A Simpler Socrates (II)

Last time I looked at some of the implicit themes of Xenophon's Socratic dialogues. In particular, I tried to show that Xenophon's Athens might have been democratic, but it certainly wasn't liberal. And that puts quite a different spin on Plato's world-building efforts, with his anti-democratic pseudo-tyrannies becoming far more the product of his existing society than a direct challenge to the social order.

In this concluding part, I feel it's only fair to tackle at least some of Xenophon's explicit claims. Much of what he says is more interesting than simply acting as a foil to Plato, so let's try and give the man his due. Time to un-scratch and get back to the surface.

Xenophon's Lucky Dip

This is how the translator's describe it. There's not much sort of structure to Xenophon's work or works, so I'll try and summarise the most interesting stuff only in brief. It's hard to assemble this in any sort of linked theme, so I'm not going to try.

Proto-Stoicism

Let's start with Xenophon's sometimes prudish and certainly conservative sense of self-discipline. There are a number of passages which are very similar to Epictetus' pseudo-Vulcan idea that emotional control is the acme of social achievement. Let's begin with a fun one. The translator's might call him prudish, but there are some particularly colourful metaphors when it comes to sex :

Socrates is reported to have said, in the presence of several persons including Euthydemus himself, that Critias seemed to be suffering from a pig's itch : he wanted to scratch himself against Euthydemus like a piglet scratching itself against a stone.

"You are dense," said Socrates. "Do you think that good-looking people inject nothing in the act of kissing, just because you can't see it ? Don't you realise that this creature which they call the bloom of youth is even more dangerous than spiders ?"

And yet while he sometimes seems to be espousing a policy of strict denial, elsewhere :

And don't forget that whereas to other animals they [the gods] have granted the pleasures of sex for a limited period of the year, for us they provide them continuously, and up until old age.

The man who is hungry or thirsty of his own free will can eat and drink when he wants to, whereas the man who suffers through force of circumstances can't stop the suffering... Easy tasks and momentary pleasures cannot produce physical fitness, or develop in the mind any knowledge worth mentioning; sustained application, however, enables us to achieve truly good results... My friends can enjoy food and drink with pleasure and without effort, because they abstain until they feel a desire for them.

This is a view that self-denial is not to be sought because the things we enjoy are wrong in themselves, but because they may become all-consuming. The goal is not abstinence, but self-control. As in the examples of rape and adultery last time, for Xenophon the moral "wrong" is not necessarily so much the act itself but the ruin of character. Compare this with Epictetus' comments that the sack of Troy itself was no more than the destruction of "stork's nests", and that the real crime was not the destruction of property but that the Greeks wanted to carry this out.

The essence of Stoicism in Epictetus is that only your opinions affect you, that how you respond to events is what matters, not the events themselves. Nothing can really hurt you unless you let it. While Xenophon never quite hits on this idea, and certainly doesn't develop it to the ludicrous extremes that Epictetus did, he comes tantalisingly close :

Enemies too are assets for someone who is capable of deriving benefits from them.

Which certainly seems to be the case for the modern politician who deliberately courts the hatred of the masses ! Xenophon was a long way from saying "only opinion is what matters", but there are definitely common themes all the same : you may be my enemy, but whether you can hurt me is not necessarily up to you.

Another similarity to Epictetus is the notion that ignorance is a form of slavery. Notably, in Xenophon's recounting of Socrates trial, he has Socrates not defend his own ignorance as in Plato's (infinitely more dramatic) version*, but behave as a much more ordinary character blessed with great wisdom and the regular sort of knowledge : he simply knows a lot of different things, rather than being self-aware of his own ignorance.

* Xenophon's version of the defence is interesting but unremarkable. Some missing aspects, such as the importance of self-examination, are found elsewhere in his works, but nothing comes close to the high drama of Plato's Apology.

This is how he spoke about those who occupied themselves with these [supposedly useless] speculations. He himself always discussed human matters, trying to find out the nature of piety and impiety, honour and dishonour, right and wrong, sanity and lunacy, courage and cowardice... while those who were ignorant of them might fairly be called slavish.

This is almost verbatim how Epictetus viewed knowledge and freedom. Likewise, both viewed behaviour as paramount. If you had the theoretical knowledge of right and wrong, but were unable to actually carry out the correct actions (or avoid the wrong ones), then you couldn't be called wise or said to be truly knowledgeable. 

When somebody asked him [Socrates] if he thought that those who understood what they ought to do, but did the opposite, were wise and weak, he replied, "No more than I think them both unwise and weak. I presume that everyone acts by choosing from the courses open to him the one which he supposes to be most expedient. So I think that those who act wrongly are neither wise nor prudent."

Plato develops this theme of nobody doing wrong intentionally at some length. I wondered if this might be because there seems a tendency in the Greek philosophers to get their knickers in a twist when it comes to definitions, e.g. Plato insisting that laws cannot be unjust, which to his great credit Xenophon partly remedies, as we'll see later. 

But after thinking it over, I think it might instead only reflect ancient Greece's much more limited understanding of psychology, both in terms of neuroscience and our apparent reasoning processes - how our minds seem to work. Conflicting desires, unconscious thoughts, hormones, an element of chance and uncertainty, do not seem to have come into the Greek thought much : pretty nearly everything in both Plato and Xenophon is a matter of knowledge and choice. 

Yet when I look at both contemporary politicians and those of history, I find it hard to believe that an element of sheer malice didn't play any role. There are some actions which are so obviously wrong that nobody can doubt them or be unaware of them; as with bullshit, it's not that some people don't know about the truth or right action, it's that they don't care. They don't misjudge which action is better or worse. They either don't make that judgement at all, or they make it and proceed wrongly anyway... or they actively enjoy making other people suffer.

Some men just want to watch the world burn. For all their many faults, both Plato and Xenophon appear to have had too noble a conception of man to allow for this simple possibility.

A Moral Busybody

Xenophon sometimes comes across as incredibly petty, criticising people for eating food without bread, insisting that washing must be done with cold water, and that people can be made to behave properly in the same way as dogs : rewarding good behaviour and punishing (often physically) the bad. There's a lot of slippery-slope fallacies, that any small deviation will lead inevitably to ruin. Start wearing soft shoes and you'll end up as a drug-addled hedonistic whore, or something.

This is an issue which continues to plague mankind. Every time we invent something which can automate an unpleasant chore, we fret over it : not just that it might not work, or be unsafe, but that if it does work it'll make us all soft and ill-disciplined, it'll be the downfall of civilisation, get those kids off my lawn...

As I see it the two competing strains of thought must both be true. We certainly can become lazy and ill-disciplined in some circumstances, but we can also be improved by easier conditions (compare the desert-hardened but brutal Fremen of Dune with the thoughtful but combat-ready officers of Star Trek) . In one very interesting passage, Xenophon says that giving people more money improves them :

When they know they've got something with which to buy what they need, they don't want to risk committing crimes.

Sadly this passage, in a work thick with humour and irony, is like many parts of Xenophon poorly developed and the discussion moves on far too soon. Elsewhere he frequently commends Socrates for his poverty.

I cannot here address the wider issue of which resources make us better or worse and under what circumstances. But I will venture a few thoughts. In my recent look at the possible impacts of AI development, I put forth that the better you are without AI, the better you'll be able to make use of it. Furthermore, it's silly to insist we must still all be capable of pencil-and-paper long division when calculating devices are utterly ubiquitous. We will always need a certain base level of understanding, but beyond that, when a technology (or resources) becomes truly universal, we should take it for granted*. That is a key part of how we elevate our capabilities, through the development of both mental and physical tools, extended cognition and extended biology. We really are man the tool-maker as a defining characteristic of our species.

* My take on AI in the classroom/exams is : yes, this is perfectly fine... if and when it becomes comparable in availability and accuracy to a calculator. Similarly, nobody would suggest giving calculators to 7 year olds and avoid training them in the absolute basics of mathematics, but nobody would suggest banning calculators in astrophysics exams either.

In other words, instead of saying that technology makes us less human, as in Dune especially, we should see it as a key part of our identity. Our solution to most problems is to invent the appropriate tool, and there's nothing wrong with that. Technology raises our concerns to ever-more cerebral levels, but this doesn't make them any less valid.

Still, it's good practise to be able to do as much as we can with as few resources as we can manage. But once we've mastered that, once our training period is complete, our devices become valuable assets. We do not become soft just because we have hot soapy water on demand and don't have to break through a frozen river to get clean every morning, as long as we're straining ourselves in other ways. Someone equipped with a state-of-the-art supercomputer who is using it to play Minecraft is a self-indulgent twit, but someone who's using it to solve ever-more complex problems, thinking about whether the results are plausible and using it to inspire themselves to further investigations, is enriching both themselves and society.

So I vehemently disagree with Xenophon's passage ranting against useless knowledge (something very similar can also be found - yet again - in Epictetus) :

Geometry should be learned so far to enable one to receive or convey or apportion land accurately in point of measurement, or to carry out a task. He [Socrates] deprecated taking the learning of geometry as far as figures which are difficult to comprehend. He said that he didn't see the use of them, and he said that these studies were capable of wasting a man's life and keeping him from learning many other useful things.

He told them to become acquainted also with astronomy, but here again only so far as to be able to to recognise the time of night... or for any other business. But to learn astronomy to the extent of even acquiring a knowledge of bodies moving in different orbits... and to wear oneself out with trying to discover their distances from the Earth... from this he vigorously tried to dissuade them. He said that in these studies he saw no utility and they too, he said, could waste a man's life and keep him from much that was profitable.

Blink.

Well, FUCK YOU, SIR !

A more stupid, short-sighted and badly-aged comment I think I have never encountered. I've railed against this kind of bigoted, backward, absurd strain of pragmatic "thinking" at length here, so I won't do so again. I am, however, dismayed to see people falling into this stupid anti-thought trap just because nowadays billionaires are the ones pushing technological development in certain areas rather than governments. This strain of cynicism is not unfounded (since mega-corps undeniably don't have the best interests of the masses at heart), but to say that therefore the technology itself is bad is as nonsensically, reprehensibly stupid as Xenophon/Socrates raving against knowledge for knowledge's sake.

Legally lawful

One different topic I feel I owe it to Xenophon to pick up on his is brief discussion of the legitimacy of laws. Recall my dismay at how this gets such a short dismissal in Plato, thanks to his strange definition that laws must only be that which is good, and anything else isn't a "real" law. Xenophon somewhat avoids this. He describes laws enacted by a despot as inherently using violence and compulsion rather than persuasion, when "a minority enacts something not by persuading the majority but by dominating it".

As usual this is not well-developed. What exactly is the difference between the sort of compulsion that defines an act of despotism and the kind of punishments that good laws must enforce ? Reading between the lines it feels like because the latter have been discussed by "truly good" men, i.e. experts, which have then been disseminated into the wider populace and accepted by a vast majority. The populace have then, in effect, voluntarily signed up to them ahead of time, knowing that if they transgress they will deserve the appointed punishment. By contrast, a despot has no agreed-upon principles and can act retroactively, without any kind of consensus in society. 

This is reading in quite a lot, however. In another dialogue, Xenophon develops much more explicitly the concept of "natural law", the laws of the gods which are universal truths; we might think of them as the laws of physics. In both cases, natural and human law, one must pay the penalty for transgressions, which may be enforced by man or god (e.g. you can't break the law of gravity, and if you pretend to be an expert in something you're not, eventually the consequences will become apparent), or both if the laws happen to coincide (e.g. laws against incest). 

This may help a little in explaining Plato's idea of the impossibility of bad law, but it has a distinct vibe that those who suffer without apparent cause are doing so because of divine wrath*. For example, Xenophon's description of farming is highly romanticised, only paying brief lip service to the hardship and toil it must have involved (interestingly, his statements about the importance of farming and fighting are eerily similar to the pantomime villain of moral philosophy, Lord Shang).

* Plato was more concerned with the opposite, emphasising that those who seem to have gotten away with wrongdoing will suffer divine retribution in the end.

Who was Socrates ?

As mentioned in the previous post, Socratic dialogues seem to have been a type of literary genre at the time, almost a sort of fan fiction. The translator warns that we learn more about Xenophon here than we do about Socrates himself, and that while the earlier works (as in Plato) are likely closer to the historical figure, this is by no means certain. Basically we've got Xenophon's half-remembered, biased recollections that he probably set down years later, sometimes not intending them to be read as fact at all.

I'm not even remotely capable or interested in doing a Plato/Xenophon Socratic comparison (the ideas themselves discussed are much more worthwhile anyway), so I'll keep this very brief. There are a myriad of similarities between the two Socrates' (Socrateases-es ? Socratii ?), especially an enthusiasm for expert knowledge. Contrary to the Apology, in both writers, Socrates is often keen to acknowledge that experts are indeed knowledgeable in their specialist area. The style of questioning and answer is, though, not always similar : in Xenophon, Socrates sometimes simply gives a whole series of rhetorical questions in the form of a speech, without waiting for or even asking for responses.

The most frustrating thing about Xenophon is that conversations are never really rounded off. They just sort of... stop. Plato keeps everything nicely self-contained, trying to summarise the findings and often stating possible errors worthy of further examination, and letting the reader know explicitly when no firm conclusion can be drawn. Xenophon's Socrates can be incredibly cringey, with clumsy metaphors and mansplaining to an unbearable degree, which is nothing like Plato's version.

The translator suggests a few things that might be going on. First, we all of us present different versions of ourselves to different people, and different people interpret us differently. Plato was mainly concerned with the abstract, high theory of philosophy, while Xenophon was much more pragmatic. So perhaps not only did they interpret Socrates in this light, but he himself probably adjusted his style to suit their preferences. And where there are some stark differences in conclusions, what might be happening is that Socrates would try to establish general principles, with his followers then applying them differently to the same specific examples, according to their own preferences.

This is reasonably satisfying. But as the translator's note, the true historical figure of Socrates is likely lost forever.

Conclusions

I found Xenophon well worth a go. He's not a perfect writer, but then unlike Plato he went on military campaigns, so he probably just didn't have the time to polish stuff up. Even so, there are moments when he comes close to Plato's level of scrutiny, and occasionally touches on issues that Plato preferred to avoid.

The most interesting take-home points for me are :

• Ancient Athens was a more religious, far less liberal society than the view one sometimes gets in popular culture. Plato neglects slaves and the issue of slavery almost entirely, Xenophon does not. While plenty of historians do emphasise that ancient philosophers existed in a very different social environment than modern academics, to read the source material in support of this has somehow a different impact. 
• Likewise, democracy is not necessarily liberal. It emerged in this early instance from a very different society to ours (albeit strikingly similar in some aspects), and was consequently shaped to an altogether different form and purpose. Any attempts to draw lessons from history regarding the success and virtues of democratic government need to take account for this.
• The idea that nobody does wrong intentionally is in my view a reflection of the Athenian's lack of understanding of psychology and neurology. We don't act entirely on conscious decisions, and we can be influenced by various forces to act contrary to our own careful, sincerely-held assessment of what's right and wrong. Behaviour doesn't always reflect belief; belief doesn't always cause behaviour.
• Self-control does not mean abstinence, and not every sort of labour-saving device or improvement in comfort will lead to a moral decline. What matters is that we take advantage of these, to use them to elevate our concerns ever further from the base level of subsistence to more profound achievements. This does not mean our workloads should always remain constant, that we aren't sometimes overworked. Enjoyment of pleasures does not automatically mean we're slacking off.

Right, that's Xenophon dealt with. On to the next in my enormous pile of unread books.

A Simpler Socrates (I)

I've been vaguely aware that Plato isn't the only source of information on Socrates for a while now. So when I saw the Penguin Classics edition of "Xenophon : Conversations of Socrates" in a bookshop, I felt duty-bound to give it a go.

First off, I have to say that the translator's notes (Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield) are a lot more helpful and analytical than usual. They're more critical than these sort of notes tend to be, in the best sense of the word : trying to get at what Xenophon meant, what Socrates himself likely thought, which arguments are interesting and which are a pile of crap. They aren't afraid to be judgemental either, noting that while much of Xenophon is good, he had a tendency towards excessive repetition, prudishness, and doesn't have the razor-sharp incisiveness of Plato. The latter is certainly true; Xenophon comes nowhere close to Plato's outstanding level of minute, careful dissections of the arguments. 

However, while they do note that Xenophon is "often at his best", I still think Messrs Tredennick and Waterfield might be a bit harsh. True, large tracts of Xenophon are simply uninteresting. But if he has a prudish, "Victorian" streak, I found it to be no more than a streak; I didn't really find it excessively repetitive either. Xenophon is sometimes plodding, often forced (almost as though nameless characters were written as placeholders) but often witty, unafraid of colourful metaphors, and usually highly readable. If there are parts which are dull, there are also parts which are extremely interesting, even if he can't lay claim to Plato's level of genius. Xenophon, like Cicero, feels a bit like "Plato Lite", but is no less worth reading for that.

There are plenty of interesting aspects to Xenophon's work that stand in their own right, some of which I'll look at in the next post. In this first part though, I want to begin with a bit more of a direct comparison with Plato. By offering a similar but different contemporary perspective, I think Xenophon helps shed a good deal of light on why Plato came up with such thoroughly weird ideas - in short, because Athenian society itself was weird, and rather more alien and less familiar than we sometimes give it credit for.

This will be a bit of an implicit comparison : that is, I'm mainly going to give you my reading-between-the-lines impressions from both authors rather than quoting either of them at any length. More direct quotes will be used next time.

Religion

First, while Plato occasionally flirts with atheism and is quite unafraid of deliberately using religion as an opiate of the masses, he never crosses the line into a true disbelief. Large parts feel sincerely devout, even if wildly different from the common ideas of the gods living atop Olympus hurling thunderbolts at errant mortals below - let alone partaking in any of those crazy swan-based antics Zeus is famous for.

Xenophon feels different. His works seems altogether more authentically religious, as though he's never even stopped to consider any notion that divinity didn't exist. To Plato, divinity might be something real but highly abstract, having no scruples about manipulating specific beliefs to further his objectives in constructing an ideal society. Xenophon doesn't show any hint of this, and would probably react to such things with horror. To him, the beliefs don't seem like beliefs : they seem like something living, actively real, to the point where the mystical element is almost absent. Divination isn't some crazy-ass priest wailing in noxious fumes venting forth from the bowels of the earth on a moonlit night, but a perfectly ordinary, common-sense tool that anyone can use to obtain knowledge inaccessible by rational, evidence-based investigation. 

Xenophon feels like a far more ordinary, conservative member of Athenian society. While he shares Plato's disapproval of the execution of Socrates (most of the work appears to be a dedicated defensive tract rather than philosophy proper), he doesn't feel the need to remake the world, doesn't attempt to design any revolutionary new systems. If his world needed reform it was only to gently swing everyone back to a previous better era, when people just thought things through a bit more carefully.

Social democracy is not necessarily liberal democracy

The most interesting aspect of this to me is his gentle but inescapable (and frequently condescending, petty, and irritating) illiberalism. Plato's idea of justice was "minding one's own business", which in some ways is the very essence of liberalism. Ironically, his two attempts at designing Utopias were both tyrannically unfree. His reasoning boiled down to his claim that some people are more expert than others at various skills, one of which is managing other people : so logically, those people are the ones who should be in charge. Which is not itself entirely unreasonable, but by God did he go nuts with this.

I think Xenophon at least helps with an explanation. What comes across is the enormous social obligations placed upon each and every Athenian : it wasn't that you could participate in the Assembly and other political processes, it's that you were expected to. We all know about slaves and the rampant misogyny of Athenian society, but it would be a mistake to think that just because the rest of Athen's inhabitants were democratic, they were also liberal. They were not. Xenophon makes it clear that even (or perhaps especially) the rich were under enormous pressure to fulfil their duty to the State* : to offer sacrifices, entertain foreign visitors, do favours for citizens, provide horse-races, finance choruses and sponsor athletic competitions, contribute to the military... He concludes this list with a warning.

* It would be interesting to look at how this relates to taxation. Athens rarely imposed direct taxes, supposedly seeing it as an affront to personal freedom, but then it had to counteract this with almost mandatory philanthropy.

And if you give the impression of not doing enough in any of these areas, I have no doubt the Athenians will retaliate as severely as if they had caught you stealing from them.

Elsewhere, the State seems to play the role of a gossipy tabloid :

If anyone shows no consideration for his parents, the State imposes a penalty upon him and disqualifies him from holding public office... if anyone fails to tend the graves of his dead parents, even this becomes the subject of a State inquiry when candidates for office are having their conduct scrutinised.

Xenophon provides another, more shocking example of just how little the Athenians valued individualism. Bizarrely, rape was considered a lesser crime than adultery, because the act of rape "ruins the character" of only one person, whereas adultery is the fault of two. In essence this views people as extremely malleable sheep, and just doesn't make any sense in a more individualistic, liberal society.

The very fact that he uses not force but persuasion makes him more detestable, because a lover who uses force proves himself a villain, but one who uses persuasion ruins the character of the one who consents. 

So we should not conflate liberalism with democracy. The idea that each person should be able to live according to their preferences does not at all fit with the strong sense of social duty pervading everyday Athenian society. Democracy seems to have been a purely political decision-making process, not as a means to providing people with greater freedom.

No escape from the nomos

And this is not just my view either. Recall Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds, which posits that the big advantage of fledgling democracies was empowering societies to field larger, more capable armies than their neighbours (and Xenophon is far more explicitly warlike than Plato), that Socrates really did corrupt the youth in that he taught them an individualist mindset that was completely at odds with the social obligations of the day. Now when I read that book I wondered if this was a no more than a pet theory of the author, but intriguingly, the comments of the translator's of Xenophon are strikingly similar.

His [Socrates] questioning method was (and is) designed to get people to think for themselves and to prick the illusory conceit of knowledge. And what is the most common source for thinking that one knows something ? It is nomos, the unwritten conditioning that any society imposes on its members. Since Socrates was particularly concerned with morality... he could easily be made out to be a subversive : justice was regarded as a State issue, not a matter of private knowledge... In short, within the context of the restored democracy... and the Greek nomos, a good case could be made out that Socrates was guilty as charged.

Elsewhere they note that a strain of anti-intellectualism pervaded society because it was - quite correctly - perceived as undermining social values. They also note that the widespread use of slavery wasn't seen as an unfortunate reality but a necessity. As Sparta had its slave caste to allow a military elite, so Athens did the same (though to a lesser degree) to allow a kind of social elite.

The workforce would have been all, or mainly, slaves. The Athenian economy depended on slave-labour. The aristocratic Athenian citizen's rather supercilious attitude to manual labour fed and was fed by his reliance on slaves; the political system, in which every male citizen could play a part by taking time off work to vote in the Assembly or do jury service, could not have existed without slaves to do the everyday work.

Similarly, Xenophon expresses admiration for Spartan society, as did Plato at times, while Herotodus records something of a pro-Spartan sentiment in the broader society. What today we see as extreme, almost unbelievable fanaticism*, was at the time widely admired.

* Personally I think this has however been greatly exaggerated in popular culture. There are plenty of hints in all of these authors that even the Spartiate were not 100% models of military perfection in 100% of the things they did 100% of the time; human beings aren't built to live like that.

With this in mind, perhaps Plato's arguments become more understandable. There are some striking similarities to modern Western society to be found in ancient Athens : not least the notion of democracy itself, but also such mundane realities as the existence of Instagram influencers (or Only Fans if you're feeling less charitable); modern symposia, on the other hand, generally have less dancing girls and prostitutes than back in the day. But in some ways it was wholly alien, founded on very different principles, and the modern ideal of liberalism - that everyone gets a say in proportion to how much an issue affects them - was simply nowhere to be found*. The goal society was primarily concerned with was a functioning society, and the idea of everyone living their own lives for their own sake would have seemed incomprehensibly selfish. 

* One very explicit example : Xenophon casually states that it's fine to enslave an enemy city, and no-one at the time would think anything amiss with this. Even given that slavery in classical Greece was nothing much like the industrial-scale horrors of later centuries, nobody today would think that this was an example of proper behaviour, no matter how "wicked and hostile" the inhabitants of the unfortunate city might be !

Dangerous democracy ? 

Now you might be wondering, what about Plato's famous rants about how much democracy breeds false experts and leads to a presumption of excessive freedom ? Here again Xenophon's different perspective considerably changes how we might view this. At first, he too goes on a very similar "it's all part of the endless moral decline of society" grumpy-old-man rant, how everyone thinks they know more than they do and how this wasn't the case in the past. And at times it feels extremely ironic that the group-oriented democratic trend has engendered a debilitating drive towards individual selfishness.

But then he adds a major caveat : actually, he says, when you look at it more carefully, this really only applies to the military. The political process in his view is just fine, with the execution of Socrates being a lamentable exception. In fact it's not even the whole of the military forces which are suffering from incompetence, but just the infantry and cavalry, with the navy still being ably led and organised.

So was Plato just taking a legitimate grievance too far ? Not necessarily. There's no obvious reason (from these texts alone) to say who was right and who was wrong; both made essentially the same complaint, but Xenophon massively restricted its scope compared to Plato. Nor was either of them writing entirely at face value. The translator notes that Xenophon uses phrases like "I know that this happened" more as a literary device than an actual statement of truth, and his works are rife with anachronisms - while Plato never even speaks in the first person at all. Socratic dialogues seem to have been a literary genre of the time, most of which from other writers are now lost, so it's hard to see them in their full context.

Plato was essentially right that the democracies of the time were unstable, however. There were many other democracies present in antiquity (some dozens, albeit in different forms), most of which did simply fail pretty much as Plato said. Michael Scott notes that Rome's limited form of democracy was far more successful than the direct version of Athens, even if its Republic was eventually perverted into an Empire. But Xenophon's comments do at least give us pause for thought, reminding us that perhaps Plato's social observations were heavily biased.

Perhaps a safer general point is that this emphasises that social culture matters as much as political culture. Today we see liberalism and democracy as intertwined; the ancients simply didn't. Inasmuch as they had any concept of liberalism, or at least personal freedom, they wouldn't have thought it was a good idea in and of itself. They simply didn't seem to have anything much in the way of a mechanism to balance the conflicts inevitable when trying to deliberately maximise personal freedoms - this is something which took centuries to develop and remains highly imperfect. So looking for general lessons about the fate of democracies based on the earlier failures is interesting and important, but we should be wary of drawing direct parallels.

By the same token, this makes it unfair to judge the past by the standards of the present. It's absolutely true that they came up with some batshit crazy monstrous ideas, but I sometimes see people taking this very... personally. Plato is explicit that you can't really know what he really thinks based on his writings; to try and conclude anything much about Socrates himself (more next time) is even more risky. So I personally would not get at all hung up on the "anti democracy" vibe of these early thinkers. They lived in a very different social unwelt from us, and to expect them to have come up with things we ourselves haven't really managed, to expect them to have actually found a working harmonious social system, is simply folly.

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 !