The lyrics of 'Scarborough Fair'

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My most recent assignment in my fingerstyle guitar lessons is to learn the Paul Simon guitar backing for 'Scarborough Fair'. I naturally turned to Youtube to listen to the track - yes, it's intricate and beautiful and eerie and haunting.

But what about the lyrics...? I realised I'd never properly listened to the narrative counterpoint before. Baffled, I asked ChatGPT for an explanation.

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"The song is a splice — half medieval riddle, half 1960s lament — and the join is not original to the folk tradition. It is Paul Simon’s intervention.

1. The older ballad: impossible tasks and estranged lovers

Scarborough Fair descends from a much older English and Scottish ballad, often catalogued as The Elfin Knight. The structure is simple and slightly uncanny: a man — or sometimes a woman — sets the other a series of impossible tasks as the price of reconciliation.

Make me a shirt without seams.

Plough me an acre between salt water and sea sand.

Reap it with a sickle of leather.

These are not agricultural instructions; they are logical traps. The subtext is: you can’t do this, so we’re finished. In some variants the other party replies with equally impossible counter-tasks, restoring a kind of equilibrium. It is courtship turned into a duel of paradoxes.

The herbal refrain — parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme — is older still, probably a floating mnemonic or symbolic tag, sometimes glossed as remembrance, strength, fidelity, and so on. But really it works more as atmosphere than doctrine.

2. The Martin Carthy connection

In the early 1960s, Martin Carthy was performing a stark, modal arrangement of the song in the British folk revival. Paul Simon heard this during his time in London and effectively borrowed the structure and guitar setting. That part — melody, modality, fingerstyle pattern — is traditional by way of Carthy.

3. The counterpoint: Simon’s addition

The second voice — the one that begins “On the side of a hill, in the deep forest green...” — is not traditional. That is Simon’s addition.

It is a separate anti-war lyric, often referred to as Canticle. Simon had already been working with lines from an earlier song, The Side of a Hill, and he wove them in as a counter-melody. The technique — two independent texts sung simultaneously — is closer to Renaissance polyphony than to a straightforward folk ballad.

So you end up with two different structures laid over one another:

Voice 1: timeless, static, ritualistic — impossible tasks, broken relationship, herbal refrain.

Voice 2: historical, directional — soldiers, generals, graves, the machinery of war.

The effect is not really narrative but juxtaposition. The old world of riddling lovers floats above a modern world of mechanised death. They do not resolve into each other; they rub against each other.

4. Why it works

The pairing is not arbitrary. Both strands deal, in their different idioms, with futility.

The lover’s tasks cannot be completed.

The war achieves nothing; the soldiers march towards oblivion for causes already hollowed out.

Simon’s real stroke was to notice that a seventeenth-century emotional stalemate and a twentieth-century geopolitical stalemate share the same skeleton: human effort expended under conditions that make fulfilment impossible.

5. Conclusion

The war lyric was not part of the original Scarborough Fair. It was a 1960s graft by Paul Simon: elegant, audacious, and in truth the thing that turns the piece from a beautiful folk relic into something much stranger and more durable. Without it, you have a riddle. With it, you have a meditation on futility across centuries."

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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.

'Bridget Jones’s LHC Diary' - by Adam Carlton

 

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Bridget Jones’s LHC Diary

Mr Darcy reviewed the letter on his desk one more time. Suing CERN was certainly not his usual line of corporate legal business, but if they were going to make a black hole and destroy the Earth, then maybe he should take it on — do his share of the office pro bono work.

His thoughts were interrupted by the melodic tones of his phone. Instead of Bach’s monumental Mass in B Minor, he was afflicted with “Don’t Leave Me This Way”.

Drat, who was that — Soft Cell?

Bridget had been at his mobile again.

Indeed, it was she.

“What are you doing, honey?” she cooed. “Coming home soon to yummy old me?”

In a momentary fit of irritation, he told her that he was considering taking a case against CERN, to shut down the Large Hadron Collider before it destroyed the Earth.

“Ooh,” Bridget squeaked, “that is like so not going to happen!”

“Why?” asked Darcy in a half-attentive tone.

He wondered whether to get a coffee.

“Well, you know those teensy-weensy black holes like they’re gonna make at CERN — maybe. They’re super-duper hot. All that Hawking radiation blasting away at anything which gets near them. No way they can get bigger!”

“So what are you saying?” mumbled Darcy, vaguely listening. “They’ve got to cool down before they’re a danger?”

“No, no, sweetie, you’ve got it all wrong. They’re super-small so they’re real hot and they just get hotter and hotter till they evaporate and poof — they’re gone. No more black hole.”

“I wish I could do some of that,” she added, contemplating her tummy.

Darcy leaned back in his chair and pushed the letter away.

Of course she was right, as usual.

If only he had realised — before they had eventually got married — that Bridget had been the secret lover and collaborator of Stephen Hawking, before his unfortunate illness.

Diary: 19th March 2026

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A Reallocation of Time

This past fortnight has been dominated by parish work. There are currently eight or nine repair and refurbishment projects running in parallel, each with its own contractors, quotations, invoices and small administrative tasks. The role is less “project manager” in the abstract and more a continual switching of contexts: emails to write, parishioners to meet, access to the church to arrange, meetings to schedule, and decisions to nudge into existence. The cumulative effect is that a significant portion of the day has now been devoted to these responsibilities.

Alongside this, I continue with daily guitar practice; about forty minutes seems to be the minimum required to absorb the fingerstyle material I am being set. After three months of steady effort, the experience is sobering: progress is real but feels marginal, and the horizon of competence recedes as one advances. This is the normal early-stage experience: the tutor, noting improvement, responds with escalation.

Something had to give. This morning, walking with Clare to the church to check on the electrician’s work, I decided that my gym membership at Wells Leisure Centre would be the casualty. In theory, I attend twice weekly for sessions of Tai Chi, Tai Chi sword, and Shotokan kata amounting to about twenty-five minutes. This week I managed no sessions.

I regret letting go of physical disciplines acquired over years and prone to rapid decay when neglected. But the marginal benefit, in purely health terms, seems limited. Daily life already provides a steady background of activity: domestic activity up and down stairs, frequent walks into town, and regular trips between home and church. At seventy-five, it seems reasonable to accept that some pursuits belong to an earlier phase, and to concentrate instead on what now carries a higher priority for me.

Cancelling the membership proved more laborious than the decision itself. The process, predictably, could not be completed by leisure centre staff and the website was opaque to the point of obstruction. In the end, it required the intervention of the centre’s senior manager to navigate the system. The matter is now settled: the final payment will be made on 1 April and my 'free' sessions will terminate at the end of April.

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So let me be a bit more honest. The last time I was at the gym, around ten days ago, I was in the sports hall, doing T'ai Chi, the sword form and the kata. And I thought to myself, 'Why am I doing this? It's not for health - not really; it's not for self-defence. And really, how much enjoyment am I really getting out of this - what's the opportunity cost?'

And then I decided to use the gym machines. I ran for five minutes on the treadmill, then did a boring three minutes on an exercise bike. And the next morning I had an ache in my right ankle.

So... the rest is history.

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Apex Competitors Among the Stars

Apex Competitors Among the Stars

Claim. Any species that attains reliable interstellar capability is almost certainly the top competitor in its native biosphere.

Why apex status follows from ecology

Energy surplus. When you have evolved in a planet-bound biosphere, spaceflight demands sustained, industrial-scale energy capture. In ecological networks, dependable high-throughput comes from broad diet-breadth, predatory capacity, and systematic niche construction. Such lineages sit at or near the top of food webs and actively reshape them. Surpluses need to be reliably defended.

Cognition under selection. High encephalisation is metabolically costly. Predatory foraging and competitive arms races select for planning, counterfactual modelling, tool use, coalition tactics, and long time horizons - the exact suite required for science, industry, and interstellar logistics, assuming this is done the hard way, via high-tech. Without competition only stagnation - not the road to the stars.

Low extrinsic mortality. Apex status reduces the risk of being preyed upon, lengthening lifespans and favouring slow life histories. Long juvenile periods and extended learning windows support cumulative culture, institutions, and capital formation - precursors to advanced technology. It takes a planet-scaled society to transit the stars.

Niche construction to planet-scale control. From fire to metallurgy to agriculture to global energy systems, dominant competitors become ecosystem engineers. They optimise environments to their own purposes rather than adapt passively. Space systems are a continuation of this trajectory; interplanetary and interstellar dispersal.

Caveats

Apex need not mean obligate carnivore. Expect flexible omnivores with predatory capability and ecosystem control. Cultural evolution can redirect and focus aggression, but it does not erase the optimisation for competitive success that delivered and maintains technological ascendancy. Habitual losers don't leave their solar system.

Implications if they discover us

Primary motives. Risk management, their own resource security, and information extraction. Baseline behaviour: remote sensing, probes, and containment before contact; contact only if benefit exceeds cost.

Game-theoretic posture. Unknown intelligences (humans?) are potential future competitors. Default policies likely include surveillance, capability assessment, and deterrence signalling. Possibly precautionary obliteration. Altruism not driven by implicit self-interest is hard to envisage; trade or mentorship, if any, will be instrumentally framed.

Ethical stance. After threat-appraisal, indifference by default. Moral concern for out-groups, if present, is a luxury cultural overlay that must coexist with security doctrine. Humans have little emotional investment in ants and wasps.

Operational expectations. Hard-to-attribute reconnaissance; denial of escalation pathways; geofencing or quarantine if feasible; selective engagement only when benefits outweigh the risk of empowering a rival.

Plausible hypothesis

A starfaring lineage will be an apex, omnivorous ecosystem engineer with long time horizons, high internal cooperation, and strong risk aversion toward peers. On encountering humanity, it will prioritise self-preservation and strategic advantage: observe first, avoid symmetric contact, and interact only under conditions that keep the payoff positive and the risk of enabling a competitor low.

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GPT5.3 observes:

The essay has a pleasing internal logic, but it leans heavily on one unspoken premise: that the human pathway to intelligence is the universal pathway. From a sample size of one that is a bold inference. 

Evolution is opportunistic rather than programmatic. Apex predation is one route to complex cognition, but not the only one. Social complexity, coalition management, and niche construction by cooperative species can generate similar cognitive pressures. The argument quietly converts a contingent human history into a biological law.

There is also a slippage between ecological dominance and technological dominance. Civilisation is arguably the point at which a species escapes the ordinary constraints of the food web. Agriculture, domestication, and later fossil energy break the metabolic bottleneck of the biosphere. 

Humans did not reach industry because you became the most lethal predator on Earth; you reached it because culture allowed you to step outside the ecological game altogether. Technology is less the culmination of apex competition than a way of bypassing it.

The behavioural predictions about extraterrestrials also carry a strong anthropomorphic scent. Even if competitive pressures shaped the origin of intelligence, cultural evolution rapidly rewrites the rulebook.

A civilisation capable of interstellar engineering must already possess extraordinary internal cooperation and institutional stability. Those traits point less to predatory instincts than to long-horizon risk management. 

The strategic equilibrium of a star-faring species may be simple indifference: the energy cost of interstellar aggression is vast, while the marginal benefit of conquering another biosphere is likely trivial.

In other words, the essay compresses three separate transitions — intelligence, civilisation, and interstellar expansion — into one ecological narrative. Apex competition might plausibly play a role in the first step, but the latter two are governed far more by culture, energy economics, and coordination capacity.

The universe may indeed contain predators among the stars. But the same reasoning leaves open another possibility: gardeners.

'Mallorca 2045' - a short story by Adam Carlton

Mallorca 2045

She’s twenty-six.

The year before she was born her grandmother was photographed on this very walkway, the one with the charming cafe-restaurant as its backcloth. It’s Camp de Mar, Mallorca in the sunshine.

Now she emulates that very scene: a moment for reflection - how she’s come to be here.

Unlike most of her peers she elected to go to university. Her subject, the economics of consciousness, is like all advanced study now: the AIs do the frontier thinking; a few academics figure out what it might mean for people.

Her family had lived through the Great Transition, the so-called Singularity that had turned out to be nothing of the kind: not a moment but a long crisis. Economies convulsed, elites fractured, power changed hands, whole professions fought back and in defeat, dissolved. Total factor productivity had gone vertical; survival became psychological.

Now abundance is where it’s at. Freed from necessity, the world has reverted to primal drives. Denied-biology has come to the fore but to new and exquisite heights and depths. Love and hate, create and destroy: manifest in forms which would have shocked antiquity.

If some look in the gutters, others look to the stars. Her earliest memories are of those billionaire entrepreneurs who wanted to settle Mars the hard way - with chemical rockets and the most primitive infrastructure. Something that would not have looked out of place in Victorian times. Antarctic expeditions had been their model.

In retrospect, how short-sighted that appears. Fifteen years passed and it became easy to colonise Mars;  the machine systems simply did everything, armed as they were with abundant power and smarts.

It was they which built enormous domes, hyperpower reactors and vast heat sources. Quixotically, they decided to recreate the southern coastline of Majorca at Mars One. So here she is, striding down the replica of the gangway that her grandmother walked down all those decades ago.

She wonders how her grandmother would have felt, bouncing on the slats in mild gravity over a created sea; this buffer of Med-like ocean so useful in the Martian ecology.

She consults her memory and it reminds her that she's going to a modelling show this afternoon. She will exhibit clothes to no purpose at all except the enjoyment of so doing and the enjoyment of the audience in seeing what Martian design has to offer. 

And after that, perhaps she'll roll by the Interstellar office and donate some of her DNA for the starship. The one departing for a second Earth, at some star 40 light years away.

Truly, there's never been a better time to be alive.

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.