I was intrigued recently when Michael Shermer, editor of e-Skeptic magazine, commenting about the judges decision in the David Irving libel case, wrote:
... the judges decision reminds me of a great quote from Isaac Asimov, from his book The Relativity of Wrong, 1989: "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The earth is of course much closer to a sphere than a flat plain and the judge concluded that while Deborah Lipstadt had been unable to prove that some of her statements about David Irving were true, on balance she was much closer to the truth than David Irving.
It concerns me when people make similar errors when discussing other issues. Take corruption. Corruption in some countries is endemic, tolerated, or treated as normal. Other countries do not condone or tolerate it and have a much lower level of corruption. When corruption does occur it may be exposed in the media and if appropriate legal action taken. There are probably few countries that are completely free of corruption but it is wrong to simply conclude that evidence of a single corrupt politician in a government that is almost free of corruption means that it is just as bad as a government where corruption is endemic. As the power of a government increases so does the potential for corruption. An open democracy, independent media, and sound legal systems are the best counters to political corruption. Corruption is not limited to politicians. As the corporate sector has increased in wealth and influence so has the potential for corruption. Ideally a democratic government should counter the excesses and corruption in the corporate area. The balance is lost and problems occur when business people and politicians form undesirable alliances and when the news media is unable to function independently of political or private ownership.
Another example is the use of rape by an army as a weapon of war. When Germany fell there was a big difference between the occupying army that handed out chocolates to children and prohibited rape, prosecuting those that did, and the army that gave its men the freedom of the city sending them out to rape more than 300,000 women and girls, some as young as 6, in one night! To say that all armies rape and are therefore as bad as one another is to be very wrong. The recent decision in The Hague to prosecute, for crimes against humanity, army officers that instructed their men to rape and who used rape as a weapon of war is a very welcome development.
Now think about this one. The very anti-English and anti-Anglican, Italian
Benedictine monk, Dom Felice Vaggioli, discussing the trade in preserved
Maori heads in the 1820s in his once suppressed History of New Zealand and
its Inhabitants, 1896, describes those who came from London to buy heads for
museums, exchanging a gun for a head, not as "just as bad as" but as
"wretches who were a thousand times crueller than the wild savage". The trade
ended in 1830 when Mr Darling, the Governor of NSW, became aware of the
implications of the trade and banned it.
IBM
Humanist Society of New Zealand 2000 Seminar:
Humanism, Freewill, and Determinism.
MARION MADDOX
Recently, at my niece's suggestion, I read Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia. This play looks at the possibility that mathematical equations can be used to model the universe and asks the question; how much can be tied up in such equations and how much is spontaneous? Thomasina, one of the characters in the play from the early 19th century, suggests that, "if you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could". If this were the case then we would have no freewill and would not be responsible for our future. But my talk is a little separated from the future that she paints - it is not a question so much of what happens to us as individuals but as my title suggests the idea of national identity, collectively. Our sense of our collective lives together. How spuriously do we understand the idea of being responsible for that, of that? Do we see our collective existence as prescribed in equations or prescribed somewhere else, or do we see it as something that we are responsible for? The way into asking that question that I want to take is to reflect on some research that I have been doing for the past year before I moved to New Zealand. Here I have to do one of those apologies that people do where I say I am not going to be talking directly about the New Zealand experience as I have only been, as you can tell from my accent, in New Zealand for I think three months yesterday.
I was previously working in Australia and for the last 12 months before I moved here to take up the job in religious studies I was research fellow at parliament house in Canberra where I was interviewing politicians about their religious beliefs and trying to find out how their views of religion affected their views of the political process. The answers that they gave me gave a very diverse view of how people understand the relationships between religious beliefs and what is supposed to be the freest of all activities - democratic practice in a representative parliament.
As you may have picked up from the media; questions of national identity have been burning at the Australian soul for the last few years - you might say that over the last ten or twenty years it has been the topic of most earnest radio talk-show discussion and soul searching, TV debate, and furious public meeting discussions. People have even started talking about questions of politics and identity in the pubs, displacing the afternoon football, which just shows how intense these things can become. It culminated in November last year when Australia had a referendum on whether to become a Republic.
Now the Republican debate itself was an interesting slant on questions of how we see ourselves as a community. To what extent do we see ourselves as throwing off the shackles of the past, or do we see ourselves as bound and conditioned and tied by our history. But along with the question about whether we should become a Republic there was another part of that debate that drew much less attention and that's the part that I want to talk about with you. This is the second referendum question that was put to the Australian people, which was about whether a new preamble should be appended to the Australian constitution. The Australian constitution - Australia unlike the New Zealand has a written constitution - and the constitution begins by listing the colonies that were coming together in federation in 1901 and says that they "come together humbly relying on the blessing of almighty God". Now this is a curious statement given that Australia likes to think of itself as the most secular nation in the world - although whenever any one actually writes that academically they put a little preface to say except perhaps for New Zealand. I'm hoping that what I've got to say may ring some bells and have some resonance with you even though what I'm talking about is research carried out in Australia about Australia.
Australia and New Zealand have another parallel; not only do they vie in the academic literature for the status of the most secular nation in the world, but we also share overt religious references in many of our most public and up-front National documents. In Australia it is the "humbly relying on the blessing of almighty God" clause in the Constitution. In New Zealand it is of course the National anthem with an invocation to the "God of nations". We both have parliaments that open each session with prayer, and so on. So as very secular nation's we nevertheless share some clear statements that our destiny, our collective destiny, is guided from somewhere else - that it is shaped by forcesbeyond ourselves - and so the preamble debate in Australia gave a particularly opportune moment to see some of this thinking in process. Is this just a symbolic expression or is there some deeper sense in which Australians are nervous about the idea is saying collectively as a nation, we are responsible for ourselves, we have freewill, we determine our future? That was the question that I wanted to explore in looking at the debate around putting a new preamble to the Australian constitution.
Because, you see, the curious thing with this, you might think that having a new preamble tacked on to the Australian Constitution would be a great moment for such a self consciously proudly secular nation as Australia to say, "time to get rid of the almighty God clause, we will have a secular preamble" - but no! The proposed draft preamble that was put to the people in the referendum began even more religiously than the 1901 one. The 1901 preamble merely remarked that the colonies "came together humbly relying on the blessing of almighty God", and that was a phrase that was hammered out through considerable debate and controversy at the time of federation as being the least committed phrase that anybody could think of. They rejected invoking the blessing of God, they rejected phrases that implied asking for the help of God, and they took "humbly relying" as the most distant phrase that they could think of. The proposed draft preamble began with the words "With hope in God, the Commonwealth of Australia is constituted by the equal sovereignty of all its citizens". "With hope in God" is surely a more committed phrase that talks about an orientation of people that the 1901 founders were careful to avoid. So you might expect that it would be a very controversial move, that the proposal to a put a new preamble to the Constitution would use such a committed phrase in secular 20thcentury Australia. But the thing that I found that surprised me greatly was that in fact it was much less controversial at the end of the 20th century than the proposal to put "humbly relying on the blessing of almighty God" had been at the end of the 19th century.
I want to tell you a little bit of a story of how the founders of the Australian federation came to that original phrase and then I want to tell you a little bit of a story of how the constitutional convention in 1998 came to its conclusion that a reference to God should remain and a little about the public debate that was almost inaudible but what very little there was tried to discuss the proposal just in the lead up to the 1999 referendum. I hope that in doing that we'll get a bit of a view about the roll that references to what are called civil religion, the idea of a religion that guides the nation, the part it plays in the sense of forming national identity, and the significance thatit has particular to this question of how do we collectively see ourselves as responsible for our own destinies or as pushed from somewhere else. It is important to realise that there was a constitutional convention in 1898 and there was also one in 1998 - when you're comparing the two it can get tricky and it is important not to confuse the two and say the wrong year.
If an unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said, then surely
an unexamined nation is not worth living in - and an unexamined national
identity is very difficult to find your way around. So how did we, to turn to
the question of examining the national identity, how did the founders of the
Australian constitution see what they were doing when they put that phrase
"humbly relying on the blessing of almighty God" at the beginning of
Australia's founding document? Well initially they didn't. Initially the
concerns of the founders found their strongest expression in the idea of
separation of church and state so they produced a draft constitution which
made no reference to the divine.There was a constitutional convention held in
Adelaide in 1897 where one of the delegates, Patrick Bing, proposed a motion
that the constitution should include a phrase invoking "the blessing of
almighty God". It was resoundingly defeated at a vote among those delegates.
A year later, the Melbourne convention in 1898 voted in favour of the phrase
which is there now, "humbly relying on the blessing of almighty God", but
they did it in the face of fierce debate.
It was a very controversial move. It came about mainly as a result of
extensive lobbying from the public. There was an organised petition campaign,
an organized letter writing campaign, and many of the speeches in the 1898
convention were along the lines that if we don't put this phrase in then the
whole federation Bill will be voted down. "We are putting it in for
politically strategic reasons because we need votes to get the federation
bill through and the idea of federation", one delegate said, "is a closed
book to the nationalist people, that this is a phrase that the people can
understand and relate to - we will put it there to get the bill through". But
there were also delegates, like the Tasmanian Douglas and another Tasmanian
Higgins, who voted against and argued enthusiastically and forcibly through
the Melbourne 1898 convention that to put a phrase like that in the
Constitution was to compromise Australian integrity. And Douglas, the
Tasmanian irascible Scott, said that, "I am, I suppose, as ordinarily and
religious as any other person here but I don't wear it upon my sleeve". He
kept saying, "will it make people more religious to put this phrase in? No it
will just be a sham and hum bug like much else that has gone on here," he
said. So in the final debate in Melbourne where the inclusion of that phrase
got passed it is very hard to see why it got passed!
The supporters of the phrase generally were silent. It got carried on the voices when it finally came to a vote. But they raise their voices only to vote yes, they didn't put a very articulated position in debate. The opponents were much more vocal and articulate so when you raise the constitutional convention debate of a century ago now it looks like a whole lot of people who were opposed to that clause getting together and saying why they were opposed and then suddenly it gets carried on the voices. The supporters didn't feel the need to present the strong argument. The anti-recognition cause, the position of those who didn't want the phrase in the Constitution was much stronger. So you might say that the "humbly relying on the blessing of almighty God" phrase only made it into the Australian constitution in the first place in the face of determined articulate thought out opposition. The reasons that the opponents didn't want it there were: that religion doesn't go in a public document, that separation of church and state is the most satisfactory guarantee of individual freedom, and they argued, that putting a clause like that into the constitution would create open slather in the future for restrictive legislation.
What do we find a century later? At the 1998 constitutional convention, not one person spoke against including a phrase that included a reference to God in the constitutional preamble. By 1998 church attendance in Australia has dropped dramatically, fewer people actually profess believe in God, but including God in the founding documents has apparently become dramatically less controversial than it was a century ago when people actually practiced religious belief in much higher numbers. Another curious thing, the people who spoke in favour of including a reference to God in the 1998 convention, fell over themselves to declare themselves as not being religiously committed. There were some people at the convention who were religiously committed who wanted it there but many of the speakers began with some variation of saying, "I'm not a religious person, but I think it should be there". So the New South Wales magistrate, Pat O'Shea, a Republican delegate to the convention, said, "I speak as probably the most convinced atheist in this hay-market. Janet Homes-A'Court, who is mainly famous in Australia for being the widow of Robert Homes-A'Court, but she is a very articulate promoter of the Republican cause and has really emerged as a public figure in the last few years or so. She got up and said, "as a Christian who cannot take the step of believing in God and therefore is not allowed to be a Christian, I think the phrase should be there". So you have all these people who say, "I don't actually believe in God but I do think God should be in the constitution"!
Now what does this tell us? A curious stance to take you may think. When I was interviewing politicians about their religious beliefs I found that pattern replicated. I was conducting most of my interviews before the November referendum and before the two major parties had come out with firm positions on the preamble. So I asked people; "tell me what you think about putting God in the Constitution"? Those who were religiously committed and regular practitioners of some religious tradition were divided. Some of them said they wanted it there, but many of them said they thought that it was inappropriate in a public document. One of them said, "well I think that the Australian nation is a good idea but I don't think that they should blame God for it". They implied that there was something improper about claiming divine sanction for the constitutional arrangements of a nation, which after all can always be improved upon. Some of them felt that it was a dangerous encouragement on the Jeffersonian principal of separation of church and state, but many people who told me that either they were atheists, or agnostics, or that they just had no religious convictions at all, told me that they thought that it should be there! They, again like the constitutional convention delegates, were enthusiastic God supporters!
Well, what reason did they give for this curious stance? Well, I found
that there were two arguments really that emerge and one of them I will deal
with briefly, the other one is of more relevance to this question of freewill
and whether we are responsible for our own destinies or whether it is thrust
upon us from somewhere else. The less relevant but still interesting argument
I found was that people who didn't have religious conviction thought that
having a reference to God in the Constitution would be what other people want
to see. They kept telling me, "well we are a very religiously diversified
nation and there are people from all over the world, they have brought their
traditional religions with them, and we must be nice to these people, so we
must include something for them". The fact that when I actually asked people
from immigrant traditions whether they thought it should be there they said
no because many of them came from countries where religious oppression was a
real and living part of their experience. But that didn't figure - the idea
seemed to be that it was a chance for secular Australia to demonstrate its
generosity, its openness, its spirit, its multi-cultural embrace, by
including something that it thought other people wanted.
The more interesting reason that people gave me, and the one that is more
interesting from the point of view of the question of where the sense of the
National direction comes from, was that people use the argument that we need
something in the constitution that is higher than politicians. We need some
level that the constitution refers to that tells our elected leaders that
that they are not the top of the tree, they're not the pinnacle of our
political structure. Now, what a curious thing to say, that an imaginary God
is better than a real constitutional structure! And this comes from the point
of view of people who told me that they had no religious convictions!
Who were the people who told me that? As I say, I was told that by
religious believers and unbelievers alike. I was told it by Republicans and
non-Republicans alike. Well you can kind of understand it coming from
monarchists. At the moment, because of course Australia voted against
becoming a Republic, so now, as before the constitution referendum, the crown
is the thing higher than politicians. So that argument didn't even figure in
the 1898 debate, they didn't need to raise the question of having something
higher than politicians because they knew that there was the crown, the
invisible level, or a kind of imagine spot, where the buck stops, that tells
politicians that they are not to touch the critical structure. Take that away
and maybe we need a reference to the divine, even if you don't think that it
actually exists, as a kind of symbolic representation of something beyond
politicians.
For Republicans it's a slightly stranger view to put because in classical
Republican theory there is something higher than politicians and that is the
people. To an old-fashioned democrat like me, I think, well what happens to
us? We are supposed to be the source of power. Whether you're a religious
believer or not that argument in its strongest form is compelling. It says,
it doesn't matter what the individual beliefs of citizens are, that's not
relevant to the question of political structure, what is relevant is the idea
that the people are the source of power. This applies whether your personal
belief thing has a religious commitment on not. Nevertheless, the question
that is relevant to political structure is that the people are the final
arbitrator, the thing that is both the real giver of political legitimacy but
also the imaginary or psychological stopping point just as the crown is in
the monarchy.
The fact that this argument, that we need something higher than
politicians, came to me so often from self-professed Republicans gave me
cause to think about this question of how does an apparently deeply secular
nation like Australia see itself in terms of national identity and sense of
autonomy? How do we understand ourselves as being responsible for our own
destiny? Well looking through the debates of the constitutional convention I
found that classical Republican arguments were referred to. It wasn't that
the Republican delegates there didn't know the idea that power comes from the
people, they did. When the topic was, where is the source of power, then they
would say power comes from the people and political legitimacy has to come
from the people - they knew it. They knew that was the right answer and when
it was necessary they brought it out. But when the discussion was about
something else, like the right way of phrasing a preamble then they slipped
back into the assumption that we need something higher than ourselves, that
people aren't good enough, that there has to be something beyond, even if it
is a force that you yourself don't personally believe in.
As a teacher I'm familiar with what happens when you try to teach a class
something and it's a new idea, or an idea that hasn't been used or they
haven't been exposed to for long time. If you set an exam question that says,
"what is x plus y?" then they will be able to tell you that x plus y equals
z. But if we set an exam question about something else where they just have
to use in passing the knowledge that x plus y equals z, they may not be able
to bring it up on call. They may revert to old assumptions. Educators often
say they haven't internalised that idea. They know it when that's the topic
of what you are talking about but when you're talking about something else
and that assumption is just going along in passing then they revert to old
assumptions and that seemed to me to be what was happening in the Republican
debate in Australia.
One of the arguments that Republicans put for why we should become a Republic - I keep saying we, I hope you will just understand I'm speaking as an expatriate here - one of the arguments that the Republican camp put was; "well, Australia is a Republic already in all but name. What is the crown? What is the crown, it does nothing. Effectively we've been a republic for a long time." Looking at the debate about putting God in the preamble to the Constitution, I don't think so. I don't think that the idea of people as being the source of power has really bitten all that deeply because the regularity with which people would trot out this idea, renege on their idea of already having something higher than politicians, and it wouldn't be contradicted. Not one person in the 1998 convention spoke against that idea and when it was brought out in other forums of public debate, in newspapers, in radio, in discussions and so on, it was never that I could find contradicted. That suggests to me that Republicanism in Australia is a bit like the x plus y equals z proposition for a class who are unfamiliar with it - in that when you ask people in opinion polls, do they in think that Australia should become a Republic more than half of them say yes.
The referendum was lost because the republican vote was split over what model of the Republic Australia should become. But more than half of Australians say yes, that Australia should become a Republic. This discussion about putting God in the Constitution suggests to me that what it means to be an independent people responsible for our own destination hasn't really bitten very deeply. The idea that destiny is still controlled from outside, or has to have some final court of appeal beyond the people, beyond the collective life of the community who make up the nation, has some way to go before it strikes home.
I haven't said very much at all about the idea of individual freewill and I have avoided that partly because the philosophical debates in that area have been so thoroughly thrashed over that it is fairly well covered ground. To me the more interesting question that follows on from that - the next question is, thinking about ourselves collectively - what does it mean to talk about the idea of autonomy as being responsible for our own destiny? The conventional answer in democratic countries like Australia and New Zealand is to say; well of course we are, and we all believe we are all the time. But the Republican debate in Australia, particularly that discussion, limited as it was about whether or not to include a reference to God in the constitution, seemed to suggest that it wasn't really a debate about belief or unbelief in God at all, because so many of the proponents were putting whatever into a deity in whom they didn't actually believe, but whose symbolic function was too important to be dispensed with. It seemed to say much more about this very question of autonomy and identity than it did about any actual position about existence or otherwise of the divine.
Marion Maddox spoke without a written paper. Her talk was recorded, transcribed, and adapted for print by Iain Middleton.
DR MARION MADDOX is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. Marion Maddox holds a PhDs in Theology, Flinders, 1992 and Political Philosophy, UNSW, 2000. She has lectured in Religious studies and Australian Politics in various Australian Universities and was most recently Australian Fellow at Parliament House, Canberra, where she wrote a book on religion in Australian politics, to be published later this year, 2000.
Humanist Society of New Zealand 2000 Seminar:
Humanism, Freewill, and Determinism.
This paper was presented at the Humanist Society of New Zealand seminar on freewill and determinism in Wellington in October and then at the Australis 2000 Congress in Sydney in November.
Introduction
Choice! Are we free to choose - to make ethical decisions - or is our brain like a machine that must by its very nature follow a path that is determined by its structure and environmental programming? This is the central question of any discussion on ethical decision-making.
This subject has generated a lot of debate, often bitter and sometimes political, but with developments in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, the study of the behaviour of the great apes and other animals, and artificial intelligence, we may now be closer to understanding and answering this old problem. These developments are challenging some people's beliefs.
Real choice is not any choice - total freedom and chaos are synonymous - it is the choice between viable and ethically acceptable alternatives. Real freedom is a constraint on total freedom - but not a constraint that prevents the exercise of viable and ethically acceptable alternatives.
To examine this question of choice we need to look at the function of the human brain and how people have regarded it, modelled it, or attempted to explain it and some of the muddled thinking that has occurred along the way.
What follows has come from my life long interest in the convergence of evolution, animal and human behaviour, the development of machines, aspects of philosophy and other disciplines, as well as my own attempts to model and explain the operation of the human brain. I have had experience in the development of complex electronic decision making machines involving many hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of active components and as early as 1967 developed models of the human brain that have been both predictive and have withstood the test of time.
The anthropocentric and the anthropomorphic errors.
Over the years, various errors in thinking have occurred regarding the nature and operation of the human brain. These included the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic errors.
The anthropocentric error is to argue that the human brain, or mind, is somehow intrinsically different from that of animals and that it is wrong to compare the two or that man is of ultimate importance and the centre of all things. A past example of the anthropocentric error was the assumption that the earth must be the centre of the universe (Aristotle and Ptolemy) as man was somehow unique in the universe. Modern examples are the assumption that only humans are conscious (Steven J Gould) and that animals have no ethical capability, no ability to reason or learn, have no emotion, and react only to their instinctive programming (Descartes) and that this will also apply to machines in the future. The anthropocentric error is still very common today.
At the other extreme, the anthropomorphic error attributes human like qualities to the brains and minds of animals, to say that they think using language of human sophistication or have human like motives for their actions - a sophistication and motivation that are in reality well beyond the capacity of their brains.
Reality is a balance between the two - an understanding that we evolved from a common ancestor with the chimpanzee, that we differ from chimpanzees by just 1.6% of DNA, and that our brains are larger and more sophisticated versions of the brains that came before us. The brains of mammals are similar in function to our own but restricted by their smaller size and processing power and the lack of some specialised areas.The mechanistic or computational model.
The brain is by its very nature a machine but comparing the human mind with machines constructed by humans has also produced errors - often because of a misunderstanding of the nature of machines.
The cybermorphic error is to assume that the function of the human brain is directly comparable to a machine, usually the latest and most sophisticated constructed by humans. Each new development in machines has led to attempts to explain the function of the brain using the latest technology. People have attempted to explain the brain by comparing it to sophisticated hydraulic systems, telephone exchanges, and over the last fifty years, the latest and most sophisticated computers. In reality, the architecture of the brain remains significantly different to each of these machines. Attempts to model the human brain should fit the model to the human brain and not fit the brain to the best machine model available. At the other extreme, the anti-cybernetic error is to argue that the human brain is fundamentally different from all machines and is therefore not in any way mechanistic.
The recognition that the brain is an information-processing machine, also referred to as the computational model, is fundamental to any understanding of the brain. If we do not take this as axiomatic, we need to invoke the supernatural to explain the function of the brain. Alternatives to the computational model include the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) that proposes a fundamental difference between biology and culture, and some quasi-metaphysical explanations, such as Stephen Penrose's that involves the production of consciousness from fluctuations in quantum physics. Margaret Mead's now largely discredited Coming of age in Samoa (1) was one of the founding documents of the Standard Social Science Model (2).
The mechanistic nature of the brain has long been realised by some thinkers. Pioneers, such as Charles Babbage and Augusta Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace, realised that they could programme a general-purpose information-processing machine to emulate various other special purpose machines. This realisation led to Augusta Byron developing the fundamentals of computer programming in the early 1800s. (3) Some fifty years ago, Alan Turing realised that this might ultimately lead to machines that could emulate or think in a comparable manner to humans. He proposed a test, now known as the "Turing Test", to determine if or when an artificial brain had become equivalent to that of a human brain.
But this has led to another extreme view - the hard deterministic view - a view that originated with the predictable nature of the motion of the planets and stars - the belief that Newton's physics would eventually explain how everything works as it had explained the motion and the movement of the astronomical bodies. The view that if we just knew where all the atoms were, and what they were doing, it would be possible to write equations, or one big equation, to predict all aspects of the future including the output of our brains. It led to the view that the human brain functions like a machine, like a very complicated piece of clockwork, and that it is therefore just as predictable as clockwork. Consequently, any freedom to choose between alternatives is no more than an illusion. A third corollary was the assumption that as mind had no physical reality it was a nebulous and meaningless concept and that consequently any attempt to distinguish between mind and brain is meaningless. These three factors, the mechanistic nature of the brain, its predictability, and the sameness of mind and brain formed the basis of the hard deterministic view.
The view that mind and brain are the same reached its zenith with the publication of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind in 1949 (4). Ryle sought to dispel the myth of Descartes' separation of physical and mental existences and establish beyond all doubt that mind and brain are the same. While his motive in attempting to dispel the possibility that mind has some separate and perhaps supernatural nature is laudable, he went too far when he argued that brain and mind were invariably and inseparably the same.
During the twentieth century, a line of thinking involving people such as Watson, Pavlov, and Skinner developed that held that that the brain was no more than a set of conditioned reflexes and that if we knew enough about a person's learning or conditioning we would be able to predict their behaviour. They devised experiments that appeared to confirm this hypothesis. Unfortunately, this did not account for all of human or even animal behaviour. Protagonists of this view held that freedom to choose between alternatives was an illusion as conditioning predetermined behaviour - consequently all choice was an illusion. This was a rather fatalistic outlook but they went on to argue that while real freedom was an illusion this did, or should not, prevent people from continuing to act as if they did have the freedom to choose - freewill!
But for machines the hard deterministic view fails on all three grounds.
· First, absolute prediction is not possible. Real limitations in physics and information theory, without invoking the uncertainty principal of quantum physics, make absolute prediction impossible. (5) It is just not possible to assemble all the information necessary to achieve total prediction and all prediction is therefore probabilistic in nature. Prediction becomes particularly difficult when dealing with an inherently noisy machine like the human brain - a machine that relies on noise as part of its normal function. Noise is unpredictable, not because we define it as being unpredictable, but because practical and theoretical physical limitations make total prediction impossible.
· Secondly, machines can exercise choice. Machines specifically built or programmed to do so can make choices between alternatives. It is possible to build freewill into a machine. It is also possible to make a machine conscious - not a simple product of complexity but a result of a deliberate architecture. The world's communication network is very complex - comparable in complexity to the human brain - but it is not conscious as it lacks the necessary architecture to make it conscious. (6)
· Thirdly, the separation of mind and brain is a valid concept - particularly when we are dealing with artificial intelligence. The mind is the product of the brain and is informational in nature. We can transfer artificial minds from one machine or brain to another. (7) This is done by transferring the information that one brain contains to another identical brain that then continues to function with the mind of the original brain. This opens up the possibility of duplicating or cloning minds, or transmitting them over great distances by radio.
For biological brains, like the human brain, the separation of the mind from the brain is a great deal more difficult, if not impossible, but it remains valid to consider brain and mind as separate concepts. People have preserved the brains of Einstein and Lenin but their minds have definitely gone.
We are left with a brain that is still deterministic - a machine - but a brain that can not be predicted with absolute certainty by any outside agency - a brain that is able to choose between alternatives - and a brain where it is meaningful to consider brain and mind as separate qualities.
So where does freedom lie in the function of the brain? To answer this it is useful to consider some of the parameters used to describe the brains functioning. Pairing parameters to form a straight line or single dimension can improve our understanding and building up a set of such lines gives us a multidimensional perspective of the brain. We do however need to exercise some caution as there is always a danger that linking parameters will lead to over simplification.
The first dimension: Instinct - Learning.
We might consider this as a line with instinct at one end and learning at the other with the split between the two lying somewhere along this line. The instinct-learning debate has often been bitter and sometimes political. Objectivity however demands that we look at this from a more rational perspective.
In 1987, G. E. Hinton and S. J. Nolan published an article titled "How Learning can guide evolution". (8) Using computer simulations, they were able to show that neural networks with a level of preprogramming learnt faster than those with no preprogramming. This means that animals born with instinct, preprogramming, would learn faster and consequently would move to the reproductive phase quicker, giving them an evolutionary advantage. However, with too much preprogramming the simulated animal started to loose its ability to adapt to its environment. The stable point was the fifty percent level. This confirmed an hypothesis proposed by the psychologist Mark Baldwin almost a hundred years earlier. Indications are that this balance does hold for natural animals. The nature versus nurture debate looks set to end in a draw. There are indications however that the specific balance point may vary for specific behaviours but this may be because the area under consideration is defined too narrowly.
Given that we are the products of evolution, we can suggest that as larger brains evolved the proportion of instinct and learning has remained constant. Both instinct and our ability to learn have increased as our brain size has increased and we might expect that other attributes, such as reason, belief, and emotion, also increase in proportion.Instinct.
In the past animals have been considered to be prisoners of instinct while humans are able to use learning and reason to choose a course of action.
Should we be concerned that instinct limits our freedom to choose and act? Yes, if instinct gave us only one possibility. Very small brains like those of insects carry only limited amounts of instinct resulting in very specific actions that we can easily study and record. The small size of the brain limits the alternatives that it might store.
As brains increase in size, the potential for alternative instinctive behaviours increases and we see more alternative behaviours occurring. Alternative instincts give choice, but how do animals choose between the alternatives that their instincts provide? Instinct is part of the answer. Consider the instincts for fight or flight. As survival itself is dependent on a quick answer, we and other animals come pre-programmed with instincts that will choose the most appropriate instinct to put into action. Thus we might see first, second and even third order instincts. In other cases, learning can provide the answer - giving us the ability to choose between pre-programmed alternatives. Reason is another possibility.
There are indications that ethics, which many consider the product of either learning or reason, are in part instinctive or have an instinctive base - ethical instincts developed by evolution to help propagate our genes. A number of books now outline how work on this proposition over the last 20 years has shown that evolution may develop ethics that are then inherited as instincts. Using reason, we might modify our ethics and produce a more human set of ethical beliefs.
Learning.
Can learning provide us with more alternatives? It depends on the learning.
The conditioning of Pavlov's dogs and Skinner's rats probably reduced the
alternatives that they could exercise - it resulted in a loss of choice for
the animals. In a real situation, learning has the potential to either reduce
the alternatives that we might choose or to increase them. It is very
dependent on the learning. Religious and political ideologies both tend to be
forms of learning that reduce and eliminate real and viable choice.
The second dimension: belief - reason and deduction.
The second dimension is one that considers the difference between reason and deduction on one hand and belief on the other. Just like instinct and learning, larger brains mean an increased capacity to both believe and to reason. Both belief and reason have an instinctive basis - we are programmed with the capacity to believe rather than with specific beliefs, and we are programmed with the ability to reason but not with specific reasoning. Belief, like instinct, is a short cut to survival - if we have a set of beliefs that aid us in our everyday survival, we are able to make quick choices. The hunter will hunt where he believes there is suitable prey. He will avoid dangerous animals because he believes that they will harm him. All animals exhibit belief and the indications are that the capacity to believe increases with brain size.
Reason is a luxury item - something we can do when we have time. Again, we might expect a balance point. As the quantity of belief increases it limits our ability to adapt to a new situation while too little belief means that we must use reason or deduction and this slows us down.
Belief is an instinctive phenomenon and we are born with the capacity to believe rather than with specific beliefs, except perhaps in some instances such as the fear of snakes or the fear of heights that appear to be instinctive. What we come to believe is dependent on our learning and reason. If we are lucky, we build up a set of beneficial beliefs. Influenced by the wrong learning or poor reasoning we may develop a set of harmful beliefs. Other beliefs are neutral.
Good reasoning is the key to sound beliefs and sound decision-making. Reason can reprogramme our beliefs. Like learning to ride a bicycle, once we have reasoned something out the answer forms part of our future beliefs enabling us to take the answer for granted.
A good set of beliefs will allow us to choose between all reasonable alternatives. A poor set of beliefs limits our freedom to act. Similarly, good reason makes us open to all viable alternatives while poor reason limits our choices. That so many people hold beliefs of such a wide variety and often-irrational nature is probably indicative of poor standards of reason or the still primitive level of our evolution. Nurturing and developing reason leads to sound answers and beliefs.
Belief is also the most dangerous thing we have. People kill and die for their beliefs. More than 100 million people were killed in the 20th century, some for their own beliefs but most for other people's religious and political beliefs. It is healthy to periodically question our own beliefs, or perhaps heed the words of the Dalai Lama who, on a visit to Wellington in 1996 said, "it is better to give up one's beliefs than to kill for them".There are indications that those who rely on belief rather than reason display greater self-confidence. With 13 year olds, the more intelligent seem to show a preference for reason but lack self-confidence.
Not all reason is what it seems. Rationalisation after the fact is a process whereby we create the delusion that we have come to a reasoned and rational decision when we have either acted randomly or as the result of a stimulus that we are not aware of. There are indications that rationalisation after the fact may account for a significant portion of what we consider reason before the fact. Learning and instinct can also create the illusion of reason. We learn to behave in a specific manner but consider that we have reasoned our responses. When instinct drives us, we still give reasons for our actions. After the act, we create an illusion of reason and of self-determination! The existence of rationalisation after the fact does not mean however that we cannot apply pre-emptive reason to solve a problem or make reasoned choices.
The third dimension: Emotion and dispassion.
Emotion is an often-overlooked part of the decision-making matrix. The brain
has evolved a complex control system based on emotion. Because the basic
structures evolved in our reptilian ancestors, many commentators regard
emotion as primitive and something to overcome or avoid while others argue
that emotion is either an animal or infantile quality and that our reason
takes us beyond emotion. Others assume that emotion is largely a human
quality and that animals either lack human emotions or have none at all. The
reality lies between these extremes.
Emotion, we might surmise, has also evolved and expanded to meet the needs of a larger brain. Just as a larger brain increases the capacity for learning, instinct, reason, and belief, it also increases the capacity for emotion. We therefore have more emotion than animals with smaller brains and this emotion is likely to be adapted to our human needs. Emotion is instinctive, but influenced by learning, and to some extent reason, and learning and reason may reprogramme emotion.
In the early 1990s, Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa reported that emotion is central to the process of rational thought. Psychological testing of nearly two-dozen patients with damage to their prefrontal cortex, that had caused them to lose the ability to experience emotion, revealed that while their intelligence appeared to be unchanged they now lacked the ability to make rational decisions and seemed unbothered by this condition. Damasio concluded that emotion is a key element in learning and decision-making. Patricia Churchland was quick to see the significance of this work, both in the inheritance of ethics but also in the need to use emotion in the teaching of ethics. (9)
The discoveries relating emotion and reason caused a lot of interest at the time but confirmed the hypothesis that they were linked that I had proposed in my private papers as early as 1967.
Emotion may well act to constrain our choices but this will be beneficial if it eliminates undesirable or dangerous alternatives. Too much emotion may restrict our freedom unnecessarily.
The fourth dimension: Freedom (Freewill and determinism).
Freewill and determinism, it was thought, formed another dimension with
freewill being the opposite of determinism. If we are deterministic in
nature, like a machine, then we could have no freedom. All our thoughts and
actions must be determined by the operation of our machine like brain.
Philosophers looked in vain for an uncaused cause.
This assumption - that these two concepts must be mutually exclusive or incompatible - fails. We do exercise choice. It is easy to construct or programme a machine to exercise choice and to provide such a machine with a will. This leads to a compatibilist position - freewill and determinism are compatible.
We exercise freewill when we are able to choose freely between viable alternatives, without our choice being constrained, or determined, by any other internal or external agent. We exercise freewill when the decision is the product of our own mind. We only exercise freewill when there are viable alternatives to choose between and when we could have chosen otherwise. In some cases, the choice may be a random one; in other cases, it could be a reasoned one. (10)
In 1967, an examination of the model of the brain that I was developing at that time led me to develop a compatibilist position. I thought that I may have achieved something new but others, such as Thomas Hobbs in 1656, considered the compatibilism of freewill and determinism much earlier. In 1971, Frankfurt published an article developing the compatibilist position in the Journal of Philosophy (11). Unaware of this I published an article in New Zealand Humanist in 1978 that outlined a compatibilist position. (12) The compatibilist position is now largely accepted.
The question that we should be examining here is the degree of freedom that we have. As we have seen, instinct and learning, belief and reason, and emotion, may all act to limit the possibilities open to us. Such limitations are acceptable and desirable when they limit us to real choice between ethically acceptable alternatives from the unlimited possibilities open to us. We need to be concerned however if the limits to our choice prevent us from choosing between acceptable and viable alternatives.
Conclusion
As our brains have evolved, instinct, learning, reason, belief, and emotion
have all increased to give us more alternatives to choose from and an
enhanced ability to make reasoned choices between these alternatives.
Unfortunately these same factors may sometimes also place unreasonable
limitations on our choices.
We do have alternatives, we can make choices, and we can make ethical
choices. We have a greater capacity for choice than animals with smaller
brains and if our choices are not constrained unnecessarily by learning and
belief we have greater freedom to act. We are not compelled to act only in
accordance with our instincts or our beliefs.
We can also increase another person's ability to choose. A person can be
empowered, to use modern terminology, by another person. Simply by saying to
someone "you may choose the best course of action" you can give them the
freedom to choose between alternatives. A freedom that they may not have
previously realised that they had.
Similarly, we can give a person responsibility. You can say to a person, "you are responsible for choosing the best, or correct, course of action". Moreover, we can tell them that they are responsible for the actions they choose and when they make the wrong choice, that they are responsible! Giving a person responsibility in this way, by clearly pointing out to them that they can choose without reference to the authority of another, often has dramatic results inducing people to think about their actions and make better decisions.
Kohlberg
We can speculate on the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. He found that as children grew and developed into adults their ethical reasoning developed according to a set pattern progressing through 6 distinct levels. Most adults reached levels three or four but only a minority went onto levels 5 and 6. Does this indicate that these levels of ethical reason are pre-programmed or instinctive, or does it indicate that they are like building blocks; you can only move to the next level of reason if you have understood and consolidated the previous level, or does it indicate that the levels are the products of learning?
Iain Middleton is a professional electrical engineer with a long interest in all aspects of the operation of the human brain. In the 1970's he was involved in pioneering work on large scale, multi-dimensional, electronic decision making networks designed to replicate the decisions made by human operators. He is currently President of the Humanist Society of New Zealand and Editor of New Zealand Humanist.
References
This column focuses on Secular Humanism as experienced in the day to day living of one person, in this particular culture, at this point in time - attempting to offer some instances of how our emotional lives need to be valued, linked to, and finally brought under control by, our powers of reason - aiming to provide a balance to the intellectuality of much of the writing about our life stance.
Recently I was reading Confessions of a Philosopher by Brian Magee, (Weidenfeld, 1997) a hefty tome of nearly 500 pages, and it saturated me in both emotion and intellectual discovery. The book had belonged to Eileen Bone, one of those remaining after other selections had been made from her rich collection (that had not been underlined or annotated!) Happily I read to page 115, focussing on Eileens underlinings and comments - and there they stopped. Here it was, then, that her sudden death had interrupted her study! Further into the book, and beginning to wonder about the authors conclusions, I turned to the last chapter - where the underlining began again to the very last page- Eileens mind and mine could still work along similar lines!
And because Eileen had existed and bought books like this, I was able to enlarge my understandings of philosophical questions and philosophers through this autobiography of a man passionate about his interest in the deeper questions of philosophy, a totally secular humanist, committed also to working in the real world, outside of academia.Magee is a great admirer of Kant - but he has also been a lifelong friend of Karl Popper. His assessment of the contributions of both philosophers is illuminating, but he is able to present Popper, not only as a philosopher but also as a very human person. I now have before me the two volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies, retrieved from the depths of the local Library store. I plan to really read what was previously only read about.
The very first page engages me with its support for piecemeal social engineering as against Utopian social engineering (market forces?); and the constant vigilance needed because of our yet only partial transition from the tribal or closed society with its submission to magical forces - to the open society which sets free the critical powers of man. All this as totally relevant today as when it was first written in 1947! And I believe, along with Paul Kurtz and the Humanist Manifesto 2000, that we have no choice but to engage with these problems on a worldwide scale, as well as in our own patch. (Next month Ill have the opportunity to share these ideas with my U3A philosophy group.)
Of my abiding memories of the Australis 2000 Congress, one is the optimism of IHEU President, Levi Fragell, who referred to our life stance as our rational humaneness and saw current happenings in countries such as China as developments towards the growth of greater free-thought, world wide. Another memories include the certainty of Paul Kurtz that basically secular humanism is ethics, and so needs to be ever more clearly asserted as the cutting edge of thinking about any future for our world - but also his disappointment with the current strength of the Australian Humanist movement compared with his previous experiences of it. Both points of view seemed very much parts of their proponents personalities at that time, but are also worthy of further investigation as valid opinions worthy of further investigation.
Reflecting on the Humanist Congress sessions around secular ceremonies in Australia left me, also, with a feeling of disappointment. Emphasis was placed on the provision of interesting, professional alternatives to church ceremonies, with little or no mention of the role that Humanist ethics plays in it all. The comparison was more with the competitive, marketing approach to secular ceremonies that is rapidly developing here in New Zealand. A sincere Humanist ex-celebrant from Adelaide told me how at one time he had officiated at seven marriage ceremonies in a day, and that was presumably before many appropriate words could be lifted directly from the Internet!
All this seemed quite a contrast to the training work for officiants being organised by the BHA. If the essence of the marriage ceremony is no longer a contract before a god, then surely it should focus on the unique needs and situation of the couple concerned, and their family - all different and requiring time and skill to elicit and package into their special ceremony, in an open, honest, patently Humanist way.
Ian Ellis-Jones, President of the Humanist Society of New South Wales, was the Australis 2000 speaker whose views remain with me most, probably because they echo my own. In the abstract of his Making Humanism More Relevant, he writes that religion has given, and still gives, a satisfying emotional support and a feeling of belonging to the universe, whose comfort remains long after the substance of the former faith has been relinquished.
Humanism is also about belonging, to a people and a tradition, and must show how it can appeal to the human heart as well as to the head. It should be presented more as an exuberant and emotionally appealing way of life, the good life, a philosophy of happiness, since, as Ellis-Jones wrote, No thought, concept, principle or idea can ever really take hold of a person unless that person emotionalises it. With their planned small February ceremony and picnic around the place where Eileen Bones ashes are buried Wellington Humanists acknowledge all these things - and the need to organise to really make things happen well.
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Jeanne van Gorkom is a Humanist marriage celebrant, council member, and Taranaki member of the Humanist Society of New Zealand.
Sydney, the city that is moving from Dreamtime to Eternity, was the site chosen for the Australis 2000 congress. A city that Asian visitors see as undeniably European but where European visitors make trips to the suburbs to see what is to them the somewhat foreign architecture of the modern houses.
Sydney, a city with an often-dubious past, traces its origins to the landing of Captain Arthur Phillip on the 26 January 1788 with 568 male and 191 female convicts. Claiming the legal fiction of terra nullius - a land without people, they displaced the original inhabitants who had occupied the land for more than 40,000 years and began the process that led to the denial of citizenship to these people for the next 179 years. It was in Sydney that Governor William Bligh, formerly captain of the Bounty, survived his second rebellion - the Rum Rebellion, and where Samual Marsden acting as local magistrate earned the name of the flogging parson before moving further East to indulge his passion for mixing land speculation with missionary work.
Travellers arriving at the airport find incorrect signs, guidebooks to Sydney available in Japanese only, must queue at the information desk to ask directions because the signs are inadequate and master the irrationality of a $2 coin smaller in diameter than the $1 coin! The temperatures are in the low twenties but humidity often near 100% and frequent rain makes exertion uncomfortable. Hotel rooms are relatively expensive, lack telephones, and public telephones that accept credit cards cannot be found.
In the city, the Philips traffic control system seeks Eternity by beeping incessantly at intersections, a blue line marks the route of the Olympic marathon, a mafia style wedding is taking place at St Marys Catholic Cathedral and Mormon missionaries, displaced from Fiji by the political situation, saturate nearby Hyde Park and harass visitors. Entertaining commuters, two attractive young women eat fire on Circular Quay. Japanese tourists queue to be photographed sitting in Mrs Macquaries chair and Asian faces outnumber others in Chinatown, known for its excellent restaurants offering a range of Asian foods.
While the quality and range of food is good the prices in inner city food courts, boosted by the new and unnecessarily complicated GST, are 35% above comparable New Zealand food courts. Some restaurants refuse to supply a jug of water insisting that the customer pays for bottled water - but bottled water, unlike tap water, is unregulated and of dubious quality, more than 30% has been found to contain higher than recommended levels of bromate that may cause diarrhoea, nausea, depression of the central nervous system and may be carcinogenic! The creator of the sustainable home collects rainwater from the roof of his home to use for drinking, flushing away the first fall hoping to keep his water free of city pollution.
Sydney is well supplied with museums and other attractions, but most charge. The Australian Museum features an excellent display showing the evolution of man while the power house museum features such treasures as a working original James Watt stationary steam engine, three stories high but producing about the same power as a small car, one of George Stephensons original locomotives, and an original de Laval steam turbine. The Art Gallery of New South Wales has a good collection of Australian and foreign art.
Sydney, like Australia struggles for recognition and a place in the world, its people no longer sure if they are the inhabitants of a country with a small population erect symbols of their emergence as a modern nation. Eternity, in the copperplate handwriting once used to mysteriously chalk the word on the pavements of Sydney, is emblazoned in fireworks above the harbour, on the bridge that locals sometimes call the coat hanger, to welcome the new millennium and is broadcast to a worldwide TV audience.
The inhabitants, a friendly and easygoing people present a mask to the world that often hides an underlying efficiency and competence. They strive to overcome the arrogance of Europe and America that sees them as no more than colonials with a largely convict background that can offer nothing valuable. A survey in England established that 85% of English doctors rejected the well-established connection between helicobacter pylori and duodenal ulcers, presumably because it was an Australian discovery!
North of the bridge is the home of the descendants of Skippy, of TV and Cornflake fame, and a temple where the Baháí claim an infallibility beyond all other infallibilities. In Sydney living on the wrong side of the tracks has real meaning. A small percentage of Sydneys population, most of them business people, accountants, lawyers, and doctors, who are adherents of Anglicanism and are of southern English origin, live in the northern suburbs and through arrogance and greed have managed to corner the ownership of 50% of Australias wealth. Living in their million or multimillion dollar homes they care little that the wealth they hold is generated by the work of others or that many in the city struggle for adequate income and accommodation, instead blaming the less fortunate for the position that they have in part at least, foistered onto them.
Yet Australia is not without a conscience. The need to say sorry has consumed the national psyche and has probably prevented them from moving on to finding real and lasting solutions to real problems. Veteran aboriginal activist, Isabell Coe, who spoke at the opening of Australis 2000, later performed fire magic at the Glebe market before moving on to occupy a now otherwise unoccupied island claiming terra nullius.
Paddys Market offers a few bargains but foists souvenir pens that dont work on unsuspecting tourists. At the Rozelle market a second-hand book dealer buys bags of books while a young woman plays the guitar and sings pleasantly. Raucous, guttural sounds emanating from highly amplified live music at the Glebe Market disturbs the tranquillity of the spacious grounds and old buildings of Sydney university where the only statue is one of Gilgamesh erected in honour of one of the worlds oldest pieces of literature. Near by, the high rise buildings of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), built in the city with very limited grounds. It is the venue for the Australis 2000 congress. The chosen lecture theatres being only a few steps from Paddys Market, Haymarket, and Chinatown.
The first afternoons sessions, reported here, were chaired by Babu Gogineni of the IHEU.
Veteran aboriginal activist, Isabell Coe spoke about some of her activities. These included establishing and maintaining the tent embassy in Victoria Park for 28 years and the establishment of other organisations. Her people, she said, had been fighting a war for 28 years in a country where the Prime Minister would not say sorry to the stolen generation. We pray - we as human beings have to link up, we believe that we have the oldest ceremonies in the world.
Dr John Hirshman, a patron of the Humanist Society of NSW who worked for many years for the WHO spoke on Bioethics in 2000 and beyond.
Advances in Biotechnologies with marked ethical implications have been extraordinary in recent decades and this will accelerate in the new millennium. The promises and possibilities of bioethics go far beyond that available just a few years ago. There is a great need for a humanist approach. A Belgium based group is tackling some of the issues but they are not sufficiently up to date. Greater computer power means that we are close to completing the mapping of the Human Genome - we know what chromosome does what and where to find some genes. The ethical implications are great in detecting disease susceptibility for employment, insurance, and genetic counselling.
We need to understand what made that 4% jump in our DNA from chimp to human [probably closer to 1.3%]. We still carry a lot of the baggage of aggression of our ancestors, tempered at times with compassion, the debt that we owe to animals.We will be able to isolate genetic anomalies and sometimes repair them. The immense complexity of gene interactions - not one gene alone will be responsible for most malformations and diseases - will still provide uncertainties in cloning and organ replacement techniques. Our expectations should not be too high. Simple anomalies may be cured but diabetes is more difficult. DNA testing is a forensic tool but early DNA scanning is possible and population scanning will advance further. Not all technologies will be benign and some can be abused.
IVF is now reasonably well understood but multiple births are a problem. IVF should be available without restriction but cost is a problem. Complete IVF (as proposed by Aldous Huxley) may be a long time coming. The use of animals to gestate other species is not acceptable; pandas should not be gestated in bears. The use of stem cells may become feasible allowing the regeneration of brains, etc. He said, I am opposed to animal experimentation that is not fully justified. Prolonging lifespan will cause problems - years without quality of life need caution. Dr Hirshman urged a collaborative view of all. Humanist ethics remain vital.
In response to questions and comments Dr Hirshman said I hate the idea that man has dominion over animals - this is totally wrong - I dislike animal experimentation - it makes us lesser humans. Access to donor sperm is controversial, it may be possible to identify the parent, and this has happened.
Jitendra Sethi said the aim of respect toward animals would lead to vegetarianism and Victor Bien noted that the Japanese have no respect for a ban on whaling but are not part of the Christian-Judo philosophy.
Rosslyn Ives, Editor of Australian Humanist, an experienced secondary science and biology teacher and research consultant gave a paper titled: Biologically rooted: why a humanistic environmental ethic should be of central importance.
Rosslyn Ives began by saying that this was a huge subject. We might use science to answer the question of where are we coming from, where are we going? All organisms live as part of an ecosystem - the Guy hypothesis. In another sense we may be biologically rooted. The environmental crisis is because we are like a plague species. Many other species have been wiped out - more than 50 a day or 20,000 per year are exterminated. People, both deliberately and accidentally, wipe out other species.
All the people of the world should be trying to live sustainedly as our
ancestors did before they changed from being hunters and gatherers to
agriculture and became exploitative - underpinned over the last 2000 years by
Christianity.
Descartes saw animals as mechanical objects that therefore did not feel pain.
From 1600 onward Western ideology dominated the thinking of mankind. Now we
would need three earths to accommodate all the people on the earth to the
standard of the USA. Alternatives to Christianity, such as Hinduism,
Shintoism, etc. give a higher standard of relationship between humans and the
rights of nature. The rights of the common man has developed from the
abolition of slavery and has extended to rights in the environmental area
leading to National Parks, etc.
In the past the high regard for science has led to the exploitation of nature, and has caused at worst the environmental crisis or at best hampered the ability to counter it.
Ben Leeman quoted Man is the measure of all things and asked if we are part of nature or should we dominate nature. Rosslyn Ives responded that we must have an environmental ethics.
Dr Joe Nickell. Senior Research Fellow, CSICOP, spoke On miracles in the mass media.
Joe Nickell started by quoting George Burns: when you get older its
better to be anywhere. He had been expecting a slide projector to
illustrate his talk but said that as there was none he would just have to
rely on his Irish heritage. He had been investigating paranormal claims for
30 years. He had been ghost- busting and here in Australia looking for the
Yowie in the Blue Mountains. While he had not found the Yowie he had found
that they did not like peanut butter sandwiches.
He mentioned Nancy Fowler and said that the Virgin Mary spoke to her on
occasions but the Virgin Mary had no messages for Methodists, just Catholics.
The spring is contaminated with E. coli so it is only a partial miracle.He
mentioned a statue with a heartbeat - a theologian might think it was
ideology. He had a stethoscope handy but could not hear the heartbeat. People
would feel the statue and detect their own pulse.
One day he had a ring from the newspaper, the Toronto Sun. There was a weeping icon in town and they had permission for someone to examine it. I packed my weeping icon kit but when we arrived we were not allowed in so I put a few items from my kit into my pocket. Somebody said $2.50 please but I said Toronto Sun and pushed my way in. There was a table and candles. I could see that the tears were not flowing but could see a smear. Olive oil applied to an icon will last for days, weeks, or even months.
The Toronto Sun published a headline saying Expert Unmoved by Weeping Icon and was accused of causing trouble in the local community. The Priest was the same one that he had investigated for producing a weeping icon in Queens, New York and had been defrocked in Athens for running a brothel.
A few months later he received a call from the church itself - would I come? You betcha. With the fraud squad present he started an investigation but the news media were a real pain, watching and asking about every move. He collected evidence for the fraud squad but they asked do you know who put the oil on the icon?, but he could not prove who was responsible.
He said that he had renamed the TV programme Unsolved Mysteries - Un-solving a Mystery. The Doorway to Heaven that often appears on a photograph or a film was in one case due to the aperture of a Polaroid camera, in another to the pack of the film. On the TV programme he was allowed to explain one of the pictures but not the rest - they wanted to create the impression that all the others could not be explained. Try to tell the truth he, concluded, if we are lucky enough to get the media on our side and we are able to expose a pious fraud.
He was asked to summarise the situation regarding the shroud of Turin. He answered that it was a 14-foot length of cloth and that 40 genuine shrouds had been produced in history. The shroud of Turin had no history for 1300 years before it suddenly turned up and a local forger eventually confessed that he had created it. It has been established that the image was made using tempera paint as the forger claimed. He added that most of the weeping icons are from churches that have lots of icons.
The comment was made that in India a lot of money is made from supposed miracles. Joe Nickell commented that many churches held the genuine foreskin of Christ. Two different churches claim to have the head of John the Baptist. Asked how this could be, one church said that the other had the head of John the Baptist when he was a boy! Commenting on the charismatic movement he said that many people want to see or be close to a miracle - people will be attracted to this.Dr Valerie Yule, of the Humanist Society of Victoria talked about the Ethics of communication.
We have moved forward in technology but backward in ethics. This paper considers the ethics of communication and some important neglected ethical issues in broadcasting, electronic information technology, print, and educational media. The ethical issues related to a global homogenised culture combined with dumbing down and Greshams law, the teaching of literacy, enculturing of immigrants, honesty in communication, censorship of the good, the state and the media, but the focus is on the ethics of an English writing system fit for international communication and mass literacy. What should the media be like? In 1931 psychologists saw TV as something wonderful but thought it might hurt the eyes. Now we see the dumbing down, the excessive and dishonest advertising. The world is short of Brain Power but it is being wasted. We measure peoples IQs but perhaps we should also have an advertisements IQ, content IQ, and ethics IQ. We need to also consider the ethics of print quality - the junk that fills news-stands wastes paper.
Full print literacy is everybodys right. What are the social forces that shape print literacy? The professions are a conspiracy against the eighty percent of people who cant. People still fail to gain literacy. It is blamed on dyslexia and so on. A simple half hour video would tell people how to cope with writing and spelling skills. People who fail just get left behind. English spelling is worse than colonial oppression.
The ethics of who is allowed to be print literate. Spells and runes and hieroglyphics (secret writing) were originally magic, kept from the people. Ruling castes have opposed easier writing systems. Revolutionary movements have fought for them. In English, difficult spelling has served as an instant screening test and a deliberate social barrier. It has been held as a sacred totem to defend rather than a man-made basic element of modern technology, subject to human engineering in research and development to make it more friendly. English spelling is the urgency of mass international illiteracy and widespread suffering versus the delights of scolding those who cannot remember ie/ei or ence/ance and an emotional conservatism about appearances that is not applied to other fashions. English remains the only major modern language with no writing system reform in the past 150 years.
English spelling reformers have unfortunately imposed a one-track mind-set, arguing about schemes purely for sound letter correspondence, rather than research on how English spelling could truly meet the needs of present readers and writers, international compatibility, adult illiterates, school-children, and English language learners, and be suited to the nature of the English language itself. Cognitive and educational research shows how English spelling could meet needs better by accelerating present trends of omitting useless letters in words; consonant consistency; accepting alternative consistent vowel spelling patterns; and going further, solving the greatest technical problem - how to represent the long vowels A E I O U.
The greatest barriers are ignorance about the English spelling system and the global burden resulting from unnecessary difficult, and glib myths about etymology, homophones, aesthetics, and costs.
Also an ethical issue are the barriers against a literacy video that gives an overview of the English spelling system.Bruce Cathey. Book Launch: Freethought Bibliography Collections. Compiling a comprehensive bibliography of Australasian freethought.
He said that Australia and New Zealand have a comprehensive freethought literature worthy of a place in the sun. I am a bibliographer of Anglo-American rationalism/secularism/humanism (freethought) of the 19th-20th centuries, working on an in-progress work which Prometheus Books (Amherst, NY) is interested in publishing upon my submission of the completed manuscript (still over a year away). In the preparation of this inventory I recently became interested in incorporating publications of Australia and New Zealand, and to date I have compiled a list of over 400 such works possibly qualifying for inclusion, including approximately 150 publications of New Zealand.
He added New Zealand to his investigations when he discovered that Wellington would be a good site for another 100 to 150 works and would be visiting Wellington after visits to Canberra and Sydney in Australia. He is looking for publications produced between 1850 and 1999. The National library of Australia has 70% of the Australian material, including massive amounts of unpublished material, while the Mitchell library in Sydney has material for New South Wales only.Professor Jitendra Sethi, a member of an Indian Humanist society discussed The Caste system of India - its ills.
Professor Sethi began by emphasising a couple of points. First, that he was not a professor of the caste system so would not be giving a scholarly discussion but that he would aim to generate discussion. Secondly that this discussion would be on the ills of the caste system - it is a bane, not a boon.
At the beginning of this year, 2000, the president of France visited India. A headline that appeared on April 19 in a French newspaper that described the president of India as an untouchable caused offence in India and an apology was offered. The French media could not realise the full extent of the offence that the use of the word untouchable would cause in India.
Longmans dictionary defines Caste as the division of society based on class differences of wealth, rank, rights, profession, or job. In India caste does not mean socio-economic class - the two can coexist. It is possible to have both rich and poor upper and lower caste Indians. [The word caste comes from the Portuguese and Spanish word casta, meaning race, breed or linage and was first applied to the Indian society by Portuguese travellers in the 16th century. The word jäti meaning race or a group sharing similar characteristics is used in most Indian languages.] Manu codifies castes into four varnas or groupings of castes: 1, Brahmins - the priestly caste who devote themselves to study and sacrifice; 2, Kshatriyas - the warrior caste who only fight; 3, Vaisyas - who only trade, and; 4, Sudras who only serve others. [In total there are about 3,000 castes and over 25,000 subcastes in India with membership ranging from several hundred to millions.]
Narasu is a study of castes. There are more theories on the origins of the caste system than there are answers. It has been suggested that race may have been an originating factor but there are many questions regarding what constitutes a race. The purity of blood theory is like the chicken and the egg problem, which came first. Other theories trace the origins to social status, wealth, and hereditary occupation. It is also suggested that it might be a petrification of what existed in the past but this does not tell us why. It is hard to subscribe to any single theory but something of this and that might explain it.
Traditionally inter-dining was not allowed and intermarrying is forbidden to this day. The lowest group had their own accommodation separated from the rest of the village. They were not allowed to use the same well and other facilities and this persists. They were allowed no temple entry and no learning. This led to social disintegration and left India easy prey to predatory conquerors. The caste system is so strong that many people cannot shed it even after conversion to Christianity, Islam, or other religions. They still retain separate eating-places and so on.
I worked in Afghanistan as a professor when it was under the Russians. One day I was travelling in a taxi and noticed that the taxi driver spoke very good English. He informed me that he had completed a PhD in Agronomy in the USA and was also a professor at Kabul University. He supplemented his income by driving a taxi in his spare time. This was a surprise to me because as an Indian it had not occurred to me that I could do this.
Regarding the ills of the caste system. Some people still advocate it and say that it carries forward a tradition or that if it was abolished cheap labour might disappear. In the field of education - there was a pledge to remove illiteracy from India but this has not been achieved. There is a stream of education reserved for the lower castes that often nobody will take up. Lower castes are reluctant to send their children to school while upper castes are reluctant to do jobs considered menial. In politics, elections are often on caste lines and this can result in the wrong people being elected. In private lives, people from different castes may fall in love leading to disappointment, family disharmony, suicide, and honour killings of the lovers. The reservation system for lower castes in higher education and in jobs often hurts the upper castes as well, preventing some able people from gaining places in universities or leading to the wrong people getting jobs and results in a lowering of academic standards and inefficiency in services. The final result is opposite to the objective to narrow the gaps between the upper and lower castes and firms up the barriers between the castes.
Maureen Hoy asked if people could escape the caste system through actions such as moving to another city. Professor Sethi answered that the caste system has a deeper label than anything else we carry. It is often part of the family name, which gives both caste and subcaste, but with education it is possible for people to intermix. Governments attempts to remove caste may be somewhat misguided, particularly when enforced.
A member of the audience said that we all agree that confining one caste to sewage maintenance is an obscenity and asked what measures Humanists should take. Sethi replied that he would like to be given the answers here and go back with them. He added that many educated people now had no problem with inter-dining and even intermarrying between castes. He considered gradual erosion was better than enforced removal.
He was asked why Indians could not change their names and a comment was made that positive discrimination does not work but now we have a positive discrimination support system. Sethi answered that there are vested interests in maintaining the caste system. People have tried to do away with their names but it is often not the only indicator of a persons caste. Positive discrimination should not lower standards.
Babu Gogineni said that he had some disagreements with Professor Sethi. He said that he would have liked to have heard Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar mentioned in any discussion of Caste in India.
In India the laws of Manu were formulated 250 years before Christianity, but after Buddha. Buddhism had been a reaction to traditional Brahmanism. Later the British incorporated Hindu law into the laws of India and this persisted until 1950.Dr. Ambedkar, regarded as the father of the Indian Constitution, was law minister in the government of India from 1947-51. A Harijan or low caste Hindu, he learnt by sitting outside classrooms, listening to the lessons through the open windows, and studying under street lamps at night.
In October 1956, together with about 200,000 followers, he renounced Hinduism and became a Buddhist at a ceremony in Nagpur, India, as a protest against the caste system and Ghandi. Ghandi supported the caste system. It is a pity that Ghandis freedom movement gained the upper hand over the social reform movement.
Who are the doctors in India today? It is the upper caste. We come from a generation of educated people but education still remains the province of the upper castes. The problem of India is not the positive discrimination or 50 years of trying to overcome it. It is the mindset of 2000 years. The countries presidents daughter had used positive discrimination to get a job.
Evening. The congress dinner was held at the Regal restaurant, a Chinese restaurant on the corner of Liverpool and Sussex streets. Highlights of the evening were a demonstration of old time Australian dancing with full costumes and the presentation of the Australian Humanist of the year award to Professor Henry Reynolds.
IBM.