Half Year Report

In two days time half of 2015 will already be gone and so it seems appropriate at this point to look back and see where I have been, musically and philosophically, so far this year. A glance at my blog record tells me I've written over 30 blogs so far this year, starting with my MUSIC MANIFESTO on the first day of the year. That particular blog was written still fresh from my entanglement in the writings of John Cage and one particular thing from it stands out. The sixth point of my "manifesto" is as follows:

Music is not about being bad or good. It is about having something to say or not.

I think that in the last 6 months I have come to believe that even more and it ever guides my creating and my listening. That manifesto carried in it a number of ideas about music being a form of story telling and I think I would hold to this belief (or be captured more firmly by this belief) than I was even 6 months ago. Since the beginning of 2014 and my albums BLUE and STATIC METAL which, in turn, gave rise to what would become the 13 part series ELEKTRONISCHE EXISTENZ (which then became the name for the whole creative project of my entire life, primarily in writing and music), I have been on a road in which my music became episodic and multiple. These days, if I was asked to write a single album, I would feel that it was a bit bare and exposed. Indeed, I have removed albums from my online store as they didn't seem to fit all by themselves anymore. My music this year has centred around three multiple part projects: Human/Being, that began with the album JEDEM DAS SEINE, the "Timeless" trio of albums initiated with the album ZEITLOS and the recent double album series of THE EXISTENZ EQUATION and THE EXISTENZ EQUATION II.

All three series this year have been high points for my music and I currently could not imagine the musical story of my life without them. And this, I think, is because I stuck to that sixth point of my music manifesto. The music can only be good and worthwhile if you have something to say. I think that I have always felt this creatively but it becomes ever more explicit. So much of what is created in this world seems either shallow, commercially motivated (often the same thing) or worthless. If I have any motivation at all in the music I have made it is to be about something and to express something. Now, of course, I can't make that the case for everyone. But I can make it the case for me. If it says something to someone else too that will have to be a bonus. And it seems as if maybe it does. I have had around 450 album downloads so far this year and well over 1,300 listens of my songs. My current catalog includes a couple of collaborations, SHIKANTAZA, a collaboration with a gorgeous vocalist from California named Valerie Polichar and a brilliant rock guitarist, Luke Clarke, who sadly died earlier in the year, and SPACE, part of my Human/Being project and a collaboration with Iceman Bob, someone who has also become an intellectual friend. As I'm not the most social of beasts these collaborations are to be noted since I am someone for whom the music is very, very personal. Fortunately, I'm happy with the outcome of both projects, neither of which simply sound like me, as they shouldn't.

In terms of the sound of my music there has been a pronounced change this year related to my listening habits. I have become explicitly influenced by two schools of German music from the 1970s, Berlin School and Kosmische. I've written about these before so I'll save you the duplication here save to say that currently I couldn't think of writing anything that wasn't encompassed by these descriptions. The longer format (I aim for songs around a  notional 15 minute length these days), developmental nature and sonic exploration of these forms seems tailor made for the philosophical and expressive types of music I want to make. 

And what of my themes? Philosophically, I have been fixated on human beings so far this year - and their particular form of being, human being. This is pointed up in the project, album and song titles and, as already explained, this is a journey for me. Things have always been very existential for me in life and they become more and more so. I feel very thrown into life, a life I often don't want or would give back. And so much of life for me is trying to understand what I was thrown into and trying to make some meaning out of it. My music and writing is my poorly articulated attempts at this. I can do no other and, if I was for some reason stopped from doing it, I would go mad. So its good for me when I make something that, listening back, I feel really hit some meaningful nail on the head. Such, for me, are albums such as THE INFINITE SEA and HUMAN/BEING X and ONTOLOGIE. In albums like these I can hear back very clearly the thoughts I was thinking and the understandings that I have come to in life. I read something earlier in the year that remarked that you would not write philosophy in anything but words because philosophy is an explicative practice that requires communicative perspicacity. Hearing albums such as these three I completely disagree. Music, something which communicates ideas, moods and emotions, can be philosophical, not least in the sense that, if allowed to, it can promote the activity of thought. At its best this is what my music does.

                 The 24 albums that currently represent my musical output online

And so as we stand at the beginning of the European summer and enter the second part of the year I wonder where things will go next. The truth about me is that I have always been very good at looking back - because I'm usually facing the wrong way in life, looking over my shoulder, observing where I have come from to try and understand where I am now. But I am absolutely terrible at looking forward. Indeed, I barely ever do it. Perhaps this is some kind of defence mechanism, afraid, as I am, to face the future. I occasionally get the urge to begin some grand project, perhaps a full length book or multi-media project encompassing artworks, music and text, but these fade because I am, firstly, very lazy and, secondly, guided always by a need for instant gratification. After getting on for 5 decades (Jesus! really?) it is very easy to fall back into the excuse that you cannot teach such an old dog new tricks.

But I am sure that I will continue to be a somewhat morose, melancholic, thoughtful man who finds the need to express himself in words and sounds. Indeed, increasingly, it seems clear that this is all I will ever be. It will have to be enough.

I would be delighted were you to sample any of my music, all of which is available for free. You can find it at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/.

Change

Its been quite a tough week here at blog central and I have felt unwell. This has been, and remains, an on-going thing prey, as we all are, to both our genetics and our environment. Put the two together and who knows where it leads? In my case it has not necessarily lead to anywhere very good and I suffer from a number of existential challenges thanks to both where I have come from physically and experientially. But whatever your life has given you to deal with and however you continue to experience it, and the world you experience can be, for you, the only "real" world there is, there is always opportunity to think and learn further whilst you can. Ultimately, perhaps, this goes nowhere. All the things you learn will pass away even as you do. But there is always the here and now to consider and human beings just can't help trying to make sense of things. This, indeed, may be part of the problem.

And so it was that I found myself lying on the bed during the middle of the afternoon one day this week simultaneously aware of any number of physical, bodily processes going on with me. I felt fluid moving around my stomach, aches and pains appearing and disappearing around my joints, a sensation of warmth more in one arm than the other, tingling sensations in other parts, muscle spasms, fearful moods arising in my head and making the back of it ache - and any number of other things. I was, for a while, transfixed by what a horror it would be if every process of our existence was conscious. That life would be unlivable.

But the sensation of lying there just experiencing all this attenuated my mind as well. It brought home to me the inevitable, brutal, constancy of change. Our minds work in many ways as do our cultures and societies. One thing they often make use of is the idea of fixity, of solidity, of things basically being the same. Advertisers may try to spin you a line about something being the same for a long time, for example. But in the fine detail, when you actually concentrate and get down to it, fixity and constancy are a lie, a useful fiction. Nothing ever stays the same because things are always moving and always changing. Of course, you may not notice this just as you don't notice the vast majority of the things even your own body is doing all the time. But, to use the old riddle, you don't have to be in the forest for there to be a sound. Something is always happening. Things are always changing. You just need to look closely enough to see it.

This change is related to time and to our perception of time. Watch a kettle, or, better, a pan full of water, boil and in about 5 minutes you will see change in action. But watch a mountain for 5 minutes and you will see no noticeable difference - at least not with the mountain. Change takes place at different speeds relative to our viewing but this doesn't mean change isn't taking place because you cannot see it. On the contrary, it means it is always taking place but that you need to make the right accommodations to see it. Watch the mountain for 5 million years and then say that it has not changed. So, although change is a constant, change also takes place at different times and in different ways. The trick is to not allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that things haven't or won't change. Not only will they but you are observing the process right now even if you don't realise it.

Nature has not been kind to us in this respect. Our world is based on the way our minds perceive it and the mind plays a trick on us to give us a stable world we can make use of. As I mentioned above of me lying there on the bed, if we were constantly aware of the flux and change of the universe in all its actuality we would go mad instantly. No one could survive that awareness of everything constantly changing, never being the same. And so our form of life, a thing which did not have to be as it is and has been molded by existence itself, does not look so closely in general. It elides things by not looking so closely and speaks of identity and similarity. It ignores the change so that we can live. The German philosopher Nietzsche noticed this too and wrote of the "proud, illusory consciousness" that we humans have. He speaks of our drive for truth, something which "becomes fixed" and of every concept coming "into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent". He goes on to say that

a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts.... but only an X which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us

The thought is clear that human beings make the same what is not, brushing over their precise and inaccessible individuality and change from one thing to another or from one example of the same thing to another. Nietzsche's anthropology is very much one of the human being as an animal that has developed the ability to instrumentalise and make use of things and that this has become their evolutionary advantage. But this instrumentality is not to get reality right. This is merely to make it useful. I find it relevant to note here that Nietzsche himself suffered perhaps three decades of tormenting illness in his life and that he must have lain in bed many times just thinking about and experiencing the constant change, not least in his own mind. Such seems to be part of his biography anyway.

But what does all this change mean to us? It could have a number of consequences. It is a worthwhile lesson of experience to constantly keep in mind that things do not stay the same. And you will find that you do have to keep reminding yourself of the fact. This is useful to do if times are good for you or bad. It means that the good will not last but also that the bad will go away too. It means that you should take nothing for granted and that you should plan for, or factor in, change. I, I expect like everyone else, am granted a certain sense of fixity in my own existence. I get the feeling that my life is not in doubt and that my current situation will go on. But, of course, this is wrong. I am going to die. I will not go on. Things will change. My circumstances will become different, are becoming different even as I write these words. As already mentioned, this perception of fixity is an effect of being human, to believe that things are set. It helps us live, enables us to live. But we must live in a universe where things are always changing, where change is the constant and not fixity. It's useful to remember that.

The Perfect Human Being?

I was exercising yesterday climbing up hills. I've always liked exercise, particularly the aerobic kind. I was always a runner or a cyclist or a swimmer. Anyway, as I was on my walk around my hilly neighbourhood I had a thought. (Incidentally, this is one reason why great minds have always walked. Walking stimulates thinking.) The thought I had was this: imagine, if you can, the perfect human being. What would that human being be like? What attributes would make them "perfect"?

I thought for a minute and considered my question. My challenge to anyone else thinking about it (besides setting aside the trite responses) is this: I don't think it's possible to think of or create a "perfect" human being. I think we have no reference for what that would be like. No set of looks, mental abilities, interests, motives or concerns could make a "perfect human being". So, in fact, I don't think that there is, nor could there be, any such thing as a perfect human being. All we have is the imperfect versions we are and will keep on being. And that is something to think about.

Do you agree or disagree?

If I was an Instrument I would be.....

If I was an instrument I would be a modular synthesizer. Modular synthesizers are very popular these days and, as is the way with these kinds of things, some don't like that. You know the kind of person. Someone who has been modular synthesizing for years and now feels threatened by the fact that other people have discovered his hobby and doesn't like it.  This is the kind of person who will waste his time being sarcastic and derogatory about these new adopters of modular synthesis rather than concentrate on his own modular synthesizer and making music with it. For these people it is as if modular synthesizing is a political thing and that you are not allowed to take part unless you have been let in by the esteemed circle of proper modular synthesists. "We can't have these newcomers infiltrating the modular synthesis ranks," they think. What they forget is that everyone, even them, started somewhere with no knowledge at all.

So that, of course, is all a lot of rubbish. There is no inner circle of modular synthesis and you don't need anyone's permission to buy a modular synth, use a modular synth or even have a modular synth on your sideboard as a pretty ornament with flashing lights. Indeed, I once saw an interview with legendary synth pop guy, Vince Clarke. He recounted how, in the 80s when he became popular, initially with Depeche Mode and finally with Erasure, he bought every synth going, from keyboard models to full modular systems. In the video interview I saw he freely admitted that when he first bought these things he had no clue how they worked. He just knew he wanted them. So if you buy a modular synth with no idea how it works just because you think it must be cool you are only really doing what Vince did. And pretty much every synth person in the world likes Vince.

                                        Some of Vince Clarke's synths in his latest studio

So what you really need to do if you get a modular synth is forget the snobs and remember that modular synthesis can be for you about whatever you want it to be. There is no proper way to use a modular synth. That is why there are all those jack points and you need all those cables. You can connect it up any way you like and whatever works for you, works. Indeed, all that freedom openly encourages you to try out random things and see what noise (and often it might just be noise) comes out from your audio output. It is often said that you don't hear very much actual music from people who have modular synths. I think these critics mean actual pieces of music or songs. I think that is probably because a lot of people with modular synths are happy just experimenting with sounds and with the here and now. And this is a worthwhile task in itself. There is no compulsory endgame with a modular synth. It is, in many ways, just a sound lab.

The current set of Eurorack modules made by Make Noise, one of my favourite manufacturers

This is what I think is very attractive about modular synthesis. The only reason to have a synthesizer with lots of access points to the processes of synthesis all over the instrument is so that you can affect the processes in unexpected or unorthodox ways. (Alternatively, you might want something to happen in a predictable way by sequencing it, of course.) In this way you can create unique or unimagined sounds. And if that's all you ever did that would be perfectly fine. There are no modular synth police, just people too busy policing something that isn't theirs rather than making music. Life is short so I really rather think it would be better to see what happens if you plug a cable in from here to here and see what happens rather than shouting into the void. But yes, since you ask, modular synth enthusiasts can be cliquey. Luckily for you, having a modular synthesizer does not mandate that you have to talk to or listen to any of them.

Complete systems by two of my favourite manufacturers, Pittsburgh Modular and Studio Electronics

So what you do with a modular synthesizer is really up to you. The same goes for what your modular synthesizer is like. There are no rules here and you are free to choose from as many or as few manufacturers as you like. Nearly all the modules of a modular synthesizer are different in some way from the modules of other manufacturers and will produce different results even when, nominally, they are meant to perform the same tasks. The clever engineers who make these instruments love to put their own little twist on these things. This is why modular synthesis is such a fun and rewarding way to make music. Getting to know the modules you have at your disposal is a lot of the fun of having a modular synthesizer in the first place. You are not stuck with a fixed instrument when you have a modular synthesizer. You can build an individual instrument, one that only you in the world has, by putting together a unique set of modules.

An absurdly large double case Eurorack modular synthesizer built online for fun which illustrates just some of the myriad possibilities when building a modular synthesizer of your own

So a modular synthesizer is a way of making music with something approaching a blank canvas and can be very orientated towards musical exploration. You could use it to make unique sounds that you sample for use in bigger musical pieces. You could create a complex patch involving multiple modules that evolves over time as you tweak the controls. Or you could do anything else you can imagine with it because, with a modular synthesizer, it really is up to you. It's the ultimate "do-it-yourself" instrument whether you choose to have one that takes up a whole room or one that you can carry anywhere in a case. It's a way to combine fun, exploration and sound all into one happy activity. It's to be enjoyed not policed.

MUSICS!!!!! 

Elektronische Existenz: Art imitating Life

"We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work! In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness." - Vladimir, Waiting for Godot.

 Good music doesn't exist. Bad music doesn't exist. You think they do exist though, right? And you think I do too. So what do I mean by making these statements? I mean that in matters of taste there can be no final arbiter and there can be no authoritative voice that speaks for all. No, in matters of taste everyone can be king (or queen). Maybe you do not like the fact and you try to resist it in practice - even though we all know that this is true. We wish there was a binding judgment of quality or innate worth to things. But there isn't. Questions of value can be agreed with more or less. Or not at all. And music falls squarely into the area of "things of value".

This is an issue that I have needed to wrestle with as I make my own music. I don't know about you, but as one who creates music semi-permanently the question of what it is worth always comes up. Another disguise this question wears is what we might call the art/crap distinction. Imagine a continuum. At one end everything is art. At the other, its useless crap. Somewhere along that line we place the music we hear or make. But the continuum is imaginary and it doesn't really exist. It's just a judgment others are free to completely ignore. It disappears like so many imaginary friends.

You will know, if you have read previous blogs I've written about music, that the philosophy of music is something I take very seriously. Maybe I even take it too seriously. I think that to make worthwhile music it needs to be based on a good idea. I think that it needs to have something behind it to express. It needs to be substance not surface. I think that if you do things this way it can even make your music into art. I don't think that this applies to all music though or that music, to be music, is mandated to follow the philosophy I set out. I am happy to live with the fact that music is made for lots of disparate reasons and for no reason at all. I cannot determinate why or how someone else makes their own music. Occasionally, if I hear something I dislike or despise, I may regret that fact. But the payoff is that people cannot tell me how to make mine or what reasons can motivate me to do so. As deals go, I can think of worse ones.

But what of the music I make? What is there to say about it? The first thing to say, in the context I have started this blog off in, is that it is not for everyone. Indeed, no music is for everyone. The consequence of having tastes at all is that not everyone will like the same thing. There are, at best, lesser and greater circles of people interested in any given music. Mine, I imagine, is quite a small circle. That's ok. I don't conceive of my music as throwaway (for reasons that will become clear below) or mass market. In general, I would hate to be popular. I want what I have called in the past "active listeners", people who are engaged in the music I make and what it is about. I want listeners who feel themselves emotionally entangled by the music I make. If you don't "get it" that is ok. It wasn't for you.

But there are further aspects to the music I make that need to be explored. There are a number of characteristics to it that are not immediately obvious and require thought - even for me, the one who made it! For example, my music is not obvious. By "obvious" I mean that I am trying not to fall into populist patterns. I'm not trying to do what is expected, pleasant or nice. Dissonance consequently plays a part in what I do and that is off-putting. This is a direct reflection of my own character. As a person, I am very wary of others. I would admit that I have a certain spiky personality and people have to persevere and probably overcome lots of irritating things about me if they want to pursue or forge any kind of friendship. Its the same here with my music. I'm not going to make it completely easy to like it. You must struggle with it and see, if you will, the beauty inside. This echoes my belief that music is not candy floss. It should be something with the power to effect change in you.

And so what is my music in this context? Before I would have said that it was me, a clear and definitive personal statement and autobiographical text in musical form. But I think that summary needs some work. There really is no "me" to find. I am an inconsistent stream of events, thoughts, intentions and attitudes and in my music what I create is a series of snapshots of that stream. And there is never a whole "me" to express anyway. What I give birth to musically is an expression of my own musical imperfection, tied to me and my earth-bound, limited ways of being in many ways. It is an individual thing and one reason we value personal creativity is because, in a real sense, no one else could do what we do. So, in that sense, the music I make is my own imperfect shots at making some kind of musical meaning.

Let's put it another way. Things are always changing, from one moment to the next. But what point or purpose is there in the fact that change just happens anyway, ironically unchanging? None. It just is. The action of time is just ceaseless, constant, meaningless change. You can't escape from this. All you can do is wait for it to end. And in the waiting you experience the ceaseless, constant, meaningless change over and over again. But you can never grasp it for there is nothing to grasp. As with a real stream, the stream of experience just evades all attempts to capture it. All you can hope to capture is a memory, a feeling. A timeline, then, is not a real timeline. Its a fiction made from any number of contingent snapshots forced to tell a story, whatever the story is that you want to tell. In one set of musical pieces I wanted to try and capture an attempt at my life story seen through my own melancholic eyes. And so I called it "Elektronische Existenz" (electronic existence). This went on to become the name for the whole project of what I do.

And yet we musical poststructuralists, we postmodernists and pragmatists of musical thought, know that there is a problem with a project built on meaning. And, indeed, with "meaning" itself. We consider the absurdity that life is both terrifying and wondrous, often in the same moment. And that is absurd. I have meditated on this fact of life long and hard in relation to my own self-expression. I've come to the view that I make an absurd music that is "out of harmony" and "devoid of purpose". It is a waiting and a passing of time just as life really is. This music, which is often deeply meaningful to me and takes on new meanings as I begin to listen to it over and over, ultimately ends up being useless and partakes in the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. In some pieces I think this is quite explicit. Some of it tries to bring this dark world to life, to make it present. So my music comes from nowhere in my imagination or arises in the randomness of what I did at a certain place and time - and goes back to it. It can be random, insensible or deliberately unheimlich (eerie, sinister). It is an experience of the aesthetics of (my) life.

This year I have evolved to a new form of music and, if anything, become more prolific. I have settled into a longer format of around 15 minutes per track based, initially at least, in German influences from the so-called Berlin School and also the more esoteric edge of Kosmische Musik. This wasn't deliberate. I just found that what I was doing fitted into that when I heard some of it. This longer format really takes the form of cycles, all slightly different and yet all the same. The same pattern over and over again. This is life. The point is to endure, to live that life and experience the whole journey. This is not because there is an end. There isn't. For the next cycle then begins… The point is to experience yourself as a being-through-time, a being who lives through the experience of this music. I have a friend who also seems to make longer tracks. I appreciate his music, which is itself highly individual, because it is a different journey. The experience is king.

We can compare John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds here. This is, in the common mind, silence. But it was never silence for Cage. It was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of experienced sound, the sounds of the environment, the sounds of life. I share with Cage this focus on sound and experience and the interplay thereof. I share with Cage the idea that you should listen to life and hear it as music. At the end nothing is resolved. Everything is just the same as at the start. But you have experienced. And in that you have experienced change and taken part in the flux and the becoming of life itself. So when you listen to one of my tracks this is what you are doing: listening to a snapshot of life, listening to another's experience. If you listen enough and to a selection of tracks you may start to pick out the distinctive sounds and emotions that are woven together there. There is an identifiable kind of song I do because we all fall into habits no matter how hard we try not to. But better to fall into your own habits than copy others. That is inauthentic. To truly fulfill your musical purpose, for me, is to fully presence yourself and add what is uniquely you to the world of sound and experience.

You may find it strange but the music I make is not the music I want to make. Its the music I can't help making. The music I want to make is always out of my grasp. And that is a reflection of life. For the life you live is never the life you want to live. Its always the life you can't help living. The life you want is always out of your grasp. So this music/art/life imitation thing seems to be going on. Indeed, how could the music or the art not be an outgrowth of the life, full of all the values, interests and moods that the life contains? Here a philosophical conclusion informs both my life and my music. Just as the only meaningful choice in life is whether to keep breathing or to stop, so in music the only meaningful choice is whether to make music that authentically expresses you or not. This is a life or death question. And the authenticity comes in living that out to the full. You must own the choice you make every time you make a sound.

And that is why, when you listen to music by me, you get the random, the chaos, the instinctual. This is because I have a distrust of the deliberate, the reasoned, the "purposeful". These things have lying mouths and promise what they cannot deliver. I have a sense that life is fleeting and without purpose and so I live in the shadow of the tomorrow that will never arrive and, consequently, need to find meaning in the circumstances of here and now. And yet the attempt to presence meaning here and now is ultimately not enough. All my music ends up being is sound marks that, in themselves, mean nothing. This is one reason why I write so few melodies. You, as listener, are challenged to find your own melody within the music or accept that there is nothing there. However, in the end, no matter how many works populate my Bandcamp, no matter how good or bad the music is subjectively judged to be, it amounts to a shout from the void into the void. My music accomplished nothing. But whilst I lived it was good to shout. Indeed, how could I not?


So what I provide you, the listener, is musical fantasies. And this, in itself, is instructive. For for a fantasy to be fully experienced is to enter it's world and partake of it fully. One cannot experience a story fully unless one reads the story and enters the world for a while. And so it is here too. You are cordially invited to listen to one man's experiences of, and reflections on, life. What is served up is a series of pieces that serve as my atonement for the sin of having been born. It may turn out to be that they do not mean much within themselves. But, should you listen for long enough, maybe they triangulate with something in your own experience and become part of something that I could never have imagined. That, after all, is what art is. Is has no inherent value but it can come to have some if you allow yourself the time to see something in it. But not to worry if it does not. There are many other examples left to try so long as human beings yet walk the Earth. I can but hope that my own Elektronische Existenz spoke to your own existenz in some way.

Should this tempt you to want to hear some of my work you can hear it here at Elektronische Existenz which is my Bandcamp site. Thoughtful listening!

Personal Beliefs

It seems, in a way, particularly trivial. A nursery worker (that's a kindergarten worker for you Americans) gets fired for telling her gay colleague that "god is not alright with her". It's pretty clear to see what is going on here. The Christian worker has let her personal beliefs come out whilst at work and her gay colleague has felt insulted and discriminated against by it. So those who employ them both decided to fire the Christian one. However, at a later employment tribunal it was ruled that she was discriminated against on the basis of her religious beliefs.

Now what are we to make of this? There will be those who think that the Christian is a bigot pure and simple. And bigotry is wrong so she should have been fired. She is clearly a terrible person. And we have other cases too. There was, for example, a Christian couple who ran a guest house. They refused to allow gay men to share a room. They were taken to court for discrimination and lost. Because they were being discriminating.

So far, so good. It all seems fairly straightforward. But then I think about it for a while and I read some of the online comments concerning the case. And some of them seem a bit confused. We are told by some that "religion should be kept out of the workplace". But that Christian nursery worker wasn't threatening to set up a church at the nursery. She wasn't insisting that her colleague face Jerusalem and pray before lunch. So I don't see what commenting about "religion" has to do with it. Another comment I read stated "When will these people realise that religion doesn't trump real life?"

I expect that the answer to that last question is something along the lines of "At that point, if they ever get to it, when an imaginary friend in the sky who is in charge of everything seems to be no longer a justifiable belief". For what we are talking about here, at the end of the day, is personal beliefs. Things that people hold dear. Things that they could no more stop believing than they could willingly cut off their own arm. It is not for this Christian nursery worker a trivial thing that there is, according to her, a god. She does not, I am sure, believe it lightly. Beliefs, indeed, are those things that you cannot help believing. Do any of us have a choice about the things that we honestly hold to be true? "But she is a bigot," you will say. I wouldn't disagree with you. But she cannot be blamed for acting in accordance with something she holds to be true anymore than you can. And I don't understand why anyone would think she should be. Are the trueness of her beliefs to her any less true than the beliefs you hold true are true to you? There are other grounds to condemn her. But this is not one.

People in general seem to have an issue with personal beliefs - as well as with its brother in arms, free speech. They try to delineate areas where only certain things can be said and certain beliefs held. This, it seems to me, is largely because they have a negative view of the beliefs concerned and, often, the worldview of those holding the belief. Free speech, it seems, is only free if you agree with me, for some at least. Unlike in the USA, where there is supposedly some constitutional protection of these things, I grew up in the UK where there is not even a general bill of rights. So expressing beliefs in public or uttering certain kinds of speech can be a dangerous thing and you never really know where the line is. So if I utter my unacceptable personal belief in public am I to be judged harshly for that? How can a person who believes in an all-powerful super being be expected to "keep it private"? How can they judge that this belief is not a matter of "real life"? What, indeed, could be more real, or more important, than a belief that you have a personal relationship with the being who made everything?

People are always trying to privatize religion. One problem is that religion takes no prisoners (if you'll pardon the pun). Religions generally tend to make universal claims. The god believed in is not usually the god of one or two people. It's the god of everyone and, whether you believe or not, this god makes claim over you. Over everything, in fact. Is this not why, according to the Westboro Baptist Church, "God hates fags"? But why, in a suburban nursery, should we fear the woman who believes that her imaginary friend is "not ok" with gay people? And what should we do about it? Should we ban her expressing any personal opinions? What personal opinions, in that case, are allowable? And what of freedom of speech?

I think we need to take some time to get things straight in our heads here. Religions are always going to make universal claims. Because that is what religions do. Asking religions, or religious believers, to keep their religion to themselves is asking any honest, upstanding, practicing religionist to do the impossible. It is consequent on their genuine belief in their imaginary friend that they act in accordance with their honestly held beliefs about him. (It is usually a him.) The request that they become a hypocrite by believing one thing and doing another is not going to find any favour with a genuine believer. How, indeed, can it? If you believe that a super being is in charge of everything and holds certain attitudes regarding people of certain sexual orientations it would be a remarkable feat of self-discipline (and inauthenticity) to keep quiet about it. And so I find the oft heard request that people "keep their beliefs to themselves" to be somewhat incoherent and lacking in insight. Surely whether you can or should keep your personal beliefs quiet depends exactly on what those personal beliefs are? At least, it will to you.

But, nevertheless, the argument extends to the public sphere too. We are told by some that personal beliefs should play no part in public life, places like politics, work and schools. But how can that be? To be a human being is precisely to hold personal beliefs - and to be held by them. These, so we think, inform our intentions, our decisions and our choices. To act in the public sphere, to live life in public, is to have personal beliefs (maybe even terrible ones) and to act upon them. Unless it is thought that what is best is a society in which no one acts according to the things they genuinely hold to be true then I am not sure what is being asked for. Are we looking for a two-faced society?

But this, of course, is not what is being asked for. What is being asked for is that the people concerned, the people with the personal beliefs we don't like, stop acting according to their beliefs and start acting according to our better ones instead. The problem is that you don't believe the same things as I do. And you are wrong. For your views are "bigotry hiding behind belief". And my views are just a perfectly good set of personal beliefs. Does anybody see the problem here?

And so we try to filter out all the nasty beliefs, the ones that involve telling gay people that god is not alright with them. But the people who believe that god is not alright with gay people still exist. And they haven't stopped believing it. Now, perhaps, they feel victimized for their belief, a belief they honestly hold and maybe even could justify in their own way. But we would not accept their justification, more than likely, especially if it maybe relies on holy books and the dogmas of their church and private messages received in prayer. For we do not accept these sources of authority. We have other, different, better ones. But let's be honest. It's not just about theists and their crazy beliefs here. Homophobes, sexists and racists alike have no need to believe in gods in order to share and act on beliefs that we don't like.

So what are we to do? We believe in free speech but we are always trying to curtail speech that we don't like. We believe that people should be free. But we are always censoring people who use their freedom in ways we don't approve of.  We believe that people are allowed to form their own opinions but then fire them if they share their opinions with other people at work. If only there was some way to adjudicate between all these beliefs in a world in which we seemingly all act contrary to the things that we say we all want.

The fact is that there is and there isn't such a way to adjudicate. There isn't a way because there is no central point about which we can gather, no "library of true facts" to which we can go and check out which of the beliefs are true and false. There is, ironically, no god who can tell us who to believe and allow and who to disbelieve and sanction or ignore. There is no language that we will ever be able to speak that could fully express an unarguable truth. And yet it is also true that there is a way. For we each have the networks of belief and contacts with which we have grown up that have formed us as human beings and given us the beliefs that we hold today. These beliefs, the beliefs that were formed in exactly the same way as the person that you don't agree with, the one who should not be allowed to utter their beliefs in public, are, in fact, the only platform that we will ever have for deciding which beliefs are ok to utter and which beliefs should, in our humble opinion, never be uttered. We will never be able to get past these socially situated and rhetorically justified beliefs to something more solid, more permanent, more able to shut up all those other beliefs that we think shouldn't ever get an airing in public. All we can ever do is keep justifying the things we believe to be true along with the moral or other basis for holding these things as beliefs in the first place in the hope that this might convince more and more people that what we hold to be right and true is more worthy of belief than what our bigoted neighbour does.

In short, we are all in the same boat and the issue is how to sail without the boat rocking too much or without the need to throw anyone overboard. And that's really all there is to it.

Is the physical all there is? Andrew and Bob, part 2

Last Sunday I published a blog that was a conversation between myself and an online friend and music collaborator of mine called Bob. We discussed human being, mind and consciousness, a subject that interests us both greatly. We come at this subject from quite different positions which makes for good conversation and I thought it would be a good idea to make a blog of our first exchange of questions. Bob agreed.

But, of course, it didn't stop there because these are questions about which it is difficult to find ultimately satisfying answers. And so the conversation continues here with part 2 in which we discuss minds and if human beings are entirely physical or if, as Bob contends, there is a non-physical component.

Andrew's Question:

On a material mind.

You argue against "the strictly material approach" to the origin of mind being physical on, what seem to me, to be flawed grounds. You seem to have a number of such grounds, one of which is that you can't understand how it might work. You ask about the brain's electrochemical activity and ask how it can account for the no doubt millions of processes it needs to account for on a constant basis. You say that a brain would likely burn out if asked to carry out this workload alone. I find this response a little puzzling. Let me give you an example of why. Imagine I have a large amount of water and a pipe. I see the water and the pipe. The pipe seems too small. I have no conception of how the water could possibly fit through that pipe all at once. But am I to rule out the possibility of a bigger pipe? Am I to say that a bigger pipe is impossible? Am I to say that no combination of water and pipes would be able to carry out the physical task I have in mind? Or am I to say that because I cannot see how this would work that I should, instead, conceive of a non-material pipe which could do the work of transmitting water for me? It seems to me that, especially since you say you have no idea how the brain's electrochemical activity might work, that you simply have no basis to make the claim that because you don't understand how it happens that you must therefore refute the possibility. As I read your answers, you don't understand completely how the non-material option might work either. And yet this fact does not stop you choosing that. So I think that, to be consistent, not understanding how something works is not a sufficient reason to completely close off that possible solution.

This same issue affects the question "what determines the content of thought?" Now "determines" is one of those words that as a thinker I don't like. It sounds very like determinism and that's not something I'm a fan of. Again, you seem at a loss to give a material response to this question because you don't understand how physical or material processes could achieve it. Now neither do I. But I know that material processes are happening. So I find it entirely plausible, in line with Occam's Razor (the simplest answer is to be preferred), to start there. And, by the way, I don't think I have to say that electrochemical processes are "determinative" for anything either. I am open to the option they are a means for thought to occur with some other, unknown factor or process the originating point instead. I'm also open to the option that, as you say, thinking of blue monkeys is caused by some electrochemical process itself. And I ask "Why can't it be?" It seems to me that you don't answer why it can't be. You just throw your hands up and say it doesn't make sense and you can't understand how it might work. My point is that in order to posit the kind of mind you have chosen to prefer (something I think is an unfounded deus ex machina) I think you need to give some evidence for it and some evidence for why simpler options are not taken up first and, if necessary, dismissed on better grounds than "I don't understand it". It could be argued, I think, that you have simply chosen to prefer a more obscure alternative when you have established no reasonable basis to do so. You start off by suggesting that the mind could be some type of energy or state and these can be conceived of materially. I myself rule neither option out. And I wish you had stuck with that line of thinking.

Bob's Response:

OK, so let's address information processing power, water and pipes. If you do some practice of being aware of your thoughts and their content, there is an insane amount of stuff going on in our brains. The brain is an amazing information processor, but the amount of information is simply staggering. Can you imagine enough pipes in a bio-mechanism the size of a cantaloupe to handle all that and store all the past experiences of your life? If you can, fine, but I find it difficult.

There is a way out of that with a still entirely physical explanation in that perhaps part of the processing is taking part in one of the other dimensions of quantum physics or string theory. This is how physicists now explain the force of gravity, which has an attractive force that is not explainable by the constraints and mathematics of our 3 dimensions. It is out of proportion and doesn't act the way it should (a problem that haunted Einstein). However, if you add the other 7 dimensions mandated by string theory (11 dimensions total), the math works perfectly with part of the force action taking place in another dimension and part here. So I would be comfortable with that as a material way to explain the amounts of processing.

However, information processing is not the same as consciousness. In your blog on Ex Machina,  you argue that Ava is capable of actions motivated by self interest and preservation but is incapable of feeling and emotion and always will be. If Ava has sensory input and information categorization abilities at least as good as ours, why can't she feel emotion? In a materialist framework, you would have to argue that there is a physical component in humans that is missing in machines. If that is so, it should be identifiable. What is it that produces emotion (and identifying the part of the brain that lights up when you're angry or happy is not the same as saying that part is producing emotion)? As T.H. Huxley said, "How is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed the lamp." So, what is the physical origin of emotion and what is the physical necessity and function of it?

(Andrew: I would like to point out here, briefly, that I don't think I do say this about Ava in my blog on Ex Machina. In fact, I say the opposite! I invite readers to read for themselves and decide if I do or not.)

I think this leads us into the non-material mind and I did give 2 pieces of evidence, out of body experiences and past life memories. I left it to you to pursue examples so that I would not guide what you would find. You have not addressed these, so I will give two examples for you to respond to. I was listening to a lecture by a psychiatrist (a podcast of a lecture given this year) who was explaining why he believes the mind is capable of leaving the body. He said that when he was an intern, he was put in charge of the university sleep research lab. Separately from his clinical duties, he met a woman who claimed that she had regularly had out of body experiences during sleep since she was a child. For a long time she thought everybody did that and thought it was normal. As she grew up, she learned not to talk about it, but she said the experiences were still occurring. She was very convincing, he was curious, and he had the perfect lab to scientifically test her. She agreed to come to the lab and he told her all she had to do was get in bed and sleep. After she was in bed, he wrote a random number (selected from a book that was thousands of pages of random numbers spit out from a random number generator) on a piece of paper and placed it on top of a clothes wardrobe too high for her to reach. He told her there was a number on the piece of paper (she's already in bed) and in the morning he would ask her what the number was. She was on camera the whole time and never left the bed, yet every time, time after time, she correctly recited the 5 digit random number that was on the paper. There are other examples you can find.The University of Southampton just completed the largest study of near death experiences (including near death out of body experiences). 

For past life memory, I'll use the example of the Dalai Lama. Dalai Lama is not a hereditary title. After a Dalai Lama dies, the next one needs to be found and tested to make sure he is a continuation of the same mind. The current Dalai Lama is the 14th. He was born shortly after the death of the previous Dalai Lama, but he was born in a remote, isolated area of northern Tibet to a poor farming family. When he started talking, he spoke in the dialect of Lhasa, even though he had never heard it and nobody there spoke it (though some could understand it. He also talked of people he knew by name who were actual people in Lhasa and accurately described buildings and places. He also passed the test (as all the previous Dalai Lamas had) of correctly identifying all and only the personal items that belonged to his predecessor out of an array of similar objects. However, he has said that the memories of his past life started fading about age 4 and now he cannot remember any of it.

There are other non-religious documented examples (about 3,500 I think) of children who can speak languages they've never heard and describe places they've never been. The interesting thing is that this almost universally occurs between ages 4 to 6. That's why I asked what your first memory was. You said it was at age 4. Mine was also age 4. It seems to me this is when the current identity formation begins blocking memory of the past in the same way that learning Japanese blocked my past knowledge of German.

So, if a mind can pass from one body to another, it would have to do so in a non-material state, or at least in a state of material we don't understand and can't measure. Going back to my examples of Jeffery Dahmer (and serial killers in general) and Mozart (and child musical prodigies in general), and homosexuality, materialists will have to posit a complex array of physical attributes, conditions and processes to account for these, and as such these should be identifiable and observable. From a non-materialist view, Occam's Razor is on my side.

Bob is @iceman_bob on Twitter and a native of Montana, USA.

Andrew is Herr Absurd, a Brit and the owner of this blog.

This conversation will continue.