being not even wrong would’ve been better
You may have heard of the Time Cube guy, whose real name is Gene Ray, the web’s first celebrity crackpot at large and lunatic extraordinaire, the trailblazer for the modern physics cranks praised by Margaret Wertheim in her attempts to cash in on documenting this curious species. And as all trailblazers, he has imitators like the now infamous Stuart Wilde whose theories about the origin of humans recently graced Pharyngula. Far be it from me to even attempt to summarize his ideas because they involve human dematerialization and the sort of stuff you’d expect to believe you saw during a really, really awesome acid trip, and not being well versed in hallucinogenic realms, all my efforts at paraphrasing would certainly fall far, far short of conveying the sheer scope of Wilde’s fevered imagination. So instead, I’m just going to let the man explain it in his own words…
The mystical shamans of South America call the Mirror World, the Aluna and in the Aluna, there’s a record of the origins of man on earth. In there, it is shown that man walked in naked from another dimension, but he was initially a bit of an automaton, unable to cope. It was as if his brain was not as yet activated to deal with a world of three dimensions and gravity, so he initially lay down on the ground and fell asleep.
You know, there’s something that bothers me about this whole walking in from another dimension thing. As a high school geometry class will tell you, a dimension is simply a property we use to measure features of the objects around us. We’re intimately familiar with four dimensions: length, width, height, and time. Dimensions beyond these are the stuff of rather creative mathematics used by string theorists to explain phenomena we’re not able to study in controlled conditions, mathematics that can easily become esoteric enough to part with all objective reality. Just enter “arXiv” in the search box and press enter for a few dozen examples as to how. With that, when I read a treatise about entities walking into our universe from “another dimension,” or in New Agey pseudoscientific technobabble, “higher dimensions,” I read it as a speculation about intelligent entities which emerge from height or width, with speculations of whether height or width have any more astral and spiritual significance than length. And that, dear readers, is absolute nonsense, much like Wilde’s concept of how our intelligence emerged. Forget the MYH16 mutation and natural selection. It was all thanks to mushrooms!
While he slept, a being came to him from another world, and it placed six psilocybin mushrooms on his chest, three down one side and three down the other. When the man woke, he found these mushrooms and being hungry, he ate them. Awhile later, the mushrooms’ affect took hold of him, and his brain that was previously dormant, clicked into action, and the man rose and stumbled off to find other humans, who had also walked into this three dimensional plane on exactly the same day. I would presume women got here in the same way, at the same time as the men.
What amazes me is the astonishing level of willful ignorance it takes to be able to spout gibberish like this in this day and age, when you can get a basic freshman college-level education on most topics online from vast university websites and their regionally accredited online courses which are open to anyone who’s willing and able to study a topic that catches his or her interest. Sure, I’ve been on the receiving end of a far more insane and elaborate worldview, but Dr. Depperman actually seemed to be certifiably, DSM V insane and trying with all the oomph his severely skewed mental faculties could possibly summon to use the ingorantly grandiose jargon deployed in post-modern platitudes. Wilde just comes off as incredibly ignorant and unwilling to even pretend that he’s ever read a popular science publication, much less took a college level course in physics or biology as one would expect from someone who decided to try and elaborate on the story of human origins. If others at least try to mention genetics, evolutionary principles, and anatomy, he gives us New Age fluff and an encounter with magic mushrooms, and thinks it’s perfectly sufficient to leave it at that.
