THE MISSING

The BBC featured a story on the past history of a nice tropical island with a dark past.

Panama's Isla Coiba bears all the hallmarks of a perfect desert island: gin-clear water, powdery white sand, a fringe of palm trees against a backdrop of dense, unexplored rain forest. When I arrived on the island, the peaceful beach was scattered with a handful of travelers bobbing in the bath-warm water or taking lazy afternoon naps on the salt-encrusted hammocks.

Yet this island paradise harbors a dark past.

For almost a century, Isla Coiba was home to a notorious island prison, rumored to be where the country's most dangerous criminals were sent and where political prisoners disappeared. With the island home to various poisonous snakes and insects and surrounded by shark-infested waters, there was no hope of escape for the thousands of prisoners, known as Los Desaparecidos (The Missing).

There were many elements of a prison on LOST. The island was protected from outsiders such as modern prisons. The island had "security systems" like the smoke monster to keep people on the island and in their place. The island had a warden, which was later revealed as "the guardian." MIB only wanted to "escape" the island like an inmate wants to escape prison. The island's harsh existence and danger was the punishment for those broken souls who happened to find themselves on the island.

A few of the characters really deserved to be institutionalized in a prison. But most had no outward signs of being criminals. For example, Rose and Bernard seemed to be a happy, older couple. The only problem they had was Rose's terminal cancer. One could argue that terminal cancer is a form of medical prison that a patient has to endure. Shannon was a spoiled brat who pawned an existence off her boyfriends and family members. Not necessarily the type of activities that would lead to a potential island prison death sentence. The same goes for Boone, who apparently did nothing wrong in his life except help out his half-sister, Shannon.

The concept of a country or culture sending away its "misfits" to an inaccessible island is not a foreign one. Lepers were shipped off to a specific island in the Hawaiian chain. Even political/war prisoners have been kept at Gitmo, outside of the U.S. federal prison system. The entire country of Australia started out as a British penal colony.  "Out of sight, out of mind" is one way leaders deal with pesky social or political problems. But the LOST survivors don't seem to be a rambo-like group of rebels who threaten the very existence of the democratic, free world.

They were just missing persons. And there is a growing number of people who go missing every day. Some, by choice - - - running away from their debts, family, job, mental depression. Some, by force through human kidnapping and human trafficking. Some, the victims of violent criminal behavior. The latter can be a forced imprisonment, almost slavery, in an abusive situation. 

LOST does not fit one mold in the prison context. It had elements of capture, imprisonment, and forced labor against one's free will. But there was no moral equivalent driving any personal behavior. 
But the context of being a prison is still the mortar that fused together several plot lines.

HARD DRIVE

The human brain is the most complex organ in the body. Scientists still do not fully understand how it operates; how it can capture images, store them and recall them as vivid memories. Some believe that the brain works like a computer hard drive, in which proteins that bond to neurons communicate and store information. The body's program code may be at an atomic level which would be exponentially greater than the largest and faster computer systems on the planet.

To equate the brain with a computer hard drive is a good comparison. But what happens when a brain misfires? Is it like a crashing hard drive? When information in a computer hard drive is fragmented, the bytes of information are dispersed on various parts of the drive - - - to be sewed back together by the operating code to be then displayed on the screen. In the human brain, when its information and recall gets fragmented, we call it a form of mental illness or disease.

Multiple personality disorders include hallucinations, paranoia, violent behavior, illusions and illogical actions. Those traits were found in many of the main characters in LOST.

One can take the hard drive theory for the show and break it down into differing premises. First, the show could have been a large, on-line multiplayer, role game of Survivor which had its main server programming break down into a different kind of game. Add the component of augmented or virtual reality, the players (characters) could have been so absorbed into the game that it turned into their new reality. Some addictive personalities could then have been trapped in this virtual world.

Second, the premise could be a metaphor that the main characters brains were malfunctioning like a crashed drive. There are many examples of characters shown with mental illness (Hurley and Libby), mental breakdowns and suicidal thoughts (Jack and Locke), murder (Ben, Sawyer, Kate), torture (Sayid and Ben), and even justified homicide (Bernard, Hurley).

There seems to be a great deal of violent criminal behavior as the undercurrent of the series.

The bonds between these main characters could reflect that they were brought to a place collectively in order to protect the rest of the world from them. This idea would fit into the statements by Jacob that he alone brought people to the island. And the fact that MIB was called a "security" system, it would seem they would symbolize a warden and a guard in a prison.

The people brought to the island were not candidates but prisoners. Perhaps it was found that each of the main characters had dangerous mental traits that could trigger abhorrent behavior in the real world. So the authorities ditched them on a private, secluded, high security island to test new penal rehabilitation techniques.

What happened on the island would confirm the authorities worst fears about some of the prisoners. There were violent episodes, Some people changed and went crazy (Claire), others went psychopathic (Ben). Without the structure of prison cells, the inmates ran the asylum.

Which is fine. The prison revolt was orchestrated by the prison guard (MIB) who was fed up with the warden and his games. MIB needed help from the inmates in order to escape the island. But it seems that the only true escape from the island is death.

Third, you can combine the two theories into one in the respect that this prison escape adventure is being a transformative hallucination of a criminal mental patient. The vivid illusions drawn upon the stories of other inmates in therapy sessions can be the building blocks for the action, the escapism, for a person who is serving a life sentence without parole. And the dream aspect could be confirmed by the "happy" ending for the inmates in heaven - - - which is very odd since all their misbehavior, crimes and sins all "vanish" once they leave the island. This is odd finish - - - except that is the fantasy outcome for someone who has committed vile acts without comprehension or accountability or guilt. The dreamers miswired brain allows him or her the fantasy of justification, free will and acceptance by his or her fellow rogues and misfits.

SOCIAL DEATH

In 1993, social psychologist Craig Haney  began studying the effects of solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison in California, one of the first "super-max" prisons in the country.

Twenty years later, he went back to gather more information — and found many of the same inmates still suffering alone in their cells.

"It was shocking, frankly," Haney, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California Santa Cruz, recently told The New York Times.

Despite not being peer reviewed as a formal study yet, Haney's interviewed of 56 prisoners, all of whom spent between 10 and 28 years in solitary confinement.

The results provide the most comprehensive look at the effects of long-term solitary confinement yet, according to the Times.

An estimated 75,000 prisoners across the US live in Special Housing Units, also known as the SHU — what the Federal Bureau of Prisons calls solitary confinement. There, they spend up to 23 hours locked in cells often no larger than the span of their outstretched arms with little to no interaction with others. 

During their few precious hours free from bars, they shower, exercise, and tend to their medical needs, still often alone.

In such extreme isolation for years, the prisoners Haney interviewed at Pelican Bay experienced what he calls a "social death."

“They were grieving for their lost lives, for their loss of connectedness to the social world and their families outside, and also for their lost selves,” Haney told the Times. “Most of them really did understand that they had lost who they were, and weren’t sure of who they had become."

The inmates describe the experience much more viscerally.

One compared Pelican Bay's solitary confinement wing to "a weapons labs or a place for human experiments," the Times reported. Another admitted he imagines his family watching TV with him and talks to them.

"Maybe I'm crazy, but it makes me feel like I'm with them," the inmate told Haney, according to the Times.

Yet another had considered begging a judge for the death penalty.

In 1993, the inmates Haney interviewed reported high rates of psychiatric issues, like depression and irrational anger and even confusion and dizziness.

When Haney returned to Pelican Bay in 2013, according to the Times, the prisoner's conditions hadn't improved.

Sixty-three percent of the inmates in solitary for more than 10 years told Haney they felt near an "impending breakdown," the Times reported. 

By contrast, only 4% of the regular inmates at the maximum security facility described themselves in the same manner. And 73% of solitary prisoners reported being chronically depressed, compared to 48% of maximum-security inmates.

Prolonged depression has been linked to the shrinkage of the brain's hippocampus, an area of the brain that helps us form new memories, process long-term memories, and link emotions to those memories.

Ian Hickie, the co-director of the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Research Institute, helped lead the largest international study comparing brain volumes in people with and without major depression. The study, published in June 2015, found that "more episodes of depression a person had, the greater the reduction in hippocampus size," he told The Guardian newspaper.

Aside from depression, the lack of physical activity, social interaction, or natural sunlight in solitary would likely be enough to cause a person harm, explained, Haney. "Each one is sufficient enough to change the brain and change it dramatically, whether it is brief or extended. And when I say extended, I mean days, not decades," he said.

While these studies show that isolation in a prison setting can cause severe mental and emotional problems, when we examine LOST's foundational story lines that have the basis in severe emotional and mental issues, one can see a link between the two.

Isolation does not have to come from prison confinement. At times, people create their own prisons. They withdraw from the world; hide in their own homes; remove contact with friends and family members. In such a situation, their mind preys upon their anxieties, fears, phobias and disillusions about how bad their life has become because of X, Y or Z reasons.  

Normal human beings live life. They work, try, fail, learn and try again. But those people trapped in their own mental prisons create the illusion of a real life because they cannot experience a real one. And this illusion based on past memories can be as vivid as reality itself.

So, even non-institutional people can create their own "social death." People are  grieving for their lost lives, for their loss of connectedness to the social world and their families outside, and also for their lost selves. That sounds like the foundational story engine for the LOST series.

DIRE WARNING

Literature and popular culture have always been a source of future developments, especially in the concepts of technology. Science fiction writers in 1800s dreamed about space exploration, which would occur at its zenith with the moon landing in 1969.

Technology is supposed to be good for mankind.  It makes life easier. Work more productive. More time for man to think about important things.

But even the most tuned technologists have a grave warning about the future of technology.

Steve Wozniak,  Apple co-founder and programming whiz, recently predicted that artificial intelligence's detrimental impact on the future of humanity to warnings from the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking.

"Computers are going to take over from humans, no question," he told an Australian financial publication.  Recent technological advancements have convinced him that writer Raymond Kurzweil – who believes machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence within the next few decades – is onto something.

"Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people," he said. "If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently."

"Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that …" Wozniak said.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has been the most vocal about his concerns about AI, calling it the "biggest existential threat" to mankind. He is an investor in DeepMind and Vicarious, two AI ventures, but “it’s not from the standpoint of actually trying to make any investment return," he said.  "I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on…nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Musk said. “But you have to be careful.”

Gates said,  "I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned," he wrote. Similarly, physicist Stephen Hawking has warned  that AI could eventually "take off on its own." It's a scenario that doesn't bode well for our future as a species: "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded," he said.

In LOST, the island housed once was "cutting edge" technology and research facilities. It was Dharma that was looking for answers to the darkest questions and mysteries in science, including end-of-the-world scenarios. 

There has been a debate on whether Dharma killed itself off, or whether it was the technology that it created that led to the mass destruction and purge.

The smoke monster may not have been invented by Dharma, but could have Dharma "programmed" this smoke monster in an attempt to give it human thoughts and memories in order to control it?  It would seem to be a reasonable scientific inquiry. But with many science experiments, unintended consequences could happen - - - such as the smoke monster learning to mimic human behavior, including violence, anger and murder. It could have used memories as a template to shape shift into human form to feed off the emotions of other life forms. For the island was kept on edge by fear, one of the strongest human emotions. Perhaps that was the source of the smoke monster's energy.

Further, Dharma could have created the smoke monster(s) and during the Incident accidently sent them back into time to the ancient Egyptian period. For some, Jacob and MIB as smoke monsters, as well as Crazy Mother, would show an advanced being trying to shed its confusing and conflicting knowledge base of humans. And the smoke monsters did not time shift back to present Dharma - - - but lingered on the island to re-live their immortal life spans, bitter about this external prison. The game itself with human pawns could have been the reaction of smoke monsters against Dharma's research  into the power of the island light.

So, Dharma failed to heed their own warning signs in creating technology which challenged time and space itself. Remember, Daniel had worked with Dharma in Michigan after his Oxford tenure. It is the time skips that give us a clue that Daniel may have set in motion all of the destructive patterns through the power to manipulate time. His return to the island was also to make amends for the horror he had created (akin to discovering the atom bomb) which was wrecking havoc on his psyche. History is littered with scientists who regretted their inventions and discoveries that were corrupted into acts of evil.