Review : Sentient (Part II)

Continuing a review/summary of Jackie Higgins Sentient. In part one I covered how biological senses are much more powerful than we might expect, even in us supposedly mediocre humans. In fact the basic sensory operations of many organisms appears comparable to the very best modern instrumentation. One photon of light, one atom of vibration, one molecule of a compound... the basic registration appears as good as can possibly be. The extraneous hardware - the shape of the nose, the ear, the size of the eye - that varies, but the fundamental conversion of the original signal into an electrical stimulus for the brain doesn't, or at least not much.

Animals do inhabit different sensory realities to ourselves though : that extraneous hardware makes a huge difference. A dog's nose being closer to the ground makes it far easier to access olfactory stimulation, and if its raw receiving power isn't that much greater than our own, its brain appears to be configured quite differently to deal with the signal. The great grey owl's face gives it far superior sound-collection powers, while the star-nosed mole's unique nasal protuberances allow for a sense of touch almost inconceivably different from our own.

Just how far does this go ? Here there is a slight weakness to Higgins book as she deliberately restricts herself to animal senses which humans are least partially share, so the electrical sense of sharks and the hydrodynamic sensing in fish don't get much of a look in. But as it turns out, there's some pretty compelling evidence that humans might share more animal senses than we usually assume. We think we all know about the basics of the eye and ear, but even these appear to have far more capabilities than our everyday experience. And as well as these familiar senses operating at a subconscious level, it also seems we might have other, wholly unfamiliar senses - without even realising it. 

In this second, concluding part, I'll look at some of those unconscious senses, beginning with the ordinary and progressing to the downright weird.

Sensing without sensation

Is it possible we have senses we're not aware of  ? To this the answer is a firm "yes". Blindsight is an intriguing one, but more ordinary examples include balance and proprioception (the sense of how our body is arranged - how we know where all our arms and legs are in the dark). Until these go wrong, we take them for granted. We don't have to think about which way is up, it is simply known. That knowledge is implicitly but not consciously filtered into our actions. 

It turns out there may be others as well. Some of these are more exotic than others, even verging on magical... which may go a long way to explaining why they've often been treated with extreme skepticism. Higgins notes many times when researchers, for a wide variety of reasons, have had great difficulty in persuading their peers that unconscious sensing is even possible.

Smell

Let's start with a return to the nose. In the previous section we looked at ordinary smells. More controversial are pheromones - scents which are "less chemical messenger than chemical command". In Dune, the Bene Gesserit use the Voice to cause override conscious objections : through the right tone of voice, tailored to the individual subject, Herbert posited that the conscious mind could be taken out of the loop, and so the Voice accesses direct, subconscious control. 

Pheromones, at least in animals, appear to be the nearest real-world equivalent. And they are incredibly potent. The giant peacock moth has more than three orders of magnitude fewer sensors than a dog's nose, but can detect female moth pheromones a thousand times fainter than anything a dog can pick up. How this equivalent millionfold increase in sensitivity is achieved is unknown.

I will take issue with a couple of claims in this chapter. First, that pheromones are such a more powerful command than other scents. That's as may be, but the giant peacock moth is not a good example - is it any wonder than an animal which lives only a few days, whose sole purpose is to reproduce, should react so strongly to a chemical stimulant advertising the availability of other sexy moths ? Higgins mentions pheromones in other animals, but never explains what the qualitative difference is. Second, that pheromones are perceived unconsciously - nowhere does she explain why researchers believe the effect is subconscious, why they don't think the animals perceive a smell they really like and react accordingly.

The point about pheromones overriding conscious control is not at all demonstrated for the case of humans either. And this is a problem, because such overstating the case has led to some ludicrous backlash. For example in one experiment trying to see if scent was a factor in human mate selection :

'Journalists got hold of the story and then politicians. One saw the words, "human, mate choice, genetics" in my proposal, tried to shut down the project and get me expelled. Then, she gave a nasty interview for an important local paper. Some of my volunteers read this and dropped out.' Other students started a protest. Newspapers quoted one who insisted the study was unsuitable because it 'optimised' offspring and another who claimed the study demeaned women by implying their 'functions and abilities are reduced to reproduction'. The furore grew. A politician denounced the project as 'Nazi research'...

All this for getting volunteers to smell some T-shirts ! But actually, nothing - nothing whatsoever - in the chapter implies that either gender is reduced to hapless sex-craved lunatics by a little sniff. It's about whether smell has an influence, not a matter of irresistible control. I cannot find anything in the chapter that justifies Higgin's description of pheromones are being qualitatively different in this regard from ordinary scents : sure, we all really like the smell of freshly-baked bread, but that doesn't send us spiralling into a whirlwind of self-destructive bread-based infatuation.

The point about smell causing an unconscious influence does seem on much more secure footing, however. Higgins cites the IgNobel*-winning study finding that strippers** received more tips when ovulating. In another case, heterosexual women and homosexual men were found to preferentially sit on a specially-dosed seat in a waiting room. Women rate men more attractive when they applied a certain compound, and when living in close proximity will synchronise their periods. Even babies react to the scent of their mother. And the T-shirt study which was eventually performed tuned out to have one of the most interesting results at all : mate selection seems influenced by complementary gene sets.

* The IgNobels are for research that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. They are not, despite the name and the often hilarious aspect, awarded because the research is bad or stupid.
** Sadly for the researchers they never had to interact with their subjects or even their environment.

In the main, these experiments are carefully done, repeated, and with multiple control conditions - Higgins is convincing in the claim that scent can have a subconscious influence. There's nothing here to me that says we're automatons with no free will, just that we don't act with 100% conscious control over 100% of our actions 100% of the time. From that perspective there's nothing new here. Far more interesting is that, like blindsight, our senses don't always interface directly with our mind. How does the brain decide what it is the mind needs to judge ? Why does it prefer to do some things consciously and some unconsciously ? And could we have other senses of which we're entirely unaware ?

Sound

Remember how the owl uses its entire face like a giant ear ? It seems that humans have more in common with this than you might think. Some blind people have trained themselves to make clicks and use the echoes to judge distances to nearby objects, but this is done through conscious training. Hearing also, however, provides subconscious information. Higgins recounts the tale of a man who went blind but began to develop a replacement faculty for his lost vision :

'In the quiet of an evening I had a sense of presence, which was the realisation of an obstacle. I discovered that if I stopped when I had this sense, and waved my white cane around, I would make contact with a tree trunk. I gradually realised I was developing some strange kind of perception. The experience is quite extraordinary, and I cannot compare it with anything else I have ever known. It is like a sense of physical pressure... upon the skin of the face.'

This so-called "facial vision" has been explored with controlled experiments, in which blind and sighted (but blindfolded) volunteers walked in a room until they thought they had reached the edge. While the blind people stop sooner, the sighted people also do not collide - unless, that is, they are also wearing headphones. In 400 such trials, not a single person failed to collide when deafened. And, when the headphones were not silent but connected to a microphone held by the volunteer, they regained their ability of collision-avoidance (which could be done to within an inch of the wall). It seems that hearing gives us much more information than we consciously realise, even if we don't have the capabilities of an owl or a bat - and there is real substance to the claim that blind people develop an improved sense of hearing.

Identity sentience

Before I get to the really whacky stuff, a few others deserve at least a brief mention. Rather than smell, the goliath catfish has adapted to have an extraordinary, full body sense of taste. More like our own sense of smell than taste, they can taste at a distance, in three dimensions, via taste buds distributed over their entire surface. Exactly how it experiences this is a mystery (though they appear to be able to sense pH levels), but in humans taste receptors are not just found on the tongue and lips : they're also found in the respiratory and digestive systems.

Unlike the taste cells in our tongue's papillae, the scattered taste cells never lead to any conscious bitter, salty, sweet or sour perceptions; they 'taste', but we do not. They work beneath our awareness... These bitter receptors do not create taste sensations, but prompt our body to eject airborne toxins or pathogens forcefully... 'No-one has defined what solitary chemosensory cells are in fish, let alone in humans. We don't know what these cells are doing. We don't even know what they mean.'

Might they help explain the sensation of an upset stomach, something not easily described by other sensory stimuli ?

I don't know. If taste senses are found throughout more of ourselves than is usually supposed, our sense of touch may be even more integral to our sense of identity. Higgins cites the rubber hand illusion as a demonstration, noting the complications of phantom limbs. The arguably related "senses" of pleasure and pain blur the lines further*, clearly related to direct sensory perception but not straightforward equivalents either. Like wavelength and colour, there is a connection, it's just very unclear what that connection is.

* This is in the chapter on the vampire bat, which is ill-constructed compared to the others. This is a shame, because there's a lot of interesting stuff here, like how they rely on food-sharing to survive and have heat sensors as well as echolocation. Unfortunately the chapter is too unfocused, never settling on a topic to drill down into the details, and lacking an overall structure to tie it all together.

Proprioception may be one of the strongest clues to a sense of identity. Here Higgins, I must say, does a better job of conveying what it's like to lose this sense than even the formidable Oliver Sacks. Both authors describe how patients learned to compensate with vision, able to send motor signals to their limbs but not receive the usual direct information about how they're positioned. Neither author is able to describe how this actually works usually - how exactly does the brain know about limb position ? Clearly we know this with a fine degree of precision; as I type this, my fingers flick back and forth over the keyboard without even needing to look at them. The brain does this with immense reliability and speed - how ?

Losing the sense is undeniably strange. Higgins describes a patient slowly (very slowly) learning to control himself as very much like the "wiggle your big toe" scene in Kill Bill 2. 

By staring at a limb, a digit, any joint, once again his brain was able to issue commands and move it. Vision and intention could stand in for his loss of proprioception. To this day, he remains utterly reliant on his eyes. If the light fails, he falls. If his focus falters for even the briefest of moments, he falls.

Higgins describes him as being both the puppeteer and the puppet. We are generally aware of "the aim, rather than the many acts required en route". Not so perhaps for the octopus, which might exist in a state not dissimilar from proprioceptionless-patients. Citing Peter Godfrey-Smith, it may generally leave its own limbs to get on with things independently most of the time, but the central brain has the ability to override and draw everything together when need be. 

Perhaps this isn't so different to the rest of us. As with blindsight, if your mind wanders, your limbs are fully capable of managing actions on their own... as Higgins says, you don't normally need to think about the minutiae*, but sometimes you don't even need to think about the aims. The number of times I've walked one door down the street from where I need to be, I couldn't tell you. It doesn't feel like I've lost my sense of identity though; we may all of us have a bit more in common with the octopus than we think.

* And when you do, what does this feel like ? Can you describe it ? I can't. It's some sort of irreducible knowledge, more than a mere sensation, that I'm in control of my actions : this is my will made manifest. 

Magnets

Okay, now we get into the more outlandish. We all know birds navigate in part by the Earth's magnetic field, but it seems some other animals can do this too. But how ? What does it feel like ? And if something as humble as a pigeon has this ability, why not people ?

Higgins describes at length the experiments to establish that birds do indeed navigate by the magnetic field, and moreover, this is disrupted by human electronics. Fortunately even going just outside a city is sufficient for these artificial fields to weaken so that birds can once again rely on their natural ability. Yet the sensitivity is, as with the other senses we saw last time, truly extreme : 

The bird compass can respond to forces that are one fifty thousandth [1 nanotesla] of the natural magnetic field... 'substantially below anything previously thought to be biophysically plausible. The bird's magnetic compass is a million times more sensitive than any other sensory system known.'

The debate over how exactly birds are able to register such changes is ongoing. There are two main theories, which is this case are not necessarily mutually exclusive. One is that it's from magnetite crystals found in the beak, a nice simple idea but potentially with problems explaining the extraordinarily high sensitivity levels. The other is a quantum theory which has no such difficulty, and potentially equips the birds with a whole new kind of vision :

Cryptochromes are found in the retinal rods and cones of a bird's eye. When a photon hits rhodopsin, its retinal molecule snaps into a different shape, setting in motion an act of sight; the quantum compass theory proposes that when a photon strikes a cryptochrome, it generates free radicals with mismatched pairs of electrons... their magnetic fields could interact with the Earth's magnetic field.

The objection from the magnetite camp is that this doesn't explain navigation in the dark, but we've seen that the eye can be sensitive to individual photons so this seems like a weak argument. Still, there's no reason birds might not use both systems. And, being in the eye, does the bird literally see the magnetic field, or perceive it in some other way ? Likewise, as to why it needs such extraordinarily high sensitivity levels, this is left unsaid. 

There's evidence that a host of other animals might use magnetic navigation as well : deer, turtles, eels, lobsters, snails, butterflies and mole rats. What about people ? We obviously can't "see" the magnetic fields in the way that birds (tentatively) might be able to, but could we be aware of it subconsciously ?

Evidence suggests... probably. Experiments taking blindfolded students on a long drive* found that they were remarkably accurate at pointing their way home, despite consciously stating that they have no idea where they were. But these had mixed results at best and replication was a problem, with even individual students giving highly variable results. Using EEG scanners with subjects in Faraday cages and sensory deprivation tanks* appears to be more promising, with changes in brain waves being induced in response to a magnetic field. More replication is needed, however, as is the need to find the sensor. But my impression is that the work which has been done so far is already so careful, so meticulous, that there is very likely something in it.

* And not murdering them at the end.
* The pro-magnetite crowd says this refutes the quantum vision theory, but it's not clear if these tanks really eliminate all photons, which is not such an easy task.

Most intriguingly of all, Higgins describes the case of the Guugu Yimithir aboriginal people of Australia, who demonstrate an ability similar but much superior to the blindfolded students. Another Australian tribe even lacks words for left and right, instead describing all directions in compass-style terms :

"They cannot explain how they know the cardinal directions, just as you cannot explain how you know where in front of you is and where left and right are. They simply feel where north, south, east and west are."

We've come across such abilities and people before. It's been suggested that is the language itself which bestows this magical ability, somehow granting us access to a whole other cognitive realm. This I have never found convincing. More plausibly, language is more a description of our (most fundamental) worldview rather than influencing the very basis of our perception. But that hasn't been a satisfactory explanation for how people could think in terms of absolute orientation - until now. I would not hitherto have speculated that humans could have an unsuspected magnetic sense.

I noted last time that this cardinal description of direction fades when people are sent from the flat terrain, where it usually develops, into somewhere more varied, but this is not at all mutually exclusive with the prospect that humans do also posses a magnetic sense. It might be dominant in flat, featureless deserts, and subsumed in more complex regions where landmarks are just a superior, easier method of navigation. Hence the language evolved in response to the particular circumstances : in this environment, humans are naturally far more in tune with this particular sense; it is the sense that causes the language, not the other way around. The only radical aspect would be the magnetic sense itself, with Higgins noting researchers face an uphill battle against the bias surrounding unconscious senses.

Time

Last but not least, how do we sense time itself ? Of all of physics, time seems one of the most mysterious of everyday realities. Some claim it's just an illusion created entirely by conscious perception, that it has no physical meaning in the way that space and mass do, while others hold that the forward progression of time is central to scientific understanding. Regardless, we clearly have an internal way of measuring time, however imperfect, so how does our internal clock actually work ?

The most obvious daily marker of time is the Sun, so experiments have revolved around depriving human and animal subjects of daylight. And indeed, orbweaver spiders show a natural rhythm independent of daylight - but it's not 24 hours, or even a multiple of 24. It can be anywhere from 18 to 28 hours, meaning that they live the life of the permanently jet-lagged. Why it isn't 24 hours, or at least something close to 24, is a mystery. But neat rhythms they naturally keep, regardless of sunshine, as do at least some plants.

As do also humans. Our body clock is set to 24-25 hours, which is a lot less weird (and makes a mockery of claims that humans could never adapt to the Martian 24.5 hour day). Yet, even when we can't see the Sun, it seems we can see time. 

Or rather more accurately : whatever process we use to sense the passage of time is present in our eyes. The Sun acts, if you like, to continuously set the hour hand, but the more frequent ticking is set by something in our eyes - provided we have incoming photons, whether from the Sun or no.

Experimental evidence of this comes from an unpleasant source. Postulating that vision had something to do with it, researchers engineered a mouse which had neither rods nor cones in its eyes. It was indeed blind. But it maintained a regular sleeping rhythm... until it was blindfolded. There is a third photoreceptor within the eyes, which has now been found and given the atrociously poor name of the "photosensitive retinal ganglion cell". Particular kinds of blindness in people have also been found to cause "time blindness".

How this actually works is a mystery. Could organisms be genetically encoded with some knowledge of the speed of light, such that something like a light clock could be present somewhere ? Nobody knows, though it would make sense that photons could be used for this just as they can be used for sensing magnetic fields. Nor, as far as I know, has anyone tried measuring the effects of complete, zero-photon darkness for protracted periods (elsewhere Higgins describes how this leads to hallucinations, so such extreme sensory deprivation might be fraught with ethical considerations). Certainly we don't literally "see" time. But that such a well-studied organ as the eye has such radical surprises in store for us only underscores the importance of further research, and how the nature of sentience itself is still an open question. Just what other senses might we have ?

Conclusions

Some of the bias against unconscious senses is understandable. The prospect that we could use photons to sense time and magnetic fields has more than a faint whiff of ESP and the like about it - if we can sense a global field which propagates at the speed of light, and given that birds have an apparently unnecessarily high degree of sensitivity, it's hard not to wonder if maybe this couldn't be used somehow for communication.

But this is unnecessary, and not warranted from the data. What's most compelling to me is that the mechanism for sensing the magnetic field relies on perfectly ordinary physics, and doesn't require the sensing process to be anything other than strictly one-way. That's not anything that even the most ardent skeptic should be worried about. Likewise, some of the bias against smell in particular is bizarre; to suppose that we are creatures of pure conscious choice is about as daft an idea as I've ever heard. No, because you subconsciously like the way someone smells does not make you a Nazi, you daft cultural warmonger. And I need to emphasise again just how careful and painstaking this research has all been, often a case of two steps forward one step back and then three more steps twirling sideways and falling over - establishing the magnetic sense in birds took seven years and more. The results are hard-won, rigorous science.

Still the question remains as to why these senses are subconscious. Especially interesting is that this occurs routinely in senses we also perceive consciously, like hearing (and on occasion vision). Why does the brain decide we don't need this information ? Why can't I get access to this normally, and just what else might the brain be doing in the background that it won't tell me ? That seems to open the door to those other, more radical sensory prospects.

As for language, as I've said many times, it is surely an interplay between deeper thought and expression. Even highly abstract, complex processes (like solving a differential equation) are done at some much deeper level within the brain, without the brain literally doing mathematics in the pen-and-paper symbolic sense. Yet when something is written down, that can trigger thoughts in new directions - the imperfection of language for recording and storing what we really mean is often a strength. So I think we can put safely to bed any notions that you need a language to really fundamentally alter our concepts of space and time, or give us new senses. It's still fascinating that we can use this to go in the other direction - to seek out cultures where, perhaps, our other hidden senses have risen to the top, shaping the way they express themselves.

Is one perception more valid than another ? This is hard to answer. Clearly some are more useful than others, but whether one is more "right" than another is altogether more challenging. Personally, I would welcome more sensory input. When the cyborg revolution begins in earnest, hook me up - let me hear those X-rays and smell the dark matter. I have no idea what this would be like, which is exactly why I'd want to do it.

Review : Sentient (Part I)

The blogging binge continues with a swift return to the default topic of consciousness. Although this time from quite a different angle to the usual.

Prelude

Jackie Higgin's Sentient is an excellent read. Naturally I chose this one because the issue of animal senses has an obvious bearing the the nature of qualia, but I'm also plenty interested in wildlife purely for its own sake (433 posts here with the "Nature" tag, and counting !). I find it fascinating that animals can experience the world profoundly differently to me and yet, even when having supposedly inferior senses and intelligence, still manage feats of which I'm incapable. 

Of course, those with superior senses are even more fascinating, but those which have different senses are surely the most interesting of all. I love the idea of colours I can't see, or senses as different from sight again as sight is from touch or smell. Why do we experience the world in the way we do ? Why doesn't our brain (usually) render vision as an audio signal ?

And if animals do have such fundamentally different senses, what does that mean for their intelligence ? In my view, qualia offer a route to free will. By allowing us access to non-physical information unconstrained by material reality, determinism is circumvented. If this line of reasoning is correct*, it means that animals have access to** information beyond what's available to me. It's not necessarily that they don't think in similar ways, it's that they - might - have a fundamentally different experience of reality altogether.

* And I'm not at all sure that it is, mind you. Just because blueness itself is not physical does not mean that the experience of blueness is not perfectly constrained by physical reality; qualia could still be absolutely deterministic.
** "Access" may be misleading. Note I do not suggest that the inner mental worlds represent some other level of reality, tending as they do to be woefully inconsistent and there being no convincing evidence for ESP and the like whatever. But read on.

The Review Bit (skip if you want to know about the animals)

Higgins takes an unusual approach, which I'm glad I didn't realise initially or else I might not have read this. While she does mention a few animal senses which are fundamentally different to anything humans possess, the main goal of the book is to compare animal senses with our own. The blurb on the back cover doesn't make this at all clear, but in the main it turns out to be a very interesting exercise indeed. While nothing as grandiose as getting inside the minds of the animal subjects is much attempted, this is played to a strength, keeping it tightly controlled and focused.

I'll note that the book is fiercely accurate in its title, unlike certain Google engineers. The book is about senses, not intelligence. Very little is made as to how animals learn or improvise; again playing this focus as a strength. This is probably worth mentioning as many people seem to confuse awareness with intelligence, which are not at all the same thing.

The book is commendably clear and readable from start to finish. Higgins is an excellent writer, balancing detail, clarity and concision pretty much perfectly. Anecdotes and descriptions of personal experiences are properly set in context. And I will cite this as a truly outstanding work for understanding the little guys of research : hardly anything in this book is depicted as a Eureka-moment revolution, virtually everything emerges from the hard graft of patiently slogging it out. Higgins does an absolutely first-rate job of conveying just how damn difficult it is, of how even apparently simple questions which seem like they should be answered in an afternoon end up taking years or even decades to answer. There are no geniuses to be found in this book at all : clever people, certainly, but much more important is that they are obsessively-interested and exceptionally determined, to the point of being bloody-minded. 

Likewise, the ongoing controversies are stated without embarrassment; Higgins does not feel like she's trying to give any particular view undue preference, and manages to state both the arguments and feelings (for scientists are all ultimately only human) of both sides without judging anyone. And this comes across very clearly also in the descriptions of how we've got the results we have when at last the conclusions seems more firmly established - yes, it's a story about challenging the consensus, but it's also about how many of those challenges are simply wrong*. Science is only in part about hypothesis-testing; it is also very much about pure exploration, of going down blind alleys only to run back in terror. If you want to get an impression of science as a process rather than a result, you could do far worse than this. It's messy, subjective, provisional, mind-wrenchingly tedious, and fun.

* Mainstream scientists may be overtly hostile to new ideas more than I suppose, but this still doesn't mean that pseudoscientists with an axe to grind ever turn out to be correct.

Yes, I know I've said all that before, but a lot of people still don't get it, so it bears repeating.

There are a few minor points that irked me though. Some sections feel like an example of bait-and-switch. In particular the chapter on the vision of the peacock mantis shrimp, first describing it as having unimaginably superior colour vision to a human only to swiftly refute itself in a clumsy and abrupt way - we don't get anything about why the shrimp has such an undeniably complex visual system to accomplish an apparently unimpressive end result, nor what it's doing with the faculty of sensing polarisation (that it does at least possess, unlike humans). The chapter on the vampire bat has an analogy to the human sense of pleasure and pain which is extremely forced at best, and comparing the sense of balance in bipedal humans to quadrupedal cheetahs just left me wondering why birds wouldn't have been a more illuminating comparison.

These points are, I stress, minor. The book is rife with interesting findings that help better understand both the animal and human experience, and I'm happy to give this an overall rating of 8/10.

On to the content. This one is quite difficult to organise. Practically every chapter contains something that's interesting in its own right, covering a huge range of areas. As I read it, two major themes emerge : 1) that we often under-estimate the strength of the senses of which we're acutely aware; 2) we may have unconscious senses that influence us without our knowing. The boundary between the two is not sharp, but I found there was so much interesting stuff here I simply had to split this post in twain. 

Super sensitive senses : sight, sound, smell and stuff

Smell

All of our senses, Higgins claims, are a lot more sensitive than we generally give them credit for. We like to point out how much sharper the vision of a falcon, how much more powerful the nose of a dog (or indeed most animals), how much better the hearing of a bat or an owl. Similarly we point out how puny we are compared to an elephant, how slow compared to a cheetah... none of this is without foundation. But it does seem to be enormously exaggerated, a humblebrag to underline how truly mighty our intellect must be in order to overcome our pathetic physical frailties in our rise to dominance :

Broca wrote [in 1879] : 'This [frontal] lobe enlarged at the expense of the others, grabbed the central hegemony; the intellectual life is centred there; it is no longer the sense of smell that guides the animal: it is simply intelligence enlightened by all the senses.' He believed that... our sense of smell had been exchanged for free will.

To be fair the idea that a bigger section of the brain means it can do its job more intensely is understandable, but we now know it isn't true : not only for information processing in general, but also for the senses in particular - elsewhere Higgins describes that those with a better sense of balance actually have smaller part of the brain dedicated to this*. Analogies of the brain to a computer are deeply flawed, arguably fatally so. But this bias against smell is even worse :

* Might the brain be an example of how technological advancement would work in a less capitalist society ? We invent labour-saving devices and then go on to just do different labour instead, often apparently increasing the amount of labour we actually perform. The brain, by comparison, thinks the point of labour-saving devices is to do less work.

Freud argued that smell was only of interest to children, perverts and neurotics. He stated, 'The organic sublimation of the sense of smell is a factor of civilisation.' Its loss supposedly raised us above other animals, effectively civilising and humanising us. Our species was relegated to the status of micro-smats : 'tiny smellers' to the dogs macrosmatic supremacy.

Even leaving aside the bizarre claim that losing the sense of smell was somehow an asset, let alone a factor in the creation of civilisation itself, this is flat-out wrong. Higgins demonstrated that our own nasal sensitivity is far from shoddy. It depends on what we're being asked to sniff - some animals are better than us at some smells, but the reverse is also true. There does not seem to be a nose which is simply better or worse across the board.

Laska has quantified the smallest amounts of scent detectable to an animal. Time after time, comparing the results to human studies, he has been surprised. 'I have found that human subjects have lower olfactory detection thresholds. That is a high sensitivity to the majority of odorants detected so far, compared to most mammal species tested so far.' Humans, it seems, can do better than monkeys, macaques, sea otters, fruit bats, vampire bats, mice, rats and shrews. According to him, 'Human olfactory inferiority is a myth.'

The dog is the single species that Laska has found to flout this pattern. 'Only fifteen scents have been tests on both humans and dogs... but it is interesting to note that humans even outperform the dog with five of the fifteen odorants.'

What of the claim that a dog's nose is so many thousands of times better than ours ? Well, there are differences between the sensory apparatus and brain structures, but quantifiably assessing how that translates into experience is nightmarishly complex. In brief, the slightly poorer nasal hardware may be more than compensated for by a brain which is far more efficient and flexible; it's more of a software issue than a hardware problem.

You may wonder why this appears so obviously not the case in practise. The answer seems to be that we just don't need to use our nose, so we don't. Experiments have shown that when people put their nose to the ground (which of course they very seldom do), they can follow scent trails just like a dog. As well as being socially awkward, this is physically much more difficult for us. So a dog's world may well be far more dependent on scent than ours, far more odour-based than vision-based, just not necessarily because its sense of smell is anywhere near as superior as popularly supposed. It's a case of use-it-or-loose it, and we just don't use it. Dogs do.

(Incidentally, there are many examples throughout the book of the senses becoming more acute when one is damaged - hearing especially. This does not appear to be the case for smell, perhaps because our nose is in such a difficult position for continuous use. And, citing Oliver Sacks for a strange case of nasal hallucinations, Higgins notes something that was missing from Sacks' own book : the drug-addled patient described in that particular case he later admitted was himself !)

Sound

If we have a perfectly decent sense of smell but don't appreciate it because we're just not using it much, the same cannot be said of hearing. Animals like the great grey owl appear to have a phenomenally powerful sense of sound, but this again turns out to be misleading. 

Bloodhounds have special adaptations that allow their nose to be more efficient in collecting odours. Likewise the owl's whole face works like a giant ear to focus the sound. These are advantages which we just don't have, so it would be foolish to claim that our senses are wholly equal - they aren't. But collecting the sound is just the first step in the process. The second step is to convert that sound into a signal the brain can process, and the third step is for the brain to register that signal as a sensation. If we're found wanting for step one, the same cannot be said for steps two and three.

The decibel scale for sound is a logarithmic ratio, so zero decibels does not mean there is no noise present. Total absence of sound is impossible - as long as there are some particles present, there will be some waves propagating, some atoms vibrating (there is, of course, sound in space, no matter that it's inaudible to puny humans). So while a whisper might be 20 dB, under the right conditions we can hear right down to zero decibels. In specially designed anechoic chambers, researchers have reported hearing their own circulatory systems and even the sound of "my scalp moving over my skull, which was eerie, and a strange, metallic scraping noise I couldn't explain". And a 0 dB sound wave corresponds to an absurdly tiny pressure wave, a vibration smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

That's pretty mind-boggling. It's not the only example of human senses probing limits we ordinarily think of requiring fantastically advanced instruments, a point I'll return to later. The great grey owl, however, can hear the faintest whispers under perfectly ordinary conditions, e.g. a mouse beneath the snow in a real-world forest environment - it doesn't have to hope that for some reason the mouse happens to be in an anechoic chamber. It seems that there's no evidence that the owl's brain or the noise-registering hairs in its inner ear are responsible : it's entirely due to the owl's face, shaped like a collecting parabolic dish to amplify the signals. Presumably, like a telescope, this amplifies the signal-to-noise ratio, preventing the owl from being deafened by the sound of random air molecules bashing about.

One other point - Higgins says that frequency and tone are directly equivalent. But this is demonstrably not the case for photon wavelength and colour, nor for chemicals and odour. So I have to wonder if this really is the case for sound... it would be surprising if sound alone was so uniquely objective. A quick Google search reveals the existence of the condition amusia, suggesting that probably you really can be genuinely tone deaf just as you can be colour blind.

Sight

I've been conducting an experiment of my own recently. In order to test how well I can recover the signals of real galaxies by inspecting data sets, I've injected a bunch of fake ones into real but empty data (so that the noise characteristics are the same) at different brightnesses. The results are interesting. There does come a point below which the artificial galaxies are so faint that none are detected at all. But when they're even slightly brighter, it's possible to detect them at a rate high above what would be expected from chance alone. It's a strange experience - at these very faint levels, it feels like guessing, but then it turns out I'm right.

This sounds very similar to experiments trying to check if humans are capable of perceiving single photons. After years of painstaking work of more than 30,000 experiments, it seems that they are :

We found that in an alternative forced choice setting, humans perceive single photons 51.6% of the time. The importance is not how much above 50% the results are, but that are above 50% with statistical significance and statistical power, making it highly unlikely that the result is a consequence of random measurement fluctuations.

I'm naturally skeptical of results slightly above a threshold value so I'll just note the paper can be read here for those who want to dig deeper. In my own experiment, the volume of the data occupied by the fake galaxies is only ~0.2%, whereas the faintest detectable galaxies are found at rates of a few percent - so it may well be that anything above 50% is indeed disproportionately significant. I would hope that they at least did tests in which no photons were injected at all, but I'm not going to read the paper right now. Higgins is anyway careful to note that others would like to see the result replicated*. Anyway :

* Though it does not seem at all controversial to state that we can detect photons in very small numbers, tens or less for sure. One other claim I've previously heard is that the sensors in the eye might be able to respond to single photons, but ordinarily the brain applies its own filters to stop us being overwhelmed by the noise. I will attest from personal experience that the brain certainly does this for sound.

When the volunteers were asked to describe such perceptions, they agreed unanimously that, whilst difficult to put into words, their experience was far from a flash of light. One said, 'If you've ever looked at a dim star in the night sky and one second you see it, but they next you don't... it's kind of like that.' Another, 'It's more a feeling of seeing something, rather than really seeing it.'

Higgins also notes that our rods, which sense brightness and not colour, are not so dense within the central region of our eye, which helps explain why very faint objects (such as, indeed, stars) are easier to see if you don't look directly at them. A colleague of mine who also enjoys amateur astronomy also notes how important it is to train your vision to such tasks : with practise, it's possible even to see incredibly faint dwarf galaxies through a small telescope.

The comparison Higgins uses in this chapter is the spookfish. This is fascinating creature of the deep that actually uses mirrors in its eyes to focus the image. While superb at low-light vision, this is a specialist. Our eyes are much better adapted to a wider range of conditions, though Higgins notes that some people are born with super-sensitive dark vision that makes them highly vulnerable to bright sunlight.

Sensory appropriation 

Most of us are aware of echolocation : bats and dolphins alike use sonar-like tactics to hunt prey and scan their surroundings. So do some blind people - more on that in the next section. But the star-nosed mole takes things in a radically different direction. Instead of replacing vision with sound, it uses an extraordinarily touch sensor located, of all places, on its nose.

Human tactile senses are impressive, being able to detect when cells are moved by just 500th of a mm, and allowing us to detect differences in a surface separated by just 0.2 mm - though this pales in comparison to our single-vibrating-atom sense of sound or single-photon sight. What seems strange to me is that our touch resolution varies across our skin, being markedly less on the back... but it doesn't feel worse there. And that's probably something worth remembering. To an animal with a wholly different sensory experience to us, its perspective of the world undoubtedly feels like "the right one", and anything differing from its norm would be somehow wrong and less real. Look at how many people have a bias against "false colour" astronomical images...

Anyway, the mole apparently does something extraordinary. Its unique protruding nasal implement is jam-packed with sensors, giving it a sensitivity and resolution I find difficult to imagine. I can't even accept that the resolution on my back is so much lower than on my fingers, so, just as I can't imagine new colours, contemplating life with a massively higher touch resolution is not at all easy. What I find really fascinating is that the mole might be "seeing" with its snout :

The star appears to act like a retina. 'The star's division into peripheral touch and central touch seems analogous to the retina in the visual system of mammals.' The star appears to act like a retina, allowing perception of the wider landscape... it is a tactile fovea - like the auditory one of an owl or a bat - to our visual fovea. As the star on the mole's snout presses down on the soil, it transmits to the brain a three-dimensional, star-shaped view of the terrain : a digital tactile image, with a particular focus on food. 'The nose may look like a hand, but it acts like an eye.'

While the mole's nose leaves us (for once) trailing miserably in the sensory department, it's to fellow humans we need to look to see how far this analogy can be pushed. Does the mole literally form an image, or does it sense touch just like we do but better, or perhaps something else altogether ? Higgins notes the cases of blind artists who can sculpt, but even more impressive is the case of blind artists painting with perspective. How in the world would you ever realise that something would look smaller if it was further away without actually ever seeing it ? Things don't feel smaller when you hold them close or at arms length. Intriguingly, the neural activity in these cases is strikingly similar to people with vision :

'A different point of view is an intrinsically visual thing; there is no tactile point of view. What I found striking was that he has vantage point and perspective without ever having seen. It suggests that this spatial awareness is somehow ingrained, innate.'... 'Esref is congenitally blind, but if you were to see this picture of the brain, not knowing what is going on, you would say this person is seeing.'

'It's provocative, but we're arguing that the brain may not be organised into sensory modalities at all... The striate cortex is visual only if you have vision. If you don't, it quickly takes on other sensory modalities.' What neuroscientists have called the visual cortex for the past century seems not to be devoted to the eyes... it might more accurately be defined as the area of the brain best able to discriminate spatial relationships and that it will use any relevant sensory input.

Kevin Warwick says in his book that the brain is remarkably plastic, capable of receiving and interpreting completely different sensory data than what the nerves are normally used for. It should be noted that others have attested differently, that vision is necessary for the perception of space. Why this should be different between individuals, or whether the mole does something vision-like or something else with its marvellous nose... I have no idea.

Conclusions to part one

Sensory sensitivity is astonishing, literally rivalling the finest scientific instruments available. This does not mean we record things with anything like the controllable, measurable objectivity of specialist equipment, because that's not at all what our brain is trying to do. Some argue that our perception is based around utility, not truth; I say that truth and utility are not in the least mutually exclusive and accuracy has a utility all of its own. But undeniably, we cannot count photons or state the exact decibel level or molecular count for some particular compound. For whatever reason, that's just not how the brain works.

What might be more interesting about this extreme level of sensitivity is that when you get down to the level of one photon, one particular molecule, one atom of movement, you're getting to the realm where quantum effects could potentially be important. I remember being chided for this back on Google Plus because apparently mentioning "quantum" and "consciousness" in the same sentence is an anathema to scientific inquiry. 

Well, I don't mean to suggest that quantum woo plays any role in mind at all (it might, but that's another story). What I would claim is that if the brain has really such extreme sensitivity, then things like the double-slit experiment could be important. CCD multipliers work by multiplying signals from single photons up to macroscopic levels, converting minute amounts of input energy into measurable electrical flows. So if the brain does the same, it does not seem beyond the pale to me at all to suppose that quantum effects play at least some limited role in consciousness, just as we can observe wave-particle duality effects and become puzzled by them. That doesn't strike me as woo, but mundane.

(It's often stated that the warm, wet environment of the brain is not a place where quantum effects are expected. I am not sure why this should be, unless there are large-scale field effects at work. Otherwise, I would not expect such rapid, minute processes to care at all about whether they're in a brain or a vat of liquid helium, and quantum tunnelling plays a role in keeping the Sun shining precisely because the temperature is astronomically high.)

More philosophically, how does our perception relate to our understanding of reality ? How would it be altered if we altered our perception - which reality is the "right" one ? That of a butterfly, a dog, an ant, a person ? Or is there only one reality which are all filtering differently ?

I lean strongly towards the latter. Not only does the existence of a blind artist understanding perpesctive point towards a shared but filtered reality, an innate understanding, but there are no things, only stuff. The problems lie not in reality itself, which exists all by itself, but in our descriptions of it, which don't. It's an age-old question of whether mathematics was invented or discovered; viewing mathematics as a language to me implies that it was both, in a sense. Clearly objects do obey physical numerical laws, but numbers themselves, equations and formulae, are not found in nature, nor is it necessary for cheetahs to do mathematical calculations to avoid falling over. Maths is a description of what's going on, but it is not the same as the the stuff that's happening itself. More on the importance of language for sensory perception in part two.

The sensory filters which animals have developed are astonishing. But we should not be too awestruck - our own capabilities are no so inferior. By the same token, we should probably not give ourselves too much intellectual credit either. As we discover that our senses are not so hopeless compared to animals, so we discover that animal intelligence is not so pathetic compared to our own. As we'll see next time, even things we think we understand continue to surprise us - all that patient, unrevolutionary work of unknown but ferociously determined researchers is paying dividends.

Review : Providence Lost - The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate

In the last few years I've become fascinated by the English Civil War. It's a period I don't know much about, but I'm trying to make amends.

I very much enjoy reading ancient and medieval military history*, but in this case I have only the most rudimentary grasp of the conflict itself. No doubt that will eventually be remedied. But the colossal scale of the Civil War seems emblematic of the massive social changes that were raging throughout the country. The bloody but brief witchfinder epidemic points to a flux in thinking from the mystical to the material, a period still rife in superstition but gradually giving way to empiricism and objective reasoning**. The war unleased creativity by reducing censorship, formulating prototypes of socialism and modern-day democracy; an initially religious conflict giving way to a choice over system of government - and of course with some powerful lessons about how that government should be run. Here was a time when few of the modern conventions existed, a key period in history when the British Constitution (such as it is) began to be formulated. There were no rules and a golden opportunity to design a truly republican (small r), democratic government. So how did they fare ?

* It's a good thing I proof-read these, because initially I'd written historical military history. I mean, historical history, for goodness' sake...

** Lucy Worsely has a new documentary about this which presents a different view of the witch hunts than the book review I've linked. Gaskill concentrates on the most famous examples of Hopkins and Sterne, whose reign of terror was brief, and aimed at the most vulnerable in society (not always women) accused of committing often rather petty crimes. Worsely presents a very different view of the background-level witch hunts, which, she says, were sometimes about prominent public figures accused of committing major crimes and with a strong sexist element at work. Furthermore they were enabled by the whole way of thinking of society, whereas Gaskill and Sterne only flourished because of the temporary lawlessness of the War, though they inflicted a much higher rate of victims compared to the more typical witch hunts.

Terribly. That's the short answer according to Paul Lay's Providence Lost, which covers the brief period when Britain was a republic. And there are many reasons for this, from the conflicting philosophies pervading society to the complex characters who found themselves in charge of the whole omnishambles. Naturally I'll cover some of those shortly.

Firstly, it must be said that the book is somewhat bipolar. The first six chapters are, to be frank, no good. Lay presumes an enormous amount of background knowledge for a popular audience which I for one just do not have. He gives no overview of the Civil War whatsoever - a truly bizarre omission ! - and rambles on and on about an expedition to some Caribbean island for no (initially) apparent reason, then gets bogged down in microbiographies of insignificant characters bereft of context. Immensely complex forces and events are glossed over, characters are named ambiguously (Charles Stuart confusingly referring both to Charles I and II), and bizarre phrases ("the mystery that is the Isle of Man") are chucked in without any apparent reason. I was well on the verge of giving up.

Well, I'm glad I didn't. The first chapters are poor indeed, but chapter 7 really turns a corner. From thereon it's excellent. It's insightful, concise, and lucid, unafraid to draw interpretations of what happened and why, whilst giving ample detail as to the events themselves. The complexities of Cromwell's character emerge, set marvellously in context. Why in the world his editor didn't tell him to chuck out the awful chapters 1-6 and write them again I'll never know, but I give nothing but praise for the rest of the book. Overall, I'll give it a solid 7/10. This could easily have been an 8 or even a 9 if the first chapters had been better or the rest had been longer. So much for the sunk cost fallacy.

So, what does this mostly-wonderful book say ? Rather than try and summarise the history, I'll try and extract some interesting themes instead.

Cromwell wasn't a dictator

Lay's view of Cromwell is conflicted : socially liberal but politically authoritarian. In the previous book review, Parliament and the Army were seen to diverge as independent actors. Here, as Protector, Cromwell himself becomes independent from both, sometimes advancing the causes of his key backers but often acting purely in his own interests.

Lay maintains that Cromwell wasn't a dictator in the modern sense, in part simply because of technological constraints of the era : "The early modern state, with its lack of infrastructure and limited communications, was incapable of administering totalitarian government, whatever an individual's ambitions." This is not to say he didn't have some strong authoritarian tendencies - he absolutely did. But there simply did not exist the modern technological capacity for rapid, large-scale monitoring and response. Nor, as we shall see, was there anything like sufficient national unity to ensure Cromwell could get his own way through dialogue, or military power sufficient to force the issue.

In fact Britain in this period was briefly but only technically under military rule - the rule of the major generals. But their inefficacy only reinforces the limits of what was possible. In essence these were regional governors with the power to raise local militias. This was paid for by a tax on the royalists, thus using the state's enemies to fund their own oppression - a clever maneuver possible thanks to its relatively mild nature, imposed on a vanquished enemy who saw no real alternative to Cromwell. 

Ultimately the scheme was a complete failure. Royalists were incapable of providing enough cash to fund the scheme, and while a few governors were (predictably) zealous, others were far more lenient with their opponents. Cromwell himself appears especially gracious in this regard, frequently letting off opponents even from paying fines. And centralised government was simply ill-equipped to deal with many of the problems : governors tried to tackle vagrancy through transportation to colonies, but the government couldn't organise the necessary ships. In the end, most were simply released. This is part of a distinct pattern of largely lacklustre attempts at enforced Puritanical virtue, "generally more heavy-handed than brutal" (though with some important exceptions).

Furthermore the population at large were simply not devout enough for the more busybody "nanny-state" aspects of the plan to ever have much impact :

Examples of inequity are rare, though not because of the mercy of the Puritan commissioners. In truth, the procedures of investigation were often long-drawn-out and there was little support for them among local populations that, on the whole, remained quietly Anglican...There is little evidence that, on their watch, sexual offences were reduced, nor that rural sports were successfully proscribed.

Lay describes the situation overall as a "preference for a blanket of mild tyranny over the chaotic discomforts of anarchy". While Cromwell did broadly support the moral policing efforts of the major generals, albeit with some considerably leniency, socially he personally was much more liberal. His authoritarianism was very real, but in the main it was limited to his dealings with Parliament. It speaks volumes about the man that he saw no irony in trying to impose religious liberty on the British people, expending considerable effort to enshrine such freedoms in the Instrument of Government (an attempt at a written constitution) - if necessary backed by military force :

Parliament's commitment to liberty of conscience was never as sincere or expansive as Cromwell's... Parliament's persistent undermining of the Instrument of Government, which led to the dissolution of the First Protectorate Parliament in January 1655, had convinced Cromwell of a simple undeniable truth : that it was the army more than any Parliament he might call the bulwark of his regime.

And while he frequently called for "healing and settling", he was hardly adverse to stoking the fires of nationalism and conflict if he felt he needed to. He was not a nice man, but - in Britain at least* - he was not much of a despot.

* Lay does not cover his actions in Ireland, because this falls out of the Protectorate period. This is definitely a major weakness of the book, because such a context could change interpretations considerably.

The Protectorate wasn't a theocracy

In my day, schoolchildren were taught that the Civil War was all about Parliament versus the King, i.e. who has ultimate authority. The religious dimension of the conflict was almost absent, except, supposedly, that Cromwell was a staunch Puritan who cancelled Christmas because he was an absolute misery-guts. This is nowhere evident in Lay's account. Attempts at moral policing were implemented, but they were largely a half-hearted failure. 

Cromwell himself emerges as a complete hypocrite. While his lavish public offices of state can perhaps be excused as they were designed to impress visiting European dignitaries, even in private his atheistic tastes were solidly Catholic :

The tapestries at Hampton Court, a particularly expensive form of decoration, depicted the sinful, adulterous figure of Venus. Those in the aptly titled Paradise Room went even further in their dabbling with sinful narratives, celebrating the Triumphs of the Seven Deadly Sins. Cromwell's collection of paintings was no less decadent in its themes... Prominent courtiers also built up substantial art collections, perhaps feeling that Cromwell's own collection gave them the latitude to do so...The Puritan Mary Netheway was appalled by "those monstres".

As for music, while "lascivious anything was out (beyond the confines of Cromwell's private chambers), dancing, at least of the courtly, decorous kind, was a matter 'indifferent' ". At court, games of dice and and cards were "common pastimes". 

The moral vision of the Puritan revolution remained unfulfilled, unachievable in this word, though the polity remained stable and its institutions largely efficient.

Lay's description has the Puritans as a powerful minority, disproportionately represented in government, but with nowhere near enough of a wider base to really alter the social norms. It's not that they didn't try, or even that they wouldn't have welcomed a theocratic form of government : many of them were far more anti-Catholic than Cromwell ever was. It was simply that were unable to accomplish anything.

The quintessential feature of the rule of the major generals was not that it was army rule, nor that it was London rule, but rather that it was godly rule, and it was as such that it was decisively rejected by the great majority of the English and Welsh people.

As Cromwell could be argued to be a would-be dictator, so could Parliament and the army be seen to be would-be theocratic rulers. Neither were at all effective : "the rule of the major generals was never that; they never did rule... their impact [was] 'very slight indeed' - though there is an important caveat to this which I'll return later :

But that was not how it was perceived at the time, and perception in politics is the greater portion of the game.

Religion was however very important, and far more mixed with politics than today. Not only did the Civil War era see the rise of the Levellers and the Diggers, both movements striving for social equality, but it also saw the birth of new religious movements like the Quakers. Like Cromwell, they were a mass of contradictions. Fiercely individualistic, they embraced feelings above expertise, abstained from politics to the point of opposing democracy - yet preached equality for all. Their confusing, anti-Calvinist views did not sit well with the godly rulers, enticing them to harsher laws. While Britain's brief flirtation with republicanism didn't entail a fundamentalist government, that's not to say there weren't strong religious overtones about it, nor should the the general failure of Puritanism be mistaken for a total failure :

It may be that the Republic was harsher on sexual practises than any British government before or since. The 1650 Act laid down the death penalty for adultery by a married woman and her partner, though few were indicted. Death was also the price paid by those judged to have committed incest and prostitutes in the habit of reoffending. This brought English law into line with that of the Old Testament.

Just as Cromwell's lack of outright despotism didn't mean he didn't have a strong authoritarian streak, so should the lack of Puritan dominance not be mistaken for a complete lack of religious-based bigotry in politics.

While I'm trying to divide things into neat little categories for the sake of readability, it would be a mistake to draw too clear a line between Church and State. They were undeniably intertwined. As well as tax-collecting, we've seen that the militias also acted as moral police. But, says Lay, this was at least partly practical, as social gatherings were places where Royalist plots were hatched. Such plots did in fact occur, so this cannot be put down as an excuse or paranoia - yet the simultaneous attempt at enforcing Puritan values, however haphazard, inhomogeneous and ineffectual, should not be forgotten.

There's one section of Lay's text where I think he fails rather badly. He describes at length the prosecution of James Nayler, a prominent Quaker who walked into Bristol one rainy October morning accompanied by a small group of followers singing a nice song about God. For this he was lucky to escape with his life. Only with the greatest of efforts was the death penalty avoided, and his eventual punishment was scarcely less brutal : he was whipped 300 times. Lay does not at all convey what in the world Nayler had done that had people so enraged against him; an analogy to a modern-day equivalent would have been helpful here.

What was Parliament for ?

In Cromwell's attempts to protect religious liberty, however limited in success, we may perhaps glimpse the formation of liberalism proper. The Blasphemy Act of 1650 was progressive for its time : it limited first offenders to six months in prison at most, and no more than banishment for repeat offenders. The Instrument of Government, for which Cromwell pushed hard, contained a considerably more liberal article :

That such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgement from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth) shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion.

Excluding Catholics, mind you. Well, it was 1650, you can't have everything.

Even so, such an extreme prospect caused outrage at Nayler's trial. "God deliver me from such liberty" ranted one MP. One of the major generals said that if the Instrument did indeed contain such religious protections he would "have it burnt in the fire".

Because the Civil War was initially a religious conflict, there was no overarching movement deciding what sort of government the people wanted*. This was not a revolution in the modern sense of overthrowing a dictator to return power to the people - because the very idea that the people should have power had barely taken root. Consequently the situation was much more complicated. Some didn't really want constitutional change, they just wanted a better ruler. Others were radically socialist, while still others held religion dear above all else. There was no one single cause that unified the nation.

* This also goes some way to explaining such harsh responses to proposed religious freedom. The war had been fought over religious matters, and to pretend the various religious orders could now become friends just wouldn't have made any sense. It would be a bit like if the Crusades had ended with everyone just deciding that actually, worshipping anything from Zeus to a giant duck god would be fine after all.

It's testament to Cromwell's skill and gravitas that he managed the chaotic situation as well as he did - even if "as well as he did" actually means "pretty badly". For "pretty badly" is not the "utter catastrophe" it easily could have been. Perhaps we can even excuse some of his more authoritarian tendencies - there being no democratic ideal to strive for and no clear idea as to what the roles of Parliament and Protector were supposed to be, no guiding principle for anyone to follow as to who should rule, let alone how.

If Boris Johnson would liken himself to Winston Churchill*, he has some definite resemblances to the nastier bits of Cromwell too. Given to long, rambling speeches, he repeatedly purged Parliament of his opponents, stoked fear and nationalism, and quite blatantly didn't understand how to work with a democratic Parliament - let along make that dysfunctional institution (for dysfunctional it certainly was) into something capable of running the country. It was Cromwell, and the respect in which he was held by the different groups, which managed that. Not respect for the office of Protector, but the man himself. Still, he was awful :

* Without realising the irony that Churchill was quite the racist and not widely regarded as being a democratic parliamentarian.

Cromwell's speech... was full of fear and warning, conjuring up once again images of 'Papists and Cavaliers' in league with the levelling sort. Much of the speech was devoted to 'security'... he claimed that those who opposed these men [the major generals] of 'known integrity and fidelity' were 'against the interest of England'.

'Being denied just things, we thought it our duty to get that by the sword which we could not otherwise do. And this hath been the spirit of Englishmen.'

It is, as so often with Cromwell, difficult to distinguish between the sincere and the manipulative, the hyperbolic and the realistic. One wonders whether the Protector found it any easier.

As with Johnson, it would be a mistake to present him as a full-throated despot. He did sometimes act purely in Parliament's interest, extending the duration which it sat when he was perfectly entitled to dissolve it by normal procedure. One of his odder moves was to in effect re-instate the House of Lords (though calling it simply the "Other Chamber"). The irony here was not that it was intended to curtail his own power, but that of the Commons - thus giving him, he hoped, more control of proceedings :

It was then that a new distraction had come upon the scene in the form of the Nayler trial, which, although it interrupted the advance of the succession debate, was to profoundly shape the Protector's attitude towards the creation of a second chamber, a successor to the House of Lords, to hold the Commons in check.

'By the proceedings of the Parliament, you see they stand in need of a check or balancing power, for the case of James Nayler might happen to be your case.' 

This, predictably, did not work :

The introduction of the Other House, so eagerly sought by Cromwell, had resulted in fewer regime loyalists in the Commons, which made managing the Hose that little bit harder. Problems were exacerbated when former allies of Cromwell... refused to take their seats in the new chamber, which looked a little too much like the old, and despised, House of Lords, and offered further fuel for the narrative of 'Betrayal'.

The need for a second chamber was real and continues to be so. But Cromwell had woefully misunderstood the nature and purpose of checks and balances. Adding more politicians, unless you really pack them with diehard, fawning loyalists, is liable to just add more disagreements - in the best case leading to more considered decisions, but in the worst case simply to an impasse. Without the second chamber Parliament also acted as a court (in the case of Nayler), and having politicians act as both judge and jury is pretty obviously one hell of a stupid idea.

Not that Cromwell never considered political theory and principle. It's just that he was very much a man of his time and the highly specific circumstances in which he found himself, with short-term considerations necessarily taking precedence over more grandiose ideas. He stipulated four principles of government which were to be strictly enforced : 1) Parliament could not sit permanently and must be elected frequently; 2) Government was to be comprised of Parliament and a "single person"; 3) Liberty on conscience was integral to government; 4) Control of the army was to be shared by Parliament and the Protector.

Here the concept of separation of powers is not more than the germ of an idea. It was a world wrestling with the idea of what the very purpose of government should be, and could not seem to escape the notion that Parliament was literally a process of parley with a ruler (formally this is still the case). That Parliament itself could be the entire system of government doesn't seem to have been on the agenda. It could be a check on the ruler's power at most, but not power itself - and perhaps in part rightly so at the time, since it was hardly a model of efficiency, let alone a bastion of representative democracy.

Strange alliances

No conflict is ever totally black and white. As in the Crusades did the Christians often side with the Muslims in support of specific goals, so during the Protectorate were there occasional alliances between Royalists and Levellers. On the face of it a group striving for social equality is by nature diametrically opposed to one insisting that certain bloodlines are divinely ordained to rule - the unifying factor was their opposition to Cromwell.

While these groups did occasionally join forces to become curious but genuinely dangerous bedfellows, Cromwell tended to exaggerate the threats. There was never any credible threat of foreign invasion during the Protectorate. For all its political failings, the basic institutes of State continued to function - political disturbance never translated into any significant unrest. In particular, Britain had a formidable and battle-tested military.

Referencing once again the unholy alliance of Royalists and Levellers, the declaration referred to a 'new and standing militia of horse'... The new tax was imposed on 'the whole of the royalist party, because the insurrection evidently involved the whole party by implications'. And yet this was despite the fact that many, perhaps most, Royalists passively accepted Cromwellian rule, if only because of the lack of any realistic hope of an alternative.

The truth is, Cromwell's rule was nowhere near as insecure as he imagined, or perhaps rather pretended it to be. A first-class intelligence network and strong army and navy made any threat from overseas implausible, while opposition within tended to be resentful and passive rather than optimistic and proactive.

Why exaggerate the threat ? Was Cromwell feeling genuinely paranoid and insecure ? Possibly. There are two reasons why this might be the case. First, Calvinist Protestantism lends itself very easily to monumental levels of insecurity :

Every event, major or minor, was to be interpreted within the overall plan of God's providence. An Essex minister sympathetic to the Protectorate recoreded his belief that the death of one of his children was due to his 'unreasonable playing at chess'... It was a surveillance society of the soul and it is no wonder it cultivated anxieties and paranoia.

The concept of a tireless interventionist and inescapable God might be compared to modern social meda.... Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are realms of round-the-clock surveillance, where one's thoughts and actions... are subjected to constant comparison and judgement. But one can opt out of social media, however addictive. There was no such option in the world God had created, nor in the next.

A heck of an analogy ! Second, and related, the failure of the 'Western Design' - a special military operation to annoy the Spanish in the Caribbean, which was poorly conceived and defined - would easily feed into this ever-watchful mindset. Even without the Calvinist philosophy, the failure of a major military project would give any ruler pause for thought. 

So it's at least possible that Cromwell really did misjudge the threats. But another explanation is that, just like in modern times, it behoves the ruling side to portray themselves as under attack. Charitably, this can be because of their own insecurities, aware their foundations are thinner than they'd like. Alternatively, but not mutually exclusively, having an external enemy to rally against is a great way to enforce group solidarity, preventing - or at least reducing - the prospect of the group fragmenting. My suspicion is that Cromwell, despite his religious hypocrisy*, was more than canny enough a political operator that this latter explanation is more likely. Perception is, after all, the name of the game in politics.

* "Puritanism and hypocrisy are natural partners", says Lay. And given this surveillance mindset, one can understand why : this level of repression is unnatural and self-destructive.

Trapped

I've likened Cromwell to Johnson, but this analogy should not be pressed very far. Cromwell, unlike Johnson, was brilliant. But the British republic was a fleeting, momentary thing. On this death, his son made a surprisingly good go of things considering he was "the worst prepared head of state in British history" (and incidentally, Richard Cromwell is the second-longest-lived head of state after Elizabeth II - it's just that unlike virtually every other ruler, he was able to abdicate and live a quiet life afterwards). Still, only a few short months afterwards, the experiment was over.

The impression from Lay is that everyone was trapped in the system. While individual Puritans made a determined - and occasionally brutal - attempt to enforce their ideology on the masses, they were nowhere near successful enough to overturn social conventions. Likewise the Protectorate system was too haphazard to ever work, too much dependent on the character of Cromwell and barely at all founded in philosophical or political principle. Once again, remembering the initially religious nature of the conflict makes this much easier to understand. Since few had actually set out to overturn the monarchy, there was little or no desire for a republic as the driving force in the country at large.

It does not seem too much of an oversimplification to state that the Protectorate was a monarchy by another name. The whole basis of government was the system of parlaying with the ruler. Without a movement to change the nature of the constitution, the easiest solution by far was simply to replace the king with someone else.

Or rather, the King, with a capital K. For monarchy had managed to cultivate an air of mystique that the title of Protector was unable to usurp. Everyone could see the Protector got to his position by merit - and there's nothing much divine about that (Calvinism notwithstanding). Whereas the King... he got there because God himself appointed him. Even in those who didn't buy into the Divine Right, kingship contained an almost mythological power that stretched back centuries. The title of Protector had no such associations.

More prosaically, the need for an individual head of state was deeply ingrained. More than that, the role of the king, and the limits of his divine power, were well-known, even if those limits were expansive. The Protector need not have such limits at all, a prospect many found distinctly uncomfortable :

Men... attended meetings in Whitehall in which the Protector would listen to their arguments as they sought to tie him down to the ancient office of monarch and restrict his personal rule to explicit English law, refined over centuries. Were the title placed on Cromwell's head, they urged, the people would 'know your duty to them, and they their duty to you... the people do love what they know.'

Cromwell was offered but refused the crown, apparently out of a sincere - on this occasion - religious belief, that God would have made it known if he should accept. He went further, endlessly procrastinating over the issue of succession until a hereditary solution was essentially forced on the system because nobody had any better ideas. But in every other respect he was King Oliver in all but title. The political circle of kingship simply could not be squared with the chaotic mass of conflicting revolutionary demands, and monarchy returned by default.

Conclusions

To me it feels like the Civil War was more the consequence than the cause of the massive social changes occurring in 17th-century Britain. Social norms were changing, but unevenly and incoherently. The country was pulling itself in different directions and nobody managed to lead a movement strong or persuasive enough to entirely subsume all the others. Reading Lay, all the major protagonists, Cromwell included, feel trapped by systemic forces they were unable to break.

Was a more democratic system even possible ? I'm not at all sure. Direct democracy would have been simply impossible, and certainly totalitarian despotism wouldn't have had any easy time of it. A representative democracy might, and I stress might, have been more feasible. But there was little or no underlying social movement to instigate it - it was simply never going to happen. And whatever Parliament's democratic elements that it did have were not nearly enough to render it a capable system of government. Too often still the notion persists that democracy of any kind is magically and literally inexplicably better than all of systems, something I think has been refuted over and over again. Democracy, it goes without saying, is essential in certain contexts, just as other methods of judgement are equally essential in other contexts.

Cromwell's Protectorate made the best of an extraordinarily complicated situation. The Instrument of Government wasn't the only attempt at a constitution, but it wasn't at all clear any sort of replacement would have helped. Years back an American associate told me that Britain should have a constitution to protect itself from dictators... well, we got rid of Johnson, however belatedly, without resort to anything except convention, whereas America had to endure Trump until he was finally beaten electorally (January 6th notwithstanding).

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying the British system is perfect - it isn't, it's shite. It's probably quite a bit better variety of shite than the American model (arguably, an irrational system of government is better able to handle man's irrational nature; the American model presumes too highly of people), but that's not saying much. My point is, the law is not the ultimate defence against tyranny. In the case of the Civil War, republicanism transmuted to de facto monarchy and then actual monarchy all too easily. As for Cromwell himself, arguably a would-be tyrant, the only thing that stopped him was his demise.

The unreality of physics

Last one on my catch-up list before I begin blogging books.

This is a very nice video which gets the closest I've ever seen to presenting a comprehensible version of the notion of wave-particle duality. I should warn you that I don't think it quite gets there. But it does open a promising avenue of inquiry.

To do this requires accepting that we are prisoners of perception, that what we can sense is not necessarily the whole of reality. This should not pose anyone any great difficulties : we know the Universe looks radically different at different wavelengths, we have no problem with the notion of animal senses being different to our own.

But we might have to go further than this. We might have to accept not only is our perception limited, but it is also just wrong - that reality is nothing like our perception of it. To me this is intuitively daft : we can only define things by how we perceive them, so anything else is a waste of time. Sure, there might be some pseudo-platonic form of an apple, but since we can never have any knowledge of what that is, it's pointless to speculate.

On the other hand, I'm comfortable with the idea of multiple dimensions. Objects existing in a fourth spatial dimension would appear magical to us, able to appear and disappear, pass through walls, and continuously change shape as they moved through a dimension our brain appears fundamentally unable to grasp. So in that sense I can accept a non-perceptible aspect to reality.

A better explanation, however, came in a recent discussion*. Simply put : there are no things, only stuff. A line they wisely rejected from The Matrix in favour of "there is no spoon"...

* Also featuring Xeno's Boner, for some reason.

What this means is that all language is a descriptive mental construct. To go back to Plato, "Names would have an absurd effect on the things they name, if they resembled them in every respect, since all of them would be duplicated, and no-one would be able to say which was the thing and which was the name." A name is not the thing, the map is not the territory. Or recall the excessively useful video about chairs (see also this). 

That is, there is something real out there that induces perception in here : we label its components (the "things"), but the real "stuff" does not have any associated chairness or planetyness about it at all. The "things" are just labels, the "stuff" is very real. This, I think, is entirely compatible with saying an apple is what induces the perception of an apple. It simply surrenders the notion of an apple of having any fundamental, atom-like reality : all it "really" is is a collection of particles.

Now this is only an analogy, but a useful one. If we accept for a moment that atoms are the most fundamental component of reality, then everything we see is just atoms. Clouds are how we label collections of water molecules in gaseous phase. Forks are collections of iron and carbon atoms arranged in a particular configuration. Bishops are collections of numerous atoms in complex configurations : neither bishops nor forks nor clouds are anything except our labels for different atomic structures; they do not exist in any strict physical sense except by linguistic convention - we can reduce everything, in this view to atoms.

The trick is to remember that this is an analogy. Atoms, of course, are certainly not the most fundamental component of reality - we have no idea at all what this might be. But it turns out we might not need to. On at last to the video.

This begins with a statement that perhaps instead of modelling the Universe, all science can do is model our observations of it. We model our knowledge, not the stuff itself. From the above, hopefully this should not be too great a leap. It's a subtle difference from the usual assumption that our models steadily improve and tell us more and more about the Universe - but the distinction that all they do is tell us more about our observations is ultimately not the same statement at all.

Rather than trying to model actual physical reality, this interpretation allows for a quantum theory which deals purely with information. And the building blocks of all our observations, if not necessarily reality itself, is certainly information. And this we can indeed reduce to a fundamental level : the bit. It appears that an information-based theory of quantum mechanics is able to reproduce quantum weirdness like entanglement and wave-particle duality.

According to this theory, since the basic unit of information is binary, you can ask a series of yes/no questions to get information about the behaviour of a quantum system. Ultimately the system only has a finite amount of information to work with, so if your experimental setup demands more, you get wave-like randomness...

But alas, dear reader, this is where the video's genius comes to an end. Frankly this feels a bit like getting the golf ball onto the green and then running away, or reaching the point of climax but then deciding to take a cold shower... if it could only follow through this chain of thought a little more ! Walk me through the double-slit experiment, for pity's sake ! Tell me how the limited information manifests itself in that experimental setup, and I'll be your friend for life !

Ah well, can't have everything. Provocative, even so.

Non-science is non-sense, not nonsense

I continue to work through my extensive backlog of write-ups, turning this time back to philosophy.

I like Ian Wardell's blog very much. He offers a different perspective to mine, is exceptionally clear in stating his reasoning and conclusions, and best of all, we agree and disagree on a sufficient number of issues to ensure that it's always worth reading. This post is one I tend to strongly agree with, and it's phrased so well that I want to respond to it here for my own sake. It's a rebuttal of a book I haven't read (though the blog post stands just fine on its own), concerning the nature of the soul and the possibility of an afterlife - both notions which Wardell believes in, whereas I reserve judgement.

There is one section where I disagree. Wardell says that the book's description of the soul as a mysterious, non-physical consciousness, giving us free will and immortality, is flawed. He prefers a definition of the mental substance of the soul as "that which thinks". I disagree that this is a useful definition, we could say a table is "that which holds the tablecloth" but this would tell us nothing at all about what a table is, only what it does. In contrast the book's description, despite its extreme vagueness, tells us far more about the nature of the soul : it is non-corporeal, immortal, and essential for consciousness. These seem like important beginnings to me.

However, this is a minor point, and has no bearing on the rest of the post. The definitions aren't mutually exclusive anyway. His next section, on whether the soul is a scientific notion, is what I find much more interesting.

Wardell first considers the idea that the soul is a scientific hypothesis, that it could be subject to verification by measurement :

The phrase that the “physical world is closed”, sometimes referred to as physical causal closure, refers to the idea that all change in the world is purely and exclusively a result of the interactions of the four physical forces existing in nature (namely, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force). Believing in a causally potent soul/self contradicts such physical causal closure.

I agree that, at least in principle, this contravening of physical causal closure will be detectable. However, I suspect that the initial impact on consciousness will likely be minute, perhaps on the quantum scale. It is only then, via physical chains of causes and effects, that this initial impact cascades into larger and larger effects. Importantly, since neuroscientists are virtually all materialists*, they won't be looking for any such influence, least of all any minute influence. Furthermore, and crucially, our functional MRIs lack the resolution to make any assertions in this regard in any case.

* I am not at all sure that's true, but this is by-the-by. 

In other words, as I've speculated before, free will means a non-physical process causing a measurable, physical change. If the mind, a.k.a. (arguably) the soul, has an effect on physical reality, if there is something non-physical at work, the effects should still be in principle visible with ordinary scientific instruments. This needn't be anything dramatic - as in CCD multipliers, a single photon can be amplified to give measurable results (though perhaps we've got the whole notion of brain waves causing conscious choices completely backwards). Various readings lately* about how difficult analysing the brain actually is in practise leave me to think that detecting something on this scale would be monumentally difficult, so I leave that possibility open.

* Especially Jackie Higgins Sentient, to be blogged soon. This does a commendable job of explaining how most science is not a series of Eureka-moment revelations but a gradual, grinding slog, where even relatively minor, incremental findings can take years or even decades to be solidly established - simply because science is frickin' hard. This is something I can attest to from direct personal experience.

Note that this is not at all the same as the "god of the gaps" fallacy. A working, materialist description of the brain in no way precludes a non-physical aspect to consciousness, as we shall see momentarily.

Wardell elaborates :

Science also has its limitations since it can only describe that which is measurable, or in other words, that which is material. This means that our experience of colours, sounds, and odours reside beyond the ambit of science. So too do our emotions, our thoughts, the pains we experience, and indeed, the entirety of our conscious lives. Hence, consciousness as a whole, and a fortiori, the self or soul that has all these conscious experiences, resides outside the ambit of science. 

I'll just interrupt here to interject this post about qualia, if it's unclear as to the difference between our experience of a thing and the thing itself.

In order to make this notion that science has its limitations more clear, it might be illuminating here to introduce an analogy. Metal detectors have a great deal of success in detecting metal. But they cannot detect wood, plastic, rubber, or anything else non-metallic. And, so long as metal detectors are merely metal detectors, they will only ever be able to detect metal, and never anything else. In a similar manner, the physical sciences can only detect the material or that which is measurable. It cannot detect that which is non-measurable, so it cannot directly detect consciousness, or selves, or souls should they exist. At best, we could only measure the effect on bodies initiated by the causal power of consciousness. But, as I have already mentioned, such an initial mental influence is unlikely to be currently detectable.

I conclude, contra Musolino, that we cannot claim that the soul is a scientific hypothesis. It is a philosophical one and, more specifically, a metaphysical one.

For more on the necessity for science to restrict itself to measurable reality, and how sometimes non-physical concepts come crashing headlong into mainstream science, see this (rather lengthy) post.

I like this very much. I am a scientist, not a scientismist : I see no reason to presume the entire of reality can be described by measurable observation. That is an assumption necessary for science but irrelevant to philosophy. Hence the title. Things which are inherently non-scientific, e.g. poetry, are nothing to do with what we can sense and measure directly : we cannot objectively measure colour as experienced, still less guilt or ennui or the delight engendered by a host of golden daffodils. These things cannot be "sensed", but they are hardly nonsense.

What does it mean here to say that the soul is a philosophical concept ? I view this to mean the soul is an interpretative concept for understanding how processes work. The cause of a thing is not the same as the thing itself, as in Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum :

“Oh, you mean the aurora coriolis,” said Oats, trying to make his voice sound matter-of-fact. “But actually that’s caused by magic particles hitting the–”

“Dunno what it’s caused by,” said Granny sharply, “but what it is, is the phoenix dancin’.”

I don't know if anyone has done an analysis of the philosophy of Discworld, but they bloody well should.

In this case, we could potentially never find the soul through scientific analysis - and it could still exist. This completely avoids any sort of fallacious gaps, much as viewing God as the underlying cause of all things does not mean an idiotic notion of a big beardy invisible man moving every particle about with tweezers. The soul instead could be conceptual, a way of understanding, not predicting, observational reality.

I should point out that Wardell has elsewhere advocated a much more scientific view of the soul, arguing that there is indeed evidence for ghosts and suchlike (which I completely disagree with). But I must also point out that I called this blog Decoherency precisely to give myself a license to contradict myself, so I can hardly critique him on that score.

I need only cover the remaining points in brief. Wardell uses the analogy of a pixelated image appearing more clearly at a greater distance as an analogy to the materialist view of consciousness : that it is somehow emergent from its constituent parts, which, when viewed correctly, can indeed be shown to be one and the same as consciousness itself even though when viewed differently nothing such is evident (i.e. neurons might be each individually physically explicable, but it's the collective whole which is conscious).

Wardell rejects this, and so do I. It seems to me that the nature of mind is simply too different to ever reconcile with materialism; qualia cannot be physical by definition. But I plan to tackle this in more detail when I eventually blog up Metazoa (I know, I've been threatening to do this for some time, but I'm on a blogging binge right now so fingers crossed). I am not sure I agree that physical objects cannot somehow create consciousness, however, but I would add that by having access to non-physical qualia, we can make choices based on non-physical reality - which seems like an excellent way to allow for free will, even if we don't have to go the whole way and accept the notion of a soul or an afterlife per se.

Finally, the notion that brain damage causes a change of consciousness meaning that it must be somehow physical. Here too I agree with Wardell that this is not so. The brain could create and mediate a conscious "field" without part of the brain itself literally being consciousness. Alternatively, a receiver need not affect whatever it receives - a broken radio doesn't stop the signal itself. And that's before we even begin to consider more fundamental aspects of the nature of reality : idealism, monism, that sort of thing.

In short, it might be possible to build a consciousness detector - or even a soul detector. But this would not at all be like the hunt for Bigfoot. In principle, you could fell the entire of North America's forests and disprove that Bigfoot was real. A soul detector that failed, however, would arguably not be the same at all. It would be as meaningless as declaring that William Blake's The Tyger was wrong or made of custard : applying things which could certainly be said about mathematics or trifles, but have no business whatever in literary analysis.