The Godless Gaps

I wouldn't normally bother commenting on articles about cosmology and God, but this one is written by the inestimable actual cosmologist Ethan Siegel, so I'll make an exception.

My broad take is that science is in some ways agnostic and other ways antitheistic. Science presumes that observable natural phenomena can in essence explain themselves, that we can discover the mechanisms at work that explain the observable world through observation and testing. Following on from the previous post about knowledge, proposed explanatory mechanisms gradually transmute into observable facts. What begin as untestable or even apparently unknowable ideas are slowly brought into the realm of direct observation. 

For example, atoms were once just a purely philosophical speculation - no-one had any idea of their size, still less if they could ever be measured. There was nothing much of a physical, observational reason to suggest them at all. Later they became a more detailed theoretical construct that helped explain specific observations and made testable predictions, but only in recent years have they themselves become directly observable. The shape of the Earth underwent a similar change, as did the existence of the planet Neptune, evolution and the Big Bang - albeit with rather more uncertainty still hanging over that last one.

Obviously not everything has undergone this full process, or science and philosophy alike would be dead in the cold earth. Gravity has transitioned from being able to explain existing observations to being testable experimentally through interplanetary probes, but that which causes gravity is not yet a direct observable. Particle physics also has reached a stage where testing ever-smaller scales is becoming impossible with currently technology. Past developments might caution us not to assume that such capabilities will be forever inaccessible, so we might perhaps be more charitable to string theory and the like : just because it might take phenomenal energies to test is no real grounds to doubting its validity, only its experimental verifiability. 

At the same time, it might indeed be fundamentally impossible to directly observe the "fabric" of spacetime. Nothing is cut and dried. There might, perhaps, always be gaps.

Science has to presume that those gaps are not, however, the realm of God. It presumes that there must always be another aspect to reality that we have not yet discovered or interpreted correctly, such that observable phenomena are ultimately able to explain themselves. The difficulties posed by competing models and alternative interpretations only indicate that a subject has not yet reached the stage where it can be subject to direct observational test, but there are areas in which this has been achieved. The crystal spheres will not return. The Earth will never be shown to be flat.

So science is strongly antitheistic in this sense. Allow even the slightest possibility that "God did it" and the crack becomes a gaping hole that undermines, if not demolishes, the entire edifice. God could be suggested as the explanation for the tiniest anomaly or the smallest deviation from theory, much as "aliens" are frequently invoked by the less religious. No, where science finds a gap, it has to be content with - and even takes delight in - labelling it as an unknown. It denies that any presently inexplicable phenomena is the work of God.

But this is not the same as denying God itself. Denying each and every specific instance is still not the same as denying the general principle. At last it's time to bring in Ethan :

If you think about it rationally, it makes intuitive sense that something cannot come from nothing. After all, the idea that anything can come from nothing sounds absurd; if it could, it would completely undercut the notion of cause and effect that we so thoroughly experience in our day-to-day lives. The idea of creation ex nihilo, or from nothing, violates our very ideas of common sense.

But our day-to-day experiences are not the sum total of all that there is to the Universe. There are plenty of physical, measurable phenomena that do appear to violate these notions of cause and effect, with the most famous examples occurring in the quantum Universe. As a simple example, we can look at a single radioactive atom. If you had a large number of these atoms, you could predict how much time would need to pass for half of them to decay: that’s the definition of a half-life. For any single atom, however, if you ask, “When will this atom decay?” or, “What will cause this atom to finally decay?” there is no cause-and-effect answer... In fact, there are many interpretations of quantum mechanics — paramount among them the Copenhagen Interpretation — where acausality is a central feature, not a bug, of nature.

To assert that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause” ignores the many, many examples from our quantum reality where — to put it generously — such a statement has not been robustly established. It may be possible that this is the case, but it is anything but certain.

He also makes an interesting link between determinism and causality. Now I believe that everything must have a cause, and that if quantum mechanics says otherwise, this is pointing to some gap in our understanding, some incompleteness (rather than wrongness) in our science. But I'm not sure I'd subscribe to the idea that causality means the Universe is entirely deterministic. And I'm not at all sure how science can robustly accept the idea of acausality, or whether the whole concept of infinite time even makes any sense. That all... doesn't sit right. More on that in a future post, maybe.

Ethan goes on to note that the Big Bang theory does not necessitate a singularity - in fact, inflationary theory forbids it. 

Whereas a Universe filled with matter or radiation will lead back to a singularity, an inflating spacetime cannot. Not just “may not” but cannot lead to a singularity.  Remember, fundamentally, what it means to be an exponential in mathematics... That’s what inflation teaches us: our Universe, for as long as inflation went on, can only get smaller [going backwards in time] but can never reach a size of zero or a time that can be identified as the beginning... To assert that “the Universe began to exist” is completely unsupported, both observationally and theoretically.

Again, as before, a “Universe that came into existence from non-existence” is a possibility, but it is neither proven nor does it negate the other viable possibilities.

So cosmology suggests that the Universe didn't have a beginning, and therefore there is no need for causation to invoke it. And you can hardly have a Creator without a moment of creation. On the other hand, there are many caveats to that : these are theoretical models which hardly have the same rigour as the shape of the Earth, and nothing in them explicitly forbids a creation event. Nothing explicitly says the Universe cannot have begun at a singular point in time but of finite size and other physical conditions, i.e. to begin the same inflationary process as we observe, but with a discontinuity only in time and not in space. But let's push on a bit further first :

 [The necessity of God] is only defensible if you define God as “that which caused the Universe to come into existence from a state of non-existence.” Here are some examples that show why this is absurd.

• When we simulate a two-dimensional Universe on a computer, did we bring that Universe into existence, and are we, therefore, the God(s) of that Universe? 

• If the Universe’s inflationary state arose from a pre-existing state, then is the state that gave rise to inflation the God of our Universe? 

• And if there is a random quantum fluctuation that caused inflation to end and the hot Big Bang — the Universe as we know it — to begin, is that random process equivalent to God?

Although there would likely be some who argue in the affirmative, that hardly sounds like the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being that we normally envision when we talk about God. If the first two premises are true, and they have not been established or proven to be true, then all we can say is that the Universe has a cause; not that that cause is God.

Here I must disagree, because I would be one to argue in the affirmative - in fact I find it strange that anyone would argue otherwise. If I create a simulated Universe, how am I not that Universe's version of a God ? I am omnipotent with regards to that simulation. With respect to that simulation, I have all the supernatural powers of a God - I can even be regarded as eternal, since I can alter the flow of time in that "universe". True, in my world I will age and die, but that's not the case from the perspective of any entities inhabiting my simulation - and for them that's all that matters. To them, I have characteristics which are literally and fundamentally beyond their comprehension or imagination.

Likewise, I think it's perfectly valid to describe the cause of the Universe as God. That argument is discussed at length in both Spinoza and the Upanishads. The definition of God needn't be confined to a traditional Western version. One version of God not as a moralistic beardy busybody but as a prime mover is that God is the solution to the infinite, the ultimate and final cause, the unknowable solution to the mystery of inescapable discontinuities. E.g., God is that which can create itself, or what causes eternal existence. Such concepts are ungraspable by the human mind, which God, by definition, is beyond. Personally I like this conception of God very much (which is not to go so far as to say I agree with it, mind you).

To return to Ethan :

In any scientific endeavour, you absolutely cannot begin from the conclusion you hope to reach and work backward from there. That is antithetical to any knowledge-seeking enterprise to assume the answer ahead of time... In particular, you cannot posit an unprovable assertion and then claim you have “proved” the existence of something by deductive reasoning. If you cannot prove the premise, all logical reasoning predicated upon that premise is unsubstantiated.

It remains possible that the Universe does, at all levels, obey the intuitive rule of cause-and-effect, although the possibility of a fundamentally acausal, indeterminate, random Universe remains in play (and, arguably, preferred) as well. It is possible that the Universe did have a beginning to its existence, although that has by no means been established beyond any sort of reasonable scientific doubt. And if both of those things are true, then the Universe’s existence would have a cause, and that cause may be (but isn’t necessarily) something we can identify with God. However, possible does not equate to proof. 

While I think science is antitheist in presumption, I think it is equally important that it be agnostic in potential. It should by default assume that God is not the answer. But if it rejects any possibility of God whatsoever, saying that God cannot exist because everything is physics, then that is circular and unscientific - just as it would be equally unscientific to use God as an explanation for everything.

It is quite sensible in everyday life to reason by induction and inference, to assume that patterns hold beyond their initial observations : lions are dangerous, therefore other animals with sharp teeth can also be assumed to be dangerous. But we would be wrong to hold this as proof. We would ordinarily be quite prepared to have our ideas subject to revision by new data. With any mystery, science should seek an explanation other than God, and indeed should reject the possibility that the answer is God... unless there is active evidence to the contrary. If a miracle-working deity descends from the clouds, at some point it becomes pretty silly to reject the possibility that it is in fact a divine supernatural being.

But is this notion of a Prime Mover just another sort of gap - the kind that science is forbidden from filling with God ? I would argue no. Where there are gaps in knowledge, such as not knowing if the hypothesised Planet Nine exists, science cannot invoke God. But here we have a gap of an altogether different kind, one that is arguably unavoidable : a gap unbridgeable by human thought. Can anyone ever comprehend a timeless or infinite existence ? No. It is not a matter of increased computational power, but something of the most fundamental kind of impossibility.

Just as the beings in my own personal simulated Universe couldn't understand my reality, so we could not understand God. This means the possibility of a simulator-like God is not impossible but rather reinforces the point that there is no reason to expect the simulation to be anything much like our observable reality. This is true even in our own simulations : we render them in a way that looks familiar, but the actual mechanics of what's happening in the computer - electrons moving around inside a chip - bears no resemblance to, say, the motion of a gas cloud or the fluid dynamics of an ocean. So our simulator God would be no less supernatural, after a fashion, than our traditional divinity - even if from the perspective of God itself, God is nothing very special. God might be a sort-of glorified computer programmer, yes, but this is to misunderstand the differences between a simulation and reality. God might well also be something utterly incomprehensible to us. Nothing about observable reality can give us any clue either way, unless God itself decides to intervene.

Science, then, is often antitheist but it is also profoundly agnostic. And perhaps most importantly of all, it should be apatheistic - to the unbiased observer, it does not matter if the evidence indicates a divine entity or otherwise. Whether God is the fundamental cause of two atoms colliding does not matter when it comes to understanding the mechanics of the collision. For science, God is not dead, just irrelevant.

I Know What You Knew Last Summer

Here's a nice Aeon piece about another favourite philosophical conundrum : what is knowledge ?

There would seem to be two broad aspects to this : how we actually evaluate data and how we should evaluate data. Like it or not, we tend to let emotions and a host of biases influence how we respond to new information, which makes it extremely important in deciding what's the correct, rational approach that our biases are obscuring.

Science posits at least a partial answer to the latter. Facts, at least, are relatively easy in the scientific world view. Facts are that which is established by repeat observations by multiple independent observers that give consistency using different observational methods. The more of those criteria you meet, the more secure your data point. At a purely practical level, above some threshold it makes sense to accept some things as hard, certain facts. True, measurements always have instrumental and fundamental limitations, but for everyday life it's often perfectly safe to drop this and use "certain" when we really mean "as confident as we can ever be".

Models, though, that’s where it gets tricky. It’s under-appreciated that wrong models can still get highly specific details right  And even where they appear to be wrong, sometimes this can only be due to a host of implicit assumptions that were overlooked. So while one can apply the same basic conditions of truth to models as one can to facts, the evaluation is always more difficult. Consistency with one model does not automatically imply inconsistency with another.

But, while nothing can be absolutely certain in the strictest philosophical sense, once we accept some common, practical restrictions as to what we mean by “knowledge”, a kind of certainty can be happily recovered. And this applies to models too, e.g. the shape of the Earth makes testable predictions and can be legitimately described as both model and fact. While I like very much the analogy described here that a model posits explanatory mechanisms which are unknown or even unknowable, with science only concerning itself with purely measurable phenomena, this is not always true. It's an extremely appropriate analogy for forefront, novel research, but it doesn't work well at all for more established findings. You can't really say that atoms are uncertain anymore, or that evolution is just an idea. Those models are also things we can say we know are true, within any useful definition of knowledge.

But... who has to know things ? There things get even more difficult. I always like the health warnings along the lines "it is known to the State of California that this chemical causes cancer", as though there were something extraordinarily special about California that was beyond the ken of mortal men. Clearly, California is not the fount of all knowledge. Here we come into a headlong crash as to who and what we can trust :

There is the larger question of what justifies our beliefs, and there is the narrower question about how justification factors into the life of a thinking, enquiring person. For internalists in epistemology, my belief cannot be justified unless its justifier can somehow be appreciated by me. Externalists deny this; they say I can have a justified belief even if I can’t check whatever makes it credible. 

Is this an academic debate? Absolutely, but I don’t think it’s merely academic. True, you’re unlikely to learn about internalism and externalism unless you’re taking upper-level philosophy courses. Nevertheless, what’s up for grabs are rival conceptions of ourselves as knowers and enquirers, and which conception will take precedence in the theory of knowledge. When we ask the hard questions about our fallible intellects, where should we start? What’s our foundational picture?

Perhaps these question deserve better outreach ? More simply put, the question would appear to be, "can I trust an expert in a field I myself don't understand ?". My answer to which is "no, never completely, but always more than I can trust my own assessment." Of course, deciding that they're an expert in the first place raises a whole other layer of difficulty. So how do we get at some basic, hard level of knowledge with which we might judge this ?

Some aspects of this appear to be quite silly :

I have a justified belief about where my dog is because I had an experience reminiscent of the sounds of her feet. And the experiences themselves need no justification, since they are, as the philosopher Roderick Chisholm put it in 1966, self-presenting. They make themselves known. And how could they not? What could be more luminous and manifest than conscious experience?

Well, opinions differ. Wilfrid Sellars articulated a lasting difficulty for the self-presentation idea: raw experience isn’t fit to justify...  If you ask me: ‘What reason do you have to think your dog is nearby?’ what good is it to indicate my unrepeatable, inarticulate inner episodes? What good is a certificate of authenticity that can’t be shown? I couldn’t even cite my experience to myself, because as soon I have the experience, it’s gone.

Seen as how all our perceptions are internal and subjective, this would seem to be utterly daft : you could raise the same objections to literally anything, and have no foundations to any sort of knowledge at all. To build on a recent post, it would seem self-evident that whenever we talk of knowledge, the applicant conditions must involve sensory perception. We cannot possibly talk of knowledge in a framework totally independent of perception, even if perception cannot be all there is to it. 

So, hearing the dog provides good evidence for the presence of a dog, and in ordinary terms that evidence is more than sufficient to constitute knowledge. The chance that we're being deceived in some way is ordinarily so low as to be negligible, and we can ignore this possibility until we have direct evidence that this is the case. Normally we would anyway have perceived that the wider circumstances are the same as usual except for the sound of the dog, so we'd actually have good grounds for believing that no-one is out to trick us. We'd only go around actively worrying about someone trying to fool us with recordings of dog noises if a) we had other reasons to suspect someone, b) we were super paranoid, or of course c) we're in a philosophy class discussing knowledge. Those are the only three possibilities.

Every internalist view, even weaker varieties, says that justification has to be accessible from your perspective. Justification always comes from inside. But what is this accessibility? It’s usually imagined as something you could have from the armchair, reflecting on your thoughts, so if you’re justified in believing anything, you can find that justification here and now by looking within. Reflection becomes the means of justifying your beliefs, and that places a huge burden on the shoulders of reflection. 

...anyone not sufficiently reflective can’t have justified beliefs. We often talk about what very young children know, even before they learn to talk, and we say that our fellow creatures know things too. I might tell you about an eastern phoebe that knows and remembers where her nest is, but can’t tell that one of her nestlings is a cowbird.

Internalism captures the hard rigour of philosophy and science, where proof and argument are the coin of the realm, but when we start taking the credibility of the beliefs of children and nonhuman animals seriously, it comes up short. They typically do not or cannot reflect, so internalism would have us deny that they can have justified beliefs. The externalist says: ‘So much the worse for internalism.’

The argument here isn't quite clear to me as to whether the author means to say that animals do or do not know things. We might fairly say that children, animals and stupid people alike all just have opinions (or unjustified beliefs), not knowledge. As do very clever people outside their comfort zone too, or perhaps only very weak justification. Correlation isn't causation, but correlation does provide evidence - it's just not the whole story. Only a belief having sufficiently rigorous justification might count as knowledge, but we needn't have certainty in all things in order to act. A songbird doesn't need the same qualitative kind of knowledge as an architect to build a nest. It isn't really necessary to say that a child "knows" the Earth goes around the Sun for them to be able to repeat it parrot-fashion; their knowledge is at best crude compared to a qualified astronomer, and more akin to an opinion - it just happens in this case to be correct.

The article goes on to an alternative method of justification :

You can form justified beliefs based on what you see while having no insight into how vision works, or even into the overall reliability of your visual system. For reliabilism, justification flows from the reliability of the process, not its accessibility to consciousness. Hence, reliabilism is an externalist theory, not internalist.

Without the burden of accessibility, externalism can account for the credibility of non-reflective thinkers, such as birds, dogs and toddlers. Frank Ramsey once compared beliefs to maps, so if we model thinking on the production of and navigation by inner maps, it makes sense why we would bring our fellow creatures into the fold. Every thinking thing needs to find its way through environments where the locations of food, friends and enemies can change. So when we’re thinking about credibility and justification for the beliefs of such creatures, we’re interested in what it takes for those creatures to succeed. They need senses that put them in contact with the world. They need reliable processes to lean on.

These two proposals don't appear to be so at odds to me. I, as I thinking being, can form conclusions and beliefs based on pure correlation - I will have rather weakly justified opinions, but opinions nonetheless. If the correlation is very good, with a slope close to 1 and a small scatter, my justification is reasonable, however imperfect it may still be. But I can also go a step further and posit explanations for the correlation - in addition to, rather than instead of, considering the degree of reliability, I also reflect on what's going on. Reliability would appear to be one possible aspect of justification, not a fully-fledged alternative to it.

Another internalist argument has given externalists more trouble... In the first story, you use the certificate to make a decision, and it gets you what you wanted. In the unhappy version, you use the certificate to make a decision, exactly as before, but it goes wrong due to no fault of your own...  If you made the right call in the happy case, then you made the right call in the unhappy case. Externalists have struggled to explain why my beliefs in the good and bad cases seem to be on equal footing. 

Which recalls the famous Picard quote : "It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." You can correctly evaluate data, but if that data itself is flawed, so will be your conclusion. This would seem to be equally problematic in this "internalist" view as well, because ultimately all external data is evaluated and interpreted internally. You can't form a conclusion from pure reflection because you'd have nothing to reflect on. 

So would knowledge count as knowledge if it was later disproved ? I guess not. All we can decide on is the best method of evaluating information, not the Absolute nature of reality itself. Every finding, in the strictest sense, is provisional, even if many are so firmly established that questioning them would be insane. You can evaluate information correctly and still reach a wrong conclusion - there is only better and worse, not true or false, which are really linguistic conveniences rather than being Really True.

Ultimately, the only way to verify anything is with more data. There is no system of knowledge in which you're constantly and consistently deceived in which you can magically reason your way to the truth. Descartes couldn't possibly overcome his evil demon through thought alone - he would need to peek behind the curtain, so to speak. 

Likewise, if you want expert-level knowledge for yourself, the only surefire way is to actually become an expert. Most of the time, most of us have to make do with something lesser, placing trust in those who seem somehow competent and trustworthy. What we can all do, however, is to do a minimum level of investigation to check if basic things that distant experts are saying is verifiable and sensible. If you can't make it to becoming an expert, or even an amateur, at least do some basic checking besides evaluating personality and character. At least try to do as much as you can. If you don't do this - if you place your faith in an "expert" purely on the basis that you like what they're saying, or even worse because you think they're a nice person with good hair, then you can still have an opinion, but it risks being worse than merely wrong. In all probability, it won't even be valid at all.

Making Meta Beta Feta Data

I put down a few thoughts on Facebooks' "Metaverse" project back when it was announced, but given that they're really going all-in on this lately, I think I'll jot down a few more. For this, I watched the keynote speech by developer John Carmack at Facebook Connect and read a transcript (because I honestly can't stand the sight of his ugly head) of an interview with Zuckerberg.

I'm at least as conflicted about this as I am about billionaires funding space travel. Human space fight is an intrinsically and highly valuable experience and I'm convinced we should be supporting this as much as possible, over and above robotic probes. The recent race for re-usable rockets has done more for this than any government projects since the Apollo era, the hopelessly expensive Shuttle project notwithstanding. All the same, this doesn't mean that the leading proponents of this aren't generally a bunch of self-entitled, exploitative, profit-mongering jerks. It is a great and bitter shame to me that these people have tainted what should be an inspirational and unifying human endeavour, something that we should see as a goal of improving life for all of us on Earth, not to allow some elitist twats to try and escape it.

Facebook's VR project is even worse. The company is, simply put, a bag of dicks, and Mark Zuckerbot has all the empathic awareness of a mad robot hell bent - literally - on world domination. Yet I love their Oculus products and use my Quest headset on an almost daily basis. I am... conflicted.

Let's start with the practical aspects. The "metaverse" is not a great name, but it is adequate. It appears to refer to this blending of multiple realities : the ordinary real world, the purely virtual world, and the use of augmented reality to combine the two. The idea appears to be that these new, virtual worlds would become as integral to daily life as the conventional world of flesh and stone. So I'm fine with the name, despite the inevitable deluge of hilarious memes.

Even Facebook is not so ambitious as to think it could dominate every aspect of this metaverse, and is even proclaiming that it doesn't want anything like a walled garden - but it does want to become a key player in it. Still, is this goal even achievable, or desirable ? The timing of Facebook's announcements is certainly more than coincidence given recent scrutiny, but this does not mean it's a doomed gimmick - not by a long shot.

I like very much Carmack's analogy of mobile phones. He made this comparison for two reasons. First, that practically, mobile phones have become highly successful and replaced a slew of different devices. Access to a metaverse could potentially offer similarly staggeringly profitable benefits, but I'll get back to that in a moment. Second, he notes that there are plenty of lapsed VR users, who bought a headset but rarely or never used it - a phenomenon not seen in phones*. So to some users, the device effectively has negative value : they already have it, they paid money for it, but they're actively choosing not to use it. Clearly that has to change for a metaverse to become feasible.

* Carmack is worth listening to, I think - he's quite honest about the practical problems, even if he does seem to buy into the "only connect !" mantra.

I think mobile phones are an excellent analogy for another reason : thresholds of convenience. We had mobile phones back in the 1980s, but hardly anyone had one. They were large, cumbersome, expensive, silly executive toys. I don't doubt they added value to their users, but that came with such high non-financial costs that their eventual explosion as a market wasn't at all obvious or inevitable.

An anecdote may help illustrate this further. When I was ~12 I remember reading a technology magazine that boldly predicted we'd eventually all have mobile phones. The magazine depicted them, rather oddly, as pendants we would wear everywhere, though we might have to move in range of antennas in order to make an actual call : outside of this they'd be no more than pagers. And I remember thinking that the magazine's depiction of someone making a phone call on the beach was very silly - who in the world would want a call on the beach ? Ridiculous ! Likewise, no-one seemed to predict the success of text messaging : why would anyone prefer this to an actual conversation ?

So I'm wary of claims the metaverse will add the necessary value Facebook thinks it will. It might just be a silly gimmick, this is entirely possible. All the same, it might succeed. It would be foolish to dismiss this possibility based on the limitations of current headsets or past 3D flops like cinematic movies (in particular, the latter are a qualitatively different experience than true VR).

Hence, thresholds are key. Carmack notes that once the Oculus dropped its price by $100, sales spiked. Likewise I think this applies to convenience too, more than it is about actual functionality. If you could immerse yourself in a 3D world, or augment the real world with 3D, lifelike imagery, as easily as you can currently say, "Hey Google", why wouldn't you ? If wearing the necessary device was no more burdensome than a pair of ordinary spectacles, if you could do this comfortably for the entire day so that its features were available when you needed and could instantly be dismissed when not, why would you choose not to have this ? Why would you choose not to opt in to this larger, enriched world ? To allow both your existing 2D content and a new world of 3D content together however you wished ? It would be like denying yourself access to the entire internet or every public library. Sure, some parts of the internet are best avoided, as are (presumably) some libraries. And some people do indeed choose to avoid both, but their numbers are negligible. The vast majority to not deliberately deprive and disadvantage themselves in such a way.

(Carmack leans toward the software aspect of the VR as being more important for increasing value than hardware. I have some sympathy for this : for myself, the iDaVIE app is almost to the point where I would use VR routinely for work. But for truly mainstream use, I think we're still at the point where hardware needs to improve before developers will be interested in writing programs to use it.)

Of course, these thresholds gloss over a wealth of practicalities : how to make the glasses visually appealing, how to have a long battery life, how to deliver high-end performance, what level of graphical fidelity would be acceptable as a minimum standard, etc. My point is that if you could create such a device, it's hard to see why any ordinary person wouldn't want it. So I do think the metaverse in principle has every shot of going mainstream. We all use smartphones to the extent that making them even more convenient and powerful definitely would add a great deal of additional value, not least in having far more engrossing conversations and fostering more productive collaborations than in primitive Zoom calls. 

I could spell out a rosy vision of an augmented reality lifestyle, where one routinely has 3D calls with distant relatives and gets to experience distant places without the high-energy demands to actually visit them; where one replaces phones, computers and screens in general with a pair of lenses. I could wax lyrical on the utopian possibilities... I think it not outrageous that a metaverse, using data, could even help us making better feta cheese (hence the silly title), or other ordinary activities where the internet doesn't normally come into play. 

In short, just imagine an activity, and try and imagine how augmenting this could help - what you could do if your imagination was as clear as day, and accessible to anyone you chose to share it with. Most activities have possibilities in such a case, I think. Not all by any means, but a hell of a lot.

But alas, this is Facebook, so we all know such grand utopian visions aren't worth dwelling on. I only mention them to point out that there are potentially enormous positive aspects, just as there are with Facebook itself. It would be foolish indeed to pretend there aren't : Facebook wouldn't have so many users were it not doing at least something right. So burying one's head in the sand isn't going to help. Furthermore, while I doubt this sort of system is going mainstream in the next five years, Facebook seems quite determined to plough billions of dollars into this. Even - especially! - if you don't buy in to the benefits, it's worth being at least concerned about the possible next big crisis in social media.

We all know by now that Facebook is horrendous, so I trust I don't need to spell this out for anyone. I do not believe Zuckerberg at all when he claims he's so passionate about social media or fostering connections between people - his company seems to have a single overriding goal in all things, and enriching human existence isn't it*. But at long last it seems the great political blocs have realised that having such huge profiteering being driven and governed by anger-inducing manipulative news feeds isn't a way towards a utopian dream, and have stirred themselves away from the trivial question of whether regulation needs to be employed towards the much more difficult questions of what, how, and how much.

* While interesting, I do not much agree with this piece on how social media doesn't lead to echo chambers or polarisation : yes, by getting people of conflicting views together it does expose that conflict, but it does exactly nothing to help and often clearly makes things worse.

Questions about whether social media companies should be treated as publishers remain difficult, in my opinion. I think of social media as something wholly new, possessing attributes of all sorts of older media together with something radically different. It is neither like someone organising a town hall meeting nor like a postal service delivering a latter. It has aspects of both, coupled with the extraordinary capability of reach fantastically large audiences in an interactive way that is simply impossible elsewise. 

Rather than wondering whether they are publishers or not, we need entirely new terminology - and new regulations to go along with it. Social media has given rise to memes and deepfakes, and this sort of art as communication is only going to get orders of magnitude more common in a metaverse.

Similarly, painting Facebook as a villain, though - and I can't stress this enough - is very, very easy, it may not be all that helpful. Just saying, "don't use it" clearly doesn't work. Profiteering is a fundamentally amoral, not immoral, activity. For this reason the actual metaverse is more likely to be closer to dystopian than utopian (think DRM problems writ large), but that doesn't mean to won't be desirable enough for people not to want it - or indeed to make its use a practical necessity for everyone else. The threshold of quality standards needed to make a profit is not the same as the threshold to ensure everyone has a wonderful time, which appears to be the foundational myth of the free market.

So is the metaverse coming or not ? I lean towards "probably, but not yet". Maybe in five years we might have a high-end device capable of the sort of features needed, but it won't be affordable. My suspicion is that VR will remain something of a niche activity for several more years, though it may well go to console-scale mainstream when it comes to gaming. Among my friends, this is almost the case already (and I've never even interacted with any of them in VR).

Unfortunately this means it's going to have to continue to put up with the usual sort of idiots who criticise anything they themselves can't see the immediate and instantaneous value of. And if VR can't make good on the convenience criteria, then it may well eventually go the way of 3D televisions - the doubters do have a point. But against this, the immersion of VR is just too much fun, the potential for education too great. The doubters aren't so much wrong as they are very narrow-minded. And if we do reach a full metaverse, it won't - most assuredly - just be because the likes of that twit Mark Zuckerberg told us to : it will because we deemed the costs to be worth the genuine value offered. We should be prepared for a much more sophisticated response to this than simple Luddite rejectionism : if it works, we won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle.

Review : Dune Version 2

Having been pretty excited by the new Dune trailer for more than a year, I finally got to see the whole movie. In a giant IMAX-3D format, no less, which I highly recommend. The 3D is a bit unnecessary but nice; there are some good distance shots, but the main benefit is from having as large a viewing area as humanly possible.

Before I get to the movie itself, I want to note a couple of really first rate long-read articles. The first one is a conventional sort of analysis exploring the influences acting on Frank Herbert in writing the story. The second is a much more unusual theological analysis from the Islamic perspective, showing that the Muslim references and Arabic trappings of the book run much deeper than giving it a flair of the exotic. Both are very long reads, but worthwhile.

In the first piece the essential conclusion is that Herbert had a lot of unresolved conflicts. A conservative environmentalist who supported colonialism but hated its consequences, a borderline technocrat who sought out mysticism, it's no wonder Dune is so bloody complicated that it comes with multiple appendices and a dictionary. I would here add also feminism. While the Empire is dominated by patriarchs, it's also subject to intense, prolonged manipulation by a group super-intelligent warriors who are also entirely female : the Bene Gesserit. Moreover, as the second article explores in depth, while the books are replete with mysticism, I do not really agree with the analysis that this is necessarily implied as "the" solution for a ruler or Herbert's desired outcome (especially given later events). We should also not forget that science dominates the universe of Dune, not least in the Bene Gesserit's millennia-long breeding programme (a.k.a. genetic manipulation just without the technological tools of the trade) to produce their fabled Kwisatz Haderach. If religion points the way, then in Dune, at least, it's science that charts the course.

As I've referenced quite frequently in recent reviews of fiction, I'm increasingly of the mindset that what you take away from fiction is more in your own mind than that of the author. Never was this more true than in Dune. Yes, there are straightforward, classical heroes in the Atreides, and archetypal villains in the Harkonnens. But absolutely everything in between is far, far more complex. Is even Paul Atreides himself truly a hero ? I say no, he does both heroic and villainous acts, even if the latter are born of necessity (in that sense, Dune cannot really be seen as white saviour tale, even though there are certainly aspects of this present). Are the Fremen heroes ? Again - by Western standards - in some ways yes, in some ways no. They are altogether more real and more complex than that, even though one can certainly find extreme examples on both ends of the spectrum throughout the novels.

Likewise, as in the focus of the second article, Dune explores religion not by providing us with the author's preferred "right" answer but more by exploring a whole array of various possibilities. The faiths of the future evolve and change in complex ways, and likewise the system of government never really settles on a single solution. It seems to me to be left largely to the reader to decide what they like about the possibilities explored and what they are horrified by. To me, Herbert's vision of the future is largely dystopian with flashes - brief but truly brilliant moments - of inspired, shining heroism. Conversely, the ugliest message from Dune is that the future is, like the present, largely unpleasant, replete with conflicts that the author implies are literally impossible to resolve, amicably or otherwise.

For this reason it is even more important than in most cases that a movie adaptation be true to the spirit of the book. Do not try and foist your own moralistic spin on the tale; the viewer, and the viewer alone, should get to decide that for themselves. Yes, you can replace Liet Kynes with a woman, as that changes nothing whatever about the story. But pretty much any other character alterations would be dangerous indeed, let alone in altering the storyline itself. At least try to tell me, first and foremost, the tale the author wanted to tell; if you want to tell your own story, do it elsewhere. It's a mark of huge presumption when a director takes a much-loved tale and thinks they can make fundamental changes to it, be that to make it more "woke" or any other reason. I want to discuss the author's vision and whether I approve or not; I don't want something modernised in the slightest.

(Aside, point 1 : this is not to say that I hold this as an absolute by any means, just a general guideline which I feel is especially pertinent in something as morally ambiguous as Dune. Setting down general conditions as what I think makes for a good, sensible deviation in a movie from its source material is not at all easy, so I won't attempt it here.)

(Aside, point 2 : as examples, two recent movies I watched on the small screen : Amazon's The Aeronauts, about a pioneering Victorian ballooning expedition to the giddy heights of 36,000 feet, and the BBC's Ammonites, about the famous fossil hunter Mary Anning. I enjoyed Aeronauts very much. The female lead is an invented character who replaces one of the real-life male explorers, but the character is well-written, well-acted, and serves as a counterweight to the science of the male lead. Most importantly, the science is respected and integral to the movie. Not so with Ammonites, which barely mentions the dominating factor of Anning's life of fossil hunting. Instead it invents, completely without evidence, a lesbian storyline. Sorry, but if I watch a movie about Mary Anning, I'm not turning on to watch her eating pussy. I'm really not. I want to know about the literal freakin' sea monsters she discovered and why they inspired her. Also, as it happens she had a far more interesting life than depicted in the movie, and I felt that by basically omitting all of this the film did her a massive disservice. It wasn't necessarily a bad movie, it was just a bad thing to do to this particular character.)

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that Dune far exceeded my expectations. It's a proper, faithful epic that does full justice to Herbert's magisterial work. A dark tale on a bright planet, I give it an easy 9/10.

First off, the cinematography and the visuals are first rate. Without inventing anything, the rather slow beginning of the book comes vividly and spectacularly to life. In look and feel it has Dennis Villeneuve all over it, minimalist but grand, with more baroque stylings where needed. The sandworms deserve especial credit, but so too does the architecture and vehicles. I never expected anyone to attempt on-screen ornithopters, but Villeneuve has managed it pretty well. If you like nothing else, you ought to be impressed by the visuals at the very least.

Second the cast. Again, faultless. I was a bit wary that they chose an actor closer to Paul's original age, but he plays the role well despite looking like he's closer to 12 than Paul's 15 (amazingly he's actually 25). The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is the gross, disgusting villain he's supposed to be - not as pantomime as in Lynch's version, but that's no bad thing. Touches of humour, missing from the book, are deftly injected here and there which only enrich the characters further. Their complexity is to my mind well depicted, but viewers will definitely benefit from the book. By and large, exposition to explain the plot points is kept to a happy minimum : enough to see everyone through, but never to the point of being spoon-fed unless absolutely necessary and then only in a careful way that doesn't ever feel forced.

The mystical aspect of Paul, I thought, was handled particularly well. Paul's visions are, like the Voice, viscerally forced on the viewer, as a just-confusing-enough blend between current and future events to be disorienting without being overwhelming. There is a dreamlike quality where it's not immediately obvious as to when a vision starts and end that isn't so overdone that the audience is ever lost. Likewise with the storytelling in general : there's plenty presented to get you by, but enough is not shown that the audience can, and is likely expected to, fill in the gaps for themselves. This is a very delicate balance given how much of the novel happens in people's heads, with their words and actions constantly being at odds, but I think Villeneuve has handled this very well.

The only "major" change of character I noticed was in Paul's fight with Jamis. In the book, Jessica explains that he's not toying with his opponent, it's that he's used to shield fighting, which demands a different technique. In the movie, she instead says he's never killed anyone before. I don't remember if she also mentions this in the book as well, but I thought this was if anything a more interesting perspective to present to the audience, reinforcing Paul's moral ambiguity - something much more important than the mechanics of shields.

Pacing is just about perfect. Like all Villeneuve movies it's slow, but not distractingly so. It's got a lot more going on than in Blade Runner 2049, but the long, slow shots are extremely effective at developing an engrossing alien world. It could perhaps have packed a little more of the book into its two and a half hours (it ends about midway through the book, before the really interesting stuff happens), with the major scene that's missing being the banquet in Arakeen, but in my view there's still plenty there, and nothing felt obviously missing. The movie's plot flows and develops perfectly well. In feel, it often feels like a better version of the 1984 version.

This isn't necessarily the definitive version of Dune, but it's a damned good one. Alternative versions could easily try and bring in more of the character's inner thoughts that Herbert describes extensively, which obviously presents a filming challenge and would probably be better suited to a series than a movie. For me, as a film I say this one nails it. It's an excellent stand-alone work and absolutely superb as a companion to the book. 

The only downside ? It doesn't have Patrick Stewart charging into battle with a pug. Oh well, you can't have everything.

The Duel of the Dual

They say that theoretical physics is "the result of two to three beers"; I would dispute only the number of beers (it's higher). But then again, after watching a 40 minute video about whether or not chairs exist (yes, really), I think it's safe to say that philosophy is the result of two or three beers, five whiskeys, an unfortunate amount of wine and an indeterminate quantity of something normally used for degreasing engines.

Most blog posts here are cheerfully ignored, but some have the (un)fortunate habit of generating a spiralling discussion. Back in July I wrote up a summary of responses to a post on Locke, which in turn generated its own really quite staggeringly long discussion post that I just don't think I have the time or the will (free or otherwise... sorry, I'll see myself out) to summarise. This brought in the Chairs video, which has protracted discussions here (sadly degenerates into an argument), here (this one is for experts and makes me actually aware of my own ignorance) and here (the one I find by far the most valuable).

(I didn't participate in those discussions. While I've since managed to read Berkeley's Principle's Of Human Knowledge and Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, I haven't had chance to blog them properly as I would have liked, nor engage in discussions until now. I started several other short posts in response, but haven't completed them yet either. Partly this is because I've been increasing immersed in Virtual Reality (surely a valuable philosophical exercise ?) and partly because there has been far too much real world unpleasantness that had to be dealt with, which didn't leave me feeling like I was up to anything as rigorous as a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality. Hitting things with a virtual sword was far more productive.)

But anyway, I leave those links for future reference. My point today is once again about consciousness. As I've stated many times, I'm a dualist : I think the mental realm is of a fundamentally different nature to the material realm. The two to me seem irreconcilable. While I could entertain the notion of idealism (consciousness is all that exists), it's distinctly unsatisfying and far too magical, while the opposite prospect of materialism (the material world is all there is) feels like full-on, self-evident lunacy.

And yet... in a private discussion with Andreas Geisler, one of the main participants in the discussions, I've realised that this doesn't necessarily mean monism in general is incorrect. I may even yet be persuaded to abandon dualism altogether. Shock, horror !

In one discussion I suggested some categorisations of the different theories of mind might be helpful; this surely exists somewhere, but not in a public-friendly format that I could find. For reasons that entirely escape me, this got someone very angry, so this didn't happen. I would still like to return to this, but for now I shall confine myself only to monism and dualism.

Whereas dualism says the mind and matter are fundamentally different, monism says they are one and the same. Idealism and materialism seem to be the most common forms, but there is a third, rather more mysterious yet possibly more satisfying interpretation that avoids the problems of both.

The basis for this appears to rely on what we mean by two key terms : "knowledge" and "reality" (also similarly "exist"). I am not going to venture into a full discussion of any of these, but I think and hope that there will be no need here.

The most useful quote from the discussions above is to my mind without doubt, "'Real' is a bastard of a word." It - ahem - really is ! Andreas has a habit, which takes some getting used to but I think is useful, of distinguishing between lower and uppercase real and Real, I shall do the same here with exist and Exist. For example, Santa Claus clearly exists in some very lose, general sense - the concept exists, but there's no actual living man going around jumping down chimneys (I still do not hold with the idea of fictional characters having some genuine consciousness). Santa Claus does not Exist in the True, Absolute sense of the word : Santa is not the Ultimate Reality.

Another way to express this is with apples. As I've said previously, I don't think much of the claim that since our perceptions are limited, an apple is probably nothing like what we think it is. All we have is perception, so I would say an apple is by definition that which induces our perceptions of an apple. That is all we can never say. Any other qualities an apple might have we cannot know, so aren't worth considering. The Platonic form, as it were, of an Apple is forever beyond us. We have only lowercase, surface-level knowledge of anything, not True Knowledge of its Real, Absolute form (see also my lengthy post on the basic assumptions of science).

There ought to be nothing inevitably mystical or weird about this at all. Astronomers have been expanding their perceptions through different wavelengths for centuries; there is nothing less "real" about observations taken through a radio telescope as with an optical one. We can never observe anything in its sum total of existence; we are always limited in time, frequency etc. 

Qualia only add to this. I completely disagree with the claim in one of the discussions that colours are not qualia, something knowable only mentally. True, you can measure the properties of an object and thus calculate how it will appear to someone - but redness itself you would never have any conception of at all unless you experience it. That the "colour" could be fully defined by the properties of an object (and, importantly, its surroundings) does not negate that the experiential property of colour is wholly different. What appears red to one person may not appear so to someone with colour blindness, or a mantis shrimp, and there is, ultimately, no way to know if two healthy people genuinely experience the same redness anyway.

So our knowledge is fundamentally limited. Again, this doesn't pose any difficulty for science (even for ostensibly very hard-nosed scientific parameters). Science analyses only what we can objectively perceive. It can't say much - if anything - about an Apple, but it can say what an apple is with certainty. Or to put it another way, scientific certainty is indeed possible but only within its own carefully defined domain. Step outside the domain of scientific knowledge and scientific inquiry becomes not even wrong. This is the basic mistake of Scientism, and indeed New Atheism.

This relates to what is for me the key part of the Chairs video. Defining identity is hard, as for example in the Ship of Theseus (a.k.a. Triggers' Broom) problem : add or subtract one atom, and is it still the same ship ? Take it apart and reassemble it and is it still the same ? What if you simultaneously replace all the parts of the original ?

The answer, according to the Vsauce video, depends on the application conditions. That is, it depends on the domain of what you're interested in. Chairs and shoes are made of atoms, but it seems a bit mad to say that atoms are ultimately all there are (we could go down to the subatomic, for example) and that therefore chairs and shoes do not "really" exist. One could describe them as emergent phenomena, but this still wouldn't address the question of whether or not they exist, and seems daft.

The answer is the domain of examination. An atom cannot itself be a shoe any more than a shoe can be an atom, but both clearly have some level of existence. It would be as mad to say that an atom doesn't exist because it in turn is made of protons and electrons, as it would to say that a shoe doesn't exist because it's made of atoms. And so on ad infinitum, at least in the upwards directions... the Solar System exists but is unstable, stars continually evaporate, galaxies are disrupted and merge, large-scale galactic filaments are inherently unstable. We can't say that these things don't exist just because they change and vary, because they clearly do have some meaningful existence (see the Chairs video for an in-depth look at this).

As does everything else. That is, to repeat : everything has some form of existence. Everything we describe is, ultimately, just a label for something. We do not, as Locke pointed out, know the most basic level of reality, we do not know if there really is something more akin to the original indivisible meaning of "atom". So yes, chairs exist, and yes, you can count them as individual objects if that's the domain you're interested in (see the third discussion's first post for a nice definition of what we mean by a thing). You wouldn't include them at all when doing studies of atomic physics because that wouldn't make any sense, just as it wouldn't really make sense to account for the details of atomic physics when teaching a course on carpentry. It's about relevance, not reality.

Now at last we can introduce consciousness. Shoes and atoms demonstrate a kind of duality : they are both very distinct from the other, but there's also an easy route to a Grand Unified Theory of Shoes. That is, we could say that shoes themselves are dualistic (or pluralistic) : trainers and clogs are fundamentally different, but they are elegantly unified in being made of atoms. 

To apply this to consciousness we go a step further. We've already admitted that our knowledge has a lowercase k, that it only applies within the domain of our perception. This means that full, True Knowledge is beyond our grasp. So, Andreas says, matter and mind could be unified by a third, monist form of reality.

That is, we can chuck out materialism as being daft. It is abundantly obvious that particles bashing about are not the whole of reality and cannot account for its mental, subjective aspect. What the true nature of "stuff" would be in this idea is unknown and unknowable. All we can say is that it is that which induces both matter and mind. It is not that matter has some hitherto unrealised properties, but that there is some altogether different substance which manifests either as mind or matter depending on the circumstances and our perception of it.

I this is an excellent compromise and like this very much. It has a lot in common with Spinoza (who I never blogged because his writing is incredibly tedious) and the Upanishads (which, after the binge drinking session that no doubt gave rise to philosophy, probably went on to smoke and otherwise ingest a whole array of now-illegal substances). All things are one, it's just that we don't know what that thing is.

... As an aside, there is a curious tendency to unify, isn't there ? Like that moment in Futurama where Fry realises there are only two parallel universes... somehow the essential twoness of all things just don't satisfy anyone, or as in the Discworld :

The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Lyn Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.

This scenario has the strength and weakness of allowing great freedom of woo. You can say, "there's no need for any mysticism whatever", because as Andreas points out, you still need evidence for stuff. It doesn't alter, let alone undermine, our lowercase k knowledge of the world around us at all. If you want, you can speculate to your heart's content as to the nature of true Knowledge and Reality; you can call it God as Spinoza did, or the Infinite One as the Upanishads and New Ages loonies refer to it. But if you evaluate lowercase r reality using scientific methodology, there is absolutely no reason to do so. Nothing here suggests or implies any kind of deity of supernatural forces, or equally, explicitly or implicitly rules them out. It is utterly agnostic. It only requires something fundamentally unknowable - nothing more, nothing less.

To me, science is an attempt to answer to the question, "what is knowledge ?". It says that this is something obtained by repeat observation using independent observers and established using different methods. You can have facts in science, which are not subject to change, and theories, which are, and the two are not always distinct (such as the shape of the Earth, which is both an explanatory model and an observable fact). I personally find it strange that anyone would use anything other than a scientific method to inquire about the nature of observable reality.

But this domain of science is limited. For example science can inform but never dictate morality or aesthetic preference : those are inherently internal, subjective beliefs. The problem with Scientism (and materialism) is that they assume that this excellent knowledge offered by science is actually Knowledge, presuming that our observations actually show us what is Real. They treat observations less as provisional evidence and more of a sort of creation myth, somehow bizarrely unquestionable without justification.

Yet science itself says nothing of the sort. As Andreas puts is, "That which gives rise to what we observe is not the same as the observation." We have no reason to think our observations are ever whole or complete. While doing science, we confine ourselves to the measurable, perceptible world, but there is absolutely no reason to then assume that this is all there is, or equally, that if there is this other aspect to reality, that we could ever know anything about it. We can "know" that the thing responsible for our observations must have properties in accordance with our observation, but we cannot know what those much deeper properties actually are.

This means that my dualistic stance is not without foundation. Indeed, within the domain of perception, I think it's extremely useful : my mental perception is clearly not the same at all as the atoms I perceive and anyone who thinks they are is barking mad. Dualism is an entirely valid view within the realm of observation (Andreas initially asking if my duality was just the difference between physics - i.e. mental models, and physicality, the things the models describe). In that sense I would say I have no need to change my stance at all. Rather, this interpretation only enlarges rather than undermining my world view : dualism is a valid description, but does not represent true Knowledge.

Of course, this all needs to sink in quite a lot more. Tentatively, I think it's a matter of taste whether this "unknowable stuff" (I presume there's a better, more technical term, but that's a detail) is Occam-compatible or not. In one sense it is, reducing things down to a single substance, but in another way one could argue that it invokes a whole new level of unknown. Maybe I'll return to this when I eventually get around to properly writing up what I thought of Berkeley and Hume. For now, I find this idea extremely appealing. Hooray !

Review : No Time To Die

Having watched the preceeding twenty-four Bond movies, I feel duty-bound to review the twenty fifth. It would surely be silly not to. Warning, minor spoilers ahead.

In short, I liked it a lot. It follows on neatly from Spectre, so I would recommend watching at least that one first although it's certainly not essential. It ticks all the Bond boxes : action sequences aplenty, gadgets, silly one-liners, car chases, a supervillain bent on world domination with a gigantic underground base... yeah, this is definitely a Bond film and no mistake.

The action sequences are all very well done. As befits the genre, they're right on the edge of believability : they seem just about possible if the protagonist were very, very lucky - highly improbable, but never obviously violate physics. That's the principle sin of really bad Bond movies. It doesn't matter if the villain is an idiot or the plot makes no sense - if the stunts defy basic physical laws, then we're in the Marvel Universe, not the Bond franchise. Here they've wisely chosen to avoid making the stunts ever more outlandish and instead try different ways to keep the tensions : different, closer camera angles, and more atmospheric environments.

Gadget-wise this film is more sci-fi learning than at least the other Daniel Craig Bond movies. For the cars we happily revert back to the classics of machine guns behind the headlights and what are essentially tiny landmines, which is great fun. Q is still Ben Wishaw, who, though no Desmond Llewellyn, is nevertheless Ben Wishaw, which I count as a positive (he also plays a fantastic Richard II, which I doubt Desmond Llewellyn could have managed).

But it's the supervillain's evil scheme that dominates the gadget front. DNA-targeting weapons have featured in sci-fi before, and here their use is reasonably intelligently explored. Certainly they make sense as the weapon of an assassin. What's less clear, and what's possibly the movie's second biggest problem, is why you would want them as a weapon of mass destruction. The villain's acting is very good (though I still personally prefer Blofeld), but his motivation isn't at all clear. "They'll kill millions", say our heroes. Okay, but is there a plan to charge a ransom ? Apparently not : the villain just wants lots and lots of people dead. Fair enough, but which people and why ? Is our villain a neo-Nazi or something else ? This is a pretty big deal which would have benefited from an answer. A villain without a motivation is not great writing.

Against that, the rest of the characters are much more developed. Indeed, it's pretty rare you can even comment on character development in a Bond movie at all, but here I thought that if anything Bond was too emotional, and that's rare indeed. The secondary characters are also excellent : in particular, Ralph Fiennes' M becomes very much more interesting and morally complicated than in the previous films, and there's a nice young lady who is an unusual mix of hapless, nervous, and deadly all at the same time. Things are not quite perfect though, with our supervillain needing quite a lot more exploration in my opinion.

All the faults are minor. I'd say this is a first-rate Bond movie; not my personal favourite, but definitely a very good one. 8/10 ? Yeah, that seems about right. Go and see it in the cinema if you're comfortable going back to the movie theatre.

There is however one huge problem which this movie makes ever more necessary to address : continuity. As discussed last time, there are many options :

1. Each Bond actor represents a different continuity, with each Bond effectively set in a different universe. References to things that apparently happened to other Bonds are just coincidence. In this vein, there's a nice fan theory that Sean Connery's last outing as Bond is in The Rock.
2. Similar to (1), there could be a few different continuities, with, say, Connery, More and Lazenby all representing the same Bond; Dalton and Brosnan another incarnation.
3. James Bond is a Time Lord who regenerates. He has all the memories of the previous Bonds, and goes around in a series of different high-tech vehicles with clever gadgets defeating evil villains with plenty of attractive sidekicks. It makes sense.
4. Bond is a Goa'uld or Trill or other parasitic life form. The body is just a host, and each time it dies the real Bond symbiont moves to a fresh new one. As with (3), this means time passes in the movies as it does in real life, but easily explains why Bond doesn't age.
5. Continuity is treated in the same way as in The Simpsons : through magic. Clearly time and politics change, but Bond doesn't age because Reasons. In some ways this fits most closely with No Time To Die, but in other ways this would be harder to sustain.
6. Shirley's theory : Bond is a code name. The most direct evidence for this would be George Lazeby's statement "well this never happened to the other guy", but this doesn't explain the discontinuity between the Craig and pre-Craig era movies (especially the continuing presence of Judie Dench's M). Also, why have a code number and a name ? Seems excessive.
7. My theory : Bond movies take place in a compressed timeline, with movies from the 1960's set in the 1980's and those from ~2020 taking place in ~2000. This just about fits the technological and political changes and allows Bond to have a plausible career length and age, provided the movies stop in the not too distant future.

None of these fit perfectly. The ending to No Time To Die might possibly have painted the writers into a corner. I mean, I'm perfectly happy if they choose to just ignore the whole issue and get on with making Bond movies as long as they're good, but it's going to feel very strange indeed if they choose to ignore the issue. Still, with No Time To Die having been delayed so long, they've had a good long while to think about this. So we'll see.

Review : The English Civil War

Ever since I read Witchfinders last year, I've been hoping to find a more general social history of the Civil War. Gaskill did an excellent job of presenting Matthew Hopkins in his broader, blood-soaked context, of a country already in political and religious turmoil - but more interestingly, of a society going through an intense change of mindset. An all-pervading mythical, stereotypically medieval world view was giving way to a more rational, modern, materialistic perspective : but by no means uniformly or equally, let alone smoothly. 

Couple that with the political parallels to recent events depicted with brilliant prescience in the movie Cromwell, and this era becomes incredibly appealing. Everyone knows the basic outline of Roundheads versus Cavaliers, the absolute monarch versus a fledgling democracy, but this is at best simplistic. As in earlier eras, democracy was not born out of some grand ideological vision, but gradually and largely accidentally. What the Civil War did was unleash an explosion of new, unpredictable ideas. It was a moment of extreme flux, replete with tyrants, hypocrites and idealists alike - and as Diane Purkiss reveals, it could easily have ended very differently.

(I picked up the book without realising that Purkiss is that very strange historian from the telly who has an extremely annoying and bizarre accent. When I discovered this, I couldn't help but mentally read it in her weirdly pretentious voice. Fortunately, I was able to overcome this because she's a far better writer than an orator.)

The English Civil War isn't quite what I was looking for, but gosh(!) it's pretty darn close. It's a bit more haphazard as a sociological history, being more concerned with individual, anecdotal experiences than drawing grand narratives. Sometimes it's a bit of a mess, being needlessly unchronological, with characters introduced hundreds of pages before they actually become relevant, or accidentally referencing things that aren't explained until much later. Like many history books, it has too many named characters who only appear once, making it very hard to know who one should pay attention to, as well as using multiple names for the nobility (e.g. their first name, surname, and title interchangeably). A Cast of Characters and a timeline would have been very welcome, as would some better maps and colour plates.

But all of these are minor irritations. To its credit, it doesn't have a bewildering array of footnotes at the back which one must keep referencing because one in ten are actually worth reading, an all-too-common practise which ought to be punishable by beheading. And though Purkiss does tend to lapse into somewhat confusing descriptions or trivial minutiae, when she writes well (which is more often), she writes very well. Overall, the text is lively and engaging, interpretative and analytic as well as descriptive. This is an attempt to explain why as much as it is describe what. While I would have preferred a few less anecdotes and a bit more big-picture, it's got more than enough of the latter to satisfy me. I give it a very solid 8/10.

The biggest take-home message to me was to depict the war as an essentially religious conflict. Yes, says Purkiss, it did transmute into a conflict about the basic power structure of the kingdom (especially concerned with how rulers should be appointed more than who specifically they should be), and there were some strongly modern democratic leanings of the sort that Jeremy Corbyn would doubtless align with, but it didn't start off this way. Fundamentally, it began with a conflict of Catholics and Protestants - or perhaps more accurately, devout Protestants and some other people who weren't Protestant enough.

Purkiss describes at some length how the conflict began with reforms that were seen as largely too Catholic in a now fervently Protestant majority country. What she doesn't really do is explain what the initial armed rebellion was aiming at. What, in particular, was Charles doing when he left London and raised his standard ? Why was he allowed to leave ? How exactly were the armies mobilised ? With hindsight, letting the king leave seems really, really stupid, so it would have been nice to have some insight into what people were thinking and expecting when this happened. Similarly, one doesn't get much a feeling as to why apparent trivialities like a new prayer book invoked such feelings of extreme hostility - some modern analogies would have helped here.

Much better and more important are the descriptions of what changed. At various points Purkiss describes a sort of reactionary, conservative radicalism : a response to exceptional circumstances to restore normality with extraordinary methods; revolutionary means rather than aims. Only as the conflict evolved did truly radical ideas take hold, for new forms of government become inevitable rather than merely changing the head of state or forcing him to alter course. "They could talk and act radically while their reflexes remained conservative, even reactionary. They backed awkwardly into a revolution they did not intend."

And later :

"It was widely known that Charles had trusted Strafford completely... so Pym said that Strafford was guilty of treason not against the king, but against the constitution. Here again, Pym seems to have reversed accidentally into radicalism because of expediency... Strafford's indictment allowed the Commons to practise talking as if they and not the king embodied English sovereignty. It was to become an acceptable rather than an unthinkable idea."

"[Pym] connected the religious menaces of popery with menaces to Parliament, to property. That afternoon, although it was not obvious to him or anyone else, Pym created the Parliamentarian cause that was to be so bloodily disputed over the next nine years."

What seems to have happened was that there was sufficient alignment between Catholicism of the king and his supporters (or more accurately, insufficiently zealous Protestantism rather than genuine Catholicism) as to cause the initial rift, but once the two sides were separated, it became ever easier to view the conflict itself as being about mode of government. Yet the initial split, according to Purkiss, was based on religion - not on political ideology. The idea of Parliament was not yet formulated enough, nor its actual institution robust enough, to drive the wedge by itself. That was a consequence of the war, not its primary initial cause. 

Likewise did the war spill over into class warfare rather than originally having much to do with egalitarianism versus the elite. Charles' obsession with the Divine Right of Kings (which I was taught in school as being central to the whole conflict) doesn't get even much of a look-in; according to Purkiss, it's all about religion (which, vice-versa, was barely mentioned to me in school).

"The people did not know they were about to fight an 'English Civil War'. Some thought they were beginning a religious war against the Antichrist. A subset of these thought they were fighting a vast conspiracy of Catholics... others that they were fighting to protect Church and State... still others thought that the war was merely a simple and obvious matter of honour... others that they were witnessing Parliament about to curb the excesses which had grown upon the king... others that what was happening was a chance for regions normally excluded from the process of government to make their voices heard... a very few thought the end of the world was coming."

Of course none of this means that the war didn't eventually define itself as the king versus Parliament, or the commoners versus an elite : it certainly did. It's just that that happened very indirectly. In particularly, the enormous relaxation of censorship allowed for the unprecedented mass dissemination of of ideas. It allowed the discussion of completely new ideas, radical alternatives to the centuries old system of government. It also allowed for fake news and propaganda - if anything, even more so than today, since fact-checking was enormously more difficult.

What this led to was a feedback effect. Lack of censorship drove new ideas which gave the prospect of a more egalitarian future a life of its own, which became a self-driving movement against the monarchy more than the Catholics (indeed, many radicals supported religious toleration, in varying degrees). One of the most interesting examples of this self-perpetuating change is... cookbooks :

"The relaxation of censorship and the resulting expansion of print and reading during the war years did not only open the way for political discussion; it also allowed tradespeople to sell their once-secret knowhow to a wider reading public. It might seem odd to describe cookbooks as a product of political liberation, but Hannah Wolley's works were to open a new way of learning to those not born to the trade. They were part of a democratization of knowledge which in turn may have had political impact. Monarchy makes sense in a world where younger servants learn from older servants in a strict hierarchy. Once print made it possible to learn outside that hierarchy, the existence of privileged knowledge and even privilege itself could be called into question." 

Such ideas eventually manifested themselves in movements like the Levellers, a sort of proto-socialist, anti-monarchy ideology, and the Diggers, a more cult-like proto-communism. But while eventually Britain was to get a far more constrained monarchy and more representative society, this was not its moment : not even close. The complex interplay between ideas and events led to a far less linear sequence of events than the popular narrative. Though created by Parliament, the New Model Army became an independent actor in its own right, at one point even occupying London. It was in victory, not instigation, that the war became cast as a drive for the end of monarchy and the rights of the people.

Unsurprisingly, this highly complex (though not truly chaotic) situation actually makes it very hard indeed to establish any heroes and villains. The anti-monarchy Independents were hardly a model of democratic ideals, having far more in common with modern Brexiteers* than genuine parliamentarians :

* The book was published in 2006, so Purkiss herself doesn't make this analogy.

"They were not a majority in any institution except the army. Perhaps they were not even a majority in any town or city. But they made their views known through a bold willingness to challenge anything that ran up against their opinions. They were immeasurably strengthened because they had now achieved their aim of winning the war. True, they did not quite command the Commons, but they were more numerous than they had been... Ideas that had once been unthinkable and certainly unsayable were now held by a significant, vocal, and very active minority."

"They removed ecclesiastical authority altogether. Learning - and especially and Oxford degree, once a passport to a clerical living - became hated signs of Royalist sympathies... Through this process, it came to seem normal to many members of London radical sects to be addressed by people who had no particular qualifications, people who would not get a hearing in the Commons, in town meetings, or in trade guilds. It even came to seem meritorious that a speaker had no qualifications : a sign of purity and even of election.... They had an open structure, too, which itself served as a model for the removal of hierarchy in other arenas. If bishops and priests could very well be abolished, why did anyone need kings and magistrates ?"

The people have had enough of experts ! With delectable irony, Michael Gove would surely feel at home among the Independents. And on this occasion they were, of course, ultimately proven right in some ways : the country of the 17th century was (by modern standards) too elitist and hierarchical by far. 

Not only that, but Parliament seriously buggered things up. Its ill treatment of its own victorious army led the army itself to radicalise and take matters into its own hands. Parliament remained an old boy's club : it was in the Independents and the Levellers where real social change was fomenting. The Army came to see itself as defending liberty not on behalf of Parliament, but actively protecting the people from Parliamentary oppression :

"...early Leveller tracts... almost identified with the king on the grounds that he too had been scorned and dishonoured by Parliament, who 'make the king their scorn and us their slaves.'"

Ultimately, this dealt a hammer blow to the fledgling British democracy :

"A war that had begun when Charles had tried to remove unruly MPs ended with the Army deciding to do the same. Colonel Thomas Pride, with a group of musketeers, forcibly removed one hundred and forty-five Presbyterian MPs, leaving a group of fifty who supported the Army. This was an extraordinary event, an armed coup. It was the end of 'Parliament' as a cause, the end of law and order, but also the beginning of true populism. After all its moderates were removed, the House of Commons was transformed into a kind of kangaroo court."

Here unfortunately is where the book's lack of focus becomes its greatest weakness. While Purkiss gives a good biographical overview of Charles, Cromwell* gets a walk-on part. Purkiss provides only the briefest outline of what happened after the war, so if and how the revolutionary concepts unleashed by the war translated into the later concept of a constitutional monarchy is frustratingly left unexplored - as too are the effects of life under Cromwell's tyranny. This feels almost like a cliffhanger ending : with the dominating narrative by the end having at last become the mode of government, to not explore what happened next is downright strange. 

* And unfortunately what he did in Ireland, which is almost glossed over completely. English history books badly need to cover this.

What is interesting is how much chance seems to have played a role in events. Nothing about the evolution of the war was inevitable. Leveller ideas could have been accommodated to a more reasonable degree than Parliament or Cromwell were willing to tolerate. The Army could have been treated more fairly and so avoided its mutiny. And indeed, Charles could actually have won - or even avoided war altogether :

"Nevertheless, despite all these doubts and difficulties, the terrifying thing about Charles' personal rule is not that it was bound to fail, but that it nearly succeeded. There were tensions, there were fears, even panics; there was also opposition. But these things were common, and had accompanied the Tudor reforms of the monarchy, too; indeed, Elizabeth I was threatened with far greater outbursts of popular dissent than Charles faced before 1642. The Civil War was not bound to occur; it would take a special, exceptional set of circumstances to make it happen."

And this is very much in line with my own take that political rhetoric is often concerned more with what could potentially happen than what actually has happened already. It's not that we fear, say, some merely dislikeable change of legislation, it's that we fear where this will lead. The frightening lesson of history is that sometimes these fears do indeed prove well founded. 

Democracy, for all its flaws, is a precious thing, and its greatest weakness is that it's all too easy to throw away. History sometimes gradually creeps forward and other times lurches spasmodically, sometimes driven by mass revolutionaries and sometimes it's dragged kicking and screaming by the elites - but the moral arc of the universe bends not in any particular direction but only where we will it. So while we would do well not to collapse in despair whenever politics takes a more authoritarian leaning, so too would be do well to point back into history and say, "Look, we're not making this up. We know our concerns are justified because we've seen this happen before. Yes, there are differences between now and then, but there are also similarities. The freedoms we have were hard-won in blood and battle, and we ought to be deeply concerned whenever anyone decides we should surrender them. History isn't an instruction book, but it would be foolish indeed not to consult it at all."

Bondshead Revisited

To be fully prepared for No Time To Die, we've been re-watching the entire canon of Bond movies, from 1963's Dr No right up to 2015's Spectre.

I love Bond movies. At one point I seriously contemplated buying the blu-ray box set, but all the streaming services now make that somewhat unnecessary. But I haven't watched the full corpus in some considerable time, so revisiting a childhood staple is quite an educational experience.

To start with the serious bit, it goes without saying that 60's Bond is a serial rapist. The movies overall are... problematic. Unlike certain memes I see from time to time, I don't think this means we can no longer enjoy them, let alone that they should be censored. I mean, I grew up watching Sean Connery force himself on women who would - inexplicably - protest ferociously but swoon uncontrollably as soon as they got a taste of that sweet Scottish machismo, and I've managed to go exactly 38 years without feeling the urge to force my testicles upon anyone. It was pretty obvious to me that this wasn't how the real world worked, still less any kind of guide to behaviour. Bond is at best a fantasy figure, but I've never seen a government assassin with a frickin' license to kill as any kind of role model (even when being heroic), because that would be very, very stupid. If you really grow up thinking that this sort of behaviour is acceptable, you have much bigger problems than which fiction you're being subjected to.

I suppose my basic take is that fiction is far more in the eye of the beholder than it speaks for itself. So while I take a much harsher line against reporting on or even presenting interpretative opinion pieces regarding the facts, when it comes to fiction I find it hard to be anything much less than a free speech absolutist. Oh, there are no doubt exceptions, but they'd be rare indeed.

The way I see it, whether you think 60's Bond's behaviour is laudable or contemptible is probably set more by external factors than it is by any direct influence the movies had on you. Collectively, perhaps, fiction shapes our morality at least to some degree, but probably individual works have little impact - and our real life experiences are massively more influential. Maybe the director genuinely thought that every girl should dream of being molested by a random Scotsman, I don't know, but that was never the impression I had. So regardless of the intent, I never saw that aspect of Bond's behaviour as something that was acceptable, let alone desirable. 

(In contrast if you're going to go around explicitly saying, "being molested by a random Scotsman is a good thing", this is, to my mind, altogether different than merely depicting it in fiction and letting the audience make their own judgement. At least, I think this is a decent guideline.)

My take on problematic movies, then, is not that we should now spurn them, any more than we should spurn classic literature. There are parts of Plato and Epictetus that are enormously offensive to any right-thinking person, but that doesn't mean we can't both enjoy them and learn from them - in the latter, both in terms of what they got wrong as well as what they got right. 

So to the more extreme proponents of cancel culture, I say just accept that these movies were produced in another era and they're going to have problems. Just as everything is offensive to someone, so everyone - absolutely everyone - is offended by something. If you start demanding that everything be acceptable to everyone, you're not going to have much left at all. I say internalise it, state your case as to why it's wrong if you feel the need to, but personally I don't feel that a minor aspect needs invalidate a whole film. The exception would of course be of the whole message of the film were offensive : if Bond were on a mission to support the KKK, take down the European Union, or get Trump re-elected... that I would never condone, but 60's Bond not being sufficiently "woke" is not something I have a problem with.

In short, I'm glad they made the movies when they did, and I'm at least equally glad that they don't make movies like that any more.

On to the movies themselves. Of the earlier Bond movies, my favourite is probably You Only Live Twice. Sean Connery is much the most problematic of the earlier Bonds, and this particular one features some truly cringe-worthy "let's pretend to be Japanese" shenanigans, but it's got a cool gyrocopter (aerial mines !) and a giant base inside a frickin' volcano. And the best, most sinister version of Ernst Stavro Blofeld yet depicted. Goldfinger is the more popular, but for me it's but a close second : it has that iconic laser scene, but it can't compete with Blofeld and an erupting volcano.

The silliness of the Bond franchise swings like a pendulum, and it's surely fair to say that it reached the zenith of the arc in the Roger Moore era. Moore's Bond had the best gadgets (the underwater car still to this day has a very high cool factor), but the hamminess definitely reached unsustainable levels. I enjoy all the Moore films to varying degrees, but Moonraker is the epitome of a bad Bond movie - most of the time the Moore films feature silliness embedded within something at least a little bit plausible, but Moonraker just lets go completely. Yet it's still not as bad as the truly dreadful Never Say Never Again, which we skipped on the grounds that it's utter crap.

I personally found Timothy Dalton very underrated as Bond. Both of his films I think have the silliness/grittiness balance just about right. There are cool but silly gadgets and a daft skiing sequence on a cello, but it manages to pull it off. Dalton is suave and sophisticated, the enemies believable (after a fashion) to the extent that the lack of a giant secret underground base is but a minor detail. He deserved a longer outing.

Fortunately, Pierce Brosnan continued in a very similar vein. Of course I have a particular fondness for Goldeneye, not only for the extended Arecibo sequence but also for the car chase in a tank, which remains one of my all-time favourite car chases of any movie. Tomorrow Never Dies is much, much sillier, but it's interesting how it foreshadows later themes that information is the new battleground : it's not the best way to examine the impact of fake news, but it deserves more credit. As for The World is Not Enough, whoever thought Denise Richards could be a nuclear physicist was a bit mad, but whoever put her in a tank top was a genius.

Die Another Day begins with an impressive hovercraft sequence but it quickly falls off the cliff of sanity, specifically a collapsing glacier being blasted by a CGI laser that's so crummy it would look bad if it was on a cheap documentary on the Discovery channel. It's a horrible movie, which is a shame because I rather liked Brosnan as Bond.

We reach now the Daniel Craig era. I hated Die Another Day at the time of release, but I hated Casino Royale even more. This was unfair of me. Yes, it's gritter and less cheesy than other Bond movies, too much so. The "let's whack Bond's gentials" scene is still going too far. But overall, it has more Bond qualities than I gave it credit for - rewatching it in sequence, I liked it a lot more than I did the first time round. There are touches of Bond-esque silliness here and there - subtle ones, but they're there all the same. I still think it's over-rated, but I'm prepared to welcome it back to the fold.

Quantum of Solace I skipped the first time around because I hated Casino Royale and everyone told me it was crap. It isn't. It's a perfectly decent Bond flick. Yes, it's got a silly title, but it builds nicely from Casino as Craig develops further into the sort of Bond we're more accustomed to. This continues in Skyfall, which I loved at the time and still do. Finally the sense of fun returns unfettered, with a self-deprecating take on the gadgets and the best exploding Scottish house you'll ever see. Thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish.

Finally, Spectre. Despite having been thrilled by Skyfall's return to form, I never got to see Spectre until a few days ago. And I was delighted - this is even more Bond-esque than Skyfall. We're fully back to Bond having cool gadgets (albeit malfunctioning more these days, which adds to the humour) and impressive, grandiose physical stunt sequences. And the villain is delightfully creepy. It's a toss-up whether I prefer this to Skyfall, so I'll have to rewatch it.

Of course, the real problem for James Bond is not whether he next should become Jane Bond, but continuity. Does each actor represent a different narrative universe* ? Is Bond a Time Lord who regenerates ? Is Bond just a code name ? 

* See the charming theory that Sean Connery's character in The Rock is actually Bond.

Personally I have two preferences. One option is that there's a compressed timeline, with 60's Bond movies actually being set in the 1980s, while the latest ones at set in the early 2000's*. In this way Bond's career has a plausible duration, with Bond currently being no older than 50, and the social and technological developments not being too outrageous. Of course this means Bond can't continue for much longer, or the in-universe character will quickly become far too old. So the other option is that we view Bond like The Simpsons, with the in-universe timeline having little or no relation to the external world, and then we all shut up and concentrate on the car chases and explosions. Which is what we probably should do anyway.

* We have to then view Casino Royale as a sort of modernised retelling of events that actually look place in the early 80's.