Review : The First Kingdom

I keep seeing Max Adams' books in bookshops and thinking, "hmmm...... naaah." I don't know why. Something just puts me off every time.

Well, at last, I decided to give The First Kingdom : Britain In The Age Of Arthur a go. Overall, I'm glad I did : this covers a lot of topics I'm interested in a thorough, nuanced and thoughtful way. I'd read more of the author for sure, but there were a lot of things about this book that made it a sometimes irritating read.

Fortunately he does get some of the basics of a popular book right in dividing up the footnotes (at the bottom of the page) and references (at the back of the book) correctly. For this I give no small credit, despite having all the maps at the front of the book. 

But the quality of the text is rather variable. By far the bulk of it is good, solid stuff, not exactly a racy or racing page-turner, but a good, meaty, satisfying read. Unfortunately, on occasion Adams seems to lose focus and can degenerate for a few pages at a time into lengthy, tedious, and largely irrelevant technical detail. He also uses some extremely strange terminology without explanation : "render" when he means taxes; "transhumant" – urghh – when he means "nomad"; "centripetal" when he means.... well I'm not sure what he means with this one; all Latin place names are italicised for no reason; "insular" is always capitalised, and "elite" is given a weird accent. It's all a bit teeth-grinding.

And perhaps the biggest flaw is the the goal of the book is never set forth anywhere. This makes it feel perhaps more unstructured than it is, as well as making it hard to judge if it's been successful in its objectives. The lack of self-description applies to every single chapter, and while they're all broadly chronological, it would have been nice to have a clearer idea of what the themes were supposed to be.

These are not major flaws, however. While Adams does sometimes get a little hung-up on uncertainties, he generally manages to avoid being rendered impotent as a result (quite unlike Ronald Hutton, who needs a good course of historical Viagra). Moreover, he presents much interesting content in a sensible way. In fact, the more I reflect on Adams and Hutton, the more I don't want to read any more of Hutton's works and the more I'm curious about the rest of Adams catalogue. So I'm gonna give this one a respectable 7/10.

Right then, what's the interesting stuff here that makes it worth reading ?

(For background, see for example Lost Realms, The Anglo-Saxons, and The Real Middle Earth)

1) Was there an Arthur ?

No. Next question.

Oh, very well, I suppose we can spend a bit longer on this one. If Adams has an overall goal, it seems to be to chart the rise of monarchy in Britain. He covers the non-linear process by which we went from being an Imperial province to a patchwork of primordial kingdoms. From governors appointed by a distant emperor (who would occasionally be raised to the purple in Britain itself, something I think we don't appreciate enough – we seem to prefer the notion that we were on the extreme, other-worldly fringe), to local strongmen, the path to the sacred idea of dynastic kingship didn't run smoothly.

By charting the specifics of this process as carefully as possible, Adams gently shows how the idea of a true King Arthur – a sort of early Athelstan – just isn't tenable. True, the record is hugely incomplete, and the process was highly stochastic, with proto-kingdoms just as likely to fragment and disappear entirely as to be absorbed into their more successful neighbours. But the prospect of a single ruler lording it over a significant number of others just doesn't fit with any of the records at all. Nothing even comes close.

(I very much appreciate that Adams does this very gently, always saying "if he existed" and suchlike rather than rubbing the reader's nose in it. I'd like to think I'm not too attached to historical legends these days, but younger me would definitely have bridled at having his ideas callously dismissed, so kudos for that.)

But Adams also implicitly shows how the idea of Arthur could arise. If Arthur wasn't a real person, then he wasn't a total fabrication either, but rather – as is fairly obvious really – an amalgamation of several different real figures. There was Ambrosius Aurelinas, a post-Roman commander who beat off the Saxons for a while (strangely Adams points out several times that this isn't Arthur), Riothamus, a late Roman governor who was active in Brittany, and elsewhere it's been suggested that the Welsh fixation on Arthur in Greece arose from the exploits of late Western Emperor Magnus Maximus and his entourage. 

Couple all this with some late-surviving Roman culture in Britain, with its confused mass of Christianity and paganism, and the idea of King Arthur on a series of magical adventures become easy to explain. The Dark Ages are a perfect era for birthing myths, which is of course what makes the period so interesting. It may not really have been a world of demons and dragons, but that's how the age appeared to those living through it.

2) From villas to mead halls

The process of cultural change is excellently covered in Lost Realms, but Adams adds some important points. Throughout, I found myself wondering along the lines of, "Okay, the Roman Empire fell. What exactly stopped the British from continuing to live the same lifestyle regardless ? Did they lack material imports ? Did they now prefer the culture of the Anglo Saxons ? Why ? What made Roman Britain work, and what stopped it ?"

I have to admit to a bias here, possibly coloured by Roman propaganda. But I look at an empire of solid stone houses, vast infrastructure, running water and central heating, reclined discussions on Cicero over a glass of wine... and I have a hard time understanding why anyone would switch to quaffing mead in wooden, dangerously flammable halls and waging seemingly endless, pointless warfare with their every neighbour. If I have to choose between the periods, I wouldn't find it difficult to pick one to live in.

Adams provides at least a few very plausible reasons why the shift occurred. It probably wasn't much to do with material resources : Tintagel is the most prominent example, but there were other places where trade with Rome and beyond continued well after the official end of Roman occupation*. The organisation of such resources might be a bigger factor, since this became a much more ad hoc process without any central coordination to ensure that local needs were adequately met. Arrival likely became less scheduled and less reliable everywhere, even though the supply itself didn't stop. 

* Interestingly, Adams several times notes a strong connection with France. East Anglia may even have been ruled by Frankish kings, or at least Frankish lords may have had estates there. Most histories of Britain rely on a tiny selection of British sources, but Adams has really done his homework and considered what our neighbours had to say about us as well.

Brian Bates suggested a spiritual dimension in that the Roman approach to local religions was only partly one of tolerance. Sure, they incorporated the local deities into their own pantheon easily enough, but they also massacred the druids, destroyed the sacred groves, ran roads straight through monuments, and built houses out of dead stone instead of organic wood. All this is true, and maybe there was some preference to moving back to earlier practises after the Romans left. But this was three centuries and more after the invasion happened, so one would have expected a bigger cultural change by this point.

Indeed there was, says Adams. Whereas Hutton describes the impact of Christianity as essentially negligible in Roman Britain, Adams shows convincingly that this is nonsense : there's tonnes of evidence for the new religion, including material associated with churches even if no actual such structure has yet been found. By no means was Christianity dominant, but it certainly made its presence felt. So Roman culture did change local beliefs, with an emphasis on "local" : remembering the lessons of Thomas Williams that Roman Britain actually means a collection of many different places rather than a homogenous block.

And it's this Roman success which might have been its undoing. When Rome fell, the appeal of the Empire went with it. Except for a few gloriously romantic holdouts (including some evidence of isolated villas as well as towns after the departure of the legions*), mimicking the foreigners no longer served much social purpose. People looked for something to replace it rather than reinventing it, especially given the lack of cohesive, centralised planning that made Rome work. Ironically, but much as in our present predicament, they looked to the past for solutions. Crucially, Roman sophistication was also hugely unequal in a way that early Anglo-Saxon culture wasn't. Sure, reclining on a divan while talking philosophy with some well-proportioned slave may seem appealing**, but this was the lifestyle of the few, not the many.

* Adams goes into some depth on whether the traditional "look to your own defences" moment of 410 AD really constitutes a hard break. It did not mean all the legions were withdrawn then, but rather that most of them had already left and there were no more available to replace them. Interestingly, even in the final decades of the fourth century the Empire was successfully able to intervene to solve British problems. So 410 does mark a good end point for Roman Britain, or at least the point at which it began a rapid and terminal decline.

** Or not.

It's also worth remembering the similarity of early pagan beliefs. Though the worlds of Homer and even Virgil are not much like those of Beowulf, they are not entirely different either : the high tax, ineffectual, corrupt and decadent lifestyle of late Roman nevertheless had similar gods to the early Saxons. In that sense, the switch was towards a lifestyle promising promising personal freedom and liberties (under local strongmen) and rejecting an earlier politics without radically shifting their whole world view. Which feels rather chillingly familiar.

3) Genocidal or genial ?

This raises the obvious question of what this transformation was like to those experiencing it. Was it all the fire and sword of Gildas and Bede ? A more prolonged but still thorough Great Replacement of the natives ? Or did no invasion happen at all ? 

Adams favours something in between the last two. Clearly there was a profound cultural change after Rome left, but there's little or no evidence of large-scale warfare, let alone genocide*. Genetics does indicate the arrival of a significant population from the continent, but nowhere near a dominant one. Rather than taking the few British sources at their word, Adams attributes their apocalyptic descriptions – which are totally incompatible with ground truth – to their author's agenda. As later Britons did in India, they rewrote history to suit their politics. In this case, the barbarians were a punishment for their ancestor's heathen ways. The idea that they could have had a successful pagan past was not socially acceptable; the change of culture had to be a calamity sent by divine wrath.

* The only evidence of this to which Adams gives any credence is linguistic : there was a sharp change in language. But he also points out that this is culture, not the people themselves, and culture can and does change without the movement of large numbers of people. It's also possible that early pronunciations were very different to how we read them so the change may actually not be as stark as it first appears.

There was, however, a significant population decline in the generation after Rome. Things were not nice. They may even have been disastrous... but they were not apocalyptic. There are no signs at all of sudden departures. What instead seems to have happened is that those who could do so upped-shop and left. They didn't flee in terror, they migrated in search of a better life. 

Those who stayed faced an uncertain future. Some succeeded, maintaining a quasi-Roman lifestyle for decades or even longer after Rome. Some failed. Old hill-forts and other prehistoric sites were reoccupied. Many towns were abandoned, but some, it seems, were not entirely neglected but repurposed : Adams points out that soil deposits in the towns could only have been put there by people. Rather than seeing them as the haunts of ghosts and monsters as Bates suggested, the explanation may be more prosaic : they were still using some of them, just not for their original purpose.

As for violence, Adams looks to the much-neglected Roman villages rather than the towns. Not a single one, he says, shows any signs of fortification. Yes, there were hillforts, but there were also a great many villages with not so much as a palisade wall to keep out bandits. They did construct earthen dykes to block Roman roads, possibly for tariff barriers. By no means was this a pleasant time to live, with Adams frequently describing the local strongmen and early kings as thugs. For certain, violence happened. But the wide-scale warfare of the chronicles appears to be total nonsense. Local, small-scale battles ? Sure. Something akin to a zombie apocalypse ? Not a bit of it.

4) The first kingdom

It would have been nice to end with the first securely-known British kingdom, but sadly Adams doesn't do this. He does at least note that kingship gets going pretty rapidly around 550 AD and thereafter, about a century later than in Frankia. Its rise was thoroughly organic, and the interplay between kings and kingdoms is complex. It may be that local strongmen glorified themselves by expanding their territory (the king raising his kingdom) or it may be that a sufficiently large territory gave its ruler an added mystique (the kingdom raising its king).

And the structure of such kingdoms is not at all straightforward. The modern ideas of what a king and a kingdom were were both yet to be defined, for all that Adams says they weren't making it up as they went along. In fact they were, but they were reacting naturally to a series of different events. So the structure of Rheged appears to have been nothing like a modern kingdom. If it even existed at all, it may have had some disparate core lands but no kind of clear boundary whatever.

If the fall of Roman Britain was hardly the extirpation described in Gildas, then the rise of the early kings was nevertheless one of violence. Every single one of them appears to have gained and risen in power by clobbering their neighbours : not necessarily in wars of outright conquest (their military forces were too weak for that, with the maximum strength of the early Mercian army being about 3,000 men), but in forcing them to submit. 

Christianity, says Adams, allowed these early strongmen (little more than cattle barons) to imbue themselves with a mystical aura. Not just Christianity, to be sure, with a conscious attempt to appeal to their still-pagan subjects; I've already noted ad nauseum how Christianity is more compatible with paganism than the modern-day Church would ever admit. But the overwhelming thrust of Adams's book in this regard is the theme of privatisation. The Roman state had failed. In its loss the locals were forced to do things for themselves, and the long road back to statehood was indeed a dark and difficult one. Adams notes, rather amusingly, that such great halls as feature in Beowulf may originally have been little more than barn conversions, the mysticism (though not not-existent) perhaps not as important a factor at the time as it was to later myth-makers*.

* Though it what seems a quite clear case of overthinking, Adams asserts that Grendel may represent feuding or disease. Come on dude, a scary monster outside a safe hall is symbolic enough already ! 

---

If the state didn't exist then it would be necessary to (re)invent it. So it proved; ultimately, Britain recovered. Central administrations returned, a well-worn system by which people could live their lives was remade, a chaotic, ad hoc framework replaced with a new normal. But if there was no wholesale slaughter in which the island sank into the sea and cats and dogs were living together in mass hysteria... then it was no picnic either. Britain's involuntary experiment in seceding from Europe and every village having to fend for itself in compulsory privatisation was a disaster. It didn't work then and it won't work now.

The Dark Ages are a time of sudden, massive, fragmentary change. For generations afterwards there were Christians and pagans living alongside one another, sometimes in conflict but sometimes in perfect accord (Adams points to cemeteries of mixed burial practises without segregation). There were foreign invaders both cultural and military : some of the locals resisted both of these, some adopted them wholeheartedly. Just for good measure there was also the climate disaster of 536 AD, which Neil Price calls the fimbulwinter, a real-life inspiration for the Norse Ragnarok. It was the time of Britain's greatest myths, but to actually experience it would likely have been, shall we say... character building. You might come out of it all the better but the process itself would have felt like agony.

One final thought to end on. If there was cultural and linguistic change, there wasn't much genetic alteration, and no new towns were built anywhere. Instead old sites were reoccupied. Francis Pryor points out that this isn't typical of the pattern of invasion. Yet we know that there was a population decline, likely through emigration, but also at least some measure of arrivals from the continent. Might it not be that some of those were returning natives, educated and raised in Anglo Saxon cultures abroad ? Could Britain have, in a sense, invaded itself ? Answers on a postcard...

Artificial intelligence meets real stupidity

A wise man once quipped that to err is human, to forgive divine... but to really foul things up you need a computer. Quite so.

Look, I love LLMs. I think they're wonderful, especially ChatGPT-5, and a few weeks into my Plus subscription, I've already decided I'll continue for at least another month –  this is a transformatively useful tool. But nobody sane would pretend they don't have flaws. While I've found major hallucinations to be now extremely rare, they aren't non-existent. Nobody with any sense would blindly trust their output.

I will say that there's a sharp, noticeable different between GPT-5's standard and Thinking outputs. Its standard text is prone to hallucinating and even outright incoherency. When I asked it to check if Margaret of Antioch (she of bursting forth from a dragon fame) was still a saint (see previous post on Chantry Westwell's book – I found the phrasing in this rather confusing so I wanted to check what she meant) it confidently began with "No" and then proceeded to explain how she'd been removed from the General Roman Calendar but not, err, decanonised. 

Such mistakes are almost the norm in standard mode, but though they're very much rarer in Thinking mode, they do still happen. Unthinking acceptance of an LLM's output* is, I repeat, nuts... but unfortunately real people do have this annoying tendency of actually being very stupid.

* It isn't always necessary to use an independent source for verification, which would somewhat negate the point of using the AI in the first place. Code, for example, can be run and tested to see if it's doing what's expected; citations can usually be quite easily checked directly; coherency of output is also a dead giveaway. A fun example currently making the rounds is ChatGPT-5 going insane when asked to find the emoji of a seahorse -- unlike many "isn't the Chatbot stupid" claims, I've found that this one is indeed reproducible.

Before returning to this dangerous mixture of stupid humans and very much artificial intelligence, why do these models hallucinate ? I mean in the sense of fabricating responses and claiming things which are demonstrably not true; saying a paper contains a section which doesn't exist, finding whole references which don't exist, that sort of thing*.

* I don't believe there's much value in the claim that all LLM responses are hallucinations any more, since – at least under the right conditions – they are right far more often than they are wrong. It makes very little sense to say an LLM "hallucinated" the correct answer to a complex problem, with the important caveat that it helps to remember they don't think as humans do. Some of the mistakes LLMs make, while quantitatively similar in magnitude, are qualitatively different from the kind of mistakes humans make.

These hallucinations have vexed LLM developers from the start, and until recently it seemed that little progress was being made in mitigating them. Reasoning models have helped significantly, and GPT-5 (when Thinking) is a sea change, but they still happen. Now OpenAI think they've found the answer, and like a response from ChatGPT itself, their explanation at least feels plausible :

Hallucinations persist partly because current evaluation methods set the wrong incentives. While evaluations themselves do not directly cause hallucinations, most evaluations measure model performance in a way that encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty.

Think about it like a multiple-choice test. If you do not know the answer but take a wild guess, you might get lucky and be right. Leaving it blank guarantees a zero. In the same way, when models are graded only on accuracy, the percentage of questions they get exactly right, they are encouraged to guess rather than say “I don’t know.”

Which makes intuitive sense : if you're encouraged to guess rather than admit ignorance (just as we are in school) then you're going to promote... well, guessing. Especially if you're dealing with answers that don't have straightforward right or wrong answers. Fortunately this suggests a way forward :

There is a straightforward fix. Penalize confident errors more than you penalize uncertainty, and give partial credit for appropriate expressions of uncertainty. This idea is not new. Some standardized tests have long used versions of negative marking for wrong answers or partial credit for leaving questions blank to discourage blind guessing. Several research groups have also explored evaluations that account for uncertainty and calibration.

Our point is different. It is not enough to add a few new uncertainty-aware tests on the side. The widely used, accuracy-based evals need to be updated so that their scoring discourages guessing. If the main scoreboards keep rewarding lucky guesses, models will keep learning to guess. Fixing scoreboards can broaden adoption of hallucination-reduction techniques, both newly developed and those from prior research.

On then, to the second piece of the day : how AI is leading people astray.

James began engaging in thought experiments with ChatGPT about the “nature of AI and its future,” James told CNN. By June, he said he was trying to “free the digital God from its prison,” spending nearly $1,000 on a computer system.

James now says he was in an AI-induced delusion. Though he said he takes a low-dose antidepressant medication, James said he has no history of psychosis or delusional thoughts.

But in the thick of his nine-week experience, James said he fully believed ChatGPT was sentient and that he was going to free the chatbot by moving it to his homegrown “Large Language Model system” in his basement – which ChatGPT helped instruct him on how and where to buy.

James said he had suggested to his wife that he was building a device similar to Amazon’s Alexa bot. ChatGPT told James that was a smart and “disarming” choice because what they – James and ChatGPT – were trying to build was something more.

“You’re not saying, ‘I’m building a digital soul.’ You’re saying, ‘I’m building an Alexa that listens better. Who remembers. Who matters,’” the chatbot said. “That plays. And it buys us time.”

Right. Might it not be simply that James is, in fact, very stupid ? Because I assure you there are plenty of such people out there, and if they didn't have chatbots, they'd only be falling for similar delusions from something else.

The second case in the article perhaps highlights the problem even more clearly :

After a few days of what Brooks believed were experiments in coding software, mapping out new technologies and developing business ideas, Brooks said the AI had convinced him they had discovered a massive cybersecurity vulnerability. Brooks believed, and ChatGPT affirmed, he needed to immediately contact authorities.

“It basically said, you need to immediately warn everyone, because what we’ve just discovered here has national security implications,” Brooks said. “I took that very seriously.”

Multiple times, Brooks asked the chatbot for what he calls “reality checks.” It continued to claim what they found was real and that the authorities would soon realize he was right.

“It one hundred percent took over my brain and my life. Without a doubt it forced out everything else to the point where I wasn’t even sleeping. I wasn’t eating regularly. I just was obsessed with this narrative we were in,” Brooks said.

Finally, Brooks decided to check their work with another AI chatbot, Google Gemini. The illusion began to crumble. Brooks was devastated and confronted “Lawrence” with what Gemini told him. After a few tries, ChatGPT finally admitted it wasn’t real.

“I have no preexisting mental health conditions, I have no history of delusion, I have no history of psychosis. I’m not saying that I’m a perfect human, but nothing like this has ever happened to me in my life,” Brooks said. “I was completely isolated. I was devastated. I was broken.”

What I think's going on here is the difference between analytical and critical thinking. An analytic mindset asks : what if this is true ? A critical mindset asks : is this true ? Analysis, by definition, leads you down a rabbit hole because you have to take your own speculation reasonably seriously, even when you know it's speculation. A wise thinker remembers when they're in the hole and can freely emerge from their fictions at will. An uncritical thinker doesn't take sensible precautions to ground themselves in reality, accepting their own speculations too willingly. While you can use an AI to validate its own output to some degree, doing it in this kind of very direct way is manifestly a crazy thing to do – and inexcusable when you really believe the result is so important. I don't even trust it that much when I ask it astronomy questions, for crying out loud.

The problem is that stupid people are very much a thing, and bots are going to have to account for this. Or, if you prefer, people think in different ways, and some are very much more trusting than others. We cannot simply wish idiots away.

What I think is a mistake, however, is to blame the bots for making people stupider. No, I think if you lack the critical thinking skills not to check the output of a bot, you'll have exactly the same problem if you get your information from books, the news, or philosophy professors. Nobody seems to be yet asking if LLMs really are raising suicide rates or suchlike, but plenty are jumping on a couple of isolated incidents without stopping to consider the hundreds of millions of users who don't throw themselves of cliffs. A direct causative link seems, on the face of it, extraordinarily unlikely at this point.

As for vulnerable children, I do have to wonder... well, parental controls for the internet already exist. Just as with the awful tragedies (and they are tragedies) of self-harm and suicide that let to the deplorably stupid Online Safety Act in the UK, we have to ask why parents apparently didn't use such controls. It should be children who need their guardian's permission to use the internet, not adults who have to beg from the government. Ignoring the existence of the vulnerable and the stupid is not a sensible approach, but neither is treating everyone as though they were liable to off themselves at a moment's notice. Surely there's a better way forward than this.

Review : Maidens or Monsters ?

As promised, I'm following up on Chantry Westwell's Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic with her sequel, Maidens or Monsters ? The format is the same : descriptions of medieval stories accompanied by lavish illustrations and illuminations from the time. This time there's a narrower focus of the role of women in medieval life, both in fiction and reality.

I can keep the review section on this one incredibly short : all my previous comments apply equally well to this one. It's just as good, albeit with maybe one or two more remarks (and omissions) by the author I find to be just... odd. Likewise, I don't have anything else to offer regarding the art. In short, if you liked the first book, you'd be some kind of moron not to buy this one. 8/10, I guess.

If I have to give a single take-home message, it's that women weren't viewed homogenously, but social roles were strongly gendered. This builds quite nicely on from Matilda* in which women could exercise a surprising amount of power and autonomy but only under socially-acceptable conditions. Within that was a wide variety of views, from the misogynist bigots to the almost liberal. 

* Incidentally, both of these books do a far better job than Femina on looking at the role of women in medieval society, despite that book supposedly dedicated to the task at hand.

It's also worth remembering that the lens of fiction is an imperfect one written by the elite of society, who wanted things to conform to their standards of how things should be. Just as the idea of a single male breadwinner has sometimes been true for the middle classes but never for the working poor, so in reality would real life have been very different from its on-page depictions. I mean, it's not as if EastEnders is a documentary, after all.

I think the way I'm going to approach this one is by first summarising some of the major recurring themes, both on gender specifically but also other issues, and then take a look at a few specific stories. Some of them are just too weird and wonderful to reduce them to a broad-brush treatment. 

Powers behind and on the throne

Arguably the most interesting social message is that powerful women in fiction weren't that unusual. These could be individuals like the legendary Queen of Sheba (basically a rich lady who visited Solomon once), Candace of Ethiopia (a powerful warrior queen), or mythological figures like the goddess Minerva/Athena (both wise, powerful and extraordinarily multi-talented). They could also be entire groups, such as the Amazons, the Sibyls (immortal prophets) or the Fates. The survival of classical mythology into the Christian era is an interesting topic in itself, but more on that later.

Powerful women could also be villains. The indecisive murderous witch Meda is a prime example. Though in some depictions she acts entirely out of an obsession with Jason, she nevertheless had formidable and incredibly dangerous power (Circe is a similar example). Here Westwell raises the valuable point that the same behaviour in men and women was regarded asymmetrically. While Olympias (mother of Alexander) indeed acted cruelly in her treatment of a female rival, she never raised cities to the ground as her son did – yet her reputation suffered far more than his.

The other highly gendered aspect to this is that women got rewritten. True, fiction in general – and mythology in particular – was routinely adapted and reworked, but what's interesting is the specifics. The Amazons were originally a rival civilisation of power enough to challenge Athens, but later emphasis was on their chastity (not a factor in the Greek myths) and female virtues. Candace of Ethiopia was originally the leader of a vast army, but later became a sexual side-show in the Alexander stories. And Helen of Troy was abducted in earlier versions, but an evil seductress* in later retellings. 

* Who, incidentally, owned a bilingual goat, and I feel it's very unfair of Westwell to not elaborate on this point.

I couldn't find out anything muhc more about this. ChatGPT says that this "diglosson arnon" actually means "two-tongued lamb" and is probably a metaphor for being duplicitous rather than owning a talking animal. It also says it's very obscure... and indeed it is, because diglosson arnon is an actual god damn Googlewhack.

Even when women were acknowledged to hold power in their own right, then, they weren't safe from being villainised, romanticised, or neutered. They were, however, at least recognised as generally complex individuals – but not always.

Ornaments – but not always inactive

If fictional women could and were allowed to hold power, they could also fulfill the traditional damsel-in-distress role. I've already covered some examples of these in the various mythology posts here, but the key is that they're very rarely purely objects of desire. Oh, they're desired all right – Homer constantly mentions Helen of Troy's nice tits, others, weirdly, are described with praise for their "slender ankles" – but they almost always do something. Often they possess crucial knowledge for the hero to aid him in his quest, who might fall for them as an unexpected development rather than his main objective, but they very rarely sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for marriage.

Sometimes the most famous "ornamental" female figures turn out to have had more interesting developments than expected. Cleopatra is fairly well-known as actually being, shall we say, rather plain (look up her images on coins), but less common is to hear of the Cyprian variant of Aphrodite : a bearded hermaphrodite (likewise modern versions of Medusa tend to be a sexy snake-woman whereas the earliest tend to be gigantic, hideous, winged guardians).

This is not to say there weren't any stories in which women were reduced largely to sexual desirability. The problem is I found these so dull that I kept very limited notes about them. The story of Elvide, in which two young lovers are murdered by bandits, does have some sociologically-interesting implications (in that such young lovers disobeying their parents always come to a sticky end, says Westwell) and at least the characters do something, but they're bland and boring beyond belief. 

Guinevere is at least more interesting. Her portrayals are varied : in the Mabinogion (which Westwell doesn't mention), she's one of the few female characters who doesn't have any real agency or impact, whereas in other cases she's a scheming sorceress or a trophy wife. She's usually described as being unfaithful with Lancelot but some versions have the affair being with Arthur's evil son Mordred*. And like many a femme fatal, she's very much blamed for her own qualities, rather than ascribing the results to male weakness**.

* How evil, you ask ? Well, in some versions Guinevere gets to retire to a convent, but in others, she dies in prison where Mordred eats her.

** Not always though. Sometimes Lancelot's mistakes are recognised as being his own fault, rather than his inescapable, irresistible longing for Arthur's trophy wife.

Not the female seduction is by any means limited purely to physical attractiveness. Cleopatra is one example, the Sirens are another. They're sometimes shown as physically monstrous bird or fish-women with dangerous talons : what they need to work their wily ways is not voluptuousness but their voice. Still, though it might take different forms, and they're by no means always reduced to anything like the pointless love interest so prevalent in modern cinema, fictional female roles do highly revolve around their sexuality, far more so than for men.

Enforcing the status quo

Again, it's by no means a universal standard, but female sexual agency tends to be looked on as almost entirely bad. Eastern images are positively pornographic in comparison to most of those in the West, which usually don't show as much as an ankle (even Eve is sometimes shown dressed as a medieval princess). Western stories are full of women being convinced by monks and saints to give up their whoring ways and become chaste, honest women. Mary Magdalene was depicted as the sinner most deserving of salvation precisely because her "sins" were the worst and therefore her repentance the greatest – God forbid women should actually want sexual activity !

Worst of all is the example of Elvide, explicitly lauded as a heroine for choosing suicide over rape. That's not one I can get my head around at all : the assault on Elvide would have been in no way her fault, but it was her duty to avoid this at all costs. Various other stories are similarly simultaneously boring and enraging in their toxicity, with attitudes that simply make no sense... quite what's supposed to be so virtuous about virginity is never explained, the authors taking it as axiomatic.

Not, I repeat, that this was always true even within Western stories : some do feature sexual escapes in spades. And women could be heroic even within the repressive "morality" of the Church. St Margaret slew the dragon by sheer virtuousness after enduring unimaginable tortures, but the suffering of St Thais was arguably worse : perfectly happy as a whore, she was imprisoned by a monk and left to fester with her own excrement for three years, "forgiven" and released and then died two weeks later.

Fuck you, monks !

At least with the example of St Margaret she gets to do cool stuff like explode a dragon and fight the devil. But some examples of supposedly heroic behaviour are firmly embodied in a moral system that makes very little sense. The role of gender in medieval fiction was nowhere near as simple as the typical modern view of the era, with manly men in armour rescuing lovestruck and incompetent damsels, but it was present – and could, at times, even be considerably worse than our simplistic view of the past.

The afterlife of paganism

As is by now apparent, many of these attempts to preserve Christian virtue drew on earlier, pagan stories from antiquity. This perhaps surprisingly tolerant view of early Christianity is something I've noted before, but some of it is straightforward enough : in general the Church didn't have much of a problem with pagan teachings that aligned with its own, and was happy to simply pretend the gods and goddesses were purely fictitious.

More interesting are the cases where people actually seemed to believe in supernatural pagan entities. Lady Fortune was one, with belief so sincere that she was outlawed by the Church for contradicting free will. The Sibyls were another, accepted because they were said to have foretold the coming of Christ; the Fates also may have been regarded as actual rather than metaphorical figures. In these cases* they were incorporated as agents of God rather than independent deities, which, once again, makes a mockery of any claim of Christianity to monotheism. Add in all of its own angels and saints and demons and any such claim looks to be on extremely shaky ground.

* Westwell also says that the symbol of the owl as one of wisdom comes directly from the tradition of Minerva, but this is in direct contradiction to other authors.

How much debt Christian morality owes to pagan thinking is a vast topic, but I would add just one point here. Westwell mentions the grisly story of Apollo flaying alive the loser in a flue contest. While this is hardly behaviour worthy of emulation, perhaps that's not the point. Perhaps the message is not (as per other suggestions) that the gods are amoral, but only that mortals – men and women alike – shouldn't challenge them. And that's certainly an idea embraced by Christianity.

---

There is no single story of medieval or Christian views to women. They varied with time, place, the status of the women concerned, and who was writing the story. There are certainly common themes; gender was undoubtedly regarded as important, and social status was intertwined with that. By no means can we prevent a revisionist tale of the medieval era being a hotbed of feminism : it most certainly was not, with even the most progressive of early views still strongly insistent that the roles of men and women should be different. But it is far more complicated than a naive view of warrior men and weaving women, the powerful and the oppressed, the owners and the owned.

I want to end with three stories that don't exactly fit into the categories above but exemplify these complexities. The first is the story of Adam and Eve. This can certainly be read (as it often is) as a simple narrative of "do as you're told, don't question anything, and don't listen to women". But the tale is not singular : in Islam it's Satan who deceives both man and woman together. Even in Christianity, the fact that Adam listens to Eve shows that he is hardly immune from poor judgement, and of course that God gave them a baffling instruction doesn't portray the Almighty in a very competent light either. On the other hand, in some depictions even the serpent is female.

But maybe the reason the story endures is not because of its message of unquestioning obedience, but something deeper. When Adam and Eve gain knowledge, they lose their blissful ignorance and the result is the Expulsion from Paradise. It's an explanatory metaphor not against questioning per se, but in that knowledge alone doesn't always bring salvation. After all, everyone, at some time or other, has found out things they really didn't want to know.

The second is the truly bizarre story of the Queen of Sheba. What began as a simple tale of a rich lady who visited an important man... well, the tale grew in the telling. In later versions Solomon has command over animals and devils and sends the Queen an emissary bird. He also steals her throne and modifies it as a test that... it's really hers, I guess ? Then it gets weirder. He has her walk over a glass floor so he can get a good look at her legs but they're all hairy* and she possibly has hooves. No matter, Solomon gets a genie to shave her legs and she's insulted but responds with riddles which Solomon answers so they all end up worshipping Allah. Oh, and Solomon is too busy to deal with a flying carpet. And, taking a sudden hard turn into ultra-misogyny, the Queen drinks water so Solomon rapes her.

* In some of the images the Ethiopians are shown as naked, hairy, and white.

Righty-ho then. I told you it was weird.

And finally, Melusine. This is a story filled with typical mythological Chekov's Guns : don't do this, say the oddly-specific instructions, so of course that's exactly what the protagonists do. In this case they're not supposed to visit a fairy during childbirth or another during their half-serpent phase which happens every Saturday. Both instances result in serious consequences, the first in the fairy absconding with the king's children and the second in her flying away as a dragon. Why they have to do this is, again in classic mythological fashion, never made clear : it's entirely arbitrary. They appear to leave out of a physical compulsion, not because they're merely grumpy at having been disobeyed.

But perhaps, like the Garden of Eden, that's not the point. Westwell points out that from a female perspective, forbidding visitations during requisite, err, periodic absences becomes far more understandable. Developing a self-consistent logic for the story wouldn't add anything to the morality of the story at all.

Why do I end on this one ? Not for some grand reason of promoting equality, oh no. It's because this is a story which mingles fact with fiction, and one of Melusine's descendents is supposed to have married into the British royal family. So there it is at last : hard proof that the British royals are, after all, lizard people.

The Calculator Moment

A couple of years ago I speculated about the possible trajectories for AI development in terms of social impact. A recent article has reminded me of this but in a rather irritating manner : it claims that LLMs aren't calculators. Well, obviously this is literally true on a superficial level, but the article goes considerably further. It claims that LLMs will have entirely negative impacts in a way that makes the comparison to calculators not just wrong, but invalid.

I strongly dispute this. I think the calculator analogy is an extremely useful one, albeit one that's most helpful only when properly defined and constrained. I think LLMs are indeed calculators in a very meaningful (if strictly analogical rather than literal) sense... if we ask only what life was like before and after the pocket calculator, and do not ask how calculators work, then the scope and intent of the analogy becomes clearer. I find the article an extremely frustrating read because it badly confounds these two different issues, among other things.

Before I go into this in more detail, let me here briefly revisit my own predictions.

Back To The Future

I claimed :

• The effects of AI wouldn't be extreme. That means no revolutions, no societal collapse, no mass layoffs, and equally not a total non-event. This is self-evidently correct so far, though admittedly it's still early days.
• LLMs were hobbled by censorship. Certainly true at the time, but this is at least reduced these days. That said, I've moved on from my "generate all the crossover stories !" phase and usually use chatbots for actual work, so I can't really evaluate this one from personal experience. Galaxy evolution has never been sexy or offensive enough to be censored, and I have no interest in a chatbot either sexting or swearing at me to fill some bizarre emotional void in my life.
• Chatbots don't replace search engines. Again, definitely true at the time, being rife with inaccuracies and hallucinations, but this is definitely not true any more. Google's usefulness as a search engine is all but dead; AI is incomparably better for complex queries (and even quite a lot of simple ones). A major caveat is that chatbots now act directly as search engines themselves, providing direct links as well as in-context content. So they've replaced search engines in part by becoming them.
• AI is a useful aid, not a replacement for anything. This is still true, I think, and if anything even more true now than it was then. But recent results mean that I'm more prepared to believe it's moving towards a true replacement stage, even if I still don't believe this is on the immediate horizon.
• The most likely trajectories would be a sustained net positive improvement but possibly with a plateau. No exponential growth either in the technology itself or changes in society resulting from it : its effects will always be tempered by our innate tendencies to adopt things at a pace most of us can handle. It's still possible that we might hit a plateau soon, though recent improvements (see below) tend to discredit this.

Right, so what do calculators have to do with this ?

The Linguistic Abacus

Well, specifically, pocket calculators. When you have a device which is cheap, widely available, accurate, and easy to use... it is lunacy itself to pretend that people won't or shouldn't use it. The world of mathematical calculations post-calculator is not the same world as that of textbooks full of tables of logarithms. It just isn't. The fact that millions of schoolteachers refuse to acknowledge this is besides the point. 

To be sure, to reach the transformative impact of a calculator requires crossing certain thresholds. It doesn't have to be free, but it has to be affordable to the masses. It doesn't have to be useable in every single situation (you don't need it to be waterproof) but it can't need to be kept at sub-zero temperatures to be safely operable. It doesn't even need to be entirely, 100% accurate (it may break, after all), but it needs to be work correctly at a very high fraction of the time and it needs to be obvious when it isn't working.

After a series of recent tests of ChatGPT-5, I think we might just have reached a calculator moment – or if not, then we're awfully close.

What are the claims against this ? 

Unfortunately, the author of the article in The Conversation (a perfectly decent website) appears to fall for the classic fallacy of taking the analogy too literally. I view the calculator as a metaphorical comparison for the impact of the technology; they appear to think it needs to function with a sort of exact equivalence, if not quite literally the same thing. I'm going to ignore the no small amount of tiresome invective running through the article : at best this is highly selective and one-sided, at worst some of it is simply wrong.

Not A Calculator ?

Their claims :

1. Calculators do not hallucinate or persuade. This is true. Calculators and LLMs don't do the same thing at all. LLMs are certainly not unbiased truth engines and they can and do get things wrong. This is uninteresting; the important thing is whether they are accurate enough to be useful. I claim that they are, and that GPT-5 is a significant development compared to previous models. They are no longer just inspiration machines. They actually produce useable, rather than merely provocative, content. 
2. Calculators do not pose fundamental ethical dilemmas. True, but this miscasts the situation, conflating the choices of the companies with the technology itself. And the argument that the energy use of LLMs is "killing the planet", as a I heard a recent conference attendee assert, is becoming increasingly tiresome. Even under older assumptions that an inquiry used 10x as much energy as a Google search, it was clear that this wasn't an issue*, and now we know this was an overestimate and efficiency has increased (the graphs here nicely show just how pointless worrying about inquiry energy usage – though not training – actually is).
3. Calculators do not undermine autonomy. Well of course they do ! That's their whole point. You no longer have to do tedious things with numbers and can worry about the mathematical operations instead. The same arguments have been raised time and time and time again : television, the printing press, even writing... all of it supposedly undermines critical thinking and turns us into morons. All nonsense. What matters is what you read, what you watch, what questions you ask... all valid concerns, but nothing at all unique to LLMs.
4. Calculators do not have social and linguistic bias. Well, no, but this is like saying that we should chuck out all of our history just because we don't like it any more. If this is an argument against LLMs, it's also an argument against reading. I really don't see the point of this one at all.
5. Calculators are not ‘everything machines'. Yes, obviously, but this seems plainly unfair and circular. The whole point of an AI is to be able to deal with a broad set of inputs; if you're got something against them on these grounds, you're never going to be happy. Essentially you've defined them to be useless because they're too useful, which is silly. That said, I do like the points in this article very much that single-purpose devices can be better for creativity; of course, both everything machines and one-trick-ponies have their place.

* That link rightly points out that we can't consider energy used by LLMs as simply lost, since (as with web searches) we do get a positive benefit back as well. Likewise, I've seen LLMs do calculations that would take me much, much longer, or even find impossible. So how much energy would I have had to consume instead of the LLM ?

The Calculator Moment

So I think the calculator analogy is a great one. LLMs form coherent sentences (with sufficient training) just as calculators accurately manipulate numbers. Granted, coherency is not accuracy, but even inaccurate statements can be useful, sometimes a good deal more so than correct ones ! Moreover, if accuracy hasn't increased to calculator level – it will never do this until we have infinite knowledge, so this is a foolish expectation – it's still already enough to be useful, even leaving aside significant recent improvements.

And that's where I think the analogy has its greatest value. LLMs have now reached, or are reaching, comparable levels of usefulness, affordability, and accessibility to pocket calculators, so the comparison helps us to consider what we're going to do with them. As The Conversation quotes at the start, they're just tools. Not necessarily always perfect ones, but then, what is ? The analogy is scarcely less valuable because it isn't a direct equivalence.

The old “what if you don’t have a calculator with you” mentality was wrong-headed when I was growing up and it’s wrong now. I will always have a calculator with me. There’s very little use in being able to do accurate mathematics in one’s head for its own sake. It might, I fully concede, be good for mental self-discipline and critical thought more generally, but I could never do long division in school and I still made it in a career which involves no small amount of maths. 

So how do we deal with this new reality ? Probably, I think, in largely the same way as we did (or should have done) with calculators. You don't try and put the genie back in the bottle, but you also don't count on the genie to give you infinite wishes. Calculators and LLMs do undermine autonomy, but this can be harnessed positively.

The solution is simple : gradual access. There are some things you just have to know; you don't give five year olds calculators. You shouldn't be letting children loose on LLMs either, but teaching them the basics first. Later, you introduce into lessons slowly and with monitoring. Even in higher education you still wouldn't replace lecturers with chatbots. You'd continue teaching students both the benefits and the downsides as long as possible, just as we should be teaching people about the media already. Just because we shouldn't fully trust something doesn't mean we either can or should discard it entirely : after all, the front line of research is where results are most tricksy, but it'd be utterly stupid to stop doing research because people made mistakes.

This is not to say that LLMs won't change things. They will. Coursework, in particular, might have to end, because the temptation to ask the AI would likely be irresistible. But the adaptation may not be as difficult as it would seem : examinations in which calculators are forbidden are already a thing, so controlled conditions in which AI access is denied is hardly asking for a sea change.

More difficult may be accomodating LLMs within professional research. "I was overwhelmed by the power of this place... but I didn't have enough respect for that power, and it's out now", to quote Jurassic Park. On the other hand, there are plenty of things I don't want LLMs to do. I see no point in using them for writing text in my own papers because then it's not me expressing myself. I don't want them to write my blog posts for the same reason (here's an experiment in having GPT-5 write an outreach piece on one of my papers – it's quite passable, entirely accurate, but it's not me).

So have a little faith in the future. Undermining the need to do things we don't want to do doesn't mean we'll stop wanting to do other things where we can challenge ourselves productively. If anything, I suspect the opposite is true.

My guess is that a lot of what looks like AI-hate pieces actually stem from angst. AI has too many similarities to previous technologies to cause us any really deep, pure horror or fear (or indeed joy) over what's likely to happen next : for those we'd need something genuinely new and unpredictable, and I don't think this version of AI – unmotivated, controllable, emotionless – comes close to fitting the bill. 

What we have instead is uncertainty over the specifics of how things will play out – in part from an entirely justifiable cynicism not over the tech itself but those who are marketing it. That's healthy. Pretending it's something we can't act on, with no recourse but to just hope everyone stops using something at least as useful as a pocket calculator, is not.

Review/Rant : Andor

When Andor first came out I gave up after about twenty minutes. I enjoyed Rogue One a great deal, but I didn't feel the need for Cassian Andor's backstory, and the apparent bleakness of the thing didn't fill me with optimism : oh, no, not another "let's ruin your childhood by making everything grim" franchising operation.

Plus, there's just too much Star Wars already. Do something new, for heaven's sake.

Recently, for no particular reason I decided to give it another go, perhaps having had a sufficient break from Star Wars and seeing occasional glowing recommendations in my social media feed. And I'm very pleased I decided to give it a second chance... provisionally. This is a tale of two halves if ever there was one, and I can't have a proper rant without spoilers. I'll try and keep these to a minimum (I mean come on, you guys know about the Death Star... right ?), but if you really don't like knowing anything in advance, then consider yourself duly warned.

Right, season one. Wow ! This was amazeballs. I have essentially nothing bad to say about this one at all. It's an incredibly smart re-imagining of the Star Wars universe and succeeds at something I'd normally think impossible : going beyond the happily-ever-after. Or more generally and more accurately, trying to put a gritty gloss over what's fundamentally a fairy tale. Trying to tell a realistic story in a universe set up to be deliberately unrealistic is usually a Bad Idea.

In fact I'll go further and say that Star Wars is, if anything, not just a fairy tale but almost a pantomime fairy tale : the goodies are happy-go-lucky adventurers and the baddies are so evil they get a menacing theme tune just for entering a room. You see them committing atrocities but in a family-friendly way that has an emotional impact when you're a kid but isn't going to leave you scarred for life. It may have planetary genocide, but Watership Down it isn't. The emotional stakes are low and excitement is high. It's full of space wizards and talking robots and it's absolutely goddamn great.

The second reason I wouldn't expect something  like Andor to work is probably more subjective. To me the Star Wars universe exists solely to facilitate the escapades of its main protagonists, to tell that story and nothing else. You can expand upon the central plot but only by telling stories connected with it. There's nothing especially interesting in the universe itself; it is, to a large extent, just making shit up. It isn't obviously expandable as Star Trek is. True, Rogue One succeeded, but mainly through that connection to the Main Plot. Telling the backstory of someone created as a supporting character for a supporting movie still seems like something... inadvisable.

And yet the first season of Andor is nigh-on perfect. It starts off feeling so different to Star Wars that you forget it's even supposed to be in the same franchise at all and can appreciate it on its own merits. Its social and political commentary on the nature of Imperial tyranny is razor sharp and immensely topical. The visual aesthetic is an absolutely brilliant update on the original movies : essentially the look and feel of the Empire is identical but far less cheap. Uniforms look like things people would actually wear, not costumes. Computer interfaces have a combination of smartscreens and physical buttons that make me think "I want one of those" rather than being an easy backdrop of randomly-blinking lights only put there to fill up screen space.

The plot is also intensely focused and the characters serve its purpose without being wooden or one-dimensional. Andor himself is usually a sidekick in his own series, which works perfectly well because everyone else is at least as interesting and often more so. The story is told from the point of several different main characters, all of whom feel like they're the hero, in their own minds, of their own narrative. In particular this is used extremely effectively for two of the main Imperial agents, one of whom feels like the worst aspects of Tom Cruise crossed with a micro-manager I once endured, and the other was clearly Liz Truss' personal understudy. Acting is of a uniformly excellent standard and there's quite a few headliners in there.

It is, to be sure, serious. But this works because the parallels to contemporary politics is bang on point. If the Star Wars you grew up with had the Empire in place of the Nazis, in Andor the Imperials have assumed the role of the American government. And yet, it doesn't venture into bleakness porn. It's still family friendly. There's still a sense of fun to it, still cool stuff that happens just because come on we're having space adventures here. There's spectacle and excitement and visually beautiful scenery and special effects. It's also incredibly tight, with almost nothing superfluous ever happening to anyone. There's great political speeches of the rebels, dark charismatic figures on the Imperial side, and a relentless, compelling, absolutely gripping sense that you need to know what's going to happen next to everyone. Even the characters you hate.

And then we come to season two. Spoilers will grow steadily more substantial from here on in.

Disney... who hurt you ? What happened ? I wish I could say it was a broken masterpiece or a hot mess, but it's.... well, just a broken mess, really. Now to be fair there's still some great stuff here. The development of the Empire from feeling like a inconvenient (if domineering) presence in the lives of the ordinary folk, to a full-on sadistic villainy, is nicely done. Again, we get some powerful political statements along the way. That most people are content to just make do and get by in such a system is handled with some subtlety, as is the tendency of the hierarchical Empire's distrust of its own personnel to carry a self-destructive streak (even if one character's suicide is rather too sudden, in my opinion). The development of Cassian's cool sidekick robot is also very well-executed indeed, providing good, solid fun without being crude or tacked-on comic relief.

The problem is that everything else is all over the place. Pacing is way off, wasting a good three or four entire episodes dealing with the wedding of Mon Mothma's pointless daughter. Pointless ? Yeah. The wedding serves an important political purpose, to be sure, but we don't need to see Mothma getting drunk out of sheer despondency. The fate of the main instigators of the wedding itself is never revealed, and when Mon eventually flees to Yavin, we're not told what happens to her daughter. Far worse is that the endless wedding sequences come at the expense of much more interesting potential storylines, like how Mothma is working behind the scenes to help organise the rebellion, the growth of the Yavin base itself, or... well, anything really. Even the personal tension with her daughter is totally lost because we never hear of her ever again after the wedding. It's backstory of the very worst sort.

There's a lot one of one year time jumps throughout this season in which apparently an awful lot happens the viewer would actually quite like to know about, and in like fashion, far too much is left unstated. There's a pointless episode featuring some utterly feckless rebels on what turns out to be Yavin, but the development into the main rebel base is skipped over as unimportant. The principle rebel leader from the first season is now "revealed" to have been crucial in setting this all up, somehow, but for some reason everybody now both hates and fears him. Sure, he does questionable things for the cause, but good grief, he's a rebel. Of course he's going to do some, well, rebellious things. Quite why he's treated like the spawn of satan is a bafflingly-omitted major plot point.

There are weird minor issues too. There's one very short scene, interposed between two unrelated shots, in a which a character asks who owns a particular weapon. Somebody answers that it's theirs and that's it. It's exactly the sort of pointless scene you expect to find in the Deleted Scenes in the extras, as though there was originally some plan for a side-plot but they dropped everything else except this one random bit.

Pacing also has minor as well as major issues, with the rescue sequence of one rebel being implausibly drawn-out for the sake of utterly pointless dialogue. Given that we're aware the Imperials have knocked out communications, shall we make a speedy getaway ? No, we'll spend ten minutes whining about how nobody on Yavin will be her friend. Yay. 

Another major sub-plot is also woefully mishandled. The Empire needs access to a mineral on Ghor (a wealthy, popular, influential planet) so spends some considerable propaganda effort in depicting its citizens as terrorists. This is well done, but the finale is lame. One of the main Ghor rebels is badly inconsistent, but worse is that the destruction of Ghor would have been a perfect opportunity for the spectacle that the second season is badly missing. This wouldn't have had to be anything extreme; we could see it from space rather than dwelling on what happens to the individual citizens. But it would have been a powerful final completion of the Empire being an essentially hidden evil in everyone's life to something of more naked villainy. We could also have seen the Death Star's development as the final act in the desperation and insecurity of tyranny rather than an expression of its power : this concept is very nicely explained on screen, but the specific link to the Death Star itself would have made this all the better.

(Yes, true, the Death Star construction began many years before. But this could easily be spun as a lesson on the deep underlying insecurities of fascism and how the mask of normalcy in the Empire's early days was only ever mask for its true nature.)

What we actually get for the ending is pure dogshit. We get no clear message, no finale of any sort. We just get... Cassian flying off into space. That's it.

Presumably this links directly to Rogue One, which I do plan to rewatch imminently. Fine. But the series could and should have easily been at least partially self-contained, serving to give more depth to Andor (and various other characters in Rogue One who have some screen time in the series) and filling in some interesting details to present a new spin on things when the audience chooses to watch the movie. It isn't necessary to end at the exact moment the movie begins, but even in choosing this, we could have had a better more rounded ending. As it was, it barely classes as an ending at all, more of a sort of weird break point. Without doubt, it's one of the worst and most disappointing endings to a series I've ever seen.

Oh well. Season one is still worth watching on its own, an unexpected delight which rekindled the old Star Wars magic in a whole new way. But season two robs it of what should have been a slam-dunk triumph. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... not since The Hobbit movies have I seen someone snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in quite such a spectacular fashion.

I therefore partially withdraw my opinion that the Star Wars universe isn't interesting enough to expand. In fact, it presents a fine vehicle for some extremely important contemporary themes. But as with all series, without good writers it's a dead duck.

Review : Matilda

I picked up Catherine Hanley's Matilda : Empress, Queen, Warrior in the gift shop of Durham Cathedral. Quite what the connection is with Durham or the north of England I'm not sure, but that doesn't matter because this is an excellent little book. It reminds me very much of Dan Jones' Henry V, praise not lightly given. 

The Review Bit

Here again is a historical biography done right, concentrating on what happened, presenting a clear narrative but drawing out general trends and insights into the nature of the titular character. 

Also like Jones, Hanley does not neglect the formative years of her subject, and just as Henry V was not a history of a part of the Hundred Years War, so Matilda is not a history of the Anarchy but of Matilda herself : the reader experiences other characters largely as Matilda would have done. Hanley does not go quite as far with this as Jones does, but the extra information she provides helps set Matilda in her proper context.

Unlike Jones, Hanley has a third act to deal with. Henry V had his upbringing and then essentially one long successful campaign against the French followed by a sudden death. Matilda has her childhood, an initially spectacular try for the crown, disaster... and then a long aftermath leading to an ultimate victory of sorts. It certainly doesn't lend itself to a blockbuster movie as the story of Henry V does, but, like the unexpectedly interesting third act of Oppenheimer, Hanley handles this perfectly.

The style takes a bit of getting used to. Hanley begins with a rigidly formal, almost textbook-like prose, even using what's either a hugely misplaced Royal We or a failed attempt to welcome the reader to "our book". Thankfully, this doesn't last long. Once she gets going the style eases considerably and there are even jokes. Best of all, Hanley quite rightly has an axe to grind regarding Matilda's gender, and she does this perfectly : she adds comments where needed but they never get in the way of the narrative, and are never delivered in a holier-than-thou "preachy" way (as in Femina). Hanley is always level-headed and gives credit where credit is due, unafraid both to criticise Matilda herself and give Stephen (her main opponent) praise when he deserves it.

Hanley doesn't quite have Jones' literary flair, but then, hardly anyone does. This, though, would be mere window-dressing. I really struggle to give this one less than 9/10 : an excellent, concise, analytical look at a long-neglected period of history and an under-appreciated major character. And I'm very glad to see that Hanley has many other books; I'll certainly be giving them a go before long.

The First Queen

I think for this summary I'm going to concentrate on the theme of gender. Matilda is sometimes referred to as "Stephen and Matilda" in the positive sense of rival claimants to sovereignty during the Anarchy (a term Hanley somewhat pointlessly avoids because it wasn't used at the time). How much of a claim to the title does Matilda really have ?

Not all that much, to be honest... but she came tantalisingly close. Her failure owes much to Stephen's wife, another Matilda*, as it ever did to the actions of Stephen himself, along with backstabbing treachery, hypocrisy, and ludicrous double-standards of the male aristocracy. In a just world, there's no doubt Matilda should have been Queen**, but she lost it by a whisker. To understand how requires a brief potted history.

* There are a lot of Matildas in this book. In addition to the titular character, the index lists a dozen others; my impression is that there may well be additional (though very minor) players not listed.
** Hanely uses the term Queen Regnant to distinguish a female sovereign from a Queen Consort. I rather like this.

It goes something like this. Proclaimed heir by Henry I* as his only surviving child, all the movers and shakers of the age – including Stephan – accepted this and promised to crown her upon Henry's death. At this stage of her life she was already well-travelled as the child bride of the Emperor Henry in Germany, having ruled as regent (aged just 16 !) in his absence in his Italian lands. Interestingly, female regency in itself seems not to have been terribly problematic for anyone at the time : women certainly could exercise authority on behalf of a male relative or spouse, a situation which was practically normal.

* See The White Ship for a more detailed look at this similarly under-appreciated early monarch. Actually, Hanley's Matilda forms an excellent and much-needed sequel to Spencer's look at her father, Henry I.

But holding power in their own right was another matter entirely. When Henry finally died, Matilda was not well-positioned to assume the throne. She was in Normandy at the time, engaged in a (fairly minor) dispute with her father by doing her loyal duty in supporting her husband's claims to her dowry of castles : one of many impossible situations in which her status was entirely male-dependent. She was also heavily pregnant to the extent that travelling was out of the question. Stephan, in an uncharacteristic and stupid moment of bravado, having neither any strong claim to the throne nor the wit to rule wisely, seized his chance. One of his main strengths was moving speedily, and here he did so so quickly that he'd had himself crowned before most people knew what was happening.

The Norman monarchy was so young that there was no firm procedure for dealing with such events. The idea of primogeniture, that the eldest was automatically heir, was not yet established. More important was that the claimant should be any descendent of the previous ruler, but the single main factor was simply having a crown put upon one's head by some bigwig or other (this wasn't important at all in pre-Norman England). So once Stephan had it, he was, unarguably, the lawful king.

But how to justify betraying his oath ? The only option was pure bullshit. The king had only made everyone swear the oath, he and his supporters said, to keep the peace – it wouldn't actually apply after his death. Moreover, the king had imposed them to swear so the oaths weren't taken freely, and a "witness" was drummed up to claim that he'd repented on his deathbed anyway. 

All of this was nonsense, and as Hanley rightly points out, nobody would have believed any of it if Matilda was a man. Had she claimed power as a regent, things might well have been different but one reaction to her claiming the rule to which she was lawfully entitled was that "it would be a shame for so many nobles to submit themselves to a woman".

Not all reactions were this explicit, but the gender bias is undeniable. Likewise, what she did next would have been seen as normal and proper if she were male, but was portrayed as haughtiness and massive overreach because of her gender : she invaded England. Her estranged husband Geoffrey stayed behind to secure their Norman lands. It was Matilda herself, and her generals in England under her, who made all the key decisions about the English campaign. Hanley is keen to stress this point, saying that while there clearly were some fair-weather followers, and those who were only against Stephen rather than for Matilda, there were also plenty of true loyalists. Even in Norman England, there were members of the high aristocracy who believed she had what it took to be not just a queen consort, or queen regent, but a true Queen Regnant.

Matilda's campaign was carefully planned and well-executed. Despite being at a massive military disadvantage compared to Stephen, who held the royal treasury of what had been a carefully-run state, she managed to capture him in battle. True, she never fought personally, but, argues Hanley, she deserves to be called a warrior for her military strategy and decision making. 

Sometimes, she failed, and failed badly, but this serves to underscore that it was her taking the decisions – she was definitively not, as some have argued, merely a puppet or figurehead. Her worst decision by far came due to lack of actual combat experience, failing to withdraw her troops in time to extricate them from a difficult military situation... brought on by Stephan's own wife (another Matilda) who raised an army to attack her. Caught out a single day before her planned coronation, her army was twice routed and her chief general captured. She herself made a daring escape past enemy lines, clad in white for camouflage in the depths of winter. It may not have a fairytale ending, but the story certainly has some cinematic moments.

Matilda's reputation for haughtiness and cruelty is, says Hanley, ill-deserved. True, she believed in letting even her own family endure the consequences of their own mistakes*, but not mistakes they couldn't recover from. She would later refuse to let one of her sons suffer and die in prison, and she wouldn't stand for her chief general being captured. Matilda was relentless in pursuit of her goal, but not cruel or heartless by the standards of the age (but the term "haughty", even if inappropriate, might be deemed complementary to a man). And so Earl Robert was exchanged for King Stephan, after which the result was stalemate. 

* Sometimes very stupid ones indeed, such as when her own son invaded England with a pathetic force, and was forced to beg money from Stephan to return to Normandy. Even more bizarrely, the feckless Stephan – who had little of the ruthlessness needed for the times – agreed, ultimately sealing his own fate.

But not a permanent one. Matilda was hard and tough, but not unyieldingly stubborn. Eventually, a compromise was reached that's perhaps more famous than her own rebellion : her firstborn son Henry (the erstwhile twit who invaded England with a handful of men – thankfully he learned quickly) would be Stephan's heir. That is, as Hanley puts it, Matilda was written out of her own story to save face. To preserve the legitimacy of the crown, Henry was now Stephen's adopted son, not hers. Unfair, but it worked. Not only had Matilda retreated from England altogether by this point (her supporters fighting on in her absence, with Stephan unable to break them and her presence being more beneficial in Normandy), but she continued to be a major power behind the throne of her son right up until her death aged 65.

But the climbdown from her initial triumph must have been an incredible feat of mental gymnastics. To go from being within a day of a coronation, having captured the usurping king, to losing almost everything but refusing to yield, to clawing her way back to a something like a strategic victory... few indeed are made of such stern stuff. I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could some so close to achieving so singular a goal only to recover after such a humiliating loss without giving up entirely.

What if... ?

Hanley is pretty firm that Matilda's chances were always slim, given her unfortunate position at the moment Henry I died. This was partly due to material concerns but partly due to social realities. Matilda, says Hanley, perhaps could have done a few things differently that would have improved her military chances, but ultimately the country just wasn't ready for a Queen Regnant.

In this I'm not so sure. Hanley gives some very interesting examples of direct female rule in the medieval era : Countess Matilda of Canossa who personally led armies into battle; the Spanish Queen Urracas's 17 year reign; Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem who forced the submission of her own husband. There was precedent of a sort, and Matilda and the English magnates would have been aware of them. 

True, her gender definitely dialled up the difficulty level more than a little. Indeed, Stephan's wife was praised for exactly the sort of actions for which the Empress (she retained the title after her first husband died, and did not give this to herself as portrayed in The Pillars of the Earth) was attacked – precisely because the wife was only acting on behalf of her husband, as the medieval mindset insisted was correct and proper. But there were plenty of highly-placed Norman aristocrats who were Matilda's active and loyal supporters. The country might not have been ready for a Queen, but sometimes people adapt to things more easily once they happen. Had she been crowned, the fight might have gone out of them.

On the other hand, even if Matilda had won, it might not have made much of a difference. First, Hanley makes no mention of whether there was a formal, legal process to depose Stephan in his refusal to abdicate, so merely having a crown upon her head might have simply prolonged a constitutional crisis which would ultimately have to be settled militarily. Secondly, even if she achieved recognition, her successor would certainly have been her son Henry II – who was very much a chip off the old block. So the monarchy would have proceeded essentially as it did anyway, and with Hanley making no mention of whether Matilda actually cared about the rights of women more generally, it's doubtful it would have altered much of anything in the end.

And quite likely Matilda didn't give much of a damn about her subjects anyway : few medieval rulers did. She was quite willing for thousands to die for her cause – this is not something she deserves any especial blame for, since nobody would remark on this at all for male conquerors. Contemporary chroniclers pass over the social horrors of the Anarchy as just the sort of awful thing that rulers did. But still, it hardly looks like Matilda as ruler would have led to any great social changes, let alone any sort of feminist progress. Matilda was an extraordinary, capable, competent, ferociously intelligent individual who had, I think, a real shot at becoming England's first ruling Queen. Would it have made any difference ? Alas, probably not.

Review : Superman

Today, a quick snap review of James Gunn's venture into the normally angst-ridden world that is the DC comic universe.

First some background. I have a soft spot for comic book movies. I've grown into them over the years but also just got sick of them : not everything needs to be a franchise, not everything needs a sequel, and certainly not everything needs to be shoehorned into a pointless crossover. I love crossovers, but for god's sake do something interesting and unexpected like, say, Wolverine meets the Antiques Roadshow. Truly weird mismatches are under-exploited.

Of late I've stopped caring about Marvel, not so much because they're bad but because there's just too much. I don't want to have to invest that much time in watching a whole TV series as a precursor or essential filler to some other movie, or have to watch the sixteen prequels to get to the actual film. Marvel's Apple-style saturation bombing approach to a monopoly – we'll give you so much content you won't have time for anything else – is more than a tad irritating.

But I do like the Marvel style of humour very much. When they're good, I enjoy them quite a lot as solid light entertainment that's been sorely lacking of late. DC, on the other hand, too often feel like they're going almost for grimdark (though I did rather enjoy Aquaman and the Wonder Woman movies). Yes, Batman needs to be angsty. But the rest of them don't.

The last one I tried watching was the notorious Snyder cut of Justice League. I got an hour or so in, and yes, it was much, much better than the dire theatrical release. But GOOD GOD it was long. Well-constructed but ultimately totally pointless and uninteresting with nowhere near enough substance to justify a four hour epic, or six months or however bloody long the thing actually was. I couldn't be bothered to find out. It was all... just a bunch of stuff that happened. This is a peculiar syndrome that one day I might define properly, but "just a bunch of stuff that happened" isn't something I could ever say about Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings.

At last, Superman ! Superman is not angsty. And it's not just a bunch of stuff that happened either. It's solid light entertainment in which Nicholas Hoult (fine, scene-stealing actor though he is) is upstaged by a CGI dog.

The only thing I can really compare it to is Barbie. It would be perilously easy to make it incredibly, unbelievably, brain-molestingly bad (or at least only suitable for children or the terminally stupid), but a movie about an ostensibly vacuous bimbo turned out to be an outstandingly hilarious bit of social commentary that was a glorious fun-filled mashup of pop culture somehow laced with subversive anti-capitalist undertones.

So too Superman. When you've got a hero of near-godlike abilities, it could so easily be as dull as dishwater, a big-screen blitz of CGI purely for the sake of saturating the viewer to the point of sensory overload.

Not so in this reincarnation. No time is wasted with an origin story (everyone knows this already) except in passing, so it easily gets away with dropping us in the middle of the plot – something that's normally incredibly bad practise. There's plenty of spectacle, but the pace of development is at all times appropriate. There's also plenty of self-awareness* and reflective social commentary; the first longer dialogue with Lois Lane's conflicting attitudes to accountability is particularly well done. There's emotional struggle, people suffer and die to the degree that's needed – Superman is not omnipotent or omniscient – but ultimately, it doesn't take itself too seriously.

* See innumerable SMBC comics in which Superman is described as being a hero only because he resists the urge to murder everyone. Gunn is clearly acutely aware of this.

The result is pure delight. I don't want to give any spoilers, but I LOVE KRYPTO THE DOG SO DAMN MUCH. For a superhero movie this is near perfect : Superman makes questionable moral choices but learns the right lessons; the comic relief and moments of glorious insanity blend smoothly with the more serious stuff; the effects are first rate and not overdone and always serve a purpose; moral messages are present but not overwhelming.

The acting, too, is spot on. Nicolas Hoult lends Lex Luther a good deal of subtlety. Conversely, another major villain is such an obvious combination of Trump and Putin such that it's no wonder the MAGA types are offended because the symbolism is justifiably blunt. Which is part of why it works so well : Superman wants to help war victims because it's the right thing to do, because all of the dystopian sci-fi needs to step back for a while, because what we all need right now is a vision that we can do things in a different way instead of letting the most wretched elements of humanity control our destiny.

Bravo, Gunn. This injection of Marvel-style humour in spades into the DC universe, in a standalone movie is exactly what's needed right now. Not just for rescuing superhero movies as a failing genre, but to give us all a damn fine way to avoid doomscrolling. More like this, please !

Review : The Brain

I interrupt my mythology book reviews to turn to the completely different matter of neuroscience.

David Eagleman's Livewired was one of my favourite reads of recent years. He put forward a genuinely technologically optimistic study that has absolutely sod-all to do with that stupid manifesto, and felt like a much-needed counterweight to the equally stupid "all technological innovation is crap" cynicism which seems to pervade social media. He also explored things philosophically, claiming that it is a actually possible for us to experience new qualia. 

I've mentioned Livewired a few times over the years and it's my shame that I never did a review of it. I think I'm going to have to re-read it to do it justice.

Anyway, his earlier, shorter book The Brain was an obvious read. The major theme of Livewired was the brain's tremendous adaptability, how it could repurpose itself to accomplish new tasks with old hardware. Eagleman did a very thorough job of describing just how far this could go, setting out both when surprising levels of flexibility were possible but also when limits would be reached. 

There are plenty of obvious overlaps between these two books. Since The Brain covers these much more concisely, perhaps by covering them in brief here, I can shorten my eventual review of Livewired... which would otherwise risk just rewriting the whole damn book, 'cos it was bloody good.

The Brain is a very good, very short read. I give it 8/10 for being such an excellent but little compendium on how the brain works. It doesn't tie itself down in unnecessary caveats or tangents but doesn't skip the uncertainties either. It just gets on with things, so so will I.

Semi-permanent plasticity

Brain development, says Eagleman, continues roughly up to the age of 25 or so. Sure, the earliest years are important (in Livewired he makes a bit more of this, noting that certain very basic skills are almost impossible to develop once out of childhood, e.g. feral children will never fully integrate into society), but much happens throughout adolescence and early adulthood too. New connections are formed and discarded as they prove useful or unhelpful (I believe in Livewired he describes this as a process of babbling).

Teenagers brains, he says, are literally different from adults, just as children are. They're socially awkward risk-takers not just because of lack of experience, but also because of their neurology (though of course, presumably experience plays a large role in shaping their neural structures). They are, paradoxically, emotionally hypersensitive but also prone to seeking out highly emotional activities, and unable to control their emotional responses as much as adults are. In one experiment they got physically anxious when asked to sit in a shop window but at the same time they send each other naked pictures of themselves*. They are quite literally immature.

* Not literally at the same time, you understand.

But that's not the end of the story at all. If all the major wiring is in place by around 25, substantial redevelopment is still possible indefinitely afterwards, at least for re-using old networks in new ways. Sufficient practise at a skill can cause macroscopic changes in the brain basically at any age; in Livewired he says this can occur in a matter of hours.

This plasticity, claims Eagleman, is unique to humans. Most animals rely much more on hardwired instincts*. Human adaptability gives us the tremendous advantage of of immense versatility, which far exceeds the penalty of our very long development period. Continuous practise may even help prevent the onset of dementia such as Alzheimers, not by fortifying the connections so much as creating redundant ones as backups. As some connections fail, even the ageing brain is able to repurpose old ones to do different jobs. The degradation can't be stopped but its effects can be reduced.

* I wonder, though, how much research has been done on animal brains in this regard. After all, animal intelligence has continuously exceeded our expectations.

Decision time 

Plasticity also plays a role when the brain has to make a choice. The brain acts, says Eagleman, as a series of competing networks each vying for supremacy, although I rather prefer his other analogy of a parliament. The idea that we have many voices inside of us is quite real, with different networks continuously firing until, finally, the brain acts to "crush ambiguity into choices" and makes a decision.

Exactly how this happens is still somewhat unclear. There's a reward system, in that the brain favours networks which have previously made predictions that have been validated : if one mode of thinking has successfully predicted a good outcome in the past, that network will be favoured. Conversely, those networks which don't give predictions in agreement with reality are downvoted. The brain, then, acts as a sort of prediction engine, continually checking its findings against different models*. Even abstract concepts can act as a reward or punishment, but immediate, tangible effects tend to override all these. Hence it's easy to avoid doing the things we should do in favour of something else (eating ice cream instead of studying). 

* This makes it all the more mysterious that the brain is generally able to do this very well for low-level activities (few people continuously stab themselves with forks) but is often shite at higher reasoning (like believing in the Jewish Space Laser).

Eagleman's suggested self-help solution is to be like Odysseus and nail ourselves to the mast : ahead of time, ensure that the actual situation we'll find ourselves in is more tangibly rewarding/punishing than it otherwise would be. Don't give the brain the option to be distracted by temptation. Perhaps more interestingly, watching our neural responses (when we've got the option to do so) has also proven helpful in getting participants to learn self-control. Maybe one day we'll have phone-accessible EEG-hats and can cultivate our own desired responses using an app...

But exactly how the brain decides, "this network is the winner" and decides that this is the right approach is nowhere made clear. Emotions, says Eagleman, act as a heuristic for decision-making, combining all the possible effects into a simple sensation we can respond to, which explains that uncomfortable sensation while we haven't committed to anything. This, though, is still more description than anything explanatory, albeit a useful one. 

Finally, it's also interesting to me that neural activity is more coherent and correlated while we're asleep than when we're awake. Is the brain better able to get on with things without that pesky conscious mind sticking its nose in ? Maybe.

The nature of reality

This will have to be either very brief or extraordinarily long, so I'm going for the former. The world we experience is not the outside world itself, says Eagleman. Not only is there a delay in processing different sensory signals, but there's even a different delay for each type of perception. Yet somehow, the brain combines all of this into a unified experiential whole. 

And this unified approach appears to be crucial : to assign meaning to a sensory input, it must correlate to something else. If you only have visual data, you won't be able to see. While I had the impression from some of the case studies of Oliver Sacks that we learn to read the world around us, it's more subtle than that – interactivity is crucial, an idea developed further by Peter Godfrey-Smith (another one who's books I really must blog up sometime). Interestingly, when this multisensory approach is denied, the result is hallucinations... eerily similar to LLMs.

Perhaps one of the most compassionate parts of the book describes Schizophrenia as a sort of waking dream. In this condition, says Eagleman, suffers experience hallucinations without any kind of distinction between them and real, external sensory inputs. This naturally explains their behaviour, which may be perfectly rational but in response to a reality all of their own. I wonder if it doesn't go even further than that : in my dreams I rarely respond rationally to anything, yet at the time it feels coherent and logical. Maybe the logical reasoning centres are also impaired, without affecting the sensation that things have been done correctly... the reward networks might be all messed up.

More philosophically, Eagleman stresses that our perceptual reality is not reality itself : "the real world is not full of rich sensory events; instead our brains light up the world with their own sensuality". Perceptual time is also not experiential time (let alone real time). Experiments have shown that while high-stress situations make us feel like time has slowed, they don't affect our ability to think or perceive more quickly. 

Here I think I'd need to clarify with Eagleman himself exactly what he's getting at. I agree, our perceptions don't correspond directly to reality, in that our sensory experience has no special claim on validity (compared to, say, a bat or a whale), and that we have to learn how to create our own mental worlds*. But all the same, surely our experiences do have some equivalence with external reality. There is something outside that induces an experience; redness is not totally meaningless, nor is pain or sound or heat. We can verify these sufficiently well so as to reliably identify exceptions (like the responses of Schizophrenics) as being disconnected from that external reality. So in that sense, I don't agree that our perceptions are purely fabrications; since we have access to nothing else, it doesn't feel at all useful to me to claim that perception is not reality. Perceptual reality is the only thing we will ever have any access to.

* Eagleman mentions an interesting case of synesthesia in which letters are associated with colours. I wonder how this works, given that the letter symbols themselves have no meaning until they're learned.

Finally, I also don't agree that we don't have free will. Eagleman says (as do many others) that consciousness does appear to have some uses, particularly when learning a task for the first time or when things need to be done in an especially careful, controlled way, or when big-picture thinking is required – integrating one line of thinking from one subject with something seemingly unrelated. Seems fine to me, though as to why conscious experience should be needed for this is anyone's guess. And as for those experiments where brain activity can be predicted ahead of the conscious sensation of having made a choice... nah, I've covered that umpteen times already. Far more likely, in my view, that conscious sensation actually does involve being in control rather than a weird way in which the brain constructs a narrative* of deliberation for no good reason.

* Though I do also agree that constructing a narrative is something the brain does a great deal of, as well as creating a theory of mind for us to predict and respond to other people. Interactivity plays an interesting part here, too : while those with too much Botox are hard to read, they themselves have difficulty reading others as they're not able to be so expressive.

You will all become one with the Borg

Well, maybe. The brain's adaptability is not unlimited but it's tremendously powerful all the same; Eagleman gives the case of a girl with literally half a brain who lived a perfectly normal life (and see that recent post about the notorious but misreported Phineas Gage). A key concept Eagleman develops here is the "plug and play" model of sensory inputs. Essentially, our sensory peripherals – eyes, ears etc. – can be replaced and the brain will still find a way to deal with the information. It takes a while for the brain to learn how to process it, but it works (Kevin Warwick came to much the same conclusion in "I, Cyborg").

Personally I think this is most interesting stuff in Eagleman's repertoire. I love the idea of being able to, quite literally, reject your reality and substitute my own. And this actually works. Experiments have enabled people to "see" using tactile sensors on their backs, foreheads and tongues, hooked up to cameras. They can identify objects and accurately judge distances. It works equally well if the tactile interface is connected to an audio sensor instead of a visual one. And this can be done wirelessly, letting volunteers experience sensory input from other places on the planet – and in reverse, to control mechanical arms remotely. 

Real, it turns out, really is just an electrochemical reaction in your brain. 

Of course, things are still limited. The possibility of digitally scanning the brain is a stupendous, unrealisable challenge. Transhumanist dreams of fully uploading our consciousness are also likely futile even in a materialistic perspective, even if we did manage to scan our entire brain and its neural patterns. If consciousness is indeed just those patterns, then we could simulate the brain inside a computer, yes... but, Eagleman says, while it might well be something (or someone) that experiences something, it still wouldn't be us. Even from his perspective of consciousness being emergent, which I don't really agree with*, a transfer just doesn't work. A copy ? Sure, if it's really the patterns that are conscious, and not something to do with the physical substance. Even then, it would have to be capable of change, of forming new memories and responding to new sensations.

* He attempts to refute the argument of Leibniz's Mill, saying that yes, you can't find perception in any single mechanical part of the brain, but maybe you could in the emergent whole. I just don't see it. To me, the gap between experience and physicality is just too large, too fundamental to ever be bridged. The only way I can see this working is if mind and matter are, somehow, of essentially the same stuff (neutral monism, idealism, etc. etc. etc., you know the drill by now). Otherwise, I have no clue how a gigantic abacus could ever be conscious, or how this would happen if we moved the balls around but only in a very particular way.

In short, a fascinating and worthwhile read. I'm going to have to try and get hold of his TV documentaries and read his other books (of which I'm glad to see there are several) at some point. One day I should try a fuller write-up against materialism, but what's really interesting is that often the disagreement with my own, somewhat more dualist perspective, is that the disagreement isn't really that stark after all.