Modal Logic Part 2

In the previous post, I discussed modal logic and presented a paradox. This paradox runs deeper than I first thought, and in tonight's post I wish to discuss this paradox again from a different angle, from a perspective that brings to the surface this profounder aporia. I know the last couple of posts have been a little drier than my readers probably like, but I've been in the mood in recent months to discuss abstract ideas, to try to get my ideas down 'on paper' as best I can. Even though, stylistically, these posts lack the fireworks you find in quality literature, may seem a little boring on the surface, underneath there is a deeper wisdom, if this is the right word, than you find in more meretricious opinion pieces.

The paradox I presented in the previous post runs as follows: The proposition "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that p." The proposition "It is possible that p" implies "It is possible that not-p." Therefore the proposition "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that not-p" – a contradiction. In the previous post, I suggested that the way to dissolve this paradox is to presume that all propositions are either necessary or possible, but cannot be both. This attitude towards proposition entails a particular attitude towards the world, a picture of the world that has attracted many philosophers for a long time. Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein both regarded the world as consisting of facts and believed that every true proposition corresponded with a particular fact in the world. Although both Russell and, I think, Wittgenstein disapproved of and dismissed modal logic, we can elaborate on the picture they embraced by supposing that all facts are either necessary or contingent. Every fact is either one or the other. Furthermore, a fact can be necessary, or it can be contingent, but it can't be both. This picture is the one we will be working with.

If we divide all facts into those which are necessary and those which are contingent, if we divide all true propositions into those which are necessary and those which are only possible, it seems, at first, that we have dissolved the paradox. The conjunct of "It is possible that p" and "It is necessary that p" is logically false. It is like saying, "The ball is blue, and the ball is red"; necessity and contingency are mutually exclusive properties. Only one of the two can be possessed by an preposition. Logically, if "It is necessary that p" is true "It is possible that p" is false, and the argument which led to the contradiction I described in previous paragraph is shown to be invalid. And so it seems we have dissolved the paradox.

Or have we? If the conjunct described above is false, it must be because one of the component propositions is false. Let us assume that "It is necessary that p" is true and "It is possible that p" is false. If "It is possible that p" is false, this implies "It is necessary that not-p" is true. Therefore "It is necessary that p" implies "It is necessary that not-p". So it appears we have arrived at another contradiction. If we assume, however, that "It is necessary that p" is false and "It is possible that p" is true, no contradiction arises. This applies, of course, to all propositions. In other words, then,  there are no necessary propositions and no necessary facts. A fact can only be contingent and all true propositions express possibility rather than necessity.

I have been thinking about this issue a lot over the last week. When the idea of the second paradox, the other horn of the dilemma, occurred to me, it seemed at first that there were only two possible solutions: we could presume that all facts are necessary and that all true propositions express necessary truths, or we could presume that all facts are contingent and that all true propositions express only possible truths. A world which is a mixture of necessary and contingent facts leads only to paradoxes of the sort I've described. At first, I leaned towards the first option – in the previous post, I stated that I believed that all truths are necessary, that fate exists and free will doesn't. In this blog, in the posts about free will, quantum theory, and Donnie Darko, I have expressed the view that the world is deterministic, that all effects follow ineluctably from causes. But when I considered these paradoxes more rationally I realised that the only logical answer to them is to assume that all the facts that make up the world are contingent, and that all propositions can only express possibilities rather than necessities.

If this argument is correct, then there is no such thing as necessity. It might be helpful to enliven this discussion with some examples. The proposition, "It is necessary that Donald Trump is President of the United States" is false but the proposition "It is possible that Donald Trump is President of the United States" is true. The proposition "All cats are necessarily carnivorous" is false but the proposition "All cats are possibly carnivorous" is true. The proposition "It is necessary that the water molecule is dihydrogen monoxide" is false but the proposition "It is possible that the water molecule is dihydogen monoxide" is true. The proposition "The Morning Star is necessarily the Evening Star" is false but the proposition "It is possible that Morning Star is the Evening Star" is true. All of these propositions imply that their opposites might be true. Trump might not the President of the USA, all cats might not be carnivorous, the Morning Star might not be identical with the Evening Star, and so on. In order to resolve the paradoxes I described, we need to abandon our certainty that truths are knowable, embrace our uncertainty.

The only way out of the two paradoxes I have proposed is to suppose that all our knowledge is provisional.

The type of argument I am making is similar in method but opposite in conclusion to arguments made by Aristotle and by Richard Taylor. These two philosophers, one ancient and one modern, argued that fate exists. Consider the statement, "The First World War ended on 11 November 1918". If this is true, they argued, it was necessarily true. Currently, the US Congress has just begun the process of trying to impeach Trump. Suppose I say, "Sometime in the next three months, Trump will be impeached." This statement is, today, according to Aristotle and Taylor, either true or false: either way it implies that future events, like past events, are necessary, are in a sense preordained, unescapable, fated. They are necessarily true. One well known wannabe philosopher tackled this problem and sought to show that the fatalists were wrong. In an essay written in 1985, David Foster Wallace argued that propositions are necessarily true at some times and only possibly true at other times. It is a long while since I have read Time, Fate, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (I recommend it to readers of my blog) but it strikes me that Wallace could have simplified his argument if he had considered the idea that the notion of necessity, in modal logic, is incoherent, as I have argued in this and the previous post.

I'll summarise my argument in the following way. The conjunct made up of the two proposition "It is necessary that p" and "It is possible that P" is false. The conjunct made up of the two propositions "It is necessary that p" and "It is not possible that p" is false. Therefore, by the law of bivalence, the first proposition in each conjunct, "It is necessary that p", must be false. Therefore there is no such thing as a necessary proposition. All facts are contingent and all propositions are only provisional, possible.

This conclusion is, I concede, inconsistent with the conclusions I have drawn in some of my other posts. Can we reconcile fatalism with the contingency I have suggested is an inescapable feature of the way we use language? In the second paragraph, I limned a picture of the world, the picture presented by Russell and others: the world consists of facts, and true propositions correspond to particular facts. Perhaps this picture is wrong. Perhaps all facts are necessary, and all propositions are contingent. Propositions do not correspond to facts but rather betoken beliefs that we have acquired from others or inferred from observations of the world. Perhaps this is a better picture. We are licensed to say, for instance, "As far as I know, Donald Trump is President of the United States" or "As far as I know, all cats are carnivorous" or "As far as I know, the Morning Star is the Evening Star". I am unsure if this different picture, different perspective, can fully resolve the paradoxes I have discussed in this post and the previous post. But it might. The view of truth I have been trying to present in the last four posts is difficult for me to articulate clearly, but if any of my readers are familiar with the work of Richard Rorty, you might find that he has done the job for me. I hope so anyway.

Modal Logic

In today's post, I wish to talk about modal logic, in particular alethic propositions. This post follows on from the previous two and will also refer to the two posts I wrote about quantum physics, "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat" and "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2". I don't have a clear idea of the direction this post will take; instead I think I'll work out what I want to say as I go along.

The major pioneer of modal logic in modern times is a chap called Kripke. When he was only nineteen and still a sophomore, he came up with a theory that has enormously influenced logic ever since. Kripke's contribution to philosophy was to say that the operators "It is possible..." and "It is necessary..." could be prefixed to propositional statements. I could say, for instance, "It is possible that my friend Harold is a lifeguard" or "It is necessarily the case that Germany lost the Second World War". In general, if a proposition such as "It is possible that P" is true, the proposition "It is necessary that not-P" is false, and if a proposition such as "It is necessary that P" is true, the proposition "It is possible that not-P" is false. In my view, Kripke's system is meretricious. It seems simple and obvious but in fact is neither. My aim in this post is to demonstrate that modal logic leads to paradoxes unless we recognise that probabilist propositions exist only in the minds of observers.

A simple example of a modal proposition is "It is possible that there is life on other planets". Another modal proposition is "It is possible that Mark Lundy didn't murder his wife and daughter."  A third is the proposition "Magnetic monopoles exist". I imagine most of my readers would regard these three sentences as reasonably unproblematic – the three propositions deal with questions that are live issues in the world today.  The paradox emerges when we deal with statements that are generally recognised as patently apparent truths or falsehoods, with statements that everyone knows to be true or knows to be false. Suppose I assert the following: "As of September 2019, it is possible that Donald Trump is President of the United States." I imagine at least some of my readers will feel that there is something fishy about this statement. Donald Trump simply is the President of the United States. You might nevertheless have the intuition that, despite its fishiness, it must be true. After all, if Donald Trump is the President of the United States, it must be possible for him to be President. A proposition like this could be reformulated or re-expressed. We could say "Donald Trump is possibly the President of the United States" is equivalent to "Either Donald Trump is President of the United States, or he is not President of the United States." This reformulation is true a priori. The sentence "Either p or not-p" is true of all propositions, including ridiculous ones, by the law of bivalence. I could say "It is possible that the moon is made of blue cheese" and it would be true, if we interpreted propositions dealing with contingent facts in this way. So the intuition that the Trump proposition must be true has been shown to lead to unreasonable and insupportable consequences.

Some of my readers may have the equally strong intuition that the fishiness of the Trump proposition I used as an example above suggests it must, somehow, be false. After all, if we say that it is possible that Trump might be the President of the United States, we are suggesting that it is also possible for him not to be President of the United States. And we know, empirically, that this must be incorrect. Because he is. We can approach this confusing and confounding situation from another direction. Consider the following two statements: 1. "It is possible that Donald Trump didn't become President in January 2017." 2. "It is possible that Donald Trump might not have become president in January 2017." From one angle it appears that these two sentences are equivalent. From another angle, they are quite different. The first appears to be saying something about the world, or about our knowledge of the world. The second is asserting that the world could have been some other way, is contingent, and hints at the idea, so dear to most people, that we all have free will and that there is no such thing as fate.

I am not a professional philosopher, have not read any recent literature about modal logic, but I suspect that the paradox I am going to attempt to articulate as clearly as I can in a moment is at once obvious and at the same time not one modal logicians have recognised, even though it is at the heart of the systems they embrace. Modal logicians know that the proposition "It is possible that p" does not imply "It is necessary that p" but I suspect that many would defend the converse relationship, saying that "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that p". They would argue that the set of all necessary truths is a subset of the set of all possible truths. The paradox is as follows. "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that p". "It is possible that p" implies "It is possible that not-p". Therefore, "It is necessary that p" implies "It is possible that not-p". We have arrived at a contradiction. The only way out is to suppose that the first inference, the first move, was wrong – if the proposition "It is necessary that p" is true, the proposition "It is possible that p" must be false. The set of all necessary truths and the set of all possible truths are mutually exclusive. A proposition can be necessarily true or possibly true, but cannot be both.

The issue I am engaging with indirectly is once again the issue of free will. Do people have it or don't they? I am inclined to believe that people don't have free will and that Fate exists. I believe that all truths are necessary and that the notion of possible truths and possible worlds is incoherent. Interestingly, the issue of whether people have free will or not is an issue that divides philosophers. Most academics working in Philosophy departments, apparently, are compatibilists – they believe it is possible to reconcile determinism with free will. Chomsky thinks we have free will but lack the cognitive firepower to make sense of the concept of it. Daniel Dennett and Rupert Sheldrake, despite being polar opposites in almost every other way, both believe in free will. Sam Harris doesn't. I sometimes disagree with Harris about political issues but I happen to agree with him on this philosophic bone of contention. For an interesting discussion of issues relating to free will and counterfactuals, have a listen to his conversation with Judea Pearl, available through Harris's podcast or on Youtube.

If all truths are necessary and the notion of a possible truth is incoherent, why then do human beings employ words like "possible", "improbable", "likely" and "unlikely" in their vocabulary? To answer this question and to resolve the paradox I submitted above, I am going to tell a small story. In mid 2015, after Donald Trump throws his hat into the ring and begins seeking after the Republican nomination, Jack and Jill go to live in the wilds of Borneo to study orangutans. They do not read the newspaper or watch TV for four years, and have no contact with the outside world at all. Yesterday, Jack says to Jill, "It is possible that Donald Trump might be President of the United States." Given this context, the fact that neither Jack nor Jill knows, this proposition no longer seems so absurd, so fishy. What Jack is saying is "As far as we know, Donald Trump might be President of the United States." It is posited as a possibility because neither Jack nor Jill has all the relevant information. This is the heart of my argument. All probabilistic statements, in my view, presume this caveat. As far as the astrophysicists and biologists know, there might be life on other planets. As far as the New Zealand body politic knows, Mark Lundy might be innocent. As far as the physicists who embrace the theories of Paul Dirac know, magnetic monopoles might exist. All estimates of probability, even an estimate as crude as the distinction between "possible" and "necessary" are, in a sense subjective, are based on models of the world that do not include all the information and relevant rules. Probabilistic statements arise from ignorance. If we could see the world in a purely objective way, if we could cleanse the doors of perception, if we were omniscient, all truths would be necessary. This is the idea that I was trying to express in the two posts on quantum physics, "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat" and "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2". I think these two posts are perhaps the most important I have written.

To try to sum up – a truth is possible if the people in the relevant linguistic community are in doubt as to whether it is true or not. A truth is necessary if everyone in the community is sure that it is true.

I hope the reader gets the points I'm trying to make. If I am unclear or have not persuaded you, I shall try to mount further arguments in favour of my position in the future. I hope, also, that you see the connection between this post and the previous two.

Fictional Objects

In the previous post, I discussed the analytic-synthetic distinction with a view of approaching, to my mind, one of the most fundamental problems in philosophy, the question of how we can make true or at least meaningful statements about fictional objects. The previous post wasn't perfect. For instance I suggested that the proposition "Pluto is a planet" is a false analytic proposition although it would in fact be better described as a false synthetic proposition. Aside from this slight unclarity, the previous post provides some good groundwork for today's post. Readers may well ask – what does the analytic-synthetic distinction have to do with fictional objects? In today's post, I wish to move a little closer to an answer.

I am interested in fictional objects because my training is in the study and interpretation of literature. Suppose we wish to write an essay about the Sherlock Holmes stories. We want to do two things – we want to paraphrase some of the stories and move towards deeper meanings. We want the statement, "Sherlock Holmes is the world's greatest detective and lives at Baker Street," to be true, at least provisionally; we want moreover to say that the stories say something about rationality and the powers of human deduction to solve problems. We want literary interpretation to be something capable of making true claims about what stories say, and we wish stories themselves to at least sometimes assert true claims. However, there is a thread that has run through philosophy, from Hume to Frege to today, that says that a proposition like "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" is either false or meaningless by reason of the apparent fact that it is making a claim about a nonexistent entity. Because literary interpretation is, in a sense, parasitic on literature, to accept this view would also be to accept that all literary criticism is either false or meaningless. Obviously, this is a conclusion I cannot countenance.

The best way, in fact the essential, only, way, to approach the issue of fictional objects is through a kind of story, a true story. Bear with me.

I wake up in the morning from a nightmare about vampires. In the dream, I believed the vampires to be real but when I wake up I ascribe to them a different ontological status. The vampires were unreal. I wouldn't apply the adjective fictional to the vampires because they seemed real at the time and we almost always know that fictional beings are fictional, but I might use the words illusory, imaginary or dreamlike to describe them after I have fully woken and shrugged off the fog of sleep. I climb out of bed and make myself breakfast. The bed, the bread, the butter, the utensils, and all the other objects in my apartment are real, existent. I pick up the newspaper and read articles about Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and convicted murderer Mark Lundy. I have never met either man and have never had any personal direct acquaintance with either – rather, my knowledge about them is based on written accounts or testimonies by journalists and the occasional photo. Nevertheless, I believe both Bolsonaro and Lundy to be real, existent; they are real objects existing in my cognitive environment. I know them to be real because I put my trust in the newspaper journalists to tell the truth about events that have happened or are happening out there in the real world. I pick up The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and read a little about Arthur Dent. Arthur Dent is also an object in my world and, like Bosonaro and Lundy, I know about him only through a written account. However, I do not regard Dent as real, rather I regard him as fictional. I know that he is fictional because he is the protagonist of a novel – there are multiple signs, both internal to the novel and external to it, that point to the fact of him being fictional. I then read a little from a recent translation of Cicero. Cicero is neither fictional nor existent; rather he is someone who died (and passed out of existence) more than two-thousand years ago. Nevertheless he is an object in my world because I can talk meaningfully about him with others. Having read a couple of passages from Cicero, I walk to the library. On the way I pass by a number of other human beings – I know nothing about them accept how they present themselves physically to my gaze but I regard them as real, existent. The library has two floors, the ground floor being devoted to fiction and the first floor to non-fiction. I assume that all the books held on the ground floor concern fictional objects while all the books on the second floor (with the possible exceptions of literary criticism and philosophy) concern objects that exist now, have existed in the past or are likely to exist in the future. I walk over to the graphic novels section and grab a collection of Sandman stories. Most of the characters in this comic book series, such as Morpheus, Death, and Delirium, are also objects in my world, objects in fact as important to me as Arthur Dent, but, like Dent, they are all also fictional.

This little story presents a kind of quasi-phenomenological perspective on how we engage with the world. It is not orthodox phenomenology. Orthodox phenomenology, as pioneered by Husserl, seeks out the universal characteristics of how we experience the world, brackets the individual out, but my little story is intentionally quite personal, autobiographical. Moreover, orthodox phenomenology brackets out the issue of existence (this is known as epoche) and focusses purely on experience. My intention is quite different. I am trying to show the variety of ontological categories into which we place the various objects that occupy our cognitive environments. Some objects in our world we know to be real, existent, because we have first hand acquaintance with them. Examples in my own experience include my bed, fridge, bread, butter, and my mother when I go to visit her. Other objects, such as Bolsonaro, Lundy, and Cicero (and for that matter China) I know about only through written and spoken reports, through hearsay – yet I know these objects to be existent because I place my faith in the honesty and integrity of the people who tell me about them. I choose not to believe the National Enquirer when it reports on sightings of Bigfoot. And then there are objects which I always know to be fictional, such as Arthur Dent, Sherlock Holmes, Garfield, Hamlet, and Scooby Doo. Even though these objects are fictional, and I know them to be fictional, they form part of my cognitive environment and I can talk meaningfully about them with others.

This perspective is at once obvious and surprising. What is surprising is the ease with which we categorise different types of object into different ontological compartments When we look at the world in this way, as a world containing both factual and fictional objects, it can seem mysterious the process by which we effortlessly divide the world up, into things that once existed, exist now, might exist, and have never and will never exist (and are thus either fictional like Dent or fallacious like Bigfoot). Yet children seem capable of making this distinction almost from the time they learn to talk. A four-year old child who is read Dr Seuss in bed by his parents almost certainly knows that the Lorax and the Grinch are imaginary, although he might not yet know this word. As soon as children begin to play, they play at make-believe, pretending to be superheroes or cops or Red Indians. The ability to play, to discriminate between fictional objects and non-fictional objects, comes naturally to children. I want to digress a little. Phenomenologists like Husserl thought there was something mysterious about why we believe other people have minds. Husserl's explanation is that a person compares the behaviour and physical form of the other to his or her own behaviour and physical form, and infers that the other has a mind as result. In reality, a child learns that other people around him have minds before the child realises that she has a mind herself. A four year old child never doubts that his or her parents have minds. If anything, children go too far in the opposite direction, ascribing conscious volition to natural processes. Similarly the distinction between fact and fiction comes naturally to children.

There is an important point I need to make before we move on. Although fictions primarily concern fictional objects, they contain existent objects as well. Sherlock Holmes lives in London, and London was and is a real place. Arthur Dent is obsessed with tea, and tea is an existent beverage. The Sandman sometimes features people who once lived, such as Augustus and Shakespeare. Moreover, fictions like Romeo and Juliet and Othello can tell us true things about love and jealousy. This fascinating topic, the way fictions mix fact and fantasy, is important, but is not something I wish to explore in this post.

The world-view I am presenting is one in which we live and move within a cognitive environment that contains fictional as well as existent objects. This leads to the conclusion that existence is a property that objects either have or don't have. The name for this position is Meinongianism, an ontological and logical system invented by Alexius Meinong and criticised by Bertrand Russell among others. Many logicians before, during and after the time of Meinong found the idea that existence might be a property or predicate intellectually or logically unpalatable (I think the first to say that existence isn't a property was Kant). In my opinion, however, I don't think Meinong went too far but rather that he didn't go far enough. Meinong argued, I understand, at least early in his career, that there is an object for every property or set of properties. I believe, by contrast, that all objects exist in the mind or world of a conscious knower. Meinong's position tends a little toward the Platonic world-view I criticised in the post immediately preceding this one– it suggests a realm of Platonic Ideas divorced from reality. I believe, by contrast, that objects are created in a conscious mind as a result of perceptions of the world and of verbal communications with others. If we adopt the position I am advocating, a number of paradoxes associated with conventional Meinongianism, paradoxes first proposed by Russell, evaporate.

For instance, Meinong argues that there are objects that each only have one property. This leads to the following paradox. "1. There is an object, x, which has the sole property of being blue. 2. The object x has the additional property of only having one property. 3. Therefore the object x has only one property and has at least two properties." This paradox can be avoided if we suppose that Meinong was wrong in postulating that there can be objects that only have one property, if we suppose that objects are created in the mind of a knower. Suppose a friend tells me, "There is an object that is blue." I have no reason not to believe her and consequently constitute such a blue object in my mind. Suppose my friend says, "There is an object that is blue and this is its sole property." I can choose not to believe her on the grounds that it is logically impossible for something to have both only one and two properties. If my friend says, "There is an object that has only one property," I can again choose not to believe her on the grounds that it is logically incoherent to presume the existence of objects that only have one property each. If we accept the position that objects exist in the minds of conscious knowers, all objects, existent and nonexistent alike, have a potentially infinite number of properties, as many as I or others wish to grant them.

According to Meinong, there is a sharp distinction between existent and non-existent, Meinongian, objects. Existent objects have infinitely many properties while Meinongian objects only have a finite number of properties. I think Meinong was wrong to propose this sharp distinction. I know that Arthur Dent is fictional because he is talked about by novelist Douglas Adams in a novel; I know that Bolsonaro exists because he is talked about by journalists in the newspaper. We base our determination of whether an object is existent or nonexistent on circumstantial evidence. There is no sharp distinction between the two types of object. Suppose a friend says to me, "I know a chap called Kevin who went to prison for tax evasion." In my mind, at first, there are only a few properties I can assign to Kevin: that a person called Kevin exists, that he went to prison, and that the reason he went to prison was for tax evasion. However, I can and do infer additional properties. I can infer that Kevin is a man, that he has two arms and two legs, that he has a heart, a brain, a liver and kidneys. I can presume that my friend knows Kevin and has a first-hand acquaintance with him. And so on. There are also things I don't know about Kevin. I don't know where he lives, if he is married, what his job was, how long he was imprisoned, if he is currently in prison, and so on. My understanding of Kevin will improve if my friend tells me more about him. I can add properties to the mental object "Kevin who went to prison for tax evasion" as a result of what my friend tell me about him. Now suppose that my friend says, "In the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent escapes Earth just before it is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass". At first, there are only a few properties I can assign to Dent: that he is a fictional character, that he appears in a novel called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that in the novel Earth is destroyed by entities called Vogons and that Dent escapes this fate. However, I can and do infer additional properties. I can infer that (in the novel) Dent is a man, has two arms and two legs, a heart, brain, liver, and kidneys. As my friend tells me more about Dent I can ascribe more properties to the Arthur-Dent-object in my mind, such as the property that his travelling companion is an alien called Ford Prefect, and the property that Dent likes tea. Obviously, this drastic revision of Meiongianism requires further work. But the fundamental idea I am proposing, here, is that existent and nonexistent objects alike both have a potentially infinite number of properties, as many as we assign to them.

Russell argued that Meinongianism leads to a second paradox. It seems that, if existence is a property, we can say "There is an existent golden mountain" or "Pegasus is an existent flying horse." In both cases, we are asserting that an object exists that we empirically know does not, yet it seems to have the property "existence". If however we assume that both "the golden mountain" and "Pegasus" are objects created in the mind of a conscious knower, we can confidently expect most people to deny that either proposition is true. Ordinary people, if you ask them, will tend to subscribe to the proposition "Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street" and deny the proposition "Sherlock Holmes exists". For most people, a property of "Sherlock Holmes" is that he is fictional and thus nonexistent. Now consider Bigfoot instead. In my mind, Bigfoot does not have the property of existence. I might have a friend however who believes in Bigfoot. In her mind, Bigfoot does have the property of existence. Which one of us is right? We might say, with Russell, that it is an empirical fact that Bigfoot does not exist but, in fact, neither I nor my friend can be absolutely sure. We can only say that the proposition "Bigfoot exists" is false for me and true for her. It might seem that I am now advocating an extreme form of relativism, the notion that all truth is subjective, but in fact my position is more subtle and complex. I think truth is arrived at dialectically, discursively, through conversation and negotiation with others and with the world. It is difficult for me to plainly and distinctly delineate this position and so I point to the work of Richard Rorty instead for a better description of it.

The reader may wonder what all this has to do with the analytic-synthetic distinction I talked about in the previous post. What I am saying is that objects are created in the minds of conscious beings, either through observations of the world or through verbal reports by other people. A verbal report can be considered a kind of definition, and a definition is a kind of speech-act. A work of fiction is an extended speech-act. When we first pick up The Hobbit, we know nothing about it except that it concerns a creature called a hobbit. As we read the book, Tolkien defines the particular hobbit who is the hero of the story, fleshes out this abstract object with more and more properties – the hobbit in question is called Bilbo Baggins, lives in a hole in a ground, a very comfortable hole, hates the idea of adventures, embarks on an adventure anyway with thirteen dwarves, finds a magic ring deep under the Misty Mountains, converses with a dragon... and so on and so forth. Tolkien creates the object Bilbo Baggins in the mind of the reader. It is important to recognise that although the mind of every conscious being is different, we tend to agree about Bilbo Baggins's properties even though there is no existent object in the world denoted by the term "Bilbo Baggins". This is a reason why I reject subjectivism.

There is much more I could say on this topic but I will end this post with just some final thoughts. The approach to fictional objects I am advocating is known as creationism – the term creationism has a different sense in the rarefied world of philosophy than it does in the popular imagination where it denotes the fundamentalist religious view that the Earth was created by God some six thousand years ago. The creationism I am talking about is something quite different. For an interesting essay about nonexistent objects, see the article on them in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/).

The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

I am considering writing a book of philosophy, focussing on whether it is possible to make true statements about fictional entities. In today's post, I wish to discuss the analytic-synthetic distinction, a distinction first proposed by the philosopher Emmanuel Kant. Talking about this distinction is an entry-point into a conversation about fictional objects such as Sherlock Holmes and Spiderman, and I hope that getting my thoughts in order in this blog will help me when I get around to writing the book.

According to Kant, a true analytic proposition is true by virtue of the meaning of the words in it while a true synthetic proposition is true both by virtue of the meanings of the words in it and by virtue of one's experience of the world. Another way to put this is that a true analytic proposition is true in all possible worlds while a synthetic proposition may only be true in some possible worlds. The classic example of an analytic proposition is the statement, "All bachelors are unmarried". This proposition does not require knowledge of the external world for us to know that it is true– rather the word "bachelor" means an unmarried man and so no experience of the external world is required. The predicate is contained in the subject. If however we say, "All bachelors are lonely," this is a synthetic proposition, a proposition which we may tentatively suppose to be true until we discover a bachelor who isn't lonely, in which case we will be forced to say that this proposition is false. Its truth or falsity depends on observations of the real world. The proposition "All bachelors are unmarried", however, can never be shown to be false, can never be disproved, because it follows directly from the meanings of the words in it.

I have been thinking about this distinction since I was nineteen and was first introduced to this idea by the Otago philosophy professor Alan Musgrave. I sensed that there was a problem with it even then but it is only in the last couple of weeks that I have decided that it is possible to clearly state what is wrong with it. I will not be the first to criticise the notion of an analytic-synthetic distinction. The most famous critic was a chap called Willard Quine and his central argument is known as "The Indeterminacy of Translation". The precise meaning of Quine's critique has been a topic of considerable debate among philosophers ever since he proposed it in 1951. I will not be engaging with Quine's argument in this post but it is possible that I have hit on a similar critique and that I can present it more clearly today than he could back then. To reiterate – I am not deeply familiar with Quine's critique but it is possible that there might be overlap between my critique and his.

Before I advance to my own critique, I would like to discuss the world-view entailed by an uncritical acceptance of the analytic-synthetic distinction. It seems to me that people and philosophers who accept Kant's argument have a particular view of language. They regard language as universal, unchanging and independent of the real world and of how real people use words. This world-view is almost Platonic. According to Plato, the world of Ideas or Forms, of Universals, exists independently of the real world and in a sense precedes it. Forms are eternal, aspatial and atemporal; real phenomena are just shadows of these Platonic Forms. A form is the essence of a thing and exists in a separate realm. Plato, apparently, believed that we are aware of these Forms before we are born, before we are thrown into a world of appearances, of imperfect representations of these Ideas. The world of Forms, in this Platonic conception, is somehow more real than the material, physical world.

This world-view is almost mystical and, although many philosophers would bridle at the suggestion that their wold-view partakes of something obscurantist, I think it does. Nevertheless, some such world-view follows from the Kantian distinction. My own world-view, my own attitude towards language, is quite different. It seems to me that there are three unquestionable assumptions or axioms we can assert about language. These are:
1. Language is learnt.
2. Different people define words in different ways.
3. The generally accepted definition of a word is open to revision, can change.
If we accept these three claims, the analytic-synthetic distinction falls apart.

The most important of these three claims is the first but I shall tackle it later in this post. I'll start with the second assertion. Suppose I am talking to my friend Steven. Suppose in my own mind I define the word "bachelor" as "a man who has never married" but he defines the word "bachelor" in his mind as "a lonely man". We both know Chuck, an unmarried man. I tell Steven, "Chuck is a bachelor" (a synthetic proposition). Steven replies indignantly, "Chuck isn't a bachelor – he has heaps of friends!" (another synthetic proposition). Which one of us is right? It seems the proposition "Chuck is a bachelor" is true for me and false for Steven; conversely the proposition "Chuck isn't a bachelor" is false for me and true for Steven. This difference occurs even though we agree on matters of fact, that Chuck is unmarried but has many friends. Now, the reader may say that I am right and Steven is wrong, that Steven has an incorrect understanding of the word "bachelor". The reader may exclaim, "Everyone knows that the word 'bachelor' means a man who has never married!" But how can you be sure that this is true, that everyone shares this understanding of the word? It seems that in the dispute between Steven and me we must appeal to an external authority. I grab my Oxford English Dictionary and show Steven that the primary accepted definition of the word "bachelor" is "a man is who is not and has never been married" and he may or may not alter his mental definition of the word as a result.

We can go further. The idea that an analytic truth such as "All bachelors are unmarried" is true in all possible worlds is obviously wrong because we can imagine a world in which all the people and all the dictionaries define "bachelor" as "a lonely man", a world in which it is recognised that even married men can be lonely.

It might seem, then, that the only way to escape this impasse is to say that the meanings of words are codified by a kind of priesthood of lexicographers, linguists, scientists, and other experts, and that these people have always agreed on the meaning of words. Even if there is disagreement about semantics among ordinary people, among the laity, there is a generally accepted definition of every word established by some consensus of relevant professionals. We can always appeal to some external authority to ground our understanding of the meanings of words. However, this move also fails. Consider the proposition, "Pluto is a planet". Today, in 2019, we know this proposition to be false. In 2006, the word "planet" was redefined in such a way that it ruled out Pluto on the grounds that Pluto was too small and that some massive bodies in the Kepler belt were larger than it. The definition of a planet (according to Wikipedia) is "an astronomical body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals"and by this definition Pluto isn't a planet. But if we were to say, in 2000, "Pluto is a planet" we would be expressing a true proposition because the word "planet" was defined differently then. According to my Oxford Dictionary, published in 1998, the word "planet" is defined as "a celestial body moving in an elliptical orbit around a star" and, by this definition, Pluto actually is a planet. In fact the dictionary goes on to explicitly state that Pluto is a planet. It seems then that the proposition "Pluto is a planet" was analytically true in 2000 and is analytically false today. This causes all kinds of problems for Kant. We could say that the meaning of a word is established by a contemporary consensus of experts, by the most recent definition,  but we would also like to say that all propositions are either unequivocally true or false. What happens if two years from now the astrophysicists get together and agree on a new definition of "planet" which again includes Pluto? How can we know if the proposition "Pluto is a planet" is true or false?

I'll give another example of this problem, the problem that even the generally accepted definition of a word can change over time. In the nineteen-fifties, "homosexuality" was defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as "a sociopathic hatred of the opposite sex". To modern readers, this definition sounds absurd. We all know gay men who have female friends and lesbians who have male friends. In fact, the definition of "homosexuality" as presented by Wikipedia in recent times is constantly changing, is in a permanent state of flux. We only need a cursory understanding of Michel Foucault to realise that this is a serious problem, and that the health of our society depends on the best possible definition of homosexuality.

At this point in the post I will turn to the first claim, the assertion that language is learnt.

According to Kant, analytic truths are known a priori. This means that a proposition like "All bachelors are unmarried" is known independently of experience. Logically this would suggest that infants are born somehow already knowing that the word "bachelor" means "unmarried man". But of course this is absurd. At some point during early life, a child is either explicitly told that the word "bachelor" means "a man who has never married" or infers that this is what the word means from his or her observations of how others use this word. This seems to me quite obvious, yet it leads directly to the conclusion that analytic truths are known a posteori, that they depend on our experiences of having learnt a language.

We can approach this issue, the almost self-evident fact that we learn the meanings of words from others (from dictionaries, books, conversations), from another direction. Suppose I wish to discuss American politics with a friend and coin the word "glockle" to describe people who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. My friend obviously won't know what the word "glockle" means and so, before we can have a meaningful conversation about glockles, I first need to say to him, "I define the word 'glockle' as meaning 'anyone who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016'. " This utterance of mine is neither true nor false – rather it is what John Seattle called a "speech act" and J.L Austin called a "performative". Like the statement "I now pronounce you husband and wife" when declared by a priest or the statement "I sentence you to two years imprisonment" when issued by a judge, my utterance has the effect of changing the world. Subsequently my friend and I can meaningfully discuss glockles – one of us could say for instance, "The Democrat presidential candidates need to win over the glockles in order to defeat Trump"– and such statements will either be true of false. Yet our ability to discuss glockles at all depends on my prior speech act, the utterance in which I defined the word, an utterance that is neither true nor false.

Of course it would be silly to suppose that "glockle" can be associated with some kind of Platonic Idea which I have discovered and named.

All this raises the fundamental and most difficult question of all. What is truth? The common sense answer is that truth is a relation between a proposition expressed in language and a fact about the world. This is the Correspondence Principle – "A" is true if and only if A. But the Correspondence Principle, when subjected to scrutiny, disintegrates. Suppose we say " 'Pluto is a planet' if and only if Pluto is a planet." Given our discussion of Pluto above, it is easy to see why the Correspondence Principle often fails. It doesn't provide a satisfactory account of the relationship between words and the world. I believe that truth is a kind of process, something dialectical, conversational, communal, a horizon that we continually approach but never arrive at. I believe I think in the idea of truth sketched out by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. I know that this is a vague claim but perhaps I will be able to elaborate on it in later posts. Or in the book I may or may not write.

Evolution and Chance

In this blog, I have discussed quantum physics and I have discussed the Darwinian explanation for evolution. These two theories may seem utterly removed from each other, may seem to deal with almost completely unrelated phenomena, but both are alike in one important respect. They both put probability, chance, at the centre of their respective systems. I have discussed quantum physics before in this blog. In tonight's post I am going to discus evolution again and will return to quantum physics towards the end. I worry that this post may end up a little dry, but bear with me anyway.

The orthodox Darwinian explanation for evolution is quite simple, so simple it can be summarised in a paragraph. We have a population of organisms that are physically very similar and breed with each other, a species. These individuals carry a string of DNA, a genetic code, in the nuclei of their cells (the same code in every cell). Occasionally an individual is born with a slightly different genetic code than that which it could have inherited from its parents. This is known as a mutation. Mutations occur randomly. Almost always the mutation is deleterious to the survival of the organism, but occasionally it is beneficial, resulting in a longer life span and more progeny than its unmutated compatriots. Over time (therefore) the mutation (or adaption) spreads through the population as a whole, causing either the entire species to evolve incrementally or a new species to incrementally emerge. I believe this is a fair summation of the Darwinian argument as it is presented today. Although I feel sure that many evolutionary biologists would criticise this summation as being too simplistic, it is adequate for my purposes in tonight's post and is not just a straw man.

At the centre of modern Darwinism is the idea of a chance mutation. Darwin himself didn't know about DNA and didn't propose the idea of mutations – rather he said that variation existed among members of the same species and that nature 'selected' the fittest individuals. He didn't explain the cause of this variation or how novel changes could appear. It was modern Darwinists who introduced the idea of chance mutations. If we accept the modern Darwinian orthodoxy limned above, we might be inclined to believe that mutations are occurring all the time. How else could evolution occur? How else could variation come into existence? What I am going to argue however is that the standard Darwinian explanation fails because the likelihood of beneficial mutations occurring with the frequency they would need to for evolution to happen is so remote that we need some kind of additional mechanisms to account for it.

If we wished to defend modern Darwinism, it would be helpful to know how often mutations arise in a species. According to the Internet, the global human population increased by close to one hundred and thirty million people last year. How many of those babies were born with small mutations? Of course, no one knows. We could make an estimate, perhaps, if we mapped the genomes of a thousand babies, compared those genomes to the genomes of their parents, and then extrapolated the results. Or we could do the same thing with lab rats (this might be easier). However we carry it out, what we wish to find is the mutation rate, how often mutations occur, or, to put it another way, the probability that an infant will be born with a mutation. In fact, I suspect mutations (rather than recombinations of parental DNA) are extremely uncommon. We hear occasionally about rare genetic diseases but we almost never hear about unique genetic diseases. This suggests to me that the mutation rate, at least among humans, is incredibly low.

Even if mutations do occur, most will either be detrimental to the survival of the organism or will have no detectable effect on the organism. We are interested only in advantageous mutations because it is only advantageous mutations that will spread through the population over time and result in the evolution of the species. Yet the possibility of a mutation being beneficial rather than detrimental or undetectable is also incredibly low. According to Stephen Meyer (see "Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution" on Youtube) the probability of a string of codons on DNA coding randomly for a useful protein rather than gibberish is miniscule. (Note: the four participants in this clip come across a little as crackpots but their arguments are good.) A third factor comes into play. If a pigeon is born with a small beneficial mutation, is, say, born a little smarter than its fellow pigeon rivals, but is eaten by a cat when it is still a fledgling or before it has had an opportunity to reproduce, the mutation dies with it.

What we are interested in is the probability that a mutation will occur that will spread through a population over time until every member of the population carries the same mutation. This probability is the mathematical product of three other probabilities: the probability of a mutation occurring in the first place, the probability of it being beneficial rather than detrimental or invisible, and the probability that the individual who bears this mutation will survive long enough to reproduce as will its offspring. This product is extraordinarily tiny. And this is just the probability of one small incremental change rather than the enormous series of incremental changes that would enable an animal like a hipopotamus to evolve into a dolphin. Now, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins would argue that even though such evolution is extraordinarily unlikely to occur in a short span of time, it is not just possible but highly probable to occur if the time span given is long enough (say four billion years) and if there are sufficient organisms around. However, I doubt this – I suspect that even four billion years is not long enough.

The argument is simple. Suppose we work out that the chance of a random mutation occurring that is beneficial and will spread through a whole population is one in a billion trillion. And we then find out that such mutations occur one time in a million. We would then be forced to conclude that such mutations aren't entirely random, and we would need to posit an additional mechanism as the cause of them rather than simply ascribe them to blind chance by itself.

This argument could be called the argument from improbability. In this blog I have also presented another argument against the Darwinian orthodoxy (in the post "On Evolution). In this previous argument, somewhat related to the Irreducible Complexity argument associated with Behe, I concluded that, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur to a number of organisms existing in the same vicinity at the same time. I wish now to present a third argument against the modern Darwinian orthodoxy. We live in an era in which the fashionable school of thought in the social sciences is evolutionary psychology, a discipline I have criticised before in this blog. Although evolutionary psychologists don't seem to want to use this word, they are interested in instincts, behavioural adaptions. For instance, an evolutionary psychologist might say that people are born with an instinctive fear of snakes, an instinct that is genetic. He or she might imply that people are born with a 'fear of snakes' gene. Somehow we go from DNA to a protein, then to an arrangement of neurones in the brain, then to an aversion to snakes. I don't comprehend this move. I simply can't understand how a fear of snakes could be encoded in DNA, in a sequence of bases.

And now it's time to bring in quantum physics. As I argued in the posts on probability and Schrodinger's cat, quantum physics introduces a new concept – objective uncertainty. In a determinist world,  people can be uncertain but reality is certain; in the quantum world, however, reality is itself indeterminate, uncertain. For example, if we fire an electron through a slit at a detector, it diffracts and there are a range of possible locations it can arrive at – and we have no way of predicting precisely where. In those posts, I argued, in effect, that everything is connected to everything else, that non-local hidden variables are at play, and I speculated that higher intelligences may operate through the quantum world. This might apply to evolution. I am not arguing that evolution didn't happen. Rather I wish to suggest that mutations are not wholly random and that some kind of intelligence may be working behind them or through them, bringing them about.

The argument about Darwin is often framed as a dispute between die-hard materialists and Christian fundamentalists. The Darwinists believe that evolution has got rid of God; the Christians see arguments against Darwin as bolstering the case for Christianity. Both sides are dogmatists. I am neither a Christian nor a Darwinist. For example, although I suspect some kind of higher intelligence may be at work in the world, and see evolution as evidence for this. I don't necessarily believe this intelligence to be benevolent or loving. This is why I like Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake is a practising Angican but not a devout Anglican. Although he talks about telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, he doesn't ever invoke God as an explanation for things. His theory of 'morphic resonance' is a third way between the dogmatisms of the Christian fundamentalists and the orthodox Darwinists. I am not sure that I believe in 'morphic resonance'. But Sheldrake's view that consciousness is everywhere and that everything is connected to everything else resonates with me.

It may be frightening to give up our convictions. But sometimes the truth involves recognising that no one knows the truth.

Six Myths About Schizophrenia

What follows is an article I sent to the New Zealand Herald. It was obviously too long to publish, and made some statements that are unprintable. Readers may be familiar with much of what I say here because I have said it at some time or the other in this blog. Nevertheless, I thought I would publish it here, in full.

Six Myths about Schizophrenia

Most people entertain a number of misconceptions about psychosis and schizophrenia. In the following article, I will attempt to discredit a number of common errors people make about madness. I will draw heavily on my own life experience to prove my points, and, in many ways, this article is something of a life story. The errors I shall mention are not just entertained by the public – they are even part and parcel of psychiatric dogma. One of the purposes of this article is to show that the psychiatric profession itself can be wrong. This article may be in some ways controversial but I hope I can provoke a meaningful discussion about some important issues.

Myth 1: Schizophrenia is a life-long continuous condition.

Schizophrenia is often considered by the public and psychiatrists as being a congenital disease or disorder that first manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood. It is supposedly incurable but its symptoms can be reduced although not alleviated entirely by medication. Complete recovery, involving a discontinuation of medication, does not occur. This view seems to be the current position of the psychiatric community. People diagnosed schizophrenic are often told that they have a condition like type-1 diabetes, the grounds for this analogy being that type-1 diabetes is also congenital and incurable, and requires daily medication. This model can be referred to as the medical model of schizophrenia.

There is an alternative way of viewing schizophrenia. In the 1970s, a different model was proposed, the ‘stress-vulnerability model’. According to this model, some people are born with or incur as a result of childhood experiences a vulnerability to psychosis; psychosis itself occurs later as a result of life stressors. Mental illness is the result of nurture, not nature. According to this theory, schizophrenia is episodic rather than continuous. I believe the stress-vulnerability model to be superior to the purely medical model in some ways but, as Peter Kinderman points out in The New Laws of Psychology, the stress-vulnerability model can be used to bolster the argument that schizophrenia is a congenital disorder because it suggests that some people are born with a predisposition, vulnerability, to psychosis while others are not. I prefer to believe that anyone can suffer a psychotic episode if exposed to enough stress. In the same way that depression is a natural reaction to bereavement and PTSD is a natural reaction to the types of distressing life-events experienced by soldiers when at war, psychosis is a natural reaction to distressing circumstances.

This view is not shared by many psychiatrists. The inclination among many doctors is to regard the term ‘schizophrenic’ as denoting a category of person when it should rather be considered a temporary condition. For instance, one supposed indication of schizophrenia is a life-long difficulty forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships. What I would like to do now is give a brief history of my life prior to my first psychotic episode, which didn’t occur until the age of twenty-seven. I shall focus on my friendships to show that I didn’t have any difficulty forming interpersonal relationships. Bear with me.

The high-school I went to was Auckland Grammar. During my first years there I had one group of friends but in seventh form I fell in with a slightly different group. It was during seventh form that I met and formed a relationship with my first girlfriend, Danielle. Before I met her, I had already decided to study at the University of Otago and so, after I moved to Dunedin at the beginning of 1998, we decided to have a long-distance relationship. I formed a number of friendships in Dunedin, my best friend there being a chap called Caleb Edwards. After two years studying in Dunedin, I had a choice: I could either stay in Dunedin with the friends I had made there, or return to Auckland so that I could be in the same city as my girlfriend. I decided to come back to Auckland.

During 2000, I didn’t have any friends except Danielle and her friends (I had fallen out of contact with my schoolmates). At the beginning of 2001, she broke up with me. The next year I undertook to study a Masters in English (for which I received mostly quite good grades). I made friends with other students, including a chap called Rene Harrison who I still see occasionally today. In 2001 or 2002 I began working at Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and made friends there; I entered into a relationship with a girl called Maya in 2003 who I had met through the Squadron. I hesitate to call her my girlfriend because our relationship was a little complicated. In 2004, I travelled for three months by myself in Europe. That same year Maya moved into a large flat in Parnell known as the Big House, a flat with some twenty tenants, and I came to know some of the residents through her. At the beginning 2006, I moved into the Big House myself; that same year, having been pressured to do so by my father and step-mother, I undertook to study to become a secondary school english teacher.

In a flat with twenty flatmates, one shouldn’t expect to be friends with everyone, but I did have some friends there, my best friends being a chap called Simeon and a chap called Harry. Maya had moved out of Auckland to teach art in Katikati. I found it difficult to juggle the social life of the flat with the intense workload of Teachers Training College and in September dropped out. I hadn’t really wanted to become a teacher but even so being forced to drop out severely knocked my self-confidence. A month or two later, I rocked up to the radio station bFM, on a whim, partly to resuscitate an old friendship and partly because helping out there seemed like something fun to do. I was engaged to write news stories a couple of mornings a week on Mikey Havoc’s breakfast show.

I have written about my experiences at bFM in a blog I keep and, even today, am still piecing together what happened in 2007, at bFM and at the Big House. It is difficult to know when a psychotic episode begins but I believe I began to go a little crazy shortly after the Big Day Out held 19 January 2007. I started to become delusional a couple of weeks later, and a couple of weeks after that stopped working at bFM entirely. For a period, I was more or less well, although I struggled with some depression, and then, shortly after watching the Red Hot Chilli Peppers perform at the Vector Arena with some family members, I became psychotic. I started to believe that the flat was bugged and that I was under surveillance, that my flatmates were divided into angels and demons, that the horoscope was referring to me. I formed a paranoid delusion that I’ll describe later in this article. Things reached a crisis point and I considered drowning myself; my flatmates called my mother and I was removed from the flat. The next day I was taken to the Taylor Centre, the public mental health facility in Ponsonby.

What I attempting to show here is that the idea that ‘schizophrenic’ denotes a category of person is problematic in my case because I didn’t experience a psychotic episode until the age of twenty-seven. Before then I had had a life; although I occasionally experienced a little anxiety and a little depression on occasion, as most people do, I had never experienced real psychotic symptoms. I wish now to show that the ‘illness’ I have suffered since was episodic rather than persistent.

Shortly after my first appointment with a psychiatrist, Antony Fernando, I was prescribed 2.5mgs of Rispiridone daily. I continued to experience psychosis for the remainder of that year. Although the Big House kept aside my room for me in the early days, I only returned there once for a visit. It felt like returning to the scene of a crime. In the early days, I did want to move back into the flat but in reality was too ill to cope effectively there. In 2008, I was very close to totally well, although the drug I was taking produced odd cognitive side-effects. Sometime in the second half of 2008 I broke up conclusively with Maya. A couple of weeks later, an old friend who had been living in the Czech Republic phoned me up and asked if he could stay in my house for a week or two. Later in the year, he moved to Piha and I would occasionally visit him there. I made the mistake of telling a nurse treating me that I had a male friend. He wasn’t even a particularly good friend. But I think the people treating me got the wrong idea.

In January 2009 I became psychotic again. For the first time I started hearing voices. I remained psychotic until August and on August 6 experienced some suicidal ideation. When I told the psychiatrist this a couple of days later, he panicked a little and allowed me to discontinue Rispiridone. Being permitted to stop taking antipsychotics cured my psychosis and I was close to well for the next two months. Then I suffered a sudden relapse. I ended up back in the psychiatrist’s office and was prescribed Olanzapine, the dosage I think being gradually increased over a couple of weeks to 10mgs daily.

I experienced my most intense period of voice-hearing in December 2009 and January 2010. The voices faded away in the first couple of months of 2010. In the second half of the year, I undertook some training at Youthline and also began going to a weekly Pub Quiz that I still attend; although I didn’t make friends through Youthline, I have formed enduring friendships with my Pub Quiz team-mates. In 2011, I unsuccessfully pursued a relationship with a girl I had met at a Hearing Voices group at the end of 2009. Although this part of the essay is concerned with interpersonal relationships rather than work history, I still wish to add that from 2005 until 2013 I worked part-time for the TAB as a call centre operator.

Around 29 January 2012, I asked my psychiatrist if I could be discharged from the Taylor Centre to a GP’s care, and also if I could lower my dosage from 10mgs, the dosage I had been on since late 2009, to 7.5mgs. He agreed. I remember my key worker at the time saying, “It’s okay to hear voices!” – I thought this an odd thing to say because I hadn’t heard voices at all for over a year and a half, but it was easiest not to correct her. I felt so well that I reduced my dosage myself to 5mgs. For all of 2012 I was totally well. During this year, I started and completed a degree, a Masters in Creative Writing through AUT. For this degree, I wrote a film about schizophrenia inspired by the girl I had met at the end of 2009. I was on 5mgs the whole year – in fact, when I travelled to Christchurch to carry out some research for my film, I took the opportunity to go off my medication entirely for a brief period.

In January 2013 I approached my GP (who I saw I think about once every three months) and asked her if I could reduce my dosage from 5mgs to 2.5mgs. I still felt totally well. She advised me to alternate between the two dosages. A couple of weeks later, I became psychotic again and voluntarily reentered the Taylor Centre. During the year, although I was seeing a psychiatrist monthly, I was unwilling to increase my dosage back to 10mgs. The reason I refused to increase my dosage is simply that, by 2013, I no longer believed medication to be the solution to the problem of mental illness. I wanted ‘talking therapy’– I wanted to talk about my family and the reasons I had become ill in the first place. I wanted the truth to be on the record. I wanted the psychiatrists to do their job. This aim has never been successfully realised. Around October or November, the psychiatrist I was seeing, Jennifer Murphy, bullied me into increasing my dosage to 12.5mgs, the highest dosage I had ever been on. Although my mother ensured I took the medication every night, I began trying to vomit it up. My next appointment with Murphy went well – until I honestly told her that I was throwing up my pills. She reacted badly but allowed me to discontinue my medication entirely.

Around February of 2014, I ended up back in the Taylor Centre. I was bullied into signing a form that I didn’t even read by about half a dozen mental health workers. This occurred while my Key Worker was away on holiday. I was sent to a Respite Facility in Point Chevalier for a couple of days and put under observation. I was indeed ‘ill’ at the time but I had good reasons – the memory of a delusion or hallucination that I had experienced in early 2010 had resurfaced, and, furthermore, I knew that regardless of anything I said or did, I was going to be put under the Mental Health Act. Shortly after I was put under a Compulsory Treatment Order. I am still under it today.

Despite receiving 300mgs of Olanzapine delivered monthly via injection, I remained psychotic, although the psychosis didn’t take the form of either delusions or voice-hearing. The worst period occurred at the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015 – it was a reaction to some eight months of seeing weekly an incompetent Clinical Psychologist. The period during which I experienced the most intense voice-hearing (usually while I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep) was 2016. Last year I lodged a complaint against Jennifer Murphy and Antony Fernando with the Health and Disabilities Commissioner; Murphy reacted by doubling my dosage. She did this despite the fact that I wasn’t psychotic at all.

What I am endeavouring to show is that the idea that schizophrenia is a persistent life-long condition is incorrect. I did not experience psychosis at all until 2007 when I was twenty-seven years old; I experienced it again in 2009 and 2013 and continued to experience psychosis after I was put under the Compulsory Treatment order. I have been quite well since the beginning of last year and completely well for the last several months. Aside from my Pub Quiz friends, I have four or five other friends that I see infrequently. Although I only see them infrequently, this should not be taken as evidence of a disorder but rather as a simple side-effect of being thirty-nine. It is the universal problem of someone staring into the abyss of middle age.


Myth 2: The voices a psychotic hears are auditory hallucinations.

Voice-hearing is one of the first-tier symptoms of psychosis – it is difficult to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia if the patient doesn’t hear voices. There is widespread awareness among the public that voice-hearing is the most characteristic feature of schizophrenia; however, many people also completely fail to understand the nature of voice-hearing. In fact, the psychiatric profession itself completely fails to understand it. To explain voice-hearing, one needs to understand the nature of consciousness.

People think. If a person is walking around the streets, or lying in bed, or doing anything at all, he or she maintains a kind of running commentary in his or her mind, an internal monologue. It can take the form of memories, of rehearsing or recollecting conversations, of writing essays in one’s head, of imagining possible future scenarios, and so on and so forth. This is sometimes referred to as ‘self-talk’. Many people have had the experience of getting a song stuck in their heads, a phenomenon known as an ‘earworm’. The verbal nature of consciousness is displayed through the literary technique known as ‘stream-of-consciousness’, a technique employed sometimes by Tolstoy, by Joyce in Ulysses, by Virginia Woolf, and more recently by Will Self in Umbrella. When we recognise the verbal nature of consciousness, it becomes easier to understand the phenomenon of voice hearing. The voices a psychotic hears are not literally auditory hallucinations; rather they could be better described as thoughts that the sufferer attributes to outside agents. The defining feature of psychosis is the feeling that one’s thoughts are not one’s own.

I first started hearing voices in late January 2009 (after I had been taking antipsychotics for over a year and a half). I had spent much of 2008 trying to derive the Special Theory of Relativity from first-principles and had eventually succeeded; lying in the bath one night, I decided to try to do it again in my head. I ran into difficulties. Then I heard a voice say, in a Texan accent, “Do you want George W. Bush to help you?”  Deciding that the former president would by of little assistance, I changed the subject. We talked. I asked him, “Are you straight?” He said, “I think so.” I asked him if he believed in God and he said, “No.” I asked him how then we could be communicating and he replied, “Midi-chlorlans”. After I got out of the bath, we talked a little more – I asked him what the real reason was for the war in Iraq and he replied with some bosh about “the clash of civilisations”. I said to him, “You do believe in God, don’t you?” He said, “So you do know a joke when you hear one.”

From the beginning, my experience of voice hearing was always accompanied by the delusion that I could communicate telepathically with other people. Starting in 2008, I had been a regular viewer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; partway through 2009 when I was lying in bed, I heard Jon in my head. He said, “Who the hell are you, anyway?” I said, “Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand.” He said, “Are you straight?” I said, “I think so.” He said, “What’s the time difference?” I said, “About eight hours.” We talked for a bit. The next day, on his show, he seemed to refer to the conversation we’d had the previous night. After this, and because of this, I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend.

My most intense experience of voice-hearing occurred in December 2009 and January 2010. I imagined I was talking to Jon and the girl I’d met at a Voice Hearing support group, a girl I call Jess, from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep. They used to tell me jokes all the time. I was continually giggling to myself. Memorably, there was a night when I was explaining to Jess that many African-Americans think milk in schools is a honky conspiracy because so many African-Americans are lactose intolerant. Jon, who in real life is lactose intolerant, broke in to say, “Lots of us feel that way.” To which John Oliver said, “Jon Stewart - are you black?”

I’ll provide one last example from my own experiences of voice-hearing. In around 2014, I was lying in bed and I heard Jess in my head. She said, “I have the perfect word to describe you – sesquipedalian.” I thought to myself, “What the hell does sesquipedalian mean?” I climbed out of bed and went and Googled it. I found it meant, “Lover of big words.”

The reason I have included these examples of voice-hearing from my own life is to show that my experience of voice-hearing was always one of conversation, dialogue, with others. Obviously this means that my experiences can’t be described as auditory hallucinations. Other people have different experiences. Probably the most common form of this symptom of psychosis is that a person hears an unidentified voice that tells the person what others think of him or her. Some overhear conversations between two or more other people. Sometimes psychotics give their voices names as I did. I know a woman who talks, or used to talk, to pop stars like Rihanna and Beyonce; this woman told me that she believed the voices to be guardian angels simply pretending to be celebrities. Another woman I spoke to recently, a woman I think in her late thirties, described a little her own experience of voice-hearing. She had suffered “adverse life experiences” when a teenager (although she didn’t elucidate what these life experiences were and I didn’t press her to explain). Since then, she had heard the voices of two men, aged in their mid thirties, who would either talk with each other or talk with her. She had noticed that neither man grew any older. The two men were often verbally abusive. The woman told me she thought the men blamed her for not protecting them when she was young. After she told me this, I commented, “That’s an odd thing to say. Perhaps you should blame them for not protecting you.”

Some psychotics do indeed experience occasional auditory hallucinations but I believe the reason why voice-hearing is thought to be so common is because psychotics often misdescribe their experiences. It is easer to tell doctors and mental health workers that they hear voices rather than explain what is more likely true, that what they are doing is misattributing thoughts to outside agents. The voices I used to hear were always imaginary friends and were never abusive, but many psychotics hear abusive voices. I don’t know why some psychotics hear friendly voices (as John Nash for instance did) and others hear abusive voices. I wish I did know why.

3. Myth 3: Delusions are Permanent

Early in my treatment, I was told by my psychiatrist that “delusions are fixed, by definition”. He told me this even though he didn’t know what my delusions were. In the same way that the public and mental health workers don’t recognise that psychosis comes and goes, so also do they fail to appreciate that a delusion can be transient. Once again I’ll draw from my own life experience to prove this point.

Around March 2007, when I first became psychotic, I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I even went so far as to decide that George W. Bush was a closet homosexual. I never spoke of this to anyone because I thought that if I exposed this conspiracy, I would be killed. My situation wasn’t improved by the fact that, at my first appointment with a psychiatrist, I decided that he was a member of the homosexual conspiracy. This delusion was extraordinarily involved: I believed that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals and that the Jews were all straight, I believed that Whanganui was a small enclave of enlightened heterosexuals who had fled there to escape all the closet homosexuals who made up the bulk of the rest of the population, I believed that this social stratification was the subject of the song Working Class Hero by John Lennon. I strongly suspect, now, and have for some time, that the writer of the film The Departed, William Monahan, must have had a similar paranoid delusion sometime in his life.

This delusion had disappeared by the beginning of 2008. Certainly, after I spoke with George W. Bush in January 2009, the delusion that he was a closet homosexual never came back and perhaps had disappeared long before that. Although I experienced psychosis again for much of that year, 2009, a psychosis characterised by the delusion that I could communicate telepathically with others, the homosexual conspiracy delusion never returned.

Another delusion I held in those early years was that there was a listening device in my glasses and that everything I said was being relayed to third parties, perhaps the media. This delusion greatly restricted my ability to talk with others about the things that I believed. This delusion took hold shortly after I became a patient of the Mental Health Services and was prescribed antipsychotics; it also went away at the beginning of 2008, returned very intermittently in 2009, and vanished for good in January 2010.

Commonly people don’t ascribe meanings to delusions but in truth every delusion has in fact a secret meaning. I believed that the world was ruled by closet homosexuals – gay men who married gay women and bore children by them. In other words, I believed that the world was ruled by liars and sociopaths, by people with no love in their hearts. The delusion that there was a bug in my glasses came to me because I sensed that if I talked about the things I believed that I would get into trouble; it was a delusion elicited by the culture of the Mental Health Services, a culture in which nothing is discussed openly.

I was not psychotic or delusional against until early 2013. When I became psychotic again, that year, my madness was very much motivated by a fear that my friend Jess was going to turn into a lesbian. This cannot, however, be regarded as a delusion because, in a way, it actually occurred – she did turn into a lesbian. A second belief I formed at the beginning of the year was that there was doubt about my sexuality in the public arena, particularly in the media; later in the year I even became afraid that I had been publicly outed as gay even though I’m not. I thought, stupidly, that if approached the Mental Health System again, sought treatment from a different psychiatrist, and told him or her that I was straight, that this fact would filter out into the collective consciousness. I still don’t know if this belief, that I had been mistakenly outed as gay in 2013, was delusional or not.

I might finish this section by saying a little about the psychiatric attitude towards homosexuality. I think most psychiatrists seem to have ridiculous views about this topic. The only logical conclusion I can draw from my interactions with them is that most psychiatrists are queer and project their own sexual confusion onto their patients. By ‘queer’, I mean that a lot of male psychiatrists secretly frequent gay brothels and fantasise, when they masturbate, about sticking their dicks in the mouths of their heterosexual male patients. I should say that I don’t have conclusive evidence for this belief. However, my interactions with psychiatrists over the last twelve years, and the attitude of the clinical psychologist I saw in 2014, suggest strongly to me that many people working in the Mental Health System don’t seem to believe that heterosexuality exists, and seem to believe that everyone is bisexual.

Myth 4: The mentally ill are stupid.

The psychiatric profession continually seeks to describe the ‘typical schizophrenic’. Some ten years ago, and perhaps still today, it was believed that schizophrenics lack verbal fluency and have problems with abstract thinking. At my first appointment with a psychiatrist he said, “Well, you’re certainly verbally fluent!”  although this assessment didn’t prevent him from leaning towards me and telling me that his sister was schizophrenic, encouraging me to believe that I had been diagnosed schizophrenic myself.

Of course, the idea that the mentally ill are stupid is just another bogus idea invented by the psychiatric profession. As someone who has been a student of English literature, I am and have always been aware that there is a strong link between intelligent creativity and mental illness. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace all killed themselves. A case could be made that Woolf was schizophrenic. In Mrs Dalloway she presents a character, Septimus, who has suffered shell-shock during the First World War – her descriptions of his psychosis could only have been written by someone who had experienced psychosis herself.  Although it isn’t mentioned in his wikipedia page, there is internal evidence in the short stories of the famous writer Donald Bathelme that he experienced mental illness, possibly schizophrenia. When one reads his stories, it is difficult to know if they are works of genius or works of madness.

I believe that in terms of intelligence Mental Health patients lie on a bell curve, a bell curve that pretty much corresponds with the bell curve of intelligence in society as a whole. Some schizophrenics are very smart indeed (an obvious example being John Nash). I myself am highly verbally fluent and possessed of a strong capacity for abstract thought, although it is possible that many years of antipsychotic medication have reduced my IQ somewhat. There is some research that suggests that a sense of humour correlates with abstract thinking ability, and I certainly used to have a sense of humour. My friend Jess, also diagnosed schizophrenic, is an accomplished poet and short story writer, proving once more, if we need further proof, that schizophrenics can be verbally fluent. This same woman received an A+ in a paper on logic through Auckland University. It is another hardship borne by the mentally ill is that they are often treated as stupid by those tasked with caring for them, when sometimes they are cleverer than the people treating them.

Myth 5: Antipsychotic medication helps

Because mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are literally considered illnesses, it seems that medication is the appropriate form of treatment. Kinderman puts it in the following way:

"Too much of our language, even the use of the term ‘mental illness’, implies that people in emotional distress have medical or biological problems. Since medical terminology and procedures are used, professionals and the public alike tend to assume incorrectly that people are ‘suffering’ from ‘illnesses’, rather than recognising that problems represent a meaningful human reaction to difficult circumstances. The hugely impressive scientific insights of neuroscience can sometimes be misused. People are damaged by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences. People are often very distressed and should be helped, but this does not need to be described as ‘illnesses’ or ‘disorders’. If we regard these experiences as ‘disorders’, it implies they are abnormal. In what sense is it a ‘disorder’ if we remain distressed by bereavement after three months or ‘pathological’ if we are traumatised by the experience of industrialised military conflict?" (p. 29)

Within the New Zealand Mental Health Service, there is considerable medicalisation of mental illness. An assumption exists that patients must be suffering from something like a congenital disease to be diagnosed mentally ill and that the best and often the only form of treatment is medication. To make matters worse, if a patient refuses to accept the idea that medication is the right answer, this refusal is itself seen as evidence of illness, of a lack of ‘insight’. This puts patients in a Catch 22 situation. If a patient wishes to discontinue medication, this can often be used as a justification to keep a patient on it (or increase it or switch the patient to another medication).

From my own experience and from my observations of other patients, I do not believe that medication is at all effective. At best, it treats the symptoms rather than the causes of mental illness. My own recovery in early 2010 had little to do with medication, and my current wellness has everything to do with a blog I have been writing since 2015 and nothing to do with the drugs I am forced to take. This might seem an outrageous claim – I know that there is some research out there suggesting that medication works. But much of this research is paid for by pharmaceutical companies who have a vested interest in selling antipsychotics, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, and sleeping pills. There are also some powerful voices on the other side, speaking out against the prevailing medical orthodoxy that antipsychotics are the appropriate treatment for madness. An example of such an apostate is British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff (who wrote a book called The Myth of the Antipsychotic). Another is Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Robert Whitaker.

One theory of schizophrenia is the so-called ‘dopamine hypothesis’. According to this theory, the brains of schizophrenics produce too much dopamine, and antipsychotic medication is the appropriate form of treatment because it dampens down the dopaminergic system. Patients are often told this, that their problem is an excess of dopamine – for instance, at my first or second appointment with a psychiatrist, I was told that I had suffered a “dopamine explosion”. However, as Whitaker points out (the clip of his presentation is on Youtube), although psychiatrists often tell patients that they have a dopamine imbalance, the psychiatric profession itself hasn’t believed this hypothesis since at least the ‘nineties. Is it any wonder that mental health patients suffer paranoia, when the psychiatric profession itself lies to them all the time?

Whitaker in fact goes even further than saying that antipsychotics are unhelpful. He argues that antipsychotic medication itself causes schizophrenia. The argument is so simple that it must be true. Antipsychotics work by blocking dopamine receptors on neurones; if a person takes antipsychotics for any extended period of time, the brain attempts to restore homeostasis by growing additional dopamine receptors. This means that over time patients become neurologically dependent on antipsychotics and suffer withdrawal effects if they attempt to go off them. The psychiatric profession and public alike believe that if a patient becomes ‘ill’ as the result of discontinuing medication, this is proof of an underlying condition that the medication controls. The idea that people may well suffer withdrawal effects, probably temporary, if they discontinue medication, although obviously true, is deliberately discounted, because it threatens the whole system, the myth that ‘schizophrenic’ denotes a category of person rather than a temporary condition.

Yes, the urban myth of the schizophrenic who secretly goes off his or her medication and becomes ill as a result is true. I have seen it myself. However the full truth is probably more complicated. If a patient secretly discontinues his or her medication, the patient may well suffer withdrawal symptoms as I pointed out above; an additional stress in the person’s life is that he or she has to try to keep these symptoms secret from those around him or her. I knew a patient who secretly went off his medication and, during this period, felt well and was even told by others how well he was doing; one day, a smell of cannabis was noticed around the complex in which he was living and all the rooms were searched. When they searched Robert’s room, they found all the medication he had been spitting out. Robert told me that he did become sick again – but only after those treating him had discovered that he had stopped taking his medication. Obviously this complicates any simplistic notion of a direct link between medication and mental health. I wish now to make a strange claim. I believe that one cause of mental illness is having others around the person believing that person to be mentally ill.

I have also known people who have suffered psychotic episodes, weren’t put on drugs, recovered and went on to have fulfilling lives, involving productive work and real relationships.

It might yet be argued that antipsychotics, even if they do no good, do no harm. However this proposition is also difficult to maintain. Some decades ago, a post-mortem examination of the brains of schizophrenics found that the schizophrenics had reduced brain volumes compared to the rest of the population. The psychiatric profession reacted to this study by resurrecting an old idea that schizophrenia is a neurodegenerative condition; they concluded consequently that antipsychotics must prevent brain-shrinkage. I was even told explicitly by my psychiatrist, I think in 2007, that schizophrenia causes people’s brains to shrink. It was his way of compelling me to take medication. There is however a significant problem with the study. All of the schizophrenics examined in it had been taking antipsychotics all their lives. This raises a basic question: is it the ‘condition’ or the drugs that cause the brain shrinkage? In 2005, a study was conducted on macaque monkeys in which some were put on olanzapine and haloperidol and other were ‘prescribed’ a sham drug. The monkeys put on antipsychotics ended up with reduced brain volumes. This study proved conclusively that it was the drugs, rather than the condition, that caused the brain shrinkage.

Psychiatrists are quite prepared to lie to protect each other and their precious medical model. I’ll cite some examples from my own life to show this. A legal right I have as someone under a Compulsory Treatment Order is that I can request an Independent Review. At this review, which lasts maybe an hour, the patient sits with his lawyer, psychiatrist, key worker, and family members across the room from a review board consisting of a psychiatrist, lay-person, and solicitor. It is illegal to talk about what goes on during these reviews but, as the subject of the reviews, I believe I myself am legally entitled to talk about it. At my first Independent Review in 2015 (I have had about four) it was asserted that I was taking 12.5mgs of Olanzapine daily in 2012 and that I became ill again in 2013 because  I had reduced it, myself, without consultation, from 12.5 to 2.5mgs. Of course, in 2012 I was actually only on 5mgs of Olanzapine. I told the panel this and even quoted from my medical notes to prove it. In the decision, they ignored my testimony and the doctor’s own notes, and said that I had become ill as a result of reducing my dosage, myself, from 12.5mgs to 2.5.

I’ll tell another true story about another review I had, I think in 2016. At this review, the psychiatrist on the panel wouldn’t even look at me. He piped up I think only once, asking, “How often do you see your mother? Once a week?” My mother replied, “Try every other day!”  During the hearing, I asked him, “What do you think the cause of schizophrenia is?” I knew more or less why I had first become ill but it was too complicated to explain to the panel at that time in that place; my question was an act of aggression. I knew but he didn’t. He wrote in my decision, “He said rather poignantly that if he knew the cause of his illness, he would argue his case better” – another barefaced lie by another fraud.

An indication of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the psychiatric profession is the way that they routinely lie about their patients.


Myth 6: Schizophrenia is causeless

Last year, I had a key worker, a nurse, who asked me on one occasion if I thought schizophrenia was caused by a kind of magic. When I brought this up with her a little later with others around, she said I had misremembered what she had said and that she believed schizophrenia to be hereditary. I got rid of this key worker shortly after because I felt I couldn’t trust her to tell the truth about me. Her attitude however indicates the general attitude of the Mental Health Service to mental illness, that it is somehow causeless. Also sometime last year, I heard a little voice that said, “The way out is the same as the way in.” I’ll conclude this article by giving some small idea of the cause of my ‘mental illness’.

When I first made contact with the Taylor Centre in 2007 I found myself in a room with the woman who was to become my Key Worker and another psychiatrist, Trish Van der Krellen. I told them, “My father’s gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn’t want me to be gay, and I want to come out as straight!” At this first contact, I wasn’t really psychotic although I became psychotic again shortly after. A proper understanding of this statement is essential to understanding my illness. The important part of it was the wanting to “come out as straight” – essentially I believed, I think correctly, that a rumour that I was gay had got out among some of my acquaintances, that this was the root cause of my paranoia, and I simply wanted to be recognised by others around me as heterosexual. The belief that my father was gay was a delusion. As best as I can reconstruct my thought processes at the time, there were three reasons why I decided that my father was gay. First, it would explain why I was friends with so many closet homosexuals and so strongly supported gay rights. Second, the contrast between myself and my father was necessary to make my justify my desire to “come out as straight”. Third, I think I decided to out my father as gay because he was the straightest man I knew.

Kinderman says that episodes like psychosis are natural responses to distressing circumstances. To think one has been outed as gay when one isn’t can be a highly distressing situation in which to find oneself. In the real world, heterosexual people never need to tell others that they are heterosexual – yet this is precisely the situation Mental Health patients often find themselves in. We could term it the Tom Cruise Syndrome. I have seen it over and over again among patients diagnosed schizophrenic. A part of the problem is that for reasons of privacy, patients are never asked how they identify in terms of sexuality, creating a culture of suspicion within the Mental Health Service. It is possible that in the same way schizophrenics are supposed to have difficulty forming interpersonal relationships, and are supposed to lack verbal fluency and abstract thinking ability, the psychiatric profession may believe that all schizophrenics are bisexual. During the years I was treated by Fernando, he never asked me if I was gay or straight. But on one occasion, in 2009 before I went off the Rispiridone, he asked me in a deliberately off-hand manner, with my parents in the room, “Do you stand up for yourself or are you a people pleaser?” I had no idea what he was talking about but plumped for “people pleaser” because I was afraid of him. When I said this, the psychopath smirked.

It is tempting to say that the psychiatrists will all burn in hell after they die – but we should try to be more forgiving. Fernando, in his public statements, says that compassion is like a muscle that can be strengthened through practice – so perhaps we should try to feel compassion for the psychiatric profession. Psychiatrists are products of their genetics, upbringing, and eduation, as much as anyone else, and shouldn’t be held responsible for the crimes they commit daily and have committed for well over a hundred years. It is not their fault that they tend to be incompetent, dishonest, and sadistic.

Really the causes of my ‘illness’ are simple. I incurred a vulnerability to psychosis as a result of my parents’ divorce when I was seven, a childhood trauma that made me very sensitive to how others perceived me. My first psychotic episode was caused by my experiences at bFM and the Big House. Every subsequent episode was caused either directly or indirectly by the Mental Health Service itself. In order to completely recover, I needed to work out the cause of homosexuality – in short, I now believe, like Ian Wishart, that homosexuality is a choice but, unlike Ian Wishart, I do not believe it to be immoral. If, however, I had been recognised as genuinely heterosexual by the people treating me, if I hadn’t been put on medication, if the people treating me had made the slightest effort to find out the real reasons I had become ill, I believe I wouldn’t have needed to take this path to recovery and would have recovered in a year. Is it any wonder I hold a grudge against the psychiatric profession?