Aggravated bigotry, House of Lords and octopuses

1 July 2023

A quick PS to last week’s blog:  in 1994, a group called Alliance Defending Freedom was set up in America with the express aim of stripping away the rights of LGBTQ+ and, more recently, those of trans people as well as people’s rights to same-sex marriage and abortions.  Sadly, the increasing paranoia of the far right about transgender rights and sexual orientation led to its income increasing by $25m between 2020 and 2021.

Amy Coney Barrett, the supreme court justice has spoken five times at an ADF training program established to push a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law”, clearly somebody whose ability to judge cases objectively and impartially would be widely respected within the confines of a padded cell.

Apart from the problematic use of the word “Christian” in this context, I’ve a feeling the ADF’s name is oxymoronic and it should change its name to Alliance Defending Bigotry?

One of my other prejudices is, as I might just have mentioned before, that there’s something very wrong with the distribution of wealth so I was delighted to see a recent article by Arwa Mahdawi.  She suggested that, instead of comparing the size of their space rockets, billionaires should boast about who’d paid the most tax that year.  Brilliant!

Talking of billionaires, isn’t there something fishy about the way Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group suddenly stopped on its way to attack Moscow, with Prigozhin being granted a free pardon before flying to Belarus in his private jet?  He started life as a criminal, became a buddy of Vladimir Putin, took up catering for a bit then became a warlord.  Let’s hope he doesn’t now start writing music*.

We’ve also been hearing a lot about Evgeny Lebedev, son of a former KGB officer, who was given a peerage by Boris Johnson.  Despite the warning in Exodus 20:5, I believe we are, mercifully, not responsible for the sins of our fathers, but Evgeny and his father co-own two British newspapers, the Independent and the Evening Standard (and Novaya Gazeta a Russian paper) so they’re both in it together.

But Lebedev the Younger is now in the UK’s ‘upper’ house which, unelected though it is, can influence the laws of Britain.

In 1999 the Labour government introduced the House of Lords Act which was passed by a comfortable majority in the Commons but – what a surprise – met resistance in the Lords.  It was nevertheless passed and disenfranchised a lot of peers whose only qualification was genetic, leaving ‘only’ 92 hereditary peers.

In 2007, further changes were proposed with the Commons supporting a wholly-elected chamber and the Lords favouring an all-appointed chamber – another surprise – and, since then, appointments have increasingly been related to the political allegiance of appointees.

Labour’s conflicted views go back at least as far as Michael Foot and have come through people like David Miliband to now, disappointingly, Keir Starmer and the party policy (if it has one) seems to involve mumbling about the need for a democratic upper house while saying its ramifications would make a change very difficult.  Even when faced with Johnson’s honours list, Starmer claimed to be scandalised by his stuffing even more Tories into the Lords but failed to mention the need for root and branch reform.

It’s even rumoured by cynics that Starmer would make things worse by elevating more Labour supporters to even the political balance.

Starmer also seems to be avoiding contentious subjects like Brexit, despite the latest YouGov survey showing that 58% of the electorate would now vote to rejoin the EU.  (Whether the EU would allow the UK to rejoin is a different question.)

Too many of us remember, 7 years ago, Nigel Farage, John Redwood, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the rest of their gang promising Brexit would give us increased prosperity, cheaper food, flourishing trade and a better-funded NHS and that we’d be free of all Brussels’ red tape, we’d take back control of our borders and nobody would have to worry about foreigners coming into the country.  After the vote, David Davis even promised our exit deal would “deliver the exact same benefits” as EU membership.

The British parliament used to be seen as a model of honesty, open-discussion and integrity but Johnson has put an end to any hopes of that with an independent committee (containing a majority of Conservatives) finding him guilty of contempt of parliament on five separate occasions.  The Commons supported these findings by 354 to 7.  (Sadly, Rishi Sunak couldn’t vote because he had what Oscar Wilde called “a subsequent engagement”.)

The government’s competence has been further undermined by the Court of Appeal’s ruling that Suella Braverman’s desire to export unwanted refugees to Rwanda was unlawful, concluding that Rwanda was not a “safe third country” even though assurances by the Rwandan government had been provided in good faith.  Not to be diverted by irritations such as the law, Braverman has said she will appeal to the Supreme Court.

Official estimates say it will cost £140,000 per deportee.  Some people have calculated how many nurses could be hired with the £14m that 100 people would cost.

I’ve just come across an article on somebody called Tuppence Middleton, an actor who was in Downton Abbey.  I once had a secretary called Pamela Halfpenny.  Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if they’d been born to each other’s parents so one of them could have been Tuppence Halfpenny (pronounced ‘tuppence hayp’ny’ in old money)?

I’ve also just come across another PS to something I wrote last month:  researchers in Japan have discovered that octopuses limbs twitch and there are rapid changes to the texture and colour of their skin while they’re asleep.  The scientists think it’s possible the animals are dreaming although they have suggested they might be just automatically refining their camouflage patterns while they sleep.  I’d like to think they’re dreaming.

*    Apologies to those who would actually enjoy wasting spending 18 hours listening to the Ring Cycle.

Are animals intelligent?

10 June 2023

I’ve mused before about how we all use words like ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ and ‘intelligence’, without ever really understanding any of them, and my curiosity was piqued once again by a fascinating article published last week which considered whether non-human living species have minds that process information in ways that we can’t even imagine.  

This week has seen the welcome but overdue departures of Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries as MPs.  We still don’t know how conscious they have become of their own (un)intelligence but, mercifully, we no longer need worry about it.

I’m indebted to Adam Kirsch, author of the article and a new book ‘The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us’, from which I have plundered much of the rest of this muttering.

Giraffes’ preference for carrots over courgettes has been used to test their perceptions by showing them two transparent containers, one holding lots more carrots than courgettes and the other holding lots more courgettes than carrots.  They let the giraffe see them take one vegetable from each container, using different hands, without letting the giraffe see what they’d picked up, and then offer them to the giraffe with closed hands.  The four giraffes tested all repeatedly chose the hand that had taken something from the container that held more carrots than courgettes.

Put in human terms, they’d calculated the odds of getting a carrot from each container and bet on the hand that had picked something from the container with more carrots because it was more likely to contain a carrot.

Experiments on zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have shown that, while they’re sleeping, their throat muscles sometimes move in the same way that they do when the bird is awake and singing.  So perhaps they’re dreaming about singing.

It’s easy to assume that only humans can imagine the future but an African grey parrot called Griffin seemed to be able to do this.  He was taught that if he refused a meal of cereal, he would be rewarded some unpredictable time later with a meal of food, such as cashew nuts, that he preferred.  Griffin managed to hold out for 90% of the time using displacement activities such as talking or preening or simply throwing the bowl of cereal across the room.

Another experiment showed how important smell is in the understanding of the world around them to many animals.  It’s well-known that dogs have a sense of smell so much more sensitive than ours that they can smell visitors coming before they’re even in sight but this involved a herd of elephants, within which each member has their specific place.  Taking a sample of urine from an animal at the back of the herd and spreading it in front of the herd led to apparent bewilderment and curiosity in the leaders about why an individual’s distinctive odour was in the ‘wrong’ place.

It’s impossible for humans to experience all these extra dimensions of the world we all live in.  For example, we can imagine what it’s like to be a bat, flying on webbed wings, finding our way around by echo-location, snatching insects from mid-air and sleeping upside down, but we’re actually imagining just what it would be like for us to be a bat, not what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.

Some of the most fascinating creatures are cephalopods, octopus and squid (and about 800 other close relations), which are incomprehensibly different from us apes.  The most recent common ancestor of humans and cephalopods is a worm-like creature thought to have lived some 500-600m years ago (to put this into context, the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived about 6m years ago).  Since then, our neurologies and physical systems have developed very differently, perhaps because cephalopods live underwater in a three-dimensional world while land animals live in a world that is, for all practical purposes, two-dimensional.

The octopus has about the same number of neurons as a dog but has a comparatively small central brain which connects with many more neurons in each of its eight arms so each of its arms can move and sense its surroundings separately.  The world they experience and the ways they interact with it are therefore quite alien to what we can imagine.

But they exhibit what we’d consider curiosity in humans and are prone to removing researchers’ tape measures.  They have also been caught covering up things they apparently ‘know’ they’re not supposed to do.

In one aquarium, an octopus lived in a tank next to another tank full of fish.  The staff noticed that fish seemed to be disappearing but couldn’t work out why so they rigged up a camera and discovered that, when the aquarium was closed and unstaffed, they were being eaten by the octopus.  This involved the octopus climbing to the top of its tank, lifting the lids of both tanks, hopping into the fish tank and taking a fish before returning to its own tank, replacing both lids on the way.  (This of course sounds pretty cool but perhaps isn’t that different from moving from one rock pool to another.)

But do these animals have a mind?  Perhaps the brain is the hardware that receives input, consciousness filters out the irrelevant stuff and passes what’s left to the mind, which is the software that makes adds information to its existing store of past information and makes decisions?  So, if this classification is even partly valid, perhaps other creatures do have minds. 

At this point, the word ‘intelligence’ springs to mind and I start to wonder how valid it is to judge intelligence from a purely human perspective, and the limited ability we have to perceive the world.  We can only see things in what we arrogantly call the ‘visible’ spectrum and our hearing and sense of smell are similarly limited;  we can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to live underwater.  Even within our own species, our senses ‘report’ different information:  some people (more men than women) are colour-blind and an estimated 10% of humans can’t smell the scent of freesias.

As for ants …

Musings on consciousness

3 July 2022

I anthropomorphised some plants a couple of weeks ago and I’ve written before about how trees communicate.

Their actions are certainly not random or accidental and clearly show a response to external influences of which they are obviously aware.  But are they conscious?

We use words like ‘conscious’, ‘unconscious’ and ‘subconscious’ and we understand what they mean in the context without ever stopping to wonder what they do actually mean.  As long as we’re just talking to other people, this doesn’t matter, but life would get more difficult if somebody asked us to explain any of them as concepts.

People have debated what ‘consciousness’ is for millenia.  The ancient Greeks invented philosophy as a way of keeping people who were too clever for their own good off the streets, but there’s still no consensus about what consciousness is.

It appears to be linked with our minds but this doesn’t help much because nobody really knows what or where the mind is either.

The brain is also linked with consciousness because it sends signals to activate muscles to move a finger away from a flame it’s become ‘conscious’ of, but nobody has ever found this link or which bit of the grey slush inside our skulls we call our ‘brain’ is links physical action with consciousness.  There are well-documented cases of individual consciousness existing independently of the body, even after some medical criteria define the person as dead.   (There are a couple of side-tracks here such as extra-sensory perception, near-death experiences and after-death experiences but let’s not over-complicate things.)

Consciousness involves an awareness of things happening inside and outside the body, but what is it that communicates this awareness with the mind or the brain?  (Think of a Venn diagram of three circles, one for consciousness, one for mind and one for brain.  How would the circles overlap each other?)

Our understanding of consciousness is unavoidably anthropocentric and based on what we’ve learnt over the last umpty-ump thousand years.  Then we use this understanding of human consciousness to judge whether non-human species like chimpanzees, corvids, sharks and Venus fly-traps are conscious.

We also ignore the fact that such judgements are tunnel-visioned, limited in time and space. 

For example, we define things like consciousness using timescales based on the speed we live at but we understand but find it impossible to grasp the speeds at which electrons or tectonic plates move.  We even have difficulty grasping numbers:  we can picture 10 things, but can we judge whether there are 100 marbles in that bowl, or 90, or 110, without counting them?  Or thousands or millions?  There’s a lot to be said for cultures that count 1, 2, 3 … 8, 9, 10, lots.

Perhaps our understanding is complicated by our use of physical dimensions like length, breadth and depth.  These concepts are useful for measuring the size of small and simple things with regular shapes, like whether a bookcase will fit in that alcove, but lead us to believe that if something can’t be measured, it can’t exist.

Then somebody suggested we could add ‘time’ as a dimension if we want to describe an object’s location by saying this object with those measurements was there from 8 pm till midnight.  Even though science has moved somewhat beyond this, we normal people still tend to think of time as a fixed ‘line’ along which we move, from the past to now to the future. 

This gets complicated when we imagine time steadily ticking its way on independently of any one person of thing.  Think how time flies when we’re with close friends and how it drags when we’re waiting for a train;  or how alcohol and other drugs affect our perceptions of time.

Time is also variable in terms of measurement.  We know that time passes more slowly as one gets higher;  and the rate at which time passes changes as an object’s speed increases towards the speed of light.  It also depends whether we’re experiencing it or observing it …

Inevitably, everything we think of as conscious tends to move at about the same speed as we do, and tends to be roughly the same size, but only because we don’t think of ascribing consciousness to things that move at vastly different speeds, or are very small or large. And, for humans to be believe they’re conscious, they have to be things we think of as living.

Why shouldn’t ‘living’ trees and forests or ‘not-living’ oceans and the earth itself be conscious?

Why shouldn’t entangled sub-atomic particles or entire galaxies be conscious?

Our current knowledge of sciences is at so primitive a level, how could we know or even be aware of it?

Perhaps we need to consider space and time as one amorphous multiverse that encompasses everything and not worry about where we are in it;  we could then include consciousness into this great unity, along with concepts like ‘mind’ and ‘emotions’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’.

In practice, of course, this is a WTF question and we just have to accept that we’re trapped inside bubbles of information collected by our senses and filtered through our consciousness;  then we live our lives based on information we get from our consciousness, and we don’t worry about how anthropocentric and incomplete the information is when deciding what to have for lunch.

When I occasionally stop and ponder this, I wonder how each scallop has up to 200 eyes with no obvious links to its brain but can still identify plankton that can be trapped and digested.  Or why so many other species can see ultra-violet colours for which we don’t even have names.  Or how octopus’s various brains communicate with each other to coordinate movement.  Or how Venus fly-traps, which don’t have any brains at all, know when to snap shut on a fly.  Or how creatures use earth’s magnetic field to navigate when migrating – nobody even knows where the magnetic receptors are in migratory birds, fish or land animals.

By now, those of you who aren’t cursed with my apparently incurable curiosity will be wondering what I’m talking about and why it matters.  Actually of course, those of you who aren’t cursed with an incurable curiosity probably won’t have read this far …

Shakespeare put his finger on it in the first draft of Hamlet when he wrote “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, but don’t let it bother you, old son, just keep on keeping on”.  (He removed the last bit when was doing the second draft because he thought the first bit seemed more mysterious on its own.)

Taliban promises, cephalopods and assisted dying

22 August 2021

It takes a brave prime minister to close down a country after only one person has tested positive for Covid-19’s delta variant.  What a pity the UK’s prime minister isn’t brave enough to learn lessons from a New Zealander who is not only a better PM but also, for heaven’s sake, a woman!  Any chance of arranging a PM job-swap do you think?

Our own Dear Leader has been testing his party’s support to the limit, most recently by going AWOL while the Taliban were hurtling across Afghanistan in their renewed mission to kill people who don’t believe in quite the same form of Islam and to subjugate all women regardless of their beliefs.  Given this example, how could our own Dear Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, resist following his guvnor’s example by going to Crete, presumably with Mrs Raab and the Raabits, where he reportedly refused to take calls as the Taliban advanced, and even failed to make personal contact with his Afghan opposite number, which is both undiplomatic and rude.

Boris Johnson’s excuse was “… the collapse of the Afghan forces has been much faster than expected”.  Given the warnings by US security agencies that the Afghan army could collapse “within days” if they pulled out too fast, this is either untrue or further proof that he and Raab don’t read their briefing papers. 

It now seems likely that parliament’s Intelligence and Security committee will investigate reports made by the Joint Intelligence committee on Afghanistan to see if Boris Johnson really did break the habit of a lifetime and tell the truth for once.

Raab is already under pressure from all sides of the house to resign but Johnson is probably safe until The Party is confident things are starting to improve, when they can replace him and leave him to shoulder the blame for all the disasters of his tenancy, even those that weren’t his fault.

The Taliban leaders have said that, under their rule, women will not be persecuted and one even allowed himself to be interviewed by a woman journalist on television.  However, the weasel words* actually used said women could continue their education and retain freedoms “under Islamic law”, without actually saying which version of Islamic law they’re talking about.  (Would that The Prophet had made it clear who he thought should take over when he died.)

They also said they would not seek “revenge” and that “nobody will go to their doors to ask why they helped” the previous administration.  They also said they would grant “safe passage” to people who wanted to leave the country.

Experts immediately said we should ignore what they say and watch they do.

What they did was:

• they blocked the gates to the airport, letting few through, searching for those who supported the previous regime, and beating and shooting at some who tried to pass
• they searched one of Germany’s safehouses, luckily empty
• they began knocking on doors and rounding up people who had ‘collaborated’ with the established regime they’d just deposed
• they shot two members of the family of a German journalist who had already returned to Germany;  only one survived
• they murdered nine members of the Hazara minority as they surged across the country:  three of the men were tortured to death and six were shot
• they admitted there won’t be elections because Afghanistan is not a democracy.

In a way, it’s like British political party manifestos, but writ very large.  Manifestos contain what a party thinks will make people vote for them and are subsequently ignored by whatever government’s voted in.

Or like the golden future we were promised if we Brexited, while what we get is long queues of lorries that need new car parks built on greenfield sites in Kent for a very long wait while some of them need to visit three different sites for HMRC checks and paperwork and physical health checks on food and animal imports.  Transport companies now have to advertise for HGV drivers with very strong bladders.

Which naturally leads to cuttlefish which don’t, as far as I know, have any bladders (or legs) but do have three hearts, eight arms that can regenerate, blue-green blood and one of the largest brains of all invertebrates.  Research carried out by Cambridge University and published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society B’ shows that, while muscle function and appetite decline as they age, they can remember what they ate, where they ate it and when.

Another academic said it was “refreshing” to discover another animal with some aspects of cognition as advanced as our own (better than mine actually, I can’t remember what I had for supper yesterday) despite having a nervous system that has developed so differently from ours in the millions of years since the evolution of humans and cephalopods separated.

In this blog’s previous incarnation, I mentioned the octopus in New Zealand that would lift the lid of its tank, pop into the tank next door to snaffle a fish, then return to its own tank and pull the lid of its own tank back into place so nobody would know what it had done.  (Staff had to fit a CCTV system to discover why the fish were disappearing.)  And we humans think we’re intelligent.

One final bit of good news.  Last week, Dignity in Dying launched a crowdfunder campaign to raise £15,000 for advertisements in the British Medical Journal to refute Baroness Finlay’s claim that doctors don’t support assisted dying.  So far, it’s raised £46,000, which shows how many of us feel that we should have the right to decide for ourselves when and how we die from life-threatening and terminal conditions.

Some time ago, I wrote to our MP about this, mentioning my own mother’s ‘suicide’ 50 years ago, and got a suitably sympathetic and courteously vague reply.  More recently, I wrote again asking for his personal commitment to support any future Bill introducing the right to assisted dying. 

No answer yet but failing to get any sort of commitment from an MP before a party Whip has told them what they believe is so unsurprising I had to go and have a cup of tea.  Perhaps we should require MPs to have a minimum IQ of … pick a figure … and let the Whips exercise the votes of MPs who fail to reach the required standard so they could stay at home and knit lifejackets for migrants.

*          Why ‘weasel’?  What’s wrong with weasels?  I think they’re rather cute.