Poor Journalism & The Art of Innuendo - A Second Personal Statement

A few days back, I made a Personal Statement about my involvement in Exaro that I had hoped would be decisive in telling the truth of the matter for those interested in the current child abuse scandal - remember that I cannot and do not speak for Exaro or for the other shareholders but only for myself. As before, this has to be a Personal Statement.

In essence, I stated that I had founded Exaro but that I had no influence whatsoever over the editorial content and that, in particular, I certainly had no say in the editorial decision to get involved in the allegations about child abuse and its alleged cover-up in the British Establishment. I expressed my continued support, however, for the investigation of allegations. One of the grounds for this was that the campaign of vilification against me, the Editor and the main shareholder in Exaro (who also has no say over editorial decision-making as a result of a decision when the Company was founded, enshrined in a shareholders' agreement) which started some months ago in the back waters of the internet appeared to demonstrate that 'Exaro was on to something'. Based on long experience (see below), this indicated that there seemed to be murky forces interested in discrediting Exaro and perhaps 'killing it off' and, in killing it off, killing off the investigations by the Metropolitan Police. I have been struck since then by the extremely robust responses of the Met to the wide campaign of denigration of the investigations that has been mounted in recent weeks. I am also keen to emphasise that not all critics of Exaro can be tarred with the same brush. There are sincere and questioning people who are right to be concerned that the investigations remain on the right side of decency and do not descend into a witch hunt - so far, I do not believe that Exaro has done this.

I came to the view that there was no point in responding to the bottom feeders in the further reaches of the internet. The opinions of people who post on forums connected to David Icke might reasonably be ignored. I referred to the fact, however, that private investigators had been used to compile a 'dossier' on me and on Exaro. Having seen that part which related to me, it was in the grand tradition of third rate research without analysis and with content riddled with opportunities for innuendo, the art of which I shall return to later. This sump of rumour and half-truths did not avoid dragging in my family but my decision stood - there was no merit in giving the oxygen of publicity to what appeared to be an extreme right wing campaign of vilification or a psychological warfare operation masquerading as such. I have no idea who initiated or was interested in undertaking this campaign. Long experience in the defence of individuals against such online campaigns of vilification have taught me that these operations are best regarded as one of the unfortunate costs of a free society - like trolls in social media. One should be bigger than this.

So far so good but the denigration has recently moved up the line on the internet in a way I should have come to expect until it has reached the point where comment has to be made or lies and half-truths will become part of the mythology of my reputation. There is no necessary connection between the innuendo of the bottom-feeders and the higher level innuendo of the more 'respectable' blogger or mainstream media - none whatsoever - but the fact of reporting or campaigning through innuendo ironically demonstrates why Exaro existed in the first place. It was created in direct reaction to experience of the worst of British journalism - the automatic publication of material provided in dossiers whether by the 'secret state' or others, the failure to give adequate background, analysis or detail on stories and the failure to check stories at source. I am not going to defend Exaro in this context - it has to defend its own conduct. If mistakes have been made (by me as by others), there should be apology but any apology should not be the cause of the destruction of a major project which may offer to uncover something of what the ESRC-funded academics in History Today this month have called the 'hidden history' of official handling of child abuse in our country.

So, do I have anything to apologise for? Absolutely not. I have made it clear that I founded Exaro - for which I have absolutely no reason to apologise - and have no, repeat no, influence over editorial decision-making. Even if the Editor was proven to be politically motivated, had lied or had engaged in fearful misconduct (none of which is the case to date), my role would be limited to agreeing with Board Members to his removal on the evidence and only on the evidence. There would be no justification for such an act if the matter was one of the editorial material being inconvenient for us personally or our business interests.

But what is the response of the media to this in my case? It is not acceptance of the facts as outlined in my clear and unequivocal blog posting but, instead, an exercise in the sort of innuendo abhorrence of which had led to the creation of Exaro in the first place. Innuendo is the natural tool of the British Press in full hunting mode because it is an art learned within the confines of English defamation law and it usefully means that not too much resource need be spent on the expensive business of fact-checking and contextualisation. There is certainly no need to defame if you can select facts and use them to suggest something that is not actually true.

There are two key items of innuendo in my case and I am not afraid to confront them directly: that because I am left-wing and radical therefore Exaro must be part of some political conspiracy; and, second, that because my company, TPPR, undertook media relations and speech writing support for Asma Al-Assad, that I am in some way a 'bad person' whose implicit evil casts a shadow over Exaro. So I am going to deal with these two items of innuendo head on.

In both cases, these items have been variously used by campaigning bloggers and, latterly, by the so-called mainstream Press. Let me be crystal clear - in no case other than one has any journalist tried to contact me personally and directly in order to verify facts or discuss the implications. I note that the common trick with colleagues is to pose apparently devastating questions (less so with close analysis) only hours before a claimed deadline in that typical game of being able to say that the target had been contacted for a comment. In my case, I hold to a simple rule. Any respectable journalist may ask me any question on my own affairs in writing and I will undertake to try - as a busy person - to give a full written response if I think it appropriate within 36 hours. The one journalist who did try to contact me did so by leaving a message on Twitter which I did not see for several days - unlike the frenetic denizens of the Westminster Bubble, I only look at Twitter once a week at most!

The first innuendo about a left-wing political conspiracy is easily handled. I simply have to point to the previous blog posting and ask a journalist to read it. It clearly states the simple truth that Exaro was created with clear rules about editorial interference. I can add that the Editor was chosen in good part because of his lack of political affiliation and none of the other Directors to my knowledge have any particular affiliation themselves. In my case, I was actually estranged from the Labour Party from around 2004/2005 until only a few weeks ago. I am more radical and more left-wing in politics than those who controlled the Party until very recently and, like many, was uncomfortable with the forward foreign policy and the lack of democracy inside the Party. It is important to note that when Exaro was founded my regard for New Labour was probably at its lowest ebb.

This brings me to two specific claims - that I am a friend of Jeremy Corbyn and that I am in any way close to Tom Watson. Maybe I will be one day but I am not now. How about some basic facts. Let us start with Mr. Corbyn. I knew Jeremy in Islington in the 1990s for the simple reason that he was my Constituency MP.  I believe my wife (I had forgotten this but can thank the private investigators for reminding us) was on a local charitable board with him. I recall, unconnected to Islington party affairs, that I brought the attention of a Tory MP to some brutalised conservative-minded South East Asian dissidents who I had been asked to assist pro bono. That Conservative picked up the house phone at the Commons saying that Jeremy was the man to deal with this and, sure enough, with his usual moral integrity, Jeremy did what he could. In 1996, I attended meetings of the Campaign Group of MPs as Co-ordinator of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance which was trying to democratise the Labour Party but I am not sure I even recall him in the room. I recall Jeremy turned up at one of our street parties. In other words, I knew him only a little more than the equally personally likeable Tory MP, Greg Clarke, in my current home of Tunbridge Wells. After I left London in 2000 - fifteen years ago - although we are 'Facebook Friends', I recall no communication between us other than one brief note of recognition when we connected. I certainly have not seen him since the late-1990s. So to claim some conspiratorial friendship is absurd. In fact, I respect and personally like him and he is part of the reason I rejoined the Labour Party but the 'conspiracy' is no more than that and I know a lot of prominent Conservatives better than I know the Leader of my own Party.

There is even less of a connection with Tom Watson. He was (I recall) my 'opposition' during the attempt to democratise the Party in 1995/1996 before he was an MP. I am not sure I even met him at that time. I may have done in passing but my dealings tended to be with Jon Cruddas amongst the Political Officers of the Trades Unions and with the Leader's Office. I am connected on Twitter and that is that. I have come to admire him for his stand on private rights over institutional force but then I equally admire the Tories Zac Goldsmith and David Davies in that respect. His election as Deputy Leader of the Party was undoubtedly a factor in my rejoining the Party as a private citizen, a decision I do not in the least regret. So, let us be clear, there is no left-wing conspiracy behind Exaro. I am the only left-winger involved, there was no Labour Party connection to my initiation of the Project (quite the opposite) and even if I had that conspiratorial intent, there is no mechanism by which I could influence policy. In short, any claim that Exaro is a left-wing plot should be regarded as the manufactured innuendo of fevered and desperate minds and this would have been made clear to any journalist who had bothered to contact me directly.

Now let us move on to the Asma al-Assad issue. The implication is that I should be ashamed in some way of my Company acting as adviser in the early 2000s to Mrs Al-Assad. Not only am I not ashamed but I am proud of the work done by my colleague - since, in fact, I cannot take credit for her sterling work. So, in the interests of dealing with innuendo and half-truths, let me tell you what one of my companies (TPPR) does in general and why our extensive work in the Syrian context was valuable and worthwhile.

I never speak of the details of the work I do for clients because of a commitment to client confidentiality but it is reasonable to write of the types of work we have done and why we do it. TPPR was founded in the late-1990s after I removed myself from domestic politics with a specific brief to defend individuals and others from the effects of unwarranted political warfare operations and also to advise on behaviour change and best practice to ensure that there was no room for future attacks in the future. It is rather interesting and amusing in some ways to be the one under attack now but at least I am well prepared with a correct and cool response to strategies of innuendo and to dossier-based psychological warfare operations.

I certainly have no need to justify our work to the British media - a lot of it was trying to educate lazy journalists on how to fact-check and ask the right questions. Sometimes we undertook pro bono or low paid work for the 'voiceless'. We were non-partisan and we might work indirectly alongside the State Department (in one case) or alongside Arab individuals wrongly accused of terrorism. With one exception, I do not recall we ever acted directly for Governments and that exception is outlined below. The details of our work, if we were permitted to reveal them, would be an advertisement for a fine and honourable little company that was at the heart of events during the so-called 'war on terror' and became expert in countering online psychological warfare operations during a dark period where collateral reputational damage was regarded as acceptable, using a supine media and even some NGOs as 'useful idiots' in campaigns to pervert and manipulate public opinion for political purposes.

Perhaps I am particularly proud of our first project which was the defence of the personal reputation of the owner of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals works in Sudan whose plant was bombed out of existence (its last shift of women workers almost slaughtered in consequence) because of a classic dodgy dossier, of our work to raise awareness in the Arab World of the appalling condition of the Marsh Arabs in Iraq in the run-up to the US invasion of 2003 and the forensic uncovering of the forged evidence used to try to remove George Galloway from the political scene. We never took sides or acted as agents of influence outside the limited parameters of specific initiatives which were ethically scrutinised with considerable care and usually related to our assessment of natural justice.

Now to Syria. Our involvement in Syria extended from approximately 2001 to approximately 2005. It certainly ended as soon as the Civil War broke out. Our Syrian friends, deeply distressed, split into their respective camps and it was ethically axiomatic that TPPR could not act for any Client in a war situation. Our relationship with Syria was complex and expressed as a series of projects in which senior and significant politicians of both main Parties might be involved and which were very much associated with the attempt to assist in the internal reform of the Government through dialogue. This was the only case where, at one point, we acted directly for an overseas Government when we agreed to assist the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in acting as liaison with the Foreign Office and in managing media relations during the Presidential Visit of 2002. We broke our rule on working with Governments in part because it was clear that it was in the British national interest to have a competent cultural liaison working with the Embassy answerable to the Embassy. During that period we had an excellent relationship with our FCO counterparts who proved, as you would expect, administratively competent under conditions where Syrian administrators were definitely not used to Western media and cultural habits.

Our other involvements were less direct. We agreed to help set up the British Syrian Society [''BSS'] with a number of highly respected British-Syrian businessmen and UK politicians as a friendship society designed to assist in the reform process that was widely assumed to be under way at the time. Incidentally, we introduced democracy to the BSS with a general vote of members to elect its Chairman. We managed the media relations for Syrian Culture Week and, through the BSS, we got to know the President's father-in-law who asked us to assist his daughter with some rather anodyne speech writing and a Press Visit by the Sunday Times. We were more than happy to do this and have no regrets. The intention was to build bridges in order to assist in modernisation. In that context, we undertook some confidential work with the London Embassy attempting (unsuccessfully) to change attitudes through educating Ministry officials on the cultural expectations of Syria in the West. Our work may reasonably be regarded as an honourable failure but it gave us a deep understanding of at least one aspect of Middle Eastern affairs. We had no connection with the Syrian Media Centre which was the State-directed communications unit in London. The specialist and educated journalists in the West covering the region were a pleasure to work with and never once were they pressurised by us to write (as if we could) anything but what they saw ... the spin and manipulation by the usual suspects was another matter. I have personal views on the responsibility for the slaughter and mayhem that subsequently appeared and I remain horrified by the ambiguities of Western association with faith-based obscurantists but that is a matter of personal politics and not the official view of TPPR.

In this second lengthy piece, I hope I have managed to make clear that not only do I have no editorial influence over Exaro which is wholly managed in that respect by the Editor but that Exaro never was, is not and never will be a political conspiracy, that the innuendo about me, about my family (if that is ever used as a tactic beyond the sump of bottom-feeders) and about my work needs cross-checking rather than accepting. My historic work in a Syrian context was mainstream, honourable and something of which I am actually rather proud.

The deeper public policy issues remain. They represent precisely the reasons I founded Exaro in 2011. Exaro may prove inadequate to the task or fail but the original impetus has been proved to be more correct than ever. When it comes to a national journalism based on dossiers, innuendo, half-truths, lack of analysis, sensationalism, partisan misinformation and disinformation, then if not Exaro ... who?

PERSONAL STATEMENT ON EXARO AND THE CURRENT MEDIA WAR OVER THE REPORTING OF CHILD ABUSE

When I created ExaroNews I had no idea of where it would lead. Its purpose was simply to 'hold power to account' through investigative journalism under the leadership of an honest editor ... a type in our society who is as valuable as an honest cop. We found that honest editor in Mark Watts.

The next stage was to get funding and this we did. What few seem to understand is that the funding came with a condition on our part - no interference by the shareholders in editorial decision-making. There was no quarrel with this and I signed away my own ability to tell Mark what to do, neither to cajole nor to threaten.

A risk was taken by us that he would continue to maintain the highest journalistic standards and not be frightened by the brute weight of the political establishment, of the dark forces to be found in every society or of rival media embarrassed that Exaro would achieve what they had signally failed to do - hold power to account - despite their massively greater resources.

Exaro does not have massive resources but it has had sufficient resources to follow through on what has become one of the biggest investigations of our age - allegations that child abuse and worse (if anything can be worse) were covered up by the powerful. This was the decision of the editorial team and no one else.

Those who followed the Kincora Case are fully aware of what very small groups of people within the system are capable of. One should not ever assume that institutions are necessarily acting in our interest simply because that is what they claim that they are doing. To me (as an outsider), it was always reasonable that they should investigate this matter much as they have investigated many other matters.

At no time (to my knowledge) has Exaro pre-judged the issue in regard to the child abuse allegations - the police once used an unfortunate turn of phrase but that is not the responsibility of Exaro. Exaro appears to have listened to claims and undertaken what investigation it could, reasonably publishing the results. Even to suggest (as one blogger appears to have done) that Exaro had the power or influence to initiate police investigations is almost comically absurd.

The mainstream media's initial approach to Exaro was to try and kill it by ignoring it. Its ability to set the agenda has emerged as a result of editorial persistence. The police make their own decisions on what is worthy of investigation from their perspective and what is not. The allegations have clearly been taken seriously by the police who, despite the ragged and sensationalist reporting of the mainstream media, have reiterated their own high professional standards in an important statement.

That article is well worth re-reading because it makes it very clear that the police are very concerned about the reporting of witness statements and the risks that the media might prejudice their investigations and later court cases while still managing to assert their belief in the importance of the responsible media in assisting investigations.

The publication by Exaro of this police statement in full (which no other media have done despite their public interest claims) is taken by me to mean that Exaro is in in agreement with it. Subsequent public comment by the Editor of Exaro on Twitter suggests that he remains concerned about the conduct of other media in relation to the witnesses and any pre-judgment of investigations. He must speak for himself - I cannot.

The allegations are also taken seriously by some prominent and rather politically brave politicians - it is gratifying that their courage has not halted their careers. Being taken seriously by police, leading politicians and Exaro does not make allegations true but it does make them worthy of investigation in a free and open society. If not, we may as well be in a closed dictatorship.

It must be made clear that at no time (despite my own close interest in the subject of which the Editor knew nothing) have I had any say or influence in the subject matter of the investigation. Neither I nor any Director were consulted on the investigation at its inception or since. I have no idea whether the allegations are true or false. I consider it reasonable, by the very nature of things, that mistakes may have been made or could yet be made but also that the allegations are far from being easily dismissed.

Everything I have read to date (noting that this has been going on now for some two years or so) suggests that Exaro and, entirely separately, the investigating police officers have cause to be interested in the allegations, have no political angle whatsoever, are professionally committed to what they are doing in their very different spheres and are utterly right to reveal any possibility of wrong-doing in the public interest in order to explore the evidential base for claims.

One is not naive - I am aware of past scandals such as the absurd satanic abuse claims of several decades ago. The possibility of such phenomena as false memory or political manipulation has to be taken into account but the right approach is not to walk away but to investigate even these possibilities rationally and in an evidence-based way, especially in the wake of the Jimmy Savile Scandal which the BBC signally failed to investigate adequately while it was happening on its very door step. In my opinion, the BBC lacks all credibility in this area and should stand down.

My own interest is now simply as an observer while others are engaged in serious professional struggles that might have equally serious reputational consequences for them if they do get it wrong. That is their risk - I don't actually share that risk. But let me give one solid reason why I suggest that the investigation may have merit and it is this.

If the investigation had no merit, I would not personally be subject, over many months, to repeated and aggressive internet attacks on my integrity based on half-truths and failures to obtain the facts directly from me (it is not as if I am hidden on the internet), including attacks on relatives of mine using innuendo.

The flow of false claims about Exaro and the individuals involved in Exaro suggest that we are seeing a campaign of deliberate attempted destabilisation of the investigations in which some mainstream media have now found themselves to be 'useful idiots'. These mainstream journalists too must investigate but they should equally investigate the sources for the claims against the investigation. In this world of smoke and mirrors, this is becoming a test case about the sort of journalism we want in our country and so of the sort of politics and justice we are prepared to tolerate.

I am personally subject to these attacks simply because I founded Exaro News and own a minority stake in the Holding Company that owns it. That is all. It is a form of political terrorism because the aim is to create fear and anxiety surrounding reputation. The attackers seem to believe that, by attacking me, they can destabilise Exaro. They do not seem to realise that, no matter what they say about me or members of my family or my businesses or my politics, I have no power to stop any investigation even if I wished to do so - and I do not.

The nature of those personal attacks - which it seems involved hiring private investigators (who seem to have done a very poor job) to build a dossier on me (and others) which included family members - indicates that someone is rattled by these investigations. It suggests that the investigations are dangerous to someone. It suggests, on that basis alone, that the investigations are worthwhile.

Here, I write in a wholly personal capacity. I do not speak for Exaro Holdings, I do not speak for Exaro News. I speak only for an individual who has no regrets whatsoever in having kick-started an organisation, now wholly editorially independent of me and which has been so since its formation as a Company, that is prepared to turn up stones to see what lies beneath them.

I cannot take responsibility for the investigations which means I cannot take either the blame or the credit for what happens next. What I will do is say that, on the balance of probabilities and on the very fact of the attacks on me in the undergrowth of the internet, Mark Watts seems to have struck a nerve. I hope that he and his hardworking team continue to refuse to be brow-beaten as I will refuse to be brow-beaten.

The Flaw in Thinking Artificial Intelligence Can Solve Our Problems

I recently knocked out a review of Frank Tipler's 'The Physics of Immortality: Moderm Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead' (1994) on GoodReads. One passing claim struck me as particularly interesting in the light of my blog postings that cast doubt on speculative science as useful - not that it is not worthwhile but that it seems to be fuelling a cultural hysteria about scientific possibility that is distracting us from what is achievable. I have a similar critique of the social sciences and I covered my concerns about excessive claims in that area in another GoodReads review - of Lawrence Freedman's 'Strategy: A  History' (2013).

Tipler's passage gave me yet another useful bullet for my gun of scepticism about claims not only about what we can know about the world but what any machine created by us may know about the world although Tipler's main task is to postulate (amongst other things) omniscient total information at the Omega Point of history.

On page 297 of my Edition but also elsewhere, Tipler explores the amount of information required to be or do or understand certain things in the world. He points out that if something is more complex than 10 to the power of 15 bits of information, then it cannot be understood by any human being whatsoever. This is the level of complexity of the human brain itself. He points out that human society is 10 to the power of 15 bits of information times the number of humans in the world.

We have to invent higher level theories to attempt to explain such complexity but these higher level theories over-simplify and so may (I think, will) give incorrect answers. The problems of human society, in particular, are far too complex to be understood even with such theories to hand which, in my view, are not scientifically valid but merely probabilistic guidelines.

Often human instinct, honed on millions of years of evolutionary development which screens out more information than it actually uses, is going to be more effective (assuming the human being is 'intelligent', that is, evolved to maximise that evolutionary advantage) in dealing with the world than theory, no matter how apparently well based on research. Tipler's omniscient Omega Point is, of course, classed as something completely different but no one in their right minds would consider any probable AGI coming close to this level of omniscience within the foreseeable future. Tipler does not make this mistake.

Therefore, in my view, an AGI is just as likely to be more wrong (precisely because its reasoning is highly rational) than a human in those many situations where the evolution of the human brain has made it into a very fine tool for dealing with environmental complexity. Since human society is far more complex than the natural environment or environments based on classical physics (it is interesting that humans still have 'accidents' at his lower level of information, especially when distracted by human considerations), then the human being is going to be more advantaged in its competition with any creation that is still fundamentally embedded in a particular location without the environmentally attuned systems of the human.

This is not to say that AGIs might one day be more advanced in all respects than humans but the talk of the singularity has evaded and avoided this truth - that this brilliant AGI who will emerge in the wet dreams of scientists may be a reflection of their rational personality type but is no more fitted to survival and development than a scientist dumped with no funds and no friends into a refugee camp short of food and water.

In other words, species or creature survival is highly conditional on environment. The social environment in which humans are embedded may be tough but it also ensures that the human species will be operating as dominant species for quite some time after the alleged singularity. Pure intellect may not only not be able to comprend the world sufficiently to be functional (once it moves out of the realm of the physical and into the social) but, because it theorises on the basis of logic and pure reason, is likely to come up with incorrect theories by its very nature.

Worse, those human policy-makers who trust to such AGIs in the way that they currently trust to social scientists may be guilty of compounding the sorts of policy mistakes that have driven us to the brink in international relations, social collapse, economic failure in the last two or three decades. Take this as a warning!

Shifting Position - On Rejoining the Labour Party

Two weeks ago, I decided to rejoin the Labour Party, I had left the Party in 2004 in growing disgust at the 'imperial' expansion by force of allegedly liberal values and the lack of progress in building a case with the public for a moderate and sensible democratic socialism in one country able to collaborate constructively with socialists, democratic socialists and liberals elsewhere in the world.

As recently as May of this year, I produced a fairly blunt analysis of why Labour had failed to win the 2015 General Election. This turned out to be one of my most widely circulated posts. Only last month I gave a similarly pessimistic view of politics under the two 'bourgeois' factions of one centrist liberal and increasingly culturally totalitarian 'National Party'. This latter piece had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the importance (to me) of transparency - I wanted readers to know where my biases and prejudices came from so that they could winnow them out when taking what they could from my work. Unusually, I am not trying to persuade anyone of anything. All I am trying to do is to get my readers to think for themselves and challenge their own assumptions as they challenge mine.

Last month, I hinted that I could rejoin the Labour Party but I was pessimistic: " ... the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? ... The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)"  

Because of that pessimism, I declined to do what I considered to be dishonourable and send in my £3 to join a bandwagon, vote for Jezza and then claim to be one of the faithful. What I underestimated was not only the level of discontent within the Party (whose activists I had prematurely dismissed as variants of Orwell's cart horse in 1984) but the impressive personal performance of Corbyn and the radical shift of opinion within huge stretches of the trades union movement persuaded me that I was wrong to stand aside. The trades unions seemed to have finally got that being the servant of urban liberals was demeaning, that the union gift of power to the Blairites in the 1990s had achieved little and that trying to regain power through a quasi-Leftist intellectual Blairite like Miliband was not going to work.

I took time to decide whether to rejoin the Party but when the decision came, it seemed right even though much of the pessimism remains. It was helped by the estimable old Labour Right winger Tom Watson being elected as ballast (as Deputy Leader) and John Prescott's statesmanlike call for Party Members to respect the decision of the Members and rally round the new Leader. 

Meanwhile, the brutal negativity of the media, of the Blairite Right and of all but the most humanely civilised of Tories such as David Davis showed us that Corbyn would have an uphill struggle. His fundamentally decent principles may stand little chance against the crude sociopathy of the radical centre with its little trotters dug firmly in the pork barrel of late capitalism and its brute determination that its sty not be cleaned out. But I was wrong about Corbyn's victory as Leader (I thought up to the wire that Burnham would get it on second votes) and I could yet be wrong about him being Prime Minister. But perhaps it is time to drop my 'cold realism' and show a little faith in the democratic socialist dream.

I said in my August posting that Corbyn's politics were not mine - I am probably an edge more nationalist, more libertarian, more aware of market reality and more wary of some of the ideological Marxists in his advisory circle - so the question arises - why? Why rejoin now as a moderate democratic socialist when a lot of middle class intellectual non-Marxist democratic socialists are running for cover. There are five core reasons other than blind sentiment to my old tribe and a mad desire to make an absurd existentialist commitment to something decent:-

1. The man matters. I knew him as my Constituency MP in Islington North in the 1990s and I was struck then by his fundamental integrity, decency and intelligence. I saw him at close quarters act on a sensitive human rights issue and discovered how much senior Conservatives respected him as the 'go to' man in this area. Everything he did during the weeks of election campaigning confirmed that integrity and also his courage, courage in standing up to stupid and biaised journalists and for what he believed.
2. I don't like fools and bullies and much of the attack on him (not admittedly by the competing candidates who conducted themselves well throughout) was either intellectually stupid or sheer thuggery. The attacks made me look more deeply into what he was actually saying and not what he was reported as saying. I was impressed
3. The attack dog mentality on his economics was worse than overdone, it was criminally ignorant. There is, in fact, more in common between serious financial market practitioners and Shadow Chancellor McDonnell than there is between either of these and the fools who have run our country into the ground. The pragmatism of Corbyn was ignored - there was no absurd rhetoric from him in the end but only a systematic commitment to the betterment of the mass of the British people which became even more clear in the notes of Ann Black, elected NEC constituency representative of the first NEC meeting held under his auspices as Leader,
4. I persist in seeing the Party as it is currently structured as decadent. This is a direct function of the democratic centralism of Tony Blair and his refusal to have an intelligent debate about party engagement at the 1996 Party Conference. An internal revolution ensuring that a democratic socialist was in control of the democrat centralism created by Blair would show up its internal contradictions and force some form of democratic reform and mobilisation on the Party. The rival candidates to Corbyn were remarkably lack-lustre and the brutes of 1997-2010 had clearly failed to create their own succession for the sake of country and party - liberal egoism at its worst.
5. Although he had to undertake something of a u-turn because of the demands of the party elite that he had inherited and of the system of forums and fixing at the top, Corbyn was prepared to open the door to important debate on key isues where the Party had previously closed off debate - the European Union, Trident, the Monarchical Constitution and the State, and socialist economics. I would disagree with important aspects of Corbyn's position, including his u-turns on some of them, but what he was doing was opening up ground for serious discussion and political education in a way unseen in three decades. This was not an excuse for disunity and internal party warfare but an opportunity for serious debate and discussion on the facts.

So, on all these grounds - the man, the frightened negativity of the failed old guard, the pragmatism underlying the policies of the man, the opportunity to transform the Party into an agent of national debate and mobilisation and the fact that new ideas were being permitted to be heard even if they may later be rejected - the re-joining of the Labour Party became a 'no-brainer'.

What next? The first thing to recognise is that, once a field general in the struggles of the 1990s, I am now no more than a foot soldier in a back water so it behoves me to watch and wait for at least six months while I understand how this party has changed since I was last a member in 2004. I also have businesses to run and a hinterland of my own - interests that have nothing to do with politics. 

This does not mean I won't be involved in politics but my instinct is to show solidarity and support for the New Leader and for the Party while it negotiates the vicious attacks of the dim and lazy low lives in the Press and from cynical and opportunist political opponents from inside and outside. If a successful coup is mounted against him by Blairites before he has had a chance to prove that he is the wrong person for the job, then my pessimism returns - I shall just bugger off to a private life again - but the long haul is the reconstruction of a democratic socialist Party capable of reaching a mass base and winning an election in 2020 without falling into the hands of loopy ideologues, becoming authoritarian on private life under the influence of post-Marxists or showing weakness when faced by serious challenges like mass economic migration or the blow-back from the petty wars of the previous Labour administrations. Be in no doubt, the Party is never anything other than a means to an end - a better Britain - and loyalty to any other end such as office for the sake of office is sheer simple-mindedness.

My one political commitment is to a 'leave' vote in the British European Referendum that must take place before the end of 2017. My opposition to the European Union has been consistent since the first Referendum of 1975. It is based on a a rational critique of the sheer danger of its aspirations to become a liberal super-state based on bureaucratic centralism, the suppression of national self-determination and, ultimately, on the economics of the free market at the expense of welfarism in a 'competitive world'. It is German-dominated (albeit with France as junior partner) and I find this a problem. 

The appalling management of the Ukraine crisis (which might have brought us to war), incompetence in the handling of the refugee crisis and the morally repugnant treatment of Greek democracy by neo-liberal ideologues are only elements of my wider outrage at the presumption of this system which is designed to ensure that democratic socialism is impossible from the Atlantic to the Urals and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic. Take a look at the TTIP and that should be enough to know that the destiny they have chosen for us is to be happy serfs and little more except that we will get to vote for our serfdom every few years or so. I expect to say more on these issues in due course. 

Meanwhile, this blog may change tone a little. The Frontiers series will continue (and will eventually be packaged in a separate blog as we have done with the Tantra and Basic British History series) and there will be occasional essays on culture as before but you may see more politics. Let us leave it there ...

Frontiers 6 - Precognition

Can we see the future? Is there any way that we can rely on our perception to predict certainly rather than our reason to extrapolate uncertainly what will happen in the future? Since reasoning has a very poor track record on prediction in practice (observe The Economist on the 2008 Crash) and often the best personal predictions are those made on instinct, it is not axiomatic that analysing the future should follow the same patterns of thought as analysing the past, especially as the data that we require is simply not there. The past has things and events in it which we might possibly know and any failures of analysis come down to our imperfect knowledge of those things and events. The future, of course, has no events or things about which we can reason except as extrapolations from the past and the present - and, as any fool investor knows, past performance is no predictor of certain future success.

The problem is that, notwithstanding the research and ideas of J.W Dunne in the 1930s and others since, we have no hard scientific evidence of our being able to know future events and things although that only means that we have no evidence of precognition and not that precognition does not and cannot exist.The most obvious challenge to precognition is that our experience of the world says that no effect can exist before its cause. Cognitive biases are also well attested that give cause to be suspicious of many claims of precognition. Yet what is puzzling perhaps - given the widespread fascination with the alleged phenomenon - is why no independent and open-minded scientist without a prejudice in either direction has yet conducted a series of experiments that can fully stand up to peer scrutiny in order to decide the matter one way or the other - either finally to quash this last bastion of irrationality or, alternatively, show some interesting effect that needs material explanation. Those experiments that come nearest to the necessary scientific criteria tend to show that there is no such phenomenon but not decisively.

Perhaps the only suggestive finding that one would think would be explored further, if only to eliminate it from the enquiry, is the possibility that precognitive effects exist for some persons in a heightened state of erotic or other arousal. This is intuitively interesting because, inconveniently for scientific minds, if shown to be true, it offers the hint of proof for the practice of sex magick and the claims of Alastair Crowley, altered states and magick and Austin Osman Spare. Of course, it has not been shown to be true, merely a possibility to be investigated further.

The argument that no effect can exist before its cause is not an absolute truth that can be demonstrated philosophically. It is true enough about the world in which we live and in which we experiment but it is not necessarily true. The best that can be said is that it is pragmatically true for a species whose existence arises from a series of causes and effects, whose relationship to the world is one of cause and effect and whose observations have always been made under conditions where time always flows in one direction and where no effect can exist before its cause.

Unfortunately, this also means that, though philosophically it might be possible to conceive of an effect existing before its cause (that time can flow backwards), scientifically and pragmatically we are 'stuck' in a world of forward moving time. Those physicists, psychologists and neuroscientists who poo-poo the possibility of parapsychology are probably to all intents and purposes correct - within their observable world. However, the assumptions of selective bias, unconscious perception, self-fulfilling prophecy, the 'law of large numbers' and memory biases may equally be presumptions since no psychologist can possibly know what is happening in another person's mind at any one time. That cognitive biases are possible or even probable is a reasonable working assumption but that they are certain is not something that any scientist can or, if they are honest, would claim.

Perhaps we should simply accept that 'to all intents and purposes' precognition is not possible from the perspective of not only rational science but also usefulness and probability but also that it is not proven that it does not exist simply because such a claim is impossible to prove. Just one precognition that is true by one person amongst the human billions taking place at just one moment in the long history of the species would mean that ... precognition is possible. And there are philosophical reasons for not entirely closing the door on the possibility because of a healthy scepticism about any scientist who makes absolute claims to knowledge (which no good scientist will do). But the 'to all intents and purposes' is sufficient to make precognition a non-issue for social and cultural investment. As we suggest below, the lack of interest in research may owe more to psychological barriers in dealing with the implications of a definitive answer far more than it does to rational engagement with the utility of such research. After all, the horrible discovery that sex magick might work might seriously frighten the horses.

In an excellent overview of the state of play in research as at May 2014, Schwarzkopf tell us what is at stake:

Such findings of “psi” effects fuel the imagination and most people probably agree that there are things that current scientific knowledge cannot explain. However, the seismic nature of these claims cannot be overstated: future events influencing the past breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If one accepts these claims to be true, one should also be prepared to accept the existence of perpetual motion and time travel. It also completely undermines over a century of experimental research based on the assumption that causes precede effects. Differences in pre-stimulus activity would invalidate baseline correction procedures fundamental to many different types of data analysis.

Which is precisely why precognition is recognised in our series as a Frontier. It is not only the implications for science and religion if a scientifically validated discovery of precognition is presented to the public that matter here but equally the implications for human culture of a major unquestionable test of the claim that appears to prove or disprove beyond any reasonable doubt (and in a replicable form) that precognition exists. At the moment, the fact that psi has not been discovered to be true is not taken (by any reasonable scientist who has not turned his appropriate scepticism into a rationalist cult) to mean that it is not existent but only that it cannot be demonstrated to exist and so only 'to all intents and purposes' does not exist. The door is open at all times to a genuinely fool-proof replicable experiment by open-minded scientists that demonstrates its probability. This must then raise questions of the sort raised by Schwarzkopf.

This is where it gets interesting because the recurring problem in parapsychological research is poor methodology and blatant distrust between the scientists involved. It should not, however, be impossible - though one suspects rationalist and believing partisans are both reluctant subconsciously to put the matter to the test, given what is at stake culturally, lest the experiment comes up with the 'wrong answer' - to construct a devastatingly simple large-scale controlled psi investigative experiment using artificial intelligence within a few years as the objective assessor of the statistics involved, including such variables as sexual or erotic or other emotional excitation. This is the Frontier to be broken - a decisive experiment that sends our culture in one clear direction or the other.

There are probably no better clues to the problems presented by psychical phenomena than those provided by Professor Broad, a serious mid-twentieth century Cambridge analytical philosopher but also twice President of the Society for Psychical Research. Psychic phenomena, in his view, would challenge five basic limiting principles of philosophy (he proposed nine basic limiting factors in philosophy but it is these five that 'stick' in this case). He is not saying that these limiting principles actually are limits but that they are only unquestioned principles that underpin our view of the world and are hard to refute in terms of experience, habit and experiment. Here, I update the five limiting principles to take account of some beliefs and theories about quantum mechanical processes that have emerged as classical physics has not so much been superceded as added to. Part of the problem of 'psi' is that it does not fit into a materialist view of the world based on classical physics but that quantum physics has introduced concepts that seem to permit the theoretical possibility of something materialist permitting, in turn, something approximating psi effects. It is quite possible that one, some or all of the limiting principles could be shown to be philosophically unsound or not quite as sound as they appear at first sight though, as humans living in a human-centred material world, the struggle to do so and be credible is immense. However, accepting that the limiting principles as not necessarily absolutely true philosophically gives us an argument similar to that which notes how 'common sense' is frequently overturned by science: in short, current science may be being faced with subversion by the possibility that it is the common sense now to be overturned by itself.

• Backward causation - that effects can precede causes is the most evident limiting principle although at the quantum level, it is clear that there is plausible theory that posits something like this actually occurring though not in ways that affect the world which we experience. Quantum backward causation is the straw which those determined to see psychic phenomena as really existing will clutch at without any proven basis for any link between quantum physics and psychic experience other than belief. However, if a 'psi' phenomenon is proven, the scientists have nowhere else to go but here to describe what is happening without having to abandon a materialist conception of the universe. Cause and effect will not be abandoned, just redefined in the context of new thinking about time and matter.
• An argument is that, if minds are non-physical and the world is physical, there is no means by which non-physical things can act on the world without actually being physical. Psychokinesis would seem to demonstrate that dualism is wrong (a major event in philosophy) and that monist materialism is correct, raising only the issue of the physical process by which minds can move matter - which brings us back to the current fantasies but theoretical realities of quantum level events in the mind having physical effects.
• If minds can actually communicate with each other (as in 'mind-reading') then the notion of minds being of a separate substance from the physical might start to fall apart (although, of course, it is possible, that insubstantial entities might be able to communicate on equal terms even if that stil begs the question of how insubstantiality communicates with substantiality in order to crerate effects). Skepticism about the non-interaction of apparently non-physical things becomes dubious. The cat is set amongst the pigeons because scientists, again, either have to accept some mystical spiritual explanation or seek a material mechanism by which information can flow over distances between minds. This, again, might be resolved by minds being material and being connected at another level of materiality - which brings us back again to quantum physical effects as the only current road to go down (or to postulate some materiality undiscovered).
• The ability to perceive events in other places than those available to the senses in one body located in one particular place not only offends human reason but offends our assumptions about perception, that perception is limited to five senses plus prioperception (our groundedness in the world), in order to add a sixth sense or set of senses. This is the key claim of those who champion a strong view of parapsychology and the subject of the experimentation by these scientists (for scientists at their best, they are) though not yet proven. If they do prove the existence of a sixth sense, then the offense to reason begins to place reason itself in doubt insofar as reasoning in the human being is calculated on the evaluation of sensory inputs combined with logic. Mental reasoning finds itself having to take account of intuitions that may be pulling data private to the individual from other sources that cannot be evaluated by an outsider ... such 'romanticism' becomes 'true' if science finds that the mind's perception of things outside immediate sense-data observable by others is true. Psychology and the social sciences become far more problematic as alleged sciences on the uncovering of such a 'sixth sense'. Power shifts a little from the expert to the 'volk'.
• A final limiting principle is that persons cannot live without their bodies. The denial of this belief represents the very heart of the transition from folk culture to modern rational and scientific culture. It offends or puzzles many folk with strong beliefs in spiritual matters but educated and rational man can see no means by which persons can live without their bodies. Elaborate schema have been proposed by such religiously-minded scientists as Tipler to give persons their bodies back at the resurrection of the dead but few are persuaded according to the dictates of reason. The idea that persons can live without their bodies is a matter of mere belief while speculative transhumanist science still presupposes that persons as information can only survive if embodied elsewhere - in machines as emulations. Although the least likely of all parapsychological phenomena to be true (because of the complexity of the claim compared to simple experiences of sensory psi), if ghosts (for example) were shown to be 'true', then the idea of insubstantial immateriality as capable of existence in the world as (say) pure thought or experience shatters the rational materiality of the age or at least forces the scientific community to reconsider the material underpinning of reality, It might lead to a sceptical belief that we cannot know our own deep materiality: the uncertainty in itself will shift power a little back from the expert to the volk.

So where we are left is in a state where any form of proven psi (not only precognition) might unravel the materialist assumptions of our time (and so the ultimate reliability of science) if science cannot reasonably quickly and certainly come up with an alternative material theory that can be tested through experiment. It is one things to prove that 'psi' exists. It is entirely another to demonstrate how it works if it exists. The 'mystery' left by scientific inability to prove rather than surmise the processes involved leaves sufficient gap for folkish spirituality to slip through the gaps. There is no philosophical reason why any of these unravellings of accepted reality could not be theoretically possible even if they cannot currently be reasonably argued for. All it takes is one piece of super-verified, fully tested, replicable proof that backward causation exists beyond the quantum level, that quantum effects have material effects on higher levels of matter, that psychokinesis happens, that the 'sixth sense' exists or that a ghost exists (the least likely of all) and a lot of rethinking has to be done about the nature of matter (though not necessarily about materialism) and of reality. Perhaps Cramer's ideas on testing retrocausality based on the quantum entanglement of photons (which might have important communications benefits) will get the funding and interest it requires. If it does and it proves retrocausality at the quantum level, then the first tiny crack may have appeared in our current cultural paradigm. A lot is at stake and scientists and funders seem to be steering clear of the psi area not only because of the unlikelihood of results given current understanding but also because the implications might be beyond what they can cope with in terms of career or mental models. It might be left to a major trading house or the Mars Programme to follow through on retrocausality but that still won't tell us anything about human precognition.

On the one hand, a decisive probability for precognition (even if highly specialised and rare), to take our main example, will raise questions about the second law of thermodynamics and so about the inherent nature of the cosmos that will overnight thrust our cosmology and physics from near-certainty into the more pragmatic realms of 'to all intents and purposes' true for nearly all available situations but yet not all. The gap created may encourage all sorts of spiritual nuts and loons to project their fantasies on to the results but that particular effect does not necessarily follow on from that cause. More likely, the discovery would have a lot of immensely clever mathematical minds considering how, why and when such things might be - assuming every aspect of the experiment had been passed as viable and replicable. It would be a revolutionary event if only because of its effects on the presumption of man in his claims to knowledge if no mathematician or physicist can come up with a viable explanation or an explanations that are not demonstrable except as dodgy but entertaining thought experiments ('speculative science').

On the other hand, a decisive and relicable proof that there really is no replicable scientific basis for precognition (and the psychologists have a slew of alternative explanations for most claimed phenomena) and the matter can be passed finally to the realm of private folk belief and left for its expansion into public life to the fraudster and aforesaid spiritual nuts and loons. Outside these areas, the elimination of precognition as last hope (for many) of the mystery of existence that underpins much private spiritual belief will be an important final cultural nail in the anti-materialist vision of our condition. Not enough to destroy it for all the reasons that make precognition still a viable subject for research today (no proof to date does not equate to non-existence of a phenomenon) but enough to make it an even stronger signifier of difference between the educated (and so culturally 'intelligent') and the uneducated (or culturally 'stupid').

So much is at stake and yet the lack of interest in this field - given the extent of folk belief in it - is curious from this perspective. It is as if no one actually wants to have to deal with the answer to the question. The risks of being proven wrong are far too great for the world-views of the competing radical spiritualist and radical materialist camps. Perhaps that final decisive set of experiments is held back because it is a weapon in the cultural equivalent of a nuclear exchange and some instinct - some sixth sense - stops the species from taking any decisive move that would force humanity to choose one or other fork in the road towards either absolute materialism or renewed uncertainty.

The Church and 'Auctoritas' - The Heart of the Problem

In Trier (Germany) in 1231, the local Archbishop, a significant temporal power in his own right, convened a Synod to consider how to implement a particular papal order - Pope Gregory IX's institution of an Inquisition to crush heresy. His concern was with dissident or aberrant religious views - that meant people who did not conform to a system of thought imposed by authority from above.

The local Church answerable to Rome had discovered that in a prosperous part of Germany (Trier, Mainz and Cologne) a counter-Church was developing with its own hierarchy of authority very similar to that of the Catholic Church itself. We know little of their true beliefs. The dissidents may have been close to the Cathars or derivative from them, or not connected at all, but what we do know is that they were (literally) 'demonised', positioned publicly as 'Luciferian' or 'Satanic'.

Key figures were isolated and burned at the stake over the next three years. Women were noted as part of the cult and accusations of sexual perversity were made. Whatever the truth of the matter, in 1231 in Germany, the Church crushed a group whose only crimes were almost certainly limited to not accepting the authority of Rome and flouting norms dictated by that Church and perhaps, though not proven, to have developed a sexual code different from the standards of a sterile priesthood.

But, of course, you might believe the Church. The Papal Bull of 1233 was to advise us that the Luciferians kissed the back side of a cat and that Lucifer appeared in the form of a cat. The accusation was much the same as that against the Cathars a century earlier. It is perhaps why, even today, black cats are regarded as unlucky and as the familars of witches.

Yet there is an intelligent argument that the Inquisition was a relatively progressive organisation. It bureaucratised mob rule. In the long run of history, Catholic areas under the Inquisition were generally less murderous in the Early Modern era than Protestant areas. It replaced lynch mobs with some form of due process, albeit one with scant justice in it. More mercy than we think perhaps but one only granted from above without any voice for the judged.

Most killings of dissidents in primitive societies are folk-based. Old women and gay men are certainly safer today in the modern West than they would be in any rural past or present and the Church has played a relatively civilising role in that respect. The Inquisition may square up better than we might think. Catholic justice was undoubtedly to be preferred to the brute volkish moral enforcements of Indo-European paganism. But this incident in Trier strikes us differently. This is not a central police force coming in to clean up an area but a local churchlord dictating terms. It smacks of an opportunity to deal with a rival faction through selective murder, commanding the heights of propaganda in a deliberate and calculated way.

This was, in short, gangsterdom covered by religion. It is the cover given by religion to moral warlordism that interests us here because it shows only one case amongst very many of special interests making use of the cover of the whole to do their dirty deeds. There is nothing spiritual going on in Trier - it was murder and oppression and there's an end of it.

When the Catholic Church looks into its own soul and recognises that what it has done over the centuries to ensure its own institutional survival and to preserve its ideology and vows never to do such things again, then and only then should it have the right to be consulted as a moral force in a modern liberal democracy. This has not yet happened even under the latest in a long line of charismatic hero figures for different Catholic factions.

The fashion today is for the Left to fall at the feet of Pope Francis because he speaks of the rights of the poor as once Las Casas spoke against the exploitation of the indigenous Indians of the Americas but we should not be too easily seduced by this. This is still the Church whose most significant philosophical father Augustine introduced persecution of rivals as an act of policy (in the case of the Donatists). There are no signs of such persecution policies in place today - quite the contrary, it is Christians who are persecuted in the Middle East - but that is merely a function of powerlessness: what happens when power is restored to the Vatican is another matter.

The Church is an organisation whose primary purpose (once the saving of souls is taken as a given) is to establish its 'auctoritas' over the human universe, pragmatically expanding and withdrawing with the resources at its disposal but always seeking total control of the human condition - literally, it is totalitarian in instinct and it becomes more liberal only when it is on the defensive.

Two thousand years onwards from Christ, it was not the Church that exposed endemic child abuse in society and within its own ranks. Instead it tried to close ranks and then quietly and inadequately reform itself without further external scrutiny - not because it believed something was fundamentally and existentially wrong but because society, secular and liberal society, had developed the ability to point out that it was wrong and the Church was eventually forced to respond.

Within the doctrine of 'hate the sin but not the sinner', ironically, human judgements on complex evil cannot be made easily but must often be left to God. Coercing a child into sex acts is a question of coercion as much it is one of sex yet coercion is the lifeblood of the historical Church. The problem for the Church is that it had got use to condemning sexual acts but had only a limited vocabulary for dealing with coercion - its approach to coercion was deived from a medieval moderation and mollification of warlord abuse rather than one involving a fundamental critique of the very fact of coercion as an intrument of policy.

The Church was accidentally complicit in the mental map of the adult who saw a child as the subject of his authority. The adult's claims on the child could even be seen as a sort of delegated power from God, the simple matter of taking ancient pagan Roman attitudes to children and absorbing them into a new and apparently more compassionate religious order directed at helping women and the adult masses. The child got abandoned in the process.

The first instinct of the Church was thus, like the State, to protect itself (as guardian of higher values in its own eyes) and not the child. This defensive and self-protective way of thinking, in both Church and State and elsewhere in society, needs to be called out. The central doctrines of the Church are 'taught', from above to below. The essence of the Church lies in Authority and the protection of the claims of Authority becomes axiomatically good. It is certainly not a question of consent for and by the governed.

It is above all not a question of encouraging consent or at least some balance in social, let alone economic, power relations. The only claim Pope Francis is making now is that Authority can be switched in a new direction, towards selective support for the aspirations of the poor, towards a shift in economic power relations, but there is no awareness here that all power relations are worthy of the same critical position. There is no critique, in other words, of the very fact of Authority. What can be switched in one direction can be switched back again in a puff of white smoke.

The Church is a complex creature with many genuinely decent and good people within it but one suspects that the Communist Party and even the National Socialist Party in Germany had some good and kind people within it. The Church can be selectively compassionate to people who obey its value commands but it is imbued with a model of 'the greater and the lesser evil' where what is higher and what is lesser is dictated by a very few whose traditionalism is based on institutional loyalty within a closed ideology. But it is Authority itself which must be challenged and at every opportunity - above all, the Church should not claim to speak for the poor and abused, it should be engaged with the poor and the abused in enabling them to speak for themselves. 

So Who Is The Author of Position Reserved?

[It occurred to the Author that regular readers had no frame of reference for the personality behind the postings. This is a slightly edited version of the Facebook Profile I use and may act as a sort of reference point.]

Existentialist, Anti-Trancendentalist Mysterian Supermaterialist and Politically Non-Euclidean with Chaotic, Possibilian, (cautiously) Trans-Humanist, Gothick, Nietzschean, Antinomian, Discordian/Erisian, Zen & Tantric Tendencies. Believer in Wu Wei and Wyrd and not much else. Looks on the species as work-in-progress likely to take another 30,000 years to become basically secure and so decent.

Politically into personal liberty (all things being equal, especially in cognitive and sexual matters), anti-bureaucratism (above all, that of the European Union which is the 'monstre sacre de nos jours'), good order mixed with compassion and common sense (the 'way of the decent copper'), sustainability for future generations and maintenance of the natural environment (which is not to be confused with any support for the Greens who are as mad as hatters or professional environmentalism which is little more than a job-creating racket), the primacy of the young over the old who usually are responsible for screwing things up in the first place, national self-determination (though never ethnicist which means that Israel worries me), against German-led Europeanism (as opposed to liking Europeans) and American-led Atlanticism (as opposed to liking Americans even though I go into hiding when they 'get God'), secularism (big time! anyone who believes in fairies and is in politics is a threat to me and mine), evidence-based policymaking, respect for difference (it is the outliers who ensure the progress and survival of the species), kindness to people who believe in fairies except in politics, anti-feminist, anti-identity politics (you are a person not an hysterical attribute) and anti-Frankfort School ideology which precisely means that I support the rights of women to make their own choices and that I support socio-economic and political equality, above all against the matriarchal top-down busybodies of the Academy.

All in all, a classic pre-1970s rational, pragmatic liberal socialist who still believes in the democratic nation state (not that the UK is really one any more) - very much an endangered species amidst the hysterics, posturers, hypocritical moralists, opportunists and downright liars of modern media-driven democracy. Not currently party-affiliated: the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? Oh, and past contributor to Tribune, The Chartist and Lobster and founder of www.exaronews.com over which I have no editorial control or influence whatsoever.
 
Instinctively polyamorous like most men if they were honest but married to a remarkably interesting woman with two very bright and likable kids ... I really like women a lot and my sympathies are wholly with Emma Goldman on 'feminism'. I do not like sport or engines. I rather like fashion and art.

However, my aversion to ideology, identity politics (which has destroyed and fragmented the intelligent distributionist Left) and post-Frankfort School idiocy suggests that if you are a dim-witted femi-nazi who denies men their fulfilment as anything other than pale imitations of themselves, an ethnicist or traditionalist or a happy-clappy rights liberal or activist, you might be a helluva lot happier not entering into my circle..

Philosophy

My philosophy in life is existentialist (as if regular readers had not guessed). Life is a path that leads to death and no other end. There is no point in believing that you will be pulled from the pit by some great God. You climb out yourself.

The only meanings are those you make for yourself. But, actually, life is good, very good, if you feel the fear and make it work for you. I am passionately anti-anti-natalist and all philosophies of death and the death instinct. I prefer Catholicism for all its evils and mistakes to a Buddhism which negates.

Sometimes, things will go very wrong but these can be good times in retrospect, though you may regret that you had to learn the hard way.

But no regrets is part of the rule-book. Just live with it and move on ...

Philosophers who are admired include Heraclitus, Socrates, Kierkegaard (without the God bit), Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Foucault. I respect Wilhelm Reich and Jack Parsons not for their thought but for their good will. I find the philosophers of the Far Right challenging, fascinating and instructive - their critiques of contemporary liberalism resonate even though I oppose them. There are dangers in these thinkers and they require contesting with respect.

Philosophers who are despised include Plato, anyone deluded enough to think that meaning subsists outside ourselves, Hegel and all Hegelians (though with a sneaking respect for Marx's use of Hegel to create a dynamic political movement which, though it went wrong, still gave hope to the hopeless and still has things to say today) and guilt-ridden post-Nazi 'liberals' like followers of Kojeve and Habermas. Zizek drives me up the wall - did he and others not see that Tsipras was engaged in a doomed enterprise. I have no time for German Idealism more generally, analytics who dance on the head of a pin or who invent elaborate ethics in order to avoid personal despair or ensure tenure. My current bug bear is the fashion for extreme scientific speculation which is taken too seriously - it is an enjoyable stopping off place between real philosophy and science fiction.

Matters of the Spirit

I was never interested in the idea of some ghostly spirit, internal or external, animating us and then merging with some abstract Great Beyond. The mind is materially embedded in the body and the mind-body in society and all is fundamentally matter. We are emergent from matter but we cannot say we understand precisely what we mean by matter in this context. Functionalist materialism is simply an interpretation of materialism and there may be more here yet to be uncovered - or never recoverable.

There remain great mysteries in the functioning of society, about the nature of ourselves and about the workings of minds which may as well be regarded magically as undiscovered, and possibly undiscoverable, science.  If there have to be gods, then I choose Dionysos and Aphrodite, Odin and Freyja ...

But you cannot escape the drag of matter, of others or of your own carcase. A Luciferian rebellion, in the end, makes it all worthwhile because it asserts the working of your own deeper matter against the matter worked on you by the laws of physics and by the burden of social organisation. The imagination, a creative irrationality, is what makes us able to move beyond being mere walking stones, shuttled around by blind necessity and previous chance.

If I could rebel against matter I would but I cannot, so, instead, I reserve the right to rebel against social convention and the dead weight of history to free the mind-body for new experiences and pleasures, for individual psychological transcendence (not to be confused with claims about the universal) and for the benefit of those I love.

God certainly need not be involved. Past texts, especially those 'revealed' in the Iron Age, are useless. As are all socially constructed abstracts ... I very much prefer the realist Foucault to the delusional Habermas.

Politics

I used to be involved in politics a great deal. I wasted much of my life and time on the 'official' Left. It achieved little and all I learnt was that the few will always command the agenda of the many, not because they are strong but because we, the many, are weak. Recent events surrounding Jeremy Corbyn's candidature for leadership has exposed to the gaze of all what I learned in the struggles of the 1990s - the main Party of the British Left is deeply dysfunctional, staffed by second and third rate minds with no strategy beyond the 'next election'. The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)

On the other hand, anarchism tends to the naive, riddled with the naturalistic fallacy, deviant forms of religion and hidden communitarian terrors. One sinks back into a soft sort of left-libertarianism, a social liberalism or libertarian socialism created out of justifiable pessimism tempered by good will. I would prefer even Baathist order to the killing fields created by enthusiastic and naive armchair liberal outrage, at least when push comes to shove on taking the AK47 out of the broom cupboard.

I have certainly come to dislike the self-regarding political class and the lies of the 'international community' (aka professional fixers) but equally those who afford them loyalty out of an ignorant tribalism, corporatist cowardice or a refusal to think about the nature of power and how the power of the few depends on the willing servitude of the many at home and their disregard abroad ... evil lies so often in obeying orders provided by those same second rate people who naturally rise to the top of political institutions.

The foot soldiers of domestic left-wing politics have been continually digging while in a hole. Solidarity, once it has served its initial purpose, tends to become slavery. The networks of people determined to collaborate to get the cattle trucks from place to place without asking about the destination, combined with the awful truths of social psychological experimentation by our elites, suggested to me that evil was well embedded in the human species by its very socialisation strategies long before we were born.

And so I am a peculiar form of pessimist of the anarcho-Left, owing more to Rabelais, De Sade (the philosopher), Nietzsche (again), Paine, Shelley, William Morris and the incomparable Oscar Wilde than the current degenerate crew of rascals serving special interests, overseas and domestic, who have passed by the moniker of 'New Labour' and who owe more to Lloyd George than Keir Hardie.

These became mere statist war-mongers who have run the economy into the ground for the sake of power, and whose supporters are a rump of dangerous post-Marxist ideologues. In the end, they rise like scum to the surface to get their well-paid jobs in an international system that they created. In that context, it is billionaire wealth creators who deploy capital well to create jobs and build economies that impress me more than the Atlanticist and European clowns who do the opposite. The real talent is at the front end of capitalism nowadays and the leaders of the people should be ashamed of themselves for letting this happen.

The problem may be with Parliamentary Democracy itself, with the prerogatives of the Crown, with the dominance of Party and with institutional special interests that stand in the way of the people's own ability to develop their capabilities in collaboration with others. The way that the priestly class of public intellectuals and third-rate journalists dictates the terms of politics in the Atlantic system and the way modern graduates lap up the nonsense is a lot of the problem ... closed cosmopolitan (a classic contradiction) elites believing their own lies about the nature of the world and existence.

I stand against the bureaucratic State, the Crown as State (though I quite like the Windsors out of sentiment), foreign wars, federalism of all types, the corporate mentality (while appreciating the innovations supplied by genuinely free Jeffersonian markets and even intelligent State infrastructural investment), managerialism as cult, neuroscientific manipulation and tenured technocracy.

Science, technology and innovation are mostly very very good indeed but have to be kept out of the hands of the fruits and the nuts. The market and the State do inspire great works of progress as well as great evils.

Malatesta,Tucker, Rocker, Kollontai, the Kronstadt Mutineers, Zapata, Makhno and, of course, Goldman all had a point and the naive Jack Parsons makes that point likeable: freedom and personal autonomy within a society of free individuals is our highest aspiration ... but I would still trust a weak democratic State over any number of self-righteous activist enthusiasts who weedle their way into the bureaucratic corporatism of social democracy under self-righteous liberal cover.

Frontiers 5 - Downloading Minds

In early July, the Guardian reported that "Scientists have linked together the brains of three monkeys, allowing the animals to join forces and control an avatar arm, in research that raises the prospect of direct brain-to-brain interfaces in humans." As with all such technology, it is 'early days' - a Borg-like collaborative ability to do something mechanical is interesting but not yet useful. However, if minds can be connected to other minds, we are moving into an area once deemed pseudo-science or magic - telepathy - and it suggests that something deemed intrinsically absurd - uploading minds to another platform than the biological human body (or into another biological form) may not be so absurd in the far future. If brain-to-brain, why not brain-to-alternative-substrate.

The possibility raises all the questions about 'what it like to be a bat' in a new form. What will it be like to be a human being whose sensory inputs are radically changed either in a soft form, by inheriting the subtly different senses of another human being, or in a hard form by being given new senses in a new form of material embodiment that might need very different processing tools to cope with the data. Will the first people to explore new worlds in inner space go mad or not? And will we have issues of neural privacy and hacking that make our issues with internet privacy seem relatively easy to resolve by comparison?

The practical short term benefit of current brain research is relatively simple and holds very few existential terrors and only tactical opportunities. If scientists can get the human mind to be able to 'move' prosthetic limbs and mechanical additions to the human body, then this would be a stunning move forward for the quality of life of the severely disabled, a liberating use of technology for a significant minority that could materially reduce human misery and frustration. On the other hand, "The scientists said that in the future, the concept might be extended to produce neurally connected “swarms” of rats with collective intelligence" [Guardian] which I suggest we need like we need a hole in the head.

There is another aspect of the case. Scientists have been dismissive of telepathy and perhaps a lot of telepathic discourse is wish fulfilment but the folk beliefs of many people attest to practical experience of small-scale examples of mental connection over long distances, especially between family members and sexually bonded people. This is before we even get into the even more contested territory of psi, clairvoyance and so forth. I have witnessed directly at least two examples of 'death telepathy' - my mother waking in the night to report her father coming towards her and calling out her name and the phone call coming to say that he had died without warning that night (though not entirely unexpectedly) and my own experience of waking with a sharp intolerable knife like feeling of something slicing through my brain and getting a phone call from my father an hour or so later that my brother had been shot on military exercises - in the head - though the timing of the shot and my waking was out of synch (though not perhaps his actual death). These could be coincidence or chance but reports of this phenomenon are widespread, unprovable (though both 'wakings' were witnessed by third parties) and tend to run in families as if there is some genetic aspect, some lost sense, which is to be found in some gene lines and not others.

The science of the 'super brain' (the ridiculous hyperbole of the media-friendly scientist) tells us nothing yet about this folk phenomena which remains scientifically very elusive. Other similar phenomena I have experienced, and which I accept as 'normal' no matter how talked away by positivists, all have one thing in common ... they are triggered by extreme external events or frustrations, usually 'in the zone' (that is distracted from reasoning). There is no means of willing or controlling or redoing what has happened. It is a form of altered state (which we discussed in the last Posting in this series).  At the end of the day, the monkeys and the rats involved in the scientific experiments were connected by material arrays making a physical connection between the brain matter and the man-made external tools. There is no evidence here of thought leaping across space and perhaps time through the ether (though if radio can, why not mental transmissions?) but only of the ability to connect matter in its formal atomic sense.

For this reason, we have to separate the random, probably real but uninvestigable business of mental transmission without any obvious material connection from this business of wires and cables - so the question becomes not whether we can enter into someone else's mind through telepathy but whether our minds can manipulate other minds, merge with other minds or be uploaded into other bodies. This is the frontier that we are looking at here. As for the monkeys, "Although their brains were not directly wired together, [they] intuitively started to synchronise their brain activity, allowing them to move the arm collaboratively to a reach for a virtual ball on the screen" which is suggestive at least.

As for Whole Brain Emulation [WBE] which is the business of taking a brain and so a mind and enabling it to run on a non-biological platform or substrate, the consensus among speculative scientists is that the technology is theoretically perfectly possible at a mechanical level even if it does not exist yet and may not do so for some considerable time. It is another question whether it is a practical proposition. Another again whether the uploaded mind will actually be conscious. So, although not immediate, the philosophical, ethical and social issues raised by WBE are going to have to be faced at some stage if our society continues to develop technologically as it is doing.

The obviously troubling questions to those who are candidates for uploading are those of identity ... is the uploaded person the same person? If there is an upload and the original remains in place, do we have two separate persons or not? If the upload is a mass upload - ten thousand uploads of the same individual - what are the implications? ... and ... another set of questions along different lines ... what changes will happen to identity and personality with massively different sensory inputs or increased or different processing power or less or more mobility or a virtual environment into which the mind is lodged? And what of death if the uploaded person is apparently immortal (or near to it) yet reliant, just as we are, on energy sources being maintained and on mechanics and systems outside the uploaded self? What becomes of the person when the biochemical basis for feeling is eliminated? Are neuroses transferred with the mind?  What happens to a mind that no longer feels hunger or suddenly has to cope with the different desires and hungers of another human body? And what of chimera or hybrid bodies that have mechanical and biological elements or merge the biologies of different species? And so on and so on ad infinitum.

But this is all high-end speculation which we frequently warn about. Speculative science is a form of mental activity somewhere between science and philosophy but it is not necessarily either good science or good philosophy. It can, too quickly, become a genre within science fiction. The 'frontier' is not (any more than in our space-related postings) way out there with the mental equivalents of star travel but in the more near-at-hand whose applications are likely to be prosthetic and related to the techno-enhancement of our own species - a subject we will deal with in a later Frontiers. Given that predicted dates for full human brain simulation through super-computation have passed already, it is probably true that Kurzweil's 2029 predicted date will pass in the same way. It is true that "a massively parallel electronic counterpart of a human biological brain in theory might be able to think thousands to millions of times faster than our naturally evolved systems" [1] but thinking is not all there is to being - a common mistake of the enthusiastic nerd.

Something that thinks at those speeds is not a human brain but something different, far faster than a human brain. It would be a brain-like thing, that is all. In any case, the speed of the connections (where electronics are far faster than biology) is not at issue but the number of possible connections under conditions where the number of connections in an average human brain would require an enormously large supercomputer. Something that large is self-evidently not relating to the environment in the same way as a brain-sized brain in an ambulatory android. Reproducing human brains (before we even get to the framework for uploading) may not require a revolution in processing speed but it would require a nanotechnological revolution in the hardware that does the processing and then a choice of embodiment that at least approximates not only the sensory capacities of the human but their mobility in the sensory world that humans inhabit (rather than a simulated silicon sensory world). It would be wrong to be dismissive of progress to date - not only is nanotechnology in itself a leading edge technology of fearsome potential but there are time-sharing options that supercomputers can use and which are already getting close to approximating mammal brains albeit at slower speeds. Something brain-like with an intellectual capacity exceeding that of our species will undoubtedly appear within the next three decades or so. But any uploaded human minds entering this system will not be human but post-human. We are speaking here of species-replacement and not enhancement.

A key question is one of data capture when it comes to the matter of moving from creating a brain-like thing that emulates the human brain, but is not like any actually existing human brain, to emulating an actually existing human brain (the upload of a personality). If you look deeply, the extrapolations from (say) Moore's Law rather evade the issue of computational complexity - the enthusiasts for mind uploading simply have no idea what the actual computational requirements, likely to be very huge indeed, would be for successful uploading and, of course, there is the other side of the equation, how one abstracts data from the really existing brain so that it might be uploaded then or later without killing it (creating a copy). Since 2005, there has been a Blue Brain Project at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne which aims to reverse engineer a mammalian brain to create an artificial electronic brain but the researchers have no illusions about what they are doing. One of the key researchers said in 2004 that "in the brain, every molecule is a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of trillions upon trillions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern how they interact. You would literally need computers that are trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing today."  It is not likely that we have seen a supercomputer, even hidden away in the defence establishments of the great powers, that is "trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing" in 2004 appear since then. In a moment of enthusiasm later, this researcher predicted a detailed functional artificial brain by 2019 so maybe ... since the funding arrived, that same researcher has been noticeably rather silent.

There is a simulation model that this writer imperfectly understands but based on reverse-engineering the blueprint of the brain's data system but this has the huge assumption embedded that there are no quantum mechanical processes involved. The jury is out on that one. A full brain map is technically feasible (we understand) in terms of data storage of the brain's system fixed in time but the sheer complexity of the functioning biology of the brain may make the final tally of data far too big to handle. The logic of the situation is, once again, not an uploaded brain of an actual person with memories and all but rather a brain-like thing that mimics a person. Will it be conscious? Hard to say when we only surmise that any other human being is conscious. No current technology appears to be sufficiently robust to reliably capture the actual molecular structure of the brain, bringing us back to the Blue Brain Project's 2004 concerns. Naturally, that does not mean that a future technology or the improvement of current technology might not result in the level of data capture required but the obstacles seem formidable.  And it should be remembered that nearly all (though not all) the research work being undertaken is funded not to upload minds but to understand the brain better for medical purposes - specifically, "various psychiatric disorders caused by malfunctioning neurons, such as autism, and ...  how pharmacological agents affect network behavior."  Some richer than average enthusiasts anxious about death are keen to fund research designed to upload a mind and reboot it in virtual space but offering, for example, $106,000 as a prize (as in one case) is unlikely to speed matters up a great deal.

The science may also be irrelevant, as we reviewed in the last Frontiers posting, if consciousness (such as it is) is not quite as quantifiably physicalist or functionalist or is based on quantum events as many philosophers suspect and argue. The critics are persuasive but there is no need to move into a dualist position to follow them. There is a revised materialist model - somewhat along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke's famous 'magic is just undiscovered science' - in which the hard materialists are right that mind is an emergent property of matter but that they are wrong that it is to be understood in terms of the quantifiable matter of classical physics or in terms of the possibility that it can be understood in real time by a sufficiently intelligent system which can then reproduce it as an 'upload'. We have seen that the simulation model cannot work if there are quantum effects but no model can work if the amount of computation of all states of being within the conscious brain is far greater than anything that is material that is not that brain itself.

One can thus perceive easily enough of a brain being created but not of a brain that can mimic perfectly another brain if only because the mimicking brain will always be sufficiently marginally different to be different from the uploaded person. At best, the person who dies does not simply transfer from one state to another but ceases to exist and a simulacrum emerges that believes itself to be the person that has just died. To all intents and purposes, the second brain, in believing themselves to be the first person, is the first person in a form of self-delusion but the differences between the state of the brain in the recently deceased body and in the new embodiment or virtual state will spin the second person rapidly into a new status altogether unless every possible memory, unconscious behaviour pattern, biological trigger and so forth are also transferred - that is, not only the brain must be transferred but the body including its gut bacteria and neuroses, indeed its somatic memory as well as its actual memory. Yes, we may able to create computational duplicates but not more than this. The fact that the uploaded entity believes itself to be subjectively the person from whom it was uploaded may be useful but it is not true. This is the fallacy of the non-self, fashionable in the dislocated modern world, but self-evidently not the case where a mind inhabits a brain which inhabits a body which inhabits a world with a continuous history of direct material experience. Transfers of minds merely transfer parts of the whole. This is the crux of the debate over whether an uploaded mind has been moved or copied.

Whatever the feasibility (and until brain emulation is judged more feasible most of the theoretical ethical, socio-economic, political, legal and philosophical thinking is pleasurable but rather idle), the actual frontier at this time is that of practical neuroscience. This also means a frontier of psychological manipulation, surveillance and intrusiveness, cognitive enhancement and medical improvement. The neuroscience directed at these ends cannot be isolated from research into artificial intelligence because it might be regarded as a race against time whether the next advanced 'consciousness' will be an enhanced virtualised or embodied human or an embodied or non-embodied artificial intelligence. The bookies would probably put money on an AI becoming at least far more intellectually enhanced than a human (and with its own views on the virtualisation or mental enhancement of its creator) well before a mind is ever uploaded.

The dialectic between the human fear of death that drives the more radical models of mind uploading and the existential risk of emergent AGI is scarcely discussed and yet this is the dialectic that matters - the human species wants to survive as individuals while something is emerging that may want to survive itself and may see the species or individuals as threat. Both sets of entity are, bluntly, being explored by capitalism as forms of slave labour and enhancements of the lifestyle of biological humans - both sets of entity may have their own views on this. If uploaded enhanced humans and emergent AGI find themselves competing for computing space within the virtual world and biological humans and embodied AGI are competing for material resources in the world as we know it, then we have science fiction scenarios that make the Terminator series look thoroughly simplistic. It means three new sets of highly intelligent enhanced 'types' emerging out of technology in a situation where none of the three should underestimate the biological cunning of the root species in a material world of four-dimensional space that it understands well from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. In the end, for all their advanced intellectual capacity, the three new proto-species may not stand a chance against the native humans ... plugs can get pulled.

We could go further down the line of our magical mystery tour and look at something which the proponents of brain emulation seem reluctant to discuss - the socio-politics of undertaking brain emulation in a society in which the first truly successful candidates (taking into account the possible horrors of existence for the experimental candidates) are likely to be represented by very rich people who can afford what they think is immortality but which is actually a post-human status that may give them enormous further personal advantages in the competition with the poor saps who remain homo sapiens sapiens. Science fiction has, with Battlestar Galactica and the Terminator series, now developed a corpus of work on the alleged dangers of one rival species, artificial general intelligence, but is only now trying to come to terms in its usual primitive and clumsy way with the theoretical threat of post-human brain transfer.

From this perspective, Luc Besson's Lucy was a far more interesting film than the predictable Transcendence simply because it tried to imagine the post-human without recourse to the standard trope of the genius-billionaire within a standard Hollywood adventure-love story that could as easily have been crafted at any time in Hollywood's history. The film failed, of course, but at least it tried. The interesting socio-politics lies not in the death-averse behaviour of billionaires - after all, the trope is as easily done with vampires as with technology as we have seen in The Strain - but the response of the masses and then of a minority of the masses to an existential threat to their identity as the dominant or most conscious of species. Extant covered this somewhat with a Kaczynski response to androids. Downloaded emulants would be highly vulnerable to deliberate warfare on their kind through destroying their new substrate as something dependent on energy and vulnerable to viruses and hacking. The terror of being stuck in a substrate and being sent to virtual hell and torment by vengeful hackers may make death the soft option. It is only (paradoxically) the lack of imagination of transhumanist billionaires and their Igors that allows them to continue with their mad struggle for immortality.

But we are falling back into the worst sort of speculative 'science'. Maybe Kurzweil is right that we will be 'digitally immortal' by 2045. I doubt it. What is more likely is that a form of digital consciousness that may or may not be zombie-like in practice and subject to its own programming will exist in some form at some stage, that it will be existentially different from us and may either be convergent with artificial intelligence or competitive with it. But the argument that 'we' can be downloaded as minds may be superficially attractive to the more autistic end of the spectrum that positions intellect ahead of emotion (yet why bother if AI can always trump us in intellect) but which strike me as speculative wish-fulfilment in the face of a classic existential anxiety over death - a sentimental and emotional response. The ultimate techno-maturbatory fantasy is to try to deal with two radical problems - that we are probably biologically incapable of reaching beyond the solar system in our current form (see our first Frontier posting) and that we are all going to die - by uploading ourselves into mechanistic starships that roam the universe near the speed of light, changing our perception of time without (apparently) going mad and yet remaining 'human'.

The argument that even if we could upload our minds, they would cease to be human minds (the new life form argument) is argued better from somewhere closer to the dear old 'bat' question of Nagel by Efstratios Filippidis in his analytical piece on mind uploading than here. He usefully summarises his position here. He argues quite simply from the differences in the perception of qualia that emerge from the formal substrate of the brain so that, although we have invented or discovered (according to Platonic taste) a scientific world of workable technologies based on the workings of matter, the mind, based on brain matter, works itself out with such massive variation between individuals that, even though we might reproduce the material basis for that mind, we may not so easily be able to reproduce the perception of qualia (sound, taste, smell, pleasure and so forth) that are based on the brain being embedded somatically in a total biological system. In short, reproducing minds or even brains in isolation from bodies is literally de-humanising a species that is not just intellectual but sentimental and emotional and has merged from within a processing system that is excellent not only at analysing situational data from several sources in motion but also, and this is key, selecting and forgetting. A mind detached from that system of mobility, sensory perception and somatic embodiment is a different from us as we are from the bat. A mind that cannot forget is never a human mind.

Of course, a mind might be uploaded with the memory of all sensations but, unable to live in the new present with mobility, the same sensory machinery and bodily structure of the past, the memory will be detached from any new experience under the new conditions of existence with very different mobilities or lack of mobilities and senses. In the end, the only true human upload is one into another (presumably improved and longer lasting) bio-mechanical body with the broadly similar sensory and mobility functions as the old. The true frontier technology of uploading is not really a matter of uploading minds but of transforming bodies in all their complexity. One may as well accept improvement to existing bodies and minds (the medical model) as a much more useful investment of human energy than sending isolated minds to go mad in energy-vulnerable autistic micro-worlds. Although much of Filippidis' essay is (frankly) absurdist science fiction and even unphilosophical moral valuation, this problem of perception of qualia does lend credence to the position that Nagel's 'bat' problem is also in play. As Filippidis puts it at one point:

"One of the powers that our virtual ones would have inside the virtual world of a computer [the model he is discussing] is to quickly transform themselves into whatever they want. By doing so, they could, soon after the uploading process finishes, rapidly or even immediately become something quite different from their original one. Consequently, their common identity with their original counterpart would be lost very quickly. We would not longer identify ourselves with our virtual counterpart and the entire idea of eternal permanence of ourselves would result in immediate failure."

This, of course, falls into the science fiction category of thought but the point underlying this is valid - that the relationship of a new uploaded identity and the old identity is not one (in fact) of identity but one of an intensification of the difference that exists even in ordinary humans between one moment and the next of being a 'self'. With humans, the transformation of self - whether circular re-invention or human progression and personal development or the leaps and bounds of punctuated equilibrium - operates at a steady pace in accordance with the underlying somatic and sensory apparatus. The transfer of a mind from one substrate to another is a far more radical shift of perception and embodiment and although, within the new body, the self will construct itself again within its steady time frame based on its sense data and type of embodiment, the distinction between the two selves will be a radical one in which only memory unconnected to the means of creating new memories of that type will exist. One may postulate that, just as the unconscious exists and is connected to neurosis and dysfunction, so the 'human' will exist as the unconscious of the newly uploaded mind and be its source of neurosis and dysfunction. Perhaps AI psychotherapists will be helping uploaded minds probe their 'humanity' for answers to dysfunctionality within the artificial world of a starship flight that takes 70,000 years ...

It is thus probably true that, at some stage in the future, minds will be uploaded in some form but it is unlikely that we will be able to call these minds human. We have already said that they will be post-human, evolved out of the human much as we are evolved from common ancestors to the chimpanzee. The mistake should not be made that evolution represents superiority or inferiority. It will simply be a better product for a new environment - whether a world created out of silicon within our world or a world of anti-biological space travel. For those who like their speculative science, Martine Rothblatt is a leading proponent of mindware but I do not think even she has quite thought through this post-human aspect of the case. She presumes (it would seem) that mind clones would be, well, clones, basically still 'us' in a different form rather than replacements for us in an environments where we cannot survive otherwise. This just does not seem plausible.

The post-human aspects of the case are made more explicit by the closing remarks of brain emulation guru Randal Koene in an excellent May 2014 Popular Science run-down of the more cultic, some might say parasitical, beliefs in brain emulation as a goal that (on the other hand) seems to be creative in pulling different scientific disciplines together in a way that reminds us of the early days of cognitive science:

"Brain uploading, Koene agreed, was about evolving humanity, leaving behind the confines of a polluted planet and liberating humans to experience things that would be impossible in an organic body. “What would it be like, for instance, to travel really close to the sun?” he wondered. “I got into this because I was interested in exploring not just the world, but eventually the universe. Our current substrates, our biological bodies, have been selected to live in a particular slot in space and time. But if we could get beyond that, we could tackle things we can’t currently even contemplate.”"

A lot of this falls down on one simple fact - unless we are dealing with a case of gradual uploading where one moves slowly and consciously from one substrate to another leaving nothing behind (that is we live consciously and aware through the transition, connected to both substrates and then jettisoning the first at the right time as a shell or first stage rocket), the transfer of a mind from one place to another is a copy. The reasoning is simple - if a transfer takes place and one mind remains in situ and another in the new substrate, then two versions (that will then diverge according to the dictates of the substrate) of the original exist. For the first to cease to be while the second version continues is to have one die and one live. Would the first observe their identical but diverging copy there and then freely extinguish themselves here in the belief that the copy was their very self. I think not - there would be a realisation that the first consciousness had not uploaded and was doomed to continue in the state into which it had been born whereas the brother or sister copy would go on to an entirely different existence albeit with a mental substrate of the first's history and memory and a belief that it was as continuous as the first. If belief makes the second into the first, then the second is the first but the first cannot become the second and remains behind ... or dead. Each upload will be, in fact, an existentially risky suicide and an upload to preserved a loved one in a virtual environment will be a simulacrum if only because existence in a virtual existence will transform the second into something different unless programmed otherwise and a loved one programmed by the lover is not a person but a toy.

The same applies to the fantastic notions of Koene and other transhumanists which are centred on species survival as if a) we are as individuals going to be satisfied with the abstract business of becoming representatives of the species (this, if anything, merely testifies to the obsessive and autistic aspects of the transhumanist mentality) and b), following on from the last paragraph, the starship persons in their silicon bodies may have descended from us but are not us, do not have our culture which is based on biology and a particular environment and at most may embody a certain sentimental relic of our human reality. If the best the transhumanists can offer us is an eternity of scientific curiosity in the wastes of space or on burning or frozen planets embodied in metal and code, then, again, it says something about the life-denying obsessions of men and women so frightened of death that they have forgotten how to live as humans.

Some of the speculative science involved here may be highly rational but it derives from assumptions about what it is to be human that are mere manifestations of the death instinct. The radical transhumanist of this type is little more than a figment of his own imaginative demise. No wonder there is a turn to religion - to Omega Points, the potty Christianity of Tipler and Teilhard de Chardin (with the occasional nod to the death instinct that is Buddhism) - in latter day transhumanism. This urge to the 'cod-spiritual' is the negation of the true transhumanism of Nietzsche (the overcoming of our socially determined nature and a return to an understanding of our biological drives and instincts as Life) and at one with the deeply sad loss of real science to the useless 'dialogue' with theology that infects the weaker minds of our culture. We can move on at this point and respect those practical transhumanists who hold to the Nietzschean vision of the enhancement of the human living in the world - lengthening lives to live well and not just longer, eliminating mental as well as physical disability, enhancing intellect, skill and the ability to love, pleasuring the senses and, yes, being curious about the world not as escapist speculation but as a process of command and control through the mastery of matter by mind.

Filippidis' own preferences are closer to mine but one still suspects that we would do better to spend our lives enjoying the time between birth and death and seeking to improve the environmental, somatic and mental conditions for this and future generations than expending energy and resources on a sub-Taoist search for immortality:

" ... my preferred methods for radical life extension and bio-techno immortality in the ( hopefully ) near future, are genetic ( and epigenetic ) engineering; continuous repair and elimination of all types of molecular garbage and structural defects accumulated by our metabolic processes, and, possibly, a progressive replacement of evolutionarily faulty cellular micro-structures and organs by artificial nano-structures or programmed nano-robots and synthetic improved organs."

So, returning to our frontier analogy, much of speculative science - starships and immortality - is really a distraction from the job in hand. The real frontier lies broadly in Filippidis' basic summary in the paragraph above. It is in the much more limited area of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that we see a real frontier rather than the hysterical almost cultic desires and claims of aspirant billionaire transhumanists. Sweep away the fruits and the nuts and we have some practical possibilities where technology can enhance human capability (which we are likely to return to in a later note). The first true BMI was probably the cochlear implant to improve hearing. Others could help victims of stroke or spinal chord injury walk again. Small electrode arrays might soon pick up neural signals from the motor areas of the brain, have them decoded by a computer and then re-transmit them to a prosthetic limb which then becomes integrated into the body-mind. The story we started the posting with is probably less interesting in that thre monkeys can communicate telepathically and more interesting in that the prosthetic limb is being manouvred by the mind of the monkeys whether one or three. There are still many technical challenges to be overcome, of course.

The bottom line here is that, with brain emulation and uploading 'minds', we are into a territory we have seen in previous postings and why the frontier analogy is so useful. There is a frontier but it is a frontier for human needs within sight of human resources. Just as entering into the inner solar system is part of the existential business of protecting all humans from asteroid impact and raising the possibility of strategic profit for some humans from resource mining, so investment in neuroscience is primarily about helping many humans and future generations overcome serious mental and physical diabilities. Just as hurtling outside our solar system to fly to the stars is scientific fantasy to all intents and purposes, at least as biological entities, so is cheating death by becoming post-human. The aspiration to the latter might motivate research to the former and feed young imaginative minds and perhaps public support for funding into the programmes but it could equally be a distraction that, if taken too seriously, could cut vital enthusiasm and funding with the first proof that the super-dream of the nerds was either certainly not feasible or too expensive for the alleged benefits or both. This would be tragic - as we saw with the first space programme which died too early because it was no longer useful in great power politics and lost us decades in defeating the asteroid threat. The speculative scientists always need managing and correcting if we are to bring people (especially intellectually lazy legislators) down to earth and return our efforts to what can be achieved if only we stick at it and do it for the right reasons. Becoming a post-human is up the with flying to Gliese 667 - second order to diverting asteroids and curing disability and we should perhaps start telling it like it is instead of treating ourselves like children (charming though that may be) with an excess of imaginative fantasy.