Why there should be more science in politics

This programme aired on ABC's Catalyst last Thursday illustrates this very well. Not only are scientists best equipped to see the future on global terms, they are best equipped to find solutions. I think there is a complacency amongst both politicians and the public-at-large that science will automatically rescue us from the problems inherent in our global species' domination. But it seems to me that our economic policies and our scientific future-seeing are at odds. Infinite economic growth dependent on infinite population growth is not sustainable. As the programme intimates, the 21st Century will be a crunch point, and whilst everyone just assumes that science and technology will see us through, it's only the scientists who actually acknowledge the problem.

Addendum: One of the interesting points that is raised in this programme is the fact that we could feed the world now - it's a case of redistribution and waste management, not production. No clearer example exists where our economic paradigms are in conflict with our global needs. The wealth gap simply forbids it.

Sequel to ELVENE

People who have read ELVENE invariably ask: where’s the next one? Considering Elvene was first published in 2006, it’s been a long time coming. Firstly, I was aware that I couldn’t possibly live up to expectations – sequels rarely do – and I also knew that I would probably never write a book as good as Elvene again.

There are many tensions inherent in storytelling but none are more challenging than the contradictory goals of realising readers’ expectations and providing surprises. Both are necessary for a satisfactory rendition of a story and often have to be achieved simultaneously.

So the sequel to ELVENE both opens and closes with surprises, yet the journey’s end is rarely in doubt. I was often tempted to abandon this exercise and let people imagine their own outcome from the previous novel. That would have been the safe thing to do. But as I progressed, especially in the second half, I was motivated by the opposite desire: to write a sequel so that no one else would write it.

For most writers, the feeling is that the story already exists, like the statue trapped in the marble, and, as the writer, I’m simply the first person to read it. For much of the exercise I wrote it as a serial to myself, not knowing what was going to happen next. This is an approach many writers take – it provides the spontaneity that makes our art come alive – even if I already knew how it was going to end (actually I didn't).

Footnote: I should point out that you don't need to have read ELVENE to read the sequel - it works as a standalone story. All the backstory you need is incorporated into the opening scenes.

Is the universe a computer?

In New Scientist (9 February 2013, pp.30-31) Ken Wharton presented an abridged version of his essay, The universe is not a computer, which won him third prize in the 2012 Foundational Questions Institute essay contest. Wharton is a quantum physicist at San Jose University, California. I found it an interesting and well-written article that not only put this question into an historical perspective, but addressed a fundamental metaphysical issue that’s relevant to the way we do science and view the universe itself. It also made me revisit Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma, because he addresses the same issue and more.

Firstly, Wharton argues that Newton changed fundamentally the way we do science when he used his newly discovered (invented) differential calculus (which he called fluxions) to describe the orbits of the planets in the solar system, and simultaneously confirmed, via mathematics, that the gravity that keeps our feet on the ground is the very same phenomenon that keeps the Earth in orbit around the sun. This of itself doesn’t mean the universe is a computer, but Wharton argues that Newton’s use of mathematics to uncover a natural law of the universe created a precedent in the way we do physics and subliminally the way we perceive the universe.

Wharton refers to a ‘Newtonian schema’ that tacitly supports the idea that because we predict future natural phenomena via calculation, perhaps the universe itself behaves in a similar manner. To quote: ‘But even though we’ve moved well beyond Newtonian physics, we haven’t moved beyond the new Newtonian schema. The universe, we almost can’t help but imagine, is some cosmic computer that generates the future from the past via some master “software” (the laws of physics) and some initial input (the big bang).’

Wharton is quick to point out that this is not the same thing as believing that the universe is a computer simulation – they are entirely different issues – Paul Davies and David Deutsch make the same point in their respective books (I reviewed Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality, in September 2012, and Davies I discuss below). In fact, Deutsch argues that the universe is a ‘cosmic computer’ and Davies argues that it isn’t, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Wharton’s point is that this belief is a tacit assumption underlying all of physics: ‘…where our cosmic computer assumption is so deeply ingrained that we don’t even realise we are making it.’

A significant part of Wharton’s article entails an exposition on the “Lagragian”, which has dominated physics in the last century, though it was first formulated by Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1788 and foreseen, in essence, by Pierre de Fermat (in the previous century) when he proposed the ‘least time’ principle for refracted light. A ray of light will always take the path of least time when it goes between mediums – like air and water or air and glass. James Gleick, in his biography of Richard Feynman, GENIUS, gives the example of a lifesaver having to run at an angle along a beach and then swim through surf to reach a swimmer in trouble. The point is that there is a path of ‘least time’ for the lifesaver, amongst an infinite number of paths he could take. The 2 extremes are that he could run perpendicularly into the surf and swim diagonally to the swimmer or he could run diagonally to the surf at the point opposite the swimmer and swim perpendicularly to him or her. Somewhere in between these 2 extremes there is an optimum path that would take least time (Wharton uses the same analogy in his article). In the case of light, travelling obliquely through 2 different mediums at different speeds, the light automatically takes the path of ‘least time’. This was ‘de Fermat’s principle’ even though he couldn’t prove it at the time he formulated it.

Richard Feynman, in particular, used this principle of ‘least action’, as it’s called, to formulate his integral path method of quantum mechanics. In fact, as Brian Cox and Jeff Fershaw point out in The Quantum Universe (reviewed December, 2011) Planck’s constant, h, is expressed in units of ‘least action’, and Feynman famously derived Schrodinger’s equation from a paper that Paul Dirac wrote on ‘The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics’. Feynman also described the significance of the principle, as applied to gravity, in Six-Not-So-Easy Pieces - in effect, it dictates the path of a body in a gravitational field. In a nutshell, the ‘least action’ is the difference between the kinetic and potential energy of the body. Nature contrives that it will always be a minimum, hence the description, ‘principle of least action’.

A bit of a detour, but it seems to be a universal principle that appears in every area of physics. It’s relevance to Wharton’s thesis is that ‘…physicists tend to view it as a mathematical trick rather than an alternative framework for how the universe might really work.’

However, Wharton argues that the mathematics of a ‘Lagrangian-friendly formulation of quantum theory [proposed by him] could be taken literally’. So Wharton is not eschewing mathematics or natural laws in mathematical guise (which is what a Lagrangian really is); he’s contending that the Newtonian schema no longer applies to quantum mechanics because of its inherent uncertainty and the need for a ‘…”collapse”, when all the built-up uncertainty suddenly emerges into reality.’

David Deutsch, for those who are familiar with his ideas, overcomes this obstacle by contending that we live in a quantum multiverse, so there is no ‘collapse’, just a number of realities, all consequences of the multiverse behaving like a cosmic quantum computer. I’ve discussed this and my particular contentions with it in another post.

Paul Davies discusses these same issues in the context of the universe’s evolution and all the diverse philosophical views that such a discussion encompasses. Davies devotes many pages of print to this topic and to present it in a few paragraphs is a travesty, but that’s what I’m going to do. In particular, Davies equates mathematical Platonism with Wharton’s Newtonian schema, though he doesn’t specifically reference Newton. He provides a compelling argument that a finite universe can’t possibly do calculus-type calculations requiring infinite elements of information. And that’s the real schema (or paradigm) that modern physics seems to embrace: that everything in the universe from quantum phenomena to thermodynamics to DNA can be understood in terms of information; in ‘bits’, which makes the computer analogy not only relevant but impossible to ignore. Personally, I think the computer analogy is apposite only because we live in the ‘computer age’. It’s not only the universe that is seen as a computer, but also the human brain (and other species, no doubt). The question I always ask is: where is the software? But that’s another topic.

DNA, to all intents and purposes, is a form of natural software where the code is expressed in amino acids and the hardware are proteins that are constructed and manipulated on a daily basis. DNA is a set of instructions to build a functioning biological organism – it’s as teleological as nature gets. A large part of Davies’ discussion entails teleology and its effective expulsion from science after Darwin, but the construction of every living organism on the planet is teleological even though its evolution is not. Another detour, though not an irrelevant one.

Davies argues that he’s not a Platonist, whilst acknowledging that most physicists conduct science in the Platonist tradition, even if they don’t admit it. Specifically, Davies challenges the Platonist precept that the laws of nature exist independently of the universe. Instead, he supports John Wheeler’s philosophy that ‘the laws of the universe emerged… “higgledy-piggledy”… and gradually congealed over time.’ I disagree with Davies, fundamentally on this point, not because the laws of the universe couldn’t have evolved over time, but because there is simply more mathematics than the universe needs to exist.

Davies also discusses at length the anthropic principle, both the weak and strong versions, and calls Deutsch’s version the ‘final anthropic principle’. Davies acknowledges that the strong version is contrary to the scientific precept that the universe is not teleological, yet, like me, points out the nihilistic conclusion (my term, not his) of a universe without consciousness. Davies overcomes this by embracing Wheeler’s philosophical idea that we are part of a cosmological quantum loop – an intriguing but not physically impossible concept. In fact, Davies’ book is as much a homage to Wheeler as it is an expression of his own philosophy.

My own view is much closer to RogerPenrose’s that there are 3 worlds: the mental, the Platonic and the physical; and that they can be understood in a paradoxical cyclic loop. By Platonic, he means mathematical, which exists independently of humanity and the universe, yet we only comprehend as a product of the human mind, which is a product of the physical universe, which arose from a set of mathematical laws – hence the loop. In my view this doesn’t make the universe a computer. I agree with Wharton on this point, but I see quantum mechanics as a substrate of the physical universe that existed before the universe as we know it evolved. This is consistent with the Hartle-Hawking cosmological view that the universe had no beginning in time as well as being consistent with Davies’ exposition that the ‘…vanishing of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description.’

I’ve discussed this cosmological viewpoint before, but if the quantum substrate exists outside of time, then Wheeler’s and Davies’ version of the anthropic principle suddenly becomes more tenable.

Addendum: I wrote another post on this in 2018, which I feel is a stronger argument, and, in particular, includes the role of chaos.

Analogy; the unique cognitive mechanism for learning

Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander have recently co-authored a book, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking (no, I haven’t read it). Hofstadter famously won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Godel Escher Bach, which I reviewed in February 2009, and is professor of cognitive and computer science at Indiana University, Bloomington, while Sander is professor of psychology at the University of Paris.

They’ve summarised their philosophy and insights in a 4 page article in last week’s New Scientist (4 May 2013, pp. 30-33) titled The forgotten fuel of our minds. Basically, they claim that analogy is the fundamental engine behind our supra-natural cognitive abilities (relative to other species) and their argument resonates with views I’ve expressed numerous times myself. But they go further and claim that we use analogies all the time, without thinking, in our everyday social interactions and activities.

Personally, I think there are 2 aspects to this, so I will discuss them separately before bringing them together. To take the last point first, in psychology one learns about ‘schemas’ and ‘scripts’, and I think they’re very relevant to this topic. To quote from Vaughan and Hogg (professor of psychology, University of Auckland and professor of psychology, University of Queensland, respectively) in their Introduction to Social Psychology, a schema is a ‘Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes’ (Fiske and Taylor, 1991) and a script is ‘A schema about an event.’

Effectively, a schema is what we bring to every new interaction that we experience and, not surprisingly, it is based on what we’ve experienced before. We even have a schema for the self, which we continually evaluate and revise dependent on feedback from others and our sense of purpose, not to mention consequential achievements and failures. A ‘script’ is the schema we have for interactions with others and examples include how we behave in a restaurant or in a work place or in the home. The relevance to Hofstadter’s and Sander’s article is that they explain these same psychological phenomena as analogies, and they also make the point that they are dependent on past experiences.

I’ve made the point in other posts, that we only learn new knowledge when we can integrate it into existing knowledge. A good example is when we look up a word in a dictionary – it will only make sense to us if it’s explained using words we already know. Mathematics is another good example because it’s clearly a cumulative epistemological endeavour. One can’t learn anything about calculus if one doesn’t know algebra. This is why the gap between what one is expected to know and what one can acquire gets more impossible in esoteric subjects if one fails to grasp basic concepts. This fundamental cognitive ability, that we use everyday, is something that other species don’t seem to possess. To give a more prosaic example, we all enjoy stories, be it in books or on stage or in movies or TV. A story requires us to continually integrate new knowledge into existing knowledge and yet we do it with little conscious effort. We can even drop it and pick it up later with surprising efficacy.

And this is why analogy is the method of choice when it comes to explaining something new. We all do it and we all expect it. When someone is explaining something - not unlike what I’m doing now - we want examples and analogies, and, when it comes to esoteric topics (like calculus) I do my best to deliver. In other words, analogy allows us to explain (and understand) something new based on something we already know. And this is the relationship with schemas and scripts, because we axiomatically use existing schemas and scripts when we are confronted with a new experience, modifying them to suit as we proceed and learn.

But there is another aspect to analogy, which is not discussed explicitly by Hofstadter and Sander in their article, and that is metaphor (though they use metaphors as examples while still calling them analogies). Metaphor is undoubtedly a uniquely human cognitive trait. And metaphor is analogy in compact form. It’s also one of the things that separates us from AI, thus far. In my own speculative fiction, I’ve played with this idea by creating an exceptional AI, then tripping ‘him’ up (yes, I gave him a gender) using metaphor as cliche.

To be fair to Hofstadter and Sander, there is much more to their discourse than I’ve alluded to above.

Ashamed to be Australian

This is an eye-opening documentary that the Australian government is doing it’s best to keep out-of-sight, out-of-mind. It’s criminal in anyone’s language: the detention of refugees off-shore with little or no recourse to legal representation.

The story reveals hidden-camera footage as well as interviews with people who spent time there and were distressed at what they observed. As one young Salvation Army volunteer observes, the government has spent millions of dollars to punish and hide these people from public view – the detainees know this themselves.

The proclaimed objective, according to the government, is that the detention is a deterrent to other people seeking asylum, yet, as the programme reveals, there is no evidence to support this. The more likely objective is purely political, as the major parties are in a psychological-power struggle to prove who is the most ruthless and hard-minded (i.e. immoral) in dealing with asylum seekers. It’s all about winning the xenophobic vote in the next election.

These detention centres are mental illness factories, as 2010 Australian of the year,  Professor Patrick Mcgorry, so aptly described them. That was under a Liberal government but the Labor government has proven that its policies are just as criminal and arguably less humane.

Addendum: Getup have a petition to close Manus Island detention centre. Thanks to Kay Hart for sending it to me.

In memory of Chrissy Amphlett: 1959 - 2013

And Chrissey's wicked sense of humour, on the same show (host is the incomparable Julia Zemiro). This may offend some people but I find it hilarious, and yes, it was broadcast on free-to-air TV on a Saturday night.

Scientology – a 20th century science fiction religion

I’ve just read 2 books: Beyond Belief; My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, by the current leader’s niece, Jenna Miscavige Hill (co-written with Lisa Pulitzer); and Going Clear; Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Lawrence Wright. I bought both these books after reading reviews in Rupert Murdoch’s paper, The Weekend Australian Review (Rupert’s Australian publications are a lot more left-leaning than his American counterparts I suspect). Previously, I had just finished reading a Scottish crime thriller, but both of these books were a lot harder to put down.

I should disclose that I had my own brush with Scientology a few years before Jenna Miscavige Hill was born, when I was around 30 (sometime between 1978 and 1983) when I was solicited in a Sydney street, along with a friend, and invited to take part in a ‘session’, but I’ll talk about that later.

There are many different ways one can define religion – to me it’s part of a personal internal journey: very introspective, self-examining and impossible to share. But the public face of religion(s) is often something different: judgemental, proselytising and mentally claustrophobic. I suspect that many followers of Scientology see themselves in the first category, but the institution itself falls squarely into the second.

Religion, in the context of historical Western civilization, has been predominantly about mind control, and it was largely successful up until the Enlightenment, when novels, new scientific discoveries (in all fields) and Western philosophy all made inroads into the educated Western psyche. In the 20^th Century, mind control appeared to be the principal political tool of totalitarian regimes like the former USSR and China. It’s not something one would expect to find in an American institution, especially one tied to the celebration of celebrity, but that’s exactly what Scientology is if one believes the accounts revealed in these 2 books.

I defy any normal sane person to read Micavige Hill’s book without getting angry. I imagine a lot of high-level people with the Scientology Church would also get angry, but for different reasons. Of all the events that she recounts from when she signed her ‘billion year contract’ at the age of 7 (she tried to run away a year later) to when she finally left under enormous duress as a married adult (after threatening to jump off a 5 storey ledge), what made me most angry was something that was at once petty and unbelievably controlling and intrusive. As a teen she received letters sent by her estranged mother, but she could read them only after they were already opened and she was never allowed to keep them. At the age of 10 she had to fill out a form so she could visit her parents for her 10^th birthday. Yet this is nothing compared to the alleged abuses by the organisation that Lawrence Wright documents in his carefully researched and fully referenced book.

Stalin was infamous for creating a culture where people reported on their neighbours thus creating fear and mistrust in everyday interactions. China had a similar policy under Mao and during the cultural revolution families were split up and sent to opposite sides of the country. According to Miscavige Hill, both these policies were adopted by Scientology, as it happened to her own family. According to her, all her friends were estranged from her, especially in her teens, and the Church even attempted to separate her from her recently wedded husband (also a ‘Sea Org’ member in the organisation) which culminated in her threatening suicide and eventually leaving, totally disillusioned with her lifetime religion but with her marriage intact.

The Catholic Church has the confessional and Scientology has ‘auditing’ and ‘sec-check’, both using their famous ‘E-Meter’. In the comprehensive glossary at the back of her book, Miscavige Hill defines ‘Sec Check’ as “A confessional given while on the E-Meter. Sec-checks can take anywhere from three weeks to a year or longer.” But unlike the Catholic Church confessions, the Scientology equivalent are not confidential, according to those who claim to have been blackmailed by them, but are according to the Church. According to Scientology’s doctrine the e-meter never lies so people being audited, including Miscavige Hill, quickly learn to confess what the auditor wants to hear so they can get it over with. Later, if they try and leave the Church, as she did, these confessions can be held over them to stop them publicly denouncing the Church. Some of these confessions are of a highly personal nature, like the intimate details of sexual relations.

Naturally, the Church denies any of these allegations, along with the practice of ‘disconnection’ (denying access to family members) and child labour, which Miscavige Hill experienced first hand from the age of 7. Allegations of basic human rights abuse are predominant in both books, yet all legal proceedings against the Church seem to eventually be settled out of court (according to Wright’s account).

Miscavige Hill also provides insight into the conditioning of both receiving and giving instructions without question. In principle, this is one of the biggest philosophical issues I have with a number of religious educations, including my own, whereby one doesn’t question or one is discouraged from thinking for oneself. Part of an education I believe, should be the opposite: to be exposed to a variety of cultural ideas and to be encouraged to argue and discuss beliefs. Teenagers are at an age where they tend to do this anyway, as I did. Reading Albert Camus at the age of 16 was life-changing at an intellectual level, and deepened my doubts about the religion I had grown up with.

Wright’s book is a good complementary read to Jenna’s autobiography, as he provides a history lesson of the whole Church, albeit not one the Church would endorse. The book contains a number of footnotes that declare the Church’s outright disagreement on a number of issues as well as numerous disclaimers from Tom Cruise’s attorney, Bertram Fields. Wright is an acclaimed author, with a number of awards to his name, and is staff writer for The New Yorker. His book arose from a feature story he wrote on Paul Haggis (a disillusioned Scientologist) for that magazine. The book starts and ends with Haggis, but, in between, attempts to cover every aspect of the religion, including a biography of its founder, testimony from many of its disaffected members, and its connection to Hollywood celebrity.

Paul Haggis is a successful screenwriter and his credits include some of the best films I’ve seen: Million Dollar Baby, The Valley of Elah (which he also directed) and Casino Royale. His career-changing movie was Crash, which I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen. I remember when it came out, it was on my must-see list, but it never happened. He also wrote Flags of Our Fathers, which Eastwood directed following Million Dollar Baby. In The Valley of Elah is a little known movie starring Charlize Theron (I believe it’s one of her best roles) and Tommy Lee Jones; part crime thriller, part commentary on the Iraq war. I saw it around midnight in a Melbourne arthouse cinema, such was its low profile. He also made The Next 3 Days with Russell Crowe, which I haven’t seen. We never know screenwriters - they are at the bottom of the pecking order in Hollywood - unless they are writer-directors (like Woody Allen or Oliver Stone) so no one would say I’d go and see a Paul Haggis film, but I would.

Haggis campaigned against Proposition 8 in California (a bill to ban same-sex marriage) which I’ve written about myself on this blog. His disillusionment with Scientology was complete when he failed to get the Church to support him.

Scientology promotes itself as a science, and, in particular, is strongly opposed to psychiatry. But at best, it’s a pseudo-science; a combination of Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist philosophy. The e-meter auditing, which supposedly gives it its scientific credibility has never been accepted by mainstream science or psychology. L Ron Hubbard, before he started Dianetics, which became Scientology, was a highly prolific pulp sci-fi writer and best friend of Robert Heinlein (a famous sci-fi author with right-wing politics). But while Hubbard lived and wrote during the so-called ‘golden era’ of science fiction, his name is never mentioned in the same company as those who are lauded today, like Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke or Ursula Le Guin (still alive, so possibly later) and I’ve never seen or heard his name referenced at any Sci-Fi convention I’ve attended.

When it comes to psychological manipulation, Scientology excels. In particular, the so-called ‘Bridge to Total Freedom’, aka ‘the Bridge’, which is effectively a sequence of stages of spiritual enlightenment one achieves as a result of courses and ‘sessions’ one completes. At the end of this process, usually taking many years and costing thousands of dollars, one is given access to ‘OT III’ material, the end of the journey and one’s ultimate spiritual reward. According to Miscavige Hill, people ‘on the Bridge’ are told that given early access to OT III would cause serious injury, either mental or physical, such is its power. Now, common sense says that information alone is unlikely to have such a consequence, nevertheless this was both the carrot, and indirectly, the stick, for staying with the course. As revealed, in both of these books, OT III is in fact a fantastical science fiction story that beggars credulity on any scale. It’s effectively an origins story that could find a place in Ridley Scott’s movie, Prometheus, which is better rendered, one has to say, in its proper context of fiction.

In my introduction, I mentioned my own very brief experience with Scientology in Sydney (either late 1970s or early 1980s) when I was interviewed and offered an ‘e-meter’ session. Something about the whole setup made me more than suspicious, even angry, and I rebelled. What I saw were basically insecure people ‘auditing’ other insecure people and it made me angry. I had grown up in a church (though my parents were not the least religious) where once we were called to stand up and declare ourselves to Jesus in writing. I remember refusing as a teenager, mainly because I knew my father opposed it, but also the sense of being pressured against my will. This feeling returned when I was in the Scientology centre in Sydney, or whatever it was called. Interestingly, they took me upstairs where I met some people about my own age who were very laid back and surrounded by a library of philosophical books. I said I would prefer to explore their ideas at my own leisure and so I bought a copy of Dianetics and had nothing more to do with them. I never read Dianetics, though I’ve read the complete works of Jung and books by Daisetz Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, so I was very open to religious and philosophical ideas at that age. Likewise, I’ve never read any of Hubbard’s fiction, though I once tried and gave up.

3 Cheers for New Zealand

I don't have much to say about this, just watch the video. When the Parliament starts singing at the end it really made my eyes well up - that would never happen in this country.

Congratulations New Zealand, may many other countries follow your lead.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas is a very recent release, which I saw last weekend; a collaborative effort by the Wachowski siblings (Lana and Andy) and Tom Tykwer. The Wachowski siblings famously gave us the Matrix trilogy (shot in Australia) and Twyker gave us Run Zola Run (made in Germany) a brilliant film that played with different media (like anime) and time (not unlike Ground Hog Day, only different). Cloud Atlas was shot in Scotland, Germany and Majorca, and, considering all its different scenarios shot with conscientious realism, it must have been very expensive.

It has to be said straight away that this film, with its 6 overlapping stories, all in different periods, and only tenuous connections, won’t appeal to everyone, yet I liked it a lot. A bloke sitting a couple of seats away from me kept looking at his iphone; a sure indication of boredom. I suspect the only thing that kept him in his seat (other than the outlay for his ticket) were the action scenes and any storyline was irrelevant to his need for entertainment. Without actually talking to him, this may be a harsh judgement, but I suspect he simply gave up trying to keep track of the 6 interlocking stories; so, for many, this may be a flawed film. Even David Stratton (arguably, Australia’s most respected film reviewer) who gave it 3.5 stars (his co-host, Margaret Pomeranz, gave it 4) said he’d like to see it again.

I think what saved the film, for me, was that all 6 stories were good stories in their own right and they all followed the classic narrative arc of setup, conflict and resolution. I thought the editing between stories (especially at the beginning) was too frequent, but that’s a personal prejudice. Once I got past the setup for each story (some took longer than others) I had no trouble following them. I made no attempt to follow any links between them (more on that below) and they all had the same theme, which was human rights and oppression, and how it hasn’t changed historically, except in its focus, and how it will continue into the future of our evolutionary development.

One story was set in the 19^th Century, 2 in the 20^th Century, 1 in the present, and 2 in the future. At almost 3 hours duration each story really only took up half an hour, therefore it didn’t drag, at least for me. As a writer I like to have 2 or 3 subplots happening at once – that’s how I write – so multiple storylines are not a problem in themselves. The popular series, Game of Thrones, has multiple storylines of 4 or more, yet I’ve never heard anyone say it was too difficult to follow.

Only one character, as far as I could tell, traversed 2 of the stories (in the 20^th Century) and there was a very clever link between the 2 future stories, which was only revealed towards the end, and I won’t give it away, except to say (spoiler alert) that it reveals how a mortal from the past can be seen as Godlike in the future. In other words, they gain an iconic status as a result of their personal sacrifice. I thought this was the singularly most germane insight of the entire movie.

To call it ambitious is an understatement. Even within individual stories, they play with time, using every storytelling device that film allows, with flashbacks, flash-forwards and voiceovers. At least once, I observed that the voiceover from one story continued into another story; to emphasise a common theme rather than any continuity in content. The trailer emphasises the common thread in a mystical sense, yet, for me, that is not what the movie is about. I thought the 2 future stories were the most powerful, especially the near-future one. My advice to anyone viewing this is just go with the flow; don’t try to analyse it while you’re watching it but just treat each story on its merit.

Correlation of gun deaths to gun numbers world wide

Just over a week ago I got into a discussion with someone on Facebook (no names, no pack drill) about gun control in the USA, or lack of it. My interlocutor was an obviously intelligent bloke and claimed his argument was objective and emotion-free, based on mathematics. To this end he produced a graph demonstrating that there was no correlation between gun murders (homicides) and gun ownership across the 50 states of America. After the debate I found another graph that disputes his findings, but that’s not what my argument is about.

In truth, I think he was just as emotive about this issue as me, perhaps more so, but believed he could take refuge in the safe haven of statistical analysis. In fact, he made the extraordinary statement (from my perspective) that violence in the US is ‘cultural ….but there's no evidence it has anything to do with guns’. In other words, he acknowledges that America is a violent country but it has ‘nothing to do with guns’, because there is no correlation between gun ownership and homicides between states. The point I want to make is that one can make an illogical non-syllogism if one can back it up with statistics. He effectively argued that yes, there are a lot of gun-related deaths in America (over 10 per 100k of people; arguably the highest in the developed world) and America has a lot of guns (9 for every 10 people; the absolute highest apparently) but there is no connection between the 2 stats.

So I pulled out an old psychology text book on statistics and did some analysis of my own. There is a well-worn formula called the Pearson Correlation that exploits standard deviation of both sets of data and delivers a figure between -1 and +1 that is easy to interpret. 1 is obviously a perfect correlation and 0 is no correlation, with -1 an inverse correlation.

Using data on Wikipedia I did a correlation for all 74 countries that Wiki lists for total firearm-related death rate (the list of gun numbers is considerably longer). The Pearson Correlation was -0.07, which is marginally negative and seems to support my Facebook antagonist. But a handful of countries have huge death rates in the 30s and 40s per 100k, which wipes out any correlation that the majority may reveal.

So if one removes all African countries, all Central and South American countries, Caribbean countries and all Middle Eastern countries (except Israel) we are left with all of Europe (both West and East, where we have figures) and most of Asia (except Philippines; refer below) and North America; 46 countries out of the 74. Now we get a Pearson’s Correlation of 0.83 which is quite high. However, if one adds just one anomalous country like the Philippines, which has a gun death rate of 9.5 (almost the same as US) but with gun ownership less than 5 per 100 people (20% of US gun ownership) the correlation drops to 0.6, a considerable difference made by one country out of 47. On the other hand, if one drops the US from the list, the correlation also drops to 0.67, so it’s a significant weighty statistic in its own right.

If one just takes England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and United States (countries most culturally similar to the US) one gets a Pearson’s Correlation of 0.95 (almost exact). But taking US out of this smaller list of 6 English-speaking countries the correlation only drops to 0.86, which suggests that the US is not an anomaly in the same way that the Philippines is.

So much for statistics. Mass shootings that grab global media headlines, apparently make up only 1% of gun-related deaths in the US (according to my Facebook opponent) therefore from a statistical point of view they shouldn’t influence the debate at all, but that’s just nonsense. The point is that they should be 0% as they tend to be in other developed countries. The obvious question to ask is what is the difference between the US and the other handful of similar countries (like England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) that provide the strongest correlation? I would suggest it’s gun control. If the US has the largest number of guns per people of anywhere in the world and the highest gun-death rate in the Western world, then it’s screaming out for gun control.

I argued on Facebook that gun-deaths in America drive up gun ownership, indicated by the fact that there is a spike in gun purchases following mass shootings. America appears to have the most liberal gun laws in the developed world – a legacy of the NRA, one of the strongest political lobbies in America. It’s unlikely that Obama will be able to do any more than previous administrations, despite his history-challenging rhetoric. Every tragic shooting reopens this debate, but nothing changes, and every incident only reinforces the belief held by many Americans that they need to be armed.

Islamophobia

Tonight, as I write this, Dutch politician and outspoken critic of Muslim immigration into all Western societies, Geert Wilders, is speaking somewhere in Melbourne (where I live) on this very subject.

He’s in Australia on invitation from a fringe organization, Q Society, who are openly anti-Muslim. Not surprisingly, they had trouble finding venues, and their meetings will be picketed by protesters, including the one held tonight as already witnessed on the news.

I’ve seen all this before, more than once, where some foreign group is going to overwhelm our cultural heritage and supplant our identity or the identity of our children. This is pretty much the rhetoric of Wilders, specifically aimed at Muslims, yet I heard the same rhetoric aimed at ‘Wogs’ (Italians and Greeks) when I was growing up, then Asians, especially refugees from Vietnam, and now it’s Muslims, as they are the predominant refugee group seeking asylum in Australia.

Xenophobia has always been alive and well in this country, as it is all over the world, yet we pride ourselves on our multiculturalism. Wilders, and the people who support him, equates multiculturalism with cultural relativism, therefore it is untenable. This is a gross simplification and misrepresentation, and is certainly not what most people see or experience who live in Australia.

Wilders has come here to warn us that we live in a delusion and that we will become an Islamic totalitarian state simply by maintaining a tolerant and open attitude towards Muslims. Wilders believes strongly that all Muslims are trapped already in this state and we will be forced to follow. Obviously, Wilders hasn’t met the Muslims that I know and he’s never had a conversation with Waleed Aly.

Wilders’ bonhomie claim to a ‘friend’ and kindred spirit in Australian politics is Cory Bernadi, who was recently forced to resign his front-bench post in Federal politics as a result of him comparing gay marriage to bestiality. Personally, I’m not surprised that Islamophobia and homophobia should produce common bedfellows. They are both based on paranoia, intolerance and a desire to freeze our society in aspic.

My observation from witnessing 3 generations of immigrants is that it’s the children who determine the result. They experience a range of cultures that sometimes creates conflict with their parents, but they’re the ones who seize the opportunity of education, social interaction and workforce experience. At the end of the day, they have to reconcile their cultural heritage with the society they call home, and, generally, they seem to manage quite well.

I find it interesting that Wilders repeatedly points out our Judea-Christian heritage being at odds with Islam, yet we are a secular society, and its strength is not to politicise religion; something other societies struggle with.

Prisoner X

The original story of this, aired last Tuesday, 12 Feb. 2013, is very disturbing to say the least. His imprisonment was so sensitive and security-averse for Israel that a gag order was put on all media in the strongest terms. The impression one gets is that the Israelis wanted him to disappear completely, and then, almost conveniently, one might say, he suicided in circumstances where suicide should be impossible. This all occurred in 2010.

A later story in the same week (Thursday) gives a slightly different story where DFAT  (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade for Australia) apparently did know of his imprisonment and his family had been informed, and he had access to legal counsel.

On the same night (Thursday) we have an interview with a Melbourne-based foreign correspondent, who apparently spoke to Ben Zygier (believed to be prisoner X) prior to his imprisonment.

This entire story is an embarrassment to Israel, and must surely strain relations between Australia and Israel, not least because it is now apparent that Israel is recruiting Australians on Australian passports to visit countries, that Israeli citizens can’t enter, for espionage purposes.

Addendum 1: If nothing else, this story reveals the necessary self-regulating role that journalism plays in a democracy. Apparently, Israel still maintained a gag order on their own media even after this was aired on Australian TV, but now they can't ignore it.

Addendum 2 (11 May 2013): There is an update to this story, which is both instructive and tragic.

Writing well; an art easily misconstrued

A friend of mine lent me a book, How to Write a Sentence; and how to read one by Stanley Fish, which is a New York Times bestseller according to its cover. It’s not a lengthy book and it’s easy to read, but I’m unsure of its intended audience because I don’t believe it’s me. And I’m a writer, albeit not a very successful one.

Fisher is a 'professor of law at Florida International University' with an impressive curriculum vitae in teaching at tertiary level. His deconstruction of the humble sentence reminds me of why I’m not a teacher; though, at the risk of sounding self-indulgent, I think I make a good teacher, with the caveat that the quality of my teaching seems to be more dependent on the quality of my students than myself.

I recently watched a biopic on virtuoso Dutch violinist, Janine Jensen, which I considered so good I’ve seen it twice. At one point she’s asked why she doesn’t give master classes. Given her schedule (200 concert performances in 1 year) she might have said lack of time, but one of her close friends said she won’t teach because it would require her to analyse her own method; deconstruct her technique. A lot of artists would empathise with her, including me, yet I have taught writing. The point is that I never analyse how I write sentences and, to be frank, Fish’s book doesn’t inspire me to.

The human brain has the remarkable ability to delegate tasks, that we perform routinely, to the subconscious level, so we can use our higher cognitive facilities for higher cognitive tasks. We do this with motor tasks as well, which is why we can walk and talk at the same time. Other animals can also do this, but they don’t do it at the cognitive level like we do. Young animals play in order to hone the motor skills they need in adulthood to survive, whether they be predators or prey. Humans do it with language amongst other things. And creating sentences is one of those things that the brain delegates so that when we are having a conversation they seem to come ready-made, pre-constructed for delivery as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Elite performers like professional sportspeople and musicians (like Jensen mentioned above) are so good at what they do that their brain delegates tasks that we can’t even do, which is why they dazzle us with their brilliance. When it comes to writing fiction, the same level of delegation applies. The first hurdle in writing fiction is to create characters, and, in fact, when I taught creative writing the first lesson I gave was to give an exercise in creating character. This is something that most people can’t do, even though they can write coherently, yet writers create characters in their sleep, sometimes literally. In other words, creating characters becomes second-nature, something they do without really thinking about it too much. Characters come into their head, complete with dialogue, temperaments and attitudes, in the same way that melodies come into the heads of tunesmiths.

Fish gives us two new terms, “hypotaxis” and “parataxis”, both Greek words; technical terms for the 2 main sentence ‘styles’ that he discusses at length: ‘the subordinate style’ and ‘the additive style’ respectively. To be fair to Fish, he acknowledges, after referencing them once, that we will probably never use them again. By ‘style’ Fish means structure, and the subordinate style is effectively a main clause with subordinate clauses added on. The best example he takes from Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), where King delivers a train of clauses describing the oppression of his people at that time, ending with a succinct final clause that sums it all up: “…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” The entire sentence is some 300 words long, yet it’s a rhetorical tour-de-force.

The additive style is where clauses are strung together almost dissociatively and the examples he gives seem to ramble a bit, which I suspect was a deliberate device by their authors to create the impression of a disjointed mind. Then he gets to Hemingway, whom I think was a master. I believe Hemingway was such a significant influence on 20^th Century writing that it’s worth quoting Fish at length:

Hence his famous pieces of advice to writers: use short sentences, write clearly, use simple Anglo-Saxon words, don’t overwrite, avoid adjectives and leave yourself out of it. The result was a style that has been described as realistic, hardboiled, spare, unadorned, minimalist, and lapidary. The last two words are particularly apt: a lapidary style is polished and cut to the point of transparency. It doesn’t seem to be doing much. It does not demand that attention be paid to it. It aspires to a self-effacement that allows the object to shine through as a master stonecutter allows the beauty of the stone to shine through by paring away layers of it.

I read somewhere last year, a reviewer saying that Hemingway changed the way we write, and I agree. I had just read Islands in the Stream, a loosely connected trilogy, published after his death, concerning the exploits of an artist living in Cuba and performing undercover operations in the War. What struck me was how he put you there, and you felt like you had experienced what the protagonist had experienced, some of which was emotionally gut-wrenching. As I said, Hemingway was a master.

So there are places in Fish’s tome where our minds meet and concur. In other places he suggests exercises in creating better sentences, which I neither promote nor condemn. If a writer is an artist then they ‘feel’ their sentences without analysing them or dissecting them. A writer of fiction should write as if they are the first person to read their words, as if they were actually written by someone else. I know that doesn’t make sense but anyone who has done it knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Reading Fish’s deconstruction of style (as opposed to content) prompted me to re-read the opening page of my novel, which stands pretty much as when I first wrote it, and they were also the first words of that story I put down. What I notice is that it has an edginess and urgency that reflects the content itself. In fiction you have to create a mood; there is always an emotional message; but you have to create it in a way that the reader is unaware of it, except subliminally. I used to tell my class that good writing is transparent: readers don’t notice good writing; they only notice bad writing. The reader should be so engaged by the character and the story that the writing becomes subliminal. The medium of the novel is the reader’s imagination, not the words on the page. The words are like notes on a music score, which, without an instrument to play them, are lifeless. In the case of a novel, the instrument is the reader’s imagination.

Before Hemingway, writers used long-winded descriptions, though I think film has had a lot to do with their progressive extinction. But Hemingway, I believe, showed us how to create a scene without belabouring it and without ‘adornment’, as Fish describes above.

I’ve said on this blog before, that description is the part of a novel that readers will skip over to get on with the story. So, not surprisingly, I provide as little description as possible, and always via the protagonist or another character, but just enough so the reader can create their own images subconsciously, which they do so well that I’ve had people congratulate me on how good my descriptions are. “I could see everything,” they say. Yes, because you created it yourself.

Melbourne wildlife warrior is a young, entrepreneurial woman

Jessica McKelson is the sort of person whom I admire. She saw a problem that seemed overwhelming and then did something about it. She’s Director of Raw Wildlife Encounters: an eco-tourism enterprise designed to help locals in Indonesia save orang-utans from extinction and raise consciousness in both cultures - Australia and Indonesia – to the plight of wildlife in the wake of human consumerism. In this case, it’s palm oil that is the principal reason for habitat destruction.

I won’t say much more as this story in The Age says it all. McKelson is also ‘head primate keeper at Melbourne Zoo’, and she typifies the changing role that zoos now play in a global society.  To quote her:

''Zoos have a purpose and they are changing for the better. Half of the primate team at Melbourne are involved in international programs. The industry is moving from being zookeepers to conservation ambassadors.''

Read the story and check out the photos.

The Uncanny Valley

This is a well known psychological phenomenon amongst people who take an interest in AI, and the possibility of androids in particular. Its discovery and consequential history is discussed in the latest issue of New Scientist (12 January 2013, pp. 35-7) by Joe Kloc, a New York correspondent.

The term was originally coined by Japanese Roboticist, Masahiro Mori, in 1970, in an essay titled, “Bukimi No Tani” – 'The Valley of Eeriness' (direct translation). But it wasn’t until 2005 that it entered the Western lexicon, when it was translated by Karl MacDorman, then working at Osaka University, after he received a late night fax of the essay. It was MacDorman, apparently, who gave it the apposite English rhyming title, “the uncanny valley”.

If an animate object or visualised character is anthropomorphised, like Mickey Mouse for example, we suspend disbelief enough to go along with it, even though we are not fooled into thinking the character is really human. But when people started to experiment with creating lifelike androids (in Japan and elsewhere) there was an unexpected averse reaction from ordinary people. It’s called a ‘valley’ in both translations, because if you graph people’s empathy as the likeness increases (albeit empathy is a subjective metric) then the graph rises as expected, but plummets dramatically at the point where the likeness becomes uncomfortably close to humans. Then it rises again to normal for a real human.

The New Scientist article is really about trying to find an explanation and it does so historically. MacDorman first conjectured that the eeriness or unease arose from the perception that the androids looked like a dead person come to life. But he now rejects that, along with the idea that ‘strange’ looking humans may harbour disease, thus provoking an unconscious evolutionary-derived response. Work by neuroscientists using fMRI machines, specifically Thierry Chaminade of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Instituted in Kyoto and Ayse Saygin at the University of California, San Diego, suggest another cause: empathy itself.

There are 3 different categories of empathy, according to neuroscientists: cognitive, motor and emotional. The theory is that androids create a dissonance between two or more of these categories, and the evidence suggests that it’s emotional empathy that breaks the spell. This actually makes sense to me because we don’t have this problem with any of the many animals humans interact with. With animals we feel an emotional empathy more strongly than the other two. Robotic androids reverse this perception.

The author also suggests, in the early exposition of the article, that cartoon characters that too closely resemble humans also suffer from this problem and gave the box office failure of Polar Express as an example. But I suspect the failure of a movie has more to do with its script than its visuals, though I never saw Polar Express (it didn’t appeal to me). All the PIXAR movies have been hugely successful, but it’s because of their scripts as much as their animation, and the visual realism of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (and now The Hobbit) hasn’t caused any problems, apparently. That’s because movie characters; animated, motion-capture or human; evoke emotional empathy in the audience.

In my own fiction I have also created robotic characters. Some of them are deliberately machine-like and unempathetic in the extreme. In fact, I liked the idea of having a robotic character that you couldn’t negotiate with – it was a deliberate plot device on my part. But I created another character who had no human form at all – in fact, ‘he’ was really a piece of software – this was also deliberate. I found readers empathised with this disembodied character because ‘he’ developed a relationship with the protagonist, which was an interesting literary development in itself.

Addendum: Images for the uncanny valley.

A master storyteller talks about his craft

This is a brief interview with Ang Lee, where he talks about his latest movie as well as his career and his philosophy. I've been a fan of Lee ever since I saw The Wedding Banquet and have seen most of his movies, including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain, all of which illustrate his eclectic interests, extraordinary range and mastery of genres.

I haven't seen The Life of Pi, but I read the book by Yann Martel many years ago, after it won the Booker Prize, and was singularly impressed. Given its philosophical nature, one should not be surprised that Lee was attracted to this story, despite its obvious challenges, both technically and thematically.

This interview reveals, more than most, the relationship between the artist and his art. How his art informs him in the same way it informs his audience. All artists strive for an authenticity that effectively negates the pretentiousness and ego that is so easily obtained, especially with success. Ang Lee demonstrates this better than most.

Addendum: A very good review here.