'Compared with low-level agents, high-level agents express a more internal locus of control, report more stability and consistency in their actions across contexts, and have clearer and more stable self-concepts. By contrast, low-level agents report acting more impulsively and describe their actions with less reference to mental states. The tendency to identify one’s actions at higher levels then may be indicative of an awareness of one’s own mind as a cause of behavior. -- Mentalizing incorporates subprocesses whereby the perceiver infers the existence of mental states, internal events, and other features of agents from external cues or from a personal simulation of the other’s experience... The tendency to mentalize in adults has been examined in studies of empathy, perspective-taking, emotion recognition and attribution, and knowledge estimation....mentalization is a continuum. At the lowest end of the continuum is the failure to attribute mental states to an agent, which might be called dementalizing. Thought, emotion, and intention are not inferred or are ignored. A perceiver can dementalize a person by explaining the person’s actions in terms of physical events, preexisting dispositions, or causal chains that do not require a mind.'

'As the Copenhagen summit starts, the rise of eco-Malthusianism shows the anti-human, future-fearing essence of climate-change alarmism. The odious Optimum Population Trust (OPT) is a zombie-like Malthusian organisation devoted to the cause of human depletion. Sadly we live in a world where, for many climate crusaders, a photo of 12 beaming babies is somehow a bad thing, a symbol of the problems we face. Why? Because the OPT has discovered that ‘every £4 spent on contraception’ saves ‘one tonne of CO2 being added to global warming’. It claims that the most effective way to fight climate change is to get rich Western people to offset their own carbon emissions by paying for birth control programmes in poor nations. What is truly disturbing about this, from a humanist perspective, is not simply that there is a silent crusade against the unique quality of human life, but that there is an almost complete absence of anger about it, a lack of any critical reaction against it.'