Déjà vu, all over again

Oh and tell me if you want to catch
That feeling of redemption...*

For no obvious reason, whilst doing the washing up, it recently occurred to me how common in fiction is the theme of “trial and improvement”. This is where a character (or, much less often, group of characters) have the opportunity to refine their responses to a situation through repeated reruns – improving the outcome by progressively learning from mistakes. It's the sort of topic which Ray Girvan, over at JSBlog, does so much better than I ... but hey, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and so on.

Trial and improvement is one of the many fictional structures which originated (so far as I am aware, anyway) in science fiction. Algis Budrys' novella Rogue moon is an example: the protagonist, investigating an alien environment, repeatedly dies, is resurrected, tries again using knowledge acquired. (For any SF purists reading this: resurrection is an oversimplification, but will do as a short hand for my purposes.) An episode of some TV series like The outer limits or The twilight zone (apologies for the lack of exact attribution; I was eleven years old at the time) had a pair of time travelling “editors” from the future running, reversing, subtly altering, rerunning a domestic dispute to fine tune a desired future outcome. Ray and I have spent many an hour debating whether this sort of transference from genre to mainstream is or is not a good thing (and for which side of the transaction), and whether or not the label should transfer along with the concept, but it certainly takes place.

The best known mainstream manifestation is the film Groundhog day, in which Bill Murray's character, Phil, starts off selfish, egotistical, callous, self serving, unsympathetic, miserable, but after living through one day thousands of times becomes sensitive, caring, and (the pay off) happier – winning, in the process, the love of Rita.. The Dickens favourite A Christmas carol could be taken as a forerunner (as an aside, Bill Murray played the central character in Scrooged, a retelling of the A Christmas carol story.), as could Dante's Inferno, but both lack the repeated “action replay” quality.

These examples all have personal redemption as the goal towards which refinement leads: analogous, in some ways, to the cycle of incarnation ascending towards perfection in Hindu and Buddhist belief.

There is an obvious connection to, but distinct difference from, “parallel universe” or “alternative history” fictions. The reruns could be seen as analogues of numerous simultaneous quantum universe segments, except that the protagonist successively builds up experience gleaned in each and applies the resultant learning to succeeding instances. This transfer of experience doesn't occur in parallel universe scenarios. Neither of the Gwyneth Paltrows in Sliding doors, for example, is able to benefit from the experience of her parallel self; each must plough their own furrow. Nor is Gully Foyle, in Alfred Bester's Tiger! Tiger! in the same mould; though he is shaped and changed by his quest, and so achieves redemption, his is a linear journey of transformation and not a refinement by repetition of the same time segment.

Ian Watson's The Bloomsday revolution takes the same “repeated day" mechanism as Groundhog day but changes the outcome. While Phil seeks escape from the cycle, he achieves it only as a byproduct of progress to socialisation; for Bloomsday's players, escape from the cycle is itself the outcome and comes as a result of breaking, not learning, rules. Ursula K Le Guin's The darkness box is a more mythic, less explicit fiction; it is by no means clear that any escape or redemption takes place, although nor is it clear that they do not. Repetition, in The darkness box, is the subject and not the mechanism.

Kate Atkinson's Human croquet is a different approach again. Here, the repetitions take place within a dream space as Isobel, the protagonist narrator, lies in a coma. The end point is neither redemption nor escape, in the usual sense, but a coming to terms with both adulthood and reality by a troubled adolescent personality struggling to integrate family secrets, prejudices, ambivalence, complexity and repressed knowledge.

The time traveller's wife (for introduction to which I am indebted to Donna Kirking – thanks, Donna) appears, at first sight, to be unrelated. There is no repetition of one episode, over and over again; the two central characters, Clare and Henry, repeatedly meet in different combinations of ages. Clare is six years old when she first meets the 36 year old Henry; she is in her teens when he dies, though she doesn't see him die until after they are married. I nevertheless classify this along with the other “trial and improvement” fictions because, by repeatedly meeting in new combinations of innocence and experience, Clare and Henry shape each other towards the people who will eventually share a life. Henry can be seen as an equivalent of Groundhog Day's Phil, “improving” through the repeated necessity for relearning Clare.

None of this has gone anywhere; just a form of talking to myself about something that interests me. Redemption used to be a religious preserve; now it's secular, crossed from SF into generic literature.

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• Kate Atkinson, Human croquet. 1997, London: Doubleday. 0385405960

• Alfred Bester, Tiger! Tiger! (aka The stars my destination). 1956, London: Sidgwick & Jackson.
  

• Algis Budrys, Rogue moon. 1980, London: Fontana. 0006154093

• Charles Dickens, A Christmas carol, in prose : being a ghost story of christmas. 1843, London: Chapman & Hall.
  

• Richard Donner, Scrooged. 1988, USA: Paramount Pictures.

• Ursula K Le Guin, The wind's twelve quarters. 1976, London: Gollancz. 0575020709

• Audrey Niffenegger, The time traveller's wife. 2004, London: Jonathan Cape. 0224073087

• Harold Ramis, Groundhog day. 1993, USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation..

• *Tanita Tikaram, "World outside your window" on Ancient heart. 1988, WEA. 2292438772.

• Ian Watson, "The Bloomsday revolution" in Slow birds and other stories. 1987, London: Grafton. 0586071431

Earth sciences, human impacts

As this appears in print, a new US president will be in his first weeks at the head of an administration informed by respected earth scientists including John Holdren, Jane Lubchenco, and Steven Chu. The words ‘earth science’ usually evoke those disciplines concerned with the lithosphere (particularly geology, seismology, and vulcanology), but public concern is rising about the effects of human interaction with the other three spheres as well – and all sectors of the earth sciences are intensive consumers of computing resources.

Computational science began with water. Societies dependent upon fertile flood plains surrounded by arid regions needed advance knowledge of when their rivers would ebb and flood; and from that arose everything from algebra to astronomy. Today, from acute surges in the Thames to chronic vulnerability in Bangladesh, from one-off disasters such as the 2004 tsunami to the global rise in sea level, flooding remains a primary concern. A tsunami is not only a hydrospheric phenomenon, it is also in the class of seismic events. Sea levels are rising due to many causes, but one significant influence is melting of old ice as a result of changing climate – which also affects the crust beneath it, and the flow of Coriolis currents. Scientific computing in these areas embraces collection, assembly, and analysis of huge, complex data sets. There are other data associated with the human impacts of earth science events: mortality, economic dislocation, rescue, recovery, and medical demand. [more...]

Knovel technical reference service

Knovel's technical reference information service, available since September through Adept Scientific, is an online catalogued library system aimed at engineers and applied scientists.

These days, any subscription portal has to justify itself against the ever swelling volume of freely available material on the open web, accessible through various general and specific search engines. Knovel does so by offering a large number of full text sources from a variety of publishers and other organisation, in one place, through a single purpose-designed interface, supplemented by useful ancillary facilities. A subscription doesn't just replicate the physical resources with a saving on storage space, access efficiency, updating, and so on, it represents several layers of value added too [more...]

Horses for courses...

Steve Wheeler muses that it is:

"...interesting after all these years that people still want to come together face to face to do workshops, seminars, participate in lectures and demonstrations, and generally network in a co-present manner. This despite all the issues of travel pollution, rising fuel prices, travel delays, terrorist threats, stress and anxiety, and so on."

It happens that I have just been asked to attend and contribute to a conference in Spain. All expenses paid, which raises the additional issue of how money is spent and how it might (or might not) be better directed. It also happens that prior commitments prevent me from accepting ... but, putting that aside, what would I feel about attending?

Truth to tell, despite my passionate belief in the importance of synthetic simulations as replacement for "co-present experience", there are some things that can't be done through them. Some things need physical, not virtual interaction. And which things those are is not a constant: they vary for each individual and, especially, for each learner.

The interaction around (rather than in) many conferences, workshops, whatever, can in the words of my invitation "create important and helpful synergies". I value the (physical) research group meetings which I attend roughly every other month, and some professional development activities which involve actually being in the same room as other people; but there are those who do not, who regard them as a waste of time. I am generally less than fully energised by physical attendance at conferences, but I know colleagues whose professional passion depends upon it.

I do about ninety percent, perhaps a little more, of my educational work using electronic means of delivery, but there are subjects, groups and individuals for which this is not suitable. I have a very rewarding voluntary involvement with groups of disaffected teenagers, for example, who need their courage validated and confidence boosted by every interpersonal cue available: they just wouldn't get what they need from computer mediated communications. And seeing one of those groups wander in shared wonder around the Natural History Museum or across a wetland habitat I cannot imagine an adequate computer mediated substitute ... supplement, yes, very certainly: but not substitute. On the other hand, there are a couple of similarly disaffected teenagers for whom social contact is difficult and painful, but for whom CMC provides a way forward.

Horses for courses; most (not all) of us need some sort of professional interaction in physical person, but there's no "one size fits all" way to provide it for everyone.

The culture of conference as jolly junket, a sort of paid holiday perk of the job, certainly needs attention. So does knee jerk rejection of the new (still sadly all too common). But technology is a glorious enrichment of the available communication options, not a wholesale replacement of them.

For the past ten years or so, I have been running an introduction to ICT in Teaching and Learning for trainee teachers, lecturers and instructors. I have seen the attendees go on into practice. Those who make the richest contribution to their students' learning are not those who embrace ICT as a new paradigm, nor those who view it as an interesting add on extra; they are the ones who eagerly seek to integrate its advantages into the broadest possible spectrum of educational experience.

Language and psyche

From a typo starting point, JSBlog takes an intriguing litcrit flight through the idea of fictional detective as shaman which has kept me browsing and reading when I really should have been doing a hundred other things.

I thoroughly recommend taking the same trip.

At a tangent, I was reminded of Ralph Harper's The world of the thriller – Harper is a theologian, and sees the protagonist of novels by the likes of Eric Ambler as a Bunyanesque traveller in a morally compromised world. I can't agree with most of his analysis (though do buy his assertion that "romance and fiction do not need facts in order to tell the truth") but it's stimulating and fascinating. Harper is long out of print, so another interesting (though very different) view of the thriller, just a click away, is John Fraser's Thrillers.

Visit JSBlog's post and onward links first, though – it's well worth your time, on many thoughtful and imaginative levels.

---

Ralph Harper, The world of the thriller. 1974, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 0801817102 (originally 1969, Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University. 0829501487)

Free will, and the meaning of loaf

Roughly twice a year, I am in the supermarket and see sliced a fruit loaf from a particular well known manufacturer which specialises in disguising polystyrene ceiling tiles as bread products*. "That looks nice", I think to myself, and pop it in my trolley.

Back at home, I take out a slice. It sits there, pallidly lifeless, on my plate. At this point, I remember that I have been here before, many times. I don't like this product. The only way to pretend that this slice of knitted white starch and sundry additives is palatable is to plaster it with a thick (at least three millimetres) layer of margarine and accompany it with coffee. I eat two slices and feel queasy.

I have a deep seated moral resistance to throwing away food in a world which is short of it, so over a period of several days I gradually eat about three quarters of the loaf (with coffee, but without margarine) ... and then feed the rest to my starling and sparrow neighbours despite my moral qualms.

All of which tends to anecdotally support Dr C's reasserted argument that there is no such thing as free will.

I am deeply "conflicted" (ugh) about this free will business.

First, I am completely agnostic about whether free will exists, or can exist. I just don't know ... and doubt whether it is possible to know.

I understand Dr C's argument, and agree with every intermediate step of it. I remain unconvinced, however, by the final conclusion that because every action narrows down to a single chemical event gate there is, ergo, no free will. After all, every event in the world is singular however complex the chain leading to it. Whether cows escape from a field or remain within depends upon whether or not I open the gate to that field ... the complex of events which place me at that gate and shape my personality do not alter that ... but that doesn't mean, ipso facto, that I have no free will in the matter of whether or not I do in fact open it. Inside General Loan's revolver there is a mechanical gate (the trigger latch) which decides whether or not the pin impacts the cartridge and fires the bullet ... it, like the chemical gate in General Loan, is at the end of the long tangle of influences which led to the final event, and once again there is no intermediate state: it unlatches or it doesn't.

None of that means that I reject the idea that Dr C may be right. I just don't know.

I am equally unconvinced by arguments that quantum physics offer free will. The best that I can say of those arguments is that quantum physics could (in some interpretations) provide both options: General Loan (or perhaps two bifurcated General loans) both does and does not pull the trigger ... but in both cases he may or may not have done so by exercise of free will and how the f*** would I know?

Again, I don't reject the possibility that free will lies in quantum effects ... I just don't know. And nor does anyone else.

Heisenbergian arguments about uncertainty of effect don't really get me off the hook either ... but they do account for some of the chaotic fog which prevents me from knowing. More of that later.

Then we have assertion, put forward by Unreal Nature a couple of days ago, that Dr C's is an "assault on what should be left unassaulted". Now, I have to confess that I am, emotionally, entirely in agreement with this view. At a gut level, and with every fibre of my being, I regard any questioning of free will (and with it the very concepts of morality and responsibility) as horrendously dangerous. BUT (and Unreal Nature, whose philosophical rigor is at least as well developed as anyone I know, is certainly already aware of this) ... intellectually, how do I square that with my rationalist credentials and my criticism of others who refuse to consider what contradicts their belief? How am I different from those who compelled Galileo Galilei to recant? How am I different from those who refused to consider Darwin's theory because it contradicted the literality of a seven day creation?

If I am to remain intellectually and philosophically honest, I must admit that the answer to whether or not free will exists can never depend upon whether or not I like it, or whether or not it is valuable. If Dr C can prove that it does not, then I must accept that proof – he hasn't, so far, as far as I am concerned, but I must remain open to the possibility that he will. If the quantum physicists can prove that it does, then I must accept it upon their evidence, not upon my wish to do so.

(Of course, if Dr C is right, then it follows neither his proof nor my acceptance or rejection of it have very much objective reality ... but the whole issue is beset by variations on this paradox and I shan't trouble you or my migraine with them any further.)

My intuitive feeling is that (as I mentioned a year and a half ago) we are unlikely to ever resolve this one definitively: an analogue of Gödel's incompleteness theorem means that we cannot completely analyse the system from within, using its own rules. I repeat, that is an intuitive feeling, not an evidential offering. What scraps of intellectual scaffolding I can manage to assemble, however, do show a tendency to lead in that same direction.

Whatever the system is or is not, and whether or not its free will component can or cannot ever be fully analysed, it is certainly immensely chaotic. Its complexity and scale are two aspects of that; the Heisenbergian uncertainty analogues mentioned above are another and simultaneously plays a large part in the difficulty of perceiving it

As with many things in the real world, being agnostic about the issue does not remove the necessity for grappling with its implications. Though if Dr C is right, there are no implications; everything I do (including my existence, and Dr C's existence, and every one of our actions including every word of this post and my rapidly approaching headache) were inevitable. The plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, the massacre of the Jews, the dead of the 2004 tsunami, the starvation of millions, were always going to happen in a deterministic universe. If free will does exist, however, then we are all culpable for those things because we did not sufficiently exercise it.

All that I am left with is a version of Pascal's wager, though I can dignify it with game and decision theory by looking for the minimax.

There are two possibilities. Either free will exists or it does not exist.

There are two responses. Either I act as if I have free will and have potency in the shaping of events, or I accept that these things are illusory and let the world be what it will be.

Here's a truth table to summarise my wager.

	I act as if free will exists	I act as if free will does not exist
Free will does exist	I may make things better or I may make things worse. I can claim to have contributed to any good which results from my actions, and to reduction of harm which might have resulted from my inaction. As a corollary, I must accept responsibility for harm which results from my actions and for good which was lost through them.	I have abdicated responsibility for events which I might have influenced. I could have made a difference and chose not to. I share blame for avoidable harm, and cannot claim contribution to achievable good.
Free will does not exist	I am obviously acting as if free will exists because that is what the aggregated biochemical gates have made me do; I had no choice in the matter. I will feel satisfaction and disappointment for the same reason, and neither are meaningful.	I am acting as if free will does not exists because that is what the aggregated biochemical gates have made me do; I had no choice in the matter. I feel relieved of satisfaction and disappointment for the same reason, not because I have brought it about.

What that table leads to is as moot as everything else. For myself, the least unsatisfactory outcome option is the green cell at top left while the most unsatisfactory is the pink one at top right. I choose (either because I was able to do so, or because the swirls of a biochemically statistical universe have made me do so) to act as if I believe in free will.

Not very satisfactory; but hey, where is it written that this vale of tears must be satisfactory? We pick up our burdens and shuffle on.

And, if you examine everything else that either Dr C or Unreal Nature have written, you find that they too join me in the green cell. I am (either because I have decided to be or because biochem has made me so) very happy in their company, even if (through intellectual differences which we may or may not have had a hand in fashioning) we differ on the science and/or philosophy of how we got there.

And now, either because I think it's a good idea or because biochemistry decrees it (or both), I am off for a cup of coffee and ... no, not a slice of fruit loaf but a chocolate bourbon biscuit.

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*Addendum: this has no connection whatsoever with Unreal Nature's thoughts on deist coprophagy.

Memory is a peculiar thing.

Publicity for the new film from Bernard Schlink's The Reader concentrates on the affair between Hanna and Michael, and particularly on images of Kate Winslet in the bath.

I knew it was time to reread the book (ten years after I last did so) because I didn't remember this aspect of it at all.

Sure enough, when I reread it yesterday, there were both the affair and the bath ... and fairly crucial, too, as a foundation for the story though not to the point of it.

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Bernard Schlink, The reader. 1997, London: Phoenix House. 1861590636

Eating in a hungry world

Though an uncompromising nonbeliever myself, I'm not deaf to the wisdom of others who frame their ethics in faith terms. For that reason, I usually find the BBC's "Thought for the day" slot worth listening to. To quote the BBC:

"A unique reflection from a faith perspective on topical issues and news events. Speakers from across the world’s major faiths offer a spiritual insight rooted in the theology of their own tradition."

It doesn't always deliver, but an investment of three minutes is a small price to pay for the many times when it does.

Akhandadhi Das, in particular, is usually excellent value. So is Rabbi Lionel Blue, who also provides a bonus in the form of good jokes. Both of them, and others besides, enlarge my humanity.

Today's thought came from Canon Lucy Winkett (of St Paul's cathedral, in London. It was interesting throughout, starting from the calorific and locomotion requirements of Homo neanderthalensis , passing through reference to Valentine's Day excess, and finishing with the observation which caught me to spark this post: "eating is a moral issue in a hungry world".

When it becomes available, I'll add a link to the MP3 file download. Here, after a delay of a week because something happened at the BBC's site, is the player link.

Response to events like the Isra'eli assault on Gaza should not obscure the ongoing, everyday violence inflicted on a majority of our world ... of which hunger is both a significant component and an avoidable foundation.

Mac

Other subjects I intended to attempt today have been pushed aside by the death of a friend.

William McRostie: Bill to most people, Dad to his family, but always Mac to me and to the half dozen friends we shared.

Mac "ate a good breakfast and had a pretty good night's sleep", his daughter tells me, then left us at 1708 UTC today. I was walking through the beginnings of a blizzard at that time, which seems somehow appropriate, and only heard the new about six hours later, just a few minutes ago.

Mac had been many things, from forester to lawyer. His passions ranged from opera to world poverty. His curiosity embraced everything from politics to string theory. He had lived through a lot of history. He had moved across the political spectrum, in the opposite direction to what most would expect. All of that went into any conversation with an always interesting human being.

Mac and I usually disagreed about most things (though not, ultimately, the most important one or two core things) but always in mutual respect. Cantankerous, argumentative, exasperating, honest, warm, compassionate, loyal, humorous, he will be deeply and sincerely missed by a lot of people. I am one of them.

Addendum (2008-02-12): a lot of people have written in response to this post, and I would like to thank all of them.