Magic v science

10 May 2025

Back onto one of my continuing interests this week:  the gulf between what we can explain and ‘prove’ and what we can’t explain.  The former is based on our latest understanding of scientific laws and hypotheses, which some people think must therefore be true, the latter can’t be explained by these laws and hypotheses and is therefore trashed by people who have shut the door on the possible realities of things beyond our current understanding.

The range of the inexplicable is huge and extends from fortune-telling to telepathy to crop circles to UAPs to ghosts to the existence of an afterlife to dowsing to healing to the location of our minds to after-death experiences and ley lines, to mention a few.  People have put forward theories about how some of these things work while others just accept their personal experience of one or more of these things without worrying about why they happened.

The boundaries between the explicable and the inexplicable are defined by the extent of our current understanding of things scientific.  Without repeating my worries about black matter / energy, think about psychotherapy.

A hundred years ago, people putting forward psychological solutions to human problems thought they were pretty cool but many of their ideas have since been developed and updated.  Remember that Sigmund Freud, who is remembered primarily for his obsession with sex, was preceded by a 19th century therapist who invented a device that gave ‘hysterical’ women orgasms and discovered this tended to relax them.  This seems hard to believe at a time when a visit to Ann Summers can now achieve similar results at minimum cost.

One of Freud’s more acceptable thoughts defined the three basic contributors to human activity as the ego, the superego and the id.  If one ignores these dated and often misunderstood terms, they can be used to parallel the development of humans from birth.  For their first couple of years, babies’ own comfort is their prime motivation but this develops into an awareness of their connections to family and friends and the interdependence of the people around them.  Most children then develop further and accept their connection with society at large and become fully-functioning humans, understanding the benefits of showing kindness to strangers.

How has this affected psychotherapy?  Fashions come and go but a study some years ago showed that success rates in curing depression hardly varied between talking therapies, medication and doing nothing.

In the last 150 years, we’ve discovered more about stuff that’s billions of miles away in space than about how the insides of our head work.

Take dowsing for example.  I’ve used two Bic biro tubes and two bent bits of coat hanger to find where the main drain ran under a neighbour’s garden.  I knew roughly where it ran so I knew where to look and, when the two wires swung inwards, then back out again as I walked on, we marked the spot.  The neighbour was naturally (?) very dubious about this so he had a go, slightly further over the garden and he jumped visibly when the wires also moved in as he walked forward.  We marked that spot, laid a rake handle between the two and that was the line of the drain, running at an angle across his garden, not parallel with the back of his house.

When he built an extension onto his house, he didn’t hit the drain and the digging showed that the line of the drain we’d marked was spot-on.

Detectorists use machines sensitive to electronic echoes to locate buried Roman coins and ring pulls.  Perhaps our brains could do the same if we let them?  What we do know is that nobody can explain how dowsing works.

Or ghosts.  A relative of mine once woke in the night in an old house and saw a ghost, a young woman in a long white shift comforting a baby by walking up and down at the foot of her bed.  “Oh,” thought Auntie Gertie, “poor thing”, and went back to sleep.

I’ve never seen a ghost but I nearly saw one once and, while I find it hard to believe in wronged lovers and dead dogs roaming the earth, I’m perfectly willing to believe that something in the multiverse allows them to appear to some people.

Sadly, I’m better at receiving telepathic messages than I am at sending them, so I can’t transmit messages saying I’m going to be late but I have received what seem to be telepathic messages.  Doubters explain it as a coincidence and even believers point out it might be due to precognition, looping back from future to the exact point in spacetime I experienced it.

We hear stories of clocks stopping at a time when somebody close to them died half a world away, and stories of children talking to invisible people before they’re told that such things don’t exist.

Some places also have atmospheres.  I’ve always felt a sense of great calm in Durham Cathedral and I once found myself feeling extremely uncomfortable in a 1930s Crittall-windowed semi-detached house in Hounslow that had, as far as I know, no history of murders or persistent indigestion and whose owners were charming.  I’ve had comparable feelings of calm in some woodlands and while watching waves break over rocks in Shetland.

It’s known that biofeedback can help people to consciously change some bodily functions.  To see if this worked for me, I once strapped on a gadget that told me my pulse-rate and lay down and, by monitoring my progress, slowed my heart from its usual 65 bpm to 39 bpm.  So why shouldn’t we believe in the power of healing using ‘magic’, whether it’s reiki, reflexology, meditation or prayer?                                 

I find it much harder to believe that any or all of these things might be a subjective response to yesterday’s crab sandwich than that they’re simply due to something – sometimes called paranormal – that our present level of ‘scientific’ understanding hasn’t yet discovered or explained.

Trans women, rapists, misogyny, abortions and when life begins

24 June 2023

Why do people get so exercised about trans women?  I haven’t seen much coverage of people worrying about trans men using gents’ loos (and I’m sure I heard that Virginia Woolf taught herself to pee standing up without needing a bath afterwards).  The majority of the worriers seem to be men, most of whom probably share bathrooms at home without having nervous breakdowns.  If I were a woman looking for a loo, I suspect I’d be thinking more about having a pee than whether the woman in the next cubicle had a penis.

Shouldn’t we worry more about the pathetic number of rapists who are actually charged, and the even more pathetic sentences often given to them if they’re found guilty?  Could it possibly be that so many people in the justice system, from beat coppers to supreme court judges, are content to have been born with a penis and don’t have enough empathy to imagine how awful it must be to realise you’ve been assigned the wrong gender?

(I must admit here that I occasionally have somewhat uncharitable thoughts and wonder if all convicted rapists shouldn’t be castrated.  There wouldn’t be as many repeat offenders …)

I wonder if the imbalance is because many men lack confidence and spend more time worrying about their own bits and their sexual ability and think they’re protecting ‘real women’ from trans women which, to them, includes worrying about the genitals of the woman in the next cubicle rather than voiding the overfull bladder that took them in there in the first place.

In one of the later Harry Potter books, J K Rowling wrote about boys arguing over who had the biggest wand and a girl saying “It’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it”.  However, I used to know a woman to whom it did matter and once ended an otherwise flourishing relationship when she saw his penis and said “If you think you’re putting that in there, you’ve got another think coming.”

(I also wonder how woman rape men.  I may be the only man in the world who needs to undergo certain physical changes before I can make love to a woman, and I’m not convinced this would happen if a woman was trying to rape me.)

Misogyny seems to be increasing as a frightening world lurches to the right and countries that might claim to be civilised in other ways are increasing men’s control of women (yes, America, I’m thinking of you).  Why should women not have the freedom to end pregnancies that are unwanted, or if their lives are in danger, or if there’s something wrong with a foetus that may or may not be ‘alive’?

In the year since Dobbs v Jackson overturned Roe v Wade in America, 14 states have now prohibited abortions and 6 more have imposed restrictions on when they can be carried out.

But where are the fathers in all of this?  Probably sitting as judges in the courts that outlaw abortion.  Shouldn’t decisions that only affect women be made by women, not men who seem to believe they have the right to control what women can do?

The courts also seem to have missed the logical connection between making a woman have a baby and making the father contribute to the baby’s upkeep.  Isn’t that why they invented DNA testing?  For mothers who don’t ever want to see the father again, the court order requiring the man to pay money to the woman could incorporate an injunction that the man could never get closer to the woman than … 5 miles?

I know some women also believe abortion should be illegal, often citing quasi-religious opinions to explain their positions, but I sometimes wonder if they’ve thought through all the implications of lovingkindness?

The freedom that American states have to make their own laws about abortions has obviously led to pregnant women having to travel to other states where they are still legal but, more worryingly, the bans are also causing real problems for medical students trying to qualify in obstetrics / gynaecology who are required to have experience of abortions before they can be accepted by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The training of medical students in Texas is therefore limited to miscarriage procedures and those who need ‘hands-on’ abortion training before they can qualify now have to leave Texas for states where abortions are still legal.

An extreme example arose recently when Lauren Miller from Texas became pregnant and the foetus was found to have no skull.  This guaranteed the foetus would not survive and threatened Miller’s own life but the state of Texas denied her an abortion.

Another recent case ended up with a British woman being sent to prison for having had an abortion at a very late stage in her pregnancy.  She already had three children, one of whom had disabilities, who will be motherless for at least a year.  Her decision was obviously tragic but it highlights some of the issues facing the arguments both for and against abortion, but what seems to unite them is a doubt about whether it was right to send her to prison.  Northern Ireland introduced a law in 2019 that legalised abortion and imposed a moratorium on abortion-related criminal prosecutions. Why can’t we follow their example?

Much of the emotion surrounding people’s convictions about abortion revolves around the point at which they believe an individual life starts.  It’s probably fair to say there’s a consensus that a baby is alive after it’s been born, whether by a vaginal birth or a Caesarian, even if it dies shortly afterwards.  It’s also probably fair to say that nobody would claim a life exists before an egg is fertilised, but there’s room for a lot of disagreement between these two extremes.

Does life start when an egg is fertilised, or when a cell first divides, or when a foetus first becomes distinguishable as a human (in the early days of its development, the foetuses of many different species are remarkably similar), or when a heart is developed enough to start beating, or when an opposing thumb first appears, or when it jumps if a dog barks (which might be an autonomic response rather than a conscious reaction), or when they discover their mother’s bladder makes a wonderful trampoline?

Other complications arise when a baby’s heart doesn’t start beating, or stops, and it’s known that it will be stillborn.

There are no easy answers but I wonder how many anti-abortionists do, or would, wear astrakhan coats? 

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 …

Refugees, Japanese respect, Boris blows it, Teslas, drugs and reality

25 March 2023

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, have been arguing over whether London’s police force is “institutionally” misogynistic, racist and homophobic.  Why don’t they agree to differ about words and just get on with the job of cleaning it up?

Using government data and the Home Office’s estimate of how many people it hopes (“hopes”???) to deport from the UK, the Refugee Council has calculated that almost 200,000 people, including 40,000 children, could be locked up or forced into destitution if the government’s Illegal Migration bill becomes law.  An official at the Home Office said they don’t recognise these numbers.  As Mandy Rice-Davies said 60 years ago in a rather different context, “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.”

When Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping this week we saw some interesting body language which made it clear that both of them accept the Chinese president as the more powerful. 

On the day after this love-in, Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida made a surprise trip to the devastated Ukrainian town of Bucha to meet president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.  After laying a wreath for the dead and observing a minute’s silence, Kishida bowed, a Japanese gesture of respect, especially when volunteered by a prime minister.  In his speech he said “Japan will keep aiding Ukraine with the greatest effort to regain peace.”

Despite her having lived in Budleigh Salterton, Dame Hilary Mantel’s memorial service is to be held in Southwark Cathedral because it has links to Thomas Cromwell about whom she wrote some books.  What a feeble excuse to save VIPs all the effort of trekking down to her own county, where she also wrote a lot of other books that didn’t mention Cromwell.

Boris Johnson made a characteristically “flimsy” appearance before the privileges committee that’s trying to decide whether he actively misled parliament over Covid lockdown parties but he blew any credibility he had left by losing his temper.  A senior Conservative MP on the committee, Sir Bernard Jenkin, told him the committee didn’t agree with his interpretation of the guidance.

The following day’s papers were generally critical.  Even the Daily Telegraph headlined “Johnson besieged but defiant” and their associate editor wrote on the front page “The cults of Boris and Brexit are simultaneously imploding”.

Steve Bell’s political cartoon in the Guardian neatly summed it up with a picture headed “The Blair Defence” and showed Tony Blair emerging from Johnson’s head as he says “I lied in good faith”.

Coincidentally, while all this was taking up the front pages, Rishi Sunak published a summary of his tax returns, presumably in the hope that we’d all be distracted from the fact that his income over the last three years was around £5m, mostly gained abroad.

Also on Tuesday, a man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder in Birmingham after dowsing a man walking home from a mosque with something inflammable and setting him on fire.  What are the odds that his attacker is white and one of Tommy Robinson’s groupies?

And Donald Trump wants to be handcuffed when he appears in court if he’s indicted for paying hush money to the ‘adult’ actor Stormy Daniels.  Why don’t they agree to handcuff him but only if he’ll agree to wear black bondage gear?

Uganda, a former member of the British Empire, has just passed a law that will make a homosexual act a capital offence.  If one can believe the rumours one hears about various institutions, doing the same in Britain would (if there wasn’t an age limit dividing gropers from gropees) rid parliament of a lot of MPs who’d been to private schools;  and, quite a few who had sung in church choirs. 

Sceptics are not rushing to buy electric cars unless they’re either small-car users in large cities or people who want to impress others or save the planet, whatever comes first.  My personal concerns are the price (about half of which is the batteries themselves), the vintage technology of batteries, the problems of disposing of used ones, the scarcity of charging points and the additional time you have to spend watching paint dry on long journeys. 

According to a recent report from Reuters, there now seems to be a new problem which is that entire cars are having to be written off because it’s impossible to repair battery packs after even comparatively minor damage, and the batteries in Tesla Y SUVs are a structural part of the car.  Imagine what this is going to do to electric vehicles’ insurance premiums.

In America, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating two complaints that the steering wheel came off the same model while they were being driven. Whooops a daisy! (Tesla’s response was to shut down its media enquiries department.)

Some neurologists and psychologists at the University of California in San Francisco have studied the effects on the brain of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the psychedelic compound found in the flowering shrub Psychotria viridis and a key component of ayahuasca, a drink that’s been used in Mexico to induce altered states of consciousness in Amazonian peoples for at least a millennium.  Further work has been done by the DMT research group at Imperial College London.

Physiologically, recordings of brain activity showed that DMT breaks down established networks so ‘normal’ electrical impulses take new paths between areas of the brain that don’t normally talk to each other and everything gets mashed up.  The results are that the connections and networks which usually ‘create’ reality for us offer up different versions of reality.

Psychologically, they can include perceptions of contacts with beings from other dimensions and journeys through alternative realities.  People describe leaving this world and entering another that is “incredibly immersive and richly complex, sometimes being populated by other beings that they feel might hold special power over them, like gods.”

Some projects are now in the early stages of testing the combined effects of altered states of consciousness and psychotherapy as a treatment for depression.

Philosophically, the cognitive effects of rewiring the brain so radically, even for such short periods, raise questions about what reality actually looks like …

To add another perspective to this, researchers from Essex University and Berlin’s Humboldt University have recently concluded that drugs do not automatically improve artists’ work, even though John Lennon once described the Beatles’ album ‘Revolver’ as their “pot album”, and it certainly marks a significant change from their earlier work. 

Not everybody agrees and ask how we could know if, say, Modigliani’s work might not have been even better without the absinthe, cocaine and cannabis, and his joint opium sessions with Picasso.

Charlotte Church has recently admitted that the broadcaster Chris Moyles once offered to “take” her virginity when she turned 16, and he later claimed his remark was “actually rather sweet”.  Isn’t that disgusting?

Spring, immolation for profit, government fears and some sad news

18 March 2023

Spring is here and all over the country people are shovelling snow aside and trying to find a rhyme for daffodils (the nearest Wordsworth got was “vales and hills” which doesn’t quite cut the mustard).

My favourite (Brooklyn-accented) verse about spring has been attributed to Ogden Nash but appears in different forms all over the place, though they all tend to share the first line.

“Spring has sprung, de grass is riz, I wonder where de boidies is;  de little boids is on de wing, but dat’s absoid, from what I hoid, de little wings is on de boid!”

Out here in the country we have springtime snowdrops and crocus and primroses and celandine and, as we discovered a few days ago, fibre optic ‘cables’ that zip a telephone call to the telegraph pole outside before sending it the last few feet underground through some antediluvian wires which so distort the signal with crickles and crackles that the end result is incomprehensible.

My theory is that, when it’s rained a lot (which it has), water gets into the junction boxes and signals arc over to the wrong bit of the wire but it’s taken us four attempts to get our supplier to admit there is a fault.  Perhaps it wouldn’t have arced if they’d fitted postdiluvian wiring …  Anyway, they’re sending somebody on Monday to check the inside socket then shin up the telegraph pole and fiddle with things.  (They’ve had to do it twice before so we know what to expect.)

What puzzles me is why it doesn’t seem to affect the broadband signal, but maybe that’s because we’re used to having the signal fail, leaving us to reset the connection or reboot the whole system.  Clever people have smartphones but if you want to use any sort of mobile phone hereabouts, you have to go outside and stand in the road.

At least we don’t have a ghost, although I must admit to suspecting the previous occupier who died here enjoyed apples because, for the first month or two, there’d be a loud smell of stewed apples at bedtime;  but there is a house in Baird, Texas that’s being marketed as an “established and running haunted house”.

The previous owners ‘furnished’ it with coffin-shaped doors and all sorts of stuff that normally disappears shortly after Halloween.  In New York, Noo Joisey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota (but not Texas), sellers are required to disclose if a house is haunted and the decisions in a 1991 New York case (Stambovsky v. Ackley for people who think I make these things up) said “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

Perhaps this confusion of law and the imagination explains how emotionally unstable judges like Brett Kavanaugh get appointed to the Supreme Court.

In the UK, some people seem to think it’s OK to sacrifice a few people’s lives in the pursuit of profit, provided it’s not too many.  Michael Gove has (5 years too late but better late than never) introduced a safety scheme requiring housebuilders to replace flammable materials found in mid-rise developments in England and 39 housebuilders have signed up to this.  However, 11 hadn’t by Monday’s deadline, including Rydon Homes, which is related to Rydon Maintenance which led the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower before the fire, which has so far declined to sign up to it saying it only “develops an average of 16 family homes per year” so it qualifies as “a small housebuilder”.  Or, in English, they only worry about safety if they put larger numbers of people at risk. To his credit, Gove has said “Those companies [who haven’t signed up to it] will be out of the housebuilding business in England entirely, unless and until they change their course” and has extended the deadline to allow them to reconsider.

Suella Braverman popped over to Rwanda, with which her predecessor last year signed an agreement to accept 200 unwanted UK immigrants.  In order to show her trip was reported accurately and without bias, she excluded reporters from the BBC and the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Independent and the i newspapers and took the Daily Mail, GB News and the Daily Telegraph.  That should do the trick.

As mentioned in these mutterings on 3 April last year, P&O suddenly sacked some 800 UK staff without notice and replaced them with cheap foreign labour not subject to the UK minimum wage.  Amazingly, the UK CEO Peter Hebblethwaite wasn’t fired even after saying “I know what the law is.  I broke it on purpose.  And I would do it again.”

At the time, Boris Johnson, last year’s first prime minister, said “We will take [P&O] to court, we will defend the rights of British workers … P&O plainly aren’t going to get away with it.”  Followed by, on the following Wednesday, the then transport secretary Grant Shapps’ admission that “The government are not in a position to take court action.” 

However, a nine-point plan that includes a seafarers’ wages bill is currently going through parliament and a government spokesperson said they had “reacted swiftly and decisively against P&O Ferries”, thereby giving a whole new meaning to “swiftly”.  Still one year is better than five I suppose.

P&O Ferries claimed at the time it was losing £100m a year. Last week, its Dubai-based owner, DP World, announced record profits of $1.8bn.

More sadly, the former actor Sam Neill has stage 3 blood cancer with no idea how long he’s got left so he’s written a book, ‘Did I Ever Tell You This’.  Rather than surrender to the cancer, he’s revelling in the “strong sense of being this little speck in the universe, of so little significance … but a unique speck”. He dismisses belief in an afterlife as ridiculous and talks about the notion of consciousness (“If it’s an illusion, I’m fine with that”), and the alluring idea of “dissolving and dispersing into the cosmos” saying “I don’t mind that idea at all.”

There’s something to think about if you ever worry about dying.

Even more sadly, Jacqueline Gold, who founded the sex shop ‘Ann Summers’ has died of cancer at the age of 62.  Her obituary mentioned that, with 100 shops over the country, she had made the Rampant Rabbit vibrator into a household name.  Not in this household but if any reader who knows what it is, please don’t bother to let me know – some things should be shared only with your closest friend(s).

Are death and consciousness coterminous?

7 August 2022

Imagine the anguish of parents whose 12-year old son suffered catastrophic brain damage while attempting an internet ‘challenge’, whose heart and lungs and entire metabolism were being kept going by machines and, although there was no sign of activity in the brain stem, they hoped he would recover. 

Imagine the anguish of the medical teams who weigh the chances of recovery in such cases and discussed at length what was best for Archie Battersbee.

Imagine the anguish of judges who had expert medical advice that the boy was, for all practical purposes, already dead and pleas from the parents who hoped for a miracle, and had to decide whether the life support equipment could be disconnected, leaving the boy to die ‘naturally’.

After every possible appeal, Archie’s parents were told last week that his life support systems would be disconnected and he died yesterday.

I’ve written before about the blurred boundaries between life and death and when a living creature stops being alive and starts being dead, and I’ve written more recently about ‘consciousness’.  My own feeling has always been that all the atoms gathered together to form my body will disperse over time and become parts of other things (I know this is an ongoing process and ‘my’ atoms are in a constant state of flux anyway but let’s assume for simplicity that a body is a body).

Since we do associate consciousness with individuals, and therefore their bodies, we rarely consider whether consciousness can exist without a body although there does seem to be some evidence that this is possible.

An American journalist, Leslie Kean, is one of a number of people who have gathered stories that seem to indicate consciousness can continue to exist after death and she (yes, I know, but we know Americans can’t spell and anyway why shouldn’t people spell their names how they like?) spent a lot of time researching cases for when this might have happened and published her conclusions in Surviving Death (Three Rivers Press, NY, November 2017).

It’s easy to dismiss this as nonsense, wishful thinking, unscientific etc but just because nothing we’ve discovered so far can explain it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Dark matter / energy accounts for most of the universe and rigorously structured scientific experiments show that something is out there but nobody has yet managed to do much more than give it a name. 

The American philosopher William James said that if you want to disprove the belief that all crows are black, you only need to find one that isn’t.

One of the most intriguing cases she describes involves young children having memories of somebody else’s life.  Typically, these start when a child is about three and have gone before they are six and a friend of mine said, when her son was about four, he said he’d been killed in a car crash.  He wasn’t upset by this, he just said it and, when she later asked him about it, he couldn’t remember having said it.

One of the most famous (and contentious) cases is that of James Leininger who, from the age of 2, was fascinated by old fighter aeroplanes and had memories of a pilot who’d been killed when his plane was shot down near Iwo Jima in the second world war.  Some of the details he gave were detailed enough to allow them to be subsequently checked against official records.  The problem is that his parents are enthusiastically religious and many people have seen James’s story as ‘proof’ of reincarnation while others, less religiously inclined, have questioned the accuracy and chronology of his story and debunked the reincarnation theory.

However, more than 2,500 children have spoken of ‘memories’ of a past life and 1,400 of them have been independently verified.  The majority of these early memories are of the lives of people who have died relatively close to the child’s home and within the fairly recent past (Leininger was unusual in this) and many of them are from cultures that do accept reincarnation.

What nobody seems able to explain is why more people don’t have these memories if we have all been reincarnated;  or how some people’s consciousness can communicate anything after their body’s death.  And anyway, why should apparent ‘memories’ of somebody else’s life automatically mean they were reincarnated rather than their minds had just picked up some cosmic flotsam?

Then there are what are known, conveniently but inaccurately, as ‘after death experiences’ when somebody has been pronounced dead but has been subsequently revived by doctors.

One woman who had suffered a cardiac arrest said that she remembered rising out of her body to look down on the medical team working on it.  She said she had seen a nurse kick a sheet of paper under her bed as they worked on her and then she drifted up and outside the hospital and described in some detail a tennis shoe on an outside windowsill on the third or fourth floor that couldn’t be seen from anywhere else.  After her recovery, she described these scenes and the nurse confirmed they had kicked some paper under the bed;  they also checked the windowsills and found the shoe exactly as she described it.

Dr Janice Holden, professor emerita at the University of North Texas, summed up the problem here rather neatly:  “If consciousness can function apart from the body in a reversibly dead body, perhaps it continues to function after irreversible death” but this can’t ever be proved because of “the methodological failure of researchers to find reliable, irreversibly dead people to participate in their studies.”

One obliging 87-year old had a heart attack and died while he was undergoing an EEG for a deteriorating bleed in the brain.  Recordings of the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped beating showed changes in brain waves, including alpha and gamma waves, whose actions are linked to memory recall.  The study suggests that neural activity continues after blood stops flowing in the brain but this is just one case, which is impossible to replicate, and there is still the difficulty of deciding an exact moment of death when different bits of the body die at different rates.

Some people who died but were resuscitated described ‘near death experiences’ when asked what they remembered from the time they were clinically dead.  A 1988 study of 344 consecutive cardiac arrests in the Netherlands, published in the Lancet in December 2001, reported that 82% had no memories but 18% (62 people) did.  The researchers contacted all surviving participants again after two and eight years and found significant differences between people who had had NDEs and those who hadn’t.  The former had no fear of death, were convinced of an afterlife and felt their lives had greater meaning, but many also suffered loneliness and depression from their inability to share the depth of their experiences with others.

Even more common are ‘end of life experiences’ which one study claimed were felt by 50-60% of people at the end of their lives, with the dying seeing visions that were never frightening and often made them cheerful and relaxed. 

Other events linked to somebody’s death that might show that consciousness doesn’t always die when the heart stops beating include relatives waking from sleep at the exact time, clocks and watches stopping, and pictures falling off the wall.  (I’ve written before about various experiences some friends and I have had which we felt was some sort of comfort offered by the person who’d died.)

There have also been psychic readings, seances and materialisations, which occasionally seem to reveal information that only the dead person could have known, such as the location of something that was lost, but these seem to me to be part of a wider field of sharing knowledge in ways that we don’t yet understand rather than as evidence that consciousness may continue after death.

If consciousness isn’t always tethered to the body and can roam free, perhaps it could somehow communicate with other consciousnesses and account for things like telepathy? (I’ll maybe come back to that someday.)

In any event, I hope that the Battersbees have some sort of experience that comforts them and helps them through their grief.

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.)