Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Gooley Lamb.
Speaker 1: I am Corrosive Joseph McCormick, and we are here with
Speaker 1: our producer death Nicholas Johnson. Yes, and it is that
Speaker 1: time again. Uh it's it's been a year since we
Speaker 1: did Anthology of Horror volume one, and so we're about
Speaker 1: to uh assault you with Anthology of Horror volume two,
Speaker 1: and then guess what the episode after this is going
Speaker 1: to be Anthology of Horror volume three. It's not an
Speaker 1: anthology unless they're at least three volumes exactly. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been looking forward to this all year pretty much, Robert.
Speaker 1: I know the back corners of your brain are just
Speaker 1: full of cobwebs made of old horror anthology TV episodes.
Speaker 1: Every time we get talking about this, you dredge something
Speaker 1: up from the void, something you saw on TV as
Speaker 1: a kid. Am I wrong about this pretty much? Because
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, I watched a lot of
Speaker 1: television and of the various joyfully weird things that were
Speaker 1: on television reruns or syndicated horror anthology shows. Were one
Speaker 1: of the best because you never knew exactly what you
Speaker 1: were going to get each episode. It's an anthology. So
Speaker 1: each episode of something like The Twilight Zone or Night
Speaker 1: Gallery or Outer Limits or Tales from the Crypt, each
Speaker 1: one is its own thing, its own world. It has
Speaker 1: its own cast, its own monster or threat or sci
Speaker 1: fi weirdness, and it's completely encapsulated. I love especially some
Speaker 1: of these are really good. Actually, the Twilight Zone I
Speaker 1: think is even better than a lot of people remember,
Speaker 1: and I think a lot of times it's because The
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone was not an hour long show, or I
Speaker 1: think maybe it was in one of its later seasons
Speaker 1: which turned out to be disastrous. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: this is a type twentysomething minute short story. It's it's
Speaker 1: a good way not to get bogged down and stuff
Speaker 1: that doesn't matter with when you're not going into like
Speaker 1: in depth character storytelling, but you're like exploring high level premises. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's more it's more in line with
Speaker 1: certainly some of the short stories you you know, the
Speaker 1: classic short stories you think of to say, like a
Speaker 1: Philip K. Dick, where it's it's really about rolling out
Speaker 1: a cool idea, maybe a cool twist or a shock,
Speaker 1: but mostly about you know, to make you think about something.
Speaker 1: And uh, yeah, so I I love a really great
Speaker 1: episode of an anthology show. Certainly, like you said, some
Speaker 1: of those Twilight zones hold up amazingly. Well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about one of my favorites of all time today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then also some of the worst examples. I love
Speaker 1: one show, and this is a show I didn't I
Speaker 1: don't think I even watched when it came on, but
Speaker 1: Perversions of Science, it was sci fi sort of spinoff
Speaker 1: of Tales from the Crypt And uh, I haven't watched
Speaker 1: Polly Sleazy, but very like Future Smooth. Yeah yeah, lots
Speaker 1: of cursing, some gratuitous nudity, but like a lot of
Speaker 1: these shows off tremendous talent packed into each episode, like
Speaker 1: some great actors, some great directors. Um So every horror
Speaker 1: anthology show, I feel like the ones that i've I
Speaker 1: look back on finally are the ones I haven't even
Speaker 1: seen yet. Uh, there's so many treasures to uncover. I
Speaker 1: watched so many of these things. It's very specifically on
Speaker 1: Beach Hotel cable. This is what I remember. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was like I watched Mystery Science Theater three thousand that way.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess basically when my family went to
Speaker 1: the beach, everybody else would be out in the sun
Speaker 1: and I'd be watching the Sci Fi Channel. But that's
Speaker 1: how you see reruns of Monsters, which is a show
Speaker 1: that I had completely forgotten about until you, uh, you
Speaker 1: sent me something about it the other day and I
Speaker 1: was looking at the images from the opening credits and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, Yes, that's way back
Speaker 1: in there, somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind.
Speaker 1: This is there. I've seen it before. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: before we get more properly into into Monsters, I just
Speaker 1: wanna tell everybody, like what the basic format here is.
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard one of our anthorogy of horror
Speaker 1: episodes before, or the creepy Pasta episodes that preceded it,
Speaker 1: the idea is, uh, we're gonna grab a few in
Speaker 1: in each episode, We're gonna each grab one episode of
Speaker 1: a horror anthology show. We're gonna tell you what it's about,
Speaker 1: remind you what it's about if you've seen it before,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna break down some of the ideas involved.
Speaker 1: There you know some of the science of the thing,
Speaker 1: whatever it happens to to be, even if we have
Speaker 1: to shoehorn it a little bit. And uh, and that's
Speaker 1: where the fun is exactly. We are nothing if not
Speaker 1: experts at dragging deep thoughts out of strangely shallow places. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: though again we're gonna also go to some I think,
Speaker 1: some rather deep waters in these Twilight zonela. So let's
Speaker 1: begin with Monsters. Okay. This this ran for three seasons
Speaker 1: from through nine, and I think I only caught it
Speaker 1: once at like my aunt's house back in the day,
Speaker 1: and I don't even know if it was in syndication
Speaker 1: or on the Sci Fi channel after it had finished
Speaker 1: its run. But today you can find all of it
Speaker 1: on Amazon Prime. You can find a lot of the episodes,
Speaker 1: maybe all of them just on YouTube. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like a lot of these shows, it's a wealth of
Speaker 1: talent and weirdness. I was wondering how many people were
Speaker 1: hoping that this show would have disappeared into history forever,
Speaker 1: only to have the digital age to revive all of
Speaker 1: these old things that these actors did. Yeah, yeah, possible. Possibly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because there you see some some interesting people show up
Speaker 1: in Monsters for instance. Uh, you know you have you
Speaker 1: have some great authors like Dan Simmons shows up tom
Speaker 1: Noonan shows up writing and directing like a couple of episodes,
Speaker 1: Tony Shalhub shows up, Gina Gershawn, Steve you Simmy in
Speaker 1: an excellent pig monster related episode that I won't spoil
Speaker 1: for anybody. Oh man, we were just talking about pig monsters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is a great pig monster episode. I gotta
Speaker 1: dive in. But yeah, this show is kind of a
Speaker 1: spiritual successor to Tails from the Dark Side, which one
Speaker 1: eighty eight I did see a lot of and was
Speaker 1: traumatized times by as a child. Uh. And the The
Speaker 1: Monsters featured many of the same people and again an
Speaker 1: incredible opening sequence, like a lot of these anthologies shows had,
Speaker 1: in which a humorous family of monsters settled in to
Speaker 1: watch TV together. I believe, right before they start watching
Speaker 1: their show, the mother monster shows up with a dish
Speaker 1: full of something she's been cooking, and the child monster declares,
Speaker 1: candied critters, Yeah, it's it's cheesy, it's great. Uh and
Speaker 1: then it and then you proceed into some new story
Speaker 1: that's going to center around a monster. And usually that's
Speaker 1: like really cool practical effects too. So these episodes it
Speaker 1: can be a little hokey intentionally. So at times the
Speaker 1: music is a little weird, this kind of sense music
Speaker 1: that I even have trouble loving. Uh, at times like
Speaker 1: synthetic saxophone music. You've got a very open heart for.
Speaker 1: Since Yeah, but great cast, cool monster And Uh, the
Speaker 1: episode I'm going to talk about today is one title
Speaker 1: far Below, And the reason I was so excited I
Speaker 1: didn't even know they had covered this. But Far Below
Speaker 1: is one of my favorite short stories by Robert Barbour Johnson,
Speaker 1: who lived nineteen o seven through seven. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: what like a Weird Tales era story that I read
Speaker 1: years and years ago, and I've just I've lived my
Speaker 1: entire life up until like this week, having no idea
Speaker 1: that anybody had ever adapted it. So so I was
Speaker 1: instantly excited and I and I said, all right, I've
Speaker 1: got to cover this. So it takes place in the
Speaker 1: deepest depths of the New York subway system, one of
Speaker 1: my favorite places anyway, And uh, you have a you
Speaker 1: have a special segment of city services that wage an
Speaker 1: endless campaign against the ghouls that burrow up from the depths.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a haunting tale. The positions them as
Speaker 1: workers in a dark, in human place against an inhuman enemy,
Speaker 1: and they all are on the risk of losing their
Speaker 1: own humanity in the process. So this season two adaptation
Speaker 1: of Far Below has a lot going for it. So
Speaker 1: not only do you have Johnson's short story as the
Speaker 1: you know, the the inspiration for it. He was adapted
Speaker 1: for the screen by Michael McDowell, the screenwriter who gave
Speaker 1: his Beetlejuice The Nightmare Before Christmas and, perhaps to a
Speaker 1: lesser extent, Thinner Two out of three ain't bad. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Plus it's directed by the legendary producer Deborah Hill, whoa
Speaker 1: Deborah Hill of like John Carpenter movie fame, Yeah Yeah.
Speaker 1: Longtime collaborator and producer of John Carpenter's films such as Halloween,
Speaker 1: Halloween to the Fog, Halloween three, Season of The Witch, Yes,
Speaker 1: Escape from New York, Escape from l A. She also
Speaker 1: produced Clue, The Dead Zone, The Fisher King, and Big
Speaker 1: Top Peeweek. So, but this was one of the only
Speaker 1: two things she ever directed, So I was instantly you know, intrigued.
Speaker 1: And then the cast is small but pretty fun in
Speaker 1: that veteran actor Barry Nelson places his character Dr Vernon
Speaker 1: Rathmore Barry Nelson, was he in Planet of the Vampires? Oh,
Speaker 1: he might have been. Maybe you can do a quick
Speaker 1: look upon that. Well, I cover some of other things
Speaker 1: he was in. Uh, you know, he's one of these
Speaker 1: character actors that was in everything. A lot of TV
Speaker 1: work back in the day, a few classic horror anthology
Speaker 1: shows as well, like Twilight Zone Suspense and The Alfred
Speaker 1: Hitchcock Hour. But I think most people will probably remember
Speaker 1: him from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in which he played
Speaker 1: Ullman opposite Jack Nicholson in the job interview scene. That's
Speaker 1: correct that I was also mistaken Planet of the Vampire,
Speaker 1: says Barry Sullivan. Okay, different bar There were lots like
Speaker 1: there are a lot of Berriers back in the day.
Speaker 1: Um So the adaptation itself is pretty fun. It introduces
Speaker 1: a new twist, and they opted to present the Ghoules
Speaker 1: which are not really referred to as such if I
Speaker 1: remember correctly. Uh, they present them much more like the
Speaker 1: more Locks from the nineteen sixty adaptation of HD Wells
Speaker 1: The Time Machine, which I think is a fine choice.
Speaker 1: You know, you need some sort of subterranean humanoid but
Speaker 1: in human creature. If you're not gonna go for like
Speaker 1: what I imagine is the straight up Google, or perhaps
Speaker 1: sort of the dog like uh, Crafty and Google, then
Speaker 1: I think a morelock is a solid choice. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to know more about the the ghouls in the
Speaker 1: story in the in the segment, are I mean, are
Speaker 1: they sort of the grave flesh eating scavengers we we
Speaker 1: know of as schools? Um, not so much. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's clearly an inspiration from um Pigman's model the Lovecraft story,
Speaker 1: in which ghouls are bubbling out from the like the underworld,
Speaker 1: um and uh and potentially corrupting mortal minds. Like, clearly
Speaker 1: that was part of the inspiration. That's part of the
Speaker 1: world from which the story emerges. But in in the
Speaker 1: story itself and in the adaptation, it's more like these
Speaker 1: are creatures that are wandering up from the depths like
Speaker 1: we've It's kind of a tolken Esque idea of if
Speaker 1: we've dug too far into the earth and now these
Speaker 1: things are coming up and we have to stop them
Speaker 1: because they're going to continue to pick off subway workers
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, vagrants and then eventually other people,
Speaker 1: and if we don't keep them in check, they will
Speaker 1: just overwhelm us. This is funny. I was just reading
Speaker 1: The Two Towers in the chapter where Gandalf explains what
Speaker 1: happens after, you know, after he plunged down after the
Speaker 1: bal Raggie says, they went into the depths of the earth,
Speaker 1: far below where any you know, the thing that lives
Speaker 1: above it is the abode of slimy things and things
Speaker 1: that cannot be named. Yes, and and indeed these are
Speaker 1: these are some of those nameless things. So on the
Speaker 1: subject of ghouls, we of course have an entire episode
Speaker 1: in the Vault about the idea of ghoules. We've talked
Speaker 1: at length as well about life underground and the effects
Speaker 1: of human life underground, and so I don't want to
Speaker 1: retread on much of that content. It's it's definitely there,
Speaker 1: and we love it. And if you want more subterranean
Speaker 1: humans and googles, go check those episodes out. But I
Speaker 1: did find a line of inquiry on this that I
Speaker 1: think is pretty solid. So we have an underground war
Speaker 1: in a great modern metropolis against inhuman enemy that rises
Speaker 1: from the depths, and yet these more lockesque creatures are
Speaker 1: drawn up to feed on humans, the humans that have
Speaker 1: overpopulated this region. They seem to feed stone, vagrant and
Speaker 1: subway workers, and would feast on far more of the
Speaker 1: populace if not for the efforts of Dr Rathmore and
Speaker 1: his you know, basically, the premises auditors have come to
Speaker 1: check him out because his department is seems to be
Speaker 1: way overfunded, way over armed, and the outsiders asking why
Speaker 1: do you need all these weapons, why do you need
Speaker 1: all this funding? And and then the story is about
Speaker 1: presenting exactly why this funding is needed. But basically, in
Speaker 1: this fight, uh, the fictional characters are far below have
Speaker 1: much in common with those who battle various organisms that
Speaker 1: we label pests in the real world. And the most
Speaker 1: obvious parallel is the rat, the true citizen of the
Speaker 1: subway tunnels exactly. I mean, when you go down there
Speaker 1: to take a train, they're not in your way or
Speaker 1: you know, getting into your stuff. You're in their world.
Speaker 1: You're just a guest. Yeah. Now, to be sure, a
Speaker 1: single rat can be a problem even in a you know,
Speaker 1: a sort of a prehistoric, precity sense of human existence.
Speaker 1: And the same can be said of say, mosquitoes, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they both can spread or help spread pathogens. Uh.
Speaker 1: The same can be said of something like the locust.
Speaker 1: But but all these examples of our organisms as well,
Speaker 1: they can become an even greater problem when they are
Speaker 1: imbalanced by human activity. So let's let's think about the rat.
Speaker 1: As biologists Ken Appland put it quoted in the Case
Speaker 1: for Leaving City Rats Alone by Becca Cudmore for Nautilus,
Speaker 1: rats are disruption specialists, so they thrive in disrupted ecosystems.
Speaker 1: They spill into unbalanced realms and carve out a kingdom
Speaker 1: for themselves. And he points out that the very few
Speaker 1: wild animals have done this quite as well as the
Speaker 1: rats in the human world without undergoing domestication. That's an
Speaker 1: interesting point. Yeah, So we we think about organisms that
Speaker 1: can successfully thrive at the edges of human civilization. You've
Speaker 1: you've got two main versions. You've got those that become
Speaker 1: tame and and eventually get bred by humans, like dogs
Speaker 1: or our animals or even cats, which are a little
Speaker 1: bit wilder versions wilder are but still definitely domesticated. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then you've got the ones that are just sort of
Speaker 1: destroyed by our presence, which are i'd say maybe the
Speaker 1: majority of animals, and like when we change an ecosystem,
Speaker 1: they suffer. And then yeah, you've got this third category,
Speaker 1: the ones we think of as unwelcome survivors in our environments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you've disrupted everything. But this is an organism that
Speaker 1: thrives on disruption. It can go right in there and
Speaker 1: find a place for itself. You know, all arerat needs
Speaker 1: is a is a is a place to borrow fifty
Speaker 1: grams of calorie rich or moderately calorie rich food per
Speaker 1: day and some water to drink um. And they they're
Speaker 1: going to find that they're going to find an abundance
Speaker 1: of that in our environments. I mean, in our garbage,
Speaker 1: in our in our you know, in our refuse, in
Speaker 1: in the in the the leavings of our civilization, and
Speaker 1: for all of our domesticated minions, for all of our
Speaker 1: traps and our poisons. Rats still rule cities New York City.
Speaker 1: In previous episodes, I think we've even talked about rat
Speaker 1: societies in New York City. Yeah, there are sort of
Speaker 1: separate subcultures of rats within the cities that that they occupy. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that's gonna that's indeed gonna become very important to
Speaker 1: here in just a minute. Okay, the rat was already
Speaker 1: perfectly evolved to do all of this. Uh, they were
Speaker 1: stealing from other organisms before us. Most likely, we just
Speaker 1: continue to offer more and more to steal, creating waste,
Speaker 1: disruption and hiding places everywhere we go. And of course
Speaker 1: we went absolutely everywhere, bringing rats in our wake. Becca
Speaker 1: Cudmore's article, however, deals mostly with the Vancouver Rat Project,
Speaker 1: which points out that some experts identify the potential dangers
Speaker 1: posed by fighting back against the rat occupation too hard.
Speaker 1: And part of it comes down to this, to the
Speaker 1: disruption of the stable rat colonies. Uh, these these stable areas,
Speaker 1: these little little pocket civilizations that the rats have established
Speaker 1: in these disrupted ecosystems. These are some of the key
Speaker 1: points that have been made. First of all, drive rats
Speaker 1: out of one home or block and into another home
Speaker 1: or block, and you might be spreading rat pathogens that
Speaker 1: would otherwise be quarantined within this stable group. Plus, urban
Speaker 1: rats have a garbage based diet, meaning that they absorb
Speaker 1: a lot of bacteria, and this is often place specific bacteria.
Speaker 1: It's tied to the building, to the people that live
Speaker 1: in that particular building. Drive them out and you spread
Speaker 1: these particular bacteria elsewhere. You're stirring the pot right, and
Speaker 1: then rats in one area will wage bloody war against
Speaker 1: any stranger rat that arrives. This applies to New York
Speaker 1: City as well, where I've read and I think we've
Speaker 1: talked about this before about how a native rat population
Speaker 1: tends to do a decent job of fighting off rat
Speaker 1: invasions that come in on ships, etcetera. Um, so it's
Speaker 1: a perpetual turf war. But these turf wars, especially when
Speaker 1: you stir them up up by fighting back against the
Speaker 1: rats too hard, potentially, Uh, those turf war wars spill
Speaker 1: rat blood. They cause rats to urinate out of fear,
Speaker 1: and so what we get is a mix of rat
Speaker 1: blood and rat urine and rat gut contents, a real
Speaker 1: witches brew. In fact, Kaylee Buyers of the Vancouver Rat
Speaker 1: Project points out that these brawls allow bacteria to converge,
Speaker 1: to mix and potentially create new diseases. Bacteria that wouldn't
Speaker 1: otherwise interact with each other are pooled together swap genes
Speaker 1: inform new diseases such as UH, methocillin resistant STAFF or
Speaker 1: m r S. A. Oh wow, I didn't even think
Speaker 1: about that as a consequence of another thing we've talked
Speaker 1: about before, of course, horizontal gene transfer between single celled
Speaker 1: organisms like bacteria. You know, if one acquires a useful
Speaker 1: adaptation and say resisting a certain antibiotic, they can share
Speaker 1: that gene for that adaptation via a sort of analogy
Speaker 1: of bacterial sex. It's not sexual reproduction, but they can
Speaker 1: take part of their genome and just put it in
Speaker 1: another bacterium. Yeah. Yeah, So we have a situation where
Speaker 1: we disrupted the environment. Organism that thrives and disruption has
Speaker 1: moved in, and then if we attempt to remove that organism,
Speaker 1: we bring more disruption into the scenario. We bring more
Speaker 1: more chaos. Uh So the idea of of fixing these
Speaker 1: probably becomes more of a hard problem of dealing with
Speaker 1: these rat infestations. Uh So. Anyway, not not to say
Speaker 1: that we shouldn't fight against rats and keep them from
Speaker 1: living too high on the hog, but we got here
Speaker 1: through disruption, so we shouldn't be surprised if there are
Speaker 1: consequences for disrupting it further totally. And if you're going
Speaker 1: to fight a secret war against the ghouls, well then
Speaker 1: perhaps it's worth fighting. Uh, you know, at a perpetual stalemate,
Speaker 1: right White turn a cold war into a hot war exactly.
Speaker 1: All right. I'm gonna have more about the war against
Speaker 1: rats and potentially ghoules here in a second, but first
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Speaker 1: dot com slash mind blown. All right, we're back to
Speaker 1: city rats, the ghouls of the real world. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: comparing it to that episode of Monsters far Below based
Speaker 1: on a beloved Google short story. Uh so, here's another
Speaker 1: thing to think about here. Uh. We've talked about how
Speaker 1: rats spread with human civilization and they are such a
Speaker 1: highly successful organism, and yet there are a few areas
Speaker 1: of the world that have remained essentially rat free, the
Speaker 1: most notable of which is the Canadian Province of Alberta. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's virtually free of the Norway rat. Uh. Now, wild
Speaker 1: rats do turn up from time to time, brought in
Speaker 1: through traditional means, you know, they come in, you know,
Speaker 1: on a ship ment or or so forth. But the
Speaker 1: province has been very proactive in squashing these flare ups
Speaker 1: to hold onto that rat free championship that they've that
Speaker 1: they've earned. You know, I have been to Alberta, actually
Speaker 1: have been to the city of Calgary and and driven
Speaker 1: around in there, and I never noticed roving teams of
Speaker 1: anti rat sorcerers, rat exorcists of any kind. So so
Speaker 1: what's the secret? Yeah, that's like everybody's next question. How
Speaker 1: did they get rat free? What they do? What can
Speaker 1: I do to get that in my city? Well, basically
Speaker 1: they were just able to keep the rats out before
Speaker 1: they moved in, which I think lines up rather nicely
Speaker 1: with the story of far Below, the idea of keep
Speaker 1: the ghouls from boiling up into New York City because
Speaker 1: once they're up, there's no getting rid of them. Announce
Speaker 1: of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: basically this is how it went went down. The Norway
Speaker 1: rat arrived in North America. And roughly seventeen seventy five
Speaker 1: keyports cities never had a chance. But from there they
Speaker 1: gradually spread across the continent and uh and that took
Speaker 1: time for certain areas. The rats didn't enter eastern Saskatchewan
Speaker 1: until the nineteen twenties, and according to Alberta's official website
Speaker 1: on their history of rat control, the rats continued to
Speaker 1: spread northwest at a rate of fifteen miles or twenty
Speaker 1: four kilometers per year. So they first reached the eastern
Speaker 1: border of Alberta in nineteen fifty and that's where they
Speaker 1: stopped them with rat control measures, keeping the province and
Speaker 1: its cities free of the furry invaders. And uh and
Speaker 1: that also includes its largest city, Calgary. Basically, they realized
Speaker 1: the threat to all levels of human activities, especially agriculture,
Speaker 1: you know, which there was a lot of, which is
Speaker 1: why the Department of Agriculture did a lot of the
Speaker 1: heavy lifting, especially early on. But legislation also mandated control
Speaker 1: of pest by quote every person and every level of
Speaker 1: government like county clerks or yeah, well, I mean I
Speaker 1: mean essentially like they basically they've spread the message to
Speaker 1: absolutely everyone, and then every municipality had to have a
Speaker 1: pest control inspector. A control zone was established and and
Speaker 1: this is good far below hinges in part in the
Speaker 1: idea that a bureaucratic outsider, uh you know, like most
Speaker 1: of the world has no idea about the Google threat.
Speaker 1: The whole tale is his education into the reality of
Speaker 1: the struggle against the ghouls. And Alberta's efforts actually mirrored
Speaker 1: this in some to some degree. They had to. They
Speaker 1: sought to enlist the population against the rat threat, you know,
Speaker 1: to build up, you know, the public awareness. So they
Speaker 1: had to educate the public about rats. Most people in
Speaker 1: Alberta had never seen a rat before. It's hard to imagine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Alberta's uh so, Alberta agriculture educators traveled around with
Speaker 1: preserved rats specimens to inform the public. There's a fabulous
Speaker 1: photocolor photograph that Alberta's website includes of these educators on
Speaker 1: a farm in Alberta with a bunch of preserved rats,
Speaker 1: not in a container, just laid out on the grass.
Speaker 1: There's a child holding one up by the tail, and
Speaker 1: they're just saying, like, these are rats. This is why
Speaker 1: you need to be vigilant about. This is what you
Speaker 1: need to look out for. It's like teaching New Zealanders
Speaker 1: about squirrels. Yeah, I guess so, um and what better
Speaker 1: way than the physical thing itself. But on top of that,
Speaker 1: there were conferences, there were posters, there were pamphlets, you know,
Speaker 1: some of these like straight up propaganda posters about the
Speaker 1: terror of the rat. They advocated the use of poisons
Speaker 1: to fight back. Uh. Though they also had to bring
Speaker 1: in outside experts to help them because again, most Alberta
Speaker 1: residents had no experience with rats, and that includes experience
Speaker 1: fighting them. Uh. So they were able to battle the
Speaker 1: rat infestations along the eastern border and keep them mostly
Speaker 1: within ten to twenty kilometers with a border and the
Speaker 1: program continues today in an altered but still effective form.
Speaker 1: It's actually illegal to own a pet rat in the province.
Speaker 1: You've got to be a zoo, a university, or a
Speaker 1: recognized research institution. Uh. There's also a rat hotline where
Speaker 1: you report rat and flare ups in case, you know
Speaker 1: they when they do occur. But one of the problems
Speaker 1: is that, again most Alberta residents don't have a good
Speaker 1: eye for rats. Hello, and extremely tiny dog just ran
Speaker 1: across my kitchen floor. Well, what happens if they end
Speaker 1: up reporting muskrats, gophers, ground squirrels, and other similar organisms.
Speaker 1: And then you know, the rat police come out to
Speaker 1: check and they're like, oh, those are not rats, those
Speaker 1: are muskrats. Uh. You know, we can't really do anything
Speaker 1: about that. Uh. By the way, to come back to Monsters,
Speaker 1: the Anthology series if if you're wondering if there is
Speaker 1: an episode of Monsters that expressly concerns rats, uh, there is.
Speaker 1: There's one called Stressed Environment, in which a female scientist
Speaker 1: who spent twelve years raising rats in a stressed environment. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in the hopes of evolving their intelligence, faces
Speaker 1: the terrifying results of your experiment. It stars care Linley,
Speaker 1: and it has stop motion rats that end up using
Speaker 1: spears against their human captors. Smart rats. Indeed, so this
Speaker 1: whole thing from far Below about this team of bureaucratic
Speaker 1: professionals who work for the city who have to go
Speaker 1: underground to fight the uh, the menace coming up from below.
Speaker 1: Of course, in the story it's ghouls. You've got the
Speaker 1: analogy to rats. But I can't help but think of
Speaker 1: the fat bergs. The people up above are completely oblivious
Speaker 1: to the fact that there are workers down beneath the streets,
Speaker 1: in the tunnels, in the darkness, waging battle against a
Speaker 1: monster that lives down there. And of course the agglomerations
Speaker 1: of fats, oils, grease and wet wipes and various fibrous
Speaker 1: substances that clog up kilometers of sewers, especially in places
Speaker 1: like England and or I guess the UK more broadly,
Speaker 1: but also in US cities. It seems like another perfect
Speaker 1: analogy for the wars being waged on our behalf below
Speaker 1: our feet that we don't even think about. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: create this vast, unnatural underworld and it's going to it's
Speaker 1: it's gonna end up potentially being populated by by opportunistic
Speaker 1: organisms or you know, they're going to be situations where
Speaker 1: things like fat burgs emerge and you need people to
Speaker 1: go wage war against them. If you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about fat birds, we have a whole episode about
Speaker 1: them from earlier this year that you can check out.
Speaker 1: So that was Monsters. Monsters I think falls more in
Speaker 1: the you know, the category of fun but often kind
Speaker 1: of a little bit cheesy when it comes to horror
Speaker 1: anthology shows. But again, some of the like one of
Speaker 1: the big names, so one of them the classier names
Speaker 1: in horror anthology is of course the classic Twilight Zone,
Speaker 1: right uh. And so there there are so many great
Speaker 1: episodes of the Twilight Zone that really do pose interesting
Speaker 1: questions that still remain interesting today. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: some that also have kind of hokey premises that don't
Speaker 1: hold up. But I want to talk about one that
Speaker 1: I really think does hold up and is still more
Speaker 1: and more mind blowing the more you think about it,
Speaker 1: and yet at the same time has an incredibly simple premise. Us.
Speaker 1: I feel like this is a great example of a
Speaker 1: story premise getting a lot of bang for its buck.
Speaker 1: And so this is one of my favorite episodes of
Speaker 1: The Twilight Zone. Originally aired in nineteen fifty nine, and
Speaker 1: it's called shadow Play. So in the beginning of this
Speaker 1: episode of The Twilight Zone, a man named Adam Grant
Speaker 1: is awaiting the verdict after being put on trial for murder.
Speaker 1: The jurors return from deliberation and they proclaim him guilty,
Speaker 1: and then the judge sentences him to death by the
Speaker 1: electric chair. But as he's being sentenced, Grant begins to
Speaker 1: laugh hysterically, and in a fit of rage and frustration,
Speaker 1: he runs around the courtroom yelling at people, not again.
Speaker 1: You can't do it to me again. You'll all die. Uh.
Speaker 1: So in his jail cell, Grant starts talking with his
Speaker 1: roommates about how this has all happened to him before
Speaker 1: the trial, the sentencing, the imprisonment, and the execution have
Speaker 1: all happened to him a thousand times, but not as reality,
Speaker 1: always as a nightmare. Grant says, he's in a dream
Speaker 1: right now, and at the moment of his electrocution, he's
Speaker 1: going to wake up screaming back in reality. And because
Speaker 1: it's always been a dream in the past, this time
Speaker 1: it must be a dream too. So he tells everybody
Speaker 1: he can don't let them send me to the chair,
Speaker 1: because when I die, I'll wake up, and when I
Speaker 1: wake up, you'll all die because I'll stop dreaming you.
Speaker 1: Then there's this newspaper reporter who was present at Grant's trial,
Speaker 1: and he starts to become a little worried that he is,
Speaker 1: in fact, maybe only being dreamed by Grant, and if
Speaker 1: Grant wakes up, he and everybody else in the world
Speaker 1: will cease to exist. So he gets drunk and he
Speaker 1: goes to the house of his friend who's the district
Speaker 1: attorney who was in the courtroom also who presented the
Speaker 1: case against Grant, And the newspaper reporter begins to beg
Speaker 1: the district attorney to stay the execution, and the d A,
Speaker 1: of course, thinks this is preposterous obvious as Lee, But
Speaker 1: the More's friend talks to him about it, the more
Speaker 1: doubts begin to creep in, however much he tries to
Speaker 1: resist them. Doesn't the world ever feel just not quite real?
Speaker 1: Isn't it sometimes just too perfect or just too full
Speaker 1: of too many coincidences? I think most people can actually
Speaker 1: identify with having this feeling every now and then about
Speaker 1: their own lives. Yeah, yeah, I mean especially we've talked
Speaker 1: before about some about coincidence, you know, and how we've
Speaker 1: would devote a whole episode to it, I believe, and
Speaker 1: and how we can over interpret that or at least
Speaker 1: that there's some vast conspiracy of foot well. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is what led like Carl Young to believe in
Speaker 1: this concept of synchronicity, that there could be that there
Speaker 1: was a connecting principle in reality that was not based
Speaker 1: on physical causation but was based on like, based on
Speaker 1: meaning essentially that events could be not caused by one another,
Speaker 1: but connected to one another through meaning. And this is
Speaker 1: why we have this feeling that there are too many
Speaker 1: coincidences in our lives now. But anyway, so after this moment,
Speaker 1: the District Attorney agrees to go speak to Grant in
Speaker 1: the prison before the execution takes place. Grant expects him
Speaker 1: before he arrives, and the d A tries to interrogate
Speaker 1: Grant on his theory. He tries to convince him that
Speaker 1: it couldn't be true. It's not possible that you are
Speaker 1: dreaming all this and we're just in your dream. The
Speaker 1: d A says, like, what you mean to tell me
Speaker 1: that my family, my friends, everybody in this city, in
Speaker 1: this state, everybody in the world is just living inside
Speaker 1: your dream? And Grant says, a dream builds its own world,
Speaker 1: and the d A asks, well, how can I be
Speaker 1: a part of your dream if I sleep and dream
Speaker 1: myself every night? And then Grant says, in this great line,
Speaker 1: you only sleep and dream because I dream you that way.
Speaker 1: So Grant is then headed to the electric chair at midnight,
Speaker 1: and the d A is faced with this choice. Should
Speaker 1: he call the governor to get a stay of execution.
Speaker 1: But that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it. But he has doubts.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna oil the ending beyond that, but I
Speaker 1: will say my favorite part of this episode, aside from
Speaker 1: the great performance by Dennis Weaver as Adam Grant, is
Speaker 1: is in the middle part of the episode. It's the
Speaker 1: part where the doubts begin to set in for the
Speaker 1: reporter and the d A and the other prisoners on
Speaker 1: Grant's row. I feel like this story at once raises
Speaker 1: several of the deepest, most challenging questions at the core
Speaker 1: of metaphysics, psychology, and the philosophy of mine. Questions like
Speaker 1: how do you know for sure that other people in
Speaker 1: the outside world are real? And how do you know
Speaker 1: your current experience is real as opposed to a dream?
Speaker 1: How do you know you're not dreaming right now? And
Speaker 1: then I think that the most mind blowing question from it,
Speaker 1: of course, is that if you're one of these other
Speaker 1: people in the story, like the d A or the reporter,
Speaker 1: how do you know that you're real? Could you, in
Speaker 1: fact be an imaginary person in somebody else's dream. And
Speaker 1: of course, with that last question, you may think the
Speaker 1: answer is just obviously self evidently. No, I think it's
Speaker 1: probably you know, but it might not be as cut
Speaker 1: and dry as we might hope. I want to come
Speaker 1: back to that in a minute. Yeah, I watched this
Speaker 1: episode this morning, and yeah, it's it's really good. It's
Speaker 1: it's one of the again, a lot of these Twilight
Speaker 1: Zone episodes, they they hold up so well, the shot
Speaker 1: and like stunning black and white. Uh. These you know,
Speaker 1: I guess at times the acting might feel a little
Speaker 1: dated to what you might have today, but it's it's
Speaker 1: all really solid. Also, this episode was adapted in the
Speaker 1: revival of The Twilight Zone, starring Peter Coyote. Uh in thee. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I haven't either, but but I looked it up and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, yeah, there's Peter Coote. And then
Speaker 1: of course this episode was written by Charles Beaumont, who
Speaker 1: is one of like the legendary names of the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 1: You have a number of killer episodes. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: really good. Uh, it's a really tight, well told story. Um,
Speaker 1: and I highly recommended, and in fact, I was just
Speaker 1: I was watching it on Netflix. The Twilight Zones all
Speaker 1: on Netflix right now, so you can go look it
Speaker 1: up if you've got a subscrib option, and it's also
Speaker 1: on Hulu, I believe if anyone wishes to to watch
Speaker 1: them there. But there's tons of Twilight Zone awaiting you.
Speaker 1: I always forget just how many episodes of the show
Speaker 1: they did. I think there's like thirty six episodes in
Speaker 1: the first season, and not all of them are great,
Speaker 1: but a striking number of them are great. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we can address these questions about dreams and
Speaker 1: being thank all right, we awaken you from the dream
Speaker 1: of advertising and back into the reality of our episode.
Speaker 1: All right, So I think we should deal with some
Speaker 1: of the questions I was just posing that are raised
Speaker 1: by this episode of the Twilight Zone. Uh, And the
Speaker 1: first one I think would be the most basic question,
Speaker 1: how do you know that your entire life hasn't been
Speaker 1: a dream? How do you know that the people you
Speaker 1: interact with aren't just figments of your imagination? I think
Speaker 1: we all assume that other people are real and independent,
Speaker 1: or at least you probably should assume that the outside
Speaker 1: world really exists. Will it will continue after I die?
Speaker 1: And so forth? But it's harder than you might expect
Speaker 1: to prove this with certainty. Uh though, I think almost
Speaker 1: nobody actually holds this view. If you actually were to
Speaker 1: believe that your mind is the only thing that exists
Speaker 1: in the rest of the outside world and all the
Speaker 1: people of it, and they're just merely products of your
Speaker 1: imagination or your dream or whatever, this is known as solipsism,
Speaker 1: and to be more specific, I think it would be
Speaker 1: metaphysical solipsism, metaphysical meaning this is how the world is,
Speaker 1: as opposed to something like methodological solipsism, which you might
Speaker 1: say is one of the tools of Saint Descartes, who
Speaker 1: I'll talk about in a minute, which would just mean
Speaker 1: like solipsism might be a useful philosophical tool for a moment.
Speaker 1: And by the way, listeners who are fans of the
Speaker 1: excellent sitcom The Good Place will recognize this is one
Speaker 1: of the philosophies that is currently being explored in season three.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I haven't gotten there yet. I think
Speaker 1: I only did season one. Doesn't stay good? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it it just gets better. They do a really good
Speaker 1: job of mixing it up and defying expectations. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: but I do want to stress I think solipsism is
Speaker 1: one of those points of view. That especially can be
Speaker 1: frustrating to normal people because you can point out that
Speaker 1: it's really hard to disprove, and that can create the
Speaker 1: false impression that, like, some philosophers actually believe this. I
Speaker 1: don't think any philosophers actually believe in solipsism, But it's
Speaker 1: one of those weird edge cases, right that everybody just
Speaker 1: sort of accepts that you have to leap over it
Speaker 1: with an axiomatic assumption. I can't prove it. I'll just
Speaker 1: assume the outside world is real and other people are conscious, right,
Speaker 1: because if you give you if you were to believe this,
Speaker 1: like things get pointless or silly or dangerous really quickly, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, I mean it's not a disprove But there's
Speaker 1: a funny implication of instability that follows from the assumption
Speaker 1: of metaphysical solipsis um uh. And it would go like this,
Speaker 1: if you're actually a metaphysical solipsist, you believe nothing that
Speaker 1: you experience is real, none of the other people actually exist. Uh,
Speaker 1: They're just figments of your imagination or something like that.
Speaker 1: What would be the point of telling anybody about it,
Speaker 1: just like for your own amusement? Like would any of
Speaker 1: the imaginary people you interact with benefit from you explaining
Speaker 1: why you think that solop sisum is true. Now for me,
Speaker 1: I guess the two reasons to tell people come to mind, though,
Speaker 1: though neither is really grounded in the reality of living
Speaker 1: within a dream. On one hand, you know, what better
Speaker 1: way to dismiss the stressors in your life than to
Speaker 1: tell them there but figments of your imagination, right to
Speaker 1: go just full Scrooge on them. But you'd also have
Speaker 1: to tell that to all the people you like and love,
Speaker 1: and and that though is actually more attractive than one
Speaker 1: might think. I mean, this is essentially an exercise of detachment.
Speaker 1: Buddhist and Hindu teaching speak to the importance of freeing
Speaker 1: ourselves from the chains of attachment. Both chains of iron,
Speaker 1: you know, chains to two things that are less desirable,
Speaker 1: but also chains of gold uh change to the things
Speaker 1: in life that we love or or or give us,
Speaker 1: you know, stability and peace. We have to free ourselves
Speaker 1: from our hates and our loves and connect with the
Speaker 1: true underlying reality of brahmin and uh and and so
Speaker 1: you know, that feels a little on par with what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here. So I think some of the
Speaker 1: incarnations of this philosophy is realized in like Hinduism. I
Speaker 1: think especially I recall them being even more radical than
Speaker 1: sollipsism actually and saying, not only is the not only
Speaker 1: is all of the sense data of the outside world
Speaker 1: potentially an illusion, but also the self is potentially an illusion.
Speaker 1: So it's not it's not that I am the only
Speaker 1: thing that exists, but maybe even I don't exist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think we're going to get into even more
Speaker 1: of this continue. But then again, since almost nobody who
Speaker 1: thinks about it seriously is tempted to believe in sollip sism,
Speaker 1: I think we can just like use the axiomatic pole
Speaker 1: vault and jump over the question. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess we don't even really follow into full blown sollip
Speaker 1: sis um via social media, in which we all have like,
Speaker 1: you know, we have a carefully maintained version of ourselves,
Speaker 1: an unreal version of ourselves that interacts with real versions
Speaker 1: of other people, like it's just a bunch of masks,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, I think if anything we're going
Speaker 1: to lead us to like this full blown solipsism, it
Speaker 1: would be that Yeah, well, I mean, there's there are
Speaker 1: plenty of ways the word solop sisum is used that
Speaker 1: aren't exactly the same. I mean, I think one thing
Speaker 1: you're getting on there is like people often do behave
Speaker 1: very solipsistic lee on on social media. But that's more
Speaker 1: in the sense of not necessarily not believing that other
Speaker 1: minds exist or that the outside worlds exists, but just
Speaker 1: acting as if you only care about yourself. True. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's it's beyond that. It's not just I'm the
Speaker 1: only one that matters, or that everybody is that everybody
Speaker 1: else only matters insofar as their attention to me. It's
Speaker 1: that they are not real. They are all figments of
Speaker 1: my mind. They are all but a dream. All right.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna jump over this question. If somebody actually
Speaker 1: holds metaphysical solipsism, I can't disprove them. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: push them in a ditch. Um, So we go onto
Speaker 1: the next thing, which is maybe a more vexing problem,
Speaker 1: which is the problem of Cartesian skepticism. How do you
Speaker 1: know that your experience right now, in this very moment,
Speaker 1: is real and not a dream? In shadow Play, Grant
Speaker 1: repeatedly explores this question. He's looking for clues in the
Speaker 1: opposite direction, trying to notice details about his environment that
Speaker 1: would tell him he's in a dream. He'll point out, Hey,
Speaker 1: this thing doesn't make sense. That must mean I'm in
Speaker 1: a dream. They wouldn't put that right there. They wouldn't
Speaker 1: let you have this in there. They wouldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: this wouldn't be scheduled in this way. Why am I
Speaker 1: Why am I getting executed the same day I got sentence?
Speaker 1: That doesn't make any sense. I must be in a dream.
Speaker 1: Why are steaks being cooked in the oven? That sort
Speaker 1: of thing. That's a good one. No, I think that's
Speaker 1: just the nineteen fifties. But yeah, nineteen fifties culinary culture
Speaker 1: in America. It might be a largely bad dream. Uh
Speaker 1: so Uh. The seventeenth century French philosopher, scientists mathematician Renee
Speaker 1: de Card, of course, was famously concerned with this question
Speaker 1: in a lot of his philosophical works, such as his
Speaker 1: Meditations on first philosophy. Uh, having doubts about philosophy that
Speaker 1: gave primacy to the evidence of our senses. So like,
Speaker 1: if I assume is a starting point that I'm sitting
Speaker 1: in a chair in a studio talking into a microphone,
Speaker 1: I could turn out to be completely wrong, because I
Speaker 1: already know there have been thousands of times in my
Speaker 1: life when I was a hundred percent convinced that I
Speaker 1: was really physically in my elementary school lunchline next to
Speaker 1: Foghorn Leghorn, or on a boat headed to Greenland wearing
Speaker 1: a I don't know, a Superman cape or something, only
Speaker 1: to wake up and realize that I was actually asleep
Speaker 1: in my bed dreaming. And I was totally convinced in
Speaker 1: the moment. Yeah, I mean, granted, it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: reduced version of us to a certain extent, Like we
Speaker 1: there are things that were not picking up on that
Speaker 1: we would otherwise pick up on a lot of the times,
Speaker 1: but within the context of the dream, we buy it
Speaker 1: as our reality. Well, yeah, that's one of the things.
Speaker 1: So you say that, and I agree with you. There
Speaker 1: is a textural difference to dreams, Uh, dreams. You know,
Speaker 1: our our waking reality doesn't feel like a dream, right.
Speaker 1: Dreams are hazy and ethereal and and absurd in ways
Speaker 1: that we don't notice in the moment. And my surroundings
Speaker 1: right now feel very lucid and solid, right, and it
Speaker 1: feels like there's a qualitative difference, of course, until we
Speaker 1: start really looking at how we observe the world right exactly, Yes,
Speaker 1: there does seem to be a qualitative difference, But maybe
Speaker 1: dreams only seem hazy and ethereal in comparison in retrospect,
Speaker 1: because in the moment, doesn't a dream often feel exactly
Speaker 1: as solid and lucid as real life. I've actually had
Speaker 1: a number of dreams I recall that almost became a
Speaker 1: lucid dream, and the sequence goes pretty much like this.
Speaker 1: Every time in the dream, I think, wait a second,
Speaker 1: I'm dreaming, aren't I? And then I look around and
Speaker 1: I test my surroundings. Doesn't this seem like a dream?
Speaker 1: Doesn't anything seem out of place? Can I fly that
Speaker 1: kind of thing? And whenever this happens, I conclude, oh no,
Speaker 1: everything around me is normal. I can't fly totally real
Speaker 1: and lucid. This must be real and not a dream.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever had this experience. Mine
Speaker 1: is similar. But what happens with me is I'll realize
Speaker 1: it's a dream, and I'll be like this annoying, and
Speaker 1: generally it's an annoying dream. It's something that's it's not
Speaker 1: a full blown nightmare. But it's like it's annoying. I
Speaker 1: realize it's a dream, and then I just fall back
Speaker 1: into it anyway, like like as if it's just I
Speaker 1: don't know that, and that in itself is frustrating. It's like,
Speaker 1: I I woke from the dream, I could have why
Speaker 1: didn't I go lucid at that point? Now? Instead I
Speaker 1: just kind of shrugged and went right back into the
Speaker 1: same old crap. Well, this is one of the things
Speaker 1: that the studies of dreams have found is that our
Speaker 1: critical reasoning abilities are extremely limited in dreams. Dreams suppress
Speaker 1: certain kinds of brain function, especially the types of brain
Speaker 1: function that cause us to question our surroundings and think
Speaker 1: critically about sense data, which of course inherently makes us
Speaker 1: a very prone to thinking dreams are reality even I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, it's hard to know how real
Speaker 1: they really seem in the moment, except for the fact
Speaker 1: that we feel like they're real right like. Well, like
Speaker 1: one bit of sort of folk wisdom is often thrown
Speaker 1: around is like, oh, well, letters are backwards and dreams.
Speaker 1: You can't read text in dreams, or you know, something
Speaker 1: like that. I don't think that's true. I don't think
Speaker 1: so either. But I have had situations where I've been
Speaker 1: reading something in a dream and it's difficult. But my
Speaker 1: experience and then of that is like, this is difficult
Speaker 1: to read. I must be dreaming. It's more, this is
Speaker 1: difficult to read. What's wrong? You know? I don't think
Speaker 1: about it about the dream answer being the solution, right.
Speaker 1: And so this whole dream problem is one way of
Speaker 1: getting to the position sometimes known as Cartesian skepticism, named
Speaker 1: after Descartes, and also affecting our our mailbot Carnie Uh.
Speaker 1: Since dreams and also hallucinations such as the kind generated
Speaker 1: by this figure, Daycard imagines this evil demon who wants
Speaker 1: to deceive him with false visions of the world, since
Speaker 1: they demonstrate that it's post sable for us to be
Speaker 1: totally convinced of perceptions about the outside world while also
Speaker 1: being a hundred percent wrong. Descartes thinks, you know, we
Speaker 1: should doubt all of our perceptions unless we justify them
Speaker 1: in a logically airtight way. And of course, the Decart's
Speaker 1: ultimate justification for the evidence of it of his senses
Speaker 1: invokes a benevolent God who wouldn't trick him. But is
Speaker 1: there any non theological way to get around this, and
Speaker 1: he tells or tests to separate dreaming life from waking life.
Speaker 1: There have been philosophers who have looked into this and
Speaker 1: tried to come up with here's how you tell the difference.
Speaker 1: The English philosopher John Locke thought he had one. He
Speaker 1: had one that was pain. Right. Locke said, you can't
Speaker 1: feel pain in a dream like you can in waking life,
Speaker 1: and that's your easy way to tell the difference. Right.
Speaker 1: So maybe if you think you're in a dream, I
Speaker 1: don't know, poke your finger with a needle and see
Speaker 1: if it actually hurts, and if it does, you're awake,
Speaker 1: and if it doesn't, you're in a dream. But twentieth
Speaker 1: century psychology research has found this is not true with
Speaker 1: so this is where we get the whole pinch me situation.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think it may very well be. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, pinch me
Speaker 1: see if I'm dreaming. I think this would not actually
Speaker 1: due to the research though, I think this would not
Speaker 1: actually be a full proof test, because people do, in
Speaker 1: fact sometimes report the impression that they have felt pain
Speaker 1: in dreams. Just one example is a nine study in
Speaker 1: the Journal Sleep by Nielsen at all uh and to
Speaker 1: read a couple of quotes from them, uh quote. Some
Speaker 1: studies indicate that pain is rare and it may be
Speaker 1: beyond the representational capability of dreaming. However, the present study
Speaker 1: describes experiences of dreamed pain that were reported incidentally in
Speaker 1: experiments on the effects of somatosensory stimulation administered during rapid
Speaker 1: eye movement sleep. The results indicate that although pain is
Speaker 1: rare in dreams, it is nevertheless compatible with the representational
Speaker 1: code of dreaming advantage Freddy Krueger. Right, And this actually
Speaker 1: comes out comes through in shadow play. Right. There's a
Speaker 1: part where, uh, where Grant talks about going to the
Speaker 1: electric chair and how he doesn't want to be sent
Speaker 1: there to die again, and somebody's arguing with them. They say,
Speaker 1: if you're just dreaming, you won't feel it, but he says, no, Wait,
Speaker 1: I mean when you dream something bad, doesn't it doesn't
Speaker 1: it terrify you? Doesn't it hurt when it happens in
Speaker 1: the dream? Yeah? I mean, I'm struggling to think of
Speaker 1: examples from my own remember dreams in which I experienced
Speaker 1: physical pain, But but yeah, it sounds completely possible. I'd
Speaker 1: be interested to hear from any listeners who have had
Speaker 1: dreams in which they have felt pain. Yeah, they also
Speaker 1: acknowledged that it might not be very common, but it
Speaker 1: does appear to happen. So I think it looks like
Speaker 1: the scientific research disproved lock here. Now there was another
Speaker 1: test I came across, and it was that the American
Speaker 1: philosopher Norman Malcolm wrote a couple of influential works about
Speaker 1: dreaming in the nineteen fifties in which he argued that
Speaker 1: dreams could be put to the test of quote a
Speaker 1: principle of coherence. So the ideas, do the events of
Speaker 1: your present circumstances connect logically with the preceding events and
Speaker 1: the rest of your life? So if you are currently
Speaker 1: having a sword fight with Christoph Lambert, why are you
Speaker 1: having that sword fight? How did you get there? Does
Speaker 1: the sequence of events make sense to you? Uh? And
Speaker 1: this is kind of similar to the test used in
Speaker 1: the movie Inception when you ask how did I get here? Right?
Speaker 1: The characters do that there to see if they're dreaming.
Speaker 1: If you find you can't recall how you got where
Speaker 1: you are, this allows you to realize that the present
Speaker 1: moment does not connect coherently with the rest of your past,
Speaker 1: and thus you're probably dreaming. But then again, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure this is a full proof test. It might be
Speaker 1: a sort of helpful test, but it doesn't get you
Speaker 1: to the right answer all the time. We know that
Speaker 1: the dreaming mind state, again, as we were saying earlier,
Speaker 1: greatly reduces critical reasoning capacities, and it often seems to
Speaker 1: short circuit logical inquiries with false answers. Right, So you
Speaker 1: might ask a question that would be a good question
Speaker 1: if you could really think it through to get to
Speaker 1: the bottom of whether you're dreaming or not. But in
Speaker 1: your dreaming state, you don't think it through very well. Right,
Speaker 1: You don't have full control of your critical thinking. So
Speaker 1: that's a self reflective question like that might not be helpful. Right, So,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, no one has introduced
Speaker 1: an airtight test to tell the difference between a dream
Speaker 1: and reality. Waking life, of course, seems real enough. It
Speaker 1: doesn't feel the way dreams feel in retrospect and our
Speaker 1: memories of them, but that still doesn't help us achieve
Speaker 1: certainty in the moment. And then this year gets us
Speaker 1: to one final thing, which I think is the weirdest
Speaker 1: place we might go about dreams. This is the crazy
Speaker 1: part of shadow play. Grant tells people around him that
Speaker 1: if he sent to the electric chair, he's going to
Speaker 1: wake up from his nightmare, and if he wakes up,
Speaker 1: everybody in the world will die, because this entire world
Speaker 1: is nothing more than his dream. And this is my
Speaker 1: favorite part of the episode. So on one hand, you
Speaker 1: might think, well, what would it matter. You know the
Speaker 1: people that you imagine in your dream are not conscious.
Speaker 1: Of course, there are many different ways to fear death,
Speaker 1: but one common neurosis here is the anxiety of being
Speaker 1: snuffed out right, of no longer existing, of their being
Speaker 1: a permanent end your conscious experience. And if the people
Speaker 1: in Grants dream are not conscious, there's nothing for them
Speaker 1: to be afraid of, no experience to exist in the
Speaker 1: first place, and thus nothing to come to an end.
Speaker 1: But in the story they do seem afraid. The ones
Speaker 1: who start to doubt their reality. They don't want to
Speaker 1: be snuffed out, and the story seems to imply that
Speaker 1: they actually do have minds that they want to live on.
Speaker 1: They don't want to be blinked out of existence by
Speaker 1: alterations in Grant's brain activity. And this is also the
Speaker 1: only part of the story that's actually fantastical, because otherwise
Speaker 1: the story isn't even fantasy or science fiction. Like, it's
Speaker 1: just perfectly plausible, right, that a man has the same
Speaker 1: mayor over and over. Uh. And I want to take
Speaker 1: this idea seriously for just a moment, could you the
Speaker 1: conscious entity with a mind, the person you are now
Speaker 1: actually be a person in someone else's dream to spare
Speaker 1: some similarities to the simulation argument that we've discussed on
Speaker 1: the show in the past. Yeah, yeah, the idea that
Speaker 1: that the reality we're experiencing now is a simulation created
Speaker 1: by a far future society that's currently just really excited
Speaker 1: about the idea of the twenty right, Um, that we
Speaker 1: really want to simulate nineteen again, Oh thank god for that.
Speaker 1: Well look, I mean, look at our cycles of nostalgia, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, look at some of our video
Speaker 1: games simulated worlds that we get into going back to,
Speaker 1: you know, like an Old West setting, or a hard
Speaker 1: boiled detective world, or or the nineteen eighties, etcetera. So
Speaker 1: it's it's not impossible. But but just as Grant argues
Speaker 1: that the perfection of one's life is an argument for
Speaker 1: simulation like this is too perfect, it's it's too you know,
Speaker 1: there's something wrong here. I believe there was a character
Speaker 1: in one of Ian M. Bank's culture novels who observed
Speaker 1: that the world is just too full of viciousness to
Speaker 1: be a simulation. That this must be the base reality,
Speaker 1: because who would dream it up otherwise. Now, I suppose
Speaker 1: that's kind of interesting, uh, to think that that that
Speaker 1: these are the thoughts attributed to a character within a
Speaker 1: fictional sci fi novel. But still I think it's an
Speaker 1: interesting point. Right. But then again, like, what kind of
Speaker 1: frame of reference do we have if we have no
Speaker 1: memory or no understanding of the world outside of the simulation? Right?
Speaker 1: But I mean thinking about one way to think about
Speaker 1: the idea of being a simulation in a computer program
Speaker 1: is that you are being dreamed by the computer. Uh. Now.
Speaker 1: One hurdle to the simulation argument has always been is
Speaker 1: it possible for a computer to generate and host conscious minds?
Speaker 1: We don't know. It's impossible. It's often assumed to be possible,
Speaker 1: but we just don't really know. The only thing we
Speaker 1: can be relatively certain works to generate and host consciousness
Speaker 1: is a brain. We know for sure they can do
Speaker 1: that because your brain is doing it right now, right.
Speaker 1: But here's where, in some respects the possibility of living
Speaker 1: in someone else's stream becomes more plausible, maybe than living
Speaker 1: in a computer simulation. We know a brain can generate
Speaker 1: at least one conscious mind. Who says it can't generate
Speaker 1: more than one. There have been a number of experiments
Speaker 1: in fact and observations and neuroscience too, especially throughout the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, that have led some experts to believe it
Speaker 1: might be possible to have at least two distinct conscious
Speaker 1: minds occupying the same brain. One big example, of of course,
Speaker 1: is something we've covered on the show in the past.
Speaker 1: We did I think a two part episode about it
Speaker 1: that you can look up, and it's the split brain experiments.
Speaker 1: These were originally experiments done by Roger's Ferry and Michael
Speaker 1: Gazaniga in the middle of the twentieth century, and they
Speaker 1: dealt with epilepsy patients, people who uh suffered really intense
Speaker 1: seizures and no other treatment worked, and so the treatment
Speaker 1: that they eventually went in for was known as a
Speaker 1: total corpus callisotomy, a severing of the corpus colossum, which
Speaker 1: is a bundle of nerve fiber that connects the two
Speaker 1: hemispheres of the brain, and the procedure apparently worked pretty well.
Speaker 1: When you sever that the corpus colosum, it does help
Speaker 1: to stave off these these horrible seizures. But there were
Speaker 1: a lot of interesting side effects that made the people
Speaker 1: who underwent this procedure very valuable to neuroscience research. For example,
Speaker 1: to give a very short version, you could show in
Speaker 1: some experiments that the part of the brain that talks,
Speaker 1: which appears to be primarily in most people, the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere of the brain, which is capable of speech, could
Speaker 1: not explain what the right hemisphere was doing. And so
Speaker 1: if you show an image to only the part of
Speaker 1: the visual field that connects to the right hemisphere of
Speaker 1: the brain and controls only one of the hands, the
Speaker 1: hand controlled mostly by that hemisphere of the brain could
Speaker 1: do things like select an object that was associated with
Speaker 1: the image displayed in that part of the visual field.
Speaker 1: But then the person talking against speech is thought to
Speaker 1: be mostly generated by the left hemisphere, couldn't explain in
Speaker 1: a logical way why that object was chosen, And that
Speaker 1: in many experiments like it, led some researchers to an
Speaker 1: obvious question. Is it possible that both hemispheres in split
Speaker 1: brain patients are conscious but separately conscious within the same skull.
Speaker 1: In some sense, could there be two conscious minds within
Speaker 1: one brain? Yeah, it's one of the This is a
Speaker 1: total like real life Twilight Zone scenario that we've we've
Speaker 1: thought about before on the show, Like maybe by virtue
Speaker 1: of once being one, like there's still like each one
Speaker 1: still thinks they are the one, but they are too. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and another thing that would be very creepy is again
Speaker 1: because of the localization of speech function in the brain,
Speaker 1: maybe only one of these can really talk to the
Speaker 1: outside world and the other one just can't really. It
Speaker 1: can still act with the body, but it can't generate
Speaker 1: complex sentences or anything, which would be an obvious asymmetry
Speaker 1: in which one of the conscious minds within the brain
Speaker 1: gets represented to the outside world. Well, one of them
Speaker 1: has no mouth and cannot scream. Now, I definitely want
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that I think our picture of this has
Speaker 1: been somewhat complicated by more recent research. I think we
Speaker 1: do talk about the center split brain episodes if you
Speaker 1: want to go revisit those and and see more detail.
Speaker 1: But our picture on how information might or might not
Speaker 1: be shared between brain brain hemispheres, even in the cases
Speaker 1: of a full corpus calisotomy seems to have been complicated
Speaker 1: by recent studies. I remember there was one we talked
Speaker 1: about by researcher named I think a Ya or Pinto
Speaker 1: who uh did research undercutting the idea that there could
Speaker 1: be two conscious minds within the same brain. Um. I
Speaker 1: feel like this is an issue that that's not fully
Speaker 1: settled and is still full of like weird mysteries. We
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what's going on. Another example from neuroscience
Speaker 1: case history that has been taken as possible evidence that
Speaker 1: there could be multiple conscious minds within the same brain
Speaker 1: is the the idea of alien hand syndrome, where you know,
Speaker 1: hands may interfere with one another's behaviors as if they're
Speaker 1: guided by different wills. So one hand tries to button
Speaker 1: up a shirt, the other hand tries to unbutton the shirt. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to stress that there is by no means
Speaker 1: proof or even necessarily strong evidence that there are multiple
Speaker 1: consciousness is within the same brain, because again, you can't
Speaker 1: know for sure that there's consciousness anywhere unless somebody tells
Speaker 1: you that they have consciousness. Right. I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: inherent problem leading back to the solve sism is you
Speaker 1: to begin with right. But but then again I also
Speaker 1: have to to throw in you know, we we have
Speaker 1: to be careful about the idea of thinking about like
Speaker 1: the unity of self conscious Yes, yes, is it? Is it?
Speaker 1: I think the more you look at it, this idea
Speaker 1: that there is one central unchanging you in there is
Speaker 1: a fallacy and one that we we still have a
Speaker 1: lot of trouble with when it seems like the more
Speaker 1: reasonable planation is that first of all, you're an entity
Speaker 1: of perpetual change, but also there's kind of a chorus
Speaker 1: of of of of yourself in there. Yeah. And one
Speaker 1: interpretation that that brings together a lot of the sceneoscience
Speaker 1: is the interpreter theory and interpretation is the interpreter theory.
Speaker 1: The interpreter theory of Michael Kasanaga, one of the researchers
Speaker 1: involved in in these split brain experiments, where he's got
Speaker 1: this idea that there's sort of a region of your
Speaker 1: brain that's associated with the speech production parts of your
Speaker 1: brain that is there to unify brain phenomena you know
Speaker 1: that are disparate in the beginning, and it's sort of
Speaker 1: its job is to tell one unified, coherent story to
Speaker 1: you about what's happening throughout your brain. So it takes
Speaker 1: all these disparate plot threads and says, here's how I'll
Speaker 1: finish up the story. Uh, and then and that creates
Speaker 1: the sense of you. Your sense of self is generated
Speaker 1: by this sort of like a concatenation process in the
Speaker 1: interpreter part of the brain. But to come back to
Speaker 1: the idea of multible consciousness is in the same head
Speaker 1: and maybe the idea of being someone else's dream. I've
Speaker 1: had this idea before. Again, this is not something that
Speaker 1: I would argue is strongly indicated by evidence, just a
Speaker 1: very strange possibility that seems hard to rule out on
Speaker 1: the basis of any evidence I'm aware of. What if
Speaker 1: the process of imagining the workings of other minds involves
Speaker 1: the low resolution simulation of separate conscious minds. What if
Speaker 1: when you're trying to understand somebody else's behavior, you trying
Speaker 1: to understand, you know, why did Jeff say what he said,
Speaker 1: and so you imagine his thought processes, Or when you're
Speaker 1: trying to write dialogue for a fictional character. What if,
Speaker 1: in cases like this you're practicing theory of mind, the
Speaker 1: brain temporarily carves out a bit of its consciousness potential
Speaker 1: to devote to this imagined person in order to better
Speaker 1: simulate their behavior. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean in many
Speaker 1: cases it would, especially if it's a perceived enemy. Right,
Speaker 1: It's probably gonna be a rather simple model. You know,
Speaker 1: it's you're you're reducing them to like, you know, cartoon
Speaker 1: villain levels of impulse and desire. But I mean there's
Speaker 1: no limiting it. Just two enemies. I mean, in any case,
Speaker 1: whenever you try to imagine somebody you don't know exactly
Speaker 1: everything your brain is doing to create that simulation of
Speaker 1: them within you. Right, Like, even the people we know
Speaker 1: they the best in our lives, say, for instance, for instance,
Speaker 1: our you know, our our you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: life partners, you know, or you know, loved ones, family members,
Speaker 1: really close friends. We might have a more robust simulation
Speaker 1: of them in our theory vr theory of mind, but
Speaker 1: it is still just a model of how their mind
Speaker 1: works and what they want and how they think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's our best, guess, it's our I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: their brain. It's our brain trying to do it. And
Speaker 1: if this were the case, you could be, in some
Speaker 1: sense creating separate conscious people in your head whenever you
Speaker 1: try to analyze a friend's behavior, or write a scene
Speaker 1: for a character in a story, or dream about a
Speaker 1: district attorney sitting across from you in a prison cell.
Speaker 1: Now you might say, well, if they're all generated by
Speaker 1: your brain, they're all you. I mean, anatomically, they are
Speaker 1: all you. They're all made by your body. The other
Speaker 1: side of this, too, is like when you read a novel,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, I mean, in any time you imagine a person.
Speaker 1: I wonder if this is possible, if there's any validity
Speaker 1: to some of these alternative theories of dual consciousness. For example,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, Michael Gazania's left brain interpreter theory. Perhaps
Speaker 1: the part of your brain that talks and interprets and
Speaker 1: seems to be in charge makes meaning of the self
Speaker 1: is not aware that the same brain is also generating
Speaker 1: little conscious simulations of people partitioned from the interpreter and
Speaker 1: the rest of the self. Yeah, yeah, I mean it
Speaker 1: makes me think. For instance, I've read a fair amount
Speaker 1: of Karl Sagan I love picking up a Carl say
Speaker 1: In book and reading it. Uh you know, it gives
Speaker 1: me comfort. And as as such, I do kind of
Speaker 1: have like a tiny Carl Sagan in my brain, like
Speaker 1: an idea of Sagan that is kind of walking around
Speaker 1: in there or maybe summoned. But the really mind blowing ideas,
Speaker 1: what if that little Carl Sagan has an experience? What
Speaker 1: if there's something that it's like to be that simulated
Speaker 1: Carl Sagan. What if he gets into an argument with
Speaker 1: the little Terence McKenna in my head? Right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's still your brain, it's still all the tissue in
Speaker 1: your head. But what if there's something in there that's
Speaker 1: a little Carl Sagan simulated by your mind sometimes that
Speaker 1: has its own wants, the desires, experiences. Now, again, I
Speaker 1: recognize that this is way out there in speculative territory,
Speaker 1: and I do not claim that there is strong evidence
Speaker 1: for this, but it is one of those strange things
Speaker 1: that I'm trying to think of reasons to rule it out,
Speaker 1: and I can't. Uh So, if this seemingly weird scenario
Speaker 1: were the case, would there be any way to know
Speaker 1: for sure that you weren't a conscious low resolution simulation
Speaker 1: of a mind inside a brain ruled by the tyrannical
Speaker 1: dictator mind that could blink you in and out of
Speaker 1: existence by the whims of a dream or imagination. Well,
Speaker 1: that sounds like a theological model there. Yeah. Fortunately again,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's any strong evidence this is the
Speaker 1: case sleep tight. All right, Well, there you have it.
Speaker 1: That is uh Anthology of Horror volume two. And if
Speaker 1: you loved it, you don't have to wait an entire year.
Speaker 1: You just have to wait a couple of days for
Speaker 1: the next installment, because we're gonna be back with Anthology
Speaker 1: of Horror Volume three, in which show will look at
Speaker 1: an episode of The Outer Limits and an episode of
Speaker 1: The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. I can't wait. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, heading over to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That's where you will find them
Speaker 1: and see what else can you do? You can find
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Speaker 1: a great way to help check out our other show, Invention. Uh.
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