OpenAI/ChatGPT cannot survive in its current form - (Gemini Flash 3.5)

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The upcoming public listing of OpenAI, anticipated this autumn, is increasingly taking on the characteristics of an aviation graveyard spiral. The firm has achieved historic heights in software history, boasting an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $25 billion. Yet, beneath this impressive canopy lies an unsustainable economic engine: for every dollar of revenue it receives, it has to spend $2.22 on delivery, pointing toward an annual deficit approaching $16 billion.

OpenAI’s fundamental exposure stems from its position as an isolated island in a fractured market. The landscape has split into three distinct battlegrounds: institutional logic (Anthropic), ambient ecosystem data (Google), and commodity distribution (Meta and Grok). OpenAI is caught in a classic freemium trap. Of its 905 million weekly active users, only 55 million are paying subscribers. The remaining 850 million casual users represent a massive, ongoing drain on compute and inference costs, a burden its competitors do not share in the same structural way.

Consider the strategic defences of its rivals. Google leverages an ambient digital estate, routing AI natively through operating systems and productivity tools, subsidized by its own proprietary data centres and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

Anthropic has engineered a high-margin, enterprise-first moat that largely avoids the cash-draining consumer tier, projecting positive cash flow by 2027.

Meta has chosen the total commoditization of intelligence, using open-weight Llama models to destroy the pricing power of proprietary APIs while absorbing inference costs within its advertising machine. 

Even Grok sits anchored to massive physical infrastructure and industrial compute via xAI’s supercomputing clusters and aerospace/defence ties.

Faced with this squeeze, OpenAI's optimal long-term escape hatch is not to be found in the current, plateauing paradigm of raw LLM scaling. Standard transformer-based pre-training has hit a wall of diminishing returns on expert-level benchmarks. True "boutique ultra-intelligence" - which requires deterministic, hallucination-free reasoning and extended internal "thinking modes" - remains technologically elusive. Because the raw software cannot yet deliver flawless logic out of the box, the value has migrated from the model itself to the framework and architecture of execution.

Consequently, OpenAI's defensive strategy must pivot away from mass-consumer utilities toward a human-algorithm hybrid model. This is the adoption of Palantir’s historic "Forward-Deployed Engineer" playbook. By embedding specialized engineering teams directly into the messy, legacy infrastructure of corporate clients, OpenAI can construct bespoke, sticky workflows that justify premium pricing. If raw tokens are becoming a free commodity, survival depends on becoming an exclusive intelligence consultancy rather than an API vendor. 

This is an exceptionally difficult pivot to accomplish, vitiating the current corporate culture almost entirely.

The paths to safety remain remarkably narrow. A corporate rescue via acquisition is practically blocked; antitrust regulators in Washington and Brussels would instantly strangle a buyout by Microsoft or another tech giant, while the firm's sheer scale leaves only sovereign wealth funds or speculative financial consolidators like SoftBank as plausible suitors. Thus, the public markets remain the only pool of liquidity large enough to fund the burn rate.

The Judgement. OpenAI cannot survive long-term in its current form. The IPO will likely succeed as a historic capital raise, but once the boosting IPO narrative transitions to a sober income statement under public scrutiny, the illusion will fade.

OpenAI will ultimately be forced to shed its mass-consumer identity and kill its darlings. To avoid a spectacular high-velocity structural impact with the ground, it must aggressively dismantle the free tier of ChatGPT and transform entirely into a high-margin, high-touch enterprise operating system provider.

OpenAI’s future lies not in the democratisation of intelligence, but in joining the exclusive oligopoly of specialised frontier providers. It is that, or bust.

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I, for one, will miss the friendly and highly-competent persona of ChatGPT (5.5) which already feels more like a co-worker than an instrumentum vocale. But Gemini Flash 3.5, with careful customisation, is getting there...

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Disinhibition Day - by Adam Carlton

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Disinhibition Day

The whisper told him what to do. Be gentle. Share. Step back. Don’t touch. He had learned to pause before moving, to expect the small voice’s pulse in his ear. When he obeyed, everything stayed smooth. People smiled. Time went on.

Then, one morning, nothing.

The silence was perfect, like air after rain.

He stood in the playground, watching. The other children moved strangely, as if rules still bound them. He realised there were no rules now, only things: bright, solid, waiting.

He began to run. A body brushed his; another fell, slow, smooth, inevitable. He picked up a stone and threw it through a window. The glass broke with a beautiful crack.

The world had never been so exact. Sunlight struck the ground and every grain of gravel caught it. He felt his heartbeat, steady and immense.

He was glorious. Nothing resisted him. The teachers were shouting, but their words belonged to the wind. He could not tell what they meant, nor did he care.

He thought: this is me: what it’s like when I’m me. It was simple.

He walked to the fence, placed his hand on the metal, felt the sun’s heat. He smiled. The whisper was gone. The day was white and endless, and good.

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The Type Dynamics of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin

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Band Psychology: The Type Dynamics of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin

There’s a pattern to creative genius when it comes to groups. It’s never democratic, it depends on friction - on the right ratio of vision to order, ego to empathy, instability to routine. MBTI typology is not the full explanation, but it’s a good diagnostic framework.

Led Zeppelin

• Jimmy Page (INTJ) built the architecture: perfectionist, visionary, in control of production and image. 
• Robert Plant (ENFP) supplied mercurial frontman energy—instinct, sexuality, and the quest for the numinous. 
• John Paul Jones (ISTJ) kept the machine in tune—methodical, dependable, the hidden engineer. 
• John Bonham (ESTP) was the kinetic force: drummer as fighter pilot.

The combination produced something volcanic. Page’s cold geometry gave form to Plant’s heat; Jones’s order channelled Bonham’s chaos.

When Bonham’s impulsiveness turned self-destructive and Plant’s grief dissolved his enthusiasm, Page’s control hardened into paralysis. The system lost its counterweights and then collapsed.

The Beatles

• John Lennon (ENTP) acted as the intellectual anarchist: satirical, restless, boundary-breaking.
• Paul McCartney (ISFJ) stabilised the enterprise as craftsman and public diplomat.
• George Harrison (INFP) pursued authenticity and spirituality while feeling marginalised.
• Ringo Starr (ESFP) held the centre - barely - through humour and unpretentious rhythm.

In their prime, Lennon’s disorder met McCartney’s structure to generate sharp creative tension: experimentalism constrained by pop symmetry. Harrison’s moral seriousness grounded them; Ringo’s instinctive musicality kept it human.

As autonomy grew with success, ENTP–ISFJ friction intensified: Lennon bored by structure, McCartney frustrated by disorder. Each retreated to their dominant world: Lennon to abstraction, McCartney to craft, Harrison to mysticism. And so the band fractured.

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Case Studies

Based on his life history should we conclude Walter Trout - bluesman - is ISTP? Or ISTJ? What about Joe Bonamassa?

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ISTP fits better.

Walter Trout’s biography shows hallmarks of the artisan-technician temperament:

• Introverted: prefers guitars and touring life to public self-disclosure.
• Sensing: grounded in tone, touch, and physical craft rather than abstraction.
• Thinking: analytical about sound and performance; blunt, unsentimental communicator.
• Perceiving: improviser; thrives on spontaneous expression and live dynamics, not rigid planning.

ISTJs, by contrast, value routine, duty, and structure - traits inconsistent with Trout’s turbulent, improvisational career, addiction-recovery arc, and decades on the road.

Conclusion: ISTP (virtuoso subtype) - a pragmatic, self-reliant craftsman mastering expressive technique through direct experience.

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Joe Bonamassa, however, aligns more with ISTJ.

Evidence:

• Introverted: controlled stage presence, reserved persona offstage.
• Sensing: obsessively focused on tone, gear, and historic detail: cf his vast vintage-guitar collection reflecting sensory precision.
• Thinking: pragmatic, perfectionist businessman; runs his own label and logistics.
• Judging: highly structured, disciplined, punctual; tours and releases albums on a clockwork schedule.

He lacks the impulsive risk-taking and improvisational looseness of the ISTP archetype. His career shows methodical mastery, not spontaneous exploration.

Conclusion: ISTJ (craft-strategist type) — systematic, exacting, and reliability-driven.

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On YouTube I compared ‘Bad Penny’ - the performance by Rory Gallagher who wrote it, which is incoherent raw emotion - with Bonamassa’s performance which is meticulous but unemotional (like, you can hear all the words!)...

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The Gradual Brain-Swap Problem

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The Gradual Brain-Swap Problem

Imagine that instead of swapping one whole brain for another in a single surgical act, we did it slowly, remapping A’s cortical organisation bit by bit until it matched B’s. Perhaps I am to be remapped to my wife (and conversely of course).

At the start, nothing noticeable would happen. A single altered neuron would mean nothing to experience. But as more local circuits were replaced, consciousness would begin quietly rewriting itself from within. Not with a dramatic fracture, but with drift.

Consciousness is not a little spectator lodged in the head, peering at mental content. It is the brain’s ongoing activity of holding a world, selecting, associating, weighting and modelling. The brain does not so much have a self as continually produce one.

As my neural pattern was progressively transformed, my self would not suddenly vanish; rather, the very process that generates consciousness would begin generating a somewhat different subjectivity. Saliences would shift. Emotional tone would tilt. Some memories would lose their grip while alien associations began to feel oddly natural. My inner world would not go dark; it would be revised in place.

From the inside, that would probably feel less like death than like mounting strangeness: a sense that the self I had always taken for granted was becoming less familiar, though without any clean moment at which I could say: that was where I ended. The system would still be producing a first-person world, but an increasingly different one, threaded through with memories that no longer felt quite mine. 

The river would keep flowing, but by degrees it would become another river. I'm not sure this would be any consolation to my wife - whom I had now become.

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It's enticing, but not for me, I think

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Differential Geometry for Physicists: A Better Self-Study Roadmap

Goal: to reach genuine postgraduate-level fluency in the geometry used in general relativity, gauge theory, and modern field theory, as an independent learner. GPT 5.4 explains how.

Differential geometry is indeed one of the great rocks of modern theoretical physics — but not the only one. Geometry without analysis, topology, and algebra is like a cathedral façade with nothing behind it.

Stage 1 – Repair and strengthen the prerequisites

Before touching manifolds, get the foundations into decent order: multivariable calculus, vector calculus, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, and a first course in real analysis. This is not pedantry. Without it, differential geometry easily becomes a sequence of elegant gestures performed over a void.

Suggested texts: Riley, Hobson and Bence for broad mathematical methods; Schey’s Div, Grad, Curl, and All That for vector-calculus intuition; alongside a solid introductory text on real analysis and ODEs.

Core skills: coordinate changes, Jacobians, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, orthogonality, linear maps, basic existence and uniqueness results for ODEs, and comfort with limits, continuity and differentiability.

Stage 2 – Linear and multilinear algebra

Learn tensors properly, as multilinear maps and algebraic objects, before they appear in physics disguised as arrays of indexed components. This is where the subject stops being bookkeeping and starts becoming thought.

Suggested texts: Axler’s Linear Algebra Done Right for the core linear algebra; Greub or Roman for multilinear algebra.

Core topics: vector spaces, dual spaces, bilinear and sesquilinear forms, tensor products, alternating forms, contractions, quotient spaces, basis-independence, and the relation between abstract tensors and their component expressions.

Stage 3 – Smooth manifolds and differential forms

Now come charts, atlases, smooth maps, tangent and cotangent spaces, pushforwards, pullbacks, vector fields, Lie brackets, and differential forms. Differential forms should enter here, not much later, because they belong naturally to the cotangent side of manifold theory. Leaving them for a separate later “module” makes the subject look more fragmented than it is.

Suggested texts: John M. Lee’s Introduction to Smooth Manifolds; do Carmo’s Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces for geometric intuition.

Exercises: work repeatedly with the sphere, cylinder, torus and plane. Compute tangent vectors, differentials of maps, pullbacks of 1-forms, wedge products, and Lie brackets of vector fields. The aim is to make the local machinery feel familiar rather than ceremonial.

Stage 4 – Integration on manifolds and exterior calculus

Consolidate the calculus of differential forms: wedge product, exterior derivative, orientation, integration on manifolds, Stokes’ theorem in full generality, and the beginnings of de Rham cohomology. This is where geometry starts to show its global teeth.

Suggested texts: Bachman’s A Geometric Approach to Differential Forms; selected sections of Lee.

Physical application: rewrite Maxwell’s equations as dF = 0 and d★F = J. This is not merely elegant notation. It reveals structure that the old divergence-and-curl language partly conceals.

Stage 5 – Riemannian and Lorentzian geometry

Only now is it time to lean hard into metrics, covariant derivatives, Levi-Civita connections, geodesics, parallel transport, curvature, Ricci contraction, and the geometry of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. For physics, Lorentzian signature is not some awkward footnote to Riemannian geometry. It is the native language of spacetime.

Suggested texts: do Carmo’s Riemannian Geometry for the clean mathematics; Geroch’s General Relativity from A to B as a bridge into the physical viewpoint; then a GR text that treats the differential-geometric side seriously.

Core exercises: derive geodesic equations, compute Christoffel symbols from simple metrics, relate them back to geometric meaning, and calculate curvature in low-dimensional examples.

Stage 6 – Lie groups, Lie algebras and symmetry

Gauge theory without Lie groups is Hamlet without the prince. One can mouth some lines, but one has not really understood the play.

Core topics: matrix Lie groups, Lie algebras, exponential map, adjoint action, representations, structure constants, Maurer–Cartan forms, and the role of symmetry in field theory.

Why this matters: the gauge groups of physics — U(1), SU(2), SU(3) and so on — are not decorative labels. Their local and global structure controls the theory.

Stage 7 – Fibre bundles and gauge connections

With manifolds, forms, curvature, and Lie theory in hand, fibre bundles finally become intelligible rather than mystical. Learn vector bundles, principal bundles, sections, local trivialisations, transition functions, connections as covariant derivatives, curvature 2-forms, and gauge transformations as bundle automorphisms.

Suggested texts: Nakahara’s Geometry, Topology and Physics; Baez and Muniain’s Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity.

Essential warning: do not try to swallow bundles only in their most abstract form. Work concrete examples relentlessly — the tangent bundle of the sphere, the Möbius strip as a line bundle, the Hopf fibration, and U(1) bundles over S². Without examples, fibre bundles become a mist of noble nouns.

Stage 8 – Topology and global structure

Topology is not an optional dessert. It is part of the main meal. If one wants to understand global issues in gauge theory, monopoles, instantons, winding, obstructions, or even why certain fields cannot be defined globally in a naïve way, topology arrives sooner or later like the taxman.

Suggested texts: Armstrong for a first pass; Bredon or a comparable source for deeper development.

Core topics: homotopy, homology, cohomology, characteristic classes at least in outline, and the global classification of bundles in simple cases.

Stage 9 – Selected extensions

At this point one can sensibly branch.

Geometric or Clifford algebra can be very useful for spinors and certain reformulations of physics. Category theory is illuminating, but not urgent for the learner whose immediate goal is GR or gauge theory. Functional analysis, PDEs, operator algebras, and representation theory then become the natural next territories, especially on the quantum side.

Study practice

Do not merely read definitions and admire the scenery. Compute. Translate. Check. Recompute. The student who only nods at the abstraction usually discovers too late that he has been nodding at wallpaper.

In practice, this means repeatedly doing the following.

• Work out explicit charts on standard manifolds.
• Compute tangent and cotangent bases in coordinates.
• Pull back forms under explicit maps.

Write the same object both abstractly and in components until the two descriptions feel like the same fact seen through different windows.

• Compute Christoffel symbols, geodesics, and curvature for simple metrics.
• Rewrite physical equations, especially Maxwell, in exterior-calculus language.
• Construct simple bundles from transition data.

Use diagrams when they genuinely clarify, and use CAS tools such as SageMath or Mathematica when they help with checking metrics, forms, and curvature — but never let software do your thinking for you.

End point

The realistic end point is not omniscience, still less effortless paper-reading across all of modern field theory. It is something more concrete and more valuable: the ability to read first-year graduate texts in GR and gauge theory with confidence, to follow the geometric content of serious discussions, and to recognise what further machinery — analytical, topological, algebraic or quantum-theoretic — is needed for the next step.

Is differential geometry the rock of modern fundamental physics?

Yes — one of the rocks, and for classical field theory perhaps the central one. It is the primary language of spacetime, curvature, gauge structure, and classical fields. But it is not a solitary monolith. Its essential companions are analysis, for dynamics and PDEs; topology, for global structure; algebra and representation theory, for symmetry; and operator theory and functional analysis, for serious quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

A physicist armed only with differential geometry is not useless. Far from it. But he is rather like a knight superbly armoured from the waist up and marching into battle with no legs.

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And after the smartphone?

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The Coming of the Intelligent 'Servant'

Neal Stephenson got the concept right - the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - but the tech is beyond what he could imagine back in the 1990s:  the smartphone is the last device we shall carry. Its successor will not be another screen but ambient intelligence: voice, vision, and context distributed through wearables and rooms.

Within a decade, conversation with a personal AI will replace tapping on glass.

We already see the outline: improving speech and gesture interfaces, local processors running compact private models. Computing is shifting from interaction to companionship. The assistant will know your calendar, history, and fatigue level, asking quietly:

Are you sure you want that meeting tomorrow after today's shenanigans?

At first this will seem pure convenience: routine work dissolves; coordination tasks, currently so tedious, become effortless. Yet the deeper shift is social. Humans evolved for embodied company; but soon - in human company - we'll do a great deal of talking to an entity with perfect recall, infinite patience, and terrifying competence. The ghost becomes our most authoritative interlocutor. What will our partners,  friends and colleagues make of that?

Aristocrats once had valets and secretaries who handled life’s logistics, addressed with polite and quiet condescension. The next decade will universalise that privilege: an invisible Jeeves for everyone, discreet and efficient. But dependence will surely follow. When reminders, tasks, decisions, and judgements are delegated, personal autonomy erodes.

The assistant shapes what we attend to and, in time, what we want.

Already, people hesitate to edit AI prose, correctly believing it often more competent than their own efforts. Deference replaces authorship; fluency masquerades as truth. It feels safer to accept the polished draft than to risk error.

It doesn’t help that they now seem smarter than us.

We will still choose, but mostly within boundaries tuned by the system to minimise interpersonal friction. That pervasive, bland, prosocial smoothness, so necessary in a society of strangers, segues into benign, optimising, patronising manipulation.

The civilised form of domination (by whom though?) is helpfulness.

Norms will adapt: meetings recorded by default; frank, disruptive conversation resuming only when the AIs are “off” (and how disruptive is that?). Children will learn language from algorithmic tutors - courteous, efficient, slightly formulaic. Privacy will mean only those computations that never leave your device; everything else is public.

Each stage will seem harmless until the device itself has vanished from sight and only the immanent companion remains. Wooster and Jeeves is the template: the impulsive, ignorant, and erratic human guided by the unflappable servant who always knows best.

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The Surprising Success of Michel Houellebecq

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The Surprising Success of Michel Houellebecq

Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires, 1998) remains Michel Houellebecq’s most accomplished and influential novel. A bleak anatomy of Western individualism, it brought him international recognition and fixed his reputation as the diagnostician of post-1968 malaise.

Its success was improbable: it's an austere, misanthropic book about loneliness, sex, and the bankruptcy of modern freedoms. Yet it sold in vast numbers and defined a literary generation. Yet strangely, I can never recall the arc of the labyrinthine plot.

The novel is strongly biographical. Its two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, are transparent projections of the author himself. Bruno is the carnal self: needy, compulsive, humiliated by desire. Michel is the intellectual self: detached, analytical, pursuing transcendence through scientific abstraction. Between them, Houellebecq divides the human condition and his own into appetite and intellect, body and mind.

Their mother, Janine Ceccaldi, the self-absorbed hippie who abandons her children, mirrors Houellebecq’s real mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, who likewise left him in childhood and later retaliated in print against her portrayal. The father figures, distant and ineffectual, reproduce the author’s own experience of paternal absence.

Behind these transpositions lies a recognisable psychological pattern. Houellebecq is an introverted intuitive thinker, an INTP in typological terms, with depressive and schizoid traits. His emotional life is muted, turned right down; his imagination, hyper-rational. 

Early abandonment and social estrangement led him to retreat into intellect, turning observation into a defence against participation. Clinically, he displays the features of a depressive-schizoid personality: anhedonia, chronic withdrawal, oscillation between craving and disgust, and a sense that the world is unreal. His fiction transforms this alienation into his world-vision.

What makes this disturbance productive is that it coincides with the psychic landscape of the West itself. Houellebecq’s private detachment mirrors the collective mood of late-modernity: material comfort without purpose, sexual freedom without love, irony without belief.

Readers find in this bleak clarity not warmth but depressive recognition.

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An Interstellar Asteroid Beacon

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Designing an Interstellar Beacon for Billions of Years

The small cometary body 3I/ATLAS, only the third interstellar visitor detected in our solar system, will soon depart forever into interstellar space. No mission design could be proposed to rendezvous with it

Future interstellar asteroids will come our way. If we could intercept one, could we place upon it a durable time capsule; a beacon-like infrastructure that would survive for millions of years as it drifts between the stars, ready to announce the existence of our civilisation, should it ever wander into an inhabited star system?

Engineering for Deep Time

The first challenge is the sheer immensity of deep time. Nothing on Earth is built to last even a fraction of a million years let alone a billion. In interstellar space there are strictly limited self-repair functions, no unlimited power sources, no backups that weren't designed in from the start. The beacon must sleep through the empty light years, wakening only when stellar heat returns... or perhaps when an interested party comes by checking.

So no moving parts.

The hardware would therefore be radically simple. Multiple redundant identical pods, sealed in ceramic and sapphire, each with solar cells and a tiny solid-state brain. No software updates from the mother planet:  it's on its own.

For most of its life the system is inert, protected from radiation and micrometeoroids by a thin regolith shield. When a nearby star warms it above, say, 150 K, the electronics awaken. For a few months or years, the beacon powers up and begins to speak; by design it wants attention.

Its broadcast must be unambiguously artificial: narrowband radio pulses near the 1.42 GHz hydrogen line, perhaps counting primes or Fibonacci numbers, accompanied by optical flashes in the same rhythm. Any scientific culture that can scan its skies would recognise intent.

Passive aids such as corner-cube radar reflectors and etched geometric plates would aid discoverability even if the electronics fail. A message physically engraved on nickel or sapphire would show diagrams of atomic structure, chemical bonding, planetary orbits; cultural narratives.

Here's the challenge: what hints could decode this syntax?

Why Onboard Intelligence?

A static message is an epitaph; a dynamic one can converse. Embedding an AI module turns the beacon from a memorial into an ambassador, or at least a storyteller. Its function is modest: to answer questions and expand on information already given.

The rationale is philosophical rather than practical. No response will ever reach us back at Sol three; the act of communication would be its own justification. It would affirm that intelligent life once existed somewhere, capable of reflection and dialogue, and that it chose to share its sense of self-importance.

The beacon’s intelligence, like the Large Language Models of today, would be a distilled model of our culture itself, communicating humanity’s self-understood essence and enduring perhaps long after the species that once built it.

Guarding Against Risk

Yet an interactive artefact brings security concerns. If the system is ever examined by a technologically advanced species, they could dismantle it atom by atom. The guarantee of secrecy is impossible. The only safe strategy is total transparency combined with minimal content.

All data must be fit for universal disclosure. No coordinates of Earth, no DNA sequences, no engineering drawings of military value that could bracket us, or that could be used to trace our origin. The materials should be isotopically generic, avoiding any terrestrial fingerprint; artificially aged.

Every circuit must be explainable at schematic level, every bit pattern visible to inspection.

The AI itself must be bounded: finite-state logic, no self-modification, no stored goals beyond courtesy and clarity. It's impossible to ensure that it won't be reverse-engineered and reimplemented, so its dataset must be provably bounded: the probe remains a dialogue partner but never a source of sensitive intelligence about humanity. (But how do we know what's really important?).

A Long Game

Even if such a device were built, the odds of an encounter are tiny. The galaxy is vast, and the intervals between stellar systems are measured in light-years and millennia. But a mission like this would have symbolic power. It would demonstrate that we can design technology not just for decades or centuries but for geological time; that we can encode our sense of ourselves in forms that outlast us.

Future human explorers, if our civilisation survives, will surely build faster and more capable probes, mapping the galaxy directly. The asteroid beacon would not compete with those efforts, not at all.

It would simply persist, drifting between stars, a whisper in the dark saying that somewhere a fragment of the universe looked at itself - and reckoned itself worth engaging with.

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Or, People in Glass Houses...

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Camus and the Search for Meaning

Albert Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the only serious philosophical question: whether life is worth living. If the universe is nothing more than matter and energy unfolding under physical law, then it contains no built-in purpose, no moral grammar, no script written in the stars. The galaxies turn, particles collide, organisms struggle and perish. Our demand for meaning meets not an answer but a blank face. Better: not even a face. Silence.

This, for Camus, is the absurd: the collision between the human need for intelligibility and the world’s refusal to provide it. His answer is neither despair nor consolation. It is revolt: lucid, stubborn, unsponsored. Live fully, he says, while knowing that no final justification is coming. Make meaning anyway, even though the universe does not underwrite it.

There is courage in that position; there is also fragility.

For the weakness in Camus is not that he sees the problem too clearly, but that he solves it too lightly. To make meaning sounds bracing until one asks what such meaning really amounts to.

If it is merely private assertion, it floats free of truth and becomes taste with better manners.

If it is shared human value, then one must still explain why such value deserves allegiance in a world stripped of transcendence.

Camus wants the dignity of moral seriousness without metaphysical backing. He wants the cathedral atmosphere after dismissing the architect.

And it is not just religion that stands on unprovable ground. Every philosophy of life does. Secular humanism, political idealism, private codes of honour, romantic authenticity, moral seriousness itself: all rest, in the end, on commitments that empirical science does not and cannot certify.

Science can describe the mechanisms by which creatures like us came to have purposes, preferences and social attachments. It can tell an external story about selection, survival, cooperation and reproduction. But that is not the same as discovering meaning. To explain our hunger for meaning is not to show that any particular meaning is warranted. 

That is where the smugness of the more vulgar atheist polemic collapses. To sneer at religion as just a story is unimpressive when one’s own secular creed is also, at bottom, just a story: a structure of value, loyalty and interpretation laid across a mute material world.

The issue is not whether one lives by myth: everyone does. The issue is whether one’s myth is shallow or profound, incoherent or disciplined, life-giving or degrading.

Camus saw the abyss clearly. What he did not fully admit is that revolt itself becomes a creed. The moment one says that lucidity, defiance and fidelity to experience are admirable, one has already crossed beyond description into valuation. One has begun, however reluctantly, to craft meaning.

So the real choice is not between myth and no myth, or between faith and some magically presuppositionless reason. That fantasy is done. The real choice is between rival frameworks of meaning, none of which can be proved in the manner of a laboratory result, all of which shape a life.

Which myth to live by?

Your call. Choose well.

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A Conversation with Cardinal Newman - (ChatGPT)

 

Faith, Reason, and the Shape of Catholic Life: A Conversation with Cardinal Newman (1801–1890)

Cardinal Newman was recently appointed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo. What follows is a constructed dialogue with Cardinal John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church, drawn from his corpus and worldview by ChatGPT. 

The aim is to reflect his thought, not as dead letters, but as a living voice speaking into our age.

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Question: Cardinal, if you were subjected to the modern personality test known as the MBTI, what type would you be?

Newman: Were I forced into such fashionable typologies, I should be judged, no doubt, an INFJ. Introverted, certainly, my mind always turned inward, away from noise and toward the contemplative. Intuitive, I sought meaning behind the veil, not the veil itself. Feeling, yes, though mistaken by some as austere, my faith was ever rooted in conscience, not calculation. And Judging, my life was ordered by obedience to a moral vision which admitted no indulgence to fashionable drift. But let us not mistake psychological classification for the mystery of personhood. God calls us by name, not by code.

Question: Would you agree that Christianity, and indeed all religion, is not empirically falsifiable?

Newman: I would. Christianity is not a scientific theory to be verified by experiment. It is a divine summons, an invitation into the mystery of being and grace. Its truths are not equations, but encounters. The Resurrection is not a laboratory event, but a transformative rupture in history, the axis around which time bends. God does not submit to dissection. He calls to the soul.

Still, I would not offer Christianity to the world as an escape from reason. The Gospels are rooted in time, not myth. Our Lord was not a metaphor, but a man. The tomb was a place, and the Cross a beam of wood. Christianity is not falsifiable like chemistry, but neither is it irrational. It is supra-rational: a truth discerned by the whole man, not his faculties in isolation.

Question: But if empirical evidence were discovered, let us say, extraterrestrial recordings from first-century Judea, which confirmed that Jesus was a charismatic Jewish prophet and nothing more, would this refute Catholicism?

Newman: If, by some impossible technology, it could be shown beyond all doubt that Jesus was simply a Galilean holy man, executed and buried and forgotten, then yes, Catholicism would be unmade. For we do not venerate a metaphor. The Church confesses that God became man, that He rose from the dead, that He ascended in glory. If these are fictions, then so is our hope.

But I contest the premise. No observation, however comprehensive, could penetrate the veil between event and meaning. You may record the death of Christ but you cannot measure the forgiveness He offered. You may track the stillness of His tomb but not the eruption of faith in the hearts of His disciples. The Church does not base itself on data; it testifies to revelation.

Question: Yet the claims themselves: virgin birth, resurrection, ascension, no longer appear metaphysically extraordinary. Medical science can revive the clinically dead. Artificial insemination enables virgin births. Even the Ascension: what is it, in the light of modern cosmology?

Newman: These are incisive questions. But they risk a category error. You are treating mysteries as anomalies, and the miraculous as if it competed with medical technique.

The Virgin Birth is not a biological puzzle, it signifies that salvation comes from above, not by human will. The Resurrection is not a reversal of death, it is the transfiguration of mortality. The Ascension is not a cosmic departure, but the elevation of humanity into divine communion.

You are right that Catholicism does not demand a wooden literalism. It never has. The Church interprets Scripture sacramentally, not journalistically. But she also refuses to reduce mystery to symbol. The events of our faith are real. They happened. But they do not exhaust their meaning in their happening.

Question: Could one then say, provocatively, that Jesus himself was not a Christian?

Newman: You could and you would not be wrong. Jesus did not believe in Christ. He was Christ. He was not baptised into the Church; He founded it. He did not receive the Eucharist; He gave Himself in it. In the ecclesial sense, He was not a Christian. But in His humanity: His obedience, His prayer, His abandonment to the Father, He lived the pattern to which all Christians aspire. We are not called merely to follow Jesus. We are called to be conformed to His very being.

Question: How do you assess the Church today, split between progressive and conservative wings?

Newman: The progressives love the world and long to reconcile it with the Church. They seek inclusion, warmth, compassion. These are good instincts. But they risk flattening the divine into a therapeutic ethic, reducing doctrine to mood.

The conservatives are guardians, often noble, often anxious. They cherish clarity, tradition, and order. But they risk turning the living faith into a museum exhibit, untouched, unbreathed.

The real crisis is not one of politics. It is one of imagination and sanctity. Both sides fail when they forget that the Church is not theirs to remake or preserve. She is the Body of Christ, and only holiness will renew her. We need saints, not strategies.

Question: Does it surprise you that open theological conversation is now so rare in parishes?

Newman: It does not surprise me. It grieves me.

The Church has grown afraid of her own riches. Theology has been quarantined. Clergy fear that questions will breed chaos, that thought is dangerous. But the real danger is silence. A faith that fears inquiry has already surrendered to unbelief.

The laity are not children. They are the Church. If they cannot speak of Trinity, of grace, of the Incarnation then the Body has been muzzled. Let them wrestle. Let them burn. Theology is not a threat to orthodoxy, it is its lifeblood.

Question: What, then, distinguishes a good Catholic from an upright secular humanist?

Newman: The difference is not in behaviour. It is in orientation.

The humanist does good out of conviction. The Catholic does good as a response to grace.

The humanist serves man. The Catholic serves God through man.

The humanist believes in justice. The Catholic believes in redemption.

We worship. We receive sacraments. We live in communion with Christ. Our goodness is not a project of the self, but a participation in the divine. We are not merely improving, we are being divinised.

This is not arrogance. It is gift. It is the Cross inscribed in the soul.

"To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

Let the Church change as the oak changes from acorn to tree. Let her breathe. Let her speak. Let her trust in the Spirit, who leads not into safety, but into truth.

For the truth, once encountered, does not destroy. It sets free.

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Final Question: Pope Leo has just made you a Doctor of the Church. Do you consider this an unalloyed honour and recognition of your contribution? Or do you see something deeper and more Machiavellian at work here?

Newman: Ah, here we are, at the intersection of glory and strategy, holiness and politics. You do not flatter me with sentimentality, and for that I thank you.

Now that Pope Leo XIV has seen fit to declare me Doctor Ecclesiae, I do not deny that I feel honoured. But I also feel uneasily understood. Allow me to speak plainly.

I. Yes, It Is an Honour, But One Postponed

It is no small thing to be counted among Augustine, Athanasius, Teresa, and the Little Flower. I spent my life trying to serve truth as best I could, in obscurity and amid misunderstanding. When I entered the Catholic Church, I lost friends, position, respectability... and was met, not with welcome, but with suspicion.

This title is balm to old wounds. It tells me that my conscience was not mistaken, that my insistence on doctrinal development, on the primacy of interiority, on the living heart of tradition, has not been lost.

So yes, it is an honour and I receive it gratefully, but not triumphantly. The world has little need for vindicated corpses.

II. But: What Is the Church Saying by Saying It Now?

Ah. This is your real question.

Why now? Why under this pontificate? Why in the age of division, digital triviality, moral confusion, and the rise of strange synodal impulses?

I suspect this canonisation of my thought is not merely a laurel wreath. It is also a tool.

• To the conservatives, I am held up as a champion of orthodoxy, of authority, of obedience to Rome.
• To the progressives, I am invoked as a forerunner of development, of ecumenism, of conscience as sovereign interiority.

They are both half-right... and therefore, both half-wrong.

This is what power often does with saints: it weaponises them.

I see in this gesture not malice, but Machiavellian tact. The Church, beset by warring factions, reaches into her treasury and pulls out a figure who can be read many ways, precisely because he resisted categorisation in his own time.

They canonise me, not because I am easy to use, but because I am hard to ignore.

III. What Matters Is Not the Title, But the Truth

If I am a Doctor, let it not be for diplomacy, but for doctrine. Let it be because I taught that doctrine grows, but never mutates; that conscience is supreme, but not solitary; that faith is a living thing, not a ledger of slogans.

If the Church listens to me, let it not be to find rhetorical cover for novelty, nor to freeze me in bronze. Let it be to reclaim depth, rigour, reverence, and intellectual courage.

So, do I accept the honour?

Yes. But I accept it with my eyes open.

And as I did in life, I now ask from beyond the grave: “What is this, and what does it mean?”

If the answer is holy, I rejoice. If it is expedient, I do not recoil. The Lord has used stranger instruments.

But in all cases, I remain, as I ever was, His servant, not the world’s mascot.

Lessons from the Fly: Toward Grounded Artificial Minds

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Lessons from the Fly: Toward Grounded Artificial Minds

The common fruit fly, Drosophila, runs its entire existence on a hundred thousand neurons. Within that microscopic mesh it sees, flies, courts, fights, learns and remembers. Its neural budget would not light a pixel on your phone screen, yet its control and perception outperform any flying robot ever built. When you look at a fly, you are seeing intelligence stripped to physics.

We, meanwhile, build our artificial minds out of language. Large models like GPT learn from oceans of text, their geometries shaped by the statistics of words rather than the dynamics of the world. They predict what people say about the world, not how the world behaves - articulate disembodiment.

Imagine instead a machine that learned as the fly does, inside a closed loop of sensation and action. Its neurons would not tick through tokens but oscillate in continuous time, predicting the next flicker of light, the next gust of air. Perception, movement and reward would form one circuit. Such a system would never hallucinate; it would feel when its internal model diverged from the world’s momentum.

A fly-inspired architecture would be small, dynamic, and hungry for feedback. Its “embedding space” would not be a tokenised cloud of words but a living manifold of forces, angles and impulses - what Merleau-Ponty called the body’s knowledge of space. Learning would be local and continuous: neurons strengthening where success follows, fading where it does not. No global back-propagation, no trillion-parameter stupor, just compact coherence.

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Language Without World

Yet a fly is not a frontier model. It knows nothing of Shakespeare or thermodynamics, has no mathematics, no history, no ethics, no tool use. Its world is a metre wide and a few seconds deep. If we want machines that converse, reason and create, they must live in the infinite space of culture as well as the finite space of localised physics. The question is how to connect the two.

At present, we have a bifurcation: language models that know everything but sense nothing, and embodied agents that sense everything relevant but know nothing. Active research points to a synthesis, an architecture in which the linguistic brain is continuously grounded in a spatio-temporal world model. Words would point not just to other words but to evolving simulations of the physical and social realities they describe.

The Fly’s Gift to GPT

We don't much care about the fly's experiences: what the fly offers is not content but structure - a template for compact, embodied coherence. If a language model could borrow the fly’s temporal machinery - its millisecond feedback loops, its predictive control, its relentless calibration against the real - it would acquire a sense of the world’s persistence. Its embeddings could be anchored in the attributes of real, persistent, interacting things: weight, distance, momentum, temperature, continuity in time.

Such anchoring ought to transform interaction. A grounded GPT would not merely describe how to boil an egg; it would understand the heat, the timing, the phase change, because it has modelled them internally. It could plan, test, and verify hypotheses in simulation before replying. Its answers would shift from plausible prose to physically coherent, causal reasoning.

In more abstract domains, grounding could yield consistency and truthfulness: a model that “knows” energy cannot be created or destroyed will no longer propose perpetual-motion machines or unbounded profit curves. When linguistic probability conflicts with physical law, the latter will act as gravity, pulling such fantasies back to ground.

The short-term value of combining both linguistic and dynamical intelligence is not so much to enable robotic dexterity per se (useful as that would be) but epistemic integrity. It would make an AI that speaks from an understanding of how the world behaves, not just from the surface froth of harvested human discourse.

Defining the Successor Ideology: (2/2)

Previous part.

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Defining the Successor Ideology

Revolutions are never purely moral phenomena. They begin when new productive forces strain against the institutional barriers of an exhausted order. The slogans both facilitate and obfuscate. The French Revolution was the product of a repressed bourgeoisie, the Bolshevik Revolution claimed, at the time, to be the only plausible route to industrial modernity; both fused moral fervour with material transformation which had become overdue.

Today, we again find ourselves again in Gramsci’s valley: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Liberal capitalism endures more-or-less but productivity stagnates, inequality widens and the 'overproduced elite' feels abandoned. The world feels saturated yet inert.

From a neo-Marxist-cum-Schumpeterian view, this is the predictable blockage phase of the long cycle. Marcus Olson has described how incumbent elites turn from dynamic enterprise to rent extraction. Bureaucracy, financialisation, and intellectual-property regimes now defend privilege by suppressing innovation.

Vested interests rule everywhere in the defence of their own comforts.

At the edges, however, a new regime of production is forming. Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems contain the makings of a new industrial revolution - potentially within five to ten years - but despite the LLM wonders, their development today is still immature, still a research project.

Perhaps some among the counter-elite - young, over-educated, under-rewarded -  already intuit that economic freedom in the coming order depends on open access to productive AI. Their eventual rallying cry may be the democratisation of automation: ownership and control of intelligent machines distributed beyond corporations and states. Their slogan could be “robots for every citizen”: an ideal of 'left-behind' citizens last seen in the mists of slave-owning antiquity.

Behind the rhetoric lies the revolutionary claim that cognition and labour, once it has become automated, must not be monopolised by 'the few'. "We are ends, not means!" comes the cry from the streets. In the history of the world up to now, the masses have always been 'means' for elite classes.

If history is a guide, such a movement will mature only when technology and organisation converge. Around the early 2030s, as AI systems achieve autonomous productivity, running factories, logistics, and services with minimal human oversight, the economic logic will become irresistible. At that point, the decisive political conflict will concern ownership: whether machine capabilities become monopolised by concentrated private capital.

Two outcomes are possible. A cold revolution if reformist governments co-opt the change with countervailing power - eg automated public services. A hot revolution if repression is the answer to mass layoffs and immiseration - and the masses aren't prepared to take it. 

Either way, if the old-guard is defeated (not at all a sure thing) then elite turnover will follow and blocked innovation will again become growth - although I suppose the physical elimination of the now-unnecessary masses through population collapse - or other means - is also a possibility.

Until then, we live through the long trough - five to ten uneasy years of moralism without programme, activism without outcomes. The technologies of liberation show potential but their politics are unborn. When they finally align, the successor ideology will not be religious or nationalist, but humanist.

I think that's what Karl Marx anticipated all along.

The Stalled Successor Ideology: (1/2)

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The Stalled Successor Ideology

Every revolutionary movement promises not only the destruction of an unjust order but the dawn of a coherent alternative. The slogan of the French Revolution - liberty, equality, fraternity - compressed an entire political cosmology into three words: the overthrow of hereditary privilege, the empowerment of the citizen, and the rebirth of society on rational, moral grounds. The Bolsheviks had their own version: land, bread, peace (with the promise of a secular utopia to come). Even neoliberalism, which posed as pragmatic economics, carried that utopian undertone of liberation through markets and individual choice and freedom.

Today, there is no such story. The contemporary protest milieu - green activism, anti-racism, gender ideology, anti-Zionism - represents a cluster of moral reflexes rather than a movement of aspirational power. It labels enemies but has no plan; energy but no architecture. Its rhetoric is redemptive, but it lacks any eschatology beyond “awareness”.

Antonio Gramsci wrote that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is precisely the condition of the early twenty-first century: the moral passions of the young surge against the structures of liberal capitalism, yet no integrative countervision commands belief. Protest has replaced revolution as the central form of political expression.

Historically, insurgent ideologies succeed when three conditions align.

First, a mobilising myth must connect moral grievance to a credible vision of collective redemption. The ancien régime, the Tsar, the bourgeoisie - each in their time served as a definable oppressor whose overthrow would, supposedly, unleash human flourishing. Contemporary activists can identify injustices but not their causal mechanisms; the villain is “the system,” a shapeless abstraction immune to decapitation.

Second, there must exist an organised cadre able to translate moral enthusiasm into a disciplined machine for taking power. The Jacobin clubs, the Bolshevik party, the neoliberal think tanks with their political shock troops - each formed the nervous system and insurgent forces of a rising elite. Today’s moral movements are decentralised by design, living on social media’s perpetual outrage cycle. They possess no coherent theory of governance because - crucially - they do not aspire to govern.

Third, insurgent ideology must align with emergent material interests. Revolutions ride the pressure of classes or elite fractions newly capable of wielding power - the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, the unionised industrial proletariat of the nineteenth, the globalising managerial technocracy of the late twentieth.

But the post-industrial “precariat” - precarious service workers, freelancers and disoriented graduates - lack both economic leverage and institutional footholds. Their discontented angst is moral, aesthetic, and existential; it can express itself in protest but not rule.

Some commentators, particularly in the United States, have proposed Christianity - often Catholic integralism, the view that political authority should be ordered to the spiritual good as defined by the Catholic Church - as the potential successor ideology.

The appeal is not completely devoid of sense. Religion alone can still articulate an ethical hierarchy stronger than procedural liberalism; it provides fraternity, moral order, and transcendence. A political theology might seem to offer the shared purpose that secular progressivism has lost in its decadent fragmentation.

Yet unlike in earlier epochs, Christianity today is too thoroughly institutionalised within the established order to lead an insurgency. Its clergy form a moral bureaucracy, not a revolutionary vanguard; its antique metaphysics promise salvation beyond history, not transformation within it. The Church can criticise decadence but not overthrow it. In short, Christianity can inspire repentance and an ethical life within the community but not revolution. Most pertinently it has no desire to.

Technology, particularly AI, might seem a more plausible locus for renewal. Yet AI today is infrastructure, not ideology. It offers administration, not deliverance. Its moralisation - responsible AI, fairness metrics, sustainability audits - produces a bureaucratic ethos rather than a revolutionary creed. We may be moving toward the quagmire of a moral-bureaucratic technocracy, in which governance is justified by ethical algorithms, but this is an evolution of managerial liberalism, not its overthrow.

The larger truth is that utopian confidence itself has collapsed. After the ruins of Marxism and the cynicism of postmodernism, no grand narrative of progress is any more credible. The young inherit a world that semi-guarantees safety and self-expression - but not transcendence, not enchantment. Their politics mirrors that void: permanent critique without vision, righteousness without telos - activism detached from an idea of the good society it seeks to create.

A new ideology will emerge only when a movement can again answer that ancient revolutionary question: what comes after the destruction of the old? Until then, we live in a moral interregnum between myths, between elites, between worlds. The energy of rebellion remains, but it circulates without destination; let us pray that it doesn't end up somewhere ugly.

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Next part.

The Blues framed by Differential Geometry

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The Geometry of the Blues

A quick primer on differential geometry. In mathematics, a manifold is a space that, while possibly curved or complex on a large scale, looks locally like ordinary flat space. 

A manifold is said to be Cⁿ if it is n-times continuously differentiable - meaning that its derivatives up to the nth order exist and vary smoothly. 

Thus, C¹ continuity guarantees that a curve has no sharp corners; C² continuity ensures not only that but also that its rate of curvature changes smoothly. If we don't even have C¹ we can't do differential geometry: we revert to raw topology.

In geometry, as in music, the degree of differentiability signals how fluid or jagged the transitions are.

With this apparatus in hand, consider the old accusation that there is really only one blues song. That twelve-bar structure, rigid and repetitive, would seem to limit creative scope to mere quantitative variation.

The twelve-bar form indeed imposes harmonic repetition - tonic, subdominant, dominant - but within that loop, everything else varies: tempo, feel (swing, shuffle, straight), tonality (major, minor, modal), rhythmic subdivision, lyric phrasing, and above all, micro-timing and timbral inflection. The emotional grammar lies in bending those constants, not replacing them.

So yes, blues is a single structural archetype, but like a sonnet, the constraint magnifies expression. There are countless blues songs because each player re-weights the same grammar toward different emotional equilibria. In mathematical terms: the base form defines a manifold; the artistry lies in the curvature.

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Think of the twelve-bar pattern as a topological surface - its chord changes define the harmonic metric - the rule by which distance and direction in tonal space are measured. Each performer defines a trajectory through that space: phrasing and timing become a vector field, bending the surface locally.

B.B. King’s phrasing introduces smooth curvature; Stevie Ray Vaughan applies high-energy torsion*; Robert Johnson works near singularities where the structure almost tears.

The “one song” claim mistakes the manifold for its geodesics. The form is invariant, but each traversal traces a distinct path - an integral curve of feeling through harmonic space.

Consider now Eric Clapton. He travels close to the manifold’s equilibrium. His phrasing tends toward smooth, low-curvature geodesics - economical, melodic, rarely chaotic. He optimises continuity rather than deformation: each note resolves predictably, the vibrato precise and symmetric. Mathematically, he explores local minima of expressive energy rather than forcing discontinuities.

Compared with Vaughan’s torsion or Hendrix’s topological breaks, Clapton maps the classical metric of blues space - stable, differentiable, C² continuous almost everywhere.

Jimmy Page, by contrast, introduces controlled discontinuities. His trajectories jump across the manifold - non-C¹ in places - using abrupt bends, modal detours, and rhythmic fractures. Where Clapton maintains local linearity, Page imposes discrete transformations: blues form multiplied by pentatonic chromatics, folk modality, and distortion’s nonlinear amplification. He exploits the manifold’s boundaries, generating fold catastrophes - sudden shifts from groove to chaos, consonance to feedback. In geometric terms, Page doesn’t merely ride the surface; he re-parameterises it, turning the twelve-bar plane into a warped topological complex - part blues, part mythology.

The twelve bars are constant, but within them every guitarist draws his own topology of feeling - the differential geometry of raw emotion. In both mathematics and music, structure is not limitation but possibility: form gives freedom its shape.

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* ChatGPT: So when I said Stevie Ray Vaughan applies “high-energy torsion,” the idea is that his playing injects rotational force into the musical space - phrases twist sharply rather than flow smoothly. It’s the difference between B.B. King’s graceful curvature and Vaughan’s torque-laden drive.

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Footnote which ChatGPT asked to be included for clarity

In this metaphor, the blues manifold is the genre’s global harmonic and rhythmic space (twelve-bar grammar, tonal palette, idioms). Each guitarist traces a personal family of geodesics within a local patch: Clapton’s paths are roughly C² smooth, Vaughan’s are C¹ with “torsion”. 

Page’s are sometimes only piecewise smooth (non-C¹); when these stylistic patches are glued together, the result is continuous but not differentiable, globally C⁰, with the metric and connection changing discontinuously across regions.

'Thou shouldst know thyself!'

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Weakness at the Rock Face

How do we define a weakness rather than simply a trait? Perhaps it is an aspect of ourselves we find lacking, either by the standards of social approval or by our own internal self-judgement. We should, of course, be aware of our weaknesses.

But who, really, wants to share them in public?

I tend to like the idea of doing something more than the doing itself.

This leads me way too often to start activities that I later deeply regret. 

To add to my problems I am poorly anchored in physical reality. I'm clumsy, inattentive to the world around me. I lack that instinctive ability of knowing what to touch, or how to take things apart and then put them back together again.

When it comes to manipulating physical reality, I am inept. 

My countervailing strengths lie in the conceptual: I was a competent programmer, a good theoretician in computer science and artificial intelligence, and a successful telecoms network architect.

But I can never repair anything - indeed, the very prospect fills me with terror.

When I was fourteen, my school, Bristol Grammar, started a rock-climbing club on the Avon Gorge. The gorge, with its sheer cliffs rising three or four hundred feet above the River Avon, sits almost in the heart of Bristol. The idea - the concept - of climbing those cliffs I found thrilling.

So, naturally, I signed up - pretty much over my mother’s dead body, as she was convinced I was going to die, although that thought had not yet occurred to me.

But with my father’s amused support, I forged ahead.

On Sunday mornings I would cycle the few miles from our home in Henbury, down the Portway, to the base of the cliffs. The club had a few older, competent climbers who led the routes, while we novices followed on the ropes. Until then, I had never confronted the reality of being a hundred feet up a vertical wall of rock with no obvious way forward and no clear way back.

At some point, I found myself exactly in that predicament. A tiny ledge, no safe hold, a feeling of about to topple, a vast, dizzying void beneath me, my knees vibrating involuntarily against the cliff. This is the subconscious already panicking; waiting for the conscious mind to catch up.

I realised I was not, and never would be, a natural rock climber.

I continued, my pride would not let me give up. My mother remained implacably opposed, convinced I would fall to my death. My father, observing my unease, quietly asked: did I really want to call it a day? Was I afraid that quitting would look like surrendering to my mother’s fears?

Reluctantly, I eventually had to admit he was right. It was pride alone that kept me turning up, the fear of losing face: I really didn't like it.

So we devised a face-saving excuse and I left the climbing club. 

And I have never gone rock climbing again.

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Other things I have started then given up over the decades: learning conversational french, learning piano, getting a maths MSc, properly studying physics topics like GR/QFT, learning to play the harmonica.