Bits and Pieces

I wish to begin this blogpost by talking about the blog itself. A little while ago, I read a horoscope in the Auckland Herald that talked about a 'private journal' – I can't remember the Leo horoscope that day exactly but it made me wonder if people in the world think this blog is a diary, that I don't want others reading it. The opposite is true. I want people to read it, lots of people, particularly people in the media. I would love it if Steve Braunias himself were to read it regularly. (If he does, I wish to express to him my appreciation of his recent article in the Herald about Benjamin Swann, an article that could have presented Swann as a monster but instead depicted him as a somewhat silly man who had made serious mistakes in his life.) The truth is that this blog is my route to recovery. I have been quite well for a long time now, indeed seem to get better every day. The reason for my recovery is my decision to talk about my life, to talk about schizophrenia and homosexuality, neither of which condition I suffer from. People may think my decision to talk about all this is a symptom of illness, that the mentally ill should bottle everything up until at last they kill themselves. The psychiatrists may not want the people they diagnose as mentally ill to talk about their lives and treatment because to do so is to illuminate the insane evil that is psychiatry itself. So long as the 'mentally ill' are voiceless, the psychiatrists retain their power to dehumanise and torture the people who, largely through no fault of their own, end up in their consultation rooms. I am fighting against a system that manifestly fails almost everyone who ends up in it as a patient.

Although I am quite well and can judge my wellness according to some rubrics such as improved ability to sit still and watch TV, to read books without becoming restless, to take better care of myself, and so on and so forth, (I no longer talk about homosexuality with my mother at all), I may not always present myself as well when I have an appointment with the psychiatrist. My last appointment was immediately before Auckland went into lockdown. I mentioned to the psychiatrist that I had got into an online altercation with a former friend of mine and I wish I hadn't told him this. This argument, which began when my friend sent me a ridiculous, asinine essay about schizophrenia, ended with him saying unforgivable things to me and me replying in kind. It is impossible for me to describe this argument without traducing my friend and so I won't. It was a mistake, however, to tell the psychiatrist that I had got into a verbal stoush with my friend. I see my psychiatrist infrequently, as you would gather, and for a long time now I have been trying to present myself as well, so I can get out of the Mental Health Act that I have been under since early 2014. At this last appointment, I brought my brother along, a lawyer. I was given a choice – either agree to take the same dosage of medication voluntarily or remain under the Act and have the medication gradually reduced. I opted for the second course of action. So far no dosage reduction has occurred – my brother told me immediately after that appointment that I should get it in writing. I wish to make two points about all this. First, the symptoms I described at the beginning of this paragraph, the restlessness, I believe to be a side-effect of the medication rather than an indication of an 'underlying condition' – because I no longer have that underlying condition. The restlessness became markedly worse after my dosage was doubled in 2018 and the only reason I feel better now is because, I believe, my brain has adjusted to the medication. Second, the psychiatric profession probably would prefer me to agree to take medication voluntarily because then, if I go off the medication secretly and get into trouble somehow, they can blame it on me and have me hospitalised and immediately put back under a Compulsory Treatment Order. Alternatively, if I go off the medication secretly, remain quite well and don't do anything problematic, they are not accountable or liable for anything – they can wash their hands of me in the same way as I can wash my hands of them. I have considered this option, agreeing to take medication voluntarily and then secretly discontinuing it, but have rejected it because this would involve lying to those treating me and perhaps also to my family. I am too honest to elect for this course of action – certainly more honest than the corrupt and lazy doctors who have been treating me.

I have titled this post "Bits and Pieces" because I want to touch on a number of different topics. I want to begin by discussing the Youtube vlogger Veritasium and then move onto talking about some moments in my own life. This post is a bit ramshackle – there is a part of me that feels that I have said all I need to say in this blog and that there is no reason to keep on writing it. Even this post has taken me a couple of weeks to get this far. I hope to accelerate the writing of it as I go along.

Veritasium is a science education channel on Youtube run by Derek Muller that began in January 2011. Muller covers a wide variety of topics, not least mathematics, chemistry, and physics. I believe the first clip I saw by him was "These Pools Support Half The People Who Live on Earth", a clip about potassium. Not long after I watched a clip about a wind-driven craft that can move faster than the wind propelling it. Muller specialises in videos that appear to be grounded in science but assert highly counterintuitive claims, a marketing strategy that has made his channel very successful. Initially I enjoyed his videos because I decided to trust in Muller's credentials as a intelligent authority on science and found his videos interesting and engaging. And then I saw his clip about General Relativity, titled "Why Gravity is NOT a Force". In this video, Muller argues that a charged object that appears to be motionless to us, which is in the same gravity well as we are, is actually accelerating and should therefore emit electromagnetic radiation according to Maxwell's laws. But this is patent nonsense. Muller doesn't address the gaping hole in his argument, that if an object that appears motionless to us because it is also on the surface of the earth is emitting radiation, that this energy has to come from somewhere. If Muller's claim is true, that an object that appears motionless to us is in fact emitting electromagnetic radiation, this violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law that energy is always conserved. To take Muller's argument to its final absurd limit, we could utilise this perverse 'fact' by putting a charged object in a room with walls capable of transforming electromagnetic radiation into electrical energy and, voila, we have something like a Perpetual Motion Machine, a simple source of infinite power. Needless to say, if General Relativity leads to such a conclusion, a conclusion that not only is counterintuitive but transgresses against one of the foundational laws in modern physics, either General Relativity is wrong or Muller's description of it is wrong. My money is on the latter.

The video on General Relativity made me wonder if Veritasium is really legit and a clip I saw recently only reinforced my doubts. The video I wish to discuss is "The Big Misconception About Electricity" – if you haven't seen this video already (which is likely) I suggest you watch it now before coming back to this blog. In "The Big Misconception About Electricity", Muller asks us to imagine a circuit consisting of a battery, a switch, a lightbulb, and a length of (resistance free) wire that stretches half a light-second in either direction. Although the circuit is enormous, although there is a full light-second of wire stretched between the battery and lightbulb in both directions, the lightbulb is physically only 1 meter away from the battery. Muller asks us, at the beginning of the clip, to make a guess as to how long it would take for the lightbulb to light up after the switch, which is near the battery, is closed. Would it take O.5 seconds, 1 second, 2 seconds, 1m/c seconds, or none of the above? Muller goes on to argue that it would take 1m/c seconds, his counterintuitive assault on the commonplace idea that energy flows through wires. But I think Muller is wrong, that although there may be some dim illumination immediately after the switch is thrown, it would take at least 1s for the lightbulb to fully light up.

Muller is arguing, in effect, that the energy that causes the lightbulb to light up passes directly from the battery to the lightbulb across the one meter gap between them in the form of electromagnetic radiation. But, again, this is patent nonsense. If we take this argument to its final absurd limit, we would have to suppose that if a lightbulb is in the general vicinity of a battery, and the switch is thrown, the lightbulb would light up even if there is no circuit connecting the lightbulb to the battery. In fact, because there is no wire connecting the battery to the lightbulb, it is difficult to even know what the expression 'the switch is thrown' means in this situation. It seems we could make a lightbulb light up simply by waving a battery near it. Muller's argument rests I believe on two mistakes. The first is that he argues that energy flow in this situation is best described by the Poynting vector. But the Poynting vector only applies to electromagnetic waves and energy can flow from one place to another in other ways. Consider a line of dominos. If we push the first domino over, each successive domino falls until the final one falls – energy has passed from the first domino to the last but obviously the Poynting vector is irrelevant in this situation. The second error Muller makes is that he argues that in the circuit electrons accumulate on the surface of the wire between the battery's negative terminal and the lightbulb and are depleted on the surface of the wire between the lightbulb and the battery's positive terminal. Although I suspect this is possible in the very small interval of time after the switch is thrown, when the current is established I believe the distribution of electrons across the surface of the wire reaches a neutral equilibrium. The reason Muller proposes that positive and negative charges accumulate on the surfaces of parts of the circuit is that, for the sake of his Poynting vector argument, he needs the electrical fields around the wire to be perpendicular to the energy flow. And although there may be a minuscule shred of truth to his argument, I think he is wrong.

So what actually happens in Muller's thought experiment when the switch is thrown? Electrons are produced by the battery's negative terminal which move along the wire pushing those in front of them which push those in front of them, and so on. Similarly, the positive charge at the battery's positive terminal pulls electrons towards it which pull those immediately behind them towards it, and so on. The electrons themselves do not move very quickly but the push and pull, the electrical field inside the conductor, moves along the wire at something approaching the speed of light. The domino analogy is useful again – although each domino only moves a little, the effect propagates much faster. When the switch is closed, a current is established, if only in the part of wire close to the battery, although the current does not instantaneously reach its full value. This current produces a magnetic field and because it is a time varying magnetic field (increasing as the current increases), it will induce an electric field in the wire immediately attached to the lightbulb, an electric field that causes current to flow in that part of the wire and the lightbulb to almost immediately light up. However, and this is important, the lightbulb will be very dim because the induced emf across the lightbulb is much less than the emf produced by the battery. Only when the current is constant across the whole circuit will the power dissipated by the lightbulb equal the power provided by the battery. This would take at least one second, the time it takes for the push from the negative terminal and the pull from the positive terminal to reach the lightbulb along the wire – in fact, if we consider self-inductance it may take much longer. Self-inductance is too complex to explain fully here but it can be briefly summarised as a characteristic of circuits that prevents them from reaching their maximum current instantaneously as energy is invested in producing the magnetic field surrounding the wire. Although Muller specifies that the wire is resistance free, he doesn't mention self-inductance at all. Yet I suspect that the self-inductance of the circuit he describes would be very substantial indeed. This is indicative of the whole video, a hash of ill-founded speculation that doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny at all.

The reaction I felt watching these two Veritasium clips was deep disappointment. We live in an age of lies and although Derek Muller is not Q, he is also trafficking in bullshit. The difference is that Muller is disseminating bullshit for smart people rather than easily debunked conspiracy theories about 5G towers and microchip-carrying vaccines. In my more conspiratorial moments, in the past, I have wondered if the bullshit that we often find on the Internet is a way of protecting the universities and other elites – in order to maintain their monopoly on the truth in an era where information about anything is only a mouse click away, I have wondered if they deliberately allow the propagation of falsehoods. Perhaps, I thought, this was their way of maintaining their power and ascendency, the established hierarchy that is founded on knowledge. Today, though, I think that the blatant mistakes Muller and others make can be blamed on the profit motive and the craving for an audience. The more provocative the content of a clip, the larger the number of hits. This is why I have gone off Bret Weinstein and Heather Haying – they have gone all the way down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole and can't come back. I presume that they are pandering to this fringe, often right-wing demographic because they have decided that the bulk of their audience is made up of vaccine skeptics – their income depends on the size of their audience and so compromise, some degree of selling-out, is inevitable. It seems to me that the Dark Horse Podcast  has jumped the shark and have largely stopped watching it. However, although Weinstein and Haying also traffic in ridiculous speculation, it is hard to argue that they are part of a conspiracy to conceal the truth by hiding it behind a cloud of bullshit. They are too paranoid about conspiracies to deliberately participate in a conspiracy themselves.

Earlier in this post, I signalled that I intended to talk about my life again. I also intimated that I feel that I have said all I need to say in this blog about my life and so my decision to talk about it again is perhaps unnecessary. In one post or another, I have said everything that needs to be said, I think. My main worry is that I have not reached enough people for my life-story to have registered in the popular consciousness, and so I hope that my readers sometimes go back to earlier posts, and the right posts, to gain a complete picture of my life and 'illness'. I have noticed that a popular post is one with the clunky title "The Limits of Discourse, or The Truth About Cats and Dogs". In this post I argued that the cat/dog delusion, which I think is or has been fairly common, has no semantic content, that "the truth about cats and dogs is that there is no truth about cats and dogs". In that post I said that, if I had to choose, I would identify as a 'cat'. I wish now to resile from this profession as I have in other posts. Since I wrote "The Limits of Discourse", other examples of people experiencing the cat/dog delusion have come to my attention, but nevertheless I think that because the cat/dog delusion is meaningless, it was wrong for me to decide to identify as a cat. Simply put, in the world there are gay people and straight people and I count myself among the latter.

I wish to start by adding something to the previous post. In "Anatomy of a Delusion" I described how I had formed the delusion in 2007, a delusion that lasted perhaps eight months, that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. I wish now to briefly mention a logical consequence of this delusion that I entertained briefly perhaps in 2007 or perhaps in 2009. In New Zealand, at this time, there were two types of men's magazines, the magazines like FHM and Zoo that put sexy bikini-clad women on their front covers, and the genteel magazines like GQ and Esquire that put men like George Clooney or Brad Pitt on their covers. I thought that the latter magazines were directed toward the vast demographic of men who harboured secret homosexual desires. Why else would a man want to buy a magazine with Brad Pitt on the cover? Many years ago I was listening to the radio and heard the DJ talk about his brother who at school had got into ballet and endured teasing because he wasn't involved in a more masculine extra-curricula pursuit like rugby. The DJ pointed out that surely it is preferable to be hanging around a bunch of near naked women than to be on a rugby field "with your head stuck up another man's arse". The point, here, is that in 2007 and 2009 I thought that men who tried too hard to be macho were all latent homosexuals, were compensating for their sexual confusion by presenting a false face to the world. I thought entirely heterosexual men didn't worry about appearing manly to the world because they had nothing to prove. A related and very important point that my magazine example draws attention to is that sexuality is defined in terms of 'attractions'. As I discussed in the post "Straight Conversion Therapy", heterosexuals are only sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex, homosexuals are sexually attracted to people of the same sex, and bisexuals are attracted to both. I knew this quite clearly even back then in 2007. I have always been strongly attracted only to women but the thing about 'attractions' is that they are by nature private, unless a person wants to appear crass and vulgar by, for instance, wolf-whistling at hot young women on the street – and I try very hard not to make the women I find sexy uncomfortable. Accordingly the fact that I am only sexually attracted to women is not something that is easily ascertained.

Because it is difficult to determine whether or not a man or women harbours attractions towards people of the same sex, a person's sexuality is often, in fact usually, deduced from circumstantial evidence, from a person's body language, accent, sartorial choices, from the parts of the city where he chooses to spend his time. At the beginning of this post I mentioned an article by Steve Braunias about Benjamin Swann. It has been some time since I read this article but, as I recall it, Steve was focussed on the way Swann went on about his life attempting to break into the media or showbiz even though charges of sexually molesting boys were hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles. It seems that everyone who had any contact with Swann thought he was gay but, if asked, Swann would say he wasn't. Steve makes a lot of the fact that Swann often wore teeny-tiny shorts and that he was often seen perambulating along Karangahape Road. (Swann lived in Eden Terrace very near K Road, as I know well because I live in Eden Terrace myself.) Presumably the reason people just assumed he was gay was because of the way he presented himself and this has made me wonder about the way I myself present to others.

Let's start with body language. I don't have any gay mannerisms like limp wristedness although, when I was very ill in 2009, there were times when I exhibited these mannerisms a little against my will. I felt then as though because others around me, specifically those treating me, thought I was gay when I'm not, that a malign force was somehow acting upon me forcing me to conform to the idea they had of me. Generally, however, I don't believe I have any gay mannerisms at all. But then there is the matter of my voice. When I was about fourteen, I had an operation on my nose and I believe this permanently affected my voice; I suspect that this operation might have altered its tonality or timbre by changing the shape of the sinus cavity. I remember when I was seventeen I applied to be in the choir for the school musical; the music teacher I auditioned for wrote in my report that my voice had "an odd quality" and put me in the bass section, the section reserved for those who can't really sing. Like everyone, I can't really hear myself, but over the years I have become aware that my voice can be a little strange, a cause for some anxiety. However, although my voice is sometimes high pitched, I don't believe that I have the gay accent. (In using the word 'accent' to describe the gay voice, I am implying that the distinctive characteristics of the way gay men speak is learned rather than innate in the same way that an ethnically Caribbean person who grows up in Glasgow picks up a Glaswegian accent.) I can adduce a story from 2009 to prove this, that I don't ordinarily have the gay accent, a story I have told before. From 2005 until 2013 I worked for the TAB part-time taking horse racing bets over the phone. In 2009, there was a period during which, whenever I received a call, I would make a snap decision about whether the punter was gay or not and, if I thought he was gay, I would put on the gay accent. Otherwise I would use my own voice. This was not a premeditated decision, rather it arose from some place deep in my subconscious mind. After a couple of weeks, I realised I was doing this and attempted to snap out of it; on the next call I put on an Australian accent – after this call, I stopped doing it altogether. When I put on the Australian accent, the chap sitting next to me said to his neighbour on the other side, in some alarm, "He's talking like an Australian now!" From this I conclude that, ordinarily, I don't employ the gay voice at all.

Let's turn now to the issue of dress. Gay men are popularly supposed to be flamboyant, to be exhibitionist in their choice of clothes. In the same way that Swann set off alarm bells with the shorts he often wore, gay men often display their homosexuality through their sartorial decisions. Do I dress like a gay man? The short answer is 'no' but there is an important exception. In 2006, my step-mother and sisters went on a trip to South America and returned with a pair of Peruvian trousers as a gift for me, pants that resembled pajama bottoms. I wore them around the Big House sometimes and was wearing them when I rocked up to bFM with the idea of resuscitating an old friendship with Jose Barbossa and possibly helping out at at the radio station. As I described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode", Jose brought me into the studio and introduced me to Noelle McCarthy; she looked me up and down and then took me on board at once as a part-time news writer. First impressions count and I believe that, principally because of the pants I was wearing, she had probably immediately decided I was a gay man. I didn't wear those pants again while I was working at bFM but I sometimes wore a blue t-shirt with the slogan "Live Like A Dissident", a t-shirt that had also been given to me by my step-mother. I sensed at the time that this t-shirt might make people, such as Mikey Havoc, think I was gay, a source of distress, but, at the time, I was dealing with an anxiogenic confusion – I couldn't be sure which behaviours, displays, were 'cool' and which were 'gay'. (After I became deeply psychotic, I briefly decided that these two words, 'cool' and 'gay', were effectively synonyms, that gay men used the word 'cool' as code to describe gay people and displays.) This t-shirt ended up causing me great anguish. Although I have not talked about it much in this blog, for most of 2006 I had been studying to become a secondary school teacher, a choice of vocation that had been effectively decided for me, forced on me, by my father and step-mother. (My father had told me that if I went into secondary school teaching, he would pay for me to go to Europe for three months, a proposal I had declined.) At the first class at AUT on the shore early in 2006, when I formally introduced myself to my fellow trainee teachers through a short speech, I was wearing this t-shirt. I often felt that year that my fellow students thought I was gay because of the bad impression I made right at the beginning. I had never wanted to become a teacher and dropped out in around September or October 2006, about a month before rocking up to bFM.

After I became deeply psychotic, a fortnight or three weeks after leaving bFM, I tried to get rid of that t-shirt. For some reason, one or more of my flatmates decided to hang it on an interior wall of the Big House. This was just something else that compounded my paranoia. That t-shirt haunted me in my sickness, as did a certain confusion about which attire is gay and which is cool. I recall in 2011 telling the girl I call Jess, as proof of how just how ill I was when I was ill, that in 2007 I had nearly bought myself some skinny jeans. I was making fun of myself, of course, being self-deprecating to try to make her laugh, but it gets at the fundamental cause of my illness, an anxiety about how I present myself to others.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the signs adduced by Steve Braunias as possible evidence for Swann's homosexuality was the fact that he was seen sometimes walking along Karangahape Road. For my foreign readers, it might be helpful to describe K Road a little. K Road, particularly the section between Queen Street and Ponsonby Road, is a hub for Auckland's counterculture – it has a couple of strip clubs and gay bars and, when prostitution was illegal, was a popular haunt for street walkers. (New Zealand legalised prostitution in 2003, becoming the first country in the world to do so.) K Road, with its bars and clubs, is a favoured destination for Auckland's young party people, regardless of their sexual orientations. However, in the popular imagination, there is something suspicious about spending time in K Road, particular at night, by oneself. I don't understand this myself – I have lived in Eden Terrace, very near K Road, since early 2016, and quite often walk around around the block in the evening, a trip that takes me along K Road from Ponsonby Road to Symonds Street. I have never felt unsafe and have only ever come close to being propositioned by a man once. I was in Myers park during the daytime several years ago. As best as I can recall, I asked a stranger who was drinking a beer on a park bench for a cigarette and entered into a conversation with him. He told me that after a period of mental illness or psychosis, he had lost interest in women. The turn the conversation had taken made me uncomfortable and I took my leave of him. Quite recently, in fact, it occurred to me that this young chap might have been fishing, trying delicately to ferret out from me if I was interested in casual male intimacy (which of course I'm not). The reason I didn't realise this at the time was that this young man didn't seem camp or crazy in the slightest.

I don't know what form my current psychiatrist imagines my lifestyle to take but I suspect that my previous psychiatrist thought I would often cruise for gay men. At my most recent Independent Review, in 2018, she wrote in my report that I would go for walks at night for hours by myself, presumably intending to prove this way that I have treatment-resistant schizophrenia by insinuating that I am secretly having gay sex with casual acquaintances. I wish my life was that exciting. The truth is that the allegation of homosexuality has hung over me since early 2014, that my life has effectively been in a holding pattern for most of the last seven years. Every day for the last three years I do exactly the same thing. I wake up late, have a shower, and go to my mother's house where I complete the cryptic crossword and watch CNN and Comedy Central. I have a very good relationship with my mother (she is a wonderful woman) and occasionally we will go for a drive somewhere. In the evening, I listen to Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Stephen Colbert, and others on Youtube. Every Tuesday I attend a Pub Quiz with some friends, a tradition I have been observing since 2010 that was curtailed for many months by the Covid lockdown. Occasionally I watch a film with my father and his girlfriend or see my brother. My life effectively stopped many years ago. I am currently endeavouring to apply to do a Masters in Philosophy through Auckland University although I am having issues enrolling – I hope that next year my life will start again.

I wish to say something about my previous psychiatrist, Jennifer Murphy. At my appointments with her I went through a phase in 2017, I think, of trying to explain to her why I had become psychotic in the first place, as I have done in this blog. I remember bringing it up on one occasion and my mother, who was present, said, "He formed delusions about some of the staff at bFM". I said, "I thought a couple of them were gay. I was right about one of them. I was wrong about Mikey – I feel very bad about that now." Murphy grimaced. In the report she wrote in 2018, she made no mention of the fact that I had been wrong in thinking Mikey Havoc was gay. I suspect that Murphy believes that a simple allegation of homosexuality is proof sufficient, that it is impossible to be wrong in thinking someone gay. This insane paranoid bigotry, this idea that the world is full of secretly homosexual men and women, a delusion shared I believe by many psychiatrists who think that you can't be wrong in thinking someone is gay, is why she never believed that I am totally heterosexual, that, like Janet Frame, I am repelled by homosexuality.  But, as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have shown, experts can be fallible. On another occasion, when my mother wasn't present, she asked me, "How is your sexual functioning?" This question came at me from left field and I simply answered, "It's alright." I wish I'd answered with the full truth, that I only watch lesbian porn because I don't like pornography with men in it.

I'll finish this post by going right back to the beginning of my treatment. At my first contact with the Taylor Centre in 2007, in the consultation room with the psychiatrist Trish van der Krellen and the woman who was to become my key worker, Kate Whelan, I said, "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay and I want to come out as straight!" I was wrong about my father but the important thing I said was the bit about wanting to come out as straight. In the same way that when a gay man comes out as gay, he is saying, "I have always been gay and I want people to know it!" I was saying, "I have always been straight and I want people to know it!" I recall Kate sitting there smiling and immediately getting a vibe, perhaps a premonition, that she was going to destroy my life. Of course, my statement then was open to misinterpretation but I didn't realise it at the time, and in fact didn't realise this until many, many years later. Milos Yiannopolous has recently announced that he wants to "come out as straight" – if I could speak directly to Milos I would say, "You can't come out as straight. You've had too much anal sex with men to ever be able to describe yourself as straight." I have to assume that the people treating me decided I was like Milos. In the end, the reason why the people treating me decided I was gay had nothing to do with my body language, voice, clothing, or nocturnal walks. They decided I was gay because I had said I was straight.

This post is quite long. I hope it is in the main free from typographic errors and that it does not seem too digressive. It may be the last I need to write about my life. The next post will, perhaps, be about something entirely different. Au revoir, my friends.

Anatomy of a Delusion

It takes a lot of courage to talk about the experience of psychosis. There is a great deal of stigma associated with severe mental illness, because, even though research has shown that most people who experience psychosis are not dangerous, there is a public perception that psychotics can be unpredictable and threatening. I sometimes read articles in which people who have experienced psychosis are even cast as somehow subhuman. In tonight's post, however, despite the risk attending such disclosure, I wish to talk about the psychotic episode I experienced in 2007, fourteen years ago. Why? For three reasons. First, I think that people with open minds might find such an account interesting. Second, I am trying in this blog to build up a picture of my life and who I am and, although I have discussed this first episode before, I have not so far depicted in detail what I believed after I became a patient of the Mental Health System in around April of 2007 until the end of that year. Third, I believe that it is possible to recover from psychosis, that doing so involves talking about the delusions that have temporarily held one hostage and publicly disavowing them. The corrupt and mendacious psychiatrist I saw from 2007 until the beginning of 2012, Antony Fernando, once told me that delusions are "fixed, by definition". He told me this even though he didn't know what my principal delusion was. But the major delusions that possessed me in 2007 and reappeared intermittently in 2009 have never resurfaced in all the years since. The idea that delusions are "fixed, by definition", like the idea that "it is impossible to recover from schizophrenia, by definition", is a cruel insanity perpetrated on some human beings by other human beings who hold positions of power.

I often meet other patients and I have noticed a peculiar prejudice I have against them which I am sure others hold towards me. It is easy to assume that someone who has been given a diagnosis like 'schizophrenia' was always schizophrenic. This assumption comes from the widely held misconception that schizophrenia is a congenital disease that first manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood. However, I didn't experience psychosis until I was twenty-seven and had had a life before then – although the delusion I wish to discuss seized hold of me when I was twenty-seven, I had never even considered this paranoid conspiracy theory before then. I had studied for two years in Dunedin, living at Knox College, where I received an award for contributions to the College culture because of a play I had written, another I performed in, a film club I ran, and a chess match I won. I went on to get two degrees and had worked for years first at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and then for the TAB. I'd had two girlfriends, Danielle and Maya. (The status of my relationship with Maya was perhaps questionable and I shall come back to it in a moment.) I'd considered doing a PhD in English at an American University and had travelled for three months in Europe with the rather presumptuous ambition of learning the rudiments of French so that I could get a scholarship. I wasn't always 'schizophrenic'. This prejudice, that schizophrenics have always been schizophrenic, is another way society routinely dehumanises the 'mentally ill'.

I first started hearing voices in January 2009, at the age of twenty-nine, after I had been a patient of the Mental Health Service and on antipsychotics for over a year and a half. The reader may wonder: had you never heard voices before? Only once. In 2003 I recall going to the Parnell Rose Garden with Maya not long after we first started going out. We were sitting there together, her smiling happilly –– and I heard a little voice in my head that said, "You should break up with her." I listened to it, and told her that I wanted to break up with her and go out with her friend Sara instead. I recall sitting in the car driving around immediately afterwards with her sitting beside me weeping. For the next month I pursued Sara through text message without any reply. On my birthday, I went to the Big House, where Maya was living, and she gave me, as a present, a Magic Eight Ball. I was obsessed with Magic Eight Balls. I thought to myself, "This girl really knows me" and consequently decided to get back together with her. To this day, I don't know if the mistake I made was my listening to the voice that told me to break up with her or my deciding to get back together with her. I didn't finally break up properly with Maya until 2008 but, although we were having sex, she may have kept our relationship secret, told people and behaved as though we were not in a relationship. I was a closet heterosexual.

I have discussed the causes of my first psychotic episode in a number of posts: "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", "Theory of Mind and The Big House", "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" and "Schizophrenia and Rationality." If I were to sum up the causes of my first episode in a sentence, I would say that, as a result of working at bFM, I had decided that the station was full of closet homosexuals and that I couldn't tell anyone this publicly. If I were to add to this simple statement, I would say that, prior to forming this delusion, I had suspected that the other people working at the station thought I was gay when I'm not. The most important post of this list is the first and I wish now to correct an error I made in it. In that post, I said that I had felt an impulse to kiss a male flatmate, had gone for a walk during which I decided that everyone in the world was gay except me, and had considered drowning myself. This is not quite right. I found the impulse to kiss a man, an impulse I had never experienced before and which I was to re-experience, once, in 2009 and then again starting in 2013 profoundly distressing. During the walk what I was actually thinking about was bFM. I thought that either bFM had outed me as gay or that I had accidentally outed myself as gay simply by choosing to go work there. When I returned to the Big House, I remember sitting outside and talking to the enormous unseen audience I imagined was listening to me through listening devices installed in the House, telling them that the community I could belong to didn't exist. And then when my flatmates woke up, I recall telling one of them, Christy, "My father's gay but I'm straight!" During the next day, the feeling that I couldn't talk about homosexuality at all dropped away and I can remember telling people, in effect, in a somewhat panicky manner, that I thought Mikey Havoc was pursuing me romantically. That night my brother collected me from the Big House and brought me home to my mother's and shortly after, the next day I believe, my father drove me to the Taylor Centre.

It is at this point in the post that I wish to start talking about the two principal delusions that featured in my thinking that year: the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and the delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses. 

I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals while I was still at the Big House that year. My logic was simple.

P1. Closet homosexuals can recognise each other but only a select few heterosexuals can tell if someone is a closet homosexual.
P2. Like the freemasons, closet homosexuals want to give each other a helping hand up the social ladder.
C1. Therefore, closet homosexuals percolate to the top,
C2. Therefore, the world is ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals.

This delusion of course emerged from my experience working at bFM. I had decided that not only had the people at bFM thought I was gay, that they had employed me because they thought I was gay. I had been, unwittingly, a kind of double agent – a straight man pretending to be gay to get a job in the media. I didn't talk about this at all for very many years. I also, as I have said before, formed the delusion at the Big House that there were listening devices in the fire alarms.

When I first made contact with the Taylor Centre, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals had gone into abeyance (although I still thought, wrongly, that my father was gay). I thought that in the Mental Health Service, issues to do with sexuality would be openly and honestly discussed. But I was wrong. After a couple of weeks, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, the delusion that there were more homosexuals than heterosexuals in the world, returned, as did the feeling that I was under surveillance – I formed the delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses and that everything I said was being transmitted to third parties, perhaps the media. This paranoid delusion caused me to feel that if I outed anyone as gay or even simply used either the words 'gay' or 'straight' at all some kind of terrible repercussion would result. The reason I became more ill as a result of my initial treatment by the Mental Health System was two-fold. At my first appointment with Antony Fernando, I decided, at a glance, that he was a member of the homosexual conspiracy. Second, I sensed at that first appointment, I think rightly, that he had decided to diagnose me a latent homosexual. These stressors made my psychosis worse and it is a wonder, in retrospect, that I recovered from it at the end of the year.

In the gay community, there is a phenomenon known colloquially as 'bearding'. The online dictionary provides this definition:  "One who serves to divert suspicion or attention from another, especially a person of the opposite sex who accompanies a gay man or lesbian to give the impression of heterosexuality." Bearding features in the film Dating Amber, a film I saw several months ago with my mother. I decided that year that the world was full of fake couples, beards; I thought gay men would marry lesbians and have children, even though the married couple didn't love each other. I thought that this was unnatural. I believed people were born one way or the other and I believed moreover that gay men and women were happier after they had come out and formed romantic relationship with members of the same sex. But I also believed that a very large number of gay men and women never came out at all. Very soon after I left the Big House, I had dinner with my father and stepmother and blew up at them, particularly at my stepmother: although I didn't use the words 'gay' or 'straight' I used the word 'unnatural' to describe their marriage. (I have two half-sisters by the way.) I think, now, that a part of what fed into that first episode was my sense that my father's marriage to my stepmother was unhappy.

Believing as I did that the world was full of closet homosexuals, I decided that openly gay men and women were honest, brave, heroic. During that year, I hated closet homosexuals but I liked openly gay men and women.

I recall some weeks after I first became a patient telling my key worker a story about the singer Darcy Clay. I had attended a Blur concert with my first girlfriend Danielle for which Darcy Clay was the support act in 1997. He had sung a countrified version of the song Candle in the Wind. I mistakenly thought, and told my key worker, that, after this performance, he had gone back to his girlfriend's house and shot himself. (This is factually incorrect. Darcy Clay didn't commit suicide until the next year.) I thought, although I didn't explicitly say this to my key worker, that he had killed himself because he had realised that the upper echelons of the music industry, the band Blur itself, were full of closet homosexuals. As the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals took hold, it subsumed all of history and culture. I decided later in the year that the New Zealand historian Michael King, who had died in a car crash in 2004, had been assassinated by the homosexual conspiracy because he had threatened to expose it. I decided that the Green Party leader Rod Donald, who had died in 2005, had also been assassinated for the same reason. Perhaps most dramatically, after a very brief period of thinking that the Holocaust didn't happen (I thought that everything the media reported was made up), I decided that the Jews were all straight and that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals. I thought Israel was a paradise and that the bad press it received was a PR campaign designed to stop closet homosexuals moving there. I thought the Holocaust was evidence of a genocidal theme that ran through history: I thought heterosexuality was being systematically weeded out of the gene pool. Later, when I read that the Nazis had also tried to exterminate homosexuals, I decided that they had gone after openly gay men and women because they regarded them, in a sense, as class traitors.

Halfway through the year, my mother and I travelled down to the small city of Wanganui to visit my godmother and I want to spend a moment talking about this trip. On the way down, we were followed by a freight truck; this caused me to become panicky because I thought it might be an agent of the homosexual conspiracy and that it might run us off the road. Not long after we arrived, I decided that Wanganui was 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 the population. Like Israel, Wanganui was a heterosexual paradise; the bad press it sometimes received concerning gangs was a way of discouraging closet homosexuals from moving there. At this time, the mayor of Wanganui was Michael Laws, a right-wing conservative who sometimes argued in his role as a talkback radio host that there was a feral underclass who should all be sterilised; I decided that Laws was really a left-winger pretending to be a right-winger. I thought that my godmother and others that I met in Wanganui were only pretending to dislike him and secretly supported him. This rather strange delusion, that apparent left-wingers were secretly right-wing and that apparent right-wingers were secretly left-wing was, for some reason I don't fully understand, a large part of the delusional framework I built up that year.

An important word to be used in discussing psychosis is 'anosognosia'. Anosognosia is the condition of not knowing one is ill even though one is ill. I suffered from anosognosia at the beginning. I honestly believed that I had a cracked an enormous secret, that the world was full of closet homosexuals, and didn't realise that I was experiencing psychosis. There were a couple of rare occasions when I considered the possibility that I might be mentally unwell, but my delusions were preferable to the frightening prospect that I might have gone mad. I can remember going to Work and Income with my key worker, Kate Whelan, to apply for the Sickness Benefit; I felt that I had to pretend to be 'ill' (which I did very subtly) because I thought that this way I could conceal the fact that I had discovered the existence of a massive conspiracy governing the world. I thought that the treatment I was receiving from the Mental Health Service was the standard treatment given to those perspicacious enough to work out this terrible truth, that we had to pretend to be mad in order not to be silenced or destroyed by the homosexual elite. At other times, I thought that I had to pretend to be a closet homosexual (which again I did very subtly) because I thought that if I advertised my heterosexuality to the world something terrible would happen to me. I can remember, for instance, visiting the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui and walking around a replica of that famous Greek statue of two men wrestling, pretending to be attracted to it. The most ludicrous delusion I formed that year was that some heterosexuals would pretend to be visually impaired to hide the fact that they were perving at women. For instance, I thought that this was the case with James Joyce when he got older.

Although this blogpost is evidence that for a number of months in 2007 I had stepped outside reality, it is important for you to realise that I was never dangerous. The dominant emotion I experienced that year was fear; I never experienced any anger. I am not and never have been a violent person, (nor have I ever been a liar). Furthermore, the two principal delusions I experienced that year, the belief that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and the belief that there was a microphone in my glasses, weren't there continuously. Sometimes they ebbed and sometimes they returned. My delusions also developed, changed, over the course of the year, particularly, for instance, with respect to religion. When I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service, I thought religious people were all closet homosexuals. (This delusion is in fact quite common – I believe the clinical psychologist I saw in 2014 shared it.) As the year progressed, however, religious themes in my thinking became more prominent. I thought that we might be living in the End Times and that, like Jesus, I had to divide the world into the Saved and the Damned, straight people and closet homosexuals. I recall one night a whole avalanche of names rushed into my head, one very insistent name being Patrick Swayze. I decided that I wanted everyone in the world to be saved. Shortly after, I saw on the news that Swayze had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Towards the end of the year, I became a day patient at the respite facility Mind Matters, an experience I wrote about, badly, in the post "Mind Matters". During this period, every night I would walk up to the Presbyterian Church at the top of the road and sit for a while in the pews. I felt as though there was a war going on between Good and Evil with my soul at stake. This particular delusion, of a spiritual battle for the soul of the sufferer, is not uncommon in psychosis. In the book Experiencing Psychosis, a book I talked about in the post "An Interpretation of 'The Hounds of Heaven'", research is discussed showing precisely this, that a common feature of psychosis is the sense of a war between Good and Evil. I suspect, for instance, that John Nash felt this way.

The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals almost entirely went away in December 2007. The delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses didn't exactly go away – I thought rather that so long as I said nothing controversial, no one would be listening. The delusion that people were indeed listening to me through a microphone in my glasses returned at the beginning of 2009, featured for a short period and then mostly went away after I started hearing voices. In January 2009, I started to believe that I could communicate telepathically with people, beginning with George W. Bush; later in the year, I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend. The conversations I had with them and others is what I mean by the term 'hearing voices'. However, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals only featured very, very intermittently in 2009 and had gone away for good by the end of the year.

I have talked about all this before in the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009".

I'll finish this post by making two remarks. Immediately after I was put under a Compulsory Treatment Order at the beginning of 2014 (an Order I am still under today), I wrote a long essay describing my life and my treatment. In that essay, I covered much of the material I have discussed in this post, although I have gone into more detail in this post. Although I had it put into my psychiatrist's pigeon hole, I don't believe the Key Worker I had at the time, Josh Brasil, ever read it. The incompetent clinical psychologist I saw in 2014 told me that he had read it but, if he did, I can't understand why he treated me the way he did. I don't believe my idiot psychiatrist, Jennifer Murphy, the woman who first diagnosed me schizophrenic in 2013 and had me put under the act, ever read it. If she had, she wouldn't have ended up having to resign. My lawyer, Paul Gruar, definitely read this essay which is why he has always been on my side, although he is very lackadaisical, even fatalistic, in attempting to present my case to the Independent Reviews I have repeatedly requested. I have wondered, as I discussed in the post "A Pigeon, A Motorcade, and a Sure Suspicion", if Antony Fernando had been intercepting the blogposts I occasionally printed out, brought into the Taylor Centre and asked to have put into the psychiatrist's pigeon hole. This might be paranoia; it might be that the psychiatrists are so overwhelmed with work that they just don't have time to read the blogposts I have brought in. The second remark concerns paranoid conspiracy theories in general. It seems to me that much of the world is in the grip of a mass psychosis, a psychosis fuelled by QAnon and anti-vax rhetoric. There may be conspiracy thinking on the Left as well as the Right.  This is a topic for another post.

This post has kind of trailed off towards the end. I don't know whether I will need to talk about my life any more in this blog or if I will go back to talking about philosophy. If the reader is interested in some of the posts I have written that people seldom go back to, I recommend the posts "Identity Politics" and "Bruce Springsteen vs. Faith No More". Anyway, adios, my friends.

The Modal Ontological Argument

In the previous post, I discussed Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God and promised to discuss the modal ontological argument for the existence of the same, and I will soon. But before I begin the essay proper, I want to register a small concern, a small anxiety. Who reads this blog? What makes it worth reading? Sometimes I discuss my life, a very important topic to me, obviously, and I think very important generally because I am discussing a Mental Health Service that has failed not just me but seems to fail everyone. I am a paradigmatic case. I am also trying to prove that people diagnosed schizophrenic (in my case, wrongly) can be intelligent, articulate, and rational, human, in a culture which continually 'others' people who have had the bad luck to be diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. I also write about philosophy and narratives, about nature vs. nurture, about fiction and reality, I hope in a way that is accessible even to laypeople with little academic experience. I tend to assume that my readers are at least a little familiar with thinkers like Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and Bill Maher, a not unreasonable assumption given the global profile these public intellectuals and commentators have. I feel that the insights I bring to the table are worth sharing but I do not know if they are reaching people who are versed in these disciplines themselves and know an innovative idea when they chance across it. I would really like it if CosmicSkeptic himself, Alex O'Conner, were to read this post and the previous one but I am forced to concede that this is most unlikely. I suspect, and secretly hope, that the figures I receive concerning the number of hits this blog collects are underestimates, but I cannot know this for sure. If people in the world enjoy this blog, give me a sign, and I will continue to write about the things that interest me.

And now, without further ado, onto the modal ontological argument, one of several arguments for the existence of God. This post may be quite long but I hope it will be interesting. 

The very simplest form of the modal ontological argument, as it is deployed by religious people, runs as follows:

P1. God either necessarily exists or necessarily does not exist.
P2. God possibly exists.
C1. Therefore, God necessarily exists.
C2. Therefore, God actually exists.

This argument can be rephrased in the following way, if we accept the 'possible worlds' formulation of modal logic:

P1. God either exists in every possible world or doesn't exist in any possible world.

P2. God exists in at least one possible world.

C1. Therefore God exists in every possible world.

C2. Therefore God exists in the actual world.

The problem with this argument is that we can deploy the exact same structure and reach the exact opposite conclusion. The atheist can counter it in the following way:

P1. God either necessarily exists or necessarily does not exist.

P2. God possibly does not exist.

C1. Therefore, God necessarily does not exist.

C2. Therefore, God does not actually exist.

Or to put it in the language of possible worlds:

P1. God either exists in every possible world or doesn't exist in any possible world.

P2. God doesn't exist in at least one possible world.

C1. Therefore, God doesn't exist in all possible worlds.

C2. Therefore God doesn't exist in the actual world.

Interestingly, many atheists are prepared to accept the first premise in the argument, the premise that God's existence or non-existence is necessary (although there are some people, such as Tom Senor, who have argued that God could be a 'brute contingent fact', that God could be the causeless creator and lord of some possible worlds and not others). The difference between the two opposed positions is in the second premise. The Christian says, "Of course, God could be possible!" while the atheist says "Of course, we could have a world without God!" To both parties, it just seems obvious. I would like to suggest that perhaps there could be a problem with modal logic itself that leads to this seemingly insurmountable impasse.

The modern study of modal logic began in 1912 with the publication of a number of articles by C.I. Lewis and major developments occurred in the mid-twentieth century as the result of work by David Lewis and Saul Kripke; although they had two somewhat different perspectives on it, both Lewis and Kripke subscribed to and developed the idea of 'possible worlds'. The argument for possible worlds is simple. To quote Wikipedia:

"1) Hillary Clinton could have won the 2016 US election.
(2) So there are other ways how things could have been.
(3) Possible worlds are ways how things could have been.
(4) So there are other possible worlds."

David Lewis coined the term 'modal realism'  to describe his own metaphysical system that seeks to accomodate the idea of 'possible worlds'. In Lewis's view, all possible worlds are just as real as the actual world, although they are spatiotemporally isolated from each other and cannot interact. To say something is possibly the case is to say it is definitely the case in at least one possible world. The only difference between the actual world and all the other possible worlds is indexical – meaning that the actual world is 'our' world in the same sense that I can say I'm here in my apartment in Eden Terrace. (Importantly Kripke, by contrast, argued that modal logic is simply a useful way of approaching the idea of possibility, that it does not commit us to the claim that other possible worlds exist.)

Modal realism is enticing because it seems such a promising way to deal with some difficult ideas in logic and philosophy generally – but it runs into serious trouble if we consider what it means for something to be identical to itself. Consider the proposition, "It is possible (as of 6 October 2021) that Donald Trump is still President of the United States". The ordinary person on the street would say that this is false but I believe that both Lewis and Kripke are obliged to say that it is true, that there is a possible universe in which Trump is still President. The obstacle modal logicians must try to hurdle is Leibniz's law, a corollary of which is that if two things have mutually exclusive properties then they cannot be the same thing. In the possible world, call it w, in which Trump is still President, he has the property 'President of the United States' while in our own world, the actual world, he has the property 'no longer President of the United States'. This suggests that the Trump in w is a different entity to the Trump in the actual world, our world. Our Trump is not the same being as the Trump in w. Lewis embraces this conclusion by advancing his 'counterpart theory': in this theory, the Trump in w is a counterpart to the Trump in the actual world but not the same person. We might say, "There is a possible world in which some person known by the name Donald Trump in that world is President of the US." However, if we accept counterpart theory, we are compelled to parse the sentence  "Trump might have won the 2020 Presidential Election" as saying "In our actual world, Trump lost the 2020 election but there is a possible world, w, in which a counterpart of Trump won the election." This runs counter to our common sense understanding of the unanalysed sentence that it concerns one individual, not two. Lewis and Kripke defend modal logic by saying it aligns with the ordinary way ordinary people use language but I contend that it doesn't, and I shall argue for a different way of understanding modal logic that I contend does a better job conforming with the way ordinary people use the words "necessary" and "possible".

Let us consider the word "necessary". Immanuel Kant argued that all necessary truths are knowable a priori but for some time now, as I understand it, this contention has been chipped away at. Kripke himself has shown that identity statements, such as water being H2O, can be necessary truths known a posteriori. I want to go much further. I want to argue, now, that there is only one world, the actual world, and that everything that occurs in it occurs necessarily. The past is unalterable and the present proceeds from the past deterministically as does the future. A statement like "Donald Trump might have won the 2020 election" implies (as Lewis and Kripke both claim) that the world could be some other way but, if one was gifted with God-like omniscience, it would be evident to one that there is no other way the world could be – unless we suppose some kind of flexibility at the very beginning of time (as I discussed in the post "The Weak Anthropic Principle"). In thinking this I am not alone. Sam Harris has several times suggested in his podcast that there might be no possibility, only necessity. The idea that everything is necessary is founded on the idea that everything is deterministic; modal logic, as Lewis and Kripke present it, seems to suggest that the universe is not deterministic. But where does this idea, the idea that the universe is probabilistic, come from? It seems that the idea that there are other ways the universe could be is buttressed by two arguments, the argument from free will and the argument from quantum uncertainty; if people have free will, it seems there are other ways the world could be as the result of the free choices that people make, and if quantum uncertainty is understood as it often is, the world is constantly spawning alternate universes. I shall not present an argument for the non-existence of free will here but rather direct the reader to Harris's book Free Will and to the rather brilliant Youtube clip Compatibilism Debunked by CosmicSkeptic. Nor will I attempt to refute the idea of quantum uncertainty here but instead refer the reader to my own posts "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat" and "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2". In these posts, I argued that it is conceivable that the universe could be deterministic if we posit a non-local hidden variable theory.  I suspect that it might be a bridge too far to seek a proof that the universe is deterministic; in an analogous way to faith in God, it requires a leap of faith to believe everything that happens happens necessarily. Nevertheless this is the contention I wish to run with now.

If everything that happens happens necessarily, why do we have words like "possible" or verb forms like "might have"? I believe that we use terms like these in situations where we lack all the relevant information. If a friend tells me to take an umbrella because "it is possible it might rain", my friend is saying, in effect, it will definitely rain or not rain but that she does not know which. She does not have perfect knowledge of all the meteorological data that would be required to make a fully accurate prediction. The reason the sentence "It is possible that Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo" strikes the ordinary person on the street as false is that the person, assuming he or she has the rudiments of an education, most likely accepts the fact that Napoleon lost as a given. Now consider the statement, "It is possible that Covid-19 originated in a virology lab in Wuhan." Lewis and Kripke would propose that this sentence should be parsed as saying, "There is at least one possible world in which Covid-19 leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan". But this misrepresents what people who utter this sentence mean by it. People mean that, in this world, the actual world, Covid 19 either definitely leaked or didn't leak but that they can't be sure if it did or not. The proposition "p is possible" really means "I don't know for sure if p is true or not". There are many things in the world about which we cannot be confident and this is where modal logic (in its revised form) comes in useful. There may even be limits on what we can know – this was the conclusion I reached in the posts about Schrodinger's cat. It may be that the Schrodinger equation and Dirac equation, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, prescribe the furthest boundaries of what human consciousnesses can ascertain about physical reality. Probabilist statements, in the final analysis, indicate ignorance rather than provide insight into alternate realities. (It is possible that the type of modal logic I am proposing here has the name 'epistemic modal logic' but, as of writing this, I cannot be certain.)

I have talked about modal logic before in the posts "Modal Logic", "Modal Logic Part 2" and "Modal Logic Part 3". I wish, now, to confess an error that I made in these posts. I thought that the statement "It is possibly the case that p" is equivalent to the statement "It is possibly the case the not-p" and this was the foundation of the arguments I made in those three posts. I was wrong – at least if we accept the modal logic system proposed by Lewis and Kripke. The expression "It is possibly the case that p" means, if we accept the forms of modal logic they advance, "There is at least one possible world in which p is true". That is, the proposition "It is possibly the case that p" is true even if p is true in all possible worlds. To say something, p, is possible is to say that the negation of it is also possible – or that the negation is impossible, that p is necessarily true, that p is true in all possible worlds. I didn't consider the 'or' when I wrote those posts. I now know a little more about modal logic (although I am far from being an expert). However, if we accept the metaphysical picture I have advanced in the preceding paragraphs, the Judd-Harris picture (to coin a term), we do have to reject the possible world semantics put forward by Lewis and Kripke and others before them. New logical axioms are required. The proposition "It is possible that p" does entail "It is possible that not-p" and the proposition "It is necessary that p" no longer implies "It is possible that p". The system I am proposing is pretty much the same as the system I proposed in "Modal Logic Part 3" – even though, when I wrote that post, I had a faulty understanding the work done by Lewis and Kripe.

I want now to raise another curious problem in modal logic which has some bearing on what I have been discussing. Consider the proposition: "It is possible that Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo." As I said above, most educated people would regard this proposition as false. Yet if I say, "It is possible that Napoleon might have won the battle of Waterloo," most people would regard this as true even though the two propositions seem to be equivalent. The reason for the difference is that people generally accept a probabilistic view of reality, the idea that there are different ways the world can be. Lewis and Kripke defend their modal logic systems by saying that it aligns with the ordinary way ordinary people use language. And I am departing from this principle of ordinary language use when I say that everything is deterministic, necessary. However, if we are to make advances in knowledge, we must sometimes recognise that the assumptions we inherit may be wrong, as Einstein and de Broglie, to pick two random examples, did, and as Alfred Wegener did when he proposed the idea of continental drift. And the popularity of Sam Harris shows that people are willing to countenance the idea that there is "no possibility, only necessity."

And now finally we can return to the version of the ontological argument that I presented at the beginning of the essay. The first premise, "God either necessarily exists or necessarily doesn't exist" is, according to the Judd-Harris modal logic system, trivially true because all things either necessarily exist or don't exist. The second premise, "It is possible that God exists" can be translated as "I do not know if God exists or not." And nothing follows from these two premises – certainly not the claim that God exists or even the claim that He doesn't.

The reader may think that the simple ontological argument I have presented is a straw man, and may wonder if there are stronger versions of the ontological argument for the existence of God. There is at least one. Randomly browsing the Internet recently, I came across a Masters thesis in Philosophy by one Andrew Kirschner, a student who had previous degrees in Biblical Studies and Christian Apologetics. In the thesis Kirshner presents his own ontological argument for the existence of God in simple form and then devotes the rest of the thesis to detailing and explicating the steps in his main argument. The thesis is sometimes a little clumsily written but I nevertheless recommend it to readers. His argument, in a nutshell, runs as follows (and this is a quote):

"P1 For every type of entity, instances of that type of entity either actually exist, merely possibly
 exist, or necessarily do not exist.
P2 If an entity can be conceived, then that entity either actually exists, or merely possibly exists.
P3 God can be conceived.
C1 Therefore, God either actually exists, or merely possibly exists.
P4 Something is necessary if and only if that entity is totally non-contingent, or if it is
inconceivable.
P5 If something is necessary, then that entity either necessarily actually exists (if it is totally non-
contingent), or is impossible and thus necessarily cannot exist (if it is inconceivable).
P6 God is totally non-contingent.
C2 Therefore, God is necessary.
C3 Therefore, God cannot merely possibly exist.

C4 Therefore, God necessarily actually exists.
C5 Therefore, God actually exists."

Kirschner's ontological argument, I believe, must be wrong – and in the thesis he provides the tools required to dismantle it. The argument depends on the idea that God is conceivable, and so everything rests on what 'conceivable' means. Kirschner discusses two types of conceivability, prima facie conceivability and deep conceivability. (In discussing these two types of conceivability, I will be paraphrasing Kirschner somewhat loosely.) Prima facie conceivability is the capacity to sort-of imagine things, even impossible things. If we try to imagine a square circle we run into difficulties (I imagine a shape wavering between a circle and a square) but we can conceive the notion of a 'square circle' sufficiently enough to make sense of the proposition "There is no such thing as a square circle". Other objects are more conceivable. Consider, for instance, carnivorous rabbits. Such creatures are conceivable enough that in 1972 a film titled Night of the Lepus was made featuring giant, mutant killer bunnies (a very stupid film). However, as has been pointed out by George Seddon, carnivorous rabbits are impossible: they lack the dentition and digestive systems, among other essential adaptations, that would enable them to eat other animals. Either the creatures in question are not carnivores or not rabbits. But we can nevertheless it seems imagine carnivorous rabbits, if only superficially. It is not just objects that are prima facie conceivable, so to are states of affairs. We can conceive what Europe would be like if Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo even though, as I suggested earlier, it was impossible for the battle of Waterloo to end any other way. The novel Fatherland by Robert Harris, set in 1964, explores the counterfactual scenario that Nazi Germany won the Second World War. If one is capable of conceiving an impossible object or state of affairs, Premise 2 in Kirschner's argument must be false – so Kirschner introduces the idea of deep conceivability to counter this objection. The term 'deep conceivability', as contrasting with prima facie conceivability, applies (I think in a possibly circular fashion) to those things that either actually or possibly exist. Kirschner's argument thus hinges on whether Premise 3, "God can be conceived," is concerned with prima facie conceivability or deep conceivability. Kirschner asserts, without much justification, that God is deeply conceivable, almost as though it is self-evident. This is the central pivot of his argument.

Kirschner's argument must be wrong. But how? If we accept what I have labeled, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, 'Judd-Harris modal logic', we can consider a different strategy in approaching Kirschner's argument than those permitted by more traditional modal logic systems, a strategy that might enable us to locate and articulate the error in it. We can do so in the following way. If all propositions about the world are either necessarily true or necessarily false, as I contended earlier, then all our conceptions that run counter to the world as it is must be prima facie because they entail impossibilities. Of course, prima facie conceptions can also be true (say by serendipitous coincidence) but the point I am making here is that prima facie conceptions, impressions, can be false as well as true. All deep conceptions, by contrast, must reliably reflect the actual world, must be true. This line of thought, so far, does little to refute Kirschner's argument. In fact, it simplifies it because it implies directly that if we can form a deep conception of something, it must actually exist (and Kirshner confidently maintains, like Anselm and Descartes before him, that he can deeply conceive of God). However, I would like to propose that all our conceptions are prima facie. Even a person's conception of his own brother must be prima facie, because even if it does not contain logical incompatibilities, it is incomplete. To deeply conceive of something requires God-like omniscience, which no-one has. Thus any conception of God or even of members of one's own family must also be prima facie. And if all conceptions are prima facie conceptions, Premise 2 must be wrong.

Although by refuting Premise 2, I have refuted Kirschner's whole argument, I would like to spend a moment talking about the second half of it. Consider Premise 6, "God is totally non-contingent." This seems to be assigning a property to God and, if so, it runs foul of the objection CosmicSkeptic levelled against the ontological argument in his Youtube video "I Think, Therefore God Exists. The Ontological Argument." It assumes the existence of God, the conclusion of the argument, in one of its premises. If, however, Kirschner is suggesting that non-contingency is a part of the idea of God, the critique that I proffered myself in the previous post serves to refute him. One can think that something exists (or, in Kirschner's case, that something is non-contingent) – and be wrong. (Of course, if we accept Judd-Harris modal logic, it is true that God is "non-contingent" but this is a trivial truth because everything is non-contingent, in the sense of being either necessary existent or necessarily non-existent.) When I first stumbled on Kirschner's thesis, I thought it might be something profound but now suspect that Premises 4 and 5 might be gibberish. Premises 4,5 and 6 could be rewritten in much simpler language as, "God either necessarily exists or necessarily does not exist" and "If something necessarily exists, it actually exists." 

The modal ontological argument raises other issues. Suppose, for a moment, that it is sound. If God does necessarily exist in every world, is He the same God or is there a different God for every possible world? If this world is the best of all possible worlds, as Leibniz proposed, are there inferior, even hellish, possible worlds also ruled over by perfectly benevolent, omnipotent beings? Such questions demonstrate the absurdity of the modal ontological argument for the existence of God. I should note in passing that though the ontological argument is unsound, I have not suggested in either this post or the previous one that it is impossible to imagine God or believe that God exists. I remain an agnostic. I just don't believe that it is tenable to prove God exists in this way.

In this post I have made some bold claims. I have suggested that probabilistic propositions all originate from ignorance and I have argued that all our conceptions are superficial, prima facie. The theory I am proposing could be termed 'the logic of fallibility', an attempt to found epistemology on a realistic understanding of how people actually make sense of the world, the understanding that we can make errors in our thinking and in our conceptions.  In psychology today, there is a lot of interest in counterfactual reasoning; I think the role counterfactual speculation plays in ordinary day-to-day life is somewhat overstated but nevertheless the idea of counterfactual reasoning is useful in describing how people operate in situations where they don't possess all of the relevant information. Sometimes we can be fairly confident of something but often we can't. I have endeavoured in this essay to present a picture of how real people function in the real world. And 'modal realism', as developed by David Lewis, is a red herring if we wish to pursue this enterprise. 

I hope that you have found this essay thought provoking and, as I said in the introductory paragraph, if you read it and liked it, give me a sign.

The Ontological Argument: Why CosmicSkeptic and The Psuedo-Intellectual are Wrong

I have written about the ontological argument for the existence of God before in this blog but recently my interest in this topic has been rekindled by some clips I have seen by some bright young philosophy students on Youtube. I'm thinking here about CosmicSkeptic, Maximally Great Philosophy, and The Pseudo–Intellectual. All discuss Anselm's ontological argument and two of the three find the ontological argument unconvincing and set out their reasons why. I do not believe that the ontological argument, specifically Anselm's version of it (the version I intend to discuss) is convincing myself, but nor do I think that the arguments put forward against it by CosmicSkeptic and The Pseudo-Intellectual are the right arguments to refute it. All of these young philosophers miss the obvious error Anselm makes. I confess, by the way, that the title of this post is click-bait – I hope that followers of CosmicSkeptic and the other two Youtubers might feel enticed to peruse this post, and I would love it if Alex O'Conner himself were to stumble upon it while searching the Internet for mentions of his name (although I think this is most unlikely). In this post, I will quote Anselm's argument and discuss the counterarguments proposed by CosmicSkeptic and The Pseudo-Intellectual before presenting my own argument for why Anselm's supposed proof is incorrect. I will not discuss the clip by Maximally Great Philosophy much because it seems to me that he is more interested in criticising CosmicSkeptic's argument than producing his own critique of the cosmological argument.

I'll start by cutting and pasting an accurate summation of Anselm's argument, an argument he first presented in the eleventh century, from Wikipedia.

"1. It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).

"2. God exists as an idea in the mind.

"3. A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.

"4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).

"5. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)

"6. Therefore, God exists."

The first issue raised by Anselm's argument is the idea of maximal greatness. In Descartes's formulation of the ontological argument, he used the term perfections rather than maximal greatness, and the Youtube clip about the ontological argument that CosmicSkeptic criticises also uses the idea of perfections. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, all perfect traits. CosmicSkeptic claims that these traits are logically incoherent. For instance, whether or not God can create a stone so heavy He cannot lift it, there must be a limit on His power, either way. Also, if God knows the future, there must be restrictions on what He can do in that it must be impossibe for Him to act in ways He has not foreseen. Does God Himself have free will? (I know that this seems a peculiar question to ask but such questions inevitably arise when we try to describe the qualities a divine creator must have.) Maximally Great Philosophy points out that Anselm's argument does not depend on God being perfect, that it suffices for God 'simply' to be greater than anything else that can be imagined. God, perhaps, could have the power to do anything except that which is logically impossible. If this is so, the criticisms that CosmicSkeptic levels at the ontological argument in the first part of his video are no longer relevant to Anselm's argument. 

Because it may interest readers, I would like to put forward a small argument of my own devising in a similar vein to the ones CosmicSkeptic proposes. If the ontological argument can be used to prove the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good being, it can also be used to prove the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly evil being. This raises the prospect of two omnipotent beings with exactly opposed agendas acting on the world, another logical incoherence. However such arguments, arguments that attempt to show that the concept of a perfectly powerful, knowing and benevolent God results in logical paradoxes, do not seem to me to get to the heart of Anselm's ostensible proof and the reason that it is wrong. It is possible to leave the idea of maximal greatness vague except as it relates to existence and still find fault with Anselm's argument. It is at this point in the essay that I wish to turn to CosmicSkeptic's key argument that he pitches towards the end of his video.

CosmicSkeptic summarises the ontological argument in the following way:

P1. God has all perfections.
P2. Necessary existence is a perfection.
P3. If God has necessary existence, he exists.
C: Therefore God exists.

CosmicSkeptic points out an apparent problem with this argument – it seems to assume God exists in the first place. Alex suggests we amend the first premise so that it becomes:

P1. If God exists, God has all perfections.

If we do this, Alex offers up the following as a fair translation of the argument into simpler language:

P1. If God exists, he exists.
P2: If God exists, he exists.
C: Therefore God exists.

Alex's argument seems, at first, a damning refutation of the ontological argument. Either the argument assumes the existence of God in its first premise, the proposition it is trying to prove, or, if we amend it to make the first premise more palatable, it is asserting a trivial analytic truth that does not entail the conclusion.  But there are serious problems with Alex's critique. First, and most evidently, CosmicSkeptic's version is far removed from Anselm's original argument – there is no mention of the mind or imagination in it at all. A second problem, as is pointed out by both Maximally Great Philosophy and The Pseudo-Intellectual, is that the first premise, "God has all perfections," rightly concerns a concept rather than an entity existing in reality. And this concept, they argue, certainly does exist. This is why it is called the ontological argument – because it attempts to move from the concept of God, a concept it seems many people can understand and imagine, to its necessary instantiation. The first premise should be "The concept of God has all perfections." If this change is made, the original version of the argument Alex presents does seem (and the word 'seem' is operative here) to be saying something novel, something non-tautological and nontrivial. 

I could spend more time discussing CosmicSkeptic's version of the ontological argument but because my primary focus is on Anselm's original argument I shall instead move to the criticism proffered by The Pseudo-Intellectual, a criticism that appears to apply both to Anselm's original 'proof' and to CosmicSkeptic's reformulation. Ollie Norton concludes, after discussing Kant's case against the ontological argument and Frege's idea that existence is a second-order predicate, that existence is not a "defining predicate", that you cannot use existence (or non-existence) as a defining characteristic of a concept. This is why, in Ollie's opinion, Anselm's argument is wrong. I am not as familiar with Frege's work as I should be but it seems to me, uninformed as I am, that perhaps Ollie should have chosen the term "property" rather than "predicate". I wish to argue, in opposition to Ollie, that "existence" and "non-existence" (say "fictionality") can indeed be defining characteristics. Although Frege and later Russell thought it was false or meaningless to talk about non-existent things, there is a tradition, going back at least as far Alexius Meinong, of proposing that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. Consider the word "fairy". In the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary definition for this word is "a small imaginary being of human form that has magical powers, especially a female one". Simply put, my dictionary includes the fact that fairies exist only in the mind and not in reality as part of the word's definition. If I say, "Fairies don't exist in the real world," I am stating an analytic truth, something which is true by virtue of the meaning of the word "fairy". If my friend tells me, "I saw a fairy at the bottom of my garden!" I can either dismiss this apparent observation as analytically false or redefine the term "fairy" in my mind by deleting the term "imaginary" from my mental definition. Of course, the dictionary does not always spell out explicitly that fictional beings are fictional – in the case of the word "leprechaun", for instance, it does so indirectly by prefacing the definition with the clause "(in Irish folklore)". Nor does the dictionary spell out that existent objects are real because this is the default assumption about every word in the dictionary. If something is generally considered to be unreal or fictional, the dictionary does however usually at least indirectly imply this. (Meinongianism, by the way, is a theoretical position that is very important to my thinking and if the reader is interested, you can find out more about it in the posts "Analytic a Posteriori truths" and "Fictional Objects".)

So the two critiques by CosmicSkeptic and The Pseudo-Intellectual both fail. Alex's attempted refutation fails because he does not directly address Anselm's original argument and because he does not recognise that the whole point of the ontological argument is that it goes from concept to reality. Ollie's attempted refutation fails because (as I have argued elsewhere) existence is indeed a property that objects can either have or not have. Yet Anselm's ontological argument is obviously wrong – most people, even many Christians (such as, back in the day, Saint Augustine) sense that it must be wrong when they first encounter it but have difficulty expressing exactly why. What I wish to do now is lay out my own attempted refutation, a refutation that I of course believe is the correct one.

Let us go back to Anselm's actual argument, the argument that I copied from Wikipedia. It is possible to quibble with the first three premises or steps but I shall not do so here. Rather let us accept them as true, if only provisionally. The major error occurs, I believe, in the fourth. I shall quote this step again.

"4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist)."

This sentence begins with the word "Thus" which implies that this step follows logically from the previous ones. However, this is not the case. In fact, this statement is introducing new premises to the argument. It is possible to break down this fourth step into two sub-premises: 

4a. It is possible to imagine a being, call it God, which is maximally great in all respects except that He does not exist.

4b. It is possible to imagine a being, call it God+, which is maximally great in all respects including the respect that He exists.

Step 5 is "But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)" I would, for clarity, like to rephrase this step in the following way: "If God+ exists in the mind, we are forced to redraw our mental picture of God by affirming that He has the property of existence, because otherwise God+ would be greater." (I am aware that I am subtly revising Anselm's argument but certainly not to the extent that CosmicSkeptic does in his video.) If we accept all these steps supposedly the conclusion "Therefore God exists" follows logically. But does it?

First, we should note that 4a and 4b seem plausible. I can imagine lots of things that I know do not exist. I can, for instance, imagine fairies, even though I know that they do not exist, or leprechauns, even though I know that they do not exist. I can imagine Frodo Baggins even though I know he is a fictional character in a series of books by JRR Tolkien. I can also imagine real things. I can imagine Mark Zuckerberg while also knowing that he is a real person in the world. I can imagine Boris Johnson while also affirming the possibility that I could go to London and shake his hand. However, it is possible to believe that something or someone exists – and be wrong. This is the error at the heart of Anselm's argument. There are lots of people who believe Bigfoot exists even though the vast majority of people know that Bigfoot is apocryphal, legendary. My friend who saw a fairy at the bottom of the garden might start believing that fairies are real even though it was probably an hallucination. I can entertain in my mind the possibility that Bigfoot and fairies are real, can make existence a defining predicate of these concepts, but be mistaken. Therefore the concepts of God and God+ say nothing about the real world.

This reasoning can be illustrated in the following way. I would like to offer now a watered down version of Anselm's argument, an argument that I call Anselm's Ontological Argument Lite. It runs as follows:

1. I can imagine an object, x, which is maximally great in the respect that (in my imagination) it exists in the real world.

2. If it did not exist in the real world, the imagined concept would lack this particular maximal greatness.

3. Therefore x exists in the real world.

Obviously this argument is completely bogus. It confuses the existence of a concept with the existence of a real object, a referent; it says that if something exists in the imagination, with the predicate of existence, it must also exist in reality. Step 1 is legitimate but step 2 is not. Anselm's Ontological Argument Lite can be summed up in one sentence: "If I can imagine that x exists in the real world, x exists in the real world". 

What is surprising, and requires explanation, is why this simple error at the heart of Anselm's argument went unobserved by the three bright young philosophy students who felt moved to opine about it on Youtube and moved me to write this post. I believe that their inability to see this simple mistake results from an error in the philosophical tradition that might go back as far as Plato, that was codified when Kant proposed that existence isn't a predicate, and is at the heart of analytic philosophy as it was pioneered by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Predicate calculus is a system of greatly seductive beauty but it might be misleading in that it might not truly capture the way people actually think or make sense of the world. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins tells a story about Russell, reporting that, although a lifelong agnostic, Russell briefly believed that the ontological argument was valid and found this sudden revelation momentarily thrilling. It might be controversial for me to suggest this but the fact that Russell could entertain the idea that the ontological argument is valid, if only briefly, might point to a flaw in his reasoning generally, a flaw that potentially lies at the heart of modern anglophone philosophy. The reason these philosophy students missed this error might be because they are steeped in analytic philosophy. The argument proposed by CosmicSkeptic is reminiscent of Russell's theorising about definite descriptions, and The Pseudo-Intellectual explicitly cites Frege. The ontological argument might be one way of prying apart the faulty assumptions of analytic philosophy. In the next post, I intend to discuss the modal ontological argument for God, show why it is wrong, and in this way pry apart the faulty assumptions of modal logic.

I'll finish this post by endorsing the three Youtubers I have discussed in this blog. If the reader wants to watch the clips I have discussed, you can find them on Youtube. The CosmicSkeptic video is titled 'I Think, Therefore God Exists' | The Ontological Argument (AFG #5) and was first uploaded on June 1 2017. The Maximally Great Philosophy video is titled Why COSMICSKEPTIC is WRONG about the ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT and was first uploaded August 17 2020 . The video by The Pseudo-Intellectual is titled CosmicSkeptic Rebuked; The Ontological Argument [A LEVEL RS SUITABLE] and was uploaded August 9 2021. All of these videos are well worth watching.

[Note: I do not often go back to posts and add to them after they are published but I was thinking about the argument I proposed last night in bed and realised that I had made a mistake. In the above essay, I say that it is possible to accept the first three steps in Anselm's argument and that the problem occurs in the fourth. This is incorrect. It is possible to accept all of the first five steps and assert that the sixth step, the conclusion, does not follow from them. This might seem a damning alteration but, in fact, it does not really affect the argument at all. I include this note for the sake of thoroughness.]