On the anti-cult

In my last post, I mentioned that people in the thrall of the bizarre cult of Boris Johnson care only about who he is, not what he says or does. To the fascist cronies of such men, the person is above all : the law, convention, democracy, due process, all of it. There is no ideology at work in the conventional sense, no determination to enact some great social reform except as a side-effect of bringing them to power. For the fascist, the important point is who is in charge, not what they do when they get there. They may well cloak this in promises of what such despots will do to improve the lives of the common folk, but that's not what fundamentally matters to them, not really.

For such a person, there is little problem in believing in contradictory ideas. If their Dear Leader one day declares death to pigeons, they will loudly devote themselves to enacting feathery death at every opportunity. If the same leader declares the very next day that pigeons are now sacred, they will immediately set about constructing great temples and statues to honour their beloved birds. It's not that they aren't aware of the stark contradiction, it's that they don't care. Self-consistency isn't what matters to them. The only thing they respect is their precious master.

The leaders themselves provide excellent evidence of this. Johnson once wrote two letters, one in support of and one attacking Brexit. Trump frequently contradicts himself in the space of a single sentence. You only have to listen to the verbal effluence spilling forth from the bowels of Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg for a few minutes to realise that these people don't have any agenda of their own whatsoever.

Not every cult is necessarily an example of fascism, but every sort of fascism is a type of cult. It enthrones the leader and discards everything else as irrelevant. 

In an earlier post, I mentioned that people can define themselves by being against things as well as in support of them. You can be against abortion rather than trying to have as many babies as possible; against veganism rather than wanting to be being purely carnivorous.

Recently I was reminded of this by seeing some of the rather distasteful reaction on reddit to the missing submersible visiting the Titanic. None of the people on board have ever had much if any media presence before, but certain segments of the internet are reacting in a very personal way. It's not the (rather obscene) wealth of the people they have a problem with, it's the people themselves they object to simply because they're wealthy.

I suggest that this is an anti-cult. Not the opposite of a cult, but cult-like behaviour applied in the opposite way to usual. Just as you can idolise someone because of who they are rather than what they do, so you can demonise them by exactly the same token. It is, of course, a form of discrimination : this person is wealthy, so I must hate them now; regardless of all other considerations I must hate them and them personally. And this is manifestly different from being opposed to wealth inequality itself; hating the person who has the money (irrespective of how they got it or what they do with it) rather than hating the fact they have the money (or hating the system that allowed this) is quite a different state of affairs.

An anti-cult is personal in the same way a regular cult is. It's all personal, not ideological. It's just that it's against specific individuals in and of themselves, regardless of context and circumstance. A regular person might say, "huh, well I don't agree with Donald Trump on most things, but when he said the time was 1:30pm, he was basically right", whereas a Trump anti-cultist would say the time simply must be something else.

We can generalise this to broader issues as well, beyond the exclusively personal. A normal person might have concerns about nuclear power but admit that its low CO2 emissions are an advantage, whereas an anti-cultist will insist that either the low emissions are a lie or even somehow a problem. A reasonable person might not like the monarchy but concede that some of their charitable activities are okay, while an anti-cultist will maintain that these must be damaging or that all charity is therefore bad. To an anti-believer, anything associated with the target of the ire must also fall victim to their displeasure. Anti-cultists like these dedicate themselves to being against certain things not because of the consequences that such things cause, but because they are against those things by their very nature.

This way of thinking may be somewhat more common than it might appear. We are all of us tribal to some degree and we shift our opinions depending on what are tribal leaders determine. If our preferred party changes its stance, we do as well, at least a little bit. Of course, most of the time we're probably not too deep in the grips of true cultism or anti-cultism : we can bring ourselves to sometimes agree with those we overall despise, and disagree on specific points with those we generally find favourable. And if we're pushed too far, we switch allegiances - if we didn't, there'd be no point in having elections. But we're none of us wholly immune to bias, tribalism and anti-tribalism alike.

Acutely aware that "everyone" must necessarily include myself, I nevertheless wonder if I've misread my social media feeds. I've been thinking that they're rife with cynicism, seeing everything and everyone as having an ulterior, malevolent motive. Things that I find inspiring (space travel, virtual reality, new technology more generally) are viewed with a strange, perverted disdain, through a warped ideological lens in which only the complete overthrow of capitalism is ever the acceptable answer to any question no matter the relevance of the financial system to the issue at hand. Any manifestly promising development is at once rejected if it comes from a disapproved source. The technology itself must be bad, the thinking goes, because the developers are inherently bad people. Any level of wealth more than half a sigma above the median is bad, so anyone not having financial difficulties is clearly in need of a guillotine.

It's all a bit mad. Perhaps I just need better social media feeds.

No Mo Mojo, BoJo

Professional arseling and three times Olympic champion in the "hairstyle so bad we're blaming it on ghosts" category Boris Johnson is, it seems, finally gone. Properly gone, or good as, relegated to a column in the Daily Fail, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing except the insignificance of weight loss pills.

Having invested so much in following the fortunes of this political personification of buffoonery so realistic that clowns were once scared he'd render their entire sector obsolete, I feel obligated to at least say something at this point. But I will keep this short, because (1) I've already said all I need to say about BoJo by now anyway and (2) if I were to be any more honest about Boris and his cronies, and certain other rather larger segments of the Tory party, I cannot think of any way I would express that properly in a way that wouldn't be classed as hate speech*.

* Though Andrew Marr's beautiful poem, "I'm so bored of Boris Johnson I could vomit" is a worthy attempt - alas that I lack his wordsmithing.

I watched last week's revelations on the Partygate report with abject glee. Ironically, since it seems to so clearly and totally vindicate everything I've said, there seems little point in me actually reading it in full. What was even more heartening was the news coverage, especially that from ordinary people on Radio 5 : "Isn't there a danger that this will make Boris Johnson into a kind of martyr ?" asked Nicky Campbell. "Only by a few people," responded a listener, "who will be considered to be mad".

Marvellous. Likewise, I'm not sure I'm going to agree with former Telegraph editor Max Hastings on many things, but what he said about Boris was bang-on : "You can say that this stuff doesn't matter," he said about the lockdown parties, "but what you can't say is that it didn't happen." Which nails it. Boris' cult followers (for those are the only real supporters he has left) are, predictably, still claiming it's all about the parties themselves, that it was only some cake, that everyone broke the lockdown rules a little bit, that it's all hypocrisy because Keir Starmer once had a beer or Bernard Jenkins talked to his own wife... it's all nonsense, all of it. Even if, just for the sake it, hypocrisy was a factor, the parties themselves were not the issue. The issue was the lying.

Boris lied. He lied again and then lied about lying. He does it perpetually and probably quite literally cannot stop himself, not just about partygate but about pretty much everything. As one of his cultists said, "It's not that he deliberately tells lies, it's that he's bored by the truth". 

Blink. 

Err... righty-hoo, and you're... not seeing how this makes him unsuitable for office ? No ? Off you fuck then.

Does every politician lie ? Likely yes, because every human being lies from time to time. But not every politician routinely tells lies to get what they want. Not every politician is so enthralled by their own gargantuan sense of entitlement that they don't feel the need to apologise or correct the record when they're told to, steps normal people take because they at least feel ashamed when they're caught. In truth, Boris is different from normal people, not in the "it doesn't matter because it's me" way that he thinks he is, but in that he literally feels no embarrassment about what he's done. Ordinary people feel ashamed when caught, but at least part of that is about what it is that they've done. For Boris, if it's anything at all, it's only about being found out, and nothing else.

Frank Herbert said, "respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality". Boris doesn't have any of that. While their are many differences between him and Trump, there are also similarities, and his routine attacks on proper procedure and democratic institutions are chief among those. It's hard to tell if this is because he does actually realise that what he's done is wrong but doesn't care, or genuinely doesn't believe himself capable of committing any wrongdoing whatsoever. Either way, it's kind of a tragedy.

What I really wish would happen is that firstly Boris would just sod off completely and we'd never hear from him again, and that secondly he'd have an epiphany. He'd wake up one morning realising the full magnitude of what he'd done, to find himself with a modicum of self-awareness. Now at one point I would have wished this as a means of reform, but I'm long past that. Instead, I only wish this upon him now purely out of a punitive desire for spite, because I want him to suffer.

While, in the light of the vote overwhelmingly in favour of the official Partygate report, Boris' fawning acolytes are sadly not going to instigate a full-blown civil war within the party, it's pretty much assured that that won't shut up about him anytime soon. And there are some seriously impressive mental gymnastics being done here. Michael Gove, the only man who rivals Nigel Farage for his uncanny resemblance to a toad, and who famously stabbed Boris in the back by running against him in a leadership contest, admits that the lockdown party videos are "indefensible", but then says that those present who received honours shouldn't have them rescinded. No, we must follow proper procedure, it was Boris Johnson's right as Prime Minister to grant those honours.

Excuse me ? We must follow the proper procedure and allow a lawbreaking lawmaker to give honours to people themselves found to have violated the laws ? Breaking the COVID laws and lying about it carries next to no consequence, but forbidding peerages to those breaking the rules and lying about it - that's where we draw the line ? Well, that doesn't make sense, unless you're a cultist. 

To give the Tories their due : this sort of egregious cultism isn't their normal practise. This sort of personality-based politics isn't usual. No-one accused May of even being liked, nobody saw Cameron as beyond reproach, nobody put Major on a pedestal. Thatcher, maybe, was different, but even then the party knew when to quit. This is how the party survives, and while Boris was once popular, fortunately that was nowhere near the extent he'd have needed to remake the party in his own image, a la Trump and the Republicans*. It was never more than a marriage of convenience, except for a few diehards. For them it's all about who Boris is, not what he says or does or thinks, regardless even of how he treats them personally. The Nadine Dorries** of the world simply don't care about stuff like that.

* So far as I can tell, the groundwork for that sort of transformation had been steadily laid down for many years before Trump even took office : the Republican party was already a cult in search of a leader, and that's just not really the case with the Tories - however vehemently I might oppose their ideologies.

** A remarkable lady, graced with all the culture war antics of J. K. Rowling but none of the redeeming features. Refusing to resign until she discovers the "sinister forces" at work that blocked her peerage ? Dear or dear. Peers become entitled, you don't get them merely by having a sense of entitlement. 

The Tory party is now essentially having their own Corbyn moment. Labour belatedly realised when the cause was hopeless and implemented sweeping (but gradual and incremental), highly disciplined reforms to oust the unelectable hard left. Unfortunately for the Tories, a similar process looks unlikely to begin anytime soon. They already tried replacing BoJo with the even madder, stupider, and more genuinely ideological Liz Truss, because that's the kind of crazed loons that form the party faithful. Sunak was then appointed really only by default, and he appears to be largely both rudderless and spineless. Rudderless, because he has no clear idea of where he wants the party to go, how it will get there, or why it needs to move. Spineless, because he lacks the conviction to enforce any sort of ideology even if he ever found one, or even stand up to the remaining loonies. In short, a complete non-entity.

How bad the damage will be is not yet known. Damage there shall surely be, but don't count the Tories out completely just yet. It's unlikely they'll truly collapse; their base support still exists, their core ideologies are not overthrown. Fortune's wheel is, however, ever turning, and while it might not grind them into dust, it has every chance of flinging them into the wilderness for a good long while.

The meaningfully meaningless meaning of meaning

I wanted to call this post simply, "Is", but I resisted. It'd make it too difficult to search for in the future, anyway.

All this AI stuff has provoked a lot (1) of discussion (2) as to whether AI can really be said to be "understanding" anything. Does it truly extract the meaning of anything, or is it only a glorified abacus, shuffling the text around in impressive yet ultimately vacuous ways ?

As befits this blog, my stance on this is conflicted. Since I believe very strongly that we have an inner awareness which arises from something that can't be reduced to mere words, in some ways I'm inclined towards the latter. Just rearranging words in the correct order does not constitute a mind of any sort. Likewise, playing all the notes even in the right order doesn't indicate the presence of emotions or intent.

On the other hand, I've long speculated that a purely text-based machine could be said to have a form of understanding, even if necessarily different from our own. It wouldn't necessarily be conscious, but it could still be important - indeed, maybe even preferable to recreating a truly living machine, which would have all kinds of no-doubt horrific emotions and be utterly unfathomable. A ruthlessly unbiased, objective truth engine is in some ways considerably more appealing, though there are of course tremendous difficulties with the very notion.

What is that we mean when we say "meaning" or "understanding" ? In one recent discussion (2), two possibilities were given, which I quote verbatim :

1. That evocation of sensory-emotional-cognitive content elicited by a bit of language within a language user.
2. Having an effective representation of one’s little corner of the world. By effective it is meant being competent in using one’s learned model to interact with the world. Meaning is as meaning does.

And a third, closely related question :

3.  Has a painting or other work of art ever had a powerful effect on you? A natural vista? We can legitimately say that these interacted meaningfully with you though these have no purported understanding of language.

I've done a piece looking at this before, but in a more moral context rather than one about cognition.  To quote myself :

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

This could also apply to severing or weakening connections just as well as creating or strengthening them; loss can be some of the most meaningful experiences of all. And where I've speculated* about meaning in the sense of understanding*, I go along similar lines :

* Both of those links are worth re-reading, containing skepticism of GPT3 from 2020 which now looks utterly ridiculous. In two or three years the output has gone from mainly dribble to mainly coherent - borderline mainly correct. The authors of the pieces I quoted in the links pronounced judgement far, far too soon ! See my follow up from shortly afterwards where I first got to play with GPT3 myself.

My working definition is that understanding is knowledge of the connections between a thing and other things. The more complete our knowledge of how things interact with other things, the better we can say we understand them... I noted that this isn't a perfect definition, since my knowledge of mathematical symbols, for example, does not enable me to really understand - let alone solve - an equation.

Sometimes, I can understand all the individual components of a system but not how the whole lot interact. [I might be able to do] each individual calculation myself (just more slowly), but not the whole bunch all together. That suggests there's some numerical limit on how many connections I can hold at once. I could fully understand each one, but not how they all interact at the same time.

Likewise, electronic circuits : in undergraduate studies they gave us a circuit diagram to solve which wasn't all that complex, just four diodes linked in a weird way, but my brain said, "nope, that's completely non-linear, can't do that". I just can't handle more than a few variables in my head simultaneously, which imposes quite hard limits on what I can understand. Processing speed might also be a factor.

This is all well and good, but I got hung up on the limitations of this approach, particularly in regard to knowledge and the base units within the web of facts that could construct an understanding :

But subtleties arise even with this simplest form of misunderstanding. In a straightforwardly linear chain of processes, a computer may only increase the speed at which I can solve a problem. Where the situation is more of a complex interconnected web of processes, however, I may never be able to understand how a system works, because there may just not be any root causes to understand : properties may be emergent from a complex system which I have no way of guessing. The real difficulty is when we don't understand a single, irreducible fact. We can know that fact, but that's not the same as understanding it, not really. How do we program such a state in software ?

Maybe this is too ambitious, however. Perhaps it's even impossible, perhaps there exists some basic atomic unit of knowledge which simply can't be reduced any further (this is very Locke). 

My thinking today though is a bit different. If we simply take it for granted that understanding is knowing how a thing relates to other things, perhaps we can unify all this. Now this is of course a paradox because it's self-referential : knowing is understanding, understanding is knowing, ad infinitium... so I throw myself on the reader's mercy and ask you to accept this most basic limitation. I need you to grant some very much deeper aspect to "knowledge" which I here cannot tackle, that we must proceed without attempting a more reductive approach or we will get nowhere.

Under this system, the two definitions given above can maybe be reconciled. The first would be that "meaning" is knowing how an external thing relates to our internal perception of it. Very similarly, "understanding" in this sense would mean knowledge of how words and text, and language, in general relate to qualia, emotions, and mental concepts (ultimately expressions of the deepest mental processes, electrochemical activities and so on).

In this version, it makes no sense at all to speak of an AI as having any sort of "understanding", because, as from thread (1) :

Their encodings do not represent any real "meaning", even abstractly. The "meaning" is in us, not in the LLM.

A language model cannot possible encode meaning in the sense of our inner awareness because it simply doesn't have one. In this definition, to say an AI "understands" something is completely ludicrous.

The second definition is more about competence, knowing which thing relates to which other things in order to produce useful results. In this sense, there's no problem at all postulating that a language model can be said to have understanding, because knowledge of how verbs and adjectives relate to each other is clearly part of this, even if only a small part of human cognition.

To me all of these seem like different expressions of the same thing. The "moral" sense of meaning, as we might get from a painting or a landscape or a speech, relates to how something affects our own internal processes. Something invokes "meaning" if it affects more of those internal connections ("wow, this picture of a windmill changes both my view of both impressionist art and 16th century agriculture !") or a few of them more strongly ("this destroys my theory of impressionist art altogether, however my views on farming haven't changed"). By contrast the "competence" model is just about different connections, the ones which are based primarily on the stuff "out there" that have little direct subjective effect on our emotional states. Both, I suggest, are fundamentally about how things relate to other things.

And both of these seem completely reasonable to me. As I discuss at some length in (1), I think it's entirely valid to say that large language models can be said to have a type of understanding, though it definitely isn't the human sort. They can operate very successfully, though not perfectly, on complex text; they can deal with the connections between words of different types. As our moral-type of understanding relates to connections in our own internal awareness, and our knowledge-type of understanding concerns connections between external objects*, so does a LLM's understanding consist of connections between elements of text.

* Or, if you insist : our own internal representations of external objects.

This to me seems perfectly straightforward, useful, and self-consistent. I don't think the suggestion in (1) that I'm applying different standards is correct :

You say you do not understand higher maths - You can’t apply it in novel ways, you don’t know why you use it like you’re supposed to use it, it’s just rote learning. From this your internal-use definition of “understanding” would seem to mean “understanding why something works to the point of being able to apply it in novel situations”.

But for ChatGPT, you’re applying something much less as necessitating understanding. ChatGPT is literally just generating words according to pattern prediction. The situations are novel, but only with respect to the topic - it is not novel in terms of word patterns or subject (if you find a subject that the bot has no training material for, it will not do well).

Just like midjourney is mimicking pencil strokes or brush strokes, so are the chat bots mimicking known text. That is something very far from the idea of understanding you use for yourself.

I take the point, but this it not my definition of understanding at all. Because to me this is all about different connections, I do not see any difficulty with claiming that "chatbots make connections between elements of text" as a type of understanding, with human understanding being something which involves connections to our own internal models. It's all about different types of connections, which are of fundamentally different natures in humans and chatbots : but in that crucial way, also fundamentally similar. The strands may be of silk or silicon, but the structure can be similar. 

Understanding in the broadest sense doesn't need a connection to a subjective awareness. And when a human misunderstands something, they fail to make the necessary connections. When a chatbot gets an answer wrong, it fails to make the necessary connections. Sure, it can't apply itself to novel situations, but humans stumble here as well. When we see an observation that doesn't fit the existing paradigm, we run into a horrible mess before we figure it out. A bot's version of understanding is strictly linguistic : it is not reasoning in the sense of coming up with wholly new concepts. I claim nothing more than that it understands text itself, not the subject matter. I don't doubt that a bot trained only on text about lettuce would come up with some... interesting stuff if asked about nuclear fusion*.

* Somebody please do this.

The weird thing here is the apparent belief that people think even this is anthropomorphising. It isn't, and if anything it's the opposite. It's simply broadening the definition of understanding to something I think is self-consistent with existing use. Human understanding just becomes a subset of this, but is not diminished in any way, nor are chatbots elevated to have something they clearly do not have (though, this is quite fun).

Here at last is where I think we have problems with the word "is". Materialism says that consciousness literally is something physical, that the flow of electrons in the brain (say) literally is thought itself. Physicalism says it's not an actual material substance, but still something physical, e.g that electrical fields are thoughts. Functionalism is somewhat broader but still boils down to "consciousness is whatever the brain is doing", that you can literally define things by their purpose... a chair is that which is for sitting; in sociology, society is defined by its goals; thinking is that which arises from the brain. Or in another thread :

Functionalism is just another way of saying that things exist at various levels of abstraction. And still be “real” at each level of abstraction. For example an algorithm is real even though that’s just a functional abstraction or any of many ways to implement the algorithm. Some people say the implementation is real and the abstraction isn’t. Word games.

I think that things do exist at different levels of abstraction, but they cannot be equally or equivalently "real" (the quotes are vital !) at each level. The kind of existence of the concept of a chair is wholly different to the wooden kind you can actually sit on. Even if there was a direct one-to-one relationship between brain waves and mental states, I think it would make not a lick of sense to say that they are the same thing. I think there is an unbridgeable gulf between the two. A thing is not its function; a function can only describe a thing in part, the two cannot literally be equal. To say understanding is the deeper processes within the brain (and only those) seems curiously limited to me.

In like vein, I find it a bit weird to define the supernatural out of even conceptual existence. Saying anything that occurs is natural by definition is to my way of thinking missing the point entirely. Defining understanding to be something only the mind or brain can do similarly doesn't seem useful. It just seems unnecessarily limiting. Grand unified theories seem to be a dream of philosophers as much as physicists. 

As to the problem of knowledge = understanding, perhaps, as in the last link, this is also something that just cannot be reduced to anything fundamental, or maybe we can only define things in relation other things. I don't know. This I will have to leave for another day. Or maybe I'll just ask a chatbot to figure it out for me instead.

EDIT : This post generated a lively discussion here (3). Together especially with (1), I think we can at least properly pin down the point of dispute even if we can't fully resolve it.

The interpretation I favour is that understanding is a process, specifically of forming connections. I actively deny that the type of understanding an AI has is the same as the human sort, but at the same time, I think it perfectly valid to say a pure textual understanding, even if using nonsense words, is a type of understanding. Text can be said to "mean" something to an AI in that (and only in that) it knows how it relates to other text.

The major alternative seems to be that understanding must account not just for the process but what's being processed. Human understanding relates language to both external sensory stimuli and internal, non-linguistic mental processes. In that sense I fully agree that no AI could be said to have anything remotely comparable to human ideas of meaning. This latter sense of the word has the major advantage in that it opens an avenue to what we mean when say we understand an irreducible fact, allowing connections to that internal, non-computational reality.

Both of these definitions have value. The point of contention is whether "understanding is processing connections" is too broad a definition, and if in fact "understanding is the processing of connections between language and mental states" (say) is already a fait accompli. To me the process is more important than what's being processed; whether one is boiling water or boiling milk, the important thing is that something is boiling. 

It's a (different) kind of magic

Existential Comics is one of my favourite webcomics, but this one's got me thinking. In the accompanying description :

The term "supernatural" is kind of funny because by definition it sort of means things that don't exist. If something exists, it is part of the natural world, in that it can interact with particles via the rules of physics. If ghosts exist, for example, they can't so much disobey the laws of physics, because scientists would simply adjust the rules of physics to match what they observed in the ghosts. 

Which then goes on to insist that the supernatural must mean things that don't exist by definition. 

Don't get me wrong, this is, as usual, an amusing comic. But I don't think it's at all accurate - I think it's circular and misses the point. The supernatural has nothing much at all to do with “existence” and instead relates to whether such phenomena do obey rigorous laws or not. To me, just because something "exists", in the sense of "being detectable", in no way implies that this is so because it is bound by any scientific rules. Indeed, that's kind of the whole point. Ordinary, mortal creatures are seen because they reflect or omit photons; a creature which was visible to our eyes without doing this would be magical by definition. If you forbid this possibility utterly, saying that there's no way our vision can work in any other way, you've misunderstood the whole notion, and have probably fallen into scientism.

Some examples and further exploration may help. Existential Comics goes on to cite Bigfoot, the Kraken and other mysterious creatures. Now Bigfoot, an undiscovered American ape, isn’t inherently supernatural, but if Bigfoot could behave in such a way as to defy any rational, scientific analysis, then it might be. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 100% supernatural 100% of the time in 100% of the things it did, there would just have to be some inexplicable aspect to it. 

And to be fair, cryptid animals often do contain a large helping of the truly supernatural about them. A serious academic researcher looking for possible escaped big cats in Britain doesn't entertain the possibility that the Beast of Bodmin has any unearthly qualities to it, but cryptozoologists do. I read a whole bunch of this stuff in my younger days, everything from aliens and monsters to time travel and frickin' Mothman, which is basically where I gave up.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, there's a whole spectrum from the basically respectable to the outright nonsensical. There are those trying to get good, scientific data to prove the existence of unknown but essentially normal species, there are those whole believe that new physics might be found in ball lightning... and then there are the folklorists. Not in the sense of those who study folklore, but those who really believe in it, hook line and sinker. The kind of people who believe the Beast of Bodmin has inexplicable powers, that the yeti isn't just a peculiar ape, but has something genuinely monstrous about it; the demon-bear in The Terror is an excellent example. Ambiguity, mystery and inexplicability are a key part of the the sense of underlying threat for such creatures.

But none of these "researchers" claim that supernatural entities don't exist, because that's just silly. This is an attempt to define the issue away, but I think this is just purely circular logic that avoids the issue rather than addressing it. It makes a good comic, but nothing more.

So what does "supernatural" really mean, then ? You might recall that time I tried to imagine being a ghost, with a view to examining that ever-popular topic of consciousness and minds. We'll get back to that angle later. But to tackle the supernatural itself, I have no conceptual problem with something that interacts with the observable world but is not bound by its rules. Why would something which interacts in some ways therefore necessarily have to obey all the regular rules of ordinary matter ?

It wouldn't. Dark matter pretty much does this, and nobody thinks it's anything mystical (well, except for Philip Pullman, I guess). To be more accurate, it doesn't interact with normal matter except through gravity, but there's no reason to think that it all other respects it somehow defies physics. Quite the opposite : the physics is if anything likely to be simpler than ordinary matter, which is why it's computationally very cheap to simulate. But it's only a short conceptual step from this to imagine something which can interact with the world enough to make itself detected, but in other ways is outside physical laws completely. I'm just not seeing anything fundamentally problematic about this as a concept, even without believing myself that any such thing exists.

The other example that comes speeding into view is obviously consciousness itself. Could we view this as something magical ? Yes, if we want to. I actually do tend to think of this - in a very casual sense - as an everyday sort of routine magic, mind over matter so continuously at work that we take it for granted. And perhaps that is even literally true. But it need not necessarily be so; as I'm often at pains to point out, this is something which does seem to fit the bill of pointing to a gap in our knowledge, rather than anything that truly breaks science. Our ability to think about concepts which don't have physical existence clearly doesn't give us any special control over the world - it's a rather oddly-limited sort of "magic" if all it lets us do is walk around the place and experience ennui.

True magic would be something that was fundamentally inexplicable through physical laws, that fit no pattern whatsoever, or that happened with no connection of any kind between the apparent cause and its effect. Magical spells are a classic example : there's no way that chanting around a cauldron full of boiling newts can cause someone in a nearby castle to turn into a frog. There's just no possible causal connection between these two events. On a James Randi forum many years back there was a guy who claimed he could make UFOs appear on demand by pointing at the sky; that would fit the bill pretty well too.

Mind might be described as truly magical if it could cause such nonlocal effects. Or, perhaps, if it were really the base level of reality, as idealism posits. In that sense the Ultimate Mind that imagines reality would not be bound by any of the laws that we ourselves feel subject to. Actually, a few weeks ago, I had ChatGPT create a discussion between Morogth and Daniel Dennet on this very point, and it raised much the same argument as Existential Comics did :

Daniel Dennett : Morgoth, I understand that you have witnessed the power of the Ainur, but have you considered that this power might not be supernatural at all, but rather the result of natural processes that we have yet to understand fully?

Morgoth : What are you talking about, Dennett? I was there when the world was created. I saw the song of the Ainur shape the universe with my own eyes.

Daniel Dennett : Yes, but consider this : what if the universe operates according to a set of natural laws that we can study and understand ? What if the power you wield is simply the result of these laws, rather than some kind of divine magic ?

Morgoth : I see what you're saying, but how can you explain the power of the Ainur ? How can you explain the very act of creation itself ?

Daniel Dennett : That's the thing, Morgoth. We might not be able to explain it fully yet, but that doesn't mean it's supernatural. It just means we haven't discovered the underlying natural laws that govern the universe.

The thing is, if the Universe were literally sung into being as in Tolkien's cosmology, I think this would be inexplicable by physical laws. In short, there do exist possibilities which, if demonstrated, I would seriously consider abandoning science and giving up. To cling to rationality in the face of manifestly irrational processes is itself irrational; to try and insist by definition that everything must obey physical laws would be foolishly circular if observational evidence indicated the contrary.

In Tolkien's mythology and Berkeley's philosophy (also Spinoza, the Upanishads, no doubt very many others !), the base level of reality is mind, which is ultimately how the magic works. This is also essentially how Neo can fly and stop bullets in The Matrix. I've compared idealism to the simulation hypothesis before, but there is an important distinction between the two : true, from the perspective of a simulated entity, I as the simulator might appear godlike, but it doesn't follow that I am the base level of that entity's reality. In the simulation hypothesis, if anything the opposite would be the case, that it would be equally likely that I myself am a simulation, and so on ad infinitum... simulations all the way down.

Which raises the question, what is the base level of reality ? Here it's worth reading this very nice little piece from IAI, which postulates that... maybe there just isn't one. Either reality could be infinite, not necessarily fractal but of infinite complexity on all scales, or it could just be self-referential. I'll reverse the order, because infinitism is in some ways the easiest to contemplate (or at least the most familiar to me) :

There are two primary alternatives to foundationalism, the view that reality does have a fundamental level. The second is infinitism, which endorses the possibility of infinite descent and hence infinite chains of dependence. For the infinitist picture to be palatable, we need to abandon the intuition that dependence needs to bottom out in something fundamental. As we saw earlier that intuition is generally tied to explanation. However, it may be driven simply by our psychological need to find the ultimate explanation. While infinite regresses are generally regarded as an alarming sign in philosophy, not all regresses or infinite sequences need to be vicious. 

There is an intriguing, hypothetical version of infinitism that could in principle be corroborated by empirical evidence. This version, sometimes called boring infinite descent, suggests that while chains of dependence could go on infinitely, there could be a point where the entities or the structure involved in these chains starts repeating; it’s turtles all the way down. The thought here is that a full-blown version of infinitism seems very demanding: if each level has a new kinds of entities governed by some hitherto undiscovered laws, then not only would there be infinite chains of dependence, but also an infinite number of different kinds of entities and laws.

I've no idea what's "boring" about this but I'm reliably informed the jargon just gets even weirder and sillier. No matter. Anyway, as far as "batshit crazy" goes, I like this very much : infinite levels of reality each with their own different laws, avoiding the tired cliché of having infinite copies of me (no pesky repeating fractals or the like) and preventing stuff from ever bottoming out. The reason that some things can't be reduced any further is not because they're truly fundamental, some "end of the line" point beyond which there are no more answers*, but because on scales below this things are radically different to the point of being incomparable. This is very appealing indeed. A webcomic version can be found here.

* I would yearn to know the Ultimate Answer, but I have great trouble imagining how this could even be a thing. 

But, while we're on the subject of gloriously crazy ideas, the other option is even more outrageous :

The first is coherentism, which suggests that we should take a more holistic view, whereby the foundation of reality could be constituted by entities that are themselves dependent on each other, in a symmetric fashion. 

For instance, quarks do not exist independently; they come in groups of two or three, such as in the case of mesons (group of two), and protons and neutrons (groups of three). So, you do not get freely existing quarks, simples though they may be. This immediately suggests that quarks lack one of the defining features that are typically ascribed to fundamentalia, namely, independence. In some sense, the quarks in these quark pair or triplets seem to be symmetrically dependent on each other… Ultimately, this could lead to a completely circular picture, where everything, or at least all the candidate fundamentalia, end up being dependent on each in a circular fashion.

I bloody love this. And I hate it too. Just have things defined entirely by other things ? That's... bold. You'd have something akin to fundamentalia but not really, there would be no single base component of reality, only base relations. That's going to need some more follow-up, but not right now. My instinctive suspicion would be that this can't work, but I'm not going to attempt to say why.

Which brings me to the final article I'll mention in this increasingly-meandering post :

A realist approach is one that takes the old-fashioned point of view that what is real in nature is not dependent on our knowledge or description or observation of it. It simply is what it is and science works by observing evidence or a description of what the world is. I’m saying this badly, but a realist theory is one where there is a simple conception, that what is real is real and [not] depend[ent] on knowledge or belief or observation. Most importantly, we can find out facts about what’s real and we draw conclusions and reason about it, and therefore decide. It isn’t a way most people thought of science before quantum mechanics.

The other kind of theory is an anti-realist theory. It’s one that says there are no atoms independent of our description of them or our knowledge of them. And science is not about the world as it would be in our absence—it’s about our interaction with the world and so we create the reality that science describes. And many approaches to quantum mechanics are anti-realist. These were invented by people who didn’t think there was an objective reality–instead, they understood reality to be determined by our beliefs or our interventions in the world.

The key idea, in society as well as physics, is that we must be relationalists as well as realists. That is, the properties we believe are real are not intrinsic or fixed, rather they concern relationships between dynamical actors (or degrees of freedom) and are themselves dynamical. This switch from Newton’s absolute ontology to Leibniz’s relational view of space and time has been the core idea behind the triumph of general relativity. I believe this philosophy also has a role to play in helping us shape the next stage of democracy, one suited to diverse, multicultural societies, which are continually evolving.

To recap from an earlier post, "there are no things, only stuff". All our understanding is flawed due to our limited perception, atoms aren't "real", they are just, in effect, labels for things which are real, whose true nature cannot be known to us. Maybe.

Leaving aside the question of the nature of the "stuff", what about the rules that govern the stuff ? Could they be said to be, in any sense, "real" ?

I think science in general assumes that they can. That nature operates on a fundamental set of inviolable principles, with our attempts at ascertaining what they are becoming progressively more accurate the more we learn, the more knowledge we have to develop our models from. The point is that some sort of rules do exist, even if might never grasp them perfectly. Whether this would imply determinism I don't know, but I suspect not, as in the last post, I think there is a valid space between the purely deterministic and purely random.

Which brings us back to magic. Something which violates an inviolable rule would count as magical. This may not necessarily be a logical contradiction, in that all ordinary matter might obey these inviolable laws (in relation to itself) but some other entities might not. This raises yet another definition of magic, that of different levels of reality following distinctly different but internally self-consistent rules. Hence the idea that you can go to a school for witches and wizards and learn how magic works : it would actively violate laws which otherwise are unbreakable, but is still limited by its own set of rules, much as in the "boring infinite descent" described above. Terry Pratchett made the point that all fantasy novels have to have rules for how magic works to avoid magic being the solution to everything*.

* Though I've heard it claimed that in the medieval period, the point about witchcraft was that it broke the normal rules of how the world worked, and the idea that you could go to a school with teachers and homework exercises to learn how to do it just wouldn't have made any sense. However, I can't remember where I heard this, and I can't find any references to it.

In this sense, we could consider almost everything magical. Atoms are magically miniscule because they operate on different principles from macroscopic reality; they experience all kinds of effects that we just don't. Conversely, galaxies are magnificently magical for exactly the same reason. It's only we, in this Middle Earth, that lack any sort of magic because we understand our own set of rules far better than those on any other scale.

Well, that was fun. To summarise the different kinds of magic considered, magic could be :

• When something interacts with us (or the world around us) by a mechanism other than the typical, well-understood methods of interaction
• When something behaves in such a way that is actively prohibited by known laws of physics, without any sort of pattern or following any rules whatsoever
• When something induces an effect without any physical connection of any kind, with no causal relation
• In general, when something does anything that is considered impossible, and no solution can be found to incorporate it into the known laws of physics, nor any problem found with those laws
• Or, when something operates on an entirely different set of its own rules that are present but inapplicable to our own lived experience. 

Some types of magic could indeed point to simply gaps in our knowledge, "any sufficiently advanced technology" and all that. But personally, I don't have a problem with the idea that some things just might not obey any laws at all and still exist - even if I don't actually believe in any of them.

Free Willfully

It seems to me that one of many odd tensions on social media concerns free will. On the one hand, people insist that most wrong actions are the result of innately awful people. The default assumption seems to be that people act malevolently, choosing to cause harm for the sheer delight of it, and not out of simple ignorance.

On the other hand, science activists on social media tend to deny that anyone can ever make a choice at all, that everything must be either predetermined, that the laws of physics are really immutable Laws that cannot ever be circumvented - or at most that there's an element of pure randomness to it all, but that actual deliberate choice is something weird and mystical.

Why this insistence against common sense ? I'm not sure. But Malcom Gaskill's marvellous books on witch-hunts have left me wondering how much of the old Calvinist mindset has persisted into the subconscious of modern America. Even those who actively reject religious beliefs cannot escape their cultural influence pervading wider society. Certainly the inherently conflicted nature of those beliefs does strike a chord with me when I see some of the abject lunacy coming from across the pond. 

Might it be that a belief in determinism is a manifestation of this, a holdover from a much earlier era of Calvinist puritanism ? It does often feel like people want to attack other people for the sake of it; rather than correcting their mistakes they just want to remove them from the arena altogether (as though they're locked in to their behaviour and incapable of change), even when those same people are actively trying to redeem themselves. 

But I digress. Personally I think free will is very much a thing; whether there is some "mystical" component to it I don't know, but I don't think there is any real need to invoke something supernatural to explain it (more on that in the next post). 

As I see it, not everything can be quantified or even measured. Yet the mind is, by some as-yet unknown process, capable of accessing this non-physical aspect of reality. I don't see anything especially "mystical" about feelings like guilt or sensory experiences like yellowness, but these things are not physically measurable. There doesn't appear to me to be any obvious need to say that because we can experience boredom, and particles of boredom don't exist, we need to believe in voodoo or the Tooth Fairy. It points to a gap in our knowledge, but nothing more than that. Anyway, by being able to act on something unphysical, this allows for the prospect of choice which defies determinism, since the information we act on is purely mental and not external to us.

So I'm gratified to have come across a couple of recent articles which are at least more sympathetic to the prospect of free will than most seem to be. The first is this short piece from The Conversation. It has quite a nice (but very brief) description of determinism, but the main take-away point for me is :

Suppose again that determinism is incompatible with free will. If so, when you freely moved your finger, that event was not fully determined by the initial conditions of the Universe and the laws of nature. Does it necessarily follow that it’s random? On the face of it, no. To be random is one thing; to be not fully determined is quite another. There’s a logical space between determinism and randomness, and perhaps free will lives in that space.

Making a choice doesn't mean you act randomly or entirely unpredictably, because that's clearly not what people are like : if I start voting Tory, my identity would have to undergo a seismic shift, and this is not at all the same as saying I had a choice. Rather, what I believe is going on is (in part) that I act on those inner mental worlds which for me define the concept of a mind. It's not external, physical reality that dictates my actions but my inner life : if I see a symbol and interpret it as meaning "five", I act differently to if I read it as "seven", regardless of what the symbol actually is. 

And the choice I make is not a compulsion. If I make consistent choices it's because my desires are consistent. Sure, you can predict this based on my past behaviour, but this will never be 100% accurate, because you can never truly know what my inner world is really like. Even I can't, because some of this is subconscious. Again, this position in between randomness and determinism is nothing weird. A Galton board, though purely deterministic, is a pretty good analogy to this : the behaviour is statistically predictable but nigh-on impossible to get it 100% accurate for individual runs. The either/or options of randomness or determinism are a false choice when it comes to the issue of free will : it's neither of those things.

The second article is from Scientific American. It says that something I've suggested for years is true : that when you make idle, inconsequential decisions, you experience different brain activity than when your decisions really matter. So the way you make those decisions involves fundamentally different processes, and that even if you can predict them through brain scans (about which I still reserve skepticism), this may only be because you're not actually making a choice in those instances. Rather the brain is just selecting something at random on your behalf, with no need to trouble your conscious mind about it. 

The other point from the article is that even from a materialist perspective (which I don't share), you can still be said to be making a choice :

When experiments have found that brain activity, such as the readiness potential, precedes the conscious intention to act, some people have jumped to the conclusion that they are “not in charge.” They do not have free will, they reason, because they are somehow subject to their brain activity. But that assumption misses a broader lesson from neuroscience. “We” are our brain. The combined research makes clear that human beings do have the power to make conscious choices. But that agency and accompanying sense of personal responsibility are not supernatural. They happen in the brain, regardless of whether scientists observe them as clearly as they do a readiness potential.

Even though I think the idea that brain activity = mental activity is nonsensical, I find it interesting that the materialistic view has more in common with my own opinions than I would have guessed. If I can tear myself away from Tolkien for long enough, expect a fuller write-up on this at some point. But coming next : the supernatural. Wooo-ooooo !

Wild-eyed Wild Isles

Much nonsense was reported about the final bonus episode of the BBC's Wild Isles recently. This didn't air on broadcast TV but was limited to iPlayer, which prompted the Guardian et al. to cry "right wing government cover-up", and claimed that "reputable sources" had told them it was because the BBC feared being too critical of the Tories.

Now these concerns are not without validity in the wake of the Richard Sharp debacle* and Gary Lineker's escapades, but in this particular instance, it was total nonsense. This extra feature was never part of the main show but commissioned by the RSPB, WWF and the National Trust. It was never scheduled to broadcast, and the show was described as five episodes in length on the RSPB and WWF's own websites. The whole furore was a bunch of bollocks.

* A case of very, very obvious conflict of interest. Good that he resigned, but disappointing that he refuses to see what's right in front of his face.

Not the show itself, though. That's superb. The main run of five episodes is up to the usual exemplary standards of Attenborough... but, it is a shame that the special didn't broadcast. It’s very much worth watching (available on Prime outside the UK, I believe), and contains nothing that attacks the government in any way. But I'm not going to do a detailed rundown of the episode. Instead, I need to go a bit more of a rant.

For once, the doom-laden tone of how badly the British environment has fared is kept to necessary minimum. Instead, the focus is on regeneration schemes, including, unexpectedly, cases where meat production can actually be beneficial for carbon capture, and where improving biodiversity is good for profits. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll reiterate : this positive approach in nature documentaries is badly needed. There have been a few others over the last year or so but the more the merrier. There is no longer any point - any point whatsoever - in the “doom porn” that too often characterises documentaries about environmentalism; I know the situation is bad, restating that in endlessly detailed and varied ways about exactly how bad things are serves no purpose. It just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy : everything is fucked, so why take any action ? Sure, let’s just all wallow in our own self-loathing, but the hell point is that supposed to achieve besides making everyone psychologically damaged ?

Well for one thing it’s not fucked. It isn’t. The environment is extremely robust if you give it half a chance, and herein are presented ways of living with nature rather than the typical binary “them or us” choice that oft-characterises environmentalism. Too often it seems to me that there is no small number of people who take a perverse delight in resharing every single “everything is awful” articles and must at some level actually enjoy this awfully depressing situation, who must be getting some sort of dopamine hit from it or something. 

Well, I’m done with that. It’s stupid. Stop rejoicing in your own misery. Cynicism is a luxury, optimism is both a burden and a duty.

And I do think that this is a problem peculiar to the left. I don't see the same sort of thing in the right. When a loathsome conservative resigns, I see the left-wing press moaning that there'll only be someone worse to replace them. I see bizarre claims that the next election could result in a hung parliament (albeit coming from both political wings, though for different reasons), despite the fact that local elections don't follow national polls that precisely and with Labour still with an enormous national lead. 

I just don't get it. Sure, complaints and criticism can be the engine of social progress. But this kind of ultra-pessimism baffles me. Such an attitude doesn't help achieve anything, it just keeps everyone perpetually miserable. It's weird.

Rant over, you may go about your business. After you watch the episode, of course.

Review : The Last Duel

Wait, didn't I already do this one ? Yes, I did, but that was the movie. This review is about the book, which lay a little too long on my shelf because I completely forgot that I had it.

Like the movie this will contain spoilers, so you might want to stop reading here.

The most obvious question is whether it's worth bothering with the book after the movie did such an excellent job. The answer is a definite yes : the book and movie differ considerably, with more details in the book about what is/isn't known and giving a rather different perspective. In particular, the chapter about the duel itself is absolutely thrilling and could not be improved upon. I hung on every word. With the rest of the book being completely solid, I feel I have no choice but to give this one a 9/10.

The only weakness I can find with this is that while the author (Eric Jager) says he tries to fill in the blanks where necessary, in practise he doesn't really do this at all. Instead he has a tendency to present all the possibilities in a rather peculiar way that takes some getting used to. To exaggerate slightly, he might say something like, "Marguerite travelled the five miles in a grand stately carriage, richly adorned with hangings and cushions to keep out the cold winter air. Or perhaps she had to make do with a small Shetland pony, her dainty feet trailing in the mud, which would have been far less comfortable."

It's a bit of an odd technique, first presenting a very clear, very specific description, only to do a bait-and-switch to another completely different but equally clear and specific alternative. But once you get used to this it becomes easy to factor this in and not get constantly jolted by the different options.

I'm going to keep this one very short. There are plenty of points of detail in difference from the movie : Carrouges and Le Gris are never described as being in combat together, Marguerite is never suggested to be a more able manager of the household than her husband. The movie's choice to present the whole story from three different viewpoints is not how the book is written (except, necessarily, during the trial), which only makes me admire the movie all the more. Still it's worth remembering that the movie does invent a lot of detail.

The most critical difference I think is in the description of Le Gris. In the movie, the rape scene occurs in all different retellings. In reality he denied this vehemently. At times it almost felt like he had a credible case. As a member of the clergy he was within his rights to deny the duel at all, but chose not to. He had an alibi for the time of the rape and seems to have gone to some lengths to establish this in detail. I found Jager's tone here to be pleasingly neutral, not taking sides with anyone but trying to present a reasonably critical appraisal of the situation.

The other major difference is something mentioned in the book only because it was not in fact used at the trial : the notion that a woman couldn't become pregnant if she was unwilling. In the movie this is added to the trial scene because it has some obvious resonances with contemporary American politics (!), and I think this is the correct choice. Jager notes that the reason for this belief was genealogical, that corrupting the bloodlines was so undesirable that nobody wanted to believe this could happen if they could possibly avoid it. This is a hard mentality for modern readers to buy into, but Jager does a decent job here.

His conclusions are, as in the movie, quite firmly that Le Gris did indeed rape Marguerite. She stuck to her story despite the extreme risk this entailed, Le Gris' alibi turned out to be unreliable, and, crucially, even his own lawyer privately expressed pretty strong doubts about the innocence of his client. Additionally, the presence of Le Gris' assistant Adam Louvel was a needless complicating detail that potentially opened the door to further alibis that would have been very much harder to refute. If the story of the rape was a fabrication, either because she was somehow mistaken or coerced into it by her rather boorish husband jealous of Le Gris's success, then this was a pointless and foolish risk. Moreover, while her husband did have reasons to be jealous of Le Gris, so too did the French court have political reasons to prefer its favourite to the troublemaking Carrouges.

Jager also weaves in some of the broader histories of duels. Outlawed in 1306, they had to be re-instituted because of their popularity. But this was in marked decline, ironically leading to even more brutality. As combat gave way to trials, unfortunately the widespread belief was that torture was the correct way to get at the truth - so torture actually increased as judicial combat declined. 

Finally, Jager also gives the history of the history, noting how the duel has been portrayed to suit different ends. Many authors have used it, unfairly in his view, to cite how foolish the duel was - not unfair because duelling was a sensible idea (it obviously wasn't !) but because of claims that Marguerite was in the wrong. Stories have emerged that she later retracted her claim, but he finds this is completely false, and largely based on a very few dubious second-hand assertions. The tale grew in the telling, such that the "retraction" became almost common knowledge, but by going back to the original first-hand evidence, it seems that all of these later findings are built on a house of cards.

As I say, an excellent little book, which definitely makes me want to re-watch the movie. Fascinating and gripping stuff. 

Review : The Ruin Of All Witches

Having thoroughly enjoyed Malcolm Gaskill's Witchfinders, I had really no choice but to try his latest book, The Ruin Of All Witches. And this is definitely a worthy sequel, if anything offering a stronger narrative, better prose, and more insight.

Whereas Witchfinders follows the history of notorious witchfinders Hopkins and Stearne and in so doing covers a plethora of "witches" they claimed to have found, Ruin takes the opposite approach. Here he follows the story of a single community, concentrating on three principle characters : the couple Hugh and Mary Parsons, and the rather hapless town leader William Pynchon. Hugh and Mary were accused of being witches both by the wider populace and by each other. Pynchon was a generally respected figure but, commensurate with the witchcraft allegations, accused of heresy for daring to say that God was probably quite a nice chap and not a fearful figure of vengeful wrath.

As previously Gaskill does a first-rate job of setting everything in its proper context. This is done on both the larger scales of the prevailing but shifting world view of puritanical Calvinism, the enormous instabilities and uncertainties of daily life, economic imbalance and stupendous social pressures, but also on the smaller scales : the particular pressures brought to bear on individuals, their personal aims and psychology - especially in treating them as complex individuals who don't always conform to the accepted social norms of the day*. He also shows how the mentality of the times was gradually shifting, and the prose is generally better and more dramatic than in Witchfinders without sacrificing clarity. He does still have a tendency to go into unnecessary detail from time to time, but this is rather reduced, and it's significantly less repetitive than Witchfinders. While I don't agree with a quote on the back that it's literally the best history book ever, I'm still tempted to give this a 9/10.

* Including, oddly enough, one young lad caught... manhandling himself outside church.

One significant novelty in this book is that Gaskill puts everything on a firmly environmental footing. That is, the realms supposedly inhabited by witches are ones of mist and murk, shadows in the cold dark, dreamlike states where the senses aren't always reliable - especially in a world of constant exhaustion from over-work, a strong prevailing belief in the supernatural, and more deep-rooted psychological problems caused by the monstrous teachings of Calvinism.

Strongly implicit throughout all this is the deeply interesting question : how do we really judge the truth at all ? It's not easy, for instance, to prove from first principles that the Earth goes around the Sun. Without good measuring devices and observational equipment this is astonishingly difficult. By embedding the reader as deeply as one can in the world of 17th-century Britain and America, Gaskill forces us to realise that this problem goes further, that how we decide what counts as "rational" is itself an extraordinarily difficult issue. Indeed, Gaskill does this with such refined skill that I often had to check myself and remember I was reading a history book about witchcraft, not a story about genuinely magical witches. Gaskill forces the reader to think critically for themselves about the allegations made, which is no bad thing at all.

I will not try a summary of the narrative. It's a slow burn at first but does pick up the pace, becoming ever more full of twists and turns right until the very end (it has serious mini-series potential, either as a drama-documentary or, perhaps better, as a straightforward historical drama). But there are a few general points I want to extract.

1) The role of religion

Let me start with the obvious. The idea that the belief in any sort of deity, or other supernatural aspect to the world, leads inevitably to witch hunts, crusades and all other sorts of nasties is just complete and utter bollocks. It's one of the stupidest ideas that somehow grips the minds of otherwise intelligent people, but it has no more credibility than a belief in the Flat Earth or goblins. But this is very far from saying that religion played no role in all this at all.

In particular, Protestantism. And especially above all Calvinism, which so far as I can tell is absolutely morally vacuous. This idea of absolute determinism in which God has preordained every outcome, such that at most all you can do is learn who's going to heaven and who to hell, is bad enough on its own*. As soon as you think that you don't really have a choice, you lose any semblance of responsibility for your actions. But worse was that this was coupled with a belief that God's standards were simply unreachably high, with the consequences utterly extreme.

* Gaskill mentions the cult-like Antinomians, who believed this so fervently that they felt themselves exempt from the Ten Commandments.

As one New England minister preached that year : "You husbands, wives, masters, servants : remember, if you are not good in your places, you are not good at all."

Failure... meant not not just exile from Christ but a kind of reunion with Satan. Passing this test, on the other hand, came more as relief than triumph, after years of feeling wretchedly lost. It also reminded others, as yet unredeemed, that they were eternally lost until they proved otherwise. This strained, opposing way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation, was part of daily life... caught between guilt and righteousness.

Both towns were locked in an existential battle between Christ and Antichrist. Hunger and disease were attributed to sin, Indians and demons were elided as enemies, and survival hinged on the merciful dispensations of grace. And at their beating heart was the message, which the Saints drummed in repeatedly : "the devil is amongst thee now."

... exacerbated by the Puritan equation of satisfaction with sinful pride.

This was made all the worse because the perpetual, inescapable judgement of the community. In Providence Lost, Paul Lay describes Protestantism as a "surveillance society of the soul" which inevitably fostered paranoia, and Gaskill makes this abundantly clear :

Ever the wayward servant and disappointing wife, even in this fantasy world [of her dreams] of escape from the mundane, she was being punished by her cruel husband and judgemental female neighbours.

So you have a world of constant judgement and unreachable standards, where you failed the tests if you were merely satisfied with your success, and even trying to get away from this nightmare fed suspicion :

But his sleeping out alone, away from his family, struck people as unusual, sinister even. To remove oneself from the community was voluntary exile from the binding covenant that kept it together. James I* himself had alerted his subjects to the "witch's natural melancholic humour", signs of which included, "desire of solitude."

* Elsewhere Gaskill notes, as I've seen other historians also explain, that James has been somewhat misunderstood as a witchfinder. His Daemonologie is perhaps better seen as a guide to make the procedure more rigorous rather than an attempt to encourage more witch-hunts, having the opposite outcome to its intent.

It's small wonder that eventually this created self-feeding spirals of paranoia which went completely out of control, manifesting themselves as witch hunts. At least stoicism, while it seeks a degree of emotional control which is frankly self-destructive, acknowledges the difficulties inherent in this, and doesn't come with a surveillance society or eternal damnation as the result of the most minor failure. 

The austerity of Protestant religious worship also created a tension with the desire for more wealth and success. If you didn't accrue wealth, you were a moral failure as well as a financial one. While there might be limits to how much wealth you should seek, these limits seem to have been pretty high, and wealth inequality certainly seems to have played a role as well. Quite how anyone squared the circle of a desire for austere religious worship with a moral drive to get richer, I don't know, but I'd bet that this too played a part in feeding the underlying conflicts.

2) The insanity of work

Which leads me on the second theme, the sheer mental and physical exhaustion of the lifestyle. Here I have to believe that Gaskill must be exaggerating, because if it was bad as he portrays, then I can't understand how everyone didn't simply fall over dead. The drive towards a strong work ethic is nothing bad in itself, if it means you want to apply yourself fully to do the best task you can. But this devotion to work as life, that this should be essentially all you ever do, all the time... this is mad. No. When you do something, you should do it well. This doesn't mean that your life must be nothing but toil.

There was no clear division of labour. Men might be artisans and farmers, like Hugh Parsons, and still do jobs for Pynchon. They toiled in enervating heat and bone-chilling cold, felling timber, excavating stumps, sawing planks, splitting shingles, breaking rocks, digging drains, diverting streams, shoring banks, building hedges and laying causeways. They mowed meadows, stacked hay and boxed pine trees for pitch and resin. They tended cattle and sheep, netted pigeons and caught fish on deerskin lines, as the Indians had taught them... 

At the end of the six-day week, labourers rested aching muscles and rubbed grease into cracked hands. The Sabbath, kept holy by law, began at sunset on Saturday and ended the following night - though Pynchon, preferring the 'natural Sabbath', hated people using Sunday evenings for games or 'the servile works of their particular callings'.

Hugh Parsons in particular seemed to be a man obsessed with work even by the standards of the time. Small wonder that with such people forming the bedrock of the community, the town grandees tended to exploit this, with a system of taxation and debts that only encouraged ever-greater workloads. The mentality of the time seems to have been one of the worst combinations of meritocracy and religion : that if you were a good person you'd succeed no matter the odds, and if you failed then this was because God had declared you a damned sinner. Free will, errors and accidents didn't feature in this way of thinking. This was even true of Pynchon, convinced as he was of God's benevolence.

Where I think Gaskill surely must be overstating the case is just how fucking awful life must have been back then. Oh, I don't doubt it was dreadful (literally, full of dread). I accept the sheer amount of hard physical labour must have been ghastly. I accept that natural disasters proved devastating with a frequency unknown to the modern West. I just think that it can't possibly have been as bad as Gaskill implies; he states the negatives commendably well, but any positive aspects at all - and there must have been some - are barely mentioned. To me the hardship seems so great that everyone would simply die, whereas in fact the town (eventually) flourished. Some more quantitative estimates as to just how bad the natural disasters (in particular) were would have been would helpful : okay, crops failed, but what exactly does that mean ? That nobody ate anything for the whole season ?

This minor niggle aside, the environment in which this unending labour occurred also deserves some mention :

She was born in about 1610 in the Welsh Marches, the wild borderlands... a patchwork of traditions bound by folklore and magic and anciently sunk into the landscape. Caves and mountains, ruins and springs, were sites of legends that told of miracles and murders, ghosts and fairies, kings sleeping under hills. Visions of black men and hideous dogs scared travellers, jolting them into mending their ways.

Yet residential Spingfield's southern boundary remained... a remote place, damp and misty by day, by night unnervingly dark and quiet. The land, stretching into infinite distance, still belonged to nature. This was where Hugh and Mary Parsons set up home, on the extreme edge of a town that was itself situated at the edge of New England.

One blue-black night, something crept out of the crawling mist. Hovering, dancing lights, like white flames tinged with colour, rose and fell, disappeared and reappeared... back in Wales these ghostly apparitions presaged a death.

Native religion was a backdrop to colonial witch-beliefs in a country as yet unconquered for Christ. Indian culture was spiritualised, sensitive to nature, with unseen forces sensed in everything from bees humming and birdsong, to tempests and dreams. But inevitably it was seen through an anxious Christian lens, which polarised goodness and evil. Therefore, like most colonists, Mary supposed that the natives were at least unconsciously, in league with the devil.

Yet Gaskill finds that this is only part of the story, with the main factors leading to witch-hunts being competition, overwork, and exploitation. The belief in the supernatural was not the instigating force but rather itself provided only context, with the real drive that set neighbour against neighbour being economic forces. The supernatural beliefs only shaped the way these moments of antagonism manifested themselves, rather than initiating them.

3) The mixture of mindsets

This last claim seems particularly appropriate in light of William Pynchon. His theology was far more merciful than the typical fire and bloodshed of mainstream puritanical Calvinism of the time. Actually this is something Gaskill handles well in general, making it clear that the society of Springfield and New England was not the only one present in the New World. Even among the colonies, others had founded far more liberal, tolerant approaches. There was as yet no unity at all in what would eventually become the United States (if there even is today).

Pynchon's main tack away from Calvinist doctrine was that Jesus did not suffer on the cross as a result of God's wrath. Mankind was not redeemed by Christ's suffering itself but his dutiful obedience to his father.

This was a different interpretation of the Trinity... and a dangerous one. It fundamentally changed the identity of identity of God and Christ... For this was a sermon about earthly conduct as well as salvation, about love and obedience, just as Christ's Atonement consisted in his loving obedience to God. Whatever wrath existed between men in Springfield, Pynchon taught, it came from the machinations of Satan.

In this scheme... the devil was no mere trickster, but rather a monster defined by perpetual fury and restless intrusion into daily life.

One of the weaknesses of Providence Lost was that Lay describes in detail what happened to certain heretics, but doesn't get into the mindset behind why it happened. It can be extremely difficult to comprehend why apparently minor points of theological detail should lead to brutal chastisement, and here Gaskill does a better job. Why did everyone else prefer to believe in this vengeful God ? Pynchon's implication was that Satan was far more powerful than his peers believed, potentially undermining the whole basis of the existence of God's chosen people - indeed seeming to refute the idea of God as all-powerful. In a world where survival hinged on unity, to challenge one of the community core beliefs was indeed dangerous. Incidentally, this much greater role for Satan is quite different to Witchfinders, where the devil was at most a minor side-character.

Other conflicting mindsets were also at work. The extremist Antinomians were not at all popular :

They were not therefore surprised when the Antinomian figurehead, Anne Hutchinson, miscarried : 'for as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.'

This is a very clear case in the belief of the supernatural, almost to the degree of idealism in which mind and matter are inextricably linked. Yet there seems to be a paradox right at the heart of this world view, of God being all-powerful in creating a predetermined cosmos but in deciding to populate it with such a myriad of evil things.

Conclusions

Gaskill pains a view of 17th-century New England (not America more widely, noting again that other states did not much share this perspective) as thoroughly toxic and conflicted from head to toe. The environment was not only physically harsh and dangerous, but it also readily fostered supernatural beliefs. In a world without any real measuring equipment to speak of, dreams and reality all too easily blurred. A shadow became a wolf; a frog became an imp. Couple this with perpetual exhaustion, constant judgement, belief that the fates were unalterable and that financial success equated with moral character, and it's only a miracle that witch-hunting didn't outright explode as it did elsewhere.

Further mental conflicts were at work. Not only across America more generally, but also in New England beliefs were shifting over time. As in old England, court trials did in fact require evidence, and (without giving spoilers), courts elsewhere took a very dim few of these rather foolish-sounding provincials. The shift was hardly linear, however, with accusations remaining frequent even as convictions declined : the experts shifting more rapidly to a more modern, rational world view than the general populace, who still continued to enact, on occasion, mob justice. This even applied to individuals themselves, with Hobbes writing that, 'though he could not rationally believe in witches, yet he could not be fully satisfied to believe there were none'.

But belief in witches did eventually subside, partly due to a more materialist world view and changing theologies, and partly politics. Satan became a mere instrument of God's will rather than a rival; visions of hellfire and damnation became only figurative images, firmly rhetorical rather than literal. Whereas in Springfield Pynchon's attempts to preach for amity only made things worse, leaving no recourse to individuals who felt genuinely threatened but to seek the dangers of magic, elsewhere toleration for diverse viewpoints rendered witchcraft utterly impotent. Where toleration of views was encouraged, accusations of witchcraft were all but absent.

The Connecticut valley was more politically stable, its towns economically varied and better governed. Controversies were brief : clashing neighbours calmed by litigation. Keeping the peace was an end in itself rather than a means to appease God.... By allowing for diversity, the law nurtured the confidence to prosper, while governors felt less threatened by dissent.

In the end, the city of devils - 'pandemonium', the capital of hell - was not demolished : it could only be starved of attention by people with fewer uses for magic than their parents and grandparents. After 1800 the demonic foes of Christian civilisation were not chased away : witchcraft faded into irrelevance, and its adherents sank bank into the ether. 

The really interesting question here, of course, being if there are more general conditions under which toleration leads to confidence versus a collapsing polarisation. I leave this for another time. 

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.