Concerning the Big Bang, Nature vs. Nurture, and Sex Differences

Recently on his show, Bill Maher discussed the Big Bang Theory with Fran Lebowitz; it was apparent to me watching that it is an idea he is uncomfortable with. According to Maher's distillation of it, all the stars, all the galaxies, all the matter in the universe, once existed in a superdense space "smaller than a marble" and then exploded almost fourteen billion years ago. Maher's discomfort with the Big Bang Theory, a picture of the universe accepted by almost everyone in the physics community, was signalled by his choice of the word "theory" for an idea that most everyone educated believes and by his comment that people smarter than him believe in it and so he chooses to accept their belief as correct, even though (it is implied) he finds the idea difficult to understand. I believe Maher's description of the Big Bang to be misleading but, because I shared his misconception about it myself until relatively recently, I think my new understanding of the Big Bang worth communicating to my audience, small as it is. In this post I wish to talk about the Big Bang, and then about nature vs. nurture, and then about the supposed differences between male and female brains. If another topic occurs to me worth discussing, I will discuss that as well.

A while ago I wrote a post called "Concerning the Universe" in which I talked about whether the universe is infinite in size or not, and some implications  that follow if it is indeed infinite, in particular the idea that if the universe is infinite, that there must be an infinite number of Earths exactly like this one and a larger infinity of Earths only slightly different from this one. This seems like an absurd consequence of cosmology and probability but it follows logically from a small set of premises. The consensus among physicists is hard to pin down but, despite arguments such as the one I made, I think many physicists believe the universe to be infinite. These same physicists believe in the Big Bang Theory. Immediately however a contradiction or paradox arises. If the universe was once point-like, "smaller than a marble", and is now infinite, at some point in time it went from being finite in size to being infinite in size. How can we conceptualise such a transition? I would contend that we cannot conceptualise such a change because it is impossible. If the universe is infinite in size now, it must always have been infinite in size. The contrary statement is also valid. If the universe was finite once, it must still be finite now. Admittedly, the second possibility seems more plausible than the first but it is the first I wish to discuss in this post.

If the universe was infinite in size at the beginning of time, how can we make sense of the notion that it was once extraordinarily dense? How can we parse the idea that it is 'expanding'? To answer these questions, we need some understanding of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. I don't pretend to fully or even partially comprehend General Relativity but I know enough to say that this theory supposes that space itself is expanding. Imagine that, at the moment the Big Bang occurred, we picked out two points in space one meter apart. These two points would today be billions of light years away from each other, not so much because objects located at these points have travelled to their current positions but because the space between them has expanded. We can visualise it this way. Suppose space is an infinitely large sheet of rubber and that machines are located at one meter intervals from each other all designed to pull and stretch the rubber. These machines can distend the fabric of the universe and, as the mathematical thought experiment known as "Hilbert's hotel" demonstrates, there is always room for a machine to move away from its neighbouring machines. Infinity can, in a sense, get bigger. This resolution of the paradox occurred to me sometime after I had written the post "Concerning the Universe", thanks partly to Youtube clips about General Relativity, and I feel dopey that I hadn't worked it out until then. The public itself is confused about this issue. Some of the blame for this state of affairs can be attributed to science communicators like Neil Degrasse Tyson for failing to make it clear that, if the universe is infinitely large now, it must have been infinitely large when the Big Bang occurred. Their failure is why Maher made his mistake. Serious physicists understand better however. The theme to the sitcom The Big Bang Theory begins: "The whole universe was in a hot dense state". There is nothing in the song to suggest that the universe was small, let alone "smaller than a marble".

It sometimes seems to me that the general public and even scientifically minded intellectuals can miss the forest for the trees. I want now to turn to the debate between those who favour nature and those who favour nurture as the principal explanations of human and animal behaviour. I am a big fan of the television show Baby Chimp Rescue, a show that expresses profound truths relevant to the nature/nurture debate in a way that is unobtrusive, surreptitious, without fanfare. This show concerns a group of chimpanzee infants, originally victims of the pet trade in Liberia, who are cared for by some human conservationists who hope to return them to the jungle. A running thread in the show is that the baby chimps must be taught the skills they need to survive in the wild. In a recent episode, an anecdote is told about another group of captive chimpanzees who were returned to the rainforest. To the surprise of their caregivers, they kept falling out of the trees – they had never learnt how to climb trees or to brachiate. Baby chimps must be taught, or must teach themselves, to climb. Similarly, the show portrays how the baby chimps must be taught to be afraid of snakes: a short sequence shows a young chimp, who had failed to learn his lesson from the tutelage of his human minders, playing with the artificial snake he is supposed to be scared of. The show's lesson (one of its lessons) is that chimpanzee behaviours such as nut-cracking, nest-building, fear of snakes, and even brachiation are learned behaviours rather than innate instincts. This runs counter to the common, received wisdom that even if humans often learn behaviours (such as how to drive cars), the behaviours of animals are instinctual, genetic. In particular, it is often asserted that all creatures are born with an innate fear of snakes and Baby Chimp Rescue proves this assertion wrong.

In an earlier post, I suggested that birds, rather than being born neurologically predisposed to flight, teach themselves to fly because they are born into the world with wings. I would like to propose that most higher animals exhibit extraordinary neural plasticity and teach themselves those skills they need to survive by exploring the possible actions their bodies can undertake. Yes, newborn foals can walk almost immediately, but this is because they are born with working legs rather than congenital walking knowledge; the reason newborn humans can't walk immediately is not because they are neurologically unequipped for walking but rather because they are physically unequipped for walking. This idea, that humans and animals alike acquire all their traits from experience and the paths their physical bodies dictate, invites the question: if this is true of higher animals, is it true of all animals? Is the waggle dance of the honey bee learned or genetic? I tend to be suspicious of genetic explanations for mental phenomena; as I have said before, I cannot understand how a sequence of bases on a DNA molecule can somehow code for a protein that somehow determines a pattern of neurones in the brain that somehow translates into a 'fear of snakes'. But I could be wrong. In The Origin of Stories, Brain Boyd deploys a powerful argument for the role of inherited instincts. He argues that they reduce the space of possible exploration, that inherited mental traits direct behaviour down prescribed channels. If the human mind was indeed a tabula rasa, he argues, a human would explore the space of all possible behaviours in such an uncoordinated, random manner as to lead swiftly to that human's demise. (It has been a while since I have read The Origin of Stories so it is possible I am misrepresenting Boyd's argument. It is also possible that this argument was not original with him.) However, if we don't lose sight of the fact that humans have a long period of development, it is possible to come somewhat closer to the conclusion that the human mind starts as a blank slate. Babies babble. They experiment with their larynx, with their lips, tongue, and teeth, to make noises and eventually to imitate their parents' noises. Of course, they respond to encouragement and reinforcement, a receptivity that might be genetic, but it is possible that language acquisition is not an instinct as Steven Pinker has argued but a learned ability based on imitation. Of course, this proposal goes against Noam Chomsky's theory of Generative Grammar – but even that most admirable and loveable of linguists and activists might be wrong on occasion.

If the preceding paragraph seems a little muddled, that is because I am presenting a speculative idea about which I am myself unsure. The problem with the nature/nurture debate is that it assumes that all behaviours and mental traits arise from one or the other, from genes or from the environment: the debate is reminiscent of the ancient debate between Rationalists and Empiricists. Is it not possible that some other influence, perhaps something spiritual or mystical, has an influence? This is a possibility I shall come back to later in this post.

If we do entertain the presumption, however, that the brain is extremely plastic, this has implications for our understanding of mental differences between men and women. A hundred years ago, it was assumed by many that men were inherently more intelligent than women. Feminism, I think especially second-wave feminism, fought back against that notion and it became a grievous solecism to espouse such views. Yet today the idea that there are sex-differences between men and women has again resurfaced under the guise of 'complementarity'. Men may not be smarter than women but women and men are indeed intellectually different: they complement each other, it is suggested. I think Bret Weinstein endorses this idea –I am fairly sure that in a recent podcast he expressed the received wisdom that men are interested in things and women are interested in people. Complementarity is often presented in the following way: women are better at social, linguistic, and communicative tasks, have greater emotional intelligence, greater empathy, while men excel in abstract and mechanical tasks, such as mathematics and engineering. I believe even Bret's wife Heather has made statements in support of complementarity, a surprising position for an intelligent woman who is well versed in math and statistics to take. I think her position is founded on her strong conviction that there are natural differences between men and women, differences in neurology that result from different DNA. There is, to be sure, a little evidential support for complementarity. A few tests (but only a few) suggest "females [are] specifically found to perform slightly better in vocabulary and reading comprehension and significantly higher in speech production and essay writing. Males have been specifically found to perform better on spatial visualization, spatial perception, and mental rotation" (Wikipedia). There is also a little evidence that there is more variation of G among men than women.

The idea of complementarity has become extremely popular in recent decades, among women as well as men, I think partly because it bolsters a person's sense of identity in the same way astrology does. For example, the Extreme Male Brain hypothesis of autism put forward by Simon Baron-Cohen is popular because it plays on stereotypes of male and female minds in a way that appeals to a lot of people, even women. (This theory is somewhat debunked by the work of literary criticism Naming Adult Autism by James McGrath, a book I read sometime last year.) However, there are dissenting voices. In The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, Gina Nippon argues that it makes as little sense to talk about a female brain as it does to talk about a female liver or female heart. The apparent differences between male and female brains, she argues, is a consequence of the fact that men have bigger brains on average than women and the reason men have larger brains is that they are generally bigger than women. And, no, bigger brains does not correspond to greater intelligence. Nippon argues that apparent psychological differences between men and women are entirely the result of culture, of nurture over nature. I haven't read Nippon's book (although I would like to) but my thinking and observations of the world have led me to a similar conclusion. No, a squad of female ruby players is unlikely to beat the All Blacks any time soon but there is good reason to suppose that in the future women will be as likely as men to excel at physics or mathematics, and that men who like poetry (or gossip) will not be labelled effeminate as they sometimes are today. Here in New Zealand, we currently have a female Prime Minister, a female Opposition Leader, a female Governor General, and a female Chief Justice. At his address to congress yesterday, Joe Biden was flanked by Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi. The nineteenth century idea that women are intellectually inferior to me, that women “represent the most inferior forms of human evolution” as Gustave Le Bon said in 1895, has been well and truly killed.

When we look at the world, we might naively suppose there are natural differences between men and women. An anthropologist from another planet sojourning here might suppose that women are genetically predisposed to wear skirts sometimes while men never do. Of course, intelligent terrestrials know this supposition to be false. Some trans women might think they can advertise their gender identities by wearing dresses, a 'lifestyle choice' encouraged by reading Judith Butler, but others around them will remain unconvinced. (I think Butler's theory of gender performativity actually makes sexism and stereotyping worse, but that is a topic for another post.) Almost all the outward signs we associate with a gender are the result of culture, the unconscious assimilation of stereotypes. The best bet for a true genetic psychological trait, a mental characteristic that really is the result of nature not nurture, seems to be sexual attraction: most men are only sexually attracted to women and most women are only sexually attracted to men; in fact, ordinary heterosexuals never even consider that there might be another option. Heterosexuality is so normal and widespread, and so fundamental a core idea to the currently supreme sciences of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, that it seems it just must be natural. But I would like you to consider the possibility that it is another learned behaviour. From infancy onward, we find ourselves in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. The books we read as children, the TV shows we watch, the people we encounter, our own parents, typify this heterosexual norm. Then, at puberty, we are suddenly awash with sex hormones and experience a libidinal awakening. Usually, though not always, this manifests itself in the form of wet dreams. I would argue that we have been primed by our childhood experience to direct our sexual energies along heterosexual channels. This is why I oppose the move to introduce homosexuality into children's literature, films, and TV. The PC campaign to do so is founded on the idea, promoted by the gay lobby, that people are born one way or the other. As I have said before, the Left is utterly inconsistent on this issue – on the one hand, everything is nurture, a social construction, except sexuality, which is supposed to be genetic even though, as I have argued several times in this blog, the idea of a gay gene is ridiculous. If homosexuality is introduced as an option into the lived experience of children, it is likely to encourage more young people to become gay. And I believe, I admit controversially, as I've said before, that it is better to be straight than gay. I know this is horribly un-PC but I can't help myself.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that there is a third possible influence on the development of human minds or, we might say, human souls. Could it be nature, nurture, or the supernatural? In the previous paragraph I said that ordinarily a person's sexual awakening involves wet dreams. Despite valiant efforts by neuroscientists and psychologists, no one is any closer than Freud to understanding the purpose or function of dreams, and Freud was way off the mark. A little while ago, Sam Harris released a podcast episode in which he spoke to Ricky Gervais about dreams, trotting out the stupid but currently fashionable hypothesis that dreams are an epiphenomena that occur when short-term memories are being transferred into long term storage. Presumably, the evidence for this hypothesis is that if experimental subjects are interrupted during REM sleep, they suffer deficits of memory. This is not sufficient evidence for such a sweeping hypothesis. I don't understand the reason why we dream but then again no one does. Despite the impression people have that scientists know everything, the world is still a profoundly mysterious place.

In this post I have discussed the Big Bang, nature vs. nurture, mental differences between men and women and the role childhood environments play in informing the sexual identities of adolescents and adults. I admit the post is a little dense, a little stream-of-consciousness, but sometimes a chain of related thoughts can be entertaining. I can only hope that you were entertained. And I hope you took something from it. Until next time...

Situational Metaphysics

A few years ago I wrote a couple of posts presenting an ethical, metaphysical, and spiritual paradigm which I called 'situational ethics' titled "The Person and Her Situation" and "Situational Ethics". For a time, these posts were quite popular. In tonight's post, I want to revisit the ideas I expressed in those posts; I also want to discuss free will again. I am painfully aware that the openings to the posts I have written recently have been a little boring - I want to apologise for this. The openings have simply been blunt statements of what I intend to talk about in the forthcoming post. The best writers however put a 'hook' right at the beginning of a particular essay or article, start with an anecdote or something provocative to grab the reader's attention, as Slavoj Zizek does at the beginning of his essay "What our fear of refugees says about Europe" when he references Jaques Lacan's claim that if a man believes his wife to be serially unfaithful, his belief is still pathological even if it happen to be true. Alas, I am too lazy to work out a provocative hook that will capture your interest immediately. You'll just have to bear with me. I promise that in future posts I will attempt a little more craft, or a little more flair, but for now, you'll just need a little patience as I roll gradually into the subject.

The topic I wish to expatiate on tonight is what I have called "Situational Ethics". I need to say straight away that this term already exists – this piece of intellectual real estate was seized and has been occupied by thinkers, often Christian thinkers, since the mid-twentieth century, the most prominent of them being Joseph Fletcher. I won't summarise this philosophical position here because, if the reader is interested, he or she can learn about it online. Suffice it to say, here and now, that although I am using the same term, I am using it with a different sense. I am interested in the metaphysical implications of 'situations' as much as, perhaps even more than, the ethical implications. Possibly a better name for the philosophical position I am proposing is "situational metaphysics". I will come back to an appropriate label for the position I am defending later in the post.

Every person is fixed, situated, within a situation. The situation a person occupies is the material, environmental, social, and interpersonal circumstances in which a person finds oneself. We are constantly finding ourselves in the world, a world that is always already present. Consider the following hypothetical scenario. Bob has recently been laid off from his job at the saw mill; he has a wife who is an alcoholic and spends a large portion of their shared income on brandy; he has one surviving parent who has recently been diagnosed with the early signs of dementia; he has a child who is severely autistic. All of these circumstances constitute important aspects of his situation. He has no control over any of them. Suppose I know Bob a little and, talking with him one day, find him disagreeable, hostile. I might blame him – but perhaps, unbeknownst to me, a couple of hours before encountering me he had seen a doctor who has informed him of his parent's diagnosis. His unfriendly attitude has a proximate cause. If I understand his situation, I can excuse him his bad behaviour. This is the ethical dimension of the situational theory. If I understand, fully understand, the other person's situation, I can empathise with him or her because I can imagine how I would behave if I was in the same situation – I can understand it and forgive it.

It is not just the outer world that constitutes a person's situation. His or her own physical body is part of his or her situation. Consider Bob again. Suppose Bob catches Covid. Suddenly he has trouble breathing, a fever, and general fatigue. He is not responsible for these symptoms although he can hope that they will go away if his immune system overcomes the virus. Suppose furthermore that Bob has scoliosis and has suffered from this since early adolescence. Again this physical defectiveness is beyond Bob's control, it is again part of his situation. Now imagine that because of his social and somatic problems, Bob has issues with anxiety and approaches a psychiatrist who diagnoses him with generalised anxiety disorder and prescribes benzodiazepines. Suppose that Bob becomes addicted to the anti-anxiety meds. The anxiety and subsequent addiction now also constitute part of his situation. Bob's own brain is part of his situation. Furthermore, he is now labelled 'mentally ill'. I don't believe that it stretches the term 'interpellation', a term coined by Louis Althusser, to say that he has become subject to a discourse, psychiatric discourse in this case, that he cannot control, and that seeks to place him within a generic pigeon hole. Bob's diagnosis is something else that is part of his situation.

My hypothetical protagonist, Bob, might fight back against the powerful and oppressive forces, the malignant Fate, that is holding him hostage. He could say, "I am not my job, I am not my wife's husband or child's father, I am not my body, I am not my brain, I am not what other people think I am. I am something else." What is the something-else that he claims to be? Considering everything I've said, what lies outside (or inside) a particular situation? It seems that everything taken together constitutes a person's situation, that there is nothing else except the situation. But surely there must be? For Jean-Paul Sartre, the something-else is the nothingness of absolute freedom. To deny this fundamental freedom is to act in bad faith. An example Sartre gives is the man who ostentatiously identifies as a waiter even though he knows he could be something else, perhaps anything else. According to Sartre, this man, in his unwillingness to accept the dictum "Existence precedes Essence", is exhibiting 'bad faith'; Sartre would say that Bob, insofar as he accepts his situation as inalterable, is also demonstrating precisely this kind of 'bad faith'. I do not agree with Sartre but another term from his Existentialist philosophy is relevant here. Sartre does not believe that people are absolutely free, and terms the restrictions on a person's freedom "facticity'. However, he thinks it is usually possible to transcend a particular situation. In reading up about Sartre for the purposes of writing this post, I found he uses the word 'situation' in a roughly analogous way to the way I have been using it, and I would like to quote from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy on Sartre in this connexion: "we are always beings “in situation,” but the precise mixture of transcendence and facticity that forms any situation remains indeterminable, at least while we are engaged in it." In my own theory, I am emphasising facticity very much over transcendence. 

The reason I cannot agree with Sartre is because, like Sam Harris, I do not believe in free will. Is it possible to have Existentialism without free will? I don't think so. This is where I plunge into mysticism. I would like to argue that the something-else is the soul. (Yes, I admit I am a dualist.) The soul is like a passenger in a self-driving car. It experiences and is affected by the world but is perhaps incapable of acting on the world. It grows and develops like a plant. John Keats memorably said, "“Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. [...] Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways...." The soul is cleverer than the brain but acts through the brain. I attend a weekly pub quiz and often have the experience of knowing that I know, at some level, the answer to a question, but being unable to retrieve it from my memory banks. In this case, my situation, neurological and social (because I am part of a team) impedes my ability to recall the relevant fact. But perhaps my true self does know; the soul knows everything that the brain can potentially know and perhaps much more besides. In Hinduism, the Atman is the eternal, indestructible Self outside time, "not the same as body or mind or consciousness, but... something beyond which permeates all these", a self which is obscured from us by maya. the veil of ignorance and illusion. In some Hindu traditions (non-dualist ones) the Atman is identical with Brahman, ultimate reality. I am not wholly sold on Vedic teachings and find much of value in Gnosticism and Manichaeism when trying to work this out for myself my own theory. For the Gnostics, the physical, material world (the soul's 'situation' to use my terminology) is evil, the creation of a malevolent demigod, the Demiurge, often identified with Jehovah; through a process of achieving spiritual and esoteric insight into one's true nature and the True God, a person can escape the material world and return to the realm of Light. For the Manichaeans, the world is a battleground between Good and Evil. I'll quote Wikipedia: "Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came." Thus the world is like a factory, producing some spark-like souls that ascend back to the realm of light. (Other souls are reincarnated.) It is interesting that Keats, although he was probably unfamiliar with Manichaeism, also described the soul as being like a spark.  Finally, in presenting something of a hodgepodge of religious ideas that have influenced me, I should mention Calvinism. The Calvinists also don't believe in free will, believing instead that some people are born predestined for salvation while the rest are doomed to damnation. I can't agree with Calvinism either but it has influenced my thinking.

If I were to attempt to draw a syncretic picture of spiritual reality, I might do it as follows. The world is like a machine that has the purpose of creating souls. If a soul has been purged of its illusions, has attained insight into spiritual reality, become itself, at death it escapes its situation and ascends into a higher plane of existence. If it is still imperfect, it is born again in another body in the process known as metempsychosis. History, as the Manichaeans said, is the process of returning souls to their true home; this life is preparation for the next. I sometimes feel that life for me has been a battle between Good and Evil and that I have received support from spiritual entities in this battle – but it is difficult to reconcile this conception of the world with an absence of free will. A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that I could picture the world of people as a garden in which spiritual agents protect and aid people the same way gardeners tend to the plants, watering them, providing compost, preserving them from blight, and ensuring that they grow strong and true. People are like plants, in this sense, except that people are being prepared for another kind of Being while the plants are being helped to survive and flourish in this world. Needless to say, plants don't have free will. But it is possible for the gardeners to love their plants even if the plants (and the gardeners themselves) lack free will.

If we were to accept this picture, even if only provisionally, it suggests a couple of implications. I have noticed over the years, thinking about my life and the lives of others, that a life often pivots around an ironic twist in which a person is forced to reappraise everything he or she formerly believed. I think this happened with Oscar Wilde and Kurt Cobain. TS Eliot underwent a spiritual crisis in the twenties (during which he wrote The Waste Land, in 1922, and The Hollow Men, in 1925) then converted to High Anglicanism in 1927.  These life-changing crises suggest the Calvinist ideas of regeneration and Irresistible Grace. However, in practice, a life-changing crisis does not lead a person to any one particular religion or denomination (such as Calvinism); rather, deliverance can take many forms. It depends on the religions a person is exposed to and the peculiarities of the person's personality. For TS Eliot, who knew a lot about a lot of different religions, Anglo-Catholicism was the best fit, but for others a different religion might be more appropriate. A second implication is that, if Gnosticism has any persuasive appeal, we might expect to find a thread of Gnosticism in the modern world. And I think we do. Woke politics and Critical Race Theory see the world as inherently and irredeemably evil is the same way that Gnostics thought the material world was evil – but, unlike Gnosticism, the Woke revolution and Critical Race Theory envisage no way out. The Woke movement and Critical Race Theory can be considered a degenerate, misdirected expression of the same impulse that gave birth to Gnosticism, but it is a Gnosticism that is all darkness, without spiritualism, without any light at all.

Of course, the picture I have presented here might not be true at all. It might just be wishful thinking on my part.

At this point in the post, I wish to switch topics a little. I still wish to discuss free will but in a different context. Readers may have noticed a contradiction or aporia in my thinking. I have agreed with Sam Harris that there is no such thing as free will – but I have several times suggested that homosexuality is a choice. This apparent contradiction can be resolved in the following way. At a scientific, metaphysical level, perhaps even at a spiritual level, there is no such thing as free will. But at an ordinary, quotidian level, at the level of everyday discourse, people still make decisions, choose from among various options: the word 'choice' is meaningful at the level of everyday speech. Even Sam Harris, when he dines out at an Italian restaurant with friends, has probably said sometimes, "What have you chosen to order?" Similarly, at the level of ordinary discourse, homosexuality must be regarded as a choice. A man chooses to sleep with other men; a man chooses to fantasise about men when he masturbates; a man chooses to tell his friends and family that he's gay. There may be biological and social, perhaps even spiritual, reasons why a person turns homosexual but these reasons lie behind a veil through which it is almost impossible to penetrate. My beliefs about this issue have completely changed over the course of my life – a volte-face that occurred as a result of the crisis that happened to me. When I was younger, I thought that the only people who could believe homosexuality to be a choice were themselves closet homosexuals. Now I believe that we must believe homosexuality a choice because it is the only moral option. The alternative would be to suppose that a person can be gay even if he or she doesn't want to be. I think, now, that a person can only be gay if he or she wants to be gay. This is the only ethical route out of this moral quandary. 

Early in this post, I said that I was searching for a name to describe the philosophical position for which I am advocating. Perhaps I will simply name it "Situational Metaphysics". Accordingly, this is the title I shall give to this post.

Before I finish up, I wish to clarify something. I have often talked about my life in this blog and have several times stated that the childhood trauma that made me vulnerable to psychosis later in life was my parents' divorce when I was seven. The first thing I wish to say is that I had, until around six years ago, always subconsciously believed that my father had left my mother because he thought I was gay (at seven). I have some evidence that I subconsciously believed this when I was twenty-one, some six years before my first psychotic episode. I know that I still believed this when I was more or less well in 2008 when I was twenty-eight. The psychiatrists have never recorded this in their notes and in fact have never even once enquired about the divorce. The second thing I wish to say about it is that the reader may have assumed that the period before the divorce was marked by parental conflict. This wasn't true in my case. My father had met someone else and one day just left. One day he was there and the next day he wasn't. At the time I found his sudden disappearance inexplicable, which is why I thought I was responsible for it. When I was a child I used to believe that he had left because he loved my step-mother more than he loved me. When I grew older, the story that I told myself was that he had left because he had fallen in love with Jan and a stressor that partly fed into my first psychotic episode was that I sensed that the marriage between my father and Jan was on the rocks. If my father's relationship with Jan wasn't real, why had he divorced my mother? The explanation for my illness, for those who have read this blog, not only the posts about my first episode but those that talk about my time studying at the University of Auckland, is simple. It is testament to the corruption and criminal ineptitude of the psychiatric profession that they haven't been able to see what is right in front of their face.