The Pub - Discuss Anything

[Vesper 28,804]

Rage against the machine

For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does

https://aeon.co/essays/can-computers-think-no-they-cant-actually-do-anything

Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play; they don’t even compute. Which doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve. The new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences, in industry, and in warfare. We need to come to terms with the transformative promise and dangers of this new tech. But it ought to be possible to do so without succumbing to bogus claims about machine minds.

What could ever lead us to take seriously the thought that these devices of our own invention might actually understand, and think, and feel, or that, if not now, then later, they might one day come to open their artificial eyes thus finally to behold a shiny world of their very own? One source might simply be the sense that, now unleashed, AI is beyond our control. Fast, microscopic, distributed and astronomically complex, it is hard to understand this tech, and it is tempting to imagine that it has power over us.

But this is nothing new. The story of technology – from prehistory to now – has always been that of the ways we are entrained by the tools and systems that we ourselves have made. Think of the pathways we make by walking. To every tool there is a corresponding habit, that is, an automatised way of acting and being. From the humble pencil to the printing press to the internet, our human agency is enacted in part by the creation of social and technological landscapes that in turn transform what we can do, and so seem, or threaten, to govern and control us.

Yet it is one thing to appreciate the ways we make and remake ourselves through the cultural transformation of our worlds via tool use and technology, and another to mystify dumb matter put to work by us. If there is intelligence in the vicinity of pencils, shoes, cigarette lighters, maps or calculators, it is the intelligence of their users and inventors. The digital is no different.

But there is another origin of our impulse to concede mind to devices of our own invention, and this is what I focus on here: the tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment. The surreptitious substitution (to use a phrase of Edmund Husserl’s) of this thin gruel version of the mind at work – a substitution that I hope to convince you traces back to Alan Turing and the very origins of AI – is the decisive move in the conjuring trick.

What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe. And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern. In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care, and so, yes, no consciousness.

Can machines think? Turing dismissed this as ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion’. Instead of trying to make a machine that can think, he was content to design one that might count as a reasonable substitute for a thinker. Everywhere in Turing’s work, the focus is on imitation, replacement and substitution.

Consider his contribution to mathematics. A Turing machine is a formal model of the informal idea of computation: ie, the idea that some problems can be solved ‘mechanically’ by following a recipe or algorithm. (Think long division.) Turing proposed that we replace the familiar notion with his more precise analogue. Whether a given function is Turing-computable is a mathematical question, one that Turing supplied the formal means to answer rigorously. But whether Turing-computability serves to capture the essence of computation as we understand this intuitively, and whether therefore it’s a good idea to make the replacement, these are not questions that mathematics can decide. Indeed, presumably because they are themselves ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion,’ Turing left them to the philosophers.

In the same anti-philosophical spirit, Turing proposed that we replace the meaningless question Can machines think? with the empirically decidable question Can machines pass [what has come to be known as] the Turing test? To understand this proposal, we need to look at the test, which Turing called the Imitation Game.

The game is to be played by three players: one man, one woman, and one person whose gender doesn’t matter. Each has a distinct task. The player of unspecified gender, the interrogator, has the job of figuring out which of the other two is a man, and which a woman. The woman’s task is to serve as the interrogator’s ally; the man’s is to cause the interrogator to make the wrong identification.

The point is to explore whether substituting a machine for a player has any effect on the rate of success

This might make for fun adult entertainment, but Turing feared it would be too easy. Even today, when gender-experiment is commonplace, it wouldn’t be that hard, in most circumstances, to sort people by gender on the basis of superficial appearance. So Turing proposed that we isolate the interrogator in a room, limiting their access to others to the posing of questions. And he added: ‘In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms.’

What does the Imitation Game teach us about machine intelligence? Here is what Turing says:

We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’

The interrogator’s goal is not to out the computer; it’s to out the human players as having this or that gender. But Turing’s goal, and the game’s point, is to explore whether substituting a machine for one of the players has any effect on the interrogator’s rate of success. It is this last question, whether or not there is an effect on outcomes, that is proposed, by Turing, as proxy for the ‘meaningless’ question of whether machines can think.

Instead of arguing about what thinking is, Turing envisions a scenario in which machines might be able to enter into and participate in meaningful human exchange. Would their ability to do this establish that they can think, or feel, that they have minds as we have minds? These are precisely the wrong questions to ask, according to Turing. What he does say is that machines will get better at the game, and he went so far as to venture a prediction: that by end of the century – he was writing in 1950 – ‘general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.’

Despite Turing’s apparent hostility to philosophy, it is possible to read him as capturing a critical philosophical insight. Why should we expect that evidence would be able to secure the minds of machines for us, when it doesn’t perform that function in our ordinary human dealings? None of us has ever found out or proved that the people around us in our lives actually think or feel. We just take it for granted. And it is this observation that motivates his conception of his own task: not that of proving that machines can think; but rather that of integrating them into our lives so that the question, in effect, goes away, or answers itself.

It turns out, however, that not all of Turing’s replacements and substitutions are quite so straightforward as they seem. Some of them are downright misleading.

Consider, first, Turing’s matter-of-fact suggestion that we replace talking by the use of typed messages. He suggests that this is to make the game challenging. But the substitution of text for speech has an entirely different effect: to lend a modicum of plausibility to the otherwise absurd suggestion that machines might participate at all. To appreciate this, recall that a Turing machine is what in mathematics is called a formal system. In a formal system, there is a finite alphabet, and a finite set of rules for combining elements of the alphabet into more complex expressions. What makes the system formal is that the vocabulary needs to be specified in terms of physical properties alone, and rules need to be framed only in terms of these physical, that is to say, formal properties. This is the crux: unless you can formally specify the inputs and the outputs – the vocabulary – you can’t define a Turing machine or a Turing-computable function.

And, crucially, it isn’t possible formally to specify the inputs and the outputs of ordinary human language. Speech is breathy, hot movement that always unfolds with others, in context, and against the background of needs, feelings, desires, projects, goals and constraints. Speech is active, felt and improvisational. It has more in common with dancing than text-messaging. We are so much at home, nowadays, under the regime of the keyboard that we don’t even notice the ways text conceals the bodily reality of language.

The gamification of life is one of Turing’s most secure, and most troubling, legacies

Although speech is not formally specifiable, text – in the sense of text-messaging – is. So text can serve as a computationally tractable proxy for real human exchange. By filtering all communication between the players through the keyboard, in the name of making the game harder, Turing actually – and really this is a sleight of hand – sweeps what the philosopher Ned Block has called the problem of inputs and outputs under the rug.

But the substitution of text-message for speech is not the only sleight of hand at work in Turing’s argument. The other is introduced even more surreptitiously. This is the tacit substitution of games for meaningful human exchange. Indeed, the gamification of life is one of Turing’s most secure, and most troubling, legacies.

The problem is that Turing takes for granted a partial and distorted understanding of what games are. From the computational perspective, games are – indeed, to be formally tractable, they must be – crystalline structures of intelligibility, virtual worlds, where rules constrain what you can do, and where unproblematic values (points, goals, the score), and settled criteria of success and failure (winning and losing), are clearly specified.

But clarity, regimentation and transparency give us only one aspect of what a game is. Somehow Turing and his successors tend to forget that games are also contests; they are proving grounds, and it is we who are tested and we whose limitations are exposed, or whose powers as well as frailties are put on display on the kickball field, or the four square court. A child who plays competitive chess might suffer from anxiety so extreme they are nauseated. This visceral expression is no accidental epiphenomenon, an external of no essential value to the game. No, games without vomit – or at least that live possibility – would not be recognisable as human games at all.

All this is to say that true games are much more than they seem to be when we view them, as Turing did, through the lens of the regime of the keyboard. (Which is not to deny that we can, and do, usefully model aspects of the game computationally.)

Here’s the critical upshot: human beings are not merely doers (eg, games players) whose actions, at least when successful, conform to rules or norms. We are doers whose activity is always (at least potentially) the site of conflict. Second-order acts of reflection and criticism belong to the first-order performance itself. These are entangled, and with the consequence that you can never factor out, from the pure exercise of the activity itself, all the ways in which the activity challenges, retards, impedes and confounds. To play piano, for example – that other keyboard technology – is to fight with the machine, to battle against it.

Let me explain: the piano is the construction and elaboration of a particular musical culture and its values. It installs a conception of what is musically legible, intelligible, permitted and possible. A contraption made of approximately 12,000 pieces of wood, steel, felt and wire, the piano is a quasi-digital system, in which tones are the work of keystrokes, and in which intervals, scales and harmonic possibilities are controlled by the machine’s design and manufacture.

The piano was invented, to be sure, but not by you or me. We encounter it. It pre-exists us and solicits our submission. To learn to play is to be altered, made to adapt one’s posture, hands, fingers, legs and feet to the piano’s mechanical requirements. Under the regime of the piano keyboard, it is demanded that we ourselves become player pianos, that is to say, extensions of the machine itself.

But we can’t. And we won’t. To learn to play, to take on the machine, for us, is to struggle. It is hard to master the instrument’s demands.

To master the piano is not just to conform to the machine’s demands. It is to push back, to say no

And this fact – the difficulty we encounter in the face of the keyboard’s insistence – is productive. We make art out of it. It stops us being player pianos, but it is exactly what is required if we are to become piano players.

For it is the player’s fraught relation to the machine, and to the history and tradition that the machine imposes, that supplies the raw material of musical invention. Music and play happen in that entanglement. To master the piano, as only a person can, is not just to conform to the machine’s demands. It is, rather, to push back, to say no, to rage against the machine. And so, for example, we slap and bang and shout out. In this way, the piano becomes not merely a vehicle of habit and control – a mechanism – but rather an opportunity for action and expression.

And, as with the piano, so with the whole of human cultural life. We live in the entanglement between government and resistance. We fight back.

Consider language. We don’t just talk, as it were, following the rules blindly. Talking is an issue for us, and the rules, such as they are, are up for grabs and in dispute. We always, inevitably, and from the beginning, are made to cope with how hard talking is, how liable we are to misunderstand each other, although most of the time this is undertaken matter-of-factly and without undue stress. To talk, almost inevitably, is to question word choice, to demand reformulation, repetition and repair. What do you mean? How can you say that? In this way, talking contains within it, from the start, and as one of its basic modes, the activities of criticism and reflection about talking, which end up changing the way we talk. We don’t just act, as it were, in the flow. Flow eludes us and, in its place, we know striving, argument and negotiation. And so we change language in using language; and that’s what a language is, a place of capture and release, engagement and criticism, a process. We can never factor out mere doing, skilfulness, habit – the sort of things machines are used effectively to simulate – from the ways these doings, engagements and skills are made new, transformed, through our very acts of doing them. These are entangled. This is a crucial lesson about the very shape of human cognition.

If we keep language, the piano, and games in view, and if we don’t lose sight of what I am calling entanglement – the ways in which carrying on is entangled with everything required to deal with just how hard it is to carry on! – then it becomes clear that the AI discussion tends unthinkingly to presuppose a one-sided, peaches-and-cream simplification of human skilfulness and cognitive life. As if speaking were the straightforward application of rules, or playing the piano was just a matter of doing what the manual instructs. But to imagine language users who were not also actively struggling with the problems of talk would be to imagine something that is, at most, the shell or semblance of human life with language. It would, in fact, be to imagine the language of machines (such as LLMs).

The telling fact: computers are used to play our games; they are engineered to make moves in the spaces opened up by our concerns. They don’t have concerns of their own, and they make no new games. They invent no new language.

The British philosopher R G Collingwood noticed that the painter doesn’t invent painting, and the musician doesn’t invent the musical culture in which they find themselves. And for Collingwood this served to show that no person is fully autonomous, a God-like fount of creativity; we are always to some degree recyclers and samplers and, at our best, participants in something larger than ourselves.

But this should not be taken to show that we become what we are (painters, musicians, speakers) by doing what, for example, LLMs do – ie, merely by getting trained up on large data sets. Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn. And for us, learning a language, for example, isn’t learning to generate ‘the next token’. It’s learning to work, play, eat, love, flirt, dance, fight, pray, manipulate, negotiate, pretend, invent and think. And crucially, we don’t merely incorporate what we learn and carry on; we always resist. Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning.

We can’t help doing this; no computer can do this.

[Vesper 28,804]

Dover sole à la meunière

Meunière means miller’s wife in French, so this is fish cooked in the style of the miller’s wife — dusted with flour. This is still my favourite fish dish. I always say if you think you don’t like fish, order yourself a Dover sole if you can afford it. I would defy anybody not to love this dish. As with many a prime cut of meat or poultry, the simplest ways of cooking fish are generally the best.

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 2 x 400-450g Dover soles, trimmed (see method) and skinned
• Salt and freshly ground white pepper
• 25g plain flour
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 50g unsalted butter
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tbsp chopped parsley
• 2 tsp capers

To serve

• Lemon wedges
• Sautéed potatoes

Method

1. To trim a sole, take a pair of sharp scissors and cut the frilly fins and the fleshy bones off both sides. You want to cut about 4cm off all round so that you are left with just the four fillets on the backbone. Repeat with the other sole. Season the fish with salt and white pepper. Dip both sides of each fillet into flour, then pat off the excess.
2. Heat the oil in a large well seasoned or nonstick frying pan. Add one of the soles, lower the heat slightly and add a small piece of butter. Fry the fish over a moderate heat for 4-5 minutes, without moving it, until richly golden.
3. Carefully turn over the fish and fry for a further 4-5 minutes until golden brown and cooked through. Transfer it to a serving plate and keep warm. Repeat with the second fish.
4. Discard the frying oil. Add the remaining butter to the pan and allow it to melt over a moderate heat. When the butter starts to smell nutty and turn light brown, add the lemon juice, parsley, capers and some seasoning. Pour some of this beurre noisette over each fish and serve with lemon wedges. Good with sautéed potatoes.

[Vesper 28,804]

Pan-fried John Dory with beer, bacon and lettuce

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with craft ale. I’m of a generation that prefers delicate English hops to the enormous power of American ones. When we were filming at the Wild Card Brewery in Walthamstow, east London, recently, brewer Jaega Wise gave me bags of both English and American hops to sniff. The American hops were like New Zealand sauvignon blanc in the strength of their aroma. But when it comes to using beer in a sauce for fish, that extra fragrance makes all the difference.

I’m very fond of this simple treatment for a great fish like John Dory, which is perfectly complemented by the bitterness of the beer and the smokiness of the bacon.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 4 x 175g John Dory or gurnard fillets, skin on
• Salt and black pepper
• 50g butter, melted
• 75g rindless smoked streaky bacon, chopped
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped or grated
• 300ml good chicken stock
• 300ml pale ale
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 750g Cos lettuce, shredded
• Small handful of parsley, chopped

Method

1. Place the fish fillets on a plate and sprinkle generously with salt. Leave them for about 15-20 minutes, then rinse off the salt and pat the fish dry with kitchen roll. Brush the fish with a little of the butter and season with pepper, then set aside.
2. Heat some of the butter in a frying pan, add the bacon and fry until golden and crisp. Add the remaining butter and gently fry the onion and garlic for 5 minutes until softened. Add the chicken stock and beer to the pan and cook over a high heat until the liquid has reduced by three quarters. Turn the heat down as much as possible, cover the pan and leave the sauce over the low heat while you cook the fish.
3. In a separate pan, heat the oil over a medium heat and cook the fish, skin-side down, for about 6-7 minutes until the skin is crisp and the fish is opaque.
4. Stir the lettuce into the sauce and allow it to wilt, then stir in the chopped parsley and season, if needed, with salt and pepper. Divide the lettuce and bacon between four plates, top with a piece of fish and spoon around the sauce. Serve immediately.

[Vesper 28,804]

Pasta with roasted squash, sage and walnuts

Serves 4

Sage and roasted squash is a classic flavour combination that always hits the spot, and the walnuts add some welcome crunch. If you want extra-crispy sage leaves, remove them from the frying pan, sprinkle with salt and leave to rest on a piece of kitchen roll — they will magically crisp up.

Ingredients
1 squash (about 900g)
Salt and pepper
Pinch of chilli flakes
Olive oil
400g pasta
300g ricotta
100g butter
1 packet fresh sage
Handful of walnut pieces
Grated parmesan

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180C fan/gas 6. Peel the squash, discard the seeds and chop the flesh into 2.5cm pieces. Season, sprinkle with chilli and drizzle with oil and roast for 20-30 minutes, turning halfway, until soft and slightly caramelised.

2. Cook the pasta in salted boiling water until al dente and drain, reserving 1-2 tbsp cooking water. Stir the water into the ricotta to loosen it and create a sauce.

3. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a pan and fry the sage and nuts until the butter is golden and the sage crisp.

4. Combine the ricotta and squash with the pasta and serve. Drizzle over the sage, butter and nuts and top with parmesan.

Edited October 26 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,804]

Stuffed pumpkin with feta and spicy grains

Serves 2

Those precooked packets of rice and grains are a great cheat for this recipe. They also come flavoured so you could even do away with the extras, although I find a squeeze of lemon juice and a few fresh herbs help to brighten them up no end.

Ingredients
1 medium pumpkin or squash
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 red onion, peeled and cut into quarters
1 x 250g packet of precooked mixed grains
25g pine nuts
40g dried apricots, chopped
1 tbsp harissa paste
Small bunch of parsley, chopped
100g feta, crumbled

Method
1. Heat the oven to 180C fan/gas 6. Halve the pumpkin or squash and discard the seeds to make a decent-sized hollow. Rub inside and out with oil, season and add two onion quarters to each half. Roast for 45 minutes.

2. Heat the grains in the microwave according to the instructions, then mix in the remaining ingredients as well as the roasted onion. Spoon into the pumpkin or squash halves and return to the oven for 15 minutes before serving.

[Vesper 28,804]

Squash and paneer curry

Serves 4

The sweetness of squash works well with curry spices, so don’t be shy when adding heat. If you can get it, Fudco Kashmiri chilli (fudcoshop.com) adds great colour without blowing your head off.

Ingredients
Splash of vegetable oil
200g paneer, cut into cubes
1 squash (about 900g), peeled and diced
1 onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, peeled
1 x 5cm piece of ginger, grated
Small bunch of coriander, stems chopped and leaves reserved for garnish
1-2 tbsp garam masala, to taste
Chilli powder, to taste
2 tins chopped tomatoes
150ml double cream
Cooked rice, to serve

Method
1. Heat the oil in a large pan over a high heat and fry the paneer for several minutes until golden. Place on kitchen roll to drain. Add more oil and cook the squash, turning it until caramelised (about 10 minutes) and drain.

2. Add more oil if needed and gently fry the onion, garlic, ginger and coriander stems for about 5 minutes, then add the garam masala and chilli and cook for a further minute.

3. Add the tomatoes and squash and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally until thickened. Add the paneer and cream and warm through. Sprinkle with coriander leaves. Serve with rice.

[Vesper 28,804]

Roasted pumpkin and green sauce

Serves 4

Pumpkin is often served just on its own, but the flavours are enhanced when it is tarted up with an easy, punchy green sauce.

Ingredients
1 x 1kg pumpkin or a mix of pumpkin and squash, cut into wedges
2 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic bulb
Salt and pepper
4 fresh rosemary sprigs

For the sauce
15g mint, finely chopped
15g parsley, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped
2 tbsp capers, finely chopped
2 tbsp cider vinegar
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp olive oil
Squeeze of lemon juice

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 180C fan/gas 6. Toss the pumpkin in the olive oil and put on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. Break up the garlic bulb and add to the tray. Season well. Scatter the rosemary on top and roast for 30 minutes.

2. To make the sauce, put the mint, parsley, garlic and capers in a bowl and mix. Add half the vinegar and the mustard. Mix and slowly add the oil, then the lemon juice. Taste and add more vinegar if necessary. Serve spooned over the pumpkin.

[Vesper 28,804]

Feta and mozzarella cachapas with honey and lime

Keep an eye out for the Insta-worthy cheese pull on these Venezuelan corn pancakes that are often sold at roadside food stands. They’re usually made with fresh corn, but I’ve used frozen corn for ease; if you’d prefer to use fresh, just stand the husk up on a board and shave off the kernels with a big, sharp knife; don’t use tinned sweetcorn here, though, because it’s far too wet. If you like, make the pancakes and the cheese mixture up to 24 hours ahead, ready for stuffing the following day.

Method Put all the batter ingredients in a blender, add a teaspoon of flaky salt and blitz smooth. Transfer to a bowl, cover with a tea towel and set aside for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, put the two cheeses, spring onions, jalapeño and crushed coriander seeds in a bowl and mix well. Put a medium, 18cm frying pan on a medium heat and, once hot, brush it with a little oil. Ladle in about 120ml of the batter, swirl the pan so the batter covers the base, then cook for three to four minutes, until the top is set and the bottom is deeply golden. Carefully flip over using a spatula, cook for another minute, then transfer to a large tray and repeat with the remaining batter, adding more oil to the pan as required. Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6. Put roughly 90g of the filling into one half of each pancake, fold over, return to the tray, then bake for 10 minutes, until the cheese has melted. Finely grate the lime zest over the tops of the pancakes, then drizzle over the honey. Sprinkle a pinch of flaky salt on top, cut the zested lime into wedges and serve alongside the pancakes.

[Vesper 28,804]

Clase Azul, which makes some of the finest tequila in Mexico, released the fourth instalment of its extremely limited edition collection: Música. An anejo tequila aged for 26 months, it has aromas of peat smoke, honey, nutmeg and plum. There are only 10,000 bottles in the world – run don’t walk. 

Clase Azul Tequila

Día de Muertos Edición Limitada

https://claseazul.com/clase-azul-family/clase-azul-dia-de-muertos-24

 

Música

In Mexico, Día de Muertos is a celebration where the sublime and the festive come together to honor the memory of those who are no longer with us.

 

#ClaseAzulLimitedEdition

 

 

 

 

Clase Azul Tequila Día de Muertos Limited Edition Música captures the vibrant and mystical atmosphere of this tradition’s music to share it with the entire world.

Nuestros Recuerdos

This is the fourth installment of Nuestros Recuerdos, an annual series of five limited-edition creations dedicated to the most exquisite aspects of Día de Muertos.

For this limited edition, our Master Distiller has crafted an exquisite, 26-month extra añejo tequila, aged in American whiskey casks and finished in casks of Scotch whisky.

Decanter

 

The decanter for this limited edition, with its deep plum color, embodies the soft and calming cadence of Día de Muertos melodies.

On the back of the base, an illustration in golden and lilac hues depicts an eclectic musical ensemble parading to the sound of traditional instruments, reflecting the diverse musical traditions of this festivity.

Ornament

The front of the decanter features a 24-karat gold-plated ornament with a fine patina finish, brought to life as a jovial, accordion-playing Catrina dancing to her own music.

This moveable artisanal piece was handcrafted at the Milagros de Latón artisan workshop in Tesistán, Jalisco. A highly intricate work, it is composed of almost 40 individual parts cast from 10 separate molds.

 

 

 

[Vesper 28,804]

Farewell, double IPA

RIP, double IPA

https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/farewell-double-ips/

Here lies the double IPA, gone but not forgotten. Born in the mid-90s in California, the colossal beer enjoyed years of popularity, adored by hop-heads, before finally falling into the shadow of other trends. The double IPA is survived by its leaner offspring, the traditional IPA, the hazy IPA, and the West Coast IPA.

 

Beers like Pliny the Elder and Stone’s Ruination made the style famous. At the time, it seemed like the next logical step for the IPA—bigger, bolder, more colossal. The IPA had won people over with its combination of bitterness and might, so why not take it to the next level?

During its heyday, the double IPA drew ravenous crowds. Beer bars fought over Pliny, and lines formed around the block when the keg was tapped. People could not get enough. And, impressively, this was before most breweries took to social media to tout their special releases. Some brewers called them double IPAs, some called them imperial IPAs, but the reaction was pretty much the same: pure glee among craft enthusiasts.

The downfall of a giant

The double IPA may have been too intense for its own good. Not that there aren’t tasty options (the two above, for example, and the extraordinary Sticky Hands by Block 15 Brewing), but something tends to happen when an IPA goes double. The raised malt bill, made to balance out the added hoppy notes, can overwhelm. There can be a candy-sweet characteristic to the beer despite through-the-roof IBU numbers. Richness can overshadow all those wonderful piney, woodsy, vegetal hop notes. It’s done in the name of balance, but the scales tend to tip the wrong way.

And this is to say nothing of the recent movements, which care not for the double IPA. Young imbibers prefer lower-alcohol beers like lagers and session IPAs. Countless options have flooded the market, from hard seltzers and hard teas to RTD cocktails. Lighter drinks like the spritz have ascended to god-like status (and not just because of shows like White Lotus). Oh, and then there’s the wellness trend, and more and more people are exploring the NA sector, which has improved dramatically over the last couple of years. In fact, there’s never been a better time to crack a good non-alcoholic beer.

This kind of backdrop doesn’t leave much room for beefy IPAs (remember triple IPAs?). Those hops are going elsewhere, from hop waters to cider infusions. Palates seem to be more refined these days, but that’s not a bad thing. We’re after delicacy and subtlety, whether in the form of a nuanced high-elevation wine or terroir-driven gin. Plus, with climate change and a hotter planet, reaching for a double IPA can be challenging, at least in the midst of a record-breaking summer heat wave.

Alas, there’s hope.

A comeback story?

While it seems like the double IPA’s best days are behind it, this writer believes there’s a chance at a second coming. Just as there are trends working against the beer style, there are trends that bode well for the hefty beer, from a focus on local grains and malts to new hop hybrids that stand up to the raised alcohol content. Brewers are nailing beers made with new hop incarnations, and some could work really well with more intense IPAs.

We certainly still love big. That’s about as American as anything gets. Just look at the stovepipe can and our collective obsession with giant hats, giant cars, giant tumblers—giant everything. And we love a good pairing, from wine and seafood to Scotch and cheese. The extra weight a double IPA carries could do wonder if teamed up with the right food. Wine-tasting rooms have gone the culinary route, treating their wines to complementary nibbles. Beer could do the same, offering flights of their offerings in-house, paired up with corresponding foods. The right bite—a salty cured meat, an extra-cheesy pasta or pizza, a spicy curry—could take the sting out of the alcohol and play off the richness of the malt backbone.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA as much as the next craft enthusiast. But beer has to look in the mirror at the moment, like a lot of industries, and some evolution will be in order if the double IPA is to remain intact. The beer will always be a bit of an outlier, but it will still have to grow to retain relevancy. If the double IPA is to walk into the sunset, it had a great run. If it’s to make something of a comeback, I’ll welcome such a thing, although it’s probably going to have to be a different animal.

So farewell for now.

[Vesper 28,804]

THE RESTAURANT

Buster’s

The team behind award-winning Clapham restaurant Ploussard and cult fried-chicken outfit Other Side Fried have launched a third concept. Opening in Brixton this week, Buster’s burger bar sees the pair go from poultry to prime cuts, with a menu that champions simplicity, flavour and top-tier ingredients such as Welsh wagyu. Buster's burgers will be cooked medium and served in a homemade potato roll, alongside locally brewed beers and pet nat by the glass. We can’t wait to try the cheeseburger, which features a wagyu beef patty, American cheese, green peppercorn dijonnaise and a buttered potato roll.

Visit BustersLondon.co.uk

HAMBURGER BAR

Traditional hamburgers, French fries & pet-nat.

Monday - Sunday | 12 - 11pm

3 Atlantic road, London, SW8 8HX

[Vesper 28,804]

What To Do In London This Weekend 30.10.24

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Wondering what to do with your downtime?

 

SLMan has you covered. From a Halloween supper club to a breakfast bap collab, here’s what to get stuck into…

 

https://slman.com/culture/whats-on/what-to-do-this-weekend-301024

 

 

Check Out This New Store

Gandys

Covent Garden’s appeal as a hub for independent fashion has grown again with the opening of a Gandys store. Founded by brothers Rob and Paul in a Brixton flat after they survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Gandys has since collaborated with big names like Liberty of London, McLaren and The Rolling Stones. Offering sturdy travel clothing, durable backpacks and accessories, the brand’s new store also furthers its mission to support disadvantaged children worldwide through educational projects.

66 Neal Street, Covent Garden, WC2H 9PA

Visit GandysInternational.com

 

Start The Weekend Off Right

Bangers X Kold Sauce

For your breakfast bap, is it ketchup or brown sauce? This November it might be neither. Kold Sauce has teamed up with brekkie hotspot Bangers on a limited-edition dish available for one month only. Inspired by a greasy-spoon staple, the sandwich contains glazed ham, fried egg, grilled pineapple, fresh crips and lashings of Kold’s Burnt Pineapple Hot Pepper sauce. If you can’t get enough, the condiment will be available to buy on DELLI while stocks last. 

5 Leonard Circus, Shoreditch, EC2A 4DQ; from 1st November

Visit BangersLondon.co.uk & KoldSauce.com

 

Celebrate Halloween

Close Ties X Chef Naz Hassan

Billed as a ‘wine rave’, Close Ties is the brainchild of Carousel’s Joshua Brat and Trullo’s Jake Norman. The collab upends the status quo of traditional supper clubs to offer guests a new experience of ‘beats and bites’. Attendees are encouraged to get on the dancefloor while enjoying dishes from guest chefs and pours of low-intervention wines. This Friday 1st November, Naz Hassan – previously of Crispin and Pidgin – will be in the kitchen, paying homage to his Bengali and Milanese heritage. The evening will kick off with a complimentary champagne happy hour, featuring Moët and canapés from Naz. Then there’s Bengali spiced lobster and prawn rolls, beef kosha tacos, tuna pucka and more. On the decks will be Secretsundaze, Soft Touch and other Close Ties resident DJs – including Jake Norman himself. Tickets on the door are £13 and Halloween dress-up is encouraged, with free tequila shots for killer costumes.

Shoreditch Arts Club, 6 Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, E2 7DD

Follow @Close_Ties_

 

Get A Health Check-Up

The Liver Clinic

After a weekend of indulgence, you might be more aware of your liver than usual. Not only does this vital organ filter out toxins, it also plays a crucial role in boosting immunity and converting glucose into stored starch. This makes it all the more important to keep your liver in top shape. The Liver Clinic’s new flagship location at John Bell & Croyden offers a cutting-edge FibroScan Liver Scan. This non-invasive and painless procedure takes just 15 minutes, providing you with expert advice and instant results from the clinic’s knowledgeable team.

John Bell & Croyden, 50-54 Wigmore Street, Marylebone, W1U 2AU

Visit TheLiverClinic.Com

 

Book Ahead

Wildmoor Whiskey Supper Club

Fancy swapping the grey skies of London for the lush greenery of the Scottish Highlands? Wildmoor, the high-aged Scotch whisky from heritage drinks company William Grant & Sons, is hosting a series of wild supper clubs led by chef William Hamer. Celebrating the Scottish wilderness and its bounty, Hamer will prepare a multi-course feast over an open flame on the shores of Loch Fyne in Argyll – just an hour's drive from Glasgow. Everything will be paired with Wildmoor whiskies. And no need to worry about the unpredictable Scottish weather, as dining will take place in the Wild Kabn Kitchen, a Victorian greenhouse on the historic Ardkinglas estate. Tickets are £135 each.

Ardkinglas House, Ardkinglas, Cairndow, Argyll, PA26 8BG; Friday 15th November

Visit WildKabnKitchenPriavteSupper.As.Me

 

Get A Culture Fix

Definitely Maybe: A View From Within Lands Exhibition

You might have heard, Oasis are back together and touring. Even if you didn't get tickets, there’s an exhibition at the Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green which is free to attend. It features the photography of Michael Spencer Jones, who made the cover photographs for the band’s first three albums, Definitely Maybe, Morning Glory and Be Here Now. The exhibition also includes many famous images and previously unseen snaps of the band.

Town Hall Hotel, Until 24th January 

Visit TownHallHotel.com

Edited October 30 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,804]

Elusive but everywhere

Everything in the Universe, from wandering turtles to falling rocks, is surrounded by ‘fields’ that guide and direct movement

https://aeon.co/essays/a-new-field-theory-reveals-the-hidden-forces-that-guide-us

A green sea turtle in the ocean off Hawaii. Photo by Michael Riffle/Getty

 

Why do rocks fall? Before Isaac Newton introduced his revolutionary law of gravity in 1687, many natural scientists and philosophers thought that rocks fell because falling was an essential part of their nature. For Aristotle, seeking the ground was an intrinsic property of rocks. The same principle, he argued, also explained why things like acorns grew into oak trees. According to this explanation, every physical object in the Universe, from rocks to people, moved and changed because it had an internal purpose or goal.

Modern science has rejected this ‘teleological’ way of thinking. In the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists and philosophers began to chip away at Aristotle’s seemingly ‘spooky’ notion of intrinsic causes – spooky because they suggested that rocks and creatures were guided by something not entirely material. For those who rejected these Aristotelean explanations, such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, organisms were simply complex machines animated by mechanisms. ‘Life is but a motion of limbs,’ wrote Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651). ‘For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.’ The heart does not have the goal of circulating blood. It’s just a spring like any other. For many thinkers at the time, this view had real explanatory benefits because they knew something about how machines worked, including how to fix them. It was in this intellectual environment that Newton developed a powerful mechanical worldview, based on his discovery of gravitational fields. In a Newtonian universe, internal purpose doesn’t cause rocks to fall. They just fall, following a law of nature.

Mechanistic explanations, however, struggled to explain how life develops. How does a grass seed become a blade of grass, in the face of endless disturbances from its environment? Long after the mechanistic revolution, the philosopher Immanuel Kant confronted the stubborn problem of teleology and despaired. In 1790, he wrote in the Critique of Judgment that – as commonly paraphrased – ‘there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass.’ Less than a century later, with the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin seemed to crack the problem of biological teleology. Darwin’s ideas about natural selection appeared to explain how organisms, from grass seeds to bats, were able to pursue goals. The directing process was blind variation and the selective retention of favourable variants. Bats who sought moths and had an ever-improved capacity to track and catch them were favoured over those who were less goal directed and therefore had lesser capabilities. Though natural selection seemed to illuminate what Descartes, Hobbes and Kant could not, Darwin’s theory answered only half the problem of teleology. Selection explained where teleological systems like moth-seeking bats come from but didn’t answer how they find their goals.

 

So, how do goal-directed entities do it, moment by moment? How does an acorn seek its adult form? How does a homing torpedo find its target? Mechanistic thinking struggles to answer these questions. From a mechanical perspective, these systems look strangely future oriented. A sea turtle, hundreds of miles out to sea, can find the beach where it was born, a location that lies in its future. A developing embryo, without any thought of the future, constructs tissues and organs that it will not need until much later in life. And both do these things persistently: carried off course by a strong current, the sea turtle persistently finds a trajectory back toward its natal beach; despite errors in cell division and gene expression, an embryo is able to make corrections as it grows into its adult form. How is this possible?

Even though mechanistic thinking has failed to solve this teleological problem, it still dominates scientific thought. Today, we invoke mechanism to explain almost everything – including human goal-directed behaviour. To explain the growth of an acorn, we look to mechanisms in its genes. To explain the ocean voyages of a sea turtle, we look to mechanisms in its brain. And to explain our own thoughts and decisions, we focus on neural pathways and brain chemistry to explain decision-making. We explain behaviour in terms of evolutionary needs, such as survival or reproductive success. We may even think of our genes as ‘blueprints’. For some 20th-century thinkers, such as the US psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, human brains are purely mechanistic. Skinner denied that people have goals at all. More recently, the primatologist Robert Sapolsky, based at Stanford University, and others have painted a mechanistic picture of us that denies we have free will.

We seem to have only two ways of explaining it: teleology or mechanism. Both are troublesome. Both are inadequate

And yet, despite centuries of rejection, teleology has not been banished. Most of us still have a deep intuition that there is more to our thinking and action than mere mechanisms. The feeling of being in love isn’t just the mechanical outcome of neurochemistry. We want to believe it is driven by our wants and intentions. Some of us, especially if moved by religious or spiritual impulses, might even see goals in the larger universe: ‘I am here for a purpose,’ you might think to yourself. For many, a world of pure mechanism seems insufficient. And beyond our intuitions about teleology, there are countless areas of science where teleological explanations are commonly deployed, even without any explicit recognition of them. Consider the debate over which parts of a genome are ‘functional’ (ie, they perform roles that are beneficial to an organism) and which are ‘non-functional’ (ie, useless remnants of evolution). The very idea that a gene can either be functional or non-functional implies that certain genes aim towards certain results, or have certain purposes for the organism, while others have no ends and are merely purposeless junk. So, even beyond our intuitions, teleology is so deeply entwined with science that there will be no getting rid of it anytime soon.

So, caught between modern science and our intuitions about teleology, we seem to have only two ways of explaining the apparent goal directedness in some systems: teleology or mechanism. Both are troublesome. Both are inadequate. In recognition of this problem, philosophers of biology and others have, in recent decades, been struggling to find an alternative. We believe we have found it: a third way that reconciles Aristotelian thinking about goal directedness with the mechanistic view of a Newtonian universe. This alternative explains the apparent seeking of all goal-directed entities, from developing acorns and migrating sea turtles to self-driving cars and human intentions. It proposes that a hidden architecture connects these entities. It even explains falling rocks.

We call it ‘field theory’.

The notion of ‘fields’ was originally developed by physicists such as Newton, Michael Faraday, Richard Feynman and others. In physics, the concept has been used to explain gravity, electromagnetism, and particle interactions in quantum theory. But fields have also been used in biology to explain the development of living things. In the mid-20th century, the Austrian biologist Paul Weiss proposed that, within an embryo, large ‘morphogenetic fields’ directed the behaviour of cells inside them. Together, these pioneers in physics and biology showed how objects in the Universe can be directed by often-invisible and large-scale external structures. Our version of field theory takes this as its starting point.

So what do fields do? How do they give us goal directedness? To answer this, we need to know something about what it means to seek a goal. Two mid-20th-century thinkers, the biologist Gerd Sommerhoff and the philosopher of science Ernest Nagel, made a simple observation about goal-directed objects: they all exhibit the same pattern of deviation and correction. When they inevitably deviate from the right trajectory – the right path toward a goal – these objects correct themselves, and direct themselves back toward their goal. A mouse embryo can be split in half at an early stage, and each half will regrow into a fully formed mouse. A person headed out to buy something can be diverted by another errand, but afterward redirect themselves toward the store. Sommerhoff and Nagel called this ability to recover from perturbations ‘persistence’.

The second signature behaviour of goal-directed entities is plasticity, the ability to find a trajectory toward a goal from a wide range of starting points. A sea turtle seeking the Florida beach where it was born can begin its journey from anywhere within a wide area, stretching hundreds of miles. A self-driving car can find its destination from almost anywhere. Persistence and plasticity are the common features that all goal-directed entities seem to share. And they point to the central problem of teleology: how do goal-directed entities persistently and plastically find their way toward a target that lies only in their future? How do they know which way to go? After all, the future cannot direct the past. What sort of strange causal chain is at work here?

These fields are not metaphorical. They are real and physical

The answer involves looking away from goal-directed entities, and instead considering what surrounds them. In our view, persistence and plasticity are possible because goal-directed entities – from turtles to self-driving cars – move and change within a larger field that envelops and directs them. Sea turtles, for example, are enveloped by Earth’s magnetic field and can use this field to find the beach where they were born. To make this journey, they rely on complex mechanisms in their brains, but also on a larger field that, from a turtle’s perspective, appears everywhere. If a current carries a turtle off course, the field is there to direct it back toward the right beach. Likewise for self-driving cars. Each car is immersed in a microwave field emanating from nearby cell-tower arrays and can use that field to locate its destination from anywhere within range of those towers. If forced to make a detour, the microwave field directs the car back toward its destination.

Our proposal is that fields direct the action of all goal-directed entities. In other words, goal directedness is the result of a particular architecture, a particular arrangement of large fields that contain and guide smaller entities. From this perspective, persistence and plasticity are possible only because a field is present wherever an entity wanders.

In field theory, fields are defined in terms of what the biologist Michael Levin calls ‘nonlocality’. They are structures whose influence extends over a broad area, not localised to any one point. Earth’s magnetic field is present not just locally, where the sea turtle happens to be at one moment, but wherever the turtle could accidentally wander. Our understanding of fields is even broader. It includes atmospheric fields that direct the formation of hurricanes, ecological fields that direct the migration of animal herds, and social fields that, to some extent, guide our wants and intentions. These fields are not metaphorical. They are real and physical. They can be detected, measured, and even manipulated.

Today, the standard scientific answer for how goal-directed entities work still involves pointing to internal mechanisms, following the tradition that can be traced back to Descartes, Hobbes and Newton. For example, how can we explain the way a homing torpedo, a classic mechanical goal-directed device, seeks its target? Most explanations would turn to internal feedback mechanisms inside the device. This is exactly what cyberneticists did in the mid-20th century, like the Mexican physician Arturo Rosenblueth. They argued that a homing torpedo uses feedback mechanisms to direct itself, detecting the sound of the target ship and responding when the sound fades by turning in the direction where it is louder. In a similar way, internal mechanisms are also used by contemporary biologists to explain the goal-directed behaviour of organisms.

Consider a dung beetle. When it enters a dung pile, a beetle will sculpt some of the dung into a ball. To escape rivals who might steal the ball, the beetle stands on top of it and rolls it away from the pile in a straight line. If it strays from a straight path, the beetle risks accidentally circling back to the pile, where it will encounter competition again. Anatomical studies have revealed that a complex mechanism in the beetle’s brain is involved in guiding its movements. From this perspective, the dung beetle’s goal-directed behaviour – moving in a straight line away from the pile – can be fully explained by some mechanism buried inside its brain. Such mechanistic approaches have dominated contemporary thinking on goal directedness.

The image of the Milky Way is a ‘light field’ that the beetle can use to orient its movements

The explanatory power of the mechanistic tradition is undeniable. But notice that these explanations of teleological phenomena are incomplete. The feedback mechanisms inside a homing torpedo have no information about the location of the target ship. That information is present only externally, in the ‘sound field’ generated by the target ship. And the mechanisms inside a beetle’s brain have by themselves no information about whether the beetle is moving in a straight line. Instead, beetles rolling their balls away from dung piles are guided by something that is not only external but light years away: the Milky Way galaxy. The image of the Milky Way is a ‘light field’, one that the beetle can use to orient its movements. The beetle’s brain mechanisms are critical parts of the causal chain, but they alone can’t tell a straight line from a very slightly curved one. When it comes to explaining ‘goals’, the mechanistic approach has a serious limitation.

Mechanisms are still important. They explain how goal-directed entities move and change, and how they execute decisions. But internal mechanisms viewed in isolation have no information about external goals. They can’t fully explain how an entity can persistently move toward its goal, even after it deviates. Mechanisms respond and execute; fields guide and direct.

So far, we have considered relatively simple examples. A more challenging case for field theory involves the development of embryos. To all appearances, embryos seek their adult form guided by internal genes, not an external field. Think of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, one of the most well-studied animals in scientific research. The mother fruit fly guides the earliest development of her growing embryos, but soon the process seems to proceed almost autonomously, as the embryo partitions itself into segments and then into body regions, with limbs, mouth, and other parts forming later. How does it do it? No information about the overall architecture of these body parts is present in the cells and tissues of the parts themselves, or in each organism’s genes. Once again, the answer requires looking outside.

Guidance is external, but not in the way you might think. It is not external to the entire embryo, but external to each body part. Guidance comes from ‘morphogenetic fields’ that are set up by the embryo itself. It is these fields that supply the cells contained within them with guidance about what to do: where to move, what to secrete, when to divide. These fields are composed of molecules, produced by genes deep inside an embryo’s cells, but the genes are not the source of guidance. They are just factories. And the molecules they manufacture combine to produce a chemical field around the growing body parts, directing their behaviour. This is where the notion of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ becomes trickier. This field is inside the embryo, of course, but is present over a broad area, outside the target cells and tissues, omnipresent and ready to correct them when they inevitably deviate.

Consider a question that still perplexes biologists. Why are your arms pretty much the same length? Genes inside the cells of a developing left arm have, by themselves, no information about the length of the developing right arm. This means that, unless tightly controlled, the cells in one arm might divide a bit faster than those in the other. This kind of variation occurs all the time in the development of organisms. If such variation is possible, then how do our arms grow to the same length? The answer is not yet known. One strong possibility is that some field exists – biochemical or even electrical – which is in touch with both arms, encompassing the cells in each. Such a field could persistently guide the growth process toward arms of the same length.

At each level, large fields direct the smaller entities contained within them

The simplified explanation above barely begins to account for the full complexity of fields in goal-directed systems. In embryos, there are multiple fields at the scale of the entire developing organism directing various tissue-level mechanisms inside. In turn, those tissues can also act as fields, directing the cells within them. And these cells in turn can also act as fields, directing various molecule-level mechanisms inside them, and so on. In the most complex systems, multiple levels of entities are nested within multiple fields. This telescoping of levels extends upward as well. Whole organisms are nested within local ecological fields, which in turn are nested within larger ecologies, and so on. What matters in these relationships – what makes goal directedness possible – are the spatial relationships among the nested entities. At each level, large fields direct the smaller entities contained within them.

By now, some might have noticed the teleological elephant in the room: our theory seems to suggest that Aristotle was right to think that falling rocks intend to fall – that they have a downward-seeking goal or purpose. After all, according to field theory, a falling rock is an entity persistently guided downward by an external (gravitational) field. And if teleology requires nothing more than a field directing a contained entity, then field theory would suggest that a falling rock really is teleological. To virtually all contemporary thinking on teleology, this is an outrageous conclusion.

We have two responses. First, not all instances of goal directedness are equal. A falling rock is among the simplest kind of teleological entity imaginable. It is minimally, negligibly, goal directed. Human intentions and purposes are among the most complex. According to field theory, historical and modern thinking on teleology has made an error. Much of this thinking assumes that teleology must be binary, that things are either goal directed or they’re not. We see teleology as something that comes in degrees. Second, allowing a falling rock to be somewhat teleological has the effect of drawing the life sciences and the physical sciences closer together, and we think that is a good thing. The very notion of a partition between them – with the life sciences allowing teleology while the physical sciences do not – would seem to imply there’s something about the life sciences that fails to be purely physical. We think that’s a mistake.

What makes field theory unique is that it is the only modern explanation of goal directedness that locates the source of goal directedness outside of the goal-directed entity. Most other modern theories are mechanistic, and even those that aren’t still point to internal processes or internal organisation, which we argue cannot have the information necessary to direct.

Though we know of no similar approaches to teleology, field theory did not arise in a vacuum. It has deep roots in the work of those studying the properties of nested, hierarchical systems. These studies stretch back almost a century and include research by social scientists (such as Herbert Simon), psychologists (Donald Campbell), biologists (Stanley Salthe) and philosophers (James Feibleman, Ernest Nagel and William Wimsatt). Although not all these thinkers are directly concerned with goal directedness, they explore the ways in which big things can affect little things nested within them, from societies affecting individuals to ecologies affecting species. This research has helped to explain the nature of hierarchical causation, how wholes affect their parts.

Finally, we turn to the most speculative application of field theory: human wants and intentions. If we’re right, then things like human culture and psychology – alongside all goal-directed phenomena – also involve direction by fields. That would mean there needs to be a hierarchical structure to human wanting. And this structure does seem to exist. Looking down, our cells and tissues have the same nested structure as other multicellular organisms. Looking up, we are individuals nested within and directed by small social ecologies (marriages, families, friend groups, etc), which in turn are nested within and directed by larger ones (economic, political and cultural entities), and so on. This is a greatly simplified explanation; even within organisms, the complex nesting of fields is never tidy.

Now consider the laws and legal systems that guide citizens into rough compliance. In this case, the ‘fields’ are the norms, expectations, forms of deterrence, and adjudication and enforcement systems that direct our wants and intentions, and therefore indirectly affect our thinking and actions. Just as Earth’s magnetic field acts on the turtle’s brain, telling it where to turn, the legal system acts on our wants and intentions from above. The same goes for the many economic fields in which we are immersed, guiding our preferences as workers and consumers. And the same also goes for the many social fields that contain us and guide us. These fields arise from partners, friends, families and the countless workplaces, neighbourhood groups, clubs and other social institutions in which we are immersed. The largest fields, like social and economic fields, are extraordinarily nonlocal, directing the wants and intentions of huge numbers of individuals over a large area. From this vantage point, human society emerges as a web of fields. People in a society, like cells in a developing organism, participate in multiple overlapping fields at the same time, which deliver different degrees of (sometimes conflicting) guidance.

But that is not the end of the story. It seems that some purposes or goals originate mostly in our heads. Here we speculate that wants and intentions direct purposeful thinking, speech and action, and must therefore be fields, too, providing both the motivational oomph that gets these processes moving and the directional focus that guides them. My desire for a cup of coffee moves me to think, say and do the things necessary to get one. By ‘wanting’ or ‘intending’ here we are referring to a large category of what might be called affective states, all closely related to emotion, including preferences, cares, feelings, motivations, and so on. This view of the mind, which dates back to the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, posits that our wants direct everything we deliberately think, say and do. Hume called our wants the ‘calm passions’ because, for him, thinking, speaking and acting are purely passive processes, having no goals of their own. We take a similar view: when we deliberately think about, say or do something, it is because some field, some want or intention, has motivated or directed us. Fields, and fields alone, motivate and direct.

Are we merely pawns pushed around by external fields, or are we free to make our own decisions?

To explain how this works, let’s consider a simpler animal. A brief downpour might nudge a squirrel toward wanting to seek shelter. But the desire to seek shelter is the direct cause of the animal’s thinking and motor movements as it heads toward shelter, not the rain – the rain just triggers the desire. Field theory predicts that when squirrel brains are better understood, we will discover that the thought and motor mechanisms involved in seeking shelter lie nested within some larger wanting field that directs them.

The squirrel case is interesting because, like us, squirrels initiate some actions almost entirely on their own, arising less from external triggers and more from internally generated wants and intentions. At any moment, a squirrel might choose to leap from branch to branch just for the exhilaration of near-flight. Field theory speculates that some large-scale pattern of neural activation, the desire for near-flight exhilaration, is a field that acts downwardly on the cognitive and motor centres enveloped by the field, causing the animal to plan, position itself, and leap.

We propose that this same architecture underlies human purposeful behaviour as well. Our deliberate decisions are driven by wants and intentions, which take the form of large fields in our brains that direct our cognitive, speech and motor centres. These fields might consist of large neural circuits. And the goal-directed mechanisms they guide – thinking, speaking and acting – might consist of smaller-scale circuits embedded within them. Like the eddies in a rushing river, the smaller circuits are embedded within the larger flow. Each eddy has its own dynamic, but an eddy’s overall movement is directed by the larger river that envelops it. Likewise, thinking, speaking and acting have their own dynamic, like the capacity of conscious thought to construct narratives, or the capacity of speech mechanisms to retrieve words and formulate sentences. However, their focus, their purposefulness, arises from the wanting or intending fields in which they are embedded. These fields are our motivations.

Our repertoire of wanting fields is enormous, far more diverse than the simple survival and reproductive drives envisioned in some simplistic biological models of intentionality. And they act across a wide range of time scales. An intention to throw a picnic directs a person to make a plan, invite others, collect supplies, travel to a park, and find a suitable spot. A desire for knowledge might direct a person to investigate, sign up for, and ultimately take an online course. A preference for a quieter life might direct someone to prepare for retirement over many years, so they can retire early. The picture is complicated further by the fact that wants are diverse, and sometimes conflicting, even on a single timescale. Owing to the complexity of human existence, we want many things at once. I both want that extra piece of cheesecake (because it’s tasty) and don’t want it (because I’ve eaten too much already) at the same time. I want to stay in school and see the world at the same time. The fields that direct us are interrelated, highly differentiated, and often in conflict.

This is where the question of free will begins to emerge: are we merely pawns pushed around by these external fields, or are we free to make our own decisions?

There is a very old line of thought, which has recently been reintroduced to the popular imagination by Sapolsky, that says we are not free. It says that all thought and action, indeed everything in the Universe, is fully determined by physical laws, and that this determinism is incompatible with free will. But this view, which sees determinism and free will as being at odds, is mistaken. According to a philosophical school called compatibilism, even if the world is perfectly deterministic, freedom is perfectly possible. Field theory is a kind of ‘compatibilist’ explanation of goal directedness.

According to our theory, freedom is direction by the fields within us. There is a temptation to regard direction imposed on us from anywhere as the opposite of freedom, but field theory reminds us that many imposed fields are our own wants and are, therefore, quite literally, parts of us. And when wants originate inside us, they are our wants, and the decisions they motivate are our decisions, regardless of whether they are determined by the external world and the fields that make it up. In this view, freedom is not the total absence of deterministic causation – it would make no sense to be free of your own wants and intentions. In a very real way, your wants and intentions are you, and no one wants to be free of themselves. The freedom we all seek is the freedom to think, say and do what we ourselves deeply want. It is not to be undetermined or free of causes.

What evidence exists for our theory of ‘wanting’ fields? The truth is that we are out on a limb, one that is both weak and strong. It is weak because there seems to be little positive evidentiary support, neurologically at least, for the notion that our wants manifest as large fields containing thought and action mechanisms. But the theory is also strong because it is not contradicted by existing research. Much is known in neuroanatomy and neuropsychology about the neural correlates of emotion. Less is known about calmer affective states such as wanting and intending. When it comes to motivations at a molecular level, large-scale neurotransmitter fields involving serotonin or dopamine could be the mediators of our wants and intentions. However, there are other candidates as well, from electromagnetic fields acting over large areas within the brain to neural circuits involving clusters of neurons that are not specific to any one neurotransmitter. Enough mystery remains to support a range of possibilities about how these fields might work.

One of the most valuable aspects of our theory is that it offers empirical guidance. It suggests that researchers hoping to understand human wanting should look for large-scale structures – larger than the thought and action systems they guide. Experiments should seek structures with these systems embedded within them. Of course, field theory, like any theory about the physical world, could turn out to be wrong about how human wanting works. And that, too, is a virtue of the theory. In good scientific fashion, it sets itself up for possible falsification.

It’s possible that our purposes have something deep in common with acorns and dung beetles

Fields are an old idea but, to a world steeped in mechanistic thinking, they offer something new. They expand our explanatory arsenal, supplementing pure mechanism in a way that explains the otherwise unexplained. They help to answer one of the oldest problems in philosophy and science: why do things in the Universe appear to have goals or purposes?

Field theory carries with it a message of unity, bringing together all teleological systems under a shared architecture, revealing a continuity in nature that has long been suspected, at least since Aristotle. Disparate phenomena, from physics to psychology, are unified under a single explanatory framework. The theory raises the possibility that our purposes have something deep in common with other goal-directed systems like acorns and dung beetles, as well as with even simpler ones, like self-driving cars and, yes, even falling rocks.

We acknowledge there are problems to resolve. Fields are often elusive, invisible and intangible. In particular, the fields that guide us as people, the wants our consciousness is bathed in, are poorly understood. We see them only vaguely, from inside. Like gravitational fields, they seem to be everywhere and nowhere in particular. And like gravitational fields, they wield a mysterious power we have yet to fully understand.

[KEVINAA 97]

 

43 Rhesus monkeys "escape" from bio-research lab in Yemassee, South Carolina — AP

[Fulham Broadway 16,849]

6 minutes ago, KEVINAA said:

 

43 Rhesus monkeys "escape" from bio-research lab in Yemassee, South Carolina — AP

On a stage in Florida yesterday

[Vesper 28,804]

Pear and chocolate crumble

Ingredients

• 4 pears, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
• 150g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
• 2 tbsp caramel sauce

Method

Preheat the oven to 160C fan/gas 4. Place the pears in a medium-sized ovenproof dish. Sprinkle the chocolate on top, then add the caramel sauce and a splash of water. Scatter the nutty topping mix over the fruit and bake for 40 minutes or until golden and bubbling. Serve with custard, cream or ice cream.

[Vesper 28,804]

Drink of the week: Elderflower fizz

by Dulse, Edinburgh

“This drink highlights one of my favourite ingredients, elderflower,” says Dean Banks from the Edinburgh restaurant Dulse. “Its crisp, floral notes bring a touch of warmth to autumn gatherings. It’s light, bubbly and gives you that luxurious feeling, much like sipping champagne.” This recipe requires a bit of planning in advance, since a week of steeping is needed to get a full elderflower flavour.

Ingredients

• 400g sugar
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• 1g yeast
• 10 heads of elderflower

Method

1. Combine 800ml water with the sugar, lemon zest and juice in a large saucepan. Bring to the boil. Allow to cool, then mix in 1.2L water and the yeast.

2. Add to a sterilised container, mix with the elderflower heads and leave in a dark place at room temperature for 7 days.

3. Strain then pour into sterilised bottles. Chill in the fridge until ready to serve.

Edited November 9 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,804]

Tortilla de Patatas

Ingredients

• 250ml olive oil
• 1 large onion, sliced into half rings
• 1kg potatoes, peeled and cut into thick slices
• Sea salt and black pepper
• 7 large eggs

Method

1. Heat 3 tbsp oil in a large frying pan. Add the onion and cook gently for at least 30 minutes until all the water has been drawn out of them and they are soft, golden and very sweet. Lift out with a slotted spoon and drain over a bowl. Leave the oil in the pan.
2. Add the rest of the oil to the pan. It should be 2cm deep and hot enough that a small piece of potato sizzles. Add the potatoes, season and cook very slowly for about 20 minutes, moving them around regularly from the middle to the edges so they cook evenly. It doesn’t matter if a few break.
3. Once the potatoes are a light golden colour and tender, take the pan off the heat, lift out the potatoes with a small sieve and drain. Once drained, put the potatoes in a clean bowl.
4. Measure about 4 tbsp oil from the pan and put in a 28cm nonstick omelette pan.
5. Beat the eggs, season and add to the potatoes together with the onions.
6. Heat the oil in the omelette pan. Pour in the tortilla mixture and cook gently over a medium heat. Move it about to make sure the potatoes are evenly distributed, then leave to cook for 10 minutes. When the base is sealed and light golden, remove from the heat.
7. Place a large plate over the top of the omelette pan. Turn the two over together so the tortilla lands on the plate, cooked side up. Slide the tortilla back into the pan, uncooked side down. Cook gently for 5 minutes. The tortilla should bejust firm but creamy inside. Slide onto a plate to serve.