Just In Case

Sarada and I talked a bit about pronouns yesterday and tentatively agreed that a possible gender-neutral option was "mer".  Another one which has been bandied about by people I don't know was "shim".  Both of these, right now, are just bald words which might be pronouns but miss a particular feature of English pronouns to which I am very attached, namely case inflection.
It's sometimes said that English lacks case.  This isn't true.  All languages have cases, but they don't all express them by changing the words.  In English they can usually be replaced by prepositions such as "of", "to" and "with".  German is a familiar language which preserves a fairly accurate relic of how English used to be, in terms of case among other things.  One of the adult ed classes in German I attended was remarkable for the fact that when we hit the subject of case inflections, known as declensions, most of the students stopped coming because they found it too daunting.  When I tried to learn German at school, I found the dative case in particular very hard to grasp.  In fact, German is pretty straightforward with regard to declension compared to some languages, since they can have up to about thirty compared to the four of German.  Incidentally, this isn't as bad as it sounds because on the whole in a lot of languages they just amount to preposition-like endings stuck onto the ends of other words.

Back to English though.  Before the Norman conquest, English had five declined cases:  nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental.  I like the name of the last one because it makes it sound like you just stop talking while a brief snatch of music plays instead of you saying the word, but that's not actually what happens.  English still has a declension of sorts although it now contains at most three cases:  nominative, oblique and genitive.  It might become a bit clearer if I call the genitive the "possessive", which is what that in fact is.  Nowadays, nominative and oblique nouns are exactly the same in form, but pronouns are another matter.  This is how they look in present day English, including "thou":

The same applies to "who", "whose" and "whom", more or less, and the apostrophe S ending in the possessive for nouns and proper nouns.  However, the maximum number of forms an English noun can have is only four, for instance "child" and "ox", whereas a pronoun, lumping singular and plural together, can have up to eight.

English pronouns carry with them the relics of the old case system.  For instance, only the objectives end in "-m":  whom, him, them, 'em ("'em" is actually a separate pronoun and a relic of the true English pronoun which was replaced by the Old Norse "they"/"them", not an abbreviation of "them"), and "-r" in a possessive implies plurality and/or femininity.  These features were more widespread in the past and some even affected nouns.

The dative and accusative merged long ago, although the dative form of the pronouns survived rather than the accusative, so it's "whom" rather than "whone" and "him" rather than "hine" for example.  Another form which survived was "why", which is the instrumental of "what", the original having been "wherefore" but the sense has shifted.  "Why" used to have a parallel in "thy" for "that", but the more recent "thy" is unconnected.  The older "thy" however, is preserved in "the more the merrier", where the word "the" was originally the instrumental of "that".

Why am I going on about this?  Well, it's about the possibility of a new ungendered pronoun, you see.  For it to work, it has to fit into the system or it will feel unnatural, like "chairperson" instead of "chair", or, sadly "Ms" instead of "Miss/Mrs", which is particularly unfortunate.  No nominative personal pronoun in English has an R at the end although Old Norse, which gave us "they", does have such pronouns, for instance "they" itself, which was originally "þær"/"þau"/"þeir" in the nominative.  So I suppose I could imagine that "mer" originally came from Old Norse and unlike the others retained its "-r".  The Old Norse word for "two" also ends in an R in the nominative, whose feminine is "tvær", and the rest goes "tvær" again (accusative), "tveggja" (possessive or genitive) and "tveim".  All of those are decidedly un-English but would adapt to English easily:  "twain" is from the English "twegen", which is accusative.  "Tvær" is used to refer to "they two", so it is even used as a personal pronoun.  Another thought I had was "ear", which used to be "eare" and becomes "earen" in the genitive and dative.

So what does that give me?  Well, one option seems to be "mer - mer - meren - meren" like "ear" used to be.  Another is to imagine it's borrowed from Old Norse and to go with something like "mer - mer - meya - mem" or "mer - mer - mera - mem".  However, complications would also lead either to levelling or it just not being used and I'm over-complicating and engaging in mind games again.

So:

If it's going to be "mer" I suggest either "mer - mer - mers - mer" or "mer" all the way through, even for the genitive.

There's today's for you then, and I realise I've been all round the houses to come up with something really simple which any normal person would've come up with immediately, but that's my brain for you isn't it?

Gender-Neutral Pronouns And I

I'm very happy to report that in a unilateral decision, Sarada has chosen to refer to me using a gender-neutral pronoun.  Clearly it is very difficult for her to refer to me as "she" and needless to say that is my preferred pronoun, but one thing I would prefer even more is to be in a culture without gendered third person pronouns. so this is a way of harnessing my linguistic nerdiness to a common end.
In fact, the English language already has lots of gender-neutral pronouns, and in fact Sarada already refers to me using one of those, namely "you".  This wouldn't be possible in all languages by any means, for instance Arabic uses "anti" and "anta" for singular "you" depending on the gender of the addressee.  As I think I mentioned before, I personally consider the word "I" to be gendered for myself because before transition was thrust upon me I used a lower case "i", so in my idiolect, "I" is feminine and "i" masculine, since I now feel OK about myself to a considerably greater degree and am at peace with the anomalous and unique English narcissism of using a capital letter for it.  That doesn't mean, incidentally, that I think anyone else should or should not do that.  This distinction is also inaudible.

Regarding the third person, Sarada and I differ in our ideas about referring to people as "it".  I would prefer "it" to "he" regarding myself, as it feels less insulting, although it probably is a little insulting, just not so much as "he" is, which feels worse than being called "b****" or the C-word, but, oddly, slightly better than being called "sir".  That doesn't mean I think people calling me that are actively trying to upset me.  There is also a precedent for using "it" to refer to people, particularly children.  Human feti and embryos are often called "it", which when you think about it is a bit weird because at least in the first trimester they are all arguably female.  Generally though, using "it" even to refer to children nowadays seems to be frowned upon, so fair enough.

One really elaborate way round this would be to start using a language without gendered pronouns, such as my favourite language, Finnish, which when it uses subject pronouns at all will generally use "se" for the singular and "ne" for the plural, but has "hän" for the singular, rather like the Scandinavian languages.  However, the learning curve for the God Language is so steep that in spite of spending more than three decades trying to pick it up I'm still only a beginner, so the chances of Sarada and I wishing each other hyvää aamu or ordering a cup of kahve in it are small.  A somewhat easier option would be the most widely spoken language in Iran, which just uses "u" for she, it and he, I think partly because the rest of its culture is so gendered that nobody feels the need to express it in pronouns.  Malay/Indonesian also has gender-neutral third person singular pronouns.

"This", "that" and "they" are all gender-neutral.  I wouldn't mind being called "this" or "that" at all, although it would probably sound a bit odd.  "They" is a viable pronoun to use in the singular in my opinion, rather along the lines of how we use "you" for "thou" mostly even though that can be very confusing.

For a short period in the Middle Ages, I seem to recall that some dialects of English lacked gender distinction between feminine and masculine.  It was something like "a" or "ha" in the nominative, i.e. the case in which "she" is.  "She" and "he" also fell together at some point as Old English had used "heo" and "he", but that rather unhelpfully led to both of them becoming "he".

Malay/Indonesian has what is known as the T-V distinction in all pronouns, i.e. polite and informal versions.  Just as we might say "you" until we know someone well enough to call them "thou", and if you think about it that still works because saying "thou" to a stranger is likely to get them looking funny at you because they aren't yet used to how much of a weirda you are yet and don't realise you're going to do something like that, Malay/Indonesian has that for many pronouns.  If you want to show respect, you call yourself "saya", which originally meant "the slave", but once you get to know someone with whom you are on equal terms, you can start calling yourself "aku".  This applies to the third person too, where the polite form is "beliau" and the informal "dia".  That language is in fact, as Anthony Burgess, fellow language nerd, "bafflingly easy", so maybe we should just all speak it, and I mean all of us, not just us two.  There's another gap in the pronominal inventory of our speech - the word "wit"/"unc" has fallen into disuse so we have to write "us two" instead.

It seems to me that if Sarada were to start using a gender-neutral third person pronoun for me, it would automatically be a familiar or informal one like "thou", because she knows me well.  There are various suggestions for gender-neutral pronouns floating about, notably the Spivaks, but they tend to be very unsatisfactory.  Spivak pronouns, for instance, just sound like you're dropping H's to me, and "em" is also almost identical to "'em".  I quite like "thon", which is also the accusative (approximately "me", "thee", "us", "them" and "whom") form of "that", which was apparently suggested in Victorian times, and may also still exist in some dialects of English.

What Sarada et al seem to be batting around, though, is "mer".  This presumably refers to my use of names with M in them.  I've also been called "shim", which was creative, and was widely used by people I didn't know and is actually fine - the objective ending appeals to me.  Sarada is going to do what she will, naturally, as is her right, but after some initial discomfort, I've decided "mer" would be OK although it's a bit third gendery.  The reason I like it is that it sounds like the first syllable of "mermaid", "mersheep", "mergoat" (which Daniel - the Introstealer's real name - is as a Capricorn) "merman" and the like, and the metaphor of the mer-entity has been used to refer to trans people before because they're amphibious and occupy two environments.  Whereas I'm not sure about that construction, I can get on board with the idea of occupying two worlds, even if one of them was largely against my will, because you have to try to salvage something positive out of your experience.

So "mer" would be OK although I might hold out for proper declension.  In the end, it's up to her of course.

Let's retire "terrorism"

Nothing in this post should be taken as endorsing violence, by which I mean deliberately and actively inflicting physical injury or death on sentient beings.  I aspire to veganism and therefore  won't be endorsing violence, as that is a non-vegan approach to life.  Therefore I am not by any means approving of anything which is taken to fall under the umbrella term I'm about to use.  Having said that, there is a word which is heavily over-used nowadays.  That word is "terrorism".

My definition of terrorism is that it is violence committed for political ends by people whose actions are not overtly sanctioned by any government.  I've already said what I think violence is.  Politics is something else.  I would say it's the exercise of power relations and that everything has a political aspect, which makes it difficult to distinguish terrorism from other activities.  However, I would also say that simple organised crime is not terrorism, so something like Boko Haram is not really a terrorist organisation as its main focus seems to be profit rather than achieving a broader political end.  That said, clearly terrorist activity is criminal and there may be mixed motives in some activities.  Terrorist activity can also give less politicised groups ideas, such as spreading rumours of contaminated food products in order to extort money from the manufacturers.

Now to the overt sanctioning by governments.  The important word here is "overt" because of false flag operations and the like.  A violent act can be done in the name of a cause or a group without actually being done by that group or for that purpose, and in fact it may be committed in order to discredit that cause.  For instance, it has been claimed that bombs planted by animal liberation groups are in fact planted by their opponents.  Whether or not that specific claim is true, the idea is out there.  The UK has some very questionable allies which do appear to be funding terrorist activity, even against the West, but of course covertly.  Therefore, covert sanctioning by government needs to be included.  Incidentally, this of course means that the idea of a terrorist state is close to being incoherent as that would be a state engaging in activity which it does not engage in, although clearly authoritarian states which lack the consistent rule of law could do something like that.  In fact, if a state is authoritarian or totalitarian, much of its activity may well be fully and openly endorsed, but where it includes the likes of conscription, judicial murder, torture and police brutality, the fact that it is activity endorsed by the state is not likely to be of any comfort to its victims.

So let's remember, shall we, what we mean when we say terrorism?  It isn't good, but nor is it necessarily different from a lot of other things morally speaking which are not sufficiently disapproved of.

Suppose, though, there is such a thing as terrorism and we want it to stop.  There are clearly aspects of terrorism where there is a profound conflict of values, so it might seem at first that this could only occur after the fact and that the urge to commit such acts is deterred by strong action against acts which do occur.  Scanning people before they step on planes or making it harder to post Anthrax or ricin come to mind, although it doesn't take a genius exactly to work around those measures so I can only presume they exist to prevent panic or to be seen to be doing something which really amounts to nothing.

One of the things I dislike about being a herbalist is that I usually find myself dealing with pre-existing medical problems.  Healing people when they actually have a condition is a rear-guard action.  It can mean that something has already gone wrong.  Turning to crime, I was very disappointed when I researched the prevention of stalking, because what that seems to be about is finding people who are potential stalkers and stopping them in spite of their urges to stalk still being in place.  Would it not be better for people not to have got ill in the first place and for people to have the emotional intelligence and maturity not to want to stalk people?

This applies equally to terrorism.  'Les Damnes de la Terre' if I remember correctly, and it isn't exactly bedtime reading, says that all other avenues should be explored before violence is considered.  If there are in fact very few such avenues, as might be the case where the main political parties are mere clones of each other, it's not terribly surprising if terrorism is on the rise.  That clearly does not account for the likes of people who behead the victims, yes, the victims, of crime or kidnap children to use as slaves or child soldiers.  Here the value system seems to differ considerably from mine and I can't pretend to be able to sympathise with it.  However, I would say this situation is at least sometimes exacerbated by poverty and lack of education along with the perceived exploitation of the areas in question by Western powers.  If a different state of affairs was in place, it would at least be an interesting experiment, which has never been tried, to see if non-state sanctioned violent activity for political ends happened less often, and I suspect it would in fact decline.

All of this has come up because of a recent news item which claimed that the new "anti-terrorist" legislation will include expectations that childminders will spy on their charges for potential signs of "terrorist" activity.  What would be good is if there were real anti-terrorist legislation, i.e. legislation which made governments more accountable to the people, ensured a fairer deal for the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet and so forth, but instead we have this.  Hence the word "anti-terrorist" is a misnomer.  It does not actually refer to measures likely to reduce terrorism at all.

Therefore, maybe it's time to place the word "terrorism" into the category of a slur word like "bitch" and the N word.  Maybe when we hear the word terrorist we should replace it mentally with "violent activity pursued for political ends without the overt sanction of any government" and see if it still makes sense, or whether it's just being used as a word to paralyse thought and replace it with a mob mentality which doesn't do anything to address the actual problem.

Moss Animals - Prefab Sprouts Of The Animal Kingdom?

Further to yesterday's conversation about oysters, a brief exchange about jellyfish ensued and I suddenly remembered these:

"Flustra foliacea" by Hans Hillewaert - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flustra_foliacea.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Flustra_foliacea.jpg

You'll probably have seen these washed up on beaches and thought they were a kind of seaweed.  They're really, really not.  This is hornwrack, Latin name Flustra foliacea, and despite its name it's a colony of small animals, about the size of mites, known as a moss animal, bryozoan or ectoproct.

They also live in fresh water.  Here's Cristatella mucedo:

"Cristatella mucedo 2014 11 10 a14" by Lamiot - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cristatella_mucedo_2014_11_10_a14.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Cristatella_mucedo_2014_11_10_a14.JPG

This is often mistaken for a string of pond snail eggs, and in fact I may just possibly have made that very mistake.  Again, it's a colony of small animals related to hornwort.  Unlike hornwort, though, the whole colony can creep along very slowly.

Some other ectoprocts look like this, but are less blurry:

(I can't attribute this image as the author of the book didn't).

These animals are about as far as you can get from something looking like a sloth or an aardvark, which might be why they tend not to be thought of as animals at all, and they do various things quite like the way plants do as well.  They are also very strange in a variety of ways, one of which is the way they excrete waste.  Whereas many animals produce stools which they then expel from their bodies, and incidentally that's not pure excretion because some of that has been eaten and hasn't changed, ectoprocts do something quite different.  Oddly, because "ectoproct" refers to the fact that they have an anus outside a ring of tentacles on each little animal, or "zooid", rather than inside it like the entoprocts:

(My drawing, sorry it's such a mess.  Incidentally, although I haven't used the technical terms for the labels, I have in fact labelled them as what they are).

An ectoproct colony is a collection of these.

You can see the anus clearly labelled.  However, rather than using that normally, what zooids actually do is fill up with excrement until it poisons them, then they die, then a new animal grows around the stool/corpse and ends up pushing it out through its anus.  Therefore, in a way ectoprocts give birth to the dead bodies of their parents.  I find this delightfully bizarre.

Other somewhat surprising things about ectoprocts mainly relate to how they're plant-like.  They capture sperm in their flower-like rings of tentacles which then fertilise their internal eggs, which I think is pretty similar to pollination of flowers.  They also overwinter as little seed-like forms called statoblasts, from which new colonies grow in the spring.  I mean let's face it, these animals have a bit of an identity issue, haven't they?  They seem to have forgotten they're animals at all and when people see them they think they're something other than what they are, such as strings of snail eggs or seaweeds.  However, they are in fact animals.  There's also another lot of unrelated animals like these called the entoprocts, which do the same kind of thing, and it took people a long time to realise they weren't just the same kind of animals, but they aren't.  Then again, if they're both animals masquerading as plants, plants are pretty distantly related to either of them, so maybe it's not that surprising that if one lot of animals ends up like this, a completely different lot will too.

What that means, in fact, is that somewhere in the space of ways in which living things can be, there's a kind of "planthood", and therefore we can probably expect other planets to host the likes of flowers, moss, seaweed and the like, except that on those other planets it might be that that they're all animals while the vegetables rampage about the landscape munching them up for dinner.  Nonetheless I won't be having them for dinner, partly because I doubt they're good conversationalists, oh, except that the entoprocts actually phone each other up, but that's another story (I'm not kidding by the way) and one which is only slightly more interesting than one of their interminable phone calls, so I'll leave it for now.

If there is some kind of abstract blueprint for plant-like things out there somewhere in the mind of the Atheon, who knows what else there might be.  Maybe a gender stereotype blueprint?  Or a pinkprint even?

Anyway, that wasn't what I was going to talk about with moss animals.  This is.  As a child, I can remember seeing hornwrack on the beach and wondering how it managed to make food considering it wasn't green, red or brown and of course the answer was that it didn't make food because it wasn't seaweed.  More confusingly though, another thing I did as a child, before I was veggie obviously, was to fish what I thought were strings of snail eggs on river weed out of the water and look at them under the microscope to see what I thought were snail embryos.  But did I?  How do I know I wasn't looking at moss animal zooids?  My memory is good enough for me to recall that the things I was looking at were dark against a light background and moving in a manner I thought suggested they had hearts, but for all I know they might have been zooids.  I doubt they were, but that's because it's too interesting, so that's like doubting the sound of hooves is zebras rather than donkeys.  So for me, this is partly about memory being unreliable and my resistance to the temptation to believe I experienced something more exotic than I really did.

Talking of exotic, another thing about ectoprocts is that they're the largest minor phylum.  A phylum is the largest classification of animals below the animal kingdom itself, not counting all the "sub" and "super" things like subkingdoms and superphyla.  It generally represents a broad body plan, so for example vertebrates are a subphylum and molluscs are another.  In keeping with something like the 80:20 rule I've mentioned before, there are a few really big phyla and loads of really small ones.  The really big phyla are the chordates (including the vertebrates), echinoderms, annelids, molluscs, arthropods, nematodes, platyhelminthes, cnidaria and the porifera (sponges) - I don't think I've missed any, but fewer than ten anyway.  Then there are the so-called minor phyla, of which there are probably about forty or fifty.  Some of these are really tiny, such as the priapulids, which have maybe eight species altogether compared to, say, more than a million species of arthropods, although they used to be more common.  There's a big gap between the big phyla and the minor phyla in terms of numbers.  One of the minor phyla, the brachiopods, used to be one of the big players before it got successfully competed with by the incredibly similar bivalve molluscs, and the priapulids used to be quite common too, but the rest always seem to have been small.  Of the minor phyla, the biggest is in fact the ectoprocts.

Naturally, I find ectoprocts interesting, and this reflects something about the way my brain works because of course ectoprocts are a minor phylum, albeit one big enough for a child to come across fairly regularly.  In fact, I find I always do this in other areas of my life.  The musical equivalent of moss animals seems to be Prefab Sprout, and like moss animals their music tends to be associated with irony.  Somehow, I always seem to back the loser, with the result that my interests tend to be obscure and arcane despite my best efforts.  This pervades my whole life.  I don't actually care, although it can be mildly annoying, but nor do I understand how it happens.  Birdwatching, for example, I find very boring because birds are too ordinary to be interesting.  Bryozoa, on the other hand, I find utterly fascinating.  The Beatles are good, and of course I like Abba, but I also like Prefab Sprout and Steely Dan, and I cannot see why others don't.  In science fiction, well, I've read a bit of Heinlein but my real favourite is Olaf Stapledon.  With painting, I don't particularly like Picasso but I love Roberto Matta.  And I am not doing this on purpose, honestly.  What's that about?

Theintrostealer

Eighteen years ago today, Theintrostealer emerged from his mother's abdomen by the highly unusual route also taken by his sister and became my favourite son.  I took him out of the operating room and placed him on a table.  He looked interested and involved.  Unlike his sister, he didn't seem to expect an immediate nipple insertion.  I lifted his bum and scooted a nappy underneath him for the first of several hundred times.  I noticed he looked a lot more like his mother than his sister.

It's actually really good having a son as well as a daughter.  Apart from the fact that his very existence is phenomenally marvellous, and I focus on him as an individual in his own right, it became impossible for me to maintain my externalised male-hating because how the heck could I possibly do anything other than totally love the fruit of my loins?  The male fruit of my loins.

What else can I say about him?  Well, I could write a book, obviously, and it still wouldn't begin to capture his essence.  One thing I do wonder about him, though, is the extent to which he's eighteen.  In a way, he could be a lot older than that.

At the age of nine, I thought that if I ever had a son, and at the time I imagined that child emerging from my own body rather than someone else's, I would call him by Theintrostealer's real name.  Subject to approval by the other parent of course.  Therefore, in a sense the child of that name already had the first brick of his essence in place.  That brick could have been washed away by Sarada's disapproval or the absence of a Y chromosome in the relevant zygote, but as it happened, that bit survived and he did in fact get called by that name.  All sorts of other things contributed to his existence, including a prodigious number of atoms which already existed somewhere out there in the Universe, although where they were is another question.

When he was born, his body was composed entirely of matter which had passed through Sarada's body.  As soon as he took his first breath, that changed, but for many months afterward all of the matter composing his body, with the possible exception of a minute quantity of colostrum, had previously been part of Sarada.  There is something very satisfying about that fact:  he was "all her own work", as it were.

So that's it really.  We no longer have children, except of course that we still have children.  It's just that they are no longer officially minors.  One might expect that to be celebrated by the consumption of certain gone off vegetable- or fruit-derived liquids by the said ex-minor, but in fact that didn't happen as he's not a fan of the sauce.

We are now theoretically at liberty to become little old shrivelled excrescences of our former selves, but in fact that won't be what happens because they still want us around.  We aren't yet in our dotage.  However, one remarkable thing about Sarada's and my relationship is that it hardly got off the ground before Sleepoversweet came along, so we don't in fact know what it's like for the two of us not to have children.  We're about to find out.

Oysters Aren't Vegan

I'm not linking to them, but there are pages on the web claiming oysters are vegan, or at least only technically non-vegan.  I disagree with this rather strongly, but the argument is that since an oyster has no brain, it's unable to suffer and is therefore ethically at the same level as a plant.

You probably know I'm panpsychist, but I can still leave that aside and make an argument against eating oysters.  Oyster nervous systems consist of a number of nerve centres connected by nerve fibres.  They are able to sense chemicals in the water, concentration of salt and somehow the position of Cynthia.  An oyster on land will know when it would be high tide if the sea was covering its location, even if that location is thousands of nautical miles from the nearest body of salt water.  I have no idea how it does this.  They have tentacles and something called a pallial organ, both of which are sense organs, and they have an adductor muscle which pulls the shell shut when a possible threat is perceived.  Effectively, they have a sense of taste.  If certain predators are nearby, they pick up their taste in the water and slam shut, and they also respond to bitter substances in the water and changes in salinity.  What they don't do, of course, is move away from threats or towards light, darkness or food.

There are similar molluscs which do move around, notably scallops.  Scallops swim through the water by opening and closing their shells, and they swim away from potential predators.  If you see a shellfish belting hell for leather through the water pursued by something which wants to eat it, you would probably easily be able to imagine that it is conscious and fleeing for its life in terror.

Now consider the oyster again.  It sits on a rock and slams shut when it perceives a threat.  It doesn't swim through the water because it's stuck to a rock, but it does respond in the only way it can.  It will contract its adductor muscle and close its shell.

Back to the scallop.  It's not stuck to a rock, but it too will slam shut when it perceives a threat, then it will open again, shut again and continue, thereby propelling itself through the water.  It moves like the things we more often tend to think of as animals move, so we're more likely to be able to relate to it as being afraid or sentient.

This happens with humans too.  Many humans would run away if their lives were threatened.  But what about someone with locked in syndrome?  They're able to hear, feel, touch, taste and so on.  The only thing they can't do is move voluntarily.  Suppose you're lying in bed and you hear the doctors near you, or more likely your relatives, discussing whether to turn off your life support.  You can't run away because you have locked in syndrome, but presumably the heart monitor would show an increase in pulse rate and your blood pressure would rise, and there would probably be more adrenalin in your bloodstream, as a result of your sensation of hearing people discussing ending your life.

I would contend for the sake of this bit of this entry that oysters are an example of an entire species with locked in "syndrome", i.e. in their healthy state they are unable to move their entire bodies, but their reactions to sensations are otherwise similar to other bivalves to which we would have no problem attributing consciousness.

However, there is a further problem.  Venus fly traps, like oysters, snap shut when they are stimulated in a particular way, and they're plants.  Does this mean they are also sentient?  I would actually say yes.  So the question then arises of why I eat plants if they might be able to suffer.  The answer is that plants are on a lower tropic level, i.e. they consume fewer resources during their lives.  Hence their consumption would harm or kill fewer organisms than the consumption of animals regardless of whether they are sentient or not.  It takes more land to raise a cow than the equivalent calories and nutrients usable from wheat plants because the latter don't move around as much.

Oysters are filter feeders.  They eat other animals and plants which do move around.  Therefore, eating oysters is likely to harm more animals than eating the same nutrition in plant form of any kind with the possible exception of insectivorous plants.

That is why consciousness is not the only reason why veganism is a good idea, and that's why oysters are not vegan.

Bifurcation

"Polyommatus bellargus male, Aveyron, France - Diliff" by Diliff - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polyommatus_bellargus_male,_Aveyron,_France_-_Diliff.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Polyommatus_bellargus_male,_Aveyron,_France_-_Diliff.jpg

The butterfly catastrophe is not to be confused with the butterfly effect, which is a good film although I can't bear to watch the sequels, and also the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can cause a hurricane on the other side of the planet.  However, it is in the same general subject area.  However, I want to wind back a bit.

There's a psychological phenomenon known as "splitting", or black and white thinking.  I've habitually done it a lot.  When I look back on it, I feel like I've behaved in a very computery manner, dealing with ones and zeroes in a very clunky way which isn't really human.  When I do it, though, it seems quite sensible and feels like a simple way of coping with the world.  In fact it isn't that at all and it also makes life more complicated for other people because they then have to deal either with me directly or the consequences of this all or nothing thinking.  Human beings really are not computers, and neither is the human mind a computer.  It just looks a bit like one sometimes.

So there's this thing out there called catastrophe theory, as you probably know because I keep going on about it, or you might know already.  It includes all sorts of fun graphs like this one, called the "cusp catastrophe":

As you can see from my diagram, there is a smooth transition on the top left hand side in the form of a slope.  This is the opposite of splitting.  The other two arrows represent a fork in the road, as it were - you end up doing the "all or nothing" thing, and the overhang, which is kind of symmetrical if you think of the graph the other way up, means that once you're in that position, you can't easily jump to the other one until the variable in question is lower than it would be to get you into that position.  In other words, the system in question, in this case the human mind, has a memory for what it's been through and finds it difficult to let go.

The bit at the bottom is known as the "bifurcation set".  It's a projection of the fork in the road you take when you start to split.  Remember that word "bifurcation".

I'm now going to go off on an apparent tangent about eating disorders.  Now I have never suffered from an eating disorder and only have a limited degree of empathy with them although my eating has occasionally very mildly disordered like many other people's, for instance in the form of comfort eating or not wanting certain bits of me to get any bigger so that their size doesn't distress a certain person, so I apologise for this possibly dodgy view, but it has seemed to some people that some other people with eating disorders generally had "split" behaviour in that some of them either fasted or binged and purged in a cycle, and couldn't enter the easier cycle some other people did where they simply ate when they were hungry until they were full, then stopped, and therefore food was not a big issue for them in this way.  Such people, and I'm basically one of them, without disordered eating right now, are on the "slope" side of the graph.  Others, such as people with bulimia, are on the "cusp" side:  they can't get into an intermediate state.

This is going to sound a bit vague because I can't remember the details, but there is another catastrophe graph, in fact there are a lot of them, but one of them is called the "butterfly catastrophe" and it looks like this (sorry about the cruddy sketch):

This graph has more variables and is therefore more than three dimensional, which makes it hard to draw.  However, the crucial thing about it from the point of view of what I'm trying to say is the bit at the bottom, which is the bifurcation set, and in this case there are three possibilities rather than two, so in a sense this is a three-storey graph rather than the previous two-storey cusp catastrophe graph, with an intermediate stable state.  For someone with an eating disorder of the kind described above, there are three choices provided there are extra variables, and those extra variables can apparently be introduced by therapy of some kind, creating this third state which involves neither fasting nor the binge-purge cycle but the kind of behaviour on the same level as the middle of the smooth transition on the other side of the graph.

Another thing about eating disorders is that I can imagine that your subconscious would move the goal posts.  You lose a bit of weight, but it's not enough and you end up looking unsatisfactory to yourself, so you lose more, then you see it again as not enough and so on, taking you ever further away from the original state, so it's an unstable unhealthy state like so many others.

I think that what's happening in my brain, and those of other people, when I do "all-or-nothing" thinking, can be remedied by introducing an extra variable, which depending on the problem could be all sorts of things.

I think the variable in my case is some kind of stress.  I think stress, possibly anxiety, pushes me into that bifurcated way of thinking.  It's like that "umpf" causes my mind to behave like a computer and start going into black and white like an old television set with poor reception.  If I want to behave like a human being instead, I need to avoid that "umpf" and go and live on the smooth side of the graph.  Alternatively, I could be all poetic and turn the catastrophe into a butterfly.

For me living on that black and white bifurcated side of the graph also involves being forced to wear only bifurcated lower garments.  To live on the smooth side, well away from that fork, I am able to wear lower garments which are not bifurcated.

There is also a moving of the goalposts.  At first, doing one or two things to relieve my self-disgust is enough.  I should rephrase that actually.  When you're depressed, and I've done this in the past, you quite often end up smelly, dirty and dishevelled, because you couldn't care less, you stop washing, you can't be bothered to seek out clean clothes or do your washing, and for people with male bodies, you might not shave.  We do need to be detached from our appearance, but it's hard to escape that and even no image is an image anyway, so perhaps it's impossible.  Being smelly, dirty and unshaven may well make you feel worse anyway, and other people's reaction to it might make you feel even worse.  Been there, done that, naturally.  Therefore, back in the day, stubble implied depression for me.  If I had a beard, and it horrifies me to think I did at some points but I did, it generally meant I was even further down, clawing ineffectively at the bottom of some well of despair on the lower side of that cusp catastrophe graph, unable to escape.  If I shaved, I felt a bit better.  If I also shaved my wrists and ankles, I felt even better.  Hiding all the hairy bits of me other than my head was also an improvement.  Removing almost all of my body hair was still better.  As time goes by, more and more changes make me feel better and better, and I realise that there's a direct connection between being able to perceive myself as female and my self-esteem, so that's what I do.

But here's the rub.  My subconscious is moving the goalposts.  I need to do more and more to be satisfied with myself.  I hope I reach a point of equilibrium, or rather of self-acceptance when I can say "this is enough".  I will of course never bear children, and that's something I found very hard to deal with for a long time, but although I still feel that yearning I can at least satisfy myself with the fact that I have two children, even though - well, I don't have to go there.

I didn't want to make this about me, so in the same way that I don't have to go there, I don't have to go there either.  However, I think there's a process in my mind at least which makes me more like a computer, but in the other direction I can be human, and to me of course human means female, the unpoisoned mind.  Which is not to say that maleness is toxic to other people, but it is to me.  All sorts of other things are going on in people's minds which do similar things to them, but they don't share my mind and I don't share theirs, but I'd be prepared to bet that there is a similar variable in other people's minds which pushes them into all sorts of black and white extremisms, and they can find a key to that to become happier and more able to grow.