"Hegel: A Very Short Introduction" - Peter Singer

Amazon link

Some days (not often) I wake up and wonder if instead of being a Marxist, I should subscribe to Hegelianism. Trouble is, Hegel (1770-1831) is so hard to understand. Back in August of last year I ordered Frederick Beiser's book, Hegel, but I over-reached. I now appreciate that Peter Singer is the place to start for the Hegel neophyte.

After a biographical sketch (life and times) Singer starts the tour with the Philosophy of History. Here Hegel reviews world history from 'oriental despotism' through antiquity (Greece and Rome, not considered the same), continuing to Christianity and then to the modern post-enlightenment state. He sees history as marking a transition from initially complete unfreedom through to its final state as conscious, free and dutiful community. (Many people considered his ideal as not a million miles away from the Prussian state which sponsored him, although Singer makes a good stab at refuting this).

Underpinning Hegel's notion of the progressive nature of history is the evolution of consciousness. Singer now takes us through one of the more obscure but central of his works: The Phenomenology of Mind. Here Hegel's Idealism (vs Materialism) is foregrounded as he examines historical consciousness developing towards completely self-awareness and the absolute. Hegel's treatment here is notoriously opaque and tortuous, brushing with ideas of psychology and religion. Singer does his best to extract a coherent line of argument.

The progress of history, expressive of the growth of mind/spirit, is a dialectical one, a transformatory logic which Hegel documented in the Science of Logic. Singer gives this work a more summary, concise treatment, drawing the links with Marx's dialectics.

The book ends with the aftermath. Hegel's more youthful works were highly dialectical and abstract; his later thinking arguably more concrete (though remember, this is Hegel) and more engaged with celebrating the Prussian state. After Hegel's death in 1831 his followers split into two camps. The Right Hegelians followed his mature thinking and vanished into obscurity; the Left Hegelians attempted to 'rescue' Hegel' from inadequate radicalism: this movement gave birth to Marxism.

Peter Singer's book is excellent, almost the perfect scene-setter for further exploration. I now understand better Marx's notes about turning Hegel on his head and removing the mysticism in his development of historical materialism.

Singer successfully conveys Hegel's overarching scheme .. but how convincing is it? Hegel's preoccupation with consciousness, freedom and duty as the true foundations of a dynamic reality could only seem plausible in a culture steeped in religion and the immanent presence of the supernatural. When Marx reconceptualised history as the dialectical process of men making history, but not under conditions of their own choosing, Hegel's ungrounded abstractions lost their force. So I've ceased to feel any of Hegel's gravitational pull on my thinking.

"Hegel" - by Frederick Beiser

Amazon link

Good, chronologically-organised exposition of Hegel's life and thought, placed within the context of the intellectual life of the times. In some places the detail is overpowering. There are two main areas of weakness: firstly there is insufficient explanation of the key conceptual edifices of Hegel's system (I am thinking particularly of the Weltgeist); secondly Hegel's actual works are not discussed specifically but only in passing via Hegel's underlying ideas.

I am still little clearer as to what Hegel actually wrote in the Phenomenology of Spirit or the Science of Logic. I had hoped for better.

Update: A better starting point is Peter Singer's "Hegel: A Very Short Introduction".

[First posted in August 2017].

RSPB Ham Wall

Clare and Alex in the canal-side hide

The wetland

Path looking back from the Noah hide to the canal

The path in the southerly direction towards the hide

The reed beds

The Noah hide

Wind-driven waves and foam

Highland cattle (on the fenced off opposite side)

For late March it was astonishingly cold, with a brisk and chilly west wind. No booming bitterns.

Of cows and Jupiter

Astonishing fact of the day:

"Jupiter has as much gravitational tug on a person as a cow two feet away."

This scarce antiquarian book ...

Amazon link

"This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work."

Alex reading this book from one of his ancestors (on his mother's side).

"Manuscript autobiography, 265 pp, 1938, regarding his life as an English fisherman and his rise to prominence. George Youell (1868-1943) was the father of John Youell and an English fisherman."

The badgers are back!

Clare thought they had all been shot but it appears they've been coming to our garden each night to hoover up birdseed (and any kitchen leftovers). Surprisingly, there were more badgers than cats in the trail camera clips.

Here's a particularly clear picture:

and here's a clip (8 seconds) showing a pair.

Clare's hedgehog house arrived today and has just been deployed out back. Hedgehogs are a tasty snack for a badger, so future events in the garden should be interesting.

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Earlier posts showing badgers from 2016 and 2015.

Russia and America should be friends?

At West Hunter, Greg Cochran writes:

"the true strategic threat to both Russia and the United States is China (not the casbah, for God’s sake): the cowboys and the Cossacks should be friends."

This makes sense from an American nationalist viewpoint: superpower politics. It also makes long-term strategic sense for Russia, looking at their Siberian border with China.

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If super-intelligent, incredibly-prosocial and pleasantly-attractive aliens landed in, say, Australia with a view to world colonisation - should we be in favour? They sound nicer than us. Or should we be with Juan Rico: on the bounce and looking out for the interests of the human race, come what may. My species, right or wrong.

Amazon link

Frank Salter had a flawed and controversial book, "On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration", out in 2006 arguing that:

"In modern Darwinian theory, bearing children is only one way to reproduce. Since we share genes with our families, ethnic groups, and the species as a whole, ethnocentrism and humanism can be adaptive."

But the average level of relatedness between random members of a genetically-homogeneous nation is about 1/128 (discussion here). This doesn't seem nearly enough to trigger any emotional feelings of kin solidarity, see here.

Nevertheless, there's plainly a measure of emotional solidarity underlying nationalism. It seems to work through shared cultural signifiers (appearance, dress, behaviour, speech patterns, interpersonal style, social conventions and ritual) rather than that you know your co-ethnics at an individual level and feel some nationalistic kin-warmth towards them. That emotional propensity seems also to have been selected for - you don't see it in other animals. It does, however, facilitate the building of empires, which are astonishingly good for your genes.

Disruptive automation in the sex trade: part 2

In Part 1 we reviewed the recent introduction (in Dortmund, Barcelona, Paris, Gateshead, with planned expansion into London & New York) of 'brothels' populated by sex dolls. The shortcomings of a dumb, passive and inert RealDoll (wikipedia) are fairly well-known. It turns out to be very difficult to add limb mobility, subtly-choreographed movements and intimate vocal interactivity (a la chatbot) to the basic product - although of course people are working on it.

There is a halfway house.

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Klara used to work the sex lines. She'd lounge in her recliner in her shellsuit in her living room, headset on, daytime TV on mute. Her callers would describe their fantasies, ask intimate questions, pay premium rates. She would string them along, imagination no longer needed, brain in neutral, hackneyed words spilling out.

But now .. her employer had brought her a new business venture. She faced a computer screen, her hand around a joystick. Only the headset was familiar. On screen the life-sized doll lounged provocatively on a king size bed. There were several cameras high on the walls - she could view and zoom from any angle.

The doll was certainly inert although its silicone body, she had been told, would be warm to the touch. More relevantly, the doll had inconspicuous microphones in its ears and a small speaker hidden behind its nose. These were connected to Klara's headset.

Klara would never see the patron's face - some clever AI fuzzed it out - but she could see his body, the patterns of movement, hear what he said. Some of the punters had a fantasy in mind: all Klara had to do was play along, provide audible accompaniment. She was used to to that. In other cases the punters were naive and confused, or positively wanted suggestions. Here Klara was in charge and she enjoyed playing the dominatrix.

And then there were the cases where the customer wanted to play a little rough. Klara wasn't keen on those but she did have a panic button. The sound of the guard's voice interrupting over the internal speakers was a joy. Possibly followed by the guard himself. Other girls were not so queasy; there was some preselection, Klara knew.

Klara was quite aware that the dolls would get better. In future years she could imagine herself as the remote human driver of a self-driving car, there to handle what the onboard systems couldn't yet do. But redundancy wouldn't be an issue for a long time yet.

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One day, Klara was well into her shift when a new punter entered the room. She couldn't see his face of course but that body, those lithe movements .. were all too familiar.

He had said he would be away at a conference, but there, right in front of her eyes, ... !

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More: [Endgadget article (NSFW)]:  RealDoll's first sex robot took me to the uncanny valley.

Disruptive automation in the sex trade: part 1

This was all over the tabloids in January, when the establishment opened in Paris, but it only came to my attention this morning when the broadsheets carried the story (about attempts to close it down).

She seems rather .. quiet ..

From the BBC:

"Paris councillors are due to decide on the future of a business where clients are charged €89 ($109; £78) to spend an hour with a silicone sex doll, local media report. Communist councillors and feminist groups have been calling for the closure of Xdolls. Currently, Xdolls is registered as a games centre, but opponents argue it is effectively a brothel. Owning or operating a brothel is illegal in France.

Xdolls is located in an anonymous-looking flat in the French capital and opened last month. Clients are mainly men, though some couples also visit, owner Joachim Lousquy, who formerly managed e-cigarette shops, told Le Parisien newspaper. Xdolls has three rooms, each containing a silicone sex doll measuring about 1m45 (4ft 7in) and worth several thousand euros. Customers make their booking and payment online, and the exact address is kept secret. Not even the neighbours are aware of the nature of the business, Mr Lousquy says. ..

Lorraine Questiaux, lawyer and spokesperson for a Paris feminist association, says "that in France, every year, there are 86,000 women raped". "Xdolls is not a sex shop. It's a place that generates money and where you rape a woman," Ms Questiaux, who also wants the centre closed, adds."

Update: 23rd March. The enterprise has been approved by the Council of Paris.

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It's normal to see business productivity enhanced by increased automation. Admittedly the dolls seem to be far inferior in competence to human operatives but - as with all disruptive innovations - that will surely improve. Assuming no legal obstacles this would seem to be a growth industry, driving innovation by increasing effective demand.

I see the industry developing in two directions.*

At the bottom of the market the trend will be to maximise automation. You book on an app, your credit card gets you entry into a cubicle, you use the doll, you leave. An AI-camera checks to make sure you didn't break anything (they have your credit card details). A human cleaner** to prepare the next session - robots aren't yet good at dexterity.

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At the top of the market - for the middle-class consumer who needs euphemisms - I see a therapy centre. You make an appointment, you're greeted by a pleasant (human) receptionist-hostess and shown to an interview room where you engage with a smooth chatbot to determine your psychosexual profile.

You are then directed into a well-appointed room where you engage with the doll for your treatment. Afterwards you do a little post-encounter therapy back with the chatbot, perhaps over a drink, and you're done .. until the next session. Two employees on site: hostess and security guard/cleaner.**

The barriers to entry seem low and the business doesn't look a lot different to any other naturalistic, holistic, psychotherapeutic, new-age consultancy - from the outside. And it should only be a few years until the currently passive doll is upgraded into a fully-automated mobile and talkative sex therapist for an even better experience.

Next: Disruptive automation in the sex trade: part 2.

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* My examples are rather introverted. The collective sports/sales/stag/military markets could be served in conjunction with hotels, restaurants, pubs .. and the MoD.

** The guard/cleaner has a covert sideline in DNA samples for the police .. and journalists.

Tyler Cowen: "a Straussian reading"

Leo Strauss - a role model for our age

Marginal Revolution (the Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok website) has a thing about 'Straussian Reading'. A commentator explains:

"It's Leo Strauss. He means, there's a hidden meaning in the text, that you may need some background information on the author and subject to understand it. This section on Strauss' biography on Wikipedia summarizes the point:

'In 1952 he [Strauss] published Persecution and the Art of Writing, arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction.

Esoteric writing serves several purposes: protecting the philosopher from the retribution of the regime, and protecting the regime from the corrosion of philosophy; it attracts the right kind of reader and repels the wrong kind; and ferreting out the interior message is in itself an exercise of philosophical reasoning.'

Cowen frequently uses the term in that sense.

From an example in your search. The Straussian interpretation of Taylor Swift using TS as a brand in China could mean she's referencing Tienanmen Square - attempting to signal tacit support for pro-Democracy groups in China.

Just like in that example, Straussian reading means putting interpretations at risk for lots of false positives (except when the author suggests such interpretations may be appropriate)."

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Why do I mention this here? Not only because it's a useful concept (tactic?) but also because one senses that public hysteria is becoming more intense.

Cowen frequently speaks admiringly of the Straussian tactic, reflecting on the weak position of academics in the States when confronting the howling tide of righteous moralising: way too many blasphemous truths can no longer be said.

I suppose when Straussianism becomes universal, the Russians will prove to have an historic competitive edge.

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I find Straussianism difficult myself. Moral outrage often encourages one to just set the record straight. There is also a suggestion of cowardice in excessive indirection. I notice some writers cope by using rather technical language which the arbiters of the good fail to understand.

I resolve to up my level of intelligence and write with more obliquity, trusting you to read the white lines as well as the text.

No communism without abundance

PDF link

This is the exact quote I was looking for (page 11 of the text above).

"this development of productive forces ... is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced"

Marx, The German Ideology, Part I, Feuerbach, Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook.

This remark seems commonplace, but its cold-eyed assessment of human nature contradicts the voluntarism which underlay Stalinism - and other over-enthusiastic projects to build the socialist utopia based on good intentions.

A Culture fit for dodos

In yesterday's post, "Paul Kincaid on Iain M. Banks", we discussed Paul Kincaid's take on the Culture, Iain Banks's attempt to define a utopian civilisation. Kincaid argued that this attempt was a failure, that the covert unpleasantness of the Culture expressed contradictions within Iain Banks's own high-minded liberalism.

Paul Kincaid was absolutely right. Social liberalism, the celebration of Enlightenment values, is an edifice founded upon ungrounded abstractions: 'individualism', 'freedom from oppression', 'human rights'. While such slogans are and were undoubtedly intoxicating in the struggle against authoritarian (and in particular pre-capitalist) formations, in content they are dramatically disconnected both from the historical specificities of the capitalism they served to inaugurate and from the evolutionary-ecology of the human animal itself.

Can we do better?

Consider an ecosystem of multiple species, many in a predator-prey relationship. Let's be specific and consider the pigeon. Here's a species whose evolutionary-physicality exactly captures its ecological constraints. Its senses are acute because it needs to forage, to avoid predators and to mate. It enjoys tasty food and is disgusted by poisons because any inferior affect would lead to loss of fitness - it might die before reproducing and those suboptimal genes would fail to propagate.

The pigeon tells us that what it really wants is unbounded food, plenty of mating opportunities, a safe nest and no predators. Should we listen to it?

The end of utopia

Occasionally animals find themselves on islands with no natural predators and plenty of resources: a truly benign environment. No doubt they would consider that they had found utopia. Yet a Malthusian-powered evolutionary descent soon follows. Their descendants lose sensual acuity, mobility and intelligence - all energy-wasters in utopia. The end result (starting out as a pigeon) is the dodo.

At the level of the individual creature's wish-list, utopia does not end well.

If the species could speak to us collectively (!) then it would tell us a different story. It would ask for a testing, but not too-testing environment. One where there were problems that the truly competent animal could overcome, thereby proving themselves and securing fame, fortune and mates. There would, sadly, be unfortunate creatures with greater than average genetic load, creatures which would be culled by natural selection. But the species, in its descendant cohort, would maintain itself in pristine condition.

You see the problem. All of this applies to humans too at every level: genetic, phenotypic and psychological. No-one even wants the all-mod-cons beach holiday their whole life. But by our very smartness, our technological competence, our innovative economies, we're on track to remove all those threats which make life a challenge. We'll start by being bored .. and then devolve into complacent human dodos.

I don't think Iain Banks wanted that conclusion, but he didn't know how to avoid it either. And evasion is the enemy of great literature.

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You say we'll correct mutational load by genetic engineering. But we end up with an 'enhanced' species-genotype uncorrelated with its undemanding ecology. Hard to see how such a mismatch leads to psychological tranquility: bored in paradise.

The dodo was never bored: it positively evolved to become complacent and easily-pleased.

It's worth reminding ourselves that all of our much-prized human attributes are an evolutionary response to the challenges of our previous environments. We value high intelligence, for example, because it enables us to manage our complex societies (the abstractions underlying science, technology, politics, processes, finance, ...) while human language was the key to adaptive social coordination and cohesion on those dangerous savannas.

If we simplify our interaction with our environment by off-loading complexities (as the Culture does with its AIs, its Minds) then there is no very good reason for us being more cognitively or physically capable than a mollusc.

Again I ask the shade of Iain Banks: what ecological problems in the desired-future are humans to be bioengineered to cope with?

Paul Kincaid on Iain M. Banks

Amazon link

I bought this on the strength of Abigail Nussbaum's positive review. Russell Letson also has a review, which includes this:

"Kincaid outlines how the Culture was devised as a delib­erate counter to earlier (particularly American) space-adventure conventions that Banks saw as militarist and imperialist and infected with “gran­diose superhero thinking that has no place in the communal, socialistic approach that Banks takes in his fiction.”

He also argues for a break in that group of books – that the Culture sequence was essentially finished before the last three books (Matter, Surface Detail, and The Hydrogen Sonata, 2008-2012) were written – that the project was complete and that the later books represent a kind of retreading of old ground.

The job of the first set of Culture novels would seem to be to deconstruct not only the political notions behind traditional space opera, but also notions of utopia – to push at the contradictions in the Culture’s own view of itself. Excession, for example,

'is about presenting the Culture with barriers it is reluctant to cross…. We begin to get a picture of the Culture as a deeply conservative society, too attached to its comforts and plenty to be easy with the idea of risk or change…. we see that it is far less a utopia, far less perfect, than it likes to present itself.'

Like the Culture itself, Banks’s thinking about attempts to square the circle of power, freedom, and ethical behavior in an imperfect world results in unresolved contradictions."

I've read all of Iain Banks's science-fiction (I abandoned Feersum Endjinn) but I do find the novels curiously unmemorable. Partially this is to do with their complex structure, the large cast of characters with indecipherable names, and detailed and baroque settings which can overwhelm the storyline. Sometimes it's hard to see the wood for the trees.

The first great service Paul Kincaid offers in this impressive piece of literary criticism is to confirm these complexities and to summarise the novels for the floundering reader. More than this, Kincaid dives deep into each book's thematic unconscious, distilling what he believes to be motivating the author.

He does a pretty good job. Kincaid sees Banks as eternally wrestling with his ideal society. If utopia is post-scarcity communism where oppression is definitionally absent, then how do people spend their time? If the Culture is about freedom, how does it deal with cultures which don't share the Culture's value system?

Perhaps in Banks's earliest formulations, these seemed distant and rather easy problems to solve. Yet the more he engaged, the more problematic the Culture became. In the end, utopia seems smug, boring, shallow, selfish, cowardly - even imperialistic.

Banks was a smart guy but he was also a proud bien-pensant liberal, a world-view which is curiously unreflective of the true roots of its value-system. In that spirit, Banks never quite resolved the contradictions at the heart of his own philosophy.

This is a mature, comprehensive and above all interesting take on all of Iain Banks's work and it's recommended.

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Next: A Culture fit for dodos

A beta-level simulation

Amazon link

I'm just finishing "Elysium Fire" by Alastair Reynolds, his follow-up to "Aurora Rising: Previously published as The Prefect". It's a perfectly serviceable SF techno-thriller: the action moves along briskly enough.

I am most intrigued, though, by the concepts of alpha- and beta-level simulations.

"An alpha-level simulation was a digitised version of a scanned human mind, perfectly replicating its brain structure. It was fully capable of remembering past experiences, learning, adapting, and was fully self-aware.

Later technologies allowed individuals to survive the scanning process, leaving essentially two copies of the same person, one physical and one digital. ...

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Beta-level simulations were sophisticated computer programs designed to mimic a person in appearance, mannerisms, and thought-patterns. While capable of successfully impersonating a human mind down to their most minute idiosyncrasies, they were not in fact self-aware -- they were just near-perfect imitations of life. As such, they enjoyed no legal rights or protections.

In Yellowstone society, and presumably other Demarchies, it was considered a most egregious social faux pas to allow someone to believe a beta-level simulation was in fact alpha-level."

A continuing theme is that after someone is murdered, they may well have had a shadowing beta-level simulation which the authorities then sequester for interrogation - a chance to interview the deceased victim, if you like. It's quite a shock when they're told they are dead.

The beta-levels generally don't know they're simulations and the hero, Inspector Dreyfus, is conflicted as to whether he should adopt the instrumental view ("I'm interviewing an expert system") or the intentional view ("I'm interviewing a digitalised person"). For the reader, this dilemma is never truly resolved.*

It does give me itchy fingers. I want to go back to my Lisp environment, to my 'Eliza' system and my automated theorem-prover. I'm sure I could knock up a fairly awesome beta-level myself, if we were talking, say, of a cat .. .

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* I suppose a remote descendant of Replika will give us all beta-level simulations.

The biotech road to full automation

In my post "Advanced AI is indistinguishable from slavery" I wrote about the advantages biotechnology brings for a future post-capitalist society. Communist theory has traditionally counterposed central planning to the 'anarchy' of the market. But that often-criticised anarchy is actually rather biological, a kind of exploratory behaviour in which potential new needs are tested for sustainable effective demand.

By contrast, as János Kornai has pointed out at length, our experience of central planning has identified insuperable principal-agent problems together with a structural inability to properly engage with real human needs.

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A global multicellular biosphere has existed on this planet for five hundred million years, exhibiting persistence and dynamic self-regulation in the absence of any intelligent oversight or central planning.

Biology is local while ecology is global.

Compare this with our global capitalist economy, the ongoing maintenance of which requires the mandatory coordination of human effort, intelligence and conscientiousness. It's because apart from human workers, other means of production are generally incredibly dumb. We work on metals, plastics, glass, oil, coal .. none of which do anything useful without the application of human labour mediated by clunky tools.

Peter Hamilton's vision of the Eden habitat (by Jim Burns)

Plants and animals, by contrast, are self-supporting nanotechnology of such stupefying sophistication and complexity that we can't even emulate the simplest possible animal (C. elegans). If we could bioengineer plants and animals to address our portfolio of needs (substituting for our present reliance on dumb stuff) the complexities and endless engagement of humans in running the economy could in large part be finally dispensed with.

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Some people think that a linear extrapolation of AI and robotics on our current technology base will deliver full automation, but (a) we're a long way from embodied AGI robots, and (b) the global supply chains to build and maintain such artifacts of metal and plastic would be incredibly brittle .. not at all to be relied upon. They should be discretionary extras around a biotech core for future societies.

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I imagine a rather sneering response: "Wait till an adversary comes up against you with high-bandwidth satellite comms, tanks, hypersonic missiles and nukes. See how far your genetically modified palm trees will take you then. Are you going to fight back with Game of Thrones-style dragons?"

So how would a super-sophisticated biotech-civilisation respond to such a threat? By using smart biology (including servitors) to build counter-artefacts. Nothing says that every element of a future biotech-civilisation must be fabricated from protoplasm: that's not even true in today's biosphere. Biotech just gives you a fantastic set of new options.

A deniable assassination drone

It is claimed that America made more than 600 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the communist leader of Cuba.

One can think of one or two contemporary leaders that the US administration might also wish to terminate but in addition to competence, the problem has always been that of deniability.

Dropping something lethal on the target from a great height is rarely a problem.

As the recent assault on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury indicates, covert administration of a lethal agent is not a problem if you have access; but wary leaders take precautions. The idea of 'slaughterbots' comes to mind, but these are high-tech. Inevitably some will crash and only partially burn - and then the adversary's weapons lab will point the finger.

The answer is to use a biological vector - an insect such as a wasp or bee comes to mind. Surely with American leadership in deep learning and artificial neural nets this must be a trivial engineering problem? But not so. Virtually nothing is known of how the insect brain controls the insect body, in terms of flight control, visual processing and goal attainment.

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The simplest possible organism with a nervous system may be C. elegans.

"Nervous systems are complex, highly parallel information processing architectures made of seemingly imperfect and slow, yet highly adaptive and power-efficient components to carry out sophisticated information processing functions.

However, despite the rapidly growing body of knowledge on almost every aspect of neural function, currently no computational model or hardware emulation exists that is able to describe or even reproduce the complete behavioural repertoire of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, an organism with one of the simplest known nervous systems.

This is particularly surprising because C. elegans, a soil-dwelling worm with a life span of a few days, 1 mm long and 80 µm in diameter, is one of the five best characterized organisms. It is multicellular and develops from a fertilized egg to an adult worm just as a human being does. Despite its small genome (~ 10 M base pairs), there is about 40% homology to the human genome (3.2 G base pairs).

The adult hermaphrodite is comprised of exactly 959 cells, including 95 muscle cells and 302 neurons. The morphology, arrangement and connectivity of each cell including neurons have been completely described and are found to be almost invariant across different individuals. There are approximately 7000 chemical synaptic connections, 2000 of which occur at neuromuscular junctions, and approximately 600 gap junctions (White et al., 1986).

All of this data including the connectome, the detailed interconnectivity map of the 302 neurons through synapses, is publicly available through the Worm Atlas (Achacoso & Yamamoto, 1992; Oshio et al., 2003; Varshney et al., 2011).

Despite its simplicity, the nervous system of C. elegans does not only sustain vital body function, but generates a rich variety of behavioural patterns in response to internal and external stimuli. These include associative and several forms of nonassociative learning that persist over several hours (Hobert, 2003). Interestingly, many processes of learning and memory in C. elegans are highly conserved across evolution, which demonstrates that there are universal mechanisms underlying learning and memory throughout the animal kingdom (Lin & Rankin, 2010).

With all of this data, information and modern computer technology at hand, it is surprising that there is yet no comprehensive artificial C. elegans emulation system from which the principles of neural information processing underlying behaviour can be derived. The Si elegans project aims to fill this gap.

Research into neural networks (NN) and artificial or computational intelligence (AI/CI) has tried for more than 30 years and not succeeded in understanding the signal processing in a simple network made of only 302 neurons.

The main reason is: nervous systems work in different ways than current computers and any simulation running on them. In nature, information is processed in a highly parallel and "plastic" fashion, which cannot be sufficiently reproduced or simulated in hard-wired, serial multi-tasking or even parallel-linked von Neumann architectures."

I'm not sure I completely believe that final sentence, although the complete operation of neuron-neuron communication is far from understood.

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Amazon link

This (2013) ebook, " Engineered Biomimicry: Chapter 9. Flight Control Using Biomimetic Optical Sensors" comes with the following summary:

"Insects are dependent on the spatial, spectral, and temporal distributions of light in the environment for flight control and navigation. This chapter reports on flight trials of implementations of insect-inspired behaviors on unmanned aerial vehicles. Optical-flow methods for maintaining a constant height above ground and a constant course have been demonstrated to provide navigational capabilities that are impossible using conventional avionics sensors.

Precision control of height above ground and ground course were achieved over long distances. Other demonstrated vision-based techniques include a biomimetic stabilization sensor that uses the ultraviolet and green bands of the spectrum and a sky polarization compass. Both of these sensors were tested over long trajectories in different directions, in each case showing performance similar to low-cost inertial heading and attitude systems."

If we could replicate the insect's brain on hardware and remotely couple it to an insect body, a possible mission architecture sees a stealthed RPV deliver a cache of insects to within a couple of kilometres of the target.

The swarm is released and remotely flown to the target - where some kind of lethal toxin is delivered. The insects then disperse to receive a 'destruct' command. If any bodies are found, there will be little left to show that they have been engineered.

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See also: Openworm. All these 'worm simulation' projects seem to be moribund, if not dead. I wonder why?

My top twelve SF novels

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has his "Ten favorite science fiction novels". It's a party game anyone can play: here are mine - in no particular order.

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1. Eon by Greg Bear (and its follow-on, Eternity)

Amazon link

Great sense of wonder SF on the grandest of canvases. The plot seriously holds attention while characterisation is not bad, at least for the major characters.

2. Quarantine by Greg Egan 

Amazon link

Cowen prefers "Permutation City", Egan's 'reality is computation' novel (cf Dust Theory), but the many-worlds interpretation of QM is so compelling a setting and the private-eye thriller-based plot so convoluted that I felt compelled to buy this novel twice.

3. The City and the City by China Miéville

Amazon link

Cowan prefers "EmbassyTown" which is clever but, for me, less involving. The City and the City has a most unusual setting, the only novel I've read centred around the social construction of reality - and while the police procedural plotting and characterisation is a bit clunky, the whole book amazes throughout. The idealism of the premise is capped by its superpowered final denouement, a brutal assertion of materialism.

It's shortly to be a four part series on BBC2 (April 6th 2018).

4. Hyperion (and its three successors) by Dan Simmons 

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Cowan agrees with this choice. The four novels are beautifully written, have cultural depth and immerse the reader. Some of the scenes are truly shocking.

5. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan 

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The story of brutal but fundamentally moral Takeshi Kovacs. The successors are good also and complete the exploration of Morgan's interestingly-complex protagonist. Warning: high levels of sex, torture and violence throughout; most characters lacking in personal empathy .

6. The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

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The writing is clunky but the plot and setting completely compelling. You won't read a better account of first contact. The style is a bracing antidote to a public culture of suffocating high-mindedness.

7. Accelerando by Charles Stross

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Hits you hard and then accelerates. A convincing and baroque invocation of the Singularity: never bettered.

8. Mindbridge by Joe Halderman 

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People usually quote "The Forever War" which is good, but Mindbridge hits more of my buttons.

9. The Reality Dysfunction (and successors) by Peter Hamilton

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Hamilton's later door-stoppers have proven tedious, but the Night's Dawn Trilogy brims with energy and inventiveness on the grandest of scales.

10. Tactics of Mistake (and follow-on Dorsai novels) by Gordon R. Dickson

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Intelligent and exciting, intricately plotted with overtones of mediaeval chivalry. Loved them all.

11. The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu 

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The writing may sometimes be rather pedestrian, as Cowen observes, but the three volumes are incredibly inventive.

12. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

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Starship Troopers: last but not least. It's the only Heinlein novel which makes the cut for me, impressing by force of conviction. The author profoundly cares about the message of the novel and it's another antidote to contemporary hand-wringing.

Putting aside the occasional bouts of didacticism, it's a great story too.

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Near Misses

Solaris is brilliant - I'm also a fan of Lem's other works such as His Master's Voice and The Invincible.

As a child I loved Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy and Frank Herbert's Dune sequence but, like Cowan, coming back to them I find they're not brilliantly written.

Advanced AI is indistinguishable from slavery

"Any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from slavery".

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Amazon link

“Before he met the brilliant, hypnotic child Milena, Alex Sharkey had never played with "dolls"—blue-skinned, gengineered lifeforms designed for work, amusement, or destruction. But the underground gene-hacker is seduced by a megalomaniacal little girl's dream of providing the soulless genetic constructs with free thought and a future—and he unwittingly unleashes a plague of madness on the world.

Now there's a void in his life and memory that must be refilled, but it means pursuing the dangerous sentient species he helped sire from the ruins of a Magic Kingdom through a wasted Europe. It is Alex Sharkey's last chance and the last hope remaining for a once-dominant human race.”

From this review of Fairyland.

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The historic role of capitalism is to develop the forces of production towards abundance. The founding fathers of Marxism speculated that everyone would then live like the ancient aristocrats of Greece and Rome, but with deeper, broader and more sophisticated experiences than those available in antiquity .. and without the slavery.

How would communism look? I sometimes think they imagined automated factories with conveyor belts and robot arms moving stuff onto automated trucks to deliver to your door. But Amazon seems to have all that in hand.

There is another route to abundance - the biological.

Biology seems to work off plentiful raw materials: air, earth, rain and sunshine. We're getting better at gene-hacking. Within a generation we could make dolls. Start from a primate base, add IQ and speech. Modify the empathy-volitional drives .. .

Is it slavery if they really want to work to keep us happy?

Everywhere you currently envision smart, AI-controlled robots of steel and chrome, tilling the fields (or the hydroponic tanks), fabricating gee-gaws .. replace them in your mind with smart biology - genetically-engineered protoplasm.

Just itemise people's needs:

• food and drink (lots of new plants) - check
• accomodation (grows from a pod, see the catalogue) - check
• transport (smart horse and carriage; primate-derived servitors) - check.

The list goes on. If it can be done with metals and integrated circuits, it can be done with genetically-modified lifeforms in a much more sustainable way.

Will our prospective uplifted biosphere be subverted, as in "Fairyland"? With all that free time in a communist society, there should be plenty of people happy to invest in counter-terrorism. Or we'll engineer some servitors to do it: there's a lot to learn from the Greeks and Romans.

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Why the emphasis on biology?

Because our existing metal-and-plastic technology-base depends upon a complex division of labour and global supply chains. It's brittle and unstable, and relies upon human (in fact smart-fraction) levels of competence to make it work at all, to sustain it against entropy. It's capitalism's great achievement.

By contrast, the biological ecosystem is predominantly local and functions on the lowest level of explicit intelligence possible. It's so much more robust. It also helps address economic coordination problems which have proved so intractable to centralised planning.

I don't think everything can be subsumed under applied biology. But most things for sure.

Other stuff (supercomputers, hypersonic/space transport, genome engineering) may be beyond anything a tailored plant/animal could do* - opportunities for our future AI overlords to shine.

What will we do with all that free time?

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* As the old saying has it: "supercomputers etc don't grow on trees". And probably in the future they won't either.

Perry Anderson's Marxism

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In this work (based on a lecture series in 1983) Anderson addresses (amongst other things) the legacy of Critical Theory and structuralism: the work of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. You will not encounter a clearer overview or critique of their school.

The author's preferred style is olympian abstraction but he is also a bit of a magpie, selecting authors and works here and there which have struck his interest. He is extremely open-minded and non-dogmatic. But he doesn't want to be a reformist or a renegade - so many of those in the history of Marxian thinking! - so when he encounters a dogma he has internalised, and which is thereby uncritiqueable, he's forced to a fanciful or fantastic conclusion. I won't discuss it further here, but his views on why the feminist agenda is unachievable under capitalism (but will be delivered by socialism) defy belief.

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Let's look at his postscript for "In the Tracks of Historical Materialism" via selected extracts. He starts with the lack of any serious examination within the Marxist tradition of what socialism would actually be like. As he correctly observes:

"Yet it is quite clear that without serious exploration and mapping of it, any political advance beyond a parliamentary capitalism will continue to be blocked. No working-class or popular bloc in a Western society will ever make a leap in the dark, at this point in history, let alone into the grey on grey of an Eastern society of the type that exists today. A socialism that remains incognito will never be embraced by it.

To bring the two closer together, there are four great areas where practical research and proposal are above all now needed.

(i) The first of these is this the political structure of a socialist democracy. What would be the precise forms of mandate, periodicity, franchise and constituency in a `neo-soviet' system articulating workplace and residential principles within a producers' democracy covering polity and economy alike?

• How far would a professional administrative apparatus subsist? 
• What division of powers would be codified? 
• How would jurisdiction be allocated between national and local instances of authority? 
• Would there exist a new 'technology of delegation'? 
• What would be the optimal ways of disaggregating control over the means of communication? 

(ii) The second central area for debate is obviously the pattern of an advanced socialist economy. Assuming a full producers' democracy and popular determination of alternative plans, all the most difficult and intricate problems remain.

• What would be the range of forms of social ownership?
• How large, or small, a role should the market play?
• Could planning ever pre-adjust to new needs, with their inherent dynamism?
• What devices would exist to resolve conflicts between central and regional interests?
• What would be the appropriate combination of price mechanisms?
• How should consumer rights be articulated with those of producers, in major services?
• Should the volume of product choices be increased, or diminished?
• Which patterns of technology, and what distribution of labour-times, would be desirable?
• How should different jobs be remunerated?

(iii) A third area where careful reflection is long overdue is what might be called the socio-cultural pattern of a 'libertarian levelling' - that is, means for abolishing class and gender inequalities beyond the reappropriation of the means of production by the direct producers.

What kinds of detailed transformation of the educational system, and mutations of the division of labour, would most effectively tend to overcome any inherited or imposed ladder of life-chances - while at the same time multiplying rather than restricting individual differentiation and development of talent?

(iv) The final and most formidable area of all concerns the international relations between - inevitably - unevenly developed socialist countries themselves. Ultimately, this involves the problem of the relationship between the producing classes in the rich nations and those of the poor nations, as well as the question of the relationship between the world peasantry and the world working-class within the poorer countries themselves.

• What would be any protectable pattern of equitable flows of trade and investment between North and South, were both liberated from the sway of capital?
• How could revenues and resources be progressively best shared? 
• What kinds of technological exchange and diffusion would most depolarize the economic geography left by capitalism? 
• Is 'evened development' historically imaginable - if so, what would it mean? 

Merely to enumerate such questions is to register how little most of them have been directly confronted within the Marxist tradition in the West."

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Anderson then considers "The Economics of Feasible Socialism" by Alec Nove.

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I have not read this book but reviewers point to its rather pedestrian vision of municipal quasi-social-democracy, a mixed economy with nationalisation of the commanding heights .. and strict egalitarian salaries .. and parliament.

Anderson is extremely polite, and in his own dismissal through faint praise simply notes that Nove present no roadmap for transition to such a state, which in any event is unlikely to inspire proletarians to die in a ditch. He continues:

"If capital could visit such destruction on even so poor and small an outlying province of its empire as Vietnam, to prevent its loss, is it likely that it would suffer its extinction meekly in its own homelands?

The lessons of the past sixty-five years or so are in this respect without ambiguity or exception: there is no case, from Russia to China, from Vietnam to Cuba, from Chile to Nicaragua, where the existence of capitalism has been challenged, and the furies of intervention, blockade and civil strife have not descended in response.

Any viable transition to socialism in the West must seek to curtail that pattern: but to shrink from or to ignore it is to depart from the world of the possible altogether. In the same way, to construct an economic model of socialism in one advanced country is a legitimate exercise: but to extract it from any computable relationship with a surrounding, and necessarily opposing, capitalist environment - as this work does - is to locate it in thin air. "

The step Anderson is not prepared to take is this: accept that capitalism is not weak, that its superficial contradictions are not life-threatening and that Bolshevik-style revolutions will never happen in advanced capitalist states.

Capitalist states have seen great dislocations and have tolerated left-wing governments (which absorbed and defused popular discontent). Their subsequent policies tended to wreck the economy which then ushered in a period of political counter-revolution (the Allende-Pinochet transition in Chile is an extreme case in point). Finally capitalism (with its vast reserves) stabilised and resumed (Chile today is quite successful).

The one thing capitalism can't handle is abundance, which undermines market relations. That's the area Anderson should be looking at but it's beyond his intellectual paradigm.

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Related: "Perry Anderson on Western Marxism and Hegemony".

Perry Anderson on Western Marxism and Hegemony

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"In The German Ideology, Marx wrote that the development of the forces of production is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it scarcity is merely generalized (nur der Mangel verallgemeinert), and with destitution (Notdurft) the struggle for necessities would begin again and all the old filth would necessarily be reproduced'. See Werke, Vol. 3, pp. 34-5.

This passage was to be recalled by Trotsky in his analysis of the reasons for the rise of Stalinism in Russia, which made scarcity (nuzhda) a central category of its explanation: see The Revolution Betrayed, New York 1965,pp. 56-60."

This from the notes for Chapter 4 of "Considerations on Western Marxism" by Perry Anderson. It's a quote I've had in mind a long time, but was unable to track down. Very critical for the analysis of the failures of bureaucratic-socialism in the twentieth century, and perhaps in the twenty-first.

Anderson is a visionary, synthetic writer: (a bird or a seer in the classic distinction). His account of Western Marxism after the Russian revolution is crammed full of insights. Anderson reviews the works of Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975.

Here's a brief summary from a generally hostile review.

"Anderson argues that despite their diversity all these thinkers represent a common response to the failure of the Russian revolution to spread to the West after the First World War, and the consequent suffocation of Marxism by Stalinists, fascism, and social-democracy.

The ‘Western Marxists’ reacted by flying from active involvement in the class struggle to a preoccupation with philosophy, and indeed with idealist philosophy divorced from practice in a way that the classical Marxists, from Marx himself to Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, would have violently rejected.

Only today, Anderson concludes, with the revival of workers’ struggles and of the revolutionary movement in the advanced capitalist countries, can Marxist theory be integrated into the class struggle again."

Anderson was writing in 1974, when the événements of May '68 in Paris were still fresh in mind and the Trotskyist movement had been revitalised (it was not to last). In his afterword written a decade later, Anderson was less starry-eyed and more conscious of the many gaps at the core of Marxist thinking: what would the socialist state look like, once we reject the naive vision of the permanently mobilised working class organised in councils? Where is the genesis of revolution to be found in a prosperous bourgeois democracy?

Our theoretical difficulties here relate to our very distance from the phenomenon in question: the practical transcendence of capitalism.

Anderson has come to see the concept of hegemony (as pioneered in the works of Gramsci) as a powerful and under-theorised foundation of capitalist stability: the privileging of consent over repression. His latest books ( The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony and the reissued The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci: With a New Preface) are his attempt to address these issues.

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Next: Perry Anderson's Marxism.