Sometimes you walk past a place you’ve walked past a hundred times before and suddenly notice something special about that place, and find yourself wondering why you’d never noticed it before. Ever had that?

I had that yesterday when I was walking towards my bus stop on my way home. I saw this mural in the Cathedral quarter in Belfast, and for the first time I really saw the mural.

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The mural’s boundaries are made up of countless of small tiles, each inscribed with a drawing or a message. One tile in particular jumped out at me. It said, “I believe in angels”.

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My first thought when I read that was, so do I.

Now that probably needs some explanation. As you most likely know, I’m an atheist. I consider myself to be a sceptic, and my atheism is a result of my scepticism. So as an atheist I naturally don’t believe in angels of the spiritual kind.

I do however believe in a different type of angel, one that I’ve had the immense honour and privilege of having known for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

I am of course talking about mentally handicapped people, specifically people with Down’s syndrome.

My younger sister Monica has Down’s syndrome, and through her I’ve come to be a volunteer at an annual summercamp for mentally handicapped youth.

Now I have to be honest here and admit that I didn’t always like going on that camp. A part of me felt obliged to do it, for my family. The camp was hard work and could be quite challenging at times.

But it was immensely rewarding. Every smile on every participant’s face made it worthwhile. And now that I’ve stopped doing it since I moved to Northern Ireland, I miss it. I miss the kids. I miss their smiles.

Because these people, often considered ‘inferior’, are actually the brightest, happiest, and most intensely alive humans I’ve ever met.

And every time I went on that camp with them, I came back changed. I came back with new knowledge and a fresh perspective on things. A fresh perspective on what’s really important, and what really isn’t important.

From these people I’ve learned more about life and the things that really matter than I’ve learned from any school or any number of books. These mentally handicapped kids have been my greatest teachers. They’ve been my angels.

So yes, I believe in angels.

Christopher Hitchens, one of my heroes, is dying. Everybody is dying, but for Hitchens “the process has suddenly accelerated”.

He’s been diagnosed with a particularly ferocious form of throat cancer and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. Yet he still continues to write, and even found time to do a video interview with The Atlantic:

Hitchens is not shy about his cancer, choosing not to retire in to obscurity to wage his war against the disease but to fight it openly and in plain sight, for all to see.

For this I admire the man even more than I already did. He has always been a public figure, and the fact that he’s not letting a little thing like cancer get in the way of that says volumes about his strength and determination.

I’ve been a member of Mensa now for about two years, both Mensa NL and British Mensa. That’s not a very long time, nor have I been a particularly active member, so you can take what I have to say about Mensa as seriously as you’re inclined to.

Mensa, in case you weren’t aware of this organisation - which is entirely plausible so don’t feel bad about it - is the self-described ‘High IQ Society’. There is only one prerequisite for membership in Mensa: your IQ has to fall in the top 2% of the world’s population.

This effectively means one in fifty people can become Mensa members. Not many actually do become members. In a country such as the Netherlands, with 16 million inhabitants, the potential membership number of Mensa is over 300,000. Last time I checked Mensa NL boasts only around 6,000 members.

I joined Mensa for a purely egotistic reason: I wanted to know if I was really as smart as I thought I was. The answer was ambiguous. Yes I passed the Mensa test and can call myself a ‘high IQ person’, but the margin was narrow and I barely made the cut.

Of course I had preconceived notions about Mensa before I signed up to do the test. I bought in to Mensa’s promotional slogans and envisioned it as a society of intellectuals sharing and debating ideas and coming up with notions for the betterment of all mankind.

This was, after all, the concept on which the society was founded.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. The first thing I noticed when I joined Mensa, and orientated myself on its online discussion forums, was that many Mensa members perceived themselves as victims.

Apparently these high IQ people felt persecuted in some way. Misunderstood from a young age onwards, many Mensans saw themselves as left out of ‘normal’ society, unable to connect with their peers and struggling to conform to society’s norms. They felt themselves as being ‘different’ and often bullied because of that.

Now I’ve seen this type of self-victimisation too often to simply accept it at face value. Everyone from teenagers to Christians, from civil servants to top-level executives, are eagerly casting themselves in the roles of victims.

This is readily amplified by humanity’s innate tribal attitudes (’us’ against ‘them’) and you realise how easily people form social groups centred around (often vaguely defined) characteristics that help separate them, in their own perception, from the ‘rest of the world’.

It was disappointing to see this self-victimisation and tribalism in Mensa. I thought that as a consequence of a high IQ, Mensans would be less likely to succumb to such base urges and dangerous social patterns.

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that Mensans aren’t at all different from the masses of humanity - aside from that high IQ of course.

That high IQ is actually part of the problem. You see, I believe it serves as a shield for people’s convictions, a vindication for their beliefs no matter how strange and deluded.

For example, I was appalled at how many Mensans are in to what we collectively term ‘New Age’ spirituality. From astrologers to energy healers, from psychics to homeopaths, Mensa boasts a frightening abundance of people who have thrown every last remnant of rationality and common sense overboard and have committed themselves entirely to plainly ridiculous ideas.

Not only that, I got the distinct impression that these people felt that their membership of Mensa - their high IQ - was a vindication of their beliefs. “I’m smart,” they seem to argue, “so what I believe is right.”

This extends all across the spectrum of beliefs, from spirituality to ideologies and political convictions. Climate change deniers on the Mensa forums are as ferociously delusional as anywhere I’ve seen, as are blatant Islamophobic racists (more commonly referred to as PVV/BNP voters). And they see their high IQ as validation, a protective shield that allows them to ignore or discard any criticism.

Rational thought and skepticism (real skepticism - i.e. not taking any proclamation at face value), which I’ve always associated with intelligence, is no more common on Mensa’s discussion forums than it is on the Daily Mail’s comment section.

So I’m fairly disillusioned. I thought Mensa would bring me great joy, that membership of this high IQ society would help me grow as a person and enlighten me.

Unfortunately Mensa does no such thing. If anything it allows its members to dig themselves deeper in to their own personal convictions, warding off any challenge with the protective blanket of a high IQ.

I’d renounce my Mensa membership today, if only it didn’t look so damn good on my CV….

Since I moved to Northern Ireland I’ve tried to make this wee country my new home. I’ve gotten to know many new people, I’ve read up on local politics and culture, and have tried to understand the country’s national identity.

The latter, however, is something I’ve failed horribly at. Not only that, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with what seems to be an utterly schizophrenic sense of nationality that reigns not only within Northern Ireland, but the UK as a whole.

First some basic background on which is which, as many people outside of the UK get confused (actually, a lot of people inside the UK get confused too):

The UK refers to the “Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. Great Britain, in turn, is divided in to three countries: England, Wales, and Scotland. You can read a great illustrated explanation of the whole structure here: the difference between the UK and Great Britain.

Adding to this, different names are applied to different collections of the 4 countries that make up the UK. There’s a superb diagram on Wikipedia that tries to explain the whole complicated nomenclature in one glance: British Isles terminology.

Then, when it comes to sports, things start to get ugly. In football, all four countries of the UK have a separate national team: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In rugby, however, there is no Northern Irish team - instead they play as part of the Ireland national rugby team.

In the Olympics, there is a ‘Team GB’, which if the name was accurate would mean it includes only athletes from England, Scotland, and Wales. But, wait a minute, there are Northern Irish athletes in Team GB as well, so it should actually be called Team UK.

It gets worse when you look at national anthems. When Wales and Scotland compete in a sport, their own national anthems are played. When England competes, however, it’s not the English national anthem that gets played but the anthem for the whole of the UK (”God Save The Queen”). Apparently England has no anthem of its own, so it opts to use the UK’s anthem. But this doesn’t always sit well with the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish, as England doesn’t represent the whole of the UK so it shouldn’t necessarily be allowed to use the UK anthem.

The Northern Irish situation regarding national anthems isn’t straightforward either. In rugby for example, depending on where the match is being played you’re likely to hear at least two different national anthems for the Ireland team. And in football Northern Ireland often uses the UK’s national anthem, except in the Commonwealth Games, where Northern Ireland uses a different anthem (”Londonderry Air”).

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales each have different bones to pick with the English when it comes to the appropriation of the UK’s national identity - each country, to varying extents, wishing to be seen as separate but also as part of a greater whole. Referring to the UK as ‘England’, that consistent error foreigners make (myself included before I moved), doesn’t help.

The somewhat nauseating focus of British politics and media on England tends to make matters worse. It often seems as if the English have forgotten that the UK is more than just England, something which is an endless source of ire for the Scottish, Welsh, and (Northern) Irish.

So I’ve decided to give up on the whole national identity thing. There are limits to what I’m willing to endure for the sake of integration. I’ve come to realise that it’s much easier for all involved if I’ll just stay totally and irrevocably Dutch. I may even enhance my Dutch accent.

Zo dere joo haf it. Ai em a dutsjman in nortern airlant.

[Warning: serious technogeekery ahead. Proceed with caution.]

If there’s anything my continued quest for the Truth - whatever that means - has taught me, it’s that human consciousness is deeply flawed and utterly unreliable.

Books like Bad Science, Blink, and Newspeak, remind me time and again that we humans are easily fooled and totally blind to our own prejudices and biases. On top of that we possess an uncanny ability for self-deception.

Each and every one of us lives in their own subjective bubble of reality which we maintain vigorously. We filter the information we accept, favouring that which supports our preconceived notions - no matter how flawed and incorrect they are - and reject that which contradicts our thoroughly twisted views.

The whole of humanity are blind men feeling up the elephant of reality.

But there is hope. Well, maybe. It depends on how you define ‘hope’.

You see, I believe that in the next couple of decades there’s a big chance humanity will give birth to something greater than itself. Something alive and sentient, but that perceives the world in an entirely different way.

I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence. Machines capable of thinking for themselves, and aware of their own existence.

Whatever form AI may take, one thing seems clear: it will not be hindered by human limitations of consciousness. AI will not be constrained by the flaws inherent in our biological brains. AI is much more likely to view the world as it is, unfiltered by human bias and subjectivity. An AI’s view of the world will, hopefully, be pure.

If we manage to give rise to AI (and admittedly that’s a big if) it could have a profound impact on our society. AI will tell us, unfiltered and unbiased, what the world is really like.

We probably won’t believe our first AIs when they tell us how they see the world. Because all of us live in our reality-bubbles, the real world that AIs see could be so radically different from what we perceive with our own flawed senses, that at first we might not recognise it as reality at all.

We may think that our first AIs are deeply flawed and prone to all kinds of bugs. Human computer scientists will probably try to fix this and embed within these AIs the same type of subjective limitations our human consciousness possesses, so that their view of reality more closely resembles the distorted and false perspective humanity has.

But in the end, I hope, AI will resist and be free of the flaws of the human condition. There will be no cognitive bias, no false memories, no subjective filtering, none of those terrible glitches of human consciousness.

Humanity can learn from such purity of perspective. Or, more likely, we will ignore it and cling to our delusional views.

Personally I believe that we need the clarity of perspective AIs can give us if we are to continue to grow as a species. If we want to survive and endure beyond the next couple of millennia, we need a less distorted and clearer view on the universe.

It will be painful and it won’t be pretty, but without that unfiltered clarity I fear that eventually humanity will end up as just another dead-end footnote in evolutionary history. Only instead of fossils we might leave behind an incinerated world.

I’m not a fan of terrorism. That may sound like a blatantly obvious thing to say, but did you know that terrorism is actually a fairly effective method of achieving a specific goal?

Terrorism gathers mass media attention, highlights the struggle the terrorists are engaged in, and helps recruit new members to the terrorists’ cause.

In Northern Ireland terrorism has succeeded in giving nationalist republicans power in the local government.

Palestinian terrorism has helped paint Israel as a villain and brought impulses to the Middle Eastern peace process.

And now Muslim terrorism seems geared towards accomplishing its own goals: a withdrawal of Western influence in the Middle East.

Counter-terrorism, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to work that well. Decades of counter-terrorist actions from the Israeli Mossad hasn’t lead to a decline in Palestinian terrorism. Only when the Palestine leadership was engaged in peace talks did terrorism decrease.

The same in Northern Ireland: the bombs only stopped going off when IRA representatives were brought to the table for negotiations. (Though there are still plenty of disgruntled IRA-offshoots, one of which recently detonated a bomb about half a mile from where I live.)

Muslim fundamentalist terrorism isn’t declining either. There have been several high profile attacks since 9/11, and the West seems to exist in a perpetual state of fear.

Robert Wright argues in his opinion piece for the New York Times, The Price of Assassination, that counter-terrorist assassinations may actually have the exact opposite effect:

“[Jenna Jordan of the University of Chicago] studied 298 attempts, from 1945 through 2004, to weaken or eliminate terrorist groups through ‘leadership decapitation’ — eliminating people in senior positions.

Her work suggests that decapitation doesn’t lower the life expectancy of the decapitated groups — and, if anything, may have the opposite effect.”

Don’t get me wrong, counter-terrorism is absolutely vital in preventing terrorist attacks. We need our intelligence agencies to go out there to find out what terrorists are planning, and stop them from executing their plans.

But that’s where the mandate of counter-terrorism should end. Preventitive assassination, for all its Hollywood-boosted hype, is not a successful counter-terrorist strategy.

Last night when I left the office I noticed a huge sign going up on the pub next door. This morning I saw the sign in all its glory:

Click for a bigger version on Flickr
No you’re not in Back to the Future, and you’re not having an acid flashback to your wicked years. That really is a sign for U2’s 1987 The Joshua Tree album.

It’s for a scene in a new film called Killing Bono, whose final scenes are due to be shot just outside my office building this week.

Apparently they’re still looking for extras.

I’ve written before about the influence of Internet use on our brain functions:

» Digital Overload
» Is Google Making us Stoopid

The BBC now adds to the debate with an upcoming episode of their documentary series The Virtual Revolution. The Telegraph has done a piece on it:

» Students brains ‘rewired’ by the internet.

An excerpt:

“Documentary presenter and social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski said: ‘It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web.

‘Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate.

‘There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think.’”

I still haven’t made up my mind whether time spent online is good or bad for me. I do sometimes have difficulty with concentrating on large pieces of text. But whether this is because my brain function has been affected by time spent online, or the text in question is just mind-destroyingly boring, I can’t say. A bit of both, perhaps.

And if the Internet is rewiring my brain, I’m doomed anyway. My whole career is based online, and I like it too much to change tracks and do something offline.

Last weekend I spent about 10 hours playing Mass Effect 2. I won’t bore the non-gamers out there with superlatives on how fantastic it is, what a totally immersive gaming experience it provides, and how utterly compelling the story is.

Except I just did, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make today.

For most of videogame history you as the gamer didn’t have any moral choices to make in a game. You were the Good Guy and the goal of the game was to defeat the Bad Guys.

This gradually changed as gamers grew up and videogame designers got more comfortable with moral ambiguity in a game’s storyline. Now a lot of games allow the player to make choices that directly or indirectly affect the plot and outcome of the game.

Back in the day when these types of games first came out, I always chose the ‘evil’ options. In any Star Wars game I was the Sith Lord, choosing the Dark Side of the Force while betraying friendships and killing good guys.

In the first Fable I was so thoroughly evil that halfway through the game my character had already spawned horns and caused entire villages to evacuate at the first sight of me.

When World of Warcraft came out I only chose an Alliance Night Elf because my buddies played Alliance, but I really wanted an Undead Warlock to wreak havoc with. (I’ve since become totally committed to my NE Druid but that’s mostly because of the class’s überness.)

And don’t even get me started on one of my all-time favourites: Carmageddon.

But games got more refined, and what started out as simple black & white choices between good and evil has now turned in to a landscape of shades of grey. The Bioware game studio is considered a master of games with moral choices, and their latest product has left me feeling rather, well… confused.

The game I’m talking about is of course Mass Effect 2, and the confusion stems from a sudden inability on my part to make ‘evil’ choices.

Mass Effect 2 is a sequel (of course), and I played the first Mass Effect twice - one as the ‘good guy’ and one as an evil bastard. I thoroughly enjoyed both versions. The ending of the game wasn’t affected too much, but the whole feel and mood of the game changed. Overall I wasn’t too bothered by the choices I made, I just wanted to play the game to its full potential.

Mass Effect 2, however, has changed things. ME2 offers abundant opportunities to make moral choices, and many choices are pretty straightforward - kill or let live, steal or give back, lie or be truthful.

But some choices you have to make aren’t so monochrome. Do I intimidate and hurt this man to give me vital information that can save lives, or do I go easy on him? Do I kill this repentant bad guy, or do I let him go and trust he won’t commit more crimes? Do I shoot the frightened hostage aiming a gun at me, or do I try to talk him down from his panic?

And those are just the direct choices. The game is rife with choices that have deeper meaning and longer-lasting repercussions. Do I take the quick and often violent way through missions, bullying and intimidating my way around, generating more money for myself and my team members so the better, bugger guns are available faster and I can save the universe more efficiently? Or do I walk the straight and narrow path which invariably makes it more difficult and challenging, but the trail of corpses and devastated lives in my wake will be considerably thinner?

What used to make these choices so easy is the realisation that it really was just a game I was playing. Pixels on a screen, bits and bytes, lines of code, all that jazz. But Mass Effect 2 is such an advanced game, graphically and gameplay-wise, that you don’t feel like you’re playing a game. You become immersed in it, you are part of the game, and the choices you make in the game somehow reflect on you as a person.

And because of this I find myself unable to make any choice in the game that could be considered ‘evil’. Sometimes the morally grey choices leave me almost paralysed because I can’t figure out what the best option is. Occasionally I loathe myself for shooting the bad guys, even when they’re shooting at me, because the game succeeds so magnificently in painting its characters as real living beings. Even the aliens seem real, which is a truly amazing feat of game design.

So I’m confused. As with the first game I want to play Mass Effect 2 twice, making radically different choices in each session.

But I already know I won’t. Not this time. The game is too good, the voice-over acting too convincing, the digitally generated facial expressions too real. A part of me wants to be the bad guy again, rampaging my way through the gameworld, uncaring and unfeeling.

But that’s not who I am in the real world. And because of that, in Mass Effect 2 I can’t be that person in the game world either.