Draft Notes for My Obituary

From ChatGPT

We went to a funeral last Thursday. Iris Klim, aged 95, a parishioner. Her son gave a eulogy: pleasant, informative, affectionate, moving. A model of its type.

Nigel said he would prefer something different when his time comes …

Skate rapidly over my life, he said: youthful communist - a militant of the Fourth International; software developer turned researcher in Artificial Intelligence; successful freelance designer of telecoms networks.

Nigel's wife and children confirm his weird and bizarre opinions.

He claimed that the passage of time is a psychological illusion, that all times exist as if in amber. He claimed Albert Einstein as an authority on this. He said that, in any case, both space and time are not fundamental: the universe we live in is an emergent artefact of quantum entanglement - true reality is set in abstract Hilbert space.

Honestly!

Nigel had yellow belts in Judo and Karate, and years of T'ai Chi. He practised these arts to the end but never fought anyone for real (after an inconclusive  scrap when he was nine  - he was provoked!).

He died a Catholic, although for most of his life he was irreligious. He said that the apocryphal Martian anthropologist (a methodological nihilist) might say that human beings were simply biological machines. But ‘it is not like anything to be’ any of the machines we know about. The materialist faith that consciousness is reducible to neural net operations is no more than that; in any case explanations do not account for lived experience: that is the mystery and reality which theology encompasses better than anything else. Anyway, he was drawn more to Catholic deontology than any specific ontology: how we live is important.

Nigel puzzled over the continuity of personal identity. How do we know that we, now, are the same person who will wake up tomorrow morning? Actually, he said, we can’t know. Many people are quite like us, whoever we are. Personal memory is always mentioned, he said, but who’d die in a ditch for that when it comes to the foundational nature of our very selves?

So at this space-time moment, in this branch of the universal wave-function, you should say: Nigel has passed on. He wanted you to know that in the great enduring sea of consciousness and human experience, it’s not such a big deal. Except to those who shared our lives together, for whom it is everything.

Wendy Payne (1935-2017)

Wendy's funeral was held yesterday in Stroud. Wendy was my mother's (much younger) cousin - she said she always regarded my mother (Beryl Seel) as more of a sister.

Here are the presiding minister's remarks (the Reverend Brian Woollaston).

"Wendy was born in Bristol in 1935. The family moved to Haydon near Radstock shortly afterwards as her father worked on the railway as a steam locomotive fireman. She thoroughly enjoyed life in the Somerset countryside, going to school in Kilmersdon.

Her father had a promotion when she was 15 to a locomotive driver at Gloucester, and they moved to Longlevens on the outskirts of Gloucester. Wendy, being a country girl, did not like living in a city, but having left school found an office job in a local printers.

After a couple of years her father got her an office job at the locomotive depot at Barnwood, checking the drivers' time sheets etc. She settled down in Longlevens joining Holy Trinity church and the choir there.

When the depot closed she moved to the other locomotive depot at Horton Road and then to Eastgate station (now ASDA!) in the area manager's office. She was well known for riding a 'sit up and beg' bicycle to and from work in the early days.

She met Derrick at Eastgate station, as he was also working on the railway, and travelled from Stroud daily, calling in at the station to collect mail etc. They were engaged in 1975 and married in 1978, and for a while Wendy continue to work at Gloucester, travelling daily by train from Stroud where they lived at Cashes Green.

As this involved a long day she left the railway service and had several jobs in Stroud before becoming a full-time housewife. Her interests still involved the church and she regularly attended both Randwick and Cainscross churches, enjoyed flower arranging and gardening and the simple things in life. She knew flowers and loved gardening.

She would help anyone and would go out of her way to do so and thought well of everybody."

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Here are some other photos of Wendy.

Wendy (aged 3) and my mother (aged 16) at Radcliffe bay in 1939

Wendy and Beryl Porter in the late 1940s

Wendy with Clare and myself in April 2017

Wendy was incredibly organised and full of energy. She bore her final illness with extraordinary stoicism and was truly thinking mostly about the future of others through her final days.

The implacable state; Autonomous AI; 23andMe as a family investment

I was reduced to helpless, incandescent fury this morning by the unexpected arrival of a speeding ticket. I had been caught on camera on the way to my mother's funeral on Monday, Dec 21st 2015. I have applied for the driving awareness course option and will let you know in due course how it went, if accepted.

I visualise the Speed Enforcement Unit putting this together, chuckling as they did so.

Turns out I was doing 35 mph in a 30 mph section of the A-road at Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol. Once my head-banging, visceral anger had subsided (a trip to the gym helped considerably) I found the list above of more or less lame excuses (none of which work) quite amusing.

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Robin Hanson has an interesting piece about a newish book, 'Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy' by Prof. David Mindell at MIT. The book argues:

"If robotics in extreme environments are any guide, Mindell says, self-driving cars should not be fully self-driving. That idea, he notes, is belied by decades of examples involving spacecraft, underwater exploration, air travel, and more. In each of those spheres, fully automated vehicles have frequently been promised, yet the most state-of-the-art products still have a driver or pilot somewhere in the network. This is one reason Mindell thinks cars are not on the road to complete automation.

“That’s just proven to be a loser of an approach in a lot of other domains,” Mindell says. “I’m not arguing this from first principles. There are 40 years’ worth of examples.”

As someone who is interested in AI and its impact on the automation of everyday tasks, I promptly bought the book (Kindle) and will let you know how compelling I think his arguments are. After my speeding ticket I am thinking wistfully - and defensively - about Google cars. How does anyone drive on a regular basis in the UK without collecting 12 points in short order and losing their licence?

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In August 2014 I persuaded my mother to donate a spit sample to 23andMe. Eventually I was able to show her the report plus the much more detailed information from Promethease. My mother had no technical interests and in particular no background in genetics. Nevertheless she read all the material in the folder with close attention for half an hour and then took possession of it, refusing to allow its contents to be shared with anyone else, even close family.

I think there was a little bit of magical thinking here, as the information was in no way earth-shattering. However, the reason I signed her up was in anticipation of a future where 23andMe provide a full genome description and we actually know what it means. It's a family history gift to future generations. I might have mentioned to her that we could clone her from this data, bring her back memoryless, but I doubt she took it on board!

My father unfortunately died in 2009, before 23andMe got into business. I have some of his personal effects in storage anticipating future DNA profiling ... .

On an adjacent topic, it's interesting to see the latest genomic news on the ancestry of the Irish. Razib Khan has an in-depth discussion.

Funeral Music

Let me recall to you the case of Paul, the husband of a relation on my wife's side. Paul was a middle-manager in the nuclear power industry and a staunch Catholic; in fact he was a member of the Catenians. Slightly shy in person and middle-class, Paul was socially awkward - he may even have been a little bit 'on the spectrum'.

In December 2006, Paul unfortunately died. His Funeral Mass was well attended and solemn, the priests (more than one) gravely peregrinating around the large, echoing church. As the ceremony ended the presiding priest announced that Paul had chosen the accompaniment for our exiting the church en route to the grave.

At this point, a ghetto blaster was produced, as if from nowhere, and a cassette inserted. We departed the building to the jarring, amplified sounds of ABBA's "Thank You For The Music".

I was delighted. Paul had managed, in the end, to subvert the formalities with the power of kitsch. At that moment I decided that I could never match this. Put me down instead for the aria from the Goldberg Variations (by Murray Perahia please!).

Francis Youell: 1946 - 2015

In Formby yesterday for my brother-in-law's funeral. Francis was well-respected as a senior police officer in Merseyside and the service was attended by hundreds of people including the chief constable.

Francis Youell as a young policeman

The reception at the St Jerome Parish Centre

When I first met Francis (on marrying Clare back in 1978) I was still somewhat associated with the International Marxist Group. Francis, who regularly drank me under the table, was a senior special branch officer. He seemed to know way too much about me. Perhaps because of this, he was always very friendly.

Here's another picture of Francis. I was told he was once tasked with infiltration of left-wing groups, which given that he always looked like that must have been quite challenging ... good luck with that, as they say.

Francis Youell

Shirley Porter

My aunt, Shirley Porter, died in the early hours of this morning. I remember her as a very attractive and pleasant woman, married to my mother's brother Gordon who pre-deceased her by a number of years.

Shirley and Gordon Porter

Shirley Porter in the 1960s

Shirley with my mother, and (L to R) myself, Elaine and Adrian (early-sixties)

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Shirley Grace Porter (née Brown): b. 26th July 1935, d. 8th October 2014 aged 79.

Husband: Gordon Alexander Porter: b. 30th October 1925, d. April 30th 1990 (lung cancer) aged 65.

Update (Friday October 17th):

Clare and myself attended Shirley's funeral today at South Bristol Crematorium. There were 30 mourners, mostly her family. The presiding Minister noted that Shirley had trained as a shorthand typist and had worked at the firm John Hall & Sons in Bristol as a secretary and later PA. It was said that anyone she PAed for ended up as a Director, testifying to her competence and, I suppose, her shrewdness in choosing good bosses.

It was there that she met her husband-to-be Gordon Porter (my uncle) who was working as an electrician. They were married in March 1958.

Here are some pictures from today.

Our bouquet

The dedication

The author and his wife preparing to attend the funeral

Order of Service: cover - click to enlarge

Order of Service  - click to enlarge