Life on Venus

... Would be hot!

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

Paranoia

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

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

Unfolding and Enfolding

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

Music Improvisation and Language

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

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

 

Back to work...

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

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

Cotswolds to Oxford

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

Cotswolds

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

Has anyone seen my mojo?

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

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

Stressed Squirrels

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

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

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

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

The Weird Case of Space Lettuce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robot Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

A parsimonious blog post

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

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

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

Only a feeling.

I could be more parsimonious and simple. 

But this isn't the place. 

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

Health and Disease

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

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

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

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

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

Scent

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

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

Being back

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

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

Home straight

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

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

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

Being one with multi-dimensionality

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

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

Caring in 3D

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

Zhuhai curiosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuanced Global Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

China

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

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

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

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

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

Brain Stuff and Heart Stuff

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

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

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

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

Asymmetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beautiful things

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

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