William H. Calvin

The spiritual reactions to news of an extraterrestrial intelligence will likely span the spectrum. A few might insist that the news is faked (just as, a generation later, some in the Islamic world insist that Americans never went to the moon in 1969-1972) or misleading (just as, for 150 years, the extensive science concerning evolution and human nature has been fought). Many will be open-minded, even eager to embrace the wider universe by reformulating their spirituality.

But with further news, all of these reactions could be replaced by alarm. As a matter of instinct, we will band together against the outsiders if they seem too interested in us. Part of standing together, if past wars are any guide, will include deferring to the majority religious concept of the local culture.

Indeed, I can imagine a future world leader, in despair at the warring factions on earth, resorting to a time-honored tactic. Get them to band together against a common enemy, preferably off the planet. To paraphrase Voltaire, "If [a predatory extraterrestrial intelligence] did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." (After all, the concept of a benevolent one has worked pretty well for bringing people together, whether or not god exists.)

Besides intellectual curiosity, what agenda will humans bring to the table? Concepts will change, and that’s the most interesting part of the present exercise. Old concepts never die (they just get reinterpreted) and so I will examine some cognitive building blocks relevant for where we are today. From the old spiritual concepts, we can guess at how they might interact with any news of contact.

So the philosophical coffeehouse is now open.

I can’t imagine an ape being all that concerned with the heavens above, even with watching the moon’s monthly movements. Why do we imagine our central mysteries as living somewhere in the skies?

Here’s one candidate scenario which, if nothing else, illustrates the cognitive factors at work. If you were a hunter or gatherer with a home base, to which you return each afternoon hauling food, getting caught out after nightfall would have been scary. In an African savanna, all of those big cats have to be somewhere and they hunt day and night. But even half a moon makes things better psychologically. Once people started paying attention to the moon’s monthly cycle, they could take occasional chances with staying out late. For the days leading up to the full moon, there’s lots of light after sunset. But the nights after the full moon, there’s a big difference, a dark gap between twilight and moonrise.

Now consider how they might have responded to a lunar eclipse. What’s the default analogy for the moon disappearing over the course of an hour? Something being slowly eaten. The eclipsing moon even looks as if a bite had been taken out of it. We also tend to assume that for every action, there is an actor – and so in addition, they likely assumed an unseen actor in the heavens.

Given how useful the moon had become, an eclipse might have been threatening, especially if you hadn’t been through a number of eclipses and formed the opinion that the moon always came back – that there was automatic resurrection after being eaten – if, of course, the actor behind the action could be persuaded.

If you don’t understand a process, you try out another process that you use routinely. (In brain research, I can recall a time when the telephone switchboard was the dominant metaphor for the brain. After computers were added to our conceptual toolkit, we started talking of the brain as a computer.) Everybody knows, no matter how poorly they understand the processes behind the weather, that social relationships can be influenced by pleading, flattery, and gifts. In a drought, many people surely gave it a try.

Something like this was likely tried out for eclipses as well. Surprisingly, the eclipse offerings worked much better than any Rain Dance. Just imagine a shaman who claimed to be on speaking terms with whoever runs the heavens. Said shaman said that an eclipse was about to happen, even though no one could see anything wrong. And sure enough, a bite was taken out of the moon later that night.

Pleading, flattery, gifts, and dances – whichever was tried, it seemed to work because the bite soon went into reverse. Cause and effect. Indeed, sometimes the eclipse didn’t happen at all, suggesting that your intervention had prevented it.

I like to view this shaman as being the first scientist, having backed into doing science without really understanding very much beyond a simple correlation. Some examples will show you how easy it is. (There are a dozen methods for warning of eclipses that I examine in How the Shaman Stole the Moon, and all are considerably simpler than Stonehenge’s methods.) If you can count backwards to when the last lunar eclipse occurred, you might stumble upon a simple rule: watch out for the sixth full moon after an eclipse. You’ll have half a chance of seeing another lunar eclipse if the clouds cooperate.

Solar eclipses occur only on the new moon before or after this full moon when a lunar eclipse is possible. They will be seen somewhere on Earth, but likely not where you happen to be. If the shaman were to try warning of a solar eclipse every six months, it would soon destroy whatever reputation the shaman had for being well-connected.

But short-term warnings are still possible. The sun itself is too bright to look at, even when half eclipsed, so no one notices anything until matters get serious. But the shaman could have easily gotten an hour’s warning, just by resting in the shade of a tree. Insects eat holes in leaves, so a leaf’s shadow on the ground have little bright spots here and there. The spot’s shape is not that of the hole but of the sun. When the sun is half eclipsed, the circular spot will have become a crescent. (It’s like a pinhole camera producing an inverted image.)

Perhaps, lacking a leaf, the shaman crossed his fingers to make a pinhole. A crystal with many facets works nicely because it produces a series of circles on nearby dark surfaces. They turn into little crescents as a solar eclipse progresses. I like to think of the shaman as the first to wear a diamond ring, carrying the scientific instrument around all of the time.

More interesting than the technique is the psychology behind advance warnings. These methods are crude compared to what we can do with our modern understanding and modern instruments. Crude methods, after all, produce many false alarms, where no eclipse follows the warning. But observe the psychology: even when the shaman is wrong some of the time, the people would have thought that their pleading-and-gifts technique worked. Indeed, it completely prevented the eclipse on those occasions!

So how did the people come to view the shaman? Assuming the shaman kept the technique secret (and didn’t use it whenever feeling hungry), they would have thought that the shaman was on speaking terms with whomever runs the heavens.

This would have been very good for business. The shaman’s everyday activities surely involved producing placebo effects via authoritative reassurance. And who would doubt the shaman’s "Take this and you’ll feel better" after such a demonstration of being well connected? Since at least a third of modern pain patients respond temporarily to a placebo drug, we might expect that, after an eclipse, the shaman’s treatments became even more effective at relieving pain and anxiety.

I also imagine this protoscientific shaman as advancing to become the first full-time priest, supported by the community and no longer having to hunt, gather, and prepare food in the manner of a part-time shaman. The society likely came to rely upon warnings so as to conduct appropriate rituals beforehand. But remember the fate of the two Chinese astronomers, Hsi and Ho, who failed to predict an eclipse and so failed to warn the emperor to schedule his rituals.

Undoubtedly gods were postulated on many other occasions, but here’s one that seems both powerful and approachable. So the psychology of eclipse predictions offers at least one plausible historical possibility for our preoccupation with the heavens, one that likely carries over to SETI.

Intellect is only the frosting on the deeper currents of instinct and tradition, many of which influence spiritual concerns by providing a focus around which to organize beneficial nonheavenly concerns. There’s probably a more primitive undercurrent of expecting gods to be running things from a distance, somewhere out there.

What about our constant search for "meaning," especially a holistic "everything hangs together"? That aspect of spirituality is surely going to be a component of the public’s reaction to Contact. Unless we understand something about human instinct in this area, we are going to make some serious mistakes in dealing with the earthbound public.

"Given our routine search for meaning, it is not surprising that religious concepts arose," I said earlier, and "they will change as we understand brains and evolution better."

We search for meaning quite routinely. When a person approaches, we ask ourselves "What does he want?" When a sound stream arrives, we try to figure out the news about who did what to whom. The neurologist Adam Zeman noted that a search for meaning is intertwined with most sensory input.

It is language that gives our search for meaning most of its daily exercise. There is nothing spiritual about most of it. Any single word is likely to be ambiguous because it has multiple connotations. Its context is needed to guide us to the intended meaning. With two words, there is more ambiguity to resolve. Worse, a group of words often refers to a unique, never-happened-before situation. (The meaning that the speaker had in mind was perhaps a set of relationships such as "Who did what to whom.")

As listeners, our task is to guess what was in the speaker’s mind. Often we can do it without any words at all, just the other’s direction of gaze, posture, and facial expression. To that we can add a set of clues contained in a set of sounds or gestures. Encountering an action term, we go looking for an actor to go with the verb. "Give" causes us to search for three nouns: a likely giver, the probable recipient, and an object that is suitable for giving.

A word can also be abstract, a concept where you cannot point at anything. (Say, the word "nothing.") In sentences, the speaker may cue you about the intended level of abstractness by saying "a dog" (the whole class of mongrels and breeds) or "the dog" (a specific dog; you’re supposed to know which one from a prior sentence). If it’s "a dog" that you hear, you automatically ignore the color, height, hair length, and disposition that make an individual dog unique. From this you get the abstract dog. All this goes under the heading of syntax and grammar. Such pointers are often omitted, leaving you to try out a range of interpretations, from the concrete to the abstract. There are lots of ways to be wrong, and speakers are expected to package the concepts well enough so that you can guess the overall meaning.

We are surprisingly comfortable with abstractions, and that makes spirituality possible. The problem, of course, is that the ambiguity load can soar, making your quality control slow. For some attributions, you may even give up and just accept what others say it means.

The quality-control problem is even worse for the speaker, who has to initially generate some options for what to say next. If it is not a matter of choosing between set pieces, it likely involves novel combinations of words. Since most of our ideas start off as incoherent as our nighttime dreams (with people, places, and occasions that do not go together very well), we first have to improve them.

Next, we must choose among leading candidates. If the sentence is longer than three words, we’ll need to introduce syntax in the form of appropriate tags and pointers to prevent terminal ambiguity. Checking them against the "rules" of the local syntax is much like playing a game that has arbitrary rules. To help others read your mind, you’ve got to make sure that your words all hang together.

We are always searching for coherence, trying to shape up combinations that "hang together" well enough to act on.  Guessing well, as we try to make a coherent story out of fragments, is routine in making and understanding sentences. It is routine when deciding what to do next.

When our quality control falters and incoherence is the best thing we can come up with, others will suspect we are dreaming or drunk. If the behavior persists, observers may suspect hallucination, delusion, or dementia.

The search for meaning permits us to pyramid complexity and nest sentences inside other sentences. We can chain meanings and call it logic if it survives double-checking. We can play formal games, checking our candidate move against the arbitrary rules. We can create contingent plans and tell good stories.

We also search for coherence in our surroundings, ways in which things unexpectedly hang together – and the pleasure we get from finding hidden patterns is striking. We have that eureka feeling each time we discover order amidst seeming chaos. This is what makes jigsaw and crossword puzzles so attractive, not to mention doing science. Spirituality is, in part, about seeking how things all hang together. Coherence finding has spawned an enormous range of art and technology.

Sometimes you don’t notice an overall incoherence because short segments of it are, by themselves, understandable. You can also start a sentence with one concept and, via a familiar chain of inference, reach a conclusion that is only another way of stating the initial concept, a mere synonym. No value was added by the chain of reasoning but you feel as if you have accomplished something, it sounds so good. "Wherever you go, there you are." Your luggage, of course, is another story.

There are a lot of beginners’ errors to discover, the task of a lifetime. Without critical thinking, we can easily get trapped, either by our own errors or via a moneymaking trap set by another mind. We routinely see connections that aren’t really there, as in astrology. We see one true connection (bleeding the patient really does help, provided that the patient has an iron accumulation disorder) and generalize it too far (bleeding all patients for whatever ails them). It can take centuries to overcome these errors.

In the aftermath of the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence, we’ll be making mistakes like that. We can’t expect the public to practice critical thinking on such short notice.

A spiritual instinct probably arose out of some predecessor instincts. Certainly sharing has to be a candidate for one of those instincts because it can be seen as leading to the Golden Rule and similar sentiments expressed in many religions.

A big ape does not simply plunder a tasty resource in another’s possession, as there seems to be an innate concept of ownership via possession. An adult holding a branch may tolerate another removing some leaves, especially (in chimpanzees at least) if recently groomed by that individual. Chimpanzees occasionally hunt and the possessor of part of the carcass may share some scraps of fresh meat. This is not a matter of offering some to others. Scraps are usually shared reluctantly, and only if someone holds out an upturned palm and screeches loudly enough. If any violence occurs, it’s never from the have-nots (occasionally the possessor will drive off one obnoxious beggar – but not the rest).

Note that the chimp’s prey (monkeys, bush pigs) are small. The possessor could consume the whole thing in a few hours and probably would except for interruptions by the noisy crowd with outstretched hands. But once our ancestors finally figured out how to acquire a large grazing animal about 2.5 million years ago, such an animal is simply too big to eat by yourself. Better to share and expect others to do so.

The problem is that everyone loves something that is "free." And so we spend a lot of time guarding against freeloaders. We even label them "cheaters." There seems to be an instinctual tendency to "pay back" violators even at considerable cost to yourself, against all notions of "economic man" looking out for Number One. This instinct, while crude, was useful to evolve our extensive tendencies to share food and help others. But it too has a dark side, such as suicide bombers who seem willing to "pay back violators" at extreme cost to themselves.

I used to contrast all of the undoubted good that religions do (I was brought up singing in the church choir and am quite aware of their good works and their civilizing influence on the young) with all of the religious wars fought throughout history. But now that I know a little more about the psychology of intolerance and the history of warfare, I am less inclined to blame the religious instinct for the wars and inquisitions. My reasons seem relevant to the possible responses to a successful E.T. search.

People just naturally form up teams, ones with almost random membership. It’s very handy in natural disasters, the way ad hoc search teams will form up to search collapsed buildings and rescue survivors.

Membership on other teams can be equally arbitrary, as when based on what external abstraction you support. (Occasionally football fan clubs beat up on one another but, then, so do their proxies. Beating up others over a true abstraction also happens, see above.) Or the group may form up around some more visible attribute, such as ethnicity or skin color or style of haircut. I’m beginning to feel that, if they didn’t organize around religious differences, they’d just organize around something else, likely without the same kind of redeeming qualities we often get from religions.

So teams will form up around how to interpret the contact. Some will suspect the science because they suspect scientists of being against spirituality. Scientists sometimes needlessly offend conservative religious people over their beliefs. Usually our skeptical response is not to the beliefs themselves but to the reasoning offered for those beliefs. The scientists usually aren’t doing it to offend or because they are against spirituality. (After all, we scientists spend much of our time seeking to understand how everything hangs together and how it came to be that way.)

Scientists just automatically carry over their effective scientific argumentation techniques to reasoning about the world more generally. Wishful thinking and faulty logic seems to be everywhere (certainly in science), so why not religion as well? (The physicist Gregory Benford throws "The Church of the Unwarranted Assumption" into one of his novels about a space colony.) Scientists automatically form up an opposing team whenever a new fact or insight is claimed. We eagerly try to prove it wrong, to find the holes in the argument – and if all that fails, we may try to show that the idea isn’t even original.

Uncomfortable as this procedure may be, it is how we discover our errors and move on. A scientist (if wanting to keep his reputation as a scientist) doesn’t challenge another to a duel or file a lawsuit. Or even picket his lecture.

Why should religious authorities be free of error? While some still claim special pipelines, my experience with theologians interested in science has been positive. Most differences need not get in the way of a broad cooperation on most fronts. And we will need to do a lot of consulting and cooperating in the turbulent post-contact period.

Finally, what about that "spark" which makes humans so special among the animals? There is indeed a gap that separates humans from our ancestors and from our cousins among the great apes. If we encounter an extraterrestrial intelligence, we might get a second take on the issue.

The nature of the ancestral leap to intellect and creativity has been debated for several centuries. It looks as if a big jump in intellectual capacity occurred quite recently, about 50,000 years ago. Yet we became Homo sapiens, big brain and all, about 200,000 years ago.

That means that there was a period, lasting about 6,000 generations, when we looked human but didn’t behave anything like the people of the most recent 2,000 generations. These look-alike ancestors were either intensely conservative or not very creative. For example, they might have been able to understand novel sentences spoken by the few who could create them, but without themselves being very creative. Their coherence-finding perhaps wasn’t yet good enough to start from scratch.

This step up (often called "The Mind’s Big Bang" though "The Creative Explosion" is a more informative name) is not about brain size per se. That’s a surprise. From the comparative studies of brain size spanning many species, we thought that the march in brain size (normalized to a standard body size) was what was behind human intelligence. Part of it, perhaps, but not the burst of creativity that showed up about 50,000 years ago in long-range trading, necklaces, bone tools, very fine engraving tools, portable art, and those scenes painted on cave walls.

How did our brains change, back then? Nothing makes a good analogy. The best I can do is to say that it may be something like a hard-working computer getting an improved operating system to coordinate the old hardware. The "upgrade" was more capable of handling long sentences, what with their demands for structuring via syntax to minimize the ambiguity, what with their need to seek coherence amid seeming chaos. That in turn made it possible to speculate about the future (including one’s own death) and see trends in the past.

That upgrade likely affected spiritual practices as well, allowing them to go beyond emotional rituals and into the realm of explanations. Without this big step, we wouldn’t be thinking about SETI and imagining the reactions here on Earth.

But notice that our intellects are very recent and riddled with bugs. The fallacies in reasoning and belief serve to fill psychology texts. That’s probably because 50,000 years is just not very much time for gene variation and natural selection to clean up the initial problems. We are still unimproved prototypes: Homo sap, version 0.8.

So if we face the aliens anytime soon, we will be hindered by a number of old, unsolved problems in our mental makeup. Furthermore, since any technology we encounter that is more than fifty years ahead of ours will seem like magic to us, we will be feeling bewildered. Let us hope that we have a long time after contact before having to make any serious decisions.

Lingua ex Machina
2000

The Cerebral Code
1996

How Brains Think
1996