Compass of hope

Over the last 6 months or so, I have discovered new dimensions to myself. Nobody ever makes discoveries like this alone. We need others, and it is a rare privilege when some interpersonal magic works like a revelation: an explosion of joy and light. Nothing is ever the same afterwards. The priorities shift to what really matters. For me this has brought a deeper grounding, patience and sense of responsibility. 

There is an individuation process which we all go through, but the twists and turns for some may be more marked than in others. The Jungian archetypes of self, shadow, animus, anima pass through stages. I often think about Tippett's Jungian opera, The Midsummer Marriage when thinking about this. The main characters, Mark and Jennifer, engage in a spiritual quest on their way to their wedding. On their individual journeys, they separate, with one of them going towards the dark "shadow" side of themselves, while the other goes towards the lighter "self", and later they swap roles before being reunited as transformed (individuated) people. The marriage only occurs after they have both visited these different aspects of their psyche.  

Tippett also drew on the archetype of the "Fisher king" - the wounded and alienated king, for whom all was material, possession and power, but who lacked the deeper spiritual aspects of the psyche. It was this lack which was his "wound" - the thing that disabled him. In  Tippett's opera, the Fisher King, becomes a cold-hearted businessman, "King Fisher", Jennifer's father, who absolutely forbids the wedding and tries his best to stop it. The mystical (and for some, frankly baffling) climax of the opera features another archetype, the "Wise old woman" who appears to bless the wedding, and cast aside the emptiness of King Fisher. As with the other operatic treatment of the Fisher King - in Wagner's Parsifal - there is some redemption for him in the Tippett. King Fisher eventually accepts the mystic realm, but dies - thus symbolically representing a new cycle of life, which affects the other characters.  

I find these stories powerful because they help me to navigate. We all know a King Fisher, we all have some understanding of our feminine and masculine sides (animus and anima), and we know we have a shadow, even if we would rather not look at it. The archetypes are rather like statues in a landscape through which we all pass, and because we pass through, our relation to them is always changing. We probably also know couples like "Mark and Jennifer". The problem with the way we live today is that we don't give ourselves time to really think about where and who we are, where we are going,  or how to become whole. In that sense we are all a little bit like the Fisher King. 

Sometimes, as in the opera, we do need to separate - at least temporarily - from the comfort of companionship and visit those different aspects of ourselves so as to discover ourselves. It is not any particular moment of experience with the shadow, or the animus/anima, or the wise woman, or the fisher king, that we individuate. It is through the slow and sometimes painful journey to understand the landscape of the psyche. Then we can be whole. 

So this time I have a more creative exercise. Can you draw, or take a photograph, of something that represents what it means to be whole? 

Rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight

Elgar prefixed his second symphony with the quote from Shelley's poem saying "I have put my soul in it". The music certainly breathes with the depth of feeling which is unmatched not only in his output, but all but the best music. A friend once said to me that this kind of music sounds "sad". I know what she means, and yet, I don't think sadness is the right word. It is the feeling one gets from a deep sigh - and that is as much a feeling of connection with everything as it an expression of transient emotion. Shelley's poem is the same:

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,

Spirit of Delight!

Wherefore hast thou left me now

Many a day and night?

Many a weary night and day

'Tis since thou are fled away.

Really, it's about breathing, I think. If music or poetry doesn't breathe, it's no good - it has no life. 

This afternoon I'm giving a talk to the Liverpool University Music Theory Club (see Music Theory Research Group (chromatic-harmony.com)) about breathing in a Haydn piano sonata.  Haydn is definitely one of the most cheerful composers - but his music breathes too. As I've been preparing this, I've been really interested in the question as why, despite it's amazing technical potential, AI doesn't breathe (obviously it doesn't have lungs - but that matters, doesn't it??)

I think the questions about music and the questions about AI are related, and they have to do with the nature of our 3-dimensional world, and the poverty of our description of that world. Breathing is of course 3-dimensional - as is everything in biology. The basic issue is that we struggle to grapple with 3 dimensions - only in actual practice or performance can the concrete experience of the dimensioned world be appreciated, but it cannot be codified without losing its life.

Most of the time in science, we attenuate dimensions. So, for example, we will choose to measure vaariable x, and ignore variable y. Statistical normalisation, correction for confounding, etc are all ways of attenuating the living world. 

However, if we understand the dimensional relations at the heart of the 3-dimensional world, then it is possible, rather than attenuate, to reduce dimensionality in a way which preserves the 3-dimensionality, but presents a 2-dimensional representation of it. This is what happens in a hologram: a two-dimensional pattern formed by interference between (say) light is an encoding of 3 dimensions. All those dimensions are preserved, but what we see, and can analyse, is a surface. This is why the holographic theory of the universe talks of a black hole being represented at its surface as a hologram - a reduction of the dimensionality which encodes the nature of matter. 

For a long time I've been interested in fractal analysis of music (fractals are basically like holograms, and like them, a dimensional reduction) - see onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sres.2738, and Music, cells and the dimensionality of nature - PubMed (nih.gov). But today I'm going to talk about the normal distribution of noise as another approach to dimensional reduction. Haydn's C major piano sonata looks a bit like this... Normal distributions are very interesting analytical approaches to dimensional reduction - although we tend not to see them like this. 

The interesting thing about this video is that it does look like "breathing". So here's a little experiment:

Relax. 

Take a deep breath. 

Clear your mind. 

And breathe out... 

here are a few questions about your experience: 

Trajectories of Oppression

It does seem that there are some quite unpleasant leaders in the world (Putin, Xi, Modi, Orban, Khamenei, etc) who seem to be gathering and organising in opposition to leaders in other parts of the world who present themselves as being less unpleasant (but may in fact be almost as bad! - Netanyahu, Trump, the CIA...). A balanced perspective on this is difficult, but there are certainly countries where speaking out against injustice will get you killed, or imprisoned. But "Being free" ought to mean something rather more than "they won't kill me if I speak out". 

Within all oppressive regimes there are restrictions on the range of things that can be said, and who they can be said to. This applies to countries as much as it does to family relationships, and indeed the most common form of oppression occurs in the home. It's always the same pattern though - there is coercion of communication, monitoring and control. Transgressing any boundaries may lead to a "visit" in one's work or home from some unsavoury character who, if not directly violent, will attempt intimidate through threats. 

Domestic oppression looks very much like this (from Jim Cartwright's brilliant play "Two"):

Free societies need to counter the tendency towards restricting communication. Openness and dialogue backed up by legal protection is always the best policy for dealing with threats. However, as the world teeters between liberty and oppression, there is a risk that this kind of behaviour spills over into normal life in free societies. So what should we do? 

Telepathy

I find there are too many occasions when "coincidences" occur for me to believe that they are merely "co-incidences". We only really believe this because we imagine ourselves to be independent from one another - little self-contained robots pursuing our own algorithms, and only "understanding" each other through the perturbations that each of us produces in others. A "co-incidence" in this model of the world is merely a particular pattern that emerges at random in the processing of these perturbations that makes one of the robots go "ah-ha!"

But it may not be like that at all. In fact, we are very unlikely to be "independent" of each other: independence is an illusion. Every cell unites us. Every cell contains a shared history which maps each "individual" back to a shared origin. If that is the case, then it is not a surprise to think that our shared history isn't causal in our coordination with each other. What then is a "co-incidence"? It is not necessarily a random encounter, but the result of a deep coordination produced the internal selection processes of mechanisms whose components belong with each other, whilst being physically separate. It is further possible that such coordinations are related in some way to basic physical processes - entanglement particularly being a mechanism that would explain this kind of "strange relationship at a distance".

We are rarely aware that we breathe together - we only become aware of it when in a large silent room with many others. When we do become aware of it, we sense something "bigger" which unites us all. Is this an illusion? If it isn't an illusion, then what must be happening is some kind of "coordination of constraint": that what constrains my free will in choosing actions becomes coupled with what constrains another person's free will. 

The simple point here is that we don't know what constrains free will. We don't know what shapes the mechanism that chooses action x or action y. But just because we don't know it, doesn't mean that there might be something that constrains action x and y and that these constraints might become aligned. 

When people fall in love, there is a very strong sense of connection - even when there is an absence. People will report picking up the phone at the very moment their loved one calls. How many times have I opened WhatsApp (for example) to see at the same moment the person I want to call show up suddenly as "online"?  So the question is, How might those constraints become aligned? 

Rupert Sheldrake speculated that its a "morphic field" which unites the various constraints that affect us and steer us to action. He conducted experiments staring at the back of peoples' heads and timing how long it took them to turn round. I think there might be a simpler explanation based on the fact that we are basically made of the same stuff, and that stuff has a common history. We don't need to invent a field, because there is already a kind of "vector" in-built into each one of our cells. 

Now the question about telepathy arises because it might be possible to "tune-in" to the vector in each of our cells and coordinate its processes with the cells in someone else. Actually, this is pretty much what happens in sex, isn't it? Also in deep conversation. So why shouldn't the same process not be possible at a distance? 

We could probably explore this experimentally if there was a way to account for the constraints bearing on cellular behaviour. John Torday, for example, has subjected cells to micro-gravity and observed common changes in this way. There may be a mistake in thinking of telephathy as "exchange of thought". Rather it seems to be "coordination of constraints on physiological process at a distance". 

I've written something on a piece of paper, and I want to conduct an experiment. Here's another form with a few questions about thought and telepathy

Trust

 In the AI world that is unfolding around us, it is going to be increasingly difficult to know what to trust and who to trust. This issue has been known in science for a long time, but it is now becoming apparent in everyday life and politics. Von Foerster and Maturana gave this wonderful talk about it many years ago: 

Von Foerster makes the distinction between two words that mean "truth": the Latin "veritas" entails checking reality (German "wahrheit" derives from this). The English word "truth" on the other hand derives from "trust" - in other words, it becomes a matter of interpersonal agreement in terms of establishing truth. Since von Foerster was committed to arguing that there was no objective reality to check, the issue of trust and truth is central.

It is trust which is being affected not just by AI but by all forms of technological communication. Trust demands human intersubjective engagement - quite simply, looking into each others eyes - and most forms of technological communication do not allow this (text, phone, email, etc). Moreover, the interaction between people using these media of communication will unfold differently from how things unfold in interpersonal intersubjective communication. 

These days, we can't be sure about anything. We can't be sure that the sender of an email is who they say. We might assume, for example, when somebody calls us up, that the person on the other end of the phone line is the person they say: but it might not be. We can't be sure that a paper was really written by professor X, or that a student actually wrote the essay they submitted. 

This is central to the problems we are going to face in the coming years. So we are going to need new ways of establishing trust and confidence in communication.

I'm interested in what people think about this - about what we can do to establish new levels of trust. Since my googleform experiments are going reasonably well, I've created another one (I hope you trust me!). There is a very simple question: How would you establish the trustworthiness of a communication in the absence of being able to look someone in the eye?

Interested to hear the responses! 

Faure's Breathing

I'm really out of practice with my playing, so apologies for mistakes here. While I'm playing at this Faure Nocturne, I'm also thinking about the way that music breathes. If it doesn't breathe, it's no good. That is a real test for something like AI - because it doesn't breathe at all. Breathing is so important - partly I think because it's relational. We don't think of breathing "together" - but we actually are always breathing together.  

When we play music, we breathe with the universe. Or try to at least.

Delius's Idyll

When I was about 14 or 15 I fell in love with the music of Delius. I had a few LPs, and one of them had a recording of the Requiem on one side, and on the other his setting of Whitman poems from "Leaves of Grass" - "Idyll", which was assembled by Eric Fenby with Delius in the 1930s. It was magical music - the Requiem's unconventional (and perhaps shocking) nihilism about sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of life resonated with my teenage mood, but the Idyll was the piece which really struck me.

Whitman's poetry is beautiful, erotic and mystical:

"Once I pass'd through a populous city,

Imprinting my brain with all its shadows.

Of that city I remember only a woman,

A woman I casually detained,

Who detained me for love of me.

Day by day and night by night we were together --

 all else has been forgotten by me."

But the music is something else. There's an extraordinary bluesy climax set to the words "What is it to us what the rest do or think/ What is all else to us who have voided all/ but freedom and all but our own joy." (section from about 16' 28'')

The music and words are really one giant fantasy - but what a fantasy! And then again, I'm now reminded that fantasies are not "made-up": they are real. Indeed, as both Tolkein and C.S. Lewis thought, fantasy is more real than reality: it is the place where we hope and dream, which is the essence of what it is to be human. The make-believe is the humdrum monotony of the world - that world is false. The music speaks the truth though: "Dearest comrade all is over and long gone, But love is not over."

Tolkien called fairy stories a "casement of the outer world": they were a space to explore possibility.  They are fundamental to humanity. Moreover, losing sight of fantasy is a deathly way to live. 

Also, sometimes, something happens in the outer world which is remarkably close to what happens in the casement. That's a reminder that there really is something "bigger than ourselves", and that it is our dreams which are our compass and guide. John Torday sees this perception of something bigger than ourselves as a reference to our fundamental connection to the cosmos. I think Delius might have agreed. 

I was once quite critical of an eminent music scholar who at a conference went on about the love letters of a composer and how they influenced what he (it was a he) did. I said that people deceive each other (I wasn't feeling particularly romantic at the time!) - I said it's easy to say stuff like "I love you" in a letter - but is it real? Now I think I was not quite right. Sometimes it's very real, and the energy that flows from it is indeed causal in remarkable things happening - like Delius's music.

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