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"...

Breathing Poetry

This is a bit geeky, but I haven't played with my Roli Seaboard for some time - partly because it developed a fault which required some delicate soldering. Now it's back, and I am rediscovering it. Also the music technology to support it has got a lot better. Ableton Live now supports Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression (without the trouble of creating lots of independent tracks) and that is a bit of a game-changer for me.

When I first ran the Global Scientific Dialogue course in Russia in 2018, the Roli seaboard was a key tool that I used to illustrate the point about redundancy (which I have always seen as key to machine learning). Now I see it as a powerful demonstration of geometric algebra, which I think is the deeper structure within which redundancy fits. It is the geometric algebra of the Roli seaboard which makes it so expressive - and which makes all music making expressive. 

When I wrote this paper on music with Leydesdorff (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sres.2738) I was interested in the multidimensional data of expression produced by the instrument and did some simple analysis. Now I think I could do more to illustrate the point. The action of playing the instrument perfectly illustrates the distinction between scalars and vectors. Noise of the environment or feedback from the instrument informs the note selection, which is constrained in various ways, and which expands itself through interaction with itself and with others. And the really important thing is: it breathes. 

AI is driven by redundancy, but it doesn't breathe. And we tend not to breathe when we get excited about the technology. But not breathing is death.

Good poetry, music and art always breathes. AI can write clever poems, but they don't breathe like the work of great artists. In poetry, it is love poems which illustrate this most clearly. Consider this love sonnet by Pablo Neruda:

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,   
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:   
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,   
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries   
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,   
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose   
from the earth lives dimly in my body. 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,   
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,   
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,   
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

The breathing in this is powerful and visceral. How do words (mere words!) do this? I think it is because when we speak, and particularly when we talk about deep feelings, the words just illuminate how we are made inside. Poets reveal their inner physiology to others. That is also why we love the people we do. We don't love them for their turn of phrase! We love them for the way they're made.

AI can only do words. But all that is illuminated by its word selection is the ingenuity of its mechanism, and the breathless enthusiasm of its proponents. For proponents like me I must remember this. To have been blessed by love is to be reminded of what really matters.

Gathering Strangers

Every morning I walk through Whitworth Park on my way to work. At night it's quite an eerie place, the light from the art gallery shining like a beacon among the trees, and there is a sign above the gallery which says "Gathering of Strangers". Increasingly I feel that there are no strangers in the world. We are all connected. 

I had a weird and sad experience the other day because I had been watching the videos from the ANPA conference in 2020 (about which I wrote in the last blog). Why was I thinking about ANPA? Because I was thinking about astrology and physics and knew that Colin Rourke had presented on this. Why was I thinking about astrology? Because I'd had some powerful experiences for which astrological explanations are helpful and soothing. All of these things were necessary for me to start thinking particularly about how brilliant the contributions were from John Williamson - a remarkable physicist from Glasgow. I was first introduced to his work by my PhD supervisor Oleg Liber, who met John at the UK cybernetics society conference. John had been presenting on the fundamental importance of light in physics which formed the cornerstone of his work. I also knew John was ill. Very sadly, and almost at the same time as I was thinking about all this, he died. Far too young. 

He'd been doing remarkable work - particularly in chemistry. (That too is connected to my astrological interest). This is him talking at the 2021 ANPA conference about sub-quantum chemistry. Very noticeable how he sees quantum mechanics as music. We got on very well! The physics is not easy stuff though - but he had spent his life thinking about it, and he definitely knew what he was doing. He was also very interested in education, and wanted to work with me on developing a learning platform around his ideas. We never got around to it.  But now we have AI... and the transcripts from these talks can be easily processed, and re-explained by the technology. This may be important as we move away from traditional forms of academic communication towards more human and trust-oriented scientific practices.  

So I suppose this has put me in a mood which is both optimistic, and melancholic. There are people I am missing very deeply at the moment. And there is a lot going on which is stopping me getting too morbid. It will all work out ok. We are all connected after all. I even started something called "Gathering strangers". No strangers have gathered yet though... But maybe they will. 

But here is "Whitworth Park in the Dark" in the "Claire de lune"...

Sun, Moon and Venus

A few years ago during COVID I hosted the Alternative Natural Philosophy conference online (see ANPA 41 Web Conference – Alternative Natural Philosophy Association). It was a great event, with many contributions from leading physicists and mathematicians, touching on really profound issues in science. One of the participants, Prof. Colin Rourke (see Colin P. Rourke - Wikipedia -  Colin Rourke's WWW Homepage (warwick.ac.uk)), gave a presentation on astrology and physics ("Intertial Drag, Dark Matter and Astrology") which was very thought provoking. Interest in the esoteric in modern physics has a surprisingly long history, with Wolfgang Pauli's collaboration with Carl Jung about synchronicity being perhaps the most significant engagement. Of course, nobody tells you this stuff in university. Why not?

Colin's presentation starts with an exploration of the structure of the arms of galaxies (for which a theory of intertial drag is proposed), alongside important critiques of the idea of a singularity (what's that, exactly?), and the big bang (didn't happen - "there are things in the universe which are older than the big bang"). He then turned to astrology, using some fascinating and convincing examples using astrological charts (see https://youtu.be/BVIWEXBEcqg?t=3326). Rourke's argument focuses specifically on gravity and gravity's effect on physiology (he discounts electromagnetism because it is too weak). The focus on gravity is an argument that has also been made by John Torday. Because of gravity, the relative positions of planets is important. Importantly, he sees the gravitational effects as largely independent of distance. Rourke mentions Liz Green (Liz Greene | The Centre for Psychological Astrology (cpalondon.com)) and her unnervingly accurate predictions about the fall of the Soviet Union, and more recent Russian history.

The discussion at the end of Colin's presentation is well worth listening to. One by one, the sacred cows of modern physics are sacrificed, from the standard model to the state of modern science, and particularly the role of money in scientific institutions. The discussion centres on what academics are no longer allowed to talk about (John Williamson - "all the money goes on old shit, not new shit"). John also makes some interesting comments about the future of modern chemistry. Lou Kauffman argues that science should be pursued for science's sake. 

I was updating my CV the other day, and feeling a bit depressed about the range of publications I have. It's so diverse, from cybernetics, to education, to biology and music. It makes sense to me, but it doesn't fit the modern paradigm of the university. And yet, it is precisely in the space of the deep arguments for science that this web discussion focusses on. 

But back to astrology... I was pulled back to this presentation because I've experienced my own astrological experiences recently - particularly a Sun-Venus conjunction. That's a very powerful attractive force and when you experience this in ordinary life, you tend to think "Wow! what is that about?!". Astrologically, the Sun is all about the self, while Venus is (broadly) about love. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to image what happens when they come together. It's an explosive combination, particularly when other factors might present complex or conflicting signals. The dynamic of strong attraction and complex interactions mean that when this kind of thing happens, it can't be ignored. Why does this happen? For that, we would have to look at Jung and Pauli's stuff on synchronicity. 

The remarkable thing about this is (whatever one might think about the astrological theory), its effects are palpable. That means that consciousness is (or consciousnesses are) in some sort of dance with the universe. That would contribute to an explanation of telepathy, for example (see Improvisation Blog: Telepathy (dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com)). Is this coordinated by gravitational forces? Perhaps the moon, which clearly and unambiguously have a direct impact on the physical environment, is a good place to start. That's about the waxing and waning of emotion...

Feedback

I went for a long walk this evening, through our local park, and into the city. I don't often do this - but the evening was beautiful, and I was reminded of many past beautiful evenings. Walking is very therapeutic - it helps calm my mood - there's so much going on at the moment. 

In a few weeks I'll be back in China in Zhuhai at the campus of Beijing Normal University, and then in Hong Kong to deliver a "masterclass" on AI and cybernetics for Manchester University. The latter came about through a connection made by a close friend who was on my mind during my walk. Everything good happens through friendship. 

I was also thinking about my blog, which in recent weeks has taken on a new lease of life. I've always seen my blog as a testament of my life - it's a cross between a memoir, a diary, and a notebook for ideas. There's everything in there from quite personal stuff to pretty abstract academic ramblings. In the 18th century, people kept "commonplace books". My blog is closest to that. 

Recently I've been asking for feedback in a novel way. Some people have responded, and it means a great deal to me when they do. But I want to know if I should continue with my experiment. Can you help? 

This is brilliant... On happiness

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n18/theodore-zeldin/diary

Purpose

There's a lovely quote from Michael Foot doing the rounds on the internet (I think partly to contrast his heart-rending social vision with the bland managerial nonsense of Keir Starmer):

"We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do."

I think Foot himself lived up to this, and it is no coincidence that the affection towards him and appreciation of his oratory and vision has risen since his death. This is what happens to people who are loved. They live on in peoples' hearts - even in the hearts of people who were born long after them. 

At the same time, I think some further reflection on the sentiment expressed here is needed. The problem is that there are so many people who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. No individual can provide for them all. So we would imagine that we need social policy to try to provide for them. But as soon as we try to enter into the realm of policy, so the temptation is to find "elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative" - however well-meaning. 

Ivan Illich addressed this problem when he spoke against charity as a variety of colonialism. He framed the challenge as one between autonomy of the individual, and heteronomy of the state or corporations: basically, it's the difference between what we can do as individuals, and what is done for us, or to us. Society goes wrong when the balance of autonomy and heteronomy is lost and heteronomy takes over. There is a huge difference between the hungry person on the street in front of you, and the hungry or dispossessed in a far away place whose tragic faces appear in the media appealing for money. 

I think Illich intuitively highlighted the difference between local biological interaction, and non-local consciousness. Both dimensions have epigenetic effects, but those effects are more directly felt in the local context. The love and care for someone close has an immediate effect on their physiology, which can potentially produce physiological change that is carried forwards in the gametes (particularly if they are young).  Even for the old, acts of kindness and love are often directed towards the young for this very reason: there is an epigenetic dynamic that binds endocrine mechanisms to acts of kindness and endocrine responses in the physiology of the young. It's not uncommon for men (for example) to become kindly and doting grandfathers, when in youth they were complete bastards! What's the biology of this? Well, here's a theory: The Phenomenon of “Subjective Age” as an Epigenetic Cellular-Molecular Mechanism (researchgate.net)

So Foot might not be entirely right to restrict the purpose of life in caring for those worse off. Caring for those worse off is part of a process geared towards preparing a better world for tomorrow, mediated by the zygote of the next generation. Kindness and love really matter - certainly far more than ambition and success. To show love or experience love is to testify to a truth about the universe. To be ambitious or cruel is to testify to the conflicted nature of ourselves as individuals. 

But why do we see so much cruelty, selfishness and violence in the world? These things too are epigenetic in origin. The logic of violence is a logic of individual survival and response to threat. The logic of love is a logic of collective survival. Biological evolution occurs as a result of the absorption of environmental threats through symbiogenesis: cells endogenise that which threatens them so as to acquire greater variety in their potential to organise into ever-more adaptable and viable entities. The uncomfortable fact may be that without the cruelty and selfishness, there can be no progress, any more than without love there would be self-destruction. 

Human relationships are such a good example of this principle. All deep and long-lasting partnerships are contested spaces where the forces of love, ambition and individual survival play out and people either grow together or grow apart. Interestingly, people grow apart when their individual growth is stymied by the partnership - and that is usually to do with an absence of love and care. Whichever way it goes, we learn new things about the world, and those experiences have epigenetic effects which are passed down to the gametes. We build a map for the generation to come of what the world looks like, and how to survive in it - maybe survive better than we did. And of course, the really important scientific insight from epigenetics is that my "I" is not an "I" trying to survive until inevitably "I" die, but my "I" is a "we" that never dies. Mortality is a peculiar illusion. 

Foot's message is not so much in his oratory, but in how we now feel about him. It is the warmth of affection for someone now long dead that lives on in a message of love and hope in a world which which will always challenge us to grow. We need love to grow, and we need struggle too. So the question is how do you grow, and how will we help those around us to grow? 

And here's a beautiful but sad song about growing...

 

Sound and Life

When I started this blog (a long time ago now), my intention was to explore music and improvisation in as scientific a way as possible. The blog served a purpose in allowing me to express myself (even if very awkwardly and sometimes not very musically), but also then it provided me with the confidence to write more about the music, and my process of making it. The blog also arose at quite a difficult emotional time for me, so the musical expression was therapeutic. At that time, I wanted to write about music in a way that connected it to everything else - to education, technology, philosophy, cybernetics. Over the years, I've made a bit of progress - there are a few papers... although of course, they're completely ignored...

What do I think now? Well, I think I was right in my original hunch that everything is musical. I also think that that the connection between music, improvisation, learning and systems is fundamentally about symmetry and geometry. What I mean is that music is clearly a "multi-dimensional" thing. That means that there are different orders of phenomena which partake in the process of making music. These phenomena are not on the same level: we cannot talk about pitch and rhythm as if they are different "attributes" of music. But we can talk about noise and pitch, and repetition (redundancy) and expectation as different orders of phenomena with different dimensionalities. 

Only recently have I appreciated this dimensional connection, and understood that pitch is like a vector - a signal from a to b, while noise is a scalar - something that has no direction, and that music requires both noise and signals. And of course, with noise, come both a necessity for repetition and a stochastic process which ensures that random events can happen. So things keep growing. 

This is to say that what music really is is an unfolding selection mechanism which selects its ongoing unfolding until such a point that it selects silence and stops. I think music is driven to reach a point of stopping for fundamental reasons probably related to deep physics, physiology and the relationship to the universe. 

A few years ago I experimented with the Roli Seaboard musical instrument. I'm trying again to do some improvisation with this. Not entirely successful, but it does make the point about how important noise is. Also, in returning to the original purpose of this blog, is to return in some way to the kind of emotional state that produced it. Since the last few weeks has knocked me sideways, it's quite nice to revisit some older practices. 

I think I've made progress over the years. But I'm not sure really. How do we ever know if we get anywhere? Most people like to progress in their careers, and they often end up in senior positions which are effectively administrative, stressful and dull. For one reason or another, I've avoided that. But I've been free to think. I think, I hope, it's worth it. It's difficult to know what to do with a life. What do you think? 

piano score here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IqqLjqC_tLozrXV3ro7Cpma6MtYvG4zG/view?usp=sharing 

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.

(I've given up on comments on my blog - too much spam trying to sell me Viagra! So if you want to feed-back, do it here:  and I'll post them up)

 

Wellbeing

One of the problems with digital communications is that they are easily subverted. It can be difficult to ascertain the real intention behind electronic communications: they can be subject to deception or coercion and that can lead to serious consequences. With face-to-face communication we at least have some insight into the lived experience of the other in the flow of communication. Human trust relies on this. 

A friend of mine commented on this phenomenon a few months back when she said of Generative AI "I am not sure who I am talking to". Quite right. We know that we are interacting with some kind of process which in itself is amusing and fascinating, but it is also deceiving. The fact that we are looking for ways of exploiting this form of deception for real-life activities says more about the poverty of our inter-human engagement where communications have become transactions than it does about the miracle of the technology. 

Fernando Flores, in "Understanding Computers and Cognition", argued that IT systems were essentially communication systems for managing the commitments we make to one another. So, for example, the email chain quickly reveals who promised what to who and when. But there's a problem with this. In recent years, the evidence trail creates lots of noise as (for example) it is revealed exactly what some cabinet members thought of Boris Johnson. As more intimate communications are recorded electronically and subject to search, we see communications intended at source to be private become public. This happens in verbal communication through gossip, but gossip permits deniability which a WhatsApp message doesn't. Because the internet is increasingly wired into the psyche, intimations and thoughts are at risk of public exposure, with social and psychological consequences.  

We might think that total transparency of communication - the tracking of commitments - is a good thing. I used to think this. But not only can it be corrupted, it also throws away huge amounts of information from the embodied source of communication. When all channels of communication are subject to surveillance, communications themselves can be coerced. In domestic situations this can be worse, because it gives rise to a "double-bind" where messages of care go hand-in-hand with threats and intimidation. Work communications too can put people in very difficult situations where they have to communicate one thing electronically, but really think another. Imagine having both coercion at home and at work. It's no wonder there is an explosion of stress. 

We probably need what Stafford Beer called an "algedonic loop" in our communications - one that provides assurance to those communicating that they are in fact "ok" - or provides a way of pushing a red button if they really are not and need help. It's not hard to do - probably something like this would work: Wellbeing (google.com)

Work, Labour and Occupational Health: Hannah Arendt and the boundaries of subsistence

I've been at the International Congress on Occupational Health conference in Marrakech this week. I gave a presentation on AI in occupational health, and also had a poster on synthetic data from large language models. I was pretty much alone in talking about AI, which I found hard to believe. It will be different by their next conference in 3 years time, by which time we may have an idea of the pathologies we might unleash upon ourselves. 

By far the best session I attended was on women and occupational health. Partly the reason why it was so good was because the general definition of work that most people would give you in occupational health is that it is "something you do for money". With women, far more than men, there is a huge amount of work which is not paid. Unpaid work such childcare, together with specific female health issues which directly relate to the viability of society, have a huge impact on paid work. I think this means that we need to re-examine our definition of "work". This has made me think about Hannah Arendt's distinctions in "The Human Condition" (which has been a book that has lived with me for most of my academic career)

Arendt (partly following Marx) makes the distinction between work, labour and action. "Work", she sees as a higher form of activity which leads to the production of things or structures which outlast the process of their creation. "Labour" on the other hand, is activity that is necessary for ongoing existence. One of the challenges for us to think about in occupational health is that a lot of the "work" we discuss (and its health implications) is really "labour". People labour cutting sugar cane, or mining: the purpose of this labour is to earn enough money to subsist, or to feed processes that require constant attention. It does nothing to create something new which will outlast the process. "Action" is specifically political - the negotiated engagement between human beings in the process of coordinating the navigation of the world.

In academia, much activity used to be "work" and "action" but has become "labour" - particularly with technology. Working with technology platforms, for example, seems to have become labour rather than work. Yes, using platforms to assemble resources for others fits Arendt's definition of work, but these administrative processes are becoming increasingly ephemeral. I have observed in my own university how meetings become dominated by discussions on what technologies to use for what, or what protocols to follow to achieve certain goals, with ever changing criteria demanding continual adaptation. This is all labour - activities for the subsistence of the operation. Very little time in such meetings is devoted to "what matters", which would be partly "action" in Arendt's sense, and work in the sense that it might produce something durable and new. Even deciding on and assessing "learning outcomes" becomes ephemeral labour, not work. Worst of all, we may have turned the intellectual journey of study itself into labour rather than work.

What technology and the complexity of modern life has appeared to do to us is to move the boundaries of subsistence. Today in order to subsist, it is necessary to perform often complex, and psychologically draining activities whose purpose is merely to feed the complex system that continually demands more input. David Graeber put a nice name to much of this activity as "imaginative labour" - the labour of guessing the requirements of those for whom we work.

It is important to think about why this has happened, since some of these psychologically draining tasks we might be tempted to allocate to AI in the future. Why should there be a desire to turn human work into labour? The issue of contingency - both in work and action - is helpful to understand this.

In Arendt's conception of "action" there is greater contingency than labour: this is partly because in political action, much is necessarily undecided. Organisations, however, are generally averse to dealing with contingency in an increasingly uncertain world. Dan Davies's excellent new book "The Unaccountability Machine" is basically a description of how organisations have designed-out the need to deal with contingency, instead seeking to attenuate-out the complexity of the environment behind anonymous systems. As long as we seek to attenuate the variety of the world, we will continue to turn work into labour.

The solution to this problem has always been to amplify contingency. It is only by amplifying contingency that the human processes of conversation and coordination where Arendtian "action" can be properly situated. So could AI amplify contingency?

The activities of work, labour and action are the result of a selection mechanism. We choose the actions of work just as we choose the actions of labour. We need to understand how the selection mechanism is constructed. The difference between them is the difference in the constraint that is operative, and the degree to which there is an increase in the number of options that are available for selection. When the number of options available for selection increases, then we are looking at work rather than labour. Where the options available for selection remains the same or even decreases, then we are looking at labour.

Contingency is the key to increasing the options for acting. It is only with uncertainty that the conversational mechanisms are introduced which steer selection processes to engage with one another and acquire new options from each other. This is similar to Leydesdorff’s idea behind the Triple Helix: new options arise through the interaction between the many discarded ideas from different stakeholders. So the correct question as to the possible impact of AI will be whether it can be used to amplify uncertainty.

If AI is used to automate tasks, it will reduce uncertainty. Increasingly, discussions will focus on the function of AI, and options will reduce to the technical details of one AI or another. However, if we see that the function of a whole organisation - a business, a university, a government - is to make selections of action, then the scientific question we can ask is "how does it construct its selection mechanism?".

AI is really a scientific instrument that can help us to answer this question and gain deeper insight into our organisations. To use it correctly is the work of science that will provide new adaptive capacity to deal with the future. To use it badly will turn what little work still exists to labour and shift the boundary of subsistence even further to encompass the gamut of human action.