If you are accused...

If you are accused angrily of sexism and misogyny, and you think the accusation is unreasonable, this is what I suggest you avoid at all costs:  replying to your accusers.

The reason is that it can be the case that your accusers are skilled with use of language and spin, and any attempt you make to rebut them will be misquoted and distorted, providing them with even more ammunition.

How do I know this?  Because I have been there - not because of accusations against me, but against friends.  My attempt to defend these friends were futile, and possibly even made things worse.

The response I would suggest is to review what you have said based on the opinions of friends you respect.  If you find merit to the criticisms, then admit you were wrong and make corrections, but those corrections should meet the approval of yourself and those whose opinion you trust, not your accusers.

Nothing you do will satisfy some of those who rail against you.  So don't try.

While waiting for Sam Harris' book - how I meditate (by an utter beginner)

I'm waiting for Sam Harris' latest book: "Waking Up", on non-religious spirituality, but I have been a convert to the idea of meditation for years, since some therapy in 2010, even though I definitely don't practice it often enough.  Buying Sam's book is a way of encouraging myself.

When I do meditate, it can be only for a few minutes at a time, and yet it is extremely calming and very pleasant.  I thought I would explain what I do, as it's simple (at least to describe).

First I find a situation where I can remain still.  It doesn't have to be quiet, just so that no-one will interrupt me.  Then, I find something visual to focus on.  Often I will look out of a window at some tree blowing in the wind, but anything will do that isn't likely to disappear from view.

Then, I keep my visual attention on that object while gently working to quieten my thoughts.  I will find my mind wandering, and when I do, I bring it back to what I am seeing, and put aside what I was thinking about.  This has to be done calmly - there should be no anger or frustration at finding thoughts arising and attention wandering - just keep putting aside thoughts and bringing the attention back to what you are seeing.  You should not try and think about what you are seeing, just keep working to keep your mind as empty as possible.

It make take several minutes for your mind to quieten, or it may not happen.  It doesn't matter if it doesn't happen - the point of this is to train your brain to be able to find calmness.  It's the process of putting aside thoughts that is (I believe) therapeutic.

When you mind truly does quieten you may experience what I do - a feeling of utter peace and a loss of the track of time.  There is no feeling of urgency to do anything, only calmness, free of any emotion.

There is no mysticism involved, not even a mention of the word 'spirituality'.  It's all about learning how to turn off distracting, compulsive and urgent thoughts.  I believe this is helpful for sufferers of OCD and obsessive thinkers, like me.

Anyway, good luck!  I'm pretty much a beginner.  I'll report back what I find useful in Sam's book.

The morality of simulated minds

A re-post from a few years ago, on the subject of the morality of simulated minds.

"The Blue Brain Blues"

A materialist does not believe in magic. A materialist does not believe that anything more than the interactions of forces and particles in the physical world is needed to explain that world and everything in it. Not many people are materialists; the majority of those alive, and who have lived, believe that there are extra aspects to the world, usually termed “spiritual” or “supernatural”. But we who don't subscribe to the idea of those extras are increasing in number.

However, I am not going to argue here the truth or otherwise of the materialist view. What I want to show is that it has consequences. Serious moral consequences, and in an area of research and technology that will be of increasing importance to humanity. The moral consequences may be surprising, and yet I will suggest that they follow inevitably from the materialist position. And, for reasons I will explain later, they may - and I feel should – change the way that certain scientists and technologists approach their work.

I'm going to start by asking one of the most difficult scientific questions: what does the brain do? We can come up with all kinds of everyday answers: it produces consciousness, it results in the mind, it allows us to have experiences, it retains memories, it gives us the ability to imagine, to dream. Those are all true, but I want to consider things at a more fundamental level. One way of looking at this question is to say that the brain is a way of helping our genes to survive. But that view does not focus on the specific nature of the brain. We can start to get an idea by looking at what it is made of. It is made of neurons and supporting tissue. Neurons are cells that respond to and process electrochemical signals. They can change their internal state and how they link to other cells in response to signals. We are able to replicate some of their behaviour in simulations called “neural networks”, which seem to be able to process signals and change state in ways similar to their biological equivalent. But how similar? And how similar does the behaviour of the artificial system need to be in order for us to consider what it does as equivalent to the biological system, and not just a coarse model?

But back to neurons. What they seem to be doing is processing and storing information. We analyse the world, and we can recall aspects of it. Our brains are far from perfect, but then evolution rarely requires or produces perfection. Even so, our brains are capable of amazing feats of computation and memory, as often highlighted in the capabilities of certain gifted people. What is crucial for my argument here is that the materialist viewpoint is that there is nothing extra to what the brain is doing other than this processing of information. As the brain obeys the laws of physics, there is no extra physical aspect to what is going on. Consciousness is not some sort of add-on to what is happening in the brain. It is not some sort of “energy” given off by neurons. It does not involve some magic from another realm. The brain consists of molecules and electrochemical interactions behaving in a way that can process and store information. And that is it. So, a materialist will have to come to the conclusion that conscious awareness, our subjective experience of the world, is what you get when certain types of information processing and storage happens. (Subjective experience may not “feel” like just information processing, but then what should it feel like? But that isn't the point anyway – I'm talking about the consequences of the materialist view of the world, not what it feels like to be an aware being in the world.) So, let's get back to neural networks. Specifically, artificial neural networks. Let's assume we get to a situation where we can produce small artificial neural networks that seem to process and store information in the same way as their biological equivalents. That would be scientifically exciting, as it would suggest that we understand all of the important functional aspects of the biological system. That's one of the main aims of simulation research in all areas of science – to see what aspects of the simulated system are necessary to reproduce in order to get realistic behaviour in the simulation. Sometimes this can be very successful, as in molecular modelling, and sometimes it can be less successful, showing that the physical system is hard or impossible to reduce to a simplified model (as in weather prediction). But let's assume success with the neural networks. Let's assume we do get close-to-identical behaviour to that of the small biological system. What to do next?

Well, at least one research group has a big idea. To build models based on the reverse-engineering of entire mammalian brains. It's called the Blue Brain Project: http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

And here the ethical alarms should start to ring loudly for the materialist. Let's summarise where we are in this argument, and in the hypothetical situation, so we can see why:

1. A materialist believes that our minds, including our awareness and sensations, are what happens when certain types of information processing occurs.
2. (Hypothetically) we have artificial systems that we believe process information in a way that is pretty much identical to their biological equivalents.
3. A research group (that assumes that they can achieve, or have achieved, stage 2) wants to construct an artificial system that processes information just like a biological mammalian brain.

In the past we have not treated animals well in science. But there are now protocols, at least in Western countries, that severely restrict what can be done in the name of research, with the intention of removing or minimising suffering. Mammals in particular are believed to be able to experience pain and suffering. Even a small animal is expected to be treated with care, and experimentation is regulated.

But what of their silicon equivalents? What happens when an information processing system that is functionally equivalent to the mammalian brain can be started up in a few milliseconds, and any desired neural input generated? Given the exponential rise in computing power, and if we assume the hypothetical success of neural network systems, that is a feasible situation with decades. Even if the Blue Brain project runs out of steam, other groups are likely to have a go at this.

Surely, to a materialist, this is not a morally acceptable situation to be left unregulated. Because the materialist would come to the conclusion that the artificial silicon and software systems have an equal ability to experience pain and suffering.

I'd like to clear a few things up at this point. The argument is not about artificial intelligence designed from the bottom-up with an understanding of the parts involved. The argument does not require that we have an explanation of how the brain produces experiences, or what particular pathways are involved. All it requires is the combination of a materialist view of the world with the ability (and intention) of some to accurately reproduce the information processing of neural systems by reverse-engineering (which is the aim of the Blue Brain project).

This might sound esoteric; a purely hypothetical argument of little practical interest. But it is far from that. The reason is that science and reason have to work based on what evidence we have, and to an extent morality should be based on the precautionary principle. We have no evidence for a non-materialistic view of what the brain does. It may not feel like we are “nothing but” the processing of information by certain types of cell, but we have no evidence that this is not the case, no matter how strongly we may believe it as individuals. Therefore, until research shows otherwise, we have to assume that a successful Blue Brain-type simulation of a mammalian brain would have subjective experiences, and could suffer. We have to start to consider if it is ethical to simulate mammalian brains before we have a good understanding of what neural activity results in sensations. Indeed, as governments are currently attempting to cut back on the number of animals used in research (a policy that is likely to continue), we have to consider whether it is morally acceptable to simulate mammalian brains at all. It's not surprising that there have been many significant philosophical and scientific discussions about the nature of consciousness, and whether or not the machine equivalents of biological systems would have subjective experiences. It is a matter of great debate. But the consequences of opposing views aren't equal. If “machine brains” have minds, then the amount of potential suffering that could be caused is almost limitless.

I have barely started to cover this vast subject. But, I think a debate on the moral implications of neural simulations has to start, and considering the exponentially increasing power of systems on which simulations can be run, this debate has to start soon.

Mounts Improbable and Valleys Probable

Many years ago I watched a wonderful lecture by someone called Richard Dawkins. This lecture was one of a series given by Richard that years, and was hosted by the Royal Institution. The RI maintain a long tradition of such lectures, shown each Christmas, in order to encourage young people to experience the wonder of science. Richard's lectures were quite definitely some of the best that had been given, and remain so to this day.

The particular lecture that caught my imagination was on the subject of 'Mount Improbable', the supposed improbability barrier to the evolution of extremely complex structures such as eyes. Richard showed how the great height of improbability that would be a sudden appearance of an eye in a lineage that had nothing resembling an eye before isn't the way evolution works. Peaks of improbability can be climbed in small steps, through individual mutations followed by selection. The eye doesn't have to (and didn't) appear in one generation.

This was a useful way of describing how evolution works, but I wasn't completely satisfied. What I could not see from the 'Mount Improbable' metaphor was why evolution would bother to climb up the the mountain at all. Looked at from the point of view of biology, the tiny steps up the mountain lead to arrangements of genes (which we call 'organisms') being better able to survive than alternative arrangements. But even so, what is actually going on, overall, in terms of probability rather than biology? What actually is the force that drives evolution up the slopes of Mount Improbable?

I have both a degree and post-doctoral work in biochemistry and published work on thermodynamics (although this was some time ago, and I have forgotten quite a lot of it). But, surely, I thought, there must be a thermodynamic way of looking at all this. So I'm going to present such a way of looking.  It's going to be wrong in many ways, but I hope it can give some idea of what is probably going on with the journey up Mount Improbable.  

Life needs energy to maintain itself and to grow and reproduce. But energy alone isn't enough. Life can't grown on heat energy, for example. Just as important as energy is the form in which the energy is supplied. The energy has to be ordered; it has to contain some kind of structure, and life feeds off that order. Plants use the energy of sunlight, energy which peaks at certain wavelengths. Plants use those wavelengths of light to drive reactions which split water into hydrogen and oxygen, providing chemical energy that is used to form carbon compounds from CO₂ allowing the plant to maintain itself and build new cells.

There are other sources of ordered energy that can fuel life; there are single-celled organisms deep in the rocks of the Earth's crust that grow incredibly slowly using hydrogen released by reactions between iron and water.  A large fraction of the mass of all life on Earth probably consists of these cells.  In these different environments on Earth, and probably in many other kinds of environment throughout the Universe, life maintains itself and grows where there are flows of energy and order.

If we only consider the organisms and their complexity we don't see the whole picture.  There is a much broader view that can help us understand why life's complexity can appear and increase.  That view includes what life leaves behind.  Living organisms make a mess. Their biochemical reactions and their physical actions throw waste products and heat into the environment, and as a result life produces disorder.  Life increases entropy.   The structure of plants produced by tapping the low entropy of sunlight is broken down by decay and digestion.  A cow turns grass into cow, but also into cow-pats, methane and heat.  The key thing here is that life produces more disorder than there would be without life.  Life is a catalyst for raising entropy.

So, Mount Improbable isn't the full picture.  At the same time as life progresses up the mountain, life erodes deep valleys of entropy, of probability.  Overall, taking into account both the improbable mountains and the probable valleys, life lowers the landscape.  Given the probability landscape before life and the landscape with evolving complex life, the landscape with life is thermodynamically favourable.  It's something that will spontaneously happen.  Life, including highly evolved life, is probable, perhaps even inevitable.

There is more.  We can ask where does the order in the energy used by organisms such as plants come from?  It comes from stars; directly when it comes to photosynthesis, and indirectly in the form of chemical energy from reactions with elements that have been formed in long-dead stars and spread throughout space by supernovae.

Where do stars come from?  They come from the collapse of vast gas clouds because of gravity.  Gravity amplifies the effects of slight irregularities in these clouds, and huge volumes of gas and dust gather into hot spheres that ignite to become stars like our Sun.

Ironically, Mount Improbable is climbed because of the cosmic power of gravity.

Starting up JavaFX in Scala

Scala is great, and JavaFX is a pretty amazing user interface system.  So, I want to combine them.  This is a short note about how to get things going quickly.

A JavaFX start-up class needs to have a main() method just like any other start-up class, and also needs to inherit from Application, so code like this can be written:

class Start extends Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Application.launch(args);
    }

    public void start(Stage stage) {
        ....
    }
}

The application starts up an instance of the class and passes the main window (the 'Stage') to the start method.

Trying to copy this in Scala results in this:

object Start {
    def main(args: Array[String]) : Unit = {
        Application.launch(args:_*)
    }
}

class Start extends Application {
    override def start(stage: Stage) = {
        ....
    }
}

(args:_* means take the array 'args' and set the elements as individual varargs parameters)

This code won't work.  There are two reasons:  There isn't the connection between the Start object and the Start class in Scala that corresponds to that between static methods and a class in Java.  Secondly, there already is an Application class in the Scala defaults.

We can deal with the first problem by explicitly mentioning the class that the application needs to start up, and the second problem can be fixed by Scala import renaming:

import javafx.application.{Application => FXApplication}

object Start {
    def main(args: Array[String]) : Unit = {
        Application.launch(classOf[Start],args:_*)
    }
}

class Start {
    override def start(stage: Stage) = {
        ....
    }
}

That does it!

In my next programming post I'll show how to get FXML binding working with Scala.

Java 8 - getting rid of the use of nulls

Java 8 will result in a slow revolution in the way Java is programmed.  There are so many new features that have been brought in from functional programming and from other languages.  One of the most powerful in terms of reducing program errors is the Optional class.  This isn't quite Scala's "Optional" but it's still incredibly useful.

Optional is a container for a value and can be considered to be a specialised one-element collection.  The use of generics and type inference in Java 8 means that it can be used pretty much universally as the return value of a method or function that in past Java coding would return either an object or null.

The problem with 'null' is that it's meaningless.  It has no type - it isn't an instance of anything useful: a null value could have come from anywhere.  Optional is typed, so can be used to indicate a typed nothingness!

Here is a method that returns an optional Customer:

public Optional<Customer> findCustomerByName(String name);

Typically in Java to date, it would have been reasonable to return a null value to indicate a search failure.  No longer.  Now code like this can be written:

Optional<Customer> customer = findCustomerByName("Zara");

if(customer.isPresent())
    System.out.println(customer.get()); // get() extracts the value contained in the Optional

This is nice.  The meaning here is explicit, which would not be the case for "customer != null".

But we have only got started.  Using Java 8 lambdas, we can also write this:

customer.ifPresent( cust -> System.out.println(cust));

The value is taken out of the optional and is available within the lambda.

With Java 8 method references, this can be abbreviated further:

customer.ifPresent(System.out::println);

Other methods available with Optional include:

Customer whoToUse = customer.orElse(someoneElse);

use the contained customer if present, otherwise use someoneElse.

Customer cust = customer.orElseThrow(IllegalArgumentException::new);

Throw an exception if the Optional doesn't contain anything.

These are extremely concise compared to what had to be previously written in Java, and the meaning is much clearer.

So, replace setting nulls with Optional.empty() and replace all checking of nulls with the clearer and safer Optional methods - you have nothing to use but NullPointerExceptions!

Essay: The Scales of Eternity

The Scales of Eternity

We are told we live in a universe that is running down, that the time of light and complexity will inevitably end. But that has always been true and perhaps always will be, from the earliest times until the stars are a just brief afterglow of the Big Bang.

At the start, no clocks were possible, but our imaginary clock ticks every 10^-44 seconds

This is a time of heat and light, the universe is full of rich activity. Time is strange, before and after intermingled. Then, a clock could tick and time's direction settles. Waves of space and time echo back and forth, particles of all sizes appear, disappear and collide, there is one force binding matter and energy into a unity. Cooling starts, the forces start to separate and then: explosion of space, faster and faster it goes, driven by the separation energy, on and on it goes, the negative gravity stretching space far faster than light, doubling and re-doubling each volume over and over again. After a long, long time, the explosion stops. The last quantum ripples remain, and the energy of the slowing inflation fills everywhere with hot particles. It's cold: not the slightest fraction of the starting heat. Things are slow, the universe is running down. Only a few particles are made now, and they drift slowly across space, occasionally meeting their opposites and annihilating. Space is almost empty.

Clock tick time is from a millionth of a second to a second. There is such heat: this is the time of plasmas, the first of quarks and the force-carrier gluons. The universe is a hot sea of 'colours', strangeness, charm, top, bottom, up, down, the quantum labels of the quarks and their forces. Exponentially, things cool as the universe slowly expands, until the photon types split: light with no mass carries electromagnetic waves without limit. Light with mass has limited time to move and carries the weakest force, felt by neutrinos. Growing and cooling, the first plasma clears as the quarks condense like drops in a mist into protons and neutons, the baryons. Large are the baryons, barely there, a triplet of quarks held by the strong force, which strangely weakens at close range, but look closely at a quark – it may be a string, a vibrating strand. Imagine that strand as a metre in length... how big is a proton? It's a galaxy.

Clock ticks slow from seconds to millennia

Now we see the elements start to form, protons and neutrons pulled together by the residue of the force between quarks. Time passes, years, decades, centuries, hundreds of thousands of years. Electrons condense into orbits around the baryon clusters. The second plasma clears and atoms form. Gases condense, settling into stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies. For a very brief time the stars burn, explode, condense, burn, explode, condense. On a rock around one star complexity is fueled by the light and life as we know it appears. One species spreads to space. The cycle of the suns is done. The star dwarves give off a red glow for a trillion years, and the galaxies spin like chains of rubies. Then darkness.

Clock ticks slow from a billion years to a trillion years and beyond

The black holes spin. Perhaps civilizations farm black holes for fuel, the twisting space around them providing energy beyond imagining. The sky is filled with quasars, beaming energy across the light-millennia. This could be the true era of life, not the brief flicker of the fusing stars. Trillions of trillions of years.

Even the black holes decay. There is nothing left. Dark and cold re-scaled by powers of powers of ten. There is nothing but the vacuum, everywhere and forever. Except... in orbits tens of billions of light years wide, electrons circle positrons, forming positronium.

Clock ticks become too long to imagine

Positronium atoms dance across the universe, forming - what? At each scale there is furious activity, both chaos and order. As these fade to nearly nothing, a change of perspective takes us back to a reality of action and energy. Will the universe ever really run down to nothing? Perhaps not, when time seems close to eternal at each scale there is always more, and who knows what there might be when the universe is experienced on a scale so long that the time of black holes is to that time what a Planck tick is to ours?

Our universe is falling apart - we are made of the cold ashes of an earlier furnace - but as it falls, there is much that can happen, there are new wonders. We are creatures of fragile complexity in a world that is always on the edge of nothingness.