The System

To begin with, you are without knowing that you are. There is no comprehension or incomprehension, there is simply experience and feeling.

Then, gradually, vapours of thought condense, a kernel of self-awareness crystallises, and a nascent layer of linguistic understanding accumulates. A new I has entered the world.

There is then a period of play and exploration. There is boisterous exuberance, an untrammelled joy at being and learning.

Then, at some stage, one discovers that one has been born into a system:

"Why do I have to go to school?"

"To learn things."

"Why do I have to learn things?"

"So you can get a job."

"Why do I have to get a job?"

"So you can make money."

"Why do I have to make money?"

"So you can buy things."

"Why don't we just give people money without making them work?"

"Then nobody would do the things people don't want to do, to make the things to buy."

So, grudgingly, we enter the system. After some years, however, a second existential transition creeps upon us. Not only is each I born into an external system, but each I is incarnated in its own animal system, and that animal system is programmed to reproduce. Previously dormant mental systems and hormones kick into action, and suddenly it is these body systems which are in control, the I simply a means to realise their imperatives.

A re-interpretation of the external system then takes place. It becomes a system to be played to our advantage to satisfy the physiological exigencies. Money will provide not only food, drink and shelter, but a means of attracting mates, and a means of rearing progeny. This second existential transition converts most into an acceptance of the system. Many are consumed by ambition from this point on. The world for most is then a world of careers, families, mortgages, bills, and pensions. A world of planning, rules and systems.

The joy and spontaneity of the young I is a barely acknowledged mote of memory.

And then a third existential transition creeps upon us. The internal system begins to decay and fail. The reproductive drive shrivels. The layers of linguistic understanding erode, and eventually even the kernel of self-awareness becomes brittle. Thought evaporates, and only feeling and experience remain. At the end, you are without knowing that you are. Beyond, there is nothing.

Strategic Trends 2007-2036

If you're looking for a reliable guide to the political, environmental, social, technological and social trends which will shape the world over the next 30 years, look no further than Strategic Trends, a rolling document produced by the MoD's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC).

The latest iteration of this document emphasises the importance of global warming to a much greater extent than its 2003 predecessor. It also includes a short section on Non-Western perspectives, and now acknowledges that the growth of moral relativism is an important trend:

"Secularism and materialism are likely to grow in significance in an increasingly competitive, inter-connected world, reflecting trends that are already well established in the more developed regions. Meanwhile, cultural mixing, the pace of change and a rapid confluence of modern ideas and traditional values are likely to increase the trend towards moral relativism and increasingly pragmatic values. These developments will trigger responses from complex, traditionally defined communities, as well as among significant minorities, whic will seek the sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism," (p12).

However, in one respect, I think that the authors of the current document have failed to make an obvious connection between a couple of their observations. Firstly, consider this accurate analysis of the geopolitical significance of the Arctic:

"The US Geological Survey estimates that around 25% of the remaining global oil and gas reserves are likely to be located in the Arctic. Although the harsh climate and environmental restrictions currently militate against oil exploration and production in this region, Arctic warming is likely to be double the global average and this will significantly improve prospects for future exploitation. Petrochemical companies, aggressively developing new extraction technologies, are likely to pursue oil production, undeterred by current environmental limitations, constraints and concerns. The annual reduction in Arctic ice coverage is likely to continue, leading to the prospect of a year-round Northern sea route across the Arctic Ocean between continents and may culminate in a summer ice-free Arctic in the period 2040 to 2080. These routes will become strategically significant, offering shorter and more direct trade links between North America, Europe and Asia," (p26).

Secondly, it is noted that:

"Russia's significance and influence in Europe is likely to increase, reflecting its extensive natural resources, particularly in oil and gas, but its ability to exert direct leverage or leadership will be limited by its internal tensions, not least its acute demographic crisis, threats to stability from radical Islam and severe regional instability on its southern periphery. The failure of Russia to diversify its economy from a single sector based on energy, as a 'Saudi Arabia of the North', may result in stunted economic development and huge inequalities resulting in political stasis and the potential for instability and disorder. This tendency will be perpetuated by ongoing difficulties in generating a self-sustaining middle class, significant levels of civic responsibility and a socio-economic model based on the rule of law. A failure to overcome these problems is likely, given historic experience, to result in an increasingly authoritarian, overtly nationalistic posture, characterized by a highly regulated, but irregular and criminalized economic sector and poor democratic credentials," (p45).

And yet, on p5, the map of conflict points around the world does not suggest that the Arctic will be a region of potential military conflict...

Black holes, Hoovers and the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider is due to be switched on at CERN this Friday, and I hope and trust that in the course of its operation it will generate a profusion of mini black holes. Mini black holes normally evaporate very quickly, and sadly pose no threat of destroying the world.

Mini black holes could, however, be put to hugely beneficial technological use. Black holes can, of course, be electrically charged, hence if one could create an electrically charged mini black hole, and if one could prevent the mini black hole from evaporating, then one could use electric fields to move and position the mini black holes.

How does one prevent them from evaporating? Well, the smaller a black hole, the greater the temperature of its event horizon, but a black hole will only evaporate if its temperature is greater than the temperature of its environment. Place a mini black hole in a heat bath at the same temperature, and it will be in thermodynamic equilibrium with the heat bath, and will not evaporate.

Now, a mini black hole like those that the LHC might produce, would have a temperature of about 10¹⁴ Kelvin, which is about 25 billion times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Hence, to move and manipulate mini black holes, and to build technological devices incorporating them, we would need to hold them with electromagnetic fields in a high-temperature heat bath. I leave this as an exercise to experimental physicists.

Once this problem has been solved, we will be able to construct a new generation of super-powerful Hoovers, each employing an array of mini black holes to suck up the dirt from the floors and carpets of our homes and workplaces. Obviously, as the black holes suck up the dirt, they will begin to grow in size, so they will need emptying occasionally. Rather as one removes the bag, once full, from a contemporary vacuum cleaner, one would simply remove the black hole module, lower the temperature of the heat bath slightly, and allow a quantity of mass-energy to evaporate in the form of a brisk gamma ray shower.

The weather outlook

Fuck me, it's wet!

Expect it to remain fucking wet for most of the week.

Dawkins and Tebbit on multiculturalism

Richard Dawkins makes a scathing attack on Islam and multiculturalism in today's Sunday Times:

"Islam is importing creationism into this country," he says. "Most devout Muslims are creationists – so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught."

"Teachers are bending over backwards to 'respect' home prejudices that children have been brought up with," he says . "The government could do more, but it doesn’t want to because it is fanatical about multi-culturalism and the need to 'respect' the different 'traditions' from which these children come. The government – particularly under Tony Blair – thinks it is wonderful to have children brought up with their traditional religions. I call it brainwashing."

"It seems as though teachers are terribly frightened of being thought racist," says Dawkins. "It’s almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because [if you do] you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic."

This last point is particularly important, because when Norman Tebbit pointed in the early 1990s to the failure of certain immigrant communities, and Muslims in particular, to integrate into British society, he was roundly slandered as a racist. Tebbit pointed out in 1991 that "some of [the immigrant communities] insist on sticking to their own culture, like the Muslims in Bradford and so forth, and they are extremely dangerous."

Whilst the introduction of creationism into British schools concerns Dawkins, it is the strain of fascist ideology in modern Islam which motivated the suicide bombings of July 7th 2005, and thereby poses the greatest threat to our liberal society. With some justification, Tebbit now feels that his warnings have been vindicated:

"I do think had my comments been acted on those attacks would have been less likely."

"I've been opposing the concept of a multicultural society for 10 years or more and that's because a multicultural society is an impossibility.

"A society is defined by its culture. It is not defined by its race, it is not a matter of skin colour or ethnicity, it is a matter of culture.

"If you have two cultures in one society then you have two societies. If you have two societies in the same place then you are going to have problems, like the kind we saw on July 7, sooner or later."

Dawkins and Tebbit united then, in their attitude to Islam and multiculturalism? It is interesting how external and internal threats are capable of making very strange bed-fellows...

Transistors and grains of rice

Some more numbers: Whilst there are 10¹¹ stars in the Milky Way galaxy, 10¹⁴ cells in the human body, 10¹⁵ grains of rice produced annually worldwide, and 10¹⁷ ants on planet Earth, it seems that the annual world production of transistors exceeds all these figures, at 10 quintillion, 10¹⁹. Not only that, but the cost of producing each transistor is about one-hundreth of the cost of producing each grain of rice!

Is secular, liberal democracy a chaotic attractor?

In terms of mathematical physics, civilisation is a deterministic non-linear dynamical system far-from thermodynamic equilibrium, and human history is the study of one particular trajectory of that dynamical system. This means that there is a set of variables {X_i: i=1,...,n} whose values uniquely characterise the state of a civilisation at a moment in time. All other properties of a civilisation are functions of these state variables.

The evolution in time of a civilisation is then governed by a set of n coupled non-linear differential equations, which the state variables must satisfy:

dX_i/dt = F_i(X₁,...,X_n;λ₁,...,λ_m),      (i=1,...,n).

The m parameters define external constraints upon a civilisation, such as those determined by the geography, geology and meteorology of the planet on which the civilisation exists.

Unfortunately, unlike Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, we don't yet know what these equations are. We don't even know what the state variables are. One might, however, hypothesise the following candidates:

(i) Population size, and population rate of change.
(ii) Total amount of available free energy (i.e., energy resources), and rate of energy consumption (i.e., power output).
(iii) Amount of information stored, and amount of information processed.

Additional variables might then be required to characterise the hierarchies and organisations which define the political state of a civilisation. All economic variables, however, can be treated as functions of the variables in categories (i), (ii) and (iii).

Identifying the correct state variables, and the equations which govern the evolution of civilisations, is a task set for the reader. However, some progress towards understanding the dynamical processes in human history is being made by people such as Peter Turchin, who has launched his cliodynamics research programme, which aims to identify the mathematical patterns in human history. Turchin has identified, he claims:

...long-term cycles that, it turns out, characterize the dynamics of agrarian states and empires. When we consider the long course of history of Western Europe from the days of the Roman empire until the Industrial Revolution, we observe waves of internal instability (widespread rebellions, state collapse, and persistent civil war) that recur every two or three centuries. The internal warfare cycles appear to be dynamically linked with cycles of population increase and decline or stagnation: population peaks are followed, after a time lag, with peaks of instability. This empirical pattern suggests some kind of a Malthusian explanation. However, the American sociologist Jack Goldstone showed that population growth beyond the means of subsistence does not directly bring the onset of civil wars. Instead, its effect is indirect, mediated through the social and political structures (elite overproduction and state fiscal insolvency), which is why there is a time lag between population and instability peaks. This pattern of linked population and internal warfare oscillations is not limited to Europe. Recently two Russian historians, Sergey Nefedov and Andrey Korotayev, showed that the same relationship holds for China during its two thousand year imperial history, for Egypt (from the Hellenistic period to the nineteenth century), and for Russia. It is remarkable that such complex, and very different, societies would all show similar dynamical patterns.

Civilisation is a deterministic non-linear dynamical system, and it is also, presumably, one which exhibits sensitive dependence upon initial conditions: two different histories which begin in a very similar state can, one presumes, diverge from each other at an exponential rate. In terms of dynamical systems theory, such systems are said to be chaotic, hence civilisation is a chaotic dynamical system. Human history also appears to be an aperiodic trajectory in civilisation space, at least over the space of 10,000 years or so. A crucial question, however, is whether the laws of civilisation permit the exist of attractors.

An attractor is a subset of the set of all possible states of a dynamical system, which is such that once a trajectory of the system enters, it never leaves. This doesn't entail that the trajectories are doomed to become periodic once they enter the attractor; they can continue indefinitely, without repeating the same exact state. Whilst chaotic systems are defined by the sensitive dependence on initial conditions that they exhibit, they also tend to possess various chaotic attractors. Which begs the questions:

Is civilisation a chaotic system which possesses attractors, and if so, is human history converging to such an attractor?

The obvious candidate for such an attractor is secular, liberal, democratic, capitalist society. This is essentially the possibility Francis Fukuyama was raising in The End of History. Whilst the current state of the world might not currently reside inside this attractor, and perturbations like 9/11 might be capable of temporarily taking it further away from the attractor, perhaps the current state of the world lies inside the basin of attraction for global secular, liberal, democratic, capitalist society.

Cliodynamics Deterministic nonlinear dynamical system Attractors

Smolin on multiculturalism

Physicist Lee Smolin pens an article for New Scientist on the principles which, he believes, should underlie a multicultural society:

The older notions of liberal democracy grew out of societies where everyone had the same background and history. Today, a citizen of the UK, Sweden, Canada, France or the US may have any ethnic origin, any appearance, and practice any religion – or none. Diversity is increasingly becoming the norm, as unprecedented mobility delivers a planetary society.

But as we move around and mix, our differences move with us and, if anything, deepen as the number of philosophies, religions and life styles combine and multiply in unexpected ways. The challenge is how to have a diverse, multicultural society that is based on reason.

The answer is that we cannot expect to agree about everything. Nor should we: history has shown that a society in complete agreement is impossible, and societies led by religious or political fanatics who attempted to impose agreement, failed - without exception. The success of the pluralistic nations tell us that diversity of views, faiths and styles of living and thinking are good for everyone.

Smolin's answer to the problem of conflict between different cultures in a pluralistic society is that "when reason applied to the publicly-available evidence does not suffice...we must agree to disagree. Clearly, disagreements about religious faith are not in the domain that can be answered [with the application of reason to publicly-available evidence], so here we must allow and even encourage a diversity of views."

Let me, however, pose the following question: if one of the cultures in a pluralistic liberal democracy rejects the principles of liberal democracy, and exercises a capability to engage in acts of violence to undermine that society, how should the liberal democracy respond? Should we merely 'agree to disagree' with such people? It would be labouring the obvious to suggest that this is no longer a hypothetical question, and that there exist Wahhabist, Islamo-fascist sub-cultures in European liberal democracies, which reject the principles of liberal democracy, which aspire to create a world-wide Islamic theocracy, and which have both the will and the capability to engage in acts of violence to further those ends.

Tolerating Islamo-fascism, seems unwise. I would suggest that the definition of multiculturalism needs to be qualified: all races, ethnicities, sexualities, religions, and cultures within a liberal democracy should be tolerated, but within the constraint that they agree with the fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Any sub-cultures which aim to undermine or destroy liberal democracy should not be tolerated.

Exactly what form such intolerance should take is one of the great issues of our time. Legislating against the teaching of Wahhabist beliefs in schools and mosques, and disrupting Saudia Arabian sponsorship of Wahhabism, are obvious options here.

Scientism

Scientism is the purported belief that science provides the only source of knowledge and understanding of the world, and the only source of value and meaning in life. Almost no-one holds this belief, and the vast majority of scientists would agree that in addition to science, there is ethics and morality, logic and mathematics, literature, and art in general. However, the development of science has progressively eroded the historical and cosmological claims which Christianity, Judaism and Islam were dependent upon, and when the combination of scientific belief and humanist morality further threatens religious dogma, the modern theist will often attempt to mis-represent scientific-humanist beliefs as 'scientistic'.

When, in 1616, the heliocentric Copernican worldview was declared to be heretical by the Catholic church, and when, in 1633, Galileo was convicted of heresy for advocating such a worldview, the Catholic church would, no doubt, have referred to the Copernican worldview as 'scientistic', if such a term had been available to them then. Heliocentrism contradicted scripture in numerous places, and such an attempt to remove man from his central position in the universe was clearly part of an attempt to extend science beyond its legitimate scope.

When a modern theist argues that science is not the only source of knowledge, the real intention is not to acknowledge the existence of ethics, philosophy and art, but to open the door to divine revelation, holy scripture, and other so-called 'spiritualities', as alternative sources of knowledge. In particular, the theist takes what is belief without evidence or reason, refers to it as 'faith', and suggests that faith offers an alternative source of knowledge, almost like a type of additional, parallel information channel to that provided by empirical, rational science. In reality, this is nothing more than an attempt to re-brand blind, ignorant belief and wishful thinking.

Another, closely allied, strategy employed by the modern theist is to argue that belief in science is itself a faith. Such claims depend upon an attempt to re-define the meaning of the term 'faith' so that a belief in anything becomes a faith. Correctly defined, as noted above, faith is belief without evidence or reason. In contrast, both scientific beliefs, and belief in the scientific method itself, are beliefs supported by reason and evidence. There is copious evidence for the success of the scientific method, and an understanding of Bayesian probability provides an understanding of why the scientific technique is so successful. Science, then, is clearly no faith.

The modern theist, wary of the success of science and humanism in Western society, is careful not to openly advocate their theism, but to construct first the paper-tiger of scientism, as an imaginary enemy, from which religion is then to provide sanctuary and salvation. On the contrary, a worldview which includes a moral system based upon rationality rather than religious decree, a scientific understanding of the physical world based upon reason and evidence, and a fully-rounded population, appreciative of the arts, philosophy and literature as well as science and technology, is the means by which the human race will be capable of progressing.

Scientism

Doctor Who's assistants

The wonderful Richard Dawkins is back with a new TV series, Dawkins on Darwin, and, to celebrate this imminent broadcasting milestone, The Times went off for a chat with everyone's favourite atheist.

However, what intrigued me most in this article was Dawkins's wife, Lalla Ward:

Dawkins has a real-life connection with Doctor Who: he is married to Lalla Ward, who was previously the wife of Tom Baker, having played the role of his assistant, Romana, in the series in the Seventies. Dawkins met her at a birthday party in 1992 for the late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Lalla floats in and out of Dawkins’s vast living room and kitchen in Oxford, smiling and bearing espressos in terracotta mugs.

Now, personally, I think it's a bit tasteless to hold a birthday party for someone who's dead, but I guess everything goes in the media world, and if it enables you to meet an ex-Doctor Who assistant who can float whilst carrying terracotta mugs, then that's the world for me. To this end, I attended Richard Whiteley's birthday party last night, and I'm happy to report that, as I write this, Billie Piper is gliding towards me with a cup of tea in a Liverpool FC mug, and a raisin-and-oatmeal cookie on a plate.

Music festivals

Holy crap.

It's the Glade Electronic Dance Music Festival this weekend. Sadly, the weather has cleared up, and all I can hear, and feel, is:

thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump

Most of the people at music festivals these days seem to be twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, trying to pretend they're still students. Listen, you're not a student anymore, you've got a boring job, a car, a mortgage, and a pension; spending two days in a tent listening to shit music doesn't change any of the material facts about your life: you're not cool, you're part of the capitalist system, you're middle-class, you're not subverting anything, and you're not really 'roughing it'.

If I had my way, heat rays would piss the decks, and hundreds of tone-deaf imbeciles would flee in terror before my engines of destruction.