THE DARK

A major theme of LOST was fear. Many characters dreaded the jungle, the unknown wild, and the appearance of the smoke monster. They also feared the island's Others and the dangers they posed to their survival.

Fear of the dark is common and an almost universal fear for at least a part of our lives (usually some part of our childhood). Though it's not so much the dark that we fear, but the unknown. There is an inner sense of danger that brings it to the conscious mind. Things one cannot see can hurt you. This trait or human characteristic is from early man's development, when mankind was not the top predator in his environment. 

As humans mature, we internalize the real odds of something dangerous hiding in the dark, and that calms us in appropriate situations, but that fear can come back when we are in unfamiliar places. The reason we are all afraid of the dark at times is because that fear gave us an advantage during our evolutionary history. Since man relies upon his senses for survival, taking away one of them (sight) because of darkness would naturally lead to anxiety about what could be out there in the dark.
Ancient man quickly learned that many predators prefer the cover of darkness to hunt and over time that association strengthened into a subconscious absolute: stay out of the dark because that's where the danger is.

 

While fear of the dark can manifest itself as an acute reaction—like panicked screaming when someone suddenly turns out the lights, or as insomnia, as a recent study conducted at the University of Toronto suggests—it more commonly manifests as foreboding anxiety. The emotion of anxiety plays a specific role in our behavioral responses to stimuli just as the emotions of love, anger, and sadness do, acting to increase our ability to cope with stress and more fully exploit beneficial opportunities.

Each emotion can be thought of as a computer program designed to accomplish some specific fitness task particularly well. If the current task is courtship, romantic love is helpful. If one is being betrayed, anger is useful. If a tiger is attacking, then fearful flight and avoidance are best. If people are disapproving, then social anxiety may be appropriate. Different emotions, however, must be orchestrated, just as endocrine function must be coordinated in an endocrine orchestra. Emotional responses must fit changing adaptive challenges, with each emotion fitting a particular kind of situation.

Specifically, anxiety increases your awareness of situations that may damage your reproductive resources. Not just your vital signs, but your relationships, income, social standing, physical features; anything that makes you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to reproduce.
Unlike anger or sadness, which occur in direct response to a specific event, the study showed responses to environmental cues indicating a potential future loss with anxiety prior to the expected event, since that's when it is most evolutionarily beneficial. Our ancestors who best recognized and responded to these cues increased their chances of survival and reproduction compared to their more less-aware peers.

Since that response is correlated with natural selection, certain cues—such as snake- or cat-eye patterns, spider-like objects, and darkness (where the snakes, leopards, and spiders all live)—more easily invoke that emotion. This is the result of generation upon generation of early humans reacting to and subsequently preparing for dangers such as these. That's why many ancient threats—uncontrolled fire, spiders, snakes, predators, and darkness—are more easily instigate a negative response, even in small children, than modern threats like automobiles, nuclear war, or guns do.

While anxiety is deeply rooted in our psyche, it is not entirely instinctive. We also learn fear and anxiety responses from our parents. If a small child is frightened of an new or unknown object and its mother responds in a calming manner, the kid learns that the item is not a threat. If the parent responds with apprehension herself, however, the child's fears are confirmed and enhanced. This allows for offspring to rapidly learn of the dangers around themselves without actually having to be bitten by snakes, mauled by lions, or be electrocuted by a penny in the wall socket while simultaneously figuring out that everything from leaves and small rocks to thunder and scary scenes on TV aren't actual threats.

It is a system that is based on experience and transfer of knowledge, but triggers an instinctive response. This subtle gnawing emotion has been honed and refined over millennia by both nature and nurture into a vital survival response that remains as useful in the modern world as it did in the Neolithic Period of Humanity. As environmental cues have changed over time, anxiety over social interactions and property such as finding shelter and not starving to death, remains the same. Humans have the inner voice that tells us to keep safe so you can live to reproduce another day. 

The fear of the dark, and by extension the fear of the unknown, are hard wired tools to make sure humans don't ever forget the basic purpose of all human beings. Fear itself is a survival mechanism.

BIGGEST WINNER

If one looks back at the series, who was the character that got the most he or she wanted - - - who came out most ahead in the series?

I initially thought of Eloise Hawking, who in the context of the conclusion of the sideways story arc, got what she wanted: her son, Daniel, would not "awaken" and leave her to join the others in the after life church. It would seem that all of the elaborate trials, hurdles, manipulations and events on the island were orchestrated by Eloise in order to keep the 815 survivors from taking Daniel away from her. Eloise was the one who seemed to know everything about everyone and how this universe operated.

But Eloise's motivations may have been an elaborate singularity. The character who achieve more personal goals was Ben Linus.

Ben accomplished much in his island life:

1. He killed his abusive father.
2. He purged an entire community of Dharma workers.
3. He banished his leadership rival, Widmore.
4. He took absolute control over the Others.
5. He kidnapped Alex and made her his "daughter."
6. He needed a spinal surgeon and one fell out of the sky.
7. He loved manipulating people and events to gain more power.
8. He had people fear his commands.
9. He developed a cult of followers.
10. He also "survived" a fatal chest wound when he was a boy; to be reincarnated at the temple.
11. He had the power to control time.
12. He had the power to summon a violent smoke monster.
13. He got revenge on Widmore for killing Alex.
14. He got revenge on Jacob for not believing in him.
15. He got his life spared by the mercy of one of Jacob's followers.
16. He got a new purpose from Hurley.

Despite all the evil bloodshed Ben contributed to the island events, he would wind up in the after life a humble high school teacher who had concern for his students. He would have a different relationship with his father. He would seek out a relationship with a past bitter enemy, Danielle Rousseau. He got the personal option NOT to move on with Hurley, in order to proceed to with his plan to create A Wonderful Life for himself in the sideways world. How Danielle or Alex would ever forgive Ben for his sins once they awakened their memories is unknown. Like Eloise, if Ben could keep those memories suppressed, he would achieve is ultimate goal of having a real family life with the Rousseaus.

In a bizarre twist, Ben actually came out well ahead of any of the main characters in the end. He really got everything he ever wanted without any truly bad consequences. Ben's fantasy life was lived and coming true in the after life.

QUANTUM EXPERIMENTAL VIEW

There is a new way to look at the LOST conundrums.

It is an analogy often used to explain difficult situations in the show, The Big Bang Theory. It is called "Schrodinger's cat." Schrodinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes explained as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Edwin Schrodinger in 1935. Though he never actually created the experiment, he wanted to illustrate a problem in one interpretation of quantum mechanics as it  applied to everyday objects. The issue Schrodinger had was the this interpretation of quantum mechanics did not yield a description of an objective reality but dealt only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta, entities that fit neither the classical idea of particles nor the classical idea of waves. The act of measurement causes the set of probabilities to immediately and randomly assume only one of the possible values.

Schrodinger's experiment postulated that a cat would be placed in a sealed box with a vial of poison. The poison would be released at an unknown, random time. This uncertainty of what is happening inside the sealed box presents the possibility that a cat that may be both alive and dead, depending on an earlier random event. This thought experiment is also often featured in theoretical discussions of quantum physics.  In the course of developing this experiment, Schrodinger coined the term Verschränkung ("entanglement").

LOST is the cat in the magic box we all call our television sets.

Based upon the information we have received, we did not know whether the characters were dead or alive at any given moment in the series.   Also, the show featured themes that included paradoxes (time travel events), various aspects of unique energy properties (the heart of the island) and most certainly the entanglement of various diverse character lives with each other. Faraday thought of the island dynamic as a measurable place in time and space, until he found that the set of probabilities could be adversely affected by "variables," which in some viewers minds meant the free will decisions of the characters.

Further, Ben clearly described the concept of the Magic Box to Locke. Ben said that if Locke wanted something badly, the magic box would produce it. Locke wanted to see the box, but Ben scoffed that aside. In Locke's case, suddenly Anthony Cooper was captured and on the island (as he said right after an automobile accident; and that the island was hell). At the time, Locke's whole life revolved around the betrayal of his father and the revenge he sought for the downfalls in his life. Those strong emotional thoughts created the situation where Locke could confront his worse nightmare face to face.

The island as a magic box does not yield an objective reality, but dealt with the probabilities of observing various aspects of a person's life outside the classical ideas of religious thought (judgment, punishment, penance, accountability, and redemption). It gave the main characters various opportunities to relive difficult moments in their lives, to give them second chances or the possibility to change (their perceived outcome of key life events). The island could be viewed as one large interactive, interpersonal experiment in which the viewers got an inside peek of the events transpiring therein.

JACK'S WORLDS

“ No man is able to make progress when he is wavering between opposite things. ”
— Epictetus 

As a follow up on the last post, there is something to be said that Jack was caught in a trap.

Jack was a man by all appearances to have a great career, special skills, admired by colleagues, wealthy and stable. He had an even temperament even in times when miracles were needed for his patients. In some ways, he was a constant dreamer.

But outside his public persona, Jack had his own demons. He had a hard time coping with women; his personal relationships would sour; and he had an addictive streak towards alcohol and drugs as a means of escape. And it appears he tried to escape - - - after his divorce, he went on a bender to Thailand to meet an exotic woman. Why a skilled spinal surgeon would flee his career to to go island native is unexplained.

So during Jack's life, he lived in two separate worlds. The world of medicine where he sought acceptance by his father, and the dream world where his personal life would be perfect. Jack was a perfectionist. He had to be when cutting around a person's spinal cord. But those skills would never transfer to his interpersonal skills.

Next, Jack gets trapped between two worlds on the island. He is an important focal point for the survivors: he has the medical skills to keep them alive and well while they waited for rescue. Jack also gave the aura of being a calming presence which led his fellow passengers to push an uncomfortable leadership role on him. At the same time, he wanted to run away from the responsibility and accountability. He saw people like Kate and Sawyer who had little cares except for their own well being. He must have been envious of their personal freedom as Jack spent his entire life studying and mastering science to get his father to notice him.  After a while, the island did give Jack the opportunity to explore his wild side - - - get outside his comfort zone, and lead adventurous missions as a commander.

But once he left the island, Jack broke down mentally. He turned into a shell of his former self: needy, greedy, alone, disheveled, and on the brink of suicide. But apparently at the same time, his soul was running through an opposite world where Jack had a very stable and content after life in the sideways world where he had a relationship with his son.

The concept that the series was really about Jack's mind bouncing back and forth between various worlds is intriguing because Jack's eye is the beginning and the end of the show. The conflict was not with other people or smoke monsters, but the real conflict was within Jack himself.

STAIRWAY

Try to imagine what it took to get to The End.

Then try to figure out why it took that path.

Trying to work backwards from memory of the key deaths that allowed the main characters to move forward, I found an analogy to the Stairway to Heaven.

It seems that each step needed a death, a sacrifice, a closure.

We don't know why some 815 passengers died while others survived the crash. We don't know why the Tail Section survivors were killed off to leave just Bernard alive. We don't know why Daniel was killed off by the time skip nose bleeds (considering he was never on the island before and had a "constant" in his own theory). It did not stop the time quirks on the island. We don't know why Charlie killed himself (he had an opportunity to open the station door and leave with Desmond). We don't know if Juliet accomplished anything tangible when she died after she was recovered from the site debris. Ben got his revenge by killing Widmore, but that did not stop or appease MIB. Sayid took the submarine bomb down the hallway (and created a more dangerous situation by not closing any blast doors to minimize the impact of the blast). Sun's entrapment was improbable and staged, as was their farewell which did not take into account their child on the mainland. We don't know if immortals like Jacob or shape shifting smoke monsters like MIB can ever really "die."  But it seems all those deadly steps led to Jack collapsing in the bamboo thicket to die. The place where his island adventure began ended in the same place.

Now, a few people could conclude that Jack never left the bamboo thicket. He was thrown to the ground and laid there, semi-conscious from his injuries. He could have imagined the entire series in his head. Jack, the hero, in his own mind, "fixes" things in a plane load of broken people. It seems more plausible than the apparent random death steps to get the souls to the sideways church.

DISSOLVING ISSUES

It recently struck me as odd that throughout the series, MAJOR CRISIS (life or death) problems seem to fade away, lose survivor interest and become non-issues without any true resolution.

It is like the attention span of a child being bombarded with multiple stimuli. Once he has had enough of one thing he goes on to the next.

Things started off in a logical manner. The survivors needed food and water, so they plundered the plane and baggage for supplies. When the threat of disease from the dead bodies (and boar attacks), the survivors torched the plane's fuselage.

When there was an issue of safety with the reveal of the smoke monster, the camp started to become divided. It got worse when they were running out of drinkable water. When Jack found the water fall cave, his plan was to move the survivors to this safer location. But he was rebutted by half the group. So the significant water issue and relocation faded away from being a crisis to a non-factor.

Then there was the natural drive to be rescued. When no one showed up for weeks, Michael got the ball rolling on building a raft to get into the ocean current and cargo traffic lanes. Despite this being the only viable option, very few survivors actually helped with the plan. And after Michael's boat was ambushed, the survivors remaining on the island no longer planned on how to seek rescue or leave the island. It was only at the very end of the series did the subject come up with the Ajira plane.

The next great crisis was the attacks by the Others. Again, in a moment of personal safety, the panic was felt throughout the camp. But after a while, the idea of enhanced security at the beach was dropped like there were no problem by most of the survivors. Out of sight out of mind.

Then there was the infection or disease which Desmond and Claire were told about. The Others had a serum to ward off the effects of the infection especially in pregnant women. It was said to be fatal. If there was a serious pathogen on the island, it faded from memory quickly. Some fans believe that it is was just a false ploy to gain confidence of the survivors or keep people dependent on those in power.

The time travel and time skips were major issues for those main characters. Instead of trying to figure out what was truly going on, and possibly use the supernatural properties to their advantage, they just rode the time rifts like surfers until they stopped. And afterward, the time skippers did not discuss their adventurous plight with any of the non-skippers.

The story pattern is fairly clear: set up an improbable situation. Throw the main characters into a dangerous mix. As that story line is about to unravel, set up a new improbable situation and drop the old one. One of the better examples of this switch was when a small group went on a mission to stop Ben from using the poison gas plant. The unguarded facility was used briefly as a "trust exercise" between the survivors and the freighter science team, but there was only a faux emergency. And once that mission ended, the poison gas was never referenced again, including when the candidates were about to brainstorm how to defeat Flocke.

Because of LOST's story format, the individual story events seem to show the final pattern of a preschool pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game.

NOT WHAT IT SEEMS

THE ISLAND WAS NOT AN ISLAND.

That should have been the tabloid headline when the freighter blew up and the helicopter was going back to the beach to make an emergency landing. The island, in a flash of light, disappeared, leaving only a small ripple on the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

An island is the volcanic upheaval from the ocean floor of lava rock which then reaches past the surface of the ocean water.  Islands are anchored on the ocean floor.

When the island disappeared without displacing any great water mass, we knew then that the island was not an island. It could not be.

From fan maps and dialog in the series, the island was approximately 12 miles wide and 18 miles long with the Hydra Island two miles off shore, with a dimension of 2 square miles. If one calculates the surface area of the island, it would be approximately 220 square miles.

The Pacific Ocean is 35, 797 feet in depth from the surface to the floor. Therefore, the island would have had real Earth dimensions of 12 miles x 18 miles x 6.77 miles or 1,462.32 cubic miles of mass.

The sudden disappearance of the island would have created an instantaneous hole in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The island surface area of 220 miles x ocean depth of 6.77 miles equals 1,489 sq. miles of water. The entire mass of the Pacific Ocean is 96, 658, 000 sq miles so the island disappearance would have displaced a large amount of water, as the surrounding ocean would rush into the void, and thereby creating a huge geyser and tsunami.

 However, we did not observe the expected violent water rush filling a massive air space in the middle of the ocean. Therefore, the island did not displace the expected amount of water.

The island was not an island, but a floating structure. There is other evidence for this fact, such as the Daniel rocket experiment that showed that the island was moving away from the freighter.

Another piece of evidence was the sideways memories of the island and its artifacts being shown at the bottle of the ocean, encrusted with corral. This would suggest that the island "sank" to the bottom of the ocean.

So we have an island on earth which is not an earth island in mass or physics.

Theorists have proposed that the island was a disguise for some alien technology such as space ship or a star gate (a portal into other dimensions). 

Other theorists believe that the island is an actual life form. It has a "heart" of life force and unique properties that allows it to move about in both time and space. It would be like a space tortoise landing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with its back turned into a tropical island over time.

Other theorists believe the island is a transition station between Earth and the after life, a gateway that souls need to traverse on their way to heaven.

No matter what theory one subscribes to, it is clear that the island was a floating mass and not a "true" island was we know them.