Cassandra Voices

Category: Science & Environment

  • A Breakthrough to Save Humanity

    In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1320) we encounter a forlorn Ulysses (Greek, Odysseus) in the Inferno, punished to eternal torments for deceitful stratagems in the Trojan war, and beyond. Dante adds a layer to the Classical myth, where the aged warrior returns to his native Ithaca only to find:

    not sweetness of a son, not reverence
    for an ageing father, not the debt of love
    I owed Penelope to make her happy
    could quench deep in myself the burning wish
    to know the world and have experience
    of all man’s vices, of all human worth.

    He persuades his crew to embark on a final voyage to a: ‘world they called unpeopled’. For five months they sail until, ‘there appeared a mountain shape, darkened / by distance, that arose to endless heights,’ which is the mount of Purgatory. But, ‘celebrations soon turned into grief,’ as a whirlwind wrecks the fleet, consigning Odysseus and his crew to a watery grave. A hero, who dared travel beyond accepted limitations, is doomed to an excruciating hell, even if there is a suspicion that Dante admires his chutzpah for seeking to experience “all human worth.”[i]

    Fear of the sea is an intuitive recognition of the danger it poses, in contrast to an attachment to home ground. As Herman Melville in Moby Dick (1851) puts it: ‘For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not from that isle, thou canst never return!’[ii]

    Odysseus’s sorry fate also reflects a medieval mindset that looked askance at unfettered ambition. This devolved into superstitions deterring voyages to unchartered territories. Thus Laurens van der Post relates a story told to him by Carl Jung, ‘that if one wanted to fix a precise moment at which the Renaissance began, it would be the day when the Italian poet Petrarch decided to defy superstition and climbed a mountain in the Alps, just for the sake of reaching its summit.’[iii] Through a rebirth in Classical ideas that followed in Petrarch’s wake, Europeans opened their eyes to hidden possibilities, leading to the discovery of new continents that relied on a spirit of innovation.

    Poetic Inspiration

    Poetry in its widest sense is a font of ingenuity and invention. Thus Andre Breton in his Surrealist Manifesto saw it as: ‘Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ Reversing a dictum attributed to Stalin describing poets as engineers of the human soul, Breton attributes scientific breakthroughs to a poetic imagination, arguing: ‘the conquests of science rest far more on a surrealistic than on a logical thinking.’[iv]

    This reinforces Percy Shelley’s proposition that poets, operating in varying capacities, are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The spark for any new venture comes from an imagination Shelley equates with poetry. He distinguishes this faculty from reason, which he describes as the ‘enumeration of qualities already known’; whereas ‘imagination in the perception of the values of those qualities, both separately and as a whole … Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.’[v]

    Too often governments, corporations and individuals inhibit that poetic ignition. Across society we see reason and logic in constant motion, but imagination is barely nurtured, and often frowned on. We proceed from point A to B, all too often ignoring possibilities arising in the remainder of the alphabet. Yet scientific innovation is predicated on poetically imagining possibilities beyond contemporary restraints. It is notable that, besides his contributions to the understanding of the physical universe, Albert Einstein was a prolific poet.

    Technological advances have diminished our intuitive fear of the ocean. As Melville put it: ‘however much … man may brag of his science and skill … yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him … nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.’[vi]

    Incontestably, a combination of greed and frightening religious extremism motivated the global exploration of the sixteenth century, which rapidly encompassed the whole Earth. But the first voyagers also displayed admirable qualities, including a willingness to set aside a fear of the unknown, the strange and exotic.

    Crossing great stretches of ocean demanded breakthroughs in nautical engineering, including the development of a lighter, more mobile, craft, the caravel. Developed in Portugal under Henry the Navigator (d.1460), this vessel could sail into a head wind. Such innovations occurred because adventurous spirits imagined pathways previously considered taboo. It is only by taking such imaginative flights, overcoming prejudices and applying the required labour, that new inventions are realised.

    Despite the ensuing carnage and destruction of natural environments wrought by European colonisation, there remains an enduring heroism in this original repudiation of orthodoxy. In Dante’s Inferno Odysseus did founder, but we may laud a spirit rejecting preconceived limitations that a medieval mind considered hubristic. Innovation demands an interrogation of established ideas, a rejection of preconception and the embrace of the unknown – like a bird taking flight for the first time in its evolution. How did that feel?

    The Great Adventure of Our Time

    Theodore Zeldin recently considered what the great adventure of our time should be: if in the sixteenth century it was discovering new continents; and scientific enquiry in the seventeenth; or addressing political equality in the eighteenth. Precisely the most valuable quest in our time remained elusive to him, but he argued that giving a new meaning to work could offer a great adventure: ‘so that it is more than the exercise of a valued skill, more than the enjoyment of collaboration with others, more than a price that has to be paid in search of security and status, means using work to redefine freedom.’[vii]

    A revolution in working practices does seem overdue, with technology performing most basic and increasingly complex tasks. A new departure in attitudes to employment should also appeal to anyone disheartened by the irrationality of boundless economic growth. Any new economy ought to harness creativity in different domains, and address the tendency towards homogenisation of large corporations. Still, I fear this aspiration to alter work practices is insufficiently ambitious for the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, in the shape of runaway climate change and a Sixth Extinction.

    Previously Naomi Klein has pointed a finger at unbridled capitalism,[viii] but simply achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth appears insufficient. Historically at least, socialism has been defined in materialistic terms, apportioning needs within a hierarchy that continues to inflate. There is a moral obligation to furnish all humans with basic necessities yes, but we must also enter into a harmonious relationship with the natural world, which, thus far, most political ideologies and organised religions have failed adequately to take account of. Within an altered ethical framework, encompassing an idea of Wild Law that I have previously expounded on, necessity will be the mother of invention of the tools required for favourable adaptations.

    ‘By nature free’

    We are in Milton’s words from Paradise Lost (1667): ‘By nature free, not overruled by fate’, but each individual vessel still faces ruin unless we tame the raging waters of our collective acquisitiveness. We require an Age of Empathy elevating symbiosis and cooperation. Thus according to Gandhi: ‘Man is not born to live in isolation but is essentially a social animal independent and interdependent. No one should ride on another’s back.’[ix]

    If we continue to gorge ourselves on the world’s resources – failing to acknowledge the limit of natural capital – we confront death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Let us hope it does not take another Flood of Biblical proportions to awaken us to this reality. Alas, a shock to the global system seems necessary to shake us out of our collective stupor. We must face up to what the future holds, and aggressively confront sinister and self-serving conspiracy theories.

    The field of science – a term only coined in the 1830s the field having previously been referred to as natural philosophy – alone cannot convey the world as it will appear in the decades to come if we continue on our present course. The arts play a vital role in conveying the apocalyptic scenes awaiting. Science fiction has long plotted dystopian scenarios – going back to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) – and this vision is entering the mainstream of literature.

    In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) a father and son wander through an apocalyptic landscape denied the sun’s live-giving rays. Cannibalism is rife as the last humans compete with one another. In the final paragraph there is a mesmerising ode to a lost Nature:

    Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.[x]

    Verily a Paradise Lost.

    Harsh Realities

    When we face up to harsh realities a change in outlook can occur. Laurens van der Post writes:

    It was only when man looked death full in the face that the mortality which is imminent in the final regard releases him from all excess in his proportions, and in the surrender of egotistical presumption which follows as night in the day, unlocks him for the experience of compassion for all living things, ‘from ant to Emperor, whale to cat’, as the Buddhists of Tibet put it, which is the sign of his conscious return from exile to the all-belonging, which has been his point of departure and is then his Home. [xi]

    Humans are capable of mind-boggling cruelty and selfishness but within our spectrum we possess staggering levels of empathy and compassion. These diverging characteristics may even co-exist in the same person.

    I propose that the great adventure of this epoch lies in the way we relate to Nature, which is all life on Earth, including ourselves. The challenge, as I see it, is to ground ourselves within that diverse ecology rather than placing ourselves above other forms of life, as the Western philosophic tradition has purported to do so. Thus Plato formatively established a hierarchy of beings in his Timaeus (c.360 BCE), proceeding from men at the top down through women to the ‘lower’ animals. Somewhat comically he compares other animals unfavourably to human beings:

    The race of birds was produced by a process of transformation, whereby feathers grew instead of hair, from harmless empty-headed men, who were interested in the heavens but were silly enough to think that the most certain astronomical demonstrations proceed through observation. Wild land animals have come from men who made no use of philosophy and never in any way considered the nature of the heavens because they had ceased to use the circles in the head and followed the leadership of the parts in the soul in the breast.[xii]

    Unfortunately, the lasting impression Plato has made on Western culture with these ideas has been no laughing matter.

    Sentience

    Widening the circle of empathy brings us into communion with all living beings. Even plant life deserves reverence. In Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees[xiii] we discover remarkable species, displaying unaccounted for intelligences. Trees communicate with one another using an array of languages including scent from blossoms, and via electrical signals that travel at a third of an inch per minute. This allows them to warn neighbours if they are under attack. Chemical signals are also passed via fungal networks around root tips, a so-called ‘wood wide web.’

    Moreover, the ability of plants to learn from external stimuli has been exhibited in Dr Monica Gagliano’s experiments on the sensitivity of the mimosa plant. Gagliano released individual drops of water on the plant’s foliage at regular intervals. At first the anxious plants instantly closed their leaves, mistaking the single droplets for the onset of heavy rainfall. After a number of false alarms, however, the plants recognised these to be harmless and kept their leaves open. Remarkably, the small plants learnt from the experience, applying the lessons weeks later.[xiv]

    Thus, in consuming any plant we should be mindful of all its complexity, and prize agricultural systems that permits a wide diversity of life to co-exist. Nonetheless, plant life can be distinguished from animal in terms of sentience: which is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Essentially, we know that other animals feel pain – both physical and psychological – via central nervous systems similar to our own. The precise boundaries between plant and animal life may be frayed, but the evidence for pain in other animals is unmistakable.

    Factory farming may soon be viewed as among the worst crimes in human history. The food writer Michael Pollan referred to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) he visited as, ‘a place I won’t soon forget: a deep circle of porcine hell.’ In a display of cognitive dissonance he acknowledges the pork sandwich he eats is ‘underwritten by the most brutal kind of agriculture.’ At least he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to the effect that ‘however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.’[xv]

    The effect of animal domestication, especially grazing ruminants and the cultivation of foodstuffs for their consumption, also has a devastating effect on surviving free animals, compelled to make way for a vast expansion of agriculture around the globe. Astonishingly, today humans, our livestock (and pets) account for ninety-six percent of the Earth’s total land vertebrate biomass.[xvi] This has all occurred alongside immeasurable devastation to the plant kingdom.

    It is futile to read a philosophy of veganism back through human history to condemn ancestors who often killed animals for survival – or even to focus on those remaining hunter-gatherer communities living in remote and inhospitable regions. But in Western societies, at least, there are a multitude of healthful and tasty alternatives to animal products, displaying great qualities of human inventiveness in the gastronomic field. We are not obligate carnivores, unlike our near relative homo neanderthalensis that seems to have gone extinct for this reason.[xvii] A global food chain now allows us to overcome seasonal shortages and localized crop failures to provide a nutritious plant-based-diet-for-all.

    New Departure

    In his biographic account of hunting whales on board a Norwegian vessel in the 1920s Laurens van der Post, recites an extraordinary statement on the new departure he considered necessary in our relationship to the natural world:

    I could not deny the excitement and acceleration into a consummation of archaic joy which the process of stalking and hunting, even at sea, had invoked in me, although I was at present now only as an observer. On the other hand, hard on these emotions, came an equal and opposite revulsion which nearly overwhelmed me when the hunt, as now, was successful and one was faced with the acceptance of the fact that one had aided and abetted in an act of murder of such a unique manifestation of creation. The only dispensation of the paradox ever granted to me in the past, unaware as I had been of the immensity of it until revealed to me in this moment at sea, was that in hunting out of necessity, all revulsions were redeemed by the satisfaction one felt in bringing food home to the hungry. That such satisfaction was not an illusion, nor a form of special pleading in the court of natural conscience, was proved to me by the profound feeling of gratitude one invariably felt for the animal that had died in order for others to live … [but]what could this possibly have to do with the necessities which were essential for the redemption of the act of killing … in this increasingly technological moment of my youth, when control of life was passing more and more from nature to man, and when there were already available all sorts of artificial substitutes for the essential oils which animals like the whale had once been the only source of supply, what, I asked myself bitterly, could justify such killing except the greed of man for money … Worse still, I was certain that our imperviousness to the consternation caused by such killing in the heart of the nature could be the beginning of an enmity between man and the life which had brought him forth that could imperil his future on earth itself.[xviii]

    Dietary change may indeed be relevant to the wider transformation of the human person. The legendary gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s maxim ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,’ perhaps overstates the argument, yet the constituents of a diet do exert a profound influence on minds inseparable from bodies. This is ingrained in almost every spiritual tradition, even Christianity. Thus in Western monasticism, going back to the Early Church Fathers and the Rule of St. Benedict, consumption of animal products was considered incompatible with a life of meditation and prayer.

    We are a product of the air we breathe, the fluids we imbibe and the bacteria with which we co-exist, our genetic programming, and perhaps morphic resonances, whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems.[xix] Nonetheless, the vast complexity of food at our disposal makes this arguably the leading variable in that process of growth and atrophy characterising life as we know it.

    Humanity today utilises a mere six hundred out of the hundreds of thousands of edible plants that exist on Earth.[xx] This vast, unrealised potential of unnurtured crop varieties mean we are only skimming the surface of agricultural possibilities, with dramatic implications for the environments that we manage. Untapped potential may also lies in the cultivation of bacteria, that could be conditioned to taste like familiar foodstuffs, including meat. George Monbiot recently argued that lab-grown food could save the planet,[xxi] albeit these technologies are still in their infancy. What we now require is an alliance of farmers, chefs, scientists and gastronomes, unbound by convention, to imagine new possibilities in a Fourth Agricultural Revolution.

    Theodore Zeldin is right to say that: ‘The invention of a new dish is an act of freedom, small but not insignificant.’[xxii] We can all play a part in this great adventure.

    An altered relationship with Nature would be a revolution unlike any other in human history, and it is surely essential for this to occur in the Anthropocene, our current geological age of human impacts, where the accumulated bones of domesticated chickens are a sign of our overweening presence, along with nuclear residues, and climate chaos. Aside from any ethical stance, ecological limits are in sight: we cannot continue slaughtering over fifty billion domesticated animals each year for food.

    Vegan Diet

    As Jiddu Krishnamurti puts it: ‘We haven’t time to fool around anymore – the house is on fire.’[xxiii] The world’s population now stands at over seven billion. At the beginning of the last century we were a mere one and a half billion, with a far shorter life span than today, leading lives far less exacting on the planet’s resources. We have since applied science to the manufacture of all manner of conveniences, culminating in a global obesity pandemic and giant plastic graveyards in the Pacific Ocean. We have waged a relentless war on the natural world that sees no sign of abating. Since the 1970s, when I was born, 60% of all mammal species have gone extinct,[xxiv] mainly through a loss of habitat intimately connected to the foods we eat.

    Scientists are devoting their imaginative faculties to the realisation of a carbon-diminished future, but environmental morality should not be reduced to an exercise in carbon accounting. I would argue that the single most transformative step any person can take in their life is to embrace a vegan philosophy, which entails a cooperative rather than exploitative relationship with Nature. And if you should fail initially, try and try again.

    Projected population growth over the coming decades makes meat consumption even more unsustainable, leading to further, horrific ‘efficiencies’ in factory farming. The whole edifice of animal agriculture ought to crumble, perhaps bringing an expansion in human consciousness. Thus Charles Darwin argues that the history of man’s moral development has been a continual extension of the objects of his ‘social instincts’ and ‘sympathies’ writing:

    Originally each man had regard only for himself and those of a very narrow circle about him; later he came to regard more and more not only, the welfare, but the happiness of all his fellow men; then his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals.[xxv]

    Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’

    Five hundred years after Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1833 Alfred Lord Tennyson published his poem ‘Ulysses’, where he develops the epic tale of Odysseus further. Again we find a frustrated Odysseus in Ithaca before a final voyage bemoaning:

    How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
    To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’
    To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
    Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

    In the spirit of his age of expansion Tennyson hails an ambition ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,’ and so might we adopt such an approach to confront impending environmental crises. As a species we are entering unknown and decidedly choppy waters, and now require imaginative capacities to take flight. This is an ominous, but ultimately heroic quest that requires us to cross new moral frontiers.

    [i] Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Mark Musa (Translator), New York, Penguin, 2003, Canto 26

    [ii] Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Wordsworth Classics, London, 1992 p.262

    [iii] Laurens van der Post, Yet Being Someone Other, The Hogarth Press, London, 1982, p.18

    [iv] MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM BY ANDRÉ BRETON, 1924.

    [v] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821)

    [vi] Melville, 1992, p,261

    [vii] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, MacLehose Press, London, p.313

    [viii] Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2014.

    [ix] Anthony Parel, Gandhi, Freedom and Self-Rule, Lexington Books, London, 2000, Washington, p.109

    [x] Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, p.287

    [xi] van der Post, 1992 p.223

    [xii] Plato, Timaeus and Critias, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Penguin Classics, London, 2008, p.90

    [xiii] Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, Jane Billinghurst (translator), Black Inc., Carlton, 2016

    [xiv] Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant, North Atlantic Books, New York, 2018

    [xv] Michael Pollan, Cooked – A Natural History of Transformation, Penguin, New York, pp.49-51

    [xvi] Olivia Rosane, ‘Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass’, EcoWatch, 2018, https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html

    [xvii] Tim Flannery, Europe – A Natural History, Allen Lane, London, 2018, p.177

    [xviii] van der Post, 1982, p.88

    [xix] Rupert Sheldrake, https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance

    [xx] Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity, Harper Perennial, London, 1994, p.93

    [xxi] George Monbiot, ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, The Guardian, January 8th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

    [xxii] Zeldin, 1994, p.94

    [xxiii]  Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘Knowledge and the transformation of man,’ https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/knowledge-and-transformation-man

    [xxiv] Damian Carrington, ‘Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds’, The Guardian, October 30th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds

    [xxv] From The Descent of Man.

  • Why is Software so Complicated?

    In the beginning in order to count we used, as we still do, our fingers, and sometimes our toes. Not only are they conveniently arranged according to the prime divisors of their sum (2 and 5 multiplied make 10, and no other primes less than 10 divide evenly therein), but we can also fold them up and down according to our needs, so allowing a primitive but very effective memory aid.

    In more recent times the abacus was was the paradigm of calculation. It was efficient, communicable, and easily learned, mainly because it is like having many more fingers we can fold up and down.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Chinese-abacus.jpg
    Chinese Abacus.

    In the ‘good old days’ of early electro-magnetic computation we programmed directly onto the computer via switches. Think of an abacus with an automatic left-alignment capability. We still need to know how to use an abacus but we can mechanically automate left-alignment. Things progressed to abstractions such as punch-cards, which could be prepared in one’s own time and then inputed into the computer to perform the calculations.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Blue-punch-card-front-horiz.png
    Punch-card.

    As you can see there are similarities between punch-cards and an abacus. They both use a columnar layout, they are of limited scope, and both require familiarity with arithmetic. Already we can also see the increase in complexity, both in terms of the density of the information on display and the amount of meta-information used.

    Nowadays we have the X86-64 architecture. Good luck with that.

    Modern microchip.

    And yet, even though these devices are so tiny and complicated that they operate near the limits of measurability itself, to such an extent that the designers have to worry about electrons jumping from one adjacent wire to another and hence spoiling everything, we don’t need luck to make them work. We use abstractions!

    We encode these abstractions in software. The first recognised programme was designed by Ada Lovelace, who worked with Babbage on the Analytical Engine,  and calculated Bernoulli Numbers. Ever since we have been working to increase both the power and clarity of our ability to communicate our calculable ideas both to computers, and to other humans.

    As a brief digression, programming is at least as much about sharing thought with other people as it is with computers. A good piece of software not only runs efficiently on whatever the hardware requires; it is also easily understood by other programmers so that when, not if, it needs to be altered to fix errors, or extend its functionality, this can happen with a minimum of stress.

    So why IS software complicated? Some of the reasons are:

    • Hardware gets more complicated and so the requirements to programme them becomes more complicated.
    • The ecosystem gets more complicated as we create more and more general libraries each of which specialises in one particular competence (for example numerical calculations).
    • New techniques are developed all the time, normally coming from academia, especially the field of Pure Mathematics.
    • We demand ever more functionality from our computers, such as real-time communication, or fancy graphics.
    • We keep on adding leaky abstractions.

    As seen above, computer hardware is becoming more and more complicated as the years go by, and this rate of increasing complexity is well described by one of the most famous heuristics in the industry: Moore’s Law which states: ‘the number of transistors in dense integrated circuits doubles every eighteen months’. This has held true for over sixty years, though we are coming up against hard quantum mechanical limits now. While this means we can perform more calculations, faster, than ever before, it also means the hardware is becoming more complicated, and so the software needed to manage the hardware must keep pace.

    A contemporary operating system is typically composed of many millions of lines of code, broken into many different parts. Typically an operating system comprises a kernel that interfaces directly with the hardware, and many libraries that specialise in tasks such as networking or the graphical user interface, as well as the programs most users need, such as word processors, games, and web browsers.

    In Mathematics itself there is a more than two-thousand year quest to define and guarantee the correctness of the subject itself, and quite apart from every novelty of efficient computation, the foundations themselves have undergone radical development in recent years. One hundred years ago Set Theory was introduced and has served well, if trickily, ever since. The trickiness involved, as well the seeming vagueness of some of the underlying assumptions, further led some, especially L. E. J. Brouwer, to try to reformulate Mathematics on an ‘intuitionistic’ basis. This in turn led to the recent Univalent Foundations and Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT). HoTT, in particular, shows considerable promise in allowing us to reason with great abstraction and powerful correctness on the theory and practice of programming.

    Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer.jpeg
    The face of a man who looked upon infinity and saw only potential.

    Our demands for greater ‘power’ impose constraints that can only be met with greater complexity. Without going into great detail, as we move from the relatively simple one-to-one, client-server computational architecture to a fully distributed computation model, as is ubiquitous in Nature (the speed of light guarantees a locality of computation), so we are more and more reliant on the subtle and intriguing theories such as Paxos, which no matter one’s expertise is still not simple. Developments in this area, from the use of bunches of graphics cards for statistical modeling, to the growth of secure data storage systems, tend to be significant both in terms of novelty and difficulty.

    Abstractions, especially as implemented by the congenitally lazy programmer, tend to reveal too many of the underlying assumptions, and hence ‘leak’ complexity both up and down our level of abstracion, though mainly up. These leaks then require us to stick our fingers in the complexity dyke, and no matter how many fingers we may abstract, the water of complexity will tend to flow downwards, around and past and through our ability to count. (Reality is not necessarily countable.)

    So what can we do about it? The answer is simple, we can provide simplicity through abstraction.

    Let me give you an example. When we are young and learning to count we learn first to count to ten, using our fingers. Each count has its own term, one, two, three, etc.. Then we learn how to count to twenty, and the terms associated. The thirties follow, and the forties, and patterns begin to form. Then, like a piece of magic, we learn how number can be represented in table.

    Having constructed a table of the first hundred number we can not only extend this to the first one thousand, but also to the first million, as befits our patience. More importantly we can abstract over the pattern, and use this pattern in its most general sense, allowing each entry of the first one hundred to refer to a table of one hundred, thereby giving a table of tables, of numerical size 10,000, or as the Greeks would have it, a myriad. So we abstract, for we are ‘outside the area contained within the lines drawn’.

    Of course, for this to work, we need to know and understand the complexities, we need to measure them, and abstract over them, and most of all we need to learn Mathematics, for it is the language of abstraction.

    Huge efforts have been made in this field, and are ongoing. Coq is a fabulous development, as is Agda, and Haskell and Rust are becoming mainstream. In Mathematics itself there is still roiling debate and vigorous argument about the nature and validity of abstraction, both pure and applied. The conversations around these topics leach into Computer Science of course, but also Philosophy, Law, Economics and even Political Science.

    Programming is like a mixture of Poetry and Mathematics. It has all the rigour of Poetry and all the interpretability of Mathematics.

    You want to know the secret of success in this field, as in so many others?

    Play. Look at children learn. From repetition of simple tasks that adults find mind-numbingly boring children learn the abstractions that give them all their languages, all their games, all their mastery over themselves and other things. So it is with mathematicians, they play with numbers and their patterns. So it is with programmers, computers are the toys with which they learn the abstractions to understand things simply, but no simpler.

    Make like a child, be simple, practice, and understand. This is the simplicity of software.

    The featured image, taken by John McSporran which shows up in searches of complexity with reuse rights, is aptly entitled ‘complexity’. Though not a picture of software it is undeniably complicated, and also beautiful, and a good deal more intuitively so than any map of dependency graphs. It also, perhaps amusingly, evokes Ted Stevens’ series of tubes.

    Eoin Tierney is the Science Editor of Cassandra Voices.

  • Building Better than Bitcoin

    Bitcoin and the Blockchain are perhaps the most hyped technology today, rivalling even Artificial Intelligence for extreme predictions and outrageous claims. We need to talk about the ecology.

    Bitcoin is a cryptographically-backed, anonymous, pseudo-currency invented by the otherwise unknown Satoshi Nakamoto. It has a dollar value because it is traded on the market, as can be seen here. It is used to trade in everything from lattes to guns, and is always free of jurisdictional monitoring and hence taxation. In other words it enables criminal transactions.  The value of Bitcoin has grown quite predictably since its creation. This is not my main problem with Bitcoin.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The Blockchain, on which Bitcoin is built, is a hideously inefficient means of computing a tally of transactions. There are many superb descriptions of how it works, such as the following:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9KAnkZUjU

    It is sometimes perceived as an intellectually-elegant formulation, provably sharing a settling of a kind of account. However it costs too much. Picture a train of carriages. There is a first carriage, normally with an engine. Other carriages may be attached to this engine. Any human can get on and off the system of carriages at any time, by adding their own carriage, and may insist that everyone else who ever entered a carriage witness this, mathematically, by adding each carriage to their own description of where the carriages are positioned in the train. This is a huge computational load on all the witnesses.

    This is the fundamental purpose of the blockchain. It provides a mathematically sound proof that a certain computational task has been performed and does it in such a way that it can be demonstrated by anyone else in the chain.

    While the asymptotic nature of Bitcoin is implied in the above it makes sense to put this in context. An asymptote is a limit to which a function can computationally approach. In Mathematics we can use purely analytical techniques to describe the overall behaviour of such functions, indeed these techniques are fundamental to the theory of Calculus. When we have to determine the stepwise approximation numerically matters can become quite complicated and require significant time and effort.

    An example of this asymptotic approach, though not necessarily the most correct, is the value of the fundamental constant Π. We learn in school that Π has a value of roughly 3.14, and this suffices for schoolroom exercises. Archimedes created techniques that foreshadowed Newtonian calculus by over a thousand years in his ingenious calculation of this  transcendental number‘s digital expansion. We can now determine Π to billions of places of precision, but we will never know it as accurately as its simplest formulation: the area of a circle is Π times the radius squared. In other words, the idea of Π as a proportion is vastly more accurate than any numerical approximation. Bitcoin utilises this asymptotic approach to guarantee that the number of Bitcoins it is possible to calculate has an upper bound of 21 million, and that it gets proportionally harder to do so.

    Most, though not all, contemporary encryption relies on one simple and strange fact: it is vastly easier to multiply two prime numbers to get another number than it is to do the reverse.  Thus it is easier to multiply 5 and 13 to get 65 than it is to analyse 65 to determine what two prime are its divisors. This gets harder the bigger the number. Why this is so is deep and suggestive and still not properly understood. Indeed the study of prime numbers is perhaps the single greatest motive for the entire subject of Mathematics. They are bizarre, profound, and remarkably useful, far past their role in encryption. In particular Bitcoin, via the Blockchain, uses the very well studied SHA-256 hash function.

    As a result all the theoretical constraints outlined above and elsewhere, Bitcoin is inefficient. Like a giant out-of-control paper clip machine it now requires more energy per month for it’s computations than the Republic of Ireland’s. This is a clear signal we are not communicating effectively with regard to distributed proof-of-computational-work schemes. Indeed the very mention of schemes calls the work of Alexander Grothendieck to mind. He would regard this as no soaking of the walnut. (He preferred not to crack a walnut of a problem using advanced techniques but soak it instead in his understanding, so that it might be peeled apart with the fingers of his mind and thereby yield much deeper understanding).

    And now we come to the real problem of Bitcoin. It is trying to solve the wrong problem. We have long suffered the Identification/Authentication/Authorisation problem. Even DNA analysis, which can be very accurate, takes significant effort to compute. Adding a requirement of secrecy to this, while constrained by modern understandings, imposes unacceptable computational cost.

    Bitcoin solves the wrong problem, badly. We can and will do better, by using more sophisticated Mathematics, to develop more efficient distributed proof of work.

    Right now there are far too many exploitative people working in Finance, Computer Science, and even alternative Politics, who are jumping on the Blockchain Bandwagon, and encouraging others to do likewise because they can profit, monetarily, through their comparative sophistication.

    Put it another way, no working mathematician I know recommends Bitcoin, yet every single one recommends the study of Number Theory. Who do you trust more? Financiers or Mathematicians?

    Eoin Tierney is the Science editor of Cassandra Voices.

  • Smart Backlash Requires Smarter Response

    We are currently seeing relatively intense media focus on veganism, but I am worried this is another false dawn. All social movements go through peaks and troughs, and today’s coverage reminds me of what happened in the 1980s and 1990s. It is quite possible we are seeing the beginnings of a repeat cycle. If we are, then we need to learn how to improve our claims-making capacity in response to negative vegan stereotyping.

    The 1980s witnessed a huge peak in animal advocacy and interest in the ‘animal issue’. British groups like Animal Aid, founded in 1977, were young and energetic and, in North America, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) emerged in 1980 as a brash, fresh, champion of other animals. This was at a time when the idea of animal rights – meaning the moral rights of other sentient beings – was being taken more seriously than it is today, and often articulated as rights-based animal rights.

    PeTA was a radical grassroots group in the early years, before it morphed into the toxic, racist, sexist, and ableist, welfarist corporation it is now. Tom Regan’s seminal The Case for Animal Rights was fresh off the presses, and things were really buzzing. At one point in England, a journalist (who was ideologically opposed to animal advocacy) estimated that the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) were carrying out around six actions per night. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection had been radicalised, and that gave grassroots campaigners throughout Britain access to funds and materials.

    Any new generation of social movement participants wants to break with the conventions of the old brigade. As Jake Conroy notes in this recent video about activism in the 1990s, recent 21st century claims about the ‘first ever open rescue’ in the USA, and the ‘largest animal rights march ever,’ ignore the history of the animal rights movement. As regards the latter case, referring to a march in Israel, in 1990 a ‘March for Animals’ in Washington attracted a crowd estimated at between twenty-five and seventy thousand participants. The organisers claimed 55,000, far more than the number who are believed to have taken part in the recent Israeli march.

    I acted as a press officer for an animal rights organisation when mass media coverage of animal advocacy shifted in the 1980s. The message got a lot darker. We were getting used to being referred to as ‘animal freedom fighters’, and ‘rescuers’, and weren’t prepared for the ‘terrorist turn’ in mass media characterisation of animal activists. Our reputation wasn’t helped by how the Animal Liberation Front literally ran out of safe homes for liberated other animals. This led to an increase in the incidence of what in those days was called ‘economic sabotage’. Other factors, such as a Mars Bar poisoning hoax, and the development of incendiary devices based on firelighters, which the press invariably called ‘fire bombs’, added to the burden on those doing media interviews.

    With the benefit of hindsight it seems to me a smart move for embattled 21st century animal farmers, and the animal user industries in general, to attempt to re-establish a link between animal advocacy and terrorism. I want modern day advocates to be more prepared for the backlash than we were.

    The animal user industries will surely attempt to ride on the wave of the current moral panic about terrorism. For example, some farmers have recently claimed to have received ‘death threats’ from ‘militant vegans.’ I notice from reports on social media that farmers have been asked to verify these threats but have failed to do so. Expect dirty from an animal user industry backlash.

    For example, Mr. Alan Newberry-Street, the Director of the ‘British Hunting Exhibition’ – a mobile bloodsports display supported by the British Field Sports Society and the Masters of Fox Hounds Association, was jailed for planting a nail bomb under his own vehicle in a bid to discredit the animal movement. At his trial he had the audacity to ask for other similar offences to be taken into consideration.

    If the tactic of linking vegans to violence is smart, we need to be smarter. The angry vegan stereotype has already been reventilated on BBC’s Jeremy Vine Show national radio. Playing up to that image, as happened sadly, is naïve and counterproductive. Any explanation as to why vegans may be angry must be couched in a calm manner. Moreover, 21st century activists must avoid joining in with this rhetoric, as some British national animal groups did in the 1980s. Sadly, there is already evidence of this occurring. In my experience paid-up staff in the movement are unlikely to defend grassroots campaigners if negative labels have been successfully attached to their activities in the mass media, however justified and merited such activities may appear.

    Drawing on Tom Regan’s ideas (see video above) and a rights-based animal rights approach and a rights-based animal rights approach, I appeal to a new crop of vegan spokespersons, firstly to diversify: there are too many male voices. Secondly read up on rights-based philosophy in order to respond to the characterisation of veganism as welfare-based. This counters the argument ‘we have the best welfare standards in world’ which all representatives of users industries are likely to throw at you. Welfare standards are not relevant to the rights-based case for animal rights: rights violations are never excused by the regulation of atrocities. Be smart, don’t fall for their traps.

  • Go Vegan World: A Call for Animal Rights

    The Irish-based Go Vegan World is the largest vegan education campaign worldwide. Its sophisticated advertising campaign has got under the skin of the animal exploitation industries, who have attempted, unsuccessfully, to shut it down. In this article founder Sandra Higgins explains the ethical considerations that animate her grassroots movement.

    Most people imagine themselves to be animal lovers. Few scenes on television spark more awe than those featuring animals in their natural habitats, or more affection than those featuring companion animals in documentaries exploring their complexity and playfulness. We find ourselves moved when we witness the precariousness of their lives in TV veterinary series. If we witness one of them being chased or threatened, we find ourselves with bated breath until they escape.

    From early childhood we are fair in our interactions with other animals. We don’t have an innate inclination to harm them. Most of us reach adulthood with the moral conviction that it is wrong to unnecessarily harm anyone, including other animals.

    Yet despite considering ourselves animal lovers, most of us are responsible for the oppression and needless deaths of sentient, complex, individual lives, in the most brutal manner, with every non-vegan choice we make. What has led to this tragic farce where we can affectionately cuddle the family dog, whilst eating the remains of someone just like him, who lived a miserable life and endured a violent, painful and frightening death, for something we don’t need?

    We grow up in a speciesist culture that discriminates against other animals on the basis that they are not human. But what occurs in exploitative industries is carefully hidden from us. We are progressively desensitised from our innate care for other lives into thinking that other animals don’t matter. We are educated in a system that teaches myth rather than fact. We erroneously believe that humans are superior to other species and that our difference from them entitles us to use them as objects to meet our needs. We are taught to separate their dead remains on our plates, in our clothing, in our personal care and cleaning products, and in our entertainment, from who they are.

    If we are to face the fact that, although they are different to us, they share our right not to be used, harmed or killed, on the basis that we all have in common a sentient capacity to feel, be aware and value life, then we must reconnect with them. We must stop believing the lies that we are sold that we are better than them, that they exist for our use, and that our use of them is necessary.

    Educating the public so that we rid ourselves of these speciesist ideas and reconnect with the animals we use, is the goal of Go Vegan World, which is a public educational campaign that originated in Ireland in November 2015, and now operates internationally.  It provides factual information that is our right to know and our responsibility to act on.

    The public face of the campaign are advertisements positioned in places frequented by consumers: bus stops, tube stations, taxis, outside supermarkets and restaurants; public bathrooms; on social media; at sporting events; in newspapers etc. These direct the public to a comprehensive website and free Vegan Guide, which provides evidence-based information for people to learn why veganism is imperative if we are to be consistent with the non-violent values we claim to hold, as well as practical help on how to live as a vegan. The campaign also involves lectures, print, radio and television interviews, and works individually and with groups of people as they go vegan and learn how to be effective animal rights activists.

    Although Go Vegan World is the largest vegan education campaign worldwide, it is a grassroots organisation firmly rooted in the lives of other animals. It is run by Eden Farm Animal Sanctuary Ireland which is home to more than 100 residents, all of whom are survivors of animal agriculture. They inspire and inform the campaign and their images feature in most of its advertisements.

    The advertisements are designed to encourage empathy towards the animals we use for food, clothing, entertainment and research, as individual, feeling beings. When other animals are seen for who they are, and for the qualities they have in common with us, empathy with them becomes easier. We can then put ourselves in their positions, and comprehend what they endure when we are not vegan.

    The advertisements cover several themes that counter traditional representations of animals as objects who exist to serve us, and willingly participate in their own exploitation, mutilation and death. They show the animals in a light that most people have not previously encountered: innocent, defenceless, trusting, affectionate beings who feel, and who do not want to die.

    The advertisements are colourful and eye-catching, capturing the complex sentience of the animals depicted. This contrasts with their stark educational messages, reminding us of the price they pay for non-veganism.

    The cow with a tear running down her face reminds us that Like Us, They Feel. The monkey behind bars in a zoo lets us know that the price she pays for our day’s entertainment is lifelong imprisonment. The frightened faces of the pigs at a slaughterhouse tell us that Humane Meat is a Myth. The innocent mouse reaching up to cling onto the hand of his vivisector shows us that They Trust Us, yet we torment them because we believe that our cosmetics, cleaning products and scientific research are more important than his life.

    The contentment of the pig as she is caressed by a human hand is juxtaposed with her comrade’s body as it revolves over a barbecue, reminding us that They Trust Us, We Butcher Them. The fish being dragged by a fisherman from the river that was her home depicts the human abuse of power in a classic bullying scene, whilst the headline reads We All Have One Precious Life. Will Your Lunch Take Hers? The beautiful mother-child bond of the cow as she licks her newborn calf reminds us that Dairy Takes Babies from their Mothers. Feedback from the public informs us that these messages are sufficiently powerful to prompt people to research the website and go vegan.

    Go Vegan World is one of the few organisations focused on the animals it advocates on behalf of, giving an unmistakable message that the complete abolition of animal use is the only rational response to the problems other animals face at our human hands.

    Unfortunately most campaigns emanating from the animal rights movement do not meet the needs of the oppressed animals they advocate for. In fact, one would be forgiven for imagining that veganism is a diet or a trend, or even a form of lifestyle consumerism, given the manner in which it is currently popularly portrayed. With typical humanocentricism, advocates assume the need to dilute the message to make it palatable to the public, presuming that they are unable to absorb the significance of a serious social justice issue, unless it is couched in a manner that prioritises human interests.

    The word vegan has been bastardised by both the media and even by many advocates, often resulting in the complete obliteration of the animals it concerns. Veganism is the moral conviction that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary violence on others. It is not the end goal; it is merely the step that we need to take to begin restoring their rights. Veganism is not a fashionable, elitist, fad. It is a radically new way of recognising and relating to other animals with respect, one that humbles us as we grapple to reconcile the complexity of their sentience with the bluntness of our own.

    In keeping with this definition of the word, Go Vegan World gives a clear message that other animals are not ours to use. Because the campaign is so deeply embedded in the individual histories and personalities of the animals at Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary, it is both informed and powerful. For the first time in history the animals themselves have taken to the streets to show us who they are and to assert their right not to be used. The campaign message remains focused on the animals who are affected by our use of them. It does not distract from or compromise on what they need from us.

    The integrity of the campaign was vindicated in 2017 by the UK Advertising Standards Authority finding in favour of the Go Vegan World claim that Humane Milk is a Myth. The dairy industry had claimed this was not fact-based, and that it misled consumers into believing that farmers did not adhere to welfare regulations in the production of dairy.

    Go Vegan World clarified, however, that its aim was to show that the use of other animals is unjust regardless of adherence to welfare guidelines. The production of dairy, like every animal use, involves rights violations such as artificial insemination, separation of mother and calf, selective breeding and the consequential physiological stress of repeated cycles of pregnancy and simultaneous lactation.

    There is no humane way to exploit the reproductive system of another being. There is no right way of separating a baby from his or her mother. There is no justification for taking away the purpose, existence and entirety of someone else’s life to meet a trivial human desire for profit. Taste or habit offers no excuse for killing.

    It is because other animals are so unfairly and violently violated that people go vegan. This is quite distinct from going on a plant-based diet, or reducing animal use for health reasons, or because it is more environmentally and economically sustainable to do so. While these intersectional aspects of veganism are relevant, they do not constitute veganism and are neither necessary nor sufficient reasons for being vegan.

    There is only one reason to be vegan and that is because we respect life and refuse to participate in unnecessary violence. This is the essence of the Go Vegan World message and it is why it targets the root cause of animal use (speciesism), and why it promotes the complete abolition of animal use by humans.

    This is also why Go Vegan World has consistently attracted the attention of the animal exploitation industries. A high profile campaign that is unwavering in its call for complete cessation of animal use is unprecedented, and it is of immeasurably greater concern to those who profit from non-veganism, than all the limp calls for better welfare of those we exploit, less meat consumption, or the public portrayal of veganism as a trendy lifestyle or diet.

    Becoming vegan involves a dawning awareness that other animals share our capacity to feel; that our use of them is unjust because it harms them. It begins when we recognise that not only can they feel pain; they also feel pleasure  and they value their lives.

    Each of them, like us, has one precious life. When we are not vegan we take that one, and only, life from them, individual by individual, in their thousands throughout our lifetime. Every year seven billion humans kill over 70 billion land animals, and trillions of fishes. Veganism is made possible when we realise that animal use is unnecessary and that every one of them dies for something humans do not need.

    Veganism begins in the cognitive processes of our altered perception of the world in light of this new information. Most of us are shaken to the core when we scratch the surface of the horror of animal use. The world we imagined to be relatively safe, benign, and trustworthy is revealed as carefully organised to profit from torture and death, the brutal intricacies of which are legislated for, and sold to us as if they are both necessary and humane.

    We go vegan when we realise we have been sold a monstrous lie. Few of us would willingly participate in the extreme violence that is inherent in every non-vegan item and choice we make, if we were in possession of the information the Go Vegan World campaign is bringing to light.

    Go Vegan World is designed to target the processes upon which behavioural change are predicated. The advertisements along with the website and vegan guide, provide information that prompts the cognitive and emotional processes that motivate people to research veganism. These processes completely alter who we perceive ourselves to be; how we view the world and our place in it; and, concomitantly, how we behave in light of the awareness of the consequences of our actions on others. This is why veganism is not a lifestyle that we can adopt and reject as it suits us. It is who we are.

    In our time where there are ample alternatives, we are either mindlessly or deliberately violent depending on whether or not we are aware of the facts, or we are vegan. The aim of Go Vegan World is to make as many people as possible aware of a violence that is generally hidden, and to remind them of who they exploit and kill, so that they chose to be vegan.

    Many will read this in agreement that veganism is the right thing to do and vaguely plan to be vegan at some distant and perfect future moment. But it is your responsibility to be vegan now.

    The animals we use feel as we do. While we wait for that perfect moment to live in alignment with the basic moral premise that it is wrong to harm and kill, they are being born exquisitely vulnerable and new to this world, with a death sentence on their young heads. Newly emerged from their mothers’ wombs, they instinctively reach for the nurturing safety of her breast, only to be heartlessly taken from her so we can take the milk she produces to feed them.

    While we wait they are being confined, mutilated and tortured on farms, in laboratories, in circuses and zoos.

    While we wait they are taken to slaughterhouses where they are hung by one leg that bears the weight of their whole, frequently artificially obese, body. Some of them are still conscious when their skins are removed or when they are dropped into tanks of boiling water. All of them are alive when their throats are slit. All male chicks are conscious when they are minced or gassed.

    We do not have the right to do this.

    Their lives and their bodies are not ours to use.

    There is nothing special about being vegan. To stop participating in this violence that we ourselves would dread, is merely the decent thing to do.  We owe it to them to be vegan.

    Sandra Higgins BSc (Hons) Psych, MSc Couns Psych, MBPsS
    Feature Image: Go Vegan World