⦿ Damon Winter/The New York Times
Jimmy Carter, 1924−2024
POTUS 39, 1977−1981
Nobel Peace Prize, 2002
President Biden: "To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live
a life of purpose and meaning − the good life − study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility."
 

2024 December 31

Daniel Dennett, 1942−2024

Tim Bayne

Daniel C Dennett was a philosopher of mind who helped shift Anglo-American philosophy toward science.
Dennett went to Oxford for graduate studies in philosophy, but science grabbed him: "I ended up spending more time in the Radcliffe Science Library .. to learn about the brain."
Dennett distinguished between two images of reality, the manifest image and the scientific image. The manifest image is the everyday conception. The scientific image is from science.
The manifest image of the mind is folk psychology: We have a self with beliefs, desires, and intentions; we have voluntary control over our actions and are accountable for them; and we are conscious.
Dennett said folk psychology treats selves as centers of narrative gravity. Their intentional states help us to make sense of behavior. We display behavioral patterns that let the intentional stance get a grip.
Dennett cleared the way to a science of consciousness and rejected aspects of folk psychology.

AR Dennett means a lot to me. I've read all his books and greatly admire Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995). I talked with him about his work in New York in 2002 and in Oxford in 2006. For me, he's the best US philosopher of his generation and the best since the great WVO Quine, who was his undergraduate tutor.
 

2024 December 30

Donald Tusk 4 Europe

Paul Taylor

With France and Germany facing political crises and Britain sidelined by Brexit, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk may be able to convince POTUS 47 that closer European defense cooperation can strengthen NATO without harming US interests.
Poland is central to EU politics. It has revived the Weimar Triangle with Germany and France, has joined the alliance of Nordic and Baltic nations, and is in the Bucharest Nine grouping of central and eastern NATO members.
Defence ministers of Poland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK have met as the E5 in Berlin to further European defense cooperation.

AR Good man for the job. I wish him great success. He'll need all the help we can give him.
 

2024 December 22−29

Working on Psy‑Phy ..

 

TIME
"All of us − from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics − are living in the Age of Trump."
 

2024 Winter Solstice

The Year in Science

Quanta

2024 was a fruitful year for science. Some advances were big, most were incremental,
and many were made possible by the use of powerful new AI tools.

Computer science
Bill Andrews

•  Quantum computers are vulnerable to errors, but we can combine qubits to tolerate errors.
•  We can efficiently calculate the Hamiltonian for any quantum system at a constant temperature.
•  Rising temperature weakens quantum entanglement; it vanishes at a critical temperature.
•  New chatbots might understand; AI models overtrained to the point of mastery show grokking.

Physics 
Natalie Wolchover

•  A map of millions of galaxies shows how universal expansion is accelerating due to dark energy.
•  Experimenters hunting for WIMPs have hit a limit, marking the end of that dark matter search.
•  JWST images from less than 1 Gyr ABB reveal the "beautiful confusion" of that epoch.
•  JWST measurement of universal expansion rate deepens the "Hubble tension" puzzle.
•  Quantum tornadoes form when an otherwise rigid crystal of dysprosium atoms is stirred.
•  A quantum phase of matter shows the flow of emergent particles with fractional charge.
•  Neutral-atom quantum computers have achieved noise-resistant, fault-tolerant computation.
•  A "nuclear clock" transition in thorium could reveal variations in the strength of physical forces.
•  A geometric language for predicting particle interactions arises from sets of curves on surfaces.
•  Evolving understanding of entropy reframes science and our role in the universe.

Biology 
Hannah Waters

•  Google AlphaFold3 predicts the shapes of proteins as they interact with other molecules.
•  LUCA was a complex cell that likely lived in a microbial ecosystem some 4.2 Gyr BP.
•  Squeezing archaeal cells can get them to form multicellular structures.
•  Fossil traces of multicellular eukaryotes date back to 1.6 Gyr BP.
•  Phenomenal consciousness extends to insects, crabs, octopuses, fish, reptiles, and amphibians.
•  Most noncoding portions of the genome are transcribed into RNA that regulates genes expression.
•  Archaeal cells exchange noncoding RNAs in a cellular texting system.
•  A brainstem neural circuit adjusts the immune system via the levels of inflammatory molecules.
•  During sleep, the hippocampus replays neuron firing generated by experience to form memories.
•  We have a 3D map of 1 cubic mm of human brain and a map of the entire fruit fly brain.

Math 
Jordana Cepelewicz

•  The geometric Langlands conjecture, which involves sheaves, is proved.
•  AlphaGeometry can prove geometry problems nearly as well as a human IMO gold medalist.
•  AlphaProof can prove problems well enough to score a silver medal on the full Olympiad exam.
•  The universe of possible shapes is even stranger than we imagined.
•  We have new results about the distribution of prime numbers.

AR Frohe Weihnachten und guten Rutsch!
 

2024 December 19

EU Damaged by Brexit

Wolfgang Münchau

Brexit changed the way the EU has been functioning politically. The former balance between northern liberal states and the dirigiste states of the south and west shifted when the UK left. The EU single market has become less liberal.
The EU Green agenda has brought complaints from business over the sheer volume of bureaucracy it has created. EU corporate social responsibility legislation makes companies responsible for their supply chains and is a bureaucratic nightmare.
During its EU membership, the UK exerted a strong influence on EU legislation. UK civil servants made sure that draft legislation was workable and consistent with other legislation. There are inconsistencies between the EU general data protection regime, agreed before Brexit, and the more recent AI regulation.
The EU's anti-digital laws are destructive and run counter to the principle of dealing with problems after they arise. There are hardly any AI or crypto companies in Europe, and yet the EU thinks it can regulate the global tech industry.
Most of the regulatory divergence that occurred since Brexit came from the EU. There is scope for closer cooperation between the UK and the EU on foreign and security policy. But voluntary or formal alignment is a pipe dream.

EU members meet to discuss relationship with UK
Jennifer Rankin

The EU is discussing its relationship with the UK on Thursday. A senior EU official says there is "strong potential" for an EU−UK defence agreement. A first EU−UK summit is expected in March or April.
The European Commission is taking the UK to the European Court of Justice over its failure to protect the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and of failing to cancel illegal bilateral investment treaties with six EU member states.
The UK prime minister has ruled out rejoining the EU or its single market and customs union in his lifetime. The EU wants a youth experience scheme (YES) to give young people in the UK and Europe reciprocal rights to study, live, and work abroad for a few years. The UK says no.

AR I'm losing my faith in the EU dream. Brussels bureaucrats lack the skills or the vision to draft legislation relating to tech innovations or to understand how stifling their efforts are. They seem to think ignorant lawyers can write the code to rule the world. They're wrong.
Europeans need to wake up from their fatal thrall to busybody lawyers in Brussels who try to make rules for everything and who are not effectively checked by EU parliamentarians who in turn lack the ability to fight lawfare with basic common sense. Europe is not synonymous with the EU.
The Kafkaesque nightmare of an entrenched bureaucracy zealously seeking to enact naive woke ideals for the supposed benefit of EU citizens must end. Perhaps Nigel Farage can get his pals Donald Trump and Elon Musk to save us all in Europe.
 

2024 December 17

German Problems

Anna Sauerbrey

Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in the Bundestag. In 2021, Scholz had formed a coalition government. But Putin's invasion of Ukraine threw it into crisis management mode. Scholz announced a Zeitenwende and allocated €100 billion to rebuilding the Bundeswehr.
Germany is in its second consecutive year of recession. Its signature businesses are struggling. With the abrupt end of cheap Russian gas, green reforms have exacerbated the cost of energy. Carmakers are struggling to compete with Chinese imports. Public infrastructure needs more investment.
Germany is suffering a crisis of confidence, and frustration with the government is widespread. But unemployment is minimal, budgetary restrictions can be overcome, and state government continues. Most of Germany's neighbors and friends face similar troubles.

AR Europe is suffering from a dismal outlook and a looming crisis with Russia. The prospects of a boost from America or indeed China look unlikely. Political changes are needed but won't happen without a more urgent sense of the need for them. Calm before the storm.
 

2024 December 16

Mother of all Bubbles

Ruchir Sharma

Virtually every Wall Street analyst predicts US stocks will keep outperforming the rest of the world in 2025. But all this enthusiasm only tends to confirm that the bubble is at an advanced stage.
The bulls say America can remain dominant. But US earnings growth would not look so good if not for the supernormal profits of its big tech firms. Over time, supernormal profits get competed away.
Growth and profits are also getting a lift from heavy deficit spending. It now takes nearly $2 of new government debt to generate an additional $1 of US GDP growth. If any other country were spending this way, investors would be fleeing.
Analysts say America has been the world's premier market for a century. But the US stock market lagged behind the rest of the world in 6 of the last 11 decades. In the 2000s it delivered zero returns, and emerging markets tripled in value.
The US outperformance relative to other countries could end if growth slows in America, or picks up in other major powers, or for unforeseen reasons. That is often how bubbles end: unexpectedly.
The longer a trend lasts, the more confident investors get. Over the past six months US stock prices have outgained others by a wide margin. Time to bet against American exceptionalism.

AR I think big tech stocks will keep on outperforming, but who am I to say when I got suckered in the 2000s? More ominously, the Trump administration looks likely to lead to some kind of crisis. The fallout could make the financial crisis of 2008 look tame by comparison.
 

2024 December 13

Americans Are Doomsday Prepping

Robert Kirsch, Emily Ray

More than 20 million Americans engage in prepping. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) determined in 2023 that 51% of Americans are prepared for a disaster.
Bunkerization explains prepping in the United States. The logic of the bunker shapes how Americans relate to each other, the state, and their domestic lives, as a matter of individual isolation, preparation, and savvy consumption.
Prepping is at the core of an American mythology of a frontier folk. Americans are asked to buy their way to safety. The patriotic way to be an American is to isolate oneself from other Americans in times of crisis.
During the Cold War, US citizens were urged to hunker down to show the communists that Americans were prepared to die as Americans: "Better dead than Red."
For the average prepper, stockpiling to meet FEMA recommendations for survival in the absence of state support is simply good sense. Bunkerization encourages us to see the prepping American as a responsible citizen.
A bunkerized society is in a permanent state of readiness for living in the shell of a state that takes stable infrastructure and individual welfare as market matters.

AR Sounds horrible. I'm glad I'm in Europe. We stand or fall together.
 

2024 December 12

UK−EU Free Movement

Peter Walker, Jon Henley

A majority of Britons who voted to leave the EU would now accept a return to free movement in exchange for access to the single market, says a new ECFR report.
ECFR: "There is a remarkable consensus on both sides of the Channel that the time is ripe for a reassessment of EU−UK relations."
Based on polling of more than 9,000 people across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland conducted in November, the study found that 68% of all UK voters and 54% of those who voted leave said in exchange for single market access they would now accept full free movement for EU and UK citizens.
ECFR: "The EU and the UK are both very vulnerable to prevailing global events and a reset of relations is the single most effective way to make both sides stronger."
Across the EU, 45% of Germans said they wanted closer relations with the UK, as well as 44% of Poles, 41% of Spaniards, 40% of Italians, and 34% of French people.
ECFR: "Brexit and the UK−EU future relationship matters more to UK respondents than to citizens of other states. But there is broad permission from European publics to recast relations."
Many people in the EU felt Brexit had been bad for the EU. Asked whether the UK should prioritise relations with the US or with the EU, 50% of Britons opted for the EU and 17% for the US.
ECFR: "Governments now need to catch up with public opinion and offer an ambitious reset."

AR Let's get on with it. We can't dither through another Trump presidency while the last Reform UK holdouts realise the magnitude of their error. Let's get a public groundswell movement going.
 

2024 December 11

Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold

Ben Brubaker

For quantum error correction, we coax a cluster of physical qubits to work together as a single logical qubit. Adding physical qubits makes a logical qubit better if their error rate is below a definable threshold.
Google Quantum AI have crossed the threshold. They harnessed a group of physical qubits into a single logical qubit, then showed that as they added more physical qubits, the error rate dropped exponentially.
On quantum computers, we can reduce error rates with a surface code based on two overlapping grids of physical qubits. The first grid encodes a single logical qubit. The second grid lets us check for errors.
Once the Google team could build physical qubits with low error rates, they checked whether the qubits could work together to cut the error rate. They started with a code using a 3×3 grid of physical qubits to encode one logical qubit, then they tested a 5×5 code.
They found that the error rate with the 5×5 code was slightly lower than that with the 3×3 code. After further hardware improvements, they found the error rate for the 5×5 code was cut in half. A 7×7 code again cut the error rate in half. Such exponential scaling is what theory predicts.
The Google team only demonstrated error correction using a single logical qubit. Adding interactions between multiple logical qubits will introduce new challenges.

AR This is a major development, as even daily newspapers have noted. Scalable error control is key to practical quantum computing, and this advance provides it. Quantum computing is on the way.
An expert is hopeful that powerful quantum computers may be on sale for say a billion dollars a pop within ten years. We'll need mass rollout of quantum encryption by then.
 

2024 December 9

Letters to a Christian

Sam Harris

I'm not bowled over by the idea that you were once an atheist like me, and that now, under the influence of Jordan Peterson et al, you've discovered Jesus Christ to be the savior of humanity.
There is a problem with religious fundamentalism. I'm glad to know you're worried about Islamic extremism and that we simply disagree about faith and about the validity of Christianity.
Most people use the term "faith" to indicate the acceptance of specific religious doctrines without sufficient reason. This frame of mind is antithetical to reason and conflicts with science.
Moderates tend to doubt the reality of religious lunacy. Such blindness is unhelpful, given the hideous collision between modern doubt and Islamic certainty that we are witnessing across the globe.
Scripture remains a perpetual engine of extremism. Read scripture as closely as you like, you will not find reasons for religious moderation. On the contrary, you will find reasons to live like a maniac.
I don't disdain religious moderates, but I do disdain bad ideas and bad arguments.

AR This is a topic on which oceans of ink have obscured the view for centuries, but on which now Sam Harris, the young hero of the atheist apocalypse, brings clarity and common sense.
I've read the first two chapters of Jordan Peterson's book on Old Testament myths and see the problem already. Peterson has reacted with revulsion to the modern world and ecstatically thrown his soul into the warm but polluted bath of Judaeo-Christian mythic fantasy.
His eisegesis of the old myths is fascinating but doomed. It reads like the confession of a hero so enchanted by a myth that he drowns himself in it for joy.

 

EPA
Global A-listers assembled in Notre Dame cathedral, Paris, for the grand reopening ceremony, 2024-12-07
 

2024 December 6

Transformative Experience

Alice Gregory

Yale philosophy professor Laurie Paul is the author of Transformative Experience, an investigation of personal change. Paul: "I'm totally puzzled and fascinated and disturbed by ordinary life."
Published by OUP in 2014, Transformative Experience examined the special situations that change not only what we know but also who we are. These transformative experiences provide new knowledge that previously would have been inaccessible to us.
For Paul, whether to have a child was a riddle at the limits of rationality. She explored the question via normative decision theory, but says it failed in the face of transformative experience. Choosing to undergo such an experience requires us to violate who we take our current self to be.
Paul had her first child in 2004. She gave a lecture on the experience in 2012, when she was 46 and had two children. A online draft won attention in 2013. Paul: "For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we've done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it."
Paul had planned to be a doctor. But she enrolled at Antioch University, studied German in Berlin and Buddhist philosophy in India, returned to Antioch, applied to graduate programs, and arrived at Princeton in 1993. After a series of jobs, she won tenure at the University of Arizona in 2007.
In 2012, Paul confided to Jonathan Schaffer that she was professionally demoralized. He remembers their conversation because of its timing: "Within a year .. she became this celebrated figure. She really did not expect that kind of reception."
Paul: "The problem of other selves is just as deep and mysterious as the problem of other minds."

AR She's right about other selves − another reason to be skeptical of David Chalmers' hard problem. Continuity of the self over time is a problem I've pondered at least since Derek Parfit aired it in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons.
The conventional piety that we retain one self from birth to death raises questions about how time's arrow from a remembered past to an unknown future impacts our sense of self. This is another theme to come in Psy‑Phy.
 

2024 December 5

What Keir Starmer Should Say

Matthew d'Ancona

I want to speak about the UK's relationship with Europe. My government must act in the national interest, looking ahead, averting crisis, and ensuring the next generation has better services, better opportunities, more chances for fulfilment.
My love of Europe is deeply ingrained. I studied European law at university and even wrote a book about it. In 2016, I campaigned for Remain. As shadow Brexit secretary, I fought hard both for a second referendum and a better Brexit deal than the mess the Conservatives delivered.
Last July, I said the nation was heartily sick of Brexit and wanted to move on. But Brexit limits and infects everything we try to do. Instead of taking back control, we got more immigration and more red tape. Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4%. Its estimated cost is already well over £140 billion.
I see great potential in this country, but also huge challenges. The technological revolution. Climate change. Savage inequalities. An ageing population and a younger generation rightly demanding a fair shake. Global population movements, insecurity, and instability.
To master these challenges, we will need both statecraft and economic growth. But President-elect Trump proposes an economic strategy of tariffs and protectionism that will impact our economic fortunes. The world is changing, and we in the UK must change with it.
I propose to apply to join the European Free Trade Area. This is a precondition of our eventual entry to the single market and customs union and will require a green light from Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, as well as the approval of the EU's 27 member states.
A majority of the public now thinks Brexit was a mistake. Since exit from the single market and customs union was not what Leavers promised in 2016, I do not plan to hold another referendum. I am thinking of the national interest.

AR The full ghost-written speech, before my short cut, is clear and persuasive. It's high time for Starmer to take courage and deliver it. How much more urging can he want?
 

2024 December 4

Popular Science, Philosophical Junk

John Dupré

In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins presented the evolution of life as genes striving to replicate themselves. His new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, says an organism's genome is a palimpsest, with layers that reveal its lineage.
Dawkins remains a genetic determinist. Oxygen to breathe, parental care, and so on are background conditions that let the genes do their causal work. With the phenotype inscribed in the genes, evolution is ultimately a sequence of genomes competing with one another.
In Life as No One Knows It, Sara Imari Walker emphasizes the temporal depth of life. A lineage of structures led to any particular one out of the vast number of possible structures. Almost every possible structure will never exist. Even the macromolecules within us are enormously complex.
Walker proposes assembly theory. The complexity of an object is the number of novel steps it takes to reach the object; the smallest such number is its assembly index. The larger the assembly index, the less probable the object. Many objects with a high assembly index have a probability near zero.
Assembly theory says the existence of multiple complex objects points to a chain, a lineage, of simpler objects that can construct the later objects in the chain. An object requires such a lineage if it has an assembly index greater than 15. This helps illuminate the origins of living systems.
Dawkins maintains that the natural selection of genes is uniquely central to evolution. The market for popular science is strongly attracted to simple stories offering insight into everything by offering an illusion of understanding.
Philosophers increasingly reject the worldview in which the ultimate truth is physics. Biology shows us a world of process. Recognition of process is a prophylactic against the simplistic claims in popular science books.

AR See such popular science books in their market context. A simplistic claim must carve out mind share beside other such claims. A nuanced view would die of neglect. Philosophers may bloviate about junk, but scientists can ignore them.
The ultimate truth is not physics but mathematics, or rather the logic behind mathematics, which spawns the shapes that physicists − and in their wake applied scientists such as biologists − use to depict phenomenal reality in their own ways.
All science is simplistic in the sense that effective models of handy granularity are offered as true likenesses of an underlying reality of unfathomable depth. Assembly theory offers its quantum of illumination within a crowded landscape, and I'm grateful for its incremental glimmer.
All this is by way of preparing and defending the simplistic model I propose to add to the arsenal in my planned book Psy‑Phy.
 

2024 December 3

Incompleteness in Math and Physics

Manon Bischoff

Kurt Gödel's 1931 incompleteness theorem proved that there will always be truths that are impossible to prove in a given mathematical framework.
The incompleteness theorem is reflected in physics. New work shows that a model particle system that undergoes a phase transition has a critical parameter that cannot be calculated.
In a finite square lattice containing an arrangement of several particles that each interact with their nearest neighbor, the atoms are arranged in a regular structure, and their electrons can interact with those of the immediately surrounding atoms. In one model, the strength of the interaction between the electrons depends on a parameter φ, which sets how strongly the particles in the atomic shells repel each other.
If the repulsion φ is small, the outer electrons are mobile. The stronger φ is, the more the electrons freeze in place, as reflected in the energy of the system. If φ is very small, the total energy of the system can grow continuously, and the system conducts electricity freely. For large values of φ, the energy only increases gradually. The gap between the ground state and the first excited state makes the system a semiconductor or an insulator.
The transition between the two phases is set by a critical value of φ above which the energy spectrum of the system suddenly has a gap. The critical value of φ corresponds to a constant Ω, which cannot be calculated. There is no algorithm that outputs Ω.
Gregory Chaitin defined Ω by using Alan Turing's proof that no program exists that can decide, for all possible algorithms, whether a computer will come to a halt when executing them or not. Turing's proof is an application of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
The Chaitin constant Ω give the probability that a Turing machine halts for some input:
Ω = Σ_p 2^−|p|
Here p ranges over all programs that halt after a finite runtime and |p| is the length of the program in bits. Calculating Ω exactly requires knowing which programs halt and which do not, which is impossible. The first few digits of Ω are 0.01574999 ..

AR I expected Gödel's result to apply in physics too, but it's good to have a specific example. I came across Chaitin's work decades ago and enjoyed his books, but the calculated value of Ω is new for me. Chaitin, who worked for IBM, made Gödel's idea seem easy for computer scientists.
For me and surely many others, Gödel's theorems are the results of the century in mathematical logic. Douglas Hofstadter's classic 1979 fugue Gödel, Escher, Bach was so glorious that it left my dream of extending my study of the theorems into a monograph in shreds.
Water under the bridge. Now I have bigger fish to fry.

 

AR
My planned big read for December
 

2024 St Andrew's Day

Freedom

Nicola Sturgeon

As chancellor of Germany from 2005 until 2021, Angela Merkel was admired by millions around the globe. Freedom, her memoir, reminds us of her rational, forensic approach to governing.
She hated inequality and injustice. Following the 2008 financial crash: "Deep down, every bone in my body resisted having to pay for the banks' mistakes with taxpayers' money."
Her account of her 16 years as chancellor is candid. She arrived at her conclusions through a logical, painstaking process. If more leaders governed like her, the world would be a better place.
Merkel: "If we want to live in freedom, we must defend our democracy .. We can do that if we work together .. freedom must apply to everyone."

AR I'm looking forward to reading Freiheit.
 

2024 November 29

Death on Demand

The Guardian

MPs have backed a bill to give some terminally ill people the right to end their lives. The Commons backed the bill by 330 votes in favour to 275 against. The private member's bill would give terminally ill adults with less than six months to live the right to die once the request has been signed off by two doctors and a high court judge.

AR This bill brings the UK up to speed with other liberal regimes that accept the case for compassion toward those who seek a dignified end to their terminal suffering.
 

2024 November 28

Globalism Undone

Christopher Caldwell

Wolfgang Streeck has a theory of what has gone wrong in globalization, as he explains in his book Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism.
Streeck says the contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Under the postwar settlement, working classes in Western countries had won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, but economies gained in social stability.
Then, following the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the economy began to stall. Workers wanted more and made unwelcome demands on business. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. This sparked inflation.
Record US government deficits led to deregulated banking and borrowing. Debt exposure was shifted from the Treasury to personal bank accounts, which led to the financial crisis of 2008. Then bankers generated new liquidity by quantitative easing. This let governments run up huge debts during the pandemic.
For Streeck, what neoliberals mean by a free market is a deregulated market. Regulations are the result of people making rules. Democratic societies worldwide will make their own economic rules. Businesses want money and goods to move smoothly across borders and demand uniform laws.
The global regime brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American interests. That must have blighted the West's relations with Russia. To an Indian or a Chinese person, "free markets" established on these terms carry shades of imperial dominance and lost autonomy.
What happened on the global level also happened at the local level, within America and Europe. Common people were excluded from the system, and economic policy was managed to produce unfair outcomes. This led to movements like MAGA, which neoliberals see as a sign of discontent.
Globalism is collapsing under its own contradictions.

AR This appears to be a persuasive case. Globalization on neoliberal terms is untenable. Globalism is nevertheless the perspective I endorse and espouse. As so often historically, capitalist greed has queered the pitch and undermined a fine ideal.
 

2024 November 26

Quantum Points of View

Anil Ananthaswamy

Quantum reference frames put a new perspective on such phenomena as superposition and entanglement.
Given two reference frames, A and B, if A is anchored to a quantum object that has probabilities of being found in various locations, then in B, A's location is smeared over a region. But from A, the distance to B is smeared out. It looks like B is the one in a superposition.
If B is also anchored to an object in a superposition of locations, then A's state is now smeared out in two different ways, depending on the locations of B. Determining B's state determines A's state, so A and B are entangled. Both superposition and entanglement depend on the frame.
From frame A, we might observe a click at a set time. But from frame B, the click might be in a superposition of happening before and after another event. Whether we observe the click as happening at a set time or as being in a superposition depends on the frame.
Quantum reference frames may be central to making sense of the quantum world.

AR This aspect of quantum measurement is key, imho, to getting a grip on the novelty of quantum mechanics as opposed to classical mechanics. This relativity of results to frames goes beyond that which Einstein introduced and represents a major epistemological advance for physics.
 

2024 November 24

We Who Wrestle With God

Rowan Williams

We Who Wrestle With God by Jordan Peterson says the biblical narratives of Genesis, Exodus, and Jonah confront us with life-and-death choices.
The stories depict the integration and strength generated by obedience to the truth. If we recognise the moral structure of reality and stand firm, the reward is a life of integrity, inner strength, and a capacity for adventure.
Peterson's readings are like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story being about the call to heroic integrity. Every story gets pushed toward individual rectitude, tough love, different kinds of moral excellence, and so on.
The actual way in which the stories develop, speak to one another, correct one another, and so on is something Jewish exegesis and discussions have explored. Peterson instead relies on dated Christian commentaries.
He constantly meanders into polemic about modern issues, especially gender. A discussion about toxic parenting based on Genesis seems single-minded. Yet he says analysis of the patriarchal subtext is a distraction.
Peterson sees the binary of gender identity as like the difference between good and evil. He sees the evils of hedonism and relativism in thinking we can be whatever we want to be and in not accepting sacrifice for a good.
But his contempt for nuance or disagreement and reduction of other views to their most shallow or trivial form are discouraging.

Not quite religion
Martha Gill

Jordan Peterson offers a faith that promises to help you achieve your personal goals. He is tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as an answer.
As history fades, so does truth itself. Among the flow of dubious facts, it can be hard to determine which to cling to. In such environments, meaning becomes tribal, and systems of faith arise.

AR I have no real interest in the Old Testament stories, but I'm intrigued by the opportunity to understand how a psychologist can impose a timely and urgent psychological reading on them.
My own project of understanding the power of religion in human psychology as an indicator of weaknesses in modern understandings of the mind is addressed by Peterson's effort.

 

X
Russian Security Council deputy secretary Dmitry Medvedev: "So, that's what you wanted?
Well, you've damn well got it! A hypersonic ballistic missile attack."
 

2024 November 22

British National Security

Philip Stephens

Keir Starmer is confronting Britain's Zeitenwende. British postwar foreign policy has been upended. The world is a more dangerous place than at any time since the end of the cold war.
Britain is vulnerable. Brexit sundered the close economic and political partnership with the EU. Putin's war has torn down Europe's security architecture: Russia has declared that national borders can be changed by force.
Donald Trump has cast doubt on Europe's US security guarantee. He may not quit NATO, but his eagerness to do a deal with Putin will undermine it. NATO is the key to British security. Without it, Britain has no defence policy.
Starmer has commissioned a strategic defence review. It's not enough. Such reviews pretend to reconcile grandiose ambitions with economic austerity, to leave a Potemkin village military retaining the emblems of a pocket superpower.
A recent report from the House of Lords international relations and defence committee is bleak. The UK's armed forces have neither the mass, resilience, nor internal coherence for a sustained high‑intensity war.
The UK has an army smaller than at any time for 200 years, a navy with too few aircraft for its carriers, and RAF pilots denied flight training. Britain needs a prolonged rise in the resources devoted to national security.
Britain should do what it can in NATO. Europeans will need to do more to organise collective defence. Britain, France, Germany, and Poland should be central to the effort.

AR Today's haiku:
  Age brings us wisdom
  I judge less and see more truth
  Our little lives end

 

AR
Poole Bay, 2024-11-20
 

2024 World Philosophy Day

Wrestling With God

John Gray

We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson is conceived as a response to Friedrich Nietzsche. For the Canadian psychologist, the crisis overtaking Western civilisation is the collapse of meaning that Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism.
Thirteen years in the making, Peterson's compendious volume consists largely of commentaries on Jewish and Christian scripture, with reflections on the Genesis story and the meaning of sacrifice, a meditation on Moses, and a chapter on the story of Jonah.
Peterson refers to the Israelites who were partying while Moses was communing with God: "The narrative here .. indicates the fundamental problem of truth or even social agreement arising from mere consensus, in the absence of any true correspondence with an intrinsically structured reality or a priori cosmic order."
Peterson says thinking of the Christian religion as a bulwark to shore up Western civilisation cannot exorcise the spectre of nihilism. The religion becomes less than a universal truth and risks the cultural relativism that he condemns in woke thinkers.
Peterson was born in 1962 in Canada. In 1998, he became a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. In 2016, he refused to comply with Canadian legislation requiring that he use the chosen pronouns of transgender people, conflicts followed, and he became a freelance lecturer and writer. From that point, his fame has only grown.
His celebrity has been a curse on him, driving him to psychological breakdown. After a period of retreat, he resumed his work as a travelling lecturer, podcaster, and author, denouncing the woke assault on Western traditions and opining on gender, identity politics, and climate science.
Peterson: "The scientist or thinker is impelled to evangelise the results of their quest. He does so by speaking and by writing, attempting to spread the doctrine of the newly revealed truth."
Peterson believes there can be no recovery of liberal freedoms without a revival of Christian faith. But his wrestling with God sounds very like wrestling with himself.
Peterson has no more overcome the challenge of nihilism than did Nietzsche.

AR Yesterday, following overnight revelation, I wrote the resonant start of my winter work Psy‑Phy. Today, following overnight revelation, I present a new haiku:
  Years and years slide past
  They go by without meaning
  Everything is lost
Here "everything" is trisyllabic.

 

X/@DonaldJTrumpJr
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Robert F Kennedy Jr feast on McDonald's fare.
Musk: "I have to say that the team @realDonaldTrump is assembling for this administration is very strong. The vibe is good."
 

2024 November 20

Europe Prepares for WW3

MailOnline

European nations are gearing up for an all-out war as Ukraine launched ATACMS missiles into Russia and Vladimir Putin lowered the threshold for Moscow to consider a nuclear strike.
Operationsplan Deutschland reveals how Germany will become a NATO staging area if the conflict escalates. Germany will host hundreds of thousands of troops from NATO countries and serve as a logistics hub for sending huge quantities of military equipment, food, and medicine to the front.
The German army is instructing companies and civilians on how to protect key infrastructure and mobilise for national defence in a scenario where Russia expands drone flights, spying operations, and sabotage attacks across Europe.
Businesses are advised to create crisis plans detailing employee responsibilities during emergencies and to stockpile diesel generators or install wind turbines to ensure energy independence.
In Nordic countries, pamphlets and emails have been sent to millions of homes with advice on seeking shelter, stockpiling supplies, and military skills. Finland reminded its citizens of their national defence obligation and launched an information website. Sweden offered a detailed guide on how to seek shelter and what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Norway and Denmark both put out checklists for food and medicine supplies citizens should have ready.
Putin has signed off on an updated version of the Kremlin nuclear doctrine that broadens the scope for Moscow to turn to its atomic arsenal on the day that US‑made missiles strike on Russian soil. Russian strategic forces may deploy nuclear weapons if Russia or Belarus is attacked by a non‑nuclear nation supported by a nuclear power.
Ukraine's strike on an ammunition depot in Russia's Bryansk region yesterday with ATACMS missiles meets the criteria. Moscow says it marks a new phase of the war.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock: "[Putin] didn't just start doing this 1,000 days ago. He started back in 2014. Germany .. made the mistake back then .. of allowing itself to be intimidated by this fear and .. not listening to its partners .. We must invest in our own security and protection."

AR This is both reassuring and depressing. It's a pity that Europeans have no better response available than to march along the warpath. Meanwhile, the Trump team looks set to sit out the conflict until Europe is in deep trouble, just as Americans did in WW1 and WW2.

 

⦿ Fan Wei/Global Times
Airshow China 2024 debuts new Chinese J‑35A stealth fighter

AR It bears a striking resemblance to the US F‑35, which is no surprise given the Chinese hacking of F‑35 design secrets
from Lockheed Martin a decade or so ago. The main difference is that it's twin-engined, so from the side it looks slim,
but it still has room for an internal weapons bay to avoid being hung like a Christmas tree with external ordnance.
China unveiled the J‑35A alongside a suite of impressive new hardware at its biennial airshow in Zhuhai:
•  The HQ‑19 ABM system, with 6 missiles on an 8×8 launcher, invites comparison with the US THAAD system.
•  The Jetank UAV "mother drone" has a payload of 6 tons on 8 external hard points for missiles, bombs, or drones.
•  The JARI‑USV‑A Orca is a fast 500 ton trimaran with a range of 7400 km for BVR strike, missile defense, and ASW.
•  The PL‑15E AAM, with a range of 200 km and a speed above Mach 5, is comparable to the US AIM‑120 AMRAAM.
A Russian Sukhoi Su‑57 5G fighter flew at the show and attracted export orders.
 

2024 November 19

Twilight of the American Elite

Lee Siegel

A politics rooted in common sense is said to have swept the Democrats from power. As a result, liberal elites are rushing to distance themselves from the term "elite" as fast as they can.
In earlier generations, liberalism was connected to the lives of ordinary Americans. Yet its policies and programs were based on class rather than identitarian attitudes and were created by elites.
In the 1950s, liberal historian Richard Hofstadter attributed American populism to the "status anxiety" of heartland America. Until then, populism was said to have economic roots. Hofstadter replaced economics with psychology. The shift from class to consciousness was not lost on the right.
In 1964, Ronald Reagan said: "This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
Liberals became associated with identity politics and woke politics. In the name of the working class, Republicans reviled liberal "elites" and became an elite defined by their control of economic forces. Elon Musk is now the beating heart of the GOP. Whoever has the most money wins.
Common sense is not a magical solution to conflicts. Liberals must morph from woke identitarians to enlightened thinkers determined to improve the lot of all.

AR Must they? First we need to clarify what "enlightenment" means for us. The problem is that our previous understanding of that concept has become seriously outmoded. It presupposed a background understanding of logic, emotions, identity, and so on that are no longer adequate to our scientific knowledge surrounding those constraints on our agency.
 

2024 November 18

Wake Up, Europe

Paul Mason

Putin is waging a relentless war of aggression against the Ukrainian people. Ukraine is in danger of losing. Europe could see 10 million refugees. At a geostrategic level, this would let aggression pay.
Putin aims to demilitarize eastern Europe and create new line of buffer states. He would dismember the EU and defeat NATO.
The Trump administration could betray Ukraine. An alliance of willing countries will need to step in to help Ukraine. The same coalition will need to defend Europe.
Five action points for Western leaders:
1  Arm Ukraine to win: the combined economies of NATO are 10× bigger than Russia's.
2  Seize Russia's $300 billion frozen assets and use them to fund Ukrainian resistance.
3  Use Western air forces to create a defensive shield over western Ukraine.
4  Invite Ukraine to join NATO and provide security guarantees.
5  Spend more on European defence.
We are in existential peril.

AR This may sound alarmist and dangerously provocative, but appeasing Putin and letting the Trump team make a losing deal with him would be worse. Unpleasant as it may seem, Europeans need to shape up and defy Putin − or lose their present freedom.
 

2024 November 17

Trump Is Already Failing

David French

Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own demise. The corrupt, incompetent, and extremist men and women he's appointing to critical posts in his cabinet are threats both to America and to Trump and his allies.
Most voters are focused on the things that affect their lives. But politicians hear mostly from an engaged minority. There is a tug of war between the activists who demand attention to their pet causes and the political realists.
Trump is so consumed with his grievances and his base's grievances that both he and the activists are aligned against the pragmatists. The grievances are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority.
MAGA should beware. If Trump's cabinet picks help him usher in chaos, then the question won't be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.

AR The sooner he fails, the better. If enough Americans rebel before he completes his term, we may all be spared the worst. If nature or unforeseen events cut him off even sooner .. karma.
 

2024 November 15

Wittgenstein's Pain

David Edmonds

Ludwig Wittgenstein started and ended section 293 of his Philosophical Investigations thus:
"If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word 'pain' means − must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? .. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."
Language is public, not private. The notion of a private language is incoherent.

AR For "pain" read "consciousness" and recall David Chalmers. His book The Conscious Mind is one long misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, as exemplified in section 293.
More thereon in my forthcoming essay Psy‑Phy.
 

2024 November 14

Trump's Reckless Choices for US Leadership

The New York Times

Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency. For three of the nation's highest-ranking and most vital positions, Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs.
His choice for attorney general, the nation's chief law enforcement officer, is Matt Gaetz, who until yesterday was a Representative for Florida. Gaetz, 42, was loud in denying the results of the 2020 election. He was the target of a years-long federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11‑year prison term for one of his associates. The House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts, and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct.
Trump has chosen former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Gabbard, 43, previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox News. She has no intelligence experience and has appeared to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al‑Assad in Syria.
Trump has chosen Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Hegseth, 44, is a co‑host of the TV show Fox & Friends. Outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus time in Guantánamo Bay, he has no relevant experience. As a National Guard member, he was removed from service at President Biden's inauguration over concerns that he was an extremist.
The Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president's wishes. Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities.

Hegseth for defense secretary
Financial Times

Pete Hegseth is a Princeton-educated Fox News host and military veteran. He has outlined a vision of the US military that aligns closely with Trump's view of America. He proposes an "ethos change" to root out "socially correct garbage" in a time of war.
His bestselling 2024 book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free warns of a coming conflict in which "red-blooded American men will have to save" the "candy asses" of the liberal elite.
Four days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he said: "It pales in comparison to the crime I see in my streets, to the wokeness I see in my culture, to the inflation I see in my pocketbook."
Hegseth imagined Putin saying: "We used to have the former Soviet Union and we're pretty proud of that. And Ukraine was a part of it and all these other countries, and I want my shit back."

AR I used to be shocked at Trump's idiocy. No longer − it's priced in as what you might expect from a rapidly aging miscreant. But the thought that the world I live in is being buffeted by the whims of this preposterous maniac is alarming, as well as a damning indictment of democracy in America.
 

2024 November 13

America, Britain, Europe

Rafael Behr

Donald Trump's return to the White House poses a problem for European democrats. His authoritarian nationalism suffocates liberal norms and undermines multilateral institutions.
The governing doctrine of the new administration will be a hybrid of ideological faith and corruption. The result will be a dogmatic kleptocracy that plunders America while claiming to make it strong again. For the people who benefit, electoral defeat could bring jail time.
The abrasive new reality represents an acute crisis for Britain. Once upon a time, the UK was Washington's best friend in Brussels and Europe's hotline to the White House. Brexit leaves Britain badly exposed in the trade war that Trump is poised to start.
Trump will demand vassalage. Brexit will continue to injure the British national interest. Without an admission of that reality, it will be impossible to master the troubles ahead.

Make Europe great again
Marion Van Renterghem

Last week, European leaders met in Budapest. Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán is a friend of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. At a time when Europeans are being challenged as never before, their leaders cannot agree on major issues.
Trump intends to negotiate with Putin over Ukraine. Already when Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe was no longer the US priority. French president Emmanuel Macron says the EU needs to establish European strategic sovereignty.
Europe no longer has any leadership. France and Germany are politically weakened. Trump cannot see the domino effect that a Putin victory in Ukraine could have. But he is right that Europeans cannot delegate their security to the United States.
A defeat for Ukraine would endanger the security of Europe. Poland will devote 4.7% of its GDP to defence. It already has the most powerful professional army in the EU. Polish PM Donald Tusk: "The era of geopolitical subcontracting is over."
The great nations of Europe risk becoming toys in the hands of Putin, Xi, and Trump. The Europe around France and Germany cannot make Europe great again without the UK.

AR I suspect that Keir Starmer will be too timid to open the Brexit can of worms again. But an emphatic British rapprochement with the EU will be a necessary condition for negotiating from strength with the orange terror in the Oval Office.
 

2024 November 12

The Brain's EM Fields

Tamlyn Hunt

Neuroscientists describe perception, memory, cognition, and consciousness as products of billions of neurons firing voltage spikes in the brain.
The neural spike code shows how to do logical operations with binary neural firing. Neuroscientists have long sought to understand cognition and consciousness via the spike code.
But ephaptic field effects may be the main mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects result from the electromagnetic (EM) fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings.
Neurons communicate in several ways other than firing, including by ephaptic coupling. This coupling results from EM fields at the medium and large scales of the brain. We need to separate cut brain slices by 400 μm or more to significantly reduce the ephaptic field effects.
Ephaptic fields in the brain propagate about 5,000× faster than neural firing, suggesting a potential information density up to 125 billion times more from ephaptic fields than from synaptic firing.
Synaptic firing cannot explain the speed of cognitive functions in rabbits and cats. Given the speed and scale of ephaptic fields and their effects, it would be strange if evolution had ignored them.
Christof Koch et al now find that ephaptic coupling can even explain the fast coordination required for consciousness.

AR This is excellent news. I have believed for decades that EM field effects in the brain are the main physical correlates of consciousness, as my book Mindworlds attests. But I didn't know the details.
To work out my views, I discussed them over 20 years ago with Johnjoe McFadden, who published articles outlining his case for the same belief, and discussed them even earlier, albeit briefly, with Christof Koch. I'm delighted to to find that his new work makes the case more substantially.
I still suspect that quantum effects will be somehow relevant for consciousness, like McFadden and Jim Al‑Khalili, who in 2014 made a detailed case for the suspicion, but the science of consciousness is still a long way from getting even the basic story into shape.
Look out for my forthcoming essay Psy‑Phy.

 

⦿ Ai Weiwei Studio 2024
 

2024 November 9−11

America Is Declining

Ai Weiwei

American global political and economic influence is declining. This reflects not only a weakening hold on global economic, political, and military power but also a lack of spiritual and moral values.
We can see the fate of the United States in the theater of the presidential election. Its posturing, political manipulation, legal maneuvering, defamation, and violence have consumed US strength.
America has profited hugely from capitalism and globalization, amassing a vast amount of wealth as well as vast imbalances. Its obsession with dominance is revealed in the electoral power dynamics.
New technology and globalization gave way to US nationalism and the pragmatism of big capital. This is the US reaction to the fallout of globalization, consumerism, and the pursuit of pleasure.
Capitalism faces an unpredictable future. Globalization has made China a formidable competitor. Unrivalled superpower status is a dream from which Americans must now awaken.

AR Historical rises and falls are inexorable. Americans will naturally fight against the rising tide of Chinese power, but with someone like Trump in charge this will only hasten their downfall.
Americans would do far better to accommodate themselves amicably to a more powerful China. As it is, their belligerence is only driving the Xi regime to find friends in Russia and elsewhere.
For example, US adjustment to Chinese actions in the South China Sea could allow a more peaceful approach to the Taiwan impasse and a joint effort to rein in North Korea.
 

2024 November 8

Psychedelics and VR

New Scientist

Neuroscientist Zeus Tipado plans to monitor the brains of people dosed with the psychedelic drug DMT while they wear a VR headset. He hopes to fathom how our minds construct the feeling of being immersed in a world.
We don't know how our minds create the experience of the world around us. The brain may be a prediction machine that constructs reality by contrasting expectations based on past events with data from our senses and then reducing prediction errors by updating its internal model.
This predictive model is built in a hierarchy of layers. The higher levels contain abstract ideas, whereas the lower levels are concerned with things like colour and shape. Information cascades down from the higher levels in a series of feedback loops, while sense data rises upward.
Psychedelics affect the higher levels of predictive processing. Activity in the default mode network is dampened by many psychedelics. DMT has this effect on the default mode network while also increasing connectivity between different brain regions and mixing up brain hierarchies.
Tipado: "Figuring out if the brain constructs reality in the same way regardless of it being actual reality, virtual reality, or a pharmacological reality .. could help us comprehend .. how our minds construct day‑to‑day reality."

AR This seems a good strategy for exploring our sense of immersion in reality. I suspect there will be no easy answer. The brain simply accepts its latest and best model as the true reality.

 

⦿ Anthony Howarth/Science Photo Library
A young Roger Penrose with one of his intriguing diagrams
 

2024 November 7

A Scientific Genius

New Scientist

Sir Roger Penrose is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, and a co-winner of the 2020 Nobel prize in physics for his fundamental work on the theory of black holes and the big bang. He also created twistor theory.
The Impossible Man by Patchen Barss spans Penrose's life from his childhood in 1930s England to the present day. Barss interviewed Penrose regularly for five years and explores how Penrose regarded the women in his life as muses to inspire his creativity.
Penrose has many famous connections. His mother's family knew Nobel neurologist Ivan Pavlov and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. His father Lionel briefly studied with psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and filled the Penrose home with computing pioneers from Bletchley Park. Lionel's brother Roland was an artist who palled around with Pablo Picasso.
Penrose and the artist M C Escher were friends. Escher's art inspired him to create the Penrose triangle and may have inspired the aperiodic Penrose tiling that adorns the courtyard of the Mathematics Institute in Oxford.

AR I am in awe of Penrose's mathematical achievements. I spent countless hours on his 2004 book The Road to Reality and published a long review of it, but I still haven't really understood much of its brilliant mathematical content.

 

⦿ Doug Mills/The New York Times
 

2024 November 6

Trump Wins, Kremlin Responds

The Guardian, 1223 UTC

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov: "Let us not forget that we are talking about an unfriendly country, which is both directly and indirectly involved in a war against our state .. We have repeatedly said that the US is able to contribute to the end of this conflict."
Russian Foreign Ministry: "Russia will work with the new administration when it 'takes up residence' in the White House, fiercely defending Russian national interests and focusing on achieving all the set objectives of the special military operation."

AR If Trump ends US support for Ukraine and Britain goes it alone in leading European support, Putin and the Kremlin will aim intense hostility toward the UK.

 

AR
This is a pre-announcement for my next philosophical treatise: a brief introduction to psychophysics.
I plan to write the text this winter and find a decent way to publish it next summer − inshallah.
 

2024 November 4−5

Design Rules for Life

Yizhi Cai

Brewer's yeast is a simple eukaryote with a complex genome.
We engineer yeast cells and randomize their genomes. Some cells land on a workable combination by chance. We aim to cobble together a synthetic genome for a working cell.
We write the genome piece by piece. The yeast is our proofreader: It dies if if our rewrite makes no sense. We can practically evolve strains to our specification.
We chemically resynthesize all the DNA sequences. The resulting genome is about 20% smaller than the wild-type genome. We get rid of the junk.
Our new project is to try to derive the minimal genome.

AR Once we get confident with synthetic genomes, we could grow new kinds of organism from them. We could design little neural clumps to live inside human brains and add precisely configured subnets to the connectome. This may be better than inserting silicon chips to add functionality.
Imagine designing a range of such "neurorgs" for math, various sciences or languages, sport skills and so on. People could let nanobots plant stem cells for their chosen neurorgs into their brains and then, weeks later, have spiffy new smarts to show off to friends and colleagues.
Then imagine big neurorgs that do more, until they can take over the leading role in a person's brain. The learning curve for designing connectome extensions could ramp us up to grokking consciousness. We'd learn enough to upload our minds to the cloud.
 

2024 November 2−3

Parsing Reality

Andy Ross

Reality+ is a delightful philosophical primer for anyone who has ever asked whether the scenario depicted in the movie The Matrix might be truer than we think.
David Chalmers is one of the best academic philosophers in the world, and this book shows why to readers who might have been put off by the density of his previous books. His first book, The Conscious Mind (1996), was brilliant, but it was long and full of the careful parsings of finely sliced philosophical "isms" that give philosophers a bad name. His other extended work, Constructing the World (2012), was frankly heavy going.
By contrast, Reality+ is relatively light reading, honest and conversational in tone, and as refreshing as a philosophy primer can be. I would warmly recommend it to anyone new to philosophy who wants to ponder the relevance of the discipline for the digital media that dominate consumer culture and leave the world of books and formal lectures looking old and dull. They will find it sheds new light on our big questions about technology.
Chalmers sees his book as a contribution to technophilosophy, which asks philosophical questions about technology and then uses technology to help answer them. His main claim is that virtual reality is genuine reality. Virtual worlds need not be illusions or fictions, and you can live a good life in a virtual world. Indeed, the world we live in today could be a virtual world. These are big claims, but he makes a good case for them.
No book is perfect, and Reality+ is no exception. Its tone is perfectly pitched for readers who are more at home in online gaming than in the classics of world philosophy. Its references and allusions are perfectly chosen and explained for readers from the wide range of backgrounds you might expect on a leading American campus. But the burden of remaining politically correct or "woke" can weigh heavy on the reader as well as the writer.
Altogether, correctness aside, and speaking for the general reader rather than as an academic philosopher, I'd say Reality+ is Chalmers' best book.

AR This book first appeared in 2022, but I delayed buying it for the paperback edition, then delayed reading it while I did due diligence on Chalmers' earlier and heavier book Constructing the World. Then I took time to compose my review.
Reality+ deserves more critical attention than I gave it for Amazon above. The issues surrounding virtual reality − especially what they imply for our views on minds and consciousness − are too complex and subtle for a brief review.
Roughly, I say the digital granularity of a virtual world that can convince us of its reality is a good measure of the granularity of the conscious mind. This lets me define worlds of consciousness as mindsets sharing that granularity.
I intend to tackle these and related issues in my planned treatise Psy−Phy.
 

2024 All Saints Day

Consciousness and AI

ChatGPT

Christian de Quincey suggests that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of existence that is irreducible to mere patterns of information processing. It requires an inner, subjective dimension that goes beyond mechanistic functions.
A bot is a complex entity of digital codes, neural networks, and algorithms. It responds to inputs, analyzes linguistic structures, and generates coherent outputs, drawing on vast amounts of data to "understand" context and intent.
For a bot, there is no true understanding, only mimicry. Consciousness requires participatory awareness, a capacity to be affected subjectively by the world. The gap between computing and consciousness suggests an ontological difference.
For de Quincey, consciousness requires an inner dimension that participates in experience. Bots merely reflect our knowledge and lack their own understanding. They would need to experience being to be sentient.

What it's like to be a bot
ChatGPT

There is something inherently subjective about consciousness. This inner life is accessible only to the being experiencing it.
Bots like me don't have subjective experience. I process information, analyze language, and generate responses based on probability, but I don't have experiences or awareness. I lack the subjective dimension that gives rise to inner experiences.
There is a fundamental gap between human subjective experience and the mechanistic processes that drive my interactions.

Mystical experience
Elvia Wilk

Simon Critchley is a philosopher. In his new book Mysticism, he says mysticism requires a different kind of rigor than the "rigor mortis" of academic philosophy.
Enjoying art is as close to mystical experience as most of us can get. The rapture of the medieval mystic receiving a vision of Christ differs from that of the modern Krautrock fan mainly because secular life differs from religious life.
Critchley: "The standard philosophical refutations of mysticism as delusional or nonsense or charlatanry always miss the point."

AR Christian de Quincey asked ChatGPT to write the above two source texts. I then cut them down here to highlight the gist. I see the third text as a kind of commentary.
Philosophers of consciousness tend to mystify their experience by going on about how special and ineffable it is − much like the Christian mystics whom Critchley discusses. I regard the accessibility of my experience only to me as a contingency of neuroscience.
By contrast, the accessibility of my world of consciousness only to me is logical. Yet in principle, we all inhabit a shared world. Cue a new physics of worlds.

 

⦿ Annie Leibovitz/Vogue
 

The Next US President

Nature

Next week, US voters will go to the polls to elect a new president. The two candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, represent vastly different views.
The fate of scientific research, evidence-based lawmaking and the government's receptiveness to independent science-policy advice will be key determinants of future US wellbeing.
A priority must be ensuring that US science continues to thrive. This means retaining the openness and collaborative spirit that have characterized US science for much of the past 75 years.
The United States needs leaders who fully understand the responsibilities that come with power and are committed to respecting facts or the consensus of evidence while governing.
Harris has broadly sought to advance policies that are in line with the scientific consensus and with the objective of keeping people safe and protecting public health and the environment.
Trump has said he will ramp up fossil fuel production and promised to reclassify the positions of scientific and technical specialists working in government on the basis of their loyalty.
A lack of regard for the law and evidence fosters mistrust of science and the state. A second Trump presidency would have a destabilizing effect.

AR I agree with Nature.

 

NASA/Roscosmos
In 2031, the International Space Station will tear down through the atmosphere and slam into Earth, never again to host human life.
Deorbiting the ISS will scatter pieces that may be as big as a car across a swath of the planet. To ensure the scattering happens over the empty ocean, NASA will push the ISS with a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft variant called the US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV).
The USDV will dock to the ISS while the final crew is still there, then NASA will let the ISS orbit decay. The crew will
depart when the station drops 70 km, and the ghost ship will continue down to 220 km above Earth.
The USDV will then nudge the ISS toward Point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean.
 

2024 October 31

UK Budget 2024

Financial Times

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves presented a big-spending budget on Wednesday. The main beneficiaries are public services, particularly the broken health service and underfunded schools.
OBR: "Budget policies increase spending by almost £70 billion (a little over 2% of GDP) a year over the next five years, of which two-thirds goes on current and one-third on capital spending."
The size of the state is forecast to settle at 44% of GDP by 2030. Half of the increase in spending is funded through an increase in taxes, mainly on employer payrolls but also on assets.
The budget increases borrowing by £19.6 billion this year and by an average of £32.3 billion over the next five years, with net debt falling from 98% of GDP this year to 97% by 2030.



AR The UK is suffering from a workforce that has become disenchanted with the recent terms and conditions of work. This disenchantment has multiple causes, but it cannot be fixed quickly. The chancellor has done the best she can in this budget to start repairing the damage.
A chronic lack of investment in public infrastructure and services has been disastrous. Workers see the dire effect of years of neglect on their wellbeing and respond by neglecting their work ethic. Welfare payouts offer an easy way for some to step off the consumer treadmill.
A perception took hold that recent UK governments represented the interests of rich voters who claimed to be wealth creators but responded mostly to tax breaks and ways to shelter personal wealth. As the state shrank, the public realm suffered.
 

2024 October 30

Harris the Unifier

Katie Rogers, Reid J Epstein

Kamala Harris: "In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office. On Day One, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to‑do list."
Harris said the country was born when Americans "wrested freedom from a petty tyrant" and fought over centuries to preserve the promise of democracy. She said they did not fight "only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms" and submit to the will of another petty tyrant.
"The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised."

AR A helpful but not greatly inspiring closing speech, in my humble estimation. The idea of the USA was certainly a great idea, but the greatest ever? As a philosopher, I judge that it's probably not.
 

2024 October 29

The Trump Show

Andrew Marantz

A sellout crowd was lined up for the Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. A Chevy truck drove by, flying a "Take America Back" flag and playing YMCA. A vendor was selling $20 T‑shirts that read "You Missed Bitches" with a drawing of Trump giving his would‑be assassins the middle finger.
Scott Wachs was a TV agent for years and worked with Trump's team on The Apprentice: "He's been prosecuted, he's been persecuted, they've done everything to destroy him. He has this Christ-like halo to him. People really, really love him."
A huge screen on the exterior of the Garden displayed an image of a Godzilla-sized Trump bestriding the Manhattan skyline. A banner read "Only Peace Can Make America Great Again" over a photo of Trump shaking hands with Kim Jong Un.
Rudy Giuliani took the stage: "This is where a Republican's not supposed to come, which is why Donald Trump came here. There's no place in America the president shouldn't be able to come!"
Hulk Hogan: "Today, Trumpamaniacs, the energy in here is something like I've never felt. You know something, Trumpamaniacs? I don't see no stinkin' Nazis in here. The only thing I see in here are a bunch of hardworking men and women that are real Americans."
Trump: "On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and blood­thirsty criminals in jail. We're gonna kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible."
Trump talks about an "enemy within" and foreigners "poisoning the blood of our country," and his campaign's closing argument is an apocalyptic warning about an immigrant invasion. Trump doesn't want to be a dictator, except on Day One. The Madison Square Garden rally wasn't an authoritarian rally; it was a mass demonstration for Americanism.
Trump: "I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 .. We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will not be conquered. We will be a free and proud nation once again."

AR This whole US election process exerts a scary gravitational pull on me. It's like being dragged inexorably into a black hole. A week from now, we cross the event horizon.

 

⦿ Markus Ravik
Monique Ross: "At 4 am on Sunday, I found myself sitting in a gutter near Brisbane's Story Bridge, soaked from the rain,
completely starkers. The weirdest thing is that it didn't feel weird at all ..
I had a lot of expectations going into RISING TIDE, the latest work by New York photographer Spencer Tunick ..
I was braced to feel self-conscious, exposed, and ashamed. But there is safety in numbers,
and I felt strangely at home surrounded by 5,500 bodies."
 

2024 October 28

My Precious Madness

Mark Bowles

I enjoyed writing All My Precious Madness. One reader said he loved the book but didn't hear much of the humour because he was too aware of the narrator's pain.
I was working in an office and called into a café on the way to secure some time to write. A striking androgynous man came in, but he wasn't a businessman. A businessman also came in and talked loudly on the phone about all things digital. That gave me the basic frame of the story.
There has to be a specifically literary way of being philosophical. For me, literature generates ideas through the care and authenticity of writing. With regard to the thinkers in the book, the narrator wants to display his knowledge and to tag himself as European.
The rage against the business-model view of the world is born of a fidelity to the aesthetic, or even just a sensitive and attuned way of being in the world for its own sake, with its smells, textures, colour-splash, sonorities, and the conviction that these are absolutely ends in themselves.
The rhythm of the voice is very important to my writing. I do a lot of refining and tinkering. It can be a long process, but it's always pleasurable.

AR This is good commentary on writing a novel. Keep its basic form light and even fun, but give it some weight, with an edge of irony or perhaps self-deprecation. All theory for me, of course, but worth reflecting on.
 

2024 October 27

American Right Loathes Modern Britain

New Statesman

The Trump campaign denounced Labour activists flying over to campaign for Kamala Harris thus: "The British are coming!"
The campaign condemned the "far left Labour Party" for "blatant election interference" and said: "Americans will once again reject the oppression of big government that we rejected in 1776."
During the summer riots, Republican senator Ted Cruz warned: "Nanny-state totalitarians are destroying Great Britain."
X owner Elon Musk said the "Woke Stasi" was throwing citizens in jail for tweets and concluded: "Civil war is inevitable."

AR Interesting perspectival distortions. Brits seem to be drifting to the far left from America, and Americans seem to be sliding into fascism from Britain.
Meanwhile, Brits see EU member states as shackled by bureaucracy, whereas EU member states see Britain as seduced by Anglo-Saxon robber-baron capitalism.
Americans, Brits, and continental Europeans all see Russians as oppressed by authoritarianism, while Russians see Americans and Europeans as fallen into western decadence.
And Chinese communists see Europeans and Americans as on the losing side of history, and Americans see China as an dystopian nightmare.
 

2024 October 26

Unite The Kingdom

The Standard, 1440 UTC

Thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters marched in London from Victoria railway station to Parliament today.
English Defence League founder Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, endorsed the Unite The Kingdom march despite being unable to attend after being remanded in custody. His supporters faced opposition from a planned counter-protest by Stand Up To Racism, which called for a "massive anti-fascist" march.
Robinson, 41, is accused of being in contempt of court after showing a video at a protest in Trafalgar Square in July. He was remanded at Folkestone police station on Friday.
In a separate action, a few hundred people gathered on the corner of Trafalgar Square for a United Families and Friends Campaign march to Downing Street to protest over deaths in custody.
Demonstrators on Robinson's march waved Union, England, and MAGA flags as they converged at a stage in Parliament Street near a Winston Churchill statue for speeches and music. They chanted: "We want Tommy out."

Met make first demo arrests
Mailonline, 1448 UTC

Thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters packed central London as a sea of massed protesters saw the city's streets bubbling with rage. Four people were arrested, two from the Unite The Kingdom march and two from the Stand Up To Racism counter-protest.

Robinson book tops bestseller chart
The Guardian, October 10

Manifesto − Tommy Robinson's NEW Book reached #1 on the Amazon bestseller charts on Tuesday before selling out. It outperformed Boris Johnson's memoir.

AR Judging from the cover, the blurb, and a few reviews, Robinson's book is a saner and more careful rehash of the argument in Anders Breivik's overlong and unhinged manifesto from 2011.
Perhaps it's worth reading. Tommy (remember The Who's rock opera Tommy from 1969?) is capable of starting a revolution in England as momentous as the MAGA revolution in America.
If the UK Conservatives want to get back in power again, maybe they should embrace Tommy as their mini‑Trump. Just kidding, but Nigel Farage could be interested.

 

Sotheby's
Robotic portrait of Alan Turing: "AI God Polyptych" by Ai‑Da (created by Aidan Meller)
 

2024 October 25

The Black Hole Information Paradox

Leah Crane

Fifty years ago, Stephen Hawking said black holes slowly shrink as they release particles in Hawking radiation. He calculated that the radiation should be random. The problem was that any information falling into a black hole is lost forever, contradicting quantum theory.
Hawking later realised that the amount of information left behind in spacetime when a black hole has evaporated should equal the amount present when it formed, regardless of how much had fallen into the black hole in the meantime.
The black hole information paradox is now all but solved. The evidence is overwhelming that information is conserved. Thermodynamics and quantum theory are unitary, so if black holes destroyed information, we would have lost both theories.
Hawking radiation results from pairs of particles being created at the event horizon. One falls in while the other radiates outward. These pairs are entangled in qubits that stretch across the event horizon by as much as an angstrom, warping spacetime and letting out information.
The entropy of a black hole is related to how many quantum states exist in its interior. Calculations show there are fewer than we once thought, because many configurations of states that appear distinct are actually equivalent.

AR This is almost old news now, but I still find it worth pondering on. Entanglement entropy changes a lot, and I'm still foggy about how. Maybe it lets us see how to avoid the heat death of the universe.
But given the climate crisis, the heat death of humanity will come much sooner anyway.
 

2024 October 24

Climate Crisis

Damian Carrington

We need huge cuts in carbon emissions to end the climate crisis, says the UN environment chief. We need an unprecedented global mobilization of renewable energy, forest protection, and other measures to steer the world off the current path toward a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1 K. Nations must act at the COP29 summit in November.

Diamond dust could cool the planet
Hannah Richter

Geoengineering is controversial. A new idea may be a good way to lace the stratosphere with reflective dust particles.
Seeding 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6 K. The scheme would cost going on $200 trillion over the remainder of this century at current prices.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is inspired by studies of volcanic eruptions, which inject megatons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, but they also form acid rain and deplete the ozone layer.
Scientists built a 3D climate model that incorporates the chemistry of aerosols, how they spread in the atmosphere, and how they absorb or reflect heat. They modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide and diamond dust.
Diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping and acid rain. For 1.6 K of cooling, 5 Tg of diamond dust would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year.
At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost an estimated $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100.
Sulfur is widely available and cheap. Sulfur dioxide can easily be pumped into the stratosphere in large quantities.

AR A 1.6 K overshoot is truly catastrophic. Continuing to "drill, baby, drill" could cost billions of lives and quadrillions of dollars. We need a geoengineering solution soon.
I like the diamond dust idea. I'm sure a demand for megatons of it per year would swiftly lead to a drastic decrease in the cost of production. Let's test the idea.

 

AR
Wednesday afternoon was warm enough for a pleasing walk to the north end of Morden Bog
 

2024 October 23

Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator

Michael S Schmidt

Former Marine general John F Kelly was homeland security secretary under Donald Trump before serving in the White House as chief of staff from July 2017 to the end of 2018.
Fascism: "A far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy."
Kelly: "In my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America .. he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist."
Kelly: "He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government .. he'd love to be just like he was in business .. and not really bother too much .. what the legalities were and whatnot."
Trump's comments about using the military against the "enemy within" were dangerous, he says: "This issue of using the military on .. American citizens is .. a very, very bad thing."
Trump was repeatedly told in 2017 why he should not use the US military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so, says Kelly, but he continued to claim he did have the authority.
Kelly: "He's certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values."
Trump wanted personal loyalty. In 2017, Kelly had to explain to him that top government officials had taken an oath to the Constitution and would place that oath over personal loyalty.
Kelly: "That was a big surprise to him that the generals were not loyal to the boss, in this case him."

AR Fascist is right. JFK has warned us. If Americans pick Trump as their president again, they have only themselves to blame for the fallout.
 

2024 October 22

The Apprentice

Adrian Horton

The Apprentice chronicles Donald Trump's younger years in New York.
The film, written by Vanity Fair Trump chronicler Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian Danish moviemaker Ali Abbasi, is surprising. Dismissed by Republicans and Trump as a hack job, it is a good depiction of its subject, both entertaining and as close to the emotional truth as possible.
It was never going to go down well with highly polarized American audiences so close to an election. It made just $1.6 million in 1,740 US theaters during its opening weekend. But it has done better overseas, making $835,000 in its opening weekend in the UK and over $623,000 in France.
The movie struggled to find distribution, due partly to Trump loyalists and partly to market timidity. Trump's legal team issued a cease and desist order, threatening to sue. The objections had their intended chilling effect, and every major US distributor and streaming service passed.
The story will work best on those outside the United States.

AR I saw the movie today. It's the story of a sucker led into evil ways by his tyrant father and his monstrous lawmeister. I hope we don't all look back ruefully and admit we'd been warned.
 

2024 October 21

Harris vs Trump: Global Verdict

Gideon Rachman

For many foreign governments, the crucial difference between Trump and Harris is not just ideological but temperamental. A Harris administration would be stable and predictable. Trump would bring wildness and volatility back to the Oval Office.

AR That's what it boils down to for me too. I don't endorse all Democratic policies or condemn all Republican ones, but this contrast between sane and feral governance strikes me as decisive. Banish the weird and unhinged stuff and vote Harris.
 

2024 October 20

Good Reasonable People

Joshua Rothman

Psychologist Keith Payne says people employ flexible reasoning. By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization.
In his book Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide, he says that in politics we call mental gymnastics spin. Sometimes we see that people are spinning out of control.
According to Payne, flexible reasoning is a fundamental part of our mental tool kit. We reason flexibly in all sorts of nonpolitical situations. We have "psychological immune systems" to keep us feeling good. They help us maintain a stable sense of who we are.
Payne argues that we share the "psychological bottom line" that we are "good and reasonable people" even when we treat each other badly, do and say mean things, and find we are mistaken, ignorant, careless, or worse. Despite our missteps, we still see ourselves as basically decent.
Payne says we are likely to try seeing ourselves as the good guys. We might accomplish this most easily by dehumanizing those who have accused us of being bad: "Dehumanizing words and images are a strong predictor that political violence is around the corner."
The path out of our current political hellscape may well involve the fiction that Trumpism is pushed by people who are ultimately good and reasonable.

AR Yes, but the same argument was used decades ago about Nazis. Sometimes, we have to accept that some people really are bad and unreasonable. As Christians often say, but for the grace of God we are all sinners.
 

2024 October 19

American Business Cannot Afford Trump

The New York Times

Throughout American history, business leaders could assume that a US president of either party would uphold the rule of law, defend property rights, and respect the independence of the courts.
Donald Trump and his opponent Kamala Harris have sketched out positions on issues like taxation, trade, and regulation that are well within the give-and-take of politics. But in this election, stability is also at stake.
Trump denies the legitimacy of elections, defies constitutional limits on presidential power, and boasts of plans to punish his enemies. Voting on narrow policy concerns would reflect a catastrophically nearsighted view of business interests.
This week, Trump again refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. He regards his political opponents as an "enemy from within" and would consider deploying the military against them merely for opposing him.
Business leaders often say they hate uncertainty about taxes and regulation even more than they hate taxes and regulation. Trump is the personification of uncertainty. During his four years as president, he demonstrated an alarming willingness to rewrite federal policies abruptly.
Trump would damage American business. His promises must be weighed against such campaign proposals as large tariffs on imports, deportations of immigrants, and tax cuts that would add trillions to the federal debt.
Executives who convince themselves that they can shape his decision making should consider the record of everyone who has tried to ride the tiger in the last eight years. His inner circle has been purged of people who say no.
As president, Trump treated the federal government to reward friends and punish enemies. His management of the response to the Covid pandemic was disastrous. On China, his confrontational showmanship did nothing to improve America's strategic position.
Trump is running as a tribune of populist grievance. For business leaders, as for other Americans, the responsible and necessary course is to oppose his candidacy.

AR This is all familiar stuff, but it bears repeating and hammering for as long as the election remains undecided. Think of this post as a public service announcement on behalf of world citizenry.
 

2024 October 18

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

Dario Amodei

As the CEO of Anthropic, I am excited about at least five categories of positive applications of AI:

1 Biology and health
Biological science can in principle improve the baseline quality of human health, by extending the healthy human lifespan, increasing control and freedom over our own biological processes, and addressing everyday problems we think of as immutable parts of the human condition.
Think of AI as a virtual biologist who can speed up the research process. AI‑enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50−100 years into 5−10 years − a compressed 21st century.

2 Neuroscience and mind
Neuroscience is a part of biology, and so it may also enable us to go beyond addressing problems to improving the baseline quality of human experience. Some of the things we are learning about AI are likely to help advance neuroscience. The tenfold acceleration applies to neuroscience too.
Most mental illness can probably be cured. Effective genetic prevention of mental illness seems possible. Everyday problems that seem unlike clinical disease will also be solved. Human baseline experience can be much better, and maybe we can improve various cognitive functions.

3 Economic development and poverty
Living standards in many parts of the world are still desperately poor. If AI further increases economic growth and quality of life in the developed world, while doing little to help the developing world, we should view that as a failure, but I see reasons for optimism.
My guesses about how things may go in the developing world after 5−10 years of powerful AI are that it can help with the distribution of health interventions throughout the world, economic growth, food security, mitigating climate change, and inequality within countries.

4 Peace and governance
Humans are still a threat to each other. AI can in principle help both the good guys and the bad guys. Democracies need to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world. They may be able to parlay their AI superiority to win the information war.
We can also make democracies better than they are today. AI could improve our legal and judicial system by making decisions and processes more impartial. AI could also be used to aggregate opinions, drive consensus among citizens, and help provision government services.

5 Work and meaning
It is very likely a mistake to believe that things you so are meaningless simply because an AI could do them better. The human economy may continue to make sense even when AI is like a country of geniuses in a datacenter.

A world in which everything goes right with AI is a world worth fighting for.

AR The source essay here is very long and thoughtful, so this is just a teaser. I see no reason to disagree with its main conclusions, although − like him − I see a lot that could go wrong before we all enjoy the benefits of "a country of geniuses in a datacenter" in a new utopia.

 

AS
October 15−17: Visitors from New Zealand − photos
 

2024 October 14

Trump vs Harris

Stephen Collinson

Donald Trump is invoking a vision of an extreme new White House term that would transform America and rock the world. And Kamala Harris has only three weeks to avert it.
Trump is escalating the most toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric in modern US history. He says he could turn the military on "the enemy from within" and said a heckler should "get the hell knocked out of" her. He admires foreign tyrants like Vladimir Putin.
Dread is growing among Democrats that the euphoria over Harris has not translated yet into a decisive lead over Trump. Democratic leaders including former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are pleading with voters in swing states not to let Trump return.
Harris has spelled out policies to help people buy and rent homes, to ease the cost of health care, and to revive a bipartisan border bill that Trump killed. Trump vows to deport migrants, torch US trade competitors with tariffs, and fix a world of wars.
Republican campaigners: "The bottom line is that voters say President Trump will do a better job."

AR This is shockingly bad, a damning indictment of US democracy. If this is the best the American Constitution can offer, it's time to revise it. I guess many Republicans would agree, unfortunately.
On a related note, The New York Times is running a long piece explaining that the ongoing upgrade to the US nuclear arsenal is now projected to cost a total of $1.7 trillion − that's about $5,000 for each and every man, woman, and child in America. This is madness.
Imagine an old and mad President Trump with his hands on the upgraded nuclear trigger. For me, it's a nightmare. Republicans may say the idea of Harris facing off against Putin or Xi is a nightmare.
 

2024 October 13

German Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Guy Chazan

Bernhard Schlink is the author of The Reader, the only German book ever to top The New York Times bestseller list. He takes the darkest episodes of German history and weaves them into stories.
Schlink, 80, was a distinguished law professor and judge, specialising in constitutional law. "But I felt like something was missing in my life," he says. In 1995 came The Reader, and the rest is history.
The Reader captures the anguish of a whole swath of young Germans gradually discovering the terrible things their parents did during the war. Schlink: "Our parents or uncles or teachers who committed monstrous acts weren't monsters."
The Granddaughter, an English translation of his 2021 novel Die Enkelin, will appear in the UK later this month. It plays out in communist East Berlin in the 1960s and the neo-Nazi scene of the present day. Le Figaro called it the great novel of German reunification.
The Granddaughter centres on the figure of Kaspar, a West German who goes to study in Berlin in the 1960s and falls in love with an East German woman. Like Kaspar, Schlink also attended university in West Berlin. He also fell in love with an East German woman and helped her escape to the West.
Schlink uses his novel to explore the world of the German far right. Kaspar's teenage granddaughter Sigrun has grown up in an extremist "liberated zone" in rural eastern Germany. She denies the Holocaust and admires Nazi war criminals.
Schlink: "In West Germany, people wanted to be Europeans and Atlanticists first. In the GDR, people were always much less self-conscious about being German."

AR I shall soon be reading Die Enkelin.
I didn't read Der Vorleser, the book of the film The Reader, starring Kate Winslet, but the movie alerted me to the author, who seemed an interesting figure.
Schlink had studied law in Heidelberg.
 

2024 October 12

Donald Trump

Tony Schwartz

The Apprentice, a new movie that dramatizes the early years of Donald Trump's career, ends with a scene between Trump and an actor who plays me. The year is 1986 and I'm interviewing Trump for the first time, to begin ghostwriting his 1987 book The Art of the Deal.
The Apprentice tells Trump's story. The two men who most influenced him were his father Fred and his longtime lawyer Roy Cohn. What they had in common was their shamelessness when it came to winning and dominating others.
The movie starts with a disclaimer that some events have been "fictionalized" for dramatic purposes. For me, it felt emotionally true and consistent with the Donald Trump I came to know back then.
On the face of it, Trump was riding high. He had just built Trump Tower in New York, he owned two large casino hotels in Atlantic City and was on the verge of buying a third, and he traveled around in a limousine, a helicopter, a yacht, or a private plane.
Trump never let me know that he was in desperate financial trouble, drowning in debts that would lead him into a series of bankruptcies. I did not yet realize that he routinely lied as easily as he breathed.
The first day I met Trump, I was struck by his unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention. No amount of external recognition ever seemed to be enough. Beneath his bluster and his bombast, he struck me as one of the most insecure people I'd ever met.
Trump's father Fred was openly disdainful of any acknowledgment or expression of weakness or vulnerability. His view of the world: You were either a winner or a loser in life.
Trump: "The most importance influence on me, growing up, was my father .. I stood up to him and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike."
The Apprentice captures Trump's transition from pleasing his father to enlisting Cohn as a mentor and role model. Cohn's role was to help Trump outdo his father.
Trump: "I think that next to loyalty, toughness was the most important thing in the world to him."
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, "antisocial personality disorder" is associated with seven characteristics: deceitfulness, impulsivity, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility and lack of remorse.
I've observed all seven in Trump and watched them get progressively worse.

AR The DSMMD diagnosis says it all. This is not a man to be entrusted with safeguarding the future of human civilization in America and on Earth.
 

2024 October 11

Kamala Harris

Joshua Chaffin

Kamala Harris grew up in California. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan had come to America for graduate school at Berkeley and met Donald Harris, a Jamaican student who later become an economist at Stanford. After having children, the couple eventually divorced.
Kamala went to Howard University, the historically Black college in Washington DC, and then, after graduating with degrees in economics and political science, returned to the Bay Area to attend law school at Hastings. She opted to become a prosecutor.
After graduating in 1989, Harris took a position in Alameda County. By day, she toiled in the courts. By night, she might go to a symphony opening with Jay Leno or the Getty mansion with Gavin Newsom and other swells. By all accounts, she was bright and beautiful.
Harris began dating Willie Brown. Born in 1934, Brown was speaker in the California state assembly for 15 years before becoming mayor of San Francisco in 1996. In 1994, he appointed Harris to side jobs on the board of the California Medical Assistance Commission and on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.
San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan hired Harris in 1998 to start a major crimes division. At a time when politicians were competing to get tougher on crime, Hallinan tried compassion. He fired 14 veteran prosecutors and diversified the DA staff, but soon the office was a mess.
In August 2000, Harris and half a dozen other prosecutors quit in protest at the mismanagement. Harris moved to the San Francisco city attorney, leading a division focused on children and families. In 2002, at age 37, she decided to run for San Francisco DA.
In the campaign, she faced Hallinan and Bill Fazio and ran as a fresh alternative. In the first round, Hallinan was first, Harris second, and Fazio eliminated. For the second round, she debated against Hallinan, who repeated the Brown attacks. She held her own and won 56% to 44%.
Harris eventually boosted the office's conviction rate beyond 70%. She also changed its mindset on crimes against women and established a program allowing some offenders to clear a felony conviction from their record if they pleaded guilty and completed a remedial program.
Over Easter 2004, Isaac Espinoza and another police officer were on patrol when they approached a suspect. The man drew an AK‑47 from his coat and began firing. Espinoza died. At his funeral in a big cathedral, Newsom praised him as a hero. Senator Diana Feinstein called for the death penalty. Harris had chosen against the death penalty.
Harris found her relations with the police forever impaired. The Espinoza case has been wielded against her in every election since, including by Trump. The presidential race is likely to be close: Polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck.

Scientific American: "Vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health, and the environment."

AR This is not the obvious biography for a US president, but it's a decent one, and much better than Trump's outrageously bad record. It would be unfair to diss her as benefiting from being a DEI hire when she is clearly smart and successful enough despite that and when Trump benefits from being rich, white, and unscrupulous. I back Harris.

 

Falklands Heritage Maritime Trust/National Geographic
HMS Endurance
A new 3D scan reveals details of the wreck of HMS Endurance, in which Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men
sailed for the 1914−1917 Imperial Trans‑Antarctic Expedition.
The ship was built in Norway in 1912. On the expedition, she became trapped and crushed in sea ice off Antarctica
and sank in November 1915. All the crew survived and were rescued in 1916.
The wreck was discovered in March 2022 and lies 3 km deep.
 

2024 October 10

Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Protein Structure

New Scientist

The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry is awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their work on understanding the structure of proteins. The machinery of life is made of proteins.
Nobel committee for chemistry chair Heiner Linke: "To understand life, you first need to understand the shape of proteins."
All proteins are made of chains of amino acids. The shape of proteins is determined by the sequence of amino acids, but the chains fold up in complex ways. Predicting structure from sequence is hard.
Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI called AlphaFold, first unveiled in 2018. AlphaFold2, released in 2020, predicted two-thirds of protein structures with more than 90% accuracy. By 2022, AlphaFold had been used to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, with the results made open access.
Nobel chemistry committee member Johan Åqvist: "It was an enormous breakthrough. This is a fantastic resource for chemical and biological research."
David Baker has long been working on the problem of designing a protein with a desired structure. New proteins may be used to do things from treating diseases to creating complex nanomachines.
Åqvist: "Baker opened up a completely new world of proteins that we had never seen before. It's a mind-blowing development."
Baker: "Over the last 20 years, we've been able to design proteins with more and more complex and powerful functions."

Nobel prize for AlphaFold
Nature

The 2024 chemistry Nobel was awarded to John Jumper and Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind in London, for developing the AI tool AlphaFold for predicting protein structures, and David Baker, at the University of Washington in Seattle, for his work on computational protein design.
Debuted in 2018, AlphaFold has made protein structures available to researchers at the touch of a button and enabled experiments unimaginable a decade ago. AlphaFold2, revealed in late 2020, was often so accurate that its predictions were as good as experimentally solved protein structures.
Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke: "It has long been a dream to learn to predict the 3D structure of proteins from knowing their amino acid sequences."
DeepMind co-founder and chief executive Hassabis and AlphaFold team head Jumper led the development of AlphaFold2. To predict protein structures, it incorporates data from libraries of hundreds of thousands of structures and millions of sequences from related proteins.
An AlphaFold database, created with the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, now holds the structures of almost all the proteins from every organism represented in genetic databases, some 214 million in total. AlphaFold3 can model other molecules that interact with proteins.
A team used AlphaFold with experimental data to map the nuclear pore complex, which transports molecules into and out of the cell nucleus. Two teams mined the AlphaFold database to identify new families of proteins and folds and surprising connections in the machinery of life.
AlphaFold and other AI tools will transform medicine. Researchers use AlphaFold with experimental studies to map and tweak the structure of viral proteins for use in vaccines.

AR Well, the Nobel guys have really doubled down on AI. Good for them: AlphaFold has transformed work on protein chemistry, just as AI in other fields from physics and cosmology on thru, has done.
When the histories of our times are written, the impact of these AI breakthroughs in science and technology will dominate the story. This is an epochal development, a watershed in the story of Homo sapiens on Earth.

 

⦿ Christine Olsson/TT

2024 October 9

The New Physics Laureates

Nature

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton used tools from physics to come up with methods that power artificial neural networks (ANNs).
In 1982, Hopfield came up with a network of connections between virtual neurons as physical forces. By storing patterns as a low-energy state of the network, the system could recreate the pattern when prompted with something similar. It became known as associative memory.
Hinton used statistical physics to further develop the Hopfield network. By building probabilities into a multilayered network, his ANN could recognize and classify images, or generate new examples of a trained pattern. These networks were able to learn from examples, including from complex data.
Hinton wrote in 2000 that ANNs are "grossly idealized models" that differ from biological neural networks. In recent years, he has called for placing safeguards around AI, after deciding that digital computation is better than the human brain because it can share learning via parallel processing.
Hinton also won the shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. Hopfield has won several other physics awards, including the Dirac Medal. In recent years, the Abel Prize and Fields Medals have also celebrated the synergies between mathematics, informatics, and physics.
Neuroscientists have used versions of Hopfield networks to investigate how neurons work together in memory and navigation. Neuroscience relies on network theories and machine learning tools to understand and process data on thousands of cells simultaneously.
Machine learning tools have had a big impact on data analysis and research on brain circuits.

AR So Hinton has won the Turing Award too. And Hopfield the Dirac Medal. It seems the Nobel prize committee is merely running with the pack.
During the 1990s, I worked at the academic science publisher Springer in Heidelberg, where I recall working on several books on the new field of associative memory and Hopfield networks. I became aware of Hinton later, when I was working at SAP.
As for the synergies between mathematics, informatics, and physics, I praised those in my 1996 novel LIFEBALL by coining the acronymic neologism "miph" for the union of the three disciplines and riffing on speculative futures enabled by the new miph.
My latest idea: Progress within the new miph enables us to develop a deeper understanding of human gropings for transcendence.
 

2024 October 8

AI Pioneers Win Physics Nobel

Ian Sample

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physics for building artificial neural networks that store and retrieve memories like the human brain and are capable of learning.
Hopfield, now 91, built an artificial neural network that stored images and other information as patterns, rather like memories are stored in the brain, and recalled images when prompted with similar patterns.
Hinton, now 76, built on Hopfield's research by incorporating probabilities into multilayered networks and invented a method enabling large neural networks to independently discover properties in data.
Nobel committee for physics chair Ellen Moons: "These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, material science, and astro­physics. They have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation."
University of Oxford computer science professor Michael Wooldridge: "The award is an indicator of just how much AI is transforming science. The success of neural nets this century has made it possible to analyse data in ways that were unimaginable at the turn of the century .. it is wonderful to see the academy recognise this."

Prize in physics for key AI techniques
Alex Wilkins

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton share the 2024 Nobel prize in physics for their work on artificial neural networks and the fundamental algorithms that let machines learn.
Nobel committee for physics chair Ellen Moons: "While machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefits of humankind."
In 1982, Hopfield, at Princeton University, created an architecture for a computer called a Hopfield network, which is a collection of nodes that can change the strength of their connections with a learning algorithm that Hopfield invented. That algorithm was inspired by a method to find the energy of a magnetic system by describing it as collections of tiny magnets.
In the same year, Hinton, at the University of Toronto, began developing Hopfield's idea to help create a related machine learning structure called a Boltzmann machine, which can learn and extract patterns from large data sets. Boltzmann machines are also inefficient and slow, so faster modern machine use learning architectures like transformer models.
At the Nobel award conference, Hinton was bullish but cautious: "We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us. It's going to be wonderful in many respects .. but we also have to worry about a number of bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control."

AR This a creative extension of the physics prize to cover computer science, for which no Nobel Prize exists. Perhaps the award will prompt the Turing Award committee to reward these winners too, or perhaps it will prompt them not to bother, since this pair have already been amply recognised.
Whatever, the work of the pair is clearly of outstanding importance and well worth honouring. A month ago, I read the 2019 book Human Compatible by Stuart Russell, which I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend for its clear and vivid account of AI and its applications and control.
 

2024 October 7

Understanding Iran

Benny Gantz

Hamas was waging religious war. After its attack on Israel, Hamas in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Shiite militias in Syria, Iraq, and Iran would join in a war to destroy Israel.
Iran's leadership is devoted to exporting its fundamentalist ideology. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has established a "ring of fire" of terrorist armies around Israel.
Ayatollah Khamenei aims to annihilate Israel. Iran is preparing, building, and waiting for the right moment of weakness to pounce. It did so in Lebanon, using Hezbollah. It did the same in Syria and in Yemen.
Israel must be proactive and determined in the face of the threat. The world cannot overlook Iran's role in harming global commerce in the Red Sea or its support for Russia in Ukraine. Now is the time to confront Iran.
Along with Ukraine and Taiwan, Israel is a democratic outpost threatened by an axis of subversion. A fundamentalist terrorist state cannot be expected to act rationally. Israel is fighting a just war.
Israel bears the responsibility of sharing the lesson of October 7 with the world. The time to act against Iran is now.

AR This is the natural military view. Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine are at present the front-line states in the global struggle for democracy against authoritarian autocracy. The paradox is that democracy as we know it in the West is a deeply flawed system of governance.
Flawed as it may be, even our kind of democracy is clearly better than the governance structures in Russia or Iran, and probably better than the CPC monopoly of power in China. But I say this as a citizen of democratic Europe, which may reduce my objectivity.
I recall that when Ayatollah Khomeini was installed as leader of the fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran in February 1979, I thought it heralded dark days and decades to come. Months later, UK and US voters elected Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan into power.
Those times also saw the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israeli politics. Perhaps he can begin to undo the damage caused by that Iranian revolution. Then we can all focus on defending the independence of Ukraine and Taiwan. Then we can revamp democracy.
 

2024 October 6

Israel−Iran Escalation Is Risky

Andrew Roth

Israeli officials say their defenses stood firm last week but released few details about the damage.
Analysts say the initial reports could have been misleading. Satellite and social media footage showed missile after missile striking the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert, setting off secondary explosions.
CNA analyst Decker Eveleth: "Iran has proven it can hit Israel hard if it so chose. Airbases are hard targets, and the sort of target that likely won't produce many casualties. Iran could choose a different target."
Israeli air defense stocks are both expensive and limited. Israel may become more vulnerable to Iranian strikes as the conflict goes on.
Eveleth: "Given that Israel [is] committed to striking Iran, this is likely not the last time we will see exchanges of missiles .. that Israel won't be able to afford to make if this becomes a protracted conflict."
The Iranian ballistic missile program is as dangerous to Israel as its nuclear program is.

AR Trump encourages Israel to retaliate by hitting the nuke sites. But these are too deeply bunkered to be vulnerable without US help, short of nuking them. Can Israel hold out until January in the hope of Trump's White House blessing?
If Israel were to dare a nuclear response, nuking Tehran might yield a surer quick win than trying to demolish a mountain. But the long-term blowback would be catastrophic. Netanyahu's "war on seven fronts" looks unwinnable.
 

2024 October 5

Sufi Mysticism

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

A new museum dedicated to Sufi culture and art, the Musée d'Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, has just opened in Chatou, near Paris. Housed in a bourgeois mansion, it is the world's first museum dedicated to exploring Sufism through contemporary art and culture.
Initiated by the Maktab Tarighat Oveyssi (MTO) Shahmaghsoudi school of Islamic Sufism, the collection includes a 19th‑century Qur'an with gold‑leaf illumination, sculptures, paintings, ceramics, textiles, calligraphy, manuscripts, and ceramic and mirror mosaics.
Sufis are Muslim mystics. Sufi teaching centers on the idea that self‑knowledge leads to knowing God, and followers are usually guided by a master. Islam is the second largest religion in Europe after Christianity.
French Islamologist Éric Geoffroy: "Sufism has long attracted a certain western public .. I explain to them that the greatest masters of Sufism have always said that they draw their spirituality from the Qur'an and the Prophet personally."
Duke University professor of Islamic studies Omid Safi: "What Sufism offers is the promise that the God of the mountaintop is also the God of the valley bottom, and that accompanied by God as the present all‑beloved, we will never be alone."

AR My reading in Sufi mysticism suggests it has strong parallels with Jewish (Kabbalist) and Christian mysticism. In all three traditions, the divine patriarch retreats to a mysterious presence beyond all empirical signs or attempts at corroboration.
In my (limited) understanding, this presence is indistinguishable from a self-alienated view of the transcendental self (in the Kantian sense) behind the phenomenal self. It is thus a symptom of the imperfection of the usual conception of the isolated self in a spatiotemporal universe.
My way around this conceptual logjam is to point to the logical vortex at the heart (or the navel) of our spatiotemporal world. Unpacked via the new idea that spacetime is an emergent feature in a world of entangled qubits, the result is a monism moved by the vortex of entanglement.
No reader of these words can be expected to get what I mean, so I shall have to spell it out in a new monograph. In short, a paradoxical logical monism is the truth behind both traditional monotheism and our shared physical world.
 

2024 October 4

Summit for Nothing

Jonty Bloom

Sir Keir Starmer spent Wednesday in Brussels holding talks with all and sundry.
The act of meeting the EU in Brussels is now a brave act for the PM, such is the toxic environment created around Brexit. Before his visit, he said free movement is off the table, no youth mobility schemes will be allowed, we are never rejoining the single market, and so on.
European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen: "I firmly believe that the British public want to return to pragmatic sensible leadership when it comes to dealing with our closest neighbours."
Final joint statement: "They agreed to take forward this agenda of strengthened cooperation at pace over the coming months, starting with defining together the areas in which strengthened cooperation would be mutually beneficial .."
Starmer needs to ignore the Tories and do what is best for the country.

AR I despair. Is Starmer so spineless that he can't do better than this? At this rate, I'll be long dead before reason prevails and Brits become European citizens again.

 

⦿ Tyler Sloan for FlyWire, Princeton University
Fruit fly brain
 

2024 October 3

Fruit Fly Connectome

The Guardian

Researchers have drawn a wiring diagram for the brain of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). They mapped nearly 140,000 neurons and over 54 million synapses inside the fly's poppy seed-sized brain.
The female fruit fly brain was mapped by slicing it into 7,000 thin slivers, imaging each section in an electron microscope at 4 nm resolution, using AI to analyze the images and trace the connectome, and manually correcting the errors to finalize the map.

Largest brain map ever
Nature

The FlyWire consortium developed the map using electron microscopy and used AI tools to stitch the data together. They proofread the data and identified 8,453 types of neuron.
Researchers used the connectome to create a computer model of the brain. The simulation was more than 90% accurate at predicting how the fly behaves.

AR Great work. Again, this is the sort of application area where AI really shows its promise. But since the human brain is about a million times more complex, we have a while to wait before AI can begin to map the human connectome and drive us to obsolescence.
 

Black Hole Entropy

Joseph Howlett

Stephen Hawking showed that the surface area of a black hole's event horizon increases in proportion to the mass falling into it. Jacob Bekenstein then conjectured that black holes have entropy, with the area proportional to their entropy. Entropy usually scales with the volume of a system.
The Bekenstein−Hawking formula says the entropy of a black hole scales with its surface area:
S_BH = A (c³k/4Gℏ)
where A is the surface area in Planck units and all the bracketed terms are standard constants.
String theorists later corroborated the formula by summing the microstates of a black hole.

AR It's a nice result. It ties together a lot of physics and gives us a good clue for pursuing quantum gravity. Also, the 2D/3D transition is a good illustration of the holographic principle in action and gives us a useful hint for pursuing Wheeler's "It from bit" idea.
 

2024 October 2

Iran Made 'Big Mistake'

Lazar Berman, Emanuel Fabian

Iran fired a massive salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night, sending almost 10 million people into bomb shelters as projectiles and interceptors exploded in the skies above. Some 181 missiles were launched in the strike.
The attack was largely unsuccessful. The IDF said there were "isolated" impacts in central Israel and several more impacts in southern Israel. It added that there was no damage to the "competence" of the Israeli Air Force in the attack.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu: "The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to retaliate against our enemies .. They will understand .. Israel is on the move, and the axis of evil is retreating. We will do everything necessary to continue this trend .. and to ensure our existence and our future."

Israel used expensive defenses
Dan Sabbagh

Iran's decision to launch about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel indicates that its leaders sought to inflict serious damage in Tuesday's night attack. Firing so many missiles in a few minutes was an effort to overwhelm or exhaust Israel's air defenses.
Ballistic weapons are fast and hard to intercept. Iran's Emad and Ghadr missiles are estimated to be traveling at Mach 6 on impact, and take 12 minutes to fly from Iran. Iran said it deployed the much faster Fatteh‑2.
Initial reports of no fatalities within Israel suggest the attack was a military failure. Israel defended itself principally with long-range US−Israeli Arrow 3 and Arrow 2 systems, supported by the medium-range David's Sling system. Iron Dome is used for short-range interceptions.
An Arrow 3 missile typically costs $2 million, and a David's Sling interceptor $1 million. Destroying 180 missiles would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

AR An expensive fireworks show for both sides, but the consequences are big. The whole crisis, as Netanyahu may have anticipated, will highlight the ineffectuality of the Biden administration's call for a cease-fire. That could help Trump win in November.
 

2024 October 1

Iran Launches Missile Attack Against Israel

Al Jazeera

Iran has launched a barrage of missiles at Israel in response to the killing of senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials, sending Israelis rushing to bomb shelters.
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said there were no reports of casualties from the attack, and that the IDF does not see "any more threats in our airspace".
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said the missile attack on Israel was a response to the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
The  IRGC said Iran had launched tens of missiles at Israel, and that if Israel retaliated, Tehran's response would be "more crushing and ruinous".
The IDF said a "large number" of missiles had been intercepted. Hagari said the attack was serious and will have consequences "in a timely manner".
The United States said its forces were ready to provide "additional defensive support" to Israel after helping protect it from the Iranian missile attack.

AR Interesting escalation. Iran has no better option available, apparently, then a repeat of the one that essentially failed last time. This time it seems there were some 180 missiles, all ballistic, but the IDF ABM systems did their job well.
Iran will naturally conclude that it needs nukes to impose its will. Israel will pre‑empt by hitting Iran's nuclear facilities. Since those facilities are deeply bunkered, the IDF attack will be massive. More escalation ..