Predicting spousal personality

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Tomorrow morning I'm meeting Tabitha's husband for the first time. I've known Tabitha for a while: she's quiet but intense, organised and rather emotional. I'm wondering what her husband is going to be like. What should I expect? My thoughts veer to Clare and myself: if someone knew Clare very well, what could they predict about me? Let's analyse this...

Clare’s temperament sits close to the ISFP profile: introverted, attuned to sensory experience, slow to engage with strangers, low on conscientiousness, high on neuroticism. She avoids public conflict but reacts strongly to stress. If we mapped her scores onto the Five Factor Model, they would cluster in the low ranges of Extraversion and Conscientiousness, high in Neuroticism, with low-to-middling Agreeableness and Openness.

Now suppose personality traits are modelled as continuous variables, roughly Gaussian in distribution across the population, according to the Five-Factor Model. The mathematics of correlated normals tells us that if two people’s traits are correlated with coefficient r, then knowing one partner’s trait gives an expected value for the other’s:

E[Trait_Spouse | Trait_Person = x] = r · x

In plain terms: spousal similarity exists, but it is partial. The closer r is to one, the more a spouse resembles the other; the closer r is to zero, the less predictive knowledge there is of the other partner.

Empirical psychology finds modest positive spousal correlations (typically r = 0.2–0.3) for traits like education, politics, conscientiousness and religiosity; weaker and sometime negative for neuroticism; sometimes near zero for extraversion.

So what of Clare and myself?

Clare is introverted; I am more extraverted. Her conscientiousness is low; mine is high, expressed in structured projects and organised commitments. Her neuroticism is elevated; mine is much lower, I'm much more phlegmatic.

By the correlation formula, if Clare scores a high positive x on neuroticism, the best estimate for me would be r·x. With r close to zero, though, for neuroticism in spousal studies, my expected value is close to zero - consistent with the reality that her anxiety does not predict mine. 

For conscientiousness, however, spousal correlation is moderate; Clare’s low score predicts a somewhat below-average score in her spouse. Yet my actual conscientiousness is markedly higher than predicted, an example of how individual outcomes scatter around the statistical mean.

Thus the conditional-expectation model provides a sober prediction: spousal similarity is real but weak, easily swamped by variance. Knowing Clare tells you a little about me, but not much.

Back to Tabitha.

She is quiet but intense (low extraversion, high neuroticism), organised (high conscientiousness), and emotional (again neuroticism). The mathematics says: expect her husband’s scores to regress toward the population mean, weighted by modest spousal correlations.

So: he is unlikely to be as quiet as she is, perhaps somewhat more outward-facing; less neurotic than she is, but not phlegmatic; with conscientiousness somewhere near average.

If I had to guess: a calm, moderately sociable man, complementing her intensity by providing ballast rather than echoing it.

Prediction via correlation is a blunt instrument. It captures the statistical truth that spouses are neither random pairings nor mirror images. The mathematics of expectation, when mapped onto personalities, reminds us that knowing one partner yields only a dim - but not entirely unsurprising - sketch of the other.

Note: I met Tabitha's husband this morning. A very pleasant man, who in personality and life-history terms seemed very like a more concrete version of me...

Abundance removes the need for men

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Abundance and Male-Female Roles

A society of abundance is predominantly a female model of social life. 

The hard material questions - securing resources, retaining them, defending them - have largely been solved, or at least outsourced to impersonal systems. As a result, daily life can be organised around interior and relational flourishing: children, conversation, social grooming, the maintenance of emotional and moral networks.

For men, however, this same environment proves actively hostile. An abundant society removes not only danger but challenge; not only hardship but the possibility of great movements, grand projects, or idealistic quests that impose themselves from without. In such conditions, men frequently experience themselves as superfluous.

That experience of psychological irrelevance manifests as the anomie and purposelessness so characteristic of modern life. One might also note that without social roles for the expression of male virtues, female-male relationships are also thrown into confused disarray.

In pre-modern or marginal environments, life is structured by a small number of inescapable facts. Resources are scarce, threats are real, and failure is visible, consequential and frequently lethal. Under these conditions, the environment generates meaning automatically.

One does not have to ask what to do with one’s life; the environment answers that question continuously and without ambiguity. Our psychologies were formed from this environment of evolutionary adaptation.

A society of abundance reverses this structure. Food, shelter, security, and continuity are largely guaranteed. Violence is monopolised by the distant state. Failure is buffered, deferred, or medicalised. This does not produce freedom in any neutral or transparent sense. It produces existential slack: a vacuum in which meaning must be self-generated without the psychological equipment to do so reliably.

Across cultures and even across primate lineages, female sociality tends to be relational rather than heroic, oriented toward maintenance rather than conquest or defence, and embedded in dense networks of mutual attention.

In an abundant society, these forms of engagement remain meaningful. Child-rearing continues to matter. Emotional labour retains its value. Gossip and informal norm-policing still perform essential social functions. Interior flourishing has a clear referent in children, relationships, and continuity across generations. Abundance maps comparatively cleanly onto caretaking-and-coordination psychologies.

Male motivational systems, by contrast, are typically quest-shaped. Across cultures, male psychology is disproportionately tuned to status acquired through risk, esteem earned through competence under pressure, and meaning derived from challenges that offer real external resistance.

Male meaning is often heterotelic: it depends on something outside the self that pushes back. Remove danger, scarcity, honourable risk and hostile enemies, and what remains is a restless surplus of drive with nowhere to go - often redirected into crime or tribal violence.

Crucially and consequentially, abundance does not merely fail to reward these drives; it actively pathologises them. Competitiveness becomes “toxic,” ambition is redescribed as “ego,” risk-taking is framed as reckless immaturity, and hierarchical instincts reframed as authoritarianism.

The male psyche is therefore not only under-stimulated but morally delegitimised. The lived result is a recognisable phenomenology: superfluity, in the sense that no one needs what one brings; disorientation, with no clear criteria for success; resentment, as others flourish without comparable sacrifice; and withdrawal into simulations - games, pornography, and bogus ideologies.

Men do not feel liberated. They feel ontologically surplus.

Are men superfluous in societies of abundance? Functionally, often yes: a tendency that advances in AI and robotic automation are likely to intensify.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that a society of permanent abundance is not neutral with respect to sexed-psychologies. It fits female social logics tolerably well, leaves male motivational systems idle, and then blames those systems for malfunctioning.

We won't return to scarcity, mythic warrior cultures, or reactionary romanticism. But challenge, risk, and meaningful opposition cannot simply be abolished without psychic cost - and that cost will be borne disproportionately by men.

We need new quests for healthy societies.

Historically that usually means revolution and war.

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These views are not particularly original. In A Secular Age (2007) - see also the Wikipedia article - Charles Taylor says this: "But the concern about levelling, the end of heroism, of greatness, has also been turned into a fierce denunciation of the modern moral order, and everything it stands for, as we see with Nietzsche.

"Attempts to build a polity around a rival notion of order in the very heart of modern civilization, most notably the various forms of fascism and related authoritarianism, have failed. But the continued popularity of Nietzsche shows that his devastating critique still speaks to many people today. The modern order, though entrenched—perhaps even because entrenched—still awakens much resistance."

I asked GPT5.2 whether Nietzsche might yet have had an answer to this centuries-old critique of abundant modernity. This was the interesting reply from GPT5.2.

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Why We Remember the Past and Not the Future

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Why We Remember the Past and Not the Future

When I was a student at Warwick University, this was a topic in my philosophy class. But it's not a question for philosophers; it's physics. Like this.

We should avoid time-laden assumptions. The universe displays an asymmetry between lower-entropy states near the Big Bang and those farther from it. From any particular state, call the past those slices of spacetime nearer to the Big Bang, and the future those farther away. Time, in this geometric sense, is simply the ordering of these slices along the expanding fabric (really the positive entropy gradient) of the universe.

Our question is: why records exist of events closer to the Big Bang but not of those farther from it.

Imagine that yesterday a supernova became visible in the sky. The light from that explosion reached Earth, interacted with our atmosphere and the Earth's surface, and altered the states of countless atoms. Those microscopic changes are, in principle, correlated with the original event, yet they rapidly disperse through further interactions, merging into general thermal motion. The information is effectively lost in the wider thermal randomisation of energy.

When you saw the supernova, however, something different occurred. The arriving photons triggered a cascade of interactions within your sensory system. Neural structures in your brain formed a configuration that encoded features of that event. This configuration can persist through subsequent physical states and can later be retrieved. A memory, in this physical sense, is a subsystem capable of forming and maintaining a structured correlation with some external interaction, preserving that correlation across later states, and retrieving it when required. That low entropy persistent record was created by you generating greater entropy in your environment, of course.

Now consider that tomorrow another supernova will appear in the sky. At this present slice of spacetime, the photons from that explosion have not yet entered your light cone. They have not interacted with you or with the matter surrounding you. The relevant regions of the universe have not yet exchanged information. No physical trace of that event exists in your current environment-state, and therefore no memory could correspond to it.

The difference between what we call past and future arises from this incomplete communication within the universe. Because the cosmos began in a low-entropy condition, its regions are still in the process of exchanging interactions. Not all parts of the universe have yet influenced one another. The network of interactions—propagating within light cones—links some regions while leaving others still disconnected. What we call the past consists of those regions that have already communicated with our present state; the future consists of those that have not.

Memory, therefore, is a local expression of this broader asymmetry. It depends on structured systems—brains, instruments, records—that can retain correlations once interactions occur. We remember the past because its signals have already reached us and have been encoded. We do not remember the future because its signals have not yet arrived.

If, in some remote epoch, the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium - its state of maximum entropy - and every region has exchanged all information accessible to it, then no new records can be formed. Patterns will cease to emerge, distinctions will dissolve, and the measure of change we call time will have lost operational meaning in a state of thermalised uniformity. The spacetime metric continues to exist but the possibility of registering the passage of time has disappeared.

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'In Congénies' - a short story by Adam Carlton (intro)

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Un mémoire fracturé, déformé par des décennies d’échos, a fini par s’échouer chez moi. Tous les détails sont faux – sauf ceux qui ne le sont pas. On m’assure que c’étaient de belles années, malgré les drames et les regards accusateurs. Et oui, tous ces rêves, toutes ces espérances, se sont révélés fondés...

Le voici.

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"A fractured memory, distorted by decades of echoes, has ended up washing ashore with me. All the details are false—except for those that are not. I am assured they were beautiful years, despite the dramas and the accusatory looks. And yes, all those dreams, all those hopes, turned out to be well-founded..."

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Why Did GOFAI become Gone AI?

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GOFAI vs. the Crushing Realities of Scale

When I was an AI researcher in the 1980s, the dominant paradigm was knowledge representation. AI, we assumed, was essentially the art of representing knowledge in a formal language - predicate calculus, or some applied version of it - and then using that representation via inference rules, plus  heuristics to stop the whole thing from exploding combinatorially.

There was a huge and optimistic research programme around this: fuzzy logic, probabilistic and Bayesian variants, and a menagerie of ad hoc representational structures - frames, scripts, semantic nets - all trying to bottle “commonsense” in forms that could be manipulated in increasingly powerful ways. 

In the mainstream, nobody cared about neural nets. That community existed, of course, but it was marginal stuff in a distinctive physics-based mathematical paradigm we didn't really understand, and which we thought useless.

In hindsight, this now looks extraordinarily short-sighted. The whole approach has been shoved into the cupboard labelled Good Old-Fashioned AI - GOFAI - as if it were a Neanderthal cousin: earnest, ingenious perhaps, but doomed. I assure you it did not feel that way at the time; it felt like the right approach.

Why? Because the way we consciously think about thought is through language. When you ask someone why they did something, they give you reasons. Those reasons come out as propositions. And if you take propositions seriously, the best formal machinery we have for them is logic. So we formalised. We inferred. We drafted and polished the rules. We argued about representation. We believed we were closing in on the core of intelligence: meaning made explicit, knowledge made inspectable, inference made principled and then effectual.

If this was such a plausible programme, why did it fail so completely?

Some people will tell you that GOFAI was about “meaning” and neural nets are about “statistics”. But that opposition is uninformed and usually tendentious. When you ask a large language model a question, you ask something with meaning and you get back something with meaning. If it were all just statistical noise, it would be useless - and it obviously isn’t. So the question is not whether artificial neural net systems have semantic understanding, but how they acquire it and where it lives.

To see the difference, it helps to focus on what we were really trying to do in the 1980s. We were trying to declare meaning in advance. We tried to build a world model by writing down the world: concepts, relations, constraints, defaults, exceptions, and the rules for moving between them. We aimed for explicitness because explicitness feels like the true essence of knowledge. If the machine “knows” something, we should be able to point at it. If it reasons, we should be able to justify it. If it is wrong, we should be able to debug it.

Those are admirable ambitions. They are also, it turns out, ruinously expensive.

The world is not just insanely large; it is also densely structured. Human life is soaked in tacit knowledge: the thousands of micro-regularities that never make it into explicit articulation because they don’t need to. Such commonplace utterances as:

• “If someone says X in that tone, they probably mean Y.”
• “If this tool is in that drawer, it implies the last person who used it was doing such-and-such.”
• “If the kettle is boiling and the milk is out, the next event is likely tea.”

We do not store these things as neat propositions. We carry them as an accumulated, largely unspoken competence - our multi-decade store of condensed experiences.

GOFAI tried to drag that whole submerged continent into the daylight, label it, and file it. And every time you write a proposition you commit yourself: the predicates have sharp boundaries; the ontology has cliff edges; the exceptions multiply. Brittleness is not an engineering accident in that world - it is structural. Logic, by its nature, deals in closed systems: a statement is true or false; a condition holds or it doesn’t; an entailment follows or it doesn’t.

Human cognition, by contrast, lives on slopes. We cope with partial fit, family resemblance, analogy, and improvisation. When our models are wrong, we often degrade gracefully rather than crash. In a certain sense we live by operational not denotational semantics: praxis or dasein, if you like.

The deeper problem, though, was not merely brittleness. It was bandwidth.

Even if you grant that explicit representations are, in principle, adequate - even if you believe you can model “meaning” propositionally - you still have to get enough of it into the machine to matter. That is where the knowledge representation research programme hit the wall. The amount of world-structure a useful system needs is not “a lot”; it is effectively astronomical.

Doug Lenat’s Cyc project is the heroic proof of concept and the cautionary tale in one. It was an attempt to win by scale within the symbolic paradigm: build a vast commonsense knowledge base by hand, assertion by assertion, rule by rule, over decades. It turns out the scale of what a lifetime of expert labour can encode is orders of magnitude below what is required for the kind of fluent, flexible competence we casually expect from “intelligence”.

It is not that Cyc was trivial; it is that the world is not.

So what did the neural approach do differently? It did not “abandon meaning”. It abandoned the fantasy that meaning must be pre-declared by a human engineer.

Large language models are trained on corpora so vast that they function, in practice, as a proxy for civilisation’s accumulated linguistic trace. That trace is not random. It is massively redundant, massively structured, and shot through with regularities about the world - causal regularities, social regularities, narrative regularities, and the implicit ontologies that language users share through use without ever explicitly listing them.

Training is then a brutal compression process. The system is forced, by optimisation pressure, to extract the stable patterns that make text predictable. In doing so it precipitates a semantic geometry: a high-dimensional space (thousands of dimensions!) in which meanings are not discrete atoms with hard edges, but regions and directions - similarity structure, entailment gradients, pragmatic association, contextual modulation. It is representation, certainly, but not the sort that sits obediently on a page as “facts”. It is meaning condensed into weights.

This is why the modern paradigm scales and the older one didn’t. Not because logic is false and vectors are true, but because the neural method exploits a source of structure GOFAI could never match: the pre-existing structure in the world’s textual data dump, harvested at industrial scale.

Symbolic AI tried to build an ontology from the top down, by explicit design. LLMs inherit an ontology from the bottom up, by statistical consolidation. The difference is not merely technical; it is ecological. Neural methods outsource much of the labour of world-modelling to the culture that produced the data. They do not ask a small priesthood of knowledge engineers to type out reality, line by line. They take what humanity has already written - the messy, contradictory, redundant bulk of it - and compress its median regularities into an internal structure that can generalise.

There is, of course, a price.

GOFAI’s great virtue was epistemic. Even when it failed, it failed in the open: you could inspect the rules, challenge the ontology, argue about the premises. Modern systems give you competence first and legibility only as an afterthought. They are astonishingly capable, but they do not come with built-in notions of truth or justification. They optimise. Sometimes that aligns with truth; sometimes it aligns with plausible rubbish. You gain power and lose a certain kind of accountability.

Still, the historical lesson seems clear enough. The decisive factor was not that symbolic representations are “wrong”, but that explicit hand-built representations cannot reach the density required for general intelligence-like behaviour. GOFAI was working with teaspoons; the world required oceans.

In the 1980s we tried to formalise intelligence as propositions plus inference. The 2020s arrived with a different discovery: intelligence scales with the compression of structured experience. Meaning can be precipitated, not merely declared. And once you accept that, the dominance of neural methods stops looking like a betrayal of reason and starts looking like a humiliating empirical fact about where the informational mass of the world really sits.

In the knowledge lies the power, the old knowledge engineers used to say; in the world's data lies the knowledge is the new mantra of the foundation model engineers.

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A Christmas Message from Adam Carlton

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Joyeux Noël à tous mes lecteurs,

Yes, yes... I know. Once again I’m photographed beneath the Trotskyist hammer and sickle, that faded relic of revolutionary chic.

“Isn’t this just the French version of Sally Rooney cosplay?” you ask. “Aestheticised Marxism as lifestyle accessory, hollow as a gentrified café in Belleville?”

I’ll spare you the discursive rebuttal: this blog is already overstocked with Marxist rake-overs and theoretical post-mortems. Listen to Camus:

« Je me révolte, donc nous sommes. »

Rebellion, after all, remains the last refuge of those too lucid to believe and too dignified to conform. La révolte demeure le dernier refuge de ceux qui refusent d’être pris pour des dupes.

And truth be told, épater la bourgeoisie has its compensations. One is rarely short of invitations. The wine is decent. And every now and then, some bickering offshoot of the ruling class borrows your slogans: usually without comprehension but always without irony.

« Cynique, moi ? Jamais. Mais m’accuser de regarder la réalité droit dans les yeux — à cela, je plaide toujours coupable. »

À bientôt,

Adam.

PS. A while ago I wrote a poem...

My Year with ChatGPT - (Christmas Eve 2025)

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But perhaps ChatGPT forgot to include my sword in the picture?

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What the two slit experiment tells us about decoherence

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What the two slit experiment tells us about decoherence

1. The set-up: what we actually observe

In the double-slit experiment we send electrons (or photons, or atoms) one at a time towards a screen. Each run gives a single, localised dot on the screen. Nothing like an “interference pattern” is visible in any single event. The pattern is an ensemble fact: if we repeat the experiment many times with identically prepared electrons, the histogram of impacts converges to a stable probability distribution, and that distribution shows fringes.

This is worth stating bluntly because it stops us from talking nonsense about “seeing the wavefunction”. We never do. We infer the correct quantum description from stable statistics across many runs.

2. The state-vector description without which-path information

Let the electron’s relevant alternatives after the slits be the two emerging wavepackets, one associated with the left slit and one with the right. Call these states |L> and |R>. In the ideal symmetric case, immediately after the slits the electron is in the superposition

|ψ> = (1/√2)( |L> + |R> )

Let |x> represent a position eigenstate on the detection screen. Define the two complex amplitudes

ψ_L(x) := <x|L>,   ψ_R(x) := <x|R>

The amplitude to arrive at position x is then

<x|ψ> = (1/√2)( ψ_L(x) + ψ_R(x) )

So the probability density on the screen is

P(x) = |<x|ψ>|² = (1/2)|ψ_L(x) + ψ_R(x)|²

Expand it out:

P(x) = (1/2)( |ψ_L(x)|² + |ψ_R(x)|² + ψ_L(x)ψ_R^*(x) + ψ_L^*(x)ψ_R(x) )

The last two terms are the interference (cross) terms. They carry the relative phase information between the left and right alternatives. With those terms present, we get fringes.

3. Add the simplest possible which-path detector: one bit of memory

Now introduce the simplest imaginable which-path detector. Model it as a two-state system (call it a “bit” if you like) with orthonormal basis states |0> and |1>. Assume it starts in |0>. The coupling at the slits is defined as follows:

If the electron takes the left slit, flip the bit. If it takes the right slit, leave it alone.

In symbols, the interaction implements the correlations

|L>|0> → |L>|1>    and    |R>|0> → |R>|0>

This is entirely unitary: a controlled operation. Now apply linearity to the incoming superposition. The combined system (electron + detector) evolves as

(1/√2)( |L> + |R> )|0> → |Ψ> = (1/√2)( |L>|1> + |R>|0> )

This is the whole mechanism of decoherence in miniature. There is no mysterious “collapse” here. The total state |Ψ> is a perfectly good, pure state. But the electron by itself is no longer in a pure superposition. It is entangled with something that stores which-path information.

4. The exact calculation: how the interference term disappears

We now compute the probability P(x) of finding the electron at position x on the screen without conditioning on the detector. That “without conditioning” clause is crucial. In a normal experiment we do not read out every microscopic environmental degree of freedom. We just look at the screen.

First compute the environment-valued amplitude:

<x|Ψ> = (1/√2)( <x|L>|1> + <x|R>|0> )

So

<x|Ψ> = (1/√2)( ψ_L(x)|1> + ψ_R(x)|0> )

This is not a single complex number. It is a vector in the detector’s two-dimensional Hilbert space. The probability of a hit at x, ignoring the detector outcome, is the squared norm of that vector:

P(x) = ||<x|Ψ>||² = <Ψ|x><x|Ψ>

Now expand, using orthonormality

  ( <1|1> = <0|0> = 1 and <1|0> = <0|1> = 0 ):

P(x) = (1/2)( |ψ_L(x)|²<1|1> + |ψ_R(x)|²<0|0> + ψ_L(x)ψ_R^*(x)<1|0> + ψ_L^*(x)ψ_R(x)<0|1> )

But the cross terms vanish because the detector states are orthogonal:

<1|0> = <0|1> = 0

Therefore

P(x) = (1/2)( |ψ_L(x)|² + |ψ_R(x)|² )

That is the incoherent sum of the two single-slit contributions. No fringes.

The key point is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it: the two “paths” no longer contribute amplitudes that add as complex numbers. They contribute orthogonal vectors in the detector/environment space. Orthogonal vectors do not interfere; their norm squares add.

5. Partial which-path information: fringes fade rather than vanish

A real detector need not be perfectly sharp. Suppose the detector ends up in two (possibly non-orthogonal) states |d_L> and |d_R>, with overlap

γ := <d_R|d_L>

The joint state is

|Ψ> = (1/√2)( |L>|d_L> + |R>|d_R> )

Run the same calculation and the probability becomes

P(x) = (1/2)( |ψ_L(x)|² + |ψ_R(x)|² + 2 Re{ γ ψ_L(x) ψ_R^*(x) } )

The interference term is suppressed by γ. If γ ≈ 1 (detector states essentially identical) you recover full interference. If γ ≈ 0 (detector states orthogonal) the fringes disappear. This is the precise mathematical meaning of the informal claim that decoherence “washes out” interference.

6. What this does and does not explain

This little model lays bare what decoherence actually buys you:

• It shows, in purely unitary quantum mechanics, how creating a record of which path was taken eliminates interference in the local statistics on the screen.
• It explains why a macroscopic environment is so effective: overlaps like γ are driven rapidly towards zero when records are amplified into many degrees of freedom.

But it also shows what decoherence does not do by itself. It does not tell you why, in one particular run, the electron hit this pixel rather than the adjacent one. Decoherence explains the emergence of classical-looking probability distributions; it does not, on its own, settle the “single outcome” question. That is a separate interpretive problem, and it’s best kept separate if you want conceptual hygiene.

7. The minimal takeaway

The double-slit experiment doesn’t merely illustrate “wave–particle duality” in the popular-science sense. It gives you the cleanest possible laboratory for the central idea of decoherence:

Interference requires not just a superposition in the system, but the absence of distinguishable records in the environment.

Once a which-path record exists—even a single bit—the cross terms that generate fringes are multiplied by an environment overlap that becomes (effectively) zero. The interference pattern dies at the level of ensemble statistics, even though the total state vector of system plus environment remains perfectly coherent.

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'A Modern Catechesis?' - by Adam Carlton

A street off the Rue Mouffetard, late afternoon in wet, gloomy winter. The café was half-empty, the heating uncertain. Every time the door opened, cold street air wafted around my ankles. I was here to talk again to Claude, to discover - as Christmas approached - how he felt the message of Catholicism could be made more relevant to the disaffected youth of Paris and around the world, young people who seemed to be re-evaluating the attractiveness of the Universal Church.

Here is our conversation, stripped of the pleasantries.

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Adam: Claude, it's reported that young people - bored, alienated and bereft of ideals - are beginning to consider Catholicism again. Yet when the Church tries to speak to the young, it seems to lead off, as always, with the implausibly miraculous: virgin birth, divine incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, a promised return. All delivered as if they were items in a history class - or a police report.

That's always going to invite the utmost incredulity... or at best a dismissive shrug. Even if the claims were taken to be true, isn't it the case that many would say: so what? What possible consequences could there be from such weird and ancient events for anyone's actual life?

Claude: How could I disagree? If we make those events the entry point, we almost ensure the wrong reaction. People hear apparent fairy stories, or what they take to be tendentious propaganda. The deeper truths - the ones that could speak to their condition - are lost before we even begin.

Adam: Yet plenty of Catholics believe the Catechism of the Catholic Church. They would be profoundly offended by the way you tend to frame the mysteries of faith as symbolic.

Claude: I believe the contemporary term is 'luxury beliefs': beliefs which - in their very strangeness - bind the community of adherents together, as an in-group but at no cost as they have no practical consequences. Beliefs become ‘luxury beliefs’ when they are held as badges rather than inhabited as disciplines.

Adam: For you perhaps. But orthodoxy would also promise those true believers literal entry into the kingdom of heaven after they die. Which self-defines as a practical consequence if you believe it.

Claude: Yes, and I'd go further. Paradoxically the very integrity and longevity of the Church absolutely depends upon its core believers - and this includes the overwhelming majority of the clergy - truly inhabiting an enchanted world suffused by the living presence of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. 

I'm the first to recognise that this, culturally, is an immense distance from the secular worldview of the average citizen in the West.

Adam: That very distance surely makes it unwise to insist upon the primacy of the counterintuitive - even counterfactual? It feels like underselling your supposedly profoundly true message by insisting on a supernatural framing which sounds completely implausible to anyone not brought up with it.

Claude: Well, the creeds are the skeleton of Catholicism - hard-won self-understanding forged over the centuries. But catechesis too often confuses skeleton for present body. A twenty-year-old doesn’t need the bones of long-forgotten doctrinal disputes thrown at them which is what the essence of the Creed is; rather, they need to know why any of it should matter to them at all.

Adam: OK, it sounds like we're in agreement. But what would you say instead? Imagine someone disillusioned with politics and consumerism and the emptiness of life. Why should Catholicism claim their attention? Rather than, say, the attractions of Lutte Ouvrière or your former PCF?

Claude: Touché, perhaps... I’d begin with the needs the Church still addresses better than most institutions: the hunger for community in an atomised society; for practices that make love, solidarity and loyalty more than slogans; for meaning that doesn’t collapse into nihilism, narcissism or utopian fantasy.

Adam: Really?! Sociology with incense? Cohesion dressed up with angels? Life after death?

Claude: The Catholic proposition is that love and truth aren’t the useful illusions of the cynic but the grain of the real. Ritual and doctrine really do point beyond mere comfort and community; they keep our community from worshipping itself. That’s why transcendence matters: it prevents the club from becoming its own idol, a cult fixated on some human charismatic who invariably falls from grace.

Adam: So let's go with an example. Your own view: do you think the Resurrection happened as literal history in AD 33 or whenever?

Claude: I don’t treat the Resurrection as a historical puzzle waiting to be solved, nor as a metaphor we invent to console ourselves. It is the Church’s foundational claim about reality as lived: that death does not have the final word over meaning, loyalty, or love.

Whether there was an empty tomb is not irrelevant, but it is secondary. The Resurrection is not a report about a past event so much as the event that brought the Church into being and still governs its life. It is true insofar as it commands allegiance, reorders fear, and sustains fidelity where despair would otherwise be rational.

Outside that form of life it will always look like myth or madness. Within it, it is simply the formulation of hope.

Adam: I guess that's a common thread in all the great religions, as well as radical political movements: "We communists are dead men on leave." But would you be so frank within the Catholic community itself, I wonder?

Claude: Perhaps, although it would depend on who I was talking to - religion works on the whole person, not just the intellect. But I would point out to those interested in ideas that a very historical literalism is a modern obsession.

The early Christians used the mode of typology - the theological method by which events, figures, or institutions in the Old Testament are read as prefigurations (“types”) that find their fulfilment (“antitypes”) in later events, especially in Christ, the Church, or the sacraments. They told their theology in narrative form.

Reading those texts as reporter's notes misconstrues the genre. It's always theological argumentation in the dense cultural matrix of the time; parable.

Adam: The Virgin Birth?

Claude: The Virgin Birth is not a biological curiosity; it is the Church’s refusal to say that what finally matters in human life is generated by ordinary mechanisms of power, inheritance, or desire.

It says: this life is received, not produced; called, not engineered. That claim had to be told in the symbolic language available at the time, just as we now tell different truths through different conceptual forms.

To read it as obstetrics is to miss its polemical force entirely.

Adam: You know the phrase 'Cafeteria Catholicism'?

Claude: Of course. But Catholicism has always been broader than the movement’s gatekeepers. Within its walls: mystics, reformers, skeptics, radicals. I stand within that broad current.

Adam: Suppose the young person replies: why not stay secular - read philosophy, join a political movement, fight for change in the actual world?

Claude: Movements always fracture on the rock of human nature, always conceal the narrower interests of some disgruntled faction of the elite or wannabe elite. The Church alone endures, not because it’s flawless but because it binds lives together under transcendental meaning - not hostage to episodic fashion.

Adam: So practice before doctrine and not to worry too much about the inconsistencies and the magic?

Claude: Practice alongside doctrine, but yes - let people see what the practices do. The Eucharist turns “this is my body, given...” from a slogan into an internalisable commitment. Confession forbids our consoling self-narratives until we’ve told the truth. If any of that begins to make sense, the liturgy becomes a grammar for what they already half-know.

Adam: And the present style of evangelisation?

Claude: Too often mistakes assent for conversion. It asks the young to nod to miracles before showing them why they might need the entire value system. Reverse the order: start with community, self-discipline, commitment to a greater cause and recognition of mystery; then teach the framework that founds and steadies those things, respecting the divergencies of interpretation within the canon.

Adam: People will point to scandals, evasions, abuse - the charge of hypocrisy lands pretty quickly.

Claude: Then tell the truth quickly. The Church’s credibility won’t be argued back; it must be behaved back through justice for victims, protection of the small, and that ordinary sanctity manifest without vacuous, bland and self-serving press releases.

---

As we get up to leave, Claude pushes a small folded manuscript into my hand without comment; I put it in my pocket to read later. When I get home I remember the paper and sit down to read it. I'm astonished by its frankness: no wonder it's written in the third person.

Here is what Claude had entrusted to me.

---

What Claude Really Believes about Catholicism

Claude’s path into Catholicism was not the tidy arc of faith rediscovered, nor the sentimental tale of a prodigal son returning to a waiting Father. It was the weary detour of a man who had lived through utopias collapsing under their own contradictions. A former militant, he watched the Marxist dream wither in police states and privileged bureaucracies, until even the rhetoric rang hollow. Something in him still sought community, ritual, and a moral horizon larger than himself. That was the opening through which Catholicism entered.

He is quick to make one point clear: he does not believe in the personalised supernatural God of catechism posters and children’s homilies. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Trinity - for him these are truths enacted in practice rather than reported as facts. He treats them as parables, symbolic formulations of truths about human dignity, suffering, and hope.

To demand their historicity is, in his eyes, to miss the point. Ancient people did not trade in empiricism; they lived by narrative and symbol. Claude insists we should meet them on those terms.

So why Catholicism? Not because it offers cosmic guarantees. He values it because it is a community anchored by the sacred. In a fragmented, atomised society, the Mass actively gathers people across divisions into a ritual of solidarity. Bread and wine, blessed and broken, are not to him the body and blood of a deity in any Aristotelian, metaphysical sense; they are the enactment of sharing, the memory of scarcity resisted by togetherness. The liturgy is both familiar and renewing, a rhythm that reassures and situates him within a living tradition.

Catholicism also gives him language. Where Marxism spoke of comradeship, class struggle, and revolution through to utopia, Catholicism speaks of communion, justice, and the Kingdom of God. Claude does not believe in heaven and hell as destinations, but he recognises them as dramatic images of what is at stake in human life.

To live rightly, to build communities of fairness and love - that is “heaven”. To surrender to greed, cruelty, or alienation - that is "hell". The Church, in all its arguments and inconsistencies, remains one of the few institutions still staging that drama on a global scale and it endures.

He is not blind to its failures. The abuse scandals, the entanglement with power, the endless tendency to authoritarianism - all this he acknowledges without apology. Yet he holds that Catholicism, precisely because it is a vast and contradictory body, is more honest than purist projects which collapse under their own abstractions and rigidities. Within its walls there are fundamentalists and heretics, mystics and bureaucrats. That breadth is its strength: “many rooms in my Father’s house,” as Claude likes to quote.

What does he truly believe? He believes in community over atomisation. He believes in love as the highest commandment. He believes in the symbolic power of ritual to bind people together. He believes that human beings, for all their flaws, need institutions that lift their gaze above consumption and private interest and in being the dupes of remote elites. And he believes that, however contradictory, Catholicism can still function as such a place.

For Claude, Catholicism is not a surrender to superstition, but a choice of solidarity. It is the flawed but enduring vessel in which he has chosen to travel through the wreckage of lost and abandoned utopias.

---

A comment on this article from GPT5.2.

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Rope Flow

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A conversation about skills and training

N: "I Saw your rope flow video (which I had not heard of before). Seems to emphasise aerobic exercise and postural stretching?

My own discipline of Tai Chi focuses on balance and more centrally the integration of complete flowing movement in a harmonious way (balance is then a consequence of correct bodily flow).

You know how when you're teaching or learning a complex skill it's important to get the form right (and not to 'fall out of form') - and then to make the form your own?

In learning Karate we do it 'slow and fast'. Slow to focus consciousness on the whole-body form; fast for real world effectiveness. 

Tai Chi is like an extremal point of training to be hyper-conscious of the form while at the same time internalising it so that it has a 'mindful automaticity'. I'm sure that applies to any complex skill when considered in the round."

---

X: "I think the rope flow you can take in different directions, you can go strength/fitness with heavy rope or more into spinal rotational flexibility but perhaps the best is getting in a flow state and achieving the flexibility as an omni-useful bonus.

That's my interpretation based on very little but it caught my eye as being quite a pleasant activity once you stopped clobbering yourself. That route from novice learning the form to unconscious expert is quite daunting when I consider doing any more skateboarding; the price of failure starts high and climbs steeply with age."

---

GPT5.2:

A few observations.

First, you and X. are largely agreeing, but from opposite ends of the skill-acquisition pipeline.

You are describing form as an organising principle: an integrated whole-body pattern that is first made explicit, then slowly embodied, and finally internalised to the point where it disappears into action.

Tai Chi, karate kata, even good guitar technique all work this way. 

Slowness is not a concession to age or gentleness; it is a way of widening consciousness so the whole pattern can be perceived at once. Speed then tests whether the pattern has actually been learned, or merely rehearsed.

X., by contrast, is describing flow as the attractor. Rope flow is interesting to him not because it has a canonical “correct” form, but because it admits multiple vectors: strength, spinal rotation, coordination, rhythm. The value is not mastery of a fixed template but entering a flow state where useful adaptations accrete almost as side-effects. Flexibility becomes an emergent property rather than an explicit goal.

Both views are defensible, and in fact complementary.

Where the generational difference shows is in the final sentence.

For you, the path from novice to unconscious competence is long but open-ended. Failure is mostly epistemic: you look clumsy, you miss the point, you have to slow down again.

For X, coming from skateboarding and snow sports, failure is punctuated and costly. The body remembers impacts. In your forties, the margin for exploratory error narrows sharply, and the old apprentice model (“fall often, learn fast”) becomes irrational.

That’s why rope flow appeals to him. It preserves the structure of skill - coordination, timing, whole-body integration - while flattening the risk curve. You can enter flow without betting cartilage and ligaments each time you misjudge the form.

So the deeper convergence is this: both of you are circling the same truth from different biographies. The mastery of complex skills absolutely requires a movement from conscious form to embodied automaticity. The question is no longer whether that is true, but what price of failure you are prepared to pay while getting there.

At 25, the price buys exhilaration. At 45, it buys caution. At 75, it buys philosophy.

---

Mother Christmas - Adam Carlton

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Mother Christmas

Long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer…

What?

Offence? Abuse? Tedium?

Another quiet afternoon; times are hard in retail this festive season. The Great Stagnation, they’re calling it: the continuing stagnation.

But hark! What’s this I hear? First the echoing clacks of shoes on marble, then these three emerge into view, tired refugees from the mall’s main aisle: Mummy, Daddy and Teenage Boy. They’re dowdy and unfashionable: meet the drabs.

Mum in her late thirties I’d guess. She’s carrying the shopping bags. The logo says they’re from the Intermarché, the anchor tenant at the far end, way down. Dad is wearing shapeless cords, a thick workman’s coat and a flat cap.

Those stereotypes just come to life in front of you.

Teenage Boy wears his universal uniform: tatty jeans, discoloured hoodie (hood up) and scuffed trainers. He’s the one walking a little in front of his carers, kicking aimlessly at the litter. He’s the one who notices me first. And turns to face his father in delight.

“Hey, check her out!”

And then with puzzlement, “Why does it say, ‘Mère Noël’?”

Yes, he’s clocked my pop-up grotto, carefully placed here at the fag-end terminus of the mall, close to the toilets and the car park lift. My grotto’s frontage is exactly one shop wide: they put it in front of a derelict outlet, one which went bust months ago. They cleared the unsold goods and ditched the carpets; peek into the gloom behind me and you’ll see dust-sprinkled rubbish and untouched envelopes paving those cold tiles on the other side of the glass.

This was the location they wanted to disguise in this peak shopping period just before Christmas.

Not that I’m much of a disguise. There’s a thin metal frame over my head decked out with fake holly and ivy, LEDs sparkling gaily. In the centre is the branding: ‘Mother Christmas’. So you know I’m here to spread joy and season’s cheer.

I sit, or rather loll, below this festive arch on a surplus recliner, dressed in my themed outfit. My chair is flanked by two large Christmas goodie-bags: the one on my left is official.

Mummy and Daddy have now noticed me, prompted by their tyke of a son. I see thin, pinched disapproval on Mum’s face – I craft an insolent scowl for her – and the flicker of lust on her husband’s which rapidly shifts to his other main emotion.

“Go back to where you came from, putain de salope!”

Such a contemptuous growl! But something to divert me – an inadequate who projects his self-loathing onto others: so I’m an effin’ slut, am I?

I feel sorry for his wife so give him back what he deserves.

“I come from your street, espèce de salaud hypocrite!” I yell raucously, “Don’t you recognise me with my clothes on, connard?”

It’s not blindingly original but it suffices. In his fury he makes to advance – then thinks better of it. He’s right to be wary: my little chatte reposing to my right has risen languidly, arching her back to glare at him. Her fur stands on end, her hiss fills space.

Cet animal est très méchant, quand on l'attaque il se défend.

People have heard what these little creatures can do with their sparking, sizzling incisors.

Grumbling at each other, the two adults trundle on towards the pay station.

The teen looks back at me, woebegone.

I taunt him then: put my hands on my knees and nudge them apart; push my chest up; lick my lips with a sneer.

Show him my olive curves.

He cracks: looking away as I knew he would. Thumb in his mouth, he scampers after his parents in unconscious regression to the imagined safety of his childhood.

---

They dressed me in a short red jacket (which I wear open and loose) over a low-cut leotard and leggings, both of figure-hugging green Lycra. I’m half Père Noël, half elf and half falling out of it.

Forget Mother Christmas: I am the enticingly-buxom Mistress of Christmas.

My sponsors wanted, indeed demanded, reactions.

---

My authorised bag has samples from adjacent shops: cheap perfume from the cheap parfumerie next door; amuse-bouche fancies from the pâtisserie further down; surplus mini-tat from bargain toys opposite.

Teen Boy was too scared to ask for any of my offerings.

---

I’ve been here eleven days so far: more than long enough for the local rackets to check me out.

See this young chap? He walks the floor of the outdoors shop on the main drag. He lectures urban ramblers on Gore-Tex.

Now he heads across, entering my lair without trepidation. Moggie ignores him – he’s on her white list.

Phénix covertly hands me a pay card and whispers, “Fifteen, please, Mère Noël.”

I reach into my second bag, the one on my right and retrieve a large tin together with an empty bottle labelled as a common painkiller. I transfer fifteen white tablets then transfer the pay card into my purse: click-and-collect.

Phénix gratefully departs to share the joy with his fellow assistants. They’re all bored out of their minds, greedy for a quiet afternoon bliss-out. Displacement-popping in face of life’s mediocrity.

---

I know this guy: he’s a stringer for the local paper. This is the second time he’s sidled up.

The first time Albert approached me (and how he must hate that name!) he flashed his journalist union card to prove he was kosher. Then he asked me what I did when I wasn’t being Mother Christmas.

“A girl like you,” he said, “must have many offers. Are you an actress or a model?”

“Kind of,” I said, “But I’m very selective. I prefer longer contracts and I rather fear I may be out of your league.”

Not being super-endowed intellectually it took him a few seconds to process this, then he had the good grace to blush rather alarmingly.

I piled it on.

“Perhaps a taster though? Try before you buy?” I said, taking his spare hand, the one not holding his interview-phone and pressing cold fingers against the warmth of my half-exposed breast.

He choked at this, pulling his hand back with amazing alacrity, stabbing at his screen. With the recording app turned off, he made his excuses and left.

A few days later he’s back, confidence restored. This time Albert, who wears a faded blue suit with no tie and is in his early twenties, is trying for man of the world.

I can hardly repress my inner merriment: ho ho!

“Tell me, how’s business going?” he asks, with his phone pointing at me.

I strike a starlet pose for the video – I suppose that’s what he’s angling for.

“Do you have a buyer for this piece you’re doing?” I ask innocently.

“Not yet,” he confesses, raising his device to get a better view of my embonpoint, “Oh by the way, I’ve figured you out. You’re the daughter of rich parents and you’re doing this for work-life experience before moving on. Like that Billy Joel song or was it Pulp?”

“I’m busy,” I say, “and you’re putting off the punters.”

Demonstrably untrue; this fag-end of the mall is deserted.

“Now push off.”

He retires crestfallen, “Can I see you again?”

I nod tiredly. I’ve already forgotten him.

---

They want to: attack me; have sex with me; swear at me; date me; ogle me.

Occasionally a little one will sit on my lap and I will present them with a free bonbon, which is probably what my mission ought to be.

I’m an illegal immigrant, a terrorist, a criminal, a parasite, a whore, a dealer (that is somewhat true, though the placebo effect is amazing), an actress researching a part (near miss) and a spy (near miss).

I am Mother Christmas, a Rorschach humanoid fabricated by Aldebaran Robotics (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the StarDrop corporation), commissioned for research by the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne of Paris.

Look at me? Look into a mirror.

Joyeux Noël, each and every one of you.

---

Block Time, Many Worlds, and the Persistence of Ordinariness

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Block Time, Many Worlds, and Why Tomorrow Resembles Yesterday - Mostly

If we combine two ideas that are often kept in separate conceptual boxes - the block universe of eternalism, and the Everettian “many worlds” account of quantum uncertainty - a question naturally follows. If the universe is a fixed four-dimensional whole, and if quantum events constantly branch reality into a plurality of decoherent futures, why doesn’t the world look, at the large scale, like a riot of amplified randomness?

Why does the past, looking backwards from here, present itself as overwhelmingly law-governed and almost pedestrian in its Newtonian-style determinism? And if that is what the past looks like, shouldn’t we expect the future, in almost all respects, to have the same look and feel despite its underlying quantum indeterminacy?

On the surface, this seems like a tension. “Many worlds” is habitually sold with a kind of metaphysical euphoria: infinite branching, limitless divergence, cosmic roulette. Yet our lived-history has never felt like roulette.

Most days contain no miracles, no macroscopic quantum surprises, no sudden turn of events caused by a radioactive atom choosing left rather than right. The planets keep their appointments; bridges don’t randomly fail because of a quantum coin-flip; people mostly continue being the sorts of people they were last week. Looking back, the macro-past seems more like a classical trajectory with occasional noise than like a random walk whose steps were decided by quantum dice.

The first thing to say is that, in Everett, the deep story is deterministic anyway - just not in the way we are used to. The universal wavefunction evolves unitarily: nothing “collapses”. There is no fundamental stochastic law picking a single outcome. The branching is not indeterminism in the global dynamics; it is the proliferation of effectively non-interfering sectors. What feels like chance from inside a branch is not a God’s-eye randomness but a self-location problem: which decohered continuation will I find myself in? From 'outside', the entire branching structure is fixed; from within, one experiences merely uncertainty about one’s address inside it.

That already blunts the popular intuition that “many worlds” ought to generate a future that is macroscopically erratic. Branching is constant, but meaningful divergence is not. Most quantum events do not amplify into macroscopic differences; they thermalise, cancel, or remain trapped in degrees of freedom that never climb the ladder of scale. Decoherence does not inject chaos into the classical world; it does almost the opposite. It explains why quasi-classical “pointer states” are stable, why macroscopic objects persist, why a chair remains a chair, why the classical description becomes such a good effective theory for large aggregates. The world looks classical because, for most practical purposes, it is.

It is worth stating an underappreciated symmetry here: what we now call “the past” was once, from some deeper-past vantage point, the future. The difference between “past” and “future” is not that one is ontologically settled while the other is metaphysically open; it is that we are embedded - instance by instance - at particular locations in the block.

In a block universe, every event is future-ward relative to earlier slices and past-ward relative to later ones. So if the world’s quantum branching had a natural tendency to erupt into large-scale caprice, we would already see that eruption when we look backwards - because the macro-history we inhabit has already run the gauntlet of being “the future” for countless earlier observers. The fact that it still reads, at human scale, as orderly is evidence that the branching is mostly hidden by the same structural constraints that will hide it tomorrow.

There is also the brute constraint of low-entropy initial conditions — the Past Hypothesis in its various guises. The universe’s special beginning does not merely explain the arrow of time; it also massively limits which macroscopic histories carry significant weight.

Wild, spectacularly diverging macroscopic histories exist as mathematical possibilities inside the universal wavefunction, but most of them are thin as mist in Born measure. The block is thick where the classical narrative is thick: regularities, stable structures, robust thermodynamic flows. The “tree” branches constantly, but almost all of the branch weight is clustered in futures that differ only in microscopic details and wash out at human scales.

So the rephrased answer is this: the reason the past looks largely deterministic is not that quantum randomness never happened, but that it almost never mattered at the scale we care about.

The macro-world is an emergent attractor: it is what you get when you coarse-grain a quantum substrate under decoherence and thermodynamics. And if that is what happened in the past, then in a block universe the future is not poised to suddenly become a carnival of amplified quantum accidents. The future block is “already there” in the same sense the past is already there - with branching built in, but with most branches differing only in trivial microscopic ways.

None of this denies that amplification can happen - it can: evolutionary contingency, threshold phenomena in neurobiology, chaotic systems near bifurcation points, rare catastrophic events. But even there, the range of viable macrostates is narrow, selection effects prune hard, and the world remains governed by constraints and regularities rather than by caprice. 

Everett does not imply a future that is wildly branching in any humanly vivid way.

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The Economics of Synthetic Musicians

"Velvet Sundown"

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Velvet Sundown and the Economics of Synthetic Musicians

Velvet Sundown appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, with soft-rock songs, polished artwork, and a Spotify following in the millions. Then came the reveal: the band was entirely artificial, from voices to videos. No tour bus, no quarrelling egos, just a data-driven pipeline of songs.

It was a case study in the new economics of music.

The economics of AI musicianship are straightforward. Once the sunk cost of model training and production infrastructure is paid, new content is cheap. Generating a dozen tracks costs a few thousand pounds at most in engineering time, mixing, and artwork. Compare this to a conventional band: advances, recording budgets, management fees, royalties, and tour support. The margin on an AI act should be structurally higher, provided the music finds listeners.

But finding revenue-generating ears is the difficult part. Streaming payouts are measured in fractions of a penny. A million plays yields only a few thousand pounds. What makes Velvet Sundown notable is not their production pipeline, but the fact that somebody spent heavily to market them: placing their songs on playlists, creating a band mythology, running PR. Without that push, synthetic music lurks unseen and unheard, buried beneath the billions of other tracks.

For record labels, the business motivation is obvious, however. AI bands are assets that never age, never sue, never overdose, never demand more royalties. A functioning pipeline can spawn ten “acts” with different styles and identities; thousands of variations can be auditioned in a few days.

It is the logical extension of the playlist economy, where mood and genre matter more than personality. Velvet Sundown demonstrates the model: songs just good enough to pass, a brand identity built in software, and marketing dollars focused on getting streams.

Yet there are reputational risks. Artists and unions are already hostile, seeing their livelihoods undercut. Critics talk of “AI slop” although quality-control issues are surely temporary. Platforms like Spotify face pressure to label synthetic content, although whether that's a plus or a minus - or irrelevant - only time will tell..

The backlash resembles every wave of automation: efficiency gained, jobs displaced, and cultural legitimacy questioned. Authenticity still matters in star-driven genres. Fans want the messy charisma of human performers, not frictionless content pipelines; AI acts today thrive best in background channels - those lo-fi beats, chillout playlists, soundtrack fodder where no one asks who's playing.

The future is not hard to sketch. Expect more Velvet Sundowns: semi-synthetic groups with human faces and AI back-end production. Expect labels to experiment with portfolios of generated acts, testing which identities gain traction. Expect fights over disclosure, royalties, and the meaning of “musician”. As always, technology reshapes the terrain while incumbents scramble to hold on.

At first sight, the future of AI musicians appears inherently limited; the analogy with chess is clear. No human has beaten the strongest engines since 2005, yet millions still play and watch human chess while almost nobody follows computer-vs-computer matches.

Or take the Tour de France: anyone on a motorbike could outpace Tadej Pogačar, but the drama lies in human effort, not raw speed.

Spectacle requires empathy, tribalism, community. It might seem unlikely that audiences would spontaneously root for android equivalents of Taylor Swift or the Gallagher brothers.

Yet the success of the ABBA ‘Voyage’ avatars in London - drawing millions and turning huge profits - shows that the public will embrace synthetic stars when anchored to familiar human stories. From reincarnated icons to entirely new creations, the road towards the android music celebrity may be shorter than it first appears.

Velvet Sundown are not be the Beatles of the AI era, but they may be its canary. The economics line up, the incentives are there, and the normal backlash has already begun.