Measuring humanity

Here's what's tricky about explaining humans in scientific terms. When you consider yourself, your mental state, it's a series of wildly shifting points along a huge number of spectra. How you're feeling at the moment exists anywhere along degrees of attractiveness, contentedness, creativity, arousal, relaxation, anger, a sense of romance – even states we think of as purely physical such as hungry or tired have uniquely emotional elements.

The shifts along spectra in those waking states fill your waking hours. From the inside, they define you – you live inside them and will never escape them, and that's the constraining envelope we think of when we describe ourselves with the attribution 'I'. Everything else going on – from breathing to muscle contraction, dreams, fatigue after exercising – we attribute with the word 'my'. They're things that belong to us and we control, regulate and live with, but they're not 'I'.

The interesting thing is all that stuff going on in our bodies but outside 'I' is our only insight into that constant inner state. We can measure the extent to which heart rate speeds up, the adrenal glands start to overproduce, the bowel decouples any nervous sensation that it needs emptying and our pupils dilate, and that can tell a scientist when we're in fight or flight mode. We can measure heart rate, nasal dilation and blood flow to the genitals to signify sexual arousal, but any measurement we can take of anything in the realm of 'my' is crude and doesn't tell anything like the whole story.

Why is that 'I' so locked off? How hungry, horny, relaxed, frightened or creative we feel– all those points on spectra that define us are very ill-defined scientifically. The only evidence we have that they exist at all is because we all live in them.

At least, I know I do – because I can never experience the same sense of immersion in what you're feeling, I can only assume you have it too because your actions in the social and physical environment are the same as mine, but for all I know I might be the only living thing on Earth, the rest of you cleverly-programmed robots that don't experience the sensation of an 'I' any more than the toaster in my kitchen does.

Empirically there's no such thing as sexual arousal, there's just increased heart rate, increased blood flow, pupil dilation and all the other physical hallmarks of it. Evolution tells us they must combine to form some function to the organism, but that doesn't explain the feeling going on in the 'I'.

It seems all the machinations in the realm of 'my' give rise to that locked-off experiential narrative, inform on it, serve and comprise it, but everything in that inside realm is impossible for science to measure. It's built on far too many varying factors from far too many independent (and interdependent) physical, psychological and physiological systems that our measuring equipment of today can ever hope to keep track of.

Will that always be the case?

Where's glamour gone?

You know what's missing from the world today?

Glamour.

You can see it (or the lack of it) everywhere – spheres of culture and economics that used to be hotbeds of glitz have been transformed.

Take air travel. There's a scene in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can where Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) sneaks onto a plane posing as a pilot by looking the part – walking through the airport surrounded with beautiful air stewardesses who look like they just stepped out of the pages of a glossy fashion magazine. People stop to stare as they pass. Jaws drop at such clean, pristine perfection. Everything about air travel used to be about prestige.

Today, after years of economic transformation (and several bouts of economic carnage) and a vastly different business model thanks to the low cost carriers, planes today are little more than flying buses.

The whole mystique about air stewardesses being blonde-tressed, shiny-toothed angels of the air is long gone. The ones who are still female are more like school matrons on most airlines, and their idea of service is quite different than those long legged beauties leaning down to fill up a champagne glass with a dazzling smile.

If you're old enough to remember catching a plane in the 1970s you'll know people used to get dressed for it. Not in their Sunday best, mind, but look at the people standing in check in queues in airports today. There are so many thongs, singlets and boardshorts it looks like the ice cream queue at the beach.

We do that because we know there'll be no glitz to be found once we board – many airlines are so strapped for profits the fittings and fixtures haven't been changed since the 1990s.

The carpet's frayed, there are still ashtrays in the armrests, TV screen lowers out of the ceiling so everyone has to watch the same rubbish family film with the swear words cut out.

We stuff ourselves like sardines into seats that have lost more and more leg and head room throughout history, and we eat barely digestible slop you wouldn't pay $2.99 for on the ground because we're driven insane with boredom and discomfort.

Then when we get out at the airport at the other end, we'll meet as much glitz and glamour as a sports stadium after the game is over, probably with a little bit of vomit on the seats and everything.

Even pilots themselves are no more those polished, poised gentlemen of yore like Leo's character in Catch Me If You Can. I have a friend who flies the biggest, most advanced passenger aircraft in the world, the A380, between Sydney and London. Because he doesn't work for one of those ultracheap airlines (where the pilot's likely to break up a beer brawl), he can't get enough work and is barely paying his bills.

We used to assume pilots were well paid and taken care of, that they were happy and confident and in control. When we were sitting behind them in a plane we often prayed they were like that.

Now a few generations of transparency about lax safety standards, a few pilots going public about the appalling pay and conditions and movies like Flight that show the men and women with our lives in their hands as screwed up and depressed as any of us have made the cultural perception of the airline pilot quite different. Miners are likely to earn more money – in fact in Australia they're the only ones earning any money.

Here's another glaring example; Hollywood. There used to be a guy on Australian TV introducing movies called Bill Collins. I was a kid so I don't know if he's even still alive after all this time, let alone working. He's the sort of film critic there used to be a professional class of film critics was all we had, not armies of scruffily bearded kids running blogs.

Collins was the kind of guy who used to love everything made before 1965 and hate everything since, and his spot was called The Golden Years of Hollywood. I loved James Bond like most kids, and my introduction to the ones that predated my own existence was through Bill Collins.

At the time movies and Hollywood seemed all about tuxedoes and prestigious cars lining up at film premieres, stars smoking cool cigarettes and drinking martinis. Collins himself seemed all about that, with his smart suit and gilt-edged studio set. There was a professional class of person who worked in the film industry, and it was all about glitz.

What's changed that? A kid who picks up a $100 camcorder, shoots a movie in his backyard and today makes $100m blockbusters in the studio system. That's a figurative metaphor, but it's accurate. There'd be a time stars would be limo-driven from one party, event and shoot to the next wearing a sharp suit. At least, that was the illusion Hollywood crafted.

Today, it's not unusual to see superstars who earn multimillion-dollar salaries looking like homeless ex roadies, even in professional capacities while promoting films.

Of course, ostentatious displays of wealth have been very out of vogue for 20 years or more. There have been some very painful economic downturns in the memories of people still in the workforce right now, and coddled superstars swanning around on beaches in Belize enjoying the perks of a lavish lifestyle we secretly know they don't really deserve is kind of distasteful.

They know that and they know their appeal today is to appear just like us, hence taking every opportunity to tell reporters they live normal lives, take their kids to school, etc etc. Most multi-million dollar directors are closer in spirit to kids running around their backyards with cameras than the Alfred Hitchcocks, John Fords and Billy Wilders of the world.

It's true that we still have the statue of the lamb of pop culture, something false for us to worship even though we know she's a false god (Kardashian, Hilton et al). They lead lavish lifestyles and flaunt them shamelessly because it's part of the business model, and we hate them for it as much as we love them.

Surely that's part of the reason why pop culture figureheads like Kim Kardashian are so adored when honestly, we all know how dumb, talentless, etc she really is. It sounds ridiculous but if anything, the Kardashians are old Hollywood, the gilded class who flaunts wealth shamelessly as an aspirational totem for the rest of us.

Here's another example – magazine publishing.

In the postwar years there were few more glamourous occupations as working behind the doors of a glossy magazine. We still look on the industry with rose coloured glasses today (just look at heroines in pop culture fixtures like Sex in the City and The Devil Wears Prada, who are paid writers for hip magazines). The field swirled with terms that carried serious weight among the creative class, 'advertising', 'art direction', 'editorial'.

But today the technology that's wrought such changes on Hollywood is eviscerating the magazine industry like it did the music industry. Today magazine publishing gives you two choices – sit around with your head down until you get retrenched, or throw in the towel and freelance on a promise of regular work from a former colleague (which won't last) or try and get more than 20 crummy cents a word out of a host of publications who have 'no freelance budget'.

Now, before I go further, some clarifications.

First, I'm not sexist enough to suggest airline cabin crew should all be tall, blonde, leggy and female. They shouldn't even be all female. And hiring young hot chicks to be flight attendants is an abhorrent practise even if it would have resulted in only young, hot chicks serving you drinks on planes.

It's also a good thing airline travel has become so cheap. I wouldn't have been able to go anywhere near the places I've been on my income in the 80s or before. I'm sure there's going to be a monumental error because of cost cutting that will result in hundreds of deaths (if there hasn't been already), but it's a similar argument to the contention that we should ban cars because they kill so many people.

And I'm all for the possibility of kicking the doors of Hollywood in with talent alone. I don't have anything approaching the credentials to be a professional film critic or journalist, but I am one through a combination of talent, persistence and sheer arse (and also because many of the media I started writing for were as irrelevant as I was). I could step from one to the next through a ladder of achievement to the big leagues that simply didn't exist before. There was a time you had to be born into the big leagues or have a connection (I had neither), or be far luckier than I am.

The other huge caveat is that I've been alive long enough to know the healing power of nostalgia. Everything – everything – is said to be getting worse. Ask anyone in any industry and they'll tell you the heyday was about 10-20 years ago (no matter when you ask them), and it's just not the same any more.

Maybe planes were actually less comfortable then. They were full of smoke, for one thing. Maybe air stewardesses were dragons like they are now, and they were only ever leggy blondes in advertising and media – the only field for which we have a fossil record of those days.

Stars and celebrities were certainly as boorish, drunk, badly behaved and undeserving of all their fame and money as they are now. You could see it every time a studio closed ranks around a misbehaving star or scandal and launched a press lockdown. It was far easier to keep things out of the press than it is today, and the public (aided by magazines, ironically – the only ones selling) didn't have such an insatiable thirst to see the mighty fall. Despite how much stars want to appear human, there's nothing we love more today than them proving their humanity by doing something stupid.

Maybe all that glamour was a carefully crafted illusion and now that we live in a transparent age we're much more in control of our choices as consumers and citizens.

But every time I go to an airport, I can't help wishing just one six foot blonde amazon with a gleaming smile and one of those little pillbox hats would traipse through in her high heels and leave awe and envy in her wake.

Here's what's happened to Australia's international profile

Before the 1980s, we didn't have one. People just knew we were far, far away and had a lot of desert. Some more enlightened/educated foreigners might have known about the bushman/swag/larrikin legends that go all the way back to the Henry Lawson/CJ Dennis era, but we barely had a current national sense of self to promote or put forward.

If we had a profile among cineastes, it was that Australia was a weird, dark, scary and forbidding place. Movies set here were dystopian visions of dread and violence, from the implied destruction and racial unrest of The Last Wave to the apparent wormhole through space and time of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Even commercial efforts were dark – if it isn't enough Razorback was Australia's answer to Jaws, about a murderous animal stalking us, it made the outback a dark place fully of craggy, dead trees and drifting mists, where if you moved more than a few metres away from the road it was a death sentence.

Then, aided by the Tourism Commission, we changed direction abruptly. Paul Hogan invited the world (particularly Americans) down, promising them he'd stick an extra shrimp on the barbie for them, with sweeping vistas of beautiful red desert and the glory of Sydney Harbour in the background.

Soon, the world was watching us, and they fell in love with the gorgeous outback full of fluffy animals, friendly aboriginals and beautiful colours. The time was ripe for Hogan to capture such romantic longing and serve up an even bigger dose of it in Crocodile Dundee, a world away from the danger, despair and loneliness of the bush with it's romantic hues, dream-like quality and stunning natural beauty. Even the danger was photogenic, transformed into a rugged Tarzan rescue mythology as the rough and tumble hero saves the pretty damsel in her G-string swimsuit.

It was a glossy sheen that lasted for a long time and cemented the image most foreigners had of us, despite the fact that most Australians lived in the suburbs and were no more familiar with the bush or outback than they were the surface of the moon. From the time Europeans settled here Australia has been too harsh for expansion, and there have always been more rural Americans as a percentage of the population than rural Australians.

Why else did the world (particularly America) fall in love with Steve Irwin's antics than because he was a lite version of Crocodile Dundee, a lovable larrikin full of the catchphrases and vernacular they found so cute. I'd bet that even by well into the 21st century, the world had no idea how urbanised and industrialised Australia was, thinking we all ran around red, dusty deserts wearing khaki shorts, leaping on top of animals and shouting 'crikey!'

But change was brewing as far back as the mid 90s. Industries and events were jostling into position to recast Australia as a hub of culture and creativity. The Star Wars prequels and The Matrix were being shot in downtown Sydney. The Olympics proved we could put on a global event. Before long Sydney went from being just another big city to one of those global cities you see on handbags and glossy magazine ads alongside New York, London, Paris and Tokyo.

Now, two things are changing Australia's image all over again. First is that more people than ever are coming here. It might be because those tourism ads are working (though it's unlikely – see more below), but it's probably simply because travel has become so cheap in the online age and generations Y and beyond are seeing the world to an extent their parents never dreamed.

So stories are getting around – not just because foreigners are seeing the real Australia, good and bad, but because there are so many more voices to be heard. It isn't only that they blog and Facebook and post their comments into a chorus of unfiltered discussion, but Australians are too, from the lowliest culture watcher to the mainstream media (and new media) who discuss issues in our country to the world that are beyond shrimps and barbies.

And the presence of Fox Studios, the Olympics, George Lucas and the Matrix did something else – it gave us our own film industry that's joined the chorus of voices, and it's selling a very message to the world that's very different from cute animals and larrikin humour.

The industry that grew up around our sudden high creative standing has led to vibrant artistry in movies from Wolf Creek to Samson and Delilah, and neither racial intolerance nor a maniacal serial killer make good tourism commercials.

Unwittingly, this generation of moviemakers are forming our collective voice and making the official tourism picture of sandy beaches and wildflowers even less relevant.

Maybe that's why none of the tourism Commission campaigns since Hoges and his barbie in the 80s have been very well received. As sustained world attention turned on us and saw what we could do in everything from sport to movies, we gained a new confidence about our place in it. We wanted to be seen as writers, dotcom entrepreneurs and other sophisticates living in townhouses along Glebe Point Road buying chai lattes from groovy cafes, not ockers drinking tinnies of Fosters with 'Pommie Bastard' written on our T-shirts.

When the government tourism body featured a hot young girl in a bikini asking the world where the bloody hell they were, the backlash was deafening. They were obviously trying to recapture some of that 80s magic by selling us as laid back, friendly, informal and provincial, but they revealed themselves to be badly out of step with mainstream opinion. The chattering classes in the cities were aghast at being personified using such caricature. We'd moved on, and we wanted the picture of ourselves to do to same.

After only 30 years, the romantic ocker of beautiful bush and rugged, attractive living was over.

The Family of Middle America vs. Hollywood

There's a family somewhere of a teenaged girl, prepubescent boy, busy working dad and loving mom.

And I say 'mom', not mum, because this family isn't Australian or British. They're American. The girl wants to borrow the car on the weekend. The dad likes to play golf. The mom knows where all the oven mitts are stored. They have an SUV and a dog. They're not as worried about terrorists as the government wants them to be but they're careful. They're a lot more terrified of pedophiles. They know Iraq's all about oil but they don't really care, they're just pissed off gas is getting so expensive at the pump.

They might not know it, but they're the most powerful family on earth when it comes to shaping culture – not just in America, but everywhere from Amsterdam to Zanzibar.

How? You have to understand the term 'family' as a political concept rather than a group of blood relatives living in the same house.

The above description is mythical. It's the reason for almost everything that goes on in Washington because most of the people in America live in that mythical arrangement and thus form the biggest voting bloc for any political party.

Just like that mythical group has the most voting power, they have the most buying power when it comes to culture. And among the products entered into the ether of culture, movies are one of the most expensive.

When they cost upwards of $100 million to produce (and as much again to market) the people who invest in and make them have to ensure a lot of people see them.

They have to make them appeal to the broadest possible group, and the most represented group in the western world as a number is the mythical family.

The reason the US studios they don't make films specifically for black or gay or Muslim audiences is simply because there aren't enough people in those groups to ensure the studios return on investment. Or there are too many subcultures and the marketing wouldn't be able to target them effectively.

As movies get more expensive, they have to aim more broadly in economic terms. That means not including anything the mythical middle American family wouldn't get or agree with.

In Australia we're more urbane – most of us live in the cities. In America most of the population lives away from large cities and they're more conservative in their outlook. As a society they're much less accepting of gay people, black people in power, women in power and other concepts that have come of age in the last thirty to forty years.

So the bigger the film, the more it has to stay on that middle American straight and narrow to appeal to those people. If it's misdirected and doesn't get all those audiences, urban populations alone aren't enough to return the outlay of so much money to the studios and distributors.

And we all know the power of the movies. Along with commercial music publishing, movie production sets the tone for culture in all corners of the developed world. I often wonder if those studio executives and directors realise how much power they're holding in their hands.

But that's not where the buck stops. As the saying goes, we all work for someone, and the bosses of those Lamborghini-driving suits and producers are the mythical middle American family, looking at the marquee above the box office every Friday and Saturday night, making or ruining careers

Language; All We Need

There's a very famous experiment where a coupe of scientists brought chimpanzee babies up as humans from birth, speaking to them and treating them like their own.

The theory was that the chimps would end up able to; as they have extremely similar facial musculature as us, other primates certainly have the mechanics to speak.

But after several years of trying, all the animals could manage was a few rudimentary grunts and sounds that communicated certain simple desires like food or water.

The conclusion was that the human brain comes hard-wired for learning language, a hypothesis promoted by Chomsky and other leading linguists. Without consciously teaching a child how to speak (as we have to do for mathematics or writing), we do so simply by being around them in our day to day lives as they grow up.

That got me thinking about the difference between humans and animals, and I decided that maybe language is the only real difference, a talent our proportionately large brain must comprise of in at least a large part.

Watching chips communicate makes you realise that they're limited to a very basic set of vocalisations, gestures, postures and expressions. We see them shake branches and bark to ward off enemies or potential successors to their alpha male status, bare their teeth when angry, hoot when alarmed etc, but that's it.

It helps explain things if you consider that each animal (including us) has an inner life – a set of fears, desires, wants, needs and ideas. At their most basic, they're the same throughout the animal kingdom.

Every animal is essentially an island, cut off from every other life form because of the inefficiency with which they can communicate their inner life to each other, predators, prey or their environment.

The inner life of a human organism is a chicken and egg question; our inner life might not be terribly more complicated than that of a chimp as we feel fear for our offspring, the desire to mate or provide for our social group (family) or we clamour for access to land or resources.

But our powers to express that inner life are incredibly broad. We can describe every facet of our inner lives with extreme efficiency (just by making sounds with our mouths) to anyone else in our species.

What that's promoted after a hundred million years of evolution is what must be the most developed sense of empathy in the animal kingdom.

The chimpanzee has the mental and physical capabilities to construct a great and complicated society – maybe more so than us with our comparatively weaker upper bodies. But what restricts them is the ability not just to have an idea that could be construed as technology or invention (as many linguists believes, we see in words), but the ability to communicate that to his or her fellows.

Every chimpanzee would have to start from scratch and construct a great society completely on his or her own, the ideas and the method of execution cut off from his contemporaries simply because the extent of his powers to communicate with them are limited to shaking branches, thumping rocks together and hooting.

The human organism, by comparison, can be described as partly the hard-wired ability for language and partly the collected wisdom of his or her entire species.

When the first mud hut was constructed by inventive plains dwellers, the accumulated knowledge they realised in making it a success has led directly to the world of today with glass and steel skyscrapers reaching into the sky.

Long-term memory might be what we call the power to retain and recall all the information we can communicate to each other, but if you think of all the times you just haven't been able to remember some small detail about something and instead have had to look it up, that's the power of speech, not our extremely fallible memories. The power of speech can be thought of as collective memory.

Most things anyone in human history has learned or decided can be or have been bought to us because of the power of language (and reading, by simple extension).

Now it may be that the other animals are supremely more intelligent than us and have failsafe linguistic systems we could never recognise, let alone understand. It might be simply that they're content to involve themselves in the simple pursuits of food and reproduction rather than art, commerce or space travel. Maybe all we have that sets us apart from them is the power of ambition. If that's true speech among humans might be the most rudimentary form of communication among life on Earth.

But if casual anthropological observation bears out, the human race as a species is closer together than any other simply because individual experience can be disseminated through the whole collective in efficient terms that provoke the empathy language has prepared our brains to feel

Farming; Do we do it wrong in Australia?

I've always believed two things about farming; one, that as unsexy and unmarketable as it is, it's the cornerstone of our entire society, We might think email and petrol-driven transport and inflation controls are important, but without adequate food production civilised society would collapse in a matter of hours.

The other is that I'd never have the heart for it. Aside from the strangling economic factors always eroding the profitability and labour base of the farming sector, there always seems to be extreme drought or flooding further ruining the chances of farmers to make a decent living. At the moment we're having the driest winter on record where I live.

It's all very well to blame global warming, and yes things have changed dramatically in the last few years, but there's something unique about Australia's climate anyway.

The conquerors who settled here came from the cold, wet climes of Europe, which was perfect for the production of winter fruits and livestock. One look at the flora and fauna of Australia should have told them they were mad to try and farm the land here.

Now we're a country of 20 million and the pockets of arable land with enough water supply in the southernmost pockets of the country will hardly be enough to sustain us any more.

In continuing to demand potatoes for roasting, crunchy apples, beef, pork and sheep-based livestock, we might be demanding more than this country can give. We inherited European (especially English) tastes, especially tastes for hot roast meats, stewing vegetables and dairy-based food.

But none of them grow here naturally, we haven't got the rainfall or the ecosystem. We should look at what's successful here. Instead of trying to raise beef with it's insatiable thirst for grass and water, there's a billion kangaroos roaming the country. Even the harshest environments produce berries and roots that sustained Aboriginal people for over fifty thousand years. They roamed the entire country, inhabiting climates from the wettest, coldest Tasmanian winters to the most unforgiving dry of the outback.

And it's all already here, already thriving in an ecosystem that it's evolved perfectly to take advantage of. A real Australian meal might not be a roast chicken on Sunday, a steak and chips or a meat pie, but a open-barbecued goanna, bush yams and witchety grubs. Within the next generation, we might not have much choice

Naked Women and the Survival Instinct

If there were no men, would young women still want to take their clothes off in magazines?

The answer lies in the question; why do they do it? The answer in the overwhelming number of cases would be because they make a living out of it. They have a product to sell - attractive bodies and their apparent willingness to have sex with you.

Look at any porn film or girlie magazine spread. They're not just naked, they're seductive, inviting you with their eyes and their pout as much as their simple state of undress. But all that posturing is to appeal to men.

The proof in the pudding of why women take their clothes off is because in all but the tiniest number of cases, they're getting paid for it. Are there women who do it for the thrill of the tease or because they're simply as wanton as the pictures promise us? Undoubtedly. But in any of the professional media and a large part of the new media, women who undress are very well paid to do so, in either cash or the sort of publicity that drives their careers as actresses or models.

It's worth noting that women almost always say (or at least claim) that they loved the photo shoot because they like feeling sexy.

Would that have any currency for them if there was no opposite sex to appreciate it? What reason is there to be as attractive as possible other than to sexually attract the opposite sex? Both so there's an audience to appreciate your beauty and because their reaction makes us feel sexy, beautiful or vindicated in our efforts. We'd slop around all day in baggy clothes and ugg boots.

So when women take their clothes off for men's magazines, you might consider that sexist or one sided. Don't believe it for a moment – men respond visually to young, attractive females to impregnate with their offspring over that of their rivals. But women respond emotionally to financially secure protectors who will ensure their offsprings' survival. Naked girls in lad mags and filthy rich male movie stars with the world at their feet in gossip rags are the same expression of our desires reflected back at us.

So when a woman takes her clothes off for a magazine, that commercial transaction is the most basic expression of everything about us that keeps the opposite gender alive

Who Wants to be Rich?

There's an assumption in society that we all want to be rich. The media is saturated with it.

But recently I've started to notice how many people claim not to be interested in lots of money – even those for whom you'd assume being rich and famous is their goal. One of Australia's best selling authors even told me he never wanted anything more than to earn $40,000 a year and to be able to write.

That got me thinking; might there be a huge number of people for whom while money is a necessity, they wouldn't want to be drowning in it? Might those people even be in the majority?

Most of us are smart enough to know money comes with a price. Casual studies have been made into the lives of people who've won huge lotteries, and in most cases it hasn't only made life no better for the winners, it's made it worse.

Then there's the transaction you take part of as a rich person, no matter what your field. We all know from everyday life nobody just gives you the money to be rich. The market is a profit-driven machine, and business is about making more money than you spend. If someone gives you as much money as Tom Cruise, Paris Hilton or the CEO of Halliburton makes, they expect you to make them a whole lot back.

Celebrities are amply remunerated for their services as high-profile salespeople for media properties, but look at their lives; hounded by paparazzi, hiding away from the public gaze any time they want to relax, their private lives and relationships dissected in the gossip press. Many of us would shudder at the thought.

It's different but little better for the million dollar CEOs and business leaders of the world, who have a level of enslavement to work the likes of which us mortals can't grasp. Think your Blackberry, mobile and email go off at any hour of the day or night, making you feel like you can never get away from work?

Imagine being a company director – sure they have the private golf club memberships and the Mercedes in the garage at Vaucluse, but every minute could bring a change in the share price that could prompt a mass shareholder call for blood. Maybe Lachlan Murdoch did the only sensible thing when he realised that and bowed out of the Murdoch empire in 2006.

By contrast, it appears most of us want nothing more than to make an honest living and have a few laughs in life. Why then do we have this loud assumption, one that might be at odds with the aspirations of the majority?

Ask yourself this question; where do we get most of our information about the world? From the media, obviously – everything from a daggy oldies radio station to YouTube. And that's a narrow field. How so?

People who work in the media are artists. They work in areas where skills in artistic creativity must be bought to bear. Even TV presenters are performers, only a step away from actors.

A large part of being an artist is to dream of being renowned for your craft – artists all want to be rich and famous. So that constant goal of wanting to be rich is part of their lives, a constant shroud of chasing money, success and acclaim. They simply don't know any other way.

That inner life of the artist ends up as the background hum of the media soundtrack. They have little empathy for or even knowledge of the dreams of the people on the streets – nurses, plasterers, housewives, accountants and bartenders – who don't live under that overcast sky of failure and poverty threatening to rain down on them every minute.

So that thirst for money we get pervades society. It comes from a very narrow but extremely influential collection of viewpoints, and we all end up enthralled by it.

So stories about the death of spiritual life and the rise of materialism might be overrated. They might be the media simply turning its gaze on itself

What is Consciousness? A New Idea...

It's when I was a kid I looked at my hands and said 'what am I?' I thought I might be my hands – that's what I seemed to use the most. But I knew it was my brain controlling my hands to do what I wanted them to. So, I reasoned, I must be my brain. But I knew even then how many functions of the body are controlled involuntarily by the brain, so the nearest I ever narrowed it down as a kid of about 10 was that I must be a small part of my brain.

Now I have a new theory.

I've known for years about the famous experiment where light behaves as both particles and waves at the same time. I read recently the addendum to that story – which I didn't fully know – of light being in two places at once when it behaves as a particle.

If you're a physicist, you'll know the experiment I mean. They shine light through a screen with two slits onto another screen behind it. It shows up as waves by a repeating pattern of stripes.

If you dim the light source down so far it only lets one photon through at a time, you can measure which slit the photon comes through by the position when it hits the backboard.

A more elaborate version of the same experiment yielded a startling result that seems to fly in the face of everything we think we know about matter – a single particle of light can move through both slits. The recording plate will in some way record that the photon has been in two places at once – until we observe the particle's position. As soon as we pinpoint the location of the photon in space after it having come through both slits, the effects of it going through the other slit disappear.

That's not exactly the scenario but in a nutshell, the crux is that something (a photon, in this case) can have two different sets of properties, even exist in two places at once – until we pinpoint its position by looking for it, whereupon the other position ceases to be.

The question is, has that particle existed in two places up until the point of observation by some magic of physics, or do we, by observing it, bring the photon into existence?

What else is like that in the universe? What familiar thing can have two different properties until we bring it into existence by manifesting it? Easy – we're surrounded by them every day.

Thoughts.

If the doorbell rings or we hear a noise on the roof, we have two choices. Get up to answer it or investigate, or ignore it and keep reading or watching TV. Both choices are real. Both scenarios have the motive (for want of a better word) to exist, because we can choose either one. Both concepts exist – for the pure reason that if one didn't exist, it wouldn't strike us as an option.

Something can exist in our mind before it comes to fruition in reality. We think both paths, both realities until we make one real. Only when we ignore the sound or get up to answer the door has the die been cast in the universe and an action has been called into being by the choice between two notions, two possible modes of existence, two possible universes.

How are thoughts related to photons of light, you may ask? What is it that gives us two options when we hear the doorbell? What gives us the power to choose one path of action or another? What is it that even allows us to know the doorbell has sounded?

Consciousness.

Consciousness is a constant and total process of input from our environment, action carried out in reaction to it, and which affects it in turn.

We think of our brains as having this mysterious quality of consciousness and the rest of the universe having quantum mechanics, gravity, electromagnetic forces etc. As science has advanced, the consciousness, soul, spirit or personality has retreated to smaller physical locations inside us until modern medicine has banished it from the human body altogether (there's nowhere mysterious for it to live now we have a good idea what each organ is for). But it exists somewhere, presumably in our brain. Is it a gland? A single neuron? A combination of cells?

What if consciousness, the perception of reality and the possibilities of realities yet to come, is a fundamental quality in the universe – a field, much like gravity?

What if it's a field that can be expressed mathematically the same as nuclear fusion, one we simply haven't detected or identified yet. There's dark matter, anti-matter, all kinds of strange fields of particles in the universe. Actual matter – the sort we're used to – only amounts to four percent of the mass in the observable universe. Couldn't one of these strange fields we've detected but can't identify be consciousness?

I know it sounds like I'm being spiritual and invoking the Gaia spirit, but I'm speaking pure science. What if consciousness is a stream of particles like neutrinos that can exist in a tiny packet, not just in complicated organisms like us? What if the most basic effect of consciousness on the universe is to call into existence a state of being? The light exists in two places at once before we observe it – just like what we're going to do about the doorbell exists in two states in our mind before we act on it. Neither state is a reality yet, but they both exist as concepts or possible futures.

Might a human being simply be a biological organism that amasses a state of complexity such that it has a strong exertion on the field of consciousness in the cosmos, resulting in that organism being aware of its surroundings?

As the owner of a body, you and I are chemically no different than a rock, a telephone or a star. We're all made up of exactly the same stuff, just put together in different configurations.

There might be no magic quality we call 'life' – it just might be a system complicated enough to use the field of consciousness to bring complex possibilities into existence – more complicated than where a photon will reveal itself. Paul Davies said in Are We Alone? that life might be no more than a level of complexity. Life might just be a term we made up to label systems of enormous complexity that change faster than most processes in the universe (and manifest in reproduction, growth, the concepts of nourishment and waste etc).

We're too used in the world to feeling like we have this strip of flesh, inside it lives a soul, and everything else in the universe is governed by minute, arbitrary processes that affect us little.

The biochemistry and atomic behaviour inside our bodies is exactly the same everywhere in the universe. We're a spot of atoms crowded together more than they are in another spot. Our physical body could disintegrate at any second given the right circumstances in our region of space. What we are, however, is our consciousness. And just like our body is the melding of atoms in an endless ocean of them, our mind might be a bunching together in the particle ocean of consciousness.

So life might well have been inevitable, and a small clump of the ability to make choices in a loose collection of carbon and water molecules might be all life is

Arts Funding; A New Approach

Artists are a pretty greedy lot. In Australia, arts funding is one of the highest profile, expensive and – if you believe some of the hand wringing – unprofitable public investments there is.

According to an article on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, arts funding totaled $701.3m in the 1998/99 financial year. Film and video got $117.5m of it, outclassed only by art galleries and performing arts venues.

At almost every stage of arts development in Australia's modern history (the media age of the 20th and 21st centuries) there's been government intervention in the form of protective action or direct investment. And if there hasn't been (if, for example, the men in power in the day had no interest in the arts), it was usually accompanied by artists' associations loudly complaining about the loss of income, erosion of the employment base, juggernaut of American media swamping our shores, etc.

In today's Blair Witch era, the kids inspired by the 70s and 80s blockbusters have picked up DV cameras and given Australian filmmaking a thrilling new dynamic – albeit no more profitable or stable than it ever was, in many cases less so. Still, you'd find few in academic, intellectual or liberal circles (to say nothing of your average filmgoer) who wouldn't support arts funding.

But it seems to be failing in at least one area – the Australian film industry is as reliant on handouts as it's ever been. Unless you're a TV writer with an idea for an extended sitcom for TV-style audiences (the sort of stuff bankrolled by the Channel 9/Macquarie Bank/Showtime-style consortia), the only option left to you is to navigate the egocentric and political minefield of the public funding bodies.

Not only do you then stand little chance of your idea and vision surviving through the process intact even if you do become a lucky recipient, recent experience suggests your film will be about as well received as the idiotic comedies that plagued our screens in 2002, 03 and 04. The praise heaped upon 2003's Somersault had less to do with any real accomplishment of the film itself than it did with there being no competition.

So with millions disappearing down the black hole of arts funding, maybe its time to change course. Maybe it's time to apply ruthless market principles to publishing, filmmaking and art exhibition…

After a frenzied decade and a half of deregulation and privatisation, we live in a staggeringly market-driven society. Services controlled by governments and seen as essential throughout most of the 20th century are just more financial market commodities to be sold to the highest bidder – from units of electricity to savings accounts.

Even the media itself – perhaps the most pervasive expression of the arts – is seen almost universally as being more about shifting product than disseminating art. And unlike the government-assisted filmmaking scene, broadcasting and publishing are as cutthroat as any other industry sector. If people aren't watching your show or reading your periodical, the press baron at the head of the boardroom table will put a big red cross through it with little consideration of cultural expression or social debate.

Plumbers don't get government grants. Why should poets or filmmakers? Plumbers train, they set themselves up in business, they market themselves and the consumers of their industry pay for their product or service. Plumbing might not be critical to the cultural make-up of the human race, but next time a pipe bursts under the kitchen sink at 11pm, ask yourself if it's an essential service.

Should we simply let film directors operate the same way? Let them source or write the scripts, cast the actors, hire the locations and equipment, shoot the whole thing, hire the editing facilities, hire a publicist, get multiple copies sent to theatres and wait? Then, if the movie doesn't recoup the cost, should we really give them a few million of public money to do it again? If a plumber can't get enough work and closes up shop, nobody complains about the lack of government assistance for plumbers. Isn't that what commerce is supposed to be about, supply and demand? If you produce something nobody wants, nobody's going to pay you for it and you have to find some other living.

And you may well argue that while a plumber only needs his tools and his van, nobody should expect an individual or independent body to have the funds necessary to produce a film (hundreds of thousands of dollars for even the smallest nationally-released movie).

But starting a bank or an insurance company is similarly out of the reach of the individual, yet nobody complains about the lack of public assistance for people who want to start their own bank, either. Sure, there might be enough financial services out there to adequately service the marketplace, but that's no reason to not have a grants fund for it; if the same rationale was applied to movies, there'd be far fewer of them. With all the films vying for our attention and $15, most people would say the global film industry is in a chronic state of oversupply.

Here's where we've gone wrong.

Funding for the arts is indeed essential. When civilisations of the far future look back on our history, our artistic expression will comprise our dreams and fears as a race. Before the days of the Roman Empire when widespread record keeping became a tool of social maintenance, the art of a people is often all we have left to understand them by.

Launching a program to catalogue the entire contents of the Internet a few years ago, a spokesman defended the decision to include all the adult content. Our predilection for porn speaks volumes about the sexual mores of our time, he believed, and the political censorship of history had no place.

That's the basis upon which we as a society should ensure our collective expression is given as much assistance as necessary to make itself heard.

The reason we've lost our way with arts funding is because it's stopped being about ideas. Instead, it's all about commerce.

One of the reasons so many Australian movies are failing is because for the last five or so years, there's only been two major voices in our industry; the TV-style comedy and the public bodies' pursuit of arthouse appeal, endlessly trying to recapture the New Wave of Australian cinema from the 60s and 70s that inspired our best filmmakers and gave rise to the current industry.

In both cases, we're trying to capitalise on an existing idea (or style, or brand – call it what you will) to make our money back. The director who bought us just one of the high profile Australian movies of the last 12 months reported her frustration at one of the better-known national funding panels and the icy reception she met when unable to tell them what other films her movie was 'like' (because there were none).

Building our industry up to be self-sufficient is a great idea, but what sort of industry do we want it to be? One that uses stock standard cinematic ideas and stories to build up media properties and milk them for every cent with licensing deals and media assets? Hollywood invented that system and works it very well. Do we want or need a little Hollywood, just with different accents?

Sure, you can bring up raw economics by quoting the number of people the Aussie film industry employs, but the local Baker's Delight has had a sign in their window for six months saying they need staff. The recession is long behind us and employment isn't that hard to come by.

And realistically, any protests from the arts funding movement that preserving culture is their agenda are baseless. Most of the desire for a healthy artistic culture in filmmaking is an industry that returns its investment (from the standpoint of the funding bodies) and the very human desire to be rich and famous (from the standpoint of the artists). Few of the hopefuls in our film schools would complain if they ended up on the publicity circuit touted as the next Tarantino, and few moviegoers would complain because they love Tarantino movies.

Who's left to ask the question; do we really need another Tarantino?

If we want to fund arts on the basis of giving the currently living members of the human race a voice, we should seek out avenues that maintain the integrity of our collective expression.

Fund art because it's something we've never seen before and because it challenges us and will continue to define what we're interested in, not what turns a profit. Fund the meaningful instead of the flashy. Fund art, not commerce. Fund culture, not competition. Fund expression, not an endless stream of copycats

Who do we thank for freedom?

I sat up one night recently fighting off sleep, trying to answer a simple question and worried because I couldn't.

I strongly hesitate to use the word 'freedom' as it's become a tool for the US to bludgeon the rest of the world to its economic will, but in it's purest sense that's what it is.

Freedom to associate, freedom to worship, freedom to choose and pursue my career of choice, freedom from persecution because of my skin colour; I enjoy these things a great deal more than the vast majority of the world's population does.

And trying to work out who or what to thank for that led to a process of backtracking through history, rejecting or accepting every notion I could come up with.

The first was capitalism. I own a comfortable house full of nice things – much more than I need to merely stay alive. Of course, whether I should have only what I need to stay alive or whether – when so many other people don't even have that much – justice allows me to have more than I need so I can enjoy being alive is an entirely different argument.

I'm hesitant to thank capitalism because it has a bad name after globalisation and the unfair balance of power in the world. Noam Chomksy talks about corporate welfare, including how one of the richest electorates in the US enjoys unparalleled handouts from the government just because so many weapons manufacturers are situated there.

But as I have to remind myself, that's their kind of capitalism, the capitalism of protecting the rich – the kind that proliferates in today's world and makes life unfair for so many. I believe in its pure form where we all provide services or products we're good at creating and try to sell them to buyers in an unhindered market together with our competitors.

It's the reason that – when people complain about the loss of manufacturing jobs to China – part of me can't sympathise because that's capitalism at work, and measures like protective tariffs are the same kind of manipulation as the burgeoning market in government handouts to already-rich industries.

So yes, after some consideration I thank capitalism.

Do I thank God, for having been born in a stable country with a lot of natural resources, resources industries based here can capitalise on and assure a high living standard through the mechanisms of the capitalism mentioned above?

South America, Africa and the Middle East all enjoy similar natural and marketable resource than Australia does, in many cases more so. It seems the instability of their political system and their history of colonial invaders and overseers has tripped them up. No colonial power has left the third world without making sure they still pulled the string locally, hence why society ladies in New York and Paris wear the diamonds that come out of Africa's mines while Africans fight and kill each other for them.

Therefore, no, I don't think being born a citizen on a continent with resources is enough.

Genetically, I'm more British than Australian. It's in large part because I have white skin that I live comfortably. Countries where they have black or dark skin were overrun in the 19th century by the European powers, their people subjugated and enslaved, their resources pillaged, conditions and cultures many dark skinned people are still struggling to free themselves from. If I'd been from native Australian stock, I'd more likely be one of the people living in a remote community ravaged by ill health and alcoholism.

So do I have the colour of my skin to thank? Because my white skinned ancestors were aggressive, expansionist, territorial and used armed invasion as a political tool where the dark-skinned races were passive and ill-equipped to defend themselves? Partly so, I think.

Do I thank technology? Absolutely. Without it, I'd be sleeping in a cold cave worried about how I'd protect my wife and daughter if a sabre-toothed cat came in. Technology enables almost every measure of security, occupation and enjoyment I have in life. Technology is the result of our genetic sense of ambition, conquest and power. But that sense of ambition has an evil twin, because when the first caveman bashed the head of an enemy in with a club to settle a land or mating dispute, it led directly to a society where I can put a DVD on or look at a web page.

Do I thank the US government, for making sure freedom endures in the world? That's the subject of a million treatises by much smarter thinkers than I, so the US as a force of destruction in the world through their program of selective interference and widespread mass murder doesn't even warrant further discussion.

Like them, the Australian government would like to do everything it can to tear up the public contracts of freedom, and has done so to a large degree in the name of convenient and scary labels like paedophilia and terrorism.

It's the institutions and the way of life in Australia that are more relevant. We operate under a constitution that in theory trickles down to set the judicial and legislative standard across all political, economic and cultural life. Do I have that to thank – the fact that it's all too unwieldy to change such a raft of tradition and law that we've had for 200 years but many would like to?

If so, where do I go to track back through the Australian rules of law and freedom? The British parliamentary system, which for all its faults still has the right spirit – of not putting too much power in the hands of too few, designed to give voices to separate interests.

Of course they all work for the same corporate paymasters nowadays just like in any western democracy, so even if the practice has been grotesquely perverted the theory is still intact, and without the theory some megalomaniac would sweep the whole system away and we'd be living under a fascist dictator.

The ethos of British government came from a single cache of documents, the Magna Carta, which enshrines rights of protections against the state such as unlawful detention without trial (interesting that it's one being steadily dismantled for the first time in 800 years across the western world right now despite being one of the most powerful concepts of the charter).

A potted history of the Magna Carta is that the King of England committed several acts of such shocking ill judgment the land barons of England rebelled and demanded limits be placed on his power.

So do I have only the lack of political skill of the human race to thank? Prior to the Magna Carta (and to some extent since then) any rights of the people were overseen by the notion of the Divine Right to rule, where the whim of a born monarch was unchallenged law.

Do I have my own nature to lust after power and control to thank, a nature that was curtailed by people who realised that everyone's lust for power should be balanced against everyone else's?

Is that not only the reason I can feel safe and secure and pursue happiness and liberty in my home today, but the reason we as a species have a shocking record of living in harmony and sharing what we have, the reason war and poverty are just two of our biggest legacies to history?