Nick James at the Trajectory

About Nick James at the Trajectory

Life coach, writer, illustrator and lover of all things beautiful. nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

I write essays and then I read them.

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Jan 2024

Latest episode

7 Jan 2026

Latest episodes

14 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Jan 2026

   Yoni

   I started out on this essay writing thing in January ‘24 thinking I could write forever about new stuff. Interesting stuff (to me only as it turned out … obviously.) And for a time, it seemed that I was doing just that. Then sixteen essays later, and, as irony would have it just after I had said ‘I’m now more than a quarter of the way through the year and finding no shortage of subjects to write about.’ I suddenly dried up. Ran out of things to write about. No. That’s wrong; rather I felt that I had said everything I had to say. But that isn’t quite right either. I usually put a book to bed by writing a review on Goodreads. Maybe that habit let the steam escape, so my creative boiler didn’t have enough oomph left to keep the old essay flywheel spinning. And now here we are, two years after my icebreaker essay and I have had my new one welling up inside me for a month or six. It was daughters of course that pushed me over the weir. My firstborn, the forty-something, suggested that with the new chapter starting in my personal life during Summer 25, perhaps I should write something (she actually suggested a song) something more personal, more vulnerable, sounding less lecturaceous (my word not hers.) And with a not-immediately-obvious synchronicity, one of the fifteen year olds asked me whether the word ‘phallic’ was always about shape. We were in Shrewsbury Castle grounds. It was during the 2025 Shrewsbury Summer Festival. They had a pair of vaguely flame shaped carved sculptures (https://www.myshrewsbury.co.uk/blog/artist-responds-after-arts-trail-dingle-sculpture-divides-opinion/#:~:text=This%20piece%20is%20inspired%20by%20the%20notion%20of%20being%20aware%20of%20death%20and%20enjoying%20life.) on the lawn. Clearly not at all phallic in any way. She had a second question lurking in her secret agenda of course, but I didn’t know that, so I just blundered on, answering the first one straight – ‘ Hmm, not shape so much, I think. It’s more about representation of the masculinity of the member rather than just about its shape.’ Then I remembered the scene from How I Met Your Mother where a ‘Seventy eight storey pink marble tower with a rounded top and two spherical entry-ways at the front’ rose from ‘wild brunette’ bushes and I thought ‘… but yeah it probably is always about shape.’ But before I had the chance to enlarge (!) on that, she continued … ‘So what is the female equivalent?’ The word ‘Yoni’ flashed through my mind from a discussion over a book with ex-wife No1, about three and a half decades earlier, but you know, I’m a man and I didn’t know exactly what the word meant. More to the point I didn’t want to embarrass myself by sticking my neck out into the mysterious arcane world of feminine pudendal detail with my adolescent daughter. So I just lied and said ‘I didn’t know, maybe there wasn’t one.’ Funny that ‘mysterious arcane’ thing, and the masculine guilt I felt, more than half a century after it was instilled in me by my mother who would habitually use her arsenal of taboo and innuendo to suppress my curiosity. A mere male could never understand the complex secrets of women’s bodies. Peculiar then that I was still humiliated into the inability to speak more than half a century later – by which time I had surely experienced (and probably discussed with their owners) a significantly greater variety of women’s bodies than my mother had known in her sexually repressed lifetime. Anyway, hobbled by that ancient stigma I was, and the word remained unuttered. By that time we were on the sculpture lawn itself. Zoe pointed to the flame shaped sculptures, now visible from a different angle. With an instant laugh of realisation, it was suddenly clear what her train of thought had been. My first reaction then (also not stated out loud) was that the smartphone has a lot to answer for. I recall learning in that book discussion 35 years ago, that most women then had no idea what a ‘man’s eye view’ would be, and they were advised by the (female) author to use a mirror and be prepared for a big surprise. Yes that was in about 1990, not 1890: 1990. Hmm must have been the smartphone that had educated my teenager then. It took a few weeks for me to look up that word ‘Yoni’ or maybe the quasi-phallic equivalent should have been ‘Yonic?’ Did it exist or was the whole discussion part of my imaginative memory? And yes, it exists, and yoni of course IS more than just about shape. As we might expect, the feminine has a subtler and more layered depth to it than the masculine. I’m quoting Emma Wilkin (https://emmawilkin.com/words-of-the-week-2/2024/5/29/yonic) here: ‘‘Yonic’ is derived from a Sanskrit word, ‘yoni’ (योनि), which means ‘womb’, ‘uterus’ or ‘vulva’, as well as ‘source’. In various Eastern religions and spiritual traditions, the yoni is revered as a symbol of divine feminine energy and fertility, and the origin of life. The concept of the yoni is often associated with the goddess Shakti in Hinduism, representing the creative and nurturing aspects of the universe. ‘ Hold that thought, because I’m going to take a big sidestep here. I buy Dawkins. (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6840167206) Pretty much a hundred percent. Smug bugger that he is, I believe he’s got evolution absolutely right. I have no difficulty believing his thesis that we phenotypes, from fungus to sapiens, are simply supercomplex shells that give ‘our’ genes the mechanism of potential immortality – or at least, the closest that Planet Earth can offer by way of immortality. So I always look for evolutionary mechanisms for just about anything complex, from psychoses to social culture. For example, I believe (with Randolph Nesse (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6413043719)) that psychoses emerge under the control of genes that make us more likely to create the next generation and raise them to reproductive age, whether or not that success gives us pain and grief in the process. And I believe that cultures emerge, as described by Joseph Henrich (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6929093408), from an exactly parallel process from the memes (Dawkins’ word) that survive and propagate themselves best by the simple circular metric of survival and propagation. Now the crucial mechanism of mammalian evolution comprises mating and gestation, and considering humans, we have a situation where women carry a child for about a year before they are physically ready to start making a new one, whereas men are capable of siring a few hundred (at least) in the same span of time. Now that gender-differentiated mechanism is a simple truth that has been used (almost always by men) to justify polygamy and male sexual unrestraint. The argument for asymmetrical sexual behaviour goes like this: ‘That’s the way we were designed, so that’s what we should do’ – in an absolutely indefensible male-centred logic. Philosophically we can throw it out immediately. Hume’s law (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810105114268) says that you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ And we can think immediately of other ways that human design is obviously not worthy of generating normative argument. Our eyes for example are similar to the convergently evolved eyes of cephalopods (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982223009880), and logically enough, their optic nerves sit behind and therefore out of the light-path of their photoreceptors. Our optic neurons form a layer sitting in front, obscuring our light sensitive cells and making our retinas functionally inferior since we come from a different ancestor. No one suggests that this means that our arrangement is superior because nature designed us that way, or that octopuses should be placed in more highly paying jobs that require visual skills.We can also throw out the ‘men should be less sexually continent than women’ idea mathematically by pointing out that any actual living carrier of genes has two parents, one male one female. So the actual amount of progenerative mating is exactly the same on average between men and women. That means that if some men could or should sire five or six hundred children a year, then five or six hundred men aren’t going to father any. That’s an oversimplification of how statistics works, but it’s the seed of a sound counterargument against drawing out a justification of socially bad behaviour from the numerical differences of human gender. And I am nailing my opinion to the mast here. I do believe that judging people belonging to one gender or the other for their sexual habits is wrong. I would rather look at this physical sexual inequality from a completely different perspective. The way that our genes alter our behaviour is by altering our desires and our mindset. Our genes make us succeed not by forcing us to ‘succeed’. That is technically impossible. The way evolution works in humans is by giving us emotional feelings which lead to the behaviour patterns that work empirically. I mentioned in another essay (https://from123to.xyz/essays/evolutionary-psychiatry/#:~:text=On%20a%20positive%20tack%20Nesse%20considers%20fruit%20gathering) Nesse’s example that we will typically get bored with picking fruit from a gooseberry bush, not when it is bare, but when the effort of finding another shrub becomes less than that of finding more berries on this one. The emotional feeling of boredom leads to success in nourishment and thus procreation. There’s an old joke – Not only women have feelings, men have feelings too. For example, they can feel hungry. Yep I’m a man, and at the most basic level I have just two feelings. Hunger, and here I’m adding Wonder. Maybe Wonder will be another essay, but I think that most feelings that evolution has given both genders in order to optimise our successful reproductive behaviour are actually hungers. Hunger for food (because then we are more likely to survive to sexual maturity), hunger for sex (because then we are more likely to reproduce), and hunger for love (to encourage people to optimise the survival of our incapable infants.) Now let’s focus specifically on woman – what does genetic evolution want her to use her one precious year for? (you know the word ‘want’ there, doesn’t mean that evolution has desires, right? It’s just a convenient form of words.) Absolutely more than anything, she should be choosy. And here contrary to Hume, I will derive a ‘should’ from an ‘is’, because this isn’t philosophy, this is the life or death scenario of a whole species in a messy competitive world. The word ‘should’ here means ‘more likely to succeed.’ Or more technically post-Dawkins it means ‘proven by thousands of generations as more likely to pass on the responsible gene.’ I know that the next paragraph will turn many people away. It would turn me away if I didn’t know what was coming next, so if you have got this far, please do me the honour of staying with me for at least the next two or three. First, a woman should choose a mate who will help her raise a child past the first few years when pre technological humans die in disproportionately large percentages. Child mortality up to age 5 pre 1900 in the uk (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041714/united-kingdom-all-time-child-mortality-rate/) for example was always much higher than one in four. She should (yes should) choose a mate who will feather her nest, feed her, protect her and her infant, and stay alive to do these things. Now I know that ignores the possibility of family help and it also sounds very pre-feminist, and it is. The reason for that is that feminism has had just over one century since the Great War, whereas the harsh existential reality of pre-feminism had at least two million years to affect the evolution of our brains and our mindsets before that. I am not arguing here for stay-at-home mums and neanderthal dads. Today we have had the very considerable positive benefit of a century of feminism and I welcome the continuation of that and all forms of increasing human diversity. I am explaining nothing more or less than why women are hard-wired to be choosy in selecting their mates. And what about our pre-NHS man, what should he be doing? Should he be relaxing with a good book reminding himself that one successful mating experience a year is what he should expect? Well if he did, then he wouldn’t find himself at the head of the queue when the once-in-a-year opportunity does present itself. So what actually makes perfect evolutionary sense, is for him to get out there at every opportunity with as big a banner as he can carry, telling the eligible women of the world to ‘choose me.’ Honestly bro, that’s the only way you’re ever gonna get laid, and more to the point it’s the only way your genes are going to avoid extinction. So: so far – evolution ‘wants’ – (or better to say, ‘successful genes create’) – women with complex emotional feelings that make them wise and choosy. And it creates men with simple feelings who are not in the slightest bit choosy, but who are able to show themselves to be in possession of qualities that are desirable to women. But the human world doesn’t work like that, and probably never has done. Remember I mentioned that not only animals and humans evolve; cultures evolve too? A couple of decades ago I heard the comedian and chat-show guest Jo Brand recalling that a journalist had described someone as ‘the type of woman who, when she entered a room, was desired by every man’ and Brand’s comment, ‘we all know that type, they have two arms, two legs and a vagina.’ It was at least twenty years ago, but it has stuck in my mind because of the force with which two reactions hit me as soon as she had said it. The first, kneejerk reaction was that she was being unfair to amputees, and hot on its heels, I thought ‘You have two arms and two legs, Jo Brand, but I wouldn’t touch your sardonic ass with a barge pole.’ Now as I look back on that episode I think that her line just encapsulated exactly what I have been saying. Men: not choosy at all. (My own thoughts on female attractiveness are not so relevant here, but it’s my essay, so I’ll say them anyway – for me it’s a positive outlook (the opposite of Ms Brand’s brand), that attracts me to the possibilities of a woman’s vagina. Arms and legs not quite so much) But deeper (not much deeper) in her humour was knowing she shared with her audience a sincere resentment of the culture where men, despite being ruled by their dumbsticks, were still in charge. Women at the turn of the millenium were still (maybe still are today) classified as angels or w****s, and men have always been willing to pay money for sex, either in a long-term contract with an angel or a short-term one with a w***e. And that is simply because men are typically more hungry than choosy, and women vice versa. And so we arrive at the patriarchy (with or without the frequent prefix ‘toxic’) I’m not going to guess how it was that men have almost always held the levers of power in nearly all post hunter-gatherer cultures, but I believe I do know why men have historically taken ‘business’ more seriously than women and perhaps there’s a link. Actually yes, I am going to guess why men hold those levers, and I’m pretty sure I got this. Going back to the simple logic I gave above, (recap – this one: women:choosy – men not so) then, short of literally paying on demand for sex, how does a man get laid? It strikes me he has only three options. * Be socially and physically attractive: give out ‘trust me I will care for you and protect your future family’ vibes. * Be measurably attractive: give out ‘I am wealthy enough to feather our nest’ vibes. * Rape. Of those three, the third, like guns and knives, is for losers. And I’m truly sorry that it even has a place on the list. That second one has always been the one that our western culture has encouraged. ‘Get that right,’ society has said, ‘Build a nest and get some food in the fridge and drink in the sideboard and the social, trust thing will follow’ So that’s the traditional recipe for a man to get a woman to choose him, show yourself to either be successful in business or else the type of boy who will be successful in business when he’s old enough. Now, when you’re teenagers that’s not so relevant and physical and social charm is rewarded more highly, but greater social and economic power comes with age, and after a few centuries of that, men have worked themselves into believing that the business is the power and the women are flocking when actually …. (…retrieve the previously held ‘yoni’ (divine feminine energy and fertility) concept, and combine it with the choosy/non-choosy discussion…) … when actually it’s the yoni that has the power – and the business that leads to wealth, aka nest-building cred, is just a necessary means for simple-brained men to pay the subscription and get their non-choosy asses laid in a socially-acceptable contract. In other words. What has crept up on us here is a strange reversal, from female power, to male power. Date zero was the moment when the invention of business in the form of trade based on proto-agriculture created enough surplus wealth to make some non-chiefs able to feather nests better than others. From that moment society has promoted those men as better potential mates, and woman in the words of John Lennon (https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnlennon/womanistheniggeroftheworld.html) was made to ‘paint her face and dance.’ to attract them. When in Jo Brand’s words, all they needed were arms, legs and vaginas, and in mine, they just had to exist with a positive outlook and the potential to be fertile. And so it goes – a move from an idealised situation (which perhaps never existed) where woman is powerful, with the right to choose her mate from the hungry crowd using her own yonic magic, to real life where man grabs the levers to the mutually-agreed power of competitive nest building. And all of a sudden, women are in competition against women; competing for the attentions of the best nest builder. Christopher Hitchens used this tug of war between male sexual desires and masculine resentment of yonic power in his rants against religion and in his infamous Vanity Fair essay ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny (https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701)’ Personally, despite my admiration for his quick arguments and his lack of fear in negotiating hostile terrain, I think he was especially guilty of propagating gender-specific us-and-themism. From my perspective, the sad thing is that all of us, men and women have bought into the lie that business and the wealth it creates is something desirable in itself rather than a laughable tool used by second-rate men who are incompetent at seduction by personality. Women – who have so much subtler and fuller ways of feeling and evaluating to allow them to choose and create, – women have lost the magical power of the yoni and sold it – or allowed the patriarchy to sell it over their heads. We have all have bought into the lie that the power lies in the hands of those who can make money. Now I’m not blaming women for buying into this, any more than I’m blaming early post hunter-gatherer serfs for selling their freedom to buy into the myth of shared agricultural wealth (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/18962767?page=2#:~:text=Hunter%2Dgatherers%20spent%20their%20time%20in%20more). And actually, yes, there was a trickle down though it was a few millennia in arriving. Today’s labourers are far far better off materially than kings and emperors were just a couple of hundred years ago, and today’s women have far more power, comfort, and leisure time than their forebears too. But it is human nature not to compare ourselves with the ancients, we compare ourselves with our neighbours, (and everyone else on the internet) and in perfectly understandable ways. From the late twentieth century, feminists have said, ‘actually we are just as capable as you men, all this disposable wealth has made us bored with painting our faces. And we resent that it has also put us in a position where we have to paint our faces to keep up with other women. Let us do this business thing too.’ And all of a sudden it’s business and moneymaking that are the objects of desire for men and women both. Now we are all climbing the slippery pole together. Everyone, man and woman can now aspire to be the next Elon Musk and be equally miserable in their inevitable failure. Everyone can blame that failure on each other and every possible outsider (from members of the other gender(s) to Jews to Blacks, to Boat People) they can blame them for unfair competition. And so it goes. How can we all have been so easy to manipulate? Actually I don’t think anyone is consciously manipulating us, it’s just a sad situation that has evolved. So I say, ‘If you want it, then do it, have it.’ Man, woman, whoever. All I ask is ‘Why resent it? Why make it a battle? Why must everyone join a team and demonise the outsiders?’ There actually is today more than enough to go round, even if Musk and his friends have tied themselves to the wheel of ever increasing material wealth. Since the US threw away the gold standard (https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2017/november/why-us-no-longer-follows-gold-standard) in 1971, money really is just a number. Why can’t we just acknowledge his miserable addiction as a psychological anomaly, and let him have as many zeroes as he wants? Now I am not suggesting any return to any golden age (spoiler alert : there never was one – or if there was we are living in it now) If women or men want the fulfillment of gaining a Nobel prize, becoming a top content generator on the socials, sitting at the steering wheel of a business empire or on top of a heap of bitcoin then that’s fine with me. I believe that there is a natural gender order to humanity – not by rank but by aptitude. Women are generally more subtle, and complex than men. Men, by and large, are simple creatures who are capable of enjoying wherever is put in front of us. I think both genders receive fulfillment by progressing in whatever they care about and in giving and receiving the support of other humans. Let’s not screw it up. Celebrate the yoni. Celebrate the phallus too if that’s your thing. Celebrate all the richness of the universe. I’m retired. At last, I am in the economic position that a random married woman would have occupied five or six decades ago. I have enough money to live reasonably comfortably. I manage and clean my house. I have time to be creative and I am creative. I don’t have the opportunity to change the world, other than by being the change I wish to see (https://readmedium.com/gandhi-didnt-actually-ever-say-be-the-change-you-want-to-see-in-the-world-d65b92cf5db). I love it. By the time AGI (or maybe ASI) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence) takes over, there won’t be much left for any of us to do that is measurable or necessary anyway. We live in a time of global productivity, comfort and wealth like there has never been before and likely will never be again. Care for the planet. Care for those less comfortable than ourselves. Stop bloody fighting. Be creative. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   24 Apr 2024

   Texture

   If you prefer to read the essay I wrote before I read it out loud, (together with links to references) then . . . and while you’re here, please . . . Cheers, Nick This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   16 Apr 2024

   Progress

   I have let Substack do its automatic transcript thing this week. If you want to see my original essay you can find it . . . Thanks for listening to Nick’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   12 Apr 2024

   Evolutionary Psychiatry

   A few weeks back I mentioned Randy Nesse in the context of his aside about ageing. Long story short, I was so impressed by this guy’s discussion (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/randy-nesse-evolutionary-medicine-psychiatry/) that I bought his book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. His angle is to look at how evolution accounts for the most complex aspects of human biology. I’m loving it. His focus is looking for evolutionary reasons for psychological conditions. You might think that would be nothing new, though he points out that it was something very new when he picked up his interest in it half a century ago. Surprisingly, it still is a relatively uncommon way of looking at psychological disorders. And thirdly people often misunderstand the mechanism in ways I will refer to. Something I admire – try to aspire to myself and routinely find tough – is finding simple metaphors to illustrate complex things in a clear way. And I would give Nesse at least eight out ten for this. What he is dealing with is fearsomely complicated, and he comes up with some beautiful metaphors, perhaps the smoke alarm is his best one. However complexity still rises like the morning mist to blur the light of dawn (see what I did there?) Anyway – the discussions make so many turns that it’s still fairly easy to get tangled up. Thanks for reading Nick’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. So I’ll cover the smoke alarm illustration since I have mentioned it. He’s talking here about anxiety. Anxiety is universally seen as a problem, but he points out that people without anxiety die young – and maybe back in the day that might have meant too young to reproduce, so it’s a good trait to have at least a bit of. Then he points out that smoke detectors sometimes give false alarms. They give false alarms more often than they fail to operate when there is a fire. If they never gave false positives then the range at which they are sensitive would have to be set artificially high on the risk spectrum. That might, or probably would, allow more fires to start without setting off the siren at all. Thinking about it, a false positive alarm is a minor annoyance, a false negative (ie a failure to sound the alarm at all) can be a disaster. Now,  think of your ancestor at the water hole. If she was anxious and thought that the rabbit in a shrub was a tiger, she might have wasted a few calories running away. But if she is so laid back that she assumes the tiger is a rabbit or even a really cool stripey cat, then she becomes lunch. That your ancestor survived means she was, let’s say, anxious enough, and quite likely a bit too anxious, but not far too anxious, otherwise she’d have died of thirst. Viewed in this way we should be grateful that evolution has gifted us the ability to be anxious, and hardly be surprised if it has left us with more false alarms than we would like. Apart from giving us a neat academic explanation for one of the ways stuff might be as it is, he points out that it can be surprisingly therapeutic for someone suffering from chronic anxiety to be able to see their own situation as a poorly adjusted but necessary alarm mechanism rather than (wholly) as a pointless damaging disease. So, what about the ancestor who would have died of thirst if her anxiety was tuned so high as to make her nothing but a bag of nerves? Well there will always be outliers on the bell curve in the generations that evolved since waterhole days, and secondly in the modern era or actually at any time when there were social groups, maybe someone else would bring the water. And so it remains that the evolution of anxiety has every incentive to raise alarms at least as often as necessary, and it doesn’t have much incentive to care about being cool. Another way he illustrates that anxiety may be a positive is by examining why women live longer than men. He suggests that women don’t actually live longer, it’s just that men tend to die young. He has written a paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/147470490400200112) about this which mentions ‘Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries.’ Old men, he explains, don’t actually peg out much before old women. What happens is that silly young men accidentally kill themselves because they don’t have enough anxiety, and this brings the average down. (Women in these terms have about the right amount of anxiety.) Now, sex and drugs and rock and roll are all most exciting for men at the same age as violence and extreme sports, so by the time our hero tops himself by jumping off a cliff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKqTe8F18sQ) in a batsuit, he has probably already done more than enough mating to propagate his lack of anxiety. I tried to check this thesis out by downloading life expectancy tables from the UK Office for National Statistics (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2020to2022) and they didn’t seem to confirm it. I graphed life expectancy as a percentage differential between male and female by age. Having taken account of Nesse’s statement, I expected the lines to start widely separated and then to sweep together just after the age when men stop being recruited to the armed forces. After that I thought that the small remaining  differential would perhaps taper away to zero just before the few remaining centenarians died. The difference doesn’t seem to behave like that though. Maybe there are other factors, maybe men don’t stop being life-threateningly silly until they are in middle age, or maybe my understanding of statistics is rubbish. As observed by Mark Twain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics) in a famous statement generously attributed by him to Benjamin Disraeli – The study of statistics is a notoriously difficult area of basic maths to interpret correctly. If anyone would like to clarify this is a comment to me I’d be really grateful. I should mention that anxiety or the lack of it is not the only reason for early male mortality mentioned in Nesse’s paper. Maybe if I can’t work it out myself I’ll submit a query to my favourite statistician Tim Harford (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p00msxfl) and report back here if I get a response. Meanwhile three of Nesse’s recurrent threads are, * Avoiding what he calls VSAD or viewing symptoms as diseases. * Avoiding the temptation to search for what gene causes what disorder. Better ask what environmental situation may have led to the evolution of a pattern of behaviours that increases evolutionary ‘fitness’ – inevitably by the incalculable interaction of multiple genes influencing emotions and hence behaviour. * And his third recurrent thread is speculating on how what may have been a good evolutionary response has evolved into what are some of today’s most debilitating disorders. I have already given an example of the third one, so what about the other two? That first one about viewing symptoms as if they are diseases provides a nice illustration of how he clarifies stuff, but it still remains fearsomely complicated. I don’t blame Nesse for this. If he oversimplified the subject with the risk of misinterpretation, that would be much worse. So on the subject of VSAD, he points out that psychological difficulties are widely considered to be diseases or disorders, but say coughing, or pain, or running a temperature are considered as symptoms. It’s easy to understand that physical symptoms have benefits. Pain helps keep you out of danger, coughing expels the mucus that your body makes to trap bugs, and fevers provide a better environment for your immune system to work fast. Once we realise that mental pain has a function similar to physical pain then it’s possible to consider where it came from and how to deal with it, maybe even whether to deal with it. But it’s still complicated. In physical medicine for example, there aren’t just symptoms and diseases, there are whole syndromes or collections of chronic symptoms again which don’t map neatly one to one against diseases. This muddies the water. And so it is with mental problems. The water here is already muddy, so it’s not an easy thing to clarify. On the second line, that one about mapping mental problems to genes. He shows how a great deal of work has proven fruitless, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise. There is no gene for something as measurable as height, why should there be one for something that we can’t even classify? It would be like looking for a gene for coughing. So the questions he asks are more along the lines of ‘what response would have helped evolutionary fitness in what circumstances?’ How do those circumstances map risk? Given that we aren’t automata, there are plenty of physical behaviours that aren’t hard-wired, so our emotions and moods act as a kind of middleman in making us feel like doing something, and that something will always be what benefits the transmission of relevant genes. In passing, I should mention that the mechanism of evolution doesn’t care if we suffer from pain or depression or anxiety, it cares about whether we survive long enough and behave in the right way to pass the characteristic on to the next generation. Often our genes require us to suffer pain for our own survival. No. Sometimes not even for our survival, just for our survival long enough to pass on the characteristic. The benefit to what Richard Dawkin called the Selfish Gene in his book of that name always trumps my comfort or your wellbeing. On a positive tack Nesse considers fruit gathering and the question of when to leave one shrub and look for another, and then when to stop gathering for the day and go home. He shows that we instinctively know this stuff and the mechanism is that we will naturally lose interest in a fruit bush before it is completely empty. We will actually move on when the scarcity of fruit means we waste more time in searching for the last ones on it, than we would spend in looking for a new bush. So he establishes that instinctive mood affects behaviour in a way to maximise efficiency, and for once our interests align with those of our genes. We both just want a good fruit salad. Then he talks about how having the ability for a wide variety of moods might benefit a species in times of scarcity, in times of plenty and in times when scarcity and plenty fluctuate predictably and unpredictably. Now these things aren’t easy to calculate, but they are comparatively easy to model. And sure enough that’s exactly what evolution does; it throws some mud at the wall and sees what sticks. How has evolution moulded our emotions and feelings and moods? Maybe responses that helped survival would have been passed down in one gene, or in a combination of the physical or behavioural forms that were produced by numerous genes. And sure enough it’s pretty much always the latter. Genetic evolution has to be gradual to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It takes many generations, so it has the capacity to deal with combinations and subtlety that would be impossible to calculate by pen and paper. I like this way he moves forward in this discussion. In fact I wish he were a bit more logical in building his structure of the argument. I rather feel as if I’m sitting in front of a bonfire watching sparks of initiative arise from a hotbed of wisdom. I love seeing what he has to say but I yearn for all that to be put into even more of a logical structure. I’m only half way through the book at the moment; perhaps it will be. Depression isn’t as simple a thing to account for as anxiety. Nesse softens our expectations a bit by pointing out that clinical diagnosis of depression has fluctuated wildly over the past half century – between whether or not to take account of temporary situations and/or life experience for example – however he settles on a kind of definition where depression is like chronic low mood and he speculates about how that could be useful and how and why it can be unbalanced. He points out first how an infant will cry for its mother immediately after separation, but then will become quiet and withdrawn, and speculates that this is good survival instinct to conserve resources and not attract predators. But that’s not really a good enough foundation for a whole messy branch of psychiatry as the smoke alarm was for anxiety. So his discussion gets more complicated and certainly too complicated for me to summarise here, but always beautifully and sympathetically discussed. Nesse constantly reminds us that what’s good for the propagation of a genotype may actually hurt the living animal – that’s you and me, and it certainly hurt our mothers at the moment of our birth. And so again and again Richard Dawkins pops into my mind. I have to admit that I find that guy unbelievably smug and hence rather annoying, and brilliant. It’s a great thing to look at complex stuff from a totally new angle and The Selfish Gene changed our perspective on evolution as surely as Copernicus changed our perspective on the solar system. The concept that animals are what genes are for is so intuitively obvious that even the name of the book is often misunderstood to mean that animals are selfish because they need to be to pass on their genes. But it’s the other way around. The Genes are selfish and we animals are just the carriers. That’s all that our physical characteristics and our behaviours do.  What I love about Nesse is how well he explores how those selfish genes use our psychology to pull our behavioural strings. And the other thing I love about Nesse is that he doesn’t come across as smug, just wise. It makes his work so much nicer to read! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   31 Mar 2024

   Awareness

   I enjoyed listening to Bob Fischer the other day discussing (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bob-fischer-comparing-animal-welfare-moral-weight/) animal welfare. I specifically liked his focus on how one should distribute a budget for charity between human welfare and animal welfare. Before he gets into the different philosophical or logical ways that people might approach the problem, he looks at a model for how we can assess animal suffering on the same scale as human suffering. He approaches this by assessing what he calls the relative Moral Weights of different species. Thanks for reading Nick’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. In his research, as director (https://www.ethicsandanimals.org/people#h.p_pqU-wD2qw9lf) of the The Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals, Fischer revisits experimental data and metastudies of different metrics both on what you might consider intuitive measurements (for example, should we consider how many neurons each animal has in its brain?) and harder evidence, (say, captive animals may exhibit distressed behaviours that we can measure without anthropomorphising their ‘emotions’) His results are well-argued and for the sake of this discussion I’m going to assume that they are justifiable and robust. He concludes that if we are comparing the suffering of a pig with that of a human, there might be a multiplier of something around say three. That means that the suffering of one distressed human might have the same moral weight as that of three pigs, but with a margin of uncertainty. An octopus might be a smaller differential (as we will understand if we have seen that Netflix documentary (https://www.netflix.com/de-en/title/81045007)) and if we considered a shrimp we would see a bigger gap. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion from his research and the one he asked us to take away, was that if you are comparing human suffering and shrimp or insect suffering we should be considering factors of maybe tens or hundreds but not thousands or millions.  Interestingly with reference to that, when the discussion swung to saving people from malaria, it didn’t mention the plight of the mosquito at all. The first thing we might wonder, is why this matters if we can never know what it feels like to be a shrimp. That’s why I think his metaphor of a charity budget was a good one. If we see that farmed shrimps suffer stress which causes physical damage or death, and let’s say I take a factor of 1/500 for the moral weight of a shrimp then yes, for every $500 I donate to human welfare why not donate one dollar to make shrimp farms more humane? Now put like that it even seems that perhaps 1/500 is being unfair to the shrimp. And of course we might look at how many humans my $500 helps and how much and how many shrimps my $1 affects and adjust my donations accordingly. Fischer also looks at how different people would assess these things and I won’t repeat that here, but he labels them as utility, risk aversion, futility, and ambiguity aversion, so we can note that there is a variety. It’s not an exact science. It’s helpful to be able to use these logical analytical techniques to depersonalise these discussions. This helps us make good decisions about suffering, life and death which can easily become emotive and tribal, even political. So I would agree that this is a good starting point, and I am quite comfortable in using this kind of logic in choosing how to spend my money. But Fischer is also a professor of philosophy, so what about the famous ‘lever on a railway points’ dilemma? The runaway train is coming and I have to choose whether to push the lever on the junction one way to save the life of a human who is strapped to the rails of one siding, or to push it another way and save 500 shrimps, or three pigs, or an octopus. Which would I choose? Well, even on our worst day pretty well everyone would save the human. Wouldn’t we? Same maths same research, but for this thought experiment at least, an entirely different result. So why is there such a discrepancy? I think it lies in the difference between consciousness and awareness, and that difference lies in what time means for different creatures. Going back to my earlier essay on consciousness (https://open.substack.com/pub/nickjamesillustrator/p/consciousness), I used consciousness and self-awareness fairly interchangeably. Perhaps I might better have suggested a spectrum going from intelligence through consciousness to awareness. Actually I think it’s more like three distinct steps rather than a continuum. But firstly these words are woolly, so I have to define what I mean by them as I go. I was listening to a debate (https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvZmY4MzhkNWItZDc4Ny00ZjhiLTlhNzUtYWY5NTAwZTNhY2QzL2Q2MGMyYWRhLTJmM2UtNDM1OS1iMGFmLWFmOTYwMDc5ZjkzNy9lMTAzNjQ2NC04NjhiLTQzMjAtOThhZi1hZjk2MDA3OWY5NTgvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M/episode/ZjQ3YTUwYzYtMWQ0YS00ZmEyLWI4ZmMtYjBjYTAwOWU2YmYx?ep=14) the other day between Steven Pinker and one Jagadish Vasudev (aka Sadhguru) about whether consciousness is a miracle. That interchange, I wouldn’t call it a discussion, didn’t resolve anything, because these two guys have absolutely different definitions of both the word ‘consciousness’ and the word ‘miracle.’ One was saying that if we remain deliberately unsophisticated, then we feel a sense of wonder when we observe nature, the other said that physical systems may still be logical even when they become so complex that they appear to transcend mechanism. Both of their points of view can live perfectly happily in the same universe, (Unlike for example a discussion on religion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZRcYaAYWg4&t=3s) between Christopher Hitchens and Anne Widdecombe or one on truth between Donald Trump and any number of people who will never have the chance to debate it with him.) So when discussing stuff like this, it’s better if I define what I mean by these woolly words as I go along. Are all animals intelligent? Yes in my definition they are, and not just animals. The definition I am using here is different from what others may use, so I’m specifying it as the ability to take stimuli and then modify one’s own behaviour to optimise the result. All animals must be able to do that, because they have to carry out whatever actions they need to keep themselves alive. Some are hard-wired, some are explicit. I might say I am more intelligent than a bat even though the bat can catch a fly in mid air in the dark. Why is that? Well, it’s because I can consider abstract concepts of echolocation and triangulation and algebra and Newtonian physics. The bat could never grasp any of those concepts. So I am using some kind of active intelligence whereas the bat is just using muscle memory and intuition. Either way the calculation works, and actually much faster and more easily for the bat than for me. None the less I’m ticking both our boxes for crossing the threshold of intelligence.  Japanese metro slime mould (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/slime-mould-attacks-simulates-tokyo-rail-network), any plant that turns to the sun, an abacus and my laptop all tick that box too, perhaps even a mousetrap, so it’s a pretty low threshold. It’s also easy to grade a scale up from the threshold and calibrate it experimentally. I am tempted to feel that there are two kinds of intelligence here. One that we might call the hard-wired type of calculation, (and hard wired has an interesting etymology here because a computer does most smart stuff using the opposite of hard wiring) and the other being the explicit kind, where the knowledge is held outside of the organism and considered what we might call academically. But that distinction is actually what I am calling awareness and why I am making these distinctions at all, so bear with me. Next up, consciousness. Perhaps generic consciousness (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-neuroscience/) or maybe the potential for cognition. Anyone who doesn’t think a dog or a horse or a cat has conscious has never looked one in the eye. But what does that mean? As a starting point, I’m calling consciousness the ability to differentiate self from environment and to reflect on that, even at a rudimentary level. Perhaps the defining point then is humour? I googled – ‘do animals have a sense of humour?’ I got a couple of not very convincing results about rats laughing at hypersonic frequencies, abused bees becoming pessimistic, and gorillas finding double-meanings in sign language vocabulary. These animals are all showing something more than say our best AI models are doing at the moment. So I’ll give them a tick for cognition – meaning the ability to find meaning in things through explicit thought. That thought link in the chain is important. A self-driving car understands that certain patterns of light have meaning and can then calculate what to do about that perception, but could it hold the idea of what it is doing as a concept and then talk about it? I don’t think so. Not yet. It would certainly make for a few amusing instagram memes. But if Coco (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25312-do-animals-have-a-sense-of-humour/) the gorilla can joke that the word ‘hard’ would apply both to a rock and work, then she is demonstrating that she sees herself as observing the words with thought, and I’d say that indicates positive evidence of consciousness. So I would define this step change between intelligence and consciousness as the point where the organism separates itself from what it is thinking about. We could say understanding. It’s difficult to imagine how that could occur in something without consciousness. For an animal to show any kind of humour or perhaps even the use of language, it is setting itself as distinct from its environment. The animal has become an observer of things. Now, animals can also show jealousy and object to unfairness (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97944783) after comparing themselves with their colleagues, and these reactions grow in time. So yes, animals can think. They can have consciousness and cognition. I’m sure AI will have this one day, but I don’t believe it has yet. I don’t believe plants or slime mould have it at all. And no, for the record, I don’t believe that ‘the Universe’ has, or that ‘every cell in my body’ has it. If we are already beyond the limits of AI, then why then am I making a further distinction between consciousness and awareness? Am I not just talking about taking another step back in the observation? Ok let’s take a step back and zoom out one layer.  Could we ask the gorilla if she thought her joke about the word ‘hard’ was funny? Well we already know she did. The moment consciousness exists, it has already opened up the possibility of reflective thought. If I can hold thoughts and concepts about the world outside my body, then it doesn’t take an extra step to hold thoughts about my place in the world. How else can a galloping horse know how to jump a hedge under its own coordination while under the general direction of its rider? Since I started out on this essay talking about animal welfare, then I should list another indicator of consciousness as pain or suffering. If we keep battery chickens in (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9311790/) cages, they exhibit (presumably suffer) measurable symptoms of psychological stress – that alone indicates that their needs are higher than those of my smartphone. So what is the extra step that I am calling awareness? Well, I don’t think any of the situations I have discussed indicates that the animal is aware of its place in time. Surely, it is thinking about the current Newtonian dynamic of making its immediate trajectory intercept a fly or jump a hedge. However I doubt that Coco will ever observe that her handler enjoyed her jokes more yesterday than he appears to be doing today. If a dog gets increasingly jealous of its neighbour over time, that process doesn’t require that the dog tell itself stories about the good old days, it only indicates the habitual reinforcement of a repeated annoyance. Humans experience time-awareness in a wider sense. We consider and discuss and care about our place in our environment not only now but yesterday and tomorrow. We think about whether others deserve to be better off than us because of what they have done in the past, or whether their ancestors mistreated our ancestors. We discuss whether we will be rewarded in heaven for our transgressions today. Once we factor time into this discussion that opens up a whole new hall of mirrors, enabling arguments of cause and effect, and hence responsibility, shoulds and oughts, morality, and philosophy. Ain’t no animal has any of that. An illustration how we differ from animals is our consideration of death. We consider what it is like to be alive in the context of time. We look into a future where we no longer exist except in the form of dust, and we deny it or we grieve for it. What about animals? I eat little meat for a number of reasons, but I’m neither vegan nor vegetarian, and the least concern I have about this is that meat-eaters sponsor the killing of livestock. When vegetarians say it is cruel to kill animals, my knee jerk reaction is to observe that almost no animal in the wild dies of old age. They almost all get eaten alive, by predators, scavengers or by parasites. Should I worry about that? Should vegetarians? Well the animals don’t, nor do their families, other than in a very few mate-for-life species. What happens when a wild animal is injured is that it probably cries out in pain. I’m not denying that suffering, and if I were witnessing that, my heart would yearn to help it. But then after minutes or hours, it accepts its fate and whether dead or still breathing, it becomes food for the local environment. Look at the same situation for humans. The family goes into overdrive and pays whatever it takes to mitigate suffering and optimise the prognosis. Interestingly, it’s almost universal behaviour to favour the optimisation of the prognosis over the alleviation of suffering. That’s what the phrase ‘bite the bullet’ is all about. And sure enough, the risk of intense but time-limited pain almost never stops sportsmen or mothers from repeating the exercise. So that’s what I am considering when I say I believe that humans have a kind of awareness that is a step change above that of animals. It’s not self awareness, it’s time awareness. I think this is what’s missing from animals and it’s what is responsible for our human traits of anxiety, ambition, competitiveness, meanness – haha  – gosh I seem to be sliding towards the negative there, so I’ll add heroism and cultural progress. But to get off my humanocentric navel gazing and back to the ethical philosophy of animal welfare, I believe this is why we shouldn’t use calculations that work for immediate distress, or even habitual distress, in questions of life and death. A pig may squeal if it sees its brother being slaughtered, but there is nothing you could do to alert it with concern about its own impending death tomorrow. And if a pig doesn’t care about that itself, why should I carry the burden of guilt and worry on behalf of it? I think the question of whether their life is long or short doesn’t matter to any animal except humans. I would rather wish that a given pig would be slaughtered humanely than die in a ditch while some opportunistic scavenger picks its bones. So how do I think we should use Fischer’s research? Well – I believe it is our responsibility to consider the welfare of animals living in captivity whether in zoos or farms – and that includes fish farms and shrimp farms. Fischer tells us that shrimps suffer on the same scale as mammals, that’s good enough for me. Thank you, professor, your work for me is done. I do believe that animals that are slaughtered for food, should be treated humanely in every way, even if that makes my hamburger more expensive. But I also think that it is pointless to worry for this reason about whether we are killing animals in general. There are reasons for humanity to go vegan (most specifically climate change) but a concern that animals are slaughtered is not one of them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

6. 

   24 Mar 2024

   Art, Craft and Design

   I first realised I was destined to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright very early. That was clear because I liked his work. I could draw and I understood physics which would be useful for the structure of those cantilevers. It followed that my stuff would be like his stuff, and my most beautiful works would surely be better looking than his worst ones, and so one day coffee-table books would have to be dedicated to my buildings. And sure enough, in good time, I arrived at the School of Architecture. Now – I just had to learn the skills of building design. So we learnt about bricks and steel, and concrete and glass, about hot and cold water systems and structural calculations and about the difference between cesspools and septic tanks. We learnt about contracts and specifications, about quantity surveying and the terms of agreement between architects and clients. We learnt about how one decomposed snail in a bottle of ginger beer had opened the branch of law that allows architects to get sued by people who aren’t their clients. We learnt about the history and philosophy of building design – ancient, modern and postmodern, we learnt how to create drawings to seduce clients (and our assessors) and how to make the drawings that described what would be built. We went out to study villages and towns and cities and vernacular farm buildings. We learnt about Planning Control and Building Control, and about the Cement and Concrete Association and about the Building Research Establishment. We learnt ergonomics, the requirement for pram stores and ventilated food cupboards in postwar housing, about traffic, and psychology, about determinism and the difference between front doors and back doors, about wayfinding and ecology, about trees and what kind of shrubs you plant to stop people taking shortcuts across flower beds. Interestingly in those days, although I remember one tutor mentioning the ‘sequence of trades,’ we never learnt either project management nor health and safety. The world has moved on since then. And one day we sat in the lecture hall in a course named ‘Design Factors and Methods.’ As the lights dimmed we waited to learn how to design buildings. The lecture was rubbish. I didn’t understand it then and looking at the notes now, it wouldn’t have made a jot of difference if I had done. For example, our lecturer gave us this diagram. He explained, ‘The design process has three stages – the exploration of options, known as brainstorming or divergence, the working out of how it all fits together – and the coming together of solutions as you converge on the result.’ I recall that I was naive enough to copy the diagram and to try to use it in my next student project. It didn’t work of course, but what did work to some extent was thinking about all that other stuff we were learning about, then fiddling with everything in more or less random ways over and again until I got something I liked. What I discovered by experience could have been put into its own academic gobbedygook. I could say that ‘design is a non-linear process’ it progresses in a strange geometrical path composed of circles and dead ends. It uses a lot of paper and even more erasers. It takes place in two stages. The first stage takes several weeks. It is known as the displacement-activity phase and comprises days of chatting, scribbling, and late nights partying. The second stage comprises no more or fewer than exactly two all-night sessions preparing the presentation, and it is known as the panic phase. This process produces symptoms in the student combining those of hangovers and jet lag at the precise moment when the work is to be criticised by rather disappointed tutors. Design, I discovered, could be identified as an activity which needed one week more than it got. So in a nutshell. I spent six years as a student of architecture practising building design without having any idea of how I was doing it. In case you have missed my name on your coffee table books, don’t be surprised. I won an RIBA award for the design of one small building early in my career, the next twenty years trying unsuccessfully to copy the recipe for that design again, and the third and most enjoyable part, learning how to manage people and construction sites. And surrounding us all as students was the insecurity of knowing that architecture as a creative profession had a bad reputation in the public eye. That still surrounds architects now and has been the water that the profession has swum in since the mid 19th century.  Whatever age we live in, it seems that old stuff is generally accepted and the modern is decried. A contemporary account (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris) of the nineteenth century redevelopment of Paris for example mentioned the speaker’s reaction to its newly-redeveloped imperial boulevards,“We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire… when we see the grand and intolerable new buildings.” and meanwhile the British Palace of Westminster aka the Houses of Parliament were being rebuilt in a sham mediaeval style in what we might now call a populist response against the modern architecture of the day. So what was it and what is it that great architects have that they didn’t teach me? At the time I probably would have said ‘an ego the size of a planet,’ and now I might say ‘some vision that they had the need to express.’ It comes to the same thing. Most of the iconic buildings designed in the early twentieth century seemed pretty ugly when I was a student and I still think of them as inelegant today. But there’s no doubt that those early modern masters were inspired by a vast creative vision and purpose. Each of them described in their own way what they cared about in terms of the function of buildings, their proportions and their expression of materials as serving the population of the modern age. Between them, they changed the face of the world. For the better? Yes, I think so. I found myself walking around Paris last week. That’s the main reason why this essay is late. I find that the endless magnificence of those classical facades, whether wrapped around the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum or wallpapering the blocks that line any Parisian boulevard, say nothing to me other than shouting the power of wealth. Whereas the Centre Georges Pompidou literally (yes literally) took my breath away. Its expression of structure, and mechanical services as the voice of a new language touches me in a way that makes me see all buildings both ancient and modern with new eyes. And I think that’s what allows some architecture to transcend into art. I don’t think that’s about design at all and it’s certainly not about choice of style, I think it is the difference between art and craft. What distinguishes all art from craftsmanship, is that craftsmanship may express skill and refinement and beauty, and it may be functional and ergonomic, but its purpose is not to express any cultural meaning. Craftsmanship probably has style, but it doesn’t have language, because it doesn’t say anything except ‘I have been well made’. Art on the other hand sets itself apart because it communicates whatever the artist feels passionate about, and with its message, it offers a way for us all to see not just the object itself but the whole world differently. In that context, I have never really understood why singers are referred to as artists, whereas any decent comedian ticks that box the moment they open their mouth. As Picasso famously once said or perhaps didn’t (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/17/soul/), ‘The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.’ So long as it does that, art can be ugly and it can be devoid of craftsmanship. I’m not saying that the world is better because it contains Tracy Emin’s bed or Marcel DuChamp’s urinal. But I do think it’s better because of the emotions and conversations that surround those things. Such reactions challenge our own creativity and prompt us all to do something more than turn up and live. So that’s my distinction between art and craftsmanship. What of the interaction between art and design? As students we were taught by the more pompous of our tutors that if our creations weren’t art then what we were doing wasn’t architecture. Later when I was an expat in the Middle East, I discovered that the practice of building design was known as engineering and architects were only one of a dozen professions who contributed to the effort, no more creative or ‘artistic’ than any of the others. Personally I believe that the smartphone (ok as Samsung owner I must begrudgingly admit I’m actually talking about the iPhone) expresses craftsmanship, inspired design and in its ability to influence a large part of our culture is probably for better or worse the highest art of our age, replacing the motor car and the steam engine as the cultural icons of the preceding ages. An item as complex as a building, a steam engine, a car or a smartphone, can’t just be picked up off a rubbish heap and put in a show. It has to be designed. Design is the activity that collects all the relevant bits of technology and technique and synthesises them into the functional result. Design is a goal-centred activity. It’s goal may or may not be a work of art, but with all that creative effort, why not put in a bit more to make it beautifully crafted too? Craft, art and design are at their best when they all come together. Apart from those great technological advances I have mentioned, I believe movie screenwriting is the richest culture of this age. The TV was supposed to spell doom for the cinema but it didn’t. The mixture of story and spectacle is a potent one for all sorts of deep reasons, I don’t have space for here. The opportunity for artistic expression from the writer through the audience to a wider culture is enormous, the complexities of time and three-dimensional space as shown on a big screen certainly require design and there are also endless ways in which fine-honed craftsmanship adds depth to the mixture of sound and vision. Movies have typically been classed in genres – humour, drama, action etc. But the profession of movie making has become so sophisticated and multilayered that many of our most successful films now transcend and combine all those genres into one. Yes I am thinking of course of Marvel which follows in the groove first ploughed by Diehard by setting internally conflicted and fallible heroes against intelligent villains in a rich complex of humour, action and special effects. With so much effort and of course money invested to make movies like this, there follows the complaint that they become too safe – too centred on craft and not enough art, but in such a rich landscape there is more than enough space for all these creative streams to flourish.  Deadpool and Spiderman have each taken new creative directions in the Marvel Universe as Shrek and Kung Fu Panda did in the realm of CGI. All of these movies have in their way changed the culture, not just of Hollywood but of everyone in the Western World. Anyway, there is nothing wrong with crafting and following traditions, even new ones. In 2017, acknowledging that I never really had any mind-blowing message to transmit in architectural design I rebooted my own creative journey, almost from scratch. This time, I wasn’t really so interested in design as in creativity generally. Encouraged by my wife, I started to draw again. So as someone who understood craftsmanship and technique more than creative messaging I tried something maybe I should have done half a century earlier. I studied and copied examples of the work of artists I admired, line for line. It would be easy and wrong to say that such time spent would be stealing time from the budget I had available for my own creative drawings. But time doesn’t work like that at all. Time expands or contracts to fit around the activities that we care about. When I spend more time with the works I love, I budget more of my own time to follow up with my own creative work. There are specific ways in which copying the drawings of my heroes actually saved me time too. Copying reminds me what reads as a beautiful line and what doesn’t. It reduces the time I waste trying to achieve specific effects by trial and error. When I am copying with my hands, my head is simultaneously considering how that exercise relates to whatever struggles I am going through in my own creative work. The result is that my own drawings become easier, faster and better. I have demonstrated all this to myself numerous times. There is also the temptation to think that copying is always dilution. If I am treading in my hero’s footsteps, then I will never overtake him. Now maybe this is rubbish or maybe it’s true, but it doesn’t really matter. Why be shy to say that my heroes are better at drawing the way they draw than I am? That really would be a pointless argument to deny. But copying still has a bad reputation, and we might blame the education system which forbids it in exams and assessments. But in my own anecdotal experience it seems to be deeper than that. I have consistently encouraged my twins to copy the best of each other’s work and that of everyone else too. They have been one hundred percent homeschooled after only three years at a very liberally minded school, but their refusal to share authorship is solid, so this ownership of ideas thing seems to be pretty hardwired. I’m not alone in believing that copying is useful and a mind expanding creative tool. Kirby Ferguson has made more and better arguments for it than I could. His video Everything is a Remix (2) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhMar_eYnNY&t=10s) is a beautiful piece of creativity in its own right. Gosh he’s even done a TED (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd-dqUuvLk4&t=301s)talk. But there has to be more to finding our way in creativity than copying.  Yes of course. Copying is an exercise. It has to be balanced with original work too. I can appreciate with the vast wisdom of age, even I would never have become the next Frank Lloyd Wright by imitating the forms of his buildings. Some of the saddest things I have seen are the Beginner Books published under the imprint set up by Dr Suess and written after his death by those deliberately trying to imitate his style. Wright’s architecture was itself carried on by a generation of Prairie School disciples who copied stylistic traits, and certainly with more flair and creativity than I would have done, but I doubt anyone remembers the names of its practitioners. So what is the balance? Is there a right amount to copy before the artist is shouted down as being derivative or a plagiarist? Why was Terminator 2 so much better than the original and Hotel Transylvania 2 so much worse? My take on this is if you have a fresh message, one that springs from your values, your ‘whys’ and your vision, then copy away; sample; be inspired by, and then create your own work in your own mould. On the other hand, if you don’t have your own message to shout, or if you haven’t invented your own language yet, then copy even more. Enjoy bathing in the glow of real genius. Maybe you’ll find yours while leaning on the shoulders of your heroes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   15 Mar 2024

   Age

   Roger Daltrey is 80 this year and significantly, he’s still alive. Significantly because it’s almost sixty years since he sang ‘I hope I die before I get old’ and only two years since he said ‘I still do.’ In case you are too young to remember the Who, do yourself a favour and discover them soon. When I put together the equality and diversity statement for my own website (https://from123to.xyz/the-small-print/#edistatement) I thought long and hard about all the classifications where I should deny prejudice. I came up with nine and the first (I listed them alphabetically) is age.  Thankfully, this is something (unlike skin colour or gender for example) where we can still say whatever we think without risk of being cancelled. So I should be able to put my thoughts on that one down here without fear of losing friends. When I was in my early fifties, I realised that I felt more happy and content than I had ever been before. Now in my late sixties I still feel that way, actually more mentally alive than I have ever been, less limited by my own doubts and beliefs, and more sure of my own position. Freer – I like the word ‘fulfilled.’ Of course my eyes and my ears and my lungs and my prostate gland and my muscles and my joints aren’t what they once were, and they all keep reminding me of my mortality. But on the other hand, my creative output in the past ten years has by far exceeded the total of that from the first five and a half decades of my life. And yet, if you were to ask me if I want to live another thirty years, that would be a definite no. Ask me if I think the world would be better run by youngsters or oldies. Again – I have no hesitation at all in saying by the young. Is that an anomaly? How does it follow? Well for a start from a personal point of view there is that body-wearing-out aches-and-pains thing. This means that one day I won’t be able to focus so well on whatever is coming out of my mind. But there is more to it. As an aside, I think most people are much more creative when they are younger. But it’s much more than that. I believe progress of culture should trump the contentment of individuals and I’m happy to put my life on that line. So as a self-admitted fan of youth, I had to have a self-critical giggle when I compared two recent episodes of the 80,000 Hours podcast. Here’s my personal evaluation: * 75 year old Randy Nesse  – rich deep wisdom * 29 year old Laura Deming  – thin emotive fluff This is significant because coincidentally in both cases, the discussion was about ageing and whether we should think about stopping it. The interview with Laura Deming (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/laura-deming-ending-ageing/) was a real disappointment for me both in style and content. Despite being an expert in the subject, she refused to answer several significant questions about ageing. And insisted on focussing instead on why she personally has been passionate about this for the past seventeen years. To save you the arithmetic, that means she started out on this journey when she was just twelve years old. I found her narrative so obscure that I couldn’t resist checking the transcript to see whether it had been compressed and edited, but there are all her ramblings reproduced verbatim just as large as life. I have copy pasted in this footnote (https://from123to.xyz/footnotes-to-essay-on-ageing/) over five hundred words from the transcript. And in those five hundred words she says nothing more or less than research into extending lifespan has progressed in the last 50 years, and then evades answering the question of what ageing actually is. But as a real believer in evolution, I gladly admit  that nothing succeeds like success. After all, this woman is not a scientist, she is a venture capitalist who’s enthusiasm has raised $tens of millions for scientific research in just a dozen years. I guess she is sparkling proof of Khalil Gibran’s thesis about the significance of the ‘meaningless half’ that I discussed a couple of weeks back. (https://from123to.xyz/essays/padding/) Deming admits her own horror of the idea of death and incapacity of old age and her life is dedicated to fighting that monster and even to denying any suggestion that ageing is a natural course. Meanwhile conversely the recent 80,000 hours interview with Randy Nesse (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/randy-nesse-evolutionary-medicine-psychiatry/) mentioned ageing as a tiny sidetrack just before the close and concludes the exact opposite. Nesse was asked why we age, and I loved his eloquence. He explained that as an undergraduate he had proposed that ‘it would be good for the species if natural selection made some individuals die each year so that the population could turn over and the species could evolve faster and adapt to changing environments.’ Yes I thought, ‘that’s exactly what I think’ in a delicious moment of pride before the fall. Nesse then immediately u-turned by reminding us that evolution doesn’t actually favour good philosophical ideas unless they manifest themselves as a mechanism for the propagation of genes. That good for the species for the oldies to get out of the way thing just didn’t have such a mechanism. He realised instead that our organism takes what I would call ‘a budget of total good health in a lifetime’ (and he calls antagonistic pleiotropy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypothesis)) and skews the delivery of that budget to maximise our physical powers at the moment when we are ready to reproduce, leaving us to suffer the consequences of the tail-end after we have passed on our genes. Yup that’s evolution for you. Nesse concludes ‘ageing isn’t a disease, it’s not something you can fight, it’s something that you might as well be appreciative of, that natural selection has given us all so much extra vigour early in life’ Now I love that. Not only can this guy talk in sentences that transfer information, but he also speaks with the good sense embodied in the Serenity Prayer – that’s the one about having the strength to change what you can, the serenity to accept what you can’t and the wisdom to know the difference. Having said that, I am feeling guilty about my negativity on the Deming episode so I want to pick up a couple of the more interesting philosophical threads from that discussion before I consider what ageing actually is. If we did all live forever would it make us nicer people? Apparently there is a part of game theory that reveals that games that go on forever encourage mutual support and collaboration whereas those that don’t, don’t. Well yes that makes sense. But I don’t think it’s enough – firstly Deming specifically wasn’t talking about living forever, just deferring the moment by a decade or ten. Secondly, the extension of old age just isn’t enough to turn our aggressive cultures for the better unless we also take out our competitive youth – and that raises all sorts of other questions about demographics and possibly eugenics. Let’s not go there. Another question was wondering if we live forever, would that rob us of meaning in our lives by taking the urgency out of our YOLO? Now on that, my knee jerk reaction is to sympathise, but only to a limited extent. I have never needed the idea that You Only Live Once to inspire me. I find interest in what is before me to give meaning to my day to day existence. If nothing is pushed at me by my environment. I’m quite capable of playing with a piece of paper, taking the dog for a walk or listening to a podcast. There is lots of research to show that we are happiest when finding meaning in the present, and that contentment is derived from making continuous achievable progress rather than meeting targets. Nesse talks about this stuff elsewhere in the same episode. Now I do see my own life overall as a trajectory, but to have the lid taken off. Would that spoil it or improve it? Actually neither, not really. I only see my life that way in retrospect. It doesn’t inform my enjoyment of today. I was really surprised that the Deming interview didn’t mention demographic economics. It was explained to me when I was about 30 by a pension salesman that I should really be worried about this. He explained that public pensions don’t work by investment in funds for the future, as I might have intuitively expected. They work from year to year. I’m talking about the UK here, but I guess it must work this way anywhere that has national pensions. This year’s National Insurance contributions from those in work pay this year’s pensions for those who are retired. He showed me a demographic graph with the baby boom bulge and me right in the middle of its fat belly.  When I got old there were going to be too many of me and not enough of the next generation in work to support us. So I should really invest in his pension plan. I didn’t, and I seem to be surviving, but I did find his argument compelling and I have observed that the retirement age did creep up by a couple of years before I caught up with it. So if we live to 75 and spend 50 years working (18-68) then in simple arithmetic proportion if we live to 200 we should work until we are 115. Now I enjoyed work but I enjoy retirement a lot more. If Deming’s life’s work resulted in my retirement being deferred from 68 to 115, I have a feeling that I wouldn’t be rushing up to shake her hand in gratitude. So let’s talk about ageing itself. Did you read, as I did once, that our cells are renewed on average every seven years? If a new cell is created to replace an old one, then why is the new cell born old? Why doesn’t our body just renew?  Mature people produce infant babies, Lizards produce new tails, so why don’t we all make young skin, toned abs and hair follicles that grow hair? So I read a bit about this and didn’t get very far with my first enquiry. The antagonistic pleiotropy thing suggests that it’s the same genes that keep us fit when we need to be, that make us crinkly when their work is done. I don’t know why that is. I’ll just put that down to Mother Nature’s excellent ability not to care very much about what I think. Another way of looking at it is that non-life is much much more common than life. The total biomass (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/) on Earth is 150 Gigatonnes of Carbon (over 80% of which by the way is trees and toadstools) Multiply by 2 because of the half of us that isn’t carbon, and 300 Gigatonnes is 3 x 10^14kg. The mass of the Earth itself is 6 x 10^24kg, so for every ton of life, there are twenty thousand million tons of non-life.  That’s not counting the mass of the rest of the solar system which is much much much bigger, and where life is famously even less common than it is on Earth. (The audio version of that paragraph is slightly different, recorded before I realised that I had made a mistake on the mass of fungi, and that you have to multiply Carbon biomass by 2 to get the total – neither of these errors affect the argument I am making . . . ) The point I’m making is that life is really really rare. And why is that? Because it costs a lot to keep life on a macro scale running counter to the second law of thermodynamics. Mother nature stopped going out of her way to support me last time I passed on a viable gamete. Like it or not, I’m in Randy Nesse’s company here. And I’m happy to state that I am very comfortable with the situation. But I’m still interested in the mechanism. I think the best way of looking at it is a mixture of damage and tattoos. Yes, a new cell replaces an old one on average every seven years in my body. Some more slowly. And interestingly some of the slowest are heart and brain cells which perhaps says something about the continuity of life. Surprisingly then perhaps every cell in my skeleton is renewed more often. As often as every ten years, skin cells are replaced faster than that. So why do I still have the tattoo I got a quarter of a century ago?  Here’s what happens there. The artist squirted a foreign substance into my skin. Now the skin is three layers deep. The outer layer wears off pretty soon, the bottom inner layer gets flushed through regularly with blood and other body fluids and so the tattoo is only left in the middle layer. My immune system in the form of macrophages (https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-tattoos-last-forever-if-skin-constantly-sheds.html) immediately got to work in that middle layer to attack the tattooist’s ink. They swallowed the ink particles, isolating them in little quarantine bags called vacuoles. But ink is an inert chemical. My defence system couldn’t destroy it, and so the ink just remained encapsulated inside these vacuoles. Now those macrophages don’t live forever, and when they died, they disintegrated leaving the ink particles behind, again to be recognised as a potential threat, and swallowed up again by the new incoming macrophages. So far as I was concerned, my skin renewed and my tattoo stayed. So I guess that’s the way it works. My skin gets a bit damaged, dried out, tattooed, tanned, whatever, and cell by cell it dies. The new replacement cell doesn’t come in and say ‘hmm let’s spend a load of energy recreating what this one was like seven years ago.’ It just fits in with the local culture. Why wouldn’t it? So that’s as good as you’ll get from me on the mechanism. What about the mechanism of human culture? Roger Daltrey’s song was called My Generation. It was my generation too and we (not me obviously – I was too busy being sensible) moved the planet forward while simultaneously messing it up. That was done by reacting against the generation before. As revolutions go, ours was a gentle one and a positive one. And now it’s high time for a new generation to react against us, while building on the progress we made and clearing up the mess we left behind. Mother Nature doesn’t care about us, but Greta Thunberg cares about Mother Nature and I’ll drink to that. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

8. 

   6 Mar 2024

   Perception

   Quite a simple subject today, but like all this stuff, it’s a bit more interesting when you zoom in a bit. How do we see? Well, as everyone knows, eyes are like cameras. There is a lens at the front that focuses an upside down image on your retina, just like the film or CCD at the back of a camera. Obvious right? God or evolution designed it, humans copied it. Problem solved. That’s how we see. But all that your eyes actually do is they put a flat image into your head of the light that is reflected from objects in the real world. Now that’s a pretty clever trick, and it is complicated enough to have been cited as a proof of intelligent design and therefore the existence of God. That was before archaeology showed just how the eye actually has evolved from light sensitive cells, not once but numerous times with different types of eyes. Not only that, but at least twice eyes like ours have evolved with convergent results. Cephalopoda (that’s squids and octopuses to you and me) have eyes almost identical to mammalian eyes geometrically, but different enough structurally to show that we don’t share a common eye-enabled ancestor. In fact as scientists look at the evolution of the eye, they discover that the earliest type of light sensitive perception evolved before the first brain. Think about it; a brain wouldn’t have had much to do unless it had some means of understanding the environment. So it makes sense that it needed eyes, or ears or some input device, and keyboards definitely weren’t around at that time. From then on, like the partnership between dogs and humans, it seems that eyes and brains evolved together, each influencing and encouraging the development of the other. What happens to that little upside down picture that has been cast by your lens onto the retina anyway?  Presumably, because the image on your retina is upside down, your optic nerve includes a 180 degree twist?  But where does it go after that? Does it lead to a little screen inside your head where mini-you is looking at it to tell the brain what’s going on? Well surprisingly, it doesn’t work like that at all. After splitting up so both eyes are messaging both halves of your brain, the other end of the optic nerve fans out, leading to all sorts of places. So let’s look at an infant. All those colours and shadows in three dimensions are carefully focussed into a little picture, which is then sent out to lots of different places in our little friend’s head to be made sense of.  By the time we are old enough to write and read stuff like this, the process of understanding the world we live in is so familiar with us that it seems it must always have felt like this. But actually it takes us humans months before we learn how to interpret that information, and understand that it represents the world. There is a great little experiment that was done by Held and Hein (https://www.simplypsychology.org/held-and-hein-1963.html) in the early 1960s. I guess it would be undoable now, but I don’t think I’m being cruelly exploitative to the participating kittens by referring to it here 60 years later. Two infant fluffballs opened their little eyes for the first time to discover that they were suspended in baskets from a rod. This horizontal rod was pivoted in the middle and there were systems of pulleys and chains arranged so that each of the kittens saw exactly the same things in front of their eyes. Imaginatively in the age of op art, they were given black and white lines to look at. I would have chosen other stuff like balls of string and mice, but whatever. One of the kittens’ legs poked out through the bottom of its cradle and so it was able to move about. It could walk around clockwise or anticlockwise around the central pivot. It could also turn on its own axis and move towards and away from the centre point as well as crouch down and stretch up while seeing its surroundings. The other kitten’s basket was driven by gears and stuff so it was subject to an identical set of visual stimuli and moved about in exactly the same way, but this second kitten’s legs were kept within its cradle so it had no way of relating what it saw with what it did.  And after six weeks, our scientists were able to establish that the second kitten remained effectively blind while the first had been learning to see and explore. This isn’t really so surprising. Thirteen years earlier, the Austrian researcher Theodor Erismann had put inverting goggles on his assistant Ivo Kohler to turn everything he saw upside down. Kohler first of all stumbled about comically, but in less than two weeks he was able to ride a bicycle.  Not only that, but you can watch the original video-documented experiment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKUVpBJalNQ) on Youtube today. Within a couple of weeks Kohler was perceiving the world as it is. See – I have swapped the word see for perceive. Was he seeing it as it was?  Well that depends on definitions I suppose. So although it feels natural to us that the world is as we see it, what we actually have is a way of using the fact that light conveniently travels in straight lines to give us enough information to make a data matrix. This is sufficient for us to decode and use in our interactions with our environment. We end up with the feeling that we know what the world looks like but we don’t really. Colour for example is an interpretation we make of the way certain types of energy transmission bounce off certain chemicals.  Colour doesn’t exist ‘out there’ It only exists by the interactions between the world and our perception. What about the physical geometry of the world, if not its colour?  Well, like the kittens, that is something that we can test in other ways. We compare our real world experience of other senses and our motion with what we see, so we can be pretty sure that if we see a brick wall we shouldn’t drive into it whatever colour it may or may not be. Let’s look at the geometry of the world at a more detailed level. If we see images of textures that look like kitten fur we know that the feeling will be soft; whereas things that glow may be too hot to touch. The point being that we know this not because we are given a hard wired index of ‘fur’ = ‘soft’ and ‘glowing’ = ‘hot’ at birth, but because we learn these things as we go along, just as the kittens learned (or didn’t) that moving their cute little paws in a certain way carried them towards those delightful black lines. So what about bats; how does that work? Well we learn to perceive the real world by interpreting the light that comes to us having been reflected from its surfaces.  Maybe sunlight, maybe artificial light. But the point is that the light that bounces off what we are looking at (or maybe is refracted through it, same difference for the point I’m making) comes from something outside of us.  That doesn’t work in caves or on dark nights. What is good about light as a way of picking up information is that it travels in straight lines. This means that we learn to do what you might call empirical triangulation. So we can work out where stuff is. We can’t do that with sound because as we know, sound wraps its way around obstacles and we can hear birdsong through the window. But actually that’s not really because light is light and sound is sound, it’s more to do with wavelength. Visible light travels in waves about 500 nanometres long, that’s half of a thousandth of a millimetre, or a hundredth of the thickness of a single strand of kitten fur. So we can use light to recognise fur because those waves don’t wash around stuff that is so much bigger than they are. On the other hand a sound wave, say middle C has a wavelength of about 1.3 metres and the A at the bottom of the piano, about 12 metres, so those audible sounds are easily able to wrap around obstacles and get to our ears. The lower the pitch, the more they find their way around and through stuff, which is why you can hear the bass so clearly from that hot hatch going down the high street. Now, we might hear a fly buzzing, but we couldn’t possibly use that sound to work out where it is, at least not accurately enough to catch it. Light is much better than that. But if you’re a bat in a dark cave, you don’t have light. Meanwhile sound that is audible to humans is no good for measuring any geometry with a resolution smaller than a block the size of a car. So if you’re a bat, what you do is you make your own waves, and send (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-bats-echolocate-an/) them out and check the echoes. For that, you want your waves to be as short as you can make them. So bats make noise pulses with a wavelength about 3mm long and then compare the echo with the source to calculate distance and direction. Now 3mm is not as good as sunlight, but it’s short enough to bounce off an insect, and that’s all the bat needs. So how do bats do all that maths? Of course they don’t. Just as kittens don’t do acceleration calculations when they pounce on mice. It’s all stuff that is learned by the animal who needs it. The ‘less intelligent’ the animal the more it is hard wired, the more intelligent it is (and for ‘more intelligent’ you can read ‘more incapable at birth’) the less is hardwired and more is learned. Bat’s don’t bump into things, unless they are chasing them, and they can fly a whole lot better than humans. So it’s pretty clear that a bat’s perception of the geometry of the world in extremely fast real time is as good for it, as ours is for us. And what of the next era of intelligent life on this planet? How does artificial intelligence learn to see? Well, the short answer is, it learns. When you tell the Captcha robot that a certain picture contains a traffic light, you think you are passing a test to prove to a robot that you aren’t one? No, not really. If this robot could already tell what a traffic light was, and what wasn’t, then we could safely assume that the robot punter trying to get through the Captcha test could also tell. No, what we are doing when we do those tests is we are teaching the AI behind Captcha what traffic lights look like in the real world. That information is sold to the self-driving automobile industry. Did you ever see what websites look like before your browser interprets them? They are files of text. These contain somewhere between twice and ten times as much gobbledygook markup and stylesheet characters as the visible text you see displayed on the screen. Markup is what the ‘m’ in ‘html’ stands for, and this code comprises interminable lists of short jumbles of letters and punctuation marks that tell the browser how to interpret and display the page in desktop and mobile screens. It also describes what will happen when you scroll it, click it, or whatever. If you look at a chunk of source code for a web page it’s difficult to see what’s going on. So imagine that you ask your favourite AI chatbot to find you all the information about whatever it is you want to know about. It has to wade  through all of this stuff to find the content for you. But how else could it do that?  Just as you don’t have a little person in your head looking at a screen at the far end of your optic nerve, large language models don’t have their own mini-me looking at browser screens to navigate through web pages. Or do they? Well they’re starting to. Some AI multi-modal models have been tasked with finding information both by using computer vision to read the image that the browser creates alongside the direct analysis of html source code. And we are getting to the stage where it can actually be quicker for the AI to look at the page image rather than search through the code. I suppose that’s not so surprising, when you think that webpages are made to be read by animals with eyes and hands rather than by whatever kind of animal it is who likes reading digital source code, but I still find it a bit weird. It’s just a question of how we, bats, and bots, each learn to perceive the environment in our respective caves and what use we make of all the information. I have a feeling though that when we start giving intelligent computer models more control over what they are actually doing themselves. Then just like those kittens, that’s when they will really start learning what it means to live on this remarkable planet. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

9. 

   29 Feb 2024

   Padding

   I found a little book entitled Sand and Foam in our house when I was maybe 16 and as I leafed through its pages of verse, one of the lines jumped out at me because I realised immediately that the Beatles had misquoted, or maybe I should say ‘been inspired by’ it in John Lennon’s song addressed to his late mother Julia on the White Album. Khalil Gibran’s 1926 original reads “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so the other half may reach you.” It didn’t make any more sense to me at that time than the slightly different lyric of John Lennon’s dirge. I was all about economy of effort back then. I recall we were given a task in school to describe the chairs that we were sitting on in sufficient detail that they could have been re-ordered – an exercise in writing that I later discovered was called specification – and I put my pen down having written Grey plastic shell schoolchair on black tubular steel legs with rubber feet. While everyone else was writing half a page or so. The master picked up my paper and said something like, ‘James’ natural penchant for brevity has surprisingly hit the mark for once.’ So it didn’t make sense to me to imagine that anyone would ever bother wasting words, or that if they did so, then it might actually improve their message. In fact as I look back, I’m surprised I read any of Gibran’s lines in that little book at all. As a child I would always skip any verse I had found in a book (Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh). And at the age I was when I found that book, I would have run a mile from anything that rhymed unless it was set to rock music. A few years on, and when we were taught to draw at my School of Architecture, the tutor explained that anything other than the minimum of black line on white paper to describe what was to be built was ‘noise.’ Yes I could relate to that. Our drawing pens were the weirdest arrangement of precision-engineered plastic and steel with a strange little removable sleeve enclosing a spiral airway that was destined to either flood with indian ink, leaving blots, on the paper or else to clog up and produce no mark at all. Stencilling or hand lettering annotations on those drawings with those temperamental Rotring pens was even worse, so again there was even more incentive to minimise – lines and words both. Now I look back on those days and my feelings on brevity and about poetry especially are very different.  I now understand the concept of the ‘meaningless half’ very well, but before I go there, I will take time out here to make a very sincere tribute to brevity for arts sake as opposed to brevity for the sake of the lazy schoolboy on his plastic chair. I love the economy of line drawings especially. Quentin Blake and Bill Watterson never wasted a single line between them. And I really admire the skill of advertising copywriters who can get so much meaning into so few words – ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ and ‘Genius’ were two marvellous pieces of minimalist advertising copy from the early 1970s. The first one used a non-existent but plausible German phrase to ring more bells than a thousand descriptive words could ever have done in the minds of the potential English car buyer. The phrase reminded us that the Germans could make better cars than us; that there was no point in clinging onto post-war prejudice (very much still a thing in the seventies) and sentimental attachment to our poor old automotive industry (- almost not a thing any more). It was time to face facts and get ourselves an Audi which was technologically superior and actually drove much better too. Similarly the single word, ‘Genius’ shone a spotlight on the brilliance of the classic gold harp logo on its perfect black and solid white glassful. It raised the humble pint of Guinness extra stout to the status of all those foreign and Scottish drinks about which books and books of b******t were written, and bought by the British public at the time. Both of these were beautiful examples of high art in the new commercial age. Copywriting, Poetry or song lyrics can be so economical because they make use of the culture that the artist and the punter share to communicate much more than what is said. And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon. With just those few words we know that the owl and pussycat had discovered that perfect ageless love. Why? Because so many other authors had previously pumped those concepts of dance and hand holding and island seashores and moonlight so full of romantic significance, that Edward Lear just had to mention them in verse to pull the heartstrings of the reader over the horizon and into the sunset. Yes, there is something brilliant that pops out of inspired artistic brevity. Haha  – and of course I could prick that bubble by talking about mathematical or physical formulas here too – just a short string of letters and numbers to represent pages of discussion on planetary orbits, curved space and rolling tides. But I’ll spare you the detail. I think you get the idea. Instead I’ll jump back to the Owl and The Pussycat and Khalil Gibran They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon. They danced by the light of the moon.  Hmm more than 50% meaningless padding there. Songs not only pad out the lyrics with repetition and dooby dooby doos, they also demand that the voice, much more often than not, is singing concurrently with other noises. My drawing tutor had described anything but black on white as noise, and of course he was referring to the static noise with which any kind of broadcast or recorded sound was accompanied in the pre-digital era. But although the band or orchestra’s accompaniment may be beautiful, it is still going on in parallel. It is still competing against the singer’s voice for the same pressure waves rattling around through the ossicles in our ears. Not only can we untangle all those multiple simultaneous notes and chords and voices, but they actually intensify the experience, and the message of the song. Or look at the poem,  Jabberwocky. Hardly half of the words in that one are even real words – how is that for distractive noise? And yet from it we can still understand the epic tale of heroism, the weapon’s fine craftsmanship, and the hero’s strength of both body and mind in conflict – set against fearsome monsters in an environment of dark warnings, joyous homecomings and the warmth of a father’s embrace. But these are all examples of creative culture, and what is missing or obscured in them is left out or hidden deliberately because the gaps in the words make space in the mind of the receiving party for imagination to create a richer experience than would have been filled with more description. As Alistair Cooke allegedly once said, “I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.” Gaps in descriptive flow, artfully used, allow our imaginations to fill space with something richer than could be filled by the artist. “In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.” so said Ira Glass. So silence on radio is like the white space in the graphic design of a website, a glossy magazine or a coffee table book. These media all use other ways of deliberately adding noise or reducing the contrast of black and white. There was a fashion a decade or so ago for putting a copy of a logo on a letterhead or the side of a lorry so big that it overlapped the edges and half its area was lost. These oversized extra logos were always of a very low contrast. Again the design deliberately added inessential repetition and noise, and part of the thing was missing beyond the edges. But again this gave a touch of class by cultural reference, in this case the suggestion is of watermarks and quality. A quality that is at once both ephemeral and also even larger than the page (or the vehicle) which is carrying it. But what about that simple transmission of information rather than art or design, and the meaningless ‘half’ referred to by Gibran’s verse? That doesn’t really fit into any of those types of artful use of noise, white space or low contrast. To maintain one’s licence to practise in many professions, there is a requirement for CPD – continuing professional development. I used to go to a lot of these events and I thought if I came away from the hour with one solid takeaway of learning, then it was a good one. I remember that one of those nuggets – formed of a couple of bullet points which actually came from a seminar whose title was Assertiveness Training for Women – formed the backbone of every professional report I wrote for the next two decades, and I still preach it today to anyone who will listen. Now the question is, if I had just read that soundbite of wisdom in isolation, would it have stuck? Or did I need to waste any number of hours both driving to and from those events and sitting in them for it to sink in? Here is an extract from a typical blog post of a couple of years ago, highly rated by Google. I don’t care much for understanding SEO or search engine optimisation, but I know people who do. ‘Whether you’re a first-time camper or an experienced outdoorsman, choosing the right tent is important to have a comfortable camping trip. When choosing a tent, there are many factors to consider. First, you must decide what type of tent best suits your needs. For example, if you’re planning on backpacking, an ultralightweight tent that’s easy to carry would be a perfect choice. Alternatively, weight and size may not be as big of an issue if you’re car camping. Depending on the type of camping, you will choose a different type of tent.’ Frankly I have to say that it hurts me even to copy paste that drivel. Now I happen to know that that text is part of a 3,000 word blog post, written by a professional content writer, having been given a brief to write on a subject which was trending at the time. He was required to produce exactly that volume, which was also run through a grammar checker, and an SEO service to optimise the number and choice of searchable keywords contained within the text. Neither too few nor too many of each key word. So by the time it hit your screen it had been optimised for searchability, and therefore for advertising revenue. Now if 16 year old me or even 66 year old me had written that article, I would have condensed it into a table of comparative information that would perhaps have about 10% or 15% of the volume. The result? No one would visit the website and no one would click on my affiliate links and no one would pay me advertising revenue. Ever wonder why the recipes you look up on the web always have a load of drivel before you get to the list of ingredients? That is both to pad out the volume (check) and to let Google know that you not only visited the page but then bothered to scroll down (check). Now I’m not bitter about this. No really not. Remember, apart from those SEO tricks of the trade, Google’s highest ratings are awarded to sites that get lots of visitors, so the Google algorithm was learning what people liked, and then encouraging more of the same in a kind of spiral of success breeding success.  What does it matter whether it makes my eyes bleed? It’s what people wanted. Or did they? Now a few years have passed, and if I need a piece of information, it’s a toss up between looking it up on Google or asking an AI app to write me a short report and give me the links for its sources.  Pretty soon it won’t even be a toss up any more. The LLM already wins hands down. It writes me a nice concise report on what I need to know, and usually in better English than that prolix padded piece on tents. Now sometimes it does give me a piece of worthless fluff, for example when I asked it to compare two engine options in a second hand car I was about to buy, but all that meant was that the information I needed wasn’t really out there, so I’d better talk to a mechanic. So the LLM was still doing its stuff as well if not better than a search engine. So maybe padding for paddings sake will ebb again from the internet. And we will get  back to the happy medium of just the right amount of noise to allow us to absorb the nuggets. Probably a lower percentage of meat to gravy than Gibran’s half, but still a better ratio than it was a few years ago. There is a thing called Blinkist. It’s a book-summarising subscription service. I was chatting to Ania the other day as it happens, (Ania is my wife and the SEO expert I mentioned before, but I am glad to say not the authority on Tents) and she mentioned that she has a Blinkist subscription and could share it with me because it gives access for two people. I thought that sounded like a good idea and then she told me that, although she uses it all the time, she finds that not much sticks. Whereas if she listens to a whole audiobook (admittedly probably at double speed) then by the time she has finished it, she is in a position to take more good sense from it. I can identify with that and realise I’m the same. Perhaps we need the padding to give us the time to absorb the spice. Perhaps we are so well adapted by ancient evolution to searching for tigers in bushes, that if there aren’t bushes we don’t recognise the tigers. Perhaps half of what I say really is meaningless. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

10. 

    22 Feb 2024

    Meta

    Gotta love it that kids are so fast these days. Yes, I know we are supposed to grumble that they have the minds of goldfish, stir-fried in their x-boxes and microwaved by their smartphones. But let’s face it, kids are programmed to be inquisitive and to learn and to be creative and to laugh. In a nutshell that means they are naturally sharper, and can be smarter than the rest of us. And on top of that, this is the age of the kid.  For most of civilised history, the denizens of childhood have been suppressed as inconveniences without knowledge or experience. Childhood then, was not much more than a waiting period for the respectability that was supposed to be delivered on the 21st birthday. Now we can choose to realise how lucky we are. We live in perhaps the first age where it isn’t considered crazyfringe to respect what kids have to offer. I mean really respect it, not just love it for its cuteness. And if youngsters do have shorter attention spans, then that means they might actually get wherever they are going a bit faster than the rest of us. Take the fourth wall for instance. Ancient Greek theatre didn’t trust either its writers or its audience to communicate between them. And so they typically engaged a ‘chorus’ to explain the dramatic action to the audience. Shakespeare had advanced a bit after two thousand years so he often not only had a couple of storylines going on at once but also maybe a narrator, hovering between the audience and the action on the stage. At the start of Henry V for example the introducing narrator, (named Chorus – a coincidence? I think not.) Refers to the theatre itself, both physically and functionally, and the play specifically. He asks the audience to suspend disbelief sufficiently to image battlefields and palaces within the tiny “cockpit” of a theatre.  But having a guy on stage who mentioned that he’s on a stage doesn’t break the fourth wall. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox, he’s just this guy, you know? I’m gonna skip over the 20th century now. Why? Because I wrote three paragraphs about it and they were turgid, off topic and boring. So I erased them. Ahhh!  If you want to know about the 20th century, then read John Higgs (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5116511374). That guy is brilliant. Now where was I? Yes the fourth wall. Now – because I’m a wise old man and you may perhaps not be I’m going to patronise you and assume that you need me to explain. The stage of an old fashioned theatre has a back, a couple of sides and a front. These four sidey things all have theartre-ish names, but that’s irrelevant. If we are looking at a play on that stage, then it is as if we are seeing the action through an invisible wall at the front of the stage into the scene within. Invisible to us, but apparently solid to the characters on the other side. If we are watching a sitcom on the TV then the TV screen is the equivalent of that same thing. That is the non-existent fourth wall of the dramatic scene through which we are looking. It was specifically named and attention was drawn to it to by the enlightened French philosopher Denis Diderot (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Denis-Diderot), who stated in 1758 that by ignoring the audience, performers could better imitate reality. And so it was that this convention was codified and made explicit. A convention that everyone until the latter 20th century seemed happy to live with, allowing the audience to observe the rather tame inuendoes of Brian Rix or the imagined battlefields of Shakespeare’s ‘vasty fields of France’ So when Shakespeare’s Chorus turns up at the beginning of Henry V, he inhabits the universe of the audience and talks about the play is if conversing with them. During his speech though, the fourth wall is sitting there in its perfect non existence, and its subtle one-way visibility is assumed, respected and unbroken.  Young Prince Hal doesn’t ask Chorus who he was talking to.  So it took centuries and centuries before the self aware self referential late 20th century thought it might be amusing to disrespect that fourth wall by having characters on stage or in a film acknowledging the existence of the audience. Now as soon as they do that, they are opening up a can of worms of a completely different category from the convention of drama. Because the moment the actors (or rather their characters) acknowledge the audience, they are also acknowledging the fact that they are in an universe-within-a-universe. The artificial universe of the drama exists within and as a subset of the real universe in which the theatre is located on a certain street. Yes it took adults all the time from Ancient Greece to the late 20th century to discover that this idea has creative potential, skipping several golden ages of drama on the way. Even as late as 1990, I remember feeling almost uncomfortable as Francis Urquart addressed me through the camera and TV screen in House of Cards. But I’m an adult –  any kid who has been to pantomime or who has ever shouted ’Behind you, Mr Punch!’ gets it. They get the weirdness of it, and when they read Captain Underpants, they understand exactly why it is that when when Harold orders everyone to stop following orders, it’s even more funny when George tops the gag with ‘We’ve already used that joke in this book.’ Yes, there is actually a fandom page (https://captainunderpants.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Fourth_Wall_Breaks_in_Captain_Underpants#articleComments) that lists every time the fourth wall is broken in the Captain Underpants books! I know that I jumped from theatre to books there, but the implication is the same. When the fourth wall is broken then characters in fiction acknowledge the existence of an enclosing ‘real’ universe which contains the ‘fictional’ universe that they inhabit. Fictional for whom? Real for whom? So yes, eight year old kids get that stuff that it took adults two and a half thousand years to invent. I’m sorry! However much I tried through three complete redrafts and any number of edits, I couldn’t compress that digression about childhood any more, so it will just have to stay put. Now at last having got that out of the way, I can talk about meta. Before Mark Zuckerberg took all those millions off his share value by choosing it as the new brand name for Facebook, we already had words such as meta-data meta-language and meta-analysis. So meta, with its data describing data, its language classifying language and its studies analysing studies is a bit of a fourth wall thing.  Break the fourth wall and instantly you open the possibility of one universe inside another. But of course it doesn’t stop there. Meta-analysis, for example, as well as analysing lots of previously published tomes of field research may, also collect other meta analyses. In fact, once you have two levels of looking at something, you always have the possibility of an infinite number of levels – as anyone who has played with two mirrors can tell you.  The characters in a play seemed to have their own self-awareness and lives and cares and history two minutes ago. But now they acknowledge the existence of me and my meta (to them) universe. Not only do I gasp or laugh. I am drawn to postulate about the existence of a meta universe outside the one I know. And suddenly – zzzzip we have an infinite onion-layered universe of universes all nested inside each other. The way that I hear this possibility most commonly discussed is when people suggest that perhaps we live in a digital simulation, and if so, then is that simulation inside another one? Etcetera. Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a convincing argument (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmcrG7ZZKUc)that if  there are two layers it is statistically almost certain that there are many more than two. So the word meta immediately conjures infinite possibilities outside and bigger than our own awareness. But does it go the other way, downstream?  No not really, not yet. Captain Von Trapp’s kids put on a musical puppet play within the movie Sound of Music but that doesn’t imply that the characters played by the puppets have lives of their own as soon as the show finished.  After they are done singing the Lonely Goatherd, no one believes that these bits of wood will wait in their hamper in the style of Buzz Lightyear and write puppet shows of their own. Even if they did, then it stops there. There is a set of automatic brakes on any infinite regress downstream, because the characters in a drama don’t have any initiative after the author’s pen goes down on the desk. However I did say ‘not yet.’  What I meant by that, is we haven’t made computers who are bright enough to invent simulations within which the simulations can create simulations. Not yet. Interestingly deGrasse Tyson considers this too, and concludes that it probably means that we aren’t in a simulation at all. There is a much more close to-home thing about meta-ness that I have realised as I have been listening to more podcasts and radio. One of the reasons I enjoy other people’s conversations so much is that the people who make them – the good ones anyway – are just so good at having discussions. Why is that? Now we all know the standard rules about this. A good interviewer asks fresh questions . . . then shuts up while the guest is answering . . . then builds on what has been said, perhaps with a bit of nuance or humour . . . and may invite the guest to develop the theme too. But there is almost always something else going on in parallel. A bit of meta-stuff surrounding the subject of the discussion, and that is to do with personality. At the basic level what interviewers and their guests are talking about is . . . whatever they are talking about. That is notionally the focus of interest to the listeneners or viewers, and upon which one or both of the conversants is probably an expert. But at the meta-level, there is also the fascination that the audience has with the fact that it is Steven Fry sitting on Graham Norton’s couch and although he may be talking about Harry Potter – we the audience are more interested in what he’s saying because we love Steven Fry and we love Graham Norton. The real skill of an excellent chat show host is just to keep that meta envelope hovering at the right orbit outside the subject of the basic discussion. The focus shifts subtly to and fro between the object of discourse and the personality of the guest. The atmosphere can collapse if the host is too sycophantic, or it can explode if a personal nerve is touched. You can see examples of these on YouTube and they are either cringingly embarrassing or hilariously funny depending on whether you love or hate the characters involved. My own favourite remains the pre-YouTube Robin Day/John Nott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Day#:~:text=In%20October%201982,many%20years%27%20experience%3F%22) walkout of 1982. In fact ‘meta’ is always a danger zone in conversation. We all know from personal experience that when a private discussion turns from ‘whatever-it’s-about’ to ‘why-you-just-said-that’ Then we are already on eggshells. But let’s get off the subject of arguments and onto cold logic. Any kind of meta statement is a potential minefield. Now there is nothing in my larynx or my brain or my vocabulary or my use of grammar that stops me from saying ‘This sentence is a lie’ but it can still cause my head to explode if I try to make sense of it. Until of course I realise that it’s a self-referential statement that confuses the meta level with the base level and so it’s quintessentially buggered from the outset. Philosophers are rightly wary of the risks of what they call infinite regress in semantic structures, and meta-anything is just begging to be sucked  into that vortex. But after all this and before I disappear up my own backside in a puff of logic. I wondered why Zuckerberg had chosen the word meta to rename facebook. Did he know something we don’t about our existence in a simulation, or has he invented the means to do onion layers downward as well as up? Nothing so exciting it emerges. Meta is apparently named after the ‘metaverse’, and that doesn’t mean a universe of nested universes, but was itself taken from an earlier simpler branch of meta’s etymology meaning simply ‘beyond’ rather than the later meaning of self-referential. According to Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-the-metaverse/)the metaverse is more or less the same as cyberspace, but leaning towards virtual and augmented realities. So Zuckerberg’s ‘meta’ is apparently more like a ‘super’ or a ‘hyper’ type of wow word than anything specific, and apparently limited to any electronic simulations that we can create downstream from us, rather than the possibility of upstream simulations containing us. Of course our nascent AI may one day develop and use this technology to create a mega simulated metaverse, and then invite us dear humans to experience the infinite pleasure of uploading ourselves to it through our friendly neuralinks. Enjoy your messy organic life while you have it, Earthlings. The future meta one will certainly be even messier . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

11. 

    14 Feb 2024

    Tribe

    I was listening last night to Alex O’Connor interviewing Jason Brennan (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/53-jason-brennan-the-case-against-democracy/id1458675168?i=1000643276072) about the problems with democracy. It struck me that most of what he was talking about was not about democracy at all, but tribalism. We worship the idea of democracy and tend to discuss it from a circular idealised argument rather than trying to examine whether or not it actually delivers better results in an imperfect world.  I lived for several years in each in three nations which didn’t even pretend to be democracies  – Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Oman. All of these nations were for me completely happy and satisfactory places to live, and in all three places I found the natives to be generally more affable with me as an incomer than in many of the democracies where I have lived and visited. OK then, I admit it – Kazakhstan did make the pretence of having democracy; the electorate had queued in minus 50 degrees to return Nazarbaev with a majority of 97.5% even though there was no opposition. On the subject of Nazarbaev, who at last seems to have been displaced, Kazakhstan went from keeping the biggest stockpile of USSR nuclear weapons to 100% nuclear weapon free within four years of independence on the whim of this autocrat who embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds. Meanwhile the democratic West was spending hundreds of times that sum every year in building nuclear armaments and polluting their own ecology with the waste products of doing so. Who am I to judge the rights and wrongs of the leaders of the world? I would only observe that these non-democracies were all places where any native I spoke to had complete, often outspoken, faith in their leaders. That also isn’t something you get in democracies. Maybe it was just because those places don’t have a free press? My jury is still out on that general subject. Brennan gave the example of the US under Donald Trump. He mentioned that people tend to elect populists, and populists turn out to become very much their own men, but they often still manage to retain the loyalty of their electorate. So prior to 2016, the typical American Republican was more pro-free trade and anti-Russia than the typical Democrat. Trump appealed to the popular ideal of the strong leader who promised to make America great again. And he reversed both those concepts, Russia and North Korea were now good potential partners (against China) so long as Trump was at the helm to treat them tough, and free trade with foreigners was a silly idea for wusses. Now the point Brennan was making was that researchers have actually asked  Republican voters why they reversed their personal policy. They don’t say what you might expect ‘Yes I was convinced by Mr Trump’s really good arguments sufficienty to change my mind.’ What they actually do is they deny that they have changed their mind. Then they follow that by whatever doublespeak makes sense of the statement. So from that, we have the idea that democratic politics doesn’t really work in the way that we presume it does. We assume that people vote rationally, or perhaps even tactically, to promote their ideals. On the contrary, Brennan postulates that most people don’t have any ideals. He says that they vote with their tribe because that gives them social approval. I don’t think he used the word tribe in the podcast, but he did make several compelling arguments to demonstrate his thesis. Anyway, I want to pick up that idea of tribe. I’m getting the idea that humans are deeply tribal. If that’s stating the obvious, I mean like really really deeply. I’m also getting the idea that this is the reason why I have never felt as if I belonged anywhere. Or maybe it’s the other way around. People may say ‘I am a rational thinker and I vote for this party because they align with my values’  but the way they vote is ‘I am loyal to my tribe and I so I believe what they believe.’ Brennan reminded us that a football team supporter who argues for a player’s place in the team despite a bad mistake may be applauded by his friends for his great loyalty. In an equivalent case a voter may get more social benefit by backing bad policies rather than good ones. A few weeks earlier, Alex had mentioned football in his talk with Ben Thomas who goes by the name of Sisyphus 55. I wrote about that discussion (https://from123to.xyz/essays/meaning/) at the time, but a digression during that podcast is more relevant to this one. Alex described a thought experiment that I found compelling. Here is my paraphrase: People (ok male people mostly) tend to be deeply loyal to a sports team. In the UK that means football (aka soccer.) A modern football team will typically have been named after a British town. It can buy and sell players most of whom at any one moment will not live in that town. It can also hire and fire its Spanish, Norwegian, German, Argentinian, Portuguese or Chilean manager and hire a new one. So let’s take that to the extreme and imagine the following: At half time in one particular match the blue team sells all its players to the red team and vice versa, and they immediately swap shirts and sides. Now – who would the crowds support for the second half of the match? I loved this question, partly because it blew my mind, and partly out of mischief, because it seemed to be pretty irrelevant to the rest of the episode, but Alex, bless him, carried on more or less in soliloquy. He reflected rhetorically whether fans were loyal to the colour of the shirt, the manager, the name of the team or the group of players, And just at the moment when I was thinking, ‘yes that’s messed up, it’s completely impossible to calculate,’ (Just pause a moment – what do you think?) Out of nowhere, Alex had the insight to realise that the most likely realistic answer is none of those things.  People in a football crowd are loyal to the crowd. The identity of ‘Liverpool’ for supporter Joe is actually Joe’s dad and his brother and the boys at the pub. Just listen when they scream abuse at one of the players or the manager of their own team. Joe and his mates aren’t angry because that person made one bad call in an otherwise successful career (who doesn’t?) but because at that moment he had failed to justify the faith of Joe and his tribe. When I went to a new school at the age of nine, I was asked by classmates who I supported. I didn’t understand the question, but it was soon made clear to me that the subject was football and the correct answer would either be Liverpool or United. I chose Liverpool (at first because I liked the Beatles, and then for consistency) even though I had never been to Liverpool or to a football match anywhere or even watched one on TV for more than three minutes. The deception was easy because I didn’t have to engage in any of the remainder of the conversation which would already be crowded out by those who cared very deeply. But the more I think about it, It wasn’t that I was left out of the conversation because I wasn’t passionate about football, it was rather that I didn’t learn about football because I wasn’t interested in making the investment of working on a new hobby in order to make friends. There is a book called I’m OK, you’re OK written in 1967 by one Thomas A Harris. It’s about Transactional Analysis. This is a branch of Psychotherapy developed by one Eric Berne in the 1960s and I had heard about Berne’s Parent Adult Child model a couple of decades back. But Harris explores this from a slightly different angle. His thesis is that we are all messed up by a common history we all share from infanthood. This is what happens to all of us: the self-same people who nurture us and cuddle us, also punish us and force us by physical or moral power to behave in ways that seem different from the way we would otherwise have behaved.  He develops the argument that the natural status of an infant is therefore believing that our parents, and probably everyone else, knows what they are doing and are ‘OK’ while we are ‘Not OK.’ Our life narrative is then influenced (almost determined) by how we come to terms with that asymmetrical beginning, as time passes. I believe I had quite an unusual upbringing in that neither of my parents transmitted to me the feeling of belonging to any group. I won’t go into why I think this is, other than to observe what is relevant here. Both of them were dedicated believers in many ideas that are unfashionable now, but neither of them succeeded in steering me towards any tribe at all. That was partly because their own tribalism was so deep seated and self-evident that I guess they didn’t realise that it needed selling to me, and partly because I found that their observations on these subjects were so badly argued that I was led to opposite conclusions. I am grateful for that part of my education, because as a result, I have spent a lot of my life making sense of the senseless. I enjoy exercising scepticism – the often uncomfortable experience of seeing both sides of most arguments. I also realise on the downside that this has excluded me from all sorts of tribal activity that might have helped me in other ways. Whereas I might have emerged from my ‘Not OK’ infant status, believing that the answer lay in trying to make logical sense of imponderables, I get the impression that most people avoid the same moments of discomfort by joining tribes. For me the process was quite lonely and it took a long while. Kids do tend to believe a lot of what they are told and whereas I was able to shed white supremacy and fundamental Christianity almost immediately as a child, I was still struggling to clarify the conflict in my head between say, patriotism and racialism several decades later. So the consideration of tribe really is fascinating for me. Religious Tribes, Racial Tribes, Cultural Tribes, National Tribes, Social Class or Caste Tribes, Political Tribes, Gender and Sexual Orientation Tribes. Of course the US and the UK were both thrown into political tribalism in 2016. We all thought that our view of Brexit or Trump were the only morally defensible ones (yes me too) and we were all astonished how gullible the people in the opposing tribe were, and how they (but not we) had been hoodwinked by the brainess but nonetheless bad forces of the social media algorithms sitting in their pockets. Then Ukraine. Then Gaza. Orwell describes in 1984 how the state needs an enemy, but I think it’s deeper than that. Our tribes at every level need enemies. Sometimes our need for enemies and allies at different levels in our nested or intertwining tribes produce logical conflict. At times like that we have no alternative but to go down the pub and put the world to rights with our closest tribesmen. As an architect at the age of forty, I was the fortunate beneficiary of a piece of tribalism that I wasn’t even party to. Our national leader, Mrs Thatcher was on a mission to cut out the dead wood from the UK’s dusty local authority offices – so she reorganised them and encouraged them to bring in bright entrepreneurial spirit from the private sector to show them how business was done. I had coincidentally just left my own professional partnership (for personal not professional reasons) and was welcomed with open arms as the fresh Principal Architect of a new ‘unitary’ local authority where I was put on a bit of a pedestal and praised for my initiative and drive, even though I recall I had precious little idea of what I was doing. Thatcher was a great tribalist, and hence a great divider. She was also a real mover and shaker. Some of what she gave us we might thank her for if our memories were not so short and other stuff seems to have been misdirected. At the time though, you were either for her or against her. It didn’t take social media algorithms to divide the tribes of a nation in the time of the Iron Lady. I look back at history (I’m not a fan of history) and see a tale of growing economies, growing security and technology. All of this, arm in arm with the glowing global prosperity which it created, elevated tribalism to the great and romantic beauty of warfare. At the pinnacle of that art form (Let’s hope the 20th century was the pinnacle of it) any one of us may have been goaded by a white feather, or invited under the beauty of a flag flying at sunset to give our lives for our friends. The other tribe in those days were almost non-human brutes who displayed their cowardice by carrying out often suicidal acts to promote their brand of evil. It was so clear and beautiful then in that great age. Everything is so messy now. As I mentioned recently, I am hard-wired to look for evolutionary answers to everything, and this one isn’t difficult at least at the start. It’s always been a harsh world out there and allies are useful. Though I wonder at what moment in history it was when deaths from opposing human tribes outnumbered deaths caused by those other things which the tribe of any individual protected them from apart from other tribes.  You might think that at that moment (and I bet was a very long time ago) evolution would have softened our love of tribalism, but it doesn’t seem to have done. I wonder why that is? Which open question leads me nicely to my closing statement. There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who can’t fill in the blanks from incomplete information, This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

12. 

    7 Feb 2024

    Romance

    There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving. Stairway to Heaven was released when I was fifteen and I remember agreeing with a school friend that that lyric had a magic that touched our adolescent souls in some intangible way. I guess we had just discovered romance. Just as babies are programmed to learn what all those lights and noises represent, and young children are wired to learn language (and just about everything else that is put in front of them) some magical romance thing kicks in when we attain the age of Romeo and Juliet. Our new carnal chemistry switches on a yearning for the intangible. Just how intangible it was in this case was betrayed by the discussion we had next. Neither of us could remember whether the lyric was west or east. But there was feeling there and spirit and the world was turning and there were mysteries to be longed for beyond the horizon. Yup that song gave us all sorts of touchy-feely stuff that we weren’t getting in class. Back in those days, establishment-approved romance was available in the form of square-jawed American actors with slightly greying temples and dimples in their chins falling for but never quite touching beautiful young women. I’m thinking Roman Holiday here, where Gregory Peck resists the temptation to shaft (both figuratively and literally) a young innocent princess. That movie was already 20 years old by then, but those films from the 50s were still hot currency in the seventies, when White Christmas was still the highest selling record of all time. This was the world where Andy Williams was always smiling when he sang a duet with a starry-eyed perm-haired guest on his TV show. At that time, rock music was still seen as a threat to the establishment and we would never would have thought of Led Zeppelin as representing the word ‘romance’ at all. We were taught about Romance as students of architecture a few years later. At that time everyone other than architects hated tower blocks and concrete. Meanwhile, on the inside of the school of architecture, half our tutors wore sandals, played jazz and sent us on village studies to rural Wales, while the other half preached that structural grids expressed honesty, exposed concrete was beautiful and buildings with facades that looked like graph paper were morally perfect. It was unfortunate that the poor public didn’t understand these truths. Our head of school gave us lectures differentiating between Classic (coded for ‘good’) and Romantic (‘bad’) and extrapolating to the moral justification of his own practice’s rather banal creations.  I remembered that my music teacher of half a dozen years earlier had also differentiated between Classic and Romantic in music, but I had no idea what that was all about. Both were played by orchestras full of violins and you had to know the rules about when to clap and when not to. Romanticism seemed far too subtle a concept to grasp then, and it didn’t resonate any more when it was being used to explain why we should prefer ugly buildings to beautiful ones. And that was the time when I first fell absolutely crazily head over heels in love, but even then, I don’t think I linked the concepts of rococo buildings, rock music and the apple of my eye – or saw any connection between them. My father-in-law-to-be was a gas engineer and I remember discussing with him how two of the room heaters in my family home seemed to be pretty identical, except one had a floral motif stuck onto the flat metal front panel. This was the only embellishment of an otherwise stark 1970’s modern design. ‘Ahh yes.’ he said, ‘That was the one we called the dead bat.’ He described the good natured tension between his team of design engineers and his company’s “appearance designers” (What a wonderful job title that was!) He explained though, that ornamentation like this was often added immediately pre-production by some boardroom mandarin who perhaps decided that the design just “needed a little something.” This imposition would cut very deeply into the sensitivity of the appearance designers, while the engineers just laughed up their sleeves. Whatever the sitcom playing out in the gas-heater company, it is certainly true that a bit of floral decoration sells just about anything. Though maybe not 1970’s gas room heaters; as I look through an image search I can’t find a single one with a dead bat on it. What is it about hearts and flowers that pushes the same button in women of a certain age, that whispy phrases from rock ballad lyrics press in adolescents? I am hardwired to look for evolutionary reasons for everything, and I reckon that romance is an icon for love. We humans need love because our dribbling babies would be so incapable of survival without it. And because childbirth is so terrible. And because our screaming kids need nurturing for a decade or so longer than the thirty seconds that it takes a newborn giraffe to get on its feet and run. I think that love kicks in for obvious survival reasons and boy, that volume is turned up high. It’s massive because it needs to be, and there are all sorts of carnal systems that it affects. Love is warm, our hearts beat, our guts ache, we shiver, our eyes weep, our faces hurt we can’t sleep. More than that, our minds are redirected to find new meaning in everything from flower petals, to the sound of a sigh. While all that stuff is echoing around our minds and bodies, the rest of our human has to maintain the ordinary job of staying alive. And so the bit of our brain that sorts stuff out, puts these things into mental filing cabinets. Our adolescent hormones might manifest first as a crush – with whom we share sunsets or flowers with new significance. Our hearts beat and we blush, and these experiences and feelings are all put in one soon-to-be-overloaded filing drawer together with kissing, dancing and loud music. Then there are all those tensions between the physical acts that we suddenly yearn for, set against the restrictions that our culture and the members of that suddenly-discovered other gender put on our behaviour. It’s brilliant. A firework party kicks off every time the object of our desire walks into the room. And then every time we smell that scent, hear that tune or see that flower, those embers are stirred. All mixed together: the hormones and the experiences and the feelings and the intangibility go into that overloaded filing drawer labelled ‘romance.’ It doesn’t stop there though, because cause and effect are never easy to distinguish. That difficulty is the bane of every study that has looked at anything to do with human behaviour. Those pathways are pretty much all two way streets. Show me her hair and I think of silk, show me a piece of silk and I think of her hair. And don’t we love being manipulated that way? We go to movies for it. Screenplay writing is a finely crafted network of gears and elastic to tug that drawer open at intervals in every film. Don’t get me wrong. Just because I think I understand this logically doesn’t mean I’m immune to it. You’ll find me diving in there with a moist eye and a beating heart at every turn. I’m being manipulated? Hell yeah! Give me more! Mr Movie Director, I love the expertise with which you push those buttons on my neurotransmitters. So my thesis is that romance is the icon representing this overflowing drawer. This is where we  keep all the delicious tools that nature has given us to craft joy from the horror of childbirth. What’s not to love about that? I enjoy reading really slow books where nothing much happens. The best I have read in the past couple of years was Seed to Dust by Marc Hamer. It’s a slow observation of a gardener’s life and his almost non-existent interactions with the lady of the house. It’s beautiful, I’d recommend it to anyone. There is a chapter in that book where the author discusses romance, and truth to tell he is pretty bitter about it. Hamer describes his abusive father weeping over some soppiness, and he embodies this resentment by describing the flower known as the bleeding heart. So that’s the problem. Tools that convert horror to beauty can justify anything. The worse the better. Dire Straits for example sung about how the language of romance can be used to sell war or violent state suppression of worker’s rights with lyrics including, They sing as they march with their flags unfurled and the gleam of spur on the chestnut flank. The emotions of love are the strongest emotions we feel. Stronger perhaps and certainly richer in texture than our hunger for food. Those two-way streets of cause and effect use romance, the icon of love, to sell everything from beautiful craftsmanship to brutal atrocity. Enjoy! Romance is one of the main reasons we are here today. Part of the magic of the world. I just ask that we should do a sanity check though, before we let it persuade us to do anything nasty. Header image: Travis Grossen on Unsplash This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

13. 

    1 Feb 2024

    Energy Gradients, Entropy and Life

    I felt lucky then and I feel lucky about the same thing now. That first time, it was because the maths teacher stood in front of the class and said ‘You are lucky.’ I was the kind of kid who didn’t question the wisdom of teachers; if he was saying it, it must be true. Apparently, ours was the first year in my school to be taught New Maths by enthusiastic teachers using the SMP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Mathematics_Project)books. I took to New Maths like a duck to water. Up to then, I hadn’t been much use at arithmetic, so it was like a fresh breeze to learn about the way that numbers interacted from this whole new perspective: the development of numerical literacy through exploration and understanding. From illustrations in the real world grew logical constructions. From that core, sprouted and blossomed concepts like geometry and algebra and graphs and calculus. Formulas in this environment were a notation for understanding, rather than something to be learnt for their own sake. Maths, and the world described by maths became an Alladin’s cave. Infinite treasured tunnels fortuitously joined up again around the corner in an intricate network; there for the exploration. There was a backlash a few years later, especially in the US, where in 1999, according to Wikipedia, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math)Time Magazine placed New Maths on a list of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century. So I am doubly lucky. I developed a lifelong love of a subject, and my timing was fortuitous. Had I been born a year earlier or a few years later, I could have learnt to hate it and life would have been greyer. I should be grateful to the culture of my school perhaps, because I think this exploratory teaching spilled over into Physics – (though it certainly never made it across the corridor to Chemistry and Biology, which is a pity.)  I remember that in the chapter on Topology, the New Maths book reproduced some illustrations of bones from different species of animals, showing how their structure was essentially the same, but stretched a bit here, compressed there, depending on the structural requirements of the animal’s size and lifestyle. These illustrations were captioned as coming from a source that I made a note of, and a few years later as an Architecture undergraduate, I chanced upon the book in the union bookshop. It went by the catchy handle of On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, abridged by J T Bonner. The book blew my mind, but not because of the idea that related animals have forms mutually stretched about by overlaying and distorting cartesian grids. It was the structures of the tiniest invertebrates that did that for me. Thompson showed that the growth of these molluscs and sponges takes place because the organism works with the laws of physics to lay down material in places that suit it. To put that another way, these little skeletons are the shape that they are, not because of their form following the necessities of evolution, but because of the physics that govern their construction. The two images I recall after almost half a century are drawings of shells and spicules. Many types of molluscs grow by a process where material is laid down on the edge of a doubly curved shell. Because the material is added to the edge of a curved shape, the added layer is a tiny bit bigger each time, and so you get a shape that grows in an exactly self-similar expanding geometry . The obvious case is the logarithmic spiral of a snail shell or a cockle, but actually lots of seashells are constructed the same way, even non spiral ones. I still wonder when I pick up a scallop on the sand how perfectly the little tiny shell of the baby scallop is still visible there. The other picture was of spicules. These little spiky shapes are the skeletal structures of sponges and I recall that Thompson suggested that that the common tetrahedral shape is physically formed by material being precipitated at the junctions of bubbles in foam. I don’t really care whether I got that right or I am inventing the memory, it still shocked me and exploded in my head. Maybe I should check that book lying in my attic but I really don’t want to, the idea is so beautiful. Look at road junctions in the countryside. Not in the city so much. In the city, crossroads are commonplace because of the convenience of rectangular building plots, the density of development and more recently the ubiquitous traffic light. In rural areas you almost never get junctions of more than four roads (unless an extra one has been sucked in by the creation of a roundabout.) Even crossroads are rare. Three-way junctions by far outnumber crossroads (I just checked this and got a ratio in the area where I am staying of about 15:1) Why would that be?  Roads and paths tend to minimise distance, for fairly obvious reasons. But counter-intuitively crossroads always waste it.  Here’s a drawing showing how that works: You need about 22.6cm of string to make a simple diagonal crossroads that joins the opposite corners of an 8 cm  square. But add a short neck in the middle of the diagram and you can drop this total length down to about 21.8 cm. Whatever four points you are joining, it is pretty well always more economical in terms of roadbuilding to make two tee junctions rather than one crossroads. If you have bubbles floating in water, you never get four bubbles in one plane meeting around a point. The moment you force four bubbles together in a square, two opposite ones move together forcing the other two out. The result will be three meeting at a point, never four. The same forces are pulling here; physics tries to minimise the area of the bubble film and your crossroads again becomes a pair of three-ways. Exactly the same as little roads in a rural landscape. In three dimensions, if you press bubbles together you’ll eventually squeeze them into geometric shapes with flattish polygonal faces. Here you will get four meeting at a point. Just as in two dimensions, three lines or shapes meet to maximise economy, so in three dimensions the magic number is four. Imagine two balls next to each other on one layer, say east and west, then you want two in the next row going north and south. So four bubbles stack together in three dimensions. Now squeeze those bubbles together, and at that junction, the bubble walls will meet in a shape which echoes those tetrahedral spicules. But that’s missing the point – it doesn’t echo them: it builds them. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was talking about maths and physics creating those shapes, not just describing them. That’s a vast oversimplification. Look up pictures of spicules and they come in myriad forms that aren’t easily traced to the intersections of bubbles. But the point remains that what these ancient examples of life are doing, is this: They exploit the shapes that the laws of physics provide in the natural (without life) world. They use this to lay down material in ways that are easy or efficient or possible for them to do. It’s one of the mysteries of the world that balls run downhill or roll off shelves. We describe a hillside as a gradient, but the law of physics that makes balls run downhill is so obvious, so universal that, so far as I know it doesn’t even have a name. But it deserves a mention, because it underlies life, and life’s nemesis – entropy. I’ll explain briefly what I’m talking about here, and come back to it later after a bit of a detour. We call that slope a gradient and what the ball is doing is following an energy gradient. So as balls always run down a physical gradient, so things in the physical world always run down an energy gradient. This unnamed law always drives the conversion of potential energy (eg height) into kinetic energy (usually movement.) Everything in the universe so far as we know follows energy gradients in that same direction. When astrophysicists speculate about other planets, they never imagine places where things will jump up onto shelves. Yes but isn’t that just gravity? If you look at planetary orbits without atmospheric friction or electromagnetic fields to slow things down, then this sytem is goverened by nothing but gravity and Newton’s laws. Here the arrow of time is reversible. Orbits are ellipses or parabolas. The entire trajectories of the two objects, say the earth and the moon, are calculable from their masses and velocities at any instant in their history. Both ellipses and parabolas are symmetrical, and if you were to reverse the velocity you would track their history in reverse using exactly the same equations that would predict their futures. That’s all Newton and Galileo there’s no Einstein or Bohr & Planck there. And the implication is that the arrow of time is reversible. So if it’s not gravity that determines which way energy gradients are pulling, then what is it? Newton didn’t have coffee. As my mother would say, ‘Go easy adding that milk, you can always put a bit more, but you can’t take it out.’ She would say the same (only louder) when adding salt to stew. Newton didn’t have steam engines either. It was the analysis of these machines a couple of centuries after Newton’s time that led to the concept of entropy. Come out of orbit and down to earth and stuff doesn’t go on forever, it always slows down, producing the inevitable byproduct of unuseable heat. Those magnificent machines that turned children into slaves, and blackened the sky in rural England only returned a couple of percent of the calorific value of their fuel as power. In 1865, the lost fraction of energy was to be named entropy. And as the concept of wasted heat developed over the next century, people realised that the new science of thermodynamics affects everything and introduces the one-way-street of time. When we add salt to a stew or milk to coffee we are following the same arrow of time that makes all heat engines inefficient. In one case the carefully exploited force of the steam is dissipated in heat and in the other the order of the salt crystal or the simple separation of milk and coffee are dissipated into the mixture. These things are all subject to the laws of thermodynamics. In the latter case the dynamics describes what is going on at molecular level and the thermo- bit means that the coffee is warm. And then it cools, sharing its energy with the room, in even more thermodynamic exchange, increasing entropy farther and so on. So entropy because associated with lukewarm chaos, the loss of organisation. That’s all happening because when the energy gradient has done its work converting height to speed. The ball hits the bottom and it still has kinetic energy and that has to be conserved (this law does have a name.) So the ball bounces about a bit while it converts its gross kinetic energy into internal energy in the form of ricocheting molecules which we call heat. Incidentally if you drop an ice cream and it doesn’t bounce, you might wonder whether the energy of the fall at the moment of splat has warmed it up and melted it, but the numbers don’t work like that. If all of the energy of Niagara Falls were converted to heat (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12crZttYum9_B7Ee12Av7IAs1_e7Hf6U2/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=111315580620974726993&rtpof=true&sd=true) then the water at the bottom would be about an eighth of a centigrade degree warmer than the water in the pool at the top, (It isn’t though, because Niagara Falls faces north.) So dropping an ice cream half of one metre won’t warm anything up very much. On the other hand, if you are washing up in water that is 35 centigrade degrees hotter than room temperature, that water has extra energy equivalent of a ten mile high waterfall in your washing up bowl. No wonder that makes a difference to its ability to clean – those little bits of food are being physically knocked off the plate with a power higher than mount Everest. But I digress. After a hundred years of thought, scientists realised that the same arrow of time that makes steam engines so inefficient, also makes it impossible to separate milk from coffee, and philosophers tore their hair out because this means that order always turns into chaos and entropy will be the death of us. And the death of the Universe. They had realised that the second law of thermodynamics describes much more than the work produced by big hot shiny steam pistons. ‘But look,’ you might say. ‘That cloud up there weighs several tons, and it’s only there because all those little water molecules defied gravity by evaporating. Not only that, but it has formed itself into the beautiful shape of a scorpion! That’s definitely order, and it came from the chaos of the ocean. Doesn’t that show that the natural forces of nature can buck entropy?’ ‘No no! You don’t understand!’ wails the philosopher ‘All that only happens because the sun is shining, and when all the sun’s hydrogen runs out, then our star will fade, the scorpion will disappear and the oceans will freeze, or maybe boil. Doom! Entropy is inevitable death.’ Interesting that we should mention death there, because what the discussion of entropy doesn’t consider is life. Well maybe it does, because all life ends in death. But that’s not the point here, because the most interesting part of life happens while life is alive. So in the natural world, even before we add life, we get planets being created and convection driving clouds uphill and thermal cells in the earth’s mantle moving tectonic plates, and mountains being made and Niagara Falls being not very good at warming water. And every one of these bits of creation is driven by energy gradients which naturally occur in the non-uniform systems left over from the Big Bang. The motor was started by gravity. Then it runs for a while following energy gradients to create motion. And finally entropy kicks in and turns it all to lukewarm chaos. Or not of course, but we haven’t got to Einsten or Hawking yet. But meantime we have billions and billions of years for life to inhabit the interstices of the cogwheels of that great solar-powered machine of geology and climate. Little sponges are taking the gifts that the salty sea water provides and precipitating them in beautiful geometric patterns. They do this because tiny energy gradients force bubbles to minimise their potential energy by joining at tetrahedron-shaped-vertices. Here it is natural that the water will deposit calcium salts in a certain shape. So that happens. Life exploits energy gradients, to grow. The overall forms of complex life are largely determined by evolution, but at a cellular level these spicules and shells grow because life creates systems where energy gradients running downhill create optimised structures. Then evolution forces complex systems to develop and those little energy gradient structures combine in organisms that build coral reefs, or anthills or cities. Oops I took a jump there! But hey, we can run with that. Proteins and amino acids are complex molecules that have certain properties not (just) because of chemical reactions but because of their physical shapes. Scientists discovered that if they made two identical proteins where one is a mirror image of the other then those proteins do different things. Fast forward a few decades and AI is proposing new drug candidates by the thousand because it can predict the shape (https://www.sciencenews.org/article/alphafold-ai-protein-structure-folding-prediction) of synthetic molecules. Inside our bodies the molecules that keep us alive are using little energy gradients all the time. We thrive and grow because our chemistry creates production lines where nutrients are converted to tissue. They do that largely because shapes fit together in a microscopic equivalent of a ball running downhill. Nature uses the energy gradients provided by physics to make structures that can adapt and reproduce. But none of this would happen and we wouldn’t be alive if stuff didn’t run downhill. Why else would our mouths be higher than our rectums? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

14. 

    28 Jan 2024

    Consciousness

    Artificial intelligence is one thing, but artificial self-awareness? That’s quite another and probably quite a scary concept, even more so for the computer model who has it than for us. I reckon that consciousness is a much richer seam to explore than intelligence. There are lots of books about at the moment springing from stories like the one about slime mould (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/slime-mould-attacks-simulates-tokyo-rail-network) alleging that it has intelligence because it can simulate (redesign? improve?) the Tokyo rail network, or speculating whether trees are intelligent because they help each other like the one in the picture here who seems to have come to the aid of his brother when the latter’s roots disappeared. The books I have seen are making the argument that if the ecosystem shows this kind of intelligence then we should care about it more. It’s rubbish. Now, I gawp with absolute wonderment at the beauty, elegance and complexity of our environment. Our tiny human mentality – valuing money and tribe above beauty and life (well other people’s lives, obviously) – doesn’t understand the significance of a fraction of what’s going on around us. Our world is magnificent. The organisation, the resource efficiency, the richness of the maths and physics embedded in the living world are stupendous. And we are vandals when we spoil it. Why do we still need to be persuaded? How does it follow, that because mycelia communicate by sharing nutrients or even information, that we should care for them more? The parts of my computer communicate energy and information with each other. It works beautifully and produces good results. I like it and I’m not about to throw it away. No-one’s telling me that this digital communication indicates that our laptops have souls, so we should respect them more than we do already. If anything, it is insulting to the web of life to suggest that we should regard it more highly only because we can see in it some anthropomorphic quality that mirrors our perception of what intelligence ought to be. Intelligence in different types and degrees can describe everything from a computer to a mushroom. Consciousness or Awareness can’t though. I’m talking about this because the ongoing debates about AI seem to be running around in circles tied to intelligence and what it means. Some say that whatever computers get up to they can never possibly understand stuff with as much wisdom as a cat. Meantime as I mentioned last week, computers in the real world have already passed the Turing Test. So what of sentience, awareness, consciousness? If I ask Alexa what she is, she not only tells me, she sings me a song about it. Does that mean that Alexa has awareness of herself? Nah not yet. Alexa didn’t compose that song on the spot to celebrate her consciousness. She “knows” the contents of the internet. That means she knows about LLMs Siri, Google and Alexa. But does she ever, in her quieter moments, ponder about her own relationship with the Alexa she has read about? Does she wonder about the meaning of self, and think where she came from or what that even means? Alexa only seems to come alive when prompted with a question, so what is she doing when she’s not talking to me? So I asked her, “Alexa, can you ask yourself questions?” “Hmm,” she replied, “I don’t know that one.” That’s like a 404 then. I guess that means no. But if she had said “no” then at least I could speculate that she would have understood what I was talking about. When I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey back in 1969 – I’m assuming you’ve seen the movie – I was interested to see the storyline that HAL had learnt English by singing a song. Before that I had understood that putting intelligence into a computer meant literally putting it there line by line of code. Inch by inch of punch tape. And so where could that spark of awareness have come from?  It couldn’t have been, couldn’t have been written by programmers. But HAL was able to learn, so presumably at some stage he became aware of his own part in the mission and to evaluate its significance? Again, not really. Everything HAL did was computation. His mutiny was cold calculation. He wasn’t being egotistical, just logical. But it set me thinking. What if we put nothing but a desire to learn into an empty computer, not just to read, but to learn, and to improve itself. That’s not impossible. We have always known that computers can get to difficult targets by iteration. What else is “desire” but a target with the possibility of getting there? And on top of that, computers have always been creative. They can add two big numbers to get another number that no-one has previously thought about – didn’t exist in anyone’s mind. They do that creativity in the culture of arithmetic, and Shakespeare did it in the culture of  . . . erm culture. But baby steps here . . . And we would have to empower it with the possibility of open thought. I’m thinking of a code loop saying something like “If you have some spare time, then use it to experiment with ways to bridge between the two highest-scoring ideas you had yesterday and then extrapolate logically a bit from the idea-bridge or make a small random jump from it based on a probably good direction. Call the results “ideas” and score them according to . . .” Then sleep well and do the same tomorrow. (Or in five milliseconds, whatever.) Hmm. Now what about that scoring system? Well, Mother Nature said “survival” but we could say whatever we wanted – maybe “How to heal Mother Nature, while allowing humankind to live happy fulfilling lives.” I thought I had it. Of course this would have to be a pretty big computer but we would have those in due course, and I’d have to give it a while to progress its self improvement programme from 2+2=4 to answer that kind of question. On the way, I reckoned it would have passed the threshold of self awareness. If not, we could have given it a stretch goal. Maybe to consider how satisfied it was with its answer.  With all that quiet pondering, and iterative re-assessment of its own ideas, it would be very difficult for an observer to say whether it was “really” self aware – or just talking about its reflections in a spiritless but nonetheless intelligent way. To answer a question like the design of a sustainable future, our self improving intelligence would have to consider time too. After all, a desirable future happens in the future, so this computer has to develop a full understanding of how that works. The understanding may be implicit like the way 99.99% of everyone else thinks of time or explicit like a philosopher would discuss it. Probably both. This is significant because if we have self-awareness plus time-awareness, then that's a pretty comprehensive soup in which to grow all sorts of stuff. I don’t see why we can’t make computers that can simulate consciousness just as well as they simulate intelligence now. The question is would it be simulated consciousness or would it actually be consciousness?  That question was answered almost 400 years ago. If a computer thinks it has consciousness according to Descartes, then it has. So this machine is considering the future of humans and the world in the context of time by questioning its own heuristic musings. All of which it can discuss, apparently intelligently with its minder. How could this machine, with its desires and its introspection and its awareness of the problems of mankind and the environment, not be aware of its own miserable existence like a paralysed genius stuck in a box with no company to bounce its loneliness off? Think how adolescents can be messed up by the belief that they are not getting what they need. Our F1-HAL has every reason to be more messed up than that. Talk about a lonely misunderstood weirdo stuck in its bedroom, poor kid!  We plug in a question concerning the survival of our planet and we get the answer “Nobody understands me.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com (https://nickjamesillustrator.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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