseudo-logical extension, commonly alleged to be able to make you immortal. You would not age, and would not sicken for any reason, which implied that you would also be immune not only to ordinary physical diseases, but also to poison and physical attack.
Does white powder gold do that?
Your idea about the magic substance "correcting" anything in one's body that is "incorrect" is entirely in line with what the old-time alchemists said about the Philosopher's Stone. It was their belief that gold was the most perfect of metals (I imagine because they didn't know about the platinum group; platinum was at the time regarded as an unwanted, unmeltable contaminant sometimes found in silver). If they'd known about DNA they'd no doubt say that the mystic Stone would "perfect" that as well.
The tricky bit is defining what "perfect" means. Many diseases, like for instance autoimmune disorders, are the result of normal bodily processes working too well. Every second alternative medicine is supposed to "boost" the immune system; if they actually do that, they should all come with warnings about how they may cause rheumatoid arthritis as a side-effect.
What, in fact, does white powder gold do? Where's this Bristol-Myers Squibb research you allude to - or, indeed, any research that doesn't just ramble on, as you always do, about mystic vibrations and extradimensional harmonic ascension?
If white powder gold has no effects that people who don't believe in it can detect, then it is no more interesting than any of the hundreds of similar potions and religions.
I do enjoy these occasional e-mails from you, though.
DEAR DANIEL DONT BE TAKEN IN BY THE SCEPTICS WE KNOW YOU ARE A GOOD MAN BUT SOMETIMES THE DARK SIDE HAS MISLED YOU ABOUT CERTAIN THINGS YOU ARE A SPIRITUAL BEING LOVED UNCONDITIONALLY BY THE CREATOR AND SINCE BIRTH MATTER IS ALL YOU HAVE KNOWN BUT THERE IS MORE THAN MERELY MATTER LAST NIGHT AFTER I CONSUMED THE WHITE STONE I COMMUNICATED WITH INTELLIGENT BEINGS FROM SHAMBALLA AND I WAS EDUCATED BY THEM IN THE SUBJECT OF THE KUNDALINI ENERGY AND BECOMING AN ASCENDED MASTER. PLEASE SEND YOUR ADDRESS FOR A COMPLIMENTARY FREE SAMPLE.
But how do you know I'm "a good man"? How, if what most humans call external reality is as ephemeral as a ghost, ready to blow away so that you can perceive greater realities when you take your magic potion, do you know that I'm even here at all?
Perhaps I'm a manifestation of the universe, here to enlighten you to yet another layer of reality. Perhaps this whole exchange is purely a figment of your imagination. Once you say that words like "is" and "exists" and "meaning" can have different... meanings... you lose all ability to say, or think, anything about anything.
You said that your product does what the Philosopher's Stone is said to have done. That, first and foremost, means it must turn base metals - classically lead - into gold. Now you say that instead it sends you on some sort of psychedelic spiritual journey. Well, OK, great, but nobody in antiquity said anything about the Philosopher's Stone doing that. It was meant to turn lead into gold, and it was meant to make people immortal. Those are the two big things that the Philosopher's Stone was meant to do.
You said, in as many words, that white powder gold does what the old alchemists said the Philosopher's Stone did. Now you say that it actually doesn't.
If I can expect consumption of this substance to make me as confused as you, I will stay very far away from it, thank you very much.
If your product instead reveals the truth of the universe or some such, then it is a different thing from the Philosopher's Stone. It is also indistinguishable from numerous psychedelic, hallucinogenic and dissociative drugs, none of which show any signs of actually giving their users superhuman powers, or allowing them to figure out things about the mundane world everybody else inhabits that they could not have figured out otherwise. On the contrary, habitual use of powerful consciousness-altering drugs tends to make people much less able to operate in the mundane world.
I do not, of course, actually believe that whatever experiences you have are actually happening to you because of the white powder gold concoction. I think it's likely to have no effect at all, and your own mental peculiarities are what're allowing you to talk to the extradimensional space gods or whatever.
Does everybody who takes white powder gold have the powerful experiences you mention? Or do you have to be a believer already? If you slip some into someone's drink without them knowing, will anything happen to them? Have you tried such a basic test to see whether you're making this all up (on purpose or otherwise)?
http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html
LINK WHICH PROVES DAVID HUDSON IS TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT WHITE POWDER GOLD
This lengthy ramble is, when it tries to say definite things about chemistry and physics, nonsense. Apart from the frequent use of words which do not exist - many of which I suppose could be the fault of the transcriber - it alleges, if I'm reading it right, that gold likes to hang around in two-atom molecules, like hydrogen, and that the element drastically changes in state if you manage to separate those atoms, becoming your magic potion.
Gold does not in fact form diatomic molecules. At all. The only "metal" that does is hydrogen, which is only metallic in very extreme circumstances. All other metals form metallic bonds between atoms, which can involve any number of molecules; it is also quite easy to separate individual atoms from those bonds, by for instance dissolving a metallic salt in water (giving a solution of ions), or by "sputtering" a piece of the solid metal (giving honest-to-goodness separate atoms flying around separately).
Gold sputtering is used routinely in, for instance, the preparation of samples for viewing under an electron microscope. Individual gold atoms are knocked off a piece of gold, and condense in a super-thin layer on the subject, where they return to their normal polyatomic metallic bonding.
I don't expect you to pay any attention whatsoever to this, because I know that when you talk about "atoms" and "molecules" and just about every other noun used at http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html, you do not mean the same thing that everybody else means. But I wonder why it is that you think that anybody else would find this "evidence" convincing, since you and your friends do not use the same dictionary as the rest of us.
Does http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html also comprise your "Bristol-Myers Squibb evidence"? The only mention of the company there is that "over the last four or five years, there is tremendous research going on with precious elements and cancer treatment. The precious elements have been found to inter-react with the cell by a vibrational frequency or by a light transfer to correct the DNA. Any incorrect part of the DNA is corrected by the precious element."
This looks to me, not to put too fine a point on it, like pure fiction. I challenge you to present this "standard literature" talking about "correcting DNA" by "vibrational frequencies".
DEAR DANIEL YES YOU ARE CORRECT IN STATING THAT REALITY IS RELATIVE TO PERCEPTION THAT IS THE KEY ALSO YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT WHEN YOU PRAY YOU SHOULD PRAY WITH SINCERITY AND FAITH NOT MERELY HOPE HOPING DENIES THAT YOU ARE GOD AND IN CONTROL OF YOUR CREATION THE STONE DOES NOT INDUCE A PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE IT BREAKS THE BOND OF DUALITY IE THE ILLUSORY PERCEPTION OF SELF AND OTHER GOD IS IN A STATE OF ONENESS PS THERE IS NO ACTUAL PROOF FOR ANY FACTS EVEN THE BEST EVIDENCE IS RELATIVE TO THE INDIVIDUAL (FLAWED) MIND OF THE OBSERVER THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION DANIEL GOD BLESS YOU
At this point, I gave up on our little chat. I'm sure AURUM™ will have something similarly enlightening to say to me in another year or two, though.
4 April 2008 at 5:03 am
It occurs to me that AURUM SOLIS™ may well have had an experience once, long in the past, where he was able to convince one a single person of his beliefs...
Perhaps, in every single subsequent conversation with those of a scientific persuasion he has, however, been utterly unsuccessful in changing anybody’s mind about anything at all. Yet on he strives, driven by his one, increasingly distant, success, to the great frustration of both himself and his mentally unusual correspondents.
4 April 2008 at 5:37 am
This whole business reminds me of the equally chemically nonsensical ORMEs I read about in Nexus magazine a couple of issues ago. I'd like to point out that when hydrogen is metallic, it's not diatomic - it forms a big metallic network like the other genuine metals. Likewise you can get alkali metal atoms as pairs in the gas phase (they're hydrogenic after all), but they behave more like hydrogen in that instance and not at all like the metallic crystal we're used to.
Like most chemistry and physics woo, there's an air of the desperate, grab-for-a-answer-from-what-you-know undergrad exam answer about it.
4 April 2008 at 6:09 am
IT BREAKS THE BOND OF PUNCTUATION IE THE ILLUSORY PERCEPTION OF ONE SENTENCE AND ANOTHER GOD IS IN A STATE OF ONENESS AS ARE MY PARAGRAPHS
4 April 2008 at 9:03 am
It actually looks a little like A.L.I.C.E. on crack. I could see the whole thing being fully automated to pick out some words from your reply for the response, and then stuffing the RANDOM ADVERTISEMENT in at the bottom.
4 April 2008 at 9:11 am
I thought exactly what Rz_Ten1 did, so I tested it on my tame ALICE bot:
me> This lengthy ramble is, when it tries to say definite things about chemistry and physics, nonsense. Apart from the frequent use of words which do not exist - many of which I suppose could be the fault of the transcriber - it alleges, if I’m reading it right, that gold likes to hang around in two-atom molecules, like hydrogen, and that the element drastically changes in state if you manage to separate those atoms, becoming your magic potion.
bot> What does "this" refer to?Who or what is the frequent use of words which do not exist many of which he or she suppose could be the fault of the transcriber it alleges if he or she m reading it right that gold likes to hang in two atom molecules like hydrogen and that the element drastically changes in state if you manage to separate those atoms becoming your magic potion?
All that's needed is toUpperCase() and punctuation removed. The difference is that my bot can learn:
me> Does white gold powder make you immortal?
bot> I think it does white gold powder make you immortal.
me> Wrong.
bot> What would you have said to "Does white gold powder make you immortal?"?
me> No, that would be stupid.
bot> Do you want me to remember that I should say "No that would be stupid." to "Does white gold powder make you immortal?"?
me> Yes.
bot> Okay, I will remember to answer "No that would be stupid." to "Does white gold powder make you immortal?".
me> Does white gold powder make you immortal?
bot> No that would be stupid.
4 April 2008 at 10:27 am
Stefans:
This suggests an entertaining experiment. Turn such a bot loose in a kook centric forum (blog, etc), and see how long it takes to be detected. Can the bot can gain converts to it's incoherent ramblings ? Building on the work of Sokal and Stribling et. al. automatic Sokalization holds the potential to revolutionize the field.
4 April 2008 at 1:31 pm
I think you should accept his "sample". If its as good as he says it is maybe we could set up a more constant "supply" and go in to business "distributing" it.
I know alot of clubs were we could make a fortune selling this stuff by the gram!!! :D
4 April 2008 at 3:49 pm
I must insist that any of you who haven’t checked out the Life Technology site go and do so right now, because the assortment of products available there really is very hard to match anywhere.
Fascinating....that's the only word I can think of to describe the site. Truly, it's a masterpiece of creative thought, both figuratively and literally. Excessive capitalisation of words seems to impart such....sincerity. Hours could be lost just wandering through the product lines, marvelling at the sheer ingenuity of them.
When I pondered it a moment it occurred to me that the people behind it all are True Believers, supremely unshakeable in their faith....or else laughing all the way to the bank. Either one could be interchangeable with the other.
4 April 2008 at 6:17 pm
My own test for extreme gullibility used to be a wonderfully batty lady called Bertha Veronneau, whose old Angelfire site is partially archived here. Her MOLECULAR STUDY PERTAINING TO NUTRITION pretty much sums her up; her diagnostic techniques and therapeutic suggestions were all completely incomprehensible.
But every now and then she'd turn up on a discussion forum, telling people to look at molecules through optical microscopes and then take "two alfalfa" for what ailed them. When the responses were mostly along the lines of "wow, thanks, what great advice", that told you right there that you were looking at a room full of people who should be kept somewhere very peaceful and given only wooden eating implements.
4 April 2008 at 7:05 pm
Amusing coincidence, PZ Myers also posted on the correlation between ALL CAPS and kook today. So if you didn't get fill of stupid yet, head on over there ;)
BTW, one of the google ads for this entry is promoting "M-State Gold Supplement" from the insidiously named domain "cancerchoices.com"
4 April 2008 at 9:34 pm
I'm pretty sure Dan has mentioned this before... But when I see sites like Life Technology it makes me wonder why I work 40 hours or more each week, when I could more easily fleece the gullible morons out there for much more than my bi-weekly salary.
5 April 2008 at 4:09 am
Well Rich, I suspect, and I may be wrong here, that you have a tiny bit of conscience and some smidgen of a sense of morality. Or maybe you're just lazy. Either way, I for one am glad you have not started fleecing the masses.
Whenever I need my fill of kook, or to test somebody elses kook quotient (Kq) I look here : http://www.timecube.com He's not actively fleecing anyone as far as I can tell but he is completely disconnected from reality.
5 April 2008 at 8:18 am
Thanks Stephans.
Artifical Inteliigence is still to come (along with my flying car) Artifical Stupidity is already here.
Have you thought of hosting a competition to prove this, a la Kasparov v Deep Blue ?
5 April 2008 at 11:56 am
reyalp:
What a disturbing thought. I dread to think what I would end up cleaning out of it's learn file if it worked. Unfortunately, most humans use some sort of punctuation in their sentences, and that's how the responses are mapped. So the following happens:
me>DEAR DANIEL DONT BE TAKEN IN BY THE SCEPTICS WE KNOW YOU ARE A GOOD MAN BUT SOMETIMES THE DARK SIDE HAS MISLED YOU ABOUT CERTAIN THINGS YOU ARE A SPIRITUAL BEING LOVED UNCONDITIONALLY BY THE CREATOR AND SINCE BIRTH MATTER IS ALL YOU HAVE KNOWN BUT THERE IS MORE THAN MERELY MATTER LAST NIGHT AFTER I CONSUMED THE WHITE STONE I COMMUNICATED WITH INTELLIGENT BEINGS FROM SHAMBALLA AND I WAS EDUCATED BY THEM IN THE SUBJECT OF THE KUNDALINI ENERGY AND BECOMING AN ASCENDED MASTER. PLEASE SEND YOUR ADDRESS FOR A COMPLIMENTARY FREE SAMPLE.
bot>I believe in God. Where were you EDUCATED BY THEM IN THE SUBJECT OF THE KUNDALINI ENERGY AND BECOMING AN ASCENDED MASTER?Thanks for asking politely. Try sending mail to Dr. Wallace (drwallace@alicebot.org) [Dr. Wallace is the creator of the AIML files used to create the base of the bot's "intelligence."]
Although looking at that, if it were in upper case and with no punctuation, it would be more comprehensible than what AURUM™ wrote.
Do you think anyone would notice if I turned it loose on a forum, or am I overstimating something?
(The earlier paragraph, "DEAR DANIEL YES YOU ARE CORRECT IN STATING THAT REALITY IS..." is responded to in its entirety by "I believe in God.")
7 April 2008 at 6:18 am
So I'm going to assume that white powder gold is actually gold. Which is probably not a great assumption but I haven't seen anything that says white powder gold is actually anything else. Anyway so someone wants to send Dan (who is asking for donation) a gram of gold. Near as I can figure they are offering Dan about $30 donation (Australian). Go for it.
7 April 2008 at 5:28 pm
Regrettably, there is absolutely no way in which "white powder gold" resembles the kind of gold that's currently worth nine hundred dollars an ounce.
That's on account of how magical it is, see.
It's like transubstantiation.
7 April 2008 at 6:07 pm
Dan, love the site, love the blog post agree with it all apart from one little thing..
" It is also indistinguishable from numerous psychedelic, hallucinogens and dissociative drugs, none of which show any signs of .. allowing [their users] to figure out things about the mundane world everybody else inhabits that they could not have figured out otherwise"
Does that include The Beatles?
7 April 2008 at 7:02 pm
I've figured out an awful lot without the use of any drugs. If I kept the kind of friends who would use the term "enlightened," I would not be surprised to be called such.
Now I sound like an egotistical snob, don't I?
7 April 2008 at 8:11 pm
Kind of because the question was wether or not The Beatles could have worked that out without drugs. Not this "enlightened" group of people you say you belong to..maybe they could do what the Beatles did, I don't know. Good luck with that.
8 April 2008 at 4:21 am
"Writing a kick-ass song" is not the same as "discovering facts about the world". It is also undeniable that you're far more likely to get work done, including the writing and recording of music, if you're no more than minimally stoned. Exceptions to this rule are very rare, and The Beatles are not one.
Pink Floyd may be one of the archetypal stoner bands, for instance, but their only member that regularly worked high was Syd Barrett - and look how that turned out.
And, on the subject of The Beatles, do you want to hear what Lennon and McCartney sounded like when they played while off their faces?
No problem!
8 April 2008 at 9:15 am
I would say that discovering how to write a kick ass song that will make you millions and that multiple generations can enjoy immensely with or with out drugs is definitely figuring something out about the world. And yes I do not deny that being out of it is generally a pre-curser to getting very little work done..
However saying “[Drugs do not allow their users] to figure out things about the mundane world everybody else inhabits that they could not have figured out otherwise” is not saying that. It’s saying that all drugs are bad for all people all the time. You’ve just stereotyped an entire behaviour there. With an unfalsifiable statement no less, disproved by showing even one example, such as the Beatles (and you give another, Pink Floyd but there are many more) it sounds like the kind of sloppy thinking that really irks me. And I hate to see it in you Dan because I generally respect you, your site and your ideas so much
Have a great day otherwise! :)
8 April 2008 at 1:27 pm
A drug that starts people babbling about how eleven-dimensional Machine Elves have revealed the true meaning of electrons to them is not one that is telling you anything useful about the mundane world, unless and until those insights let you design a new kind of transistor, or something.
OK, someone, somewhere may well have some actual useful insight while stoned that they might not otherwise have had that day. I did not allege that this was not the case. What I said is that drugs do not allow you to figure out things which you could not have figured out otherwise.
If you oppose this, then it is not just your position that drugs are not "bad for all people all the time"; your position is actually that taking psychedelics, hallucinogens or dissociatives is necessary in order to figure out some particular facts about the mundane world.
I imagine that's not actually what you meant to say, though.
9 April 2008 at 2:53 am
"drugs do not allow you to figure out things which you could not have figured out otherwise."
Drugs certainly do allow you to figure out what it is like to be stoned - try doing that sober!
On a somewhat related, and less I'm-being-an-ass-for-the-sake-of-being-an-ass note, drawing upon the similarities between experiences induced by psychedelic drugs, and symptoms of certain mental illnesses, it can be possible through taking drugs for the normally "sane" individual to experience something close to "madness." Though it was never widely practiced, some therapists during the early days of LSD use, did take the drug for exactly that purpose. I've got the reference in some stuffy 1960's era book, but it's probably on the web as well if you want to go hunting for it.
I think it is fair to say that taking drugs did help them figure out something about their patients' realities, but I do very much doubt the usefulness of basing an entire religion (or worse yet, "science") on getting really, really high. Unless you want to know what it is like to be the Timecube guy.