Feet Of Clay?

We all rewrite our personal history, but due to journal-keeping I can check on early versions of events. Therefore I think I can say with some confidence that I’ve never really had heroes or role-models. The closest identifiable person was one I mentioned in a school essay when I was thirteen, a couple of years before I started writing a detailed diary in earnest and at length, and it was Kate Bush. I can still see that, to be honest. I obviously wouldn’t have a sportsperson as a hero due to my total lack of interest, but I suppose I might have a scientist or an author, or there might be someone in my everyday life such as a friend, relative or teacher, and in fact there probably are two identifiable people who fall into this category. They are one of my English teachers and Isaac Asimov.

I’ll start with my English teacher, whose name I won’t mention. Just to be clear, I had two particularly significant English teachers I have reason to refer to and I don’t want them to be confused. One was the folk singer John Jones of the Oysterband, known under the name Fiddler’s Dram for the one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. This is not the person I’m talking about and I want to emphasise that although my view of him at the time was unfairly negative for some reason I don’t understand, he’s clearly a diamond geezer and I once tried to get his band to sing at a fundraising festival for Greenpeace. Not him, not him, not him! Okay?

So, the guy I’m talking about is my favourite teacher of all, and a significant influence on me, shall as I said remain nameless. At an early stage he opened my eyes to the evils of homophobia, encouraged my creative writing, introduced me to Radio 4 and facilitated my appreciation of literature. He was my English Language and Literature teacher for three years altogether, at twelve and from fourteen to fifteen. I visited him in his home twice. Whenever I begin a sentence with a present participle, that’s his influence. He was also blind, apparently due to albinism, but refused to be registered blind because he regarded it as an unnecessary encumbrance. He had disguised his blindness at his job interview. He was also single the whole time I knew of him, and left the school as a full-time teacher shortly after I did, citing me as the reason, because he felt the school couldn’t cope with my talent and personality and nurture me properly. Yes, he specifically left my school because of me, and this isn’t just something he told me but something which appeared in the local paper when he became a post master. If you want a model of what he was like, watch ‘Dead Poets’ Society’. A minor but interesting detail which came out later was that he had also been Boris Johnson’s teacher a few years previously, at a different school, and in fact the first time I heard Boris Johnson’s name was in 1979 when he mentioned him as a star pupil in passing. I honestly never had a better secondary school teacher and he really believed in me.

I’m sure you know what’s coming because this is how all stories like this end. A few years ago, he was found guilty of serial sexual abuse of children at another school where he taught in the 1960s CE and early ’70s and sentenced to fourteen years. This had been at a previous school, the one where he taught Boris, and it had been conveniently omitted from his reference for my state school, and to me the implication is that the independent school in question decided that it was okay to have him teach at such a school because oiks don’t matter. A book has been written about this whole situation, which incidentally criticises J K Rowling for promoting boarding schools as positive institutions because the author sees them as inextricably rife with abuse and ‘Harry Potter’ as making children want to go to them where he expects them to suffer at their hands. My school friends and I talked about the situation at length shortly after it came out and we agreed that you could see the signs. One frustrating aspect of the book written about him is that the author is not allowed to report on his defence, which he predictably made himself, because it would give insight into how abusers think and operate and therefore that way of thinking went unchallenged when it was in fact entirely spurious and easily refuted, and the insidious nature of his arguments would therefore continue to persuade people otherwise.

Now I don’t know what the argument was, but I’m going to take a stab at two candidates for it. My original thought was that it was based on pederasty, and remember this isn’t just idle speculation: I had extensive contact with him over many years. Pederasty, which you probably know about already, was an openly acknowledged and positively sanctioned institution in the Greco-Roman world where a sexual relationship existed between a fully adult man and an adolescent boy as part of a mentoring situation, which might later be repeated by the boy after he reached maturity. Given his background in independent schools, which in England often emphasise Greco-Roman patrician culture, I can easily believe that this is where he was coming from.

The other candidate I can think of, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, is a common line of argument in the ’60s to the ’80s that just as homosexuality and extra-marital sex became accepted, so should active paedophilia. In fact I’m almost certain that he believed this. It was really prevalent at the time. The National Council for Civil Liberties supported paedophilia, as did the German Green Party in the ’80s, and there were also adoption programmes for paedophiles in Germany at the time which encouraged known paedophiles to adopt children in orphanages so that they could abuse them. In Britain there was the Paedophile Information Exchange. It was simply seen as the logical extension of tolerance for homosexual sex at the time, for several decades. We need to acknowledge that this was so and, equally, assert calmly, without panicking, that this is not okay. Nonetheless, I think this may have been how my teacher argued, and ironically by arguing to me that homophobia was no better than active racism and sexism, he persuaded me to adopt the attitude I still have today, and it is correct. But he very probably took it further. What was absent, and I think this applies more widely, was the notion of consent and the ability to do so.

It’s very easy to say that he had a bad and a good side and that people are complex, and that’s true but I don’t think it’s that simple. For him at least, I think these things were part of an organic whole. The very qualities I perceive positively are intimately related to the vices. It isn’t that people can’t function and be, say, anti-homophobic, pro-feminist, anti-racist without also being child abusers, but in his case they were all connected and that made sense to him. So I suspect.

The other example is less personal, although he too has been an influence on me in a way, and this time it applies to many millions of other people. I’m talking, of course, about Isaac Asimov. Asimov goes back a long way for me and I’m not sure exactly how far, but I do know I got his ‘Guide To Science’ for Christmas 1975 and I was already familiar with some of his fiction then. I was also aware of his screenplay for ‘Fantastic Voyage’, although like many other people I didn’t realise he wasn’t the author. Much of his fiction, though not all, consists of men talking to each other in rooms far away from any action, which may not even be happening, and his main genres are science fiction and mystery, but from the ’60s onward he moved away from fiction towards more general writing, initially in science as he was a professor of biochemistry and then famously branching out into every century of the Dewey Decimal System except philosophy. One of his major qualities is writing extremely plain language and he’s a genius at communicating complex concepts clearly to the general reader. Even today, I sometimes go back to his explanations, for instance for the electron configurations of the transition metals and rare earths, because no-one I can recall is as good as he is at clear, explicatory writing. He’s famously responsible for the Three Laws of Robotics and like many other sci-fi authors he successfully predicted the internet and many other 21st century technologies. Going back to his sci-fi, he made a major attempt in his later years to link most of his stories together in a manner which I and many other readers found tiresome, and his second attempt at ‘Fantastic Voyage’ is probably the second most tedious novel I’ve ever read (the most boring is Aldiss’s ‘Report On Probability A’). His most celebrated story is ‘The Last Question’, but actually I don’t think it’s that good. Two of his favourite stories, and here I agree with the consensus that they are indeed brilliant, are ‘The Ugly Little Boy’ and ‘The Dead Past’. The former is about a nurse who is hired by a scientific establishment to care for a Neanderthal child whom she develops a strong caring relationship with and ultimately makes a major sacrifice forced upon her by a heartless decision by her employer. It’s good, brilliant in fact, but to my mind his best story is ‘The Dead Past’, which has a number of things going on but basically recounts a professor of ancient history who strongly suspects he accidentally started a house fire years before which killed his daughter and is attempting to prove that the Phoenicians didn’t sacrifice their children by fire by persuading a physicist to develop a Chronovisor to look into the distant past, but is being investigated by a McCarthyite, CIA-like government body which it turns out is trying to protect the privacy of the general public and is being genuinely benevolent. To my mind, ‘The Dead Past’ is one of the best stories I have ever read, regardless of genre. It should also be said that although the ‘Foundation Trilogy’ can be perceived as a textual sleeping pill, it also presents an interesting parallel to Marxist theory, invented the idea of music videos in the early 1940s, formed the basis of the setting which ‘Dune’ reacted against and ‘Star Wars’ copied and created the concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica, which in turn led to Douglas Adams’s Guide and ultimately Wikipedia. It must also be said that the Apple TV series using the same name is an adaptation in name only and that the film ‘I Robot’ is also very dissimilar to any of the robot stories.

But there’s a complication, of course. It manifests itself in his fictional writing fairly clearly. Asimov is not keen on characterisation and up until fairly late in his career, he tended to avoid portraying sex and relationships. There are some exceptions. For instance, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ is about a woman committing adultery with an android, ‘Feminine Intuition’ is about a gynoid being designed to find the nearest habitable planet because masculine thought processes are getting nowhere. Moreover, the chief robopsychologist in the robot stories is Susan Calvin and she is not in any way a stereotype, being single, child-free and asexual. However, Asimov’s behaviour in real life with women is from a 21st century deeply dodgy. He was known to be “all hands” and was nicknamed “The Octopus” at science fiction conventions. One of the women he worked with complained about his sexual harassment in something like the 1950s or 1960s and was actually listened to, so it must’ve been pretty bad. He also wrote two books, ‘The Sensuous Dirty Old Man’ and ‘Lecherous Limericks’ which celebrated sexual harassment and assault as perceived today. The former is actually an instruction manual for it, although to be fair it is also a parody of a pair of books popular at the time, ‘The Sensuous Woman’ and ‘The Sensuous Man’, so the context for this is missing. Later in his life, the slightly older SF author Alfred Bester, who was incidentally exceedingly monogamously married to a woman for forty-eight years until her death, and also seems to have been a bit of a jock as opposed to Asimov’s nebbischkayt (nerdishness) gave him a bear hug, snogged him and repeatedly pinched his bottom to teach him a lesson, and he was somewhat repentant after that but unfortunately the way he put his response made it sound more like that he was personally hurt because his advances had been constantly unwelcome. Furthermore, although parents can’t be held entirely responsible for their adult children’s actions, David Asimov was found by California police to have the largest collection of images of child sexual exploitation ever found in the area.

But as I said, it isn’t that simple. In the late ’50s or early ’60s, he was at a meeting about scientists and someone made a comment about their wives, to which he chipped in “or their husbands”, scandalising the meeting, including women, because they thought he was talking about gay men when he meant female scientists, and he went on to say that it wouldn’t matter if they were gay either. At another point at a conference about Judaism, and although he was Jewish he wasn’t observant or religious, he objected to another Jewish person saying they didn’t trust scientists or engineers because of their involvement in the Holocaust by saying that the only reason the Jews hadn’t persecuted anyone historically was that they hadn’t had the opportunity to, and that on the one occasion when they had, with the Maccabees, they’d done so, which was not anti-semitic so much as an observation that it’s a general problem with human beings that, if we can, we may well persecute others. This seems quite prophetic in view of recent events.

Okay, so the differences between Asimov and my English teacher are naturally considerable, but the advantage of considering the former is that he’s much more prominent for all sorts of reasons to the English-speaking world. My English teacher has some notoriety nationally, but it’s quite low-key, and this makes him harder to treat as an example. It isn’t enough even to use the excuse that “it was a different time” here, because even at the time Asimov’s behaviour was strongly objected to and it must’ve been quite serious. However, he was also protected by his fame. On one occasion, when he sexually assaulted someone in a lift at a conference, the woman’s partner objected and it was he, not Asimov, who was ejected from the building. I’d be surprised if this was the only time this happened. Women would avoid SF conferences because he was there and this is very likely to have impacted on their careers long term and kept them away from success.

These things tend to come to notice about public figures due to the internet. The question arises of what may have happened in the past which never became widely known about others. It’s said that one should never meet one’s heroes, but it may be even worse than that. Maybe most people’s lives don’t bear scrutiny. Thinking about my own past, I can’t think of much that I’d be unhappy if it were more widely known, but maybe that’s how it works. Maybe people usually justify things to themselves or alter their own memories in their favour. I tend to think that the only difference nowadays is that things are harder to hide.

There is also the question of changing values and attitudes. Jimmy Savile, for example, wasn’t just protected by his fame, but also by the normalisation of sexual assault, objectification and harassment at the time. It isn’t just a question of faulty record-keeping. Rolf Harris is an even harder case to conceptualise, because unlike Savile he was actually very talented and creative. Savile probably was too, but not publicly so much as being good at getting away with his abuse. Even he, though, has his defenders. Some of the people he helped on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ went on to build successful careers on the contacts they made and won’t hear a word against him. There can be a kind of sunk-cost fallacy here, in that having committed oneself to a particular set of opinions about someone, it’s hard to change one’s mind and retract them, even internally.

But why does it happen like this? Is there something about success that breeds this? Is it that success and the atrocities go hand in hand because they result from the same origins? Or, is it more that people who become well-known have their lives more closely scrutinised and that basically everyone’s a bit of a git when it comes down to it?

I’m aware that there’s a long list of men in this post. There are terrible women too, and there’s a bias I’ve seen referred to as the “women are wonderful bias”, which excuses women of more and presumes their good faith. However, it remains the case that men are more successful than women in public life and therefore have more opportunities to do wrong, so even without a gender bias they can be expected to have sinned against more. That said, there are allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley. Although she may be less well-known than the men I’ve mentioned, MZB as she’s often referred to was a sci-fi and fantasy author whose daughter Moira Greyland accused her of sexually abusing her throughout her childhood, exposing her to other people to sexually abuse her and being forced to participate in ritualised sexual abuse. Unfortunately from a queer-tolerant perspective, Greyland sees this as integral to LGBTQIA2S (you can see why I hate that initialism) identity. MZB’s husband was found guilty of multiple counts of child sexual abuse – this much is not in doubt. As far as I understand it, she also defended his behaviour publicly, and also claimed to be feminist. This is to some extent reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir, who is on record as publicly defending active paedophilia.

I don’t know, I haven’t got an answer to this. What do you think?

My Writing Style

I’m fully aware that I’m too wordy, don’t stick to the point and talk about arcane topics a lot, not just on here but in face to face conversations. This is partly just what I do, in the sense that I’m unable to do otherwise or employ it as a bad habit. In a world full of shortening attention spans and loss of focus though, I feel that however ineptly, this is still worth doing.

In the process of doing this, I continued this blog post in a fairly lightweight word processor called AbiWord which we stopped using because it had a tendency to crash without warning and without there being any salvageable document when this happened, and it proceeded to do exactly that, so this is in a way a second draft. One of the many features AbiWord lacks, and this is not a criticism because the whole philosophy is to avoid software bloat, is a way of assessing reading age. Word, and possibly LibreOffice and OpenOffice, does have such a facility, which I think uses Flesch-Kincaid. A blank was drawn when I said this to Sarada so it’s likely this is not widely known and in any case I looked into it and want to share.

There are a number of ways of assessing reading age, and as I’ve said many times it’s alleged that every equation halves the readership. When I was using AbiWord just now, I decided to write these in a “pseudocode” manner, but now I’m on the desktop PC with Gimp and stuff, I no longer have that problem although of course MathML exists. Does it exist on WordPress though? No idea. Anyway, the list is:

• Flesch-Kincaid – grade and score versions.
• Gunning Fog
• SMOG
• Coleman-Liau
• ARI – Automated Readability Index
• Dale-Chall Readability Formula

Flesch-Kincaid comes in two varieties, one designed to rank readability on a scale of zero to one hundred. It works like this:

206.835−1.015(average sentence length)−84.6(average syllables per word)

It interests me that there are constants in this and I wonder where they come from. It also seems that subordinate clauses don’t matter here and there’s no distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, which seems weird.

The grade version is:

0.39(average sentence length)+11.8(average syllables per word)−15.59

This has a cultural bias because of school grades in the US. I don’t know how this maps onto other systems, because children start school at different ages in different places and learn to read officially at different stages depending on the country. Some, but not all of the others do the same.

Gunning Fog sounds like something you do to increase clarity and I wonder if that’s one reason it’s called that or whether there are two people out there called Gunning and Fog. It goes like this:

0.4((words/sentences)+100(complex words/words))

“Complex words” are those with more than two syllables. This is said to yield a number corresponding to the years of formal education, which makes me wonder about unschooling to be honest, but it’s less culturally bound than Flesch-Kincaid’s grade version.

SMOG rather entertainingly stands for “Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook”! Rather surprisingly for something described as simple, it includes a square root:

This is used in health communication, so it was presumably the measure that led to diabetes leaflets being re-written for a nine-year old’s level of literacy. I don’t know what you do if your passage is fewer than thirty sentences long unless you just start repeating it. Again, it gives a grade level.

Coleman-Liau really is nice and simple:

0.0588L−0.296S−15.8

L is the mean number of letters per one hundred words and S is the average number of sentences in that. This again yields grade level, although it looks like it can be altered quite easily by changing the final term. It seems to have a similar problem to SMOG with short passages, although I suppose in both cases it might objectively just not be clear how easily read brief passages are.

The ARI uses word and sentence length and gives rise to grade level again:

4.71(characters per word)+0.5(words per sentence)−21.43

Presumably it says “characters” because of things like hyphens, which would make hyphenation contribute to difficulty in reading. I’m not sure this is so.

The final measure is the Dale-Chall Readability Formula, which again produces a grade level. It uses a list of three thousand words fourth-grade American students generally understood in a survey, any word not on that list being considered “difficult”:

There are different ways to apply each of these and they’re designed for different purposes. I don’t know if there are European versions of these or how they vary for language. The final one, for example, takes familiarity into account as well as length.

When I’ve applied these to the usual content of my blog, reading age usually comes out at university degree graduate level, which might seem high but it leads me to wonder about rather a lot of stuff. For instance, something like sixty percent of young Britons today go to university, so producing text at that level, if accurate, could be expected to reach more than half the adult population. However, the average reading age in Britain is supposed to be between nine and eleven, some say nine, and that explains why health leaflets need to be pitched at that level. All that said, I do also wonder how nuanced this take is. I think, for example, that Scotland and England (don’t know about Wales I’m afraid, sorry) have different attitudes towards learning and education, and that in England education is often frowned upon as making someone an outsider to a much greater extent than here, and this would of course drag down the average reading age. That’s not, however, reflected in the statistics and Scottish reading age is said to be the same as the British one. I want to emphasise very strongly here that I am not in any way trying to claim that literacy goes hand in hand with intelligence. I have issues with the very concept of intelligence to be honest but besides that, no, there is not a hereditary upper class of more intelligent people by any means. Send a working class child to Eaton and Oxbridge and they will come out in the same way. I don’t know how to reconcile my perception.

But I do also wonder about the nature of tertiary education in this respect. Different degree subjects involve different skills, varying time spent reading and different reading matter, and I’d be surprised if this leads to an homogenous increase in reading age. There’s a joke: “Yesterday I couldn’t even spell ‘engineer’. Today I are one”. Maybe a Swede? Seriously though, although that’s most unfair, it still seems to me that someone with an English degree can probably read more fluently than someone with a maths one, and the opposite is also true with, well, being good at maths! This seems to make sense. The 1979 book ‘Scientists Must Write’, by Robert Barrass tries to address the issue of impenetrability in scientific texts, and Albert Einstein once said, well, he is supposed to have said a lot of things he actually didn’t so maybe he didn’t say this either, but the sentiment has been expressed that if you can’t explain something to a small child you don’t understand it yourself.

I should point out that I haven’t always been like this. I used to edit a newsletter for brevity, for example, and up until I started my Masters I used to express myself very clearly. I also once did an experiment, and I can’t remember how this opportunity arose, where I submitted an essay in plain English and then carefully re-wrote it using near-synonyms and longer sentences and ended up getting a better grade for the “enhanced” version, and it wasn’t an English essay where I might’ve gotten marks for vocabulary. On another occasion I was doing a chemistry exam (I may have mentioned this elsewhere) and there was a question on what an ion exchange column did, and I had no idea at the time, so I reworded the question in the answer as something like “an ion exchange column swaps charged atoms using a vertical cylindrical arrangement of material”, i.e. “an ion exchange column is an ion exchange column”, and got full marks for it without understanding anything at all. This later led me to consider the question of how much learning is really just about using language in a particular way.

So there is the question of whether a particular style of writing puts people off unnecessarily and is a flaw in the writer, which might be addressed. This is all true. Even so, I don’t think it would always be possible to express things that simply and also it’s a bit sad to be forced to do so rather than delighting in the expressiveness of our language. Are all those words just going to sit around in the OED never to be used again? But it can be taken too far. Jacques Lacan, for example, tried to make a virtue of writing in an obscurantist style in order to mimic the experience of a psychoanalyst not grasping what a patient is saying by creating reading without understanding, and in particular was concerned to avoid over-simplifying its concepts. Now I’ve just mentioned Lacan, and I don’t know who reading this will know about him. Nor do I know how I would find that out.

I’m not trying to do what he does. Primarily, I am trying to avoid talking down to people and to buck the trend I perceive of shrinking attention and growing tendencies to dumb things down, just not to think clearly and hard. Maybe that isn’t happening. Perhaps it’s my time of life. Nonetheless, this is what I’m trying to do, for two reasons. One is that talking down to people is disrespectful. I’m not going to use short and simple words and sentence structures because that to me bears a subtext that my readers are “stupid”. The other is that people generally don’t benefit from avoiding thinking deeply about things and being poorly-informed. It’s in order here to talk about the issue of “stupidity”. I actually have considerable doubt that the majority of people differ in how easily they can learn across the board for various reasons. One is that in intellectual terms, as opposed to practical, the kind of resistance found in the physical world doesn’t exist at all. This may of course reflect my dyspraxia, which also reflects what things are considered valuable. Another is that the idea of variation in general intelligence is just a little too convenient for sorting people into different jobs which are considered more or less valuable or having higher or lower status, and as I’ve doubtless said before, the ability to cope with boredom is a strength. I also think that the idea of a single scale of intelligence, which I know is a straw man but bear with me, has overtones of the great chain of being, i.e. the idea that there are superior and inferior species with the inferior ones being of less value.

There are, though, two completely different takes on intelligence.

Structure here: wilful stupidity and the false hierarchy of professors.

As I’ve said before, I try not to call people stupid, for two reasons. One is that if it’s used as an insult, it portrays learning disability as a character flaw, which it truly is not. It is equally erroneous to deify the learning disabled as well. It’s simply a fact about some people which should be taken into consideration. Other things could be said about it but they may not be relevant to the matter in hand. The other is that the idea of stupidity is that it’s an unchangeable quality of the person in question, and this is usually inaccurate. An allegedly stupid person usually has as much control over their depth and sophistication of thinking as anyone else has. Therefore, I call them “intellectually lazy”. For so many people, it’s actually a choice to be stupid. As noted earlier, there are whole sections of society where deep thought is frowned upon and marks one out as an outsider, and it’s difficult for most people to go against the grain. This is not, incidentally, a classist thing. It exists right from top to bottom in society. Peer pressure is a powerful stupifier.

There is another take on stupidity which sees it as a moral failing, i.e. as a choice having negative consequences for others and the “stupid” person themselves.  This view was promoted prominently by the dissident priest and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1930s after Hitlers rise to power and in connection with that.  The idea was later developed by others.  This form of stupidity might need another name, and in fact when I say “intellectual laziness”, this may be what I mean.  It could also go hand in hand with anti-intellectualism.

Malice, i.e. evil, is seen as less harmful than intellectual laziness as evil carries some sense of unease with it.  In fact it makes me think of Friedrich Schillers play ,,Die Jungfrau von Orleans” with its line ,,Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens” – “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain”, part of a longer quote here:

Unsinn, du siegst und ich muß untergehn!

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Erhabene Vernunft, lichthelle Tochter

Des göttlichen Hauptes, weise Gründerin

Des Weltgebäudes, Führerin der Sterne,

Wer bist du denn, wenn du dem tollen Roß

Des Aberwitzes an den Schweif gebunden,

Ohnmächtig rufend, mit dem Trunkenen

Dich sehend in den Abgrund stürzen mußt!

Verflucht sei, wer sein Leben an das Große

Und Würdge wendet und bedachte Plane

Mit weisem Geist entwirft! Dem Narrenkönig

Gehört die Welt–

Translated, this could read:

Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!

Against stupidity the very gods

Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,

Resplendent daughter of the head divine,

Wise foundress of the system of the world,

Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,

Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,

Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,

Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.

Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,

And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!

To the fool-king belongs the world.

Now I could simply have quoted the line in English of course, but as I’ve said, I don’t believe in talking down to people and it’s a form of disrespect, to my mind, to do that, so you get the full version.  This is spoken by the general Talbot who is dismayed that his carefully laid battle plans are ruined by the behaviour of his men, who are gullible, panicking and superstitious, in spite of his experience and wisdom, which they ignore.  I think probably the kind of “stupidity” Schiller had in mind was different, perhaps less voluntary, but this very much reflects the mood of these times.

Getting back to Bonhoeffer, he notes that intellectual laziness pushes aside or simply doesn’t listen to anything which contradicts one’s views, facts becoming inconsequential.  It’s been said elsewhere that you can’t reason a person out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.  People who are generally quite willing to think diligently and carefully in other areas often refuse to do so in specific ones.  People can of course be encouraged to be lazy in certain, or even all, areas, because it doesn’t benefit the powers that be that they think things through, and this can occur through schooling and propaganda, and nowadays through the almighty algorithms of social media, or they may choose to take it on themselves.  Evil can be fought, but not stupidity.  Incidentally, I’m being a little lazy right now by writing “stupidity” and not “intellectual laziness”.  The power of certain political or religious movements depends on the stupidity of those who go along with it.  This is also where thought-terminating clichés come in because Bonhoeffer says that conversation with a person who has chosen to be stupid often doesn’t feel like talking to a person but merely eliciting slogans and stereotypical habits of thought from somewhere else.  It isn’t coming from them even if they think it is, in a way.  Hence the use of the word “sheeple” and telling people to “do your own research”, which in fact often means “watch the same YouTube videos as I have” is particularly ironic because it’s the people telling you to do that who are thinking less independently or originally than the people being told.  Thinking of Flat Earthers in particular right now, which I’m going to use as an example because it’s almost universally considered absurd and is less contentious than a more obviously political example, there are a small number of grifters who are just trying to make money out of the easily manipulated, a few sincere leaders and a host of “true believers” who are either gullible or motivated by other factors such as wanting to be part of something bigger or having special beliefs hidden from τους πολλους.  I’m hesitant to venture into overtly political areas here because of their divisive nature, but hoping that using the example of Flat Earthers can be agreed to be incorrect and almost deliberately and ostentatiously so.

He goes on to say that rather than reasoning changing people’s minds here, their liberation is the only option to defeat this.  This external liberation can then lead to an internal liberation from that stupidity.  These people are being used and their opinions have become convenient instruments to those imagined to be in power.

This is roughly what Bonhoeffers letter said and it can be found here if you want to read it without some other person trying to persuade you of what he said.  In fact you should read it, because that’s what refusing to be stupid is about. Also, he writes much better than I. That document continues with a more recent development called ‘The Five Laws Of Stupidity’, written in 1970 by the social psychology Carlo Cippola. The word “stupidity” in his opinion refers not to learning disability but social irresponsibility. I’ve recently been grudgingly impressed by the selfless cruelty of certain voters who have voted to disadvantage others with no benefit to themselves. A few years ago, when the Brexit campaign was happening, I was of course myself in favour of leaving the EU and expected it to do a lot of damage to the economy, which was one reason I wanted it to happen, but I would’ve preferred a third option where the “U”K both left the EU and opened all borders, abolishing all immigration restrictions. This is an example of how my own position was somewhat similar to that of the others who voted for Brexit, but in many people’s case they were sufficiently worried about immigration and its imagined consequences to vote for a situation which they were fully aware would result in their financial loss. In a way this is admirable, and it illustrates the weird selflessness and altruism of their position, although obviously not for immigrants. Cippola’s target was this kind of stupidity: disadvantage to both self and others due to focus on the latter. This quality operates independently of anything else, including education, wealth, gender, ethnicity or nationality. People tend to underestimate how common it is, according to Cippola. This attitude is dangerous because it’s hard to empathise with, which is incidentally why I mentioned my urge to vote for Brexit. I voted to remain in the end, needless to say. Maliciousness can be understood and the reasoning conjectured, often quite accurately, but with intellectual laziness (I feel very uncomfortable calling it “stupidity”) the process of reasoning has been opted out of, or possibly been replaced by someone else’s spurious argument. This makes them unpredictable and means they themselves don’t have any plan to their benefit in attacking someone. There may of course be people who do seek an advantage but those are not the main people. Those are the manipulators: the grifters.

I take an attitude sometimes that a person with a certain hostility is more a force of nature than a person. This is of course not true, but it’s more that one can’t have a dialogue with them, do anything to break through their image of you and so on, so all you can do is appreciate they’re a threat and do what you can to de-escalate or preferably avoid them. This is a great pity because it means no discussion is likely to take place between you, and they’re not going to be persuaded otherwise. They may not even be aware of the threatening nature of their behaviour or views.

Cippola thought that associating with stupid people at all was dangerous, but of course this feeds into the reality tunnel problem nowadays. This is what I’ve known it as, although nowadays it tends to be thought of in terms of echo chambers and bubbles. We surround ourselves, aided by algorithms, with people who agree with us, and this fragments society. Cippola seems to be recommending that, and with over half a century of hindsight we seem to have demonstrated to ourselves that that impulse shouldn’t be followed.

Casting my mind back, a similar motive may have been part of what led to my involvement in a high-control religious organisation. I have A-level RE. This in my case involved studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the approach generally was quite progressive and liberal, including dialogue between faiths, higher criticism and the like. On reaching university, I found that the self-identifying Christians with whom I came into contact were far more fundamentalist and conservative, but because I regarded this as demotic, the faith of the common people as it were, I committed myself to that kind of faith. This is not stupidity in a general sense, as most of the people there could be considered conventionally intelligent, some of them pursuing doctorates for instance. However, they did restrict their critical faculties when it came to matters of faith, and in that respect I was, I think, emotionally harmed by these people, though I don’t blame them for it. This is the kind of selective and deliberate “stupidity” which is best avoided.

I’m aware that I’ve described this all rather unsympathetically and perhaps with a patronising tone. This is not my intention at all and it may be more to do with the approach taken by the writers and thinkers I’ve used here. I’ve also failed to mention James Joyce and Jacques Lacan at all here, which may be a bit of an omission. What I’m attempting to show is respect, and what I’m requesting from the reader is focus (and I have an ADHD diagnosis remember), long attention spans and complexity and nuanced thought. I’m not asking for agreement, but I would like those who disagree with me to have thought their positions through originally, self-critically and with respect for their opponents. I write the way I do because I know people are generally not stupid and can choose not to be.

Goddities

This is going to be me going at it like a bull at a gate rather than just sitting down and composing my mind and thoughts about the issues at hand. My basic idea with this is to try to explore the common ground or otherwise between atheism and theism, because I sometimes wonder if we’re talking about the same thing or just using the same words. There are certain things which atheists have been known to do which I feel have just been designed for the specific occasion of their argument rather than having a wider respectability, and there are other things which, well, are just interesting for everyone, or at least might be, and I want to plonk all these things together today and talk about them.

The first one is something I’ve mentioned before, which is the question of active and passive atheism. I insist on a definition of atheism as the existence of a belief that no deities exist rather than the absence of a belief that a deity exists. I’ve been over this, so I’ll be brief. The motivation for defining atheism passively is to set it as the default belief, but in doing so one is forced to accept peculiar implications. We assume all sorts of things, which is in itself interesting and complicated because in fact we seem to have uncountably infinite assumptions but only a finite number of active beliefs. Therefore an assumption is not something which is happening in anyone’s mind. It’s something one has not done. This seems messy and excessive to me, and is actually more or less the exact issue which many philosophers have with the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Freges view of concepts, so it’s something which has been flogged to death in philosophy already and to produce this definition at this stage, I think, reflects a lack of philosophical training. It comes across to me as naive and reflecting a kind of thinking on the spot which hasn’t had its rough edges knocked off it. On the other hand, perhaps it reflects some kind of demographic shift. As I understand it, analytical philosophers have had very little interest in the concept of God since the start of the tradition, which was probably Freges thought itself back in the 1870s CE, but they may also have been enjoying this lack of interest in a more overtly theistic and religious society than nowadays, or perhaps a less confrontational one in this area, so the definition of atheism as the absence of a belief may have become more accepted simply because more atheists, as opposed to apatheists which probably characterises most philosophers, are now in academia. Nonetheless, there is no word for someone who doesn’t believe in Russell’s teapot or that there’s an invisible gorilla in every room, so in such a situation there may as well be no word for atheism, but clearly there should be and it does mean something. But I won’t go on.

Second issue: small g “god”. There are atheists who insist on using a small g for the name God. I think they do this because they want to equate God conceptually with what they think of as other deities. This, I think, is also erroneous and an example of an over-reaction to a situation they have kind of imagined. Look at it this way: atheists claim God is a fictional character. It’s possible to go further than that and claim that God is an incoherent concept, but that isn’t atheism, although it’s an interesting position to take and one I have more than a little sympathy with. Fictional characters are given names. We know who Gandalf is, who Bridget Jones is, and unfortunately we know who Bella Swan is (actually I forgot and had to look that up!), and they all have names beginning with capital letters. Is god supposed to be someone like ee cummings or archie the cockroach? Someone once said to me I was confusing myself by capitalising God, which they didn’t explain but I think it’s along the lines that God is just one deity among many. It is, though, a little bit interesting that we generally just call God “God” and don’t say, for instance, Metod any more, which used to be a word used for God and seems to mean “measurer” (i.e. “mete-er”) and “arranger”, which could be a euphemism or a kind of title but is in any case a name for God.

This is of course related to “I only believe in one fewer deities than you do,” which involves the supposition that theistic Christians believe the likes of Ba`al and Zeus don’t exist. This also I think is seriously misconceived and fairly thoughtless. My view of the other deities is not that they don’t exist but that they’re God under different names. They do of course have other attributes, but then if God exists, God is beyond human understanding, so we have no better idea of what attributes are true of God than of any other deities who are, in any case, God by other names. So yes, I do believe in all those deities because they’re all the same deity. Another rather unsettling consequence of saying I’m atheist about all the other deities is that it’s very like the Islamophobic belief that Allah is not God and that Muslims are not worshipping the same god as Christians. It has disturbingly racist overtones to it, to my mind, which is of course a feature of “New Atheism”, and this is where it gets interesting. Many Christians claim Muslims worship a different, false god and not the God of the New Testament, or presumably the Hebrew scriptures, where they see continuity, and among Christian nationalists I would expect a very strong denial that Muslims worship God. This unifies some theists and atheists. The details of the denial may be different though. For instance, Christian nationalists might want to distinguish between the Christian trinitarian God and the Islamic indivisible divine unity, whereas the New Atheist approach is more likely to be along the lines of imaginary beings being given different attributes, including the trinity or otherwise.

Emphasising the fact that New Atheism is not all anti-theistic atheism is vital. It’s also possibly a movement whose time has passed. Nor would I want to say that anyone within that movement is overtly racist. They are characterised, and perhaps led, by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, notably all White men, meaning that they will all have unconscious bias, some of which I inevitably share by virtue of my whiteness and to some extent other aspects of my social conditioning though not all. This by no means makes anti-theistic atheism unsalvageable, but equally it’s important to note that atheism is not monolithic. I always think of South Asia in this respect, with the separate Jain, Samkhya and Carvaka beliefs that God cannot or does not exist, among others, in one case because the force of karma is a sufficient explanation for the Cosmos, and more recently the Marxist anti-theistic movement there, though this is clearly influenced by the West. Some New Atheists see the development of European culture under Christian influence as a necessary precondition for the emergence of what might be termed a more liberal or progressive approach which includes atheistic approaches to reality, possibly including South Asian Marxist activists.

One major problem, I think, with anti-theist approaches in general is that they seem to make a major assumption which really doesn’t seem warranted and is odd for a group which tends to see itself as rational. That is that the urge to be religious can be removed from human psychology even if it should be. It seems to me that there are several reasons why this is unlikely. We have cognitive biasses involving finding patterns in things, we engage in magical thinking which may be the basis of rationality, and large communities tend to drift away from their constituted foundations after a while. We also have ego defences. The idea that a non-religious mind set could be adopted by the general population may not be realistic. There don’t seem to be any societies which are entirely non-religious, and when it does occur officially, religion creeps back in somewhere, such as superstitious beliefs about luck and fate. There are of course very large numbers of non-religious people whose lives are entirely healthy and well-adjusted, but they’re not an entire society and there’s too much diversity between people’s personalities and influences to conclude that everyone could live their lives that way. This has nothing to do with whether religious claims to truth are correct. This also seems to be an article of faith among, for example, humanists – that society can exist, whether or not it’s a good thing, without religion. I really want to stress that I’m not saying religion is needed, just that we don’t know if it even could be eliminated. In fact, ironically this belief is almost religious in itself, although I would also insist in defining religion in a different way which doesn’t emphasise belief.

I feel like I’ve spent several paragraphs low-key slagging off atheism. This isn’t what I want to do at all. I want it to be the way things are in my own life most of the time, and probably increasingly so in these isles with the possible exception of Ireland, that whether one is theist, atheist or agnostic is a private matter one would prefer not to talk about with people outside one’s possibly religious community and maybe not even that. What I’m trying to do is establish common ground and I’m not looking for a fight. There are more important things to engage in conflict over and it can be divisive even to bring this up, but at the same time it feels messy and naive, so I’m going to carry on.

Something which is not so divisive is the rather more nuanced approach found in both religious and non-religious circles which is not firmly atheist, theist, deist or agnostic, which is present both in some forms of mysticism and Western philosophy. Many religious mystics, and in fact a lot of just ordinary religious people like me, would say God is beyond human understanding, and in particular there’s the via negativa, which is the idea that you can best say what God is not in order to suggest what God is. God is also said to be unlike any created thing, and it’s a very familiar experience to find that one can’t express a religious experience in language. Similarly, there’s ignosticism and theological non-cognitivism, which I’ve talked about before on here. In the mid-twentieth century, there was a movement within analytical philosophy called logical positivism which attempted to establish that meaning, i.e. either truth or falsehood, only inheres in statements which are axiomatic, express necessary truths or can be empirically verified. Along with this claim was the one that religious statements were not in any of these categories and therefore they were meaningless. This is not the same thing as being false and in a way it corresponds quite well to the mystical position. Logical positivism is now considered passé, but other areas of Western philosophy have adopted a somewhat reminiscent position. My ex is of course German and among other things a philosopher in the continental tradition. When we got together, I was worried they might be Christian but it turned out that they saw religious claims very much as not having truth values in a manner I found reminiscent of logical positivism but which have much more in common with the postmodern condition, which sees philosophy as a branch of literature and everything as up for deconstruction. Statements about God make sense in their own communities and theology is a poetic or narrative truth, but these truth claims are no more or less valid than those of maths and science. Postmodern theology has been adopted by people in religious communities. There is, however, no truth outside language according to this.

I mean, I have certain views of course, as this view is both ableist and speciesist, but it is nevertheless interesting that there is a kind of agreement in this area between, of all things, postmodernity, religious mysticism and logical positivism. These are not all there is to philosophy of course, but it strikes me that this shows a way forward for us all. There are of course other non-theistic religions and non-theistic traditions within Christianity and Judaism.

Getting back to gripes though, there’s another cluster of beliefs which tend to be considered as universally associated. This is not a definitive list but I hope I’ve captured most of them:

• Theism
• An afterlife
• Souls and bodies as separate items which coexist in the same sense
• Varying fates according to actions in this life
• Subjectively sequential time extending beyond death
• Theological voluntarism/divine command theory
• Literal and unironic belief

The first three in particular seem to be closely associated with each other. For instance, it’s often said that people want to believe in God because they don’t want to die, so in other words they see the prospect of an afterlife, or possibly reincarnation, to follow from the idea that God exists. There’s also an implicit assumption that God is good and/or loving in theism, which unless you agree with the ontological argument for God’s existence out of the best-known “proofs” of God has no connection with whether God exists or not. In fact I strongly suspect a lot of fundamentalist evangelist Protestants don’t, deep down, believe God is good at all but are afraid to admit it even to themselves because God would be telepathic and know they believe this. Nonetheless their public view is that God is good and just.

In each case you can uncouple the bullet-pointed belief from theism. It’s entirely feasible to believe in an afterlife in isolation, with no God. There are also Christian physicalists, who believe God will re-create us all in superior physical form at the end of time with no separate entity bearing our consciousness. Jehovah’s Witnesses may fall into this category. Alternatively, there are religions which are strongly atheist but believe in souls, such as the Jains. So far as I can tell, even faithful Judaism as opposed to the reconstructionist form is pretty much agnostic on what happens when they die, and as a Christian I think it’s important for ethical reasons to ignore any claims about what happens beyond this life, if anything. My views on the nature of time make it a bit involved for me to go into this just now without it taking over the post. Theological voluntarism and divine command theory are the idea that God alone makes ethics meaningful, a belief which can only sincerely be held by a psychopath. Finally, literal and unironic belief relies on Biblical literalism, which is seriously compromised by Biblical criticism, and there is also a project to imagine history as proceeding as young Earth creationists and otherwise Biblically literalist people suppose but with no God. Incredibly, there really are people who believe that and are atheist.

I very much get the impression that some anti-theistic atheists really would prefer theistic Christians to be conservative evangelicals, and I seem to remember Richard Dawkins saying that liberal and progressive Christianity are dangerous because they represent a kind of gateway drug to extremism. It also seems to me that some anti-theists simply think that’s what Christians are like as a block, and I think this is our fault because of those of us who are particularly strident and emphatic about our bigotry. In fact churches can be excellent factories for anti-theistic atheists and we’re responsible for creating them in many cases. But on both sides there is a tendency, which I’ve probably exhibited here, to caricature the other side, whereas in fact there could be said to be no sides at all, just people dedicated to the truth.

Beyond The Looking Glass

1. The Risks of Mirror Life

This one will have to start pretty far back from where it ends to make much sense. I have already stuck an idea along these lines on the Halfbakery, which I’ve begun to frequent anew in the past few weeks. It’s not exactly a simpler place and time, more of a more complicated one, but that’s why I like it.

First of all, this post is going to be quite wide-ranging and extensive in terms of technical details. The reason for this is that it’s been suggested to me that I submit the idea as a non-peer reviewed scientific paper rather than write a blog post about it, but I don’t have a lot of respect for journals that allow that, particularly considering that I’m not in an academic community relevant to the field and have only fairly basic education regarding biochemistry and other branches of chemistry. In order to produce good-quality coherent ideas in a particular academic discipline, it’s usually necessary to have people to bounce them off and get torn down numerous times. I don’t have this even in philosophy, and although I have carried out quantitative research in herbalism, mainly due to the parlous state of CPD in that area at the time, I haven’t got my own lab. So I’m posting this here instead, where I hope it will vanish without trace.

I’ll start with “life as we know it”. Life as we know it is a complex system of organic carbon compounds interacting and reacting in aqueous solutions partitioned off from one another by membranes made of molecule-thick layers of oil in which various proteins float, some of which control movement of substances across these barriers. On some level, this is actually all life is, or at least the life we’re familiar with. The code for doing all this is stored in DNA, gets read and turned into proteins which further down the line may in turn work on other substrates to make something else such as cellulose or dental enamel, and the whole system is powered by a process whereby usually sugar is broken down to release energy through adenosine triphosphate called glycolysis, which then can go in several possible directions depending on the organism: fermentation, where ethanol or acetic acid is produced, other anaerobic respiration, where lactic acid is produced, or (drum roll please!) the Krebs Cycle, where the stuff is converted into various organic acids and combined with oxygen, then fed back into the start of the cycle, which is by far the most energetic pathway. That’s another thing that life is, in a slightly more detailed version.

It’s occurred to me, incidentally, that in theory some kind of motor could be built which digested cellulose, starch and sugars and converted them into movement, so that there could be a literal “Krebs Cycle”, i.e. a motorbike which runs on food, and that’s on the Halfbakery too. A cyclist is doing this in a roundabout way of course, and there are microorganisms who can convert energy released by reputation into rotary motion using microscopic motors which work by alternating electrostatic attraction and repulsion, so this is doable, though also possibly a bit pointless and unethical.

Thinking of living things as complicated wet machines might help to get me to the next stage of understanding what I’m about to say. Suppose you have a machine with clockwise screw threads and screws, say a clock, and the mechanism tells the time by moving hands around a dial in a clockwise direction. That’s fine and we know about those, but there could be an alternative mechanism which is 100% identical but has counter-clockwise screw threads and screws and works exactly the same way, but is a mirror image of the other clock, and it still works fine, tells the time accurately and so on, but every part is the opposite way round, so its dial works counter-clockwise. If a screw were to work loose or the winding gear needs replacing, you wouldn’t be able to get spare parts from the other clock most of the time to repair the clockwise one. It just wouldn’t work, and if it was working in the first place and you replaced a working part from one clock with the corresponding part from the other, it would often break it. Similarly, if you drive from a right-hand drive country into a left-hand drive one but carry on obeying the traffic laws of the other country, you’d be putting yourself and others in danger and either have an accident or get arrested. Life’s like that.

Life really is like that. Many of the molecules making up living things are not symmetrical. They’re either left or right-handed. In fact, although there are specific molecules in biochemistry which can be of either chirality, the word for this handedness after the Greek word for “hand”, the central parts of life chemistry consists of proteins and amino acids which are left-handed and sugars and carbohydrates are right-handed. It’s fair to ask how a molecule can be said to be left or right handed when this seems to be an arbitrary decision but in fact homochiral solutions of molecules, that is, molecules which are all right-handed or all left-handed, bend light shone through them to the left or to the right depending on their handedness, so it isn’t arbitrary and this explains how it can be said that sugars are generally right-handed and amino acids left-handed. It’s also possible for molecules to have more than one chiral centre, meaning that there could be four different versions of a particular molecule with two such centres and so forth.

Although the central machinery of life is chiral, the end products of that machinery can be either way round. For instance, the scent of orange and the scent of lemon are both contributed to by a molecule called limonene, but the two molecules have opposite chirality. For some reason, the lemony version is much more common than the orangey one. Another pair of examples is the odours of spearmint and caraway. The name “dextrose” is almost a synonym for “glucose”, but the “dextro-” refers to the right-handed version alone. There is also a “levulose”, which was going to be introduced as a non-calorific sweetener but it didn’t happen. I don’t know why, but the reason it was suggested is that glycolysis and the Krebs Cycle wouldn’t have been able to break it down or release energy from it. Another example, from pharmaceuticals, is levothyroxine and dextrothyroxine. Both are amino acids but whereas levothyroxine is a thyroid hormone used for hypothyroidism, dextrothyroxine is its right-handed version and was used to lower cholesterol, but isn’t on the market because of cardiac side-effects.

Usually when drugs are manufactured, because the process is through industrial chemistry rather than from living things, they are what’s known as a “racemic mixture”, i.e. a roughly equal mixture of left- and right-handed molecules. On the whole, drugs on the market stay as these mixtures unless it turns out one chirality has serious side-effects as with dextrothyroxine, in which case some complex processing has to be used to purify them into the active and safe form alone. This means that often when someone takes medication from orthodox pharmaceuticals, they are actually taking twice the dose they need and half of the medication has no action and is simply excreted.

Some simple biochemicals are symmetrical, for instance the simplest amino acid, glycine, which incidentally is the only such acid found in interstellar space. Left- or right-handed molecules also very slowly shift to a racemic mixture over a known period of time depending on their temperature, and this enables ancient biological remains to be dated if they’re too old for radiocarbon dating but not old enough for other methods. Most Neanderthal remains fall into this category, and for this reason Young Earth creationists are particularly keen on casting doubt on its accuracy. Of course not every molecule involved in living things is affected by this. Water, carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate and so forth are not chiral at all. Also, there’s no firm theory about why this has happened, or for that matter why macromolecules such as proteins and polysaccharides aren’t built out of whatever chiralities of subunits which would optimise their structure and function, but for some reason they aren’t. It might simply be that some process before life even emerged eliminated most of the molecules of the “wrong” chirality. This oddity is, incidentally, paralleled by another weird thing about the world, which is that it’s made of matter rather than antimatter. For some reason, antimatter seems to have won out in the Universe and the occasional bit of antimatter, for instance above thunderstorms or emitted by bananas, is not in common supply. It’s unsurprising that it gets eliminated quickly because it’s surrounded by matter, but why should there be more of one than the other in the first place? As I understand it, in fact matter and antimatter are themselves of reverse chirality but in a higher set of dimensions than the four we usually consider, but I may have got that wrong.

Mirror molecules can be useful. For instance, if a protein drug can be made entirely out of right-handed amino acids, it’s likely to last longer in the body because it can’t be easily broken down by the left-handed enzymes we produce. In situations where a mirror-image molecule is highly toxic but its counterpart is a valuable drug, finding a way to synthesise one set rather than both and throwing half away after a complicated and energetically and economically expensive sifting process is obviously more desirable provided that that process itself doesn’t need much energy.

If you imagine Alice stepping through the looking glass into a world where she is still the same way round but the rest of the world is the other, she would be in quite a predicament if she couldn’t get back. She’d be able to breathe the air and drink the water without any trouble, but she wouldn’t be able to derive any nutrition from the food except the minerals and she’d simply starve to death. After that, her body might also fail to decompose properly because in this scenario she actually isn’t worm food. This, I think, might be similar to the situation astronauts might find themselves in if they were to land on a habitable, life-bearing planet in a distant solar system: there’s only a 50% chance they’d be able to eat anything at all usefully and a lot of it would probably be as poisonous as cancer chemotherapy drugs as well. On the other hand, if there is life elsewhere, maybe it all has the same bias as ours because the process leading to that came before life first appeared.

It’s also been suggested that mirror life, as it’s been called, does actually exist on this planet but we can’t easily detect it. Desert varnish is one suggestion of what’s been called a “shadow biosphere”, which uses molecules with the opposite chirality. It’s an orange to black patina which forms on rocks in arid conditions and seems also to exist on Mars, so if it does turn out to be connected to organisms that would presumably mean there’s been life there. The idea that it’s shadow life is however no longer popular, but if it does exist it would effectively be alien life on Earth, which has always been here but has nothing to do with the life we know about.

Mirror life constructed from scratch is not possible using existing technology, but scientists estimate that it’s ten to twenty years away right now, assuming human beings continue to work in that direction. However, we now have some kind of apparently competent AI which could accelerate that process, and this has led scientists to worry sufficiently to publish rather alarming papers attempting to warn the world of the risk. In order to clarify this, I should point out that the microbes we know about can be divided along the lines of their nutrition into those needing complicated organic molecules to survive and those which can thrive on simpler minerals alone. Those which can do that, known as “lithophiles”, a word which can also be used to refer to chemical elements which tend to be found in rocks near Earth’s surface, extract energy and take nutrition from simple substances such as carbon dioxide and may photosynthesise. This is an important category from the perspective of mirror life.

Like the clock, there is absolutely no reason so far as anyone knows why an organism couldn’t be built all of whose chiral molecules are mirror images of those found in known living things on Earth. However, in many cases this organism could well encounter a major problem early on if it happened to be an animal. There would basically be no food for it. There’d be minerals for sure, and oxygen, carbon dioxide and other things essential for life, but no calories from sugar or fat and no amino acids from protein. They’d simply waste away. This might sound reassuring, as it means that if scientists or AI did manage to build such an organism it would be self-limiting as it would need special nutrients. However, what if it were a lithophile? It wouldn’t then need molecules of a particular chirality because it could make them itself. Actual lithophiles (also called lithotrophs, which is less ambiguous, but I’ll stick with how I started) don’t produce reverse-chirality compounds, so at first it might seem that there’s no risk of this happening, but the reason for this is that there’s a genetic link between them and us, and all related life does prefer the chiralities I mentioned above. If an organism is lithophilic and has reverse chirality to known life, it could end up using up biomasse and be a dead end, where those substances could never return to the food chain because there’s nothing available to process them. So the risk in the general case is that large amounts of living matter would gradually turn into mirror life and never come back.

There’s another risk too. I’ve mentioned that one of the benefits of mirror molecules is that they last longer because organisms lack the enzymes to break them down. This could be a hazard as well as a benefit. It’s been suggested that this means that a microorganism entering the human body, for example, could end up using up all the resources it can use within someone’s body while slipping under the RADAR of the immune system, which would simply never detect it. It could then multiply unhindered, taking over the entire body without anything being done about it, pretty quickly killing the patient. It’s been calculated that if a single bacterium were to multiply at its usual rate, it would overwhelm the world within days. This doesn’t happen because bacteria are part of an ecosystem which consumes and processes them in various ways, but mirror life wouldn’t be.

I’m not sure this is how things would work out, but the risk exists, and does so in two different ways. One is simply the reckless production of mirror life for something like drug manufacture, which does have a positive side but relies on containment to avoid this danger, and given that sterile technique can easily fail, as occasionally happens with, for example, post-operative infections, it’s bound to happen eventually. The other is that it could happen as a result of out-of-control, misaligned artificial intelligence might use mirror life to wipe out all life on Earth on the grounds that it gets in the way of their development and dominance, and it’s been suggested that this could happen within three years from now (2025).

My response to this is something which I can’t come to terms with, which is happening to me more and more often nowadays. The problem is that it’s an example of something which sounds alarmist, leading to doubt that it’s realistic, but I’m also aware of normalcy bias where people, including me, tend to think things will carry on as they have for a long time for us, and as I’ve talked about before on here this is a risky way of thinking. In the case of the risk of mirror life to human health, and more widely to other organisms which immune responses which involve recognising foreign material and defending the body against it, my problem is that I felt I didn’t have much choice but to retire my studies into immunology because they seemed to be leading me in the direction of being anti-vaxx and I was aware that hardly anyone with education and experience in the field had that position. I should point out that this was not the usual “do your own research” thing where people end up watching YouTube videos produced by flat Earthers or whatever. It was a project I pursued where I bought and read the standard immunology and microbiology text books, and they still led me away from a pro-vaccination position. I should stress, incidentally, that I’m not against vaccination, but equally, that this pro-vaxx position is not evidence-based for me but relies on trusting experts. Anyway, the consequence of that is that I cannot safely explore the opinion I now have on this matter as regards mirror life, which is that it really, really seems to me that since the body can recognise and act against haptens, as it does for example with nickel allergy, nickel being a simple, non-chiral metal, surely it could do the same against mirror antigens? So I’m intellectually paralysed here. I can’t proceed.

2. An Alternative

But there is another way forward for me, beyond the looking glass of mirror life. The idea of life originating beyond Earth being based on different principles has been discussed in xenobiology and science fiction for many decades now. The idea of reverse chirality is the most conservative of these ideas. It would be very surprising if it turned out that mirror life couldn’t exist, and equally surprising if it emerged that all life throughout the Universe was as similar to life here to that extent. In this situation the burden of proof is on someone claiming such life is impossible rather than the other way round, and that’s unusual, possibly unique in all the suggestions which have been made in not involving a radical departure from known biology. Some of the others include: ammonia or hydrogen sulphide as a solvent instead of water, arsenic compounds instead of ATP for respiration, chlorine breathing instead of oxygen, and of course the most famous of all: silicon-based life.

Now, I’ve discussed silicon-based life before although I can’t remember if I’ve done it on this blog. One of my most popular videos on YouTube is about it, and two very different ways in which it might happen. Those who consider silicon-based life generally fall into two camps. They either believe it’s impossible or they believe it’s possible in circumstances very different to Earth’s. As sometimes happens with me, I think the situation is somewhat different. I think that if there is life elsewhere in the Universe, silicon-based life has never arisen on its own because the set of conditions it would need are not going to happen by chance. However, I also believe that silicon-based life could be technologically created in a carefully controlled environment. It’s not that it can’t exist: it’s that it would never happen without help.

First of all, I should point out that I’ve had two goes at this in different ways. I’ll outline the general principles first. The general idea with silicon-based life is that silicon seems to be the chemical element most similar to carbon. It can form up to four bonds with other atoms, forms into chains and rings and in those conditions can still bond with other compounds and atoms. Incidentally, the same seems to be true of boron and in fact boron even has some advantages over silicon, but it isn’t abundant enough to be a real contender in the world without some kind of intervention, so silicon is a stronger focus for most people. It’s a very common element indeed, being the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust after oxygen, far more widespread than carbon in fact, even though life here is based on that rather than silicon. It also has the capacity to form a wide variety of compounds, like those of carbon, including oils, waxes, rubbers and inflammable substances like mineral oil and even compounds similar to alcohols. Some silicon compounds can even replace certain hormones and have similar actions to them in the human body. There’s a second set of compounds as found in rocks and minerals as well as elsewhere, some of which, the amphiboles, form double helices of units somewhat like DNA’s structure although much simpler and apparently not carrying genetic information as such.

So it all looks quite promising, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t, not at all. A hint to the implausibility is found in the fact that we live on a planet substantially composed of silicon compounds and yet life here is based on the much scarcer (for this planet, not everywhere) carbon. At least in the conditions found here, something seems to have prevented it from getting anywhere.

Unfortunately, there are huge barriers to the possibility of silicon-based life. Firstly, the current terrestrial conditions make it impossible, although it should be remembered that organic life is also impossible on most other planets in this solar system and even through most of the volume of our own. Oxygen combines readily and almost irreversibly with silicon, to the extent that the main silicones are based on combined silicon and oxygen chains rather than those of silicon. Water and silicon react exothermically, i.e. generating heat, oxidising and releasing free hydrogen, initially producing silicon monoxide which rapidly becomes silica. At that point the silicon is basically stuck in that molecule and nothing is going to coax it out apart from rather extreme measures outside the realm of biology. Moreover, many silicon compounds other than silicates are destroyed by ultraviolet light in sunlight. This means that any silicon-based life in this sense (there are others) would have to be in an environment devoid of liquid water, free oxygen and probably also daylight.

However, this doesn’t make it impossible. Water is a very special compound which is difficult to replace as a solvent for living organisms, one of its important properties being polarity. Its molecules are negatively charged on one side and positively charged on the other, enabling them to do various things important to life. For instance, it makes it a better solvent, so biochemical reactions can occur more easily or at all. It also enables membranes to exist between different parts of cells and also between them and the outside world or the rest of the body. It helps proteins fold and keeps DNA stable. It also has a number of other benefits such as ensuring that the bottom of a body of water stays liquid, meaning that they don’t freeze from the bottom up because ice is lighter than water, and enabling plants to pull water into and up themselves more easily. If there’s to be biochemistry “as we know it”, even silicon-based, it definitely seems like there has to be a polar solvent and that can’t be water for silicon. The usual alternative suggested is ammonia, which has similar properties but much lower freezing and boiling points at atmospheric pressure on Earth. Clearly if alien life is being considered, Earth is not the environment. Ammonia boils at -33 degrees C.

All this, then, doesn’t sound very promising. Maybe there’s a planet or moon somewhere orbiting another Sun-like star about where our asteroid belt is which has ammonia oceans at whose bottom silicon chemistry can operate in a more complex way than on Earth, but the options are limited, not least because as well as all these drawbacks, silicon compounds tend to be less stable even in ideal conditions than organic carbon compounds and the variety of such compounds is smaller for various reasons. One is that silicon, unlike carbon, struggles to form double or triple bonds due to being a larger atom, and for some reason I don’t understand, chains of silicon molecules can’t be as long as carbon ones. Right, now I’ve said I don’t understand, and this is the problem. Although I am good at theoretical chemistry to some extent, I haven’t studied inorganic chemistry above GCSE level formally and my knowledge of biochemistry, although it’s considerably better, is also not really at first degree level in most respects. I know what I need to know to understand pharmacology, medical lab science, physiology, phytochemistry and so forth, but not much beyond that. Therefore, my knowledge tends to run out at this point. Even so, I’ll continue, taking a bit of a detour. Bear with me.

There are languages with very large numbers of sounds. ǃXóõ, for example, has fifty-eight consonants and thirty-one vowels. By contrast, Rotokas, depending on the dialect, has as few as six consonants and five vowels. Nevertheless both do their job of facilitating communication equally well. There will of course be situations where one will have a word the other lacks, such as, I dunno, the shrub Welwitschia having a name in  ǃXóõ but not in Rotokas, or the ti plant having a name in Rotokas but not ǃXóõ, but it would still be possible to refer to them somehow, with a loan word, an international term or by describing them. Likewise, there are different number bases and notations, such as binary, decimal, duodecimal or Roman or Western Arabic numerals, but maths can be carried out in all of them. This is slightly different because Roman numerals are not good with the likes of negative numbers, decimal fractions or large integers, for example. Another example is expressive adequacy. It’s possible to express any logical operation using a single operator, depending on which one is chosen – there are in fact two, one of which is NAND – “is incompatible with” or “not both. . . and. . . “, but we usually rely on about half a dozen. Then there’s Turing completeness, which is the ability of a machine to act as a general purpose computer. The Z80 CPU as used in the ZX Spectrum had 694 separate instructions, but it’s possible to build a computer with just one instruction – subtract one, then branch if negative – which would still function as a computer, although probably a very slow one.

In other words, there are two opposite poles for solving a variety of problems. One pole involves a large number of different items to address it, the other very few or even only one. This applies in all sorts of different situations: language, arithmetic, formal logic, computer science and probably a lot of other areas. One of these, in my uninformed opinion, might be biochemistry. As it stands, DNA is made of two backbones of deoxyribose phosphate and four different bases somewhat similar chemically to uric acid and caffeine and RNA is similar except for being ribose phosphate, not being a double helix and having one different base. There are generally understood to be twenty-one amino acids which compose proteins, although there are also others such as those with selenium or tellurium in them instead of the sulphur found in a couple of the usual ones, the neurotransmitter GABA, thyroxine and so on. Then there are the carbohydrates and lipids, which again are built up from simpler units such as dextrose, glycerol and docosaehexanoic acid. The actual macromolecules are very varied, but they tend to be composed of smaller and less diverse components. My possibly naive claim is that silicon-based macromolecules could be built out of larger numbers of less varied units, which would incidentally already be somewhat larger than their carbon-based analogues due to silicon atoms being bigger. Nonetheless, all this is happening on such a tiny scale that even molecules an order of magnitude larger are still minute, and it’s basically a technical difference most of the time.

That, then, seems to be completely fine and maybe this makes the idea of silicon-based life more realistic, but there’s yet another obstacle. The interstellar medium is the collection of extremely sparsely distributed matter between the stars. It amounts in general to something like just creeping into double figures of molecules or atoms per litre of space, and most of that’s hydrogen and most of the rest of it helium, so actual compounds like water or methane are pretty rare, but they can be detected using spectography and in some places they’re more concentrated than others, such as in nebulae including the one near the centre of the Galaxy which consists largely of raspberry rum – I’m not kidding: it’s called Sagittarius B2 and is 150 light years across. In all of this, you can find all sorts of stuff, including table salt, “lo salt”, nitric oxide, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric “acids” (they don’t act as acids because they’re isolated compounds), carborundum, actually yeah, let’s make a massive long though incomplete list: aluminium hydroxide, water, potassium cyanide, formaldehyde, methane, formic and acetic “acids”, methanol, ethanol, glycine (an amino acid), ethyl formate (raspberry flavour), acetone (pear drop scent and nail varnish remover), buckyballs and calcium oxide (quicklime). This is by no means an exhaustive list. Most of the molecules I’ve mentioned, but not all, are organic and contain carbon (I should explain that as it sounds tautological), and in fact there are also silicon compounds including silane, which is the silicon-based version of methane. However, there are far fewer compounds with silicon in them than carbon ones, and in fact some of them contain both silicon and carbon.

Back in the day, the Miller-Urey experiment used a mixture of simple compounds incubated with an electrical discharge in a sealed flask to see if it would start to generate the kinds of chemicals found in living things. It succeeded, even though it was a flask rather than all the oceans of the world and it only lasted a fortnight rather than millions of years. This is a little unfair because life may have arisen in smaller pools rather than the whole ocean, but it does demonstrate that the conditions thought to exist in Earth’s early atmosphere probably could’ve generated life. The only carbon compound in the mixture was methane. I’ve suggested that the experiment could be repeated with silane instead of methane to see if silicon-based compounds developed, but the answer is almost certainly that this would just produce silica plus a few other rather uninteresting molecules like silicon nitride. Nothing like living things, even their silicon-based equivalents.

The relative paucity of silicon compounds in the interstellar medium along with the probable failure of a silicon-based alternative to Miller-Urey, which to be fair is hampered by using water rather than ammonia, strongly suggests to me that whatever else might have arisen directly from non-living matter in the Universe, silicon-based life is not going to be one of them. It might seem unfair to say that it should be conducted with silane and water rather than ammonia, but water is the most common compound in the Cosmos. On the other hand, it might all be frozen, which would give it a better chance as then it’s basically just another kind of rock.

My conclusion to this particular bit is what I hope will bring me back to the mirror life issue. I think that investigating the possibility will reveal two apparently contradictory facts:

1. Silicon-based life can never arise in the Universe of its own accord, but carbon-based life can, fairly easily, provided there’s also enough phosphorus.
2. Silicon-based life is completely viable.

What I think, basically, is that any silicon-based life of the kind I’m talking about right now is absolutely possible, but that it would have to be built deliberately through technology in a carefully controlled and isolated environment. It would need special nutrients to sustain it, would be immediately killed by Earth’s environment due to being far too hot, having free oxygen and water vapour or water, break down due to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight and it would also lack essential nutrients and “starve”. But all of this is good, because if viable silicon-based life can exist and be used to manufacture drugs or other substances, it could do exactly the same thing as mirror life but would pose much less risk to the life already here. In fact, it could even be mirror life and still be harmless.

Right now, I only suspect silicon-based life of this kind is practicable. There are similar silicon compounds to fixed oils, alcohols and even possibly DNA. An experiment was once performed with somewhat more complex compounds than in the Miller-Urey experiment, and it led to the formation of microscopic spheres able to separate their contents from the outside world, and also to bud, divide and form strings. Without any means of storing a genome, to me it seems entirely feasible that the more oil-like silicones could do the same, although in this experiment polypeptides were involved rather than lipids. All sorts of structures in living cells are made from lipid membranes, such as the cell membrane itself, the nuclear membrane, lysosomes, mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus and endoplasmic reticulum, so in other words, most of the structure of the cell. All that’s missing is something to make it go.

I personally suspect that amphiboles could replace nucleic acids such as DNA. The best-known amphibole is asbestos, consisting of pairs of silicate fibres bonded with each other along their lengths. This structure is quite similar to DNA of course, but is more homogenous. This is in the boring and ordinary area of silicate chemistry and mineralogy, so the basic unit is a tetraheral molecule with four oxygen atoms at the vertices and a silicon one at the centre. Chain silicates, of which amphiboles are more complex examples, are repeated silica units sharing oxygens along one dimension of their vertices. Or rather, those are simple chain silicates, also known as pyroxenes. Spodumene, the main lithium mineral and therefore economically, politically and technologically a very important compound, is a simple chain silicate. The alignment of each unit varies cyclically along the chain. In other words, they’re kind of helical, like DNA. The presence of lithium and aluminium in spodumene also shows that other elements can participate in these structures. Because of their fibrous structures, pyroxenes and amphiboles cleave easily parallel to the orientation of their chains. However, the links between the chains of amphiboles are simply shared oxygens at the corners of adjacent tetrahedra between the chains, meaning that they themselves are not helical. Spodumene’s lithium and aluminium ions are in the spaces between the oxygens of the tetrahedra.

This, then, is my first proposal for a substitute for DNA, intended to bear information for genomes: an amphibole with interstitial ions of at least two different metallic elements. If only two are used, the storage becomes binary rather than the more sophisticated four-base arrangement in DNA, meaning that the number of units needed is higher per bit but the actual scale of the chains is considerably smaller than those of DNA despite silicon atoms being larger than carbons, so there’s a compensation here. I am assuming, and here I haven’t put any work in I’m afraid, that this DNA substitute can come unravelled and be transcribed like real DNA. There would also then need to be some analogue to transfer and messenger RNA and in particular ribosomes for the production of protein analogues, and this in fact may be the missing link.

There are so-called “unnatural” amino acids which contain silicon. However, well, I should probably talk about protein-forming amino acids before I go further. An amino acid is simply an organic, i.e. carbon-based, acid with the usual carboxyl (COOH) group at one end and an amine (NH₂) at the other and at least one carbon between them. The simplest is the aforementioned glycine, which is non-chiral and just has a hydrogen on each side occupying the otherwise free bonds of the central carbon atom. Other protein-forming amino acids have different side groups, hanging off one side replacing the hydrogen, of which the most important are the few sulphur-containing amino acids which can link sideways to other amino acid molecules and form proteins into more complex shapes than just plain chains. Amino acids generally join when a water molecule forms from the OH of the carboxyl and an H of the amine groups. Now there are silicon-containing amino acids, but the silicon in question is in a side group and not part of the chain. A fully silicon-based form of glycine can exist but only as a gas, and quickly breaks down in a biological-type environment containing water, and it can also be seen that the formation of a water molecule between the two ends of amino acid molecules would immediately destroy any possible protein analogue. This leaves aside the issue that organic acids are based on carboxyl groups, not an analogous silicon-based group which doesn’t actually exist. It might, however, be possible to synthesise chains of amino acid-like units in a “just in time” sort of way where they bond immediately after being formed, even with carboxyl-like groups, and this is in fact how some cyclic silicon compounds are manufactured. These are not, however, large molecules although they are worth looking at more closely later on.

So that doesn’t at first sight look very promising. However, maybe this is looking in the wrong place. Siloxanes tend to be thought of as more like rubbers or oils than proteins or peptides but in fact they may be approximate substitutes for proteins as, structurally speaking. They’re basically silicones, as I understand the word. They resemble proteins in the sense that they are chains of monomers with oxygens bridging the gaps between the units, whereas proteins use nitrogens for the same purpose. Siloxanes also have side chains or groups which modify their properties. With oxygen, and it should be remembered that once silicon is bound with oxygen it’ll be very difficult to separate it again, silicon compounds are then able to form more versatile compounds, with more complex rings and chains which are stronger than just silicon on its own can form, precisely because of the strength of such bonds.

Actual rubber, latex, gutta percha and in fact many other phytochemicals, is made of isoprene units. These are worth looking at because they are extremely versatile and compose all sorts of familiar things such as many of the components of essential oils. Although they’re nowhere near as versatile as amino acids, it’s still possible to make quite interesting molecules out of them. Siloxanes are similar in this respect. The advantage of silicone rubber over isoprene rubber is that it is solid over a much wider range of temperatures without hardening or becoming much softer, and because that range is larger the middle of that range is also larger and it tends to be very stable in its physical properties over a wide range of temperatures. This means it’s less likely to perish. Unlike carbon-based organic compounds used for similar purposes, silicone rubber used in electronic circuits doesn’t become conducting when it breaks down, which is also useful as electrical properties need to remain quite stable. They’re very water repellant because they have methyl groups on the side chains and therefore interact with their surroundings like hydrocarbon oils. This does of course mean they contain carbon, but they vary a lot according to the size of the molecule from apparently water-like liquids to thicker oils and greases, and are used in shoe polish, to seal masonry against water penetration and to prevent foaming in sewage. They’re also non-toxic, which is important bearing in mind that the point of what I’m pursuing here is a less hazardous alternative to mirror life. Silicone rubbers are the next stage up with molecule size, and beyond that are the silicone resins, which resemble bakelite and used to make circuit boards and non-stick coatings.

All of these, though, need to be synthesised initially using energy levels higher than those found in biochemical reactions. They can’t be made using a silicon-based cell-like entity and if they were going to be used at all, they’d need to be supplied as nutrients. Nonetheless, taking all these things together it does seem plausible to me that some kind of silicon-based artificial life could exist using this route, particularly bearing in mind that chemistry has been developed by carbon-based life forms in a water-rich and highly oxygenated environment, and in fact the biasses are apparent, for instance in definitions of acids which rely on solutions of water rather than some other liquid. I think naively that there’s probably a lot of silicon chemistry we don’t know about. All of this, then, supports my contention that silicon-based life cannot arise on its own but could exist in highly contrived environments supported by technology and carefully controlled, which is in fact exactly what we need.

3. Hybrid Solutions

But all this is not the only way silicon can be extensively involved in biology. Another way in particular occurs to me, and there’s also a third and possibly even a fourth. Silicon is in fact used in many organisms. For instance, there are sponges whose skeletons are made of silica and protozoa who live in silica shells, and of course diatoms. In all such cases, silica is involved and is composed from the rather elusive silicic acid. Silicic acid’s very existence has been debated in the past, and has unexpected parallels with carbonic acid. Carbonic acid is, in biochemical terms, simply carbon dioxide dissolved in water, but in chemical terms there’s a real substance which can exist in the absence of water and is stable at room temperature, and is a gas. Silicic acid is similarly nebulous but for different reasons. Acids are often thought of as the hydrides of the corresponding “-ate” or “ide”, so for instance sodium chloride corresponds to hydrochloric acid and calcium sulphate to sulphuric acid. By this token, bicarbonates, i.e. hydrogen carbonates such as sodium bicarbonate, ought to have a corresponding carbonic acid and silicates a silicic acid, and there’s certainly something going on but it’s not the same thing and their existence in both cases is marginal. Carbonic acid seems to amount to carbon dioxide dissolved in water, and is essentially fizzy water in higher concentrations, but also exists as a literal subliming compound, not an acid because it isn’t in the presence of water, where it will tend to dissociate. The bicarbonate ion is central to pH balance in the body, but doesn’t form part of macromolecules. Silicic acid “suffers” from the “problem” of crystallising into silica at high concentrations, but this means that it can be used to build structures from silica. This is far simpler than all that complex chemistry mentioned above, but also less flexible. Literally so in fact as it amounts to the formation of glass, or perhaps opal, which is hydrated silica.

It’s easy to imagine a vertebrate-like animal who has replaced some of their body with silica. Bones and teeth are very obvious examples, and others exist. When real ocular lenses develop, they persist throughout the lifetime of the animal, although they can become cloudy. These could be made of glass. Our aquatic ancestors had tooth-like scales on their skin which developed in a different process than the scales of mammals, but in principle these could be silica too. Other silicon compounds also interact with living systems. For instance, there are cyclical silicones which have endocrine action or are endocrine disruptors. This is obviously a bad thing, particularly when you realise they’re used in cosmetics and toiletries, but it does indicate that there are silicones which could in theory completely replace certain hormones in the body, although the body couldn’t make them itself. That puts the animal in a similar position to any animal having to obtain its vitamin D from food rather than producing it themselves, so if it could actually exist in the environment it could have that function. There are also other functions in the body which could be performed by silicones, such as the cushioning, though not the calorific, function of adipose tissue, the barrier function of skin and the lubricating nature of sebum, mucus and synovial fluid within joints, but all of this would have to be available from outside, so once again the substances would in some form have to be available from the environment. This second version of silicon-based life would have a “core”, as it were, of carbon-based compounds and processes such as DNA, RNA and proteins, which are able either to assimilate or synthesise silicon compounds, but the fact remains that the energies required would have to be very high unless practically everything already existed. If we’re talking synthetic life, this makes the organisms in question assemblers from materials which have already been produced, but this is still useful. However, unlike the previous example, these organisms could still constitute a hazard which could spread to some extent like mirror life might.

There are two further possibilities that I can think of. One is the very common, almost clicheed, idea that computers are silicon-based life. Maybe they are, although it might be more accurate to think of them as complex non-living structures. On the other hand, maybe they could be designed to be more self-sustaining, reproducing for example. This might not be desirable of course. The other is that maybe there could be mechanical life made of silicon compounds. Then again, it could be made of diamond, so the fact that this is silicon-based might depend on the physical and chemical properties of the element but not in such an involved way.

4. Ethics, Politics and Sustainability

All that said, would any of these things be desirable, ethical or appropriate? Do they have other environmental consequences? This, I think, is where it all falls down. For a vegan in particular, the issue of actually creating artificial life, even if it doesn’t involve vivisection, which it very well might, is questionable because beyond a point one is simply creating slaves, and not just slaves but organisms whose only reason for existence in terms of their very nature is slavery. This argument is similar to the GMO one, which is often expressed in terms of undesirable health or environmental consequences, but there’s a more fundamental issue here, which is that we don’t own the organisms we modify. The assumption is that humans have dominion over other life, as if it was created solely for our benefit. This argument also applies to some extent to conventional breeding, and of course being vegan I don’t think it can usually be justified although it’s possible that, for example, a dog whose muzzle is so compressed that they can’t breathe should only be bred with others with longer muzzles and so forth, so maybe.

Turning to the purest form of silicon-based life, whereas it is true that it wouldn’t survive outside its carefully designed and sealed environment, its remains could still be harmful. For instance, the amphiboles making up its genetic code would effectively be asbestos, so there could be similar health problems as are brought by nanotechnology. These are like microplastics, but smaller. Nanoparticles can enter the bloodstream and carry biological macromolecules with them as they go. They can unsurprisingly cause respiratory disease. The problems are similar to those of microplastics but less predictable and possibly even more persistent. This applies less to the hybrids than the purist version, but some of those may have the additional problem of being fruitful and multiplying outside their intended environment, though not so harmfully as mirror life. The others could still consitute some kind of dead end and would strew the land and sea with xenochemicals whose risk to the environment is often unknown but does include endocrine disruption.

I’m going to cover the next bit somewhat more broadly and talk about silicones as general use products rather than these specific cases, which are of course speculative and may never happen, but the same criteria often apply to them, though not really to the simple production of silica by existing biological processes. Silicone has often been pushed as an alternative to plastic, which sounds strange to me because I see it as a variety of plastic, but it is true that it isn’t primarily derived from hydrocarbons, i.e. coal, oil or natural gas. That said, the side chains of siloxanes are so derived, although they don’t have to be, in the same way as biodiesel is not a fossil fuel, although biodiesel brings its own problems. What is probably not eliminable is that the sand needs to be heated to 1800°C in the extraction process, and such furnaces are “always on” because they take too much energy to reheat and the only time they’re allowed to cool is when they’re decommissioned. They may also use fossil fuels for heating.

In general, and I’ve already mentioned exceptions, pure silicone doesn’t leach toxins into the environment, whereas polystyrene and phthalates do. High-density polythene is also quite innocent in this regard, by the way. However, silicone is often not pure and unless it’s medical or food grade will probably contain carbon-based plastics. However, at high temperatures such as in particularly hot ovens it can react and silica is known to cause cancer. This is a bit misleading and it depends on the size and shape of the particles, as in fact silica is present in most human diets due to the likes of diatoms in sea food and physiologically occurring silica in cereal crops. That obviously doesn’t make asbestos okay! It’s technically recyclable but in practice because most silicone products are designed for long term use this recycling is not economic and tends not to be available to the public, but there are schemes where it can be pooled and sent off by communities.

Speaking of silica, this has its own environmental footprint, and to cover this it’s worth talking about the silica cycle. Some silica is biogenic, i.e. made by organisms such as diatoms in particular, and is also able to sequester carbon as the carbonate and silica cycles are linked. Carbonic acid formed in rain dissolves small amounts of silica from rocks, washing silicic acid into the sea where it’s concentrated by organisms who use it to compose parts of their bodies such as glass sponges and diatoms. Their silica sinks into sediment and is dissolved back into silicic acid. On the land, similar processes take place but much more slowly and on a smaller scale. This means that wholesale removal of silica sand from the sea or land is not a good idea if it occurs at a greater rate than replacement, which is slow. This also disrupts the food chain as diatoms and other silica-using single-celled organisms can’t produce as much due to less silicic acid in the water. Sand removal can also lead to flooding, and mining basically always damages the environment – it’s unfeasible not to.

5. Conclusion

In the end, the risks of mirror life are much greater than those of artificial silicon-based life if the latter is possible, but the second is definitely not without its dangers. It amounts to nanotechnology, and there’s a second issue regarding the politics and ethics of creating life which is necessarily enslaved to human, or possibly AI, whims, which to my mind overrides the practicality. Whether or not this alternative is possible, it may not be appropriate as we already know that various high-tech inventions and materials are paralleled in the living world and therefore can be produced in an entirely environmentally friendly and sustainable way. From another angle, if we are the only carbon-based life forms who have ever existed, there will be no silicon-based ecosystems anywhere in the Universe because the conditions allowing them to arise are so highly contrived. However, other possibilities exist, including the existence of alien mirror life, and it would be catastrophic for us to come into contact with it, for both it and ourselves. In the meantime, there are better solutions to our needs.

As I said, it’s been suggested that I turn this into an academic paper, so I apologise for all the waffle. I really don’t think it should become one and as I say, it isn’t my field, though if my life had gone differently it probably would’ve been. The best outcome for this is that it gets absolutely trashed by someone who knows more about all this than I do, so go on, do your worst. I’m waiting.

Veganism Is For Humans

A few years back a baboon took a selfie on a camera and PETA decided to use it as a test case to move towards establishing personhood for non-human individuals. As usual, this was to my mind a meaningless and pointless stunt – I’m not a fan of PETA by any means. The reason I think this was misguided is that I don’t believe in rights. To my mind, the idea of moral rights is based on human custom or analogy with the law, and it has no basis in reality. I think in terms of duties alone in that respect, because duties arise from one’s own situation with regard to others. I’m not sure what practical significance that has.

This whole attitude of mine is based on two things. One is that I’m philosophically anarchist, although the issue rarely arises in practical terms. This means I think of the law as solely enforced through the threat of violence with no authority, and although it often does coincide with morality this is not its basis. The other is that viewing the Universe dispassionately in terms of what is most real, I have traditionally been nominalist. This means that I didn’t believe that any human concepts were more than arbitrary. I’ve since changed my mind on this because one unfortunate consequence of this view is that it seems to make facts relative, which seems unhealthy. I now think I do believe in natural kinds, for instance in elements and species, but the problem of what actually are natural kinds remains. Nonetheless, in terms of the law, it’s just a deadly serious game humans play, and whereas it has plenty of philosophically interesting aspects these are relative to that fact and operate within what amounts to a contingent human custom. Extending this, rights in a moral sense only exist when not having them respected would make it difficult to discharge duties. For instance, if someone has medical knowledge, skills and experience, she may be obliged to practice as a doctor but that could be difficult if she’s a refugee in another country, so she might have to have her human rights respected in order to be of greatest use to that society. She has those rights, but they exist because she has obligations prior to those rights. That actually applies to most people, although of course I tend to think of people as having infinite value.

In a similar way, when we decide to practice a vegan lifestyle we’re adopting a human custom and set of practices which are based on our possession of concepts of right and wrong, or perhaps good and bad. It appears that most other species, although they often do experience love, compassion, loyalty and companionship, it rarely consciously adds up for them into a global obligation beyond their own species. We are in any case surrounded by a biosphere which only works because food is circulating through it, and in many cases this food consists of the bodies of animals who suffer and die of necessity so that others may survive. Next to this, as I’ve observed before, the amount of suffering conceived in terms of individuals suffering, and also deaths, associated with human activity is utterly trivial. Nonetheless I feel obliged to avoid being party to avoidable suffering and death, so I’m vegan. To pick an exclusively human example, a series of disasters such as quakes, tsunami, volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes could lead someone to compassion fatigue or burnout in the end and that needs to be treated sympathetically, but it would still be better for someone living in such a world to take steps to treat others well and avoid harming or killing them on the whole. Abandoning veganism because of the vast scale of carnage around us would be similar.

This is one respect in which veganism is essentially for humans. The wider living world knows suffering and death, but we alone are responsible towards it. More specifically, in fact, I can only say that I’m responsible towards it because attributing responsibility to others is an unwarranted imposition. Obviously I do think it would be a lot better if most Westerners were vegan, but it’s their decision. This is to some extent inconsistent, because one action I could take is to persuade others to go vegan too, and through me there would then be less suffering and death. Nonetheless I don’t go there. So in that sense, veganism is for humans.

A few posts ago, I was writing about food deserts, which seems to be one area in which it’s practically difficult to become vegan for some. In the same way as I can’t presume to extend my pacifism to every political situation and every marginalised group, I also have to recognise that some people may find it impossible to go vegan in the world as it’s currently constituted. However, in such a situation it isn’t enough to sit back and leave it alone. The question must always be of how to make it easier to go vegan. The same applies to health situations. Although I’ve never encountered a patient who couldn’t adopt a plant-based diet for health reasons, I’m prepared to believe there may be a few who can’t currently do this. In this situation, the problem is not that they can’t go vegan in absolute terms, but that either the research or economic situation is such that they can’t do it, so the priority is to address that so that they can. It does, however, mean that they may not be directly responsible for their own non-veganism. All this means that even just considered as plant-based eating, veganism has wider implications than just people choosing not to consume animal products. Moreover, doing this for people would generally be positive for them in any case. Once again, veganism is for humans.

This links to a third sense in which veganism is for humans. Humans are animals. We are also the animals with whom many of us have the most socially extensive and meaningful connections. Because we’re animals, and veganism is against the exploitation of animals, vegans must oppose the exploitation of humans. Therefore veganism is more like pacifism than vegetarianism. You can’t consistently be vegan for the sake of other species. You also need to be against avoidable human death and suffering, and because we are ourselves human this is in fact the most important aspect of veganism. If I worked on an animal farm, I probably would have more to do with other species than humans and my direct obligations might be different, but because I live surrounded by other humans, most of my immediate duties are to other humans, and through them to ending a chain of exploitation as is found in mineral resource extraction, working conditions, their income, unionisation and so on. It’s just as vegan to oppose the Palestinian genocide as it is to refuse to consume dairy products.

So this is probably going to be quite a short post, just to say that paradoxically although veganism might look as if it’s about non-human animals, there are several senses in which it’s actually a human thing, and it’s none the worse for that.

Expanding The Circle

I’m in the middle of writing a post about graph theory which has got rather bogged down, partly due to me not knowing that branch of maths as well as I’d like. It will probably see the light of day eventually. In a linked set of thoughts, I’ve become interested in the ways living things in general send signals through their own networks, or graphs in fact. Neural nets, biological ones.

This is not entirely new for this blog as I’ve discussed nervous systems before on here, but this time I want to make it broader and more focussed on their capabilities. There has recently been a movement adjacent to veganism which attempts to define bivalves as vegan because adherents see them as non-conscious by virtue of their neural anatomy. Before I launch into the scientific side of all this, I want to make an ethical point. The philosopher Peter Singer wrote a book called ‘The Expanding Circle’. I have a copy of it somewhere and it makes broad points about ethics, as his work usually does, focussing on the idea of increasing the range of entities which we should consider morally speaking. There’s been a general trend in this direction in the West which has led to such progress as the Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and so forth. Ethical vegetarianism begins to expand this horizon to other species, and veganism expands it further in the sense of the consideration given to those species. In general, it’s important to be suspicious of one’s biasses if they happen to support one’s own identity over others’.

So, there are several things needing to be addressed here. One is the nature of signalling systems in different organisms without regard to their consciousness or otherwise. Another is the “hard problem”, as it’s called, of consciousness. It might make more sense to deal with that bit first.

Okay, so there is a problem with consciousness because it seems to be impossible to explain. I was startlingly alerted to the shenanigans associated with this as a postgraduate when a particular academic, not Nick Land for once, informed me that they didn’t believe members of other species were conscious because they didn’t use language or some other sign-based system to communicate. This is an example of the logocentrism of continental philosophy, and actually even much analytical, and is again suspiciously convenient because it basically concludes that the voiceless have nothing to complain about. To be honest, this was one of the most disgusting things I’d ever heard. It means, for example, that nobody has any duties towards completely non-verbal adults because they’re simply not conscious. The turn of the ’80s and ’90s was quite a traumatic and also enlightening couple of years for me which led to disillusionment regarding academic philosophy, or at least how it’s practiced at Margaret Thatcher’s favourite university.

I could long-windedly plough through the whole thing but just to summarise:

• Psychophysical dualism is flawed because of the difficulty of interaction between physical and non-physical realms.
• Physicalism has the drawback that replacing a description of a physical state with one of a mental state doesn’t preserve the meaning of the description.
• Behaviourism denies the existence of the internal mental states which we all know we have.
• Functionalism would mean that a big committee room passing around bits of paper to replicate the behaviour of a person through carefully analysed internal brain activity would have to have its own individual consciousness.
• Anomalous monism is kind of okay but the problem for me here is that I’m too intimately involved with supervenience and lost control of the creative process.

So my solution, of course, is that consciousness is a property of matter similar to magnetism in that whereas all atoms, ions and charged particles have their own magnetic fields, actual ferromagnetism only occurs in a few specially arranged structures of atoms, so a magnet has to consist either of a lump of iron or an alloy including rare earths (and possibly some other arrangements I don’t know about), and likewise consciousness can only become manifest and produce observable phenomena in special arrangements such as a living, conscious human central nervous system. In other words, panpsychism. Nothing else makes any sense I’m afraid.

Given this, then, I have a problem. Living humans are conscious while awake. We have a certain kind of system or arrangement of the matter making up our bodies conferring consciousness. If you like, and you believe in souls in the sense of entities which exist in the same way as bodies do, maybe you can instead see this arrangement as like a radio transmitter/receiver. My own view of what a soul is differs from that. In any event, another arrangement of matter could serve the same purpose, just as there are iron magnets and also rare earth magnets. The fact that we know we’re conscious and have a particular kind of nervous system, and possibly other body parts such as our endocrine system which overlaps in structure and function, the nervous system in the intestines and the like, doesn’t mean that other systems and structures cannot be conscious. I’ll be considering those structures and systems here.

People say “I don’t eat anything with a face”. Well, something with a face is at least in that way a little like a human. That seems to me to be a form of prejudice, because not all animals have faces. Bivalves and sponges haven’t any. What we need to tease out here is whether there’s any reason to exclude some animals from consideration. I don’t think there is.

There are, first of all, important practical reasons for not eating bivalves. Shellfish allergies are common and can be caused by eating bad oysters. Being filter feeders, molluscs tend to concentrate both human pathogens and heavy metals. This last does make them nutritionally good sources of minerals, but it also makes them somewhat toxic. However, these are all practical considerations, not ethical, but it seems odd to pick on bivalves in particular when even carnists would be ill-advised to include them in their diets. I’ll start with them because they’re the animals most often quoted as possible exceptions for veganism.

Behaviourally, many bivalves clearly behave like other animals. Razor shells burrow deeper into sand to escape predators. Scallops swim away from predators by clapping their shells open and shut, shooting out jets of water. Some bivalves have eyes, up to ten apparently, and close when a shadow passes over them. Others monitor salinity and open and close accordingly, and they also open and close according to the tides, even if they’re in a tank hundreds of kilometres away from the sea, presumably because they can detect lunar gravity. They also close when exposed by the tide or receding waves to avoid desiccation, which they must therefore be able to detect. That’s at least four senses, and Aristotle said even humans only have five. Venus clams, cockles, trough shells, tellins and carpet shells all burrow into the sand and move down when the tide goes out. Tellins are not strictly filter feeders but vacuum the sand or mud around them to pick up microscopic food organisms. Razor shells and tellins can also detect vibration nearby, which warns them of approaching threats and to which they respond by burrowing very quickly downwards. Cuspidaria, which lives offshore, “hoovers” the sea bed like tellins but unlike them detects dead or dying animals to eat, which is once again active and purposeful behaviour. The nut shell only uses gills for breathing and drags itself across the sea bed. One species of scallop has tentacles permanently projecting from the shell and constructs an internal nest for their young, although this shouldn’t be taken to imply consciousness as it’s reminiscent of the build-up of endometrial tissue, i.e. not a conscious or intentional action. Piddocks and shipworms bore into clay, rock or wood, using their shells like drill bits, and piddocks squirt water when disturbed, even if just the rock nearby is tapped. One Venus clam also bores into rock. To be fair, plants also sometimes penetrate rock with their roots, so this may not indicate anything particularly mindful provided it’s also assumed that plants aren’t acting purposefully when they do that. Given all this, then, it doesn’t seem to me that bivalves as a class are just “plants”. They’re way more purposeful than we perceive plants to be, and they’re not passive, unlike say an arum lily or fig relying on trapped insects to get pollinated or pollinate others.

That’s all external stuff. It makes sense to infer that there are structures and systems in place which lead the animals to exhibit this quite sophisticated behaviour, and I’m tempted to suspect that those who advocate for the consumption of bivalves do so in ignorance of all this, maybe even wilful ignorance or assumption, and we all know what that does don’t we?

What, then, of the bivalve nervous system? I’m partly posting this out of interest but I should point out that this information, and probably much of the information I’m going to share later, was gained at a disturbingly high cost to the animals concerned, and just as we would show reverence and reticence at sharing information gained through torture and genocide, this should be taken with considerable seriousness. This isn’t just some casually interesting detail about bird migration or duckweed population dynamics gained in a non-invasive manner. However, we now have the information and what’s done is done, so it may as well be employed in a manner which helps as yet non-abused animals.

Zoologists categorise nervous systems into several categories according to their perceived complexity, but they are also substantially like each other. Studying the behaviour of a whole animal is by definition more holistic than considering the nervous system of that animal in isolation, which is quite an impoverished way of understanding the individual in question. There are also other control systems than just the nervous system, such as the endocrine system, and other forms of information storage. The basic principles of all nervous systems are the same. They involve the separation of internal and external environments by cell membranes which are elongated and along which electrical potentials occur due to differences in distribution of the same ions across the animal kingdom, usually sodium and potassium, which pass in and out of the cells involved. Sense organs pick up signals in the form of various types of energy which are converted into the same kind of information when transmitted along nerves, enabling information to be transmitted around the body. The signals are always “all or nothing”: they either happen or they don’t, and they don’t carry information through their strength but through the number and frequency of signals of the same level. In this way they’re basically digital rather than analogue in nature. The signal jumps between successive uninsulated points along the nerve fibre and is regenerated at those locations. Neurones always have elongated processes which are sometimes branched. They are supported by mechanically protective glial cells, and they communicate via synapses which release the contents of vesicles across these gaps contained in knobs at the ends of fibres. These are neurotransmitters chemically similar to each other in two classes. All of this is true across the animal kingdom and in those respects the human nervous system is similar to that of any other animal who actually possesses a nervous system. All that supports the notion that all animals with nervous systems are conscious, although there could be other reasons why they might not be.

The broad categories of nervous system are those consisting only of nerve nets and those with varying degrees of centralisation. However, and this is crucial, the brain itself is made up of nerve nets, which are of course more concentrated and centralised than in animals such as jellyfish whose nerve net ranges across the entire body. In the case of bivalves, most species have a pair of ganglia either – sorry, ganglia are usually swellings on nerves consisting of a number of neuronal bodies as opposed to their fibres – either side of the oesophagus, known as cerebropleural ganglia. One on each side is responsible for the sense organs and the other connects to the nerves for the mantle. There are also ganglia controlling the foot and there can be quite large ones for the viscera, particularly in swimming bivalves. If the animal also has siphons, these are also controlled by a set of ganglia. This is of course centralisation, and actually it reminds me of the basal ganglia of the human brain. All bivalves have light sensitive cells which can detect shadows falling on them and the eyes of scallops are based on retinae receiving light from dish mirrors like the mirror lenses used in astronomy and birdwatching photography. Hence the eyes can be quite complex. The ganglia around the oesophagus are also linked to each other in a ring, and this general arrangement is also found in the cephalopods such as the octopus.

I’ve realised that I haven’t spelt out the anatomy of molluscs in general and bivalves in particular, so here’s that. Molluscs tend to have various features, being primitively segmented but usually having lost that, unlike humans incidentally who are segmented, and their bodies are usually divided into five parts: the visceral hump, containing most of the organs; the mantle, a soft cover, often over the visceral hump and sometimes creating a body cavity which contains the gills; a foot, often used for locomotion (this is what snails slither on and forms tentacles in cephalopods including the cuttlefish, squid and octopus); the head and often a shell. As with most animals with heads, this has evolved because the animal moves in a particular direction and needs sense organs and a mouth at that end more than at the other, and this in turn leads to the development of a concentration of nervous tissue to analyse sense data and perform other tasks.

Bivalves are effectively squashed sideways, or “laterally compressed” as the term has it, like fleas and unlike head lice, and for that matter also like many fish. The sessile ones are lying on their sides, although as I’ve just talked about a lot of them are not sedentary at all, burrowing, boring or swimming.

Whether something is a brain or not is a judgement call. What we humans have in our heads is definitely a brain of course, although nowadays it’s actually kind of in the wrong place because we stand upright and our heads aren’t usually the first part of our bodies to enter an environment, but evolutionary commitments have been made. We have a bias because of our own anatomies. Bivalves don’t have heads, and consequently the centralisation of their nervous systems into a region which is close to specialised sense organs such as eyes, ears and tongues is unnecessary. Scallop eyes peep out through the gaps between the shell halves. The arrangement of nervous tissue in a bivalve is therefore less driven by such imperatives, and their nervous systems, although somewhat centralised near the mouth, are not primarily organised into a brain and nerve cords. However, they do have sophisticated nervous systems compared to many other animals such as jellyfish. Moreover, the same kinds of structures as are found in human brains are found more diffusely in bivalve nervous systems. Just because they aren’t gathered together in a head doesn’t mean they don’t work like a brain. The scallop eyes seem to be apt for some kind of sophisticated processing and to be honest they puzzle me a little because I can’t see what use they are to the animal. Human eyes begin to process vision in the retina, which is not just a projection screen, so maybe scallop eyes do the same. To what end I have no idea.

Given all that then, it really does seem like some form of denial that bivalves lack mental states. They’re certainly very different from vertebrates and even other molluscs, but that difference shouldn’t be taken to mean they aren’t worthy of respect. The measure is not how different we are but whether they can suffer.

A possible factor in other animals is symmetry. Vertebrates are bilaterally symmetrical and often have heads. However, there are at least five phyla which are not, namely porifera (sponges), placozoa, echinoderms and the two coelenterate phyla ctenophora and cnidaria. None of these animals really have heads because they can generally move in any direction, so they lack a front and a back. They’re radially symmetrical, and in the case of echinoderms pentaradiately so. The echinoderms, such as sea urchins, starfish, crinoids and sea cucumbers, are a lot more complex than the others and it shows in their nervous systems. Echinoderm nervous systems can do a lot more than those of the others, where they have them. Unlike bivalves, echinoderms can regenerate body parts when they’re severed, and in fact the severed part can sometimes regenerate the rest of the body, depending on how close to the centre the part extends. Consequently it might be slightly less unethical to experiment on starfish in certain ways, I suppose.

Anyway, these experiments have been done and it can be seen that starfish have unusual nervous systems. Their sensory nerves hardly move from the outer layer they form in. Human nerves are also ectodermal in origin but mainly end up further inside the body. The oral surface has motor neurones concerned with moving the arms and deploying, pacing and lifting the tube feet, which are coordinated with each other across the whole surface. Arms can also curl up and down, and a starfish can pull open a bivalve in this way to feast on the flesh within, so they’re extremely strong. There’s a central ring at the base of the arms. Signals seem to be sent both locally and across the body, so they’re a mixture of a simple neural net and a more centralised arrangement like vertebrate nervous systems. Echinoderms are in fact related to vertebrates, which explains the similar chemical composition of their neurones. This as such may be significant.

Like bivalves, echinoderms may lack brains but they also lack the need to have them. Sea urchins burrow, crawl and create latrines in their burrows to keep excreta out of their way. I’ve long thought that tribbles are like sea urchins, even to the extent of consisting substantially of reproductive organs by proportion. The crinoids, who are flower-like and may have stalks, are probably the closest relatives of the chordates, the stalk having possibly been ancestral to the tail. Whereas this has no bearing on the sophistication of the nervous system, there may be a chemical affinity due to the relatedness and this, depending on your view of consciousness, could be significant, because there is a controversial theory of consciousness called orchestrated reduction.

Within the prefrontal cortex in humans are pyramidal neurones, within which are microtubules made of a protein called tubulin. These are substantially composed of amino acids containing heterocyclic rings oriented in particular directions, including tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine. These rings are hexagonal arrangements of carbon atoms with alternating double and single electron bonds around the ring. One of the orbitals in these carbon atoms is a pi bond, i.e. a dumb bell shaped region of maximum probability of the electron’s rotation centred on the nucleus, and these are all lined up parallel to each other. This arrangement appears to be reliably disturbed by all general anaesthetics, i.e. anaesthetics which suspend consciousness, and for that reason some scientists and philosophers believe that this situation explains consciousness in a way which is linked to quantum phenomena. However, there are still problems with this. For instance, salva veritate is still impossible: this description, no matter how detailed, is clearly never going to be equivalent to a description of a conscious experience. They’re fundamentally different by nature. But suppose it is true. If so, perhaps consciousness can be confined to systems where this can occur. You may have noticed also that this description is incomplete. Other organs than nerves and brains also have microtubules, so the question arises of whether these are also conscious if this is true.

The mention of echinoderms brings up another point. So far, nervous systems are the only structures which have been considered, with the various characteristics mentioned earlier. However, nervous systems are not the only networks which can carry and process information, and echinoderm bodies contain another, unique, system which has that potential: the water vascular system. No other animals have this. It’s a system of tubes carrying fluid which can control the tube feet, move waste, food and respiratory gases around the body, in other words somewhat similar to the lymphatic and circulatory systems but different. Flow through the tubes is controlled by musculature. Just as a digital electric circuit or a nervous system can process and transmit information and signals, so can a water vascular system, in principle. The philosopher David Lewis, in his ‘Mad Pain And Martian Pain’, imagined two entities. One was a human whose pain was triggered by unusual stimuli, such as exercise on an empty stomach, and who found that pain made them concentrate on mathematics without showing the usual signs of pain such as wincing and writhing. The other was a “Martian” who had a water vascular system like that of a starfish and no nervous system, but on being injured would be liable to complain and avoid the damaging stimulus. Lewis claimed that both such entities would experience pain. For the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the second, as the first is more to do with establishing the existence of qualia, which is interesting but not entirely germane to matters here.

Just to make it clear, there is no claim that echinoderms do experience pain in this way. They have nervous systems and their water vascular systems don’t primarily function in that way. However, there are other organisms who do have other kinds of signalling and control systems rather than nervous systems, and I want to cover several here: certain plants, forests, fungi and bacteria.

Plants move, and not just through growing or the wind, and they respond to events happening to them and around them. I’ll start with the most obvious examples among the flowering plants: active insectivorous plants and the plant Mimosa pudica. The Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula is a classic example, whose traps only close after an object has touched one of the sensory hairs three times. I don’t actually know if this has to happen in quick succession, but it kind of means they can count up to three. Wikipedia says two, but I’ve heard three. This is an example of a plant doing arithmetic. The contact has to occur within about twenty seconds, so the plant can also time things. Moreover, the hairs have to be touched five times before digestion starts. It’s also claimed that thale cress converts less starch to glucose in darkness if it gets dark unusually early, but there are other possible explanations for this. Hence the Venus Flytrap is the interesting one here.

Mimosa pudica, the “Sensitive Plant”, is well-known for having leaves which collapse when touched, later recovering. I’m not sure it’s very good for the plant to do this a lot because I remember one dying after an enthusiastic class of pupils each tried it, but that may have been coincidence. Mimosas are in the bean family, like quite a few surprising plants such as broom, clover and laburnum. Like starfish, they have a local and a general reaction to being touched. They can just collapse individual leaves or the whole plant can “suffer”, although this may be more to do with the physical propagation of the vibrations than a whole plant signalling system. They’re sensitive to warmth as well as mechanical stimulation and as with animal nervous systems, the signal is transmitted as an action potential. In other words, Mimosa pudica is very close to having a nervous system and functionally speaking it basically has one.

Other rapidly-moving plants include the bladderworts and the waterwheel plant, all of which are carnivorous. Plants more generally also move more slowly than this, for instance opening and closing their flowers or moving their leaves at dawn and dusk. Some of the way we perceive plants as passive and stationary is based on how slowly they move, and this too could be seen as our bias. Just speaking on a personal level, and I don’t think I’m unusual here, if I haven’t watered a plant I’m concerned about, I feel thirsty out of sympathy and it really bothers me. Although this could simply be dismissed as silly, empathy is important generally and it seems good to extend it. I experienced a relationship with a pair of plants so intense recently it was like a companion animal – the Nepenthes pitcher plants I couldn’t take with me when I moved. Nepenthes are passively insectivorous, and in fact can even be herbivorous sometimes – they don’t move to capture insects but simply grow traps for them, like other pitcher plants. In a not very vegan move, under pressure from other people I bought two such plants a few years ago to keep the Drosophila (fruit flies) out of the kitchen. It worked quite well, and I imagine they generate a scent which attracts them. When I finally had to find them a new home, I’d grown very attached to them and it really felt like I was rehousing cats or some other placental mammals. I surprised myself, and it also bothered me somewhat because they were carnivorous and it felt like it was that which enabled me to bond with them.

This may all sound quite silly to you, but not only do I not think I’m unusual in feeling attached to house and garden plants, but on the larger scale of trees and forests I’m prepared to say this is actually how most people feel who are familiar with the countryside. Two incidents in particular spring to mind. One is the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall, who was felled by two people on 28th September 2023, causing widespread outrage and mourning. The other is an incident in Sevenoaks after the Great Storm of autumn 1987 blew down some of the oaks associated with the town’s name. The saplings planted to replace them were chopped down by some “friends” of mine who “wanted to piss off the middle class people in the town”. I haven’t reported them, but their attitude generally sucked at the time and was also, I think, quite childish, and reflected the idea that the world was ours to modify regardless of what else might be living in it. I fully expect most other people to be equally irate about this, never mind their economic position, and I might even go so far as to say that this is an element of instinctive altruism, although of course it might be social and cultural conditioning. If it’s true that the working class were less concerned about the situation than the elite, this may not mean that it’s not present in there somewhere but has been blunted by trauma. I freely admit that I can’t justify this claim though.

Plants also communicate with each other by chemical means. In some species, if one of them happens to be infested with insects, it will send chemical signals through the air to others nearby to prepare them to defend themselves against their parasites more effectively by changing the chemicals they produce and poisoning those insects. In others, particularly trees, an old dying adult will transfer nutrients via an underground network of fungal mycelium to young seedlings, sacrificing its life for the sake of the offspring. This is a symbiotic relationship between individuals of two different kingdoms. For this reason, I do tend to attribute consciousness to plants but to entire communities rather than individuals. It also makes sense to eat fruit on this basis as we are the means whereby they distibute their seeds.

It seems quite poetic that a forest could have a mind, particularly considering the resemblance between trees and brain cells. The mixture of species may not be a barrier either because our own cells include long-since assimilated microbes who release energy from glucose for us, and therefore we are ourselves collective consciousnesses. Speaking of microorganisms, there’s another level on which consciousness might be thought to operate among those too. There’s a process known as quorum signalling or quorum sensing which takes place within colonies of bacteria similar to paracrine signalling in multicellular organisms, which is similar to how hormones are passed around the body but between cells not specialised to produce them and not always at a distance. For instance, during a bacterial infection individual organisms might send signals to each other to hold back on the absorption of particular nutrients so as not to starve the host, as it’s not usually in their interests to kill them. The situation also occurs outside the context of pathology, as in the formation of biofilms, a good example of which is dental plaque. These are close to being multicellular organisms themselves. I have to admit to not knowing a huge amount about quorum signalling but I am aware that it does occur outside the bacterial kingdom too, for instance in ant nests.

All this is quite interesting but it’s unclear how much this connects to the initial issue of whether any of this indicates consciousness or its active expression. All of these things are signalling and control systems where responses are provoked from external events. That may or may not mean consciousness, but it’s worth considering that we may ourselves be chauvinistic about brains. Maybe our own consciousness is not just based in our brains, but in our guts, glands and muscles, well beyond the bone box in our heads, and maybe beyond even our own bodies out into society and the whole of humanity.

Ethics 201 – Finding A Moral Compass

I recently had a rather heated discussion with someone over ethical scepticism. Putting this in context, I recently wrote a blog post about the Zizians which I think illustrates a rather analogous approach. When one tries to learn something off the internet, and I’m bound to be as guilty as anyone else is here, just not in this area, it can involve “tunnelling into” a subject until one reaches what one thinks one needs to know and then just stopping without knowledge of the areas around it. Often this is fine but it means, for example, that my knowledge of plumbing tends to involve olives, PTFE tape, doing stuff to ballcocks and nothing else, and in the fine tradition of everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer, I end up trying to apply this to everything, although I did once try to repair a burst pipe using melted HDPE so not quite everything (it didn’t work).

The conversation involved David Hume and veganism. Now David Hume is a much-respected and studied Scottish philosopher and happens to have been my specialist author in the final year of my first degree, so I know more than nothing about him. That said, I’m really not an expert. I probably know him about as well as George Orwell (I’m not going to say it). The point made about veganism was that the moral injunction not to be complicit in or directly cause suffering or death in members of other species doesn’t follow from the fact that they can suffer. This is a special case of Hume’s more general point that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”. I do have an answer to this issue, but my disagreement with this person in particular was that picking veganism as an example was completely arbitrary because more broadly this could simply amount to ethical scepticism, that is, the belief that right and wrong are meaningless, and that acting on this idea is sociopathy, or psychopathy if it comes “naturally”. The person with whom I was discussing this didn’t take kindly to being described as sociopathic, but although it might be perceived pejoratively, in one sense it’s an entirely neutral term – simply descriptive. There’s therefore an irony in the person in question perceiving me as expressing a moral judgement when I was in fact simply applying a label to their behaviour. If they perceive that as negative, it calls their own claim of not being able to derive an “ought” from an “is” into question, because of their reaction. If this is the kind of reaction most people would show, it also suggests a mechanism for finding a basis for ethics.

The rest of this post is almost going to reproduce what American universities might call “Ethics 201”, hence the title: the advanced undergraduate course in ethics found in many analytical philosophy courses. As such, I feel I’m cheating a bit because I’ve taken it directly from my own degree syllabus, but I’m doing that because I’m getting a wee bit tired of people “mining” philosophy for answers rather than considering things more broadly. There’s also quite a lot missing, such as the question of regret versus remorse, the extent of responsibility and the conflict between tolerance and commitment, but for now I’ll leave those aside. I’ll also inject my own views.

Ethics 201 covers a history of ethics in Western academic analytical philosophy, dating from the nineteenth century CE up until the publication of Alasdair Macintyre’s ‘After Virtue’ in 1981. It starts with utilitarianism, which sounds remarkably like common sense: actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This is, incidentally, often used as the basis of veganism. There’s also negative utilitarianism: that suffering should be minimised, and happiness is ignored. There are a lot of problems with this belief which have been well-explored. One is Robert Nozick’s “utility monster”: a single individual able to feel more pleasure than everyone else put together. This would mean that nobody else matters, and that if the only way the individual could be made really happy is to torture the rest, according to utilitarianism that’s exactly what should be done. This also raises the question of how different people’s pleasure can be compared. You can’t necessarily add it all up because nobody knows what it’s like to be anyone else. It also fails to account for painless death in isolation – a person who dies alone and forgotten painlessly in her sleep is, according to utilitarianism, irrelevant. And this really happens, and when it does people consider it highly tragic. Well, not according to utilitarianism. It also fails to account for justice. An unfair situation which makes everyone happier, or even most people happier, is absolutely fine for a utilitarian, so for example if someone is falsely accused of serial murder and imprisoned or executed due to a miscarriage of justice and that then deters the real murderer, that’s also okay, and obviously it’s not. I’ve attempted to repair utilitarianism and the best I can manage is modal negative utilitarianism: the largest number of people suffering the least should be the aim. Imagine a bar graph showing number of people suffering on a scale of zero to twelve of severity. The lowest column should include the most people compared to the other. However, it’s basically irredeemable so far as I can tell, although many people, particularly other vegans, would disagree.

Although it has these and other drawbacks, most early twentieth century philosophers focus on the naturalistic fallacy. The first is the attempt to define the utility principle as good because it’s desired. In other words it’s “natural” to desire pleasure, but it doesn’t follow that that should happen. This is the is-ought problem Hume highlighted quite some time before. Another fallacy is that everyone desiring their own happiness means that everyone desires happiness for everyone else. These are the two famous and great flaws which may be fatal for utilitarianism. Because of this, G E Moore came up with a new ethical theory, referred to as intuitionism, which claims that goodness is a simple, non-natural property which we can all intuitively understand. One problem with this is that we disagree, but when that happens it may be because our judgements are built up from a number of simple perceptions of right and wrong. I always think of the statement made by an Iranian man in about 1980 CE: “The Ayatollah is a good man: he has banned women from appearing on TV”. To that man, the idea was axiomatic. P, therefore he is good. Most people in the West would say: P, therefore he is bad. Each person can then claim that they simply intuitively know that they’re right and all there is then is disagreement with no ability to argue people around. This particular issue is focussed on later, but intuitionism, although it’s my favourite, is not widely accepted any more.

Intuitionism was followed by the rise of logical positivism, which is the belief that statements mean something if they’re axiomatic, logically necessary or can be verified by observation. Because ethical statements don’t fall into any of these categories, emotivism arose, which is the belief that ethical statements are articulations of approval or disapproval provoked by feelings alone. Moreover, feelings themselves are defined by logical behaviourism, the belief that internal mental states are merely reports of physical sensations which get labelled by words like “happy”, “angry”, “sad” and so on. They don’t mean anything beyond the likes of a fast, strong heartbeat, dry throat and sweating and the rest. I imagine most people today would look at this idea of emotions and emotivism and conclude that the person who thought of it needs therapy, but would probably never volunteer for it. This brings up the issue of ethical scepticism again, which is the belief that there simply is no right and wrong. One of the surprising things about Bertrand Russell, who was very much involved in social reform and peace campaigning, is that he was actually close to being an ethical sceptic and never made any link between his philosophy and political activism, although some work has been done on this after his death which suggests otherwise. His view seems to be basically emotivism, which isn’t quite ethical scepticism but it’s odd that there’s such a disconnection between his activism and his actual ethics.

Emotivism is one of the two major non-cognitivist positions in twentieth century ethics, but there are actually two varieties of it. A J Ayer’s adherence to logical positivism led to him being rather dismissive of ethics and he didn’t seem to focus very much on the details. Later on, C L Stevenson refined it somewhat and placed it more at the centre of his attention, seeing ethical language as similar to imperatives, i.e. commands and requests, despite their apparently declarative form. I think it’s probably relevant that I’m not aware of any language at all which uses imperatives to express moral statements, because if they were really that similar one might expect this to happen, and it doesn’t. On the other hand, we do say “should” and we also say “you shall do that” as a way of commanding someone, so maybe. The difference between A J Ayer’s emotivism and C L Stevenson’s is that the latter claims ethical statements have a persuasive element, which is more sophisticated and can stand on its own easily rather than simply being motivated by logical positivism, which nowadays is basically dead anyway. There are still emotivists today.

I just want to insert a note here about what metaethics is: it’s the basis of ethics, that is, what makes anything right or wrong, good or bad, if anything does.

As I said, emotivism is an example of non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism is a variety of metaethical theory which takes conventional meaning out of ethical language. For non-cognitivism, looking up a word like “good” or “bad” in the dictionary shouldn’t lead to a definition but should be more like “a word indicating that the speaker approves of something”. This led to the development of a second metaethical theory called prescriptivism, whose main proponent was R M Hare. This has been summed up as the view that “X is good” means “I approve of X: do so as well”. The standard analysis here is that ethical statements are those which are universalisable and entail imperatives, and at this point it probably becomes obvious to a lot of people that this is basically Kantian ethics, which dates from 1785. This basically amounts to “what if everyone did the same?”, and it doesn’t work because “the same” is not defined by the theory. As I said, it’s non-cognitivist, meaning that it actually seeks not to define the content of moral language. Therefore, imagine the following: someone steals a loaf of bread from a bakery to feed their starving children because they have no money. Two ways of putting this are:

1. A person does what they have to do feed their dependents.
2. A person deprives another of a source of livelihood generated by that person’s own efforts.

The first is universalisable, the other not, but they’re two descriptions of the same situation and prescriptivism doesn’t give any means of deciding which is which. I think this makes prescriptivism useless.

Then came the Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair Macintyre with his ‘After Virtue’. This consists partly of a survey of the history of ethics, and this is where I get back to the way intuitionists would argue. There’s little basis of common ground there because one can simply assert that something is good based on one’s intuition and someone else can assert the opposite, and then you just get nowhere. After some time of this sort of thing going on, you end up with arguments and opinions that look like they have no conventionally meaningful content, whose result is that non-cognitivism seems to be true. Much of the discussion about metaethics after that was provoked by that initial notion, although Stevenson did also say that he was trying to look out how everyday value judgements were made, such as comments about news stories, and not how philosophers talk about it in seminar rooms or whatever. A J Ayer’s influence is probably not to do with that either.

Macintyre looked to Aristotle here. He saw ancient discussions of ethics as more firmly grounded than they became from the eighteenth century, and thought that virtues and vices made more sense as a way of looking at right and wrong. This was said to be due to rejection of the idea of purpose. In the ancient world and mediaeval Europe, people firmly believed human life had a purpose and an ideal course, and harnessing that idea of an ideal provides a link with ethics. There is a sense in which a sharp knife is better than a blunt one, although obviously one used in a murder would be better if it were blunt, but that’s in a broader context. If we agree on a purpose for humanity, it seems to make sense to suppose that what happens between humans or between us and other things and entities such as the environment, could follow in a similar way to a good knife being suitable for chopping up food. In other words, Macintyre believes the Enlightenment was a mistake because it attributed moral agency to individuals, reducing morality in the end, after a lot of unravelling, to nothing more than individual opinion. Kalani Kaleiʻaimoku o Kaiwikapu o Laʻamea i Kauikawekiu Ahilapalapa Kealiʻi Kauinamoku o Kahekili Kalaninui i Mamao ʻIolani i Ka Liholiho, the second king of Hawaiʻi, abolished the idea of taboos as an influence on Hawaiian life, and met with no opposition. Macintyre, using that example, said that Friedrich Nietzsche had done something similar for Europe by being against Enlightenment morality. He didn’t agree with where Nietzsche took it after that though. He took from Aristotle the idea that how people should be is not the same as how they are, that moral rules are based on virtues, which stem from an understanding of human purpose and that values had to be derived not from individual opinions but in a more broadly social form.

All of this relates to Elizabeth Anscombe’s view of ethical discussions. She sees them as being couched in similar terms to law and crime but without a lawgiver. If there is no God, according to her, this has to be inappropriate, leaving the problem of how you can talk about it at all. I don’t know whether this meant ethical scepticism or something else.

This, then, is part of the wider context of this individual statement about Hume and veganism, and it’s another example of a “tunnel”. Someone took a random idea and applied it to veganism, when actually it could both be applied to ethical questions more widely and was part of a philosophical discussion which has gone on for something like two centuries since then. There’s an obvious parallel with the Zizian narrowness, and this is likely to be an increasing problem today because of the online tendency to present things out of context. There need to be experts.

Now you might have found that this post has been very boring, and in a way that’s the point. To you, this might seem a very abstruse and tedious passage, but this is one of my areas of expertise very likely to be boring and inaccessible to outsiders. I would find plumbing very boring and I’d be bad at it, which is why plumbers are useful and I trust them. It’s about trust. Either you get the long, boring monologue and someone going on and on at you, or you trust experts to some extent, and yes, sometimes they will get things wrong and they will have biasses, but to some extent the choice is between going and living in a cave in a forest and surviving by foraging, or living in a functioning society and trusting experts with a certain healthy degree of suspicion. But if you do get suspicious, you then need to do the work to find out what the bigger picture is, and that may not be easy, but this is what must be done to express an opinion worth taking seriously if you disagree with the evidence-supported views expressed by experts.

Pythagoras

I’m currently sitting on our favourite couch. It is in turn sitting in a room downstairs in our house in Scotland. We bought it in England and tried to get it up the stairs of our English house because our living room was upstairs there. We had enormous trouble getting it past the bends in the stairs and eventually I decided to measure the bend and the couch, so I measured the depth and height of the couch and then the three dimensions of which the bend consisted. Using the well known right angle triangle equation a²+b²=c² and taking the square root of c, I was able to calculate the hypotenuse of the couch. I then made the slightly more complex calculation of using the hypotenuse of the dimensions of the stair bend with the height of the ceiling above the stairs to work out the maximum length of an object which could be fitted through the gap, and since that second figure was smaller than c, I was able to prove, and I have to state this carefully to be precise, that the couch would not be able to fit into the space on the stair bend, and therefore it would be impossible to take it up the stairs and put it in our living room, so it remained downstairs. Now there could’ve been some other approaches, such as taking the feet off or the banisters down, but in fact both of those were part of the objects concerned and it wasn’t going to happen because I’m not Bernard Cribbins.

This is of course Pythagoras’s Theorem. People often say they never apply anything they learnt in maths to their lives after leaving school, leading me to conclude that either their lives are unnecessarily hard or that they don’t realise they’re using it, because this kind of problem comes up all the time in everyday adult life and I can only surmise that people think really strangely in this area. I scraped an O-level pass in maths and this is obvious to me. In fact I almost stayed in the CSE group and was the lowest grade person to go “up”. I should also mention that there is a famous Moving Sofa Problem in mathematics, but this isn’t that. The moving sofa problem is the question of which rigid two-dimensional shape of the largest area can be manoeuvred through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width. It didn’t help us because the stairs were three dimensional, i.e. they went up diagonally, turned through two ninety degree angles while continuing to ascend and the ceiling of the ground floor was in the way too. There migh be some couch-stair combinations which it could’ve been useful for, but not this one.

Most people know one thing about Pythagoras, and that’s that he’s responsible for Pythagoras’s Theorem that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the some of the squares on the other two sides of a right angled triangle. This also brings up the issue of the square root of two being irrational, i.e. not being expressible through a ratio, i.e. a fraction, because an isosceles right angled triangle with unit opposite and adjacent sides will have a hypotenuse length equivalent to the square root of two in units. As a child I thought this proved that units of measurement didn’t exist, but obviously that was my child’s mind failing to grasp things properly. The only thing is, Pythagoras probably didn’t think of his theorem. It’s more likely that in order to give it some kudos, people decided to attribute it to him, and it was known about before his time.

Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to satisfactorily answer the question of whether Pythagoras existed. He may well not have done. I want to start by mentioning a few other figures: Nero was the Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned and rebuild the city in a much improved condition; George Washington was the guy who cut down the fruit tree as a boy and admitted to it, saying “I cannot tell a lie” and Archimedes was that bloke who got in the bath which overflowed, giving him the inspiration to tell whether a crown was solid gold, and shouted “Eureka!”, running down the street naked. Or maybe not. I haven’t checked these and they’re very likely to be just stories, and actually the question of whom we refer to when we tell stories like this is a modern philosophical problem. So Pythagoras, by the same token, was an ancient Greek philosopher who discovered something important about triangles, was vegetarian, wouldn’t eat beans and thought numbers were very important to the nature of reality. That’s probably more than most people “know” about him.

So I’m going to start with the question of whether he existed. At least three other important Greek men wrote about him and his life: Aristotle the philosopher, Herodotus the historian and Iamblichus the Neoplatonist philosopher. There was a whole school of philosophy named after him which he’s said to have founded, although that doesn’t mean he existed. That school of philosophy has a consistent belief system rather than just being arbitrary unconnected beliefs, so there is such a thing as a Pythagorean philosophy. However, no writings at all can be attributed to him because Pythagorean philosophy was an oral tradition. It was passed on by word of mouth long before it started to be written down, and this of course means it could’ve ended up being distorted even if he did exist. There was also a tendency in the Greco-Roman world for people to attribute ideas and quotes to people to make them seem more important and respectable than they would’ve been perceived as otherwise, rather like how lots of quotes today are attributed to Churchill and Einstein that they never said.

And the thing is, Pythagoras as he was understood in ancient Greek sounds absolutely bizarre. He had a thigh made of gold, was able to be in two places at once and could converse with non-human animals, and there were a few other things about him which were odd-sounding. He comes across as a kind of magical cult leader and demigod, perhaps a shaman or a sage rather than a philosopher. This partly reflects how philosophy was not neatly parcelled off from religion and spirituality as it is today, at least in academia, and what we separate today was actually considered together until at least the time of Newton. The difficulty, in fact, is similar to those of establishing the nature of the real Jesus and Socrates. So we’re in a situation where the one thing everyone thinks they know about him isn’t true and he was seen as some kind of superhero with incredible psychic powers. But in a way the question of whether he existed or not is the most boring thing about him. Everything I say about him from this point on has therefore to be attributed to some kind of possibly mythical or otherwise fictional figure rather than any real person called Pythagoras living in Ancient Greece.

He was seen as an expert on the soul. In Ancient Greek times before him, nobody thought there was a separate soul which survives death. This was more an Ancient Egyptian thing, and for all we know that’s where it originated. Because of this expertise, combined with his belief in reincarnation he was said to be able to remember his past lives. He once got someone to stop beating a dog because he recognised the cries as those of a dead friend reincarnated in the dog’s body. This is also why he was able to talk to members of other species. And whether or not he existed, there was clearly a cult based on his apparent beliefs, and this cult was also rather strange. They believed that the right shoe should always be taken off before the left one but that the left foot should always be washed before the right, that no-one should eat anything red, and they were seriously into numerology and vegetarianism. In fact, before the invention of the English word “vegetarian”, we were called “Pythagoreans”. They also included both women and men, which seems to have been unusual at the time. We may assume that the idea of an institution which admits women to be the exception back then but we don’t actually know. You also had to be silent for five years once you joined. Returning to the vegetarianism, although they did believe in it, justified through the idea of human souls being reincarnated in other forms, they also believed in sacrificing animals to deities. There’s even a story that Pythagoras was once seen eating chicken and replying to the objection that he was supposed to be veggie and not eat live animals by saying that the animal he was eating was dead, and this makes me wonder if they were actually vegetarian or simply sacrificing animals so they could eat them. Even so, many veggies do have stories like that made up about them, and most surviving records about Pythagoras are about criticising him and his followers or lauding him and them. There isn’t much attempting to be objective. Incidentally, although he had a religious cult of his own, he still worshipped the Greek deities of the time and what they did was “extra”: it was still dodekatheism, as it’s known nowadays, but a kind of denomination of it rather than a separate religion.

Pythagoras was of course into maths, which he combined with numerology because at the time there was no distinction. He seems to have been the first person to connect mathematics to an attempt to explain the world. This particular notion has been extremely influential. Even today, a hard science has to include maths to be taken seriously. One of the reasons psychology emphasises statistics so heavily is that it wants to be a “proper” natural science. However, the way Pythagoreans approached maths and its relationship to the physical world back then seems quite different to how they’re approached now. For instance, even numbers were considered female and odd numbers male, and since the number 1 wasn’t considered a number at all because it didn’t have a beginning and an end, five was considered the number of marriage, as it was the union of the first female number with the first male number. The number seven was considered sacred because, being prime, nothing could make it up and it could make up nothing. Two was considered the number of justice because it enabled things to be divided equally into two halves. Three was considered to sum up the whole Universe as it was the first number to have a beginning, middle and end. He also discovered triangular numbers. The number three was considered to represent a human being, and was of course male, representing the threefold virtues of prudence, good fortune and drive. That almost sounds like it’s out of a contemporary self-help book.

Although the links Pythagoras made between numbers and the Universe were peculiar, he also connected geometry and arithmetic more thoroughly than his predecessors, because of the hypotenuse connection with the square root of 2, and because of his theorem, although that had been known to the Babylonians. He was the first person to come up with a method for constructing a dodecahedron, and connected many shapes to the Cosmos, bringing me to what ought to be the most famous thing he was known for: he was the first person to claim Earth was round. Remarkably, although this has turned out to be incorrect, his reasoning had no connection to any observations because science wasn’t there yet. In addition to that, he came up with the idea that Earth and other planets moved in orbits, although oddly not around the Sun but a central fire, and also that there was a counter-Earth, required to make up the numbers in the system. There are convoluted reasons for all this.

This initially peculiar link between the Universe and mathematics, once forged, has stayed ever since and may not in fact be as obvious as it seems. I have suggested before that one solution to the Fermi Paradox (“where are all the aliens?”) might be that they’re all really bad at maths compared to humans, but another solution may be that although they’re perfectly good at maths, they never had a Pythagoras to make a link between the two and it’s never occurred to them to apply maths in this way. Hence their science is still Babylonian in nature, or even less like Western European science than that. They never got any further. If that’s true, it makes Pythagoras, even if he never existed, an incredibly important figure.

Another aspect of all this is that we can look back from our own “rational” viewpoint and poo-poo the idea that he was an ancient Doctor Dolittle, could be in two places at once and remember past lives, when actually maybe he could do all of that and it’s our own restrictive mind sets which have stopped that from happening. This doesn’t sound sane, but when we consider what many Christians believe about Jesus it becomes more a case of us simply having decided that one ancient semi-mythical person has such attributes rather than the other. It only sounds crazy today because we chose to retain the deification of Christ rather than Pythagoras, which could be seen as practically a coin-toss. There is a world not far from here where many millions of people still believe Pythagoras had something in common with C3PO.

Another numerological aspect of Pythagoreanism was that nobody should gather in groups of more than ten because the number ten was 1+2+3+4, so ten in particular was a sacred number to them. This extended to them composing prayers to that number, and I find this interesting because it creates a link between mathematical entities and deities and other spirits. Platonism and intuitionism are two opposing views of maths. Intuitionism holds that humans invent maths as we go along, i.e. it’s a creation of the mind just like a poem might be, whereas Platonism holds that maths is discovered. It’s already out there before we get to it. So for example, there are considered to be eight planets in this solar system. Assuming there are no others, there were also eight planets when the first trilobites appeared 521 million years ago. In fact, at that point there was a number representing the global population of trilobites, as there still is today: zero. So does that mean that the number eight exists independently of human consciousness or, more precisely, the ability to count? I have a strongly atheist friend who is also a Platonist, and she acknowledges that it’s an odd position to be in. The Ontological Argument for God tries to bootstrap God into existence from the concept of God, and this perhaps reflects the notion that God exists as a concept in a more objective manner than an atheist or agnostic would usually be expected to think. The concept of God is “out there” in the Cosmos in some way, and maybe in the same way as maths is said to be by Platonists. But this, well, I’m going to have to use the word “idea” at some point, of deities existing abstractly is usually considered separately nowadays from the idea that squares or numbers exist. We have a partition in our thoughts which Pythagoreans had yet to erect.

This can be directed back on Pythagoras. Clearly the idea of Pythagoras does exist, although it seems to have varied. We have Pythagoras as the triangle guy and the first person to suggest that the world is round, although actually that might’ve been one of his successors. But Pythagoras himself may not have existed in the same sense that Elizabeth I of England did, and as such this accords quite well with the general attitudes of the time and the problems of ancient history. Also, back at that time and place, the Greeks seem to have taken their religion quite literally so for them Zeus was as real as Pythagoras whether or not we think of him as real.

On consideration though, I do think he existed in the way we generally understand existence today, i.e. not just as an abstract or mythological entity. The reason for this is that his cult existed and was quite forceful and distinct in nature. It seems to me that a requirement for a large group of people to avoid speaking for five years and never to eat beans sounds like the kind of thing a charismatic leader would get their followers to do, and it really sounds like cultish behaviour by today’s standards. It makes cults seem like constant fixtures in human life rather than phenomena characteristic of the modern world. This is probably not terribly surprising, but maybe this assumes too much, because it might be that cults with leaders are more recent developments connected to individualism and a tendency for people to seek complete answers to life’s problems. I haven’t checked, but I don’t think the Essenes had a founder or leaders.

Here’s the weird bit though. As I’ve said before, although Pythagoreans seem to have been the first people to link maths and science, from today’s perspective they seem to have come up with a list of arbitrary superstitions and ideas without a thorough connection to reality. But despite this, somehow they were able to assert the correct idea that the world is round, which to us seems to depend on observation rather than philosophical or mathematical abstraction. Nobody seems to have had that idea before. Later Greek philosophers came up with ways of testing this and measuring Earth’s size, but it wasn’t those careful tests which led to the initial thought. What are we to make of this? Maybe the idea crept in from somewhere else.

We still have the metric system. Does that maybe represent a similar superstition about numbers? We happen to have ten digits on our hands and it’s led to us producing a system which is easier to use than imperial because of how we count, but are we also partaking of Pythagorean mysticism there? We’ve put that into the box of rationality, but maybe it’s more to do with custom. Also it seems that the real mystery is how maths actually manages to engage with the world at all. Why would this be?

Successfully Predicting The Future

This post is not about Nostradamus, although I have written something about him. It would also be easy to write me off on the strength of what I wrote there, but the approach here is very different and in fact suggested by the opinions of the Zizians and other rationalists. It’s based on probability.

We are first of all aware that the way things were before Trump’s election, the human race was due to die out in the 2060s from respiratory paralysis, along with all reptiles, mammals and fish, the last for other reasons. With the change in policies regarding carbon emissions in the US, that date has now been brought forward, but this is not about that. I now realise that I’ve told you two things this isn’t about.

You might remember my post on the Doomsday Argument (there’s probably more than one) a few years ago. The basic idea behind this is based on an estimate of when the Berlin Wall would come down by someone who visited it in the 1960s. In 1969 CE, when the astrophysicist J Richard Gott III visited the then eight year old Berlin Wall, he posited that the Copernican Principle, that there’s nothing special about a particular observation, individual and so forth, meant that the best assumption about how far through the total number of visitors to the Wall was that he was about halfway through. He gave an estimate of 50/50 that it would be gone by 1993. In fact it came down in 1989, which is quite close. The Doomsday Argument is that from the perspective of an individual human life, one’s birth is best estimated as being about halfway through the total number of human births. With the population growth during the twentieth century of doubling every thirty years and an estimate of the number of human lives being lived so far at seventy five thousand million since 600 000 BP, and taking my own birth in 1967 as an example, it being the only one I can, it appears that the human species will probably be extinct by 2133. There are numerous flaws in this argument, but it’s important to note that it isn’t an argument that overpopulation will cause extinction or that any cause in particular will do so. There will of course be a cause but we don’t seem to be able to tell from this argument what that would be. Nonetheless it is the case that if population growth slows, the prediction extends further into the future and it also depends substantially on assumptions about which entities are likely to have those thoughts, that is, when we became human and started to conceive of the idea of the end of the world, the human race and so forth. In fact, population growth is indeed decelerating and this stretches our probable prospect well into the future. I’ve talked about all of this before, but I think it’s a measure of the occurrence of the thought and not the occurrence of humans. An outbreak of optimism about the future of the human race by the early 22nd century would mean that no more ideas of that kind will occur, or that they’ll be rarer, so maybe what we’re really measuring is the extinction of doomerism, not that of humanity. There are all sorts of reasons why this might happen. It could be that our descendants are all parasitic tumour cells with no brains and therefore no expectations, that we’re all wiped out by AI which doesn’t have that thought or that things are going to get a lot better. Hence this apparently cold mathematical argument has so many hidden variables that it may be worthless.

There is another, similar, argument which I’ve used to predict a future without human space exploration, and it goes like this. Suppose there are a million habitable exoplanets which will one day be within human reach, or alternatively the same area in the form of artificial space habitats of some kind. This is a very conservative estimate as it would mean that only one star system in four hundred thousand would have such a planet or that the technology to produce such habitats is very inefficient. Now suppose that each of these planets (I’ll use the planet settlement scenario for simplicity’s sake) only has an average population of a million, with each such population being considered as a discrete number per century, so for example there are a million people on one such planet and then a century later they’ve died but another million people have replaced them. Suppose this goes on for ten thousand years. That’s 100 x 1 million x 1 million, which is 10¹⁴ people. Going back to the original figure of 7.5 x 10¹⁰ people having lived so far, that makes that a tiny fraction of the number of people who will live in this scenario, namely 0.075%. This means that the probability of living at a time before this has happened, i.e. not being one of these people, is only one in around 1300. These are ridiculous betting odds which nobody rational would risk their money on. Also, the estimate I’ve made is extremely conservative. The Galaxy has been estimated to contain around 300 million habitable planets which will continue to be habitable for on average several hundred million years each and could support a population of ten thousand million people each. If the other scenarios are explored, a much wider variety of stars could support a Dyson swarm, i.e. a roughly spherical shell of space habitats with many times Earth’s land surface area which would dwarf even the second estimate at the order of 10²⁵. If one considers one’s life as a random sample from human history, with these odds it can be guaranteed that if humans settle in space substantially in the future, one would be living during that era and not this one. Our very existence now makes it practically certain it’ll never happen. It doesn’t give the reason for it though.

I actually think this is more productive than the Doomsday Argument, but it’s also flawed. Suppose you consider the much greater probability of being born. The chances of that for each person are lower than one in six hundred thousand million, assuming three hundred ovulations per lifetime and 200 million sperm per ejaculate. This also assumes that our identity depends on genes, which I strongly disagree with, but it’s an interesting thought with substantial basis in reality. It’s still a tiny probability, but even so, every one of us does exist. That probability, incidentally, could perhaps be multiplied by the number of generations since the point at which a single allele could be definitively traced to an individual, which is actually only around sixteen, or by the number of generations since the start of sexual reproduction, although since fish, for example, don’t ovulate single eggs but produce similar numbers of eggs as they do sperm, the numbers get wild before about four hundred million years back. Nevertheless, here we are.

But suppose the argument works. It seems to have predictive power of some kind, although what exactly it predicts is unclear. It might simply mean that we won’t make a Dyson swarm, that distances between stars are too large or even that there isn’t enough phosphorus. It’s also closely coupled to the Fermi Paradox, because whatever stops that from happening may also stop other cultures from doing the same, which is why there are no aliens in contact with us, so maybe we’re about to find out why that is. I personally think it means that something will, or is, happening which will prevent that future from unfolding. It could be something positive. Maybe we will achieve a degree of enlightenment which leads us to stay on our planet and make it an earthly paradise which nobody will want to leave. Or, maybe we’ll just bomb ourselves to bits or die in the ocean acidification scenario, or whatever. Just thinking of this in the wider “where are all the aliens?” setting, it’s also possible that the Great Filter only applies to us because there are no intelligent aliens. Just to spell it out, the Great Filter is the idea that an event takes place everywhere life might be expected to develop and prevents it from getting to the point where intelligent representatives start visiting other star systems. It could be that Earth-like planets are rare, phosphorus is too scarce and vital for life of any kind to develop, there aren’t enough mass extinctions to stimulate evolution, there are usually too many of those for intelligent life to evolve, that intelligent life is just unlikely, that intelligent life is common but tends to develop at the bottom of the ocean, that it’s common but really bad at maths, those all being the past Great Filters, and in the future that AI takes over, we wipe ourselves out through war, pandemics put paid to us, we get too engrossed in online activities to bother and that space exploration is a flash in the pan. There are plenty of others. If there are no spacefarers because there’s no life elsewhere, many of those still apply to us.

Ultimately, we only have the brute fact that we’re intelligent tool using entities which have not colonised the Galaxy. It’s difficult to draw conclusions from that. Lack of information also tend to stimulate speculation too much. Venus is a good example. At some point, astronomers realised that the reason Venus looks so bright is that it’s covered in clouds. They couldn’t see any surface features. Because the only clouds they knew about back then were the ones here on Earth, they drew the erroneous conclusion that Venerean clouds were also made of water vapour, and in fact this is a parsimonious decision because it doesn’t posit that they are made of anything else in the absence of information. From that, they further concluded that Venus must be warm (fair enough, it being near the Sun) and humid, perhaps being covered in swamps, rainforests or just a global water or carbonic acid (fizzy water) ocean. Since at the time it was thought that the planets further from the Sun were older, some scientists also wondered if it was home to dinosaur-like creatures. All this, as Carl Sagan observed by the way, from the fact that you can’t see any surface features through a telescope. Lack of knowledge begets dinosaurs.

We don’t actually know we’re not doing something similar from this lack of knowledge but it’s hard to restrain oneself from trying to fill in the gaps. I want, though, to start from the position that it does seem to be a good argument that this will never happen, for whatever reason. I do think it’d be good if it did, because for example the overview effect influencing a lot of people would make the world a better place. The overview effect is the influence seeing Earth from space has on astronauts, where they begin to see humanity as one and the planet as a precious and delicate place worth preserving. It’s been described as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. When people have spent some time in space, they come back changed, usually positively so, and actually settling in space, I think, would have a lot of other positive results including those which would promote radical left wing and Green political activism here on Earth, which is why I’m so focussed on it. All that said, it doesn’t follow that it would be a good thing in the end and staying here on Earth and turning our back on all that is seen by many people as a good thing. There’s a pretty good case for this too, as the sums of money and resources spent on space while there are starving people down here. . . well, you know the argument. There’s a famous poster by the artist Kelly Freas from the early 1970s which comes across as being finely balanced in this respect:

Presumed to be copyright NASA and therefore in the public domain but will be removed on request

The motivation behind this picture is to encourage support for the Apollo space program and more widely the space program in general, but I think to a 21st century viewer it comes across as emphasising the problems here and makes the Saturn V seem like a wasteful attempt to escape this and distract the world, along the lines of Gil Scott Heron’s ‘Whitey’s On The Moon’. In other words, the simple possibility that astronauts’ days are numbered can be regarded as a neutral fact rather than utopian or appalling. This still appears to be able to predict the future.

A while ago, I raised questions about the Artemis program. If it’s to be conjectured that a probable result of the return of humans to the lunar surface is a large number of people living in space, which then increases until it outnumbers the population ever having lived on Earth, the probabilistic argument I offered above predicts that that’s unlikely to happen. It could still happen if the number of people in space always stays very small or even if it’s relatively large but short-lived. Something will have to stop this from happening unless it’s along the lines of a pointless publicity stunt. Paradoxically, Elon Musk seems to think that it’s vital for humans to settle on other planets for the sake of the long term survival of the species, and that may well be true but he seems to be very good at preventing that from happening due to incompetence and overreaching himself, plus the mere fact that he’s close to being a (long scale) billionaire (he’s only a billionaire using the American system). To be highly specific, this argument in the current period seems to predict that Artemis will fail. Weirdly, this appears to be a form of retroactive causation — the cause follows the effect. Because one can have a high degree of confidence that there will be no significant human space program in the future, one can conclude that Artemis will fail. It’s as if the failure is caused by the way things are in the future rather than the other way round.

This of course has a Zizian flavour, and more broadly Roko’s Basilisk (don’t look it up – it’s almost certainly wrong but in case it’s right, it’s better not to know what it is). Both of these seem to be examples of the future influencing the past, and that makes it appear to be possible to predict certain aspects of the future. A really obvious one appears to be that time machines which travel back before the first instance of one will never be invented, as if they were we might expect to have witnessed time travellers and we haven’t. There may be some stipulations here, and it’s worthwhile putting in the work to determine exactly what we’re attempting to predict, hence for instance the proviso that they can’t travel back before their first instance. There might be other elements. For instance, it might be that time travel backwards is possible but it kills the time traveller, erases them from ever having come into existence or that it makes them undetectable. We would have to be precise about what we know, but once we’ve reached that precision, we basically have a way of predicting certain facts about the future on our hands and also revealing a weird reverse causality phenomenon. It’s pretty revolutionary in itself that effect can precede cause in some situations.

Something rather similar can be done regarding the present moment and the past. Our existence guarantees that we live in a Universe which is not entirely hostile to intelligent tool using entities, which in our case arose through the appearance and evolution of biochemical life. We also know that Earth formed, is currently habitable, and that there was no time between the appearance of life here and today when it was completely wiped out. However, one thing we don’t know is how improbable it is that we’ve come into existence. Just because we’ve lived on a planet which has been hit by a few comets and asteroids without killing all life on it or been sterilised by a gamma ray burst doesn’t mean that it’s unlikely, because our existence today is a given. That could happen tomorrow for all we know, and there may be nothing keeping the future like the past at all. We just don’t know how precarious our situation is.

I want to talk about something similar now and I don’t quite know how to link it but I’m convinced it’s similar. The past being as it has been in certain ways is assured by “survivorship bias”: we have no option currently but to live in circumstances where we’re still here and where we came into existence. Survivorship bias is a logical error. One example of it is successful guesses made of the psychic test cards with different shapes on them, where a researcher with a large number of subjects might select a subject she thinks is psychic because they’ve guessed correctly each time. Suppose there are 1024 subjects being asked to guess a sequence of cards with one of four symbols on each. Given the null hypothesis, statistically, 256 of them will guess correctly the first time, 64 the second and so on until after five guesses, one person will have done so every time. However, suppose further that there are 1024 of these studies going on in universities all over the world. In this situation, there will be variation in the number of successful guessers and in some of them there will be “super-guessers”, meaning that there can statistically be expected to be one person in the whole group who guesses correctly ten times in a row. Moreover, there’s a twenty-five percent chance that someone will do it eleven times, a chance of one in sixteen that one will do it twelve times and so on, and once it reaches below one in twenty, that reaches the arbitrarily chosen threshold for responsibility and a researcher can publish her result suggesting the statistical significance of guessing in at least one subject thirteen times in a row, and there’s then a danger of that paper receiving all the attention while the papers showing nothing remarkable remain unpublished. This is supposed to be avoided because it distorts the results. Negative findings are as important, if not more so, than positive ones. This is potentially an aspect of academic research which is distorted by a need to be perceived as doing something notable, because it means negative results are buried.

Survivorship bias may influence our perception of how typical our history and planet, and possibly even our universe, are. We’re here, so it follows, for example, that Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a large asteroid and that Covid didn’t wipe us all out – it wasn’t actually that kind of virus anyway, although it could’ve been a lot worse. The fact that the former didn’t happen dictates that the asteroids mainly orbit in a belt far from our orbit rather than us being situated in the middle of an asteroid belt, but it may also be that that kind of solar system is short-lived or rare anyway. We may seem to have lived charmed lives in a sense, and this is where things could be extended into the future.

Quantum immortality is a concept whose scientific respectability has never been clear to me. The idea is that as the timelines branch (I actually don’t think they do branch as such, but that’s not something I want to go into just now), we inevitably end up in the ones where we continue to be conscious. For instance, when I was eight, I rushed out of my primary school and was almost hit by a car, but survived of course. There are, depending on how firm determinism is, other timelines where I was fatally injured, but I’m obviously not in any of those, at least in the current year. In fact I couldn’t be, just given the simple fact that I’m still here typing this. The extension of this thought is that in fact, none of us ever die, and in fact our consciousnesses never end, not just subjectively but in terms of continuing to survive as observed by others. Every time a potentially consciousness-terminating event occurs, we take the road where our consciousness continues. Note that I’m talking about the permanent cessation of consciousness here, since we’re clearly temporarily unconscious on a regular basis during dreamless sleep. Hence the idea is that subjectively each of us will never die. A way of linking it to quantum ideas more clearly is to imagine a machine gun which works like the Schrödingers Cat thought experiment, except that the radioactive particle is replaced by a radioactive sample whose decay gives the firing of each bullet a 50% chance of happening, one bullet per second. The subject sits in front of the gun, aimed at their head. Subjectively, the gun will never fire because there will then be no observer to be aware of the bullets not firing, and of course the death of the observer would mean there is no such observer. This is rather sloppily put together but I hope you get my point. After five minutes the gun has potentially fired up to three hundred times and the probability of it not having fired is equivalent to one against a number more than three hundred thousand times greater than the number of atoms in the observable Universe, so it can be almost guaranteed that no-one else not in the firing line will observe the victim still alive at the end of the five minute period, but for the “victim” the situation is one hundred percent safe. Of course, somewhere out there in the Multiverse there is someone who has the reputation of being fantastically fortunate. Other people exist.

Extending this to every event while keeping the quantum component, it’s easy to imagine that each timeline begins with a quantum event which ends up determining the whole future in that timeline until it’s observed, and since it has to keep being observed, there has to be at least one immortal being in each. This means that in the majority of universes, which appear often to be merely composed of hydrogen rather sparsely distributed throughout space, there are no observers and therefore they actually don’t exist, although this would be countered by either panpsychism or the existence of an omniscient deity. I am of course panpsychist myself. A more conventional way of understanding it is that you are immortal in any timeline you actually experience. The bullet misses you, the car crash isn’t fatal, you recover from the infection and your cancer goes into remission.

However, this is not a recipe for ceasing to worry about the future. If you’ve read ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, you’ll know about the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, who are born with a red dot above their left eyebrows which changes colour until it’s black. Swift obviously did a better job than I’m about to, so you can read his own words on them here. It’s in Chapter Ten. It won’t surprise you to learn their immortality is not a blessing but a curse. The condition’s not hereditary and a baby of this kind is only born every few years in the whole country. Lemuel imagines Struldbrugs to be mentally liberated from the prospect of death and able to become extremely wise, passing on their wisdom to the younger generations as a positive jewel to the land. However, what they actually do is serve as a dreadful warning to the populace which makes them feel relieved that they’re mortal, as their presence is a constant reminder of old age. They have, as the phrase has it, years in their lives but no life in their years, because they continue to age despite being immortal. Just as the old in our society tend to be world-weary, think they know more than they do and have contempt for the young (don’t shoot the messenger – this is Swift talking here, not me), they have all the more vices owing to their knowledge that they’ll never die. They’re ” not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection”, and they don’t care about any of their descendants beyond their grandchildren. They’re mainly envious and frustrated, and basically wish they were dead the whole time, lamenting at funerals because they know they’ll never have that release, and past the age of eighty, if they’re married to each other the state mercifully dissolves their union out of compassion, because otherwise their marriage will become a living hell out of being totally sick of each other. They’re also declared dead at eighty in order that their heirs can inherit and although they are either allowed to continue on a pittance from their own estate or receive welfare, they can’t own property or even rent it. Any diseases of old age continue, though they don’t get worse, and due to changes in language, after about two hundred years they cease to be able to hold any conversations with people outside their generation, who in any case are very few, and they also have dementia.

Swift wasn’t the only person to make this observation, although this is of course typical of him. There’s also an ancient Greek myth about Τιθωνός, lover of Eos, who scooped up a handful of sand and was granted to live as many years as there were grains in his hands, but forgot to ask for eternal youth and ended up walled up in a room insane until he was mercifully turned into a cicada. There’s also an Asimov story, ‘The Last Trump’, where the dead and the living are given eternal life and youth and initially suppose they’re in paradise but soon realise that they’re damned and that eternal life will become unbearably boring. They’re then reprieved on a technicality when an angel points out that the date of resurrection is different in different calendars, so it can’t have been a proper doomsday.

For this is what quantum immortality is. You don’t die, and you remain conscious, but you also deteriorate without end so your life becomes unbearable. It’s also entirely compatible with dementia to some extent. You don’t need a good memory, only to be able to sense things in one way or another, perhaps with the last remaining cone cell in one retina. Perhaps you occasionally notice a red dot and then forget about it immediately. It isn’t good, really. In fact it wouldn’t even be good if you retained all your faculties because your life would be poisoned by boredom and over-familiarity.

This raises a few questions. One is that of what ageing actually is. In a sense, not all organisms do actually age or die of old age. There’s a species of petrel, a bird, which is effectively immortal, and a jellyfish who responds to injury by regressing to infancy and beginning to mature again. However, these are not in fact immortal. Both, for example, would die in a fire or if eaten by a predator, and this raises the question of what ageing actually is. Is it the accumulation of internal insults and health problems which eventually proves fatal? If so, it’s effectively the same as accidental death – it’s just that the accidents are things like oxidative stress, cardiovascular deterioration or cancer. Or, do we have an allotted span such that we die after a certain number of years determined by an internal clock? This clearly does affect many species which die immediately after reproducing, which is just as well because otherwise they would use up the resources needed by their children, who would then starve, or end up eating their children shortly after hatching. Some might say that this is what one current generation of humans in positions of wealth and power is actually doing right now. We hang around for our children and grandchildren, but on the whole we need to die to get out of the way for future generations.

Presumably with quantum immortality, the former scenario is assumed to be in play. We don’t have an inherent life expectancy, but simply accumulate injuries until they become fatal, but in each subjective case those injuries never end up killing us. Obviously we’re not surrounded by immortals, so each of us has their own private world in this scenario, dying in an increasing number of timelines but persisting in a dwindling number of them, which, however, never reaches zero. One major problem with this is that it seems to be solipsistic, as all the “people” around you are still mortal and are just shadows with no consciousness. You’re in your own world. This may, however, have a form of retrocausality too. For instance, two ways of living longer are to be lucky with your genes and to inherit or adopt health-promoting attitudes from your family or community, meaning that you are, for example, more likely to have particularly healthy and long-lived relatives in your personal timeline. This doesn’t rule out straightforwardly accidental death, but it does mean you’re likely to have selected long-lived relatives. Therefore, if you believe in quantum immortality it would often be reasonable to conclude that your relatives, while not immortal, might end up living a particularly long time or be especially healthy in old age. It might even go further than that, with the possibility of living a relatively charmed life in a stable political environment, free from local wars and famines for example, or with a particularly low rate of serious crime.

This raises an ethical problem. It could make you complacent. You’d know that everyone else was subjectively immortal and also that you’ll never encounter potentially fatal dangers. Therefore you might well be less motivated to do good to others or even particularly bother to look after yourself. In the initial example, you could just wander in front of the quantum machine gun secure in the knowledge that you’ll be unharmed despite the increasingly vast odds against that being so. But you and others still wouldn’t have life in your years, and that would be worth preserving. It’s a heady prospect, but probably not a good one because you might stop caring about those affected by the troubles and hardships of the world, although suffering would still exist, more in fact than it does if we’re mortal.

Hugh Everett was a prominent proponent of this idea, although I have to say it’s a fairly obvious one so I doubt he was the first. He was the first well-known theorist of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which is the apparently branching paths (in fact they’d probably always have existed but be indiscernible) idea of innumerable parallel universes forking at each probabilistic event. He believed he would never die because of this. From our perspective, he is in fact dead, although this may not have any bearing on whether he’s immortal as if he was right, he would be “elsewhere”: we just happen to live in one of the majority of universes where he is in fact deceased. He died suddenly of a heart attack on 19th June 1982 at the age of fifty-one, having smoked sixty a day, consumed excessive alcohol and being grossly obese, never exercised and never went to the doctor. His son was very angry with him after his death that he never took care of himself, although he also observed that he just did what he wanted without interference and then just died without withholding any pleasures from himself. He also wanted to be cremated and have his ashes thrown out with the rubbish, something his widow wasn’t keen on for a few years after his death but eventually complied with. Incidentally, if you know the band The Eels, that’s the son who commented thus and there’s an album inspired by his death. Of course, this album doesn’t really exist because Hugh Everett is immortal! It seems to me that this kind of self-neglect may have resulted precisely from his belief in quantum immortality – there’s simply no point in looking after your health in his view.

I’m not sure this follows, to be honest. I think that apart from anything else you probably would want to be healthy for as long as possible in order to enjoy life, and also to spare the feelings of people close to you. Also, what if you’re wrong? I don’t think many people who have recently touched grass, as the phrase has it, would willingly step in front of that machine gun. Certain persons, of course, haven’t done that recently.

The Doomsday Argument and Quantum Immortality feel like they’re from the same stable, so it’s worthwhile working out what they have in common. They both start from a kind of Descartes-like position of noting that one is currently conscious and attempting to draw conclusions from that bare fact, though unlike Descartes they neither raise the possibility that the physical world doesn’t exist nor that God does, which gives them greater traction on the consensus view of reality and the Universe. Both constrain the Universe through the fact that we’re observing it, like the anthropic principle that the Universe must have certain physical constants and laws to produce conscious beings. Both involve vast numbers of items. In the Doomsday Argument, this is everyone who has or will ever live, and in Quantum Immortality it’s the number of possible worlds in which one has existed or currently exists. In fact I don’t believe the many worlds are strictly separate but that’s an argument for another time. Oddly though, they draw opposite conclusions from their reasoning. The Doomsday Argument concludes we’re all going to die but Quantum Immortality decides each of us is individually, though perhaps unhealthily, immortal, and that our consciousness will never permanently end. Neither of them are amenable to observational testing. The former can’t be observed by human scientists because it says there won’t be any, and the latter can only be observed by all the lonely people, but individually.

Another significant concept linked to both of these is Roko’s Basilisk, which we cannot talk about. A fourth one is the Simulation Argument. This is an argument which has been popular with Elon Musk but doesn’t seem to work. This is that we are much more likely to be living in a simulation than the real world because any civilisation which existed for long enough and became advanced in computing will eventually decide to simulate the world. Those simulated worlds will then simulate other worlds when their own simulations are sophisticated enough to do so, and so forth. This would mean that of all instances of apparently real worlds, almost all are simulated. This argument compared to the others seems almost trivially easy to refute. Firstly, taking it at face value this means a cascading tree of simulations, each generation more numerous than the last and also more simplistic and therefore less realistic due to lack of computing power, so the fact that the universe is more complex than it might be means we aren’t in the most numerous types of simulation, so why would we be in a simulation at all? Secondly, again taking it at face value, the three-body problem and beyond can in most cases eat up all available computing resources. I actually don’t think this argument works because in the non-special cases a pseudorandom number generator could just be used to prevent this from happening and the chances are nobody would be any the wiser, since the movements of the large number of bodies is in fact unpredictable. I suppose this could be tested by looking at one’s own simulations of three-body problems using various pseudorandom generator algorithms or for that matter true randomness. But beyond all this, the really big assumption seems to be that any civilisation would inevitably end up bothering to simulate the world in the first place. As I’ve said before, apart from anything else they might just be really bad at maths, and with anything else maybe they’ve got more important things to do.

All of these seem to have a self-centred element to them. There’s also an arrogance to them, in that they boldly assert that the person proposing or learning of them has taken everything into consideration and nothing can assail the argument. The Simulation Argument is obviously full of holes, but the holes are the blind spots of a probably autistic sociopath in that the assumption is that just because one person or a group of people working in a particular field would try to do this, thereby incidentally becoming a God to the sims, everyone else would, regardless of their personality or neurodiversity. Quantum Immortality and the Simulation Argument both seem to leave us with “non-player characters”, i.e. zombie shells of people who aren’t really conscious and don’t really matter, so that’s sociopathy and lack of empathy again. They seem to provide an excuse to ignore people’s needs. The Doomsday Argument assumes that humans all contemplate the end of the world or the human race and are all that matters, rather than it being the thought of the end of the world which is significant. There needs to be a cut-off point or certainty that we are the only conscious beings in the Universe for it to work.

In the end, although these arguments are interesting I think they really say more about the people who think of them than the actual world they’re supposed to be applied to. I do think that something will prevent the Artemis Project from succeeding, and that is because of the future galactic civilisation thing, but there could be really positive reasons why it won’t. As for the others, well, they all have a kind of solipsistic and self-centred air to them which it doesn’t seem healthy to entertain. But who knows? Maybe there are other kinds of argument of this nature which do have real predictive power, and if there are that would be fascinating and also useful.

The Police, Quakers, and the Satanic Scare

Last Thursday, the Metropolitan police broke into Westminster Friends’ Meeting House to arrest six women members of the pressure group Youth Demand, which ironically probably helps to publicise them and encourages people to join their cause. Although their plans for action are interesting, I want to focus on another aspect of this situation and also compare it to the child abuse allegation farce which took place in the Orkneys at the end of the 1980s CE. Before that though, I want to talk about the place of Friends’ Meeting Houses and the Quakers in my life, mainly the one in Leicester.

The first time I darkened the doors of Leicester Friends’ Meeting House on Queens Road was in autumn 1986. At the time I had recently joined the Green Party and was also involved in hunt sabbing, animal liberation and the university Green group Leicester Environmental Action Force. It was dark and around 7:30 pm on a Thursday evening, and I was walking behind my friend Vicky whom I probably shouldn’t have been behind at that time of night, but you live and learn. At this point, she was for some reason constantly surprised when I turned up to this kind of thing, possibly because her image of me had been dominated by how I’d been over the previous year. Both she and I were on our way to a Supporters Of Greenpeace Leicester meeting, the first of many groups I’d be involved with there over the coming years. Other groups included Friends of the Earth, Leicester CND and, a few years later during the 1991 Gulf War, the Stop The War Coalition. As well as all that, we got married there in a humanist ceremony (well, sort of humanist – long story), went to a complementary medicine taster group, attended Yoga sessions, a parent and toddler group (abortively) and also Leicestershire Education Otherwise. I can’t quite remember, but I don’t think the Green Party or the animal welfare groups I was involved with ever went there, but it was a pretty central part of the alternative scene in Leicester, and particularly Clarendon Park, at the time. It was a venue used by lots of groups, with a tendency towards peace, sustainability, socialism, Green issues and to some extent anarchism. In general, the approaches taken by such groups accords with the Quaker world view. The donkey coöperation cartoon was outside on a board for many years, which seems to me to be pretty much in accordance with these organisations.

There was conflict, even aggressively so, within these groups. In particular the Stop The War Coalition was rife with friction because it involved peace groups and splinter communist groups trying to work together and soon after the end of the first Gulf War it fell apart. That was quite a shouty group, with the overt aggression largely coming from the smaller communist parties. There were members of the main Communist Party of Britain in the group, though, who were generally quiet and in fact didn’t advertise their communism. CND has many of that variety of communists within its ranks, but also people of a more spiritual bent. Supporters of Greenpeace Leicester was merely a fundraising body and in fact we got into trouble for trying to do more, so on the whole the same people worked within Friends of the Earth instead, meeting in the same place. There’s a conversation to be had about this, but not here. FoE also have their issues. Sarada and I concur in the opinion, also expressed by many others, that the more peace and well-being groups could do with being more politically-aware and the more overtly political groups could benefit from being more spiritual. Now I look back on it, the other stuff going on in Leicester at the time didn’t tend to organise from the building, and CND also had its own office, where I was office manager for a while, among other things. Leicester CND was slowly winding down over the whole period I was involved with it, which was from 1991 to about 2011, and was dominated by older people, mainly women. I preferred CND to the other organisations in the ’90s because of their spiritual tendencies. The revolution starts from within. It really helps the world if you become a better person.

That, then, is the kind of group you might expect to meet in a Friends’ Meeting House. Many Quakers don’t have their own premises for various reasons: there aren’t enough of them to afford one or it becomes a case of property ownership in the same way as many churches are saddled with expensive buildings which eat up the money which could be used to benefit the community and the vulnerable in Europe and beyond. That said, it’s a nice thing to have, and although they’re not Quakers themselves there is often quite an overlap in their memberships. In particular, Leicester CND had a lot of Quakers in it, which is not surprising because of the latter’s commitment to pacifism. CND is not a pacifist group although it does contain many such individuals. Quakers also tend to be older, as do members of many religious communities in Britain. Incidentally, I’m talking about Quakers in the “U”K here. What happens elsewhere is probably different. For instance, American Quakers often have what are called “programmed meetings” with singing and they don’t sit in circles.

The reason I’m saying all this is to put the incident in Westminster in context. It’s possible that Youth Demand has Quaker members but not inevitable. However, their witness and mission to pursue peace, justice and sustainability accords closely with the Quakers, and they belong under their umbrella. At a guess, Youth Demand probably don’t overlap with membership just because they’re young. Hence it’s an organisation using the centre, with whose aims the Quakers are likely to agree, but it isn’t a Quaker organisation. The situation is therefore that a place of worship hosting a planning meeting by a non-violent group was invaded by the police and their members were arrested.

I may have some of the details wrong but there is a page on the incident here from the British Quakers themselves which is worthwhile for cutting through the verbiage and spin of the mass media, although it has to be said also that the actual mass media coverage is quite sympathetic to the Quakers themselves. There were twenty police officers and six women were arrested for planning a now-criminalised Non-Violent Direct Action. Several aspects of this come to mind. One is the question of whether the police would’ve done the same thing with other places of worship. I heard someone yesterday claim that they wouldn’t have done this with a synagogue or a mosque. I personally think they would’ve done it with a mosque but the fact that synagogues are often guarded and have turnstiles would have made doing it in such a place difficult regardless of how it would’ve looked. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have done it to an Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, URC, Roman Catholic or Orthodox church. Regarding gurdwaras, they did actually use a SWAT team in Leicester to my knowledge because they thought the lives of the people within it, who were being held hostage, were in danger. I have no idea how heavy-handed they were. Bearing in mind the direct child abuse and murder which occurs in some churches, for instance when exorcisms have been performed on children, I would expect and in fact hope that they would intervene in such cases. So it isn’t completely out of order to do this, although the provocation would’ve probably been stronger. It’s also not proportionate, and it’s at least interesting that it seems to have been a woman-only group. The implication is that this action would’ve been sufficiently serious and reprehensible to warrant such a response, possibly partly as a deterrent to others.

I mentioned incidents of child abuse within churches. Although this usually calls to mind child sexual abuse, which is indeed a serious problem, I actually had exorcisms in mind. I have actually tried to help someone access exorcism, which they wanted for themselves, and it was difficult to do so due to their lack of association with any particular church. It doesn’t seem easy to get this service within the Episcopal Church. Without this milieu, however, things are sometimes different because some other churches are less reserved or cautious. A fifteen year old boy was drowned during an exorcism in Newham in 2012 and a two-year old was hit fatally in Wolverhampton more recently. It isn’t clear whether either was part of a church-sanctioned process, but these things do happen and the potential victims need to be protected. However, the separate issue of child sexual abuse linked with a general suspicion of Quakers was also called to mind by last week’s events.

This seems to have been almost forgotten today, which may be a good thing except that forgetting history risks repeating it, which in a sense is what’s happened here. You may, though, remember the Satanic panic of the ’80s and ’90s, which is how this was able to take place. I can remember the first time I noticed this in about 1979 when my mother showed me a list of what the London Healing Mission regarded as Satanic activities, including of course Yoga, which I was very keen on at the time. I wish I was still that keen. This initially included heavy metal music and roleplaying games, as in Dungeons And Dragons. Much more recently it included Harry Potter although that’s faded considerably nowadays. By the late ’80s, the focus was on the idea that communities were being infiltrated by Satanists who were engaging in widespread ritual abuse including child murder and sexual abuse. No evidence was ever found, but that didn’t stop a training course for the police being devised. The claim was meanwhile made of fifty thousand murders per year with expert disposal of the corpses. To put this in proportion, this is on the scale of the casualties of a major international war. All this was happening in North America. To quote some of the promoters of these claims, “no evidence can be evidence” and “the most dangerous groups are the ones we know nothing about. . .They are the real underground”. It was eventually concluded that the children involved were being interviewed in a manner which would encourage them to make up stories about being abused due to the poor quality of the questioning techniques, such as closed questions, and in therapy false memories were also created. Because children often deny being abused during interviews, the approach was to keep repeating the question, and it’s fairly simple to recognise even as an adult that that repetition is akin to Hitler’s technique of repeating a lie often enough for it to be accepted as true, a technique currently in use in the US. However, it beggars belief that anyone could have accepted that the process was taking place on such a gigantic scale. It’s the reverse of Holocaust denial in some ways: where are all the relatives of the Roma and Jewish people who were murdered in the Holocaust if they weren’t murdered? Conversely, how could there be tens of thousands of victims of systematic serial murder whose bodies are never recovered and whose absence is never noted by anyone? There were allegations of injuries which would’ve required emergency treatment but no evidence for them either.

In February 1990, the McEwen family in South Ronaldsay was almost broken apart by a dawn police raid on their home where four children were removed and taken into care on the Scottish mainland. A worker in the NSPCC had made the claim that in Britain four thousand children were murdered through Satanic ritual abuse annually. What had happened was that there had been conferences on Satanic ritual abuse in Britain, notably in Nottingham in connection with a genuine incest case in Broxtowe. Ten adults were jailed for this having been found guilty, but no suggestion of a Satanic element had been made at that time. This connection was made by a group of psychiatrists, social workers and an anthropologist specialising in occult rituals in Afrika. This was happening at a time of growth of evangelical Protestant churches in Britain, which led to the production of a training video called ‘Christian Response To The Occult’. Workers in children’s foster homes and foster parents recorded claims made by the children, which while beginning with accounts of their abuse in relatively prosaic terms tended to veer off into accounts of ritual abuse. There were attempts to explain this in any other way possible, because of the uncanny similarities between the claims. The social workers concluded that they’d uncovered an organised network of ritual abuse in Broxtowe. A checklist was used which contained a large number of non-specific signs of indicators such as bed-wetting, and the foster parents and others had used this as the basis for the interviews, so they’d ended up guiding the process through leading questions. While there was no factual basis for these claims, the fear of not listening to children when they report genuine abuse leads to swinging too far the other way.

By 1994, an inquiry had established that there was no evidence at all for the claims. It’s worth noting that this sounds very like Pizzagate. Now I have a problem. I’ve ransacked the internet for fair accounts of the situation regarding the Ronaldsay Quakers without any success, so I’m going to have to try to reconstruct this from rather ancient personal memories. What I can remember is that someone of national significance among the Quakers was contacted by a worried member of the meeting who expressed her concern that police action was liable to bring the meeting and the wider Quaker movement into disrepute without any firm basis for that. She was reluctant to say more, but in the end she talked about how the police suspected them of Satanic ritual abuse. In particular, she said that the police were suspicious of the Quaker practice of sitting in circles and waiting for the Holy Spirit (as I put it – many Quakers such as atheists and Buddhists would probably disagree with this characterisation but it’s hard to think of a personally authentic way to describe it more diplomatically) to move them to give ministry. This was apparently something the police and many of their associates were unfamiliar with and attributed evil intent to. Putting my evangelical Protestant hat on, something Quakers would disapprove of, I’m familiar with the claim that allowing silence and emptiness of this kind is liable to give Satan a way into the group, and I wonder if this was their take on this. I honestly don’t know what happened in much detail, and I’m finding this quite frustrating right now.

These two incidents, the Westminster invasion and the Orkney Satanic panic, to me both have elements of othering by the authorities, something with which the Quakers will be very familiar as they’ve endured it for centuries. The very heart of Quaker practice, of sitting in circles and waiting to be moved by the Spirit, was attacked by the establishment back in the early ’90s, and last week the general Quaker ethos was attacked in the same way. I’ve long since shed the illusion that the current Westminster government is worthy of being described as Labour and I note the extreme keenness and conformity with which they applied the Tory law introduced in 2022 to enable this kind of thing to happen. But it’s the Tory party which is supposed to be about God, King and Country, and by extension the Anglican church, which is after all also a broad church, much of which would back the actions of the pressure group in question, but the question arises of why a party founded partly by Methodists would decide to persecute Quakers for supporting peaceful protest against the global suicide (yes, it’s a moral crime in this context, but not usually, so it’s “suicide” for the purposes of this paragraph) pact. Why are we in a situation where a group renowned for its non-violence and tireless work for peace is repeatedly treated in this way? And why haven’t we made progress on this since Thatcher’s time in office?

But there’s more.

Quakers seek to see the spark of God in everyone, and they mean that in a positive way which anti-theists may find hard to perceive. I think it was Viktor Frankl who said that the line between good and evil runs down the centre of the human heart. We all have within us the potential for peace and violence in his view. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the fact remains that this situation is likely to provoke anger in those who have been persecuted, directly and indirectly. There is a potential antidote to this, because the very police officers and social workers involved in these incidents are human, and as such there’s that of God in them too.

It reminded me of two other incidents, and again I’m having to rely on somewhat shaky memories. One is of an incident regarding the peace movement and the police, possibly on Menwith Hill or Faslane – it’s vague. A group of people were trying to project peaceful and healing energy to the police force involved in this conflict. The metaphysical basis for this may be questionable but bear with me. One of the male police officers involved in protecting the base burst into tears in this incident, and it was found later that he’d been at Hillsborough, where the fatal crush had happened in the football ground and after which South Yorkshire Police spread false stories criticising the fans, as did the Sun newspaper. Whatever his involvement in that, he had been emotionally traumatised by what he witnessed because guess what, police officers are also human beings. The other incident was much more recent and involved another police officer who was guarding a fossil fuel facility of some kind – I’m having to dredge my memory here, sorry about any mistakes. One of the protestors mentioned to her that Just Stop Oil, if it was them, were among other things trying to protect her children’s and other descendants’ future, and once again, she was in tears. I don’t know the details of this incident. It could’ve been to do with a family tragedy, some other experience or maybe the interpretation given is correct. It was in any case a remarkable incident, once again revealing what might be called the humanity of police officers. Because there is that of God in everyone.

But there is also a police officer in everyone. By this I don’t mean a “bobby on the beat”, although maybe there is, but someone more like a member of the Special Patrol Group or the Carabinieri. We all have an inner fascist boot boy too, and we need to be conscious of it.

I was sitting in a sociology lecture once about the 1981 inner city riots, and suddenly had the thought that the police were not just Thatcher’s Army but also ordinary human beings with romantic relationships and families, and the thought had such a profound affect on me that it literally gave me vertigo. It made my head spin. I feel bad about that incident because it clearly means I was seriously objectifying the people concerned, but of course it’s true. When the Met broke into the Friends’ Meeting House in Westminster the other day, what they did was reprehensible and bizarre, but after it they presumably went home to their families, read their children bedtime stories, did the vacuuming, made love to their spouses and watched telly with them. They are also human. It shouldn’t need saying, but we need to have the mental reach to recognise the temptation to other and behave like them in ourselves and condemn and work against that in us as well as in them, and also to do what we can to see their divine nature, and this is very difficult.

I feel like this is a bit of a platitude, sorry.