Concerning the Universe

In tonight's post I intend to tackle a minor, trivial issue – the universe as a whole. I am going to discuss the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite. This will not be a long post, not because the topic isn't complicated and deserves voluminous discussion, but because the points I wish to make are simple.

To begin with, when we discuss the universe, we need first to make an important distinction. We need to distinguish between the observable universe and the universe as a whole. The observable universe is simply that part of the universe that we can see. The edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion lightyears away. When we look at a galaxy at the edge of the observable universe, we are also looking back in time close to 13.8 billion years because that is the length of time it has taken for light from that galaxy to reach us (13.8 billion years being the age of the universe.) The reason the size of the universe is so much greater in lightyears than its age in years is, I think, because the furthest galaxy has continued to recede away from us after emitting the photons that have reached us, and because space itself has expanded. The figures I have cited come from Wikipedia but, in fact, the size and age of the universe are continually being recalculated and revised and next week the Wikipedia entry may have completely altered its estimates.

In this post, I don't want to discuss the observable universe but rather the universe as a whole. By using this term, the universe as a whole, I am including the many stars and galaxies that exist in regions so remote from us that we can't see them and never will. It seems to me that there are three possible hypotheses we can entertain about the universe as a whole.
1. The universe is finite and the mass-energy it contains is also finite.
2. The universe is infinite but the mass-energy it contains is finite.
3. The universe is infinite and the mass-energy it contains is also infinite.

Now, you'd think the physicists would know which of these three options is correct but in fact they don't. When I was younger, I used to read lots of books about physics intended for popular consumption and believed that the issue was settled –the first option was correct, the universe is finite. Let us consider this option for a moment as though the question indeed had been settled. Readers may wonder how the universe could be finite: wouldn't that imply that it has boundaries? However, the universe can be finite but unbounded in the same way that the surface area of a sphere can be finite but unbounded. Space-time curves in such a way that it joins up with itself, circles back on itself. If we could send a space-craft much, much faster than the speed of light directly up in a straight line it would eventually return to us from the opposite direction in the same way that if we travelled due west from Auckland we would circle the globe and arrive back at Auckland from the east. I also used to think that we could only make sense of the claim that the universe is expanding by assuming that the universe is finite. How else could we say that the universe is getting bigger?

I simply assumed, based on what I read, that the universe is finite. I think my first inkling that in fact my belief that there was a consensus about this issue was wrong occurred in 2012. There is a scene in the film A Beautiful Mind in which Nash's love interest Alecia, in an attempt to prove to Nash that he takes some things he believes on faith, asks him if he thinks the universe to be finite or infinite. He replies, "Infinite". She says, "How do you know?" He says, "I just know." (This may not be a totally accurate recapitulation of this scene because I am working from memory.) In a film already stuffed to the gunnels with factual errors, I thought this another howler. How could a genius like Nash believe the universe to be infinite? I know now that there is no consensus about whether the universe is finite or infinite. The second or third option could be the right one.

Consider the second hypothesis. In this hypothesis space is infinite and the material universe is finite. The universe as a whole is an archipelago in an endless ocean that contains no other land. The universe is expanding into empty space. This option may be the correct one but is not one I wish to dwell on here. Consider now the third hypothesis. The universe is infinite and the mass-energy is contains is also infinite. This statement is equivalent to saying that the universe as a whole contains infinitely many stars. This proposal has some odd consequences which I do wish to dwell on. (In the following discussion, I am indebted to Sam Harris for a throwaway comment he made when debating the issue of free will with Bret Weinstein, a throwaway comment that inspired this post).

Suppose we say that the probability of a star having a planet or planets capable of supporting life is one in a billion. If the universe as a whole contains an infinite number of stars, it must therefore contain an infinite number of planets capable of supporting life – infinity divided by a billion is still infinity. Suppose we go on to say that the probability of such a planet bearing intelligent life is also one in a billion. Infinity divided by a billion again is still infinity. Therefore there must be an infinite number of star systems in the universe as a whole inhabited by intelligent life. If the universe is indeed truly infinite, the question "Are we alone in the universe?" has a trivial answer. Of course, we aren't alone! There are an infinite number of other intelligent species out there in space – even though we may never be able to contact them.

We can take this logic still further. If there are an infinite number of stars in the greater universe, every possibility, no matter how minuscule, is instantiated somewhere, in fact instantiated an infinite number of times. There are planets where time runs backwards, where entropy decreases. There are planets that are exact doppelgängers for our own – in fact, there must be an infinite number of planets exactly identical to Earth. An infinite number of planets exist that are exactly the same as this one except that you stopped reading this post after the first paragraph. An infinite number of Earths exist in which Hilary Clinton is President rather than Donald Trump. In saying that every possibility is instantiated, I am not necessarily talking about quantum indeterminacy – the differences between different planets could result from such quantum effects but could also arise from very slight differences in initial conditions exaggerated by recursion. Everything that is possible is actual an infinite number of times, out planet is possible, so an infinite number of other Earths exist.

This argument is like a reductio ad absurdum. If you believe that the picture I have limned in the last two paragraphs is ridiculous, you will be forced to conclude either that there is some problem in our notion of probability, or that the third hypothesis must be false, that the material universe is finite. Alternatively, you might embrace this picture, particularly if you enjoy science fiction.

Cosmology is currently faced by profound and presently unanswerable questions. Where is the missing mass in the universe? Why is the universe's rate of expansion increasing? In previous posts I have argued that quantum physics places limits on what we can know about the microscopic world. Perhaps the same thing is true on the greatest possible scale. Perhaps there are questions about the universe as a whole that we will never know the answers to. Or perhaps the power of human intelligence will take steps towards solving them. Here's to hoping.

Concerning Truth

In some of my previous posts, I have indicated that I do not believe in the correspondence theory of truth, or, to put it more accurately, I do not believe that the correspondence theory of truth is at all helpful. I have signalled, perhaps obliquely, that I share a similar attitude towards truth and reference as the philosopher Richard Rorty. In tonight's post I wish to discuss Rorty's espoused philosophical perspective, termed 'pragmatism', and attempt to show how pragmatism is different from relativism. I also wish to talk about my life a little more and make an observation about current political discourse. As usual, this post is a kind of long-form miscellany, but I hope that the transitions between topics won't prove too jarring.

The correspondence theory of truth is the standard, common sense view of truth, the default position among the laity (insofar as ordinary people ever interrogate their notion of truth) and among the priestly class, professional philosophers. The correspondence theory of truth states, simply, that a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds with a fact in reality, or, to put it differently, with a state of affairs. The proposition "p" is true if and only if p. Thus we could say "The cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the particular cat to which we are referring is indeed on the mat. This theory of truth seems self evident. However, it is not difficult to find problematising cases – we might think, e.g. of Kantian analytic truths as counter-examples. For instance, the proposition "All bachelors are unmarried" is true in all universes, including universes in which there are no bachelors. So, in the case of analytic truths, the correspondence theory is either otiose or downright misleading. In the post "The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction" I gave another example, which I'll give again. Suppose we are to make the claim "Pluto is a planet". This proposition is true if and only if Pluto is indeed a planet – and it seems that this proposition was true twenty years ago but is false today, because in the intervening period we have redefined the word "planet". This all suggests that the correspondence principle does not enable us to escape language even though it is intended as a bridge between language and the real world.

Another class of problematising counter-examples are fictional objects. The proposition "A dragon breathes fire" seems to be true even though it does not correspond to any object in the real world. Likewise "A unicorn has a single horn" or "Sherlock Holmes is a famous detective who lives at Baker Street" seem to be true even though they do not correspond to things in the real world. Many philosophers would argue, as Bertrand Russell did, that the proposition concerning Holmes is false because it fails to refer to anything, but my intuition, an intuition shared by many people I believe, is that such sentences are both meaningful and true. (I have discussed all this in the post "Fictional Objects".) So fictional objects, like analytic truths, cast doubt on the utility and universality of the correspondence theory.

A third class of problematising counter-example may be propositions concerning abstractions. Consider the proposition, "Jealousy destroys the thing it loves" – we could appeal to Othello as evidence for this proposition. The problem with it is that there is no thing in the world to which the term "jealousy" refers; there is nothing in the world we can point to and say, "That is jealousy". It seems that in order to parse this sentence we need to rephrase it in the following way: "If a person becomes jealous, he or she will destroy the object of his love and jealousy" or, alternatively, "Jealous people destroy the ones they love". The move from the original sentence to its more empirical form is a kind of reverse reification – an adjective that has been made into a noun must become an adjective again. Consider another proposition, "Crime doesn't pay." In order to make sense of this sentence in a way that satisfies the correspondence principle, we would have to say "People who commit crimes do not benefit from the crimes they commit." But we don't seem to need to mentally reformulate such statements.  The use of abstractions is rife within ordinary language discourse, and we seem to manage and make sense of abstractions quite well without parsing them into more concrete forms. It seems to me that abstractions also present difficulties for the correspondence theory of truth. I admit, though, that this particular issue, the question of whether abstractions fail to correspond to anything and thus militate against the correspondence theory of truth, is an issue that I haven't fully thought through as yet.

Consider the following proposition: "Global warming is caused by human activity." This is a proposition that has been at the heart of public debate and proposed public policy for at least twenty years.  If we accept the correspondence principle, we might say, "The proposition 'Global warming is caused by human activity' is true if and only if global warming is caused by human activity." And yet affirming the correspondence principle is no help; there has been and still is considerable disagreement about the truth of this proposition among many groups of people, with some still denying that global warming is occurring at all. The problem is that we can't point to anything and say, "That is global warming." We have only the indirect evidence of global warming provided by scientists, evidence such as temperatures recorded at various places at various times, shrinking glaciers and arctic ice, and coral bleaching. To defend the theory that global warming is caused by human activity, we need a scientific argument. The argument exists and runs as follows: greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapour, and methane, created by humans and domesticated animals, prevent infra-red radiation from escaping the atmosphere, trapping energy in it, and raising global surface temperatures as a result. Yet even this scientific argument does not persuade a large swarth of people, particularly religious people and those on the political right. The fact is that this issue, the issue of whether global warming is occurring at all and, if it is, is anthropogenic, is still subject to passionate debate around the world. This demonstrates the failure of the correspondence principle to settle many important questions. It does not help furthermore that 'global warming' is another abstraction. If we were to try to de-reify it, to apply Bertrand Russell–style predicate calculus to the proposition, we might say, "Something exists such that it is the atmosphere, had a particular average temperature in 1980, has a higher average temperature today in 2019, and this increase in temperature (a change in property) is the result of changes in greenhouse gas concentrations (another property)." But this cumbersome reformulation, I admit not a particularly good reformulation, doesn't really help us at all.

It seems that there are myriad objections we can raise to the correspondence theory of truth. Yet if we reject it, what should we replace it with? It might seem that the only alternative is a coherence theory of truth: I used to believe this myself. However, there is a better alternative – pragmatism. Richard Rorty is not an easy philosopher to read but I believe he regards truth as the outcome of a process, of conversation, dialogue, with others; furthermore he regards truth as always provisional. To espouse the pragmatist position is to say that we should believe to be true only those propositions which are useful to us rather than presume that true propositions somehow mirror reality. The traditional definition of knowledge is that it is 'true, justified belief': Rorty argues that we should drop the word 'true' and say that knowledge is simply 'justified belief'. (For an interesting discussion of pragmatism, see the Youtube clip "Pragmatism with Rorty, Putnam, and Conant" in which Rorty advances this claim.)

The problem with pragmatism is that it risks falling into relativism, the position that truth is totally subjective and that I can believe some proposition to be true and you can believe it to be false and we can both be right. In the clip I just recommended, Rorty says "Relativists are what people who don't like pragmatism call pragmatists." Is there a way to be a pragmatist without falling into the relativist trap? I have thought about this and one solution, not a solution advanced by Rorty so far as I know but one that has occurred to me, is to subscribe to the view that true knowledge is that set of beliefs held by an ideal totally rational and objective agent who is acquainted with all the relevant information. We might suppose agents who approach this ideal already exist or that, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, such agents will exit in the future. Such an agent might, on assimilating and considering all the facts and arguments as reported by newspapers and scientific journals concerning climate change, conclude correctly that global warming is occurring and that it is the result of human activity. Knowledge exists in the mind of a knower, for sure, but, to avoid relativism, we might posit a mind that is superior to others in its rationality and in its ability to discriminate between legitimate facts, legitimate arguments, and bullshit. We might say that real knowledge is simply that set of beliefs held by such a consciousness. This provides a way of approaching knowledge without appealing to the correspondence principle.

And yet...

There is a difficulty or complication with supposing that knowledge is that set of beliefs held by a totally rational consciousness who is cognisant of all the facts and arguments. It supposes that 'rationality' itself is unproblematic. Imagine we let loose on the web a powerful artificial intelligence that scrutinises everything daily added to the internet and attempts to form a 'picture' of the world from what it reads– it is not impossible that such an intelligence, discovering all the ghost stories that people tell each other every day, will decide that ghosts are real. Most people who opt to wear the 'rationalist' label will say, however, that any belief in ghosts is irrational – an a priori assumption at the foundation of rationalism is that the world is materialist and that the supernatural does not exist. Is belief in ghosts rational or irrational? It depends on the type of rationality at work. Different rational systems start from different premises. Could a purely rational intelligence work out which is correct – the neo-Darwinian perspective advanced by Dawkins and other mainstream evolutionary biologists, or the theory of morphic resonance proposed by Rupert Sheldrake? I don't think so. It seems that any rational system contains premises that cannot be justified, and so one cannot adjudicate between different systems. In order to create a pragmatism free of relativism, to ground a theory of knowledge in the way I have sought to do by positing an ideal, totally rational and objective mind, we need to suppose that if more than one such mind existed, they would all arrive at the same conclusions. But it may be possible for different entirely rational and objective minds to arrive at different conclusions. So my proposed method for separating pragmatism from relativism fails.

This issue is still something I have no clear answer to. I may never have a satisfactory answer. But this should hardly surprise anyone. It is unlikely a mere lowly blogger could work out the answer to the ultimate questions, Life, the Universe, and Everything, when no one else ever has. It is an answer that has eluded philosophers since Socrates. Perhaps I should just say that the answer is 42, and leave it at that.

At this point in the post I wish to stop talking philosophy and start talking about my life again.

In this blog, I have often railed against the psychiatric profession. The year before last my psychiatrist proposed at an Independent Review I had requested that I had treatment resistant schizophrenia – peculiarly, however, she downplayed just how profoundly psychotic I was in 2007, when I first became 'ill', and you would think that if she was trying to prove me insane, she would have mentioned just how completely delusional I was that first year. I think I have finally worked out the mistake the doctors made with respect to me, and I will come back to it later in the post. For now, I simply want to describe some aspects of the psychotic episode I experienced in 2007. I may go over old ground again but sometimes a person needs to repeat himself to be heard.

While living at the Big House in early 2007, I formed the delusion that the world was full of closet homosexuals. I began to believe that I was under surveillance, that there were listening devices in the smoke detectors; I began dividing my flatmates, of which I had twenty, up into angels and demons. I have talked about this before in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". What I wish to stress now is that after I left the Big House, returned to my mother's home, and became a medicated patient of the Mental Health System, the delusions did not go away. Or rather they went away briefly and then came back after I became a patient of Tony Fernando.

I had formed the belief that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, and that the closet homosexuals who ran the world would kill any whistleblowers who threatened to expose their secret. This delusion endured all of 2007. There were times that year that I even became afraid that the homosexuals might try to poison me by putting arsenic in the wine I sometimes drank. Shortly after I became a patient of the service, I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses and that the media were listening to everything I said; I thought that if I said the wrong thing I would be destroyed somehow. I never discussed these delusions with anyone. The closest I came was on one occasion when I went for a walk on Mt Albert with a sympathetic support worker; although I was terrified at the time that the American government was spying on me using satellites, I brought myself to say to him that I believed myself the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by Mikey Havoc. When we got back in the car to go home, he said, "Who's Mikey Havoc?"

After my experience working writing news stories at bFM, I decided that literally all the news reported on the television and through the radio was fabricated, made up. I even briefly entertained the idea that the Holocaust didn't happen – this particular delusion only lasted a day. The next day I had an experience that forcefully impressed upon me the reality of the gas chambers and, after that, I never doubted the reality of the Holocaust again. In fact, I decided that the Jews were all straight and the Nazis were all closet homosexuals. I decided that Israel was a paradise and that all the bad press it received was intended to dissuade closet homosexual from moving there. My core delusion, that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals, that homosexuals ruled the world, swept everything up into its matrix. I believed that the famous New Zealand historian Michael King, who had died in an unexplained car accident in 2004, had been assassinated because he had threatened to expose the homosexual conspiracy. In the middle of the year, my mother and I travelled to Whanganui to visit my godmother; during the trip, we were followed by a lorry and I became frightened that it was acting on behalf of the homosexual conspiracy and that it would run us off the road. After I had spent a couple of days in Whanganui, however, I decided that it was a heterosexual paradise, a small enclave of enlightened heterosexuals who had fled there to escape all the closet homosexuals who made up the bulk of the rest of New Zealand's population. I thought the bad press Whanganui received (supposedly Whanganui has gang problems) and the impression of it created by Michael Laws, then its mayor, were an elaborate deception intended to dissuade closet homosexuals from moving there. In other words, I thought that Whanganui was the New Zealand equivalent of Israel.

The people treating me seem to have thought that the cause of my 'illness' was sexual confusion; in truth, the thing that made me sick that year was an explosion of homophobia. There were times in 2007 (and again in 2009) when my thoughts took on a religious bent. I sometimes thought that the Apocalypse had occurred and we were living in the End Times; I thought the Rapture had happened. My feeling that the entire world had ended sprang directly from my awareness that having become a patient of the Mental Health Service, I would never fully escape it. Occasionally, in 2007, I believed that I was a Jesus-like figure and that my role was to divide the world into the saved and the damned, heterosexuals and closet homosexuals. I don't fully understand why my delusions sometimes took on a religious aspect. I was an atheist then and an agnostic today.

I never told anyone that I believed the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. The closest I came to discussing sexuality out loud at all was during my first contact with the Taylor Centre and perhaps once or twice a little later. I said at that first contact, among other things, that I wanted "to come out as straight". What I meant by this was that I had always been heterosexual and that I wanted people to know this. At that first contact, I was close to well – in fact, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals had briefly gone away. I became 'sick' again after my first appointment with the fraudulent and sadistic psychiatrist Antony Fernando. Every psychiatrist I have ever met seems to have a different understanding of what 'schizophrenia' is and what 'homosexuality' is; many psychiatrists seem to think that sexuality is inborn and unchangeable. I believe that Fernando decided, deliberately, that I was a gay man who wanted to turn straight, that my claim to being straight was a delusion because it is impossible for homosexuals to turn heterosexual. This insanity, the idea that my saying I was straight was either a lie or a delusion, has dogged me for over twelve years. It has often been a source of considerable psychological distress. After that first contact with the Taylor Centre I never said I was straight again for six years. Nor did anyone ever ask me how I identified in terms of sexuality. However I have been saying that I'm heterosexual either directly or indirectly reasonably frequently ever since Easter 2013. It is something I literally can't understand, the utter corruption of the psychiatric profession – psychiatrists train for thirteen years and come out the other end of their training stupider, more ignorant and more mendacious than they were when they started. They can't seem to see what's right in front of their faces.

Over the last couple of weeks, a number of things have become clear to me. My intuitions regarding the cause of my first psychotic episode have come into sharper focus. I have also come to a clearer understanding of the role my older brother has played in my 'illness'. This is not something I feel I can talk about in this blog though. I know readers sometimes go back to older posts – I would like to recommend the post "Bruce Springsteen vs. Faith No More" as an important essay worth revisiting. I may in the next post articulate more explicitly the reasons I became ill 'in the first place'.

I began this essay by saying that I also wanted to talk about a feature of current political discourse. I was watching Don Lemon's show on CNN a few days ago and a contributor opined that Donald Trump is antisemitic. I felt like throwing something at the screen. I don't like Trump. But he is not antisemitic. His son-in-law Jared Kushner is an Orthodox Jew. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism. As Bill Maher pointed out on his show once, half of Trump's cabinet when he first took office were Jewish. All of his policy decisions with respect to Israel have been in support of his pal Benjamin Netanyahu, decisions such as moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognising Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, and legitimising the building of settlements in the West Bank contrary to international law. It seems to me that in the same way that the Republican Party wooed Evangelical Christians by opposing abortion and gay marriage and by supporting the teaching of creationism at schools, it is now seeking to secure the Jewish vote by supporting Israel.

Supposedly, a trope of antisemitism is to suggest that Jews have a 'dual allegiance'. I would like to suggest that many Jews do have a dual allegiance but this shouldn't be surprising. Any ethnic group, any group of immigrants, contains a proportion who are partly loyal to their ancestral homeland. In the 1950s, New Zealanders of English descent, even those born here, referred to Britain as 'Home'. I read a newspaper article a couple of years ago about a survey which found that a significant chunk of the Chinese community here in New Zealand would put Chinese interests ahead of New Zealand interests. If we recognise that a kind of dual allegiance is common to any immigrant group, it is no longer a specifically antisemitic trope – rather it is a simple fact about ethnic and national identity.

It is possible to oppose Israeli policies without being antisemitic. Consider the Squad. Ilhan Omar got into trouble for criticising the lobbying of politicians by pro-israelis organisations in February of this year. And yet three members of the Squad have endorsed Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders is Jewish. What I am trying to get at here is that the issue is complicated and that the current discourse, in which people tell lies about whether Trump is antisemitic or not and say that any criticism of Israel is anti-Jew, misleads the public and contributes to a fog of bullshit that plays into the hands of the liars and bigots.

Some years ago I read The Divided Self by RD Laing. It wasn't a good book. But RD Laing did say something very true. He said that madness is a sane reaction to an insane world. This is a sentiment I can endorse.

Evolution, Entropy, and the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God

In tonight's post I would like to talk about evolution again, entropy briefly, and then move onto discussing the ontological argument for the existence of God. To lay my cards on the table right at the outset, I do not find any of the ontological arguments persuasive, but my reasons for finding these arguments unconvincing may be of interest to readers. The ontological argument has troubled philosophers for nearly a thousand years – many, particularly atheists but also religious people, have sensed that there must be a problem with it and yet have had difficulty finding the precise flaw. The reason it is so difficult to refute the ontological argument is that to do so one needs to reconsider one's understanding of language, truth, consciousness, and existence. I shall sketch out my critique of the ontological argument later in this post.

I wish however to start with evolution. In some of my posts, I have tentatively raised some objections to the Darwinian account of evolution that has been strongly promoted by people like Richard Dawkins and the many other evolutionary biologists who subscribe to the neo-Darwinian synthesis and who can be found holding court on Youtube to admiring throngs. It may seem to readers that this must make me a Christian apologist because it tends to be fundamentalist Christians who most want to attack Darwin, people who believe the world was created six thousand years ago by God over seven days, and who believe as well either that fossils are hoaxes planted in the ground by Satan or that cavemen coexisted with dinosaurs. But, despite some possibly misleading figurative language I have used, I am not a Christian. In fact I believed whole-heartedly in Darwin until around February or March 2013. In the film script I wrote in 2012, I included a character who had been converted to the notion of Intelligent Design but I included him ironically – I expected that any viewers the film would have would realise that he was spouting forth conspiratorial bullshit. In early 2013, however, an argument against Darwin occurred to me that shook me up so thoroughly it caused me to doubt my atheism.

I set out this argument a number of years ago in a post titled "On Evolution" but it was a badly written essay and so I will summarise the argument again now. It runs as follows. For two organisms to successfully breed with each other, they must be genetically very similar. Occasionally, a mutation must occur that is very significant. Such a mutation is highly improbable. Furthermore, an individual born with a really large mutation would be unable to reproduce because, if it mated with a member of the unmutated population, it would be unable to produce viable offspring. Therefore, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur to a number of individuals in the population at the same time and in the same vicinity. This makes it even more vastly improbable. Now, readers who are versed in Evolutionary Biology may say that evolution occurs through tiny incremental changes rather than discontinuous jumps and may challenge me to provide proof that really large mutations sometimes occur. The example I would give, and gave in the post "On Evolution", is chromosome number. A horse has 64 chromosomes; a donkey has 62; a mule (the offspring of a horse and a donkey) has 63 and is therefore sterile. Presumably horses and donkeys have a common ancestor that, from an evolutionary point of view, lived in the not too distant past, and so at some point either an animal like a donkey with 62 chromosomes gave birth to an animal like a horse with 64 chromosomes, or vice versa. We could also consider chimpanzees and humans. Chimps have 48 chromosomes and humans 46. And yet we all descend from a common ancestor. So at some point either chimps gained two chromosomes or humans lost two chromosomes. Such mutations must occur because different species have different numbers of chromosomes, and yet such mutations are really significant genetic departures from the norm.  Note that I am not saying that evolution didn't happen; rather I am saying that the standard dogma that evolution proceeds simply as a result of a simple interplay between chance mutations and natural selection must be false or incomplete.

I have touched on evolution in other posts, such as "Evolutionary Psychology and the Gay Gene" and "Evolution and Chance". In recent days I have been thinking about the argument Dawkins presented in Climbing Mount Improbable and have been wondering if he got his math wrong. As yet, however, I haven't thought through it enough to know if there is a mistake in his reasoning. Something I feel sure about, however, is that the current fashion known as evolutionary psychology is a dead end. Evolutionary psychologists presuppose that all aspects of human nature, human mores and behaviours, can ultimately be explained as adaptations intended to promote survival and reproduction in the distant past. As I have argued in previous posts, evolutionary psychology cannot adequately explain homosexuality (if we define homosexuality in the facile, superficial way most people do).  Something else evolutionary psychology cannot explain is music. I want now to set out a second objection to Darwinian evolution.

Music is something truly magical. If we know only a smattering of music theory, we come to realise that music is all about mathematical patterns, relations between frequencies, timbres, and rhythms, that are all highly abstract but affect listeners viscerally, bypassing the rational mind. A simple melody, for instance, might begin with the tonic, move to the subdominant, then to the dominant, and then back home to the tonic. A major chord, a chord in the Ionian scale, sounds happy; a minor chord sounds sad. I have long pondered the question of whether the capacity to understand and appreciate music is learned or innate. Does a minor chord sound sad because the sad songs we were exposed to as children employ the Aeolian mode? Or are we born with a predisposition to interpret major chords as happy and minor chords as sad? I think I believe now that the ability to appreciate and create music is inborn. But this raises a problem for evolutionary psychology. How could an ability to appreciate and sometimes create music be an adaptive advantage? We could invent a Just So story to explain it. Maybe, a million years ago, humans communicated through song, using Ionian melodies to express happiness and Aeolian melodies to express sadness. Then, as language fully developed, people stopped communicating through song, and the ability to unconsciously understand and appreciate music became a kind of vestigial trait. Perhaps, alternatively, sexual selection was at work. Perhaps musicality is a display of cerebral competence purposed to attract mates, a little like a peacock's tail. Certainly the musical instinct must have arisen long before humans were capable of inventing musical instruments like lyres. We simply don't know. Yet we know enough, or I know enough, to suspect that the Darwinian idea that the meaning of life is solely survival and reproduction is inadequate to explain the appreciation of music and, by extension, human nature.

Something I am endeavouring to communicate in this blog is how ignorant people, even experts, are of fundamental aspects of human life. We don't understand music, or dreams, or love, or memory. We don't really understand evolution. Even though almost every educated person believes Darwin to have found the key to the meaning of life, I do not believe he did. It is our ignorance I am trying to display to the world. I wish now to move away from evolution and discuss entropy and time, another fascination of mine.

Almost all the laws of physics are time-reversible. An apparent exception seems to be the second law of thermodynamics, the rule that in an isolated system, entropy, disorder, tends to increase. The second law of thermodynamics provides us with some sense of time's arrow – the future is different from the past because there is more entropy in the future than the past. However, something people often don't realise about the second law is that it is probabilistic, that it simply states that entropy is far more likely to increase than decrease but does not state that entropy necessarily increases. An example that illustrates this point is as follows. Suppose we have a box divided into two regions by a thin partition or membrane and that all the gaseous molecules in the left side are red and all the molecules in the right side are blue. If we break the membrane or remove the partition, the two different coloured gases will almost certainly mix to form a more or less uniform colour. If however we start with a mixture of blue and red molecules in a box, a possibility that all the red molecules will randomly congregate on the left hand side and all the blue molecules will congregate on the right hand side exists that is small but non-zero. If there are n red molecules and n blue molecules the probability is 1/2 to the power of n, if the molecules are distributed evenly throughout the space. For any macroscopic situation, if the box is say one metre cubed and at sea level, there are so many molecules involved that this possibility is so small as to be almost impossible. Almost impossible but not quite totally impossible. So there is no necessary reason to think that time might not sometimes run backwards.

I don't feel equipped right at this moment to expatiate on time and entropy, because my brain is all foggy because of the medication I am forced to take. I will say that I sometimes speculate that, if all the laws of physics are time reversible, as they are, it might perhaps be possible to remember the future as well as the past. I could give examples from my own life to support this speculation but to do so would be to stray too far from the topics I wish to cover in this post. Before I finish with entropy, though, I wish to relate it back to evolution. Some religious critics of Darwinism say that the ever increasing complexity of life on Earth violates the second law of thermodynamics. This is not a good argument. The Earth is not a closed system. If we take into account that all the energy stored and expended by Terran organisms originally comes from the Sun, we need to include the Sun in the system. If we do so, we are forced to conclude only that entropy increases more slowly as a result of living systems than if there wasn't life on Earth.

At this point I wish to turn at last to the ontological argument for the existence of God.

The first Christian formulation of the ontological argument was by Anselm of Canterbury in 1078. I shall quote his argument as it is summarised in Wikipedia. "Anselm defined God as "a being than which no greater can be conceived", and argued that this being must exist in the mind, even in the mind of the person who denies the existence of God. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it exists only in the mind, then an even greater being must be possible—one which exists both in the mind and in reality. Therefore, this greatest possible being must exist in reality." Anselm's argument is not the only kind of ontological argument – Graham Oppy proposed that there are eight different types of ontological argument. But I shall be focussing primarily on this one. We can summarise it still further. "We can conceive of a perfect being (i.e. God); to be perfect it must exist; therefore God exists."

Obviously, the ontological argument turns on the twin issues of 'perfection' and 'existence''; even in Anselm's day, critics realised that there must be a flaw in it. Gaunilo of Marmoutiers parodied the argument in the following way – we can conceive of a perfect island; to be perfect it must exist; therefore a perfect island exists. Gaunilo contended that Anselm's argument could be used to prove the existence of literally anything. For instance, we could mount the following arguments: We can conceive of a perfect unicorn; to be perfect it must exist; therefore at least one unicorn exists. We can conceive of the perfect detective (i.e. Sherlock Holmes); to be perfect he must exist; therefore Sherlock Holmes exists. We can conceive of a being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly evil (i.e. the demiurge); to be perfect it must exist; therefore the demiurge exists. These parodies do not refute Anselm's argument in and of themselves, but they indicate that Anselm must somehow, in some way, be committing some kind of logical error.

Over the last thousand years, many philosophers have attempted to refute Anselm's argument in various ways. One method is to say that the conception of 'perfection' does not logically entail 'existence'. I believe this was Kant's position – he argued that existence isn't a predicate. In this blog, specifically in the post "Fictional Objects", I took a kind of Meinongian position, claiming that existence is indeed either a property or predicate, and so Kant's exit out of the problem is not available to me. We can say however that one possible flaw is that the notion of 'perfection' is incoherent. How do we know that an existing being is more perfect than a non-existing one? If we provisionally subscribe to a kind of Platonic worldview, we could say that all existing objects are imperfect copies of perfect archetypes that inhere in a transcendental realm – this would mean that if something is perfect, by definition, it doesn't exist, or at least cannot be included in the inventory of objects constituting the material world. For me, certainly, I have difficulty conceiving of a perfect anything.

Although it may be fruitful to explore the notion of 'perfection' further in an effort to vanquish Anselm, it seems more interesting to me to focus on the notion of 'existence'. Anselm argues that because he can conceive of a perfect being, this being must exist, claiming that even atheists possess a conception of a perfect being. Later, Descartes argued that because he had a "clear and distinct" idea of God, God must exist. To quote Wikipedia quoting Descartes, "the mere fact that I exist and have within me an idea of a most perfect being, that is, God, provides a very clear proof that God indeed exists.” Descartes goes on to say, “It is no surprise that God, in creating me, should have placed this idea in me to be, as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work.” The problem for both Anselm and Descartes is that there are many people who do not have a clear and distinct idea of God – I include myself among that large group of people, those who cannot conceive of a God and may be damned to perdition as a consequence. In the posts "The Analytic Synthetic Distinction" and "Fictional Objects" I proposed that all objects exist in the minds or worlds of conscious beings. My friend Sally believes in Bigfoot – he is a real object in her world. I do not believe in Bigfoot, and so he is not an object in my world. God is an object in the worlds of, respectively, Anselm and Descartes, but He is not an object in mine. For those who believe in God He is real, while for those who do not believe in God, He is not.

The answer I am sketching out is complex but is of a piece with the last several posts I have written. I have not expressed myself as clearly as I would like, but I hope that in future posts I may express myself better. I'll finish this discussion by making the following point. The argument "I can conceive of a perfect being (i.e. God); perfection entails existence; therefore God exists" is only a step away from the argument "I can conceive of an existent being; therefore this being must exist." Does thinking something exists mean it must exist? Does thinking something true make it so?

In this blog I have often discussed my life but I haven't done so for a while. I don't know whether readers prefer discussions of my life or my philosophy. I should say that, ironically, even though I have been presenting a view of the world over the last six months in which truth is relative and subjective, I have come to a much clearer and truer understanding of my own life. This seems to me characteristic of many postmodernists, from Nietzsche to Foucault. People who say there is no truth are more honest than those who say there is. Foucault, for instance, who has been accused of moral relativism, was, in reality, a truly good, honest man who fought on behalf of the oppressed and marginalised – madmen, homosexuals, and criminals. The irony of postmodernism is that its denial of objective truth is a route to something beatific, something like salvation. In my next post, I will make the effort to again talk about my life.

Centrist Democrats and Neoliberalism

The other day I listened to Sam Harris interview journalist Andrew Marantz on Youtube: the two entered into a serious clash over the issue of 'dog whistling'. Marantz alleged that Tucker Carlson had made statements that pandered to racists among his viewers and Harris bent over backwards to defend Carlson. saying that we don't have solid proof that this was what Carlson was trying to do, that we don't have access to Carlson's intentions and so can't know for sure. I think Marantz won the argument and I think Harris knew this because in the postscript to the interview he said that he found such conversations tedious, an indication of pique. In tonight's post, I want to discuss public intellectuals like Harris again, and the current conflict in the US between centrist Democrats and the Far Left.

Much of my conceptual diet consists of videos on Youtube of people connected with that strange loose conglomeration of former professors and professional pundits known as the Intellectual Dark Web, people like Harris, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and so on. Other people occasionally float to the top of the fish tank but I can't remember the names of every single person who gets interviewed. The various podcasters and influencers that are recommended to me by Youtube have a couple of things in common. They all hate Trump. Generally, they tend to identify as Leftists, Democrats (although there are exceptions like Peterson). But they all also tend to oppose what they call the Far Left, the Woke extreme of the Democrat Party which Harris, for instance, argues has created a kind of 'cancel culture' that can be found in schools, in the academy, in companies, everywhere. Sometimes I would like to hear the Woke side of the argument but the algorithms that dictate which clips to recommend to me appear to have decided I'm a centrist Democrat and don't give me the option of sampling opposing viewpoints.

Let's consider Jordan Peterson first. An excellent piece by David Brooks in the New York Times (Jan 15 2018) suggests that Peterson could be considered the "most influential public intellectual in the world right now". Although I find some of what Peterson says thought-provoking, I also find myself very much at odds with his view of the world. Peterson appears to think masculinity is somehow threatened by the rise of feminine values, seeks to show how hierarchies (presumably with white men at the top) are inevitable, rejects the idea of 'white privilege', and rails against 'postmodern neo-Marxists' by which I think he means Lefty female academics. Peterson thinks that life consists of battles, of the domination and subjugation of others – it is ironic that he thinks this because he also accuses his Lefty interlocutors of unscrupulously borrowing from Foucault the idea that everything is about power. Peterson believes that in every interaction between men there is the possibility of it descending into violence. All of these ideas, the ideas Peterson advocates, point to some kind of gender confusion, suggest that Peterson's own sense of himself as a man is somehow fragile and must be defended. It is ironic that he became famous as a consequence of taking a conservative stance on the issue of Trans rights, because it is evident he has deep seated gender issues himself.

The reason I find Peterson at once fascinating and laughable is because I simply don't share his view of what masculinity is. Readers will of course know that I have had my issues, but despite years of mental 'illness' and the status anxiety associated with being unemployed, I have never doubted that I was and am a man. For me, men have penises and are sexually attracted to women: it's almost that simple. A long time ago in this blog I told a story about something I did while studying in Otago when I was eighteen and I'll tell it again now. Because I missed my girlfriend, who was living in Auckland, I bought a copy of Cleo, a magazine she liked; I told my best friend over whiskey that I was secure enough in my sexuality that I could buy a women's magazine without it worrying me. My friend, a Philosophy major, said, "By that logic, you could prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing in women's clothes." I lightheartedly accepted his challenge, put on a dress, high heels, and wig belonging to a female friend, and had our lesbian pal who lived down the hall take photos. It was a fun night. Now, readers may want to see this story as something symptomatic. But what I'm trying to show is that what I believed for most of my life is that men who try too hard to be macho, who try too hard to conform to gender stereotypes and conventions, must all be trying to compensate for something, must have doubts either about their sexuality or gender. If you suggested to Peterson that he could prove he was a man by putting on women's clothes, he would probably vomit. And then, if he did put on women's clothes, he would never take them off.

Peterson is unusual in that I don't think he is a Democrat but what he shares with other members of the Intellectual Dark Web is his antagonism towards political correctness, Woke culture. The popularity of Peterson is itself symptomatic of something else. To understand this schism in the Left, one requires a potted history lesson.

The Republican party has for a long time been and is still today the party of the wealthy, of the business owners and landlords. The Democrat party was traditionally the party of the working class, the proletariat. The problem for Republicans is that the ultra-rich make up only a small fraction of the electorate and the US is a democracy; consequently Republicans need some special plan to encourage working-class people to vote against their own economic self-interest in order for Republicans to win elections. Such a plan was put into action by Nixon in the 'seventies, and given the moniker "the Southern Strategy." Essentially, Nixon sought to woo white religious voters, Catholics in the North and Evangelicals in the South, by making religion, abortion, race relations, gay rights, and women's rights, political issues, and by taking a reactionary position on all of them. In the 'eighties another revolution swept the Western world. Under Reagan in the US, Thatcher in the UK, and Lange (as well as Roger Douglas) here in New Zealand, neoliberalism, with its tenets of deregulation, privatisation, laissez-faire capitalism, and the free movement of people and capital across borders, became the new status quo. In America, the Democrat party moved to the right on economic issues. With the acceptance by people like Bill Clinton that neoliberalism was the new norm, the Democrat party sought to define itself in opposition to the Republicans in a new way, as being the party of liberal values rather than as the party of the working class. The Democrat party became the party of cannabis legalisation, of abortion rights, of gay marriage, and in the last couple of years, Trans rights. Rather than engaging in class warfare, Democrats and Republicans have been involved in a 'culture war' – underlying economic facts, such as the stagnation of wages among working class people, declining life expectancy, and obscene and ever increasing income inequality, are all swept under the carpet.

The huge problem with the culture war is that it doesn't touch issues like corporate consolidation and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority. Studies have shown that once a person passes a certain threshold in terms of income, a little bit more money makes no difference in terms of happiness. If you're already a billionaire, another billion isn't going to result in any significant improvement in terms of the quality of your life (except perhaps that it might encourage you to think about buying a slightly bigger super yacht). Nevertheless, a small but extremely powerful economic elite not only controls much of the world but is determined to maximise their profits as much as they can. These people don't care about abortion, or racism, or homophobia. All they are concerned about is chasing bigger profits. Corporations will, for instance, jump on the Woke bandwagon if doing so counts as good advertising. (This happened during the Roseanne Barr/Ambien scandal.) I don't know if John Stankey, the CEO of WarnerMedia, or Jeff Zucker, who indirectly runs CNN, are good people or bad people, but I think it possible that so long as the Democrat party defines itself in terms of fringe issues, so long as Democrats don't suddenly start advocating a massive increase in taxes on the biggest corporations, the executives will be willing to support them if this means making a buck. It well may be that Zucker is perfectly happy to employ a gay, black man like Don Lemon to front a flagship show on CNN – but only so long as Lemon sticks to Identity Politics talking points and doesn't turn on his bosses by suddenly saying that WarnerMedia should pay a higher share in taxes or should be broken up.

It is difficult to characterise all of the Intellectual Dark Web, to lump them all in together, but it sometimes seems to me that most of them implicitly subscribe to the neoliberal agenda (although exceptions that can be found on Youtube include Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek). I think Harris, for instance, identifies as a Democrat mainly because the Republican Party is the party of the religious-right and the Democrat Party the party of free thinkers. I heard a pod-cast a little while ago in which Harris and a couple of guests invoked the word 'neo-liberalism' and all agreed that they thought the word meaningless – Sam, you simply need to look the word up on Wikipedia to know that the term has a meaning. It is only because neo-liberalism has been the consensus for close to forty years that it seems invisible to you. Another case in point is Bill Maher. I have mixed feelings about Maher; sometimes he says good things and sometimes he doesn't. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, he did an excellent 'new rules' segment about price gouging. But Maher is really a soldier in the culture wars, a man who supports the Democrats because he supports drug decriminalisation and gay rights and opposes religion. He is a soldier in the culture wars who got left behind when the frontline advanced. On his show, for example, he and his guests often seem to agree that Elizabeth Warren's proposal of medicare-for-all is a step too far, that the American public wouldn't support it. I think many people would vote for it if the American media could give a balanced and clear account of her plan and point out that similar systems are the norm in every other developed country. It is not that the general American public doesn't want Warren's scheme – rather it is the media corporations and the pharmaceutical companies that buy advertising time on Fox and CNN and HBO who don't want it.

However, there is a little light in the room. Both Warren and Bernie Sanders are polling very highly. Neither is really running as a 'Woke' candidate, it seems to me, but rather as old fashioned Democrats with economic agendas. In a previous post, I tentatively declared my support for Pete Buttigieg – I would now like to change my mind and support Warren. The reasons I am picking Warren over Sanders is that, first, she is a woman, and I think it time America appointed a woman as President, and, second, that she is younger than Sanders and so better equipped to handle two terms as President. I believe either could beat Trump, so long as they are treated fairly and reasonably by the media.

The debate in the Democrat party is not really between two factions but three factions. On the one hand, we have centrist Democrats who implicitly subscribe to the neoliberal agenda but who support the Democrat party out of a kind of tribal affiliation while finding themselves very uncomfortable with political correctness and the Woke culture of the Far Left. On the other hand, we have the Far Left, who are prepared to destroy people if they deviate in the slightest from a politically correct ideology, but who completely fail to register that the fundamental problem is with contemporary capitalism itself. And then (on the third hand?) we have old-fashioned New Deal type Democrats like Warren and Sanders who correctly diagnose the current malaise as resulting from neoliberalism and are presenting solutions. The issue at the heart of the debate is whether the world is improving or deteriorating. The centrists recommended to me by Youtube, people like Steven Pinker, Peterson, and others, argue that the world is continuously getting better for everyone – the subtext to such arguments being that the neoliberal revolution was a good thing and that we shouldn't rock the boat. Personally, I am not at all convinced that the world is indeed getting better but this is an emotional reaction to what I see happening and I can't prove it.

Before finishing with the Intellectual Dark Web, I would like to make one small but important point. I believe in anthropogenic climate change but have not made a big deal about this in the blog because it is so obviously a fact that there is no need for me to bang on about it. All three factions of the Democrat party believe that global warming is real and that something should be done about it. This is another light in the dark.

What I am trying to suggest in this post is that the fight between centrist Democrats and the Woke Left is a distraction from the real issues. It is these real issues, such as the feeling among the working class that economic development has left many of them behind and that Washington is ruled by an 'out of touch elite', that got Trump elected. I suspect that it is these real issues that also explain the popularity of Jordan Peterson. Peterson casts his adversaries as 'postmodern neo-Marxists', a position that attracts Republican voters unwilling to recognise that it is the ideology of the Republican Party itself, and the monied elite, that is the real enemy.  Rereading this post, I wonder if I was unnecessarily harsh on Peterson. What I feel sure of, though, is that Peterson is part of a backlash that, at its roots, is really a backlash against neo-liberalism. And people on the Left should stop fighting among themselves about political correctness and engage with the real problems. Hopefully it is these real issues that will be the subject of the conversation in next year's election. One can only hope.

Physics and Miracles

In some of my previous posts, I have discussed quantum physics, and I wish to do so again today.  I will assume that readers have some rudimentary understanding of quantum physics or, if not, can carry out a little research on the Internet to improve their understanding. I can assure you that it is really quite interesting and that this post should also be interesting. What I wish to do is to explore some of the counter-intuitive implications of quantum physics and of thermodynamics, and then discuss probability again. If you have, as I do, some sense that science itself suggests that reality has some kind of mystical or supernatural component to it, you might find the ruminations in this post stimulating.

One of the most important rules of quantum physics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This principle states that it is fundamentally impossible to measure with absolute precision the position and momentum of a particle along a given dimension; it is also fundamentally impossible to measure the energy and exact position in time of a particle. The uncertainty in one quantity multiplied by the uncertainty in the corresponding quantity can never be less than a given amount, specifically Planck's Constant divided by two. We can never know anything for sure. The classic example of how this principle affects experimental results is a diffraction experiment. Suppose we fire an electron horizontally at a narrow horizontal slit, that this electron passes through the slit and then, after a couple of meters, arrives at a detector. Because the slit is narrow, there is only a small uncertainty in its position on the y-axis, so there must be a large uncertainty its vertical momentum. Consequently, the wave associated with the particle spreads out a lot, diffracts, and there is a much larger vertical uncertainty in its arrival destination at the detector than the uncertainty in its vertical position when it passed through the slit. This simple experiment is the classic demonstration of the idea that light and matter exhibit both wave and particle characteristics.

However, when we think about this experiment, we can see it leads immediately to paradoxical results. Although there is a range of possible locations the electron can arrive at at the detector, in reality it is observed to arrive at only one place. This means that, if we know the distance between the slit and the detector, and if we know the time it took to travel from one to the other, we should be able to calculate its momentum when it hit the detector and, extrapolating backwards, work out its vertical momentum when it passed through the slit. This means that we can estimate both the vertical momentum of the electron and its approximate position when it passed through the slit with less uncertainty that that permitted by the Uncertainty Principle. The Uncertainty Principle specifies that the exact position and momentum of a particle cannot be known simultaneously but does not say that we cannot perform multiple experiments on a single particle at different times and combine the results. A related paradox is that for the particle to hit the slit it must be travelling dead horizontally and must have picked up the vertical momentum it possesses afterwards as a result of passing through the slit.

There are two solutions to this apparent paradox but before I get to them I wish to to discuss a second paradox. Suppose a particle is trapped in a box and is in the n=2 energy state. In this situation (a thought experiment often found in elementary introductions to quantum physics), there is a 50% chance the particle will be found in one half of the box and a 50% chance it will be found in the other half of the box. But the chance it will be found at the centre of the box, at what is known as the 'node', is zero. So, if the probability of the particle being found at the centre of the box is zero, how does it pass from one side to the other?

As I said, there are two solutions to these apparent paradoxes. The first involves looking at the quantum world from a Bohmian perspective. According to Bohm, both particles and waves exist objectively, with the wave acting as a pilot for the particle, guiding it. Furthermore, according to Bohm, particles do not have fixed velocities when not under the influence of a force; rather, their speeds and directions are continuously changing, although not so much as to deviate completely away from the pilot wave. As it were, they are always tending to jiggle about. The Bohmian theory enables us to dissolve the first paradox – even if we know the momentum of a particle when it hits a detector, this tells us nothing about its momentum when it passed through the slit. In this way, we can rescue the Uncertainty Principle from the paradox. The Bohmian picture resolves the second paradox because it enables us to suppose that when a particle is at the middle of the box, its velocity is momentarily infinite, and this is why we will never find one dead centre.

The second solution to these paradoxes is to suppose that an electron or a photon can sometimes be a wave and can sometimes be a particle but can never be both at the same time. It is senseless to speak of the particle's momentum when it passes through the slit because, at this moment, it is not a particle but rather a wave. Likewise, it is senseless to suppose that a particle in a box is literally a particle, bouncing backwards and forwards between the two walls – rather what we have is a wave in a box. It is a wave that collapses into a particle at the moment it is measured.

These two solutions represent two different interpretations of quantum physics, the de-Broglie Bohm interpretation, which asserts realism, determinism, and non-locality, and the Copenhagen interpretation which is unreal and indeterminate. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, reality consists of waves that are underdetermined, and which 'collapse', taking on properties such as position and momentum, when they are measured, observed. What I've read suggests that many physicists have disputed the idea, an idea that seems to me to follow logically from the Copenhagen interpretation, that consciousness causes the collapse, that consciousness in a sense creates the universe, but I don't see any alternative way to parse this particular interpretation. Given that the Copenhagen interpretation paves the way for such a flakey view of the universe, it may be surprising to remember that the Copenhagen interpretation was the orthodox position among most physicists for much of the twentieth century, although Einstein, among others, was uncomfortable with it and very much fiercely opposed to it.

These two interpretations are not the only two interpretations of quantum physics that can be found. Another is the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. This particular interpretation has no bearing on the two paradoxes I described above, but I mention it for the sake of completeness. The many-worlds interpretation has it that whenever more than one outcome is possible, different universes branch off, each instantiating one of the possibilities. A novel I didn't enjoy much but which nevertheless influenced me a great deal when young was The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, a book that explores this interpretation through fiction. Interestingly, although the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics was very much in vogue when I was a teenager, today hidden-variable theories such as the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation seem very much more in fashion, more so even than the Copenhagen Interpretation.

At this point in the essay, I wish to move a little away from interpretations of quantum physics to discuss some other unbelievable occurrences that physics permits. Suppose you were to lower your head and charge at a brick wall. A slim possibility exists that you would pass through the wall and find yourself, intact and uninjured, on the other side. This is known as 'quantum tunnelling'. Ordinarily, it is only subatomic particles that tunnel (it happens routinely during alpha-decay and thermonuclear reactions) but it is not entirely impossible for a grown person to 'tunnel' in such a way through a wall. It is so incredibly unlikely that we can call such an occurrence practically impossible, but it is not absolutely impossible. And this slim possibility exists regardless of the interpretation of quantum physics to which we subscribe. Suppose, now, that you drop an egg onto the floor and it breaks. There is nothing miraculous or unbelievable about such a happening. But it is also possible for a broken egg to gather energy from the ground, reform itself, and leap off the floor into your hand. It is incredibly unlikely but still possible: all the laws of physics are time-reversible. Readers who feel that I must be wrong about this might think to cite the Second Law of Thermodynamics to refute me, saying that "The entropy of an isolated system can never decrease". However, this 'law' is not really a law at all but more a general rule. Statistically speaking, entropy can decrease, although it is far more likely to increase than decrease, and the chance of it decreasing is much greater for smaller systems than larger ones.

This discussion is relevant to miracles. A traditional definition of a miracle is that it is an occurrence that violates the laws of physics. But it seems to me that a miraculous event could be one that is enormously improbable but still possible within the scope of natural laws. In the same way that it is possible for a grown human to 'tunnel' through a brick wall or for a broken egg to reform and jump into a person's hand, it may be possible for a person to walk on water. Extremely improbable, yes, but still possible. In the post "Evolution and Chance", I argued that the neo-Darwinian explanation for evolution fails because the evolution of a new species through chance mutation and natural selection alone is so incredibly unlikely as to be impossible, and it might seem that I am now contradicting myself. What I am rather saying is that the evolution of intelligent life is a kind of miracle or series of small miracles, and that such miracles may have occurred in more than one form more than once in human history. Whether we concern ourselves with the evolution of species or wonder if, if Christ existed, some of the stories surrounding him were true, we might want to consider the notion that human development has been steered by something supernatural. We might want to take 2001: A Space Odyssey seriously.

I have frequently discussed probability in this blog. Especially in the post entitled "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat" and its sequel, I argued that any estimate of probability is subjective rather than objective. I thought that this opinion was original at the time but have since discovered that the physicist and philosopher E.T. Jaynes put forward a similar view. What, to begin with, is probability? Everyone knows that the chance of rolling a six on a fair die is 1 in 6. How do we know this? Because we were told this at some point. How did the teacher or tutor who told us this know it? If we assume that an estimate of probability is objective, if we align ourselves with those statisticians who calls themselves objectivists, we might suppose that some time in the past, someone rolled a die many, many times and determined that, on average, a six popped up 1 time in 6. The problem with this account is that to be absolutely certain of a probability determined by counting how often a certain outcome occurs, we need to roll the die an infinite number of times. We might only roll a die sixty times, find that we roll a 6 fifteen times (this is possible) and then then erroneously conclude that the probability is 1 in 4. Obviously this is not how we work out probabilities in the real world. Instead we just look at a die and see that it has six sides of equal size and so know that the possibility of rolling a six is 1 in 6. Similarly all we have to do is look at a roulette wheel to see that the chance of winning is 1 in 37 (if we bet on a single number).

When making an adjudication as to the probability of an event occurring, one forms an abstract mental model of the situation of interest, an ideal representation or prototype, a model that is inevitably underdetermined, and applies certain rules of thumb to it. Suppose Bob is presented with a pack of cards and asked the probability of drawing a Queen of Hearts from the top. He will say the probability is 1 in 52. Dave, however, knows that the top 26 cards are all red and so estimates the probability as being 1 in 26. Jane knows that the top card is either the Queen of Hearts or the Ace of Spades and so estimates the probability as being 1 in 2, 50%. Eric knows for sure that the top card is the Queen of Hearts and so estimates the probability as being 100%. Any estimate of probability emerges from subjective uncertainty; in a deterministic universe, if an agent possesses all the relevant information, he or she will know with absolute certainty what will happen with respect to a particular situation in its future. To take an extreme example, if we know beforehand all the forces acting on a die when it leaves a person's hand, arcs through the air and rolls across the table, we would be able to predict with absolute certainty which number will be uppermost when it comes to a stop.

One of the major revolutions of quantum physics, a revolution which few people appreciate, is that it introduced a new concept, objective uncertainty. You don't need to be E.T. Jaynes to have worked out that this is a problem – that in a deterministic universe, estimates of probability arise from subjective uncertainty, from the uncertainty of individuals, and that the introduction of objective uncertainty involves a reconceptualisation of the concept of probability. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger equation and Dirac equation all suggest that the universe itself is uncertain, indeterminate. This seems to me a mistake as it seemed to Jaynes – I think we should get rid of the idea of objective uncertainty altogether. We should say rather that these equations describe what we can know about the universe. The universe might be deterministic but the hidden variables at play are variables we can necessarily know nothing about. This means, among other things, that it may be impossible to know which of the interpretations of quantum physics I discussed above is true. It may also mean that if God does intervene in the world, He likes to keep His hand hidden.

I'll conclude by saying something about this blog. I have talked about my life in it in the past but have not done so for quite a while. This does not mean I have nothing more to say about it. I am still under a Compulsory Treatment Order, still cognitively enfeebled by medication, and am still banging my head against the brick wall which is the insane, evil, and idiotic Mental Health Service. A couple of days ago, my key worker said, "Would you rather be right or happy?" For me, it's not a choice. It has been living with lies for many years that made me 'ill'. All I want is for the sociopathic and mentally retarded psychiatrists who have been treating me to apologise and let me go. I don't know if this will ever happen.

Modal Logic Part 3

In the previous three posts, I have been talking about modal logic, and I wish to do so again today. As I've said before, this blog is a process rather than a destination, an opportunity to think out loud as it were – and I wish to amend some of the conclusions I came to in the previous posts. It is not so much that I have changed my mind, as that I have thought through the problems a little more clearly. It might be that many modern modal logicians, and Kripke himself, have come to similar conclusions to the conclusions I have reached and intend to spell out, but I need to be honest and say that I haven't actually read Kripke's Truth and Necessity and so am basing my views on perhaps an imperfect understanding of Kripke's work. I think it probable my view differs from his. Although I am not as well informed as others about his work, I still think what I have to say is interesting and perhaps novel, if the reader is interested in logic and philosophy, and can follow my argument.

We start with a picture of the world inspired by Bertrand Russell. The world consists of facts. We employ language to talk about the world, and every true proposition corresponds with a particular fact in the world. A fact can be either necessary or contingent. To say a fact is 'contingent' is to say that it could have been different, or that there are other possible worlds in which it is different. For instance, consider the sentence: "Donald Trump definitely became President in January 2017, but he might not have become President in January 2017". This sentence is ambiguous because English is ambiguous. From one perspective it seems to express something oxymoronic or paradoxical; from another perspective, it simply expresses the common-sense notion that the future is indeterminate and so past events could have happened otherwise. Donald Trump's past investiture is a contingent fact. Consider now the sentence "A water molecule is definitely H2O but it might not be H2O" or the sentence "All cats are carnivorous but some cats might not be carnivorous" or the sentence  "All bachelors are unmarried but some bachelors might be married." These propositions we feel must be false, because they correspond (or, more exactly, fail to correspond) to facts that are necessary rather than contingent. A necessary fact is true in all possible worlds, whereas a contingent fact is true only in some possible worlds. We could add to the picture that all analytic truths are necessary, although not all necessary facts are analytic. Generally speaking, we tend to have a feeling about facts, a feeling that a particular fact is necessary or that it is contingent, but an exact determination of which category a fact falls into can be difficult to make. It is possible to argue that all facts are necessary and that there are no contingent facts at all; it is also possible, although far more unconventional, to argue that all facts are contingent and that there are no necessary facts. The problem of how we divide the world into necessary and contingent facts is extraordinarily difficult to solve but we don't need to solve it to deal with modal logic because, in truth, the issue of necessity vs. contingency is not the issue modal logic was invented to address. Modal logic is concerned with propositions rather than facts.

Modal logic, in the form Kripke first presented, proposes that we can prefix an alethic operator to propositions, an operator of the form "It is necessary that..." or "It is possible that..." I intend to argue that any proposition of the form p falls into one of three groups: "It is necessary that p", "It is necessary that not-p" or "It is possible that p". To assert of a proposition "It is possible that p" is also to assert "It is possible that not-p." This three-part partition reflects a person's knowledge of the world. If I say, "It is necessary that Donald Trump is President of the United States," I am saying, "I know with absolute certainty that Donald Trump is President of the United States." If I say, "It is necessary that Nancy Pelosi is not President of the United States," I am saying, "I know with absolute certainty that Nancy Pelosi is not President of the United States." If I say, "It is possible that life exists on Mars," I am saying "I don't know if life exists on Mars or not." Suppose you and I agree that some proposition p is true beyond a shadow of a doubt. We can then say to each other "It is necessary that p". If we agree with absolute confidence that p is false, we can say to each other "It is necessary that not-p." If we agree that neither of us know for sure if p is true or false, we can say to each other, "It is possible that p." (Of course, you and I might disagree about whether a proposition is necessarily true, necessarily false, or simply possible, but this type of disagreement is not something I wish to discuss in this post.) Modal logic does not tell us that the world itself is uncertain; rather, it tells us that a person's knowledge of the world is uncertain. A proposition expresses a belief about the world. All propositions, all beliefs, fall into one of the three groups, and no proposition can be in more than one of the three groups at the same time.

In the post "Modal Logic" I showed that a paradox seems to arise from the more conventional way of looking at modality. This paradox can be expressed as follows. "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that p"; "It is possible that p" implies "It is possible that not-p"; therefore, "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that not-p" – a contradiction. In that post, I argued that we could dissolve the paradox by upholding as a foundational axiom the doctrine that a proposition can be necessary or possible but can't be both at the same time. However, in "Modal Logic Part 2", I showed that this strategy also results in a paradox. "It is necessary that p" implies "It is not possible that p" and "It is not possible that p" implies "It is necessary that not-p", therefore "It is necessary that p" implies "It is necessary that not-p"– another contradiction. In the same post I concluded that the only way to avoid both paradoxes is to say that there are no necessary propositions at all, that all propositions are probabilistic. In the post immediately preceding this one, "Logical Investigations", I showed that these paradoxes arise from six basic assumptions or premises about modal logic. Obviously, if we wish to retain the notion that there are necessary propositions as well as possible proposition, there must be something wrong with these six premises.

I want now to list four alternative premises or axioms, premises different from those I presented in "Logical Investigations". These premises harmonise with the picture of the world I sketched out earlier in this post and have the added advantage that neither of the two paradoxes I mentioned above follows from them. These four premises are:
1. "It is necessary that p" implies "It is not possible that p", "It is not possible that not-p" and "It is not necessary that not-p".
2. "It is possible that p" implies "It is not necessary that p", "It is not necessary that not-p" and "It is possible that not-p".
3. "It is not necessary that p" implies "It is possible that p" and "It is possible that not-p", or "It is necessary that not-p".
4. "It is not possible that p" implies "It is necessary that p" or "It is necessary that not-p", and "It is not possible that not-p".
These four premises provide a comprehensive alternative to the premises I presented in "Logical Investigations".

To reiterate, these four premises fit with the picture of the world I painted earlier in this post, and do not result in either of the paradoxes I have shown occur if we take a more conventional way of approaching modal logic. Moreover, this picture of the world aligns with the picture of the world I outlined in the posts "The analytic-synthetic distinction",  "Fictional objects" and the two posts about quantum physics. This view, my view, is that reality is partial, subjective, and exists principally in the mind of conscious observers.

A curious extension of modal logic is second-order or second-level modal logic. In the picture I have drawn, all propositions fall into one of three camps: the necessarily true, the necessarily false, and the possible. However, you and I might be uncertain about which of the three categories a given proposition falls into. This uncertainty means that we can have sentences such as "It is possible that it is possible that p" and "It is possible that it is necessary that p". We could say "It is necessary that it is possible that p" – a type of sentence very appropriate to quantum physics. We could say that "It is possible that p" implies "It is necessarily possible that not-p". We could even say that "It is not possible that p" implies "It is possibly necessary that p." Obviously extending modal logic to encompass such meta-statements may result in things that look like paradoxes, but these paradoxes are less serious than the ones I have discussed earlier.

I hope this discussion is not so brief and curtailed that I have failed to make my case.

I'll finish this post by making an important point about my view of the world. It might seem like I endorse an extreme form of postmodernism, that I believe reality is created by conscious minds. A couple of years ago, I read "The Rhetoric of Fictionality" by Richard Walsh who appears to have this view– Walsh seems to subscribe to the doctrine that consciousness imposes form on "formless sense data". I myself do not believe this to be true though. I believe, rather, that regularities do indeed exist in the world and that we label these regularities with words. Two-hundred years ago, a Maori wandering in the bush would be able to distinguish between different types of tree – he or she could describe one tree as a Rata, another as a Kauri, another as a Totata, another as a Manuka. The natural world is divided into different types of object, different species of flora and fauna, and different people can agree that one type of object is different from another, even if we use different words to describe the same type of living being. This is a simple fact about the natural world. In the man-made world I live in, I can also distinguish between different types of object – between a sewer grate, a sign post, and a park bench, for instance. Whether we are dealing with a natural or man-made environment, different types of object present themselves to the senses. Humans, like other animals I believe, sort the world into different categories, but unlike other animals associate a given category with a spoken sound or written mark. The instinct to categorise things is innate. The problem arises when we take this cataloguing too far, by supposing, as psychiatrists do for instance, that human beings can be sorted into separate categories.

Once again I have found this post difficult to write. I feel tired and woolly-headed all the time which makes it difficult to express myself clearly. Still, I wanted to get my thoughts written down and I think I have achieved this.

Logical Investigations

In the last couple of posts, I have discussed modal logic, and I intend to do so again tonight. I shall also touch on another couple of subjects. The unifying thread of this post is the application of reason to problems, whether those problems be logical or political. The first part of the post is dedicated to modal logic and the second part is focussed on some political issues.

I believe I can sum up the argument I have presented in the last two posts quite succinctly. Modal logic is grounded on perhaps six central claims. These might even be described as axioms. These six are:
1. "It is necessary that p" implies "It is not possible that not-p".
2. "It is not necessary that p" implies "It is possible that not-p".
3. "It is possible that p" implies "It is not necessary that not-p".
4. "It is not possible that p" implies "It is necessary that not-p".
5. "It is possible that p" implies "It is possible that not-p."
6. "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that p".

If we accept all six axioms, a paradox appears. Accepting premises 5 and 6 leads to the conclusion that "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that not-p", and this contradicts premise 1. I have described this as a paradox but it might better be described as a reductio ad absurdum – one of premises 1, 5 and 6 must be false. The first four premises are generally recognised as foundational axioms within modal logic, so the most obvious candidate for a false premise is premise 6. If we assume it to be false we should then replace it with the following premise, which we shall now assume to be true.
6b. "It is necessary that p" implies "It is not possible that p."

If we now accept the amended list of premises, however, another paradox emerges. Accepting premises 6b and 4 leads to the conclusion that "It is necessary that p" implies "It is necessary that not-p." Although premise 5 says that "It is possible that p" and "It is possible that not-p" can both be true, we cannot accept that the two propositions "It is necessary that p" and "It is necessary that not-p" can both be true. Thus, it seems that whether we accept premise 6 as being true or as being false, if we accept 6 or 6b, either way something like a paradox emerges. The problem can't be with premise 6, and so we are then forced to say that the problem is with premise 5. "It is possible that p" does not imply "It is possible that not-p". But this apparent solution forces us into the awkward position of, effectively, arguing that some or all statements of the form "It is possible that..." are really statements of the form "It is necessary that..." And because the whole point of modal logic is to draw a distinction between necessary and possible sentences, between necessary and contingent facts, the whole enterprise collapses. It collapses because its foundational assumptions are unsound.

It seems to me that there are two potential responses to the problems I have outlined in this and the previous two posts. We can suppose that all facts are necessary or we can suppose that all facts are contingent. I think, at the moment, that all facts in the world are necessary but all the beliefs we form and express about the world are uncertain. There is a gap between the world as it is and our knowledge of the world. This is also the conclusion I defended in the two posts about quantum physics, "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat" and "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2". The issue is epistemological: can we know anything for sure? What we need to do it seems to me is to abandon the Correspondence Theory of Truth in favour of some better theory of what truth is.

If we accept premise 5 wholeheartedly, the tenet that "It is possible that p" implies "It is possible that not-p" means that any statement of the form "It is possible that..." is empty of semantic content, is, according to a Fregean style analysis, meaningless. So, we can at least conclude that in our discourse about topics, we should try to avoid statements of the form "It is possible that..." and prefer statements of the form "It must be the case that..."

At this point in the post I wish to switch from a discussion of logic to a discussion of politics.

Often in this blog I have illustrated my arguments by telling stories drawn from my own life. I have described my experiences at bFM in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". If the two posts about quantum physics are the most important essays I have written on philosophical issues, these other two posts are the most important I have written about my life and 'illness'. I wish now to describe something that happened at bFM one morning back in 2007, something that I haven't talked about before. I know that this will be an abrupt change in the tone for this post – perhaps because I am going to say a couple of controversial things it is safest to bury my more provocative opinions in the second half of a post that began as something quite dry and abstruse.

I believe I was asked the question on Waitangi Day. Because Waitangi Day is a public holiday, there were only three of us in the station. Mikey Havoc was manning the radio desk; I was writing news stories in a side room; and a young, slightly odd woman who I don''t think I'd met before was reading the news bulletins every half hour. At one point she came out into the side room and asked me, "What's your opinion on abortion?" I couldn't work out clearly why she had asked me this question; it seemed to come out of nowhere. I should have just said that I was pro-choice but instead I equivocated, saying "It depends on your life experiences." Although I wasn't sure why she had asked me this, at some level I kind of knew. They thought I might be a fundamentalist Christian. And for some reason I found it difficult to dissuade her of this idea on the spot, perhaps because it might have seemed to ring false if I had just said that I was pro-choice. I am not one hundred per cent certain why they thought I was a fundamentalist Christian but I can hazard a good guess. A notion that circulates widely among left-leaning atheist heterosexuals almost by osmosis is that gay men who don't come out don't come out because they subscribe to a fundamentalist Christian ideology. I know that many people believe this because I believed the same thing myself. The people at bFM had decided I was one of those. The truth however was that, back then, at the age of twenty-seven, not only was I heterosexual, I was very close to being what is now called New Atheist, was in fact then a fan of Richard Dawkins. Having the people at bFM think I was a fundamentalist Christian was almost as painful to me as having them think I was gay.

In the years since, sometimes this question has come back to haunt me. I felt that I needed to give it a definitive answer, and I've never been able to. Logically, the issue is simple. We can take it as axiomatic that it is ethically wrong to take human life, and so the question becomes 'At what point during gestation does a foetus become human?' It seems obvious that a zygote or blastocyst isn't human but it also seems obvious that after say eight months a foetus is quite close to becoming a baby. Sometime during pregnancy an embryo becomes a foetus, and then a little later the foetus becomes a person. This is simple logic but expressing it can elicit hostile, distraught and emotional reactions both from people who are pro-choice and people who are pro-life. Somehow this topic came up in a conversation I had recently with my brother and he angrily stated that women have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies. I tried, in what I felt was a sober and dispassionate way, to express the problem, saying, "It's a philosophical issue. At what point are we dealing with two individuals rather than one?" But there is no arguing with some people. Someone other who weighed in on this issue was David Foster Wallace. In an essay about language and lexicography entitled "Authority and American Usage" Wallace digressed to express his views on abortion. His argument was more complicated and sophisticated than mine (it is a long time ago that I read it and so can't paraphrase it) but, like me, he ended up going right down the middle, noting in a joking way that the position he was taking would invite disapproval, condemnation, personal attacks, from people on both sides of the political spectrum.

The problem is that we lack a clear enough definition of 'human' that would enable us to adjudicate the rights and wrongs of this issue. When in doubt however, one should go with the opinions of those one trusts and likes, with one's political tribe. So I guess I should say that I'm pro-choice. If I could go back in time, though, and could change the answer I gave to the girl at bFM, I would say, instead, "It's none of my business."

Several months ago, I wrote a post in which I talked about Israel. I didn't express myself as well as I could have in that post and suffered the additional horror that I published the post the same day as the Christchurch Mosque attack (after it happened but before I had heard about it). I wish now to discuss Israel again, in a different way. I want to apply logic to this ethical minefield.

What is a nation-state? Rather than give a full definition, I simply want to say that today most Western countries are multicultural and multi-ethnic. Consider my country, New Zealand. The indigenous people here are the Maori. In 1840, a large number of Maori chiefs and representatives of the British Crown signed an enormously important document, the Treaty of Waitangi,  in which Maori were given the rights of British citizens, were guaranteed ownership of their lands, and ceded sovereignty to the Crown. Unfortunately the Maori translation of the Treaty was somewhat different than the English original, leading to disagreements about land and sovereignty culminating in all out war between the English and many Maori tribes a few years later. The treaty then languished for well over a century until, starting in 1974 and 1975, steps were taken to redress historical injustices. The Waitangi Tribunal was established to award monetary compensation to iwi who had been illegally dispossessed of their lands and rights ('iwi' being the Maori word for tribe). The word 'reparations' in not appropriate in the New Zealand context but I would like to throw it in here because New Zealand history may provide a useful analogy to an issue very much in the air in American politics.

Maori still face discrimination and systemic bias today, as Lizzie Marvelly pointed out in an opinion piece in Saturday's Herald. But it seems to me that New Zealand is perhaps the most successful post-colonial country in the world, the country that has done and is doing the most in terms of addressing the historical crimes of colonisation. A problem we face though is that New Zealand is officially bi-cultural and factually, today, multi-cultural. We receive and welcome immigrants from all over Europe, from India, from the Middle East, and from East Asia, and this complicates the picture. To be absolutely clear, I have no problem with this. It's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a thing. It means that I have a wonderful array of different types of restaurant I can go to when I want to eat out. In New Zealand, as in most other developed countries, a person becomes a member of a country by moving here with her family, by applying for and being granted New Zealand citizenship, by staking her future on a life here in this country. This seems normal in the world today. Like New Zealand, the modern UK is multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, having accepted large numbers of immigrants from the West Indies, from Pakistan, and more recently Poland among other places. And of course the United States is a nation of immigrants. Multi-culturalism is far more the rule than the exception.

The significant anomaly to this general consensus of what a modern liberal democracy is, is Israel. When it seemed Benjamin Netanyahu had won re-election just last week, in his victory speech he repeatedly referred to Israel as a "Jewish state" and came back again and again to the word 'zionism' in his oration. In 2018 the Knesset passed a law known as the "nation state law" and for an excellent piece of reportage about this law I recommend an article on the Internet which presents my case in many ways better than I could myself (https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-nation-state-law-bill-explained-apartheid-netanyahu-democracy). The situation in Israel/Palestine is analogous to the situation in apartheid era South Africa. You might want to say to me, "As a Gentile New Zealander, you have no right to have an opinion on this issue." But New Zealanders have a way of becoming concerned about what happens in other countries. Some of my older New Zealand readers may remember the Springbok Tour protests in 1981, a milestone event in New Zealand's history that provided the backdrop to a story I published in this blog, "The Good Ol' Days."

Logically, it seems to me, a country that privileges one ethnicity and one religion over all others is racist. Israel, in its conception, is racist. Of course, Israel is not alone in privileging one group over others – Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, are both officially Islamic states. But, unlike Saudi Arabia and Iran, Israel pretends to be a liberal Western democracy and pushes back against those who accuse it of illiberality by accusing them of racism.

The conversation about this issue on the Left is clouded, distorted, by knee-jerk emotion; often any opposition to the Israeli Right is conflated with anti-semitism. The mistake I made in the previous post about Israel was that, for whatever reason, perhaps because the collective unconscious had been stirred by events I wasn't consciously aware of, I didn't do a good enough job distinguishing between principled opposition to Netanyahu and anti-semitism. But they are two totally different things. In fact, a deeply disturbing truth is that there are white supremacists in the United States who approve of Israel and hold it up as a kind of role model, who think America should become a whites-only country in the same way that Israel is a Jews-only country. A kind of zionist anti-semitism exist. I know this claim about some white supremacists is shocking but, although I can't direct the reader to any relevant site to prove it, I have seen a white supremacist on the Internet who made this argument, and it is a rational position for some white-supremacists to take.

On his show a couple of weeks ago, Bill Maher said that people who support Palestinian self-determination are ignorant of history. In writing this post I have done a little research into the history of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and this research has not dissuaded me of my opinion that the currently prevailing situation is morally untenable. Rather than rehash the whole history of the region, I direct the reader to the articles on wikipedia about the birth of Israel and the string of Arab-Israeli wars that have occurred since 1947. I hope that these essays are more or less correct. Something important I learned from them is that there has never been a Palestinian state. Prior to World War 1, the area then known as Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire; during WW1 it was taken over by the British. Between 1947 and the Six-Day War in 1967, the West Bank was ruled by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The idea of a possible independent Palestinian state wasn't floated formally until the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988.

Defenders of Israel's actions, ranging from officials in the Israeli administration to supposedly objective bystanders like Bill Maher and Sam Harris, argue that Israel is fighting for its very right to exist, that the Arab populations living around and within Israel's borders wish to wipe Israel off the map. Such opinions, I understand, are bolstered by literal readings of statements such as the founding constitution of Hamas. However, we need a better answer to this problem than the stupid idea that either Israel or the Palestinians should just disappear. The UN answer has been for a long time the two-state solution. What I wish to suggest, tentatively, is that the whole area, Israel and the Palestinian Territories together, should become a single country, a modern liberal state that is multicultural and accepts that it is made up of many ethnic groups. I believe that this is Noam Chomsky's preferred answer to this almost irresolvable problem.

My views on Israel are shaped by my experience of living as a Pakeha New Zealander in a multicultural county that has for a long time been seeking to atone for the evils of colonialism. We can't undo colonialism, in the same way that liberal Americans can't undo slavery – all we can do is apologise, make restitution and ensure that Maori today are treated at least as fairly as Pakeha. Maori themselves know that we can't return to pre-1840 New Zealand; there may be some Maori who wish to rise up in revolt and restore Maori sovereignty over our islands, but, if so, I've never heard of one or met one. We all, Maori and Pakeha alike, have to live with our colonial history. In the previous post about Israel, I said, "Whether the establishment of the state of Israel was a good thing or a bad thing is irrelevant. Israel has been around for over seventy years and isn't going anywhere." The best answer, in a utopian world, would be for Israel and Palestine to amalgamate, and for Jewish and Arab citizens alike to be granted equal citizenship under the law. Of course, this raises the question – what should we call this country? Israel or Palestine? In New Zealand, we use the English name for the country, New Zealand, and the Maori name, Aotearoa, almost interchangeably and often use both. For a number of years now, before sporting fixtures, it has been customary to sing both the Maori and English versions of the national anthem. In the same way, the nation known as Israel and the Palestinian Territories should belong to both groups, to the indigenous inhabitants as much as to the settlers.

I hope this post makes sense. I have found it extraordinarily difficult to write, and I hope I have expressed myself clearly. I hope that nothing horrible happens in the world tomorrow. I am going away to Whanganui for a week tomorrow and, when I get back, my next post is probably going to be about philosophy again. I'll work out then what to write about.