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What's this ? Professer Michael Crawford has uncovered surprising properties of certain dietary brain fats. He encouraged me to write up my recent talk. This is a fuller version of the one submitted.
CONSCIOUSNESS REINSTATED USING THE CERTAINTY PRINCIPLE - A Better Mental Health Strategy. contents the uncertainties of docosahexaenoic acid
The statistical probability that six consecutive double-bonds in any given fatty acid will be all ‘cis’, and none ‘trans’, is less than chance (p<0.02). The chances of all-cis-docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) recurring in quantity over geological time is infinitesimal. The fact that it has, is inexplicable, yet vital to our welfare – much like medical practice in general. Since such intriguing considerations are scrupulously eliminated from orthodox conceptualisations, a refurbished Occam’s Razor – the Certainty Principle – is offered in this paper as a responsible pragmatic guide. There are indelible problems in our ways of knowing. Indeed six of the ineradicable flaws in our knowledge base are deployed below to help disinfect toxic speculation, leading to a psychiatry that is immediately understandable, self-evident and effective, supported here by objective prison data. The only realistic antidote to our lethal global psychiatric epidemic is reinstating consciousness and its wellbeing.
KEY WORDS
Consciousness, epistemology, theories of mind, theories of knowledge, causality, mind, irrationality, malattachment, psychiatric reform, curing Personality Disorders, docosahexaenoic acid, chance, living cells, Occam's Razor, emotional neotony.
600 million years ago, out of the blue, a rather curious molecule came into being. It had never been there before. Its arrival was a uniquely significant biological event. Though this relatively simple carbon compound now goes by the name of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), its impact on evolution has been stunning. In view of its remarkable importance, there are two absolute certainties about it, which must be clearly stated. The first absolute certainty is that if it had not arrived, you would not now be reading this page, nor I writing it. This is because it permits nerve tissues to transmit, and eventually human beings to think. Without it we would be nowhere. However, in order to see quite how remarkable this is, it is equally important to acknowledge the other absolute certainty - namely we shall never, ever know how it came into existence, nor how it has managed to persist unchanged for an aeon of geological time.
The plight of our globally deteriorating mental health demands a much clearer strategy than that currently deployed. With the WHO predicting more deaths from mental disease than from obesity and cardiac diseases combined, radical action is required. And in particular we desperately need a device, a modern version of Occam's Razor to guide us through our phenomenal and ever-growing complexities. In 50 years' medical work the type of rule of thumb I found most useful is one that is simple, understandable and more often right than not. In medical practice, it is vital to prioritise, to concentrate on those enquiries that prove more fruitful, at the expense of those less so. Not only does this save invaluable time and indeed lives, it also discourages toxic speculation. Accordingly expanding Occam's Razor from stating that “simplicity is best”, we need to explore every item under four Points - 1) where does it come from? 2) what is it like? 3) what does it do? and 4) what it is for?
The practical value of this approach, termed here the Certainty Principle, is that it redirects attention away from what is indelibly unknowable to what we can certainly know more about. And a minute's reflection will confirm that it is rather easier on the mind to wrestle with problems and challenges we can do something about, rather than to struggle endlessly with questions that can never be known, which are quite beyond our comprehension anyway, and will always remain so.
The main thrust of this paper is the application of the Certainty Principle to consciousness and its better wellbeing. However such intangibles benefit from concrete examples. So before proceeding to consider how and why our current versions of psychiatric practice need remedy, it is prudent to digress and apply this Principle to that most practical of all items, the human hand. If the reader will consider how this applies to his or her own appendage, the discussion might bear more weight. Point 1 of the Certainty Principle enquires as to the origin of this invaluable extension to human anatomy. For my own part, I have simply no idea where my hand came from. It's been there for as long as I can remember, and probably for some time before that - but where it originated, I cannot possibly say. This reinforces the absolute uncertainty of our knowledge of our hand - we cannot begin to know how it came about, and there is generally little practical value to be gained from pursuing this line. Speculation is usually interesting, but should not be confused with concrete, evidenced knowledge - thus we may have developed our hands to help pick up small shell fish and other edible items on the sea's edge - but we cannot be sure, and it would make little sense to invest huge amounts of time or mental energy on the question.
Point 2 relates to what the hand is actually like - and here again, I have only a grossly inaccurate picture. What you see on the outside is very far from what the hand really is. Nor does the picture become clearer on closer, more detailed examination. You might like to think that your hand has four fingers and a thumb - and there are those who would agree. However, if you were to set out to define precisely what you meant by 'thumb', you would soon come to grief - the tighter your definition, the sooner and deeper the grief. Suppose you defined your thumb as consisting of two bones, how do you place the skin fold, which comes halfway along the second bone? What are you going to do about the 'third bone', the one adjoining the palm, which links the first two to the wrist, and which alone makes provision for the invaluable 'opposing' of the thumb. This third bone by itself won't get you very far - you need the several wrist bones, which in turn call upon the radius, the humerus, the clavicle and so on, all of which blend with the other 400 bones in our complex makeup.
This is only the bony substrate. The nerves, muscles, blood vessels, skin, tendons, even blood all need to be included in any comprehensive 'definition' - there is no limit to the number of items involved, nor therefore any end to what we may 'know' about the thumb. Even when the anatomy of this invaluable object is disclosed, its physiology or function leaves the mind gasping. It is powered by what medical texts cheerily label 'voluntary musculature' - does this entail Free Will? Are you convinced?
It is therefore a verbal illusion to suppose that we can know more about an object by describing it ever more minutely. Which takes us, with much relief, to Point 3) of the Certainty Principle - 'what does the hand do?' And here, provided we stick to pragmatic principles, we are indeed for the first time on solid ground. The simple answer is that it performs an infinite number of manual tasks, from feeding invaluable fish oils into our mouths to composing verbose texts on what it is all about. This may seem rather less than absolute, and open to the suggestion that different individuals will have a differing answer to the question - 'what does your hand do?' However, it does at least make sense - a vital commodity when considering items as intrinsically complex as consciousness. It is reasonable to concede that what one person might wish to do with their hands is rather different from another - but there is much less harm in variety than in dogma.
If there are many answers to the question 'what do hands do?' then of course there are innumerably more to the next question 'what are they for?', which forms the fourth and final Point of the Certainty Principle. However from a medical viewpoint, this question has vital significance. Indeed clinically it is the most important of them all. In the overall clinical context, every medical symptom represents a failure or partial failure of one aspect of the whole human being. So the question, 'what is that aspect for?', has immediate practical value. In the case of the hand, if it is diseased, what can you no longer do ? - if feeding, then alternative gismos need to be invoked, if shaking hands, an alternative form of greeting needs to be acquired. Whatever the loss, the remedy is to ascertain the fundamental purpose that has become deficient, to then evaluate this on a life-death scale, prior to implementing the best available remedies to address that loss. Clinical medicine (and global politics) in a nutshell.
So here the Certainty Principle is applied to the hand - 1) we have no idea where it came from, and this should trouble us little. 2) Our picture of what it is really like, is astoundingly inaccurate, and though this is troubling, it is less so. 3) We know what it does - indeed we perhaps know too many things it does, but this is much better than our indelible ignorance as in the first two Points. Finally 4) we know well enough what it is for - it is to help us through the many challenges which beset all living organisms on this rather curious and not always quite so hospitable planet.
THE UNCERTAINTIES OF DOCOSAHEXAENOIC ACID Having applied the Certainty Principle to our familiar hand, let us now do the same to docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Point 1 : it is clear that the origins of this astonishing compound are decidedly unknowable. Where it came from, how it came about, what its antecedents were, what mechanism brought it into being - these we do not know, and never will. While it is indisputable that it originated within a living cell - this tells us remarkably little, and opens yet deeper chasms of ignorance.
As for Point 2, 'what is it like?', it's very structure is a provocation. Its full name is all-cis-docosa-4,7,10,13,16,19-hexa-enoic acid. In brief, this indicates that the molecule has 6 double bonds, and that all, yes all, these are of the 'cis' form. In non-technical language this entails each and every double bond in the carbon chain bending sideways compared with its predecessor. This is not random, this is a steady consistent pattern. Were you to synthesise this compound in the laboratory, then the chemical you would derive would have these double bonds distributed irregularly - some straight, some not. Where this molecule occurs in living cells, all bend the same way, they are all 'cis' and none are 'trans'. This is because when synthesized in a living cell, none are random - none at all. Something decidedly unknowable is afoot.
It is important for non-technical readers to grasp this point, so it is worth simplifying the picture to the point of caricature. Fatty acids, of which DHA is one, consist of chains of carbon atoms linked together like beads on a string. Every now and again, these links are unusually 'strong' - these are termed 'double-bonds'. And the curious feature of a double bond is that it can take one of two forms - the atoms are the same, their join is different. In effect, they may distort the geometry of the chain, either bending to the side, or not. The 'trans' form keeps the line straight, the 'cis' introduces kinks. In synthesised molecules these occur entirely at random. There is absolutely no difference in the chemicals which comprise the two compounds - it's just that they are put together in different, 'asymmetric' ways. There are physical differences brought about by the presence or absence of these irregularities - the straighter more 'trans' chain versions have higher melting points, because the molecules snuggle up together better - the crooked more 'cis' chains fit less well with their neighbours, so solidify at lower temperatures. The point is that the chemicals are the same, but their construction is different. Thus a compound with 6 double bonds, could have each of them twisting the same way, giving all-cis molecules as in DHA. Or they could all remain straight, giving all-trans molecules. Or they could be any mixture of the two. The point is that in all living tissues, every single DHA molecule has every single double bond bending the same way. In common parlance or put colloquially - “it ain't natural”.
Speaking more strictly - the statistical probability of this occurring by chance throughout the myriad of living organisms in the 32 phyla that Crawford (2008) notes, and over a period of 600 million years, is smaller than anything ever yet conjectured. If not 'chance', then what? An especially pressing case for the Certainty Principle.
This has immediate impact on the conventional wisdom on the origins of life. Sparking electricity through presumed primitive atmospheres produces unusual carbon compounds. However none have any regularity that remotely approaches that of DHA. Nor can they ever do so. This is as dead an end as was phlogiston in its day. Or take the faith currently reposing in the genome. Before 600 million years ago there were no genes for DHA - how could there have been, since it had no prior existence. There is no rational genetic origin for this incredible compound. It arrives. It was not there before. Once it arrives of course, there has to be a mechanism for preserving it consistently, so that its remarkable properties can benefit posterity - but this has no bearing whatever on its origin. It survived unchanged for a geological aeon while all around it was undergoing Cambrian and other 'explosions' - this astonishing persistence merely points up the irrefutable limitations in our capacity for absolute knowledge. It's as if 'nature' having arrived at an 'answer' to nerve conduction, 'decided' to keep it the same way ever after, by 'preserving' the delicate molecule it had 'come up with'. The inverted commas are signposts to the infinite number of holes in our chains of reasoning, which are mentioned further below. But the Certainty Principle also applies here - that sentence makes sense at the colloquial, pragmatic level - and following the advice of that Principle, this 'sense', however limited, needs conserving, since there is precious little elsewhere in this field. Yet it leaves so many points unanswered, so many 'anthropomorphic' assumptions unquestioned that it would stand little chance of surviving in any academic discourse. The problem with attempting anything more 'scientific' is that you are likely to come up with speculation that is patently farcical, e.g. calling on destructive cosmic rays or other quasi-toxic influences to drive the wheels of evolution by providing mechanisms for breaking down chromosomal structures, commonly known as 'mutation'. 'Science' here loses out to common sense, whatever that might be. For we have here a prime example of toxic speculation - a quasi-deliberate suffocation of the one feature which makes the topic uniquely fascinating - highly reminiscent of the self-crucifixion so often found in irrationality, as discussed further below. The point that has been so conspicuously missed is - how on earth has this remarkable molecule survived and been preserved for so long in the teeth of a highly entropic milieu? How indeed? Faced with such limitless expanses of fascinating magnificence, both Newton and Einstein invoked the Supernatural - for myself, the Natural is quite awesome enough.
Academic speculation may appear innocent enough in our ivory towers - but when it degrades our understanding and general appreciation of what consciousness is and does, then its more toxic sequelae are less welcome.
Point 3 of the Certainty Principle refers to the task DHA performs - and here we rely on the work done over decades by Crawford (op cit) who suggests that its unique twisted structure permits tunnelling electrons, analogous to semi-conductors. This is intriguing, it helps solidify our floating notions of this fascinating chemical, and it ties in, however indirectly, with what we understand of the astonishing use to which we now put silicon and other semi-conductors. It also directs our attention to the very process of speculation, of thought itself. Here we have a 'bio-semiconductor' which enables our nerves to conduct, which deploys electrons in curious patterns - using it, we can think. Without it, nervous tissue would not exist, nerve impulses would be still born, and speculation impossible. Application of the Certainty Principle advises the re-direction of such mental activity into areas which are more fruitful, more satisfying, and indeed more sane.
Point 4 - 'what is DHA for?' is easy enough - without it, cognition could not occur.
It goes against the current ethos to label certain areas of inquiry as 'out of bounds'. It's as if one were proposing censorship, or erecting the equivalent of the Roman Catholic Index - a list of topics which were forbidden on pain of excommunication. However, in practice, especially in medical practice, as mentioned, prioritising the myriad factors in a clinical case is quite literally vital. Lives can be saved, or in the case of current psychiatric practice lost, by missing the real point, while dithering in a mire of fatuous speculation.
The quasi-miraculous technology we currently enjoy dazzles us and obscures the yawning gaps in our ways of knowing. The Certainty Principle is proposed as the best available remedy for the fragility of our hold on the fundamentally incomprehensibility of cosmos we find ourselves in. This fragility is, in large measure, responsible for the toxic cul-de-sac into which contemporary psychiatry has painted itself. These are large and controversial claims, so a brief digression is called for into why the world we live in is so decidedly unkind to the simple means we have of knowing about it. In a word, our cosmos is under no obligation to be comprehensible.
Six unbridgeable chasms should suffice. First the Greeks, who, faced with the bewildering variety all around them, deployed the concept of the a-tom, an invisible particle which they optimistically supposed retained all the consistency and regularity that was so conspicuously absent in the world at large. 'A-tom' means un-cuttable - so when the atom was split, this comforting concept was shattered with it - 'subatomic' is strictly a contradiction in terms - a point that has not been generally acknowledged nor welcomed, but which can never be gainsaid.
Second, in 1745 David Hume disturbed the current dogmatic thinking, especially that of Immanuel Kant, by questioning whether the links in the chains of cause and effect by which we reason could be relied upon. We know that the match will light, because (by-the-cause-of) we strike it on the box. Hume doubted we could rely on such knowledge 'necessarily', next, or forever. It would mostly work, but not universally so. And what applied to matches, applies to every other chain of knowledge we can think of. In reality, Hume was unduly parsimonious with his scepticism. Not only is every link in the chains of our reasoning suspect, but there are an infinite number of such chains. And moreover none of them has a 'First Cause', a Standard Beginning, something that we can all relate back to and agree upon. In practical, and especially medical reality we must make do with only short chains, and do the best we can with we've got. To punch this case home, consider the match. We 'know' the matchstick burns by-the-cause of the wood having stored solar energy. The sun we know has energy, by-the-cause of its thermonuclear reactions. Here the chain falters - where does this energy come from ? Also this chain, as every chain, has no First Cause - the Big Bang was rather too brief, and too far away to count for very much in our knowledge base. The links in this and every chain are unreliable - the match might not burn, it could be damp. There are also an infinite number of such chains - the match lit because I wanted a fire, and so on ad infinitum. Not comfortable for those aiming for total knowledge.
Third, in 1886 the speed of light proved itself entirely unconscionable. If you hit say, a tennis ball at 100 miles an hour, then if you do so on a train travelling at the same speed, the ball will go at 200 mph, as you would expect. However, with light, things are disturbingly different - the light leaves its source independent of the speed of emitter. A torch travelling at X miles an hour does not emit light travelling at X plus the speed of light. The mathematics of simple addition do not apply. Nothing in Newton's mathematical genius could have protected him from getting his sums wrong when it came to the incorrigible nature of the real world. Not a comforting, nor welcome conclusion for those hankering after mathematical perfection.
Fourth, in 1900 Planck concluded that energy travelled in packages, not waves. Now the difficulty here is that you can predict reasonably well when the next wave will arrive - with a particle, like a parcel in the post, you cannot. It sets out or arrives in its own time - not a helpful attribute if you seek comprehensive understanding.
Fifth, once the atom had been split, another source of irreducible ignorance emerged. We all now know that a radioactive atom has a half life - half of all the atoms will have radiated in that time span. The problem is no one can ever tell you which atom is going to radiate next - we may all agree that by the end of the half-life, half of them will have done so - but the order in which they 'go' is utterly, indelibly, and forever indeterminate. For a given atom, we simply have no way of knowing when. And if you judge that a statistical 'average' will satisfy, then you have yet to attend an oncology clinic.
Sixth and finally in this sceptical catalogue is dark matter and dark energy. Our mathematical calculations of what our cosmos contains has holes. These discrepancies have been filled, usefully or otherwise by a notional matter and a notional energy that we have no understanding of. We have no contact with it, and no knowledge of it. We could each of us be full of it, or partially filled on the nano scale. We have absolutely no conceivable way of knowing - and Plank's space is awfully small. Which is really rather the point of the Certainty Principle - somethings are utterly unknowable - explore them as best we may, but acknowledge the paucity of our tools of understanding, so as to make better use of the mysterious but marginally more understandable items available to us, among which I include consciousness. The rest, to deploy an appropriate Greek term, is hubris.
Psychiatry has rarely been so badly misconstrued (Whitaker 2003, Johnson 2006, MonCrieff 2008). Until it is reformulated, the death rate from mental disease will rise as inexorably, and for the same reason as it did from cholera before Koch's Postulates and sanitation. Consider the following question - if docosahexaenoic acid, DHA, can retain its stability over the best part of a billion years - why can't we? The answer of course, is that manifestly we can - but the circumstances, as with all living things, must be right. Just as growing seedlings need appropriate warmth and nurture, so do we. The central difficulty is that since our mental worlds are intangible, it is all too easy to get lost in the verbal contraptions which are all we have for communication. If these perplexities can even afflict something we have all been familiar with from birth, our hands, then it is small wonder that mental worlds go oft awry.
The central purpose of the Certainty Principle, as indicated, is to deflect our mental resources away from unknowables, to those items which are at least in some points, knowable. And as the question in the last paragraph indicates, there clearly is a form of stability out there, some way of retaining an item consistently through the vicissitudes of aeons of time - unhappily our current verbal apparatus fails to preserve or communicate it as successfully as other parts of us do our DHA.
It will doubtless come as something of a surprise, especially to those inured in contemporary 'classic' psychiatry, that there can be anything 'certain' about psychiatry. However, as the preamble of this paper indicates, there are indeed a number of items about which we can be absolutely certain, and my present task is to show that rationally, realistically, and above all healthily, such absolute certainties can readily be found in psychiatry. Indeed, once the dogmas and prejudices have been wheeled away, mental security, peace of mind and of society, globally, can readily be engendered - once it is appreciated that all these invaluables come in the same living package and with the same vital attributes and lively raison d'être as our own docosahexaenoic acid. These steps are simple, but not always easy, as with sanitation.
Here's a 60 second scenario of a psychiatric intervention strategy that is understandable, self-evident and effective. First replace 'Personality Disorder' with 'Perception Disorder'. Then imagine an adult who, on entering a roomful of people, has a panic attack. The room is perceived as dangerous, not merely mildly unpleasant, but close to lethal. Others in that room don't perceive it this way - what's gone wrong? This is the essence of a Perception Disorder.
What circumstance could ensure that any and every human being, thrust into a roomful of strangers would feel panic, realistic panic? In what situation would what the sufferer is telling us make better sense to us than it does to them? Suppose that the person afflicted perceived themselves as very small and entirely weak - just as they did when they were two years old - their emotions would then fit this to a 'T'. Imagine being 2 feet tall, toddling rather than walking, while being outrageously weaker than these gigantic adults around you - who would not feel the need for reliable adult allies? And in their absence - terror. Terror is being perceived where none now exists
So assuming that inside every panicking adult there is a two year old failing to grow up - what would you most need to do? What would it take for a two year old not to perceive the room as dangerous - quasi-lethal? The answer is both obvious, and immediately effective - they would need, and you could readily supply, the healing hand of kindness. Technically speaking this is supporting the rational mind to defeat the irrational.
The human infant is peculiarly susceptible to trauma, and their invariable response is to pretend it's not happening to them - consequently in adult life they cannot then tell themselves that it has stopped. They deliberately disorder their perception then, to cope with that trauma, and this strategic distortion is continued into adult life, in the same way it was when the trauma first befell them. The problem is that what was a survival strategy when little, is entirely counter-productive when large. The trauma inevitably continues unacknowledged, unaddressed and therefore entirely unabated in their heads, just as it did when they were small. Far from escaping their noxious nursery, they carry it with them well into adult life, coping as best they can as they go. What a tragedy.
This strategic distortion dislocates doctors. For reasons of personal security indeed of survival the sufferer pushes all memory, all data, of the trauma to the very back of the mind. This was the device used before to 'prevent' it happening then, so it certainly is not going to be allowed to 'happen' again, now. Thus when the doctor asks what's wrong, and even suggests a problematic childhood - this is far too close to the bone, and the afflicted individual uses every device available, including murder, to deflect such painful and terrifying items from seeing the light of day. Re-traumatisation is an every day risk, and one which the sufferer will avoid at all costs.
The pathogen is fear, the antidote trust, and the lesion is infantism - namely the persisting into adult life of infantile emotion survival strategies - a type of emotional neotony. Irrationality is then defined as the application of patterns of thought derived from a different time context, which are obviously seriously out-of-date in adult life. Here the sufferer is acting and thinking in an entirely rational manner, in a way which would be entirely appropriate and realistic were they still infants, which happily they are not. Irrationality is thus co-terminous with infantism - and once emotional maturity is facilitated, it evaporates entirely.
A trustworthy bond is required to empower the rational mind to first acknowledge the irrational, then examine it and so discard it as out of date - not always an easy path, but undeniably a simple one. Every single psychiatric condition from anorexia to psychosis, from self-harm to psychopathy shows the same underlying pathology, and response. It's as if every sufferer from psychiatric symptoms is going through adult life as if they were still a child, and indeed an unwanted child at that, much as Alice Miller described in 1980 (Miller, 1980). Once given adequate support, via the healing hand of kindness, and enough gentler persuasion that today is vastly safer than yesterday, then Cognitive Emotion Therapy offers a 100% guarantee of cure, provided you finish the course, just as the elimination of all cholera cures that plague 100%.
The mind is the organ of socialising - the most important of all human organs. We need it to keep tabs on our ever expanding social networks, which can become formidably complicated, as befits a species whose sole defence and chances of survival are entirely dependent on its ability to socialise successfully. Testimony to the mind's central importance comes in the proportion of the general population who seek medical assistance from their general practitioner. Mental problems recur with vastly greater frequency in general practice than for those arising from any other organ. Indeed those clinicians who ignore the centrality of this organ do so to the decided detriment of their clientele, as happens, unfortunately with the current psychiatric 'bible' (DSM-IV, 1994), which astonishingly manages to eschew all substantive reference to it. Perhaps the reformulation called for above could start here.
Acknowledging fear or in its extreme form, terror, as the obvious mental pathogen is essential for better psychiatric practice. When terrified there is a tendency to stop thinking straight - panic takes over, and rationality leaves. And greatly to my initial astonishment, many grown men and women still do view the world through perspectives driven deeply into them in their infancy. Happily these are software problems, not hardware, and are amenable, given adequate supplies of the healing hand of kindness, to Emotional Education, such that no scar need be left from earlier childhood injuries. It is this which, as mentioned, forms the basis of the Psychiatric Certainty. Clinically speaking there is abundant evidence of infantism in psychiatric practice (Miller, op cit,), especially in the genesis of violence which is a learned disease and can be unlearnt (de Zulueta, 1993). Sadly abundance of evidence does not always suffice to ensure that clinical benefits accrue. The role of DHA in mental health is clear - adequate supplies are unquestionably required for healthy brain tissue - but where childhood malattachment prevails, even the healthiest brain can become irrational. Equally, such irrationality can be repaired given enough support, together with appropriate dietary requirements.
Working in the most coercive conditions imaginable, with men who were branded extreme 'untreatable' psychopaths, taught me that they had been born Lovable, Sociable and Non-Violent, a notion explored further elsewhere (Johnson, 2005). Their violent behaviour was not genetic, since no genes changed within the 5 years of my working there. If such disadvantaged individuals in the most coercive and deliberately mentally destabilising environment our government could devise, could yet throw off their infantile burdens, become violence-free, as they did, then there is no clinical reason why this should not apply globally.
The evidence of the success of this traumagenic approach is shown in the two graphs. It is supplemented by the fact that no alarm bells were rung for three years, down from an average of 20 a year - a unique record for any maximum security prison wing worldwide (HMSO, 1995).
Certainty has a seriously troubled history. Too many attempts to establish it have ended in costly and frequently bloody failure. The Certainty Principle is intended to provide a more viable alternative. Because living things move on their own, because they are self-movers, they can choose where to go, within clearly defined limits. Don't ask me how, or what conceivable mechanism they employ - but do ask why. And the most intriguing 'movements' of all, occur within the human mind. Now this might seem like dipping a soluble spoon into a corrosive and highly subjective stew, from which only mumbo-jumbo can emerge. But think again. If the wasp that flies in through your window can 'decide' to fly out again, then the thought that comes into my head can be made equally obedient to my 'decisions' - however that might come about.
And here is the Principal Certainty - I can decide to be consistent, or at least as consistent as I am capable of being - I can decide to be constant, I can elect to be Trustworthy, such that what I say is as near the Truth as I can make it. I can choose to be reliable and responsible, I can aspire to provide certainty and hence reliability in my immediate vicinity. I don't do this because I am forced, or coerced, I do it because I Consent to do so. I volunteer it, I select it from the infinite range of options available to me, through the astonishing facilities afforded by living cells, especially those within my cranium. I will never know how I do this, but I am well aware both that I can and what it is for. The axiom behind this Certainty is the trio of Truth, Trust and Consent (see Johnson, 2005).
Now if I can do this, then so can you. And if we all do it together, then we can begin to organise an area of certainty. Limitations will apply, they always do - but the fact that it can occur at all in our otherwise disastrously chaotic cosmos is itself part of the miracle of life. And occur it certainly can. I like to think that the writer of Leviticus (chapter 19, verse 18) had this in mind when he advised us to love our neighbour as ourselves - but I'm open to other interpretations on this point. Perhaps a graphic picture might help. Imagine a ping pong ball suspended atop a water fountain. The ball jiggles about, the water is constantly changing, while forever pushing upwards - but there is a clear element of stability, of certainty, despite all the splashings to the contrary. And this is what consciousness is really about, this is the aspiration towards which all humanity is moved. We all crave security, stability and peace of mind - and here, by delving into what living processes can do, and deflecting attention from their origins and what they 'really' are, we can see that it does come about, that it is real, rational, and what's more, healthier. The more streams of 'intent' and consent, the greater the stability, which is the essence of any real democracy.
Capturing this dynamic security through the static printed word is challenging even for the most poetic. Even videos fumble. However, the stability of the docosahexaenoic acid molecule should challenge us to greater efforts to find the same certainty in other parts of our living selves. Consciousness is indescribable, for reasons discussed - but it is currently open for exploration and on-going experience. What could be a better purpose in life than to keep exploring this utterly fascinating and endlessly creative entity, which comes free to every one of us who is awake. Let's explore, create, dream, but above all, enjoy.
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Crawford, M.A., Broadhurst, C. L., Galli, C., Ghebremeskel, K., Holmsen, H., Saugstad, L. K., Schmidt, F. S., Sinclair, A J., Cunnane, S. C. (2008). The Role of Docosahexaenoic and Arachidonic Acids as Determinants of Evolution and Hominid Brain Development. In Fisheries for Global Welfare and Environment, 5th World Fisheries Congress 2008, K. Tsukamoto, T. Kawamura, T. Takeuchi, T. D. Beard, Jr. and M. J. Kaiser, eds. pp. 57-76. Terrapub 2008.
De Zulueta, F. (1993). “From pain to violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness,” Whurr, London.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Edition, 1994 (the DSM-IV) American Psychiatric Association.
HM Prison Parkhurst. Report By HM Chief Inspector Of Prisons (1995). HMSO. ISBN 1-85893-382-X
Johnson, Bob (2005). “Emotional Health”. Trust Consent Publishing, Isle of Wight, UK. ISBN 978-0-9551985-0-2
Johnson, Bob (2006). “Unsafe at any dose”. Trust Consent Publishing, Isle of Wight, UK. ISBN 0-9551985-1-8
Miller, Alice (1980). An Anfang war Erziechung. Published in English in 1987 as “For Your Own Good, Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing - the Roots Of Violence in Child-Rearing”. Virago Press.
Moncrieff, Joanna. (2008) “The Myth of the Chemical Cure”. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230574328
Whitaker, Robert, 2002 “Mad in America”, Basic Books, New York, ISBN 0738203858
I am grateful to Professor Michael Crawford for his interest in my work, and for inviting me to contribute 'boldly' to a recent conference on which this paper is based. The original philosophical work on Kant's failure to refute Hume was completed in 1960. The 1944 Education Act which was passed in war torn Britain during drastic economic constraints was indispensable for what turned out to be an unusually universal university education without which the foregoing would, with absolute certainty, be unavailable. This generous Act has recently and unaccountably, been repealed.
Dr Bob Johnson Saturday, 10 October 2009
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