LLMs Ex Nihilo

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT ? SERIOUSLY ? WHEN YOU GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT ?

– Death, Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)

That's the scale of the problem we're facing when dealing with the issue of whether computers can think. Forget the robot uprising crap, we're talking full-on "meaning of life stuff" here. Allow me to explain.

As I've said previously, I've made peace with the idea that we'll probably never get a "truth engine" that can analyse data and form a truly objective, impartial conclusion. We might well get something that does better than we do at formulating conclusions though, which is not to be sniffed at. So instead I'm comfortable with describing AI (mostly but not entirely meaning LLMs) as "thinking engines" instead. That is, they process data and produce conclusions, and that's all I mean by "think". I'm using the word in a very broad, very liberal sense.

I tend to object rather strongly to the notion that LLMs currently go any way beyond this. I don't think they're conscious because I don't think they have any sort of subjective inner awareness. They're not really deterministic but they are still essentially algorithmic robots. They can be described as having a kind of understanding in a useful, productive sense, but not at all in the human-like way. They don't form mental images. They have no sense of the ineffable about them, no emotions, no desires of their own, they are nothing but data processors – and I think there's a very great deal more in a genuine mind than merely analysing raw input data.

The following article from Vox is remarkably thoughtful for a popular piece with a clickbaity headline. It's worth reading in full, but there are two essential points I want to highlight. The first is that minds are not necessarily all alike :

Radically different materials can execute the same basic operation. Biology may have produced the first flying entities. But the reason that birds can soar above the treetops isn’t that they’re made of organic tissue — it’s that their wings perform a set of aerodynamic tasks, such as generating lift and minimizing drag. As airplanes vividly demonstrate, if you put metal and fuel together in just the right way, you can replicate these functions and take to the skies.

To be sure, biological neural networks and artificial ones aren’t identical in design or behaviour. But neither is a cardinal [presumably meaning the bird, not the bishopy sort] and a Boeing 747. Nonetheless, the airplane replicates the avian functions that are necessary for flight. Likewise, computational functionalists wager that computers can instantiate all the neural operations that are relevant to consciousness. So, as long as they recreate a brain’s elaborate algorithms with sufficient precision, they actually can be conscious.

I will gloss over that "be" for the moment, because I take the point that minds might be qualitatively different from each other. Indeed, it would be surprising if they were not, animals having enormously different biology, senses, appendages, and environments with which they have to interact. So I'm prepared to concede that a conscious LLM may have little enough in common with the mind of a bumblebee or a dog or a professor of geology.

But how fundamental can this difference be before we stop calling it a mind at all ? For sure, it could be so different that we have very great difficulty in recognising an alien or robotic intelligence as being conscious. It seems to me, however, that if it doesn't have subjective, inaccessible, inner awareness, if it can't imagine things and those imaginings have no direct correspondence in the real world (just as we can imagine yellow without yellow being present), then we have no business calling it a mind, really. Thinking ? Understanding ? Yes, but only in the (still useful !) sense of data processing. Not at all in the philosophical sense. I see no reason whatever to presume that a network of probabilistic word generation algorithms, however elaborate, would count as truly having a mind any more than would an abacus. 

The article then explores (quite nicely) the notion of computational functionalism, wherein it's the process that's conscious, not the thing itself. I'm sympathetic to this view. Indeed, this could be interpreted as far more subtle than ordinary materialism or physicalism, in which some physical thing actually is conscious. You could even see it as a hybrid step, as close to dualism as a physicalist interpretation would allow*. And in that sense, I don't think it's crazy.

* That is, an electron is a real physical thing. But the mere movement of an electron isn't a thing. You can't say that movement is a physical object, because that's nonsense. So the process of electrons moving around, in a complex EM field, as being conscious is not really the same claim as saying the electrons themselves are actually little bits of minds.

The article's second major point is where I come unstuck :

We can name the physical laws that enable birds to get off the ground. And we have always had reason to believe that inanimate objects could emulate their movement; grains of sand have travelled through the air since time immemorial. By contrast, no one has ever seen a rock experience pain or pleasure, even momentarily (in part, because it’s impossible to directly observe the internal experience of any being or entity other than oneself).

There's the crux. You can't observe consciousness from the outside because it only exists internally, and whether this is because it's a process or an actual substance makes no difference at all. If you see a bunch of neurons firing, do you see yellow ? No, a bunch of neurons firing doesn't look yellow. If you see hormones diffusing throughout the brain, can you honestly say, "yep, I'm witnessing anger ?". No, you cannot. You have no idea what's going on in the conscious mind of the subject. 

The physical and the conscious clearly have some deep, intimate connection, but they are absolutely nothing like each other. There's a world of difference between saying that one gives rise to the other (I'm perfectly comfortable with that) and saying that the two things are literally the same.

A possible escape route is that maybe we can't say a person is angry or horny or introspective from a mere brain scan due to sheer complexity. Maybe we need to know everything in great detail, and we just can't capture the full neurochemical state in enough resolution to make more than a crude guess as to what a person is thinking. Perhaps if we could do so, we would literally be able to read minds.

I claim that this is not the case. I think the Hard Problem is actually the Impossible Problem. I claim that even if we had absolutely all physical information about the system, we would still never know what a person was thinking, not really.

Imagine, if you will, a stupendous spreadsheet listing the configuration of every atom, every subatomic particle in a human body. Could you use this to learn an awful lot about brain states, even a reasonable guess as to what the person was thinking about ? Yes, certainly. But no list of numbers ever actually is yellowness or being horny. The numbers [255, 255, 0] may describe perfectly to a computer how to produce the colour yellow, but it makes no sense to say that that list actually is yellow. They give rise to it, and that is all they do, all they can do.

"What ? That argument is stupid, I'm seeing [255, 0, 0] right now !" said no-one ever. You cannot experience a colour just from a list of numbers : they might give rise to your internal state, but that's not at all the same as saying they actually are the colour itself. That would be insane. Complexity is simply not the issue here at all.

Which brings me to the "meaning of life stuff" I promised earlier. What's been running around in my head is the opposite case : the idea that connections and processes are literally all there is. In that case, you could certainly say that an LLM had a similar consciousness to a human. You wouldn't have to resort to panpsychism, because you could legitimately say that only certainly processes were complex, and not everything in existence undergoes such processes.

But the result would be, I think, extreme nihilism of such a degree as to be actually offensive. I've postulated that meaning arises through knowledge of the connections between different things, that we can be said to understand a thing based on how much we know about how it relates to other things and our ability to predict its behaviour in novel situations. The more moral sense of the word "meaning" may encode something similar : meaningful experiences are those which affect many of our internal links, our own local knowledge of how things relate to each other.

Now suppose that those connections are all there are. That is, knowledge, understanding, and ultimately consciousness itself, arise from connections between items of information and nothing else. That's it. We've hit rock bottom. A mind is a set of relations between physical things and there's nothing else to it. Mystery solved, we can all go home for tea and biscuits.

Or, quite honestly, we may as well all do whatever the fuck we want, or just not bother. I find this idea unspeakably bleak, because if that's all there is, then we're just... electrons and magnetic fields. Atoms bashing about. We have no more claim to moral value than a rock. Without something deeper than the visible connections (some continuing series of connections, possibly going all the way down), we could not rightly say that murder or torture was wrong, and that I simply will not accept.

"But,", you may say, "maybe the moral meaning is something that emerges from the system if it can't be found within it reductively". Ah yes, you might say that. But that concedes the point that there's more to the system than what's visible, doesn't it ?

Fortunately for my own mental health, I think this idea has absolutely no merit in it. The idea that a mind literally is the observable processes, or the physical constituent parts of the nervous system, is to me absolutely and incomprehensibly WRONG. 

Now to be sure many people accept the materialistic world view without falling into moral degeneracy; some at least have probably even fully embraced the "it's all just atoms" perspective without becoming absolute cunts (though I would be a wee bit skeptical as to just how many have really thought this through). And that's fine, I guess, as long as it helps them get through the day. But I cannot escape the feeling that for me personally, this doesn't work. If other people want to live in such a reality, then good for them, I suppose. But for me ? I think I'd rather hit myself in the face with a brick, thanks. After all :

If droids could think, there'd be none of us here.

– Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

The Better Angels Of Our Scientific Nature

I've pointed out many times that what seems rational is constantly evolving as evidence changes. If you don't notice things disappearing over the horizon gradually, or the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, then a flat Earth is an entirely sensible thing to believe in.

A contrary view from comes from the New Atheist crowd, who are apt to insist that all of humanity's history would have been better if people had just never believed in anything religious. This is a garbage and meritless claim, for many reasons/ For one thing, as Pratchett pointed out :

“The amount of belief in the world must be subject to an upper limit... It follows that if a major focus of belief is removed, there will be spare belief.”

You can't just stop believing in things by choice. Can't be done. And this follows in part from the above, that at one point, the evidence for the now-discarded ideas seemed very good indeed. Supernatural explanations made a lot of sense, because we understand minds and agency at a much more instinctual level than we do the conservation of momentum or the hysteresis curve. 

It follows, then, that at one point we really had very little option but to believe in supernatural agency for a good many things : we literally have to believe in something, and without a rational explanation available, the gap is filled with angels and demons.

Which leads me in to this thoroughly interesting Aeon essay which examines this in a lot more detail. More than that, it shows how philosophical musings on the nature of angels was anything but the proverbially-empty question : how many angels can dance on the head of the pin, it turns out, is a tremendously useful vehicle for exploring the nature of space and matter. Inquiries may have begun from a world view that now seems preposterous, but the full examination of these early ideas, when done with careful rigour and logic, led directly to some of the scientific notions we now find most fundamental of all.

This view of angels as immaterial ‘intelligences’ became pretty standard in medieval philosophy and theology. But the scholastic period saw an increasing desire to systematise, systematise, systematise. The precise nature or essence of angels became a serious cause for debate, and these debates were not mere thought experiments. Rather, because of the real belief in the existence of angels, theologians and philosophers could think through angels as a way of understanding the nature of the physical world and things like place, bodies and motion. 

This was motivated by significant theological concerns. One concern was that, if angels are immaterial intelligences, then what makes them different to God? For us, our bodies are what make us limited, able to exercise force only directly, such as when I throw a ball. Does this mean angels, having no body, could exist everywhere or act at a distance? This was dangerous territory for theologians, potentially challenging God’s omnipresence and omnipotence.

And again, I've gone on enough times about how Christianity isn't really monotheistic, because if you allow other supernatural powers which aren't under god's direct agency, then you've all but conceded paganism. However, the author here has a much more interesting point : that to make sense of angels conceptually, you have to grapple with basic physics. And no, the "it's just magic" explanation was not enough for medieval theologians.

The view was that angels had to be located (i.e., limited) but without a body. The key to understanding the angelic debates of the scholastic period is to understand what conceptual tools the physics of the day provided. For all intents and purposes, this physics was Aristotle. For Aristotle, physics was simply about things that move and, on his account, bodies don’t move because of gravity or kinetic energy or the warping of spacetime but because of their natures. 

Similarly, there was no concept of absolute space, but rather a concept of ‘place’, which, unlike Newtonian absolute space or Albert Einstein’s spacetime, does not exist entirely independent of the bodies that inhabit it. As the philosopher Tiziana Suárez-Nani points out in Angels, Space and Place (2008), ‘space … as an undifferentiated and homogenous receptacle, was alien to the medieval mind.’ For Aristotle, bodies could not exist without place, which served as a kind of container. Likewise, there had to be bodies for there to be place. In other words, a vacuum is not possible in Aristotle’s view.

I think it's worth pausing for a moment to consider just how profoundly different this is from the modern concept of space. For us, space is a container : it consists of nothing in itself, but it's where everything goes. It's the "fabric" of the Universe which can itself expand, warp, contract etc., but it's not really a physical thing. It's more the reference system we have for other objects. It isn't defined by them, though it is intimately connected*. It can, in principle, be absolutely empty (vacuum energy notwithstanding), and indeed that's exactly what we mean by space itself. The kind of vacuum-abhorring "place" that Aristotle espoused was something altogether different from our modern notion.

* And people say dualism is some sort of mysticism ! Don't worry, I'm not going there today.

So, what has that got to do with angels? If you recall, theological concerns at the time required angels to have a specific location – to be limited and bodiless – in order to avoid angels with limitless power, rendering them omnipotent as well as omnipresent. Normally, the material body of something locates it, so how can immaterial angels be located? Aquinas and others solved this problem creatively, locating angels not by their physical dimensionality but by their operations. Aquinas proposed that an angel has a different type of location than a bodily being. An angel is in a place by virtue of applying its power to the physical objects in a given place. This limited both an angel’s operations and their location, locating them by their operations, rather than by a body.

Right, so you can have angels which aren't omnipotent or omnipresent and are still immaterial and supernatural. Hooray ! But :

Importantly, the Condemnations of 1277 forbade believing that angels are located by their operations rather than by their substance, so Aquinas’ solution for angelic location was now off the table. If an angel exists in a place solely by its operations, as Aquinas claimed, then what happens when it’s not operating? Angels had to be rethought.

Here’s what Scotus did: he made ‘place’ more mathematical, less tied to location and more similar to our notion of dimension. When thought about in terms of dimension, the ‘place’ occupied by an object stays the same as the object moves through locations. In this sense, its ‘place’, redefined as dimension, is the same, even though it changes location. In other words, Scotus, as aptly stated by Lang, ‘neutralises’ place radically. On the Aristotelian account, direction or location were part of the definition of ‘place’. When redefined more mathematically as a kind of dimension, direction is no longer a necessary feature of this new kind of ‘place’. You can have an idea much more like that of ‘space’, something that doesn’t inherently contain ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ in its definition.

Technically, this meant that God could create a rock in no ‘place’, if place referred to Aristotle’s definition of place, which was a location within the outermost rim of the heavenly spheres. Whereas Aristotle had defined place as a necessary defining feature of physical bodies, Scotus did not. Instead, he created a hybrid account in which something can exist inside the outermost rim of the celestial sphere (occupying place in the Aristotelian sense), but it doesn’t have to; it could equally just occupy space by having dimension outside of that sphere.

And to use another Pratchett quote : all places are indeed one place, but that place is very large. 

Ahem. We even get something akin to the Uncertainty Principle cropping up :

The image Lang uses, citing Scotus, is of a surface that must have colour, but whose colour can be anything. Angels can occupy a place however small or large, just not infinitely so, and they must operate in a place, though they themselves exist in the place indeterminately... To posit angels as immaterial external forces was indeed oddly closer to a classical physics that sees an invisible force like gravity working on bodies externally. In fact, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz accused Newton of having introduced occult forces with his theory of gravity, because gravity seemed to be a supernatural force acting on bodies at a distance.

I mean, it just tells you a lot about human psychology when you find scientists accusing each other of being occult because their rigorous, predictable, mathematical theorems are somehow similar to angels... I'm not sure what exactly it's telling us, but it's certainly a lot, whatever it is. It's interesting to consider "angels" as a proxy for "force", though it would seem very strange to suggest that God ordered the world using ultra-obedient angels rather than just making things go round and round. Why didn't planets move directly according to his will ? Perhaps this again points to a seriously profound mismatch between our modern concepts and the medieval mindset. 

The role angels played in such thought experiments was unique: angels transcended the purely physical world but were still ‘creatures’ that abided by the rules and the logic governing the Universe.. .angels, precisely because of their intermediary status, allowed human beings to think about dimensions of created reality that yet transcended our direct human perceptions.

While it is easy enough to ridicule the suggestion that movement is the result of occult forces such as angels, we cannot, having ascended the ladder of knowledge, so easily kick that ladder out from under ourselves... We equate ‘up’ with ‘more’ when we say ‘the stock market rises’ because when we see, for example, rocks piled up, we learn to equate higher with more. We say we ‘grasp’ an idea because we have experienced reaching for a piece of fruit on a tree. In addition, we have a very hard time imagining a nonphysical thing. What we imagine, when we imagine a soul or an angel or a demon, is some kind of insubstantial, but still ghostly, object.

I would say slightly the opposite on this last point. We have no problems at all imagining ghosts in an abstract sense. Ghost ? Sure, it's a person who can walk through walls, wails around a lot waving chains and making woo-woo noises. Easy peasy. But try and explain how this works on the physical level and we come quickly unstuck. How can it be perceived if it doesn't interact with light ? How can we hear its woo-woo noises if it can walk through solid walls : why would its lungs interact with the molecules of the air, and why doesn't it fall through the floor ? Nevertheless, the imaginary concept of a ghost is simplicity itself.

Although occult forces such as angels and demons may be ridiculed in modern culture as ‘hand-wavey’ explanations of quite logical, down-to-earth scientific phenomena, I would suggest the inverse. That what is most down-to-earth might in fact be to think about the invisible forces of nature as angels, agents, immaterial intelligences with certain properties familiar to us, but amplified. Properties like agency and intention. It is only in thinking through, and with, these more familiar concepts that we can then discover a less intuitive set of concepts, like spacetime, which require grounding in concepts like dimension, body, place and movement. These necessary grounding concepts were sharpened, historically, by thinking through the relationship between the material and immaterial world, and angelology played a significant role in their honing.

And I find myself in strong agreement. I presume that the author doesn't mean that we really should think about things as all being imbued with intentionality or anything like that, only that we naturally do. Such a beginning is our jumping-off point, something we can easily understand in order to progress to the next level. Saying that electrons, in suspiciously Aristotleian-fashion, want to reach the lowest energy state, is a very handy lie-to-children. Pretty soon (sometimes immediately) we realise that the electron doesn't necessarily want anything at all, in the literal sense, but the metaphor helps us understand. Only with that basic concept in hand can we get to the hard mathematics, to try and consider – insofar as our observational data permits us – what's really going on.

Right then, time to write to Dan Brown and tell him to write a blockbuster sequel. I'm sure philosophical musings on the nature of immaterial angels and their implications for cosmology is a guaranteed cinema hit.

Review : Galileo's Daughter (I)

There was only one trial of Galileo, although legends often speak of two... There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand – the suppression of science by religion, the defence of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech. No other process in the annals of canon or common law had ricocheted through history with more meanings, more consequences, more conjectures, more regrets.

Today, a look at Dava Sobel's magisterial Galileo's Daughter. First published in 1999, this was one of the books from an unread stockpile I bought back with me from my last trip home.

I can only find two real weaknesses with this book, both minor. It's a little weirdly undefined in its goals in the first couple of chapters or so, making the pace a feel just a little bit off. It would have helped a little to spell out what the book was going to be about, especially because of the title. We hear almost nothing of the eponymous daughter until a hundred pages in, and even thereafter, she's not really the focus at all.

Not that this matters. What the book actually is is a biography of Galileo, focusing heavily on his conflict with the Inquisition. The central thesis is that while this might have been a conflict between an academic and the Church, by no means was this a clash between science and religion. Along the way we get an in-depth look at Galileo the man, particularly drawing on letters from his daughter, but also plenty of theological and philosophical insights. 

If she fails to give a clear mission statement of what the book is supposed to be, Sobel nevertheless manages to balance things perfectly. The book is not one word too long or too short. We get enough background to Galileo's life to understand the trial in its full context without losing focus; enough detail on the trial itself to understand how things proceeded without getting into unnecessary minutiae; enough of the aftermath to follow the consequences without losing sight of Galileo the man. We get all the core philosophical arguments, all the essential subtle differences between the views of Galileo and his detractors, presented in a clear and unbroken narrative flow. Overall, I think I have to give this one 9/10.

I cannot possibly give a summary that retains Sobel's narrative without still being many thousands of words long. So instead, let's try the usual thematic approach, gradually building up to the all-important trial which has become so (arguably) spuriously emblematic of the conflict between science and religion. In this first part, I'll look at Galileo's other achievements outside astronomy and his character as a person. In part two, I'll cover his philosophical approach to scientific inquiry and his conflict with the Church.

1) Galileo the Polymath

Perhaps the first thing that becomes apparent is that Galileo was no one-hit-wonder. To be honest this is something I should have been more aware of, but while I knew something of Galileo's astronomy, I had only vague impressions of his experiments on motion, and I knew nothing at all about his more practical skills.

Here Galileo is revealed to be a true renaissance man, a veritable polymath to rival Da Vinci except for his lack of artistic achievements. He possibly could have gone down this route – his father was a musician and his own drawings of the Moon are of extremely high quality – but he seems to have preferred to have concentrated firmly on science and engineering. His more creative tendencies were reserved for his public outreach activities and tending to his garden. And this is no bad thing, since, unlike Da Vinci, he left little unfinished. His interests were wide-ranging, and yet he seemed to have no issue with taking years to complete his projects : not to say that he wanted things to take this long, but he wouldn't get distracted along the way. If he was ever derailed, then it wasn't by choice, and he'd almost always eventually pick up where he left off.

Galileo's most famous non-astronomy work is surely dropping cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Sobel is careful is her framing here of this "legendary" experiment, but in the text as written, it sounds very much as though he actually did do this, and much earlier in his career than in the more carefully-documented case of rolling balls down an inclined plane. Still, he wrote with some bitterness that while the larger ball did beat the smaller, the point was that they don't fall at anything like the same speed, as Aristotle had claimed : his detractors were completely missing the point. "Speaking of my tiny error", he wrote, they "remain silent about his enormous mistake".

He would tackle more minor but important problems throughout his life. In Venice he was granted a patent on an irrigation device, and while under house arrest much later in life, he prepared a practical demonstration to explain why a recent bell-casting had failed in spectacular fashion. For income, he was partly supported by the sale of his own geometric calculating compass : a sort of elaborate slide-rule for a wide variety of mathematical calculations. Whilst conducting his early observations of the heavens, he also showed, as a side project, that objects float because of their density and not their shape as the prevailing wisdom dictated*, thus overturning centuries of conventional wisdom by having some bloody common sense.

* There was an odd belief that ice was actually heavier than water, which is something so easy to test that it just seems bizarre that nobody ever checked it.

Perhaps the most impressive Galilean spin-off came later. During his experiments on acceleration with inclined planes, he developed standardised measurements to ensure he was making fair comparisons between data points. This was in itself a monumental breakthrough. First, that he came up with a practical method to reach the precision and accuracy needed, but secondly, that the concept of standardised measurements simply didn't exist. This was a profoundly non-mathematical world, and while the mentality of those in the distant past can be startlingly similar to our own, in other ways it can be shocking in its most fundamental differences. Galileo played no small role in changing that. And finally, he did this in his old age while in chronic ill health. So much for the idea that scientific revolutions are the province of the young... In his rigorously quantitative approach, Galileo would surely appreciate the cliché that age really is just a number.

Oh yes, and he also invented the microscope. Janus-like, he looked both to world above and below, and if he spent more time on the firmament than terra firma, this seems to have been merely a matter of happenstance. Galileo appears to have been very much the right man at the right time : he had the practical skills needed to develop the instruments and the mindset to appreciate just how radical his discoveries really were. As he himself wrote with no false modesty :

"I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries... four planets never seen from the beginning of the world right up to our day."

Through some admittedly blurry images from crude glass, Galileo's discoveries would change the world. Small wonder that not everyone approved. With the simplest of devices and an image quality that still left much to be desired, he was proposing nothing less than a total restructuring of reality.

2) Galileo the man

But before we get carried away, it's worth a brief look at the character of Galileo. The figure that emerges from Sobel's telling is a genius and generally a good egg by the standards of his day. He seems to have been extremely generous to his family, sparing what little income he had (in his early days) to support them with enthusiasm rather than reluctance. 

But he was not much of a social radical. True, he wrote a rather bawdy poem bemoaning the fact that his scholarly toga wouldn't let him visit brothels (we've all had that problem), but he also put his daughters in convents and didn't marry his partner as this was just not the done thing for scholars at the time. Which also reveals that even this most Catholic of countries could, and did, easily find ways around the rules when it suited them. It was never a case of the Church having absolute control over people's lives, which is purely the stuff of myth.

The advantage of Sobel's biography is to set Galileo's work in the context of his personal life. In many scientific histories, it's easy to think of them as pathologically obsessed with research : this Galileo is, instead, a real person with real person things to do. We follow his surprisingly mobile career in institutes in towns across Italy, his chronic ill health (making it all the more impressive that he reached 77 years of age by the time of his death), his love for his family along with his (very) occasional chastisements. We see him being delighted to send them fruit and exasperated when they turn up en masse for a while in his rather modest accommodations; the embarrassment of his daughter on learning that "buffalo eggs" were actually a type of cheese is still palpable after more than three centuries.

What emerges is, as you might expect, a complex character. He was famously entertaining and flamboyant, and could use this in the most obsequious terms of flattery when seeking a patron. He seems to have a real need to be liked by people as well as persuade them of his ideas, but also (like many exuberant promoters) was quite willing to offend. Although generally quite careful in what he wrote, he would sometimes deliberately tread on people's toes if they disagreed with him. He definitely seems to have had an arrogant streak that was perhaps the source of his rhetorical flair, but it was hardly unjustified : he really had seen things that nobody had seen before and contemplated them in ways undreamt of.

But he also seems to have been something of an egalitarian and favoured a meritocratic approach to education. He worked under the patronage system and adopted university dress codes only insofar as he could not avoid them, preferring more casual attire whenever possible. He wrote his outreach dialogues in Italian, not Latin, having a genuine belief that this would be of benefit to the common man and not just to the scholarly elite. If he does seem to nonetheless have enjoyed being one of the elite, he definitely valued learning wherever he found it. He does not appear to have been especially concerned with fighting culture wars or calling for any sort of social reform. He would help people when he could, but doesn't seem to have contemplated any structural changes to society – though he did have some very definite ideas about where the Church was going wrong theologically.

Perhaps his biggest contradiction was that he was willing the bend the rules and outright lie in the interests of the greater truth. In this we must allow two things : first, that most of us will probably try to save our own skins ahead of sticking to our principles, and that parts of the Church were most certainly corrupt. "No-one has spoken with more piety or with greater zeal for the Church than I", he wrote. Yet when necessary, he also called his own work, "merely a poetical conceit, or a dream... this fancy of mine... this chimera." His beliefs were sincere, but his approach was flexible.

Galileo knew he was right and the Church was wrong, and that in his mind, suppression of his ideas was harmful to everyone – including the Church. If he had to lie about what he really believed in order to publish it, then so be it. If he had to take desperate measures in publishing them in the protestant Netherlands, and then proclaiming in transparently ridiculous terms that he had no idea how that happened, then he was surely justified in doing so. Sticking rigidly to his principles and telling the Church where to shove it might have been a heroic stance to take, but Galileo was no hero... and it would have been profoundly unwise. Galileo was right and the Church was wrong, but as we shall see, this is not at all the same as the claim that science and religion were at odds. In Galileo's own mind, such a thing was not even possible. 

---

In part two, we'll move on to see how Galileo had no issues in reconciling science and religion, and indeed the very idea of a conflict was barely imagined. Nor was he alone in his theological happiness, with his views being widely shared amongst the upper echelons of the Church. Naturally, then, we'll conclude with a look at how, despite everyone being one big happy god-fearing family, everything went so catastrophically wrong for a man so used to widespread acclaim and admiration. 

Review : Impossible Monsters (II)

Time to conclude my breakdown of Michael Taylor's Impossible Monsters, which looks at the discovery of dinosaurs from the perspective of science and religion. In part one I covered how the boundaries between the two were often fuzzy, especially in the early part of the Victorian period. Individuals, too, were the proverbial rich tapestry : some clergy were tolerant and liberal, some agnostics were nasty little bastards. Here I'll look more at how the theory of evolution itself developed, and some of the conflicts that occurred between theory and theology.

Sometimes, a harmonious coexistence of science and religion prevailed. But there were lines which, if crossed, could lead to psychological violence with serious consequences for those involved.

At the start of the period this was almost entirely in favour of the religious, who held all the cards and pulled all the strings of society. By the end, the roles were in no sense reversed, but a critical tipping point had been breached. No longer would every atheist routinely fear for their job security, let alone their social standing and still less for their basic freedoms. It wasn't that there was no longer disagreement by any means. But it was now possible for the outwardly atheist and agnostic to receive the highest honours society could bestow, even to get away with deliberate provocation against the more hardline religious elements.

Philosoraptor Continues

Britain had advanced considerably along the road to liberalism. Like the scientific discoveries that accompanied, and perhaps assisted, the progress of society, it was sometimes slow and grinding work but occasionally punctuated by moments of sudden and decisive change. As a case study, Taylor shows how the theory of evolution came about largely due to decades of painstaking work, building from smaller parts of the main idea, rather than due to lone geniuses or a flash of inspiration. 

Rather than making this end result less dramatic, the exact reverse is true – but it's only clearly visible when we take a step back. For the kind of change of thinking this necessitated affected nothing less than our understanding of time itself, a reshaping of thought so profound that simply couldn't have happened overnight.

Such radical ideas witnessed no small amount of outright hostility, and if the supremacy of religion was waning, it wouldn't go down without a fight. Continuing a theme from the first post, some of this was in fact a result of perfectly legitimate scientific doubts about the strength of the evidence, which initially had literally dinosaur-sized holes in it. In no way did evolution, at first, meet the standards of "extraordinary evidence" required of extraordinary claims. But some of it was due to purely human, emotional fallacies. Ideologies could run rampant on both sides, but ultimately, this was a fight in which there could be only one winner.

Incremental revolutions

But let's begin with a gentle look at how the theory of evolution itself evolved. A variety of social factors shaped how people accepted or rejected the same evidence, or interpreted it differently to each other. Just as the sociological situation was nuanced, so too was the state of the pure evidence itself. The final conclusion of evolution by natural selection was, undeniably, a scientific revolution, but it was not the work of a singular genius. 

One of the most famous building blocks is that of Thomas Malthus, who thought that population growth would eventually lead to consumption of finite resources and thereby catastrophe. Malthus crops up a few times in Impossible Monsters, not for his economic gloom-mongering, but for the more basic principle of natural change implicit in his theory. Keith Thomas' view that medieval paintings show classical antiquity in then-contemporary styles becomes easier to understand when you remember that they genuinely thought the world was just a few millennia old : there just hadn't been enough time for significant changes. 

Malthus' extrapolation to the future was a small but important contribution to reshaping our view of time and thus our own place in the world. Rather than placing us at the summit of creation, we were now at the threshold of a deep and fearful pit – with no obvious mode of escape.

A second, more direct component came from Charles Lyell and James Hutton. Hutton had proposed the idea of slow, continuous geological development and change – deep time and uniformitarianism ("the present is the key to the past", as my geology teacher used to say... because he stole it from Lyell) – as far back as the 1790s. This was certainly religiously shocking and evinced no small amount of harsh invective, but intellectually it was something of a damp squib. It lay all but ignored and forgotten until Lyell more successfully resurrected it in the 1830s, in a larger, more careful work with a greater body of evidence.

Biologically, too, the idea of change was not unprecedented. Already in 1809, Lamarck had proposed that animals could change their individual characteristics over time in response to their environment. The implication that man could have been the descendent of monkeys had not gone unnoticed, but there was little evidence for Lamarck's idea of transmutation at the time.

Overall, the development of Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution was the end result of a series of incremental developments unregarded by the general public. It was punctuated by moments of sound and fury signifying breakthroughs, but even those came out of work of the most extraordinary levels of painstaking tedium. Darwin himself conducted some pretty horrific experiments (especially on pigeons), and spent so many years studying barnacles that he hated them "as no man ever did before". He applied equally diligent efforts to a study of plants.

This is not to say that the Origin of Species didn't mark a watershed moment in scientific progress : it did*). But it did not spring forth from the head of Darwin fully formed in a flash of genius. It came from a stupendous amount of specialist work by both himself and a great many others – not just Hutton, Lyle, Lamarck, but a host of others as well. Essentially all of the major concepts were already in place for Darwin's big moment, just as so many pieces of the puzzle were ready for Einstein to assemble his theories of relativity. 

* Interestingly though, an early talk shortly before the more famous debates failed to gain much attention from anyone. Taylor makes it clear that the subsequent debates, however, did play out much as in the lively fashion which popular history records.

Darwin, though, gave a plausible mechanism* for how Lamarckian-style changes might come about –  one species changing into another – together with a wealth of meticulously-detailed evidence for it actually happening. Both Wallace and Darwin formulated their ideas only after global voyages lasting years, collecting their own data by hand because nothing else suitable existed. It was physically exhausting, gruelling work to come up with an idea we now take for granted. Not that it was by any means complete at this stage : the lack of a theory of genetics would remain a difficulty long afterwards. But the force of the arguments and evidence were, slowly, becoming irresistible.

* Oddly, initially he seemed a bit confused as to how natural selection related to animal husbandry, only later realising that it provided solid support for the idea.

In short, scientific advancement isn't without moments of important breakthroughs or paradigm shifts. But those owe at least as much to dedication, specialisation, and an awful lot of hard graft as they ever do to innate genius.

One side can simply be wrong

The distinction between early science and religion was nowhere near as stark as it appears today. But a difference was emerging, gradatim ferociter, into a form that many would eventually come to see as irreconcilable. 

Conflict was present right from the earliest days of modern geological investigations. Hutton's work was described as "contrary to reason and the tenor of Mosaic history, thus leading to an abyss". But disagreement was by no means unrelenting. It was, for a while, possible to frame geological discoveries so as to support scripture, and when this happened there was no problem. This did not even necessarily mean acquiescing to Biblical literalism. Catastrophisim was popular not just because everyone knew that local catastrophes – even extinctions – did happen from time to time, but also because they allowed a metaphorical but acceptable interpretation of the Bible. 

The basic idea was that there could have been multiple catastrophes on a par with Noah's Flood, with God remaking the world multiple times over. If any of the clergy objected to this, it wasn't on a significant scale : there seemed no problem interpreting Biblical "days" of creation as firmly metaphorical. And on the academic side, Buckland, Mantell, Anning, and very nearly all the great and the good of the early fossil hunters and geologists were devout Christians, with Buckland in particular keen to emphasise the harmony of geology and scripture. 

More interesting is the case of Charles Lyell. Whereas the others were actively trying to support scripture, Lyell explicitly declared he wished to "free the science from Moses". Yet his epic, 1,400 page Principles of Geology, though he regarded it as a "deliberate strike against religious dogma", did little to provoke anything nastier than mild criticism. Unfortunately Taylor doesn't go in to why this should be : religious institutions were largely praiseworthy of the Principles, sometimes profusely so; specialists gave it really no more than the most modest of rebukes. How Lyell managed to avoid this, despite resurrecting Hutton's shocking ideas, isn't clear.

EDIT : On reflection, part of the reason might be the following. Hutton explicitly drew attention to the extreme conclusions of his theory, i.e. infinite time, which was believed to be contrary to scripture. He also lacked evidence and didn't present his arguments well. Lyell was more accessible, there had been at least some movement towards considering longer timespans by the time he published, and he didn't rub anyone's nose in it. That is, he didn't make any specific claims with regards to the age of the Earth, but instead tried to let this flow naturally out his prodigious and very carefully argued body of evidence.

Things did eventually turn ugly though. When geology was used to support scripture there was no problem, but when the roles were reversed and the Bible made to be subservient, it was another matter entirely. The clergy had no problem with science giving way before faith, but, especially in America, they had no truck with the opposite. Notably, the same could not be said in Europe, and it was a paradox of the age that while Britain initially led the world in dinosaur research, it did so from a much more conservative position. The whole idea of liberalism and European-style rationalism was openly regarded with something approaching horror.

To cut a long story short(er), Darwin was afraid of publishing his ideas for very good reasons. True, sometimes radical positions had gone largely unpunished save for criticism, but the consequences could be serious. Manuscripts were burned, authors fined, imprisoned, and socially ostracised – no small punishment for academics who weren't in the Old Boys club. Deviants could be publicly humiliated, some police offers were recorded as wishing they could still burn heretics at the stake. Frederik Maurice was hounded from academia merely for debating the meaning of the words "endless" and eternity; only through a protracted struggle did he manage to return. Others, such as Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Beasant, would suffer prosecution and – in Bradlaugh's case – lengthy imprisonment for the right to atheism and socially progressive views.

The conflict between science and religion was, then, real and it did happen. And while in some ways many of the scientists were equally belligerent in their approach to debate (Huxley in particularly must count as the most aggressive agnostic of his age), ultimately it wasn't a fair fight. Scientists were arguing from a position of evidence : imperfect and incomplete, but progressively improving. The faithful, increasingly, clung to their views only out of... well, faith.

Religious literalism was ultimately dealt a mortal wound with the discovery that reptiles preceded birds, contrary to Genesis; even the most metaphorical interpretation of "day" simply couldn't make the ordering work. Attempts to compromise were, in the end, futile. 

To be fair, many changed their minds in response. The majority of religious believers today aren't Creationists. But a scientific world view and one which adheres to the literal truth of the Bible are inevitably at odds. Taylor's major point here (backed up by Keith Thomas where he strays into this period) is that literalist beliefs persisted far longer than we like to think – they were absolutely normal in Victorian Britain, and hadn't been overturned by previously findings.

There are many ways in which science and religion can and do happily coexist. I personally find some of the Biblical metaphors useful : the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve, the magnitude of the cosmos expressed to Job, and of course the markedly socialist tracks of some of the teachings of Jesus. In no way does this mean I believe in any of it, but for those who do, there is no reason for any sort of anti-science attitude. To me, to believe that an ancient text of any kind must be on unimpeachable Truth is just not sensible, but to deny that it contains any truths at all is equally crazy. There are innumerable straw man arguments raised by New Atheists (and indeed by Victorian atheists, as Taylor shows !) that I have no sympathy with, the sort that tar all believers as Six Day Creationists – as though you could reduce the awesome complexity of the human condition to a box-ticking exercise. You can't and it's silly.

But, Richard Dawkins was dead right when he said that one side can be simply wrong. Even a couple of centuries ago, there was no good scientific evidence for an Earth billions of years old. Early objections did not proceed entirely from religious devotion, though that was part of it. But nowadays any position against the scientifically-determined age of the Earth or evolution is untenable. Despite protestations to the contrary, that debate has been long since won.

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How exactly did religious literalism develop ? Even Greek mythology alone contains different explanations of the same thing : different creation stories, different explanations, different actions by the same heroes, different moral interpretations. It would be difficult indeed to have any sort of devotion to any one particular story in that system, which is innately flexible and versatile.

The Biblical stories are much simpler. They state unequivocally what happened with no room for alternatives. Yet even the earliest Church grandees realised that contradictions pointed to metaphorical interpretations, and theological debates raged incessantly (a very nice SMBC illustrates how taking things literally is itself fraught with difficulty). From Keith Thomas I never had the impression that a Creationist view was especially widespread in the late medieval/early modern period – and he gives pretty good direct evidence that many ordinary people both hated religion. They neither understood it nor saw it as especially important; it was really understood that the practise of going to Church was what mattered, not what one believed.

Something had clearly changed by the Victorian period, but as to how this came about would surely take another book. Whether this represents an error or only an incompleteness on the part of Keith Thomas, I don't care to speculate. I note, though, that Taylor doesn't restrict himself to the academics, with ordinary people also being a bunch of literalist zealots in his account. 

On that point, the difference between literalists and zealots is also something not often discussed. I tend to think of them as synonymous, but in the Victorian period this seems not to have been the case : people accepted the literal truth of the Bible as their default position, but most of them changed their opinions when enough new data was presented. A hardcore of fanatics were unconvinced, of course, but the point is that type and strength of belief don't necessarily correlate. Presumably there's a selection effect at work here though : today, religious literalism demands irrational devotion, in a way it simply didn't back in the era of early Victorian science.

If there were some stark differences in beliefs of the era compared to today, there were also some interesting parallels. One of which, muscular Christianity, had suspiciously familiar emphasis on male strength and patriotic duty to certain modern day movements. How depressing that some of the stupider Victorian beliefs appear to be making such a resurgence !

There's nothing wrong with setting ambitious goals for oneself, of course. What becomes problematic is when one applies those same standards to others who might have entirely different life goals, and of course how one responds when they don't meet those expectations. This is why I harp on about the myth of lone geniuses so much (of which I go into a bit more detail on Quora, see also the comments). They give the impression that all science is done by a handful of supermen and all the work by the rest of us counts for nothing. They also pander to the crazies who believe themselves misunderstood only because they're so far above the ordinary scientists.

What Impossible Monsters shows is just how much the incremental work really matters. Yes, there were moments of genius here and there (radical free-thinking did play a part), and no small amount of luck was involved too. But far more important this was dedication to hard, tedious work by people with all the same flaws and virtues as the rest of us. Decades of their patient efforts ultimately achieved something stupendous : they changed the way we think.

Review : Impossible Monsters (I)

Michael Taylor's Impossible Monsters fits in extremely well with my recent reads of mythological animals. Here are the real monstrous creatures of the past... but Taylor's focus is not on the dinosaurs themselves but how they changed our understanding of the world. A seismic shift that had begun centuries earlier was about to come to its heady climax : from a world of magic and mystics we had shifted to intercessionary relationships with an omnipotent singular God. Now we were about to take another dramatic lurch, replacing scriptural literalism with scientific materialism. The last vestiges of a medieval mindset were, at last, giving way to modernity.

Here, then, is a philosophical, theological, and sociological history of dinosaurs – and of those who found them.

The Review Bit

There's so little to criticise about the book that I can keep this brief. The book has an excellent balance of breadth and depth presented in an engrossing, accessible way without dumbing down. Taylor gives mini-biopics of each of the major characters that greatly add to the understanding of how the discoveries came about, very carefully curated to balance the purely human, amusing side of things with informing the reader of just how different the academic process was in Victorian Britain. He covers a range of topics with sensitivity and impartiality, from the sociological situation (such as the treatment of the poor and destitute) to the theological disputes (especially the big one, over whether the Bible needed to be taken as literal truth). 

Rarely, if ever, does he get on a hobby-horse and rant at the reader about the absurdity of religious literalism. At the same time, he's abundantly clear that it's Wrong With A Capital W. He balances the attempts to harmonise science and religion with the painful conflicts that occurred between the two. The latter, he says, happened loudly and frequently. This is in stark contrast to an earlier documentary which claimed (as I remember it) that Creationism and the like never really got going until decades later, and that the initial reaction to evolution was actually fairly muted. 

Not so, says Taylor, putting forth a wealth of evidence to the contrary, and always careful to set everything in context. For example he compares the sales figures of Darwin's works with other (religiously moderate) texts*, which initially far exceeded them; he notes that when Paine's The Age Of Reason was censored, this wasn't because of the work's particular nature but part of a prevailing approach to anything deemed offensive at the time. Even so, there was no shortage of incidents of harsh invective from both sides, sometimes with severe and serious consequences for those caught up in the debates.

* Of which Darwin himself approved, despite having all but lost his own personal religious faith by this point.

In Taylor's history, science ultimately wins – but there's no unnecessary triumphalism here. He tries quite earnestly to get into the literalist mindset rather than pronouncing believers as simply idiots, and isn't afraid to criticise the scientists either. What emerges is, if you'll forgive the clichés, an extremely rich and nuanced picture, colourful characters rather than any monochromatic sort of good-versus-evil struggle. These were real people with all their foibles : Darwin's staunch social conservatism persisted despite his loss of faith; Richard Owen was highly intelligent but capable of being a Right Stupid Bastard; Huxley's agnosticism was often viciously aggressive. And to Taylor's great credit, what could have been a complex, messy narrative is always kept clear and on-point.

There is one glaring omission, however. Taylor chronicles in detail both the geological discoveries and the changing social and scientific reaction to them. But what drove those changed responses ? At the start of the 19th century, someone speaking out against scripture would certainly be socially ostracised and likely fined or even imprisoned. By the end of the period, atheist scientists were being awarded high honours. So was it the changing geological findings that drove a loss of faith, or was it the loss of faith that allowed for new interpretations of the evidence ? What specifically was different in Victorian Britain that allowed for such radically different understandings of the same sort of dinosaur bones that had undoubtedly been unearthed for centuries past ?

To be fair, this is really the only difficulty of any substance I have with the book – but it's a pretty big one. Overall, I'm giving this one 8/10. I suspect it's a book that will age well and become a lasting influence.

The World According To Philosoraptor

Taylor references Jurassic Park a couple of times, but surprisingly never uses any philosoraptor memes. Oh well, a missed opportunity. On the other hand, most of the ideas discussed in the book don't lend themselves easily to meme-format, so perhaps it's for the best. So here's my summary of the most interesting themes from the book, delivered as good-old-fashioned text rather than the considerably more popular captioned images.

In this first part, I'll look the complexities in distinguishing science from religion at the start of the period, as well as just how weird some of the major characters were. In part two I'll cover how the theory of evolution was itself, in part, the result of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process, and how while science and religion can sometimes live together happily, sometimes they can't help but fight it out.

Blurred boundaries

Taylor promises not to go on a polemic against religious literalism and he does indeed manage to steer clear of this. He clearly views such ideas with disdain, but he makes a pretty good attempt at sympathising with the believers as people. Often they were, at the time, genuinely doing the best they could with the evidence they had at hand (the same cannot be said for modern lunatics, of course).

While most of the book covers the period of the 19th century, the prologue examines the famous estimate of the age of the Earth by Bishop Ussher. It's worth remembering that this now obviously nonsensical result was obtained a mere two centuries before the Victorian era, and while there had been other similar calculations, this was one of exceptionally diligent effort*. And it was a calculation. This was no mere quick reading of the Bible and trying to make things add up on the back of an envelope. This was a slow, tedious examination of a multitude of historical documents that took years to complete. It was a meticulous, scholarly effort – you could even call it scientific, in its way.

* Though other estimates had reached similar values. Ussher's would also have likely have faded into similar obscurity, had he not been fortunate enough to have it included in the commentary printed with certain editions of the Bible.

Without the careful, fully scientific results that would take thousands of people centuries longer to obtain, Ussher simply had no better methods available. The conceptual leaps needed to arrive at the modern value were monumental : atomic theory, thermodynamics, whole forms of mathematics... he had none of this. It wasn't his fault, the poor sod.

And if doubts about the age of the Earth were creeping in by the start of the Victorian era, they were weakly founded, and nowhere near strong enough to challenge the prevailing literalist wisdom. At most there was uncertainty and concern rather than any genuine rival theories; no alternative, self-consistent world view had yet been presented. Again, the conceptual leap needed to go from an Earth thousands of years old to billions is vast, and can't – shouldn't – be done without extraordinary evidence. Scientifically, Ussher and the early fossil hunters were on surprisingly solid ground, given what was actually known at the time.

It's a similar story with the development of the central theory in the field : the theory of evolution, the climax of Taylor's book. If the boundaries between science and religion were not always well-delineated, then evolution was by no means the self-evident notion it appears today. At least, not at first. One of the major problems was, ironically, with the fossil record. To arrive at evolution proper required a series of advancements more than a singular inspiration (as we'll see next time), but one of the problem was that animals in the past, naively, should be expected to be simpler than the modern ones. Dinosaurs, being huge and complex beasts, did not fit that pattern at all. 

Nor, with the fossil record still being hugely incomplete, were there any signs of clear progressions. It all just seemed too chaotic, too haphazard. This fit neatly with the widely-held idea of occasional catastrophes, which nobody took issue with since these demonstrably happened. But there was a huge implicit bias that any sort of slow, incremental change must necessarily be progressive. The idea of speciation, and in particular adaptation to the current circumstances (probably Darwin's biggest and most unique contribution to the field), was of an altogether different order to the kind of changes that were accepted to occur. Everyone could see disasters for themselves, but you couldn't see speciation (or even lesser developments) unless you were extremely dedicated and carefully looking for it.

So in essence, just as in the very distant past the idea of a spherical Earth would have contradicted all the evidence any sane person could see, so too was evolution on a much more rickety pedestal than it is today. You could very credibly argue that its early advocates were making nothing less than a leap of faith in adopting it, because some of its findings went against the available evidence rather than being shaped by it. Not all of evolution's (early) detractors were skeptical simply because of religious devotion : just as with Galileo, some doubts were scientifically legitimate.

The human factors should not be neglected either. Richard Owen, who coined the word "dinosaur" and founded the Natural History Museum, could be a horrible elitist snob, as could much of the Geological Society. Indeed Owen coined "dinosaur" as a deliberate way to highlight the apparent absurdity of the complexity of earlier creatures. Remember, this era was not far removed from a period where even the notion of extinction implied the heretical notion that God could make mistakes : prevailing wisdom is difficult to overcome because sometimes we're not even aware of the assumptions behind it. But try and flip it around and things become easier to understand. If today an academic were to try and claim a divine origin for all things, then the difficulties they would encounter become clear.

A few final points. Materialism (the idea that the physical world is all there is) was a problem both socially as well as theologically. Not only would it flatly contradict the Bible by leaving little or no room for God, but it would also give the lower orders... agency. Suddenly everyone's brain would become, after a fashion, equally capable of understanding and reason, or at least having equal potential. Any idea of nobility, any hint of being one of the elect*, would be gone. This was the dramatic restructuring of thought that the Victorians were being demanded to make.

* On a tangential note, the idea of God's Chosen People baffles me. Whenever this crops up, it's never clear why God made that choice – if he did it just on whimsy, then he's clearly a moron. Theologically this seems bonkers.

To give this some context, Richard Owen was progressive by the standards of his day in that while he regarded certain races as far inferior to others, he did at least accept them as human. The more conservative elements of his day... didn't. They literally believed that some people weren't actually people. So the idea of allowing them freedom of opinions was a tough selling point, to say the least.

It's worth stressing the character complexities a little more. Owen could be an academic thug, but he was also a dedicated champion of science and public outreach. He also had some experiences which were truly bizarre, involving decapitated heads and ghost stories (I give a proper quotation here). And of course, he was religiously conservative : he could accept evolution if it was pre-ordained, but the idea of natural selection was to him a step much too far. 

Other religious figures responded differently to scientific progress. While the various crises that afflicted Mary Anning made her cling all the more deeply to her faith, the loss of Darwin's daughter saw him all but lose his. The great fossil hunter Gideon Mantell refused to be swayed away from his faith, while Charles Lyell was sympathetic to the principles of evolution but couldn't stomach the idea of mankind arising from apes. And, completely independently of geology, Bishop Colenso decided that the Bible was actually riddled with contradictions* and was excommunicated for saying so (he was later reinstated despite his highly unorthodox views). 

* For example, he was required to deny the existence of witchcraft despite witches very much existing in the Bible.

Finally, the famous Alfred Russel Wallace later became skeptical of natural selection, but vigorously defended the scientific method : he was, confusingly, staunchly opposed to the Flat Earth movement, anti-colonial, pro-phrenology and pro-supernatural. Characterising anyone as simply religious or atheist or agnostic is, then, a calamitous oversimplification of the extremely complex factors that shaped their highly individual beliefs.

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The boundaries between science and religion, the faithful and the heretical, are awfully confused. Equally, the transformation from a religious to a secular society can't be described as any single process. Sometimes there were incremental changes, one small idea leading inexorably to another small idea, with differences only becoming clear after a long series of such developments. But at other times there were sudden, lurching realisations and discoveries that brought about revolutions far more quickly and with a much more aggressive debate. And while in those slow, progressive periods, compromise and debate are often the order of the day, in the point of revolution there are usually clear winners and losers. That's what I'll look at in part two.

Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (II)

I resume my examination of Keith Thomas' outstanding 1971 work, "Religion and the Decline of Magic". Not the snappiest of titles but it does exactly what it says on the tin. Last time I looked at how religion and magic are distinct, how the Protestant and Catholic churches had very different attitudes to them, and some of the psychological reasons why magical beliefs were beneficial. 

In this second part I'm going to begin by developing that a little further, looking at why magic is so hard to refute despite its (seemingly obvious) deficiencies and incoherency. I'm also going to cover one of the sections I found most rewarding in the book, astrology. As an astronomer its earlier conception of cosmology is fascinating in itself, but as Thomas makes abundantly clear, astrology was an incredibly important step in the advancement towards genuine science. Not only for its examination of the heavens and its use of specific mathematical methods, but also for much deeper, more profound ways of thinking without which science would never have happened.

3) Why magic "worked" : the power of circular reasoning

How was it that magic remained so appealing even when it went against all the evidence ? One major reason that it was often unfalsifiable. In particular astrology, which used genuinely complicated mathematical calculations : it was easy to make a mistake, so if all else failed, the astrologer could simply say they'd got their sums wrong. Clients could also get a second opinion, or a third... so long as one of them gave the right answer (i.e. the one they wanted), they'd still believe in the process. They'd only doubt the individuals, rather than becoming skeptical about the method itself. After all, everybody knew it worked, so there was no need to doubt it.

The same was true, maybe even more so, in medicine. People were actively looking for cures for their ailments, so when their local wizard prescribed them something and they got better, they were apt to identify the recommended remedy as responsible. They were in no sense doing any kind of systematic testing. And there were many other factors at work that made the most bizarre of cures seem normal : some illnesses go away on their own anyway (or at least diminish before returning), some prescribed herbs were genuinely useful, the placebo effect* can be quite potent in some situations... and the local wise woman would seldom try and cure anything really serious. 

* It's interesting to read here that in 1971 this was still a very new discovery.

And of course, actual medical doctors in the modern sense scarcely existed, with real scientific knowledge being extremely thin on the ground. Worse, doctors would often prescribe painful remedies which weren't any better or worse than the usually painless ones from the wizards. A final point which made the magical medical remedies unfalsifiable was that it was always possible, if the treatment didn't work, that the patient was bewitched by some other, malevolent magical practitioner. They had an answer to everything, to the extent, of course, that they explained nothing.

It's a similar story when it came to finding criminals. Since the sincere belief in magic was widespread, the idea of a wizard coming to find the guilty party could be so intimidating that they'd reveal themselves before suffering the sometimes onerous trials to determine guilt (although the practise actually ended much earlier, formally, trial by battle was legal until 1819 !). A wrong accusation could lead to the accused being extra motivated to help find the real criminal. Likewise there was a popular obsession with "ancient" (often only a couple of centuries old) prophecies, which were often hopelessly vague and/or fabrications, deliberately invented to be self-fulfilling. This could even extend to seemingly-natural phenomena : says Thomas, if enough farmers believed there would be a famine so that they didn't bother with proper cultivation of the soil, prophecy turned into reality all too easily.

The point was that the strangeness of methodologies employed by the wizards were irrelevant to belief in magical practises. They were sustained in large part through social pressures, not through any rational evaluation of the evidence (let alone any theoretical basis as to how they processes were supposed to work). It's not that people were incapable of this so much as they just didn't need to, and they had no alternatives to solve the problems magic claimed to solve. So far as the ordinary people were concerned, understanding magic wasn't an issue that needed solving. It was a practical, everyday tool which got the job done.

4) We owe a huge debt to astrology

Of all the beliefs covered here, Thomas is perhaps most sympathetic to astrology. Not because of its success, because it simply doesn't work, but because of what it tried to do. Astronomy and science in general owe more to astrology than I would have guessed.

The relationship between astrology and magic is complicated. They certainly weren't mutually exclusive. There was never a school of magical thinking and not much (though not nothing) in the way of an underlying, unifying theory behind the various rituals. Astrology made use of magical forces but astrologers would often make use of other magical practices for serving their clients as well, and in like token, wizards would sometimes use astrology to answer their own questions. Astrology was, in one sense, just a particular variety of magic which anyone could use if they had sufficient mathematical skill.

But in another sense there was a deeply profound difference and astrology wasn't just another variety of abracadabra. For astrology did possess a coherent world view, did claim to have an underlying theory and understanding of how it worked. For the first time, it was an attempt to look for quantitative patterns in data. Not in just the movement of the planets, but their supposed effects on everyday life. It did an awful lot of things very badly, being no better at avoiding circular reasoning than the other strands of magical thinking, and it certainly had no truck with being falsifiable or other modern conceptions of the scientific method. But that it bothered to make use of numerical data at all, that it found a practical use for complex and esoteric mathematics.... that makes it a legitimate precursor to modern scientific practice. And indeed even to sociology, with attempts to cast horoscopes for entire cities as well as individuals.

In terms of its actual scientific content there wasn't much reason for suspicion. It was taken quite seriously by intellectuals (even Newton*) and commoners alike, as were many magical beliefs. People could see for themselves, quite plainly, that the Sun and Moon did have an effect on the weather, the seasons and the tides, so why shouldn't the stars and planets do the same ? Since the weather and seasons affected all aspects of life, why shouldn't the planets control people's temperaments, or at least influence them to a degree ? Especially given the prevailing medical theory of humours, making it compatible with the broader scientific views of the time.

* This is not a great piece, but does make the point that many of the intellectual titans have had some seriously weird and irrational ideas. There's certainly more to reasoning than pure logic, but the conclusion that it's because "beauty is truth" is ridiculous. A much more plausible factor is creativity.

And it didn't begin as a fully-formed world view that claimed answers to every question, but as with so many belief systems, it evolved into that gradually and unevenly, only reaching the zenith of its claims after the reputable academics had largely discarded it.

We often take the modern view of cosmology for granted. There's the Earth in the Solar System with all its planets, then there's the stars which are very much further away and spread out in the galaxy, and then there are other galaxies which are massively further away again. But as I try and remind my students, until the 1920s all we had as evidence for other galaxies were smudges of light just visible through powerful telescopes. In 1620 we had very much less than this. Comets were very plausibly atmospheric phenomena and therefore entirely capable of direct influence over us; there was next to no evidence for what meteors were and no clue as to the distance of the stars. In a sense, our whole conception of distance was fundamentally different. To suppose that the stars were Sun-like objects was radical and unwarranted; lack of atomic theory made their fusion power source literally beyond imagination. So the idea they were fixed points of light on a relatively close surface, that could potentially influence us, was by no means whatsoever crazy or irrational. Mystical, yes, but as far as anyone could tell, there wasn't that much reason to doubt mysticism either. We simply didn't have the tools to evaluate things properly.

Astrology was of course eventually broken by all sensible scholars. It wasn't the shift from geo to heliocentrism, says Thomas, that was ultimately fatal, but this collective, much more radical and fundamental shift in our view of the nature of reality itself. Astrology could have accommodated heliocentrism, but not the notion that the planets were rocks and the stars burning balls of gas. That some persist with it anyway is to miss the point : once, everyone, including the brightest minds of their generations, accepted it as normal, whereas today hardly anyone takes it seriously.

But even in the period when astrology was a reputable practise, it had other detractors. As with all magical notions, astrology came under fire to highly varying degrees from different Christian sects. It was in some ways very pagan, certainly predating Christianity, with some concepts of human beings being themselves hosts to planetary systems. Just as the macrocosm of the wider Universe could directly influence us, so too could we influence our internal planets : quite literally, as above, so below. 

There were two things about astrology that really annoyed the more religiously zealous. First, it claimed a deterministic nature to the universe, with the planets – not God – as the direct cause of events (even though God as a prime mover would have accommodated this perfectly well). This was sometimes viewed as blasphemous, even though most astrologers regarded the cosmos as no more than one among many influences upon earthly life, rather than being the singular force at work – this helped give them an out when their predictions went awry, and of course justified them in being vague to begin with. 

All this caused the most friction, ironically, with the Puritans, precisely because their own deterministic beliefs were so similar : their ideas were not identical and so, says Thomas, the result as that they were rivals. In particular, while Puritans thought the future was set by God, they didn't think it was possible for anyone except God to know the future... except with the help of the devil (who was their answer to an awful lot of tricky religious questions, far more so than he ever had been for the Catholics).

More fundamentally, what annoyed both Catholics and Protestants alike was that astrology claimed it could provide moral guidance. This made it seem like a fully-on alternative religion, even a pagan religion in which (for some at least) the planets were literally gods. Thomas says that these concerns were largely overblown, with most astrologers themselves seeing no incompatibility with Christianity, but not entirely without foundation. It's fascinating to consider astrology as a late-surviving pagan practise, if not ever really a wholehearted sort of paganism itself. It's also important to remember that while such a thing would have been heresy of the highest order, for which astrologers risked the worst sort of punishments, attitudes to it were... confused. Prosecutions were extremely rare, bordering on non-existent, with even some Puritans finding nothing much wrong with it. Then as now, people are complex beasts indeed.

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Belief in magic, then, fulfilled an essential role in society. It helped people understand their own inclinations and make their own decisions, allowing them to choose when there was no rational method of choosing but a decision had to be made. It was sustained in part by society (because everyone believed it, and in the earlier era at least, the Catholic Church actively encouraged it), in part because of lack of evidence to the contrary (itself due to a lack of scientific methodology) and because it was almost impossible to falsify.

And yet it was both necessary and unavoidable. The essence of both magic and science is in looking for patterns; in the strictly mechanistic sense, the only difference between science and magic is that the one works and the other doesn't*. Without knowing how to test things rigorously, assuming that the world behaves magically, with unseen but broadly predictable forces at work, is all but inevitable. Modern scientific practise is a hard-won (and still developing !) result of all this which owes a great debt to astrology, which tried more than any other magical belief to construct a coherent, numerically quantifiable world view.

* I'd probably go considerably further though. It's not magic if the cause is known and understood.

As we've already seen, the change of beliefs from the Catholic to the Protestant wasn't uniform or smooth. People might label themselves one or the other but in practise, especially given the understanding of religion as more a ceremonial practise than a set of beliefs, they could be anything but. Even so, the broad change from a magical to materialistic perspective brought with it enormous social changes. This was no mere esoteric quibble but a change of mindset with profound consequences. In particular, local "cunning men" and "wise women" were no longer the important community figures they'd once been. Now they were about to find themselves labelled as witches. And that's what I'll cover in part three.

Passing paradigms

I now turn away from my mythology binge – which continues in the background unabated – and back to an assortment of articles I've been meaning to read for bloody ages. Let's start with this one, a piece from the London Review of Books on scientific paradigms. Sounds dry ? Well, read this bit and then decide :

As Morris tells the story, ‘the bile just flowed out of him.’ Kuhn ‘started moaning. He put his head in his hands and was muttering, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.”’ At the end of his tether, Kuhn threw an ashtray ‘with malice’, maybe at Morris, maybe just in his general direction: ‘It came hurtling across the room, spewing butts and ashes.’ (Kuhn and ashtrays were constant companions; he smoked upwards of six or seven packs of cigarettes a day, and died of throat cancer.) First Kuhn threw the ashtray, then he threw Morris out of graduate school. 

If I were the editor, I'd pick something from that for the big quote-in-bold designed to grab the readers attention. But what in the world could provoke such fury in the ivory-tower world of philosophy of science ?

That would be Thomas Kuhn's one-hit-wonder of 1962 : The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I've had this in the back of my mind for a while as something I should probably read, but after reading this piece I've decided firmly against it. There's too much in it that would annoy me, but also far too much I'd misunderstand. Kuhn himself wasn't exactly thrilled by the book's reception :

Invited to a seminar by Princeton undergraduates inspired by what they took as the book’s anti-authoritarianism, Kuhn erupted, telling them that they just hadn’t read the thing properly: ‘I kept saying, “But I didn’t say that! But I didn’t say that! But I didn’t say that!”’

So I'm probably far better off with the article, providing the author, one Steven Shapin, has done their job well enough. I'll pass over the biographic stuff and stick to the ideas. 

Very broadly, Kuhn seems to have been the one who came up with the idea that science advances in revolutions. We tinker away diligently enough, but then some moment of genius happens which throws it all away, and suddenly we're in a whole new world. This idea seems so ingrained in popular culture that I took it for granted that it was just a natural conclusion that everyone reached; to find out that this is not so is interesting by itself (though what the model of progression was before Structure Shapin does not say). 

Regular readers will know I despise this idea. Or more accurately, one particular aspect of it : that singular geniuses are largely responsible and we an essentially ignore everyone else (the "great man" of history theory). And though of course our ideas and world views shift, I'm less sure of whether that feels like the popular notion : a sudden moment of revelation in which the nay-sayers are cast down and the plucky underdogs revealed as unfairly-shamed geniuses. I rather doubt it ever seems like that; popular science reporting has it that something akin to this happens all the time whereas to those of us on the inside it seldom feels much of anything like the popular depictions.

Anyway, the initial definitions of paradigms :

Kuhn plucked the word ‘paradigm’ from linguistics – where it referred to the permutation of forms having a common root, like the conjugation of verbs or the declension of nouns – and repurposed it as the term for a key regulative resource in scientific inquiry, a concrete model of ‘the right way to go on’... A New Yorker cartoon shows tramps leaning against a wall: ‘Good news – I hear the paradigm is shifting.’

Paradigms are one of the few bits of philosophy of science that we were explicitly taught as undergraduates. Our lecture's model was simply that the paradigm is the prevailing wisdom, the conceptual framework by which we default to interpreting data. Paradigms, he said, can of course change. Such a shift might or might not be dramatic and exciting, depending on how it happened. But though it would presumably be beneficial, it wouldn't be inevitably good or bad, it would just be a thing that happens. This is a much more neutral view. Only once does the article come close to this, with Kuhn later describing paradigms "as concrete, non-rule-like regulative structures".

Nothing here seems terribly offensive. So what got people so riled up that "groups of philosophers had "‘gathered and said that the book should be burned’" ?

Not so much, perhaps, of the nature of paradigms themselves. Having a framework within which to interpret data is inevitable. What seems to have really ticked people off is the nature of how Kuhn proposed they changed and who got to decide when such a change had occurred. In standard prevailing wisdom :

Science methodically compared theoretical expectations against observational and experimental evidence; it purged itself of bias and prior expectations; its knowledge was cumulative; the quality of that knowledge was guaranteed by explicit methodological standards shared throughout the scientific community; the various bits of science were part of a fundamental unity, whether of concepts, facts, or methods; it arrived at, or at least approached, truth. 

But :

Structure denied all this. Scientists were not notably open-minded. Their training encouraged the embrace of what Kuhn frankly called ‘dogma’: theirs was ‘a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox religion’. If the account in Structure were accepted, Kuhn wrote, the notions of ‘“scientific progress” and even “scientific objectivity” may come to seem in part redundant.’ We may ‘have to relinquish the notion’ that scientific change brings scientists ‘closer and closer to the truth’. Scientific knowledge did not accumulate: it moved from moments of puzzle-solving ‘normal science’ governed by one paradigm, through ‘crisis’ and ‘revolution’, to subsequent moments of ‘normal science’ governed by another paradigm... there was no independent way of adjudicating between them; the embrace of a new paradigm ‘can only be made on faith’.

...either side of a paradigm shift scientists live and work ‘in a different world’. There were no bodies of facts, methods for establishing facts, or theories for interpreting the facts, that were paradigm-independent; there was no ‘neutral algorithm’ for judgment. This was the Kuhn who was taken to be a reality and reason-denying relativist.

Ahh, now this is spicy stuff indeed. A rant here on my part would seem inevitable, were it not that the article reveals that this is far more of how Kuhn was misinterpreted rather than what he actually meant. 

Two thoughts though. "Dogma" is a trigger word, so I have to say I don't believe there is such a thing as scientific dogma* : provisionally. That is, I don't believe we have things we believe with inflexible rigidity. We use the term "Law" only to underscore the robustness of a finding, not to declare from on high that it is forever unchallengeable. The only sense in which I think we have "dogma" is a much weaker one. We have common "maxims, norms or (his preference) values of science"; there are useful heuristics for interpreting data, default frameworks which can safely be assumed to correct for everyday purposes. These are by no means set in stone, we just don't challenge them routinely because we feel that to do so would make no progress, with there being more obvious mysterious avenues that would be better explored instead.

* As for "faith", that is too big a topic to condense here, so see this post instead.

Secondly, the profound revelation of a paradigm shift according to these (mis)interpretations of Kuhn... well, this reminds me of one of my all-time favourite Star Trek quotes :

For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.

Scientists are not closed-minded to such revelations. On the contrary, I claim that such things are, in a smaller way, very normal. To illustrate : a useful tactic, I've found, is to think on different scales. Especially while coding. It happens regularly that I find my code doesn't do the thing I want it to do, and my first efforts are always to check for the small stuff : maybe I used the wrong variable, got a positive or negative sign wrong, that kind of thing. Then I move up a level to checking the structure : maybe I haven't indented a loop correctly, maybe I've not iterated correctly, etc. 

But if all that seems secure, I move to the largest scale (or if you prefer, higher level) : the basic premise of what I've written. Maybe the actual line-by-line execution is doing exactly what I wanted it to, but I've got the whole foundation of how to do the task wrong. Figuring out that I've done the wrong thing in the right way is, in some ways, one of the most rewarding parts of debugging code, albeit sometimes the most frustrating as it means not a mere tweak to a section but a full rewrite.

Paradigms, I claim, are just like this. They're on a grander scale to be sure but the principle is the same. And I don't think it's true at all that scientists aren't especially open-minded towards paradigm shifts. Rather we go deliberately looking for them, but we're still skeptical when we find evidence of them. Such a profound change deserves a very high level of confidence, just as you wouldn't want to start believing you could suddenly breathe underwater without some seriously compelling reason.

Even this, though, may not be enough to warrant hurling an ashtray at someone or calling for the book to be burned.

Structure implicitly challenged the notion that there was such a thing as a unified scientific community; rather, there were many communities, each of them organised through its commitment to specific achievements, specific methods and specific standards of fit between expectation and evidence. The much treasured idea of ‘scientific unity’ was also sacrificed: science was a ‘ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts’.

This I think is actually a good description of academia but a lousy one of science itself. Academics and individual disciplines certainly have different standards and methodologies, but the collective scientific world view is stupendously self-consistent. To call it "ramshackle" is nonsensical.

But there were even more controversial parts of Structure :

One philosopher targeted what he called Kuhn’s ‘purple passages’ – for example, where he said that there was no standard for scientific judgment higher than ‘the assent of the relevant community’ ... Campus radicals seized on Kuhn’s book as a brilliantly subversive exposé. Just as they had suspected, science wasn’t the open-minded objective pursuit of truth, but merely one more mode of authoritarianism. Scientists were just as dogmatic as anyone else, and one way of seeing the world was as good as another. If there were no better criteria for judgment than communal assent, why should anyone bow down to scientists’ pronouncements? Oh thank you, Mr Kuhn, for telling us about paradigms,’ he remembered the students saying. ‘Now that we know about them, we can get rid of them.’

Kuhn stood accused of being yet another philosophical ‘corrupter of youth’. Philosophy of science here bled seamlessly into Cold War politics.

That would seem to explain the vitriolic responses. When you both treat science as yet another religion, another mythological framework to be debunked, when you see scientists as another type of authoritarian High Priest, you essentially demolish the whole edifice. It denounces the entire practise as not worth doing. And that is deeply, deeply insulting. And just plain wrong.

But this doesn't seem to have been Kuhn's intent at all. I will attest myself, again on an altogether different scale, to having been misinterpreted on many occasions. This is deeply frustrating, because instead of writing what I want to write in a way that expresses things in a (to me) lively but clear way, I have to add caveats and provisos and clarifications that can rob the text of all its force. So I'm gonna give Kuhn the benefit of the doubt on this one.

What he actually seems to have been driving at is much more modest :

You should not, Kuhn had written, think that scientific change brought practitioners ‘closer and closer to the truth’. The outcome of change, in Kuhnian terms, was ‘the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practise future science’. 

This I think it would be harder to have much of a problem with. What seems the most promising line of inquiry ? Well, first we assume the code is basically okay, so we check for typos... but then we realise that's all fine, so we move to considering the whole premise of the operation instead. And lo, we get a code we can use for a good while longer, until we need it to do something else (I'll leave aside the notion that we don't ever reach some "objective truth", which is too big a topic for today).

In his Last Writings, Shapin says that Kuhn was intent on "showing how progress might occur across paradigms and why the involvement of subjectivity in science could be considered innocuous." That too is nothing problematic. Subjectivity in science is nothing to be squeamish about, simply because it's a) inevitable, it being folly to think you can mitigate all effects of bias completely and b) limited since you can objectively test your findings : you can get a binary yes/no answer. It is a step much too far, but by no means inevitable, to presume that because science isn't perfectly objective and rational that it's also totally corrupt, totally at the whims of the researcher's moods. It isn't anything of the sort.

Finally :

A theory should be accurate and consistent; it should have broad scope; it should simplify accounts of phenomena; and it should be fruitful in disclosing new phenomena or revealing new connections between them. There were, Kuhn acknowledged, substantial problems in applying these values... These were what Kuhn called the maxims, norms or (his preference) values of science, though he felt no need to offer systematic evidence that these values were generally agreed and invoked.

And there's nothing wrong with that either. We just don't need exact, specific instructions as to how fruitful a theory must be, how much more accurate the predictions of one model should be in order to consider it as overturning another. General guidelines are helpful and good. Overly-strict rules, in this case, would be the opposite. I believe it's helpful for scientists to actively think philosophically about what they're doing and why. But there's no need to do this constantly, let alone resort to hurling ashtrays because of methodological differences. That would make for an entertaining conference, though...