It's NOT hard to fool a nose

People, I've decided, are weird. Common sense tells us that reality is objective, as anyone who's ever been hit in the head with a brick will attest to (as long as the brick didn't hit them too hard, at least). Common sense would further suggest that determining what that objective world is is sometimes quite difficult, but possible with sufficient effort - repeat testing, multiple witnesses, that kind of thing.

Unfortunately there's no way avoid the slippery slope that will hurl the inquiring mind towards the unavoidable Big Question, "what do we mean by objective reality, anyway ?". Luckily, this is quite different - fundamentally different - from the question of what objective reality really is ("what's it all about, when you get right down to it ?"). What we mean by objective reality is, I think, simple enough : it's what gives rise to our perceptions. Ideas like "reality is nothing like what we think it is", which are oddly common, are thus rendered impotent. We can't ever know "the truth" about reality, we just know that it's what gives rise to what we see. That's all we can ever define it as. Trying to describe it on some silly deeper level is pointless.

To recall an earlier example : a fish is that which always gives rise to what we perceive as a fish. Asking what the true, Platonic nature of a fish really is, or saying that a fish is probably nothing like what we perceive it to be, is just being a bit daft.

What does this have to do with the nose ? Well, the author of this Aeon piece points out that the nose is much neglected in studies of human cognition and philosophy. His main point, which is well made, is that the nose works in a fundamentally different way to the eye. It's not as poor a sense as you might think :

Humans can sense the presence of particular odorants (smelly molecules) in dilutions of less than one part in several billion parts of air... The reason why you are seldom aware of this chemical blast of information around you is straightforward: your nose is actually a bit too good at its job for your brain to handle. If your mind was consciously processing all the molecular information that your nose picks up, without any break in its conscious awareness, you’d soon agree to a lobotomy just to ease your mind.

But the eye is capable of detecting just a single photon, and again the brain does some highly complex signal processing to stop us being overwhelmed the whole time. And one photon is not one among mere billions, but one in ~10²⁰. Or more. So vision wins there, hands down.

Where things get more complicated is when it comes to subjectivity versus objectivity. I agree (of course !) that smells are generated objectively, but I don't think there's any need for a defence of the objectivity of the nose : who thinks smell is especially subjective ? No-one I know. It's a bit straw-man-ish. Yes, we smell the same thing in different ways, and can like or dislike them differently, but that's no different from any other sense.

When you smell a mix of isovaleric acid, for example, it makes a difference if I tell you that what you perceive is the odour of Parmesan or vomit... On its own, indole has a strong and characteristic faecal smell. Yet you won’t perceive it in the overall coffee aroma – unless you are a pregnant woman. Pregnancy alters your sensitivity toward specific components that can act as potentially harmful contaminants... Consider androstenone, a pig pheromone, that people perceive quite differently. To some, it smells like urine, and to others like body odour (often noted as unpleasant). Others find androstenone has a woody and even a vanilla or floral note... Perceptual reactions to smelly molecules are variable not because they represent subjective whims but because small changes in the chemical composition of the environment are what the olfactory system evolved to evaluate, objectively – and pretty reliably so.

This section seems to undermine its own main point. Yes, my eyes can be fooled too, but they generally give me a reliable view of the world. If I see I'm about to walk into a tree, then unless that tree is actually a very clever and carefully-created illusion, then my eye has given me a useful and correct perception of reality. The nose seems to be much more limited, since it's tied so directly to other senses and even our higher reasoning. I can't use my nose to reliably determine much of anything, since context is so essential. In contrast, vision on its own appears to me to be very much more useful 99% of the time.

(Yes, one could imagine some clever setups to reverse this, like making a disgusting food look appetising but retain a horrible odour. But this would be rare outside of a lab.)

These processing differences explain why olfaction affords greater variation in the perceptual interpretation of the physical stimulus. One might wonder how human olfaction could provide us with objective access to reality despite such prevalent variation in perception. The alternative is to suggest that it provides us with access to reality because of such variation. Indeed, it might be easier to fool your eyes than your nose!

This bit doesn't make sense to me. If I see a picture of a deer and tell someone it's an elephant, they'll say, "no it's not." But I I tell them they're smelling vomit when they're really smelling parmesan cheese, and I can fool them by this simple trick, then that seems to make a nonsense of the idea that the nose is hard to fool. The nasal sense provides much less direct access to reality than the others.

Certainly, olfaction is much more variable in its perceptual expression than vision. But this variation doesn’t mean that the nose has been misled. Olfaction simply does not work analogously to the visual system. Crucially, feature coding in smell is not viewpoint-invariant. On the contrary, the causal principles of the olfactory system facilitate a cue-dependent interpretation in the computational integration of its neural signals. 

Okay, a fair point that the nose is supposed to work in tandem with other senses, but I don't see how you can say it hasn't been misled if it gives you a smell of vomit when you're actually smelling a delicious cheese.

Why assume that perspective invariance is the criterion of objectivity? What characterises objectivity as the hallmark of reality is not the appearance of things, which is changeable. Instead, we need to understand the underlying causal principles that give rise to this appearance and its variability. Smell appears fickle only without a sufficient understanding of its causal mechanisms.

Whut ? Look, if smell gives me the wrong answer more than vision does, then I say that it's a less useful and less accurate sense than vision. The criteria for objectivity is to establish how what we sense will influence our other senses in other conditions. The most objective sense is the one that gets to the truth - this perspective-invariant thing that we can use to infer our perceptions in other circumstances - with the greatest precision and accuracy. Start defining objectivity by anything other than perspective invariance and you end up with a strange world indeed, and the author's own examples show quite convincingly that smell just isn't as good as that (at least in humans) as vision is.

Why might it be easier to fool your eyes than your nose? - Ann-Sophie Barwich | Aeon Essays

Your nose is the best biosensor on the face of the Earth. This claim must sound counterintuitive since the sense of smell has acquired a rather poor reputation over the past centuries. Philosophers and scientists alike have only rarely singled it out for close study.

Life Under Lockdown (III)

Another week trapped in glorious quarantine. Yay !

All remains quiet on the eastern front. Working from home is much like working from work, except more comfy but with fewer people to talk to. The shops remain open and fully stocked. The wi-fi is working and Netflix continues to delivery reliably excellent picture quality. All is well with the world, except that of of course it isn't, but in my little world things are positively lovely. Would it be nice to go outside more often ? Sure. Does it have me clutching at the walls ? No.

To be fair, I'm probably in the extreme tail end of the Gaussian when it comes to enduring isolation. I'm in a country where no-one is panic buying anything, I have a job for which funding was already pre-allocated, I live with my girlfriend and tiny fluffy dog, and I a large chunk of my life is spent behind a screen anyway. Would I prefer it if I was back home in Cardiff ? No, because Britain is handling the supply of goods with the skill of a toddler who's decided to jam crayons up their nose. I'd prefer it everyone I knew there was trapped over here instead though.

In work we've resorted to holding out regular coffee mornings via Skype, which has proved a big success. This helps a lot when you're not on Facebook. We've even started doing remote board games, which was a lot of fun too.

That aside, I tend to scan through my social media feeds pretty quickly these, since they've become monotopics, diatribes of cynical invective. They can summarised thus : coronavirus is awful and most countries are doing a shitty job to tackle it, especially the US. There, we're done. I just don't know what more we're supposed to do with that information. I certainly don't need to read this in two hundred elaborate, thorough and thoroughly inventive ways every single day. It's not helpful.

What I am starting to wonder more and more about is when the Czech Republic's restrictions will start to have a measurable impact. Measures started about two or three weeks ago, when the case numbers were still very low. The Czech government is predicting 3,000 cases by the end of the month, eventually reaching a maximum of 15,000. Currently the number of cases continues to rise, but so does the testing rate (which is now as high per capita as in South Korea). The Wikipedia page is pretty comprehensive and updated daily; this site is better for visuals as it lets you highlight countries more easily than most other graphing pages, this one plots the reproduction number.

Last week I said I guessed we'd have to wait two or three weeks more to see any sign of an improvement, if there was one. Still, I admit to a twinge of disappointment that there's no indication of that yet. With all the social distancing, the face masks, the disposable gloves in supermarkets, the ban on groups larger than two, it seem impossible to believe that it won't. Maybe it won't all suddenly come to a screeching halt, but it's got to make some difference, right ? We'll have to continue to wait and see, I guess.


I'm still dividing my work and leisure time more or less as a did before, which is made easier by Shirley having to work to a schedule. But this week I indulged myself by exploring one of those grey areas between science and outreach : developing interactive content. I discovered that the Blend4Web plugin is a really easy way to make Blender files run in web browsers with minimal effort, so that demanded some attention. The first "complete" project, an interactive model of the Virgo cluster, can be found here, and you can also see the Milky Way's hydrogen disc here (with full technical write-up here, public outreach version to follow). Oddly, both of these seem to meet with high approval to anyone I show them to, but have thus far fallen utterly flat on social media. Well, pish, I say : I maintain that if seeing 774 galaxies in your web browser isn't your cup of tea, you must be a weird individual indeed.

With any luck, this might re-open the long hoped-for prospect of an interactive Arecibo. Next week's task will be to start looking in to how to make a first person camera, and see if the complexity of the mesh is too much to expect for a browser to handle.

Illusion-ception

Look, I know COVID-19 is (I hope) by far and away the biggest story of the year, but there's only so much to be said about it. Stay at home and wash your hands until Lady Macbeth herself would look aghast. That's all you can do, so let's try and resume normal services as much as possible.


Remember that weird idea that consciousness doesn't exist ? A while back a gave a summary of a back-and-forth exchange of articles on IAI between a bunch of philosophers, one an idealist (who thinks consciousness is the root of everything) and two... well, frankly complete nutters who contradicted themselves every five seconds. Something about consciousness not existing at all, apparently.

I ended with a set of questions as to what these "illusionists" really believe. This was necessary because trying to figure out what they're saying is like trying to nail fog to a wall or grab a greased eel. The main points are whether they think we have inner mental lives (the mind's eye, ear and so on), in what sense such mental constructs can be said to be "illusory", and, if we don't have such experiences, how can we possibly be fooled into thinking that we do.

In case it wasn't obvious already, it seems to be to be absolutely daft to say we don't have an inner mental life. In this context, "I think, therefore I am" is as close to rock-solid certainty as one can get. This bias, however, does not mean I'm not interested in - or even unwilling to entertain - what the illusionists have to say.

In this latest article, Keith Frankish (who was engaged in the previous exchange) makes a valiant attempt to answer some of these difficulties. Valiant, yes, but ultimately, I think, quite mad.

The basic explanation is simple; illusionists don’t deny that we are conscious. It is true that some interviews with me have appeared under titles that suggest otherwise, but I always make it clear that my target is a much more specific claim, as I shall now explain.

Okay, fair enough - but bear in mind that other illusionists have most certainly said in the most explicit terms that consciousness doesn't happen.

Our lives are filled with conscious experiences — episodes of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and of having bodily sensations of various kinds. These episodes acquaint us with the world around us — they tell us about the shapes, sizes, colours, and motions of objects, about the composition of our food, about the substances in the air, about the texture of things against our skin, about the condition of our bodies and our psychological well-being, and much more. We also have experiences of mental imagery, which seem like impoverished versions of regular experiences, detached from their normal causes.

Right, good. So we definitely do have inner mental lives and experience non-physical mental constructs. We agree on that.

I shall call this the qualitative conception of consciousness. The conception is widespread, at least among philosophers, and I take it that it is the one Kastrup, Strawson, and other critics of illusionism have in mind. Now the qualitative conception makes consciousness mysterious. How could brain processes create this subjective world of pure qualities, this qualia show?

Yep, with you so far. That's a good description of the problem.

...the view seals off consciousness into a private mental world, isolating it from the network of physical causes mapped by science. This in turn threatens to make consciousness ineffective, since there is good reason to think that all our reactions can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain (at any rate, scientists haven’t found any that can’t). Defenders of the qualitative view may have to accept the counterintuitive conclusion that consciousness — even the feel of acute pain — has no effect on our behaviour. Such worries give us a reason to question the qualitative view of consciousness and look for an alternative.

Okay, here we begin to come a little unstuck, but just a little bit. We have accept that there's a problem in explaining how the conscious experience interacts with the world - there has been for centuries. That, in fact, is the very problem we're trying to solve. But we don't have to accept that consciousness is ineffective, and we certainly don't say that pain doesn't change our behaviour ! Just because we have a problem in explaining how the process works does not mean we must therefore deny the process exists - if we did that, there'd be no problem.

It's true that people often cite cases of brain damage and chemicals and whatnot as evidence that the physical world affects the mind. Fair enough. And sometimes they go on to say that the process cannot work in reverse, that measurements of the brainwaves show only the effect of matter on the mind, not the other way around. But why should this be ? Suppose that the process works in both directions, that the mind and matter affect each other. How could we ever determine which one was the root cause of our physical observations ?

I put it to you that we can't. We are only observing correlation, not causation. If we see a change in brainwave patterns, perhaps it's perfectly valid to say, "their thoughts have changed their brainwaves" rather than usual, "the brainwaves have changed their thoughts". Perhaps this effect of mind over matter is staring us full in the face. It's very, very hard to say in which direction the causation works, but I say maybe it goes both ways at different times : yes, if you stab someone in the head you'll change their behaviour, but you only did that in the first place because you thought about stabbing them.

In essence, the problem of the interaction between the physical and non-physical mental realities can be argued to be as difficult to explain in either direction. Yet while people readily accept there's a problem when it comes to explaining the "ghost in the machine", that is, how our mind could affect objective reality (even to the extent of saying that it doesn't), they seem generally less concerned about the opposite case. How does the non-physical arise from the physical ? It clearly does : emergent properties like temperature and pressure and relative velocities are unarguably a thing. But how ?

That the interaction is equally problematic in both directions does not invalidate that the processes occur. If one is willing to accept that consciousness can arise from physical matter, one has already conceded that there is some sort of interaction between the two. Why, then, would we assume that this must only go in one direction ? How could matter produce something that cannot affect it ? To me it seems more reasonable to presume that the interaction can go both ways, even without understanding how it happens.

Anyway, I do accept Frankish's argument that we could look for a radical alternative. That's absolutely fine by me. I don't agree with the motivation - I think it's probably only a tiny minority who believe in this ineffective consciousness - but the difficulty of the Hard Problem certainly warrants trying out new ideas.

Illusionists reject the qualitative conception of consciousness. They hold that qualia, and the private show they constitute, are illusory; they seem to exist but don’t really. This is the core claim. (I have sometimes expressed this by saying that phenomenal consciousness is illusory — phenomenal consciousness being a form of consciousness consisting of qualitative properties.)

Okay... what in the world do you mean by "seem to exist but don't really" ? It's obvious that inner perception has no physical substance, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist any more than a rainbow doesn't exist. The whole point and problem of qualia is that they have no physical substance, no physical existence. If I imagine a dinosaur eating everybody, that has no direct effect on anything whatsoever. Yet if I deny that I actually did imagine the dinosaur, I will be deluding myself. Indeed, I could hardly be more certain of anything other than my own thoughts (saving caveats about memory and so on, discussed last time).

The alternative is that consciousness consists, not in awareness of private mental qualities, but in a certain relation to the public world — a relation that involves receiving information about things and reacting to them. For one to have a conscious experience of something is, I claim, for one to have a rich stream of sense-based information about it and for this information to have a wide range of effects — causing rapid behavioural responses, generating beliefs and desires, evoking memories, triggering associations, initiating emotional responses, and changing one’s psychological and behavioural dispositions in a myriad subtle ways.

But I don't see how that helps in the slightest. If one accepts that one has an inner mental life and inner perceptions - in a sense - then this concedes the problem. Of course a large part of this arises from external information, that's obvious. I wouldn't accept that the information need have "a wide range of effects" either - I see a tree, I'm aware of the tree, end of. I don't have to feel compelled to do anything about it, I'm simply aware of it. If one denies an inner "perception", then why not go the whole hog and deny that we have external perception as well ? I mean, look, when I'm looking at this very screen, right now, I'm clearly perceiving something : the external world has been translated into a private mental reality.

On this view, experiences are physical states of the brain, and we can be aware of them in the same way we can be aware of anything else — namely, by receiving information about them and reacting to them. Introspection provides us with information about our experiences, enabling us to do the things I mentioned earlier — recognize our experiences, compare them, report them, say whether we like them, and so on.

So we have inner awareness then ! At this point I feel the need to slap the author very hard and shout, "THAT'S THE WHOLE PROBLEM YOU TWIT !"

But, as with awareness of the world, introspective awareness doesn’t involve or produce mental qualities; it simply is a cascade of informational and reactive processes. When we talk of what our experiences are like, we are referring, in an oblique way, to these effects and dispositions to react.

The blazes are you prattling about, man ? Again we degenerate to the problem of nailing fog to a wall. Either we have mental constructs or we don't. You can't say, "we do have them, but they're not real". That's stupid. Frankish is acutely aware of the difficulty but I find his answer to be even stupider.

Seeming to introspect a mental quality (say, the quale of yellowness) involves having a stream of introspective information which produces the same psychological effects that awareness of the actual quality would have done — producing appropriate beliefs, preferences, associations, emotional reactions, and so on. In short, to have the illusion of qualia is to be inclined to believe that one has them and to react as if one has them. This does not require the existence of the qualia themselves, so the account is not self-defeating or circular.

No, this is as maddeningly ridiculous as I thought it was last time. Nothing new has been added, it boils down to, "we're not really thinking, we just think we're thinking", or, "we're just imagining our own imaginings". It's absolutely as flagrantly circular as Frankish is trying so desperately to deny. This is full-on Flat Earth level of crazy. I'm not a fan of idealism or panpsychism, but bugger me sideways they're more respectable than illusionism.

The demystification of consciousness

This article was written in response to Bernardo Kastrup's article ' The Mysterious Disappearance of Consciousness' Bernardo Kastrup is mystified by the view of consciousness that has come to be known as illusionism . He describes it as a "mind-bogglingly extraordinary claim", which seems to be, simply, "nonsense". He's not alone.

Life Under Lockdown (II)

So far, so good. There's been very little development here and the only things to report on are firmly of the first world problems variety. Netflix is supposedly limiting picture quality, but I haven't even noticed. We're in that kind of a crisis.

Yesterday I went to the shop for the first time in a week, quite expecting to find nothing but burning embers and half-dead corpses stumbling around, futily clutching for the last roll of toilet paper. In fact it was as normal as normal can be. Panic buying ? No sign of it, not even for toilet paper. Why exactly the rest of the world appears to think that this is something necessary to stockpile, and why the blazes the shops haven't put a stop to this, and furthermore why this isn't happening in the Czech Republic, is quite beyond me. I mean, it's not as if all the shops are going to shut, because that would cause starvation - it isn't going to happen because that would be far worse than the bloody virus. So what in the world is the point on stocking up when the shops are going to stay open ?

I'm told that there is some panic buying here - of flour. Apparently this is a memory of the old times when everyone baked bread at home, even though this is now comparatively rare. And I'm told that since they moved the hours dedicated for senior citizens, things are a little more empty, but that could be because my neighbour went three hours after the senior hours finished and they just hadn't re-stocked yet.

The senior citizen hours are, of course, a thoroughly good idea. Originally these were from 10-12, but they soon shifted that to be from 7-9. This is much more sensible since it avoids the elderly forming queues before 10. A silly problem, but swiftly dealt with.

The only unusual thing about the shopping experience was that everyone was wearing face masks, as required by the government. From what I've heard these are largely useless, but not in themselves harmful. I think it would probably be better if they government spent more effort on encouraging people to maintain a safe distance from each other - most Czechs are not at all touchy-feeling, but they tend not to care about personal space very much.

Anyway, these "masks" can be anything. So I used a neck warmer, which has proven effective enough for the brief evening dog walks. This was a mistake. Before I even got to the shop I had to remove my glasses, because I couldn't see a damn thing through the condensation. Inside, I quickly found I became profusely sweaty - well, it's supposed to keep me warm, for heaven's sake - and the thing needed perpetual adjustments. Apart from the fact I was able to stock up on supplies, it was a thoroughly lousy shopping experience and I didn't like it one bit.

(Oh, okay, and they happened not to have any honey so I got Nutella instead. Truly these are the end times.)

As for work itself, that continues more or less unimpeded. It's been unseasonably warm of late, so I've even been working outside. Lulu does not approve, but she doesn't get a vote because she's too small and fluffy. Even though the overhanging ivy causes me to get horribly itchy and sneezy, it seems worth making the most of this brief warm spell as temperatures are expected to crash back down to winter levels tomorrow.

I've been dividing my time between recoding FRELLED and reading papers. I've got the astropy WCS module working, so now I can figure out the coordinates of a FITS file pixel without having to roll my own like I did previously (cunningly combined with the datetime module to give sexigesimal notation). Galactic coordinates aren't cooperating yet but I'm sure I'll fix that with enough testing. And I've allowed myself to work on a side-project of making a nice 3D interactive map of the Galaxy - more of that over on the astronomy blog, hopefully next week.

What then of the virus ? It remains, frustratingly, too early to tell. Case numbers continue to rise, but so do testing rates. Since the quarantine measures haven't been applied for very long, my guess is it could be another two or three weeks before we can tell if they have any impact compared to countries which implemented them more slowly. So we continue to watch this space. For now, everything remains about as normal as it can get in this weird dystopian reality.

Combat Cows Countering Climatic Carbon Catastrophe

... and yes, I am proud of the alliteration. Thanks for asking. Anyway, remember that idea that using huge herds of livestock could actually be beneficial for fighting climate change ? If not, the basic idea is that grasslands didn't develop in isolation, but in tandem with the evolution of grazing animals. Since we eliminated most of the grazing megafauna, the land is out of balance. It's no longer being fertilised or trampled, and the natural decay processes when the grass dies aren't happening. This, in short, isn't good - but the effect can be recreated with great efficacy using livestock herds. As well as preventing soil erosion and increasing crop yields, this also allows the soil to re-absorb enormous amounts of carbon. And you get a bunch of tasty cows wandering about to boot.

This first article takes a similar angle, with the slightly different spin that this means there's no need to give up eating meat. Actually, not really - despite the title, it barely mentions that. What it does do is note two important things : 1) that we're used to thinking of crop and meat production as two separate things, but this is a recent development; 2) we only think of cattle as causing problems because we're so used to (1), but if we abandon this and switch to high intensity grazing, it turns out that the carbon absorbed by the soil more than compensates for that produced by the cattle. Win-win all round.

A second article deals with a totally different climate issue, but in a similarly counter-intuitive way of using animals. What do we need to save the permafrost ? Horsies ! Lots of horsies ! How do they help ? By getting rid of the snow.

Wait, what ?

It turns out that snow is bad in this context because it's such an effective insulator. What you want to do is expose the ground to the cold winter air so it can freeze. The trampling hooves of horses (and other large animals) compresses and disperses the snow, halving the average depth and reducing the insulation. That, overall, should keep the ground significantly colder and allow the permafrost to last a lot longer. So more animals => less climate change = super happy environmentalists.

At least you might think so. But I've learned that whenever anyone posts anything - anything at all - that says, "we can fight climate change using method X", where method X is anything other than reducing fossil fuels, the reaction tends to be negative. For a substantial minority, nothing less than living in the trees and sacrificing babies to a rare species of carnivorous goat seems to be enough. "This will distract from the fight against fossil fuels !" they say. Geoengineering gets a particularly bad rap. And make no mistake : the schemes outline above are indeed geoengineering, just using animals instead of robots.

Here's the thing. We've already put too much carbon into the atmosphere, so we have a responsibility to clean up our mess. More fundamentally, why on Earth limit yourself to fighting fossil fuels ? If you really believe that climate change, not fossil fuel per se, is the problem, you should be using every possible method to mitigate it. By all means, reduce fossil fuels as well as the other options, but good lord don't forbid those other options. That only makes the battle harder to win. Yes, fossil fuels are nasty things, and ought to be phased out anyway. But if it's really climate change that you're trying to stop, use every weapon available rather than trying to fight with one hand tied behind your back.

Life Under Lockdown (I)

So the coronavirus is now the only news story. I'll be covering all the usual stuff here and on my other blogs, but it seems appropriate to keep a personal record of events during this unprecedented situation. Updates will be sporadic, as and when appropriate or there's nothing else to do.

I've been self-isolating since Friday last, not because I have much chance of actually having it, but because minimising contact with everyone else should by now be common sense. All through the parameter space of possibilities that range from "it kills me stone dead" to "I'm a symptom-free carrier", there's no region at all in which staying at home isn't the best option by far. I know old people can do irritating things like vote for Brexit or tell long-winded stories that don't go anywhere, but even so, I don't actually want to give them a potentially fatal disease.

Plus, no-one cares very much where the research gets done, and I can work just as well from home. By chance we were given official advice to work from home the same day I decided to anyway, which just goes to show what a sensible bunch astronomers can be. It helps that we're not a teaching institute, so we have no lectures to cancel. Whether I'm here or there, the galaxies will still be way up in the sky, so going home makes almost no difference. The only thing I need to do to work from home is to avoid catching the metro every morning.

Personally I'm in a pretty much ideal situation. We have a spacious multi-floor apartment, a back garden, a small fluffy dog, a high-speed internet connection, plenty of books, ample provisions for the week*, and Shirley also has an employer who understands the situation so we're home together. A gilded cage may still be a cage, but hell, it's a lot better than a feckin' scorpion pit.

* Panic buying hasn't been much of a thing here so far, with the occasional exceptions of pasta and rice for some reason. I'd guestimate that 95% of shelves are stocked at normal capacity.

Actually, it's barely even a cage at all. The Czech Republic may be under "quarantine", but the quotation marks are certainly needed. They've been incrementally applying stricter and stricter laws, but currently the "don't go out unless you need food, medicine, petrol, or to go to work, or to visit family, or to walk your dog, or [and this is quite literal] you want to spend time in nature" is hardly a real lockdown. It's not much of a quarantine if you can take a stroll through a park just because birds and doggies and whatnot.

Even so, to its great credit, the Czech government started implementing measures almost as soon as the first cases were recorded (most notably closing schools and borders), and it's been ramping them up ever since. It didn't wait until it had thousands of cases before actually lifting a finger to do something, unlike many other European nations. So I'm hopeful that there's a chance this will either nip it in the bud completely here, or at least massively slow down the infection rate before it spirals out of control.

But hopeful is not the same as optimistic. I'm not at all sure these measures really will have the desired effect, for two reasons :
1) Testing rates here have thus far been extremely low, so there are likely very many more unreported cases. Remarkably, even when there were just 200 cases, I actually happen to known four of them (who are, so far as I'm aware, fine, and I haven't seen them since January). This is perhaps why the cases are rising so rapidly in the Czech Republic - not because it's spreading with exceptional virulence, but because it's still being found.
2) Although the quarantine measures are non-negligible, as I said, they're hardly draconian yet. Many workplaces are closed, but there were also so many exceptions (like technology stores for some reason) that it would have been faster to list the places allowed to stay open.

I'm trying not to follow the story any more closely than I need to, not because I don't care, but because there's only so much I can do and making myself anxious about it won't help. I can either stay at home and be productive or stay at home and worry myself sick. I choose the former.

For that reason, I'm not going to be commenting on whether nation X or nation Y has the best corona policies. That can wait. More broadly, there are good grounds to be optimistic : in all counties where strict quarantine has been implemented, the virus is receding. This is an entirely survivable crisis and there's no reason that dealing with COVID-19 has to be the new, permanent normal.

Work-wise I have a single project to keep me occupied : recoding FRELLED in a modern version of Blender. This is a perfect work-from-home task because it requires extended and uninterrupted time to work on it - trying to switch from coding to other projects (or going to unrelated meetings) is seldom a good idea. So working from home is actually beneficial for this, and it's a task I've even been wanting to get my teeth into. And I have plenty of papers to read and other possible tasks should I feel the need to do something else for a bit.

And on the employment level, I think things are as good as can be expected. We've been told to stay home and file timesheets as normal, and have been given detailed instructions as to how to sign in remotely to do this. Some of the more popular and serious blog posts about how bad COVID-19 could become have been circulating in the official advice emails, which gives me confidence that my employer is taking this seriously.

Right now the whole thing feels surreal more than anything else. Oh, you want me to stay at home in my comfy flat for a month and work on a pet project ? Great ! The only ways I've been adversely affected are my discovering that the building recycling bin was too full of Oculus Go headset boxes to add anything, and, more annoyingly, not being able to take my usual Easter holiday. Oh, and I can't treat myself (yet) to an Oculus Quest, since no-one know when it will become available again. First world problems indeed.

How much worse will it get ? It seems unlikely to become anything unendurable. Even the Italians are singing from their balconies. Perhaps we'll eventually degenerate into a Mad Max dystopia and resort to eating cats, but for now, nothing feels unnecessary, still less harsh or draconian. At least for the time being, it's all just a bit odd.

Not that Dominion, the other one

If I say to you, "Tom Holland", do you :

a) Assume I mean the big-shot Hollywood actor

b) Assume I mean the English historian

c) Wonder why the heck I'm spouting random names at you

If the answer is b), welcome to my world. What if I say, "Dominion" ? Do you :

a) Assume I mean the Dominion of Canada

b) Assume I mean the popular card game

c) Tell me to please stop with the delerious random statements already

The correct answer is c). Today's post is about the book Dominion by English historian Tom Holland. If you thought I was going to be describing a card game with a Hollywood star, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong blog.

Enough of this tomfoolery. Anyway, s a writer, Holland is the sort who could wipe the floor with Edward Gibbon's ponderous excuse for rhetoric. Holland never wavers from his style of vivid and compelling prose. The word "magisterial" is frequently used in reviews, and quite properly so. I have all his books and they're all superb.

Dominion is his latest offering. Unlike his previous efforts, which tell narrative history over relatively limited episodic moments, this is a sweeping epic on an altogether different scale. Holland charts how Christianity influenced, for better and for worse, the evolution of the Western and eventually global mindset. This is a mammoth task indeed, but Holland is more than capable of selecting appropriate moments to illustrate the wider trends. With consummate skill, he deftly renders an immense tale into something (relatively) concise, readable, and yet never lacking in the feeling of scope. It's particularly interesting to see how he uses his characteristic melodramatic style* to describe the present in the same way as the distant past, giving the whole work a palpable sense of continuity. This is enhanced further by keeping the focus on the mental world, rather than anything so mundane was what people actually did. Modern life is shown to be a contiguous development from a very ancient world, if hardly the same as it. Holland uses the what only ever to illustrate the more important why.

* This is intended as a complement. I like melodrama.

Holland's central thesis is simple but under-appreciated. Christianity, he says, has caused an extremely powerful shift in moral and philosophical attitudes, even among those who are virulently opposed to it. Secularism, he says, did not start because governments wanted the Church to keep its nose of our private business, but ironically for just the opposite : by demarking the limits of government (at the time monarchic government), the Church gave itself more control over its dominions*, not less. In order for the Church to administer the secular world, it was first necessary to define secularism itself.

* Still not referring to the board game, or Canada.

This separation of mental concepts is a running theme through the book, and Holland is particularly keen to illustrate how the Christian faith gave rise even to the very concept of religion. Prior to this idea that secular and theistic worlds are distinct, the world was seen with different eyes. It's not that faith didn't exist : it's that its intrusion into all aspects of life was taken for granted. Few, before Christianity, would have defined themselves by what supernatural deities they believed in. They believed in them, yes, but they didn't say that believing in Zeus was a core part of their identity any more than we might say that having electric light bulbs is part of ours.

There are strong echoes of Hannam's God's Philosophers here, sometimes very loudly. Whereas Hannam concentrated exclusively and explicitly on how Christianity (and especially Catholicism) influenced the material world view for the better, Holland is broader in scope and more implicit in his delivery. He is also not unbiased, concentrating heavily on the positive aspect, though not excluding the negative either.

What he is most successful at is demonstrating how powerful our underlying assumptions can be. To really step outside our most basic world view is no mean feat, and Holland makes an attempt as good as anyone could reasonably expect. As modernity turns ever more atheistic and anitheistic, Holland reminds us that the concept of human rights was developed through Christian morality. Indeed, he sees it as something that's hard to envisage developing otherwise, since the notion the universality of humanity, that we're all equal before God, was explicitly Christian and contrasted starkly with the prevailing ideas of the time (notably, he shows how it was likewise difficult even for the earliest Christians to escape the prevalent pagan moral views of their day).

Even many of the most vitriolic atheists today owe a moral debt to early Christian teachings, as though living in its moral afterlife. Few indeed would think that the poor deserved whatever suffering befell them, or that women are little more than things to service men. Holland shows how, while the notion of monogamous marriage may have eventually been perverted into something patriarchal, initially it was anything but. Far from binding unfortunate women to their oppressive husbands, the point was to end the abusive male freedom to copulate with anything in sight. By demanding fidelity from both partners, marriage began as an equaliser, not a tool of oppression.

But not all thinkers are wholly bound to such now-obvious notions of equality and freedom. Holland describes how Nietzsche's ideas hark back to a much earlier era, when people literally and sincerely believed that might equals right. Here we encounter the first and main weakness of the book. While Holland is keen to show that the concept Christian charity was, inasmuch as was possible in its time, an almost socialist revolution, the book almost entirely lacks any description of the debt Christianity owes to earlier thinkers - in particular the Greek philosophers.

For example, it seems very odd to describe how execution carried a stigma of shame and not describe the trial of Socrates, or not to acknowledge that the idea it's better to suffer an injustice than commit one originated with Plato. Many other early pagan philosophers came up with similarly daring ideas, and though Christianity may have been infinitely more successful at disseminating them, to not acknowledge their contribution is a strange omission. It seems highly unlikely that Christianity developed them entirely independently; its prehistory well deserves its own chapter. Holland shows very well how the conditions of the Roman Empire assisted the flourishing of the new religion, but says little enough about the initial origin of the ideas. Unbeliever though he is, is he still biased towards preserving a sense of mystery ? Possibly. Yet even if Christians genuinely came to their beliefs through divine revelation, one could still acknowledge their use of earlier authors to help them understand the word of God. Early Christian thinkers didn't put Aristotle back on the bookshelf.

The second mistake is also one of absence rather than inaccuracy. Holland dwells on the moral achievements of Christianity while somewhat neglecting its failings. It's not that he avoids them entirely - on occasion, he describes all too clearly some of the horrors that Christianity has inflicted - it's that such discussion is too much downplayed. Similarly, in some ways his largely implicit style of delivering a conclusion is often used to great effect, forcing the reader to formulate the conclusions for themselves - but at other times this becomes a weakness. Knowing what the author thinks, or even simply presenting any kind of interpretation at all, is sometimes essential for assessing one's own view, otherwise it becomes a series of events with little clear connection to link them. This is a rare problem in the book, but present nonetheless. Holland demonstrates very compellingly that Christianity led a moral revolution, and at times shows equally compellingly that many of its failings are secular in origin, not born of the faith itself. But failings it most certainly has, and the lack of discussion here becomes all too evident. I can understand why he would do this - the internet is chock-full of idiots who think all religion is the worst thing imaginable*, even as they themselves preach a distinctly Christian morality - but sometimes issues need to be dealt with head-on.

 * He nicely notes the hypocrisy of John Lennon's Imagine, in which the singer prances around in his enormous mansion while saying we should have no possessions.

But in its main goals, Dominion is a resounding success. As he reaches his finale, his descriptions of Tolkein in the Somme find particular resonance. Soldiers immersed in unimaginable horrors have both clung more tightly to and discarded their faith and moral views; the complexity of psychology is very much in evidence. For the modern intelligentsia, God may be dead, but his shadow lingers. History, Holland shows, is indeed written and re-written by the victors, freely usurping the mantle of enemies where necessary and discrediting them where possible. Yet even the most perfect retcon has an inherent limit : for all that we can forget our past, we cannot escape it. Holland does a first-rate and much-need job of demonstrating how our most basic presumptions are far from the self-evident truths they are often held to be. 9/10 from me.


EDIT : A few months on, and I'm tempted to bump up the rating to 9.5. Holland describes how he used to feel the old Roman myths were so much more colourful and lively than the Christian stories, which I can certainly relate to. After letting the book sink in, I have to say that if his goal was to transform this particular part of a reader's worldview, for me it's a success. Even with such mundane things as playing Rome 2 Total War or re-watching The Vicar of Dibley, there's a different outlook on the events. The greatest story ever told ? I'd have said it was actually a pretty dull tale, not so long ago. Am I now converted ? Hell no, of course not, but I'd be a lot more inclined to agree that it does, at least, have fair claim to being an astonishingly revolutionary idea. Good job, Holland.

Review : Doctor Who series 12

WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD !

I wasn't overly impressed with season 11 of Doctor Who. It had some good episodes and made much better use of the historical episodes, using them as morality tales instead of excuses to randomly add random alien monsters at random into random historical events, randomly. But the Doctor herself was weak and ineffectual - small, polite and helpful to an absurd degree that made no sense whatsoever for the established character, even given that regeneration allows for major character changes. Some limits can be broken but really, really shouldn't.

Although the full consequences have yet to be played out, I'm highly suspicious that season 12 has gone too far in the other direction. It had a strong opening, getting away from the "play it so safely that it's deadly dull" approach of last season and back to the epic style of modern-era Who. It took risks again, meaning that although we had to deal with stupid episodes, we got back to the potential for high drama. But has it actually delivered ? There's a fine line between clever shock twists and just making stuff up...

I don't know. My verdict has to be provisional, because the final episode ends in such a way that I'm not at all confident in what's going to happen next. I cannot really explain this properly without spoilers, so if you don't want any, stop reading NOW.

My feeling on Doctor Who is that it's the moral heir to Star Trek, even though Doctor Who came first. Fundamentally, it has to be optimistic. Yes, things can go badly, badly wrong - main characters can suffer and die, disasters are plentiful... hell, genocide is a recurring theme. And yes, time can be re-written, and yes, scientific accuracy is something that happens to other people. But consistency can only be violated with some difficulty, and a large degree of fundamental optimism is essential. We all know the Doctor's going to win in the end, because that's what the Doctor does. Ultimately, even if things go wrong, they eventually either get better or are reset in a time-wimey fashion. When Capaldi's Doctor says "nobody wins for long", he's clearly referring to villains.

This season's finale seemingly violates this. I've never seen a season end in a way where I think, "well, that was just depressing" before. Yet this one did to such a degree I have to wonder - hope would not be too strong a word - that they're going to undo everything next time. Never before have I wanted a season finale to be undone. After all, season finales are supposed to be the moment where tragedy is overcome, not where everything goes wrong.

This season has, to its great credit, had plenty of shock reveals : the return of the Master, the destruction of Gallifrey, the Lone Cyberman, the earlier incarnation of the Doctor as Ruth. They've been deftly revealed as part of a larger storyline in a cleverer way than either Davies or Moffat ever managed. What's more, the Doctor is significantly more complex and less goody two-shoes than in the last season. Though they still haven't managed to get the humour working again (I think Jodie Whitaker is just no good at it), kudos to Chibnall for fixing a lot of problems.

... except.... I worry that the solution may be worse than the problem. I'm not at all convinced this storyline is one the show should have pursued. It's not merely dark - it's bleak, not to mention joyless.

Early in the season, it was revealed that the Master has destroyed Gallifrey on having discovered some great secret. This was worrying, since having spent ten years getting Gallifrey back, for the show to immediately destroy it again just feels downright mean : not like it wants to toy with the viewer or keep them guessing, but as though it actively hates its own audience. But this is merely a prelude to prepare the viewer for how much worse things are going to get.

The series ends with shock revelations in spades. The Master reveals that the Doctor isn't a Time Lord at all, but an alien who fell from another dimensions on to Gallifrey early in its history. By deciphering her genetic secrets of regeneration, the Gallifreyans eventually became the Time Lords we're all familiar with. Ruth was just one of those earlier regenerations of the Doctor; the whole limit of 12 regenerations thing being a lie as far as the Doctor is concerned. Apparently while this limit applies to the other Time Lords, the Doctor has infinite regeneration capacity. Faced with this awful truth that his nemesis was responsible for all Gallfreyan achievements, the Master destroyed Gallifrey by means unknown. And then, just for good measure, he brings in the Cybermen to use the Time Lord corpses to raise an invincible army of regenerating Cyber Lords to make war across the Universe.

Not even Chibnall is mad enough to let the Master actually succeed, so the Doctor destroys the whole damn lot of them with a "death particle" carried by one of the Cybermen. Okay, so she and her companions survive, as they must. But this doesn't feel like winning - it's just avoiding personal death in the face of a catastrophic defeat. All the Time Lords are dead, and Gallifrey - if not actually obliterated - is left a smoking ruin. This is not nice.

I'm just not sure I want the show to go this far. I like the show because it's fundamentally happy, especially since it's one of the few such sci-fi shows around at the moment. What kind of message is it to say, "be a good person and you might survive the death and destruction of everyone you love ?" A fucking awful one, is the answer. Screw that Stoic crap, I want the show to be fun. I want to see the joy of exploration. I want a message that the Universe isn't a horrific nightmare from start to finish. Bleak, depressing sci-fi has its place, but God alive I don't need to be saturated in it. I don't need to be guaranteed that every sci-fi show is just going to vomit depression at me. To see Doctor Who turning grim is like turning on Sesame Street and seeing Big Bird torturing kittens in a cocaine-fuelled orgy of death and destruction. It's like watching Sooty boil Sweep alive and eat his soggy corpse, or eviscerating a pregnant Sue. I don't need to see that, and no-one else does either.

Then there are the practical matters. Just how did the Master manage to destroy the entire race of Time Lords ? Were they really that pathetic ? That undermines their whole established image. And the Doctor being billions of years old ? I don't see the point of that. Moffat went through a phase of giving companions pointless epic backstories, but if there's anyone who doesn't need an epic backstory, it's the Doctor. The intention being to make the Doctor something even more than she was before doesn't really work - you should only boost a character who needs boosting. Never mind that there's no obvious reason why the Time Lords should have kept the truth from her.

Of course, the show being what it is, it's possible the whole thing could be re-written in the very next episode or in the future. But it doesn't feel like it's being set up for that. It feels like the writers want to undo the last 15 years and send the show into a new and horrible direction. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not optimistic.

Not such a dirty rat

Here's a question : if there was a machine which had emotions but no intelligence at all, would it be ethical to experiment on it ? Another one : is it ethical for us to eat animals, and if not, is it ethical for animals to other animals ?

I have no idea. Anyway, I'd heard of rats showing empathy before, but I wasn't aware this was known in the 1950's. See original article for links to individual studies.

We now know that rats don’t live merely in the present, but are capable of reliving memories of past experiences and mentally planning ahead the navigation route they will later follow. They reciprocally trade different kinds of goods with each other – and understand not only when they owe a favour to another rat, but also that the favour can be paid back in a different currency. When they make a wrong choice, they display something that appears very close to regret. Despite having brains that are much simpler than humans’, there are some learning tasks in which they’ll likely outperform you. Rats can be taught cognitively demanding skills, such as driving a vehicle to reach a desired goal, playing hide-and-seek with a human, and using the appropriate tool to access out-of-reach food.

The most unexpected discovery, however, was that rats are capable of empathy.It all began with a study in which the rats refused to press a lever to obtain food when that lever also delivered a shock to a fellow rat in an adjacent cage. The rats would rather starve than witness a rat suffering. Follow-up studies found that rats would press a lever to lower a rat who was suspended from a harness; that they would refuse to walk down a path in a maze if it resulted in a shock delivered to another rat; and that rats who had been shocked themselves were less likely to allow other rats to be shocked, having been through the discomfort themselves. Rats care for one another.

Most scientists were not convinced, suggesting instead that the rats probably just wanted someone to hang out with, or that they found it annoying that the trapped rat was making such irritating noises and wanted it to stop. The rats, according to these scientists, were not acting out of concern for the other, but out of pure egoism. What else could one expect from a rat?

The obvious question here being : what's the difference between humans and rats in these scenarios. The answer is easy : nothing. We have no grounds for assuming that humans are empathic beyond their own protestations that they have possess emotions and sentience, which might simply be a lie. So when it comes to other animals displaying emotional behaviour, we have only the behaviour itself on which to judge. And it's no more valid to attribute rat behaviour to irritation than it is to empathy. Given that the behaviour shown is far, far more similar to what we know about empathy than annoyance, assuming it's due to irritation because we don't like rats is just plain stupid. When it comes to analysing inner mental lives, we have no choice but to make assumptions.

But the sort of people who experiment on rats, one suspects, aren't capable of understanding this. If you're looking for the stereotypical evil scientist, your search is at an end.

For decades, Harlow created psychologically damaged primates in order to better understand human psychopathologies. Monkey babies were separated from their mothers for six to 12 months so that he could study the effects of breaking the maternal bond. Juveniles were isolated in what Harlow called the ‘pit of despair’: a tiny metal cage meant to induce depression in otherwise healthy and happy monkeys. It worked all too well. 

Scientists are now tinkering with rats’ empathy in order to find ways of treating human psychopathologies. In some cases, rats are given treatments that temporarily disable their empathic capabilities, such as anxiolytics, paracetamol, heroin or electric shocks. In other cases, the harm is permanent. Rats are separated from their mothers at birth and raised in social isolation. In some studies, their amygdalae (the brain area responsible for emotion and affiliation) are permanently damaged. The explicit goal of this research is to create populations of mentally ill, traumatised, emotionally suffering rats.

I don't know if its ethically justifiable to experiment on animals to develop new medicines for humans or not. But I'm damn sure that deliberately turning animals into psychopaths is an grotesque, purposeless act. I won't try and see what sorts of experiments are ethical or not, but I will say very firmly that these ones are wrong.

Why don't rats get the same ethical protections as primates? - Kristin Andrews & Susana Monsó | Aeon Essays

In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can't hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp's lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he realised there was something that appeared unexpectedly similar to human laughter.