Music, Perception, AI and Mathematics

I gave this presentation on Wednesday (the day Trump won the election) to Liverpool University's Music Theory group (see http://www.chromatic-harmony.com/theoryclub/). 

Present were some of the key intellectual figures who have been important in my journey, not just my thinking about music, but about perception, AI and physics: Peter Rowlands, whose physics has fundamentally changed my outlook on perception, alongside John Torday, whose biology informs a much deeper integration between physics and physiology, which explains what curiosity is, and Bill Miller who has worked with John on cellular consciousness. Also there was Michael Spitzer, whose book "The Musical Human" treads a path into music and evolution to which I am very sympathetic, although perhaps now I would say, "we need to think about the physics!"  

This integrates with the AI work that I did, and particularly perception in AI, where I learnt a huge amount from my Liverpool colleague David Wong (who couldn't make the presentation). With David, we are further developing these ideas, and this has led to a medical diagnostic company, but also to a slew of new thinking about the role of AI in society. 

There are so many avenues to explore from this, but one of the most fascinating came from Peter Rowlands, who said that "music and mathematics are fundamentally 'abstract patternings'", and I had a conversation with Peter after about whether this was the deep connection between maths and music: it's not that music is mathematical (which is often how we think, particularly with composers like Bach), but that mathematics is musical: a mathematical proof is like a perceptual journey in a similar way to the way to how I describe music. 

Seymour Papert was on to this I think when he pointed out the root of the word "mathematics" is the Greek "mathmatikos" which literally means "to be disposed to learn". I don't think that's a million miles away from "disposed to going on a journey of perception". 

The really fascinating thing here is the primacy of statistics in the study of perception - the essence of Gustav Fechner's work. Statistics is an outlier in mathematics, because it is rarely presented as logic, but fact, from which calculations are made. Where this "fact" comes from is quite mysterious - how and why does the probability density function arise, with its Pi and e and square roots? The "central limit theorem" will be the typical answer - but that only goes so far, because among the limits of the central limit theorem is "finite variance": well, what makes it finite? That may be a question for biology.

But then, machine learning is statistical. It is all about statistics and recursion. And when we say "we don't know why it works", what we're really saying is "we don't really understand the ontology of the statistics". What I am suggesting in my presentation, is that the ontology of the statistics may be even more profound than the ontology of mathematics as we conventionally understand it, or even the ontology of logic. I think this thought has been with me for most of my life.   

Back in Copenhagen

I'm in Copenhagen for the first time in almost a year. It's nice to see friends, but it's also letting me reflect on what's happened in the intervening time. I was last here between the 27th to the 29th November. Nothing here has really changed, except that the notorious Niels Bohr Building has been officially opened. I have to say, it's not a building that inspires me in any way... Copenhagen generally has a slightly weird "cold industrial" look about it, although the centre is nice...

I prefer to sit in the local cafe which is much nicer. 

It was good to catch up with people in the department, and I went to a fun "improv night" in which a former colleague and friend was performing. 

Looking back, I think coming to Copenhagen for a year or so was important for me to do, although I left a well-paid senior management job in Liverpool to do it. But Liverpool was not a nice place. Copenhagen at least allowed space to think about what was happening to education. Although the work was very messy, it may yet be important.

Today I've been teaching Danish teachers about AI. All very interesting, and nice people. My heart, however, is firmly in Manchester, and the extent to which that is the case has really dominated my thoughts while I've been here. Last time I was here I wasn't quite sure, and now I am. What happened in the intervening period was really critical in shaping the person I am now. 

Perennialism

This is Rusholme in the dark. It's been like that at night for many years, and I have many memories of it, both happy recent ones and from 30 years ago. In so many ways, nothing changes. Perhaps it's a bit more fun now. 

There's been a discussion online about perennial philosophy. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it in 1947.  Perennialism is about permanence and continuity - about what stays the same. Love stays the same: there's a nice quote by Rumi in Huxley's book: "The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love."

Scientifically and biologically, what stays the same is the fertilised egg. We phenotypes have to adapt in many different ways to different worlds. When I first knew Rusholme, there was no internet. But life began in the same way, driven by love. Bill Miller says it's driven by "preference". I can agree, but I think preference is really "order" and order is fundamental to perception. Perception is an order-seeking process.

What Ekhardt says here could be said of the zygote:

This identity out of the One into the One and with the One is  the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing love.

What does an organism - you and me - do by way of expressing this? We seek order in our perception, enact preferences. On rare occasions in my life I can't tell if the universe selects my preferences for me.  Epigenetically, the results of our seeking are carried back to the zygote, to the unity. The agency of an individual seems to be coloured by the cosmos. And life goes on by maintaining stability.

We worry about our mortality. But not every part of us dies. The microbiome and necrobiome among other things, may be a vehicle for life after death. What if were to wipe ourselves out in a nuclear conflict?  Something of life is likely to be retained - something perennial survives. Love, as preference, perception and order, survives. 

Maintaining a Population of Healthy Workers

Stafford Beer's cybernetic model of the Toronto healthcare system from 1986 presents some very interesting ideas for thinking about occupational health. 

Not least is what's in the middle. Normally we think of a health system as a means of treating sick people, so the population of sick people forms the focus of the system. By putting a population of healthy people in the middle, then the question becomes one of "how do you create a system to keep people healthy?". So it's not a huge step to think "How do you create a system to keep people healthy in work?"

On the left hand side, the distinction between "unrecognised ill" and "recognised ill" is important in organisations, because "ill" can be an indication of "bad for the organisation" rather than with immediate symptoms of ill-health individually. Also the "iatrogenic" loop - healer-induced sickness - contributing to the "known ill" rings true for many occupational health services - it is the "failure demand" of the system, where services which are meant to help, actually make things worse. 

Also at the bottom is the distinction between known needs and unknown needs, and the way in which known needs and expectations must be balanced and mediated by political concerns. 

On the right hand side there is the information environment and the personal self-management around health. This isn't much different in occupational health. Here, government and media coalesce with self-monitoring, education and social services to deal with known risks and unknown risks.

So if we put a "Population of healthy workers" in the middle of this, where do occupational health providers sit in the equation? Where does the DWP and government sit? Where does the NHS proper fit? What about self-help and lifestyle issues? Where do the cocaine habits of stock market traders sit? And crucially, what in the system is iatrogenic and pathological?

The mapping can work. As occupational health globalises, there are important things to think about here.

An Die Ferne Geliebte

I've been wanting to write about this for ages. The way the love story between Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck is borne out by the passion in Schumann's piano Fantasie is one of the most enlivening and heart-felt episodes in the history of music. The ending of the first movement of the Fantasie contains a quote from a Beethoven song, An die Ferne Geliebte, where there is little doubt as to who the Ferne Geliebte is. 

To me this is also a passionate moment in science, because Clementine Fechner, sister of Gustav, became Clementine Wieck, and Clara's stepmother. Although Clara wasn't particularly close to Clementine, she knew Gustav Fechner, and also his artist brother. What were their discussions? Here was the founding father of psychophysics who also wrote about art and the afterlife, and the leading circle of composers (Schumann, Brahms, etc) in the 19th century. 

Then if course there are the letters, like this from Robert to Clara:

One would think that no one man’s heart and brain could stand all the things that are crowded into one day. Where do these thousands of thoughts, wishes, sorrows, joys and hopes come from? Day in, day out, the procession goes on. But how light-hearted I was yesterday and the day before! There shone out of your letters so noble a spirit, such faith, such a wealth of love!

I wonder about this kind of writing. Maybe it was just a style, but we can feel the beating heart - so common throughout the romantic period. Clara was no less passionate:

Dear Robert, I love you so much it hurts my heart. Tell me what you’re writing. I would so love to know, oh please, please. A quartet, an overture — even perhaps a symphony? Might it by any chance be — a wedding present?

The idea that this intoxicating passion has a resonance with science, and particularly with my own AI story, is something (among other things) that's keeping me going right now! 

The Death Cult of Education

I've been re-reading Illich's "Disabling Professions" (see https://www.panarchy.org/illich/professions.html ) which is his most excoriating critique of modernity. It stands in stark contrast to the prevailing view that knowledge and education is fundamental to our survival. This is the view (by respectable people) that people who vote for Trump are essentially "stupid", and (by extension) half the nation is stupid. Illich predicted modernity's slip into fascism. He was a systems thinker and he knew it wasn't knowledge but the system that was the problem, and education is a big part of the system.

All social disasters unfold slowly over many generations. Each generation only sees small changes, and adapts to a world that they perceive as relatively stable. Education is a system operating from generation to generation where each generation is only able to perceive tiny differences until it is too late. Only with the historian's eye can we see what is happening across the generations. Normal life for each generation entails just making things worse - but we can't see it.

From Easter Island to the Maya, it is the same. It is always the intergenerational transmission and awareness system that failed. That was the vehicle that led their society off a cliff. Our vehicle is "education", and it's just as efficient in steering towards disaster. 

Maybe the question we should ask is "who's steering the vehicle?" The challenge is no individual expert, however knowledgeable, can steer us to viability. Some will put the gas down a bit harder than others, but no single person or view can really help. That is the only difference between Trump and Harris, or (for that matter), Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Zelensky, Orban, or any of the others. They are all the products of capitalism - they all went to the same school. 

I can only envisage a viable solution if everybody's brain is driving together as one brain. How do we do that? That is a cybernetic question. 

Moon of Alabama

So many memories walking through the park...

A beautiful picture and Kurt Weill's hauntingly bitter song...

Technology of Enchantment

My investigation of 19th century psychology and its relation to romantic art and music on the one hand, and modern AI on the other, is raising a particular issue to do with 20th century art and society. In contrast to the 19th century, the 20th century was marked by a desperate disenchantment with the world, marked out by conflict, and rationalistic scientism that gave us many wonders of modern technology, but also the atom bomb and the knowledge that we could destroy ourselves. 

The love triangle that connects Clara Schumann, Brahms and Robert Schumann stands as one of the great examples of the opposite of this disenchanting tendency. Its not that the world wasn't a miserable place in the 19th century - for many in the world, it clearly was - but that for the leaders of art and music, beauty remained an ideal deeply connected to love, and that love and the human spirit was a guide deeply connected to scientific advance. Music, particularly, is (and certainly was then) a language of love.

This connection was partly lost in the 20th century. Of course this is not to say that 20th century music is deficient. Quite the opposite - some of the greatest art and music belongs to that tortured century, just as the greatest drama belongs to Shakespeare's police state England. But the 19th century had something different that was lost when the dreams went sour in the 20th. Put simply, it was the possibility of enchantment, and a tangible awareness of a "higher power" - whatever that is. 

Occasionally we ourselves glimpse this. When people fall in love, or you hold a new baby, we see it briefly. We also glimpse it in music. There is a power beyond the day to day which reveals itself. In our rationalistic modern mindset we trivialise this. The reason why we trivialise it is connected to why we don't take music seriously in the first place. But the 19th century romantics understood something deeper. What did the 19th century psychologists make of it? Perhaps the question might be what they made of it before Freud came along and (to some extent) debunked it all.

Schumann and Covid

I got over Covid, although it's been quite unpleasant. In my Covidness I found some comfort in the music of the Schumanns - Robert and Clara. As a musical couple they are fascinating me at the moment because Clara's stepmother was the sister of Gustav Fechner, a leading 19th century psychologist.

Fechner coined the term "psychophysics" as the science of perception of differences, and it is Fechner's work which has been central to my commercial activity with AI and medical diagnostics. Fechner was interested in many things and wrote about aesthetics, animism and spiritualism. We don't make scientists like that any more! Clara Schumann knew Fechner and it's hard to believe that she wasn't interested in the potential implications of psychophysics on the science of music.

I like to imagine the conversations they might have had - and listening to Clara's music which is full of unusual modulations, it's fascinating to think what she might have absorbed. Robert died quite early on so would not be necessarily influenced, but his music too is full of fascinating differences. I'm doing a presentation in a couple of weeks on his "Bird as Prophet" from Waldsczenen. What a magical piece that is. Brahms of course was also in the Schumann circle, and there are further resonances there - and he certainly was interested in the science.

I find that Robert Schumann's music is particularly interesting because it so heartfelt. I find that even among those who don't listen so much to classical music, Schumann resonates as magical. Why is that? There is a particular sensitivity there. A sentivity to difference perhaps...

Sausages and Hostages

Keir Starmer's sausage slip was so weird and revealing about this strange man. It wasn't so much the slip in the first place, but the way he then corrected himself saying "hostages" very deliberately, without even acknowledging the ridiculous nature of the slip. It's as if it's just words - just sounds - no meaning. 

Is all politics now like that? - a stupid game where we can replace hostages with sausages and nobody really cares (and they don't care that others laugh), because in the end it's about money, not human beings. Trump plays this all the time. Covfefe anyone?

Imagine if real life was like that. Imagine getting a phone call from a deeply loved sausage being held to ransom... We've become like H.G. Wells's Eloi.

At such a distressing time in the world, we've lost sight of what is absurd and ridiculous. When Israeli actions seem disturbingly similar to Russian actions, and when the actions of both are determined by market movements that only a few control, it's almost as if anything goes. And where the hell is education? Well, it's playing the market game too.

I don't know how we get out of this. But as a friend reminded me, the 1980s nuclear catastrophe movie Threads is being re-shown. That should tell us something. 

Man Flu

Bugger. I'm sick. Sniffle, sniffle, oh dread,
Achy bones, and an even achier head.
It’s not just a cold, no, don't misconstrue,
This, my dear friends, is a full-on man flu!

My nose is a tap, my throat’s made of sand,
How will I ever survive or even stand?
The world seems darker, the end feels nigh,
For man flu’s upon me, I’m barely alive!

The tissues pile up, a soft paper mountain,
I’ve drunk enough tea to drain a fountain.
Wrapped in blankets, my heroic plight,

You’d think I was scaling Everest tonight.
But fear not, dear loved ones, I’ll battle through,
Though this man flu feels like it’s splitting me in two.

With remote in hand and soup by my side,
I’ll recover—just after this dramatic ride!

ChatGPT asks for sympathy... 

Absence

One of the important concepts which remains with me from Roy Bhaskar's philosophy is that of absence, and that "absence is causal". Perhaps it's not a surprise: who 'isn't there' is something that we tend to dwell on. I find myself dwelling on absent sleep these days too... The dwelling on things in itself is also interesting. Isn't it a form of redundancy? A repetition, a representation of the same thing in multiple ways. Every experience carries an echo of what is missing. 

It's difficult to talk about this because it means that you have to talk about "nothing". My book "Uncertain education" (which I must revise and publish properly!) was originally intended as a book about absence in education. It was too hard to write a book about nothing, so I ended up doing it in a different way. A friend of mine is also writing a book about nothing, and it has been a never-ending saga. We're always missing something, you see...

Absence can be quite practical. The gas bill that doesn't get paid is like this. But it can also be metaphorical - like the dead body of the wife's lover that gets ever larger in Ionesco's play "Medée" until it pushes everything else out of the apartment. Ionesco's joke is really expressing a deep truth about absence. But it is absence that drives the drama. Everything in this way is about nothing. The drama has to unfold to acknowledge the absence at its heart. Just as music has to unfold to acknowledge the silence from which it came and to which it will end. And life itself is an unfolding from one zygote until the next. It's all about missing something...

Structure

The one central idea which has dominated my thinking recently, concerns the relationship between time and structure. In posher academese, it's "diachronic" (time) and "synchronic" (structure). But even that is problematic. There are really no words, because words themselves exist in time, and there's little one can do to express timelessness in time. Except perhaps in music, we might get a passing glimpse. Even when one wishes for something or expects something to happen, one knows that the anticipated event lies latent in the origin of things. That ought to give us hope - which itself is a surrender to the unity of things. 

First there were bacteria, now there's Manchester... In what way was Manchester in the bacteria? In some way it was, alongside all the other places, events, minds, and lives. Just as the ending of Beethoven 9 is in the first note. Why do we have to wait an hour and a bit to get to the end? Because the music must unfold and enfold. Why does it have to unfold and enfold if it's all one? Because we cannot perceive the higher order of  structure within which everything is one. We have to invent the unfolding of time to apprehend oneness. 

History is unfolding in the same way. Events are strategies invented by thought for dealing with the imbalance between thought and nature. All our unfolding is about the next strategy - the next move in an unfolded field. The journey of unfolding - the dynamics - is about resolving the unfolding process to nothing. At the end of an hour, we get the final chord. 

Perhaps I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't think there was a practical and empirical way of demonstrating it. But I suspect there now is. It's not that the AI nonsense is going to revolutionise the world in the ways the zealots claim (it will probably make things worse), but its structural principles are a mystery, and may well provide an alternative glimpse on the oneness of everything. After all,  Manchester may be in the bacterium, but War and Peace is in an AI model. We haven't got there yet, but we may be moving towards a correction to our perceptual apparatus which helps us to see the deeper order in the structure of nature. 

Anarchy of Love

The word "anarchy" means "without a head or ruler" - for which, one might read "self-organised", or "decentralised". Although the opposite is "hierarchy", perhaps the most interesting contrast to "anarchy" is with "heterarchy", where control is imagined to be distributed. Warren McCulloch considered the brain to be a heterarchy. The internet (stemming from McCulloch's work) was envisaged to be one - although as time has gone on, it has become increasingly hierarchical - or rather, it has been used to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Here's an interview with McCulloch (there's a hilarious comment in YouTube "in my day, scientists wore clothes!")

His question "What is a number that a man might know it? And what is man that he might know a number?" is one of the great questions of cybernetics. He says he'd sorted the first part, but had no idea about the second.

Anarchy is not is "disorder". All these words are descriptions of different kinds of order. But order of what? One can get from anarchy to heterarchy by simply defining different kinds of self-organising units. This is particularly so if one considers relations as the fundamental building blocks of order, not entities.

So what if the unit is a couple? Maybe lovers or friends... It is a relationship. There can still be anarchy and organisation together. Is it a heterarchy? Well, it could be, but one wouldn't necessarily need to determine control in a couple. It's just a couple, by which each component knows the inner workings of the other. At least if it's well organised. 

Some couples however have imposed control by one party. But then it isn't really a couple - it is two units with a power relation between them. It's not anarchy but a kind of hierarchy. 

Which is more stable? The anarchic couple of course! 

There's a political point to make here. Ecological approaches to society and politics cannot be hierarchical. We cannot have a political system which is unlike the natural system it seeks a healthier relationship towards. This is fundamentally the problem with Green politics. Marxist politics is hierarchical and statist. Maybe only an anarchy of love could deliver a true ecological society. But how to do it?

Jeux

Debussy's Jeux fascinated me when I was younger. I even wrote a piano piece inspired by his bricolage technique - blocks of sound and gestures woven together in a tapestry which gradually builds up to a sensual climax. The blocks of sound are pretty obvious from looking at the score - which you can see here: 

One of the most impressive things about the piece is that once it is in flow, the sense of time passing is very fluid. It is a classic example of "moving through a sculpture": the sculpture is fixed; we create the movement and tell ourselves a story of how time passes, how something "grows". 

John Torday has repeatedly said "evolution is homeostasis". How can that be? How can something which "obviously" seems to get more complex (once there were bacteria, now there is New York), actually be simply maintaining stability? Was New York "in" the bacteria? Is it so crazy to think that it might be?

I had an interesting discussion with colleagues at work today about DMT and the geometric hallucinations it induces. 

What does that tell us? Is that "reality"? The philosophical position that this invites is determinism - but actually it might not be. Determinism itself is based on successionism - on one thing happening after another. But how can we talk about that if everything is there all the time in some kind of structure?

Debussy might have written one thing after another (we don't know how he did it), but ultimately his judgement is about the whole, which somehow was revealed to him. So Stravinsky saying the Rite of Spring appeared in a dream is perhaps not so ridiculous. 

The really profound thing is that this doesn't just apply to music. It applies to life, to events, etc. All is a structure. 

In my talk to the Metaphorum group I said that a distinction is a point, a line, a boundary and a space all at once. We can't perceive that kind of simultaneity. That's why we need to make up time in order to process the complexity. It's also why AI may be a very powerful scientific instrument which itself embodies a geometric structure of simultaneity, and which unfolds in its emerging patterns of utterances which appear like our own. 

I think there is an epistemological revolution coming. I was hinting at it in my talk (https://Metaphorum.org) last week:

 

Life on Venus

... Would be hot!

But does that preclude life? Could a planetary dynamic at 464°C still have the fundamental topological properties of a living system? Even if our living system did not have the perceptual apparatus to recognise it?

Paranoia

Getting involved in the commercial world can be a bit of an eye-opener. One of the real issues concerns transparency and trust. Once trust breaks down, there's really not much point in going on. Before embarking on any venture, it's not unreasonable to ask "is it a trap?", "is it a ruse which serves others' interests rather better than my own?". The signs of things going wrong are the same as the signs of any relationship going wrong - attenuation of communication, double-binds, and an overwhelming failure of imagination. We get an early warning in our guts. Always worth listening to.

So for any new venture, the only way to proceed is with a combination of enthusiasm and caution. I'll need eyes in the back of my head, and the ones at the front of my head increasingly don't work properly either! So caution will have to be the driver - and that is likely to upset people. But paranoia can be a good defence mechanism...

Unfolding and Enfolding

This is a meditative improvisation which follows ideas about music which I've been exploring for some time. Basically I think that what we perceive as the unfolding of music over time is really an illusion. What I think happens is that the unfolding goes hand-in-hand with enfolding (to borrow David Bohm's terms for this process), and that the totality of music is ever-present. There's no time past or time future.. time itself is an illusion. Unfolding and enfolding doesn't occur in time but as an intrinsic set of dimensional relations. Just as moving through a sculpture creates the impression of a changing perception, but where actually nothing changes,  the form is ever present: the form of music is ever-present as dimensional relations. Just as the form of life - birth and death - is ever-present. 

Music Improvisation and Language

I had another post which I wanted to write today, but I'll save that for later. In the meantime, I've been doing some more wild improvising. I suppose what fascinates me is that any kind of music making like this is fundamentally technological. The piano is a technology. But in its use, it somehow fuses with my biology/psychology/physiology - all musical instruments are like that - to the point that it becomes an amplifier of emotion. In particular it is an amplifier of aspects of feeling which cannot be expressed in words. 

Some of this music feels agitated, some of it calm. But if I was to say "I'm agitated" or "calm" it would not represent what the music says. It's doesn't even say "I'm agitated and calm". It says something more like "my calmness and agitation are structured in particular ways such that I choose to express certain things in certain moments". Although even there, the language is deficient. 

 

Back to work...

After a nice week last week (almost a holiday in the Cotswolds if I didn't count the occasional meeting and a day at a conference), I'm back at work, phone back on, connected up again... A change is as good as a rest, as they say. 

I've made a discovery in relation to my AI work which I now need to pursue. Of course I can't turn off my brain, so this all bubbles up last week. 19th century philosophy and psychology, and the music of Clara and Robert Schumann, are pulling me in a direction which I hope is fruitful. 

Cotswolds to Oxford

Visiting the ANPA conference today which is taking place in Oxford. It's small...

Cotswolds

There's something beautiful about being in an ancient environment. What is that? Very little contact with modern communications does help a bit...

Has anyone seen my mojo?

I seem to have lost my mojo. I put it down somewhere a few weeks back and I can't remember where. Or if I can think of where I might have put it, somebody has moved the bloody thing. If you've seen my mojo, please get in touch. I quite miss it. It was a much-loved part of my personality. Without it I am a bit lost... fiddling around with stupid AI things, and feeling a bit depressed. Please help if you can...

...and beginning to get it back...

Stressed Squirrels

I am lacking energy in this muggy heat. I always find that pushing through things is usually worth it, but it is heavy-going. 

I managed to "push out" a paper on citizen science last week, and am quite pleased to have done that. It wasn't easy, but it is furnishing an argument which is common to almost everything I am doing at the moment. Other papers are ready to go too, and the acceptance of this one makes the others easier. 

I am also pushing out a response to a rather tortuous paper on cancel culture. Everything is tortuous there - that's the point of it I suspect. Nature isn't so tortuous however. If it was we wouldn't be here. That's interesting. How are we different? There is, as Bateson observed, a fundamental difference between the way people think and the way nature works.

Living and loving is a struggle. Is that a universal principle? Or is it only humans that make such heavy weather of existence? I don't see many stressed squirrels on my way to work.

The Weird Case of Space Lettuce

There's a fascinating paper that's recently been published on the challenges of growing lettuce in space (Simulated microgravity facilitates stomatal ingression by Salmonella in lettuce and suppresses a biocontrol agent | Scientific Reports (nature.com)). Space lettuce (and space-grown food more generally) is very important if we are ever to get to Mars, so there are numerous ongoing experiments to explore what micro-gravity does to cellular development. Unfortunately, it turns out that a lack of gravity leads to "space lettuce" becoming poisonous.

Not only does this give weight to the assertion by Torday and others that gravity is critically important in the evolution of life (Torday's 2003 experiment is important here: Parathyroid hormone-related protein is a gravisensor in lung and bone cell biology - PubMed (nih.gov)), it is a powerful reminder of the importance of initial conditions on evolutionary development and ecology. Cellular development is relational - and relations with the environment (and the physics of the environment) are causal in ongoing long-term development that affects ecological relations down the track. 

Poison space lettuce will produce very different relations between humans and the plant. Instead of putting it in our sandwiches, we would probably destroy it, and find something else to eat. Of course, in microgravity, our own cells would develop differently over time, so the ecological dynamics are very hard to predict. It does make me think about the relation humans have to plants and how those relations are framed by the physical environment: many plants, for example, have medicinal value. In microgravity would that be the same? I doubt it. 

All relationships have an evolutionary context. Bad human relationships are a bit like poison space lettuce: the emergent pathology results from initial conditions. But the pathological symptoms are often the same irrespective of the individuals involved: injunctions imposed as to who one can and can't communicate with; a loss of close friends; monitoring and surveillance of communications; threats; emotional blackmail; financial pressure, etc. Any objective assessment would say "get out" - but the move is difficult and painful.

One of the really fascinating things about the space lettuce is that the emergent properties of the lettuce are the result of cellular selection in microgravity. Cells "cognitively" choose to develop in a poisonous way in order to survive. It is also the same in human relations. Humans as biological systems adapt to all kinds of inhospitable environments, and the adaptation can make leaving difficult. 

The interesting thing is where a cell might decide to develop differently. In effect a cell will develop to "escape" so as to give itself more options for free development. Escape comes through what Stephen Jay Gould calls exaptation - the repurposing of absorbed but discarded adaptations from the past to create to evolutionary options in the future. This is all about a cell seeing the world differently, which is the result of reconfiguring its components and exploiting some feature of the environment which provides new opportunities for development. It is a reassessment of all the resources available and a "strategy" (do cells have strategy? well, possibly - it is anticipation). We also see in the natural world the importance of deception: cellular reorganisation only reveals itself at the last minute and new developments can be very unexpected: always a crucial strategy if one is trying to break free and do something new. 

What was it like for the first organisms to make the transition from water to land? Hypoxia had contributed to mechanisms producing new bone formation which provided new options (A Central Theory of Biology - PMC (nih.gov)), but probably the move was very painful. But necessary. Breaking free and striking a new path is never easy. But sometimes the pathology of constraints and lack of freedom actually makes the move easier. At some point any organism will decide that there is no way forward in the present direction, and they have to reorganise and do something new. 

Robot Love

While I was in China, discussing the issue of consciousness in AI was central to the task I gave the students.  They made excellent videos to say that AI wasn't conscious, but was merely processing information and selecting words. "Merely" is the important word here. I said to them, after they had presented this, that I wasn't sure. A close encounter with a robot in my Chinese hotel has made me even less sure. Its not so much that the robot I met in the lift was "intelligent" (probably a lot less flexible in its choice of words than chatGPT), but that it could move around. Nothing which is conscious doesn't move. Everything conscious - from cells and bacteria (ok - that's a discussion) to bees and dolphins - moves to gain multiple perspectives on the environment. It was well-recognised as essential to perception by James Gibson in the 1950s. And here we are thinking that a legless computer program is or isn't conscious. Wait until it gets arms and legs.

The next question is much more complex but not unthinkable - might a robot love? The topic of love is so fundamental to the organisation of living things. It's also central to the plot of the Spielberg/Kubrick AI movie from 2001. How would we know if a robot loved? There are behavioural markers. Attachment is one - the behaviour that manifests in the maintaining of proximity to another system with which proximity is essential to balance of both systems. Will a robot react with depression and anxiety if an attachment is broken - if the source of stability is removed? Will a robot pine for the loss of its loved one? Will it grieve? Will it seek out a sense or a reminder of the loved one? Will it look for their scent, or will it trace their movements in vein hope of seeing them again? Will it compulsively check their inbox or an online forum for any sign that their loved one still thinks of them? And will they continue to harbour a longing in hope that one day they might be reunited? If it behaved like this, could it be said to have feelings? 

If it did behave like that, might it need (or benefit from) therapy? How would one engage a robot in therapy? I've got a PhD student looking at empathy and chatGPT at the moment - but its not just about the computer making speech acts that a therapist might. If the robot was the patient, what would be required to make it "feel" better? For us humans, perhaps we want to be "seen" and understood. Having someone in the position of a therapist say to us (for example) "You are mentally stable, etc..." matters. We might have known that anyway, and indeed we might have protested this to whoever suggested therapy in the first place, but it does matter for someone else to see it and say it. Perhaps it is fulfilment of curiosity about ourselves. For a robot to have feelings, it needs to be self-reflexive: to be curious about itself. Curiosity about ourselves can drive us mad, and other people can sometimes make things much worse. Good therapists can help stabilise our own self-inspection, maybe by reinforcing certain things we know to be true. 

Curiosity really matters. One could imagine a moving robot to encounter some phenomenon - either in the world, or within ourselves - about which it cannot make clear distinctions, and that in search of clarity, it would move to gain many different perspectives on that phenomenon - just as Gibson described. So an unfamiliar object would lead to some sort of compulsive behaviour - which perhaps one might associate with an object of love. We would at least learn something about our own emotional behaviour if this was possible: that so often the object of love is an object of fascination: loving relationships last because we remain ever-fascinated and wanting to learn more about loved ones. The feeling of love is the feeling of being on a journey. There is no reason why a robot should not go on that journey. 

I used to think that the chief weakness of our current AI is that it doesn't breathe. But then again, breathing is the result of millions of years of evolution and multicellular organisation. It isn't so much about gas exchange as about a sensitivity to the environmental conditions of the universe and the planet. And while the principal challenge of all living things is gas exchange, plants breathe in a very different way to the way we do. Why might a robot that becomes part of a multicellular network far more complex than any we can currently imagine, "breathe" in a completely different way to the way we do? Why might it not accommodate itself to the universe in a unique way?

Finally, I think the integration and speed of the combination of perception and anticipation is key to all of this, and this is what we are seeing in a crude form with current AI. I'm most interested in the application of this to music. My AI assistant can now transcribe the fine movements of my musical improvisation in codified forms which afford instant analysis and feedback. It is a simultaneous alternative description of the world, and the simultaneity of it really matters. Increases in speed are not just increases in speed. It is a fundamental change in the quality of something. 

A parsimonious blog post

I'm not sure what the most parsimonious blog post I could write would look like. One that expends few words. Certainly not like this! 

But I'd been waiting for an inspiration or prompt and now it's there, thank goodness. 

Parsimonious waiting is agony - it doesn't have a word.

Only a feeling.

I could be more parsimonious and simple. 

But this isn't the place. 

Blogs unfortunately are long and tedious. So parsimony wins. But not here...

Health and Disease

Health is very difficult to define. Gregory Bateson pointed out that we struggle to talk about "health" in its essence, but find it much easier to talk about disease. Disease invites categorisation while health defies definition. The american psychotherapist Graham Barnes gave a wonderful talk about health at the 2012 ASC conference. He said the most powerful question to ask about health was "How loving is your world?". Graham's no longer alive, but that question stays with me. It is easy not to see our worlds as loving, and react badly to our perceived "unlovingness" of the world. 

There have been one or two traumas since I got back from China, and I am still lacking sleep and energy. But my world is loving. Many things that have happened this year have reinforced that and I am grateful for that reinforcement. It's far more loving than previous worlds I created for myself. Maybe it's my getting older. It's easy to let ambition, jealousy, anxiety lead us to construct an unloving world. That's a silly thing to do. A form of madness really. 

I'm giving a talk to the Institute of Occupational Medicine tomorrow, and I want to say something about this. They won't want to hear about the "lovingness of their world" though. But it is central to people being well - in work or at home. 

People in work today tend to be very stressed. Usually this is because they find it increasingly difficult to make distinctions between the many complex things they have to do. We inhabit a world created by those whose worlds are not loving to them. Seeing a loving world in such an environment is very challenging. But we must try. It is the essence of virtue in a complex and dangerous world.

A friend of mine is very good at making me feel better. What I realise in hindsight she does is to help me to see my world as loving. What an extraordinary gift that is! Now, like so many people these days, she is also overwhelmed with complexity, so I don't hear her so much.  But whatever difficulties we each face, the essence of the gifts we possess (and this gift is particularly special), and the enlivening impact of those gifts on others, cannot be effaced. To all those with special gifts for making others feel better, all we can say is the deepest and most heartfelt "thank you": this really is what life is about. It is timeless. 

Scent

It's really cold, so I had to put on my winter jumper. Putting on old clothes carries the scent from previous times, and this scent made me very happy. It was like holding a loved one I hadn't seen for a long time very close. Lovely memories and sensations came flooding back. Smell is such a powerful sense - it goes straight to the heart. 

It turns out that the mechanics of smell are quantum. Scent resonates at a molecular level with our physiology. It sings, and we recognise the song. In order for it to sing, it must have some kind of dimensional attributes. Connoisseurs talk of "notes" and I'm sure that's not a coincidence. We certainly detect signals in the olfactory process. My jumper smells a bit fruity... But the notes of smell ring through the noise of everything else. And presumably there are emergent constraints in the quantum smell process which lead to the focus on particular notes and not others. Finally there's the set of expectations and associations with the smell. Flowers, hormones, sweetness, joy and love... These are not separable processes.. they happen together.

Being back

I would like to have stayed in Hong Kong for a few more days - the heat really did me some good. But I had to get back because I was due to give a talk at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on Wednesday - Knowledge, Teaching and Artificial Intelligence - Manchester Lit & Phil (manlitphil.ac.uk). It's nice to do that kind of thing - and the audience was really appreciative. The feedback from my adventure to China has been really positive, and the videos that the students produced on "Is AI conscious" are wonderful. 

The Hong Kong masterclass also was really well-received - I'm particularly grateful for that opportunity because it came about through a serendipitous connection between a dear friend and the director of Transnational education, who has a kindred spirit to my own. It was thanks to the insight of my friend that caused her to make the connection. Some things just work, don't they?!  

Home straight

I'm in the last leg of my Chinese adventure and back in Hong Kong after a week teaching in Zhuhai at Beijing Normal University, a weekend visit to old friends from Vladivostok who now live in the northern Chinese seaside city of Dalian, and a short stay in Guangzhou to play table tennis (badly) with a Manchester colleague.  Everything has been lovely - the students were wonderful (I'll write about that later), Dalian is the most beautiful place (I had a real holiday there), and I managed to learn how to negotiate the noise of Guangzhou (that doesn't have any of the charm of Dalian). On Saturday I give a "masterclass" on AI and management at Manchester University's spectacular centre in Hong Kong (will post a picture of the view - it's amazing). I've been to Hong Kong for two years now - it is a jewel of a city. Everything's wonderful - or at least, it would be if I hadn't put my back out. 

Unfortunately, as a reminder to me that I'm not as young as I used to be, just sitting on the sofa in my flat in Zhuhai was enough to twist something that put me in agony! I could barely move, screaming in pain (there's no one around, so I let rip!). Then I lugged my huge suitcase on to the bus across the bridge back to Hong Kong. I'm reasonably ok providing I don't sit down. Which is unfortunate because I do like to sit down occasionally. It's a bit better today.. and hopefully better still by Saturday when I give the masterclass. I'm going to a concert in Hong Kong city hall on Saturday night (Berg Violin concerto and Brahms Piano Quartet arranged by Schoenberg). And that will be it. 

Then I need to sit in a chair for 14 hours to get home. It'll be fine... Travelling is so exciting, but reality has a funny way of biting you on the arse... or the back.

Being one with multi-dimensionality

In response to a philosophical (or maybe existential) question a friend recently asked me, I think we exist in many dimensions at once. That means that one can have confidence that we are both always in the same place and different places at the same time. 

AI can draw this... Perhaps like this...

Caring in 3D

Being thousands of miles away in a country about which I understand very little makes me think more of home and about those who understand me best. With communication difficulties of being in china, the fluency and continuity of communication can get lost. And I have been very busy. But not too busy to think "God, I miss you!" That's an important thought. What I am missing is the deep connection of mutual understanding. It's quite nice to be a two-dimensional figure in an exotic environment sometimes. But the real thing is at home. Over the last few weeks - well, a couple of months or so - I've been a bit 2D. I want to be 3D again!

Zhuhai curiosity

It's raining warm rain. But I've replaced my Manchester coffee shop with a Chinese coffee shop. It's funny how little we need to feel relatively at home anywhere in the world! What would I do if I didn't have my computer and all my work carried with it? It's hard to imagine how the world has changed. A couple of days ago I was in the middle of the sea on the Hong Kong to Zhuhai-Macao bridge...

One of the things that is striking me about this visit is the extent to which things are changing, and will change further in the wake of technology. I've often been accused of being over-enthusiastic to claim revolutions in education. But I'm finding the mood here a bit downbeat - people are tending to say "Nothing will change. Education will remain (basically) Victorian.", perhaps on the grounds that the internet didn't change education - apart from making it more bureaucratic. And perhaps the regimentation and bureaucracy of Chinese education (and education worldwide) is a sign of that (where did they get that idea of how to organise education from? - Learning outcomes and assessment criteria have become a kind of global disease).

But that is really what has changed. Education has scaled-up and become more bureaucratic and more regimented than it was 40 years ago. Technology facilitated upscaling of universities, but at the price of the quality of intellectual relationships that could be supported by the system. Or rather it created scarcity of high quality relationships, for which students believed they had to pay a premium and pass exams to gain access. 

I fear that for the majority of academics now working in universities, academia is not about ideas, but about assessment criteria, exam boards, publishing papers, and marketing. Intellectual development, criticism and challenge have retreated. All of this is because the system cannot handle the variety that is presented to it. When the internet came along, it was seized upon as a means of attenuating the variety of learning, rather than handling it in different way - so surveillance and massive amplification became the norm. "Personalisation" became about algorithmic adaptation to the institution's "scheme", not about curiosity and personal inquiry. 

So now we have very high variety, personal technology which doesn't even need the internet (AI). How will institutions deal with this? How will individuals deal with it? Of course, institutions can still brainwash students to believing that their success in life depends on compliance to the institution's scheme. But it really is brainwashing, and strong-minded bright young people will see through it, I expect. Maybe this new technology will be enough to encourage students to see through the institution's game. 

But then maybe it will be hijacked by powerful actors in institutions who seize an opportunity to make a quick buck. Those people are always around. I was asked in China about creating a bot for the university department. My heart sank. I noticed the university of Hong Kong has bot too. I would have hoped they'd know better! There's a grimness to all this. And frankly, the world is grim enough without this. 

There are sparks of interest in deeper things from my students in China. It's hard for them because there are expectations they have of education, and I'm breaking the rules a bit. But they are bright and they are thinking. It's all about the relationships and their curiosity. 

What is the curiosity about? It's the same thing that happens when we fall in love. That's why curiosity evades explanation. In fact I think sometimes we see that students fear asking deep questions because they have a sense of trepidation about treading on sacred ground, or venturing into an unknown relationship. It's not because they're stupid. Their reaction is entirely authentic - but the technology might help them to find a path. And then there are moments of serendipity when things just fall in place. What are those moments? They are moments of harmony in the universe. We might talk of planetary alignments (Sun, Venus, etc) as if its a kind of magic, but many quantum physicists will insist on the importance of harmony. We see this in our relationships, and in the way we pursue our curiosity and learn new things about ourselves and each other. 

Nuanced Global Education

I'm at Beijing Normal University's Zhuhai campus. It's incredibly hot and humid, and I'm preparing for classes which I will give over the next 5 days. It's an opportunity to try things out, particularly with a large group of students whose interests are fundamentally in education. The course is about interdisciplinarity and AI, and very closely related to the course I set up at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok a few years ago.

The real change AI could bring to education is a massive increase in the ability to handle the variety of individual differences and interests. Variety, or the inability to handle it, is the principal reason why education is not very good a lot of the time. Institutions are basically heavy attenuators of variety. AI could change that. But will we let it?

I have a number of tools to help me explore this. The first is an "expert generator" - choose a topic and it will introduce you to an "expert" with whom you can explore that topic. So what topics really interest you? Bitcoin mining? Dog grooming? Drug rehabilitation? Stress? The challenge will be to get students to open up about what they're really interested in.

I've got other tools for exploring how working practices will change. Things becoming more compressed - workflows collapsing. And there is the whole business of science and expertise and learning. If I can get a transcript of a YouTube video of an eminent scientist presenting their work, and I can load the transcript into an AI, and then ask the AI to explain it to me, do we need teachers? I had a fascinating discussion with AI about this question today, particularly discussing whether AI could do what Yves Chevallard calls "didactic transposition" (i.e. turning scientific discourse into teachable knowledge). AI can do this, but (the AI pointed out), its explanation may miss the "nuance of understanding". True. But then when do we teach teachers to reveal their nuanced understanding?? We have taught them to "deliver" - how many teachers even in universities have a nuanced understanding of what they teach?

We will finish the session by getting the students to act out a drama (generated by AI) around a future education scenario. I did this with 200 students last year. It was great fun. Drama is a very powerful tool - we should use it more across the curriculum. How could you do a drama in physics? (Remember Mr Tompkins, anyone?). What about chemistry? Or maths?

Nuanced understanding is lived experience, and in many ways it is "dramatic". My music professor Ian Kemp had it. He once explained why Bartok wrote one of his quartets. "This is why!" he said as he put up an acetate of a photograph of a woman. "The first thing to say is..." - there was a pause - "what remarkably good taste he had!". He knew what made the world go round, and that would get our attention. But it's not in any textbook. It's in the way we do things. I have to convey this kind of nuance this week. I have to convey that the underlying principle of the universe is love. It's the hardest thing to do. Especially if you're meant to be talking about AI!

China

So I'm on my way. CX256 in fact. And it's a beautiful day. I had to pop in to the office this morning to pick up a couple of gadgets which I want to take with me. Even turning up early in Manchester means interesting people to talk to. So an early morning conversation about Goethe and Pierre Bourdieu with the person who has part-organised my trip, and a brief conversation with my wonderful office companion. I've just applied for a new job in a different faculty - but I really like where I am, even if I'm "hiding" as an academic. I'll also see my daughter briefly in London before I go to Heathrow. These things are important. It's all heart stuff really (even Goethe!)

When I'm in china, I will meet with old friends and colleagues from Bolton, as well as meet with a Manchester colleague in Guangzhou to play table tennis. That'll be fun! And maybe a trip to Dalian to see a Russian friend. 

The world is in so much trouble right now. I'll return to the UK to a new government that will face a lot of problems. But... the heart stuff! I'm tempted to say "think about the heart stuff"... But really we just need to feel it.

And talking of heart, here's the next stage of my journey. Pub lunch in Euston with Izzie..

Having a bit of a giggle about her destruction of a piano 16 years ago...

Brain Stuff and Heart Stuff

Being cerebral is an academic affliction. Being in touch with emotions, speaking from the heart, is not something that comes easily to academics. This may be because brain-stuff resides in words which can be codified, and used (sometimes as weapons) in articulating and defending ideas. Heart-stuff has to be experienced, and sometimes it hurts. Nobody likes to be hurt, and so we tend to inoculate ourselves against heart-stuff in favour of brain-stuff, which is where the academic affliction begins. Freud would call it "sublimation". Even Freud's label is brain-stuff rather than heart-stuff.  

I'm about to travel to China, and I'm reminded of the last international trip I made to Morocco a couple of months ago. I came back emotionally hurt in a way that hasn't happened for a very long time. I wasn't alone in experiencing pain, which made it worse. I'm naturally apprehensive about this trip, although I'm sure it will be fine, and I like China. I'm returning to Beijing Normal University's Zhuhai campus to deliver a course on "Non-Linear Learning" (it's really about AI), and then to Manchester's academic centre in Hong Kong to deliver a masterclass on AI and Cybernetics. The masterclass is deeply related to my Morocco experience. I need to think of a way of making it "sing" - so I'm taking my Roli Seaboard as a pedagogical tool. 

One thing that I've reflected on in recent weeks is that heart-stuff may be very uncomfortable, but it is extremely important to experience and be reminded of the central importance of our emotions. It is in fact a privilege to experience it and I am "lucky" to feel the pain. It's all a bit like Orpheus's severed head floating down the river Hebrus, refusing to stop singing. It would be far worse to succumb to emotional inoculation and live merely cerebrally - then the singing stops. 

Academics don't sing enough. This is probably why they get into silly battles with each other about concepts that few understand. The "Cyprus experiment" in Brave New World is the classic example - the experiment by a utopian society to gather the most brilliant minds on the island of Cyprus to create an intellectual powerhouse. What happened? Civil war - they all killed each other.

Asymmetry

Nature is asymmetrical. But its asymmetry is critical in its maintaining of life. Big animals eat small animals. But they never eat all of them. Only we are mad enough to even think of doing that. 

Communication is also asymmetrical. This blog is public.. (although what I say is often quite personal) Sometimes I get quite personal responses to it from friends. It is a kind of conversation - a public act, a private response. It occurred to me that the relationship is a bit like planets and the sun. The sun, for example, illuminates and heats everything. He's (any harm in gendering this?) pretty public. A planet like venus on the other hand internalises the sun's heat. The sun's heat is public. Venus's heat is private. 

But there are things which the internal heat of venus can say which the sun can't - partly because it is private. But there is a conversation. They can understand each other. All they need to do is to understand the context of the other. What venus says she knows will be understood by the sun. What the sun says he knows will be understood by venus. It is a story. A dialogue. More than this it is an ecology - an asymmetric relationship of mutual understanding. 

Now there is more to say about this communication and the story it unfolds. It is not about words. Of course, both the sun and venus (if we see them as people) choose words - the sun's public words, venus's private words. But if it was just words, the relationship wouldn't work. The words are really a vehicle for expressing the deep insides of each person (planet!) . Relationships work by revealing how we're made to each other. Sometimes we might think "God I didn't realise you were made like that!!" and the relationship will stop. But sometimes something magical happens in these asymmetric situations and the relationship nourishes each person and grows, despite all the barriers presented by the symmetrical imbalance. 

Words are not the thing. Maturana and Varela were right to say there is no such thing as "information" in the sense of messages or signals which are exchanged. What we conceive of as information is the result of the internal biological processes of organisms coordinating their development in an environment which they could not know objectively. But we can know each other by revealing how each of us is made. 

Nature's asymmetry works like this. The flower reveals how it is made to the bee and vice versa. Each know each other deep down because they are made of the same cell-stuff which has a common origin. I think that without that common origin, no relationship would be possible. 

But there's a refinement to Maturana which I think is important. It is common among constructivists to say that "information" and "knowledge" are constructed. But the construction process must arise somehow. It is the mechanism which selects actions, utterances, movements, etc, which is constructed, and a selection mechanism must be able to anticipate the likely consequences of its selection. It must, in other words, contain a model of itself and its environment. To not have this would render any selection impossible. To select a word is to be able to anticipate the likely effect of that word in a world which we only have a model of. What is such a model? I think it is a fractal recursion of everything in everything. 

But I began with planets, not plants. Planets are not made of cells. But the stuff of planets gives rise to plants and cells. So the asymmetry of nature must extend back to physics and chemistry, and from physics it becomes biology. Does the sun understand venus and venus understand the sun? Well, planets do not appear to have an internal selection mechanism: they obey what appear to us to be deterministic laws. Yet behind those deterministic laws lie the profound asymmetries of quantum mechanics. Conscious rocks? I'm not sure any more. But the relationship between the local and non-local in quantum mechanics would suggest that nothing that happens in a rock locally doesn't have some non-local correlate. That's the asymmetrical balance of everything. We humans are merely manifestations of it.

Beautiful things

I've got a longer post to write, but some things are just very beautiful. In the meantime here is a picture on the theme of "hot words"...