Late night dram on the solstice
hopes of light to come.
Mixtures of music from the piano
major sevenths and ninths
and blue notes from old jazz tunes.
Will there be light again?
Will the darkness be defeated?
Only to come again next time round
next year, if we make it.
But the music will still be there.
Netflix. Video on demand over the internet. I finally decided that broadcast TV just wan’t enough. We have FreeView: but there never seems to be a programme that I want to see when I want to see it. And while my smart TV (actually, a Mac mini with a USB tuner) can record TV programmes, and while I have iPlayer as well, and can watch programmes that have been shown, it never quite seems to work.
So I decided to try Netflix.
When I was but a young lecturer in Computing, teaching people about X25, and later the Coloured Book Protocols , the idea of Video on Demand was completely over the top. Getting that sort of data rate was quite unimaginable, and besides, it was seen as terribly wasteful of valuable communications resources. But faster networks, much better compression techniques, and virtually free processing cycles have turned all that on its head (even if the protocols and network are still not very well designed for that sort of thing). But here we are, into the 21st century, with videophones, VoD, though not jet-packs or 15 hour working weeks!
So I watched a Star-Trek movie, with a wee glass of whisky in my hand. Downtime. Necessary from time to time.
But will it work? One could spend all one’s time watching the box of delights. What about creative pursuits, like clarinet, piano, or, indeed, artificial intelligence or spike-based low-level audio interpretation…
Watch this space. Will the next blog entries be about music, or science, or reviews of films?
At the University Court meeting on Monday last, I was made (I understand) an Emeritus Professor. Hurrah! Now at least I have an official position, again, with my University. Mind you, they kept me an office the whole time, so I can’t really complain.
Where do you think this might be? Italy? France? Spain?
In fact, it’s the tympanum of the West door of Dunfermline Abbey, in Scotland. While it’s famous for holding the bones of Robert the Bruce, it is one of the most ancient religious buildings in Scotland.
The tympanum above is (I think) 11th century, much older than the doors of the Cathedral in Dunblane where I live. I’m interested in the designs on the outermost stones – the inner ones seem to primarily have a chevron design on the innermost two, a flower-like pattern on the next one, and chevrons again on the 4th one. On the outermost ring, some are faces, some interlocked rings, and some other designs that I don’t recognise. I’m sure these have symbolic meanings, but I don’t know what they might be.
I think this tympanum is exceptionally beautiful.
I wrote about the idea of making perception primary in July, and I eventually turned it into a paper for a smal meeting in Edinburgh, who rejected it. Nothing wrong with that,as it really didn’t say anything new. But now I think I can see an extension of this idea, perhaps helping to explain the views of those who think that the Universe is a simulation.
Now, I think this viewpoint is nonsensical, because the actual Universe would then have to include the simulator, and this itself might be a simulation, and so on indefinitely. So how can anyone really propose this?
Thinking of the first person experience as primary perhaps enables this viewpoint, because it then makes the rest of the Universe secondary. Like the earth-centered view of the universe, it makes the rest of the Universe secondary. That means that logical flaws in it can more easily be ignored, and ideas in this secondary Universe don’t need to be as clear. This strengthens the hand of those who have strange ideas such as simulation based Universes: such a view would have no effect on the first person experience.
There are flaws in this argument too, unfortunately. Truly simulation based universes would be undetectable if properly built however we looked for them, whether we make the first person world or the physical world primary. But that is the way with truly nonsensical ideas: they can’t be disproven because the logical flaws on which they are based enable country-arguments, rather like logical systems which include a contradiction being able to prove anything.
Maybe I should blame the post-structuralists who seem to suggest that all views can have equal validity. I truly don’t agree with this!
Last night, Angus Scott (Saxophones) and I (piano) played a gig at The Crook Bar, in Bridge of Allan. We played three 50 minute sets, in this very noisy, busy gastro-pub. It was a huge amount of fun – for us anyway – and I think the customers liked it too, though some groups were so noisy that I could hardly hear myself play. As I get towards retirement, I’m looking to play more music (whether jazz, blues, folk or whatever), and this seemed a good way to get going. I’ve been playing with Angus for a while now, mostly just practising (though we did play the Dunblane Hotel’s beer festival last year, and one or two other charity gigs), but now I think we’re ready to get out more! Listen to us on SoundCloud (just 2 tracks right now: been having problems with the USB interface on this old laptop).
We’re hoping to play at The Dunblane’s beer festival again this year. And looking for other gigs (nearby!) too… Contact me if you are interested: lestheprof at gmail dot com.
i’ve spent long time wondering about the physical basis of perceptual entities. There’s lots of possible types of perceptual entity, visual, auditory, or the perception of time: indeed every possible form of mental activity. I’ve always been thinking about how the physical nature of the brain can perform physical activities theatre then interpreted as mental events. This is a hard problem: how do mental events supervene on physical events. No-one has the answer.
But now I’m wondering if this is the wrong question (and whether that’s why it’s quite so hard). We are very attached to out view of physical reality, whether that’s the physical nature of matter (quarks, electrons, atoms, molecules, or just pieces of stone and wood…), and energy (sound, music, light, and so on), so we look to physical reality to provide a basis for mental events. We know that physical reality is tricky: the physicists tell us that our everyday view of solid matter is not the only reality, that’s largely space. And we know that light is an electromagnetic radiation within a small say of wavelengths.
In fact all that we directly perceive is mental events. Everything else is provided to us as mental events, whether directly through our senses, or less directly through instrumentation that maps something invisible to something sensory, or less directly still through processing signals, or simply reading about it. So lets start at the other end, and make the mental events primary. So let’s start by assuming the reality of the mental events. Let’s not try to explain them away as accidental results of some physical process that’s dong something else.
It’s not that don’t believe there is some physical correlate of mental events (I do: I can’t accept that the mental event has no physical correlate at all: to do so would be to accept the possibility of disembodied mental systems, which for this scientist seems a step too far right now). What I would suggest is that by making the mental events primal, we start to see just how far our “artificial intelligence” systems are from minds. Yes, we can map vectors to vectors, and learn about the deep structure of visual and auditory information; yes we can build systems that can perform certain types of mathematical reasoning, are create plans. But no, we can’t provide any sort of autonomous volition, not even the coalition that an amoeba has when swimming up a concentration gradient of some nutrient. We might be able to recognise the gradient (maybe – actually, that’s still quite hard), but we wouldn’t know that we wanted to swim up it.
I think we’re a whole lot further from the Singularity than is currently assumed. Yes we can build awfully clever automata, and make them perform some sparkling recognition tricks, but little more than this.
I’m in Derry, visiting the Magee Campus of the University of Ulster, to give a seminar (yesterday), and examine a PhD (today). Both done now, so I have a little time to be a tourist, and perhaps even to think. The picture id the Peace Bridge, a pedestrian bridge that crosses the River Foyle. It is, as you can see, a big river, with the old city (with it walls) on one side, and a rather newer area (which I haven’t yet seen) on the other. I gave a seminar entitled “40 years behind the keyboard, and what next”, and it seemed to go well, and I enjoyed the PhD Oral: a very good and able student. If this were Germany, the PhD would have been summa cum laude, but in the UK, we don’t grade them beyond pass and fail.
This afternoon, I walked from this hotel into the city, and wandered around the old town. While Derry is not quite on its uppers, it was sad to see what looked to have been an independent department store, Austin’s, closed. Wandering around the walls, the views are excellent, but there’s still signs of the past, from the distant past (the siege of Derry, and the potato famine, when many migrants left from the docks in Derry, to more modern troubles). But the place has a guid conceit of itself, and a lively music scene too. I like it here: it’s very like Scotland in many ways (and not very far away either).
It’s only about 3 and a half miles from my house to my office, down the main (and rather busy) road. And it’s a bit further, and much hillier going over the Glen Road, a track that was a proper road till parts of it fell into the valley below leaving a track that’s now only for people and bicycles. I use this track now, and have been bicycling it once or twice week for a few years. But I’d like to use it more often, yet I seem to need a day to recover between cycle runs.
So I finally took the plunge and bought an e-bike at the week-end: a Raleigh Motus Crossbar e-bicycle. I bought it from Easygo bikes in Linlithgow, who had a really big range of e-bikes.
So today I commuted to work on it. It’s got 5 different levels of pedal assist, from none to lots: so far I’ve only used the two lower levels of assist. And it’s like cycling with a following wind: it just takes he pain out of the hills. Back on it tomorrow!
“If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring” (song, which I remember from Harry Secombe singing it, a long time ago, written by Cyril Ornadel and Leslie Bricusse) seems fitting today. We have a small pond, and for most of this week – and particularly today – the frogs have been cavorting like mad. Now we have some frog spawn too, so we look forward to some tadpoles later in the spring. We dug the pond about 15 years ago, and now it seems very much part of the landscape.
Spring is a little early this year, though there’s a little snow forecast for next week, still. Last week, I planted a tree, a Morello Cherry, and it looks good. The sun is shining now, and it must be 10 degrees C, or even a little more. Better get out in it, and abandon this machine!
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