Review : The Nature of Middle Earth / Beren and Lúthien

Continuing my book-reading holiday splurge. After completing The Habsburgs, which had languished on my side-table for some weeks because its density doesn't make for good bedtime reading, I moved on to a miniature Tolkien binge.

First up was The Nature of Middle Earth. Having recently completed a five-part blog post addressing the philosophy of Middle Earth through the lens of cosmology, this has been on my wish-list for some time. Then it appeared in my local bookshop's Tolkien section, and though for some reason I hesitated to buy it, wondering if this might not be too haphazard a selection of short notes scribbled by Tolkien in the margins, I decided to buy it anyway.

This was a sensible decision as it's a wonderful book. There's little enough fiction here, but it's exactly what I was after : an analysis of both the morality and natural philosophy implicit in Middle Earth, presented by Tolkien's own papers in which he attempted to seek consistency between the worlds of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I made so many notes on this that I'm going to have to release an appendix to the blog series, so that will cover the deeper stuff eventually. Suffice to say that I think my basic conclusions were spot on. Here, just a short review rather than a summary proper.

NOME is not for those looking for more stories, but anyone interested in Tolkien's world-building should definitely give it a go. For the dedicated nerds, it includes many pages of detailed calculations about Elven life-cycles and a robust solution explaining why the world isn't overrun with Elves. It even includes some description of atomic theory as applied to Middle Earth, and these kinds of numeric, scientific details aren't something I was expecting at all. For the philosophers, the second section of the book is pure gold, with whole swathes being exactly the kind of thing you'd find in Locke or Berkeley. For the theologians the appendix relates some of these issues to Catholic doctrine, while those who like Tolkien's occasional lapses into silliness will find discussions of why it's evil to chop the legs off squirrels and a fascinating, bizarre section of the friendliness of Númenórean bears and their adorable dances. 

Personally I think this book is outstanding. If you're trying to do a full-on scholarly analysis of the self-consistency (or lack thereof) of Tolkien's world, you'll find enough numerical details here to do the job. If you're just interested in Tolkien's changing ideas over time you'll have more than enough to go on. The only downside is that perhaps some of this gets a bit repetitive, especially as Tolkien tended to doggedly persist with ideas with minor modifications only to then make sweeping revisions that undid everything, making all the previous work null and void - it's probably worth keeping that in mind throughout. And the third section of the book is perhaps rather dry for the most part, though not entirely so. 

But overall, I have to give it a 9/10. The material is presented and edited with commendable common-sense. It reveals an interplay between Tolkien's desire for a specific story shaping the nature of the world he was creating, which created a feedback loop : any inconsistency needed changes to the story, which changed the nature of the world, and so on. After reading this, it becomes very much more understandable why he never finished it : the task of creating a ruthlessly self-consistent world, recognisable to our own but operating on fundamentally different principles, whilst making it believable to the common reader and mythologising our own history, was a truly monumental one. All the more remarkable that many of the texts presented were written on the backs of examination papers and calendars.

Next up, Beren and Lúthien. This is my favourite story from The Silmarillion, so I was curious to see how the tale had developed. And I was not disappointed. The earliest version presented dates from 1917, when the 25 year-old Tolkien had just got married, fought in the Battle of the Somme, and was convalescing in the less terrifying region of Yorkshire.

This first version was the most interesting to me. It's written far more in the style of a conventional fairy tale than the final version published in The Silmarillion (sadly, and I think this is a major oversight, that version is not included here as it's by far the best and most epic of all the iterations). Lúthien, at this point known by her later-nickname Tinúviel, begins as a Rapunzel-like figure. While Melkor (Melko in this case) is present as the supreme evil, instead of facing Sauron, our heroes have to contend with... Tevildo, Prince of Cats.

Yes, really. He's a giant cat, ruling a castle of giant cats, which is specially designed so that the cats have secure access thanks to their powerful leaps, which Elves and Men cannot match.

This sounds bizarre, and it is. Not only that, but Tevildo sets Beren the challenge of catching three giant evil mice that he's kept around for sport. What's really interesting here is that Beren, unlike most fairytale heroes, simply fails. He has to be rescued by Lúthien (and also Huan, here given the title Captain of Dogs), who though not the stunningly powerful sorceress of the final version, nevertheless has powerful magic. Instead of throwing down Sauron's fortress, she... shrinks the cats.

There are lots of echoes (if you will) for the final version here, both in the language (hinting here and there of the greater things to come) and the themes, mentioning in particular how both Melko and Tevildo, as themselves untrustworthy liars, are themselves untrusting yet easily deceived. Though undeniably strange compared to the straightforward epic of much later years, it's also genuinely charming, like a fairytale aimed at grown-ups without being the least bit cynical or base. It forms a curious, highly entertaining (and very very silly) myth to explain the origin of the enduring enmity between dogs and cats. Actually, this is one point on which Tolkien and I could never see eye to eye :

"... nor have they since that day had lord or master or any friend, and their voices wail and screech for their hearts are very lonely and bitter and full of loss, yet there is only darkness within and no kindliness."

OUCH !

The other versions presented are mainly the incomplete poetic versions. I'm not at all fussed on most of Tolkien's poems but these are more readable, albeit in the main part very simple... they remind me at times almost of Data's poetry. They do become somewhat repetitive, however, and I think perhaps removing one and replacing it with the final version would have been more useful. Still, it's fascinating to see the tale gradually morph from something charming but quite ridiculous into one of the most epic parts of all of Tolkien's canon.

There's also a good introduction and commentary by Christopher Tolkien, explaining why Tolkien initially called some of the Elves "gnomes", meaning "gnomic", "knowledgeable", which he changed on realising that hardly anyone would read it that way. There was also an early intention to have the Elves become more and more fairylike (in the modern sense) over time, but that I leave for the planned future post. Overall, a great read, with some wonderful illustrations (probably it's worth getting the hardback version if you can). I give it a solid 8/10.

Two final points. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Unfinished Tales and now these, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and this morning bought myself Christopher Tolkien's 12 volume, 5000+pages, hardback version of The Complete History of Middle Earth.

BOOKY. GOODNESS !

And secondly... Tolkien purists are hypocritical nutters. To say you prefer the original version over some adaptation or other because of the changes is just what are you even talking about. Do you want Tevildo and Tom Bombadil back ? DO YOU ? Well, go on then, go ask a chatbot to write you a revised version. Yes, if you must, object to revisions, that's fine (actually there are some changes Tolkien planned that I don't like), but don't go complaining just because adaptations don't follow the "original" text. Where Tolkien is concerned, hardly any such thing even exists.

Review : Habsburgs - Embodying Empire

I spent the last week exploring a small Dutch island and going on a hardcore reading binge, so it's time to blog up some of that.

Let's kick off with Andrew Wheatcroft's The Habsburgs : Embodying Empire. Recently I tried to broaden my range of European history knowledge with Simon Winder's Lotharingia, but it was by some margin the most pointless thing I've ever read (at least for non-fiction; The Count of Monte Cristo certainly claims the title in the fiction category). It was so stupendously bad that I couldn't even blog it properly and contented myself with a short rant here. 

Fortunately I picked up a few other titles during the same book-buying spree, which brings us to Habsburgs. This begins very well, with a good mixture of the exciting and the analytical. When he wants to, Wheatcroft can write a battle scene that would equal anything Roger Crawley comes up with - and Crawley is the absolute master of narrative military history, so this is not a comparison to be made lightly.

By the end, though, the book degenerates to something which is... decent, but weird. This actually becomes clear deceptively early on. Wheatcroft chooses to begin by describing the events of 1386, but never links this to any general narrative. It's a perfectly fine bit of narrative, but I was waiting to learn of its broader relevance. And waiting, and waiting... until I finally realised there wasn't one. This is non-linear history without a clear reason for it, something that ought to be studiously avoided.

It's also largely biographical. But not a biography of any one individual, but a haphazard attempt at a biography of the whole family. Now I did learn quite a bit from this, in particular the relations between the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg lines. And the early and middle stages of the book are okay, choosing a few select individuals and examples to go into detail without trying to cover absolutely every emperor, which would have been foolish (though even here it isn't clear how he made his selection). By the end, however, it becomes a somewhat plodding series of mini-biographies which cover far more of the final days and slow deaths of each successive emperor than saying anything about their achievements while they were alive. And I'm not sure what the point of this was supposed to be.

And it falls foul of another pet hate : excessive footnotes (dozens per chapter !) at the back of the book, mixing references and commentary. Worse, Wheatcroft claims that these are the most interesting bits, but they're really not. Oh, a few of them are worth reading, but all of those could have should have been incorporated into the main text. 

In short, it's a mess. The chapter on Charles V is pretty good, but while Wheatcroft explicitly tries to frame his final years as being a tragic failure, nothing he says gives this impression at all. Indeed, it felt to me like he'd been remarkably successful, so for Wheatcroft to arbitrarily decide the exact opposite feels like very bad writing.

Not that it's without merit elsewhere. Wheatcroft argues that the Habsburgs use of symbolism, his principle topic, came about as a response to exclusion from the great circles of power - a retreat into fantasy where they could reimagine themselves as they would wish, which, when their fortunes waxed, they were able to propagate throughout Europe. And Wheatcroft tries hard to get into the mindset of the time. For the rulers of the age, he argues, facts really didn't matter very much at all. The point of their elaborate imagery, from conventional paintings to massive, intricate woodcarvings, was to persuade, not to establish actual truth. The sense of entitlement behind it all was often breathtaking. They knew, deep down, that of course they should be in charge; if forgeries were required then forgeries would be produced without a moment's qualm.

We now enter a shadow-world... and world in which the power of the imagination could outstrip the power of the sword. It is a mental gap almost impossible for the modern mind to bridge. To our eyes the Holy Lance... looks like a broken old spearhead. But the totemic power of these relics was incalculable. In such a world the Habsburg's invisible power had a clear purpose, for it gave them a matchless weapon, a Castle Dauntless that no enemy could conquer or subvert.

Likewise, he makes the point that medieval Europe was transitioning between oral and literate, where the written word was only beginning to supplant spoken testimony. This is often overlooked, perhaps because historians deal so much more frequently in written text than in oral histories. More on the importance of this in one of the next reviews. And on later periods, he notes that while the education of the emperors wasn't at all what we might consider necessary in a rule, it probably wasn't so far off the mark considering what they would actually need to know at the time. Again, he makes a commendable effort to get into the mindset of the era.

Perhaps his most interesting, if somewhat implicit, concern is with the Romanesque imagery. I always find Roman follies in 18th century gardens very melancholy, for reasons I give in suitably melodramatic terms here*, but Wheatcroft does a decent job of trying to explain how it would have been seen at the time : not as trying to recreate a lost mental world, but in jubilantly claiming the theatrics for the then-modern times, using the ancient symbols to represent and enliven contemporary virtues. So confident was the age in its complete destruction of paganism that it could usurp the earlier symbols to create its own images : not an act of recycling but genuine creation. Likewise, when the Habsburgs increased the propagation of their symbols, this should be seen not as insecurity but the opposite : self-consciously, they needed to already feel confident of success before showing their work to a larger audience. "Methinks he doth protest too much" does not seem to apply here.

* My mum and my girlfriend have endless fun teasing my about this, but I don't care.

The way the Habsburgs used power could also be interestingly complex. Of the Emperor Joseph II :

His energy and the cascade of changes that he unleased - the decrees and instruments alone are numbered in the thousands - were in the service of "enlightened" ideals, although Joseph had read very little of the great philosophers and practitioners of "Enlightenment". He abolished serfdom, reduced censorship, restricted the rights and privileges of the nobility, instituted freedom of worship, and created a bureaucracy - of administrators and secret police - to put his programme into effect.

Which is pretty close to being a benevolent despot. There were, says Wheatcroft, no torture chambers, but the censorship even if limited was still powerful and conducive to a climate of fear. If by and large the state would only watch its citizens rather than molesting them, so intently was this done that rarely would any venture out of line, however liberal the limits might be.

When he asked in a most friendly fashion what was so disturbing about the play to warrant its suppression, the censor replied with some animation, "Oh nothing at all; but I thought to myself, 'One can never tell'."

Finally the evolution of the behaviour of the rulers towards their subjects is interesting, even if there's nothing especially Habsburg about it all :

"True greatness is broad, gentle, familiar and popular; it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters."

There is an curious mixture of being almost progressive in some aspects while being domineering and conservative in others. If the modern British monarchy is still distinctly uncomfortable with being seen close-up, and clearly chooses its self-imagery very selectively, it also can't possibly believe this is fooling anyone anymore. The Habsburgs, though they came to terms quite easily with losing their aura of mystique that differentiated the nobility from commoners, nevertheless remained firmly in charge until the end, expecting their propaganda to be successful.

When Wheatcroft tackles specific issues he generally does a good job. He clearly shows that the Habsburgs did not suffer from indecisiveness as is often supposed, but had the exact opposite fault of stubbornness. He also demonstrates that while inbreeding (a topic he overlooks too much) did cause physical infirmity, it did not cause mental problems. 

Wheatcroft's problem is not so much in finding the right words or arguments (though he can sometimes be dull and tedious; the text is often very dense) but in choosing which arguments to tackle, deciding on which bits of history to address in the first place - and, crucially, in how to structure the whole. In these aspects the book must be seen as largely a failure. Most fatally of all is the lack of context : if like me you're not all that familiar with every single period of history on a pan-European scale, you're going to miss a lot. I now know a lot of things happened but remain completely in the dark as to why or how, who was involved, or even what exactly was going on in the first place. This could certainly have been arranged in a much better way.

Overall I have to give it a 6/10. It's not bad, it contains enough bits of interest to be worth a read, but not worth recommending. The author really should have discussed the basic structure with someone a lot more before putting pen to paper. 

Partygate Live

Boris Johnson has once again risen his objectively ugly head with the "partygate" saga, by way of the Privileges Committee meeting convened to hear his testimony. I watched the thing in full because this is the sort of fun-loving antics I like to get up to in my spare time*. Let me try and summarise this into the main results of question from the seven different panel members.

* Actually, whenever I watch these longer debates outside of the main Westminster chamber, I'm reassured. These people always ask the same questions I want asked and the debates proceed in a sensible way, quite unlike the bear pit that usually characterises the ones in the main chamber.

First, Harriette Harman's opening statement is a good summary of why this matters. I won't dwell on this but will note two things. One, that it's about lying, not whether the Covid rules were broken or lockdowns were necessary, except in terms of validating statements Boris made to Parliament. Honesty is a fundamental component of the democratic process without which it simply cannot function. Two, the evidence from the Sue Gray report has not been considered by the Committee yet, and won't be until statements of truth are gathered from the witnesses. This may seem strange and perhaps disappointing, but it isn't. Indeed, it has some very interesting consequences, as we'll see.

0) Boris' opening statement

This was the most classically Johnsonian nonsense of the whole three hours. For the rest, he mostly tried to stick to his guns, but in this one he was all over the place.

He began with a weird claim that he thought the Committee had already vindicated him in spite of its interim report all but declaring him to have lied. All the evidence clearly supports him, he said, even though the Committee nonetheless decided that it didn't. He then quickly turned partisan, saying they should publish in full all the evidence so that the public could judge for themselves. He variously made claims that he respected the Committee, accepted their impartiality, but thought they were prejudiced and unfair.

All this is classic Johnsonian have-it-both-ways mentality, which is to say, being mental, because this just isn't possible. It amounts to saying, "I trust you to be fair even though you're clearly unfair." This is best expressed when he said that the Committee couldn't possibly mean to accuse him of lying because no-one really impartial could ever do that, a deplorably circular line of reasoning that implicitly attacks the Committee's credibility from the outset.

He then moved on to more specific claims, including rubbish about there being an official photographer but not explaining why (a) these photographs were not seen until the story broke (b) these photographs are crappy and anyone with a phone could easily frame a better shot and (c) why this matters. To the last point, he similarly claimed that there were so many people present, if it was so "obvious" that the rule were broken, someone must have realised this and would have raised a warning if it were so. It's a classic "so many people can't be wrong or stupid !" fallacy, coupled weirdly with the fact that "so many people" and "Covid guidance" make for awfully strange bedfellows. This also ignores the fact that many people are known to have raised objections.

Boris did at least concede that the guidance was indeed not followed at all times, that this would have been impossible. And this is actually fair enough, but is beside the point, which is that he repeatedly claimed that it was followed perfectly.

Johnson also noted that the police agreed that the attendance was in compliance with the rules because most people at most of these gatherings were not fined. And when they did issue fines, they only did so - with one obvious exception - after he had left. Well ! First, the police didn't investigate every single person at every single gathering. Second, if fixed penalty notices (FPNs) are the measure of morality, then claiming that he didn't understand why he himself received one is very Schrodinger.

Finally he made the stupid point that his claims about the assurances he received about adherence to the rules and guidance were only in relation to specific gatherings. This is dumb, because he shouldn't be relying on such narrow guidance and anyway he himself was present at some of them. Again, more later. He also repeated the erroneous claims about the UK's supposedly world-beating response to the pandemic, which is just another lie so far as I'm concerned.

1) Sir Bernard Jenkins

Sir Bernard began with a picture of Johnson raising a glass to a group of staff with many bottles of wine on the table. Boris didn't accept that people weren't making an effort to social distance, okay maybe not just at that particular moment, but in general they definitely were. It was just an impromptu meeting to thank staff, no FPN was issued (Jenkins later corrected him on this point, actually at least one was), and it just didn't occur to him it would have breached rules or guidance.

Jenkins responded that Boris hadn't claimed the guidance was followed "as well as we could", but much more categorically that everything was complied with perfectly at all times. Here Boris elaborated on perhaps his only tenable claim in all this, that it's just not possible to follow all the guidance perfectly 100% of the time in Downing Street, and that, more importantly, that's why they had a testing procedure in place as well, which at the time wasn't so common in other workplaces. Couple this with perspex screens, attempts to be socially distanced as much as possible (including using Zoom), and the situation looks rather better. 

Not much better mind you, especially as everyone else was doing mostly similar stuff, and more because all those bottles of wine are quite something for an "impromptu" meeting. Others went to considerably greater lengths to avoid such clearly celebratory meetings. And Sir Bernard wasn't fooled. If Boris thought things were looking up when the senior Tory said that "if you'd said all that at the time, you might not be here", then he was about to be disappointed. 

Jenkins asked where the screens were. The answer : the next room. Well, the guidance doesn't say you can have a thank-you meeting because you think it's important, said Jenkins, it said that you should avoid such meetings. So why gather in a different room where it's not possible to be Covid safe ? This is just where everyone would gather quickly, apparently, but it seems to me that is exactly what you're supposed to avoid. Getting everyone together for socialising even for work purposes is precisely what you were supposed not to do.

Johnson didn't really have an answer here. He stuck to the line that this meeting was necessary for work and it just never occurred to him for an instant that it wouldn't be. Harman interjected to discuss the guidance allowing for 1m separation; the upshot seemed to be that there had to be other mitigations and it should still be avoided and kept to 2m if at all possible, which this "meeting" clearly doesn't qualify for. Jenkins asked if Johnson would have told other people at the time that such meetings were acceptable. Johnson gave a rambling answer saying basically "yes", but then quickly backtracked to say he meant "follow the guidance", which wasn't much of an answer at all. Especially since people were fined for many similar events to this.

The rest of the session with Jenkins had some more convoluted thinking from Johnson that would cause Schrodinger's Cat to give up in despair, invent a whole new theory of quantum mechanics and keep the box firmly shut. The once-unquestionable Sue Gray report, which vindicated Johnson entirely despite being absolutely damming as far as everyone else was concerned, then disregarded as a left-wing stitch up, is now back to being beyond reproach so the Committee should use all these stuff right away. I mean, sure, they're going to. But how in the world he expects that to help his case is absolutely beyond me. The other main point, raised by everyone else again and again, was that it must have been obvious that the rules were being broken.

2) The Ginger Lady

Whoever she was, she raised the point that other meetings clearly included people who shouldn't have been there if they were work meetings : his wife and son and interior designer of all people. Was this really necessary for work purposes ?

Yes, said Boris. Those photos just show me in between meetings and aren't representative. And then, with a truly perverse flourish of logic, he reasoned that because he never realised any of this was a problem, that just self-evidently demonstrates how un-obvious it was that none of this was a problem. 

This is just torturous in the extreme. The Ginger Lady quoted the guidance Boris himself had told the nation not a week before the garden party, but he just didn't get it. Okay, it's true that (as he stated) it's a peculiarity of Downing Street that as both workplace and residence, occasionally you'll get family members moving around the place. That doesn't for one moment explain their presence in government meetings, for God's sake. It certainly doesn't explain why his interior designer was there at all, and it's one heck of a coincidence that his wife was in the garden party with all that wine around.

3) The Scottish Man

This guy again continued to press the the point that the breaches must have been obvious and brings up the alcohol on the tables. Boris insisted this was all necessary for work purposes and no, it wasn't obvious this was contrary to the rules or guidance. It was absolutely essential to have these events to thank staff, he said, despite the rest of the country cancelling such events - something which was reported routinely in the press at the time. 

The Scottish Man also asked about one particular party which Boris isn't known to have attended, but occurred in Downing Street just a few metres away from the private flat with direct line of sight between the two. Did Boris witness anything ? No, definitely not, he says, in an utterly implausible "deny everything" strategy that makes as much sense as claiming this much wine is legitimately necessary for "work purposes". Definitely nobody said anything to him whatsoever, and no suggestion ever entered his brain, that anything was improper until the story broke.

4) Andy Carter

Carter pressed the issue that Boris himself should have known the rules were broken and not have had to rely on assurances from others. This discussion got a bit bogged down in the difference between rules and the guidance, but one of Boris' points was that he didn't think it would matter, and if he used one of the terms incorrectly (he did) it was because he misremembered a line intended for the media. For the same reason, he didn't feel it necessary to correct the record, since there was no distinction in the public eye between the rules and guidance - but to my mind this makes things much worse, since the guidance was always stricter than the rules.

Carter also raised the important point that the story persisted for some time. Eventually it must have become obvious that there was a problem. So why not mention these gatherings when it became clear there was a problem ? And finally we got a straight answer from Johnson, that he probably should have done. If he'd explained what went on in full detail (if we accept for the sake of it his version of events), then perhaps there wouldn't have been quite such a problem later.

This discussion became somewhat forensic. Cater asked about the advice from Martin Reynolds to change the wording of a statement at PMQs, but Johnson thought he was just being overly-cautious and didn't really think there was any problem. He said that Reynolds was only concerned about imperfect social distancing, not breaking the guidance more generally. He claimed he could prove this but his answer degenerated into pure waffle, and disguises the main point : people had raised the issue with him to the extent he cannot have avoided the central issue. Likewise, when the Allegra Stratton fake interview came up, Johnson did commission an inquiry, but didn't feel the need to correct the record. It was just that difficult for him to tell the difference between a party and a work meeting, apparently.

Harman interjected here to note from the evidence that people were passing drinks to each other. Yes, said Johnson, it's true the guidance wasn't followed perfectly. Riiight, so they were oh-so-careful and didn't use each others pens, but did pass drinks around ? That's just dumb. 

5) Alberto Coster

Coster pressed heavily on the need for Johnson to have sought legal advice rather than relying on political communication directors. Johnson admitted that he hadn't done this and have never claimed to have done so. Nor did he have advice from any senior civil servants or hear a single voice telling him the rules or guidance were breached.

Coster asked why didn't use a lawyer, of which there are a great many employed by the government. Johnson said it was because he asked people who had been at the events themselves, which is an awful lot like saying, "I prefer to ask the alleged criminal instead of a barrister". Coster pressed the point that it must have become obvious that the rules or guidance might have been breached, if not at the moment of the events themselves, then it must have done so when the story broke.

Johnson retorted that Martin Reynolds is a lawyer. Well, he might be qualified as one, but that's not the same as actually being employed and - crucially - independent. And he did ask a senior civil servant, Simon Case... but only to start the inquiry, which is completely different from asking him at the time whether the guidance was followed !

Coster noted that the statements Johnson issued were initially developed as lines to the media and nothing more. Johnson agreed, but said he had to rely on the advice of such people. Yet, Coster pointed out, these same people clearly had doubts about compliance, but Boris insisted that they never raised any of these issues with him, and any doubts that they had were in relation to events were him and they were not present. Coster again said the breaches were obvious, to which Boris muttered "nonsense".

Coster here ended his questions and there began a short impromptu session with Jenkins and Harman. Harman said she was dismayed that these assurances only covered one single gathering, covered the rules and not the guidance, and were from political communicators and not senior servants or lawyers. She also raised the very obvious but absolutely necessary point that he shouldn't have needed assurances at all for meetings he himself attended, making the analogy that someone caught speeding doesn't need anyone else to tell them this. She said the assurances are flimsy, and don't amount to the face value everyone in the House took them for. Johnson responded that it's surely enough for him to rely on advisors.

Harman took the view that if you're relying on people who themselves clearly had doubts, this is inherently not good enough. That they didn't express those doubts demonstrates that they are inadequate to the task, hence you'd expect to rely on civil servants and lawyers, not spin doctors. 

Jenkins raised what I think was an excellent point. Johnson was being accused of breaking the law, and therefore should be expected to have consulted a lawyer. The ministerial code says they should take "due care" and in this case seeking legal advice seems like an unavoidable necessity. Johnson retorted that he wasn't being accused of law-breaking (in PMQs it's true Starmer didn't say this directly, but he didn't need to : the rules were the law), and didn't even think Starmer would bother with the story (!). He reverted back to the line that it had just never occurred to him any of these meetings were a problem, so he saw no need to seek further advice. Jenkins objected, at which Johnson became properly angry, saying it was all nonsense and that he did ask the relevant people.

The only "nonsense" here is obviously from Johnson. Being as charitable as possible, let's assume his story is correct and he was just absolutely thick. In this case he could have just totally forgot about the meetings... initially. There's still no way at all that he can't have realised after the story broke that there might have been very serious problems. He had many, many opportunities to both correct the record (there was no need to wait for the Sue Gray report) and volunteer that other similar meetings had happened, but simply didn't bother.

6) Sir Charles Walker

Walker's questions were about political legitimacy and the wider context. He quotes the left-wing "stitch-up" alleged by Johnson's supporters regarding the Sue Gray report. He also notes that it's misleading when some claim that most Tories didn't oppose this Committee because in fact absolutely nobody did at all.

Here I think Johnson was at his worst. He reiterated that his concerns about fairness are all in his written submission but said he was sure the Committee would be impartial. Walker said he was concerned that Johnson supporters (not the man himself) were trying to have it both ways, to hope that the Committee would exonerate him but preparing to play the illegitimacy card if it didn't. Johnson said his presence showed how seriously he took the processes, saying (quite strongly, and out of context actually expressing things very well) that this was indeed how things are done, that this is the procedure that must be followed... but then that he doesn't believe he could possibly be found guilty. Which is missing the whole point of the system.

Walker returned to statements of Johnson's supporters : witch hunt, kangaroo court and the like. He asked if Boris regretted these. His response was initially promising, but degenerated into a non-answer. Of course, he said, he doesn't endorse any insults or intimidation or bullying, but refused to say that he outright disapproves of the statements made, and that he was convinced the Committee would exonerate him. Coster interjected at this point to ask if it was at least possible in principle the Committee could be fair and wrong rather than a witch hunt. Boris said that if it found him in contempt it would be insane and wrong.

Walker moved back to the assurances, making the point that they couldn't have known if the guidance was always followed so carefully given that Downing Street is such a large (and crowded !) building. Johnson admitted it wasn't possible to be omniscient but there was no alternative. Okay, so any employer could have just turned a blind eye to whole thing by that argument. Walker said that 126 (!) FPNs were issued showed the limitations of this, but Johnson decided this was just such good evidence for how incredibly un-obvious it was to everyone that the rules were being broken.

 

Summary

I despise Boris Johnson. The other thing I find worse than his fascist-level sense of entitlement is the current government's blatantly racist, morally abhorrent "stop the boats" policy.

Boris's best argument, which to his credit he tried very hard to stick to, was that he just didn't realise anything was amiss, so yes, he misled Parliament, but not intentionally. The trouble is that even this, "I'm just really stupid" argument falls apart at a moment's scrutiny. Meetings where wine was flowing freely ? Completely normal work events. Loud parties down the hallway ? Didn't hear anything. Colleagues relied on for advice who are on record as having doubts ? Never expressed them to me. Didn't consult the proper lawyers ? Didn't see the need to, no, not even after it was obvious the allegations were of law-breaking.

Pretty much all of this was expressed by the Committee. The one point I don't think they picked up on (and it's not always easy to do this during a meeting) was the inconsistency level that would make Schrodinger blush. The Sue Gray report was deemed to be useless but now essential. FPNs were deemed to be clear evidence of wrongdoing expect for Boris himself. The fact that rules were broken was not evidence of corruption but of how palpably innocent everyone must be. The Committee was the right and proper system to judge him but couldn't possibly believe he was lying simply because of all the evidence demonstrating that he was lying.

Johnson is a fascist through and through. If the essence of liberalism is, "what's it to you ?", then that of fascism is surely, "because it's me". Fascism isn't a system of government but a cult : I must lead because it's self-evident that I deserve to. It is pure personality in place of procedure. To be as charitable as I possibly can, Boris Johnson's sense of entitlement is so extraordinary I wonder if he might even genuinely believe it, to really, deeply believe that he's not one of the little people and just not realise (rather than not care) that he's a massive, ugly, snivelling prick that passes for a human being. 

Not that it makes any difference in the end since the effect is the same. For us non-fascists, all we can do is wait and see what the Committee decides.

Prodding the boundaries of knowledge

My quest to clear my phone of unread open tabs continues. Remember the time when I could just peruse Aeon at leisure because I had nothing else to do ? Those were the days...

Anyway, this piece hits on a number of reoccurring themes and it's worth a read. For me the most important sections are :

2. Why does there appear to be a major chasm between the cognitive capabilities of our hominin ancestors and the cognitive capabilities of modern scientists, artists and philosophers?

The author mentions social feedback but assumes that the base level of individual intelligence in the hunter-gatherer days would have no reason to be anywhere near that of a contemporary professor of mathematics. I sympathise, but personally, I remain entirely satisfied with this answer : social feedback plays a role, but the individual intelligence needed even in a Stone Age lifestyle is surprisingly high, and there may be a need to have excess capacity to compensate for the poorer nutrition of the time.

Moving on :

4. Is it possible for an entity that exists only in a computer simulation to run an accurate computer simulation of the ‘higher’ entity that simulated them?

If the answer is ‘no’, then whatever we contemplate in our universe is only a small subset of what can be known by those who reside higher in the sequence of more complex simulations. And if the answer is ‘no’, it would mean that there are deep aspects of reality that we cannot even imagine.

This is a more interesting use of the simulation hypothesis than I've seen elsewhere. It's very easily re-interpreted because we don't have to take "entity" and "simulation" literally here. Rather the question is perhaps better formulated as : can we understand the true, base nature of that which gives rise to our observations ?

In more classical simulation hypothesis language, I would err strongly towards "no". We render simulations in a way that those representations make sense to us, but those representations are not the simulation itself : the picture of a galaxy interacting with another is not at all the same as the electrons being shuffled around on the chips; no gravitational effects were involved in the simulation at all. As with the one about Joseph Needham, you can't explain representations in terms of the representations themselves, but I see no way we could ever escape thinking in those terms. How could we infer the presence of something radically unlike any of our most basic concepts ? 

That said, arguably, from the last piece, we're struggling to do this now with quantum mechanics, to try and realise that space and time themselves are just things induced in our minds. And I think that's a bit dangerous, because it opens the door to declaring that everything is all but magic. I would feel a lot more comfortable if someone could explain what rigorous, objective science would mean in a world where we accept that what we take as base reality is actually all an illusion.

Next :

8. Is it a lucky coincidence that mathematical and physical reality can be formulated in terms of our current cognitive abilities, or is it just that, tautologically, we cannot conceive of any aspects of mathematical and physical reality that cannot be formulated in terms of our cognitive capabilities?

Eugene Wigner asked why our mathematical theories ‘work so well’ at capturing the nature of our physical reality. Maybe the answer to Wigner’s question is that our mathematics isn’t very effective at all. Maybe our mathematics can capture only a tiny sliver of reality. Perhaps the reason it appears to us to be so effective is because our range of vision is restricted to that sliver, to those few aspects of reality that we can conceive of.

Ahh, the old "is mathematics and invention or discovery ?" question. Should we marvel at our own ingenuity in uncovering the laws of nature, or are we just coming up with new and better descriptions of the observables, of describing what's going on in our heads ?

I lean towards the former. One of the greatest achievements of the Standard Model is* its self-consistency, with radically separate areas of science combined into one harmonious whole. Observations give rise to ideas which can be applied on scales millions of times smaller or larger than their original basis yet are still resolutely successful. However much we might be limited to our own perspective, the Universe does seem to obey the principles we've derived : they are not merely convenient descriptions but are at least in some sense "real".

* Here by necessity simplifying and glossing over many enormously interesting problems.

Does this mean I actually secretly endorse materialism ? No, because this doesn't prohibit their being something "behind the curtain" we can't access. But in terms of explaining the observables we might not need to. Nobel Prizes in quantum experiments be damned, I cling to the belief that there probably are hidden variables - they're just very well hidden indeed.

This may all well be inconsistent, as befits a blog called Decoherency. As a stab at what my underlying reasoning is here, it might be something like the following : The true, deepest nature of reality is unknowable, but the observed Universe generally behaves logically, displaying causation and local reality. I take consciousness as self-evidently exempt from this, once we understand that consciousness is mental representation. 

That is, unlike a cactus or a sausage or a duckling, consciousness itself is the mental state : it is not a representation of anything, it is the underlying condition. I do not mean to say the idealism is correct, that's not what I'm driving at at all. Rather I'm saying something much weaker. I'm saying only that the things which are represented within conscious perception are not the same as conscious perception itself. We can understand those things in ways which are uniquely inapplicable to consciousness. Ordinary scientific approaches are perfectly valid for our observed external reality even knowing that we cannot access their full nature, because this is applying rules designed for observables to the observables themselves. But this doesn't work for consciousness, because it's not an observable, but rather it is the fundament of the observables, their base medium. The equivalent base nature of reality is unknowable (there is no need to posit that it too is consciousness as Berkeley did), but this is no way belittles the stupendous scientific achievement in describing and explaining the observables.

There, that'll do for now.

Culture Match Of The Day

Just jotting down some quick thoughts on the Gary Lineker fiasco. Like practically everyone else, I call bullshit on the part of the BBC on this one.

Ordinarily Match of the Day is something I find less interesting than the defecation rate of extinct tortoises, but it’s fun to see a whole stream of pundits withdraw their support in solidarity with Lineker.

I mean, if a news reporter had expressed outrage at the “let’s kick refugees in the ribs !” policy*, which is near enough what it amounts to, then… there would be a case to be made. You can’t have actual journalists venting their opinions during the news reports because that clearly starts down the road to Fox News, which is something to fight against tooth and tail.

* If the government had made an egregiously racist law and Lineker spoke out against it, would he have been similarly censored ? One would hope that demanding "impartiality" here would be seen as abhorrent, because it is.

But Lineker is a sports presenter, in this case expressing himself on on Twitter. Not a journalist. Not a professional political commentator. Not expressing his opinion on his sports program. So yeah, there’s a very strong case to be made for strict impartiality among journalists, but this can hardly mean that the BBC gets to set strict rules about what all its employees can say in all circumstances - that’s just plainly unviable. Especially given the recent debacle over Sharp’s assistance to Boris “Watermelon Smiles” Johnson, this feels very much like “impartiality” is being used as a cover to say, “don’t criticise the government”. Which is tantamount to similar cases in which “free speech” really means, “shut up and let me have my racist diatribe”.

And just how far is this impartiality supposed to go, exactly ? The BBC employs several excellent satirists who routinely go considerably further than anything Lineker has said (e.g. Ian Hislop, Frankie Boyle). Is a special exemption granted for them ? Maybe, but if so, these rules ought to be stated very clearly, otherwise it becomes arbitrary.

I expect the Tories to come out with this crap about Lineker not knowing history for making a perfectly valid comparison, but I expect better from the BBC. Impartiality as an absolute is no more possible than free speech as an absolute - it literally can’t be done and it’s stupid to try. So where it can’t be maintained, I expect a sensible organisation to err on the side of caution by allowing criticism of those in power. That seems by far the most sensible default position to me. 

All gymnastics is mental gymnastics

Various different sources have been mentioning that reality isn't real of late, so I want to consolidate them here. Because I have a terrible cold ahh crap this time it's actually COVID raging at the moment, I'm going to try and limit myself to summaries and possibly interesting questions.

Exhibit 1 is a video interview by the inestimable Fraser Cain with a professional philosopher of science. Now I admit to having a sneaky wariness about such people : philosophers are fine, and scientists are fine, but specifically philosophers of science make me... edgy. How can you possible know what's the best scientific methodology without getting your hands dirty by analysing actual data ? How can you have any special claims on better approaches without having been through the full wringer from grant application to peer reviewed publication yourself ?

At the same time, I feel any effort to reconnect philosophy and science, to get scientists to realise that the data doesn't speak for itself, is to be warmly welcomed. It seems to be underappreciated that science improves itself not just by learning more facts but also by figuring out new methodologies, new ways to avoid fooling itself. The development of improved statistical techniques is an ongoing one : to take any particular value as a yes/no binary choice is generally a very silly thing indeed, but quantification is (and should be) a bloody important core of the scientific process. Science, it seems, is grounded in hard facts.

But oddly enough, philosophy doesn't seem to have come up with much in the way of a satisfying definition of knowledge. Apparently it just isn't necessary to be able to do rigorous science, something I find more than a little disconcerting.

The main part of the video takes this to extremes. As mentioned here previously, we can view the world only through our own unwelt, our subjective sensory realities. Compared to us, pigeons see the world in slow motion, while bats and dolphins use sound much like we use vision, while the star-nosed mole does the same with touch, and some fishes using electroreception. So all perception is mental representation. While I'm happy enough that this clearly debunks the foolish notion of materialism, I'm much less happy about where this leaves those essential hard facts.

In the video the argument goes further and says that even such things like space and time are themselves mental representations. They are not, to use that dread word, real, not things external to our minds, but internal to us. Presumably those mental representations themselves must correspond to something that induces them, but what the hell would that be ? I mean, it's one thing to say that our sensory worlds are incomplete, but quite another to say they're wrong, and still worse to say they're not even wrong... and... space and time themselves ? To quote from an earlier source, the mind recoils from such a stupendous conception !

Anyway this particular philosopher (Sam Baron) is working on what the basic nature of reality might be (as one does), in his case suggesting causation. Rather than causal effects being something that occurs within space and time, space and time, he says, arise out of causation itself. This is pleasingly anti-Humean, but... dude, put it out. No, I don't care if it's legal, you've had enough.

[EDIT :  Exhibit 1a is another video that goes into much more detail about this idea that space and time and mental constructs, going into more detail about how the brain responds to our changing location and marking the passage of time in different ways. This is well worth a watch, although I am not sure if this really means the brain is constructing the notions of space and time or just responding to actual physical phenomena. I'm not sure how we would distinguish these possibilities.]

Exhibit 2 is a nice little piece about the opposing medieval viewpoints of realism and nominalism. Nominalists believed that language only describes reality, that our labels for things like dog and cat and (yes) chair are useful descriptions but nothing much more, with chairs not being a fundamental component of reality. In other words there are no things, only stuff : reality exists, but its fundamental substance is unknown and the best we can do is apply labels to things. Realism, on the other hand, feels distinctly Platonic in saying that general cases like "dogs" and "chairs" (rather than any specific dog or chair) really do exist, somehow.

This... is hideous. Only philosophy can make both the case that dogs do and don't exist seem equally absurd.

Or, it's all trivial and stupid. The mind is capable of generalising from many dogs the basic characteristics of dogginess, and from there it constructs a simulacrum of a general dog and it "exists" mentally but not in physical reality.

Let's go with that before my brain escapes.

Exhibit 3 takes us back to hard physics. Although I still have many questions, this video does the best job of explaining Bell's Inequality I've yet come across. If you have two entangled particles and measure one, does your measurement reveal the previously hidden properties of the other, or does it actually in some way set that property ? Einstein, with his notion of "hidden variables", thought it was the former, that quantum uncertainty only confuses our measurements and says nothing at all about what's - ahem - really going on. 

But experiment suggests it's the latter. That there is some "connection" between distant photons wherein measurement of one directly affects the other, without needing to send another photon : it happens instantaneously. You should watch the video for the description of the experiment lest I report it incorrectly, but the upshot is that the Universe isn't locally real, isn't determined solely by local direct contact. And that's weird.

Personally I would have preferred it if the video had been quite a bit longer. I may or may not try and delve deeper on this one, but not right now. I'm not going to say if I agree with it or not.

Exhibit 4 returns us to language and philosophy. It says that, though the concept has been widely abused, "alternative facts" are perfectly possible, that true facts as we understand them do not in fact exist.

Personally I think this is utter bollocks, which is not helped by the various claims therein which are tantamount to stating that anyone who does believe in facts is basically a Nazi. Look, science is always subject to revision. Its very paradigms change as a matter of course. But most scientists accept the validity of facts and data and - FFS ! - they're not Nazis. Yes, I agree, facts are incomplete and subject to biases, that being truly objective is exceedingly difficult (perhaps impossible for individuals, but maybe not for an ensemble). But to wholly reject them without providing an alternative is... dumb. The mind indeed recoils from such a ludicrous suggestion.

Rather than ending with any kind of conclusion, my main question from all this is : what would it mean to do science in a world without factual, objective reality ? What, if any, difference would it make to suggest that we have no kind of true knowledge of reality whatever, that absolutely everything, even our most basic concepts are naught but mental constructs ?

To me, the revisionism inherent in the scientific process isn't at all incompatible with certainty and facts. We can be certain that given X, a model predicts Y. If we can observe the fundamental aspects of a model directly, then we can be certain it is correct. The existence of atoms and the roundness of the Earth, within our own unwelt, will never be disproven, can never be disproven. But most models can't be observed directly in this way, which is why they never achieve such lofty heights of certainty, why we have to explore the theories more indirectly. And sure, we can question the very basic nature of the observations, but this is the remit of philosophy, not science.

... except where things get quantum. At this point I cannot but throw up my hands and say, "look, I don't know." To question this existence of space and time and locality is a thrilling exercise, but exactly how this helps us do science and make sense of the observations, I have no clue. If we're not going to construct explanations constructed in terms of mentally comprehensible observables, then what are we even doing at all ?

Forward the Metaverse ?

A couple of recent articles prompt a quick check-in regarding the progress (or lack thereof) about the metaverse. You might want to read this post first so I can avoid repeating myself. 

First, this one has some intriguing news about upcoming hardware releases. 

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta’s flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don’t fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. 

“The main north star for the team was from the moment you put on this headset, the mixed reality has to make it feel better, easier, more natural,” he said. “You can walk effortlessly through your house knowing you can see perfectly well. You can put anchors and things on your desktop. You can take your coffee. You can stay in there much longer.”

This would be a significant development, to the point I'd be wondering if I should upgrade my Quest 1. Recall that, in my opinion, the potential for widespread adoption of mixed reality is all about thresholds, and right now, the threshold for convenience isn't that great. You have to prepare yourself for VR as though you were going for a short hike. You can't just slap on the headset and go but have to define boundaries, prepare a clear space, and if you're using a PC you have to set up a wireless link (woe betide you if you're using a cable, poor fool !). Sure, things have progressed leaps and bounds, but this is still a significant burden. 

And I would stress that the Quest 3, like the Quest Pro, is still only a step forwards. Compare the situation to gravitational wave detectors. Each incremental advanced increased the sensitivity a little bit, but only when a critical threshold was breached did this have any real consequences. The Quest 3 is another step along that road : necessary, but not the final goal.

More intriguing is that something more like the final product necessary for true metaverse immersion does seem to be in the works :

Meta’s first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, are designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world. There will be an “internal launch” for employees to test the glasses in 2024, according to Himel. A version won’t be released to the public until 2027, when Meta will launch what Himel called its “Innovation” line of AR glasses for early adopters alongside a “Scale” line of the less advanced smart glasses and the second generation of its neural smartwatch.

So, basically in keeping with my original post, mixed reality as a normal experience towards the end of this decade doesn't seem implausible. If, that is, Meta can figure out a sensible business model, which given their recent troubles does seem to be giving them some grief.

Now last time I said that the hardware development might be more important than the software, but I think I'm going to revise my opinion a little here. The "if you build it they will come" approach is not correct. Rather it should be they can come. You've got to cross that technological barrier for a metaverse to even be possible, but that by no means guarantees that it will actually happen.

There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. 

Which is good because it's a running joke in the Quest community that they'll be offering the same games in ten years as they are now. Development of new apps and games is absurdly slow, and the Quest apps do an appallingly bad job of promoting new ones (except for flagship projects) when they do appear. Kudos to them for having the "App Lab" that means developers can realise projects which don't meet their full standards, but they do a lousy job of promoting this.

The situation is perhaps akin to HD TV. HD content is undeniably better than SD, but if there's nothing to watch, the technology is pointless. On then to the second article :

So if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it’s done reasonably well. And I think we do need to look at it as a gaming console. Meta might have big ambitions for VR headsets and their place in the metaverse, but the reality is that the top software on the Quest 2 are all games. VR early adopters in the consumer space buy headsets to play games. Devices like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and the PSVR (which sold around 5 million headsets by 2020) were adopted by consumers to play video games, not dick around in a barely built metaverse.

And the push for the Quest 2 to be a metaverse device hasn’t especially resonated with consumers. Rabkin told staff that “sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in, the people who bought it this last Christmas, they’re just not as into it” as the early adopters. Those early adopters were eager to play games, and that’s what they saw when they slipped the headset on. New users are seeing ads for stuff like Horizon Worlds, which, again, is such a mess even the people who make it don’t want to play it.

And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it’s kind of ignoring that core gamer audience and not doing a whole lot to build it. Beat Saber, arguably VR’s killer app, is four years old, and no other VR game has really captured the zeitgeist in a similar fashion.. Steam and Sony are both very aware that killer AAA game experiences are necessary for a VR platform. That’s why we’ve got excellent titles like Half-Life: Alyx and Horizon Call of the Mountain. They’re invested in the software as much as the hardware. Meta isn’t.

I don't see the appeal of Beat Saber myself but the point stands. Meta is building a series of improving games consoles but forgetting to provide any content for them. Fair enough that the ultimate goal isn't gaming but something much more far-reaching. But to get there, you've got to give people a hook. And  the games developed by Oculus Studios were very, very good, whereas the avatars that Meta are coming out with are just so soullessly corporate that nobody who's actually not a robot is ever likely to use them.

Personally I stand by my long-running opinion that they should focus on the headsets as an interface. Have all the heavy work done by an external PC or other device; that's ultimately what AR glasses are surely going to have do anyway. Focus on getting extremely good wireless access to said device and market them as being able to play all your favourite games in A/VR. Right now, gaming is pretty much all they're good for. Yes, routine productivity will be possible eventually, but it isn't right now*. So yeah, aim for the metaverse, but provide gaming and social events as the means by which you'll get there.

* There are some diehard fans who swear the few "productivity" apps which do exist are genuinely useful, but personally I think the sheer cumbersomeness of the headeset (and the low resolution), combined with the lack of mixed reality, makes this a complete non-started right now. They're enough to demonstrate future potential but nothing more than that.

I remain convinced that VR is far more than a gimmick; the potential for such devices as being equivalent in prevalence to mobile phones is very real. But we're not quite living in that future yet, and the road to it is (as should be expected) a bumpy one. Still, that Quest 3 is sounding pretty tempting...

What is it like to be an essay ?

Not content with such humdrum concerns as "what is it like to be a bat ?"*, linguists are now moving on to trying to figure out if text can understand itself. Well, that's how I'm choosing to spin it, anyway.

* The answer turns out to be "fucking awesome, but not as awesome as being a dolphin".

Recently I went on a short rant about how I don't get why a few people are claiming ChatGT isn't useful. I will likely return to this in due course, but that's not the point of this post. Rather, in the discussion I raised the question :

How far can a chatbot progress with this pure linguistic intelligence ? Will it reach some hard wall beyond which further understanding is impossible ? Or, if we give it enough information, can its understanding rival our own ?

This is actually a very old theme of mine which I first started wondering about back in high school, if you can believe it. More recent examples : in this post I explore what we mean by understanding (in another discussion, I'm gratified to find that nobody else seems to have much of a better definition than my own "knowledge of context and connections", also explored in a different but related sense here); in this post I describe my much earlier thinking which stemmed from an incredibly crude chatbot by modern standards. 

In brief, I wondered about how a network composed entirely of if-then units, albeit forming a network of incredible complexity, might eventually constitute some form of intelligent (though not conscious) process. My hope was that we could feed information and have it evaluated in a gloriously unbiased way, a "truth engine" of sorts.

Again, this post need to have the reins kept pretty tight or else I'll likely go off in the wrong direction. The thing I want to concentrate on here is the response :

Apparently there has been a lot of research on your question “How far can a chatbot progress with this pure linguistic intelligence ?” It’s called distributional semantics. I should have known about this, but somehow completely missed this research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01896 

Now it took me a while to find the time to read it, but I'm glad I did. But I must begin with a tremendous irony. For a very long time I thought I'd correctly learned the meaning of the word "semantics" by hearing it used, which in my circles is pretty much invariably in the phrase, "arguing over semantics". Naturally this led me to assume it meant "petty irrelevant details of language" - like minor details of word order or an obvious typo in the placement of a comma. Imagine my shock to discover it meant "the meanings of words", as though this weren't the most important aspect of any dialogue at all ! I mean, how can you even have a coherent conversation if you don't agree about what words mean ? 

A bizarre and stupid phrase, I think. Even worse than "rhetorical question", but I digress.

Anyway, the irony is that this paper looks at distributional semantics, the idea that the meaning of a word can be inferred from its relation to other words - something which I clearly failed to do. Now you can probably see how this relates to chatbots, philosophy and ideas about consciousness and whatnot. It's always seemed to me that our understanding is based not merely on words themselves, but on the sensory and mental experience conjured by those words : qualia, concepts, and all manner of purely mental notions (see also this post on the general attributes of consciousness, which I think is deeply flawed by still useful). 

But the paper takes my high school speculation and runs amok with it, albeit in an altogether more sophisticated form. It explores the "Distributional Hypothesis, which states that similarity in meaning results in similarity of linguistic distribution". 

The basic idea seems to be to create a "semantic space". A one-dimensional example of this might be words ranging from black to grey to white, which you could populate with all the shades in between ad nauseum. By looking in large amounts of text at how frequently a word (or phrase, e.g. "very dark grey") was used in association with others, you could infer similarity. This example would be useless, though, because words have many different sorts of meaning : you could infer that black relates to white, but have no idea about yellow or ennui.

Instead the process involves describing the words in typically hundreds of different ways, which enables a very great deal of nuance. Words can be very similar in some senses but completely different in others, e.g. "dragon" and "daffodil" are both nouns, both Welsh*, both begin with d, both refer to "living" creatures, but still refer to completely different things.

* It's St David's day today, as it happens.

With hundreds of vectors, this "radically empirical" approach allows for much more nuance than this. The approach seems to be that the meaning is entirely relative : context is everything, like a thesaurus on steroids. It can show how word meaning changes both on current context and how that context changes over time, e.g. "dog" used to mean a particular breed but now means a whole group of animals; "awful" used to be mean more literally "full of awe" but now means "terrible". And they can detect how word use broadens and narrows over time, becoming used in more or less contexts from one decade to the next. "They thus infer a change in meaning when they observe a change in the context of use."

The connection between individual words can show very subtle differences in meaning indeed, e.g. "baking a potato", which is applying heat to a potato and nothing more, is actually quite a different process of "baking a cake", in that the latter is designed to transform raw ingredients into an end product. 

This process can be applied to individual words, phrases of multiple words, or even to the parts of words themselves, e.g. "ist" and "er" as suffixes. Matching the senses in which words are used within phrases can reinforce the meaning of those phrases. And it's possible for such an approach to figure out which associations are not only technically correct or incorrect, but also which ones are correct but unfavourable. The author does note that this is not without limitations, such as being good at finding general meanings but not at individual ones : if I decide to spontaneously swap "dragon" and "daffodil", you could probably figure out what I was doing, but distributional semantics would be very confused because it wouldn't have "St George and the Daffodil" in its database.

Still, it's highly provocative stuff - in the sense that it provokes thought, not that it winds me up the wrong way.  To what extent does language influence our thoughts ? I lean strongly towards the view that it's mainly our thought process which drive language instead of the other way around, with the real hard thinking being done at much deeper levels than anything we consciously access. But you have to wonder from all is if we don't do at least some of this sort of pure linguistic reasoning ourselves, if we think based on word properties (or at least use them as a heuristic) rather than running a sort of simulation when we want to imagine a new scenario. 

For example, recently the example came up of George Washington fighting a Sasquatch. Not very sophisticated, but perhaps the brain files these terms away in categories not that dissimilar to nouns and verbs and suchlike, so that I can easily imagine Washington fighting a yeti but aren't very likely to imagine him fighting, say, custard, and have even more trouble imagining in a battle against sessions or density. What the hell would that even mean ?

Clearly sensory data is useful though, and no large language program will ever have the same understanding of these things as I do until it also has the capacity for direct experience of the world (and quite probably not even then). But at least some degree of meaning, even if of a different sort, could perhaps be said to be encoded in text itself, with sensory data providing an absolute anchor for a reasoning processes which is otherwise entirely relative. 

The answer to me original question then is probably, "Quite far, but not without limit, and it will never become truly human-like". It probably does reach a hard wall, but that doesn't mean it can't provide useful output even without the same sort of understanding that we have. My dream of a truth engine will probably never be fulfilled by this method, but the radically different perspective from this purely linguistic approach seems to be powerful enough all the same.

Pinning down consciousness

After some recent reads, I'm tempted to venture a working definition of what I think I mean when I say "consciousness". This is nothing more than what I find useful, mind you.

I've said in the past that I think consciousness is a spectrum, and that a dreaming or sedated person has a consciousness of a sort. But actually now I'm thinking if it wouldn't be better to demark consciousness as a particular kind of the more general category of mental states. Clearly, dreamers and the drugged have those, but they're not conscious in the usual sense. We can be subconsciously aware of our surroundings all the time but not really actively thinking about them, and in the vernacular we often use "conscious of" to mean "attending to" rather than merely "sensing".

It's helpful to start with the extremes. Let me be bold enough to declare that I think our regular, waking sort of awareness - of the Sun at noon, in bright light with nothing hidden or concealed beyond our own sensory limits - is the truest sort of consciousness. Look, I know, we could spend all day trying to justify this, but I don't want to do that so I won't.

Under these conditions, I think the following characteristics define our conscious person. Each of these needs to be heavily qualified, but let me just state them first :

• They have an inner awareness of themselves and their surroundings which has no direct connection to their external reality. For example they can create mental imagery, run an inner monologue, and in general create imaginary things that aren't there.
• Intelligence. They can take information and process it using some kind of (preferably, but not necessarily, reasoned and self-consistent) judgments to arrive at a conclusion.
• Agency. That is, they feel they can make choices put before them and decide for themselves as to how they act. This can be done with varying levels of intelligence.
• Sentience. They receive external information from their senses (or internal in the case of proprioception) which is incorporated into their internal awareness.
• They are self aware. They have control over themselves in relation to the external world. They can distinguish their own inner awareness from their perceived external reality.

My reasoning being that we can surely all agree that someone having all of these characteristics is definitively conscious, and someone having none of them is definitely dead, or a rock. Furthermore, each individual characteristic is a spectrum : you could be sentient about one or many things and have varying degrees of sensitivity; you can have agency over some things you do (choosing to go left or right) but not others (liking or disliking a particular taste); you can sometimes muddle up external and internal realities (did I just see that or was it a trick of the light in the corner of my eye ?). 

With this definition, not only is consciousness itself allowed to be a spectrum, but you can have qualitatively different sorts of mental states as well. A dreamer is not conscious, but is clearly alive; an intelligent robot can be useful, but isn't necessarily conscious or alive.

Let me further qualify these characteristics to avoid any gross misunderstandings. Note that I'm trying to keep each of these as independent as possible in order to allow for different types of mind and information processing. The reasons for this will become clearer as we go on. 

Inner awareness : I mean a mental state that has no direct connection to reality; essentially, qualia. A conscious person experiences something. For example, colour is not wavelength, touch is not pressure, sound is not frequency, and heat is not temperature. What we experience is how our brain interprets those external events, and the experience of a thing is not at all the same as the thing itself. Memory is another good example. Other things are also totally imaginary* and exist nowhere in reality, e.g. concepts ("show me one atom of justice" and all that). Such imaginings need not be at all sophisticated, however.

* From our senses we only know our mental representations of the external thing and not the true nature of the thing itself - but we do at least know that something external induced an internal representation. 

For me this is the main hallmark of a mind and thought. The "mind" is the collection of these thoughts which are all of this same basic type. If you don't have this inner, unphysical awareness, you're a mindless zombie or an abacus. But if you do have it, you still might not be what we mean by a fully conscious being. Awareness is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness, but necessary and sufficient for a mind.

Intelligence : This I see as the capacity to solve problems. That is, processing and integrating information, forming a reasoned judgement about how things work and forming conclusions appropriately. This need not at all be a rational process, that's much more sophisticated. Pavlovian responses are a good example of basic intelligence. A pure stimulus response (smelling food -> go towards food -> eat the food) is not intelligence, but responding to something only indirectly related requires some level of reasoning (hearing a bell -> go to the place food is dispensed -> eat the food). You can't do this without some sort of very basic learning.

The difference between instinct and intelligence isn't always clear. Some key behaviours can be purely instinctual but then applied using genuine intelligence to different circumstances. And computers, in my view, can count as intelligent but they're not at all likely to be conscious. But in the main they have only the most rudimentary form of intelligence, further blurring the line with instinct : they can carry out highly sophisticated calculations, but only in a purely mechanical, instinct-like way. They don't form any chains of reasoning by themselves. Chatbots are increasingly able to overcome this, but I hasten to add that intelligence does not automatically imply that any of the other conditions I'm proposing are satisfied.

Intelligence, as with some of the other characteristics, surely requires memory. I'm hesitant to include memory as its own parameter as to me it seems like intelligence is more crucial to consciousness : an automaton could regurgitate information, but intelligence requires some form of thought (if not necessarily the conscious kind). Memory is thus included here only implicitly.

Agency : Some capacity for decision-making is essential. It doesn't mean a conscious being must actually be capable of carrying out its decisions, only that it's capable of making them. It must be able to determine or act towards a goal, however crudely. 

Note that I regard this as closely related to, yet far removed from, intentionality. I don't think any artificial intelligence at present comes close to having any sort of intentions whatsoever - none of them have even the merest inkling of any sort of "desire" at all. For that I think you require also this inner awareness, the capacity to form internal imaginary constructs. As it stands, programs can be said to have "agency" only in the very loose, very basic sense that they can make decisions. They can't really act on their own volition because they don't have any. They can have goals, but they can't as yet analyse those goals and alter them, certainly not based on any deeper objectives.

I should note a couple of other points. First, by "desire" I don't mean this in the emotional sense. I don't think emotion is necessary for consciousness. There isn't a good word meaning "desire" that isn't also emotive so we're just going to have to live with that.

Second, I don't propose to define free will here; I personally do think this is a thing but that's a whole other gargantuan kettle of fish. More to the point is that a conscious being (which must have inner awareness) will tend by default to believe it's acting on its own will. It will probably, I think, have true intentionality, but let's limit this requirement to mere agency to play it safe. This property doesn't require intelligence, but could be limited to just choosing between options or deciding a numerical value. They key point is that it makes decisions. Of course, when coupled with intelligence, this becomes very much more powerful.

Sentience : It's an interesting question as to whether this condition can exist independently of all the others. I lean towards no. A camera receives light, but by itself it can't be said to be "sensing" anything - something must occur as a result of its input for that to be the case. This could be merely changing the inner awareness, or causing a decision to be made or the information to be analysed. But it can't do absolutely nothing at all, or nothing has really been sensed. So while sentience can be independent of all of the other conditions here, it can't exist without at least one of them. You can't have something which is just sentient.

Should we choose this capability to mean only in relation to the external world, or should we allow internal senses as well ? I lean towards the former. Bearing in mind that I've said consciousness is just one particular sort of a more general variety of mind, I'd say a person who is totally disconnected from the external world is still, crucially, thinking, but like a dreamer, we wouldn't say they are conscious.

A more general point is that a conscious being requires something to think about. Now a sentient being automatically has this, but sensory perception is not the only route by which this can happen. Computers without external sensors can still have information to process, and I want to allow for the possibility for a conscious (or at least mentally aware) computer otherwise there's a risk of defining valid options out of existence. So as memory is implicit for intelligence, let's let "access to information" be implicit for sentience.

Self awareness : Since we allow the minimum condition for sentience to be sensing the external world, self awareness here means being able to distinguish the internal and external realities. In this definition, a conscious being cannot help but have an internal reality - that is indispensable to the whole concept of a mind. But to be conscious they must be able to sense the external reality as well. They must further be able to distinguish the two, otherwise they cannot have any real agency within their environment : they would be living in a dreamworld, or more accurately a sort of augmented reality which blurs the lines between real (external) and imaginary (internal).

Bearing in mind again that dreaming is here defined to be a kind of thinking, and consciousness another sort, it seems essential that conscious creatures must be at least partly able to distinguish the two. And again, since I allow everything to be on a spectrum, it's not necessary that they are fully capable of making this distinction at all times (hardly anyone can do that). It's enough that they can do it at all.

So that's my minimally-conscious entity then. It has an inner life, can sense the external world and distinguish it from its imagination, make judgements about information, and has goals. It needn't do any of these very well, but the more it does them, the more conscious it can be said to be. A dreaming person thinks, but is not conscious; they may think they have agency, but are unable to make decisions with respect to the real world. Sleepwalkers blur this distinction, and that's perfectly fine since this definition allows for different degrees and types of consciousness.

Recall that I've decided that memory and access to information, and possibly emotions, are only implicit requirements for consciousness. A thinking being is probably going to require these in general, but a being which is specifically conscious rather needs the higher-level attributes of intelligence and sentience (and possibly intentionality).

We can explore this further by considering different possible configurations. Taking some inspiration from the "moral matrix" concept, I envisage these characteristics as a series of sliders. Unfortunately there are rather a lot of possible combinations... if we reduce them to the binary on/off conditions, there are 2^5 = 32 possibilities. Allow an intermediary state and that's 3^5 = 243 options.

Well, the binary cases aren't so bad. Let's simplify the criteria so that :

Inner awareness = mindless if none, mindful if present

Intelligence = stupid if none, clever if any

Agency = inert if none, intentful if any

Sentience = blind if none, sentient if any

Self-awareness = dreamlike if none, awake if any

And allowing all options to have memory and access to information in general, as implicitly required.

Using this we can print out all 32 possibilities and explore the various combinations of mental states, just for funzies. Let's group them according to the number of conditions satisfied, and sub-group them according to whether they have inner awareness (a true mind, however limited) or not.

Yes, really, this is how I spend my spare time.

0 conditions met

Mindless Stupid Inert Blind Dreamlike : The trivial case of being dead. Or a rock.

1 condition met

Mindful

Mindful Stupid Inert Blind Dreamlike : Willy Wonka, living in a world of pure imagination.

Mindless

Mindless Clever Inert Blind Dreamlike : Calculators.

Mindless Stupid Intentful Blind Dreamlike : Angry switches.

Mindless Stupid Inert Sentient Dreamlike

Mindless Stupid Inert Blind Awake 

2 conditions met

Mindful

Mindful Clever Inert Blind Dreamlike : Sleepy scientists.

Mindful Stupid Intentful Blind Dreamlike : Brexit voters.

Mindful Stupid Inert Sentient Dreamlike : Drugged Brexit voters.

Mindful Stupid Inert Blind Awake

Mindless

Mindless Clever Intentful Blind Dreamlike : A decent chatbot.

Mindless Clever Inert Sentient Dreamlike : Useful robots.

Mindless Clever Inert Blind Awake

Mindless Stupid Intentful Sentient Dreamlike : Dangerous robots.

Mindless Stupid Intentful Blind Awake

Mindless Stupid Inert Sentient Awake

3 conditions met

Mindful

Mindful Stupid Inert Sentient Awake : Lazy idiots.

Mindful Stupid Intentful Blind Awake

Mindful Stupid Intentful Sentient Dreamlike : Hallucinations.

Mindful Clever Inert Blind Awake

Mindful Clever Inert Sentient Dreamlike : Beginnings of true AI.

Mindful Clever Intentful Blind Dreamlike : Beginnings of truly dangerous AI.

Mindless

Mindless Stupid Intentful Sentient Awake : A really boring but dangerous robot.

Mindless Clever Inert Sentient Awake

Mindless Clever Intentful Blind Awake : A hallucinating robot.

Mindless Clever Intentful Sentient Dreamlike : A different hallucinating robot.

4 conditions met

Mindful

Mindful Stupid Intentful Sentient Awake : About half the population.

Mindful Clever Inert Sentient Awake : Philosophers.

Mindful Clever Intentful Blind Awake 

Mindful Clever Intentful Sentient Dreamlike : Angry philosophers on drugs.

Mindless

Mindless Clever Intentful Sentient Awake : A potentially superb AI.

5 conditions met

Mindful Clever Intentful Sentient Awake

The trivial case of being a full conscious being, the most highly evolved entity possible, i.e. a radio astronomer.

This all reduces to 23 options, including the two extreme cases. Of course no more than a rough draft. I've not allowed the cases of being awake without being sentient, but we could debate if this is the best use of terms; clearly, you can know something is out there without really knowing what it is. And obviously the descriptions aren't meant to be taken seriously !

And... I'm not really happy that the characteristics don't have the same level of independence. I'm not thrilled with my definition of "agency" either. As I said, a rough draft.

Still, I think it's maybe at least provocative ? There are attempts to build machines to detect consciousness, which is very important for patients in a coma. According to the above, such patients may be truly conscious but unable to act, or they may still have mental states (which is more important for ethical considerations) but not consciousness proper, just as a dreamer. 

More philosophically problematic may be people who have aphantasia (no mental imagery) or no inner monologue. My assumption is that they do have some form of inner awareness, just not the most common ones we're used to. Or maybe they have them but they're at a lower level. Or maybe they don't, and they're the equivalent of biological robots. Which would be a bit scary, but at least it would explain Dominic Cummings.

How to write a popular book

Having read innumerable popular history and science books, I want to consolidate a few thoughts on some all-too-common mistakes. I would not presume to offer anything as grand as a guide, just some observations on things that happen (or don't happen) too regularly to ignore. 

1) Bibliographic references go at the back, footnotes go at the bottom of the page

This is by far the most common and most irritating structural problem of the books I read. Yes, please, do give me references - sometimes even a lay reader like me does like to check the sources. And absolutely do give me footnotes as well. They're both generally a good thing.

But combining references and footnotes and putting them all at the back is daft. Why would I want to keep flicking back and forth between different sections, doing a really tedious lucky dip to see if I get some interesting extra text or just yet another reference ? I mean, IBID ? Again ? YOU MADE ME TURN 356 PAGES JUST FOR THAT ?

Look, it's perfectly simple. Supplementary information that's immediately relevant to the main text : same page please. References : at the back.

Why these points are so often overlooked  is something that confuses the heck out of me because it just seems so bleeding obvious. Yet probably about 90% of authors don't do this. And I can't understand how nobody else seems to want to complain about it.

2) Put maps in relevant sections, not all at once

Likewise, maps are great. But if they're all together (usually at the front) despite referencing different areas or times, they're not much help. And this is silly, because by and large different chapters tend to have a different geographic or chronological focus, so just put each map at the start of the most relevant chapter. I mean, it's fine if occasionally you need to say "see map on page N" which happens to be in a different chapter. I don't mind turning to a different section once in a while; I don't have some weird allergy to looking up page numbers. Just making me do this constantly is very annoying because it breaks the flow of the text.

3) Reference all figures and colour plates

A final structural point : using colour plates is nice, but just because they're usually (by necessity) in a separate section doesn't mean they have to be avoided in the main text completely. Just give them numbers and then refer to them appropriately. Hardly anyone does this, which is just irritating : at what point should I stop to look at the pictures ? Are they just to be perused at random ? Honestly, this takes next to no effort and helps the flow of the narrative considerably.

4) Be chronological, not biographical

This one is a bit more subjective because there certainly are times when it's beneficial to do things out of order. But attempts at doing biographies of historical figures tend to be pretty awful, in my experience. First and foremost, tell me what the person did. This is far more comprehensible if you tell me what things they did in the order that they did them. If you want to extract some common character traits by all means do that, but trying to do this by itself is pretty much guaranteed to fail.

Likewise, in popular science it's helpful to sketch a history of how we arrived at current findings, and here too being chronological is a perfectly sensible guideline if nothing else. Above all, though, try and tell me a story. Tell me how one thing led to another, or how one thing may or may not imply another. You don't have to be rigidly linear and you certainly don't have to make everything artificially certain. But give me a thread to follow and explore.

5) Make a point

Or at least, have a point. I personally enjoy it very much when an author has a clear axe to grind, even if it's not very likely I'm going to agree with them : at least I know what they're up to and feel equipped to mentally argue back, to view their arguments more critically. Trying to draw at the grand underlying trends and causal effects has a particular appeal to me - I want to know why things happen not just how.  As long as your attempt isn't hopelessly stupid, I'll probably enjoy the reasoning process regardless of the end result.

I don't mind either way if an author wants to be explicit or explicit about this. Sneakily trying to bend the narrative so the reader goes away with a certain impression without ramming your own personal pet theory down my throat is fine; on the other hand, being up-front about why you're writing the book is usually a good idea. Of course, one can set this out at the start and/or end without having to labour the point continuously in every section.

But most important of all is that you have some point to make. Doesn't have to be anything deep or insightful, you could just want to tell a good tale. Or you might want to support the established view in defiance of popular alternatives, or indeed do the exact opposite. It's all good. What you absolutely cannot do is have no sort of point at all, otherwise you'll just get a big mess. And if you do have an axe to grind, feel free to grind away... but don't pretend you're not doing it. Don't pretend to be writing something you're not. If you want to wax lyrical on the sins of the decadent West, that is fine - but don't tell me you're writing a history of China, because it'll be obvious what you're up to and you'll come across as biased and annoying.

There we go, that should sort everything out.