01 April 2015
30 March 2015
Plato, Democritus and Alternative Medicine
Could the history of philosophy, and in particular the unresolved debate between Plato and Democritus, explain the present debate between alternative and conventional approaches to nature and health?
'Alternative Medicine' is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "any of a range of medical therapies not regarded as orthodox by the medical profession", citing chiropractic, faith healing, herbalism, homeopathy and reflexology as examples. 1 Yet a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that over one third of people preferred alternative medicine to conventional methods, citing the medical establishment's emphasis on diagnostic testing and drug treatments that did not consider the patient's well-being and health as a whole.2 Edzard Ernst, a Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter in the U.K puts usage even higher, saying that "about half the general population in developed countries use complementary and alternative medicine".3 And in some countries, notably China and India, what are considered 'alternative' treatments are central to government health strategies. 4 In fact, there are social and cultural dimensions to health policy as well as scientific and historical ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the response and acceptance of so-called 'alternative' health treatments.
Health as bodily harmony
The underlying assumptions of alternative medicine are that health is a state of bodily harmony or balance, and disease is a disharmony or imbalance 5 . This idea, central to traditional Chinese and Indian herbal treatments, is also present in the Western medical tradition, often taken as starting with Hippocrates. Hippocrates believed that the elements of good health were essentially environmental, such as a calm mental state, a balanced diet and physical exercise. Even that 'commonsense' health mantra of ‘fresh water, sunshine and exercise’ is by no means universal, it has its own social and cultural roots.
Vitalis, the doctrine that the functions of a living organism cannot be fully explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone, has a long history in medical philosophies. Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is sometimes referred to as the 'vital spark', 'energy' or élan vital, which some equate with the 'soul'.
Most traditional healing practices propose that disease reflects some imbalance in those vital energies that distinguish living from non-living matter. In the Western tradition, these vital forces were identified as the four humours; Eastern traditions posit forces, such as qi, particularly important in conceptualising acupuncture and prana in Yoga.
Philosophically speaking, the split between 'modern Western approaches and 'traditional, Eastern ones seems to have come about in the seventeenth century, around the time that René Descartes (1596-1650) split the world into two parts - the mental world of minds and the physical world of bodies - the theory known as 'dualism' and the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, described people as 'but an Artificial Animal, the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels'. (It is no coincidence that Descartes' Meditations starts with an account of the French philosopher's dissection of a monkey...)
However, conventional medicine is seen to have split away from the 'bodily harmony' approach in the nineteenth century, particularly following the discovery of disease-carrying microbes - germs, viruses, bacteria and so on. Prior to this, medical practitioners in Europe shared what is sometimes called the 'humoural' model of the human body, but no one school had a monopoly of authority in health matters.
The Theory of the Four Humours
The humoural theory, developed by the Roman doctor [[Galen]], held that the four elements in nature - fire, air, water and earth - corresponded to four fluids in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Herbs were believed to positively affect the humours through four key properties: being hot, dry, cold or moist. Health was a matter of balancing the humours or ‘bodily juices’.
Nonetheless, Europeans at this time were particularly open to new treatments that arrived from abroad as a result of trade in far-off and mysterious lands. 6 These were seen not merely as a response to a more fundamental bodily imbalance, but as the essential 'cause' of the imbalance. Hence they could be treated in isolation, usually through drugs.
Where conventional medical treatment is seen as effective in dealing with certain 'emergencies', such as physical injuries, other long-term illnesses and bodily dysfunction's seem to many people to remain poorly understood and conventional treatments ineffective and even harmful. Another objection to conventional medicine is its emphasis on 'treatment' rather than 'prevention'. Almost all health spending in Western countries is on the former - some 85% in the case of the United States - as opposed to the latter. 7
The importance of lifestyle
A report by the US Centers for Disease Control stated that 54%of heart disease, 37% of cancer and half of cerebrovascular and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) was preventable through changes in lifestyle. 8
As Roberta Bivins puts it, in Alternative Medicine - A History, "medical practices are typically culturally specific - that is, they are internally coherent with and respond to practically the cultures in which they initially developed". Bivens puts it thus: "The incorporation of dissection in to medical training and knowledge production was clearly integrated with Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and empiricism." And today, recent advocates of 'enlightenment thinking' invariably cite examples of treatment by Alternative Health practitioners as dire evidence of the spread of 'irrationality". Yet how rational is say, modern medicine, and how irrational are alternative remedies? If, according to World Health Organisation figures, in the 30 years from 1967 to 1998, just under 6000 ‘adverse events’ world-wide can be traced back to the prescription of herbal and other alternative medicines, this figure can only be contrasted with those from a University of Toronto study in 1998 which found that there were at least 106 000 fatalities each year, in the US alone, from side-effects of officially sanctioned and proved drugs.9
The Right to Culturally Appropriate Healthcare
The World Health Organization determines four criteria for the adequate delivery of health care and the realization of the highest attainable standard of health: Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, and Quality (AAAQ)
Acceptability : All health facilities, goods and services must be respectful of medical ethics and culturally appropriate, as well as sensitive to gender and life-cycle requirements. 1
However, anatomical dissection is opposed to the social values of Confucian China and Buddhist India, contributing to the continued acceptance of 'alternative medicine' in these cultures and conversely the added resistance to it in the West. 11 Equally, approaches such as acupuncture and moxabustion were in harmony with the philosophical beliefs of the East, but opposed to those of the West. Central to both techniques is "an immense pharmacopoeia, a detailed disease classification system and a set of body-maps" which define relationships between the body's organs and systems, as mediated by a circulatory system "that moves both tangible and intangible substances" around the body. In particular, the strange (to Western eyes) concept of qi.
At certain points on the body's surface, the various vessels or channels through which these fluids move, and which connect different functional and sensory organs, can be stimulated, thereby altering the flows of qi within them and between the organs. In moxabustion, this is done through the medium of small cones of fibre (extracted from the leaves of Artemisia vulgaris or mugwort) that are burnt on top of the points. In acupuncture, needles, inserted to different depths and sometimes manipulated, are the means of intervention 12
The mystical lore of plants crosses virtually every cultural boundary. For example, according to Kathleen Karlsen, MA , an advocate of herbal medicine, a 60,000 year old burial site excavated in Iraq included eight different medicinal plants. 13
"This evidence of the spiritual significance of plants is echoed around the globe”, she adds. In Europe, works such as Pliny’s ‘’Natural History’’, which describes the supposed properties of plants gathered from numerous cultural traditions including the herbal practices of the Celtic Druids, and Dioscorides’ ‘’De Materia Medica’’ , which is a work regarded by some as the cornerstone of modern botany and by herbalists today as a key pharmaceutical guide. But the Romans were not the first.
In ancient times, healing formulas existed for almost every known disease. Specific conditions were treated with a variety of methods such as tinctures, teas and compresses or by inhaling the rejuvenating fragrances of essential oils. 14
Indeed, as Kathleen Karlsen also notes, “Shamanistic medicine, alive and well in traditional societies today, often incorporates the use of hallucinogenic plants which enable the herbal practitioner to reach unseen realms to obtain higher knowledge and guidance. “
The esoteric wisdom of ancient healers and of plant lore has been central to medicine since ancient times, not only spawning approaches such as herbalism, traditional Chinese medicine, biofeedback, and homeopathy, but also influencing mainstream approaches to illness. These approaches draw upon general theories, such as the 'theory of similars' or the related 'theory of signatures'.
For instance, the onion was favoured by the Egyptians not only as a food, and used as a medicine, but also respected for reflecting their view of the universe's multi-layered structure. Egyptians identified medicinal properties in plants such as myrrh, aloe, peppermint, garlic and castor oil. Healing plants are also featured extensively in ancient Arabian lore, in the Bible, and in the druidic tradition of the ancient Celts. Herbal tradtions were central to life in the Mayan, Aztec and Inca civilizations, and north American Indian herbal rituals.
The medical use of plants by the ancient Greeks reflected their idea that each of the twelve primary gods had characteristic plants. Such approaches are clearly methodologically incompatible with conventional medicine, to say the least. The US Food and Drug Administration strictly patrols claims made for herbal medicine, to prevent medical claims being made to promote them. On the other hand, herbs lacking such elevated 'connections', such as parsley, thyme, fennel and celery were allowed correspondingly more everyday roles in health, and are to many today more easily accepted as having 'health-giving' properties.
Different languages for discussing health
(That's 'tea' on the left...)
One way to approach the debate (and lack of debate) between alternative and conventional approaches to health and biology is by comparing their two languages and trying to find proper translations, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, and acknowledge when there is incommensurability:
One way to approach the debate (and lack of debate) between alternative and conventional approaches to health and biology is by comparing their two languages and trying to find proper translations, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, and acknowledge when there is incommensurability:
Incommensurability thus becomes a sort of untranslatability', localized to one or another area in which two lexical taxonomies differ ... Members of one community can acquire the taxonomy employed by members of another, as the historian does in learning to understand old texts. But the process which permits understanding produces bilinguals, not translators ... The bilingual must always remember within which community discourse is occurring. 15
Alternative medicine operates under a holist paradigm. It tries to identify shapes, as in the doctrine of signatures, and make them "resonate", as in homeopathy, which lies on the law of similars. It should be reminded that Plato, when he conceived the notion of Ideas, was also referring to the notion of shape (eidolon, from which "idea" comes, also means shape or structure).
Shape and symbol
Does science have, in its own terms, a way to account for shapes in nature?
Conventional medicine, of course, is concerned with shapes, as exemplified by our modern icons : the double helix (DNA), the key-lock model of chemical messenger-receptor action, and the more elaborate 3D protein simulations that fascinate most of us. However, although molecular biochemistry is entirely based on the shape of proteins, molecules and electron clouds around nuclei, it would be erroneous to assume that molecular biochemistry covers all shapes and forms found in the living universe. It is not its purpose, because it operates with the worldview of logical reductionism.
Under this paradigm, it is believed (but not provable) that, by reducing life to its most fundamental components, by analyzing all its details, it will be possible to account for the observed universe.
Under this paradigm, it is believed (but not provable) that, by reducing life to its most fundamental components, by analyzing all its details, it will be possible to account for the observed universe.
The alternative view (which was the conventional view before the Enlightenment), on the contrary, adopts a phenomenological perspective. Observing that one plant, because of its shape, evokes an image, an idea, or an impression, the alternative-minded practitioner will immediately use it as a tool to discover occurrences of this Idea in the sick or healthy body or mind.
'Magical thinking' will link the appearance of the St-John's Wort flower with hope or happiness because of its unexpected yellow colour, or the concentric organization of the onion with the orderly organization of the cosmos. Nonsense?
This analogical thinking is prevalent in dreams and normal thought processes, but it is not accceptable in scientific discourse, where it is condemned as dangerous and fallacious. Yet could it be that the active molecules of the St-John's Wort and the onion do deliver a message, through the algebra of organic molecules?
- 1Oxford English Dictionary, ninth edition 1996
- 2Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg (Celestial Arts, 2002) page 3
- 3 in a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia - Ernst E. "Obstacles to research in complementary and alternative medicine." Medical Journal of Australia, 2003; 179 (6): 279-80 available at
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/179_06_150903/ern10442_fm-1.html
- 4 "In 1948, the Committee by Planning Commission in 1951 and the Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia Committee in 1962 testify to this. At the instance of the recommendation of these Committees, the Government of India have accepted Homoeopathy as one of the national System of Medicine and started releasing funds for its development" from
- 5Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg, Celestial Arts, 2002, page 6
- 6 Alternative Medicine?: A History by Roberta Bivins, Oxford University Press 2007, p46
- 7 Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg, Celestial Arts, 2002, page 4
- 8 Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg (Celestial Arts, 2002) page 4
- 9As catalogued, wittily in The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It by Dan Hind, Verso, 2007.
- 10 [www.who.int/entity/mediacentre/factsheets/fs323_en.pdf Joint fact sheet WHO/OHCHR/323], August 2007
- 11 Alternative Medicine?: A History by Roberta Bivins p44
- 12Alternative Medicine?: A History, by Roberta Bivins p45
- 13 Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology, James L. Pearson, Rowman Altamira, 2002 p. 114 ISBN 0759101566, 9780759101562
- 14
- 15 Kuhn, Thomas S. (1990)
28 March 2015
27 March 2015
List of Investigations ...
Click on an essay of your choice ...
About PIAnd so on ...
Essays Tab
Header Experiment
Propaganda
Essays Tab
I have created a new Front Page, which admits one post only.
I have added an Essays page which admits multiple posts. Clicking on New Post automatically sends posts here.
I placed an index at the top of Essays, which stays on top so long as it is updated.
However, amongst the accomplishments there's (maybe) a hitch. The blog opens at Essays now, not on the Front Page ...
I have added an Essays page which admits multiple posts. Clicking on New Post automatically sends posts here.
I placed an index at the top of Essays, which stays on top so long as it is updated.
However, amongst the accomplishments there's (maybe) a hitch. The blog opens at Essays now, not on the Front Page ...
23 March 2015
Aspects of Mind
by Thomas Scarborough
Part I. Mind and Matter
I tap my finger on a table-top. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. So does the passion I have for my diesel pick-up, my grief over my grandmother's passing, or the fact that I am a Yorkshireman. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.
Now consider what this means to me philosophically. It seems to me, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined, or illusory. Further, it would seem to me that I am an observerof this world, not merely a “robotic” presence there. And on this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind which observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the matter which it observes.
If it were so simple. As to what reality really is, is another question. Itis a problem which has become acute in recent generations. Three things in particular have changed. Firstly, the natural sciences have enabled us to get behind our surface impressions, to understand that the physical world is no more than it seemsto be to me. Secondly, psychologists have discovered that our senses canall of them without exception be wrong: sight, smell, touch, and all. And thirdly, an increasingly materialistic outlook has led us to wonder whether there is any mind at all: the mind, said D.M. Armstrong, is nothing but the brain.
What should we do, then, with the old intuitive view, which leads us to set our mind apart from matter?
Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words.
To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.
Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words.
To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.
There are other ways of proving this “disjunction” between our language andreality. One of these is described in my Metaphysical Notes Part III. What seems clear is that, if this disjunction did not exist, we would be mere “machines”.
We therefore have a real reality, so to speak – which is however partnered with an unreal language which can never really get a grip on this reality we seem to know. The very nature of our language curiously distances our words – in fact our mental processes – from the reality which they describe. There is no real correspondence between the two. The mind, in a sense, hovers over the surface of reality. The mind is wholly other.
The mind, one might say, functions in a completely different modeto the reality which we seem to know. This may well explainwhywe perceive our mind to be so different. It may explain, too, the many situations and states of mind which give us a sense of unreality or detachment: déjà vu, for instance, or the imposter syndrome, or a sense of alienation. As to whythe mind is wholly other, and what this means, are different questions, which we may examine in time.
Part II. Consciousness and Attention
Pointing to my arm, you ask me, “How did you cut yourself there?” “Oh!” I exclaim. “I really don't know. It completely escaped my attention!” Then, with a philosophical turn of mind, you ask me, “Were you consciousat the time that you cut yourself?” “Well of course!” Ireply. “At least, presumably I was! But, not about the cut.”
This imaginary conversation contrasts the concepts “attention” and “consciousness”. Consciousness is of course the more familiar of the two, although nobody really seems to know what it is, let alone how to explain it. Simon Blackburn tentatively suggests: the theatre where my thoughts and feelings have their existence. Attention, on the other hand, while not as well known, iswell established in psychology. Daniel Dennett defines it as the conscious awareness of information.
Could the two be one and the same? And if not, then what is the relationship between the two?
Just one-hundred years ago, it first came to the public attention that we might not be as conscious as we think – and at the time, people were (and they still are) loath to accept it. Yet one should have guessed it. Our very language is replete with words which speak of our lack of conscious awareness: we are oblivious, inattentive, napping, and so on. Alternatively, we may lose ourselves in what we are doing: we are, for instance, absorbed, preoccupied, immersed.
If then I am oblivious to my surroundings – or more accurately, to aspectsof my surroundings – am I always conscious? Similarly, if I am absorbed in my surroundings, am I always conscious? If I am absorbed in myself, or in the problems of the imaginary world of constructs, am I always conscious? Clearly, none of these states of mind would seem to be quite the same as being fully aware, awake, or alert.
There are, too, degrees of awareness. Norman Dixon famously ranked the conscious and non-conscious aspects of our sensory modalities (see the image). We easily become aware of pain, he noted. We are vaguely aware of smell. Yet we hardly become aware of what are called visceral interceptors, such as our heartbeat or breathing – even riding a bicycle, perhaps, while sending a text message. It is a hierarchy of that which, so to speak, grabs our attention. Consciousness and attention might seem to be frightfully complex subjects– yet we find a common thread which runs through all our attentive moments, if not our conscious ones. We take notice of (and sometimes we especially ignore) novelty,discrepancy, and interruption – or perhaps rather, we take notice of that which representsnovelty, discrepancy, and interruption, to me. In short, we detect the “unexpected”, writes Richard Gregory.
Let us pause at this point, to notice that this speaks of my taking notice, in every case, of some kind of contradiction. Novelty is a contradiction of that which I have been accustomed to. Discrepancy is a contradiction of that which I know. Interruption is a contradiction of that which I expect. Therefore, it is contradiction that arrests my attention, more than anything else. It is in moments of contradiction that I am most aware. And one does not need to see far to see that this further relates to reason – which we may explore, too, in time.
In short, consciousness has a lot to do with attention – and attention has a lot to do with those things which conflict. Now combine this with the fact that the pace of modern society todayis such that we need to process far more contradictions of many kinds than people used to do – many of whichwere not even contemplated one-hundred years ago. David Gelernter writes, with this in mind, that the modern mind is characterised by an ever more acute self-consciousness.
Not only this, notes Gelernter, but previous generations were far more disposed to low-focus thought – a thought which had and has little concept of contradiction or logicality. Pre-historic societies, perhaps, were no less intelligent than we are. Rather they entertained less contradictions – and perhaps, thereby, they were happier.
Part III: Reason and Contradiction.
Aspects of Mind
by Thomas Scarborough
Part I. Mind and Matter
I tap my finger on a table-top. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. So does the passion I have for my diesel pick-up, my grief over my grandmother's passing, or the fact that I am a Yorkshireman. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.
Now consider what this means to me philosophically. It seems to me, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined, or illusory. Further, it would seem to me that I am an observerof this world, not merely a “robotic” presence there. And on this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind which observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the matter which it observes.
If it were so simple. As to what reality really is, is another question. Itis a problem which has become acute in recent generations. Three things in particular have changed. Firstly, the natural sciences have enabled us to get behind our surface impressions, to understand that the physical world is no more than it seemsto be to me. Secondly, psychologists have discovered that our senses canall of them without exception be wrong: sight, smell, touch, and all. And thirdly, an increasingly materialistic outlook has led us to wonder whether there is any mind at all: the mind, said D.M. Armstrong, is nothing but the brain.
What should we do, then, with the old intuitive view, which leads us to set our mind apart from matter?
Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words.
To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.
Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words.
To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.
There are other ways of proving this “disjunction” between our language andreality. One of these is described in my Metaphysical Notes Part III. What seems clear is that, if this disjunction did not exist, we would be mere “machines”.
We therefore have a real reality, so to speak – which is however partnered with an unreal language which can never really get a grip on this reality we seem to know. The very nature of our language curiously distances our words – in fact our mental processes – from the reality which they describe. There is no real correspondence between the two. The mind, in a sense, hovers over the surface of reality. The mind is wholly other.
The mind, one might say, functions in a completely different modeto the reality which we seem to know. This may well explainwhywe perceive our mind to be so different. It may explain, too, the many situations and states of mind which give us a sense of unreality or detachment: déjà vu, for instance, or the imposter syndrome, or a sense of alienation. As to whythe mind is wholly other, and what this means, are different questions, which we may examine in time.
Part II. Consciousness and Attention
Pointing to my arm, you ask me, “How did you cut yourself there?” “Oh!” I exclaim. “I really don't know. It completely escaped my attention!” Then, with a philosophical turn of mind, you ask me, “Were you consciousat the time that you cut yourself?” “Well of course!” Ireply. “At least, presumably I was! But, not about the cut.”
This imaginary conversation contrasts the concepts “attention” and “consciousness”. Consciousness is of course the more familiar of the two, although nobody really seems to know what it is, let alone how to explain it. Simon Blackburn tentatively suggests: the theatre where my thoughts and feelings have their existence. Attention, on the other hand, while not as well known, iswell established in psychology. Daniel Dennett defines it as the conscious awareness of information.
Could the two be one and the same? And if not, then what is the relationship between the two?
Just one-hundred years ago, it first came to the public attention that we might not be as conscious as we think – and at the time, people were (and they still are) loath to accept it. Yet one should have guessed it. Our very language is replete with words which speak of our lack of conscious awareness: we are oblivious, inattentive, napping, and so on. Alternatively, we may lose ourselves in what we are doing: we are, for instance, absorbed, preoccupied, immersed.
If then I am oblivious to my surroundings – or more accurately, to aspectsof my surroundings – am I always conscious? Similarly, if I am absorbed in my surroundings, am I always conscious? If I am absorbed in myself, or in the problems of the imaginary world of constructs, am I always conscious? Clearly, none of these states of mind would seem to be quite the same as being fully aware, awake, or alert.
There are, too, degrees of awareness. Norman Dixon famously ranked the conscious and non-conscious aspects of our sensory modalities (see the image). We easily become aware of pain, he noted. We are vaguely aware of smell. Yet we hardly become aware of what are called visceral interceptors, such as our heartbeat or breathing – even riding a bicycle, perhaps, while sending a text message. It is a hierarchy of that which, so to speak, grabs our attention. Consciousness and attention might seem to be frightfully complex subjects– yet we find a common thread which runs through all our attentive moments, if not our conscious ones. We take notice of (and sometimes we especially ignore) novelty,discrepancy, and interruption – or perhaps rather, we take notice of that which representsnovelty, discrepancy, and interruption, to me. In short, we detect the “unexpected”, writes Richard Gregory.
Let us pause at this point, to notice that this speaks of my taking notice, in every case, of some kind of contradiction. Novelty is a contradiction of that which I have been accustomed to. Discrepancy is a contradiction of that which I know. Interruption is a contradiction of that which I expect. Therefore, it is contradiction that arrests my attention, more than anything else. It is in moments of contradiction that I am most aware. And one does not need to see far to see that this further relates to reason – which we may explore, too, in time.
In short, consciousness has a lot to do with attention – and attention has a lot to do with those things which conflict. Now combine this with the fact that the pace of modern society todayis such that we need to process far more contradictions of many kinds than people used to do – many of whichwere not even contemplated one-hundred years ago. David Gelernter writes, with this in mind, that the modern mind is characterised by an ever more acute self-consciousness.
Not only this, notes Gelernter, but previous generations were far more disposed to low-focus thought – a thought which had and has little concept of contradiction or logicality. Pre-historic societies, perhaps, were no less intelligent than we are. Rather they entertained less contradictions – and perhaps, thereby, they were happier.
Part III: Reason and Contradiction.
14 March 2015
12 March 2015
Propaganda
BBC propaganda
Who's Churning the BBC Machine?
• 'How the BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots - as recounted by its former news frontman, Peter Sissons
An alarming insight into how the BBC operates?
Based on the Daily Wail story whch in turn drew on Peter Sissons's memoirs, with additonal comments by Pi editors.
Sissons diagnoses it as 'political correctness'. Worrying about manmade climate change was an incontrovertible duty - a view also taken, for example, at the Guardian and the Times newspapers. But Sisson's writes:
'From the beginning I was unhappy at how one-sided the BBC's coverage of the issue was, and how much more complicated the climate system was than the over-simplified two-minute reports that were the stock-in-trade of the BBC's environment correspondents.
These, without exception, accepted the UN's assurance that 'the science is settled' and that human emissions of carbon dioxide threatened the world with catastrophic climate change. Environmental pressure groups could be guaranteed that their press releases, usually beginning with the words 'scientists say..'. would get on air unchallenged.
On one occasion, an MP used BBC airtime to link climate change ≠doubters with perverts and holocaust deniers, and his famous interviewer didn't bat an eyelid.
On another occasion, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, the science correspondent of Newsnight actually informed viewers 'scientists calculate that he has just four years to save the world'. What she didn't tell viewers was that only one alarmist scientist, NASA's James Hansen, had said that.
My interest in climate change grew out of my concern for the failings of BBC journalism in reporting it. In my early and formative days at ITN, I learned that we have an obligation to report both sides of a story. It is not journalism if you don't. It is close to propaganda.
The BBC is bound by charter, of course, to be accurate and not conduct campaigns for causes. Exceptions however, can be authorised. The BBC's editorial policy on climate change was spelled out in a report by the BBC Trust in 2007. This announced that the BBC had held 'a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus'.
The Trust promised thqt that climate change dissenters had been, and still would be, heard on its airwaves. 'Impartiality' in keeping with their status as a 'minority view'. The BBC report adds: 'as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space.' (By which it meant the same sort of thing as allowing racist parties might be allowed to comment on immigration policy, for example.)
Indeed, Sissons notes: 'In reality, the 'appropriate space' given to minority views on climate change was practically zero.'
One mystery that has perplexed PI researchers, is who WAS at this important seminar assessing the status of climate science. Numerous Freedom of Information requests have for the guest list have been brushed off - but then a list turned up on the Wayback Machine revealing that they were... a mix of amateurs, business men with profits to make from the AGW scare - and greenies.
For a start, the seminar was partly funded by the UK government and organised in conjunction with a lobby group called the International Broadcasting Trust, both of which had a particular policy aim of increasing coverage about human environmental damage.
Likewise Exeter is a nice town, but it’s an awfully long way from Broadcasting House in London. But it is the base of the UK government’s research unit whose job is to produce evidence of the effects of human-made global warming.
When an Italian climate sceptic found the names of the people at the expert conference on a long-forgotten web-page the cat was really out of the bag. The list showed that far from a representative sample of scientific opinion, the meeting consisted of scientists whose jobs revolved around proving the theory of human-made climate change; campaigners whose commitment to the cause of fighting global warming was in inverse proportion to their expert knowledge; and groups with financial interests such as British Petroleum.
This all came out after Sissons wrote his memoris. But in these, he says that there is one brief account of the proceedings, written by a conservative commentator who was there.
'He wrote subsequently that he was far from impressed with the 30 key BBC staff who attended. None of them, he said, showed 'even a modicum of professional journalistic curiosity on the subject'. None appeared to read anything on the subject other than the Guardian.'
And, as we know too, Guardian journalists, even so-called environment ones, rely on Wikipedia! for their information.
Sissons adds that this attitude was underlined a year later in another statement: 'BBC News currently takes the view that their reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.'
'Those scientists outside the 'consensus' waited in vain for the phone to ring', notes Sissons.
'It's the lack of simple curiosity about one of the great issues of our time that I find so puzzling about the BBC. When the topic first came to ≠prominence, the first thing I did was trawl the internet to find out as much as possible about it. Anyone who does this with a mind not closed by religious fervour will find a mass of material by respectable scientists who question the orthodoxy. Admittedly, they are in the minority, but scepticism should be the natural instinct of scientists - and the default setting of journalists.'
Yet the cream of the BBC's inquisitors during my time there never laid a glove on those who repeated the mantra that 'the science is settled'. On one occasion, an MP used BBC airtime to link climate change doubters with perverts and holocaust deniers, and his famous interviewer didn't bat an eyelid.
(PI adds: This is probably a reference to the present Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, Nick Clegg, who used this comparisonn in the pre-election debates. Clegg's wife has a good reason to be concerned about the issue - she is the director of a business that makes wind turbines, and relies on government largesse.)
Sissons makes another interesting point too:
'Meanwhile, Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice-President and climate change campaigner, entertained the BBC's editorial elite in his suite at the Dorchester and was given a free run to make his case to an admiring internal audience at Television Centre.'
At the BBC, Gore's views were above journalistic scrutiny, 'even when a British High Court judge ruled that his film, An Inconvenient Truth, ≠contained at least nine scientific errors, and that ministers must send new guidance to teachers before it was screened in schools. From the BBC's standpoint, the judgment was the real inconvenience, and its environment correspondents downplayed its significance.'
Sissons also records how daily reporting turned into daily applauding:
'At the end of November 2007 I was on duty on News 24 when the UN panel on climate change produced a report which later turned out to contain significant inaccuracies, many stemming from its reliance on non-peer reviewed sources and best-guesses by environmental activists.'
But the way the BBC's reporter treated the story was as if it was beyond a vestige of doubt, the last word on the catastrophe awaiting mankind. The most challenging questions addressed to a succession of UN employees and climate activists were 'How urgent is it and 'How much danger are we in
Back in the studio I suggested that we line up one or two sceptics to react to the report, but received a totally negative response, as if I was some kind of lunatic.'
01 March 2015
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)