The Joss Knight Universal Theory of Mind

For some time now I've been working on a theory of consciousness, or rather I've had a theory and I've been trying to work out how to articulate it. I'm not entirely there yet, but I believe I've got it to a stage now where some people understand what I'm talking about.

When philosophers, psychologists and so forth talk about 'consciousness' they often mix two different concepts together and I should prise them apart first. Firstly, there is consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness. There are things we are aware of and things we aren't. There is a temporal sequence of events of which we are aware and usually causal relationships between them. There is the internal monologue, what we are 'thinking', as distinct from the everyday things our brain is doing. This is the mechanism of consciousness, this is consciousness as an engine for boiling the world and our experience down to some simplified model so we can make sense of it. It's the cognitive module where experience, thought and decision converge. This is much of what Dennett is talking about in his book Consciousness Explained.

Secondly there is conscious experience. Recently I've just been calling it 'experience' or sometimes awareness to distinguish it. It is also sometimes called 'qualia' (singular quale). This is what it 'feels like' to be aware, to receive sensory input and to have a functioning brain. It refers to the feeling of pain as opposed to the stimulus and neural activity, the feeling of being in love as opposed to the mental parameters of it. It is this meaning of consciousness that I'm going to discuss.

You see, the engine of consciousness may not be fully understood but nobody is suggesting it is anything fundamentally incomprehensible. The brain just has a particular way of modeling the world for us, and it's essentially just a matter of time while we work out how that works (and perhaps why the brain has evolved to represent the world that particular way).

But for this other aspect, subjective experience, there seems to be a problem. Not only does there seem to be a need to explain where it comes from - how you go from neural activity to 'feelings', to put it simply - but it's quite hard to understand how we might even start investigating it. The two things just seem so fundamentally different that they could never been connected up.

One possible method of investigation suggests itself: build an artificial consciousness. If you can build a machine that has experiences then that will have explained the connection between the cognitive material (silicon, electricity, computer programs etc) and the qualia. But the people who suggest this are being a bit disingenuous. How exactly are we going to tell when our AI is conscious? Right now I can have a device which measures stimuli and records the data and nobody believes my device is 'feeling'; I could even create a robot designed to shy realistically away from undesirable stimuli - but still nobody would believe my robot was actually in pain. I see no reason why this would change as the stimuli and responses got more and more complex.

The reasons we believe other people are conscious are twofold: firstly we know we are conscious (that's part of the whole definition), and secondly other people are like us. This doesn't apply to a manufactured device. No matter how convincing a simulation an AI may be, there is no way to 'get inside its head' and prove that it is experiencing rather than just responding as if it were (and the same is true of other people of course). Even if the created device were biological rather than mechanical, organic rather than metallic, the same objections would apply. Taken to the extreme, perhaps the only way people would be convinced the created organism was conscious would be if it had grown from some simple beginning (like an egg) rather than being built complete - and that just leaves room for the magic spark of consciousness (if it is magic) to get in in the same way it does for us, thus leaving the problem unsolved. Before you know it, we're discussing P-Zombies and you know when that happens you should shut up and go and hide in a corner till it goes away.

So building a machine that appears to be having subjective experiences, although it might be enough for some people, really won't cut it. And the question is whether anything will. I think I know the answer: no.

The problem as I see it is not how to resolve the causal relationship between brain activity and experience, but to recognise it as non-existent. There is no causal relationship because they are the same thing! One is just a different aspect of the other. A different point of view. Specifically, qualia are brain activity from the brain's point of view. The apparent difference is because subjective experience is like introspection, we are perceiving brain activity using sensors made up of brain activity, the sensor is sensing itself. When we look at brain activity objectively, from the outside, we measure current, charge, ion flow and so forth, but when we are the current, charge and ion flow it 'looks' different, and that is what experience is.

What I usually tell people is that our brain activity has to feel like something, so why shouldn't it feel like it does? If all a brain is doing when it experiences pain is switching on a neuron for 'pain' (obviously it is more complex than that but let's simplify it) then switching on the neuron has to feel like something, the damn thing is in our head where our very identity exists. What else ought it to feel like? Something going 'click' perhaps, like a light switch? A musical tone changing frequency? An LED illuminating? Why those and not 'pain'?

And for those who think it ought to feel like nothing, what possible justification is there for that? If we are our brain activity then things like neurons firing ought to impinge on our experience (or at least they ought to sometimes). It's only if we're not, if we are brain activity plus magic (or some other 'aspect' or 'stuff'), that we might be tempted to assume that a neuron switching on wouldn't feel like anything, but in order to look at it that way we have to assume what we are trying to prove, so it's circular. The important point is that 'experience = brain activity' is self-consistent, nothing more is needed.

Now in the past this is as far as I've gone and, to be honest, if you lost me above then you're probably never going to follow what I'm getting at. Certainly I've spent hours arguing these points with very clever people (monists, not dualists, who still think there's a missing causal link despite not believing in a soul or other magic mind-stuff), and they haven't been able to come with me thus far.

However, I have put together a new analogy which is supposed to help clarify what I mean by "they are the same thing" and there's always a hope that it might be enough to get some others on board. I call it "Joss's Car Analogy of Mind", and it has two versions. Like all analogies if you try to stretch it too far it will break. It only works within the bounds established by the description. It is an aid to comprehension not a theory or a challenge.

Joss's Car Analogy of Mind

Version 1.

The brain is a car. The workings of the brain are the engine. 'Experience' is that of a person, 'you', inside the car. Everybody has their own car, nobody can leave their car, and nobody else can get into your car. You experience your car as the sound of the engine. You can also investigate other people's cars by listening to the sound of their engines. Because of the difference in aspect, location and so on, ie. point of view, other people's engines sound distinctly different from the way your engine sounds to you inside the car. Nonetheless, the source of the sound is the engine, and it's the same sound energy whether it's you that's listening or someone else, it just sounds different.

In this version of the analogy, the emphasis is on the fact that the engine's activity is all there is to explain the sound. The difference between the way your engine sounds and other people's is because you are inside your car, and not in theirs, not because something else is operating, generating other sounds which mix with that of the engine.

Version 2.

Now the cars are perfectly sound-proofed so that no sound energy can leave your car and impinge on other people's. Sound, as a concept and material thing, only exists inside the car, and all the sources of sound must be inside the car. Other people can still investigate each other's cars through other means, like measuring heat radiation. But only you can hear the sound of your own engine. However, despite the fact that your experience of your engine is dramatically different from the way other people perceive it, the engine is still the only thing doing anything in your car.

In this version of the analogy, we make sound special to the inside of the car to draw analogy with the extent to which subjective experience is qualitatively different from the material activity of the brain (neurons firing, ions flowing etc.). It still doesn't require us to postulate more mechanisms, or other engines or devices.

Discussion.

The main flaw in this analogy as I see it is the distinction between the sound of the engine, and the activity of the engine. The engine causes sound inside the car and there is still the question of 'how'. In the analogy the sound isn't caused by the engine so much as it is representing the activity of the engine, but there is no good analogy for that. Still, the analogy does help us see how point of view can make something that is actually the same appear very different.

New Atheist Camp (song)

Last summer (2007) my brother and I co-wrote a short musical review on behalf of The Old Stagers, an amateur dramatic society of which I am a member. This was performed after a play on two nights of a week-long run.

What really happened was that my brother was asked to write it and he enlisted my help. I was unable to come to the week of performances (during which The Epilogue, as it is called is rehearsed), and therefore I wouldn't be able to be in it, or contribute to its direction. So I was resistant. However, I said I would write 'a couple' of sketches. In the end I wrote one song, one sketch, and a bit of another sketch.

The song was a tribute to my atheistic interests. The Epilogue is supposed to be topical, and the 'New Atheists' were topical in 2006/7, so I thought I'd write a light-hearted, simple song about them.

In the final version my brother made (understandable) edits, and cut out Sam Harris' solo, both to shorten the skit and because he thought nobody would know who Sam Harris was (honestly!). However, I am posting here the full original text:

(Richard Dawkins only)
My name is Richard Dawkins
I’m sure you seen me talking
Evolutionary biology’s
What usually gets me squawking
But world events have pressed me
To skip and dance and sing
Of how religion’s naughty
And faith’s a silly thing

(All)
We are the New Atheists
We’re targeting the lay theist
To cunningly convince you
The Enlightenment’s the way, theist
We are the New Atheists
We’ll bait you with the weightiest
Verbal excitation
To inflame to the irateist!

(Sam Harris only)
My name is Sa-am Harris
My reputation’s garish
My book “The End of Faith” proclaims
Religion’s time to perish.
I’m young, I’m hip, I’m fashionable
As fits the philosophical.
I got designer polo-necks
From Ralph Lauren in Paris!

(All)
We are the New Atheists
We’re feisty and we’re gay, theists.
We’ve got a competition to see
Who can be the raciest.
We are the New Atheists,
Come on and have a play, theists.
Munch on our polemicals
And tell us who’s the tastiest!

(Christopher Hitchens only)
I am Christopher Hitchens
You’ll know me ’cos I’m bitchin’.
But secretly, the real me
Is just a cuddly kitten.
My rallying cry “God Is Not Great!”
Won’t pull a Muslim on a date.
But I bring clever techniques to
The bedroom and the kitchen.

(All)
We are the New Atheists
Our books are not the paciest
Meticulously worded to be
Un-indoctrinate-eist
We are the New Atheists
Our critics are the slatiest
But we remain determined
Undeterable-y matiest.

We are the New Atheists
Our books are not the paciest
Meticulously worded to be
Un-indoctrinate-eist.
We’ve come here to say, theist
That God has had its day, theist.
(Coda)
We don’t just have no faith in it...
We want to rub your face in it!

Tina Beattie epilogue

My conversation with Dr Tina Beattie over email continued after the first two, and got very interesting. It has paused because we both agreed that I would need to finish reading her book before it continued. I believe any transliteration of our conversation that I make here should wait until it's 'finished' too; plus I haven't asked her permission to make the conversation public, and I probably ought to. I have just finished reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali and am now reading her book, so hopefully I'll have something for the public soon.

I should say that page 63 of "The New Atheists" did not contain any admonishment of atheists for their pride or ridicule, but a reference to female genital stimulation. I was suitably amused...

Dr Tina Beattie responds

I sent Dr Tina Beattie my letter by email, only edited slightly to replace "huge black fleshy mass on my testicle" with "huge lump on my privates" (yes, I know it's bowdlerising but I didn't want her just to dismiss it in disgust at my crudeness). I got a very good-humoured response:

Dear Joss,

Thank you so much for your e-mail. I admit to being very moved by your situation, and quite humbled to know that you were so comforted by the programme.

Of course, miracles do happen and we must never give up hope, but I think truthfulness is an essential factor in all human relationships, don't you agree?

With that in mind, I have to say that things don't sound good for you. If I were your wife, I would take full advantage of your swollen privates while she can, because I fear that you might soon be joining your dear dead grandma and her starving dogs.

By the way, if your wife needs to comfort herself after you've gone, she might find it helpful to take a look at page 63 of my recent book, The New Atheists. I understand that there are now some top of the range devices available for this problem. (You can find my book on amazon.co.uk and there is also an interesting blog about it on Richard Dawkins' website).

With all best wishes, and thank you again for taking the time to contact me.

Tina Beattie.

I haven't looked at page 63 of her book yet but fully expect it to be either some pap about consolation, or an admonishment that atheists are always resorting to ridicule because they lack adequate arguments. Still, I appreciate her effort to respond in a good-natured way.

Naturally, I wasn't trying to claim that Tina was actually arguing that the feeling of absence proves god. It is more a statement of exasperation that not experiencing god has no affect on a believer's faith and is dismissed with such a piece of sophistry. It's like the church leaders and theologians are saying, "You can't see god or touch god, but you can experience him in your heart and that is very real. Oh, and if you don't experience him in your heart, that's actually just another 'way' of experiencing him."

I don't think we can ever win over people as deeply indoctrinated as the sweet but batty and deluded Dr Tina, this sort of thing proves just how futile it is. We must work on the young, and at the fringes.

Presence = absence

Well that's it. I might as well pack up my bags, and move into a seminary. The arguments for god are now all wrapped up, thanks to Dr Tina Beattie of Roehampton University. In a feat of sophistry so unbelievably fatuous and astounding, gormless and yet somehow sweetly innocent, she informed the listeners of Sunday Worship on Radio 4 yesterday that God existed precisely because he wasn't there:

Sometimes God's presence is most intensely experienced as a form of absence and yearning.

Well, what can you say to that, eh? I have drafted the following letter to Dr Beattie, I wonder if I should send it?

Dear Dr Beattie,

I very much enjoyed your discussion of Mother Teresa on Sunday Worship on Radio 4, and was taken aback by many of your insights. One thought struck me as particularly profound, when you said, "Sometimes God's presence is most intensely experienced as a form of absence and yearning."

This came as a great comfort to me. You see, my dear grandmother passed away recently; I mean, I thought she had, there was a body, a funeral, a cremation and everything. But I yearned so much for her to be with me again, and applying your reasoning, I now realise that she isn't in fact dead - she's just not talking to me any more. All I need to do now is try to understand why she won't answer the phone when I call. Still, it's a great weight off my mind, especially because now I don't have to have her dogs put down, and I duly dropped them back off at her house the other day (she was out, but I presume she's got her reasons for avoiding me).

I was wondering - does it work the other way round? If I yearn hard enough can I make something that appears to be present go away? I ask because I've developed this huge black fleshy mass on my testicle, or at least that's what it feels and looks like. But perhaps if I really concentrate on my yearning it will turn out to be just a silly delusion that I'm having? I'm really interested to know because my wife is starting to get a little upset that I won't go to the doctor.

In grateful expectation of your response,

Joss Knight

I am confident that the good 'Doctor' (I can't bring myself to extract that from scare quotes since the lady is a Doctor of Theology, which scarcely counts) will be able to answer my question as she is clearly highly qualified in the field of bollocks.

Tina was talking about the recent revelations of Mother Teresa's loss of faith. In recently published letters it was revealed that for the last 50 years of her life, Mother Teresa felt no presence of God, neither in the practice of her religion nor in her heart. She wrote, "I'm told that God loves me, and yet the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great, that nothing touches my soul."

The poor woman was brow-beaten by her indoctrination into declaring belief in something inherently unbelievable, and going through the motions and rituals of her religion even though it gave her no benefits, only despair. And Christians around the world hold her in high esteem, as the model of a good Christian. They're supposed to aspire to be like her!

Well, it's certainly an interesting state of affairs - the ultimate demonstration of Christian faith is to have managed to dispense entirely with all conviction of god's existence. I suppose it is somewhat akin to the 'machismo' of pointless and arbitrary religious doctrine, like not eating pig or shellfish, or being circumcised - if you can successfully remove all practical experience of faith, and yet go through the ecumenical motions anyway, you've won big time brownie points for endurance (and mindless obstinacy).

One cannot help but be put in mind of the quip of satirist Peter de Vries:

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

It seems a lot less like satire when an academic theologian is saying essentially the same thing with a straight face. In fact, we ought to note this important reminder: Dr Tina actually believes in what she said. She really, honestly, thought it made perfect sense that you can experience god through his absence. We can be pretty sure of that because it went out on the air and must have been reviewed dozens of times before it did. I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw, but it serves to remind us just what we're up against.

Review of "In God We Doubt" by John Humphrys

I recently read a book by John Humphrys called "In God We Doubt". It irritated me so much I penned a review for Amazon. Here it is, edited slightly for context:

Humphrys has a problem. He doesn't believe in God, but finds the implications of a purely natural universe bleak and depressing. And so, like many, if not most atheists in the UK, he decides to call himself an 'agnostic' instead. Surely, if he looks hard enough, he can find some excuse to believe in 'something', thereby rescuing his worldview from the dark nihilistic depths of dreaded atheism? This book is like looking into Humphrys' mind while he argues with himself, a great clash of reason and denial.

Humphrys doesn't like the resurgence of Enlightenment thinkers who are open about their disagreements with religion and he goes out to irritate those readers from the outset: characterising Richard Dawkins as a bully who 'knows there is no God', and who would tear a comfort blanket from a starving child in the name of truth, and dismissing Christopher Hitchens as a 'clever clogs'.

I couldn't help myself - I was annoyed by these characterisations, particularly because of the assumption being made that religion is a subject that ought to be afforded special gentility simply because many people have chosen to take those beliefs very seriously. But it's hard to imagine Humphrys describing as a bully a man who, say, vociferously attacks someone's political views because he believes them nonsensical, and religious belief is, after all, a choice.

However, I have to accept that, although if you page carefully through 'The God Delusion' you will never find Richard Dawkins claiming to 'know' there is no god, neither could it possibly be fair to label him arrogant or a know-it-all, this is precisely how a lot of people see him and we admirers of Dawkins must accept that. We ought to be aware of the way agnostics see us.

What is pretty unforgivable, however, are some of outrageous presumptions he makes later in the book about what atheists believe. It reaches its most offensive with a list of seven things that "sum up the attitude of those militant atheists". They include such monstrosities as "Believers are mostly naive or stupid", "The few clever ones are pathetic", and "If we don't wipe out religious belief by next Thursday week, civilisation as we know it is doomed". His excuse for such virulent vilification? : "I make no apology if I have over-simplified their views with that little list: it's what they do to believers all the time." How...immature.

Well Mr Humphrys, I know a lot of atheists and I don't think they put a tick in any of your boxes. But even your tyrant of 'militant' atheism, Richard Dawkins, could not possibly be characterised with such superlatives. What Humphrys, like many self-described agnostics, is missing is a sense of just how ridiculous the world seems to someone who has come to see the great religions as superstition no less absurd than the almighty Xenu. It's hard to imagine Humphrys reining in his scepticism when discussing Ronald Reagan's use of astrologers to help him make presidential decisions, or Tony Blair's use of Tarot Readers or whatever other New Age claptrap his wife is into this week.

Sniping at atheists aside, the thing that strikes you most about the book as you're reading the first two-thirds of it is - in what sense is Humphrys not an atheist? In a slightly disordered, conversational way, Humphrys dismisses all the arguments for the gods of religion. He doesn't believe in any kind of benevolent, involved deity, and he is convinced of that. That makes him unambiguously an atheist - so what's all the soul-searching about?

He eventually shows his cards in the last few chapters, and it is a dreadfully disappointing hand, but, again, says a lot about the way people think. His first target is morality. He gives a laudable description of how evolutionary biology explains the origins of moral impulses (sniping at Richard Dawkins' reverence for Darwin as "perilously close to worship" on the way), but at the end asserts that there must be something more. How does he justify this? "Follow this thinking to its logical conclusion and you reduce human beings to the level of a marauding, oversexed chimpanzee. Kindness and the other virtues make us what we are...a world without kindness, altruism, generosity, empathy and pity would be unimaginable". In other words, he doesn't like the sound of there being no transcendental, other-worldly quality to our moral urges, therefore it can't be true. Way to go, denial!

He uses the terrible 'ought' argument of C.S. Lewis to back up his point. Apparently, if we're in a situation where two instincts are in conflict, one selfless and one selfish, we know that we 'ought' to do the selfless thing, such as risking ourselves to help someone in need. So what is driving this 'ought' judgement? The argument that follows is utterly scatter-brained, with facile assertions sharing space with arguments for one side that have already been addressed by the other. "By any Darwinian measure the stronger [urge] is bound to be self-preservation." Says who? Regarding the progress of the moral zeitgeist over the centuries, "We have only moved in one direction". This is either tautological, or false (we can hardly claim that the fall of Athens led to improvements in the moral baseline, to cite just one example). "We are more than the sum of our genes - selfish or otherwise". He claims that the moral superiority of selflessness cannot be explained by social convention because if it were simply convention we would expect it to be different in different societies. He (and Lewis) never click that the veneration of selflessness may be a necessary property of society. In fact, no attempt is made to look for a biological or sociological explanation, it is simply asserted that there is none.

And finally he discusses the comfort that religion brings, and how dare we horrid atheists disturb that. I am open to the possibility that religion's sedative properties may outweigh its ill effects, but the arguments Humphrys uses are so lamely one-sided. For instance, he describes how a couple whose two daughters were killed in a road accident were able to come to terms with their loss through the knowledge that they had gone to heaven, and were even able to forgive their killer. No mention of the secular alternatives to wishful thinking, other than to dismiss them out of hand. No mention of the downsides of such denial - whether it might be easier, in the long term, to move on from such a loss if you've accepted they're really gone. No question that forgiving the killer was a noble thing to do.

Humphrys' style is casual, conversational, and sloppy. Quite apart from the mistakes that others have mentioned (calling Sam Harris "Sam Smith" for several pages must be considered almost unforgivable), he switches back and forth between points with no clear direction, spatters his rhetoric with childish retorts, fails to provide references for anything - like I said, it is like listening to him arguing with himself.

However, in many ways, this book ought to be read. It gives a genuinely interesting insight into the minds of a great proportion of the population. Confused, and in deep denial. Just don't let Humphrys get away with the suggestion that the agnostic position is the 'hard' one. Hard to justify, yes, but trivially easy to take up without justification, as most people do.

Absolute morality is an oxymoron

I was listening to Peter Hitchens and Christopher Hitchens arguing the other day and it set me thinking, as I have in the past, about absolute morality and how it is not just non-existent, but ruled out by definition. Peter Hitchens' main thrust in this row is that, regardless of whether or not an atheist behaves morally, if they do not believe in a moral absolute then there is no way they can claim that anything they do is 'good' or 'bad' - everything is arbitrary. He says you can make choices on pragmatic grounds but your claim that one choice is 'better' than another has no authority over another person's claim of the opposite.

Leaving aside for the moment how an atheist does justify their choices in moral terms, I want to argue that absolute morality is in fact a contradiction. Morality, by definition, excludes the possibility of being absolute - by which I mean either a property of reality, or imposed (or 'declared') by an outside agent, such as a creator god.

It is absolute morality, not subjective morality, that is arbitrary, or more specifically, divorced from the consequences of actions and choices. I believe a necessary definition of morality is that moral choices have desirable consequences. If you break the connection between consequences and the original rules, the rules cannot be moral. Rules imposed by an outside agent, whether a god, or a ruler, or just someone other than yourself, can only ever be laws, they cannot form a foundation for morality, precisely because the imposer can choose them at whim. Rules cannot simply be labelled moral.

One might simply assert that this is not true, that precisely because of the difficulties of subjective morality, of the need for absolutes (such as were articulated by Peter Hitchens), consequences must be only secondary, or irrelevant. First let me argue merely rhetorically - if a law from above or beyond were to lead to something horrific - genocide, say - how could anyone, in all honesty, say it is moral? Of course, people have done, but mostly they try to claim that the beneficial consequences are merely hidden from us, helping to prove my point. However, more rigorously, once divorced from the consequences the rules become arbitrary, as I stated. If you need to understand this problem consider the circular argument: This action is moral because it is the way God wants me to act. Why must I act the way God wants me to act? Because God's commandments are moral.

Let us consider, then, a kind of absolute morality in which the rules are chosen because they bring about desirable consequences. Desirable to whom? I would contend that no action can be considered moral unless the outcome is desirable (in some way) for the individuals involved - otherwise we are left with the conundrum of how we evaluate the moral worth of the consequence. In other words, it is perfectly clear that a ruler may impose laws that have immoral consequences (apartheid, say).

What if the ruler's laws have consequences that are desirable for the individuals involved? If this is the case, can we not learn for ourselves which rules bring about those consequences? We have struck the main point here. The source of moral reasoning is the consequences, not the rules. If we know what consequences we desire, we can reason our way to the rules; the rules themselves are derivative, and never absolute.

A possible way out of this is if the desirable consequences are created by the law-giver. Punishment and reward, in other words. I argue that such rules can never be moral. You cannot invent morality through power, that reduces to the absurd conclusion that morality lies with the powerful. I asked this question to the Bible Answer Squad once, and the response was that God was the exception in this case. Such an assertion could be made anywhere along any line of reasoning, it is hardly compelling!

What about morality as a property of reality? Can the universe impose a moral law? Let us consider how we would detect such a thing. We would do so by examining the consequences of our decisions. In other words, even if it were possible to impose morals on reality, it would be irrelevant. Good choices would bring good results and that is how we would know.

Once we have successfully identified 'desirable consequences', and not the mind of God, as the source of moral reasoning, we quickly realise that ascertaining the desirable consequences is tricky. People's desires are often in conflict. We are forced to conclude that not only is morality not absolute, but it is changing, and elusive. This is a big problem for some people. But consider this: you are captured by a highly intelligent, but primitive tribe of cannibals, who are going to eat you. To them, you are morally no different from an animal. How would you reason with them to get them to set you free? You could scream at them about how they would go to hell, or how we are all made in the image of God, until you were blue in the face, but that is not reasoning, it is assertion, and these cannibals don't know about your religion. No, you would try to identify common ground, consequences that both you and the cannibals find desirable, and on that ground attempt to show them how their actions are undesirable to them.

This is what morality is. It is the outcome of reasonable people coming together, first to establish what are the shared desirable consequences, and then to reason as to how to bring them about. We can see how morality cannot be clear-cut, because if it were it would become close to being absolute, and absolute rules cannot be moral. Morality is nothing substantial, nothing tangible, it cannot be by definition. And that is a good thing, since the obsession with absolute morality has for centuries kept power in the hands of the powerful, and those who claim to be able to read the mind of god.

Hitchens' unjustified assertions about Iraq

I admire Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great) so much mainly because I love his aggressive no-nonsense style. I wouldn't want everyone in the world to be like him, but it is great to have a few of them. I've even admired his stance on Iraq, because he makes many very good points.

But I think I've managed to distill his opinions on the war down to their ultimate flaw. Essentially, we are presented with the option: interfere, accept inevitable deaths in the conflict and after, and provoke more terrorism and hatred of the West, while possibly arresting the progress of irrational regimes towards the manufacture of cataclysmic weaponry; or don't interfere, choose diplomatic means, and in the mean time accept inevitable deaths caused by those regimes and the possibility of them acquiring that weaponry. And he chooses the first and asserts vociferously that it is the lesser evil. We must promote civilised governance and stop theocratic regimes from getting nukes. But he doesn't seem to be able to argue for that.

Deaths and suffering and oppression are inevitable if we do nothing. But far more deaths and suffering are inevitable in the short term if we provoke aggressive war. How does Hitch know that in the end, the invaded nation will be better off? He cannot count the potential dead. But he can make a good estimate of how many will die because of war. And how can he know that the provocation that invasion creates won't actually accelerate the acquisition, and use, of apocalyptic weaponry by some group or some nation? He cannot know this for sure.

Neither can I know that the diplomatic route is safer. But I can look at history. And history tells me that sweeping changes to a country's governance and culture only come about over decades and centuries, not through any one imposition by some group promoting a new way of life. Such conflicts can only make relatively small changes, in the big scheme of things.

Democracy was not imposed on England after the Civil War, the emancipation of women not caused in one swoop by the Suffragettes or by the publication of The Female Eunuch, freedom of religion didn't suddenly 'switch on' after the French Revolution or when The Age of Reason hit the desk of King George or Thomas Jefferson. The closest thing I can think of to a culture-changing conflict was the American Civil War, 'causing' the abolition of slavery, but the conditions that set up the two conflicting parties were brought about by a whole array of earlier events and discourses.

There are probably many counter-examples, but it does seem to me that in the case of the Middle East, the changes that will bring about peace, reason and democracy will likely be closer in speed of action to those that brought it to the West, than a bit of a fight and a decade or two of aftermath. Surely the most likely causal agencies will come from within these countries, as they did for us, and as they seemed likely to do in Iran until we blundered into the region again and made the authorities crack down and the youth harden their attitudes.

Perhaps the reason Hitch makes the assertions he does is because this time there is more urgency, because Iran could get a nuke soon, and with their apocalyptic vision of the world they could be tempted to use them without any thought for the consequences. But it seems to me there is an easy argument that it is our actions in the middle east that provoke this outcome, just as much as our inaction.

The point is that Hitchens is too damned sure of himself. Normally he's quite carefully rational but on this point he seems to be making unjustified assertions simply because he cannot be seen to back down even slightly from the corner he backed himself into. So come on, Hitch, tell us why you think the fast, aggressive route is more likely to prevent Armageddon and reduce suffering than the slow, diplomatic, educational, evolutionary route? I'd love to know.