It’s a beautiful book about how time shapes our universe and our lives. Go and read it if you are interested in physics. Here’s a quick summary if you are not.

Chapter 1
In the beginning, every civilisation had its own way of keeping track of time but they reset their calendar to zero every time the king died. One day, the Seleucids decided not to reset their calendar and used the same year counter forevermore. A few centuries later, we reset our calendar one last time and decided that 1 AD should be four years after Jesus was born. There is no Year Zero.

That’s all the book has to say about timekeeping. The rest is about physics and philosophy.

Aristotle divided the earth from the heavens each was made from different stuff. The universe is finite with us at the centre.

Newton said the universe is infinite and has no centre. Everything everywhere is made of the same stuff and follows the same laws. Time and space exist independently of the objects that are in them and motion is just the change of place over time.

Leibniz disagreed. Space and time are relations between objects.

Galileo showed that if you do experiments with balls, you will get the same result whether you are moving at constant velocity or at rest. But not if you are accelerating.

Chapter 2
The speed of light turns out to be the same for everyone however fast they are travelling. Einstein’s theory of relativity explains this by treating time as just another dimension in spacetime. Distances and time intervals are different for different observers. It makes no sense to say that one event in spacetime happened before or after another event or that one person is moving while another is at rest. It’s all relative to the observer.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity describes how spacetime is warped by massive objects and Minkowski gave us the maths to describe it. Warped spacetime gives us black holes where time appears to stop. But it doesn’t.

Chapter 3
Our commonsense understanding of time conflicts with the consequences of relativity. That’s why we need philosophy!

Chapter 4
The equations that describe the physical world are reversible. If you throw a ball, it will travel in a parabola. If you reverse time, the ball will follow the same trajectory in the other direction. Physical equations have no opinion on which direction the clocks run. All physical equations except one: the second law of thermodynamics says you can’t unstir your coffee.

The author describes the second law in terms of microstates and macrostates. Microstates — like the molecules of milk and coffee — don’t care about the arrow of time. Macrostates — cups of coffee — do. There are more ways to arrange the microstates of the milk and coffee if they are mixed than if they are kept separate and you can’t unmix them. Stirred coffee stays stirred. The same rule applies to omelettes, steam engines and star systems. Any random change to the microstates results in greater entropy and time’s river flows to the sea.

Given enough time and a lot of mixing, complex structures formed. Some structures found a way to copy themselves and the miracle of life began. Life can unmix the coffee for a brief period and uses energy from the external environment to change its internal environment. Eventually the copies mutate and the best mutations survive, giving evolution a way to swim upstream in time’s river and we end up with bumble bees, cabbages and gazelles.

Chapter 5
Einstein’s world suggests that time is an illusion. All of spacetime was laid out in advance and we seem to be travelling across it in a predefined route. But we humans don’t experience time this way.

Henri Bergson argued that Einstein’s world leaves out the features of time that are essential to human understanding. Where is our sense of self in Einstein’s world? What happened to that little boy who gazed up at the stars? For Bergson, time is more like a river that flows through a past, a present and a future.

Neuroscience sheds light on these mysteries. The unconscious brain builds a model of the world informed by our memories and experiences and presents it to our consciousness. Our experience of the flow of time informs our model and guides our actions. It tells us where to run to return a tennis serve and when to hide our nuts in storage for the coming winter.

We see our own lives from multiple perspectives. We live in anticipation, in experience and in our collection of the memories, perceptions, hopes and fears that shape who we become. We look forward to branching possibilities and we look back on the thin, hard line of fact.

The author gets lyrical in chapter 5 and muses on penguins recognising their sole chick in a sea of thousands and little children struggling with third-grade maths. He tells of the doctor who does not see, of the old woman on his operating table and of the young mother who fastened our buttons against the cold on the first day of school.

I thought I was reading a book about time but it turned out to be about all of creation and all of humanity. I wish all science books and philosophy books could be written this way. I will read it again and again.

Nine-year-old poker players are pretty easy to beat because they tend to be very aggressive, betting on all kinds of crazy hands. After The Little Clown went all in with three cards to a straight for the umpteenth time I decided it was time for a lesson in probability. As synchronicity would have it, The Little Clown’s annual science fair was coming up and we agreed that he would choose as his question:

What should I bet if I draw three cards to a straight in Texas Hold’em?

We filled in the forms and it didn’t take long before his teacher contacted me, appalled that a nine-year-old would be playing poker, let alone that he would have the audacity to want to study the topic in a science project. After some negotiation, we compromised on a less provocative hypothesis:

What is the probability of a pair if you draw two random cards from a deck?

Little Clown did a science project every year from kindergarten to fifth grade but this one was my favourite as it fulfilled all of my criteria for a good science project.

1. There should be an obvious hypothesis that is wrong.
2. The hypothesis can easily be proved wrong by an experiment.
3. The experimental result can easily be confirmed with maths.

Excuse me for a second while I rant a little about elementary school science projects.

Who exactly was it that decided that filling a cardboard volcano with baking soda and vinegar was a good science project? What is the child learning from the experiment?  What is the hypothesis? How come the vast majority of children’s science projects are either variants on the volcano “experiment” or an exercise in building a model out of lollipop sticks and elastic bands?

I predict that if I leave bread out for three months it will go moldy.

I predict that if I make a little car that is jet-propelled by a balloon, the car will be jet-propelled by the balloon.

How is that science? Where is the experiment?

Anyhoo…

The poker experiment is perfect because 9-year-olds (like most people) don’t really get probability and will always get the answer wrong (that’s why they are easy to beat at poker). It’s also easy to demonstrate by choosing random pairs of cards from a deck and recording the results. The maths is a bit harder, but this was actually my favourite bit of maths instruction ever with my budding scientist. We started with a coin.

What is the chance of getting heads if you flip a coin?

We tried it a hundred times and confirmed our intuitions before moving on to something more complex.

What are the chances of getting two heads if you flip two coins?

This was a little bit harder but we figured it out and experiments again confirmed our intuition. We tried more coins.

What are the chances of getting three heads if you flip three coins?

Intuition failed us here but … maths to the rescue! Do 9-year-olds know about exponents? *shrug* Mine did and we got the results quickly and confirmed it with experiments. From there, it was trivial to try four coins and five coins so we moved on to dice.

What are the chances of getting a six if you roll a dice?

Intuition was inadequate again, but again the maths held up (hooray, maths!). Exponents still work if the base is 6 instead of 2 and the experiment confirmed it.

What are the chances of getting two sixes if you roll two dice?

By now it was easy and we zoomed through three dice and four dice. Time for cards.

What are the chances of getting a pair if your draw two cards from a deck?

A deck of cards is trickier because you have to deal with the whole take-one-away thing but, luckily, 51 is divisible by 3 and the maths is not hard, even for a nine-year-old. The experiments are more tedious because you have to deal with a lot of pairs to demonstrate a 1 in 17 chance and nine-year-olds are not famous for their patience. Fortunately my nine-year-old was already a pretty good Logo programmer as he was already a four-year veteran of the business having started to learn Logo in first grade.

I helped him recreate the coin-flip experiment in Logo and then we did it again for the coins. The cards were beyond his programming skills but he followed along OK when I wrote the code and he got a kick out of the results.

Challenger School – where my little clown learned his nine-year-old skills – gets a bad rap for allegedly teaching rote learning. But the rap couldn’t be further from the truth. Having sent one little clown to Challenger and another to public school, I can attest that only one of them was ever subject to rote learning and it wasn’t the Challenger clown.

Challenger is intensely academic and, while I can understand that it is not right for every kid, mine was challenged in ways that he didn’t experience again until high school. In fact, I wonder whether the transition from high-performing fifth grader to coasting sixth grader wasn’t detrimental to his determination as it taught him that coasting was an option; an option unavailable to him at Challenger.

Fast-forward nine years and my little clown is now all grown up and accepted to UC Santa Barbara and, under protest, Ragged Clown Sr and Ragged Clown Jr are on their first road trip together to go check out Jr’s home for the next four years. It’s a long trip so we brought along Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich for company.

Jad and Robert – and their magnificent Radiolab podcast – have long been our companions on road trips. On this particular trip, the podcast app summoned up the episode “Are You Sure?”

Radiolab episodes have a certain structure. There is always the main theme – in this episode the theme was doubt –  and they do a powerful job of exploring variations on the theme with an eclectic selection of interviews and zany editing and contributions from psychologists, scientists and moral philosophers – and anyone else who has a good story to tell.

The first segment was interesting albeit not relevant to my story here. A couple of devout Christians were due to get married until one of them started to wonder whether all that stuff in the bible was actually true. That topic would make a great blog post, but it was the second segment that intrigued me more.

Annie Duke is a decision strategist – a poker player – and won the poker world championship in 2004. In her segment, Annie describes the strategy that professional poker players use for winning poker games: know the odds. But knowing the odds doesn’t just mean knowing which hand is likely to win; it means understanding that the hand that is most likely to win will often lose (and vice versa). The secret is in knowing the pot odds.

Annie:

If there is a $300 in the pot and you have to bet $100 to stay in, you could lose the pot three times and still break even if you win the next hand.

Robert:

So you could lose a hundred dollars on Monday, a hundred dollars on Tuesday, you could lose another hundred dollars on Wednesday, but if you win the hundred back on Thursday, you are good.

Jad:

So you just need to win one out of every four times

In other words, it’s not enough to know your chances of winning. The important thing is that your chances of winning are greater than the pot odds.

The climax of the story has Annie playing against her brother in the final of the World Hold’em Championship. They are playing for two million dollars and she’s holding a pair of sixes and her brother goes all in with a pair of sevens before the flop. Her brother is 82% to win the hand. Amazingly, the flop gives Annie a full house and she wins the $2,000,000.

Aside from the lessons on how to play hold’em, Annie’s good luck highlighted some fundamentally different ways of thinking in the Clown household. There’s one strand of thought that says, if there is a chance that a bad thing might happen at a particular event, you should avoid events like that in the future. Bad movie? No more movies! Awkward silence or said the wrong thing at a social gathering? No more social gatherings! On the other hand, the more optimistic clowns are willing to tolerate a lot of crap movies and awkward gatherings in the knowledge that, eventually, you’ll find a movie to enjoy or that a social gathering will sparkle. Even without knowing the pot odds, I’m pretty certain that if you never take a chance, you’ll never win.

A final word from Annie:

It’s not about winning the hand all the time. It’s about winning the hand enough of the time […] That embracing of uncertainty does some really wonderful things for you.

Jad:

You learn how to avoid that very human tendency to feel ashamed or embarrassed when you lose. You just float right above it.

Annie’s brother:

If you are making good decisions, then you are making good decisions.

Annie:

You have to be somewhat outcome blind.

By coincidence, Annie was a psych major and Little Clown is majoring in bio-psych at UCSB. He’s gonna be a scientist!

I hope he’ll learn from Annie and take some chances. I hope he’ll win some too.

Let’s get the flaws out of the way first. What I had in mind first time around was his total disdain for the institutions of religion and monarchy but, on reflection, I think he really deserves respect for standing up for what he believed in at potentially great cost to his career.

There are a bunch of interesting anecodotes about his antipathy to organized religion—Crick makes Richard Dawkins look like the Archbishop of Canterbury—but my favourite episode occurred when Crick was offered a founding fellowship of Churchill College. The college was being founded in honour of Winston Churchill as a specifically scientific college in an attempt to imitate the success of MIT. Crick had initially refused the fellowship because the college planned to add a chapel (the initial plan did not include one) and Crick thought a chapel had no place in a place of science. He was persuaded to change his mind because it was considered unlikely that the college would ever raise the funds to build the chapel. Crick became a fellow.

Shortly after that, one Timothy Beaumont donated the entire cost of the chapel and the foundations were dug before the fellows even got to have a say. Crick resigned immediately and sent a letter of resignation to Winston Churchill. He received the following reply:

I was sorry to learn that you have resigned from Churchill College, and am puzzled by your reason. The money for the chapel was provided specifically for that purpose by Mr Beaumont and not taken from general college funds. A chapel, whatever one’s views on religion, is an amenity which many of those who live in the College may enjoy, and none need enter it unless they wish.

Crick sent this reply:

To make my position a little clearer I enclose a cheque for ten guineas to open the Churchill College Hetairae [courtesans] fund. My hope is that it will eventually be possible to build permanent accommodation within the College, to house a carefully chosen collection of young ladies in the charge of a suitable Madam who, once the institution has become traditional, will doubtless be provided, without offense, with dining rights at the High Table.

Such a building will, I feel confident, be an amenity which many who live in Cambridge will enjoy very much, and yet the institution need not be compulsory and none need enter it unless they wish. Moreover it would be open (conscience permitting) not merely to members of the Church of England, but also to Catholics, Non-Conformists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Zen Buddhists and even atheists and agnostics such as myself.

The trustees may feel my offer of ten guineas to be a joke in rather poor taste. But that is exactly my view of the proposal of the Trustees to build a chapel, after the middle of the 20th century, in a new college and in particular one with a special emphasis on science. Naturally some members of the college will be Christian, at least for the next decade or so, but I do not see why the college should tacitly endorse their beliefs by providing them with special facilities. The churches in town, it has been said, are half-empty. Let them go there. It will be no further than they have to go for their lectures.

Even a joke in poor taste can be enjoyed, but I regret that my enjoyment of it has entailed my resignation from the college, which bears your illustrious name.

The chapel was eventually built outside of college grounds.

Crick refused to attend weddings, funerals and baptisms in church but suggested that, if humanism were to take off it would need its own rituals, anticipating Kev and Jeff’s House of Death by 40 years. I think Francis Crick would have appreciated a sad, silent clown.

There is another great story which has a broke, father-of-three, Francis Crick writing to Jim Watson to request—and being refused—Watson’s blessing for a show about the double helix on BBC Radio:

Do you still feel you can’t allow the Third Programme Broadcast? I’ve yet to find anyone who would object to it, and things have cooled down a bit now. Also, it would bring in $50 to $100 which at the moment I could do with.

Watson refused his blessing:

If you need the money that bad, go ahead. Needless to say, I should not think any higher of you and shall have good reason to avoid any further collaboration with you.

Crick graciously declined to do the broadcast but this episode was perhaps in the back of his mind when he and Watson had their great falling out over the latter’s The Double Helix (Amazon, here I come again). Crick did everything he could to try to suppress Watson’s book which (I am told…still waiting for delivery) is written as much as a warts-and-all autobiography as an account of the science that led to the breakthroughs with DNA that won them their Nobel Prize. Crick succeeded in getting Harvard Press to refuse to publish it and, after its eventual publication, bore a grudge for several years.

But, as Julio suggested, none of that rises to the level of ‘flawed’. But flaws, sadly, there are. In the 70s, Crick was very outspoken on such contentious topics as eugenics, population control and race. He made suggestions that seem outrageous now (and, presumably, then) such as forced sterilization, social experiments on twins (who would be subject to mandatory separation at birth) and a form of licensing to discourage breeding among the genetically unfit.

I won’t spend too much time on Crick’s flamboyance. Just open the book at any page to read of the parties at his residence, The Golden Helix (at one party in particular, guests were handed a sketchpad and required to provide a sketch of the nude life model in the foyer) or of his reckless yachting adventures or his eccentric choice of friends including one who would habitually use Crick’s name whenever he was arrested (often) or picking up women on foreign beaches (all the time).

The book is ultimately, of course, about Crick’s genius which seems almost unfathomable. Consider a man who quit his well-paying job to enter academia but could not decide whether to first solve the secret of life or whether to explain the nature of consciousness. With the double helix well-documented and the DNA code cracked Crick still found time, at the age of 60 to start work on the second problem. Sadly, time ran out for Francis Crick in 2004. I am sure he would have cracked that one too if he had only started a little earlier.

One day, when I am rich, I will have a house with a study and on the walls of that study will be the portraits of all my heroes. Francis Crick will be up there with Bob, George, Winston and the others.

Bob Wright asks the classic question “Why do we dream?” and Robert Stickgold gives a long and fascinating answer about the role of dreams in information processing and its relationship to forming memories.

There are studies demonstrating that, if you are given a cognitively complex task to perform and then tested on that task three hours later, your performance will degrade. However, if you have a nap during the three hour interval, you’ll perform even better after the interval than you did when you first attempted it.

A more elaborate version of the study has the researchers waking the subjects from their naps at periodic intervals and asking them what they were dreaming about. The subjects who reported dreaming about the task, performed better at the task when they were retested than those who didn’t. Robert Stickgold’s conclusion is that (one reason) we dream is to help form associations between events. I think this is wrong and it’s got to do with a muddle over the meaning of the word consciousness.

Bob Wright:

When you wake up in the middle of the dream it seems as if there was consciousness of the dream but if you didn’t wake up, you would never be able to recall it. It’s as though consciousness has to be a part of the information processing infrastructure.

It seems completely obvious to me that memory and awareness are separate functions in the brain and Robert corrects Bob’s error…

You are conflating a couple of things. One has to do with remembering your dreams when you wake up.

…but then goes on to make a similar error himself. Let’s deal with Bob’s error first.

Arguments about the meaning of consciousness have a long and storied history and I expect that a lot of the controversy arises because it’s not obvious what the term consciousness refers to. Is it the difference between being asleep and awake? Is it something to do with recognizing yourself in the mirror? Is it that ineffable quality of experiencing the colour red? I think it’s none of those things and all of the mystery goes away if we stop using the word consciousness and talk about awareness or attention instead.

In a previous dialog with David Chalmers, Bob tried to explain the distinction between perceiving the color red and having the experience of perceiving the color red. That distinction, in a nutshell, according to Bob, is what consciousness is all about and is what separates us from the lower animals and is why machines will never be conscious. But, for the life of me, I struggle to understand this distinction and wonder whether or not I am actually conscious myself.

The real explanation is simpler.

I can perceive the colour red and I can be aware (or not) that I have perceived the colour red and I can have a memory (or not) that I was aware that I have perceived the colour red and those are all separate ideas. It’s well established that we can perceive things without being aware of it—this is the basis for subliminal messaging—but it’s less obvious that we can be aware of something but to then immediately forget that we were aware of it. At least, it’s less obvious to Bob.

When you think about it, our brains must have a finite memory and to make sure we remember the good stuff we have to throw away a lot of the bad stuff and our brains continuously make decisions about which is which. This brings us back to Robert’s explanation of what dreams are for.

Dreams, according to Robert, are for making associations between events and for fitting them into an information schema in our memories so that we can recall them at appropriate times in the future. According to this explanation, our dreams rummage through the day’s events and decide which are significant and which are not (paying special attention to the emotional valence of an event, which is why dreams are often emotionally disturbing). I think this is close, but wrong.

Michael Gazzaniga discovered through experiments on patients with split-brains, that is patients who have had the connection between the left and right halves of their brains severed, that different areas of the brain have different responsibilities. You can think of these areas as specialized modules.

From a New York Times article,

In the decades to follow, brain scientists found that the left brain-right brain split is only the most obvious division of labor; in fact, the brain contains a swarm of specialized modules, each performing a special skill — calculating a distance, parsing a voice tone — and all of them running at the same time, communicating in widely distributed networks, often across hemispheres.

In short, the brain sustains a sense of unity not just in the presence of its left and right co-pilots. It does so amid a cacophony of competing voices, the neural equivalent of open outcry at the Chicago Board of Trade.

In one experiment, Dr. Gazzaniga showed different pictures to different halves of the brain.

The man’s left hemisphere saw a chicken claw; his right saw a snow scene. Afterward, the man chose the most appropriate matches from an array of pictures visible to both hemispheres. He chose a chicken to go with the claw, and a shovel to go with the snow. So far, so good.

But then Dr. Gazzaniga asked him why he chose those items — and struck gold. The man had a ready answer for one choice: The chicken goes with the claw. His left hemisphere had seen the claw, after all. Yet it had not seen the picture of the snow, only the shovel. Looking down at the picture of the shovel, the man said, “And you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

The left hemisphere was just concocting an explanation, Dr. Gazzaniga said.

In this multi-module model of how the brain works, there is a module for recognizing faces, another for experiencing emotions and yet another for  reasoning. But most importantly for our purpose here, there is a module whose job it is to make up stories about what we’ve just seen. Dr Gazzaniga calls it the interpreter or narrator.

The brain’s cacophony of competing voices feels coherent because some module or network somewhere in the left hemisphere is providing a running narration.

Back to the question of what dreams are for. Putting together what we’ve learned from Dr. Gazzaniga and Professor Stickgold, my answer is: nothing at all.

I imagine that there’s a module somewhere in our brain that sorts through our memories, categorizing them and throwing away the useless ones. As this memory sorter looks at each memory, it comes to the attention of the interpreter module which makes up a story about it.

So, imagine your memory sorter going through your recent memories one by one:

• Big presentation at work (file it under anxiety).
• Beautiful lady said ‘Hi’ on the bus (file it under lust).
•  Taxes are due next week (file it under dread).

These three things are unrelated except for the fact that they were memories to be filed away. Meanwhile, the poor old interpreter is watching these memories as they scroll by and feels compelled to make up a story about them and suddenly you are back in 10th grade giving a presentation to your class in double history and, when the cute girl in the front row smiles, you realize you are naked and run away screaming.

There’s no rational meaning to the dream (like President Trump, the storyteller’s gonna tell stories whether they are true or not) and if you happen to wake up at the right moment, the story itself becomes a memory. And that’s where dreams come from.

Dreams are not for anything. They are a weird side-effect of your memory-processing system being watched by your story-telling system. They have no function and no predictive power. Just enjoy them.

Dream Photos from Flickr (Creative Commons)

What is ChatGPT?

You probably remember chatting with Eliza back when you got your first computer.

ChatGPT is a bit like Eliza but, while Eliza just repeats back what you said in the form of a question, ChatGPT has a huge library of text which it uses to generate responses. Here’s an example:

ChatGPT’s algorithm is not a million miles from the algorithm that Google uses to make suggestions when you start typing a query. It tries to guess what comes next based on what other people have typed in the past.

The crappy autocomplete on your phone does the same kind of thing but ChatGPT has rules to make sure the answer uses good grammar, makes sense and is on topic.

ChatGPT has its critics

I get a kick out of reading the objections of the naysayers every time there’s a new advance in AI.

“Well, yes,” they say. “AI can do X but it will never do Y.”

Their predictions never seem to last very long.

“ChatGPT just regurgitates what you can get from a Wikipedia page”, they say.

“Computers will never be creative.”, they say.

“Computers have no understanding of the topics they talk about.”, they say.

“Self-driving cars will never be able to drive selfly.”, they say.

“Computers don’t always get it right.”, they say.

Well, OK. They were right about this one. But then again, who does get it right all the time?

Sometimes ChatGPT just makes shit up.

Sometimes it learns racism and other unpleasantness from us humans.

But sometimes its answers are dazzlingly impressive.

You ain’t seen the best of me yet

I think the people who pooh-pooh artificial intelligence are making several big mistakes. Number one, they focus on the stuff that ChatGPT is not so good at. It can’t do maths, they say.

ChatGPT can’t paint pictures either.

Another criticism compares ChatGPT with the very best in society. Maybe the best teachers and the best journalists are safe for a while but not everyone who writes for a living is among the best.

Sturgeon’s Law gives us a good way to think about this. Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer who was once told that “ninety percent of science fiction is crap”. Sturgeon responded that “ninety percent of everything is crap”.

You probably remember from your school days that only a handful of teachers stood out as excellent (ten percent?). The others were mostly crap. Same with paintings, movies, blog posts and Eggs Benedict for breakfast. What percentage of poets are remembered by history? Journalists? Novelists? Professors?

Sturgeon’s Law encourages us to dive a little deeper. If you are a professor of philosophy, you probably compare ChatGPT’s thoughts on Sartre with that of your best students. But, actually, a lot of philosophy students are not among the best (ninety percent?). You should be comparing ChatGPT to your average students, not your best students.

Some of those students cheat.

Think of all the crap writing on the internet: the corporate-speak; the product blurbs for hair removal cream; the local news stories about lost cats; the blog posts about unblocking your drain. Who is going to write that stuff in the future? If you have a job writing crap on the internet, you should be looking for a new job.

All we need to do now is to build an AI that can read the generated copy and we can cut humans out of the loop entirely.

What even is intelligence?

ChatGPT raises questions about what it means to be intelligent. At the moment it just regurgitates the words from other writers. But, then again—who doesn’t?

People will see me and cry

Critics like to point out the limitations of ChatGPT as it is now. Imagine telling 11-year-old Lionel Messi that he is not as good as the grown-ups.

The AI is just getting started.

Everyone knows by now about the Diana monkeys who have different alarm calls for “leopard” and “eagle” and “snake”. If a monkey spots an eagle flying over, he’ll scream “eagle!!” and all the other monkeys will take cover. If a monkey sees a leopard, he’ll scream “leopard” and the other monkeys will run higher up the tree. Their words are not actually “leopard” and “eagle” of course. They are more like “eeeeeuuuugh! ooh oh ooh!” and “ooouuugh ooouuughoo”.

The segment on the Diana monkeys ends with the spine-tingling tale of how the researcher while walking through the jungle, heard troop after troop of Diana monkeys screaming “eeeeeuuuugh ooh oh ooh! eeeeeuuuugh ooh oh ooh!” and he thought “silly monkeys! They think I am a leopard!”

I won’t spoil the ending. Go listen to it yourself so your spine can tingle too. Then listen to the one about America’s heroes or the one about animals showing empathy to humans and get hooked right along with me. Each show is a zany mix of interviews intercut with sound effects and voiceovers and they are mostly about some new aspect of science or psychology or philosophy that you previously did not know. Marvellous stuff.

That wasn’t even my favourite bit of the show.

In another segment, a researcher analyzed prairie dog calls and discovered that they used different “words” when different men walked through their territory. The researcher was able to figure out that the prairie dogs had words for tall and short and blue and red. When someone walked by, they would say things like “Here comes the tall man wearing blue!”

The researcher rigged a pulley system so that he could drag coloured shapes across their territory and recorded the prairie dogs saying “big, blue triangle” or “small, red circle”. How cool is that? He learned the language of another species! Humanity has dreamed of this moment since Doctor Doolittle!

I felt a touch of the  Doolittle myself on Monday when The Quail Family stopped by for a visit.

We get quail in our garden nearly every day but on Monday, Ma and Pa Quail introduced us to their new chicks. All eight of them.

When we saw them through the window, they seemed to be on a mission. Ma and Pa did a superb job of keeping their little chickies in line — better than Mr and Mrs Clown anyway — and hustling towards their destination, at least until they reached the corner by the fence.

Ma and Pa hopped up the twelve inches of our retaining wall and called “pipipipip” to encourage the littl’uns to hop up with them. But, either through obstinacy or the fact that there was no freaking way that those tiny bundles of fluff could jump that high, the baby quails stayed firmly where they were.

Ma and Pa got more and more impatient – “PIPIpipiPIP!” – and even tried to demonstrate the technique for jumping up onto a foot-high wall…you just hop… hop up… you hop…hop..you….dammit you little buggers! Get up here!

The fluff bundles looked up at their parents like they were eedjits. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! How are we supposed to jump all the way up there?? What are we? SuperQuail?”

That was the point where we – the non-quail residents of Quail Creek Circle – decided to intervene.

You may remember the unfortunate affair of Mr and Mr Robin — the last time we tried to interfere in the lives of our feathered friends — and suspect that our intervention was not fated to end well. We suspected the same thing.

My first idea was to build a little quail staircase out of leftover pavers – the kind you might build if you had a salmon trapped in your pond – but I was scared that I’d freak Ma and Pa Quail into abandoning their offspring. Besides, once they cleared the retaining wall they still had an even bigger hop ahead of them to clear the fence.

Mrs Clown suggested picking up the fluff bundles in my hand one by one but, having recently witnessed the Twilight Temptation of Edward, I wasn’t sure I could overcome my carnivorous instincts with such a tasty avian snack in my hand.

Eventually, I decided to open the gate and let them walk out of the garden. To get to the gate, I had to walk quite close to the little chicks and this naturally caused their parents a good deal of consternation. This is where my Doolittle instincts kicked in.

I noticed that Ma and Pa had pretty solid control over the movements of their tiny wards. Like shepherds in an avian edition of One Man and his Dog, they had the little chicks running hither and thither at their every peep.

I figured out that

chip-chip-chip-chip-chip-chip

meant

Hurry along my little ones!

and

cheep-pip-pip-cheep-cheep

meant

Huddle together in a little fluffy bundle!

Another command told them to spread out and forage. Still another had them scurrying for cover behind a huge rock when the big, bad human — potential quail-eater — walked by.

Eventually, I opened the gate and the grateful parents hurried out calling for the younglings to follow. We bade The Quail Family a fond farewell for the day but my curiosity was piqued and I went to consult the literature on quail calls.

Sure enough, I found a paper, VOCAL BEHAVIOR OF ADULT CALIFORNIA QUAIL by H.Warrington Williams [1969].

THIS paper describes the calls of adult California Quail (Lophortyx californicus) in terms of their form, causation,and function. A later paper will report on the derivation of adult calls from the repertoire of the chick.
Previous studies of this species concerned with life history, habitat, food habits, and social behavior, placed little emphasis on vocal communication (Emlen and Lorenz, 1942; Howard and Emlen, 1942; Genelly, 1955; Raitt, 1960). Sumner(1935) provides the most complete listing of calls and the contexts in which they are given.

I learned a ton about quails and their vocalizations.

The adult California Quail has at least 14 calls. I have divided these into four categories modified from Collias (1960):  social contact, alarm, reproductive including agonistic and sexual, and parental. The causation and function of several calls vary with season and social context and are described under separate categories. I initially named each call by ortho-graphic description to avoid implications of function.

H. Warrington has tables and tables of data showing duration and frequencies of the calls as well as frequency plots of all 14. O! If only I hadn’t run away to sea, I could’ve spent my life recording quail calls (or Diana monkeys!) instead of writing software.

The calls were all right there in the paper.

Adults confined in adjacent individual cages and not in visual contact gave the call during active periods or after a disturbance. Birds that had been separated from a group or mate called ut ut loudly immediately following separation. This grades to the cu ca notes and finally to the complete cu ca cow sequence (Figure 2C). The ut note and the cu note of the cu ca cow call are similar in configuration (Figures 1 and 2).
Adults give a similar call sounding more like a mo mo mo to their chicks. The ut ut grades to the food call with the discovery of new food or movement of the group to the food hopper.

He covered alarm calls too.

The alarm notes of the California Quail are associated with the presence of aerial and ground predators, freezing following alarm, running away, and severe distress.
The pit pit call (alarm note).–Next to the cu ca cow, the pit pit call, a series of metallic-sounding pits (Figure 3A), is the most frequent call of the California Quail. Both male and female birds give the call at all seasons of the year with little variation among individuals or sexes.

Fortunately, although I frittered away my life writing software, I still have two offspring on which to project my frustrated hopes and dreams. I hope you like quails, little clowns!

pit pit pit!

Photo Credits

Quail photos: Mrs R. Clown
Diana monkeys photos: cburnett c/o wikipedia
Prairie dog photos: Baldur c/o wikipedia

The neuro-oncologist said “Hmmm… Doesn’t sound like a seizure to me. I’ll send you to a neurologist.“

A seizure is a sudden, uncontrolled burst of electrical activity in the brain. It can cause changes in behavior, movements, feelings and levels of consciousness.

Mayo Clinic

The neurologist said “Nope. Not seizures. But you can carry on taking the anti-seizure medication if you like.” I carried on taking the medication until I forgot it when we went on holiday to Tenerife.

It’s a year later and I am finally having seizures. They are usually at night or in the morning so you probably won’t see one. They always start with a massive electrical storm that feels like a nightmare where I am on a fairground ride that spins me around too fast before it crashes.

Last night, I knew what was happening so I was able to wake Mrs Clown and ask for help.

I lose my language every time but I am perfectly lucid and able to understand what is going on (remember this the next time a philosopher argues that consciousness depends on language). I can think clearly but I don’t know any words. I remember everything.

Mrs Clown always gives me one of those quizzes where you test the patient for alertness. I usually get my name right — and Bob Dylan’s! — and I was quite close with my birthday. I forgot the dog’s name though… and my children’s. Last night I remembered that my address was “Crescent and something. Two syllables. Starts with a ‘W'”.

Eventually, my words come back and sometimes the pounding headache goes away too. The rest of the time I am fine except for a few misplaced nouns. Last night we were able to get back to sleep and everything was fine in the morning.

You put my feet back on the ground
Did you know you brought me around
You were sweet and you were sound
You saved me

Somersault, Zero 7

I don’t know how long this will go on for. It might end tomorrow or next year. Maybe it will be another 20 years. Who knows?

I’ve been interested in philosophy since reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance all those years ago but, after dozens of philosophy books, I still feel like a perpetual beginner. I decided it’s time to study it a bit more seriously and see if I can’t make some progress. I’ve started a philosophy degree with the Open University.

I have a bunch of ideas in my head about how the world works and what it all means and I thought it’d be fun to write some of them down before I get all my naive habits and beliefs tutored out of me. I’ll come back and read them later once I’m educated to see if they were any good — a bit like when they make you draw a self-portrait in your first drawing class and make you compare it to the portrait that you draw in the final class. I expect Future Me will find Current Me cute but silly.

Here goes for the first one: I think I might be a dualist.

Dualism is the idea that there are two different kinds of stuff in the world. There is material stuff — the stuff you can poke and prod and pour — and another kind of stuff. What the other stuff is depends on what kind of dualist you are.

Dualism is often associated with René Descartes who believed that we consist of a material body and an immaterial mind. In Cartesian dualism, the immaterial mind is the “real me” that does all the thinking, hoping and believing and is associated with a material body only for the duration of our brief, mortal life. According to Descartes, the material body and the immaterial mind are made from different substances. For this reason, Cartesian dualism is often referred to as a kind of substance dualism.

Cartesian dualism was the prevailing belief in the West for a couple of hundred years and similar beliefs still dominate in other parts of the world. Cartesian mind-stuff has often been associated with supernatural ideas like spirits and the Christian soul. But dualism began to fall out of fashion as philosophers began to reject theistic accounts of the world and scientists gave more complete accounts of the brain that did not require this second, immaterial substance.

The leading alternative to this two-substance account of the world is physicalism. For a physicalist, everything can be explained in terms of physical objects and the physical laws that they obey. Physicalism used to be called materialism but the latter fell out of fashion for what seem to me to be pedantic reasons but now, at least, physicalists are not confused with those materialists who are driven by a desire for wealth and possessions. Totally different people.

I happened to ask my tutor how physicalists think of non-physical ideas like Pythagoras’s theory or Super Mario World or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Are they physical? I expected a yes/no answer but instead I got a 2000-word email that said, more or less, it depends. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was not much more help. Its 16,815 words on physicalism said, more or less, that opinions vary.

One account has it that anything that is physical or is caused by something physical or — jargon alert — supervenes on something physical is also physical (complaint: philosophy seems to have a lot more jargon than is strictly necessary). By this account, Beethoven’s Fifth is physical — which seems nuts to me.

I wonder if the folks who are committed to the idea that Beethoven’s Fifth is physical are influenced by a lingering distaste for the association between dualism and supernatural concepts like spirits and souls and resist the idea of a second category for that reason. I understand the idea that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity and, sure, the argument that ideas and information can be physical because they are caused by physical things seems correct but it doesn’t seem very useful to have a single category of things that includes both orchestras and the music that they play. They seem like fundamentally different kinds of thing to me.

My tutor suggested that thinking about Beethoven’s Fifth just confuses things. I can make philosophical progress by just thinking about ‘Middle C’ and what that is. Beethoven’s Fifth is just more of the same. That doesn’t seem right to me either though. ‘Middle C’ is the name that we give to a particular frequency of sound; it’s just our name for something that exists in the physical world. Beethoven’s Fifth is not like that. Beethoven’s Fifth exists in the pattern of sounds created by an orchestra or in the pattern of indentations in a compact disk. It can also exist as a series of markings on a page of sheet music. It seems to exist in all those mediums and yet independently of any one of them. It once existed in the mind of Beethoven and, before that, it didn’t exist at all.

The Stanford Encyclopedia talks about the distinction between physical objects and abstract objects but focusses on the example of 7+5=12. Again, that seems like a different kind of thing from Beethoven’s Fifth. 7+5=12, according to one account, has been true since the beginning of time — it’s more like a physical law. But that phrase dah-dah-dah-daaaah did not exist until Beethoven banged it out on his piano. Also, 7+5=12 can be true or false, like a proposition. Can Beethoven’s Fifth be true or false? Is it a proposition? I don’t think so.

The Stanford Encyclopedia goes on to say that if 7+5=12 is not a physical object, or a fact about physical objects or a relation between physical objects or one of eleventy other ways of saying it derives from physical things then physicalism is false. That doesn’t sound right to me either. I mean, maybe 7+5=12 is a fact about physical objects but Beethoven’s Fifth is not. I don’t want physicalism to be false — it’s a useful theory — but I’d like some other category to put symphonies and video games in to separate them from oak trees and jumbo jets.

Stanford also allows that we might be able to save physicalism by restricting the definition to include only objects, or properties of objects, that are grounded in the physical world.

Physicalism is true at a possible world w iff every groundable property instantiated at w is either a physical property or is grounded in a physical property.

[Stanford suggests that this definition might come from ‘Fundamentality physicalism, Inquiry‘ by Gabriel Oak Rabin (2020) but the cite is not clear and I don’t have access to the original paper. I hope I am not misrepresenting it.]

Grounding physicalism allows for some objects or properties of objects that are not physical without throwing out the concept of physicalism. Hooray for physicalism, I guess. It seems to me, however, that grounding physicalism opens up a hole big enough to sneak spirits and souls back in but still doesn’t give me a place to put my symphonies. Chomsky says the whole project of trying to apply physicalism to mental concepts is misguided. This sounds right to me but I’ll save that argument for another day.

I think where I’ve ended up is that physicalism is a good and sufficient explanation for objects and events and processes in the physical world but that Beethoven’s Fifth does not exist in the physical world. Symphonies are not physical and the laws of physics are not useful in explaining them. We need another category. The Stanford Encyclopedia suggests several ways of describing this arrangement but most of them seem to me to be more committed to saving physicalism than in providing a useful category for describing ideas and information. Property Dualism sounds closest to what I have in mind so I’ll go with that for now. Property dualism says that there’s only one fundamental kind of thing in the world but things of that kind have two different kinds of properties: physical properties (size, shape, position etc) and mental properties (properties that only exist in minds — though I want to argue later that symphonies can exist outside of minds too).

So, dualism then. What are the consequences of my new worldview?

I think the most important thing I’ve learned from this episode is that dualism doesn’t necessarily entail supernatural entities and that I can still wear my Brights badge with pride.

I think I’m also committed to the idea that there is value in thinking of the mind as analogous to software (brain is to mind as hardware is to software) and I’ll write more about that another day (update: I wrote about it here).

I need to revisit David Chalmer’s argument about the Hard Problem of Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument now that I understand that Chalmers and Jackson are not arguing for souls and spirits. I still think they are wrong but they are not wrong for the reasons that I thought before.

Introduction

I’m learning to write philosophy essays and both of my tutors have made it very clear that philosophy essays need to have an introduction that summarises everything you are going to say in the essay proper. However, this is a blog post and not an essay and I’m still committed to the idea that it’s better to have the big reveal at the end instead of giving everything away at the start. Maybe I’ll change my mind on that or have it beaten out of me but I am not there yet. You have to read to the end to find out what I think. No numbering my paragraphs or references either. Sorry. Follow the links if you want to know more about something.

A Funny Story about Introductions

I completed my first module recently. Each module has a bunch of assignments that are graded and returned with a bunch of feedback. My first tutor wrote feedback in the Word doc that contained my essay. My tutor for my second module didn’t do this and I got really confused and hunted frantically for my feedback.

So, you know how when non-techies send you a zip file and there are all sorts of random files and attachments that just kind of get swept up in the zip? There’s always a LOGO.JPG and a weird little text file with a copyright notice along with the actual document that they wanted to send. Sometimes there’s an HTML file with a gobbledegook name and some corporate nonsense in it. When I couldn’t find any feedback from tutor number two, I searched all the files one last time and found that the corporate nonsense file actually contained all my tutor’s feedback.

“Hmmm…” I thought and went back to re-open all the zips from tutor number one. Sure enough, all the HTML files were full to the brim with comprehensive and very useful feedback that I had never seen before! I had essentially been working for six months with practically no feedback!

Tutor number two said that my grade on my first assignment would have been better if I had written a more comprehensive introduction. It turns out that tutor number one had said the same thing on four different assignments but I didn’t see it because I had never read his feedback. Oh well. Live and learn.

“The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?” – Bentham (1789)

When the Spanish seafood firm Nueva Pescanova recently announced its plan to open the world’s first octopus farm, many animal rights activists (and the wider public) reacted with horror. Taking intelligent creatures from the wild to exploit them for human gain is seen instinctively as a moral step backwards.

Ellen Pasternak in UnHerd magazine

Ms Pasternak suggested that the only relevant moral line is the one between humans and other animals: humans — be kind to them and don’t eat them; other animals — eat them and be as cruel as required to turn a profit. I suspect that Ms Pasternak is missing the point of concerns about octopus farming.

I am a confirmed meat-eater and my favourites include a rack of lamb and a nice juicy steak but my favourite dish of all is octopus stew. I am well aware that for me to enjoy my culinary delights, animals have to die. That fact does not overly concern me. It is the way of the natural world. I would gladly slaughter the lamb or kill the octopus myself.

However, I am absolutely appalled by the way that industrial farming treats animals, especially in the USA, which mostly follows Ms Pasternak’s ethical rule to treat only animals on the near side of the human/other line with respect.

You’ve all, no doubt, seen the way that industrial farmers keep sows in farrowing cages where the sow is unable to move or even see her piglets. You’ve seen the dark, fetid charnel houses where chickens are raised for eating. You’ve seen the way that calves are removed from their mothers and crammed into warehouses of death.

Many vegetarians argue for a complete ban on meat eating. I don’t think an outright ban is morally justified and neither is it good politics. Meat eaters have too many votes for this approach to be successful.

I have, however, been persuaded that the suffering we inflict on animals in the food production industry is cruel and unnecessary and it demeans us as well as them. It’s perfectly possible to raise cows, pigs and sheep with respect and to kill them humanely. We have been doing it for thousands of years.

Ms Pasternak’s ethical bright line should be extended to include the animals that we rely on for food and that rely on us for care. The way that we raise chickens is appalling but I dread to imagine the horrors that we will inflict on conscious and intelligent molluscs. I gave up eating octopus three weeks ago for precisely this reason.

An ethical approach to meat-eating will require us to eat less meat and to source it from farmers who treat their animals with respect. We’ll have to learn to treat ribeye steak as an occasional luxury instead of a cheap sandwich that we eat 5 days a week. Pigs raised in humane conditions actually taste nicer. You should try them. For the other days of the week, vegetarian substitutes are a pleasant variation.

An ethical approach to sustainable farming is the way forward if we want to move past this atrocious period in animal husbandry—there’s no need to ban meat-eating.

The climate will thank us too.

I’ve been following John Walker’s Hacker’s Diet for about nine months now. I love the simplicity of it.

“Anyone can control their weight. It’s a simple matter of balancing calories.” – John Walker

Mr Walker’s book is a fun, simple read. If you are technically inclined and you want to lose weight, you should certainly read The Hacker’s Diet. The book introduces a model of the human body as a rubber bag full, mostly, with water. Every day stuff goes in and stuff comes out, but the rubber bag always obeys the laws of physics.

If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight at a rate of a 3500 kCal/lb. Simply count the calories you eat and subtract the calories you burn and the resulting number will tell you how quickly you will gain (or, hopefully, lose) weight.

But I think it’s even simpler than that.

If you weigh yourself every day, you can quickly figure out whether you are gaining weight. If your weight goes up, you are eating too much. Eat less.

Ok, ok. It’s not quite that simple. Your weight can vary by a couple of pounds each day as you retain water (or, as John Walker delicately puts it, solids); but if you plot the moving average you get a surprisingly stable trend line. From that trend, you can figure out your daily excess (or deficit) and decide to eat more (or less) accordingly.

People who work in software development use a planning technique called yesterday’s weather. The idea is based on weather forecasting. Imagine a computer that monitored the humidity and the temperature and pressure and a thousand other variables and used it to predict the weather with an accuracy of 82%.

It turns out that, if you just predict that today’s weather will be the same as yesterday’s, you’ll be correct about 70% of the time. That’s close enough for most purposes and it saves you a really expensive computer.

In my case, the prediction that I’ll eat about the same number of calories today as I did yesterday saves me lots of tedious calorie counting. With a little practice, I got quite good at knowing whether I was eating too much or too little and adjusting my intake accordingly.

Here’s my trend since last October:

You can see from the chart that I lost weight pretty steadily for several months. My daily deficit held steady at about 250 cal/day for most of that time. 250 calories is about a bagel a day and represents the loss of a pound every two weeks. Since I don’t really like bagels anyway (or french fries, or bread, or candy) it was easy to stop eating them. I hit my target weight about a month ago and, since then, my weight has crept up a little (I don’t like bagels but I do enjoy beer).

The little red dots are a warning sign that I might be eating too much (notable red dots: The Captain’s Table Dinner in January and Piratefest in July) and the prominent red 74 says that I need to have half a pint less beer at Quiz Night.

Like any good hacker, I decided that I didn’t like any of the weight trackers out there so I wrote my own for my iPhone (it was also an excuse to learn Objective C). I might decide to stick the app on the app store one day but, for now, it’s just a bit of fun that I am sharing with some friends. Ping me if you want to play along too.

Epilogue

This post is from 8 years ago. The iPhone app is long dead but I wrote a little web app a few years ago.

It’s a bit bare on the bones but it has served me, a handful of friends and a couple of strangers well enough for a while now.

Try it if you like: Slimming with Strangers

If you weigh yourself in pounds, it works pretty well. If enough people nag me, I’ll let you enter your weight in stone or kilograms.