Overthinking it with Helen DeWitt

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Helen DeWitt, author, has had a troubled life.

"Many, many writers are chronically broke. Many have a long list of grievances with the publishing industry. Many will tell you about the circumstances that would have allowed them to enjoy the success of Ernest Hemingway or David Foster Wallace. Many have had multiple brushes with suicide, but there’s only one who wrote The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods, two of the finest novels published this century, and she’d recently spilled a glass of iced tea on her MacBook. ...

"The Last Samurai was a sensation even before it appeared. The toast of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999, with rights sold to more than a dozen countries, the novel came out in 2000 to wide acclaim, sold in excess of 100,000 copies in English, and was nominated for several prizes. But for DeWitt, this was the beginning of a long phase of turmoil that still hasn’t abated.

The book’s success was marred by an epic battle with a copy editor involving large amounts of Wite-Out; typesetting nightmares having to do with the book’s use of foreign scripts; what she describes as “an accounting error” that resulted in her owing the publisher $75,000 when she thought the publisher owed her $80,000; the agonies of obtaining permissions for the many outside works quoted in the novel, including Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai — which was the title of The Last Samurai until it was deemed legally impossible."

I reviewed it here.

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And then there are the suicide attempts:

"Once, after a book deal that she negotiated herself fell apart, she took a sedative and put a plastic bag over her head, but she couldn’t fall asleep. She sent an email to a lawyer asking that she ignore the previous email about disposing of her corpse. She went to Niagara Falls, but by the time she got there Reuters had reported her disappearance and a policeman picked her up on the street and took her to a hospital.

"Six years later, after the agent Bill Clegg failed to sell Lightning Rods to about a dozen publishers and resigned as her agent, she sent him a suicide email and set out to throw herself off a cliff near Brighton. She halted the plan after her ex-husband wrote saying he was expecting his first child with his second wife."

So Helen DeWitt appears to be living in poverty in Berlin, appealing on her website for people to buy her a coffee online. She has suggested she might be 'on the spectrum' and calls herself a rationalist.

Here's a bit of author bio:

"DeWitt grew up primarily in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador), as her parents worked in the United States diplomatic service. After a year at Northfield Mount Hermon School and two short periods at Smith College, DeWitt studied classics at the University of Oxford, first at Lady Margaret Hall, and then at Brasenose College for her D.Phil.

DeWitt is best known for her debut novel, The Last Samurai. She held a variety of jobs while struggling to finish a book, including a dictionary text tagger, a copytaker, and Dunkin' Donuts employee, legal secretary, and working at a laundry service. During this time she reportedly attempted to finish many novels, before finally completing The Last Samurai, her 50th manuscript, in 1998."

DeWitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese.

Helen DeWitt  at Oxford, in 1990

Her latest book, Some Trick, is a collection of 13 short stories, some of which date back to her Oxford days (1985) when she would have been 28. Critical reaction has been uniformly positive - if a bit baffled - while some less illustrious critics on GoodReads felt that the stories were underdeveloped - simply fragments, or that characters were merely sketched.

I'm with the 'work of genius' crowd .. but I can see why neurotypicals might get confused.

The title of the first story, 'Brutto', means ugly in Italian. From The Atlantic a synopsis:

"[It] is about a middle-aged artist who gets her first and, she fears, last shot at fame when her work attracts the interest of a rich, feckless gallerist. The artist only wants to paint, but the gallerist is entranced by an ugly suit of clothes that the artist made decades earlier, as part of a professional apprenticeship as a tailor. Can she make 20 duplicates to exhibit in a museum, he asks? And while she’s at it, can she provide samples of all her bodily fluids—sweat, blood, spit—to display alongside the suits? It’s the opposite of what she wants to do, but the temptation is great: “If you have never been there you think it is easy to walk away,” she muses darkly."

The second, 'My Heart Belongs to Bertie, is reviewed in The Atlantic like this:

'is an account of a disastrous meeting between Peter, a mathematician, and Jim, a literary agent. Peter is the author of a math-related bestseller, but success was poisoned for him by his publishers’ resistance to following his exact wishes—in particular, their refusal to include opaque mathematical symbols in the book. Negotiating for a second book, what matters most to Peter is not money, but his intellectual vision; he wants to convince Jim that he will sign with any publisher who will agree to do exactly what he wants. “The thing that matters is not, ultimately, an understanding of number theory, or the structure of the atom, or the semantic tradition, but an unswerving commitment to the pursuit of truth,” he earnestly lectures Jim.

But the agent, of course, thinks Peter is either joking or delusional—especially when he declares that he will be happy to give Jim 85 percent of the profits. “It is entirely reasonable for me to determine my own ends and offer financial compensation to you for the inconvenience of promoting them,” Peter impotently explains. He is quite aware that he is being perceived as an unworldly nerd, but he doesn’t care; for DeWitt, nerddom is allied to genius in its deep indifference to conventional expectations. In the end, Peter gets distracted by his own thoughts and ends up walking out of the meeting without saying goodbye. He can’t get what he wants from the world, but he is adept at making up a world in his head.

You see the autobiographical core in both these stories, right? More from The Atlantic review:

"Several stories in the book bear the note “Oxford, 1985,” and perhaps it was as an American graduate student in Oxford that DeWitt picked up her outsider’s sensitivity to English conversational style. These early stories focus on bright young men who run roughshod, conversationally and sexually, over polite young women, and at first sight they seem out of place in the book - as if DeWitt wanted to bulk out an already short collection by including juvenilia. But in the end, these stories earn their place, because they ask the same question, essentially, as the later tales about artists: How do you get a complacent world to stop talking and pay attention?"

My favourite story was Famous Last Words. Here's a short extract - they're discussing Voltaire's last words:

"X has found Pomeau's analysis of the confession.

'Wouldn't take the sacrament - says he dies in the church, not a member of it - second statement the real Voltaire - Whew!

"Il était mort en théiste, non en chrétien." '

`Whereas Noyes,' say I, 'says Voltaire's early religious training gave him a strong sense of the sanctity of the host.'

X puts a hand on my knee.

'Boswell sounded Voltaire out on immortality,' I say, 'Boswell wore his flowered velvet at the interview. ...' "

Young men using intellectual chatter to advance their subtext; young ladies of a rationalist disposition who run with the text .. while observing their own subtext reactions at a puzzled distance. Yes, we've all been there.

I liked Some Trick. I liked the sardonic, dry wit; I liked the acute observation; I like the celebration of the search for truth and the joy in the richness of ideas in the world and the dismay at the mass of people who just don't get it. And I admire the portrayal of the dismal fate her protagonists endure at the hands of ordinary folk: an NT meets a world of sensors.

I bought the book; I bought her a coffee.

The reification/ossification of theory: Samir Amin

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Scientific theories represent not only their subject matters, but also a history of our changing engagement with their domains of concern. All theories ossify and sediment as their historically-constructed forms, vocabularies and content are stranded by the ever-developing engagement of humans with the world. Social relations, and relations with the natural world, are in continual flux, mediated through ever-changing needs, technologies, conflicts and opportunities.

In the natural sciences we have an audit trail of progress, surfing the industrial dynamism of capitalism mostly. In the so-called social sciences, all 'theories' have an agenda, theorising the interests of the social groups and factions which sponsor them.

The exception was meant to be Marxism: a theory which represents the dispossessed, not any elite faction. Surely such a theory has no interest in wilful obscurantism? And when Marxism was hijacked by Stalinism to justify a newly-formed bureaucratic elite, wasn't it Marxist critics of Stalinism who most profoundly analysed the degenerate result?

But we are where we are. Marxism today, largely confined to the liberal-arts elite in academia, is mostly exegesis and dogma. Marx's curiosity and skepticism about everything has been replaced by a complacent indifference to new results in neuropsychology and genetics, combined with blindness to the inner obscurities of the Marxist corpus (value theory, the supersession of capitalism, the compatibility of extensive automation with continuing capitalist reproduction).

I am interested in value theory, because a critical foundation of Marxist theory is that only human labour creates value, and that abstract social labour is the key concept underlying the exchange process which lies at the heart of generalised commodity production, ie capitalism. This captured a particular view of observed reality in Marx's time, capitalism in its first developmental phase.

In the modern physicalist view of things, humans are effectively biochemical 'machines' - so any apparently-vitalist distinction in Marxism (only living labour can create new value) cries out for a deeper understanding, driven by the need to analyse increasingly widespread cognitive automation.

We have always understood that value is a social relationship, not a quasi-physical attribute of a commodity. Yet there are subtleties. Natural processes (wine ageing, for example, or the ripening of fruit) appear to increase value. Rents and value-creation are confusable. Workers have different concrete abilities and training so measuring abstract social value seems difficult - is it an operational concept? And finally, what will stop machines we design in the image of ourselves and pay wages to from creating new value? - Just say no to vitalism!

I was hoping Samir Amin might be able to help me out. But no: his short book is really an extended advertisement for his other books. There is a difference between understanding a theory in its own terms and being able to deploy it accurately, on the one hand .. and understanding the underlying reality so deeply and profoundly that you can assess, critique and creatively develop that theory, on the other. It's the difference between good and great.

Amin has read his Marx and internalised it. He can do exegesis even as he criticises it. Yet what he writes that is profound is not new, and what is new in his book is not at all profound.

Good is not enough: I am disappointed.

Climate collapse and pandemics: the fall of Rome

Amazon link

From the Princeton University Press description:

"Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria.

He takes readers from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted.

Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague."

This is a highly readable, even exciting narrative which situates the Roman Empire within the climate cycle of the:

• Roman Climate Optimum (200 BC - 150 AD)
• Late Roman Transitional Period (150 - 450)
• Late Antique Little Ice Age (450 - 700).

Agrarian societies are highly susceptible to climate deterioration and its attendant woes of famine, plague and attack from similarly-stressed 'barbarians'. Consequent depopulation subverts both the economy and the military. The later Empire was, as Harper demonstrates, constituted as a sequence of structural-political responses to increasingly debilitating challenges. In the end it was all too much.

This is by far the best, and most compelling account I have read of the dynamics underlying the fall of the Roman Empire (and also the rise of Islam, which brought the final coup de grace). Another case where climate science and paleogenetics are revolutionising history and archaeology.

One small criticism: Harper uses anachronistically the categories of capital and wage labour. But Rome was not capitalist, it was mercantilist, dominated by a mode of production based on ubiquitous slavery as Harper explains in great detail.

Quantum Gravity and the double-slit experiment

The backlog of books I wish I had already read continues to grow.

Amazon link

"Fields of Color explains Quantum Field Theory to a lay audience without equations. It shows how this overlooked and misunderstood theory resolves the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics and the paradoxes of Relativity. The third edition contains a new and simple solution to "the most controversial problem in physics today": the measurement problem." .. from the Amazon page.

Note (updated Friday 27th July 18): having now read this book I don't endorse it. It's simplistic, misleading and dumbed-down to the max. The author, who is an experimentalist, seems to believe that fundamental physics is best understood through a bluff, no-nonsense, concrete interpretation which in no important sense violates our everyday intuitions. Hard to reconcile with the maths (Hilbert space vs spacetime) .. the problematic ontology of operator-valued fields .. and so on. I accept that he believes what he says and that his intentions are good.

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This post is about quantum gravity. Marginal Revolution  provided a link to this article: "a good explanation of why a theory of quantum gravity in particular is needed". The points made are not unfamiliar (see this superior post from Backreaction*) but the issue is at least somewhat clear.

 " ...you put a (preferably uncharged) test particle in the middle between the slits to see where the gravitational pull goes. If the gravitational field is quantized, then in half of the cases when the electron goes through the slit, the test particle will move left, in the other half of cases it would move right (it would also destroy the interference pattern). If the gravitational field is classical however, the test particle won’t move because it’s pulled equally to both sides. " (Backreaction).

Note that in the former case there's a measurement leading to a 'collapse of the electron wavefunction'.

Take the seemingly-related question: what is the electric field at a point 'at the screen' of an electron in a state of spatial superposition transiting the two slits? (Of course, we know that the electric field is quantised - the photon is the EM field quantum).

I don't recall this matter ever coming up in the usual QM discussion of the two slit experiment. Those are always concerned solely with the spatial trajectory of the electron itself.

It seems to me that this question can't be addressed within quantum mechanics, which assumes a classical electromagnetic field. Surely one must turn to quantum field theory? (See also this from Physics StackExchange). I don't have any top-level, hand-wavy intuitions about that, though. But the book above by Brooks might help.

Still, in QFT the fields are propagating within a fixed spacetime. When it comes to gravitation we're talking about the dynamic metrical structure of spacetime itself. That theory (quantum gravity) really isn't anchored down at all: the reality underpinning spacetime is utterly unlike the continuum of our naive intuitions.

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* I had never studied the Schrödinger–Newton equation.

Diary: so we bought a car ..

On Sunday I wrote about the somewhat fraught car-buying process. Yesterday was devoted to test drives, ending up with our choosing the Volkswagen Golf SV GTI.

VW Golf SV GTI

The Skoda Karoq was fun in a big, squishy van kind of way but in the end the sleeker hatchback from VW won us around. The SV variant of the Golf has plenty of room in the back.

As I drove around south Bristol with the VW salesman in the back, I had the opportunity to floor the pedal. (Our preferred choice is the automatic). The engine seemed to step back a moment through the change-down .. and then the Golf surged forwarded with a shove in the back. I half turned to him and said, "I guess this is what it feels like when the Shuttle launches!"

Sanity prevailed as we chose the 130 bhp rather than the 150. It's enough.

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The VW operation in general seemed more professional and process-oriented than the rather haphazard Skoda/Seat dealership. Our particular experience was marred, however, by a 40 minutes wait for service as the collective intelligence of the sales team had forgotten who had seen us on our first visit Friday.

Thanks again to WhatCar. Its target pricing allowed us to negotiate down from VW's inflated, premium-markup list pricing.

Now we wait until October/November for the factory order to come through.

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PS: at no point in the proceedings did any salesperson mention electric car options to us. Despite the hype, it's nowhere in the salesrooms.

The general take on 'Driver Assist' is that it's a combination of useful (parking sensors, cruise control), marginal (cameras, lane holding) and gimmicky (auto-drive in slow-moving traffic, traffic sign recognition, self-parking). So much for the hype on the imminence of self-driving cars.

Diary: on buying a new car

Posts have been infrequent recently. The Tour de France, obviously. But we've also been busy trying to buy a new car.

A lot of stuff to get in the back

Returning from our recent camping trip to the New Forest, Clare - writhing and shuffling on the Toyota Auris's uncomfortable seats - suddenly had an epiphany:

"We need to get a new car!"

So her requirements are: more space for camping equipment .. and seats which are a lot more comfortable. I would add that the sluggishness of the Auris has always irritated me while some high-tech driver-assist would be really interesting.

Apparently what we need is a compact (or family) SUV.

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It's a nightmare choosing the short-list. Most manufacturers have this category in their portfolio. Cue tedious research on the Internet before we discovered the Top Gear 'best small SUV list'. This was enough to get a five car shortlist (not including the Dacia Duster!) and on Friday we hit the showrooms of South Bristol.

I had initially thought that selection was equivalent to running an internal Prolog program like this:

spacious(volkswagen_golf_sv).
spacious(skoda_karoq).
spacious(seat_ateca).
spacious(volvo_xc40).
spacious(peugeot_3008).
spacious(dacia_duster).

comfortable(volkswagen_golf_sv).
comfortable(skoda_karoq).
comfortable(seat_ateca).
comfortable(volvo_xc40).

fast(volkswagen_golf_sv).
fast(volvo_xc40).
fast(skoda_karoq).         % some models!
fast(seat_ateca).              % some models!

value_for_money(volkswagen_golf_sv).
value_for_money(skoda_karoq).
value_for_money(seat_ateca).
value_for_money(dacia_duster).

likes(clare, Car) :- comfortable(Car), spacious(Car).
likes(nigel, Car) :- fast(Car), value_for_money(Car).

choose(Car) :- likes(clare, Car), likes(nigel, Car).

This is what you see when it runs.

?- choose(Car).
Car = volkswagen_golf_sv ;
Car = skoda_karoq ;
Car = seat_ateca.

But nothing beats walking up to the car in the showroom and sitting inside it. We have test drives booked for this coming week. I am advised that it is critical to test drive all the shortlisted cars, not just the preferred one. Ride comfort, handling and noise just can't be predicted.

Another tip is from WhatCar which publishes the 'target price', usually several thousand pounds under the list price. As they say,

"Sales staff's margins depend on a number of factors, including the bonuses and incentives that are being offered by manufacturers to their network (many of these are leaked to our team of secret shoppers). So it's worth double-checking that day's Target Price on the car you're interested in before you head off to the showroom; we'd even recommend printing out a screen-grab or taking a copy of What Car? magazine with you so you can stick to your guns during negotiations.

If your salesman won't do the deal, we'll try to find one who will."

We shall see. That and the part-exchange on the Toyota, which after ten years is worth around £1,400.

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Some people, I'm told, treat buying a new car as fun. It's not exactly a chore but I'll be pleased to complete the process.

Goodbye to The Economist

Dear Sir/Madam,

This is to inform you that I have cancelled my Direct Debit to The Economist, due in August 2018. My customer reference number is *******.

The reason is that I am increasingly exasperated by the partisan slant of your articles, particularly on politics and culture. Instead of analysing and explaining the great changes afoot in the world (where I commend Irwin Stelzer for example), your articles are highly partisan on one side of the debate. You could be writing for the UK Liberal Party or the US Clintonite Democrats. In cultural pieces your journalists consistently indulge blank-slate, Guardian-style prejudices, offending the intelligence of your readership.

It's a shame. There are pockets of analysis in your science section and the generally excellent technology quarterly that I shall miss.

Regards, etc

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Update Saturday:  I received the following reply this morning.

Dear Mr Seel,

Customer Reference Number:-****** 

Thank you for contacting The Economist.

We are sorry to hear that we are losing a valued subscriber.

I confirm that I have cancelled your subscription on its expiry with the issue dated 25th August 2018 and no further payments will be taken. Please ensure that you also cancel the Direct Debit instruction with your bank.

We hope that you will continue to read The Economist from time to time.

Should you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards
Stefan King

The Economist subscription centre

Send the flea letter.

Good to know that The Economist AI did a close reading of my note.

"Steps Toward Super Intelligence" - Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks's long-awaited essay has now arrived. It's in four parts starting here: Steps Toward Super Intelligence I, How We Got Here.

Follow the links therein to read the three subsequent parts, or click here: two, three, four.

Rodney Brooks

I fleetingly met Rodney Brooks once, at an AI conference in London. I guess this would be in the 1980s when he was already rather famous for his controversial 'subsumption architecture'. He was a small guy who reminded me of Paul Simon. He politely asked me what I did and I pompously replied that I was an AI theoretician. He looked at me as I would have looked at someone from, say, Andorra who claimed to be an 'AI theoretician'.

The eminent roboticist gracefully made his apologies and moved on.

My subsequent encounter with Rodney Brooks was indirectly via our purchase of several vacuum cleaners from his highly successful company, iRobot. They were excellent.

The essays too are uniformly excellent.

"Comments" now posted

Apologies to those people who sent comments which I apparently ignored. Google failed to send me the notification emails. Thanks, Roy.

I've now gone through the backlog (sorry again!) and they're up now.

Keep them coming!

Variational Principles

Amazon link

Like Ted Chiang ('Arrival'/'Story of Your Life') I am a huge fan of variational principles. I was therefore pleased to discover Jennifer Coopersmith's well-regarded book (above). She has a good article about the connection between Newtonian Mechanics and the Principle of Least Action which I stumbled across when I was thinking about something quite different .. .

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First Brexit. Beneath the daily froth of politics find the plate tectonics of political-economy. Political forms and institutions seek their stable equilibria, their maximal-entropy configuration. There's a variational principle here!

The UK is a small island abutting a Franco-German empire . The EU likes to drape itself in high-falutin' ideals but it's really about elite power and economic efficiency. Institutionally it's in crisis. Neoliberal stagnation and decay has frayed the bonds of social cohesion across the western world. Yet the economics of international supply chains, specialisation and scale permit no national regression. The consequent collapse-process is slow and uneven - and BRINO was perhaps always the fated outcome in this phase.

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I was also thinking of my days as a BNR network planner in the 1990s, bringing modernity to the ex-socialist states of Eastern Europe. I was a frequent flyer, regularly presenting Nortel's model for modern network design to Polish, Hungarian and Romanian telecom planners.

We would take a country and look up the main town and cities in an atlas. We'd carefully measure the distance between every pair of towns to create a distance matrix. Then we'd check the populations figures: so many thousands of people per city, and apply a multiplier to work out the total traffic generated (erlangs in those days, now G/Tbps).

Next came the clever part. We used a gravity model on the inter-city distance matrix to work out how much traffic each link would have to carry. As I recall, we didn't use an inverse-square law: empirically that was too sharp a cut-off. A 1/distance rule worked better. So now we had a traffic matrix.

This was input into our network design tool, and out came design-graphics and equipment lists for access, aggregation and long distance core networks. Our audience, people who'd been using pencil and paper hitherto, were awestruck.

We made a lot of sales.

I mention this only because our solutions, too, seemed instances of a variational principle. The optimal cost-benefit solution for a network design, given the 'traffic potential field' defined by underlying populations and geographic-separation parameters.

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Update: Gwern has researched all this to within one inch of its life.

Three cute cats

"What did you think of the previous post?" had more than 159 hits over the last week.

Were they all there for the concept of '2'? No. Here's what you guys really crave .. .

Our legendary HP printer with yet another fan

That thing they do on the carpet. So cute.

Shadow on his first day with us.

Normal service will be resumed shortly. Enjoy a sunny Sunday.

"They choke horses, don't they?"

It was a sunny afternoon, nearly as hot as the famed July of 2018. Clare was setting up a picnic table in the back garden when I exclaimed,

"Look what I found under the stairs!"

I had been looking for seldom-used barbecue coals.

"What?"

"It's a six-pack of those carbonated water bottles that Waitrose used to sell."

These had been unavailable since the great plastic panic of 2018-19.

"Wow! Bring one out and we'll have it with the wine."

Meanwhile, the neighbourhood protection drone cruised up our street on its stealthed rotors. Fully autonomous, it provided a complete suite of crime prevention and counter-terrorism functions.

A shadow crossed my path as I stepped into the brilliant sunlight of our back garden - a shadow followed by a great sky-shout:

"Stop! Put down the plastic bottle! Back away with your hands up!"

With a glance at the malevolent predator thirty feet above me, I slowly and carefully complied. An elderly man just a few months ago, crying defiance, had ineffectually held a similar plastic bottle to his chest. Next thing he was rolling on the ground in agony. Taser flechettes.

I needed a story for the SWAT team already on its way.

Sat on the ground with my hands on my head as the thing maintained its surveillance, I turned to Clare who had her hands over her mouth in horror.

"You remember back in 2018 there was that carbon dioxide shortage? When it turned out that they'd be using it to 'stun' animals before slaughter? As if suffocating an animal with carbon dioxide - like putting a plastic bag over its head - wasn't the cruellest thing, much more cruel than simply slitting its throat.

"I reckoned the animal rights people, the liberals, would be all over it. But not a peep. No moral high ground on choice of gas, you see. No kudos in nitrogen.

"But plastic - huh! - what's not to like?"

As my hands were taped behind me and I was marched off to the van, I figured most likely they would not make a terrorist rap stick.

Huawei MediaPad M3 10" Lite Tablet

Clare with her new tablet and its girly cover

Huawei MediaPad M3 10" Lite Tablet: Amazon link

Clare got her (refurbished) Nexus 10 tablet back in September 2016. I suppose two years or thereabouts is the expected lifetime of a tablet. In fact over the last twelve months it's developed a common Nexus 10 problem: from a full charge the battery runs down rapidly and after a couple of hours - despite ~50% charge remaining - the tablet shuts down. She has ended up using the device in tethered mode, largely undermining the intended experience.

So today we make a new start with Huawei's M3, a device which I chose based on its solid battery life and fingerprint security. It's also pretty fast - which mainly buys you future-proofing.

The Nexus 10 - which I was prepared to junk - has migrated to her bedside.

"Angelmaker": free will and quantum indeterminacy

Amazon link

In “Angelmaker’, Nick Harkaway’s Apprehension Engine MacGuffin threatens to bring complete truth to the human race, in the process necessarily eliminating quantum uncertainty. According to the government agency tasked with suppressing this dastardly plot, this would end reality as we know it. People would be reduced to Laplacian clockwork automata; Free Will would vanish.

The agency is most likely wrong about that, and I'm still too early in the novel to determine whether the author shares that belief (which incidentally didn't seem all that upsetting to Laplace).

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AI researchers tend to take it as axiomatic that human consciousness (including the illusory sense of free will) may be implemented on a classical computer - no explicit quantum phenomena there.

But are they right?

Neurons are chemistry and chemistry is an effective theory largely decoupled from its quantum foundations. Indeed it's news when a non-classical mechanism is discovered within the chemistry of the cell, such as electron tunneling transport in ATP synthesis.

But nothing in biology depends upon 'the collapse of the wave function’.

In my QM course (SM358) we discussed atomic and molecular structure in terms of orbitals - solutions of the time-independent Schrödinger equation. There were no quantum fluctuations (except for the miniscule Lamb shift), and nowhere for free will to be smuggled in.

Amazon link

I'm reminded of Greg Egan's (classical simulation) Autoverse in his novel Permutation City. If our universe could be re-engineered to work in a Laplacian fashion (and maybe it does) I don't think in a state of nature we'd really notice. Historically, people didn't, you know.

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I wrote this today while Clare was swimming. Strangely, Google didn't autocomplete this one.

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Backreaction has a post on this very subject just out. Take a look.

Thoughts of a biological neural net

This post is hard to write .. and equally hard to read and internalise.

"The passion between Darcy and Elizabeth was frozen in time, locked down by the strictures of Regency England. As they are driven away after their wedding, the final shot shows Darcy leaning across Elizabeth: finally, finally! - their lips touch."

How romantic.

I have read science-fiction stories which would narrate the scene thus:

"The larger protoplasmic bag of fluids and guts slithered towards the smaller one. The damp, tumescent borders of their ingestion orifices made contact and an exchange of mucus and pre-digestion fluids took place."

You see what I did there. But it's a reframing designed to elicit disgust - and that's not what this post is about. Try this:

"The two multicellular systems were positioned adjacently in the carriage. Both neural nets, housed in their respective skull cavities, were in a state of dynamic tension. Brainstem and limbic arousal (evolved to coordinate mating behaviour) was suppressed by higher cortical inhibition (encoding social norms). Only a small preliminary act escaped this standoff, which duly occurred."

The stance of the engineer or evolutionary biologist - abstracting from the emotional experience of being human. The fish doesn't see the water it swims in; we don't see each other the way the Martian Anthropologist (or a psychopath) would.

Yet it is the truth.

When I consider myself not as a Cartesian 'person’ but as a mobile biological neural net with a defined lifespan, I find that somehow reassuring (the truth shall set you free), no matter that it is subversive of every possible ambition, sentiment or point. But none of us (putting aside psychopathy) can consistently live our lives like that. We're hardwired not to - it would be evolutionarily self-defeating - indeed, how does it feel to you to even engage with this line of thought?

Scott Bakker, in his blog Three Pound Brain, has been arguing this it seems like forever.

"The end of spacetime" - Nima Arkani-Hamed

Recently via Lubos Motl's blog.

"Nima Arkani-Hamed talks about the demise of spacetime, simplification in QFT, amplituhedrons which turn scattering amplitudes into high school geometry volumes, and other things."

Ideal if you have a spare ninety minutes 😏 .. . It's a public lecture, so not too technical.

"The Last Samurai" is a work of genius

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From the New York Times review:

"The progenitor of these projects is Sibylla, a woman of frightening intellectual intensity who trades America for Oxford in an attempt to avoid a family tradition of dreams deferred. Frustrated by the limited scope of her Oxford studies, she soon drops out, opting for a precarious existence at society's margins in a sad parallel to the American life she had tried to escape.

Nine months after a drunken tryst with a popular travel writer, Sibylla gives birth to Ludo, a child prodigy who at 4 is reading the ''Odyssey'' in Greek. Sibylla refuses Ludo knowledge of his father because she can't bear the idea of involving such a banal man in the life of her son.

As a father substitute, Sibylla offers Kurosawa's film ''The Seven Samurai,'' which she watches obsessively in her attempt to escape the drudgery and mediocrity of the real world. Rather than sating Ludo's paternal yearnings, the film inspires him to embark, at 11, upon a quest to choose his own father. ...

Ludo shares the novel's narrative center with a cast of seven potential fathers, one literal and six wishful, whom Ludo seeks out during his Kurosawa-inspired quest. The lives of these men are provided in asides that almost constitute a short-story collection within the body of the novel.

DeWitt's imaginative powers are showcased here as she details these engaging and eccentric men, luminaries in fields ranging from astronomy to professional bridge. DeWitt's facility with their stories is so convincing that you wonder, briefly, if these characters are based upon historical figures -- a true marker of effective fiction.

Ironically, these men often feel more real than Sibylla herself, who becomes more a collection of quirks than a multidimensional presence."

The Last Samurai is laugh-out-loud funny, highly ingenious and a page-turner; it's rationalist-libertarian, self-satirical and smart. I have her latest, Some Trick, on the stack downstairs.

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Here's the more erudite Paris Review on DeWitt's novel.