Two Pieces Of Evidence For Evolution, And The Nature of the Bible

This post tries to do the same for evolution as this did for the Earth being a globe, but with an additional bit on the nature of sacred texts in general, focussing on the Bible. It isn’t supposed to be a thoroughgoing survey of evidence for evolution so much as just a couple of tests which can be done fairly easily which demonstrate that it’s fantastically improbable that evolution didn’t happen. I’m also going to mention a couple of other things supporting evolution. This is A-level biology stuff. It isn’t so sophisticated as to be hard to understand for a lay person. I’m also repeating myself here but it’s worth it for the sake of a more targetted post.

Immunological Studies

I should point out first of all that there is a major ethical issue with this one, and possibly also with the other one depending on the organisms on which it’s carried out. Most vertebrates have an immune response somewhat similar to memory. When we’re exposed to certain substances, our bodies come to recognise them and deploy defences against them. This is often more harmful than helpful, but the way it’s done is for the immune system to manufacture large molecules called antibodies whose surfaces match the molecular structure of the surfaces of the molecules they neutralise, like jigsaw pieces fitting together. They also match other molecules with sufficiently similar shapes. There’s an example of this in vaccination. The BCG vaccine, used against tuberculosis bacteria, also works against the leprosy pathogen because the two are closely related and have similar compounds on their surfaces. Both are in the genus Mycobacterium and are about as closely related as horses and donkeys.

In fact you can even use horses and donkeys to demonstrate this. If you take a blood sample from a horse and inoculate a rabbit with it, not only have you done something extremely unethical but you’ve also caused the rabbit’s immune response to recognise a particular set of molecular patterns as found in the blood of a horse. If you then take a blood sample from the rabbit and combine it with the blood of a donkey or zebra, it will similarly show an immune response but not as strong as it would to a horse. It would show a weaker response to the blood of a tapir or rhino and a much weaker response to a more distantly related animal such as a human. Incidentally, you could do this with any set of mammals. The rabbit is not crucial here. Inoculating a human with horse blood in the same way would produce an immune response which would be steadily weaker with more distantly related animals.

This happens because the proteins found in animals tend to vary in detail from species to species, but these variations are usually not directly related to their function, which means that random mutations in their DNA often result in different amino acids in the chains. I should probably explain this a bit better.

DNA codes for proteins. That’s what genes are: instructions for building proteins from amino acids. Amino acids have small molecules with groups at either end which can bond to each other quite easily. These form chains known as polypeptides. Some amino acids can also bond at their sides using sulphur atoms, which enable the chains to fold into particular shapes. If one of these changes, it’s unlikely to preserve the function of the protein, but it often doesn’t matter much what the chain of amino acids other than the ones which link is made of in detail. Consequently there is no pressure for them to conform, and organisms simply will tend to become more chemically different from each other if they don’t form part of a single breeding population. This means that these immune responses are effectively using an animal’s immune system to measure how closely related to each other two organisms are, and the variations are not normally anything to do with how the organisms have been “designed”. They’re simply random differences.

DNA Strand Bonding And Temperature

This can be carried out more ethically than the immune system, although it’s practiced differently. This one basically looks at the code for making the proteins rather than the proteins themselves, but has the advantage of including an organism’s entire genome rather than just the proteins produced by its genes. Most DNA is non-coding. Actually, you know what? I’m going to introduce the nature of DNA here.

DNA is the molecule which stores genetic information in most organisms. The exceptions are certain viruses which use RNA instead. DNA is arranged like a ladder, with the sides consisting of a sugar called deoxyribose and a phosphate group. These are linked to the half-rungs, consisting of four compounds, two with a pair of rings and two with single rings. These are cytosine, guanine, thymine and adenine, known as bases. Each can only bond with one of the others, cytosine with guanine and adenine with thymine. The whole assemblage twists in a double helix like a spiral staircase. On a larger scale, the DNA molecule coils again like a telephone handset cable, and several times again, packing the whole molecule into a small space. There are also globules of protein which help it stay in this arrangement. On a higher level the molecules are organised into two larger systems visible under a light microscope. These are chromosomes and plasmids. Plasmids are loops of DNA not found in the nuclei of cells but found in the likes of bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Chromosomes are usually paired in most organisms, or at least animals, but they can also either be single or in groups of several such as threes or sixes. Humans usually have forty-six chromosomes. Most of the time they’re invisible because they’re packed away but sometimes there are giant chromosomes, as in the salivary glands of fruit flies, and they become discernible when cells divide.

DNA encodes genes in the “rungs”. Every amino acid has a three-base code, or several codes, and there is also a “stop” codon which ends protein transcription. Every gene codes for a protein, but further down the line these proteins are responsible for the manufacture of other chemicals and structures, or for their acquisition and movement from the external environment, so living things are not just made of protein.

Most DNA is non-coding. That isn’t the same as non-functional. For instance, the centromere some way through the chromosome has a certain pattern of bases which makes it easier for the spindles to pull on the chromosome during cell division and the telomeres at the ends of the chromosomes stop the genes towards those ends becoming deleted or damaged when cells divide. Much of it has no clear function, which is of course not the same as it having no actual function. In a way, non-coding DNA is like dark matter is supposed to be, in that it constitutes the majority of the genome but is “invisible” in that it doesn’t turn into proteins. This means that whereas it could constitute the design of an organism if you’re going to go all teleological on us, it probably doesn’t. It could be anything most of the time. Something like 99% of the human genome is thought to be non-coding. Some other organisms have much more coding DNA than humans. For instance, there’s a species of seaweed with only three percent.

Protein transcription occurs when the strand is unravelled by a protein (the purple blob in this clip, which shows replication rather than transcription). It’s possible to use these enzymes to separate DNA into single strands. If you did this with a human sample and put it into solution, the corresponding bases in the DNA would tend to align and recombine. If that solution were then heated sufficiently, it would separate again. However, if single-stranded DNA samples were to be made from a chimpanzee and a human, they would combine to a certain extent but maybe about one percent of them would not bond, and when heated in solution will separate at a lower temperature. This trend continues with increasingly distant relatives, such as humans and cats, humans and kangaroos, humans (let’s just stick with ourselves for now) and cobras, humans and fruit flies, humans and bananas and so on. Each of these will separate at lower temperatures than its predecessor. This is because they have fewer and fewer bases in common.

Now, it’s possible to imagine that organisms that occupy similar ecological niches will be genetically similarly “designed”, so you might expect, for example, that an aardvark and an anteater would, if designed, have a lot of genes in common, such as genes for a long snout, powerful claws and digestive enzymes for breaking down insect cuticles. This would make sense if the animals in question were designed. However, studies such as this and the immunological technique mentioned before show that aardvarks are not closely related to any other mammals although they are somewhat related to manatees and elephants, that is, that they have more DNA and genes in common with them than anteaters. By contrast, anteaters can be shown by the same methods to be quite closely related to armadillos and sloths, and as a group these three clades are only very distantly related to all other mammals. It has nothing to do with design. The non-coding DNA underlines this as there is no reason for it to be faithfully copied if it has no function. All it does is indicate how closely related organisms are.

My own genome shows that I am mainly Scottish and Irish (i.e. I’m ethnically a Gael) with some apparently Mestiço ancestry originating in West Afrika or the nearby islands. This corresponds with what I know about my family history and health and isn’t even slightly surprising. Established genome sequencing techniques confirm what I already knew or strongly suspected. It’s just a way of tracing family history, among other things, and it works beyond our own species to establish common ancestry all the way back to LUCA – the Last Universal Common Ancestor, thought to have lived somewhere between 3 480 and 4 280 million years ago. I imagine it wouldn’t work on viruses to link them to other organisms usefully, as they might have RNA genomes or genes which have been transcribed into the genomes of hosts. But there is no qualitative difference between me discovering I have West Afrikan relatives and a scientist discovering armadillos and pangolins are not closely related but armadillos and anteaters are.

A Couple Of Miscellaneous Points

There used to be a sea urchin whose madreporite (the orifice urchins and their relatives use to ferry sea water in and out of their bodies) started off in the centre of its shell and it gradually moved towards the edge. There are plentiful fossils of this sea urchin in chalk cliffs, and the further up you climb from the beach in, say, Dover, the closer the madreporites on these fossils are towards their edges. This is clear visual evidence for evolution, although it uses fossils, which leads some people to doubt. Therefore here’s another. Mammals have a nerve supplying their larynxes called the recurrent laryngeal nerve. This travels down the neck, loops round the collar bone and then comes up towards the larynx. In most mammals this is fine and a slightly odd but functional arrangement. It’s also true of giraffes with their almost two metre long necks. They have a nerve whose only function is to move the larynx which is three and a half metres long, when it need only be well under a metre in length. This may actually be one reason giraffes are so quiet. They can make a low grunting noise and that’s it. This may or may not be useful. One thing which is clear, though, is that this is not a sensible way to design an animal. The only reason giraffes’ recurrent laryngeal nerves are this way is that they’re descended from okapi-like animals with much shorter necks. I find this to be one of the best pieces of easily stated evidence available to support evolution.

The Bible

This came up twice recently, once in connection with flat Earthers and once with young Earth creationists. It’s notable that historically, young Earth creationists have tended not to believe Earth is flat, although more recently more of them seem to. Before that, for a long period there was only a tiny minority of Christians who were flat Earthers, although more seemed to have a problem with evolution. To an extent it’s a waste of time to engage with them, for a couple of reasons. One is that there are more pressing concerns in most people’s lives, and another is that they don’t seem to be willing to listen. It’s also very difficult to determine if they’re in earnest, but there are people who spend a lot of money and resources into promoting the idea that Earth is flat, suggesting that they really do believe that.

The Bible, and here I’m including both the Tanakh and the New Testament as I get the impression that Christians proportionately outweigh faithful Jews among flat Earthers, is a collection of disparate texts. If you are a faithful follower of either or both parts, the chances are that the main reason you take it seriously is that you regard it as a guide to living righteously. Because it’s so varied, it can’t be categorically said that none of it is a science textbook, particularly Torah. Torah has what appear to some to be instructions on hygiene, for instance with respect to infectious diseases, and dietary prohibitions which it’s often been argued are linked to avoiding parasites. That may or may not be what they’re about. Jewish traditions often seem to involve disputations about the true import of a text and as a Goy I probably shouldn’t comment. I am, however, aware that that view exists, and consequently it isn’t entirely true to say that the Tanakh is never supposed to be taken to refer to something like science, accurately or otherwise. All that said, the chances are that such a wide-ranging and enormous corpus as the Tanakh and the New Testament would end up revealing something about the human writers’ views on the nature of the physical Universe. Jewish cosmology seems to look something like this:

By Tom-L – Own work Based on File:Early Hebrew Conception of the Universe.png and several other depictions, including Understanding the Bible, Stephen L. Harris, 2003., CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99817773

That’s all entirely clear, or rather can be gleaned from various parts of the text. The New Testament view seems to be somewhat different, as from Paul’s comments about the Seventh Heaven it seems to have incorporated the Greek view of a cosmos consisting of nested spheres, each bearing a planet or the fixed stars. At that time, the Jews were largely Hellenised, some of the authors, such as Luke, were well-educated and it seems that such ideas as those of Eratosthenes and Aristarchus had filtered through. However, the gospels refer to Satan taking Jesus to a high place where all the nations of the world could be seen, and the risen Jesus ascends into Heaven, which strongly suggests a “sandwich”-type cosmology of a flat Earth and heaven. Even Luke mentions these, and they seem to imply Earth’s flatness. However, what’s more important about the incidents? What do they communicate? Surely that Satan tempted Jesus with great Earthly power in return for submission to him, which Jesus rejected, isn’t it? The Ascension is harder to account for, and to me at least the suggestion that it’s an “acted parable” is not convincing. Even so, the idea communicated is that Jesus Christ is God. Focussing on Earth’s shape because scientifically ignorant people, which basically everyone was at the time anyway by the way, is utterly beside the point.

This can be seen elsewhere in the Bible. For instance, there’s a passage which refers to plants forming a barrier which have either stings or thorns. The details are not important. Torah refers to insects using a word translatable as “quadruped”, as it contains the Hebrew term for “four”. I’ve seen Christians attempt to argue that it refers to locusts because their hind legs are for hopping and don’t count as legs, which I find silly and pointless.

Conclusion

Not only is it unnecessary to be creationist or a flat Earther to be a faithful member of the Christian or Jewish faith, but in the case of the former it’s actually questionable to be due to the fact that unlike Judaism, Christianity is an evangelising faith, and to insist on creationism or belief in a flat Earth is both a barrier to evangelism and a refusal to use the divine gift of reason. Anti-theists would possibly be very happy with Christian flat Earthers because they give Christianity such a bad image. However, it just isn’t necessary to believe either absurdity to be Christian.

Olaf Stapledon Part II – The Jayne Mansfield Connection‽

DON’T STOP READING JUST BECAUSE OF THE TITLE! That’s for later. Oh, and massive spoiler warnings of course.

Yesterday I wrote a post about the SF author, philosopher and peace activist Olaf Stapledon. Once I’d “done” ‘Last And First Men’, ‘Star Maker’ and ‘Last Men In London’, I realised it was getting really long, so I decided to break it up. That said, I did start on ‘Odd John’, so I broke off in mid-flow and will now continue with that novel. And yes, unlike much of Stapledon’s fiction it is actually a novel with plot, characters and everything.

‘Odd John”s full title is ‘Odd John: A Story Between Jest And Earnest’. I’ve largely ignored the satirical element in Stapledon’s fiction up until now, but it’s there in spades, possibly even humour. This makes a lot of his work “between jest and earnest”. I can relate to that because someone once said of me that they could never tell if I was serious or not and I realised that often, neither could I. It may not be surprising that I can relate to this.

The novel is a biography written by a journalist, who is, however, claimed to be the same person as the narrator of ‘Last And First Men’. That, though, claims to be narrated by one of the Last Men from two thousand million years in the future, so the questions arise of whether this is just a slip by the author, and of whether the reader can justifiably see the novel as written by the journalist under the unconscious influence of that same Neptunian. It’s also possible, indeed likely within the setting of the novel itself, that John Wainwright is in fact influencing what the narrator is writing in some way, telepathically or just by very subtle psychological manipulation. He is after all seen to do this within the story, for instance with the businessman who invests in South Africa – “the money stayed in the Empire”. In fact that whole conversation between John and the Magnate is pure gold for a socialist, and another example of Stapledon’s satire. This can also be seen in the treatment of the subhuman descendants of the First Men by the monkeys and their refusal to put down pieces of gold, the hidden flavour-based racism of the Other Men, the face masks worn by the early Neptunians to hide their mouths because eating is considered obscene and sex is just widely accepted by the public as natural and normal, and in the whole “Gordelpus” fiasco and the limited understanding of science, philosophy and spirituality seen in the First World State. None of these, though, comes across as lecturing or axe-grinding, and they all fit well into the “plot”, if there is one. Okay, they fit well into the chronicle when there’s no real plot.

Back to ‘Odd John’. The novel describes the central character’s life from birth to his death at a young age. He’s said to have a distinctive laugh in certain situations few would find funny, and to have very probably laughed in the face of his death, which he anticipated well in advance. This laugh, I think, represents the same sentiment as the detached appreciation for all the lows and highs of life in the Universe Stapledon alludes to elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, John is home educated and his mother carries out the pretence of teaching for the sake of public scrutiny, but he is in fact an autonomous learner. He didn’t get on well at school. As he moves through childhood, he becomes an adept cat burglar, and starts inventing things to profit from the patents. Take note, this is significant for me personally – here’s the first sign of madness, ideas of reference specifically. An idea of reference is where an apparently insignificant detail is interpreted by a diagnosably psychotic person to refer to them directly or have other special personal significance, and in this case it’s conveniently protected from scrutiny. This is, though, the only idea of reference I’m aware of having, so I will move on for now. John then discovers, interestingly, that he can’t play the money markets in the same way as he’s able to succeed in other areas, because he’s completely taken in by scams and dishonest dealings, which brings to mind, as does the entire book, the suspicion, as I often feel with Stapledon’s accounts of “first men” who are early sports for Homo superior, the neurodiverse. Incidentally, it’s also this book which coined “Homo superior“, and I’ve previously talked about the genealogy of the concept from this via Arthur C Clarke to David Bowie.

One way of looking at this novel is that it’s about a superhuman character, but it diverts from the usual graphic novel-style depiction of the subject because unlike those superheroes, John actually decides to turn his back on the world at large and do his own thing, trying to find his own people and community – other superhumans. His aim is to live his life unimpeded, not to save the world. He’s also bisexual, and has relationships with women and men alike. This was published in 1935! He then sets off across the world in search of companions, and finds several, including a man who died thirty-five years earlier in Port Saïd who communicates with him telepathically across time. He also encounters an evil baby eighteen years old who seems to have a long term malevolent influence on the entire group and tries to drag him down to Hell. I’m not sure what to make of this except that Stapledon does seem to believe in the idea of an evil cosmic force, as some of his other writings show. He doesn’t seem to believe in a literal Hell. I think maybe this baby is supposed to be an extremely frustrated, extremely advanced superbeing who would take many decades to reach adulthood. One of his fellow commune members, Jacqueline, looks about thirty but is in fact over one hundred and sixty years of age and has an elderly daughter who seems easily old enough to be her mother. I think part of the point of this section of the novel is to present a survey of how people might evolve piecemeal into a more advanced species. Stapledon undoubtedly believes in theistic evolution with a goal, although it’s also true that human intelligence of a certain kind has indeed advanced in the past few million years.

After all these adventures, John and his friends do indeed succeed in setting up a utopian colony on an uninhabited Pacific island. This is a naturist multi-ethnic community able to hide itself by manipulating Earth’s magnetic field with concealed buildings in a rain forest. There is highly sophisticated technology on the island including a total matter-to-energy conversion generator controlled by the mind, and something which appears to convert atomic matter to dark matter, which seems out of place until you realise the concept of dark matter was first thought of by Kelvin in 1884. The narrator compares the atmosphere to a Quaker meeting, something of which I think we can presume Stapledon has considerable experience. Some time after this, an international expedition attempts to carry out a mass arrest and are repelled by a psychic attack from the commune. After that, the group bequeaths the results of its studies in written form to the human race and is attacked by mercenaries, unsuccessfully. John sends psychic visions to his mother Pax outlining their plan to destroy themselves and their island, and the plan is accomplished, rather like the self-killing of the flying humans on Venus in ‘Last And First Men’.

‘Odd John’ was, until recently, Stapledon’s only work whose film rights had been sold, and it got far enough that David McCallum was chosen to play John Wainwright and George Pal was going to direct. This was in 1967, and sadly nothing came of it. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t’ve been any good anyway.

For me, the most remarkable thing about this book is what others would regard as an idea of reference in Chapter VI, but which I see as an Easter egg. I won’t go into detail about what this is because I think that if it were to be revealed, it would cease to be able to perform its function, which it may have to do again in future, I hope many times. In order for this to happen, I need to be able to make a long-lasting impression, not necessarily a big one, on culture in my lifetime, and I believe I have now done this and am able to pass this on beyond my own lifetime. For it to work, however, it’s important that nobody else knows what it is. I told you this was going to go weird. It will be obvious to whoever needs to see it in a future generation.

Getting back to apparent sanity, we reach ‘Sirius’. This is said to be Stapledon’s most relatable novel, even though its central character is a dog. It’s remarkable for having a cover which, as is so often the case, reveals that the artist has never read the book:

Adrian Chesterman, 1979

That’s Plaxy and Sirius apparently. ‘Sirius: A Fantasy Of Love And Discord’ was published in 1944 and makes references to the Second World War. Along with the reference to Hitler in ‘Star Maker’ I often wonder how Stapledon felt about having made such a massive miscalculation in ‘Last And First Men’. Maybe I shouldn’t wonder. Maybe I already know. Another few preliminary remarks. James Herbert’s ‘Fluke’ is also about a superintelligent dog and I wonder if it was inspired by this, although I’ve never read it and it may turn out to be completely different. A friend of mine actually went so far as to name her child Plaxy because of this book. I’m certainly not aware that the name existed before Stapledon wrote this.

If I wanted to be dismissive, I would say this book is basically ‘Frankenstein’. The novel is set in North Wales. A scientist breeds dogs for increasingly human-like intelligence and injects pregnant bitches with a hormone that stimulates brain development. This usually kills the mother because it causes her brain to grow as well and fatally increases intracranial pressure. He succeeds in breeding very capable sheepdogs and making a living from them, and finally in producing one dog of human intelligence, who is born at about the same time as his daughter Plaxy. They form a very close relationship and Sirius, who lives far longer than a dog could be expected to, grows up with her. He is chiefly frustrated by having to live in a human world with a canine body, and by being the only one of his kind. However, he does succeed in having a relationship with a bitch and feels that he can kind of glimpse the person she would be if she had his kind of intelligence. He is apprenticed as a sheep dog, which he does really well, and manages to write and post a letter back to Plaxy. He also, and this is difficult, enters into a sexual relationship with Plaxy. Ultimately he is killed and I can’t remember how that happens. I don’t remember this as well as the previous ones.

Pacarane Political Party – will be removed on request

There’s a whole lot going on here. I want to mention first of all that although Sirius is described as a large Alsatian in the novel, I always saw him as a Shetland sheepdog, although an unusually large one. The name Sirius is very clever, because he’s the brightest star in the canine firmament. Returning to the name Plaxy, this is as I say very probably an invention of Stapledon’s because in ‘Odd John’, John Wainwright’s mother is called Pax, and whereas I can believe in someone being called that and presume it’s a real personal name, Plaxy is not a name I came across any real person being called until I met the actual, real life, person who had been given that name. It makes reading the novel a somewhat odd experience because of the association, and I have to keep reminding myself that the character in the novel is not the same person. The novel is, as I say, considered to be the most “human” and relatable story of all his work, and the irony of the central character being canine is not lost on readers of his other works here. The author sets himself a problem by attempting to describe the superhuman in most of his work, since that is by definition unimaginable, although he still manages quite well. In this novel, he solves this problem by pulling everything down a notch, and having a “subhuman” species become human-like. The similarities to ‘Flowers For Algernon’/’Charly’ are also apparent. Stapledon manages to take the supernality of his usual protagonists out of the equation here and examine the issue of being a misfit hampered by one’s physical limitations and that of society, and it can therefore be read as a metaphor for disability. Sirius is not simply a dog with a human voice. He can’t vocalise as most of us can and has developed a kind of argot which only those close to him can understand, although he understands English perfectly well. It also works well from a vegan perspective because one is forced to relate to a member of a different species face to face.

I’m going to have to discuss the bestiality. This is never explicitly portrayed but is clearly going on and I think is what results in his murder. Olaf Stapledon is no stranger to Gender and Sexual Minority content. At this point I’m going to have to refer to ‘Star Trek’. From a conservative perspective, ‘Star Trek’ is a filthy show where humans regularly practice bestiality, since inter-species sexual relationships are normative in it. Humans marry Vulcans, there are mixed-species characters and so forth. Taken from a certain viewpoint, wherewith I emphatically disagree, it’s a moral sewer. Imagine a show set on a ranch somewhere with people having sex with horses, sheep and dogs portrayed in a positive light. This would, I conjecture, have some difficulty with being greenlit on primetime TV. But in a sense that’s substantially what ‘Star Trek’ is: ‘Wagon Train’ in space where the human characters have sex with the horses. We never see it like that though, because there’s a crucial difference: informed consent. A real bitch or dog can’t give informed consent to sex with a human, but Sirius can. The other aspect of this issue, ethically, is that it engages the wisdom of disgust, so there are right and wrong reasons for opposing zoöphilia and one of them edges into racism from the perspective of the prejudiced person. In any case, I think this represents Stapledon’s remarkable anachronism, and again he may also be using it as a parallel to homophobia. As far as I can tell, Stapledon believes in utopian bisexuality, or possibly pansexuality since he portrays a world with ninety-six genders.

This novel is also markèdly unlike his other works in that its stage is very restricted. As far as I can remember it’s entirely set in a village in North Wales and the surrounding farmland. This reflects the restrictions in Sirius’s own life. There also seem to be parallels with Olaf Stapledon’s real relationship with his wife Agnes. Agnes Zena Miller was his cousin, born in Australia in 1894 and therefore eight years his junior, and they were friends from her childhood, at which point Olaf was already adult. I wonder if he felt disquiet at the age gap, the relatively close genetic relationship and the fact that they met when she was still decidedly a child, and I believe that the relationship between Plaxy and Sirius may reflect this. There’s also an incident in ‘Odd John’ when John, at the age of fifteen and looking like a twelve-year old, has a relationship with an adult woman called Europa. I just wonder. I also think that what we now think of as fair situations for including under the GSM/LGBTQIA+ umbrella have not always been the same, and therefore that Stapledon’s attitudes towards sex make us somewhat uncomfortable today because they appear to include pædophilia and zoöphilia. I needn’t remind you that until the early 1980s the Pædophile Information Exchange was supported by the National Council for Civil Liberties or that even in the later half of that decade one of the German Green Party’s policies was the legalisation of sex between adults and children. It disgusts us now but it didn’t back then, or at least the category of queerness had a different scope. As I said yesterday, he was very much a man of his times.

I now move on to what I think of as Stapledon’s more obscure writings. One of these is ‘The Flames’, or rather ‘The Flames: A Fantasy.” This is an epistolary story published in 1947, and is written from a mental hospital. A living flame has been trapped in a rock for millennia and is found by Cass, short for Cassandra but a man, who feels the urge to put the rock on the fire, thereby releasing the flame, who reveals after some time that it has caused Cass’s wife to kill herself and is manipulating conditions on Earth to make them more suitable for its species to thrive upon by, I think, attempting to cause a nuclear holocaust. It also wants him to be their ambassador to humanity. Cass extinguishes the flame and embarks on a mission to destroy all of its race, until he is sectioned after shutting down a furnace in a steam train factory. The letter’s recipient, Thos (for Doubting Thomas), visits Cass in hospital, where Cass claims to have established contact with the flames who are living on the Sun. At the end of the novel, Cass dies in a fire he started himself, burning down the asylum.

Probably the most significant theme in this novel, which incidentally seems to be motivated out of concern for the use of nuclear weapons, is that Cass is seen as psychotic because of his contact with the flame beings, and having that name, he is of course fated never to be believed. This idea of voices in the head being mistaken for a psychosis is also present in ‘Last Men In London’ and ‘Star Maker’. Authors are not their work, of course, and they don’t necessarily honestly entertain the ideas they put into novels, but clearly Stapledon is serious about some of them, for instance Communism is clearly what he sees as the ideal society and depicts Communist societies often in his work, and there also seems to be a link between his love life and his writing, often in a very healthy way.

The final work of fiction I’ve knowingly become familiar with is ‘Darkness And The Light’. This is unremittingly depressing. The 1942 novel seems influenced by being written in wartime. Stapledon envisages two possible futures stemming from what he calls a Tibetan Renaissance. One path leads to a dystopian nightmare and the degeneration and extinction of the species and the other to a socialist utopia. I only bothered to read the depressing bits! I don’t remember it clearly but it left me with the impression of being overwhelmingly pessimistic even compared to his other work. I probably shouldn’t’ve ignored the brighter side.

That concludes the fiction of his that I’ve read since my birth. The others are, as far as I know, ‘Old Man In New World’, which is about a man in the 1990s witnessing a parade where he notices that the seeds of jingoism and belligerence leading to the Second World War are once again germinating. ‘Four Encounters’ is an unfinished mainstream short story describing meetings with four people archetypal of the mystic, scientist, revolutionary and Christian.

With the exception of ‘Nebula Maker’, which is an early draft of ‘Star Maker’, I think that’s it for his fiction. Tell a lie, there’s also ‘Death Into Life’, which is about the afterlife. However, being a philosopher myself I’m also familiar with a lot of his non-fiction, including ‘Beyond The Isms’, ‘Philosophy And Living’ and ‘A Modern Theory Of Ethics’. This last is his PhD thesis, presented in 1929 and his first published prose. When I read it, I was surprised to find that it was uncannily similar to my own first degree dissertation ‘A Cognitivist And Consequentialist Theory Of Ethics’. It should probably be pointed out that this is a very common and hackneyed topic for undergraduate dissertations, and probably was back then as well, and it doesn’t bode well for a future career in academic philosophy. I presume that at the time it wasn’t a career-defining decision for Stapledon to write on this subject because unlike me he did actually go on to become a pro, as it were. ‘Philosophy And Living’ is a two-volume introduction to philosophy somewhat along the lines of something Russell might have written. I can’t really remember ‘Beyond The Isms’. There are some others such as ‘Waking World’ and ‘New Hope For Britain’ which I haven’t read.

Stapledon’s biggest claim to fame is probably that he was a major adversary to C S Lewis, to the extent that he included a version of him in his ‘Space Trilogy’, specifically ‘That Hideous Strength’. I don’t want to go into too much depth here but Stapledon’s depiction of the genocide of the Venerians in ‘Last And First Men’ very strongly negatively impressed Lewis because he felt he was too dismissive of them and regarded the Fifth Men’s natural supremacy as the only morally relevant point in the incident. In Stapledon’s defence, I would say that the human race was completely devastated and spiritually destroyed by that act, and they didn’t exactly get off lightly either. They knew it was an atrocity but felt they had no choice, and were fighting not only for their own survival but for the survival and growth of enlightenment in the Cosmos. They were not aware of any other sentient life forms in the Universe at any stage in their history apart from the Martians, who by this time were extinct, and for all they knew, that could’ve been the end of intelligence in the Cosmos. The Venerians were also doomed anyway. That said, I do see Lewis’s point. But Stapledon was a nice, gentle guy and also had a strong spiritual life. There’s no way he was the monster Lewis caricatured him as.

‘Last And First Men’ at least seems to have been influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. I’m not aware of anyone else mentioning this, so maybe I’m wrong or maybe it’s just coincidence, but I mention it just in passing because I think there may be a link between their thought, although Bergson is in a very different tradition of philosophy than ours. Apart from that, there are a number of other interesting influences on his thought such as J D Bernal’s ‘The World, The Flesh And The Devil’, which is partly the inspiration for parts of ‘Star Maker’. But to me the most interesting figure, along with his ideas, is J W Dunne and his ‘An Experiment With Time’. J W Dunne thought up a theory of time called Serialism, which also influenced J B Priestley. This can be seen, for example, in ‘Time And The Conways’ and to a limited extent in ‘An Inspector Calls’. Serialism attempts to account for precognitive dreams by proposing that there’s a second time dimension along which consciousness operates which enables it to perceive past and future as well as the present. In dreams, the waking consciousness’s relationship with time is different and operates in a manner less constrained by the first time dimension as lived through progressively by the wakeful mind. The obvious problem with this is that there is an infinite regress of time dimensions. As well as influencing Stapledon’s writing, Serialism also seems to be an element in Tolkien’s idea of Lothlórien time, where it seems that time passes more slowly there, implied I hear by lunar phases, and of course in the Chronicles of Narnia, where time in Aslan’s world appears to pass more quickly than it does in ours. In fact, I can’t help thinking sometimes that the wardrobe does seem to be very much larger on the inside and leads those who walk through its doors to have a very peculiar relationship with time. Does that sound at all familiar?

These are all, of course, fictional devices although I get the impression that J B Priestley at least was pretty serious about his, since his plays don’t seem to be fantasy or even magic realism. Olaf Stapledon’s version of mental time travel is described in considerable depth in ‘Last Men In London’. After a ten-day period of isolation spent in study and meditation, the person concerned enters a trance which decouples their daily activities for maintenance of their health and fitness such as eating and exercise from their consciousness, which lasts thirty hours. After that point, the subject appears to fall asleep, but subjectively finds themselves experiencing at first a confused blizzard of experiences from arbitrary points in human history which gradually narrow down to the target mind living in a specific place and time. This can go on for months or even decades as far as an observer of the person’s body is concerned, but of course the consciousness of the individual concerned is experiencing at first hand the life of a different individual in the possibly very distant past.

If you know me face to face or in other situations, you will be aware that I’m quite focussed on dream work and lucid dreaming.

Jayne Mansfield

Here we go then. This may be the point at which you stop reading. It may even be a good idea to do so. Have you ever had a conversation with someone which appears to be going along in a fairly ordinary manner but then, as if they’re still talking about the weather, they start expressing their concern about a race of little people living in the trees which need to be legislated against (yes I did get that from Donald Fagen, in case you’re wondering)? Well that’s what’s about to happen to this blog post. You can still leave this post thinking I’m sane and that my contribution is, I hope, worthwhile and interesting. But do also feel free to accompany me on my descent into madness.

Jayne Mansfield is a 1950s movie icon who of course was tragically killed when her open-top car collided with the back of a lorry on 29th June 1967, causing her fatal brain trauma and immediately killing her. I was born thirty-one days later. On the night of her death, it’s said that someone spoke with her voice at the exact moment of her death. Unfortunately I have no further recollection of this story.

She’s almost exactly the same age as my mother, having been born Vera Jayne Palmer on 19th April 1933. Her IQ and mine have also been measured at exactly the same figure, but then IQs are pretty much meaningless in my opinion. She had a degree in physics and drama, and became a stage actor, playing in ‘The Crucible’. She’s been referred to as a “female female impersonator”. It isn’t clear to me whether she used her intelligence or not, but it does seem a shame that she didn’t get to use her physics degree. She bought a mansion on Sunset Boulevard which became known as the Pink Palace, in 1957, seven years after Stapledon’s sudden death from a heart attack. Her film career was at first successful but went into a decline. In the ’60s, she became a LaVeyan Satanist and Anton LaVey put a curse on her boyfriend Sam Brody, apparently to protect her from what he saw as Brody’s malign influence. Jayne was then involved in a car accident, she had her jewellery stolen, she was charged by the Venezuelan government with tax avoidance, robbed in Las Vegas and sexually assaulted by a mob in Rio. Brady then suffered a car accident on 22nd June 1967. After her death, she’s said to have haunted the Pink Palace. It was impossible to paint it a different colour in spite of investigations by experts on the science of paint. At her memorial service, a series of amber lamps suddenly brightened with no explanation. All the hair on the back of her daughter’s hair was torn out when it got wrapped round the axle of a toy electric car. People in the house reported a feeling of being watched. Mama Cass moved in some time later and died in her sleep of a heart attack in a hotel in London in 1974 at the age of thirty-two. The next occupant of the house felt the urge to bleach her hair blond and have breast enlargement surgery for reasons she was unable to explain and dress in some of the clothes still remaining in the house from Mansfield’s occupation, spent thousands of dollars on Mansfield memorabilia and finally heard a voice pleading with her to “get out” of the house, which she did so with considerable alacrity. Ringo Starr then bought the house and had the problem with attempting to have the pink paint covered up mentioned previously. He was followed by Engelbert Humperdinck, an ex of Mansfield’s, who concluded the house was not haunted but was a little perturbed when a quake revealed a heart shape in the garden, which was a favourite motif of hers. This, however, turned out to be a filled in paddling pool.

Why am I telling you this? Isn’t it parsecs away from the story of Stapledon? Well yes, on the whole, although they were contemporaries and there are spiritual concerns, plus there’s someone called Cass in both biographies, if ghosts can be said to have those. But the reason I mention this is that on hearing the story of Mansfield’s immediate haunting after her death, I began to believe I was her, that is, her reincarnation. This was substantially because the account I read got the date wrong and said she’d been killed the day before I was born. I have now completely discarded this idea. Even now though, when I look at photographs of her I still feel that I’m looking back at myself in them. It remains an uncanny experience. I definitely don’t feel like that when I look at Jean Shrimpton (who’s a close blood relative of some kind). It’s probably a process of auto-suggestion.

But there’s still the other issue, which doth unfix my hair.

William Olaf Stapledon had certain identity issues and an apparent belief in mental time travel. There are quite remarkable similarities between his PhD thesis and my first degree dissertation in spite of the fact that I hadn’t read his at the time I wrote mine. It’s possible, of course, that the influence of his thought on mine via his other writing succeeded in causing me to believe similar philosophical positions to his.

It’s very common indeed for people to “discover” that they are reincarnations of Cleopatra or some other famous historical figure from the distant past. I’m personally very sceptical about the idea of reincarnation because I don’t believe the self holds together as an entity even in life, except socially. Past life therapy, I believe, serves the purpose of creating a meaningful narrative for the client which helps them cope with their current circumstances. My own model of personal identity is that there is an underlying persistent identity within one’s own life, but that memories are more diffuse and disconnected, in a manner rather similar to Stapledon’s apparent view that he contained multitudes, perhaps even elements from elsewhere in the Universe or other times. I also believe that time travel is possible in dreams, because dreams as we apprehend them are not merely physical events in the brain. I have also myself experienced precognitive dreams which I wrote down the morning after I had them and were fulfilled several years later, and they corresponded to what I wrote down at the time, which I did to avoid the possibility that I might create false memories.

As I’ve said, I practice extensive dream work and sometimes dream lucidly. Last night’s dream is in fact lucid. I also recount dreams in the present tense because I believe they have a different relationship to time than our waking experience has. And, on one occasion, I have attempted to travel back in time using a lucid dream. Here it is:

I am in a dark multi-storey car park in Canterbury in the late 1960s, on the back seat of a car. Sitting in the front passenger seat is Olaf Stapledon. We have a conversation about his future and my present, which I think is probably the late 1990s at this point. Unfortunately, like the guy in Asimov’s ‘Birth Of A Notion’, I find myself unable to remember any facts at all about my waking present except that we now have decimal currency, so I fish a few coins out of my pocket and show him. He is mildly peeved and disappointed, and I am most apologetic.

Now I’m not saying that I’m definitely a reincarnation of Olaf Stapledon. Doing that would make me seem too special, and on the whole we’re all just faceless replicas in an impersonal universe. But I can’t account for the couple of sentences in ‘Odd John’ I mentioned before, and which of course I conveniently refuse to recount because I’ve used them to send a similar message to the future, so that makes them unfalsifiable in a pseudoscientific way. Nonetheless I do believe that somehow memories can be communicated between minds which exist at different places in space and time, and that I have in fact done this.

Feel free to call me crazy. Stapledon was himself quite afraid he might be judged as insane too. But also, ask yourself, what function this has in my life, and just because I’m delusional, is this more harmful or helpful to me and others. After all, happiness is often propped up by delusion and that’s healthy.

Neanderthal Pinhead Brains And The Sentient Internet

Stereotypically, Neanderthals tend to be presented as the classic “cave man” caricature, usually male, clubbing their female partners over the head and dragging them off by their hair, somewhat hairy themselves and of course notably unintelligent, oh, and living in caves. I’ve had a go at this stereotype and the other one about dinosaurs previously, but before I get down to things I may as well go through it briefly again.

First of all, dinosaurs are often used as a metaphor for something which is clumsy, overgrown and unable to adapt to a changing world. This really owes more to the Victorian image of dinosaurs as giant lizards than what’s known about them nowadays. Dinosaurs really got lucky, then got unlucky. The mass extinction at the start of their reign helped them take advantage of their various ecological niches, then the mass extinction at its end killed them off because many of them were very large. Many of the smaller ones survived as birds. If humans had been around at the end of the Cretaceous, we too would’ve bitten the dust.

Neanderthals are a kind of blank slate to many people onto which various things can be projected, and I may well be doing the same. Their brains were often larger than ours, but that doesn’t mean they were more intelligent. The probable cause of their brain size was to do with a bulkier body and the need for more pathways to help control and perceive that body. Whales have larger brains than we for similar reasons, although in their case that isn’t all there is to it. Nonetheless, when one considers that orang utan, gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees are all capable of sign language, and chimps have learned to speak a few words but lack the vocal apparatus to master human speech effectively, this automatically places their “IQ” above that of the severely learning disabled. Note that I’m extremely sceptical of IQ as a concept. If orang utan intelligence is sufficiently similar to human to be assessed and rate above thirty on an IQ scale, Neanderthals are bound to be at least that intelligent. It’s also thought that human short term memory has suffered at the expense of developing language, as that of chimpanzees is far better than ours. Hence when Neanderthals come into the picture, it can be assumed safely that they would also have been capable of language and perhaps actually used it. The crucial final step in physical capacity for phonation – producing speech sounds with the vocal tract – is the position of the hyoid bone in the throat, which allows attachment for the larynx, glottis and tongue, and needs to be in a particular position to enable its owner to speak. The problem is that the hyoid is perhaps unique in having no articulation with any other bone in the body, and therefore tends to get lost in fossils. Consequently Neanderthal hyoids are often missing and it took until 1989 for it to be established that they were like ours.

A couple of issues are going to come up in this post which are probably going to be considered idiosyncratic on my part. Here’s the first. Although I am aware that the FOXP2 gene is considered important in human capacity to use language, and Noam Chomsky believes in an innate capacity for language as a distinctive feature of the human species, I have issues with this as potentially speciesist and am disappointed that such a clearly politically radical figure as he would promote this view. I believe humans stumbled upon language before we had a special ability to use it. There are examples of other species being able to use spoken and signed language as language, as opposed to merely imitating it, notably Psittacus erithacus, the Afrik/can Grey Parrot, who presumably had no predisposition in their genes for using it beyond the ability to produce speech sounds and so forth. Clearly a certain kind of cognition is necessary for this to happen, along with the ability to produce the sounds physically, and once spoken language exists it’s going to be selected for compared to individuals who don’t speak, and this will lead to some kind of marker in the genes – perhaps we are better at producing or hearing a wider range of speech sounds than other species for example – but the initial moment when the first baby made a sound like “mama” whose parent then interpreted it as a reference to her, which was perhaps the beginning of language, did not in my opinion depend on very specific physical traits and could have occurred in another species.

The genomes of living humans include a few genes from the Neanderthals and it’s thought there was hybridisation tens of millennia ago in our history. To a very limited extent, we are therefore Neanderthals ourselves unless we’re Afrikan. The highest percentage of Neanderthal genes is found in East Asians and they’re usually absent from people all of whose heritage is from Afrika south of the Sahara. Neanderthals would probably have been fair-skinned and maybe also blue-eyed, and have had straight hair. I personally wonder if they had epicanthic folds, which of course have a higher incidence among East Asians but are also found in Caucasians without any Asian ancestry, and I’m guessing that those people might also have inherited that trait from Neanderthals. Recently the Neanderthal genome has been in the news for conferring greater resistance to SARS-CoV2.

Now for the reason I’m writing this today.

In recent years it has become possible to culture brain cells in Petri dishes. This isn’t the same as growing an entire human brain in a vat, but involves producing pinhead-sized agglomerations of cells. Recently, a gene linked to brain development in Neanderthals has been spliced into human cells and grown in such a dish. For many people this has a high yuck factor. The specific gene involved is NOVA1, on the long arm of chromosome 14, which is associated with various cancers but also nervous system development. There’s an indirect connection between familial dysautonomia and the NOVA1 gene which primarily involves the autonomic nervous system and insensitivity to pain and sweet tastes, among other things, but as far as I know doesn’t influence cognition, so that doesn’t necessarily give us a clue, although it’s possible I suppose that the inability to taste sweet might be related to Neanderthal diet in some way. That’s a bit of a reach. Whatever else is so, mini-brains with the archaic NOVA1 variant look rougher to the naked eye than the smoother versions which have the variant common in today’s population. The archaic version developed more quickly than the unaltered one and started to show electrical activity sooner. In write-ups of this experiment, we’re assured that these mini-brains are not conscious.

I have a major issue with that assertion.

The question of the existence of consciousness is sometimes referred to as the “hard problem”. It’s been suggested that it may even be so hard that it’s beyond the capacity of the human mind to account for it. At the same time, there’s a recent strand in philosophical thought, characterised by Daniel Dennett, which is sceptical about the very idea of consciousness as an irreducible property. I can’t take Dennett’s views here seriously, for the following reason. He has made a very good argument for the idea that dreams are not experiences but false memories present in the brain on awakening onto which the mind then projects the impression of previous events. I take this idea fairly seriously although I don’t do the same thing with it as he does. It’s one reason why I recount dreams in the present tense. However, a good counter-argument to this is that lucid dreams – dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and is able to control the dream world – aren’t experiences either. Although he does produce an argument for this, I believe that his reason for making this assertion is kind of ideological, because we practically know that lucid dreams are experiences. They might not be dreams in the same sense as non-lucid ones are, but they are experiences to my mind, and claiming they aren’t seems to be part of his attempt to shore up his view of the nature of consciousness.

Dennett is sceptical about qualia. These are things like the “sweetness” of sweetness, the “purpleness” of purple and so on. They’re what people are talking about when they say “my red could be your blue”. His doubt about their existence is based on the idea that they are not a definable concept. This to me is a silly denial of subjectivity which makes no sense in itself. Dennett’s motivation for believing that dreams are not experiences, qualia don’t exist and that even lucid dreams are not experiences is based on a more general view of psychology that consciousness is a specific faculty within the brain which may have evolved and has selective advantages. This thought leads one into seriously murky ethical waters because it seems to be a rationalisation of the idea that some other species of animal are not conscious, which is suspiciously convenient for non-vegans. It just so happens that the voiceless don’t suffer because they don’t have a voice. How very useful this is for someone who eats meat. Kind of as useful as believing Black people are not conscious would be for a racist.

My own view of consciousness, panpsychism, tends to be seen as equally silly by some people. It’s my belief that consciousness is an essential property of matter rather like magnetism is. A ferromagnet is a particular arrangement of charged particles whose domains within, say, a lump of iron, are aligned and it’s able to attract ferrous metals such as steel. There are other, similar magnets, such as rare earth magnets, which are magnetic in the same way but contain no iron at all. On a subatomic scale, magnetism is manifested by elementary particles with spin and axes which amount to tiny electrical circuits, and I have to admit that my understanding of actual, fundamental magnetism is not very good, but there are clearly non-magnetic substances too, such as granite and most blood (unless it’s infected with malaria). Even these non-magnetic substances, though, do consist of magnetic particles.

Consciousness is the same, to my mind. Everything material is conscious, but in order for that consciousness to become manifest, matter needs to be arranged in a particular way, such as a human nervous system. However, just as there are magnets which are not made of iron, so there could be sentient beings who are not made of the same stuff as we are. Objects which have nothing like sense organs or motor functions are in a sense severely disabled entities, but they’re still conscious. This is my panpsychism.

I should point out too that panpsychism is unsurprisingly quite controversial and often ridiculed in philosophical circles, although good reasons for doing so are sometimes lacking. Even so, there are other accounts of consciousness, one of which involves the idea that it’s generated by a network of “black boxes” interacting with each other, which in the case of the human brain amount to nerve cells. You don’t have to believe in panpsychism to assert that a tissue culture is conscious, and to me it’s entirely clear that the assertion that anything made of matter is not conscious is not based on any kind of evidence but a bias towards the kind of view of the mind-body problem asserted by Dennett and others.

Consequently, it definitely isn’t safe to say that these “Neanderthal” mini-brains are not conscious, or that the ones based on unaltered Homo sapiens cells are not conscious. Before I go on to talk about the internet as potentially sentient, I feel a strong urge to go off on a tangent about my experience of the Mandela Effect.

I have several more detailed posts on this issue on this blog, here, here and here for example, but in the meantime I will sum up what it is before going on. The Mandela Effect is the situation where a number of people agree on a memory which is markèdly different from the consensus or establishment version of that memory. Most of the time, this is about minor details such as spelling of brand names or the appearance of brand logos, but occasionally the discrepancy is more significant. It’s named after the impression many people had that Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, and sometimes that this led to a revolution which overthrew apartheid in South Africa. History clearly appears to record a very different chain of events involving Nelson Mandela being released from prison in 1991 and becoming president of South Africa soon after. I think that’s it anyway. There are various unusual reasons why I take this seriously which are largely based on Humean scepticism about cause and effect and the existence of possible worlds, which means I tend to deprecate accounts which merely refer to confabulation as an explanation – the construction of false memories due to misconceptions. There is some evidence against this being true, such as the fact that when the position of landmasses on maps varies, it always does so along the direction of continental drift and never at an angle to it.

I have a few personal Mandela Effects (MEs) which are rare but shared with at least two other people, and they tend to have things in common with each other. One of these is that a science museum had a planetarium like robot which responded to heat, light and movement and was run by a minibrain grown from cultured mole nerve cells, in the mid-1970s. Two similar MEs of mine are that in the late ’70s a process was devised to measure intelligence via brain scans which was used in selective education by the DoE in England to replace the 11+, which was later exposed as unreliable and discontinued, though this was a scandal because it adversely affected the lives of many people who were children at the time. A third one was to do with some guy who designed and built a domestic robot which was able to read aloud by 1975. These are three of many, and they are conceptually connected by being about intelligent-seeming neural processes. If they happened, they would’ve required an understanding of neurology which was absent at that time, in the case of the domestic robot presumably via some kind of reverse engineering. I accept that hardly anyone else has these memories, but it’s still odd that two other people who had no strong connection with me at the time do have them. And the thing about these memories, particularly the museum robot, is that they could potentially be realised by this kind of culture of brain cells in a Petri dish.

Now for the idea that the internet is sentient.

It was once asserted that the last computer a single individual could fully understand was the BBC Model B, a microcomputer which came out in 1981. There are a couple of problems with this statement. One is, what is meant by “fully understand”? It’s certainly possible, for example, for someone to hold the network of logic gates which constitutes the BBC Micro’s 6502 microprocessor in their head at the same time as the structure on that level of the 6845 chip responsible for its graphics capabilities and the SN76489 chip responsible for its audio, and then extrapolate from that to the machine code of the system software in its interaction with the motherboard and memory mapping of these various bits of hardware, although it would take some doing for most people. However, if I did that I would have a vague understanding of how the NPN transistors work, involving electron holes and their relay-like behaviour, but to be honest my understanding of silicon doping, for example, is pretty limited. When one says that the BBC Micro can be completely understood by one person, is that supposed to include the aspects of materials science which make the production of its hardware possible, or the mechanical properties of the springs in its keyboard? What does it mean to “fully understand” something? The other problem with this assertion is that the BBC Micro, as I understand it, isn’t essentially more complex than the original IBM PC. The latter has more memory and a more complex and faster processor, and its system software is usually PC-DOS or CP/M-86 and more advanced than the BBC’s MOS 1.2 and Acorn DFS, but it can still be understood and it lacked the built-in graphics and sound hardware of the eight-bit computer which ended up on the desks of so many British secondary schools. Later on, with sound and graphic cards added, the latter including the very same 6845 as used in the BBC, it still wouldn’t’ve been as complex and would still have been comprehensible. It seems to me that the ability to comprehend these devices fully in that sense probably ended around the time Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. But whatever else is the case, the point at which any one person could be said to understand a device including both hardware and system software is now decades in the past.

Now take these two facts together. Firstly, we really don’t know what makes consciousness possible. Secondly, the internet, a network of billions of devices hardly any of which are understood to a significant extent by any one person, is extremely complex and processes information it gathers from its inputs. And yet it’s often asserted that the internet is not sentient, as if we know what causes sentience. At the same time, there are many internet mysteries such as Unfavorable Semicircle and Markovian Parallax Denigrate, which can often be tracked down to some set of human agents, but nobody has a sufficient overview to be confident that every single one of these mysteries has a direct human cause, or even that a fraction of them have.

Hence I would say that we might suppose that the internet is neither conscious nor sentient, but in fact we don’t really have sufficient evidence that it isn’t. It really has quite a lot in common with a brain, in any case we don’t know why anything is conscious, and it’s even possible that everything is. Therefore, just maybe, the internet is sentient and nobody can confidently say it isn’t.