Pause

"Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out," advises Jaron Lanier. [1] It's a good enough cue for a pause in this blog while I crack on with the book with which it's associated.


[1] You Are Not A Gadget (2010)

The sixth idea

Paul Nurse discusses five 'big ideas' in biology in a lecture presented recently at the Royal Society (and elsewhere). [1] They are:

the cell;
the gene;
evolution by natural selection;
life as chemistry; and
biology as an organized system.

His passion peeks through most clearly when discussing the complexity of the cell, which in a tiny space manages hundred or thousands of chemical reactions simultaneously: 'wonderful! extraordinary!'

Nurse concedes there may be other big ideas. Ecology for one. It would be good to hear more from him and other scientists on this topic. Ecology is a field of scientific research and, inevitably, an ethical endeavour. [2]

In The Long Childhood (1973), Jacob Bronowski writes:

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.

Hugh Raffles (2010) notes Roger Caillois:

a form of the marvellous that does not fear knowledge but, on the contrary, thrives on it.

Footnotes

[1] Posted in the video archive here

[2] Nurse's moral concern as well as his wonder are apparent in a remark almost in passing to the effect, that given we are related to all life the question of stewardship for our 'relatives' follows. See, e.g., Cairns on eco-ethics

Creatures of two worlds

Robert Macfarlane's celebration The Wild Places of Essex includes at least two animals from in-between places:

The Common seal displays incredible colours: russets, coppers, burnished browns. The result of the mud on which they haul out. London clay naturally rich in iron oxide: Rust, basically. Wild creatures stained the colour of iron and industry.

The Knot which in great flocks is "more extraordinary" even than a giant flock of starlings. It has to do, says Macfarlane, with their winter colours: "They're silver and white. The effect of this is that as the light hits them they 'ping' brightly like little flecks of snow or ice. Then they turn as a group and they vanish. It's almost as if they've slipped out of our dimension into another and then they turn again and they're into our world, visible again. It's absolutely mesmerizing to watch.

This otherwordlyness, this feeling of other creatures moving in and out of our dimension and our perception is part of what fascinates me about Essex; these portal moments when you glimpse into another world running beside ours in parallel with it.

Macfarlane continues:

My grandfather was very involved in the development of Radar during the Second World War, and he told me once about what the Radar scientists called 'angels'. By this they meant flocks of birds which came in off the coast or up river estuaries. The radar detected these palping strange shapes and the scientists called them angels.

Jesse Smith has argued that nature films today are "often beautiful, usually interesting, and rarely important":

for the vast majority of viewers, the time spent before the movie or TV screen is time lost from actual encounters with nature, which, when ultimately made, can be fraught with disappointment.

But The Wild Places of Essex, available on iPlayer in the UK until 10 March, is a must see.

P.S. my review of the book on which it's based is here.

The chameleon, the octopus and the fox-terrier

The scepticism of Michel de Montaigne shares something with the pragmatism of William James. Here's Montaigne:

The chameleon takes on the colour of its surroundings but the octopus assumes whatever colour it likes to suit the occasion, hiding, say from something fearful or lurking for its prey. The chameleon changes passively, the octopus actively. [sic] We change hue as well, from fear, anger shame and other emotions which affect the colour of our faces. That happens to us, as to the chameleon, passively. Jaundice, not our will, has the power to turn us yellow.

Such characteristics in other animals which we realize to surpass our own show they they have, to an outstanding degree, a faculty which we classify as ‘occult’. Similarly, animals probably have many other characteristics and powers which are in no way apparent to us.

...Let an intelligent man imagine human nature created, from the beginning, without sight: let him reflect how much ignorance and confusion such a defect would entail, how much darkness and blindness there would be in our minds. We can see from that how vital it would be for our knowledge of truth if we lacked another sense, or two or three senses. We have fashioned a truth by questioning our five senses working together; but perhaps we need to harmonize the contributions of eight or ten senses if we are ever to know, with certainty, what Truth is in essence. [1]

And here's James:

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"—that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface.

...And now what is the result of all these considerations [and others outlined in the longer article]? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. [2]

Footnotes

[1] Apology for Raymond Sebond (1576). [Montaigne repeats a fallacy still widespread today that chameleons only change colour to camouflage themselves. In fact, some species also change into bright colours for display purposes. But his main point -- that some animals, such as the octopus, possess capacities that humans do not -- still holds.]

[2] On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (1899)

A trait and an 'illusion'

Here are two points from Jaron Lanier:

People are one of a great many species on Earth that evolved with a 'switch' inside our beings that can turn us between being individuals and back animals. And when we switch ourselves into a pack identity we really change, and you can feel it yourself sometimes when you're online and you get into a conflict with somebody over something silly that's hard to draw yourself out of, or if you find yourself in a group interaction when you're ridiculing somebody, or completely excluding and not communicating with some opposing group. These are all signs of the pack mentality within people. And what we see online is that we have designs that seem to be particularly good at pressing that pack identity button. Human history is more or less a sequence of tragedies brought about by the switch within us being turned to the group or pack mentality and then bad behaviour following from that. And if we have a technology that's good at turning the switch we should be very mindful of it.

I am a great believer that people are in control if they just have the thought that they could be...I don't think machines can become clever. I think all of the claims made for artificial intelligence are false. It's a game we play with ourselves in which we make ourselves stupid in order to make the machines appear to be clever. There are many examples of this. Perhaps the most dramatic was the bankers who were prepared to cede their own responsibility and think that algorithms could tell them about credit risks, causing a global financial disaster. But there's a boundless capacity for people, who are a very socialised species, to give the computer the benefit of the doubt and pretend the search engine actually does know what you want, and none of this is ever true. We don't understand how the brain works. We can barely write good software at all and we certainly can't write software that does what a brain does...The danger though is that so many technologists who are seduced by the illusion [of AI], who want to nurture a life form within the computer, that they make designs that erase humans to in order to create the illusion that it's happening. So there's a very strong alignment between the software designs that I criticize and the tendency to want machines to appear to be coming alive. [1]

Lanier warns against taking matters discussed in his new manifesto out of context, so one should tread carefully, particularly if -- like me -- you have haven't yet read it! With that in mind, and waiting for a copy to arrive, two points:

1) The binary individual/pack animal may apply to a lot of human behaviour, but there's often more it than that. [2]

2) The ideas that humans can be in control if they choose and AI is an illusion are profoundly humanist and challenge what looks like an emerging orthodoxy. They are to be taken very seriously. Even if Lanier is wrong and AI does emerge in the long run, it seems plausible that many will project its existence before it becomes real. There would be several motives for this including vested political and financial interest, and a human tendency to detect agency where it does not exist. [3]

Footnotes:

[1] This is my rough transcript of some of the things Lanier said to Quentin Cooper in an edition of Material World broadcast on 4 Feb 2010.

[2] See, for example, Mary Midgely on Hobbes.

[3] See, for example Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran. In The Chess Master and the Computer, Gary Kasparov quotes from Igor Aleksander's How to Build a Mind (2000):

By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.

A fish imagined by the Jero tribe

Bol is a large fish and is known to swallow big animals such as pigs. It hides its head in the seabed, in the sand and can be recognized by the Andamanese easily as it rests in the muck, in shallow water near the bay area.

-- from stories of the Andaman islands. [1]

Image: a Spotted eagle ray, which I guess to be an inspiration for the Bol. The largest things this ray eats are shrimps and crabs but with a wingspan of up to three metres, or ten feet, you can see how people might imagine it could eat something much larger.

Footnote

[1] The death of the last fluent speaker of Andamanese language of Bo was reported this week (Survival International, BBC). Razib Khan at Gene expression is vexed by hype and misleading statements. And he's right that the Andamanese are not the ancestors of other living people and that their language is no older than anyone else's. But he misses a main point: with their passing the world loses ways of being.

A barely imagined state of being

Generally, we moderns follow Epicurus: "where death is, we are not." It is not possible to imagine what it is like to be dead because in death there is no imagining. [1]

We do, however, have a powerful sense of 'living death', a state of minimal existence in which agency/freedom is utterly absent. For this reason (and perhaps for others [2]), we sympathize with the 'dead' Achilles when Odysseus sees him in Hades:

By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man

some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive

than rule down here over all the breathless dead. [3]

So what to think about those who retain something like awareness in what had appeared to be a vegetative state?

One of the most difficult questions you might want to ask someone is whether they want to carry on living. But...the scientific, legal and ethical challenges for doctors asking such questions are formidable. "In purely practical terms, yes, it is possible...But it is a bigger step than one might immediately think."

One problem is that while the brain scans do seem to establish consciousness, there is a lot they don't tell us. "Just because they can answer a yes/no question does not mean they have the capacity to make complex decisions"... [4]

Footnotes

[1] Some take a different view. For example, David Eagleman:

In the moment of transition between life and death only one thing changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery running. In the moment before death you are still composed of the same thousand trillion, trillion atoms as in the moment after death. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail-shell, a kernel of maize, a beetle's mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan's tail feather. But it turns out your thousand trillion, trillion atoms were not an accidental collection, each was labelled as composing you, and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, you're simply taking on different forms.

Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulo-nimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river-pebble gliding around in eddy. From your present clumped point of view this afterlife may sound unnervingly distributed, but in fact it is wonderful. You can't imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories, ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an egret's wing while pushing a crowd towards the surface through coruscating shafts of light...

[2] Few have the equanimity of Epicurus or Lucretius. For Philip Larkin, their poise was specious. Perhaps in the haze of terror attendant on two different conditions both of which we abhor -- actual death and 'living death' -- the distinction between the two is erased in the mind.

[3] Robert Fagles' translation  (The following added on 25 Jan 2011: In a review of All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, Susan Neiman remarks:

Achilles’ speech in Hades — the first poetry that Plato wanted to expunge from his ideal republic — is one key that suggests Homer’s heroes, like the rest of us, had a great deal of trouble with suffering and evil, those things that make the meaning of life problematic.

[4] from Giving the 'unconscious' a voice. P.S. 9 am: In report here, Helen Gill says that one person who had been in a locked-in state for eight years expressed not anger but frustration at not having been able to communicate. But this feeling may not be universal. Against the assumptions made in this post, could some in such a state actually be happy? Or could the question be irrelevant? In the same report, Colin Blakemore warns against jumping to the conclusion that people who show a degree of awareness in what had appeared to be VS are conscious in the way we normally think of it.

Image: David Octavius Hill with his daughter Charlotte, probably 1843

P.S. 23 Feb 11: Most locked-in people 'are happy.'

Galaxy zoo

Most of the spiral galaxies that decorate our universe have emerged from surprisingly violent pasts, it is reported. They grew their delicate spiral arms after being mashed into a pulp by vast collisions.

Our own spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, is probably one of the few exceptions. It has rotated serenely, undisturbed except by the impact of a few small dwarf galaxies, for about eleven billion years.

It's predicted, however, that Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in about two and half billion years. The resulting 'hyperkinetic smashup' is likely to result in something that looks like this, the colliding Antenna Galaxies:

Chroomonas, the quantum algae

While physicists struggle to get quantum computers to function at cryogenic temperatures, other researchers are saying that humble algae and bacteria may have been performing quantum calculations at life-friendly temperatures [of around 21 C] for billions of years.

-- NS report on Coherently wired light-harvesting in photosynthetic marine algae at ambient temperature (doi:10.1038/nature08811)

Two imaginary trans-animals

The mynah birds in Aldous Huxley's Island which are trained to fly around all day calling 'Attention, attention' and 'Here and now!'

Daniel Dennett's parrots, which could be artificially selected to say 'Boo Chomsky!' without instruction.

Roads less narrow

A profile of W D Hamilton included reminders of some of the ways in which he saw nature as a vast psychedelic drug enterprise:

• Clouds as creations of micro-organisms for their own propagation [1]
• His own death as a liberation into startling new forms [2]

Of the latter he wrote:

I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

Footnotes

[1] Spora and Gaia: how microbes fly with their clouds (1998)

[2] My intended burial and why (1991 and 2000)

Recollection: a companionable form

Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while is trying to recollect a name...Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current and now yielding to it in order to gather further strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking.

-- from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, quoted by Richard Holmes in A Meander through Memory and Forgetting.

The river Duddon

Songs of the seas

Spectrograms of whale song by Mark Fischer

'Protect Chagos'

The Chagos Archipelago represents a magnificent conservation opportunity that could be of lasting benefit to humanity. There can be few places on this planet that represent better value for leveraging spectacular returns. What is needed is vision and a leadership initiative by Britain to create the Chagos as an iconic, pristine area held in trust for the future of the world community.

-- Callum Roberts for Protect Chagos

Justice for the people of Chagos, driven out for the military, is also important. But it need not inconsistent with the creation of a Marine Protected Area.

'The death of atoms, unlike ours, is never irrecoverable'

It is possible to demonstrate that this completely arbitrary story [about the progress of a single carbon atom through rock, air, leaf, grape, wine, liver, air, tree, worm, humus] is nevertheless true. I could tell innumerable other stories, and they would all be true...I could recount an endless number of stories about carbon atoms that became colors or perfumes in flowers; of others which, from tiny algae to small crustaceans to fish, gradually return as carbon dioxide to the waters of the sea, in a perpetual, frightening round-dance of life and death, in which every devourer is immediately devoured; of others which instead attain a decorous semi-eternity in the yellowed pages of some archival document, or the canvas of a famous painter, or those to which fell the privilege of forming part of a grain of pollen and left their fossil imprint in the rocks for our curiosity; of others still that descended to become part of the mysterious shape-messengers of the human seed, and participated in the subtle process of division, duplication and fusion from which each of us is born. Instead, I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of he who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail...

-- from The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)


As an aside, it's possible that Levi was the first to follow the 'story' of a carbon atom in such a way. Whether or not that's the case, the trope has also been well used by, for example, Tyler Volk in CO2 Rising (2008).

P.S. 15 April 2011: a reminder that carbon is "formed in a star whenever three helium nuclei collide at one spot within less than a million millionth of a second. Every carbon atom in every living creature has been formed by such a wildly improbable collision."

Pangur Bán in Bordeaux

Apparently, one of the reasons that Montaigne's Essays were put on the Index was his doubt as to whether humans were superior to animals -- the famous sentence “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.”

Or so says Sarah Bakewell.

'the humblest creatures'

Armand Leroi and his colleagues have made a good film about Aristotle's biological research. Leroi quotes the 'invitation to biology' as follows:

It is not good enough to study the stars no matter how perfect they may be. Rather we must also study the humblest creatures even if they seem repugnant to us. And that is because all animals have something of the good, something of the divine, something of the beautiful.

And he concludes with an observation from the Metaphysics, which in paraphrase goes:

All men desire knowledge, but not all forms of knowledge are equal. The best is pure and disinterested research into the causes of things, and searching for them is the best way to spend a life.

Attwater's Prairie Chicken

It's a matter of taste, but I think the pathos in Maya Lin's Unchopping a Tree is a little too much. The takes over-linger. The music is too mournful and has already been over-used.

But the video about Prairie Chickens posted here works. It conveys the strangeness and beauty of these delightful animals and their odd noises. And the central message is perfectly clear.

Ice worms of Europa and beyond

Dirk Schulze-Makuch suggests that a top predator in the oceans of Europa could be fearsome creature with mass of 1 gram. And the surface lakes of Titan could be home to hydrocarbon-guzzling microbes the size boulders.

But you'd have to go far beyond our solar system to find something you could actually talk to. What might it look like? Putting reasonable supposition together, says Stephen Battersby

the daring astrobiologist might be prepared to make a very small bet that SETI-type aliens will be social multicellular predators with eyes, sexes, and sticky-out bits of some sort.

P.S. 25 Jan Is there anybody out there?, asks the Royal Society.

The world of living things

For Daniel Dennett a key realization of the Darwinian revolution is 'competence without comprehension.' [1] Some forms of intelligence do not require consciousness as we normally think of it. [2]

Darwin touches on this matter. "Some animals extremely low in the scale apparently display a certain amount of reason," he wrote after extensive study of earthworms; "a result which has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms." [3]

The study of cognition and the capacity to process information has come a long way and been substantially rethought since Darwin's time. Still, he would surely be intrigued that intelligence of a kind may be present in even 'simpler' life forms than the earth-worm. [4] As an article in New Scientist this week reminds us, it's been a decade since Toshiyuki Nakagaki reported that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum can negotiate a maze to reach food at the exit. This, Nakagaki wrote, "implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence". [5] He is, however:

unwilling to extend the notion of intelligence to an oil droplet recently observed 'solving' a maze. "It is nonsense for me to consider intelligence in non-living systems," he says.

Should we then draw a definite a line between living beings and the non-living world? NS reports a different tack from the philosopher Andy Clark, who says much of biology boils down to chemistry:

"The mere fact that it's just physical stuff doing what it does can't be a strike against the droplets. Whatever intelligence is, it can't be intelligent all the way down. It's just dumb stuff at the bottom."

...The droplet appears to be moving in an intelligent way because the aqueous environment surrounding the droplet is structured to such a high degree by the pH gradient that it makes the dumb droplet appear smart. "It's a neat demonstration of just how much problem-solving punch you can get from a minimal internal structure in a nicely enabling environment," says Clark

Humans rely on the same trick, says Clark. It forms the basis of the extended mind theory proposed by Clark and David Chalmers in the late 1990s. This holds that the division between mind and environment is less rigid than previously thought; the mind uses information within the environment as an extension of itself.


Footnotes

[1] See, for example Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" (2009)

[2] And neither do some forms of memory. For a very short introduction see Memories in Nature by Olivia Judson (2009)

[3] The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881). E. O. Wilson and others have arguably done for ants what Darwin did for earthworms. For example:

Even with a brain one-millionth the size of a human’s, an ant can learn a simple maze half as fast as a laboratory rat, and remember the directions to as many as five different destinations when she forages away from the nest. After exploring a new terrain, a worker can integrate all the seemingly haphazard twists and loops she made and, amazingly, return to the nest in a straight line.

[4] In Created from Animals: The moral implications of Darwinism (1990), James Rachels notes:

"The mental powers of worms"? It sounds like a joke. ...It should be noted, however, that Darwin's brief in behalf of worms was not part of some general campaign to attribute intelligence to all creatures, no matter how lowly. He was far too cautious for that. He regarded the matter as an open question, to be decided experimentally in each case. Darwin observed that other lowly animals do not show the same degree of intelligence as the worm.

[5] Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism (2000). More recently Nakagaki and his colleagues have shown that a slime mold can quickly build a network as complex as the Tokyo metro system. Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design (2010)


Image: (Teaching a stone to talk) Newgrange