Confidence

inventing new fictional science (1950)

I've previously mentioned dianetics in passing. Earlier this year, I also mentioned John Campbell, editor of Astounding, and his interest in "psionics". In April I blogged about the Jack Vance story "The Potters of Firsk" which was published in the May 1950 issue of Astounding. As reviewed in detail here, that was the issue that included an editorial by Campbell in which he referred to science fiction story teller Lafayette (Ron) Hubbard as an engineer and described Hubbard's dianetics as a "revolutionary" "scientific thesis". Although Hubbard had been enrolled in college for a time, he never obtained an academic degree. In his editorial, Campbell optimistically referred to the soon-to-be-published book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health as a textbook*.

Dianetics: The Evolution Invention of a Science 

the "textbook" cover

I love the idea that Hubbard's 1950 "fact article" in Astounding about dianetics was actually science fiction. Look at the cover illustration in the image to the left on this page. I like to imagine that Hubbard was charmed by Vance's idea (in "The Potters of Firsk") of potters using the heat from a volcano to fire their wares. Vance's story had a dark side, with his imaginary potters cooking the bones of people into their pots. 

 

I suspect that Hubbard read Vance's "Potters" story and then created his own tale about death and volcanoes. Once he latched onto an idea, Hubbard's imagination could move in amazing directions. Sadly, we science fiction fans have apparently never gotten the complete story of the volcanoes of Xenu. The full "truth" is reserved for those who join Hubbard's church and pay big buck$ for the privilege of revelation. 😞

Scott Aaronson

There is a long tradition of people trained in the physical sciences trying their hand at "explaining" how the brain functions to create our mental experiences. One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is on display in the book The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. Penrose, a physicist, proposed that in order to understand the mysteries of consciousness we will first need a good theory of quantum gravity. 

 

Needless to say, no biologists working to understand consciousness have dropped their biology research in order to first create a complete and "correct" theory of quantum gravity. However, Penrose has contributed to the rise of a "quantum consciousness" cult that is no less persistent than Hubbard's church of scientology.

Fictional science in science fiction

from "To the Stars"
Related Reading: shortcut

Why did Campbell (with training in physics) ever believe that the "engineer" Hubbard could tell us something useful about "mental health"? Hubbard had constructed a simplistic "theory" of psychosomatic illness that included the type of mechanistic thinking that appeals to physical scientists. 

 

Imagine the human body as a machine that can malfunction and, in particular, picture the brain as a computer. Just think how great it would be if simply by correcting errors in our mechanical thought processes we could cure illnesses like tuberculosis! Hubbard apparently suckered Campbell into believing that evidence for such medical "thought repair cures" had been obtained in the course of his (Hubbard's) many years of painstaking "research" on the subject. Dianatics was exactly the kind of thrilling, cutting-edge "scientific" advance that Campbell wanted to be able to share with the wonder-junkie readers of Astounding magazine.

Confidence tricks or science
fiction?            image source

I believe that Hubbard was an "engineer" in the sense that he "solved Campbell" and had learned to provide Campbell with exactly what Campbell wanted most. I've previously observed that during the 1940s Campbell was likely to publish in Astounding any science fiction story (such as "To the Stars") that included a few equations. I'm sure that Hubbard told Campbell that there was "experimental" evidence to support the medical efficacy of dianetic (thought) "auditing". 

 

To Campbell's credit, when after a year had passed and no evidence was provided by Hubbard to support his claims of disease cures, Campbell stopped acting as Hubbard's shill. Campbell quickly moved on to his next pseudoscience enthusiasm. He needed to provide his readers with new thrills, not a boring "fact article" about how Hubbard's dianetics scheme had collapsed in bankruptcy.

profitable religion

Write what (and who) you know

I love Isaac Asimov's 1955 novel The End of Eternity. There are two amusing characters in that book, Senior Computer Laban Twissell and August Sennor. I suspect that both Twissell and Sennor were characters built upon Asimov's many years of experience with Campbell. Campbell was a smoker and Asimov depicted Twissell as a smoker. Asimov describes Sennor as having "leapfrog enthusiasms", moving on from one all-absorbing-interest to the next before ever finishing his work on the last one. Twissell is depicted as a scam artist, hiding his personal crimes while secretly working to engineer the entire structure of Eternity.

scientology

Jack Vance's 1958 story "Parapsyche" might also have been reacting to the confidence trick that had been pulled off by Campbell and Hubbard in 1950. Vance often mocked religious hypocrisy in his writings and by 1958, Hubbard was 5 years into expanding dianetics into his new religion, scientology. I would not be surprised if Vance was thinking about Hubbard's creation of a money-making religion when he wrote "Parapsyche".

published 1950 in Astounding

 

from the introduction by J. Winter

To Shill or Not to Shill

In 1950, Campbell was not the lone shill for Hubbard. The "fact article" by Hubbard in Astounding begins with an introduction by Joseph Winter. (There was almost a third entirely invented shill, as described here.)

I love the idea that each human contains "a machine incapable of error, working with memory storage banks of infinite capacity". For my Exode Saga, I imagine that the positronic robots of Earth faced a major challenge when they developed time travel technology. They needed a way to control the "butterfly effect".

source

Endosymbionts

I imagine that when the pek arrived on Earth two billion years ago, they impregnated our planet with zeptites. When humans evolved, they evolved as biological organisms that contained a zeptite endosymbiont. Later, when R. Nyrtia created temporal momentum, a second femtobot endosymbiont was added to the human brain as a sub-system. For each human on Earth there were corresponding replicoids in the Hierion Domain.

Here on Earth, our endosymbionts can link us to the vast quantum computational capacity of our replicoids in the Hierion Domain. The behavior of each person on Earth can be made to precisely match the behavior that was "recorded" by our replicoids in the previous Reality.

"Hierion Writers Club"

For the story that I am currently writing ("Hierion Writers Club"), in the Foundation Reality, R. Nyrtia is experimenting with the use of replicoids for a new purpose. It has been discovered that replicoids can can be given a new independent life of their own within the Hierion Domain, breaking the pre-programmed link between replicoids and humans on Earth. 

 

At first, only nanoscopic replicoids are made, but eventually "full-sized" replicoids with the normal human body size are created for use as Interventionist agents on Earth.

 

see this

Eric Russell

Hubbard could not get through his 40 page description of how he had invented his fictional science of human thought without explicitly mentioning science fiction. At the very end of his "fact article", Hubbard mentions Eric Russell's "sinister barrier". For his fiction, Russell had imagined parasitic Vitons (see the illustration to the left) who secretly control human behavior.

 

interior art
by Walt Miller

Hubbard cheerfully implies that his new-found dianetic methods will liberate Humanity from the horrible norns that insidiously disrupt the perfection of our minds. Poor Walt Miller apparently had no choice but to illustrate Hubbard's "fact article" as if it were just another science fiction story. Look at Walt's depiction of Hubbard's norns in the image to the right. The norns are shown as a type of evil puppet master. 

Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding

I love Hubbard's idea that human brains have both standard memory circuits composed of neural networks AND an additional system of engrams. He imagined that the perfect information storing engrams were subcellular. For the Exode Saga, I imagine that there are nanoscopic infites, capable of holding memories and shifting them into human minds.

Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding

Sadly, Hubbard was writing in the age before nanometer scale integrated circuit lithography and before it was understood how genetic information is stored in DNA molecules. For the Exode Saga, I've had to invent nanoscopic replicoids, femtobots and zeptites in order to equip humans with subcellular memory systems.

 

Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding

* Footnote: I've never completely read anything written by Hubbard. I find his writings to be very painful reading. For all I know, maybe Hubbard's book on dianetics is a textbook, with a whole chapter in it about the discipline of "Chinese apuncture" and another on "healing crystals". As a biologist, I found it hard to get past the first page of Hubbard's 1950 "fact article" where after describing the perfect computer he states authoritatively that the human brain is a perfect computer. That's a great introduction to a science fiction story, but it is not science.

Related Reading. Asimov was a grandmaster of fictional science. See: psychohistory, endochronic starships and quantitative micropsychiatry

See Also: the Dean Drive

Next: fantasy teleportation

On page 66 of the Feb 1959 issue of Galaxy. Hubbard Association of Scientologists International.

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