Just because we don't understand consciousness doesn't mean it isn't working

Our cat started me thinking on this as it came into our kitchen one day. It jumped at the sudden noise when a saucepan was dropped, then walked sensibly round a chair that was in its way. Is our cat reacting, thinking, conscious, intelligent, or what?

In our eyes, intelligence and consciousness are different because homo sapiens ponder things and felines don't. That does not disqualify the cat. The case isn't what Descartes proposed, 'I think, therefore I am'. We don't exist because we think. We exist anyway.

Consciousness is a principle of life - that is, a mutual and reciprocal arrangement with the environment that evolved to sustain everything living on Earth. In us, it has adapted over time into the uniquely complex interrelationship we call intelligence. 

  

But words should not mislead us. Consciousness and intelligence are the same thing, one an elaboration of the other, distinguished only because our evolved minds can think and speak of them the way we do.

 

 

A piece of my mind on consciousness

Our cat started me thinking on this as it came into our kitchen one day. It jumped at the sudden noise when a saucepan was dropped, then walked sensibly round a chair that was in its way. Is our cat reacting, thinking, conscious, intelligent, or what?

In our eyes, intelligence and consciousness are different because homo sapiens ponder things and felines don't. That does not disqualify the cat. The case isn't what Descartes proposed, 'I think, therefore I am'. We don't exist because we think. We exist anyway.

Consciousness is a principle of life - that is, a mutual and reciprocal arrangement with the environment that evolved to sustain everything living on Earth. In us, it has adapted over time into the uniquely complex interrelationship we call intelligence. 

  

But words should not mislead us. Consciousness and intelligence are the same thing, one an elaboration of the other, distinguished only because our evolved minds can think and speak of them the way we do.

 

Did Hamlet get the big question wrong?

An actor interviewed on TV pointed out that 'To be or not to be - that is the question' is not the question. He playfully twisted the famous line, re-punctuating the words as: 'To be or not? To be - that is the question.' He touched on a point. What is existence? What are we doing here?

We're no longer separate from the Universe observing it from outside. That's an old religious idea. It hasn't weathered well since science came along to show humans aren't something created apart.

But like the child is not just the same as its parents, neither do we seem to be made just the same as the evolved Universe of galaxies and stars, rocks and rivers and trees. Science has the atoms that say we are, but circumstances and personal experience beg to differ. 

It's a dilemma. Are we the product of biology or physics, and how does that work? We get lost in exotic queries about consciousness when the question that needs answering first is what is life?

Theories of space and time, that the Universe is infinite or a Multiverse, that we're all living in a computer simulation, can sound a lot like the words, words, words Hamlet reads because he doesn't know himself.

How are we to understand Donald Trump?

In the years following WWII, Adolf Hitler was explained - and explained away, pegged and dismissed - simply as 'mad'. A parody of him as the 'Mad Dictator' even became a standing joke.

That was a travesty, but also clearly now a serious error of judgment.

Something much the same happens today with Donald Trump, who is explained and explained away simply as a 'narcissist'. That too misses the dangerous nature of the man, as 'mad' did for Adolf Hitler.

Worse, it misses what part everything else plays in making Donald Trump what he is.

Read more about it.

Will the people turn against Donald Trump in the mid-terms?

 

It's become the Question of the Day because Trump may be considered, and is certainly called, a neo-fascist - that is, a fascist for our times, not one out of the past. 

One feature supporting that is Trump knows instinctively his whole appeal is to what are called 'the people', a formless grouping that may or may not exist in reality, but which appears undeniable in the face of the enormous anonymous numbers out there. 

However that may be, Trump wins support by using every modern means of communication to promise that 'they', the faceless, undifferentiated masses, can only get what they want from him. That was fascism's project from the start and is what distinguishes fascism from democracy, which accepts variety and works on compromise. Fascism isn't a mendacious corruption of democracy, but a legacy from monarchy, when everyone was an obedient subject of the king.

The internet is a key instrument, but not the only one, to achieve Trump's ambitions; he has above all the prestige of being POTUS with the automatic universal attention that commands. In the role, he sees himself as Leader, akin to a dictator rather than to a king: self-made and answerable to none, fearless, infallible, even touched with Divinity. But still one of us.

What could upset this claim to power is the world has moved on from one hundred years ago. Democracy has taken root and can avail itself of the weapons Trump depends on. He has potent ways to persuade, but oppositions have their own means as long as they use them.

The question now isn't so much whether fascism's manipulable masses exist (and for that matter Marxism's intractable classes): it is whether the mass of voters have changed since Hitler and Stalin were able to force their infamous politics on the world. 

Are We the people still ready to back politicians who thrive on bragging that the solution is no problem provided they alone deal with it? Or has the lesson got home that when a politician makes that easy promise, both the problem and the solution are suddenly the people's?

"THE TRUTH WILL OUT"

There's little doubt President Donald Trump won his first essential objective, that being to destroy what is called 'the truth'.

But though it's no consolation at the time, that always turns out to be a temporary victory, as Trump's turbulent second term is confirming. His word is no longer trusted.

In the end, a programme of lies cannot replace 'truth' because what we call 'the truth' is plural, comprising many views. Lies simply take their place among all the differing opinions on a topic.

And what emerges from that plurality, that diverse, quarrelsome mix, is people's rough-and-ready consensus on something else entirely: on what they see as right and wrong.

It can take an age to show, many may always deny it and not comply, but everyone's stuck with morality. 

That's what we mean when we say the truth will out. 

Girl, young woman, in a red coat

 

i woke up at 4.30 last night. I wasn't particularly tired, but for once I thought I won't start the day this time or I'll be tired today. So I re-arranged my pillow, snuggled down and eventually fell asleep, I suppose.

We were walking across a large square. We'd just left something, somewhere. It might hVe been an opera, but I can't remember that now. I'm not sure what it was. She was a young woman, walking not together with me, but going the same way, a little distance off. There weren't other people anywhere. She had a bright red coat on, and was very friendly, just chatting away. I heard her voice and what she was saying very clearly and even replied in my own voice. Though it was all very clear, I can't remember anything we said now, writing this. She was so friendly, open, easy and nice and I began to think, how can I ask if we could just meet again? Could I do that without making her think I was creepy or just ridiculous after just this little talk as we walked.

Now I'd moved on from the big open square we were walking across talking and was in a smaller but still open space. There was a young bloke standing facing me across there. The girl had gone, so I naturally knew I had to speak to him. Again, I could hear my voice very clearly as I spoke. I asked him if I could see the girl again. I said I didn't mean anything by it. I was anxious to assure him. it was just that she'd talked so nicely and had been so friendly to me. In any case, at my age, how could I mean anything else? I said. He began to take it in, bbut never got round to making a reply.

At that exact point I woke up. It was 6.46. Every word of this is true and as accurate as I can report it now, not made up or elaborated in any way. I've written it down as I waited to open the gate for Velli at 7.30 in the 'study' bedroom, because I think it must be the strangest thing that's ever happened to me. I had been walking, say, just three or four minutes in that world, I would estimate, walking along with some girl in a red coat I'd never seen before and couldn't make out exactly, somewhere else.

 

As you see, I wrote this piece less than a year before. https://paulwhelanwriting.blogspot.com/2025/10/dreaming-consciousness-and-our-brain.html

(I've posted this two hours later, after adding the link, just as I wrote it, unedited, typing mistakes and all.) 

THE COMMON MISTAKE WITH FASCISM

We must avoid the error of defining fascism by reference to historical figures labelled fascist. If we don't, it's not difficult to show differences between them and the contemporary model. The result is the confusion and uncertainty that fascism thrives on.

It has learned, first of all, that to repeat the past, you must change it. Extremism wears no uniform and insignia now and makes a salute at its peril. Such gestures can only recall what followed last time. 

Instead, a down-to-earth, approachable leader flatters by sharing fears. There is a personal engagement with people's ordinariness, their everyday sympathies and prejudices that are all part of their common sense, decency and feelings for fair play. Familiar, honest things. The idea is normality rules here, not a brood of fanatics.

This is more than 'populism', as it's usually called: populism is only its method. It is an enveloping style of politics that finds a home in hard times, embodying only their discontents. Its trade is grievances, by which it appears to have no respectable opposition, only devious and corrupt enemies. It works by seizing opportunities thrown up by the issues of the day, welcoming the controversy that keeps it in the news. It is at all times tactical, very strong on what's wrong but elusive on what's right. 

If there's a defence against it, it requires equal calculation, a search of the values behind the plausible rhetoric. We can listen to the words but must also hear any words unspoken: war but not peace, for instance. We must hear words that scorn democratic norms and institutions, show contempt for tolerance, and slyly imply that violence is justice. We must particularly hear words that reserve or deny sympathy for a majority and a minority.

In these times of people power and social media, of the evasions and outright lies of self-serving politicians, we must be all ears. There are striking similarities between "Hitler" and many others who could turn out to be one; they're just dressed up differently for today.

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH REALITY?

If there are waves and fields, if there is the electromagnetic spectrum, as Einstein reminded colleagues there is, and nuclear forces and gravity, then waves and fields, the spectrum, nuclear forces and gravity are real. 

That produces a problem, and a problem produces knowledge of the problem that leads to many theories and speculations.

It also leads to work on the problem.

We may get closer to an understanding, even an explanation, one day. That idea is real too - part of the problem.

Meanwhile, some will go on tackling the problem and others will go on theorising and speculating about it. Both and both together.

You've got to accept and allow for the fact there's the problem and there's us, intertwined, indissoluble.

That's the reality.

Is the 'hard question' - our consciousness - really so hard?

There are a great many things to say about human nature, but one feature stands out at all times: we enjoy nothing more than a mystery: if there isn't one, we'll make one. We're wide open to the latest conspiracy theory and the paradox, some contradiction in terms.

It's plainest to see on social media these days. People who insist the Moon landings were faked believe aliens land on Earth in flying saucers. They'll say it's impossible the Universe created itself from nothing, but that a Supreme Being did it is no problem. This Supreme Being is allowed to be eternal, though the Universe must be sensible.  The Universe must have a Beginning and End, like everything else.

It's a mystery we manage to think all this at the same time. But then are we really here, leading a life among trees, mountains, other people and cities, or do we only imagine we are? We say we're conscious of everything and, the biggest mystery of all, of our self. What is a self? What do we mean by being 'conscious'? What is this thing, consciousness?

Well, let's consider. First, it's not a 'thing'. It's a physical process by which not only we, but anything alive, interacts with its environment, modelling and adapting to it and therefore persisting.

We must assume many forms of life do this without being self-aware; we cannot know for sure if a sunflower is figuring it out as it turns with the sun, or if a dolphin has a sense of destiny. What we know is homo sapiens is always trying to find what being self-aware is and advancing many different theories and speculations about it. Often this leads to complicating rather than clarifying matters.

One current idea, for instance, is that consciousness dissolves any distinction between the observer and what's observed, and that goes to show that our consciousness is not a separate 'thing' in us but a sharing of some ultimate pervasive metaphysical essence.

Yet that's just what a physical process would produce in an individual organism or in a group as a body. An adaptive, persisting life form on Earth, or anywhere else it may exist, will be a natural, acting occupant in and of the surrounding Universe, not some puzzle apart.

How democracy works. And may yet disappoint Nigel Farage.

How can people best show their disapproval of their government? Get something done? Get change?

No secret. Under democracy, it's by voting. By their vote. Not the guy's next door. Not someone else. Everyone. Individually.

It doesn't help not to vote. A non-vote says nothing and can affect nothing unless it's a vote withheld from what you usually vote or voted last time. And even then that's not decisive. It can be explained away by 'low turnout'.

So the answer is to vote for someone who will frighten the life out of government, drive or force them into action.

And who else would that be in the UK right now but Reform?

Mr Farage may - stress, may - be counting chickens before they're hatched. And getting rid of Mr Starmer for someone else may turn out to be another (and big) mistake.

If Starmer's so bad, Mr Farage should logically want him to keep going.

Take nothing for granted under democracy. That's why it's the best form of government.

All things considered.

 

Mr Starmer v Mr Robbins

 

Isn't "the truth" - if "truth" has any meaning whatever in political life - that Mr Starmer (and No 10) wanted Mr Mandelson in place asap for political reasons, and that Mr Robbins, new in the post, flinched from delivering the bad news about the security situation, having technical authority not to disclose any news that prejudices or runs counter to the will and decision of the executive branch?

No wonder sophistry is having a field day. No power on earth or in heaven could cut this legal and moral Gordian Knot.

THE MADNESS OF KING DONALD

 

Trump's ambition is perfectly clear by now: to cajole and coerce into the hard right not just the US but the world, to put an end to the decadent times of "bleeding heart liberalism", as the neo-fascists see the years before and after 1989 when the enviable USSR fell apart.

That's what Kings do: exercise power as they see fit. To Trump, a deeply reactionary Monarch, that means making America great again, as in his mind it was once upon a time. It means turning the clock back.

A hopeless project, others will judge, except it seems possible in the gilded world of wealthy courtiers and impressionable subjects, backed with a powerful means to achieve it these days, the worldwide internet. Tweet your royal fantasies into reality for millions of people at a click. It works. Really. Proselytise, propagandise, pull the wool over eyes. Lie as required, to order.

After all, if Mars is to be under the American flag in 15 years or so, as Mr Musk predicts, why not the same on Earth? The biggest ships, the most advanced warplanes, the impregnable Golden Dome show Trump is unstoppable. "No other king and country in the world could do it". 

It's been coming for some time, though. The slow realisation, a growing unease, that it's too much to ask of the whole Stars and Stripes. 

It's not possible - not doable. It's not affordable. It's not ..."right".

Ordinary people always get in the way.

TRUMP'S LOSING SECOND TERM

The outline (I note the new buzzword is "contour(s)") of Trump's strategy in his second term is perfectly clear by now: to convert not just the US but the world to the hard right, to put an end to the decadent times of "bleeding heart liberalism", as the neo-fascists see the years to have been since WWII.

That's what Kings do: exercise power as they see fit. To Trump, a deeply reactionary King, that means making America great again - as it appears to him it was in the past. Amassing money. Needing no outsiders and keeping intruders out. In general, turning the clock back.

A hopeless project, many can see, except it seems possible in the royal world of wealthy courtiers and zealous subjects, backed with a means to bring it off, the worldwide internet. Tweet your fantasies into reality for millions of people at a click. It works. Really. Proselytise, propagandise, pull the wool over eyes. Lie as required, to order.

After all, if Mars is to be under the American flag in 15 years or so, as Mr Musk says, why not the same on Earth? The biggest ships, the most advanced warplanes, the impregnable Golden Dome show Trump is unstoppable. "No other country in the world could do it". 

It's been coming for some time, though. The slow realisation, a growing unease, that it's too much to ask even of the mighty Stars and Stripes. Trump has turned out just another false prophet.

It's not possible - not doable. It's not affordable. Worse than that, it's beginning to seem "wrong"...

Other people always get in the way.

What's wrong with Flat Earthers?

My internet comment: 'Flat Earthing' is about what most of us do a great deal of the time about a great many things - trust gossip, "common sense", hearsay and false reasoning, rather than keep an open mind, question what we're told and think for ourselves.

Rob's internet reply: That's what they say about us...

My reply to Rob: Absolutely. And the immediate cause of that is that our "Reason" - reasoning - can be employed to support things that are incorrect, whereas we all take it for granted that "reasoning" leads only to the correct conclusion. It simply does not. That, I believe, is obvious. 

The more interesting question then becomes why different people reach different conclusions in their "reasoning".

What is the nature of that difference and its causes? It can be cultural - who we "mix" with - but it appears to be also something genetic.

Rob's internet reply: Personally I think it's a mix of lack of education (for obvious seasons) and an anti-establishment attitude. When you are kind of 'angry' or jealous of people who in your opinion 'made it', you just attack their standpoints. Who cares about knowledge or truth?

Another thing is social acceptance for loners. I saw a documentary where shy people without social skills and friends gained respect in a group of flat-earthers (not online, they arranged large meetings) and even ended up on stage, addressing the public. And the same here: no-one really cared if earth was flat or diamond-shaped, they just enjoyed being together.

Science and Magic today

Magic is the way humans, from the start, explained agency. It was there eons before Science came along, the go-to explanation for events much longer than Science. 

Hardly surprising, then, that magic beats Science in the explanatory stakes still. What are quantum mechanics but the contemporary form of magic - there, but inexplicable? Invisible particles passing through walls. Effects without causes. People, like old-time wizards, able to change Reality. Wonders ...

So magic has another advantage it will never lose as long as we are what we are.

It's all of a piece with the human capacity to imagine, to marvel, and in that respect, is useful and beautiful. It takes imagination to see humanity as moving out into the infinite Universe. It takes a flight of Magic that leaves Science limping dully behind.

WHAT IS THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER?

Look up a dictionary. Oh dear. 

It says it's Conformity to fact or actuality. Reality. 

But today we're told there is no 'Reality'. There is nothing 'out there' or, if there is, it's virtual.

Another definition: 'A statement proven to be or accepted as true.' In other words, the truth is what's true. How does that help?

The only reality seems to be that it's impossible to say what the truth is.

Where's the 'truth' if I say the 'fact' is this way and you say it's another way? And if someone else disagrees with both our 'facts'? The truth, reality or the 'fact' then is that it's actually several, maybe many, different views of what the 'fact' is.

That's not relativism, as the soothsayers say: it's pluralism. But we miss the point by always arguing about the 'truth' when what we should see is we are arguing about our knowledge and why we have it.

The 'truth' is a word for the position or opinion each of us adopts on a subject and that is contradicted by others who have a different view.

We're not, then, in some grand search for something eternal. We're only in a permanent struggle to persuade one another in the moment. 

And from there, what emerges are things many of us find we can agree with, given time.

 

WHY YOU CAN'T COUNT ON OPINION POLLS

 

GB News is no more a news channel than Mrs Browns Boys is a comedy show  (Social media comment)

Politicians of all parties are always careful to flatter everyone by saying "the people" are not fools.

When I read the social media, it seems to me some people are foolish and some aren't. Some of "the people" are extremely sharp.

So, in one way, polls are right. In a democracy, you've got to count. Getting good government in a democracy is a question of numbers.

The trouble is polls count what people say, not what people are.

Our consciousness, brain and dreaming

(Once or twice recently I've used this blog like a journal, an aide memoire, to note something that I'd realised, concluded or decided on after a lot of thought. What, after all, does anyone write anything for but that, and in the hope that publishing it might in some way be useful to others? This piece is one more instance of it.)

I am convinced that our consciousness - the "hard question" - is the sole product of our brain, a material organ of baffling complexity that has a life of its own inside our head, as you might say the human heart or lungs have lives of their own in our body, working over lifetimes with no volition from "us", from whom "we" are.

The evidence is dreams, in which dilemmas, people, incidents, crises and whole worlds exist with a reality that can only be explained by the brain, from its genetic and bio-chemical composition, ambient culture and vast store of the individual's lived experiences and learning, creating a universe it controls and makes sense of in its own way. 

When "we" dream, we often recognise familiar content, maybe a lot, in the brain's story, but it's the brain storytelling. Like any other story we think we invent.

Are we humans or gods?

If the Universe is infinite, which can never be ruled out, it must contain infinite possibilities, in which case the emergence of oceans or a black hole, of a galaxy or mountains, or of a peanut or ant, isn't inexplicable but only an event.

From there to insist the emergence of a leg or of an eye, or of an entire living person, is unaccountable - that it defies the vast mathematical odds against it - ceases to be coherent. How can there be odds in Eternity? Chance cannot exist.

It simply shows people as yet know too little of themselves, or perhaps believe too much in themselves, not that human beings are impossible.

From Lord Heseltine, Patron European Movement UK

Dear Paul,

Yesterday, I told the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester that we must not abandon the shared laws of Europe.

We cannot afford to forget the lessons of history. The rise of fascism across Europe, and even in our own streets, was only stopped by visionaries such as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Winston Churchill, who worked to create a united Europe - an alliance based on cooperation, not empire.

Today, we face new challenges. The economic collapse of 2008, the Covid crisis, and the rise of populism across Europe and America have eroded confidence in governments. As I told BBC Newsnight last night, extremists are back on the march and are using immigration as a scapegoat. Yet the overwhelming majority seeking refuge are simply fleeing persecution and seeking to share in our standards of living.

Britain’s future lies in Europe, not apart from it. Our companies, our defence, our research, and our influence thrive through cooperation. Only together can we tackle global warming, defend freedom, and protect our economy. The young electorate also understands this: less than 20% of those under 50 think leaving Europe was right, and the tide is turning.

The European Movement has always stood for a Britain that is confident, prosperous, and influential within Europe. 

Both your membership and recent donation are making a real difference, Paul, thank you. Together, we’ve kept the flame of European cooperation alive at a time when populism and division threaten it.

History demands action - and this is our moment to act.

With determination,

Lord Heseltine

Patron, European Movement UK

My article just two days after the Brexit vote 

The Nature of the Universe

 

I can see myself still, 17 or 18, walking on to the school playground from 'the field' - the boys' football pitch alongside the girls' hockey pitch with a square between the two for cricket in the summer - reading Fred Hoyle's The Nature of the Universe; feel still my naive surprise at all the galaxies and millions of stars there were, knowing nothing of cosmology let alone about the Big Bang v Steady State dispute Hoyle had instigated. I even seem to remember thinking his Steady State Universe was the more likely, everything being kept in place by 'spontaneous creation' - after all, why not? 

When I say all these years later if God did not create the Universe, then the Universe created itself, I mean to mock the idea of either creating itself. Which leaves an eternal Universe no less possible, probable or certain than a Creator God.

To me now, what the Universe 'comes from' is whatever it was and is. I don't believe human beings can make sense of anything other than 'the Universe' is just that - all there is and always was, existing as whatever it is and may change from, to. We have been made part of it, not the other way round.

All these years later, I do not see how what I mean can ever be clarified beyond these words I did not have then.

 

How on earth can time not exist?

 

There’s even a famous song about it existing, from the movie Casablanca, and everyone knows the movie Casablanca.

We humans know that ‘time goes by’, time moves on, and space is where we park the car and hang our clothes. We see time and space as separate ‘things’. Always did.

Modern Physics suggests there is no such thing as Time and no such thing as Space separately like that, but only the-two-together as spacetime.

Can we really understand spacetime without getting into other mysteries of maths and geometry? Perhaps, if we don’t make the same mistake twice.

We need to think of spacetime as not some thing ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ something else, something we call the Universe, but of Time-and-Space together as a property of the Universe.

Now instead of getting all technical (as if I would or could!), Einstein is said to have got the idea for Special Relativity while going down in a lift somewhere.

Inside the lift, he intuited that if you were falling inside a lift that was falling, there would be no Space and Time anymore. Can we all imagine that happening? Just going on and on? Maybe we can, but not on Earth. Where then could it happen?

Only where there is no up and down, no left and right, no backwards and forwards. In spacetime infinite Universe. Where there is no Space and there is no Time.

 

How to understand why you're here, instead of making something up

 

Around 1620, a genius called Rene Descartes reasoned, 'I think, therefore I am'. He may have said it in French, 'Je pense, donc Je suis'. We know it famously in Latin, 'Cogito ergo sum'. But M Descartes would not say that today. Today, he would say, 'I am, therefore I think'.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" - Sherlock Holmes, 1890

*****

You can actually figure out the answer to this biggest question of all, from this simple experiment at home. 

Imagine you have 50 coins. You lay them all down 'heads'. (Easy enough to imagine. You don't actually have to do it.)

Now, toss each coin, one by one, carefully, in your mind. They won't all come down heads again, will they? You know that. You don't know how you know it, and you don't know how many will come down heads again. Or tails. But you know they won't all be heads again.

Now instead of with 50, you could do that experiment with 500 or 500,000 or 5 million coins. Imagine you do. You know the answer will be the same: not all heads (or tails), but of course not the actual numbers.

Okay. Now. After many, many experiments, experiment gives you not a definite number or 'answer' but a statistical probability. It's not a definite figure and it's definitely not 'true'. A statistical probability, by definition, is never certain.

And the really extraordinary thing that you know is that you know, in spite of however many experiments you do, it's still possible all the coins could come down heads again. You simply can't deny it. Whether 50 or 50 million. You know. You know that it's not absolutely and completely out of all possibility. You understand that it's not impossible.

That's Science. It's not certain. It's not the truth. But it's not making things up.

And it shows how and why you are here. There was some probability you’d be, in the Universe.

"In heaven's name, why on earth are we here?"

It's our call. There it is. If Heaven isn't the answer, we've got to find it on Earth. What have we got?

Three things are clear. The first is that you have a body and are 'here'. 

The second is we don't know how we got 'here'. No one does for sure.

The third is that we make things up. Ideas, theories and prophecies are what we come up with because we don't know something for sure. When we don't know something for sure, we make something up. Like we eat and breathe and walk and talk, we try to understand.

It's one of the things being here means. Trying to understand.

Then there's the deeply puzzling fourth thing: the 'here' outside our body. We'll never understand that. The best guess is that there's always been a 'here' outside our body, simply because no other idea, theory or prophecy is ever for sure. 

Here must have always been there.

It was just us that was missing.

From Here to Eternity: Science v Religion

"God doesn't exist."

"Yes, He does. He created everything."

"Watch your pronouns!  No, she didn't. Evolution did."

"Evolution's not true. Evolution doesn't explain how life started."

"Nor does God. Just saying God did it doesn't prove it."

"There's no proof of evolution - it's just a theory! Theories aren't facts." 

"The fact is religion's just a belief."

"So's your atheism - that's a religion."

You'll recognise some of that: the Science versus Religion argument. (Note the capitals: Science and Religion as different ways of knowing - not of any particular versions of each.) 

There you were, thinking that was over, that it was done and done with, and it's not over or done with at all. It's back. 

It's back because people have two different ways of explaining the same thing: the mystery of existence. That includes all of us. There's no getting away from it. The argument goes on and on as everyone argues that one of the other, Science or Religion, must be right, must be true.

One way out is to ignore it, but that's no answer. A better way is not to bother about what's true or not true and to think how the argument came about in the first place.

When did people start disagreeing like this? That is the question, because once upon a time the disagreement wasn't there on anything like the scale it is today. People argued all the time, but they argued about which religion was true, not whether Religion or Science was.

In the west, you can say it started around the beginning of the seventeenth century - 1600 and something. There's no firm or agreed date for it, and there was certainly not the remotest possibility of seeing how it would develop into what it is now. It was the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, of something that had not happened before.

People argue about the Scientific Revolution, of course, Nevertheless, that time period can be seen as the start of a fundamental change in thinking. Not sudden, not general; sporadic, scattered - not involving anything like the majority of people, who went on thinking as usual. (Just like today really. For heavens sake, what is a computer?) 

The coming of Science was the start of people thinking that there is another way of thinking.

They started thinking about and studying the natural world as the natural world; and slowly learned, to their confusion and unease, that the inquiry led inevitably to themselves; to what and who they were as a part of it. They had different answers.

"It leads back to God Who gave us everlasting life."

"That's a lovely story. But it looks like the Universe itself is just infinite and eternal."

And so on and so on. There's no end to Eternity.

Trump, his tariffs, the law and the Supreme Court

 

The law can 'decide' the question of whether POTUS has the 'power' to impose tariffs but cannot settle the issue. 

That is because it is, finally, a political, not a legal dispute; it puts democracy and the law - that is, the existence of legal restraints on democracy - at odds.

Trump and his legal advisers are well aware of this but will continue to press their case because they do not believe in liberal democracy and accept the spirit of the law (or to be exact about Trump's attorneys, because they are commissioned to challenge those concepts). They are advocating together a form of fascism: elective dictatorship.

The only way the Supreme Court - if the matter gets that far - seems to have round this is to take the Constitutional view of the separation of the powers and decline to hear the case.

Whether Trump has the power to impose tariffs, or the power to do anything else he likes, can only be settled by whether American voters continue to support him. That is, whether they let him.

That's the reality. That's democracy. What other choice is there?

Ein Heldenleben

As you'll remember (I wrote to a friend who'd asked if I knew Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben), I first heard the usual pairing of the Wagner Prelude and Liebestod on May 4 1954. 

One of the clearest things I've written is about that first time. It changed my life, and not so much changed as expanded beyond all expectation what music had been to me till then: traditional jazz, bop - the trumpet starring because I played one myself - Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton. 

But after that experience, I couldn't get enough of what people oddly call 'classical' music, which had started, also unforgettably, one Sunday with Sibelius's 2nd Symphony on the radio, but after the Wagner, moved on to Mahler, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Shoenberg, Vaughan Williams, Debussy and all sorts of things by Delius and Nielsen and Richard Strauss, who had been widely considered the most brilliant composer in the world around the turn of the twentieth century but tarnished his reputation by staying on in Hitler’s Germany. 

The connection between the Wagner family and the Nazis no doubt accounts for much of the antagonism to that Richard too, not to mention his deeply unpleasant writing about Jews. Knowing nothing of all that at the time, I held Wagner in awe, above all, but was thrilled and moved also by Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan, the Four Last Songs, Metamorphosen, Salome, glorious Der Rosenkavalier.

I can never quite get down in words what all this great music meant to me. It was somehow or other about everything, mixing, and mixing up, beauty, love, hopelessness, all the confused yearnings of youth. I don’t sit now to listen to it like I did then because the memories that come with it sadden, though I find myself listening on YouTube often enough. Ravel's Sheherazade there is as ravishing as ever.

It is still Wagner most. After all the years, as the productions move with the times, I see more than ever his remarkable intelligence and unique vision and feel more intensely his feeling for people, life and love. 

Then I imagine him working in some room in Switzerland, or in the palazzo in Venice now a casino, hearing, getting it down, re-thinking, hearing again; in the middle of everybody else's ordinary day actualising Tristan and Isolde; to be free of the unearthly demand inside him alone in all the world.

Unintelligible, amoral: is that how the Universe is?

 

Why do humans have morals, a sense of right and wrong? Humans have at least three explanations. Leave out the one that says there is no right and wrong and consider two others.

There is an absolute Right and Wrong, as Plato had us believe before Christianity, and later the Christian God implanted a sense of both in every one of us. 

The other, secular explanation is we are social beings and our sense of right and wrong, and moral conduct, are evolved adaptations that enable us to survive. Without them, there would be no restraints. Living together, society, everything we do, would be impossible.

While everyone argued the two options, Edwin Hubble showed a century ago that our vast galaxy of the Milky Way was not the entire Universe. And one hundred years later, we find the Milky Way is not vast but tiny, just one of billions of galaxies in a Universe expanding in all directions faster than the speed of light.

To many people, our arguments seem as nothing in the circumstances. The Universe races further and further beyond the furthest reach of our imagination, as our morality falls further and further short of an explanation for it. 

We only know science will never give up trying to understand and religion will never give up insisting on right and wrong. Otherwise we humans are alone with what the Universe is telling us.

How toothpaste caps explain science

Just so everyone's clear, science is talking probabilities, not preaching the 'truth'. That's why you always hear about the scientific 'theory' of this and that.

A scientific theory may refer to some feature of the natural world observed and established by experiment. It is not 'proof', but it is more than 'belief', and it is definitely not 'final'.

It's perfectly possible to replace one scientific theory with another, but you cannot replace a scientific proof by another proof. In that case, the first proof was wrong. Or maybe the other one isn't right.

Confusing. But the confusion can easily be cleared up by a little trial and error at home. 

If you twist the top of the toothpaste anticlockwise, it almost certainly will not come off and you will very probably not do that again.

However, that does not 'prove' that the tops of all toothpastes cannot be removed anticlockwise. You can never be absolutely certain after one hundred or one thousand tests. And you don't have time for that.

You can then of course start to believe the tops of toothpastes always come off clockwise and say to others it's a fact.

And that's what causes all the trouble.

You can even say it's a scientific law and been proved - though the fact is science has proved no such thing.

Neverthsless two things encourage you to stick with that belief. First, if you refuse to believe science and its methods, you can believe anything you like. Second, should the top of a toothpaste open anticlockwise anywhere ever, you can say that proves science is wrong. 

Does God exist? A straightforward answer Part II

Although I thought I'd been clear in the first part of this, someone who read it suggested I wanted to 'sit on the fence' ... 

"On reflection, I think you are right that I want to 'sit on the fence'. I sit there from what I know as me, from who I am, not from what religion or science are alleged to have me believe on the subject.

I believe in evolution because it can make sense to me more than a Creator God. But that does not mean I have 'proved', even to myself, that God does not exist, or that I have some solution to why we and everything are here. 

You and I disagree on many points, but I do agree that religion and science are irreconcilable. In everyday language, they are entirely different ways of explaining what it's all about. 

There are of course scientists who know. And there are scientists who do not know. Without being a scientist myself, I am in the latter camp. No one knows. I don't believe anyone will ever know.

As far as I am able to tell, the Universe is eternal and infinite and meaningless. But though I definitely do not get that from religion, I also do not get it from science.

Thank you for the civilised exchange." 

 

Understanding why people don't believe in science

 

Some suggest it's a low IQ. But what's a high IQ? Ability to do IQ tests, or to have doubts about IQ tests and skip them to do something practical? 

Isn't it more absence of science? Not of brains to grasp quantum mechanics or relativity, but of a popular understanding of it and of the kind of thinking that questions, is curious, doesn't settle for what passes as common knowledge.

After thousands of years of not inquiring, getting by on magic and authority, it's no surprise we can see science as a stranger bent on destroying everything of value, beliefs that are tried and trusted

Long past is the inspiration of some Ancient Greeks and Chinese and the bits they worked out. There's no comparison to be made anymore. In just 400 years or so science has utterly transformed Reality, racing on now to who-knows-where for who-knows-what.

That's not what we learned at school or thought until quite recently. Science got things right; we could take what it says for sure; it would make people wise and the world a better place. That was the truth. 

For science, that was never the truth. It isn't the truth for anyone who thinks for themselves. Especially those who also believe in magic.

 

Does God exist? A straightforward answer at last

The question does not require a discussion of particle physics or materiality. And let us not start by saying God does not exist because science 'proves' or cannot 'prove' it. It is not a question for science.

The question poses an idea and needs answering as an idea.

The straightforward answer runs like this. 

If God created Herself/Himself, then two things must follow: 1] there is/was some power or event of creation once that we humans cannot comprehend; or 2] God did not create Herself/Himself and is eternal and infinite. That is also incomprehensible to humans but may be agreed by all those willing to accept the idea of God on those terms.

What is clear is that you can replace the word God in the above with the word Universe and neither point 1 nor point 2 needs to change. That is to say that if God could have created God by some mystery, or could be eternal and infinite, something we call the Universe could have done, or be, the same.

The Universe is what a scientist and anyone else who does not follow a religion speak and speculate about in a wide variety of ways. A scientist and anyone else who does follow a religion will also speak of God.

In short, these are personal explanations, arising inevitably from our consciousness and individual cognition, not a confirmation of one thing or another existing ‘out there’.

It may help if I mention that I believe the Universe is eternal and infinite because nothing else makes sense to me. But that is not science. And definitely not faith.

The Catcher in the Rye

"You're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them-if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."

~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

What's Donald Trump about, in the end?

It's not just about policy, is it - about tariffs, about insisting the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America and annexing Canada? That's like saying banditry is just about stealing.

And it's about more than politics and doing deals. We all take sides and fight to win, but we also develop laws and democracy that make for some balance, for keeping things roughly fair.

The political innovation of 'His Majesty's Loyal Opposition' in the UK and of two competing but loyal parties to the US Constitution was a key advance in government that is now under threat. Why would that be?

It's normal for politicians to blame problems on political opponents, but Trump needs to suggest anyone with a different view is an enemy.

And not only the 'extreme right' agree with him. Many in the centre, left and right, accept populist alarms that 'they' have allowed 'things' to go too far. Who are 'they'? Anyone not MAGA. What 'things'? Everything. 

Perhaps we can have too much freedom, too much democracy, and then there's a swing back, a cycle. Is that the explanation?

But that History goes in cycles seems again to miss the point. Why would History have cycles and what on earth causes them?

Much of the talk now is about how Trump will end. Isn't that a clue? Nothing lasts forever. And what happens after the end must depend on us and our values. 

On Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde? 

Mr Hyde has to come out sometime simply because he's there and gets tired of hiding? 

And then, after some time, so must Doctor Jekyll?

 

Why people don't trust science

They never did.

People want certainty, which is why we have habits and rituals, why there are schedules and insurance companies and more conservatives than liberals.

And why there's always a turning away from doubting to religion and magic, which share the warm assurance of permanence.

People resent the rigour of science, fear its innovations, and have no time for its restless searching. It may be confusion after everything we learned about it at school, but more likely it's the way we grow up to be.

There's no certainty in Nature, or in life. It leads a chosen few to be happy questioning, while others come to see the point, or somehow knew it from the first, from a sense of history.

"How do you know that a reality exists 'out there', independent of any consciousness?"

.

It was a challenge to me on an internet site.

One answer is that if a reality 'out there' is only speculation, then that there is no reality out there is also speculation.

Consciousness does not confirm either case and seems to lack a clear connection to the subject. 

Knowledge and judgment are the answers here. They tell us that our experience of what may or may not be out there broadly coincides with the experience of entities all around us; and that those entities are clearly not us but otherwise appear to act like us. 

 

What's more, our cat acts in response to our surroundings. As two or three of those entities might jump at a sudden noise or walk round something in the way, so does our cat.

Bertrand Russell was useful on this. He said if a thing is not certain or is unprovable, it’s best to go for what is probable. 

It’s at least probable that ‘our’ world is ‘out there’ as a cat’s is. It’s just that we are able to speculate that it isn’t. No cat has been known to do this.

Well, has the Trump magic changed History?

A proper understanding of history must begin with human psychology, mustn't it, with understanding the minds of those involved in it?

So President Trump diverts us. He talks of making History with a capital H, as if History exists apart yet can be made to perform to order - Trump's. 

And so the wizardry of tariffs will make all trade fair and every American rich, a dazzling illusion Donald Trump doubtless sees as real - at least until the next sleight of hand gets us baffled and taking sides. Trump magic pulls trick after trick.

But how does that craft make anything an historical certainty, besides confirming Trump and his supporters' belief in his limitless power? And what if the idea of History Repeating Itself is only the failure of leaders to learn from the past - lessons being the one area where Trump definitely gives rather than receives?

Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, convinced of all kinds of truths. Even so, it is hard not to see a foundational difference between the world views of two broad types - conservatives and liberals. And putting the matter broadly again, it is conservatives who worship President Trump as a MAGA magician and liberals who do not. 

The divide between magic and reality is visible everywhere there are people and stoked to extremes in the US today. Given human nature, a way back from mounting political disorder there is nowhere in sight. 

Hence a well-known piece of advice: if you're relying on conjurors like Trump to change their act before they are forced to, don’t hold your breath. And hence the only possible outcome: history alone will show whether Trump magic works wonders now.