Ingridients:
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email: i(at)jamver.id.au

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Job description

Sean Eddy, who is one of the Good Guys as far as I'm concerned, has written a wonderful article about interdisciplinary science and what is wrong with the way the funding agencies are treating it at the moment. Along the way, he writes something which I wish I had written, and I assume that it is within the bounds of review to cite this one paragraph:

I've been a computational biologist for about 15 years now. We're still not quite sure what "computational biology" means, but we seem to agree that it's an interdisciplinary field, requiring skills in computer science, molecular biology, statistics, mathematics, and more. I'm not qualified in any of these fields. I'm certainly not a card-carrying software developer, computer scientist, or mathematician, though I spend most of my time writing software, developing algorithms, and deriving equations. I do have formal training in molecular biology, but that was 15 years ago, and I'm sure my union card has expired. For one thing, they all seem to be using these clever, expensive kits now in my wet lab, whereas I made most of my own buffers (after walking to the lab six miles in the snow, barefoot).

And I also agree strongly with his point that "inter-disciplinary" is really "ante-disciplinary" - bringing together different things into a new field that doesn't really exist yet. I think I'm going to have to persuade a few people around here of that if I want a permanent job.

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Because I need to share.

Vasa. Gustavus. Oskar. Valois. Armitage. Bruno. Cup. Tudor. Nanos. Pumilio. Fog. Gurken. Rhino. Bloody fingers. Cloche. Moonshine. Vlad tepes. Gremlin. Sonic hedgehog.

Sometimes, I wouldn't mind it if gene naming was taken a little bit more seriously. I don't think breaking into giggles regularly is going to convince anyone I'm actually trying to do research. On the other hand, maybe the names will help me remember what does what and to whom. But at the moment, it's just overload, like too many bright clashing colours drawing my attention at once.

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Trevor's book

The reasons I recently wrote about Trevor are that not only would he have been 50 this year if he was still alive (I think...), but his wife, Lesley, recently sent me a book Trevor had started to write shortly before he died.

It took me a bit of time to work up to actually reading it. It's short. I like what is in it, I agree with most of it, and of course, it stops just when I'm not quite sure I understand his point, and I might really have been able to learn something from the next bit.

That's how it goes, I guess.

I have Lesley's okay to type it up here. I get to keep the hard copy, in Trevor's handwriting.

For Ingrid

Hoping that she finds within these pages enlightenment.
Or if not, that she finds something of interest.
Or if not, that she sees something amusing.

But if not, the effort is not wasted since this may last long enough to find somewhere to lodge itself.

Even if it doesn't, the effort is not wasted since I am gaining knowledge of myself by writing this.

Introduction

Manuals really ought to be written by experts. SO, a manual about living ought to be written by an expert on living. But how can anybody be an expert on that? Each of us gets one life, with no chance to rehearse or practice and with very little instruction from qualified teachers.

Right from the start then, I'll make it clear that this isn't anything but a collection of my thoughts and ideas and is worth precisely what you paid for it.

Like everybody, I have been influenced by many people as I grew up and am still being influenced by people now. All of us are. We also influence others - and that's partly why I'm writing this.

There are lots of reasons I'm writing this. Possibly the most important is that I want to understand myself a little more before I die. Not that dying is itself really a big thing.
It's knowing about it that's the big thing. We all know we will die one day.
Every one of our ancestors - right back to the primordial slime - has died. But the important thing is that they lived first.

Chapter One
Who am I?
In which we find out who we are.

Most people don't think about who they are. They don't have to - they know. Just ask them. Ask someone who they are and thy will probably tell you their name, maybe what they do as a job or where they live or what they have as hobbies.

People are good at describing themselves and will do so in great detail if you ask enough questions. That, of course, isn't the point.
Humans are social animals - and that is the point.

Every person on the planet is part of an enormous interconnecting web of relationships. Family, friends, workmates, enemies, the most casual of casual acquaintances - all are part of the primary web stretching out from an individual. Each strand connects to a person who is themself the centre of another web. Many of the strands connect with each other at the points of mutual friends or coworkers. Some - especially these days - skip across continents and oceans and can encompass the world.
To make it more complicated, they also reach through time. From childhood playmates to others in the retirement village, the strands of the web reach intangibly, but strongly, through time.

The first part of the answer to the question of this chapter then becomes
"I am the centre of a vast network of people."

This relationship web is however, a two edged sword. Just as I am the centre of my web, every other person is the centre of theirs.
Pulling on the strings of the web can be done both ways. The pull can also come from one of two people - either the person at the centre or the person on the periphery. But which is which?
Each of us normally sees ourself as the most important (note that I say normally - there are exceptions) person and therefore sees our own desires as more demanding of our own - and other people's - attentions.

Others, naturally enough, see things the same way so that to them, our needs become less important.
It is this balance and counterbalance of the importance - or rather the percieved importance - of our own and each others desires which keeps the relationship webs in a state of constant flux.
This is something which is enormously complex but which we do all the time. It's part of being human.
This gives us the second part of the answer to our current question.
"I am a small part of a vast network of people."

That's not all of it, I'll type the next bit when I have time.

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Noodling on "Philosophy in the Flesh"

I had a skim-read through the library copy of "Philosophy in the Flesh" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson yesterday and I want to noodle about it.

The central thesis of their book is that recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive science have a profound impact on our understanding of what a human mind is. And that most philosophical theories, in the West at least, are based on incorrect assumptions about the human mind.

Lakoff and Johnson claim that adjusting philosophy to match modern scientific knowledge is a major change, possibly even a traumatic, world-changing, experience for some philosophers. I guess I can be glad I'm an evolutionary biologist, then, because it felt more like a confirmation/clarification of my developing world view. So I recognise several of the examples they give of "this is the way 'we' think the world is; but this is how it actually works" that match my own experience very closely: either of assumptions I used to hold that I've rejected, or of arguments I have with other people where they seem, to me, stuck in a naivë way of looking at the world.

One of Lakoff and Johnson's central arguments is that all attempts to claim some kind of "pure" reason, separate and unsullied from our bodies, are nonsense. This matches my own sense extremely well. I have a distinct memory of the first time I learnt explicitly about Greek philosophy's assumptions about pure mind, separate from the body, sometime in my teens. I hope I can be forgiven for sexist attitudes as a teenager, because my immediate reaction was something like "that's the kind of bullshit only men could come up with."

And I suppose it's implicit in my noodling here that I'm still a bit startled that something could be obvious to me as a teenager, in the 1980s, and yet is being made a big deal of, in a book published in 1999 by two actual, grown-up, philosophers.

I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing that this book has reinforced my belief that my instinctive reaction to some academic pontificating as being total nonsense, disconnected from all reality, is usually correct. I'm in the mood to regard it as a good thing.

On to more interesting stuff. Lakoff and Johnson talk about our tendency to categorise things - male and female, bird and animal, black and white. We need to be able to categorise to make any sense of the world - the most basic living things need categories of "edible" and "not edible"; "dangerous" and "not dangerous". Categories are intrinsic. L&J say a lot of philosophy involves categorisation, without examining the underlying assumptions of categorisation.

Now from the point of view of their "empirically" based philosophy, categorisation is an abstract concept, ultimately based on human experience of physical reality. The idea is that our minds are based on the learning that we do as very young children, about the world, how it works, how we can affect it, and so on. L&J claim that all human abstract concepts are based on what they call "primary metaphors" based on actual physical experience.

The primary metaphor for categorisation is that of putting stuff into containers - and I think most of us can remember a stage as children when we either were encouraged to, or spontaneously chose to, sort the big lego (duplo) and little lego into separate containers, or put the textas, colour pencils, and crayons into each their holder, or whatever.

I certainly spent a fair amount of time at my great-aunt's summer house, sorting her pair of decks of patience cards into the blue-backed and the pink-backed cards. So much so, that when she died, those cards explicitly went to me, and I still have them.

Of course, the cards were easy to sort into those discrete categories. But as I've grown, I've found more and more situations where I have a lot of trouble finding discrete categories for things. (I'm trying not to even think about what blog post category to put this into, for example.)

I think I hit my first significant "philosophical crisis" of categorisation, in the sense Lakoff and Johnson might be talking about, when I was grappling with species definitions in biology. None of them satisfied me. Then I tried to think about it logically, from an evolutionary point of view: how do new species evolve? I've indented my thinking so it's easier to skip.

At time A, we have one species. Then stuff happens, maybe some part of the species becomes geographically isolated. If the two populations stay separate and don't exchange genetic information, eventually, by sheer genetic drift, the two populations will no longer be able to exchange genetic information. It's more likely that the populations, by being in different places, (or being separated by other means) will separate into two species much earlier due to selection for different advantageous changes in the two places, but even without selection, drift will get you two species eventually, at time B.

Now think about the intervening time between A and B. Push the A time point as far forward as you possibly can, still confident that there is one species. Also push the B time point back as far as you can, still confident that there are two species. If you're a remotely reasonable biologist, you're going to agree that there's always going to be a time interval between A and B where you cannot confidently define this situation as being one species or two.

You could get really pedantic, and come up with some definition of fractional species, so that in the interval between A and B, there is a continuous increase, from 1 species, through 1.1, 1.5, 1.7, to 2 species. And then you could say that greater than 1.5 (for example) is two species and less is one, and thus your A and B are the same time point and you've got yourself a species definition.

But I would like to point out that firstly: even though you define 1.47 as one species and 1.52 as two species (or whereever the cutoff is), 1.47 and 1.52 species are situations that have far more in common with each other, than they do with either one or two species.

And secondly, as all the biologists who might be reading this would realise, you can only really define any of this retrospectively. I would just hate the idea of trying to define a particular population isolation situation as being 1.75 species; if they stay isolated much longer we will unambiguously have two species, but if for some reason they don't stay separated, there's still a significant, although small, chance the populations can re-integrate and form one genetic species again.

So species definitions are to some extent historically contingent - it's much easier to tell what's going on in retrospect. Given the number one rule of evolution (or possibly of science?) that there is nothing special or privileged about right now, we ought to be surrounded by species in the process of maybe becoming more species, and many of those cases the biologists are arguing about are cases of trying to pin the number one or two on a situation that in retrospect might be 1.37.

In conclusion, I decided that the reason defining what a species is, is so difficult, is because people are trying to force speciation into discrete bins when it's a continuous, fluid process. And I thought about all the other examples in my life of people trying to make discrete bins for fluid items. The most obvious example that sprang to mind was that of colour - we talk, usefully, about black, white, red, blue, and green, but we don't have sharp boundaries between them. And even people who are sure that this is green and this is blue, are prepared to agree that it's a bluish green and a greenish blue.

So, since, I've gone to some effort, when I'm in situations where I feel like there's some categorisation going on that I'm not comfortable with, to think about whether a colour analogy is more appropriate to the situation than a "sorting stuff into bins" analogy. And it's been working quite nicely for me.

It was rather interesting to read Lakoff and Johnson on primary metaphors for abstract concepts and realise that I had, all by myself, replaced the "containers" primary metaphor for categories with a "colour" primary metaphor. And that colour was in fact a primary metaphor (direct sensory experience) and that was possibly why I felt so comfortable with it, and why I'd chosen it, in preference to, say, real numbers vs integers (the species example). Numbers (real numbers anyway) are too abstract to be a primary metaphor and one also runs the risk that other people use different primary metaphors when they think about numbers.

So this is the part where I'm really excited by Lakoff and Johnson's work, because they've given a formal framework for describing stuff that I already do, and their conclusions are generally close to my sense of how the world works. So I am rather more inclined to believe they might be on to something, than otherwise. But as I said above, I'm in the mood to go with my gut instincts on these kinds of theories.

There actually was some other noodling I wanted to do about their work, but this is long enough for now and I should post that separately. Now to figure out what "container" category this post goes in.

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Babylon 5 in the flesh

One of the things that surprised me while I was skimming "Philosophy in the Flesh" - specifically the section on Strict Father vs Nurturing Parent - was Lakoff and Johnson's claim that competitiveness is a Strict Father-side trait, with Nurturing Parent favouring co-operation (which does make some sense).

James and I have been watching Babylon 5 on DVD recently, and something curious occurred to me. Lakoff and Johnson have a dichotomy somewhat like this:

Strict Father - rules; obedience; people intrinsically bad unless effort is applied; competitiveness.
vs
Nurturing Parent - care; concern for others; people intrinsically good once selfishness is overcome; co-operation.

Babylon 5 also has a dichotomy at the centre of the plot, in the form of the eternal war between the Vorlons and the Shadows:

Vorlons: order; rules; obedience; rigidity; hierarchy; humans must be guided and led by their betters; the Vorlons, when seen, appear as angels to "lesser" (more recent) races and in one critical scene are represented by someone looking like a Greek Goddess frozen in a block of ice.
vs
Shadows: chaos; warfare, randomness; competitiveness; humans must be encouraged to fight among themselves to identify the strongest; the Shadows, when seen, appear as cloudy, shadow-like spidery shapes and in the corresponding critical scene, the Shadow representative is played by different actors, walking in and out of shadow.

J. Michael Straczynski, the writer of Babylon 5, has explicitly said that the humans' and other new races' rejection of both the Vorlons and Shadows is having "to step outside the control of your parents and create your own life". So I think it's fair to consider the Vorlon/Shadow dichotomy a kind of "parenting/moral strategy dichotomy". I'm not suggesting that JMS has a better grip on this than L&J, but I think he does have at least as good a grip on the actual metaphors of parenting and morality that most people work with.

I don't have much to add here, except that I think the case against Strict Father and Nurturing Parent as the only two important parenting and moral metaphors is pretty strong.

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Multiple intelligences

Because I've been musing about this, particularly as an educator who is becoming aware of the buzzfield of "different kinds of intelligence", I thought I should take a multiple intelligence inventory. And so I did.

Note that even though this is called "multiple intelligence", it's really about learning styles, how one absorbs and processes information about the world.

The inevitable is that I scored highest in the mathematical category, and lowest in the interpersonal.

The shocker (I certainly wouldn't have picked these) is that my second-highest score is body/kinesthetic, and my second-lowest is linguistic.

I'm wondering if it isn't the case that all my scores bar interpersonal are so close together that it could be argued I cover just about all areas, pretty evenly. I've been "accused" of being highly verbal so many times (and I'm really comfortable in an environment like this, happily blogging away, although I do so want to show you all pictures of the cat and my crafts) that I can't believe I'm lower in linguistic learning/intelligence in any meaningful way.

One thing that did alarm me, and strike me as possibly distorting the results, is that while some questions (which I hope might give accurate results) are of the "I really like...." or "I like to spend time ....".

Other questions seem to be either-or, and preclude someone having a high (or a low) score in two categories. For example, one of the questions is something like, "I prefer books with lots of illustrations". I have no idea whether strongly agreeing with that will increase your visual/spatial score, lower your linguistic score, or what. My reaction was "that really, really depends on the book!" (possibly with some subliminal swearing at the person who thought this was a sensible question to ask), so I chose a mid-range value.

Because I love Jane Austen without illustrations (and prefer her without), ditto for most fiction authors and yet love Life A User Manual for all the little drop-in diagrams. If I'm reading non-fiction, like craft how-tos, the more diagrams the better. And I tend to value art books by the number of glossy well-printed pages.

Idunno about anyone else, but one of the things I love about books is that some are all about the words, and some are about the visual/spatial, some are about the mathematical/logical, and some are even about the body/kinesthetic (although these are more likely to have problems, and are being replaced by DVDs to some extent). How can I not love a medium that appeals to so many learning styles at once, as a multiple learning style learner myself?

And now I'm wondering if I can get really cynical, and claim special rights for being a body/kinesthetic learner. I've been reading a lot about how kinesthetic learners are disadvantaged, how they're ostracised by a society that's mainly visual and linguistic. Well, both of those scores of mine are lower than my kinesthetic score, so I must be disadvantaged, right?

On the positive side, it goes a long way to explaining my pleasure in teaching (this was one of the factors that got my interpersonal score as high as it is). I've long had a sense of adapting my explanations to fit, and now I'm wondering if that's because I change teaching styles to fit learning styles.

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More fleshy philosophy

I just wanted to point out that my read of Lakoff and Johnson's book was pretty quick, and for example I think there was a long section about applying multiple, potentially contradictory, primary metaphors to the same abstract situation. So my noodling here is not necessarily a fair critique - there was plenty of stuff I didn't look at.

One thing that struck me as I was looking in particular at the detailed critiques of historical philosophy, was that although Lakoff and Johnson believed that the foundations of their critique is cognitive science, that really, a lot of the critique could be made purely from an evolutionary perspective.

I did appreciate their point that many people misunderstand evolution, and are applying the wrong kinds of primary metaphors when trying to think about it. Thus, they argue that social Darwinism is doubly mistaken - firstly evolution has been misunderstood, and secondly, the wrong moral lessons have been taken from that misunderstanding. I would phrase my argument a bit differently from theirs, but it would boil down to the same thing.

L&J devote quite a bit of space to morality, as indeed I think any work like this would have to. The idea here is that morality is simply an abstract generalisation of family relationship rules - thus the family dynamics you grow up in provide your primary model for moral behaviour.

They identify two major patterns of family dynamics: the Strict Father and the Nurturing Parent.

The Strict Father model postulates the world as a harsh, dangerous place, and each individual constantly at threat from it. The Strict Father's job (this role is rarely played by a woman) is to provide clear, rigid rules, and to punish transgressions of those rules, to help prevent all those dangers befalling the children. Over time, the child is expected to internalise those rules, and apply punishment themself as necessary.

The Nurturing Parent model postulates that the major role for parents towards children is to nurture and care for them, supporting them as they grow up, until they can nurture and care for themselves and others. Rules and boundaries are necessary, but should be motivated by concern for others. The "ideal" nurturing parent is a rather mid-range model, as the extreme opposite to the Strict Father is a lasseiz-faire, indulgent model (which L&J don't give a name to) in which the child can do whatever they want, without concern for others.

L&J point out that probably every family has a mixture of models, but I'm not convinced they're covered all bases, and I'm particularly bothered by the fact that they play down the lasseiz-faire model and don't give it a name. Because L&J present Strict Father and Nurturing Parent as the only two important patterns, and as opposites, they, in my opinion, dodge some important questions.

Remember that this isn't just about family dynamics, but also about morality, and ultimately, politics. Lakoff certainly has been gaining some fame recently as a left-wing pundit critiquing the US right-wing's framing of political debate there, and the left's failure to address this. Although Lakoff has a number of valid points, his own political views are hardly in the background, and I think they distort some of his arguments, and make him easier to ignore.

Framing, as I understand it, essentially means to deliberately or otherwise choose the metaphors that will be applied in a particular debate, in order to win by getting everyone to agree that your assessment of what's important is correct, ideally without anyone noticing that that's what you've done.

So, for example, in the US at the moment, the right wing is getting a lot of mileage out of framing the debate about homosexual marriage as being about protecting children from evil, dissolute lifestyles, and forcing religious organisations and people to recognise what to them are immoral relationships and behaviours. Whereas if you frame homosexual marriage as being about human rights and equal access to legal rights and privileges, as they have in Canada, things go rather differently.

I don't want to get into a detailed rant about the fact that the US extreme right has successfully managed to frame "Christian" to mean someone who self-righteously tells everyone else how evil they are, how society is going to collapse if we don't all follow their rules, how any scientific development that contradicts a literalist reading of Genesis must be wrong, how one particular prohibition in Leviticus should be imposed on the entire planet when most of the others can be freely ignored, etc.

I'll just point out that Jesus mentioned something about the one without guilt getting to throw the first stone, loving and forgiving one another, getting help from Samaritans, and that he appears to my reading to be rather critical of the Pharisees, who seem a much better model for right-wing "Christian" behaviour than anything Jesus ever did.

As for reading the events in the old Testament literally, that seems to me so profoundly stupid that it's hard to know where to start. One could point out that the Jews, who in some cases do still choose to actually follow most of Leviticus, don't feel any need to take Genesis literally. And the Pope, in overturning the Catholic church's excommunication of Galileo mentioned something about informed awareness of the field and the limits of [one's] own competencies.

As you can see, the detailed rant is hard to avoid.

Back to the main stream. It's certainly easy to recognise Strict Father morality in the right wing, and a more Nurturing Parent model from the left. But as I've suggested, I think L&J are to some extent damaging their own cause by not explicitly mentioning an Indulgent Parent model. They seem to think the Nurturing Parent is so obviously the superior pattern, at times as though it is free of flaws, that they run the risk of being unable to communicate anything to a "Strict Parentist" who is going to see anything less strict as Indulgent.

I personally like the idea of Nurturing Parent being in the middle, between Strict and Indulgent, because firstly it always helps if you want to win politically if you grab the middle, and secondly, because it suggests that good parenting and good politics are a matter of balance, finding a difficult equilibrium, and sometimes tipping a bit far in one direction or the other, but being willing to adjust in the other direction as necessary without a sense of "having sold out to the other side" - because both Strict and Indulgent are now the other side. And neither is.

In other words, I'm trying to mix the perfect shade of aqua, and I need both blue and green, and I'm not "conceding" to anyone when it's time to add more blue.

I like it when I find some fat juicy ideas I can really make a mess with.

What is hopefully clear by now is that L&J's morality discussion suffers from a significant weakness. Their claim is that a new, sensible philosophy grows out of an understanding of cognitive science; and that there's an obvious, correct philosophical morality as well. But accepting L&J's arguments about primary metaphors etc doesn't, as far as I can tell, force you to accept their morality - which is heavily dependent on their version of nurturant parent.

In other words, I thought the final section was a bit of a let-down, because rather than cognitive science telling us how to think about morality philosophically, we basically have L&J, and their clear left-wing bias, telling us what they think morality is.

It's not that I disagree with them that the correct foundation for moral and ethical behaviour is caring and compassion (for self and others) rather than strict arbitrary rules. But surely the point is to provide something remotely useful as an argument to those who aren't already convinced?

The real crux of the difficulty, in my experience, comes in convincing the Strict Rules people that their strict rules are arbitrary and do not reflect any ultimate truth or absolute reality. Now, in some sense, L&J are trying to address that with the entire rest of the book, with the issues of all our experience being filtered by the contingencies of our brains and the metaphors we may not even realise we're using when we think about ultimate truth or absolute reality.

But on my admitted skim reading, they didn't round their argument out fully, and I was left with the impression that Strict Father or Nurturing Parent was just a matter of choice, of what felt comfortable.

And for many people, relativism and subjectivism are very frightening when first encountered, and they don't have the courage to get in there and grapple with those issues and figure out how to pull oneself out, accepting the truth that one's experience of reality is subjective and can never be the truth because that doesn't exist. And nevertheless having to get on with life and make decisions about what is worthwhile and right and good.

They actually find the absolute position, however preposterous it looks from the outside, reassuring, because it tells them they can be sure. And in my experience, they cling to each other, convinced that because they both believe there's an absolute truth, it must be the same one.

And even L&J admit that it's easy to succumb to the illusion that there is one absolute truth, because each of our subjective experiences are somewhat similar to each other - shaped and moulded by our exposure to the outside world, and we've been shaped by that world for four billion years, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

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Trevor's book, part the second

Continuing from where we left off in chapter one.

This, in typically human fashion, doesn't in the least contradict the first part of our answer. Humans are like that.
However, the problem is that both of these part answers define us only in relation to other people. While that is an important part of the whole answer, it is by no means all of it.
Now, we have to look inwards rather than outwards.

If we do look inwards at ourself we find a reflection of the external situation. We can say that a person is the centre of their thoughts or that a person is the sum of their thoughts.

We all think - some more than others, it's true - and as a result of thinking about things we build up a picture of the world.
It may not be an accurate picture (and I would suspect an accurate picture may not be possible) but however poorly drawn, it is a unique picture.
In fact it can only be experienced by one person.

Data about what is happening reaches our brain via our senses, and is interpreted according to the existing world view. As it is interpreted however, it changes that picture of the world by a tiny (or sometimes a not so tiny) amount.

As a result that internal, individual view we all have of what the world is all about is constantly changing and we can't stop it.

Everybody knows this, but few people recognise it as being a continuous process. We all know we are different to the person we were 10 years ago, but few people realise we are also different to the person we were yesterday.

The third part of our answer can be expressed as "I am the only viewer of an ever-changing picture of the world."

This leads immediately to the fourth part. That can be written like this "I am the ever-changing viewer of a picture of the world."

All four parts of the answer have one thing in common. They all have as a central part the concept of continuous change. When the separate parts are added to make a whole, this must be a central part of the complete answer.

So, who we are is constantly changing due to not only changes in our perception of the world around us but also to changes in what is doing that perceiving of the world.

But there is something else which is constantly changing too - although our perception of it remains basically the same.

Time.
There's no time like the present, so they say.
That is both right and wrong.
There is no time but the present - that single moving moment that is always with us but also always just out of reach because as soon as we reach for it, it becomes the past.
This is a small, but important, part of knowing who we are.

Looking back on what has been written leads us to see ourself as one important part of a network of equally important parts of a constantly changing view of the world which exists from moment to moment in that briefest of intervals called the present.

Which all sounds far too convoluted to be of any use as a definition of who anyone is.

Let's simplify it then. Let's ask the question, and answer it and see if the answer makes sense.

Q. Who am I?

A. I am me as I am now.

That looks pretty good to me. It nicely sums up who I am right now while leaving open all possibilities for who I might have been before or might be in future.
And that's as it should be.

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The Fabric of Reality: Final roundup.

I have very mixed feelings about this book overall. There are aspects I agree with quite strongly, and aspects where I totally fail to find Deutsch's arguments convincing. Now I've read the entire thing, I'm very puzzled about how some of the content is actually meant to relate to the overall thesis, and I would really have liked some of that text devoted to a stronger case for Deutsch's arguments.

I enjoyed the first and last chapters the most, and they function really well as the endpieces to a great book about how to look at the world; unfortunately I don't think this is that. The first chapter is about the dangers of reductionism; as I have my physics-envy rant stored somewhere (and maybe I should pull it out and polish it up) I was cheering through most of this. Chapter 14 is a bit of a crazy science-fiction trip to the far future. Ignoring that, it has a lovely vision of how I think science, and human society in general, works best (and most realistically). And it gave me hope that I'd simply seriously misunderstood him elsewhere.

Along the way, there are plenty of bits I did enjoy - I'm content to go along with what he says in Chapters 3 and 4. As I mentioned, although I was having serious visceral problems in Chapter 5, I agree with his conclusion (that virtual reality is not that different from "real" reality and reflects the fact that the universe works a certain way).

I think I agree with his argument about inductivism in Chapter 7, even if it does have the typical overbearing flaws of Socratic-style dialogue, and I don't disagree with most of what he has to say about maths in Chapter 10. And I agree with him that if time travel is possible, it must work somewhat as he outlines in Chapter 12.

I'm not sure how to comment on Chapters 2 or 9, which are strongly quantum-oriented, because it's a weak area of mine, and clearly a very strong area of his. Except to note that people who do know more about quantum theory than I do say that his arguments are not that strong. There are two important things I took away from these chapters: firstly, he regards the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics as the only meaningful way to look at quantum theory, secondly, he regards this multiverse interpretation as adding significantly to our understanding of the universe.

As I outlined in my critique of Chapter 8, I don't follow his thinking here. It seems to me that he's being excessively reductionistic, requiring a physical existence of counterfactuals, which the rest of us seem able to generate just nicely, whether we're familiar with quantum mechanics or classical mechanics or neither.

Chapter 6 I was very disappointed in. The core of it is about the worst instantiation of Cantor's diagonal argument I've ever seen. It's not that it strikes me as unreasonable that there are logically possible virtual realities we can't simulate in our reality, it's just that the argument, to my eyes, misuses the crux of Cantor's argument, and also completely ignores some really important issues. I've decided to write about these issues separately (look for something called "Gödel, Darwin, Bake").

So, overall, I could already see a connection between three of his four strands going in (knowledge, computation, and evolution/life), but not with quantum, and going out, I still don't feel he's made a convincing case. The major significance of quantum to the overall argument seems to be that desire for knowledge and information and interestingness to be actual physical quantities, and I don't understand that at all.

He spends, as I say, a lot of time telling us things in great detail, the relevance of which isn't clear to me, and then slips over really critical arguments in a couple of sentences, and we're supposed to take his word for it the rest of the book. And the crux of his attempt to glue the four strands together seems to be the argument that each of the four strands is being used in practice, without really being believed or understood properly by most people. And that they aren't fully believed because individually they're off-putting and alienating, but that they become this harmonious whole when put together and you can't properly understand them without each other. I don't feel he explains why putting four off-putting things together makes the result warm and inviting, but it obviously works for him.

And his argument that evolution is being used in practice but not really believed seems to hinge on the fact that Richard Dawkins now spends most of his time ranting against creationists. (The argument in the case of computation is the opposition to strong AI; the argument in the case of knowledge is apparently the popularity of Kuhn, or at least the word paradigm; the argument in the case of quantum is of course the unpopularity of the multiverse model.)

I'm not quite sure how loudly it's seemly to laugh here. Yes, Dawkins has made an important contribution to evolutionary theory with selfish genes and memes, yes, most evolutionary analysis now is largely done from a gene's-eye view, yes, Dawkins does spend his time writing popular science books against creationism, yes, Dawkins has not developed meme theory further. No, most evolutionary biologists do not speak critically of Dawkins because the selfish gene is too cold to really believe, no, no-one is stopping Dawkins from working on memes other than Dawkins, who from what I remember either doesn't know where to take the concept or doesn't think it's worth it, and no, no sane scientist thinks that his extreme atheism is helpful in the evolution-creation debate. Although I get the impression that it's mainly virulent atheists who think the argument is even worth engaging in. I mean, how much time are geologists meant to devote to flat-earthers?

He also dips his toes very tentatively, and I think completely unsuccessfully, in the pool of morality and beauty, and whether these are objectively assessable characteristics. I found this a bit embarassing, because I think these subject areas have been touched on far more sanely by other scientists and philosophers.

I guess the crux of my problem is that Deutsch thinks I need to understand and appreciate quantum theory (and specifically the multiverse model) in order to feel relaxed and comfortable with the "cold cruel world" of Darwin, Dawkins, Turing, and Popper. And I just don't feel like that. I won't dispute that coming to a full appreciation and acceptance of the consequences of evolution did include side tours outside biology for me (particularly Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea), but this is the first time anyone has tried to convince me that I need to understand quantum mechanics first. Maybe that means I do but just don't realise it.

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Ontology is overrated

I'm having a great time reading this article? - blog entry? - who cares - about classification systems and why they don't work anymore, and I'm doing a lot of nodding and agreeing.

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Pizza pizza pizza pizza

James assures me I am so worked up about this that I should rant at the world in general and not just at him. There's this TV ad on at the moment for Pizza Hut, it's a square pizza where you can specify the topping for each corner. I don't actually know how large the pizza is, or how many people it's meant to feed, because I haven't actually seen the ad as such. It's been on TV in the background while I've been surfing the net or making dinner, and I only tune in when they claim that, with Pizza Hut's 13 different toppings, that's 13⁴ = 28561 different pizzas.

Apparently combinatorics is very close to my heart because I seethe every time this claim comes up, even though, as mentioned, I'm not actually paying attention to the TV.

So I am going to put the correct numbers out there. I am assuming that the only thing people would be concerned about is what the four toppings are, and not what their relative arrangement or orientation might be. This is partly because I can't imagine the people making the pizzas or putting the cooked pizzas into boxes would be paying attention to arrangement or orientation.

All four corners with distinct toppings = 13 * 12 * 11 * 10 / (4 * 3 * 2 * 1) = 715
Two corners with the same topping, the other two corners distinct = 13 * 12 * 11 /2 = 858
Two corners same, other two also same (but distinct) = 13 * 12 = 156
Three corners with the same topping, last corner distinct = 13 * 12 = 156
Four corners with the same topping = 13
Grand total = 1898

Some people would probably only regard the 715 with distinct toppings to be what Pizza Hut is referring to. I find it vaguely interesting that there are actually more distinct ways to have two corners identical, but that happens fairly often in scenarios like this.

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The simple and the complex

There's a seminar on tomorrow night which seems to match some of my current ideas, but it's $22 and a pain to get into the city late in the afternoon. And I'm not optimistic I'll actually gain much from it, or at least as much as I could, staying at home and reading and writing about it. So I'm copying the abstract here, to remind me.

Professor Julianne Schultz

'The Lure of Simplicity, the Need for Complexity: Fundamentalism, independent media and politics'

TUESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2005 5.30pm registration; Seminar commences 6.00pm

According to Stuart Sim, (Fundamentalist World, 2004) 'fundamentalism has replaced communism as the new spectre haunting Western consciousness'. Editor of Griffith Review 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism, Julianne Schultz will discuss the appeal of fundamentalism, and the way in which religion has again become a defining political ideology. She will look at the capacity of people to behave in ways that are incomprehensible to those who do not share the same beliefs and values - one of the abiding mysteries of human existence.

'Belief untamed by reason can unleash dark forces, as we witness every day in gruesome news reports from around the globe, some disturbingly close to home, most more distant, in places that appear to be burdened by ancient animosities and challenged by changing social and economic circumstances.'

Professor Schultz asks what could motivate someone to fly a jet plane into a building, or deny access to affordable life-saving drugs and information because it offends deeply held beliefs, or build a wall to divide a country?

Julianne Schultz, editor of Griffith Review, has had a distinguished career as a journalist, editor, academic and media manager. In Brisbane during the 1990s she was a columnist for the Courier-Mail writing about the media, she is now a professor in the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University.

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No-one expects the scale-free network!

My friend Prasenjit has pointed me at this abstract of a scientific paper, which demonstrates that heresy in the middle ages was transmitted among people as though in a scale-free network. Furthermore, the Inquisition did much better at eradicating heresy once it targeted the hubs of the network.

So I have yet more reason to be happy I'm not a hub myself. I'm more likely to avoid the Inquisition this way.

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Our knowledge of the growth of knowledge : Popper or Wittgenstein? by Peter Munz.

I've been poking around in the philosophy of science recently, when I've had time, and I think it would be a good thing to write a bit of something about some of what I've been reading, just to get a bit of a sense of progress.

Peter Munz is apparently the only person to ever have been a student of both Popper and Wittgenstein, and he seems to have survived with his sanity intact (Popper and Wittgenstein met only once, and had a memorable argument, which only confirmed their mutual loathing. Full details in Wittgenstein's Poker, Edmonds and Eidinow). Nevertheless, I found the title a bit misleading, at least the P or W? part, because I didn't pick up all that much W stuff, and in fact the book spends rather more time tearing down Kuhn and other recent philosophers of science.

Munz is definitely on Popper's side, and since I have a feeling I'm also more or less on Popper's side, this means that there was quite a lot of the book I either enjoyed and found thought-provoking, or agreed with. However, there was also a lot of the book which I frankly found tedious. I got the impression I'd accidently wandered in to Chapter 17 of The Twentieth Century War Over The Philosophy Of Science, wading through pages of argument that might have made sense given the context of having read everything that came before it. But I didn't see any you can only read this book if you are taller than this warnings at the front of the book.

Munz believes that science, and knowledge in general, needs to be tackled in an evolutionary framework, both in the specific biological sense (we are biologically-evolved beings, with all that implies) and in the more general philosophical sense, and again, this is pretty much how I look at it, so this is probably why I agreed with so much. His major argument for Popper seems to boil down to "Popper's first version of hypothesis falsification was pretty crap, but the evolutionary version works nicely, so if you're arguing against the first version, you're wasting your time".

His argument against Kuhn (and others of that ilk) seems to boil down to "So, if there's no objective standard for anything, why should we listen to you, in particular?" which is, in fact, a pretty devastating critique, in my most humble opinion. The problem with complete cultural relativists is that they still think they know more about the subject than you do, so clearly they have some standard they're measuring against in the back of their minds, somewhere.

By far the most interesting and intriguing idea I took away from the book is his notion of false knowledge as social glue. But, just as I recently re-learnt why I'm a biologist by reading a book by a physicist, I've re-learnt that I'm an empiricist rather than a philosopher, and even though Munz puts a lot of weight on empiricism in his argument, at heart he's a philosopher.

His notion is that prior to culture, consciousness, and all that human jazz, biological organisms are knowledge about their environment, in the sense that being better-adapted to the environment is equivalent to having more knowledge of it. I'm okay with this, but with the caveat that it's a rather specialised definition of knowledge and particularly if you're writing a book about philosophy of science, with not one, but two copies of the word in the title, you have to be very careful what you mean by that word each time you use it, and that you don't commit any definitional fallacies, where you define a word one way, and then drag your poor audience along by playing on other meanings and connotations of the word.

Then, humans invent culture and societies and in addition to the knowledge of the world they have in the form of knowing what foods to eat, how to bring up children, they invent a bunch of false, cultural knowledge. Munz' argument is that the knowledge more or less needs to be false, because it is functioning as social glue, and you don't want to accidentally include outsiders in your society because they happen to share your knowledge, and that risk is much higher if the knowledge happens to be true.

Munz thus proposes that only societies and cultures that don't put a store on shared knowledge as social glue, but uses other kinds of social glue, can start to develop real knowledge of the world in the form of science: hypotheses to be argued over and falsified with appropriate experiments.

It's a pretty idea, as I said. But Munz puts the whole thing forward as though it were self-evident if you just thought about it hard enough, whereas I immediately started thinking about how you would go about collecting data about knowledge from different cultures and societies, how to evaluate its (empirical?) truthfulness impartially, how many cultures you'd have to survey to get enough data, issues of sampling and independence, and then finally seeing whether all that data tends to confirm or deny the idea, and being prepared to come up with a modified idea if necessary.

See, one of the core problems I have with the idea is back to this concept that we can easily distinguish the external, physical environment, and the human, cultural environment any given person is surrounded by. That it is meaningful to talk about shared cultural beliefs as being "false knowledge" (equivalent to, if you remember from way above, reduced evolutionary fitness), when, clearly and blatantly, that person holding those beliefs has a clearly enhanced evolutionary strategy (co-operate with the other people sharing my culture) relative to the human who's bashing on their own against the wilderness. Bluntly, humans don't survive bashing on their own against the wilderness.

Munz seems to see religion and so forth as an anomalous blip on the smooth growth of knowledge from biology to neurology to science. I think religion and so forth are an example of a different kind of knowledge, on a different level, and worrying about the literal truthfulness is like arguments about what font to print The Origin of Species in, rather than arguing about the actual contents of the book.

So, yeah, my head is full of lots of ideas about how complicated things are, particularly once humans are involved, different layers of reality and meaning, and the fundamental issues of being human, and therefore both an individual and part of a society, which I don't think our culture is tackling particularly gracefully at the moment.

Also memes, and the way that they are both abstractions, above any physical representation, and yet, once all the physical representations (I include synaptic patterns in someone's brain in case that isn't clear) are gone, so is the meme. And how that makes it really difficult to define and pin down memes. But that isn't a bad thing, because I don't think they are things that can be easily pinned down and defined, and I'd rather have that staring in my face as a constant reminder.

Sometimes I think genetics has gotten itself stuck up a bit of a side track, or at least some problems are looking far hairier than they actually are, because people want the definition of gene to be simple, straightforward; with clear categories of what is and what isn't and what's one and what's two, and I think it just ain't like that. And nature doesn't care that we can't nicely define genes as discrete entities in isolation of the environment, because nature does what works.

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The Fabric of Reality: Chapter 8, The Significance of Life

I was approaching this chapter with some trepidation, since I'm an evolutionary biologist, and evolution is one of David Deutsch's four core strands, but he's a physicist, and evolution is introduced in Chapter 8, of a 14-chapter book.

I think the chapter justified my trepidation, as it was pretty much what I expected, but it did have the nice effect of reminding me why I stopped thinking of myself as a mathematician and started thinking of myself as a biologist. And by the end of the chapter, it was equally clear to me that Deutsch really, truly, is a quantum physicist.

But first, I think I'll toss out the expected nitpickings of a biologist reading a physicist's summary of evolution.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution explained the origin of life in terms that required no special physics, and since then we have discovered many of the detailed mechanisms of life, and found no special physics there either.

I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. [...] Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

This gene-based understanding of life - regarding organisms as part of the environment of gene - has implicitly been the basis of biology since Darwin, but it was overlooked until at least the 1960s, not fully understood until Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982).

I'm possibly oversensitive about what is in Darwin's theory, and how evolutionary understanding has evolved since then. This could be because I live in a society that contains people who are particularly hostile to evolution among the sciences, who refer to people like me as "Darwinists"; when I'm either a neo-neo-Darwinist or a neo-neo-neo-Darwinist, depending on who's counting, and whether the whole neo- thing is worth persisting with at this point.

On the positive side, and in sharp contrast to my impression of Chapter 5, he does understand and appreciate the importance of the environment, or niche, a living thing, or other replication-capable thing, finds itself in.

Now, why did the chapter remind me why I'm a biologist? And convince me that Deutsch is a physicist? Well, picture a giant pile of sand, with an ant crawling around on it. I think any sensible description of this scenario would have to focus most of its attention on the ant. The sand is simple, boring. The ant moves around, it's got anatomy and physiology and chemistry that is complicated - it's interesting. To me, anyone who gets caught up in the fact that 99.99% of the matter physically is silicon dioxide has missed the point, and I think Deutsch sort of agrees with me.

But on the other hand, he still seems impressed by the sheer physical vastness of space, and the fact that the laws of physics apply everywhere. His argument that life is interesting and profound seems to revolve around the idea that life has the potential to mess around with physics and chemistry on the grand scale. The ant has to justify its interestingness by being capable of moving the pile of sand, grain by grain. I fundamentally just can't seem to get into that headspace. It could be a retrospective explanation for why I hated physics.

But why did I stop thinking of myself as a mathematician and start thinking of myself as a biologist? Well, it seemed to me that maths presented this vast spectrum of possibilities, complexities, interestingnesses, but as long as it's pure maths, has to firstly be very broad-brushstroke, and secondly, have a dreadful time picking which particular interestingnesses to pursue further. For me at least, there's a slight aimlessness when overwhelmed by choice, and a tendency to get to too high levels of abstraction.

In biology, you have lots of wonderfully complicated interesting things, that as it turns out, have been selected from a much larger array of potential interesting things. It's the difference between possibility and actuality. There's still a lot of choice, but it's magnitudes smaller, and it's been sifted to contain a much higher density of interestingness.

I, like probably most scientists, am curiousity-driven, which means I want to explain interesting problems. I like solving quite broad, generalised problems (which is what makes me mathematical/computationally oriented), but so far, I've mainly found them as generalisations of very specific problems. I've noticed I unsettle a lot of other people, both biologists and not, by my total confidence that if I persist on any one specific, motivated biological problem, I will eventually come up with something broader, that can be applied to several other problems, and that I would not have come up with the broad solution if I'd started by looking at the broad problem.

And why do I think Deutsch is not only a physicist, but a quantum physicist? Well, he wants life and information to be physically different from non-life and non-information, to justify its interestingness. He says elsewhere physicality of information isn't important, but I think he means something different by that than I do. And then he tries to explain why the same sequence of bases in a gene and in an irrelevant part of the genome (I've got to be careful these days, as most 'junk' DNA probably isn't, but we don't know exactly what it is yet) have different significance, and again, it feels to me like he's trying to justify why we should pay attention to the ant when the protons, neutrons and electrons in it are no different at first glance from the subatomic particles in the sand.

So his explanation for why the sequence in the gene is more interesting involves his multiple-universe model of quantum theory. Never mind that the computational and information-based theories used to analyse genomic sequence employ a number of principles I find much easier to explain to undergraduates (and frequently do). No, apparently the way Deutsch is convinced that this sequence of ant DNA has information and that (identical) sequence doesn't, is because among the millions of parallel-universe ants, the first sequence is conserved and the second isn't. Never mind that he can't, physically, do that comparison, whereas boring biologists go out and compare those sequences in an analogous way between that ant, other ants, and other insects.

It's like watching someone fly from Brisbane to Melbourne via New Zealand. It's hard to avoid guessing they grew up in New Zealand, and aren't terribly familiar or comfortable with Australian geography.

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Christopher and the Turing Test

I realised my review was getting a bit out of hand, so this is a separate post with thinking provoked by reading "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time".

I can remember at some point in my reading, well after I personally was convinced that Christopher, however unusual and unlike a "normal" person, definitely was a person and entitled to full rights and respect as such, thinking "I'd be really worried about anyone who could read this far and still not think Christopher (and others like him) is a person deserving of rights and respect".

Acknowledging that partly, this is because we're getting Christopher "from the inside" and there's plenty of evidence in the book that the people who meet Christopher have a lot of trouble seeing him that way, and that we ourselves would have that same trouble, of course. Mark Haddon again: Here's a character whom if you met him in real life you'd never, ever get inside his head. Yet something magical happens when you write a novel about him. You slip inside his head, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world.

So, there I was, thinking something similar to MH, but from a different viewpoint, and it occurred to me that MH was interested in the difference between real life and novels, and my natural reaction was more like a Turing Test, in reverse.

I realise that in the AI community, the Turing Test is about thinking, but the way the game is set up I can't see how it isn't about determining person-ness, and now I've had these thoughts in the context of Christopher, I can't escape the idea that surely, whether or not the interrogator can tell apart the human and the computer, depends on the interrogator, and to some extent, that must be something to do with the interrogator's person-ness (or ability to think, if you prefer something closer to the original TT).

I have no trouble imagining a scenario in which a specific human - computer pair could be distinguished by one interrogator, and another human - computer pair could be distinguished by another interrogator; but InterrogatorA couldn't tell, of HumanB and ComputerB, who was which, and InterrogatorB couldn't tell, of HumanA and ComputerA, who was which.

And I also have no trouble imagining that things could be such that there was no possible Interrogator C who could perform both distinctions correctly.

In particular, it strikes me that Christopher or someone like him could be very good at making certain kinds of distinctions, and absolutely lousy at making others, which almost any random person off the street could do. I think I can switch between the two views reasonably well, but I also recognise that I can't follow either Christopher or the random person off the street into the farthest reaches of their world view, and I have to make decisions about which world view, or blend of world views, is correct for any given situation.

And this is just one dimension: there's also the dimension in which I'm at one extreme, Anti-Ingrid is at the other, and other people find themselves able to see both viewpoints to varying degrees. And so on.

I can't prove my scenario or the lack of any possible Interrogator C of course, and I know that personal incredulity is never a good argument, but I'm prepared to do some handwaving in the direction of Gödel's Theorem and the difficulty in defining species and leave it at that for now.

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The Fabric of Reality: Chapter 5, Virtual Reality

I'm currently reading my way through David Deutsch's book The Fabric of Reality. I intend to post an entire review once I get through, or maybe several reviews along the way. Deutsch is one of the leading lights in quantum computing, but this is advertised as more of a popular science/philosophy book, expounding his Theory of Everything which is apparently the union of quantum mechanics, computation, knowledge, and evolution.

What I'd like to write about today isn't exactly review, more a negative visceral reaction. The thing is, I have no particular dispute with the point that Deutsch eventually reaches at the end of this chapter, and which the chapter summary covers elegantly. I was even wondering during the reading of the chapter if my problem wasn't an unnecessary distraction and whether I couldn't in fact predict that the chapter was ending somewhere moderately uncontroversial (to me).

Virtual reality is not just a technology in which computers simulate the behaviour of physical environments. The fact that virtual reality is possible is an important fact about the fabric of reality. It is the basis not only of computation, but of human imagination and external experience, science and mathematics, art and fiction.

The way I have defined it, a virtual-reality generator is a machine that gives the user experiences of some real or imagined environment (such as an aircraft) which is, or seems to be, outside the user's mind. Let me call those external experiences. External experiences are to be contrasted with internal experiences such as one's nervousness when making one's first solo landing...

One can conceive of a technology beyond virtual reality, which could also induce specified internal experiences. A few internal experiences, such as moods induced by certain drugs, can already be artificially rendered, and no doubt in future it will be possible to extend that repetoire. Bu a generator of specifiable internal experiences wouuld in general have to be able to override the normal functioning of the user's mind as well as the senses. In other words, it would be replacing the user by a different person. This puts such machines into a different category from virtual-reality generators. They will require quite different technology and will raise quite different philosophical issues, which is why I have excluded them from my definition of virtual reality.

(Hunger and thirst, and other sensations such as balance and muscle tension, are perceived as being internal to the body, but they are external to the mind and are therefore potentially within the scope of virtual reality.)

Weightlessness and all other sensations can, in principle, be rendered artificially, Eventually it wlll become possible to bypass the sense organs altogether and directly simulate the nerves that lead from them to the brain.

Once we can artificially generate nerve signals accurately enough for the brain not to be able to perceive the difference between those signals and the ones that our sense organs would send, increasing the accuracy of this technique will no longer be relevant.

The environment may include the user's own body: since the body is external to the mind, the specification of a virtual-reality environment may legitimately include the requirement that the user's body should seem to have been replaced by a new one with the specified properties.

The human mind affects the body and the outside world by emitting nerve impulses. Therefore a virtual-reality generator can in principle obtain all the information it needs about what the user is doing by intercepting the nerve signals coming from the user's brain.

I found a photo of Deutsch online, and this was possibly a mistake, because he looks like one of those stereotypical physics nerds who wouldn't recognise his own propioceptors if they sent him news about quantum computing in morse code. It's quite possibly true that he wouldn't feel less himself, detached from his "body", but that doesn't give him the right to make claims about the rest of us. I realise I'm implicitly engaging in a kind of reverse discrimination here, as a physically active, kinesthetically oriented person who also manages some intelligence with that, but I'm honestly trying to allow him his reality and I don't think he's allowing me mine.

Now of course this kind of technology doesn't yet exist, anyway. And I don't know how I'd experience having my bodily sensory input replaced by computer simulation. But given how my relationship with my bodily sensations has developed, I'm prepared to guess that it's as likely as not that I will feel less like myself than I do when under the influence of certain mood altering drugs.

And I expect, given my experience with mood altering drugs, and comparing notes with others, that there's no neat listing of things that are "safe" to do virtually, that will remain exterior experiences, and not change the user into a different person. I think this also throws a stone in the cogs of his later argument:

I do not want to understate the practical problems involved in intercepting all the nerve signals passing into and out of the human brain, and in cracking the various codes involved. But this is a finite set of problems that we shall have to solve once only.

Certainly, a virtual-reality generator that renders a given environment perfectly for humans will not do so for dolphins or extraterrestrials. To render a given environment for a user with given types of sense organs, a virtual-reality generator must be physically adapted to such sense organs and its computer must be programmed with their characteristics. However the modifications that have to made to accommodate a given species of user are finite, need only be carried out once.

Similarly, I don't think there is a sharp boundary between the "brain" and "the rest of the body"; the self and "the rest of the world".

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On Bullshit

This sounds really intriguing and like it might be my kind of book. Of course, it could be bullshit itself. Must poke around further. Will report back.

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