So there is this pastor who proposes concentration camps for gay people.  One of his bright followers considers that this would remove the problem of gay people because they can't reproduce and so they would die out.  The stupid is strong in these people.

I'm neither surprised nor shocked.  It may be politically useful to act shocked, but I'm not.  The reason I'm not is that it's a both a small and big world.  It's a small world because news travels fast, and yet it's a big world full of billions of people.  Pick any extreme view and you will find a considerable number of people who support it.  That's what you get in a world this size.  The trouble is that there are gay people who have such extremists as members of their local community.  I find it hard to imagine how scared they must be.  

The way to deal with such people is to expose them.  Let them see what the reaction is to their views.  I have seen suggestions that we should ask for apologies for what they say, but that achieves nothing.  Apologising doesn't change opinions.  

I suspect the only answer is time.  Such views will die out along with the people who express them.

In view of recent ideas on the matter of consciousness I have posted, I’m going to revisit an interesting problem to do with free will and consciousness.   

I have shown that if you are committed to the brain operating according to physical principles, then no thoughts that you have can be justifiably taken as evidence for anything beyond physical principles being involved in any aspect of the human mind, including consciousness: no extra aspects of reality can be involved.

Also, that commitment removes the possibility of contra-causal free will: our decisions are determined by physics, not some extra-physical will.

These ideas of consciousness and free will fit well together, because if you don’t believe in contra-causal free will, then your must accept that your beliefs, just like your choices, are ultimately determined by physical interactions.  This gets us to the situation where all your thoughts about consciousness are determined by physical processes, and so no thoughts about consciousness being strangely non-physical can be justified (if you want to keep the commitment to physics).

It’s a simple line of reasoning; if our will is a result of physics, then all our thoughts must be. So what do we make of Sam Harris’ blog of 19th October:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-consciousness-ii

“How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided.”

Because Harris believes in physics, in fact he doesn’t accept any definition of free will, then he must, to be consistent, accept that he finding it impossible to imagine how consciousness arises isn’t actually evidence for anything to do with consciousness.  He can’t use the fact that he finds this impossible to in any way justify an argument that there really is any particular problem to do with consciousness.   The only evidence that has any rational use in explaining consciousness is that which we get from a neuroscientific investigation of the brain.

Of course, to get out of this, all he (and we) have to do is abandon our acceptance of the idea that our brains are physical organs that resulted purely from millions of years of evolution.

That’s a big step!

The mysteries of consciousness, whatever they may turn out to mean, are nothing when compared to the strangeness of time.  Time is everything, as nothing can be without time.  To be is to possess extent in time.  We exist, and yet existence disappears like a mirage if we try and find what it really means.  To exist is to have a series of nows.  Each now slips into the past, and yet it can’t do, as in order to slip it needs time to happen.  How can time flow, when flowing needs time?  And yet, it does flow.  It’s the surest thing we know.  And yet, it can’t we can be sure of that too: our thoughts are processes in our brains and yet there is there is no ‘now’ involved.  I think about now.  I think about now.  I think about now.  All those thoughts are the same, and yet how can they be - each caught hold of ‘now’ and then lost it.  How did this happen?  Why isn’t my first thought about now still in the present?  

If anything strains our physical understanding of the world, it is the experience of the moving present.  How can physical thoughts result in this?  In the future - the then that will become a new now - we may know in terms of brain activity precisely why our brains produce thoughts about time.  How can a physical story of these thoughts not be complete?  And yet it seems as impossible as anything could ever be that this could be true.  The tension between fact and feeling over the nature of our experience of time is a wonderful mystery, for now at least.

I know that it may seem obsessive to go on and on about the subject of the supernatural.  There is a reason why we should all be concerned about the use of this concept by those in religious and political authority.  Not just concerned, but fed up, disappointed, insulted, annoyed, angry.

This needs to be said bluntly - if you say that you have knowledge of the supernatural, you are saying that you have magic powers.  Mainstream religions do try and dismiss talk of mere magic as rather wicked.  There has even been some accusations that the Harry Potter stories are a bad influence for children.  This is tosh.  Supernatural means magic.  It means bypassing the rules of the world and getting things done by cheating.  Resurrections are no less magical than hippogriffs.  Priests believe that they are wizards, waving their hands over bread and wine and adding some invisible Christ-power to them.  Bishops are wizards with bigger hats and wands.  They turn up at parishes, spreading good cheer, blessing water and oil and suchlike.  Clearly an essential service.

This is all rather funny, although it really isn’t.  Blessing water is one thing, but forgiving child molesters is another.  Telling the world that contraception is wrong is another.  Condemning homosexuals is another.

The silly supernaturalists need to be shamed.  They aren’t wizards, there is no magic, and they have no moral right to preach based on their stupid beliefs.

Supernaturalism isn’t just a matter of philosophy, it’s a moral poison.

"Having considered this matter carefully, I am afraid I have come to the decision not to support gay marriage," Paterson told his constituent Andrew Smith in a letter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/22/tory-minister-opposes-gay-marriage

I'm fascinated by what it means for someone like Paterson to have considered gay marriage carefully.  I'm not saying this with any sarcasm - I really am interested.  I believe that there are quite different kinds of methods of considering, and it can lead to misunderstanding if they are mixed up.

One kind of considering is to go through a rational analysis of a situation, having a particular goal for the analysis, such as to rate an idea on a scale, to see if it meets certain criteria.  For example, in terms of gay marriage, there might be matters of the ease with which legislation could be introduced.

Another kind of considering is to let your mind wander over vague thoughts about a situation, and then see how you feel emotionally about it.  In terms of gay marriage, you might see if you feel comfortable with the prospect.

It's hard to see how a rational considering of gay marriage could lead to anything but support, so it's valid to insist that someone such as Paterson explains what he meant by consideration.  Just asserting that he did consider isn't enough.

Here we go again:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/18/jack-conkling-teacher-writes-being-gay-just-like-being-a-murderer_n_1527608.html

"All this talk in the news about gay marriage recently has finally driven me to write. Gay marriage is wrong because homosexuality is wrong. The Bible clearly states it is sin. Now I do not claim it to be a sin any worse than other sins. It ranks in God's eyes the same as murder, lying, stealing, or cheating."

He's wrong, of course.  Such a short list of sins.  It is a list cut short surely by accident and not intention.  There is so much more than the Bible clearly states, so much more that Christians must know to feast on the delights of Heaven. 

Leviticus 11:10

But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales, of the swarming creatures in the waters and of the living creatures that are in the waters, is detestable to you.

Don't clam up! Develop some moral mussell!  Don't be crabby in the sight of God!  Those who eat of the scaleless seafood are as sinful in the eyes of the Lord as those men who lie with men.  We can't have such careless exclusions from the Holy Book threatening immortal souls - we need to help those poor Christians who don't realise how wicked their behaviour is.  The eaters of oysters must be told it's not a sin to desire the lemon-sprinkled flesh in the shell, it's the swallowing that condems them to the fires. 

We need to spread the good news of fishy redemption to all who insist that the Bible's strictures are the saving of the soul; keep the prawns off the barbie, and the lobsters out the larder.  No squid in the salad, no clam in the chowder.  The Bible's word must be spread, so all can know the taste of paradise.

Insisting that children go to church, perhaps as part of being at a faith school, can have an interesting consequence - a dislike of churches.  When you are young time can pass very slowly, and there are few words which can describe the mind-numbing boredom that a child can suffer having to sit through a church service.  When I was young the services often including plodding hymns that droned on and never seemed to end, preachings about mortal sin that were rather upsetting, and, in later years, painful musicianship from an organist who seemed to care more about getting the notes out on time than whether or not they were the right ones.  

So now, churches seem oppressive.  I feel at best uneasy, and at worst claustrophobic.  Is this a common experience?

We don't let pets suffer.  If they are experiencing pain that cannot be overcome, we put an end to their suffering.  There are important campaigns to allow the same mercy to be shown to people who suffer due to illness.  We expect to keep farm animals in good conditions.  We don't always achieve it, but that is the aim.  So what about animals in the wild?   Suffering is a common part of an animal's life and death.  Some animals die through predation, some through illness and parasitism, and some through starvation.  Others may die slowly as a result of wounds obtained in fights for territory or mates.  Nature is absolutely full of suffering.  

So, this is question of morality:  should we do anything about it?  Do we have an obligation to reduce suffering generally when we know that it exists, and if so, should we put effort into making the lives of wild animals less full of pain and disease?  If this is hopelessly impractical (as it is), would there come a point at which we should euthanize Nature wiping out whole ecosystems as quickly as possible?

Discuss...

This is a collection of some fascinating facts about life on Earth that may change the way you consider it.  It did that for me!

1. The rain forests are the lungs of the planet.  If they go, we are in trouble.
Land plants could disappear and we would be fine.  The place where the mass of photosynthesis and oxygen production happens is the sea, and it is due to bacteria.  When it comes to the oxygen balance, land plants are pretty much neutral.

2. Life has gone through several mass extinctions, when it came close to being wiped out.
Not even close.  The vast majority of life hardly noticed the effects of the dinosaur-killer impact or mass volcanism long before.  Bacteria, archaea (look like bacteria), small plants, microbes, worms, fungi and most insects didn’t suffer in any way.  After the dinosaur-killer impact there are fossil records of vast growths of fungi and ferns.

3. Your body is human.  There are more than ten times as many non-human cells in your body than human cells.  They are in the form of bacteria and fungi, the vast majority of which are either harmless or helpful.

4. Most life on Earth lives because of sunlight.  Questionable.  It’s quite possible that most of the mass of life on our planet is in the form of bacteria and archaea living in seafloor mud and crustal rocks, and is based on chemical energy, not photosynthesis.

5. The dinosaurs are extinct.  No they aren’t.  Birds are dinosaurs and are doing very well indeed, including the brainy corvids which seem to thrive alongside humanity.

I'm sorry that I have not been responding to comments on my blog - I can't get to them via posterous!  Also, googlemail has been sending e-mail notifications of comments to Junk!  I think that Posterous is slowly dying.  I'll probably have to transfer to somewhere else.  I'll let y'all know if and when