This is sort of related to the articles I’ve put up recently responding to CJ of ASSAP’s ideas on UFOs an d ghosts. Roger Penrose is a highly respected British mathematician and physicist. He believes that consciousness cannot be reduced to simple, straightforward mathematical computations. In his book The Emperor’s New Mind, published decades ago in 80s or 90s, he argued that it was, in fact, produced by quantum effects in the human brain. In the 90s he and the American neurosurgeon, Stuart Hameroff, suggested that these quantum effects occurred in the nanotubercules in human brain cells. This was taken up and discussed by the BBC science documentary series, Horizon, which also covered the possibility that, due to its quantum origins, consciousness survived death and the Near Death Experience was indeed evidence of life after death.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German physicist and science vlogger. In this video below she discusses this theory and a recent, independent study that confirms that quantum effects really do occur in this section of human brain cells. Scientists had previously discounted this possibility because it was believed that human biology was far too warm and wet. Quantum computers are suspended on shock absorbers and supercooled to within a few degrees of absolute zero in order for the quantum effects they use to appear. Now it seems this is not necessarily the case, at least as far as the human brain goes. The biologist Jack Cohen, who has spent decades assisting SF writers like Jack Niven construct plausible aliens for their novels, also believed that the human brain was also too warm and wet, but suggested that aliens with a different biology and chemistry may also use them in his book on what real aliens would look like. Hossenfelder nevertheless remains unconvinced on the matter of quantum consciousness, pointing out that Penrose and Hameroff don’t state how these quantum effects could lead to it.
This is my response to the second part of CJ’s article arguing that ghosts are a kind of hallucination, nevertheless created by something with an objective reality outside of the human brain. The second part of his essay is more speculative and possibly more controversial, arguing as it does that contemporary brain scan technology and the attempts to create artificial telepathy through technology could lead to devices to see ghosts technologically.
There are already devices aimed at ghost hunters which claim to be ghost detectors. As I understand them, they work by detecting minute changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which, it is claimed, is produced through the presence of a ghost. This is rather a specious assertion, and in my experience the serious psychic investigators such as those in ASSAP are highly sceptical of it. The technology that CJ suggests could be used to see ghosts is different. He is impressed with recent advances in the use of brain scans to read people’s minds. In one experiment, a man was able to play chess through mentally thinking out his moves, which were detected by the machines. I recall another experiment in which people were played something by either the Beatles or Pink Floyd. Their brains were being scanned while they listened to the music, and the experimenters were able to reconstruct from the scans what the test subjects had heard. It wasn’t perfect – the scientists said that it sounded like the band was singing underwater, but it was definitely recognisable. And then there is Elon Musk and his desire to create genuine artificial telepathy through his neuralink implants.
CJ is well aware of the totalitarian dangers of this technology, and the possibility that it could be used by highly oppressive regimes to monitor the thoughts of their subjects. He cites the psi judges in the 2000 AD strip ‘Judge Dredd’, to which could be added Agent Bester and Psi Corps in the 90s SF TV series Babylon 5. The latter character’s name is undoubtedly no accident. It looks like a homage to the SF writer Alfred Bester, the author of The Demolished Man. This is about a millionaire planning a murder in a future society with telepathic police monitoring the citizenry. Closer parallels to what CJ is suggesting, however, are in the 2000 AD strips ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ and ‘ABC Warriors’. ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ was set far in Earth’s future, where the bulk of the planet’s population live underground and the world renamed Termight – Mighty Terra. It is ruled by Torquemada, Grand Master of the Terminators, successors to the medieval military orders of the Crusades, who have turned humans’ fear of aliens into a religion. In one story describing the past of the alien hero’s human companion, Purity Brown, it is revealed that the Terminators use such technology to monitor and suppress dissidents. Purity’s father, a tube engineer, keeps his hatred of Torquemada well hidden until one night he has a dream. This is detected and he is arrested. Yes, I’m sure it’s based on a passage in Orwell’s 1984, just as I don’t think it’s an accident that the mobile surveillance vans used for this kind of surveillance in the strip look like the old TV detector vans which used to go about looking for people watching TV without a licence. There’s always been a very strong element of satire in 2000 AD.
The ABC Warriors is a long-running strip about a group of former war droids, led by the square-jawed, patriotic Hammerstein, to fight evil and oppression on Mars. In one episode, the Meknificent Seven, as they are dubbed, are sent into a Martian city, whose ruler prefers to communicate only through technological telepathy. The city is divided into various quiet zones in which citizens must keep silent so that the ruler’s machines can monitor their brains for subversive thoughts. There’s also a satirical edge to this story as well, as there is a subversive graffiti artist sending the ruler and his secret police up. One of his murals depicts the ruler and his head of secret police in a kiss, much like Banksy’s painting of two policemen.
There are real dangers and possibilities with this technology. One of the videos on YouTube discussing it describes an experiment in which people had their arms linked through the technology to another person’s brain. This person was then able to move the first person’s arm against their will. This brings us very close to a possibility the British scientist J.D. Bernal outlined in his book, The World, The Flesh and The Devil, in which one person could be mentally linked to a control a group of robots. Or alternatively, Star Trek’s Borg, a technological gestalt organism in which the individual is totally subsumed into the group. In the 1960s and ‘70s some scientists predicted that it would be possible to technologically implant false memories, exactly like the premise of Philip K. Dick’s short story, ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, filmed in 1990s with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Total Recall. At the moment we seem to be safe from such intrusive technological surveillance. As CJ points out, the equipment at the moment uses sensors directly connected to the skull, so it won’t detect people’s thoughts from a distance. As he also reminds us, people’s brains are also wired slightly differently, so what could pick up A’s secret cogitations may not pick up B’s private thoughts. Mercifully for democracy and freedom.
There are two ways brain scanning technology could be used to allow people to see ghosts. One would be through monitoring the visual cortex of a medium, so that others are able to see the spooks he or she sees, either through monitors or being technologically linked to him or her and experiencing what he or she feels through impulses fed directly into their brains. But, if I’m following CJ’s argument correctly, this is not what he’s talking about. I think he means using the brain scanning technology on the environment, not an individual, living brain, in order to reveal the presence of a ghost.
CJ reminds his readers that the 19th century founders of the Society for Psychic Research concluded that ghosts were hallucinations, but generated remotely by other minds and brains. The SPR’s constitution states that one of its aims is to investigate unknown powers of the human mind. The Society coined the term ‘telepathy’ to describe this process, although the concept existed long before its foundation. It was originally called ‘thought transference’. In the early part of the century, one of the pioneering lady novelists of the period wrote a story in which a young woman develops this ability. She then encounters a man with same telepathic abilities, and is left terribly alone when his telepathic presence vanishes. I think CJ believes that the brain monitoring technology could be used to artificially see ghosts if it was directed at the environment and the specific spot where the ghost was located. It would then pick up the impressions from the disembodied mind generating the illusion of a ghost, which would then be reconstructed into an image or sound by the technology, or piped directly into the experimenters’ visual cortex so they could ‘see’ it for themselves. He is, however, somewhat sceptical of anyone inventing ‘ghost goggles’.
It’s a thought-provoking and challenging idea. Let’s see if we can further unpack what might be involved here. I think this idea assumes that, even though the person generating the ghost hallucination has passed on, nevertheless they left behind something analogous to the human brain. Something so similar, in fact, that even though other instruments may say that there is nothing there save empty space, the technology used to scan living minds can nevertheless be used on it with something like the same results. But this brings us back to what this mind or brain stuff could be. Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel The City and the Stars, has its young hero meet and befriend a disembodied mind in space. The novel is set thousands of years in the future in which space travel has ceased and the Earth become a desert, desolate except for a single city. The disembodied mind is the result of experiments by human scientists at the height of civilisation and interstellar travel, which succeeded in embedding minds on space itself. Something similar was described in the BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s Tripod’s trilogy. The alien invaders in their citadel in the French alps use living computers created by another alien civilisation, who similarly embossed volunteers from their culture on space-time.
Back in the 90s, an American neurosurgeon, Hameroff, suggested that quantum processes in human brain cells generated consciousness and would continue after death, thus preserving the identity of the deceased and generating ghosts and Near Death Experiences. Philosophers have suggested that consciousness is an integral part of the universe along with matter and energy. And way back in the 1920s a New Zealand scientist had much the same idea. In his view, not only did the universe contain the elementary particles of matter, such as atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons, but also a particle of mind – the Mindon. This comes close to the 18th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz alternative theory to atoms, monads. Atomic theory, then being seriously revived and considered by European scientists and philosophers, was regarded with suspicion through its association with atheism, as laid out by the ancient philosopher Lucretius in his De Rerum Naturae. Leibniz instead argued that there were similar particles, monads, which also contained elements of consciousness and soul. These gradually gained in size, intelligence and supernatural power, following the divine will.
The problem here is that we don’t know what kind of mental stuff ghosts are composed of, or how it could interact with material technological bodies. Anything embossed directly on Spacetime without particles of matter, such as atoms and electrons, is, I would say, far beyond the ability of our technological devices to detect. Remember that brain scans work by detecting the minute bioelectric signals passing through the matter of the brain. Although these signals are minute, they nevertheless arise through a material process. We have no means to read disembodied minds. The same problem arises if the minds of ghosts are generated by quantum events. We have no means to monitor these outside of the bioelectric and chemical changes in the brain.
There is another problem in that brain scans are set up for the particular structure of human brains. Even if the ghosts have or constitute the type of brains that generate hallucinations, as the SPR theorised, we again have no idea, if these brains are organised in the same way mortal, embodied brains are. It may be that they’re totally different in structure, in which case the scanning equipment may not work.
This may not be an obstacle to getting usable results, however. Psychic research is replete with instances of ghosts and poltergeists interacting with electrical equipment. There are cases of electrical machines working in poltergeist cases despite being disconnected. People have also received phone calls from deceased friends and relatives. In some cases, they had carried on a normal conversation unaware that the person was dead. Some time later they may find out that the other person was no longer alive and that their phone had been disconnected. I think there are also cases where people have apparently received phone calls, either from ghosts or from supposed space being or Ultraterrestrials, despite their own phones being disconnected. And then there is the Electronic Voice Phenomenon. This follows the research of Konstantin Raudive, and is when a tape recorder or other electronic device records the voices of the dead, even when they are inaudible to the experimenters. In one version, the researcher tuned his or her radio to a dead channel, and waited for fragments of speech to come over the airways. This method of supposedly hearing the voices of the dead is controversial and there is considerable scepticism about it. Signals from other channels can bleed over into others, so that the snatches of speech heard may actually come from people who are very much alive broadcasting on another channel whose signals for a few moments got onto to the supposedly empty one.
There is also the problem of pareidolia. The human brain appears wired to find patterns, even when there is no pattern there. This includes people mistakenly hearing Satanic messages when they play records backwards. This was demonstrated a several decades ago at a Cheltenham Festival of Science by the editor of Dr Who Magazine, talking about the science behind the series. To demonstrate how the human brain can be fooled into hearing coherent speech in cacophonous noise, he played a piece by AC/DC backwards. This just sounded like white noise. He then read out what people had supposedly heard when doing this. This was the rock band admitting that Satan was their lord and that he tortured them in their garden shed. He then played the same track again, and you could actually hear these words, even though nothing like it had actually been said and it was an entire illusion. People experimenting with EVP therefore run the risk of hearing entirely illusory messages across the airwaves coming from the white noise and interference on radios, at least of the analogue type.
The EVP also raises the question of whether ghosts could also be recorded on video tape by video cameras. There have been a number of attempts by researchers to photograph ghosts, as well as photos by ordinary people of spectral figures. Again, there have been many cases of fraud here, most notoriously by the 19th century spirit photographer Hans Mummler. Obvious methods of faking such photos include double exposures. One explain for photographs of ghosts was that camera exposures are longer than that of the human eye, and so cameras could capture on film objects that were otherwise too faint to be seen. There are, however, very few, in any, uncontroversial photographs of ghosts. Some spectral figures have supposedly been caught on camera, including CCTVs. There was much excitement a few years ago of footage from a stately home of a door opening and someone in 16th century costume looking out, long after the period actors employed at the historic palace had gone home.
Way back in the 1980s there was a piece of conceptual art, Belshazzar’s Feast, which was shown on Channel 4 and reviewed on Did You See…? Hosted by Ludovic Kennedy. This was a piece of animation, in which a cartoon fire blazed against an entirely black background while a ‘strangulated voice’, as Ludo called it, described the horrific messages that people had supposedly received while watching television after closedown. 24-hour broadcasting on television really began in the 90s. Before then, broadcasting stopped at 11 or 12 O’clock at night, after which there was only the ‘snow’ pattern you otherwise got through interference. Despite this, some had stayed up late watching their TVs and received frightening messages about alien invasions. The film is still about, and I think it might even be on YouTube. I wonder if this is, again, another example of people finding messages in what is just noise.
Despite this, I am not aware of anything similar to the EVP occurring with visual cameras. I’d be more than willing to hear otherwise, but I have not heard of people at ghost investigations recording a moment or so on their phone cameras, only to replay it later to find a ghost present with them. When recording ghosts, their seems to be a difference between sound and vision. One may be recorded, the other not.
Considering the numerous examples of ghosts and poltergeists interacting with electric devices, it is possible that brain scanning technology could be used to record ghosts in the same way it records sounds and impulses from living minds, despite the apparent absence of anything material to scan and record from. I doubt that such experiments are going to be made soon. At the moment, scanning equipment for the brain is large and expensive. I cannot see hospital authorities, stretched for resources, agreeing to let such valuable equipment be used for something to apparently frivolous as finding ghosts.
But this does not mean that something like it may not occur spontaneously. I can imagine technicians in some of the older hospitals becoming confused while performing a normal brain scan, perhaps while setting the machine up and doing a few preparatory checks, to find signals from a brain despite no person actually being connected to the machine. A case like this, while fascinating and worth investigating in itself, would also go some way to corroborating CJ’s suggestion that further scanning using the equipment for the Visual Cortex itself could indeed render ghosts visible.
This is another response to a recent article by CJ, a very long-time psychical researcher and member of the paranormal research group ASSAP. Over the past few days he has written a two-part article discussing the Psycho-Social Hypothesis of the UFO experience and its possible flaws, which I have also responded to. Now he has put up a similar thought-provoking essay on the possible neurological origins of the ghost experience.
CJ states that we don’t just see with our eyes, but with our brains. There are particular sections of the brain devoted to turning the electro-chemical impulses from our peepers in to vision, and our conscious visual perception of the world around us. Among other parts of brain mentioned by him is the visual cortex located at the rear of the skull. People who have received an injury to this section of the brain may become cortically blind. There’s nothing wrong with their eyes or optic nerves, but the blow to the visual cortex means that they cannot translate the impulses from the eyes into images in their brains. There also a related phenomenon in which the cortically blind nevertheless seem to have some kind of vision subconsciously. When these people are asked to point to a person or object, they are perfectly able to do so with accuracy, even though they aren’t consciously seeing anything. To them, it’s all guesswork, even though something more than this is operating.
This leads to the thorny question of what is actually going on when people see ghosts. Scholars, theologians and spiritualists have been discussing the nature of spooks since the days of the Greek philosophers. And many people, who believe that scepticism only arose in the 18th century Enlightenment, would probably be astonished how much scepticism towards ghosts, demons and magic there was in the Middle Ages and before. Theologians had to wrestle with the problem of how ghosts could be seen, if the soul was immaterial. They concluded that there was a third form of material between the soul and ordinary matter. This was spirit. It was extremely tenuous, but nevertheless could be seen, and so could souls when they were embedded or cloaked in it. In the 19th century some Spiritualists suggested that the deceased were made of matter as we are, but this was at a higher vibration and so usually invisible to us. This followed 19th century theories about the ether and how atoms were some kind of whirlpool within this attenuated stuff that pervaded the entire cosmos.
A similar explanation has been used by Contactees and members of UFO-based New Religions to explain their contacts with the space brothers. These religions arose before humans had sent probes to the neighbouring planets and discovered how hostile they were to organic life like ours. George Adamski, dubbed by UFO Magazine ‘the great pretender’ because of his notorious hoaxes, claimed that he had met and interacted with men and women from Venus and Mars. Mars, unfortunately, is not the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs full of beautiful alien princesses, feudal warlords and alien creatures. Nor is the world of canals of Schiaparelli. It is an almost-completely airless world more like the Moon, and any life existing there is probably microbial. Venus is not C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra either, or the various primordial swamps suggested by previous scientists. It’s a hell world of sulphuric acid rain, a mean temperature of 400 degrees and an atmospheric pressure 40 times that of Earth. Any life departed from its rocky surface many millions of years ago. But several decades ago, a gentleman from the Aetherius Society tried to explain away this divergence from his religion’s teaching on Wogan. Debating the issue with astronomy presenter and broadcaster Patrick Moore, the presenter of the Sky at Night, this said that the aliens on Venus with which his religion claimed to be in contact, had not been detected because they were at a higher vibration.
Back to ghosts, CJ appears to be following the view of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research that ghosts are hallucinations, though of a different nature from that experienced by schizophrenics and others with mental health problems. They suggested that ghosts were hallucinations caused by other minds, living or dead. Crisis apparitions are one example. These are when a person suddenly sees an image of a friend or loved one on the verge of death. The SPR believed that they are caused by the dying individual telepathically sending out an image of themselves to the percipient. The theory that ghosts were telepathic impressions from other minds is the central premise behind L. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic ghost story, The House and the Brain.
There is clearly something to this. There are ghost encounters that do indeed suggest that the experience is in some sense hallucinatory, but nevertheless also objective, generated by something or someone. In one of the cases investigated by Tony Cornell, an academic and veteran paranormal investigator, he and a colleague were called out to a haunting in a woman’s house. Their car broke down along the way, and so one of them stayed to get this sorted out while the other went on to talk to the woman. When he arrived, she explained to him that there was a red-headed woman by the fireplace. His fellow turned up a few minutes later, having heard nothing of the previous conversation. When he came in, he asked who the woman by the fireplace was. This suggests that there was an objective element to the experience, in that there was something or someone there generating the image of the woman seen by the house’s occupant and one, but not both, of the ghosthunters. This has given rise to the Stone Tape theory, based on the ideas of T.C. Lethbridge, in which there is something in the environment that records mental impressions, and which replays them to certain sensitive individuals. These people then experience them as ghosts.
If this is correct, then it raises the question of what changes or features in the visual cortex or other structures of the brain involved in vision, that allow genuine mediums and clairvoyants and ordinary people to perceive ghosts. The brain, it has been said, is the most complicated organised structure in the cosmos. At the moment there are controversies over the possible existence of neurological differences between certain sections of humanity. There has been a long-time debate over whether there is a difference between the brains of men and women, and whether this is the cause of different mental abilities between the sexes. Obviously this is intensely controversial. A few decades ago one neuroscientist discovered that the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemisphere’s of the brain, was thicker in women. This discovery was received with fury by some, and there have been demonstrations against the neurologist, including physical assault, one of which left him with a fractured skull. See the relevant article in the volume The Human Brain Evolving. Differences in brain structure have also been claimed as the origin of homosexuality. A Californian doctor, LaVey, claimed after extensive dissection of the brains of gay men, that one section of their brains was more similar to heterosexual women than to hetero men. And it has also been claimed that gay women’s brains are similarly more like that of heterosexual men than heterosexual women. This appears to be the accepted view. But some neurologists have questioned whether men’s and women’s brains are all that different. These doctors and surgeons point out that you can’t immediately tell the sex of a brain from its appearance. There may be immense problems examining the question of a neurological origin of the ghost experience.
And it is questionable whether the theory that ghosts are some form of hallucination actually explains all the varieties of the ghost experience. Looking through Hillary Evans’ excellent Seeing Ghosts, it is clear that people’s experiences of seeing and encountering ghosts is extremely varied, and often doesn’t simply consist of seeing or hearing them. Some of the encounters in the book are about instances where the percipient had eaten with a supposed ghost in a café or restaurant, only to find out later that this person had been dead for days before. Yet when they met them, they behaved like a fully embodied, corporeal being. And what about poltergeists, the noisy ghosts that throw objects about? These appear to have a physical reality, at least in their effect on the homes and property of the people haunted by them. They aren’t hallucinations, although the entity responsible for the hurled plates or whatever may also be invisible and immaterial in itself, just as the ghost causing the hallucinatory experience in that model is also objectively invisible and immaterial. It is possible that there is no single ghost experience, but a variety of related or apparently similar phenomena, and so no single explanation is possible. Or it may be there is a single ghost phenomenon, but that it involves a number of factors and processes, including hallucinations, but that these may vary according to types of experience. CJ has stated that this is the first part of his discussion of ghosts and hallucinations, and promised that in his next piece he’ll return to the subject of UFOs. I await both with interest.
Rakib Ehsan, Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities (London: Forum 2023).
I first came across this in an interview Ehsan himself gave about it on YouTube. I can’t remember now what channel it was on, but I think it may have been the SDP’s as Ehsan’s politics seem similar to theirs – left-wing economically but conservative socially. He also says at the outset that he tries to bridge the gap between Blue Labour and Red Tories. I have very strong issues with both of those groups, as they cloak their Thatcherite economics that disenfranchise and exploit working people in the language of the left. See Philip Blonde’s Red Tory. The book is directed very firmly at the Labour party. Ehsan sees the party as having abandoned class based activism in the wake of the BLM movement for divisive identity politics imported from America. This is a country that has a very different history and political culture from the UK, and this is going to cost them the votes of the very ethnic minorities they seek to court.
Contrary to identitarian propaganda, Britain and its people aren’t racist, although racism still exists and needs tackling where it does. The supposed privilege Whites enjoy over people of colour disappear when examined in detail. Some ethnic minorities are surpassing Whites in school grades, pay and employment. There are also differences in achievement between White demographic groups. Working class White English males are nearly at the bottom, with only Irish Travellers below them. Chinese and Indians outperform Whites. Black Africans are also outperforming Whites academically. There is no overarching ‘BAME’ community, as these are very different peoples who have different levels of achievement. Black Africans, for example, are much more successful than Afro-Caribbean peoples. The success and growing achievements of people of colour is being obscured by the grievance narrative that they are all being held back by systemic racism. As a man of mixed Bangladeshi-Uttar Pradeshi heritage, he felt particularly insulted when Jeremy Corbyn declared that only Labour could unlock the potential of Britain’s Black and Asian communities. This attitude, he warns, is going to cost the Labour party the votes of Britain’s non-White communities. Rather than being obsessed with racial grievances, these communities value the two parent family, religious faith and are patriotically British. It is these values, that are despised by the woke left, that produces their increasing academic, economic and social successes. This success should be celebrated, and the White population, which is trailing behind in many instances, could, he dares to suggest, take a leaf out of their book. At the last election, one million people of colour abandoned Labour for the Tories.
Brexit Not Fascist Project of Nostalgic White Supremacists
He is also a Brexiteer and is at pains to argue that Brexit wasn’t the project of Fascist, backward-looking Whites. Many of the Whites who voted for it did so because they came from communities who believed the country had been harmed by the EU, not because of immigration. And a large proportion of the non-White population also voted Leave. One in three Asians did so. They feared the immigration to this country of large numbers of people from parts of Europe which were much less tolerant of non-Whites. They also wanted Britain to establish greater contact with the Commonwealth.
Ethnic Disparities Based on Other Factors Apart from Racism
As for the disparities between ethnic groups in sport, jobs and education, some of this is down to class, and differences in culture and job expectations. For example, Bangladeshis largely do better than Whites at school, but come from a very traditional culture that sees women’s place as being in the home. There is thus a relative lack of Bangladeshi women in the workplace. He also discusses the question of the absence of British Asians in cricket played at the county and national level. This comes from the allegations of racism at Yorkshire CC. He states that this was clearly a case of racism, and that the club was racist hellhole. But he quotes several British Asian cricketers that there are particular attitudes in British Asian culture against playing cricket professionally. Asian parents want good, secure jobs for their children – jobs like doctor or dentist. Professional cricket is very insecure, and so their parents will try and steer their kids away from it. As for the police, in many instances it’s a matter of family tradition, with children following parents and relatives in the force. Thus, White people tend to predominate simply because of family tradition. And on the subject of the cops, he cites evidence that shows that most people of colour are satisfied with their local police forces. Indeed, more non-Whites trust the cops more than White British. This does not include the Metropolitan Police, who are distrusted because of their proven racism, misogyny and other forms of bigotry. He believes that this could be tackled by breaking it up into smaller, local forces, and letting local forces also run the parts of the Met that extend into surrounding counties like Kent.
Regarding Islam, he cites the statistic that three-quarters of Muslims believe that Britain is a good place to be one. This is much more than the general British population. More Muslims are also concerned about the threat of Islamism than Whites. He also criticises the Labour MP Naz Shah for claiming that the Prevent programme was resented by Muslims for demonising them when the stats showed that 53 per cent of Muslims weren’t aware of it.
Black and Asians Patriotic Brits
The Black and Asian communities were also generally more patriotic and had a greater trust in British democracy, although this was much less so in the younger generation. 78 per cent of older Asians had faith in British democracy, but only 58 per cent of the younger generation, just a bit lower than Whites at 62 per cent. He put this down to the older generation coming from countries which were unstable with very repressive regimes, tracing the history in particular of the British South Asian community. This began after the War with Sikhs from the Punjab, who had been displaced from Pakistan and given poor quality land in India. They were then followed by Gujuratis seeking employment in the NHS. And then came the ethnic cleansing of the Ugandan Asian community by Idi Amin and his policy of Africanisation. The South Asians in Africa were employed as middle ranking officials and businessmen between the White colonial officials at the top and indigenous Africans at the bottom. There were already immigration restrictions in place, but they were admitted by Ted Heath. I’ve heard again and again, including from Asian speakers at our local church, that the Ugandan Asian community is still grateful to Britain because of this.
He also has immense respect for the Queen and King Charles. The Queen had a strong sense of duty to the Commonwealth, while our current liege lord is strongly multicultural. He said in his coronation speech that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ and that he wanted to be known as ‘Defender of Faith’, meaning all Britain’s religious communities, not just the Anglican church. On the subject of which, he notes the strong contribution made by Black Africans to keeping it alive in the face of the massive secularisation of the White population. He states that you are far more likely to get a sense of the deep antiquity of Christianity in Britain in an African cafe eating Jellof rice in London than in many White communities. It is ridiculous to blame the Queen for the evils committed under imperialism and colonialism, and Britain’s non-Christian religions are certainly not resentful of Christianity. He takes issue with the secularists in the Labour party, who feel that religion is outmoded and dangerous. They are actively putting non-Whites off, because these cultures have a very strong religious identity. More Muslims see their religion as important to their identity than Whites. The Labour party has a strong tradition of Christian Socialism, and these non-Christian religious communities would like to see it revived.
Importance of Education to Indians and Chinese
He also puts the growing success of the Indian and Chinese communities in education and professionally to strong families and religion. He cites statistics showing that children from stable, two parent homes are less likely to join criminal gangs, are more emotionally stable, and do better at school and in the world of work. Far fewer Asian children live in single parent families than Whites. They, and the Chinese, are also very aspirational. They want their children to do well, make sure they work hard at school and in the case of the Chinese make sure they keep away from bad influences. They also have the support of the wider community, with elders actively taking an interest in the welfare and progress of the young. He does not decry single mothers, recognising the immense hard work so many do to raise their children, and that the relaxation of the divorce laws were brought in for the very good reason of allowing women in particular to escape abusive marriages. But it has had a devastating effect on marriage and the family in Britain. 63 per cent of Afro-Caribbean children live in one parent families, and 43 per cent of Black African. 25 per cent of Whites also are being raised in families largely without a father. This is holding these groups back, and he dares to suggest that Whites could take a leaf out of the Asian communities in starting to value marriage and the family more. I am in complete agreement, and don’t think this is at all controversial.
On the subject of religion, he states that he has mixed views on the subject, wondering if it really is outmoded and dangerous, especially after the terrorist attacks of 7/7 and the massacre of schoolgirls by a suicide bomber at the Ariana Grande concert. But the stats also show that people, who have a strong religious faith are generally more mentally stable, more optimistic and with a higher degree of life satisfaction than atheists. He also believes that respect for the cultures of ethnic minorities should not be used as a pretext for avoiding tackling crime and extremist attitudes in those communities, which could be excused by their perpetrators as part of their culture.
Britain Not Racist Country
He also cites the statistics showing that Britain is not a racist country. A large majority of Whites -well above 70 per cent – believe that Englishness is a matter of values rather than colour. The number of people linking Englishness to White ethnicity is low, and fell markedly in the last decade. Britain has robust laws against racism and discrimination, and the level of real racism, including abuse and violence, is lower in Britain than in many continental countries like France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. This, he claims, shows the falsity of the Remain argument that views the continent as a paradigm of anti-racism in contrast with evil Britain. Anti-Black racism also isn’t confined to Whites. Eight per cent of Blacks in Britain have experienced discrimination at the hands of other Blacks. 84 per cent of Brits have no problem with a person of colour heading the government. Rishi Sunak, regardless of his wretched political policies, is an example of Asian success, who should be celebrated. His parents both worked in the medical sector – I think his father was a pharmacist. Sunak was privately educated, rising professionally and politically.
This is where the book is really controversial. He takes these stats showing that Britain isn’t a racist country from a variety of reports, including those of CRED and Sewell. The last was commissioned under the Tories, and came under widespread attack for supposedly erasing the reality of racism in Britain. This was despite it being written by mostly Black and Asian academics. Various Labour MPs accused it of being Fascist, with one even Tweeting an image of a Klan meeting underneath. The Black and Asian politicians, who do not accept that Britain is racist, like Kemi Badenoch, are subjected to horrendous racist abuse as Uncle Toms and worse language. He himself has been attacked in these terms. His favourite has been that he is a ‘Muslim Mosley’. Well, I’d say that the Muslim Mosleys were the Islamists convincing lost and alienated Muslims to join Daesh, or march around our cities demanding sharia law while waving the black flag of jihad. The British left, and primarily the Labour party, has taken over dangerous and divisive identity politics imported from America. What many of the people of colour demanding these policies want is not equality, but preferential treatment. He is also suspicious of many of those attacking Islamophobia, as he suspects that many of those are Islamists using it as a strategy to introduce aspects of sharia law. I think he’s right here, as the mass protests against the autistic schoolboy for Islamophobia when he scuffed a Qur’an, a horrendous blasphemy under Islam, certainly shows. He is against the European Court of Human Rights ruling that businesses are allowed to discriminate against women wearing the hijab if this threatens to be disruptive. He points out that the hijab simply covers the face. It is not like the niqub, which covers the whole body, including the face. The ruling threatens to prevent devout Muslim women from finding work outside the home and bring them into contact with mainstream society.
Attacks on Corbyn
Naturally for a man of the right he gives Jeremy Corbyn a good kicking. He claims that Labour lost the 2019 election due to his inability to tackle the anti-Semitism crisis and the promotion of identitarian politics. But this wasn’t the case. Corbyn had very wide support and paradoxically a greater share of the vote than Blair and New Labour, regardless of the fact that it was the poorest electoral performance for the party since the 1930s. What brought him down was a very manufactured campaign by the British right and the official Jews of the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and various pro-Israel groups. They were alarmed by his championing of the Palestinians against the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Israeli state, and so did everything they could to smear him as an anti-Semite. Corbyn has a long career of standing up for Jewish Brits, but this counted for nothing to people who regard any opposition or criticism of Israel as an anti-Semitic. As for the real anti-Semites in the Labour party, the true nature of the crisis was kept hidden from him by right-wing intriguers and traitors within the party. People like Margaret Hodge, who admitted she did everything she could to stop Labour being elected.
Rejection of Labour’s Proposed New Equality Act
He respects the Labour party for the anti-racist legislation it passed in the 70s as well as the Equality Act passed by Blair, but is firmly against Labour’s promised new Equality Act demanding affirmative action. The majority of Black and Asian people do not want or need it. Indeed, he claims that there is a suspicion that Labour will hold people of colour back in order to stop their success invalidating the claim that their lagging behind Whites is all due to racism. He is also critical of organisations like the Runnymede Commission pushing this narrative. Twenty years ago the Commission praised Britain for its multicultural tolerance. Now it claims that Britain is marred by deep structural racism. But British society isn’t racist and hasn’t become worse. It is just that the Runnymede Commission, in order to keep itself relevant, has joined BLM and the other grievance mongers. Labour’s embrace of these groups and individuals, such Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, is putting voters, including those of colour, off. And they may well abandon the party because of it.
The Trans Issue
He also has controversial views on the trans issue. He states that trans people should enjoy the same protection from abuse, discrimination and violence as other protected groups. However, transwomen should not be allowed to enter women’s private spaces such as prisons, toilets and changing rooms. In many ways, this is common sense as trans identified biological male rapists have been put in women’s prisons in California and Scotland, and there has been an outcry against it. The SNP lost much of their support when they also placed these dangerous men in women’s prisons. It does conflict, however, with the view that ‘trans women are women’, even if they are not biologically, and so trans activists and supporters will naturally find it very offensive. And he is also not afraid to call divorce parties degenerate as part of the collapse of marriage and the nuclear family in the west.
Radical Attacks on Marriage and the Family
This is a controversial but necessary book. Controversial because it overturns the received wisdom about British ethnic minorities as the victims of systemic racism needing aid and allyship from mainstream White British society. The statistics about the beneficial effects of growing up in two-parent family are almost certainly correct. They’ve been reproduced several times before. This will jar with some on the radical left. There has been an attack on traditional European marriage since the time of the 18th century French philosophes. Free love instead of marriage was embraced by 19th century Romantics like Shelley and Byron. It has also been part of the Anarchist critique of capitalism as well as Marxism. Marx states in The Communist Manifesto that it degrades women and believed it was dying out among the working class in his own time. This was further expanded by Engels in his The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, which also drew on the Das Mutterrecht of the German antiquarian, Backhausen. Backhausen had believed that society had passed through several phases of development – a communal society without institutional marriage, followed by matriarchy and then finally patriarchy. Archaeologists and historians have since rejected this. Historical research has also shown that marriage very definitely wasn’t dying out among the 19th century working class. Nevertheless, marriage has been attacked by radical activists. I can remember the controversy about Pebble Mill, a BBC lunchtime magazine programme in the 70s, when they invited on a couple who very definitely believed that marriage was dying out, and that this was a very good thing indeed. Over the other side of the Channel, the Postmodernist Marxist Althusser attacked marriage and the family as part of the sociological infrastructure of capitalism and feudalism.
Benefits of Religious Faith
Similarly there is abundant evidence supporting the view that religion is beneficial to one’s wellbeing. A few years ago medical researchers claimed that having a faith in general added six months to one’s life. And back when the New Atheists were beginning their assault on religion neurologists found that people who had mystical experiences were generally in no worse mental health than the rest of the population. This obviously isn’t something secular and atheist activists want to hear. Nor do I think they really want to hear that in general, non-Christian minorities don’t have an issue with institutional, public Christianity. The claim that they do tends to come from secularist and atheist organisations like the Humanist Society as part of their project of removing Christianity and other forms of religion from the public sphere. The philosopher Bruce Trigger tackled this subject in his Religion in Public over decade. He claimed that many Jews did not want the bishops removed from the House of Lords because, so long as they were, it created a public space for religion in politics.
Ethnic Success Also Due to Differences in Culture and History
I also think that the stats showing that Britain is not an intrinsically racist country is likely to be true, even if the report that argued this was commissioned by the Tories. If it is untrue, then it has to be shown to be untrue through further sociological research and polling. The argument that it must be the case from ethnic disparities is false, because as Thomas Sowell has shown, different ethnic groups have different attitudes and economic and professional specialities due to their history and quite often geographical location. The Chinese and Gujuratis are, like the Jews, ‘middleman cultures’ strongly based on trade. They therefore tend to surpass other groups in business, as do the Lebanese in South America. Ehsan himself argues that the success of various ethnic groups depends on the cultural resources and the attitudes and material advantages they may have enjoyed when they left their country of origin. Ugandan Asians have prospered, despite having been robbed of nearly everything they owned by Amin and his thugs, because they were business and professional people. Afro-Caribbeans, however, generally speaking lack this entrepreneurial and professional background and so lag behind. And the idea that all White people are privileged is going to ring particularly hollow for White working class boys and the hollowed out coastal towns and post-industrial communities. The instant dismissal of the claim that Britain isn’t racist is based on prejudice rather than genuine scepticism.
Changes in Patterns of Racism Since the Experience of the First Afro-Caribbean Migrants
The attitude of the identitarian left that Britain must be intrinsically racist seems to come mostly from the experience of Afro-Caribbeans, who are generally more distrustful of the police and democracy than other groups. They have indeed, along with the first generation Asian immigrants, suffered real racism in the form of institutional discrimination – no dog, no blacks, no Irish – racist bullying and violence, particularly from real Fascists in the shape of the BNP, National Front and other lowlifes. It is Afro-Caribbeans in particular who lag behind Whites. This history has bred an attitude among many that Britain is racist and hostile, backed up with convoluted and contrived arguments from the Postcolonial set. This has become part of the general culture of the left, because of the long tradition of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. It looks plausible, because for over four decades now the received view has been that Britain is racist to a greater or lesser extent, even though the situation has changed and is now becoming much more complex. Diane Abbott didn’t want to discuss inter-ethnic minority conflict and racism, but this attitude is contradicted by rioting last year between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester. Ehsan points out that this shows that ethnic conflict isn’t just something confined to Whites. And there is now and industry of grievance mongers in academia and woke capitalism, whose careers are centred around portraying White Britain as innately oppressive, that Blacks and other people of colour are always victims and that Whites should feel guilty as racial oppressors tainted with the blood of the indigenous peoples they exterminated and enslaved.
Multiculturalism Pulling Ethnic Groups Apart, Not Together
Ehsan notes that while Britain may be more tolerant than other countries, there is still a problem in pulling the different ethnic groups together. He cites further statistics shown that a majority of Brits feels more needs to be done on this count, and argues that was is needed is a common set of shared values. But this is one of the problems of multiculturalism. Blair recruited as his community representatives people who very definitely not representative of their communities and determined to push their own sectarian or ethnic politics. And the attack on the welfare state has meant that different communities are competing against each other for government funding and aid. For all his faults, Corbyn did represent a return to class politics, which is another reason why there was such a concerted attempt to remove him. If the working class in general receives proper welfare support, there is less jealousy and resentment between ethnic groups, and so Whites in particular are less inclined to heed racists like the BNP.
Blue Labour and Attacks on the Welfare State
As for the position that government action is needed to strengthen the family, I agree. But this goes further than simply making it a matter of tax. And I am very suspicious of the right when they claim to strengthen the family. All too often it is based around the view that it’s declined due to the welfare state, and so the first thing they do is cut welfare support even further while loudly crying, like Thatcher, that it’s more self-help and will make people more self-reliant.
He is critical of the Tories as a corrupt group wrecking the economy for their own benefit and hope that Labour will put forward pro-working class policies. But this won’t come from Blue Labour any more than it will supposedly come from Red Tories. What comes from the Blairites and the other Thatcherite infiltrators is more privatisation, including that of the NHS, more cuts to the welfare state and more attempts to strangle the unions, all of which you can see in Stalin’s leadership of the Labour party.
This book is necessary as it argues against the current racial narrative from a man of colour, who clearly believes that such narratives are damaging the Labour party. Certainly racial attitudes have changed radically in my lifetime and it is time that the debate recognised this. But at the same time, as Ehsan is careful to state, racism still exists and needs tackling where it does.
Our favourite internet (non)historian this afternoon put up a video asking the above question. Even though it only last just over five minutes, I got just halfway through it before I turned it off and went looking for something less contentious and more edifying. Webb’s argument is that all the opposition to anthropological studies linking race to IQ are ideological rather than scientific. I don’t know enough about scientific, or pseudo-scientific racism to be able to fully refute him there. But I guess a start could be made by reading the late Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, which is about how Darwinian evolution was utilised in the 19th and early 20th centuries to prove the inferiority of non-Whites and women. I can also remember reading an article in a student magazine in the 80s/90s by Marek Cohn that covered this topic. Cohn is, I believe, certainly not a right-winger. He argued, if I recall correctly, that the same data the racial scientists had used to argue that there were real differences between different races in IQ was then re-evaluated after the War and the horror of Nazism to argue the reverse. Which suggests that, whatever its supporters say, the evidence is at least ambiguous.
As for the question why were are reluctant to discuss any link between race and IQ, it’s because it has been used to justify terrible oppression and crimes against humanity. The reluctance isn’t complete. A few years ago Channel 4 screened a series which looked at these differences. In one programme they found that northern Europeans are more resistant to the cold than southern European and Blacks. They also found that east Asians have much less to resistance to alcohol than westerners. This was put down to the orient having tea, rather than alcohol, for generations as their drink of choice. Although I am aware that they also had palm and rice wine, like saki in Japan.
It also covered the extremely delicate subject of cognitive differences between Aboriginal Australians and others. The programme made it clear that this was a sensitive subject because of the way IQ and cognition had been used to oppress and disinherit these incredibly ancient people. However, studies have shown that the visual cortex of indigenous Australians contains 25 per cent more neurons than in people of other races. As a result, they have excellent visual memory. The programme showed Aboriginal people outperforming Whites in memory tests of objects placed before them. It was put forward that the Aboriginal brain had evolved this way to help them find their way in the trackless wastes of the Outback and desert. Landscapes that seem featureless and confusing to westerners are full of landmarks to indigenous Australians. Aboriginal children lag behind other races in education, and it was suggested that their teaching could be improved by taking advantage of this racial skill.
I think the strongest warning against finding some races inferior comes from H.G. Wells. Wells had his fair share of prejudices himself. Biographers have noted that he himself confessed to being a racist and an anti-Semite. But Wells also wrote powerful pieces against racism, extracts from which I have put up here. In one of his SF works, which actually looks forward to a future utopia in which the world has been united into a single state and people of different races mix freely and in equality, he states that if a people were found to be racially inferior, it would be better to exterminate them rather than have them live as slaves. It’s a sentence that chills the blood after the Holocaust.
But the point is clear: decent people don’t want to find a connection between race and IQ, because it has and can lead back to slavery and other horrors.
And that, I believe, answers at least part of Webb’s question. As he himself very likely knows.
Here’s a piece of optimistic science news. Yesterday’s I for 27th August 2020 carried this article by Tom Bawden, ‘Microbots can be injected to repair human body’, reporting that scientists have developed tiny robots that may injected into the body to carry drugs or repair tissue. The article runs
Scientists have created a new kind of microscopic walking robot that is shorter, thinner and narrower than the width of a human hair and can be injected into the body in a syringe.
Researchers hope that this new kind of robot – the first to carry and use onboard electronics – can be used to deliver drugs deep into human tissue or to sew up miniature blood vessel wounds deep in the body.
They hope that within five to 10 years the robot – currently a prototype that has been tested successfully in the lab – can be developed into smart, autonomous devices that can explore an area without the need of human guidance, according to a study in the journal Nature.
In their current form, these are the first microscopic robots that incorporate semiconductor components, allowing them to be controlled with electronic signals.
Each bot consists of a circuit made from silicon photovoltaics – which convert light into electricity and functions as the torso and brain – and four electrochemical “actuators”; components that function as legs.
The researchers control the robots by flashing laser pulses at different photovoltaics, each of which charges up a separate set of legs. By toggling the laser back and forth between the front and back photovoltaics, the robot walks.
“Machines like these are going to take us into all kinds of amazing worlds”, said Marc Miskin, of the University of Pennyslvania.
There’s also a snippet stating that they hope to use the robots for neurology:
The researchers are exploring ways to soup up the robots with more complicated electronics that could result in swarms of microscopic robots being dispatched to probe large areas of the human brain.
Scientists have been working on such robots for a long time. I think the ultimate goal is to develop nanorobots – robots so tiny that they could climb inside and repair cells. It’s been suggested that such machines could be so effective that they’d give people immortality. On the other hand, such nanobots have also raised the spectacle of the ‘grey goo’. In this scenario, scientists develop self-replicating nanomachines that simply turn everything into a grey goo. These escape, and destroy the world. I think we’re a long way from that just yet. The robots do, however, remind me of the old SF movie, Fantastic Voyage, in which a crew and their submarine are miniaturised and injected into a wounded scientist to save his life. But obviously without the miniaturisation technology and Raquel Welsh, who was one of the stars.
However, from reading the article it seems that they haven’t quite perfected remote control. I don’t see how using a laser to guide its legs would work if the robot was injected far away from a light source inside someone. But perhaps I’m missing something. I also have grave doubts about using them to explore the human brain. I’m very much aware that this would be immensely useful, considering how little we still know about it, but the technology seems to me also to have the potential for massive abuse. For example, if swarms can be injected into the brain to explore, it’s possible that they could also be used to alter the brain and control the person on whom they’re being used.
There’s clearly much potential here, but I wonder how long it will actually be before there are any practical machines developed from these devices.
There really couldn’t be a clearer statement of the Tories’ contempt for society’s weaker, less privileged and disabled members. Mike put up a piece today reporting that the Tory candidate for Amber Rudd’s old constituency of Hastings & Rye, Sally Ann Hart, managed to outrage people at a local husting with her recommendation on how much people with learning difficulties should be paid. She said that they should earn less than people of normal intelligence, because ‘they don’t understand money’ (!) This lead to shouts of ‘Shameful!’ and one person in the audience shouting that they were autistic, and they wanted to get paid for the work they do. As they should.
Amber Rudd, when she held that constituency, only had a majority of 346 votes over Labour. After this, Mike reckons that the Labour candidate, Peter Chowney, might just take it. And Mike also makes it clear what Hart’s comment means:
I think it means it is Conservative policy to rip off and shortchange people whenever and wherever they think it is possible.
Never mind whether they do a good job or not, if someone has a learning disability, the Tories are saying not only that you can – but that you should – pay them less money.
He goes on to describe what the Tories’ re-election would mean for other disabled people across Britain.
But we can see what kind of nation the Tories would create if they are elected into government again on December 12: one in which the hostile environment they have already built for disabled people would spill over into open contempt, with more pushed into poverty, and possibly even more deaths than we’ve seen in the last nine years of Tory misrule.
The Tories really do amaze me. Just when you think they couldn’t get lower or scummier, they do. Their morals are so low they’re subterranean. And I also wonder if Hart herself isn’t a bit defective in the old grey matter. Years ago I read a piece in New Scientist about some of the problems suffered by people with injuries or other impairments to specific parts of their brain. One region of the brain apparently regulates morality. According to the neurologist interview by the magazine, those of his patients who’ve suffered damage to that area will do things like start eating the food off other peoples’ plates in restaurants. They do so simply because, with that part of their brain not working correctly, they no longer understand that’s not the right thing to do.
It’s tempting to speculate that Sally Ann Hart may have a similar mental impairment. But sadly, I doubt it. She doesn’t appear to have suffered any damage to her brain. She just has a nasty attitude to the disabled.
As for disabled people not understanding money, while that’s no doubt true of some, it most certainly isn’t true of others. Some autistic people, for example, are superb mathematicians, but find it difficult to cope in social situations. And there are too many people of normal intelligence, who are unable to deal properly with money. I’ve heard stories of people falling on severe financial difficulties because the money they should have used to pay the rent or the mortgage they’ve instead spent on an expensive car or luxury holiday to somewhere exotic. They’ve made a stupid choice, but they aren’t mentally handicapped and shouldn’t be paid less for their work either.
But Hart’s comments about the disabled also reveals much about the wider Tory viewpoint, at least for some members of the party. One writer on American Neoconservativism believed that they had an essentially Hobbesian worldview. That is, they followed the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes in considering people purely as isolated units in society, engaged in a ‘war of each against all’. This also seems to be Hart’s thinking, in which those physically, mentally or socially inferior are to be taken advantage of and exploited. Because they are unable to cope for themselves, and so ultimately it’s for their benefit. Hence the punitive benefit sanctions and the Work Capability Test. These may strike everyone with an ounce of compassion and objectivity as grossly unfair and cruel to the point of murder, but to the Tories it’s all for the good of those at the receiving end of it. They have to be kept in line, even by exploitation, as they cannot cope and function as proper, self-reliant, responsible members of society otherwise.
It’s a disgusting attitude. Stop this Tory exploitation of the disabled and, indeed, anyone else on Thursday. Get them out, and Corbyn in!
As Mike posted a few days ago, BoJob was booed out of Addenbrook’s hospital in Cambridge, when he turned up for a visit. And one medical student, Julia Simons, was so disgusted by this blatant piece of electioneering that she confronted him with it. This video from the Groaniad shows her trying to question our disaster of a PM as he walks out of the hospital to his limo surrounded by his bodyguards and minders, pointedly refusing to answer her questions. She also gives a brief interview explaining her attempt to confront him to the Groan’s reporter afterward.
She asks him, ‘I’d also like to ask you about your awareness of the health crisis and the climate crisis? I won’t be working in a system like the one today … Have you read the IPCC report? Do you understand that? Have you read it? Do you understand the IPCC report?’
She gets no answer, and slams the car door shut.
She says to the reporter afterward:
Basically, I just came out of clinic and I was told that Boris Johnson was coming, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness’, like as a normal person you never get that opportunity to say something to someone like that. I really want to ask him, ‘What’s next?’ And I was told I wasn’t allowed to ask him any questions. Which is a really good sign, I think, that this is a PR stunt. People who work in this hospital know the reality of cuts, like I’m a medical student, I don’t know the cuts in the way these people do. They were all really angry to hear he’s coming here for a PR stunt, ’cause we know what cuts have done to our NHS. We know the NHS is being privatised even if it’s not explained in explicit terms.
The reporter asks ‘What’s the mood among the staff at the hospital having had Boris Johnson come in?’
She replies
Oooh, we weren’t told he was coming, which is a really big sign. As a Prime Minister you should be proud of how you’re leading your country. We were told that we weren’t allowed to know he was here. But I think it’s one of frustration because, as doctors we practice evidence-based medicine and politics should be evidence-based too. And yet the health outcomes from his policy changes evidence-wise, that doesn’t work and we shouldn’t keep doing that. And he’s too much of a coward to talk to any real members of staff rather than some random medical student, who happened to get in front of some cameras about the reality of those cuts.
Very well said!
Of course it was a publicity stunt, just as all the Tories’ visits to hospitals and doctors’ surgeries have been. And I’m not surprised that the staff were told to keep schtumm. They know perfectly well that the Health Service is being privatised, and that it is all driven by ideology. The neurosurgeon, Humanist and philosopher Ray Tallis and Jackie Davis make this absolutely clear in their book, NHS-SOS. Despite all the verbiage about introducing private sector discipline and skills into the NHS, the reality is that private medicine and hospitals actually provide a poorer service than state medicine. But Tory ideology, plus their class interest as people with private business interests themselves mean that they are promoting the privatisation of the NHS for all they and their backers in private healthcare companies can get.
When Simons talks about evidence-based medicine, she means, of course, treatment that has been subject to thorough scientific testing and proper statistical analysis. But these are alien to the Tories, who lie through their teeth and won’t release proper statistics on anything whatsoever, because in healthcare, and so often generally, the proper stats flatly contradict their lies. See Mike’s experience of how Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP tried everything they could to refuse him the stats for the number of people, who had died after being declared fit for work by Atos, then handling the fitness to work tests.
Julie Simons is obviously an extremely conscientious student, who cares deeply for the NHS and the care it provides. She should make an extremely good doctor. She also joins a long line of other doctors, surgeons and medical professionals, who’ve also tried to confront the Tories about the catastrophic effect their vile policies are having.
But I am also afraid that, by daring to confront BoJob, she will also have her card marked as a troublemaker and will be subject to some of the appalling harassment and abuse that the Tories and their troll army have inflicted on others, who have confronted them like this.
The only politician and party that will keep the NHS publicly owned, providing free medicine at the point of use, is Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. Vote for them, and get the Tories and Lib Dems out.
Friday’s I, for 4th October 2019, also carried the astonishing news that a paralysed man had been able to walk and move his arms using an exoskeleton developed by scientists at the university of Grenoble. The article, ‘Paralysed man walks with help of exoskeleton’ by Rhiannon Williams and Tom Bawden, on page 5 of the newspaper, ran
A paralysed man has been able to move his arms and walk with the assistance of a robotic exoskeleton suit controlled by his thoughts, in a breakthrough that could revolutionise the lives of patients around the world.
The 28-yeard-old man is paralysed from the shoulders down with only partial movement in his biceps and left wrist, meaning he is classified as a tetraplegic and operates a joystick-controlled wheelchair.
Over the course of a two-year trial conducted by French researchers including the University of Grenoble, he was able to move all four of his limbs through brain signals recorded and interpreted by the robotic suit.
The team implanted a recording device between the patient’s brain and skull either side of his head, containing electrodes to collect brain signals and transmit them to a decoding algorithm. Those signals were translated into his desired movements and communicated to the exoskeleton suit to move it, after activating a brain-operated “on” switch. The suit was suspended from the ceiling to allow it to balance correctly.
The patient trained the decoding algorithm to understand his thoughts by using it to move a digital avatar in a video game before raching out for 2D and 3D objects while wearing the suit. He spent 95 days training the algorithm at home playing the game and teaching an avatar to walk onscreen, and a further 45 days operating the suit in the lab. In the first two months, he was able to activate the switch 73 per cent of the time over six sessions, while over 39 sessions he was able to walk over a total of 145m.
The study, published in The Lancet Neurology, has the potential to enhance patient autonomy and quality of life. “Our finds could move us a step closer to helping tetraplegic patients to drive computers using braini signals alone, perhaps starting with driving wheelchairs using brain activity instead of joysticks and progressing to developing an exoskeleton for increased mobility,” said Professor Stephan Chabardes, a neurosurgeon from the CHU Grenoble-Alpes teachinig hospital. The trial is continuing with three more patients as researchers seek to remove the ceiling-mounted harness.
While the study is a “welcome and exciting advance”, its findings are a long way from reality, said Professor Tom Shakespeare from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “Even if workable, cost contraints mean hi-tech options are never going to be available to most people with spinal cord injury,m” he said. “One analysis suggests only 15 per cent of the world’s disabled population have access to the wheelchairs or other assistive technologies they need.”
A related peace, ‘Success: Real-world results after months of training’ adds
Robotic exoskeletons have been touted for years as a way to increase the mobility of elderly people and those who have limited movement, with global companies such as LG, Honda, Panasonic, Audi and Hyundai among the investors.
The trial’s exoskeleton is operated by a semi-invasive brain-computer system, and is the first of its kind designed for long-term use to activate all four limbs, according to Professor Alim-Louis Benabid, from the University of Grenoble.
‘Previous brain-computer studies have used more invasive recording devices implanted beneath the outermost membrane of the brain, where they eventually stop working. They have been connected to wires, limited to creating movement in just one limb, or have focused on restoring movement to patients’ own muscles’, he said.
The exoskeleton in the trial has 14 degrees of movement, meaning it can move in 14 different ways. Over time the patient progressed from reaching towards targets on cubes using one hand to using both hands to touch targets including rotating both wrists after 16 months. On average, the patient was able to perform tasks between 10 per cent and 20 per cent more successfully with the exoskeleton than by controlling the digital avatar, suggesting he received richer feedback in the real world.
Here’s the picture that accompanied the article of the man wearing the suit.
As the article says, there have been designs for robotic exoskeletons for some time. IN the 50s – 60s American scientists had plans for one. However, only the claw was built because the motors that they were using were so powerful they would have shaken the whole suit apart. Then in the 1990s there were designs for robotic leggings very much like those in the Wallace and Gromit film, The Wrong Trousers. They were designed to help paralysed people to walk. Driven by electric motors and with a computer learning system, the trousers would have first been worn by an able-bodied person. They would have walked about to teach the machine how to do it. After the machine had taken in this information, they would have been passed on to the disabled people needing them. A similar machine appeared in the I a few weeks ago, when it reported the development of robotic shorts.
At the moment, I’m afraid Professor Shakespeare is right, and such exoskeletons are too expensive for general use by the disabled. But hopefully if this technology is improved and developed, the price will come down and something like this machine might become affordable. It would certainly improve disabled people’s quality of life. In the meantime, we could do much by giving far more disabled people throughout the world access to the devices and machines we have now, like wheelchairs, so that far more than 15 per cent of the global disabled population have them.
The Muse in the Machine: Computers and Creative Thought, by David Gelernter (London: Fourth Estate 1994).
I came across this book looking around one of Cheltenham’s secondhand bookshops yesterday. I haven’t read it yet, but I fully intend to. Although it was published nearly a quarter of a century ago, I think the issue it addresses is still very real, and one that isn’t acknowledged by many computer scientists. And it’s immensely provocative. Gelernter argues here that the brain is not like a computer, and by concentrating on rationality and logic, computer scientists aren’t developing genuine Artificial Intelligence – true minds – but simply faster calculating machines. What is needed instead is creativity and inspiration, and that can only come from emotion and spirituality.
The blurb for the book in the inside cover runs
Is Artificial Intelligence really getting any closer to understanding the workings of the brain? Or is it, despite generations of smarter, more logical reasoning machines and more refined philosophical theories, missing the point? Is the AI model, for all its apparent sophistication, simply too crude?
David Gelernter believes that it is. In this dazzling, powerfully persuasive new book he argues that conventional AI theory is fatally flawed, ignoring as it does the emotional elements in the human mind. AI can go on improving its creations as much as it likes, but as long as it insists upon seeing the mind as a machine, it will always been building machines and not minds.
It’s time to tackle a fundamental truth: feeling isn’t incidental to thought, a pleasant diversion or unwelcome distraction. It’s essential, a precondition and part of all our thinking. A mind that can’t be irrational can’t be rational; a machine that can’t feel can’t think.
Spirituality is not failed science, anymore than poetry is botched prose. Significant as recent developments have been, suggests Gelernter, the real renaissance is yet to come. The new science of the mind will involve art and theology as closely as it does technology, and will owe as much Wordsworth and Keats as to Papert and Minsky.
Bound to cause a furore in the field of Artificial Intelligence, the Muse in the Machine has far wider implications than this, and far great importance. It is a book which demands to be read by everyone who values human thought and its achievements. If it offers much to intrigue and to provoke in its daring, wide-ranging discussion of the mind and its workings, it provides much, too, to delight and move.
It’s probably no surprise that Gelernter believes that art, literature and spirituality/ theology should also be important components of genuine machine intelligence. Not only is he credited as an associate professor computer science at Yale University, but also a lover of philosophy and published poet, with an MA in Classical Hebrew Literature.
For all that the book and its thesis were – and no doubt still are – controversial, he has correctly identified a major problem. Other philosophers and scientists, both of computers and the human brain, have pointed out that the brain isn’t a computer. Rather, the computer is simply the latest metaphor for the brain. Before then, the metaphor was of an immense telephone exchange. And before that, in the 17th century, when modern neurology was only just beginning, it was as a series of fountains. I also understand that many neurologists now believe, following the ideas of the paranormal researcher Stan Gooch, that much of human thought and cognition actually occurs deeper in the more primitive sections of the brain, connected with emotion. And I can imagine many atheists distinctly unsettled by the idea that true rationality also requires a spiritual, religious and theological component. That’s enough to send Richard Dawkins completely up the wall!
It’s going to be an very interesting, provocative book, and one I shall look forward to reading. And I’ll definitely post about it when I have.
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