West Side Story

It's been a ridiculously busy week this week - no time to think. But I went to the Spielberg West Side Story in Wythenshawe this evening - part of an initiative to bring arts to Wythenshawe. I think Spielberg's remake is a masterpiece. I first saw it on a plane to China. Embarrassing because it made me cry - always difficult to say you want another coffee when that happens!

What's so extraordinary about this version is the sensitivity with which the love scenes are played. The timing is exquisite - Spielberg's musicality is not just in his use of the music, but in the choreography of the camera and pacing of gestures. But it just tells us how music is at the root of emotion. Everyone relates to this because everyone knows how this feels - even if not everyone actually experiences something so intense. But some people do. 

But the process of making something so sensitive is not something that is driven by feeling, but by intelligence and technique. One of the other things that has happened in the last week is a set of fascinating academic discussions about the difference between form and process, particularly with Lou Kauffman. 

The form of an experience is not the same as the process of experiencing it. The structure of the love scenes in the film is not the same as the experience of watching them. The form of a mathematical proof is not the same as the process of discovering it. The form of a piece of music is not the same as the process of hearing it, and certainly not the process of writing it. 

But form and process may be united at a deeper level. To think this is to think that there is no time. There is no moment where Maria and Tony are apart, and another moment when they are together. There is no "moment" at all, but everything is one together. To be in a deep spiritual state where we appreciate that is to have hope not just that things can get better, and that the moment of things being good and whole is ever present with the darkest of times. 

Wave Genetics, maths and Health

As is usual for this time of year, it's been hard to get motivated. I've got to the end of the week thinking that I haven't done anything, although one or two things I have done have been quite good. 

Involving Peter Rowlands in my academic department at Manchester I hope will be the most significant thing from this week. Peter and Sidney came to our departmental meeting - so what can a genius theoretical physicist contribute to our thinking about occupational health or public health? Well, one thing came up almost immediately - there is a deep interest in the University in the potential occupational hazards, and potential opportunities for improving OH in the widespread use of graphene. Any new material presents new kinds of risks, but to understand it, we need to understand what the material is.

In his book "Foundations of Physical Law", Peter made a prediction relating to graphene and the measurement of fermion velocity. Basically, one of the properties of graphene is that electrons (fermions) have no mass, and therefore can travel at speeds very close to the speed of light. Graphene presents opportunities for investigating the behaviour of electrons and quantum mechanics. One of the interesting empirical phenomena is the Quantum Hall effect, whereby the resistence of current flow can be seen to be quantized (i.e. goes in steps) in what are called Landau Levels as a magnetic field is increased. Peter's prediction is that as the magnetic field is increased, so the speed of electrons is reduced because they acquire mass. 

Might this fundamental property of the material relate in some way to the biological effects that the material might present? Or even, might the insight gained into the dynamics of quantised energy through graphene cause us to rethink the simplistic cause and effect models in occupational health or public health? I think both of these questions are very interesting. It all goes to show the power of an interdisciplinary approach to these things - particularly if we are lucky enough to get a concentration of highly original thinkers.

The second thing that happened this week was that I managed to finish a short article in response to a piece by Lou Kauffman on "naming" for the journal Constructivist Foundations. This week, Lou has also been leading a discussion on "Biologics" for the Foundations of Information Science mailing list, and gave a webinar which was attended by Peter Rowlands, Stuart Kauffman, John Torday, Plamen Simeonov, Karl Javorszky, Gordana Dodig Crnkovic and many others from FIS. There were one or two important things that came out of this which were new to me. 

Lou began with self-reference (as he did with the paper he wrote about naming), and quickly moved on to the difference between form and process. In the flow of conversation, Stu Kauffman introduced the recent idea of "constraint closure" developed by Mael Montevil and Matteo Mosseo (see Biological organisation as closure of constraints - Maël Montévil). I wish Loet Leydesdorff was still around - I think he would have been very interested in this. It also raises fundamental questions about the "self" to which a "self" refers in self-reference (which was one of the questions I raised in my response to Lou).

Then Plamen Simeonov raised the work of a Russian biologist called Peter Garyaev on what he called "wave genetics". Garyaev has an unusual take on genetics which took him to postulate mechanisms for genetic transmission far beyond conventional biology, some of which involved sound and music. This is obviously interesting to me - but it could be mad. But aren't the most interesting things like this? Wave genetics - Institute Of Lingvistiko-Wave Genetics. There may be a connection to Rudolph Steiner here - but why not!

There was a fascinating moment when John Torday tried to relate his thinking about symbiogenesis to Lou's thinking about the place of mathematics in biological systems. John's view is that maths is ontological in some way, and which is endogenised by biological systems through symbiogenesis, which provides the foundation for the cultural practices of mathematics that we know. This made Lou think and I suggested whether this idea of symbiogenesis and the embrace of evolutionary history as a dimension to the "constraint closure" might provide us with a way of uniting "form" with "process". 

A final question I asked related to what a protein perceives in another protein. Lou responded by illustrating a knot in a plastic chain (some kind of lego thing - very interesting), and saying that one could determine the topology of a chain by pulling parts of it. I think that's very interesting because the "floppyness" of the chain becomes a transmitter of information about the chain - so the inherent "disorder" of many proteins may present an invitation to be "pulled" by other proteins. 

Related to this was a comment made by Peter Rowlands about measurement earlier in the week: when we measure gravity, we are not measuring gravity but inertia. The same might be said for pulling on a protein. 

2025

It's a very wet new year's eve. I think I will blog more in 2025 - it's the one habit I established in the wake of the social media revolution of the early 2000s which has stuck with me. Many events of my life, and a good deal of my academic work, is here. Certainly more than in silly journal articles... 

I'm not sure what 2025 will bring apart from that. What will I blog about? What will drive me this year? Every year of my blog has been driven by something new. I imagine when I'm much older I will look back with some curioisity. Some of these posts are a bit embarrassing - but each one tells a story. 

That's what we do. We tell stories - and hopefully pass a message to those who come after us. Or provide enough text so that a future AI can continue to tell stories!

More single line stuff

I've been experimenting a bit more... The interesting thing here is the role of harmony. Now, surely one might think that harmony is a "multiple" line because it has multiple voices. But it can be seen as merely a new aspect on a single sonority.

This is half-composed - a bit too busy in places, but interesting what can be done...

Noise of the unfolding line

One of the features of music composition which has fascinated me recently is the phenomenon of heterophony: the playing of a single melodic line by many voices which meander around that line, providing different versions of it.

Heterophony generates noise which feeds the line, which generates noise. The line becomes continuous and self-referential. The lines swirls and gains new degrees of freedom as a knot. In swirling it creates a space of interaction. Totality is in a single note. We move into a structured nothing with perception of a line of a plane. This may be the essence of being human. And it means that everything that happens is inevitable because it exists as a possibility within totality. The totality of perception is nothing - we can only hold onto a thread of our part of that totality. 

AI may one day be able to do better than this - to offer something more total (although it could never be totality itself). And AI is essentially heterophonic, as I have mentioned before: Improvisation Blog: AI and Heterophony

This improvisation isn't so much a dance, but I think the combination of timbres and gestures is in reality the unfolding of a single line which knots itself and gradually unknots itself, in the process constructing and demarcating time. 

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.