The Meaning of Meaning

What do we mean when we ask, "What do we mean?" This is a problem within philosophy of language. Philosophy of language in my view reigns supreme over all other branches of philosophy because it undergirds all fields of knowledge: all scholarly disciplines, with the possible exception of mathematics, rely on language to explicate knowledge and theories and to communicate knowledge and theories from one person to another. To understand the foundations of all knowledge we need to enquire into the nature of language. The purpose of this essay is to present a theory within philosophy of language, a theory of meaning. It picks up from the previous essay I published in this blog some time ago. Because in that essay I tried to cover too many different topics in the same post, not all of which were closely related to the core topic, it may have seemed to meander. In this post I am going to stick more closely to my main topic: the meaning of 'meaning'. This essay will be longer than that typically written for a university course but will, of course, still not do justice to the topic. My main sources for writing on this topic are the cluster theory of proper names first proposed by John Searle, Kripke's seminal lecture series "Naming and Necessity", and the article "Word Meaning" in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, although I shall reference other works. I actually have a novel contribution to the conversation to make, an idea I presented in the previous essay but which I think I can defend more robustly here. I shall finish the essay by considering the notion of 'truth'.

Often when presenting a philosophical argument, we must begin by defining the central terms or stipulating how they will be used. The salient word here is 'meaning'. English language speakers use the words 'mean' and 'meaning' routinely. We say, "What do you mean?" or "I didn't mean to do that," or "I didn't understand what the poem meant" or "What does that word mean?" or "What is the meaning of life?" Nevertheless ordinary speakers may have trouble defining the word 'meaning'. The online Miriam Webster dictionary defines 'mean' as follows: "to have in the mind as a purpose : INTEND [...] or to introduce a phrase restating the point of a preceding phrase [...], to design for or destine to a specified purpose or future; to serve or intend to convey, show, or indicate : SIGNIFY [... ]; to have importance to the degree of [...] to direct to a particular individual." Although the dictionary definition does not clearly signpost this, meaning has always seemed to me and hopefully to many of my readers a mental phenomena. The meaning of the word 'cat' is, to speak a little loosely here, some kind of mental representation or concept competent English speakers associate with the phonological and graphological sign 'cat'. Although we also associate the term 'meaning' with 'intention' I shall not be using the term 'meaning' in this way here but rather as denoting some kind of mental correlate of a sign of any sort we perceive in the world.

This way of parsing the meaning of 'meaning', as a mental correlate of some sign in the world, is, I think, a twentieth century development. If we go all the way back to Plato, we find the doctrine that the word 'horse', for instance, was supposed to be associated with the Idea of Horseness. Ideas, for Plato, were, to quote Wikipedia, "non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations". The realm of Ideas is eternal and mystical; it may exist in the minds of people but also somehow elsewhere somewhere. I suspect that Plato didn't have a solid conception of the human mind and consequently didn't consider the possibility that different people might possess different ideas, or that ideas can change over time both at the personal and community level. Although we still use the term 'Ideas' for Platonic Forms today, this term may to many of us seem misapplied because so many of us now consider ideas to be mental phenomena. For Plato 'horse' is both a word and a kind of thing to be found in the world, a set of things that are imitations of some prototypical ideal Horse in the realm of Ideas. Thus from the beginning there was confusion between the meanings of words and the types of things that are found in the world.

Of course philosophy is complex and different philosophers have understood the word 'meaning' and its analogues in other languages differently. For instance the very famous philosophers John Locke and David Hume seem to have viewed the meanings of words as being mental pictures and so did indeed interpret meanings as mental phenomena. However historically and today meaning has often been tied to reference. By the nineteenth century, philologists had realised that the meanings of words can change over time but philosophers didn't recognise the philosophical import of this. Within philosophy a distinction came to be drawn between two different types of word: proper names and common words, the latter being generic nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Both types of word have meanings, and in fact in this essay I will not draw a sharp line between the two. But historically the two types of word have been treated quite differently.  I shall focus first on proper names. In 1843, John Stuart Mill argued that the meaning of a proper name simply is its referent, that there is no 'semantic' content to a name like Dartmouth or Aristotle. It was not until Frege, in 1892, proposed the distinction between 'Sinn" and "Bedeutung", usually translated as "sense" and "reference", that we begin to get a distinction in philosophy between the meaning of a proper name and its referent, when we start to tease the two Platonic conceptions of ideas apart, and even then this new philosophical paradigm is still embryonic.

The next major development in this line of philosophical thought occurred in 1905 when Bertrand Russell proposed that the semantic content of a proper name is a definite description. For instance, the semantic content of the name "Aristotle" is (partly) "the teacher of Alexander the Great". The notion here is that by virtue of this definite description we can pick out uniquely the object the word refers to. Of course there is more than one definite description that can be associated with "Aristotle" and I don't think Russell explained why we should pick any one definite description rather than any other to be the semantic content of a name. There are other problems with their theory which I will not spell out here, although if the reader is interested they can perhaps watch the video "Proper Names by John Searle" on Youtube. This brings me neatly to John Searle. Searle criticised both the tradition associated with Mill and the one associated with Frege and presented an alternative theory. According to Searle, a proper name is associated with a cluster of descriptions, none of which are necessary to the meaning of the word. In fact Searle thought that the looseness associated with the meaning of proper names, the fact that no single descriptor is necessary, is what makes them so useful: proper names are tags to which people can attach descriptions that can change over time and, although Searle does not say this explicitly, his theory coheres with a view of the world in which different people can understand the meanings of words differently and of a world in which the meanings of words can shift.

Searle does not use this type of argumentation in his famous essay but I believe I can begin to elucidate my own theory, a theory that follows directly from Searle's cluster theory, by invoking the notion of what we might call a conversational interaction. Suppose Jack and Jill are discussing philosophy and Aristotle comes up. Suppose Jill knows only a little about Aristotle: in her mind the cluster of descriptions might be only "famous Greek philosopher", "student of Plato", and perhaps some mental pictures of a bearded bust. Jack knows a little more: he knows for instance that Aristotle came up the Lazy Man argument. He tells Jill that Aristotle was one of the first known philosophers to propose an argument against predestination, that this argument is called the Lazy Man argument, and then goes on to summarise it. Jill has learnt something new, and if she believes Jack and remembers what he has told her, she has added another descriptor to the term "Aristotle", specifically "deviser of the Lazy Man argument". Of course, Jack, in telling Jill about the Lazy Man argument, is presupposing that Jill has at least a little familiarity with "Aristotle". However if Jack and Jill associated the exact same set of descriptors with the term "Aristotle", it would be impossible for Jack to tell Jill anything new about him. We could also imagine a situation in which Jill associates an incorrect descriptor with the term "Aristotle", perhaps that he died from drinking hemlock, and that Jack rectifies her understanding by informing her that she is thinking of Socrates. Through conversational interactions, people are constantly relaying to each other information that is new to the person hearing or reading it, and this seems to be one of the primary purposes of language. If everyone possessed the exact same understanding of language and of the world as everyone else, we would never need to talk to each other, never be able to tell anyone anything new. As another example, an example inspired by Frege, many casual astronomers throughout history may not have realised that the Evening Star is identical to the Morning Star until someone told them.

Searle's theory seems to me very close to the correct theory but, unfortunately, in 1970, Saul Kripke delivered a series of lectures known as "Naming and Necessity" and completely derailed philosophy. Kripke has been enormously influential but I believe his influence has been terribly damaging. In these lectures, Kripke repeatedly insists that when we are using a proper name like Aristotle, there is no semantic content but that we are simply referring to that man. He offers no argument for this contention but simply assumes his audience shares his intuition. Kripke attempts to debunk the cluster theory of proper names; in doing so I believe he misrepresents it. In his view, the cluster theory seems to imply that everyone has got together and, through something like a vote, picked out a set of descriptors that should be associated with a name like "Aristotle" and that these descriptors are then to be treated as both necessary and a priori. I believe that Kripke misunderstood Searle, perhaps because Searle didn't go as far as I intend to in this essay. Obviously Searle is not suggesting that some kind of vote is taken before anyone can start using a word like "Aristotle" or that any of the descriptors associated with "Aristotle" are necessary or known a priori. Jack assumes that Jill has some understanding of the name, an understanding he assumes most people have, but he does not assume that Jill was born knowing that a descriptor associated with "Aristotle" is "famous Greek philosopher". He assumes, as we all do when talking about Aristotle, that the person we are talking to has learned this sometime during his or her life. So it cannot be known a priori. Nor is any descriptor necessary: Jack can meaningfully say to Jill "Aristotle wasn't Greek" if he, perhaps, means to suggest that he believes Aristotle actually immigrated to Athens from somewhere else around the Mediterranean. If it is necessary that Aristotle be Greek, Jack's statement would not be meaningful to Jill but, I contend, Jill will still find it meaningful because there is still considerable overlap between the sets of descriptors both associate with the name "Aristotle". Thus none of the descriptors people associate with proper names are necessary either. Rather, when talking to someone else, one makes assumptions about what the other might or might not know; one assumes enough overlap in one's own and the other's understanding of words that we can meaningfully communicate but we do not assume the overlap is complete. If the overlap were complete, Jack would have nothing new to tell Jill about Aristotle – but if there was no overlap at all, the two would not even share the same language and would be unable to communicate at all.

So far I have been discussing proper names but now we can bring in another type of word: common nouns. (The discussion could be extended to verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as well but I shall not do so in this essay.) When talking about the meanings of common nouns, it seems we need a distinction between the essential and the accidental, and a closely related distinction, the necessary and the contingent. We might say that it is essential, necessary, to the word "horse" that it denote something that has four legs but that the colouring of any particular horse is contingent, accidental. The belief that common nouns have both necessary and sufficient conditions goes back to the ancient Greeks again, is of a piece with Platonic philosophy, and is still central to much modern philosophy. The difference between a proper name and a common noun is that with a proper name, like Aristotle, not only does the name only refer to a single object, it seems also that we could theoretically itemise an indefinitely long list of necessary properties associated with it whereas with a common noun the list is truncated. Some properties are held by all members of the class, are necessary to all of them, while some properties might be held by one member of the class and not by another. The distinction between the essential and the accidental is so entrenched that those of us who have been introduced to this idea find it difficult to imagine disposing of it.

A long time ago, however, I found an essay on the Internet, a essay I believe to be a famous essay by a famous philosopher, challenging this distinction. (I have been unable to relocate this essay so cannot name its author here.) In this essay, the author argued that in fact when we say some characteristic of a thing is essential to it, we are really just saying that it is a characteristic we find it almost impossible to imagine the thing not having, something we are very unwilling it give up. Consider: today we say that it is essential to the word "water" that it denote "a collection of H20 molecules" but the fact that water is constituted by H20 molecules was not discovered until 1811 and people had been happily using the word "water" and its synonyms in other languages for thousands of years meaningfully before this without knowing it. There may be many people in the world today who happily use the word "water" meaningfully without knowing that it is 'essentially' H20. One may be able to mount a persuasive argument that water ought to be regarded as H20 essentially but, if people can use the word "water" meaningfully without knowing this, it suggests that knowledge of this 'essential' property is not required for people to use this word meaningfully. We might also consider that the word "bachelor" is supposed to essentially denote "an unmarried man" but it is possible to imagine some hermits who have lived in the wilderness all their lives, who have heard the word "bachelor" but do not know its dictionary definition and believe it to mean something quite different. It seems, surely, that they can use the word 'bachelor' meaningfully when talking with each other even though they do not know the dictionary definition – although they might then meet people who tell them the dictionary definition and bully them into accepting it. Not only can the essential properties associated with common nouns vary among people, they can vary over time. Of course some properties seem, in the world we live in, to go together: chordates seem always to also be renates. However an unknotting of this particular puzzle, the puzzle of why natural kinds seem to exist in the world, why properties seem to come together in bundles, does not belong to philosophy of language bur rather to ontology. The aim of this essay is to discuss the nature of meaning and its mental character.

Like proper names, common nouns have historically been viewed as inevitably involving reference. There is however, to my mind, a knockdown refutation of the idea that meaning necessarily involves reference. Picture Jack and Jill again. Suppose Jill tells Jack, "This morning I saw a unicorn in my back garden." Now Jack, knowing that unicorns are mythical, may wonder if Jill hallucinated, but even so he would still find her statement meaningful. Even though the word "unicorn" has no referents, it would still likely have a meaning for Jack. Jill is telling Jack that she saw a pure white horse-like creature with an ivory horn protruding from its forehead in her garden. Contrast this little story with another. Suppose Jill says to Jack, "This morning I saw a thiggle in my back garden". Of course, no one knows the meaning of this word "thiggle" because I have just made it up. The word will not be entirely meaningless to Jack however because he will assume that whatever a thiggle is, it is something that could turn up in a back garden and the appearance of which is surprising enough for Jill to mention it. It will have little more significance to him than this though and so Jack could justifiably plead ignorance and say to Jill, "What's a thiggle?" To which Jill might say, "It's what my mother called a fantail." Or, "It's what my sister called a pixie." Either way Jill will have furnished Jack with additional descriptors, additional meanings, for the word "thiggle" My general thrust here is that, although a word like "thiggle" has very little meaning to competent English speakers, words like "unicorn", "elf", "dragon", "vulcan" and "vampire" do have meanings even though they all lack referents. Searle makes a similar argument in the context of proper names. He points out that from Millian perspective, the word "Zeus does not exist" must be parsed as "The name 'Zeus' has no referent" but that throughout history and even today there are people and animals called Zeus and so the proposition "The term 'Zeus' has no referent" is false even though most people would regard the proposition "Zeus does not exist" as true. This supports the claim that the word "Zeus" should be considered a tag for a number of descriptors that most people associate with the name "Zeus", such as "chief of the Greek gods", "father of Hercules", "husband of Hera", and "wielder of thunderbolts". The words we ascribe to mythical beings such as those listed above, unlike the word "thiggle", must surely be regarded as meaningful even though they lack referents. They figure in the mythical and literary treasure house of English speakers' linguistic history.

I arrive now at the crux of the essay. What do I mean by 'meaning'? The view I shall propose here is more indebted to linguistics and cognitive science than mainstream philosophy, and is supported by the success of AI developers in creating large language models like ChatGPT based on huge neural networks. ChatGPT I think passes the Turing test. I claim that the human mind can be considered an enormous network of interconnected nodes. Every word in a person's lexicon is connected to other words. For instance, the word "cat" is contrasted with "dog" and also contrasted with the word "cab". The word "bachelor" is connected to the phrase "unmarried man". This suggests a Structuralist perspective, a la Saussure, but unlike Structuralists, I claim that the nodes are not all verbal, but may also be sensory: the word "cat" in most people's minds also often conjures up images of cats performing catty activities, is connected to such memories or imaginings. An enormous proportion of a person's knowledge is non-verbal. We can recognise the difference between Emma Stone and Melinda Clarke even if we have trouble verbally articulating their defining features; we can distinguish between a London and New York accent even if we know nothing about non-rhoticity and rhoticity; we can pick which pop song is playing on the radio from the first couple of bars even if we know nothing about music theory and are not pitch perfect. The fact that a great deal of the knowledge a human possesses is non-verbal is, when you think about it, obvious. If I tell you, "Close the door!" and the meaning of the word "door" were entirely verbal, you would not be able to accede to my request. You need some kind of visual idea of what a door is to know what I mean; visual imaginings of doors form part of the meaning of the word "door". The relation between nodes may be extraordinarily complex. It enables humans for instance to make statement like "Mt Everest is bigger than a shoebox", a sentence that in no simple way involves either purely verbal or visual nodes, seems to somehow involve conceptual nodes or some kind of encyclopaedic knowledge; I have heard statements like this can trip up ChatGPT.

From this perspective, it seems likely that in the human mind there is, at a fundamental level, no clear distinction between essential and accidental properties, but rather a reticulated dispersal of meaning from one node to those proximate and then those more distant. Eleanor Rosch has argued that when we think of a "cat", we imagine a prototypical cat and then tend to think of things as either more or less cat-like, rather than drawing a sharp line between "cats" and "non-cats" based on some criteria, as would seem to be the case if the meanings of words were constituted by essential properties. Rosch's proposal seems plausible to me.

The second vital point to note about language is that it is learnt. Of course this is obvious. Chomsky argued that the fundamental syntax of all languages is innate, perhaps genetic, and this is why he invented the idea of Universal Grammar. But no one today can seriously take the Platonic position that the semantics of a language is innate. No baby is born knowing the meaning of the word "unicorn". It takes years for a child to learn the meaning of the words used by those around her and then to start speaking herself. Even more importantly, the language the child learns is that spoken by those raising her. The obvious fact that different linguistic communities possess different languages conclusively proves the claim that the semantics of a language is learnt. Infants are sponges, somehow picking up on how others around them use language and conforming to the lexical rules of those around them. The ability of small children to learn so quickly their mother tongue is, when you think about it, astonishing. By the time we are adults, we tend to understand the meanings of all common words in almost exactly the same way as those around us do. But even as adults we can continue to learn and I claim that even as adults we are often appending new descriptors, new meanings, to the words we know and even learning new words. For example, I learnt this week about the new film Furiosa and can attach to this proper name, which I did not know before, descriptors such as "latest film in the Mad Max series", "film featuring Chris Hemsworth in a starring role", and "set like the earlier instalments in Australia". It is not just lexical knowledge that is continually developing but all knowledge. Suppose Jill takes Jack to a new cafe in East Auckland, one he has not visited before. As a result Jack may well commit to memory the geographic location of this cafe, a fact that is not linguistic but spatial or topographical. Supposing that knowledge is somehow actualised in the brain, the lessons of neuroscience become pertinent: it is well established that a person's brain evolves enormously from infancy through childhood and adolescence and that the frontal cortex is not fully developed until a human is about twenty-five. But even those of us, like me, who are nearing middle age can continue to learn new information, albeit with much more difficulty than we did as children, and, if materialism is true, this suggests that the brains of adults are still constantly changing (although to a lesser degree than they did when very young). This is not to say, of course, that a person is capable of remembering everything he or she has learnt or been told over the course of his life; it is probable that although we might gain new descriptors for terms we also lose others. The capacity of the human mind is not infinite. 

The picture I am drawing is that 'meaning' is related to knowledge and that knowledge is an enormous network of interrelated signs, stored images and sounds, concepts, and so forth in a particular human mind. The meanings of words are not isolable units. You might know that "Aristotle" is "a Greek philosopher" but even then you cannot really know the meaning of the name "Aristotle" without also having at least some vague understanding of the terms "Greek" and "philosopher". It might be that even if you do have some understanding of the term "philosopher" you may not be able to distinctly articulate the meaning of this word – but you might connect it strongly in your mind with people like Rene Descartes and Bertrand Russell, less so with Darwin and Einstein, and not at all with someone like Donald Trump. You might say of a friend, "Amy is a bit of philosopher," if she occasionally says something deep. (To reiterate, not all knowledge is verbal or capable of verbal expression.) To try to delimit the boundaries of a word's meaning by invoking necessary and sufficient conditions ends up a kind of question begging. It seems moreover that the meanings a person attaches to a word are implicit, can only be inferred from the way the person speaks and behaves, that they cannot be accessed through introspection.

The theory I am advocating for here is related to meaning holism and I encourage the reader to look up the Stanford Encyclopaedia entry on this theory. However my own theory departs from the holism defended by Quine among others. Traditional holistic theories of meaning often seem to suppose that the network of meanings in the mind of one person must be either entirely identical with or entirely different from the person she is speaking to; this is wrong. As I argued above, it seems that when one talks to someone else, one assumes a great deal of overlap but not complete overlap. If the networks are identical, there would be no point communicating at all and if the networks are entirely different, communication would impossible. We constantly make assumptions about what others know when speaking to them. A second way my own theory departs from traditional holistic theories is that these theories suppose that if the meaning of one term changes it alters the meaning of every single other term in the network. But we can quite simply suppose that with the addition of a new descriptor, or adoption of a new belief, a change propagates to related nodes in the network without also supposing that every single term in the network acquires a new meaning. Dropping a stone in the Hauraki Gulf will probably not produce a ripple that will travel all the way to South America. If Jill learns that Aristotle came up with the Lazy Man argument it may affect her understanding of terms like "Aristotle", "philosophy" and, say, cause her to alter her beliefs concerning how long arguments about the existence of free will have been raging – but it won't affect her beliefs about the location of the Britomart train station. Finally, traditional holism has trouble explaining how one learns a language to begin with. Consider – a child's first word may be "No". If some holistic theory of meaning is true, how can the child know the meaning of this word "No" if presumably she knows no other word? However we can go some way towards solving this puzzle by recognising that the child has been observing the way others around her use this word, their body language, and the types of situations in which it is used. Quine and other proponents of meaning holism assume that the network consists entirely of words but, as I argued above, the network comprises in addition an enormous amount of perceptual experience and perhaps some elementary concepts. A network is in place before the first word is spoken. You may ask: how does the network originate? I cannot answer this question except to say that it may be a chicken-egg type empty question.

The novel contribution I wish to make to philosophy of language is to extend Searle's cluster theory of meaning to descriptors that indicate the ontological category of beings. Quite simply, it is part of the meaning of a word whether what it denotes exists or not. Consider: when Jill tells Jack that she has seen a unicorn in her back garden, the reason that Jack may not believe her is that if Jack is like most people he regards unicorns as mythical. The descriptor "mythical animal" is one most people associate with the word "unicorn". Why? Because we learn this almost from the time we learn the word. Similarly, along with descriptors like "chief of the Greek gods", and "father of Hercules", a descriptor we associate with the word "Zeus" is "non-existent". Why? Because we learn that the word "Zeus" is a figure in Greek mythology and when we first encounter Greek mythology we also assimilate the belief that all the beings in Greek mythology don't exist and never existed (although we may later learn that the city of Troy did in fact once exist). Descriptors associated with "Sherlock Holmes" include "greatest detective in nineteenth century London", "close friend and confidant of Dr Watson" and "fictional character created by Conan Doyle". Thus some of the descriptors associated with "Sherlock Holmes" seem to characterise him as real and others do not. The fact that people can disagree about whether some objects, like God for instance, exist or not strongly supports the hypothesis that whether something exists or not is a part of the meaning of the term used to denote it and can vary among people. Once we recognise that ontological status, existence or non-existence, can be part of the meaning of words, this leads us to the conclusion that Searle's cluster theory, although a good start, is not a fully adequate theory of meaning. Its inadequacy is that Searle's theory seems to imply that the meaning of a proper name is a list of descriptors. But if want to explain how the meaning of "Zeus" can be attached to both "wielder of thunderbolts" and "non-existent" we need to recognise that the meaning of a word must also involve very complex relationships between different descriptors. The meaning of a word is a structure of which ontological category might be a kind of base-level component. And, to reiterate, this structure is not entirely verbal and is not wholly isolable from the structures of other related words.

I'll make an observation concerning this, something I find fascinating. Children learn that some things are real and others fictional almost from the time people start telling them stories. It seems that the imbibing of fairy stories and fantastical narratives, like the Beatrix Potter tales and the Harry Potter books, is an important part of child development. Children need to be exposed to fantastical, literally false, stories, and they seem to enjoy fictions precisely because they are fictions. No culture in the world thinks that children should learn to read by being forced to study encyclopaedias. To have a robust sense of reality we also seem to need a sense of the unreal. Perhaps child psychologists have delved into this interesting topic but I do not know if there is ever been any philosophical exploration of it.

The meaning of 'meaning' is closely related to the meaning of 'definition'. It can sometimes seem that these two words are identical but I shall suggest that there is an important nuance. Today we often think that the definition of a word is what we find in good dictionaries but there is a problem with this view – as Quine pointed out in his famous essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", lexicographers ultimately determine the definitions of words by closely studying how people in their linguistic community actually use them and, when there is uncertainty, adjudicate between different meanings by kowtowing to the usage of famous writers, like say Milton, or experts, rather than that of ordinary yobs in the street. The aim is to find some balance between how people generally use words and how they ought to use words. The definition of a word is shorthand for the meaning most people generally ascribe to it or the meaning they ought to ascribe to it should they accept the opinions of authorities. When we recognise this, it leads us to a total reconceptualisation of much philosophy. Philosophers and others throughout history have often argued that some claims are true by virtue of the definitions of the words contained in them. The sentence "A bachelor is an unmarried man" is true by definition, supposedly. "God exists" is true by definition, supposedly – this last is an important version of the ontological argument. Years ago a psychiatrist said to me, "It is impossible to recover from schizophrenia by definition." With an improved understanding of definitions, we can reinterpret claims such as these as saying, for instance, "God exists because everyone believes He does and this is the view of authorities on the matter". Now, in the Middle Ages, the descriptor "existent" was almost universally attached to the word "God" and this belief was strongly encouraged by church authorities. But today believers may be in the minority and this descriptor may no longer, for most people, be part of the meaning of the word "God"; thus it is no longer possible to say "God exists by definition." In my dictionary, a contemporary dictionary of course, the main definition for "God" runs as follows: "(in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being". Note that this definition includes an ontological category: "in Christianity and other monotheistic religions". It is up to the person consulting the dictionary whether or not she wants to believe that Christianity is true. We could imagine a definition of "Sherlock Holmes" as being "(in the novels of Conan Doyle) the greatest detective of nineteenth century London." This line of reasoning suggests that an argument of the form "Sentence A is true by virtue of the definition" is not conclusive because it relies on the infallibility of the beliefs of the linguistic community who have together determined the meanings of the words that make up the sentence. It is not conclusive because the linguistic community might be wrong.

The perspective which I am presenting in this essay is based on a view of language as something that mediates between individuals in the form of conversational interactions. Even when someone writes an essay, as I am doing now, I am seeking to communicate my ideas to others, hopefully to you, the reader, although I have very little notion of who you are. Now, it is certainly the case that a person may maintain a kind of internal monologue in his or her head, a monologue in which the originator of the monologue and its audience are the same person; Chomsky has argued that language evolved principally to be the building blocks of thought, with communication as a secondary, derived function. But I myself still adhere to the old-fashioned view that communication is the primary purpose of language and that its role in private cognition is secondary, although I am not absolutely committed to this view. Conversational interactions require that there be considerable similarity between the semantic structures of speaker and auditor but would be redundant if the two were absolute identical. My perspective is that we have to regard language users as all individuals interacting verbally with each other. This perspective runs counter to the general paradigm of much philosophy, especially in the anglophone tradition. There is a tendency to regard the linguistic community as monolithic: "we" think this and "we" think that. Kripke's theory of proper names, for instance, assumes the unitarity and eternality of human civilisation implicitly : he supposes that two and a half thousand years ago, Aristole's parents baptised him "Aristotle" and that there has been an unbroken causal chain linking speakers today with that original baptism. Kripke does not discuss the links in the causal chain (the conversational interactions), does not account for how a word like "Zeus" (which lacks a referent and therefore never involved any kind of baptism) can be meaningful, and has trouble accommodating the fact that different individuals can have different beliefs and understand the meanings of words differently. Although I concede that there is very significant overlap between the semantic structures of individuals within a linguistic community, that it is not altogether disingenuous to say "we" think this and "we" think that, I am highlighting the differences between people. And, to repeat my most important point, although not all language use involves the communication of information between individuals, this is a major role of language, something that would be redundant if there were no differences between the mental networks of different individuals.

Finally we come to the issue of Truth, something that has been looming over the discussion. The best way to approach this question is through some case studies. In the early twentieth century, physicists believed the universe as a whole to be eternal and unchanging. The reason Einstein included the Cosmological Constant in his theory of General Relativity was because, without it, his equations predicted that the universe would be either expanding or contracting, and he did not believe this to be possible; Einstein later called this inclusion his greatest blunder. It was with the discovery of the red-shift of distant galaxies by Hubble that physicists concluded that the universe was expanding and, together with the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, this led to the postulation of the Big Bang. It is tempting to think that the physics community changed their minds en masse overnight but of course this is not what happened. Physicists generally believed the universe to be eternal and unchanging in 1915, then subsequently Hubble and others found empirical evidence for the expansion of the universe, came to the conclusion that the universe was expanding, and then persuaded others of this 'truth'. This 'truth' propagated out to others, through 'conversational interactions', but this did not happen instantaneously – in fact, the physicist who coined the term "Big Bang" did so to show his disdain for the theory. He chose a ridiculous term for the theory because he thought the theory was ridiculous. Gradually the theory of the Big Bang gained acceptance throughout the physics community, through persuasion, persuasion usually employing corroborating observational evidence that physicists accepted, and from there disseminated out to the lay public. Even today, however, people can be found who think the universe was created by God in 4004BC and the physicist Roger Penrose has argued, if I recall correctly, that some stars predate the Big Bang, are remnants of a previous universe, and that therefore the Big Bang was not the ultimate beginning . Thus what we think of 'truth' must be considered a kind of consensus opinion created through persuasion and justified by one's faith in authorities, in experts, and even then dissent can exist. In the case of the Big Bang, the success of this theory is partly attributable to people's faith in experiments and empirical evidence as reported by credible scientists, well replicated experiments and observations, faith generally in the scientific method, as objective support for the arguments made by theorists.

Consider now the term 'schizophrenia'. The situation with this word is very different than that with the Big Bang because there is much more obvious disagreement about how to define this word than there is disagreement today about whether or not the Big Bang occurred. The most authoritative definition of this word might be that found in the DSM but still there are great divergences of opinion about its meaning because the word 'schizophrenia' is I believe somehow shapeless, can take on any meaning anyone wants to associate with it. Robert Sapolsky, in Determined, regurgitates the faddish new definition of schizophrenia as "a disease of disordered thought", but recently I have been reading The One Thing We've Never Spoken About by Elfy Scott, a book which does not attempt to define 'schizophrenia' but nevertheless presents a picture of this condition, a meaning for this word, quite different to that presented by Sapolsky. Scott is the daughter of a schizophrenic mother, has studied it, and has spoken to many people who have been diagnosed with it; I think her view of 'schizophrenia' is vastly superior to Sapolsky's view and that Sapolsky had waded into territory he knows almost nothing about. Then we might consider this blog in which I have been discussing the meaning of 'schizophrenia' for many years and presenting a different view again. It has occurred to me recently how problematic the definition of schizophrenia is because, although I have often experienced profound mental distress over the last ten years, this distress didn't really take the form of hallucinations or delusions but rather, for instance, of terrible nightmares, and was a reaction to my treatment by the Mental Health Service; nevertheless I was officially diagnosed 'schizophrenic'. It is not the purpose of this essay to elaborate on this self-reflection. The point here is that the meaning of the word 'schizophrenic' varies widely among people, that there is no consensus opinion with respect to its meaning or with respect to what we can say truly about it. With respect to 'schizophrenia', our notions of truth break down. Truth here is a matter of negotiation between people about how best a term like 'schizophrenia' should be defined and it might be that the word 'schizophrenic' is so compromised that we should discard it altogether.

In the post "Rationality and Irrationality", I discussed how in anglophone philosophy there is confusion between the descriptive and the normative. Philosophers want to stipulate how we ought to determine whether a sentence is true or not whereas I want to describe how people actually decide in the real world whether some sentence is true or not. We need to recognise that much of our 'knowledge' about the word is communicated to us through language, through 'conversational interactions' if we broaden this term to include linguistic artefacts such as news stories, scholarly essays, books, and so on. Everything I know about Aristotle, I have either read or been told by someone else. When someone communicates to someone else information new to him or her, the receiver will tend to believe it, to regard it as 'true'. If different conversational interactions convey conflicting information, we make decisions about what to believe based on prior knowledge, on reasoning processes, and often by deciding which of the communicators we feel should be regarded as most credible. Where there are differences of opinion within the linguistic community people seek to persuade others and if we define 'rhetoric' as 'the art of persuasive speech' we must consider rhetoric to be a core part of language use. I strongly believe that much of a person's beliefs are formed by the person conforming his or her beliefs to those expressed or espoused by those he or she finds trustworthy, an idea we find in Kenneth Burke. We could throw the notion of 'truth' away completely but I don't want to do this. Rather I would like to suggest here that any notion of truth must depend on a kind of faith. Generally we have faith in those around us to tell the truth and when there are differences of opinion we choose who to have faith in. Although I have not observed the galactic red-shift myself, I put my faith in the physics community, as represented by someone like Sabine Hossenfelder, in choosing to accept their consensus opinion that the universe is expanding. I put my faith in Michael Cohen over Donald Trump with respect to whether or not Trump fiddled the books. I put my faith in Steve Braunias when he says that Mark Lundy was actually innocent of the crime for which he was convicted, the murder of his family. Of course one's faith in someone else may always be misplaced but we have no other option.

I'll conclude the essay by summarising the theory of meaning I have proposed. The meaning of a word involves a reticulated network of associated words, sensory memories, and perhaps concepts; the meaning of any one word cannot be isolated from the meanings of other words. Knowledge of language is learnt and much of the way it is established is by means of 'conversational interactions'. Conversational interactions rely on the participants possessing very similar meaning networks but there would be no point speaking or talking to anyone else at all if the participants all possessed exactly the same linguistic networks as each other; this is the reason conversations occur at all. Through conversational interactions we align our networks with those around us and with those we trust. When there are differences of opinion within the linguistic community about what is true we make decisions about who to believe based on principles like consistency and the apparent trustworthiness of those speaking with us. We place faith in those around us to tell the truth. This theory may seem cynical: we may contrast it with the position of someone like John Rawls who argued that the principle of universal human rights follows directly from the "definition of justice". Just because it is cynical, however, does not make it incorrect.

This essay may not be that interesting to many of my readers and I am not sure if I have presented my theory as clearly as I could. However this topic is interesting to me and maybe one or two readers out there will find it thought provoking.

Language and Empathy

Anyone who seriously thinks seriously about other minds should arrive at the conclusion that enormous gulfs can exist between people – in outlook, in worldview. This is one of the major realisations I have reached as a result of my reflections on myself and others. Every person is different from every other person. On a whole people find it very difficult to empathise with those different from them because they simply cannot imagine what it is like to be someone else. Ironically I have become aware of these gulfs between people despite the fact that, for instance in my fiction, I have really endeavoured as best as I can to understand others – or at least some others. Or perhaps it might be better to say that I have written stories inspired by my own experiences in an attempt to communicate such experiences to people who have not lived them. Yet such experiences are not unique to me. It is because I have experienced psychosis myself that I feel I can at least a little understand the mad; ordinary people can't do this. I understand homosexuality about as well as is possible for a heterosexual; ordinary heterosexuals don't. I understand religious faith and also understand atheism because I have been an atheist but have also seriously considered religious ideas. Most people not only don't understand others but are unaware that they don't understand others. It seems here that I am being hubristic in suggesting that I do but, don't worry, I am not presuming some special insight into others that most people lack; I know enough to approach others with humility. It is best to presume that the person you are speaking to knows herself better than you do. However this discovery, that seemingly insurmountable differences can exist between people, was not something I possessed when I was younger and was hard won. It was won by virtue of experience. For instance, I know now that religious people, generally, simply cannot imagine a world without God, and atheists, generally, cannot imagine a world with one. Democrats cannot understand Trump supporters and Trump supporters cannot understand Democrats. However humans possess a resource that other animals lack: language. Through language one can at least attempt to communicate his or her inner world to others and at least attempt to understand others.

In this essay I wish to discuss language and how confusion can arise as the result of different understandings of what particular words mean. I especially wish to describe how such misunderstandings can arise in philosophical discourse. I want then to go on to say something about the recent debate in New Zealand concerning the principles underlying the Treaty of Waitangi. Although this debate may seem inconsequential to my foreign readers, readers who might be more interested in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the upcoming American election than a parochial issue down here in the Antipodes, it is of fundamental significance to New Zealanders because Te Tiriti o Waitangi can be considered as foundational to New Zealand national identity as the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution are to Americans. I wish to try to present the Maori perspective on this issue even though I am a Pakeha. I want then to return to Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. I have discussed Anselm's argument before but I wish to revisit it because I wrote my original post about it over six years ago and readers may have forgotten it; furthermore I suspect I can make my critique of the ontological argument a little clearer than I did in the previous post. These three topics are all thematically connoted to the topic I introduced in the introduction because they all involve mutual sense making and empathy with, or understanding of, others. In particular a proper consideration of what is wrong with Anselm's argument leads to important conclusions with respect to other minds and to meaning itself. Finally I shall conclude by saying some brief things about my own life.

A Youtube channel that the Youtube algorithm regularly directs me to is "Rob's Words". It's host (Rob, obviously) recently uploaded a wonderful video called "Words We've Ruined". He discusses a linguistic term called skunking. Basically different people can use a word in different ways and common usage can change over time; this can result in a situation in which a competent language user feels she has to avoid particular words because of the possibility that her audience will misunderstand her, will parse what she is trying to say in the wrong way. These words have been skunked. Example he gives are the words "nonplussed", "ambivalent" and "bemused". I am not going to talk about these words here because the reader can just look up the video and see if he or she has been using these words correctly. The reason for this problem, as Rob points out, is that the meaning of a word is pulled at once towards its history, its etymology, and its current usage, the novel ways with which it may be being employed by contemporary speakers. Etymology and usage can part company.

Personally I usually pretend that words haven't been skunked. When I use the word "incredible", I have tended to assume that readers can determine by virtue of context when I am using it to mean "not credible" or "unbelievable" and when I using it as an intensifier. Similarly with word like "phenomenal" or "stunning". It should be obvious that in describing the video above as "wonderful", I am not saying it is full of wonders but simply communicating how much I enjoyed it. Still, one needs to be careful. If someone say, "Unicorns are fabulous" we would need a little context to know whether the person is saying "Unicorns are creatures out of fables" or if the person is just being camp. However generally I believe we should assume readers are competent, give them a little credit. Only one time in this blog have I deliberately chosen not to use a word because it had been skunked. In a post last year, I considered using the phrase "assuming for the nonce" and decided, to be safe, to look "nonce" up. I thought "assuming for the nonce" was equivalent to "assuming for the moment" which indeed was true historically and is still true in the US and perhaps in New Zealand. But when I looked it up I found that in the UK "nonce" is a slang word for a pedophile. (I later saw a Ricky Gervais special in which he used the word in this sense.) So I decided it would be safer to use another word. Examples of such semantic misunderstandings abound. On their Breakfast Show here in New Zealand, Jeremy Wells and Matt Heath would in the past often ask international  male celebrities if they had ever "pashed" a man. I don't think Wells and Heath realised that this word "pash" only has the meaning "French kiss" in New Zealand and means something completely different, if anything at all, elsewhere. Some of their guests may have accidentally admitted to more than they meant to.

I do try, although I do not always succeed, to use words precisely. The task is made difficult by the slipperiness of language. However, when you read quality prose, you often find that good writers often speak figuratively, sometimes poetically; it seems readers appreciate writers who find novel ways to express novel ideas. They also appreciate writers who find novel ways to express cliches. Sometimes an idea can only be  expressed using metaphors. The slipperiness of language can sometimes be an advantage rather than a handicap; I wish I could express my ideas more poetically, find ways to exploit the complexities and ambiguities of words, but it is a challenge to make oneself write like Janet Frame, Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce. I don't even trust myself or the reader enough to make jokes because I am afraid readers will take me literally.

In a post I wrote late last year I discussed how the word "deconstruction" has strayed so far from its original definition as put forward by Jaques Derrida in 1967 as to have become almost meaningless. I won't talk about this word again. However I wish to discuss some other words that appear in philosophical discourse and the misunderstandings that result from the different meanings different people attach to them.

Consider the word "rhetoric". My own way of defining this word, the meaning I picked up a long time ago somewhere along the line, is "the art of persuasive speech". This definition is value neutral – an instance of rhetoric can as easily be used to persuade someone of the truth as of something false. Yet in the world we live in today the term "rhetoric" has taken on a pejorative flavour. Pundits and commentators often dismiss the arguments of their opponents as "just rhetoric", "empty rhetoric" or simply as "rhetoric". The implication is that the term "rhetoric" is reserved for false arguments, for specious arguments, but true arguments are not rhetorical at all but something else. Interestingly this ambiguity apparently goes back to the ancient Greeks. Plato didn't like rhetoric but his student Aristotle did. I have, as always, consulted Wikipedia here to make sure I have my facts straight (or are least aligned with Wikipedia) and the entry on it suggests that there is an unbroken tradition of the academic teaching of rhetoric from the ancient Greeks right up until the present day although the syllabus has often changed. What Wikipedia does not do is say anything about the negative connotations this word has in current common usage, which I know it does because I actually do read and listen to what others say, or why these negative connotations have attached to the word. I'll try to hazard a guess. Philosophers such as Hume, Locke, and Mill may have preferred a word like 'logic' rather than 'rhetoric' to describe their arguments, and the rise of the scientific method probably suggested to many people that science and 'reason' were preferable ways to approach the truth than through the deployment of rhetorical devices. Rhetoric became something associated with the oratory of hypocritical mendacious politicians. So there is an ambiguity in the word 'rhetoric' that may mean it has been skunked.

You'd think academics would realise this problem with the term 'rhetoric' but they don't always. At the beginning of 2018 I decided to write a long essay for an English professor as part of a paper here in Auckland. My thesis was that a successful story is a unified argument in favour of some core proposition, what we might call a 'moral' or a 'message', hardly an original thesis but one worth seriously exploring. Because I regard stories essentially as exercises in persuasion, I was attracted to the term 'rhetoric' and so my lecturer recommended The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth, originally published in 1961, an important work in narrative theory. What struck me is that in this book Booth almost never uses the term 'persuasion' – rather he sought to criticise the dogmatic credo that novelists should feign realism, 'show' not 'tell', and argued that in reality storytellers always introduce an element of artifice into their work (although I can't remember if Booth used this word 'artifice'). It seems that Booth chose the word 'rhetoric' because of its modern connotations, in order to argue that fiction always contains non-realist elements, rather than because of its historical meaning. Shortly after this, I read the The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh, a book deliberately referencing Booth's. Although Walsh's work is interesting and important, I found it even more vexing because again it never uses the term 'persuasion'. Like Booth, Walsh seems to be using the word 'rhetoric' as a synonym for 'artifice'. It was vexing because it seemed to me that if one is going to use the word 'rhetoric' in the title of a book, one should address its historical meaning – yet neither do. If you want to describe all fiction as terms of rhetoric, you should also recognise that the story is trying to persuade the reader of something. Why else use this word? It seems that the word 'rhetoric' has been skunked.

I observed another quite interesting example of miscommunication early in 2022. I was attending an online lecture about Boethius, I think, or possibly one of ancient Greeks. One of my young fellow students said to the lecturer that the view of the philosopher being discussed seemed to him 'quite idealistic'. I knew precisely what this student was trying to say; I don't think I need to spell it out to the reader because this student was intending this word in its modern sense which everyone at least roughly knows. The lecturer thought he was referring to the philosophical doctrine of Idealism, the doctrine that reality is made up wholly of ideas. The poor professor was so steeped in the history of philosophy that he had forgotten how little contemporary students generally know about German Idealism unless they have done a course in it – I know very little about it myself. The mistake is interesting however because our modern word 'idealistic' can I think indeed be traced back to German Idealism in the eighteenth century. The word originally belonged to the philosophers but then leaked out into the wider world and gradually took on its current quite different meaning the same way the term 'deconstruction' more recently did. Today the term 'idealist' is also probably skunked – although given a little context and background knowledge a person should be able to distinguish which sense is being meant on a given occasion.

Another word in philosophical discourse that seems to cause significant trouble is the word 'contingent', a problem because the word is so central to much modern philosophy. In the same course, early on, we read, in translation of course, some passages from St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas raises the question, "Does God know future contingent truths?" When I read this question, it seemed to me a kind of non-sequitur. I stared at it and simply couldn't understand it. (Aquinas goes on, by the way, to answer this question in the affirmative.) I believe the reason for my incomprehension may have been that the word 'contingent' meant something quite different to Aquinas in the thirteenth century than it does to people today. And even people today are uncertain of its meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term 'contingent' has two quite distinct senses: 1.) subject to chance and 2.) occurring or existing only if (certain circumstances) are the case; dependent on. Furthermore philosophers today recognise another meaning: following the work of modal logicians like Lewis and Kripke, the word 'contingent' can be defined as 3.) existing in at least one but not all possible worlds. The problem here is that not only are these three definitions different, they can sometimes be incompatible. It seems to me that if something occurs by chance it cannot be wholly causally determined by prior circumstances, so an event can be contingent in the first sense but not in the second, and vice versa. Similarly it is difficult to square the logicians' definition with the second Oxford definition unless somehow every possible world is associated with unique 'certain circumstances'. And if we believe in free will, it seems that a freely willed action can be contingent in the third sense but not in the two Oxford definitions unless we suppose that 'freely willed' actions happen by chance or are dependent on prior circumstances, something defenders of free will would want to deny.

But how did Aquinas himself understand the word 'contingent'? I don't clearly know. It is arguable that Aquinas anticipated modern modal logic because he thought that God could create any possible world, that is, any world free of logical or metaphysical contradictions, and so in a way all these other possible worlds exist as potentialities in the  mind of God. But did Aquinas believe in chance if he also believed in an omnipotent God? Did Aquinas attach any solid meaning to this term 'chance'? Do any of us do this today? I won't speculate here. But it is worth noting that theologians, even today, always describe God as totally non-contingent and seem to mean by this that God is all of the above, that is, not existing by chance, not dependent on anything else, and existing in all possible worlds (if any). There is equivocation here. From what I've read, Christian Apologetics sometimes breaks down because the arguments slide between different senses of the term 'contingent' without clearly signposting the change.

Language constantly evolves but philosophy in particular has an outsize role in influencing this drift. Sometimes philosophers invent new terms and then these terms filter out to the general public where over time their meanings shift, as happened with 'deconstruction' and 'idealistic'. Sometimes philosophers will take words from the vernacular and pressgang them into theoretical service, introducing new meanings in the process. Sometimes philosophers within the tradition will take established philosophical jargon and seek to redefine it within the tradition – although such philosophers will often say that they are rather trying to establish 'better' or 'more correct' definitions. This does not occur in sciences like chemistry or biology. In these sciences neologisms for chemicals and organisms are coined and then tend I believe to maintain stable meanings subsequently. The difference between philosophy and science might be that philosophical arguments usually depend on shared intuitions – that is, such arguments are not trying to prove completely novel claims or describe completely novel phenomena but rather clarify or elucidate notions people already possess but which they have difficulty clearly articulating, notions shared by the community. In researching and thinking about this topic, I have hit on a key idea that may be of great service to any of my readers interested in philosophy. Within the anglophone world, the main philosophical tradition since people like Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein has been 'analytic '. Early analytic philosophers distrusted 'natural languages' and wanted to create an 'ideal language'. This does not mean that they wanted to create a wholly new language like Esperanto. Rather, I believe, they wanted to take existing words and stipulate definitions for them that would enable such a language to perfectly or at least optimally mirror the real world. Natural language philosophers however, by contrast, think that we can arrive at truths by analysing natural languages. These two tendencies within philosophy, which we can call, following David Foster Wallace, prescriptivist and descriptivist, contribute to the gradual onward movement of the philosophical conversation, a conversation that because it is concerned with words and shared intuitions permeates out into the wider linguistic community. Both tendencies, however, come into conflict with the insight I mentioned in the introduction, that individuals can possess totally different worldview and thus, potentially, define words differently.

So far I have been considering semantic confusions associated with philosophy but I would like now to describe a semantic confusion I was involved with recently at my weekly pub quiz. A friend of mine said something about how Vladimir Putin wanted to spread communism into Western Europe. I said, "Putin isn't a communist." My poor friend didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. The problem here is that arguably the term "communism" has also been skunked, perhaps almost since its inception. It seems that everyone understands this word differently. Personally I take the rather renegade position that no communist state has ever existed. This is because Marx, when he coined the word in 1848, envisaged it as denoting a classless, stateless society made up of small self-governed communes – hence his choice of the word 'communism'. The term for the official political system of the Soviet Union from the 1920's until 1991 was not officially communism but Marxist-Leninism, a system in which the Communist Party ruled absolutely ("the dictatorship of the proletariat"); this "socialist" system was always supposed to be temporary, a provisional arrangement that would hypothetically give way later to genuine communism (even though genuine communism never arrived). But everyone called the USSR a communist state and people today still call China communist. This indicates that there is indeed enormous confusion today with respect to the word "communism" (and indeed with the related word "socialism"). But very very few educated people today have so little understanding of the term that they would describe Putin as a communist. Although people sometimes throw around words like "oligarchy" and "kleptocracy", I think Russia today should be described as a capitalist autocracy. Putin in fact hates the legacy of Lenin and the other 'Communist' leaders and his rule is based on a nationalistic and even somewhat religious mythos rather than any kind of economic theory. So of course my friend was wrong. The reason my pub quiz friend got confused, and I sensed this at the time, is partly that many people view the current conflict between Russia and the West as a continuation of the Cold War, as a struggle between capitalist democracies and 'communism', because they haven't updated their world views since 1991, and partly that many people seem to assume that all dictatorships are necessarily communist, that 'communism' and 'autocracy' are synonyms. I had to bring up 'fascism' as a counter example. Now you may think my pub quiz team mate was being a bit dopey but I think his misunderstanding may be far more prevalent than my readers may realise.

The lesson in all this is that not only that we need to know, as best we can, the meanings of words to understand someone else but that in order to understand someone else, we often need to guess how he or she understands particular words. Not only does linguistic communication help produce empathy, empathy helps produce communication.

The themes of language and miscommunication bring me to my second topic: Te Tiriti o Waitangi. I talked about this in January last year (in a post called "Concerning Co-Governance") but I shall add a little to what I said then and bring the reader up to date with recent developments here in New Zealand. In 1840, the British Crown signed a treaty with 512 Maori chiefs in which, at least according to traditional readings, the Maori ceded sovereignty to Queen Victoria, were guaranteed rights to their lands and other possessions ('taonga'). and were given all the protections, rights, and privileges of British citizens. Notoriously the Maori version of the Treaty is slightly different to the English version; today legal scholars regard the Maori version as the authoritative version. One linguistic issue is that Maori, for good reason, did not possess the concept of 'sovereignty' in 1840 and so it was translated as as 'kawanatanga', a word today often translated into English as 'governorship' instead but which may not be fully translatable at all. After 1840, a great deal of Maori land passed into settler hands through fraudulent practices such as governmental confiscations. In 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up by the then Labour government to provide redress to Maori tribes ('iwi') for such historical injustices. This makes total sense – it explicitly says in the Treaty that Maori have rights to all their lands and possessions to keep or sell as they choose and by 1975 the Treaty had been recognised as New Zealand's founding document. When the Tribunal was set up, the legislation said that Māori "could bring a claim to the tribunal about a Crown policy or practice (amongst other things) which was or is ‘inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty’" (Te Ara.govt.nz). Note that the Act talks of the 'principles' of the Treaty rather than what the Treaty explicitly says. There is a gap here because the legislation does not specify what these principles are. Eventually these were established by the courts. In 1987, the Court of Appeal determined that the Treaty "signified a partnership between Pakeha and Maori requiring each other to act towards the other reasonably and with the utmost good faith" (ibid). There are two important points here. The first is that this principle was determined by the Court rather than by Parliament. Secondly, the term "partnership" does not appear explicitly in the Treaty. Perhaps the Court found some way to interpret the terms 'kawanatanga' and 'tino rangatiratanga' (chiefly authority) in terms of partnership or perhaps there is documented evidence that the chiefs conceived of the Treaty this way back in 1840. Or perhaps it was judicial activism. However it happened, the idea that the Treaty represented a partnership between Maori and Pakeha entered into and became increasingly important in legal and political discourse. Today just about every government department has as part of its mission statement that it should act in accordance with the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The embedding of the partnership concept grew far more pronounced under the previous government, under Jacinda Ardern. All government departments and ministries were given Maori names. An independent Maori health body tasked with dealing specifically with Maori health issues, policies, and outcomes, called Te Aka Whai Ora, was set up in 2022. The disastrous Three Waters reforms would have seen New Zealand water services fifty percent controlled indirectly by councils and fifty percent by iwi. Inevitably, because of strong anti-Maori sentiment among a chunk of the electorate, these reforms provoked a backlash, and in October a new, centre-right government was elected determined to reverse these changes. The right liberterian ACT party, now a junior coalition party in the government, had campaigned on a promise that there would be a national referendum on the Treaty. It is important to realise that David Seymour wasn't wanting a referendum on whether or not we should keep the Treaty. He's not that evil. Rather he wanted a public conversation and referendum on what the principles should be. And he does have a point. I disagree with David about many things – I think New Zealand should have a wealth tax and a capital gains tax in order to help prop up our ailing healthcare service, our police, our schools, our water systems, and so on. David, though, has referred to a wealth tax as an "envy tax". But a case can indeed be made that the Treaty's principles should be honestly debated either within Parliament or by the citizenry in order to clarify what they should be (if we can ensure that the conversation doesn't get hijacked by bigots). Its not going to happen though. Having weathered a storm of protests by Maori and by Pakeha allies of the Maori, our new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, said he wouldn't support the referendum bill past the select committee stage.

My intent here is not to argue either for or against David but to say something about what I as a Pakeha believe to be the Maori perspective on the issue. Since the election and the swerve away from Jacinda's Maori sympathetic policies, there has been significant activist activity. Among some activists on the left, the view has at some time taken hold that Maori did not relinquish sovereignty when they signed the Treaty. I found this very surprising when I learned of this view. A little while ago, activists broke into Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum, and vandalised a replica English version of the Treaty to make a point about colonisation. I believe that the reasoning underlying this protest movement, the justification for it, is that in the first article of the Maori version of the Treaty, Maori ceded "kawanatanga" and in the second article were guaranteed "tino rangatiratanga". The second term can, today, apparently, also be translated as "sovereignty". So it seems that in the first clause of the Treaty, Maori ceded sovereignty to the Crown and, in the second, were guaranteed it. The activists are motivated thus by how they understand the meaning of "tino rangatiratana". But are they right? I recently read a piece by Sir Apirana Ngata, written in 1922, in which he makes no reference to this apparent contradiction in the Treaty, so this interpretation may be quite recent. Perhaps what the writers and signatories of the Treaty understood by this term depends on its context within the document and how they understood this term at the time. Perhaps the term 'tino rangatiratanga' has itself also been skunked.

The problem with the activist view, however founded on facts it may perhaps be, is that the activists have no clear idea what they actually want. Let us concede for the sake of the argument that Maori never ceded sovereignty. What would this mean for New Zealand? Should Maori take over the rule of the whole country? Which iwi would be in charge? Or would we have two states somehow in the same country: a Maori state with its own government, own taxation regime, own police, own schools, own health care system, and so on, and another state for Pakeha? Given the amount of intermarriage over the last two hundred years, how could we reliably demarcate Pakeha from Maori? Perhaps we could imagine a less dramatic response to a rejection of the English version of the treaty but I am not sure what it would look like.

I'll describe a conversation with another pub quiz friend which might illustrate some of the flaws in this kind of reasoning, the reasoning that seems to lead to the idea of having separate services for Maori and Pakeha. We were discussing Te Aka Whai Ora. My friend, a Pakeha, said, to paraphrase her, that Maori are different from Pakeha culturally and ethnically and so require a qualitatively different kind of healthcare, preferably by other Maori. To be clear, she was supporting the Labour position. A similar kind of argument for Te Aka Whai Ora is that Maori health statistics are demonstrably worse than Pakeha ones and that therefore the old one-size-fits-all model must be to blame. I asked her, "If I decided that Maori treatments were better than Pakeha ones, could I as a Pakeha seek treatment from Te Aka Whai Ora?" Presumably I would be unable to. I followed this up by asking, "If some Maori forms of treatment are more effective than European treatments objectively, why not have a single system that samples the best of both worlds?" It seems to me that the idea that Maori need an entirely different health care system seems to imply that Maori are biologically totally different to Pakeha and that Pakeha doctors are incapable of understanding and treating Maori health issues, an idea which must be incorrect. Yes, in the Mental Health System, culture and interpersonal relationships have an enormous effect on the emotional well-being of patients and so in this context Maori culture and staffing may be important. But it seems to me that when we think of diseases like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, all that should matter is the competence of the doctors. 

Of course, it may be that in thinking of Te Aka Whai Ora in this way, as a kind of alternative healthcare provider, I may have misunderstood its role. If I have misunderstood it, it may be the fault of the previous government for poor messaging, the media for poor reporting, or the current government for shameless Maori-bashing.

If dividing New Zealand up into separate Maori and Pakeha jurisdictions is practically unfeasible, it seems that lefty activists and the recent protests more generally lack clear objectives. Given this lack of clear objectives, what has been driving the opposition to David Seymour's bill? What are Maori afraid of? In the end I believe the impetus is more emotional than rational. Maori are more emotional than European New Zealanders; their emotionalism is related to Maori spirituality and culture, to the importance of mana and ceremony and connections to kin and land and taonga. Possibly this emotionalism is also partly attributable to the effects of colonisation and past repression. I now come to the point that I have been driving towards. The Treaty is important to Maori emotionally because it indicates respect for Maori. Maori want to be acknowledged as the indigenous people of New Zealand; this is the impulse that has driven the Maori protests. They do not want to be seen as better than their Pakeha compatriots but nor do they want to seen as less than them – and it is the second attitude that is what they are afraid of. The importance that most Maori ascribe to the Treaty is not instrumental. Perhaps a few in the Maori community may hope or have hoped to use the Treaty to try to grab money or power, but most Maori don't. Rather the importance that Maori ascribe to the Treaty is symbolic. Unlike immigrants who voluntarily choose to make their lives in another country, Maori in New Zealand come from here and were here for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Aotearoa is their ancestral home. Many reacted the way they did to David Seymour's proposal because they feared that the Treaty might be taken away from them. The Treaty, especially the Maori version and its interpretation in terms of 'partnership', helps support Maori identity and self-determination as a community. Maori are afraid that if the Treaty were to be somehow nullified or David Seymour's interpretation of it, in which the Treaty is seen as concerning all New Zealand citizens equally, became established law, Maori identity might be erased. Or at least significantly diminished.

Some of my readers may have read or heard of a philosopher called Jason Brennan and his book Against Democracy. If you haven't, you can watch a video on Youtube of him being interviewed by Alex O'Conner. In this book, Brennan argues against universal suffrage on the grounds that most people are too incompetent to make sensible voting decisions, and suggests that people should have to pass a test in basic civics and economics before being permitted to vote. This argument jars with many people, particularly the majority of political philosophers. The most common argument made against Brennan's thesis is that the right to vote has symbolic significance and that this is the reason we should endorse universal suffrage. Close to two years ago, I wrote an essay about this book for a Political Philosophy paper and attempted, not quite successfully, to use this argument myself. Brennan has made the comment that he doesn't think this argument works. I have thought about this recently and worked out what I should have said two years ago. To present the argument formally:

1. Utilitarianism is true.

2. Utility should be understood in terms of emotional states such as happiness or self-respect.

3. Symbolic gestures, such as granting a person the right to vote, bolster emotional states such as happiness or self-respect.

4. Therefore we should grant all people the right to vote.

Although I don't believe in utilitarianism myself, very many people do, so this argument seems a very strong contender in favour of inclusive democracy. The relation of this digression to the discussion of te Tiriti should be obvious. The Treaty, understood as a document concerning partnership, in an analogous way to universal suffrage, has symbolic value that improves the emotional well-being of Maori and does little to harm the emotional well-being of Pakeha (apart from a few bigots who can be safely ignored). Therefore we should maintain the idea of the Treaty as signifying a partnership between the two peoples. Yes, we need to find the right balance between symbolism and actual power over others – Three Waters was probably a mistake. And we need to take into consideration that only a minority of people in New Zealand can speak Maori when naming government ministries and departments. But this second concern can simply be addressed by giving departments and ministries both English and Maori names. I don't quite know where the line between symbolic acts and 'real' political power should be drawn myself but it is not the purpose of this essay to solve all of New Zealand's race relation issues. My aim in this section was to attempt, despite being a Pakeha who has had only glancing contact with Maori culture, to understand why Maori were so deeply upset by the apparently anti-Maori direction the present government has taken, to empathise with them. In trying to do so I am pushing back against the many Pakeha who have made effort to do so. This perspective on the issue enables to us to reconsider those far left activists who deny that Maori ever ceded sovereignty. The motivations of these activists are not instrumental – they are not wanting to completely reform New Zealand culture and institutions. Rather their activism is born from emotional impulses.

I turn now to Anselm.

Anselm's ontological argument is one of the more famous arguments for the existence of God. But it is highly controversial. Atheists today and in fact even many Christians from the eleventh century onwards when it was first proposed have felt that the argument must be unsound somehow but have struggled to say precisely where and why it goes wrong. I believe the mistake in the argument is, from one point of view, quite obvious – but this particular point of view involves looking at words and meanings in a way that runs completely counter to much philosophical tradition, even modern analytic philosophy. It is because of the prejudices of mainstream philosophers with respect to words and meanings that they have found it so difficult to pinpoint the error in the argument.

 In my previous essay about the ontological argument, I quoted Anselm's argument as it was presented in Wikipedia at the time. This time, rather than giving that version again, I shall give my own version.

1. If one can conceive of something like God in all ways except with respect to His existence, one is not conceiving of God.

2. Therefore if one can conceive of God in all ways, one must conceive of Him existing.

4. One can conceive of God in all ways.

5. Therefore one must conceive of Him existing.

4. Therefore, God exists.

This version of the argument is different from Anselm's original formulation. The most important difference is that Anselm's argument depends on the ideas that God is by definition that being none which greater can be imagined and that it is possible to imagine the greatest possible being. I claim however that my version of the argument is equivalent to Anselm's even though it makes no mention of either relative or absolute greatness. Defenders of Anselm may want to insert a jemmy between the two versions but I don't believe any such fiddling around with the arguments will be able to make Anselm's original argument sound when it can be easily demonstrated that my own version of it is unsound. In fact I believe we can set out an even simpler version that is also effectively equivalent.

1. One can conceive of God.

2. If one can conceive of God, one must conceive that He exists.

3. Therefore one must conceive that God exists.

4. Therefore God exists.

The first thing to note about this argument is that I have used the rather vague pronoun 'one'. Who is one? Well, presumably Anselm at least. But Anselm intends the argument to apply to everyone – you, me, the whole population of New Zealand, the whole population of the world, everyone, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Everyone supposedly can conceive of God. The supposed universality of faith in a Judeo-Christian deity is why Anselm thinks his argument is so effective. We are all supposed to be able to conceive of God and consequently His necessary existence; therefore, because everyone either openly or secretly believes in the Judeo-Christian God, this argument must be true. People who call themselves 'atheists' are ether lying or in denial or just stupid. Religious people sometimes trot out the passage from the psalms: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good," and there is even a term for the wilful, deliberate, and perverse rejection of God supposedly practiced by supposed atheists – Alex O'Conner discusses this term in one of his debates, a term I cannot include here because I have not been able to track the debate down. However, on the other side of the divide, we can find atheists who deny that anyone believes in God. According to such atheists, religious people are all engaged in irrationality, in wishful thinking and self deception. Insofar as Dawkins, for instance, sees belief in God as a belief at all, it is a delusion. If we consider these people, it seems we can turn lines 1 through 3 of my second version of Anselm's argument against Anselm – because some people do not believe in God then, by Anselm's own argument, these people cannot conceive of God. Some people can conceive of God and others cannot. Which group is in the right? We arrive back at the claim I made in the introduction to this essay, that seemingly insurmountable differences obtain between people. Some people cannot imagine a world without God and some people cannot imagine a world with one, and these two groups are incapable of fully understanding each other because they see the world from incompatible perspective.

However it is not the fact that faith in a single, simple, omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent God is not universal that kills Anselm's argument (although it does weaken it). The real fatal error, as those of my readers who are on my wavelength will already have noted, is the move from 3 to 4. This move is not valid. To make the argument valid we need to add another premise which we can call 3.5. 

3.5 If one can conceive that something exists, it must exist.

If we add 3.5 the argument is valid despite the fact that 'one' is not clearly identified. But 3.5 is false. We can conceive that something exists –  and be wrong. We can show this through several examples.

Suppose Bob believes in Bigfoot. He knows a great deal of folklore about Bigfoot and has heard testimony from people he trusts who claim that they have seen Bigfoot. It seems to me quite obvious that Bob can conceive of Bigfoot and that furthermore he conceives of Bigfoot as existing. However suppose Bob then learns that the supposed witnesses he trusted were lying or unreliable and encounters people who present him with solid evidence that Bigfoot doesn't exist. This may cause Bob to change his mind. Bob's prior conception of Bigfoot involved Bigfoot's existence and his later conception involves Bigfoot's non-existence. This means that whether Bob conceives of Bigfoot as existing or not has no necessary bearing on whether Bigfoot actually exists. Suppose, alternatively, that a large number of people know a great deal of folklore about Bigfoot but believe he is apocryphal. This is arguably the situation today. Suppose however that a group of respected scientists release a bombshell report that persuades everyone that a few big hairy human-like bipeds do indeed live in the forests of northwestern North America, that the testimony of previous eyewitnesses was credible. It seems then that the meaning of the term Bigfoot will consequently change not only in the minds of many individuals but collectively. Much of this essay has concerned the way different people can understand words differently and the way the general consensus concerning the meanings of words can change over time. I am claiming here that whether something exists or not is part of the meaning of the word used to signify it and that this too can differ between individuals and change over time. I claim moreover that this aspect of meaning applies to both general terms and to proper names.

I could devise many other stories to back up this claim but I will pick only one. Consider unicorns. Everyone today regards them as fabulous. Suppose however that archeologists discover evidence that now extinct creatures almost exactly like horses but with ivory horns growing our of their foreheads roamed Europe and Britain in the distant past. Saul Kripke argues that even if this discovery were to occur, we still would not call such creatures unicorns because, as I construe his argument, the history of this word can be traced back to the fictions written by fabulists in the Middle Ages and earlier and so it seems likely that there is no causal connection between the word's origins and the newly discovered remains. But suppose we imagine a little more: let us suppose that evidence is found that shows that such apparent fictions were directly inspired by actual creatures that roamed Europe and Britain in the Middle Ages. It seems to me that people can justifiably now say, "Unicorns existed after all!" The meaning or conception associated with the word 'unicorn' would have changed and the most important alteration is that we would now say of unicorns, "Unicorns once existed" whereas we would formerly have said, "Unicorns don't exist and have never existed." 

So far I have discussed ontological arguments in term of meanings or conceptions but Anselm's argument, like other ontological arguments, also depends on the notion of "definition". The issue I have raised reoccurs here. In Anselm's day there were no dictionaries but today we can talk about the "dictionary definition" of a word. Importantly the dictionary definition does not specify the whole meaning of a word; in particular, I claim that because most words signify actual things, lexicographers do not bother to mention that they do. But dictionary definitions usually do say if something is fictional or fabulous or mythical. The Oxford definition of unicorn is, "a mythical animal usually represented as a horse with a single straight horn projecting from its forehead." Unlike meanings or conceptions, definitions are determined by experts based on how they observe the way words are usually or authoritatively used by their linguistic community, a determination that can often be difficult to make. Definitions, unlike conceptions, should not differ between people. But still, as I have shown in this essay, definitions too can change. If definitions are contingent and created by people, the claim "god exists by definition" must be false because it equivocates between two different notions of "exists".

The argument I have been making is I think the best way to refute Anselm's argument. But it creates significant further problems because it goes against the grain of the whole modern tradition of analytic philosophy. Russell, for instance, thought that existence should be understood in terms of whether some thing in the real world satisfies one or more predicates and built his system of logic on this idea. We could reject much analytic philosophy and consider countercultural alternatives to predicate logic such as Meinongianism, the doctrine that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. We could invoke some kind of cluster theory of meaning; at the moment for instance I am drawn to the notion that verbal constructions like "existing", "not existing", "existing in the past but not today", "existing in the works of Lewis Carroll" and so forth are descriptors that as part of a shared cluster of descriptors in the minds of a speaker and auditor enable meaningful communication, a notion inspired by but not identical to a theory proposed by John Searle. The most significant problem is that my proposal seems to imply that we need to have two notions of existence and by implication two notions of truth. Anselm conceived of God existing but God might not actually exist; the proposition "God exists" might be true for Anselm but not actually true. The good ol' Correspondence Theory of Truth does not seem to cut it. We need to come up with some other theory of truth, perhaps social constructivist, perhaps pragmatic. This is far too complicated a topic for me to tackle here in this essay.

In this essay I have covered several subjects. The two themes I have explored concern the meanings of words and our understanding of others. These two themes are closely related because not only do we understand others by virtue of what they say, we understood what others are saying by virtue of our understandings of others. There is thus a strong connection between language and empathy. In spite of what I said in the introduction, perhaps if we make the effort the apparently insurmountable differences between people may not be wholly insurmountable after all.

I'll finish this essay by briefly reporting some things about my own life. In the previous essay I described a visit to Waiheke Island and said that it occurred in spring 2009. In fact it occurred in autumn 2009. It might be that I forgot that I live in the Southern Hemisphere rather than the Northern Hemisphere. This detail may seem trivial but it is important because it shows that how 'ill' I was when I was still taking Respiridone. Second, and this very significant indeed, yesterday my psychiatrist decided to release me from the Compulsory Treatment Order I have been under since early 2014. I have been under the Mental Health Act for almost exactly ten years. I have agreed to continue taking medication for at least a little while but readers may recall that I am now on a far lower dosage than I was two years ago. My reason for continuing to take medication is not that I think I need it but because of the overconservatism of my psychiatrist and mother. Hopefully I will get off it completely some time in the next six months. Even though so much in the world is going to shit, sometimes some glimmers of hope can still be found.

Religiosity and Scientism

For several weeks recently, often when I walked at night past the Edinburgh Castle, a tavern on Symonds Street, I encountered a woman engaged in vigorous conversation with invisible companions. I could only catch snippets of what she was saying but on one occasion she mentioned something about "five hundred civilian casualties." Not long after I first met her, I asked her, "Who are you talking to?" She replied, "I'm just talking to the archangel Gabriel". I asked her, "Can you see him?" She said, "Sometimes." A little while later, when I encountered her again, I asked her, "Are you talking with the archangel Gabriel again?" She replied,"No, I'm talking to one of his friends." My feeling is that this woman, for reasons of course unknown to me, was suffering a rather benign kind of psychotic episode. I suspect that she believed she was helping to coordinate with the archangel Gabriel and his friends some sort of massive humanitarian operation. The fact that this was occurring during the ongoing war in Gaza suggests to me that this may have influenced her delusions. Of course this is just speculation. I decided that this woman, who told me she lived at the pub and wasn't badly dressed or in any other way manifesting any of the signs we associate with homelessness, might benefit from talking to a corporeal being, that I could be of some help. I thought because I understand psychosis it might be therapeutic for her to have someone like me to share her inner world with. I certainly didn't want her to end up in hospital or on drugs. So far she has been reluctant. When I suggested to her that we have a drink and a chat, I suspect she might have taken it the wrong way. But, at the time, she said something like, "Maybe later. I"m just helping load stuff on an airplane." 

I find it interesting that when I tell friends and family that I regularly bump into a woman who believes that she is conversation with and presumably assisting the archangel Gabriel, often they say, "She must have had a religious upbringing." When I told a friend about my suspicion that this woman believes she is assisting in some kind of enormous humanitarian operation, my friend conjectured that this woman might have at one time worked in the army. The problem here, of course, is that ordinary people simply don't understand psychosis. 

This little anecdote is a doorway to the topics I wish to discuss in tonight's post. One purpose of this essay is to discuss religion and specifically the relation between religion and morality – I promised to do this in the previous post. Often psychosis is associated with religiosity and in a country like New Zealand, where most people are secular, there is a widespread aversion towards the religious and religiosity generally, sometimes even a kind of contempt and sometimes even fear. This seems to me a kind of bigotry, a bigotry born of an inability to understand that other people are others. A second purpose of this essay is to show how religious ideas can take hold during psychosis and how they can be interpreted in relation to psychosis. In the last part of the essay I shall turn to a quite different topic and shall discuss physics again – I shall present an argument which I think shows that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics is incoherent, a different argument to the one I made in "Quantum Physics for Dummies". I shall also discuss a central plank of the scientific method: statistical independence.

Now, in holding forth about religion, I am not pretending to be an expert like Bart Ehrman or a lecturer in Philosophy of Religion who taught me early last year, Timothy Mulgan. But I am not a total slouch either. Back around 2016, as a result of ongoing emotional distress, I considered various religious systems with some thought towards adopting one. I thought I could find some hope, "the thing with feathers" in Emily Dickinson's evocative words, in some religious framework, some kind of escape hatch. I seriously considered Gnosticism and would today be quite happy if people called me a Gnostic. The difficulty I faced was that I didn't believe in free will; this led me to also toy with Calvinist ideas. According to Calvin, some people are born predestined for heaven and others for hell; those who are destined for heaven are subject to "irresistible grace" and the process that leads a person to spiritual rebirth and eventual salvation involves a kind of "regeneration" which, according to some writers, can be spiritual torment, the dismantling and reassembling of a person's self somewhat analogous to the more modern notion of ego-death. Today, in 2024, I would reject the bleakness of the Calvinist vision in which everyone is wicked and sinful, in a state of 'total depravity', except for an elect few picked for salvation by God before they were born. A God who enjoys the suffering of sinners and consigns almost all of humanity to the sinner category is not a God I can believe in. This brings me to my first topic – the possibility of religion without morality, without a heaven or hell.

This is not really so hard to imagine. Let's start by considering the ancient Greeks. It may be that people today don't consider Greek mythology a religion but of course it should be thought of as such. The Greeks, as most people know, were polytheists. The chief god was Zeus but there were a whole raft of other gods like Athena, the goddess of wisdom, Mars, the god of war, Artemis, the goddess of the moon and hunting, Apollo, the god of the sun and the arts, Poseidon, the god of the sea, and so on. There were semi-divine beings like the Muses and the Fates, sometimes called the Furies. Greek mythology consists of an enormous number of stories concerning gods and the mortals who were the children of the gods. The elder gods were the children of the Titans and it may be that the Titans constituted an older mythology of an earlier civilisation that was superseded, rendered obsolete, by Zeus and his family. The gods of Greek mythology are very much like people and are conspicuously amoral – they squabble, become jealous, play practical jokes, and sometimes rape and kill. Leda, for instance, was raped by Zeus, a story which far more recently was the subject of a famous poem by Yeats. In The Iliad, composed in the eighth century BC, which concerns the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, and Aphrodite side with the Trojans, while Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, and Hephaestus side with the Greeks. Zeus pretty much stayed out of it. Even though Poseidon supported the Greeks, Odysseus manages to offend Poseidon by killing his Cyclops son and Poseidon's machinations, his attempts to kill Odysseus, prevent Odysseus from returning home to Ithaca for ten years, as recounted in the Odyssey. 

When I think about Greek mythology, I often wonder, "Did the ancient Greeks literally believe these stories?" It may be impossible to know – it may be that modern notions like 'truth' and 'fiction' didn't apply as neatly back then as they seem to today. Certainly I believe the Greeks worshipped their Gods and engaged in rituals such as propitiatory sacrifices. In a recent Sam Harris podcast, Brian Muraresku discusses the Eleusinian Mysteries that began close to two thousand years before Christ and probably persisted into the early Christian Era.  According to Muraresku, these rituals, which a person would participate in only once in his life, probably involved psychotropic compounds. This is interesting but the relevant point here is that these rituals also involved the myth of Persephone, the myth in which she was abducted and taken to the underworld by Hades to be his queen. According to one version of the myth, Zeus commands Hades to release her but, because she has eaten some pomegranate seeds while underground, she is only allowed to return to Olympus for part of the year and must remain in the underworld for another part of the year. The myth of Persephone was the ancient Greek way of explaining the changing of the seasons.

I tend to hope that my readers are literate enough to know a little mythology, whether it be Greek, Norse, Maori, or some other. We could try to explain the mythologies of ancient peoples by saying that 'primitive' societies used them to explain natural phenomena. But this would not be wholly satisfactory. Many Greek myths don't do this – we might think of the myths involving Theseus or Heracles, myths about the children of gods that seem even more removed from what we today tend to think of as religion. However the primary reason that many might be reluctant to identify Greek mythology as being a form of religion is that it didn't involve morality, at least 'morality' in the modern sense, although the Greeks certainly praised virtues like valour. The ancient Greeks might sacrifice oxen to a god in the hope that the god would respond with a bountiful harvest; however I don't believe the ancient Greeks thought that if an individual performed virtuous deeds and refrained from vice, the gods would reward him or her in this life or the next. This is not to say that the Greeks were amoral. Wikipedia credits the invention of Ethics to Socrates, who was born around 470BC, but philosophical thought concerning morality must have existed in Greece before him. Ancient Greek philosophy and mythology seem to be somewhat distinct, something that lends credibility to the idea that the ancient Greeks simply gave lip service to all these stories. Socrates thought we should try to be good simply for the sake of being good, not because the gods want people to be good and reward good people. Interestingly, Aristotle came to the conclusion that the world required a First Mover, an argument we find today in Christian Apologetics and which has become popular again recently. But, even though Aristotle seems to be anticipating the monotheism of Abrahamic religions with this argument (an argument that, of course, predated Christianity although it didn't quite predate Judaism), what Aristotle didn't do is identify this first mover as Zeus (or Cronus or Uranus or Gaia or Chaos, the family lineage that begat the Olympians). 

Modern Christianity not only fundamentally concerns itself with morality, it makes the promise that after a person dies, if she has been good, she will go to some kind of paradise, which we term 'heaven'. This notion is almost absent from Greek mythology. According to the ancient Greeks, everyone when she dies descends underground, crosses the Styx, and ends up stuck forever in the underworld. The whole premise of my favourite Greek myth, the myth of Orpheus, is that the underworld is unpleasant and one should want to be rescued from it if this can be at all achieved. Sometimes the underworld is not dissimilar to hell. Sisyphus is punished by the gods to endlessly attempt to roll a boulder up a hill, and Tantalus found himself in a fairly analogous predicament. Not everyone who dies is punished eternally but the underworld is nevertheless pretty dire. There are some hints of something like a heaven – the Elysian Fields (or Isles of the Blessed) occur sometimes in Greek fable and seem like a precursor idea to the Christian heaven. Initially, when first conceived, this paradise was reserved for children of the gods and great heroes but, as it developed in some strands of Greek thought, entry was permitted to people of great virtue. But Elysium seems to be a minor movement within Greek mythology. In the Odyssey, Odysseus arrives at the outskirts of the underworld and talks to a number of ghosts; he talked to Achilles who tells him that he would rather be a poor peasant on Earth than a ruler among the dead. I found a rather tendentious blogpost about this scene by New Zealand classicist Peter Gainsford (who writes a blog called "Kiwi Hellenist") in which he argues against the common interpretation of this scene that it is intended to show the superiority of the living world to the world of the dead. Having with some effort found a free translation of the scene on the Interweb, I discovered that the the realm of Hades is indeed however described fairly grimly as a "joyless place" and in terms of a "gloomy darkness" and so we seem quite entitled to believe that Homer and presumably many ancient Greeks didn't view the afterlife particularly positively.

Let's now consider the religion/mythology of a people who lived fairly near the ancient Greeks: the Jews. The writings that formed the basis for the first part of the Hebrew Bible were collected in the fifth century BC. Of course I am not an expert on what Christians call the Old Testament but my sense is that it is a mix of mythology, history, and moral instruction. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, and so forth seem quite a lot like mythology. There also may be something historical about the Hebrew Bible. It is full of genealogical information – so-and-so begat so-and-so who begat so-and-so and so on. It recount wars between the Jews and the other peoples who lived in the near East and famously of course the period when the Jews were captive in Egypt. It may not be possible to clearly distinguish between mythology and history in the Hebrew bible. (This is true of Greek mythology as well. The Trojan war may actually have happened.) Judaism, unlike Greek mythology, was monotheistic. In talking about ancient Judaism I shall say something that, even though it is obviously true, may offend some people. The God of the Hebrew Bible was God of the Jews and of no-one else – His role was to help the Jewish people. This is why we commonly refer to the Jews as the "chosen people". The other peoples in the region had their own gods although the Jews didn't recognise these other gods as being worthy of worship. The God of the Jews would often aid them in their wars and, when the Jews lost, as occasionally happened, it was because the Jews had failed in some way in their devotion to their single God. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written around 1790, William Blake poetically accentuates the absurdity that people tend to ignore. In this poem, he presents the almost Postmodern notion that "a firm persuasion" can change the world, and has Ezekiel say "from these opinions [those of King David] the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the Jews. This said he, like all firm perswasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the Jews' code and worship the Jews' god, and what greater subjection can be."

Unlike Greek mythology, Judaism does explicitly involve a kind of morality. We might consider the Ten Commandments that Moses brings down from Mount Sinai, or all the rules in Ezekiel and elsewhere, such as the rule that two or more different types of seed shouldn't be sown in the same field or that a man shouldn't have a pointed beard. The morality of the Hebrew Bible was a blind obedience to God's laws as laid out in their holy texts. Again, of course, this is obvious. A foundational myth within Judaism is the story of how God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son to prove his piety only to spare the son at the last moment. However, unlike modern Christianity, the Jews didn't believe that they would be rewarded for their obedience to the laws laid out in scripture with a blissful afterlife. In Judaism there was and still is no real notion of a heaven. The word the Jews used for the abode of the dead was 'Sheol', and Sheol is even less clearly described in Jewish writings than the Greek underworld is in Greek writings (although some later Jewish mystics have made the attempt). Like the realm of Hades, Sheol is subterranean and both the virtuous and the wicked end up there. Apparently, some Jewish thinkers compartmentalised Sheol in the same way that some Greeks invoked the idea of Elysium but there was no consistency to this. On a whole Sheol is also imagined as a joyless, gloomy place. The Jewish God was not really concerned with the fates of individuals after death; rather He was concerned with the living Jewish people. We can see this today in modern Israel among Orthodox Jews who see the Jewish state as something promised to them by their God, view God as fundamentally concerned with the living Jewish community.

And now we arrive at a religion/mythology more closely connected with me and perhaps many of my readers than the others: Christianity. It may seem provocative to argue this but one could well regard many or most of the stories associated with Jesus as myths. The tale of the Three Kings arriving at the manger, and the resurrection of Lazarus, for instance, probably simply didn't happen. It is also fairly evident that Christianity has from the beginning involved morality; the significance of Jesus, as we understand him today, is as a moral teacher. Where the Old Testament says, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth", Jesus said that if you are struck, you should "Turn the other cheek." Jesus said that one should love one's neighbour, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, that blessed are the peacemakers. It is in Christianity that we first start to get the idea of heaven, at least in Europe and the Near East. But we still don't get the simple doctrine that if you do good deeds, you go directly to heaven when you die and if you sin you plummet immediately into hellfire. The sacrifice of Jesus, his expiation of human sin, opened up the possibility of going to heaven, a possibility that had not been available to the heathens of previous millennia. But the way to get to heaven was through belief in Christ and through the Eucharist, the consumption of Christ's flesh and blood, not through virtuous action. 

And for the early Christians it was not immediate. Today most Christians and non-Christians alike imagine that people have souls and that, if heaven exists, the person's soul soars to it straightaway after death. But the early Christians thought something quite different. They thought that when you die, you get buried and then, on the Day of Judgment sometime in the future, you get bodily resurrected and, if you've been good, subsequently get to enjoy an eternity of happiness here on Earth. Many Christians today have no problem with the idea of cremation but for most of the Christian Era, the idea of cremation would have profoundly disturbed most Christians. If you had no physical remains, they thought God couldn't resurrect you. Even today very clever Christians can be found who literally believe in the Day of Judgment and the General Resurrection and deny that people have souls distinct from their bodies. Of course, there has always been disagreement among Christians concerning eschatology but the notion that people have souls distinct from their bodies I think didn't really become widely popular until Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century proposed his philosophy of Cartesian Dualism. I am not sure how our modern conception of heaven emerged but it is worth noting that even people who today do believe in heaven can tell us very little about what they believe it to be actually like.

There are a couple of points related to the previous discussion that it might be interesting to draw attention to. According to traditional Christian doctrine, no one living before Christ could possibly wind up in heaven. This seems a little cruel of God. In the early fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri, in The Divine Comedy, went to some effort to try to describe hell, purgatory, and heaven, an epic poem indicating, incidentally, that by this time the notion of the General Resurrection was not the only way people made sense of the afterlife. In the first part of the Divine Comedy, Dante descends into the inferno. The first circle of hell, the least hellish, is Limbo. This is where the unbaptised and the virtuous pagans dwell. We learn that the great Jewish patriarchs originally found themselves in Limbo but were rescued by Christ shortly after his crucifixion. In Limbo there is a palace in which the major Roman and Greek poets and philosophers who had lived before Christ reside. Even though they are not permitted to go to heaven, their afterlives are, thankfully, quite pleasant. In this way, Dante sought to reconcile religious doctrine with a more humanist view of the people he admired but were unlucky enough to be born before Christ. (There is admittedly very little more humanism in the Inferno.)

Another point which I think might be important to note concerns Gnosticism. In the Christianity we have today, there is continuity between the Old and New Testaments. Both are regarded as holy books. In the Hebrew Scripture there many prophecies associated with the Messiah and in the New Testament the apostles continuously speak of Jesus as having fulfilled these prophecies. (Religious Jews today of course don't accept that Jesus was the Messiah; they are still waiting for the genuine Messiah to arrive.) However in the early centuries of the Christian Era, a kind of religious system arose known as Gnosticism that took a rather different view. It is a matter of debate as to whether or not Gnosticism was a kind of Christianity; it was denounced as a heresy and stamped out by the early Church Fathers. According to the Gnostics, the material wold was not created by the true God but by a lesser deity known as the Demiurge who they considered evil; the world consequently is evil. Christ is a divine figure who came to Earth from a separate and purer realm to draw people towards the true good God who dwells apart from the wicked material world. The Gnostics even developed their own convoluted mythology. The Gnostics did not believe that people attained salvation through virtuous action; rather they thought that one achieved salvation through a kind of mystical esoteric insight. Interestingly, and this is the point, many Gnostic sects believed that Yahweh, the Jewish God of the Old Testament, was not the true God but rather the Demiurge. There was thus for many Gnostics a sharp divide between the Old and New Testaments; Christ was the emissary of an entirely new religion. When we look at this period in the development of religion around and north of the Mediterranean, we can wonder what might have happened if Gnosticism had survived and flourished. The tensions found within and between the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religions we collectively refer to as Abrahamic, may never have arisen.

The theme that has emerged from the discussion so far is that I am eliding the terms 'mythology' and 'religion'. My reason for doing so is to stress the commonalities between the two concepts. Of course many theologians and other religious people may think it very important to clearly demarcate the two. They may say, for instance, that religion necessarily involves morality in a way that mythology does not, or that religions make genuine truth claims that mythologies do not. However, I have my reasons for the elision that will become clearer later. I note furthermore that my selection of mythologies is very Eurocentric. The reason I am not talking about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism, or discussing South American or Maori mythology is that if I did this essay would just wind up too long.

Religious and mythological thought is complex and interesting. It is possible to approach it from a literary perspective, as constituting a collective treasure house of marvellous stories, rather than in terms of clearly isolable systems making different truth claims. We can suspend our disbelief. We might think of it the way Neil Gaiman does in the Sandman comic books and his novel American Gods. We might think of another comic book series from the 'nineties, The Invisibles, which consciously plays around with Gnostic ideas. Religious and mythological stories fascinate those of us with inquisitive minds. However fundamentalists of all stripes tend to cling to their own preferred systems and react sometimes with fear to anything they don't understand. Consider how Evangelical Christians in the US tried to ban the Harry Potter books in I think the early 2000s because they thought JK Rowling was promoting witchcraft. But there is another kind of fundamentalism – atheist materialist fundamentalism. Many people, especially here in New Zealand, genuinely dislike religious people because they don't understand them. There is a stereotype of the Born Again Christian who is homophobic, intolerant, anti-science, and right-wing; furthermore sometimes I think atheists are afraid of being judged by sanctimonious Christians and found morally wanting. Unfortunately some people can be found who fit the stereotype. We might think of the Republican Party in the US, current House Speaker Mike Johnson, or former Vice-President Mike Pence. However there is a different sort of religiosity – the sort displayed by people experiencing psychosis.

As I have talked about before in this blog, the definition of 'schizophrenia' is always changing. Nevertheless a common 'symptom' that psychiatrists and others still often associate with 'schizophrenia' is 'religiosity'. The fact that psychiatrists consider religiosity a symptom of a neurological disease, a problem, demonstrates how committed psychiatrists mostly are to atheist materialism. It also indicates one way in which psychiatrists dehumanise their patients, by denying that the spiritual questions that often preoccupy them might be legitimate concerns. I believe that religiosity does indeed often feature in psychosis although it is not universal. About five months or six months ago, I read Finding Hope in the Lived Experience of Psychosis. In this book, the now retired psychiatric registrar Patte Randal tells the story of her life. I have met Patte a couple of times and have shared things in my life with her that I haven't talked about in this blog. Patte has made contributions to the treatment of the mentally ill, particularly in her advocacy for the use of a therapeutic tool she invented called The Gift Box, a tool that may be helpful to many people if deployed by the right therapists although it wouldn't have been any help to me. Patte has actually experienced seven brief but intense psychotic episodes herself over the course of her life. What is relevant here is that although Patte came from a secular Jewish family, she fell into Christianity later in life, from memory I believe after her second episode. It wasn't a sudden Road to Damascus conversion but rather a process that involved her closely reading the whole Bible. Patte's faith is very important to her and she has written journal articles about the relationship between faith and mental health. Her faith supports her. Patte is an important voice validating the religious concerns of people who have experienced mental illness but find themselves among the intolerant and close-minded.

I have seen other evidence of religiosity. I knew a woman, another patient, who told me that she sometimes spoke to God. A number of times when she came into the clinic she would bring a tattered old book, a book she presumably found in a second-hand bookshop, in which its author seeks to show that Christianity is compatible with reincarnation. This little anecdote hints at the difference between the religiosity we associate with close-minded bigots and the religiosity of people who have experienced psychosis – the religiosity associated with psychosis involves a kind of spiritual journey, a spiritual curiosity, a spiritual questing. It is not dogmatic. This woman obviously can't be considered someone who was indoctrinated in childhood by religious ideology, ideology she has never questioned, if she is researching whether or not Christianity can be reconciled with reincarnation. People who experience psychosis are looking for meaning and may experiment with multiple religious, philosophical, and mystical traditions and theories before finding the one that suits them best (if they ever do). The risk for people who have experienced psychosis is that they are thus vulnerable to being captured by cults although I have seen only a little evidence of this.

The best way to explain how religiosity enters into psychosis is to talk about my own life and experiences again. I am a little reluctant to do this because I feel that I've said pretty much all that I need to say about my own life in this blog. However it may be possible to extrapolate from a single life to the experiences of a whole group of people, and the only life I know really well is my own. My own experiences may illuminate religiosity more generally.

When I was little I briefly went to Sunday School. My parents are both atheists (although my mother says she subscribes to Christian values) and I don't know why they sent me to Sunday School for at least a short while but they definitely did. At Sunday School I read children's versions of famous Biblical stories such as the stories of David and Goliath, and of Samson. This early religious exposure didn't seem to affect me, at least consciously. As a child and into my early teenage years I read an enormous amount of fantasy and science fiction novels rather than religious works. Books that made a strong impression on me included the Thomas Covenant novels by Stephen Donaldson, the books of Ursula Le Guin, and the science fiction novels by Ian M. Banks. I loved Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. I still adore The Sandman series of comic books. Like everyone else my age I was a big fan of the first Star Wars trilogy. Relevant to what I shall discuss later, I also read science fiction books by Julian May and Joan D. Vinge, books full of characters with psychic abilities like telepathy and telekinesis. During my time at high school, I shifted from fantasy and science fiction to 'serious' literature but even then I preferred literature with a magical bent such as The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, The Trial by Kafka and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My mind was full to the brim with fantastical fictions.

Despite my fascination with fabulous stories, I grew up into someone totally irreligious. I subscribed wholly to the atheist materialist paradigm and thought religious people were all deluded. At high school, morning assemblies always began with a prayer – all the the other boys, most of whom were probably atheists or adherents to non-Christian religions, would automatically bow their heads, but I made a point of never doing so. This was my small act of defiance. Unlike the New Atheists, however, I didn't think atheists should try to convert the religious to atheism. When I met religious people, I didn't try to dissuade them of their convictions. I thought that because religious faith was ridiculous it must also be fragile, and I worried that I might harm believers accidentally by proving to them that their beliefs were stupid. I put all my faith in science. Looking back, I think my rejection of everything paranormal had its roots in a childhood fear of the supernatural, of ghosts and ghouls and vampires. I recall that in Seventh Form I learnt about the Placebo Effect. The idea that a person's beliefs could influence that person's physical body profoundly perturbed me. This discovery had lasting effects on how I viewed the world and I never fully reconciled it with my faith in science.

So I have always been torn between my love of myths and wondrous stories, and my commitment to atheist materialism. I suspect that one reason for the importance of fiction to human life is that to know 'reality', we also have to know 'unreality'. This idea, that dreams and the real world mutually define each other, that both are necessary, is one Neil Gaiman hints at evocatively in the comic collection Brief Lives. It is actually quite a Derridean conception. But I shall not develop this idea here because I don't really have a theory about it yet. 

Then in 2007 at the age of twenty-seven I experienced my first psychotic episode. As a result of acute stress, my sense of reality shifted sideways. I have talked about this so much in this blog that there is no point revisiting it here in detail. What is significant is that during this episode and the subsequent episodes I suffered is that little bits of my life, memories, all the stories I'd read or viewed, history, and my incomplete understanding of biology, psychology, psychiatry, physics, all the sciences, inspired and constituted the delusions I entertained. I was no longer sure where to draw the line between reality and fantasy. I felt compelled to arrive at some new worldview based on these materials. People often use the term 'psychotic break' and I am not sure whether or not this term is too strong for what I experienced. In Jerusalem,William Blake said, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's." I felt compelled to try to make sense of what had happened to me and was happening to me and this led me to conclusions that most people would consider crazy.

Many of these delusions were somewhat scientific. In 2007, for a number of months, I thought that there was a microphone in my glasses. Years later I told my psychiatrist this and he said, "They have the technology to do that, you know." I remember in 2007 reading an article in the New Zealand Herald about how the Y chromosome is shrinking. This is true – the Y chromosome in humans and many other animals has been gradually shortening over many millennia. At the time, I decided that this might explain why all of humanity seemed to have turned or be turning homosexual. I was constantly trying to come up with biological or psychological explanations for the cause of homosexuality. In July 2009, as I recounted in the post "The Nocebo Effect and the Cardinal Principle", I heard a voice that said, "The only difference between you and them is testosterone." I decided that the drug I was on might somehow turn me gay by messing with my hormone levels and shortly after managed to get my psychiatrist to permit me to discontinue it by threatening suicide. Of course (and I can't stress this enough), even today there is no accepted biological or psychological theory that credibly explains the cause of homosexuality although no shortage of cranks have proposed unlikely hypotheses.

Despite appearances, I am not anti-science. In early 2013, I read an article in Mother Jones that argued that the massive increase and decrease of crime that occurred in the twentieth century and peaked in the early 'nineties was the result of lead poisoning, particularly from car fumes. The argument is that lead damages the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles executive function. I wrote a letter about this to the New Zealand Herald which the Herald published. I was actually totally well when I wrote this letter but became 'ill' again shortly after partly as a result of what I sensed to be people's reaction to it. This theory is not unscientific. I strongly suspect that the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, for instance, would agree with me that the lead hypothesis is quite plausible. However when I was put under a Compulsory Treatment Order in early 2014, the fact that I had written this letter was adduced as evidence of my insanity. It demonstrates how stupid psychiatrists are that they don't even understand basic neuroscience, something you'd think they'd know at least a little about.

However, of course, not all my delusions were quasi-scientific like those I have described above. In January 2009, I was lying in the bath attempting to go through the derivation for the Special Theory of Relativity in my head again but couldn't get started. I heard a voice that said, in a Texan accent,  "Do you want George W. Bush to help you?" This was almost the first time I ever heard a voice. Deciding that he would be of little assistance, I changed the subject. I asked him, "Are you straight?" He said, "I think so." I asked him if he believed in God. He said, "No." I asked him how then we could be communicating. He said, "Midi-chlorians." After I got out of the bath I asked him what the real reason for the war in Iraq was 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."

The principal delusion I entertained in 2009, the delusion that began with this conversation and that was most vivid over the summer of 2009 and 2010, was that I could communicate telepathically with others. Jon Stewart and Barack Obama were two of those I spoke with. What I realise now is that this delusion probably derived from the science fiction books I'd read as a child and adolescent, and from Star Wars. Of course notions like this circulate in the collective unconscious and sometimes find expression through urban myths. This delusion, that everyone was telepathic, led me to think that one could only communicate with living people. I only spoke with a dead person once, briefly, and it happened to be Michel Foucault. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that a dead person should speak with me. Years later, when reading about the experiences of others who'd experienced psychosis, it would puzzle me that they had sometimes spoken with dead people. Another feature of this episode is that my interlocutors would sometimes say to me, "Where are you now?" and I would sometimes say this to them. We all seemed to need to be reminded of where we actually were. Unlike the woman I described in the opening of this essay, I never lost sight of my actual physical location. It is interesting to note that although Bush was the first person I spoke with, I heard him only once more, in early 2010. When he spoke to me this time, he didn't at first sound like himself. He said something like, "Hold on, I need to remember what I sound like."

This purpose of this part of this essay is to discuss religiosity and the purpose of this section is to discuss how religiosity featured in my own experience of psychosis. Although the delusions I have already discussed did not involve religiosity, it did feature a lot in other delusions. Very shortly after I first became 'ill', after I had left bFM but before I was removed from the Big House and became a patient of the Mental Health System, I decided that Jesus was straight and that all the disciples were gay; I considered the possibility that I might be Jesus myself. This must sound monstrously blasphemous to my Christian readers if I have any. There were times when Biblical myths like that of Cain and Abel seemed particularly relevant to my situation. Later in the year I thought that we were all living in the End Times and that people in the world around me were being Raptured up to Heaven. There were times when I thought that like Jesus I had to divide the world into the Saved and the Damned, heterosexuals and closet homosexuals. A river of names flowed like a river through my mind at times and eventually I decided that everyone in the world should be saved. 

In 2009, the apocalyptic delusions didn't feature but I still had a sense of having been chosen to suffer for a salvific purpose. I recall visiting Waiheke (an island near Auckland) with my mother and one of her friends, a devout Catholic, in spring that year and hearing voices consulting with each other, saying things like, "Maybe he's the one". I remember asking them, "What is this - a committee?" Around that time I attended a Catholic service with these two and visited a nunnery – yes, there are indeed nunneries in New Zealand. Later in the year I had a very vivid experience that seems particularly significant. I went outside into our back garden and decided that the tree in the garden was one of the Suicide Trees from Dante's Seventh Circle of Hell. I had in my mind a terrible conception of all the young gay-seeming men in the world being driven to suicide by the misdiagnoses of sadistic psychiatrists. I thought I was in Gethsemane and, like Christ, wanted to say, "Take this cup away from me." I said to the voices, "Choose someone else!" They immediately said, 'Okay." I went back inside and lay on the couch. I asked the voices, "Am I Jesus or am I in hell?" They replied, "What's the difference?"

Despite this occasional religiosity, my most intense period of psychosis, over the summer of 2009 and 2010, didn't feature anything overtly religious at all. This was the period when I genuinely believed I was in constant communication with Jess, Jon, and Obama, among others. I felt my role was to help my friends by devising a religion for atheists. I can remember saying to Obama, "God is the goodness that speaks through men."

In discussing my own experience of religiosity, there is one further element of it that seems pertinent. Occasionally I would go to churches. Towards the end of 2007, I would often walk up the road to the Presbyterian church at night and sit by myself on one of the pews. I felt that my soul, my core sense of self, was in peril and thought religion could magically save me. In 2013, although I was not as seriously psychotic then as I had been in 2009, I would sometimes go to the Anglican Cathedral, light a candle, and make a wish sometimes for myself and sometimes for Jess. This was not a gesture of genuine Christian piety but rather a desperate appeal for some kind of magical or thaumaturgical intervention that I hoped could save me or her from the cruel machinations of God or Fate.

These anecdotes concerning my own life are ones I have told before in this blog but the reason for my returning to them is that they shed light on psychosis generally. We can interpret psychosis rationally or as involving something supernatural. As I hope I have shown in this essay and others, the content of my delusions were inspired and informed by all the diverse and often incompatible ideas I had come across in my life, from Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, works of fantasy and science fiction, to Greek myth, Judaism, and Christianity. I seemed to lose the ability to discern between those which were 'real' and those which were 'fictional'. However all these ideas seem to float around in the Collective Unconscious – people sometimes seem to inherit these ideas without knowing where the ideas have come from. It is interesting to note that twenty or thirty years ago a common delusion entertained by psychotics was that microchips had been inserted into brains; today, even though owing to research funded by Elon Musk among others such scenarios have become increasingly feasible, psychotics no longer tend to entertain this particular delusion. This is intriguing – one wonders why not. The idea of the Collective Unconscious, although it seemingly comes wrapped in the vestments of serious science, psychology, is really something mystical, paranormal. Some people seem to think that mythic archetypes are somehow coded into human DNA but we should regard this idea as absurd. An understanding of the Collective Unconscious requires a view somewhat mystical. Jung himself was inspired to arrive at the theory of the Collective Unconscious after a conversation with a schizophrenic; he probably experienced psychosis himself, experiences that led him to write the Red Book. Furthermore, he was probably a genuine theist. It may be that to really understand psychosis we also need to accept the idea of some kind of collective animating spirit that people come closer to during psychosis.

If we accept the idea of the Collective Unconscious, we can perhaps take a step that I think Jung didn't, the logical next step. We can postulate that this group mind or World Soul changes over time. The people who believed in Greek mythology became the people who accepted Jesus as their lord and saviour. The Protestant Reformation introduced a sea-change in the way many people interpreted Christianity. The Christians of the nineteenth century were replaced during the twentieth century by atheist materialists. Even today fundamental change is occurring – panpsychism has become not only popular but respectable, something that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Often these radical changes emerge from the words and actions of individuals – Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, L. Ron Hubbard, the founders of religions. But we may also think of visionaries like Marx, Freud, Derrida, or Chomsky, founders of secular religions. Many of these 'prophets' are Jewish, interestingly. Psychotics are caught in the currents and vortexes of the Collective Unconscious. Sometimes they are influenced by old religions that have passed their use-by-dates – Islam was probably a good thing in the seventh century but is not so viable today, and the Old Testament of Judaism and Evangelical Christianity should similarly be regarded as obsolete. (I feel the same way about the US Constitution but to talk about this here would be to wander off-topic.) It seems that as the collective soul of a community or of humanity as a whole changes, new religions have to appear or old religions have to change. Psychotics are pulled simultaneous towards the past and the future, pulled back towards the mythologies we have inherited and forward towards the mythologies we are in the process of creating. The terms we use in political discourse, 'conservatives' and 'progressives', are truer than people realise.

There is a whole school of thought that Jesus was mentally ill. The people who propose this are of course usually atheists. C.S. Lewis, approaching this question from a theistic perspective, famously said that Jesus was either "mad, bad, or God". Another way of approaching this issue might be to suggest that the mentally ill are all a bit like Jesus. They see problems in the world and are trying, usually unsuccessfully, to solve them. In my case, it was the attitude of society towards homosexuality that was the problem. I suppose I should remind everyone that I am still straight – the issue I struggled with for years was not sexual confusion but rather my own homophobia. The position I eventually reached is that homosexuality is a choice that is not immoral. It is worth recalling that major changes in the world related to sexuality and gender have occurred in the last ten years. Gay marriage was legalised here in New Zealand in 2013 and in the US in 2015. People who opposed the law changes were usually Fundamentalist Christians who used scripture to justify their bigotry. In the Old Testament, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because the men in Sodom had demanded that they 'know' a male angel carnally; in Leviticus, it says that if a man lieth with another man, both should be put to death. The god of the Old Testament was deplorably homophobic. In 2009, I would sometimes hear this Old Testament god in my head – He spoke precisely in the style of the King James Bible. This Old Testament god sometimes spoke to me during thunder storms. Back then I knew little about Gnosticism but even then I sensed this Old Testament god was not the 'real' god and my sense that this god was at the very least intolerant and conceivably evil that drew me to Gnosticism years later. I no longer worry about an evil god in the same way I once did. I am not proselytising on behalf of Gnosticism here. Rather I am trying to persuade atheists to view the religious more sympathetically and for the religious to realise that religions like Christianity can evolve and change over time as social attitudes change. We don't need to regard something written down two and half thousand years ago in Palestine as a timeless moral truth. 

At this point I wish to switch to talking about physics and science more generally. The transition may seem abrupt but in a way there is a common thread because some science today partakes in the esotericism of ancient mythology and religion. I think part of the reason I liked physics is because it held out the promise of explaining reality. However recently I have realised that really most physics today is concerned with either the very, very small or the very, very big – particles on the one hand and cosmology on the other. Yes, physics also deals with combustion engines and electronic devices but it is particle physics and cosmology that receive all the attention. I sometimes wonder if the meaning of life might be found in other sciences, sciences like psychology or sociology or ecology, or in the humanities, rather than in physics. The other thing I realised recently is how messy physics actually is. Physicists have a whole bunch of theories but they do not cohere neatly with each other.

This may seem like a strong claim but I can give an account that I hope will support it without making me sound like a crackpot. A couple of years ago I watched a Youtube video by Veritasium in which he discussed General Relativity. A central idea in General Relativity is that gravity is not really a force, it is a 'fictitious force' like the centrifugal force. You and the chair you're sitting in are not really being pulled down by a force; rather you are accelerating up and are being 'held down' by your own inertia. I think another way of expressing the same idea is to say that your frame of reference is actually accelerating down. In the video, Derek Muller says that because, according to electrodynamics as it was developed in the nineteenth century, accelerating charged objects radiate electromagnetic radiation, we could test General Relativity by seeing if apparently stationary charged objects produce radiation. I thought this must be wrong because if Muller's claim were correct, that an apparently stationary charged object continuously radiates energy, this would violate the law that energy is always conserved. I thought Muller must have misunderstood General Relativity and wrote a blogpost saying this. More recently however, not long before Christmas, Sabine Hossenfelder released a video saying the same thing as Muller, that gravity is not a force. I don't mean to be unfair to Derek but I have more respect for Sabine than him when it comes to physics; I wrote a comment asking if anyone could explain how General Relativity could be reconciled with electrodynamics. It didn't seem possible that Sabine could also be misunderstanding General Relativity. On Christmas Eve, while wandering around the city late at night, I realised that it wasn't Derek or Sabine who had made a mistake. It was Einstein. The Theory of General Relativity is wrong. Or at least incomplete.

Lots of us know a little about physics and take a recreational interest in it. We know, because people say this all the time, that quantum physics doesn't play nicely with General Relativity. On a whole we are not supposed to worry about this because when we are dealing with the very, very small, gravity is completely negligible and quantum physics works really well, and when we are dealing with the very, very big, General Relativity works really well and quantum effects are completely negligible. Supposedly the need for a quantum theory of gravity only arises if we want to understand Black Holes. However what I realised is that General Relativity doesn't even play nicely with the classical theory of electrodynamics. And Einstein knew this. He came up with General Relativity in 1915 and spent the rest of his life attempting to formulate a better theory. Einstein wasn't trying to reconcile General Relativity with quantum physics because, even though he helped invent quantum physics, he didn't particularly like it or the direction it had taken. He was trying to reconcile General Relativity with classical electrodynamics. And he didn't succeed.

There are other inconsistencies in physics. Physicists routinely say that nothing can travel faster than light, that causation itself travels at the speed of light. Then they kvetch about the implications of entanglement, that it involves spooky action at a distance. Einstein might have contributed to this interpretation of Relativity, that the speed of light sets an upper limit to the speed of causation. But in fact the Special Theory of Relativity only says that massive objects must travel slower than light and that electromagnetic waves and other kinds of waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. It does not say that information cannot travel faster than light. To infer this is to go further than the theory actually states. Of course, if we wanted to say that information can travel faster than light or, as we might speculate, that it can even travel backwards in time, we would need a good definition of 'information', something I have not been able to find on Wikipedia or anywhere else.

If you want more evidence of the messiness in physics, look no further than the endless debates concerning how best to interpret quantum mechanics. Something else I have been thinking about recently concerns the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics; I believe that I have conceived of an almost watertight argument that shows this interpretation must be wrong. To present this argument I only need to go a little further than I did in the posts "Quantum Physics for Dummies and a New Idea" and "Determinism, Quantum Physics, and Free Will". If the reader recalls, in these essays I discussed diffraction and presented the view that experiments such as those concerning diffraction involve both primary and secondary measurements. In order to carry out a diffraction experiment, the experimenters need first to measure the width of the aperture through which a particle like an electron is to be fired, measure the distance to the screen on which it will arrive, and estimate its velocity in order to determine the particle's wavelength. These can be called primary measurements. Based on these primary measurements we can determine the particle's wave function. According to most interpretations of quantum physics (although not my own), this wave function is objective. Applying the Born rule to the wave function, we can determine the probabilities of where the particle will land on the screen. The determination of where it actually arrived constitutes the secondary measurement. The fact that we observe it arriving at a particular point rather than being distributed over an area is why we use the term 'wave function collapse'.

I first encountered the Many Worlds Interpretation when I was a teenager in a comedic science fiction novel The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. At the time I thought it a fun fantastical idea but didn't give it much critical attention. These days I sense it must be ridiculous; I have the intuition that it must be wrong and I tend to trust my intuitions. I'll give again a brief description of the Many Worlds Interpretation. According to this Interpretation, the primary measurements are still used to determine an objective wave function – in this way it is no different than the traditional interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation. However, unlike the Copenhagen interpretation, wave function collapse does not occur. Rather, every possible secondary measurement occurs, each in its own world which splits off from the world of the primary measurements. The observer and the subsystem being observed (the electron and its collision with the screen) are correlated or entangled; some number of universes diverge and in each one there is a different version of the observer and of the subsystem. There is some ambiguity in the way Many Worlds proponents present their theory. On the one hand, they present it as I have here, as involving the idea that every possible secondary measurement occurs each in its own world. On the other hand, Everett, who first proposed it in 1957, as well as many of his acolytes, stress the fact that the value of this theory is that in it wave function collapse never occurs at all and so the paradoxes associated with wave function collapse never arise. From this perspective, secondary measurements never actually happen, they just seem to us to happen.

The problem with the theory is this: why should we distinguish between primary measurements and secondary measurements? If secondary measurements never occur, it seems that for the sake of consistency we should also deny that primary measurements ever occur. No measurements are apparently ever made at all. If, however, we deny that primary measurements are ever made, we can never establish the wave function of a particle in the first place. We need empirical data to plug into the Schrodinger equation or Dirac equation. The word 'measurement' is difficult to define with respect to quantum physics but it seems to me that any observation of the world made by a sentient being can be considered a type of measurement. Every observation involves a wave function collapse, so if wave function collapse never occurs, this entails that observations never occur. It seems then that the Many Worlds Interpretation leads us to the conclusion that the empirical world does not really exist at all, that it only seems to exist. Or that our observations have no real relationship with underlying reality. This consequence is so deeply counterintuitive that it gives us strong reason to reject the Many Worlds Interpretation.

Proponents of the Many Worlds Interpretation might reply in the following way. They could draw an analogy between their theory and the idea of conditional probability, the idea that the probability of an event is predicated on prior circumstances. Given that the experimenter finds herself in a world in which the primary measurements take on the particular values that she observes, they might argue, all the possible secondary measurements and possible universes follow from the wave function she calculates. This reply involves a way of looking at time Everett and others assume without explicitly spelling out. The present world is constantly branching into multiple possible futures and then each possible future branches further into more possible futures; however the past is unitary, fixed, the same way that the branches of a tree lead back to the trunk. Although it seems intuitively correct to very many people, I find this asymmetry between the past and future implausible. Personally I think that the future is as unitary, as fixed, as the past, but that we tend to assume it is indeterminate because it is so difficult for humans to make accurate predictions about it. There is another alternative. We could rectify the asymmetry by proposing that if there are very many possible futures, there are also very many possible pasts. The second response however leads us to the same kind of extreme skepticism that the Many Worlds Interpretation seemed to imply and that we were trying to resist.

I have also been ruminating about science more generally. My impetus is the claim made by Robert Sapolsky that desert climates tend to produce monotheistic religions, that there is a causal connection, a claim that even though I think it mistaken is still fascinating. I have discussed this twice in recent posts. What is the difference between science and history? Historical works are narratives involving specific people, specific places, and specific events. Historians might study how specific monotheistic religions arose, when they did so, and where they did so. Often historians try to draw causal connections between events but we could also describe history as "just one damn thing after another". Science however involves abstractions or universals. Scientists study generic electrons, generic octopuses, generic persons. They hope to find rules governing generic causation. The mistake Sapolsky made is to try to treat history as though it were science, to think we have enough recorded instances of monotheistic religions independently arising in desert cultures to justify his claim that desert climates, considered generically, somehow naturally engender monotheistic religions considered generically. I have shown in the other posts why this claim is unsound.

Not only does science involve abstractions, the scientific method also depends fundamentally on another concept: statistical independence. One way to gesture towards a definition of this term is to say that events A and B are statistically independent if the probability of both occurring is the product of their individual probabilities of occurring. Science needs statistical independence. We want an experiment in Amsterdam on a generic electron, generic octopus, or generic person to be statistically independent of another experiment carried out a week later in the same place or a third experiment carried out in Sydney. We don't want to worry that one experiment might somehow magically affect another. However the concept of statistical independence is coming under fire from some surprisingly different directions.

Modern physicists are currently faced with the challenge posed by experiments that show that Bell's Inequality is often violated. This is another issue within quantum physics. These experiments seem to show that if two particles are 'entangled', a measurement on one will instantaneously affect the properties of the other even if the two are very far apart, a kind of spooky action at a distance. Many Worlders have tried to wriggle out of the implications of Bell's Inequality by arguing that this spooky correlation doesn't really exist because the measurements involved never happen. I think this is also ridiculous but it would take too long to give my reasons why here. Sabine Hossenfelder's response to the challenge is different. Sabine believes that a local hidden-variable theory interpretation of quantum physics must be right, as did her hero Einstein, and has argued that the loophole in Bell's Theorem is that it assumes statistical independence. Sabine believes in something known as Superdeterminism, a theory which, if true, might suggest that owing to a shared causal origin far in the past, we should expect bizarre and surprising correlations between spatially separate individuals in the present, something which would I think would look exactly like paranormal phenomena. One could describe this as being similar to "ubiquitous alien mind control". Even though Sabine is endeavouring to defend Einstein's intuitions, I suspect even Einstein might balk at the idea of giving up on statistical independence to save some kind of local hidden variable theory. 

Then we have Rupert Sheldrake, someone coming from a totally different perspective and background to Sabine but arriving at a similar conclusion. In 1981, Sheldrake proposed his theory of Morphic Resonance. This is the idea that owing to to morphological resemblances, organisms and sometimes apparently inanimate structures can magically influence each other over time and at a distance. An example Sheldrake gives is crystal formation: after a particular new kind of crystal is grown in one lab, it takes less time for it to form in other labs subsequently. More 'rational' scientists have proposed that this can be explained away by supposing that scientists have accidentally carried seed crystals between labs but Sheldrake sees this as clear evidence of Morphic Resonance. I don't know if Rupert has realised himself that his theories amount to an attack on the idea of statistical independence. He is very much an empiricist, someone who enjoys and is very good at devising experiments to test his paranormal theories; he might not realise himself that he is effectively employing the scientific method to undermine the scientific method itself.

The current questioning of statistical independence is an extremely interesting development. Sometimes, within the context of Bell's Theorem, the axiom of statistical independence is called the free will axiom because it is equivalent to saying that the two scientists involved in the entanglement experiment are free to measure whatever they want independently of each other. There are many intellectuals today, such as Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky, who reject free will but wholeheartedly endorse science. Such intellectuals, despite rejecting free will, might still balk at the idea of giving up statistical independence. But this is the direction some in the world are currently heading.

It is possible to bring the disparate topics of this essay together. The first point is that multiple religious and mythological systems have been created to describe the world; modern scientism is just another such system. I have only discussed three or four mythologies but there are many more. Fundamentalists of all stripes say that their particular systems are true and that the others are false; we should reject this view. Good people can come from any religious or spiritual background and still improve the world. And it is the idea of improving the world that is key. The carrot-and-stick paradigm of many religions, the idea that we should be good because then we will merit an eternity in heaven and avoid an eternity in hell, not only should be rejected but can be rejected. I don't think even Putin or Netanyahu deserve an eternity in hell. I think Trump and his supporters are stupid but I don't think that they are evil. We should do good, as Socrates preached, for its own sake. This is the sense in which I mean that it is possible to have religion without morality, without the notion that good people go to heaven when they die and bad people go to hell. It is moral questions like these that psychotics grapple with.

The view that I am expressing, a view that I can only set out tentatively, is that some collective spirit animates people and drives them forward. This is a kind of religious view but it is a view that encompasses all religions and leaves no one out, not those who belong to other religions nor people who have performed actions I disagree with. It is possible to believe in a kind of World Soul. Oddly enough many scientists, in questioning the idea of statistical independence and endorsing what Einstein disparaged with the title "spooky action at a distance", are arriving at a similar mystical position even though they began their journeys from materialist presuppositions. This is a striking new development. And one that may lead us into a new world that even though it is scary because it is unknowable may still be better than the world we have inherited.