Synogenes.com

The growth of Bebo, MySpace, and the other personality projection sites is an expression of the growing need for people to design their presence, to choose those aspects of their personality they want others to see. On these sites we can actually control to a high degree the initial impressions made on others by designing the interface. We can expose as much or as little detail as we like, stress those aspects we want others to focus on. We can refocus the image of us as much as we like and as many times. If the response is not what we want, we adjust the image and fine tune it.

This is very different from the real world where impressions last, and relationships are based on person to person contact with the recipient free to take in as much or as little of the rich matrix of perceptions available to them. There is a very narrow information bandwidth available on these sites, essentially some photos and a self-selected set of characteristics; none of the facial expressions, psychological reactions, quick or slow reactions.

What effect does that have? Well, it makes it entertaining to start with. The harmless manipulation of other people's reactions to us, drip-feeding just enough information to give them the desired impression, can be entertaining in itself. Of course, although we are manipulating the reactions, we are not immune from them so whilst we can engineer positive responses on demand by playing to strengths and weaknesses of our audience, we can't determine the audience itself - we assume that we will attract the right attention.

Some of course have a more commercial need to project an image. Musicians for example need to put not just their music into the marketplace but also their personality, image, world-view, biographical snips, hooks and tags to connect with their market, including mailing lists, blogs, podcasts, downloads, etc.

There is a curious overlap beginning to take place in which individuals who are essentially using the sites for entertainment, are consciously or unconsciously branding themselves by designing a personality. Whether they can or should live up to it in the real world is almost beside the point because they benefit from the entertainment value and it could be an alter ego in which they test out what kind of personality they'd like to have. That's part of the attraction for adolescents and teenagers and may provide a useful outlet for the emotional pressure that would otherwise be focussed on the hapless parents and relatives.

There may well be beneficial social effects too. It's now very easy to find and communicate with people of similar interests all over the world. You don't get the face-to-face (unless you use Skype...) and you don't generally get the longer term relationship, and you don't get an immediate response, but you do get people, mostly real people on the other end, even if they may not be who they say they are.

Negative sides? There are tales of the unfortunate teenagers who, without many friends in the real world, construct an image and profile for themselves in the virtual world and hope to attract lots of "friends". Unfortunately, not going out and inviting links with others, they remain not just isolated in the real world, but advertise their isolation to the global webspace - only 4 friends in the whole world, how sad? Perhaps a good way to exacerbate depression?

The subtleties of a pre-designed interaction using an avatar (even if it's only a partial one) create a very different psychological experience from the real world, but one which has an impact on the real psychology of the individual. They may become more adept at manipulating other people's perceptions of them but they may also become very much more aware of the subtleties of human interactions both skeptical and trusting. That kind of judgement is typically hard won in the world of knocks and scrapes. It might actually produce more adaptive and psychologically competent individuals rather than the distopian predictions of some of the technophobe pundits.

You can almost hear the clamour for research grants...

There are already many sources of studying this "new" field Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) including the following:

The inevitable Wikipedia entry

fascinating OU study of CMC and psychology.

Amnesty International is a very well-respected campaigning organisation for human rights, identifying and exposing torture and human rights abuse around the world. It benefits enormously from being always seen to be on the side of compassion, humanity, justice, fair play. Virtually everyone would support its aims and passively or actively support its campaigns.

Governments of all hues have earned the attention of AI at times and there are scarcely any governments immune, whether it be caused by torture of republican prisoners in the Castlereagh barracks in Belfast, or the extrajudicial incarceration of muslims in Guantanamo Bay.

But those same people who would normally back AI, get rather touchy when the subject of rights is brought closer to home with the issue of abortion rights. Many are quite wrongly claiming that AI is breaking its principles by ignoring the rights of the unborn in favour of the rights of the woman.

See for example Catholic Times.

They talk in terms of the child and mother when in fact they should be referring to the embryo and woman. The woman is not the mother until a child is born. The difference is crucial.

Rights in human society are afforded to individuals by virtue of them being people and not simply because they consist of human tissue. Rights are afforded to individuals because they are valued as people in society and they cannot be people as unborn embryos.

Therefore we cannot talk of human rights for embryos any more than we can for stem cells. (There are of course some catholics who argue for rights for stem cells as proto-children displaying a woeful ignorance of basic biology.)

The catholic church, of course, is opposed to abortion because it believes there is some mythical entity that appears at the point of conception called the soul. It doesn't trouble them that there is not the slightest evidence in support of this belief, but they are happy to use it to prevent a woman having control of her own body, her own fertility, and by implication, her own future. Even rape victims are expected to suffer the continued violation of their bodies.

Rather than being inconsistent for AI to deal with human rights from the point of view of the woman, it is absolutely consistent. It is the catholic church which is hypocritically talking about compassion, at the same time as condemning millions of women who do not have adequate access to contraception, to unwanted pregnancies.

By basing human rights on a belief in mythical entities, the catholic church makes the exercise of rights dependent not on the collective strength of those socially demanding them, but on the whim of a single allegedly infallible human being. And it's not just the catholic church - this argument applies to all those who seek to root ethical principles in religious dogma.

Ethics is a socially pragmatic practice. It changes with the times, with historical events, with the rise of science, with an understanding of psychology, with the more detailed understanding of the processes of reasoning. Wherever religion infects ethics with a dependence on insubstantial, mystical beliefs, the experts in the case become those in authority within that religion, whether it is an imam, an archbishop, a rabbi, or a priest or a pope. By claiming additional moral rights, they distort the process of justice and rational ethical argument. This is a fundamental political abuse and Amnesty are being completely consistent in its ethical stance.

The irony will doubtless be missed by those catholic critics of Amnesty who are rather selective about their choice of rights.

Some people will believe anything but many people will believe some odd ideas when they run out of help. This is especially the case in chronic illness where a busy GP may be unable to diagnose the cause of a problem and will offer only palliative, some would say placebo, treatment.

Suppose for example, you suffer from neuromuscular pain which is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Without expensive neurological investigation there is little hope of identifying any cause and as it often disappears for periods of time, any investigation could prove fruitless. Little wonder then that GPs will often suggest pain killers and exercise. Where this doesn't work, people will naturally turn to the alternative.

Since they think they've tried science, they now try something else and it might be homeopathy, a chiropracter, or some healing therapy suggested by a friend. That friend, having already spent money on it, will more often be a keen advocate than a sceptical assessor and will offer persuasive support.

The argument goes something like this.

1 There are things we don't know, phenomena that we haven't yet come across, lots of things we don't understand. Undoubtedly true.

2 Some people claim that these therapies have helped with x,y,z conditions and so they might help me. It may be that they work and we just don't understand how. Again true, but this is not used to suggest we put the claims to the test by studying them - it's a suggestion that we should take the claims to be true...

3 I have nothing to lose because I am still suffering. Except money and time...

Once started on the mystical route, there is a strong psychological motive for justifying the (seldom trivial) amounts spent. Instead of single sessions, they are courses of treatment and where they involve some measure of massage, the effects of increased circulation and movement of stiff muscles and joints, can work for a short time depending on the physical ailments. So with a minimum of light physiotherapy, it is possible to temporarily alleviate some conditions giving the patient a sense of wellbeing but also to build in the repeat-custom, that essential element of all successful businesses.

Now of course, there's nothing wrong with someone helping alleviate muscle and joint pain with a bit of massage (providing of course they know enough to avoid causing strain and injury through ignorance). And leaving it at that point is very close to the lowest (unspecialised) level of mainstream medical therapy known as physiotherapy, a thoroughly rational medical practice.

On the other hand, when it's laced with mystical theories about energy lines, channels, chakra and so on, what is being promoted is a mis-understanding of what is going on, confusing evidence-based diagnosis of injury with a belief-based conjecture about possible causes. Medicine relates the treatment to the diagnosis precisely to increase the likelihood of effective treatment and that requires observation, study of symptoms, understanding of anatomy and physiology, and also an understanding of how the body reacts to the proposed treatment.

All of this is deftly avoided by the introduction of mysticism. Since energy pathways and channels can't be seen or even detected, no-one can question them. Instead of a treatment based on good grounds for expecting success, we have a completely open question - try it and see. This is little better, and arguably worse, than medieval magic. It's a con-merchant's charter because anyone can make unreasonable claims and sell them to any gullible person looking for an alternative to the market medicine on offer.

Unfortunately, busy GPs who can't or won't refer people to specialists to get a clear diagnosis that will inform effective treatment, are effectively fuelling the growth of medieval mysticism in alternative medicine. As Dawkins has said, there is no alternative medicine. If it works reliably, it is medicine. The problem is that what evidence there is shows it doesn't work and there is a psychological predisposition to doubt the need for testing it.

One recent therapy that seems to have taken off in Australia and is growing in the UK is a combination of very light massage and foot rubbing which might feel nice in itself but isn't likely to cure anything or be a treatment for anything - it's called the Bowen Technique after its very wealthy founder.

Here's the official explanation of the technique from those who profit from it: The official version, and here's a useful blog questioning just one or two of the outrageous claims made.

In this apparent scam, the body is seen to be able to heal itself but the therapist in some way gives the body the information to be able to do so, not that there's any diagnosis involved. But I won't spoil the fun...

It's unfortunate that there's no protection for the psychologically vulnerable from this sort of exploitation though the best antidote is a strengthening of the critical faculties. In the UK, we still have the absurdity of a homeopathic hospital paid for by the state - fraud on a state-sponsored scale - and while we have that level of magic-worship, there's little hope for the unfortunate patients who are led to believe that if there's no pill on the prescription pad, there's no evidence-based medical cure.

It's a classic example of the symbol being taken to represent the thing...

A school teachers gets the kids to vote on the name for a class teddy-bear and being in an islamic country, the primary school kids choose Mohammed. Hardly surprising, but the teacher has now been arrested and is awaiting charges, apparently of blasphemy.

Some sensitive islamic folks have taken the fact that the name was used to identify a teddy-bear as somehow an insult to the prophet of Islam, Mohammed. Just what exactly is blasphemous in the identification of a toy as Mohammed will presumably exercise islamic legal scholars but surely the only safe way to behave for islamic parents is to refuse to allow the name Mohammed to be used in any context. Ludicrous.

By extension there's a whole new area of islamic jurisprudence opening up... There are 25 prophets named in the Qur'an including Adam, Ibrahim, Ishaq, Ismail, Sulaiman, and so on and these are popular names. Sooner or later we'll need a list of approved names for teddy-bears, or any other toys.

If a child calls a pet cat or dog the name of some prophet, does that become blasphemous?

This is the sort of crazy situation you get when you venerate a symbol and insist on the right not to be offended. In normal conversation it's laughed off as ridiculous but when you're dealing with a medieval state machine insisting on it's right to vengeance when insulted, the mere hint of a slight can trigger a catastrophic response.

Islamic law is based on the ethics and morals of the middle ages and the followers insist on its literal truth - hence it cannot be changed. Any reasonable person would ask where in the Qur'an does it say anything about teddy-bears? The unreasonable will scour the book for any reference that justifies the interpretation of blasphemy. Guess who's in charge?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7114439.stm

There's always been a debate about how consciousness works because we all have an impression that we exist inside of our brain and this idea that the self is somehow separate from the organ inside the skull gives rise to notions like souls. For science, trying to explain how we get that impression has been difficult because we are observing the observer that happens to be us...

There's clearly a lot of self-referencing going on as we are conscious of our own thoughts and that makes it difficult to analyse what's happening.

But there has been a lot of progress in neuroscience over recent decades and one book particularly has explained a great deal about our understanding of consciousness, how it arises, and our perception of self. Douglas Hofstadter has written a book called I Am A Strange Loop which offers a materialist explanation of consciousness based on science but being Hofstadter, he also draws inspiration from mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and even photography. His argument goes as follows.

Human brains have developed under evolutionary pressure, the ability to manipulate abstract symbols. Instead of always referring to the simplest of objects, we are able to use more general (abstract) ideas such as village, food, tools, harvest, season, etc. This abstraction enables us to manipulate and control the natural world and gives us an evolutionary advantage.

We relate these abstract conceptions together in patterns of symbols, adding new concepts to the network to integrate the new knowledge obtained through our experiences. Now all this seems to be evidenced in all sentient animals although the level of symbolism is variable. Hofstadter wonders about the symbolic structures available to a mosquito - presumably not very sophisticated. However, for people, these symbolic structures represented in distributed form in the brain acquire a property which is quite remarkable - they become self-referential, they become aware of themselves.

Now for the difficult bit, for which Hofstadter uses the ideas of an Austrian mathematician by the name of Kurt Gödel. He was interested in the attempt by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, to represent all of the axioms of mathematics symbolically. Russell and Whitehead hoped to prove that if you could represent a mathematical theorem using a logically consistent symbolic notation, then it would be possible to prove whether or not the theorem was correct. If they could do that, then any properly formulated mathematical statements would be provable - and therefore all of mathematics would be shown to be logically consistent. Cheers all round, Nobel Prize, nice holiday, etc... Unfortunately, Gödel tipped it on it's head.

He found a way to represent self-referential statements inside any consistent symbolic notation which meant unprovable statements could be accurately made, so mathematics could never be totally provable. Cancel the bubbly!

What's that got to do with consciousness? Well, our system of linked symbols in the brain will stay reactive unless they can become self-referential and that's what's happened in the mammalian brain. Hofstadter argues that as the brain develops, it is able to maintain self-referential loops of symbolic structures which provides us with self-awareness. It's that self-reference that gives rise to our perception that we are inside our brains. It also gives us the idea that we are in control.

Our consciousness is simply a property of the human brain and a bi-product is the notion of self. But the really important part is that because it is self-referential, it is not a closed system - the symbolic structures can influence the way those structures themselves develop. It's the basis of a learning system, developing more sophisticated symbolic structures to improve the manipulation of other symbolic structures, ultimately improving our ability to manipulate the real world.

Philosophers have argued about the mind/brain problem for centuries - is there something called mind independent of the brain? Since we feel ourselves perceiving things, it's easy to accept the idea of this other presence, and that's why many people believe there is a soul. Hofstadter shows how unnecessary this idea really is. Our perception of ourselves is easily explained by the self-referential symbolic structures in our brain.

But as neuroscience increases our understanding of how these symbolic structures are manipulated in the brain, and as we generate computer systems with a similar capability, we may see our understanding of consciousness radically changed. The transition from inert, to barely conscious, to human-level consciousness, or beyond, may simply be a question of the control of self-referential symbolic loops.

That challenges the very persistent belief that humans are special in their form of sentience. Already we have computer systems that can reason symbolically and there's no reason that they can't become self-referential. If Hofstadter is right, artificial consciousness is just as likely as artificial intelligence and we've been using the latter for several decades.

Just by way of a bonus, the advent of artificial consciousness should send the right-wing religious neocons into an ethical tailspin as we get legal calls for the rights afforded to embryos to be extended to computer systems that have developed the ability to express feelings. Now that would be a debate worth watching...

Apparently religious folks are responsible for the decline in faith because they have been treating god as a "fact in the world" - that's according the crusty cardinal Cormack Murphy O'Connor. You see the problem is that you apparently can't treat imaginary gods as if they were real without sounding, well, a bit whacky.

Instead he was arguing for keeping the mystery and his coup de grace was explaining that his god also existed for atheists too, it's just that they didn't recognise it. He explained (though that's really stretching the meaning of the word to the limit) that a life without religion was dangerous and used Hitler and Stalin to frighten the children. He tried to imply that a secular society would end up like Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

But then, as if not really being convinced of the strength of his argument, he declares that "To believe in god is not unreasonable." Errr, yes it is!

The big problem with any arguments with theists is that they dispense with reason in the first breath - it's a faith thing and therfore does it does not have to meet the rigorous standards of reasoned argument and it reduces to "I believe because I believe because..." As Dawkins pointed out, there are no other areas of human dialogue where such positions would be taken seriously.

In the political arena where such claims are the expression of blind prejudice, they start wars. Take for example the belief that Blair and Bush had about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no evidence but they didn't need it, because they were guided by that alluring vagueness called faith, and as we all know, nothing fails quite like faith.

The whole point of the movement called the Enlightenment was to subject claims to reasoned testing, to free people from irrational leaps of faith which often had dire consequences. Instead of killing people who became ill, under the medieval backwardness of belief in devils, we started to make medical advances, to study the symptoms, try to identify causes.

Instead of the cardinal offering patronising and disingenuous respect for atheists, he would be better advised to try to improve his ability to reason rationally, to question faith wherever it appears and to promote scepticism, and above all, to respect the advances in knowledge brought about by the very rationality he fears so much.

Cardinal, witch doctor, shaman, and crystal-selling new age mystic merchant... they all have the characteristic that they've dispensed with reason. You wouldn't want any of them making decisions that affected you.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7390941.stm

The recent figures say it all:
- 37% of the 132 NHS health care trusts still have contracts with homeopathic services

- 200,000 people are treated annually on the NHS using homeopathic remedies

- 55,000 appointments with homeopaths are paid for by the NHS each year

There are some signs that the position is improving and that GPs are finally getting the message that medieval magic is not the way to go... Spending on these quack cures has dropped from £593,000 in 2005 to a still lamentable £321,000 last year.

But of course, it's big business... something like £40 billion per year is spent worldwide on alternative therapies. And that's despite more than twelve authoritative and exhaustive studies which have shown repeatedly that there is no evidence to support them.

The latest exposé is the recent book by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst: Trick or Treatment - Alternative Medicine On Trial. The former is a well-known science writer who has a doctorate in particle physics, and the latter is a man of unusual background. He is now a Professor of Complementary Medicine though he trained as a physician, picking up a PhD on the way, and he has specialised in the clinical investigation of alternative medicines. Not only does he understand the world of alternative medicines, but he has the scientific rigour to investigate them thoroughly... which has made him the scourge of the alternative therapy world.

He has conducted several dozen systematic trials and over a hundred clinical reviews. In the course of his studies he exposed the assumption that alternative therapies were free of potential harm, identifying among other things that around 13% of acupuncture patients suffered side effects, that chiropractic spinal manipulation carried a risk of rupturing the arteries in the neck leading to strokes, and perhaps most irritatingly, that the flagship remedy of homeopaths, Arnica, has no more than a placebo effect in dealing with post-operative pain, bruising and swelling.

His results were so thorough and conclusive that he has been rewarded with no fewer than thirteen scientific awards, and two visiting Professorships. He is someone to take seriously when considering complementary medicine.

He argues convincingly that £500 million of NHS funding ought to be spent other than in selling water to gullible patients.

It is interesting that so many people, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, still adopt an uncritical attitude to the peddling of medieval remedies. Some considerable time ago, Theodor Adorno looked at astrology to try to understand the psychology of people who have irrational beliefs(The Stars Down To Earth).

He came to the conclusion that it was largely about the need for an abstract authority figure and where the individual had something of a rebellious streak, rather than trusting their own thinking, they delegate it to another abstract authority, which is opposed to convention. In doing so, we convince ourselves that we are being different, not accepting the status quo, and that we are asserting our individuality. In practice we are taking the very easy route of abnegating our responsibility to think for ourselves. (Adorno went on to argue that this sort of thinking predisposes people to acquiesce in authoritarian politics... but that's another story.)

It certainly seems that there's more than a hint of this type of psychology in the pandering to alternative medicines. But surely, it's about time that those working in medical roles should have the confidence to acknowledge the gains made during the Enlightenment rather than leading their gullible patients back into the dark ages.

Edvard Ernst - resume

Simon Singh

Here's a little puzzle to see whether we really understand the significance of accuracy.

A patient goes to a doctor and after explaining the symptoms, the doctor thinks it might be illness X, for which, fortunately, there is a test. He explains that the test is 90% accurate, that is 90% of the test results are right but 10% of them are incorrect.

The patient agrees to undergo the test and a couple of weeks later the patient gets the bad news that the test was positive saying he has illness X. Now the question - should he believe the results? Is he really likely to have illness X?

Intuitively we all say of course he is likely to have the illness, because the tests are 90% accurate.

But, we are missing a vital piece of information. How many people in the population actually suffer from illness X? Since I'm making up the problem I happen to have that statistic to hand and it turns out that at any one time, there is an incidence of 2 in 1000 of the population suffering from illness X.

Now let's do some simple sums.

Let's assume there are 10,000 tests done. We know that given our statistics, twenty of them will have illness X.

Since the test is 90% accurate, 18 of them will be told correctly that they have illness X, and 2 of them will be told incorrectly that they don't.

Now let's think about the rest, the other 9980 people who in fact don't have the illness at all.

For 10% of them, the test will return incorrect results so 998 of them will be told incorrectly that they have illness X. The remaining 8978 will be correctly told that they don't have it.

Lets add up the results:
Told they have illness X: 1016
Told they don't have illness X: 8984

Number who actually have the illness: 20

Probability that someone told they have it really does: just under 2%.
Probability that someone told they don't have the illness really doesn't: a touch over 90%.

This might seem like a catch question but it's an illustration of why statistical information has to be examined very carefully. It's remarkably easy to jump to conclusions without enough information.

If it's any consolation, this test is regularly applied to journalists, scientists, academics, etc, and most of them get it wrong too.

Incidentally, that's why there has to be so much rigour and exactitude in conducting medical tests for illnesses, especially rare ones. Reliability has to be very very high to justify diagnostic conclusions. A test accuracy of 90% with an uncommon illness is almost useless! So although it sounds impressive, we are really comparing it with how we'd feel in a test we'd completed ourselves - if we scored 90% we'd feel quite pleased. Science and especially medicine has to have very much higher standards.

If I said I was a deity, I would be judged to be insane or at the very least deluded. If on the other hand I said I believed in a deity, I'd belong to a very large group of followers of a religion.

The credibility gap seems to concern the distance from the evidence and the demands made. If an individual of our acquaintance claimed to be a deity, we would expect them to have supernatural powers, omniscience, and other characteristics we know from experience to be impossible for humans. So we rule out the possibility that they could be a deity, and regard them as dishonest, insane, or at least deluded.

So as long as the idea of a god is out of reach of evidence, separated from the world of consequences where such a claim could be challenged, it can remain apparently credible. Any demand for evidence is dismissed by the definition of a god - a god is ineffable, omniscient, ever-present, invisible, etc. For the world of everyday reality, gods cannot be shown to exist because there can be no tangible consequence. For many that's enough to rule them out.

So to provide justification for belief, there has to be some indication which will attract and convince believers. So an appeal is made to explain the origin of some mysterious aspect of human lives. Typically this involves quasi-mystical concepts like "the good", "evil", "truth" and so on. Since such concepts cannot be explained on a factual basis (they refer to intangible concepts or at best are simply adjectives), they are placed in an appropriately abstract state - ready for an equally abstract untestable explanation.

Now this abstract space that religion occupies is full of controversy. Since nothing can be demonstrated, everything can be challenged and churches, though united in their main aims (perpetuation and growth), can only appeal to equally abstract ineffable causes.

In much the same way as philosophers have entertained themselves discussing the nature of reality without arriving at anything approaching a consensus, religious discussion has as a sole purpose (soul purpose?), the perpetuation of the focus on the question in dispute. Making the question of "good" and "evil" into a difficult question, lends apparent profundity to the question.

In fact, terms like "good" and "evil" are adjectives used to express a comparison with our own values. We judge things to be good or evil in comparison to values we support. There is nothing in reality that corresponds to the good, or the evil. It's a false profundity.

Unfortunately, theological discussion and its philosophical equivalents provide career paths for those perpetuating the confusion. But a moment's clear thinking shows the absurdity. Given that there is some deity, how is its nature discovered in such a way that we can distinguish between support for Zeus, or Odin, or Allah, or Jahweh, or any of the thousands of others? And if all are equivalent, we are reducing religion to a psychological and social phenomenon. That's why religions fiercely defend their differences. But there is no strictly philosophical basis for ruling out any of them if any of the others are included.

On the individual level, how can someone distinguish between what they call a religious experience, and an intense emotional one? It can only be through the way they are predisposed to describe them. And how can such a description be distinguished from delusion? Unfortunately, it can't.

It's only the social acceptability of religious statements which avoids religious individuals being considered as delusional. Society accepts religious statements as non-delusional whereas psychologically equivalent statements which talk about supernatural beings would be considered medically significant, and the individuals would be given some form of treatment.

For the religious, their forms of thinking, providing they are mild, doubtless have psychological benefits. But those benefits apply equally to other beliefs in imaginary beings. A child takes comfort from the presence of an imaginary friend - the comfort is no less real for the fact that the friend is imaginary.

But equally, reliance on emotionally perceived messages from deities, imaginary friends, or other delusional objects, can have serious consequences. While the messages from god accord with normal social values, we say that people are "good". When they don't, we lose no time in diagnosing the patients as schizophrenic. When they are muslim suicide bombers, we call them terrorists. When it's someone like George Bush who claimed to have a hotline to God, millions of Americans took him seriously and Iraqis are still suffering the consequences.

The belief that some religious people have that the deity is what keeps them moral is perhaps the most worrying aspect of religion. If an insubstantial super-being is required to keep them in tune with accepted social values (which we call morality), then their behaviour is on very shaky ground indeed. Far better that they lose the mystical and engage honestly with the values of society that they support, and dispute those they disagree with. At least they, and everyone else, will know where they stand.

The TED conference in Oxford this year was the scene of an announcement by Henry Markram, Director of the Blue Brain Project, that we could have an artificial human brain within ten years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm

Although the motivation is to model the activity of a human brain to provide a tool for researching illnesses, and also to be able to replace animal testing in many cases, such work also has important consequences for our understanding of human feelings of self and consciousness.

Already it is possible to show these brain simulations images which are then automatically converted into internal representations. It has long been argued (by Hofstadter, Dennett and others) that a self-referential neural network would exhibit signs of consciousness and we are inching closer towards understanding whether this can be demonstrated in practice.

This is an important scientific activity in its own right as such a development would provide scientific evidence for the first time that our notions of self-awareness, of consciousness, of some soul or human essence, is a bi-product of the activities of the brain itself. If it can be demonstrated that consciousness can be produced artificially, then we can no longer claim that human life has some deep spiritual significance.

For that reason, if for no other, the developments of the Blue Brain Project will be an extraordinary path of discovery over the next ten years.

They have already been able to simulate credibly the neuronal activity of a rat brain. Couple a greater mental capacity with an ability to communicate and respond and we have something able to participate in learning and self-evaluation.

One interesting ethical question will be what rights do we afford such a "brain"? Is it a person? It would meet the criterion of sentience. Similarly, if it was self-aware and was learning, would it be developing a personality? Would it acquire values? Who would be entitled to turn it off, if anyone?

Science fiction used to be so far removed from practical science as to permit the use of the term fiction. Now, science advances so fast that what counts as science fiction today, is a research project tomorrow, and scientific evidence in a year's time. We could be seeing the emergence of artificial consciousness, mirroring the development of artificial intelligence from the late 50s into the 90s. Although there are major difficulties with artificial intelligence, few now doubt that we can get machines to do remarkable feats of reasoning. When we first interface with a reasoning, self-aware artificial brain, will we be able to distinguish its consciousness from any other conscious entity?

It is not a surprise for most rational people that a report commissioned by the Food Standards Agency has found that organic food is no healthier than non-organic food.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8174482.stm

But although the report explains that there is no public health advantage to people eating organic food, there is no explanation of why this should be the case. But it's not difficult, nor secret. In fact it's rather obvious if you know a little bit about biology.

Plants take up nutrients through their roots and as long as the nutrients get through the roots, they will nourish the plant. But the really important point is that plants take up their nutrients as inorganic ions.. For example, Nitrogen is absorbed either as an ammonium ion, NH₄⁺, or as a nitrate ion, NO₃^-. Potassium is taken up as a positively charged inorganic ion, K⁺. Until the organic material providing those sources are decomposed into their inorganic state, they cannot be used by the plant.

That's basic biology. So as far as the plant is concerned, organic is just the same as inorganic. The plant will grow in exactly the same way regardless of whether the nitrogen comes from organic or inorganic sources and will only be taken up once they are available in inorganic form.

Therefore it is entirely obvious that there would be no additional health benefits to eating organic food. It's the same food!

One of the reasons why supermarkets can charge such high prices for organic foods is because most people don't understand very basic plant biology. Their customers' poor understanding of science helps them hoodwink gullible people and take higher profits. The customers think they're getting better food when in fact it's the same food at higher prices.

A little science goes a long way so it's worth making the effort to understand it. And the internet is an excellent place to find these things out.

You might still prefer to eat plants grown organically perhaps because you believe that it's better to avoid chemicals, but that too is a fallacy. Organic fertilizers also break down into inorganic chemicals - they wouldn't work otherwise. So you are not avoiding chemicals.

Avoiding pesticides is of course another matter but there's no guarantee that foods sold as organic are pesticide-free. All it means is that the pesticides used are likely themselves to be organic in origin, and therefore possibly contain unidentified chemicals as well. Indeed some organic pesticides such as rotenone are toxic to humans too. Rotenone produces Parkinson-like symptoms in rats. It's not nice stuff!

The message is clear. Don't get conned by the organic hype. Wise up and learn a bit of biology. It's not difficult, and it's not secret.

In America recently, there was a ruling by the Federal Trade Commission against a company called CVS Pharmacy Inc. They were cashing in on the recent scares about flu to market a product which they claimed could prevent colds, fight germs, and boost immune systems. Unfortunately, there was no evidence...

Last year, the FTC issued rulings against a number of other companies including Airborne Health Inc, Improvita Health Products Inc, and Rite Aid Corporation. These were promoting health food supplements that could apparently treat colds and the flu... Hmmmm.... Colds and flu are viruses... and these were being treated by... dietary supplements...

Read about it here.

This case is interesting because the FTC is responsible for consumer protection against false claims, and it files a report when it thinks there is a likelihood that the law has been broken. But the report is not itself evidence that the company has broken the law, even though in this case they're paying out $2.8 million in consumer refunds.

Normally consumer legislation is seriously hampered in the case of Woo merchants because the actual evidence is always very thin on the ground. Few detailed studies are done on whether these wacky therapies and products actually do anything. Partly that's because the resources to investigate them cost money and it is better spent elsewhere, but also because Woo practitioners are remarkably evasive when it comes to controlled, double-blind trials. They like stories and anecdotes, rather than clinical trials which tend to expose their empty claims. The sell the placebo effect but they don't want everyone to understand that or sales will fall.

In the case of Woo therapies, the libel law often protects practitioners against direct challenge. And in order to demonstrate fraud, you have to be able to show that someone is knowingly selling a fake treatment or product as if it was the real thing. If they are ignorant of the facts, but believe they are selling something real, that's a valid defence. Ignorance of human biology and science is an excellent defence for individual Woo practitioners.

But in the case of a corporation with the resources to find out and keep informed, it seems there is at least some expectation that they observe the requirements of evidence before making extraordinary claims. If only that was enforced in the case of people selling crystals, ear candles, aromatherapy, homeopathy, Reiki, and all the other baseless therapies and products out there.

Leaving the Land of Woo, by Bob Lloyd, is now in production and should be out by the middle of October.

Woo is that land where the constraints of the real world don't apply, where therapies and cures are effected through undetectable energies, where our biochemistry and physiology are irrelevant and are replaced by aligning chakras, and unblocking channels. It's the land where magnets and crystals can influence our bodies in ways unknown to modern science, defying all reason and rationality.

Leaving the Land of Woo looks at how we get our knowledge of the way the world works, how we test it, and how we can challenge theories to see if they are right. It looks at the varieties of Woo including theories about alternative medicine, food, religious beliefs, and claims about the paranormal. It takes a critical look at what these varieties of Woo have in common, and shows how the theories all rely on a believing viewpoint in which our rational faculties are suspended. Such a viewpoint would have catastrophic effects on our practical lives if allowed to extend into all areas, and yet we are led, credulously, to spend vast amounts of money on untested, baseless products.

Leaving the Land of Woo provides a checklist of useful questions to be asked of alternative medicine practitioners, and a guide to evaluating the claims made.

If you have ever even been tempted to spend real money on Woo products, whether alt-med, foody therapies, supplements, detox, or religion, you could save yourself money by buying this book. It would pay for itself just by avoiding one encounter with Woo.

Watch out for the release:
http://www.leavingthelandofwoo.com

The continuing saga of the misplaced libel suit against Simon Singh brought by the British Chiropractic Association grinds into its latest phase today, as Dr Singh applies again for permission to appeal. He's been denied twice, but once he has exhausted the UK courts, he can then take the case to the European Court. He's back in court today, but with little chance of success - judges very rarely challenge each other's judgements.

Already we have seen the British chiropractors reeling from the attention they have attracted to unfounded claims of what they can treat, including childhood colic and asthma. More than 500 of them have been reported to the regulatory authorities including the Advertising Standards Authority, the Trading Standards Authority, and even their own regulatory council, the General Chiropractic Council.

The McTimony Chiropractic Association issued a rather panicky letter to its members urging them to take down their websites and remove unevidenced claims, and whole business is feeling the effects of the Quacklash.

The evidence offered by the BCA to support the use of chiropractic in treating childhood colic and asthma was reviewed by the British Medical Journal who had an exceptionally low opinion of them. The BMJ editorial described the references as having been totally demolished. Which to any reasonable person indicates that there wasn't any evidence there.

We hope that Simon Singh is successful, not just for him personally, so he can get on with his excellent work unhindered by this ludicrous case, but because there are wider implications for the free criticism of medical therapies. If someone comes along with a preposterous theory and starts charging confused people for treatment that has no scientific basis, we'd all be justifiably talking about fraud, deception, dishonesty, unethical practice and so on. And the way to establish whether or not that really is the case, is to look at the evidence. That's all Dr Singh tried to do.

The reaction of the BCA in resorting to libel laws to try to shut him up, rather than offering high quality scientific and medical research speaks volumes about them, and their concern for commercial opportunity rather than scientific credibility. Let's hope the Quacklash they've unleashed on themselves spreads to all the other purveyors of Woo. At the very least, it might make them think twice before trying to stifle the voice of reason.

The business of Reiki is interesting because it is based on undetectable energy, so practitioners have to claim to have received it from a Reiki practitioner or trainer, or even Master. Based on their personal statement that it has happened, anyone assessing them can do nothing other than go along with it. If the paying customer says they've received energy (because that's what they just bought), the seller will obviously accept the money.

That form of self-assessment is the basis of Reiki qualifications. The way it works is this. There are three levels (which they disingenuously call degrees) of supposed Reiki training and the first is supposed to be about self-healing. You can get that by just attending a one-day session and paying a fee. You won't have to be assessed other than by being asked what you feel and as long as you give the expected answers, you're in. You're now qualified at the first level and that's a necessary precondition for getting to the second level, where you make money.

The second level is supposed to be about you being able to download energy so that you can then pass it on to someone else, friends, relatives, or customers, through a process called empowerment. Again, give the right words and pay the money, and you're in. That entitles you to set yourself up officially as a practitioner. In many places, to get business insurance you have to provide some kind of written certificate to show you've been trained and that arbitrarily means level two. Sometimes there are associations which sell the insurance, and you have to join them first.

So how does the Reiki pyramid selling business work? First you get yourself joined up which involves an outlay of around £740 - around £130 for the first level, £160 for the second level, and a massive £450 for the third level. The first two levels are normally each one-day courses, and the third one is generally a two-day event. All of the sessions typically involve self-treatment as well so there won't be any stressful learning involved.

Now you've paid your money and joined the pyramid, you can start transferring the financial risk to others by charging for treatment sessions. You can officially do that once you've done the second day session. Once you are up to level three, you can start charging people learning Reiki by running the courses yourself, pretending to be training others.

All you need to do to get your money back is to be able to maintain the delusional marketing activity, say the right things about downloading energy, and empowerments, ride on the wave of Woo publicity, and attract customers. Once you've recovered your outlay, you can begin to collect the profit, perhaps spending some of it on getting more non-qualifications which you can use to boost your marketing message. As long as you don't care about how things work in the real world, as long as you don't think about whether it is even credible that this energy exists, you can submerge yourself in Woo nonsense.

During the process you have to go along with the mumbo-jumbo but it's a small price to pay for inclusion in a very lucrative pyramid selling scheme.

The interesting question is how any Reiki trainer could ever tell whether the undetectable energy has been transferred anywhere, given that the customers could just be playing the game to get the piece of paper, to join the club. Someone claiming to receive the empowerment is just as untestable as someone claiming to provide it. Boths sides of a consensual fraud aim to gain by perpetuating the pyramid selling. If you try not to think about that, you might even delude yourself into thinking that it's not really fraud.

The real losers are those who pay for the treatment without joining the pyramid. The real con artists are those perpetuating the delusional business, by doing the courses and conning gullible customers into paying them.

It is welcome news that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the display of crucifixes in classrooms in Italian schools, on the grounds that it violates the rights of parents to educate their children as they see fit, but more importantly, that it violates the child's right to freedom of religion.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340411.stm

If schools decided to inculcate in children political beliefs in the same way as church schools indoctrinate children into irrational religious beliefs, there would be a massive public outcry. The schools would be charged with manipulating children, even abusing them. Somehow, our societies grant a free pass to churches to do the same thing with religious ideas.

In Italy now, catholicism is no longer the official state religion but the crucifixes remain. In countries such as Spain, there is an ongoing conflict between the secular state and the catholic church. There, the catholic church has benefited massively from a default tick box on tax forms which channels funds destined either for charity or the church itself. Even priests were paid for by the state. And despite formally being a secular state, the church still has a very strong involvement in education.

In the UK, the growth of faith schools increases the likelihood of religious indoctrination of children. Almost every new school now has a religious involvement despite education being officially secular.

It will be interesting to see how other countries react to the ruling. Although some have been only too willing to campaign against the wearing of islamic dress in schools, they've often shied away from including crucifixes, yarmulkas, fish badges and the like. But surely there's a difference between the individual expression of a religious belief, and the public display of an institutions support for it when that institution is entrusted with the education of children?

We should be teaching children to be critical when presented with irrational religious ideas. They should be able to think critically about them, understand their social and political significance, understand their consequences. They need to know about religions but that emphatically means not educating them into religions.

Over the last few years there has been a growing availability of university courses and degrees in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, CAM, but recently there have been moves to examine the content of the courses.

Dr David Colquhoun has been using the Freedom of Information Act to request information about the course contents from a number of universities and has been met with a blank refusal. But David Colquhoun, being the way he is, insisted, appealed, won, and has obtained some frighteningly irrational content.

The quacklash has awakened some of the university administrations who, although they want to exploit the revenue stream coming from low grade private institutes, by validating degrees in CAM, are now seriously embarrassed by course content that includes crystals, magnets, healing energy, and the like.

All UK universities have now stopped issuing BSc degrees in homeopathy - doubtless on the grounds that it is difficult to award a science degree to a non-science, and to examine something with no real content. Some others have halted enrollment into the CAM courses in recognition that there is an academic standards problem. But some shameless institutions are trying to shy away from scientific scrutiny by rebranding the degrees as BAs. As if it is possible to hide lack of content by calling them arts courses.

But what happens to the students, those well-meaning folks who thought they would build themselves a career helping people, students who accepted that if they obtained a degree from a university they could expect to have received a university education. Instead they come out with a piece of paper stamped by a university that has woefully compromised its academic standards for commercial reasons. They will have been taught unregulated content with no scientific basis whatsoever, sat examinations which were marked outside of the university, based on course materials that the university may not even have seen. Their qualifications are a testament only to their deception.

Nevertheless, they will go out into the world, opening businesses and treating people as if their training meant something. They will call themselves healers and therapists, they'll display their certificates on the wall, and start taking money off people who know even less about human biology than they do. The deception of pseudoscience is given commercial respectability by the woeful negligence of the university administrators.

Many universities subcontract both the teaching and the examining, charging for the university stamp. The University of Wales for example validates 34 outside institutions and collects over £5 million per year.

It is to be hoped that the very many principled scientists and others who teach in universities, will wake up to what is going on and start to publish the irrational course content of these pseudoscience courses. Maybe that will embarrass the universities into keeping up their academic standards and will stop them deluding paying students into believing that they have had a university education in pseudoscience.

Whenever there is a natural disaster, the media always turns to some religious representative to wallow in the suffering, to explain that God is with us, that there is some underlying fundamental reason for suffering, and that people shouldn't see the tragedy as any reason to doubt their faith.

And the media always accepts that position with only the mildest of criticisms. Even the formidable John Humphrys of Radio 4's Today programme today gave the Bishop of York, John Sentamu, an easy ride as he sat quiet during the bishop's hopelessly incoherent diatribe. The worthy bishop was wrestling with a question that Humphrys put to him: how can a merciful god be responsible for such devastating disasters? For a bishop you'd think the question would be easy.

Of course it's a fair question and one which cannot be answered by the religious. The worthy bishop wriggled all over the place talking about the goodness of Christ, and the munificence of nature, and the power and beauty of the world, and all that stuff. But what he couldn't do was explain the actions of a supposed all-powerful deity causing disaster. You have to be a deluded theologian to wriggle out of that.

Haiti lies on the edge of the Carribbean tectonic plate and one of the fault lines which has been stable for the last three centuries or so, gave way to the pressure of plate movement. It was around 10km down in the ground that the quake occurred. That has nothing whatsoever to do with ideas about mythical super-beings, omniscient gods, or anything of the kind. This is a geological process which is well-understood but difficult to predict.

Whenever there is a disaster of some kind, it is natural that the media will focus on the human aspects of the story, the suffering, the relief effort, the economic and social consequences, and will try to convey the sense of human loss.

But to have a religious representative pontificating about the goodness of his mystical deity and coming over all pious about his sympathy towards the suffering people of Haiti, is not just irrelevant, but somewhat insulting. Attempting to gain publicity for religion at a time of such enormous suffering is opportunist and cynical at best.

And far from being a reason for deepening faith in religion, such disasters ought to help people realise that there is a material world, subject to physical laws and it operates quite independently from any mystical super-beings.

Such disasters show very clearly how utterly irrelevant religion is to the real practical interests of living people. If the religious bodies want an all-powerful god in charge of everything that happens in the universe, let's see them step up to the plate and claim responsibility on his behalf, instead of wriggling incoherently to evade it.

These days it's becoming common for people to say they are opposed to political correctness. They are so fed up with stupid legislation, stupid rules, an apparent obsession with controlling people's behaviour, that they refuse to allow the free expression of their views to be curtailed just because someone might think them politically incorrect.

Any viewpoint which can be labelled as politically incorrect acquires a kind of rogue currency, the cry of the rebel, the refusal to be kept quiet. Anyone who tries to limit the expression of those views is regarded as the enemy, someone to be campaigned against, fought against.

What gets lost in this grass-roots rejection of control is any consideration of the content of the views. So the expression of any and every viewpoint, however odious or prejudiced, is regarded as a fight for freedom. And any criticism of those views is assumed to be on the side of the politically correct. This is a remarkably effective smoke-screen for extreme right wing views, racist prejudice, and anti-democratic campaigning.

As a result of the highlighting of prejudiced attitudes, and various items of legislation to outlaw discrimination, those people who feel their views are under attack have used the term political correctness to imply that they are being forced to shut up. But in fact, what has happened is that a lot of people are so fed up with the xenophobic and racist prejudices, the little-England mentality, the scaremongering about people from other countries, that they want to live in a country that doesn't support those views.

As cultures mingle and international influences are seen in the arts and literature, film and TV, those people who are open to outside influence, find the closed and suspicious attitude of nationalists quite offensive. Unfortunately, many of those people are so accommodating that they typically avoid confrontation. Instead of defending their viewpoint, their internationalism and open cultural attitudes, they keep quiet.

The xenophobes spout their racist nonsense insisting that they are defending their right to speak and the liberals, who of course defend free speech, don't object. But what we need are clear arguments which oppose racist views, those snide prejudiced comments that the Brits often produce whenever they talk about immigration and foreigners.

Anyone who opposes the arguments against immigration are dismissed as politically correct and the arguments are never addressed. Many newspapers love to pander to prejudice and dismiss any contrary views with the simple epithet.

Sure, we can all be irritated by excessive legislation and silly restrictions, but there are some fundamental principles at stake. Why should someone's right to express racist views force foreign people in the UK to be subjected to prejudiced treatment? Why should someone have to experience discrimination so that some bigot can have free rein in expressing their views? Expressing views which encourage discrimination and prejudice is illegal for good reason, because doing do injures the rights of others. Expressing views implies some responsibilities too and that's why the law balances them.

Unfortunately, with so many people objecting to political correctness without thinking through the consequences, the racists and xenophobes have found a comfortable cover behind which to hide, whilst continuing to spout their odious views. We can and should expose racism and xenophobia for what it is and challenge anyone who tries to hide behind some fight against political correctness.

It is becoming too easy for odious views to find an acceptable justification behind a simplistic campaign against regulation. Racism is not politically correct because such views are prejudiced, ill-informed, and discriminatory. That's why they should be opposed.