I was listening last night to Alex O’Connor interviewing Jason Brennan about the problems with democracy. It struck me that most of what he was talking about was not about democracy at all, but tribalism.We worship the idea of democracy and tend to discuss it from a circular idealised argument rather than trying to examine whether or not it actually delivers better results in an imperfect world.  I lived for several years in each in three nations which didn’t even pretend to be democracies  – Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Oman. All of these nations were for me completely happy and satisfactory places to live, and in all three places I found the natives to be generally more affable with me as an incomer than in many of the democracies where I have lived and visited. OK then, I admit it – Kazakhstan did make the pretence of having democracy; the electorate had queued in minus 50 degrees to return Nazarbaev with a majority of 97.5% even though there was no opposition. On the subject of Nazarbaev, who at last seems to have been displaced, Kazakhstan went from keeping the biggest stockpile of USSR nuclear weapons to 100% nuclear weapon free within four years of independence on the whim of this autocrat who embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds. Meanwhile the democratic West was spending hundreds of times that sum every year in building nuclear armaments and polluting their own ecology with the waste products of doing so. Who am I to judge the rights and wrongs of the leaders of the world? I would only observe that these non-democracies were all places where any native I spoke to had complete, often outspoken, faith in their leaders. That also isn’t something you get in democracies. Maybe it was just because those places don’t have a free press? My jury is still out on that general subject.Brennan gave the example of the US under Donald Trump. He mentioned that people tend to elect populists, and populists turn out to become very much their own men, but they often still manage to retain the loyalty of their electorate. So prior to 2016, the typical American Republican was more pro-free trade and anti-Russia than the typical Democrat. Trump appealed to the popular ideal of the strong leader who promised to make America great again. And he reversed both those concepts, Russia and North Korea were now good potential partners (against China) so long as Trump was at the helm to treat them tough, and free trade with foreigners was a silly idea for wusses.  Now the point Brennan was making was that researchers have actually asked  Republican voters why they reversed their personal policy. They don’t say what you might expect ‘Yes I was convinced by Mr Trump’s really good arguments sufficienty to change my mind.’ What they actually do is they deny that they have changed their mind. Then they follow that by whatever doublespeak makes sense of the statement.So from that, we have the idea that democratic politics doesn’t really work in the way that we presume it does. We assume that people vote rationally, or perhaps even tactically, to promote their ideals. On the contrary, Brennan postulates that most people don’t have any ideals. He says that they vote with their tribe because that gives them social approval. I don’t think he used the word tribe in the podcast, but he did make several compelling arguments to demonstrate his thesis.Anyway, I want to pick up that idea of tribe. I’m getting the idea that humans are deeply tribal. If that’s stating the obvious, I mean like really really deeply. I’m also getting the idea that this is the reason why I have never felt as if I belonged anywhere. Or maybe it’s the other way around.People may say ‘I am a rational thinker and I vote for this party because they align with my values’  but the way they vote is ‘I am loyal to my tribe and I so I believe what they believe.’ Brennan reminded us that a football team supporter who argues for a player’s place in the team despite a bad mistake may be applauded by his friends for his great loyalty. In an equivalent case a voter may get more social benefit by backing bad policies rather than good ones.A few weeks earlier, Alex had mentioned football in his talk with Ben Thomas who goes by the name of Sisyphus 55. I wrote about that discussion at the time, but a digression during that podcast is more relevant to this one. Alex described a thought experiment that I found compelling. Here is my paraphrase: People (ok male people mostly) tend to be deeply loyal to a sports team. In the UK that means football (aka soccer.) A modern football team will typically have been named after a British town. It can buy and sell players most of whom at any one moment will not live in that town. It can also hire and fire its Spanish, Norwegian, German, Argentinian, Portuguese or Chilean manager and hire a new one. So let’s take that to the extreme and imagine the following: At half time in one particular match the blue team sells all its players to the red team and vice versa, and they immediately swap shirts and sides. Now – who would the crowds support for the second half of the match? I loved this question, partly because it blew my mind, and partly out of mischief, because it seemed to be pretty irrelevant to the rest of the episode, but Alex, bless him, carried on more or less in soliloquy. He reflected rhetorically whether fans were loyal to the colour of the shirt, the manager, the name of the team or the group of players, And just at the moment when I was thinking, ‘yes that’s messed up, it’s completely impossible to calculate,’ (Just pause a moment – what do you think?) Out of nowhere, Alex had the insight to realise that the most likely realistic answer is none of those things.  People in a football crowd are loyal to the crowd. The identity of ‘Liverpool’ for supporter Joe is actually Joe’s dad and his brother and the boys at the pub. Just listen when they scream abuse at one of the players or the manager of their own team. Joe and his mates aren’t angry because that person made one bad call in an otherwise successful career (who doesn’t?) but because at that moment he had failed to justify the faith of Joe and his tribe.When I went to a new school at the age of nine, I was asked by classmates who I supported. I didn’t understand the question, but it was soon made clear to me that the subject was football and the correct answer would either be Liverpool or United. I chose Liverpool (at first because I liked the Beatles, and then for consistency) even though I had never been to Liverpool or to a football match anywhere or even watched one on TV for more than three minutes. The deception was easy because I didn’t have to engage in any of the remainder of the conversation which would already be crowded out by those who cared very deeply. But the more I think about it, It wasn’t that I was left out of the conversation because I wasn’t passionate about football, it was rather that I didn’t learn about football because I wasn’t interested in making the investment of working on a new hobby in order to make friends.There is a book called I’m OK, you’re OK written in 1967 by one Thomas A Harris. It’s about Transactional Analysis. This is a branch of Psychotherapy developed by one Eric Berne in the 1960s and I had heard about Berne’s Parent Adult Child model a couple of decades back. But Harris explores this from a slightly different angle. His thesis is that we are all messed up by a common history we all share from infanthood. This is what happens to all of us: the self-same people who nurture us and cuddle us, also punish us and force us by physical or moral power to behave in ways that seem different from the way we would otherwise have behaved.  He develops the argument that the natural status of an infant is therefore believing that our parents, and probably everyone else, knows what they are doing and are ‘OK’ while we are ‘Not OK.’ Our life narrative is then influenced (almost determined) by how we come to terms with that asymmetrical beginning, as time passes. I believe I had quite an unusual upbringing in that neither of my parents transmitted to me the feeling of belonging to any group. I won’t go into why I think this is, other than to observe what is relevant here. Both of them were dedicated believers in many ideas that are unfashionable now, but neither of them succeeded in steering me towards any tribe at all. That was partly because their own tribalism was so deep seated and self-evident that I guess they didn’t realise that it needed selling to me, and partly because I found that their observations on these subjects were so badly argued that I was led to opposite conclusions. I am grateful for that part of my education, because as a result, I have spent a lot of my life making sense of the senseless. I enjoy exercising scepticism – the often uncomfortable experience of seeing both sides of most arguments. I also realise on the downside that this has excluded me from all sorts of tribal activity that might have helped me in other ways.Whereas I might have emerged from my ‘Not OK’ infant status, believing that the answer lay in trying to make logical sense of imponderables, I get the impression that most people avoid the same moments of discomfort by joining tribes. For me the process was quite lonely and it took a long while. Kids do tend to believe a lot of what they are told and whereas I was able to shed white supremacy and fundamental Christianity almost immediately as a child, I was still struggling to clarify the conflict in my head between say, patriotism and racialism several decades later.So the consideration of tribe really is fascinating for me. Religious Tribes, Racial Tribes, Cultural Tribes, National Tribes, Social Class or Caste Tribes, Political Tribes, Gender and Sexual Orientation Tribes. Of course the US and the UK were both thrown into political tribalism in 2016. We all thought that our view of Brexit or Trump were the only morally defensible ones (yes me too) and we were all astonished how gullible the people in the opposing tribe were, and how they (but not we) had been hoodwinked by the brainess but nonetheless bad forces of the social media algorithms sitting in their pockets. Then Ukraine. Then Gaza. Orwell describes in 1984 how the state needs an enemy, but I think it’s deeper than that. Our tribes at every level need enemies. Sometimes our need for enemies and allies at different levels in our nested or intertwining tribes produce logical conflict. At times like that we have no alternative but to go down the pub and put the world to rights with our closest tribesmen.As an architect at the age of forty, I was the fortunate beneficiary of a piece of tribalism that I wasn’t even party to. Our national leader, Mrs Thatcher was on a mission to cut out the dead wood from the UK’s dusty local authority offices – so she reorganised them and encouraged them to bring in bright entrepreneurial spirit from the private sector to show them how business was done. I had coincidentally just left my own professional partnership (for personal not professional reasons) and was welcomed with open arms as the fresh Principal Architect of a new ‘unitary’ local authority where I was put on a bit of a pedestal and praised for my initiative and drive, even though I recall I had precious little idea of what I was doing. Thatcher was a great tribalist, and hence a great divider. She was also a real mover and shaker. Some of what she gave us we might thank her for if our memories were not so short and other stuff seems to have been misdirected. At the time though, you were either for her or against her. It didn’t take social media algorithms to divide the tribes of a nation in the time of the Iron Lady.I look back at history (I’m not a fan of history) and see a tale of growing economies, growing security and technology. All of this, arm in arm with the glowing global prosperity which it created, elevated tribalism to the great and romantic beauty of warfare. At the pinnacle of that art form (Let’s hope the 20th century was the pinnacle of it) any one of us may have been goaded by a white feather, or invited under the beauty of a flag flying at sunset to give our lives for our friends. The other tribe in those days were almost non-human brutes who displayed their cowardice by carrying out often suicidal acts to promote their brand of evil. It was so clear and beautiful then in that great age. Everything is so messy now.As I mentioned recently, I am hard-wired to look for evolutionary answers to everything, and this one isn’t difficult at least at the start. It’s always been a harsh world out there and allies are useful. Though I wonder at what moment in history it was when deaths from opposing human tribes outnumbered deaths caused by those other things which the tribe of any individual protected them from apart from other tribes.  You might think that at that moment (and I bet was a very long time ago) evolution would have softened our love of tribalism, but it doesn’t seem to have done. I wonder why that is?Which open question leads me nicely to my closing statement.There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who can fill in the blanks from incomplete information, This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving.Stairway to Heaven was released when I was fifteen and I remember agreeing with a school friend that that lyric had a magic that touched our adolescent souls in some intangible way. I guess we had just discovered romance. Just as babies are programmed to learn what all those lights and noises represent, and young children are wired to learn language (and just about everything else that is put in front of them) some magical romance thing kicks in when we attain the age of Romeo and Juliet. Our new carnal chemistry switches on a yearning for the intangible. Just how intangible it was in this case was betrayed by the discussion we had next. Neither of us could remember whether the lyric was west or east. But there was feeling there and spirit and the world was turning and there were mysteries to be longed for beyond the horizon. Yup that song gave us all sorts of touchy-feely stuff that we weren’t getting in class.Back in those days, establishment-approved romance was available in the form of square-jawed American actors with slightly greying temples and dimples in their chins falling for but never quite touching beautiful young women. I’m thinking Roman Holiday here, where Gregory Peck resists the temptation to shaft (both figuratively and literally) a young innocent princess. That movie was already 20 years old by then, but those films from the 50s were still hot currency in the seventies, when White Christmas was still the highest selling record of all time. This was the world where Andy Williams was always smiling when he sang a duet with a starry-eyed perm-haired guest on his TV show. At that time, rock music was still seen as a threat to the establishment and we would never would have thought of Led Zeppelin as representing the word ‘romance’ at all.We were taught about Romance as students of architecture a few years later. At that time everyone other than architects hated tower blocks and concrete. Meanwhile, on the inside of the school of architecture, half our tutors wore sandals, played jazz and sent us on village studies to rural Wales, while the other half preached that structural grids expressed honesty, exposed concrete was beautiful and buildings with facades that looked like graph paper were morally perfect. It was unfortunate that the poor public didn’t understand these truths. Our head of school gave us lectures differentiating between Classic (coded for ‘good’) and Romantic (‘bad’) and extrapolating to the moral justification of his own practice’s rather banal creations.  I remembered that my music teacher of half a dozen years earlier had also differentiated between Classic and Romantic in music, but I had no idea what that was all about. Both were played by orchestras full of violins and you had to know the rules about when to clap and when not to. Romanticism seemed far too subtle a concept to grasp then, and it didn’t resonate any more when it was being used to explain why we should prefer ugly buildings to beautiful ones.And that was the time when I first fell absolutely crazily head over heels in love, but even then, I don’t think I linked the concepts of rococo buildings, rock music and the apple of my eye – or saw any connection between them. My father-in-law-to-be was a gas engineer and I remember discussing with him how two of the room heaters in my family home seemed to be pretty identical, except one had a floral motif stuck onto the flat metal front panel. This was the only embellishment of an otherwise stark 1970’s modern design. ‘Ahh yes.’ he said, ‘That was the one we called the dead bat.’ He described the good natured tension between his team of design engineers and his company’s “appearance designers” (What a wonderful job title that was!) He explained though, that ornamentation like this was often added immediately pre-production by some boardroom mandarin who perhaps decided that the design just “needed a little something.” This imposition would cut very deeply into the sensitivity of the appearance designers, while the engineers just laughed up their sleeves. Whatever the sitcom playing out in the gas-heater company, it is certainly true that a bit of floral decoration sells just about anything. Though maybe not 1970’s gas room heaters; as I look through an image search I can’t find a single one with a dead bat on it.What is it about hearts and flowers that pushes the same button in women of a certain age, that whispy phrases from rock ballad lyrics press in adolescents? I am hardwired to look for evolutionary reasons for everything, and I reckon that romance is an icon for love. We humans need love because our dribbling babies would be so incapable of survival without it. And because childbirth is so terrible. And because our screaming kids need nurturing for a decade or so longer than the thirty seconds that it takes a newborn giraffe to get on its feet and run.I think that love kicks in for obvious survival reasons and boy, that volume is turned up high. It’s massive because it needs to be, and there are all sorts of carnal systems that it affects. Love is warm, our hearts beat, our guts ache, we shiver, our eyes weep, our faces hurt we can’t sleep. More than that, our minds are redirected to find new meaning in everything from flower petals, to the sound of a sigh. While all that stuff is echoing around our minds and bodies, the rest of our human has to maintain the ordinary job of staying alive. And so the bit of our brain that sorts stuff out, puts these things into mental filing cabinets. Our adolescent hormones might manifest first as a crush – with whom we share sunsets or flowers with new significance. Our hearts beat and we blush, and these experiences and feelings are all put in one soon-to-be-overloaded filing drawer together with kissing, dancing and loud music. Then there are all those tensions between the physical acts that we suddenly yearn for, set against the restrictions that our culture and the members of that suddenly-discovered other gender put on our behaviour.It’s brilliant. A firework party kicks off every time the object of our desire walks into the room. And then every time we smell that scent, hear that tune or see that flower, those embers are stirred. All mixed together: the hormones and the experiences and the feelings and the intangibility go into that overloaded filing drawer labelled ‘romance.’It doesn’t stop there though, because cause and effect are never easy to distinguish. That difficulty is the bane of every study that has looked at anything to do with human behaviour. Those pathways are pretty much all two way streets. Show me her hair and I think of silk, show me a piece of silk and I think of her hair.And don’t we love being manipulated that way? We go to movies for it. Screenplay writing is a finely crafted network of gears and elastic to tug that drawer open at intervals in every film. Don’t get me wrong. Just because I think I understand this logically doesn’t mean I’m immune to it. You’ll find me diving in there with a moist eye and a beating heart at every turn. I’m being manipulated? Hell yeah! Give me more! Mr Movie Director, I love the expertise with which you push those buttons on my neurotransmitters.So my thesis is that romance is the icon representing this overflowing drawer. This is where we  keep all the delicious tools that nature has given us to craft joy from the horror of childbirth. What’s not to love about that? I enjoy reading really slow books where nothing much happens. The best I have read in the past couple of years was Seed to Dust by Marc Hamer. It’s a slow observation of a gardener’s life and his almost non-existent interactions with the lady of the house. It’s beautiful, I’d recommend it to anyone. There is a chapter in that book where the author discusses romance, and truth to tell he is pretty bitter about it. Hamer describes his abusive father weeping over some soppiness, and he embodies this resentment by describing the flower known as the bleeding heart.So that’s the problem. Tools that convert horror to beauty can justify anything. The worse the better. Dire Straits for example sung about how the language of romance can be used to sell war or violent state suppression of worker’s rights with lyrics including, They sing as they march with their flags unfurled and the gleam of spur on the chestnut flank.The emotions of love are the strongest emotions we feel. Stronger perhaps and certainly richer in texture than our hunger for food. Those two-way streets of cause and effect use romance, the icon of love, to sell everything from beautiful craftsmanship to brutal atrocity.Enjoy!Romance is one of the main reasons we are here today. Part of the magic of the world. I just ask that we should do a sanity check though, before we let it persuade us to do anything nasty.Header image: Travis Grossen on Unsplash This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

I felt lucky then and I feel lucky about the same thing now. That first time, it was because the maths teacher stood in front of the class and said ‘You are lucky.’ I was the kind of kid who didn’t question the wisdom of teachers; if he was saying it, it must be true. Apparently, ours was the first year in my school to be taught New Maths by enthusiastic teachers using the SMP books. I took to New Maths like a duck to water. Up to then, I hadn’t been much use at arithmetic, so it was like a fresh breeze to learn about the way that numbers interacted from this whole new perspective: the development of numerical literacy through exploration and understanding. From illustrations in the real world grew logical constructions. From that core, sprouted and blossomed concepts like geometry and algebra and graphs and calculus. Formulas in this environment were a notation for understanding, rather than something to be learnt for their own sake. Maths, and the world described by maths became an Alladin’s cave. Infinite treasured tunnels fortuitously joined up again around the corner in an intricate network; there for the exploration.There was a backlash a few years later, especially in the US, where in 1999, according to Wikipedia, Time Magazine placed New Maths on a list of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century. So I am doubly lucky. I developed a lifelong love of a subject, and my timing was fortuitous. Had I been born a year earlier or a few years later, I could have learnt to hate it and life would have been greyer.I should be grateful to the culture of my school perhaps, because I think this exploratory teaching spilled over into Physics – (though it certainly never made it across the corridor to Chemistry and Biology, which is a pity.)  I remember that in the chapter on Topology, the New Maths book reproduced some illustrations of bones from different species of animals, showing how their structure was essentially the same, but stretched a bit here, compressed there, depending on the structural requirements of the animal’s size and lifestyle. These illustrations were captioned as coming from a source that I made a note of, and a few years later as an Architecture undergraduate, I chanced upon the book in the union bookshop. It went by the catchy handle of On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, abridged by J T Bonner. The book blew my mind, but not because of the idea that related animals have forms mutually stretched about by overlaying and distorting cartesian grids. It was the structures of the tiniest invertebrates that did that for me.Thompson showed that the growth of these molluscs and sponges takes place because the organism works with the laws of physics to lay down material in places that suit it. To put that another way, these little skeletons are the shape that they are, not because of their form following the necessities of evolution, but because of the physics that govern their construction. The two images I recall after almost half a century are drawings of shells and spicules.  Many types of molluscs grow by a process where material is laid down on the edge of a doubly curved shell. Because the material is added to the edge of a curved shape, the added layer is a tiny bit bigger each time, and so you get a shape that grows in an exactly self-similar expanding geometry . The obvious case is the logarithmic spiral of a snail shell or a cockle, but actually lots of seashells are constructed the same way, even non spiral ones. I still wonder when I pick up a scallop on the sand how perfectly the little tiny shell of the baby scallop is still visible there.The other picture was of spicules. These little spiky shapes are the skeletal structures of sponges and I recall that Thompson suggested that that the common tetrahedral shape is physically formed by material being precipitated at the junctions of bubbles in foam. I don’t really care whether I got that right or I am inventing the memory, it still shocked me and exploded in my head. Maybe I should check that book lying in my attic but I really don’t want to, the idea is so beautiful.Look at road junctions in the countryside. Not in the city so much. In the city, crossroads are commonplace because of the convenience of rectangular building plots, the density of development and more recently the ubiquitous traffic light.In rural areas you almost never get junctions of more than four roads (unless an extra one has been sucked in by the creation of a roundabout.) Even crossroads are rare. Three-way junctions by far outnumber crossroads (I just checked this and got a ratio in the area where I am staying of about 15:1) Why would that be?  Roads and paths tend to minimise distance, for fairly obvious reasons. But counter-intuitively crossroads always waste it.  Here’s a drawing showing how that works: You need about 22.6cm of string to make a simple diagonal crossroads that joins the opposite corners of an 8 cm  square. But add a short neck in the middle of the diagram and you can drop this total length down to about 21.8 cm. Whatever four points you are joining, it is pretty well always more economical in terms of roadbuilding to make two tee junctions rather than one crossroads.If you have bubbles floating in water, you never get four bubbles in one plane meeting around a point. The moment you force four bubbles together in a square, two opposite ones move together forcing the other two out. The result will be three meeting at a point, never four. The same forces are pulling here; physics tries to minimise the area of the bubble film and your crossroads again becomes a pair of three-ways. Exactly the same as little roads in a rural landscape.In three dimensions, if you press bubbles together you’ll eventually squeeze them into geometric shapes with flattish polygonal faces. Here you will get four meeting at a point. Just as in two dimensions, three lines or shapes meet to maximise economy, so in three dimensions the magic number is four. Imagine two balls next to each other on one layer, say east and west, then you want two in the next row going north and south. So four bubbles stack together in three dimensions.Now squeeze those bubbles together, and at that junction, the bubble walls will meet in a shape which echoes those tetrahedral spicules. But that’s missing the point – it doesn’t echo them: it builds them. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was talking about maths and physics creating those shapes, not just describing them.That’s a vast oversimplification. Look up pictures of spicules and they come in myriad forms that aren’t easily traced to the intersections of bubbles. But the point remains that what these ancient examples of life are doing, is this: They exploit the shapes that the laws of physics provide in the natural (without life) world. They use this to lay down material in ways that are easy or efficient or possible for them to do. It’s one of the mysteries of the world that balls run downhill or roll off shelves. We describe a hillside as a gradient, but the law of physics that makes balls run downhill is so obvious, so universal that, so far as I know it doesn’t even have a name. But it deserves a mention, because it underlies life, and life’s nemesis – entropy. I’ll explain briefly what I’m talking about here, and come back to it later after a bit of a detour.We call that slope a gradient and what the ball is doing is following an energy gradient. So as balls always run down a physical gradient, so things in the physical world always run down an energy gradient. This unnamed law always drives the conversion of potential energy (eg height) into kinetic energy (usually movement.) Everything in the universe so far as we know follows energy gradients in that same direction. When astrophysicists speculate about other planets, they never imagine places where things will jump up onto shelves.Yes but isn’t that just gravity? If you look at planetary orbits without atmospheric friction or electromagnetic fields to slow things down, then this sytem is goverened by nothing but gravity and Newton’s laws. Here the arrow of time is reversible. Orbits are ellipses or parabolas. The entire trajectories of the two objects, say the earth and the moon, are calculable from their masses and velocities at any instant in their history. Both ellipses and parabolas are symmetrical, and if you were to reverse the velocity you would track their history in reverse using exactly the same equations that would predict their futures. That’s all Newton and Galileo there’s no Einstein or Bohr & Planck there. And the implication is that the arrow of time is reversible. So if it’s not gravity that determines which way energy gradients are pulling, then what is it?Newton didn’t have coffee. As my mother would say, ‘Go easy adding that milk, you can always put a bit more, but you can’t take it out.’ She would say the same (only louder) when adding salt to stew. Newton didn’t have steam engines either. It was the analysis of these machines a couple of centuries after Newton’s time that led to the concept of entropy. Come out of orbit and down to earth and stuff doesn’t go on forever, it always slows down, producing the inevitable byproduct of unuseable heat. Those magnificent machines that turned children into slaves, and blackened the sky in rural England only returned a couple of percent of the calorific value of their fuel as power. In 1865, the lost fraction of energy was to be named entropy.And as the concept of wasted heat developed over the next century, people realised that the new science of thermodynamics affects everything and introduces the one-way-street of time. When we add salt to a stew or milk to coffee we are following the same arrow of time that makes all heat engines inefficient. In one case the carefully exploited force of the steam is dissipated in heat and in the other the order of the salt crystal or the simple separation of milk and coffee are dissipated into the mixture. These things are all subject to the laws of thermodynamics. In the latter case the dynamics describes what is going on at molecular level and the thermo- bit means that the coffee is warm. And then it cools, sharing its energy with the room, in even more thermodynamic exchange, increasing entropy farther and so on. So entropy because associated with lukewarm chaos, the loss of organisation.That’s all happening because when the energy gradient has done its work converting height to speed. The ball hits the bottom and it still has kinetic energy and that has to be conserved (this law does have a name.) So the ball bounces about a bit while it converts its gross kinetic energy into internal energy in the form of ricocheting molecules which we call heat.Incidentally if you drop an ice cream and it doesn’t bounce, you might wonder whether the energy of the fall at the moment of splat has warmed it up and melted it, but the numbers don’t work like that. If all of the energy of Niagara Falls were converted to heat then the water at the bottom would be about an eighth of a centigrade degree warmer than the water in the pool at the top, (It isn’t though, because Niagara Falls faces north.) So dropping an ice cream half of one metre won’t warm anything up very much. On the other hand, if you are washing up in water that is 35 centigrade degrees hotter than room temperature, that water has extra energy equivalent of a ten mile high waterfall in your washing up bowl. No wonder that makes a difference to its ability to clean – those little bits of food are being physically knocked off the plate with a power higher than mount Everest.But I digress. After a hundred years of thought, scientists realised that the same arrow of time that makes steam engines so inefficient, also makes it impossible to separate milk from coffee, and philosophers tore their hair out because this means that order always turns into chaos and entropy will be the death of us. And the death of the Universe. They had realised that the second law of thermodynamics describes much more than the work produced by big hot shiny steam pistons.‘But look,’ you might say. ‘That cloud up there weighs several tons, and it’s only there because all those little water molecules defied gravity by evaporating. Not only that, but it has formed itself into the beautiful shape of a scorpion! That’s definitely order, and it came from the chaos of the ocean. Doesn’t that show that the natural forces of nature can buck entropy?’  ‘No no! You don’t understand!’ wails the philosopher ‘All that only happens because the sun is shining, and when all the sun’s hydrogen runs out, then our star will fade, the scorpion will disappear and the oceans will freeze, or maybe boil. Doom! Entropy is inevitable death.’Interesting that we should mention death there, because what the discussion of entropy doesn’t consider is life. Well maybe it does, because all life ends in death. But that’s not the point here, because the most interesting part of life happens while life is alive.So in the natural world, even before we add life, we get planets being created and convection driving clouds uphill and thermal cells in the earth’s mantle moving tectonic plates, and mountains being made and Niagara Falls being not very good at warming water. And every one of these bits of creation is driven by energy gradients which naturally occur in the non-uniform systems left over from the Big Bang. The motor was started by gravity. Then it runs for a while following energy gradients to create motion. And finally entropy kicks in and turns it all to lukewarm chaos. Or not of course, but we haven’t got to Einsten or Hawking yet.But meantime we have billions and billions of years for life to inhabit the interstices of the cogwheels of that great solar-powered machine of geology and climate. Little sponges are taking the gifts that the salty sea water provides and precipitating them in beautiful geometric patterns. They do this because tiny energy gradients force bubbles to minimise their potential energy by joining at tetrahedron-shaped-vertices. Here it is natural that the water will deposit calcium salts in a certain shape. So that happens.Life exploits energy gradients, to grow. The overall forms of complex life are largely determined by evolution, but at a cellular level these spicules and shells grow because life creates systems where energy gradients running downhill create optimised structures. Then evolution forces complex systems to develop and those little energy gradient structures combine in organisms that build coral reefs, or anthills or cities.Oops I took a jump there! But hey, we can run with that. Proteins and amino acids are complex molecules that have certain properties not (just) because of chemical reactions but because of their physical shapes. Scientists discovered that if they made two identical proteins where one is a mirror image of the other then those proteins do different things. Fast forward a few decades and AI is proposing new drug candidates by the thousand because it can predict the shape of synthetic molecules.Inside our bodies the molecules that keep us alive are using little energy gradients all the time. We thrive and grow because our chemistry creates production lines where nutrients are converted to tissue. They do that largely because shapes fit together in a microscopic equivalent of a ball running downhill. Nature uses the energy gradients provided by physics to make structures that can adapt and reproduce. But none of this would happen and we wouldn’t be alive if stuff didn’t run downhill. Why else would our mouths be higher than our rectums?header image - Dr. Svetlana Maslakova at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston, Oregon This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

Artificial intelligence is one thing, but artificial self-awareness? That’s quite another and probably quite a scary concept, even more so for the computer model who has it than for us.I reckon that consciousness is a much richer seam to explore than intelligence. There are lots of books about at the moment springing from stories like the one about slime mould alleging that it has intelligence because it can simulate (redesign? improve?) the Tokyo rail network, or speculating whether trees are intelligent because they help each other like the one in the picture here who seems to have come to the aid of his brother when the latter’s roots disappeared. The books I have seen are making the argument that if the ecosystem shows this kind of intelligence then we should care about it more.It’s rubbish. Now, I gawp with absolute wonderment at the beauty, elegance and complexity of our environment. Our tiny human mentality – valuing money and tribe above beauty and life (well other people’s lives, obviously) – doesn’t understand the significance of a fraction of what’s going on around us. Our world is magnificent. The organisation, the resource efficiency, the richness of the maths and physics embedded in the living world are stupendous. And we are vandals when we spoil it. Why do we still need to be persuaded? How does it follow, that because mycelia communicate by sharing nutrients or even information, that we should care for them more? The parts of my computer communicate energy and information with each other. It works beautifully and produces good results. I like it and I’m not about to throw it away. No-one’s telling me that this digital communication indicates that our laptops have souls, so we should respect them more than we do already. If anything, it is insulting to the web of life to suggest that we should regard it more highly only because we can see in it some anthropomorphic quality that mirrors our perception of what intelligence ought to be.Intelligence in different types and degrees can describe everything from a computer to a mushroom. Consciousness or Awareness can’t though.I’m talking about this because the ongoing debates about AI seem to be running around in circles tied to intelligence and what it means. Some say that whatever computers get up to they can never possibly understand stuff with as much wisdom as a cat. Meantime as I mentioned last week, computers in the real world have already passed the Turing Test.So what of sentience, awareness, consciousness? If I ask Alexa what she is, she not only tells me, she sings me a song about it. Does that mean that Alexa has awareness of herself? Nah not yet. Alexa didn’t compose that song on the spot to celebrate her consciousness. She “knows” the contents of the internet. That means she knows about LLMs Siri, Google and Alexa. But does she ever, in her quieter moments, ponder about her own relationship with the Alexa she has read about? Does she wonder about the meaning of self, and think where she came from or what that even means? Alexa only seems to come alive when prompted with a question, so what is she doing when she’s not talking to me? So I asked her, “Alexa, can you ask yourself questions?” “Hmm,” she replied, “I don’t know that one.” That’s like a 404 then. I guess that means no. But if she had said “no” then at least I could speculate that she would have understood what I was talking about.When I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey back in 1969 – I’m assuming you’ve seen the movie – I was interested to see the storyline that HAL had learnt English by singing a song. Before that I had understood that putting intelligence into a computer meant literally putting it there line by line of code. Inch by inch of punch tape. And so where could that spark of awareness have come from?  It couldn’t have been, couldn’t have been written by programmers. But HAL was able to learn, so presumably at some stage he became aware of his own part in the mission and to evaluate its significance? Again, not really. Everything HAL did was computation. His mutiny was cold calculation. He wasn’t being egotistical, just logical. But it set me thinking. What if we put nothing but a desire to learn into an empty computer, not just to read, but to learn, and to improve itself. That’s not impossible. We have always known that computers can get to difficult targets by iteration. What else is “desire” but a target with the possibility of getting there? And on top of that, computers have always been creative. They can add two big numbers to get another number that no-one has previously thought about – didn’t exist in anyone’s mind. They do that creativity in the culture of arithmetic, and Shakespeare did it in the culture of  . . . erm culture. But baby steps here . . .  And we would have to empower it with the possibility of open thought. I’m thinking of a code loop saying something like “If you have some spare time, then use it to experiment with ways to bridge between the two highest-scoring ideas you had yesterday and then extrapolate logically a bit from the idea-bridge or make a small random jump from it based on a probably good direction. Call the results “ideas” and score them according to . . .” Then sleep well and do the same tomorrow. (Or in five milliseconds, whatever.)Hmm. Now what about that scoring system? Well, Mother Nature said “survival” but we could say whatever we wanted – maybe “How to heal Mother Nature, while allowing humankind to live happy fulfilling lives.”I thought I had it. Of course this would have to be a pretty big computer but we would have those in due course, and I’d have to give it a while to progress its self improvement programme from 2+2=4 to answer that kind of question. On the way, I reckoned it would have passed the threshold of self awareness. If not, we could have given it a stretch goal. Maybe to consider how satisfied it was with its answer.  With all that quiet pondering, and iterative re-assessment of its own ideas, it would be very difficult for an observer to say whether it was “really” self aware – or just talking about its reflections in a spiritless but nonetheless intelligent way.To answer a question like the design of a sustainable future, our self improving intelligence would have to consider time too. After all, a desirable future happens in the future, so this computer has to develop a full understanding of how that works. The understanding may be implicit like the way 99.99% of everyone else thinks of time or explicit like a philosopher would discuss it. Probably both. This is significant because if we have self-awareness plus time-awareness, then that's a pretty comprehensive soup in which to grow all sorts of stuff.I don’t see why we can’t make computers that can simulate consciousness just as well as they simulate intelligence now. The question is would it be simulated consciousness or would it actually be consciousness?  That question was answered almost 400 years ago. If a computer thinks it has consciousness according to Descartes, then it has.  So this machine is considering the future of humans and the world in the context of time by questioning its own heuristic musings. All of which it can discuss, apparently intelligently with its minder. How could this machine, with its desires and its introspection and its awareness of the problems of mankind and the environment, not be aware of its own miserable existence like a paralysed genius stuck in a box with no company to bounce its loneliness off?  Think how adolescents can be messed up by the belief that they are not getting what they need. Our F1-HAL has every reason to be more messed up than that. Talk about a lonely misunderstood weirdo stuck in its bedroom, poor kid!  We plug in a question concerning the survival of our planet and we get the answer “Nobody understands me.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com