Richard Dawkins - Religion's Misguided Missiles & The Improbability of God

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 112.62KB 9 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Religion's misguided missiles

Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause

disaster

The following Richard Dawkins essay appeared in the popular U.K. news

website,The Guardian on September 15, 2001, four days after the World Trade

Center terrorist attack.

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a

jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot

discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York

skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

That is precisely what a modern "smart missile" can do. Computer

miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of today's smart missiles

could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with

instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Smart

missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned

in the Gulf war, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and

scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and

easier alternative?

In the second world war, before electronics became cheap and miniature, the

psychologist BF Skinner did some research on pigeon-guided missiles. The

pigeon was to sit in a tiny cockpit, having previously been trained to peck keys in

such a way as to keep a designated target in the centre of a screen. In the

missile, the target would be for real.

The principle worked, although it was never put into practice by the US

authorities. Even factoring in the costs of training them, pigeons are cheaper and

lighter than computers of comparable effectiveness. Their feats in Skinner's

boxes suggest that a pigeon, after a regimen of training with colour slides, really

could guide a missile to a distinctive landmark at the southern end of Manhattan

island. The pigeon has no idea that it is guiding a missile. It just keeps on

pecking at those two tall rectangles on the screen, from time to time a food

reward drops out of the dispenser, and this goes on until... oblivion.

Pigeons may be cheap and disposable as on-board guidance systems, but

there's no escaping the cost of the missile itself. And no such missile large

enough to do much damage could penetrate US air space without being

intercepted. What is needed is a missile that is not recognised for what it is until

too late. Something like a large civilian airliner, carrying the innocuous markings

of a well-known carrier and a great deal of fuel. That's the easy part. But how do

you smuggle on board the necessary guidance system? You can hardly expect

the pilots to surrender the left-hand seat to a pigeon or a computer.

How about using humans as on-board guidance systems, instead of pigeons?

Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not significantly

costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior.

Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats,

which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their

passengers.

The natural assumption that the hijacker ultimately values his own life too, and

will act rationally to preserve it, leads air crews and ground staff to make

calculated decisions that would not work with guidance modules lacking a sense

of self-preservation. If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who,

though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for

bargaining. A rational pilot complies with the hijacker's wishes, gets the plane

down on the ground, has hot food sent in for the passengers and leaves the

negotiations to people trained to negotiate.

The problem with the human guidance system is precisely this. Unlike the pigeon

version, it knows that a successful mission culminates in its own destruction.

Could we develop a biological guidance system with the compliance and

dispensability of a pigeon but with a man's resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate

plausibly? What we need, in a nutshell, is a human who doesn't mind being

blown up. He'd make the perfect on-board guidance system. But suicide

enthusiasts are hard to find. Even terminal cancer patients might lose their nerve

when the crash was actually looming.

Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that

they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a

skyscraper? If only! Nobody is that stupid, but how about this - it's a long shot,

but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn't we

sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards?

Don't be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in

the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps and wings wouldn't appeal to the

sort of young men we need, so tell them there's a special martyr's reward of 72

virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive.

Would they fall for it? Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to

get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins

in the next.

It's a tall story, but worth a try. You'd have to get them young, though. Feed them

a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make the big lie sound

plausible when it comes. Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart.

Do you know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have just the

thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which has been honed over

centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been

brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may

understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though

the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-

heads and give them flying lessons.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Religion'smisguidedmissilesPromiseayoungmanthatdeathisnottheendandhewillwillinglycausedisasterThefollowingRichardDawkinsessayappearedinthepopularU.K.newswebsite,TheGuardianonSeptember15,2001,fourdaysaftertheWorldTradeCenterterroristattack.Aguidedmissilecorrectsitstrajectoryasitflies,homingin,say,ont...

展开>> 收起<<

Richard Dawkins - Religion's Misguided Missiles & The Improbability of God.pdf

共9页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Richard Dawkins - Religion's Misguided Missiles & The Improbability of God

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: