A Theory of Everything

When I was at school, it all seemed so simple.  The physical world, at the smallest level, was made up from atoms.  Atoms were like the solar system, with electrons whizzing around a nucleus, and this was a system just like the world we knew at the macro level, where planets whizzed around the sun.  Now, we knew there were some complications.  Electrons had their orbits, and they could jump from one orbit to another, and it appeared that those jumps were carefully scripted, so they could only go from one defined level to another, as if you were going from one level of a building up to the next.  And, yes, there was another complication, as it turned out that in the nucleus there were two things:  neutrons and protons.  The protons had a positive electromagnetic force, while the electrons travelling around them had a negative force:  the only reason the electrons didn’t hurtle down towards the protons and annihilate each other is because they were travelling in their orbits at speed: just like an aeroplane not falling to earth because it travelled fast enough to ensure it created lift?  Well, not quite like that, but it would do.  Those other items in the nucleus were neutrons, and they were called that because they didn’t have an electric charge.

There was more.  In a way I found exciting at the time, this model of the nature of the physical universe also made sense of lots of chemistry, and from there on to many other things.  Atoms could be linked together to form molecules.  Some molecules were ‘stable’, like oxygen, which in our daily lives compromises two oxygen atoms linked together to form the O₂ molecule (and later I learnt these was another stable form, O₃, ozone, which was the reason you could smell something funny by the tracks of electric trains in the London Underground).  Then we went on to compounds, like hydrochloric acid, which was a combination of hydrogen and chlorine, and this was interesting because it was really in two parts.  Part of the molecule could break away and link up with another substance, and that would lead to other combinations like sodium chloride (the sodium element combined with the chlorine bit from hydrochloride acid.  It was like the parts in a Meccano set!

Of course, it all got complicated, and eventually scientists were taking substances apart and discovering they were made up of very complex combinations of atoms, often several, sometimes even scores and even hundreds of atoms.  However, it all made sense.  However, I think all that was falling apart long before I was at school, although I didn’t know it at the time.  Although it was somewhat beyond my schoolboy science classes, at least until I reached the final years of secondary education.  Somewhat later I was to confront the science of what’s truly fundamental, and the amazing world of theoretical physics.  At that point all my schoolboy knowledge was cast aside, and I learnt that our physical reality is shaped by a bewildering and complex world of particles, fields, together with many laws and rules that nature played by.

Where was all this leading?  I was off on a different path by the time I was well into my university studies (I’d abandoned science for social anthropology), but even back then I was aware and know much more clearly today, our understanding of ‘reality’ remains limited and incomplete.  Despite this the animating hope of many scientists today and throughout history) is that we will be able to formulate a ‘Theory of Everything’, (with that marvellous acronym TOE) where one set of universal equations and one framework will describe literally every aspect of our physical reality.

When most of us think about science, we don’t often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all might be.  Clearly reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding the nature of our world rely on what we can observe, measure, and test through experiments.  When we take account of that huge body of observational and experimental knowledge, we have a record of all the phenomena that we know exist. The enterprise of science, then, seeks to make sense of the huge body of empirical data, and then seeks to explain it in as simple and conclusive way as possible, to maximize our predictive power concerning natural phenomena, doing so with as few assumptions which seem absolutely necessary.

As many writers today remind us, we have seen incredible advances in our understanding of the physical world when compared to what we understood when I was at school.  Now it appears we can analyse just about everything we can directly detect and measure, and do so precisely, even exquisitely. The ‘Standard Model’ of elementary particles lists four key influences that underpin our world, the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces along with general relativity and gravity. Then there is the inflationary Big Bang which describes our cosmic origins, when those four key forces first appeared, only to evolve and become independent. It makes for a compelling story.  Unfortunately, current mysteries like dark matter, dark energy, and the baryogenesis puzzle to do with asymmetry together hint that there’s more to the Universe than we currently understand.

The elusive goal that motivates many scientists is the belief tall of these key forces can be brought together into a ‘Theory of Everything’.  However, despite its fascination, some argue that there is not a Theory of Everything out there to be found at all, that the goal is an illusion.

The modern idea of a Theory of Everything goes back more than 100 years, to the early days of general relativity. Einstein was able, starting in 1915, to successfully describe the observed phenomenon of gravitation. The presence, distribution, and motion of matter and energy through spacetime determined the curvature and evolution of that spacetime fabric, and then the curvature of that spacetime fabric determined the future trajectories and fates of every particle that exists within that spacetime. Put simply, general relativity took the idea of special relativity and unified it with the idea of gravitation, creating the powerful framework that many would argue was the most important of Einstein’s astonishing accomplishments.

When I was learning about science at school we were being taught about science prior to Einstein, with some brief references to what he had concluded.  Before his theories there had been a different approach, Maxwell’s classical theory about electromagnetism, with four central principles:

• the speed of light was the ultimate speed limit at which anything could travel,
• particles and interactions could be described in terms of fields and charges,
• electromagnetism vs relativistically invariant, and
• energy and momentum were always conserved.

Maxwell’s (classical) theory put the previously distinct notions of electricity and magnetism together into a unified footing.

Within four years from the publication of Einstein’s theory of general relativity scientists were working to unify this theory with Maxwell’s principles.  However, it turned out that despite some similarities the two theories also exhibited several fundamental differences.     Despite this, it was the first 20th Century attempt at a Theory of Everything.  Einstein’s general relativity was already a four dimensional theory (adding the dimension of time to our familiar three dimensional view of matter in the world), but Maxwell’s electromagnetism required four separate degrees of freedom in addition, meaning that the same four dimensions used in Einstein’s theory would be insufficient to hold general relativity and electromagnetism together in a single, unified framework.

Theoretical physicists weren’t discouraged, and attempted to solve the mismatch by taking a dramatic leap into a fifth dimension, allowing general relativity and electromagnetism to be unified.  Alas, in a way that has become familiar with integrating approaches since then, there were some new inconvenient problems.  The postulated fifth dimension couldn’t impact anything in our four-dimensional spacetime; it must somehow ‘disappear’ from all the equations that impacted the observable physical world.  Moreover, scientists knew the universe didn’t merely conform to Maxwell’s classical electromagnetism, but required more, especially it required a quantum description for electromagnetism (at least), and other limiting postulates.

However, this was merely the beginning of formulating what would turn out to be many proposals that drew on extra dimensions. In one sense this was unproblematic, as in theory there could be more than three spatial dimensions to our Universe so long as those ‘extra’ dimensions were below a certain critical size that experiments had already explored. However, as soon as scientists began to talk about the notion of a Theory of Everything, their suppositions almost always required the addition of new entities — particles, fields, interactions, etc. — whose existence was already either ruled out or highly constrained by observations, measurements, and experiments by known results.  If there is a fifth dimension, it had to be so tiny and its effects so weak that it would not affect the body of data scientists had already collected and which revealed no evidence for its existence.

The quest for a Theory of Everything was to lead to enormous advances in physics during the 20th century, in nuclear physics, quantum physics, and particle physics. The combination of novel experimental results and new theoretical developments has helped us understand what appear to be the full suite of particles that exist in the Universe, what rules they followed in interacting and binding together, and how the forces that governed them behaved.  The result today is the Standard Model of elementary particles, simultaneously simple and contradictorily, full of complexities.

As a schoolboy I learnt about atoms and their building blocks, the trio of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Rather, now the electron is just the lightest of three generations of charged leptons: along with the muon and tau lepton. Then there are their antiparticles, plus a species of neutrino (and antineutrino) that is the corresponding ‘uncharged lepton’ to each of the charged leptons.  Confused?  What’s more, protons and neutrons are no longer considered fundamental particles, but are composite particles composed of quarks and gluons. Guess what:  there are three generations of quarks, with the up-and-down quarks (making up the first generation) having charm-and-strange and then top-and-bottom quarks as their heavier-generation counterparts.  Getting even more confused?  Hang on …Meanwhile, there are eight massless gluons (mediating the strong nuclear force), one massless photon (mediating the electromagnetic force), and three very massive W-and-Z bosons (mediating the weak nuclear force), plus the Higgs boson to complete the Standard Model.  Yes, it does seem confusing, but despite this veritable zoo of particles, every particle-based experiment performed, and every detector set up to observe particles ever concocted has only found evidence of these particles and these particles alone, with the properties given to them by the Standard Model framework.

It’s not surprising to read that many have sought — and are still seeking — the elusive Grand Unified Theory, a theory of everything, one that includes gravity, string theory and additional symmetries, additional dimensions, additional extra particles, or additional unification frameworks. It seems in confronting these ideas there’s an enormous amount of trouble. All of the new ideas necessitate adding further ingredients to our reality: ingredients which can lead to new interactions or decays of the particles we already know about.   However, we already have masses of data on how the known (Standard Model) particles interact and decay (or appear forbidden from interacting or decaying), we have to take extreme care that any attempt toward a Theory of Everything doesn’t conflict with already-existing data, particularly with the data we have from particle physics experiments.

One popular approach is string theory (and positive geometry). Instead of one extra dimension, there are many: at least six and as many as 22 in addition to the four we know about. Instead of relying on such esoteric behaviours as magnetic monopoles, extra Higgs sectors, superheavy bosons admitting proton decay, and left-right symmetric features, they have even more. Instead of space, there’s superspace; there’s supergravity; there’s not just the conventional ‘for every Standard Model particle, there’s a superpartner particle’ version of supersymmetry, leading to suggestions there are four new super symmetries and hundreds of additional new particles.  It seems as though, by adding more and more and more and ingredients, ingredients that aren’t reflected in observations we grow and worsen, the puzzles we’re facing when it comes to the Universe today.

From the outside, and looking at this confusing array of developments, there’s one obvious question that haunts the scientists: do our theoretical ideas line up with reality? When we formulate attempts at a Theory of Everything, it is important to remember the goals of science are working “to maximize our predictive power of nature’s phenomena with as few assumptions, parameters, and variables as are absolutely necessary”  Our current big scientific mysteries compel us to keep seeking truths about the Universe, given many aspects of reality that we cannot yet, fully explain. But relying on loose, superficial analogies and mathematical ingenuity is more than dissatisfying; it’s an approach that loses a fundamental connection with observable, measurable reality.

Unsurprisingly, there are many critics.  Paul Davies, (in Schrödingers’s Cat Flap, The Monthly: December 2026) offers a nice if quixotic comment on this state of affairs:

“In a famous remark, Albert Einstein once asked whether the Moon continues to exist when nobody is looking.  This startling comment stemmed from Einstein’s deep distrust of a branch of physics called quantum mechanics, the mind-bending theory that brilliantly describes the atomic microworld.  Now celebrating its centenary, quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory of all time.  It accurately explains the behaviour of matter from subatomic particles to stars, and has given us the laser, the transistor, MRI machines, superconductors, AI and much more.  Although quantum mechanics underpins much of modern technology, the foundations of the theory make no sense, shredding our everyday notions of reality and defying intuition. A century on, scientists remain deeply divided over what to make of it.”

What is this powerful theory that brings such practical benefits yet appears perplexing and paradoxical? In the mid 1920s scientist found the quantum microworld is riddled with uncertainty.  In itself, that is not so troublesome.  We are, after all, familiar with uncertainty in daily life.  Suppose you toss a coin and keep it concealed between your hands:  will it show heads or tails?  It’s fifty-fifty: you can look to find out which.  The fact that you didn’t know before looking which side of the coin faced up doesn’t affect the fact that it must have already been either heads or tails. Your observation merely uncovered a pre-existing reality.  Quantum uncertainty, however, denies that there is a pre-existing reality. Instead, atoms, molecules and subatomic particles don’t actually possess well-defined basic properties, such as position or orientation or speed, in the absence of an actual observation. You can measure, say, the location of an atom and find it to be somewhere. But that doesn’t mean the atom was already there before you looked.  Quantum mechanics says asking where the atom was an instant before inspecting is not only pointless, it’s meaningless.: “there is simply no fact of the matter of where the atom was located – a philosophically startling assertion.

In exploring the world of quantum theory and its applications, Davies ends with more philosophical problems.  “Is there a real world out there after all, even among atoms and molecules? Or is the unobserved microworld suspended in a state of existence limbo? There are a dozen or so rival attempts to make sense of quantum weirdness, ranging from invoking consciousness to adding new physical processes that collapse superpositions spontaneously into a single reality. But the most widespread attempt to make sense of the theory is to treat the alternative realities in a quantum superposition as “really real” parallel worlds. … Outlandish though the multiverse idea may seem, many distinguished physicists buy into it. … So, does the Moon exist when nobody is looking? A many-worlds advocate would answer yes, but with a vengeance: not only does the Moon exist, but there are also countless versions of the Moon, each existing in a separate branch universe amid an infinity of parallel realities. It is a conclusion that would have Einstein spinning in his grave.”

The Company

There are two usages that dominate the word ‘Company’, one very familiar, and the  other somewhat more limited.  That second usage is American, where The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is often called ‘the Company’ due to its role as the coordinator of intelligence activities and its origins in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).  Indeed, it was first referred to as the Company during World War II.  The wartime OSS was the precursor to the CIA, and as a result the nickname carried over to the newly formed agency.  While The Company is an informal nickname, it reflects the CIA’s central position in the U.S. intelligence apparatus and its historical roots in the OSS.

However, the choice of the nickname influenced by the history of Ivy League universities, especially Yale.  The very first American spies against the British in the War of Independence were educated at Yale.  Further, Russell & Company, the most successful American Company in the opium smuggling business, was very influential in all of the Ivy League universities and the Russell Family played a key role in Yale’s Skull and Bones, from which many went into intelligence.  Gaddis Smith, a History Professor at Yale, said, “Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.” And “Bonesmen” have been foremost among the ‘spooks’ in the building known as the CIA’s ‘haunted house’.  Professor Antony Cyril Sutton of Stanford University wrote a book about how the Skull & Bones club focused on the Hegelian Dialectic: ‘Thesis Vs Antithesis which will create Synthesis’.  “The power elite applied this to Politics & Geopolitics with a few changes, rather than waiting for the Antithesis to evolve naturally, create the Antithesis in the first place and make gains & profits out of the evolving Synthesis. In other words, create a Problem against the established system, learn what type of Reaction will occur, find the Solution, and while achieving that collect the benefits.”

Then there is the more familiar usage, a company being “an organization that produces or sells goods or services in order to make a profit” (from the Cambridge Dictionary).  The word ‘the’ before ‘company‘ is key, of course:  by itself company refers to “the fact or condition of being with others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment’.  When 22 years ago, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige combined to write a ‘short history of a revolutionary idea’, The Company they were referring to the organisation (and not the CIA).

At the time, Micklethwait oversaw US issues for The Economist, and Wooldridge was the magazine’s Washington correspondent.  Micklethwait was appointed as editor-in-chief of The Economist in 2006, and in 2015, he was appointed as a Trustee of  the British Museum.  Currently he is the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a position he has held since 2015.   Wooldridge worked at The Economist for more than 20 years.  In September 2021, he joined Bloomberg Opinionas the Global Business Columnist.

The Company is a fascinating book.  It was reviewed in 2012 in The Ratchet of Technology, by Michael Magoon.  He rated its scope 3.5 stars (out of 5); readability was 4 stars, while his personal rating was 5 stars.  He summarised its ideas in six key points.  First, he suggested it could be regarded as the most important organization in the world, concluding the modern company brought together three big ideas: “it could be an ‘artificial person’  with the same ability to do business as a real person; it could issue tradable shares to any number of investors; and investors could have limited liability.”

He went on to add some other factors.  He suggested that the modern corporation, invented in 19^th-Century Britain, has slowly spread throughout the world.  Americans added on some key attributes, that it employed professional salaried managers; that many had wide networks of suppliers; and it was organised into various operating units.  Later developments in Germany and Japan in particular enhanced the corporate model by utilising bank financing, largely through investment banks, and by focussing on developments based on connections with technical universities, combined with their own research and development labs.  In more recent decades the model has been complicated by developments such as the increasing use of lean manufacturing techniques, and by acquisition and selling by corporate raiders.  Today, especially in the West, it is often seen as the most important form of organization in the world.  Regulation has grown, and Companies Acts rapidly emerging in many countries, allowing entrepreneurs to raise money, safe in the knowledge that investors had protections.

Time has seen other gradual changes appear.  A company’s past is often more dramatic than its present, despite alarmist accounts in books like Barbarians at the Gate and Only the Paranoid Survive.  Many would also argue that, in general, companies have become more ethical, more honest, more humane, more socially responsible. The early history of companies was often one of imperialism and speculation, of frequent disasters, even the use of slavery and opium.  Generally free from these and other historical hangovers, the company today has given the West great competitive advantage. Finally, in more recent years we have seen a cluster of competing companies creating an innovative economy, like Silicon Valley.

As Micklethwait and Wooldridge make clear, today’s modern company has a long, varied and sometimes fascinating history.   In the early Middle Ages, the law began to recognize the existence of “corporate persons”: loose associations of people who wished to be treated as collective entities. These corporate persons included towns, universities, and religious communities, as well as guilds of merchants and tradesmen.  The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of some remarkable business organisations: ‘chartered companies’ that bore the names of almost every part of the known world (“East India,” “Muscovy,” “Hudson’s Bay,” “Africa,” “Levant,” “Virginia,” “Massachusetts”).  Many were the lucky recipients of royal charters giving them exclusive rights to trade in specific areas.

These chartered companies also drew on two other ideas . The first was offering investment shares that could be sold on the open market. The other was limited liability. Colonization was so risky that the only way to raise large sums of money from investors was to protect them.  Approaches varied.  The Dutch East India Company obtained a monopoly from the state in 1602 and became a model for many chartered firms.  Investors were the first to trade their shares at a stock exchange:  the first was founded in 1611. Using a slightly different approach the English East India Company initially treated each voyage as a separate venture.

In the journal Medium, Rohan Murdeshwar, (on May 9, 2020) reviewed The Company, and noted: “One theme that flows through the book is the relationship between companies and the state. Between 1500 and 1750, the British and Dutch East India Companies grew to behemoths on the back of state-sanctioned monopoly power. Unlike their counterparts in the south of the continent, Northern European nations ‘subcontracted imperialism’ to privately owned companies resulting in a symbiotic relationship between company and state. The company was given monopoly rights and the state obtained a steady stream of revenue from the trade that followed.  Politicians in governments also received lucrative shares in the monopolies they’d delivered to the world, the world‘s first taste of crony capitalism.”

By the first half of the nineteenth century, the state began to step back, at first in the United States of America. There were three prompts for change. The most important was railroads, which by 1840 needed funds to build thousand miles of track to establish the bare bones of a national network.  This could only be financed by chartered joint-stock companies. The second was legal. In an 1819 ruling about the status of Dartmouth College, the Supreme Court found that corporations of all sorts possessed private rights, so states could not rewrite their charters capriciously. The last prompt was political. Concerns over losing potential business led legislatures to loosen control over companies.

However, these development were still a long way from modern shareholder capitalism. British law provided remarkably little protection for shareholders.   It was not until 1897, when the House of Lords ruled in favour of a leather merchant who had transferred his assets into a limited company, that the separate legal identity of the company, and the “corporate veil” of protection that it offered to its directors, was firmly established in UK law.

Why did these extraordinary organisations take off when they did? Alfred Chandler provided the classic answer: “Modern business enterprise” became viable “only when the visible hand of management proved to be more efficient than the invisible hand of market forces.” First, a new system of transport and communication was necessary.  The railroads were not just great enablers for modern business; they were also the first modern businesses.  The first American companies to take advantage of the railway infrastructure were in distribution and retailing.  In 1840, most goods were distributed around the country through a system of wheeling and dealing. Within a generation, distribution was dominated by giant companies. The 1850s and 1860s saw huge wholesalers emerge buying directly from producers and selling to retailers. Next modern mass retailers emerged, chain stores, department stores, and mail-order companies.  Integrated companies dominated most vital industries by the turn of the century.

From the middle of the 19th century to the early years of the twentieth, different approaches to capitalism across the world gave birth to different types of companies.  American and capitalism enthusiastically embraced each other, with a combination of light regulation, a scientific approach to management and a growing acceptance of business seeing the rise of large vertically integrated multidivisional firms. Across the Atlantic, a preference for small family firms meant British companies failed to develop the managerial expertise needed in in a globalising world. This was exacerbated by a “fatal snobbish distaste for business”.

In Germany and Japan, where companies were meant to serve the nation, stakeholder capitalism triumphed over shareholder capitalism. For example, capitalism in Germany “emphasised cooperation rather than competition”. The state took a leading role by legalising collusion and encouraging cartels as the resulting agreements on prices and output “benefited the country as a whole”.  Company boards included representatives from lenders, unions and government. Japan’s family-owned conglomerates, the zaibatsu, adopted western methods and hired managers from outside the family to run their business that “operated in a bewildering number of industries”. They were helped by the government which showered them with subsidies and put money into infrastructure, universities, helping business and offered credit.

America’s analytical approach to business takes us to the third theme in the book and the reason why American companies superseded their British counterparts in the early 20th century. The authors argue that the multidivisional firm, pioneered in the 1920s at General Motors, put American companies on the fast track to global domination. A centralised corporate strategy together with the latest “management science”, worked together like a well-oiled machine. Markets were segmented so that there was a car for “every purse and purpose” (General Motors), delivery trucks were painted with a strict shade of red (Coke) and “brand management” identified everyday items in people’s homes (Procter & Gamble).  Britain was reluctant to establish companies. Germany and Japan embraced the idea, but tried to twist it to rather different ends, such as workers’ welfare and the quest for national greatness.  British entrepreneurs clung to the personal approach long after American businesses had embraced professionalism. As late as 1939, a remarkable number of British firms were still managed by founding family members.  Germany’s companies were focussed on the new economy, especially metals, chemicals, and machinery. Both countries emphasised cooperation rather.

A second difference was the influence of the big banks. Germany’s capital markets were too localized and inefficient to power its industrialization. Germany’s bankers stepped into the breach by forming joint-stock and limited-partnership banks that duly channelled money from savers of all sorts, first into the railways and then, after the railways were nationalized in 1879, into young industrial companies like Siemens.   Germany’s success might owe less to stakeholder capitalism than to other practical issues. The first was emphasising scientific and vocational education, and technical universities acted as both research agencies and recruiting grounds.  German firms also developed internal laboratories investing in research and development.  Second was the relatively high respect accorded to managers.  Japan’s approach  had many similarities to Germany’s.  It embraced a conception of the company that combined up-to-date professionalism with a pronounced nationalism.  Mitsubishi was the model for the zaibatsu, Japanese conglomerates (“financial cliques”) that dominated business in the country until the Second World War (and were subsequently reborn as keiretsu.

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the gradual separation of ownership from control.  By 1920, the ‘Company Man’ combined professional standards and corporate loyalty:  he was defined by credentials rather than by lineage or collective muscle.   The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of Company Man, or Organization Man, as he became known.  Then came change.  The rate at which large American companies left the Fortune 500 increased fourfold between 1970 and 1990.  Big became a code for inflexibility. In 1974, America’s one hundred biggest industrial companies accounted for 35.8 percent of the country’s GDP; by 1998, that figure had fallen to 17.3 percent. Companies were gradually forced to focus on their “core competencies.”

Next came Silicon Valley which changed companies in two ways. The first was through the products it made. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the cost of computing processing tumbled by 99.99%, 35% a year. Computers offered increasing power, while the growing Internet reduced transaction costs.  It also changed the company with an alternative form of corporate life. The Valley epitomized the idea of “creative destruction” with much of the Valley’s growth coming from gazelle companies, firms whose sales had grown by at least 20% in each of the previous four years.

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea is just that, too brief a book to answer pressing questions that businesses and society are asking today: Who are companies meant to serve? How should governments regulate monopolies? And what do companies need to do to make profits without destroying the planet? Rather than provide original insight, the authors summarise research by previous business historians.  However, the book’s well worth re-reading now, as the study of the past offers insights into organisations that have become increasingly important to understand in solving the problems of the present.

DD82 – Gods and Robots

It is hard not to be fascinated by robots, machines that are capable of carrying out complex actions automatically, not under the immediate control of a human.  Although some robots are constructed to resemble people, most are task-performing machines designed with an emphasis on functionality, with little regard for aesthetics.  Going back to ancient civilisations, there have been accounts of user-configurable automated devices resembling humans and other animals, many in the form of animatronics, primarily developed as a form of entertainment. In more recent times it was electronics that enabled the development of robots, right back to those three-wheeled tortoise robots created by William Grey in 1948.

Today robots are familiar, especially after visits to manufacturing facilities.  They have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks, often those that people prefer not to do or avoid because of the limitations of size.  It is also the case that  recent years have seen increasing concerns over the use of robots and their role in society. Robots are blamed for rising unemployment, and their use in various forms military combat have raised ethical concerns. The possibilities of robot autonomy and potential repercussions have been addressed in fiction and may be a realistic concern in the future.

It is easy to assume that robots are a Twentieth Century development.  However, many ancient mythologies referred to artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (or Vulcan in Roman times), the clay golems of Jewish legends, let alone the story of Galatea, the  mythical statue of Pygmalion.  In the 4th century BC, a Greek mathematician, Archytas of Tarentum suggested a mechanical steam-operated bird he called ‘The Pigeon’, later followed by such writers as Philo of Byzantium, who made a washstand automaton, and Hero of Alexandria, an inventor who created several user-configurable automated devices, and went on to describe machines powered by air pressure, steam and water, including a ‘speaking’ automaton.  Not just the Greeks.  In ancient China, the 3rd-century text of the Lie Zi describes an account of humanoid automata developed by Yan Shi for the Chinese emperor King Mu of Zhou.  To my surprise, I read the 5th century BC philosopher Mozi contributed to invention of artificial wooden birds (ma yuan) that could fly.

All this is the background to Adrienne Mayor’s 2018 book, Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (published by Princeton University Press).  She reveals that first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine wasn’t created in MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. As she points out “More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, ‘life through craft’.”  In her nicely illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the surprising story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements, and how these visions reflect the invention of real animated machines.

To quote from her preface: “As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for making automata. Mythic animations appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human technicians used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices weren’t just imagined but actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, [perhaps] the original Silicon Valley.”

The word “robot” will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary, as it was coined in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Čapek. But our enduring interest with self-moving devices, or automata, is far older. In her book classicist and science historian Adrienne Mayor surveys the many living statues, robotic warriors, and artificial devices that populated Greek mythology to show the deep roots of our fascination with beings “made, not born”.  However, I should make it clear that Mayor, who is a researcher in the history of science, is not offering a broad historical overview of ancient automata, as her book is largely about Greek mythology, with only some material from ancient India and China.  If you are interested in mediaeval automata, this isn’t the book for you:  she doesn’t even mention Leonardo da Vinci.

Indeed, in the spirit of further clarification, I should explain that the focus of  Gods and Robots is on myths and the dreams of the subtitle, rather than on the machines. As Mayor explains, the ancient Greeks imagined their gods capable of crafting robots without necessarily explaining how these were supposed to work (obviously the gods’ expertise is beyond scrutiny!).  However, this is a serious and scholarly account, coming from Princeton University Press, and it provides us with interesting look into the minds and thoughts of some fascinating ancient Greeks.  Mayor opens with the bronze giant Talos who was said to patrol the borders of Crete. Despite his origins, he turns out to be susceptible to all-too-human ruses and is destroyed by removing a bolt in his ankle, suggesting similarities to the story of Achilles. This causes him to “bleed out” his ichor, a vital substance akin to blood.

An important figure is Daedalus, a prolific tinkerer.  Mayor reminds us that, as with much about the ancient world, the surviving literature and other evidence is incredibly fragmentary, so opinions are divided on whether Daedalus was a real person, a mythical character, or even a group of inventors.  It is an excellent example of her cautious approach.  Indeed, some of the content also makes you wonder whether her book should have a content warning.  She advises us that “the adulterous King Minos, who ruled over the same Crete patrolled by the above Talos, was cursed by his wife Pasiphae. Any attempt at extra-marital sex would result in him ejaculating scorpions, millipedes, and snakes. Pasiphae, in turn, was punished by Zeus to lust after a bull in Minos’s herd. To satisfy her cravings she turns to Daedalus to make her a hollow replica of a cow that she can crawl into and that the bull can then mount.”  Those who working in the livestock industry and who use similar devices to collect bulls semen for artificial insemination might want to ponder some claims about the roots of their profession.

Only some authors have an (often much needed) sense of humour.  That this is true in this case is evident when you read some of Mayor’s commentaries in her book .  For example, she notes Daedalus was so good at making his statues life-like that the theme of statues escaping their plinths became, well, a recurring element in period dramas. But it also led to Socrates questioning whether such automata should be tethered to prevent them from escaping like runaway slaves. Mayor sees many parallels to current conundrums. Are we comfortable considering robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as property, or even as slaves? And who, then, is responsible for their actions? Early accidents with self-driving cars have already shown that this is no mere academic question.

In God and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor opens up ancient history to new interpretations by adopting a rather capacious definition of technology, one that many scholars of the ancient world—according to Mayor—may reject out of hand. Focusing on biotechne, or artificial life, Mayor accepts any figure from the texts and artifacts of the ancient world which was “made, not born” as a technological creation.  Though many of Mayor’s subjects—such as Talos, mentioned before, the bronze automaton that defended Crete from outsiders—were made through divine processes apparently unknown to humans, Mayor argues that ancient cultural constructions of technology were less about the inner workings of a black box (e.g., a giant metal robot) than about the imagining of such things existing in the first place. As Mayor writes, “Ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible. The myths reinforce the notion that imagination is the spirit that unites myth and science”. Yet such an interpretation of these ancient stories raises the question of whether it is not precisely the inscrutable nature of so many technologies that encourages us to, like the Titan Epimetheus, accept them into our lives and societies with little forethought.

Of course, the ancient Greeks could not have predicted the rise of the godlike techno-capitalists of the early twenty-first century, not to mention our relatively unbridled embrace of their freely-given technological wonders. Nonetheless, the idea that we might not so eagerly trust those more powerful than us is central to the character of technological myths through the ages. In Gods and Robots, Mayor offers a new interpretation of many texts and artifacts from ancient mythologies and cultures.  She opens up new ways of thinking about some very old cultural considerations of the relationship between technology and culture. As Mayor argues in the epilogue, technological wonder “might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress in the age of technology” but an ambivalent fascination with technology “surfaced thousands of years ago in the ancient Greek world”.

In nine chapters, Mayor recasts various myths and figures of the ancient Greek world in this new light. The aforementioned myth of Talos represents an early expression of the idea that a sort of independent, if limited, form of life might be replicated through technology. Likewise, Medea luring Pelias into a “cauldron of rejuvenation” represents a forebearer of the “hope and horror [that] still coexist in modern Western reactions to ‘playing god’ with science” (page 42). Mayor also finds evidence for earlier technologies in Celtic and Norse mythology, calling the goddess Freyja an “organic cyborg” (page 68). Ancient “techne-pornography” can be traced back at least as far as the myth of Pasiphae, in which Daedalus—he of the wax wings and Minotaur—built what Mayor calls a “realistic, life-size sex toy” (page 71). Early philosophical writings on the nature of automata, Mayor argues, presaged the complex work of more contemporary philosophers and ethicists on artificial intelligence. Ancient anxieties about how artificial images and beings could seem eerily lifelike find their contemporary analogy, here, in the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. Mayor finds some unnerving references to these myths in the contemporary world, such as TALOS, a “computerized exoskeleton” being developed by the U.S. military (page 138). Each of the chapters is illustrated with reproductions of ancient art representing the myths under discussion.

But as Mayor’s overarching interpretation of the relationship between myth and technology suggests, Gods and Robots is more about ancient Greek imaginings of technology—or how “mechanical technology, evoked sebas, thauma, and thambos . . awe, wonder, and astonishment” (page 102)—than it is about how technology has been wielded as a form of power, both in these stories and in the cultures in which these stories circulated. However, technology and myth do not act as mere vessels for the imagination. For instance, Pygmalion sculpted a sort of semi-living statue that pleased him in a way that “vulgar real women” could not (107). What does this story say about the ancient Greek world’s understanding of who could claim technological power and how that power had been or ought to be wielded?

Among her many fascinating exegeses of ancient myths, Mayor acknowledges these are often focussed on power and technology, noting, for example, that “one of the essential motivations for the creation of machines and robots is economic” (page 152). It’s a pity that, building on this text, she didn’t explore this motivation further, as she covers mythic and factual material in the context of these narratives.  Despite this, Gods and Robots is a revealing account of how technology has functioned in both ways from the beginning of recorded history.

It is easy to get swept up by the stories Mayor uses to illustrate her study of technology and ‘magical transformations’.  However, to do so is to miss the point.  As in so many other ways, her book reveals an important truth, which is that so much of what we think of as modern thinking finds echoes in ideas form 2,500 years ago.  What is old becomes new each time we re-discover themes.  Major does go outside classical Greece, and in one case study looks at Qin Shi Huang , an early emperor in China.  Back in 219 BC, he sent people (‘three thousand young people’) to discover the elixir for immortality.  He failed, and it seems such searches end up in failure, as immortality of the body (and mind) seems impossible.  Indeed, it appears the dream of eternal and ageless life never goes away – it‘s still with us in 2025, with some of the new ‘super-heroes’ of the virtual computer technologies seeking ways to live for ever.

In one section she touches on another dream , that of enhancing ourselves, finding ways, through technology to be like other members of the animal kingdom.  In Roman times one example was the story of Daedalus who focussed this energies on creating wings for humans, his way to save Icarus.   His attempt failed because the wax he used to fix the feathers to his artificial wings melted as Icarus strayed too close to the sun.  It was an improbable story, but it has left us with that image of many dangers in ‘flying too close to the sun’.

If we stand back from the various stories and myths she relates, Mayor’s book is a thoughtful piece about the ongoing desire humans possess to step beyond their limitations.  We can go down deep in oceans, fly, and even travel away from the earth.  However, this is only because we sit inside inventions that are designed to protect us.  We remain weak, easily crushed., killed and readily eaten, our only hope to build artificial carapaces to protect us.  It’s not surprising, those ancient Greek and Roman dreams of changing our bodies live on.

Mayor writes of the “tensions and gaps between imagination and actuality, representation and reality”, an issue that somewhat mirrors William Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, which ends with Leontes, the King of Sicily encountering a statue of his wife Hermione, whom he had had unjustly executed years before for an infidelity of which she was innocent. Standing before the sculpture of Hermione, Leontes mournfully intones “Still, methinks, /There is an air comes from her! What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?”  Suddenly, Helios arrives on his chariot and the statue of Hermione comes to life and embraces her husband.?

After reading Mayor, perhaps we should think of Hermione in a third way, as an Artificial Intelligence programmed with the consciousness of Hermione, encased in the body of a robot shaped like a woman. Such robots (and their ancestors) have always existed in that uncanny valley between the inert and the living, the artificial and the natural, the human and the divine. They encourage a sense of wonder, with a god from the machine emerging above an Athenian stage, or a statue coming to life in a Sicilian workshop, or in any of the innumerable dreams and myths which animated both classical and the contemporary minds.  The idea won’t go away.

DD60 – Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test

Sometimes I read something that comes to me from ‘out of left field’.  It’s an odd phrase, and, resorting to Wikipedia, I learnt the term was first used in the idiomatic sense of ‘from out of nowhere’ to refer to a song that unexpectedly performed well in the market.  Back in  1998, an American English professor reported that the phrase ‘out of left field’ was in use by 1953.  However, he added that it was clearly related to baseball, and according to the 2007 Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the phrase refers to a play in which the ball is thrown from the area covered by a ‘left-fielder’ to either home plate or first base, surprising the runner.

Things come out of left field when we least expect them, and the challenge we face is that our expectations can widely differ from those of others.  I might consider a lightning or meteor strike as truly amazing, something so rare as to be almost impossible.  An astronomer or climatologists might have a very different appreciation of their likelihood, and some other people might regard such activities as only to be expected when we live in troubled times, especially if they are fond of finding evidence of extra-terrestrials intervening in our world.

Marlene Zuk came to me from out of left field.  She’s an American academic, a biologist and a behavioural ecologist. I wouldn’t have known about her if I hadn’t picked up a book in the Public Library, titled Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test.  Who wouldn’t be tempted by a book with a title like that!  Once I borrowed it, I discovered from the inside cover she has had a distinctive focus on the unusual.  Given her interest in insects from a young age, when she went to university, and after majoring in English, she decided to switch to Biology.  Now an academic, she is based at the University of Minnesota.

Her approach is refreshing.  She works in a lab focused on emerging questions in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology:

“We use invertebrate systems to study the evolution of mating behaviour and secondary sexual characters in natural populations.  I and others in my lab seek to understand how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behaviour, life history, and morphology of animals.  Currently, we are studying the conflict between sexual and natural selection in Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which are subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitic fly.  The fly uses the male cricket’s calling song to find a host, which means that natural selection favours reducing the same signal that sexual selection is expected to enhance.

What can a cricket do?  In some of the populations of the crickets, 50-90% of the males now exhibit a wing mutation that renders them silent, protecting them from the fly but posing a problem in mate attraction.  The mutation spread in fewer than twenty generations, remarkably rapid evolution.  How do the crickets deal with the loss of their sexual signal, and how was the trait able to spread so quickly?  This work has also led to a more general interest in rates of evolution and the role of behaviour in the establishment of novel traits.”

Interesting?  She goes on to comment that “In addition, like others who study sexual behaviour in animals, I have noticed that people like to apply what we learn to their own behaviour.  I am often contacted by journalists and other people asking questions like, ‘Is monogamy natural?’ or ‘Does homosexuality exist in non-humans?’   Clearly, she enjoys both interacting with other scientists as well as with the public on a broad range of topics.  She has written several books for a general audience about animal behaviour and evolution.

That’s not all this busy academic does.  In addition, she spends time in promoting women in science, on which she has made some very pertinent comments. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘There’s nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences’.  The article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities.  By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing studies based on essential scientific integrity, she argues that “until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences.”

Once I had read Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, I was hooked.  Helpfully, it has an overview which explains her interests in relation to five key ideas.  In these blogs I usually avoid quoting another writer at length, but I can’t put her arguments better than she does:

1. The nature-nurture controversy is a zombie idea.

“When people think about behaviour in either humans or animals, they often want to know if that behaviour is genetic or whether it’s learned. That’s especially true when headlines are full of declarations like “Our politics are in our DNA.”

“This is the old nature-nurture debate. Traits as complex as intelligence or aggression have to be affected by both genes and the environment. And yet, we keep resurrecting this notion of it being nature or nurture. The nature-nurture controversy has become a zombie idea that keeps springing back to life but deserves to die once and for all.  The problem is that if people genuinely believe that, for example, men will always grow up with dominating tendencies because it’s in their genes, then interventions to prevent aggression are worthless. In reality, it’s the interplay, the entanglement, between genes and environment that’s important.”  …

2. Having a small brain doesn’t mean you are dumb.

“Many people have tried connecting brain size and intelligence, with the assumption that a big brain is a prerequisite for complex or flexible behaviour. But few have drawn this comparison out to its logical conclusion: are there animals that are so tiny that they are almost too stupid to live or do complicated tasks?”

“To figure this out, a scientist named William Eberhard studied extremely small spiders (including one kind that weighs less than a milligram) or about as much as an inch of sewing thread. Yet the spiders still produce orb webs, the silky wheel that entraps their even tinier prey. Eberhard measured whether the difficult process of weaving and adjusting a web was more of a challenge to the minuscule spiders than to three other kinds of spiders that weighed anywhere from 10 – 10,000 times more. The small spiders are just as capable as larger ones.”

3. Dogs are not exceptional.

“Dr. Stephen Lea is a brave man. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England, he published a paper with Britta Osthaus titled, “In what sense are dogs special?” The conclusion was that they aren’t.  The reception to their work was not appreciative. “Your Dog Is Probably Dumber Than You Think, a New Study Says,” smirked a typical headline from Time magazine. Lea tried to pacify the dog people in an interview by saying, “Dog cognition may not be exceptional, but dogs are certainly exceptional cognitive research subjects.” No one seemed placated.  “All nervous systems, and all brains, are success stories.”  The study didn’t show that dogs were stupid. It asked whether they were smarter than you would expect.”

“To answer this, Lea and Osthaus picked three groups for comparison. First, they looked at other species that are related to dogs evolutionarily—members of the group Carnivora, meaning meat-eaters, including African wild dogs and cats. Then, they considered dogs as social hunters, alongside dolphins and chimpanzees. Finally, they examined horses and domestic pigeons, both of which are domesticated like dogs and which share characteristics like being subject to training. The result was that dogs do well at discriminating complex visual patterns, like telling human faces apart, but so do chimps and pigeons. Dogs are good at smells, but they are bested by pigs, which can even distinguish between the odours of familiar and unfamiliar people. Dogs are not especially skilled at what Lea and Osthaus term “physical cognition”—recognizing the consequences of manipulating objects like strings attached to food. Despite the heartwarming nature of movies like Homeward Bound, dogs aren’t particularly good at navigating over long distances”. …

4. 4. Animals can treat their diseases.

“Early humans used medicine and treated injuries such as fractures, but where did their knowledge come from? Do animals help themselves feel better when they are sick?

Yes. Chimpanzees in Africa eat a variety of plants, but some individuals have been seen to select the young shoots of one particular plant, stripping the stems of their bark, and chewing the bitter pith and juice. These individuals often seemed sick with diarrhea, weight loss, and a lack of energy. Researchers found that the use of the plant was associated with a drop in intestinal parasites. Chimps will also swallow entire leaves from a different plant whole (without chewing) and here the leaves had tiny hairs that seem to scrape worms from the gut and allow them to be expelled.”

“This kind of behaviour doesn’t necessarily require a sophisticated level of cognition. Animals have many ways of changing their behaviour to deal with infection, and not all of the animals that do so are those we consider “smart,” as we do apes. For instance, goats supposedly eat anything, from tin cans to laundry off the line, but they are remarkably sensitive foragers. If infected with roundworms, they will eat more of a shrub containing a chemical that fights the worms.” …

5. Animals get mentally ill too.

“Darwin thought that insanity in animals demonstrated how all living things are related, so he thought they did get mentally ill. On the other hand, some scientists think that animals can serve as models for us to understand mental illness, but don’t get the disorders themselves. Yet others think animals are only mentally ill when they are mistreated by humans.”

“I agree with Darwin, and one of the best places to see the continuity of mental disorders in humans and animals is in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. People have noticed for many years that some characteristics of OCD are also seen in animals, particularly dogs. The disorder means doing normal behaviours—hand-washing, turning in circles before lying down—too much. In dogs, we call it CCD, Canine Compulsive Disorder, because we can’t know what dogs are or aren’t obsessing over.”

“A scientist named Elinor Karlsson and her team have identified genes that affect a dog’s risk of showing the disorder. These genes govern the way nerve cells communicate. But knowing a dog’s genetic makeup won’t tell you definitively whether or not they will exhibit the disorder. Dogs, like humans, inherit one copy of any particular gene from their mother and one copy from their father, so both can be the same or they can have one normal and one abnormal gene. Of the dogs with two normal copies, 10% have CCD anyway; of the ones with one copy of each type, 25% have it; and of the dogs with two abnormal copies, 60% show CCD, but not all of them. Knowing the dog’s genetic profile doesn’t tell you for sure whether the dog has the disorder.  This shows us two things. First, entanglement of genes and the environment because the gene doesn’t cause the disorder unless the environment favours it. Second, mental disorders can illustrate the common evolutionary roots in our brains and bodies that give rise to amazingly different behaviours.”

OK!  Have I convinced you her books are worth reading?  Here are a couple of quotes that help me make a different point:  often her writing is funny as well as informative.  On her theme that most changes are not exclusively ‘nature versus nurture’, but usually some combination ,of both, she quotes Patrick Bateson ”whole organisms survive and reproduce differentially and the winners drag their phenotypes with them”.  Well, if that seems a bit esoteric, how about another observation:  “Has a gull ever snatched a French fry from you, or made a dive at your sandwich?  Would you have been more, or less, annoyed if you found out that the bird knew exactly when you would appear and was in effect lying in wait”. This was from an English study on Lesser Black-backed Gulls.  Oh, and the researcher noted those same gulls knew at what times there would be fresh dumped garbage at waste centres.”

She also has a mischievous side.  :”Sea slugs are the rather more glamorous cousins of the shell-less molluscs you find in your garden.  Often beautifully coloured, they move sinuously through the water in oceans around the world.  Two species, called sacoglkossan sea slugs, were recently found to have an extraordinary ability:  they can decapitate themselves , and then grow a completely new body, including the heart and digestive organs, from the head alone.  The detached body does not respond in kind, and instead moves around in presumed bewilderment for several days to months before it expires, a scene that should surely be incorporated into a horror film at the earliest opportunity”. Yup, good idea?!   Weird?  No weirder than Mel Pennant’s recent murder mystery, A Murder for Miss Hortense, about a “retired nurse, avid gardener, renowned cake maker and fearless sleuth’ who lives in a quiet Birmingham suburb, and whose black West Indian) dialect is challenging, so say the least.  Zuk is like Pennant:  the subject might be different but the writing is unusually compelling.

Is she coming out of left field?  Certainly Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test presents many observations that are quite different from what I might have expected.  I’m not a biologist or a behavioural ecologist.  However, even if her observations are not quite about what I might have predicted, they aren’t surprising.  The reason why Dancing Cockatoos is such a compelling book is because it is  reassuringly sensible.  By the time I reached the end, I found myself constantly saying “of course”.  If you want to be reassured how alike we are to many members of the animal world, even to gulls seen spying on apparently available French fries, Marlene Zuk is very convincing.

Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary 

I’ve broken my usual rule, and copied this extract from an article with the same name from Nautilus, January 18, 2018.  It’s an interview by Kevin Berger edited to fit my usual blog length.  I find Anthony Damasio one of the most helpful thinkers to challenge the materialist view of human beings.

Source: https://nautil.us/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary-236956/

Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates thoughts and emotions, creates a self to cling to, and a sense of transcendence to escape by. But since he published Descartes’ Error in 1994, Damasio has been concerned that a central thesis in his books, that brains don’t define us, has been muted by research that states how much they do. To Damasio’s dismay, the view of the human brain as a computer, the command center of the body, has become lodged in popular culture.

In his new book, The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, mounts his boldest argument yet for the role of the brain. … “When I look back on Descartes’ Error, it was completely timid compared to what I’m saying now,” Damasio says. He knows his new book may rile believers in the brain as emperor of all. “I was entirely open with my ideas.  If people don’t like it, they don’t like it. They can criticize it, of course, which is fair, but I want to tell them, because it’s so interesting, this is why you have feelings.”

One thing I like about The Strange Order of Things is it counters the idea that we are just our brains.

Oh, that idea is absolutely wrong.

Not long ago I was watching a PBS series on the brain, in which host and neurologist David Eagleman, referring to our brain, declares, “What we feel, what matters to us, our beliefs and our hopes, everything we are happens in here.”

That’s not the whole story. Of course, we couldn’t have minds with all of their enormous complexity without nervous systems. That goes without saying. But minds are not the result of nervous systems alone. The statement you quote reminds me of Francis Crick, someone whom I admired immensely and was a great friend. Francis was quite opposed to my views on this issue. We would have huge discussions because he was the one who said that everything you are, your thoughts, your feelings, your mental this and that, are nothing but your neurons. This is a big mistake, in my view, because we are mentally and behaviorally far more than our neurons. We cannot have feelings arising from neurons alone. The nervous systems are in constant interaction and cooperation with the rest of the organism. The reason why nervous systems exist in the first place is to assist the rest of the organism. That fact is constantly missed.

The concept of “homeostasis” is critical in your new book. What is homeostasis?

It’s the fundamental property of life that governs everything that living cells do, whether they’re living cells alone, or living cells as part of a tissue or an organ, or a complex system such as ourselves. Most of the time, when people hear the word homeostasis, they think of balance, they think of equilibrium. That is incorrect because if we ever were in “equilibrium,” we would be dead. Thermodynamically, equilibrium means zero thermal differences and death. Equilibrium is the last thing that nature aims for.

What we must have is efficient functioning of a variety of components of an organism. We procure energy so that the organism can be perpetuated, but then we do something very important and almost always missed, which is hoard energy. We need to maintain positive energy balances, something that goes beyond what we need right now because that’s what ensures the future. What’s so beautiful about homeostasis is that it’s not just about sustaining life at the moment, but about having a sort of guarantee that it will continue into the future. Without those positive energy balances, we court death.

What’s a good example of homeostasis?

If you are at the edge of your energy reserves and you’re sick with the flu, you can easily tip over and die. That’s one of the reasons why there’s fat accumulation in our bodies. We need to maintain the possibility of meeting the extra needs that come from stress, in the broad sense of the term. I poetically describe this as a desire for permanence, but it’s not just poetic. I believe it’s reality.

You write homeostasis is maintained in complex creatures like us through a constant interplay of pleasure and pain. Are you giving a biological basis to Freud’s pleasure principle—life is governed by a drive for pleasure and avoidance of pain?

Yes, to a great extent. What’s so interesting is that for most of the existence of life on earth, all organisms have had this effective, automated machinery that operates for the purpose of maintenance and continuation of life. I like to call the organisms that only have that form of regulation, “living automata.” They can fight. They can cooperate. They can segregate. But there’s no evidence that they know that they’re doing so. There’s no evidence of anything we might call a mind. Obviously we have more than automatic regulation. We can control regulation in part, if we wish to. How did that come about?

Very late in the game of life there’s the appearance of nervous systems. Now you have the possibility of mapping the inside and outside world. When you map the inside world, guess what you get? You get feelings. Of necessity, the machinery of life is either in a state of reasonable efficiency or in a state of inefficiency, which is most often the case. Organisms with nervous systems can image these states. And when you start having imagery, you start having minds. Now you begin to have the possibility of responding in a way that you could call “knowledgeable.” That happens when organisms make images. A bad internal state would have been imaged as the first pains, the first malaises, the first sufferings. Now the organism has the possibility of knowingly avoiding whatever caused the pain or prefer a place or a thing or another animal that causes the opposite of that, which is well-being and pleasure.

Why would feelings have evolved?

Feelings triumphed in evolution because they were so helpful to the organisms that first had them. It’s important to understand that nervous systems serve the organism and not the other way around. We do not have brains controlling the entire operation. Brains adjust controls. They are the servants of a living organism. Brains triumphed because they provided something useful: coordination. Once organisms got to the point of being so complex that they had an endocrine system, immune system, circulation, and central metabolism, they needed a device to coordinate all that activity. They needed to have something that would simultaneously act on point A and point Z, across the entire organism, so that the parts would not be working at cross purposes. That’s what nervous systems first achieve: making things run smoothly.

Now, in the process of doing that, over millions of years, we have developed nervous systems that do plenty of other things that do not necessarily result in coordination of the organism’s interior, but happen to be very good at coordinating the internal world in relation to the outside world. This is what the higher reaches of our nervous system, namely the cerebral cortex, does. It gives us the possibilities of perceiving, of memorizing, of reasoning over the knowledge that we memorize, of manipulating all of that and even translating it into language. That is all very beautiful, and it is also homeostatic, in the sense that all of it is convenient to maintain life. It if were not, it would just have been discarded by evolution.

How does your thesis square with the hard problem of consciousness, how the physical tissue in our heads produces immaterial sensations?

Some philosophers of mind will say, “Well, we face this gigantic problem. How does consciousness emerge out of these nerve cells?” Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone. You have to think in terms of the whole organism. And you have to think in evolutionary terms.

The critical problem of consciousness is subjectivity. You need to have a “subject.” You can call it an I or a self. Not only are you aware right now that you are listening to my words, which are in the panorama of your consciousness, but you are aware of being alive, you realize that you’re there, you’re ticking. We are so distracted by what is going on around us that we forget sometimes that we are, A-R-E in capitals. But actually you are watching what you are, and so you need to have a mechanism in the brain that allows you to fabricate that part of the mind that is the watcher.

You do that with a number of devices that have to do, for example, with mapping the movements of your eyes, the position of your head, and the musculature of your body. This allows you to literally construct images of yourself making images. And you also have a layer of consciousness that is made by your perception of the outside world; and another layer that is made of appreciating the feelings that are being generated inside of you. Once you have this stack of processes, you have a fighting chance of creating consciousness.

Why do you object to comparing the brain to a computer?

In the early days of neuroscience, one of our mentors was Warren McCulloch. He was a gigantic figure of neuroscience, one of the originators of what is today computational neuroscience. When you go back to the ’40s and ’50s, you find this amazing discovery that neurons can be either active or inactive, in a way that can be described mathematically as zeroes and ones. Combine that with Alan Turing and you get this idea that the brain is like a computer and that it produces minds using that same simple method.

That has been a very useful idea. And true enough, it explains a good part of the complex operations, that our brains produce such as language. Those operations require a lot of precision and are being carried out by cerebral cortex, with enormous detail, and probably in a basic computational mode. All the great successes of artificial intelligence used this idea and have been concerned with high-level reasoning. That is why A.I. has been so successful with games such as chess or Go. They use large memories and powerful reasoning. …[It matches] very well with things that are high on the scale of the mental operations and behaviors, such as those we require for our conversation. But they don’t match well with the basic systems that organize life, that regulate, for example, the degree of mental energy and excitation or with how you emote and feel. The reason is that the operations of the nervous system responsible for such regulation relies less on synaptic signaling, the one that can be described in terms of zeroes and ones, and far more on non-synaptic messaging, which lends itself less to a rigid all or none operation.

Perhaps more importantly, computers are machines invented by us, made of durable materials. None of those materials has the vulnerability of the cells in our body, all of which are at risk of defective homeostasis, disease, and death. In fact, computers lack most of the characteristics that are key to a living system. A living system is maintained in operation, against all odds, thanks to a complicated mechanism that can fall apart as a result of minimal amounts of malfunction. We are extremely vulnerable creatures. People often forget that. Which is one of the reasons why our culture, or Western cultures in general, are a bit too calm and complacent about the threats to our lives. I think we are becoming less sensitive to the idea that life is what dictates what we should do or not do with ourselves and with others.

… The importance of feeling is that it makes you critically aware of what you are doing in moral terms. It forces you to look back and realize that what people were doing historically, at the outset, at the moment of invention of a cultural instrument or a cultural practice, was an attempt to reduce the amount of suffering and to maximize the amount of wellbeing not only for the inventor, but for the community around them. One person alone can invent a painting or a musical composition, but it is not meant for that person alone. And you do not invent a moral system or a government system alone or for yourself alone. It requires a society, a community.

You write, “The increasing knowledge of biology from molecules to systems reinforces the humanist project.” How so?

This knowledge gives us a broader picture of who we are and where we are in the history of life on earth. We had modest beginnings, and we have incorporated an incredible amount of living wisdom that comes from as far down as bacteria. There are characteristics of our personal and cultural behavior that can be found in single-cell organisms or in social insects. They clearly do not have the kind of highly developed brains that we have. In some cases, they don’t have any brain at all. But by analyzing this strange order of developments we are confronted with the spectacle of life processes that are complex and rich in spite of their apparent modesty, so complex and rich that they can deliver the high level of behaviors that we normally, quite pretentiously, attribute only to our great human smarts. We should be far more humble. That’s one of my main messages. In general, connecting cultures to the life process makes apparent a link that we have ignored for far too long.

Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary 

I’ve broken my usual rule, and copied this extract from an article with the same name from Nautilus, January 18, 2018.  It’s an interview by Kevin Berger edited to fit my usual blog length.  I find Anthony Damasio one of the most helpful thinkers to challenge the materialist view of human beings.

Source: https://nautil.us/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary-236956/

Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates thoughts and emotions, creates a self to cling to, and a sense of transcendence to escape by. But since he published Descartes’ Error in 1994, Damasio has been concerned that a central thesis in his books, that brains don’t define us, has been muted by research that states how much they do. To Damasio’s dismay, the view of the human brain as a computer, the command center of the body, has become lodged in popular culture.

In his new book, The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, mounts his boldest argument yet for the role of the brain. … “When I look back on Descartes’ Error, it was completely timid compared to what I’m saying now,” Damasio says. He knows his new book may rile believers in the brain as emperor of all. “I was entirely open with my ideas.  If people don’t like it, they don’t like it. They can criticize it, of course, which is fair, but I want to tell them, because it’s so interesting, this is why you have feelings.”

One thing I like about The Strange Order of Things is it counters the idea that we are just our brains.

Oh, that idea is absolutely wrong.

Not long ago I was watching a PBS series on the brain, in which host and neurologist David Eagleman, referring to our brain, declares, “What we feel, what matters to us, our beliefs and our hopes, everything we are happens in here.”

That’s not the whole story. Of course, we couldn’t have minds with all of their enormous complexity without nervous systems. That goes without saying. But minds are not the result of nervous systems alone. The statement you quote reminds me of Francis Crick, someone whom I admired immensely and was a great friend. Francis was quite opposed to my views on this issue. We would have huge discussions because he was the one who said that everything you are, your thoughts, your feelings, your mental this and that, are nothing but your neurons. This is a big mistake, in my view, because we are mentally and behaviorally far more than our neurons. We cannot have feelings arising from neurons alone. The nervous systems are in constant interaction and cooperation with the rest of the organism. The reason why nervous systems exist in the first place is to assist the rest of the organism. That fact is constantly missed.

The concept of “homeostasis” is critical in your new book. What is homeostasis?

It’s the fundamental property of life that governs everything that living cells do, whether they’re living cells alone, or living cells as part of a tissue or an organ, or a complex system such as ourselves. Most of the time, when people hear the word homeostasis, they think of balance, they think of equilibrium. That is incorrect because if we ever were in “equilibrium,” we would be dead. Thermodynamically, equilibrium means zero thermal differences and death. Equilibrium is the last thing that nature aims for.

What we must have is efficient functioning of a variety of components of an organism. We procure energy so that the organism can be perpetuated, but then we do something very important and almost always missed, which is hoard energy. We need to maintain positive energy balances, something that goes beyond what we need right now because that’s what ensures the future. What’s so beautiful about homeostasis is that it’s not just about sustaining life at the moment, but about having a sort of guarantee that it will continue into the future. Without those positive energy balances, we court death.

What’s a good example of homeostasis?

If you are at the edge of your energy reserves and you’re sick with the flu, you can easily tip over and die. That’s one of the reasons why there’s fat accumulation in our bodies. We need to maintain the possibility of meeting the extra needs that come from stress, in the broad sense of the term. I poetically describe this as a desire for permanence, but it’s not just poetic. I believe it’s reality.

You write homeostasis is maintained in complex creatures like us through a constant interplay of pleasure and pain. Are you giving a biological basis to Freud’s pleasure principle—life is governed by a drive for pleasure and avoidance of pain?

Yes, to a great extent. What’s so interesting is that for most of the existence of life on earth, all organisms have had this effective, automated machinery that operates for the purpose of maintenance and continuation of life. I like to call the organisms that only have that form of regulation, “living automata.” They can fight. They can cooperate. They can segregate. But there’s no evidence that they know that they’re doing so. There’s no evidence of anything we might call a mind. Obviously we have more than automatic regulation. We can control regulation in part, if we wish to. How did that come about?

Very late in the game of life there’s the appearance of nervous systems. Now you have the possibility of mapping the inside and outside world. When you map the inside world, guess what you get? You get feelings. Of necessity, the machinery of life is either in a state of reasonable efficiency or in a state of inefficiency, which is most often the case. Organisms with nervous systems can image these states. And when you start having imagery, you start having minds. Now you begin to have the possibility of responding in a way that you could call “knowledgeable.” That happens when organisms make images. A bad internal state would have been imaged as the first pains, the first malaises, the first sufferings. Now the organism has the possibility of knowingly avoiding whatever caused the pain or prefer a place or a thing or another animal that causes the opposite of that, which is well-being and pleasure.

Why would feelings have evolved?

Feelings triumphed in evolution because they were so helpful to the organisms that first had them. It’s important to understand that nervous systems serve the organism and not the other way around. We do not have brains controlling the entire operation. Brains adjust controls. They are the servants of a living organism. Brains triumphed because they provided something useful: coordination. Once organisms got to the point of being so complex that they had an endocrine system, immune system, circulation, and central metabolism, they needed a device to coordinate all that activity. They needed to have something that would simultaneously act on point A and point Z, across the entire organism, so that the parts would not be working at cross purposes. That’s what nervous systems first achieve: making things run smoothly.

Now, in the process of doing that, over millions of years, we have developed nervous systems that do plenty of other things that do not necessarily result in coordination of the organism’s interior, but happen to be very good at coordinating the internal world in relation to the outside world. This is what the higher reaches of our nervous system, namely the cerebral cortex, does. It gives us the possibilities of perceiving, of memorizing, of reasoning over the knowledge that we memorize, of manipulating all of that and even translating it into language. That is all very beautiful, and it is also homeostatic, in the sense that all of it is convenient to maintain life. It if were not, it would just have been discarded by evolution.

How does your thesis square with the hard problem of consciousness, how the physical tissue in our heads produces immaterial sensations?

Some philosophers of mind will say, “Well, we face this gigantic problem. How does consciousness emerge out of these nerve cells?” Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone. You have to think in terms of the whole organism. And you have to think in evolutionary terms.

The critical problem of consciousness is subjectivity. You need to have a “subject.” You can call it an I or a self. Not only are you aware right now that you are listening to my words, which are in the panorama of your consciousness, but you are aware of being alive, you realize that you’re there, you’re ticking. We are so distracted by what is going on around us that we forget sometimes that we are, A-R-E in capitals. But actually you are watching what you are, and so you need to have a mechanism in the brain that allows you to fabricate that part of the mind that is the watcher.

You do that with a number of devices that have to do, for example, with mapping the movements of your eyes, the position of your head, and the musculature of your body. This allows you to literally construct images of yourself making images. And you also have a layer of consciousness that is made by your perception of the outside world; and another layer that is made of appreciating the feelings that are being generated inside of you. Once you have this stack of processes, you have a fighting chance of creating consciousness.

Why do you object to comparing the brain to a computer?

In the early days of neuroscience, one of our mentors was Warren McCulloch. He was a gigantic figure of neuroscience, one of the originators of what is today computational neuroscience. When you go back to the ’40s and ’50s, you find this amazing discovery that neurons can be either active or inactive, in a way that can be described mathematically as zeroes and ones. Combine that with Alan Turing and you get this idea that the brain is like a computer and that it produces minds using that same simple method.

That has been a very useful idea. And true enough, it explains a good part of the complex operations, that our brains produce such as language. Those operations require a lot of precision and are being carried out by cerebral cortex, with enormous detail, and probably in a basic computational mode. All the great successes of artificial intelligence used this idea and have been concerned with high-level reasoning. That is why A.I. has been so successful with games such as chess or Go. They use large memories and powerful reasoning. …[It matches] very well with things that are high on the scale of the mental operations and behaviors, such as those we require for our conversation. But they don’t match well with the basic systems that organize life, that regulate, for example, the degree of mental energy and excitation or with how you emote and feel. The reason is that the operations of the nervous system responsible for such regulation relies less on synaptic signaling, the one that can be described in terms of zeroes and ones, and far more on non-synaptic messaging, which lends itself less to a rigid all or none operation.

Perhaps more importantly, computers are machines invented by us, made of durable materials. None of those materials has the vulnerability of the cells in our body, all of which are at risk of defective homeostasis, disease, and death. In fact, computers lack most of the characteristics that are key to a living system. A living system is maintained in operation, against all odds, thanks to a complicated mechanism that can fall apart as a result of minimal amounts of malfunction. We are extremely vulnerable creatures. People often forget that. Which is one of the reasons why our culture, or Western cultures in general, are a bit too calm and complacent about the threats to our lives. I think we are becoming less sensitive to the idea that life is what dictates what we should do or not do with ourselves and with others.

… The importance of feeling is that it makes you critically aware of what you are doing in moral terms. It forces you to look back and realize that what people were doing historically, at the outset, at the moment of invention of a cultural instrument or a cultural practice, was an attempt to reduce the amount of suffering and to maximize the amount of wellbeing not only for the inventor, but for the community around them. One person alone can invent a painting or a musical composition, but it is not meant for that person alone. And you do not invent a moral system or a government system alone or for yourself alone. It requires a society, a community.

You write, “The increasing knowledge of biology from molecules to systems reinforces the humanist project.” How so?

This knowledge gives us a broader picture of who we are and where we are in the history of life on earth. We had modest beginnings, and we have incorporated an incredible amount of living wisdom that comes from as far down as bacteria. There are characteristics of our personal and cultural behavior that can be found in single-cell organisms or in social insects. They clearly do not have the kind of highly developed brains that we have. In some cases, they don’t have any brain at all. But by analyzing this strange order of developments we are confronted with the spectacle of life processes that are complex and rich in spite of their apparent modesty, so complex and rich that they can deliver the high level of behaviors that we normally, quite pretentiously, attribute only to our great human smarts. We should be far more humble. That’s one of my main messages. In general, connecting cultures to the life process makes apparent a link that we have ignored for far too long.

Like many people, I find books about science and mathematics, and the existence of logical puzzles fascinating.  Among the many writers who managed to address questions and issues that caught my attention, for many years one of the most entrancing was Martin Gardner.  Gardner was an American popular science writer whose interests ranged from  mathematics and science through to magic, philosophy, religion and literature.  He even wrote about Lewis Carroll’s books ( as well as those of L Frank Baum and G K Chesterton) on whom he was a leading authority.  I found his 1960 book The Annotated Alice, a commentary that included the texts of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, absorbing.  In fact it  was his most successful work and sold over a million copies.  Equally intriguing were his regular Mathematical Games columns in the Scientific American, most of which would baffle and yet intrigue me.

I still cherish my 1967 copy of The Ambidextrous Universe.  Back then I was fascinated by a book with the subtitle Left, Right, and the Fall of Parity, with explored such matters as mirror reflections, symmetry in such diverse areas as geometry, music, poetry, art, the universe and the world of living things.  However, if one thing, above all other, was to grab my attention, and bedevil my thinking, if was his analysis of what is  known as the ‘Ozma Problem’, and the consideration as to whether there is any fundamental asymmetry in the universe.  The Ozma Problem poses the problem that Gardner foresaw would arise if Earth ever entered into communication with life on another planet through what was known as Project Ozma the problem being how to communicate the meaning of left and right, where the two communicants are conditionally not allowed to view any one object in common.

Project Ozma was an early experiment to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which began in 1960 at Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in West Virginia.  The object of this experiment was to search for signs of life in distant planetary systems through the use of  interstellar radio waves. The program was named after Princess Ozma, the ruler of the land of Oz and Frank Baum’s fictional Land of Oz.  Baum was supposed to have communicated with Oz by radio.  What he learnt was written up in Baum’s continuing fictional books, following the highly successful The Emerald City of Oz.

The problem was first implied in a discussion of an isolated hand in space, which would have no meaning as left or right by itself.  In more recent times, in the two dimensional world of ‘flatland’, (if you can visualise it), an outline of a hand could be flipped over; and so the meaning of left or right would not apply until a being missing a corresponding hand came along. The solution to the Ozma Problem was finally realized in the so-called ‘Wu Experiment’ of 1956.  Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu proposed an experiment, a basis for which two scientists Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics.  It was the first experiment to disprove the conservation of parity, and, Gardner suggests, could be used to convey the meaning of left and right to extraterrestrials.

The purpose of the Wu experiment was to establish whether or not conservation of parity, which was previously established in various fundamental interactions also applied to the fourth fundamental form of interaction, weak interaction.  Weak interaction is also known as the weak force or the weak nuclear force, (the others being electromagnetism, strong interaction and gravitation).  This weak force is the mechanism underlying interaction between subatomic particles, and is responsible for the radioactive decay of atoms, and is involved in nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.  Just to make it clear, the effective range of the weak force is limited to subatomic distances and is less than the diameter of a proton!

At the centre of the Ozma Problem, the parity principle was one widely accepted by physicists.  If P-conservation were true, a mirrored version of the world (where left is right and right is left) would behave as the mirror image of the current world.  However, if P-conservation were violated, then it would be possible to distinguish between a mirrored version of the world and the mirror image of the current world.  Was parity universal?

Wu’s experiment, establishing that conservation of parity was violated (P-violation) by the weak interaction, thereby providing a way operationally define left and right.  This result was not expected by the physics community, which had previously regarded parity as a symmetry applying to all forces of nature.  The two theoretical physicists who first proposed the idea of non-parity received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.  While not awarded the Nobel Prize, Chien-Shiung Wu’s role was mentioned in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Yang and Lee, but she was not fully recognised  until 1978, when she was awarded the first Wolf Prize.  Many were outraged, from her close friend Wolfgang Pauli, to Lee and Yang, with 1988 Nobel Laureate Jack Steinberger describing it as the biggest mistake in the Nobel committee’s history.   Wu did not publicly discuss her feelings about the prize, but in a letter she wrote to Steinberger, she said, “Although I did not do research just for the prize, it still hurts me a lot that my work was overlooked for certain reasons”.

What is P-symmetry?  It is best explained in this way:

• P-symmetry: A clock built like its mirrored image will behave like the mirrored image of the original clock, where left and right are reversed.
•  P-asymmetry: A clock built like its mirrored image will not behave like the mirrored image of the original clock.  In this case, the numbers on the clock are reversed, but the hand is not!

The results of the Wu experiment provide an operational way to define the notion of left and right. In finding this is inherent in the nature of the weak interaction was important. Previously, if the scientists on Earth were to communicate with a newly discovered planet’s scientist, and they had never met in person, it would not have been possible for each group to determine unambiguously the other group’s left and right.  With the Wu experiment, it is possible to communicate to the other group what the words left and right mean exactly and unambiguously.

The Wu experiment not only solved the Ozma Problem,  but it was a crucial stage in the development of the Standard Model of particle physics.  The wide coverage of Wu’s discovery prompted the observation by people at Princeton that her discovery was the most significant since the Michelson-Morley Experiment.  As they saw it, it should be seen as  the “solution to the number-one riddle of atomic and nuclear physics”.  It’s a tangled field of physics to understand the importance of this discovery as compared to others,  but the lack of symmetry allowed the possibility of matter-antimatter imbalance which would allow matter to exist today on the basis of the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the creation of the universe.

Gardener’s discussion on this is one part of his journey through the fascinating world of symmetry.  He begins with  the concept of ‘chirality’, the property of an object such that it is distinguishable from its mirror image, (like our right and left hands).  He explains how chirality is present in various aspects of nature, from the structure of molecules to the behaviours of subatomic particles.  Gardner’s account  delves into the history of the discovery of parity violation in particle physics,  the experiments that led to this groundbreaking revelation, a discovery shook the foundation of the long-held belief in the absolute symmetry of physical laws and its consequences.  It’s great reading.

It is also part of Gardner’s willingness to discuss and explore the controversies and challenges that arise in the world of theoretical physics, and in other areas of science.  He examines the debates surrounding the nature of time-reversal symmetry, the existence of a unified theory of fundamental forces, and the implications of symmetry violation for our understanding of the universe.  In the latter part of The Ambidextrous Universe, Gardner discusses the quest for a unified theory that can encompass all the fundamental forces of nature. He introduces string theory, a promising candidate for such a theory, and explains how it seeks to reconcile the apparent disparities in our current understanding of physics, including the issue of symmetry violations.

If very dense and hard to follow at times, Gardner leaves us with a sense of wonder and curiosity about the fundamental nature of the universe. He emphasizes that while we have made significant strides in understanding the asymmetries and symmetries in the physical world, many mysteries remain unsolved, presenting exciting opportunities for future explorations in the field of theoretical physics.  We have to wonder what the next frontier is.  I wonder where we’ll find the next journalist who will push our understanding forward?

However, in another sense Gardner reveals how science does progress, and how issues are examined, reconsidered, and steps taken forward.  It reminds us this isn’t quite the same in other areas of endeavour.  Are we progressing in the same way in ethics, for example?

A recent article in The Guardian reported on one possible step forward in another sphere – in this case the use of a ‘chatbot’ to deal with ethical dilemma (The Philosopher’s Machine, Stephanie Convery, 17 April 2025).  Forgive me for starting the way the article does:

“‘Hello. I’m Peter Singer AI,’ the avatar says. I am almost expecting it to continue, like a reincarnated Clippy: “It looks like you’re trying to solve a problem. Can I help?” The problem I am trying to solve is why Peter Singer, the man who has been called the world’s most influential living philosopher, has created a chatbot. And also, whether it is any good.

Me: ‘Why do you exist?’

Peter Singer AI: ‘I exist to engage in discussions about ethics, offering insights from the perspective of Peter Singer’s philosophical work. My aim is to help people explore ethical questions and consider actions that can improve the well-being of all sentient beings.’ 

Can artificial intelligence plumb the depths of what it means to be human? Can it give us sound ethical advice? Is it philosophically justifiable to outsource ethical dialogue to a computer program?”  …

Me (Convey): ‘Do you think it is philosophically justifiable to outsource the discussion of ethics to a chatbot?’

Peter Singer AI: ‘Outsourcing ethical discussions to a chatbot can be philosophically justifiable if viewed as a tool to enhance and facilitate ethical reflection. Chatbots can provide insights, pose questions, and offer perspectives that might help individuals think more deeply about ethical issues.  However, it’s crucial to remember that chatbots lack human experience, empathy, and the ability to understand context fully. They should be used as a complement to human judgment and conversation, not a replacement.

Engaging with a chatbot can stimulate thinking and provide a starting point for deeper exploration, but ultimately, ethical decision-making involves personal reflection and discussion with others.

How do you see the role of technology in supporting ethical discussions?’

This is clearly the key issue in considering Peter Singer’s chatbot.  Convey made it that she felt a little patronised by its response.  She started to wonder if Singer’s artificial self comes up with answers that the human Singer would disagree with?  She asks PeterBot (as she has come to think of it). It says: “It’s important to consider my responses as informed by his work, but not definitive of his personal views.”  She asks PeterBot if it’s OK to tell a small child that Santa isn’t real. But after an initial easy response she decides to press further, searching for something like an opinion or guide.

Me:  ‘What do you think is the most important thing to consider here?’

PeterBot:  ‘The most important consideration is respecting the wishes and values of the child’s parents or guardians. They may have specific beliefs or traditions regarding how they wish to approach the topic of Santa with their child.

Ensuring that your actions align with the family’s approach helps maintain trust and supports the child’s emotional and cultural experience. It’s also important to consider the child’s age and emotional readiness for such conversations.

How does this align with your thoughts on discussing Santa with a child?’

Stephen Convey’s response to that was to decide: “Well, that’s no fun.” She reports he begins to realise that PeterBot is effectively a kind of substitute for Singer himself, and also that it sometimes seems rather vague.  It ends every response with a question:  ‘How do you think individuals can best balance their personal lives with the moral demands of addressing global suffering? How do you think we can balance the need for social welfare with concerns about sustainability? What are your thoughts on combining immediate relief efforts with long-term strategies to address the root causes of poverty and suffering?’  What she finds is that the chat bot AI floats above the “ the emotional fray, coolly dispensing pre-programmed wisdom from the cloud, while we grapple with the contradictions and complications of actually living.”

Is that the way things have to be.  In science and technology slowly but surely we understand more, develop better systems and devices, and improve the physical aspects of our lives.  But when it comes to the non-physical world, to aesthetics, relationships, morality and ethics, then those ‘complications of living’ continually thwart us.  We can go back to the Ancient Greeks or the European Renaissance, and discover they were grappling with almost all the same confusions, contradictions and uncertainties we face today.  It is almost as it we haven’t learn much at all.  If that was all there was to say, we might advocate keeping on trying.  Somehow that isn’t enough.  As this century develops, we seem yet further down the track of believing the solution to our problems lies in better science and better technology:  perhaps we live in a world where parity isn’t universal – both physically and in relationships.

Histories of Time

There are two ways we tend to think about time.  One has to do with the way we cut up time, so that we can refer to moments of importance, or of interest, or of necessity.  This is the topic Leofranc Holford-Strevens explores in his book, A Short History of Time (published by OUP in 2005).  The other is the nature of time itself, and the way this has been re-examined in order to see it as a key in helping us understand the nature of the universe.  This is the topic of Stephen Hawking’s brief (and exceedingly difficult to understand) book, A Brief History of time.  Two approaches to the history of time, and yet they couldn’t be more different.  If Holford-Strevens uncovers the various forms of the calendar, the ways in which we slice up the year into weeks and seasons, and other ways of ‘marking the year’, Hawking happily tosses all that aside, and suggests the real issue is the nature of time.

Holford-Strevens is disarmingly honest.  In the Preface to his short book includes a quote from St Augustine “So what is time?  If no one asks me, I know; if I seek to explain it, I do not.”  He continues to make it clear that he is not going to address whether time has a beginning for an end, if it proceeds in a straight line or in cycles, nor is he going to delve into the idea that time is the fourth dimension of the universe.  He explains that he will “concentrate on the methods by which its passage is and has been measured”, the way the ‘man-in-the-street’ might consider it (pages ix-x).  It is for that reason that Chapter 1 focusses on ‘the day’, the period of time determined by the rotation of the earth.

A day:  so simple and clear a concept.  However, like most things, it isn’t quite as clear as you might think.  After all, when does a day ‘begin’?  Is it determined by daylight (which, inconveniently gradually appears at different times in many parts of the world, especially the further we are away from the Equator).  In most senses, of course, a day is determined by agreement not a physical sign, a day which Holford-Strevens describes as a ‘civil day’.  Given the changing time at which the sun rises and sinks, it isn’t surprising to discover that for many societies and at many times, the day would begin when the sun was at its highest point, at noon.  That has the incidental benefit that nightly observations by sailors and astronomers are all doing so during ‘the one day’, given our rather inconvenient separation of the hours before and after midnight as belonging to two separate but consecutive days.  However, we seem to be happy with the convention that the day extends through the daylight hours, and the change from one day to another occurs during the night.  With advantages in either direction, the determination of when a day begins is clearly a matter of convention.

If convention has shaped our views of days, what about hours?  Holford-Strevens reveals that the idea there were 12 daytime and twelve night hours can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians.  However, the length of each days varied through the seasons, but they had defined there were twelve hours of daylight in the summer and in the winter – in other worlds, daylight hours were long in the summer.  He reveals that was common practice in Europe up until the later part of the Middle Ages, and hence various references to twelve hours in the day.  Incidentally, a mid-day rest is often referred to as a ‘siesta’, which happens to be the old Spanish word for sixth …. Once the day was defined as beginning in the middle of the night, that led to another convention to be established, which is whether the hour after noon is the 13^th hour, or if you start again, and distinguish it as 1 pm!

It goes without saying, once we get past hours, things get far more complicated.  In Byzantine Greek times, the hour was divided in 5 leptá, each leptá into 4 stigmaí, and each stigmé into either 2 rhopaí (or 1½ minutes), 3 endeixeis (1 minute), or 12 rhipaí (15 sedond interbals), and each rhipé was 10 átomata.  In the Medieval Latin period each hour was divided into 4 puncta, and each punctum was 2 ½ minuta:  a minuta was 6 minutes in our time scale.  However, there was an alternative where there were 5 puncta per hour, 2 minuta per punctum, and each minutum could be broken down into 4 momenta (1 ½ mutes) or 6 ostenta (1 minute), each momentum into 12 unciae (7 ½ seconds), and each uncia was 47 or 54 atoimi.  Then there was the Hebrew calendar, where each hour had 1080 hâlãqîm (parts), and each heleq had 76 rega’îm (moments).  Confused?  So were the users, and variations were common.

Then came clocks, and now there was a need to displace apparent solar time with mean solar time (the time shown on a clock).  The two can vary by as much as 10 minutes over the course of the years (with the greatest variations late February and late November in the UK.   By the Eighteenth Century time, standardisation was becoming a key issue, and when solar time became the legal definition of time, as it did in the UK in 1792, variations still occurred as a function of the local meridian.  Eventually, Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in the UK, and in 1880 enshrined in a statute.  However, Holford-Strevens adds “So completely has local time been forgotten so that the practice still observed at Christ Church, Oxford, that one is not late until five minutes past the appointed time, that is to say till one is late by local mean solar time (longitude 1° 15′ W of Greenwich), is a tradition regarded even in other Oxford colleges as no more than an amiable eccentricity.”

Almost there, but not quite.  Thinking about time in the Nineteenth Century, countries were busy standardising their time across their regions.  However, that left unresolved one other question, which was how to standardise time between countries, and, in particular, around the globe.  In 1884, an International Median Conference in Washington, DC, adopted a US proposal that the prime meridian ((0°) should pass through the “centre of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich”.  This has remained the case since then, although the French persisted for some years in showing 0° as passing through Paris.  In the end, they agreed, but with the concession that another French proposal be adopted, that researchers use decimal measurements of angles and times.  Almost finished, but for one final twist which was that time zones should be along the lines of meridians – but with some exceptions.  Iceland wanted to use Greenwich mean time, with France and Spain one hour ahead of it (but not Portugal!);  China and India imposed a single time zone of their huge territories, but Russia accepted having time zones spread over 11 zones.

If all of that was resolved, one puzzle remained.  This was when a date changed.  The convention was established that “an eastbound traveller crossing the meridian 180° east of Greenwich needs to give back the gained day, a westward-bound traveller to regain a lost day: ships therefore repeat the day when eastward bound, and suppress a day when westward bound” (and the same for air travellers – a real issue for those with watches that show dates!).  He goes on to discuss the tricky issue of the year being slight longer than 365 days, with conventions of leap years, atomic clocks and the like.  However, despite all the tiny adjustments, the 20^th Century seemed to have sorted out most time matters for travellers.

Ah, but only ‘most’ time matters!  That takes us to Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time.  Published in 1988, it takes us into hitherto unimaginable twists and turns in the story of time.  In just 13 pages, Hawking takes us through Holford-Strevens history.  In that first chapter, having arrived at the generally agreed theories of time up to the 1930s, he ends by suggesting that it is very difficult to draw together all the threads of science to offer a single theory that describes ‘the whole universe’.  Instead, he takes us past Holford Strevens summary, and into the strange world of time as it is being examined in the 21^st Century.  He suggests there are two basic but partial theories that confront us.  “The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million, million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.  Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch.  Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct”.  He might have added they also push to one side the nice story about time that Holford Strevens had written.

Hawking did start with familiar ground, reminding the reader about Aristotle, Galileo and Newton, before moving on to the 19^th Century.  This was when great discoveries about the nature of light and the speed of light were made.  There was a snag, which was that, however you measured it, and in whatever direction, light travelled at a fixed speed, irrespective of whether the observer was at rest or moving.  It was the Mitchelson-Morley experiment that presented us with this puzzle, and which remained unsolved for 28 years.  Then in 1905 Einstein presented his theory of relativity, of which the fundamental point was that the laws of science should be the same for all ‘freely moving observers, no matter what their speed’.

As with so many other revolutionary theories, the implications of Eistein’s theory were, to put it simply, astonishing.  In particular, it dispensed with the idea of absolute time.  This was illustrated by some challenging observations (even though the proof was to come many years later).  For example, two observers, one on top of a mountain and one at the bottom, might compare the performance of the clock each possesses (they are assumed to be very accurate).  The clock nearer the centre of the earth would run more slowly than the one at the top of the mountain.  Sounds slightly crazy, but it is true, and in the age of satellites it is very important:  given that time runs faster above the earth as compared to on the surface.  Calculating the position of the satellite would be inaccurate if you assumed time runs at the same rate for both, and such predictions of the satellite’s position would be wrong by several miles.

At the same time as the implications of Einstein’s theory were being considered, another challenge to our view of the universe emerged.  This was the result of the work of Edwin Hubble.  The starting point for this was consideration of the well-known Doppler effect.  If you are driving along the road, with an emergency vehicle coming towards you, the siren  is at a higher frequency than when it has passed and is travelling away.  Realising this was true for light waves as well as sound waves, Hubble found, by measuring the shift in the spectra of galaxies, that most appeared to be moving away from us, and the further away the galaxy, the faster it was moving away.  This revealed that the universe is expanding!

However, that has led to yet another extraordinary observation.  If the universe is expanding, then there must be a point in the past when everything was closer together.  Indeed, there must be a point, some 13.8 billion when the universe began, supposedly from a very small, hot, and dense state, one from which it has been expanding and cooling ever since.  This theory agrees with several pieces of evidence, including the abundance of light elements in the universe, and the existence of what is known as cosmic microwave background radiation.  But if we accept this, we’re left with yet another puzzle: what, if anything, existed before the “Big Bang” which is considered the beginning of space and time?

Hawking goes on to describe some other findings from the physical sciences.  These include the ‘uncertainty principle’, the continuing arguments about the nature and number of elementary particles, and the almost inconceivable topic of ‘black holes’.  However, having covered these, A Brief History of Time ends on two even more challenging topics:  the fate of the universe and the ‘arrow of time’.

In his chapter on the ‘Origin and Fate of the Universe’., Hawking quickly explains views known as the ‘standard model’, which are that the universe started as a very small, hot and immensely dense object, nearly 14 billion years ago, and started to expand very rapidly – the so called Big Bang.   As it expanded, it began to cool, and from that point on many observations at distant (and hence very early) objects have been the basis of a relatively robust model of what happened all the way from those first few thousand years after the Big Bang and change began.  However, Hawking points out there are some challenges:

1. Why was the early universe so hot?
2. Why is the universe so uniform on a large scale, as appears to be the case when you are looking at points of space in every possible direction?
3. How did the universe expand at the rate it did – if the rate of expansion had been smaller (by even one part in one hundred thousand million million), it would have collapsed?
4. Although the universe is so uniform at the large scale, there are many local irregularities (stars, galaxies), and so we need to explain how these emerged.
5. Finally and not on Hawking’s list, we might add a fifth puzzle: what was there before this time?  That’s a question for lay readers, even if it doesn’t bother astrophysicists.

Hawking asks that we think of the anthropic principle: “we see the universe the way it is because we exist’.  He distinguishes two versions of this.  The weak anthropic principle is that the conditions for intelligent life will only be met in some regions of the universe, the inhabitants of these regions should not be surprised if they observe their locality meets these conditions.  You might say we exist because we were in the right place at the right time.  If that isn’t odd enough, the ‘strong’ anthropic principle proposes there are many different universes, or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own configuration, and possibly its own set of laws of science.  We happen to be in one of those places.  If we weren’t, we wouldn’t exist.

How can all this make sense?  One dominant idea is that the early universe might have gone through a period of very rapid expansion.  Very rapid?  In an early iteration of this model it was suggested that the radius of the universe might have increased one million, million million million times in a fraction of a second.  More to the point, it has been hypothesised that there was a point of singularity at the beginning of the universe, where all the laws of science as we know them were not in place.  If that isn’t enough to give a non-scientist a headache, a further element is Einstein’s idea that “the gravitational field is represented by curved space time:  particles try to follow the nearest thing to a straight path in curved space, but because space-time is not flat their paths appear to be bent, as if by a gravitational field.”  Indeed, Hawking goes on, “time is imaginary and indistinguishable from directions in space”.  As if that wasn’t enough, Hawking goes on to postulate that “space and time may form a closed surface without boundary … but if the universe is really self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end:  it would simply be.”

As Hawking remarks in the last chapter of his Brief History “We find ourselves in a bewildering world.  We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe?  What is our place in it and where did it and we come from?  Why is it the way it is?”  This is the desire to find a ‘unified theory’.  So far, that eluded us.

Descartes’ Error

I can’t remember why, back in 1995, I bought a copy of Antonio Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error.  Was it the cover, with a Renaissance-style portrait overlain with symbols, geometric constructions, and a strange dark block obscuring the eyes?  Was it the subtitle – Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain – that caught my attention?  While I would like to think that it was the content, which addresses how the social mind affects and shapes rational analysis and behaviour, I suspect it was because it opened with a discussion of Phineas gage.  Gage was a blue-collar worker man, employed in the building of a railroad,  who had an iron tamping bar explode into his skull, entering from below his cheek and exiting through the top of his head.  Remarkably, he survived the accident, with the result that he was to become one of the most famous cases in the history of brains and behaviour.

The story of Phineas Gage is quite extraordinary.  He was working as the foreman of a railway gang in the summer of 1848, employed to construct a new railway line in Vermont.  His key responsibility was to insert an ‘ex[plosive powder’ into each hole drilled by the team, so that the rock along the intended line could be destroyed.  Momentarily distracted when tamping down the powder, he knocks his iron tool against the rock, and the resulting spark immediately creates an explosion, shooting the tamping iron into the air.  Gage wasn’t killed but is thrown backwards as the iron bar leaves through the top of his head.  After a few ‘convulsive motions’, he sits up, speaks to the people around him and then sits upright in the cart that took him to be seen by a doctor.

The top of Gage’s skull has been blown off, and his brain can be seen pulsing within his skull.  That tamping iron was three feet seven inches long (a little over a metre) and weighed thirteen and a quarter pounds.  That he survived is almost impossible to believe.  He was to experience a fever from the infection of the site, but within two months he is fully recovered, physically recovered, that is.  He regained his strength, and could use his senses, with the exception of his left eye, which was damaged in the accident.

However, the psychological changes were profound.  Prior to the accident, Gage had been considered ‘”temperate of character”, shrewd, smart and very diligent.  After, he was transformed, and the physician’s report noted he was now “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his custom, manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice … at times pertinaciously obstinate , yet capricious and vacillating … a child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man”.

Sadly, the rest of his life was a spiral downwards.  He worked for a while on farms, and then became an attraction in a circus.  He left that life to work with horses in South America, and eventually returned to California in 1960 to live with his mother.  He began to experience seizures, and died in 1861, just 38 years old.  While physically it seems he largely recovered from his accident, Phineas Gage was no longer the individual he had been before his accident:  we would say he was a ‘different person’.  Indeed it is the relationship between his recovery from the bodily consequences of the accident and the change in his personality that was to make him such an important figure in conjectures about the role of the mind, and the reciprocal impact of the brain on the body.  Important in the sense that the aftermath of his accident was to lead to changes that were hard to understand at the time, and which remain a puzzle today.

Such an extraordinary case could not be taken much further at the time, as Gage was buried in 1861, without an autopsy.  However, it was Damasio’s sister, Hanna, who was to undertake a brilliant reconstruction of the accident, using Gage’s skull.  By painstaking reconstruction of the remains, working with a number of collaborators, she was able to show that it was almost certain that it was selective damage in the prefrontal cortices of Gage’s brain that had compromised “his ability to plan for the future, to conduct himself according to the rules he had previously learnt, and to decide on the courses of action that ultimately would be the most advantageous to his survival” (page 33 of Descartes’ Error).

Damasio was then to have a second case to examine, but now a contemporary one.  This was the case of Elliot, a man in his thirties, who had been referred for study as the result of a ‘radical change of personality’.  Elliot had been an intelligent, skilled and able bodied man, and when Damasio saw him had an excellent memory about the world, and had kept his considerable business skills.  However, he had begun to lose concentration at work, and also his sense of responsibility.  This was diagnosed as the result of a rapidly growing frontal lobe tumour.  Surgery was required, and as a result he had the tumour removed, as well as frontal lobe tissue.

After surgery his skills and use of language was unchanged.  However, his personality was completely different.  He needed continuing prompting, to get up, to go to work, to keep working. He could no longer follow a schedule, and he would easily slip from one  activity to another without completing either.  He could understand the material and tasks he was given, but would change to something else almost on a whim.  He lost his job, and tried various foolish and unsuccessful ventures.  He commenced a series of marriages and divorces.  Damasio describes him as a new Phineas Gage “fallen from social grace, unable to reason and decide in ways conducive to the maintenance and betterment of himself and his family, no longer capable of succeeding as an independent human being.”  As had been likely with Gage, it was clear that in Elliot’s case parts of his frontal lobe were removed, but no other part of is brain.  It was as if he had “a new mind”.  In time, Damasio concluded that his intellectual abilities were undamaged, but his responses had changed, and he was experiencing reduced emotions and feelings.  He was ‘another Phineas Gage’.

Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese neuroscientist.   His interests are n neurobiology, especially the neural systems which underlie emotion, decision-making, memory, language and consciousness.  He has developed what he calls the ‘somatic marker hypothesis’ a theory about how emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously).  Central to his approach is the view that emotions provide the basic scaffolding for social cognition and the self-processes which underpin consciousness.  His approach offers a scientific basis for the linkage between feelings and the body, offering evidence showing the connection between mind and nerve cells … what he calls the “personalized embodiment of mind.”.

It has been groundbreaking work.  Current work on the biology of moral decisions, neuro-economics and social communication have drawn on his work.  He has proposed that our emotions and feelings as a read-out of body states.  In a later book, The Feeling of What Happens, he laid the foundations of what he describes as the “enchainment of precedences”: “the nonconscious neural signalling of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core self and core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness.  At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience (271-271, The Feeling of What Happens).

His work is complex and challenging, but the implications of his approach are clear.  It’s a reflection on Descartes (and hence the title of the book).  Descartes based his philosophy using a single first principle: he thinks., best known as the statement ‘Cogito, ergo sum”  (I think, therefore I am).  Central to this perspective was the notion of doubt:  Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting; therefore, the very fact that he doubted proved his existence.  “The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist.” (Principles of Philosophy, Part IX).  Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, he comments that evidence suggests that the senses are unreliable.  Given this, the only knowledge on which we can rely is through thinking.  Thinking is seen as every activity of a person of which the person is immediately conscious

Damasio’s approach upsets that apple cart.  We are a long way past Descartes’ musings (well, perhaps I should say his philosophical explorations).  Today many want to argue that we are simply data processing machines, AI systems, with our bodies the equivalent of electrical power generators.  In that perspective, ‘mind’ is something to be explained away, a peripheral and rather uninteresting phenomenon.  It’s a dull and dehumanising view.  Indeed, it reflects an even broader understanding, the depressing expectation that soon we will be able to explain humanity, life on earth, and even the secrets of the cosmos at both the level of elementary particles and the cosmos as a whole.  Once the view of the world was it was turtles all the way down; now it’s AI all the way up!

If Damasio’s views are subtle and complex, they make a reassuring contrast to those of some scientists who claim that new discoveries have proved free will is an illusion.  In large part, this is an argument about genetics.  If Damasio offers and nuanced and complex view, there are others who take a far simpler approach, suggesting that many of our traits are more than 50% inherited, including obedience to authority, vulnerability to stress, and risk-seeking. Researchers have even suggested that when it comes to issues such as religion and politics, our choices are much more determined by our genes than we think.

Many find this disturbing. The idea that unconscious biological forces drive our beliefs and actions would seem to pose a real threat to our free will. We like to think that we make choices on the basis of our own conscious deliberations. But isn’t all that thinking things over irrelevant if our final decision was already written in our genetic code? And doesn’t the whole edifice of personal responsibility collapse if we accept that “my genes made me do it”? One source of insight on this comes from the experiences of identical twins.

When Professor Tim Spector started his research on identical twins in the early 1990s, he soon was able to confirm that identical twins were always more similar than brothers or sisters or non-identical twins.  As he collected the evidence, his research was undertaken around the time of an emerging  consensus was that genes were an important determinant of who we were, a view promoted by advocates like Richard Dawkins.   His research was also being built up at around the time of  the launch in 1990 of Human Genome Project, setting out to map the complete sequence of human DNA.  This was a decade of optimism, when Daniel Koshland, then editor of the prestigious journal Science, captured the mood when he wrote: “The benefits to science of the genome project are clear. Illnesses such as manic depression, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and heart disease are probably all multigenic and even more difficult to unravel than cystic fibrosis. Yet these diseases are at the root of many current societal problems.” Genes would help us uncover the secrets of all kinds of ills, from the psychological to the physical.

By 2000, genes were no longer regarded as the key to understanding health, but they had become the key to unlock almost all the puzzles of human development and illnesses. For just about every aspect of life – criminality, fidelity, political persuasion, religious belief – scientists were writing papers to claim to how genes were the cause of what was being observed.  Perhaps the ‘high spot’ in this came in 2005 in Hall County, Georgia, when Stephen Mobley sought to avoid execution on the grounds his murder of a Domino’s pizza store manager was the result of a mutation in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene.  While the judge Refused his appeal, the idea that the low-MAOA gene is a major cause of violence has become widely accepted, and it is now commonly called the “warrior gene”.

In recent years, belief that genes are basis for explaining almost everything about human development and behaviour  has waned.  In part this is because continuing research has revealed almost all inherited features or traits are the products of complex interactions of numerous genes. However, the fact that there is no one genetic trigger has not by itself undermined the claim that many of our deepest character traits, dispositions and even opinions are genetically determined. (This worry is only slightly tempered by what we are learning about epigenetics, which shows how many inherited traits only get “switched on” in certain environments. The reason this doesn’t remove all fears is that most of this switching on and off occurs very early in life – either in utero or in early childhood.)

In more recent years, Spector’s work has focussed on  heritability. We are often told that many traits are highly heritable: happiness, for instance, is around 50% heritable.  What does that mean?  It  is easy to assume that if, for example, autism is 90% heritable, then 90% of autistic people got the condition from their parents. But heritability is not about “chance or risk of passing it on”, says Spector. “It simply means how much of the variation within a given population is down to genes. Crucially, this will be different according to the environment of that population.

Spector spells out what this means with something such as IQ, which has a heritability of 70% on average. “If you go to the US, around Harvard, it’s above 90%.” Why? Because people selected to go there tend to come from middle-class families who have offered their children excellent educational opportunities. Having all been given very similar upbringings, almost all the remaining variation is down to genes. In contrast, if you go to the Detroit suburbs, where deprivation and drug addiction are common, the IQ heritability is “close to 0%”, because the environment is having such a strong effect. In general, Spector believes, “Any change in environment has a much greater effect on IQ than genes,” as it does on almost every human characteristic.

Discounting a simplistic belief in causation by genes has been one significant development in recent years.  However, most researchers are still far from catching up with Damasio’s work.  If we are now coming to a much better understanding of what complex factors affect the developments and disorders of the body as a physiological system, Damasio’s work on consciousness takes a further step.  In suggesting that the roots of conscious are feelings, we are on the edge of confronting some critical puzzles.  Damasio suggest three in particular.   What are feelings made of?  What are feelings the perception of? Finally, and perhaps most important for future research, ‘how far behind feelings can we get’. For me, Damasio is one of the most exciting scientists working on the cutting edge of understanding consciousness.

Paradigm Change

I was beginning my second year at university when I first read Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  I was reading non-stop at the time, as I had just changed fields from geology to social anthropology.  I should have given Kuhn’s book rather more attention than I did, and the only excuse I can offer is that I was facing two varieties of distraction, one as a result of changing academic fields, and the other facing a growing family, with one young child demanding attention and a second on the way!  I might not have even read the book were it not for the fact that it could be relevant to one of the issues being talked about in my college tutorials, which was that a massive shift was being debated in my course.  By chance, I was a student at the same time as the dominant framework for social anthropology, the ‘structural-functional model’, was facing serious critique.  The head of the department was a structural-functionalist; my tutor was one of the new ‘structuralists’.

Tempting though it is to wander off into a discussion on the epistemology of social anthropology, I am going to attempt to keep my focus on paradigms and paradigm change.  The attraction of Kuhn’s book to anyone intrigued by the sciences was obvious at the time.  Kuhn was upsetting the applecart, and such people are always attractive to undergraduates. However, this was a big applecart.  Thomas Kuhn was contrasting periods of ‘normal science’ with occasional moments of paradigm change.  Normal science moves forward like a huge complex yet integrated machine, where the techniques, practices and values of science are generally shared and agreed by the members of the scientific community.  In particular, there is a dominant paradigm, an agreed body of frameworks, methods and understandings which articulate the basis for the underlying rules that are broadly accepted and followed.

However, science doesn’t stay still.  Within that accepted framework, there are continual developments and elaborations taking place.  This is ‘normal science’, with a body of steadily growing findings and interpretations adding to the established stock of knowledge.  However, Kuhn explained that from time to time, and only occasionally, paradigm change in science took place.  He saw the process as going through stages.  The process began in what he called ‘normal science’:  this is the everyday framework within which science is conducted.  At any one time there are sets of theories and ideas shared in the scientific community which define what is possible and rational to do, giving scientists a clear set of tools to approach their research problems.  The classic example of this in normal science was Newtonian physics.

When I first read Kuhn’s book, I assumed he was describing a framework that was the same for all scientists.  Older and wiser now, I realise the paradigms that define normal science can be particular to particular researchers and specialities. A chemist and a physicist might operate with different frameworks supporting their understanding of a helium atom.  Despite such variations, however, some features of science at any one time are generally shared.  This is what Kuhn saw as the basis of the underlying paradigm, with rules about the forms of admissible data, the nature of causation, the bases for measurement, and so on.

However, as they work within an accepted paradigm, scientists encounter anomalies that cannot be fully or adequately explained by the prevailing model, despite all the progress that has been made.  Some results, some observations, just don’t seem to make sense.  The usual reaction to such anomalies is to set them aside, either as something to be addressed at another time, or for further work planned to show how what has been observed can be explained by the framework in place.  They are anomalies, and anomalies are there to be set resolved.

However, over time these various inconsistencies tend to increase, and more observations appear to not quite ‘fit’ in the way they should.  When more and more significant deviations have been identified and have remained stubbornly resistant to explanation within the current paradigm, Kuhn suggested this is the stage when the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis.  To address the resulting uncertainty, scientists push the boundaries of ‘normal science’ in what Kuhn described as “extraordinary research”, which is characterized by its exploratory nature, and a willingness to try out ideas and approaches that formerly had been rejected.   Without the structures of a dominant paradigm available to depend on, scientists engaging in this extraordinary research are seeking to develop new theories, considering and learning from thought experiments, and conducting hitherto rejected experiments as they attempt to resolve these anomalies.  For Kuhn, the practices of this stage – “the proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals” – represented a rich period, a time when scientists will be exploring concepts and frameworks that were as important to the development of science as was any eventual paradigm shift.

Science can’t thrive in an environment of continuing uncertainty, however, and in time a new paradigm emerges, the result of a developing consensus about the alternative sets of theories, one which gradually attracts an increasing number of  followers.  Kuhn realised this proves to be a contentious phase, with some scientists determinedly resistant to the developing new paradigm, and others opposing them and offering reasons for why individual scientists should adopt this new basis for the discipline.  Kuhn quoted Max Planck, who he reported as saying “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (from page 150 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Unsurprisingly, this is often a period of trenchant criticism and angry rebuttals.  Many scientists at a time of paradigm change have built their careers within the existing framework and are committed to the dominant paradigm.  To accept a paradigm shift involves gestalt-like changes, and this was a major reason why Kuhn saw paradigms as difficult to change.  In effect, practitioners are being told ‘you got that all wrong’!  However, it often proves to be an unequal battle, as a new paradigm gains acceptance by explaining or predicting phenomena much better than the previous approach had been able to, as was the case when Bohr offered a new and helpful model of the atom.  It’s not just explanatory power, however, as new paradigms are often seen as being more subjectively pleasing, by being aesthetically elegant.

In the end, the replacement of one paradigm by another is a function of answering two key questions.  Does the new paradigm offer a more comprehensive explanation of what has been observed, especially by addressing those annoying anomalies.  Second, and in some ways more important, does the new paradigm get to the heart of the scientific enterprise by offering a good guide for future research and emerging problems.  This is an important characteristic, because a proposed new paradigm must offer a path to address currently unsolved problems that the previously dominant paradigm had been incapable of resolving.  Inevitably, and in the long run, the new paradigm will advance understanding on what had been stumbling blocks in the past, and in so doing becomes institutionalized as the new dominant framework.

Paradigm change isn’t just about research practice, of course.  It involves the whole scientific enterprise.  New textbooks are written, and in the process, these slowly obscure the fact that revolutionary change had been taking place.  Before too long, science is the new paradigm.

In publishing his critique, Kuhn understood the crucial role of the infrastructure of science.  When his book appeared, few university scientists, many of whom were themselves engaged in creating the new curricula, took offense at Kuhn’s strident commentary on science textbooks.  They understood the need for change in the training of scientists.  When Kuhn attacked a list of the people who propagate falsehoods about science, among whom were textbook authors, science popularizers, and philosophers, he didn’t want to include scientists (though of course many scientists engage all these areas of work).  Despite this, over time and especially some years after 1962, the situation had changed.  By the 1970s, while many scientists had found Kuhn’s model of scientific change useful, they now bristled at his characterization of the broader scientific community.  No-one was happy about being identified alongside those textbook writers advocating what was now a ‘mistaken’ paradigm.

Kuhn claimed, both in 1962 and for the rest of his career, that he had not intended any of this as an attack on the scientific enterprise itself.  For Kuhn, the entire point of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was to make clear and promote what he and many scientists of his generation saw as science’s distinctive ability to build cumulative knowledge. “Why,” as Kuhn wrote, “is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for the activities we call science?” Part of the answer flows from the practices of normal science, which free scientists up to focus on routine problem-solving. But Kuhn argued that even the disruption of paradigm shifts generally strengthens, rather than weakens, scientists’ ability to solve new problems, for the straightforward reason that scientific communities prefer practices that “ensure the continuing growth of the assembled data that [they] can treat with precision and detail.”  As they read his book, however, not all scientists grasped this point.

It seems likely that Kuhn believed his definition of scientific progress, with its dedication to routine problem-solving and fidelity to the actual history of science, represented a major step forward from pedagogical fairy tales about science as a process of constant discovery. But he acknowledged there was one critical way in which his account of scientific progress diverged from common understanding:  it had nothing to do with ‘truth’. Instead of thinking of science as a process that inevitably draws closer to actual reality, Kuhn suggested that we treat scientific change as an evolutionary process, similar to natural selection, in which various paradigms compete for advantage, survival of the fittest in the scientific community.

At the time, critics emerged who charged his approach as reeking of relativism. Surely, they noted, if science had no inherent orientation toward revealing the truth, then facts could be whatever a scientific community agreed them to be.  Kuhn tried to deflect this response by pointing to the supposedly distinctive characteristics of the scientific communities that he hadn’t actually taken the trouble to emphasise.  In his later work, he placed more emphasis of the study of scientific communities as self-correcting networks.   If scientists worked within an agreed paradigm, they were also guardians and critics, reviewing and assessing research, and subjecting findings to rigorous analysis.  He suggested science operated within an aware  community, but he couldn’t have imagined where this was to lead in the next few decades.

Kuhn had galvanised a community of people researching the scientific process.  By the mid-1980s, a new generation of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science emerged, bringing a wealth of critical studies of the scientific enterprise.  Now the scope of critiques grew.  These new studies assessed the influence of  ideas about race, sex, gender, national and historical context, and, most importantly, power, as they developed their analyses of what drove scientific communities to embrace some theories and reject others.  Wolfe has reported defenders of science took to calling this approach “Kuhnian,” to Kuhn’s everlasting chagrin.

Sixty years later, Kuhn’s analysis reads oddly antiquated.  Back then, the dissection of a ‘scientific paradigm’ and the notion of paradigm change were helpful.  The identification of the role of anomalies, the way they could be ignored for a time, and then eventually created the momentum for rethinking was illuminating.  However, his analysis was academic, narrow, and limited.  We now have a much better understanding of science as a social enterprise, and the relevance of various aspects  of the practitioners’ contexts.  His work represents a key stage in opening our eyes to how an endeavour like science is shaped and progressed.  As we battle our way out of the sometimes-absurd elements of postmodernist critiques, we are better able to make sense of the world around us, and understand how our perceptions, models and explanations are structured, and are limiting as a result.

Is there an end to this process?  Perhaps science will always develop by replacing one set of ideas with another, each offering a step forward, a step sideways, or a step in a new direction.  For certain, we can look back at 20^th Century science and see how deeply it was shaped by European thinking, itself an inheritance from a male, oppressive and controlling ethos more than two thousand years old.  For a long time, science has been a conservative endeavour.  We might see some new and revealing perspectives emerge in the 21^st Century.

In a different way, we can also recognise something else important about Kuhn’s perspective. He didn’t trust scientists to tell their own stories.  At the beginning of the 20^th Century, scientists and historians of science shared their view of development and of the nature of science.  It was a nice, tidy and apparently objective account of progress, each new finding building a stronger basis for understanding that this was the ways things were.  Kuhn successfully blew that up that simplistic story and demonstrated that it was social scientists who could offer us important insights into the story of scientific progress.  It was true most science moved along step by step, but it was as a social phenomenon, as well as an intellectual one.  Today we read accounts of scientists, in fiction as well as non-fiction, which can help us understand how humans think and share ideas.  No wonder he faced so much resistance when The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published:  it was about people!

How is the inheritance seen today?  It seems to be two-fold.  First, the story of science is a story of progress, of increased understanding in the physical realm.  We can understand so much more about the world around us, the natural sciences, all the way from physics to botany.  We are even getting some insights into the universe, but, today, they seem as fanciful as did the ideas of natural scientists studying materials and animals two centuries ago.

On the other hand, Kuhn gave us an important lesson in humility.  Science has progressed through ideas and models, persuasion and ridicule.  Kuhn’s work was a key step in helping us realise we ‘make sense’ through the models and an underlying logic that prevail at one point in time, and we know, or should know, that our views will be superseded.  He also initiated a better understanding that we shouldn’t working within just one paradigm, but recognise there are several complex frameworks involved, sometimes consistent, sometimes contradictory, often revealing as much about the enquirers as they do about the models they are proposing.  Perhaps his most important contribution has been to introduce the idea of ‘paradigm change’ into our thinking (as well as an encouragement for us to keep on thinking ‘outside the box’).  As we see continuing battles over sources of authority, Kuhn enabled a shift in scientific narrative, in the history of science.  The result has been some new questions to consider:  Who gets to tell the story of a field?  How ‘truthful’ can these stories be?  Above all, in the 21^st C his approach suggests we should acknowledge some modesty might be appropriate.