According to the ABC, WHO has declared Swine flu an ‘international public health emergency’. Mexico’s official figures are 81 dead and 1300 infected.

That, in itself, wouldn’t have me worried.

But it’s clearly already crossed the board to America in quite a large way, according to the UK Telegraph:

The disease has already spread to the United States and eight children in New York, two people in Kansas and eight more in California have reportedly been infected by the virus.

That’s quite a lot of confirmed cases over a large geographical spread.  And the problem with a virus being in America is that there is A LOT of international air travel from America.

International air travel may have already spread the virus to New Zealand and the UK:

A New Zealand school group has been quarantined after returning from Mexico with flu-like symptoms, local news media reported on Sunday quoting local health authorities.

Three teachers and 22 senior students from Rangitoto College in Auckland, arrived back in the country on Saturday after a three-week trip to Mexico, according to the reports.

And in London a member of a British Airways cabin crew was taken to hospital with “flu-like symptoms” after falling ill on a flight from Mexico City to Heathrow.

So now let’s move on to some speculation from less reliable sources. I bumped into this report:

I’m a doctor in Mexico City, people here are sort of concerned, calling it the end of the world. I’ve read most of the articles floating around and, I’m sorry to say, the situation is being covered up.

I work at one of the public hospitals in the state of Mexico. On Friday, in our hospital alone, we had 32 deaths attributed to this, and today it was 28 deaths by 3 pm,when my shift ended. This is only in one hospital out of several. We have converted the ICU into an isolation area. since there are many people coming in with initial symptoms.

I would also like to share with you the history of the disease. People who die do so about 5 days after initial symptoms. Also, i want to add the fact that patients are presenting hemoptysis, which means coughing up blood -this has not previously been a symptom of influenza.

There is definitely cause to be concerned, and by the looks of it, this could spread quickly. I am actually taking antiviral profilaxis with oseltamavir, hopefully that will keep me safe. I go back to the hospital on Monday, wish me luck!

Naturally that could be fake. But it’s relatively likely that Mexican authorities are not accurately reporting the scale of the problem. International students have reported that universities have been closed by authorities.

Perhaps it’s time to close some boarders and see how this plays out?

ABC news today ups the ante:

Sokaluk is accused of starting the Churchill-Jerralang fires in Gippsland which killed 11 people.

Sokaluk is facing charges of arson causing death, intentionally lighting a bushfire and a count of possessing child pornography.

Wait what? Possessing child pornography?

At least five Facebook groups have been started by members, calling for violent punishment for 39-year-old Brendan Sokaluk.

The groups also label him an arsonist and “pedo”.

However, the groups are in breach of court order prohibiting the publication of photos of the accused.

Some comments posted by Facebook users make threats against Sokaluk’s life and call for victims of the bushfires to take the law into their own hands.

One comment read “That mother f***er should hang by his toes and rot”, and another says “burn him!”.

This sort of behaviour must be considered unacceptable! If the accusations are true, then sure he’s a pretty fucked up guy. But we don’t torture people because they’re screwed up. And we don’t deem people screwed up on the basis of an accusation. How is this bloke going to get a fair trial when he’s up on these charges in this media environment?

I wonder about Australia’s sense of justice at times.

Pat also provides some useful links in the side-bar if you click through to his video.

Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery.

Vigilantes took the black and white beast to the police saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

“The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car,” Kwara state police spokesman Tunde Mohammed told Reuters by telephone.

“They pursued them. However one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat.

“We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody. We cannot base our information on something mystical. It is something that has to be proved scientifically, that a human being turned into a goat.”

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in parts of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

Residents came to the police station to see the goat, photographed in one national newspaper on its knees next to a pile of straw.

So herein lies the problem with ‘faith’ based (or non-evidenced based) thinking. Most obviously, you look like an idiot to people with different sets of beliefs. I’d imagine that no witches read this blog, so everyone agrees that the thinking in the news above story is highly nuts. But when a Catholic thinks that a bit of bread turns into the actual body of Jesus, to everyone else, that belief is just as absurd as thinking that the thief turned into a goat. And when that Catholic looks at the beliefs of the Hindu, Muslim or any other religion – they find them just as absurd. That’s the funny side of things, but there is a serious side too.

The serious side is that, once you accept the proposition that there are supernatural events and supernatural pathways to truth, anything can happen. Exactly the same thinking process leads to quaint but ludicrous beliefs (God wants me to wear a funny hat) as leads to highly destructive beliefs (God wants me to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma city to hasten the second coming of Christ). If you want to avert the socially destructive consequences you can’t argue, as religious moderates do, that people ignore what God tells them to do if it’s socially harmful. You can’t make that argument because ‘social harm’ is outweighed by ‘god said so’ in the head of the believer. To avert the social harm you need to argue that ‘God wants me to X’  is a bad way of thinking regardless of what X is.

In short, if you want to stop people blowing stuff up in the name of god, you need to admonish people just as strongly no matter what they think they’re doing in the name of god.

The gist is that Wilders is a Dutch MP concerned about the Islamification of Europe. He makes ‘radical’ statements about Islam,  including a video called Fitna, which essentially calls Islam a violent religion. The Dutch Director of Public Prosecutions had decided that Wilders was engaging in legitimate public and political discourse, hence it would not bring charges. Now a Dutch court has overturned the DPP decision and the prosecution will go ahead.

My law honours thesis was written largely on this topic, so if you’ve got a couple of hours to invest – check out my thesis here.

Short of reading my thesis, let’s take a look at why people should be free to express their views on these subjects.

Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders made a controversial film last year equating Islam with violence. The opening scenes of Fitna – a Koranic term sometimes translated as “strife” – show a copy of the holy book followed by footage of the bomb attacks on the US in 11 September 2001, London in July 2005 and Madrid in March 2004. The film ends with the statement: “Stop Islamisation. Defend our freedom.”

Equating Islam with violence by overlaying the Koran with 9/11. Why is this unfair? It’s indisputable that Islamic belief was a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, cause of 9/11. No one argues otherwise. There is no reason an obviously true, if unpleasant, statement should be outlawed.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said at the time that the film wrongly equated Islam with violence and served “no purpose other than to offend”.

There is no merit in criminalising being offensive. All kinds of people find all kinds of things offensive for all kinds of reasons. Being gratuitously offensive might be very good cause for social criticism. Perhaps the PM is right to stand up and say that Geert is being a tool bag. That’s how public and political discussion works. Islamic leaders should be free to stand up and explain why Islam should NOT be equated with violence. This is how punters can be convinced of the truth. Using the law to silence someone you don’t agree with and label as ‘offensive’ what they say isn’t helpful to arriving at the truth.

“The Amsterdam appeals court has ordered the prosecution of member of parliament Geert Wilders for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs,” the court said in a statement.” In a democratic system, hate speech is considered so serious that it is in the general interest to… draw a clear line,” the court in Amsterdam said.  “The court also considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshipers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders,” it added.

Firstly, what someone says can never amount to discrimination. Discrimination requires action or inaction based on a not-relevant trait. Saying “I hate all black people” is racism, but not discrimination. Secondly, there is a crucial distinction between people and their ideas. Wilders attacks Islam, not Muslims. Wilders ‘hate speech’ is directed at the Islamic memeplex, not people who happen to hold those memes. Wilders is inciting hatred for Islam, not for Muslims. Islam the idea MUST be legally open to all avenues of criticism. People should be protected from incitement to violence, but ideas themselves must not be protected in lieu of the sensibilities of people holding those ideas.

All ideas must be open to robust criticism to permit the progress of humanity. Imagine if everyone who, for instance, preferred the the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics took personal offense if their interpretation was questioned by proponents of the many worlds theory. So courts, to protect the sensibility of the Copenhagen-physicists, prevented many-world-ers  raising their objections. This isn’t helpful to progressing quantum physics. These people NEED to argue to work towards the truth. You can’t allow people to have a legal sook in lieu of their ideas.

The three judges said that they had weighed Mr Wilders’s “one-sided generalisations” against his right to free speech, and ruled that he had gone beyond the normal leeway granted to politicians.

Since when has the law required people to be balanced and present both sides of an argument? That’s not how debate and public sphere discourse work. If Wilders is so wildly wrong and doing such obvious injustice to Islam, it should be no problem for someone to make ‘Fitna Debunked’ and show how stupid Wilders is.

There is no duty on anyone to present both sides of a debate. There is simply the ability for other people to stand up and destroy ignorant and unsophisticated positions. For instance, if I say something wrong on this blog, people can and do tell me so in the comments. That’s great. If courts just hit me with the ban-stick, that’s not helping anyone.

Mr Wilders said the judgement was an “attack on the freedom of expression”.”Participation in the public debate has become a dangerous activity. If you give your opinion, you risk being prosecuted,” he said. Not only he, but all Dutch citizens opposed to the “Islamisation” of their country would be on trial, Mr Wilders warned.

Wilders is right, opinion shouldn’t be criminal. Especially opinion about ideas.  If Wilders is wrong, his opponents should relish the oppertunity of being able to strengthen their position by publically rebutting his arguments. Banning one side of the debate is a loss for both sides.

The bigger picture

I shudder when someone against democracy stands up for democratic election. There’s something not right about electing someone who will abolish elections. It’s a radical – self-destructive – inconsistency. There needs to be (and usually is) a law in democratic nations requiring those standing for election to be on the same intellectual page as elections themselves. We saw that today when Obama pledged to uphold the constitution of the USA.

We saw a similar thing happen in the sub-prime market collapse. A radical belief in the utility of the free market allowed insidious elements to go unchecked.

Democracy is a good idea, but it needs to come with a big caveat that if you’re not into democracy you’re not welcome to participate. Free markets are a good idea, but they need to come with a big caveat saying that if you’re going to fiddle them you’re not welcome to participate.

Western values have the same problem as the above. Our belief in democracy is so radical that we allow those who don’t believe in democracy to vote. Our belief in being inclusive is so radical that we want to include those who don’t believe in being inclusive. Our belief in free speech is so radical that we want to give free speech to those who want to use it to fight it. Our belief in human rights is so radical that we want to give a suit of rights to people who don’t want to permit others such rights. Etc etc

This radical application of Western values is potentially self-destructive. It is analogous to having the potential to democratically elect a dictator.

One word stands out here. You guessed it, ‘probably’. Apparently that word was required by UK advertising standards because the lack of existence of god isn’t certain. You’ve got be kidding, right? Perhaps it’s technically true that some versions of god (certainly not any of the monotheisms) can’t be disproved deductively. So, despite all evidence being to the contrary, it is possible that god exists. But if you caveat that, you have to caveat EVERYTHING. My shirt, ‘probably made in china’ ‘McDonald’s, probably in 10km’ ‘this weekend only, probably half price’. Ridiculous.

But it gets worse. The UK telegraph picks up the story which Australia seems to have entirely missed.

[Secular groups in Australia] hoped to put adverts on the back of buses with slogans stating “atheism – celebrate reason” or “atheism – sleep in on Sunday mornings”.

But the proposed campaign was rejected by APN Outdoor, the country’s biggest outdoor advertising company.

David Nicholls, president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, said: “I am flabbergasted. This is extremely disappointing and a severe blow to freedom of expression in Australia.

“Australia is going to look provincial and narrow in outlook to the rest of the world because of this decision. The planet is moving to a more enlightened era but apparently, public transport advertising agents in Australia have missed the bus.”

A similar plan for atheist bus adverts in Tasmania was thrown out by the state-owned bus company, Metro, which is set to lead to legal action on the grounds that it is discriminatory.

Metro has previously allowed adverts from religious groups including anti-abortion campaigners, but says it has now changed its policy to ban all material deemed controversial.

What a disagrace! Why isn’t our media outraged? Begger’s belief.

“Storm”

Inner North London, top floor flat
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
Rice Paper partitions
Modern art and ambition
The host’s a physician,
Lovely bloke, has his own practice
His girlfriend’s an actress
An old mate from home
And they’re always great fun.
So to dinner we’ve come.

The 5th guest is an unknown,
The hosts have just thrown
Us together for a favour
because this girl’s just arrived from Australia
And has moved to North London
And she’s the sister of someone
Or has some connection.

As we make introductions
I’m struck by her beauty
She’s irrefutably fair
With dark eyes and dark hair
But as she sits
I admit I’m a little bit wary
because I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area
Just above the derrière
And when she says “I’m Sagittarien”
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon
When she says her name is Storm.

Chatter is initially bright and light hearted
But it’s not long before Storm gets started:
“You can’t know anything,
Knowledge is merely opinion”
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon
Vis a vis
Some unhippily
Empirical comment by me

“Not a good start” I think
We’re only on pre-dinner drinks
And across the room, my wife
Widens her eyes
Silently begs me, Be Nice
A matrimonial warning
Not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm
Whether knowledge is so loose-weave
Of a morning
When deciding whether to leave
Her apartment by the front door
Or a window on the second floor.

The food is delicious and Storm,
Whilst avoiding all meat
Happily sits and eats
While the good doctor, slightly pissedly
Holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history
When Storm suddenly she insists
“But the human body is a mystery!
Science just falls in a hole
When it tries to explain the the nature of the soul.”

My hostess throws me a glance
She, like my wife, knows there’s a chance
That I’ll be off on one of my rants
But my lips are sealed.
I just want to enjoy my meal
And although Storm is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking the boat,
Although it’s becoming a bit of a wrestle
Because – like her meteorological namesake -
Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:

“Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.”

And try as hard as I like,
A small crack appears
In my diplomacy-dike.
“By definition”, I begin
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”

“So you don’t believe
In ANY Natural remedies?”

“On the contrary actually:
Before we came to tea,
I took a natural remedy
Derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller that’s virtually side-effect free
It’s got a weird name,
Darling, what was it again?
Masprin?
Basprin?
Asprin!
Which I paid about a buck for
Down at my local drugstore.

The debate briefly abates
As our hosts collects plates
but as they return with desserts
Storm pertly asserts,

“Shakespeare said it first:
There are more things in heaven and earth
Than exist in your philosophy…
Science is just how we’re trained to look at reality,
It can’t explain love or spirituality.
How does science explain psychics?
Auras; the afterlife; the power of prayer?”

I’m becoming aware
That I’m staring,
I’m like a rabbit suddenly trapped
In the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.
Maybe it’s the Hamlet she just misquothed
Or the eighth glass of wine I just quaffed
But my diplomacy dike groans
And the arsehole held back by its stones
Can be held back no more:

“Look , Storm, I don’t mean to bore you
But there’s no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds
Or star-signs or tea-leaves or meridian lines
These people aren’t plying a skill,
They are either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for those who claim to hear God’s demands
And Spiritual healers who think they have magic hands.

By the way,
Why is it OK
For people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
Is it not totally fucked in the head
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died
And telling her you’re in touch with the other side?
That’s just fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify that there’s no such thing as a psychic?
What, are we fucking 2?
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still think that Santa brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson hasn’t had facelifts?
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks
That we think that the dead would
Wanna talk to pricks
Like John Edwards?

Storm to her credit despite my derision
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

“You’re so sure of your position
But you’re just closed-minded
I think you’ll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist”

“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.”

Everyones just staring at me now,
But I’m pretty pissed and I’ve dug this far down,
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:

“Life is full of mysteries, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won’t be found
By people sitting around
Looking serious
And saying isn’t life mysterious?
Let’s sit here and hope
Let’s call up the fucking Pope
Let’s go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra

If you’re going to watch tele, you should watch Scooby Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there’s a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the waterslide.
Throughout history
Every mystery
EVER solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.

Does the idea that there might be truth
Frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon
On Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you
Frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural
So blow your hippy noodle
That you would rather just stand in the fog
Of your inability to Google?

Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
If you’re so into Shakespeare
Lend me your ear:
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet… is just fucking silly”
Or something like that.
Or what about Satchmo?!
I see trees of Green,
Red roses too,
And fine, if you wish to
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
That’s ok.
But here’s what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant…
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncles and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting shitty
With good-looking hippies
With fairies on their spines
And butterflies on their titties.

And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is mended:
We’d as well be 10 minutes back in time,
For all the chance you’ll change your mind.

When we’re sick the symptoms that we experience, such as pain, fever and coughs are often not the work of the disease itself, but rather the bodies reactions to fight the disease. Raising body temperature during a fever attempts to inhibit the replication of the virus or bacteria. Pain is the body’s mechanism to encourage the mind to protect the area in pain. So, if we roll an ankle, the pain encourages us to limp or not walk to give the ankle time to heal.

The mechanisms are evolved responses, however, they (and the immune system generally) will not kick in unless the benefit outweighs the potential cost. It’s well documented that a woman in late-term pregnancy will never have a fever. The harm to the baby does not, in evolutionary terms, justify the benefit of slowing the multiplication of the infection.

Why is this interesting?

Evolutionary medicine explains the placebo effect. Let’s cast our mind back to the evolution of man kind 100,000 years ago. Imagine that your direct genetic forefather is out hunting when he, like me today, contracts the flu virus. If his immune system, as soon as it detected the virus, committed all of its resources to fighting it, the man would become weakened and useless to the hunt – perhaps endangering his entire tribe. Compare if his body’s resources were devoted to good hunting, and waited an extra couple of days for the hunting party to return to the relative safety of the tribe before the immune system began the draining battle with the virus. That way the hunt could be successful and the man’s downtime would occur at an opportune time. This would enhance prospects for survival.

We all experience this kind of thing in our lives. Many of my uni friends often feel ‘drained’ after exams and become sick immediately after the final exam. What’s happening is exactly what happens during the hunt. The body contracts the illness, but knows not to devote resources to the fight until more pressing concerns are dealt with.

One more example with the cave man. Imagine if your direct descendant 100,000 years ago gets a certain type of cancer. Curing this cancer is within his body’s capacity. If the body simply ignores the cancer, it will become debilitating in say 3 years and fatal in 5. Imagine that the body devotes all its resources to curing the cancer, then contracts the flu, and the man is dead in a week. Compare if the immune system ignores the cancer and saves its energy for the flu-like problem which will invariably arrive. Perhaps the second strategy, on average 100,000 years ago, lead to longer lives.

Where does the placebo effect fit it?

The body is waiting for ‘permission’ to get better. It’s after some sort of compelling sign that it’s in safe hands, the present danger is over and now is a good time to heal itself. Perhaps the body associated receiving ‘medicine’ from a tribe shaman as the sign that all is well and now is a good time to mend itself.

In the modern context, how many times have you felt better merely upon arriving at the doctors surgery? Once you know you’re in safe hands, your body is happy to mend itself.

Alternative medicine and the placebo effect

What effective alternative medicine does is give the body, via the mind, the all-clear signal. Tells the body that it’s being looked after and directs it that it’s safe to devote resources to dealing with the problem at hand. Perhaps if it’s very effective it could convince the body that it should fight the long-term cancer threat and not worry about short-term virus threats.

Problems

I think the idea presented above is quite elegant. But I’ll admit that I’m not entirely convinced. Mainly because of the disconnect in timing between the onset of symptoms, the administration of the placebo, and the healing. If the ‘permission’ argument was right we’d expect symptoms (the body’s way of fighting the disease) to appear AFTER the administration of the placebo. But, in most cases, the placebo is administered DURING the symptom stage. I suppose this makes sense where there are ‘symptoms’ caused by the disease itself which display, followed by the administration of the placebo, followed by the symptoms of the body fighting the disease.

But this Lauren was neither a fool or a popularist. So i ended up vexing my brain on the topic during the drive home trying to think of a new (for me) argument against the position.

The moral vegan’s position

In brief, the position of the moral vegan is that:

1) Animals are analogous to humans as moral actors in that they are ‘conscious’ or similar

2) farming practices are evil, exploitative, induce suffering etc

3) It is immoral for one moral actor to be bad towards another moral actor

therefore

4) We ought not consume animals or their products because it supports immorality.

The usual rebuttals

Rebutting the above argument is easy. For a start, animals cruelly kill other animals all the time. A lion will take down its prey and then slowly eat it alive. Often it will take hours for the prey to finally die. If the lion is a moral actor and the above argument is true – shouldn’t we strongly condemn lions as immoral? Perhaps you might argue that a lion HAS to kill to survive whereas humans don’t. But the lion could easily take 5 seconds to finish off its prey before it starts eating. Secondly, are farming practices all that evil? Most farming is concerned with the health and life of the animal – albeit with the final goal of killing it. Compare the natural world where there is something out to get you at every moment and your next meal is never guaranteed – is living in the wild really ‘better’ or are humans just imposing their understanding of liberty? Note that all animals (including us) are going to die eventually. Thirdly, the position is open to reductio ad absurdum. If we accept the above argument, the moral life would be to pursue  merely the quantity of life. The more things living naturally the better. Consider if I just shot myself in the head. The death of my life would give way to the lives of billions of organisms responsible for my decay to dirt. So does suicide become the only moral option available to us?

I could go on, but I won’t bother. In short, speciesism is justifiable.

Awareness v experience

I want to target the first axiom of the moral vegan. Because, usefully, it’s largely a scientific question.

Blindsight is a human condition, type 1 blindsight subjects have no awareness whatsoever of any stimuli, but yet are able to predict, at levels significantly above chance, aspects of a visual stimulus, such as location, or type of movement, often in a forced-response or guessing situation.

So if you ask someone with blindsight if they can see, they will honestly say no. They are not aware of their ability to see. However, if you hold a colour swatch in front of someone with blindsight, and ask them to guess what colour it is, they will almost certainly guess correctly.

What’s happening is that the eyes are wired into two parts of the brain. First, they are wired into the experience section. A part located deep and low in the human brain and a part which closely resembles that of other animals in the evolutionary tree. This wire works fine in someone with blindsight. The ‘guessing’ process crudely taps into this primitive ability. Secondly, the eyes are wired into the awareness parts of the human brain. These parts are located higher and more forward in the human brain and don’t have a counterpart in most (perhaps all) other animals. It is this wire that isn’t working in someone with blindsight.

Importantly, blindsight is not an anomaly. A similar split between experience and awareness exists for all of the senses. Google alexithymia. Some people experience pain, in that they display the physiological reactions, without being aware of being in pain.

Now what we can do is create a picture of what it’s like to be a regular animal by amalgamating the experience of these humans who split experience and awareness. Brain evidence shows that animals DO experience but are not aware. They do have the lower parts of the brain which generate experience in common with us, but not the parts that evidently generate awareness. So we can know, from evidence, that animals truly are automatons. They do experience and react, but they are not aware of it.

Consider, would it be torture to lock a blindsight victim in a room with bright lights? Would it be immoral? Surely not if they are unaware of the lights. Would it be immoral to perform surgery without anesthetic on someone who is unaware of the pain? Surely not if they are unfazed. Suffering is attached to the awareness of these events, not the experience.

Moral of the story is that animals are not moral actors because they can neither be aware of their predicaments nor held accountable for their actions. Locking a cow in a milk-stall is, demonstrably and evidently, no more morally culpable than leaving your laptop locked to your desk. Arguments about letting chickens peck because it’s what comes naturally to them is like arguing that we should let our computers compress and decompress files all day because it’s what comes naturally to them.

Google earth seems have been a useful part of that strategy. Anyone who has driven through a new city will know the navigational and planning utility of Google earth and Google street view. In the Mumbai terrorist attacks, that was used for ill.

The issue is that the Bombay High Court has been petitioned to ban Google earth because it “aids terrorists in plotting attacks”. That may be true, but banning it for that reason is mindbogglingly stupid. If I was a wowser, I’d say that ‘it’s letting the terrorists win.’ The moral of the story is that people uninformed and ignorant about new technology will seek to ban and limit it at the first sign of a problem. Are they saying we should ban mobile phones because they were used to communicate? No. Probably because judges and law makers understand the utility and functionality of mobile phones.

We must stop law-makers and courts, in Australia and across the world, fucking up our future because they don’t understand it.