FATE WORSE THAN HELL

One of the theories about LOST and its quirky sci-fi story line inconsistencies was that the characters were not "living" in a real world environment, but part of some grand experiment or alternative world (through technology like networking brains of coma victims).

Science may be catching up to some wild fiction.

The Daily Mail (UK) reports the scientists have kept alive pig brains outside of the body for the first time as part of a controversial new experiment. The radical experiments could pave the way for human brain transplants and may one day allow humans to become immortal.

The report suggests to ethics experts that any experiments to reanimate dead brains could lead to humans being locked in an eternal "living hell" and enduring a" fate worse than death."

That's according to Nottingham Trent ethics and philosophy lecturer Benjamin Curtis who made the comments in light of controversial experiments on pig brains.

"Even if your conscious brain were kept alive after your body had died, you would have to spend the foreseeable future as a disembodied brain in a bucket, locked away inside your own mind without access to the sense that allow us to experience and interact with the world,' Curtis said. "In the best case scenario you would be spending your life with only your own thoughts for company.

'Some have argued that even with a fully functional body, immortality would be tedious. With absolutely no contact to external reality it might just be a living hell. To end up a disembodied human brain may well be to suffer a fate worse than death."

Last month, Yale University announced it had successfully resurrected the brains of more than 100 slaughtered pigs and kept them alive for up to 36 hours.

Scientists said it could pave the way for brain transplants and may one day allow humans to become immortal by hooking up our minds to artificial systems after our natural bodies have perished. 

In LOST, viewers were conflicted about who, what, where and how the main characters were interacting with each other on an island that was not an island (where the laws of physics and smoke monsters roamed). Immortality was seen through Jacob, who shipwrecked as a baby on the island during Roman times. The Man in Black appears as an immortal smoke monster savagely imposing judgment on humans. Even the character of Michael appears to be trapped as a "whisper" on the island as a soul that cannot move on in the after life.

The idea that LOST could have been merely a network of reanimated brains now has a thread of truthful basis in current science. And the nightmare of being trapped on an island hell is what Mr. Curtis alludes to in his criticism of the experiment's potential outcome.

DREAMS OR DELUSIONS

There is a fine line between dreams and delusions.

A dream is a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep. It is a state of mind in which someone is or seems to be unaware of their immediate surroundings. Dreams also include cherished aspirations, ambitions, or ideals; a perception of something or some one as being wonderful or perfect.


But if a dream is an unrealistic or self-deluding it becomes a fantasy.

A delusion is an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder. Or it can mean the action of deluding someone or the state of being deluded, for example,  what a capacity television has for delusion. Delusions of grandeur a false impression of one's own importance can cloud a person's judgement.

In LOST, the characters struggled along this fine line.

Jack had a dream to reconcile with his father. He could never meet his father's expectations. He felt that he was trapped in his father's shadow. He dreamed that his father would one day respect him as an equal. That seems to be a reasonable goal.

Kate had a vague dream about getting out of her boring, dull and suffocating rural Iowa life. However, her dream turned dark when she took the abuse her stepfather had on her mother to an extreme. She then went on a fantasy crime spree to hide from justice. 

Locke had a simple dream. He wanted to be reunited with his parents; to be part of a normal family. But the bitterness of being abandoned by his parents and bouncing among foster families led him to be disillusioned about his fate. He tried to fantasize about having a new life, with a wonderful spouse to being an adventurous outback hero. His outlook crippled him, literally and physically, when he was scammed by his con artist father. 

Ben's dream was from his lack of self-esteem and friends. He was blamed for mother's death. His alcoholic father never cared for him. He took his sorry lot of life for a long time until the island gave him an opportunity to feed a delusion of revenge and power. For Ben to be important and in control of his path, he believed that he had to be in charge, be the leader, to have control over others. He seized on the notions of absolute power against the conventions of normal human relations. He turned into a cold blooded killer and an absolute dictator.

Sayid had a common dream. He wanted to leave his war-torn homeland to live in peace with his true love, Nadia. His focus was to find her. In the end, we are unclear whether Sayid's affection for Nadia was real or imagined to cover up the pain of the tortures he made on others. 

Hurley had a dream to re-unite with his father. To pick up where they left off when he was a child. But that only happened after he won the lottery. His father came back not to love him, but for the love of his new found money. The dream of a happy, healthy and wealthy family turned into a personal curse that led Hurley into mental institutions. 

Sawyer had a mean dream. He vowed to kill the con-man who destroyed his family. His obsession with his revenge turned him into the man he hated - - - a con artist preying on the weakest. He began deluding other people by tapping into their fantasies of romance, wealth or fame. The fact that he was no better than the man who killed his parents made Sawyer believe that he was a worthless human being - - - in need of no compassion, friends, family or goals. Once he killed Cooper, his dream was gone and effectively, the focal point of his life was gone.

If you look to the island as the experimental extrapolation of each characters' dreams or desires, then many of them crossed the fine line. Jack's grief of losing his father before he could reconcile with him led him to madness (but not after showing the world he could be a good leader in a time of crisis.) But Jack's reconciliation only happened in a dream like state of the after life (or a projected version of it).

Kate's island dream was fulfilled because she never really had to account for all the crimes she committed in her real life. Were all those crimes merely unfulfilled fantasies of a young farm girl?

Locke had the opportunity to become the great outback hero, but his own personality flaws crashed and burned his own fantasy leading to his own projected tragic death at the hands of Ben.

Sayid's dream finish was confusing - - - as he re-connected with his long lost love, but then ended up with the exact opposite, Shannon, a spoiled rich girl with no talent and no ambition.

Hurley's island life contained more friends and finding Libby who would love him just as he was - - - but since Libby was seen as a pre-island mental patient in Hurley's day room, was Hurley's happy island ending just another delusion?

Sawyer's island life was only a means to an end. The end of his search for Cooper. And his fantasy revenge was fulfilled when Cooper was miraculously dropped in his lap. Once that occurred, Sawyer was merely a loner only looking out for himself. When he left the island, he had no prospects, no dreams, no aspirations. In one aspect, his life (purpose) died on the island.

Whether the island was a fantasy fulfillment zone is a question that viewers will continue to debate and theorize about. But it was clear that the island was the intersection of character dreams and delusions.

THE GRAND EXPERIMENT

LOST had many controversial elements. One was that so much of the criminal activity on and off the island was not punished. One could literally get away with mass murder.


In civilized society, the rule of law, a code of right and wrong, is necessary to stop the general public from turning into aggressive savages. In some ways, the island was its own uncivilized society where the normal rules did not apply to the characters.


It is possible to equate this element with a new scientific study which attempts to map "criminal intent" in the brain activity of potential criminals. In order to convict a person of a crime, the prosecution must prove mens rea, or the "intent" to commit the crime. It is done mostly by circumstantial evidence and common sense. For example, if you carry a gun into a store and demand money from the clerk, you are intending to rob the store. Judges and juries often have to gauge a defendant's mental state at the time he or she committed a crime in complex cases or where the defendant may have mental impairment. They have to decide whether a defendant committed a crime "knowingly" or "recklessly." In some cases, the difference could be a matter of life or death.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has turned to the brain to find a basis for this distinction. The researchers were able to find distinct brain activity patterns that revealed whether participants knew they were committing a (virtual) crime or were recklessly taking a risk.


“All the elements of the crime being the same, depending on which mental state the court decides that you were in when you committed the crime, you can get probation or 20 years in jail,” said the study co-author Read Montague,  a neuroscientist at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. “I can't think of anything more important than loss of your liberty, so understanding these distinctions or the subtleties in them is important.”


For this study, 40 participants played a game inside a brain scanner. They had to decide to carry a suitcase that could contain sensitive documents through a maze where they could encounter one or more guards. The number of suitcases and the guards were altered in each round of the game to play with the level of risk the participants had to take.


The researchers used a machine-learning method of data analysis that looks at activity across the entire brain to find patterns. This revealed two activity patterns that corresponded to the conditions in which participants knowingly decided to carry a suitcase containing contraband, or the conditions where the participants made an uncertain but risky choice.


The distinct brain patterns they found suggest that these two legally defined mental states—knowing and reckless—are not arbitrary, but indeed map to different psychological states.


Montague is quick to point out that this study is not something you could use to avoid harsher punishment.


“It has no implications within a courtroom, and probably won't for quite a while,” Montague told mentalfloss.com  “This is a proof-of-principle study that informs the idea of mental-state distinctions.”


In fact, what neuroscience in general could potentially offer in a courtroom is heavily debated.
Our relatively recent ability to scan the brain and look for otherwise undetectable injuries has raised the idea that neuroscience could be used to inform the circumstances of a criminal case. If you have a brain lesion, after all, your behavior could be profoundly affected.


Taking this scientific study to the LOST world, Dharma was interested in various aspects of brain activity. From manipulation to brain washing, Dharma and Ben used methods to control the Others and the survivors. But it is unknown whether the original Dharma researchers had more civil aspects to their experiments such as finding clues to criminal behavior through tests and brain scans.


In order to get samples from various types of people, it makes sense for the island scientists to bring various people to the island and let the boundaries of civilized society be negated in a new world where basic survival is the only thing that matters. Call it a grand experiment to determine how normal people react in an abnormal environment. And if it was an experiment on how humanity is changed under those circumstances, it would appear the verdict would be that normal people mostly fail both their own moral codes with increased criminal behavior.

THE BASIS FOR SCIENCE DISCOVERY

One of the bedrock assumptions of science is that for a study's results to be valid, other researchers should be able to reproduce the study and reach the same conclusions. The ability to successfully reproduce a study and find the same results is, as much as anything, how we know that its findings are true, rather than a one-off result.
 
This seems obvious, but in practice, a lot more work goes into original studies designed to create interesting conclusions than into the rather less interesting work of reproducing studies that have already been done to see whether their results hold up.

That's why efforts like the Reproducibility Project, which attempted to retest findings from 100 studies in three top-tier psychology journals, are so important. As it turns out, findings from the majority of the studies the project attempted to redo could not be reproduced. The New York Times reported:  

Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported in the journal Science have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

This is a serious problem for psychology, and for social science more broadly. And it's one that, as the Times points out, observers in and around the field have been increasingly worried about for some time. 

Why is psychology research (and, it seems likely, social science research generally) so stuffed with dubious results? There are  three likely reasons:

A bias towards research that is not only new but interesting: An interesting, counter-intuitive finding that appears to come from good, solid scientific investigation gets a researcher more media coverage, more attention, more fame both inside and outside of the field. A boring and obvious result, or no result, on the other hand, even if investigated honestly and rigorously, usually does little for a researcher's reputation. The career path for academic researchers, especially in social science, is paved with interesting but hard to replicate findings. (In a clever way, the Reproducibility Project gets around this issue by coming up with the really interesting result that lots of psychology studies have problems.) 

An institutional bias against checking the work of others: This is the flipside of the first factor: Senior social science researchers often actively warn their younger colleagues—who are in many cases the best positioned to check older work—against investigating the work of established members of the field. As one psychology professor from the University of Southern California grouses to the Times, "There’s no doubt replication is important, but it’s often just an attack, a vigilante exercise."
This is almost exactly what happened in an incident earlier this year when a couple of grad students first started to find discrepencies in a major study about attitudes toward gay marriage. The study, which claimed to find that attitudes on gay marriage could be quickly made more positive by a 20 minute chat with someone who is gay, turned out to be built on fake data. The grad student who uncovered the fakes has said that, over the course of his investigation, he was frequently warned off from his work by advisers, who told him that it wasn't in his career interest to dig too deeply.

Small, unrepresentative sample sizes: In general, social science experiments tend to work with fairly small sample sizes—often just a few dozen people who are meant to stand in for everyone else. Researchers often have a hard time putting together truly representative samples, so they work with subjects they can access, which in a lot of cases means college students.

One of the most controversial topics today is global warming. To critics, it is a fraud and shame. To proponents, it is the most important discovery since the big bang. The problem with the billions of dollars spent on global warming studies is that the results are based upon "models" created by the researchers which discount actual, verifiable facts like actual temperature readings. The models are created to make assumptions, which can be manipulated by the type of data used in the pre-determined formulas to get a pre-defined result.

In elementary school, we learned about the planet. It's environment had changed over time. There was a massive ice age which covered much of the planet. Then a massive warming spell that carved the Great Lakes from the receding ice flows. Montana used to be a tropical jungle when the dinosaurs roamed the planet. And all of these great climate changes had nothing to do with mankind's industrialization of the planet. The Earth's climate is really determined by the radiation from the sun, the ozone layer which reflects much of the radiation, the tilt of the planet's axis, rotation of the planet around the sun and moon, and ocean currents which are the engine for all weather patterns. 

The problem with global warming research is that various scientific groups cannot verify results because the inherit flaws in the proprietary models used by the various groups. The result is like two children arguing whether the sky is white or gray. 

True science has been a major influence on the quality of life for us. Real, verifiable and repeatable research has led to life changing medicines, vaccines and inventions which have enriched our lives. But there is an alarming trend of pseudo-science and academic fraud which diverts valuable resources from worthy research efforts. Our we getting lazy? By getting grant money for projects in which we rig the results beforehand in order to appease a political viewpoint is the new norm, are we dooming ourselves to a state of lethargic, intellectual appeasement?

RATS IN A CAGE

Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage...
Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage...
Someone will say what is lost can never be saved...
Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage...

Smashing Pumpkins.

This chorus could sum up LOST.

All the main characters led not "great" lives. They have had professional triumphs, but led painfully lonely personal lives. They may have had criminal pasts or mental issues which led to painfully lonely lives.

One could see the analogy of dropping broken spirited individuals onto an island to see how they interact with each other.

Daniel used a lab rat to experiment with conscious time travel.  In the end, it ruined his and his girlfriend's minds.

The analogy could go further to explain that the whole LOST experience could have been the tortured lost mind of Daniel after subjecting himself to his own experimental backlash.

The conflicting science in the show is the conflicting scientific principles colliding in Daniel's fragile mind which could not explain how his girlfriend was permanently injured. The idea of his step-father, Widmore, being an evil incarnate or his mother being a controlling soul trying to isolate him from the real world may have been phobia and paranoia of a comatose mind. For Daniel broke away from both his parents by imagining himself going back (in time) to an island to "rescue" plane crash victims.

Except, there were plane crash victims to save. Daniel's mind experiments may have unlocked a portal to an alternative universe or dimension which he could interact with the lost souls of Flight 815 as they journeyed through the after life. Daniel in essence was a hitch hiker on others cosmic journey in time and space. The afterlife has no physics or rules so it was hard for an analytical mind like Daniel's to cope with this new reality. A reality that his mind recognized but the other people he had mental contact with did not. The main characters were not aware that they were dead until the end. But instead of being upset by the news, the characters seemed surreal and content by their fate. They did not question how or why they died, or even where they were - - - - it was like a burden was lifted from each of the them with a large sigh of relief. Their experiment or journey was over. They were no longer rats in a cage for survival. They could move on to an eternal retirement.