Concerning the Garden of Eden

God, according to the mainstream Christian theological tradition, is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent. And yet there is evil in the world. This seeming contradiction or apparently irresolvable incompatibility between official religious doctrine and a seemingly obvious empirical fact about the world is used as ammunition by atheists in their ongoing turf war against the faithful while the Christians on the other side sweat blood struggling to come up with rejoinders to the atheist observation that Evil exists, producing arguments and explanations that go under the rather beautiful term 'theodicies'. A theodicy is a story that seeks to undo the knot or explain away the contradiction. I have followed arguments between atheists and Christians for years and years and at least one of the religiously minded atheists that I enjoy watching spar with older Christians on Youtube, Alex O'Conner, has said that the Problem of Evil is the best possible logical assault on the medieval castle of doctrinaire Christianity (although I don't think he has ever expressed himself in quite this style). The purpose of this essay is to present what I think may be the best possible theodicy, a response to the Problem of Evil that finds its foundation in the concepts of 'good' and 'evil', in language and semantics, a theodicy that I have never seen or heard any one else ever propose. The argument is subtle but, when I set it out, should seem patently obvious. Somehow though it seems to have been missed both by Alex and the other atheists, and by the Christian contingent on the other side, despite their continual striving to solve this most impenetrable of paradoxes. I believe it is a Gnostic argument that I intend to make and in making it I may be spilling some of the secrets of the Gnostics, unravelling a mystery that the Gnostics may have wanted to keep invisible, esoteric. I feel few compunctions about spilling this secret though because, of course, I am only relaying it to the few initiates who have somehow stumbled across this blog in their peripatetic perambulations across the World Wide Web and who may probably already be Gnostics themselves. I am not blowing the lid off all of Creation in this essay.

First, though, I want to make a couple of comments concerning perhaps some of the most salient features of debates concerning religion in the modern Western world, especially as these appear to those of us addicted to Youtube. On the one side we have atheist materialists such as, at one time, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and David Dennett. The New Atheists regarded all organised religion as wicked and wanted to eliminate it from modern society. The special bugbear for Harris is Islam but generally they focussed on Christianity. The New Atheists had a moral sense but it was a liberal humanist morality, not one grounded on any kind of religious system – Richard Dawkins has often indirectly supported gay rights for instance. Despite their moral sense, they saw no problem with the existence of evil in the world. People can be happy or sad, good or bad, whatever they want, it has no bearing on the arguments set forth by the New Atheists. In fact, as already noted, the Problem of Evil, the empirical facts concerning the existence of wickedness and suffering in the world, is probably the best argument for atheism around. Although someone like Sam Harris has weighed in on normative ethics by proposing a kind of utilitarianism, it is typical for atheist materialists to simply accept another empirical fact, the fact that apart from sociopaths most people appear to have a moral sense and seek to act morally, and then to invest their considerable intellectual capital into elaborate attempts at scientifically explaining why this empirical fact is the case. Because atheist materialists admire and espouse Darwin so much, there have been many who have sought to explain the empirical fact that people usually seek to be moral by invoking ideas from evolutionary psychology such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Indeed because neo-Darwinists have been so infatuated with the 'selfish gene' theory of Dawkins, and because, even setting aside Dawkins' update of Darwin, nature, red in tooth and claw, selects only for the fittest, the problem for atheist materialists, being so often firmly wedded to ideas from evolutionary biology that they cannot consider any alternative to it, is not so much a Problem of Evil as a Problem of Good. It is a problem concerning why people are so often unselfish and sometimes even self-sacrificing, altruistic. If the meaning of life is simply the individual's surviving and producing as many offspring as possible, why should an individual want to concern himself or herself with alleviating the suffering of others? If the actions of others so often have so little effect on a particular individual's life, why should he or she express praise or censure of these actions? This is why I claim that it is not the Problem of Evil but rather the Problem of Good that is the puzzle the atheist materialist contingent needs most desperately to address but so far their own attempts to unravel a mystery that arises from their own way of looking at the world have fallen far short of the mark.

However it is not the atheists on their side of the cultural divide who I principally want to discuss but their adversaries, the religiously minded defenders of the Lord. I am thinking of Christians who are also professors, academics, often specialising in Philosophy of Religion, the ones we find so frequently participating in online debates. These high status commentators and apologists are firmly rooted in the Christian academic tradition that had its beginnings in the work of St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was the first to say that God was omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent – he listed at least a dozen more essential attributes of the deity showing, I think, a little hubris when doing so (although he usually sought scriptural support for the essential qualities he attributed to the Godhead). The high-status Christian intellectuals that propagated their influence first through the seminaries and the monasteries and then later through the universities believe in monotheism, monism, unitariness. Yes, the supernatural exists but it is all wrapped up in God, finds its centre, its focal point, in one single indivisible being. There is in this viewpoint a rejection of older more pluralist conceptions of the supernatural. If God is one single indivisible being, how are we to make sense of the Catholic tenet of the Trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? I don't know that we can. But the apologists ignore this contradiction between natural philosophy and doctrine. Nor can we easily make sense of other older Catholic notions such as the idea that the Virgin Mary and the Saints can intercede on a person's behalf. In the past, even after Christianity became dominant in the West, the ordinary person's conception of the supernatural was usually more pluralistic than the intellectual Aquinian tradition. It was once believed that there were legions of angels on the one side and legions of devils on the other and that the devils were in the employ of an adversary to God, known as Satan, Lucifer. In folk Christianity, therefore, we could once explain away the existence of Evil by positing it as resulting from the actions of the Devil, Satan. There was a kind of Manichaean tendency among ordinary folk. Manichaeanism, which was once a religious alternative to Christianity in the West and to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam in the East, held that the world was the scene of an ongoing cosmic battle between Good and Evil, between Light and Darkness, and that human history constituted a cosmic process through which the lights of human souls were gradually liberated from the darkness of material reality and returned over eternity to the heaven of the God of Light. Now, I am not suggesting that many Christians throughout history were secretly Manichaeans. Rather I am inviting the reader to entertain the idea that the undereducated laity endorsed a kind of dualism with respect to the supernatural without being fully aware that their religious leaders rejected such a dualism. There is another tradition within Christianity, one with scriptural authority because it is something we find in the Book of Job, that presents Satan as a servant of God but I believe this cosmology too has been disavowed by many modern Christians – the wager Satan makes with God concerning Job is regarded as something metaphoric, poetic, with no relation to anything real at all. To put it baldly, I believe that many of the Christians who feature so prominently in online debates, while still believing in God and in the divinity of Jesus, actually don't believe in the devil or in Satan at all.

The point I am trying to make here is that the debates we see online between atheist materialists and Christians are debates between people who view the world, respectively, as a world without anything supernatural to it at all and people who believe in only one single supernatural being, an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent God. It is because the Christians who have bought into this intellectual philosophical position with respect to religious cosmology view the supernatural in this way that the Problem of Evil arises – if God were either not completely omnipotent or else not completely omni-benevolent, then no problem of evil would appear in front of us. If we lived in a world that was at least in some perhaps vague sense Manichaean then we could attribute evil to evil supernatural beings. But because the apologists are committed to the notion that the supernatural is focussed on a point, is built up toward a single vertex or apex that we term 'God' in the same way that the Illuminati print on American currency a pyramid with an eye at the topmost point, this escape hatch is not available to them or to us insofar as we accept conventional theological wisdom. The Problem of Evil should be better titled the Problem of Divine Omnipotence and Divine Omni-Benevolence because we all seem to have empirical evidence for the former, the existence of Evil, but for the later have to rely on the word of theologians following the Thomist tradition. Philosophers of Religion are committed to the attribution of omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence to the Godhead, accept these three attributions as premises or axioms that must be deemed incontrovertible before venturing any further into any kind of theodicy, and so find themselves forced into the contorted position of trying to explain evil away entirely– some, for instance, by arguing that evil is an illusion and some, such as St Augustine, arguing that evil is an absence or privation of good. The simplest response to the atheist interlocutor, to claim that God does indeed exist but is not entirely omni-beneovent and/or not entirely omnipotent, is a didactic strategy that the apologists recoil from because, deep down, the idea that Good and Evil may both exist and that Good may not always win out in the end is a notion that makes them uncomfortable. Deep down many Philosophers of Religion are Christians who imbibed a conventional Christianity with their mothers' milk and never shook it off despite all their philosophical training.

If we are to discuss the Problem of Evil, we need first to try to say a little about what Evil actually is. Something else I noticed about the Philosopher of Religion who taught me the year before last, in addition to his adherence to a kind of monism, is that he was unclear about what is meant by 'evil'. It is a confusion I have seen repeatedly among others on both sides of the debate. We need to distinguish between natural evil and moral evil. For instance, if an earthquake in Pakistan kills hundreds of people we should regard this not only as an evil but also as a natural evil. We cannot regard it as a moral evil unless we have evidence, for example, that the quake was caused by the Indian government dropping a nuclear bomb on their opponents. Natural evil encompasses all forms of unhappiness – suffering, pain, boredom, anxiety, depression. Death. Cancer is a kind of natural evil as are congenital diseases such as spina bifida for instance. On the other hand we also describe immoral actions committed by agents as evil – murder, fraud, assault, rumourmongering. The Problem of Evil involves both kinds of evil but communicators on both sides often confuse them and this can lead them and us down blind alleys. Alvin Plantinga has argued that moral evil is the price we pay for free will but has found no way to rationalise away natural evil. Of course we could try to claim that earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes are God's punishment for sins committed by the causalities but this seems at least uncharitable, certainly deplorable, in and of itself. It is interesting to note here that there is a widespread view that morally good actions are rewarded and morally bad actors punished, if not in this world then in the next, if not by secular police and judicial processes then, according to Christians, by God. Some apologists have argued that this is a consequence of a fourth divine perfection, perfect justice. The relation between crime and punishment, though, is not something this particular essay shall concern itself with.

The world in which we find ourselves, which we are passing through, is saturated with values and these values come in pairs. Not only do we have Good and Evil but we also have Happiness and Sadness, Pleasure and Pain, Beauty and Ugliness, Hunger and Satiety, Truth and Lies, and so on. Every possible positive value one can find in the world has associated with it a corresponding negative value that we can find or at least be aware of. Furthermore people, like all animals, are motile. We seek, through our actions, through our behaviours, to actualise positive values and avoid or move away from negative values. If I want a coffee, for instance, my desire for coffee can be satisfied by my walking to the cafe at the top of the road and buying a flat white. A person's inclination to seek to actualise positive values is analogous to the way plants grow towards sunlight, a tendency known as phototropism, or the way their roots seek water, a tendency known as hydrotropism. In seeking to actualise positive values and to minimise negative values we encounter resistance. This resistance has two forms. The physical material world itself constitutes a form of resistance. I can't say, "I wish I had a flat white" and then have a cup of coffee magically appear in my hand. I have to walk to a cafe and buy it with money. Another form of resistance is that a person's desires can conflict with the interests, the desires, of at least one other person. In these cases, in order for one person to actualise his or her own Good there would have to be a diminishing of the Goods attained or actualised by another. This is why we require morality – we sometimes need to negotiate between or find some balance between the desires felt by one person and the desires felt by another. The picture I am painting here is reminiscent of the picture painted by academic philosophers' favourite thinker, Ayn Rand, but it has one significant difference. Rand thought that that because people pursue values, people ought to be selfish, but her ethical system didn't account for the obvious possibility that one person's selfishness may negatively affect others. Nor does the doctrine she presented in The Virtue of Selfishness account for what seems to me to also be an incontrovertible empirical fact: by performing good deeds, good works, acts of charity, acts of altruism, we can actualise a sense of ourselves as Good People, that Goodness can in some limited sense be described as self-rewarding.

If God is omni-benevolent, maximally good, and also omnipotent and omniscient, we would expect to find ourselves in a world that is maximally good for all its inhabitants. It is helpful to bring in some ideas from ethics here, in particular the ethical systems that go under the banner 'consequentialist' or 'utilitarian', currently the most popular ethical frameworks among philosophers. Utilitarians think that individuals should act in such a way as to realise the greatest possible utility. There are three main sorts of utilitarianism. The first holds that people should seek to maximise pleasure or happiness in an impartial impersonal kind of way: this is known as hedonistic consequentialism. The second, known as desire-satisfaction consequentialism, holds that we should try to maximise as many desires that agents have, again in an impartial impersonal kind of way. The third is known as objective-value consequentialism which holds that there are objective goods that should be maximised. The literature surrounding consequentialism is incredible complicated and I cannot do it justice in this essay so, for the sake of the argument I intend to make here, I shall focus only on the first two conceptions and come back to the third later in the essay. I shall set aside the complications, provisos, provisions, convolutions, and involutions that a thoroughly rigorous explication of consequentialist thinking would require but which would need me to write an essay the length of Kant's Critique of Pure Judgment if I wanted to set it all out. All that is sufficient to say here is that insofar as God can be considered Himself a person, an ethical agent, and a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, we would expect to live in a world without any natural evil in it at all. We would expect to live in paradise. Yes, if Plantinga's argument is sound, moral evil might still be possible, although unlikely, but there would be a complete absence of natural evil.

In Christian mythology, paradise features twice: at the beginning of time when Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and, after a person's death, if the person has been good enough to avoid Hell and earn Heaven, after the person disembarks at Heaven's train station. What would paradise be like? If hedonistic consequentialism is correct, God presumably organised the Garden of Eden in such a way that Adam and Eve enjoyed absolute joy, absolute bliss, all the time. It must have been the case that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Even were totally content eating delicious sumptuous fruit, effortlessly writing perfect lyric love  poetry for each other, and, I dunno, having front row seats at perfect sporting fixtures carried out between rugby playing animals in which the home team always won. I am of course being slightly facetious here – it is difficult to imagine a paradise in which its two human inhabitants enjoy absolute happiness all the time. (Sometimes people like to imagine that the pre-colonial Pacific Islands were paradises and this view informed the first and most popular novel by Herman Melville, Typee.) If hedonistic consequentialism is true, then Adam and Eve only have ever experienced positive emotional and physical states. If desire-satisfaction consequentialism is true, then we need a subtly different picture of Paradise. Every time Adam or Eve formed a desire for something God would immediately grant it. If Adam formed a desire for a flat white sometime while in the Garden of Eden, God would then immediately make one materialise in his hand. Presumably, in a similar way, He also ensures that the virtuous faithful who have found their way to Heaven will enjoy absolute joy, absolute bliss, for the rest of the eternity that they are spending there. This view of paradise informs the film This Is The End by Seth Rogen – at the end of the film, when Seth and his friend Jay arrive in Heaven, they find themselves in a place in which Jay can wish for a Segway and have one magically materialise under him and in which Seth can wish for the Back Street Boys to reunite and perform their greatest hits and for this too to magically happen. In Paradise, there would be no resistance; its inhabitants would not need to actively work for anything at all but instead would passively have all their wishes instantly and supernaturally granted. In Paradise, there would therefore be no physical or material reality as we understand it, and it would be a world which either has only one resident or a world in which no one person's wishes or desires conflict with the wishes or desires of anyone else. So maybe two max.

In the last story in the collection A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes, Barnes paints a picture of what Heaven might be like. It has been a long time since I've read this story so in talking about it I am relying on a blog post called "Kahn's Corner: The Problem of Eternity in Barnes' "The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters."" In this story, the narrator dies and finds himself in his idea of paradise – an exclusive country club staffed by angels, in which he dines extravagantly every morning and evening, has sex with a different beautiful woman every night, and spends his days perfecting his golf game on the best possible golf course. After millennia, his golfing skills having improved to the point that he gets a hole in one with every single drive and succumbing at last to terminal boredom, ennui, the narrator chooses total non-existence rather than continue as a guest in Heaven's country club. Before he goes, he is told by one of the angels that everyone in the end makes the same decision at last. This story has the unusual distinction of being a work of comic fiction that is frequently referenced by Philosophers of Religion. One moral we could draw from it is that if we are to go to Heaven indefinitely, God must do more than satisfy the desires we formed while we were alive but also fulfil new desires we need to form after we have died. If the catalogue of desires can be endlessly refreshed after death, then God can go on satisfying them eternally. But even this may not stop Heaven becoming too insufferably dull to remain in.

We arrive now at the core argument, the theodicy this essay has been inching towards. If there were no Evil in the world, could there be any Good? If we were living in the paradise of hedonistic consequentialists, we might be in a state of constant unadulterated bliss but we wouldn't know that we were happy because we would have nothing to compare it with. For happiness to have any meaning at all we need to contrast it with its opposite state, unhappiness. To know happiness, we also need to know unhappiness. Adam and Eve may have been happy but they did not know it because they had nothing to compare it with. All of the values I talked about earlier come in pairs and the meaning of one element depends on the fact that it has a binary opposite – we cannot have a notion of Beauty without a notion of Ugliness, we cannot have a notion of Truth without also a notion of Falsehood, we cannot have Sweet without Sour or Salty without Bitterness. Light without Darkness, Good without Evil. Adam and Eve knew only the positive term in each binary opposition and so lived in a world without values at all. This is why God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And it is why after the snake had tempted Eve to try the fruit and then she had convinced Adam to disobey as well that God expelled them, banished them, from Paradise.

The story of the Fall is probably the most well known of all Biblical stories and those of us who spent a little time at Sunday school when children remember it even if we recall nothing else of the Biblical tradition. All children and generally speaking all the adults that they grow into interpret the story of the Fall alike,  in quite a simple way. God said, "You shall remain in paradise eternally so long as you abide by one rule – don't eat that particular fruit!" Adam and Eve were banished for breaking God's one rule and they were banished because they had broken it. It seems to me that all children and almost all the adults they grow into fail to see the significance of the name of the fruit – it grows on a tree called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Having broken God's rule, Adam and Eve were thrown into a world in which evil exists in all its forms – death, despair, disease, disfigurement, toil, violence, cruelty, shame, etc, etc. They fell into a world of values in which every positive value had its equal and opposite. What people miss about the story of the Fall is that Adam and Eve could not have truly known Good without also learning about Evil. The secret is in plain sight. The fact that somehow people fail to notice this, the name of the tree, when thinking about the story of the Fall, is reminiscent of the way people often have the "To be or not to be" speech from Hamlet memorised but fail to recognise that the secret at the heart of Shakespeare's most famous play is hinted at in it when Hamlet describes the afterlife as "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns," Hamlet says this in his most famous soliloquy even though he has had a conversation with the ghost of his dead father at the beginning of the play. The secret at the heart of Hamlet is that Hamlet does not know himself whether or not he is mad, if the ghost he parlayed with in the first scenes was real or not. This is why he is so indecisive. In the same way, the vast majority of people think that they understand the story of the Fall but have missed its inner kernel of meaning, the meaning indicated by the name given to the tree in Genesis.

I would like to suggest that a world which contains no evil but also no good cannot really be a paradise at all. It would be something like limbo. This is because to be human must surely involve the pursuit of positive values and flight from or fight with negative ones. A world without values of any sort would be a world without any meaning at all. 

"But," the reader may say, "you have been discussing the story of the Fall from the perspective given by hedonistic consequentialism. What about the desire-satisfaction consequentialists?" In the same way that I have argued that the paradise of hedonistic consequentialists contains not only no evil but also no good because it involves only positive physical and mental states and no negative ones, I would like to argue that the paradise of desire-satisfaction consequentialists likewise contains not only no evil but also no good as well. Remember that in our Fallen world, associated with every desire there is resistance. The resistance may be small for small desires, small wishes, but very great desires, great wishes, may be associated with very great resistance indeed. Many of our biggest desires, such as winning Lotto and flying to Australia to travel up the West Coast, may not be satisfiable at all. Some of our desires are ongoing such as the desire not to be beaten up or not to be rained upon when walking round the city – such desires can be put under the heading 'freedom from' as opposed to 'freedom to'. Both sorts of desires though require actions by the desirer. I would like to suggest that a paradise in which all desires are automatically satisfied would be no paradise at all because the goodness of actions, according to the desire-satisfaction consequentialists, is associated with the overcoming of resistance. There is always a gap or interval between the forming of a desire and its actualising and what I would like to argue is that the goodness associated with active desire-satisfaction-seeking does not lie in the moment when the desire is satisfied, an idea which would return us to the paradigm associated with hedonistic consequentialism, but rather with the active seeking of such satisfaction. Consider the cup of coffee example again. I form a desire for a cup of coffee, walk up the road to buy one, and then enjoy the taste. If it is the satisfaction of the desire in which the goodness of the action lies, then it would be in the anticipated and then realised taste of the flat white where we would find it – it would seem then that desire-satisfaction consequentialism has collapsed into hedonistic consequentialism because the movement towards fulfilment must be understood as secondary to the enjoyment associated with the taste of the coffee, with the reward. In order for the two ethical systems to remain distinct, the goodness associated with desire-satisfaction consequentialism must lie in the forming of desires and the quest to fulfil them rather than in the moments when the desire is actually fulfilled. The forming of the desire and one's attempts to satisfy it can be regarded as Good and the resistance to these attempts can be regarded as Evil. Every time I buy a flat white from the cafe up the road this can be regarded as a small victory of Good over Evil. But, in a paradise in which all wishes are immediately, automatically, and magically granted by God, there could be no victory over Evil because there would be no Evil at all to resist one's wishes and thus, even in the paradigm associated with desire-satisfaction consequentialism, no Good either. If the goodness of desire-satisfaction is not to lie in the emotional and physical states that arise when the desire is consummated, then it must lie in the triumph of individual will over the resistance erected to try to stymie the desire.

There is a second argument I would like to make concerning the desire-satisfaction ethical paradigm. Resistance is associated with the material physical world and the desires of others. A world without resistance would also be a world that lacks physical materiality and a world without other people, people who if they did exist in it might sometimes have subtly different and sometimes enormously different sets of desires. Earlier in this essay I hinted that I am a value pluralist, that I think that there exist many different types of value. Perhaps the positive value associated with having a flat white magically appear in one's hand is outweighed by the negative psychological effects that arise as a consequence of being in such close proximity to an omnipotent, omniscient and 'omni-benevolent' God, specifically the rather terrible implication that there is no stable reality at all and that other people may not really exist, that the people one seems to see are only phantasms or apparitions. Earlier this year, on a couple of occasions, I had small wishes seemingly magically granted. On one occasion, I decided that in order to write an email, to help me concentrate, I needed cigarettes and then seemingly magically found an almost full packet near my bed. I did not attribute these tiny miracles to God but rather to supernatural beings, fairies or pixies, fair folk who were mischievously granting the small velleities that appeared in my mind but had no inclination to respond to my more deeply felt desires. On three occasions this year I saw perfect rainbows but the effect was not to make me feel that there was an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent God wanting a personal relationship with me but rather to make me feel that there was something malevolent about these optical phenomena. It made me feel as though God were kicking me in the head and repeating over and over again, "I exist!" All this has bearing on another argument atheists direct at their Christian opponents, the Problem of the Divine Hiddenness of God, but, although I may well discuss this problem in a later essay, I do not intend to talk about it now except to say that it is related to the Problem of Evil and that, in a way, this essay is an indirect riposte to this problem as well.

The Gnostics interpreted the story of the Garden of Eden in quite a different way to ordinary Christians. The Gnostics thought that the creator of this world and ruler of this world was not God but an inferior being, the Demiurge, one of many 'aeons' who 'emanated' from the true superior good God known as the 'Monad'. Many Gnostic sects thought that the Demiurge was actually Evil himself while other sects held that the Deminurge was simply a somewhat incompetent servant of the true good God. There were apparently (according to Wikipedia) some Gnostics who thought that the Demiurge was actually ignorant of the Monad entirely. Jesus was either an angel or aeon who had descended to Earth to teach mankind about love and compassion or an enlightened prophet: he was not God Himself the way Christians today regard him as God Himself. According to many Gnostic writings, it was the Demiurge rather than the Monad who had created the Garden of Eden and laid out its rules. And according to this tradition, the snake was not actually evil but rather, as Christ would be later, a representative or emissary of the true good God, a God who actually wanted mankind to have Knowledge of Good and Evil, an instrument of the good God. Remember that the term 'gnosis' is simply Ancient Greek for 'knowledge'. The Gnostic interpretation of the myth or fable of the Garden of Eden can thus be set out in this way. The true good God, the Monad, wanted Evil in the world, wanted a world containing death, despair, disease, disfigurement, toil, violence, cruelty, shame, etc, etc, because without Evil in the world there could not be Good. Adam and Eve could not have knowledge of Good without knowledge of Evil as well, without knowing about both natural and moral evil, and they could only have knowledge of all these evils if these evils actually existed.

(There is another even odder interpretation of this myth and parable one could defend. Perhaps all of these evils pre-existed the nibbling of the apple but Adam and Eve were not aware of them until after partaking of the Fruit. In this interpretation, the Garden of Eden was no paradise at all but rather just something its inhabitants thought was a paradise because all the evils in it were invisible to them until the moment when they received Knowledge of them. This would seem to suggest that the writers of Genesis might have endorsed the postmodern tenet that the world is simply what we know about it, that reality is a social construction, but this seems suspiciously poststructuralist for a work written presumably around six hundred years before Christ. In this context, one may also think of an aphorism coined by the poet Thomas Gray in 1742, "Ignorance is Bliss".)

It certainly seems self-evident that we live in a world containing both Good and Evil. We live neither in Heaven nor in the Garden of Eden. Some people like to imagine that they pass through life continually making decisions between right and wrong but this is not really true of me and I believe most others. Rather we continually make decisions in which we regard our desires as automatically Good and often only much later realise that we have done something immoral or censurable. This may have happened to me recently although I cannot be sure because I lack solid intelligence either way. Early this year I was told that I was Good and that my older brother was Evil and that in the forthcoming conflict or struggle between us I would win out. Certainly any conflict between individuals can be framed as a conflict between Good and Evil – have you noticed how often both sides of a war or both sides of a sporting match claim beforehand that they have God on their side? Humans pursue positive values and it is helpful to imagine one is Good to do so and that God has one's back. Furthermore, in the pursuit of Good, in the overcoming of resistance, a person may not only improve his or her own life but the lives of others. The mystic poet William Blake, a man who had his finger on the spiritual pulse of the world, penned the following in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. "Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." Blake's argument is rather different from mine but this sentiment fits well with what I am trying to say myself. Without movement, motility, nothing in the world would change – the world is designed for active agents that form desires, seek to attain them, seek to actualise positive values, and then either enjoy the benefits of having satisfied these desires or the penalties of having failed to do so or of having been the victims of blind fate or accident. Not only in pursuing values individually can individuals sometimes improve or at least change their own lives but through collective actions we can sometimes improve or at least change the world. The political sphere is full of politicised conflicts – between Russia and Ukraine, between Democrats and Republicans, between climate change activists and conservatives, between David Seymour and Chloe Swarbrick. It makes one think of the Hegelian dialectic. However I am less optimistic than Hegel was when he argued that history progresses through oppositions between theses and antitheses coming together to form new syntheses because I am still undecided as to whether or not we can put any faith in the notion of human progress at all, in a divine masterplan.

I would like to quote some more Blake. This is the last part of the poem "Auguries of Innocence," the full text of which can be found elsewhere online.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the Soul slept in beams of light.
God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But doth a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

My reason for quoting these lines is because it captures a sense I have that some people just have miserable lives while the fortunate few who have so much power today are not just unwilling to understand the quiet desperation of most others but are unable to understand it. And every life ends in pain and death. How can we watch footage on TV of children dying of starvation in Gaza and believe God to be not only omniscient and omnipotent but wholly benevolent? "Auguries of Innocence", as a whole, is a poem concerned with the visible empirical fact of evil – the conceit at the heart of it is that small evils have can send cataclysmic reverberations throughout the state of England and the supernatural domains both above and below it. The failure to "see thro' the eye", the failure to be aware of all these small evils, to pretend that evil does not exist, is to be led to believe a lie. We need to acknowledge the viewpoints and experiences of "those poor souls who dwell in night". This passage is saying something even deeper though, I think, something that perhaps many readers will not have noticed is there in it because of an ambiguity in the way Blake is expressing himself and because they may not be attuned to the mystical tradition I am discussing. As already noted in this essay, there is a tension between organised conventional Christianity and some off its ordinary followers because the West's religious leaders have perpetuated as dogma since Aquinas that there is only God and that God is only and wholly good while under the surface, among the hermits and pariahs and non-conformists, the mystics like Blake, there has always been a kind of subterranean Manichaeanism or Gnosticism. It is an esoteric teaching that we find hints of again and again not just in poetry but in modern pop songs. I believe that those "who dwell in night" are the Gnostics, the Manichaeans, while those "who dwell in realms of day" are the orthodox comfortable Christians who have no doubt that God is a person who exists and is good and that they are destined for a blissful afterlife. The ambiguity is that, if one reads this poem closely, Blake seems to be saying that it is this second group who are "led to believe a lie" and so seems to be aligning himself with "those who dwell in night" even though a more cursory reading would tempt us to suppose, because the poem finishes the way it does, that Blake is saying that he is one of those who "dwell in realms of day". It is a tension between an overt Christianity associated with the sun and a subterranean counter-culture which saw the world in terms of Light and Darkness and which took its tone from the asterisms visible only at night. Only those who have experienced something like the dark night of the soul can appreciate the grave truths in a poem like this. The ambiguity in the poem arises from the fact that Blake is unwilling to pledge loyalty either to boring bourgeoise Christianity or to a more sexy but more dangerous because heretical alternative – perhaps in this poem he was shifting from one camp to another. 

I return now to an idea I touched on earlier. If evil exists, it seems then that we might have to abandon the Thomistic axioms concerning the attributes of God. Either there is continual conflict between two opposed supernatural forces, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, and we cannot know for sure which one will win out, or, if God is indeed omniscient and omnipotent, He is not omni-benevolent and may have plans for us which may not involve all of us having more happiness than unhappiness in our lives or involve the satisfaction of our deepest desires. This might explain why I found the appearance of three perfect rainbows in my world this year so menacing. I thought it might be the handiwork of a Demiurge who, if not evil, might have been utterly amoral. However, I would like to end this essay on an optimistic note. Could it be possible that there actually is a supreme God distinct from the Demiurge who is indeed not just all-powerful and all-knowing but all-good? We can imagine this to be true if we suppose, for instance, that it is not just God who is hidden from us but also His goodness. Perhaps in order to live in this world we need to believe in Good and Evil, as I have already suggested, and also, in order to do things, to perform actions in the world to help ourselves and others, we need to doubt that a good God exists and that an afterlife exists. We need to rail against death, to fight for ourselves and for others. "Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." And, if an afterlife does exist, it can be nothing like the picture painted by Julian Barnes in his story. This is why I find reincarnation a more probable eschatology than the Heaven and Hell of conventional Christianity. I do not believe in the Hindu doctrine that good actions lead to rebirths in more fortunate circumstances though because I am not sure that I believe in free will, It may yet be though that after a person dies there is an interregnum period during which he or she selects the next life he or she wants to have out of a kind of dispassionate curiosity– I think Plato himself proposed such a scheme and something like this is discussed in the scholarly work When Souls Had Wings by Terryl Givens. Perhaps after I die I may want to return to Earth to learn what it was like to be Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu or the Marquis de Sade. Or perhaps to experience the life experienced by Ramses III. It may well be that the Knowledge of Good and Evil is at a deeper level indeed an illusion. Perhaps a supremely good God may want us to believe in free will, in Good and Evil, may want us to be unsure if He exists and whether or not an afterlife or pre-life exists. Perhaps it is only if we possess such Knowledge, even if such Knowledge is at a deeper level indeed an illusion, only if the lives we led before we were born and will lead after we die are concealed from us, that we can most fully participate in the common human endeavour of seeking happiness for ourselves and others. Is ignorance paradise or perdition? The Gnostics knew the answer. *

A Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith

 I am going to take a small risk. For months I have been speaking to someone in my mind or in her mind and, as I have in the past, I want to try to hint to her that I am real and that she should make contact. There must be a way for you to contact me because I cannot contact you. Now, you're not a dunce and so you don't need to wear a dunce's cap and sit in a corner. What you do have is a thinking cap in your wardrobe and I would like you to put on your thinking cap backwards and come up with some cunning plan to reach me, a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel. By putting on your thinking cap backwards you'll be a skater girl and thus be the opposite of the boy in Avril Lavigne's song "Skater Boy".

I would like to sue the Mental Health Service or file charges against them with the police, but I still lack actual evidence of wrongdoing. I think that you have this evidence. I also lack financial resources and might have to employ a Legal Aid lawyer or whatever they're called in this country. In an email I sent someone this year I said that with my ability to come up with crazy theories and your facility with language and talent for gaming the system we should team up and use our sorcerous powers for Good instead of Evil. I no longer believe so much that you have an ability to game the system because I think you were encouraged and assisted, in a sense abetted, by others when doing some things that were a little shady and that they are more at fault than you. If you yourself want to sue the Mental Health Service I can help you do so if ever you make contact. It may be that rather than suing the Mental Health System directly, I shall have to sue my father and older brother. If this is something else you want to do, like I say, find some way to make contact.

I have this vision in mind of us being in a witness protection scheme and staying for a period more or less together somewhere like Oakune.

I have a lot of ideas about how to make New Zealand a better place. This might interest you, There are two very good long anthologies of poetry edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney called "The School Bag" and "The Rattle Bag." I think that in year nine, students at New Zealand secondary schools should be given these books to keep for the rest of their lives. They should also be given a quality anthology of New Zealand poetry to likewise hold on to forever. These books could be referred to again and again by English teachers during the five year period students spend at High School. In this way we could foster a love of poetry among New Zealand children, improve their language and interpretive skills, and also, by giving due weight to the New Zealand poets, instil a sense among New Zealand children of New Zealand identity, what it means to be a New Zealander. Another idea I have is to introduce a four day working week, something that we need because of high unemployment and the drying up of jobs partly because of technological innovation. I wish I was in a position where I could influence those in power to take seriously some of my ideas and sometimes I feel that if you and I were together, we might somehow be in this position.

You must endeavour as much as you possibly can not to be swept off your feet by multi-billionaire Peter Thiel. Just because he owns and controls a massive private spy agency called Palantir doesn't mean he always has people's best interests at heart. I have an interesting thought related to this. Omnipresent cameras and the capability of phones to record our conversations, together with AI, may render the legal profession redundant, obsolete. This is because the legal profession deals with both matters of fact and matters of interpretation (perhaps matters of opinion) and, in a surveillance state, there will never be any doubt about the facts and a genius level AI will perhaps always be able to come to the right conclusions concerning matters of interpretation, supplanting both the judge and counsel on both sides of any legal dispute.

It feels to me that I am currently the centre of the world. It is a ten minute walk to the University and only a little further to the Auckland High Court, It only requires a walk of comparable duration to reach the Aotea centre and town hall. I can easily walk to Dominion Road. A couple of weeks ago I walked around Mt Eden to Government House on the other side. The talent agency I used to work for occasionally, Kam Talent, some years ago shifted premises to Eden Terrace – I can see it through the windows of this apartment building. The reason I mention this is that I want to approach Mike King's charity, I Am Hope,  either to help out or to receive help and, when I looked up its address the other day, found that it is based five minutes away, in Diamond Street, in the streets between Symonds Street and Eden Terrace.

There must be a way for you to contact me so please please please, to quote both Morissey and Sabrina Carpenter, try to figure out a way to do so.

Yours sincerely, Silverfish AKA Andrew

A Simple Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics; Naming Myself

Repeatedly over the years I've discussed quantum mechanics in this blog and the main aim of this particular essay is to present, in simple terms, my interpretation of it. I've thought about quantum physics sometimes over the last six months when not encountering supernatural beings late at night in the Auckland CBD or thinking about God and now believe I can set out my understanding quite briefly and clearly. It is a conceptual rather than a mathematical interpretation; in fact, it is so simple and common sensical that it may disappoint some of my readers. I want then to talk a little about Bayesian probability and, in the last part, I want to talk about myself in the hope that the person I originally started writing this blog for still reads it.

I am not a fully trained physicist but you don't need a doctorate in physic to either invent or understand the interpretation I am going to present. Despite the simplicity of this interpretation, I have gathered the impression that it is unusual; I cannot remember learning about anyone else having espoused this particular interpretation. The reason I approach quantum mechanics from a different perspective than others who have studied it in more depth and in institutions other than the University of Auckland is that the textbooks I read explained it from a historical perspective whereas at other universities, I believe, they attempt to explain it ahistorically and from the ground up. At other universities, they teach quantum mechanics using Dirac notation whereas the textbooks I read came at it from a wave perspective. It is the clarity and pedagogical effectiveness of these textbooks, Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Serway and Jenett, that has enabled me to come up with a new interpretation of quantum mechanics. Of course, it might seem that I am being arrogant when I say that it is new – perhaps others have come up with the same interpretation or similar interpretations to it in the past but, if so, I have never heard about it or about any of them.

The easiest way to approach quantum mechanics is to think of a one-dimensional system. We can imagine a curve or sine wave, a diagram in which the horizontal axis relates to space and the vertical axis relates to something called a probability density or probability amplitude. The probability of finding a particle between two points, a and b, is the area under the curve, squared, between these two points. Because we are assuming that one and only one particle definitely exists somewhere along this single dimension the absolute square of this area must, in total, add up to unity, one. Sometimes a wave function can have complex values, both a real and an imaginary part, and so, even when considering a one dimensional system, we need two other axes, one for the real and one for the imaginary part of the probability amplitude. In reality, when wanting to describe a particle in the real world, we need three spatial dimensions, one temporal dimension, and two other dimensions related to the real and imaginary parts of the probability amplitude. Thus the wave function associated with a single particle actually involves six dimensions and if we want to conceptualise or hypothesise a wave function involving two particles, I think we need twelve dimensions.

In order to calculate the wave function we need a few measurements. One then works out what wave function or wave functions will fit these measurements, a wave-function which, when squared, because we are making the reasonable assumption that one and only particle is being described by it, at every moment in time has under it an area the integrates to equal exactly unity, one. We also need to ensure that the wave function satisfies the appropriate equation, the Schrodinger equation or, if we want to be more precise, the Dirac equation. Having calculated the wave functions that conform to the measurements (there can be more than one), we can use the wave functions so calculated to surmise the probabilities associated with other measurements that we have not yet made, measurements concerning where the particle will be in the future or where it must have been sometime in the past. 

The wave function is a kind of hypothetical or ideal structure, a structure always associated with some set of measurements. Suppose we use the wave function associated with a particle to work out where it will be at some future moment, which we call t, and then, at time t, perform a measurement to see whether or not it is at the location or not. We can either stick with our original wave function and pretend that the later measurement never occurred. Or we can revise the wave function we calculated by incorporating this later measurement into the data set, an incorporation that will force us to calculate a different wave function to associate with that particle.

Thus, in my interpretation, measurements are real and the wave function is unreal. The wave function is something hypothetical, abstract, idealised. It is a kind of model associated with some set of measurements. There is at least one wave function associated with every set of measurements or observations and these wave functions can be used to make probabilistic estimates concerning other potential measurements but, when these measurements are actually performed, either these later measurements must be ignored or, if not ignored, included in the set of measurements. And if they are included in the set of measurements, a new wave function must be calculated that incorporates these later measurements. My interpretation is that simple.

A long long time ago, in this blog, when first bringing up the topic of quantum mechanics, I discussed the Schrodinger's Cat paradox. I'm not going to describe this thought experiment again in detail because the reader may be able to find those original posts or, alternatively, just look up the Schrodingers' cat paradox on Wikipedia. According to my interpretation of quantum mechanics, the apparent paradox can be easily dissolved. Wigner is looking a box containing a cat, a gun, and piece of uranium with a fifty-fifty chance of decaying in a certain period of time, a piece of uranium which will cause the gun to kill the cat if it decays. According to traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time but in my interpretation the cat is both alive and dead only with respect to the set of measurements, observations, phenomenological experience possessed by or accessible to Wigner before he opens the box and makes the necessary observation, performs the measurement. The cat, though, because it can access or has available to it a different set of measurements, a different set of observations, a different phenomenological world, is, if it is alive and thus a conscious observing being, definitely alive. If Wigner, rather than opening the box himself, asks an assistant to do it, then the assistant, until such time as he tells Wigner whether the cat is alive or dead, has accessible to him or is possessed of or can register a different set of measurements than Wigner. The assistant has as part of the set of measurements available to him, in the period between opening the box and telling Wigner what he saw, information concerning whether the cat is alive of dead, that Wigner does not have until he himself is told. Because more than one set of measurements or observations can be associated with a particle, more than one wave function can legitimately be associated with it – if two different physicists have made two different sets of measurements of a particular quantum system, they will come up with two different wave functions for it and thus calculate two different estimates of the probability related to future measurements of the system in question. I'm going to repeat myself here because the idea is so simple and so obvious – a wave function is an abstract idealised conception always associated with some set of measurements. If two different people have made, collated, two different sets of measurements associated with a single system, they will arrive at two different wave functions to associate with it even though both sets ostensibly concern a single system.

I'll give another example. When you fire an electron through a slit and then observe where it lands on a screen some distance from the slit, you can make a probabilistic estimate of where on the screen it will land. The wave function that enables you to do this is calculated through some set of measurements – the width of the slit, the momentum of the electron, and the distance to the screen. However if we observe where it actually lands, one can revise one's understanding of the wave function it must have had when going through the slit and on transit to the screen. If we fire thousands of electrons through the slit, we can either ignore where they land and base our calculation of the wave function solely on the width of the slit, the distance to the screen and the momenta of individual electrons. Or we can calculate a different wave function for every electron basing the calculation on a set of measurements that includes where each lands. Or we can somehow calculate a kind of aggregate wave function that includes not only the width the slit, the distance to the screen and the momenta of the particles, but also the information given by where the electrons tend on average to arrive. The choice depends on the experiment and experimenters.

Much of the confusion surrounding quantum mechanics arises from a confusion about the nature of probability itself. Physicists themselves are often reluctant to admit how central a role probability plays in quantum mechanics, even though this was first suggested by Max Born in 1928, because the nature of probability is itself so misunderstood. Probability estimates or calculations arise from the uncertainty of particular agents. Suppose Bob knows that Alice drew a card from a deck yesterday; he may estimate that the probability of her having drawn the ace of spades as being one in fifty-two. However Alice herself, together with everyone she has told, knows for sure that she either drew the ace of spades or did not. The probability from her point of view, and from the point of view of others who have more information than Bob has, is either one or zero. Because I believe that the world is deterministic, the same type of argument applies when trying to calculate whether or not Alice will draw at the ace of spades tomorrow. From the perspective of omniscience events are always either absolutely certain or else impossible. It is because individuals have limited knowledge that we have any reason to believe in chance at all; probability calculations arise from individuals' uncertainty about the outcomes associated with particular scenarios. This may lead us to want to think of probability in a Bayesian way. Thomas Bayes's theory of probability is explicitly subjective, explicitly concerned with the knowledge of individuals, explicitly concerned with the relationship between hypotheses and evidence. But there is a problem with Bayes' Theorem as I want now to discuss.

Bayes's Theorem supposedly allows us to calculate the probability of probabilities. However, in reality, Bayes Theorem only enables us to say which of two competing hypotheses is more likely – it provides us with a rough guide as to which of two probability estimates is better. Suppose, for instance, we hypothesise that a fair die will come up 6 one time out of every six throws. We then roll a die six times and it comes up 6 once. The probability of our hypothesis being true given this evidence is the probability of this evidence given that they hypothesis is true multiplied by the probability that the hypothesis is true divided by the probability of the evidence. However in the absence of a more general hypothesis concerning the probability of the evidence in general, we cannot perform this calculation. Mathematically, however, the probability of the evidence equals the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis being true plus the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis being untrue. However we still cannot perform the calculation because assuming the hypothesis to be false gives us no clue as to how to calculate the probability of the evidence (given that they hypothesis is false.) We need a second competing hypothesis to perform the calculation.

We could approach this problem in the following way. Our main hypothesis is that a die will come up 6 on average once in every six throws. The probability of the evidence given this hypothesis can be worked out to be 5/6 to the power of five. We can pick, although for no particularly good reason, the following competing hypothesis: a die will come up 6 once in every two rolls. The probability of the evidence given this second competing hypothesis is 6 times 1/2 to the power of 6. To make the calculation easier, we shall assume that the probability of both hypotheses, before any evidence is taken into account, is equal. If we also pretend that these two hypotheses, the two priors, are mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive, then we can assess the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence as 5/6 to the power of five divided by the sum of 5/6 to the power of five and 6 times 1/2 to the power of 6. Of course, these two hypotheses are not mutually exhaustive but we can weigh the first hypothesis against the second by saying that the first hypothesis is 2 times 5/3 to the power of four weightier or more likely than the second hypothesis. The two values of the hypotheses can then, if we want, be substituted in as the priors of another calculation if we then roll the die six more times or however many times we want; hopefully the more often the die is rolled and the evidence tabulated, the closer we will come to a hypothesis that absolutely fits the evidence. The mathematics in this paragraph is complicated but I hope I have made no mistakes and the more mathematically minded of my readers can check my maths to see if I have it completely right.

We might also imagine rolling a die six thousand times and it coming up a 6 a thousand times. This is certainly what we would expect but the statisticians among my readers will of course know that for a 6 to come up exactly a thousand times our of six thousand rolls is still extremely unlikely. Yet hopefully you'll also understand that this is still the most likely outcome. The probability of the hypothesis, that the probability of rolling a 6 is 1/6, is vastly more weighty or more likely than a competing hypothesis such as the probability of rolling a 6 being 1/2. The hypotheses that come closest to being the best are the closest to 1/6 such as, for instance, a probability of 999/6000.

Although there are cheerleaders for Bayes' Theorem among the mathematical community, it is still not the perfect way of approaching probabilistic problems, still not the best way to understand what chance and randomness actually are. Its main advantage is that it seems to be explicitly subjective and begins with hypotheses, with rational problem solvers trying to make the best possible guesses. The hurdle all the Bayesian advocates admit to be problematic, the problem they all recognise when attempting to explain Bayes Theorem to the laity, is that, at first, the probabilities assigned to the hypotheses, the priors, are arbitrary. However, as they point out, the more evidence accumulates, the more the posterior probabilities should get closer and closer to the truth. So evidence increasingly should lead to a correct assignment of probability to a generic situation without any of the messy assumptions involved in older and more 'traditional' ways of understanding the nature of chance. The thing though that these cheerleaders or advocates forget to mention is that in order to perform a Bayesian calculation we need two competing hypotheses, not just one. (I have written about this before, last year, and if the reader is still unsure, he or she might be able to find and read this post.)

Even though Bayes Theorem is imperfect, it foregrounds the subjective nature of probability estimates. It fits with what I said earlier about how both the past and future may well be deterministic and that therefore probability must be considered a kind of estimate of how likely something will be from the perspective of an observer with limited information; probability estimates cannot be disentangled from the uncertainty of conscious agents or, I think to put it even better, an uncertainty related to some kind of schema associated with some set of measurements, a schema that enables someone who can work through all the complicated ever ramifying mathematics to make approximate predictions about future measurements. But these estimates are, like I say, approximate, uncertain. 

The interpretation of quantum mechanics I have presented in this essay is actually very very simple. It is far better than, say, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics invented by Hugh Everett. Everett thought that because the wave function only gives probabilities of future events and permutations, every possible event and permutation occurs, each in its own world. But this is really fucking stupid. I know people, especially Hollywood screen writers making up superhero stories, love the idea of a multiverse but the reason it is stupid is that many Many Worlds enthusiasts say that measurements never really occur, that the wave function is real and measurements are not, even though we cannot have a wave function at all without at least a couple of measurements to establish what it is or might be. It seems really stupid to me as well that Everett and his followers seem to think that even though there is an infinite number of futures there is only a single past. For the sake of consistency, they should either argue that there is only one past and one future (that the universe is deterministic) or that if there are indeed an infinite number of futures, as they want to claim, there must be an infinite number of pasts (and presumably an infinite number of presents as well). If this second paradigm seems to them the best, then there can indeed be no real measurements because all possible measurements happen, and if all possible measurements happen I suppose we might still be able to have wave functions but these wave functions are things that we can know nothing about because to know anything at all about them we actually do need at least a couple of measurements.

My interpretation, which is so simple (although it follows directly from other essays I've written over many years in this blog), simply seems the best and most obvious way to make sense of quantum mechanics. The only conceptual pill to be swallowed is the idea that probabilities are subjective estimates resulting from complex mathematics or worked out by ideal totally rational minds. Why then have so few people, if anyone at all apart from me, posed this as the best possible interpretation? Partly the physicists screwed it up through their choice of terminology. Almost from the beginning they talked about 'wave function collapse'. The wave function was something diffuse, distributed over a volume, but particles, when observed, when measured, seem to collapse to points. What the physicists who spoke about 'wave function collapse' missed is that if, when measured, a particle is observed to have a distinct localised location, its momentum must become quite a lot more inexact, as per the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The wave function doesn't collapse; rather another measurement has occurred resulting in a change to the wave function, in fact meaning that we must posit a whole new wave function that includes the new measurement as well as the prior ones as a data point in the total set of measurements.

This essay has been concerned with quantum mechanics again and a little with Bayes' Theorem. I feel that it is still unclear. If I am allowed to say this, it feels to me as though the world has changed around me, a change which makes it more difficult to express my ideas than it used to be; perhaps this has something to do with Trump's election. A lot has actually happened to me this year and the person I have spoken to almost all the time this year, albeit telepathically, may be surprised to learn that I am still obsessed by quantum mechanics despite everything else that has happened. I actually want to write about God, about Divine Hiddenness, and the Problem of Evil, even more than about quantum mechanics, but I am not far along the road enough yet to know what precisely I should say about all of this. One small thing I would like to do is to name myself: the author of the Silverfish blog is an Aucklander called Andrew Judd. If the person who I still cannot be sure absolutely exists and who I have been talking to indeed does have a friend called Emily Bronte (or something like that – I am being deliberately disingenuous to conceal people's true identities), a friend who has an interest in physics, perhaps one of you two can write to me and tell me if the theory I have proposed has legs at all. And, remember, if you ever get emotionally distressed, the best thing to do is to "Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!" If you ever do want to contact me, of course, you know my email address. If you don't contact me soon I may be forced to think that despite you seeming about as real as a disembodied person can be, although you seem the most plausible of impossible beings, you are indeed impossible and I will have to figure out another explanation for why God gave me the experiences he gave me this year. Here's hoping for a change in the weather. 

Concerning Telepathy

 The word 'rational' is indispensable. English speakers everywhere, particularly philosophers, use it all the time, but it is a word which most people seldom ever attempt to sufficiently fully elucidate in their own minds even though it so central to sane debate. In my dictionary, the main definitions given for the word 'rational' are "based on or in accordance with reason or logic [...] (of a person) able to think clearly, sensibly, and logically". It seems then that to think rationally is use deductive, inductive, or abductive reasoning to progress from evidence towards some kind of settled belief about the world. The most obvious kind of rational reasoning is deduction, in which we move from some set of premises to a conclusion. A deductive argument is valid so long as the conclusion follows from the premises even if the premises are wrong. However, when we think of the word 'rational' we all, philosophers included, tend to think of some inventory of premises, axioms, which we unquestioningly assume to be the proper foundation for all rational thinking. For an argument to be rational, not only must it be valid, it must also be sound – the premises must also be true. For instance, it is today considered rational by many, and here I'm thinking of public intellectuals like Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky, to think that the world operates deterministically, that the future is as fixed as the past; but it is considered irrational to think that it may be possible to accurately foresee the future. The notion that a poem written many decades ago could be an accurate prophecy concerning present events and people alive today seems to many, and here again I include Harris and Sapolsky, irrational. This is because people tend to accept as an axiom that we can know with certainty past happenings but can only make inductive guesses about future happenings, guesses predicated on scientific and statistical knowledge and our best understanding of the laws of nature. To think that the future is predetermined is today considered quite rational although this was not always the case; to think that future developments can be imparted to people in the present through some kind of mystical revelation is not.

Sometimes we say that a person is irrational if the person has inconsistent beliefs. The thing I find so annoying about many fundamentalist Christians is that, on the one hand, they subscribe to the dogma that God is omniscient, omni-benevolent, and omnipotent while, on the other hand, promoting the bigotry that only some Christians will ascend to Heaven while everyone else will be hurled into Hell for all eternity. This would mean that someone born and raised Muslim in Indonesia, through no fault of her own, will inevitably find herself in a realm of brimstone and hot pokers forever after, as will all Hindus in India, as will all the remote tribesmen in Brazil and Papua New Guinea who have never even heard of Jesus. These outcomes are not compatible with a truly good God; the beliefs of these fundamentalist Christians are not consistent and so, in my view, not really rational. However there are many people in the world who think any belief in God or in the supernatural at all is irrational a priori. I'm thinking here not only of Harris and Sapolsky but also Richard Dawkins. Such intellectuals believe that faith and superstition are irrational not because such positions have been reached through faulty reasoning but because the reasoning is based on false premises. The favourite argument of Richard Dawkins for atheism is that Darwin has shown that we don't need a creator God to explain the world and so we should use Occam's razor to cut him out of the picture entirely. We don't need Him; God has done more harm than good; so best evict him from the edifice of our beliefs. But this argument says nothing about other supernatural ornaments and appurtenances such as synchronicity, clairvoyance, omens, prophecies, or telepathy. To believe in magic is, according to the rationalists, to have accepted certain premises about the world which rationally we should have ruled out. But how can we rationally choose the correct set of premises?

This essay is concerned with telepathy. Stylistically, it starts off as a dry-as-sawdust academic treatise and then becomes a kind of narrative, a spooky story. If I wanted, I could write poetically, as I think the girl I call Jess would want me to do, or try to write comedically – but for me comedy is something that only emerges naturally, organically, when it emerges at all. I can't force it. And people who read this blog probably read it for the dry-as-sawdust philosophising because that's been my thing mostly. Before I get on to my main topic I just want to say about my writing that now I have been released from the Act and am off medication, I find that I am writing more confidently, more coherently, and much more quickly than I used to do.

Telepathy is one those phenomena that 'rational' people reject a priori. It is dismissed immediately from 'rational' discourse, I think, for two reasons – it requires us to believe that people have minds or souls somehow separate from our brains and bodies, and it requires us to also accept 'spooky action at a distance'. However there are still plenty of credible pundits who believe in souls and quantum mechanics quite plausibly suggests that spooky action at a distance happens all the time. Whenever a measurement is performed, according to a number of interpretations of quantum physics, it instantaneously affects everything else. All we have to do for the argument I wish to present and the story I intend to tell to be digestible is to set aside the axiom that telepathy is necessarily impossible; we have to allow ourselves to be a little 'irrational'. We can suppose that people do have souls and that souls can interact instantaneously or backwards and forwards in time.. We might say that even though the vast majority of people have never experienced telepathy (that they know of) and even though the 'experts' pooh-pooh the notion because it mucks up the 'rational' theories they devise, and because it frightens them, it might be that telepathy can in fact sometimes occur. In particular it may be a feature that may often be associated with individuals unlucky enough to be deemed 'schizophrenic'. Although doctors and the public generally want to file people diagnosed schizophrenic away in a drawer labelled 'loonies' it may be that the reason 'schizophrenia' is so hard to treat is because the supposedly 'rational' theories invented to describe it are wrong. Because they are based on false premises.

I believe a diagnosis of schizophrenia is a kind of curse, a malediction. The diagnosis itself, whether or not it is made explicitly, perniciously affects the patient – who I think should better described as the victim. Once a diagnosis of 'schizophrenia' is made, a person can subsequently begin to exhibit the kinds of signs and symptoms popularly and technically associated with the word. Because schizophrenics are supposed to sometimes stab people with knives, sometimes someone diagnosed schizophrenic can start to feel an impulse to stab people with knives. Because schizophrenics are supposed to wander around the inner city at night, they can start wandering around the inner city at night. These days there is a movement to define schizophrenia principally in terms of 'thought-disorder' and it may be that patients who were not formerly thought-disordered can after a time end up displaying incoherent speech patterns because of this change in diagnostic criteria, despite their best efforts to keep their communications linear. (As I've said before, I have simply never observed any thought disorder in any of the schizophrenics I've known but this might be because I knew them before this movement had gained momentum.) The worst aspect of 'schizophrenia' is that it is considered irremediable. I have known young people new to the system who were still full of hope for the future but, over time, if they have accepted the label and the idea that they need to take antipsychotic medication until they die, if they have accepted that they will never have a real job, never marry, and never have children, this hope is gradually surgically removed. They despair. And this might be why so many schizophrenics eventually wind up killing themselves.

I do not think thought-disorder is a necessary feature of schizophrenia but there is one feature that does seem to me almost universal – voice-hearing, It is difficult to know if voice-hearing is indeed an essential component of the condition or somehow arises because we expect it to. Sometimes schizophrenics, apparently, hear a voice maintaining a running commentary on their day-to-day lives. Others hear two or more voices in conversation. I knew a woman, Clair, who heard two male voices talking to each other. Most of the time schizophrenics hear negative voices, abusive voices. My own experience was that I didn't start hearing voices until after I had been a patient of the Mental Health Service for over a year and a half – and then when it started I would tend usually to have conversations with famous people, the first being George W. Bush, in my head. I didn't experience auditory hallucinations. Rather I thought I was communicating telepathically with these people. In my own experience, abusive voices were mercifully absent.

It may be that the rationale for defining schizophrenia today particularly with reference to thought disorder is because so many people who don't want to be considered schizophrenic also hear voices. There is a song by Rhianna which contains the lines "I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed/ Get along with the voices inside of my head." Pearl Jam have a song ("State of Love and Trust") which includes the lines "And I listen to the voice inside my head / Nothing, I'll do this one myself." Blink 182 have a song which includes the lines "Don't waste your time on me, you're already the voice inside my head." And, perhaps the best example, the song "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead begins "Can you please stop the noise, I'm trying to get some rest/ From all these unborn chicken voices in my head." Surveys have been done that show that voice-hearing is far common than is often realised. One is tempted to say that there is a community of people who hear voices, a community of people who often do not realise that they belong to a community. Some of them are Mental Health Patients and some of them are millionaire pop and rock musicians. There is probably many others. In the essay I wrote late last year about Janet Frame and Pink Floyd I mentioned that a patient I had met, Katrina, had told me that she would often speak with famous pop stars like Rihanna and that she regarded the voices she heard as belong to guardian angels, angels pretending to be celebrities. 

What I am going to suggest here is that often, although not always, voice-hearing is actually, literally, a kind of telepathy. I would like to suggest that it may be the case that sometimes voice-hearers may somehow sometimes get on the same wavelength as others who hear voices, sometimes famous people, sometimes people who are supposedly schizophrenic, sometimes people who hear voices but are not themselves mental health patients, and either speak with them or at least hear them in their heads. This is not a complete explanation for voice-hearing (it may be that the voices sometimes do not in fact belong to living people at all) and it also involves a leap into the apparently irrational, into a world in which we are rejecting the generally accepted axiom that mind-to-mind communication is impossible, in which we are tentatively positing that genuine telepathy may exist. This claim may seem crazy but only if we have ruled out telepathy on a priori grounds; furthermore, weirdly enough, believing in telepathy helps me understand my own life rather better than if I didn't believe it.

In this blog I have reverted to the question of my 'illness' again and again. I have often discussed my treatment by the Mental Health System. I have talked about my family and upbringing sometimes – although I have not gone into detail about them in the essays I have written here, I have said more about them in emails I have sent to various people. The vital piece missing from any coherent consistent explanation of my 'illness', I have realised, involves this notion of telepathy. I cannot fully explain my life without it. I think, now, that although it seems unlikely, it is not entirely impossible that I spoke with George W. Bush in January 2009. However the instance of voice-hearing that I want to return to again, because it was so important, was my first conversation with Jon Stewart, a conversation that occurred some months later, a conversation I have described a couple of times before. I was lying in bed one evening and heard him say, "Who the hell are you anyway?" I replied, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand." He said, "Are you straight?" I responded, "I think so." He said, "What's the time difference?" I replied, "About eight hours." We talked for a while and then the next night on his show he seemed to refer to the conversation we'd had. It blew my mind. Bear with me here. What I want you to imagine now is the following scenario. The real Jon Stewart, perhaps while lying in bed in the New York morning, from time to time hears voices in his own head. He has perhaps been hearing my voice for some time and singles me out as someone he wants to talk with more directly. He probably doesn't believe I'm real but decides to talk with me anyway. This scenario seems totally consistent with the manner of our first interaction and something that felt true to me at the time it happened. And then, as a consequence of this short conversation, not only do I adopt Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend but he decides for some inexplicable reason to adopt me as his imaginary friend.

I need to again rehash the story of my life at that time. For much of the remainder of 2009, Jon acted as a kind of guardian angel. I was under an enormous amount of emotional stress the whole year, particularly in August when, having threatened to kill myself, I was allowed to incrementally discontinue the drug I had been on, Risperidone. In around October or November of that year I began attending a weekly Hearing Voices Group at which I met the girl I call Jess. This is something I have also discussed several times before. Although my 'relationship' with Jess didn't begin in the fairy tale manner of a conventinal Rom-Com, I fell for her immediately and told people this. I made some mistakes with her early on – some of my missteps around her were the result of the 'illness', if that's the right word, that I was then experiencing, and some resulted from my own self-hatred. At the end of the last group session, she was swept away to the respite facility in West Auckland called Mind Matters that I had myself briefly spent time at and which I wrote a blogpost about a long time ago. After that last session, for a couple of months I experienced a 'psychotic episode' in which I heard voices from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep. I always intended to write a blogpost describing in detail this episode but never got around to it. At first I only heard Jon and Jess. It seemed to me rational to suppose that if Jess was a voice-hearer that she and I would be able to talk mind-to mind. Jon, as I've said in other posts, acted as a kind of go-between, setting Jess and I up together. One of the first things he said to me about her was, "Her brother's gay by the way." (The real girl's brother is not gay, to be clear, although the real girl, being young and somewhat naive then, may have entertained the silly notion that her brother was gay because he was foolish enough to be a fan of acclaimed musician James Blunt.) Shortly before New Years, I began hearing the voice of a former love, Sara, and then others. Eventually, perhaps around January 10, I started also talking with Barack Obama.

These experiences of voice-hearing, and possibility telepathy, felt totally real to me at the time. For instance, in I think early January, when I believed she was still staying at Mind Matters, I convinced Jess in my mind to run away from it and come stay at my house. In my mind, I imagined her sitting in a bus listening to music I had recommended, such as songs by Tricky. I even that evening put a comic book I'd bought in my letter box so that when she arrived she would be able to identify which house I lived in.

There is another story that I would like to tell here because it is important to me. Earlier that year, before I'd met Jess, I'd had a dream in which people were bubbles floating around in a kind of primordial soup. I remember one of the bubbles was John Campbell. I wrote a poem partly inspired by this dream that I included in a post I published some time ago, "Bruce Springsteen vs Faith No More" and which I'll quote again.

The brick asserted its right to be

More than an idea in someone's head,

And soon as the press got wind of this

A thousand ghouls gathered round his bed

And started demanding to be fed.

"We want what's in your brain," they said,

"No point prevaricating, don't try to hide,

Just speak out whatever's on your mind."

So I obliged and they, in return,

Vouchsafed a vision of Heaven's domain,

A million bubbles adrift in primordial goop,

Endlessly repeating each its own name.

"Open your eyes," said one. "Don't listen to those

Others and their idle chat, that's just noise

Jamming the signal. There's a light at the end

Of the tunnel, if you're wise." So I chose.

There's a light at the end of the tunnel.

There's a life at the end of the tunnel.

There's a seed at the end of the tunnel.

There's a knife at the end of the tunnel.

At the end of the tunnel, there's another tunnel.

In the end theres something still can be said

Sometime during that New Zealand summer, after I'd met Jess, while dozing, I had a follow-up to the dream I mentioned, not so much a real dream such as occurs when actually asleep but something more like a daydream. In it, Jon and I were bubbles talking with each other and a third bubbled floated over and joined us. The third bubble was Jess.

In writing this essay I am operating under the assumption that real telepathy is possible even though in doing so I may be completely undermining any reputation I may have acquired for being a rational thinker interested in science and philosophy. But let's still assume that telepathy can indeed sometimes occur. I would like to present the following extraordinary claim, that in some sense my two principal friends actually heard me. In Jon's mind, perhaps while lying in bed at night, he thought he was devising a love story about a man and a young woman, both straight but misdiagnosed homosexual and both correctly or incorrectly diagnosed schizophrenic, who meet and fall for each other. He thought it was a story he was making up, didn't realise that in fact it was real. I think Jess might actually have heard me that summer as well. In Jess's mind, I think she heard me as well as another male voice – but she didn't realise that the other male voice was Jon Stewart because she'd never watched The Daily Show. To her it felt as though what she was experiencing was something like a dream and a lot of our interactions were things she was just making up. Don't ask me how I know this. Much of the shared dream world we inhabited was fantasy, sometimes created by me and sometimes by the other two. Of course, there were other voices I heard during this period and it is still difficult for me today to fully separate the real from the illusory concerning this period.

In around February something unpleasant happened which I didn't understand until recently and the voices faded away. Perhaps in March there was another Hearing Voices Group organised that I attended. I didn't attend it because I was still hearing voices but rather because I hoped to see Jess again. Unfortunately she didn't come back. For some reason, The Daily Show didn't return to New Zealand TV that year either.

In 2011 I made contact with the real girl and we hung out a number of times that year. We saw three films and a play together. I am not certain how often we saw each other but it wasn't often. I think now that she liked me but was perhaps too insecure to see me on a regular basis. I think she felt comfortable enough with me though to tell me things that she would perhaps never tell others. That year I had another blog, Persiflage, which she regularly read; I think she was my only reader. I stayed over at her house one night early on and she showed me some of her poems; I could tell immediately that they were the work of a genuine poet; that night I slept on the couch. Because the girl's story is at least as important as mine I feel I need to share something that may seem like oversharing; it may be that she thought we'd had sex when I thought we hadn't. The reason for this misalignment of our histories is that I think she and I defined the term 'sex' differently at the time. On one occasion she said to me, "You've got further than anyone else." I have a hunch, and this is quite important, that she did genuinely like me but didn't particularly like herself – at the time though I though that the reason why she was always unavailable when I suggested we do stuff together was because it was me who was unlikable.

In 2012 I wrote my film about her but, oddly, only drew a little upon the actual madness I'd experienced. In 2013 I became 'ill' again, partly I think because somehow the film script I'd written had blown up and partly because my medical notes, which I think were all wrong, had been leaked to the media. I reeentred the Mental Health Service with the aim of getting the truth about both me and Jess on the record. In early 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act and, incredibly, just after I was put under a Compulsory Treatment Order, The Daily Show suddenly returned to New Zealand TV. I believe Jon Stewart might have saved my life that year. If miracles can occur I think this qualifies as a miracle. Once again I am going to venture into the realm of conjecture. Perhaps someone in Jon's circle had told him, "Someone in New Zealand has written a film about schizophrenia with you as a character"; perhaps it was somehow at his request that The Daily Show came back. It may also have been the rather traumatic discovery that I was a real person, or perhaps his sense that he hadn't successfully saved me or saved himself, that led Jon to retire from the public eye for ten years. Of course, the girl I call Jess is at least as important as me and required saving just as much as I did, but I don't think Jon realised this at the time.

Let's move away from a bald narration of a rather boring history to discuss telepathy more generally. Like Rupert Sheldrake I am compelled to try to come up with naturalistic theories of the supernatural, rational accounts of the irrational. It seems to me that people are like radio antennas, that it is possible for people who may be on opposite sides of the world to have the same resonant frequencies. What Jon, Jess, and I all had in common is not only that we're bright and highly verbal but that we were all adversely affected by parental divorces when we were children. Jon's reaction was a kind of anger directed towards his father and all authority figures; my reaction was to feel responsible and thus to often experience terrible feelings of guilt and shame; I believe that Jess's reaction is that she developed a terrible fear of being abandoned by those around her. She tended to avoid emotional intimacy because it made her vulnerable. Something else about about telepathy: it exists in the overlap between people, the knowledge two or more people share. Although it is possible to communicate some information from one person to another, I cannot, for instance, tell Jess about an author or actor she has never heard of. It is this dependence on shared knowledge that makes genuine telepathy so difficult to prove. There is something else. Sometimes when conversing with a voice, one's interlocutor can sometimes make small errors understanding one, exactly as can occur in a real conversation. It is these errors that, for me, partly make my belief in telepathy even stronger.

The reason I have written this essay is because, as readers will have gathered from the last several posts, this year I have again been talking with Jess and sometimes someone else in my mind. Most of the time I am just as 'sane' as any other person and am in fact much happier and more functional than I was when being forced to take a large dosage of Olanzapine on a fortnightly basis. But every now and then during the day and night I can slip into a state in which I talk with Jess and others. I can choose when this will occur and these periodic shifts into psychic craziness haven't prevented me from approaching the City Mission to see if I can be a volunteer or reading the book I am currently reading. When I talk with Jess, unlike when I talked with her and others fifteen years ago, it feels real. What we talk about is not something I really want to share with the whole world. But it feels like the truth. Often it seems Jess is afraid that I don't really exist and this is why I am again writing about it. In fact I made a commitment to her to write a post tonight and this is why this essay is not as well written as I would like it to be and why I have stayed up all night writing it. My own fear is somewhat more peculiar: I worry that I am not speaking to her in the present but am somehow speaking with her as she was two or three years ago, when she wrote her poetry collection Naming the Beasts. I hope this fear is unjustified.

As I said I am not going to divulge all our conversations here but as a token for her that I can hear her, I want to talk about movies again. The impression I formed is that she is living in some kind of complex or supported accommodation for the mentally ill and watches so many movies that she has grown to dislike the entire medium. Antipsychotic medication has a side-effect known as anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. In a recent essay I suggested we watch Lost Highway together but, rather than wait to see it with me, she decided to watch it herself – and intensely disliked it. A few days ago she told me that her favourite movie was Exit Through The Giftshop. I said, "I've heard of it. It's a documentary, isn't it?" Then I went and googled it and found it to be a mockumentary directed by the artist Banksy. I told her that my favourite film was Naked by Mike Leigh. More recently she asked me to give her a list of my four favourite movies and I got the impression that she had picked up a pen and paper and written them down. The films were, in order, the French film Holy Motors, Tim Burton's film Ed Wood, Secrets and Lies by Mike Leigh again, and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. I am not sure if these four films are indeed my favourite films but they were the first films I could think of. This is actually the point of this long essay, an essay I do wish was written better – to put those four films that I listed to her in her head in this blog.

I don't want to suggest that all the voices schizophrenics hear can be explained through telepathy. In a way, and I know this again sounds crazy, I think that there may be angels and demons in the world. St Augustine thought that angels were disembodied intelligences that spoke to people. The story I have told in this essay seems to involve three people but in fact there is a fourth who is invisible. For Christmas, my niece's partner, an atheist who interestingly has a degree in Religious Studies, bought me Scented Gardens for the Blind by Janet Frame. I think it is an astonishing book and I think I would recommend it even more than her poetry. In it there is a character who one day hears a voice speaking to him six inches away from his ear. Much of the book is eminently quotable but there is a long passage I want to single out because it concerns voice-hearing, although not the kind of voice-hearing I have been discussing in this essay, and because it is considerably more well written than this post has been.

The voices nagged him at night. They disappointed and shocked him, for he had always believed, as people do, that if ever a voice from a cloud addressed him it would be concerned with prophecies, eternities, that it would provide remarkable information which man had been unable to get in any other way. Except for one or two occasions, Edward's voices talked trivialities, telling him, for instance, that the door was shut when he knew that the door was shut, that he had forgotten to pay his paper bill, when he knew that too. Or they called his name, not, as one might expect, as if he were a chosen soul hailed from the heavens, but as if he were being called to lunch by someone who did not particularly care if he stayed hungry. At other times the voices spoke obscenities about the Strang family; indeed, it was mostly the Strang family who featured in the remarks; but again they told Edward nothing which he did not already know or suspect, and this infuriated him with a sense of wasted time, for he could not decide whether he should listen to the voices in the hope of collecting a stray prophecy, or whether he should ignore them and seek revelations from people who had not such a need to remain bodiless, who could be answered back and argued with and whose speech could be made visible and human, though less effective, by gestures and the stacking of sentences, in picket-patterns, between flesh and light. Yet, however he decided to act, Edward could not ignore the voices. They claimed his consciousness as if it belonged to them by right. They occupied it entirely, and only when they had withdrawn could he make some movement, or attempt to reply to them, and by that time it was always too late; they had fled, he was left alone, angry, ashamed, confused, and often afraid. The Strangs, they said. The Strangs.

Janet Frame was such a good writer it can make the rest of us just want to not even bother.