The End of a Very Short Era

I'm putting an end to this blog but NEVER FEAR, my philosophical ramblings will continue on humanfriendly.tumblr.com, where I have already been double-posting all the work found here anyway.

This is primarily because I've been finding it hard to decide what fits better there or here, and it just seems much easier to have everything in one place. Humanfriendly.tumblr.com is also where I publish whatever cartoons come out of my head, various things of interest from around and about the internet and stupid gifs. You should go read that blog, because it's lovely. It is Human Friendly.

I also write a regular piece (in theory) for Oxford Road Writers, so go and read that. There are lots of other great writers over there too.

See you over there and there.

Charlie

Some perspective on Obama

Ok internet, I’m officially irritated with loud stupid people. I think everyone will agree right now that Obama is way more a hawk than anyone thought but I’m really, really tired of this idea that he’s something new, or worse. America has been violently intervening with the internal policies of countries significantly and illegally since the second world war and before (I’m well aware Britain has too, that’s not the point here), and brinksman politics were the goddamn norm during the cold war. JFK and Reagan both acted in a way that makes current politicians look like mild mannered pacifists.

And I need not even mention Vietnam.

I’ve heard time and again that Obama is a warmonger, or a murderer, and it really needs to be said: what version of the last seventy years of American history have you been reading to make such a negative comparison? Government overthrows, illegal funding and aid of terrorist organisations, client warfare so blatant it may as well have been straight up war with the Russians, chemical weapons abuse in Vietnam, NUCLEAR BOMBARDMENT OF THE JAPANESE.

By our current standards, Obama is a little scary, but what is scarier is the way people are cherry picking their way through history to show America as a force for good in the past progressively getting more malignant, rather than precisely the opposite. Aside from their involvement with the first and second world wars, America’s military action in the past has been incredibly shaky morally. This must not be forgotten.

A Short, Ranty Reply to David Attenborough

This morning I nearly burst a blood vessel reading an interview with David Attenborough and it's just now been brought back to my attention. My overall feeling about the whole interview is disappointment and irritation. His comments about humans having stopped evolving are just wrong-headed and seem to wilfully misunderstand what evolution actually is.

Evolution is a process whereby any organism adapts generationally to its environment, whatever form that environment takes. This is adaptation to anything, over time. This can be standard environmental pressure (things with big teeth want to eat my species, so I suspect Johnny Fast-Runner is probably going to be the one surviving to breeding age), sexual selection, cultural selection, or even unimpeded mutation, i.e. a mutation occurs and doesn't necessarily cause any harm or benefit and survives. This is not a transcendent process. It is not a ‘simple to complex' process. It is NOT a directed process. It is a series of adaptations changing the form of an organism over generations. This cannot be stopped. The environmental pressures can change, but there will always be environmental pressures. Attenborough seems to be under the illusion that humanity exists in a vacuum and is somehow immune to the pressures of life around it. Problematically, humans have been adapting alone for many tens of thousands of years. The hominin control groups are all dead, so we have very little to directly compare ourselves to to make our adaptive changes more immediately obvious, but be certain, adapt we do and adapt we will. Thousands of generations down the line, we may look the same, but we will have speciated away from our current norm. Evolution is not a blue-printing design improvement process. It is simply the gradual change in a species over time. It can not be stopped. We are not gods.

Secondly, this population bomb style fatalism he brings to the table regarding over-population in the future: hogwash. The population bomb is a 1960s idea that the population would rise exponentially and cause an ecological apocalypse. In the late 1970s, the population increase (percentage increase per year) plateauxed, and has been decreasing ever since. So whilst the population has continued to increase, the speed of increase has been slowing since the 1970s. With this in mind, the consensus is that the population will peak around the middle of the century at ten or eleven billion. This is not an apocalyptic number. Freeman Dyson said of climate change, “sounds like a land management issue”. Well the same goes for population increase. It is a land management issue. We need to keep developing agricultural technology and practice. We need to be creating increasingly well connected, distributed and efficiently powered cities. We need to fully accept responsibility for this Terran environment we have spread throughout. When we can do this, we can feel safe. And we can do it. We've done much crazier things.

Factual errors aside though, my biggest source of disappointment is that David Attenborough, such a loved and influential figure, would express such malign views. There is no strength in defeatism, or fatalism. We must be innovative. We must be hopeful and starry eyed, and we must know the sheer power of human cooperation. On all counts, we need faith in humanity's ability to adapt and improve, as we always have. So for the first time in my life, I must say, “don't listen to David Attenborough. The world and its future is much more wonderful than he would have you believe.”

 

Untitled

If anyone advises you to chase your dreams, no matter what, they are advocating psychopathic behaviour. Chase your dreams, not fantasies.

Pavane - Keith Roberts

Well here's a book which genuinely surprised me. I imagined this would be a heavy-on-exposition exploration of the effects of a huge cause - the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I. What this actually is is a beautifully crafted exploration of this strange version of the alternate late-20th century using richly, thoughtfully and humanely created characters who allow you glimpses of the rest of the world from a small corner of an England (Angle-Land) occupied by a militant, controlling and constricting Roman Catholic empire. As brush strokes lend humanity to a scene un-framed in standard vision, so does Roberts' observation and craft lend life to this bizarre reality. Without his calm and steady hand, this interlinked collection of stories could have been hackneyed, schmaltzy or even boring. His painterly prose are like individual flames lending art to the heat of fire; they mesmerise whilst they sustain.

I found myself reading and re-reading passages just to have his imagery re-form in my head.

Roberts' skill doesn't end simply with his style of prose. The stories told here expertly illustrate and animate a world seemingly trapped under a millennium-long dictatorship, actually on the verge of all-out change and revolution. This revolution is not introduced with chauvinist bombast, flag waving or hill-top speeches though. It is allowed, with the patience of someone truly confident in his material (and materiel), to seep into your mind through implication before its ultimate reveal, and even that reveal is merely a beginning, a jumping-off point. No one of the characters is a Hero, and no one is born with a manifest destiny, or a vengeance or even so much as a steely eye towards justice. They are humans; agents of circumstance. They are us, and because of that novels like this are so desperately important.

And you are not a hero, this novel will tell you. You are never completely correct in your prejudices. Roberts toys with our need to sort people into heroes and villains, sort plots into good versus evil. But his revelations towards the end of the book, that evil perhaps must exist to warn us against worse mistakes, are truly sobering.

We must always fight for Humanity, and our humanity, but an essential part of that fight is keeping watch on our past, and never mistaking the urge for vengeance for the urge to force good into the world and bad out. This novel will always be prescient.

 

The Long Earth - Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett

Well I'll start by simply saying that I could not put this book down. Pratchett and Baxter have created a fantastic cooperative writing style here mixing interesting character work, philosophy and incredibly enthusiastic world building. At the very least, I was expecting a fascinating new universe to stretch my mind out into, but these two give so much more than that.

 

Where it must have been so tempting for them to immediately start describing their endless worlds, the first theme to be explored is actually the very human reactions to the concept of "stepping" - the ability to move to neighbouring dimensions using a home-made machine, the blueprints of which are freely available on the internet - and the social effects this has back home. There are two brilliant conceits at work here. The first is that anyone can make one of these machines using household junk, and the second is that all Earths aside from this one are devoid of Homo Sapiens. A huge exodus begins from this "Datum" earth, which is often compared to the move West into the New World but is actually the start of something quite profound. Iron is non-transmittable through dimensions, so industry and infrastructure effectively has to start again over and over. The difference between the move into the Long Earth and the conquest of the New World is that the concept of infinite Earths removes the need to any sort of territorialism and the social side-effect this brings.

Instantly, infinite Eden is open to humanity. There's so much here that I desperately want to write about but even more desperately don't want to ruin. All I will say is that the human exploration and exploitation of The Long Earth is fantastically explored through families, individual characters and the description of government responses. The description of the British response is wonderfully venomous, in particular.

 

Using this social exploration as their take-off point, the possibilities of this infinite Earth quickly become apparent, and again, I'd rather not get into too much of this for want of not ruining some of the more magical surprises. Sufficed to say, there is a spectacular range of variation in The Long Earth, and yes, there are dinosaurs. There is also a dimension where Earth straight up isn't there, which... Well I'll let you think about the possibilities of that. It leads to one of my favourite written conversations ever. One of those conversations where you can almost physically feel your horizons being stretched open. The kind of writing that electrifies me from Arthur C. Clarke. It's that awesome.

 

For me, however, all of this was just delicious, epic garnish I felt the actual meat of this story was the questions it raises about intelligence, sapience, consciousness and our Homo Sapiens-centric take on the universe. It's not giving too much away to say that one of the main characters in this is an AI living within the (possibly legitimate) guise of a reincarnated Tibetan. There are also other possibly hominin/humanoid species so wonderfully different that their sapience is actually in question. Don't read on if you don't want spoilers. On top of all this, we have a colossal polyp intelligence bearing a distinct (and referenced) similarity to the zealous emergent intelligence blob in The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke (for the love of God read that book if you haven't already). I particularly loved that the rivalries and differences between the various intelligences in this book were not the predictably territorial ones done to death in... well all of human mythology to be quite frank. They are conceptual, due to the origin of intelligence. These differences are dealt with not through disagreement, argument or war, but through rising alarm and suspicion with the realisation of unpredictability innate to a lack of common ground and a lack of context. The Big Bad in this book is not some cackling villain with lightning in the background; it is a being with homogenising motives philosophically identical to our own, down to the justification of love, and therefore ultimately threatening to us. Whilst reading the final act of this book, I couldn't help thinking of Steve Jones in Almost Like a Whale (I think... It could have been The Descent of Man) when he pointed out the wonderfully, epiphanically obvious: There is no conflict like that between animals attempting to occupy the same niche.

 

Overall, this book comes highly recommended. It was a hell of a lot of fun, eminently readable and just exceptional food for thought. I spent several days after having finished reading mentally exploring my own personal image of The Long Earth, and that, for me, is a hallmark of great fiction. I have to thank Baxter and Pratchett; they have created me a new world.

Time

I've had a rather confusing thought with regards to time, and what the hell it is. I've been trying to twist my brain around the idea of the universe's "default speed". We experience time at a certain set rate because we're human and that's how we're calibrated. If your thoughts were slower, time would appear faster, and vice versa. So we calculate the speed of events based on the speed at which we perceive. [Psuedo-philosophical nonsense deleted].

 

What I became fascinated by was how anything actually occurs. What is the reference point for time, if nothing is actually happening? It led me to suspect that, in reality, time must be an emergent property of interacting forces,and we only perceive time because we are part of this universal system of interacting forces.

 

This leads to a rather obvious paradox: If time is an emergent property of interacting forces, i.e. the four dimensional geometry of interactions we perceive as three dimensional then the time aspect of everything would still have to be innate to the universe, like a phorm.

 

Is this a paradox? Is it any more of a paradox than the existence of space? I suspect I need to do some reading.