The honour of faux outrage

In general I really enjoy John Man's books - they're superbly readable light history. Ironically, it's one of my least favourite of his works that has an interesting observation that's been running through my head a lot lately.

In Samurai, Man describes how honour-based societies have to pro-actively seek out offences. A society based around its own honour needs insults to survive. You can't very well go around defining yourself by how you respond to supposedly ill-treatment without actually having some ill-treatment to respond to. And if no-one happens to be genuinely insulting you, an offence can always be invented.

Sadly the rest of the book was (unusually) a humdrum and tedious narrative and I never finished it, but this idea strikes me as important. Consider this speech in Star Trek :

We have not injured you in any way. Why would anyone seek to harm someone who has done exactly nothing to hurt them at all ? There is absolutely no reason, in principle, why people of different sexual orientation cannot coexist happily. They may not necessarily approve of each other - a sense of purity and inherent rightness plays its part - but unless they see the other's actions causing active harm to them in some way, it's surely strange that they should so pro-actively and preemptively attack people who were quietly minding their own business.

The honour-based society helps explain things. Tribalism is important, but it's more than just us and them : it's not that we define ourselves by being a member of a particular group but by not being the others. At a silly level, the Welsh define themselves in no small part by being not English; the Klingons spend enormous time proclaiming how much they hate the Romulans. At a more serious level, homophobes define themselves not by being heterosexual, but by not being homosexual. Atheists define themselves by not being religious; anti-capitalists define themselves...well, that's obvious; a host of political activists of all stripes define their identity by being against the other side and not for anything in particular.

Is anyone really offended by people wearing face masks ? Do they really find this a tyrannical oppression of their essential freedom to wave assault rifles around ? Of course not. It's all about identity-based honour and manufactured conflict.

This kind of honour mentality and "othering" is distinct from the everyday sort of disapproval. Consider Nickelback. They're an objectively awful pile of walking crap that is to music what astrology is to marine biology. But do you see me hunting down Nickelback fans on the internet just so I can tell them how ashamed of themselves they should be ? No, because as long as they don't make me listen to the uber-generic lung exhalations that they apparently enjoy, I'm fine with us leaving each other alone. I hate Nickleback with a fiery passion, but it's not something that I define myself by.

Then again, some seemingly harmless behaviours might lead eventually to harmful behaviour. Music has been oft-proclaimed as one such area; video games are another. In principle, getting upset by these is perfectly justifiable. It's not inherently unreasonable to posit that people spending hours each day in simulated worlds replete with gratuitous violence might eventually become violent in reality... at least until you see all evidence, such as the multitudinous hordes of astonishingly non-violent gamers. It's those who persist after examining the evidence that might be suffering from this honour-based crusade : "I am the person who hates video games, therefore I must continue my quest to wipe them out". So disliking something and being defined by your dislike of it are very different things.

I wonder how deep this honour-based system runs. Importantly, unlike classical tribalism, we need not join an organised group to slip into this kind of thinking from time to time. Might it help explain the stronger levels of (apparent) hatred from some racists, homophobes etc ? Certainly I'm wary of anyone who's monotopically obsessed - if you only ever talk about one thing, you've likely sunk into over-specialisation, which is a perhaps a warning sign of letting external events define you. So I have an inherent distrust of activists - they tend to sink from perfectly reasonable initial positions ("I don't want to eat meat") to rabid obsession ("let's kill anyone who's not a fan of kale").

(And because this is Decoherency, I feel bound to point out that the very last post here was one of political activism.)

Like racism, this is a spectrum ranging from the generally good(ish)-natured Welsh versus English, to entirely honour-driven societies of samurai Klingons, right up to the horrors of genocide; from "I want you to stop doing this thing I don't like" to full-blown "I want you to die for this meaningless difference between us". And it isn't at all easy to spot. Even - or especially - if our cause is just, we can still let it define us to an irrational extreme. It's entirely possible to be right for the wrong reasons. Keeping tabs on how you're thinking is far more important than on watching your conclusions.

No Prime Minister, I don't want to move on

There's much to be angry about in the Dominic Cummings scandal. I need not go in to the heart of it - it's self-evident that a top advisor not obeying the same rules as everyone else is unfair. Especially so when so many others were in far worse, more dangerous situations and still found a way to manage without driving across the country to their parent's sprawling estate. That's the behaviour of a cunt. As is saying, "I was perfectly reasonable and justified", which means that either everyone else was too stupid to understand the rules correctly, or that he's so important that the rules don't apply to him. There isn't a third option.

But we need not dwell on that. What I want to rant about here is the barefaced lying, which in the long term is far more damaging than one middle-aged idiot driving to a castle when he shouldn't. It's the excuses and their defence that should concern us more than the recklessness itself.

Nobody goes for a 60 mile drive to "test their eyesight" - anyone who does is knowingly endangering themselves and others. Nobody manages a 260 mile drive with a 4 year old without stopping. Nobody has "shouted conversations" across a 50 yard gap when they're ill, except those who've never heard of telephones. Never mind retroactively editing a blog to make oneself look more knowledgeable about a coming crisis which leaves tens of thousands dead. That is bizarre indeed : does he want us to think he knew but did nothing ? That's far, far worse than simple ignorance.

Not to mention feeling threatened by the media at his London home during a period when nobody was allowed outdoors. Or the downright strange description of his parents estate as having a bunch of cottages, private woods, but also being "not very nice, just a bunch of concrete blocks". And as for which erroneous media claims have been refuted, that's anyone's guess, since he refused to specify which ones were wrong. "Everyone will understand now they know the truth", he said, after having confirmed the exact truths everyone was very angry about.

The litany of transparent falsehoods in the account is too long to examine fully, so let's take it for granted that the whole account is a sham. Does it even matter that one twit told a pack of lies ?

Well, yes, obviously it does. At least the other important political figures who had to resign had the decency to admit their mistakes. They didn't try and convince us they were actually lovely people doing perfectly sensible things : they admitted their wrongdoing, and, perhaps, learned from it.

But there's worse. When the Prime Minister throws his all at defending a lunatic, what does that say about the Prime Minister ? Or when he says, "I've seen the evidence, but no-one else needs to", what does that say about him ? If this lying scumbag is so important to him, what does that say about the Prime Minister's intellect and character ?

Obviously nothing good. But when he tells us to "move on", that is arguably worse still. It is a synonym for "I don't care". He's saying, "you just have to accept this because I'm the boss." He's saying, "accountability means me feeling slightly uncomfortable during interviews but not actually doing anything about it".

Now Boris did not, so far as I'm aware, openly admit to an error on the NHS surcharge for foreign workers, but at least that error was remedied. When it comes to Dominic Cummings, he won't even do that. No advisor should ever warrant this level of immunity. Saying, "move on" is an attempt to force us to agree to disagree, to say, "these are the lies, shut up and live with them". Well, screw you, Prime Minister - it's not up to you to tell me what I should approve of. Your top advisor is a deranged liar, and you're defending him. You're saying it's okay for the government to tell lies while simultaneously telling the public to use their common sense. What conclusion am I supposed to draw from that ?

With a twenty point plummet in the opinion polls, the consequences for trust in the government - at a time when it's most needed - are already clear. We absolutely should not move on from this. Government defence of liars is not a Westminster spat, it's an attack on the system of government itself. My conclusion is that you're an arsehole, Prime Minister.

Is fire hot inside the moral matrix ?

The "fire is hot" problem, you may recall, is my term for when someone needs to be convinced of something that is as obvious as is ever possible. If you're literally on fire, you ought to know that fire is hot - it's as self-evident as can be. Your sensory information is as direct and unfiltered as it's ever going to get. And yet some people - not necessarily in small numbers either - still need to be convinced of facts which are every bit as obvious as fire being hot.

There are plenty of good, careful guides to persuasion out there, but they all take it for granted that people will believe the evidence when it reaches a certain critical threshold. The fire-is-hot problem says that actually maybe they don't. They can remain ignorant or in denial even of the most obvious of facts and the strongest of evidence. How on Earth can they be convinced in such extreme cases ?

The example I gave originally was of Boris Johnson's election (this isn't going to be a protracted political rant, but I do need to state my position on the issue). Recently, for quite some time I was hoping that things might have changed - that the unprecedented national emergency and personal circumstances might have allowed his better qualities to shine forth and suppress his worst tendencies. I was hoping I'd have to write a retraction, or at least explain how the unforeseen situation had changed things for the better.

Alas, as events progress, it's becoming ever clearer that I was right in my first instincts, and that any correct actions taken by Johnson (instituting lockdown, changing course on unfair charges for foreign NHS staff, financially supporting workers - the latter something I would not at all have expected) are not part of any wider personal change. Witness the confused and confusing messages, denying they're confusing even though people have said, "we find this confusing". Witness the manipulation of data, removing charts comparing the UK with other countries the exact moment we reach the highest death toll in Europe. At witness the absurd defence of a nonsensical press conference in which advisor Dominic Cummings spouted a bunch of laughably absurd, truly ridiculous excuses for why he gets to ignore the rules.

But enough of the contemporary politics. What does all this have to do with a matrix ?

The idea behind this is that we all have different fundamental concerns : care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. We each value these to different degrees, with, in general, liberals valuing care and fairness more highly, whereas conservatives prefer loyalty, authority, and purity. Our "moral matrix" is our world view, wherein those parameters define what we perceive as moral behaviour. Only by being aware of these parameters, say researchers, can we start to truly understand our own actions and beliefs as well as those of others. Neither of these major ideological positions, they say, is inherently immoral - something I do not dispute.

There's another possible point suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune. Herbert said, "respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality". This seems at least plausible. A person with no respect for the truth can do whatever they feel like, because they can - as the old saying goes - alter the facts to fit their views. With no respect for objective reality, all the other sliders on their moral equaliser become theirs to command : they can say without compunction, "I killed your wife as an act of care" or "I betrayed you because I was loyal to you".

There are of course many complexities, not least of which is the nature of objective truth - still more subjective moral truth ! Herbet himself added, "this is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be". There's also the issue of whether this respect for truth would be another independent parameter or a multiplier for the others. But for now, seems safe to say that it is at least a key part of the moral matrix, even without saying exactly how it fits in.

How, then, does the fire-is-hot problem conflict with this complex moral matrix ?

Well, let's take healthcare. If we agree that it's important people have access to affordable healthcare, we can have an intelligent conversation. We may well disagree on how best to implement it - you might favour an insurance system, I might prefer single payer. But so long as our goal is the same, we can probably get along. Both of our stances can be said to be moral, and if one of us is proven incorrect, we may ascribe this to a mistake rather than malevolence.

If, however, you say instead that no-one deserves healthcare, that everyone should suffer horribly as much as possible, then we can't. I'll reject you not merely as disagreeing on policy, nor even on your moral stance, but as fundamentally, incontrovertibly evil. It is a fire-is-hot level of fact that your views are not based on a different moral system, but are innately immoral. The only sensible explanation is that you are actually being willfully malevolent.

Lies and a lack of respect for the truth are similar. Suppose I now say something very much stronger, that a single payer system is the only possible workable solution in any and all circumstances and anyone who disagrees is a corrupt tool of Big Pharma who should have flaming elephant dung forced up their backside. You, on the other hand, demonstrate with reasoned arguments and clear evidence that actually it's not as bad as all that, and that in some circumstances an insurance model can actually be the better option. If I insist on maintaining my self-righteous indignation, then I'm surely behaving immorally. Clinging to lies in the face of evidence is a malevolent, immoral act.

That's the problem for the moral matrix concept. It is absolutely correct to say that what we value defines what we think of as being moral, but there are some in-your-face, fire-is-hot level of behaviours that should be seen as immoral by any value system. Wanting to torture children isn't due to some "moral" obsession with safety. Telling lies to excuse your bad behaviour isn't the result of a "moral" respect for yourself. These things are simply wrong.

Now of course, this does not mean the matrix concept is without uses - far from it. I don't deny that a great deal of disagreements do arise as a result of different values between people who still appreciate the same end goals. And context, of course, is absolutely vital : both the pandemic and the financial crises were generally approached by highly socialist remedies - in the case of the former by highly illiberal, authoritarian social policies which would be thought horrendous in normal situations. So the moral matrix concept is certainly useful, but context can undeniably cause strange and highly complex effects.

But on the other hand, I cannot say that, for instance, valuing authority and not compassion is a legitimate moral viewpoint - that's how you get hilariously evil pantomime villains like Lord Shang. Whether we can decide if one of the major world views (liberal or conservative) is inherently more or less moral than the other is not the the point. The point is only that while people do have different value systems, and some combinations of sliders do lead to legitimate moral viewpoints, it does not follow that all such combinations produce valid moral positions. The point is how can we stand by and say, "he's only torturing kittens because his morality is different" or "he only told those lies because he values different things" ? Surely, not valuing truth and compassion are unavoidably immoral stances. If we have to choose between the fire and the matrix, surely sometimes we must choose the fire.

I'd like to teach the bee to count

From the Discworld :

In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three, many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don’t realise that many can BE a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-three, LOTS.

Remember how bees can supposedly count up to four and understand zero ? Well this new study says it's more subtle than that.

We found the bees could tell the difference between groups of one vs. four flowers—but not between, say, four vs. five. Basically, they couldn't differentiate between groups of two or more flowers. 

Our honeybees were shown pairs of flower quantities ranging from easier number comparisons (such as one flower vs 12 flowers) to more challenging scenarios (such as four flowers vs five flowers). Interestingly, despite previous findings that trained honeybees can discriminate between challenging quantities and can also learn to add and subtract, the bees performed poorly in our spontaneous number task. 

We found they were only able to discriminate between one vs 3, one vs 4, and one vs 12 flowers—wherein they preferred the larger quantity. When one flower was an option they succeeded, but confused any comparisons between groups of two flowers or more.

But this leaves so many questions. Only 1 vs 12 ? Why not 1 vs 6 ?

Suppose I'm a bee. My job is to collect as much nectar as possible, but I have limited visual information on which to judge this. Flower size being equal, I'll need to maximise nectar collection by visiting as many different flowers as possible, but if flower size is not equal then I might prefer one big flower to two smaller ones. And I'm going to want to minimise nectar collection time, so one big flower is going to be preferable to lots of widely-separated flowers. Furthermore, I might not have great visual resolution to distinguish between lots of small flowers crammed together.

This is going to make testing the bee's ability to count somewhat tricky : a bee might prefer one big flower to three small ones not because it's an idiot, but because it knows that choosing one big flower is more sensible. On the other hand, bees might be able to learn that the experimental reward given is based purely on the number of flowers, not their size.

So my guess would be that if you want to see if bees can count you would start by giving them a reward in response to choosing a patch containing one "flower" of varying different sizes, always while keeping the size of the patch constant. Then you add a second flower, and this patch should contain twice the reward. If the bees can distinguish between one and two, then they should surely always choose a patch containing two simulated flowers, no matter the size or size ratio of the two (again always keeping the patch size - i.e. flower number density - constant), within the limits of their visual acuity.

Those are my pre-emptive caveats. So does the paper give anything more informative than the press release ?

Yes and no. The authors do carefully set out their control conditions, e.g. testing whether the background colour of the patch makes any difference, randomly moving the different patches around the testing area etc.; they also account for the "flowers" being able to have the same total area or have fixed individual sizes. But they were only trained in response to a single "flower" with the same reward. So, surely, the bee then has to make its own judgement about whether it would be better to go for more flowers or bigger flowers. How is it to know how much nectar each contains ?

Another thought occurs : smell. There's nothing mentioned about it, but in the wild bees will also be able to smell greater amounts of sugar. So how did they control for this ? Retroactively, I'd say in the training phase you have the bees exposed to different quantities of sugar in proportion to the number of flowers regardless of their size or number density. And why not go the whole hog and do the entire thing by scent ? If they can distinguish 2 vs 6 in terms of scent alone, that's still counting in my book.

The way they chose the numbers of flowers also seems a bit odd to me and it's not at all clear how they chose it. The obvious thing to me would have been 1v2, 1v3, 1v4 etc. But they don't have 1v5 or 6 or 7. This is a shame, because while there's no numerical preference between 1vs2, there is for 1vs3 and a stronger one for 1vs4. Maybe this would have increased further, presumably reaching some limit when the density becomes so high it just looks like one giant flower or is indistinguishable from the previous case.

All that said, their discussion section is very nice, and contains some additional self-criticism :

It may not be important for bees to differentiate between two or more flowers as they may simply classify these quantities as ‘many’ [YAY TROLLS !]. When foraging, perhaps there is little difference between visiting a flower patch which provides two flowers to visit as opposed to three or four. However, when conditions are not optimal and few flowers are present in an environment, it may be vitally important to find a patch with more than one flower. 

Perhaps the number of elements contained within the alternative stimuli during tests was too high for bees to process the visual task efficiently, leading to errors and/or a tendency to choose at random. 

Honeybees have evolved in tropical environments, which host scarce but clustered sources of nutrition. Thus, honeybees may have acquired a fast but inaccurate visual search strategy when compared with bumblebees, which have evolved in sparse but evenly distributed resource environments in temperate zones. Consequently, bumblebees use a slow but careful foraging strategy. The fast but error-prone strategy of honeybees is useful for environments where accuracy provides no benefit.

In short, bees might think a bit like trolls, but it's very hard to tell for sure.

One, then some: How to count like a bee

If you were a honeybee, how would you choose where to find flowers? Imagine your first flight out of the hive searching for food. What would you do if you saw flower patches with one flower, or three, or twelve, or twenty?

Maths doesn't matter, says scientist

Way back during my PhD, a friend with some strong transhumanist leanings asked me why I'd want to study the real universe if a more interesting simulated one were available. Heck, if I could live inside a simulation, surely I would immediately opt out of reality and become immortal ?

Well ! I was stumped for an answer. I knew I didn't want to study some silly simulation, but I couldn't for the life of me say why - it just felt wrong. Hours later I realised what bothered me was simple : a simulation isn't real. Leaving aside the immortality aspect, If I want to study how the universe works, I need to study the real universe. Oh, simulations might give me some clues, but ultimately it's observations that matter.

This article is a very nice companion piece to that one a few days ago about how physical theories sometimes can't be tweaked, but must be completely revamped. For most situations, the Einsteinian notion of spacetime makes only minor differences in its numerical predictions, but its conception is radically different.

He [Kepler] noticed that there were six planets total, if you included Earth but not Earth's Moon. He also noticed that mathematically, there were only five Platonic solids: five mathematical objects whose faces are all equal-sided polygons. By drawing a sphere inside and outside each one, he could "nest" them in a way that fit the planetary orbits extremely well: better than anything Copernicus had done. It was a brilliant, beautiful mathematical model, and arguably the first attempt at constructing what we might call "an elegant Universe" today. 

But observationally, it failed. It failed to even be as good as the ancient Ptolemaic model with its epicycles, equants and deferents. It was a brilliant idea, and the first attempt to argue — from pure mathematics alone — how the Universe ought to be. But it just didn't work.

Mathematics is a language : whether a sentence is grammatically correct or not doesn't tell you anything about whether it's true. "The dishwasher went cave diving with a well-endowed elephant who was also an exploding pink fairy" makes perfect sense, but nothing like that has ever happened in all of history, and it never will. Mathematics provides a toolkit. It's well worth rummaging around in and banging some stuff together, but just because something seems plausible doesn't mean it has any bearing on reality.

What came next was a stroke of genius that would define Kepler's legacy. He took his beautiful, elegant, compelling model that disagreed with observations, and threw it away. Instead, he went and dove into the data to find what types of orbits would match how the planets actually moved, and came away with a set of scientific (not mathematical) conclusions. The key advance that happened is that science needed to be based in observables and measurables, and that any theory needed to confront itself with those notions. Without it, progress would be impossible.

This idea came up again and again throughout history, as new mathematical inventions and discoveries empowered us with new tools to attempt to describe physical systems. But each time, it wasn't simply that new mathematics told us how the Universe worked. Instead, new observations told us that something beyond our currently understood physics was required, and pure mathematics alone was insufficient to get us there.

Yes, but surely of more importance is that there must be some conceptual framework behind the resulting theory. You can and should use equations to get a handle on understanding what might be happening. But a pure equation, backed up by endless observations but without any physical mechanism proposed to explain it, is disappointingly impotent. It doesn't convey any real understanding or meaning. It's just a bunch of accurate numbers dressed up in fancy clothing.

In some ways, it's a lesson that every physics student learns the first time they calculate the trajectory of an object thrown into the air. How far does it go? Where does it land? How long does it spend in the air? When you solve the mathematical equations — Newton's equations of motion — that govern these objects, you don't get "the answer." You get two answers; that's what the mathematics gives you. 

But in reality, there's only one object. It only follows one trajectory, landing in one location at one specific time. Which answer corresponds to reality? Mathematics won't tell you. For that, you need to understand the particulars of the physics problem in question, as only that will tell you which answer has a physical meaning behind it. Mathematics will get you very far in this world, but it won't get you everything. Without a confrontation with reality, you cannot hope to understand the physical Universe.

There's some hints here as to what we really mean by "physics". Clearly it's not just applied maths, or a matter of cobbling together a bunch of equations, chucking them at the observational data and seeing what sticks. Kepler created a precise mathematical description of planetary orbits, but it was Newton (and later Einstein) who provided an explanation. That's the interesting and worthy bit, in my opinion. How things happen is the heart of it.

But does this actually help ? Perhaps not. As in the previous article, such mechanisms may ultimately only ever be descriptions, not a true account of the way things are. This, then, provides an answer to the question of what the Ultimate Question actually is. And it's very simple : what the hell is going on ?

No, The Universe Is Not Purely Mathematical In Nature

At the frontiers of theoretical physics, many of the most popular ideas have one thing in common: they begin from a mathematical framework that seeks to explain more things than our currently prevailing theories do. Our current frameworks for General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory are great for what they do, but they don't do everything.

Build your own gom jabbar

Okay, not really a gom jabbar, but I'm re-reading Dune for the millionth time so what the hey.

The gom jabbar is a test to distinguish humans from animals. Humans, say the Bene Gesserit witches, will endure pain rather than give into animal instinct. Whether this is even a remotely sensible definition of humanity is debatable, but what about consciousness ? Devising a test to see whether someone is actually experiencing thought - not just thinking but actually being aware of their own thoughts - is a lot harder.

EDIT : See this article for an intriguing way not to detect whether someone is currently conscious, but whether they will become conscious at some point in the future. The "sniff test" is remarkably accurate. I find this particularly odd since I've never (or at most very rarely) been able to smell anything in a dream, which I would think means a less direct connection between smell and awareness. But perhaps not. Maybe this could work in the other direction and dogs could be trained to sniff out the smell of dreams...


But first, every so often it's worth pausing to think about why we should even care about the nature of consciousness. It is, after all, somewhat esoteric and we seem to get by in everyday life just fine without having any clear answers. At least, no-one needs to engage in philosophical debate to decide if they want to wear shoes or not. Either put them on or accept bruised and battered feet as you walk across a floor covered in Lego - understanding the nature of the soul won't help you.

Yet there are many reasons to care. Whatever it is, consciousness undeniably exists (regardless of the illusionist perspective, which is arguably the stupidest idea in history and certainly not worth further discussion). It is therefore part of the Universe, yet no modern scientific theory alludes to the emergence of consciousness in any way. This, potentially, is a whacking great hole in our entire world view, as though we'd come up with a wonderful theory of geology but completely missed the existence of sand. Of course, while it might be a fundamental component in itself - something which has some measure of independent existence - it's also possible it is "merely" a process. But even then, it's a process we have no idea how to explain. Whether process or substance, it demands investigation.

If sheer curiosity is not enough, morality ought to be more compelling. Are we really any different from a rock ? Most of us would tend to say yes, and I'd agree - I don't think rocks are thinking about anything; it doesn't matter if we smash them to bits just for the hell of it. On the other hand, dogs and cats and college professors clearly are, to varying degrees - and it does matter if we smash them to bits. So where's the dividing line, and how do we tell ?

We can at least be confident in declaring consciousness to be a spectrum (or perhaps something more complicated) : a dreamless sleep is different from a regular dream, which is different from a lucid dream, which is different again from being fully awake, which itself is different from being drugged and so on. But how could we actually know if a rock was thinking ? On occasion, people emerge from comas after years of inactivity, so behaviour is not much help. And computers muddy the waters still further. While it's at best highly controversial whether plants can make choices, computers and other mechanistic systems can undoubtedly do this. But they don't, so far as we know, want anything - they just do what we tell them to. So making choices does not necessarily indicate any kind of desire or awareness.

But even if plants were conscious, we'd still have to eat them - and no-one ever suggested that we should force all predatory animals to become vegan. If consciousness is a guide to morality, then animals make this an extremely difficult problem. Which consciousness has more rights than another, and why ? Should we shoot the lion to save the zebra ? If not, we're choosing to let the zebra suffer and die. Why is this acceptable when cannibalism obviously isn't ? Animals don't have any compunction about eating each other, so why should we ?

And there are larger sociological questions as to how consciousness relates to free will. If we do make choices, rather than being stuck on a mechanical course which we can observe but never change, then this affects how we interact with each other - when to praise and when to shame. Our actions make a difference. If, on the other hand, such choices are mere illusions, then at best all we can do is understand what's happening - or not, since we can't "will" ourselves to learn anything, we either will or won't and there's nothing we can do about it.


Understanding the nature of consciousness, then, would be super interesting. The present article looks at ways to try and detect it.

Latin for ‘little brain’, the highly compact cerebellum occupies only 10 per cent of the brain’s volume, yet contains somewhere between 50 and 80 per cent of the brain’s neurons... in this sense that the hospitalised Chinese woman was missing the majority of her brain. Incredibly, she had been born without a cerebellum, yet had made it through nearly two and a half decades of life without knowing it was missing. Compare that with strokes and lesions of the cerebral cortex, whose neuron-count is a fraction of the cerebellum’s. These patients can lose the ability to recognise colours or faces and to comprehend language – or they might develop what’s known as a ‘disorder of consciousness’, a condition resulting in loss of responsiveness or any conscious awareness at all.

Without trying harder, we’ll never know if injured patients are truly unconscious – or unresponsive but covertly conscious with a true inner life. Without this knowledge, how can doctors know whether a patient is likely to recover or whether it’s ethical to withdraw care? 

Covert consciousness includes not only locked-in syndrome, but also patients with damage to the cerebral cortex. In that instance, covert consciousness is harder to identify because the mental abilities these patients retain are likely impaired. For example, such a patient might be unresponsive not because she is unconscious, but because a lesion to her cerebral cortex has taken away her ability to understand spoken language. 

To detect covert consciousness in patients diagnosed with disorders of consciousness, an international team of researchers, including my current supervisor, Martin Monti, have used a clever task that exploits the mental imagery that some otherwise unresponsive patients can generate on command. The team wheeled 54 patients inside a brain scanner. [Not all at once, I hope !] There, the team imaged their brain function using functional MRI (fMRI) in order to deduce what fraction, if any, might be covertly conscious. 

Once inside the MRI machine, researchers asked unresponsive patients to imagine one of two tasks, playing tennis or walking around their house. Exactly how many patients would be responsive was anyone’s guess, Monti told me. But with the first swing of the racket, so to speak, the team found an otherwise unresponsive patient who appeared to understand the tennis task. The patient fulfilled all the criteria for a vegetative state diagnosis but was, in fact, conscious.

Hang on, how do you know they were conscious and not just responding to stimuli ? Did you test the same procedure on someone who was merely asleep ? Even that isn't going to help without a very clear definition of what you mean by "conscious" in the first place. Memory is hardly perfect when remembering dreams, so asking people when they regain normal consciousness isn't going to tell you much. So yes, you can monitor that the brain is doing something, but monitoring for an inner awareness, I suspect, is by definition impossible.

At least in the strictest sense. A more reasonable approach would be to compare the responses to people in all sorts of different states, especially those who are as awake as awake can be - at some point, it's sensible to concede that while we can't prove anyone else is conscious, we have to assume that they are. If if a supposedly unconscious person wakes up and says, "I remember you asked me that question about tennis", it's only reasonable to assume they were conscious. But still, that the brain processes the input "game of tennis" differently to "walking around a house", measured by means of a scanner, is a long way off concluding inner awareness. Plenty of everyday sensory input is processed subconsciously.

Alarmingly, one out of the five healthy volunteers who had undergone general anaesthesia for the sake of science using the drug propofol was able to do what shouldn’t be possible: generate mental imagery upon request in the scanner. The implications are clear: we aren’t necessarily blissfully unconscious when the surgeon puts us under.

But unless anaesthetic also blocks memory, that seems daft. Where are the hordes of people screaming about how they felt the incision of the scalpel ? Again, it seems more likely that they're just unconsciously processing input. There's no reason to assume they're aware of it. More reasonably :

Consciousness can also occur without language comprehension or hearing. In their absence, a patient might still experience pain, boredom or even silent dreams. Indeed, if only certain regions of the cerebral cortex were lesioned, vivid conscious experiences might persist while the patient remains unable to hear the questions asked by Monti’s team. Because of this, MRI scans might miss many people who are conscious, after all. Rather than depending on mental imagery that must be wilfully generated by brain-injured patients who can hear and understand language, an alternative marker of consciousness – a superior consciousness detector – is needed to shine a piercing light in the dark.

A large chunk of the rest of the article then gets quite dull, but it picks up again toward the end when it starts describing another possible gom jabbar :

Formally known as the perturbational complexity index, the technique is sometimes referred to as ‘zap-and-zip’ because it involves first zapping the brain with a magnetic pulse and then looking at how difficult the EEG response is to compress, or zip, as a measure of its complexity. Researchers have already used zap-and-zip to determine whether an individual is awake, deeply sleeping, under anaesthesia, or in a disorder of consciousness such as the vegetative state. Soon, the approach could tell us which unresponsive, brain-injured patients (not to mention patients anaesthetised for surgery) are covertly conscious: still feeling and experiencing, despite an inability to communicate. Indeed, this is the closest science has ever come to ‘quantifying the unquantifiable’.

Children with a rare genetic disorder called Angelman syndrome display electrical brain activity that lacks differentiation even when the kids are awake and experiencing the world around them. There’s no question that these children are conscious, as one clearly sees from watching their rich spectrum of purposeful behaviour. And yet, placing an EEG cap on the head of a child with Angelman syndrome reveals neurons that [unlike others] appear to be locked into agreement.

Which brings us back to the woman missing a big chunk of her brain. The adaptability of the brain to process and/or generate conscious thought is fascinating, but that would seem to make it inherently very difficult indeed to make a consciousness detector : never mind that animal brains may be different yet again.

To say what consciousness is, science explores where it isn't - Joel Frohlich | Aeon Essays

In 2014, a month-long bout of dizziness and vomiting brought a 24-year-old woman in China to the hospital. She was no stranger to these symptoms: she'd never been able to walk steadily and suffered from dizziness nearly her whole life.

Rejecting other people's reality

I think this is a very nice overview and I don't really have anything to add, so I'll just give some summary quotes for anyone wondering if they should read the full piece or not. What I particularly like is that nowhere is "falsification" even mentioned; "prediction" barely gets a look-in. I think I'll let this one gestate a while before offering more than the briefest of comments.


---
Richard Feynman told his listeners to imagine two objects, each gravitationally attracted to the other. How, he asked, should we predict their movements? Feynman identified three approaches, each invoking a different belief about the world. The first approach used Newton’s law of gravity. The second imagined a gravitational field extending through space. The third applied the principle of least action, which holds that each object moves by following the path that takes the least energy in the least time. All three approaches produced the same, correct prediction. They were three equally useful descriptions of how gravity works.

It happens again and again that, when there are many possible descriptions of a physical situation—all making equivalent predictions, yet all wildly different in premise—one will turn out to be preferable, because it extends to an underlying reality, seeming to account for more of the universe at once. And yet this new description might, in turn, have multiple formulations—and one of those alternatives may apply even more broadly.

“I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.”

[If you're thinking, "it's just because they're descriptions of reality, not reality itself", continue reading.]

Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They’ve searched for a “theory of everything” that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms; atoms, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be clusters of protons and neutrons... Reductionists think they must work their way downward to recover the truth. Physicists now know that gravity wrecks this naïve scheme, by shaping the universe on both large and small scales... that reality isn’t structured in such a reductive, bottom-up way.

[Emergent properties come to mind, and it's worth remembering that such an approach does have merits. Pressure arises from multiple atoms, but you can describe and derive it perfectly if you know the atomic conditions. But pressure, I suppose, is really just an artificial label for the cumulative effects of bajillions of atoms, whereas gravity is something much more fundamental.]

The objective isn’t—or isn’t only—to seek a bedrock equation governing reality’s smallest bits. The existence of this branching, interconnected web of mathematical languages, each with its own associated picture of the world, is what needs to be understood.

Paul Dirac, a British pioneer of quantum theory, stressed the importance of reformulating existing theories: it’s by finding new ways of describing known phenomena that you can escape the trap of provisional or limited belief. This was the trick that led Dirac to predict antimatter, in 1928. “It is not always so that theories which are equivalent are equally good,” he said, five decades later, “because one of them may be more suitable than the other for future developments.”

Einstein’s general theory of relativity beautifully weaves space and time together into a four-dimensional fabric, known as space-time, and equates gravity with warps in that fabric. But Einstein’s theory and the space-time concept break down inside black holes and at the moment of the big bang. Space-time, in other words, may be a translation of some other description of reality that, though more abstract or unfamiliar, can have greater explanatory power. Some researchers are attempting to wean physics off of space-time in order to pave the way toward this deeper theory.

Perhaps the most striking thing about those explanations is that, even as each draws only a partial picture of reality, they are mathematically perfect. Fiddle with the equations even a little and you lose all of its beauty and simplicity. It turns out that, if you want to discover a deeper way of explaining the universe, you can’t take the equations of the existing description and subtly deform them. Instead, you must make a jump to a totally different, equally perfect mathematical structure.

One common conception of physics is that its laws are like a machine that humans are building in order to predict what will happen in the future. The “theory of everything” is like the ultimate prediction machine—a single equation from which everything follows. But this outlook ignores the existence of the many different machines, built in all manner of ingenious ways, that give us equivalent predictions.

To Arkani-Hamed, the multifariousness of the laws suggests a different conception of what physics is all about. We’re not building a machine that calculates answers, he says; instead, we’re discovering questions. Arkani-Hamed now sees the ultimate goal of physics as figuring out the mathematical question from which all the answers flow.
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The only thing missing is that the article either needs to end with Feynmam's quote about preferring to have questions that can't be answered OR the words FORTY TWO in great big friendly letters.

A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

In 1964, during a lecture at Cornell University, the physicist Richard Feynman articulated a profound mystery about the physical world. He told his listeners to imagine two objects, each gravitationally attracted to the other. How, he asked, should we predict their movements? Feynman identified three approaches, each invoking a different belief about the world.

Life Under Lockdown (VII)

Too late did I realise I should have titled these posts with parodies of the Star Trek movies. Oh well.

Is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end ? Hard to say. As lockdown measures ease - or rather come screeching to a halt - it all feels very odd. Italy, for example, is still getting hundreds of new cases per day, yet has decided to declare itself open for business - including to the outside world in a couple of weeks time. I have honestly no idea how to feel about that. Do they now have some excellent track-and-trace system, or are they hoping it's going to go away on its own ?

Consider the Czech Republic. At its peak, it had 381 new cases per day. That's now down to ~50. Great !

But while that's nice and all, but that curve has only flattened. It doesn't seem to be dropping any further. And the R-number doesn't look at all encouraging either.

With the significant caveat that the final data point cannot be trusted as I'm
writing this early in the morning before any data has been released.

Also, the Czech restrictions are completely and utterly barking mad when it comes to masks. When pubs and restaurants re-open (admittedly with sensible rules closing them at 11pm, which basically rules out nightclubs to all but the terminally enthusiastic), people will have to continue to wear masks except while eating and drinking. Pools are going to re-open, including water slides (!), but you have to stay 1.5 m apart in the queue and... wear a mask. Right, cos that totally makes sense.

In some ways, life on the streets* feels like it's already back to normal. People are gathering outside pubs for a drink, and paying not the slightest bit of attention to social distancing. There's also a lot more casual disregard for mask wearing. Yet the number of cases shows little or no sign of rising.

* I mean when out and about, not sleeping rough.

But on the other hand, in some ways it's still not even remotely normal. Yesterday, for the first time in two months we met up with some friends to go for a walk in a park on the outskirts of Prague. Here's the extremely long escalator to the Náměstí Míru metro station, normally packed at all times :

This is still well in the realm of "sci fi dystopia" than "quaint European city". Trams are busier than they usually are, but the metro remains far below its usual capacity.

So what's going on ? Has the Czech Republic beaten the virus, or is the eye of the hurricane before the second wave hits* ? Unfortunately, the Google mobility report isn't very helpful as it currently only goes to 9th May :

* Hurricanes cause lots of waves, so this isn't mixing metaphors as much as I would like.

So it's really, really hard to get a feel what the current state is, or what's going to happen next. Czech colleagues tell me that the government does have a track and trace program, but it's not being promoted very much so it's unclear even to natives how much this is really being used.

Oddly, I'm not worried about the situation. Confused, certainly, concerned even, but curious more than anything else. Worried ? Not a bit - I think I spent all my reserves of worry on Brexit. But what the heck is going on ? Why is having 50 cases per day less dangerous now than it was two months ago, given that hardly any of the population has been infected ? Are we just being hugely premature, or is the danger really declining - either through testing/tracing, or some other effect like the weather (which is still a bit on the chill side) or hitherto unrecognised natural immunity ? It took a lot longer than I thought it would for the effects of the lockdown to have a measurable effect on the spread of the virus - will the same be true in reverse ?

I have no idea. We'll just have to continue to wait and watch the figures come in.


Today our institute re-opens as normal, which I'm a bit surprised by. During our weekly informal discussion last Friday, everyone agreed we could soon start to get back to the office. Hours later the director sent an email saying we'd resume from June 18th, which seemed a bit slow but sensibly cautious. This was quickly followed by a correction to May 18th, which to me feels too far in the other extreme. 1st June or thereabouts was what I expected, but oh well.

I'm writing this while doing some more early-morning remote observing from my flat. For my part, I'll go in to the office later today to take care of the necessary paperwork, but I'm not intending to go back as normal for the foreseeable future. Going in every once in a while, that's fine with me, the risk is minimal. Daily ? No. Not happening. Not only does it feel premature, but right now it's much easier for me to work from home. Switching back to the office would be a major disruption that I could really do without.

And more generally, I'd like to keep this going long-term, a la Twitter. For me, working from home is much more efficient than trudging to the distraction-ridden office : I have less travel time and get to choose when to divert my attention, which makes everything easier. By getting things out of my system, like checking social media feeds and what have you, without feeling guilty about it, I end up being a lot more focused throughout the day. Would I want to do permanent 100% home office ? I wouldn't say no.


As for life in general, this continues much as it has for the past two months. My daily routine is more-or-less as follows. We get up and watch the news for an hour or two, then I start observing for a while. Since observing is usually dull, I use this for some personal activity - typically, working on my interactive Arecibo model, which is coming along quite nicely. Still lots to do but a bit dent has been made in it already. Or I might write a blog post if I've got anything interesting to say, or just check social media. If I don't have observing, I sometimes indulge myself in a quick bout of Rome 2 Total War, which will get its own post and some point but suffice to say is hugely fun.

At around 9ish (later today since the observing is much longer than usual), I set to work proper. I've taken to writing myself micro to-do lists of tasks I want to get done for the week, which I re-arrange as things take more or less time than expected. This is a good way of forcing myself to get the little things done that need to be done (like sending boring but important emails to people who are becoming ever-more disembodied voices... email, admittedly, does not have anything like the impact factor that requests delivered in person do). It also means I allocate time to read papers, and I've made a respectable dent in the backlog of reading material I'd built up. And it stops me from focusing too much on any one thing, keeping some variety in day-to-day tasks.

Work at the moment consists mainly of recoding FRELLED. This is going really well. It's now much more robust to smaller data sets (good for hi-res ALMA observations) and can convert data between different velocity conventions (even between frequency and redshift) on the fly. It's also wayfaster to load and has the potential to do very different kinds of displays, making it more versatile and convenient. I think I've just about finished the axes-plotting code, which now uses the astropy module and is quite a lot simpler (and better) than it used to be. Pretty soon - this week, hopefully - I can start writing the GUI and make it into an actual useable product.

In other news... WE'RE GETTING A PUPPY. It will be another papillion, half-sister to Lulu, in October/November. Fluffy madness abounds. We've also trained Lulu to use an iFetch, which is a lot of fun.


So that's the current state of affairs. Will this be the last Life Under Lockdown post, or will we end up right back under quarantine in a few weeks ? No idea. I'll make a note to write something in two weeks regardless - by then, we should have at least an indication of which way things are going.

The meaning of meaning

Well, there's a fun question : what does meaning mean ? (Here in the moral sense, not the understanding sort) This article is definitely far more interesting for the questions it provokes than the answers it provides.

When Bob sits down to polish the steel junk he’s about to haul to the scrap heap, we can say his activity is meaningless: there’s no point to it. Similarly, when my students sit down to prepare for an exam that I have decided to cancel, their work is pointless and meaningless. Meaningless things have no point to them – nothing is achieved, no purpose can be fathomed, and the work we dedicate to them is entirely wasted. Meaningful things, let’s presume, are just the opposite.

Right, so for a thing to be meaningful it has to have a connection to something else. The more or stronger the connections, the more meaningful it is, and vice-versa. An utterly meaningless activity would be something that doesn't affect anything else entirely in any way whatsoever, like a subatomic particle which emerges from the quantum foam for a picosecond and then goes away again (or one of Ricky Gervais' Flanimals, which "does absolutely nothing and dies"). Bob's polishing his junk ?* Could be utterly meaningless, if Bob doesn't see the point in it. But if he does - if, for some strange reason, he achieves some mental well-being as a result of his pointless polishing, then it's not really pointless or meaningless at all. It's not necessarily deeply meaningful, but it has some meaning**.

* Pun intended.
** Practically nothing is really totally meaningless. But for the sake of easy language, we can simplify "almost totally pointless" as "meaningless".

Meaning is at least partially subjective, since only we can be the judge of whether some things affect us or not. It's also not the same as pleasure. Death can be incredibly meaningful but also incredibly horrible. On the other hand, learning something that changes our outlook can be deeply meaningful but could equally be horrific or joyful.

So, how about life as a whole – your whole life, and the lives of everyone? If we believe in a Grand Scheme of Things, some cosmic contest with an unambiguous finish line, then we might then see lives as meaningful. This is one thrillingly grand notion of cosmic meaningfulness – but hardly anyone now believes it. Most of us accept that the universe has not come about for the purpose of achieving anything.

Wait, who said anything about "purpose" ? If Bob genuinely feels better for his junk-polishing, despite having to throw it all away at the end, then the purpose was entirely internal : it made Bob feel better. That was the goal in itself (as in the case of dwarves on the Discworld, for whom having a big pile of gold is its own reward - spending it on things will only decrease the available gold). Bob can then go on with his day feeling much relieved and more productive, but even if he didn't, his activity would still have had meaning to him.

The Universe doesn't need to have a purpose for us to live meaningful lives. Good lord, if we all had to have goals in order to have meaning, we'd be in a sorry state indeed ! Since our objectives change constantly, I don't see "purpose" as being a useful definition of meaning.

Does the Universe itself have meaning ? Of course not, any more than a dishwasher has meaning - unless it's conscious or under the influence of something conscious. It can convey meaning; it doesn't have meaning in itself. We have meanings to ourselves and to each other, perhaps extending very far indeed into the future through people affected by our actions. That meaning is internal within the chain of connections. That the chain eventually ends has no bearing on each link finding meaning of different sorts.

The author however disagrees :

While this is a cheery idea, I think it is completely false, even obviously false. I’ll grant, of course, that we can pretend that our lives are meaningful, and we can ginny up some enthusiasm for the purposes we imagine for our lives. But when we do this, we have to forget for the time being that (to repeat) all of existence is completely meaningless. We have to think that, somehow, that fact that we happen to value something is itself a meaningful fact – when it isn’t.

What ? That's like saying that we have to "pretend" we can see the colour yellow. I suppose if you insist that meaning is purpose then this makes more sense, but I identify it far more with value. Again, valuing something, benefiting from it, is not at all the same as enjoying it.

This emphasises that the meaning of meaning is surely subtler than "connections which affect things" and definitely subtler than "liking things". Suppose someone is wrongfully imprisoned and never released, causing them to go insane. Their life then becomes utterly meaningless to themselves and others. But if instead they're released after a year, they can learn from this experience even if the experience itself is not at all beneficial. It could be said to be a meaningful experience even if they'd have been better off without it.

If anything can be made meaningful by an individual’s choice – then nothing really is meaningful. It is only a matter of individuals acting as if or pretending that their pursuits are meaningful.

(See obligatory Existential Comics link) But it isn't a matter of choice, at least not entirely or directly. Do you "choose" to find value in fine art or watching Celebrity Love Island On Ice or whatever the latest craze is ? No - you simply do or don't. At best you have indirect influence over this by choosing what to experience, but you have far less control over how those experiences affect you. So you can't just "make" things become meaningful.

“But, in fact, some pursuits are better than others. Obviously, it is more meaningful to save lives, create art, and extend knowledge than it is to count blades of grass!” But this is not at all obvious. It may seem obvious – but only if we forget about the larger frame of futility that encompasses all human endeavors.

But something that affects more people is very clearly more meaningful than something which affects hardly anyone. Meaning has both breadth and depth to it, as well as both objective and subjective elements. The vikings discovering America, for instance, was not as meaningful as that time Christopher Columbus stumbled upon it, because the viking discovery was far, far less consequential. The same art can be intensely meaningful to some and utterly useless to others. Saving a life is of such an extreme consequence that by and large it is obviously more meaningful than counting blades of grass. If it isn't obvious to you, then you should seek help immediately : you're a danger to yourself and others. Especially gardeners.

Consider the question that gets raised from time to time over a glass of wine: “What would you do today if you knew the world was going to end tomorrow?” Most people would toss aside everything they have been doing because the very pointlessness of it all becomes starkly evident.

Obviously the only sensible answer is "a massive orgy"... but that doesn't mean I'd like to spend the rest of my (hopefully much longer than one day) life in said orgy. See, the question is false. Anyone else remember the excellent god game "Black & White" ? Part of the marketing was that you could find out who you really were since your decisions had no consequences, but that's exactly wrong. A fantasy is often fun precisely because it's a fantasy. It's fun to go on a killing spree in a computer game precisely because it isn't real. If the world were to end tomorrow, that wouldn't mean that we might as well start torturing each other in imaginative ways. Why would it ? We'd only be increasing the amount of pain experienced.

Similarly, our normal daily activities have meaning because they have connections to the future. Of course we'd stop doing them if there was no future, but that wouldn't made them pointless or meaningless for us to do them before. That's just silly. The meaning of activities depends on context.

Well, here’s a newsflash: the world will end, maybe not tomorrow, but someday. With what reason should the distance between “tomorrow” and “someday” magically bestow meaningfulness upon the things we do?

A whopping big one, idiot ! Good grief. For starters, if I'm going to die tomorrow then sure, I'm going to stop writing the code I'm currently working on, because there's no way I can finish it in 24 hours. But if I'm going to die 50 years from now, then I'll carry on coding, because I'll get many years of benefit from completing it.

Short-term futility, we all agree, is bad, meaningless, absurd: there’s no point in rushing to paint the house when the tornado is on its way. We try to avoid putting time or effort into projects that are evidently and immediately futile. But then we go on to think that it is meaningful to save the rainforest since the extinction of life on earth will not happen any time soon – its futility is long-term. But long-term futility is every bit as futile as short-term futility.

You're an idiot, sir.

But let me hasten to add that, at the same time, I’m a huge fan of existing. (Woody Allen: “Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.”) I think there’s plenty of fun to be had – at least for those of us not in tragically dire circumstances. Moreover, siding with thinkers like Hume, I think there’s a great contentment in seeing other people being helped, and great joy in behaving like a decent human being.... Each one of our examples of meaningless activities can all be thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated.

Then I will smugly declare that you're just used a really, really stupid definition of "meaning". I think you've got hung up on the idea of meaning as having to relate to some absolute, external deity or something, that everything must be part of some Big Plan and is meaningful only because the deity says so :

A pursuit is made meaningful in virtue of being part of some larger purpose or end that exists apart from us. But a pursuit or activity or achievement can be pleasurable or valuable by meeting some condition set by us – either deliberately (as in staged contests), or simply by us being the sort of beings we are.

It seems to me that this just shifts the problem - apparently, if the deity finds something valuable, then it can be said to be meaningful, but us mortals don't get to decide this. I think that's pointless. If I value something, then I find it meaningful, end of. There's no "pretending" involved, I just do.

Bob might take great pleasure in revealing the beauty hidden within scraps of metal. My students might enjoy being together and arguing and exploring their knowledge together, even if the exam has been canceled. Sally may be in the highest throes of amusement as she drafts her anti-memo memo, intending to delete it as soon as she finishes. Recognizing these clearly pointless activities as meaningless need not make them any less enjoyable or rewarding. The great experiment of our age – living without Grand Schemes – consists in recognizing that we don’t need meaning in order to find value.

You're mad. Bob can find value in a pointless activity ? That's daft. If Bob did something he appreciated, then that appreciation was the point, and the same for Sally and the rest. If I go out to buy food, then clearly my activity has a purpose. If you want to say, "but you'll eventually die, so it's pointless, however your activity does have value since it will stave off your untimely demise for a while" then your definition of "meaning" is self-evidently insane.




Everything is meaningless but that's okay What would it be for life to have a “meaning”? What does it mean when people say life is meaningful? I’m not sure, so let’s start with smaller, more obviously meaningful things. Better yet, let’s start with some meaningless things.

"And if possible a coconut Nintendo system"

In Greg Bear's Eon, after the nuclear war, selfishness is seen as a crime of stupidity : people hoarding resources are shunned and don't fare as well as those who co-operate. I always liked this interpretation better than the "it's every man for himself !" popular trope, fun though it can be, and in fact there's good evidence that this is generally what happens after a disaster. Here's some more.

These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year. 

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. 

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”... They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg.

See, in the endless crank-a-handle terrible Netflix dystopian sci-fi shows, people have no basic emotional control. The slightest provocation escalates until people start punching each other or someone gets murdered or the planet explodes. Nobody ever says sorry and nobody ever forgives anyone. Presumably, it's easier to write viewer-grabbing shows by means of hugely dislikeable teenage idiots than it is to write a plot that's actually of any interest. Or maybe, more generously, all these shows are intended as instruction manuals as to how not to behave in a disaster...

Real people, on the other hand, don't fly off the handle because of What Their Sharon Said About Our Jason, and they forgive each other all the time. That's part of human nature just as much as selfishness and stupidity. That a group of children should know not to behave like complete morons strongly suggests that morons are something you have to nurture. You have to work quite hard to get a complete jerk.

And you do get jerks, unfortunately. See Netflix's Fyre documentary for a case where a minor disaster led to rich overprivileged unskilled idiots behaving exactly as you'd expect. Or a bunch of wars and other disasters caused solely by human failings. So culture must play some role. Therefore I propose an experiment, involving random samples of children from different countries of similar age distributions and requiring a whole bunch of unpopulated islands... I can't imagine why I wouldn't get funding for this.

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind.

Pavlov's plants are pants

Another follow-up post on the possibilities of plants that can think. Although there were some very vocal public criticisms, they didn't seem to amount to anything substantial, so I went and checked for citations to the original paper. Since I'm not a botanist, much less a philosopher, I resorted to using Google Scholar for this. Doubtless there are better ways to find citations, but this'll do. I skimmed through the paper titles, looking for any that might be relevant, then quickly checked the abstracts to see if that held true, and/or searching with ctrl+f for the author's name to see if the citations were actually important or just minor remarks.

There were 93 citations listed on Google Scholar. Of those, I found three which had anything of substance regarding Gagliano's claims that plants can learn and/or show Pavlovian responses to training.

The first has only a throwaway skeptical remark about the memory experiments, but some more interesting criticism about the Pavlovian tests. They say that contrary to what Gagliano states, that plants should normally grow in the direction of the last light source (the control case) is not at all expected, and that the review she cites does not describe this at all. What they say they expect to happen is that the plants should revert to vertical growth in the absence of light. If, then, there's a problem with Gagliano's control experiment, then the statistical significance of the training experiments is potentially greatly weakened.

The second paper is a review, so (quite rightly) doesn't do much besides state what Gagliano claims. However, it does mention that there might be an unexpected variable : plant-to-plant communication through chemical signalling. This means it's important to describe how the plants are stored, and the different stimuli the plants were exposed to could affect this. They suggest exposure to other subjects to control for this.

All this is quite interesting but doesn't actually undermine the central result of Gagliano's paper at all. However, as of April this year we now have a full-on replication study, and this shows exactly what the first paper was concerned about : the control conditions. The bottom line is that this study shows no evidence of any plant behaviour inconsistent with random chance. They try and recreate the original study as closely as possible, but it just doesn't seem to work. They do find that there is some tendency to grow towards the last light source, but it's much weaker than Gagliano's claim.

What's nice about this is that they emphasise the need for further testing with the original authors. Since their claim was statistically strong, presumably something interesting must be going on, but what ? They say that the author's co-operation would help address the (seemingly) minor differences between the two experiments, and they don't rule out the possibility that their own results might be in some way erroneous. So the evidence for Pavlovian responses in plants is, for now, looking a bit odd.

Life Under Lockdown (VI)

It's been a while since doing one of these because there's precisely bugger all to report. This is the end of history : all days are the same, time has no meaning. Which is fine by me - the amount of stuff to binge watch remains inexhaustible. We've recently gone through the entirety of Star Trek : The Next Generation, The Borgias, and The Last Kingdom, and we've still barely made a dent in the mountain of high-quality entertainment to explore.

(Shirley has some very interesting insights into Star Trek from the perspective of a human resources manager. I'm trying to persuade her that we should co-author a blog post on this, but she doesn't think anyone would be interested. Nerds of the internet, I summon thee !)

Also, I finally finished The Talos Principle. It took me 32 hours, which is way longer than its suggested 15-20 hours. And I had to cheat several times. If I don't solve a puzzle within about 15 minutes, chances are I'm completely flummoxed and could spend an indefinite amount of time fruitlessly doing the same thing over and over again. Likewise, the sigil puzzles are okay when they're small, but just frustrating when they're large. So eventually I stopped seeing the point of them and looked up the answers online (I looked up hints for the main puzzles rather than walkthroughs, expect in a few cases).

That said, I enjoyed the game a great deal. I'm hoping to do the expansions in VR when my Oculus Quest finally arrives. I'm also thinking of trying a Total War game again, a franchise I haven't touched in probably too long. All those medieval dramas are definitely having an effect.

Since "what I've been watching on Netflix" is nearly as dull a topic as "what I did on my holidays", what about The Virus ? Unfortunately my favourite tracking website appears to now have some weird issues on desktop PCs so I had to download the image from my phone, hence the crappy quality.

Basically, a lot of countries are now seeing a continuing plummet (though what the hell's going on with Spain and France I've no idea). There's been a claim floating around on dubious sources that the virus behaviour follows a time-dependent, predictable pattern regardless of lockdown procedures. I'll not link to that since I find it highly suspect, but if anyone know what I'm on about, I'd much appreciate any links to detailed critiques. Is there anything to it or not ? It strikes me as wrong-headed.

On the Czech-specific front, generally the news is good. Daily cases peaked at over 300, but now we're back in the tens - even the low tens. The reproduction number has been below 1.0 for several weeks.

More worrying are the political developments, which, from the view of an English-speaking immigrant, appear to be as though the government suddenly went mad. Initially, everything seemed to go about as well as could possibly be expected - swift, decisive, appropriate action. Even though the Czech intensive care capacity is a mere 500 beds, at one point we were even importing patients from other, more badly-affected countries. Then there was a successful legal challenge that the government actions were unconstitutional : instead of implementing them under one act they should have used another, apparently. The very next day, instead of re-implementing using the correct act, the government moved their ending-lockdown schedule forward two weeks. So instead of noises from the Prime Minister about the borders being closed for a year, they're already open - albeit only in principle, but this is expected to become a practical reality (with Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia) by July.

(In the thoroughly excellent Xenophobe's Guide to the Czech Republic, it says, "What keeps them from being quite unbearably astute is a knack for screwing up when it really matters." Indeed.)

I'm all for re-opening borders, but I'm thoroughly confused about what's going on here, and more concerned about the easing of local lockdown measures. When the government decides not to re-implement its emergency powers under a different act (because that would involve paying people compensation) and instead moves it schedule forward, that doesn't fill me with confidence - even if they bring out some epidemiologists to say it's okay. Instinctively, I'm against easing the lockdown right now - surely, waiting an extra couple of weeks would get those case numbers down further and make it easier to track and trace. But perhaps I'm wrong - perhaps the numbers are already low enough that we can move back towards a containment strategy. We'll see soon enough, but my guess would be a second wave and a brand new lockdown. I'd be happier if they'd say more about their track-and-trace program.


I should also say something about the UK's response. I believe firmly in giving credit where credit is due, and what the government has done seems to be more or less correct as far as I can tell. Construction of the Nightingales was genuinely impressive, and while there were problems (like insufficient staff for the number of beds), I submit that similar mistakes would occur under any government. You're going to have problems in an unprecedented crisis regardless of who's in charge.

Similarly, from a purely political perspective, I think the PMQs we've been having lately have been the best in many years. Both sides actually praised each other ! No braying nonsense or waving of papers, but some actual proper feckin' intelligent discourse - yes, even from Dominic Raab, on occasion. I agree with him that we should wait for the expert advice on how the virus is progressing before deciding on a lockdown strategy, although if we can't be told when or what, it would have been nice to hear something about how the strategy is being formulated. Who's involved ? Are they running simulations ? Are their behavioural scientists and epidemiologists involved as well as politicians ?

More worrying has been the fiddling of testing figures. Look, this 100,000 a day by some arbitrary deadline isn't the issue. I would have been perfectly happy if they'd said, "we're not quite there, but we expect to be there soon". Instead they confounded the issue with definitions of testing capacity versus tests carried out and so on, which just feels petty. And the claim that capacity wasn't being used due to lack of demand was a barefaced lie.

As for newly-minted opposition leader Starmer, for me he's got the balance just right. I don't accept critics who say he should stick the knife in and never say a good word about the government - that is wrong. During an emergency, you don't stop to say, "who's fault is that ?". You say, "how can I help ?". Afterwards, well that's a different story. But during the actual crisis ? No - there are bigger issues than who-did-what. When people say or do something wrong you call them out on it (if only to stop them hurting themselves even more), but you don't, during the event itself, go back to pick over all the mistakes they made that led them to that point.

That said, the media are right to say that they should be holding the government to account : it's the politician's job to pull together right now, but the media still have a duty to find fault. If the government can't be criticised when its inactions lead to thirty thousand dead, well, we're in a sorry state of affairs indeed. If there's nothing much wrong with what the government did, it has a hell of a lot to answer for for when it did it. That is not yet a matter for the politicians, but once the dust settles, it most certainly will be.

Pavlov's plants

I decided that that thing about plants that make choices was too interesting not to follow-up on. Surely a plant that grows toward sunlight through a maze can't be said to be making a choice ? Growing towards sunlight is just what plants do, so there must be more to the experiment than that.

There is. I actually mentioned this in passing before, but it deserves a more thorough commentary.

Previously I suggested that in order to say something is really making a thoughtful choice, it has to be indirect : an entity must perform action A that causes process B to lead to consequence C. It can't just go straight to process B - it needs to do something that requires learned knowledge. Thinking about it more now, I suppose process B must also be context-dependent on action A. That is, if action A always leads to process B which in turn always leads to consequence C, then no choice is really being made : the consequence would still be direct, just several steps removed. Is that context-dependency enough to constitute a meaningful choice ? I don't know. Let's look at the plant experiment, maybe that will give some clues.

(I really do try quite hard to be self-consistent - see recent post about all the stuff I've got wrong - but the clue is in the name here : Decoherency. The whole point of this blog is to allow inconsistent ramblings and discussions that eventually lead to something useful, not to produce fully-formed ideas on the fly. So forgive me if I contradict what I said last time !)

Basically what they've done here is try and induce a Pavlovian response in plants. They start with a seedling at the branch of a simple Y-shaped "maze". On each fork they put a blue light, a fan, or both. They use a series of "training sessions" in which both the fan and light are present, in order that the plant might learn that fan=light and will therefore, in future, grow towards the fan based on the presence of the fan alone. They varied which arm of the maze the fan and light were placed in, so the plant's behaviour wouldn't be simply a directional preference. They trained the plants in three different ways : 1) with the fan and light on the same arm, so plants would associate a fan with light; 2) with a fan and light on different arms, so the plants would learn that fans do not provide light; 3) a control group with no fan or light, in case plants should have a natural directional preference for growth.

After training, all plants that were not stimulated by a fan or light grew towards the last direction of the light. But when they introduced a fan, something interesting happened. Of those in the group trained to associate the fan with light, 62% grew towards the fan without a light present. Perhaps more convincingly, of those that were trained to believe that fans do not provide light, 69% grew in the opposite direction to the fan.

This would seem to satisfy my criteria for a meaningful choice. Based on context, they take different actions in order to produce a consequence : if a fan is associated with light, they grow towards it; if it is associated with an absence of light, they grow away from it even with no light present anywhere else. I would have liked a another control training group with just a fan present, but that the plants will grow in the opposite direction may be sufficient by itself.

Let's assume the experimental result is valid (though I'll look up citations in a future post). Does that mean plants are thinking ?

I don't know. I find it hard to say they aren't making a choice, but then, the conditional if-then loops of computer code also constitute a choice. Is it fair to say computers are thinking ? Arguably yes, but in a completely mechanical, deterministic way. Of course, whether or not we think in completely determinstic ways is highly controversial by itself, but that's another story. For now : plants are capable of making choices. That's fascinating enough by itself.

Learning by Association in Plants

In complex and ever-changing environments, resources such as food are often scarce and unevenly distributed in space and time. Therefore, utilizing external cues to locate and remember high-quality sources allows more efficient foraging, thus increasing chances for survival. Associations between environmental cues and food are readily formed because of the tangible benefits they confer.

Plants that talk back

I'm fairly open on the idea that plants could have some sort of mental awareness, that what they sense is subject to some level of conscious processing. Maybe only a very rudimentary sort, but something. Wouldn't say I was mad keen on the idea, but certainly open to it.

I'm much less enthusiastic that plants have fully developed minds of the same sophistication as we do, as Dr Gagliano believes. Clearly, humans and animals think differently - not entirely differently by any means, but undeniably there are differences. A dog will never understand how to do calculus, a human will never understand why chasing a ball is fun*. So it doesn't make any sense to me to say that plant minds would be more similar to ours than a dogs, despite a dog being biologically much more like me than a cactus.

* Professional football players, obviously, are not really people.

But do plants even think at all ? The memory experiment described is very interesting, though it would be nice to have follow-ups and independent testing. I hate to say it, but Gagliano is clearly biased (I'll come back to that shortly). That doesn't mean the results are wrong, let alone fabricated, but it definitely makes a replication test all the more necessary. But let's suppose the experimental result is perfectly correct. Learning and remembering is one thing, but a book stores information but doesn't have agency or intent. Do plants ? Do they make deliberate choices ? Gagliano says :

There is no doubt the plants make choices in real decision-making. This was tested in the context of a maze, where the test is actually to make a choice between left and right. The choice is based on what you might gain if you choose one side or the other. I did one study with peas that showed the plants can choose the right arm in a maze based on where the sound of water is coming from. Of course, they want water. So they will use the signal to follow that arm of the maze as they try to find the source of water.

Okay, but is this the same as having a will ? Does a plant "want" things in the emotional sense and how would you tell ? I liked very much the tests that show octopus can be fooled by optical illusions - that makes a pretty good case that they have inner lives, in my view. Obviously it's not watertight because that's not something we can ever be certain about, but about as good as we can expect. But instinctively growing towards a stimulus is not at all the same as doing it intentionally - we could build a purely mechanical system that responds to stimuli, and it wouldn't be sensible to say it was making a choice in the agency sense. Again, I'm quite open to the prospect that plants do make deliberate choices, but I don't think this experiment warrants that conclusion (I'm not quoting Gagliano's other quotes on the subject here as I don't think they convey anything useful).

Of course you might be thinking, "hang on, back up there a bit, did she just say the plant responded to sound ?". Yes, she did, and it really seems that they do :

Plants not only produce their own sound, which is amazing, but they are listening to sounds. We are surrounded by sound, so there are studies, like my own study, of plants moving toward certain frequencies and then responding to sounds of potential predators chewing on leaves, which other plants that are not yet threatened can hear. And more recently, there was some work done in Israel on the sound of bees and how flowers prepared themselves and become very nice and sweet, literally, to be more attractive to the bee. So the level of sugars gets increased as a bee passes by.

But still, having senses doesn't mean that a plant thinks, any more than a telescope or a microphone thinks. So do plants have minds or are they just acting automatically ? I don't think the experiments thus far have indicated much either way. Admittedly it's hard to think of an experiment that would properly demonstrate this. Could a plant somehow be taught to use its tendrils to pull on levers that release water or turn on a light ? I've no idea. I guess that the basis of an experiment would be to get the plant to alter what happens to it indirectly : it's not good enough for a plant, say, to close its pores and stop absorbing water, it has to be able to realise that pushing a button (or whatever) has the same desired effect.

Anyway, it must be mentioned that Gagliano subscribes to some pretty unorthodox views. For my part, I don't agree with her at all on this: I think if we were to take her at her word, we'd also have to take a million other crazy people at their word too, most of which would contradict each other. It's not science. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but it can't be objectively verified - though none of this invalidates the experiments. There are lots of bits in the rest of the discussion I could pick out and go on a rant about, but I'll refrain.

For one experiment, the one on the Pavlovian pea, I was trying to address that question the year before with a different plant. I was using sunflowers. And while I was doing my dieta with a different tree back in Peru, the plant just turned up and said, “By the way, not sunflowers, peas.” And I’m like, “what?” People always think that when you have these experiences, you’re supposed to understand the secrets of the universe. No, my plants are usually quite practical. [laughs] And they were right. 

If you had this experience of connecting with plants the way I have described—and there are plenty of people who have—the experience is so clear that you know that it’s not you; it’s someone else talking. If you haven’t had that experience, then I can totally see it’s like, “No way, it must be your mind that makes it up.” But all I can say is that I have had exchanges with plants who have shared things about topics and asked me to do things that I have really no idea about.

Okay, so how do you eat anything then ? If everything is as alive as in an old-timey Disney cartoon. doesn't that just mean the entire Universe is really, really creepy and weird ?

Guided by Plant Voices - Issue 84: Outbreak - Nautilus

Plants are intelligent beings with profound wisdom to impart-if only we know how to listen. And Monica Gagliano knows how to listen. The evolutionary ecologist has done groundbreaking experiments suggesting plants have the capacity to learn, remember, and make choices. That's not all.