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.

The Left-Right Paradigm Problem

An issue struck me when listening to the Guardian's politics podcast (highly recommended by the way) this morning. Lord Adonis was being interviewed at length due to having just released a book about the formation of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Whilst coming across as friendly and erudite, one of the main things I brought away from it was the debate over the Liberal Democrat Party's position on the Left-Right political spectrum, and also Nick Clegg's personal position.

Lord Adonis' opinion is that the Liberal Democrats are a fundamentally Centre-Left party, whilst Nick Clegg is Centre-Right. On the face of it, I can't disagree, although I suspect strongly that the Liberal Democrat core are more realist pragmatists than the idealists Adonis suggests them to be, but this is by the by. The main problem with the conclusion he reaches and the political context that informs it is that it in itself highlights a weakness of the Left-Right descriptive paradigm.

Firstly, and most obviously, it is reductive to the point of opacity. To describe someone as Left Wing or Right Wing or Centrist is not only completely subjective, it is almost counter-communicative. It tribalises and pigeon holes and reduces the likelihood that an observer would inspect the motives and aims of those perceived to be operating in a different area of the Left-Right spectrum to their selves. The party system is transparently guilty of this, of course, but the Left-Right dogma is insidiously entrenched so as to be the core from which the superstructure of opinion is formed, rather than a short-hand means of lumping together certain policy types.

The true facets and complications of politics and politicians are obviously not going to be assimilated by everyone, just as you couldn't expect everyone in the country to be interested by physics or dinosaurs, but I honestly believe that day to day political discourse in the papers, on the news, in the pub, would all benefit from binning these restrictive, overly reductive mental boundaries: "Right", "Left". As per the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (read about it, it's bloody interesting), language impacts and partially dictates thought. Less restrictive language may well result in less restrictive discourse (now who's being reductive? Send pedantic complaints to the usual address).

And finally (for this blog. I can see myself needing to rant further about this in future), I have to address this issue of the idea of the Liberal Democrats being a "Centre-Left" party led by a "Centre-Right" politician. This is a singularly unhelpful description of the party. Their current leadership is comprised of the same slightly bizarre tasting realist-pragmatist-idealist dough from which Tony Blair and David Cameron are formed. These people are not Right or Left Wing. Their politics do not respect these territories.
What the Liberal Democrats are currently is the epitome of British politics. They have a core of mostly PR-based ideals protected by smoke and mirrors to simultaneously hide their workings and reflect the public and opposition back on itself. To describe them as Centre-Left seems to miss the point. They are whatever they need to be; their Centre-Leftness remains only as absolute lines they will not cross, and even these are increasingly sketchy. This behaviour can be seen also in the Conservative and Labour parties. Some might even say Labour invented it in 1997. The idealism of the mid-20th century is either so long dead, or so long the norm, that party divides have become increasingly blurred and the Left-Right spectrum has been relegated in its usefulness to describe political extremes so self-evident as to make it singularly redundant.

I would posit that the Right-Left paradigm, with regards to British politics, is not only unhelpful or counter-productive, it is obsolete.

Time for a Little Change

I've been mulling on this blog for a while and I think I'm going to alter the format slightly. Or majorly. I write and waffle a lot, with philosophy being one of my major themes. I do, however, on my other blog humanfriendly.tumblr.com, write on various other things such as films, books, current events and just stuff that comes out of my head. From the creative side of things, I would find it easier if all these things were in the same place, riffing off each other organically and keeping mental context for me.

With this in mind, Have a Philosophy will still serve as a means for me to bellow out my personal ideas on the running and analysis of the world, but it will also serve as a means for me to bellow out my personal ideas on quite a bit else as well.

I can guarantee that this will mean you hearing much more from me. Make of this what you will.

Location:Holloway,Tamworth,United Kingdom

Consciousness Continued

David Stephenson writes:

Self awareness and consciousness; obviously entities have varying degrees of self awareness, particularly as demonstrated by a baby's development, does this mean they have varying degrees of consciousness?

And as an add on to that, if they aren't fully conscious, where do their rights lie in terms of taking their lives ethically. And by babies I did mean children AFTER birth, not during pregnancy.

I would probably argue that consciousness is an innate, connected set of abilities. It is the possession of the ability to react to one's sensorium. Whether we can react in a complex way to our senses in combination or whether we react based on a single input, we can be said to be conscious of our environment. By this definition, consciousness and environmental awareness are synonymous.

Self-awareness goes a step further than that. It an effect of a conscious entity being able to create a recognisable and even malleable environment out of their own physiognomy, psychology, past, present and future. Self-awareness in humans comes mainly from the power of hypothesis. We have evolved the ability to hypothesise the topology of our environments, behaviour of our enemies and friends, and the outcomes of events resulting from these elements. Past a certain level of complexity, we were able to turn these abilities inwards. We looked at ourselves and started analysing our own motivations, likes, dislikes, mistakes et cetera.
It must be stressed that this is still an indirect process. Humans still have to examine themselves on evidence, rather than having access to some kind of source code. Some of us are better at this examination than others. Truly, self-awareness differs between adult individuals. Whilst pretty much anyone will recognise themselves in a mirror, how many are comfortable when presented with a description of their psychology? The majority are more likely to see their own reflection of their selves as the most accurate, despite obvious bias.

The process of development towards self-awareness is instinctive, as language is, but just as with language, we develop shorthand rules for our internal conceptualisation. By this logic, babies learn self-awareness as they do language. They are born with a potential for greater self-awareness than all other animals (as far as we know) but at birth they are a dependent little monkey with no great introspective abilities.

They are, however, entirely conscious of the world around them. The problem with treating consciousness as a basis for individual right to life is that that would instantly rule out the entire meat business.

Problematically, the other major alternative is that we must give utmost right to life to anything, such as a human or a dolphin, which can achieve self-awareness. I say problematically as this logic rules out abortion, but that is a vastly complicated topic for another post.

To work this out without having to descend into endless mind-mending and the creation of a huge number of arbitrary get-out clauses, I will simply say this: Rights must follow common sense and when two sets of rights are in conflict, those which would preserve the greater good and human dignity must be respected.
I don't believe the right to life should be linked to self-awareness or consciousness, simply because this creates an unnecessarily rigid basis on which to base any law or code of ethics. Babies do not have increasing levels of right to life after their birth because this would be impossible to logically justify.

Our right to life is not based on our ability to think, or perceive, and it never must be. It is based on the needs of the many, and the avoidance of the chaos which would ensue if it did not exist. Born babies, as potentially autonomous members of the human race, share our right to life, whether they know it or not.

Consciousness

I struggle with the idea of consciousness. It’s a duality issue, I guess. A matter of perspective. This tiny flash of life we get – how does it work? Are we like a short, sharp sound? A click of the finger? Except instead of a sound, we are a consciousness, brought into being through no volition of its own? If so, if we happen to create echoes, those echoes are the things that people find interesting, especially if they’re distorted. A short, sharp consciousness, only aware of itself, its echoes escaping it, a flawed facsimile of itself. All our actions are only a flawed re-iteration of the original mind.


The conscious mind can never directly interact with, and therefore fully comprehend, its own actions, or the actions of others, because of this. There is a disconnect between thought and action because of the divided nature of these two things. Eventually the echoes fade, and the original sound dies, leaving only a situation with no explanation.

From another perspective, are we not like stars, seen through our atmosphere? During the night, some are clear, always. People with adequate vision can all see them, recognise their colour and size, understand the significance. The majority, however, are dim, and distant, quivering through the air to our eyes. Looking at them directly often makes them invisible, removing comprehension. Looking at them indirectly causes them only to appear momentarily, jiggling from side to side. Some lack the ability to see them even in this way. And are those tiny, flickering stars even stars? Are they not clusters of billions of stars, banding together to be more visible, all in vain? On top of all that, the patterns they choose are not what others see. Whilst they choose logical spirals and discs and clouds, what people see in the sky is lines of un-associated stars forming patterns simply due to their position in a two dimensional perspective. Try as they might, these stars will always be mis-associated. Individuality will always be taken from you by the perceiver.

Whether we are heard as echoes, or seen mistakenly as a flickering member or disassociated brethren, consciousness is something that cannot be transmitted; communicated. Our mind is stuck in our head, only observable, truly, by ourselves.

But I wonder if even that is true. Even self-reflection is a method of translating the conceptual, abstract mess that is our mind into a form of language, even if you are not thinking in words. You are trying to create a typology of your own thoughts and motivations, and in so doing are perverting them to fit a framework that you think is logical. Trying to understand the internal workings of the mind is unavoidably the creation of an infinitely reflexive problem. As soon as you try to analyse the mind using logic, you must then ask “why do I think this logical framework is best, and why do I want to know about the internal workings of my mind?” To this, you must then ask “why do I doubt my own internal logic, and my motivation for wanting to know my mind?” Also: “What is my motivation for doubting my internal logic, and for wanting to know the motivation for knowing my mind?” To this, you must then ask “What is my motivation for doubting my motivation for doubting my internal logic” et cetera. It is improbable that there is a logical ‘atom’ of consciousness that cannot be reduced. It is more probable that, like actual infinity; if the number ‘one’ is the expression of a completely certain term, and zero, or a very small fraction of one is our logical starting point, then to create the certain term, we must build it through the endless decimal places that make up any number. This is impossible, as any number can be divided down infinitely.

So exists the mind. Instead of communicating concepts from their core forms, which may or may not exist, and which is impossible, we make imperfect approximations, even to ourselves. To know ourselves is, therefore, as impossible as to know another. Our true selves may, in fact, be an infinite regressive illusion.

Our Children Will Not Curse Us

There's an idea which has been floating around my mind for a while, and it relates to what we are all doing, as a global civilisation. Specifically, what we are doing environmentally as a civilisation. The damage we are causing to our atmosphere, the sea and the land in the interests of our economies and lifestyles and expectations for the future is now fairly unquestionable. Sea acidification rises, sea ice melts, global climate change is becoming more and more difficult to ignore and farming and industry cover more of the land than is necessary or justifiable, taking the place of forests and other pretty useful features of the non-human environment.

This is all reasonably alarming, I have to admit. There is, however, one niggle. We are told repeatedly that our children will curse us for what we have done to the world and they will spit our names as the reason for their ravaged lands, higher sea-levels and whatever else. "Why did they not act sooner?" they will cry over the flaming deserts of Australia. "Those short sighted fools," as they enjoy a glass-bottom tour of submerged Manhattan.
Now I'm not quite so sure that will be the case.
More likely, those alive in 2113 will not give a single flying proverbial. I'll tell you why.

The first, and most plausible explanation for the lack of interest from our descendants will be that, like people of today, they just don't care that much about history. They care more about the here and now. They will have geopolitical fear and they will have terrible pop music and they will need to keep up with the stupid clothing of the day and how do I ask Mandy out and jeez maybe I'm getting a little fat after NeoSaturnalia.
If I was to jump forward in time and fall to my knees, begging forgiveness, I suspect their reaction would be one of bemusement. And possible marvel at my time travelling abilities. But mostly bemusement. Theirs is the real world into which they were born. Mine would be the world of history, that they read about from a book. People become blasé about the most amazing things, such as mini-ice ages, the blitz, horseless carriages. Even if weather remains crazier, or gets crazier, people in a hundred years time will just accept this as normal.

They will exist in a new normal, and our world will be aberrant.

Secondarily, and much more hypothetically, I do just wonder if societies further and further into the future might deal with these situations a little more level-headedly, the further they are removed from our current apocalyptic, post-millennial angst. It is an interesting morsel for thought to think that perhaps a lot of hysteria and mass-panic raging around now might still subconsciously be linked to still being so close to the big 2k. I don't know, perhaps I am over-analysing...

I would like to add that I entirely advocate acting against climate change. It's a big horrendous monster that I'm in no way trying to downplay, but it's a fun little game, trying to jump into the heads of those finding normalcy after all this craziness is done. I'd be fascinated to hear what people out there think.

Location:Armshead Road,,United Kingdom