Moral Panics, Tutors and Deponent Verbs

This blog is of course supposed to be about home ed and herbs, so here's a few thoughts about the former.

There's been a letter doing the rounds recently regarding families who have not currently opted into the school system purporting to warn people about tutors who are on the sex offenders register.  This has become somewhat controversial because it's been sent to EHE ("elective home educating") families when families who have elected for schooling also use private tutors, so the question arises of whether it has also been sent to them, which it may have been, and if not, why not.  As I say, it may have been.  Another thought is that it may be an attempt to sow FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - among home edders who are not confident they can deal with something like maths or a foreign language on their own and wish to recruit outside help.  It may be the usual process of trying to talk down someone's self-belief to the point where they feel a need to rely on the school system.  It's not exactly a recipe for self-assured and mentally healthy families.  Again, I'm not attributing intention here so much as looking at possible consequences.  To spout yet another cliche, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  I'm merely reporting a probable effect of such a letter on perhaps isolated families.  Just as Microsoft might want people to buy their software rather than use perfectly serviceable free alternatives, and consequently talk about things like the Total Cost of Ownership, i.e. the idea that people will have to spend time learning how things are done outside Microsoft's little proprietary bubble rather than sticking to the familiar and that this will cost time and therefore money in training and errors, so might the local authority want people to go to their schools.  The bureaucracy has a stake in feeding itself and perpetuating its dominance, even if subconsciously.

Sarada and I have now been involved in education otherwise than at school since the Lib Ed conference in summer 1993, and so we have had a lot of experience offering our services as facilitators of education, which I suppose is fairly similar to being tutors in some ways.  Children who come to us often leave, for example, knowing more Spanish or German than they did previously or being able to get GCSEs in chemistry, so we are presumably doing something right on occasion.  In case you're unfamiliar with the way home ed tends to work, perhaps because you haven't read this blog much, it needn't be done in isolation and frequently people avail themselves of each others' skills and talents where they currently lack the confidence to do it for themselves.

This might at first sound like we're tutors.  At this point, I will digress into Latin, because after all classical languages are one of the things I offer as a tutor.  Let's look at that word "tutor", or should I type TVTOR?  It is of course a Latin word.

You may remember a few entries back that I mentioned in passing that Afrikaans, whatever its faults and political connotations, has the virtue of using the same verb for teach and learn (penultimate paragraph).  Well, there is a whole class of verbs in some languages which has a similar kind of ambiguity - the deponent verb.  First of all, the active, middle and passive voices need to be understood.  The active voice is something like "I hit the ground", the passive is "I was hit by the ground" and the middle includes such things as "the ground and I hit each other".  If English wasn't a Germanic language pretending to be Chinese, the word "hit" in each of these would have a different form as is so in, for example, Swedish.  Latin expresses the passive voice by changing endings, so for instance we have the famous:

which is the active voice but also this:

And of course there's the gerund "amanda" - "a female worthy of love"!  Latin has no middle voice, incidentally, so it does have some grammar in common with English.

Some Latin verbs (and the same applies to all sorts of other languages) are passive in form but active in meaning - they have no grammatically active voice and always look as if they're describing something being done to rather than actively doing (which sounds a bit like my life).  I find these interesting because to me they usually have some connotation which explains that.  Examples of deponent Latin verbs include moror - die; loquor - talk; conor - try; orior - arise.  It would be easy to imagine connotations here which just aren't there but even so, I would say that a conversation involves being spoken to as well as speaking, hence loquatiousness is something we do together and it also is, I would hope, understood, so speaking is a cooperative activity involving agreement on meaning and intention.  Dying is something one isn't around to experience once it's done.  In this case something similar happens in English:  people are dead in cenetaries, but they aren't dying, on the whole, there, so living and dying are not two opposite activities, there's just "being dead", a passive state, hence mori.  Conor is less clear to me but orior makes more sense as rising seems to me to be something which sort of happens to you.  The elective home education staff have arisen in this blog and the discussion without them being willing to do so.  Nonetheless it has been they who are doing the arising.  The subject of fear, uncertainty and doubt has arisen here too.  And so on, she says as ungrammatically as the King James Bible, that well known bastion of illiteracy.

Anyway, we have this Latin word "tutor", which is apparently a deponent verb, so when you "tutor" someone, or when you are a tutor, you are engaging in an activity which is grammatically passive but actually active.  The word "tutor" originally meant "guardian" or "custodian".  So, when I am tutoring children, and I'm not sure I ever really am, I am protecting them and also engaging in "learning" them - we are learning together.  This meaning is not trivial.

The sessions which I've held with parents and children have usually involved the children being there with their parents or other children's parents, or of course the parents trusting me enough to leave them in my care. The main function of schooling is childcare, so it stands to reason that a parent might want to leave a child with me if she needs to do something which would be harder to do with that child.  I'm going to use this afternoon's Spanish session as an example here.  I don't know exactly what's going to happen but a typical session involves several parents turning up with their children, and, and this is the crucial thing, staying with them for the duration of the session.  This is because parents enjoy sharing activities with their children and it also has the practical effect of completely booting the idea of the children being at risk out of the window, unless you are completely paranoid and assume that all us home edders are running a pedophile ring, in which case you're probably unreachable by rational persuasion.  It also has the practical effect of parents and children learning together, which means that when they go away, rather than having to recall something which may or may not have happened in a school classroom decades previously, they're sharing a recent memory of something which they all enjoyed.  And regarding child safety, well, even if the parents are taking advantage of the willingly offered childcare aspect of the session, the other parents who are staying act as a near guarantee of their safety.

The tutors are also deponent of course.  We may learn, for example, that some children are intimidated by questions but learn by osmosis whereas others thrive on showing off their knowledge.  We may learn that sometimes we give too much information:

Child:  Mum, what would we do it we weren't alive?
Mum:  Why do you ask?
Child:  Because I want to know.
Mum:  Why don't you ask your father?
Child:  because I don't want to know that much!

Yes, that is from personal experience, on both sides.

Hence a certain letter from a certain official body whose effect, never mind the cause, is likely to be that fear, uncertainty and doubt will arise (orior) among parents about a tutor, isn't really anything to worry about in a home ed community where skills are shared and learning involves children, parents and adult friends.  But most of you already knew that, didn't you?

T.E.E.T.H. And Getting What You Pay For

When someone trained as a healthcare practitioner of any kind in the past (I'm not sure about now), they learned various abbreviations and acronyms such as NAD (Nothing Abnormal Detected), GCS (Glasgow Coma Scale) and U's & E's (Urea and Electrolytes) so that they didn't have to spend the whole day scribbling this stuff down.  Herbalists are no different because clearly we need to communicate with other professionals and in a medical context it's not a good idea to make up your own shorthand because it may confuse others and then people could die.  I wouldn't generally have much need to use GCS, for example, myself, although it might come up in the previous medical history section of a patient's notes.

People also use slang of course, and doctors are no exception.  Therefore there are various other initialisms floating about which are less officially sanctioned, often with dubious connotations.  For instance, there is JPFOOG - Just Plain F-----g Out Of Gas - for a patient who is obviously going to die soon, considered in a holistic way come to think of it, because clearly action can be taken and heartbeat and oxygen can be sustained as a result, but it won't do them any good because they've had it.  You can already feel, presumably, the somewhat dismissive and harsh tone taken there, but please be reassured that it isn't mine, and at least that abbreviation offers some degree of protection to the feelings of relatives.  Another one is GROLIES - Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence In Ethnic Skirt - which might describe me.  A lot of them have F's in them.  Fortunately, these abbreviations are in decline, hopefully due to increasing respect for patients but possibly due to the fear of being found out, although at least that fear might cleanse medical subculture of such approaches.  Also, they probably express things like frustration at limited concordance and just the way people are, and it's true of course that people can be annoying, but I can guarantee you that I have never used an abbreviation like that.  To be cynical of course, a doctor gets paid anyway so when a so-called "heart sink" patient comes through the door it can have that effect, but in my case a patient usually means a couple of things - an interesting new acquaintance, someone whose life story I want to know and someone I want to help, and also of course, someone who is about to give me money.

One acronym, however, which is close to my heart, is "TEETH":  Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy.  I imagine the colouring of this particular thing is that nothing at all will help someone's health condition, so in the doctor's view the next stage is literally to try nothing at all, i.e. the allopathic and quasi-sceptical view of what constitutes homeopathy.  I'm not going into that now but you might want to conjecture that my own view of homeopathy is not the same as that of the average soi disant "skeptic" (spelt the American way of course for reasons that aren't obvious without veering off-topic).  It makes complete sense to me to replace the word H stands for there with "herbalism", and this acknowledges an important truth.  My patients have often tried everything else to no avail.  Herbalism is often a last resort to them, even after CAM therapies have been tried.  This can mean, of course, that all the "easy" problems have been weeded out ("a weed is a plant growing where you don't want it" - well I want those weeds, figuratively and literally) and I'm left with the toughest nuts to crack, to mix metaphors but stay in the vegetable kingdom.  Note, by the way, that it's the cases which are the nuts and not the patients.

It might then be thought that I am then left with a load of patients I can't help.  It might even be thought that I am using this argument to justify an appointment diary full of patients whom I can't help because my chosen therapy just doesn't work.  Obviously I'm not going to believe that, if only for psychological reasons, but I do also believe that it's rational not to believe that - dare I say be sceptical about the idea that herbalism doesn't work?  This is because in my experience, the opposite is so.  Patients come to me, I do my thing with them and their health improves.  When I say it improves, what I mean is that not only does it improve subjectively - they feel better - but also in measurable ways.  High blood pressure goes down, peak flow goes up, excessive thyroid hormone levels sink, areas of skin affected by skin diseases reduce, joints move further and hair grows back.  You can see it happening.  Of course, many conditions improve without intervention but after someone has had something for many years and it just happens to improve when they come to see me, I would say that means something.

I mentioned before that I am very happy to see people who, among other things, are about to give me money.  Well, this works both ways.  To a considerable degree, you get what you pay for.  Sarada and I were recently offered counselling free to us and decided to turn it down because we believed that we would value it less and it wouldn't work as well. We are people with relatively little faith in the accuracy of money as a standard of measurable value - it's incredible what people are willing to pay for and what they aren't willing to pay for.  Nonetheless it does influence us, and free counselling lacks the added value of being expensive to the person benefitting from it.  We turned it down, and of course that may have been a bad decision, but the point is this:  if a patient perceives herself (incidentally on the comment yesterday, yes, most of my patients are female) to be paying for my treatment, she may get better more quickly for that very reason.  She values it more.

This is an advantage over the National Health Service, because although we do all pay for it, in VAT if nothing else, we often don't perceive ourselves to be paying for it.  Consequently, people often do get better more quickly if they pay for something.  Therefore, in a sense you get what you pay for.

Of course, this may be a comforting myth so that I can continue to fleece the public, but what would be good, and I don't know how this could be done, would be to find a way to divorce the act of monetary payment from its effect.  If we can get better on our own if we pay for something, even sugar pills or water (that's not a comment on homeopathy incidentally, but on orthodox clinical trials of medicine which need to eliminate the placebo effect), surely it would be useful to research how this effect can be separated from the actual need to pay?  Someone could still be paid of course, perhaps to train the person to deploy the placebo effect consciously.

To finish, then, don't insult your patients, try herbalism before you've tried everything else, and if you can pay, do, because it will help you.

NHS Doctors And Herbalists

Herbalists are not doctors and it's a criminal offence to claim to be a doctor unless you really are one.  This is slightly muddied by the fact that you might have a PhD instead of an MD, but clearly if you're calling yourself "Dr Smith" and practicing as a herbalist when your doctorate is actually in Mesopotamian potsherds, it could be said that you're not behaving with much integrity.  This is about medical doctors.

Nonetheless doctors and herbalists often do have a lot in common, although many herbalists tend to be ex-pharmacists rather than doctors.  I can't speak for other herbalists but I have no personal dispute with doctors and I hope they haven't with me.  It would in any case be unprofessional to engage in such a slanging match, not to mention disrespectful.  Picture a doctor spending long hours on a night shift attending to patients, having to fill in reams of paperwork, or just not being able to do her job properly because of the way the organisation she works for is structured.  She could be forgiven, to say the least, to think about all the alternative and complementary practitioners tucked up in bed as a violent patients takes a swing at her at three in the morning or she has to tell someone her child has died.  It's not an enviable job.

In this country, we have the NHS, and I'm not about to criticise them, but comparing herbalists to doctors here usually means comparing privately practicing herbalists to doctors working for the NHS.  Due to circumstances outside the NHS itself, GPs have to abide by certain rules which means consultations must be extremely brief and only one problem can be presented at a time.  This has a number of knock-on effects.  Whereas doctors often become extremely skilled at rapid diagnosis and planning, the time available to perform physical examinations is very limited.  Consequently it must be very easy to become de-skilled in such areas, and this means referrals for investigations, for that reason or through simple lack of time.  Investigations cost money and can create further problems.  For example, a barium enema uses very strong X-rays meaning that most of the torso is exposed to ionising radiation to a considerable degree over a considerable period of time, with all the risks that entails.  Such investigations can also be very expensive.  On the other hand, a longer period of time spent with a doctor examining the abdomen and having taken a history focussed on gastrointestinal matters would usually reveal the probable cause, and more invasive investigations can produce false positives and false negatives in any case.

I regularly spend several hours with a patient.  I'm able to do this because I get paid for it directly by the patient and because the demand for my services is limited, but it does mean I'm able to build up a very detailed picture of their health and they get listened to, I hope, and perhaps head off problems which would otherwise become very serious and need a lot more resource-hungry intervention.

This is where it gets complicated though.  This picture of waylaid doctors versus laid-back CAM people (and I must remember to say at some point why I'm not sure herbalism is CAM at all incidentally, not to the detriment of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, she adds hastily!) suggests a change in orthodox health services where the GPs spend more time with patients and perform physical examination and the like more often.  This clearly would mean fewer radical and more expensive interventions later and more crucially less suffering and greater quality of life, but the question arises of what the break-even point would be.  Clearly a GP can't be regularly expected to spend an entire day with a patient and it would not be a sensible use of resources to do that.  At some point, though, there must be an optimal solution to the problem.

In the real world, what usually happens with herbal consultations is that patients are already seeing a doctor and taking pure-ish medicines (I should come back to that too).  We actually work with that situation all the time.  Consequently our task involves caution with prescribing herbs which may interact with those medicines, and it is of course at best a decision between the patient and the doctor what they do with that kind of medication.

If it did turn out that herbalists became part of the NHS at some point, I suspect what would happen is that we would no longer be able to devote so much attention to the patient as we currently do.  This leaves me with a quandary because it means I am in a way committed to private medicine when I don't want to be.  I don't really know what to do about that.

What's A Herbalist's Role?

Here's the spiel I give people who enquire about what I do, with minor variations:

"I interview people about their health problems, taking a full medical history and doing any physical examination which is necessary, then prescribe and dispense herbs and give lifestyle advice".  There are then follow-up consultations, usually, which are broken down in terms of the subjective (what the patient experiences), objective (what can be agreed to be experienced), action (what needs to be done now) and plan (what needs to be done in future).  This second bit is less structured than the first.

The training I have in terms of the interview and physical examination itself is comparable to the first three years of a medical degree.  This is starting to sound like a leaflet, isn't it?  Anyway, another way I describe the work is "like a doctor except that I use herbs instead of pure drugs".  I should point out that no-one who is not an officially qualified and registered doctor can legally claim to be one and everyone who is called a doctor is legally bound to correct that claim.  That means you incidentally, unless of course you're a doctor, in which case I should probably trust you or something.

However, is this really what a herbalist does or should do?  Is it what I do?  To an extent yes, if I get the opportunity to do it.  Here comes the complicated bit.

Nowadays, people often feel that they are qualified to know what herbal remedies they need because of the information available online, so they are quite likely to come to me and ask for those.  Whereas I do have two decades of experience as a herbalist, I also distrust the cult of the expert, so I often just give people what they want.  I assume they have already sussed out, for instance, whether they have high blood pressure, are allergic to something which suggests they will react badly to the remedy and so on.  I do usually ask them as well of course, but I believe the decision is theirs and don't want to disempower them or undermine their confidence, because ultimately a lot of professions, sadly, have to rely on talking people's confidence down so they will pay you to do what they could do instead.  This isn't a criticism, just a sad fact about the way the economy works.  We live in a system which thrives on lack of confidence and many of us have a stake in reducing other people's self-belief and making them reliant on us.  This is one reason that I dislike being a herbalist, although I have very little choice about it and it can be very positive, interesting and rewarding too.

Turning this round, patients often come bearing wisdom.  They have often found something which helps them or may have come across someone else who has found something helpful on an unrelated health problem of their own, frequently handed down through the generations.  When this happens, it's my turn to listen in a different way to my patient and to see myself more as a student than a teacher.  This brings to the fore another possible role of the herbalist, or for that matter many other healthcare professionals.  They can act as a go-between.  Someone comes to me with eczema but without asthma because she has found a breathing exercise which has resolved it.  Then someone else comes to me with asthma who hasn't heard of the exercise, so I tell her about it, and her asthma is resolved.  At the same time, she has no eczema because she's found an answer to that which I can pass on to the previous patient.  Hence being a herbalist is a bit like being an ethnobotanist. I collect information about the uses of plant remedies and pass them on.

One big influence, or perhaps quandary, I'm presented with as a herbalist who has also home edded is that I'm a great believer in autonomous education.  A medical consultation should be a process whereby the practitioner renders herself unnecessary to the patient, something which, of course, clashes with capitalism.  In the same way, parenting, also known as education, is a process whereby parents render themselves unnecessary to the child.  In fact children, depending on their character, tend not to need much input for them to learn.  Transferring this to the practitioner-patient relationship, there is of course often the problem that they have been schooled and therefore expect to need input, but at the same time there are some things which some people find harder to learn autonomously than others.  Therefore, the kind of hands-on experience which is needed to learn the aforesaid breathing exercise really involves being there with the practitioner in front of you, or in my case at an angle of about 135 degrees, showing you, of all things, how to breathe.

I would certainly say a herbalist is in the business of one-to-one education, but just as, for example, Afrikaans uses the single verb "leer" and non-standard English uses the verb "learn" instead of distinguishing between learning and teaching, so is the job of any teacher to learn from her students or pupils, or parents from their children, although this might be in various forms.  However, there is more.  Clearly it is important to care for a patient, and one of the best ways of caring is to be there with them.  Various processes are facilitated by physical presence, including communication, empathy and the simple feeling that someone cares about you and respects you for your suffering and wants to help.  As a result, being with a practitioner who has the time to assess your health in depth, which many GPs lack, and who can look at all your health issues and your status as a complete person, has in itself a placebo effect besides the efficacy of the herbs, and consequently is healing in itself.

To conclude therefore, the role of a herbalist is educational, learning from the patient as well as helping the patient to learn, caring and healing, and to act as a conduit of knowledge between patients who can thereby indirectly help each other.  It's also interesting to compare and contrast a herbalist's role with that of a doctor, and I'll be doing that in the next post.

Language Doesn't Make The World

It's often said, by linguists and philosophers for example, that language is such a strong influence on us that when we speak a language, we can only think of the world in a particular way.  This is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.  I could be splitty about this and say it's not so ever, but in fact I don't think that at all.  Nor do I think it's completely true to the extent some people do.
An example is colour.  Here's a spectrum with silly bits on the right, really a flattened out colour wheel:

Quick experiment by the way:  look at that and decide where you think the colours are definitely one thing or another.  I wonder how different your view and mine are.

To make things a bit easier, here's the same kind of thing as blocks of colours which don't blend into each other:

I personally don't really believe in indigo.  It's there to make the number of colours up to seven because Newton saw the number as special, as it does in the Bible.  I don't think the orange is right either - looks more like mustard to me.  Nonetheless we have names for each of these colours and the ones in between sometimes too.  However, not all languages have the same number of colour words as we have.  The Mandarin Chinese version of the spectrum looks like this:

This is not what a Mandarin speaker sees, but it does represent the three main words for colour, usually translated as "red", "yellow" and "blue", and they also have words for black and white of course.  There are no languages as far as I know which have no words for black or white, although there is at least one language with only black and white and no true colour vocabulary - it's a dialect of the south Indian language Malayalam.  I've chosen ambiguous colours here to indicate that the words refer to a whole range of colours just as they do in any other language.

Notice that I said, though, "this is not what a Mandarin speaker sees".  I might be referring to a very crude version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis here but when I look at a rainbow I generally see three colours unless I look carefully, and I also see an odd stripy effect on either side which I presume is seen by everyone but I just want to mention because of that whole purple blotches thing a few years ago.  If I were an artist, I would probably see something else.

Nonetheless, when we in English talk about "making" and "doing", it really feels like we're talking about two different things even though many languages lack that distinction, but when we talk about "knowing", we don't feel the lack of the words "savoir" and "connaitre", even though we used to have the words "wit" and "ken", which are very similar to the French words in meaning.  As Anglophones we certainly seem to live in a world which at a glance has people doing and making things.  We do the washing up but we make the dishes we put in the sink, for example, and we know our friends in the same way as we know that it's a sunny day, but for speakers of German and French there is a sense that the reverse is true.  We also tend to think of aubergines, tomatoes and cucumbers as vegetables and oranges, apples and bananas as fruit, when we could think of all of them as vegetables or all as fruit.  This is a very firm distinction for some people.

Nonetheless I believe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is false.  It has an element of truth in it but it is not all there is, for two reasons.

Firstly, if language constructs reality, that seems to mean that the absence of language implies that the individual concerned does not experience.  That would mean that a child who has never been exposed properly to language, as with neglect, or has not managed to acquire language, as with learning disability, is not conscious or so out of touch with others' reality that she does not suffer or feel pain.  This also applies to other species, suggesting that a farm animal or a pet is not able to suffer and matters a lot less than many people seem to think it does.  To me, this is not only absurd, but also amounts to the idea that if you can't speak up for your needs you don't have them.  It centres everything so much on language that it seems to ignore everything else.

Secondly, and I'm afraid I'm going to talk about gender yet again, there are many languages with absolutely no grammatical gender but they are used in a wide range of cultures, some of which seem to be more gender-blind than others.  Finnish, for instance, has no gender at all unless you could the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, and its society is sometimes seen as quite egalitarian in that respect.  It was the first European country to give women the vote, for example.  However, here's a list of other languages with only gender-neutral pronouns:  Swahili, Persian and Malay/Indonesian.  None of these have different pronouns for female and male humans in any form which divide along gender lines.  All of them are spoken in societies where there is a very definite strong gender binary regarding roles.  They are also of course spoken in societies where the Arabic language is important too, and Arabic divides gender so strongly into feminine and masculine compared to most Western languages that its word for "you" and its verb forms are gendered.  Therefore it may just be that the existence of a second language with such firm gender demarcation means it doesn't need to be strongly marked in the vernacular.  However, I look at it differently.

There are probably still people for whom the word "nurse" will conjure up an image of a woman, and for who the word "doctor" will bring a picture of a man to mind.  This is of course no longer the case.  Suppose, though, that it not only still was but that this extended beyond such roles to encompass the entire culture, so that all roles were universally assumed to be either female or male.  A language spoken in a culture like that wouldn't even need gendered pronouns because every role would be assumed to be gendered.  It'd be like having a gender for bears which move their bowels in the woods or Popes according to the church they belong to - actually there would be a point to that because in fact not all popes are Catholic.  Polar bears, hmm.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that the culture is so gendered that gender in language is unnecessary.  This happens in English with the word "animal" to some extent.  We tend to assume that word doesn't refer to humans when we use it, because humans are seen by most people as significantly apart from all other species.  I say "other species" on the whole.

To cut a long story short then, I don't believe in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.  Our language doesn't make the world because it's embedded in a culture and doesn't exist in isolation, and because it sounds like an excuse for abuse.

Audrey II Isn't Vegan Either

There's apparently an original film and a stage musical of 'Little Shop Of Horrors', but to me and probably most other people it means the '80s film.  In it, an unexpected total eclipse of the sun results in the appearance of a blood-eating plant which turns out to be sentient, called Audrey II.  I can't provide illustrations because of copyright, but I can link to the trailer:

As you can probably see from the thumbnail, this plant is carnivorous, and in fact anthropophagous, if that's a word.  If it isn't, I just made it up and it means it eats people.  Now the question is, would it be OK to eat Audrey II and if so why?  If not why not?  I would argue that it wouldn't be, for two reasons.

It could be argued that Audrey II should be eaten for reasons of poetic revenge, and although she is of course a strange and interesting new plant, I have some sympathy for that idea.  It does potentially provide a tiny food chain consisting of two species as well, which is quite interesting.  Nonetheless, Audrey II is a sentient life form.  I do think it would be OK to eat her if she had been killed in self-defence, which I seem to remember did happen, although she might be poisonous.  This reminds me of the idea of eating road kill.  It would be a shame to eat an unusual species of plant unknown to botany without analysing it a bit.

The first reason for not eating Audrey is naturally that she is clearly sentient.  She uses language.  That's not what makes her sentient even if Christine Battersby says it is, but it is evidence of her sentience.  She is able to report on her own mental events.  A less "intelligent" but still sentient species of fictional plant is of course the triffid.  In the case of both the triffid and Audrey II, it would be wrong to kill although it would probably be a good idea to give both a wide berth in the same way as one might a tiger.  No reason actually to kill them as such though, because the world was not put here for mere human convenience and we have a duty to live and let live if at all feasible.

The second reason also applies to real carnivorous plants such as the Venus Flytrap

"Venus Flytrap showing trigger hairs" by Picasa 2.0. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venus_Flytrap_showing_trigger_hairs.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Venus_Flytrap_showing_trigger_hairs.jpg

 and certain bromeliads, although it's quite convoluted.  Sleepoversweet once maintained that if it was OK to eat any kind of animal, the best ones to eat would be carnivores because that way their prey's lives would be saved.  I find her argument utterly mind-mangling and fascinating, although I don't agree with her.  By the same token, maybe a vegetarian ought to base their diet solely on carnivorous plants because that way she'd be saving their prey.  Some bromeliads, namely pineapples, are edible but they tend to try to eat you at the same time as you try to eat them, at least in Daniel's case.

This is where it gets confusing because of the food chain.  One of the arguments for veganism is that you put less strain on the biosphere by eating only organisms which make their own food and don't move around much.  This means you're eating almost as efficiently as possible, and in fact you'd probably be eating more efficiently than if you ate only food which was entirely synthesised from non-biological materials because on the whole, living things are amazingly efficient at what they do, probably as efficient as possible given the materials at their disposal.  Even so, there is a bit of a quandary here because everything gets recycled, so if a herbivore uses of the order of ten times the quantity of plants to produce the same mass of material and the carnivore that eats it multiplies it by another factor of ten or so, how come this doesn't spiral out of control when the dead bodies and waste of these animals or plants are eaten by the detritovores and saprophytes such as houseflies and mushrooms?  I think the answer must be that they don't move much, but to be honest I don't really understand it.  After all, a housefly seems to move quite fast to me (and incidentally does it make sense to think of flying insects as "cold-blooded"?).

Pineapples and their kin don't move around much though, so they are not inefficient compared to antelopes in producing food for other organisms.  This is the reason why it might be OK to eat Audrey II, particular considering that she seemed to use a heck of a lot of energy compared to most plants.  Nevertheless I have to admit to being quite confused now.  I think it's probably a bad idea to eat carnivorous plants because they occupy the same tropic level as some carnivorous animals, but by that same argument it might be a bad idea to eat any fungus which has consumed an animal.

Anyway, here's a picture of the Doctor pulling Sarah Jane Smith out of a conduit:

Reminds me of the idea of being born.  What about you?

The Intelligence Thing

I've said this a lot, but I may not have explained it in detail before.  I'm sceptical about the notion of intelligence.  This isn't quite the same as believing there's no such thing as intelligence.  It's more a question of whether it's useful.

At first, it might look as if intelligence varies a lot in the population.  There are professors, brain surgeons and rocket scientists, and there are sewage workers, road sweepers and shelf-stackers.  This is not to denigrate any of them, and in fact that is precisely my first point.  Sewage workers are through the roof in the value of their work.  Compared to them, almost anyone's job in an industrial society is practically worthless, except possibly for farm labourers. The utility of a sewage worker to society is stratospheric.  They're practically in orbit.  However, they're also not recognised, and if you were to have a job as a sewage worker, I can imagine you'd probably avoid mentioning it when you met people unless you were quite confident, and if an average person were to be given a wide selection of jobs and rate the likely intelligence of the person suited to the work, it would probably be one of the lowest.

Of course, just because a job is valuable it doesn't mean it takes intelligence to do it.  Nonetheless, and this is my first peeve, doesn't it seem just a little bit suspicious that people are sorted into categories which mean the hottest and noisiest jobs, as the Simpsons once put it, are the ones which appear to need the least intelligence?  And that the worst paid work is the work supposedly stupid people do?

Consider the ability to tolerate boredom during a manual task.  That's a talent or possibly an acquired skill.  It's also something which people of allegedly low intelligence are supposed to be very good at.  If that's so, in what sense is it not a cognitive strength?  I would suggest that it is and that the only reason it isn't considered one is that it seems like a weakness to the people involved in writing the textbooks and the like.  It may also be that the people who write the textbooks think something completely different than what I'm saying they think here but that happens a lot, here and elsewhere.

Then there's the question of what you as a proper three-dimensional human being do with what you think.  You might not want to appear too clever in front of people so as to avoid being stigmatised in some way, or you might not have the confidence to stand by the conclusions you have come to after a lot of thought when they are in fact valid.  You might also be what I refer to as "intellectually lazy", although that too is unsatisfactory.

Calling someone stupid is ableist.  Learning disabled people are not bad people, although presumably some are and some aren't like people who are not learning disabled.  Due to this, I have been careful to call people intellectually lazy rather than stupid, as that's often what's meant.  People, myself included sometimes, want the world to be simple and they want issues to be simple, so they will tend to bifurcate possibilities when in fact the true situation is frillier or twiddlier, as I mentioned before, or otherwise over-simplify.  They could put the time and effort in but they don't.

It's recently been brought to my attention that describing someone as intellectually lazy is insulting.  Sometimes it's intentionally so, but sometimes not, and this brings up two further issues.  One is that someone may simply lack the confidence or the positivity in a particular situation to pursue an idea to its logical conclusion.  The other is that free will may not exist!  If that's so, the concept of insults themselves becomes dubious, as nobody can help what they do, but it still means that the process whereby people behave "stupidly" is not to do with how capable the isolated parts of their mental faculties which cogitate are.  How meaningful or possible it is to isolate that bit is another matter.
Hence stupidity becomes a kind of vice, but in this view a vice is a little like a mental version of a disease which might be temporary or permanent.

Then we come down to organic differences.  It does seem to make sense to say that just as some people are weaker than others, and some people have wasting diseases which make them abnormally weak, some people's ability to think things through is weaker than others', due to things like memory and attention, or the capacity to spot which patterns are valid and which aren't.  On the whole, though, muscles can be trained and strengthened or they can become weaker through disuse, and although it's important not to extend a metaphor too far, my experience of how people's health is does strongly suggest that they are like this in many other ways too, so it makes sense to me that their minds and abilities to think would be generally responsive to intellectual stimulation, so they would be able to call on greater intellectual resources after some time or their minds might fall into disuse.  Clearly, however, I do believe in the likes of dementia, so to that extent I believe in intelligence.

Finally, there's an issue illustrated by 'Futurama'.  Philip J Fry is in a cell and has nowhere to go to the toilet, so he does it all over the floor "like an animal".  Leela then points out that animals generally allocate one part of the floor to do that.  Now, I can easily imagine someone "stupid" doing that and being trumped by a member of another species, perhaps quite a "lowly" one (that's problematic too).  If we're going to try to arrange different species of animal into different levels of intelligence that way, it makes little sense that a language-using primate such as Fry is nonetheless unable to think of that option.  Nonetheless it's easy to imagine that that might be so.  It's even easy to imagine that a "stupid" version of a non-human animal would do that and an "intelligent" individual of the same species, say a cat, wouldn't.  Also, other animals have intellectual capacities beyond ours, such as migration.

I haven't even mentioned multiple intelligences.

All of this, and probably some more stuff, is why I don't feel that the idea of intelligence is a very good or sensible one.  Even if it does exist, it might be better to ignore it as it could be a self-fulfilling thing.

Oh wow, I just realised I've blogged on-topic by mistake for the second post in a row!