From the Vault: Anthology of Horror, Volume 2

The time has come. Once more, Stuff to Blow Your Mind reaches into the depths of TV horror anthology history, pulls out a handful of episodes and spins science and wonder out of the monstrosities therein. For this year’s installment, Robert and Joe discuss episodes of Monsters and The Twilight Zone. (Originally published 10/29/2019)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday
vault time, folks. This episode originally aired on October nineteen,
and it is our Anthology of Horror volume two. That's right.
I mean we'll introduce this in the episode itself, but briefly,

(00:26):
this is you know and Thought TV anthology episodes that
are horror themed. We take them, we use them as
a springboard to talk about science. This was the second
one in this series, and we'll be sharing the third
one in the series as a vault episode in the
weeks ahead, and hey, might even get an all new
fourth volume. We'll see what we can put together. Welcome

(00:48):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, and my name is Robert Gooley Lamb.
I am Corrosive Joseph McCormick, and we are here with
our producer death Nicholas Johnson. Yes, and it is that

(01:09):
time again. Uh, it's it's been a year since we
did Anthology of Horror volume one, and so we're about
to assault you with Anthology of Horror volume two, and
then guess what the episode after this, He's going to
be Anthology of Horror volume three. It's not an anthology
unless they're at least three volume exactly. So yeah, I've

(01:31):
been looking forward to this all year pretty much, Robert.
I know the back corners of your brain are just
full of cobwebs made of old horror anthology TV episodes.
Every time we get talking about this, you dredge something
up from the void, something you saw on TV as
a kid. Am I wrong about this? Pretty much? Because
when I was a kid, I watched a lot of television,

(01:52):
and of the various joyfully weird things that were on
television reruns or syndicated horror and oology shows were one
of the best because you never knew exactly what you're
going to get each episode. It's an anthology. So each
episode of something like The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery
or Outer Limits or Tales from the Crypt, each one

(02:13):
is its own thing, its own world. It has its
own cast, its own monster or threat or sci fi weirdness,
and it's completely encapsulated. I love especially some of these
are really good. Actually, the Twilight Zone I think is
even better than a lot of people remember, and I
think a lot of times it's because The Twilight Zone

(02:33):
was not an hour long show, or I think maybe
it was in one of its later seasons which turned
out to be disastrous. I mean, you know, this is
a type twentysomething minute short story. It's it's a good
way not to get bogged down and stuff that doesn't
matter with when you're not going into like in depth
character storytelling, but you're like exploring high level premises. Yeah,

(02:54):
you know, it's it's more it's more in line with
certainly some of the short stories you you know, the
classic short stories you think of a say like Philip K. Dick,
where it's it's really about rolling out a cool idea,
maybe a cool twist or a shock, but mostly about
you know, to make you think about something. And uh, yeah,
so I I love a really great episode of an
anthology show. Certainly, like you said, some of those Twilight

(03:15):
Zones hold up amazingly. Well, we're gonna be talking about
one of my favorites of all time today. Yeah, but
then also some of the worst examples. I have one show,
and this is a show I didn't I don't think
I even watched when it came on, but Perversions of Science.
It was sci fi sort of spinoff of Tales from
the Crypt and uh, I haven't watched fully sleazy, but

(03:37):
very like future smooth. Yeah. Yeah, lots of cursing, some
gratuitous nudity, but like a lot of these shows, often
tremendous talent packed into each episode, like some great actors,
some great directors. Um. So every horror anthology show, I
feel like the ones that i've I look back on
finally are the ones I haven't even seen yet. Uh,

(03:58):
there's so many treasures to ever. I watched so many
of these things. It's very specifically on Beach Hotel cable.
This is what I remember. Yeah, it was like I
watched Mystery Science Theater three thousand that way. I mean,
I guess basically when my family went to the beach,
everybody else would be out in the sun and I'd
be watching the sci fi channel. But that's how you
see reruns of Monsters, which is a show that I

(04:22):
had completely forgotten about until you you sent me something
about it the other day and I was looking at
the images from the opening credits and I was like,
oh my god, yes, that's way back in there. Somewhere
deep in the recesses of my mind. This is there.
I've seen it before, all right, Well, before we get
more properly into into monsters, I just want to tell everybody,

(04:44):
like what the basic format here is. If you haven't
heard one of our anthority of horror episodes before, or
the creepy Pasta episodes that preceded it, the idea is, uh,
we're gonna grab a few in in each episode. We're
gonna each grab one episode of a horror anthology show.
We're gonna tell you what it's about, remind you what
it's about if you've seen it before, and then we're
gonna break down some of the ideas involved there, you know,

(05:07):
some of the science of the thing, whatever it happens
to to be, even if we have to shoehorn it
a little bit. And uh, and that's where the fun
is exactly. We are nothing if not experts at dragging
deep thoughts out of strangely shallow places. Yes. Uh again,
We're gonna also go to some I think some rather
deep waters in these twilight zones. Yeah, so let's begin

(05:29):
with monsters. Okay. This This ran for three seasons from
eight through ninete and I think I only caught it
once at like my aunt's house back in the day,
and I don't even know if it was in syndication
or on the Sci Fi channel after it had finished
its run. But today you can find all of it
on Amazon Prime. You can find a lot of the episodes,

(05:50):
maybe all of them just on YouTube. But but yeah,
it's like a lot of these shows, it's a wealth
of talent and weirdness. I was wondering how many people
were hoping that this show would have disappeared into history forever,
only to have the digital age to revive all of
these old things that these actors did. Yeah, yeah, possible. Possibly, Yeah,
because there you see some some interesting people show up

(06:12):
in Monsters for instance. Uh, you know you have you
have some great authors like Dan Simons shows up tom
Noonan shows up writing and directing like a couple of episodes,
Tony Shalub shows up, Gina Gershaun, Steve U Simmy in
an excellent pig Monster related episode that I won't spoil
for anybody. Oh man, we were just talking about pig Monsters. Yeah,

(06:35):
and this is a great pig Monster episode. I gotta
dive in. But yeah, this show is kind of a
spiritual successor to Tails from the Dark Side, which one
eighty eight, which I did see a lot of and
was traumatized to times by as a child. Uh. And
the Monsters featured many of the same people, and again
an incredible opening sequence, like a lot of these anthologies

(06:56):
shows had, in which a humorous family of monsters settled
in to watch TV together, I believe, right before they
start watching their show, the mother monster shows up with
a dish full of something she's been cooking, and the
child monster declares, candied critters, Yeah, it's it's cheesy, it's great. Uh,
and then it and then you proceed into some new

(07:17):
story that's going to center around a monster. And usually
that's like really cool practical effects too. So these episodes
it can be a little hokey intentionally, so at times
that the music is a little weird, this kind of
sense music that I even have trouble loving at times,
like synthetic saxophone music. You've got a very open heart
for synth. Yeah, but great cast, cool monster and Uh.

(07:42):
The episode I'm going to talk about today is one
titled Far Below. And the reason I was so excited
I didn't even know they'd covered this, but Far Below
is one of my favorite short stories by Robert Barbour Johnson,
who lived nineteen o seven through seven. Uh, this is
like a Weird Tales era story that I read years

(08:02):
and years ago, and I've just I've lived my entire
life up until like this week, having no idea that
anybody had ever adapted it. So so I was instantly
excited and I and I said, all right, I've got
to cover this. So it takes place in the deepest
depths of the New York subway system, one of my
favorite places anyway, and you have a you have a
special segment of city services that wage an endless campaign

(08:26):
against the ghouls that burrow up from the depths. It's
a it's a haunting tale. The positions them as workers
in a dark and human place against an inhuman enemy,
and they all are on the risk of losing their
own humanity in the process. So this season two adaptation
of Far Below has a lot going for it. So
not only do you have Johnson's short story as the

(08:46):
you know, the the inspiration for it. It was adapted
for the screen by Michael McDowell, the screenwriter who gave
us Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and perhaps to a
lesser extent, Thinner. Two out of three ain't bad. Yeah.
Plus it's directed by the legendary producer Deborah Hill, whoa
Deborah Hill of like John Carpenter movie fame. Yeah Yeah,

(09:06):
longtime collab collaborator and producer of John Carpenter's films such
as Halloween, Halloween to the Fog, Halloween three, Season of
the Witch, Yes, Escape from New York, Escape from l A.
She also produced Clue, The Dead Zone, The Fisher King,
and Big Top Peeweek. So, but this was one of
the only two things she ever directed. So I was instantly,

(09:28):
you know, intrigued. And then the cast is small but
pretty fun. In that veteran actor Barry Nelson places his
character Dr. Vernon Rathmore Barry Nelson was he in Planet
of the Vampires? Oh, he might have been. Maybe you
can do a quick look up on that while I
cover some of other things he was in. Uh, you know,
he's one of these character actress that was in everything.

(09:50):
A lot of TV work back in the day. A
few classic horror anthology shows as well, like Twilight Zone,
Suspense and The Alfred Hitchcock hour, but I think most
people will probably remember him from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining,
in which he played Ullman opposite Jack Nicholson in the
job interview scene. That's correct that I was also mistaken

(10:11):
Planet of the Vampire, says Barry Sullivan. Okay, different bar
They were like there are a lot of Berriers back
in the day. Um. So the adaptation itself is pretty fun.
It introduces a new twist, and they opted to present
the Ghoules, which are not really referred to as such
if I remember correctly. They present them much more like
the more Locks from the nineteen sixty adaptation of HD

(10:31):
Wells The Time Machine, which I think is a fine choice.
You know, you need some sort of subterranean humanoid but
in human creature. If you're not gonna go for like
what I imagine is the straight up Google or perhaps
sort of the dog like love crafty and goul, than
I think a Morelock is a solid choice. Now, I
want to know more about the the ghouls in the
story in the in the segment, are I mean, are

(10:53):
they sort of the grave flesh eating scavengers we we
know of as gools? Um? Not so, I mean, there's
clearly an inspiration from Pigman's model the Lovecraft story, in
which ghoules are bubbling out from the like the underworld,
um and uh and potentially corrupting mortal minds. Like, clearly

(11:14):
that was part of the inspiration. That's part of the
world from which the story emerges. But in in the
story itself and in the adaptation, it's more like these
are creatures. They are wandering up from the depths like
we've It's kind of a tolken Esque idea of if
we've dug too far into the earth, and now these
things are coming up, and we have to stop them
because they're going to continue to pick off subway workers

(11:36):
and you know, vagrants and then eventually other people, and
if we don't keep them in check, they will just
overwhelm us. This is funny. I was just reading The
Two Towers in the chapter where Gandalf explains what happens after,
you know, after he plunged down, after the Balaragi says,
they went into the depths of the earth, far below
where any you know, the thing that lives above, and
it is the abode of slimy things and things that

(11:58):
cannot be named yes, and and indeed these are these
are some of those nameless things. So on the subject
of Google's, we of course have an entire episode in
the Vault about the idea of Google's. We've talked at
length as well about life underground and the effects of
human life underground, and so I don't want to retread
on much of that content. It's it's definitely there and
we love it. And if you want more subterranean humans

(12:21):
and Googles, go check those episodes out. But I did
find a line of the inquiry on this that I
think is pretty solid. So we have an underground war
in a great modern metropolis against inhuman enemy that rises
from the depths, and yet these more lockesque creatures are
drawn up to feed on humans, the humans that have

(12:41):
overpopulated this region. They seem to feast on vagrant and
subway workers, and would feast on far more of the
populace if not for the efforts of Dr Rathmore and
his you know, basically, the premises auditors have come to
check him out because his department is seems to be
way overfunded, way were armed, and the outsiders asking why

(13:02):
do you need all these weapons? Why do you need
all this funding, and and then the story is about
presenting exactly why this funding is needed. But basically, in
this fight, uh, the fictional characters are far below have
much in common with those who battle various organisms that
we label pests in the real world. And the most
obvious parallel is the rat, the true citizen of the

(13:25):
subway tunnels exactly. I mean when you go down there
to take a train, they're not in your way or
you know, getting into your stuff. You're in their world.
You're just a guest. Yeah. Now, to be sure, a
single rat can be a problem even in a you know,
a sort of a prehistoric, precity sense of human existence.
And the same can be said of same mosquitoes. Uh,

(13:46):
you know, they both can spread or help spread pathogens. Uh.
The same can be said of something like the locust.
But but all these examples of our organisms as well,
that can become an even greater problem when they are
imbalanced by human activity. So let's let's think about the
rat as biologists Ken Appland put it quoted in the
Case for Leaving City Rats Alone by Becca Cudmore for Nautilus.

(14:09):
Rats are disruption specialists, so they thrive in disrupted ecosystems,
they spill into unbalanced realms and carve out a kingdom
for themselves. And he points out that the very few
wild animals have done this quite as well as the
rats in the human world without undergoing domestication. That's an

(14:29):
interesting point. Yeah, so we we think about organisms that
can successfully thrive at the edges of human civilization. You've
you've got two main versions. You've got those that become
tame and and eventually get bred by humans, like dogs
or farm animals or even cats, which are a little
bit wilder versions wilder but still definitely domesticated. Yeah. Then

(14:51):
you've got the ones that are just sort of destroyed
by our presence, which are i'd say maybe the majority
of animals, and like when we change an ecosystem, they suffer.
And then yeah, you've got this third category, the ones
we think of as unwelcome survivors in our environments. Yeah,
because you've disrupted everything. But this is an organism that
thrives on disruption. They can go right in there and

(15:12):
find a place for itself. You know, all the rat
needs is a is a is a place to borrow
fifty grams of calorie rich or moderately calorie rich food
per day and some water to drink. Um. And they
they're going to find that they're going to find an
abundance of that in our environments. I mean in our garbage,
in our in our you know, in our refuse, and

(15:34):
in the in the leavings of our civilization, and for
all of our domesticated minions, for all of our traps
and our poisons. Rats still rule cities like New York City.
In previous episodes, I think we've even talked about rats
societies in New York City, And yeah, there are sort
of separate subcultures of rats within the cities that that

(15:56):
they occupy. Yes, and that's gonna that's indeed gonna become
very important to or in just a minute. Okay, the
rat was already perfectly evolved to do all of this. Uh,
they were stealing from other organisms before us. Most likely,
we just continue to offer more and more to steal,
creating waste, disruption and hiding places everywhere we go. And

(16:16):
of course we went absolutely everywhere, bringing rats in our wake.
Becca Cudmore's article, however, deals mostly with the Vancouver rat Project,
which points out that some experts identify the potential dangers
posed by fighting back against the rat occupation too hard.
And part of it comes down to this, to the

(16:37):
disruption of these stable rat colonies. Uh, these these stable areas,
these little little pocket civilizations that the rats have established
in these disrupted ecosystems. These are some of the key
points that have been made. First of all, drive rats
out of one home or block and into another home
or block, and you might be spreading rat pathogens that

(17:00):
otherwise be quarantined within this stable group. Oh yeah. Plus,
urban rats have a garbage based diet, meaning that they
absorb a lot of bacteria, and this is often place
specific bacteria. It's tied to the building, to the people
that live in that particular building. Drive them out and
you spread these particular bacteria elsewhere. You're stirring the pot, right,

(17:23):
and then rats in one area will wage bloody war
against any stranger rat that arrives. This applies to New
York City as well, where I've read and I think
we've talked about this before about how a native rat
population tends to do a decent job of fighting off
rat invasions that come in on ships, etcetera. Um, And
so it's a perpetual turf war. But these turf wars,

(17:43):
especially when you stir them up by fighting back against
the rats too hard, potentially, uh, those turf war wars
spill rat blood. They cause rats to urinate out of fear,
and so what we get is a mix of rat
blood and rat urine and rat gut contents real which
is brew. In fact, Kaylee Buyers of the Vancouver Rat

(18:04):
Project points out that these brawls allow bacteria to converge,
to mix and potentially create new disease. It's bacteria that
wouldn't otherwise interact with each other, are pooled together, swap
genes and form new diseases, such as a methocillin resistant
staff or m r S. A. Oh wow, I didn't
even think about that as a consequence of another thing

(18:27):
we've talked about before, of course, horizontal gene transfer between
single celled organisms like bacteria. You know, if one acquires
a useful adaptation and say resisting a certain antibiotic, they
can share that gene for that adaptation via a sort
of analogy of bacterial sex. It's not sexual reproduction, but
they can take part of their genome and just put

(18:47):
it in another bacterium. Yeah, so we have a situation
where we disrupted the environment. Organism that thrives and disruption
is moved in, and then if we attempt to remove
that organism, we bring more this eruption into the scenario,
We bring more more chaos. Uh So the idea of
of fixing these probably becomes more of a hard problem

(19:11):
of dealing with these rat infestations. Uh So. Anyway, not
not to say that we shouldn't fight against rats and
keep them from living too high on the hog, but
we got here through disruption, so we shouldn't be surprised
if there are consequences for disrupting it further totally. And
if you're going to fight a secret war against the ghouls,
well then perhaps it's worth fighting. Uh you know, at
a perpetual stalemate, right White turn a cold war into

(19:34):
a hot war, exactly. All Right, I'm gonna have more
about the war against rats and potentially ghouls here in
a second, but first let's talk go an ad break here.
All right, all right, we're back to city rats the
ghouls of the real world. Yeah, and comparing it to
that episode of Monsters far Below based on a beloved

(19:56):
ghoule short story. Uh. So here's another thing to think
about here. Uh. We've talked about how rats spread with
human civilization, and there's such a highly successful organism, and
yet there are a few areas of the world that
have remained essentially rat free, the most notable of which
is the Canadian province of Alberta. Uh. It's virtually free

(20:19):
of the Norway rat. Uh. Now, while rats do turn
up from time to time, brought in through traditional means,
you know, they come in, you know, on a shipment
or or so forth, but the province has been very
proactive in squashing these flare ups to hold onto that
rat free championship that they've that they've earned. You know,
I have been to Alberta. Actually, I have been to

(20:41):
the city of Calgary and and driven around in there,
and I never noticed roving teams of anti rat sorcerers,
rat exorcists of any kind. And so, so what's the secret? Yeah,
that's like everybody's next question. How did they get rat free?
What they do? What can I do to get that
in my city? Well, basically they were just able to
heat the rats out before they moved in, which I

(21:03):
think lines up rather nicely with the story of far
below the idea of keep the ghouls from boiling up
into New York City because once they're up, there's no
getting rid of them. Announce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure. Yeah. So basically this is how it
went went down. The Norway rat arrived in North America
and roughly seventeen seventy five keyports cities never had a chance.

(21:25):
But from there they gradually spread across the continent, and
that took time for certain areas. The rats didn't enter
eastern Saskatchewan until the nineteen twenties, and according to Alberta's
official website on their history of rat control, the rats
continue to spread northwest at a rate of fifteen miles
or twenty four kilometers per year. So they first reached

(21:45):
the eastern border of Alberta in nineteen fifty and that's
where they stopped them with rat control measures, keeping the
province and its cities free of the furry invaders. And
uh and that also includes its largest city, Calgary. Basically,
they realized the threat to all levels of human activities,
especially agriculture, you know, which there was a lot of,

(22:05):
which is why the Department of Agriculture did a lot
of the heavy lifting, especially early on, but legislation also
mandated control of tests by quote every person and every
level of government like county clerks or yeah, well, I mean,
I mean essentially, like they basically they've spread the message
to absolutely everyone, and then every municipality had to have

(22:27):
a pest control inspector. A control zone was established. And
and this is good far below hinges in part in
the idea that a bureaucratic outsider, uh, you know, like
most of the world has no idea about the Google threat.
The whole tale is his education into the reality of
the struggle against the ghouls. And Alberta's efforts actually mirrored

(22:48):
this in some to some degree. They had to. They
sought to enlist the population against the rap threat, you know,
to build up, you know, the public awareness. So they
had to educate the pub like about rats. Most people
in Alberta had never seen a rat before. It's hard
to imagine. Yeah, so Alberta's so Alberta agriculture educators traveled

(23:09):
around with preserved rats specimens to inform the public. There's
a fabulous photocolored photographs that the Alberta's website includes of
these educators on a farm in Alberta with a bunch
of preserved rats, not in a container, just laid out
on the grass. There's a child holding one up by
the tail, and they're just saying, like, these are rats.

(23:31):
This is why you need to be vigilant about. This
is what you need to look out for. It's like
teaching New Zealanders about squirrels. Yeah, I guess so, um,
and I mean, what better way than the physical thing itself.
But on top of that, there were conferences, there were posters,
there were pamphlets, you know, some of these like straight
up propaganda posters about the terror of the rat. They
advocated the use of poisons to fight back, though they

(23:54):
also had to bring in outside experts to help them,
because again, most Alberta residents had no experience with cats,
and that includes experience fighting them. Uh So they were
able to battle the rat infestations along the eastern border
and keep them mostly within ten to twenty kilometers of
the border, and the program continues today in an altered
but still effective form. It's actually illegal to own a

(24:15):
pet rat in the province. You've got to be a zoo,
a university, or a recognized research institution. Uh there's also
a rat hotline where you report rat and flare ups
in case, you know they when they do occur. But
one of the problems is that, again most Alberta residents
don't have a good eye for rats. Hello, and extremely

(24:36):
tiny dog just ran across my kitchen floor. Well, what
happens if they end up reporting muskrats, gophers, ground squirrels
and other similar organisms and then you know, the rat
police come out to check and they're like, oh, those
are not rats, those are muskrats. Uh, you know, we
can't really do anything about that. Uh. By the way,
to come back to monsters, the anthology series If if

(24:58):
you're wondering if there is an episod out of monsters
that expressly concerns rats, there is. There's one called Stressed Environment,
in which a female scientist who spent twelve years raising
rats in a stressed environment, uh, you know, in the
hopes of evolving their intelligence, faces to the terrifying results
of your experiment. It stars Carol Linley, and it has

(25:18):
stop motion rats that end up using spears against their
human captors. Smart rats. Indeed, so this whole thing from
far below about this team of bureaucratic professionals who work
for the city who have to go underground to fight
the uh, the menace coming up from below. Of course,
in the story it's ghouls. You've got the analogy to rats,

(25:39):
but I can't help but think of the fat bergs.
The people up above are completely oblivious to the fact
that there are workers down beneath the streets, in the tunnels,
in the darkness, waging battle against a monster that lives
down there. And of course the agglomerations of fats, oils,
grease and wet wipes and various fibrous substances that clagge

(26:00):
kilometers of sewers, especially in places like England and or
I guess the UK more broadly, but also in US cities.
It seems like another perfect analogy for the wars being
waged on our behalf below our feet that we don't
even think about. Yeah, you create this vast, unnatural underworld,
and it's going to it it's gonna end up potentially

(26:20):
being populated by by opportunistic organisms or you know, they're
gonna be situations where things like fat burgs emerge and
you need people to go wage war against them. If
you want to learn more about fat Birgs. We have
a whole episode about them from earlier this year that
you can check out. So that was Monsters. Sub Monsters
I think falls more in the you know, the category

(26:40):
of fun but often kind of a little bit cheesy
when it comes to horror anthology shows. But again, some
of the like one of the big names, one of
them the classier names in horror anthology is of course
the classic Twilight Zone, right uh. And so there there's
so many great episodes of the Twilight Zone that really
do pose interesting questions that still remain interesting today. I mean,

(27:03):
there are some that also have kind of hokey premises
that don't hold up. But I want to talk about
one that I really think does hold up and is
still more and more mind blowing the more you think
about it, and yet at the same time has an
incredibly simple premise. I feel like this is a great
example of a story premise getting a lot of bang
for its buck. And so this is one of my

(27:24):
favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone. Originally aired in nineteen
fifty nine, and it's called shadow Play. So in the
beginning of this episode of The Twilight Zone, a man
named Adam Grant is awaiting the verdict. After being put
on trial for murder, the juror's return from deliberation and
they proclaim him guilty, and then the judge sentences him

(27:45):
to death by the electric chair. But as he's being sentenced,
Grant begins to laugh hysterically, and in a fit of
rage and frustration, he runs around the courtroom yelling at people,
not again. You can't do it to me again. You'll
all die. Uh So in his jail cell, Grant starts
talking with his roommates about how this has all happened

(28:08):
to him before the trial, the sentencing, the imprisonment, and
the execution have all happened to him a thousand times,
but not as reality, always as a nightmare. Grant says,
he's in a dream right now, and at the moment
of his electrocution, he's going to wake up screaming back
in reality. And because it's always been a dream in

(28:31):
the past, this time it must be a dream too.
So he tells everybody he can, don't let them send
me to the chair, because when I die, I'll wake up,
and when I wake up, you'll all die because I'll
stop dreaming you. Then there's this newspaper reporter who was
present at Grant's trial, and he starts to become a
little worried that he is, in fact, maybe only being

(28:54):
dreamed by Grant, and if Grant wakes up, he and
everybody else in the world will see to exist. So
he gets drunk and he goes to the house of
his friend, who's the district attorney who was in the
courtroom also who presented the case against Grant, and the
newspaper reporter begins to beg the district attorney to stay
the execution, and the d A of course, thinks this

(29:16):
is preposterous, obviously, but the more his friend talks to
him about it, the more doubts begin to creep in,
however much he tries to resist them. Doesn't the world
ever feel just not quite real? Isn't it sometimes just
too perfect or just too full of too many coincidences?
I think most people can actually identify with having this

(29:37):
feeling every now and then about their own lives. Yeah, yeah,
I mean especially we've talked before about some about coincidence,
you know, and how we would do a whole episode
to it, I believe, and and how we can over
interpret that or at least that there's some vast conspiracy
of foot well. I mean, this is what led like
Carl Young to believe in this concept of synchronicity, that
there could be that there was a connecting inciple in

(30:00):
reality that was not based on physical causation but was
based on like, based on meaning. Essentially, that events could
be not caused by one another, but connected to one
another through meaning. And this is why we have this
feeling that there are too many coincidences in our lives now.
But anyway, so after this moment, the District Attorney agrees

(30:22):
to go speak to Grant in the prison before the
execution takes place. Grant expects him before he arrives, and
the d A tries to interrogate Grant on his theory.
He tries to convince him that it couldn't be true.
It's not possible that you are dreaming all this and
we're just in your dream. The d A says, like,
what you mean to tell me that my family, my friends,

(30:42):
everybody in this city, in this state, everybody in the
world is just living inside your dream. And Grant says,
a dream builds its own world, and the d A asks, well,
how can I be a part of your dream if
I sleep and dream myself every night. And then Grant says,
in this great line, you only sleep and dream because
I dream you that way. So Grant is then headed

(31:04):
to the electric chair at midnight, and the d A
is faced with this choice. Should he call the governor
to get a stay of execution? But that would be ridiculous,
wouldn't it? But he has doubts. I'm not going to
spoil the ending beyond that, but I will say my
favorite part of this episode, aside from the great performance
by Dennis Weaver as Adam Grant, is is in the

(31:26):
middle part of the episode. It's the part where the
doubts begin to set in for the reporter and the
d A and the other prisoners on Grant's row. I
feel like this story at once raises several of the deepest,
most challenging questions at the core of metaphysics, psychology, and
the philosophy of mind, questions like how do you know

(31:46):
for sure that other people in the outside world are real?
And how do you know your current experience is real
as opposed to a dream? How do you know you're
not dreaming right now? And then I think that the
most mind blowing question from it, of course, is that
if you're one of these other people in the story,
like the d a or the reporter, how do you
know that you're real? Could you, in fact be an

(32:08):
imaginary person in somebody else's dream. And of course, with
that last question, you may think the answer is just
obviously self evidently no. I think it's probably no, but
it might not be as cut and dry as we
might hope. I want to come back to that in
a minute. Yeah, I watched this episode this morning, and yeah,
it's it's really good. It's it's one of the again,
a lot of these Twilight Zone episodes, they hold up

(32:30):
so well, the shot and like stunning black and white. Uh.
These you know, I guess at times the acting might
feel a little dated to what you might have today,
but it's it's all really solid. Also, this episode was
adapted in the revival of The Twilight Zone, starring Peter
Coyote Uh in The Elite. Yeah, I haven't either, but

(32:51):
but I looked it up and I was like, oh, yeah,
there's Peter Cody. And then of course this episode was
written by Charles Beaumont, who is one of like the
legendary names of the Twilight Zone. You have a number
of killer episodes. Yeah, it's really really good. Uh, it's
a really tight, well told story. Um, and I highly recommended,
And in fact, I was just I was watching it

(33:13):
on Netflix. So the Twilight Zones all on Netflix right now,
so you can go look it up if you've got
a subscription, and it's also on Hulu, I believe, if
anyone wishes to watch them there. But there's tons of
Twilight Zone awaiting you. I always forget just how many
episodes of the show they did. I think there's like
thirty six episodes in the first season, and not all
of them are great, but a striking number of them

(33:33):
are great. Yeah. Yeah, Well, maybe we should take a
quick break and when we come back, we can address
these questions about dreams and being all right, we awaken
you from the dream of advertising and back into the
reality of our episode. All right, So I think we
should deal with some of the questions I was just
posing that are raised by this episode of The Twilight Zone. Uh.

(33:55):
And the first one I think would be the most
basic question, how do you know that you're entire life
hasn't been a dream? How do you know that the
people you interact with aren't just figments of your imagination.
I think we all assume that other people are real
and independent, or at least you probably should assume that
the outside world really exists, will it will continue after

(34:16):
I die and so forth. But it's harder than you
might expect to prove this with certainty. Uh though, I
think almost nobody actually holds this view. If you actually
were to believe that your mind is the only thing
that exists, and the rest of the outside world and
all the people of it, they're just merely products of
your imagination or your dream or whatever, this is known

(34:36):
as sollipsism, and to be more specific, I think it
would be metaphysical solipsism, metaphysical meaning this is how the
world is, as opposed to something like methodological solipsism, which
you might say is one of the tools of Saint Descartes,
who I'll talk about in a minute, which would just
mean like solipsism might be a useful philosophical tool for
a moment. And by the way, listeners who are fans

(34:58):
of the excellence sitcom The Good Play will recognize this
is one of the philosophies that is currently being explored
in season three. Oh yeah, yeah, I haven't gotten there yet.
I think I only did season one. Does it stay good?
Oh yeah, it it just gets better. They do a
really good job of mixing it up and defying expectations. Uh. Yeah,

(35:18):
but I do want to stress I think solipsis um
is one of those points of view that especially can
be frustrating to normal people because you can point out
that it's really hard to disprove, and that can create
the false impression that, like, some philosophers actually believe this.
I don't think any philosophers actually believe in solipsism, but
it's one of those weird edge cases, right that everybody

(35:39):
just sort of accepts that you have to leap over
it with an axiomatic assumption. I can't prove it. I'll
just assume the outside world is real and other people
are conscious, right, because if you give you if you
were to believe this, like things get pointless or silly
or dangerous really quickly. Right. Yeah, of course, I mean
it's not a disprove But there's a funny implication of
instability that follows from the assumption of metaphysical solipsis um. Uh.

(36:03):
And it would go like this, if you're actually a
metaphysical solipsist. You believe nothing that you experience as real.
None of the other people actually exist, Uh, they're just
figments of your imagination or something like that. What would
be the point of telling anybody about it? Just like
for your own amusement? Like would any of the imaginary
people you interact with benefit from you explaining why you

(36:24):
think that solipsism is true? Now for me, I guess
the two reasons to tell people come to mind, though,
though neither is really grounded in the reality of living
within a dream. On one hand, you know, what better
way to dismiss the stressors in your life than to
tell them they're but figments of your imagination, right to
go to full Scrooge on them. But you'd also have

(36:44):
to tell that to all the people you like and love,
and and that though is actually more attractive than one
might think. I mean, this is essentially an exercise of detachment.
Buddhist and Hindu teaching speak to the importance of freeing
ourselves from the chains attachment. Both chains of iron, you know,
chains to two things that are less desirable, but also

(37:05):
chains of gold. Uh, change to the things in life
that we love or or or give us, you know,
stability and peace. We have to free ourselves from our
hates and our loves and connect with the true underlying
reality of Brahmin and uh and and so you know,
that feels a little on par with what we're talking

(37:25):
about here. So I think some of the incarnations of
this philosophy has realized in like Hinduism. I think especially
I recall them being even more radical than sollipsism, actually
and saying not only is the not only is all
of the sense data of the outside world potentially an illusion,
but also the self is potentially an illusion. So it's
not it's not that I am the only thing that exists,

(37:47):
but maybe even I don't exist. Yeah, and I think
we're going to get into even more of this continue.
But then again, since almost nobody who thinks about it
seriously is tempted to believe in sollipsism, I think we
can just like use the axiomatic pole vault and jump
over the question. Yeah, I mean, I guess we don't
even really follow into full blown solop sisum via social media,

(38:08):
in which we all have, like you know, we have
a carefully maintained version of ourselves, an unreal version of
ourselves that interacts with unreal versions of other people, like
it's just a bunch of masks, and uh, you know,
I think if anything we're going to lead us to
like this full blown solipsism, it would be that. Yeah. Well,
I mean there's there are plenty of ways the word

(38:30):
salop sisum is used that aren't exactly the same. I mean,
I think one thing you're getting on there is like
people often do behave very solipsistic lee on on social media.
But that's more in the sense of not necessarily not
believing that other minds exist or that the outside worlds exists,
but just acting as if you only care about yourselves. True. Yeah, yeah,
So it's it's beyond that. It's not just I'm the

(38:51):
only one that matters, or that everybody is that everybody
else only matters insofar as their attention to me. It's
that they are not real. They are all figments of
my mind. They are all but a dream. All right.
So we're gonna jump over this question. If somebody actually
holds metaphysical solipsism, I can't disprove them. I'm just gonna
push them in a ditch. Um, So we go onto

(39:14):
the next thing. Which is maybe a more vexing problem,
which is the problem with Cartesian skepticism. How do you
know that your experience right now, in this very moment
is real and not a dream? In shadow Play, Grant
repeatedly explores this question. He's looking for clues in the
opposite direction, trying to notice details about his environment that
would tell him he's in a dream. He'll point out, Hey,

(39:36):
this thing doesn't make sense. That must mean I'm in
a dream. They wouldn't put that right there. They wouldn't
let you have this in there. They wouldn't you know,
this wouldn't be scheduled in this way. Why am I?
Why am I getting executed the same day I got sentence?
That doesn't make any sense. I must be in a dream.
Why are steaks being cooked in the oven? That sort
of thing. That's a good one. No, I think that's

(39:57):
just the nine But yeah, nineteen fifties culinary culture in America,
it might be a largely bad dream. Uh so uh.
The seventeenth century French philosopher, scientists mathematician Renee des Card,
of course, was famously concerned with this question in a
lot of his philosophical works, such as his meditations on
first philosophy, uh, having doubts about philosophy that gave primacy

(40:22):
to the evidence of our senses. So like, if I
assume is a starting point that I'm sitting in a
chair in a studio talking into a microphone, I could
turn out to be completely wrong, because I already know.
There have been thousands of times in my life when
I was a hundred percent convinced that I was really
physically in my elementary school lunchline next to Foghorn Leghorn,

(40:46):
or on a boat headed to Greenland wearing a I
don't know, a Superman cape or something, only to wake
up and realize that I was actually asleep in my
bed dreaming. And I was totally convinced in the moment. Yeah,
I mean, granted, it's it's it's west version of us
to a certain extent, Like we there are things that
we're not picking up on that we would otherwise pick
up on a lot of the times, but within the

(41:07):
context of the dream, we buy it as our reality. Well, yeah,
that's one of the things. So you say that, and
I agree with you. There is a textural difference to dreams. Dreams,
you know, are waking reality. Doesn't feel like a dream, right.
Dreams are hazy and ethereal and and absurd in ways
that we don't notice in the moment. And my surroundings

(41:29):
right now feel very lucid and solid, right, And it
feels like there's a qualitative difference, right, of course, until
we start really looking at how we observe the world
right exactly, Yes, there does seem to be a qualitative difference,
But maybe dreams only seem hazy and ethereal in comparison
in retrospect, because in the moment, doesn't a dream often

(41:51):
feel exactly as solid and lucid as real life. I've
actually had a number of dreams I recall that almost
became a lucid dream, and the sequence goes pretty much
like this. Every time in the dream, I think, wait
a second, I'm dreaming, aren't I? And then I look
around and I test my surroundings. Doesn't this seem like
a dream? Doesn't anything seem out of place? Can I

(42:13):
fly that kind of thing? And whenever this happens, I conclude,
oh no, everything around me is normal. I can't fly
totally real and lucid. This must be real and not
a dream. I don't know if you've ever had this experience,
mine is similar. But what happens with me is I'll
realize it's a dream, and I'll be like this annoying,
And generally it's an annoying dream. It's something that's it's

(42:34):
not a full blown nightmare, but it's like it's annoying.
I realize it's a dream, and then I just fall
back into it anyway, like like as if it's just
I don't know that, and that in itself is frustrating.
It's like, I I woke from the dream, I could
have why didn't I go lucid at that point? Now?
Instead I just kind of shrugged and went right back
into the same old crap. Well, this is one of
the things that the studies of dreams have found is

(42:57):
that our critical reasoning abilities are extremely limited in dreams.
Dreams suppress certain kinds of brain function, especially the types
of brain function that cause us to question our surroundings
and think critically about sense data, which of course inherently
makes us very prone to thinking dreams are reality even

(43:18):
I don't know. I mean, it's hard to know how
real they really seem in the moment, except for the
fact that we feel like they're real right, like well,
like one bit of sort of folk wisdom is often
thrown around. It's like, oh, well, letters are backwards and
dreams you can't read text in dreams or you know,
something like that. I don't think that's true. I don't
think so either. But I have had situations where I've
been reading something in a dream and it's difficult. But

(43:41):
my experience and then that is like, this is difficult
to read. I must be dreaming. It's more, this is
difficult to read. What's wrong? You know? I don't think
about it about the dream answer being the solution, right.
And so this whole dream problem is one way of
getting to the position sometimes known as Cartesian skepticism, named
after Descartes, and also affecting our our mail about Carnie Uh.

(44:06):
Since dreams and also hallucinations such as the kind generated
by a this figure, Decard imagines this evil demon who
wants to deceive him with false visions of the world.
Since they demonstrate that it's possible for us to be
totally convinced of perceptions about the outside world while also
being ad percent wrong. Descartes thinks, you know, we should
doubt all of our perceptions unless we justify them in

(44:28):
a logically airtight way, And of course, descartes ultimate justification
for the evidence of his of his senses, invokes a
benevolent God who wouldn't trick him. But is there any
non theological way to get around this? And he tells
or tests to separate dreaming life from waking life. There
have been philosophers who have looked into this and tried
to come up with here's how you tell the difference.

(44:50):
The English philosopher John Locke thought he had one. He
had one that was pain. Right. Blocke said, you can't
feel pain in a dream like you can in waking life,
and that's your easy way to tell the difference. Right.
So maybe if you think you're in a dream, I
don't know, poke your finger with a needle and see
if it actually hurts, and if it does, you're awake,

(45:10):
and if it doesn't, you're in a dream. But twentieth
century psychology research has found this is not true. This
is this before we get the whole pinch me situation.
Oh yeah, I think it may very well be. Yeah, yeah,
that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, pinch me.
See if I'm dreaming. I think this would not actually
due to the research though. I think this would not

(45:31):
actually be a full proof test, because people do, in
fact sometimes report the impression that they have felt pain
in dreams. Just one example is a nine study in
the journal Sleep by Nielsen at all uh and to
read a couple of quotes from them, uh quote. Some
studies indicate that pain is rare and it may be
beyond the representational capability of dreaming. However, the present study

(45:53):
describes experiences of dreamed pain that were reported incidentally in
experiments on the effects of somato since restimulation administered during
rapid eye movement sleep. The results indicate that although pain
is rare in dreams, it is nevertheless compatible with the
representational code of dreaming advantage Freddy Krueger, Right. And this

(46:13):
actually comes out comes through in shadow play. Right. There's
a part where uh, where Grant talks about going to
the electric chair and how he doesn't want to be
sent there to die again, and somebody's arguing with them.
They say, if you're just dreaming, you won't feel it,
but he says, no, Wait, I mean when you dream
something bad, doesn't it doesn't it terrify you. Doesn't it
hurt when it happens in the dream? Yeah? I mean

(46:35):
I'm struggling to think of examples from my own remembered
dreams in which I experienced physical pain, But but yeah,
it sounds completely possible. I'd be interested to hear from
any listeners who have had dreams in which they have
felt pain. Yeah. They also acknowledged that it might not
be very common, but it does appear to happen. So
I think it looks like the scientific research disproved lock here. Now,

(46:56):
there was another test I came across, and it was
that the American philosop of for Norman Malcolm wrote a
couple of influential works about dreaming in the nineteen fifties
in which he argued that dreams could be put to
the test of quote a principle of coherence. So the ideas,
do the events of your present circumstances connect logically with
the preceding events and the rest of your life? So

(47:18):
if you are currently having a sword fight with Christoph Lambert,
why are you having that sword fight? How did you
get there? Does the sequence of events make sense to you? Uh?
And this is kind of similar to the test used
in the movie Inception, when you ask how did I
get here? Right, the characters do that there to see
if they're dreaming. If you find you can't recall how

(47:38):
you got where you are, this allows you to realize
that the present moment does not connect coherently with the
rest of your past, and thus you're probably dreaming. But
then again, I'm not sure this is a full proof test.
It might be a sort of helpful test, but it
doesn't get you to the right answer all the time.
We know that the dreaming mind state, again, as we
were saying earlier, greatly reduces critical reasoning capacity is and

(48:00):
it often seems to short circuit logical inquiries with false answers. Right,
So you might ask a question that would be a
good question if you could really think it through to
get to the bottom of whether you're dreaming or not.
But in your dreaming state, you don't think it through
very well, right, You don't have full control of your
critical thinking. So that's a self reflective question like that

(48:22):
might not be helpful. Right, So, as far as I
can tell, no one has introduced an airtight test to
tell the difference between a dream and reality. Waking life
of course seems real enough. It doesn't feel the way
dreams feel in retrospect and our memories of them, but
that still doesn't help us achieve certainty in the moment.
And then this year gets us to one final thing,

(48:42):
which I think is the weirdest place we might go
about dreams. This is the crazy part of shadow play.
Grant tells people around him that if he's sent to
the electric chair, he's going to wake up from his nightmare,
and if he wakes up, everybody in the world will die,
because this entire world is nothing more than his dream.

(49:03):
And this is my favorite part of the episode. So
on one hand, you might think, well, what would it matter.
You know the people that you imagine in your dream
are not conscious. Of course, there are many different ways
to fear death, but one common neurosis here is the
anxiety of being snuffed out right, of no longer existing,
of their being a permanent end your conscious experience. And
if the people in Grants dream are not conscious, there's

(49:26):
nothing for them to be afraid of, no experience to
exist in the first place, and thus nothing to come
to an end. But in the story they do seem afraid.
The ones who start to doubt their reality. They don't
want to be snuffed out. And this story seems to
imply that they actually do have minds that they want
to live on. They don't want to be blinked out
of existence by alterations in Grant's brain activity. And this

(49:49):
is also the only part of the story that's actually fantastical,
because otherwise the story isn't even fantasy or science fiction, Like,
it's just perfectly plausible, right that a man has the
same night or over and over. Uh. And I want
to take this idea seriously for just a moment, could
you the conscious entity with a mind, the person you
are now actually be a person in someone else's dream

(50:14):
to spare some similarities to the simulation argument that we've
discussed on the show in the past. Yeah, yeah, the
idea that that the reality we're experiencing now is a
simulation created by a far future society that's currently just
really excited about the idea of the right um that
we really want to simulate nineteen again. Oh thank god

(50:36):
for that. Well, look at I mean, look at our
cycles of nostalgia, right, I mean, look at some of
our video games simulated worlds that we get into going
back to you know, like an Old West setting or
a hard boiled detective world or the nineteen eighties, etcetera.
So it's it's not impossible. But but just as Grant
argues that the perfection of one's life is an argument

(51:00):
for simulation, like this is too perfect, it's it's too
you know, there's something wrong here. I believe there was
a character in one of I. N. N. Banks culture
novels who observed that the world is just too full
of viciousness to be a simulation. That this must be
the base reality, because who would dream it up otherwise. Now,
I suppose that's kind of interesting, uh, to to think though,
that these are the thoughts attributed to a character within

(51:22):
a fictional sci fi novel. But still I think it's
an interesting point. Right. But then again, like what kind
of frame of reference do we have if we have
no memory or no understanding of the world outside of
the simulation? Right? But I mean thinking about one way
to think about the idea of being a simulation in
a computer program is that you are being dreamed by

(51:42):
the computer. Uh. Now, one hurdle to the simulation argument
has always been is it possible for a computer to
generate and host conscious minds. We don't know. It's impossible.
It's often assumed to be possible, but we just don't
really know. The only thing we can be relative of
least certain works to generate and host consciousness is a brain.

(52:04):
We know for sure they can do that, because your
brain is doing it right now, right. But here's where,
in some respects, the possibility of living in someone else's
stream becomes more plausible, maybe than living in a computer simulation.
We know a brain can generate at least one conscious mind.
Who says it can't generate more than one. There have

(52:26):
been a number of experiments in fact and observations and
neuroscience too, especially throughout the twentieth century, that have led
some experts to believe it might be possible to have
at least two distinct conscious minds occupying the same brain.
One big example, of of course, is something we've covered
on the show in the past. We did I think

(52:46):
a two part episode about it that you can look up,
and it's the split brain experiments. These were the originally
experiments done by Roger's Ferry and Michael Gazaniga in the
middle of the twentieth century, and they dealt with epilepsy
patients of people who suffered really intense seizures and no
other treatment worked, and so the treatment that they eventually
went in for was known as a total corpus callistotomy,

(53:10):
a severing of the corpus colossum, which is a bundle
of nerve fiber that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.
And the procedure apparently worked pretty well. When you sever
that the corpus colosum, it does help to stave off
these these horrible seizures. But there were a lot of
interesting side effects that made the people who underwent this

(53:30):
procedure very valuable to neuroscience research. For example, to give
a very short version, you could show in some experiments
that the part of the brain that talks, which appears
to be primarily in most people, the left hemisphere of
the brain, which is capable of speech, could not explain

(53:51):
what the right hemisphere was doing. And so if you
show an image to only the part of the visual
field that can next to the right hemisphere of the
brain and controls only one of the hands, the hand
controlled mostly by that hemisphere of the brain could do
things like select an object that was associated with the

(54:13):
image displayed in that part of the visual field. But
then the person talking against speech is thought to be
mostly generated by the left hemisphere, couldn't explain in a
logical way why that object was chosen, and that in
many experiments like it led some researchers to an obvious question.
Is it possible that both hemispheres in split brain patients

(54:37):
are conscious but separately conscious within the same skull In
some sense, could there be two conscious minds within one brain? Yeah,
it's one of the This is a total like real
life Twilight Zone scenario we've we've thought about before on
the show, Like maybe by virtue of once being one,
like there's still like each one still thinks they are

(54:59):
the one, but they are too. Yeah. Well, and another
thing that would be very creepy is, again because of
the localization of speech function in the brain, maybe only
one of these can really talk to the outside world
and the other one just can't really. It can still
act with the body, but it can't generate complex sentences
or anything, which would be an obvious asymmetry in which

(55:23):
one of the conscious minds within the brain gets represented
to the outside world. One of them has no mouth
and cannot scream now. I definitely want to acknowledge that
I think our picture of this has been somewhat complicated
by more recent research. I think we do talk about
the center split brain episodes if you want to go
revisit those and and see more detail. But our picture

(55:43):
on how information might or might not be shared between
brain brain hemispheres, even in the cases of a full
corpus calisotomy, seems to have been complicated by recent studies.
I remember there was one we talked about by researcher
named I think a Ya or Pinto who uh did
research undercutting the idea that there could be two conscious
minds within the same brain. Um. I feel like this

(56:04):
is an issue that that's not fully settled and is
still full of like weird mysteries that we don't know
exactly what's going on. Another example from neuroscience case history
that has been taken as possible evidence that there could
be multiple conscious minds within the same brain, as the
the idea of alien hand syndrome, where you know, hands
may interfere with one another's behaviors as if they're guided

(56:27):
by different wills. So one hand tries to button up
a shirt, the other hand, tries to unbutton the shirt. Now,
I want to stress that there is by no means
proof or even necessarily strong evidence that there are multiple
consciousness is within the same brain, because again, you can't
know for sure that there's consciousness anywhere unless somebody tells
you that they have consciousness. Right, I mean, that's the

(56:49):
inherent problem leading back to the solve sism issue to
begin with. Right. But but again I also have to
to throw in, you know, we we have to be
careful about the idea of thinking about like the unity
of self for the yes, yes, yes, is it? Is it?
I think the more you look at it, this idea
that there is one central unchanging you in there is

(57:10):
a fallacy and one that we we still have a
lot of trouble with when it seems like the more
reasonable explanation is that first of all, you're an entity
of perfessional change, but also there is kind of a
chorus of of of of yourself in there. Yeah. And
one interpretation that that brings together a lot of the
sceneroscience is the interpreter theory and interpretation is the interpreter theory.

(57:35):
The interpreter theory of Michael Kazaniga, one of the researchers
involved in in the split brain experiments, where he's got
this idea that there's sort of a region of your
brain that's associated with the speech production parts of your
brain that is there to unify brain phenomena you know,
that are disparate in the beginning, and it's sort of

(57:55):
its job is to tell one unified, coherent story to
you about what's happening throughout your brain. So it takes
all these disparate plot threads and says, here's how I'll
finish up the story. Uh, and then and that creates
the sense of you. Your sense of self is generated
by this sort of like a concatenation process in the
interpreter part of the brain. But to come back to

(58:16):
the idea of multiple consciousness is in the same head
and maybe the idea of being someone else's dream. I've
had this idea before. Again, this is not something that
I would argue is strongly indicated by evidence, just a
very strange possibility that seems hard to rule out on
the basis of any evidence I'm aware of. What if
the process of imagining the workings of other minds involves

(58:39):
the low resolution simulation of separate conscious minds. What if
when you're trying to understand somebody else's behavior, you trying
to understand, you know, why did Jeff say what he said,
and so you imagine his thought processes, Or when you're
trying to write dialogue for a fictional character. What if,
in cases like this you're practicing theory of mind, the

(59:00):
brain temporarily carves out a bit of its consciousness potential
to devote to this imagined person in order to better
simulate their behavior. Interesting, Yeah, yeah, I mean in many
cases it would, especially if it's a perceived enemy. Right,
It's probably gonna be a rather simple model. You know,
it's you're you're reducing them to like, you know, cartoon

(59:24):
villain levels of of impulse and desire. But I mean
there's no limiting it just two enemies. I mean, in
any case, whenever you try to imagine somebody, you don't
know exactly everything your brain is doing to create that
simulation of them within you. Right, Like even the people
we know they the best in our lives. For instance,

(59:45):
our you know, our our you know, uh, you know
life partners, you know or you know, loved ones, family members,
really close friends, we might have a more robust simulation
of them in our theory VR theory of mind, but
it is still just a model of how their mind
works and what they want and how they think. Yeah,

(01:00:05):
it's our best guess, it's our I mean, it's not
their brain, it's our brain trying to do it. And
if this were the case, you could be, in some
sense creating separate conscious people in your head whenever you
try to analyze a friend's behavior, or write a scene
for a character in a story, or dream about a
district attorney sitting across from you in a prison cell.

(01:00:27):
Now you might say, well, if they're all generated by
your brain, they're all you. I mean, anatomically, they are
all you. They're all made by your body. The other
side of this, too, is like when you read a novel,
yeah exactly, I mean, in any time you imagine a person.
I wonder if this is possible, if there's any validity
to some of these alternative theories of dual consciousness. For example,

(01:00:49):
you know, uh, Michael Gazzaniga's left brain interpreter theory. Perhaps
the part of your brain that talks and interprets and
seems to be in charge makes meaning of the self
is not aware that the same brain is also generating
little conscious simulations of people partitioned from the interpreter and
the rest of the self. Yeah, yeah, I mean it

(01:01:13):
makes me think. For instance, I've read a fair amount
of Carl Sagan. I love picking up a Carl Sagan
book and reading it. Uh, you know, it gives me comfort.
And as as such, I do kind of have like
a tiny Carl Sagan in my brain, like an idea
of Sagan that is kind of walking around in there
or maybe summoned. But the really mind blowing idea is
what if that little Carl Sagan has an experience? What

(01:01:36):
if there's something that it's like to be that simulated
Carl Sagan. What if he gets into an argument with
the little Terence McKenna in my head? Right, I mean,
it's still your brain, it's still all the tissue in
your head. But what if there's something in there that's
a little Carl Sagan simulated by your mind sometimes that
has its own wants, the desires, experiences. Now, again, I

(01:01:58):
recognize that this is way out there and aculative territory,
and I do not claim that there is strong evidence
for this, but it is one of those strange things
that I'm trying to think of reasons to rule it out,
and I can't. Uh So, if this seemingly weird scenario
were the case, would there be any way to know
for sure that you weren't a conscious, low resolution simulation

(01:02:20):
of a mind inside a brain ruled by the tyrannical
dictator mind that could blink you in and out of
existence by the whims of a dream or imagination. Well,
that sounds like a theological model there. Yeah. Fortunately, again,
I don't think there's any strong evidence this is the case.
Sleep tight. All right, Well, there you have it. That
is uh Anthology of Horror volume two, And if you

(01:02:43):
loved it, you don't have to wait an entire year.
You just have to wait a couple of days for
the next installment, because we're gonna be back with Anthology
of Horror Volume three, in which show will look at
an episode of The Outer Limits and an episode of
the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror. I can't wait. In the meantime,
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Bow your Mind, heading it over to Stuff to

(01:03:03):
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(01:03:25):
Blow Your Mind discussion the module Huge Things. As always
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(01:03:51):
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