Will someone please remind me what psychiatrists are for? At one time I thought I knew the answer to this question but a lot of things have become less clear, since I stopped taking the blue pills.
My first psychiatrist impressed me hugely by summarising my life story in short, declarative sentences (about five of them) after a 45 minute consultation. Then, when I'd internalised the implications of this intellectual tour-de-force, I sank deeper into depression. I decided that suicide was the only sensible option and got as far as a wine bar, into which I descended to drink my last bottle of wine. Three bottles of wine later, I had lost the will to die and I went sheepishly home, never to return to work.
Psychiatrist number two operates out of the Priory, a loony bin for the well-insured. She changed my drugs, doubled the doses occasionally and advised me to find a therapist.
Shrink number three is an addiction specialist and has so far succeeded in trampling underfoot the miniscule sense of self worth that had survived the last few years of misery.
Presumably most psychiatrists embark on their careers with a sense of mission. Or perhaps I am being too generous. I really wonder, having suffered at the hands of the profession, whether its practitioners ever ask themselves what they are trying to achieve. Are they trying to minimize their patients' suffering? Are they trying to maximize their happiness? Are they trying to find a socially acceptable way of reintroducing mentally ill people to general society? Are they simply going to work and trying to get through the day without irretrievably fucking up their careers?
The three that I've been exposed to haven't, so far as I can tell, asked themselves this question. No. 1 was more interested in discussing his bond portfolio than my mental health. No.2's over-riding goal was to improve the IRR of The Priory's owner, my employer, RBS. No.3 is messianic in his conviction that substance abuse is the source of all evil, in which respect he is mistaken.
Over the years since I received the cathartic but fateful diagnosis of depression I have encountered dozens of general practitioners, psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists, only one of whom I admire. Only this one person can be said to have done me any good. I cannot help but wonder whether, if the profession of psychiatry were abolished, the quota of good in the world would increase or diminish.
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Perspectives
One of the benefits of having scientific, as opposed to religious heroes is that you are free to disagree, vehemently, with some or most of what your hero believes. Richard Feynman, for instance, was notoriously contemptuous of philosophy. 'Philosophy of Science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.' Is one of the kinder ways he found to express this loathing. But I think he underestimated the need that ordinary scientists have to be told (by philosophers) what they meant when they said... If you think that believers have the same freedom with respect to their heroes, ask yourself when you last heard a priest say 'Yeah, I admire God but I think he's a bit unsound on buggery.' Religious critics of God's alleged views on buggery are reduced to arguing that God did not in fact claim that buggery's just reward is an appointment with the state executioner (Leviticus 20:13).
So the fact that David Deutsch doesn't just look like he ought to be a genius but is in fact a genius does not in the least deter me from thinking he's got a dodgy sense of perspective. Promoting his book The Beginning of Infinity, which I recommend, he performs an entertaining stunt in this lecture, illustrating what it is like to occupy a 'typical' place in the universe. It is of course dark there and cold. Apparently photons are so rarefied out there that a supernova in the nearest galaxy wouldn't register on your retina if you were staring right at it when the light reached you. He concludes that, therefore, living in a brightly lit, warm part of the universe is pretty special. In a couple of skips and a jump he's gone from there to the claim that there are no limits to (suitably augmented) human understanding and that we are at the very beginning of a journey of intellectual discovery that will transform our descendants into gods. David Deutsch is, I think it fair to say, an optimist.
Deutsch's mistake is surely the same as that made by the lottery winner who thinks to himself, 'well fuck me, I'm a millionaire, when yesterday I was a simple toilet cleaner. Makes you think. There must be someone up there looking out for me.' Come off it, David. The odds imply that someone had to win the lottery. That doesn't mean there's anything special about the winner. The physical constants that pertain in our universe imply that most of it is devoid of photons and heat but also that a few bright spots must exist, for a while. Of course David Deutsch exists in one of those bright spots. To be fair, Deutsch is not helping himself to the claim that he was put here, but he is certainly reading much more into the fact of his existence than that mundane event warrants. Douglas Adams' vainglorious puddle would find itself in an unusual alliance with Deutsch and the Pope.
I think that many of the mistakes that our species has made stem from failures of our sense of perspective. For various reasons, I have spent a lot of time recently driving up and down the M5 motorway, which runs roughly north-south through southern England. There are several sections of this road that are, so the signs say, being 'upgraded to managed motorways'. For present purposes it implies that the speed limit in these zones is 50mph and new average speed cameras enforce rigid compliance. As a result of this triumph of technology over liberty, I have noticed that the difference between 49mph and 51mph is really obvious. To the extent that I become impatient with the driver of a car ahead of me in the same lane traveling 1mph slower than the limit. I presume that the reason for this sensitivity is that, despite the fact that until a couple of hundred or so years ago, no human had traveled at these speeds, the mechanisms that enable us to gauge our velocity when walking or running still function at the velocities prevailing on a typical British motorway. Step into an aeroplane, however, and once you are at cruising altitude all sense of speed is lost. Of course you know that you are moving at 500mph but, gazing down at the land below, it just doesn't feel that way.
Or what about the alleged wisdom of 'ancient' civilisations? Whenever some cretin tells me that a certain 'ancient' remedy is a sovereign cure for the common cold I want to tie the fucker down and saw his leg off using ancient surgical techniques. Recorded history extends, at the very most, three millennia into our past. Homo sapiens is about 200, 000 years old (that is, the lineage that led to all extant human beings diverged from other hominids about that long ago). In other words, the most ancient 'wisdom' to which we have access is about 1.5% as old as our species, which is in turn a neophyte on the global biodiversity stage. In comparison with the span if the history of life on earth, our most ancient texts are insignificantly earlier than contemporary texts.
Well, OK, but we are still at the summit of the immense mountain that evolution has scaled to produce us, aren't we? This is the most pernicious of all human conceits. Evolution didn't have us 'in mind' on its long, blind journey from our ancestors. We are precisely - no more and no less - as 'evolved' as every other extant organism on earth. We occupy a position at the terminus of one of millions of spokes on the wheel of life. The bacteria in her small intestine can trace their ancestry exactly as far back as the Queen of England, to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).
One of the things I'm trying to learn about at the moment is how my conspecifics have thought about ethics during our very recent (say 3,000 year) history. When you approach the literature on this subject from a more-or-less random direction, as I have done, you quickly realise that there are two camps. According to one camp, humans of all societies are all the same, ethically speaking. Just as you can take a day-old baby from anywhere on earth, place it in a family anywhere else on earth and watch it acquire effortlessly the language of its adoptive parents, this camp says, the same baby will effortlessly acquire the moral mores of the culture in which it is raised. This is because humans posess a 'moral grammar' analogous with the universal grammar that all humans share (see here). What matters, therefore, is how we use the knowledge that our values are as much the product of natural selection as the shape of our noses. The other camp says no, no, no, morality is a cultural construct. Biology has nothing to do with it. Criticism of cannibalism or Nazism is therefore just another form of imperialism and should not be taken seriously.
This second claim makes me so cross that I want to stamp my feet, preferably repeatedly on the heads of the morons who adhere to this view. I defy you to look at the picture above and understand it and remain proud of your status as a human being. We humans are, to all intents and purposes, identical with respect to our values. The difference between Camus and a cannibal is trivial in comparison with the difference between both of them and a chimpanzee. Perspective. It's all about perspective.
So the fact that David Deutsch doesn't just look like he ought to be a genius but is in fact a genius does not in the least deter me from thinking he's got a dodgy sense of perspective. Promoting his book The Beginning of Infinity, which I recommend, he performs an entertaining stunt in this lecture, illustrating what it is like to occupy a 'typical' place in the universe. It is of course dark there and cold. Apparently photons are so rarefied out there that a supernova in the nearest galaxy wouldn't register on your retina if you were staring right at it when the light reached you. He concludes that, therefore, living in a brightly lit, warm part of the universe is pretty special. In a couple of skips and a jump he's gone from there to the claim that there are no limits to (suitably augmented) human understanding and that we are at the very beginning of a journey of intellectual discovery that will transform our descendants into gods. David Deutsch is, I think it fair to say, an optimist.
Deutsch's mistake is surely the same as that made by the lottery winner who thinks to himself, 'well fuck me, I'm a millionaire, when yesterday I was a simple toilet cleaner. Makes you think. There must be someone up there looking out for me.' Come off it, David. The odds imply that someone had to win the lottery. That doesn't mean there's anything special about the winner. The physical constants that pertain in our universe imply that most of it is devoid of photons and heat but also that a few bright spots must exist, for a while. Of course David Deutsch exists in one of those bright spots. To be fair, Deutsch is not helping himself to the claim that he was put here, but he is certainly reading much more into the fact of his existence than that mundane event warrants. Douglas Adams' vainglorious puddle would find itself in an unusual alliance with Deutsch and the Pope.
I think that many of the mistakes that our species has made stem from failures of our sense of perspective. For various reasons, I have spent a lot of time recently driving up and down the M5 motorway, which runs roughly north-south through southern England. There are several sections of this road that are, so the signs say, being 'upgraded to managed motorways'. For present purposes it implies that the speed limit in these zones is 50mph and new average speed cameras enforce rigid compliance. As a result of this triumph of technology over liberty, I have noticed that the difference between 49mph and 51mph is really obvious. To the extent that I become impatient with the driver of a car ahead of me in the same lane traveling 1mph slower than the limit. I presume that the reason for this sensitivity is that, despite the fact that until a couple of hundred or so years ago, no human had traveled at these speeds, the mechanisms that enable us to gauge our velocity when walking or running still function at the velocities prevailing on a typical British motorway. Step into an aeroplane, however, and once you are at cruising altitude all sense of speed is lost. Of course you know that you are moving at 500mph but, gazing down at the land below, it just doesn't feel that way.
Or what about the alleged wisdom of 'ancient' civilisations? Whenever some cretin tells me that a certain 'ancient' remedy is a sovereign cure for the common cold I want to tie the fucker down and saw his leg off using ancient surgical techniques. Recorded history extends, at the very most, three millennia into our past. Homo sapiens is about 200, 000 years old (that is, the lineage that led to all extant human beings diverged from other hominids about that long ago). In other words, the most ancient 'wisdom' to which we have access is about 1.5% as old as our species, which is in turn a neophyte on the global biodiversity stage. In comparison with the span if the history of life on earth, our most ancient texts are insignificantly earlier than contemporary texts.
Well, OK, but we are still at the summit of the immense mountain that evolution has scaled to produce us, aren't we? This is the most pernicious of all human conceits. Evolution didn't have us 'in mind' on its long, blind journey from our ancestors. We are precisely - no more and no less - as 'evolved' as every other extant organism on earth. We occupy a position at the terminus of one of millions of spokes on the wheel of life. The bacteria in her small intestine can trace their ancestry exactly as far back as the Queen of England, to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).
 |
| 'You are here' at about 10.30 |
One of the things I'm trying to learn about at the moment is how my conspecifics have thought about ethics during our very recent (say 3,000 year) history. When you approach the literature on this subject from a more-or-less random direction, as I have done, you quickly realise that there are two camps. According to one camp, humans of all societies are all the same, ethically speaking. Just as you can take a day-old baby from anywhere on earth, place it in a family anywhere else on earth and watch it acquire effortlessly the language of its adoptive parents, this camp says, the same baby will effortlessly acquire the moral mores of the culture in which it is raised. This is because humans posess a 'moral grammar' analogous with the universal grammar that all humans share (see here). What matters, therefore, is how we use the knowledge that our values are as much the product of natural selection as the shape of our noses. The other camp says no, no, no, morality is a cultural construct. Biology has nothing to do with it. Criticism of cannibalism or Nazism is therefore just another form of imperialism and should not be taken seriously.
This second claim makes me so cross that I want to stamp my feet, preferably repeatedly on the heads of the morons who adhere to this view. I defy you to look at the picture above and understand it and remain proud of your status as a human being. We humans are, to all intents and purposes, identical with respect to our values. The difference between Camus and a cannibal is trivial in comparison with the difference between both of them and a chimpanzee. Perspective. It's all about perspective.
Monday, 12 March 2012
Perspective
The spacecraft Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in the early 1970s and are drifting silently away from earth to this day. On the side of each probe is a small gold-anodised, aluminium plaque, six inches by nine depicting representations of the species - Homo sapiens - that built
and launched them. The wonderful, whimsical idea, conceived by Carl Sagan, was that an alien
intelligence discovering the probe in the far future could decipher the
inscriptions and learn something of what we had been and hoped to become.
What do you say to a hypothetical alien species using no more than 52 square inches of aluminium plate and how do you express yourself? A great question surely for A-level students
of critical thinking. NASA's answer was to use the language of
mathematics, which seems to be universal, and to provide a sort of
Rosetta Stone in the form of depictions of the hydrogen atom (hydrogen
is the commonest element in the universe) and a pulsar map. It also included
drawings of a man and a woman, naked, provoking the utterly delicious criticism that NASA was using taxpayers' dollars to 'send smut to the stars' (note the censorship of the woman's genitalia).
Voyager I, launched in 1977 - later than the Pioneer craft - is further from earth than any other human artefact. It is currently approaching interstellar space, 120 times further from earth than earth is from the sun (that's 180, 000, 000, 000 kilometers or 4.28 kilometers for every dollar of net worth of Carlos Slim Helu, the richest man in the Solar System), and in 2014 will cross the heliopause, the theoretical boundary where the solar wind is balanced by whispers from elsewhere in the galaxy. Building on the Pioneer plaque, NASA included in each Voyager spaceship a disc encoding a few images of typical earth scenes (e.g. multicultural groups of well-fed children playing happily together) and a diverse selection of music from recent earth history. There's a lovely story (also attributed to Sagan) told about the late Douglas Adams. When he heard that a snatch of Bach's music had been considered for inclusion (and rejected) he said something like: 'don't you think that would have been showing off?'
The story may be apocryphal. It doesn't matter. It's trademark Douglas Adams in that it puts an explosive bullet through the center of parochialism's underdeveloped frontal lobes. The very finest Adams riff was a spontaneously delivered demolition of the hard anthropic principle, the vainest and most absurd of all our species's many parochial fantasies.
'... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'
Douglas Adams is a hero of mine because he made me simultaneously acutely aware of my own insignificance and glad to be a relatively well-educated human being. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think it is fair to say, provides a sounder assessment of our species' importance ('mostly harmless') than all the creation stories of all our holy books combined. There's no point in rehearsing here the statistics that demonstrate our ephemerality (Sagan's 'Cosmos' does an unimpeachable job on this score but Monty Python makes the same point just as well, with added humour here).
Imagine you're a passenger on Voyager I, gazing back at Earth which is long-since irresolvable by your human eyes. Even the Sun is just a bright speck against the glorious galactic skyscape, like Venus viewed at dawn from the Atacama Desert back home. You've subscribed to a news digest service from Earth, just to keep in touch, and today's edition (a few hours out of date, for reasons that Einstein could probably have explained) contains an op-ed piece about this guy Rorty, who says that science and technology are just 'narratives', indistinguishable from other narratives about gods that make the sun rise each morning or devils who whisk away the souls of unbaptised children to an eternity of suffering in a hell beyond human imagining. Your eyebrows, frostbitten in the chill of interstellar space, rise a fraction of an inch (or should that be millimeter? it doesn't seem to matter out here) and you think 'but here I am, a few billion miles from home, thanks to the narrative that put me on top of a ten minute controlled explosion and launched me into space on a trajectory that took me via four gas giants and a few big rocks to this slightly lonely and very dark place. Could Huitzilopochtli really have brought me all this way? Or Jesus? He had some serious powers. Surely the Faculty of Social Studies at the Sorbonne could have designed a semiotic hermeneutics engine that could have propelled me at least this far on the crest of an immense wave of fart gas?
Sagan understood perfectly that the chances of an alien intelligence - if such exist - intercepting one of the Pioneer or Voyager probes is vanishingly small and that the messages were intended for human not alien audiences. Even if near-Earth interstellar space were littered with curious aliens, which it ain't, the chances of one of them noticing our toy rockets are miniscule. But let's just say that, in this, or a virtually identical parallel universe the unthinkable happened and the little green men happened upon Voyager I and decided to haul it into the cargo bay. What are the chances they'd be able to decipher and 'listen' to the recordings? What are the chances they'd appreciate Beethoven and Chuck Berry, both of whom made it onto the recordings, unlike Bach?
In the forgettable Monty Python movie 'Erik the Viking', Erik and his crew arrive at Hy-Brasil and are astonished to find it occupied by welcoming but musically incompetent people. This is funny because such a place could never exist, at least not on Earth. Why not? Because musicality is universally present in normal humans and hospitality to strangers is, if not universally absent, certainly not conspicuous by its presence in the tales and legends that have filtered down to us from prehistory.
Human musicality is a genuine puzzle for evolutionary biologists. New born human babies have it; almost all adults (even those, like me, with a tin ear) have it; other primates appear not to; some birds might. Steven Pinker described music as 'auditory cheesecake', a super-stimulus that tickles pleasure centers that evolved for other reasons. He came in for a lot of criticism from people with a fine grasp of music but limited appreciation of the gaping holes in their own education (see here)1. The Dutch psychologist Henkjan Honing is also sceptical of Pinker's theory and has done some brilliant and fascinating research, which he summarises here, 16 minutes of unadulterated pleasure.
Music of course has an underlying mathematical structure. Sounds lacking rhythm are noise. An octave is the interval between two musical pitches that harmonise and it so happens that the ratio between the frequencies of corresponding pitches in successive octaves is 2:1. This pattern was discovered independently by many musical traditions long before the mathematical relationships were quantified. But the mathematics of music runs much deeper than this. In this article for example, Dmitri Tymoczko is quoted as claiming that 'When you are sitting at a piano, you are interacting with a very complicated geometry...In fact, composers in the early nineteenth century were already implicitly exploring such geometries through music that could not have been understood using the mathematics of the time...Just as a mountaineer will find that only a small number of all the possible routes between two points are actually negotiable, so musicians will have discovered empirically that their options are limited by the underlying shapes and structures of musical possibilities.'
The narrator of Jorge Luis Borges' novel The Library of Babel is a librarian in a vast hive of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each lined with bookshelves packed with books, each 410 pages long. The books appear to be randomly arranged on the shelves but the librarians have inferred that the library contains every permutation of a limited set of symbols, spaces and punctuation marks. Of course, almost all the books are gibberish or religious tracts but somewhere in the library there must exist improved versions of Shakespeare's plays, perfect predictions of the future and succinct, lucid explanations of true scientific theories not yet discovered. There are vastly many of these literary gems randomly scattered through the library but, because they represent a vanishingly small proportion of all the books, they cannot in practice be located. The librarians, unsurprisingly, go nuts.
There is a musical equivalent of the Library of Babel, a library containing all possible musical scores, of a certain length written with a small, finite number of symbols representing a restricted number of octaves, each divided into an arbitrary number of pitches, say twelve. Most of these scores, when played would be noise. A handful, however, would render Bach's sonatas banal by comparison. Unlike Borges' library, the 'musical' as opposed to noisy scores would run together like veins of ore in a lump of conglomerate. This is not just to say that these rivulets of music are the only scores in the library that could in principle be appreciated but that everything else isn't music, it's noise.
I do not begin to understand either the music or the mathematics underlying Tymoczko's analysis - so feel free to shoot me down - but it suggests the fascinating possibility that music might be a property of nature that humans in the course of our evolutionary history have not so much invented as discovered. Just as flying machines built by other civilisations on planets with gaseous atmospheres will operate using the same laws of aerodynamics that permit heavier-than-air flight on Earth, it is conceivable that intelligent denizens of another reasonably similar world (who will certainly have sense organs capable of interpreting sound waves) might have discovered some of the same pathways through the 'complicated geometry' of musical space. In other words, it is vanishingly improbable but just conceivable, that Chuck Berry could have another hit with 'Johnny B. Goode' on a different planet in another solar system in the far, far future. How cool is that?
1. As an aside, the following sentences from a review of The Music Instinct by Philip Ball, are as fine an example as you could wish for of complete gibberish I've read outside a holy book: 'We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves.' This half-wit wants so badly that music be mysterious, he is prepared to bury all evidence to the contrary, while his audience watches him dig his own intellectual grave.
Voyager I, launched in 1977 - later than the Pioneer craft - is further from earth than any other human artefact. It is currently approaching interstellar space, 120 times further from earth than earth is from the sun (that's 180, 000, 000, 000 kilometers or 4.28 kilometers for every dollar of net worth of Carlos Slim Helu, the richest man in the Solar System), and in 2014 will cross the heliopause, the theoretical boundary where the solar wind is balanced by whispers from elsewhere in the galaxy. Building on the Pioneer plaque, NASA included in each Voyager spaceship a disc encoding a few images of typical earth scenes (e.g. multicultural groups of well-fed children playing happily together) and a diverse selection of music from recent earth history. There's a lovely story (also attributed to Sagan) told about the late Douglas Adams. When he heard that a snatch of Bach's music had been considered for inclusion (and rejected) he said something like: 'don't you think that would have been showing off?'
The story may be apocryphal. It doesn't matter. It's trademark Douglas Adams in that it puts an explosive bullet through the center of parochialism's underdeveloped frontal lobes. The very finest Adams riff was a spontaneously delivered demolition of the hard anthropic principle, the vainest and most absurd of all our species's many parochial fantasies.
'... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'
Douglas Adams is a hero of mine because he made me simultaneously acutely aware of my own insignificance and glad to be a relatively well-educated human being. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think it is fair to say, provides a sounder assessment of our species' importance ('mostly harmless') than all the creation stories of all our holy books combined. There's no point in rehearsing here the statistics that demonstrate our ephemerality (Sagan's 'Cosmos' does an unimpeachable job on this score but Monty Python makes the same point just as well, with added humour here).
Imagine you're a passenger on Voyager I, gazing back at Earth which is long-since irresolvable by your human eyes. Even the Sun is just a bright speck against the glorious galactic skyscape, like Venus viewed at dawn from the Atacama Desert back home. You've subscribed to a news digest service from Earth, just to keep in touch, and today's edition (a few hours out of date, for reasons that Einstein could probably have explained) contains an op-ed piece about this guy Rorty, who says that science and technology are just 'narratives', indistinguishable from other narratives about gods that make the sun rise each morning or devils who whisk away the souls of unbaptised children to an eternity of suffering in a hell beyond human imagining. Your eyebrows, frostbitten in the chill of interstellar space, rise a fraction of an inch (or should that be millimeter? it doesn't seem to matter out here) and you think 'but here I am, a few billion miles from home, thanks to the narrative that put me on top of a ten minute controlled explosion and launched me into space on a trajectory that took me via four gas giants and a few big rocks to this slightly lonely and very dark place. Could Huitzilopochtli really have brought me all this way? Or Jesus? He had some serious powers. Surely the Faculty of Social Studies at the Sorbonne could have designed a semiotic hermeneutics engine that could have propelled me at least this far on the crest of an immense wave of fart gas?
Sagan understood perfectly that the chances of an alien intelligence - if such exist - intercepting one of the Pioneer or Voyager probes is vanishingly small and that the messages were intended for human not alien audiences. Even if near-Earth interstellar space were littered with curious aliens, which it ain't, the chances of one of them noticing our toy rockets are miniscule. But let's just say that, in this, or a virtually identical parallel universe the unthinkable happened and the little green men happened upon Voyager I and decided to haul it into the cargo bay. What are the chances they'd be able to decipher and 'listen' to the recordings? What are the chances they'd appreciate Beethoven and Chuck Berry, both of whom made it onto the recordings, unlike Bach?
In the forgettable Monty Python movie 'Erik the Viking', Erik and his crew arrive at Hy-Brasil and are astonished to find it occupied by welcoming but musically incompetent people. This is funny because such a place could never exist, at least not on Earth. Why not? Because musicality is universally present in normal humans and hospitality to strangers is, if not universally absent, certainly not conspicuous by its presence in the tales and legends that have filtered down to us from prehistory.
Human musicality is a genuine puzzle for evolutionary biologists. New born human babies have it; almost all adults (even those, like me, with a tin ear) have it; other primates appear not to; some birds might. Steven Pinker described music as 'auditory cheesecake', a super-stimulus that tickles pleasure centers that evolved for other reasons. He came in for a lot of criticism from people with a fine grasp of music but limited appreciation of the gaping holes in their own education (see here)1. The Dutch psychologist Henkjan Honing is also sceptical of Pinker's theory and has done some brilliant and fascinating research, which he summarises here, 16 minutes of unadulterated pleasure.
Music of course has an underlying mathematical structure. Sounds lacking rhythm are noise. An octave is the interval between two musical pitches that harmonise and it so happens that the ratio between the frequencies of corresponding pitches in successive octaves is 2:1. This pattern was discovered independently by many musical traditions long before the mathematical relationships were quantified. But the mathematics of music runs much deeper than this. In this article for example, Dmitri Tymoczko is quoted as claiming that 'When you are sitting at a piano, you are interacting with a very complicated geometry...In fact, composers in the early nineteenth century were already implicitly exploring such geometries through music that could not have been understood using the mathematics of the time...Just as a mountaineer will find that only a small number of all the possible routes between two points are actually negotiable, so musicians will have discovered empirically that their options are limited by the underlying shapes and structures of musical possibilities.'
The narrator of Jorge Luis Borges' novel The Library of Babel is a librarian in a vast hive of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each lined with bookshelves packed with books, each 410 pages long. The books appear to be randomly arranged on the shelves but the librarians have inferred that the library contains every permutation of a limited set of symbols, spaces and punctuation marks. Of course, almost all the books are gibberish or religious tracts but somewhere in the library there must exist improved versions of Shakespeare's plays, perfect predictions of the future and succinct, lucid explanations of true scientific theories not yet discovered. There are vastly many of these literary gems randomly scattered through the library but, because they represent a vanishingly small proportion of all the books, they cannot in practice be located. The librarians, unsurprisingly, go nuts.
There is a musical equivalent of the Library of Babel, a library containing all possible musical scores, of a certain length written with a small, finite number of symbols representing a restricted number of octaves, each divided into an arbitrary number of pitches, say twelve. Most of these scores, when played would be noise. A handful, however, would render Bach's sonatas banal by comparison. Unlike Borges' library, the 'musical' as opposed to noisy scores would run together like veins of ore in a lump of conglomerate. This is not just to say that these rivulets of music are the only scores in the library that could in principle be appreciated but that everything else isn't music, it's noise.
I do not begin to understand either the music or the mathematics underlying Tymoczko's analysis - so feel free to shoot me down - but it suggests the fascinating possibility that music might be a property of nature that humans in the course of our evolutionary history have not so much invented as discovered. Just as flying machines built by other civilisations on planets with gaseous atmospheres will operate using the same laws of aerodynamics that permit heavier-than-air flight on Earth, it is conceivable that intelligent denizens of another reasonably similar world (who will certainly have sense organs capable of interpreting sound waves) might have discovered some of the same pathways through the 'complicated geometry' of musical space. In other words, it is vanishingly improbable but just conceivable, that Chuck Berry could have another hit with 'Johnny B. Goode' on a different planet in another solar system in the far, far future. How cool is that?
1. As an aside, the following sentences from a review of The Music Instinct by Philip Ball, are as fine an example as you could wish for of complete gibberish I've read outside a holy book: 'We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves.' This half-wit wants so badly that music be mysterious, he is prepared to bury all evidence to the contrary, while his audience watches him dig his own intellectual grave.
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Re-Kant-ation
In a previous post I described 'An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics' by Scott James as 'dismal'. This assessment was unfair and I take it back. In fact, on a second reading, I view the book as a concise, impartial exposition of the state of the art in ethics thinking. I wish I were capable of expressing myself with James's clarity. I ought to have directed my ire not at the book's author but at his intended audience - students of philosophy. To the extent that philosophy is an enterprise concerned with clarifying the ideas being generated on the disputed frontiers of human understanding - perhaps the kindest definition one can offer - it is incumbent upon practitioners to familiarize themselves with the most recent maps. Reading James's book, one receives the impression that most students of ethics are working from charts marked 'here be dragons' at the edge of the known world.
Contrary to my earlier rash assertion that two thirds of the book is devoted to convincing readers that evolution happened, only the first two chapters - 47 pages - address this subject directly. Come on guys! Even Darwin's contemporaries accepted the fact of evolution; all that he did was to supply the mechanism, natural selection. Biologists have been exploring the implications of his astonishing insight for more than 150 years and have made quite a lot of progress. For example, the evolution of altruism has been studied intensively since Darwin's time and, in the last few decades, the problem that he feared represented a 'fatal flaw' in his theory has been largely resolved. Whenever Richard Dawkins or another prominent atheist writes a newspaper article, you can guarantee that some pathetic parish priest will write a letter to the editor asserting that evolution can't explain charity, self-sacrifice or love. This claim isn't just fatuous, it's pig-ignorant. I cannot comprehend how any literate human being can have avoided noticing that, not only can natural selection explain such phenomena, it is the only theory that explains all of them without resort to special pleading.
The problem that caused Darwin the most angst was existence of eusocial insects, for example honeybees or ants, in which worker castes are sterile and work for the benefit of the queen and her offspring, their sisters and brothers. How, he wondered, could a behaviour that required some individuals to eschew the ability to reproduce ever evolve? The manner in which this problem has been studied and resolved is an object lesson in how to approach an intellectual puzzle, one that all theologians and many philosophers would do well to heed. As an undergraduate, I was taught that the problem had been solved by William Hamilton, who argued that a quirk of hymenopteran genetics (female honeybees arise from fertilised eggs and therefore have two sets of chromosomes, whereas male bees derive from unfertilised eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes) implies that female bees are more closely related on average to their sisters (by 3/4) than they would be to their children (by 1/2), implying that their genes would be better served (i.e. copied more often) if sisters worked for the benefit of their female siblings than if they worked for their children. This insight (the 'haplodiploid hypothesis') was regarded as one of the finest intellectual achievements of Darwinian thinking. Amusingly enough, it turns out that Hamilton was wrong. For one thing, he neglected to take account of the fact that female workers work not just for sisters but for brothers (to whom they are related by 1/4) too, and for another he was not aware of the many social animals with conventional genetics that have subsequently been discovered. Here is E.O. Wilson, the founding figure of sociobiology, writing recently on the demise of the haplodiploid hypothesis.
'Hamilton's perception, later called the haplodiploid hypothesis, and intensively promoted (not least by myself, while synthesizing the new discipline of sociobiology in the 1970s...), became firmly entrenched as an explanatory idea in studies of the evolution of animal colonies...It turns out, however, that this is wrong. Hamilton made three mistakes, which have led to the vitiation of his main thesis concerning altruism and the origin of sociality...these developments in sociobiology are in full progress, and surprises no doubt lie ahead. The interpretation I have presented here [that a type of group selection led to the evolution of eusocial insects] may itself in time be swept aside.'
The main point that I wish to make is that explaining altruism depends upon an extremely subtle understanding of the consequences of natural selection, operating within the rules imposed by genetics. A subsidiary point is that, faced with compelling evidence that a brilliant, beautiful theory is unfortunately false, Wilson does what any good scientist would do and ditches the theory. When was the last time you witnessed such humility in the teeth of evidence in a churchman?
But back to 'evolutionary ethics'. Hamilton's concept of 'inclusive fitness' (roughly the idea that genes that favour their own replication, whether the copies exist in their own host or others, will spread) does explain altruism towards kin. Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism does explain atruism towards non-kin. The old philosophical chestnut 'is an act altruistic if ultimately it is motivated by selfish ends?' is shown by these theories to be not just the wrong question but a meaningless question. Genes that confer on their bearers the propensity to behave in a way that increases the gene's fitness will prosper and vice versa. All acts are ultimately 'motivated' by selfish ends, in the sense that selfless actors (i.e. genes) die out. There are numerous subtle consequences of this simple fact: for example, sibling rivalry; infanticide and conflict between paternally and maternally inherited genes, the last of which may explain certain psychological diseases in the human animal. But the main point, once again, is that there is simply no useful way in which to approach the study of altruism or its reflection, ethics, except in the light of evolution.
We know that we share a common ancestor with all extant life on earth. We know that we share with our closest extant relatives a moral mind. We know that more distant relatives behave in ways that indicate they possess a moral sense, albeit one we don't recognise as a close cousin (female mice, for instance, will be perfect parents to their offspring when times are good but will kill and eat them without a second thought when their own survival is called into question). We know, therefore, that our moral sense evolved. We have known all this for an awfully long time but the news doesn't seem to have reached the people who's mission is to clarify the way we interpret these findings.
Nothing in the preceding several paragraphs is controversial. Everyone familiar with the evidence and not ideologically committed to some theory-from-revelation agrees that this is the way the world works. I'm not trying to bully you into accepting as true something you don't understand. I'm simply pointing out that, if you decline to acquaint yourself with the relevant evidence from natural history, your ethical opinions are precisely worthless. Immanuel Kant may very well, for example, have possessed the most fabulous mind ever to have enquired into the origins of virtue but the Categorical Imperative is nevertheless more interesting to historians than ethicists. Kant didn't know where our ethical sense comes from (he assumed, incorrectly, that it comes from God), so his fabulous mind could never achieve traction on the problem of what one ought to do. It is, in my view, a delightful comment on the enlightening power of science that the comedian Tim Minchin (see here) comes closer to the truth than Kant when he sings 'if you cover for another mother fucker who's a kiddy-fucker, fuck you, you're no better than the mother-fucking rapist...if you look into your mother-fucking heart and tell me true if this mother-fucking stupid song offended you...are just as morally misguided as that mother-fucking, power hungry, self-aggrandizing bigot in a stupid fucking hat'.
Contrary to my earlier rash assertion that two thirds of the book is devoted to convincing readers that evolution happened, only the first two chapters - 47 pages - address this subject directly. Come on guys! Even Darwin's contemporaries accepted the fact of evolution; all that he did was to supply the mechanism, natural selection. Biologists have been exploring the implications of his astonishing insight for more than 150 years and have made quite a lot of progress. For example, the evolution of altruism has been studied intensively since Darwin's time and, in the last few decades, the problem that he feared represented a 'fatal flaw' in his theory has been largely resolved. Whenever Richard Dawkins or another prominent atheist writes a newspaper article, you can guarantee that some pathetic parish priest will write a letter to the editor asserting that evolution can't explain charity, self-sacrifice or love. This claim isn't just fatuous, it's pig-ignorant. I cannot comprehend how any literate human being can have avoided noticing that, not only can natural selection explain such phenomena, it is the only theory that explains all of them without resort to special pleading.
The problem that caused Darwin the most angst was existence of eusocial insects, for example honeybees or ants, in which worker castes are sterile and work for the benefit of the queen and her offspring, their sisters and brothers. How, he wondered, could a behaviour that required some individuals to eschew the ability to reproduce ever evolve? The manner in which this problem has been studied and resolved is an object lesson in how to approach an intellectual puzzle, one that all theologians and many philosophers would do well to heed. As an undergraduate, I was taught that the problem had been solved by William Hamilton, who argued that a quirk of hymenopteran genetics (female honeybees arise from fertilised eggs and therefore have two sets of chromosomes, whereas male bees derive from unfertilised eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes) implies that female bees are more closely related on average to their sisters (by 3/4) than they would be to their children (by 1/2), implying that their genes would be better served (i.e. copied more often) if sisters worked for the benefit of their female siblings than if they worked for their children. This insight (the 'haplodiploid hypothesis') was regarded as one of the finest intellectual achievements of Darwinian thinking. Amusingly enough, it turns out that Hamilton was wrong. For one thing, he neglected to take account of the fact that female workers work not just for sisters but for brothers (to whom they are related by 1/4) too, and for another he was not aware of the many social animals with conventional genetics that have subsequently been discovered. Here is E.O. Wilson, the founding figure of sociobiology, writing recently on the demise of the haplodiploid hypothesis.
'Hamilton's perception, later called the haplodiploid hypothesis, and intensively promoted (not least by myself, while synthesizing the new discipline of sociobiology in the 1970s...), became firmly entrenched as an explanatory idea in studies of the evolution of animal colonies...It turns out, however, that this is wrong. Hamilton made three mistakes, which have led to the vitiation of his main thesis concerning altruism and the origin of sociality...these developments in sociobiology are in full progress, and surprises no doubt lie ahead. The interpretation I have presented here [that a type of group selection led to the evolution of eusocial insects] may itself in time be swept aside.'
The main point that I wish to make is that explaining altruism depends upon an extremely subtle understanding of the consequences of natural selection, operating within the rules imposed by genetics. A subsidiary point is that, faced with compelling evidence that a brilliant, beautiful theory is unfortunately false, Wilson does what any good scientist would do and ditches the theory. When was the last time you witnessed such humility in the teeth of evidence in a churchman?
But back to 'evolutionary ethics'. Hamilton's concept of 'inclusive fitness' (roughly the idea that genes that favour their own replication, whether the copies exist in their own host or others, will spread) does explain altruism towards kin. Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism does explain atruism towards non-kin. The old philosophical chestnut 'is an act altruistic if ultimately it is motivated by selfish ends?' is shown by these theories to be not just the wrong question but a meaningless question. Genes that confer on their bearers the propensity to behave in a way that increases the gene's fitness will prosper and vice versa. All acts are ultimately 'motivated' by selfish ends, in the sense that selfless actors (i.e. genes) die out. There are numerous subtle consequences of this simple fact: for example, sibling rivalry; infanticide and conflict between paternally and maternally inherited genes, the last of which may explain certain psychological diseases in the human animal. But the main point, once again, is that there is simply no useful way in which to approach the study of altruism or its reflection, ethics, except in the light of evolution.
We know that we share a common ancestor with all extant life on earth. We know that we share with our closest extant relatives a moral mind. We know that more distant relatives behave in ways that indicate they possess a moral sense, albeit one we don't recognise as a close cousin (female mice, for instance, will be perfect parents to their offspring when times are good but will kill and eat them without a second thought when their own survival is called into question). We know, therefore, that our moral sense evolved. We have known all this for an awfully long time but the news doesn't seem to have reached the people who's mission is to clarify the way we interpret these findings.
Nothing in the preceding several paragraphs is controversial. Everyone familiar with the evidence and not ideologically committed to some theory-from-revelation agrees that this is the way the world works. I'm not trying to bully you into accepting as true something you don't understand. I'm simply pointing out that, if you decline to acquaint yourself with the relevant evidence from natural history, your ethical opinions are precisely worthless. Immanuel Kant may very well, for example, have possessed the most fabulous mind ever to have enquired into the origins of virtue but the Categorical Imperative is nevertheless more interesting to historians than ethicists. Kant didn't know where our ethical sense comes from (he assumed, incorrectly, that it comes from God), so his fabulous mind could never achieve traction on the problem of what one ought to do. It is, in my view, a delightful comment on the enlightening power of science that the comedian Tim Minchin (see here) comes closer to the truth than Kant when he sings 'if you cover for another mother fucker who's a kiddy-fucker, fuck you, you're no better than the mother-fucking rapist...if you look into your mother-fucking heart and tell me true if this mother-fucking stupid song offended you...are just as morally misguided as that mother-fucking, power hungry, self-aggrandizing bigot in a stupid fucking hat'.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Altruism, deceit and ethics
Something nice happened to me at the weekend. No, honestly, it's true!
I lost my wallet and, at the very instant that I slipped a hand into my pocket and discovered the loss, my mobile phone rang. It was a policeman calling to say that some lost property belonging to me had been handed in at Bath police station and would I like to come and collect it? So before my shit-happens-primed brain could scream the words 'identity theft' into the uncaring void, the ball of stress coalescing in my sternum dissipated.
The woman who'd handed in my wallet had left her name and address. I went immediately to a florists' and ordered an extravagant bunch of flowers to be delivered to her on Monday with a message that ended 'give yourself a big hug'. I meant it too. Rarely have I felt so well disposed towards a total stranger and never pre-coitus. I was back in the same florists' today, buying a bunch of flowers to go on the kitchen table and, while she was tying an elaborate bow around the bouquet, the woman behind the counter asked 'You're the guy with the wallet, aren't you?' 'You've obviously been talking to my builder.' Is what I should have said but instead admitted I was the same guy. 'So, did she call?' She asked.
Now I hadn't spent more than five minutes considering whether I should append my phone number to the note with the flowers and I had been in no way influenced in my decision not to do so by the fact that my benefactor had given her name as 'Mrs...' but it amused me to discover that florists must get a little kick from the thought that many a relationship has been launched on the rocky road to ruin and recriminations by an extravagant hand-tied bunch of flowers prepared by their own fair hands.
In truth, all that I really know about Mrs... is that she isn't a thief and that she approximates sufficiently closely to a typical Homo sapiens that the following equation is satisfied in respect of our relationship.
I lost my wallet and, at the very instant that I slipped a hand into my pocket and discovered the loss, my mobile phone rang. It was a policeman calling to say that some lost property belonging to me had been handed in at Bath police station and would I like to come and collect it? So before my shit-happens-primed brain could scream the words 'identity theft' into the uncaring void, the ball of stress coalescing in my sternum dissipated.
The woman who'd handed in my wallet had left her name and address. I went immediately to a florists' and ordered an extravagant bunch of flowers to be delivered to her on Monday with a message that ended 'give yourself a big hug'. I meant it too. Rarely have I felt so well disposed towards a total stranger and never pre-coitus. I was back in the same florists' today, buying a bunch of flowers to go on the kitchen table and, while she was tying an elaborate bow around the bouquet, the woman behind the counter asked 'You're the guy with the wallet, aren't you?' 'You've obviously been talking to my builder.' Is what I should have said but instead admitted I was the same guy. 'So, did she call?' She asked.
Now I hadn't spent more than five minutes considering whether I should append my phone number to the note with the flowers and I had been in no way influenced in my decision not to do so by the fact that my benefactor had given her name as 'Mrs...' but it amused me to discover that florists must get a little kick from the thought that many a relationship has been launched on the rocky road to ruin and recriminations by an extravagant hand-tied bunch of flowers prepared by their own fair hands.
In truth, all that I really know about Mrs... is that she isn't a thief and that she approximates sufficiently closely to a typical Homo sapiens that the following equation is satisfied in respect of our relationship.
If you are unfamiliar with the equation and the meanings of the terms I refer you to the marvelous paper by Robert Trivers in which it was first published, available here, for free - and that's a bargain).
Understand this equation, which is so simple that even my mathematically challenged brain can grasp its meaning intuitively, and you will have seen something lovelier than the combined magnificence of all the illuminated manuscripts in all the libraries of theology in the world.
In a sense, this is the equation that states the conditions under which it is possible for something like a human being to evolve. What it says, to paraphrase, is that, in a highly social, intelligent animal species, where members of the species possess memory of social interactions and meet one another frequently, natural selection can favour the evolution of reciprocal altruism. In other words, it can produce human beings. Or Vampire Bats. Vampire Bats are very much like human beings when it comes to reciprocal altruism in that they possess the same salient traits - sociality, intelligence, memory - that we do. A Vampire Bat that returns from a night's unsuccessful foraging will soon die but is often saved by an unrelated bat - a good sanguinarian? - regurgitating some blood into its friend's mouth. The system evolved because Vampire Bats remember who has saved them from certain death in the past and apportion their altruism accordingly.
It is an interesting feature of reciprocal altruism in humans that we seem prepared to act altruistically towards strangers that we have never met and likely never will (as in me and Mrs...). It's an open question, I think, whether this feature of our behaviour is an adaptation or an example of cultural evolution temporarily (I am thinking millennia, not decades, here) out-manoeuvreing natural selection.
I presume that anyone reading this will be either familiar with Trivers' equation or too lazy (or tired, or fried, or whatever) to bother with reading a succinct explanation of the mystery that religion has been trying pointlessly to solve for ever: why are we so damned nice? If you set a million monkeys to masturbating in the corners of their lonely wire cages, the results could not be sadder nor less fruitful than the speculations of Aquinus or Augustine or Mohammed. Give a slightly crazy genius an insight into natural selection, a pad of paper and a pencil, on the other hand, and you get revelations.
Robert Trivers, according to Wikipedia, went bonkers trying to make sense of Wittgenstein, which is an excellent reason not to read Wittgenstein. Having revolutionised his adopted field of evolutionary biology in the 1970s, Trivers disappeared from view until very recently, when he published 'Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others' (buy it here).
What seems to have motivated Trivers to write this book is the desire to answer the question why that, whereas there are obvious benefits (to the deceiver) of deceiving others, the same does not apply to deceiving oneself. When I described this puzzle to a philosophically-minded friend, he denied the possibility of self-deception (how can one both affirm and deny a certain proposition simultaneously, he asked). So I'd better be clear what I (and I think Trivers) means by self-deception: interpreting sense data in a way that conforms with pre-conceived notions of truth, when an unbiased interpretation of the same data would result in a contradiction.
Trivers' claim which, so far as I know, is original is that natural selection can favour the spread of self-deception in species in which there exists an arms race between deceivers and deceiver-detectors. Imagine the following conversation between a husband and wife.
[Husband, staring into the middle distance.]
Wife: 'What are you thinking, darling?'
[Husband suspends contemplation of sex with the au pair; blushes slightly; suppresses blush.]
Husband: 'I was thinking about how much fun we had together before X and Y were born. Why don't we ask your parents to babysit and go on a cruise together?'
[Wife thinks: 'Yeah, I wasn't born yesterday, you wanker; who is she?']
Wife: 'Sometimes you still surprise me, darling. That's a lovely idea.'
[Husband resumes contemplation of whether doggy-style or reverse cowgirl would be more enjoyable, for him].
Wife: 'I'll call my parents tomorrow and ask when they can come over for a week.'
[Husband: Hmm, the au pair is half my age and a third my weight. Perhaps the cruise is a good idea.]
Husband: 'I love you, honey.'
Now I'm not suggesting, and I doubt Trivers would either, that this sort of dialogue is typical. However, I don't think it is particularly unusual either. There are two possibilities: my heterosexual male friends are a strange, sexually-fixated subset of the (otherwise balanced) population; or, all heterosexual men would really like to fuck the au pair, provided there were no consequences. What is more interesting, however, is to notice that, at the end of the hypothetical conversation, the hypothetical wife believes that the hypothetical husband loves her and, more pertinently, the hypothetical husband believes it too. If he didn't, the extraordinarily sensitive deception detector that is the human female brain would have seen the contents of his pitiful sex-crazed brain and left.
Why? I mean, why would any sensible British man (I am speaking from my own, limited, experience; I'm quite sure analogous arguments could be made for any gender, orientation or nationality) risk marriage, reputation, family and fiscal independence for a few brief thrusts into the vagina of an economic refugee from Poland? The answer, of course, is that ancestors in a lineage stretching four billion years into deep time have persisted by, so to speak, coercing Polish refugees into having sex.
Do you not find this fascinating? I mean, perhaps I am telling the story badly, but isn't it the most interesting story of all? What are we and why are we as we are? Come hither...
...to a book that I've recently finished: 'An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics' by Scott M. James. Philosophers write very carefully. That is what they do: they rephrase more carefully what the enthusiasts on the frontiers of discovery have reported. So I must state in words of as few and unambiguous syllables as possible my opinion of the book: dismal.
How is it possible that, in 2012, an influential moral philosopher can publish a book, three-quarters of which is wasted on convincing its audience that evolution actually happened? The temptation to mock the imbeciles who haven't yet clocked this fact is almost irresistible. I suppose that I should admire Scott M. James for his dogged determination to explain, in Bowdlerised form, the theory that has informed all reasoned discussion since 1853 to persons too stupid or willfully ignorant to have taken it on board yet. But I don't. Why? James, when he finally allows himself to come to the point, argues that the case for what he calls 'moral anti-realism' - aka the truth - is more-or-less accepted. Except for his own theory, on which he will no doubt build a pointlesss career.
Look. Our ancestors, before primates; before mammals if you want to go that far back, did not contemplate right and wrong. Jellyfish, the descendants of our (common) ancestors, do not worry whether they have offended their brother-in-law. But neither did they owe him a small fortune. We are descended from animals that had no moral sense. We have one. Ergo, it evolved. I don't expect to convert anyone with this argument but one can hope.
If we admit that our moral sense evolved, it is worth considering two subsidiary possibilities. Morality could be a property of the universe, like viscosity or gravity. If we ever drag our sorry asses off this planet and discover examples of life on other planets, we can be confident that 'birds' will fly, 'fish' will swim and 'bodies' will fall. Does anyone really think, however, that aliens will avow that sex before marriage is a sin? No, really - do you think this is likely? The other possibility is that morality is a word for the codes that enable society, given the genetic and cultural inheritance of a particular species. As Montesquieu said, triangles would worship a three-sided god and despise rectangles. If ants had a god, the caste system would be morally obligatory.
When you feel the tug of conscience, it isn't god whispering into your ear. It's billions of dead ancestors, all of them evolutionary successes telling you that if it works...
If we admit that our moral sense evolved, it is worth considering two subsidiary possibilities. Morality could be a property of the universe, like viscosity or gravity. If we ever drag our sorry asses off this planet and discover examples of life on other planets, we can be confident that 'birds' will fly, 'fish' will swim and 'bodies' will fall. Does anyone really think, however, that aliens will avow that sex before marriage is a sin? No, really - do you think this is likely? The other possibility is that morality is a word for the codes that enable society, given the genetic and cultural inheritance of a particular species. As Montesquieu said, triangles would worship a three-sided god and despise rectangles. If ants had a god, the caste system would be morally obligatory.
When you feel the tug of conscience, it isn't god whispering into your ear. It's billions of dead ancestors, all of them evolutionary successes telling you that if it works...
Saturday, 11 February 2012
Windows onto the mind of God
It is a source of immense frustration to biologists that the physics department's budget typically has several more zeroes on its end. What is more, biologists are scientifically-minded folk who weren't clever enough to study physics, which hurts. In the end though, the budget gap is due less to the relative profundity of the two disciplines than to a missed marketing opportunity on the part of biologists. Whereas physicists can speak without blushing of striving to understand the mind of god; of reaching for a 'theory of everything' or of 'unifying' the 'fundamental' forces, biologists' grant applications concern the mating system of the Dunnock or the function of the stripes on a zebra's arse (I am not kidding: see here). Ironically, it is biology that shines the brightest light into the mind of god - obviously one and the same thing as the mind of man - and while it might not have a theory of everything, at least has a deeply satisfying explanation for all of life, in its wondrous diversity, which is more than can be said for physicists and their zoo of possibly but probably not fundamental particles.
As my friends know very well, I am a living library of wasted opportunities. The first truly great opportunity that I squandered (ignoring the offer of a blow job to be administered by J, which I fluffed on account of nerves and alcohol) was the possibility of a lifetime spent as an academic biologist, studying tropical rain forests, Dunnock mating systems or pretty much anything I found interesting. My PhD was supervised by Nick Davies, who literally wrote the book on Dunnocks, and who is nevertheless one of the most original scientists alive. He practically invented the field of behavioural ecology, the study of the evolutionary basis of animal behaviour. With hindsight it is almost impossible to imagine asking questions about animal behaviour except in light of this approach. Nick was one of the first to apply it and is one of the keenest observers and among the most brilliant theorists.
In the preface to his book about Dunnocks, Nick quotes Reverend Frederick Morris, who admired this archetypal little brown bird for its apparently unimpeachable moral probity: 'Unobtrusive, quiet and retiring, without being shy, humble and homely in its deportment and habits, sober and unpretending in its dress, while neat and graceful, the dunnock exhibits a pattern which many of a higher grade might imitate, with advantage to themselves and benefit to others through an improved example.'
As it turns out, Dunnocks are among the most sexually wanton vertebrates ever studied in detail. The average human threesome is positively suburban in comparison with a polygynandrous dunnock family, in which both male and female surreptitiously cuckold the other. In a delightful inversion of orgasm, the female is often induced to eject the sperm of the male who previously inseminated her by her current paramour's 'cloacal pecking', a distressingly clinical term for oral sex, bird style. It's easy to mock Rev. Morris, which obviously isn't going to stop me doing just that. The problem for RM and all previous and subsequent admirers of god's handiwork is that The Maker appears to have been a bit of a sicko.
I have mentioned elsewhere my fascination with what Christians, Muslims or other creationists think the exploding penis of the honey bee reveals about the mind of god. I'm not sure why this particular example of nature's perversity captivates me except perhaps that I cannot help but wince at the thought of my bollocks exploding across the quivering buttocks of some drunken bird in a pub car park. It would certainly make you think twice about that second Bacardi and rum. It is frequently said that Charles Darwin finally abandoned his belief in god as a result of contemplating Ichneumon Wasps, which lay their eggs in the living bodies of other insects. The larvae consume their hosts from within. It's hard to reconcile the existence of such a 'creature' with a creator overflowing with kindness. Mice are occasionally infected by a parasite that causes the infected mouse to lose its fear of cats because the parasite requires a cat's intestine to complete its life cycle. Certain primates tend to leave more grandchildren if they trade their faculty of reason for membership of a cult. One could go on.
God is most certainly dead but the news hasn't reached everyone yet. My friend R has coined the perfect slogan to describe the struggle ahead: one believer, one bullet. I'll see you in hell.
As my friends know very well, I am a living library of wasted opportunities. The first truly great opportunity that I squandered (ignoring the offer of a blow job to be administered by J, which I fluffed on account of nerves and alcohol) was the possibility of a lifetime spent as an academic biologist, studying tropical rain forests, Dunnock mating systems or pretty much anything I found interesting. My PhD was supervised by Nick Davies, who literally wrote the book on Dunnocks, and who is nevertheless one of the most original scientists alive. He practically invented the field of behavioural ecology, the study of the evolutionary basis of animal behaviour. With hindsight it is almost impossible to imagine asking questions about animal behaviour except in light of this approach. Nick was one of the first to apply it and is one of the keenest observers and among the most brilliant theorists.
In the preface to his book about Dunnocks, Nick quotes Reverend Frederick Morris, who admired this archetypal little brown bird for its apparently unimpeachable moral probity: 'Unobtrusive, quiet and retiring, without being shy, humble and homely in its deportment and habits, sober and unpretending in its dress, while neat and graceful, the dunnock exhibits a pattern which many of a higher grade might imitate, with advantage to themselves and benefit to others through an improved example.'
As it turns out, Dunnocks are among the most sexually wanton vertebrates ever studied in detail. The average human threesome is positively suburban in comparison with a polygynandrous dunnock family, in which both male and female surreptitiously cuckold the other. In a delightful inversion of orgasm, the female is often induced to eject the sperm of the male who previously inseminated her by her current paramour's 'cloacal pecking', a distressingly clinical term for oral sex, bird style. It's easy to mock Rev. Morris, which obviously isn't going to stop me doing just that. The problem for RM and all previous and subsequent admirers of god's handiwork is that The Maker appears to have been a bit of a sicko.
I have mentioned elsewhere my fascination with what Christians, Muslims or other creationists think the exploding penis of the honey bee reveals about the mind of god. I'm not sure why this particular example of nature's perversity captivates me except perhaps that I cannot help but wince at the thought of my bollocks exploding across the quivering buttocks of some drunken bird in a pub car park. It would certainly make you think twice about that second Bacardi and rum. It is frequently said that Charles Darwin finally abandoned his belief in god as a result of contemplating Ichneumon Wasps, which lay their eggs in the living bodies of other insects. The larvae consume their hosts from within. It's hard to reconcile the existence of such a 'creature' with a creator overflowing with kindness. Mice are occasionally infected by a parasite that causes the infected mouse to lose its fear of cats because the parasite requires a cat's intestine to complete its life cycle. Certain primates tend to leave more grandchildren if they trade their faculty of reason for membership of a cult. One could go on.
God is most certainly dead but the news hasn't reached everyone yet. My friend R has coined the perfect slogan to describe the struggle ahead: one believer, one bullet. I'll see you in hell.
Sunday, 5 February 2012
The dangers of materialism.
'Earth, man. What a shit hole!'
Johner, a character in Alien Resurrection.
'What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how
like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and
yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say
so.'
Shakespeare, Hamlet
'All sex is bestiality.'
CW, in an email
Despite having grown up on a diet of E.O. Wilson and Gerald Durrell, Johner's assessment of our beautiful pale blue dot succinctly expresses my feelings on the subject of the home planet. From the scum that floats in a greasy layer on our poisonous oceans to the scum who peddle porn, religion and other drugs to our not-yet depraved children, our world is surely a shit hole sans comparaison.
Saturday dawned bright, cold and crisp. I know this because, highly uncharacteristically, I was awake and alert at dawn, packing up my papers after a week spent trying to bash a round peg into a computationally square hole (more of which in another post). Saturday, I need hardly add, was the day of the first snowdrop sale of the season, at Myddleton House. What do you mean, you hadn't heard? Myddleton House is the former home of E.A. Bowles, one of those almost impossibly lucky healthy, wealthy and clever nineteenth century English gentlemen-of-leisure whose passion was plants. Myddleton House is now in Enfield (the house hasn't moved but Enfield has). Need I go on?
Snowdrop sales ought to be the subject of some social-wannabe-scientist's PhD thesis because they are little maelstroms of human vice, with greed, lust and envy to the fore. I was fourth in the queue when the gate was opened at 10.30am and by 10.33am I had bought about 30 new snowdrops, mostly from the incomparable Glen Chantry nursery. Even so, several that I'd wanted had sold out by the time I'd fought my way to the front of the line at stalls I visited after cleaning out Glen Chantry. Those of you who know me will not need to be told that this is my idea of fun. I can't remember the last time I experienced 15 minutes of such unalloyed pleasure. Two of my purchases, 'Big Boy' and 'Fanny', are illustrated below. So far as I know there isn't yet a snowdrop named 'Cunt' or 'Knob' but surely it's a matter of time before someone with a sufficiently developed sense of irony comes along.
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| Galanthus 'Fanny' |
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| Galanthus 'Big Boy' |
Coming 'home' is almost always guaranteed to extinguish any glow of warmth that has, against the odds, been kindled in my increasingly ample breast. On this occasion, my evanescent glimpse of happiness was snuffed out by a particularly surly greeting from my wife (who has been pushed beyond the brink of reason and reasonableness by me and whom I do not in the least blame) and an email from an old friend, announcing that his partner had died after four years with motor neuron disease. 'It is good news really although it does not feel like it yet', he said, and I wanted to cry.
In 'The World According to Garp', John
Irving describes how his fictional mother's funeral is hijacked by her
feminist friends and he ends up dressing in drag to gain admission. I have thought about whether it is fair to write about the private tragedies of friends in a public forum, however unlikely it is that anyone will ever read this. In the end I decided that John - 'no man is an island' - Donne had it right when he argued that we are all diminished by and perhaps complicit in every tragedy and that speaking out is the right thing - or at least an acceptable thing - to do.
As it happens, X's death (or rather her illness) is one of a trio of tragedies, soon to be joined by a fourth, that I have become aware of in the last couple of weeks. Motor neuron disease is a foul condition, reducing most sufferers to mentally alert prisoners in a physically inert shell. By the end of her life, X retained control over only a single muscle in her body - that in one eyelid. Before the onset of the disease, X was a brilliant and successful linguist. Her partner, my friend, nursed her in their home, at great personal cost, throughout her illness with a devotion that beggars belief.
The second death was reported to me by a mutual friend of mine and the man whose son, T, had died. The boy, who I suppose must have been five or six, had been diagnosed at birth with severe epilepsy and was given a prognosis measured in weeks or months. In the end, as the moving email circulated by his father described, he died quietly within a few yards of his oblivious parents who could not literally chain themselves to his bedside and so were not there when he had his final seizure.
A few days ago I had an email from another friend, reporting that a man I knew slightly had committed suicide. I had stayed with this man and his male partner in the USA a few years ago and had been shown immense hospitality, though I was practically a stranger at the time. Who knows what S was thinking when he shot himself dead but I am reasonably confident that his sexuality, or more precisely, the dissonance his sexuality caused in him and those he was close to, was to blame.
How on earth is one supposed to react to these three events? A brilliant academic, in the prime of her life, is struck down by motor neuron disease and gradually reduced to a brain-in-a-jar, so that her death, when it comes after years of suffering, is universally perceived as a 'blessing'. A boy dies, silently screaming for help, which his parents, only a few yards away, are too late to give. He never knew fully what it is to be human. A young man, tortured by who-knows-what demons, walks into the woods and blows his brains out, leaving a note for his bewildered and unsuspecting partner.
None of these events is surprising, if one is a materialist. In fact, one expects the temporary defiance of entropy that we are pleased to call 'life' to end miserably and without warning. The single most mystifying aspect, to me, of this sordid, everyday story of human affairs, is the final sentence of the email from T's father, a man who was once a good friend of mine: 'Blessed be the name of the Lord.'
There is really nothing funny about any of this, yet I am irresistibly drawn to the (true) story told by the philosopher Daniel Dennett about a recent brush with death. He had a major heart attack and survived only thanks to some cutting-edge and swift surgery. While he was recovering in hospital he wrote an article designed in part to disarm the inevitable suggestions that he had recanted his atheism while in extremis. Some of his friends, he wrote, had said they'd prayed for his recovery. 'Thank you.' He was too polite to reply. 'Did you sacrifice a goat too?'
Dennett is one of those supremely rare people - how I envy him - who really gets how the world works and yet seems to be having an enormous amount of fun. My old friend W, confronted with the unspeakable and ineluctable reality of human experience, has tied himself in knots to deny the truth that is staring back at him from his late son's blank eyes. We are animals. We are born without reason; we live without purpose and we die, alone. Materialism is austerely beautiful but it isn't comforting.
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