I molt therefore I am

"They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation."

-- Nicolas Fontaine, 1650

I once visited an oceanarium hoping I'd get the chance to hold a live lobster in my hands. It turned out the place wouldn't let us--something about contaminating them, I think. I did get to hold a horseshoe crab, a starfish, and a sea cucumber, all alive. The lobsters, however, we could only observe in their enclosures, snapping their claws, waving their antennae.

Our guide was eager to debunk the popular notion that lobsters scream when they are cooked alive. That is impossible, he told us, first because lobsters have no vocal cords, and second because they have no brains.

That didn't sound right to me. First of all, of course lobsters don't have vocal cords, but then neither do birds, and birds certainly emit a shrill noise when in extreme distress. I suppose he meant lobsters don't vocalize, period. Fair enough. Then what is the high-pitched sound heard when a lobster is placed in a boiling pot? He didn't say, but later I found out that many sources explain it as steam escaping from the animal's carapace.

A much bigger stretch was his second claim. I knew that not all animals have brains. We even got to see a confrontation between two such creatures. Someone placed a starfish into a tank with a mussel, an animal that looked sort of like a three-dimensional Pac-Man. As soon as the starfish hit the water, the previously sedentary mussel rocketed toward the other end of the tank, its shell bobbing open and closed with each stroke. We were told it was trying to escape because the starfish is a natural predator. It wasn't "afraid" of the starfish. As a type of clam, a mussel has no brain and therefore can have no emotion. But it did nonetheless possess survival reflexes.

The problem was that everything I knew about lobsters, insects, and other arthropods suggested they did have some sort of brain. I had done several reports in college on honeybees, who have the most complex system of communication in the animal world, involving a "dance" that conveys the location of nectar to other members of the hive. They know the dance instinctively, but it seems unlikely that any brainless creature could process that level of information.

It wasn't until a while later that I found the decisive refutation for what our guide had said. I was in my university's library when I wandered into the biology section and decided, on a whim, to check a book on crustacean anatomy. The book unhesitatingly described these animals as possessing a brain. In fact, the brain of arthropods is fairly advanced for invertebrates, surpassed only by that of cephalopod mollusks--squids and octopuses, the only invertebrates that appear to possess intelligence.

As noted zoologist Donald Griffin stated, "Experimenters have demonstrated that the central nervous systems of crustaceans, insects, and cephalopods organize and modulate information in ways that are quite comparable in complexity and precision to those of vertebrate brains" (qtd. in George Page's Inside the Animal Mind, p. 167).

Okay, so they have brains. Or at least something we can call a brain. But that leaves open a more crucial question: Do they have any consciousness? When injured, do they experience pain? Remarkably, many scientists insist the answer is no. A 2005 study funded by the Norwegian government received wide publicity, which claimed it merely bolstered an existing scientific consensus that these animals feel no pain:

[A]nimals with simple nervous systems, like lobsters, snails and worms, do not have the ability to process emotional information and therefore do not experience suffering, say most researchers.... "When you drop a lobster in boiling water, or put a fishhook through a worm, those stimuli cause those muscles to contract," Stevens said. "We describe that as pain because of the motor response, which is nothing more than neurons that have been stimulated."

Or, in the words of the Terminator, "The data could be called pain."

I guess that settles it, huh? Not quite. A more recent investigation paints a rather different picture:

[Robert] Elwood, along with Stuart Barr and Lynsey Patterson, outline seven reasons, with supportive findings, they believe crustaceans suffer.

For one thing, they argue, crustaceans possess "a suitable central nervous system and receptors." They learn to avoid a negative stimulus after a potentially painful experience. They also engage in protective reactions, such as limping and rubbing, after being hurt.

Other scientists remain unconvinced. As one puts it, "You could argue the shrimp is simply trying to clean the antenna rather than showing a pain response."

Well, of course you could argue. An alien scientist studying humans could argue that humans do not experience pain. They cry, scream, and sweat when they're injured simply because those are adaptive behaviors for getting help or scaring away predators (or whatever). If you're intent on denying an organism's inner experience, you can explain away any behavior you see. Much of what drives this skepticism, however, is scientists' unwillingness to expand their idea of what an invertebrate nervous system can do.

Proving that lobsters suffer when boiled would probably have legal consequences. They would be subject to laws prohibiting cruelty to animals (they already are in some places), and chefs might be required to kill them or stun them before boiling them. (There is even now an electrocution device for that purpose called CrustaStun.) Since there's a big worldwide seafood industry and many people consider lobsters incredibly tasty, it's no wonder discussions of this nature tend to provoke angry, knee-jerk reactions.

What do religious Jews, who don't eat lobster, think about this issue? Most don't get involved at all. We already have our own problems dealing with groups that seek to ban kosher slaughter. But the teachings of our religion do shed light on this topic. While allowing the killing of animals for food and other human-related purposes, Judaism places great value on their proper treatment. There are a range of laws about taking good care of one's livestock or pets, including feeding them on time and not overburdening them. Many rabbis prohibit hunting for sport, and none encourage it. The ritual slaughter of mammals and birds attempts to make their death quick and painless.

These rules have given Judaism a better record on animal welfare than Christianity, but they have important limitations. They allow a Jew to harm an animal for a legitimate human purpose (for example, ridding a rat infestation), and some Jews have interpreted this stipulation broadly enough to justify some pretty brutal practices. The ugliest example in recent memory concerned the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant (later shut down after the fallout from another controversy, involving mistreatment of employees). Undercover videos released by PETA showed cows apparently walking around for several minutes after their necks had been cut. Defenders insisted the animals were like chickens with their head cut off, acting on reflex but feeling no pain.

Kosher supervisors finally agreed to change the plant's practices, and later it received a positive review from an inspection by leading animal-welfare expert Dr. Temple Grandin. But one of their controversial practices that remained in effect was turning animals upside-down before killing them, which is authorized by Israeli rabbis but not practiced by any other kosher slaughterhouses in America.

Judaism teaches that non-Jews should observe the Noachide commandments, which include an injunction not to eat an animal while it is still alive, usually interpreted as a general statement against cruelty to animals. But the obligation is narrower than it is for Jews, and might not apply to a marine invertebrate anyway.

The important point in all this, however, is that Judaism always intended the principle of compassion for animals to go beyond the letter of the law. As Rabbi Natan Slifkin explains in his book Man and Beast:

Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi was once approached by a calf fleeing in terror from the butcher. But Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi did not take pity on it. He said, "Go; for this is what you were made for!" As a result of this he suffered pain for many years. His atonement came when his maid discovered a rat's nest in the house and was about to sweep it away; Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi told her to leave it alone.

Now it is undeniably true that the calf's purpose in life was indeed to be eaten. That was what it was bred for. This is neither wrong nor cruel; on the contrary, it assures the success of the species (cows will never become extinct) and the elevation of this animal. Yet nevertheless it was this event that brought punishment to Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi. For treatment of animals is not meant to be determined on a purely legal level. The purpose of the mitzvah of kindness to animals is to inculcate one in the trait of compassion. That cows are destined to be eaten is irrelevant. When faced with a dewy-eyed, bleating, tender calf, one's mercies should be aroused. Likewise, although there is every reason to dispose of rats, it is admirable if one feels sympathy for the poor little things and cannot bring oneself to do so.

There are other limitations in one's actions toward animals. Although a human need justifies causing pain to animals, it only justifies it insofar as it is required. Where different options are available, one should choose the less painful option. (pp. 194-5)

The prime consideration in Judaism is not what the animal is experiencing but what type of person you become in the way you treat it. People who are unaffected by seeing an animal suffer are likely to lack empathy in general. So even if the lobster's nervous system is too simple for the creature to experience pain, just the appearance that it does ought to give us pause. Whether the practice of boiling lobsters alive continues or not, there's something seriously wrong when people have desensitized themselves to the point they consider the process as casual as chopping fruit.

Design creating the designer

Given the achievements of theoretical physics in the last century, it can come as a shock to realize the amount of unbridled speculation in the field. The way Paul Davies presents the topic in his book The Goldilocks Enigma occasionally gives it the aura of classical mythology. For example, tell me the following account of the early universe doesn't sound like some primordial battle between a good and bad deity:

Whenever matter and antimatter mingle, they quickly annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.... So that presents a puzzle: how did the big bang make 10⁵⁰ tons of matter without also making 10⁵⁰ tons of antimatter?.... however it is done, the story of the origin of matter would go something like this. The heat radiation released after the big bang created copious quantities of both matter and antimatter, all mixed together, but containing a slight excess of matter. As the universe cooled, the antimatter would be totally destroyed by virtue of its being in intimate contact with matter, leaving unscathed the small residue of excess matter--about one part in a billion. (p. 105)

The coincidence of my coming upon this book just a few weeks after I wrote my post about pantheism, which covers similar ground, wasn't lost on me. Both deal with the question of why the dead universe around us seems uniquely suited for life. To rephrase the old conundrum, how come anyone's around to hear the tree make a sound?

Physicists over the past few decades have discovered that many of the physical laws of the universe seem "just right" for the development of life. If the numbers had been slightly lower, or slightly higher, life as we know it could not have come to exist. I will mention just a few examples, because the topic is vast and has been covered thoroughly in numerous books:

1. If the neutron were slightly lighter, the proton would be unstable and atoms probably could not have formed. If it were slightly heavier, nuclear fusion would not be possible and stars could not have formed.

2. If gravity were slightly stronger, all stars would be giants with relatively brief lives. If it were slightly weaker, heavy elements necessary for planet formation would not have been produced.

3. If the nuclear resonance level of carbon were any different, our sun could not have produced high quantities of the element.

One must exercise caution when examining these apparent facts. Perhaps a very different sort of life, or lifelike phenomenon, would have emerged under other conditions. Perhaps we aren't exercising our imaginations enough. But examples like these have piled up, and so far they haven't gone away.

Like me, Davies isn't satisfied with the standard copout, "That's just the way the laws are, and if they weren't that way, we wouldn't be here to discuss it." To illustrate the flaw in this argument, he takes off from an idea in Carl Sagan's novel Contact. The number pi consists of decimal digits going on into infinity. The digits are completely arbitrary except for the fact that the number is derived from nature. Let's say you created a computer program displaying the number in binary, where a light pixel would represent one, and a dark pixel zero. Most likely, the screen would be flooded with meaningless "snow." You wouldn't expect to see a coherent image, such as a circle, much less a smiley face. But what if one did appear after just two minutes? Assuming the program wasn't rigged, the only conclusion most scientists would permit would be that it's just a freakish coincidence.

Davies explores several possible solutions to this dilemma. (I will deal with only a few of them here.) The most popular is the hypothesis of multiple universes. In an infinity of universes, some are bound to produce life. Those that don't will obviously go unnoticed. We're here simply because our universe is one that happened to have the right set of laws needed for our existence.

The multiverse hypothesis isn't purely ad hoc; it seems to follow from certain versions of the Big Bang theory, as well as from certain versions of quantum mechanics. But there are major problems with the hypothesis, as Davies explains. For starters, it is borderline untestable. It also seems to violate Occam's razor, the principle that theories should be as simple as possible. And it leaves unanswered the question of where the universe-generating mechanism came from.

One bizarre twist on this hypothesis bears mentioning. Davies quotes Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom as saying, "There is a significant probability that you are living in [a] computer simulation. I mean this literally: if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilisation. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation."

That's just a modern variation on an age-old philosophical idea, but Bostrom makes a case for it based on the multiverse hypothesis. See if you can follow this. If countless universes exist, there are likely to be ones containing civilizations that have reached the point of creating simulated universes. Any civilization with that capacity is likely to exercise it numerous times. Therefore, there are likely to be more fake universes than real ones, and so, by the laws of probability, we are more likely to inhabit one of the fakes.

Davies has fun with this idea. If we're in a simulation, who is to say we aren't in a simulation-within-a-simulation? "Logically there is no end to this nested sequence.... The real universe could be lost amid an infinite regress of nested fakes. Or it may not even exist at all. Reality might consist of an infinite sequence of simulations, period" (p. 185).

As the saying goes, that way lies madness. Bostrom's argument has many holes, but the most basic is that the conclusion undermines the premises. If we live in a fake universe, how do we know the physical laws we have discovered--on which the multiverse hypothesis rests--accurately describe the reality outside the simulation?

Davies, in any case, prefers a one-universe model, but he still suspects that the seemingly life-friendly laws cannot be due to chance. He proposes that there must be something leading our universe in the direction of producing conscious, thinking beings like ourselves. What that something is, he leaves open, but he puts forward a series of related theories that he maintains are compatible with modern physics.

While I'm not sure I understood all the details, his basic idea is that conscious life itself, in the far future, somehow influences the early universe to produce life in the first place. The laws create life, and life creates the laws, in a sort of circular time-loop with no ultimate origin. I couldn't help thinking of the following Escher drawing:


Davies contrasts this idea with the classic grandfather paradox, where a time traveler kills an ancestor. He says it is more like a time traveler saving the life of a girl who will one day become the time traveler's mother. Davies insists that this scenario, while strange, does not create a paradox.

Actually, the scenario is called an "ontological paradox." One notable example I discussed on this blog is from the movie Somewhere in Time. A man receives an antique watch from an old lady. He later goes back in time and gives it to a young woman, who will become the old lady who gives it to his younger self--and so on, ad infinitum. The paradox is that the watch was never built by anyone, at any time. It just eternally exists, fully formed. Since Davies is as bothered as I am by the question of why anything exists, I would think he'd stay far away from such scenarios, which only compound the question.

Considering the difficulties with all these theories, why not accept the traditional idea of a creator God? Davies thinks this answer presents at least as many difficulties as the others. For one thing, did God choose to create the universe, or was it a necessary act that flowed from His very nature? Either possibility leads to additional questions. Also notice the problem with describing creation as an event in time--God exists outside of time, at least according to traditional religions.

I think that such questions miss the point. God by definition is where rational inquiry ends. To believers, the purpose of belief is to transcend the rational in order to connect with the unfathomable. The usual response by scientists is that God, then, should remain forever outside of scientific discussions. To some extent, I agree. But when scientists are reduced to positing fake worlds within fake worlds, or self-created entities from an unexplainable time-loop, we are justified in wondering if the end has already been reached.

God's third party

The most poorly understood philosophy about God is pantheism. To pantheists, God isn't the creator of the universe, God is the universe. To other people, this sounds more like a semantic trick than a coherent philosophy, as if pantheists are simply calling the universe by a different name, without making any unique statements about reality.

Curiously, many self-described pantheists almost seem to agree with that characterization of their beliefs. Pantheism.net, for example, approves of Richard Dawkins's description of pantheism as "sexed-up atheism." According to the website, "our beliefs are entirely naturalistic, and compatible with atheism, humanism and naturalism. Also with those forms of paganism that see magic and the gods as symbols rather than realities."

Hard-nosed skeptics find pantheism infuriating. They don't know how to deal with a system that renders proof irrelevant. Not that all traditional theists claim their beliefs are provable. But the statement "God exists" at least qualifies as a truth claim. The statement "God is the universe," on the other hand, merely redefines God as something which even atheists admit exists. Yet a fellow blogger makes a strong case that pantheism and atheism do in fact differ in their beliefs about reality:

The major difference lies in the appreciation for existence. What is existence really? Is it some random backdrop in which we find ourselves or is it an integral part of who and what we are?

Pantheists are generally philosophical Monists [who believe that] everything is 'one thing' and all comes from the same source. All things within the universe are interconnected....

The ultimate difference lies in what each side considers the basic substance of the universe to be like. The atheist conceives of nothing but subatomic particles whizzing about or random quantum fluctuations while the pantheist imagines a fundamental well-structured ground of being.

In practice, there is a fine line between pantheism and the views of traditional believers. Western forms of mysticism have challenged the simple assertion that "God exists." To the mystics, God is beyond existence in the usual sense. Many of them have come to think of God as the totality of everything, including, but not limited to, the universe. This view is called panentheism. It's pantheism with an extra syllable, which apparently makes all the difference as to whether it's acceptable to mainstream Judaism and Christianity.

The raison d'être of pantheism concerns two interrelated questions about the universe. Why does anything exist? And why is the universe that does exist capable of producing conscious beings--in effect, becoming aware of itself? Theistic philosopher Roger Scruton ponders this second question in a recent essay:

Dawkins writes as though the theory of the selfish gene puts paid once and for all to the idea of a creator God -- we no longer need that hypothesis to explain how we came to be. In a sense that is true. But what about the gene itself: how did that come to be? What about the primordial soup? All these questions are answered, of course, by going one step further down the chain of causation. But at each step we encounter a world with a singular quality: namely that it is a world which, left to itself, will produce conscious beings, able to look for the reason and the meaning of things, and not just for the cause. The astonishing thing about our universe, that it contains consciousness, judgement, the knowledge of right and wrong, and all the other things that make the human condition so singular, is not rendered less astonishing by the hypothesis that this state of affairs emerged over time from other conditions. If true, that merely shows us how astonishing those other conditions were. The gene and the soup cannot be less astonishing than their product.

Since atheists have no answer to the question of why anything exists, all they can do is neutralize it by asking "Who created God?" But the idea of an uncreated Creator as the conscious source of everything raises fewer questions than the idea of an uncreated universe which happens to have the properties needed to become conscious of itself.

It's no wonder so many atheists fall back on the hypothesis of multiple universes, even though an infinity of time and space in which anything can happen is little different in effect from an infinite Creator. Others pretend the question isn't objectively meaningful. "The world exists because it exists," they say, and they go on to suggest that our ability to come up with such questions must have evolved in our primitive ancestors.

That's a major point of divergence from pantheism, which attempts, however imperfectly, to bridge the gap between theism and atheism. Its tenets superficially resemble those of atheism, but it has a greater appreciation for the mystery of existence. The consequence of viewing existence as one interconnected whole, of which conscious beings that can reflect on the matter are an integral part, and not just a byproduct, is subtle but real.

From amoebas to elephants

Panati's Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, a book whose accuracy I have sometimes found wanting, has an interesting take on a familiar fact. According to Panati, sex and death are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Organisms that reproduce asexually do not have finite lifespans like we do. The amoeba simply splits into two amoebas, which in turn exist until themselves splitting. As long as it isn't killed, it multiplies endlessly without ever dying.

But in sexual reproduction, two individuals contribute genetic material that grows into a new organism, then they die. Death is simply the logical corollary to a process that uses a mere fraction of an organism to produce a new creature. In humans, it may happen decades after the sex act itself, but it's inevitable--and linked to the fact that we are sexual beings.

"In one sense," writes Panati, "we possess immortality, but not where we want it. We have it in our generational genes. We'd prefer it in our body, in the form we cherish, in the face that gazes reassuringly back from the mirror" (p. 6).

Despite Panati's argument, there isn't much to envy about amoebas. They don't care about their immortality any more than your sex cells care about theirs. Lacking consciousness, they are unable to care.

For your part, cloning wouldn't satisfy your desire to live forever. You would think of the clone as a new person, just as you think of identical twins as two separate individuals despite their genetic sameness. What you really want is a continuance of your soul, not your body. Even if you don't believe in the soul, you recognize a distinct inner self which perishes at death. Immortality, to you, means the permanent existence of this self.

Previously, I raised the question of whether you'd be willing to die if a clone with all your memories were created in your place. That sort of experiment could be the key to immortality, assuming that merely copying the information in your brain to another vessel would effectively move your consciousness there, like a transfer of data between computers.

There are problems with that assumption, however. In his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card discusses a fictional species that communicates by transferring memories. According to Card, "individual identity would be much less important to them than to us. And death would be almost meaningless. As long as you passed memories before you died, then everything you thought and experienced would continue to live on, so that even though you might cease to take part, everyone in the community would clearly remember having done everything you did!" (p. 50)

Card here implies that there is some intangible "you" existing independently of your memories, so that even if those memories are passed to someone else before your bodily death occurs, "you" perish. But if "you" are nothing more than your memories, as some philosophers have argued, then how is a memory transfer from one body to another any different than what happens in life from each moment to the next?

I believe it is different. No matter what the philosophers say, there is something intangible inside us. Consider the attempt to create an android with human emotions. You might program it to have a distinct state called "sadness," where it would display symptoms such as frowning, downcast eyes, and broken concentration. But it's doubtful that any of this would cause the machine to experience sadness, any more than an actor experiences the emotions he performs.

Inner experience, one of the most mysterious features of human life, is not just information in the brain. It is the part of yourself which experiences the information. You can't prove it exists. You're directly aware of your own, but you can only infer that other people are something more than machines programmed to behave as though they have inner experience.

Philosophical materialists typically attempt to ignore or downplay the mystery of inner experience, viewing it as merely another illusion to be swept away by the inevitable march of scientific progress. The problem with that argument is that since all illusions are perceived through a person's inner experience, to call inner experience itself illusory borders on the tautological. Inner experience is the elephant in the room, the one thing in existence that absolutely defeats a materialistic explanation.

I post, therefore I am

You're walking down the street, and a scrawny young man approaches you. He has acne and wears braces. He can't be more than seventeen. He says to you, "I'm George, a 52-year-old surgeon." A moment later, he says, "And I'm Clara, a 26-year-old law student."

As absurd as this scenario sounds, many people are acting this way for real, not because they are psychotic, but because the Internet enables them to get away with this sort of behavior. In most online discussion areas, users can adopt whatever name they want and say just about anything without facing the consequences that would result from similar behavior in the real world. Many use this anonymity to their advantage, making up facts about themselves to intimidate others and empower themselves. They also may pretend to be more than one person by posting under more than one name. In extreme circumstances people can be traced to their real identities, but this rarely happens except when law enforcement is tracking criminals. There are other, limited ways of counteracting the problem, none of them foolproof.

It is therefore important to be cautious before accepting claims that people online make about themselves. I'm not saying that you should go around calling people liars, but you should be cognizant about the way people in Internet discussions can use their anonymity to manipulate the situation.

I have had several apparent encounters with such individuals. I say "apparent" because I never was able to prove my suspicions. The earliest was in 1997, on the Excite message boards, which happened to be my first experience with message boards. A fellow started a board entitled "HOMESCHOOLERS ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO TEACH!!!!!!"

He took every opportunity to insult anyone who challenged his views. His main argument was based on personal experience: he wrote that he knew several homeschooled children who were "all lacking in social behavior, adjusting to their surroundings and general knowledge." I asked him to clarify what exactly he had seen, pointing out that his observations may have been too limited to draw general conclusions. He replied that he had encountered numerous homeschooled kids in his jobs as an interviewer and a college instructor, and they were "all blown away by others who had attended formal education."

A fairly well-known homeschooling advocate named Karl Bunday, who has made a side career interviewing homeschooling families, joined the board and asked for permission to interview some of those kids. The person replied, "you expect me to just cough up names of my students so that some nutcase can come to their house to evaluate them?!? That is hardly confidential or professional." The question, then, was why he would base his arguments on information that others could not verify. For all we knew, he could have made it all up. Even if he hadn't, his judgment of those kids may have been less than fair. That was a distinct possibility considering how quick he was to insult complete strangers.

When I raised these points, he said that questioning his claims was unreasonable since the purpose of these boards was to "share experiences." He then attempted to put his experiences on the same level as the documented evidence of homeschooling success I had presented: "I guess I could compile my studies and call it research refuting homeschooling as being effective."

People observing the debate told me I handled myself well, but I felt I was being suckered too easily by this person's antics. He was clearly exploiting his anonymity to win the argument, by relying on "data" that could never be investigated. I acted flustered at times, and he seized on that weakness. (The good news is that I successfully changed the mind of someone else on the board, a person who actually listened to my arguments instead of just trying to fight me.)

Years later, I got a new opportunity to deal with this sort of situation. In 2005, after taking a course in which my final paper examined the movie Fight Club, I went to the Internet Movie Database's message board for that film, eager to share my insights. I soon found myself in a heated argument with two posters. If I take what they said at face value, they consisted of a middle-aged psychology professor and a young female fan. Personally, I suspect both of them were in fact one person. How do I know? I don't. I found clues, to be sure, like the fact that they frequently posted just minutes apart from each other, and that their writing styles (particularly spelling errors) were similar. But I mostly based my suspicions on my familiarity with this sort of situation.

The argument started when the "professor" posted an analysis of the protagonist's mental condition. He ridiculed all the laymen (which he spelled "laimen") who had addressed the issue. Having researched this topic, I found many errors in his post, and I pointed out that the filmmakers were themselves laymen. I hinted not too subtly that I doubted he was a real professor.

He and the "girl" erupted into insults. Here is a sample (pardon the strong language, but this is what they said): "Stop being a little bitch crying because you don't like that someone here has experience and truly knows what they're talking about." "If you ever have something to say, do yourself a favor and just shut up." "YOU were the only retard unable to comprehend me, you think it's my fault. That's your mom's fault." "Being the arrogant asshole you are, I'm sure you're not done yet, so go ahead and prove me right again by posting another whiney bitch post."

Does any of this sound like the words of a typical professor? I asked him for proof of his credentials. He replied that they had been "proven to TRUSTED people on this board, aka NOT YOU." Of course I respected his privacy; however, as long as he was flaunting his credentials, it was ridiculous that he should expect everyone to believe him without verification. Any anonymous user can claim to be a professor. It doesn't prove anything.

For a working professor, he sure seemed to spend a lot of time on the board. He had established a club called the "Space Monkeys" (modeled after the film), and board members who wanted to join he would initiate into it. He started a new thread inviting his Space Monkeys to attack me. There, they each provided me with brilliant kernels of wit, such as the following (I'm not making this up): "Kylopod is stupid and his logic is stupid and the reason he is stupid is because the opposite of smart is Kylopod." Afterwards, the "professor" praised the intelligence of these comments.

I had a chance to get angry and join in the abuse. But I decided to restrain myself from such an emotional reaction. That's one of the advantages of message boards as opposed to real-life encounters. You get some time to think before posting a reply. Here is a passage from one of my posts:

I want to thank you.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking I mean that only in a sarcastic way, and maybe you're right. But I'm actually trying to be quite honest now. I really am thankful for the insight you've provided me with your latest posts, though I realize my gratitude is of a kind that you're not likely to appreciate.

You see, I've always been fascinated by multiple-identity trolls such as yourself. What makes you tick? I've had my theories, but it's largely impossible to confirm any of them. Trolls are elusive almost by definition. All I can deduce about you is that you're pretending to be a professor, and that you are assuming at least two identities on this forum. Other than that, I know very little about you. I assume you are young, but I don't know how young--you could be anywhere from teens to twenties. Perhaps you actually are older; I really can't say for sure.

But your two latest posts have helped me understand the troll mindset better than I ever have before.

Despite his/her/their attempts to portray me as an "attacker," I adopted a cool, detached tone when replying to their rants. I acted completely unruffled by their insults. I gave the impression that I was coldly analyzing them and reacting to their attacks only with quiet amusement. As one observer put it to me in an email, "you calmly and coolly handed them their asses time and again, and you did it without swearing at them. I am humbled by your patience."

I could have simply walked away as soon as they started attacking me. That would probably have been the most sensible approach. But I've always had the weakness that I enjoy deflating bullies. In this case, I was being passive-aggressive, a quality I don't normally display in the real world. I'm usually very direct with people. But because this was a message board, I had the opportunity to try a different strategy, and I was pleased by the results.

I may have improved in my ability to handle this sort of situation, but I'm still perplexed by what it all means. I have made actual friends online. But the lack of accountability remains a problem with Internet communication. I know I'm for real, but I often cannot be sure that someone else is. There's something positively solipsistic about this situation, where the reality of everyone else's life can only be accepted on trust.