Editorial intervention

  Brother Jero can't handle this, so I'll have to have a go.

  The previous post has a link to a Royal Society paper, an elegant and I’m sure mathematically rigorous demonstration that the evolution of human culture in the area of colour is affected by cognitive bias: that is, “human colour perception is an effective encoding of the physical structure of our environment [21,22], and […] the systems of colour terms observed across human societies are good solutions to the problem of partitioning the space of colours given the properties of this perceptual system.”

  This paper is well worth reading — and as so often chapeau on a huge scale to the Royal Society for making this kind of thing available to all. However I think it might also be a Trojan Horse that carts a big unexamined assumption through the main gates of the analysis of the variation, reiteration, selection model of cultural evolution.

  When writing fiction we are advised, if we want to get some unlikely given such as time travel into the story, to announce it as a fact right at the beginning, so that it’s out of the way.

  The authors follow this advice:

  “Cultural evolution involves two kinds of forces: those that affect who we choose to interact with, and those that affect what is transmitted through the interaction. These two kinds of forces have effects that are formally analogous to the effects of selection and mutation in biological evolution, and both contribute to the outcome of cultural evolution.”

  Now it is very likely that these two kinds of forces have effects that are formally analogous to the effects of selection and mutation in biological evolution, and both contribute to the outcome of cultural evolution.  That is a very different thing from saying that it is only the effects of who we choose to interact with that are analogous to selection, and that it is all the effects of what is transmitted through the interaction which are analogous to the effects of mutation.

  I choose to interact with the authors of the paper.  I then select parts of “what is transmitted”, in order to reiterate them (reiteration being analogous to biological reproduction).  Thus selection is an effect of who I choose to listen to (but I can’t really call that selection in any Darwinian sense) and, more accurately, of “what is transmitted”.  Various factors, my ability to understand, my memory, will affect this selection. The fact that I select for retransmission in this blog bits of “what is transmitted” in order to question and reject them is I think significant, because it demonstrates that what evolves is not what I would choose to evolve, that cultural evolution goes on independent of the intentions of the human agent.

  Likewise, what is transmitted, in the sense that it starts off in one neural substrate and ends up in another, is not by any means always analogous to mutation.

  “Do you want the light on or off?”

  “Off.”

  The word off is, I suggest, as near totally unmutated as you can get.

  Off can then be selected; I turn the light off.  This selection reinforces its utility, and thus it probable further iteration in the metaverse.

  What in culture constitutes variation and what selection is complex, and I suggest not yet rigorously defined.  And I can see the temptation to simplify it to make a good fit for mathematical models.  In fact I think the function of this simplification may be spurious in this excellent paper, and not conducive to a detailed analysis of what in human culture mutates, and what is the process of selection.

The meeting place

Foetus, 1911, Encyclopaedia Britannica

  I stand before you today naked and afraid.  No, no, sethren, uncover your eyes, surely the power of my words is not so great that they can tear this palpable, though not thermal, robe from my shivering body.  Intellectually naked and afraid.

  I have no more idea of what the workspace is than you do.  The Cartesian stage with its infinitely receding subject homunculus has vanished i’the air, into thin air.  Saint Daniel talks of multiple drafts, and a virtual machine that hovers in the brain and shuffles these drafts in and out.  I am a simple man, and know nothing of computers or, I often feel in the fastnesses of the night, much else.

But enough of modesty.  Here’s what I think.

  The problem of exactly what it is that  does all this grandstanding at the centre of our identity is huge and difficult, and I promised to go nowhere near it.  So I will just look at it from afar.  I talk only in my language.  Things might be different for you.  There is I, who does things, emotes, and am, and there is me, which cannot am, but only is, and that only retrospectively. “Who’s that?”  “It’s me.”  “Who’s next?”  “Me.”

  “It’s me”  suggests at least two, and then there’s you.  “You’re lying.”  I know that you is me, but me in your ideoverse, not mine.  Three, then, at least.  And then your name.  Oi! Sether Albert!  There, see what I mean.  You know it’s you, we know its him, he knows this him is me.  And other forms of reference.  “That fucking git in a dress who spouts garbage on the ringroad.”  Alas, I.  And me.

  No, sethren, language will get us nowhere.  Sed in machina sit deus.  My Latin is a bit rusty, but on this day of new leadership for a different and archaic faith, I thought I should celebrate it in its own tongue.

  Let us look elsewhere.  Let us look at the foetal brain, the brain before Culture.  The thing to get hold of here is that we don’t have brain as one thing, then all that goes on in and around the brain as another.  We don’t have brain and then, in the old philosophy, thought.  From blastocyst to neonate, the brain develops as a working process.  The foetal brain forms along with light and darkness, the noise of a mighty rushing wind and pipes gurgling, the sacred and the profane, the thunder and jitter of drums, voices, the aching distance of a bone flute, the flutter of fire, the rock and jiggle of kinesis, the stutter of rap.  And these don’t work on an inert receiver.  The foetal brain is not a vinyl disc onto which the world engraves itself.  The foetal brain, can you not remember it, that dance of colour, not kaleidoscopic, as I recall, but dancing orientations of colour and lines (yes, sether, colour does seem to be part of cognitive bias, where do you get these things?) a visual and aural synaesthesia, the kora as it sweeps the heavens, that harpsichord bit in maybe the fourth Brandenburg, the Madonna of the Rocks at the stratum of pure hue.  That at some stage is what is going on in the foetal brain.

And then suddenly, the child is born, and the hugest changes we will ever feel take place, just like that.

And the energy of the universe rushes in, magnificent and terrifying.  Five seconds.  Enough.

  “Enough” is the beginning of what we might understand as the centre of the neonate’s ideoverse, the top of the hierarchy of neurons and connections, the meeting place, where things are decided.  Like “Enough”.  The baby closes down the portals to the world, and begins the infinite process of sorting out that energy.  Huge demons spin in the neural substrate.  Gradually they settle and calm.  For a moment the baby sleeps.  Then again it’s eyes open.

  The process continues over hours and years.  The demons increase in number geometrically, have to be re-sorted, they drift together in alliances, alliances muscle in on the processes of perception and organisation. Demons evolve an economy, they become smaller and more differentiated.  Alliances drift up the taxonomy:

demon      thing      action    concept     map       praxis    Culture

  This goes on for the rest of our lives, sethren, or as long as we are properly alive.  Elderliness is not a neurological condition like dementia. It is the fading away of that thing we are looking for, that which is not I or me or you, though I or me or you is exactly what we call it.

  But from neonate, even from foetus, to last conscious breath, the meeting place where in the just new-born there fires “Enough”, and the portals to the universe are closed down, and the brain does miraculous work on what is there; and then in the meeting space there shouts “More”, and the portals are opened again to more wonder; that meeting place is what we are after, but it is nameless.  The workspace is hardly an elegant phrase for the unnameable.  What else can we properly call it?

  Oh.  Off they have fucked, without my adjuration.  And I have no dinner money.  Fuck.

All the mind's a stage? No way

Le cervau de Descartes- left temporal lobe  Britannica 1911

  And tomorrow becomes today, above freezing, but still with that wind from the Pole.  When, oh sethren, will the ignorant stop confusing climate with weather?  What hope is there for us, the wretched of the earth, our glaciated marrow, our sluggard tubing?  Fire, sethren, the fire of knowledge.

  Demons are called, those stable cycles of energy in the part of the continuum of the universe which is the human brain; which is an ideoverse; demons are called, I said, to the workspace.  And what is this workspace? you ceaselessly demand.

  To be honest, sethren, being a bit of a thespian myself, I think of it as a stage.  I am Prince Hamlet, and everybody else is the ghost.  I am an actor director.  I call demons to the stage, we act things out under my direction, I aim to end each scene with a soliloquy that is dignified, passionate, moving, wise and inspiring so, as the ghost fades out yet again, the expression on its spectral mug is “How I desire to be e’en more like thee, oh Hamlet”.  Then I say to the demons, okay, off you fuck (surely I can say that to demons), and so they do.

  Things don’t always turn out like that.  Demons arrive in hordes, and not always those that were summoned to the stage.  Often they disrespect my directorial role, they shout out, they brawl, they set out, in alliances, to undermine my confidence, my amour proper, they jostle me into places I do not want to go.  But at the best of times, they make me what I am and what I would wish to be.

  Here’s an example.  “What’s the time?”  That’s a common question.  And one with a fairly simple answer, as long as we don’t get philosophical about it.  I ask it of myself.  “What’s the time?”  Actually I have no watch.  Yes, I had one yesterday.  Just another sad story of our times.  Our times, times of austerity for us lot, undreamed of wealth for plump and pink Etonians.  Okay, our times demons, I banish you from the stage.  “What’s the time?”  Welcome, oh image demon, image of a church-tower-with-a-clock, welcome.  I look around, but no out-in-the-world perception meets with this image.  There is St Paul’s, but it has a spire, and no clock.  Get ye gone, ye trying to be helpful church-tower-with-a-clock demon.  Aha, my eye alights on sether Derostro, surreptitiously engaged in congress with his phone.  Another image demon arrives, the phonescreen demon and, summoned by that demon, a top-right-hand-corner demon, a four-digit demon, I plunge my hand beneath my robes, withdraw my phone, thumb demon and silver button demon, and there it is, time demon triumphant, 11.32.

  (Yes, sether Punctilia, that does seem to be the case.  Every demon I have summoned is in fact an association of demons.  And yet church-tower-with-clock does seem to me a single demon.  Perhaps we need to look further at the relationship between language and demons.  A demon is not an existence in language, though a demon can metamorphose into language in order to travel between brain and brain.  Language, which has to be finite and recursive [the system, sether, not the utterances], may present a demon such as the silver button with which I switch on my phone as a thing of infinite variation [gold knob radio], each locus in the paradigm continuously variable [the iridium molar with which I chew one marigold leaf].  But that necessary structure of language does not mean that in my ideoverse, and therefore in the metaverse at large, the silver button with which I switch on my phone is not unique, and a perfectly ordinary, perfectly respectable demon.  Uh-oh, we are losing them, sether.)

  Order.  Order.  I summoned demons to the stage to find out the time.  I found out the time.  But as always, that time has passed, your cheeks are slabs of mountain slate, your tubes cry out for the worst sort of cholesterol.  I showed you the workspace as a stage to which I, Hamlet and director, summoned demons.  But I confessed at once that that was the way I thought of it.  Wrong, entirely wrong.  There is no stage.  And what is this "I" that purports to summon demons to a non-existent theatre?

  Oh, we are in deep water, sethren, deep and boreal, a perilous sea I shall before your eyes shoot out of like an intercontinental missile from one of those ocean-going submarines with which plump pink Etonians (yes, and before them shallow and venal Fettes boys) protect our streets, yea, even our ringroads.

  And when I land, I shall not atomise a city.  I shall, without ado, say what the workspace is and how demons are summoned there.  Away with you.

Angels exist, yes they do

This is not an angel - Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911

  So, sethren, do angels exist, or don’t they?

  Yes, of course they exist.  How else could we speak of them, and know what we mean?  There may be a certain amount of disagreement about classification, morphology, number of wings, if any, sex and sexual orientation, if any.  What, sether Sanctimonia?  No, not blasphemous at all.  Well, you may be a Christian.  It is not forbidden unto us.  But if so, why don’t you read the Bible?  In the beginning, as I recall, Jehova was not the only being in heaven, of course he wasn’t.  If there had only been one god, he wouldn’t have said “I the Lord they God am a jealous god.”   He was distinguishing himself from the other gods, who were quite happy with the polytheistic setup.  And the Sons of Heaven, you will recall, yes, in the Bible, the Torah, the Pentateuch, yes sether, we are talking about the same book, in the Bible the Sons of Heaven came down and had congress with mortal women.  Yes, sexual congress.  And offspring were the result.  Giants, as I recall.  So in that particular case, male angels clearly had all the necessary bits.

  Okay, let’s leave it at that.  What I’m getting at is, there may be considerable diversity among angels, but angels exist.  Irreducible difference again.  We know the difference, in an illustration or a story, between a fairy and an angel, there is seldom any ground for confusion.  Yes, sether Albert, and between an aeroplane and an angel.  Between a human being and an angel?  More difficult.  In early times angels did often hang about the place, outside the tent, loitering on the path, in order to communicate with Homo sapiens; Abraham, Moses and the like.  Jaweh himself did the same, and all in human form.  But there didn’t seem to be any confusion.  If somebody met an angel upon the road, they knew it was an angel.  Jaweh likewise.

  The question is not whether angels exist, but whether they existed in the real world, the world before Homo Sapiens, or will exist in the world as it will be when we are extinct.  And the answer is that angels do not exist in the real world.  Well, okay sether Polly Agnostica, they might.  But only in the sense that there might be an invisible and weightless pink elephant balanced like a ballerina on the weathercock atop the spire of St Paul’s there — Holy Mary mother of God, is there a need to turn round and look?  I said it was invisible. There might be, but how would we know?  It is massless (otherwise the weathercock would collapse).  Everything has mass, even light travelling at whatever speed it does.  E=mc², remember.  You cannot go round altering the laws of physics just for the sake of an invisible elephant.  So, in order for you to assert that there may be such an elephant there atop the church spire, you have, a priori, to define that elephant as not existing in any sense that an elephant does exist.

  It is only in this sense that angels existed in the real world.

  However, in our world, angels do exist in their millions.  They exist in pictures, carvings, spoken words, in hymns, books, stories, in encyclopaedias and dictionaries, on the internet and above all, in the brains of Homo sapiens.  In their millions.  To suggest otherwise would be an absurdity.

  Their existence is distributed, between all the physical states I have mentioned, out in the world (the world that exists outside our bodies, between us, not the real world); carvings, books and so on.  And they exist, angels, in the neural substrate of millions of human beings, as a locus of irreducible meaning, the place where a demon exists, where it can be summoned into the workspace, in alliances with other demons, or there to divide into further demons, one for cherub and one for seraph, as it might be; or named angels, Gabriel or Jezriel, or your own very special guardian angel, this too will be a demon with its own special place, its locus of irreducible meaning, in the neural substrate.  Yes, sether Albert, the fucking brain it is.  But I use brain to denote the whole caboodle, in action, electrical, chemical, millions of signals flying every which way every second.  Whereas the neural substrate is more like the Tube map.  It is a fiction, insofar as demons are nothing if not dynamic, and to try to tie them to a single location in the wiring of the brain is unlikely to be possible.  And what is the workspace?  Tomorrow, tomorrow, always tomorrow.  We have so much to cover, and life is short.  Spring is here, and with it the Arctic wind.  The world heats, hot tempests seethe northwards and topple the pillar of freezing air that should tower above the Pole, so that it collapses and spills southward in a mighty wind that funnels round the ringroad as if it were a racetrack, freezing off whatever appendages are appropriate to our angelic sexual form.  Bollocks it is sether, but one assumes that angels can also be women.  The obverse is clearly so.

  Okay, patronising guff.  I apologise.  Cold breeds hunger, and while bread alone is inadequate, so are words.  Before you go—it is this.  Angels exist in the metaverse, and only in the metaverse.  And the metaverse is a space, a real space, that extends from the world out there into the brain, the active brain, the ideoverse of each human being, and is made up of every demon, and of the locus of every demon in the world.  That is, the demon angel is a locus in thousands, millions of neural substrates; in each  ideoverse.  But it travels between each ideoverse as words, spoken or written, or pictures, sculptures, holograms, televison signals, angels have many forms out in the world.  If you add each and every possible demon, and all demons are possible, the down quark and your aunty’s birthday, the man (or hare) in the moon, the mug from which you sip your warming tea, then that infinite number of demons, and all the existences in which they travel between the ideoverses in and about each brain, words and carvings and all, if you sum the lot to an infinite total, then that is a freeze-frame of the still expanding metaverse.  That is Evoculture.  Dizzying, I know.  Luckily, all but the most minuscule fraction of it is safely stored away in the neural substrate, and in the considerably larger fraction of the universe which neither you nor I are perceiving at this moment.  It's also stored away in the ideoverses of your partner, your parent, your child and every living human being.  Yes, there's a lot of it.

Tomorrow, the workspace.  But now, hot sweet tea to warm our ideoverses and frozen hands.