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.