Tugboat Stew

There have been complaints, from my many readers (ok, one), that I haven't been blogging frequently enough. Sorry about that.

I am, however, pretty relaxed about this building up slowly, and part of the reason why is Stewart Brand.

Sometimes you read something so compelling that it seems to sing inside you as right. And sometimes you read something that's so obviously true that you can't believe no one thought of it before. And sometimes you read something so well expressed that you are delighted that complex stories can be told in simple sentences. And sometimes you read a book so good that you buy copies of it to give to your friends.

Stewart Brand's 'The Clock of the Long Now' is all of these things.

This is a book about time, our relationship to it, and changing the way we think about and approach it. Brand thinks that our idea of the future has become too short. We focus on the immediate and the instant.  Long term thinking means years, or decades at best, and this is to our great detriment. "We are revving ourselves into a pathologically short attention span", says Brand, and he is right. 

Even our most profound problem as a society - climate change - seems to be portrayed and viewed as something that lasts a century. We are told that temperatures will increase by X degrees by 2100, but what happens after 2100? Will the temperature rise magically stop at that point, or will it continue to go up? Why don't we look beyond the end of the century? Is this the limit of our knowledge, or of our perception? It's a very strange way of looking at this problem, especially when you consider that if you have children, then, assuming the worst predictions don't come to pass, their children - your grandchildren - will be alive to see for themselves what happens the other side of 2100. And what about their children?  Are we really unable to think about how our kids might feel about their grandchildren? Is that such an inconceivable concept? Sometimes it seems like we can't even think past the end of the week.

To help counteract our collective short-termism, Brand and his collaborators in the late 1990s built a foundation dedicated to fostering long term thinking and responsibility, and to reconnect with caring about something larger than ourselves and our immediate surroundings.  The Clock of the Long Now is the story of the birth of the Long Now Foundation, and the development of its iconic project - the clock itself.

The idea is to build a monumental clock, which will run, with minimal maintenance and winding, for 10,000 years - a roughly equivalent time into the future that agriculture has been around up until now.   In an exciting development for this blog, there's a picture of the prototype over there <  

It will tick once a day, and bong once a century.  The display on the prototypes shows the year in 10,000 year form (so this year is 02008).  This sounds gimmicky, but it looks odd and makes people think.  When I went to look at the prototype in London's Science Museum, a kid next to me pointed out that it was showing the wrong year, so I explained why it was designed like that.  "Oh", he said, "that's really clever".  

The clock is going to be as looter-proof as possible, made with non-precious metals, and having no easily detachable collectable parts - it's hoped that there won't be a black market in ball-bearings taken from the clock of the long now.   It will be designed to be intuitive, so people can figure out how to repair it in the absence of a manual, and it will be designed to be fixable with bronze age technology, in case we balls everything up and have to start over.  And the Foundation has built a big stable chunk of rock in Nevada to build it in, so if you ever find yourself in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, you'll at least have one place to go on holiday.   

But besides all the cool, geeky features, the best thing about the clock is obviously what it symbolises.  That there are people, alive today, who are thinking 10,000 years into the future and, as the clock's chief designer Danny Hillis puts it, saying to themselves "I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks."  

Speaking of oaks, there's a fantastic anecdote in the book about a note the Swedish navy received from the Swedish forestry department in the 01980's (see what I did there?) telling them that the oak trees they had ordered 150 years ago were now ready for harvesting.  The forest they planted in the 1830s to make ships with is now a nature reserve.  

The Foundation has other great projects, and one of the most fun for interweb lovers is longbets, where Warren Buffet has just placed a (say it in a Dr Evil voice) one million dollar bet, over ten years, on financial fund performance.  All of the proceeds go to charity, so it's good clean fun, and some of the bets are really creative.  Fans of Cheers will be interested to see how Ted Danson did.  

The term 'long now' was coined by Brian Eno (yes, him out of Roxy Music).  "Eno's Long Now", writes Brand, "places us where we belong, neither at the end of history nor at the beginning, but in the thick of it.  We are not the culmination of history, and we are not start-over revolutionaries, we are in the middle of civilization's story."  

There's a much better article than this one by Michael Chabon on the Foundation's website, where at the end he shows just what it means. His son asks him if there will still be people alive in 10,000 years time, and he answers that there definitely will. The clock is a beautiful symbol of a commitment to making that statement come true -  a commitment to ourselves, and to civilisation. 

What has all this got to do with a lazy blogger?  Nothing much, save that I'm happy to take my time over this.  As Brand said, bad things happen fast, good things happen slow.  And if you subscribe to the RSS feed, you'll get a little message whenever I post. I promise I'll try and be a bit quicker than the Swedish forestry.  

And if you really, really, can't wait, then you can follow the advice the Fat Cyclist gave to his readers, and try to decide which is the very best kind of pie. 

In A City

Lots of books on the environment (like James Lovelock's 'The Revenge of Gaia') have pictures in them of the earth from space at night, showing the cities of Europe and North America lit up across the map like constellations.  The implication, and reprimand, is that humans have ruined the beautiful pristine earth with their evil development, and now, thanks to their unnatural electric lights, it's not even dark at night any more.  

There is, of course, a different perspective on this, and a pretty good example of it is here, from Stewart Brand, the cleverest man on earth who lives in a converted tugboat.  A great example of how to give a presentation.  The music, if you're interested, is by Brian Eno. 

"The stars have shined down on earth's life for billions of years, and now we're shining right back up."  

More on this man later.  

Young and Old

Here's fun: 

http://colorwar2008.com/youngnow

Pictures of people when they were kids, and then the same shot retaken as adults. Hats off to the fully clothed man in the bath.

Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper

Karl Popper said that you can't predict the future well because you cannot predict new technology with any degree of accuracy.  New inventions are, to use Nassim Nicholas Taleb's phrase, black swans - unpredictable, paradigm changing developments and discoveries.

Now Dean Kamen might be one of those snake-oil salesmen adept at telling people he has found the solution to all of life's ills, and it's in this magic box, and if you just give him a few million dollars he'll give one to everybody.

Or he might have invented something that can change the world.  Time will tell, but  I'm betting on the optimists.  I'd rather do that and be wrong that side with the pessimists and cynics.   A pity that Colbert didn't get around to drinking the Doritos though.  

Design Features

Over in the links section you'll find a website called Palojono, by a stirling British chap currently exiled to California studying design and creativity at Berkeley.  His site his full of interesting links about aspects of design and the making of things.  Not just the usual things we think of as designed, but anything that people create, and the huge range of fascinating questions and problems they come across while making things.  

I've been reading 'Freedom Evolves'  by Dan Dennett over the past few weeks (and working very hard, hence the lack of posts).  The book is about whether and how free will can exist if we are all essentially just a collection of cells that obey deterministic laws. Dennett makes a compelling and inspiring case that it does exist (although maybe not in the form that many would regard as free will), but one of the things that has really stuck in my mind is a question of design.  

When discussing speed of decision making, Dennett talks about returns of service in tennis being designed.  Which of course they are, but I had never equated a person working on a product - refining it, testing it, improving it - with an athlete practicing a particular move over and over again - refining it, testing it, improving it.  Like many good ideas (or perhaps successful memes) it's completely obvious when pointed out, and then you start to see the parallels everywhere.  The feeling you get when you're impressed by a good bit of design is very similar to that you have when you see a bit of sporting excellence.  So my delight at finding out that iPods pause if you accidently yank out the headphone cable is the same kind of experience as my joy at seeing Cristiano Ronaldo's backheeled goal against Aston Villa yesterday.  They both elicit an admiration of human intelligence and creativity, and, for me, a sense of pride at what humans are capable of.  

Of course one might expect good design from these two sources.  I'm not a Manchester United fan, and my doses of astonishment and delight are much more frugally rationed by the sports team from my area.  Such is life.

The other point that Dennett makes, citing Hume, is that morality is a kind of human technology.  Again, despite years of reading and thinking about this stuff, no way of looking at morality that I have come across has resonated quite so clearly as this idea.  Starting from evolved behaviour, and then refined, tested and improved by generations of humans, morality is something we make - for our own benefit as a social animal.  It doesn't come from any external source, and it doesn't need to in order to have meaning and force.  Dennett's book is essentially a plea to look at free will (and by extension morality) as something designed by humans, and also to ignore the claims of the transcendental - so that we do not view freedom and morality as unquestionable and untouchable externalities to our animal natures, but instead as something we make, something that improves, and something that we continue to try to perfect.  Keep the R&D rolling.  

You Won't Fall

Well, actually, you might.  

"Q: This job is unbelievable.
A: I know. I used to tell people at parties that I knock people over for a living and no one believed me. Every now and then, after a team meeting, I would be struck by how absurd it was that we'd just spent 30 minutes in a brainstorming session on new or better ways to make people fall down."

Side Effects

Fans of beards, being alive,  the Republican Party, and short posts will enjoy this.  And it's only three minutes long.  

Lucky

In one of David Attenborough's many nature documentaries, he showed a fungus which entered the brain of an ant, took control of its motor functions, forced it to climb to the top of a plant, paralysed it, consumed its body, and then exploded out of the back of its head to scatter spores onwards to reproduction of the fungus, and presumably the demise of more ants.  It was utterly terrifying - a zombie creature struggling against the thing controlling it, aware that it is no longer in charge of matters.  I felt real sympathy for the poor ant, which was surprising given the number of both old fashioned and chemically advanced ways I have successfully murdered ants and their offspring in the past.  

The Lancet Fluke described by Daniel Dennett in this talk is a different creature, but has a similar M.O.  Control the ant in order to reproduce.  Dennett's talk is fascinating, although a bit rushed as he realises he's running out of time, but let's be kind and say that this is the mark of an expansive and wide-ranging intelligence. 

Dennett makes an interesting comparison between the Lancet Fluke and memes.  On this account, like flukes, memes get into our heads and control what we think and do.  If this is right, then it's reassuring that we don't notice it happening and don't feel like we're being controlled by something 'other' than ourselves (assuming that there is a self to be controlled).  I particularly like the idea of unawareness, as it makes me feel less sorry for the ant, and therefore allows me to carry on pouring kettlesful of boiling water into their nests.  

Dennett has I think explored this theme to a certain extent in his books (memes and their effect on us, rather than pest control), but it's where he takes the idea of memes next that's the most interesting, and the most frustrating because it's so rushed.   Noting that it was germs, not bullets, that truly conquered the new world and destroyed indigenous cultures, he compares memes to germs.  Our memes (freedom of speech, equality of sex and sexuality, all the things we associate with western civilisation*) are fantastic replicators and are successfully taking the place of other memes in other cultures.  This is destroying other cultures, and, he hints, reducing the cultural biodiversity of the world.  Like blankets infected with smallpox, television, the internet, movies, all our cultural products, are spreading our ideas into the minds of others.  

Is this a good or bad thing?  Dennett offers no view, other than we need to be aware of this happening, and be less surprised when cultures react against ours and our memes, sometimes violently.  

On the one hand, we must believe that our memes are the right ones.  Liberty, tolerance, respect - these are good things.  We should try and spread these ideas around the world, we should consider them better than the alternatives, especially as we at least try to base them on reason rather than superstition.  Yes we should exercise care, think about the ways that people react to fundamental change in their culture, and not try and drop democracy out of  plane, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to shed light on the world.  

On the other hand, as Dennett hints at, this could just be our memes talking (or causing us to talk), and maybe we're not so different from the ant after all.    So we need to be vigilant, rigorous, and (to steal Dennett's joke) try to ensure that what we think is not just a fluke.  

Falls to Climb

The quote at the top of this blog is from "Ferocious Minds - Polymathy and the new Enlightenment" by Damien Broderick.  

Broderick is a science fiction and popular science writer, editor of sci-fi journals, and is described in lots of places as a genius.  I've no real way of telling whether this is true or not, but I've enjoyed everything I've read by him, which I admit is not a huge amount.  If you want to know more, you can see an unofficial website (link should be over there > ), or ask Wikipedia the all-knowing.

Ferocious Minds is a really interesting book.  It starts off with a description of what Broderick thinks we are experiencing - a revived enlightenment, better poised to deliver on the hopes of the original version.  Broderick is unashamedly a fan, a believer in progress and the benefits that reason can bring, and the first section of the book is a rallying cry for those already signed up:

  

"I will argue that today's reviving enlightenment, despite such fashionable rumours to the contrary [refers to a quoted dismissal of progress by the Chapman brothers], is no recuperative sham, let alone a path to doom and ruin.  To the contrary: it is our single, best highway to deliverance from a future of accidental or malign oppression." 

For that rhetoric, the book is surprisingly thin on justification for this belief.  I don't think that's because such a justification can't be made, it's rather that Broderick's enthusiasm for the writers, scientists and thinkers he discusses overtakes him very early in the book, and it turns instead into a race through the best of popular science (and more technical, less popular science).   We run through evolutionary biology, evolutionary linguistics, evolutionary everything, AI, nanotech, ufo abductions, sci-fi, feminism, the paranormal, stem-cell research and much much more in around 200 pages packed with citations, quotes and links to academic essays available online.  

The book is a primer, a new Enlightenment 101 containing lots of signposts for the would-be polymath (or, as Steve Jones has it, the civilized person) to follow, wherever their curiosity takes them.  It's a catalogue of wonderful, exciting and energising topics and minds, gingerbread trails disappearing off in myriad directions through the whole forest, and it's really well written and worth reading.  

It also raises an interesting question about the definition of a polymath, and the status of expertise.  True polymaths are rare, and it's much more likely that people are experts in one field or another.  It is a popular concern that we have so much knowledge now that it is impossible for people to know everything, and that we will have to defer to expert A and expert B for answers on their specialist subjects.  The tyranny of the expert beckons, a true technocracy.  This topic deserves, and will get, more attention here, so for now I simply raise the point that there ought to be a way through, for people to have wide-ranging knowledge and enjoy a diverse intellectual life, and be able to make assessments of views of experts without themselves being expert.  If the best science writers can make complex theories and the history of the development of those theories intelligible to the lay reader, then I think there is reason enough to believe that the polymath can continue to flourish and have fun in the process.  Don't stay up too late watching it though.  

Begin the Begin

In his 1991 essay, 'The Third Culture', the writer and publisher John Brockman discusses what he sees as a shift in public discourse, away from the traditional literary intellectual towards the scientific and empiric . He writes:

"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

For Brockman, the really important questions about life are unlikely to have their answers in the pages of the New York Review of Books, the LRB, or similar learned publications. He has little time for literary intellectuals, arguing that a "1950s education in Freud, Marx and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s". Traditional intellectuals are often ignorant of the most important intellectual achievements of the last 100 years, and sometimes even proud of it.  

This sort of intellectualism is, Brockman says, "chiefly characterised by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost."  While that may be an ironic quotation to post on a blog, where I hope to get comments aplenty, it is surely right.   Intellectual discussion in the traditional sense is a kind of dance, to display that you understand how theories interrelate and run together, that you know who critiqued who, and to show that your selected beliefs fall within the acceptable boundaries of polite discussion (or for extra frisson, just outside!).  Like a complicated parlour game where the object is to guess the rule, it is a world that sets up complex barriers to entry to the discussion, intimidating aspirants into believing that they too must be able to hold their own on Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva if they are to be considered intelligent.  You might well be able to explain quantum theory, but have you read Sappho in the original?  

This kind of writing and thinking often tends towards the pessimistic.   Brockman's excellent website, www.edge.org, sends an annual question to a huge list of interesting and intelligent people, mostly scientists.  The 2007 question was 'what are you optimistic about?' and the responses are informative, surprising, and above all uplifting.  Inspired by this, Prospect magazine in the UK tried a similar exercise with a host of public intellectuals and academics, and received contributions that for the most part could easily pass for suicide notes.  Doom and gloom were foreseen everywhere, the world on the road to ruin, technology, science and progress the drivers toward destruction.  

This isn't a criticism of Prospect, but of the majority of the contributers who have criticism as the main weapon in their mental arsenal.  For some of them, criticism is their sole weapon.

 

Instead of a curiosity about the world, and a desire to understand it and possibly improve it, all they can do is criticise it, analyse it for faults, point out its failings.  It's the kind of writing that tends towards what Dave Krieger calls 'disasturbation' - idly fantasising about disasters without properly assessing their likelihood or attempting to do anything to prevent them.  

The second effect of the traditional intellectual world is that it can intimidate people away from art.  Plenty of literary theory, for example, is complete rot, but it can easily trick people into believing that they have come up short in some way in trying to understand art.  The assumption is always that if you don't like James Joyce, there must be something wrong with you.  Perhaps you don't fully understand his significance.  Maybe if you'd read the Odyssey (in the original), then you would.  Never is the suggestion made that the author may have failed, and a snobbish disdain prevails for authors who work hard to make themselves clear and understood.   As for critics who don't go in for the hardcore world of literary criticism, such as  John Sutherland or Nick Hornby (and, heaven forfend, McSweeney's or the Believer) are treated like embarrassing relatives, the lunatics in the attic. 

It is a real shame, but people are put off from experiencing and enjoying art by a sense of not fully understanding it, whereas in fact what they  actually don't understand is the industry of theory that has formed around art like mould between tiles.  And why should they understand it?  It's utterly inexplicable.  

There is, however,  a danger that in dismissing the kind of intellectual that he does, Brockman could be read as dismissing art as well.  The term 'the third culture' was inspired by an book called 'The Two Cultures' by the physicist and novelist C.P. Snow.  Snow talks in similar terms about the differences between scientists and literary intellectuals, but hoped that a third culture could emerge where the two groups would overcome the communication gap between them.  Brockman explicitly rejects this conception of the third culture, instead arguing that, having given the literary intellectuals a chance to join in, and seen it spurned, the scientists have simply bypassed them, and taken over the playing field: "the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everyone on the planet."  Science has won, it seeks the truth and has had astounding success. The literary intellectuals have failed, and public discourse must be about science if it is not to be irrelevant.  Brockman's essay is a polemic, and he takes on his opponents robustly.  He obviously feels that there is a balance to be redressed.  Nevertheless, despite the force of his argument, I don't think that he intends to exclude art and literature along with the literary intellectuals (a number of the contributors to Edge are artists, writers, musicians, and even actors) .  

If Brockman does want to dismiss art, I think he makes a mistake.  While it is true that a world in which the potential of science and technology to rapidly redefine what it means to be human leaves discussions like this looking elitist and pointless, art and literature do have something to say about life and what it means to be human, and they can (and arguably should) be informed by the best understanding of the world that science provides.  While science may have the best explanations, it doesn't have all the answers - ought does not follow is, and there remains a space for art to engage in the third culture, as the best art surely does.  

I think that the third culture is the best one we can aspire to, but I also think it should be the one that Snow hoped for.  I love art and literature, and I'm also fascinated by science.  And I agree with Brockman that "third culture activity is evidence that many people have a great intellectual hunger for new and important ideas and are willing to make the effort to educate themselves."  

This blog is part of my ongoing effort to educate myself, and it is a modest attempt to contribute to the third culture.  Talking about the third culture, the biologist Steve Jones says "If you aren't someone who can talk in general terms about scientific as well as nonscientific issues, you aren't civilized."  I aspire to being civilised, and you'll find on this blog discussions of science written by someone who is not an expert, but is not scientifically illiterate either, and discussion of art and literature by someone who is glad not to be an expert in these fields. There'll occasionally be stuff about cycling too.  

I hope you enjoy all of it.