Andrew Hickey

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to York's The Press.

Author’s Note: Below is the prepared version of a talk that I gave two weeks ago at the workshop Quantum Foundations of a Classical Universe, which was held at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.  My talk is for entertainment purposes only; it should not be taken seriously by anyone.  If you reply in a way that makes clear you did take it seriously (“I’m shocked and outraged that someone who dares to call himself a scientist would … [blah blah]“), I will log your IP address, hunt you down at night, and force you to put forward an account of consciousness and decoherence that deals with all the paradoxes discussed below—and then reply at length to all criticisms of your account.

If you’d like to see titles, abstracts, and slides for all the talks from the workshop—including by Charles Bennett, Sean Carroll, James Hartle, Adrian Kent, Stefan Leichenauer, Ken Olum, Don Page, Jason Pollack, Jess Riedel, Mark Srednicki, Wojciech Zurek, and Michael Zwolak—click here.  You’re also welcome to discuss these other nice talks in the comments section, though I might or might not be able to answer questions about them.  Apparently videos of all the talks will be available before long (Jess Riedel has announced that videos are now available).

(Note that, as is probably true for other talks as well, the video of my talk differs substantially from the prepared version—it mostly just consists of interruptions and my responses to them!  On the other hand, I did try to work some of the more salient points from the discussion into the text below.)

Thanks so much to Charles Bennett and Jess Riedel for organizing the workshop, and to all the participants for great discussions.

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I didn’t prepare slides for this talk—given the topic, what slides would I use exactly?  “Spoiler alert”: I don’t have any rigorous results about the possibility of sentient quantum computers, to state and prove on slides.  I thought of giving a technical talk on quantum computing theory, but then I realized that I don’t really have technical results that bear directly on the subject of the workshop, which is how the classical world we experience emerges from the quantum laws of physics.  So, given the choice between a technical talk that doesn’t really address the questions we’re supposed to be discussing, or a handwavy philosophical talk that at least tries to address them, I opted for the latter, so help me God.

Let me start with a story that John Preskill told me years ago.  In the far future, humans have solved not only the problem of building scalable quantum computers, but also the problem of human-level AI.  They’ve built a Turing-Test-passing quantum computer.  The first thing they do, to make sure this is actually a quantum computer, is ask it to use Shor’s algorithm to factor a 10,000-digit number.  So the quantum computer factors the number.  Then they ask it, “while you were factoring that number, what did it feel like?  did you feel yourself branching into lots of parallel copies, which then recohered?  or did you remain a single consciousness—a ‘unitary’ consciousness, as it were?  can you tell us from introspection which interpretation of quantum mechanics is the true one?”  The quantum computer ponders this for a while and then finally says, “you know, I might’ve known before, but now I just … can’t remember.”

I like to tell this story when people ask me whether the interpretation of quantum mechanics has any empirical consequences.

Look, I understand the impulse to say “let’s discuss the measure problem, or the measurement problem, or derivations of the Born rule, or Boltzmann brains, or observer-counting, or whatever, but let’s take consciousness off the table.”  (Compare: “let’s debate this state law in Nebraska that says that, before getting an abortion, a woman has to be shown pictures of cute babies.  But let’s take the question of whether or not fetuses have human consciousness—i.e., the actual thing that’s driving our disagreement about that and every other subsidiary question—off the table, since that one is too hard.”)  The problem, of course, is that even after you’ve taken the elephant off the table (to mix metaphors), it keeps climbing back onto the table, often in disguises.  So, for better or worse, my impulse tends to be the opposite: to confront the elephant directly.

Having said that, I still need to defend the claim that (a) the questions we’re discussing, centered around quantum mechanics, Many Worlds, and decoherence, and (b) the question of which physical systems should be considered “conscious,” have anything to do with each other.  Many people would say that the connection doesn’t go any deeper than: “quantum mechanics is mysterious, consciousness is also mysterious, ergo maybe they’re related somehow.”  But I’m not sure that’s entirely true.  One thing that crystallized my thinking about this was a remark made in a lecture by Peter Byrne, who wrote a biography of Hugh Everett.  Byrne was discussing the question, why did it take so many decades for Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation to become popular?  Of course, there are people who deny quantum mechanics itself, or who have basic misunderstandings about it, but let’s leave those people aside.  Why did people like Bohr and Heisenberg dismiss Everett?  More broadly: why wasn’t it just obvious to physicists from the beginning that “branching worlds” is a picture that the math militates toward, probably the simplest, easiest story one can tell around the Schrödinger equation?  Even if early quantum physicists rejected the Many-Worlds picture, why didn’t they at least discuss and debate it?

Here was Byrne’s answer: he said, before you can really be on board with Everett, you first need to be on board with Daniel Dennett (the philosopher).  He meant: you first need to accept that a “mind” is just some particular computational process.  At the bottom of everything is the physical state of the universe, evolving via the equations of physics, and if you want to know where consciousness is, you need to go into that state, and look for where computations are taking place that are sufficiently complicated, or globally-integrated, or self-referential, or … something, and that’s where the consciousness resides.  And crucially, if following the equations tells you that after a decoherence event, one computation splits up into two computations, in different branches of the wavefunction, that thereafter don’t interact—congratulations!  You’ve now got two consciousnesses.

And if everything above strikes you as so obvious as not to be worth stating … well, that’s a sign of how much things changed in the latter half of the 20^th century.  Before then, many thinkers would’ve been more likely to say, with Descartes: no, my starting point is not the physical world.  I don’t even know a priori that there is a physical world.  My starting point is my own consciousness, which is the one thing besides math that I can be certain about.  And the point of a scientific theory is to explain features of my experience—ultimately, if you like, to predict the probability that I’m going to see X or Y if I do A or B.  (If I don’t have prescientific knowledge of myself, as a single, unified entity that persists in time, makes choices, and later observes their consequences, then I can’t even get started doing science.)  I’m happy to postulate a world external to myself, filled with unseen entities like electrons behaving in arbitrarily unfamiliar ways, if it will help me understand my experience—but postulating other versions of me is, at best, irrelevant metaphysics.  This is a viewpoint that could lead you Copenhagenism, or to its newer variants like quantum Bayesianism.

I’m guessing that many people in this room side with Dennett, and (not coincidentally, I’d say) also with Everett.  I certainly have sympathies in that direction too.  In fact, I spent seven or eight years of my life as a Dennett/Everett hardcore believer.  But, while I don’t want to talk anyone out of the Dennett/Everett view, I’d like to take you on a tour of what I see as some of the extremely interesting questions that that view leaves unanswered.  I’m not talking about “deep questions of meaning,” but about something much more straightforward: what exactly does a computational process have to do to qualify as “conscious”?

Of course, there are already tremendous difficulties here, even if we ignore quantum mechanics entirely.  Ken Olum was over much of this ground in his talk yesterday (see here for a relevant paper by Davenport and Olum).  You’ve all heard the ones about, would you agree to be painlessly euthanized, provided that a complete description of your brain would be sent to Mars as an email attachment, and a “perfect copy” of you would be reconstituted there?  Would you demand that the copy on Mars be up and running before the original was euthanized?  But what do we mean by “before”—in whose frame of reference?

Some people say: sure, none of this is a problem!  If I’d been brought up since childhood taking family vacations where we all emailed ourselves to Mars and had our original bodies euthanized, I wouldn’t think anything of it.  But the philosophers of mind are barely getting started.

There’s this old chestnut, what if each person on earth simulated one neuron of your brain, by passing pieces of paper around.  It took them several years just to simulate a single second of your thought processes.  Would that bring your subjectivity into being?  Would you accept it as a replacement for your current body?  If so, then what if your brain were simulated, not neuron-by-neuron, but by a gigantic lookup table?  That is, what if there were a huge database, much larger than the observable universe (but let’s not worry about that), that hardwired what your brain’s response was to every sequence of stimuli that your sense-organs could possibly receive.  Would that bring about your consciousness?  Let’s keep pushing: if it would, would it make a difference if anyone actually consulted the lookup table?  Why can’t it bring about your consciousness just by sitting there doing nothing?

To these standard thought experiments, we can add more.  Let’s suppose that, purely for error-correction purposes, the computer that’s simulating your brain runs the code three times, and takes the majority vote of the outcomes.  Would that bring three “copies” of your consciousness into being?  Does it make a difference if the three copies are widely separated in space or time—say, on different planets, or in different centuries?  Is it possible that the massive redundancy taking place in your brain right now is bringing multiple copies of you into being?

Maybe my favorite thought experiment along these lines was invented by my former student Andy Drucker.  In the past five years, there’s been a revolution in theoretical cryptography, around something called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which was first discovered by Craig Gentry.  What FHE lets you do is to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data, without ever decrypting the data at any point.  So, to someone with the decryption key, you could be proving theorems, simulating planetary motions, etc.  But to someone without the key, it looks for all the world like you’re just shuffling random strings and producing other random strings as output.

You can probably see where this is going.  What if we homomorphically encrypted a simulation of your brain?  And what if we hid the only copy of the decryption key, let’s say in another galaxy?  Would this computation—which looks to anyone in our galaxy like a reshuffling of gobbledygook—be silently producing your consciousness?

When we consider the possibility of a conscious quantum computer, in some sense we inherit all the previous puzzles about conscious classical computers, but then also add a few new ones.  So, let’s say I run a quantum subroutine that simulates your brain, by applying some unitary transformation U.  But then, of course, I want to “uncompute” to get rid of garbage (and thereby enable interference between different branches), so I apply U^-1.  Question: when I apply U^-1, does your simulated brain experience the same thoughts and feelings a second time?  Is the second experience “the same as” the first, or does it differ somehow, by virtue of being reversed in time?  Or, since U^-1U is just a convoluted implementation of the identity function, are there no experiences at all here?

Here’s a better one: many of you have heard of the Vaidman bomb.  This is a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics where there’s a package, and we’d like to “query” it to find out whether it contains a bomb—but if we query it and there is a bomb, it will explode, killing everyone in the room.  What’s the solution?  Well, suppose we could go into a superposition of querying the bomb and not querying it, with only ε amplitude on querying the bomb, and √(1-ε²) amplitude on not querying it.  And suppose we repeat this over and over—each time, moving ε amplitude onto the “query the bomb” state if there’s no bomb there, but moving ε² probability onto the “query the bomb” state if there is a bomb (since the explosion decoheres the superposition).  Then after 1/ε repetitions, we’ll have order 1 probability of being in the “query the bomb” state if there’s no bomb.  By contrast, if there is a bomb, then the total probability we’ve ever entered that state is (1/ε)×ε² = ε.  So, either way, we learn whether there’s a bomb, and the probability that we set the bomb off can be made arbitrarily small.  (Incidentally, this is extremely closely related to how Grover’s algorithm works.)

OK, now how about the Vaidman brain?  We’ve got a quantum subroutine simulating your brain, and we want to ask it a yes-or-no question.  We do so by querying that subroutine with ε amplitude 1/ε times, in such a way that if your answer is “yes,” then we’ve only ever activated the subroutine with total probability ε.  Yet you still manage to communicate your “yes” answer to the outside world.  So, should we say that you were conscious only in the ε fraction of the wavefunction where the simulation happened, or that the entire system was conscious?  (The answer could matter a lot for anthropic purposes.)

You might say, sure, maybe these questions are puzzling, but what’s the alternative?  Either we have to say that consciousness is a byproduct of any computation of the right complexity, or integration, or recursiveness (or something) happening anywhere in the wavefunction of the universe, or else we’re back to saying that beings like us are conscious, and all these other things aren’t, because God gave the souls to us, so na-na-na.  Or I suppose we could say, like the philosopher John Searle, that we’re conscious, and the lookup table and homomorphically-encrypted brain and Vaidman brain and all these other apparitions aren’t, because we alone have “biological causal powers.”  And what do those causal powers consist of?  Hey, you’re not supposed to ask that!  Just accept that we have them.  Or we could say, like Roger Penrose, that we’re conscious and the other things aren’t because we alone have microtubules that are sensitive to uncomputable effects from quantum gravity.  But neither of those two options ever struck me as much of an improvement.

Yet I submit to you that, between these extremes, there’s another position we can stake out—one that I certainly don’t know to be correct, but that would solve so many different puzzles if it were correct that, for that reason alone, it seems to me to merit more attention than it usually receives.  (In an effort to give the view that attention, a couple years ago I wrote an 85-page essay called The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, which one or two people told me they actually read all the way through.)  If, after a lifetime of worrying (on weekends) about stuff like whether a giant lookup table would be conscious, I now seem to be arguing for this particular view, it’s less out of conviction in its truth than out of a sense of intellectual obligation: to whatever extent people care about these slippery questions at all, to whatever extent they think various alternative views deserve a hearing, I believe this one does as well.

The intermediate position that I’d like to explore says the following.  Yes, consciousness is a property of any suitably-organized chunk of matter.  But, in addition to performing complex computations, or passing the Turing Test, or other information-theoretic conditions that I don’t know (and don’t claim to know), there’s at least one crucial further thing that a chunk of matter has to do before we should consider it conscious.  Namely, it has to participate fully in the Arrow of Time.  More specifically, it has to produce irreversible decoherence as an intrinsic part of its operation.  It has to be continually taking microscopic fluctuations, and irreversibly amplifying them into stable, copyable, macroscopic classical records.

Before I go further, let me be extremely clear about what this view is not saying.  Firstly, it’s not saying that the brain is a quantum computer, in any interesting sense—let alone a quantum-gravitational computer, like Roger Penrose wants!  Indeed, I see no evidence, from neuroscience or any other field, that the cognitive information processing done by the brain is anything but classical.  The view I’m discussing doesn’t challenge conventional neuroscience on that account.

Secondly, this view doesn’t say that consciousness is in any sense necessary for decoherence, or for the emergence of a classical world.  I’ve never understood how one could hold such a belief, while still being a scientific realist.  After all, there are trillions of decoherence events happening every second in stars and asteroids and uninhabited planets.  Do those events not “count as real” until a human registers them?  (Or at least a frog, or an AI?)  The view I’m discussing only asserts the converse: that decoherence is necessary for consciousness.  (By analogy, presumably everyone agrees that some amount of computation is necessary for an interesting consciousness, but that doesn’t mean consciousness is necessary for computation.)

Thirdly, the view I’m discussing doesn’t say that “quantum magic” is the explanation for consciousness.  It’s silent on the explanation for consciousness (to whatever extent that question makes sense); it seeks only to draw a defensible line between the systems we want to regard as conscious and the systems we don’t—to address what I recently called the Pretty-Hard Problem.  And the (partial) answer it suggests doesn’t seem any more “magical” to me than any other proposed answer to the same question.  For example, if one said that consciousness arises from any computation that’s sufficiently “integrated” (or something), I could reply: what’s the “magical force” that imbues those particular computations with consciousness, and not other computations I can specify?  Or if one said (like Searle) that consciousness arises from the biology of the brain, I could reply: so what’s the “magic” of carbon-based biology, that could never be replicated in silicon?  Or even if one threw up one’s hands and said everything was conscious, I could reply: what’s the magical power that imbues my stapler with a mind?  Each of these views, along with the view that stresses the importance of decoherence and the arrow of time, is worth considering.  In my opinion, each should be judged according to how well it holds up under the most grueling battery of paradigm-cases, thought experiments, and reductios ad absurdum we can devise.

So, why might one conjecture that decoherence, and participation in the arrow of time, were necessary conditions for consciousness?  I suppose I could offer some argument about our subjective experience of the passage of time being a crucial component of our consciousness, and the passage of time being bound up with the Second Law.  Truthfully, though, I don’t have any a-priori argument that I find convincing.  All I can do is show you how many apparent paradoxes get resolved if you make this one speculative leap.

For starters, if you think about exactly how our chunk of matter is going to amplify microscopic fluctuations, it could depend on details like the precise spin orientations of various subatomic particles in the chunk.  But that has an interesting consequence: if you’re an outside observer who doesn’t know the chunk’s quantum state, it might be difficult or impossible for you to predict what the chunk is going to do next—even just to give decent statistical predictions, like you can for a hydrogen atom.  And of course, you can’t in general perform a measurement that will tell you the chunk’s quantum state, without violating the No-Cloning Theorem.  For the same reason, there’s in general no physical procedure that you can apply to the chunk to duplicate it exactly: that is, to produce a second chunk that you can be confident will behave identically (or almost identically) to the first, even just in a statistical sense.  (Again, this isn’t assuming any long-range quantum coherence in the chunk: only microscopic coherence that then gets amplified.)

It might be objected that there are all sorts of physical systems that “amplify microscopic fluctuations,” but that aren’t anything like what I described, at least not in any interesting sense: for example, a Geiger counter, or a photodetector, or any sort of quantum-mechanical random-number generator.  You can make, if not an exact copy of a Geiger counter, surely one that’s close enough for practical purposes.  And, even though the two counters will record different sequences of clicks when pointed at identical sources, the statistical distribution of clicks will be the same (and precisely calculable), and surely that’s all that matters.  So, what separates these examples from the sorts of examples I want to discuss?

What separates them is the undisputed existence of what I’ll call a clean digital abstraction layer.  By that, I mean a macroscopic approximation to a physical system that an external observer can produce, in principle, without destroying the system; that can be used to predict what the system will do to excellent accuracy (given knowledge of the environment); and that “sees” quantum-mechanical uncertainty—to whatever extent it does—as just a well-characterized source of random noise.  If a system has such an abstraction layer, then we can regard any quantum noise as simply part of the “environment” that the system observes, rather than part of the system itself.  I’ll take it as clear that such clean abstraction layers exist for a Geiger counter, a photodetector, or a computer with a quantum random number generator.  By contrast, for (say) an animal brain, I regard it as currently an open question whether such an abstraction layer exists or not.  If, someday, it becomes routine for nanobots to swarm through people’s brains and make exact copies of them—after which the “original” brains can be superbly predicted in all circumstances, except for some niggling differences that are traceable back to different quantum-mechanical dice rolls—at that point, perhaps educated opinion will have shifted to the point where we all agree the brain does have a clean digital abstraction layer.  But from where we stand today, it seems entirely possible to agree that the brain is a physical system obeying the laws of physics, while doubting that the nanobots would work as advertised.  It seems possible that—as speculated by Bohr, Compton, Eddington, and even Alan Turing—if you want to get it right you’ll need more than just the neural wiring graph, the synaptic strengths, and the approximate neurotransmitter levels.  Maybe you also need (e.g.) the internal states of the neurons, the configurations of sodium-ion channels, or other data that you simply can’t get without irreparably damaging the original brain—not only as a contingent matter of technology but as a fundamental matter of physics.

(As a side note, I should stress that obviously, even without invasive nanobots, our brains are constantly changing, but we normally don’t say as a result that we become completely different people at each instant!  To my way of thinking, though, this transtemporal identity is fundamentally different from a hypothetical identity between different “copies” of you, in the sense we’re talking about.  For one thing, all your transtemporal doppelgängers are connected by a single, linear chain of causation.  For another, outside movies like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, you can’t meet your transtemporal doppelgängers and have a conversation with them, nor can scientists do experiments on some of them, then apply what they learned to others that remained unaffected by their experiments.)

So, on this view, a conscious chunk of matter would be one that not only acts irreversibly, but that might well be unclonable for fundamental physical reasons.  If so, that would neatly resolve many of the puzzles that I discussed before.  So for example, there’s now a straightforward reason why you shouldn’t consent to being killed, while your copy gets recreated on Mars from an email attachment.  Namely, that copy will have a microstate with no direct causal link to your “original” microstate—so while it might behave similarly to you in many ways, you shouldn’t expect that your consciousness will “transfer” to it.  If you wanted to get your exact microstate to Mars, you could do that in principle using quantum teleportation—but as we all know, quantum teleportation inherently destroys the original copy, so there’s no longer any philosophical problem!  (Or, of course, you could just get on a spaceship bound for Mars: from a philosophical standpoint, it amounts to the same thing.)

Similarly, in the case where the simulation of your brain was run three times for error-correcting purposes: that could bring about three consciousnesses if, and only if, the three simulations were tied to different sets of decoherence events.  The giant lookup table and the Earth-sized brain simulation wouldn’t bring about any consciousness, unless they were implemented in such a way that they no longer had a clean digital abstraction layer.  What about the homomorphically-encrypted brain simulation?  That might no longer work, simply because we can’t assume that the microscopic fluctuations that get amplified are homomorphically encrypted.  Those are “in the clear,” which inevitably leaks information.  As for the quantum computer that simulates your thought processes and then perfectly reverses the simulation, or that queries you like a Vaidman bomb—in order to implement such things, we’d of course need to use quantum fault-tolerance, so that the simulation of you stayed in an encoded subspace and didn’t decohere.  But under our assumption, that would mean the simulation wasn’t conscious.

Now, it might seem to some of you like I’m suggesting something deeply immoral.  After all, the view I’m considering implies that, even if a system passed the Turing Test, and behaved identically to a human, even if it eloquently pleaded for its life, if it wasn’t irreversibly decohering microscopic events then it wouldn’t be conscious, so it would be fine to kill it, torture it, whatever you want.

But wait a minute: if a system isn’t doing anything irreversible, then what exactly does it mean to “kill” it?  If it’s a classical computation, then at least in principle, you could always just restore from backup.  You could even rewind and not only erase the memories of, but “uncompute” (“untorture”?) whatever tortures you had performed.  If it’s a quantum computation, you could always invert the unitary transformation U that corresponded to killing the thing (then reapply U and invert it again for good measure, if you wanted).  Only for irreversible systems are there moral acts with irreversible consequences.

This is related to something that’s bothered me for years in quantum foundations.  When people discuss Schrödinger’s cat, they always—always—insert some joke about, “obviously, this experiment wouldn’t pass the Ethical Review Board.  Nowadays, we try to avoid animal cruelty in our quantum gedankenexperiments.”  But actually, I claim that there’s no animal cruelty at all in the Schrödinger’s cat experiment.  And here’s why: in order to prove that the cat was ever in a coherent superposition of |Alive〉 and |Dead〉, you need to be able to measure it in a basis like {|Alive〉+|Dead〉,|Alive〉-|Dead〉}.  But if you can do that, you must have such precise control over all the cat’s degrees of freedom that you can also rotate unitarily between the |Alive〉 and |Dead〉 states.  (To see this, let U be the unitary that you applied to the |Alive〉 branch, and V the unitary that you applied to the |Dead〉 branch, to bring them into coherence with each other; then consider applying U^-1V.)  But if you can do that, then in what sense should we say that the cat in the |Dead〉 state was ever “dead” at all?  Normally, when we speak of “killing,” we mean doing something irreversible—not rotating to some point in a Hilbert space that we could just as easily rotate away from.

(There followed discussion among some audience members about the question of whether, if you destroyed all records of some terrible atrocity, like the Holocaust, everywhere in the physical world, you would thereby cause the atrocity “never to have happened.”  Many people seemed surprised by my willingness to accept that implication of what I was saying.  By way of explaining, I tried to stress just how far our everyday, intuitive notion of “destroying all records of something” falls short of what would actually be involved here: when we think of “destroying records,” we think about burning books, destroying the artifacts in museums, silencing witnesses, etc.  But even if all those things were done and many others, still the exact configurations of the air, the soil, and photons heading away from the earth at the speed of light would retain their silent testimony to the Holocaust’s reality.  “Erasing all records” in the physics sense would be something almost unimaginably more extreme: it would mean inverting the entire physical evolution in the vicinity of the earth, stopping time’s arrow and running history itself backwards.  Such ‘unhappening’ of what’s happened is something that we lack any experience of, at least outside of certain quantum interference experiments—though in the case of the Holocaust, one could be forgiven for wishing it were possible.)

OK, so much for philosophy of mind and morality; what about the interpretation of quantum mechanics?  If we think about consciousness in the way I’ve suggested, then who’s right: the Copenhagenists or the Many-Worlders?  You could make a case for either.  The Many-Worlders would be right that we could always, if we chose, think of decoherence events as “splitting” our universe into multiple branches, each with different versions of ourselves, that thereafter don’t interact.  On the other hand, the Copenhagenists would be right that, even in principle, we could never do any experiment where this “splitting” of our minds would have any empirical consequence.  On this view, if you can control a system well enough that you can actually observe interference between the different branches, then it follows that you shouldn’t regard the system as conscious, because it’s not doing anything irreversible.

In my essay, the implication that concerned me the most was the one for “free will.”  If being conscious entails amplifying microscopic events in an irreversible and unclonable way, then someone looking at a conscious system from the outside might not, in general, be able to predict what it’s going to do next, not even probabilistically.  In other words, its decisions might be subject to at least some “Knightian uncertainty”: uncertainty that we can’t even quantify in a mutually-agreed way using probabilities, in the same sense that we can quantify our uncertainty about (say) the time of a radioactive decay.  And personally, this is actually the sort of “freedom” that interests me the most.  I don’t really care if my choices are predictable by God, or by a hypothetical Laplace demon: that is, if they would be predictable (at least probabilistically), given complete knowledge of the microstate of the universe.  By definition, there’s essentially no way for my choices not to be predictable in that weak and unempirical sense!  On the other hand, I’d prefer that my choices not be completely predictable by other people.  If someone could put some sheets of paper into a sealed envelope, then I spoke extemporaneously for an hour, and then the person opened the envelope to reveal an exact transcript of everything I said, that’s the sort of thing that really would cause me to doubt in what sense “I” existed as a locus of thought.  But you’d have to actually do the experiment (or convince me that it could be done): it doesn’t count just to talk about it, or to extrapolate from fMRI experiments that predict which of two buttons a subject is going to press with 60% accuracy a few seconds in advance.

But since we’ve got some cosmologists in the house, let me now turn to discussing the implications of this view for Boltzmann brains.

(For those tuning in from home: a Boltzmann brain is a hypothetical chance fluctuation in the late universe, which would include a conscious observer with all the perceptions that a human being—say, you—is having right now, right down to false memories and false beliefs of having arisen via Darwinian evolution.  On statistical grounds, the overwhelming majority of Boltzmann brains last just long enough to have a single thought—like, say, the one you’re having right now—before they encounter the vacuum and freeze to death.  If you measured some part of the vacuum state toward which our universe seems to be heading, asking “is there a Boltzmann brain here?,” quantum mechanics predicts that the probability would be ridiculously astronomically small, but nonzero.  But, so the argument goes, if the vacuum lasts for infinite time, then as long as the probability is nonzero, it doesn’t matter how tiny it is: you’ll still get infinitely many Boltzmann brains indistinguishable from any given observer; and for that reason, any observer should consider herself infinitely likelier to be a Boltzmann brain than to be the “real,” original version.  For the record, even among the strange people at the IBM workshop, no one actually worried about being a Boltzmann brain.  The question, rather, is whether, if a cosmological model predicts Boltzmann brains, then that’s reason enough to reject the model, or whether we can live with such a prediction, since we have independent grounds for knowing that we can’t be Boltzmann brains.)

At this point, you can probably guess where this is going.  If decoherence, entropy production, full participation in the arrow of time are necessary conditions for consciousness, then it would follow, in particular, that a Boltzmann brain is not conscious.  So we certainly wouldn’t be Boltzmann brains, even under a cosmological model that predicts infinitely more of them than of us.  We can wipe our hands; the problem is solved!

I find it extremely interesting that, in their recent work, Kim Boddy, Sean Carroll, and Jason Pollack reached a similar conclusion, but from a completely different starting point.  They said: look, under reasonable assumptions, the late universe is just going to stay forever in an energy eigenstate—just sitting there doing nothing.  It’s true that, if someone came along and measured the energy eigenstate, asking “is there a Boltzmann brain here?,” then with a tiny but nonzero probability the answer would be yes.  But since no one is there measuring, what licenses us to interpret the nonzero overlap in amplitude with the Boltzmann brain state, as a nonzero probability of there being a Boltzmann brain?  I think they, too, are implicitly suggesting: if there’s no decoherence, no arrow of time, then we’re not authorized to say that anything is happening that “counts” for anthropic purposes.

Let me now mention an obvious objection.  (In fact, when I gave the talk, this objection was raised much earlier.)  You might say, “look, if you really think irreversible decoherence is a necessary condition for consciousness, then you might find yourself forced to say that there’s no consciousness, because there might not be any such thing as irreversible decoherence!  Imagine that our entire solar system were enclosed in an anti de Sitter (AdS) boundary, like in Greg Egan’s science-fiction novel Quarantine.  Inside the box, there would just be unitary evolution in some Hilbert space: maybe even a finite-dimensional Hilbert space.  In which case, all these ‘irreversible amplifications’ that you lay so much stress on wouldn’t be irreversible at all: eventually all the Everett branches would recohere; in fact they’d decohere and recohere infinitely many times.  So by your lights, how could anything be conscious inside the box?”

My response to this involves one last speculation.  I speculate that the fact that we don’t appear to live in AdS space—that we appear to live in (something evolving toward) a de Sitter space, with a positive cosmological constant—might be deep and important and relevant.  I speculate that, in our universe, “irreversible decoherence” means: the records of what you did are now heading toward our de Sitter horizon at the speed of light, and for that reason alone—even if for no others—you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  (Here I should point out, as several workshop attendees did to me, that Bousso and Susskind explored something similar in their paper The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.)

Does this mean that, if cosmologists discover tomorrow that the cosmological constant is negative, or will become negative, then it will turn out that none of us were ever conscious?  No, that’s stupid.  What it would suggest is that the attempt I’m now making on the Pretty-Hard Problem had smacked into a wall (an AdS wall?), so that I, and anyone else who stressed in-principle irreversibility, should go back to the drawing board.  (By analogy, if some prescription for getting rid of Boltzmann brains fails, that doesn’t mean we are Boltzmann brains; it just means we need a new prescription.  Tempting as it is to skewer our opponents’ positions with these sorts of strawman inferences, I hope we can give each other the courtesy of presuming a bare minimum of sense.)

Another question: am I saying that, in order to be absolutely certain of whether some entity satisfied the postulated precondition for consciousness, one might, in general, need to look billions of years into the future, to see whether the “decoherence” produced by the entity was really irreversible?  Yes (pause to gulp bullet).  I am saying that.  On the other hand, I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as it sounds.  After all, the category of “consciousness” might be morally relevant, or relevant for anthropic reasoning, but presumably we all agree that it’s unlikely to play any causal role in the fundamental laws of physics.  So it’s not as if we’ve introduced any teleology into the laws of physics by this move.

Let me end by pointing out what I’ll call the “Tegmarkian slippery slope.”  It feels scientific and rational—from the perspective of many of us, even banal—to say that, if we’re conscious, then any sufficiently-accurate computer simulation of us would also be.  But I tried to convince you that this view depends, for its aura of obviousness, on our agreeing not to probe too closely exactly what would count as a “sufficiently-accurate” simulation.  E.g., does it count if the simulation is done in heavily-encrypted form, or encoded as a giant lookup table?  Does it matter if anyone actually runs the simulation, or consults the lookup table?  Now, all the way at the bottom of the slope is Max Tegmark, who asks: to produce consciousness, what does it matter if the simulation is physically instantiated at all?  Why isn’t it enough for the simulation to “exist” mathematically?  Or, better yet: if you’re worried about your infinitely-many Boltzmann brain copies, then why not worry equally about the infinitely many descriptions of your life history that are presumably encoded in the decimal expansion of π?  Why not hold workshops about how to avoid the prediction that we’re infinitely likelier to be “living in π” than to be our “real” selves?

From this extreme, even most scientific rationalists recoil.  They say, no, even if we don’t yet know exactly what’s meant by “physical instantiation,” we agree that you only get consciousness if the computer program is physically instantiated somehow.  But now I have the opening I want.  I can say: once we agree that physical existence is a prerequisite for consciousness, why not participation in the Arrow of Time?  After all, our ordinary ways of talking about sentient beings—outside of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and maybe theology—don’t even distinguish between the concepts “exists” and “exists and participates in the Arrow of Time.”  And to say we have no experience of reversible, clonable, coherently-executable, atemporal consciousnesses is a massive understatement.

Of course, we should avoid the sort of arbitrary prejudice that Turing warned against in Computing Machinery and Intelligence.  Just because we lack experience with extraterrestrial consciousnesses, doesn’t mean it would be OK to murder an intelligent extraterrestrial if we met one tomorrow.  In just the same way, just because we lack experience with clonable, atemporal consciousnesses, doesn’t mean it would be OK to … wait!  As we said before, clonability, and aloofness from time’s arrow, call severely into question what it even means to “murder” something.  So maybe this case isn’t as straightforward as the extraterrestrials after all.

At this point, I’ve probably laid out enough craziness, so let me stop and open things up for discussion.

It seems that someone supports Boris’s proposal to make people guilty until proven innocent:

Britain’s most senior police chief has called for wide-ranging new powers to tackle homegrown terrorism, including a “rebuttable presumption” that anyone who visits Syria without prior notice should be treated as a terror suspect.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, chief constable of the Metropolitan police, also called for a return of control orders and said Britons who wage jihad in Syria or Iraq should be stripped of their passports.

When did we become a country where it’s acceptable for senior police officers, speaking in an official capacity, to call for fundamental changes in the law? And what made Bernard Hogan-Howe think it would be a good idea to do this on the same day he had to apologise for the Met breaking it’s own rules in using CS gas against lawful protesters?

But at least we have Police and Crime Commissioners to hold a senior officer like Hogan-Howe accountable. Except London doesn’t have a PCC, instead the Met are held accountable by the Mayor. Yes, the same Mayor Hogan-Howe has just been publicly supporting the proposals of…

By not simply crossing the floor at Westminster to join UKIP, but resigning and calling a by-election to do it, has he now set a precedent for any other Tory MPs who want to do the same? The last MP to do that for a defection was Bruce Douglas-Mann switching from Labour to the SDP in 1982 (and he lost), and MPs who’ve done it since then haven’t followed his example.

However, if there are any other Tories thinking of doing the same (and there probably are), they’ll be watching what happens in Clacton very intently as they know that if they want to switch, they’ll face lots of questions about why they’re not calling a by-election too. Indeed, a cynic might suggest that Carswell has found a way to establish himself as UKIP’s only MP (with the resulting media profile) should he win and if no one else wants to take the same risk.

That's Jack Kirby, dancing with his beloved Roz at a surprise birthday party some of us threw for him in 1987 when he turned 70. He was born in the not-so-affluent part of New York on August 28, 1917 so he could have been 97 today.

I have written thousands of pages and articles about Jack and somehow, it never seems to be enough. There are people out there who think he was just a great comic book artist and the co-creator of some of the world's most popular fictional characters. That would have been enough to warrant all the honors and accolades he achieved in his life…and the recognition of him has only grown since we lost him in 1994.

But Jack was more than that and it's tough to put it into words. I used to use "visionary" until it came to be applied to everyone who ever thought of anything. "Genius" isn't bad but Jack's uncanny ability to understand and prophesize didn't span the galaxy like so many of his stories. His mind raced about from topic to topic, leapfrogging over some to land in the darnedest places. He would start talking about the future and take you there via a load of yesterdays and even a couple of todays. If he sounded disconnected, it was partially your fault for being unable to bridge the gaps as he vaulted from one thought to another.

He knew he was the best in his field but somehow, he was amazingly humble about it. When one of his comics or stories met with disapproval somewhere, he wasn't bothered. He just said, "You watch. One of these days, most people will come to appreciate it." And more often than not, that's exactly what happened. It's why his work — even work which at the time was deemed a flop — is constantly reprinted, much of it in very fancy volumes.

I loved the sheer, non-monetary value of being around him. There was so much to learn and somehow, when you talked with Jack, you came away feeling more talented and energized. That was because he treated you as an equal so some of the sheer imagination within him was absorbed by osmosis. You didn't have to actually meet Jack to be inspired by him — you could do that by reading darned near anything he worked on. But meeting him sure helped. It reminded you that human beings could do things like he did and that he thought you were fit to breathe the same air.

Happy Birthday, Jack. It's hard to miss you when there's so much of you surrounding us. But miss you, we do…

Five years ago when I was a fairly new member of the Lib Dems I was trying to plan my time at my first ever Federal Conference in Bournemouth. I was a little nervous never having attended one of these before and as I was popping fringe events and hall debates into my schedule I realised that I hadn't been invited to anything on the Saturday night which was largely filled with various dinners for local parties and groups. I mentioned this on Twitter and almost immediately Alison Goldsworthy got in touch and insisted that I join her Welsh Lib Dem dinner on the Saturday evening. I pointed out that I am not (nor have never been) Welsh but she was having none of it. I went along and had a really good time being introduced to a number of different movers and shakers in the Welsh party all of whom made me feel very welcome. And despite the fact that I had never met Ali before that evening she treated me as if I was an old friend. I have never forgotten that kindness.

It was clear to me that she was phenomenally well connected within the party, even though she was (and still is) relatively young. She had already stood as a European candidate and was about to stand for a Westminster seat. She was clever, articulate and very funny. Exactly the sort of person you would expect a party like the Lib Dems would want representing them.

But Alison Goldsworthy is no longer a Lib Dem. She left the party in the last few days following the fallout from the Rennard scandal. Ali is one of the women who made allegations about inappropriate behaviour against the peer, allegations that have effectively come to nothing as he was reinstated.

Actually in Ali's case, if what she alleges is true, I would say "inappropriate behaviour" is a severe understatement:

She alleges that in 2004, when she was a 21-year-old candidate in the European elections, she posed for a group photo after a black tie event. She was stood next to Lord Rennard, then Lib Dem chief executive, and was wearing a long, backless dress.

She says that he put his hand down her gown and inside her knickers, past “extremely intimate” areas.

“There was no way it was an accident or that I had invited such an approach,” she claimed. “I couldn’t believe what had happened.”

It is an absolute disgrace that in this situation, Ali is the one who has been left with no choice but to leave the party she loves. In fact all four of the women who made allegations against Rennard which Alistair Webster QC found "broadly credible" have all now left the party.

This is utterly unacceptable. Whatever the Lib Dems think they have done in response to these allegations is nowhere near enough. If the party has any sense it will not consider the "matter is closed" as Rennard so menacingly suggested everyone now needs to do in a recent comment on Lib Dem Voice.

If they don't do something else they frankly deserve the opprobrium being heaped on them and Ali's parting comment that they no longer deserve to be taken seriously.

Last Saturday evening a new Doctor landed on BBC1, causing even his friends to wonder if they knew who he was any more. That’ll be doubly unnerving if you’re coming to the Doctor and the series for the first time. But don’t worry. It’s only as complicated as you want to make it. There’s really very little you need to know – and the easiest way to find out is to watch an episode of Doctor Who. But here’s a simple start…

What Do You Need To Know About Doctor Who?

The Doctor is a traveller in time and space. He goes anywhere he likes, from Earth’s past, present and future to alien worlds and stranger places still. He respects life rather than authority, and obeys no-one else’s rules. He lives by his own joy in exploring new places and times, and by his own moral sense to fight oppression. He prefers to use his intelligence rather than violence, and he takes friends with him to explore the wonders of the Universe.

That’s it.

OK, so that’s the important bit, but if you want answers to a few more questions, take a look at the headlines below and read the bits that you want to know about. Or you could just get on and watch an episode.

The Doctor – Who Is He? Why Does He Travel?

He’s an alien, from a world whose rigidly authoritarian rulers watched over all of time and space – but without interfering. He found that just watching and keeping everything the same bored him, when he wanted to get out to meet people and experience things for himself. So he took a TARDIS and the name “the Doctor” and left.

The TARDIS – the Doctor’s Time-ship

A TARDIS is a machine (or a place, or an event) for travelling through time and space, the name standing for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The Doctor’s TARDIS was a bit old and unreliable back when he borrowed it from his people, and he’s patched it up and customised it many times in the perhaps a couple of thousand years that they’ve been travelling together. Just to make it even less likely it’ll go where he wants it to (but more likely to go where he needs it to), it’s quite literally got a mind of its own, too. It moves seemingly by vanishing from one place, then just appearing in the next, travelling not through ordinary space but a strange space-time vortex.

The other big thing about the TARDIS is that its outside gives no sign of what’s inside. It used to disguise itself on landing so it wouldn’t be spotted, but when the Doctor arrived in the 1960s it got stuck on taking the form of a police box, a sort of dedicated phone booth before handy mobile communications. Inside, though, unfolds into many other dimensions and many different rooms. You’ll have noticed that it’s bigger inside than outside, then. So do most people who go in (unsurprisingly). And while the old blue exterior is pretty much a constant, from time to time the interior changes its style, colour, shape and tone, while keeping its essential character. Much like its pilot does…

The Daleks – and Why the Doctor Fights Them

Once he started travelling, the Doctor found that that the more experience he had of other people and places, the more he wanted to get involved, because the more he saw the urge to dominate others the more he wanted to stand up to it. He’s opposed bullies, tyrants and monsters from many alien races – and from his own, and from ours – but one enemy always comes back.

Those he’s fought most often in their endless campaign to dominate and exterminate without question are the Daleks, alien conquerors in armoured mini-tanks with a hatred for all other races. They’re the ultimate dictators, the opposite of the Doctor’s own desire for freedom.

The Daleks too developed time travel, leading to a cataclysmic Time War with the Doctor’s own people – which is a history so complicated that no-one has a full answer. But by the end of it, the Doctor seemed the only one left, so he just carries on travelling, making the most of life, seeing the sights, toppling empires, that sort of thing. And if that sounds like a dangerous lifestyle, it’s often been fatal…

How the Doctor Changes

The Doctor’s people were each remarkably long-lived, so that helps more than moisturiser. But it’s not just that their bodies live for many hundreds of years. When they get too old, or are fatally injured, they’ve got a way of cheating death. At what would be the final moment, their body is reborn into a completely new one, giving them a new lease of life, shaking up their personality while remaining essentially the same person underneath. The Doctor’s had quite an eventful life, and the most recent body he’s been ‘born’ into is his… Well, it’s easiest to say it’s his twelfth.

How Old? How Many Bodies? …No, Nobody Else Really Knows Either

Some people might tell you that the Doctor is now in his thirteenth, fifteenth or twenty-third body, and they’ll all be right, but just as with the Time War, no-one has a precise answer and it makes no difference to the story. Similarly, while the Doctor is as a rule honest, he’s at best a little confused over his precise age. Perhaps on occasion he’s dropped a few hundred years or so for vanity’s sake (my money’s on the one in the leather jacket having a mid-lives crisis). But like his precise number of bodies, the Doctor’s exact age isn’t something we need to know – just as well, really, as we’re never going to. Just nod sagely and say, ‘Ah, well, things got complicated in the Time War,’ because if time was getting messed up to that extent by rival peoples each with the power to control it, things were bound to, weren’t they?

These disconcerting rebirths also help Doctor Who the series carry on when the actor playing the Doctor decides to leave, making it almost the only TV show that can recast its lead without hoping the audience are watching TV with the picture turned off or pretending it’s something to do with plastic surgery or showers. The latest actor to play the Doctor is Peter Capaldi.

What’s Special About Doctor Who?

The TV series Doctor Who began broadcast in 1963, starring William Hartnell as the Doctor (the first three stories are available in the DVD box set Doctor Who – The Beginning). It ran continuously for more than a quarter of a century, making it the longest-running science fiction series in the world and inspiring an awful lot of people. Kept alive in books, audio plays and millions of imaginations, the TV version was reborn in 2005 and has again been a popular and critical success thanks to its sheer joy, its unique flexibility and, of course, to monsters like the Daleks. A bonus to the series always reinventing itself is that you don’t need to know any intricate details, ongoing plots or characters to follow it. Even the most involved elements change and get left behind (or even undone); happily, many of the best writers assume that every episode is someone’s first, and even if some are tempted to make no concessions to the viewer, the very variety of the series stops it ever becoming too impenetrable.

It’s one bold central idea that’s important and that runs through now more than half a century of adventures. With Doctor Who, you can go pretty much anywhere and do pretty much anything, and always see that people everywhere are worthwhile, whether they’re people like us or green scaly rubber people. The Doctor believes in freedom, and hates ignorance, conformity and insularity. He doesn’t work for anyone, wear a uniform or carry a gun, making the series both very British and very anti-establishment.

Doctor Who encourages people to think, to have fun, and to take a moral stand, but it’s wary of solving problems by shooting them. You don’t have to believe what you’re told, still less do what you’re told. And it’s spent several decades scaring children with nasty monsters, eerie places and even the music, which when you put it all together is what family entertainment is about – a show with enough in it to satisfy all ages, from action to excite the adults to sharp questions to keep the children intrigued. That’s how down the years it’s inspired spin-offs from novels to comics, from Torchwood to The Sarah Jane Adventures and many more.

The best of Doctor Who would include a dash of horror, adventures in history, enough wit to make you smile, enough ideas and strangeness and to make you think, and enough action to get you excited. That’s probably too much to fit into just one piece of television, which takes you right back to the idea that you can go anywhere and do anything, because it’s not about just one piece of television, but different travels. Like the TARDIS, Doctor Who is bigger on the inside. It’s the only show where, if you don’t like where it’s ended up one week, if you want it to be scarier, or funnier, or more thoughtful, or more action-packed, the next week will be in a completely different place and time and probably in a completely different style, but still recognisably the same programme.

That’s probably why I fell in love with it, anyway.

How Can You Find Out More?

You can read more on this blog (and my occasionally updated others) and any of my terrifyingly in-depth Doctor Who articles that take your fancy, or there are at least hundreds of thousands of other web pages, books and learned articles (though, obviously, I don’t think they’ll be as good. As with everything else about Doctor Who, your tastes may vary).

But I wouldn’t just read, if I were you. Doctor Who is probably the best TV programme ever made, so the best way to find about it is just to watch it. Take a Deep Breath and plunge in.

The new series started on BBC1 and on many other TV channels around the world last Saturday. Tune in every Saturday evening for the next three months to see more of it unfolding, brand new, that you know as much about as I do, with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and whatever friends and foes there are to come. If you missed the first episode and are in the UK, it’s free on air this Friday (and doubtless many more times) on BBC3 and at times of your own choosing on BBC iPlayer.

Or you can choose older stories in a multitude of formats – aside from the books and comics and CDs, you can find pretty much every single episode of the TV series on DVD and other formats, broadcasts, downloads and online (some of the latter even free and legal).

If you do want more than the new stories to warm your darkening Autumn nights but the incredible range of choice is bewildering, here are two suggestions that might help in your selection. Ready?

The Twelve-ish Faces of Doctor Who

It’s now a few days after the full-length debut of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. Back in 2010, a few days before the full-length debut of his predecessor Matt Smith, I published my pick of “The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who” – one story for each Doctor, to introduce them all. Or, rather, two sets of one for each Doctor, one my pick of more populist stories (or as mainstream as Doctor Who gets), the other of stranger or more thoughtful tales. They’re all easily available on DVD, with several in other formats as well.

Click here to look at both lists and see if anything takes your fancy. Then watch one.

They’re a good set of introductions for each of the other Doctors so far – except one. Four years later, there is of course a big addition to make.

To celebrate the full Matt Smith, his Doctor deserves a full story too. My lovely Richard and I are in the middle of rewatching all his adventures, and though they’ve still not settled in enough for me to divide them into populist and strange, here are some particular favourites of mine from his era:

• Amy’s Choice – a brilliant sci-fi short story, and almost Matt Smith’s era in a nutshell
  

• The Doctor’s Wife – dark, strange and moving
  

• The Crimson Horror – and this Victorian horror story makes me laugh.

Plus

• The Day of the Doctor – the Fiftieth Anniversary special, starring three Doctors and featuring a great many more.

Then choose your own Peter Capaldi story, because right now I’ve not seen those yet either!

Or perhaps, rather than the hero in his many faces, you want to get into the Daleks. If so, here’s another article I’ve prepared earlier in which I explain who and what they are and give a rough idea of what I think of their stories so far.

Tune In To #WHOonHorror

If you’re in the UK and your TV can receive the Horror Channel, you’re in luck. Several months ago, the Horror Channel bought the rights to show thirty different Doctor Who stories – at least two from each of the first seven Doctors.

So my advice is, again, to turn on your telly (or other device) and watch one.

Apparently their Doctor Who selection has been doing very well for the channel’s ratings, so with luck they’ll still be showing them in their two-episodes-daily run for some time to come. Besides, who knows? They’ve been quite a success, so they might decide to get hold of more stories to show. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve made an excellent set of choices so far. The thirty Horror Channel Doctor Who stories include fifteen that I’d give nine or ten out of ten to – and just five I’d score lower than five out of ten. I’m not going to give you a great long list of them all my own order of preference, though, because there’s something good about all of them and everyone’s tastes vary.

But if you want to look out for my particular favourites, these get my personal ten out of ten:

• The Deadly Assassin
  

• The Talons of Weng-Chiang
  

• The Curse of Fenric
  

• Genesis of the Daleks
  

• The Mind Robber
  

• The Caves of Androzani
  

• An Unearthly Child

They may or may not be great introductions to the series, but I love each of them especially, and if you happen to catch them on #WHOonHorror I can guarantee there’ll be something to entertain, amuse, scare, intrigue or offend. I just can’t guarantee which will apply to you. And if none of them happen to be scheduled for a repeat in the next few weeks, just try your luck and start with whichever one’s on!

What Doctor Who People Say About Doctor Who

This is the third edition of an article I originally wrote in 2006 to introduce that year’s new series. Version one and version two are pretty much the same as each other; this time it’s more of a regeneration. Of my other Doctor Who writing, some of my favourite – and more bite-sized – pieces I’ve written to illustrate why Doctor Who is brilliant are a selection of great scenes and what makes them marvellous. These might be easier to take in than writing about a whole story at once. In theory there are going to be fifty of them eventually, but I’ve not quite got that far yet. Still, click here for my slowly growing Doctor Who 50 Great Scenes and choose one at random.

If you want a different perspective from mine, should you have a device that can read the Radio Times App, this week’s issue (search for 23-29 August 2014) has a particularly special free gift. As well as having Peter Capaldi on the cover and several articles introducing the new series, the electronic version includes the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special from 1973. I was given a tattered old second-hand copy when I was a small boy and loved it dearly, and I still think it’s one of the most gorgeous Doctor Who magazines that’s ever been published. It’s fun and it’s now free in electronic form with the ordinary issue, so I recommend it.


And finally, for another change from me, here’s what some of the most important creative talents behind the series in past and present have to say about Doctor Who:

Russell T Davies, Doctor Who lead writer for the 2005 relaunch and through the 2000s:

“Doctor Who is the best idea ever invented in the history of the world.”

Peter Capaldi, the new Doctor:

“You should watch it if you want to nourish your heart and your soul – and if you want to be scared.”

Jenna Coleman, the Doctor’s friend and current travelling companion, Clara:

“If you like adventure, if you want to imagine that you could go anywhere in space and time – what would you do? Where would you go? It’s just a show full of infinite, infinite possibilities.”

Steven Moffat, current Doctor Who lead writer:

“Doctor Who is about a man who can travel anywhere in time and space in a box that’s bigger on the inside.”

Verity Lambert, Doctor Who founding producer from 1963 to the mid-1960s:

“He embodied the utmost complexity – he was sometimes dangerous or unpleasant, sometimes kind, sometimes foolish, but most importantly he was never a member of the establishment. He was always an outsider.”

Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who lead writer during the early 1970s and author of more Doctor Who books than anyone else:

“Much has changed about the Doctor over the years but much has remained the same. Despite the superficial differences in appearance, at heart, or rather at hearts (the Doctor has two) his character is remarkably consistent.
“He is still impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He still hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him.
“The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.
“In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around.”

Robert Holmes, Doctor Who lead writer during the mid-1970s (and so the man who got me hooked, got me into politics and got me the man I love):

“Let’s frighten the little buggers to death!”

So why don’t you turn off my web page and go and watch a more interesting Doctor Who television programme instead?

[Not actually inspired by Robert Wiblin's recent Facebook post on this same topic, but I acknowledge the coincidence. The media has actually done a much better job than I expected here and deserves some credit, but I will snark anyway.]

It’s a classic staple of action movies and Tom Clancy thrillers – the Islamic terrorist group that takes over a failed state, forcing the heroes to mount a decisive response. But some geopolitics experts think such a scenario could soon move from political fiction…to political fact.

If carbon dioxide levels reach 500 parts per million, it could initiate dangerous “runaway global warming”. But more conservative scientists urge laypeople not to worry, noting “Carbon dioxide levels are not that high yet.”

A sufficiently large nuclear war could completely destroy human civilization. If the bombs struck major manufacturing centers, they could also cause thousands of people to be put out of work.

Remember that time your boss paid you a few days late? Or that time the supermarket stopped carrying your favorite brand of cookie? Then you might not be surprised to hear many analysts believe the world economy will crash causing a giant decades-long depression.

[An informative, scientifically rigorous explanation of the dangers of climate change, but the picture on the top is that image of the Statue of Liberty buried in ice from The Day After Tomorrow]

A giant asteroid could smash into Earth at any time, scientists say. Indeed, already we are having to deal with avalanches and landslides that have blocked several major roads. Geologists think stabilizing our nation’s cliff faces may be the answer.

A group of meteorology nerds have sounded the alarm that a major hurricane could form in the next week – and now they’re turning their giant brains to the question of where it will make landfall.

Tacticians worry Russia might invade Ukraine – for example, they could choose to paradrop the 5th Battalion in under cover of night. But our experts say that that the 5th Battalion is not capable of night-time paradrops. Therefore, Russia will not be invading Ukraine.

The new superplague is said to be 100% fatal, totally untreatable, and able to spread across an entire continent in a matter of days. It is certainly fascinating to think about if your interests tend toward microbiology, and we look forward to continuing academic (and perhaps popular) discussion and debate on the subject.

The 1980s were a good time for someone with a developing interest in oceanography. In 1984, archaeologist Barry Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship captained by Black Sam Bellamy during the Golden Age of Piracy, off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, a stretch of coastline that's a notorious navigation hazard and the site of many wrecks. It's also a coastline that happens to be six hours away from me and a place I consider a second home. The discovery of the Whydah by Clifford and his team was the result of an extensive search up and down Cape Cod's Atlantic coast and marks the first, and to date only time, an authentic pirate shipwreck has been located by marine explorers. Clifford founded a museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts (just north of Wellfleet) dedicated to Bellamy and the Whydah that remains open to this day, and while he's a local hero in New England, neither him nor the story remains well known outside of the region.

In 1985, Robert Ballard and a team of oceanographers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod made world headlines by locating the much sought-after wreck of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic. Ballard's discovery captured the imagination of people all over the world (myself included), it remains possibly the most famous exploration and recovery mission in the history of oceanography, and the story of the Titanic would inspire director James Cameron to create one of the two highest-grossing movies of all time over a decade later. It's since been revealed Ballard's expedition was actually a front, and that throughout 1985 he had been secretly in the temporary employ of the United States Navy. The true purpose of his mission to clandestinely search for two missing US submarines, the USS Scorpion and USS Thresher, which had sunk in the same waters in the 1960s before they got to test the experimental nuclear reactors they had been outfitted with.

Also in 1985, a humpback whale nicknamed Humphrey attracted heavy media attention after he got “lost”, travelling through the Golden Gate to end up in San Francisco Bay. Marine biologists grew concerned when he further deviated from his normal migratory patterns by swimming up the freshwater Sacramento River before getting himself trapped at the other end of the Rio Vista Bridge, putting his life in danger. In order to get Humphrey to safety, humpback researcher Louis Herman and acoustical engineer Bernie Krause played recorded songs of whales feeding on high-power underwater speakers provided by the US Navy to get Humphrey to retrace his steps and return to the Pacific Ocean. My interest in whale songs and whale behaviour was fostered by the story of Humphrey (adapted into a wonderful book called Humphrey the Lost Whale) and other whales in the news at the time (including the sadly near-annual tradition of pilot whale beaching themselves on Cape Cod), helped cultivate my interest in the ocean and a living ecosystem and is but one facet of the link I share with it.

At first glance, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home looks for all the world like Star Trek finally deciding to say something about the environmentalist movement, about ten or twenty years too late. The now ex-Enterprise crew has to travel back in time to 1986 to retrieve a pair of humpback whales, the species having gone extinct in the 21st century and a probe from the outer reaches of the universe has come looking to talk to them and keeps turning up the frequency of its message to dangerous degrees because it can't understand why it can't get any kind of response. Spock's constant comments about the illogical shortsightedness of hunting a species to extinction and Gillian Taylor's fiery and impassioned dedication to her cause at least place this movie on the right side of the issue, though in truth The Voyage Home's environmentalism is pretty superficial. There's not a whole lot of actual marine science on display here, and most of the rationale behind saving the whales the characters discuss amounts to “it's mean not to”. This isn't bad in the slightest and I'm not about to drag Star Trek across the coals for delivering a positive message in a soft way in a world where the collected works of Margaret Armen exist, but this does mean we probably ought to re-examine what this movie actually is.

What it is, first off, is a Star Trek sandwich. Being Star Trek, the production history naturally resembles a patchwork quilt knitted by seventeen different seamsters, none of whom knew what anyone else was doing and one of whom lived on the Moon. The beginning and end of the movie, that is, the parts set in the Star Trek universe's “present” and deal overtly with tying up the film serial's threads, were written by Harve Bennett, while the bits in the middle, the action in 1980s San Francisco, was helmed by Nicholas Meyer, no less. That is, by the way, after the initial four or five drafts were rejected and Paramount went through a bunch of writers. What's notable about the Bennett-penned stuff is, actually, how incredibly dull it is: We spend what's got to be a half-hour watching Starfleet people look at screens, Spock playing Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! on his Vulcan Nintendo WiiU and everyone else recapping the plot of the last two movies. Special demerits have to go to the scenes in the Federation council chamber, which basically amounts to a bunch of dignitaries having a right old laugh at the silly Klingon ambassador thinking he has grievances to air at the Federation. It basically nails the coffin on any idea that Kruge from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was supposed to be a problematization of the Federation's authority and presumptuousness.

(This is not helped by Bennett writing Kirk and crew as the noblest of noble, heroically enduring suffering and sacrifice for the good of the universe. It almost feels like this isn't the work of an old Star Trek veteran, but a fan coming to the series with pre-existing notions of its gravity and importance.)

Speaking of The Search for Spock, this is also the moment where Robin Curtis' Saavik is finally unceremoniously dropped off a bridge, staying behind on Vulcan for reasons that go entirely unspecified. Well, actually that's not quite true-They do go specified in Bennett's original draft for this portion of the movie, which would have had Saavik stayed behind on Vulcan because she was pregnant after her escapade with Spock on the Genesis Planet in the last movie. I really don't think I need to elabourate on why this would have been such a catastrophically horrendous idea, so I'll just once again stress that Saavik was originally supposed to be Star Trek's new lead in Star Trek II, got demoted to a support role in Star Trek III and Spock was explicitly her teacher and at least several decades her senior. Thank goodness director Leonard Nimoy stepped in and had that scene cut. In the finished film, Saavik's exit is insulting, but at least it's not as unbelievably offensive and repugnant as it could have been I suppose.

No, it's without question the time travel story that's the real highlight here. Perhaps surprisingly, considering his work on Wrath of Khan could charitably be called “amateurish”, Nicholas Meyer's section of the film is a largely unqualified triumph. Maybe it helps him to be working with a far more skilled director and to be limited to writing contemporary dialog, but the parts of Voyage Home set in San Francisco are generally an absolute joy and rightfully considered among the best of Star Trek's film offerings. Given its emphasis on marine biology and conservation, you'd think that would elevate the movie for me and it does: I'd definitely call it my favourite of the Star Trek films we've revisited so far. And yet oceanography is not actually one of Voyage Home's central themes (indeed, it's so little of a theme that we get puzzling decisions like redressing the Monterey Bay Aquarium as the “San Francisco Cetacean Institute” when there actually is a Marine Mammal Center in Marin County). Instead, what this movie really is, conceptually, is an update of “Tomorrow is Yesterday”.

While the main impetus for the time travel is different (the original pitch amounted to “there's something the Federation needs that can only be found in the 1980s” and the story is about purposefully going back to the past to save the future instead of escaping it), the structure is broadly similar, as both “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and Voyage Home have the crew time displaced and interacting with contemporary Earth in a humorously awkward and stilted way. Voyage Home comes across as superior in this regard purely because it builds off of the groundwork laid in Search for Spock in putting all of the characters, not just Kirk and Spock, on the same level, and it does so in leaps and bounds. Not only does each and every character get a moment to shine, they each get their own subplot that's integral to the final resolution. Never before or since has this cast been depicted this way, and everyone rises to the challenge eagerly and formidably: Everyone remembers Chekov and Uhura stumbling around Alameda looking for the “Nuclear Wessels”, or Scotty and McCoy inventing transparent aluminum with a Gen. 1 Macintosh (I had that computer, by the way). In “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, by contrast, only Kirk gets to play around in 1967, with the rest of the bridge crew relegated to pushing buttons and watching viewscreens.

That's not to say the choice to make the MacGuffin humpback whales was completely arbitrary, though: Nimoy picked them because he felt whale songs would give the film an “air of mystery”, and the film does pick up on this. The probe is one of my favourite ideas in all of Star Trek: This big, mysterious thing that suddenly appears out of nowhere, returns just as quickly and remains a completely incomprehensible and unknowable enigma. Likewise, the scene of it travelling through the solar system making the Federation's science stations go all wonky is one of my favourite sequences in the franchise too. It's the first moment I can say Star Trek truly and indisputably (and successfully) hits cosmic wonder. There's also the tiniest flash of the mystical and Fortean here too: Some people might scoff at the idea of cetaceans being a highly advanced intelligence with ties to the extragalactic realm (though curiously nobody seems to mind when Douglas Adams does it), but there is at least one account I've read where eyewitnesses report seeing whales and dolphins going wild in the presence of a UFO hovering over the ocean. I remember being reminded of this account the first time I saw this film and thinking how clever it was Star Trek seemed to be acknowledging that. In hindsight it probably wasn't intentional, but it's a fun motif to graft onto the movie either way.

Though the conservation message is there, the real purpose in sending the former Enterprise crew back in time is to re-examine Star Trek's utopianism with the renewed scrutiny the perspective of the 1980s provides us. In his own terrific review of Voyage Home, Jack Graham points out how the movie tells the story of relics from the utopianism of the 1960s forced to wander through Reagan's Neoconservative United States. This ties back into the wave of nostalgia for Star Trek and other pop culture artefacts like it that must have been circulating at the time: Voyage Home is essentially about digging up Star Trek and throwing it up against the modern world to see if it's still worth hanging onto in 1986. So, how does Star Trek's flavour of idealism and vision for the future stack up in 1986?

Well, one consequence of Nicholas Meyer handling this portion of the movie is that some of his trademark top-down heavy-handedness does work its way into the film: The worst example is probably when Spock questions Kirk about profanity on the bus, and he responds by saying “That's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you if you don't swear every other word”. The implication, of course, is that Star Trek's refined and elegant future would have no need for such vulgarities, being as they are the province of uneducated commoners. So that's pretty bourgeois and classist. Then there's the scene (also on the bus), with the punk and the boom box, which is about as bad and predictable as people have said it is. And Meyer, being Meyer, can't resist throwing in pointlessly showy name-drops to Shakespeare, Melville and D.H. Lawrence, because he wants to make it perfectly clear to us that he thinks he's more intellectual and well-read than we are.

(Speaking of Star Trek's futurism, and I don't think this has ever been commented on before, but I think The Voyage Home may be the very first time in the history of the franchise where it's stated the Original Series is supposed to take place in the 23rd Century, and that money no longer exists in that time. This makes sense not just given Meyer's perspective, but because this movie also marks Mike Okuda's Star Trek debut, and it's Okuda who created the official Star Trek Chronology for “The Neutral Zone”. On a related note, Spock's behaviour in this movie was totally the template for Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

So this isn't looking terribly good. Star Trek is coming back for its own nostalgia theme party and still seems to be clinging to its dangerously outmoded paternalistic upper class white attitudes. It still seems to think it can swoop down from On High and tell us all how to live our lives, even though the world is a vastly different place and it never even had the right to do that in the first place. But The Voyage Home's production tribulations actually bail Meyer out on this one, because the key character here is Gillian Taylor. Though her part was originally written for Eddie Murphy in what is admittedly one of the franchise's biggest missed opportunities, Catherine Hicks is absolutely phenomenal: She's defiant, commanding and sprightly and a more then effective comic performer. She immediately gels with the rest of the cast (especially William Shatner and James Doohan) and outright demands to be heard and taken seriously as an equal at every opportunity, both in and out of character. Hicks turns Taylor into a complete subversion of the girl-of-the-week role she's expected to play, making decisions out of her passion for whales and for the future-Not at all for Kirk, whom she mostly regards as a well-meaning, but washed up, guy who's past his prime.

This is why Taylor is the lynchpin to everything here. The biggest criticism leveled against her, and one Meyer himself raised, is that her decision to accompany the ex-Enterprise crew back to the future invalidates a valuable message about taking responsibility to foster material social progress in the present. In essence, an escape into a utopian dream (and indeed, given Star Trek's age and attitude, one that may well be outdated) with no commitment to work towards making it a reality. Meyer is, predictably, wrong. Remember, the whole point of Voyage Home was from the start that there's something we have in 1986 the utopian Star Trek future lacks and is in dire need of: Taylor doesn't represent an escape into fantasy or an embrace of retrograde ideals, she represents the utopian ideals of the 1980s and the reason she's so important is because she reminds Star Trek that it needs them. That Star Trek needs her. On a textual level, Taylor herself points out that nobody in the crew's time knows anything about humpback whales, and there's nobody more qualified than her to teach them. And remember, this whole mess started because there were no whales in the future for the probe to talk to and the Federation had no clue what to do. Gillian is going to work for a better future because she's going to work to make Star Trek better.

(Oh yes, Gillian absolutely belongs in the 23rd Century. Which is why I adore it when Chris Claremont brings her back for the Original Series graphic novel he wrote for DC in the 1990s. She doesn't have a huge role, but Claremont clearly writes her as the only person who can act as Kirk's true equal and foil: She's the new, improved, platonic Carol Marcus. I always felt Gillian should have gotten a position on the new Enterprise as a natural sciences officer and was beyond livid when neither Star Trek V or Star Trek VI acknowledged her existence. Especially because the heartwarming scene in San Francisco bay at the end of the movie unquestionably casts her as a member of the family.)

And that's why this is such a terrific time travel story. Star Trek's re-emergence in the 1980s has revealed it to be something of a dinosaur: It's very telling Kirk and Spock's cover story is that they're homeless and burned out Berkeley hippies from the 1960s (hell, they don't even have the Enterprise anymore). As Gillian says, they're “hard luck cases” and it's tough not to have a soft spot for them. In allowing Gillian to come back to the future with the crew, Star Trek is admitting that it's a bit faded and out of its time, but, more importantly, it's making us a promise that it knows this and is willing to learn and grow with the times. It's something Star Trek has always said, but it's vitally important that it says this again now when history has definitively moved beyond it and Star Trek has officially become retro. It's the exact message the franchise needed to convey at this point in time, and it's a true laugh riot to boot. It's no surprise that in spite of its quirks and imperfections The Voyage Home became the most popular and successful Star Trek movie ever. Gillian Taylor brought whales to Star Trek, and Will Riker will someday make an offhand comment about a “cetacean ops” on *his* USS Enterprise.

Speaking of...The Voyage Home did so unexpectedly well that Paramount thought the time was finally right to bring Star Trek back to television. But, given the actors' salaries coming off of four feature films made them prohibitively expensive for a television budget, they decided to start fresh with a new cast. And, to everyone's surprise, they announced Gene Roddenberry, D.C. Fontana, Dave Gerrold and Bob Justman would be back in the production offices.

The Next Generation is finally about to be born.

In addition to his occasional duties as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson finds the time to do a wide range of other things, including earning £250,000 a year as a columnist for the Telegraph. With all those things to do and so little time to do them in, it’s hardly surprising that Boris can’t devote his full attention to everything he does, and this time it’s the column that suffers. For it’s here that he’s not been paying proper attention to what he’s writing, and has let the affable, humorous Boris the buffoon mask slip to reveal the scary reality of the true Boris underneath.

Boris has declared, like so many other columnists and professional bloviators, that Something Must Be Done to stop terrorists and the Islamic State. Despite this situation having directly emerged from the Something That Was Done when the same people were calling for action against terrorism and Saddam Hussein a decade or so ago, we’re assured that this time, Doing Something is the only option, as long as it’s the Something that columnist has decreed is the right thing.

What does Boris want done? Oh, nothing much really, just a minor change in the law. It’d only be a tiny thing…

it is hard to press charges without evidence. The law needs a swift and minor change so that there is a “rebuttable presumption” that all those visiting war areas without notifying the authorities have done so for a terrorist purpose.

Yes, it’s just a minor change in the law to declare that a certain class of people (that no one will accidentally be included within, of course) will from now on be treated as guilty of a crime until they can prove that they didn’t do it. Having been branded as a terrorist, and thus subject to the control orders that Boris also wants to bring back, it’ll no doubt be a simple task for them t prove their innocence, especially when many things will be kept from them in the name of ‘national security’. Of course, we’ve now got secret courts, and it’ll only take a further minor change in the law to ensure that all those we’ve declared terrorists have to go to one to prove their innocence.

And so it turns out, if there was any doubt, that Boris is just another politician ready to fall into the politician’s fallacy of something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done. Like so many politicians of the last decade or so, it turns out that the Something which Boris thinks Must Be Done to protect us against the terrorists is to give yet more powers to the state and the security services and take more powers away from the rest of us. As ever, these powers are only to be used against Bad People, but once the state has acquired the convenience of being able to declare people guilty until proven innocent of a certain crime, what do you think is more likely? That those powers would remain restricted to just one crime and one group of people (or even be allowed to wither away unused and be removed from the statute book) or gradually be applied to a wider group of alleged crimes and people, just because they’re such useful powers? How long until someone seriously proposes David Allen Green’s Something Must Be Done Bill because we can’t be too careful and Something Must Be Done?

Welcome to the future, where we’re all guilty of something and someone we’ve never met will be given the chance to prove our innocence behind closed doors. It’s OK, though, because Boris is Prime Minister and he’s got funny hair. Laugh at the funny man with his funny hair, and pay no attention to the jackboots behind the smile.

 

Another four hours’ work on this writing exercise. I wrote the new stuff yesterday morning, so before I saw Deep Breath, and I’ve not re-read it since I’ve seen Peter Capaldi in the role (or the relaunched Clara). Feels a little like the home stretch now, which are always famous last words for a writing project. Now I’ve decided to complete the script, I’ve had to go back with an eye to giving it a proper story and set up a few twists and reveals better. There’s still quite a lot missing. The Daleks-as-Buddhists thing is a funny idea, but there’s meant to be something with bite behind it, and I need to get more of that across. If only to make it seem like something a Dalek would do, rather than a silly idea a writer had. There needs to be a better sense of what the human monks are doing, more of a sense of community. I realised that this story is yet another ‘Daleks pretending to be friendly / one Dalek on his own is OK’ variation on The Power of the Daleks, and that’s played out, now, so I’m trying to get across – and I’m not quite there yet – that it’s more like Bruce Banner, that it’s about keeping the lid on genuine anger and violence.

Reading it, I also started to wonder what would have happened if the Doctor hadn’t shown up. One of my golden rules when I’ve written Doctor Who is that I ask that question. What difference is the Doctor making? I’ve found that the stories that work are ones where the answer is ‘everything is different’. There are stories, particularly in some of the early EDAs, where the Doctor just kind of observes and doesn’t disrupt. Asking that question is really useful, because it crystallises what the stakes are, what the threat is. ‘If the Doctor hadn’t shown up, then … ‘ is a sentence that any Doctor Who writer should be able to complete very early in the plotting process, and which they need to keep in mind right to the end.

Not that there’s been a ‘plotting process’ here, as such. But it’s interesting: if the Doctor hadn’t shown up, perhaps ‘Gandalf’ (sorry, still using a placeholder name) and the Eternal Dalek would have reached a stable point, perhaps there would have been peace. Not going to happen, is it? The Daleks haven’t fired a shot, yet. You can’t have a Dalek story without at least something getting shot, can you?

And at some point I really need to time it, to make sure I can tell this story in the, er, 47 minutes. Does that sound about right?

I’m going to try to get this finished before the actual Dalek episode next week. So … yeah, more famous last words for a writing project.

Normal caveats apply: this is unfinished, it’s a writing exercise, so on and so on.

Retreat3

I've realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from 'Allo 'Allo.  But not as good.  That's a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner.  You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff.  Moffat evidently imagines that Strax's misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of 'Deep Breath' for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he's already done several hundred times in other episodes.  (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from 'Allo 'Allo - he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded - upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase - from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique.  If you object to my singling out 'Allo 'Allo here then, really, I agree with you.  How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner - with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it - is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy.  Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc.  So we can't be too hard on Moffat here.  He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism.  Can't really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn't as good as the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo... because the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words - it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they'll get it... because English is the only proper language, and people who don't speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don't mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat.  But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy.  Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who.  And Strax isn't overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality.  He's supposed to be an alien.  And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc.  Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance.  He is the other, sure, but the other muddling along amongst us and basically on our side.

But here we run into yet another twist in the story... because this alignment of the other with 'us' is worrying in itself.  This recurring team - Vastra, Jenny and Strax - worries me.  It represents the reconciliation of the antagonist with 'us'.  They don't just live with humans, they live in Victorian London, and this seems to me to be the most blatant possible way of integrating them into a kind of aggressively middle-class, twee, cutesy, ostensibly lovable, yet aggressive and insular and ressentimental Britishness, a Britishness at its most iconically imperialistic and hierarchical.  Victoriana is the heavy drapes and elaborate dresses and cravats and top hats of the middle-classes.  Victoriana is the coughing, shivering, gin-swilling street poor as an essential background decoration, a set of tropes to locate us.  Victoriana is brown derby-wearing police inspectors (probably called Lestrade) who consult toff private detectives because, being working class, they're too thick to do their jobs themselves (the implicit goodness and necessity of the police is never questioned in Victoriana - something that wasn't true amongst common people in actual Victorian London, who often saw the bobbies as incompetents at best, violent spies at worst).  Victoriana is empire as backdrop.  Queen and country.  Big Ben.  Smog, gaslight, cobbles, hansom cabs, etc etc etc.  This is the milieu that Vastra, Jenny and Strax have assimilated themselves into.  Vastra even challenges the bad guys "in the name of the British Empire!"  This sort of thing no doubt seems desperately cute to Moffat, and all those people who write those rubbishy Jago & Litefoot audios for Big Finish, but its only our historical amnesia to what the British Empire was that allows this kind of desperate cutesiness to subsist.  The subsistence of it, in turn, allows the amnesia.  And boy, do we love our symptoms... hence our desire to inflict them on everyone and pull everyone, and everything, into them.  The Silurian and the Sontaran, for instance, have joined us in our adorable, pop-Conan-Doyle-inflected national fantasy of a penny dreadful past of wonders and horrors.  The horrors are all safely in the past (things we've cured now) and the wonders remain as a kind of nostalgic longing for the lost times when, right or wrong, he had confidence and lush gothic cliches galore on our side.  Vastra - the representative of a displaced people who are perpetually denied redress and justice (umm... imperialism? colonialism?) - has isolated herself from her people and integrated herself into imperial Britain.  She has ceased to be any kind of rebuke to 'our' world, or 'us'.  And 'we' have become the national gestalt that once lived in the United Kingdom of Sherlock.  Strax - the representative of a culture of militarism and conquest - has similarly integrated himself.  His imperialist attitudes are turned into cute, amusing misprisions which allow him to sink with ease into the warm slippers of imperial Victoriana.  The militarism of the Sontarans is no longer a rebuke to 'our' militarism.  The Sontaran may not be a threatening other anymore, but he is now no longer, in any sense, a mirror reflecting our own nastier values back at us.  He's not a reflection that attacks.  He's a stooge who safely reminds us of our foibles by being sillier than us, and then puts on the uniform of a servant and takes his place in the pyramid.  The good pyramid.  'Our' pyramid.  The pyramid we all fit into somewhere, nicely and neatly.  The pyramid that even the comedy tramps fit into.  The pyramid in which the chirpy cockney maid voluntarily calls people "ma'am" and serves them their tea, as an empowered life choice.  The pyramid of contextless, gutted, sanitised tropes.  This is partly why our representations of the Victorian era are so tropetastic... because tropes slot neatly into each other (hence all the Victoriana crossovers, i.e. Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc), arrange themselves into pyramids of perceived cultural weight, and start to resemble a vertiginous but orderly class structure, a sort of naturally-occuring periodic table of the social roles, which is the ideology of Victoriana that we are sold by every bit of culture the tropes come from.  This is why 'actually existing steampunk' (which 'Deep Breath' appropriates in predictable fashion, Moffat having been pulling at this particular thread for some time) is so pernicious.  Because the iconography of the high era of industrialisation, imperialism and colonialism is reduced to contextless fetishized commodities, sumptuous archaic kit, and safely de-conflicted social classes.  And even the identification of the cogwheel and the top hat with villainy nevertheless makes no apology for the joy we're supposed to take in the sheen of the 19th century machine. 

Of course, once again, we shouldn't be too hard on Moffat.  He's just doing what lots of people do.  He's just going along.  And he's not doing anything worse than Robert Holmes did in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  In fact, he's better than that.  His obligatory Victorian chinese person looks right, according to the big book of stereotypes... but at least he was played by an actual Chinese person.  And at least he wasn't being singled out.  At least he was just another brick in the pyramid, another character on the picturesque Quality Street tin that Victorian London has been turned into by our culture industries.  That's what we do now.  We don't do stories about Victorian London in which Chinese people are The Enemy.  The sneer at the foreigner has been displaced elsewhere, translated into code.  Now, we do stories in which all races and classes, all costumes and styles, all tropes, are brought together, all present and correct, all slotted into place.

Is that so bad?  I honestly don't know.  I'm not necessarily arguing that we're looking at a regress.  But I'm pretty sure we're not looking at progress.  And I'm not talking about the paucity of round things on the wall.

Comrade Lucian suggested I do predictions based on the episode summaries that have been released for the new episodes of Doctor Who, and also try to guess who’s writing what. Episode descriptions from here (iirc they’re copied from the Radio Times).

Deep Breath – Killers stalk London in the late 1890′s. A restaurant that is actually a slaughterhouse and a buried spaceship see the Doctor confronting a long-forgotten foe.

tr: pointless Victoriana (steampunk, if we’re really unlucky) and the fanfic characters (no matter how much they say it I’m not referring to them as ‘the Paternoster gang’) making their return (though to be fair, I knew this in advance). Despite being directed by Ben Wheatley, I’m not optimistic. “A restaurant that is actually a slaughterhouse” sounds like the kind of establishment that’d probably do well amongst the hipsters of Brighton. We’re also running out of long-forgotten foes, too. My money’s on the Meddling Monk. Writer: Moffat [again, knew this one already, plus first episode, so it’s obvious]

Into The Dalek – A miniaturised team embark on a fantastic voyage into a Dalek so damaged it has become good.

Oh, they used the name of the thing they’re ‘paying homage’ to in the summary. Good stuff. Seriously, though, are we still doing the Daleks? Haven’t you realised that unless you’re really going to try (by, eg, letting Rob Shearman write it) there’s no real point to it beyond being able to say “oh look, Daleks in it again”? Then again, they’re probably paying the Terry Nation estate an insane amount of money for the licence so they might as well fill their boots while they can, I suppose. Writer: idk, Moffat again? [Moffat and Phil Ford]

Robot of Sherwood – The Doctor discovers an evil plan from beyond the stars in Sherwood Forest. Who is real and who isn’t?

I do quite like that title. Otherwise, not much meat on those description-bones. Just serves to remind me it would be quite nice to have a straight historical¹ but I don’t see it happening any time soon. Writer: Stephen Thompson or some similar non-entity [Gatiss (really? gosh)]

Listen – What scares the Doctor? Ghosts of the past and future crowd into the lives of the Doctor and Clara; a terrified caretaker in a children’s home, the last man standing in the universe, and a little boy who doesn’t want to join the army… “What’s that in the mirror, and the corner of your eye? What’s the footstep following, but never passing by?”

Oh, a Scary episode. This’ll be good/bad depending on who’s writing it and how they’re feeling. Means it’ll either be written by Gatiss or Moffat (“can’t write” and “won’t write”, respectively). Writer: Moffat fosho, just noticed the nursery rhyme at bottom there. A kid will definitely say in a way he thinks is spooooky at some point. [Moffat]

Time Heist – The Doctor is tasked with breaking into the Bank of Karabraxos, the deadliest in the cosmos. He is helped by a beautiful shape-shifter and a cyber-augmented gamer. But nothing can prepare them for the Teller: a creature that can detect guilt.

“a cyber-augmented gamer” um, ok. This sounds terrible. Writer: ok, this one definitely sounds like Stephen Thompson [Thompson].

The Caretaker – Clara has it all under control, so long as everybody in her life never actually meets, but then Coal Hill welcomes a new relief caretaker with a Scottish accent, while the Skovox Blitzer is ready to destroy humanity.

Sounds a bit like The Family Of Blood Lite. If they had any wit it’d be a misdirect but they’re lazy enough that it probably isn’t. Skovox is a good alien name. Probably not a Moffat joint, though, it doesn’t have nearly enough syllables. Writer: doubt he’d return to the well, and besides, he’s writing books and Wolverine at the moment, so not Paul Cornell. No idea.[Moffat & Gareth Roberts]

Kill the Moon – In the near future, the Doctor and Clara arrive on a decrepit shuttle making a suicide mission to the Moon. Crashing on the lunar surface, they find a mining base full of eviscerated corpses, spider-like creatures scuttling about in the dark, and a terrible dilemma.

Yep, quite a good title. Rest of the episode sounds entirely standard. Writer: nope [someone called Peter Harness, Wikipedia tells me he adapted that Jason Isaacs detective show my mum quite liked a few years back]

Mummy on the Orient Express – The Mummy is stalking the passengers and if it sees you you have 66 seconds to live. Clara sees the Doctor at his most deadliest and most ruthless and realises it’s time to say goodbye.

See, this raises my hopes that we’ll be getting rid of Clara, then I look immediately down at the next episode summary and she’s back! Description suggests it’ll be a bit grimungritty so I’m not hugely optimistic, but again, a funny title, so. Writer: I’d guess Chibnall if I didn’t think² he was too too busy writing that thing with olivia colman and that other Scottish guy who used to be in this. Dunno. [Jamie Mathieson, who apparently wrote for Being Human (ok) and that Dirk Gently series (nope). Probably MOR.]

Flatline – Clara is now separated from the Doctor and discovers a threat from another dimension. But how do you hide when even the walls are no protection? With no Doctor around, Clara goes against a foe that exists beyond normal perception.

This sounds like the description of this series’ version of The Girl Who Waited or something. In fact, it sounds a bit like it cold have been a Big Finish audio. Kinda hopeful for this, actually. Writer: Based on my earlier comparison, Tom McRae? [Mathieson, again]

In the Forest of the Night – The human race wakes up to the most surprising invasion yet: the trees have moved back in. Everywhere a forest has grown overnight and taken back the Earth.

Thin description, sounds pretty weird, I genuinely have no idea what it’s going to be and Writer: it’s written by Frank Cottrell Boyce [ok I knew this one too]. This is the episode I’m most looking forward to.

Dark Water / Death in Heaven – In the mysterious world of the Nethersphere, plans have been drawn. Old friends and old enemies manoeuvre around the Doctor, and an impossible choice is looming over him. Death is not an end, promises the organisation known as 3W. “You betrayed me. You betrayed my trust, our friendship, and everything I’ve ever stood for. You let me down.”

Mysterious world blah blah, plans have been drawn blah blah, friends and enemies, the word ‘impossible’, choice to make, some nebulous statement about death blah blah blah, Big Portentous Phrase at the bottom about someone who’s been betrayed or some shit… Where’s my series finale description bingo card gone? Yep, this’ll be a two-parter to round the series out, fully expect it to be entirely standard. Writer: Moffat, of course [Moffat]

So, there’s some stuff in there that might not be entirely terrible. We’ll see what we’re in for on Saturday.

Having watched the BBC documentary on Kate Bush last night, I naturally called in at HMV in Leicester on the way back from visiting my mother in hospital to buy a copy of her 50 Words for Snow.

I got talking with the young man on the till.

He asked if I had seen the documentary. I said I had, but that for me her first LP would always be the most important.

"Was that 1979?"

"No," I said, "1978."

In fact, as I could have told him, it was February 1978.

For a few years in your teens, every month feels different and you are acutely aware of changing trends and fashions.

My misfortune was that, for me, the years when this was true for me coincided with the reign of glam rock in the singles chart and then that odd period when we listened to novelty hits like Kung Fu Fighting and waited impatiently for punk.

I know most hits from the 1980s, but because this was my decade of political activism, I know them from the pub after canvassing or council meetings. So I can struggle to tell you what they are called.

After that it is all a blur and it is hard to know which decade a song come from.

But for a few years in the Seventies I was cool, even if the singles chart was not.

Will Peter Capaldi know how to fly the TARDIS in an hour’s time? Take a Deep Breath!

We’re thrilled looking forward to the new Doctor, and an old monster. Sixty-seven million years old (today).




It’s not the first time dinosaurs have savaged London (and I’m not talking Boris vs Ken). Doctor Who history includes the 1974 story Invasion of the Dinosaurs, featuring Jon Pertwee and, as I’ve written before… Some problems. But it also boasts one of the most fabulous book covers (and onomatopoeic effects) ever devised.

Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Blood Heat is a more thrilling if more obscure 1993 story published as part of the brilliant continuing book range that kept the series and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor alive in the 1990s. It even features Silurians, too! But the cover of Jim Mortimore’s novel, while thrilling, isn’t quite as awesome as that of Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation from 1976. So I’ve drawn a very subtle bonus feature to fix that. I think you’ll agree it was just what it needed.




I don’t know what tonight’s story will bring us, aside of course from another Tyrannosaur in the capital and a Doctor who’s at last not hiding his age, but I hope it’ll be every bit as exciting as its two predecessors. Now all they need is to commission a book version and a proper painted cover – both Chris Achilleos and Jeff Cummins are still around. There’s only one way to decide which… FIGHT!

KKLAK!

RROAR!

VWORP VWORP!

See it in an hour.

Today at work, one of my heroin addict patients getting treated in inpatient rehab for heroin addiction managed to smuggle…well, you want to take a wild guess? Yeah, he smuggled in some heroin and got high in the hospital. Another patient saw him do it and told me. I had a long talk with him and took measures to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

I wouldn’t say I’m disappointed in the addict. Anyone who expects heroin addicts to follow rules that result in them getting less heroin is going to be so consistently frustrated that they will eventually lower their standards.

But I am a little disappointed in the patient who told me. Come on, man! Nobody likes a tattletale!

I realize this feeling is totally one hundred percent irrational. The patient was absolutely correct that using heroin in rehab is bad, we enforce our anti-heroin rules fairly and don’t have any draconian punishments when people break them, and most of these people come into rehab at least sorta-voluntarily and agree to the rules. Telling me was absolutely the correct decision.

But I still feel a little disappointed in him.

This feeling is not born of any kind of personal experience. I’ve never had much trouble with authority. I follow most of the important laws, I never got in trouble in school. No one’s ever tattled on me. Although my association with many libertarians provides me with a lot of examples of authority overreaching itself, I’m pretty sure the rule “don’t use heroin in a drug rehab” isn’t one one of those.

As far as I can tell, my only two consistent positions are “disagree with the existence of rules” and “agree with rules and be happy when people help enforce those rules”, and I’m definitely not pushing for the first.

And yet I’m still kind of annoyed with that guy.

Dislike of tattletales seems to be, if not a human universal, at least a human very-common, arising in the absence of obvious social pressure and seeming attractive even to people whose social position ought to naturally turn them against it. My impression from old mobster movies is that even the police had contempt for people who ratted on organized crime, even though those people were obviously doing good for society.

This seems to be a clear case of virtue ethics versus utilitarianism. A rat who betrays the mob is helping society by getting rid of criminals, but he’s also proving himself an untrustworthy person who betrays his friends and who might not be a good choice to associate with. Fine.

But my patient? He never promised anybody he wasn’t going to tell on them. He had no association with the addict besides being a patient in the same hospital as him. If he had any duty at all, it was to his doctors, who were working really hard to help him, and he discharged this duty admirably by helping them enforce their rules.

So in this case I think it is just a flaw in my brain. I am acting as if all my patients had made some kind of implied deal to respect each other’s privacy, and the one tattletale was being a dealbreaker by defecting. But since no such deal was made – and since indeed people in a rehab facility should not expect such a deal – there was no deal-breaking involved.

One cannot say the same for the position endorsed by Leah Libresco, who wrote about a similar episode of tattling in her blog post The Ethicist Endorses Omertà

The NYT‘s Ethicist has taken a very strange approach to wrongdoing in this weekend’s column. A student wrote in to say that ze saw a friend take someone’s car keys and throw them into a lake. The friend offered the letterwriter $50 as an implicit bribe in order to stay quiet. The bribe worked. Later, someone came by looking for his keys, and the letterwriter kept mum. But ze felt queasy about zer choice, and asked the Ethicist for his advice.

Assume that for some reason he can’t just give the guy his $50 back before talking. His only two choices are to keep the money and stay silent, or keep the money and talk. The first choice fails to right a wrong, the second breaks his contract. Which is better?

The Ethicist said the writer was wrong to take the deal, but having taken it, he is compelled to respect it. Leah disagreed, saying that he was wrong to take the bribe, and having realized that he should break his deal and tell the victim everything. She says: “Sticking by an immoral compact wrongs yourself and your accomplice. . . it’s clear that we don’t want people to hew to unethical agreements, simply because breaking promises is bad.”

I’m about halfway between these two positions. One should try one’s hardest to get out of an immoral contract. But if that’s impossible, I think one needs to weigh the moral cost of breaking a promise against the moral cost of carrying out the immoral contract, with a bias towards keeping your word unless it’s totally repugnant.

Let me try to give an example Leah will be especially able to understand.

Suppose that I become a Catholic priest and take confession. I swear not to break the seal of the confessional and not to go tell the secular authorities what I hear.

My first client (I bet there’s a better word for that!) is a child molester who confesses all the child molestation he’s doing. I tell him to stop, and he says unconvincingly that he’ll think about it.

I think “Holy f@#k, I was just expecting people to talk about sleeping in on Sundays, this is way worse than I could have expected”. I decide that my original promise not to tell the secular authorities was immoral, and I go off and tell the secular authorities. They arrest the child molester. Everyone lives happily ever after except that no one confesses things at Church ever again.

Both Leah and myself agree that some sort of a confessional-type institution is useful (even if I as an atheist think of it more in terms of psychiatric confidentiality). But such an institution is impossible without people being able to really mean promises. A credible promise can’t just be “I promise to do this thing unless I later decide it is bad, in which case I won’t”. You have to be able to really trust someone.

As Leah herself very correctly puts it in a different blog post on a different botched Ethicist decision:

The Ethicist is crippling his own ability (and that of anyone suspected to subscribe to his philosophy) to make a promise. A promise is not an indication of present beliefs (“I don’t plan to repeat anything you say in this room”) it is a bind on future action (“I won’t repeat what you say, even if I wish I hadn’t made this promise later”). If he isn’t comfortable making that kind of promise, he has the option to tell patients and others up front, but treating promises as breakable upon reflection dilutes them for him and everyone else.

The covenant marriage movement is meant to counteract this kind of thinking in one sphere. In an age of no-fault divorce, they’re trying to carve out a special niche, clearly differentiated from mainstream marriage, where a change of heart isn’t sufficient justification to break a promise. But there isn’t an equivalent in most other spheres of life. One can say only “I really mean this promise,” and a reader of the Ethicist’s column might reasonably hear a silent “right now” at the end of that phrase.

But now it’s Leah adding the “right now” and The Ethicist enforcing covenants. Leah points out that the Ethicist has changed its mind on this point, but doesn’t explain why, upon being given the opposite position, she continues to disagree.

Promises are useful because they allow beneficial Pareto-optimal deals to be made. If promises are untrustworthy, beneficial deals become impossible and everyone loses out. The principle “Break all promises to respect immoral deals” not only makes immoral deals impossible, but also any moral deals where there is a risk of either participant deciding they are immoral, or even moral deals where one participant can credibly claim to have decided they are immoral and so back out of their obligation punishment-free. This is a pretty big set of deals and so we should not lightly endorse people’s ability to break promises they believe are immoral.

I should probably clarify here that all my promises usually contain an implied “unless following this promise is much more difficult than I could reasonably have expected” and I assume my interlocutor knows this. So if I promise someone to get them milk from the store, and then I go to the store and there’s only one carton of milk and a guy has just taken it and tells me he won’t give it to me, I don’t feel morally obligated to beat him up and steal it from him. If somebody wants a promise from me without the implied “unless” they are welcome to ask me for it. Or in certain cases where it is obvious that is what they want, I will assume it without being asked. And in those sorts of cases if I make it I will keep it, beating-up and all. But I would think much harder before making a promise like that, and I would lawyer its wording the same way I would a wish from a genie with a known mean streak.

Much simpler and perhaps best of all were those ancient promises, where people were like “If ever I betray your trust, then may the ravens of Odin peck out my right eye!” There’s no ambiguity here. You know exactly what’s enforcing the deal – getting your right eye pecked out by ravens. If you later decide your deal was unethical, you are welcome to assuage your conscience by cancelling it, but you should still expect to have your right eye pecked out by ravens. Since the enforcement mechanism is bloodthirsty heavenly birds rather than morality per se, you don’t get these weird questions about whether other, different morality can ride in and free you from it. It’s not even a question of “freeing” so much as of trade-offs. If you want to break your promise for money, you can get the money – but the ravens will peck out your eye. If you want to break your promise for love, you can get the love – but the ravens will peck out your eye. And if you want to break your promise for a greater moral cause, you can get your greater moral cause – but your eye still gets pecked out.

You know exactly where you stand with eye-pecking ravens, which is a hell of a lot better than you can ever say about morality.

Friday:

We've got just ONE day to go before DOCTOR WOO returns with brand new Doctor, Sir Peter of Capaldi.



So we've been celebrating by watching all of the Grand Moff's stories so far.

It would be UNFAIR to suggest that this hospitalised Daddy Alex, but we have to confess that our little remake of Carry On Doctor may have slightly DERAILED our Matt Marathon… our scaling the Matt-a-horn. Sufficient to say that Season Six has proved… difficult.

But looking back at the GRAND PLAN we suddenly realised we'd been looking at it all wrong! What was it we'd missed? It was right there on screen from the beginning, from The Eleventh Hour!

Who destroyed the Universe? The Silence didn't destroy the Universe; the idea is absurd. Only two powers in all of space and time have been seen to have the power to do that. And the Daleks were trying to stop it.

What did we see in The Eleventh Hour? We saw what was on the other side of the Crack. The Crack in the surface of the Universe. We saw what was on the inside. Inside Time. And it was a PRISON.

Where in the Moffat era would you hide the Time Lords? Where else but inside a lost story. Inside THE lost story.

The other side of the Crack isn't Gallifrey.

It's Shada.

Happy Capal-day!

“Corporal punishment never did me any harm.”
“Really? Then what did?”
      A.A Milne. attrib.









Read: Where Dawkins Went Wrong --  The Book

Doctor: All elephants are pink. Nellie is an elephant, therefore Nellie is pink. Logical?

Davros: Perfectly.

Doctor: You know what a human would say to that?

Davros: What?

Doctor: "Don't be silly. Elephants aren't pink."

Davros: Bah. Humans do not understand logic.

Destiny of the Daleks

This takes for granted that "Violent" is a synonym for "Severe" and that "Non-Violent" is a synonym for "Mild". "Severe pedophilia is worse than mild pedophilia" would have been meaningless, amounting to no more than "Bad things are worse than good things". But "Violent pedophilia is worse than non-violent pedophilia" is contentious, to say the least. People with human feelings would  probably think that the two are, well, differently bad. The offences for which Rolf Harris went to prison were non-violent. Yet the victims testified in court about the devastating effect the assaults had had on their lives. Some people might think that a long term quasi-consensual "love affair" between an adult and a young child was if anything rather "worse" than a violent attack. But it's simply nonsense. Are orange things worse than bank holidays?








Read: Where Dawkins Went Wrong --  The Book

Most Americans want to criminalize pre-teens playing unsupervised.

“Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it....

"What do you mean?" said Gandalf. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"

"All of them at once," said Bilbo.








Read: Where Dawkins Went Wrong --  The Book

Brian Krebs, "Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China", Krebs on Security 8/14/2014:

Imagine discovering a secret language spoken only online by a knowledgeable and learned few. Over a period of weeks, as you begin to tease out the meaning of this curious tongue and ponder its purpose, the language appears to shift in subtle but fantastic ways, remaking itself daily before your eyes. And just when you are poised to share your findings with the rest of the world, the entire thing vanishes.

It all started a few months back when I received a note from Lance James, head of cyber intelligence at Deloitte. James pinged me to share something discovered by FireEye researcher Michael Shoukry and another researcher who wished to be identified only as “Kraeh3n.” They noticed a bizarre pattern in Google Translate: When one typed “lorem ipsum” into Google Translate, the default results (with the system auto-detecting Latin as the language) returned a single word: “China.”  

Capitalizing the first letter of each word changed the output to “NATO” — the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Reversing the words in both lower- and uppercase produced “The Internet” and “The Company” (the “Company” with a capital “C” has long been a code word for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency). Repeating and rearranging the word pair with a mix of capitalization generated even stranger results. For example, “lorem ipsum ipsum ipsum Lorem” generated the phrase “China is very very sexy.”

Variations on the "Lorem ipsum" text produced even more bizarre results.

Krebs reports a wild and wonderful theory about all this:

Kraeh3n said she’s convinced that the lorem ipsum phenomenon is not an accident or chance occurrence.

“Translate [is] designed to be able to evolve and to learn from crowd-sourced input to reflect adaptations in language use over time,” Kraeh3n said. “Someone out there learned to game that ability and use an obscure piece of text no one in their right mind would ever type in to create totally random alternate meanings that could, potentially, be used to transmit messages covertly.”

Meanwhile, Shoukry says he plans to continue his testing for new language patterns that may be hidden in Google Translate.

“The cleverness of hiding something in plain sight has been around for many years,” he said. “However, this is exceptionally brilliant because these templates are so widely used that people are desensitized to them, and because this text is so widely distributed that no one bothers to question why, how and where it might have come from.”

Google's explanation makes more sense to me, though it's not nearly as much fun:

Just before midnight, Aug. 16, Google Translate abruptly stopped translating the word “lorem” into anything but “lorem” from Latin to English. [...] A spokesman for Google said the change was made to fix a bug with the Translate algorithm (aligning ‘lorem ipsum’ Latin boilerplate with unrelated English text) rather than a security vulnerability.

The comments on Brian's post include some other amusing examples, like the fact that not all fragments of the Lorem ipsum passage have been fixed – here's my own screenshot from this morning:

… and the fact that even the original fragments still work going from English to Latin(again a screenshot from a few minutes ago):

As other commenters explain, it's pretty obvious why a statistical MT algorithm would do this kind of thing, given what an unsuspecting automated finder of apparently parallel text is likely to come up with in the way of Latin/English training material. At some point, Google will manage the harder job of purging all instances of Lorem ipsum text from its training data, and then this particular source of amusement will mostly be gone.

For those few who may not know what Lorem ipsum is, Wikipedia explains that

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. Replacing meaningful content that could be distracting with placeholder text may allow viewers to focus on graphic aspects such as font, typography, and page layout.

The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed such that it is nonsensical, improper Latin.

A variation of the ordinary lorem ipsum text has been used in typesetting since the 1960s or earlier, when it was popularized by advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets. It was introduced to the Information Age in the mid-1980s by Aldus Corporation, which employed it in graphics and word processing templates for its desktop publishing program, PageMaker, for the Apple Macintosh.

The typical Lorem ipsum passage is a munged derivative of a part of I.10.32 of Cicero's work, starting with the last five letters of the accusative form dolorem, and picking up and adding letters (as indicated below until I lost interest):

Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] velit, sed qu[d]ia[m] non num[my]quam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam  corporis suscipit120 laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?  At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti121 atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio, cumque nihil impedit, quo minus id, quod maxime placeat, facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus.

I have no idea why they didn't just use an unmunged chunk of Cicero — but no doubt one of our erudite commentators can enlighten us.

 

(Note to visitors: I am not American and this is not an American blog. Please check your cultural assumptions!)

I’m on a work/vacation road trip, but I’ve been unable to avoid the bad news coming out of Ferguson. And thinking about the wider societal questions that it raises.

How many of these fundamental principles of policing (emphases mine) are the police in Ferguson still following, either in practice or even just to the extent of paying lip service?

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them*.

It seems to me that if they’re not committed to the Peelian principles, then they’re not a police force: they’re something else. And the mind-set of a gendarme is not the mind-set of a police officer; it’s the mind-set of a soldier at war.

(Footnote: Yes, I am aware of the role of racism in determining the unadmitted objectives of American policing, and I believe I know what current events in Ferguson are really about (warning: dark humor alert). But what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander and even if you’re not a member of one of the cultures on the receiving end of the jackboot today, the fact that the jackboot exists means that it may be used against you in future. Beware of complacency and apathy; even if you think you are protected by privilege, nobody is immune. See also Martin Niemoller.)

“[Tuesday's] St. Louis Post-Dispatch front page looks terrifying,” Andrew Peng tweeted early Tuesday. He wasn’t wrong.

 

Yes, I changed their headline, but that’s not really a joke. Perhaps there’s some other explanation for the tactics and strategy employed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, but I can’t imagine what it is.

The simplest explanation would seem to be that they are trying to do exactly what it appears they are trying to do: Incite a riot that would provide a pretext for a more violent response.

The best one can say for these police is that they don’t realize that’s what they’re trying to do, but that doesn’t change the fact that all of their efforts are pushing in that direction.

These are men with guns, pointing their guns at unarmed American citizens who are violating no laws.

Many people have noted that it seems these police never received the fundamental firearm training that every soldier and Boy Scout was required to take. It’s as though they’d never learned one of the most basic rules of firearm safety: Never, ever point a loaded gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot.

But the really sick and scary thing is that I think they do know that rule. They’re not pointing those guns at anyone they don’t fully intend to shoot. They’re just waiting, itching, begging for a pretext that will allow them to do it.

In 2012, according to data compiled by the FBI, 410 Americans were “justifiably” killed by police—409 with guns. That figure may well be an underestimate. Not only is it limited to the number of people who were shot while committing a crime, but also, amazingly, reporting the data is voluntary.

Last year, in total, British police officers actually fired their weapons three times. The number of people fatally shot was zero. In 2012 the figure was just one. Even after adjusting for the smaller size of Britain’s population, British citizens are around 100 times less likely to be shot by a police officer than Americans. Between 2010 and 2014 the police force of one small American city, Albuquerque in New Mexico, shot and killed 23 civilians; seven times more than the number of Brits killed by all of England and Wales’s 43 forces during the same period.

[From a local newspaper.]

That’s Congressman John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), speaking of the Republican candidate for Illinois governor, Bruce Rauner. Whether Shimkus knows it or not, he’s comparing Rauner to Benito Mussolini — and favorably.

The comparison fails in three ways: 1. Mussolini wasn’t responsible for making trains run on time. 2. The claim that he did make trains run on time is typically advanced as a grim joke: “Yes, but he made the trains run on time.” 3. It is inadvisable to laud an American political candidate by likening that candidate to a fascist dictator.

You may remember Congressman Shimkus making the news in 2009 for his observation that we need not worry about rising sea levels because God promised not to destroy the world by flood.

For more on Mussolini and trains, see snopes.com.

I’ve decided that from now on any policy I expose on this blog or elsewhere will have to have to have gone through a ‘people test’ first. This will determine what their effects will be on people, so we can be sure these policies won’t cause any harm to people. I’m not going to make any specific definition of who these people my test will apply to are, but rest assured that I am committed to supporting people despite not coming up with this gimmick vitally important test until now.

Yes, I’ve got the idea from David Cameron’s ‘family test’ that he’s promising to subject all new policy to, without actually specifying what definition of ‘family’ he’s using. I suspect he’s not applying Conrad Russell’s subjective definition – ‘those groups are families that believe that they are’ – but I also doubt he’d have the courage to stand up and say who he does and doesn’t include in his ‘family test’. It thus becomes more meaningless political twaddle, as he might as well be proposing a ‘people test’, given that he won’t (publicly, at least) exclude anyone from his definition of ‘family’. He’s blowing the dog whistle again, hoping people won’t notice that he wants some people to think he’s happy to screw over certain parts of the population if they don’t fit his definition of ‘family’.

The question is will anyone – a journalist today, an MP at PMQs when Parliament comes back from recess – be willing to put him on the spot and ask Cameron what he defines a family as, and who is not included in his ‘family test’?