24 Hours From Tulpa

When I was twelve, because I felt an absence of like minds around me, and I wouldn’t overemphasise that because there were some, some of whom might be reading this now so don’t take it personally please, you’re all mentschen, I decided to create a separate person who was just as real as I was to live in my head. More specifically, I wanted him, whose name was to be David, to live in the top left hand corner of my frontal lobe. I can’t remember all the details of the ritual I undertook to do this but I do remember it involved imagining the room I was seated in becoming transparent and being surrounded by interstellar space. After some time, I became sure I had created this being, that my work was done, and he became my constant companion. I allowed him to speak through me to friends at school, who described him as “lackadaisical”, and I would certainly describe him as depressive. By the time I was fourteen, he was fading although I might say he’s either fused with my own personality or that I am this person now, the old me having disappeared. However, more than that I would say he was kind of an imaginary friend and I grew out of him.

More recently, I’ve come across this concept labelled as “tulpa”. A tulpa in contemporary Western usage is a mentally created thought form who is actually a conscious being. Not an imaginary one but a real one. The word is derived from Tibetan, a word which seems to be སྤྲུལ་པ་, although I’m not sure because of how strange Tibetan script is. The actual Tibetan word transliterates as “sprul-pa”, which is more general, meaning “manifestation” or “emanation”. The idea is similar to a golem in Judaism in some ways, and has also been translated as “thought-form”. It’s also found in Bon, a more folkish spiritual tradition in Tibet. The mere fact that a Tibetan word happens to be used to refer to a thought-form means neither that this is cultural appropriation nor that the concept isn’t universal. It also has a value and a meaning whether or not it’s literally possible to create an independent conscious being psychically.

Because of the possibility that one is creating a conscious entity, creating a tulpa shouldn’t be taken lightly. I think of David as having merged with my personality, so he isn’t so much dead as part of me. I don’t know what wider views are on this. I presume that once the decision has been made, people engage in detailed planning and perceptual, well, “outreach” is what I suppose I’d call it, to form their tulpa. Once all this has been done, the tulpa can be checked for sentience by opening one’s mind to them and finding out if they say and do things one wouldn’t expect.

It won’t have escaped your attention that a tulpa is very similar to an imaginary friend, something which is usually thought of as confined to childhood. Consequently, my apparent creation of David, as seen from the outside, might look rather immature for a twelve-year old. There are various other associations possible here too. For instance, belief in an interventionist Creator has sometimes been mockingly described as being an “imaginary friend”, and to some extent this can be embraced. It would be blasphemous for many theists to attempt to create God, but the association people make between imaginary friends and immaturity or psychosis is quite stigmatising and allows that mockery to be taken seriously. In fact tulpas, real or not, perform important emotional and psychological functions. I happen not to take the existence of David seriously now as a separate person who has ever existed, but I presume his apparition had a rôle. Incidentally, just to clear this up I have also had two close friends called David. Both of those are or were incontrovertibly real, physical people, one of whom I knew from school and was part of my small circle of friends as a young adult, and the other of whom I met at university, I lived with and died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. Please don’t run away with the idea that either of these people were in any sense imaginary. The second has had his biography presented on Radio 4.

Back to the issue. There is a question of childishness as a line drawn at a certain stage in one’s life after which, as Paul put it, one “put(s) away childish things”. In Greek then:

ὅτε ἤµην νήπιος,
ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόµην ὡς νήπιος· ὅτε
γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου.

1 Corinthians 13:11

Paul is speaking here of becoming an adult human male. The word he uses, ‘ανηρ, means that and also husband, and it refers to a rôle which arguably no longer exists because this was in a highly patriarchal society. If one really does put away childish things, one may impair one’s ability to relate to younger members of one’s own family. I don’t know what kind of rôle Greeks and Second Temple Period Jewish men played in the upbringing of their children, and I wonder about that because it may not have been as hands-off as the stereotype suggests, but my perhaps naïve assumption is that it didn’t involve much of a relationship in many cases. And I’m not saying this because of my own issues with gender identity. It’s uncontroversial to assert that fathers must be emotionally involved and empathic in their parenting. But leaving gender aside here, every adult is also a child, because they have been a child. My own experience of my life is that it’s rather homogenous in nature. When I was a child (“ὅτε ἤµην νήπιος . . .”), I was an oddly adult child, and maybe now I’m an adult I’m an oddly childish adult, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take responsibility for things, and most people feel a need to play, which has to be taken seriously. But in saying this I’m impinging on both Transwaffle and Homeedandherbs. It just needed saying here.

Two aspects of this come to mind. One is that of an author creating a fictional character, and the other is the psychological condition of dissociation. In order to be convincing, it should be impossible to sum up what a fictional character is in a short textual passage. They can’t be a talking head into whose mouth you put words. They have to have a life of their own which extends beyond the page in your imagination. Also, if other people read what you’ve written, one would hope they have a life of their own beyond what you imagine. The process of creating a fictional character is markèdly similar to that of creating a tulpa, and like some tulpas, the author has often built a world around that character for them to live in, whether it resembles ours or not. This suggests that if it’s true that psychic energy is invested in a tulpa, making them real and having a life of their own, a fictional character could also have a real existence. Conan Doyle’s annoyance at having to bring Sherlock Holmes back comes to mind, and considering his interest in the paranormal I wonder in fact if he considered the possibility that Holmes might in fact be in a sense real though incorporeal.

Dissociation is often seen as a psychiatric condition, and it does emerge as a coping mechanism for emotional trauma. This was once referred to as multiple personality disorder, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly because it does in fact often relate to unbearable experiences in early life. Dissociation is controversial as a diagnosis, as some see it as a product of the therapeutic process rather like some might see past-life regression, and it might also seem like the kind of rôle-playing which many claim takes place under hypnosis. However, there clearly are situations where people perceive events happening to them as taking place to someone else, and this can be a protective mechanism, so the question arises of why one might want to remove that simply so that the body in front of one can be considered a single personality when it may be of no advantage to them but merely be a form of conformity for the observer’s comfort. Then again, it may also cause distress for the people concerned to be in this state. The seriousness of the cause in many cases ought to lead one to proceed with caution here.

A common Christian view of the situation is that people are possessed. This is partly linked to Jesus’s saying in Matthew 12:43-45:

Ὅταν δὲ τὸ ἀκάθαρτον πνεῦµα ἐξέλθῃ
ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, διέρχεται διí ἀνύδρων τόπων ζητοῦν ἀνάπαυσιν,
καὶ οὐχ εὑρίσκει.

τότε λέγει, Εἰς τὸν οἶκόν µου ἐπιστρέψω ὅθεν
ἐξῆλθον· καὶ ἐλθὸν εὑρίσκει σχολάζοντα σεσαρωµένον καὶ
κεκοσµηµένον.

τότε πορεύεται καὶ παραλαµβάνει µεθí ἑαυτοῦ
ἑπτὰ ἕτερα πνεύµατα πονηρότερα ἑαυτοῦ, καὶ εἰσελθόντα κατοικεῖ
ἐκεῖ· καὶ γίνεται τὰ ἔσχατα τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐκείνου χείρονα τῶν
πρώτων. οὕτως ἔσται καὶ τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῃ τῇ πονηρᾷ.

• Now when the unclean spirit has left the human, it passes through arid places seeking rest and finds none. Then it says, “to my home I shall return, whence I came. And having come, it finds it unoccupied, clean and tidy. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they dwell there, and the human ends up worse off than they was in the first place. Thus will the evil be onto this generation.

So, the question arises of whether, far from creating a tulpa, I allowed myself to be possessed by doing this. This is also what many Christians think the risk is with meditation. One of the notable contrasts between the Tanakh and the New Testament is that the latter has a much stronger emphasis on possession by demons. Not being religiously Jewish, I don’t know how Judaism would view glanim (unsure of the plural here) from the viewpoint of sin. One difference between a tulpa and a golem is that the former is a physical being who can be manifested entirely from thought whereas the latter is a physical object upon which an animating principle is imposed by something like kabbalistic alchemical transmutation, so there is a sharper division between body and soul. To me, either seems like a form of hubris, and I’d feel uncomfortable about doing it nowadays, but I do recognise that they may have therapeutic or educational value.

Maybe a tulpa is like a companion animal. If they’re not conscious, they would seem to be a better choice than the practice of acquiring “pets” in many cases because nothing has the potential to do so except the creator. Or they may be like one’s child. I certainly spent a lot of mental energy creating our “phantom baby”, so maybe she was a kind of tulpa, which is disturbing as we tend not to think about her nowadays, but there was no intention to take her seriously as a real person at any point. Then there are the fictional characters I’ve created, and some of those have suffered a lot, some even killing themselves to end that suffering, so it would be extremely concerning if they were tulpas. I hope that some kind of intent would be involved. On the other hand, ethical considerations could mean that vegans are obliged to presume tulpas are conscious until proof of the contrary.

It does seem far-fetched that this could happen. However, in practical terms many people do behave as if a particular entity is real, notably deities. Certain avowèdly fictional characters can also have enormous followings and may be exceedingly realistic, and the question arises of whether there is such a thing as collective psychic energy which is able to hold such a being literally in existence. I don’t want to go too far down this road because it seems delusional but I do sometimes wonder about the existence of some kind of psychic field in sacred places and places of worship, although these would not be thought forms in the same sense. It would raise fewer issues to go into the question of their therapeutic value, which seems certain, although the question of malignant daydreaming also arises.

Two thirds of children are said to have imaginary friends at some stage in their childhood. It gives them the chance to play with someone when they’re bored or alone and on some level they do know they aren’t real, but it’s still important to respect this. It’s also supposed to be good for their language development because they talk more than they would otherwise. They help with creativity and emotional self-control. I would imagine that it could also help future authors and actors. I personally didn’t have an imaginary friend as a child, at least before I was twelve. I did, however, used to narrate my life for quite some time, which is kind of complimentary to characterisation in that it’s another aspect of writing fiction.

Speaking of which, one of the strangest things I found about NaNoWriMo when I started to do it was that participants would often talk about their protagonists as if they were separate from themselves. They would talk about them being reluctant to do things, for example. This is entirely different from how I write fiction. For me, although I do try to write fairly convincing fictional characters, they exist because they have a certain set of functions in the narrative, such as being a window onto the world, having a particular kind of character trait or constitute thought experiments, and they can’t be separated from the process of worldbuilding because they’re part of that world, or the setting if you want to think of it as mainstream. I wonder if there’s a link between this other tendency, which extends well beyond NaNo, and the recent focus on tulpas, and perhaps also between the facility to have imaginary friends as children and later creative writing. Then again, there are a lot of things about NaNo I find odd and baffling.

Adolescence is not generally considered an appropriate age at which to have an imaginary friend, so this has been the object of psychological research. Are they a sign of immaturity or something more positive? Three possibilities were investigated: whether they were a sign of a deficit, giftedness or egocentrism. Teenage diaries were read and the conclusion reached, perhaps surprisingly, was that teens with imaginary friends tended to be more socially competent than average, had good coping skills and were particularly creative. This is not at all what I would expect, and I don’t feel like it describes me at that age. What does reflect my attitude at that time is that teenage imaginary friends are not created as a substitute for real friends.

There’s clearly an at least superficial resemblance between tulpas, imaginary friends and dissociation, but dissociation tends to be pathologised. This seems similar to the way hearing voices is stigmatised. Medicalised and pathologised coping mechanisms, or simply aspects of experience and behaviour, often seem to be due to an intolerant and emotionally dismissive perspective on what it is to be human. It can also be hypocritical. For example, depending on the society it’s considered entirely acceptable by many to see theistic religion as “normal”, but leaving aside the question of the reality of either deities or tulpas, both of them involve interaction with a being who is not perceived by everyone. The difference with a tulpa is that they may be perceived by one person alone, but being in a minority of one doesn’t make someone mistaken. Looking at it from a mental health perspective, I don’t think it would be a bad thing for someone to manifest such an entity regardless of one’s views as to their reality. To use a possibly inappropriate analogy, the processes of physical pathology are usually initially an attempt to compensate for imbalance and remain in or return to a stable phase in terms of homoeostasis, and whereas inflammation and pain, for example, may be unpleasant there is usually a reason for them. Addressing the issue of a tulpa as if it’s a central part of a psychiatric issue is similarly inappropriate, even if there are other issues going on for the person involved.

Most people who generate tulpas consciously see them as psychological or neurological phenomena. I would probably fall into the second category, at least as I perceived David back then, in that as I said, I saw him as someone who took up residence in a specific part of my brain: part of my frontal lobe. However, I also feel that a tulpa is like the soul of a dead person, in the Ancient Egyptian sense of being a subjective impression of their physical presence, which is one of the aspects of the soul from that perspective. In that respect, the essence of the departed who visits one in one’s dreams or is seen around after their death does have a consciousness in my view because even if they are only “simulated” in one’s own mind, one’s mind is conscious by definition and therefore this person is conscious, tulpa or otherwise. The two are very similar. Only one person in twelve sees the tulpa associated with their consciousness as having a metaphysical explanation.

Thoughtforms are conceptually ancestral to tulpas in the current sense of the latter term. In Islam, they have been referred to as djinn, but a djinn is, as I understand it, generally conceived as a morally uncommitted spirit like an angel or demon in essence, and in fact I’m not convinced they aren’t physical. As mentioned previously on this blog, plasmas can exist in the form of charged dusts and have many of the characteristics, such as the ability to partition off areas of themselves to form protected special environments like cells, which make life possible, and they would need to avoid damp areas to do this, and for this reason I think it’s possible that the Islamic references to djinn may in fact be “life Jim, but not as we know it.” Consequently, a djinn and a thought-form could be completely different things. That said, maybe it’s possible for djinn to form through psychokinesis or perhaps a more firmly established physiological process, in which case they could be both.

The illustration which opened this post is from the Theosophist Annie Besant’s 1901 book ‘Thought-Forms’. Besant would unsurprisingly have attempted to fit the concept into Theosophy. Certainly the image above does call to mind my impression that physical churches and I presume other places of worship and special spaces have a kind of psychic energy field, which in the case of a church could be seen as an organ of the bride of Christ, to put it in Christian terms. Therefore, whereas many Christians might find that the general idea of thought-forms and tulpas is dangerous and Satanic, I would imagine that they would go along with this, and I can’t see the difference between this and the idea of a spirit-filled church. Regardless of denomination, it seems to me that some churches feel kind of “flat” and others “vibrant”, including house churches, and I can only really conclude that there really is something supernatural going on here. In fact it doesn’t even require theism to accept that this is true, and even physicalism might allow for some kind of esprit du corps.

This relates to such phenomena as the Winchester House, which is by any standard a remarkable building. It’s a large house in San José, California, owned by the heirs to the Winchester estate, i.e. the company which manufactured the rifles and hard drives. When Sarah Winchester inherited the fortune, it was the result of her father-in-law’s and husband’s deaths and when her daughter died of malnutrition, she consulted a medium who claimed to channel her husband, telling her that she must go west and continuously build a house to atone for the deaths of the victims of the company’s products. Ms Winchester receives instructions in her dreams for additions to the house which she then drew up as plans the next day, and although work was not constant on the house, there has been extensive remodelling and additions. Even new additions were sometimes demolished according to her wishes, or as she would probably have said, the wishes of the spirits haunting the house. It now has seven storeys and includes windows which open onto walls, staircases leading nowhere, stained glass windows and plentiful other odd features. This could be looked at, non-exclusively, as either a manifestation of guilt or grief, or as a kind of thought-form and a house with a spirit of its own. It’s been claimed that other haunted houses are tulpas too. I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that Ms Winchester had this done to assuage her guilt at the deaths caused by Winchester rifles or for some other emotional reason such as bereavement just because of the claims regarding supernatural influence or thought-forms.

From a philosophical perspective, all of this relates to the idea of concepts as external to the mind, although this sense is less concrete. According to the philosopher Michael Dummett, analytical philosophy, that is, the dominant strand of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world, held that the philosophy of thought can be understood through the philosophy of language alone and completely. This doesn’t sound particularly promising from the viewpoint of tulpas or thought-forms as it would seem that their existence must therefore be reduced to linguistic fictions, but there are other aspects of analytical philosophy which are more promising. Dummett is also on record as saying that the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Frege, generally regarded as one of the parents of analytical philosophy and promoted by Bertrand Russell, contributed to this school of thought by separating thoughts from the mind and therefore separating philosophy of mind (such as the mind-body problem) from the philosophy of thought. Moreover, the notion of psychologism is much criticised in Western academic philosophy generally. This is the belief that psychology is central to understanding many or all non-psychological ideas. I do in fact think this is entirely plausible in some situations, for instance the interesting parallels between ego defences in Freud’s thought and Kantian categories, but the general consequence of these demarcations is that there is a realm in which concepts exist separate from consciousness. And in fact I do believe concepts are usefully thought of in this way, and that there are no inventions but rather discoveries. A concept seems to be “in the air” waiting to be grasped sometimes, and it’s common for different people to come up with the same thing independently at roughly the same time simply because the season for doing so has arrived, possible examples being SF novels about asteroid impacts in the 1970s and filament light bulbs. Hence, although it isn’t concrete in nature, something like the idea of thought-forms does exist even in respectable academia.

This hasn’t been a thorough survey of all that can be said about tulpas and thought-forms, but I have expressed certain issues in connection with them which come to mind often. One takeaway from this is that although I personally happen to believe that tulpas have a kind of independent existence, although I’m not sure about consciousness unless one is referring to the actual grey matter substrate on which their ideas depend, their utility, value and meaning to those who construct them is clear, and they should not be stigmatised according to some reductivist paradigm which equates mental and physical illness.

The Central Science

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When I was a youngling, for some reason my image of chemistry was a man in a white coat doing something with test tubes of orange liquid. I have no idea why the liquid was orange and in fact there probably aren’t many compounds which are that colour. It’s all the stranger that this was my image because my father was an industrial chemist, so one might imagine I was more grounded in that particular respect.

I don’t know how the process worked exactly because he was a rather distant influence on my life in some ways, but by the time I was about seven or eight I had abandoned my childish ambitions to be a nuclear physicist and decided I wanted to be a biochemist. If you imagine science as a three-tier system with biology at the top and physics at the bottom, chemistry is in the middle: the central science. In this schema, biochemistry would be about two-thirds of the way up, with organic chemistry under it down to the middle point and below that would lie inorganic chemistry.

At secondary school (and we’re kind of on homeedandherbs territory here so I won’t dwell on it too much), I excelled at chemistry and out of my year of ninety selective (11+ passers) pupils I got the highest mark at the end of the third year, which is Year 9 or Key Stage 3 in contemporary terms. My year head (who is now a successful folk musician incidentally and has been on TOTP) was very happy about this. However, I had a problem. My best friend was doing German with me and although I was very close to him emotionally I also thought he was a bad influence in the sense that if we were in the same classes it would be difficult for us to concentrate on our work, so I had to eliminate German and the way the block system worked with options, I couldn’t do both that and Chemistry. There was also the question of balance, which I’ll come back to. I therefore gave up Chemistry and instead did the unpopular combination of Biology and Physics at O-level. To my mind at the time, I’d also heard that the concept of molarity was important in chemistry and I’d failed to understand it a couple of years previously and found it intimidating. This was a very unpopular decision with my Year Head, and he later anxiously asked me whether I was planning to do A-level English because again my results during the O-level years had been the best in the year. I did, but it was a bit of a disaster really for reasons I really shouldn’t go into on this blog. In case you’re wondering, I did eventually take GCSE Chemistry at evening classes in the ’90s when it was an entry requirement for my herbalism training and got an A, although to be frank getting anything other than an A at GCSE when you have a postgraduate qualification basically means you’ve failed calamitously. I also have a B in Spanish and it’s worse than my French, which I failed at O-Level.

Continuing with the school theme for a bit, pupils who followed science were generally encouraged either to do one science or Chemistry with either Biology or Physics because the two were closer to each other than Physics and Biology. My approach was different of course. I decided that since biology and physics both impinged on chemistry, studying Biology and Physics would enable me to learn some chemistry from either end, and it did in fact do so to some extent. This is of course because chemistry is the central science of the three.

This phrase, “The Central Science”, is in fact the name of a popular textbook on the subject, first published in 1977, and the idea was also posited by the philosopher Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. Chemistry can be seen as central because it deals with entities which are the concern of physicists such as electrons, protons and marginally neutrons, and is also used to explain the behaviour of organic molecules such as DNA, proteins and lipids which are the basis of life as we know it. As such, chemistry is isolated from other sciences and is able to develop concepts of its own which may not connect as closely with reality as the other two, although it’s probably true that right now physics isn’t doing too well in that respect either. There’s also the question of turning the current ladder on its head. Right now, most people who think about it at all probably consider physics to be the basis of, well, physical reality, but it’s possible to invert this and consider the Cosmos to be centred on life, which in the carbon-based biochemical form we’re familiar with can be used as the basis of science by implying certain things about the nature of the Universe. For instance, Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, predicted that because there was organic life in the Universe, and carbon was unexpectedly common, the energy of the carbon nucleus must be unusually close to the sum of the energies of three helium-4 nuclei, since that was how it formed in the first place, and he turned out to be correct. We can safely start off from the idea that our kind of life exists and work out what that entails for the nature of reality. It’s therefore fairly simple either to regard biology or physics as the most fundamental science, but the same can’t so easily be done with chemistry because of its central position.

Physics can leapfrog chemistry into biology to some extent: there is such a thing as biophysics. For instance, the way birds and insects fly or the emergence of turbulence in a blood vessel leading to arterial disease rely more on physics than chemistry. By contrast, there’s nothing to leapfrog to in chemistry. It’s either going to become biology or physics on the whole, although there’s also the likes of geochemistry and astrochemistry, though these are more specialities of the subject itself. Chemistry cannot claim, therefore, to be the basis of anything in a fundamental way. It’s always going to have to rely on other sciences to some extent. This is not a criticism of the science so much as a musing on its nature, but it has practical consequences for academia.

Chemistry is impinged on from all sides. In the ’80s, I was unsurprisingly involved in campaigning against cuts in higher education, and at the time they focussed very much on the arts and humanities. I would partly put this down to the influence of another industrial chemist on this country and my life, namely Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s government concentrated very much on slashing funding and resources to the humanities while leaving chemistry relatively untouched. Although I can’t remember the details particularly well, I do remember participating in some kind of dispute on campus regarding the injustice of this unbalanced approach to research and teaching, and at one point we found ourselves confronting chemists, who were apparently of the opinion that the humanities were less important than their own faculty and department. Incidentally, the layout of Leicester University reflected the central position of Chemistry because it had three linked buildings dealing with physics, chemistry, biology and medicine, with Chemistry in the middle joining the others together. I don’t know if this is coincidence, architectural conceit or logistical. The chemists’ hostility to us, and at the time chemistry graduates tended to be politically on the Right, was in fact ill-founded because from a twenty-first century perspective this looks like a case of divide and conquer, and Chemistry turned out to be particularly vulnerable to funding cuts. It’s a case of Martin Niemöller’s famous dictum, “first they came for the Socialists. . . “, though in some ways not so serious, but who knows the consequences?

During the ‘noughties, there was a rapid decline in Chemistry departments. This came rather close to home, as one of our closest friends worked for such a department at De Montfort University, formerly and much more appropriately known as Leicester Polytechnic, but all over England Chemistry departments were closing down. Between 1997 and 2002 there was a fifteen percent drop in British chemistry graduations compared to a nine percent drop in graduations overall. Chemistry is an expensive course to teach, which rather annoys me as the Humanities which bore the brunt of the cuts from 1981 on are probably cheaper than any of the natural sciences. Nonetheless a university looking for savings is going to be eyeing Chemistry suspiciously. This has consequences for the pharmaceutical and materials sciences industries in this country, which is particularly serious in the former case as it’s a major British industry (even though it must be nationalised to preserve the NHS and engages in animal abuse on an appaling scale). It’s also a less popular course with students because they see the careers as less lucrative than others, and also see the subject as less exciting than some others, so there was a decline in applications during the ’90s. This may reflect the unhealthy shift towards a “vocational” rather than a truly academic approach to higher education. The way the National Curriculum lumped all the sciences together and for some reason allowed major errors to creep into the syllabus can’t have helped either. However, this is not just a British phenomenon. The same is happening in North America, Europe and Japan, although there has been a rise in interest in China and India. Even so, nowadays only half the universities in the “U”K offer Chemistry per se as a complete degree.

This could easily turn into a discussion about Britain vs the rest of the world but the pressures are the same everywhere. Chemistry is also vulnerable to inroads being made into it due to its central position. Physically-based materials science can advance “upwards” from physics into chemistry and biotechnology can advance “downwards” into it. There’s also nanotech, which does the same kind of job as applied chemistry might’ve done in the past. Biotechnology and pharmacology are difficult to tell apart in some ways. For instance, biotech is used to manufacture drugs and since it aims at altering the function of cells it clearly applies to medicine. Chemical engineering also uses a lot of nanotechnology nowadays. Hence the territory of chemistry is easily invaded.

Ever since I studied it at school, I’ve felt that geography isn’t a real subject. It seems to be more a collection of bits of other disciplines such as economics and geology rather than having a real core. Of course a circle can easily be drawn round a subject and it can simply be called something, but it means it has neither a claim to being fundamental in a way most other disciplines are nor its own theoretical basis. I may of course be wrong about this because of Dunning-Kruger, but my perception of the nature of geography, which is I admit fairly dismissive, has some similarities with how I apprehend chemistry. Chemistry has too many connections with other fields to stand a good chance of holding together in the long run except in a significantly reduced area, although I have a great deal more respect for it than geography. Part of the subject’s predicament could be linked to the rather confusing possibility that scientific and technological progress is actually slowing down rather than speeding up. There was an exponential growth in the number of synthesised substances between the start of the industrial revolution and the 1990s, but it isn’t clear that this has or will continue, and it may be deceptive. For instance, in pharmacology, an area I tend to know more about due to being a herbalist, the so-called “non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs” (NSAIDs) are all cycloöxygenase inhibitors despite the fact that there are many possible points along which the inflammatory pathway could be modified and in spite of large numbers of compounds being known to interact with them. Likewise with broad-spectrum antibiotics, there are many antimicrobial compounds out there, but the ones used tend to be quite similar. This is partly due to capitalism of course, because altering a compound you know works and which is already well-known and manufactured on a large scale is easier than coming up with a completely new one. This can also be seen in my post on fibres, where Du Pont owned the patent on Nylon-66, leading to the development of new nylons which were somewhat different from the first but also had a lot in common with them. The restriction imposed by the patent did spur creativity, but in a specific area. Also, it’s notable that the most recent organic synthetic polymer mentioned in that post was first marketed in 1958, and there was a peak of synthetic fibre production in the mid-twentieth century.

The exponential growth in the number of different compounds synthesised in the past two and a bit centuries could be expected to follow other markers of technological change and go into decline. It’s partly driven by population growth, which possibly goes some way towards explaining why India and China now have more chemists than they used to because they’re developing nations with large populations. In principle, the more the population is, the more people there are to have useful ideas, in chemistry and other areas. Once development has got past a certain stage, population growth slows and this is likely to happen for the whole species, potential extinction events notwithstanding. The date for a technological singularity has been steadily postponed and is according to some people now in the early twenty-second century, and some consider it to be the end of exponential progress followed by a decline. In other words it’s a peak. It’s possible for one person to have been born the year of the first powered plane flight and retire during the Apollo programme. By contrast, a person born the last year humans left low Earth orbit will now be forty-nine. By 1970, most of the technologies that made the biggest difference to standards of living were already in place. The exception, of course, is Moore’s Law, but that too has now ceased to operate due to transistors being too small to operate reliably owing to the laws of physics. That doesn’t mean there isn’t another way forward though.

The problem with chemistry is that it was particularly useful for those kinds of mid-twentieth century achievements, such as antibiotics, plastics and synthetic textiles. Once we’ve got those the situation changes, and in particular it’s held back by capitalism and the emphasis on vocational training in universities rather than actual education, although slowing population growth is also likely to be a factor.

Another problem, affecting academia across the sciences, is scientometrics. This is the attempt to measure and quantify research papers and publications, and is used to assess funding and resources allocation in science. It can be seen to encourage the “publish or die” approach, where research is divided up into “minimum publishable units”, which increases the paper count but doesn’t particularly contribute to progress. It also distorts it. For instance, in palæontology there’s been a tendency to report a very large number of species in our genus and I suspect that this is because it’s newsworthy and attracts funding rather than anything else. The result is poor quality research. Recently I noticed that a number of medical papers seemed to have oddly small sample sizes which didn’t seem to be the kind of numbers you could do reliable statistics on. Maybe there’s been some advance in stats which means that tests are now able to be trusted with smaller samples but I strongly suspect this is publish or perish. I cannot see this not having an influence on chemistry, although how is another question.

Finally, there are some philosophical issues associated specifically with chemistry rather than other natural sciences, although of course they would have their own too. Chemistry is in broad terms the science of the structure and transformation of matter, although it’s possible to take issue with that because not all materials science is chemistry and not all matter is atomic. It also impinges on quantum physics a fair bit. For instance, there’s mesomerism. An atom might form a double bond with another but a single bond with a third and fourth at the same time, in which case the two single-bonded atoms would be negative ions, but because of the quantum nature of electrons it’s uncertain which of the three atoms it’s bonded with have the double bonds and which are ionised. There is, I think, no definitive fact about this, and in the many-worlds interpretation this means that we don’t know which universe we’re in, and in fact may be in three different worlds until we are able to observe the fact of the matter, or create that fact. Atoms also lack a definitive radius, and have different radii according to whether the bond they’re making is covalent or ionic. Also, the very distinction between ionic and covalent bonds is not black and white, since some bonds are closer to being covalent and some closer to being ionic but they can’t be neatly pigeonholed. This is partly because atoms are not really atoms. They’re not indivisible (α-τομοι) units of matter.

The idea of describing a compound in terms of a certain number of atoms of each element joined together also doesn’t always make sense. For instance, tantalum carbide’s formula is TaC_0.88 because it doesn’t in fact consist of equal amounts of tantalum and carbon. This happens a lot with minerals. Some chemists claim there are chemical properties which can’t be reduced to physics, such as Roald Hoffmann, who questions the reducibility of pH (acidity or alkalinity of a substance dissolved in water) and aromaticity (ring-shaped organic molecules) to non-chemical concepts.

Note the resonances – there’s a degree of uncertainty here

Aromaticity famously came to the chemist Kekulé in a dream where he sees carbon atoms joining hands and turning into snakes who swallow their own tails. I’ve just realised this is going to sound odd unless I explain the difference between aliphatic and aromatic compounds. In organic chemistry there are two main types of compound. Aliphatic compounds are based on chains of carbon atoms and aromatic compounds are based on rings of the same. They’re called aromatic because early on, some of them were noted to be smelly, such as benzene, but this is not an essential feature and many aliphatic compounds are also smelly.

As noted yesterday (to me, not to you), hexagonal rings of carbon are particularly strong, which is why it might be feasible to build a space elevator with their help. The above ring is therefore particularly stable. Each hydrogen can also be replaced with something else. Phenol, for example, replaces one hydrogen with an hydroxyl (OH) group, or a larger entity such as the rest of an amino acid can occur to, as with phenylalanine:

(Hydrogens and carbons are not routinely drawn in structural formulæ).

That alternating double and single bond in the hexagonal ring may not represent reality, partly due to resonance structures, and consequently they’re more often represented thus:

There is a problem with drawing it this way, because it’s easy to forget that every carbon has four bonds, leading to impossible structures being drawn if you’re not careful, but it’s plainly quicker and reflects the non-local nature of the electrons, which is where things get a bit imponderable for me. Atoms, and in particular their orbitals, are not spheres but collections of lobes meeting at a point in which the electrons are most likely to be located. This is irreducible probability: there is no hidden mechanism which determines where they are, and there cannot be – it’s been proven. Hence there are situations where two lobes on one atom can overlap with two lobes on another, and these are known as π bonds. They’ve been evoked as an explanation for the existence of free will, as they occur aplenty in human brain cell microtubules. In the case of an aromatic compound there are six of them, each overlapping with two adjacent carbons. Double and single bonds between carbon atoms have different lengths, but X-ray crystallography shows that all the carbon-carbon bonds in benzene are the same length, so the picture above of alternating single and double bonds is unrealistic. It’s also a little hard to imagine how such a molecule could be a regular hexagon, and this leads to knock-on effects in different parts of the molecule if it’s bigger than just benzene. Hexabenzocoranene, for instance, consists of a sheet of thirteen of these rings, and it seems they’d need to tessellate for this to be possible. Therefore the orbitals can be thought of as a pair of parallel tori on either side of the molecule, and the molecule must also be flat even though the classical understanding of the bond lengths would mean it couldn’t be. This is an emergent property of resonance, and as such could be considered a purely chemical concept or property, not reducible to physics.

When this idea became popular, it underwent “mission creep”: chemists started to see these non-localised bonds everywhere. It also changed the definition of what an aromatic compound was again, because for instance that structural formula of phenylalanine above is no longer as neatly alternating as it’s shown to be. Aromatic compounds become compounds including carbon rings with delocalised electrons, themselves in rings.

I mentioned X-ray crystallography. This involves working out what shape a molecule is by crystallising a lot of it together and X-raying it. This leads to a distinctive pattern of X-rays bouncing off it in the same way as a diamond with a beam of light shone through it would produce a distinctive pattern of reflection which would reveal its symmetry, and it’s possible to work back from this scattering to a shape which the molecule in question must be. This was later joined by NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, since renamed MRI so as not to scare patients that the process was dangerously radioactive. The magnetic fields induced cause the electrons and protons to behave in a distinctive way in aromatic compounds, and therefore the test for whether something is aromatic or not is now several steps away from being the same thing as containing a hexagonal ring of carbon with alternating single and double bonds. Computers also made determining their form faster, and this is significant because it changes the definition of stability. It means that a molecule only needs to be stable enough to last as long as it takes for a NMR scan to be computed of it, meaning in turn that less stable aromatic compounds can be said to exist than before. However, on the other side again, the reason for their instability may be that they are on Earth at a certain temperature interacting with other molecules, and there are in fact polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in interstellar space. They do exist, and our understanding of them is in a way parochial, because just as pH makes most sense considering compounds dissolved in water, so does our understanding of polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

It even gets to the point that all that’s needed is for atoms of any kind to form a loop. There’s a square molecule of four aluminium atoms, which probably exists transiently but doesn’t persist but could in a sense be called aromatic, and again in deep space there’s C₆, which is just the tiniest and loneliest possible piece of graphite. On Earth it would either oxidise to carbon dioxide or find other carbons and become graphite, graphene or a carbon nanotube.

This brings me back to the minimum publishable unit. At some point the concept of aromaticity got out of hand and it’s suspiciously similar to the plethora of supposèd species of Homo. It seems that it might be quite exciting and publicity-seeking, and maybe in a way fashionable, to declare something an aromatic compound just to crank out a paper, and I’m not blaming anyone here. It’s the system. In doing so, this pressure to publish erodes and blurs the originally nicely defined concept of the benzene ring, and later the delocalised electron thing. It’s an example of how capitalism influences science, not in the sense of forcing scientists to develop new antibiotics which are basically the same as their predecessors and therefore have the same drawbacks and potential to lead to resistance, but in the sense that it subtly pervades the scientific consciousness and very concepts used in it. In a way it was better for this concept before there was a means of measuring the length of atomic bonds, and it was certainly a more sensible environment before scientometrics started to make a serious impact on chemistry.

In conclusion, then, I wonder if anyone at all has read this far, and also that chemistry is in danger of being eroded precisely because it’s the central science, and also due to political and social pressures, the concepts within it, which may be unique to chemistry and not helpfully explicable in reductivist ways to physics, are like much of science in danger from capitalism via scientometrics. The issue of aromaticity is a single but insidious example of that. Also, calling chemistry “the central science” kind of makes it sound fundamental, but in reality what it means is that it’s the most “sciency” science, since it’s the one which is furthest from anything non-scientific. It’s the middle rung of the ladder, and as such has special status, but that also makes it especially vulnerable.

The Anti-Universe

A prominent mythological theme is that of time being cyclical. For instance, in Hinduism there is a detailed chronology which repeats endlessly. Bearing in mind that the numbers used in mythological contexts are often mainly there to indicate enormity or tininess, there is the kalpa, which lasts 4 320 million years and is equivalent to a day in Brahma’s life. There are three hundred and sixty of these days in a Brahman year, and a hundred Brahman years in a Brahman lifetime, after which the cycle repeats. Within a Brahman Day, human history also repeats a cycle known as the Yuga Cycle, which consists of four ages, Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. The names refer to the proportion of virtue and vice characterising each age, so Satya is perfect, life is long, everyone is kind to each other, wise, healthy and so on, satya meaning “truth” or “sincerity”, Treta is “third” in the sense of being three quarters virtue and one quarter vice, Dvapara is two quarters of each and Kali, unsurprisingly the current age, is the age of evil and destruction. Humans start off as giants and end as dwarfs. Then the cycle repeats. Thus there are cycles within cycles in Hindu cosmology.

The Maya also have a cyclical chronology, including the Long Count, in a cycle lasting 63 million years. Probably the most important cycle in Mesoamerican calendars is the fifty-two year one, during which the two different calendars cycle in and out of sync with each other. The Aztecs used to give away all their possessions at the end of that period in the expectation that the world might come to an end.

The Jewish tradition has a few similar features as well. Firstly, it appears to use the ages of people to indicate their health and the decline of virtue. The patriarchs named in the Book of Genesis tend to have shorter and shorter lives leading up to the Flood, which ends the lives of the last few generations before it, including the 969-year old Methuselah. Giants are also mentioned in the form of the Nephilim, although they are seen as evil. I wonder if this reflects the inversion of good and evil which took place when Zoroastrianism began, where previously lauded deities were demonised. There is also a cycle in the practice of the Jubilee, consisting of a forty-nine year Golden Jubilee and a shorter seven year Jubilee, and obviously there are the seven-day weeks, which we still have in the West.

The Hindu series of Yugas also reflects the Greek tradition of Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages, which was ultimately adopted into modern archæology in modified form as the Three-Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron. The crucial difference between the Hindu and Greek age system and our own ideas of history is that they both believed in steady decline whereas we tend to be more mixed. We tend to believe in progress, although our ideas of what constitutes that do vary quite a lot. In a way, it makes more sense to suppose that everything will get worse, although since history is meant to be cyclical it can also be expected to get better, because of the operation of entropy. Things age, wear out, run down, burn out and so on, and this is the regular experience for everyone, no matter when they’re living in history, and it makes sense that the world might be going in the same direction. On the longest timescale of course it is, because the Sun will burn out, followed by all other stars and so on.

Twentieth century cosmology included a similar theory, that of the oscillating Universe. It was considered possible that the quantity of mass in the Universe was sufficient that once it got past a certain age, gravity acting between all the masses in existence would start to pull everything back together again until it collapsed into the same hot, dense state which started the Universe in the first place. There then emerge a couple of issues. Would the Universe then bounce back and be reborn, only to do it again in an endless cycle? If each cycle is an exact repetition, does it even mean anything to say it’s a different Universe, or is it just the same Universe with time passing in a loop?

This is not currently a popular idea because it turns out that there isn’t enough mass in the Universe to cause it to collapse against the Dark Energy which is pushing everything apart, so ultimately the objects in the Universe are expected to become increasingly isolated until there is only one galaxy visible in each region of the Universe where space is expanding relatively more slowly than the speed of light. This has a significant consequence. A species living in a galaxy at that time would be unaware that things had ever been different. There would be no evidence available to suggest that it was because we can currently see the galaxies receding, and therefore we can know that things will be like that one day, but they would have no way to discover that they hadn’t always been like this. This raises the question of what we might have lost. We reconstruct the history of the Universe based on the data available to us, and we’re aware that we’re surrounded by galaxies which, on the very large scale, are receding from each other, so we can imagine the film rewinding and all the stars and galaxies, or what will become them, starting off in the same place. But at that time, how do we know there wasn’t evidence of something we can no longer recover which is crucial to our own understanding of the Universe?

Physics has been in a bit of a strange state in recent decades. Because the levels of energy required cannot be achieved using current technology, the likes of the Large Hadron Collider are not powerful enough to provide more than a glimpse of the fundamental nature of physical reality. Consequently, physicists are having to engage in guesswork without much feedback, and this applies also to their conception of the entire Universe. I’ve long been very suspicious about the very existence of non-baryonic dark matter. Dark matter was originally proposed as a way to explain why galaxies rotate as if they have much more gravity than their visible matter, i.e. stars, is exerting. In fact, if gravity operates over a long range in the same way as it does over short distances, such as within this solar system or between binary stars, something like nine-tenths of the mass is invisible. To some extent this can be explained by ordinary matter such as dust, planets or very dim stars, and there are also known subatomic particles such as the neutrinos which are very common but virtually undetectable. The issue I have with non-baryonic dark matter, and I’ve been into this before on here, is that it seems to be a specially invented kind of matter to fill the gap in the model which, however, is practically undetectable. There’s another possible solution. What makes this worse is that dark matter is now being used to argue for flaws in the general theory of relativity, when it seems very clear that the problem is actually that physicists have proposed the existence of a kind of substance which is basically magic.

If you go back to the first moment of the Universe, there is a similar issue. Just after the grand unification epoch, a sextillionth (long scale) of a second after the Big Bang, an event is supposed to have taken place which increased each of the three extensive dimensions of the Universe by a factor of the order of one hundred quintillion in a millionth of a yoctosecond. If you don’t recognise these words, the reason is that these are unusually large and small quantities, so their values aren’t that important. Some physicists think this is fishy, because again something seems to have been simply invented to account for what happened in those circumstances without there being other reasons for supposing it to be so. They therefore decided to see what would happen if they used established principles to recreate the early Universe, and in particular they focussed on CPT symmetry

CPT symmetry is Charge, Parity and Temporal symmetry, and can be explained thus, starting with time. Imagine a video of two billiard balls hitting and bouncing off each other out of context. It would be difficult to tell whether that video was being played forwards or backwards. This works well on a small scale, perhaps with two neutrons colliding at about the speed of sound at an angle to each other, or a laser beam reflecting off a mirror. Charge symmetry means that if you observe two equally positively and negatively charged objects interacting, you could swap the charges and still observe the same thing, or for that matter two objects with the same charge could have the opposite charges and still do the same thing. Finally, parity symmetry is the fact that you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is the right way up or upside down, or reflected. All of these things don’t work in the complicated situations we tend to observe because of pesky things like gravity and accidentally burning things out by sticking batteries in the wrong way round or miswiring plugs, but in sufficiently simple situations all of these things are symmetrical.

But there is a problem. The Universe as a whole doesn’t seem to obey these laws of symmetry. For instance, almost everything we come across seems to be made of matter even though there doesn’t seem to be any reason why there should be more matter than antimatter or the other way round, and time tends to go forwards rather than backwards on the whole. One attempt to explain why matter seems to dominate the Universe is that for some reason in the early Universe more matter was created than antimatter, and since matter meeting antimatter annihilates both, matter is all that’s left. Of course antimatter does crop up from time to time, for instance in bananas and thunderstorms, but it doesn’t last long because it pretty soon comes across an antiparticle in the form of, say, an electron, and the two wipe each other off the map in a burst of energy.

These physicists proposed a solution which does respect this symmetry and allows time to move both forwards and backwards. They propose that the Big Bang created not one but two universes, one where time runs forwards and mainly made of matter and the other where time goes backwards and is mainly made of antimatter, and also either of these universes is geometrically speaking a reflection of the other, such as all the left-handed people in one being right-handed in the other. This explains away the supposèd excess of matter. There’s actually just as much antimatter as matter, but it swapped over at the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang, time was running backwards and the Universe was collapsing.

In a manner rather similar to the thought that an oscillating Universe could be practically the same as time running in a circle because each cycle might be identical and there’s no outside to see it from, the reversed, mirror image antimatter Universe is simply this one running backwards with, again, nothing on the outside to observe it with, and therefore for all intents and purposes there just is this one Universe running forwards after the Big Bang, because it’s indistinguishable from the antimatter one running backwards. On the other hand, the time dimension involved is the same as this one, and therefore it could just be seen as the distant past, which answers the question of what there was before the Big Bang: there was another universe, or rather there was this universe. It also means everything has already happened.

But a further question arises in my head too, and this is by no means what these physicists are claiming. As mentioned above, one model of the Universe is that it repeats itself in a cycle. What we may have here is theoretical support for the idea of a Universe collapsing in on itself before expanding again. That’s the bit we can see or deduce given currently available evidence. However, in the future, certain evidence will be lost because there will only be one visible galaxy observable, and the idea of space expanding will be impossible to support even though it is. What if one of the bits of evidence we’ve already lost is of time looping? Or, what if time just does loop anyway? What if time runs forwards until the Universe reaches a maximum size and then runs backwards again as it contracts? There is an issue with this. There isn’t enough mass in the Universe for it to collapse given the strength of dark energy pushing it apart, but of course elsewhere in the Multiverse there could be looping universes due to different physical constants such as the strength of dark energy or the increased quantity of matter in them, because in fact as has been mentioned before there are possible worlds where this does take place. Another question then arises: how does time work between universes? Are these looping universes doing so now in endless cycles, or are they repeating the same stretch of time? Does time even work that way in the Multiverse, or is it like in Narnia, where time runs at different speeds relative to our world?

It may seem like I’ve become highly speculative. In my defence, I’d say this. I have taken pains to ignore my intuition in the past because I believed it was misleading. However, there appears to be an intuition among many cultures that time does run in a cycle, and the numbers these cultures produce are oddly similar. The Mayan calendar’s longest time period is the Alautun, which lasts 63 081 429 years, close to the number of years it’s been since the Chicxulub Impact, which coincidentally was nearby and wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. The Indian kalpa is 4 320 million years in length, which is again quite close to the age of this planet. Earth is 4 543 million years old and the Cretaceous ended 66 million years ago, so these figures are 4.6% out in the case of the Maya and 5% for the kalpa. Of course it may be coincidence, and the idea of time being cyclical may simply be based on something like the cycle of the day and night or the seasons through the year, but since I believe intuitive truths are available in Torah and the rest of the Tanakh, I don’t necessarily have a problem with other sources. Parallels have of course been made between ancient philosophies and today’s physics before, for example by Fritjof Capra in his ‘The Tao [sic] Of Physics’. Although much of what he says has been rubbished by physicists since, there is a statue of Dancing Shiva in the lobby at CERN and one quote from Capra is widely accepted:

“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.”

My Political Awakening

Up until 2002, every year seemed to bring something new in my life. My second year at university was no exception.

1986 was the last time I spent a protracted period of time in Canterbury. I came back from Leicester on 24th June and took a washing up and cleaning job at the local mental hospital, noting sadly that the cleaning services were now privatised and therefore that I’d be working for a private sector employer, which went very much against my principles. I lasted four days. I was unable to learn the layout of the hospital and made everything less efficient. I also joined the Green Party, thanks to Vicky posting their Canterbury address on the noticeboard of the Attenborough Bridge. I was quite depressed for most of that summer, feeling that most of my first year at university had been blighted thanks to the Christians and that I was never going to get that back. I was also worried that I would never have a romantic relationship. I also found myself rather worryingly developing feelings for an old school friend, but I didn’t tell anyone, including her, until they faded because I realised this was a kind of rebound from Vicky.

That autumn, of course, I went back to university and threw myself into social life and political activism. I joined the Green group, LEAF, which I was eventually to become co-chair of, and also the Hunt Sabs and the World Development Movement. I was nineteen at the time and aware of the phenomenon of rosy retrospection, which is where one looks back on one’s own past with unwarranted nostalgia. Therefore I decided to note consciously that I was happy at this point in my life, and again the question of unreliable memory is resolved. I got to know Vicky better and she recommended the ‘New Internationalist’ to me as a good source of information on progressive issues. I also went on a lot of demos and did various other things like campaigning for better vegetarian and vegan meals, watched a heck of a lot of films and gained a lot of new friends. I also decided to follow pacifism and became anarchist. In a sense I’m still anarchist. I also got involved with supporters of Greenpeace Leicester, Leicester Friends of the Earth, and the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign. Early on in the year, I got a fair degree of hassle from a Trotskyist group called the Revolutionary Communist Party and it was interesting to note both their dishonest dealing and the similarity between such groups and small Christian denominations who believe they alone are right. This planted the seeds of a long-term thought process which is still underway regarding small far left parties, so that too is rather seminal.

Academically, I did extremely well in my second year and was heading for a First. Nor was this at the cost of my social life. I also believed temporarily that I’d made my peace with the Vicky situation. As far as I was concerned, she was nothing more than a friend although I still occasionally pined after her. This wasn’t helped by the widely acknowledged fact that she and her partner in no way appeared to be emotionally close. It was an odd relationship which some people would probably put down to the fact that it was unusually durable for a couple of that age, since they’d been going steady since she was fourteen, having got together on her fourteenth birthday. My curiosity about their relationship led me to perform a Yi Ching (易經) divination which told me that they were 60-80% of the way through their relationship, which in fact turned out to be accurate. They were together for seven years and nine months, which is within a month of when the 易經 predicted they would split up. I have used this method three times in my life and don’t plan to do so ever again. However, it does indicate that I am not and have never been naturalistic, at least since I was about seven, and in an analytical philosophy department in the 20th century this is a difficult intellectual position to be in.

’86-’87 was also the year I began to engage majorly in consumer boycotts. Many people on the Left regard these as pointless because it doesn’t fix the system, and it’s also the case that it’s largely ineffectual and tinkers around the edges. However, taking it seriously enough it broadens out into what might be called a global boycott, which amounts to self-sufficiency – not being part of the problem. However, to be self-sufficient involves owning land, and in order to own land one either has to inherit it or to be sufficiently involved in the capitalist system to derive a large enough income to acquire that land, and in doing so one is either privileged as such or doing a substantial amount of damage to avoid doing more damage in the long term. All of these things are very difficult. To some extent boycotts are about assuaging one’s feelings of guilt and powerlessness. Having said that, I’m not about to go out and buy a jar of Nescafé. This is a process which began in my second year at university.

There was also hunt sabbing, something which at one stage I was doing every week and didn’t end for good until the year after I graduated. I always had issues with this. I can see the emotional value of wanting to save foxes’ lives, and I also understand that it’s substantially class-based, but that’s what makes me uncomfortable. It’s important to recognise that there is class conflict and that countless people’s lives are blighted and even ended by that, but the symbolism of nobility and royalty being overprivileged has never been something I’ve strongly bought into. I would also say that the way we sabbed in Leicester in the mid-’80s was not aggressive, as we were quite strongly influenced by a pacifistic tendency in our group. The aggression came later and I was never comfortable with it. But in practical terms, this is the example which always occurred to me. I might go out with a van of people and sab a hunt, perhaps saving two foxes. I can’t imagine that we’d save any more. That might be eight people achieving that. On the other hand, I could staff the animal rights stall in the city centre and the two people on that might persuade one twenty year old to go vegetarian and ultimately vegan for the next sixty years, thereby saving thousands of lives. I don’t think there’s any utilitarian argument for sabbing as opposed to doing the animal rights stall. Incidentally, it’s also possible to sab anglers, but people rarely do that because it’s a more working-class form of animal abuse.

I went vegan in October ’87 as a natural progression from vegetarianism, which I’d always planned.

My second year at university probably marked the biggest shift in my life towards political activism I undertook. It was a peak in my social life. The situation with Vicky was stable. However, I also found that I was developing crushes on people, or rather that I was kind of uninformèdly stabbing in the dark at what were conceivably sexual relationships, because at the time I was trying to prove to myself that I was a man. I also began to feel very strong urges, though non-sexual, to wear feminine clothes, which I was to resist for the next four or five years. A major influence on me at the time was Janice Raymond’s ‘The Transsexual Empire’, which I’d read in summer 1986 and completely accepted, which put paid to any ideas I’d had about transitioning male to female. This probably contributed to my depression that summer, as I was feeling very boxed in by things. I then did something rather embarrassing. There was another woman in my year whom I perceived to conform to conventional notions of attractiveness and found I was becoming once again fixated on. Therefore, I rather creepily sent her a note telling her that I “loved” her but reassured her that I would do nothing about it, because by this point I had become very pessimistic about the prospect of a relationship happening at all in my life. She just generally seemed very angry with me for a long time, and this continued while she spent a year in Germany and was eventually more friendly when she returned. Sarada and I have very different interpretations of this incident. Mine is that she found this unwelcome, intrusive and insulting, but Sarada’s is that it annoyed her that I’d kind of “pre-broken up” with her. I perceive Sarada’s interpretation as excessively optimistic, and since I was there at the time and wouldn’t meet her for over a thousand days, I believe my version is the correct one.

One of the problems with what I can only really describe as the Vicky catastrophe is that it led me to distrust my intuition. It didn’t seem like wishful thinking that she was attracted to me, and that clearly had major influences on my future attitude towards relationships and also spilt over to all sorts of other areas, with the result that one of the long-term consequences has nothing to do with sex and relationships at all but is more to do with a general distrust of my own judgement.

There was great stability in the second year, and also a lot of happiness. One significant event was the 1987 General Election, which of course the Conservatives won, but I had expected nothing else. This depressed a lot of my friends but for me it was just to be expected. I was remarkably positive about many things at the time. A couple of significant events were the organisation of a Greenpeace benefit rock concert on Victoria Park and the sponsored walk on Abbey Park, again to raise money for Greenpeace. It began to bother me that we couldn’t engage in direct action under the Greenpeace banner, and we were criticised for using the Greenpeace banner (literally) on a march in London. My irritation with the organisation grew during this period. I was doing a lot with Vicky at the time and used to frequent her flat, which she shared with her man. It was of course familiar to me because of the dream. Every time I mention this it sounds insane, but what happened happened.

Early on in the year I took some careers advice. It didn’t look promising, mainly because they were very oriented towards working for multinationals or the Civil Service, neither of which I had any interest in doing. I breezed through the part 1 exams and began work on my dissertation. I actually underperformed on this in the long run because of what was about to happen.

In the final year, everyone went mad, basically. There was a lot of stress emanating from the fact that we were all going to have to graduate and move on, get jobs and so forth, or possibly become long term unemployed. This was not, however, my plan. I was heading for a First and planned to do an MPhil followed by a doctorate, and then become an academic, at another university because the department at Leicester was merging with Nottingham apart from the Logic and Scientific Method component which was to become part of Computing. I think this experience of extreme stress in the final year is quite common. A couple of my friends considered killing themselves and one of them actually attempted it, but survived for the time being. There were also a lot of parties and clubbing. I also joined the Labour Party.

In January ’88, everything came unstuck for me. I was clubbing with my friends and met Vicky’s partner, who was there with another woman. After a couple of days of emotional crisis, some friends decided we had to tell her, which we did and they then split up. The problem was that while they’d been together, my interest in her was contained and under control, but I was aware that there was no chance of us becoming an item. Because I wanted to make this certain, I manipulated her best friend into doing a character assassination on me which would put paid to any possibility. All of this was rather distracting and resulted in poor concentration on my studies and a rather disappointing dissertation which was seen as well below my usual standards. Also, one of my friends was killed in a hit and run accident. After some thought and discussion, I decided to take a year out after graduation to decide whether to do postgraduate or not, the issue being whether to go into political activism full-time as part of a pressure group or political party, which would directly influence politics (possibly), or to work on theory behind it by doing postgraduate work and becoming an academic. By that time, I had met my first girlfriend but we were not together yet. That didn’t happen until after my time at Leicester Uni. I also had a one-night stand, but my heart wasn’t in it because I was still completely obsessed with Vicky and worried about her well-being. Consequently I didn’t get a First but a 2i, and that may look like a success to someone else, but as so often before I had seriously fallen short and failed to do myself justice. Somewhere in all that I went on a kind of date with a woman who turned out to be a lesbian, but never followed it up.

Then the academic year ended, I toured Europe with a couple of school friends and I returned to Leicester to graduate, and found that one of my friends ostracised me because of what I understood to be an innocent postcard I’d sent her from Rome – we never spoke again – and another just cut me out in spite of previous closeness. I took a year out and went to Warwick to study the MA in continental philosophy.

What about those three years marked me in the long term then?

My first year was wasted. I effectively spent two rather than three years at university in terms of activism and social life and for a long time afterwards I was trying to compensate for what I’d missed. It was several years before I finally let go of university due to what felt like missing out. I just am a philosopher. It’s an important part of who I am and in that sense I was able to be myself to a much greater extent, particularly in my second year, than at any other time. Politically there was an awakening around the age of nineteen. I became Christian and in a sense have persisted with that, even though the circumstances involved emotional manipulation. I learned to live in the outside world in a gradually phased process which nowadays many young adults seem to miss out on. Owing to the complications with Vicky, I ceased to trust my intuition and my first relationship was highly unsatisfactory for both of us. I began to move into a kind of political career which, however, never got past volunteering although a few months later I was offered a job working for an anti-fluoridation pressure group which I turned down because I couldn’t convince myself it was a significant health problem (although it clearly is a civil liberties issue). I went vegetarian and then vegan.

My interest in furthering any kind of career was rather stymied by the deep ethical problems I perceived with almost any paid work and by the fact that I continued to be preoccupied with my failure to have a sexual relationship. This has had a long-term effect on my prospects from which in financial terms I never really recovered. I became very attached to Leicester, and only moved away from there recently to care for my father.

That’s it really. It feels a bit truncated as all sorts of things happened soon afterwards which are worth mentioning, but my main aim in writing this is to attempt to trace long term influences from my time as an undergraduate.

Anyone care to compare notes?

A Skyline Campus

It’s been suggested that I give an account of my experiences at the above place, so this is it.

Back in the 1980s, I seem to recall that something like two to five percent of people in the UK went to university or polytechnic. It wasn’t the ubiquitous stage which people expect today. Prior to going, people made the observation that it was practically my natural habitat, and I still think that’s true, at least as far as 1970s universities were. Tempering this, it’s only fair to point out that a university education, at least at the time, mainly fostered a particular variety of learning and intelligence which is simply a variety of that rather than one which has priority over other kinds, but because academia is substantially responsible for forming dominant notions of what constitutes intelligence, this is what we tend to end up thinking is “the” intelligence.

For the few years before I got there, university didn’t at all seem inevitable to me. The actual institutions I chose initially included Stirling, St Andrews, Warwick, Bristol and Essex – Oxbridge was a non-starter for practically anyone at my school although there was one pupil in the year above me who did get there – but I then scrapped that list and applied to Keele, Nottingham, Reading, Exeter and Sheffield, along with NELP, Oxford Poly and Hatfield. Exeter rejected me by return of post and I only got offers from Hatfield, NELP, Keele and Sheffield. The choices of Keele, NELP and Oxford Poly communicate my aim to study a broad range of topics rather than go for single honours, because I had been pursuing an attempt to go for as wide a range of subjects as possible at school.

My aim for university was neither vocational nor academic, but primarily focussed on the opportunity for political activism and becoming independent of my parents. Being born in late July, I was one of the youngest people in my academic year and I felt at the time that my mother was over-protective, although given her history I don’t judge her for it. 1985 was the year of the Live Aid concert, and bearing in mind that I was quite naïve at the time I expected this to be instrumental in addressing world famine. During the summer, while I was working on a strawberry field in a farm near Canterbury, the pirate station Laser 558 was constantly playing Power Station’s cover version of the Isley Brothers song ‘Harvest For The World’, and for me that summed up why I was going and the vision I had for the future. You can’t really overstate the importance music has for people of that age. This was before I was vegetarian and I concentrated on human needs rather than those of other species, not realising that they were indivisible, so it was very much about a just distribution of resources according to need. I also had a very non-religious outlook at the time, which was shortly to change. I also started to apply the year ‘Threads’, the post-nuclear Holocaust TV drama, was broadcast, and that scene at the beginning of Ruth and Jimmy conceiving a child in a car on the hills over a dingy, overcast Sheffield seemed very exciting to me – these big industrial Northern cities with their rain, greyness and cooler climate somehow represented my future very positively. It was this desire to go somewhere less affluent and in a bubble than a small city in Southeast England which influenced my interest in Scottish universities and those in the Midlands and the North

My A-level results were disappointing. To be honest I’ve never really got past this. I still feel overawed by Sarada’s A-level grades, for example. I don’t understand how people managed to achieve such high grades and it seemed completely beyond my capabilities at the time. Consequently, I didn’t achieve either the points or the grades to get into my university of choice, Keele, and went through clearing. This is one of those pivotal moments which amounts to a butterfly effect. I started to phone universities to look for offers in alphabetical order, considering Combined Studies as it had a lower entry requirement and was, again, broader than single honours. I had gone through a process of considering Philosophy and English, then Philosophy and Psychology, but the former I rejected when I realised how abysmal my understanding of literature was. Psychology I chose, like so many other people, because I hoped it would help me understand myself, in particular my queerness. At the urging of my friends, I rang a series of other universities until I got to Leicester, and managed to get in. My Plan B had been to get work at the local mental hospital and take a year out.

Hence on 29th September 1985 I took the train to Leicester, a city I would live in for the next thirty-two years. I’d never physically seen the place before and knew next to nothing about it, even where it was situated in England. I had no idea it was in the English Midlands or that Adrian Mole was set there for example. However, two years previously I had had a kind of precognitive dream about the city, which included some of the buildings I was later to become familiar with, including the railway station, the building next to it, Elizabeth House, the post office admin building next to that and the Engineering Building, which is on the left hand side in the top photo and which I considered to be the ugliest building in the world at the time, although it won an award. Thus I found the city startlingly familiar, and this is not confabulation because I wrote the dream down in great detail at the time.

I had opted for Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology, and stayed in Beaumont Hall, a hall of residence in the fairly distant suburb of Oadby. My first year did not go well. I failed to join any clubs or societies because I was too shy, and a major problem was that I was pining after a woman I was infatuated with back in Canterbury. My academic performance was, however, not problematic. I didn’t make many friends, with the exception of one guy called Keith who was very much on my wavelength. The big issue in my first year was that the hall of residence was home to a fundamentalist evangelical Protestant sect called the Navigators. Now you can look at their approach in two different ways. From their perspective they were rescuing people from damnation by packing out the hall of residence with their variety of Christianity and ensuring that no other voices be heard. There was also an element of notches on the bedpost of how many converts they could get, which was not healthy. From an outsider perspective, they were praying on emotionally vulnerable young people to get them into a cultish environment. The Navigators are not a clear-cut organisation which can be neatly slotted into the pigeonhole of a cult or non-cult. Individual members might have cultish approaches to things and others wouldn’t have. Life is not generally as simple as that.

In my discussions with the Navigators, I described my spiritual beliefs as that there was a God, and that God was good. You should probably bear in mind that my spirituality was strongly influenced by the thought of Olaf Stapledon then and now, and that my view of God was that it was rather aloof but still worthy of worship, and was most emphatically “it” rather than “he”. I should also mention that I’d recently completed an A-level in RE, something which had strongly influenced my decision to opt for philosophy at university. Therefore, I wasn’t going into this naïvely and found their attitude to be a little patronising. They had a particular view of Christianity to promote, to the exclusion of all else, which was pretty much your bog-standard evangelical Protestant stuff, and they weren’t above deception and emotional manipulation to promote it. After a very short period of time, I made a commitment to Christ, at around 10 pm on 23rd October 1985. It was a Wednesday. I have stood by that commitment ever since, although it’s waxed and waned, and my view of the nature of Jesus has changed. I fully acknowledge the manipulative nature of their approach. Prior to making this commitment, I had said to them that I would have a lot of questions which would make it difficult for me to continue, and they encouraged me to continue to ask these questions.

Becoming Christian was probably one of the most oppressive and depressing experiences of my life. It made me feel like all my options for my future had been closed off to me, and that I was trapped until death. That said, I did get to know a few people and make friends, and I was very impressed by the incredible atmosphere of love which was clearly present in gatherings of the people concerned. I decided to shelve my issues for the time being, in the hope that I would find answers. This went on for three months.

At the beginning of the second term, I decided to assert myself on the issues which concerned me, such as intolerance of other spiritual paths, sexism and in particular homophobia. I found that the other Christians I knew at university were not in fact keen on answering this issues, and in fact didn’t have the open attitude towards them I’d been led to expect. Some of them were also shockingly materialistic and acquisitive. I had felt that there could be a trade-off between the bigotry and anti-materialism, but in fact there wasn’t. Christians that I knew through the Navigators were in fact often quite concerned about financial gain and consumerist frippery. As I’ve mentioned before, it seems very clear to me that homophobia is intuitively wrong and that there are no valid objections to homosexually expressed romantic love between consenting adults, and the alternative is as absurd to me as the idea that two plus two equals five. They were completely recalcitrant on this issue and would not budge an inch on their bigotry. I’m not going to fixate on this issue this time because I’ve done so elsewhere, but really, you can’t tolerate any belief system which is compatible with homophobia.

Over my second term, I was also studying practical ethics and becoming steadily persuaded that I could not ethically continue to eat meat, so I became vegetarian on the 9th March 1986, as a transitional state to becoming vegan later. However, I didn’t actually tell either my Christian friends, who disapproved of it, or the university, meaning that I had to keep throwing away the meat on my plate I was served in the dining hall. I also wrote my first dissertation, on the subject of Islamic societies and the Great Transformation. I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with psychology because of its extreme emphasis on statistics, although that has later proved very useful in other areas, and when I found out there was a six-hour stats exam in the second year it clinched it, and I gave up the subject and transferred to single honours philosophy from the start of my second year. But by that point the damage was done.

Over the course of the first year, although I was still fixated on my friend from school, I became increasingly aware of a woman in my philosophy and sociology lectures and tutorials who looked remarkably familiar, as if I’d known her years previously, but whom I couldn’t quite place. This is of course the famous Vicky, who anyone who knows me personally will be aware of. I found the image she presented very off-putting and at odds with her personality, as she was very careful to present herself as stereotypically attractive. She wore contacts, bleached her hair, waxed her legs and so forth, all of which at the time seemed to me superficial and an excessive concession to patriarchal standards of feminine beauty. I would never dream of being so judgemental today, but this is back in the era of the boilersuited shaven headed butch lesbian separatist stereotype, some of whom were quite judgemental about the appearances of other women. That said, on some level I would’ve loved to have done the same myself, so I think to some extent I really wanted to be her. I found her intelligent, witty and engaging, and she seemed to feel the same way about me. I was however concerned that I should remain loyal to the woman I had a crush on back in Kent, and it also occurred to me that Vicky was so conventionally attractive that she was bound to be in a relationship and therefore not an appropriate person to feel this way about. I thought I’d got to know her quite well, as we tended to work together and she went to the occasional philosophical society meeting. I definitely perceived her as being interested in and attracted to me, although I couldn’t understand why, and I also couldn’t understand why she never seemed to mention any significant other. People do the “boyfriend mention” very early on in such situations normally, but she didn’t do this. And there’s another aspect to this which you may find hard to believe. You know that dream I mentioned of Leicester two years before I came? Well, she was in it as my partner and was also a Greenpeace activist. As I say, I was careful to record this dream in detail in case it later got distorted and elaborated as memories often are, and I can assure you, Vicky is in this dream. I should also mention that I die in it.

In the final term of my first year, I managed to break free from the Navigators and start to live my own life. At the same time my friend in Canterbury was having huge emotional difficulties with a man she was in love with, just as my interest in Vicky was starting to get out of hand, so immediately after my last exam I went back to Canterbury and visited her. She said she was glad to see me, and I may be wrong but I think this could just have been another untaken path, but I’ve seen where it would’ve led and it didn’t involve either her or me being happy. Nonetheless I do remember taking the decision not to pursue it but to remain friends. Whether the option was there or not I don’t know. We’re still friends.

After a few days in Canterbury, I went back to Leicester and started to get involved in political activism. I noticed that someone had put up the contact details for Canterbury Green Party on the bridge noticeboard to the Attenborough Building and copied them down. They were involved in a campaign against the Channel Tunnel, hence the rather surprising location of their details in Leicester. I then became aware that I needed to inject a bit of reality into the situation with Vicky. I was concerned that because of her conventional image she would have equally conventional values and political beliefs, and this couldn’t be part of my life. Then I realised that she was campaigning on behalf of a Green Party presidential candidate for the NUS, and at that moment I realised that as well as being intelligent, generally a sympathetic person and the like, she also had the same political perspective as me. It later transpired that it was her who stuck the Canterbury Green Party address up on the noticeboard. Unbeknownst to me, she had also decided at this point to tour Europe. If she hadn’t done that, I could’ve resolved the situation much more easily, but the problem created by this was that she was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t expect to resolve the situation before the start of the next academic year. I was acutely aware that this could turn into an unhealthy obsession if I didn’t manage to do this.

Then something weird happened. On the evening of 23rd June 1986, I was in my bedroom at Beaumont Hall and was effectively told that if I went to the gates between Queen Mother’s Walk and the University at 9:33 pm, I would meet Vicky and be given the chance to resolve the situation. Basically, it wasn’t a voice in my head so much as a sudden revelation of a series of instructions. Rather freaked out by this I followed them to the letter and it worked! I can’t account for this, or the dream. All I can do is assert that these things happened. I do not know how. And Vicky was there. With her cohabiting boyfriend of five years whom she had failed to mention in spite of us having got to know each other pretty well. They even had a dog. So that was that. So people, for God’s sake do the boyfriend mention will you? And also, don’t shoot the messenger. These two incidents, of the dream and the encounter, did happen as I described them, and both are recorded in advance so I know I haven’t modified the memories. I am an assiduous diarist: I record everything. Believe me, this is what happened.

Unfortunately, although this did resolve the situation, by that time it was too late and I’d tipped over into full limerence. The day after, I left Leicester and went back to Canterbury for the summer.

Okay, I’m becoming aware now that this is going to turn out rather long, so I’ll summarise this and continue tomorrow. There were indeed a number of pivotal and influential events in my first year at university. Leaving home is of course one of them and I would’ve had that in common with many other people of my age at the time. Another one is becoming vegetarian, becoming Christian, having difficulties with fundamentalists and meeting and falling for Vicky. A major secondary strand was becoming a member of the philosophy department staff-student committee and campaigning against the closure of the department.

More tomorrow then.

Love And Other Gods Part II

This is the second part of my reaction to Michael Nangla’s autobiographical description of his mental health journey, which I started yesterday

Michael Nangla, just to fill you in, is an acquaintance of mine from the Continental Philosophy MA at Warwick, academic year ’89-’90. As I never really integrated myself into Warwick University successfully for reasons I mentioned yesterday, he or any other student there could never be more than an acquaintance, but he interests me because we are the same age and made the same decision to follow this course, and he later got sectioned and diagnosed as bipolar. Michael is a passionate, serious and genuine person whose life, experiences and opinions are very interesting and thoughtful.

The second major psychotic episode was provoked by the second Gulf War. He felt the suffering and death perpetrated substantially by Tony Blair very intensely as a personal loss. By this time, I had already been through a rather numbing personal crisis regarding the first Gulf War, and by the second one I was rather more immured from it than I found desirable. The issue for him was confronting this loss at every turn. This wasn’t helped by his friend David’s death by his own hand. He began to feel that his work at the BBC, which one of his friends had criticised, seemed vapid and dishonest, which exposed the void and emptiness behind everything. An early sign of what an outsider might recognise as a psychotic break occurred when he heard a voice saying “everything is infinitely divisible”. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but this is metaphysically the view that hyle is the ultimate reality of matter rather than atoms. However, there’s also a famous quote by Demokritos:

νόμωι (γάρ φησι) γλυκὺ καὶ νόμωι πικρόν, νόμωι θερμόν, νόμωι ψυχρόν, νόμωι χροιή, ἐτεῆι δὲ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν.

• By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void. 

I’m not suggesting for a moment that this had any influence on his experience, but it is literally true that what we live in is largely an illusion, although his take on it is social in nature. Then he says something which has direct relevance to a conversation we once had at Warwick. As you probably know, I’m panpsychist and tempted to accept hylozoism. I believe that all matter is conscious. I once gave a work in progress seminar to this effect, to which Michael responded that it seemed like I’d been influenced by too much Cannabis. I’m paraphrasing here. When I expressed this belief, it impressed him as deeply delusional. The response he suggested, and which I took, was to base my ontology on ethics – as Levinas put it, “ethics as first philosophy”. I followed exactly this and found it led me in a circle back round to panpsychism. This is probably the most significant interaction between him and me, because it determined my future views and the foundations of my later philosophy of life. On the occasion Michael recounts here, he says that “everything outside and inside me was abundantly sentient”. This is notably close to panpsychism, except that the claim there is universal consciousness rather than sentience. For me, panpsychism is an almost prosaic fact of life, though one which means I have obligations to everything, even inanimate objects. For Michael, his similar belief was apparently a sign of madness, but the difference, apart from the fact that sentience and consciousness are not the same, is that it was a much more vivid reality to him than it usually is for me, although I have my moments. I actually feel that it would be better if I felt this as strongly as he.

I’ve previously mentioned (not sure that’s the right link) that I feel disquiet at what I perceive to be an Ayurvedic negativity about birth because it means one is still trapped in the round of reincarnation. Remarkably, Michael makes a very different claim about Indian and British attitudes towards birth. In his view, and this is from the horse’s mouth so I can’t really dispute it, that “in India birth betokened a gift from God. In Britain one sensed a feeling of it being sinful.” I can’t account for this discrepancy. To me it seems that in the Abrahamic tradition, as we at least would be expected to be here, birth is an unequivocally positive event. In our tradition, a baby is an entirely new creation rather than someone who has become trapped in another life, and therefore is a blessing. I can’t account for this discrepancy. I also don’t know how it would be for a Sikh, apart from this particular Sikh, because their tradition combines these two strands of faith. I just don’t know what to make of it except maybe to say that the grass is greener on the other side.

It’s often quite hard to distinguish which events are taking place in Michael’s head and which are “real”, but I’m immediately going to restate that. Michael’s reality and account appear to include elements which would not be widely observed. This is actually very effective. It reminded me a little of the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’, where it took me a while to register that Nash had become psychotic, because of course this is what psychosis is like. There’s a lack of what a psychiatrist might call insight into the condition. But it isn’t only Michael who experiences the world in this way. None of us know what it’s like to be anyone else or if that even makes sense. As Sartre might put it, there’s the world, which is our phenomenology, and then there are holes in that world which are other people. Hence Michael has a conversation with his counsellor and Tony Blair about the morality of the war, and whether this is a literary creation or a memory of how he experienced the situation at the time doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Blair was not held to account for his actions by the British public, and has still got away with it. His therapist, Peter, is, interestingly, also part of Michael’s account even when he would not be agreed to be present by others, and this is a dream-like situation, as is unsurprising because of the nature of many states others might classify as psychotic. Peter becomes a positive influence in Michael’s life by being able to be internalised in this manner. It’s like he’s his guardian angel. He is however decidedly not Michael. For instance, he appears to contradict Michael’s view of samsara.

Peter’s fees were very high, and this raised the feeling in me that help should not be so expensive, including my help. As a healthcare professional myself, I often feel guilty (not ashamed) at asking clients for money. It isn’t that I don’t feel I deserve it although that can be there too, but more that we shouldn’t be living under an economic system where people’s suffering becomes profitable.

One thing that surprised me about this account is how left wing Michael seems to be. This leads me to think even more that we were presenting masks at Warwick to an extent which went well beyond how Kierkegaard meant it. I was much more myself at the philosophy department at Leicester Uni than I was there. It seems there was a kind of emergent consensus beyond anyone’s individual control, but I would raise a caveat there. Whereas this may have been true, it was also the case that I was constantly removing myself physically from the site. It should probably also be said that Warwick is a campus university separated physically from Coventry and that many students, Michael included, actually live in Leamington Spa. Also while we were there, there was a peculiar and I think irresponsible art project to make the site unfriendly with the use of searchlights and other things, which was supposed to be replaced later by a contrastingly friendly and welcoming atmosphere. Bearing in mind the mental health issues rife among students even then, this feels like they were playing with people’s lives. I suppose the people we think we know are merely projections of our own minds a lot of the time, and the atmosphere of the campus and my attitude towards it contributed to that.

It got to the point in reading ‘Love And Other Gods’ that I couldn’t even tell if his daughter existed for a while. People who know me will be aware of our “phantom baby” situation, a kind of game we played as a family to account for a child I felt we were missing a couple of years after our son was born. I won’t go into it here, but given my uncertainty regarding the connections between Michael’s reality and mine, and the apparent non-existence of several of his protagonists, it took me a while to register that Hayal is real. This reflects his own difficulty in adjusting to her birth. He wanted to be there for his child, but catastrophically the passion of his love for her once again tipped him over the edge. This reminded me of post-puerperal psychosis, the situation many mothers find themselves in after they have given birth, and in a way it’s a tribute to his empathy and involvement with his wife’s pregnancy and birthgiving that this happened. Practically, however, it was a disaster, as it meant that he got sectioned mere hours after becoming a father, missed those crucial early days with his daughter and was unable to support the two of them as they settled in at home. It also reminded me once again of Warwick, because one of the MA students took a year out when he became a father. He describes himself as “ashamed to call myself her father”, which I’m going to have to say is misplaced, but it is also interesting that he chose the word “ashamed” rather than “guilty”.

I love how Michael is so openly emotive and feel also that this is part of his diagnosability, by which I mean that the psychiatric profession as it is can technically fit him into ICD-10 F30-31 somewhere quite easily, but this should only be taken as a guide to how he might be approached and doesn’t reflect the florid reality that this is a whole person with entirely valid experiences in front of us, whose experiences moreover arise as a substantially valid response to circumstances such as parenthood, romantic love and grief at the loss of life from an illegal war. It felt like the people he encountered in his episodes were aspects of himself or a dramatisation of his internal conflicts, perhaps along the lines of dissociation, where action and conversation can take place projected out into his sensory perception which do appear to reflect what’s going on for him. It’s as if his inner critic is a literal figure standing there in the room with him, along with others who are also participating in his drama. I imagine this would be useful for a playwright.

I’ll finish by quoting Peter, Michael’s therapist: “I don’t believe existential problems can be medicated away indefinitely”. Now I don’t want anyone to go away from this thinking I’m down on anti-psychotic medication. I have known too many people whose lives and and the lives of those around them have taken a nosedive after discontinuing the likes of haloperidol or chlorpromazine, and I do recognise their value. I also think it’s potentially an insoluble problem for some people when they become psychotic, but there is also art and meaning in Michael’s life which he successfully emphasises in his writing.

So, I haven’t done this book justice at all in these two posts and I strongly recommend that you read it. You can get it here and it’s quite an experience to read. It was published as part of a larger project which aims to open conversations about mental health, and is hugely worthwhile. Please do the man some good and get it if you can.

Love And Other Gods

During my time at Warwick Uni, which I always think of as in Coventry, one of my more notable acquaintances (that’s a significant word) was Michael Nangla. He was a fellow student on the MA in continental philosophy, ethnically Punjabi and from Leeds. One of the most striking things about him was his seriousness. A mutual friend once said of him, and this is not a criticism, that it was impossible to have a superficial conversation with him.

I never really dove into life in Coventry. I didn’t live there, I became rather disillusioned with the philosophy department there and academic philosophy generally, mainly from a political perspective. It felt devoid of spirituality and seemed to be more about giving excuses for the way society was rather than trying to address the injustice. In particular, nobody seemed to care much about veganism or animal liberation. But there were other issues. I managed to organise everything on the same day of the week, when I took the first train there and got the last train back, I spent nine months only on the whole course and didn’t really get to know anyone. I was also rather owerawed by most of the people I met. There was hardly any social side for me, most people seemed to take about twice as long as I did to complete the course, a luxury I didn’t have due to lack of money, and I didn’t really get to know anyone. Probably the students I got to know best, and even that wasn’t very well, were Antonia, Anthony (only just realised that’s practically the same name) and of course Michael. I’m not going to pretend I knew Michael at all well, but I did know him enough to have a meaningful conversation with him. It was, as has been said, impractical to have any other kind.

The reason he comes up now is that I’ve just finished reading his excellent, recently published, book, ‘Love And Other Gods: Adventures Through Psychosis’, described as “a brutally honest account of being bipolar”. He’s certainly succeeded in striking a chord in me with his writing, and this is substantially down to his own personality, honesty, openness and diligence in what he wrote, but it’s also to do with the fact that we did vaguely associate with each other for about a year in 1989-90, and being my contemporary and moreover someone who opted to follow the same academic course as I did, we have certain things in common. We were at about the same stage in life when we were there as well as being the same age, and in particular our romantic sensibilities seem to have been rather similar, which is not at all surprising.

Before I go on, I want to do two things. One is to link to somewhere you can buy his book here, and if you can, please do because it’s great. The other is to mention the other blog post on here which talks about my experience of Warwick Uni, here, which is about Nick Land.

Michael starts by being very tough on himself. In the Prologue, he states:

By most accounts, I have failed in my life. I have no job. My mental ill health seems to have confined me to a life of forced indolence. But it’s my choice to reject a world that is fake.

I don’t think of him in any way as a failure. In fact, given his difficulties I feel quite badly about how poorly I could see myself as having done in my own life. Unlike me, he’s worked full time for Radio 4 and managed to hold down a job in London for several years. By some freak happenstance, I have managed neither to be sectioned nor diagnosed with anything now recognised as a mental health problem although, as I’ve said before, I’d be astonished if I wasn’t diagnosable as depressive. In spite of his difficulties, Michael has done a heck of a lot with his life and I feel the same way about many of the people who passed through Warwick Uni philosophy department back then. Comparisons are of course odious. But this isn’t just about me, but him. A major difference between us is of course our ethnicity, and the cultural background that happens to have accompanied his informs his perspective on his experiences considerably.

I have a rather amorphous collection of thoughts on Michael’s book before me which I may not even try to pull into some sort of order, and he’s coaxed me into asking questions about my own life back then. A major issue for him seems to have been that intense feelings of love and grief tend to overwhelm him and push him into an emotional place which he can’t really get back from without help. In writing this, I’m aware of how willing he has been to express his feelings, and I’m aware that I should try to adopt some degree of sensitivity in responding to them.

I don’t figure at all in the book so far as I can tell, which is hardly surprising since we’re mere bit players in each other’s dramas, substantially due to my aloofness from the university. I feel a sense of regret that I didn’t get to know him better at the time, but then I wouldn’t have relished having to be party in having him sectioned, which is what his friends eventually felt they had no choice but to do. One aspect of psychosis is that it never seems to be foreign to someone’s personality but very much a development of it, and if you go in the direction where your road would take you untrammeled, sometimes you simply will end up being fitted into a professional’s diagnosis of a psychotic condition of some kind. It absolutely is not stepping off the path for most people. It’s where you are led to by the way you and your life are. He has expressed this better than I. I was reminded of Nietzsche, and Nick Land saying that you couldn’t take what he said after a certain point seriously because of his psychosis. This has always seemed to be utterly wrong to me. You have to follow someone into their psychosis to understand them. It isn’t usually something which has just collided with them and caused trauma whose damage is a reaction to a foreign body by a broken brain. Unless you embrace Nietzsche’s madness and take it on board as a serious perspective on life, you may as well not read him. He rightly aims to stir you up and change everything about you. Michael does the same.

I want to describe my immediate trajectory across Michael’s life in a way that’s illuminated by his own writing. As an undergraduate, as is well-known, I became utterly fixated on another student who was unavailable because she was already in a relationship which had lasted a third of her life by the time I met her. Despite struggling to forget her, this failed completely and I did everything I could think of to purge her from my mind. Around two years into this, I also went vegan and over the following eighteen months I gradually developed a B12 deficiency which involved a mild and I might say boring psychosis. In early 1989, at the age of twenty-one, I finally began a sexual relationship with someone which wasn’t good for either of us and caused me a lot of unhappiness and stress. She persuaded me to study the MA at Warwick and because I wanted to maintain my relationship with her I turned down the possibility of a lecturing job at Stirling University and postponed moving to Glasgow, and also stayed in Leicester in order to be with her, hence my lack of engagement at Warwick. Warwick was, as I said, rather disillusioning. Towards the end of my time there, I split up with my partner but we remained close friends. As my MA approached its end, Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq and took some British people hostage. This escalated into the first Gulf War, and I was traumatised and disgusted by the supportive response of the British public which made me feel that we’d made no progress since 1914, the rhetoric of the mass media being very similar. This was how I got involved in the Peace Movement, particularly CND, which continued into the 2010s. At the same time, I was impressed by the spiritual and philosophical aspects of peace activism compared to the sometimes rather mechanical and impersonal approach of left wing radical politics, though not usually the Green movement. I came to see the cause of the Gulf War as ultimately and substantially to do with toxic masculinity and the patriarchy, as well as mature capitalism, and for that reason partly I decided to kind of come out as gender dysphoric, as a way of turning my back on masculinity, and went by the name of Ruth for a couple of years. I had one more relationship, which wasn’t serious enough for me, and a couple of years later Sarada and I married and had children, before I decided to train as a herbalist. There is a sense in which my response to the Gulf War situation was a breakdown, or at least a major adjustment, but paradoxically 1991 was also the happiest year of my life up until that point because I was single and not looking, and not interested in sex or a relationship.

That’s one way of describing the narrative that leans towards Michael’s experience. I probably wouldn’t have described it that way if I hadn’t just read his book. It does of course cover some near-universal themes in people’s lives at that age and period of history, and is probably somewhat more like Michael’s life due to the fact that various things led us in the same direction regarding our academic studies.

Michael’s own romantic experience at that early age was with a woman he calls Anarkali. I presume he has changed her name, although he does name Anthony accurately. He admired Anarkali from afar and, after his time at Warwick, got together with her, but was so overcome by the intensity of his passion for her that he tipped over into a psychotic episode and his friends, including Anarkali herself, had him sectioned. I was above all else shocked by her coldness towards him after this happened. She attributed his response to egoism and was absolutely brutal in her reaction. I would accept that his mental health was not her responsibility because she wasn’t to know how extreme her effect on him would be, but as a significant person to him, as he was to her, I still believe she owed him more than that. I think this is partly out of fear, and I’ve seen it a lot in people confronted with other’s mental health issues. They have the precious territory of their own sanity, or what they see as that, and they draw a firm line around it to avoid being pulled in by the other person. And this is a real danger: folie à deux is a thing. But it wasn’t like she didn’t return his feelings at all. He wasn’t her stalker. And of course I’ve been there too. It occurs to me that if by some fluke the woman I became obsessed with as an undergraduate had responded positively, it could have pushed me too far in that direction as well. Maybe I should count my blessings. But this is the same kind of coldness as I experienced from her, and also from some of my friends when I graduated, sometimes for baffling reasons.

In a way, and I think he acknowledges this, Michael was fortunate still to have been in a mental hospital when the first Gulf War began. He was fairly insulated from the belligerence and jingoism of the atmosphere in this country at the time, and perhaps his medication would have helped with that. But when the world goes “mad” in the way it did here in 1991, what’s the sane reaction? Are you just supposed to acquiesce to the bloodlust and orgy of hatred? Nonetheless, I’m happy that he was shielded from it because it was a deeply traumatic experience that made me feel very hostile towards most of the people I came across in the street. I didn’t behave in an aggressive manner at all towards them, because that would perpetuate the cycle, but it was very hard to keep a lid on things. The BBC in particular didn’t help with their 24-hour so-called “news” coverage of the war. And to me at the time, and for long afterwards, it really was “The War”, just like the Second World War had been capitalised, because it seemed so significant. I could easily spiral down into something at this point too, so I choose to drop it. Nonetheless, Michael was blessed by not witnessing that, though not by the conditions in the hospital.

While in Whitchurch Mental Hospital, he met a guy called David with whom he stayed close for the rest of David’s life. The name is significant to me because I also had a friend called David, who had AIDS, was gay and died young. In Michael’s friend’s case, it was by his own hand, and I suppose one bright light in that is that AIDS as such didn’t “win”, though it’s only a faint glimmer.

The philosophy department at Warwick had a highly secular atmosphere. There was one openly theist professor there, Roger Trigg, who was Roman Catholic. Students used to take the mickey out of him for what they saw as shoehorning religious themes into every seminar and tutorial he was involved in, but that’s just intellectual honesty to me. If your spirituality includes religious beliefs, how can you not include that in your work with students? It was always in the spirit of open discussion. Apart from Roger, however, there was actually not a secular atmosphere come to think of it, but an atmosphere where the assumption was that religious beliefs belonged in the Kindergarten of human history and we’d all outgrown that. That is not in fact secular, as that involves giving equal weight to all schools of thought. Nor was this attitude confined to religion. When my partner brought up the question of animal rights in a meeting, one of the people responded with an anecdote beginning “While we’re on this level . . .”, with the implicit assumption that compassion for other species was once again an immature and anti-intellectual concern which “we” had all outgrown. As I’ve said before, one of the flaws of the English language is that it lacks a distinction between inclusive and exclusive “we”. I wonder what pronoun would’ve been used on that occasion if we had that feature.

I have a history of being religious, which came to the fore in 1985 during my first year at university. I kept it fairly quiet for most of my time there and at Warwick it was almost entirely eclipsed, but I noticed that Michael comes across in his book as a lot more religious than I ever noticed him being while reading for the MA, and it occurs to me that there may have been considerable inauthenticity from many of us students. He was religious, I was religious, but it was the sensibility that dare not speak its name. And considering that we were, among other things, studying existentialists, authenticity was a major issue on the MA. There’s a degree of hypocrisy here which is likely to have hampered free discussion and thought on these matters, and perhaps across the board. I don’t hold anyone responsible for it, but how could the department have been more “real” in this respect? How did it manage to lose this and what were we really doing? Philosophy of all things needs to be taken seriously and engaged with holistically. It shouldn’t be an act or a performance, except to the extent that everything is.

Syncretism is an issue for me in approaching his life experience. I can’t work out if his awareness of the significance of all sorts of faith traditions is part of him being a Sikh, connected to his South Asian background or related to his mental health. Perhaps these divisions are irrelevant or even racist on my part, but the reason I wonder is that we have known another Sikh who was bipolar, sectioned and unfortunately ended his own life. Then again, clusters are a feature of randomness so I think this probably is pure racism on my part. Michael, I can only apologise. Just on the subject of racism, another student following the MA course at the same time, which was of course mainly White, was Antonia, and I have recently wondered whether they could’ve bonded over that because she was also ethnic minority.

Another issue raised for us during the course was the question of the Look, Sartre’s account of the acceptance of the existence of other minds as it would be put in analytical philosophy. Sartre asks one to imagine spying on someone through a keyhole at the end of a corridor when one hears footsteps behind one, and we experience guilt, making one an object for others. This is clearly related to Sartre’s view that Hell is other people. I took three main approaches to this. One was to attempt to extend it to other species, particularly cats. Another was to relate it to other sensory modalities such as hearing and touch, to see how it altered it. Christine Battersby, our tutor, said she couldn’t relate to what I said about other species and this was one of the crucial exchanges which was ultimately to lead to my disillusionment with much of continental philosophy because it felt more like a brush off, that she would never take the idea of non-human sentience seriously or give it any serious thought and subsumed that to feminism, when they were in fact part of the same struggle. There’s also an element of ableism in the assumption made by the spy that they were seen, because they don’t know the person approaching is not blind, hence the emphasis on sensory modalities. Michael managed to engage more successfully with the discussion by contrasting guilt and shame, although I can’t remember where he went with that. What I can remember is that he stated quite emphatically that his cultural background was based on shame rather than guilt, and this came to mind in something his friend David said: “There is nothing to be afraid of except your own shame and guilt”. It made me wonder how this contrast between the two would influence the experience and construction of mental illness in South Asia.

Michael was told that he could expect to be on medication for at least the next two decades. This for him would mean the numbing of his senses and walling off of life as it is experienced in the raw for the sake of avoiding another psychotic episode, and that was a price too high to pay. I got the impression that some of his family members felt that having had a psychotic episode had put him beyond the point where they could expect anything positive from him that would fulfil their expectations and hopes projected onto him, which actually reminds me of when children come out as gay and are rejected by their family, possibly out of shame, and there’s that word again, and also because their expectations that they would live a life with which they would be able to empathise easily and have grandchildren would be frustrated at that point. Both of those things are about wanting your children to be forced to live for others alone, and we’re back to Sartre’s Look. Although I dislike Sartre’s view, I can see its relevance here.

Nearly all of the long-term patients of his acquaintance at Whitchurch he perceived as having had contact with God. In some cases, they actually believed they were God in a different sense to how others are. As a result of this sensitivity and openness to spiritual meaning, these people “are disenfranchised and possess rights only to a rudimentary life”, because civil society as it stands in urban Wales does not have a place for this experience. This is more an indictment on life in Britain and the West than anything else. It therefore makes perfect sense that Michael’s next step was to spend some time with a healer in India. He discontinued his medication. That sentence might lead one to expect a steady spiral towards catastrophe, but the fact is that this absolutely did not happen. Three months after stopping his haloperidol, he still seemed fine and this was in no small measure due to the respect his healer in India had for his experience which had been classed as psychotic by the NHS. Indian mythology recognises the madness brought on by passionate love and limerence. As he says, the power of the imagination must be applied to the world to ensure that it does not dissolve. To a geologist, the Himalayas are simply two continents ploughing into each other and raising a range of mountains. To a Hindu they have spiritual import, and relating this to existentialism I am of course going to say that they have meaning – significance. It’s like the notion of the sublime in Romanticism, which also approached mountains as important rather than just interesting.

The scars of former love were still there. Of Anarkali, he says he “was stricken with self-contempt and fury at being a nobody for her”, a sentiment I can closely relate to. I was nothing, so far as I could tell, to the woman I fell for during my first degree, and I’m impressed with how clearly Michael has managed to express this feeling. I suppose, and this is my take, not explicitly his, Anarkali’s attitude towards him is like a geologist’s attitude towards the Himalayas as opposed to a non-geologist Hindu. I am caricaturing geologists here, but bear with me. He wanted to be sublime to Anarkali, and he wanted her to turn her face to him and see him in all his inconvenient but beautiful detail, but perhaps out of fear or her own scars, she had decided to turn away.

On returning to England, he became a producer and journalist for Radio 4. His perceived seriousness made it hard for him to integrate into social life with his coworkers. I recognise this Michael from the time I knew him, and it shows how his personality survived the onslaught of the British mental health care system. It seems that his time in India nurtured the person he really is. He felt strongly, and as an outsider I completely agree, that there was relatively little integrity in the journalism pursued by the BBC. He then met his future wife, a Kurd, in a cinema. By this point he hadn’t taken antipsychotic medication for ten years. Unfortunately, this was about the point at which the second Gulf War began, and this time he wasn’t cushioned from it by being on haloperidol or lithium in a psychiatric ward. He had no asylum. During the Gulf War demo of 2003, it seems that his perception of reality becomes much more vivid and dreamlike. At this point it was impressed upon me that I can imagine a psychiatrist looking at his medical history and attributing his psychotic break to Cannabis use while ignoring the fact that the country was pursuing an illegal war at Blair’s behest, and that if criminalising the herb is justified on the basis of potentially triggering psychosis in some, then not pursuing that war and many others, such as the “war against terrorism”, was a much more important measure to take to protect the mental health of the British public, entirely aside from its wider morality for the people dying there. But of course that doesn’t happen, and Cannabis remains illegal while our governments continue to send young, impressionable people to murder and be injured, traumatised and killed thousands of kilometres away.

I feel now that I’ve said enough for today on the book, but I’ll continue tomorrow.

Ethics As Foundation

It’s important to bear in mind that certain issues tend to serve as a distraction from working together for the common good, and therefore that certain discussions, dialogues or arguments are not fruitful because they take energy from the main effort to do this. There are two situations in particular which come to mind in this respect. One of them is the gender identity issue. In certain circles, Mumsnet comes to mind, feminist discussion is dominated by this concern at the cost of others, such as period poverty, the importance of female access to toilets in the developing world, rape culture, domestic violence, and basically everything which comes up in Everyday Sexism. I often wonder if that’s almost the point: to prevent action being taken on these issues by focussing on trans stuff. To a lesser extent, the same issue can arise in conversations about atheism, agnosticism, theism and the much more interesting but rarely mentioned misotheism and ignosticism. Therefore, I have only reluctantly decided to address this point here. It is, however, an important point because sometimes there needs to be a united front on certain issues, and while we’re fighting or discussing, we aren’t addressing those and that serves the “Other Side”. There’s also the issue of what constitutes the other side, and whether that’s even the right way of describing things.

Nonetheless, communication is important and I recently got the impression this wasn’t working very well because I wasn’t giving people the context to my views. It’s not easy to do this because they involved a lot of work and thinking and are, like everyone’s, drawn on life experience, and you haven’t lived my life. All of this hardly needs saying, although it probably does need saying that through no fault of my own, I seem to reliably arrive at different conclusions from everyone else, which is probably to do with neurodiversity, but the conclusions I reach, particularly in this case, might illustrate why I’ve previously described myself as being “neurodiverse not otherwise specified”.

Here it is then.

Immanuel Kant once analysed our apprehension of the phenomenal via something he called “categories”. We are initially confronted with a blizzard of impressions he referred to as the Manifold, and in order to conceive of and think of anything at all, we impose structure on them. The thought that a physical object is known is making a judgement about it. The word is not used here in terms of classification but as what can be stated about any object. They include such things as cause and effect, existence, necessity and contingency. Now at some point in the past I noticed a remarkable parallel between Kantian categories and Freudian ego defences such as projection, rationalisation, transference and the like. I am not Freudian but do believe ego defences are valid and can be observed in oneself and others, although not with sufficient rigour to become valid natural kinds. Also, Herbert Marcuse attempted a synthesis of Marxist analysis of society with Freudianism in his work in the 1950s and ’60s. This is the kind of environment in which I think of the world.

A second, much less nebulous factor in my thinking is based on a process which may be practically universal. There is generally something about the characteristics of the thinker in their beliefs which appears to justify their position, which are convenient for that thinker. For example, a meat eater may believe that humans have souls and other species haven’t or a man may believe that women can’t be raped because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down”. A White person may believe that Black people are naturally less intelligent than White people. I probably don’t need to give many more examples. We might like to think we’re objective and neutral, but we aren’t, and in the past this has applied to science so there’s no particular reason to suppose that it no longer applies.

Addressing this is difficult, but one way of doing so is a little like the Cartesian method of doubt, which is well-known enough not to need introduction, but it’s still worthwhile to describe it to pursue this analysis. The Cartesian method of doubt is to systematically doubt everything until one is left with what can be known, in the sense of beliefs which cannot be rationally doubted. This left him, in his opinion, with sensory impressions, the laws of logic and mathematics and his own consciousness, although some would reduce that further. He then made what in most circles today looks like a very silly move involving attempting to prove the existence of a benevolent deity via the ontological argument, which I can’t even be bothered to repeat, in order to establish that he would not be deceived and therefore the “external world” exists more or less as it’s perceived. This was not a sensible move, but the method of doubt is sound.

What I chose to do was establish a similar ethical process in order to reach a stage where my motives couldn’t be doubted, and to reconstruct the world in a similar way based on moral considerations rather than logical or rational ones. This applies mostly to the issue of consciousness. It’s impossible to be certain that one lacks ulterior self-serving motives for particular beliefs and in fact it’s very common for people to believe things first and try to find reasons for believing them later. This is of course rationalisation.

One of the most significant features of my world view, following from this, is panpsychism. If one believes that all reality is conscious (and there’s an issue here regarding whether it’s atomic matter, all matter or matter, energy and space), it’s likely to make one a lot more cautious and considerate. If I believed something else, I could be motivated unethically and it could be about selfishness.

What we consider to be rational thought is in fact moulded by emotions, maybe sometimes unconscious ones. I believe this is true to the extent that we are never truly rational and it isn’t even desirable to be so. We just aren’t, we should embrace that and acknowledge it, and when we explore our reasoning we should also explore our feelings, because the two are inextricably entwined and may not even be distinct.

This has a number of consequences. One is that it solves the problem of deriving an “ought” from an “is”. Utilitarians notoriously attempted to establish the principle of utility from the idea that that which was desired was therefore worthy of desire. This is partly due to a shortcoming of the English language, that whereas many others would use a gerund or future participle to derive their word for “desirable” from “desire”, English instead tacks “-able” on the end: capable of being desired as opposed to worthy of being desired. This leaves the whole world of ethics apparently unfounded in naturalistic terms, and is therefore known as the naturalistic fallacy. But what if it’s the other way round? What if, instead of deriving evaluative terms from descriptive ones, descriptive ones derive from evaluative ones? This would explain why you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”. It’s simply the wrong way round.

A couple of other people have come up with something similar. One of them is the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Much of his thought involves the attempt to purify a Jewish approach to things, although his thought needn’t be taken theistically. It isn’t clear to me whether he is in fact theistic, and this is undoubtedly a good thing because it’s better to transcend the distinction between theism and atheism than to focus on it in, as I mentioned above, the interests of solidarity in pursuing social justive. It also crops up in Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship, and the idea that when we relate to each other it’s ideally face to face, i.e. authentic, honest, personal. There should never be a point where something is simply used, and that of course hearkens back to Immanuel Kant’s Kingdom of Ends.

So there you go. This could’ve been more detailed but I think I’ve at least presented my view even if I haven’t justified it. This is generally how I attempt to conceive of the world and relate to it. It justifies, for example, my veganism, anti-racism, anti-sexism and so forth, and at least in psychological terms helps to explain why I relate to certain people the way I do.

And now I’m going to do the census form.

Could Everything Be Alive?

Hylozoism, the idea that everything is alive, may be such an old idea that it isn’t an idea at all. It may also be such an early idea in people’s minds that it may not be an idea at all in our personal life histories. Imagine you come to awareness in a dim, warm, red world like the inside of someone’s mouth, in your mother’s womb. Everything you know is alive. Or is it? Is the amniotic fluid alive? How finely must matter be divided before non-living parts emerge? How much of something has to be dead before the whole thing is dead? Are my bones and teeth alive? What about the water in my stomach? What makes it alive?

There are three related ideas here, but perhaps I’m naming them in spite of them always having been there, or naming the same thing three different ways: hylozoism, pantheism and panpsychism. As I’ve said, hylozoism is everything being alive, pantheism is everything being God, or perhaps each thing being a deity, and panpsychism is everything being conscious. Pantheism is distinct in that it may in fact be a form of atheism, whereas it doesn’t seem like the other two are anything like atheism, although maybe they’re similar to their apparent opposite in their own ways. In that case, hylozoism may be the view that everything is dead and panpsychism that there is no consciousness. But there is consciousness. That’s undeniable. And at least some things are alive.

The word is from two Greek words, `υλη – substance, stuff, and ζωον, which I’ve always understood to mean “animal” rather than “life”, which is βιος as I understand it. Perhaps that’s important. Perhaps the idea is that the world is in motion and wriggling like an earthworm or buzzing and swirling around like a swarm of gnats. The Greeks are known for using this idea. For instance, some of them would’ve argued that a magnet was alive, which is an interesting choice because I tend to use magnets as a metaphor to illustrate panpsychism – correctly arranged matter can attract opposites physically and repel like matter, and needn’t be made of iron to do so, and differently arranged matter can express its consciousness. Giordano Bruno also believed in hylozoism. I say that, but maybe that’s not remarkable because maybe we all start off assuming it, and perceive ourselves as growing out of it.

Cats are keen on crunchy things and rustling noises because their evolutionary imperatives attract them to small animals whose bones they can crunch after they’ve heard them rustling, or perhaps chirping or squeaking. In that sense, maybe the whole world is alive to a cat, but along with that they cannot afford to extend the faculty of empathy towards that world because then they couldn’t survive. As humans, we are not carnivores and we are social animals, so we require empathy. We’re the opposite to predators even though we have preyed upon other animals. Sometimes when we’ve done so, we’ve treated their dead with reverence and honoured their spirits.

Amœbæ are, much simplified, envelopes of phospholipid into and from whom water passes and we apparently decide that once that water is within their bodies, it participates in the lives of those organisms. Yet it’s merely a molecule of a very special substance. There’s a sense in which most of a tree or coral is dead. Both arrangements of matter only have a thin veneer in which living processes continue, in the case of the tree joined by a transportation system of vessels moving their sustenance between the living parts. Yet the whole organism in both cases is alive. As far as we know, Earth is the same. A thin skin of life, the biosphere, surrounds an apparently dead planet. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between the situations. Hence maybe Earth is alive.

This brings me rather delightedly to ‘Blake’s 7’, Series B episode six, ‘Trial’, in which I feel more may be happening than appears. Gan has just been, possibly pointlessly, killed in the previous episode. Having been confronted with death of a crew member, Roj Blake asks Zen to find him an appropriate planet to be passive-aggressive on and go for a walk. It looks like a jungle and he is rather surprised to meet a being on it called Zil who thinks it’s his mother and needs protection. Zil turns out to be one of a race of parasites who live on this entirely living planet, described in the show as a “flea”. Just as an aside, something is definitely going on here. This is William Blake’s painting ‘The Ghost Of A Flea’:

And this is Zil:

It’s a terrible costume and the whole thing is poorly-executed but the idea is there. I don’t think it’s accidental. But in any case, the planet, like others in science fiction such as Lem’s Solaris or Marvel’s Ego, is depicted as alive in that it is infested with parasites and eats or destroys those parasites when things have gone too far. The ground opens up and swallows them, but they also feed off the ground, and ultimately the land is inundated by the saliva ocean to digest Zil and its mates. This is not merely a metaphorically living planet, although the entire story is a metaphor, and the question arises, taking the tale literally, what are the significant differences between this unnamed globe and Earth?

The major difference that comes to mind is that our planet’s biosphere can be thought of as a dog-eat-dog, competitive situation with everyone struggling against everyone else to survive, and a single living organism who does that is not healthy. Autoimmune diseases, for example, involve the body attempting to destroy itself from within because it’s mistaken part of itself for a foreign body or infection, and they’re not part of a healthy state. However, is this really the way the living world is, or are we projecting that onto it because it’s merely the way we tend to live? Also, touching back to ‘Blake’s 7’, Zil is going to get eaten by its planet and that’s not peaceful coexistence. I have an image of Cynthia (“the Moon”) backing away from Earth because she’s got the lurgy we call human beings and has already had a mild infestation back in the early 1970s which she does not wish to re-acquire. Humans are scabies?

Biology defines life as the confluence of seven characteristics: reproduction, growth, sensitivity, respiration (not the same as breathing), excretion, movement and eating. This is an older list which is more to do with what can be observed easily on the macro level. I’m not sure where it comes from but it may be from Aristotle. More recent characteristics lists look more closely and include such things as passing genes on and homoeostasis, but whereas this is more well-informed, I don’t think this is the way to go in this case, at least for now. I actually suspect that there are complex life-like processes elsewhere in the Universe which we would count as alive on cursory examination which in fact lack one or more of these criteria. For instance, what if there is a Solaris-like living ocean which sustains itself but counts as a single organism? It wouldn’t reproduce, but it would be kind of bureaucratic to deny it was alive. I’m also not sure that this rather reductive list works particularly well on an intuitive level. Nowadays we have art and science in separate categories, but in antiquity this was not so: astrology and astronomy were basically the same thing.

Another aspect of this is the hierarchy of emergent properties we have imposed on epistemology. Biology is applied biochemistry operating on a larger scale. Biochemistry is a special case of mainly organic chemistry (not entirely, as there are plenty of inorganic compounds in living things such as salts and inorganic acids) and chemistry is a special case of physics. Does it have to be in that order though? Have we imposed our own reductivist understanding on science where it doesn’t belong? What would happen if biology was considered the basis of other sciences? This may sound absurd, but we could just take the view, without needing to justify it, that the Universe is alive and that the life we think of, such as bacteria and anteaters, is just a special case. Is there a kind of homoeostasis to the way a star manages to balance the pressure of light and gravity? It could be argued, of course, that everything depends on physics, but perhaps science would still make sense if life was considered some kind of focus at the centre of the conceptual universe, gradually fading out into viruses, crystals, organic compounds in the interstellar medium and so on.

So far I’ve been talking about matter as potentially alive, but what if that isn’t the limit? Could space itself be alive? The philosopher Baruch Spinoza thought so, or rather he saw space as God, partly because it had various characteristics often attributed to God such as omnipresence, eternity and infinity, at least as he understood space. My problems with this are that this may not be the same as life. Does the concept of God require God to be alive as opposed to a consciousness? According to Christianity, God has reproduced, and the same is often true with polytheism, but it’s vital to Islam, Judaism and Baha’i that God does not and never would reproduce, so going by a possibly rather crass biological definition of life, God is not alive. But the claim that God is dead, made of course by Friedrich Nietzsche, is generally taken to mean that we have transcended the concept of God and now realise that God never existed. It doesn’t mean that God existed at some point and no longer is, and in general, when one speaks of a formerly living thing being dead, we tend to mean that it no longer exists.

Not always though. Centuries ago, some Christians used to claim that fossils were put there by Satan to deceive humanity into thinking that Earth was more than a few thousand years old. One of the many problems with making that claim today would be that many sedimentary rocks and minerals are in fact made of fossils, such as chalk, flint, coal, oil and gas. This means that saying Satan made fossils is tantamount to saying that he created much of the surface of the Earth, such as the chalk downs of Kent and Sussex, the coal deposits in Kent, the flint from which many churches are built and so on. This illustrates how the surface of this planet is in a sense alive in many places, in that it consists of the bodies of organisms. These are only dead in the same sense as hair and the surface of the skin are. When we look at each other, most of what we see is dead in that sense, but it’s counterintuitive to think of it in that way because it makes it sound like we’re a load of zombies or something.

This way of thinking, though, is a portal into what might be called the “world of It”. Forgive me a brief foray into gender identity issues here. It’s currently considered advisable to introduce oneself using one’s pronouns in some circles, and various requests are made here, usually amounting to “she”, “he”, “they” or something like the quixotic Spivak pronouns. As far as I know, I’m the only person who prefers the pronoun “it”. The reason for this, of course, is that “it” has been weaponised by gender-critical people, or more precisely, people who seem to have a moderately unmediated view of gender identity based on presumed genitals and karyotype. To counter that objection, just briefly, there are quite successful attempts to recuperate “queer” from its status as an insult, so why not “it”? But there is a lot of truth in the thought that we are, first of all, “it” rather than “she/they/he”, because we are objects which happen to be alive and conscious. And if we’re “it”, what about all the other things which we habitually refer to as “it”? Is their status so different from our own or are we just putting on airs?

There is a case to answer here to the claim that hylozoism could just be a bit vapid, in the same way as pantheism is perhaps just a word used by squeamish atheists. If we’re saying everything alive, are we also saying that nothing is? Using pantheism as an example, Spinoza claimed that only “God or Nature” exists, that phrase not representing alternatives but a single reality which could be thought of in either way. This pantheistic God doesn’t seem to act, hear prayer or give anything. Richard Dawkins has described pantheism as “sexed-up atheism”, and here the view is definitely assumed to be combined with metaphysical naturalism, that is, the denial of the supernatural. Pantheists who accept that there are no miracles, souls of the same status but essentially different from bodies, or psychic abilities, then it does seem that people calling themselves that are really just holding onto something out of sentiment. But even in that case, it would seem to cultivate some kind of reverence for the world and the Universe which is worth having and which there may be an ethical imperative to adopt. It makes sense, for example, to consider inanimate objects as having rights, assuming that there is such a category. A deforested area of the Amazon which is going to be ploughed up and have grass grown on it for cattle destined to become burgers does seem intuitively to have had its rights violated in some way, even if there is no God or consciousness involved.

Controversially perhaps, I am not metaphysically naturalistic. There is a problem with delineating what constitutes the natural as opposed to the supernatural that makes it difficult for me to express what I mean, but I believe, for example, that prayers are answered. You may be uncomfortable with that, but there are other possibilities which are less theistic, but in which I don’t necessarily believe personally. For instance, someone might believe it’s possible to communicate with the souls of the departed or have accurate foreknowledge of the future acquired without ratiocination. Either way, this is seen as supernatural, but the question arises of whether it would still be supernatural if it turned out, for example, that our brains are sensitive to tachyons and that’s how we perceive the future. That would be a radical naturalistic explanation. This is not what I mean though. What I mean is that there are many things, not least consciousness, which are beyond our understanding simply because we evolved as hunter-gatherers on the Afrikan savannah, so why would that mean we would be able to understand the finest intricacies of the Cosmos? If we can, that is itself a bit weird from a naturalistic perspective. I presume that we are hampered with respect to the world of odours, for example, because we lack a good sense of smell, and other species may have a more intuitive grasp of magnetic fields because they use them to navigate or detect potential prey or predators. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the supernatural would not in some way exist simply because all possible projects of the human mind occur in a particular arena, outside which a lot more could be going on. This is in a sense the supernatural but perhaps not in the sense we generally understand the word. In any case, this supernatural realm, whether or not it’s a psychic supernatural realm, could provide scope for the existence of either a pantheist God or a sense in which the Universe is alive, but this would then not be the kind of meaning which could be reduced to a mere definition.

Finally, there’s the question of the Marxist metaphysics of dialectical materialism. In the Marxist view, everything must be seen as dynamic rather than static and also as connected, and contradictions exist objectively. It’s quite odd that this aspect of Marxism as applied to physical reality seems to get “bleeped out” of most depictions of the ideology both left- and right-wing. However, maybe this kind of constant flow and change is a way of conceiving the Universe as alive, and if biology is given primacy as opposed to physics, thereby couching all scientific findings in terms of life, it’s even closer.