The Climate Coalition published my letter to the future, much to my surprise. 

I thought it might be too close to the truth for comfort. Truth can be painful, sometimes pain is good for us, it tells us what we need to know to avoid a greater injury and is helpful if one responds appropriately.

I knew what I was writing was provocative and close to the edge and there was a risk their moderators would not "like" it and avoid publishing it on their platform. This turned out not to be the case which I think reflects a certain congruence in our perceptions and priorities and I am grateful in as much as I hope it helps. 

I like what I wrote because it comes from the heart and reflects a lifetime of ecological awareness and dismay informed by a degree in zoology from Oxford University and many years of reading and contemplation and meditation with classical and buddist philosophy along with biology as my muses, straightening out the delusions I encountered and held myself. I dont believe in taking myth and metaphor literally but I do believe in communication.

I promised myself that if the Climate Coalition would not publish my letter to the future, that I would. Simply so that my message, which I worked for hours to shape, would be expressed for others to read and not be suppressed and discarded for whatever reason it was. It is too important to me to give up on it. There was a long delay so I did publish it here believing I had been moderated out of the discussion.

I accept it is contentious, has a highly philosophical perspective which is edgy, even though based on the deep truths of biology.

I thought they might be averse to the discussion of power, which I will address because power can make people afraid, it is in our nature. Power can also be addictive which is part of the problem and can lead to psychosis, which is why I think we need to think about it more carefully. Power is a difficult impulse and perception to balance rationally, perhaps even more so than sexuality, which we have terrible trouble discussing and which it is related to in evolutionary, psychological and artistic contexts. 

So please bear in mind that when I discuss the means of power, democracy is a means of power. Law is a means of power. Religion is a means of power. Whatever form power takes in your nation, is the form of power reason must engage with and use, to prevent ecological disaster.

The years of my study and the lack of an adequate response to the climate crisis have convinced me humanity, as a collective entity, has a problem with facing reality, which we need to address.

So here it is, from the heart, my letter to the future which they did eventually publish, written on or about Halloween, so perhaps it is meant to be a little scary, it is definitely meant to be philosophically challenging but it is also meant to be poetic and a little dramatic. 

I hope it does not frighten anyone too much and if it does please be reassured that I mean to advocate only peaceful means, even though peaceful protest is necessary where power does not listen to reason.

https://www.letterstotomorrow.com/letters/richards-letter-1874/

My apology to future incarnations of humanity, like myself.

You will be like me, you will live after me in what is my future and I will be of your past. 

We are born of the same genepool, our brains are similar, you will think like me and you can see what I can see, I write to you as if to myself.

Dear friends I am so sorry. I tried to help them think. I tried to change their priorities. I tried to help my brothers and sisters embrace the need for change without fear, based on knowledge and reason. But humanity are creatures of habit and could not let go of the ways which had served so well in the fossil fuelled industrial era, which doubled our number in its first century and then quadrupled it again in the next, taking the population of humanity from one to eight billion souls in two hundred years. 

At this time it seems only material disaster will prove enough to persuade them to change. 

I know you will understand because you are like me, the genes which create us evolved to make us compete for survival if we could. Those who could, produced the next generation and so our genepool became more and more competitive. Like the megafauna of a bygone age, when an evolutionary spiral ran out of control and nature could not sustain what she had created. Our spiral is destroying the very nature we depend on for life.

There is a flaw in our kind, it is the psychological equivalent of antlers that grew so large heralding the doom of the giant Irish elk Megaloceros giganteus. We are too competitive, too wrapped up in ourselves and perceptions of our place in the great game of life. We live in a fantasy world of self image and paranoia, sexual impulse and greed, bequeathed to us by our evolutionary inheritance. 

The industrial revolution was possible when we invented and taught science as a discipline to help train abstract reasoning, which evolution also created, to overcome our fears, urges and delusional prejudices and perceive the precious truth. 

This was hard, because our competitive instinct is a search for power, which overwhelms abstract reason and was given the crown over our motives by our evolution in the world we once inhabited.

This is why power cannot relinquish power to serve reason, which is in turn why reason must take power by means of power. Our revolution of reason has to date failed, many cannot even see it is needed and think social outrage more fun, fighting vainly to take another's power and territory more important, than building renewable energy generators. It is in our nature, it is what our genes made us but today it is wrong.

We vie with each other and with reality itself to fulfill our instinctive impulses and have become so used to success we cannot believe the danger we pose to ourselves. Our genes have not evolved to manage a planet, they developed in small tribes with tiny populations, fostering fierce rivalries in a seemingly endless world. Never before have eight billion of us tried to live in the same world together.

Many saw global warming as propaganda, a ruse from wily shamanic academics. Powerseeking overcame reason. As with the hunting of witches, which do not exist, yet were the perfect foil for our instinctive paranoias, humanity chose perversely to follow the run of its imagination, to blame the very voice of reason for its discomfiting message, to obey Apollo's curse and ignore Cassandra's truthful warning.

Foresight is informed by hindsight and it looks like it will take physical disaster on a global scale for humanity to realise there is a problem. At the time of writing reason tells us it is already too late. Thus we created the world you must live in, destroying half the life that was in it when we were born, because although we could see the future we were creating, we could not act on our vision. We simply could not believe we were the ones who had to make that choice, that we were so powerful and could do ourselves such harm by failing to take responsibility for it. In this we were paralysed by our genes and the spiral of megalomania which our evolution created within us. 

Look within and you will see the seeds of the tragedy which is unfolding. I hope you can forgive us and in so doing forgive yourselves.

Once again I am so sorry and am bitter to the pit of my stomach at the folly of the great family of humanity, which I love and on whose existence my life depends yet who will not listen to reason. I did try to help us understand but the madness our genes create would not allow it and I can only apologise over and over again for the state of the world you will inherit. 

Judge us as you must to learn from our mistakes and make a better civilisation than ours. One which recognises truth as more precious than vanity and can act accordingly.

Good luck. 

Always your friend, booly.

The Priceless Value of Life - for the future of humanity and what it means about conservation today.

Its worth enunciating why all life is precious. We need to make the case for conservation of the living world and preservation of all species.

To the best of our knowledge the universe is coming to an end. Not soon but eventually it will and in the meantime we are riding the crest of a wave of matter and energy created by whatever miracle caused the explosion which started it all.

With luck it will last for aeons, many billions of years probably and people like us will live through it all. Our descendants will begin their journey with the legacy we leave them and one of the most important things we can leave them is the living world we inherited.

The future of humanity is to explore, it has to be because the universe is set to last longer than the Earth is. Those who survive the last days of Earth, when it will roast in the fiery outer atmosphere of the sun, will be far away from it. 

In a strange way it is comforting to know that it is all a hill of beans, in the end everything will come to nothing but in the meantime what matters therefore is surviving, prospering, living the good life, being happy doing what we want to do because we choose to. In the end there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there is just this, more of the same and we do what we do because we are compelled to by our nature.

Our progress into the post-Earth future will continue to be an evolutionary process and only those who choose to survive will survive and their descendants will live among the stars. Those who give up will die out as surely as those who offend against their fellow humans and I feel sure there are plenty who will not because that is what life on Earth has made of us, survivors and mutualistic cooperators. 

Every generation exists because the previous generation survived and passed on their likeness and knowledge. We have reached a point in our long journey where we have understood enough about what works and what does not that the future will not be like the past, because we have the ability to shape the environment we want to live in and thereby, we create the future. It is a power and a responsibility because we will become what we make ourselves, our world will become what we make of it. The shape of the future is our choice.

It seems possible that if we survive long enough, despite real dangers posed by natural disasters like asteroid strike, supervolcanoes and pandemics, we will learn to live away from the Earth and likely that we will create large habitats in which we are as comfortable and fulfilled as we would be living in a beautiful and well managed city somewhere on Earth. It is probable we will learn to move these city ships over many years around the universe and not at all unlikely that this will eventually lead to voyaging between planets and stars, slowly but as safely as we can.

It will not matter that it may take thousands of years to reach a new star when the journey itself has all that life can offer because the ship is a home from home.

One day such ships will reach planets which can be made habitable and then the life they brought with them will be the means of making it habitable and beautiful to human eyes. It is then that we will count the cost of every unheeded extinction, every species lost to us today, which could have lived in our new garden home.

It is not right that we allow the future of billions of years of humanity to be scarred by the short termism of a few wannabes today. Every species which exists has passed the test of evolution and has skills and secrets locked in the molecules from which it is made and behaviour it can employ. Not only are they intrinsically beautiful in their own right but they can become our tutors in the capabilities of nature, both now and for aeons to come and this is why I hold life a sacred and priceless treasure.

I do not believe the majority of humanity would willingly allow such a priceless treasure to be needlessly destroyed through ignorance and it is my hope we will continue to pass laws and enforce these such that extinctions of species due to habitat destruction by negligence or by design and due to hunting for superstitious talismans comes to an end and the species which live on Earth today will all continue to live as will we and travel with us to live in distant times and places throughout the long life of humanity for as long as we all may live.

So let us take responsibility for our future and live now as we must to continue in the same way for the foreseeable future, sustainably. The time the universe can sustain life may end one day but between now and then is a very long time and we should lose no more of the unique species which have taken billions of years evolve, as it is a shameful waste and a cause for profound regret. 

I hope readers agree it is right to act according to their conscience. 

If in doubt try searching for " conservation charities " and see where it takes you.  

Every little helps to support conservation both locally and globally.  :)

GM debate : ignorance of reality is no defence.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/25/gm-wheat-no-more-pest-resistant-than-ordinary-crops-trial-shows



boolybooly

And now we have a bunch of gene spliced pollen floating around the countryside fertilising next years seed corn.

fizzgog

From http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/01/anti-gm-activists-wheat-rothamsted:
To prevent stray pollen the Rothamsted scientists have surrounded the trial plots with 10 metres of barley and three metres of conventional wheat.

No cereals or grasses are grown within 20 metres of the border. Wheat pollen is heavy and travels at most 12 metres.

boolybooly

These precautions @fizzgog are totally inadequate to prevent contamination. They have been conceived within the wrong paradigm, they are designed to reduce the statistical likelihood of a single pollen grain passing to a food crop but where you are dealing with billions of pollen grains in a real world situation, a small statistical chance for one grain becomes a statistical inevitability for many many thousands.

It bears comparison with the reason that the Nazis did not develope the nuclear bomb, they believed the statistical likelihood of a single neutron collision required that it travel through many meters of plutonium, what they didn't consider was what the allies understood, which is that not all the neutrons need to collide to generate a self sustaining fission chain reaction. Only a smaller proportion need to collide, a statistical inevitability where billions are involved. Their huge error meant they believed a nuke had to be made of tonnes of material and so they did not pursue the idea when in fact the critical mass for plutonium 239 is about 11 kg.

These field trial precautions fall foul of the same kind of mistaken interpretation of statistics. The contamination of the food crop with genespliced pollen was inevitable using these protocols, it has already happened.

Consider the case where there is a local eddy which can pick up much heavier objects than a breeze and transport them to altitude thus moving them far further than laboratory based experiments predict. This is due to the low pressure tube which forms at the middle of any vortex and sucks in medium like a vacuum cleaner. They dont have to big, even a dust devil would shift pollen a lot further than 12m and a strong turbulent persistant wind will tear the lab based statistics for pollen distribution to shreds as turbulence creates multiple chaotic vortices. Its absolutely unconscionable to expose the UK countryside to experimental windborn GM pollen.

Not even one grain of pollen should be allowed to escape. Genetic contamination does not require that a whole field be pollinated, it requires only that one seed planted for next years crop be fertilised by this years genespliced pollen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-27298939

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/agriculture/geneticmodification/11702744/Anti-GM-protesters-dont-understand-how-science-works.html#comment-2104389847


flyingfox (aka boolybooly)

The article above is predicated on a straw man argument. Many GM critics are highly qualified and well informed biologists. The people doing GM work are not all of the same caliber and have been hired by profit motivated companies flush with finance to play with forces they do not seem to understand. 

The design of this experiment was negligent and unsafe and has ensured that modified genetic material will have escaped into the environment and will now become part of the wheat crop in the UK whether it was successful or not, whether it was safe to eat or not, we will soon be eating it.

Critical Party

I assume that the critic "scientists" you're referring to are people like Seralini, Carmen, and Seneff? People that have been thoroughly lambasted for poor science by regulatory agencies across the board. 

Also, your second paragraph is hilarious. Your knowledge of how genetics works is clearly completely nonexistent.

flyingfox

I am afraid you have that backwards, it is you who does not understand. I am not trying to slap you down or anything but FYI and because you brought it up I have studied evolution and genetics at a reputable academic institution :) please feel free to troll away if it makes you feel good.

If ignorance is no defence in law, it certainly will not protect us from reality. The experimental design ensured that wind borne pollen has escaped, it does not take a field full of GM wheat for next year's wheat crop to be contaminated, it takes only one pollen grain to fertilise one seed and for that seed to be planted among next year's crop for the genetic modification to become established in the food crop gene pool. The theory of evolution by natural selection depends on the possibility that mutations happen only once but can be inherited by an entire species due to the process of gene fixation. This is because where one individual organism reproduces it can create more than one offspring eg the many seeds (and pollen grains) of a wheat plant seed head. Where offspring inherit an advantage they will reproduce better than competitors without that advantage, but even where a genetic difference confers no advantage the frequency of GM chromosomes will still persist in the gene pool alongside competitor non GM chromosomes and can potentially increase due to a process termed "genetic drift". We know this already.

However the conception of this experiment has been criticised on the basis that aphids respond to changes in pheromone concentration, so are not deterred by an even and constant spread of the chemical across an entire field ie they become habituated to a constant concentration and only respond to a sudden increase signalling an alarm. Where contaminating seed grows in an environment where it is one plant among many without the modification it might potentially be granted an advantage not evident in the experiment precisely because it is present in small numbers within a host crop, creating localised maxima of pheromone concentration so that an aphid arriving at a GM plant will encounter a relative rise in alarm pheromone and be repelled to nearby plants without the pheromone, which means that there may be a selection pressure which will raise the frequency of the contaminating GM genotype to an equilibrium point within the gene pool where it no longer confers an advantage because too many neighbours have the same pheromone. Such a gene would never reach fixation in a monoculture crop but would never be extinguished either because where it became rarer it would become advantageous again and so would always be present.

The point is we don't know whether this can happen but the lab experiments suggest it is a possibility. But that is the point, ignorance is no defence in reality. These field experiments should never have gone ahead in the open without proper laboratory background research into the phenomena they are trying to exploit. In this case the failure shows the experimentation had not been done adequately.

But there are also other real world reasons for caution which are being completely ignored by open air experimentation. All GM product should be treated as biohazard until food trials have been conducted to ensure pleiotropic effects or the reawakening of epigenetically suppressed genes has not allowed any carefully bred out plant defences or other toxity to result. They should certainly not be allowed to contaminate food crops. I fear it will take a disaster on the scale of an industrial accident for biotech companies to take genetic safety seriously.

These companies are playing biological roulette with your daily bread. With this trial the damage has already been done and we will just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best. There is nothing else we can do except ensure that local wheat farms for a 5km radius do not allow their wheat to be used for seed next year.

Our priority must be to defend the Earth not create an elitist enclave of narcissistic boffins on Mars.

I know it looks like I am hitting on Professor Hawking for which I am sorry, as this is the second article in a row in this blog to reference one of his media statements. But he does say interesting and sometimes controversial things which do seem intended to stimulate thought.

Some time ago, spurred by reports of Stephen Hawking's express desire to see humanity live in space I felt it appropriate to respond with a consideration of the correct ordering of priorities for humanity at this time. An interesting interaction ensued. As I explained I didn't mean it unkindly but I think it makes more sense to look at this from a different perspective.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/7935505/Stephen-Hawking-mankind-must-move-to-outer-space-within-a-century.html

flyingfox 5 years ago• Our priority must be to defend the Earth not create an elitist enclave of narcissistic boffins on Mars. 

finsburyparker • It's thanks to your so called 'Narcissistic boffins on Mars' that you have access to this medium you are using to berate them! G. P. 

flyingfox •The boffins who invented the internet did not live on Mars (to the best of my knowledge) ! The reports we are seeing of Prof Hawking's thoughts have been dumbed down, my reply was intended to match the level of the discussion. Sorry if it seemed a little terse, I was having trouble making myself heard due to obstructive interactions between Disqus and Twitter which erased my first attempt so I tried to keep it short and pithy. 

 Am I calling all boffins narcissistic? No, only those Zardozesque straw boffins who would hypocritically condemn and might wish to escape from their fellow humans, rather than face their own flawed humanity and defend the only place we can call home from the danger of asteroid impacts.

 This would be the primary justification for journeying further into space than Earth orbit of sufficient urgency it can be countenanced when there are people dying in squalor all over the world, when we have not learned to husband our resources or to cherish rather than defile our environment or balance our population at sustainable levels, let alone switch to renewables, so that we may continue to live in sustainable comfort, with a clear conscience, in the one place we can call home. 

 The more we understand about the universe and our own evolution, the more we recognise that this planet is priceless, irreplaceable and indispensable to the future of humanity. If we have learned anything surely it is that there really is no place like home. 

 Asteroid impact is the one thing we cannot afford to let happen while we sort these other things out and this justifies continued investment in astronomy and space exploration, but these other things must be sorted not run away from or they will follow us wherever we go and our self inflicted torment will never end.

To comment further : IMHO The escapist tendency within the culture of science finds a creative outlet in science fiction in which space exploration is a trope for leaving the woes of the human condition behind. Much of this woe springs from the battle for civility within our own societies, the battle between brain and brawn within the body politic of our governments and academic institutions is a recapitulation of the battle between individuals who specialise in developing either. I am talking about geeks versus jocks. The truth is we need them both, not just as a society but as individuals, we need both. Ideally jocks need to get smart and geeks need to stay fit and healthy, or to look at it another way we all need to strike a balance between the inner geek and jock.

As I see it, much as space colonisation may have been an inspiration for the Star Trek generation, myself included, there is no practical way to escape this Earth of ours on a permanent basis within the next century because of the vast infrastructure which would be needed to support a breeding population anywhere else.

We take for granted all the things which Earth does for us and its time we didn't. It is time we recognised that the Earth is priceless and I cannot agree that we should ever treat it like a disposable item, in any case its not that simple.

Our survival even in the case of an extinction event asteroid impact would depend not on running away to space, but in the worst case it would depend on sustainable subterranean civilisation which would be far easier for us to do as we simply do not have the muscle to launch 1000 people, plus maternity hospital, plus resource gathering infrastructure and refining and manufacturing plants into orbit. Even if we had the ability to construct gravitational environments on a sufficient scale that they would be sustainable, which as yet we don't, the cost of putting them in orbit let alone on Mars would be, well, astronomical.

We would get far more for our money by burying everything we need below the protective skin of the Earth's crust and get gravity for free. It just makes more economic sense, not that I don't like the idea of getting away from it all, it just wouldn't work, not yet awhile.

On Aggression

Stephen Hawking recently commented that ...
“The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression”

www.techienews.co.uk/9723908/stephen-hawking-human-failing-like-correct-aggression/

This is something which piqued my curiosity as an undergrad', so I felt it was worth contributing a few thoughts to the discussion in the media which Professor Hawking's comment made possible. Below is a reply to the article linked above, which summarises some key reasons for optimism about the human condition which result from the contemplation of biological knowledge, which I hope others will find interesting. 

I also plugged Konrad Lorenz's book "On Aggression" on which some of these ideas are based.

If one wishes to correct aggression one needs to understand the biological causes for it, its behavioural context and behavioural counterbalances like peacemaking, friendship and love which in the natural state inhibit aggression in appropriate circumstances.

Aggression is a part of us all. Even academics are aggressive in their own way and it would be hypocrisy to say otherwise and we all know that kind of hypocrisy is no stranger to religious fanatics either.

At the root of all our behaviours is natural selection which exists because self reproducing DNA reproduces more successfully the better it is at reproducing, obviously. OK we are competing for limited resources and winning can be a matter of life and death and that is the reality. For social animals like humans winning has a lot to do with making friends precisely because life isn't fair and contests of power between groups of equals become a numbers game. Consequently we have all that we need to solve the problems of aggression and live as friends should circumstances permit. In today's world those circumstances are of our own making.

In an aggressive world one needs to be aware of reality to survive but we can improve on the past. The numbers game is real but for example, given the right circumstances, democracy can win, because it pleases most of the people some of the time. Its not perfect but its usually better for everyone than war and revolution.

This is why I think it would help if more people understood the biological basis for our own psyches because this is as close as we have come to understanding our own reality and consequently offers us some chance of finding ways to remedy recurring patterns of violence. Such as the traps of tribal antagonism, since this is like a knee jerk reflex response for the human mind grappling with its group identity when it has no other frame of reference by which to assess its own emotions or clear understanding about the disgrace which such attitudes inflict on us today.

Nevertheless, even within a scientific context, the greatest obstacle between us and a peaceful cooperative life is ourselves, since understanding others is predicated upon such. One could do worse than starting with "On Aggression", a book by Konrad Lorenz, a noted ethologist, which is where my journey towards understanding my own and others' aggression began.

Is Everyone Around Me Conscious?

This was posted as a Yahoo question. I did my best to answer as below.

Are you? If one can surprise oneself or learn about oneself then one's mind is greater than its apparent working knowledge of itself. Are you fully aware of your own mind? IMHO to the nascent human mind the answer to your question is "probably", their body is the same shape as one's own body, they react to things the same way, hot and sharp are painful to them too, food is good etc, they can tell one things with their actions or by gesture or language that make sense to one's consciousness, so it is likely they have a similar consciousness to oneself, but that does not mean identical. Some seem more similar to oneself than others. In educational theory this process of becoming aware of others is regarded as a developmental process and is studied as the "theory of mind".

One apparently has no direct awareness of others' minds since they can act in ways one did not predict, unless of course humans evolved protean behaviour, like flies, as a means for obfuscating prediction and evading telepathic predation. So while it seems likely that one can only deduce the existence of another mind and its character by inference from sense data, we cannot be certain we are fully conscious of all types of sense data being employed. Though whatever the kind of sense data involved one can still only guess at what others think, as a reflection within one's own mind and as a projection of one's own thoughts.

So while consciousness in others can only be attributed as an extension of one's own by sympathy this does not mean this consciousness does not really exist in the same way that imaginary phenomena like fantasies do not really exist, because the nature of other's minds is infered from sensation not invented (unlike Tinkerbell). So it seems likely the capability to sympathise and project have evolved to permit prediction of others' behaviour, because this is the prediction of something real, something sensed in our environment which acts autonomously and which can directly influence survival and reproduction, be they spouse or mother in law!

But if one's own selfconsciousness is incomplete, how then can one's awareness of others ever be complete? Conversely one can sometimes see in others truths about human nature which one denies in oneself yet which must be in fact a part of one's nature for one to be able to conceive of it.

This is why I studied animal behaviour as a zoology undergrad, in part to learn about human nature, because everything one sees in animals, as in others, is subjectively a reflection of oneself and objective scientific data about animals and conclusions abstracted from it are instructive in the principles of evolution which in all probability shaped my human consciousness. Thus by sympathy on the one hand and principle on the other, all the natural inhabitants of the planet can be a muse, in a way that another human being may not, since with animals one may remark on truths that social and political constraints prohibit revealing in the contemplation of human nature.

That is where I ended my answer. To sum up my perspective on this, one's awareness of other peoples' consciousness is directly related to one's awareness of one's own consciousness and vice versa, one's awareness of one's own consciousness is directly related to one's awareness of other peoples' consciousness and this is because we have evolved to use our own brain to as a model by which we may understand other peoples' brains, which is the basis of sympathy, the inevitable and inescapable result of millions of years of social evolution.

What we choose to do with our faculty for sympathy is a moral / socio-political decision each of us must make which can have a profound influence on the course of our lives and this too is inevitably subject to the process of natural selection. I wonder where it will take the human race a million years from now?

The biological soul, rationalising the body-mind duality.

Human beings have evolved, there is no way round it. This means that everything we perceive comes to us through senses which evolved, into a mind which has evolved, eliciting emotions which have evolved because of what they make us do.  After bodily health it is our behaviour which determines the evolution of our genes. Our purposes are the purposes of the survivors of billions of years of evolution. To understand ourselves we must understand evolution.

When I was young I frequently encountered a school of thought which dwelt on the "body - mind duality". The idea was simple, that human beings had a body and they had a mind which were different and separate. It made assumptions underpinning common attitudes and professional paradigms. It was a hangover from prescientific religion and many people I met were perplexed by it because they knew deep down that it doesnt make sense. But people would not bother to question it openly, there was too great a disadvantage in stepping outside the norms and questioning fundamental assumptions. It was best for each individual to proceed on the basis of the common culture and not to go against the flow.

This dichotomy stemmed from the even older metaphysical notion of flesh and spirit, giving rise to the idea that human beings have a distinct soul. This is not a scientific idea, but is a very old shamanic concept which always has subserved political reality as a metaphor for "the big picture" by which means the human conscience has been projected as the soul and its deliberations portrayed as metaphysical phenomena. Inevitably it has been used for political purposes and reformed by the machinations of religious academia attempting to conceive of an ideology sufficient to serve the struggle for power. The differentiation between body and soul has been elaborated on in the attempt to come to an arrangement between individuals over relationships of power expressed in theocratic terms.

This explains why the notion is so firmly entrenched in the culture of my country. It has been a way of discussing the surrender of individualism to a culture of negotiated mutual support. You can understand why negotiations backed by force of arms were handled by displacing the discussion into a spiritual context. Religion was the diplomatic alternative to open war and preferrable to many who might otherwise die on the battlefield.

The legacy is long lasting. Even today works of popular fiction like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a slew of similar cryptoreligious works still reflect the same dichotomy of body and soul and everyone seems to know what they are going on about even though it makes little sense to a rational eye.

As a scientist other perspectives were available to me in youth but I had no way to know which was truest because in science truth requires hypothesis testing and all attempts to discover quantifiable aspects to spirituality had been discredited. There was no data, which is itself mystifying. The subtext was that spirituality was bunkum even though that is not a scientific position to hold without evidence. To a child that is perplexing, it takes the perspective of adulthood to unravel the complexities of human politics which created the spiritual dichotomy of body and soul. But like most people I wondered why so many believed, or at least acted though they believed, something which others denied as bunkum without evidence, based apparently on a subculture of prejudiced scepticism.

It struck me that both traditions of belief and scepticism rely on received wisdom by virtue of being traditions, in that people tend to adopt one or other attitude under the influence of someone older who they emulate and repeat the arguments of the past and try to develope them. So they constitute competing cultures developing alongside each other, but the fact is the sceptical culture exists as a reaction to the religious culture since it has nothing to say other than that these people are mistaken. So it can never win, it can only dimiss the attempt to pacify those bent on conflict by spiritual means. This is not an entirely constructive thing to do if one has no better means of conflict resolution available.

So people of my generation have looked to other cultures to understand their religions and means of conflict resolution and methods in the persuit of peace. I took an interest in hinduism and buddhism for example, a bit like the Beatles. The hippy era was all about peace, the punk reaction tried to be honest about base human emotion and antagonism because ideals werent working. The 90s just tried to cover it all up again. In the 2000's we started a new war and are back to square zero. I am not sure if we learned anything at all.

I think future progress lies in the direction that we need to take responsibility for ourselves and stop projecting good and evil outside ourselves and accept them as our subjective perceptions of a real world. Its going to be an educational necessity in a future where tribalism and territoriality dissolve in a world wide community of humanity. So little by little we must try to develope our culture, both the believers and the skeptics.

There are other perspectives we could try. For example it is more likely the body and mind are one thing, the difference between them imaginary. The evidence of science supports that idea and so does the philosophical method of Occam. In this view both body and mind are objects created in the minds eye by the mind itself to encapsulate and discuss different aspects of our experience.

So from where I sit the soul is not separate from the living body but is in truth one's own concept of one's reputation in the eyes of others. The division between them is not due to two items coexisting in the same place, or a split mind, it is the interruption of volition by cognition, the regulation of desire by thought. Thoughts which are as much a part of oneself as the desires they govern and the foundation of a moral relationship with the rest of humanity. The metaphor of the soul has been used to educate generations of people to listen to their conscience by reminding them that even if they appear to get away with offences against other people i.e. they survive an action without injury, there is still something of their action which persists even once an action is over, something which can have repercussions later on. In other words the impression you make on other people can return to haunt you. This is the nature of your soul and the reason it is true that it persists even after death is because those who live on can still remember you and their memories can influence the way they treat your surviving relatives eg children. For evolutionary purposes this matters, which is why it matters to us as individuals. We know that what is precious in life is greater than our own individuality but to date we do not have the intellectual framework to recognise why. The reason why is that evolution makes us altruists, we cannot help it, the genes in our fellow humans are as precious to us as our own, sometimes moreso and evolution has endowed us with the equanimity to recognise this and the inclination to act upon it and the sympathy to feel the pain of others as if it were our own. This is the truth about the legacy of evolution in the human heart and the dogma of selfishness and competition is not the whole truth about human nature but is merely one pole of the entire world of human motivation, the other pole is our awareness of the rest of humanity and their importance to us.

The idea of the soul has long been a moral metaphor which attempts to discuss the feelings we have about our reputation and has validity in that context but taken too far this idea has been mistakenly interpreted as suggesting consciousness was separate from the body and persisted after the body had ceased to live. The elements of that idea have their roots in reality but then the stems grew twisted in confusion, by which I mean the elements are not put together right, yet they are close enough to truth that despite the confusion they can guide actions sufficiently well that the confusion can continue despite the inevitable contradictions that attempting to live by these mistaken ideas reveals.

The reason such errors of thought persist is that they cause pleasure of a kind and this addicts the minds of some people and addiction of this subtle kind can turn delusion into psychosis which can then spread itself by immitation and sympathy. This is the problem and each such delusion is the beginning of a new cult. The idea of a distinct soul implies that you can escape death which is a great relief to aging humans. Yet most people know you shouldn't take it literally. As deep down we understand it is a vanity, a private conceit and an overestimate of ones true capabilities but some people prefer to live in hopeful delusion because the idea of death is troubling and painful and this creates an aversion. These two, addictive pleasure and repellant aversion, are enough to turn the mind from sanity to ever more grotesque delusion.

If one accounts for the repulsion of morbid fear and the attractive fantasy of eternal life one can begin to appreciate that the separated soul is truely the delusion of a single living being with a neurologically integrated mind which is moved by its instincts to maintain constructive relations with the rest of its kind in preference over conflict and enmity which might lead to its own demise, providing its evolutionarily set requirements are met. Yet even after the scientific enlightenment many thinkers and academics of all shades were for centuries confounded by the difference between the mental and physical self, for example with respect to mental and physical illness and the legacy of that remains with us today in the way mental patients are treated with a different paradigm to the way patients with other illnesses are treated. I have come to the conclusion that there is something about the way our brain functions biologically which perpetuates that perceptual dichotomy.

If one looks on the body and the mind as both sensory experiences within a consciousness created by a more or less coordinated and self aware nervous system, the difference between the two is in reality a difference of perceived location. The sensations arising from the body are referred to the body's form as we conceive of it because it is in our biological nature to grow up with the sense of a body. It is through this that we learn to coordinate our physical actions with our senses and appetites and our nervous system is hardwired (somatotopically) to facillitate that process, the spatial relationships in the pattern of bodily innervation are reflected within the pattern of sensory and motor nerve fibers in the brain. We evolved to have a very strong awareness of our own body and the instincts to keep it alive, so this naturally has the priority over other forms of cogitation and dominates our perceptions.

The sensations arising in the mind as abstract thoughts and ideas by definition do not have the same strong sense of location as sensations arising from the body, so it is possible but mistaken to conceive of them as occurring somewhere else than the body, on some other 'plane' for example, which would explain much historical philosophy and metaphysics. The observations of science tell us they are not really somewhere else at all, even though sometimes people believe they are. The true location of such thoughts is inside the body, inside the nervous system but without the same kind of certainty about their location that bodily perceptions evoke it is possible for us to imagine all kinds of things about their nature and place in the cosmos which are unreal. This is why cults of delusion arise and persist and why humanity continues to struggle with the body mind duality when in reality these are simply two aspects of the same awareness, both occurring in the same location, one aspect of awareness dedicated to coordinating the body the other dedicated to considering what our senses tell us exists outside it and how it might be useful in the task of staying alive and fulfilling the purposes of our evolved being.