Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Naming the prey
Giving names to prey animals is a joke we've had for a few years, ever since watching a nightly week-long BBC real-time nature series about lions. All the lions were given names by the breathless presenter, possibly having already been named by the game wardens. The grazing animals that the lions hunted were simply an anonymous herd. After a few nights we got fed up with this blatant carnivorist bias from a supposedly impartial state broadcaster and started naming the antelopes.
'Will poor Doris and her little calf Freddie get away, or will their throats be torn out by ravenous lions? Find out in tomorrow evening's thrilling episode of "Rushing Around the Serengeti in Jeeps"!'
I'll never get over the end of another nature programme, set in the Arctic. The closing shot of Mummy Polar Bear (whose care for her charming, tumbling cubs we'd followed for an hour) swimming towards an ice-floe on which a seal was just visible as a black squiggle, was accompanied by the heart-rending cry from beside me: 'Look out, Sammy!'
OK, this is all a domestic in-joke and sentimental nonsense, but it would have taken a harder heart than mine to watch unmoved a later sequence in the Attenborough episode. A female whale and her newborn calf were swimming up the West Coast of the US, heading for a herring spawning or some such annual multi-layered feeding frenzy off Alaska. The rest of her pod, unencumbered by young, were hundreds of miles ahead. Out of the blue a pack of orcas turned up, looking somehow sinister in their shiny black and white SS uniforms. For six hours they harried the cow and calf, until they drove the young whale to such exhaustion that it began to drown. As it foundered, the pack moved in for the kill. You might think that after all that effort, they'd at least eat all they could of the unfortunate beast. But no. They bit off its lower jaw and part of a flipper, and left the rest for the hagfish that crowd around every dead whale on the sea-floor, and then for the bacteria, which excrete nutrients for the phytoplankton, which ...
So it goes, but what are we to make of it?
Nothing. This is just nature, and it isn't cruel. It isn't even indifferent. It's just mindless machinery thrashing about. There is no 'I' behind any non-human animal eye. Subjectivity is inseparable from language. Although emerging from animal sensation, animal emotion and animal signalling, conscious reflection and self-awareness are unique to human beings. We can name the prey, but they don't name themselves.
I very much doubt that this is the deeper meaning of the account in Genesis 2:19 of how Adam named the animals, 'and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' (Even restricting the exercise to birds and beasts, as the King James suggests, it must have been a long day. 'Hmm, I think I'll call that one Conopophaga lineata ...') If, however, that passage had been taken as such by fundamentalists we might have been spared some of the excesses of Young Earth Creationism.
Here's how it works. One of the stumbling-blocks for YECs is the notion that suffering and death existed before the Fall. If animals suffered and died for tens of millions of years before Adam saw apple, well ... This leads YECs into all sorts of absurdities about prelapsarian vegetarian carnivores, such as the well-known case of the tyrannosaur's teeth being designed for cracking coconuts rather than ripping flesh. But if non-human animals don't have consciousness then there's no non-human suffering, and their deaths are just part of the economy of nature, not 'an evil'. The implications are above my pay grade but no doubt theologians can take it from there.
Fundamentalists are unlikely to use this conclusion from the Marxist-Leninist theory of consciousness to get themselves off the YEC hook, but I offer it nevertheless, in a spirit of charity.
Labels: atheism, creationism, evolution, Marxism, squibs
Fictitious narrative considered harmless
Twenty-first century science has caught up with my grandmothers. Fiction is indeed nothing but lies, and the best that can be said for it is that it is a harmless if unprofitable diversion. It keeps us out of mischief and passes the time.
The one thing it cannot do is help us to understand human nature and the motivations of other people. If it did, the work done in Departments of English (etc) Literature would be of enormous interest to Departments of (e.g.) Business Studies, Politics, and Sociology. Oddly enough it is not.
For real insight into human behaviour, practical people turn to science.
Psychology has, over the past century, moved from misty speculation and hazy introspection to hard, repeatable laboratory and field experiment. Neuroscience is a hair's-breadth from tracking our thoughts in real time. The dismal truth the convergent sciences of the brain and behaviour have delivered is that our own spontaneous understanding of these matters is specious.
'Folk psychology' and introspection give us no insight at all into our own minds, let alone those of others. The most it can give us is a rough-and-ready 'Theory of Mind' that enables us, with notorious unreliability, to predict the day-to-day actions of our fellows.
How, then, could literary or genre fiction, based as they are - at best - on folk psychology, give us any insight into the human condition? Reading the greatest works of literature will no more help you to understand human behaviour than watching Star Trek will help you discover a method of reaching superluminal velocities. The most it will give you is a selective and partial (in every sense) understanding of the author's own folk psychology.
Reading Jane Austen will certainly help you to understand the mind and heart of a young woman: Jane Austen. It may give you a limited insight in that particular young woman's Theory of Mind. But this is not a great deal of use to you, because you will never meet Jane Austen, who is dead.
And Elizabeth Bennett never existed, except as a figment of Jane Austen's Theory of Mind. Not matter how deeply you think you understand Elizabeth Bennett, it won't help you to overcome pride and prejudice to find the love of your life. Finding the love of your life must be surprisingly easy, considering how often it happens, but this truth is far from universally acknowledged.
[Note, added 2 April, the day after posting: the most significant line in this post is the date-stamp.]
Labels: bookfestival, squibs, writing
A Sunday Prayer
In which case, carry on as You were.
Thank You.
That will be all.
Observing the Leonid Meteor Shower
I'm sure my talented brother James could do a better job of this, but here it is anyway, on a rainy night in South Queensferry.
If the second time was farce, what's the third time?
There's a certain kind of comedy that depends on the actors remaining deadly serious even as the audience is doubled up laughing. It restores one's faith in human nature to catch some of the actors smiling behind their hands. The only evidence of a sense of humour I've ever seen from Western Maoists was a reference (on Kasama, of which more later) to portrayals like this of their Five Great Teachers as '"history of shaving" pictures'. Back in the 60s and 70s, many thousands of young Americans, radicalised by the Vietnam War and the Black struggle, were inspired by those socialist states that at the time militantly resisted the US: Vietnam, Cuba, China. They began to study what Ho, Fidel, Che, and Mao had to say, and thus found their way to Lenin and Stalin. They also re-examined the history of the CPUSA, which by then was for many young people a quite uninspiring organization, and found 'a usable past' in its early-30s militancy and its mid-30 to mid-40s popularity. The task was to do what the CPUSA had done in its glory days, but this time do it right.
And so the 'new communist movement' was born. Never was the adage 'the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce' more tragically and farcically apt. The strains of applying tactics drawn from the Stalinist line-changes of the past to the even more neck-wrenching lurches and swerves of 70s Maoism were more than enough to reduce the entire squabbling motorcade to roadside wreckage by the 80s. When you find yourself urging US imperialism to take a stronger stand against the Soviet threat, the suspicion must dawn on the dimmest that you're doing it wrong.
Some of the wheels that had dropped off kept trundling on. Some drivers kept walking forward with a steering-wheel clutched in their hands and encouraging imitations of engine noises from the passengers limping behind them.
Now these remnants are being joined by a small but growing crowd. One manifestation of that is Kasama, where posts and discussions are a random mix of sharp analysis, philosophical obscurantism, and Maoist baby-talk. Another is the recent rash of Maoist and Hoxhaist blogs. Despite being divided on whether China is now or has ever been socialist, they often link to each other, striving as of old to unite all who can be united against the main enemy: Trotskyism.
It would be interesting to know, from anyone better placed than I am, how much this reflects anything going on on the ground. Is the American radical left doomed to do the 60s and 70s over again?
We know how it ends, and it ain't pretty (Update: thanks to bensix in comments for the link.):
(This picture, which I think I found on Blood and Treasure is a lot more sinister than it looks. If anyone can remind me of the link, I'll be grateful. Update:, ah, found it.)
Labels: far left, Marxism, revolution, squibs
If the Greenland ice sheet slides into the ocean ...
Scotland at standstill as strange white substance falls from sky
Transport links across Scotland have been severely disrupted today by an overnight fall of an unknown substance from the atmosphere. Lying several centimetres deep over much of the country, it has made roads, railways and airport runways dangerously slippery and often impassable. As an emergency interim measure while authorities and scientists struggle to identify the phenomenon, schools have been closed.
The mystery material is initially white in colour, and is said to sometimes resemble salt. Attempts at closer comparison have failed because salt has - also overnight and unexpectedly - disappeared from all retail outlets.
Local sci-fi writer Ken MacLeod, who had to cancel plans to meet his daughter for lunch because of the transport chaos, blamed the lack of preparedness on 'cultural snobbery towards science fiction'.
'I'm not asking for some sort of instant readiness for anything,' he said. 'That would be utopian. But I do think that reading a few catastrophe novels or even watching the odd disaster movie on TV would open minds to the possibility of unprecedented events.'
A source at Edinburgh City Council accused the writer of having his head in the clouds. 'All we can do now is wait for the scientists to come up with something, which could take months. And keep watching the skies.'
Labels: climate, local, Scottish politics, squibs
What if the equations are the fire?
Valid equations are trivially and necessarily true.
There is a system of equations that describes every physical interaction.
Including those in our brains.
That system of equations is a timeless necessary truth.
Yada, yada.
Therefore we necessarily exist.
Hail you, necessarily existent being!
Today I looked for more on the work of Gary Drescher and found that the basic idea is called the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, and has been elaborated by real philosophers and physicists with degrees and everything.
I think this hypothesis is what Spinoza was getting at, so that's another ground for confidence. Greg Egan probably agrees too. I'm not saying I completely understand it, but throw in some blind faith and fanatical enthusiasm, and the world is ours.
Labels: amazing things, atheism, evolution, squibs
' ... for then we would know the mind of God'
My talented brother James responds:
Filling a much-needed gap
What I'm thinking of is some purely mechanical device, that took the basic QWERTY keyboard with Shift and Return keys and so on, but with each key attached to an arrangement of levers connected to a physical representation of the given letter or punctuation mark. These in turn would strike through some ink-delivery system - perhaps, though I'm reaching a bit here, a sort of tape of cloth mounted on reels - onto separate sheets of paper, fed through some kind of rubber roller (similar to that on a printer) one by one. The Return key would have to be replaced by a manual device, to literally 'return' the roller at the end of each line. Tedious, but most writers could do with more exercise anyway.
Corrections and changes would be awkward, it's true, but a glance at any word processor programme gives the answer: the completed sheets could be, physically, cut and pasted.
Someone more patient, less easily distracted, and more mechanically savvy than myself would have to develop such a device, and maybe already has - for all I know, the patent may be gathering dust. Now, its time has come. There's a huge gap in the market for it.
I tell you, someone's going to make an absolute fortune from this.
Labels: squibs
Implausible television series
Cat vacuuming? I don't even have a cat!
Last Thursday Mrs Early took a well-deserved long weekend away. I'm well within deadline on my next book, but well behind my unofficial target for it, so a few days on my own might seem to be a good time to go at the writing full tilt. The only other things I definitely had to do was fill in my author comp tickets form for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and pick up two pet gerbils to look after while young Master Early & his beloved swanned off to a Greek island for their well-deserved break. I duly picked up the Early vermin on Sunday, in good time to pop a can of Pepsi Max and chomp Doritos while watching England v Germany in the World Cup. No gloating from me - one of our neighbours had a German flag up, but I wouldn't do such a thing. Enough of my family and friends are England supporters for me to feel a twinge of sympathy for the fans if not for the team, as well as a twinge of that feeling the Germans have a word for. Through the open window I could hear singing. Is 'Deutschland Uber Alles' still the German national anthem?
How-evah ... whenever Mrs Early is away I feel a strange, guilty urge to do something that will impress her when she gets back, and these days ironing her work uniform isn't enough. Besides, I was still smarting from having exposed to the world the state of my workroom, on my very own shiny new webcam at that. Before she left I'd mumbled something about tidying the workroom.
But, you know, first things first. Back to Friday morning. There was writing to be done. One kitchen floor wash and one cooker-hob cleaning later, interspersed with occasional updates on the state of the world as mediated by the blogosphere, I was fit for nothing but finishing reading Iain Banks's The Steep Approach to Garbadale, a worthwhile project in itself. Smelling faintly of whisky and household cleaning products, I went to bed at the crack of dawn on Saturday.
I woke up ready to tackle the workroom. I began, logically enough, with the teetering stacks of books. Turning these into stable stacks with the spines facing outward led to the rediscovery of books I'd forgotten I had. Some of these I'd picked up in charity shops on the off-chance. I had to pause to consider whether each one should be added to the stack just outside the workroom to go to the charity shop. Sometimes I had take a quick look inside, just to check. Did you know that Journey to the Centre of the Earth is really quite good? For one thing, it's got one heck of an opening hook.
Then there were the books I'd read, and appreciated. But. If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance The Penguin Guide to Modern Theology, Vol 3: Biblical Criticism, let us ask, would I ever want to read it again? No. Commit it then to the charity shop.
(You see how I did that? I couldn't lay my hand on A Treatise of Human Nature so it's just as well I never chucked out my copy of Language, Truth and Logic, which quotes that passage. Otherwise I'd have been looking for the Hume book all day. Oh, there it is, on the inner stack on a bookshelf.)
So much for the books. Now the magazines. There's the stack of copies of New Sceintist from 2008-2009. That stack was the result of a previous tidying. No problem. Move the stack into the hallway and ring up the school librarian on Monday, to see if she wants them. (She didn't. Anyone?)
And that leaves the heap of paper and jiffy bags and plastic bags and cardboard boxes (empty) in the middle of the room. It swirled before my eyes like a pool full of sheets of paper and plastic bags does when it swirls. I started by pulling out all the empty boxes, and the grubby jiffy bags, and the cardboard, and putting them all in the biggest box. And then there's the packing material and the plastic bags. An entire bin-bag's worth of balled-up newspaper that someone used as packing material. Time for a coffee, and time I checked my email.
The heap took days. Hot, humid days. The trouble with the heap is how it accretes. The process starts with the workroom tidy, and new magazines and mail and kipple severely excluded from it, instead piling up on the end of a dining-table bench, on the coffee-table, under the ... anyway. The workroom is tidy. Then someone comes to visit, or we have a party. All of this gets swept up in armfulls and carried upstairs and stacked in the workroom. And once there's one stack, it gets added to. Then there's another stack. Then they fall over. Then I do my tax return. Then there's a heap.
So sorting through the heap involves lots of new and exciting discoveries. And decisions. What on earth is that Sunday supplement from 2005 doing there? Was there something interesting in it? I scan it carefully to check. Nope. But by now it's practically a historical document. A museum piece. Can you believe people dressed like that back then? A shame to ... nah. Into the recycling bag with it. Oh, so that's where that form went! They still owe me for that talk ... Eventually I have a stack of magazines I want to keep, and everything else. This eventually becomes a stack of proof pages, typescripts, conference and con programmes and notes (several new paperbacks from the goody bags go into the charity shop pile) and everything else. I go looking for a box to put the everything else in, and find all the boxes are full of all the packaging stuff. I take that to the garage, because you never know.
Then I see the box of author copies of The Restoration Game, all of which are spoken for. Good grief! I'd better get in touch with all the people mentioned in acknowledgements, and ask for their snail-mail addresses so I can send them their copies.
So now I have an empty box (and a neat stack of copies waiting to be sent, but I'll get round to that in a day or two). I put the unsorted kipple in the empty box, and that's it done. I check the stack of books for the charity shop, remove a few items including The Penguin Guide to Modern Theology, Vol 3: Biblical Criticism from it and put them back on the new neat stacks, and take the remaining dozen or so books to the charity shop. I managed not to buy any more books while I was there, though it was a close thing.
Then I whizzed around with the hoover, admired the wide open spaces of the workroom, and ironed a work uniform for Mrs Early, due back that evening. I picked her up at the airport late last night, after I'd been in and out of town for the City of Lit salon evening in the Wash Bar, where Nick Barley, the director of the Book Festival, announced their new Unbound programme of free evening events. I remembered that I still had to fill in my author comp tickets form. I took the Unbound programme and the Filmhouse programme home with me and laid them carefully on the end of a bench in the dining-room.
Labels: coming attractions, local, skiffy, squibs, writing
Apophatic atheology: an April apologetic
A great deal of needless offence and rancour, it seems to me, is caused by the unfortunate tendency of certain believers to take the speeches and books of atheism literally. To an unwary or hasty reader, perhaps caught up in or reacting against fundamentalist readings of the texts, it may seem that atheists are denying the existence of God. Nothing could be further from the truth! What could it possibly mean, to deny that a being, agreed by all to be inconceivable, exists? That would be to claim knowledge of the unknowable. Atheists are not, of course, such fools. They are asserting, in common with all believers who have reached the age of reason, that they have no conception of the Inconceivable.
Likewise, when a Dawkins asserts that natural selection makes a Creator unnecessary as an explanation of design in nature, or a Hawkings avers that that his current understanding of time makes an act of Creation superfluous to the temporal origin of the Universe, they must be understood as giving the Creator the highest praise of which such men are capable. This praise is exactly like declaring one's admiration of a supreme artistic or athletic accomplishment by describing it as effortless. When Hitchens (the elder) declaims that religion poisons everything, he is making the same heartfelt protest against the unworthiness of the human vessels of divine revelation as has been made by saints and reformers from the beginning.
Atheists, by speaking of the non-existence of God, proclaim the depth of their devotion to and understanding of the divine hiddenness. Let us therefore agree, this particular fine morning in April, to cultivate our own gardens.
Gorby buys Indy
I found lots to disagree with the Indy about over the years, but that was part of its appeal. After the paper adopted what became its (understandably unique) selling point, the single-issue pictorial front page (polar bear, penguin, starving child, heroin syringe, baby seal, smoking chimney, polar bear polar polar bear polar bear will you please just sod off and drown you smelly seal-chewing top predator where was I?) I still stuck with it. Even after Johann Hari revealed that for years he'd been popping anti-depressants that made him unable to see the downside of anything he thought was a good idea at the time (which explained, a little too late for a lot of dead brown people, his drum-banging for the attack on Iraq), I blinked back the red mist. When its hard-pressed science editor explained that nanoparticles are a problem because they're so small that they no longer obey the laws of physics, I spluttered Crunchy Oats over the page and turned to the next. I went on buying the paper every day, but I read it mainly for the columnists, which was just as well because there was less and less actual news in it.
It was one of the columnists who finally did it for me. Bruce Anderson, the (predictably ex-Trot) Tory the paper keeps on a string in the back yard, wrote a column defending torture, yelping excitedly over the ticking bomb scenario as if it were a new, fresh, insightful thought experiment and running with it all the way to torturing not only Mr Alarm-Clock but also - should that fail to get results - Mrs Alarm-Clock and all the little Alarm-Clocks.
At this point it became difficult to hold the breakfast down.
So, with some embarrassment, I crawled back to the Guardian, and you know what? It's good. It's so good I don't have time to read all the good bits. Still infuriating and smug, mind you, but at least it doesn't keep banging on about polar bears.
Now the Indy has been bought by a former KGB man, in close association with the former General Secretary of the CPSU. This means it might become interesting again, but for me it's too little, too late.
Labels: climate, squibs, War on Terror
Great moments in psychohistory
Conspiracy theorists - you're under starter's orders!
(From an article on Charles Stross's most distinguished co-panellist.) (Via.)
The liquidity trap, shown by boom and bust rap!
(Via).
Labels: libertarian, squibs
Science prof's office untidy - shock claim
[T]hanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess. [...] His colleagues recall that his office was ‘often surrounded by jumbled piles of papers’.Elsewhere in the paper, we learn the full horror:
According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.Tens of thousands of pieces of paper! Chaos and mess! Jumbled piles! In a scientist's office! Having been inside the offices of many science professors, and having worked for a year with social scientists who've made close anthropological studies of the everyday work of natural scientists, I'm shocked to the core.
Guilt-tripping and hair shirts not way to go, hair-shirted Green guilt-tripper admits
If the lesson for scientists is that the era when they can practice their trade entirely separately from the rest of society is well and truly over, the lesson for environmentalists is equally harsh. Having spent years (once again, myself included) reminding the public of the horrifying potential consequences of climate change, and demanding major lifestyle change on the part of ordinary people, it seems that our message is not just falling on deaf ears – but may even be counterproductive.
We have to start accentuating the positive, rather than constantly invoking apocalypse. Getting off fossil fuels is a necessity, but that does not mean that people’s lives must be made harder or more austere. Forget all the “war economy” analogies, locally grown jam and appeals to save old clothes. Our message needs to be a forward-looking one of hope, prosperity and technological progress.
We also have to stop trying to make people feel guilty. No, flying isn’t analogous to child abuse. Polar bears won’t drop from the sky. Constantly accusing normal people of immoral behaviour is perhaps a way to get noticed, but not a clever way to win converts. And the normal people in question, upset at being accused of killing babies every time they step onto Ryanair, will be very susceptible to the first conspiracy theorist who whispers in their ear: “Don’t worry, it’s not true.”
Labels: climate, far left, genomics, libertarian, squibs
"It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star."