Friday the 13th is an unlucky day. It is a superstition passed down from generation to generation, culture to culture.
The number 13 was said to be unlucky because when archeologists researched the Roman Coleseum chambers where the slave gladiators were housed, the best gladiator scratched only 13 victories before his death. Once you got to 13 wins, the next time you would die, hence 13 being an unlucky number.
Why Friday and 13 got a bad rap is probably because in the modern work week, Friday was supposed to be the start of the weekend, relaxation away from work. There is a possible dread that the boss will complicate your life by adding a ton of work on that day, ask you to work on Saturday, or make an unreasonable deadline in which upsets your plans.
In any event, numbers played a role in causing Hurley to have his own bad luck. It was not his curse, but a crutch, an excuse, to smooth over his own insecurities and faults. At times, negative thoughts can instill negative behavior and actions. Even when Hurley won the lottery, his negative thoughts appeared to manifest itself in death, destruction and bad luck all around him.
There is an old saying that a person makes their own luck.
Luck is the success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions or a chance considered as a force that causes good or bad things to happen. Many believe luck is something regarded as bringing about or portending good or bad things, a pre-state of mind.
Some lucky bastards are more lucky than good, and that ticks some people off with envy, jealousy or hatred. Why is this person wealthy, prettier, successful, stress-free, or happy? Why can't I have those things? He or she is not better than me!
You can see how a negative perception of one's self can lead to an internal circular argument that some outside influence, luck, is creating your personal state of unhappiness.
The LOST world was mostly an unhappy world. Every day seemed to be like Friday the 13th. The main characters shadows were their ever present fears, phobias, anxieties and dark behaviors. Over time, these shadows began to eat away at their mental outlook on life. For some, it took them deep in the pit of despair. For others, it took them deep into irrational behavior, like Ben.
But Hurley was the one main character who readily admitted his bad luck, that he himself created bad luck, and that people should not be around him because he was bad luck. This is the grand excuse of an introvert and loner. A hermit who built excuses to isolate himself from interacting with the real world, with real people, and to make real friends.
Locke had a similar path, except he did admit he was unlucky with family, friends, career or goals. He pretended to be an extrovert and leader, with grand ideas and hopes, but with no means to accomplish them because he could never forge true bonds with other people in order to fulfill his dreams. He built his own isolation from anger about how the world around him did not understand him, that he was smarter, better and more entitled to have the wealth, happiness and prosperity of his bosses. He was more like a hermit crab striking out at others, which reinforced a negative stereotype to others.
So Locke and Hurley created their own bad luck. And they suffered for it because they could not change their own personal outlook on life. Locke never achieved any reformation. Hurley, as best we could tell, found some peace of mind (but apparently only in the after life).
So on any Friday the 13th take heed not what is around you, but what is inside you.
Friday, March 13, 2015
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
LOST IN A BOTTLE
But could LOST have been better, with a tighter script, if its cast was concentrated into 6 main players?
And who would be those six?
Instead of a plane crash, a small cruise yacht could have shipwrecked off the island, leaving six survivors coming on shore.
If one was to "dramatize" Gilligan's Island, the characters would be a captain, a sailor, a rich man, a rich wife, a model, a farm girl and a professor. The closest analogous characters would be the marshal Mars, Desmond, Bernard and Rose, Shannon, Kate and the jack-of-all trades, Sayid.
This group would have the possible sub-story lines of the original pilot:
Mars could have been tracking a con-artist-murderer in Kate on this voyage, just before he arrests her in open waters.
Desmond is the one person with transoceanic experience. He may have been the yacht charter captain out of Fiji.
Rose and Bernard, both professionals, could be luxury type cruise passengers on holiday. Or, if Rose cancer story remains, both trying live life to the fullest before she dies.
The self-absorbed lazy model persona would fall to Shannon, the rich girl who expects people to be at her beck and call with a flip of her long eye lashes. She would be the center piece of conflict between the men.
Sayid played a professor like role in LOST. Whenever there was a science, mechanical, communication issue, Sayid had the answers. He fixed broken equipment. He could build things.
If you take away all the Dharma, supernatural, Numbers, Others and smoke monsters, where would this version of LOST taken us?
One would expect the idea of rescue would have been foremost in the minds of this landing party. There would have been some conflict between Desmond, the captain of the ship, and Sayid, the military-survival expert, on how to organize their camp and signal passing ships. This conflict would allow the other survivors to begin to choose sides, and work each other in political moves to make their stay on the island better.
As the one with medical training, Bernard would be called upon to be the one to keep them all alive. But he would be torn up inside with the secret Rose wants kept that she is dying. The idea of helping others live while he has to allow his wife to die would emotionally tear up Bernard.
The dynamic between Mars and Kate would be edgy and in constant conflict. Mars would probably "arrest" her, but there would be a backlash from the others who may agree with Kate that "his laws" don't apply on the island. Everyone has to work together in order to survive. This tension that Kate is having extra freedom from her crimes gnaws at Mars to the point of near violence against the others. Some see him as a threat. There could be talk of exile as Kate cons and charms her way into an important role in the camp.
While Kate may be helpful in setting up camp, the signal fires, and gathering food, Shannon appears to be aloof and troublesome. Her constant nagging and complaining would grate on the other survivors to the point ultimatums from the leaders to "shape up or ship out." This could give Mars an opportunity to "recruit" Shannon on his side to get "a confession" from Kate about her crimes.
After some time, when rescue is not coming, the group dynamic could shift into petty jealous taunts and leadership breakdowns. Desmond and Sayid may try to build a raft to get out into the shipping lanes, while others believe that it is not worth the physical effort when survival materials are in short supply or when some of the survivors start to become ill from dehydration, and possible tropical disease. The added stress on Bernard could lead to emotional to violent outbursts which further tear apart any unity within the group.
Since JJ Abrams has a habit of "rebooting" series, like Star Trek in alternatives, perhaps if LOST returns (which is doubtful), this is the format that a new show would take, as a true dramatic survival show.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
In a recent New Yorker article, the power of suggestion is examined and its results are somewhat startling to the average mind.
The power of suggestion is not new. In 1906, Hugo Münsterberg, the chair of the psychology laboratory at Harvard University and the president of the American Psychological Association, wrote in the Times Magazine about a false confession case. A woman had been found dead in Chicago, garroted with a copper wire and left in a barnyard, and the simpleminded farmer’s son who had discovered her body stood accused. The young man had an alibi, but after questioning by police he admitted to the murder. He did not simply confess, Münsterberg wrote; “he was quite willing to repeat his confession again and again. Each time it became richer in detail.” The young man’s account, he continued, was “absurd and contradictory,” a clear instance of “the involuntary elaboration of a suggestion” from his interrogators. Münsterberg cited the Salem witch trials, in which similarly vulnerable people were coerced into self-incrimination. He shared his opinion in a letter to a Chicago nerve specialist, which made the local press. A week later, the farmer’s son was hanged.
It would take decades before the legal and psychological communities began to understand how powerfully suggestion can shape memory and, in turn, the course of justice. In the early nineteen-nineties, American society was recuperating from another panic over occult influence; Satanists had replaced witches. One case, the McMartin Preschool trial, hinged on nine young victims’ memories of molestation and ritual abuse—memories that they had supposedly forgotten and then, after being interviewed, recovered. The case fell apart, in 1990, because the prosecution could produce no persuasive evidence of the victims’ claims. A cognitive psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus, who had consulted on the case, wondered whether the children’s memories might have been fabricated—in Münsterberg’s formulation, involuntarily elaborated—rather than actually recovered.
To test her theory, Loftus gave a group of volunteers the rudimentary outlines of a childhood experience: getting lost in a mall and being rescued by a kindly adult. She told the subjects, falsely, that the scenario was real and had taken place when they were young. (For verisimilitude, Loftus asked their parents for biographical details that she could plant in each story.) Then she debriefed the subjects twice, with the interviews separated by one or two weeks. By the second interview, six of the twenty-four test subjects had internalized the story, weaving in sensory and emotional details of their own. Loftus and other researchers have since used similar techniques to create false memories of near-drownings, animal attacks, and encounters with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (impossible, since Bugs is a Warner Bros. character).
Earlier this year, two forensic psychologists—Julia Shaw, of the University of Bedfordshire, and Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia—upped the ante. Writing in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, they described a false memory method, not of getting lost in childhood but of committing a crime in adolescence. They modeled their work on Loftus’s, sending questionnaires to each of their participant’s parents to gather background information. (Any past run-ins with the law would eliminate a student from the study.) Then they divided the students into two groups and told each a different kind of false story. One group was prompted to remember an emotional event, such as getting attacked by a dog. The other was prompted to remember a crime—an assault, for example—that led to an encounter with the police. At no time during the experiments were the participants allowed to communicate with their parents.
What Shaw and Porter found astonished them. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty-per-cent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw told me. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” After three debriefing sessions, seventy-six per cent of the students claimed to remember the false emotional event; nearly the same amount—seventy per cent—remembered the fictional crime. Shaw and Porter hadn’t put undue stress on the students; in fact, they had treated them in a friendly way. All it took was a suggestion from an authoritative source, and the subjects’ imaginations did the rest. The students seemed almost eager to self-incriminate.
One young woman spun a story about a kind of love triangle. In the first debriefing, she remembered the incident as a fistfight between her and another girl. In the second, she remembered having thrown a small rock at her adversary after the girl uttered a slur. By the third debriefing, the rock had grown to the size of her fist and she had hurled it at the girl’s face. “It was very emotional,” Shaw said. “Each time she’d reënact the event, the rock would fill her hand a little bit more.” Nothing in the woman’s affect suggested that the memory was false. She earnestly believed in the truth of her confession, as most of her fellow-participants did theirs. The memory was vivid, loaded with details about the crime that the interviewer had not furnished. Moreover, Shaw and Porter could find no personality traits that distinguished the false confessors from the few holdouts, and no way of identifying who was most susceptible.
Researchers conclude that these are troubling findings. They mimic, in the gentlest way, what can happen during police questioning: a small lie, told to shake loose the truth, rattles around in a suspect’s imagination and takes root. The psychologist Saul Kassin has studied interrogation and false confession for decades. He told me that Shaw and Porter’s experiment illustrates perfectly how social pressure can make innocent people admit to wrongdoing. “Think about the dilemma the suspect now faces: ‘I don’t have a memory for this, but the person who took care of me does. Therefore it must be true and I have to find a way to remember it.’ ”
After reading this article, this is another plausible premise to the LOST saga. As the plot started, we were on a fairly straight and narrow crash survival tale, but over the course of time, it moved off into very different, strange tangents unrelated to the initial premise. It is like minor suggestions were being conjured and amplified in a person's mind - - - creating a roller coaster of self-importance to criminal behavior memories. A theory is that LOST was the creation within some character's mind.
The power of suggestion is not new. In 1906, Hugo Münsterberg, the chair of the psychology laboratory at Harvard University and the president of the American Psychological Association, wrote in the Times Magazine about a false confession case. A woman had been found dead in Chicago, garroted with a copper wire and left in a barnyard, and the simpleminded farmer’s son who had discovered her body stood accused. The young man had an alibi, but after questioning by police he admitted to the murder. He did not simply confess, Münsterberg wrote; “he was quite willing to repeat his confession again and again. Each time it became richer in detail.” The young man’s account, he continued, was “absurd and contradictory,” a clear instance of “the involuntary elaboration of a suggestion” from his interrogators. Münsterberg cited the Salem witch trials, in which similarly vulnerable people were coerced into self-incrimination. He shared his opinion in a letter to a Chicago nerve specialist, which made the local press. A week later, the farmer’s son was hanged.
It would take decades before the legal and psychological communities began to understand how powerfully suggestion can shape memory and, in turn, the course of justice. In the early nineteen-nineties, American society was recuperating from another panic over occult influence; Satanists had replaced witches. One case, the McMartin Preschool trial, hinged on nine young victims’ memories of molestation and ritual abuse—memories that they had supposedly forgotten and then, after being interviewed, recovered. The case fell apart, in 1990, because the prosecution could produce no persuasive evidence of the victims’ claims. A cognitive psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus, who had consulted on the case, wondered whether the children’s memories might have been fabricated—in Münsterberg’s formulation, involuntarily elaborated—rather than actually recovered.
To test her theory, Loftus gave a group of volunteers the rudimentary outlines of a childhood experience: getting lost in a mall and being rescued by a kindly adult. She told the subjects, falsely, that the scenario was real and had taken place when they were young. (For verisimilitude, Loftus asked their parents for biographical details that she could plant in each story.) Then she debriefed the subjects twice, with the interviews separated by one or two weeks. By the second interview, six of the twenty-four test subjects had internalized the story, weaving in sensory and emotional details of their own. Loftus and other researchers have since used similar techniques to create false memories of near-drownings, animal attacks, and encounters with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (impossible, since Bugs is a Warner Bros. character).
Earlier this year, two forensic psychologists—Julia Shaw, of the University of Bedfordshire, and Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia—upped the ante. Writing in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, they described a false memory method, not of getting lost in childhood but of committing a crime in adolescence. They modeled their work on Loftus’s, sending questionnaires to each of their participant’s parents to gather background information. (Any past run-ins with the law would eliminate a student from the study.) Then they divided the students into two groups and told each a different kind of false story. One group was prompted to remember an emotional event, such as getting attacked by a dog. The other was prompted to remember a crime—an assault, for example—that led to an encounter with the police. At no time during the experiments were the participants allowed to communicate with their parents.
What Shaw and Porter found astonished them. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty-per-cent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw told me. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” After three debriefing sessions, seventy-six per cent of the students claimed to remember the false emotional event; nearly the same amount—seventy per cent—remembered the fictional crime. Shaw and Porter hadn’t put undue stress on the students; in fact, they had treated them in a friendly way. All it took was a suggestion from an authoritative source, and the subjects’ imaginations did the rest. The students seemed almost eager to self-incriminate.
One young woman spun a story about a kind of love triangle. In the first debriefing, she remembered the incident as a fistfight between her and another girl. In the second, she remembered having thrown a small rock at her adversary after the girl uttered a slur. By the third debriefing, the rock had grown to the size of her fist and she had hurled it at the girl’s face. “It was very emotional,” Shaw said. “Each time she’d reënact the event, the rock would fill her hand a little bit more.” Nothing in the woman’s affect suggested that the memory was false. She earnestly believed in the truth of her confession, as most of her fellow-participants did theirs. The memory was vivid, loaded with details about the crime that the interviewer had not furnished. Moreover, Shaw and Porter could find no personality traits that distinguished the false confessors from the few holdouts, and no way of identifying who was most susceptible.
Researchers conclude that these are troubling findings. They mimic, in the gentlest way, what can happen during police questioning: a small lie, told to shake loose the truth, rattles around in a suspect’s imagination and takes root. The psychologist Saul Kassin has studied interrogation and false confession for decades. He told me that Shaw and Porter’s experiment illustrates perfectly how social pressure can make innocent people admit to wrongdoing. “Think about the dilemma the suspect now faces: ‘I don’t have a memory for this, but the person who took care of me does. Therefore it must be true and I have to find a way to remember it.’ ”
After reading this article, this is another plausible premise to the LOST saga. As the plot started, we were on a fairly straight and narrow crash survival tale, but over the course of time, it moved off into very different, strange tangents unrelated to the initial premise. It is like minor suggestions were being conjured and amplified in a person's mind - - - creating a roller coaster of self-importance to criminal behavior memories. A theory is that LOST was the creation within some character's mind.
THEOREM OF PROBABILITY
Bayes' Theorem is a mathematical formula to find probabilities of certain outcomes.
In the Bayesian (or epistemological) interpretation, probability measures a degree of belief. Bayes's theorem then links the degree of belief in a proposition before and after accounting for evidence. For example, suppose it is believed with 50% certainty that a coin is twice as likely to land heads than tails. If the coin is flipped a number of times and the outcomes observed, that degree of belief may rise, fall or remain the same depending on the results.
For proposition A and evidence B,
P(A), the prior, is the initial degree of belief in A.
P(A|B), the posterior, is the degree of belief having accounted for B.
the quotient P(B|A)/P(B) represents the support B provides for A.
In a diagram form, the theorem looks like this:
If knowledge of one independent value is sufficient to deduce several outcomes.
It is in human nature to try to predict the future or future outcomes. There is a great reward in knowing what is going to happen. One could bet on the outcome (such as a horse race or stock price) to become quite wealthy. Or one could weigh the values to determine a course of action to avoid a hazardous risk.
The latter is the basis of insurance, the calculation of certain past events and conditions is used to create the value of an insurance pool to pay claims.
There is also the ego intelligence that tries to force future outcomes by manipulating the present values. In the stock world, it is insider trading to floating rumors to affect stock prices.
When we apply probability theorem to LOST, we cannot diagram a clear valuation to the end.
Initially, we have the following starting point:
Plane crash - - - probable outcomes: death, injury, survival.
If death, then the future factors (plot points) would be purgatory (limbo), hell (punishment), heaven (paradise/reward).
If injury, then future factors would be pain, human interaction (care), cure or death.
If survival, then future factors would be food (starvation), shelter (danger), rescue (home).
To attempt to diagram the plot probabilities of LOST, one has to start with the crash as the key starting point:
The plane crash yields five probable outcomes for a character:
If survives the plane crash, the possibilities are living in danger on the island or going home.
If one does not survive the plane crash, the possibilities are heaven, redemption or nothingness.
Nothingness is the black void of ceasing to exist at any level. It is the worst fate for a human spirit.
So which theorem path did the LOST story take?
In the Bayesian (or epistemological) interpretation, probability measures a degree of belief. Bayes's theorem then links the degree of belief in a proposition before and after accounting for evidence. For example, suppose it is believed with 50% certainty that a coin is twice as likely to land heads than tails. If the coin is flipped a number of times and the outcomes observed, that degree of belief may rise, fall or remain the same depending on the results.
For proposition A and evidence B,
P(A), the prior, is the initial degree of belief in A.
P(A|B), the posterior, is the degree of belief having accounted for B.
the quotient P(B|A)/P(B) represents the support B provides for A.
In a diagram form, the theorem looks like this:
It is in human nature to try to predict the future or future outcomes. There is a great reward in knowing what is going to happen. One could bet on the outcome (such as a horse race or stock price) to become quite wealthy. Or one could weigh the values to determine a course of action to avoid a hazardous risk.
The latter is the basis of insurance, the calculation of certain past events and conditions is used to create the value of an insurance pool to pay claims.
There is also the ego intelligence that tries to force future outcomes by manipulating the present values. In the stock world, it is insider trading to floating rumors to affect stock prices.
When we apply probability theorem to LOST, we cannot diagram a clear valuation to the end.
Initially, we have the following starting point:
Plane crash - - - probable outcomes: death, injury, survival.
If death, then the future factors (plot points) would be purgatory (limbo), hell (punishment), heaven (paradise/reward).
If injury, then future factors would be pain, human interaction (care), cure or death.
If survival, then future factors would be food (starvation), shelter (danger), rescue (home).
To attempt to diagram the plot probabilities of LOST, one has to start with the crash as the key starting point:
If survives the plane crash, the possibilities are living in danger on the island or going home.
If one does not survive the plane crash, the possibilities are heaven, redemption or nothingness.
Nothingness is the black void of ceasing to exist at any level. It is the worst fate for a human spirit.
So which theorem path did the LOST story take?
Friday, March 6, 2015
GEMINI SYNDRONE
There is a philosophy that each person is born with a duality.
Gemini is the ‘twins of the zodiac.’ That itself kind of captures the whole concept of duality, but on a philosophical level; you have yin-yang, positive and negative, day and night, and left and right. These are principles that we created. We made words for those things to help us understand the world that we live in. Bringing those two sides together, everybody has good and bad days, good things and bad things, and even we have good shows and bad shows. It’s just trying to balance those two things to make your life more fulfilling and trying to make it the most positive experience you can.
Each person could be said to contain two individual characters.
There is the conscious self as opposed to the unconscious self. In the light of day we have a public self, while at night we can have a private, dark self where societal rules do not apply.
There is the good behavioral person as opposed to the evil persona. Each person has within themselves to do evil. It is how we check this bad twin is what keeps normal people from becoming criminals.
We have split personalities of the work ethic and the procrastinator, where there is a moving slide mixing the two elements to determine the course of our daily lives. Some days we are work horses, other days we are lazy bums.
We also have various emotional states that are constantly in flux. Love-hate relationships. Kindness versus cruelty. Extroverted energy to introverted paralysis. There are various shades of the emotional self that has many variables based upon cultural and environmental cues.
LOST had various themes which included a duality principle.
The mirror is a reflection of one's self. It also could be considered to represent the other side of your personality (usually a darker one).
Duality is a central principle in Egyptian burial mythology, where a person's soul is divided into parts which are reunited if the person passes final judgment.
Several main characters went through drastic phases in their lives. For example, Ben was a shy, introverted school boy who deep inside hated his father to the point of being an evil mass murderer and dark tyrant. But even then, the story twists unbelievably to Ben as a sympathetic nice guy waiting to cure his sins in the sideways purgatory. Fans were drawn quickly to the evil Ben more so than the redeemed Ben.
And the fact that LOST was set in two different dimensions is still a cause of great concern. Was the sideways world purgatory, heaven, dream state or alternative universe? Likewise, was the island time line real, imagined, science fiction worm hole or psychotic?
The series raised duality concepts but failed to clearly address them in a coherent fashion.
Gemini is the ‘twins of the zodiac.’ That itself kind of captures the whole concept of duality, but on a philosophical level; you have yin-yang, positive and negative, day and night, and left and right. These are principles that we created. We made words for those things to help us understand the world that we live in. Bringing those two sides together, everybody has good and bad days, good things and bad things, and even we have good shows and bad shows. It’s just trying to balance those two things to make your life more fulfilling and trying to make it the most positive experience you can.
Each person could be said to contain two individual characters.
There is the conscious self as opposed to the unconscious self. In the light of day we have a public self, while at night we can have a private, dark self where societal rules do not apply.
There is the good behavioral person as opposed to the evil persona. Each person has within themselves to do evil. It is how we check this bad twin is what keeps normal people from becoming criminals.
We have split personalities of the work ethic and the procrastinator, where there is a moving slide mixing the two elements to determine the course of our daily lives. Some days we are work horses, other days we are lazy bums.
We also have various emotional states that are constantly in flux. Love-hate relationships. Kindness versus cruelty. Extroverted energy to introverted paralysis. There are various shades of the emotional self that has many variables based upon cultural and environmental cues.
LOST had various themes which included a duality principle.
The mirror is a reflection of one's self. It also could be considered to represent the other side of your personality (usually a darker one).
Duality is a central principle in Egyptian burial mythology, where a person's soul is divided into parts which are reunited if the person passes final judgment.
Several main characters went through drastic phases in their lives. For example, Ben was a shy, introverted school boy who deep inside hated his father to the point of being an evil mass murderer and dark tyrant. But even then, the story twists unbelievably to Ben as a sympathetic nice guy waiting to cure his sins in the sideways purgatory. Fans were drawn quickly to the evil Ben more so than the redeemed Ben.
And the fact that LOST was set in two different dimensions is still a cause of great concern. Was the sideways world purgatory, heaven, dream state or alternative universe? Likewise, was the island time line real, imagined, science fiction worm hole or psychotic?
The series raised duality concepts but failed to clearly address them in a coherent fashion.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
DEAD TWICE
The British newspaper, The Independent, reported the death experiences of a man who "died" twice, once after a motorcycle accident and once after a drug overdose. In both cases, his experience was exactly the same.
On the sensation of death itself:
"I had no idea, it was just black emptiness. No thoughts, no consciousness, nothing.
"Both times I was just "not there". It was just all black. I would describe it as when you take a nap. A short nap with no dream, you wake up and it feels like you've been sleeping a long time, when in reality it's only been about 15 minutes.
"The only reason I know is because the doctors were obligated to share the information with me. "So yeah, you were dead for a couple of minutes, just FYI" hahaha.
"So if the doctors wouldn't have said anything I would've just thought that I took a dreamless nap."
On the experience itself:
"It was definitely not just a gap. Much like a dreamless nap, you don't just wake up and feel like time just jumped ahead. You know that you've been asleep for a while. At the same time, you can't really remember experiencing anything at all, unless you had a dream.
"So yes and no. I experienced something, and that something was nothing."
On his religious viewpoint and his experiences being dead:
"I have always been an atheist, but I have always had a part of me that hoped there was a God or Heaven or something greater than us. I mean, who wouldn't want there to be a Heaven?
"I am still an atheist, and now I know that there is no such thing as God or Heaven. At least not for me. My reasoning behind that is no God would ever put a person and family through such a experience.
"I am an Atheist, and always will be. But I believe that your belief is your belief. The only thing we can share is our own experiences and let people make up their own mind. People need to stop forcing their own beliefs onto others."
On death itself:
"Death is death. Once your dead, that's it, it's over."
This is an report of one person, whose statements cannot be confirmed by science. However, when dealing with such experiences in the past, medical providers have been told by other "dead" patients of seeing a white light and a sense of being floating upward.
It may be a question of subconscious belief memories kicking in as a defense mechanism.
But if this man's account is taken as fact, then the premise of LOST, with its life and death symbolism such as the sideways world, is totally false. It would bring the premise of the series more in line with the dream state or coma theories, where the brain is still processing information to the conscious self.
On the sensation of death itself:
"I had no idea, it was just black emptiness. No thoughts, no consciousness, nothing.
"Both times I was just "not there". It was just all black. I would describe it as when you take a nap. A short nap with no dream, you wake up and it feels like you've been sleeping a long time, when in reality it's only been about 15 minutes.
"The only reason I know is because the doctors were obligated to share the information with me. "So yeah, you were dead for a couple of minutes, just FYI" hahaha.
"So if the doctors wouldn't have said anything I would've just thought that I took a dreamless nap."
On the experience itself:
"It was definitely not just a gap. Much like a dreamless nap, you don't just wake up and feel like time just jumped ahead. You know that you've been asleep for a while. At the same time, you can't really remember experiencing anything at all, unless you had a dream.
"So yes and no. I experienced something, and that something was nothing."
On his religious viewpoint and his experiences being dead:
"I have always been an atheist, but I have always had a part of me that hoped there was a God or Heaven or something greater than us. I mean, who wouldn't want there to be a Heaven?
"I am still an atheist, and now I know that there is no such thing as God or Heaven. At least not for me. My reasoning behind that is no God would ever put a person and family through such a experience.
"I am an Atheist, and always will be. But I believe that your belief is your belief. The only thing we can share is our own experiences and let people make up their own mind. People need to stop forcing their own beliefs onto others."
On death itself:
"Death is death. Once your dead, that's it, it's over."
This is an report of one person, whose statements cannot be confirmed by science. However, when dealing with such experiences in the past, medical providers have been told by other "dead" patients of seeing a white light and a sense of being floating upward.
It may be a question of subconscious belief memories kicking in as a defense mechanism.
But if this man's account is taken as fact, then the premise of LOST, with its life and death symbolism such as the sideways world, is totally false. It would bring the premise of the series more in line with the dream state or coma theories, where the brain is still processing information to the conscious self.
Monday, March 2, 2015
THE ANTI-HERO
We live in dark times in culture and literature, partly because of the long malaise of a deep recession and less opportunities for young graduates in their career fields. Modern culture has a clear dystopian future vibe.
In many respects, LOST also culled that genre.
An anti-hero is a flawed hero, and therefore, much more interesting then the more traditional heroes.
Anti-heroes can be working on the side of good, but with a serious flaw, or a horrible past, or for reasons that are selfish and not entirely "pure." They can also be working for the side of evil, but with hidden noble intentions, or other underlying complexities. These darker heroes can be jerks, pathetic, hard, jaded, or mean. However, all anti-heroes must have enough heroic qualities, intentions, or strength (physical including attraction or mental) to somehow gain the sympathy of the audience.
The show was filled with many (maybe too many) anti-heroes.
Ben had an immediate and strong fan base. The portrayal of a cold, emotionless psychopath was a brilliant hook to apply real danger to the series characters.
Sawyer was the traditional anti-hero. He was a loner, a criminal, a charmer and a thief. He was so easy going to be likeable and despised at the same time.
Kate was also an anti-hero but wrapped up in the mirage of the girl-next-store image. She was entirely selfish and manipulating the men who crossed her path, usually ending in very bad trauma.
Locke was never a true hero. He was the door mat that other characters used to scuff on on their way to their goals. He was a dreamer who could never connect to his dreams. He was naive, and heroes are wise. He had self-esteem issues while heroes can look beyond their own faults to the common good.
The body snatching by MIB to create an evil Flocke did nothing to restore any honor to the Locke character. MIB, as an intellectually evil smoke creature, had similar qualities of Ben, but with no thread of heroic intentions. MIB vowed to somehow leave the island, but we don't know why nor did we care. One has to care about their heroes, including the anti-heroes.
Jack should have been the traditional hero. He had the skill set, being a "miracle" surgeon. He had the calm intellect to command order within the group. But once he got out of that traditional role to begin lead missions into the jungle or attack the Others, he fell out of favor with many in the group. The castaways first leaned on Jack for survival, but once rescue was lost and the beach camp settled in Jack's traits were no longer needed by them.
In many respects, LOST also culled that genre.
An anti-hero is a flawed hero, and therefore, much more interesting then the more traditional heroes.
Anti-heroes can be working on the side of good, but with a serious flaw, or a horrible past, or for reasons that are selfish and not entirely "pure." They can also be working for the side of evil, but with hidden noble intentions, or other underlying complexities. These darker heroes can be jerks, pathetic, hard, jaded, or mean. However, all anti-heroes must have enough heroic qualities, intentions, or strength (physical including attraction or mental) to somehow gain the sympathy of the audience.
The show was filled with many (maybe too many) anti-heroes.
Ben had an immediate and strong fan base. The portrayal of a cold, emotionless psychopath was a brilliant hook to apply real danger to the series characters.
Sawyer was the traditional anti-hero. He was a loner, a criminal, a charmer and a thief. He was so easy going to be likeable and despised at the same time.
Kate was also an anti-hero but wrapped up in the mirage of the girl-next-store image. She was entirely selfish and manipulating the men who crossed her path, usually ending in very bad trauma.
Locke was never a true hero. He was the door mat that other characters used to scuff on on their way to their goals. He was a dreamer who could never connect to his dreams. He was naive, and heroes are wise. He had self-esteem issues while heroes can look beyond their own faults to the common good.
The body snatching by MIB to create an evil Flocke did nothing to restore any honor to the Locke character. MIB, as an intellectually evil smoke creature, had similar qualities of Ben, but with no thread of heroic intentions. MIB vowed to somehow leave the island, but we don't know why nor did we care. One has to care about their heroes, including the anti-heroes.
Jack should have been the traditional hero. He had the skill set, being a "miracle" surgeon. He had the calm intellect to command order within the group. But once he got out of that traditional role to begin lead missions into the jungle or attack the Others, he fell out of favor with many in the group. The castaways first leaned on Jack for survival, but once rescue was lost and the beach camp settled in Jack's traits were no longer needed by them.
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