Does this sound like a civilized country?

Perhaps I'm just upset by the youths who come round every few days trying break out kitchen window (which is now safety glass, since they succeeded three times previously). Or perhaps I'm truly shocked by the events of my current home country, but wouldn't you be? In the category of 'truth is stranger [scarier?] than fiction' comes Three reasons to question whether you country is civilized

1) It is a hotbed for slavery. Criminals trafficking in women and girls aimed at the illicit sex trade are widespread.

2) I has been known to export terrorists and is currently under investigation for possibly exporting terrorists in regard to a recent massive terrorist attack

3) The national security department has secretly searched and detained official opposition to the government

Now, I'm pretty sure that we're all horrified when we hear of countries like this. What wrong with the world? Why doesn't the UN or someone do something? At least I live in a civilized country. We shake our heads in dismay for the poor victims before we breathe easy, secretly happy that at least our country doesn't do such things. I know I was that way once. It seems long ago now, before I became more aware of the world's reality, before I paid real attention to the news--trying read between the lines, taking in the global picture. Sometimes I wish I had remained like I was before, sometimes I still try. I've even taken to watching the news only once or twice a week to reduce the media fear-mongering and sensationalism, and to try not to be so depressed.

It's all building up to something--something that can only be beginning with fire!--Pete Townsend

We do have chances to fix things--the financial crisis was the perfect opportunity to try and rectify and obviously flawed system. We chose to use the bandaid approach. Car manufacturers are in crisis (what a surprise! people buy fewer cars when they have less money and when they worry about the environment!). We could choose to make them go green, force them to develop and build green cars after we bail them out. Instead it's same-old, same-old. All we're doing it passing the problem to our children. Sure, that's what we humans have being doing for many generations...only this time, our children really will have to deal with them.

Anyway, I've digressed somewhat from the opening topic. So, for anyone curious as to which country I was speaking about: it's England.

1) Sex trafficking has been a huge problem here for many years. Girls as young as 12 from Asia or Eastern Europe believe they are visiting their new boyfriends and looking for work and when they arrive, their passports are taken and they're forced to work as prostitutes.

2) The UK has exported Muslim terrorists in the past (one was involved in a suicide bombing in Israel) and currently, allegations that some of the terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks were British are under investigation

3) Yesterday the Homeland Security Department searched the office and homes of opposition member Damian Green and detained him for questioning for 9 hours in regards to 'leaks from the homeland office'. All of this was done in secret and was, technically, legal under the anti-terrorism laws. Maybe they were taking him in for 're-education'.

Children: a Privilege not a Right

I'm hoping to elicit some comments with this entry. Basically, this last week there has been a lot of news in the UK regarding child abuse:

a 17 month old foster child was brutally beaten for months before being killed and left in his blood-spattered bed.
a mother stabbed her two young children to death (Manchester)
a mother was involved with the kidnapping of her own daughter in order to get a share of the reward money when she was found (Leeds).
a father was discovered to have repeatedly mentally and physically abused his two daughters over a period of 25 years! leading to 19 pregnancies, 9 births and 7 living children (many of which have severe disabilities). (Sheffield) [this comes on the heals of a similar case in Austria recently]

This brings me to the very obvious point that there are some people who simply should not be allowed to raise children. Actually, they should not be allowed to conceive, raise or even be around children. In this day and age, with almost 7 billion humans on the planet, there is no justification for allowing such people to breed. Countries like China already have limited procreation, perhaps the west should follow.

Incidentally, many people will argue: well China does it because of their limited space and resources. China is the fourth largest country in the world, and has a population of 1.3 billion. The United Kingdom is one of the smaller countries in the world (about the size of Oregon), and has a population of about 60 million. In terms of population density, the UK, with 298/sq km has over twice the density of China (138/sq km)! [you can work it out for yourself using the numbers on the CIA world fact book web site] There is no way that humans evolved, are wired if you will, to live in an area with an average density of almost 300 people per square kilometre (incidentally, that's about the same as India).

I propose that a license be brought in. You have to take a test and qualify for the right to have a child. And then, your license will state how many children you are allowed. The government should love this as it could be another source of revenue--you have to renew your license after the first year, and then every x years (5, 10).

[as an aside, I'm still adjusting to all the people in other countries. I grew up in Canada, where the average population density is 3.3/sq km (and 0.3/sq km where I grew up). You get a very different perspective on life in such places).

[aside #2: it's interesting to me that most countries really start to worry when their population growth is negative. This is a sign of the times: growth is better, more is better, quality doesn't matter. In today's world, in a country like the UK, with 60 million people, the government should be happy with a falling population. The country would probably be comfortable with about 20 million people. Incidentally, a license could help regulate the rate of population growth also.]

The Reality of Reality TV

Okay, we all know in our heart-of-hearts that there is something screwy with Reality TV. Many questions have arisen regarding people in past shows not being who they are described as being. And just why do so many actor-wannabe's get on the shows, etc. Not to mention the fact that all survivor-type shows feature strong Type-A's. There hasn't been a single reasonable person on the show.

More recently, the big reality shows revolve around talent searches: X-factor, Come dancing, and others. The key to this model is that we the public get to spend our hard-earned money to vote for who we want (just imagine how much money that could be! If 100,000 people call in to vote, that's $100,000 made per episode, excluding advertising!). For such a model to work, and not to lose face, the public's vote has to count, their decision has to matter. But, even ignoring the fact that they don't reveal the number of votes for each person and that the last two have to 'sing off', regardless of their vote differential (at least in the UK), does it?

Here in England there have recently been two cases that question the validity of the vote and the public's importance to the network. First was an X-factor show where a singer favoured as one of the top two was voted off seventh. This sparked a petition of 21,000 names to get her reinstated (in vain).

The second case was far more blatant. On Strictly Come Dancing, the public was, for whatever reason, in love with a guy who simply couldn't dance. Week after week they voted him back despite the judges' very harsh criticism (judges, I might add, that have no real role in the show except as targets for the public scorn). Finally, the guy quits the show! It might be what the judges wanted, but it was not what the paying voters wanted! Clearly someone, somewhere in TV land is taking themselves too seriously and the public not seriously enough.

Now, personally I don't care, I don't like dancing and I would definitely never watch a dancing show. However, the principle of this really bothers me. The fact that the networks have a show where people can vote in to get what they want, and then the network decides to tell the people what they should want or what the show should be! You can't have your cake (or cash cow) and eat it too! You have a show run by the people, you have to listen to the people. It shows you just how much they really think we're mindless ants, doing whatever they tell us.

World Philosophy Day

In honour of World Philosophy Day, I'll post some questions from the BBC and my responses. Feel free to post your own answers/comments:

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

(A) Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

(B)Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

(C)If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

(A) Obviously not. Where would it stop? One could easily envision a warping where rich and powerful people could buy less fortunate people from poor families for money. Poor could even have children just to sell them (hey, it already happens for other reasons). In any event, donors could become available after you killed Bill.

(B) No. To quote James T. Kirk: 'I don't believe in the no win scenario.' As long as there was a chance, I'd try and work to stop the guy. And if he gives me the gun to shoot them, what's stopping me from turning it on him? or throwing it away?

(C) Yes, if I can find no way to derail the tram. In my opinion, this is the only one of three where someone actually has to die (and will die regardless of whether you interfere or not).

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

This isn't a question so much as a statement, and it is rather obvious anyway. It is only our belief in ourselves as separate entities that even allows us to raise the question. To a Budhist, the question is irrelevant as we are all one and everything is constantly changing.

As an aside, your mental states result from the structure of the cells and neurons in your brain and thus, your 'mental state' could not be implanted on another biological brain without completely altering its structure. In which case it would not be a copy of your brain anyway. It may be possible to mimic the brain through computer software/hardware and thus imprint your brain on a computer at sometime in the future (maybe even in this century?!). In which case, who says one person cannot be in two places? That is a very restricted view of reality (I would suggest reading Mindscan by Robert J. Sawyer for a good presentation of this possibility).

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
Muller-Lyer illusion
Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not

But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, its readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."

The reverse of 'how do I know I exist?' Short answer is: You don't. As Descartes wrote 'Cogito ergo sum' I think therefore I am. Pretty much the only thing you have any chance of being remotely sure about is that there is some entity somewhere that is having your thoughts. If nothing else, The Matrix should have convinced you of this.

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."

As presented, this point is not very interesting. Given Quantum uncertainty principles, we would argue that such a level of prediction is not possible. My only interest in this part is pertaining to religion, as it would be easy to replace 'Fred' with the God of Christianity, who is supposed to be all-knowing. If God could be all-knowing then why punish someone (Adam and Eve) for doing something that is not their choice? Surely, as the creator of such a system, God would know how everything would go from the beginning. It actually makes him irrelevant after the big bang.

However, a more interesting version of this has come about recently in relation to neurobiology research. It seems that our brains are far more autonomous than we previously suspected. Measurements of signals in the brain have revealed that the stimulus to do something (say, pick up a glass of water) is actually made before the conscious thought. Without getting into more detail, it seems the role of our conscious mind is simply to veto, or not, the thought/action that our brain initiates. There have been several good SF short stories made around this research into free will (or lack thereof).

Anyway, those are my answers/comments/reasoning. I'm interested to hear from others.

A sign of the times

It seems to me to be somehow symbolic of the larger global climate, that the monks of two Christian sects came to fisticuffs at their most holy site this weekend. The world is controlled by Christian countries. If the clergy of different Christian sects can't even get along, how can anyone expect their countries to.