Something I Want To Be True

Almost certainly a copyright violation: this will be removed if you ask.

Although I did watch and enjoy it, I was never really a fan of ‘The X-Files’ because it had a couple of annoying things about it (apart from saying “The Church of Ephesia” at one point which was just funny). One of them was what I think of as lazy writing. It was common for a standalone episode to end without resolution, and from a writer’s perspective, that’s just irritating, because most people who write work hard to tie things up at the end, and rather than doing that, this series did the opposite and actually tried to make it into a virtue. So it’s like, there’s this guy who has an extra skeletal muscle over all of his skin which enables him to shapeshift, and then – oh I dunno, a load of stuff happens and maybe he hadn’t anyway but I don’t care, here’s next week’s episode, forget that. And then the same thing would happen until the end of the series.

That was one annoying thing. Another one was “I Want To Believe”. Mulder is a detective. He is not supposed to “want to believe” that a particular person is guilty or innocent or that a particular modus operandi (sorry, modum operandi) characterised a particular incident. “I Want To Believe” was for the viewers, maybe because they wanted to believe, but unless he was mocking himself and wanted to cast doubt on his reputation, he definitely should not have put a massive great poster on his wall advertising his unsuitability for his line of work.

But yes, I also want to believe something. Not in flying saucers particularly, although I do think it’s interesting that spheroids, discs and cigar-shaped objects are all convincing three-dimensional slices of a simple hyperspatial superovoid thingy. It’s the wrong attitude because it leads to cognitive bias and not seeing what’s in front of your face. Basically delusion. In one case, it really worried me. Now I’ve never been anti-vaccination, but as usual I have opinions which are different from most other people’s on the matter. I was worried about this and I wanted to believe that vaccines were a good thing, so I started to read up on immunology. I got two standard textbooks on immunology and two standard textbooks on microbiology and started to plough through them, confident that their sources and arguments would be high-quality and well-presented. Unfortunately, as I read more into the subject I started to feel my faith in vaccination ebb away. I feel the need to emphasise that I most definitely do continue to support vaccination in general, more than I used to in fact because the objections I had in the 1990s have now largely been addressed. However, I didn’t have the courage to pursue what was increasingly appearing to be the truth about the situation as backed up by rigorous scientific research. I didn’t fail to understand the reasoning, didn’t doubt the evidence or research, but I still found that very reasoning and information was taking me rapidly away from the consensus, and I strongly suspect that if I’d continued to learn more about the immune system and infectious diseases, by now I would have become an anti-vaxxer. But I’m not. The reason I’m not is partly peer pressure and partly because I trust the expertise of immunologists and microbiologists. For some reason, my brain works that way but theirs obviously doesn’t, and the flaw is probably in my own thought processes.

Opposite to this is Mulder’s attitude in ‘The X-Files’. His desire to believe was probably confirmed by in-universe events and he got what he wanted: his wish to believe was granted. I’d be interested in knowing what other people find here because I haven’t heard that this happens for other people, but I often find that precisely when I want to believe passionately in something, I actually find it harder to believe than if I didn’t really care about it. Whatever else was going on in my process to convince myself that vaccination is a good thing, I’m pretty sure my strong desire to believe it was a big factor in me not finding it convincing. Even so, to my conscious mind it seemed to present itself as an ever-growing list of reasons for believing the opposite. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this tendency if it does exist in me, but I suppose on this occasion I just decided to trust the brains of people with apparently less unusual cognitive styles than my own.

So, the rest of this is about something I want to believe.

I’ll start with straightforward memory, learning and information transfer in living organisms, mainly humans because I am one, allegèdly. The two things many people think of as information in ourselves are our memories and thoughts on the one hand and our heredity on the other. There are at least two other systems in our bodies which do something similar, namely the specific immune response and the endocrine system. I can’t make too many comments on the former because of what I talked about earlier, but the endocrine system is easier to discuss. Some of the transformations our bodies undergo due to hormones is even similar to memory. For instance, growth hormone makes us taller and then we stay taller after it stops taking effect. There are other examples not easily categorised. I have a transverse scar on my wrist from when I cut myself on an aluminium drink can bale in 1992 and it was dressed incorrectly by using cotton wool, which I then had to yank out from inside the healing wound. That’s not just a memory, but a clearly observable physical mark on my body recorded by a physiological process, in the same way a memory is. Things do leave their mark on us. Looking at me, you can tell it’s been more than three years since I had a haircut, that I’m no longer in my twenties and so on. In terms of deep time, the fact that I have a navel records an incident in the Cretaceous when some of my ancestors caught a viral infection which led to them retaining their eggs rather than laying them, causing a placenta to form. The fact that I have nails rather than claws recalls the fact that later ancestors of mine climbed trees and the fact that I breathe oxygen is a legacy of the most catastrophic event to befall life on this planet in its entire history: the production of free oxygen by microörganisms.

But I digress. We carry the traces of our past, and the past before our own lives, in our bodies and in a way those things are memories. They’re records of the past. Some of them are recorded in tissues we’d never normally think of as being able to carry memories. Others are much closer to being what we’d think of as remembrance than others. There’s muscle memory of course, but that doesn’t refer to memories stored by muscles, but a learned habit which can be repeated through physical actions. What does definitely seem like memory, though, is the ability of single-celled organisms to learn.

It stands to reason that a small, mobile organism swimming through a hostile aquatic environment would benefit from being able to learn from its mistakes, but of course if it consists of a single cell, it has no multicellular organs and systems such as a brain and a nervous system. It may, however, have sensors. Euglena, for example, is a single-celled organism with a red “eye spot” which helps it to detect light and react accordingly. But how does it respond, and do its responses change after repeating the same stimuli? If they do, isn’t that a form of memory?

Well, yes it does happen. Slightly annoyingly, slime moulds are well-known to do things like learn to avoid caffeine, solve mazes and would probably have been able to redesign the British rail network if given the chance, and no, that is not a joke. However, slime moulds are not typical single-celled organisms and probably when most people hear that, they think of something like this:

Although this is a large organism in single-celled terms, it probably goes without saying that it resembles the human lymphocytes, B-cells, T-cells and macrophages in the human body, and in many cases these latter cells actually do exhibit altered behaviour depending on circumstances due to their recognition of antigens, but this learning process is carried out by the larger immune system rather than individual cells.

Paramecia are a better prospect than either of these amoeboid doobreys:

A paramecium can make associations between electric shocks and lighting conditions. If it’s shocked a few times in the light, it will avoid the light after a while. However, it can’t make associations between darkness and electric shocks. There’s said to be an association between learning and cyclic AMP, which is a common compound found across the animal kingdom as well. It’s a second messenger in humans, meaning that it sends a signal inside the cell in response to a substance received by the cell, in nervous systems for example neurotransmitters, so there’s also an association with learning for us.

Stentor, whose examples are seen here, can also learn. This protist anchors itself to a substrate and draws water and food into itself by creating a vortex by a ring of cilia around the wide end of the trumpet. It also leans over in order to locate richer food sources. In its environment, it may encounter a stream of food at an angle on a particular side, and when it does so it can move in this way. It also contracts in response to strong mechanical stimuli, presumably as a defence response. If it’s repeatedly poked, it gets used to it and not shrink so readily, so it clearly has some kind of memory of being poked before, but if it’s poked harder it still responds. It also doesn’t bother to lean over any more if it isn’t getting anything from that direction, and it can not only choose to detach itself from its substrate to seek food elsewhere but also prioritises between different decisions based on conditions. It also reverses the direction of the vortex if it encounters noxious tastes, and will do so more readily if it’s encountered them before. It does all this, of course, without any brain or nervous system.

Writing all this makes me feel uncomfortable. As a vegan, I disapprove of animal experimentation and in these cases I’m aware that these protists have been experimented on to get these results, and I find that unsettling. I haven’t seen a Paramecium or a Stentor behave this way but I have seen a Vorticella, one of these:

Vorticella campanula, Date 28 August 2010, Source https://www.flickr.com/photos/giuseppevago/4938691032/, Author Giuseppe Vago

. . . flinch and coil its stalk in response to a threat, and I was aware that after I’d looked at them through a microscope I probably wasn’t going to be able to return the protist to its original environment in a stream at the bottom of the lane. I was six years old at the time and not yet even vegetarian, but even still.

Here, then, is the next bit, the contentious bit, something I want to believe.

Individual, unicellular organisms can learn and in some cases make decisions and prioritise. They’re not entirely dumb. Incidentally, intelligence and information processing are not the same thing as consciousness, and being panpsychist I obviously believe all these organisms are conscious in some sense, but I don’t want to consider that at this point. No, what I want to consider is this: our whole selves can learn, in various ways but prominently we learn and remember using our nervous systems. We also develop immunity, allergies and auto-immune diseases, so that system also has memory, and likewise our hormones show parallels to learning. Beyond that, our bodies show the marks of our journeys through life, although that’s only learning in a very loose sense. However, we do appear to be the descendants of single-celled organisms very similar and probably closely related to the ciliates I’ve mentioned here (and our bodies also contain amoeboid cells but we’re not so closely related), whose representatives today do in fact show definite signs of learning and memory. So the question is: do we also have cellular memory? Do our own cells carry memory-like traces of their past experience besides their genes or hormonal changes if they’re not among the classes of cells which literally carry memories or “immune education”?

At first, that does seem logical. However, our cells are not themselves single-celled organisms and they live in bodies where everything depends on everything else, everything has its functions and has surrendered many of its functions to other cells. Muscle cells contract and move the body or aid in organ function and some other cells move quite rapidly and readily, but many of them just sit there and are passengers in a moving body. Protists have little choice but to move unless they’re permanently stuck to something and even then they may contract or expand. Our own cells generally lack the pressures of having to fend for themselves, and consequently they may have lost a lot of functions their ancestors had. Even our gametes live within our bodies and although each of us starts as a single-celled animal, that’s internal too, except when deliberately extracted or fertilised via technological means which are unlikely to have had much influence on our tendency to remember or not.

Nevertheless I want it to be true that our cells as well as ourselves remember.

Levinas, Buber and the Ethics of the Face

There’s a time-worn philosophical problem in certain circles which has a recent iteration through the medium of video games.  Although they have changed considerably since, Space Invaders illustrates this.  Computer game protagonists are either player characters, PCs, ornon-player characters, NPCs.  In Space Invaders, the PC is the base shooty thing you move about at the bottom of the screen.  NPCs are the aliens and flying saucers.  You can’t play Space Invaders as one of those – they’re NPCs.

Nowadays, games are much more convincing and imagination has become less important, so gamers have more immersive experiences in 3-D simulations, but there are still PCs and NPCs.  There are still characters whom one can play as and characters one cannot play as.

Some people extend that to meatspace.  There are people who roleplay as NPCs, for example.  Some people also now truly believe there are NPCs in the physical world, or at least in the simulation which some of them hold reality to be. That is, there are people who see themselves as real and another set of figures around them as not having minds or consciousness at all.  Not a very healthy development, but it has significant implications.  However, there is nothing new under the Sun, and this is just today’s solipsism.  In analytical philosophy, this is the problem of other minds: since we only have access to our own consciousness, for all we know everyone else we meet could be a robot or a zombie with no inner life at all.

I’ll get back to that, because for now I want to mention Edwina Currie.  I was once at a protest against Edwina Currie in the mid-’80s, and it was like the Five Minutes Hate.  I was at the front of the crowd, and she stepped out of her car right in front of me.  This immediate face-to-face meeting completely disarmed me as I realised that, far from a hate figure, she was a fellow human being with her own subjectivity and consciousness.  Right then, I couldn’t conceive of her any other way.

Sartre might have sympathised with the notion of an NPC.  He was acutely aware of how some people act out a particular role rather too strongly, but I want to dwell not on that right now but on his take on the problem of other minds.  Sartre saw the very idea that the problem could be taken seriously as scandalous and symptomatic of what was wrong with Western philosophy.  Showing how this was a pseudo-problem, he imagined the following scenario, referred to as ‘The Look’.   Suppose you’re at the end of a long corridor spying on someone in a room through a keyhole  when you hear footsteps behind you, making you ashamed or guilty, and self-conscious.  None of that could happen without you assuming other minds.  The apparent issue of their existence or otherwise is a kind of abstract, cold-blooded issue which Sartre sees as irrelevant to properly engaged philosophy.

This can be used to introduce the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a French-Lithuanian Jewish philosopher.  Levinas is significant and worth reading for all sorts of reasons, not least his views on the nature of Jewish thought separate from its involvement with Hellenisation which might be helpful for Bible study, but for now I just want to consider his ethics of the face, and ethics as first philosophy.

Modify Sartre’s Look slightly.  Imagine you are driving along a deserted road in a remote area and you come across someone whose car has broken down at the side of the road.  That meeting makes an original demand on you before you consider anything else about the situation:  this person needs help, and you can provide it.  In fact, if you can, you should provide it.  These are the “ethics of the face”.  The face-to-face encounter makes an immediate ethical demand, and everything else can be built from that. Clear parallels can also be drawn with the Good Samaritan.

English is unusual in having only one word for “you”.  We rarely contrast “you” and “thou”.  When I chose my name, this was partly an attempt to overcome this, because if there are formal and informal versions of names, it gives one a clue as to the nature of one’s relationship, but it doesn’t work very well because the T-V distinction is a little different.  Even German speakers can be unsure, doing things like using the plural familiar form when they only know one member of a couple well.  There and in Hungary, they have a ceremony for thouing.

For Buber, pronouns occur in pairs:  I-It and I-Thou.  Each implies the existence of the other member of the pair.  Sie, and for that matter “a senhora” and “Usted”, are third person, and therefore correspond to I-It.  “It” here stands in for the other singular third person pronouns.  God is the eternal “Thou” and we are also each “thou” to God. Being omniscient, God knows us intimately. God asks for a face-to-face relationship, and demands we have face-to-face relationships with each other.  We must be “I-Thou”, although we must begin from “I-It” in order to reach “I-Thou”.

Sacred argument:  The Talmud comprises a series of nested commentaries on each page centred on the oral Torah, also known as the Mishnah, consisting of fewer than a hundred words per page.  Around this are Rashi’s commentary, around twice as long, the Gemara, a record of intricate debates on matters arising, written around the time of the Fall of Rome, and the Tofasot, Mediaeval European attempts to resolve conflicts between the other commentaries.  The Mishnah is about a tenth of the content.  The discussion is where the action is.  It’s the point of the whole activity and when the Talmud is studied, further discussion occurs around all of these.  There is a seven year daily cycle of Talmudic teaching which is considered inadequate by many Jews.

The I cannot exist without the Other.  This is true in practical terms:  we had to learn to speak and take care of ourselves, serve the community and so forth from others, often our parents.  Babies and children are of course vulnerable and dependent, although the point at which they begin to contribute varies according to culture and family ethos.

There must be sacred argument: authentic presentation and mutual respect with proper dialogue and without over-simplification.  In fact, it could be pursued by trying to construct and strengthen one’s opponent’s position and possibly by swapping positions, arguing for the opposite to your own opinion.  Loving and sacred argument.

The issue of first philosophy:

Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ is an attempt at epistemology as first philosophy.  A metaphysical foundation might be another option, where the likes of the nature of reality might be considered to be its basis.  Levinas took a different view, suggesting that philosophy should be based on ethics, and this is in fact also my position although I don’t know how similar it is as I might be reading my own views into his.

It’s very easy to build a self-serving system if you aren’t careful.  There’s a myth that male scholastic philosophers claimed women had no souls whereas men had.  This is a misrepresentation of what was actually said.  The Council of Macon in 585, despite claims to the contrary, did not claim that women had no souls.  This would have made no sense given the acceptance of, for example, martyrdom, female saints and of course Mary the mother of Christ.  Even so, it is very often the case that self-serving claims are made, and these are set into the presumed structure of reality.  I would posit such claims can dominate what we imagine are neutral, innocent world views.

To illustrate this, I want to talk about Jean Baudrillard.  who claimed that the 1991 Gulf War would not take place because it was sufficient that the media hype and representation of the imminent conflict occur and could replace any purported “reality” of the situation.  Then, of course, the Gulf War happened, but Baudrillard said it didn’t happen for the same reasons.  The reality of the war, whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of the situation politically, is that people suffered and died in countless numbers.  I would say that he’s wrong because his assertion is unethical, which also means the past is real.  You could say the world was created just now or the past is less real than the present.  Responding to these ideas is a possible philosophical exercise, but more importantly, they would allow, for example, Holocaust denial.  Hence it’s more important that it’s unethical to make such claims.

But there’s a problem.  If you are in a position of privilege, it may be salutary and magnanimous to examine what assumptions you might be making about the world.  However, how do you know you’re in that position?  Also, if you’re not, and you make concessions to others on the strength of assuming that you are, you could end up distorting your view of reality just as much as someone in that privileged position might without examining their assumptions.

Finally, I want to mention politics.  This is an ethical position.  Is it feasible to extend this into a political position which in some way transcends the likes of the left-right division?  I encountered Edwina Currie and was unable to demonise her.  What would the world look like if nobody demonised anyone?  What does this look like in view of the imperfection of the world and our tendency to sin?

Is Revelation A Source Of Knowledge?

This is not about the Book of Revelation, though as I typed it I realised it sounded like I was about to do some exegesis on the last book of the Bible. No, it means revelation in the sense of an experience of divine origin. The other thing is, this is something which I’ve been trying to sort out in my own mind for about fifteen years.

This may actually be quite a short post as it merely aims to pose a question, not to answer it.

I’ll start with a popular analytic definition of knowledge as justified true belief. A re-statement of this is that knowledge is belief which cannot rationally be doubted. There seem to be two sources of knowledge at this standard. One is direct experience. That is, although one might be dreaming, one cannot deny that one is currently experiencing a particular sensory quality when it’s happening. These are known as qualia: qualities or properties as experienced or perceived by a person. The singular is “quale”. Although the ringing in one’s ears may not reflect an actual sound and the odour of burning may be the result of an imminent stroke, the fact remains that one does have the relevant experience. This is not in doubt and cannot in fact be doubted rationally.

The other source of knowledge is logic and mathematics, or at least it seems to be. For instance, 2+3=5. This can be known. It can also be known that if it’s raining then it’s raining. One might also go on to claim that two parallel lines never meet by definition, but this is where a possible flaw in this source of certainty emerges, because it famously turned out that this was not so. Euclid’s Fifth Postulate, which attempts to establish this fact through logic, is oddly wordy and unwieldy, and this is because it turned out that the parallel line claim was not axiomatic but based on observation, and it further turned out that in actual physical space, parallel lines don’t always stay the same width apart and do in fact tend to meet at an enormous distance. Likewise, logic’s reliance on bivalent truth values may be a similar flaw as these may not be enough. There might be meaninglessness, for example, or tense-based truth: something might be true now but false in the future. All that said, logic and mathematics seem to be a good basis for certainty independent of experience: multivalent logic exists and so does non-Euclidean geometry. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the number of things which can be known from this source alone is infinite, so it isn’t true that a fairly extreme form of scepticism leaves one with knowledge of almost nothing.

Suppose, though, that you believe in an omnipotent source of reliable knowledge such as God. It doesn’t have to be God but I am of course theist myself. If you’re not, this will probably sound highly arcane and theoretical to you but you could look at this more as a thought experiment or perhaps something that can be applied to another force acting on consciousness and it may mean that it’s logically possible that what I’m about to suggest can happen. Anyway, here it comes:

If an omnipotent and omniscient entity exists, that entity would be able to create knowledge in the human mind. Henceforth I’m going to call that entity, theoretical or otherwise, God. Putting it simply, God can do anything, so God can make people know things. That means that God can remove doubt when something is true, and if there is a God, revelation can be a source of knowledge.

However, there’s a caveat here. God doesn’t do everything God can do. When I was a child, I saw a graffito on a fence post saying “I hate you”, and for some reason interpreted it as God’s message to me. Don’t ask me why. I rushed home rather distressed and came into the kitchen, where my mother was listening to a song on cassette called ‘Our God Reigns’. In my perturbed state I heard this as “Our God hates”. I asked her if God hated me and she laughed, replying, “No! God is incapable of hate!”. This didn’t reassure me much because I was aware that the concept of God included omnipotence, meaning that if God so chose, God could indeed hate. This is the prototype of a belief about God I have today that God is capable of anything, but doesn’t invariably act on that capacity. Hence God can hate but doesn’t, or at least God chooses not to hate humans. Applying this to the matter at hand, that would mean that God might be able to force us to know things but does not choose to do so. Hence we are left with confident belief at most rather than actual knowledge in the sense that God provides us with anything it’s rationally impossible to doubt.

To me, it seems quite invasive and controlling for God to cause this to happen in one’s consciousness. It seems to violate the principle of free will. However, it could be that God would respond to one giving consent to bring this about in some way. “God I believe: help my unbelief.” Would it happen then? Prayers are not always answered the way one might expect. It’s undoubtedly also true that omnipotence means God could create a feeling of complete confidence in something which isn’t so, which is not knowledge.

I think that’s the issue stated as clearly as I can, but there’s another approach to this based on the general use of language. In many cases, if we were to insist on exact meanings for words, they’d end up not referring to anything. Nothing physical is perfectly spherical, perfectly flat or perfectly smooth. Hence if I were to say something like “Here is a smooth one metre sphere resting on the flat upper face of a two metre cube”, it would fail to refer to any real situation because the “sphere” wouldn’t be perfectly spherical, exactly a metre in diameter or perfectly smooth, and it wouldn’t be resting on a perfectly flat perfect cube exactly two metres on an edge. Nonetheless I might seem to have referred to a situation correctly and usefully, and to be that nitpicky about language and reference is plainly silly. Now for the situation with God causing me to know something. Maybe my standard of what constitutes knowledge is too high with justified true belief. Maybe knowledge is just belief that is near enough to certainty that it would make no odds. Otherwise we’d be stuck with a concept of knowledge useless for a wide variety of practical situations.

So that is basically the question I’m asking and a few considerations related to it. It’s also something I asked a few times on Yahoo Answers of all places in the vain hope of getting a sensible answer. All I got in the long run was some legalistic moderator saying I shouldn’t ask the same question more than once, even though I asked it several years after failing to get a helpful answer. Ah well.

Star-tling Thoughts

I don’t know where to start with this one! The reason for this picture will eventually become clearer.

You probably know I’m panpsychist, which is linked to my veganism. I suppose the best place to begin is to account for this connection and the reasons for this belief, and also to describe what that belief actually is first of all, so here goes.

Panpsychism is the belief that matter is inherently conscious. In fact I’m not so sure about this definition because it might also be that space itself is conscious. I should point out further that my own version of panpsychism might differ from the usual version, and that it isn’t the same as hylozoism or pantheism. I usually employ an analogy with ferromagnetism, thus. Many elementary particles carry an electrical charge, including in particular quarks and some leptons. All such particles have magnetic fields, and a north and south pole which means they can be lined up by applying a magnetic field to them. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not magnets. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are lumps of iron whose magnetic domains are aligned. In this situation, the essential magnetic character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also magnets, such as the rare earth pickups used in electric guitars.

Consciousness is, in my view, similar. At least many and possibly all elementary particles are conscious, and in fact possibly all of space because of virtual particles. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not minds. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are wakeful humans with their particular bodily form and functions. In this situation, the essential conscious character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also minds.

There may also be a need to contrast this with pantheism and hylozoism. Hylozoism is the belief that everything is alive. This is not the same thing as most people would probably say that not all living things are conscious, such as bacteria and plants. It’s more like the belief that the Cosmos is an immense living organism, which to some extent I can get on board with because it’s a bit like the very liberal definition of acid which interprets almost all chemical reactions as reactions involving the action of an acid. It’s fine, but it’s not panpsychism. The other thing panpsychism isn’t, although I have some sympathy with it, is pantheism, which is the idea that God is everything. One issue with that belief is that it can be a kind of squeamish version of atheism which is afraid to call a spade a spade. I am personally not pantheist because God is unlike and not dependent upon any created (or sustained) thing. That doesn’t mean the Universe isn’t worthy of respect or that God is more like a human than the Universe. I don’t want to dwell on these distinctions, but it’s important they be made because many people think this is the claim I’m making.

Okay, so why do I believe this? Because there’s no other way of accounting for consciousness. All the other models – behaviourism, physicalism, psychophysical dualism, functionalism, idealism and anomalous monism – have massive flaws. I don’t want to go into them in depth right now because although I’m staking out a vague claim here, this isn’t the main point of this post. The claim that panpsychism isn’t a solution to the mind-body problem either is also fair, because it attempts to solve the problem by assuming what it’s trying to account for. Why would matter be like that?

This belief of mine has certain consequences. For instance, it makes me vegan but in a way my veganism is more extreme and sadder than most people’s because I accept that plants are also conscious and suffer. Hence veganism is just a kind of utilitarianism where suffering is minimised rather than a particularly positive way of life where no avoidable suffering and death is wrought upon the world. I constantly destroy bacteria too. We cannot be entirely non-violent but we should still strive to be as non-violent as possible, and partly for that reason it’s not my place to judge others. The world is a practically endless cycle of carnage in which we are all complicit. I’m vegan because eating animals or dairy products would involve an unnecessary extra step which would involve the death of more plants than just eating plants.

All this doesn’t generally occupy my mind much. However, a couple of things have come to light in the past week. One was that I met up with my ex and was presented with a first draft of an essay I wrote for my Masters:

I’ve already talked about my time at Warwick. The above essay is a reaction to a comment made by Christine Battersby near the beginning of that year. The reason I did my MA was to further pursue radical philosophy and help to provide a theoretical basis for progressive politics, and as I must surely have said elsewhere, it turned out that Warwick University’s primary activity seemed to be manufacturing excuses for why the political state of affairs was inevitable – capitalist realism in other words. I hoped that the Women’s Studies contingent would be better but although I very much liked their transphobia, they were also speciesist. Battersby claimed that consciousness depends on language use, so in other words if you don’t have a voice it doesn’t matter what happens to you. She was utterly focussed on humans and didn’t care about anything else. I’m not going to rubbish everything she says, because for example ‘Gender And Genius’ is a very interesting book, but there were a number of problems with her belief system, not least its incompatibility with more than a very limited anthropocentric version of veganism. If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, you need to check your privilege. Yes, I know that’s a cliché.

So that’s one. The other one is more widely interesting but no less personal. It starts, as so many things do, with Olaf Stapledon, “W.O.S”, whose name is associated with the works ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Star Maker’. The second is more relevant here. Neither of these books is really a novel, and in fact this statement is made at the beginning of the first. They are, however, both science fiction. The first describes the two thousand million year-long future history of the human race from 1930 onward. The second covers the entire history of the Multiverse, focussing mainly on our own Universe. Yeah yeah, big canvas, vast scope, origin of the adjective Stapledonian, but that isn’t what I want to concentrate on right now. The relevant bit at the moment is the way stars are portrayed. And I quote:

It isn’t clear whether W.O.S. actually believed this, but then again it isn’t even clear whether W.O.S. considered himself the author of these words for reasons I can’t be bothered to go into here, but there are two ways of looking at this taken at face value. One is hylozoism – stars are living organisms. In fact, in ‘Star Maker’, various things are living and sentient organisms which might not be considered so by most earthlings. The other is something close to panpsychism, at least if the star itself is considered a world. The outer layers of the star are conscious. The chapter goes on to claim that the voluntary movements of stars are identified by astrophysics as their normal movements as predicted by scientific laws and theories.

This sounds fanciful and outlandish, not to say unscientific and perhaps even superstitious. We don’t generally look at the stars at night and think of them moving around deliberately. In fact, apart from the fact of Earth’s rotation, most of the time non-astronomers don’t think about the stars’ proper motion at all. Eppur si muoveno – pardon my Italian. The formation and rotation of galactic arms is confounding in various ways. The most obvious of these is the one dark matter is evoked to explain. The velocity of objects in the outer margins of galaxies does not compare to those further in according to the mass of the visible portion of those galaxies, so it’s claimed that there must be invisible matter causing them to rotate faster than they should. Moreover, the spiral arms of galaxies are more like the bunches of vehicles in traffic jams, separated by sparsely-populated stretches of road, through which individual motorists move, than a kind of “formation dance” arrangement. Finally, and this is a more significant fact than may at first appear, stars of different spectral classes move at different velocities around the galaxy. At this point I should probably fish out the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram:

By Richard Powell – The Hertzsprung Russell Diagram, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1736396

It can be seen that stars are not randomly distributed by these criteria. There are, for instance, no small hot stars other than white dwarfs and there’s a general correlation between brightness and heat, the hottest stars being on the left of the diagram – O-type stars like Rigel. Hence their size and mass can be taken into consideration if need be. The cooler stars are on the right, and these are the interesting ones from the viewpoint of the very peculiar statement that has been quite recently been made about them by a respectable astrophysicist.

So here’s the thing: cooler stars move faster around the Galaxy than hotter ones at the same distance from the centre. This is called Parenago’s Discontinuity. More specifically, stars of spectral type F8 and hotter “orbit” faster. A few explanations have been offered for this apart from the rather obvious one I’m going to mention in a bit. One is that stars might be shining more brightly on one side than the other, and although light has no mass, it does have momentum and therefore can be used as a method of propulsion:

Another “sensible” explanation is that the stars emit jets of plasma which have the same effect, and there seems to be a third one that it’s to do with stars being slowed down as they move through nebulæ.

Okay, so another explanation has been offered by one Gregory Matloff. Matloff is a pretty respectable guy. He has a doctorate in meteorology and oceanography, a Masters in astronautics and aeronautics and a BA in physics. He’s authored various books, such as one on solar sails with Eugene Mallove – this is the very real technology of using reflective mylar sheets as a form of space propulsion by sunlight pushing on the “sail” thus formed, because as I said above, starlight has momentum which can be used as a power source. He’s currently a professor of physics. So this guy is not exactly like a Sasquatch chaser or UFOlogist – he has been involved in SETI but in a very dry, scientific kind of way – but has some respectable credentials. It should also be said that just because someone is an expert in their own field, it doesn’t mean their opinions are worthy of respect in other fields about which they know less. Immanuel Velikovsky seems to have been a competent psychiatrist but his claims about the recent origin of Venus as a comet are completely ridiculous and seem also to be motivated reasoning. Matloff is not like that so far as I can tell.

So why am I going on about this bloke then? Because he’s a panpsychist. Not only that, but he reckons panpsychism is a testable explanation for why cooler stars circle around the Galaxy more quickly than hotter ones. He believes that such stars are conscious and move around of their own volition. They don’t obey the laws of physics as we know them as precisely as they’d be expected to, but the extent to which they don’t is only like someone running for a hundred years and changing their velocity over that time by a couple of centimetres a second. This minimal degree of involvement reminds me of the Steady State Theory, which saw matter as continuously springing into existence at the rate of about two hydrogen atoms a year in a volume the size of the Empire State Building. Although, so far as I can tell, Matloff is open to the idea that the stars in question are adjusting their speed and direction using jets or changing their luminosity, he’s also open to the much more controversial idea that not only are they doing it deliberately but that they’re doing it by psychokinesis.

There comes a point in certain conversations where the “argument by incredulous stare” is deployed. This happens in a couple of philosophical areas, one of which is panpsychism and another of which is modal realism (the idea that the Multiverse is real). However, mere outlandishness doesn’t make something false and doesn’t constitute an argument against it. This is the fallacy of the argument from incredulity, much beloved of flat Earthers and Apollo mission deniers. It is, though, true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

A relatively good piece of evidence that this is in fact going on is found in the fact that only cooler stars do this. There are a number of ways to account for consciousness, one of which is the behaviour of the rings making up some of the molecules in nerve cell microtubules. These are part of the cytoskeleton, and it’s been suggested that quantum events associated with the p orbitals in aromatic moieties within tubulin, the protein they’re made of, is what consciousness is. If this is so, only similar phenomena would be able to manifest consciousness, although this could be functionally equivalent and not be made of the same stuff. If it actually does require that stuff though, stars couldn’t be conscious. Maybe they aren’t. Actually this needs restating: even if panpsychism is true, it doesn’t mean that consciousness would be manifest in stars, though stars could still be impotently conscious.

Matloff prefers to evoke the Casimir Effect. An example of this is the tendency of two metal plates very close to each other to pull towards each other. It’s an example of zero-point energy, which is the “free energy” supposèdly present in empty space. Whereas this energy undoubtedly exists, it doesn’t follow that it can be extracted and used, or that if it can that that would be a good idea – my naïve mind suspects that this would cause collapse of the false vacuum and the end of the Universe, but that’s just me and I might be catastrophising. If that’s true, though, depending on the size of the Universe and how common technological cultures are within it, it seems guaranteed that that can’t happen because we’re still here. Matloff claims that the Casimir Effect’s contribution to molecular bonds makes cooler stars conscious.

This next bit is going to sound like W.O.S. again. Stars are often too hot for chemistry. Atoms as such have trouble existing in many of them because they’re too hot for electrons to stay in orbitals around them, so the idea of microtubule p orbitals being associated with consciousness is a non-starter here. However, the upper layers of stars are cooler than their interiors and molecules can form in the cooler stars, i.e. those of spectral class F8 or below. Hence the proposition that consciousness becomes operable at the energy level below which molecular bonds exist because they are involved with certain molecular bonds implies that volitional behaviour in entities below that temperature would not be found in similar entities hotter than it. In a very crude sense, all living humans have body temperatures below 6300 Kelvin, or 6000°C. This is actually true. A human running a temperature above 6000°C would not be conscious but be superheated gas. Or would she? I don’t know. It’s counterintuitive that she’d be in good mental health.

Okay, so the idea is that stars cool enough to have molecules are conscious and have volition. They act deliberately. Evidence for this is that cooler stars travel through the Galaxy faster than they should. Incidentally, this also means the Sun is conscious, because it’s a G2V star, well below the threshold where consciousness is extinguished at this stage.

Now, unfortunately I have completely forgotten how I came to this conclusion but three dozen years ago or so, I realised that if panpsychism is true, psychokinesis must also be possible. I have racked my brains about this and cannot for the life of me recall my train of thought regarding this. It isn’t to do with anything like psychophysical dualism, although that would also strongly suggest psychokinesis in the most straightforward version of that model (bodies and souls). So I apologise for this irritating omission. This also means that my reasoning can’t be examined for this belief. I might just have been wrong. Also, it makes panpsychism testable: if it could be shown that psychokinesis is impossible, it would also refute panpsychism.

Stars being conscious isn’t the same thing as panpsychism being true or psychokinesis being possible. It could be that one of the other methods of transportation they could use is under their voluntary control, and that an alternative arrangement of matter found in cooler stars also confers consciousness, but merely in functional terms like a human being is often conscious.

The problem I have with all this is that I can’t decide if Matloff is serious, or if he is, whether he’s sensible. It’s true that I am panpsychist and nowadays I take it on faith that this implies that psychokinesis is possible even though I can’t remember why. However, there is a problem with this set of claims. There’s a thing called “God Of The Gaps”, which is the idea that God is simply used to explain anything we don’t understand. Thus before the theory of evolution was popular, people believed God created all species more or less as they are in historical times. This is not a good way to believe in God. Likewise, panpsychism could be evoked to explain a lot of things we don’t have good scientific theories for. For instance, dark matter is the usual explanation for why galaxies rotate faster than the visible mass in them suggests they should. Another one is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND). I don’t like the first explanation because it seems to me that dark matter is a conveniently inactive substance which has just been made up to plug the gaps in the model, although I am open to the idea that it might just be ordinary matter which can’t be seen such as rogue planets, dust, neutrinos and so on. However, it would be equally possible to say that stars simply move around galaxies faster than the ordinary laws of physics suggest because they’re using psychokinesis. In fact, maybe I’ll just decide that’s what I believe.

I can’t imagine these views being taken seriously in the astrophysics community. However, it is interesting that they are the same views as W.O.S. expressed in ‘Star Maker’ in 1937. ’Star Maker’ is a work of fiction. It gets certain things about astronomy and astrophysics completely wrong. At the time, it used to be thought that planets were formed when stars came close to each other and pulled elongated cylinders of gas out of their photospheres, which then condensed into gaseous or solid bodies, and that red giants were young stars in the process of forming. There’s clearly no omniscient authority telling W.O.S. what to write, or if there is it’s an unreliable narrator. W.O.S. does, however, portray himself as the true author of neither ‘Last And First Men’ nor ‘Star Maker’. He also narrates his own experiences in the third person in some stories, and the continuity between ‘Last Men In London’ and ‘Odd John’ suggests that he is not who he says he is. Is it possible, then, that certain ideas arrive in fiction from another source? Did W.O.S. somehow intuit that stars were conscious and did their own thing? I do have a very good reason for suspecting that this is true because of a certain paragraph in his ‘Odd John’, but because it suggests an ontological paradox and would cease to be useful as a message if I said what it was, you’re just going to have to trust me on this.

Leaving all that aside, I find it very hopeful to think of stars as living organisms, or as conscious beings. If that’s true, it means that whatever happens to this planet’s life because of what humans are doing to it, mind will continue to exist in the Universe, and in fact life, at least until the end of the Stelliferous Era, roughly one hundred million million years from now. After that, W.O.S. suggests other ways in which life and consciousness might survive and there are other suggestions about what might be possible in the very long term, but for now, if I can persuade myself that stars are conscious, I find the future to be very bright indeed.

My Jupiter Ace

Hoarding tends to be frowned upon. Of course, to the hoarder, it seems entirely sensible and “normal” to engage in the practice others describe in this way. Aristotle had something to contribute to this. He was the apparent inventor of the concept of the “happy medium” (which I think turns up in ‘A Wrinkle In Time’ but I may be misremembering). That is, virtues are the ideal position between two pairs of vices. Courage, for example, is between cowardice and recklessness. However, the happy medium is never exactly halfway between its corresponding vices. Courage is more like recklessness than cowardice for example. Likewise, tidiness is going to be closer to one thing than the other. Most people seem to see it as more like obsessive over-neatness where you can’t do anything for fear of causing a mess than slovenliness. To my mind, the happy medium is closer to messiness. Somebody writes psychiatry textbooks and manuals, and those people are likely to normalise their own methodical tendencies, which could manifest as excessive neatness, and therefore regard untidiness as problematic.

Now don’t get me wrong. It is problematic, and it’s also much easier to become untidy than it is tidy. Nonetheless, a couple of observations will be made at this point by that nebulous genetic subject which makes them appear objective by using an impersonal construction. One of them is that I collected old copies of the ‘Radio Times’, not to be confused with the ancient Greek philosopher Θεραδιοτιμης, for six years until my dad got annoyed with the clutter and had me throw them out. I doubt it was exactly six years, but at four dozen editions annually over half a dozen years that’s a couple of gross, and since each one costs £7.50 on Ebay, that’s over two thousand quid’s worth of magazines. I also still have a fair number of ‘2000 AD’ comics from 1977, which are worth a fair bit. I do not believe it was the right decision to throw these things out.

This brings me to the subject of this blog post: the Jupiter Ace, which I’m always tempted to call the “Joobrrace” due to the fact that it’s one of those terms you can use to practice rolling your R’s. I should point out first that the term “Jupiter Ace” has actually been used for two completely separate things. There’s the computer illustrated at the top of this post and there’s a band which had a minor hit in 2005 called ‘A Thousand Years‘. Although this is slightly confusing, I’ve long thought that the sleeve design for this single would work as the cover illustration for a computer manual:

Given the appearance of the ZX81 manual, can you not just see how this would work really well?

Leaving the band aside though, once upon a time, there were a lot of home computers, all unique. Each one had a personality of its own and was usually incompatible with all the others. They did, however, tend to have standard interfaces. I first paid close attention to microcomputers in 1981, and up until that point I’d made various assumptions about them which turned out to be untrue and, to me, rather startling. I had assumed that they would all use the programming language Pascal or something else. I was very surprised to find that they nearly all used BASIC. As far as I was concerned, BASIC was just a language for people just starting out in programming and wouldn’t be used on “proper” computers. This was in fact so on mainframes and minicomputers around this time. The languages I was familiar with, such as Algol-60, COBOL and FORTRAN, were a lot more popular on those, so I just assumed that those would be used on microcomputers, in ROM, so that they would boot into a development environment-like program which would then let you put lines of FORTRAN, say, in and compile and run the program. As I said, I assumed that Pascal would be the favourite because to me that language seemed to have a kind of contemporary vibe to it at the time. It was being pushed fairly hard, but initially, like BASIC, was intended as a language to teach programming rather than having serious use. In particular, the idea behind Pascal was that it should be structured – that the code could be read and planned easily and methodically, with blocks and control structures imposed on the user. By 1981, it had started to fall from grace because this very approach to structure restricted its flexibility. I’m not going to get all technical on you here because that’s not what I’m getting at, but in general I tended to be confounded by programming languages as they were presented because they didn’t seem to have any facilities for using things like sound and graphics, or even interacting with a CRT-style display, because they were designed for a world of punchcards and teletypes. It was all rather puzzling.

There were a few exceptions. For instance, going way back to 1975, IBM had introduced a desktop computer (not a micro as its processor occupied an entire board) which ran APL, “A Programming Language” based on symbols rather than words of which I happen to be a fan due to its lack of language bias and terseness. An APL-native micro also existed in the early 1980s, and APL was used to do the exploding and rotating Channel 4 station ident in 1982. The more expensive business machines also had no programming language firmware and the user would have to purchase a programming language as an additional piece of software, so the situation wasn’t just that BASIC was universal. There were also some home micros, such as the Microtan 65, which could only be programmed in machine code, and others which would boot into a “monitor”, which is a simple program with single letter commands for manipulating and viewing memory contents, and executing machine code programs either loaded or typed in by the user, as a series of hexadecimal numbers.

The standard practice of using BASIC in firmware on home micros usually went further than just the unextended form of the language. It was usually Microsoft BASIC, often in an extended form which constituted a de facto standard. There were other versions of BASIC, used particularly in British as opposed to American home computers, such as Sinclair BASIC used in the ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum, and BBC BASIC, which began on the BBC Micro and Electron but was later adapted for use on IBM PC clones and other machines such as the Tatung Einstein. It was also possible to buy alternative programming languages such as FORTH. And of course the mention of FORTH brings me to the main object of today’s discussion: the Jupiter Ace.

Clive Sinclair was apparently not a particularly easy person to work with. Shortly after the ZX Spectrum had been designed, a small number of employees, possibly just two, left the company to found Jupiter Cantab, apparently retaining their intellectual property on certain aspects of that phenomenally successful computer, and proceeded to design, manufacture and market a radically new machine, the Jupiter Ace, in autumn 1982. The hardware of the computer in question was not particularly special. It comes across as a cross between a ZX81 and a Spectrum, though without colour or true high resolution graphics. However, the really unusual thing about the Ace was that instead of having BASIC in ROM, it had FORTH. This is a highly idiosyncratic language with two distinctive features. Firstly, it uses Reverse Polish Notation. Instead of “2+2” it uses “2 2 +”. There is a structure in memory in most computers called the stack, which is a series of consecutively stored numbers originally used as addresses in memory to which a program will return. In FORTH’s case, a number typed will be placed on the stack and a “word”, such as “+”, will expect a certain number of values on that stack and operate accordingly, often depositing its own result on the stack for future use. Secondly, words are defined by the user instead of programs, consisting of other words, so for example, squaring a number could be defined thus:

: SQUARED
DUP * 
;

“DUP” duplicates the number on top of the stack, “:” opens a definition of a new word, in this case “SQUARED”, and “;” closes it. Thenceforth, typing something like “9 SQUARED” would put 81 on top of the stack and so on.

Advantages of FORTH include structure and speed. The standards at the time didn’t include floating point numbers, but the Ace had a few proprietary extensions which allowed them. They could’ve been defined by the user, but since the stack has to contain ordinary floating point values, it makes more sense to extend the user interface to recognise any series of digits with a decimal point as a floating point number. Unlike the BASIC available on most home micros at the time, Ace FORTH didn’t support text strings in an easily-used way, but it did have arrays and a text buffer and again, it could be modified to allow them.

The Jupiter Ace did very badly. Although it was an interesting device, it was let down by the absence of colour and poor sound. Although the keyboard was similar to the Spectrum’s, this was fairly normal for the time, but because it couldn’t have the Sinclair system of entire keywords being produced by a single keystroke, this meant it was in much heavier use, which made its cumbersome nature much more obvious. It comes across very much as the kind of computer which might’ve been produced in the late ’70s, though in a much better case, with better interfaces and a superior keyboard, such as the TRS80 Model 1 from 1978. Consequently, Jupiter Cantab went bust and sold off their remaining stock to Boldfield Limited Computing, which in turn reduced the price from £89.95 to £30. This happened in 1984.

Another thing which happened in 1984 was that Safeway opened a branch in Canterbury for the first time, leading to my first paid job, as a cashier at the age of seventeen. I was paid £1.41 an hour, which was a huge amount for me at the time. This was before minimum wage, but prior to that I’d only had a pound a week. I lost the job after only twelve weeks due to my unassertiveness. For instance, I was on the “9 Items Or Less” (sic) till but couldn’t bring myself to turn customers away if they brought whole trolleys of stuff, and I didn’t want to ask for extra change so I ended up paying people in pennies. However, in that time I succeeded in amassing enough cash to buy a Jupiter Ace, so around October time I received one, and at the same time I bought a 16K RAM pack to upgrade the memory to 19K. I can’t remember how much that cost, but the initial outlay would’ve been about twenty-one hours work.

Unlike most people who bought an Ace, although I found the FORTH interesting I actually got it as an upgrade. My previous computer, a 16K ZX81, which my father bought the whole family, was the absolute cheapest available computer at the time. It was ingeniously designed to be as cheap as possible, and that design rendered it rather atypical as a computer. For instance, to this day computers use the ASCII character set, although nowadays this is a subset of the much larger Unicode which includes most of what you might ever want to type, although I find it inadequate due to things like its lack of Bliss symbols, which I use extensively in writing. The ZX81, though, only used sixty-four symbols, including twenty-two graphics characters used to draw Teletext-style pictures, and it lacked lowercase letters and a lot of the usual graphemes such as “@” and “\”. It also defaulted to black text on a white background and had an unchangeable white border, and in its 1K version barely had enough memory to display a full screen of text, so it would skip the memory for lines less than thirty-two characters long. The screen also didn’t scroll unless you included an instruction to in the program, when it would scroll a single line, and the cursor for input stayed at the bottom of the screen. There was also no sound. However, because Sinclair had a fair bit of financial oomph behind it, they were able to design a large custom chip which did everything the computer needed apart from processing programs and storing information, and to this day I find this very impressive, because the total chip count is only five:

This is the kind of achievement which is impressive because of the limitations the available technology imposed upon the designers. It’s similar to the helical scan mechanism on a VCR in a way, in that only that inspiration even makes it possible.

By contrast, the Ace had a full ASCII character set with redesignable characters, single-channel pitch-duration sound, a proper scrolling screen and a white on black display like a “proper” computer. It also had slightly more memory. However, Jupiter Cantab were a tiny and impoverished company, so small in fact that their turnover, not adjusted for inflation, actually overlapped with my own turnover as a herbalist in the ‘noughties, though over that period sterling had halved in value. It’s remarkable to contemplate that the size of the company was less than one order of magnitude greater than our partnership. One practical consequence of this was that they were unable to have the kind of custom chip designed and produced for them which gave Sinclair the advantage with the ZX81 a year earlier and had to resort to discrete logic. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but I want to make the observation that this is a good example of how poverty is expensive. Instead of employing one chip, Jupiter Cantab had to use many:

Those smaller components on the right hand side of the board are mainly doing similar jobs to the large chip on the left of the ZX81’s, but there are many more of them. They also need to be soldered onto the printed circuit board, and it makes the design of the board more complex. This makes the whole computer more expensive to make, and unlike the Sinclair computers, only smaller numbers of components could be purchased, making them more expensive per unit. On the other hand, unlike the ZX81 and Spectrum, the Jupiter Ace is not really a “pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap” product because they didn’t have the option to make them cheaply. There are, even so, clear signs of cost cutting. The sound is produced using a buzzer rather than a speaker, which seems to be identical to the Spectrum. An odd design decision exists in a number of British micros, where rather than routing the audio via the TV speaker, a separate loudspeaker or unfortunately a buzzer was used on the motherboard, and I don’t know much about the design but that seems to me to add to the cost of the hardware while interfering with the quality of the sound.

The chips involved were bought off the shelf and are available to the general public even today. In order to replace a ZX81 ULA, the large chip on the left which does “everything” (it actually does less than the discrete logic on the Ace board because much of the work to put the older computer’s display on a TV is done via system software) has to be replaced by another large chip that does “everything”. With an Ace, there is a “right to repair” as it were, because all that need be done is for the malfunctioning chip to be located and replaced by another, very cheap, integrated circuit. In fact it’s still possible to build an Ace today from scratch with pretty basic equipment. It’s possible also to build a ZX80 in the same way, and since a ZX81 is, functionally speaking, just a ZX80 with different firmware, that can be done too, but not with only five chips and a simple motherboard.

The personal significance of the Ace to me, as a milestone in my life, is that it was the first durable and substantial product I bought with my own money. This landmark would for many people be followed by increasingly impressive and expensive things rather rapidly, ramping up over less than a decade to the likes of a car and a house. This never happened for me for reasons I can’t explain, and in fact if I knew why my life considered in such terms failed so badly, the chances are it wouldn’t have done. It’s probably connected to neurodiversity and mental health issues, but in any case it means this very cheap product bought nearly forty years ago has more sentimental significance to me than most others. I have now succeeded in buying a second-hand car, although I can’t drive so it’s for Sarada, and for most people this is the kind of thing they manage to do by the time they’re in their early twenties and they’d be able to drive it themselves. Hence the kind of failed product the Ace is reflects my own sense of failure in life.

There’s another, rather similar, aspect to this. I always tend to back the loser. Probably the most obvious example of this is that I’m a Prefab Sprout fan. This band is known mainly for a novelty song, ‘The King Of Rock And Roll’, which is about a band known mainly for a novelty song. It’s unintentionally meta. There are other aspects of their career which are like this. For instance, the lead singer and songwriter Paddy McAloon once penned and sang the lines “Lord just blind me, don’t let her innocent eyes reminds me”, and proceeded to go blind suddenly as he drove along a motorway. Fortunately he survived. Anyway, there would have been a point, back in 1982, when Prefab Sprout released ‘Lions In My Own Garden’, then some other band, maybe Lloyd Cole And The Commotions or Frankie Goes To Hollywood, had their own debut singles released, and somehow I get into the first and only to a limited extent the other two. Granted, most of this is down to the fact that most undertakings are unsuccessful, but for some reason my interest in something seems to be the kiss of death. Prefab Sprout and the Jupiter Ace computer were both critically acclaimed and enthused about with good reason: both were unsuccessful. I could name all sorts of other things which have a similar trajectory and about which I was quite keen at the time. What does this mean?

All that said, there is a sense in which the fortunes of the Jupiter Ace have now changed. Like the Radio Times, they are now a lot more valuable than they were when they first came out. They can go for more than a thousand quid each now. The trouble is, mine doesn’t currently work. I also suspect it’s fried, but it may not be. This is where something unexpected may come to my rescue.

I am, as you probably know a philosophy graduate. Most people say that it’s an excellent qualification for flipping burgers but in fact it isn’t because like many other people, I examined arguments for veganism while I was studying and became vegan as a result, so the burgers in question should probably be veggie. However, it is in fact useful in various ways, one of which is that you get to understand symbolic logic and Boolean algebra. There are various reasons for this, such as helping one understand the foundations of mathematics and distinguishing between valid and invalid arguments, but in any case logic is central to philosophy. While I was studying the subject, another student found that applying a particular technique to the design of digital circuits helped him simplify them and use fewer components. In general, there happens to be an enormous overlap between philosophy and computing. After the department was closed down, the logic and scientific method subsection of the department merged with computing, and as far as I know survives to this day.

One practical consequence of this is that I have no problems understanding how computers work, at least simple ones such as this, and a possible consequence of that is that it might even be possible for me to repair it and sell it. I should add, however, that mere knowledge of how the logic circuits, for want of a better word, work still leaves a massive chunk of ignorance about electronics in general. I do know why the machine is broken. It’s because the polarity of the power supply was reversed, meaning that current flowed in the wrong direction through the circuit, thereby damaging at least some of the components beyond repair. What I’m hoping, and I’m not terribly optimistic about this, is that the voltage regulator was destroyed but protected everything else. However, the cost of the components is such that it would still be cost effective to replace everything on the board, thereby ending up with a working Ace, since they sell for such a high price. This is, however, a philosophical issue because it amounts to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If everything which makes up the Ace is replaced by something else with the same function, is it still an original Ace? What does that mean about the value?

There’s something out there called a Minstrel:

This is an updated Ace. It costs £200 but has 49K memory rather than 19K and seems to be able to use USB storage. I don’t know much about it, but I am aware that it works with newer televisions. One of the differences between the two boards, other than the larger memory chips, is the absence of the silver and red Astec modulator, whose function is to interface with a conventional CRT television. Unlike many other cheap computers of the time, the Jupiter Ace had the rudiments of a monitor interface available without modification, although the signal needed to be amplified, and nowadays a modulator just gets in the way because it means you have to have an old-style TV as well.

Although it’s tempting to attempt to upgrade this computer I am under no illusions regarding my abilities and it would be good if I even ended up with a working model at the end. It would be interesting to know how much a non-working Ace would go for, but clearly a working one would be worth more.

This is the plan:

• Ensure a good connection between the Ace and a CRT TV via a cable.
• Use a ZX81 power supply to turn it on.
• If it doesn’t work, replace the voltage regulator.
• If it still doesn’t work, replace every component until it does.
• Sell it.

Right, so that’s it for today. I was going to talk about nostalgia a bit but I’ve probably bored you senseless.

On Being A Tube Worm

This is only going to involve a bit of light zoölogy.

That illustration above, of a polychæte worm called Chætopterus, looks quite fierce and jagged. In fact these animals are entirely innocuous to humans and we rarely encounter them, but I have at times become inordinately focussed on them. Although this is not really about them, they’re worth considering, so I’ll go into a bit of detail.

Any number of species of animal sit around all the time not doing very much, particularly in the sea and to a lesser extent in the much harsher environment of freshwater rivers, lakes and ponds. There’s no particular reason to single Chætopterus in this respect. It just happens to be one of those countless animals whose lifestyle involves doing very little other than filtering food out of water. The picture shows such a worm in a state it would rarely be in while alive, because in its burrow its chætæ would be lying flat against its sides, and they are by no means sharp or offensive weapons. It lives in a mucus-lined U-shaped burrow in mud or sand, although some of them live under rocks. The middle section has fans which draw sea water down towards them and the front makes a bag of mucus in which a bolus of food is formed, which it passes down its back towards its mouth. The current it creates also enables it to breathe, just as a fish’s gills exchange dissolved gases in a current. It’s completely blind, but oddly it also glows blue when disturbed. Any consciousness it has does not include the luminescence, so it can’t perceive that it does this and there’s no possibility of it being a signal between individuals of the same species. There are a couple of small species of crab who tend to share its burrow and they can’t live anywhere else.

Really, the point is not the animal itself, as it’s only one of many sessile organisms who do nothing but filter feed on the bottom of bodies of water. In some cases this is extreme, in the sense that they actually live kilometres down on the abyssal plains of the oceans, but on the whole their lives seem quite simple compared to our own. They just suck and eat. In the case of Chætopterus they also have separate sexes, but even simultaneous hermaphrodites generally benefit as a species from combining their gametes with other individuals. It is worth asking how a sexual animal that just lies there all day can reproduce and whether this contributes to the richness of their life experience. Females release a chemical which stimulates the males to release sperm, which in turn stimulates the females to release eggs. In both cases this is done by rupturing the body wall, so in a sense both sexes explode with pleasure, and we might imagine this as orgasmic. The gametes then combine in the water, becoming planktonic larvæ, most of whom are presumably eaten, possibly by adults of the same species. Being a tube worm is not like being human. The presumed death of the parent worms conveniently gets them out of the way for the next generation, preventing them from hogging resources such as food and substrate, and is pretty normal for thousands of animal species. It means that they are all absentee parents and orphans, and they substitute parental care with prodigious physical reproduction.

It seems to be an easy life. It also seems to be the kind of life which, if lived by a human being, would lead to our swift demise. There are trivial ways in which this is true: for instance, obviously no human is going to live very long buried in the seabed trying to breathe water. However, on the whole it’s a very inactive life, and although there are overuse injuries, often acquired by athletes, humans more often suffer as a result of physical inactivity or disuse: “use it or lose it”. In the richer parts of the planet, many health problems are associated with not doing very much physically, although the situation is very different in the global South, and has historically been elsewhere. Yet there are many animals who do best when left alone.

In a way, the life of a polychæte worm buried in silt all her adult life is idyllic. On the other hand, harnessing the probably instinctive taboos humans have about mucus, what she’s “actually” doing is very similar to picking her bogies and eating them, because the dust we inhale which gets trapped in our nostrils by the mucus and is then sometimes disposed of by people “picking their nose and chewing it” as the song has it, is how she keeps body and soul together. An odd thought in a way, and also a disgusting one. She also lives in a tube of congealed mucus. There’s another question here. Is this tube to be considered part of the animal’s body or is it just a container? Also, if it’s the latter, it could be considered to be clothing for worms in a way, so humans are not the only clothed species, although caddis fly larvæ cases are a lot closer to what we do.

The inevitable issue of consciousness arises. As a panpsychist, I am going to say that of course this species is conscious. There’s even a central nervous system including a brain. Some polychætes, notably peacock worms, react a hundred times faster than we can, which makes them superior in that one respect. I don’t know if this is true of parchment worms (which is what they’re called because of the texture of their tubes) as they don’t seem to need to respond so quickly to a stimulus. Their companion crabs use their burrows to hide from predators, so it’s probably quite a dull life from that perspective too. Nonetheless they can sense the pheromones in the water, seem to make some kind of decision as to when to release them, also choose when to move the lump of food and mucus towards their mouths and do something which results in them glowing blue when they’re threatened, although that could in theory be passive. There also seems to be some awareness of the passage of time, or of the right conditions coming about, in the female initiation of the reproductive sequence. However, thinking of our own puberty, although there is a correspondence between life events and hormonal changes, they aren’t, at least straightforwardly, under conscious control. The endocrine system has parallels to the nervous system and even uses some of the same compounds such as adrenalin, but only one appears to involve consciousness clearly. All that said, maybe there’s a shadowy, or not so shadowy, consciousness within our endocrine and immune systems, and maybe they’re even linked to what we think of as our nervous system-based consciousness. After all, almost nobody who remembers or experiences it would say puberty doesn’t pack an emotional punch, and this is just one example of a hormonal event, albeit a near-universal one.

The SF writer Philip K. Dick introduced the concept of “zebra”. Based on the idea that zebra stripes are a form of camouflage, which they probably aren’t, PKD conjectures that although we may be aware of camouflage which works well to fool other species into not noticing particular organisms, there could also be a successfully camouflaged entity which completely deceives all human beings. Although it’s almost impossible for this to be a scientific possibility, because the idea is that it is in principle impossible to observe this entity, nothing seems to rule it out, and there’s also an element of humility in the idea that we humans may be as subject to being deceived as any other animal. There are very clear examples where we know we’re being fooled some of the time, as with the likes of flatfish and cuttlefish who can change colour and hide themselves visually, and the way cricket chirps seem to come from a different direction than the actual cricket is a similar happenstance, but the rational possibility exists that there could be something we will never see or know about. Our sensory world is quite restricted in various ways, notably due to our practically non-existent sense of smell, and it seems feasible that a dog, for instance, would be able to smell our fear or a change in odour when we get certain types of cancer. We don’t know what tricks or senses are possible which are not available to us. Hence what are the chances that, just as Chætopterus glows blue when threatened, presumably scaring off some potential predators, we also have an adaptation which serves a function for us but of which we are completely unaware, even in principle? It needn’t be something particularly exotic. Maybe we emit an aversive odour when we’re afraid which deters predators, and dogs can smell it but are not averted.

Carefree lives are probably rare, and I’m thinking of all animal lives here, possibly more than that. I was clearing up some lumber earlier and a spider fled across one of the planks. I think it would be a failure of empathy to deny she was afraid. Whether that’s actually so is another matter, but the benefit of the doubt should be exercised on most occasions. If you see an animal of whatever size or phylum moving as fast as they can away from an obvious threat, it makes sense that that’s how they’re feeling. I could go on, but I won’t. The observation was once made to me that in the past, every human adult’s life involved being afraid, hungry and tired almost all the time, and the same still applies to the rest of the animal kingdom. I’m not entirely sure this is true of humans because they were on top of things, but it does occur to me that childbirth and parenting of small children at least seems to resemble that more closely than most of the rest of human life in an industrial or post-industrial society for most White able-bodied wealthy (etc) humans.

There used to be a pair of wood pigeons which nested in a sycamore tree outside our house. During discomfortable conversations with Sarada I used to look at them and imagine they had an easy, simple, happy relationship raising chicks and letting them free into the adult world. They came back at least once. Then it became clear that the sycamore was sending roots under the neighbours’ house and causing damage, and it was deemed that the tree be felled. This was not while they were nesting in it, but it occurred to me that they might return to their haunt the next year and find it gone, so their life wasn’t really as blissful as all that, thanks partly to us. Probably most of a wood pigeon’s life is nasty and miserable. The average lifespan of the species in the wild is three years, but they can live for more than seventeen in captivity, demonstrating the difference between potential and reality. A house mouse can be expected to live an average of eighteen weeks but could live to be a year and a half. I don’t know if these figures are skewed by infant mortality. This was probably never true of humans or their childhoods would have to have been a lot shorter than they generally are, but it shows how hard life generally is.

But the thing is, maybe life for humans is supposed to be hard. Not for us that nice cosy mucus-coated burrow in the mud. Something about our very existence might have to be difficult for us to live at all. When I consider our granddaughter, I’m acutely aware that she is happy and carefree much of the time, or so I imagine, but thinking back at my own childhood I can remember that at the age of ten I traced back what I worried about and found that worry had been my constant companion for as long as I could remember. That might be me of course, but I don’t think childhood is the happiest time of most people’s lives, or rather, I don’t think childhood is usually happy. It might be that adulthood has more potential for happiness but maybe it doesn’t get realised. Nor do I think poverty is the sole culprit here because many wealthy people are thoroughly miserable, not necessarily because of their wealth but because that’s what life is like. On the other hand, maybe that’s just what we’re supposed to believe because human life could be a whole lot better but it isn’t, though not because of non-human influences.

They shoot horses. I don’t honestly believe it’s kinder to do so because there are examples of horses who were able to recover from serious limb injury, but it is also true that to a considerable extent a horse is a running being, and not being able to do so is psychologically and physically injurious. Humans need to be good at being human, but it isn’t always clear what that involves. We don’t, then, benefit from living in slimy holes on the sea bed, but what do we benefit from?

I’m not totally clear what I’m getting at here. Maybe I should’ve thought about it a bit longer, or maybe you can tell me.

The Continuation Of Political Theory By Other Means

There are certain issues with certain people’s opinions of certain works. Consequently I’m going to push the details of what this post is about exactly beyond the fold, but not beyond the pale.

The only thing I know about Carl von Clausewitz is that he said “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. He also said “the best form of defence is attack”, “the enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan” and “to secure peace is to prepare for war”. However, this post is not about von Clausewitz. It’s about two fairly famous related works, one based on the other, both fairly thoroughly misunderstood and one also unfairly dissed: ‘Starship Troopers’.

Up front I’m going to say that I disagree strongly with the political philosophy of Heinlein’s novel although I do have quite a bit of sympathy with the idea. As for the film, something terrible seems to have happened to its reputation, and bearing in mind that Verhoeven is also reponsible for ‘Robocop’, also quite misunderstood, and ‘Total Recall’, it’s fairly obvious that if you think he meant for it to be a pro-totalitarian or pro-Fascist film, you’ve got it completely wrong. There’s also the issue of identifying what Heinlein intended with Fascism or even totalitarianism and whether it’s a thought experiment or direct advocacy for his political beliefs. The whole thing is a bit complicated really.

Just to introduce the two then:

Robert A Heinlein is a front-ranking English language science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century CE along with the politically very different Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. Among other things, he wrote military science fiction, and I’ve found everything I’ve read by him to be very readable and a page-turner. However, I haven’t read much of his work because he has a reputation for being right wing. Asimov is a liberal and was even invited to join the Communist Party, which he turned down. Arthur C Clarke has a religious bent and was heavily influenced by Stapledon, and is of course British. Heinlein supported the Vietnam War, although he also ran for office as a Democrat as a young man. He’s influenced, as are many other SF writers, by his experience of the Second World War. He served in the Navy during the previous decade and as an engineer in the War itself. Like many other people, he drifted to the Right as he got older but unlike some others, he was always politically active, from his Democratic years in the 1930s at least up to 1959’s ‘Starship Troopers’. He believed very much in military government. However, weirdly, his ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ was very popular with hippies and the counterculture, and he regarded himself as a libertarian who was close to being anarchist. He has a beguiling talent for making his worldbuilding seem believable and reasonable to the reader. I have a sneaking admiration for his work even though his politics are in some ways very distant from my own. He’s also very character-centred and “human”. A better word borrowed from this century’s parlance might be neurotypical.

‘Starship Troopers’ is one of a series of his works driven by a political perspective, and it’s arguable whether it’s his or not. He may simply be setting up an idea and seeing how it works through the plot as a thought experiment, but my impression is that he takes it pretty seriously and I think it probably is what he actually believes. I’m not familiar enough with his writing or life to say too much from an informed perspective. I’ve read ‘I Will Fear No Evil’ and ‘The Door Into Summer’, ‘Beyond This Horizon’, ‘The Number Of The Beast’ and I’m not sure what else. The first is actually quite a strong influence on my view of the nature of personal identity, so there we have it, a right wing author forms a plank of one of my most fundamental philosophical stances which has a major influence on my life and those of the people around me. That novel is the reason I disagree with Derek Parfit’s views. He’s considered the most important and seminal writer of genre SF, establishing many of the central tropes of what outsiders tend to think of as science fiction. Heinlein’s heroes tend to balance the physical and the mental in that they don’t shrink from using violence but are also powerfully intellectual. Being close to pacifism, I hope I don’t need to state that I disagree strongly with the specifics here but also consider one of the major virtues of Yoga that it does the same, though very differently.

‘Starship Troopers’ is influential in two different ways. As well as its political theory, it was a factor in the establishment of the Mecha subgenre of Anime, although Gerry Anderson is also an influence here. Besides that, I would say it promoted military SF, although in a way that’s part of the same thing. The powered exoskeleton, a wearable machine that enables one to exert greater strength than one would alone, already existed before 1959, the year the novel was published, but would probably not have been so widely adopted without his work, for better or worse. But today I want to talk about the other influence.

I get the impression I’ve mentioned this before on this blog, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself (apparently I am to some extent). The basic premise of the novel is that in order to vote, one must serve in the military for at least two years, and violence is seen as a legitimate solution to problems. The reason for this is that liberalism ruined society and it was basically scientifically established that violence had a rightful place in human affairs. It’s probably obvious that I completely disagree with this but at the same time I find his views and the way he illustrates and argues for them fascinating. The novel is partly a propaganda piece defending the Cold War and using the aliens as a symbol for Red China, but it goes deeper than that. Heinlein clearly maintains that there is something central to human nature which makes it impossible for Communism to work, and that for us, a species for which Communism would work would seem utterly abhorrent and a threat. It’s like our instinctive dislike for insects is linked to an innate repulsion to socialism. And that’s interesting, because apparently research has shown that Right wing people make a stronger connection between disgust and moral judgement than Left wing people. I would disagree with this to some extent because I think there are different ways to be Right wing and some of them have nothing to do with prejudice against marginalised groups, at least consciously, and to say they have subconsciously is to presume to know the minds of the people with these views better than they know themselves, which is quite an arrogant position unlikely to lead to empathy and therefore any kind of helpful dialogue. It is nonetheless interesting that Heinlein makes this equation.

I’m not interested in defending a slave-owning democracy. That said, the democratic nature of ancient Athens meant that the people voting for or against war were doing so in the full knowledge that it would be their own lives on the line if they chose to pursue a belligerent policy. This is no longer the case in Western democracies. Nowadays, people who join the military are unlikely to get anywhere near the levers of power unless they’re already privileged. There was a time when the monarch led their troops into battle, but this seemed to end because of the risk to a particularly valued member of society, and at a time when the fate of millions was tied up in that individual’s fate it did make sense to stop doing this, regardless of the wisdom of having such a social order exist in the first place. If that’s a given, it is a rational decision, but it means that the choice of life and death can be made without personal risk. This is the central issue in the novel. In order to earn the right to vote, one must be prepared to put one’s life on the line to defend the body politic.

It’s also light years away from my political beliefs, but precisely because it’s so radically different, the questions asked are in the same realm as my own. My personal belief is that political obligation cannot be derived legitimately but is instead imposed by force, by a government holding a monopoly on the threat of violence. We’re born in territories claimed by governments which most people have never freely consented, because there is no way of opting out without severe personal cost in financial or other terms. There is no hospitable place to which one can move in order to avoid the coercion of government. There are the high seas, Antarctica and war zones, and that’s probably it for this planet. Of course, one reason those places are inhospitable is that there’s no state or other organisation making them more habitable, but when that happens, there are strings attached. It’s a valid argument to say that your life depends on the state, because for example one might be born in a hospital run by the government, go through schooling provided by it, be protected from the threat of violence by a police force and eat food brought to you by road and rail built by them. There’s also the question of compromise, because the chances are nobody will agree with you politically 100%, so you have to comply with the law of the land even if you weren’t a member of the party which brought a particular law into being and would never vote for them. The law also often coincides with morality. I don’t actually think it would be okay to kill or steal, or for that matter drive dangerously, which in my case actually means driving in any way at all. Nevertheless, there is no other choice, and the absence of that choice means that the only ultimate reason to obey the law is that it’s enforced by potential violence and loss of freedom, and in some countries loss of life.

Heinlein poses the right question but gives the wrong answer. His answer is diametrically opposed to mine. He has one of his protagonists express the opinion that violence is often the answer, which I disagree with, but I agree with his opinion that exercising the franchise is in a sense a form of violence. I do vote. In doing so, I’m not entirely pacifist (and incidentally therefore not entirely vegan, which is close to pacifism) because I am engaging in action which endorses the state’s monopoly on violence. Heinlein, amazingly, has got this absolutely right. Of course, the alternative of not voting is irresponsible and the powers that be can sometimes be very keen on the idea of people not voting and therefore it may be in their interests to encourage cynicism about politicians as public servants, because that way one loses the ability to discriminate between better and worse politicians and the actual point of having a democracy, such as it is. However, I’m not completely pacifist anyway because I honestly believe violence was the only way Nazism could be defeated and I don’t want to impose my values as a privileged White Westerner on other, more heavily oppressed people whose experience has led them to conclude that armed insurrection is the only effective answer. After all, it doesn’t actually make their violence less legitimate than that of the armed forces, and there’s moral complexity in both.

Heinlein’s system works in detail like this: you are not born destined to have the right to vote. At the age of eighteen, everyone of sound mind can make the free choice to serve in the armed forces for at least two years, during which they have no freedom. If war breaks out during this period, this is extended for the duration of the conflict. Even a blind paraplegic can serve, although it would be hard to find tasks for which they’re suited. Because of the wide range of abilities, the government has had to provide some kind of work, usually dangerous and unpleasant but always necessary, for every potential citizen. Once one’s term of service is over, provided you haven’t been killed, you not only have the right to vote but the obligation to do so unless you break the criminal law. However, any interruption of service will permanently lose you the opportunity even if you sign up again.#

Now, this has been compared to fascism, and the absence of possible other forms of service which can’t be integrated with the armed forces is ignored. It means that a pacifist has no right to vote, which to Heinlein’s mind is entirely fine because a pacifist doesn’t have the defence of a democratic government as their highest principle. Of course it isn’t actually fine and it assumes that every member of society benefits enough from the social order to defend it. To be fair, the society in question is depicted as having no racism or sexism as Heinlein understands it, although of course this is to the mind of a White male American living in the mid-twentieth century and in fact there are sexist and racist elements in the book as written. In some situations, women are seen as more suitable for particular front line rôles in the military, such as spaceship pilots, because they’re more able to stand the G forces involved and are usually smaller than men, but they also need to be good at maths to do this, and again there’s no suggestion that they wouldn’t be just as capable as men. Racism is seen as small-minded and excessively focussed on local concerns. I mean, he does try, and his society is in fact one where ethnicity and gender are not barriers to success or enfranchisement so this could be fair given his assumptions. Whether it’s possible to get there from here is another question.

Non-citizens are not considered intellectually or morally inferior. These are people who can’t vote because they have not done military service. They do, however, pay tax, so this is taxation without representation. That said, being a taxpayer does give one some rights as to how the government spends one’s money and you can be wealthy and entrepreneurial, and have high status without also having the right to vote. Non-citizens may regard involvement in politics as a dirty business they don’t want to be involved in, and this is quite a common attitude in liberal democracies generally. The government and armed forces don’t encourage people to join up. If anything, they discourage them. They’re given forty-eight hours leave as a cooling off period immediately and many of them never bother coming back, which bars them forever from citizenship. They place severely injured ex-combatants as recruiting officers in order to demonstrate the potential price of service. Future citizens absolutely go into this with their eyes open, so to speak, and it’s very much a free choice.

This is also very much a society in which veterans are respected, which contrasts starkly with our own. There aren’t likely to be any homeless vets here, for example. Not only is a very large component of adult society ex-forces, as was the case with men in the post-war era probably somewhat formative in Heinlein’s thought in preparing the novel, but also they’re generally fairly respected, except for the fact that politics is considered by many non-citizens as getting one’s hands dirty and therefore not particularly worthy of respect. Also in this society there are as many female veterans as male, so there is less balance there among those who can vote. The brutalising effect of being trained to kill and the tendency to make irrational decisions in the heat of the moment which then become set in stone because of the high price paid for them, such as the death of one’s friends or one’s own serious injury. People who haven’t been through this psychologically damaging experience have no say in how the world is run.

On the other hand, Paul Addison’s ‘The Road To 1945’ made the case for the Second World War causing the rise of the welfare state and the NHS. Rico, in the novel, is from a rich background but is treated just the same as everyone else, and it’s been claimed that the mixing of people from different social strata led to a fuller appreciation on the part of the more privileged of the lot of the lower orders. There was also more trust in giant publicly-funded projects. One thing I’m interested in but haven’t looked into yet is whether there’s a connection between the large governmentally-organised hospitals and public servant healthcare workers who must have existed at the time, and the establishment of the NHS. Maybe a society run entirely by veterans would have this aspect to it as well. It led to a historic Labour victory.

This society, then, doesn’t seem fascist. Even so, the implicit attitude to pacifism does come close. One’s supreme duty is seen as being to the state, which is the simple definition of fascism I feel most drawn to, although I admit that’s because it’s simple and not because it’s accurate. But as far as I know we don’t get to find out if it’s pluralist or not. It’s possible that there are no longer political parties because government aims at unity of purpose, which means in a sense that it’s a one party state. We do, however, know that it isn’t Communist, because the Pseudo-arachnids are portrayed as Communist and suited to it, and there are clearly private big business ventures. Pseudo-arachnids are contrasted with humans. They are portrayed as a perfectly communist society and were a stand-in for the Maoist Chinese government and possibly people in the book, except that in reality Heinlein seems to have seen Communism as unsuitable for the kind of organism which human beings are, so if anything Pseudo-arachnids are more Communist than any human group could ever be. The novel also has the Skinnies, humanoids in league with them initially but possibly through mind control rather than willingly and who switch sides later on.

The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like . . . a giant, inteliigent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites: they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo.

Hence Heinlein, or at least Juan Rico, believes that humans are not adapted to thrive under a communist system. As an ex-Stalinist, I can remember sympathising with Stalin’s idea that it was worth sacrificing a whole generation of the human race for utopia, but I don’t believe that he was trying to do that. That is, I’m sure he was persecuting a generation of the Soviet peoples (plural) but not for the sake of utopia in the long term.

The Pseudo-Arachnids (I’m not calling them “bugs”) have certain features which makes it “okay” to be speciesist against them. I’m pretty sure Heinlein is on record as saying that we will find that there are intelligent life forms in the Universe whom it’s practically our duty to exterminate because they will be essentially inimical to the human race. Making something look and behave like a giant arthropod stimulates the human disgust instinct as expressed in Torah with its list of treyf animals (but for locusts, probably because they eat all the crops so we may as well eat them). If you start with a real human target for racism and use it for propaganda purposes to distract and divide the populace, you have to impose negative stereotypes on a pre-existing set of individuals, and it’s therefore important to prevent people from getting to know them and realising they aren’t as they’re portrayed or a mass of individuals, but the Pseudo-Arachnids are carte blanche. Heinlein can write whatever he wants about them and they plainly are the “yellow peril”. But this presumably means that back in the twentieth century, in his real world, he can see that Communism isn’t working for them because they’re human and have the same proclivities and instincts as WASPs. For the purposes of the novel we can be confident that Red China could not endure because of human nature, which not only prevents Communism from functioning properly but also leads to its downfall. This is actually quite historically deterministic, which is a fixation of Marxism. For the Federation, history does have a direction and a scientific basis. It just doesn’t go in the direction of Communism.

There is plenty more to say about the novel, but its influence means that it’s also worth moving on. It’s said to be responsible for the Mecha (メカ) subgenre of anime, also known as ロボットアニメ (robotto anime) such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, and of course it also has a manga version. Indigenous Mecha pre-dates ‘Starship Troopers’ by a couple of decades, but was clearly influenced by both ‘Thunderbirds’ and the novel. There is, for example, an OVA mecha anime based on it called 宇宙の戦士 – Uchuu no Senshi – ‘Warriors of the Universe’. There’s also a board game released in 1976 and re-released as a tie-in to the film, a tabletop game, possibly an RPG, and of course the film and its apparently execrable sequels, a TV series and a 21st century video game. The only one of these I’m familiar with is the first film. I don’t want to judge the sequels without watching them but I also don’t want to watch them. The first sequel has a rating of 3.6 on IMDb, which isn’t encouraging, but of course everyone else can be wrong. I suspect what they’ve done with the sequels is cash in on the misinterpretation. I also think there’s a myth established that when the first film came out, it was misinterpreted as pro-fascist. This didn’t happen in my recollection, and I think I’m going to have to address this before anything else.

2020s fans of the film seem to make the claim that it was initially seen as almost fascist propaganda and a bit brain-dead. This, I think, is a kind of superiority thing we get nowadays where, to quote Professor Frink of ‘The Simpsons’, “No you can’t play with it! You won’t enjoy it on as many levels as I do.”. This is pretty sucky, and doesn’t reflect how it was actually received at the time. When it was first released, it was seen in the context of other Vehoeven films such as ‘Robocop’ and ‘Total Recall’. They all have a kind of grey clunky look to them, which I don’t think is merely due to contemporary influence. His films do seem to have a tendency to be misunderstood though. They’re kind of brainy action films. ‘Robocop’ is about the dehumanisation brought on by masculinity, rampant capitalism and corporate power. ‘Total Recall’ is about identity, capitalism and the nature of reality. There are other films of his I haven’t seen with more sexual themes and I don’t know about those but ‘Starship Troopers’ is in the same vein as the two just mentioned. Verhoeven has said that a major theme is that “war makes fascists of us all”. That was also how it was understood by many viewers at the time, though not all.

In a sense, the film isn’t so much about Heinlein’s philosophy as expressed in his novel as the circumstances likely to give rise to belief in such an ideology, or perhaps the result of a society run along those lines. It basically makes you root for fascists, then confronts you with the fact that it’s done so and gets you to ask yourself why. It brings out one’s inner fascist and criticises her. Several interludes in the film take the form of propaganda films modelled after ‘Triumph des Willens’ and ‘Why We Fight’. Like the novel, it’s a Bildungsroman, or rather a coming of age film in this case, following several teens out of high school, all of whom enroll in the forces and pursue their careers very successfully. Verhoeven only read something like the first two chapters of the book, so some people argue that it can’t be a real adaptation. It’s also been compared to ‘Full Metal Jacket’.

One of the major influential innovations in the novel, the powered armour, is completely absent from the film. There are many other differences, but there would probably have to be because the novel is a lot more cerebral. The film definitely goes for deliberate corniness. The initial flashforward is to the barren Pseudo-arachnid homeworld Klendathu rather than an urban Skinny environment. The mobile infantry are lower-tech. Carl is not psychic but is an electronics genius. Dizzy is female and doesn’t get killed in the first chapter. This actually changes things quite a bit as in the book the women are pilots, not ground forces. Rasczak survives well into the second half of the film rather than having died in the backstory and is merged with the teacher character Dubois. The film Johnny Rico is from Buenos Aires along with his family and both his parents get killed in an asteroid impact, along with the rest of the population of the city, giving Rico, Dizzy, Carmen and the rest a major personal grudge against the Pseudo-arachnids. In the novel, Juan’s father joins up because his wife was killed in the attack on Buenos Aires and Rico ends up as his commanding officer. The Pseudo-arachnids are generally less intelligent although there is a more intelligent caste.

It feels to me very strongly that in the film, the asteroid strike on Buenos Aires is a false flag operation to start an aggressive war against the Pseudo-arachnids. Klendathu is on the opposite side of the Galaxy to Earth so the asteroid would have to travel 80 000 light years to get to us, leaving ample opportunity for interception, and it doesn’t make sense that the asteroid would be sent from their system rather than be perturbed in this one to hit Earth. The attack on Klendathu, I also suspect, was deliberately lost. They engineered an attack on the home world in order to guarantee three hundred thousand deaths and provoke the human race into hatred and xenophobia. But maybe not. Maybe the government simply underestimates the abilities of the aliens due to its own xenophobia.

The young and central characters are all pretty people and we’re made to care about them. This establishes a deliberately superficial æsthetic contrast between them and the Pseudo-arachnids, so there’s an implicit criticism of the audience’s prejudice. What appear to be tactical shortcomings in the film may not be. There’s a planetary asteroid defence system which is not used against the asteroid which destroys Buenos Aires. The news report is deliberately gory. The Federation clearly doesn’t want the war to end. However, the society itself is remarkably egalitarian. The new Sky Marshall (i.e. Federation president) is a Black woman, there’s a mix of ethnicities who are clearly equally treated and the mix of women and men in the military and society is clearly not gender-based, less so in fact than in the novel. Violence between humans is considered normal and acceptable. There are public executions. Perhaps one of the interesting differences in the film is the emphasis on media manipulation.

Social Darwinism is a theme. One of the catchphrases is a quote from a real soldier in the book:

Come on you apes! Do you want to live forever?

– Unknown platoon sergeant, 1918.

The battle wipes out less suitable soldiers and the upper ranks of the military carry out their own eugenics by using live ammo in training exercises and shooting cowards in the battlefield. The centrality of the heterosexual romantic relationships is also about breeding in the long run. A parenthood licence is also mentioned, which is a bit strange since Rico’s parents are non-citizens.

It’s never clear what one should do when one produces a cultural artifact which is open to being taken in a way which conflicts with one’s values. One doesn’t want to talk down to one’s audience, viewership or readership, and Verhoeven doesn’t, but the result is that it has tended to be taken in a way which is opposite to his beliefs. Two other films seem to stick out as fitting into that category quite easily. There’s ‘V For Vendetta’, which seems to be taken as a rallying cry by Conservatives, and an older film, ‘They Live’, which is taken by neo-Nazis as an allegory for a Jewish conspiracy to run the world. It’s difficult to know what to do with these takes. In some cases, they might expose common ground between different political perspectives. It’s like the film is an equation which different variables can be plugged into, but perhaps the misinterpretation of ‘Starship Troopers’ is more about being overtaken by the propaganda-influenced direction than seeing it as a metaphor for different political views.

By forcing us to inhabit the minds of what is arguably fascist, both works probably help us understand one’s enemy, and that kind of empathy is in short supply right now. Consequently, Heinlein’s and Verhoeven’s talents are universally useful and could help us to have a more mutually respectful dialogue about things which matter deeply to us. Therefore, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that both the novel and the film achieve a kind of universality which makes them great and they escape from the prejudices of the author and director. At one point in the film, the Sky Marshall says that we must understand the Pseudo-arachnids in order to destroy them. Maybe we should forget about the second bit and just do the first.

110 Possible Blog Posts

Or, if you prefer, nine dozen and two.

I don’t know if any of you blog using WordPress, but one of the things you get after a while of using tags (I only started doing that fairly recently) is a list of the ones you use most often. Probably because of the decimal bias of our cultural hegemony, it lists the ten. In my case, this is probably not a good guide to getting more readers but then I’m not particularly interested in doing that, except maybe as a kind of game in which I hope I wouldn’t become emotionally invested. It makes me want to draw a diagram, or rather a pattern:

Apparently this is called a “complete graph” and is described as a simple undirected graph in which each pair of distinct vertices is connected by a distinct edge. The above image shows a K₁₂ , apparently. Because of the decimal bias, my ten tags can be linked up in a similar diagram with rather fewer edges. I used to have hours of “fun” getting computers to draw ever more complicated complete graphs. The distinction also ought to be made between undirected and directed complete graphs of this kind.

There is bound to be an equation which tells you how many edges are needed for a given number of vertices, and in fact there is. It’s:

w_n+2=n!e_n

. . . where “e” is Euler’s constant. No, hang on a minute, that isn’t it apparently as it isn’t necessarily an integer and these obviously will be, so it’s:

(n(n-1))/2

Okay, so plugging in my ten tags gets me (10(10-1))/2, which is forty-five. So much for my title then! I’d worked it out at a hundred and ten but it seems it’s smaller. So then: ninety blog posts.

Here’s what I’m thinking. I have ten tags listed. A fairly crude way of generating blog post ideas would be to combine pairs of them, perhaps in both directions. They are: Philosophy, Ethics, Christianity, Judaism, Veganism, Racism, Evolution, History, Star Trek, Politics. Most of the time, if I blog on one subject on that list it’s likely to involve more than one of the others, which adds to the number of possible combinations in the graph, but it would also be interesting to see what I’ve missed, using those as major foci for a post. For instance, veganism and racism is something I’ve written about before, but not in a “pure”, more focussed sense, and there’s also racism and veganism, which could be something quite different. In pursuit of that combination, there is a lot to be said. For instance, veganism is perceived as a very White project even though, for example, I-Tal diet in its most complete form is RastafarIan and there’s also the question of the growth of supposèdly vegan products in the Third World as cash crops for export and forcing up the prices of something like quinoa, putting it out of reach of the communities which have traditionally eaten it. All very fruitful subjects. There are apparently forty-five pairs of tags in one direction and another forty-five in reverse. Judaism and Christianity is another interesting subject which it would be very easy to write something about, but writing something original and respectful might be a lot harder.

Thinking about writing in this way links mathematics and composition, but as a fairly naïve mathematician I may not be the person to do that. I often find that when I try to connect mathematical activity to something usually considered non-mathematically, I come up with a lot of mind game-type ideas but not much which is particularly applicable, or sometimes something which fits quite well into a particular mathematical activity but is also amenable to common sense. The question in my mind right now is, how useful is it to think of pairs of blog tags as a complete digraph? Is “evolution and Star Trek” a different topic to “Star Trek and evolution”?

Incidentally, the reason “Star Trek” crops up in that list is that I’ve reviewed every episode of “Star Trek TOS” and written several other more general posts on the series. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to generate a lot of views, or maybe not because so many people must be writing about it. I feel, unfortunately, that although it’s a major cultural phenomenon it’s also quite naff to write too much about it.

The above graph apparently also forms the net of an eleven-dimensional simplex, because every complete graph is a projection (the way it’s represented here, in two dimensions) of a simplex of K_n-1 dimensions. Hence this image:

is the net of a tetrahedron. And it clearly is: you can see the faces at the front and back, paired off and seemingly at right angles to each other. Each vertex connects to each other by three edges, and that gives the essence of the simplex in a way. My K₁₀ graph would presumably have each vertex joined to the other nine, each edge forming a polygon enclosing a face, each such polygon enclosing a tetrahedral cell, each tetrahedral cell forming the solid limiting a four-dimensional simplex, and so on. Each one of these encloses a possible combination of tags, more than one this time, and we’re in the realm of factorials and the possibility of more than three and a half million possible blog posts which can be appropriately tagged in various ways from that list, and will be found in the depths, if that’s the right word (it isn’t). This, then, is the hyperspatial approach to blogging. Each tag is located at a precise location relative to the others in hyperspace and since the links between them need not be mere edges but triangles, each blog post can be considered to be written on one of the faces of this nine dimensional simplex, either tapering towards the bottom or getting longer and longer lines as it goes on. You can hold this cluster of blog posts in your nine-dimensional hand-things and turn it this way and that to read each one of the ninety posts, all of which are on the surface of the polytope. If you happen to be a nine-dimensional entity, that is. Some of these are probably already written but I don’t know what they are.

This suggests a way of viewing blog posts via a virtual tesseract, merely four-dimensional and with each face of each of the eight cubes having a post written on both sides, four dozen in all, manipulable via one’s viewing device while wearing 3-D glasses or a VR headset. But all of this is fanciful and it isn’t clear how it would help one blog.

Leaving all that aside, it’s also possible to use the same old AI as I’ve been using for a lot of other things to finish my list of tags with others. It’s quite interesting what happens when I do this, because it fills my list in with the subjects I deliberately avoid on this blog, such as gender identity and trans stuff. InferKit just now gave me this:

Harry Potter
Animals
Politics
Military
Religion
Science
Food
Smart People
Animals and Animals
Writings
David Icke
Family Values
Hot Car Deaths
Holocaust
Asian-American

“Animals and Animals” is a little like “Vulcan And Vulcan” even though it hasn’t seen it. I don’t really want to blog about Harry Potter, although “Hot Car Deaths” is a depressing but possible subject. “Asian-American” strikes me as something you really should be in order to write about it, except that it is interesting how America sometimes seems like the extreme Far East even beyond Asia, so that has possibilities. DeepAI gives me “Science, Education, Welfare, Vacation, Innocent and Damn Law,”, then it seems to turn into a government form of some kind with things like “Pregnancy”, “Birth Year” and the like. This is not very useful and probably reveals the kind of text it thinks I’m writing.

I’ve done all this before, of course.

This blog is naturally a meandering mess of brain dumps, and consequently these two methods vaguely reveal some topics I might want to write about but they’re unlikely to get much readership, and that’s fine. However, I would say this. I suspect that if you’re serious about blogging and already have a blog which has a direction, a focus and a significant readership, you could do worse than to use these techniques. Maybe you’ve written about every combination of tag pairs. Finding out which ones you have and haven’t and colouring in the edges on the resultant complete graph would probably reveal where the large gaps are in your coverage, although some might be nonsensical. I don’t think any of mine would be though, so I suspect yours wouldn’t be either. Just two tags is rather limited, and if you open it up to all combinations, unless you’ve automated the process in some way you just will not have written hundreds of thousands of blog posts, meaning that some of the combinations will be stimulating and novel. As far as predicting tags is concerned, I found it tended to fill in things that I was genuinely interested in but hadn’t blogged about. This would also seem useful. You could also take all the AI-completed tags and build your own complete graph from those. It seems to me that there are likely to be other applications of graph theory to blogging which I have yet to become aware of. Worth investigating maybe?

Every Side Up

A couple of posts ago I mentioned what I understand to be the anomalous nature of not having a widely-accepted proper name for that thing in the sky which lights up the night, looks about the same size as the Sun and is often shown as a crescent in children’s books: the so-called “Moon”. Well, it turns out this is just the start, and relates to a number of other ruminations I’ve had over the years. Although we intellectually accept that we are on a tiny blue speck orbiting the proverbially unregarded yellow star in the Perseus-Carina-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way, which is in turn just one of countless other galaxies like grains of sand, as Brian Aldiss once put it, emotionally we tend still to operate day to day by the “sandwich” model of the Universe, where we live on a flat surface with the ground underneath us, the sea off somewhere across the way and the sky above us, with the Sun and Cynthia rising and setting above us. But is it psychologically healthy to do this? Is it a sign of having well-adjusted brains? Or, should I say, being well-adjusted brains, if we are indeed our brains.

I’ll start with Cynthia. As I mentioned the other day, I chose to call her Cynthia because that is in fact the name of one of the Greek goddesses associated with the big round hunk of rock some astronauts went to to prove a point about capitalism in a rather heavily government-assisted program half a century ago. Other Western options include Diana, Artemis and Selene, and there are wider possibilities which it might be only fair to include considering the heavy Greco-Roman bias for the names of the larger planets, moons and asteroids. Other sky lores are available. Such deities include Ge, Coyolxauhqui, Meztli, Tecciztecatl, Aucimalgen, Mama Killa, Qango, Tsuki Yomi, I mean I could go on, there are lots of course. The Latin word “luna” and its descendants, found in Romance languages and for some reason apparently Russian as well, is itself a euphemism for the earlier “mensis”, which became too strongly associated with menstruation and presumably made it sound to them that there was a “period” in the sky, which considering the taboos many cultures have around it led them just to call it “the light”, “lumina”, which then became “luna”. The Etruscan goddess is Tiur, with other names, and it seems to me that they could just have called Cynthia after that, but they didn’t. There are also kennings, which I’ve considered using directly or as an inspiration, but old Germanic literature doesn’t seem to have much occasion for mentioning the big light in the night sky for some reason. The options there seem to be “moon-wheel”, which is obviously a bit unsuitable but is a nice idea, conjuring up a rotating half-light, half-dark sphere viewed from its equator, “year-counter”, “waxer” and “waner”. I suppose I could’ve called it “sky-rabbit”, but the word “sky” is problematic too. In order to avoid the rather jarring and eccentric “Cynthia”, I do try to circumlocute references to her.

A couple of you have said it all seems a bit unnecessary, and I have sympathy with that idea. That said, calling our moon something other than “Moon” asserts her individuality. Just on the question of gender, although moon goddesses are more common than moon gods, the Old English word “mona” is actually masculine and “sunne” feminine. Once again, sun gods are more common than sun goddesses, such as Apollo, Helios, Ra and Sol Invictus. It’s not unusual for Germanic folk to get things the “wrong” way round, such as using nights instead of days to count time (“fortnight”), winters instead of summers on a longer timescale and considering the tail rather than the head as the “start” of an animal (“redstart”).

There is a secondary point regarding Cynthia: she may not count as a real moon, in spite of the fact that the word “moon” is now out there being used for ones which are. Isaac Asimov came up with the concept of the gravitational “tug of war”: the ratio of gravitational pull on a satellite between its planet and the Sun. He looked at the thirty-two known satellites in the Solar System at the time and found that of all of them, only Cynthia was pulled more by the Sun than Earth. He also found that the most distant moon of Jupiter know at the time, Sinope, was only slightly more attracted by Jupiter than the Sun. The Sun attracts Cynthia, however, more than twice as strongly as Earth does. Looking at the orbits of the planetary moons as they move around with their planets, you get a kind of “spirograph” pattern with them looping the loop. Cynthia alone doesn’t do this but is always concave to the Sun. It’s more like she’s just drifting along as our companion. Among the official planets, but not Pluto, Cynthia is also much larger relative to the size of her primary than any other body considered to be a moon. Hence the “Moon” is arguably not a moon at all but a companion planet. This, I admit, is a little like the botanical “nut” and “berry” situation, where bananas are officially berries but blackberries aren’t, and peanuts aren’t nuts but nutmegs are, but consider these sentences and which one sounds less peculiar: “The Moon is not a moon”, or “Cynthia is not a moon”. I would say the first sounds much sillier than the second. In fact I think we’d all agree that Cynthia is no moon, but we’d probably be thinking about someone we know called Cynthia who is not a ginormous ball of rock in space, which would be entirely sensible of us. For me, then, the word “moon” has a murky history where it was used to refer to said massive craggy sphere but that’s all in the past now apart from the few hundred million speakers of English who haven’t gotten with the program yet.

Then there’s the question of the definite article. We say “THE Earth”, “THE Sun” and “THE Moon” (well I don’t, but most people do), as if to pick them out and make them special. Now I do say “the Sun”. “The” is used a bit oddly in English compared to the use of definiteness in other languages which have that distinction. There are, for example, languages where omitting a definite article makes a noun indefinite, which doesn’t happen with us, and it often has other rôles common to many other languages which are absent in English where it tends to be more widely used, with proper nouns for example. “Earth” and “Sun” in these usages are indeed proper nouns, which don’t take the definite article in English. However, both words have other meanings: “earth” means “soil” for example, and “sun” refers to any star with planets. It’s fairly common for “Sol”, the Latin for “Sun”, to be used as a name for the Sun in the same way as Sirius A or Betelgeuse might be used as names for those stars, and again this has a Western bias which in fact is unusual for a star name, many of which are Arabic. The Arabic word for “The Sun” is “Al-Shams”, ignoring certain grammatical considerations. There are also Bayer designations to be taken into consideration, which are Greek letters followed by the genitive of the constellation the star is seen in from Earth. Clearly this can’t apply to the Sun here because it (“he”?) moves through the Zodiac once a year, but from α Centauri for example, the Sun is a bright star in the constellation of Cassiopeia and from τ Ceti, twelve light years away, it’s a rather fainter star in a constellation made up by Carl Sagan called the Six-Leggèd Unicorn (Monoceros Sextupedalis), at the base of whose tail we are situated. The constellation is unusually large compared to the ones in our sky.

Speaking of sky, this is also a bit of a planet-bound concept. It’s the view we have of the atmosphere and the rest of the Universe from our vantage point which is not blocked by the body we’re situated on. Space is not “up there” but all around us, and we are also in space. This is news to nobody of course, but it isn’t how we think of things in general. Wherever one happens to be within the atmosphere, the sky is above and Earth below. In order to be “in space” conceptually, we probably need Earth to occupy less than an eighth of our field of vision. The actual situation is complicated mathematically because it’s technically impossible to see an entire hemisphere regardless of one’s distance from a sphere, although one gets so close to being able to do so that this is rather fussy. The sky often refers to something which is almost an optical illusion where the rest of the Universe is obscured by the gas and clouds in the atmosphere, so it does exist during the day, but a clear sky at night is just a good view of part of our environment, to the naked eye up to about two million light years away but which we perceive as a black dome with pinpricks of light in it, plus Cynthia. Once again, we all know this. I’m aware I’m not saying anything new here, but although I reject the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis that our language completely determines our world, I do think it’s significant.

An illustration of how new this isn’t can be found in the work of the mid-twentieth century architect Buckminster Fuller. It was he who popularised the idea of “Spaceship Earth”, emphasising our interdependence on each other in a hostile void and the need to ensure that the systems which keep us safe here are maintained. Ironically, he was also a frequent flier. He used to speak of “Universe” as a proper noun without articles, which is of course similar to how I suggested dropping them for “The Earth”. The rationale behind this was “the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) Experiences”, a definition I feel is rather anthropocentric but which also acknowledges the fact that what we perceive just is the world to us. This brings to mind the error apparent in John Norman’s thought of confusing his own preferences with the wider idea of essential human nature, and as Norman has inadvertantly illustrated, the folly present in that confusion, which is something whereof we should all be aware. Buckminster Fuller’s frequent flying, environmentally unsound though it may have been, did also give him the insight of authentically experiencing Earth as a globe, and this influenced his use of the English language. For instance, he would talk of “world-around” rather than “worldwide”, in a move practically the opposite of the flat earthers in the recent satirical novel ‘The End Of The World Is Flat’, and it’s notable that this links to what might be seen as a more rational and just approach to humanity than “worldwide”, which suggests we’re not living on a globe. I personally find the specific phrase clumsy and would prefer to substitute “global” as more succinct and less intrusive, which makes it more likely to be accepted. He also substituted “in” and “out” for “down” and “up” respectively and used to talk about “going outstairs” instead of “upstairs”, emphasising the fact that we’re all clinging to the surface of a ball in space. That sounds precarious, but it’s worth considering our situation as precarious in a different way and therefore serves us as a reminder of that.

He also replaced “sunrise” and “sunset” with “sunsight” and “sunclipse”. The second sounds a bit artificial to me but the first is fairly okay, although still quite attention-grabbing in a way which doesn’t help unobstrusive adoption. Then again, calling Cynthia that doesn’t exactly seem unobtrusive either, so maybe I’m being hypocritical. In my unfinished novel ‘Unspeakable’, I refer to the limb of this planet concealing and revealing the Sun rather than sunset and sunrise, or something like that (I can’t remember the exact wording). Another approach is to refer to the terminator, which in astronomical terms is the locus of points on a body tangent to the Sun, enabling the synonymity of “my location crossed the terminator”, which can refer to either sunrise or sunset and emphasises movement and rotation rather than the illusory stasis we imagine we’re in.

Then there’s this:

The Australasian branch of the Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things is in a sense actually doing the opposite to what the Staffordshire branch didn’t do. Do they really deserve the praise of the chair? Although the angle isn’t perfect, what the Australasian branch have in fact done is put twenty-two things underneath other things. Alternatively, a less Eurocentric view would allow for the Staffordshire branch not to have done anything wrong and to have at least not undone the work of the Society. Then again, it appears that the Society as a whole does in fact grasp that Earth is round and gravity pulls towards the centre, and as a side issue the Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things does succeed in doing something very similar by putting things underneath other things, because the end result is that something is still on top of something else. What it’s actually doing, from a non-gravity dominated perspective, is putting things next to other things. If there is also a Society For Putting Things Underneath Other Things, they are not their enemies and in fact there could be a federation of societies for putting things next to each other to which they would both be entitled to belong. Their real enemies are such groups as the Society For Taking Things Off Other Things. Incidentally, a less well-known society is the Society For Putting The Letters “SPR” At The Spreginnings Of Sprertain Words, but their rôle is rather different, though also interestingly similar.

However, it is in fact important to know what’s on top of things on this planet, dominated as we are by gravity, and it would be dangerous to remove this distinction from language. It’s scant comfort to a crew trapped in a sub at the bottom of the ocean that they’re in another sense at the top of the ocean with a force pulling the water towards them, and their rescuers would be confused if they were to have the situation described to them as “the intermarine is situated next to a major phase change in matter” without specifying that that phase change was liquid to solid and therefore more likely to be at the bottom of the ocean than the surface. There’s a time and a place for these things and they aren’t always appropriate. Nonetheless, our intuitions can be misled by using language based on outmoded concepts such as these, which are particularly outdated for two reasons: they are based on a flat Earth, which was superceded in Ancient Greek times, and also a geocentric view, which began to be replaced five centuries ago.

Another aspect of this is the realisation that spacetime is a single set of relationships rather than two separate things, meaning that, for example, a unit such as a light year is a measure of spacetime and not just distance as we’d usually understand it. Relative to us, light travels in a diagonal line, and its spacetime coördinates are four-dimensional, as is everything else. Hence when we consider Earth’s rotation and her orbit about the Sun, among other forms of motion, we are in a sense referring to angular motion when we use ideas about the passage of time to some extent. At midday any location on the Equator is 90°from the terminator in all directions across the surface of the globe. Although the situation is harder to describe in different places on Earth, the fact is that time of day can still be considered to be an angular measurement in our planet’s rotation. Likewise with the year, which is close to amounting to a degree’s movement per day although it’s slightly under on average and Earth also accelerates and decelerates somewhat according to time of year, being fastest near the northern summer solstice and slowest half a year later. Of course, the whole Solar System is orbiting the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way once every 225 million Earth years or so, meaning that Earth is describing a shape locally similar to a helix but in fact part of a larger approximate helix. Moreover, the Great Attractor in the direction of Virgo is pulling the Local Group of galaxies, including our own, towards it, and space itself is expanding, although that has little bearing on most of the rest. It might mean that whatever is pulling us all towards Virgo will be more distant in the sense that it will take longer than might be expected at a constant velocity because it will in a sense be in a different place.

There’s also the question of the light cone. This is in fact a sphere of influence rather than a cone, concerning the distance between points which can influence each other in a given time. Say a star explodes. After ten years, the explosion will be visible ten light years away, after a hundred, it will be visible a hundred light years away and so on. Its sphere of influence spreads out at a maximum speed equivalent to light’s. Therefore it may not make much sense to consider that anything really occurs simultaneously. If something is happening now ten light years away, it’s impossible for it to make any difference here for at least a decade. For this reason, again in ‘Unspeakable’, I used a calendar system based on the Crab Nebula pulsar about five thousand light years away, with the date beginning at the instant light reached the location in question, and with units of time based on the period of the pulsar, which is very gradually slowing. Hence because the Crab Nebula was first observed on Earth in the year 1054 CE, I chose that as the year zero for us, but for Antares that calendar would begin in about 1600 CE because it’s more than five hundred light years further away from that supernova. I was trying to illustrate the ties between time, space and causality by doing this, and in fact I’m quite keen on the idea that such a calendar would work for real. In practical terms it would make very little difference on this planet because it only takes light forty-two milliseconds to cross Earth’s equatorial diameter, but using the period of the pulsar as a unit of time takes it away from Earth- or solar-based units. The current period of the Crab Nebula pulsar is approximately 33.1 milliseconds, a figure insufficiently accurate to base a calendar or clock system on. SN1054 took place on 4th July 1054, which was Julian Date 2106209. Today’s date as I write this is 18th September 2021, or Julian Date 2459476.08125 (it’s 1:57 pm). The tropical year 2000 was 365.24219 days long, which is 31 556 925.22 seconds. However, it makes more sense to treat this in terms of days rather than years, which makes it 353 267 days since we saw SN1054, or 30 523 046 400 seconds, bearing in mind that the exact time of night was not known. In terms of current pulsations, which will have slowed a bit by now, that makes 922 146 416 918.429 with spurious accuracy. I have to say that using base ten to express this is not ideal, and in the case of timekeeping, we are in fact used to not using that radix anyway, as is the case with angles.

A little while ago, I wrote a post considering what Latin would be like today if Rome hadn’t fallen, bearing in mind that Latin does survive as an everyday widely-spoken language in the form of languages such as French, Romanian and Catalan. In particular, something to consider here is that scientific nomenclature would probably have arisen directly from spoken language rather than having been mainly based on Latin and Greek but without native sensibilities or a firm grasp of the language itself. Hence elements could be referred to by their atomic numbers directly, which does happen today for placeholder names to some extent, as in “ununpentium”, now known as moscovium but clearly dependent on Western Arabic numerals used in decimal and employing place value. Similarly, when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered, they were given classical names in accordance with the spirit of the names of the other planets but perhaps not in direct accordance with how “modern” Romans would have named them. Hence it’s easy to imagine a language which is somewhat like Italian and Romanian but uses different, though still classically-based, technical terms. It’s also possible to decouple these terms from the vagaries of history and the techology available when they were first discovered, leaving us with a more logical scientific vocabulary. There are in reality tendencies to address this in human anatomy, where we no longer speak of Fallopian tubes and the Achilles tendon but uterine tubes and the calcaneal ligament. It would be interesting to address this across the board and see how it changed our way of thinking, but it’s also difficult to anchor it accurately because new discoveries are being made all the time which could turn this upside down. Whatever we came up with would become a kludge in the long term and need a rethink.

To conclude, we are imprisoned on this planet and in our present state by the way we use language. It’s very uncomfortable and interferes with communication and clarity to mess about with it too much, but it’s also profitable at changing how we perceive the world, and might enable us to come up with new outlooks and solutions in the long run. Hence although all this is a game, it’s quite a serious game and it’s worth playing if we achieve some kind of conceptual breakthrough as a result.

The Crucifixion And Paraphilia

My motivation for writing this post is that my previous post on a similar subject, ‘Was Jesus Raped‘, has gotten popular in the wrong way. It’s attracted a lot of spam due to the fact that the title contains two keywords and this has made it difficult to discuss anything in the comments. Therefore I’m going to attempt to close that post for comments and start one here in the hope that it doesn’t get similarly inundated. However, I can’t just replicate the passage, so I’m going to talk about something rather different, though still related to that one.

There are probably three areas which we need to look at here: concrete evidence regarding the sexual assault of Jesus, the motives of people who represent that possibility and the good faith or otherwise of their assertion. I also want to look at atonement and the concept of perversion.

I’ll start with perversion. To many, this is an old-fashioned word which doesn’t have much meaning today. It’s probably similar to the word “fornication”. When I shared a house with a fundamentalist Christian, that is, a Biblical literalist who was a Young Earth creationist and also pursuing a doctorate in genetics, an interesting combination, she used to object to us watching the Channel 4 lesbian and gay magazine programme ‘Out On Tuesday’ in a number of ways, including watching ‘Minder’ of all things, and once said that to her the whole thing was “nothing more than fornication”. Now I will cut her some slack here because she was from Kerala and her English was therefore Indian English rather than British English, which uses words rather differently than we do, but even so, the word “fornication” sounded very old-fashioned to me even back then in 1992. I feel the same way about “faggot” used homophobically. The word has an antiquated feel to me, like using the word “gay” to mean “happy”.

Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper in 1969 for the ‘Journal of Philosophy’ which was later collected in his ‘Mortal Questions’ (Nagel, T. (2012). Sexual Perversion. In Mortal Questions (Canto Classics, pp. 39-52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107341050.006). Citation date notwithstanding, Nagel’s essay is a creature of its time, and therefore uses the word “perversion” quite baldly. He begins by raising the question of how we have a concept of sexual perversion. For perversion to exist, there must be sexual desires or preferences which can be plausibly described as unnatural. This raises an immediate problem which I will however breeze past for now. Nagel then states that the main problem is how to make that distinction. Unless one throws out the concept of perversion entirely, and most people wouldn’t although they might call it something else, there’s a core of practices which just are perversions. Nagel lists shoe fetishism, bestiality and sadism. I would take issue with the last one because I think it varies with consent. We might not agree with this list. I personally would consider bestiality, morally speaking, to be morally wrong, and today it seems sometimes that many people almost use the word “perversion” as a synonym for pædophilia while possibly failing to realise that many acts of child sexual abuse are perpetrated by non-pædophiles. If perversions exist, says Nagel, they’re inclinations rather than adopted for other reasons, and this is of course counter to the Roman Catholic understanding of what they were at the time, and possibly still. As a counter-example, using Nagel’s shoe fetishism, someone’s spouse might wear a particular style of footwear in order to turn their partner on or indicate subtly that they were interested in going to bed with them today, but have no direct sexual interest themselves in that item. I mentioned Roman Catholics, and this is harsher in hindsight considering recent scandals in the Church which had yet to come to light in the 1960s. According to Nagel, Roman Catholics consider contraception as a perversion, I presume because they see it as frustrating the divinely ordained function of sex as for procreation, but contraception is not a sexual preference. Many people would, all things considered, prefer not to use barrier methods of contraception for example if they knew conception was impossible anyway. There could be a sexual fetish based on diaphragm use, but that’s not the usual reason people employ them.

Next, other “frustrations” of reproduction are considered. One example of this would be the banana, which has been bred not to have seeds in the fruit and consequently cannot reproduce through fertilisation but has to be grafted. Among humans, there is infertility and miscarriage, neither of which have anything to do with perversion. Mammals and possibly other animals, though, could be considered perverted, such as the famous example of the monkey who was aroused by a zookeeper’s boots. This can happen and does count as perversion. A “radical” argument for the non-existence of perversion is proposed, thus:

Sexual appetite is similar to other appetites, such as that for food. It can have various objects but none are “unnatural”. Sexual desire is defined by the organs and areas of the body where it is felt and the types of sensation which cause it. Some such desires are ethically problematic (i.e. wrong) and others are hard for many to identify with, but as such they’re simply sexual desires and cannot be considered inherently perverted.

Nagel disagrees with this argument, but it isn’t a strawman. He objects to it by using the analogy of hunger. If someone had pica, which I have had of course because I used to eat pencils and wood, or could satisfy their hunger by looking at lavish photographs of food in a cook book, those would both seem to be examples of perversions of appetite. Hence the analogy in the argument breaks down. Sadly, nowadays eating disorders are more recognised and there’s a sense in which these are such perversions, although having called them “eating disorders” I feel that I am reducing the people concerned to their disorder and probably should speak of “disordered eating” instead.

The idea that sexual desire always attempts to achieve the unattainable is then introduced, and this I think is particularly relevant to Christian world views. Perfect love is only possible unaided by the divine. Human love would always fall short in some way unless perhaps, according to Christianity, one was a channel for divine love. Hence the sexual expression of that love could always be perceived as a form of perversion. However, that sets the bar much higher than most people in today’s world are willing to place it, and the majority of Christians probably do see marriage as a good and blessèd thing. There is an issue here with being called to celibacy and there’s also a problem in some churches with there being undue emphasis on the married state, and perhaps even married with children, which tends to exclude singles, willing or otherwise, simply through the assumptions made by such a large proportion of married people. This is a separate issue from extramarital sex, incidentally.

Sartre is then considered. Sartre regards sexual desire as a doomed attempt for embodied consciousness to come to terms with the existence of others. It’s doomed because one will either objectify the other or become an object for them, and one cannot win through by capturing the other’s freedom as freedom. Hence for Sartre there can be no ultimately successful sexual relationship because the deep aim of sexual desire is unachievable. Although Nagel rejects this rather pessimistic idea, he’s still interested in the way Sartre presents it, and proceeds to paint a picture of a scene where a woman and a man notice each other sexually, go on to notice that they are attracted to each other and are aroused by that attraction. Hence there is a mutual objectification here which he understands to be what might be called “vanilla” sex. This he also sees as typical of human relations, in that, for example, anger between people breeds more anger between them and so forth. In the identification of both parties with their bodies, the actions of the body take over and threaten the will, and unlike hunger there is a saturation of the body with sexual desire. This, Nagel claims, is the non-perverted condition of sex.

He then uses a variety of examples of more deviant sexual activities to illustrate where it becomes perversion, noting that it isn’t always black and white. For instance, it probably isn’t ideal for a couple to be privately fantasising during lovemaking but it isn’t perverted either. This lack of interpersonal relationship is, he contends, found in pædophilia, bestiality, fetishism, voyeurism and exhibitionism. I would add necrophilia to that. More controversial cases are found in homosexuality and sado-masochism. Incidentally, it feels a little shocking reading this because it’s pretty cold, as it must be, when pædophilia and bestiality are mentioned and analysed, so in a weird way it is quite a hard read. Sadism seems to fall short of reciprocity, but this assumes there is no consent, but then in some cases a sadist, or even a masochist, would require lack of consent in order to become aroused. This conjures up a couple of odd scenarios. In one of them, the sadist imagines they’re causing suffering when they aren’t, and not through any artifice of rôle-playing. This illustrates a clash between consensus understandings of what constitutes sexual attraction, because if someone’s proclivities are sufficiently obscure or perverse, they undercut any attempt to avoid lust. For instance, it’s entirely possible that some heterosexual men find the burqa more arousing than a naked woman’s body. In fact Rule 34 guarantees that this is so, and from their perspective it means that whether or not it’s forced, women are encouraged to dress in a way those men find more sexually arousing than if they were dressed in a conventional, supposèdly titillating Western manner. Nagel proposes that sadism falls short, and is therefore a perversion, because it lacks interpersonal reciprocity, but the trouble with that is that he seems to assume only a subset of sadists who are perhaps impaired in terms of empathy, or who empathise and despise.

Homosexual activity, on the other hand, is singled out as being completely non-perverted because the kind of multilayered embodiment and reciprocity involved does not depend on gender or sex. It would only become an issue if the proclivity was absent and at least one of the people involved was a “closet heterosexual”. If the kind of sex involved is a matter of activity and passivity and either is seen as “natural” to one sex or another, that would mean that one party at least would be going against their nature, but in fact this kind of active-passive division is not automatically male and female respectively and therefore there would be many heterosexual acts which don’t conform to this but are unlikely to be perceived as perverted because of that.

In the closing remarks of his paper, Nagel turns to the question of evaluation. The concept of perversion is evaluative and implies that better sex is possible than the kind of sex pursued by the pervert. Subjectively this may be impossible because in physical terms a pervert may be unable to achieve sexual pleasure any other way, but this could be seen as a shortcoming on their part, or perhaps a disability. Certainly there might be a problem with loneliness if the possible pool of people with whom one can engage consensually with is smaller than usual, perhaps even non-existent. However, this idea of better and worse sex may be more æsthetic than ethical, because once one enters the realm of ethics things become more complicated. One is evaluating human beings. Even within the realm of perversion there could be cases of sex which is better than the worst vanilla sex, given that one considers there to be such a thing, and I do think almost everyone would. For instance, there’s consensual homosexual sex and there’s heterosexual rape, and although I’m not in the homophobic camp I would still fervently hope that nobody would consider heterosexual rape of any kind better than loving homosexual sex.

Nagel’s view is not the only one of course, and I also feel it’s quite outdated, not least in his use of the word “perversion”. It might also fail to capture a conservative religious viewpoint on the issue. For instance, he does note that the Roman Catholic Church regards sex with contraception as perverted. I’m not sure what to do with this observation because I find it hard to imagine that the Church would want married heterosexual couples to separate if one of them turned out to be infertile or that they should stop having sex after the menopause. Maybe, but I haven’t come across this and it really doesn’t seem to be what they believe.

Clearly I do believe there’s such a thing as morally bad sex. Zoöphilia and pædophilia are pretty much obviously wrong in the sense that if they were to be indulged in reality they would have devastating consequences for the victims. I feel an æsthetic sense of disgust here but this should not be allowed to interfere with one’s moral judgement. On the other hand, the conscience could be akin to a moral sense. In the case of pædophilia I do think that poorly-drafted legislation could lead to the criminalisation of sex between two people a single day apart in age, which would just be silly, but at least historically in this country age difference has been a significant factor. But that’s an extreme case, and extreme cases make for bad law.

Thank you for being patient with me so far. I shall now discuss the issue of Jesus being sexually assaulted again, though from a different angle than the spam magnet post I wrote some time ago. There could be said to be several camps here, one of which oddly misunderstands the issue. There would be those who say Jesus cannot have been sexually assaulted, and they would make several assertions on this matter. For instance, no gospels, canonical or otherwise, mention a frank sexual assault. Others, and this includes me, maintain that it’s possible that he was sexually assaulted for various reasons, some of which have a Biblical source, and might further claim that thinking of him in this way helps the survivors of sexual assault to bond with him and be aware that he is with them in all circumstances. A further category amounts to trolls, and this is the puzzling category because they seem to have misunderstood the attitude Christians are supposed to take towards the Incarnation. Finally, and this is the reason for the preamble on Thomas Nagel, there’s the category which could be described as “perverts”, which is of course quite a strongly pejorative term. Some might say that these categories are not isolated from each other. For instance, one could take the view that once one has abandoned a particular orthodox view, one would gradually become corrupted in various ways and drift into the “perversion” category. There’s a New Testament justification for this in Paul’s Letter to the Romans 1:18f:

¹⁸ αποκαλυπτεται γαρ οργη θεου απ ουρανου επι πασαν ασεβειαν και αδικιαν ανθρωπων των την αληθειαν εν αδικια κατεχοντων

¹⁹ διοτι το γνωστον του θεου φανερον εστιν εν αυτοις ο γαρ θεος αυτοις εφανερωσεν

²⁰ τα γαρ αορατα αυτου απο κτισεως κοσμου τοις ποιημασιν νοουμενα καθοραται η τε αιδιος αυτου δυναμις και θειοτης εις το ειναι αυτους αναπολογητους

²¹ διοτι γνοντες τον θεον ουχ ως θεον εδοξασαν η ευχαριστησαν αλλ εματαιωθησαν εν τοις διαλογισμοις αυτων και εσκοτισθη η ασυνετος αυτων καρδια

²² φασκοντες ειναι σοφοι εμωρανθησαν

²³ και ηλλαξαν την δοξαν του αφθαρτου θεου εν ομοιωματι εικονος φθαρτου ανθρωπου και πετεινων και τετραποδων και ερπετων

²⁴ διο και παρεδωκεν αυτους ο θεος εν ταις επιθυμιαις των καρδιων αυτων εις ακαθαρσιαν του ατιμαζεσθαι τα σωματα αυτων εν εαυτοις

²⁵ οιτινες μετηλλαξαν την αληθειαν του θεου εν τω ψευδει και εσεβασθησαν και ελατρευσαν τη κτισει παρα τον κτισαντα ος εστιν ευλογητος εις τους αιωνας αμην

²⁶ δια τουτο παρεδωκεν αυτους ο θεος εις παθη ατιμιας αι τε γαρ θηλειαι αυτων μετηλλαξαν την φυσικην χρησιν εις την παρα φυσιν

²⁷ ομοιως τε και οι αρσενες αφεντες την φυσικην χρησιν της θηλειας εξεκαυθησαν εν τη ορεξει αυτων εις αλληλους αρσενες εν αρσεσιν την ασχημοσυνην κατεργαζομενοι και την αντιμισθιαν ην εδει της πλανης αυτων εν εαυτοις απολαμβανοντες

²⁸ και καθως ουκ εδοκιμασαν τον θεον εχειν εν επιγνωσει παρεδωκεν αυτους ο θεος εις αδοκιμον νουν ποιειν τα μη καθηκοντα

²⁹ πεπληρωμενους παση αδικια πορνεια πονηρια πλεονεξια κακια μεστους φθονου φονου εριδος δολου κακοηθειας ψιθυριστας

³⁰ καταλαλους θεοστυγεις υβριστας υπερηφανους αλαζονας εφευρετας κακων γονευσιν απειθεις

³¹ ασυνετους ασυνθετους αστοργους ασπονδους ανελεημονας

³² οιτινες το δικαιωμα του θεου επιγνοντες οτι οι τα τοιαυτα πρασσοντες αξιοι θανατου εισιν ου μονον αυτα ποιουσιν αλλα και συνευδοκουσιν τοις πρασσουσιν

In the KJV:

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

¹⁹ Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

²⁰ For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

²¹ Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

²² Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

²³ And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

²⁴ Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

²⁵ Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

²⁶ For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

²⁷ And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

²⁸ And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

²⁹ Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

³⁰ Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

³¹ Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

³² Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

The process described here is similar to Pharaoh’s heart being hardened before the Exodus, and raises a couple of questions. One is that of the perseverance of the the saints: one cannot lose one’s salvation if one has ever honestly committed oneself to Christ. This also contains the most important “clobber” verse used by homophobes. I personally happen to believe that a literal interpretation of the Bible, and the New Testament, requires one to be homophobic. I’m not in the camp that tries to make excuses or explain away these passages with cultural relativism. However, I also believe that to believe homosexually expressed mutually consensual love is sinful is similar to believing 2+2=5. If you went through a process in maths which led to a result which implied that 2+2=5, you would check your working until you either gave up or found your error. Similarly, if your understanding of Scripture leads you to conclude that homosexual activity is immoral in different circumstances to heterosexual activity, ethical intuition, that is, your conscience, will make you aware that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. However, the problem with the idea of ethical intuition is that one can simply baldly assert that one’s conscience is telling one something without having to justify it, meaning that sensible discussion is impossible, so this doesn’t get anyone very far as far as dialogue is concerned. Anyway, the idea is that if someone strays from the path laid out by Christ and the Word, one will become corrupted even if one has repented and committed oneself, and the belief that Jesus was raped is placed firmly in this category by many people. And it is a very tough thing to come to terms with, or at least it ought to be. It may not be for some people, particularly if they aren’t Christian.

I’ve been asked for evidence, and such evidence is forthcoming. Firstly, I’d like to quote the last verse of the Fourth Gospel:

εστιν δε και αλλα πολλα οσα εποιησεν ο ιησους ατινα εαν γραφηται καθ εν ουδε αυτον οιμαι τον κοσμον χωρησαι τα γραφομενα βιβλια αμην

In the KJV:

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.

In other words, bearing in mind also that the gospel of John is the most recent canonical gospel, even all of the gospels taken together do not constitute a complete account of Jesus’s life. A notable omission found in all is a complete absence of any account of his life between twelve and thirty. The infancy gospels, generally considered unreliable, do at least indicate the strong desire to know more about his life. The gospels are not a complete biography of Jesus, and perhaps they don’t need to be, if one assumes that all that needs to be known about him is in there. For instance, it isn’t important what he looks like and he isn’t described at any point. Except that in a sense it is. If Jesus is to be the stand-in for any human, maybe his appearance was significant, or would be to us today. For instance, the fact that he was Jewish would mean that anti-semitism in full knowledge of Jesus’s physical appearance could often mean that a Christian is persecuting someone who looks very like him. Although Jesus was not Ashkenazic, Sephardic or Mizrahic, or for that matter Beta Israel, because the different communities had yet to diverge at that point, his appearance is likely to be closest to that of the Mizrahim, and since even Sephardim are perceived by WASPs as non-White, odd though that seems, the chances are that Jesus would be too. Matthew 25:40 of course reads:

καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐρεῖ αὐτοῖς· ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐφ’ ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοὶ ἐποιήσατε.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

In other words, Jesus acts as a stand in for people and Christians are supposed to see him in everyone. This is where the issue of rape arises too. If it’s a real prospect for Jesus to have been a victim of sexual assault, it means that those who sexually assault others, and rape does occur within marriage of course, might see themselves as sinning directly against Jesus.

I’m not going to deny that it’s shocking and difficult to accept. Jesus is supposed to have a radical influence on one’s life. The evidence is there that this could have happened, and it also makes sense that the gospel writers may have been silent on the matter. However, there are several passages which do appear to allude to it in the gospels. In the KJV, Matthew 26:47-50 reads:

And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.

⁴⁸ Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.

⁴⁹ And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail, master; and kissed him.

⁵⁰ And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then came they, and laid hands on Jesus and took him.

In Greek, this is:

⁴⁷ και ετι αυτου λαλουντος ιδου ιουδας εις των δωδεκα ηλθεν και μετ αυτου οχλος πολυς μετα μαχαιρων και ξυλων απο των αρχιερεων και πρεσβυτερων του λαου

⁴⁸ ο δε παραδιδους αυτον εδωκεν αυτοις σημειον λεγων ον αν φιλησω αυτος εστιν κρατησατε αυτον

⁴⁹ και ευθεως προσελθων τω ιησου ειπεν χαιρε ραββι και κατεφιλησεν αυτον

⁵⁰ ο δε ιησους ειπεν αυτω εταιρε εφ ω παρει τοτε προσελθοντες επεβαλον τας χειρας επι τον ιησουν και εκρατησαν αυτον

Mark 14:43-45 similarly read:

⁴³ και ευθεως ετι αυτου λαλουντος παραγινεται ιουδας εις ων των δωδεκα και μετ αυτου οχλος πολυς μετα μαχαιρων και ξυλων παρα των αρχιερεων και των γραμματεων και των πρεσβυτερων

⁴⁴ δεδωκει δε ο παραδιδους αυτον συσσημον αυτοις λεγων ον αν φιλησω αυτος εστιν κρατησατε αυτον και απαγαγετε ασφαλως

⁴⁵ και ελθων ευθεως προσελθων αυτω λεγει ραββι ραββι και κατεφιλησεν αυτον

⁴³ And immediately, while he yet spake, cometh Judas, one of the twelve, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders.

⁴⁴ And he that betrayed him had given them a token, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away safely.

⁴⁵ And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightway to him, and saith, Master, master; and kissed him.

The verb καταφιλέω translates as “I kiss”, “I caress with affection” and “I kiss tenderly”. It doesn’t seem to me to be a stretch that this is the beginning of a sexual assault, although of course it may only appear to be given contemporary Anglo-Saxon mores. After all, in the Arab world, for example, it’s normal for men to hold hands affectionately when walking down the street.

Another important passage is the mocking of Jesus, covered in Matthew 27:27-31 (KJV):

²⁷ Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers.

²⁸ And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.

²⁹ And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!

³⁰ And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.

³¹ And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.

²⁷ τοτε οι στρατιωται του ηγεμονος παραλαβοντες τον ιησουν εις το πραιτωριον συνηγαγον επ αυτον ολην την σπειραν

²⁸ και εκδυσαντες αυτον περιεθηκαν αυτω χλαμυδα κοκκινην

²⁹ και πλεξαντες στεφανον εξ ακανθων επεθηκαν επι την κεφαλην αυτου και καλαμον επι την δεξιαν αυτου και γονυπετησαντες εμπροσθεν αυτου ενεπαιζον αυτω λεγοντες χαιρε ο βασιλευς των ιουδαιων

³⁰ και εμπτυσαντες εις αυτον ελαβον τον καλαμον και ετυπτον εις την κεφαλην αυτου.

This, of course, is the point where, if it happened at all, the sexual assault is most likely to have occurred. It’s brutal of course, even as written, but Jesus is stripped naked before being dressed in a robe and mocked. This has overtones of the abuse of power, and it should be remembered that rape is primarily about power, more specifically the abuse thereof, not sex. The New Testament also paraphrases and euphemises sexual acts. I’ve already quoted Romans 1:27 –

. . . αρσενες εν αρσεσιν την ασχημοσυνην κατεργαζομενοι . . .

. . . men with men working that which is unseemly . . .

Other translation of ασχημοσυνη are “shamefulness”, “indecency”, “deformity”, “pudendum” and “nakedness”, the point being that this is euphemised. Elsewhere, in Genesis 4:1 for example, this appears:

וְהָאָדָם, יָדַע אֶת-חַוָּה אִשְׁתּוֹ; וַתַּהַר, וַתֵּלֶד אֶת-קַיִן, וַתֹּאמֶר, קָנִיתִי אִישׁ אֶת-יְהוָה.

The verb יָדַ֖ע here occurs more than five dozen times in the Tanakh, meaning “he knew”, usually with literal connotations, but occasionally referring to sexual relations. Both the Tanakh and the New Testament tend to refer to sex obliquely, not of course not always. However, we are correct in reading both of these passages as referring to sexual acts even though they are not explicitly mentioned. The difference in the gospels, of course, is that any euphemism would range over the entire passage. It would be a hint rather than a euphemism as such.

Paintings of the Crucifixion make concessions to the modesty of the times, just as other religious paintings do. For instance, although I won’t reproduce it here because I’ve posted it before and it will damage SEO, paintings of the resurrection on the Day of Judgement depict the naked bodies of the resurrected with swathes of cloth around their genitals, although this is not how the New Testament describes it. Likewise, the Crucifixion is usually shown with a loin cloth. This is inaccurate, and in a culture when modesty was key, nakedness would be shameful and have sexual overtones. The presence of the loincloth is not mentioned in any gospel account. It isn’t Biblical.

Seneca the Younger, in his ‘Of Consolation: To Marcia’, rails against crucifixion as cruel and unusual, as we might put it today, and talks about victims’ genitals being impaled in some cases. An important element of crucifixion is to shame the victim, and here again the abuse of power is involved. Within the concept of the gospels a man is stripped naked and flogged. This is sadism, and referring to Nagel’s account, is perverted. The perversion is there in the New Testament. It doesn’t need to be stretched or creatively interpreted to be seen as sexualised, and more specifically to do with the abuse of power over someone expressed sexually. Josephus refers to the torture of Jewish rebels by Roman soldiers, including sodomising them with sticks and sticking vetch stalks into their urethræ (from ‘On The Jewish War’). In Gorgias 473C, Plato refers to castration preceding crucifixion. So there’s some chapter and verse for you from external, non-Biblical sources that crucifixions had a sexual element.

Then there’s the circumstantial evidence. We all know that prisoners are raped. Sexual atrocities have been regularly committed by the military throughout history. Anal rape of men by Roman soldiers is an established fact of ancient history. Now put these all together:

• The Tanakh and the New Testament euphemise sexual acts.
• Anal rape of men as a humiliating punishment was common in the Ancient World and was perpetrated by soldiers.
• Roman soldiers sexually assaulted Jewish men around the year 70 CE, i.e. forty years after the Crucifixion.
• The depiction of the stripping and flogging of Jesus is unequivocal sadism.
• Rape is more about the abuse of power than sex, but there was no Roman taboo about homosexual acts.
• Contemporary accounts of crucifixion include sexual atrocities.
• Jesus was naked on the Cross.

I don’t deny that there are people out there who get off on the idea that Jesus was raped but simply because there are doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It’s also true that Jesus needn’t literally go through the exact same sufferings as everyone who ever believes in him, but being the victim of sexual assault is an important category of suffering which people experience, sometimes in religious contexts. Also, the fact that people still use it today to mock Jesus doesn’t mean it’s sullied. In the Middle Ages, some nuns used to have visions that they were marrying Christ with his foreskin used as a wedding ring. This strikes us as peculiar and sexualised today, but it doesn’t irrevocably sully the relationship Christians have with him.

I want to move on now to the way people in today’s world react to this idea.

Before the late, largely unlamented Yahoo Answers succumbed to the malign neglect inflicted upon it by Verizon, there was a flurry of questions regarding the possibility that Jesus was raped. The motivations for many of the posts on that forum, if that’s the word, were often obscure. It was rife with people, myself included, who could probably be seen as mentally ill. For instance, there was a period during which Philosophy was afflicted by incessant questions about the details of the Australian Collins Submarine Project, which seemed to be an attempt by someone to come to terms with the office politics of the organisations involved but came to dominate the section, which one might expect to be about such questions as “if a tree falls in a forest with nothing to hear it, does it make a sound?”. Although there was a time when sensible questions could receive sensible answers there, by the end it was full of trolls and manifestations of mental illness. Hence the questions about Jesus being raped may well have had an erotic component for some of the people asking, but also were, I think, often attempts to upset Christians. The problem is that this approach is ill-conceived. Christians already worship a figure whose humiliation and low social status is for many of them a central part of his identity. He’s supposed to be a King who ruled from below while he was among us, and:

⁷ But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:

⁸ And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

⁹ Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:

¹⁰ That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;

⁷ αλλ εαυτον εκενωσεν μορφην δουλου λαβων εν ομοιωματι ανθρωπων γενομενος

⁸ και σχηματι ευρεθεις ως ανθρωπος εταπεινωσεν εαυτον γενομενος υπηκοος μεχρι θανατου θανατου δε σταυρου

⁹ διο και ο θεος αυτον υπερυψωσεν και εχαρισατο αυτω ονομα το υπερ παν ονομα

¹⁰ ινα εν τω ονοματι ιησου παν γονυ καμψη επουρανιων και επιγειων και καταχθονιων

Philippians 2:7-10.

We basically already know this about him. We may disagree on the details, but there are undoubtedly many examples of the consequences of his humble status which are not mentioned in the New Testament. Constantly bringing this particular aspect to light seems to be a calculated attempt to cause distress, but for many people it probably just makes the person doing this look silly and reveals their ignorance about the nature of the Christian faith. The appropriate response might be to work out a way to evangelise to such people, because their ignorance is a barrier to their salvation, as a Christian might see it.

All that said, I do agree that it’s possible that some of these statements are erotically motivated. I think they probably work because they cross taboos in people’s minds which were instilled early in their life, so the situation may be similar to something like a fetishist taking dirty underwear and masturbating to it. I don’t want to judge people for doing that, although for me it doesn’t sound like it’s just a fetish. It sounds, rather, that they are thoughtlessly or maliciously indulging their paraphilia when they could confine it to something which impinges less on the personal integrity of others. That said, a compassionate approach to someone’s psyche cannot allow one to give in even to moral disgust. I suspect that part of people’s motivation here is that they have been wronged by organised religion in one way or another, although I’m also sure there are many edgelords who are just doing it to get a reaction. And of course we do reward them for doing this when we do react.

That, then, is what I have to say for now, and the purpose, as I’ve said, of this post is to initiate a discussion which doesn’t descend into spam and the kind of silliness which happens on many online fora nowadays. Nonetheless, that’s my position on this. Any thoughts?