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Stuart Weitzman, who made his fortune in shoes, is parting with three of his collecting triumphs, including a block of four "Inverted Jennies."

This block of four extremely rare "Inverted Jennies" was created more than a century ago by a printing error that left the image of the plane upside down. It is to be sold at auction in New York in June. Credit... via Sotheby's

On the day in 1918 when the Postal Service began selling stamps with an image of a newfangled airplane, a 29-year-old stockbroker's clerk and stamp collector went out on his lunch hour to buy some. He emerged from the nearest post office with a single sheet of 100.

Soon federal agents were hunting for him and demanding them back.

The airplane on the stamps was - uh oh - upside down. The clerk had stumbled across one of the most celebrated stamp mistakes in history, the famously misprinted Inverted Jenny.

A block of four stamps from that single sheet - a singular quartet because it still bears the plate number - will go on display, by appointment, at Sotheby's in Manhattan on Thursday in preparation for an auction on June 8.

The quartet, known to collectors as the "plate block," is one of three rarities owned by Stuart Weitzman, the designer and entrepreneur known for creating strappy gladiator sandals, thigh-high boots and other shoes that have been worn by everyone from Kate Moss in his advertisements to Kate Middleton in paparazzi photos.

The other two items in the auction are also marketed with superlatives. Weitzman is selling the world's most valuable single stamp, the 1856 One-Cent Magenta from British Guiana, which he bought in 2014, and one of the world's most valuable coins, a $20 United States gold piece that was minted in 1933 and is known as a double eagle. Weitzman paid $7.6 million for it in 2002, at the time the highest price any coin had ever sold for.

The "One-Cent Magenta" stamp was among other rare items that Stuart Weitzman collected and is now selling. Credit... via Sotheby's

On the back side of the stamp, following the practice of prior owners, Weitzman left his mark, a stiletto heel and his initials. Credit... via Sotheby's

Weitzman, 79, said that owning the three items had fulfilled a boyhood dream of collecting that began as a rookie with stamps and coins. As an adult, he said several years ago, he focused on pursuing one-of-kind items with lasting value. Now, though, he said, it was time to plan ahead.

"No one takes a U-Haul to the cemetery," he said. "We have to figure out what to do with all this stuff."

"The reason I'm doing the selling is my children don't want to inherit these items," added Weitzman, whose former company has been owned by the luxury fashion house Coach since 2015. "They say, 'It's great to do with them what you did, but we don't want to have to worry about them, fuss with them, protect them, figure out what to do with them.'"

The money from selling the three items - as much as $37 million, based on Sotheby's presale estimates - will go to charitable ventures, including The Weitzman Family Foundation.

Richard Austin, the head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby's, said it was "very difficult not to use hyperbole" in describing any one of the three. "For one person to accumulate all these treasures is unusual," he said. "It's a childhood collecting fantasy that he was able to make come true. I don't even know if Stuart appreciates how unusual this is."

Robert G. Rose, the chairman of the nonprofit Philatelic Foundation, which authenticates stamps, was similarly impressed. "You're talking about two of the most iconic pieces in all of Stamp World, all of philately," he said. "And of course there's the coin. It's one of a kind as well."

Sotheby's expects to sell the Inverted Jenny plate bock for $5 million to $7 million and the double eagle for $10 million to $15 million.

Weitzman's identity as the owner of the double eagle is being revealed here for the first time. Sotheby's never revealed the buyer after the 2002 sale, and even internally some Sotheby's employees referred to the purchaser as simply as "Mr. Big." There was speculation that the owner was Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. The coin was on display at the New-York Historical Society from 2013 until last month, but the museum merely labeled it "Property of a Private Collector."

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The 1933 Double Eagle Coin that is to be sold at Sotheby's in June. Weitzman paid more than $7 million for it in 2002. Credit... SquareMoose, via Sotheby's

The double eagle is unique: No other double eagles can be privately owned. The 445,500 that were made were supposed to be melted down. But 20, including Weitzman's, were stolen from the mint. Some ended up in the hands of a Philadelphia jeweler and coin dealer who sold nine of them in the 1940s. In 2004, when his daughter discovered 10 others in his safe deposit box, the government challenged her claim of ownership, and won. The 10 were taken to Fort Knox, leaving Weitzman's double eagle the only one from 1933 that can legally be sold.

The One-Cent Magenta is also unique - apparently the others printed with it were discarded - and is considered by some collectors to be the "Mona Lisa" of stamps. In the 1920s it was owned by a textile entrepreneur who was said to have outbid King George V when he bought it for $32,250.

Weitzman purchased it from the estate of a later owner, John E. du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune who had acquired it in 1980, before he went to prison for the murder of the Olympic wrestler and coach Dave Schultz. The killing served as the basis for the 2014 film "Foxcatcher."

Like the One-Cent Magenta's past owners, Weitzman left his mark, a stiletto heel, on the back of the tiny stamp. Among stamp collectors, it is not unusual for the owners of great rarities to put their initials or a symbol on backs of the stamps. Purists cringe, but many philatelists say that doing so - carefully, and tinily - does not damage a stamp or detract from its value.

For a week, beginning Thursday, the "One-Cent Magenta," shown here, the plate block of "Inverted Jennies" and the double eagle coin can be viewed by appointment at Sotheby's. Credit... Michael Nagle for The New York Times

As for the Inverted Jennies, there is only one plate block, the corner of the original sheet with the number identifying the plate used on each page of stamps at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. The sheet of 100 was broken up by Col. Edward H.R. Green, a fanatical collector whose mother was the stingy financier known as the "Witch of Wall Street." The other 96 stamps on the sheet have been sold one by one, but the four adjacent to the plate number have remained intact.

Green was the third owner of the sheet. For the first owner - William T. Robey, the stockbroker's clerk - it was the lucky find of a lifetime. He paid $24, the face value of the 100 stamps, when he went to a Washington post office on the day they went on sale.

He knew what he had as soon as the postal clerk handed him the sheet. He rushed out of the post office and eluded postal inspectors who came looking for him, trying to get back a red-and-blue misprint that, to their bosses, was an embarrassment. Apparently a printing plate had been flipped in the two-color printing process. The image of the plane, the Curtiss JN-51, nicknamed Jenny and set to carry the first loads of mail by air, came out upside down. Any other sheets printed that way were caught and destroyed at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. But Robey's sheet slipped by inspectors, and out into the world.

Robey soon turned a profit of $14,976, selling the sheet of 100 stamps for $15,000, enough to buy a new car, which he is said to have driven through the wall of the garage that came with his new house. The dealer who purchased them promptly turned a profit of $5,000 by marking up the price $20,000 for Green. The plate block has changed hands several times since then, most recently when Weitzman acquired it in 2014.

Stuart A. Weitzman in his Madison Avenue showroom in 2015. Credit... Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

For years, Weitzman kept quiet about his collecting, not wanting the publicity. In 2012, 10 years after he had bought the double eagle, it was the centerpiece of a display at the Federal Reserve in Lower Manhattan. David Tripp, the special consultant to Sotheby's on coins, did not know who owned the coin when, at the opening of the exhibit, he was approached by David N. Redden, the Sotheby's executive who had handled the auction in 2002. Redden had two people in tow.

"David said, 'I've got a friend here with his daughter. His name is Stuart. Tell him about the coin,'" Tripp recalled.

Tripp, unsuspecting, went on to describe the particulars of the coin to the man who owned it.

"Years later," Tripp said, "when David told me Stuart Weitzman was the owner, Stuart Weitzman the great designer of shoes, I clicked on Google and said, 'I've met that guy before.'"

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He Owns World Famous Stamps and a Prized Coin. Now He's Selling.

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Stuart Weitzman, who made his fortune in shoes, is parting with three of his collecting triumphs, including a block of four "Inverted Jennies." On the day in 1918 when the Postal Service began selling stamps with an image of a newfangled airplane, a 29-year-old stockbroker's clerk and stamp collector went out on his lunch hour to buy some.

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An Inverted Jenny stamp, with a biplane upside down, is considered one of the most valuable stamps in the world. This one has been owned for decades by a family in Illinois. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

No. 49 of 100 Jennies famously misprinted with an upside-down biplane was locked away in vaults for generations. The whereabouts of No. 66 remains unknown.

An Inverted Jenny stamp, with a biplane upside down, is considered one of the most valuable stamps in the world. This one has been owned for decades by a family in Illinois. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

When the phone rings at the nonprofit Philatelic Foundation in Manhattan, sometimes it is a caller claiming to have a rare stamp and wanting the foundation to authenticate it.

In the internet age, the people at the foundation can ask for a cellphone photo of the stamp in question. Usually someone from the foundation calls back and says something like, "Sorry, your stamp is not what you think it is. It's not that special."

But a recent call from Illinois got their attention. The man on the phone said he had one of the most famous stamps in the world, an Inverted Jenny with - oops - the airplane upside down. When the man sent a cellphone photo, the foundation's curator, Lewis Kaufman, suspected the stamp was an Inverted Jenny that disappeared from sight soon after it was printed in 1918. Only 100 Inverted Jenny stamps exist. Mr. Kaufman suspected it was No. 49, one of only two that remained unaccounted for.

He handed the photo to his boss, Larry Lyons, and said, "I think it might be genuine. You ought to call this guy back."

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Larry Lyons, the executive director of the Philatelic Foundation, traveled from New York to Chicago to verify the authenticity of the Inverted Jenny. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Mr. Lyons, the foundation's executive director, called. The man in Illinois said the stamp had been in his family for generations, most of the time in one safe deposit box or another.

To stamp experts like Mr. Lyons, No. 49 was an unusually treasured find. It was in pristine condition. It never had a gummed hinge affixed to the back, for mounting in a stamp album. It was never recut and reperforated, as one Inverted Jenny was after it was stolen. It was never sucked up by a vacuum cleaner, as another was. It was never put in a locket, as still another was, as a present for an owner's wife.

Most of all, it was never resold, although Mr. Lyons suspects the man is considering selling it.

So for 100 years, No. 49 remained off the radar, to use an expression that did not come along until decades after the Jennies had captured the public's imagination. A 1986 book that tracked each of the 100 Jennies had this entry for No. 49: "No record." No. 49 has been a black hole on a Jenny website set up by Siegel Auction Galleries, a Manhattan firm that has sold many Jennies over the years.

Mr. Lyons said the Illinois man's 91-year-old father had been a stamp collector, but the stamp had come from his mother's side of the family. A great-uncle apparently bought it after the sheet of 100 was broken up, and after the great-uncle died, the great-aunt left it to the man's mother in the 1930s.

Only 100 Inverted Jenny stamps ended up in circulation and two remained unaccounted for before the Illinois family revealed that they had one, No. 49. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

"It spent all those years in bank vaults, which was a good thing for the stamp," he said. Mr. Lyons said the man, who has asked not to be identified, could not explain why his father never put it in an album with his other stamps.

Inverted Jennies are not the most expensive stamps in the world - that title belongs to the one-cent magenta from British Guiana, the only one of which sold for $9.5 million in 2014. But Jennies can be pricey. No. 58 sold for $1.35 million in May 2016, according to the Siegel website. Three that had small flaws have changed hands since then, for far less money: No. 79 for $299,000 and No. 28 for $389,000, both in February of last year, and No. 76 for $295,000 last May.

No. 76 was stolen at a stamp show in Norfolk, Va., in 1955. It had been one in a block of four that belonged to the daughter of one of the founders of Dow Jones & Company. Who made off with the block, and who separated them into single stamps, remains a mystery. No one has ever been arrested. Of the four, only one, No. 66, remains missing.

No. 49's story, like that of No. 66, began when no one at a government printing plant in Washington noticed the problem with the planes appearing upside down on a single sheet of 100 stamps among thousands printed in May 1918. But a financial clerk named William T. Robey noticed when he went to a Washington post office during his lunch hour soon after the biplane stamps became available. The clerk handed him the sheet of Inverted Jennies.

Some Inverted Jennies have sold for over $1 million. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

He paid $24, the face value of the 100 stamps. He knew what he had. He left the post office as fast as he could and rebuffed postal inspectors who came looking for him, trying to get back what, to their bosses, were bloopers.

He soon turned a profit of $14,976, selling the sheet of 100 stamps for $15,000, enough to buy a new car, which he drove through the back wall of the garage that came with a new house. Or so the story goes.

The dealer he sold them to quickly resold them, for $20,000, but not before writing little numbers on the back of each stamp. The number "49" was visible on the stamp in the cellphone photo.

"The owner was even afraid of handling it," Mr. Lyons said. "He asked me to come and get it. I said, 'Put it in a FedEx envelope and send it to me.' He said, 'I'm not doing that.'"

Nor would he schedule a trip to New York, Mr. Lyons said. So Mr. Lyons flew to Chicago.

He accompanied the owner to a bank where the stamp lay in a safe deposit box in a Mosler safe. That was an appropriate coincidence: Gustave M. Mosler, who was president of the American Philatelic Society from 1929 to 1931, was part of the family from the safe-manufacturing company.

"He said, 'You take it out,'" Mr. Lyons said. "That's when I realized exactly what it was. I had a big magnifying glass with me, and the colors were so fresh. And then I turned it over and saw the 49 and went 'Jackpot.'"

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An Inverted Jenny Surfaces. The Flawed Stamp Had Not Been Seen Since 1918. (Published 2018)

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No. 49 of 100 Jennies famously misprinted with an upside-down biplane was locked away in vaults for generations. The whereabouts of No. 66 remains unknown. An Inverted Jenny stamp, with a biplane upside down, is considered one of the most valuable stamps in the world.

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The great fire of Notre Dame on 15 April 2019 broke the hearts of culture lovers around the world. Parisians wept in public while the flames reduced large parts of this monumental cathedral to smouldering ashes. The French president Emmanuel Macron Tweeted a sentiment that not only French people felt: ' Je suis triste ce soir de voir brûler cette part de nous ' ('I feel sad tonight to see this part of us burn'). According to official sources, the fire was accidental, most likely due to technological malfunction. Yet, it was only a matter of time before the first conspiracy theories started to circulate on social media. Even before the fire was extinguished, conspirational websites such as 4chan began alleging that the fire had been started by the French government, Jews, or an Islamic terrorist group. Almost instantly, the charges spread to a receptive audience worldwide. It was the expected course of events. Big, impactful and shocking social events - a fire, a flood, a terrorist strike, a war, and so on - typically elicit conspiracy theories among large groups of citizens who question the official reading of the news.

Prominent figures at the radical Right promoted the conspiracy theory that the fire was a terrorist strike by radical Muslims. The far-Right political commentator Hal Turner saw a link between the Notre Dame fire and other recent fires in Christian churches in the United States, Australia and Russia. He claimed that these incidents were the result of 'Islamic warfare', and even posted a video suggesting that a Muslim was at the Notre Dame Cathedral when the fire began. Fact-checking later revealed that the person in the video was not a Muslim but a fire-fighter, wearing a helmet, mask and protective clothing. By that time, the video had already been re-Tweeted hundreds of times. In my own country, the Netherlands, the video also gained attention when it was re-Tweeted by Thierry Baudet, the new rising star of the Dutch populist Right.

Particularly in the past few years, conspiracy theories have been omnipresent on the internet and in social media. These modern forms of communication allow conspiracy theories to spread faster than ever, and make it easy for like-minded people to connect and form online echo chambers. As a result, the flat-Earth movement - endorsing the conspiracy theory that the Earth is actually flat and that scientists have been lying to the public for more than 500 years - is now an organised society with regular conferences. People can even book holidays that focus on conspiracy theories; the Conspira-Sea cruise, for instance, offers a one-week vacation on a cruise ship, including a programme filled with conspiracy speeches and discussions.

In the wake of Donald Trump's election in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK, conspiracy theories have become a normal part of political discourse, particularly among supporters of populist movements. These movements typically portray a struggle between 'corrupt elites' and 'the noble people'. The populist mindset facilitates conspiracy theories, assuming that elites deliberately impose terrorist strikes, economic crises or disease epidemics on the rest. It seems as if we now live in an age of conspiracism. More citizens than ever before seem to believe conspiracy theories, and our society provides an exceptionally fertile soil for them to flourish.

But is this really the case? Sure, conspiracy theories spread fast nowadays, and like-minded believers rapidly find each other online. But that doesn't prove that the proportion of believers has actually increased, or that modern technologies are a root cause. In fact, a penchant for the conspiracy theory has been around as long as Homo sapiens has.

A conspiracy theory is the suspicion that a group of actors have joined together in secret agreement to plan evil acts. This definition implies that a conspiracy always consists of multiple actors that work together in a coalition or a group. Lone actors may also plan to commit harm and carry out those plans, but lone actors are not conspiracies as long as they do not conspire with others. Furthermore, the definition suggests that conspiracies are planned by enemy groups: 'They' are trying to harm 'Us'.

One might counter that citizens often believe conspiracy theories about the actions of their own government. But citizens may feel disenfranchised and alienated from the politics of their country's government. In the US, Democrats may believe governmental conspiracy theories particularly when a Republican administration is in office, and vice versa. Put differently, citizens are most likely to believe such conspiracy theories when they perceive the government as 'Them', not representing 'Us'.

This suggests that the root of conspiracy thinking lies in our ancient instinct to divide the social world into 'Us' and 'Them' categories. If true, one would expect that conspiracy theories were already common millennia ago, when all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers in a Paleolithic environment.

Inspired by their tribal nature, the evolutionary psychologist Mark van Vugt and I wrote an article, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2018, that examines the evolutionary origins of conspiracy theories. Before the agricultural revolution of roughly 12,000 years ago, all human beings lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Such small societies didn't have social media, populist movements, Democrats versus Republicans, or ethnic and religious diversity. What many of these societies did have, however, was lethal conflict with other groups. Although the prevalence of tribal warfare varied substantially between eras and locations, on average ancient humans had to be on guard for enemy groups much more than modern humans are. Archaeological records suggest that it was relatively common for ancestral humans to die in violent conflict with hostile coalitions or groups; substantial portions of fossilised remains found at various locations around the world show evidence of violent deaths, most likely due to hostile coalitions.

The realistic dangers of hostile groups thus constituted an adaptive problem for ancestral humans. This is still evident from the death tolls produced by tribal violence in hunter-gatherer societies today. For instance, the Yanomami people in South America regularly suffer high rates of lethal casualties due to tribal warfare. Such warfare often takes the form of blood feuds that can perpetuate over generations, in which members of one village take revenge for the harm caused by a different village. Groups of about 10 to 20 men typically attack an enemy village at dawn. Most often, these lethal coalitions kill the first few inhabitants that they encounter, and then retreat before the victimised village is able to get organised and fight back. Anthropologists have estimated that about 22 per cent of all the deaths among the Yanomami people are due to such coalition killings. Without the protection of large states and a strong rule of law, violent coalitions - that is, actual conspiracies - pose a real and serious danger to people's lives and wellbeing.

What psychological features would increase the likelihood of surviving the perils of violence committed by other groups? One important factor is the human capacity to make assumptions about the intentions of others. Does that different tribe in the vicinity have positive, peaceful intentions? Or are they planning to attack and kill us in order to confiscate our territory and resources? By making such assumptions, people gauge how dangerous different groups are before they strike. Such empathic foresight enables people to take appropriate, life-saving action on time. If ancestral humans believed that another group was conspiring to harm them, they could, for instance, migrate to a safer environment; they could develop a solid defence system; they could even commit a surprise attack themselves (a 'preemptive strike') to chase away, or kill, the suspected conspiracy. Either way, people could protect themselves and their kin against lethal violence by recognising other groups' hostile intentions at an early stage.

But assumptions can be mistaken, and not all types of mistakes are equally costly. Consider the example of seeing a strange shadow in the woods. Is it a dangerous tiger, or just the shadow of a rock behind the trees? If the shadow is a rock but one mistakes it for a tiger, there is little harm done. Except for an unnecessary detour and some stress, life continues as usual. However, if the shadow is a tiger but one mistakes it for a rock, a person is in serious danger by obliviously crossing the tiger's path. Evolutionary theories therefore propose that when the costs of false-positives (mistakenly seeing a tiger when in fact there is none) are unequal to the costs of false-negatives (mistakenly not seeing a tiger when in fact there is one), natural selection will favour a tendency to make the less costly type of mistake.

It was too risky to trust groups one did not know, and that were powerful enough to commit harm

People also make these mistakes when assessing the intentions of different groups, and both false-positives and false-negatives carry some costs. When a member of the Yanomami dies under mysterious circumstances, tribe members often blame the death on sorcery committed by members of a different village. This conspiratorial allegation is unlikely to be true, yet it can cause conflict, and even revenge killings. Such a false-positive implies an unnecessary conflict with a group that could be a useful ally or trade partner. This is certainly a wasted opportunity, and hence costly. Yet, in an environment where lethal conflict between groups is common, the price of a false-negative is likely to be much higher.

Some tribes have a history of mutual raiding and violent conflict over territory or valuable resources - such as between the Nyangatom and the Daasanach people in Ethiopia. If a genuine risk of an enemy attack exists, some safety precautions are warranted, even if one might overestimate the other group's aggressive intentions. Perceiving a hostile group as harmless puts one at risk for victimisation, and can result in injury, imprisonment, forced labour, rape and death. If false-negatives indeed were more costly than false-positives when trying to estimate the intentions of different groups, evolutionary theories would predict that ancestral humans evolved to be conspiracy theorists. This can manifest itself in various ways, such as conspiracy theories about how exactly different groups prepare to commit harm, or theories that blame these different groups for the misfortune that one experiences. Due to the actual perils of violent coalitions or groups, it was too risky to take chances and trust groups that one did not know very well, and that were powerful enough to commit harm.

After the agricultural revolution, human beings gradually started living in large states and societies changed at a fast pace. However, this didn't change people's tendency to suspect conspiracies, as Ancient Greek myths reveal. When the Argonauts arrived at Lemnos, they found that only women inhabited the island. According to the legend, after these women had discovered that their husbands had cheated on them with Thracian women, they conspired to kill all the men on the island.

Ancient Rome had its fair share of conspiracy theories too, and the Latin word coniuratio ('conspiracy') appears frequently in the writings of the Roman historians Tacitus, Sallust and Livy, as well as in the speeches of Cicero. They frequently voiced suspicions of how slaves, women or foreigners conspired against the Roman elites. Livy describes how in 331 BCE many Roman elite citizens were suffering and dying from an unknown disease. A young slave woman then accused a group of upper-class women of poisoning Roman citizens. According to Livy, two of these conspiring women were forced to drink their poisoned concoctions in the Senate, and died in public. A total of 170 women were found guilty of participating in this conspiracy. Furthermore, Roman emperors regularly suspected that conspiracies were being formed against them. Tacitus, for instance, described Emperor Tiberius as a suspicious ruler who murdered various possible rivals to the throne. These murders included the grandson of the previous Emperor Augustus. Tiberius' own adopted nephew Germanicus also died under mysterious circumstances, and Tacitus suspected that he was murdered as well. When the emperors were suspicious, it was not always irrational: actual conspiracies did occur, the assassination of Julius Caesar being a well-known case in point.

Conspiracy theories were numerous in medieval times. Many suspected that secret societies such as the Illuminati, originally launched in Bavaria, controlled the world through an internecine network of connections and front groups. Others spread the idea of 'blood libel', in which Jews were accused of murdering a Christian child each year and using the blood for religious rituals. In the French town of Blois, in the year 1171, all the members of the local Jewish community were burned at the stake following such a conspiratorial accusation. Supernatural conspiracy theories were also common. The infamous 15th-century book Malleus Maleficarum ('the Witch Hammer') by Heinrich Kramer gave momentum to widespread witch hunts across Europe. One core assumption of the book is that witches conspired, and had sexual intercourse, with the devil. In line with that, they were said to sacrifice unbaptised children to the devil (not only killing them but preventing them from going to heaven), cook the bone marrow of first-borns to create magic creams (which they applied to sticks or brooms, providing them with flight capacities), spread diseases, and make crops fail.

Conspiracy theories have permeated the history of humanity from our earliest hunter-gatherer days through to modern times. We are less likely than our ancestors to be killed by enemies, and are relatively well-protected by the legal system, to name just a few differences. However, the fact that our environment has changed doesn't mean that our evolved, ancestral brain has changed along with it. This is the basic idea of an evolutionary mismatch: over the past 12,000 years, the way in which human beings live has changed quickly and dramatically. But on an evolutionary scale, 12,000 years is just a fraction of time, and our inborn predispositions have not changed by much. Our brains are adapted to a stone-age environment but we live in modern times.

As a result, some traits that were once functional are no longer functional, or sometimes even dysfunctional in the context of today. Take people's appetite for sweetness: in the Palaeolithic, a preference for sweet tastes was adaptive because it stimulated people to eat nutritious food from nature, such as berries and sweet potatoes; in modern times, this same preference makes people consume excessive quantities of sugary drinks and candy, causing obesity and expensive dental treatments.

A similar mismatch is likely for conspiracy theories: ancestral humans were easily suspicious of a different tribe nearby, which might well have saved their lives. They would migrate into safety before the other tribe committed a lethal attack. Modern humans are still easily suspicious of different groups - but now these different groups might consist of medics, scientists and pharmaceutical companies, leading people to refuse life-saving vaccines or treatments. Or they might consist of ethnic minorities, amplifying xenophobia, discrimination and exclusionary policies.

Xenophobic sentiments fuel conspiracy theories about minority groups

Conspiracy theories appear in all cultures, worldwide. For instance, Indonesia has suffered a fair share of terrorist strikes in the past decades, and a common conspiracy theory in that region is that the Western world is behind these attacks, hoping to blame them on Islam.

In Poland, many people blame the 2010 Smolensk plane crash - which killed all 96 people on board, including many prominent politicians such as the Polish president Lech Kaczyński - on a Russian conspiracy. In South Africa, a country with high rates of HIV infections in the population, a common conspiracy theory is that pharmaceutical companies produced and disseminated the HIV virus to sell antiretroviral medication. Finally, conspiracy theories are common in rural Africa, including Tanzania, Nigeria and Mozambique, where many people believe that modern Western technology is a form of sorcery designed to harm or control them.

The psychological essence of all these conspiracy theories is much the same: people make assumptions of how a different group colludes in secret to harm or deceive them. Modern conspiracy theories are thus rooted in our ancient tribal instinct to classify the world into 'Us' versus 'Them'. This insight helps to explain the appeal of conspiracy theories among populist movements, which describe an eternal struggle between regular, hardworking citizens and a corrupt elite. Although populism spans the political spectrum, far-Right populist movements in particular tend to demonise ethnic or religious minorities as hostile groups. Turner's ideas about the Notre Dame fire underscores how xenophobic sentiments fuel conspiracy theories about minority groups.

One factor that might have contributed to the recent electoral success of populist movements is the increasing plurality of modern societies. Armed conflicts in the Middle East have stimulated an influx of refugees across the European Union, and many citizens of central American countries try to escape violence and poverty by immigrating to the US or Canada. Besides such need-based forms of immigration, in our globalising world it is now also easier than ever before to work or study abroad, to travel to different places, or to move to a different country in order to start a life with a romantic partner.

While many people might embrace such plurality as positive, quite a few people are likely to experience it as threatening. These people feel that their own group is under threat from strangers, paving the way for conspiracy theories as a populist motivator and tool. These theories strengthen the appeal of populist rhetoric that emphasises sentiments against immigration and globalisation, and promises to reinstall a nation's previous glory.

This evolutionary perspective sheds light on extremist organisations endorsing violent conflict with other groups. Left-wing extremists promulgate conspiracy theories about how bankers and multinationals secretly control the world. Right-wing extremists endorse conspiracy theories about how ethnic minority groups will overtake their culture. Muslim fundamentalist groups endorse conspiracy theories about how the Western world tries to subvert Islam. When a nation is at war, the conspiracy radar is high. Recall that the George W Bush administration justified the war against Iraq with allegations that Saddam Hussein was secretly developing and hiding weapons of mass destruction. These allegations turned out to be an invalid conspiracy theory. Finally, distressing events in general elicit conspiracy beliefs, but mostly to the extent that people blame such events on groups that they distrust to begin with. Through conspiracy theories, people blame an economic or financial crisis on bankers, a terrorist strike on secret-service agencies, a disease epidemic on the pharmaceutical industry, and so on.

People differ in how prone they are to believe conspiracy theories. Some citizens are active on conspiracy websites and assume a conspiracy for almost anything that happens in the world, while others are skeptical of most conspiracy theories and tend to reject them out of hand.

This raises a question: if a tendency to believe conspiracy theories has evolved through natural selection, shouldn't we all believe conspiracy theories to the same extent? But, in fact, individual differences are a prerequisite for natural selection to occur: if everyone had the same trait to exactly the same extent, there would be nothing to select for. Take speed in predators. Some leopards run faster than others; does this observation speak against the notion that speed in leopards is a product of natural selection? Of course not. Leopards evolved speed because there was variation. Some leopards were better able than others to survive and reproduce because they ran faster, and thus were more likely to catch prey. The average speed of leopards therefore progressively increased over generations, but this doesn't have to eradicate variation within generations. If natural selection favoured a tendency to believe conspiracy theories, one would expect many conspiracy theories in the human population without excluding possible variation in how strongly people believe them.

Many present-day conspiracy theories are maladaptive, and lead to poor health choices

Of interest here is that people not only differ in conspiracy beliefs but also in how prone they are to interpret ambiguous social signals as evidence of conflict with other groups. For instance, collective narcissism - an unrealistic belief in the greatness of one's own group - is a good predictor of aggression towards other groups. Likewise, people differ in how much they value authority, order and tradition, a trait known as authoritarianism, which is closely coupled with prejudice about different groups. Research indicates that those with high levels of collective narcissism, or authoritarianism, are also likely to believe conspiracy theories. Put differently, personality traits that predispose people to prejudice, discrimination and hostility towards other groups go hand in hand with a tendency to believe conspiracy theories. Some people see hostility and conflict with other groups where others see none. Perceiving conflict with other groups drives conspiracy beliefs.

There is a paradox in the evolutionary argument, however. After all, evolutionary processes are descriptive and not prescriptive. Finding that conspiracy theories evolved for good reason in the past doesn't mean that it is desirable to believe conspiracy theories in the present. Many present-day conspiracy theories are maladaptive and lead to poor health choices such as rejecting vaccines or contraceptives, climate-change denialism, hostility, xenophobia, radicalism and, in extreme cases, violence.

When in December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch opened fire in the pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong in Washington, DC, one might say he was following his evolved conspiratorial instincts. He believed the 'Pizzagate' conspiracy theory - that prominent members of the Democratic Party engaged in human trafficking and paedophilia in the restaurant's basement - and tried to release the victims. Both the gunman himself and anyone present in the restaurant would have been better off if Welch had been able to suppress his conspiratorial instincts and reflect more rationally on the plausibility of this conspiracy theory. Just like physicians urging us to overcome our evolved appetite for sugar, an important future challenge might be to overcome our evolutionary legacy to turn to conspiracy theories whenever we feel insecure.

The Notre Dame fire was a shocking event that stimulated people to search for explanations. How can such a monumental building that we all care deeply about catch fire? In finding explanations, the human mind is hardwired to overestimate the likelihood that a conspiracy caused the event. Macron was right: we were indeed sad that night to see a part of 'Us' burn. But one might add that the fact that a valuable group was harmed so significantly made it tempting to blame the fire on 'Them' - whatever societal group one despises. The scientific principle of parsimony stipulates that the simplest explanation usually is the most likely (in this case, a technological malfunction), yet people's natural response is to assume the worst, and little is worse than a coordinated attack by an enemy conspiracy.

Do we now live in an 'age of conspiracism'? Social media certainly has introduced new dynamics in how conspiracy theories spread, how conspiracy theorists get organised, and how easily one can find conspiracy theories. It is also undeniable that many citizens in the world believe conspiracy theories, and that populist movements that actively propagate conspiracy theories have enjoyed remarkable electoral success in recent years. But that doesn't make the present appreciably different from the past. Throughout history, conspiracy theories have been common, spreading through any available communication channel, and fuelling conflict, prejudice, hatred and war. The 'age of conspiracism' has lasted for millennia. Conspiracy theories always have been part of the human condition, and always will be.

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How conspiracy theories evolved from our drive for survival - Jan-Willem van Prooijen | Aeon Essays

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The great fire of Notre Dame on 15 April 2019 broke the hearts of culture lovers around the world. Parisians wept in public while the flames reduced large parts of this monumental cathedral to smouldering ashes.

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Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn't have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn't they?

Polling evidence suggests that Oliver's views about 9/11 are by no means unusual. Indeed, peculiar theories about all manner of things are now widespread. There are conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, the 1969 Moon landings, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK. Sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be right - Watergate really was a conspiracy - but mostly they are bunkum. They are in fact vivid illustrations of a striking truth about human beings: however intelligent and knowledgeable we might be in other ways, many of us still believe the strangest things. You can find people who believe they were abducted by aliens, that the Holocaust never happened, and that cancer can be cured by positive thinking. A 2009 Harris Poll found that between one‑fifth and one‑quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, astrology and the existence of witches. You name it, and there is probably someone out there who believes it.

You realise, of course, that Oliver's theory about 9/11 has little going for it, and this might make you wonder why he believes it. The question 'Why does Oliver believe that 9/11 was an inside job?' is just a version of a more general question posed by the US skeptic Michael Shermer: why do people believe weird things? The weirder the belief, the stranger it seems that someone can have it. Asking why people believe weird things isn't like asking why they believe it's raining as they look out of the window and see the rain pouring down. It's obvious why people believe it's raining when they have compelling evidence, but it's far from obvious why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job when he has access to compelling evidence that it wasn't an inside job.

I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn't mad (or at least, he needn't be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution - in a word, of his intellectual character.

Usually, when philosophers try to explain why someone believes things (weird or otherwise), they focus on that person's reasons rather than their character traits. On this view, the way to explain why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job is to identify his reasons for believing this, and the person who is in the best position to tell you his reasons is Oliver. When you explain Oliver's belief by giving his reasons, you are giving a 'rationalising explanation' of his belief.

The problem with this is that rationalising explanations take you only so far. If you ask Oliver why he believes 9/11 was an inside job he will, of course, be only too pleased to give you his reasons: it had to be an inside job, he insists, because aircraft impacts couldn't have brought down the towers. He is wrong about that, but at any rate that's his story and he is sticking to it. What he has done, in effect, is to explain one of his questionable beliefs by reference to another no less questionable belief. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us why he has any of these beliefs. There is a clear sense in which we still don't know what is really going on with him.

Now let's flesh out Oliver's story a little: suppose it turns out that he believes lots of other conspiracy theories apart from the one about 9/11. He believes the Moon landings were faked, that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered by MI6, and that the Ebola virus is an escaped bioweapon. Those who know him well say that he is easily duped, and you have independent evidence that he is careless in his thinking, with little understanding of the difference between genuine evidence and unsubstantiated speculation. Suddenly it all begins to make sense, but only because the focus has shifted from Oliver's reasons to his character. You can now see his views about 9/11 in the context of his intellectual conduct generally, and this opens up the possibility of a different and deeper explanation of his belief than the one he gives: he thinks that 9/11 was an inside job because he is gullible in a certain way. He has what social psychologists call a 'conspiracy mentality'.

The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don't believe they are closed-minded

Notice that the proposed character explanation isn't a rationalising explanation. After all, being gullible isn't a reason for believing anything, though it might still be why Oliver believes 9/11 was an inside job. And while Oliver might be expected to know his reasons for believing that 9/11 was an inside job, he is the last person to recognise that he believes what he believes about 9/11 because he is gullible. It is in the nature of many intellectual character traits that you don't realise you have them, and so aren't aware of the true extent to which your thinking is influenced by them. The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don't believe they are closed-minded. The only hope of overcoming self-ignorance in such cases is to accept that other people - your co-workers, your spouse, your friends - probably know your intellectual character better than you do. But even that won't necessarily help. After all, it might be that refusing to listen to what other people say about you is one of your intellectual character traits. Some defects are incurable.

Gullibility, carelessness and closed-mindedness are examples of what the US philosopher Linda Zagzebski, in her book Virtues of the Mind (1996), has called 'intellectual vices'. Others include negligence, idleness, rigidity, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, and insensitivity to detail. Intellectual character traits are habits or styles of thinking. To describe Oliver as gullible or careless is to say something about his intellectual style or mind-set - for example, about how he goes about trying to find out things about events such as 9/11. Intellectual character traits that aid effective and responsible enquiry are intellectual virtues, whereas intellectual vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. Humility, caution and carefulness are among the intellectual virtues Oliver plainly lacks, and that is why his attempts to get to the bottom of 9/11 are so flawed.

Oliver is fictional, but real-world examples of intellectual vices in action are not hard to find. Consider the case of the 'underwear bomber' Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009. Abdulmutallab was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to affluent and educated parents, and graduated from University College London with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was radicalised by the online sermons of the Islamic militant Anwar al-Awlaki, who was subsequently killed by an American drone strike. It's hard not to see the fact that Abdulmutallab was taken in by Awlaki's sermons as at least partly a reflection of his intellectual character. If Abdulmutallab had the intellectual character not to be duped by Awlaki, then perhaps he wouldn't have ended up on a transatlantic airliner with explosives in his underpants.

Intellectual character explanations of questionable beliefs are more controversial than one might imagine. For example, it has been suggested that explaining peoples' bad behaviour or weird beliefs by reference to their character makes us more intolerant of them and less empathetic. Yet such explanations might still be correct, even if they have deleterious consequences. In any case, it's not obvious that character explanations should make us less tolerant of other peoples' foibles. Suppose that Oliver can't help being the kind of person who falls for conspiracy theories. Shouldn't that make us more rather than less tolerant of him and his weird beliefs?

A different objection to character-based explanations is that it's just not true that people have questionable beliefs because they are stupid or gullible. In How We Know What Isn't So (1991), the US social psychologist Thomas Gilovich argues that many such beliefs have 'purely cognitive origins', by which he means that they are caused by imperfections in our capacities to process information and draw conclusions. Yet the example he gives of a cognitive explanation takes us right back to character explanations. His example is the 'hot hand' in basketball. The idea is that when a player makes a couple of shots he is more likely to make subsequent shots. Success breeds success.

Gilovich used detailed statistical analysis to demonstrate that the hot hand doesn't exist - performance on a given shot is independent of performance on previous shots. The question is, why do so many basketball coaches, players and fans believe in it anyway? Gilovich's cognitive explanation is that belief in the hot hand is due to our faulty intuitions about chance sequences; as a species, we're bad at recognising what genuinely random sequences look like.

And yet when Gilovich sent his results to a bunch of basketball coaches, what happened next is extremely revealing. One responded: 'Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn't care less.' This seems like a perfect illustration of intellectual vices in operation. The dismissive reaction manifested a range of vices, including closed-mindedness and prejudice. It's hard not to conclude that the coach reacted as he did because he was closed-minded or prejudiced. In such cases as this, as with the case of Oliver, it's just not credible that character traits aren't doing significant explanatory work. A less closed-minded coach might well have reacted completely differently to evidence that the hot hand doesn't exist.

Could we explain the dismissiveness of the coach without referring to his personality in general? 'Situationists', as they are called, argue that our behaviour is generally better explained by situational factors than by our supposed character traits. Some see this as a good reason to be skeptical about the existence of character. In one experiment, students at a theological seminary were asked to give a talk elsewhere on campus. One group was asked to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, while the rest were assigned a different topic. Some were told they had plenty to time to reach the venue for the lecture, while others were told to hurry. On their way to the venue, all the students came across a person (an actor) apparently in need of help. In the event, the only variable that made a difference to whether they stopped to help was how much of a hurry they were in; students who thought they were running late were much less likely to stop and help than those who thought they had time. According to the Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman, the lesson of such experiments is that 'we need to convince people to look at situational factors and to stop trying to explain things in terms of character traits'.

You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission

The character traits that Harman had in mind are moral virtues such as kindness and generosity, but some situationists also object to the idea of intellectual virtues and vices. For example, they point to evidence that people perform much better in problem-solving tasks when they are in a good mood. If trivial situational factors such as mood or hunger are better at explaining your intellectual conduct than your so-called intellectual character, then what is the justification for believing in the existence of intellectual character traits? If such traits exist, then shouldn't they explain one's intellectual conduct? Absolutely, but examples such as Oliver and Gilovich's basketball coach suggest that intellectual character traits do explain a person's intellectual conduct in an important range of cases. People don't believe weird things because they are hungry or in a bad (or good) mood. The view that people don't have character traits such as gullibility, carelessness or prejudice, or that people don't differ in intellectual character, deprives us of seemingly compelling explanations of the intellectual conduct of both Oliver and the basketball coach.

Suppose it turns out that Oliver lives in a region where conspiracy theories are rife or that he is under the influence of friends who are committed conspiracy theorists. Wouldn't these be perfectly viable situational, non-character explanations of his beliefs about 9/11? Only up to a point. The fact that Oliver is easily influenced by his friends itself tells us something about his intellectual character. Where Oliver lives might help to explain his beliefs, but even if conspiracy theories are widespread in his neck of the woods we still need to understand why some people in his region believe them, while others don't.

Differences in intellectual character help to explain why people in the same situation end up believing such different things. In order to think that intellectual character traits are relevant to a person's intellectual conduct, you don't have to think that other factors, including situational factors, are irrelevant. Intellectual character explains intellectual conduct only in conjunction with a lot of other things, including your situation and the way your brain processes information. Situationism certainly would be a problem for the view that character traits explain our conduct regardless of situational factors, but that is not a view of character anyone has ever wanted to defend.

In practical terms, one of the hardest things about dealing with people such as Oliver is that they are more than likely to accuse you of the same intellectual vices that you detect in them. You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission. You say that he dismisses the official account of 9/11 because he is closed-minded; he accuses you of closed-mindedness for refusing to take conspiracy theories seriously. If we are often blind to our own intellectual vices then who are we to accuse Oliver of failing to realise that he believes his theories only because he is gullible?

These are all legitimate questions, but it's important not to be too disconcerted by this attempt to turn the tables on you. True, no one is immune to self-ignorance. That doesn't excuse Oliver. The fact is that his theory is no good, whereas there is every reason to believe that aircraft impacts did bring down the Twin Towers. Just because you believe the official account of what happened in 9/11 doesn't make you gullible if there are good reasons to believe that account. Equally, being skeptical about the wilder claims of 9/11 conspiracy theorists doesn't make you closed-minded if there are good reasons to be skeptical. Oliver is gullible because he believes things for which he has no good evidence, and he is closed-minded because he dismisses claims for which there is excellent evidence. It's important not to fall into the trap of thinking that what counts as good evidence is a subjective matter. To say that Oliver lacks good evidence is to draw attention to the absence of eye-witness or forensic support for his theory about 9/11, and to the fact that his theory has been refuted by experts. Oliver might not accept any of this but that is, again, a reflection of his intellectual character.

the aims of education should include cultivating intellectual virtues and curtailing intellectual vices

Once you get past the idea that Oliver has somehow managed to turn the tables on you, there remains the problem of what to do about such people as him. If he is genuinely closed-minded then his mind will presumably be closed to the idea that he is closed-minded. Closed-mindedness is one of the toughest intellectual vices to tackle because it is in its nature to be concealed from those who have it. And even if you somehow get the Olivers of this world to acknowledge their own vices, that won't necessarily make things any better. Tackling one's intellectual vices requires more than self-knowledge. You also need to be motivated to do something about them, and actually be able to do something about them.

Should Oliver be condemned for his weaknesses? Philosophers like to think of virtues as having good motives and vices as having bad motives but Oliver's motives needn't be bad. He might have exactly the same motivation for knowledge as the intellectually virtuous person, yet be led astray by his gullibility and conspiracy mentality. So, both in respect of his motives and his responsibility for his intellectual vices, Oliver might not be strictly blameworthy. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done about them or about him. If we care about the truth then we should care about equipping people with the intellectual means to arrive at the truth and avoid falsehood.

Education is the best way of doing that. Intellectual vices are only tendencies to think in certain ways, and tendencies can be countered. Our intellectual vices are balanced by our intellectual virtues, by intellectual character traits such as open-mindedness, curiosity and rigour. The intellectual character is a mixture of intellectual virtues and vices, and the aims of education should include cultivating intellectual virtues and curtailing intellectual vices. The philosopher Jason Baehr talks about 'educating for intellectual virtues', and that is in principle the best way to deal with people such as Oliver. A 2010 report to the University College London Council about the Abdulmutallab case came to a similar conclusion. It recommended the 'development of academic training for students to encourage and equip them not only to think critically but to challenge unacceptable views'. The challenge is to work out how to do that.

What if Oliver is too far gone and can't change his ways even if he wanted to? Like other bad habits, intellectual bad habits can be too deeply entrenched to change. This means living with their consequences. Trying to reason with people who are obstinately closed-minded, dogmatic or prejudiced is unlikely to be effective. The only remedy in such cases is to try to mitigate the harm their vices do to themselves and to others.

Meanwhile, those who have the gall to deliver homilies about other peoples' intellectual vices - that includes me - need to accept that they too are likely very far from perfect. In this context, as in most others, a little bit of humility goes a long way. It's one thing not to cave in to Oliver's attempt to turn the tables on you, but he has a point at least to this extent: none of us can deny that intellectual vices of one sort or another are at play in at least some of our thinking. Being alive to this possibility is the mark of a healthy mind.

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The intellectual character of conspiracy theorists - Quassim Cassam | Aeon Essays

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Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job.

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Credit to Brooks for finding this one!

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Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post- Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism.

The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance.

Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism's use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche, which is the imitation of another's style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not "real" but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land.

In short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is hidden in this very aspect.

Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in modern life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is effected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste Land tries to recapture the lost meaning and organic unity by turning to Eastern cultures, and in the use of Tiresias as protagonist

In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other hand celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions.

This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism -both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre. In Derridean terms, the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida called differance. In Postmodernism's celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in differance, a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed.

The Postmodernist disbelief in coherence and unity points to another basic distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism believes that coherence and unity is possible, thus emphasizing the importance of rationality and order. The basic assumption of Modernism seems to be that more rationality leads to more order, which leads a society to function better. To establish the primacy of Order, Modernism constantly creates the concept of Disorder in its depiction of the Other-which includes the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-adult, non-rational and so on. In other words, to establish the superiority of Order, Modernism creates the impression- that all marginal, peripheral, communities such as the non-white, non-male etc. are contaminated by Disorder. Postmodernism, however, goes to the other extreme. It does not say that some parts of the society illustrate Order, and that other parts illustrate Disorder. Postmodernism, in its criticism of the binary opposition, cynically even suggests that everything is Disorder.

The Modernist belief in order, stability and unity is what the Postmodernist thinker Lyotard calls a metanarrative. Modernism works through metanarratives or grand narratives, while Postmodernism questions and deconstructs metanarratives. A metanarrative is a story a culture tells itself about its beliefs and practices.

Postmodernism understands that grand narratives hide, silence and negate contradictions, instabilities and differences inherent in any social system. Postmodernism favours "mini-narratives," stories that explain small practices and local events, without pretending universality and finality. Postmodernism realizes that history, politics and culture are grand narratives of the power-wielders, which comprise falsehoods and incomplete truths.

Having deconstructed the possibility of a stable, permanent reality, Postmodernism has revolutionized the concept of language. Modernism considered language a rational, transparent tool to represent reality and the activities of the rational mind. In the Modernist view, language is representative of thoughts and things. Here, signifiers always point to signifieds. In Postmodernism, however, there are only surfaces, no depths. A signifier has no signified here, because there is no reality to signify.

The French philosopher Baudrillard has conceptualized the Postmodern surface culture as a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a virtual or fake reality simulated or induced by the media or other ideological apparatuses. A simulacrum is not merely an imitation or duplication-it is the substitution of the original by a simulated, fake image. Contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been thus replaced by false images. This would mean, for instance, that the Gulf war that we know from newspapers and television reports has no connection whatsoever to what can be called the "real" Iraq war. The simulated image of Gulf war has become so much more popular and real than the real war, that Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War did not take place. In other words, in the Postmodern world, there are no originals, only copies; no territories, only maps; no reality, only simulations. Here Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that the postmodern world is artificial; he is also implying that we have lost the capacity to discriminate between the real and the artificial.

Just as we have lost touch with the reality of our life, we have also moved away from the reality of the goods we consume. If the media form one driving force of the Postmodern condition, multinational capitalism and globalization is another. Fredric Jameson has related Modernism and Postmodernism to the second and third phases of capitalism. The first phase of capitalism of the 18th -19th centuries, called Market Capitalism, witnessed the early technological development such as that of the steam-driven motor, and corresponded to the Realist phase. The early 20th century, with the development of electrical and internal combustion motors, witnessed the onset of Monopoly Capitalism and Modernism. The Postmodern era corresponds to the age of nuclear and electronic technologies and Consumer Capitalism, where the emphasis is on marketing, selling and consumption rather than production. The dehumanized, globalized world, wipes out individual and national identities, in favour of multinational marketing.

It is thus clear from this exposition that there are at least three different directions taken by Postmodernim, relating to the theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Postmodernism also has its roots in the theories Habermas and Foucault. Furthermore, Postmodernism can be examined from Feminist and Post-colonial angles. Therefore, one cannot pinpoint the principles of Postmodernism with finality, because there is a plurality in the very constitution of this theory.

Postmodernism, in its denial of an objective truth or reality, forcefully advocates the theory of constructivism-the anti-essentialist argument that everything is ideologically constructed. Postmodernism finds the media to be a great deal responsible for "constructing" our identities and everyday realiites. Indeed, Postmodernism developed as a response to the contemporary boom in electronics and communications technologies and its revolutionizing of our old world order.

Constructivism invariably leads to relativism. Our identities are constructed and transformed every moment in relation to our social environment. Therefore there is scope for multiple and diverse identities, multiple truths, moral codes and views of reality.

The understanding that an objective truth does not exist has invariably led the accent of Postmodernism to fall on subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is of course plural and provisional. A stress on subjectivity will naturally lead to a renewed interest in the local and specific experiences, rather than the and universal and abstract; that is on mini-narratives rather than grand narratives.

Finally, all versions of Postmodernism rely on the method of Deconstruction to analyze socio-cultural situations. Postmodernism has often been vehemently criticized. The fundamental characteristic of Postmodernism is disbelief, which negates social and personal realities and experiences. It is easy to claim that the Gulf War or Iraq War does not exist; but then how does one account for the deaths, the loss and pain of millions of people victimized by these wars? Also, Postmodernism fosters a deep cynicism about the one sustaining force of social life-culture. By entirely washing away the ground beneath our feet, the ideological presumptions upon which human civilization is built, Postmodernism generates a feeling of lack and insecurity in contemporary societies, which is essential for the sustenance of a capitalistic world order. Finally, when the Third World began to assert itself over Euro-centric hegemonic power, Postmodernism had rushed in with the warning, that the empowerment of the periphery is but transient and temporary; and that just as Europe could not retain its imperialistic power for long, the new-found power of the erstwhile colonies is also under erasure.

In literature, postmodernism (relying heavily on fragmentation, deconstruction, playfulness, questionable narrators etc.) reacted against the Enlightenment ideas implicit in modernist literature - informed by Lyotard's concept of the "metanarrative", Derrida's concept of "play", and Budrillard's "simulacra." Deviating from the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern. writers eschew, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this. quest. Marked by a distrust of totalizing mechanisms and self-awareness, postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author's "univocation". The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Postmodern literature can be considered as an umbrella term for the post-war developments in literature such as Theatre of the Absurd, Beat Generation and Magical Realism.

Postmodern literature, as expressed in the writings of Beckett, Robbe Grillet, Borges, Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz and Angela Carter rests on a recognition of the complex nature of reality and experience, the role of time and memory in human perception, of the self and the world as historical constructions, and the problematic nature of language.

Postmodern literature reached its peak in the '60s and '70s with the publication of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lost in the Funhouse and Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, Gravity's Rainbow, V., and Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, "factions" like Armies in the Night and In Cold Blood by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, postmodern science fiction novels like Neoromancer by William Gibson, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the '80's with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas t called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in (1985) or The Satanic Verses (1988) to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.

Postmodern film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism trough the cinematic medium - by upsetting the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroying (or playing with) the audience's "suspension of disbelief," to create a work that express through less-recognizable internal logic. Two such examples are Jane Campion's Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is shown in episodic segments arranged in reverse order; and Karel Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the private lives of the actors playing it, which the audience also sees. However, Baudrillard dubbed Sergio Leone's epic 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West as the first postmodern film. Other examples include Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, Federico Fellini's Satyricon and Amarcord, David Lynch' s Mulholland Drive, Quentin Tarantino 's Pulp Fiction.

In spite of the rather stretched, cynical arguments of Postmodernism, the theory has exerted a fundamental influence on late 20th century thought. It has indeed revolutionized all realms of intellectual inquiry in varying degrees.

Categories: Literature

Tags: Amarcord, Angela Carter, Armies in the Night, Baudrillard, Beat Generation, Catch-22, Crying of Lot 49, Federico Fellini, Fredric Jameson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gravity's Rainbow, Habermas, Jane Campion, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Heller, Karel Reisz, Kurt Vonnegut, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Lost in the Funhouse, Lyotard, Magical Realism, Marxism, metanarrative, Michael Winterbottom, Michel Foucault, Modernism, Naguib Mahfouz, Neoromancer, Norman Mailer, Once Upon a Time in the Wes, Postmodern film, Postmodernism, Raymond Carver, Robbe Grillet, Salman Rushdie, Sergio Leone, simulacrum, Sot-Weed Factor, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas, The Satanic Verses, The Waste Land, Truman Capote, White Noise, William Gibson

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Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing....

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The aim of science is to establish facts, as accurately as possible. It is therefore crucially important to determine whether an observed phenomenon is real, or whether it's the result of pure chance. If you declare that you've discovered something when in fact it's just random, that's called a false discovery or a false positive. And false positives are alarmingly common in some areas of medical science.

In 2005, the epidemiologist John Ioannidis at Stanford caused a storm when he wrote the paper 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False', focusing on results in certain areas of biomedicine. He's been vindicated by subsequent investigations. For example, a recent article found that repeating 100 different results in experimental psychology confirmed the original conclusions in only 38 per cent of cases. It's probably at least as bad for brain-imaging studies and cognitive neuroscience. How can this happen?

The problem of how to distinguish a genuine observation from random chance is a very old one. It's been debated for centuries by philosophers and, more fruitfully, by statisticians. It turns on the distinction between induction and deduction. Science is an exercise in inductive reasoning: we are making observations and trying to infer general rules from them. Induction can never be certain. In contrast, deductive reasoning is easier: you deduce what you would expect to observe if some general rule were true and then compare it with what you actually see. The problem is that, for a scientist, deductive arguments don't directly answer the question that you want to ask.

What matters to a scientific observer is how often you'll be wrong if you claim that an effect is real, rather than being merely random. That's a question of induction, so it's hard. In the early 20th century, it became the custom to avoid induction, by changing the question into one that used only deductive reasoning. In the 1920s, the statistician Ronald Fisher did this by advocating tests of statistical significance. These are wholly deductive and so sidestep the philosophical problems of induction.

Tests of statistical significance proceed by calculating the probability of making our observations (or the more extreme ones) if there were no real effect. This isn't an assertion that there is no real effect, but rather a calculation of what would be expected if there were no real effect. The postulate that there is no real effect is called the null hypothesis, and the probability is called the p-value. Clearly the smaller the p-value, the less plausible the null hypothesis, so the more likely it is that there is, in fact, a real effect. All you have to do is to decide how small the p- value must be before you declare that you've made a discovery. But that turns out to be very difficult.

The problem is that the p-value gives the right answer to the wrong question. What we really want to know is not the probability of the observations given a hypothesis about the existence of a real effect, but rather the probability that there is a real effect - that the hypothesis is true - given the observations. And that is a problem of induction.

Confusion between these two quite different probabilities lies at the heart of why p-values are so often misinterpreted. It's called the error of the transposed conditional. Even quite respectable sources will tell you that the p- value is the probability that your observations occurred by chance. And that is plain wrong.

Suppose, for example, that you give a pill to each of 10 people. You measure some response (such as their blood pressure). Each person will give a different response. And you give a different pill to 10 other people, and again get 10 different responses. How do you tell whether the two pills are really different?

The conventional procedure would be to follow Fisher and calculate the probability of making the observations (or the more extreme ones) if there were no true difference between the two pills. That's the p-value, based on deductive reasoning. P- values of less than 5 per cent have come to be called 'statistically significant', a term that's ubiquitous in the biomedical literature, and is now used to suggest that an effect is real, not just chance.

But the dichotomy between 'significant' and 'not significant' is absurd. There's obviously very little difference between the implication of a p-value of 4.7 per cent and of 5.3 per cent, yet the former has come to be regarded as success and the latter as failure. And 'success' will get your work published, even in the most prestigious journals. That's bad enough, but the real killer is that, if you observe a 'just significant' result, say P = 0.047 (4.7 per cent) in a single test, and claim to have made a discovery, the chance that you are wrong is at least 26 per cent, and could easily be more than 80 per cent. How can this be so?

Take the proposition that the Earth goes round the Sun: it either does or it doesn't, so it's hard to see how we could pick a probability for this statement

For one, it's of little use to say that your observations would be rare if there were no real difference between the pills (which is what the p-value tells you), unless you can say whether or not the observations would also be rare when there is a true difference between the pills. Which brings us back to induction.

The problem of induction was solved, in principle, by the Reverend Thomas Bayes in the middle of the 18th century. He showed how to convert the probability of the observations given a hypothesis (the deductive problem) to what we actually want, the probability that the hypothesis is true given some observations (the inductive problem). But how to use his famous theorem in practice has been the subject of heated debate ever since.

Take the proposition that the Earth goes round the Sun. It either does or it doesn't, so it's hard to see how we could pick a probability for this statement. Furthermore, the Bayesian conversion involves assigning a value to the probability that your hypothesis is right before any observations have been made (the 'prior probability'). Bayes's theorem allows that prior probability to be converted to what we want, the probability that the hypothesis is true given some relevant observations, which is known as the 'posterior probability'.

These intangible probabilities persuaded Fisher that Bayes's approach wasn't feasible. Instead, he proposed the wholly deductive process of null hypothesis significance testing. The realisation that this method, as it is commonly used, gives alarmingly large numbers of false positive results has spurred several recent attempts to bridge the gap.

There is one uncontroversial application of Bayes's theorem: diagnostic screening, the tests that doctors give healthy people to detect warning signs of disease. They're a good way to understand the perils of the deductive approach.

In theory, picking up on the early signs of illness is obviously good. But in practice there are usually so many false positive diagnoses that it just doesn't work very well. Take dementia. Roughly 1 per cent of the population suffer from mild cognitive impairment, which might, but doesn't always, lead to dementia. Suppose that the test is quite a good one, in the sense that 95 per cent of the time it gives the right (negative) answer for people who are free of the condition. That means that 5 per cent of the people who don't have cognitive impairment will test, falsely, as positive. That doesn't sound bad. It's directly analogous to tests of significance which will give 5 per cent of false positives when there is no real effect, if we use a p- value of less than 5 per cent to mean 'statistically significant'.

But in fact the screening test is not good - it's actually appallingly bad, because 86 per cent, not 5 per cent, of all positive tests are false positives. So only 14 per cent of positive tests are correct. This happens because most people don't have the condition, and so the false positives from these people (5 per cent of 99 per cent of the people), outweigh the number of true positives that arise from the much smaller number of people who have the condition (80 per cent of 1 per cent of the people, if we assume 80 per cent of people with the disease are detected successfully). There's a YouTube video of my attempt to explain this principle, or you can read my recent paper on the subject.

the number of false positives in the tests where there is no real effect outweighs the number of true positives that arise from the cases in which there is a real effect

Notice, though, that it's possible to calculate the disastrous false-positive rate for screening tests only because we have estimates for the prevalence of the condition in the whole population being tested. This is the prior probability that we need to use Bayes's theorem. If we return to the problem of tests of significance, it's not so easy. The analogue of the prevalence of disease in the population becomes, in the case of significance tests, the probability that there is a real difference between the pills before the experiment is done - the prior probability that there's a real effect. And it's usually impossible to make a good guess at the value of this figure.

An example should make the idea more concrete. Imagine testing 1,000 different drugs, one at a time, to sort out which works and which doesn't. You'd be lucky if 10 per cent of them were effective, so let's proceed by assuming a prevalence or prior probability of 10 per cent. Say we observe a 'just significant' result, for example, a P = 0.047 in a single test, and declare that this is evidence that we have made a discovery. That claim will be wrong, not in 5 per cent of cases, as is commonly believed, but in 76 per cent of cases. That is disastrously high. Just as in screening tests, the reason for this large number of mistakes is that the number of false positives in the tests where there is no real effect outweighs the number of true positives that arise from the cases in which there is a real effect.

In general, though, we don't know the real prevalence of true effects. So, although we can calculate the p-value, we can't calculate the number of false positives. But what we can do is give a minimum value for the false positive rate. To do this, we need only assume that it's not legitimate to say, before the observations are made, that the odds that an effect is real are any higher than 50:50. To do so would be to assume you're more likely than not to be right before the experiment even begins.

If we repeat the drug calculations using a prevalence of 50 per cent rather than 10 per cent, we get a false positive rate of 26 per cent, still much bigger than 5 per cent. Any lower prevalence will result in an even higher false positive rate.

The upshot is that, if a scientist observes a 'just significant' result in a single test, say P = 0.047, and declares that she's made a discovery, that claim will be wrong at least 26 per cent of the time, and probably more. No wonder then that there are problems with reproducibility in areas of science that rely on tests of significance.

What is to be done? For a start, it's high time that we abandoned the well-worn term 'statistically significant'. The cut-off of P < 0.05 that's almost universal in biomedical sciences is entirely arbitrary - and, as we've seen, it's quite inadequate as evidence for a real effect. Although it's common to blame Fisher for the magic value of 0.05, in fact Fisher said, in 1926, that P = 0.05 was a 'low standard of significance' and that a scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if repeating the experiment ' rarely fails to give this level of significance'.

The 'rarely fails' bit, emphasised by Fisher 90 years ago, has been forgotten. A single experiment that gives P = 0.045 will get a 'discovery' published in the most glamorous journals. So it's not fair to blame Fisher, but nonetheless there's an uncomfortable amount of truth in what the physicist Robert Matthews at Aston University in Birmingham had to say in 1998: 'The plain fact is that 70 years ago Ronald Fisher gave scientists a mathematical machine for turning baloney into breakthroughs, and flukes into funding. It is time to pull the plug.'

The underlying problem is that universities around the world press their staff to write whether or not they have anything to say. This amounts to pressure to cut corners, to value quantity rather than quality, to exaggerate the consequences of their work and, occasionally, to cheat. People are under such pressure to produce papers that they have neither the time nor the motivation to learn about statistics, or to replicate experiments. Until something is done about these perverse incentives, biomedical science will be distrusted by the public, and rightly so. Senior scientists, vice-chancellors and politicians have set a very bad example to young researchers. As the zoologist Peter Lawrence at the University of Cambridge put it in 2007:

hype your work, slice the findings up as much as possible (four papers good, two papers bad), compress the results (most top journals have little space, a typical Nature letter now has the density of a black hole), simplify your conclusions but complexify the material (more difficult for reviewers to fault it!)

But there is good news too. Most of the problems occur only in certain areas of medicine and psychology. And despite the statistical mishaps, there have been enormous advances in biomedicine. The reproducibility crisis is being tackled. All we need to do now is to stop vice-chancellors and grant-giving agencies imposing incentives for researchers to behave badly.

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It's time for science to abandon the term 'statistically significant' | Aeon Essays

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Academic psychology and medical testing are both dogged by unreliability. The reason is clear: we got probability wrong

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Lissajous figure, also called Bowditch Curve, pattern produced by the intersection of two sinusoidal curves the axes of which are at right angles to each other. First studied by the American mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch in 1815, the curves were investigated independently by the French mathematician Jules-Antoine Lissajous in 1857-58. Lissajous used a narrow stream of sand pouring from the base of a compound pendulum to produce the curves.

Lissajous figure Oliver Kurmis

If the frequency and phase angle of the two curves are identical, the resultant is a straight line lying at 45° (and 225°) to the coordinate axes. If one of the curves is 180° out of phase with respect to the other, another straight line is produced lying 90° away from the line produced where the curves are in phase ( i.e., at 135° and 315°).

Otherwise, with identical amplitude and frequency but a varying phase relation, ellipses are formed with varying angular positions, except that a phase difference of 90° (or 270°) produces a circle around the origin. If the curves are out of phase and differing in frequency, intricate meshing figures are formed.

Of particular value in electronics, the curves can be made to appear on an oscilloscope, the shape of the curve serving to identify the characteristics of an unknown electric signal. For this purpose, one of the two curves is a signal of known characteristics. In general, the curves can be used to analyze the properties of any pair of simple harmonic motions that are at right angles to each other.

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Lissajous figure, also called Bowditch Curve, pattern produced by the intersection of two sinusoidal curves the axes of which are at right angles to each other. First studied by the American mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch in 1815, the curves were investigated independently by the French

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What can Schrödinger’s cat say about 3D printers on Mars? | Aeon Essays

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On a sofa in the corner of the room, a cat is purring. It seems obvious that the cat is an example of life, whereas the sofa itself is not. But should we trust our intuition? Consider this: Isaac Newton assumed a universal time flowing without external influence, and relative time measured by clocks - just as our perception tells us. Two centuries later, Albert Einstein dropped the concept of universal time, and instead introduced a concept of time measured only locally by clocks. Who before Einstein would have thought that time on the Sun, the Moon, and even on each of our watches runs at slightly different rates - that time is not a universal absolute? And yet today our cellphones must take this into account for a GPS to function.

Science has made amazing strides, uncovering a deep and often counterintuitive understanding of physical reality. We understand a lot about the atoms in the human body and the stars in the night sky: much more than we do about the individual human as an example of life. In fact, life scientists continue to debate the exact definition of life. It was Aristotle who first said that life is something that grows and reproduces. He was fascinated by the mule, a cross between a horse and donkey that is always sterile. But just because the mule was sterile, you couldn't call it dead. The debate is endless: some say that life must metabolise, that is, take in compounds, turn them to energy, and release some waste. But do jet engines qualify? In short, there is no theory and therefore no measuring apparatus that can confirm or refute our assumption that the cat is alive and the sofa is not, nor even that you are alive as you read this.

This is not for lack of trying. An important step to understand the fundamental principles that could explain life was put forward by Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum physics. Schrödinger is perhaps best-known for his thought experiment of a cat that is both alive and dead, thus existing in two states at once (called a superposition in physics). But he is also highly regarded for a series of lectures he delivered in 1943 at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies under the thought-provoking title 'What Is Life?' The lectures were published as a book in the subsequent year, and gained fame for inspiring generations of scientists to understand life at a deeper level. Most widely noted is his influence on the molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick to search for the structure of DNA, which Schrödinger predicted as an 'aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance'.

In What Is Life?, Schrödinger explained an apparent incompatibility between life and the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that the entropy, or disorder, of a physical system always increases. How can life increase order when the Universe must always decrease its order, as mandated by the second law? Schrödinger's answer was that life has to feed on 'negative entropy' or free energy - what we more typically call food and sunlight. The second law mandates that the amount of order in sunlight that is destroyed when it heats up our planet must be greater than the amount of order generated by a growing plant.

There is, however, a difference between showing that life is compatible with the laws of physics and making the stronger claim that life is explained by them. Schrödinger in particular was intrigued by how life can act in such an ordered manner despite constant exposure to the noise inherent in molecular dynamics - something that remains an unanswered question to this day. Even harder is explaining how life emerges from nonlife.

Schrödinger himself was left puzzled by such questions, commenting towards the end of What Is Life? that perhaps a 'new type of physical law' might be necessary to explain life. In the more than 70 years since Schrödinger's book was published, there have been many attempts to define life or at least pin down its key properties. But, so far, an explanatory theory remains elusive.

It might be that our intuition of life is wrong, based on flawed perceptions because we cannot see directly the relationship between the cat and the sofa. Driven by the idea that universal rules or laws are true everywhere, not just for cats or sofas or atoms or galaxies, physics has a long history of discovering the hidden structure in our world. Take, as an example, the law of conservation of energy: that no process will create or destroy energy, whether a galaxy or a cat. An important step in recognising this law was realising that kinetic energy and heat can be unified. In trying to determine a physics of life, we must consider all examples of life to fundamentally be part of the same universal phenomenon. Otherwise, 'life' is not an objective property, it is a collection of special cases. If a 'new type of physical law' is indeed necessary to explain life, as we think, and as Schrödinger hinted, then we must radically rethink not only our approach to life, but also to physics. The 'laws of life' should be universal in the same sense that the laws of physics are. We should expect them to apply not only to life on Earth, but also on other worlds, and not just in biology, but also in physics in general.

Debate surrounding whether life is governed by its own special laws, or whether the same laws apply within and without life, is not new. Vitalist philosophers argued that there is something special about living organisms - a vital force - that separates the living from the nonliving, and in chemistry separates the organic from the nonorganic. The vital force was supposed to explain why bacteria shouldn't spontaneously appear in dirt. In 1859, Louis Pasteur, after whom the process of pasteurisation is named, showed that bacteria cannot spontaneously generate. His conclusion was that all life must arise from other life.

But today we know that it is not lack of a vital force that prevents spontaneous generation of a bacterium. Instead, something else is missing: information. By this we mean the structure of the bacterial cell, and the contents of its genome. This information has been acquired over billions of years of evolution and can't be regenerated instantaneously from systems with no information, no matter how much dirt you have. In a way, this information is the real vital force: it is what separates living from nonliving. However, rather than being some mystical force possessed only by special bits of matter, it emerges over time and space via the process of selection. To understand the origin of life, we must learn what bits of matter can acquire such information, and how they do so.

To answer this, we must go beyond the ideas of Claude Shannon, who spearheaded the theory of information in 1948 in part by ignoring meaning. For example, in studying radio signals or other communications, Shannon was not concerned with the content of the message transmitted. Instead, he was interested in whether the bits transmitted reduced uncertainty in a receiver about the state of the sender. To accomplish this, he counted only possibilities. If tomorrow might see rain or shine, both equally likely, and you see a 100 per cent accurate weather report saying it will rain, the number of possibilities is reduced two-fold. You gain one bit of information. The same holds true if you flip a coin and learn which side faces up, or if you observe a black hole to see whether it rotates to the left or to the right. In all these examples, you gain precisely one bit of information by your observation. Information is simply the reduction in the number of expected possibilities, in essence reducing uncertainty. This is true no matter what the message says - the meaning of a signal is irrelevant to Shannon's theory.

If we found dead Martian cats, we will have found life on Mars

To develop a theory of life, we need to put the meaning that Shannon removed back into information, and, by extension, also into physics. When billiard balls hit each other, they become correlated - you can predict something about one ball from looking at the other. This is information in the Shannon sense: it is just about reducing the number of possible states that the first ball could be in once you know something about the second. On the other hand, when life gains information about its environment, this information isn't about predicting the likelihoods of arbitrary states. It is what we call 'functional information' - information about how to survive better in the environment, and how to reproduce that information in the next generation.

Another polymath of the 20th century looked at reproduction and information transfer from a mathematical point of view. John von Neumann was a pioneer of many areas including the early development of computers, game theory and economics. He recognised that to get organisms, or any reproducing machine - which he called universal constructors - to build themselves, they need a program specifying how to do it, and a means to copy this plan and transfer the copy to the new entity. Constructors are more sophisticated than things such as sofas. Sofas can be generated only by information, but constructors can also generate new things by processing information (this includes mutant variants of themselves, which allows evolution to work in the first place) - that is, they can use information. A cat is a programmable constructor in this sense and so are you, but the sofa is not. In all these cases however (sofas and cats etc), a process of evolution is necessary to generate them.

A theory of information that could explain living systems will thus have to account for two aspects of information - how the information is acquired, and how it is used. This information was acquired over evolutionary time, for example through selection, via survival of the fittest. The use of the information is, as Schrödinger pointed out, accomplished by siphoning off negative entropy to pay for the increase in organisation that organisms need to survive, which they can do because they are constructors with information about how to produce themselves.

At this point, it is instructive to distinguish two concepts pertaining to acquisition and use of information: we'll refer to them as life and alive. Alive refers to the continual use of negative entropy. It is the opposite of dead. While alive, a cat can use the negative entropy it acquired in the form of food to generate order in its cells, to construct itself. Things that are alive are constructors. A dead cat is not able to do that anymore. Being alive requires a process of maintaining homeostasis, that is, overcoming perturbations and maintaining the balance of the organism, overall.

Life, on the other hand, refers to the process that generates the required information. It also generates things that are alive and the information required to produce them. Also included in life are cases where information is acquired to generate things that aren't alive, such as sofas. This is the process that generates information that is copied over time and across different physical things: from parent to offspring or among individuals. Life generates long threads of information through time - what evolutionary biologists call lineages: lineages of cats, leading from the ancestors of all cats to the cat sitting on the sofa; lineages of information leading from the first seats to the sofa; and lineages leading from the origin of life to the bacteria in the cat's gut. These lineages would be the ones that scientists call 'open-ended', that is, they are candidates for continual evolution and expansion of novelty. Known life is our biosphere, including all lineages that have existed on Earth and the future lineages that will evolve from them. Alive things are the generating systems for expanding this process in space and time by constructing new possibilities. Thus, the cat and sofa are both life, but only the cat is alive.

To see why the distinction between life and alive is useful, we can consider a common example used in debates about definitions of life: viruses. There is a disagreement in biology about whether viruses are alive. They don't have their own homeostatic mechanism, and piggyback on that of host cells to borrow the machinery needed to generate more viruses. By common criteria, therefore, viruses are not alive because they are not constructors able to reproduce themselves. But they can still be life. Viruses, such as cells, cats or humans, emerge through a long process that gathered functional information. If we want to explain the origin of life, we have to be able to explain how this process emerged. A dead cat is not alive, but it is life - it also emerged through a long process of acquiring functional information. If we can explain the origin of dead cats, we will have explained the origin of life, and if we found dead Martian cats, we will have found life on Mars. It is thus important to distinguish the organism, the thing that is alive, from the process - life - that generated the information that it uses.

It is possible that every time life arises in the Universe, things will appear that we would call alive, or that share some of the features of what we think of as being alive. They will probably use information and negative entropy to maintain themselves. But it is not at all clear that all life will lead to things that are alive everywhere that life exists, nor is it clear what features of being alive are necessary for open-ended evolution and expansion of a biosphere.

Imagine you have built a sophisticated 3D printer called Alice, the first to be able to print itself. As with von Neumann's constructor, you supply it with information specifying its own plan, and a mechanism for copying that information: Alice is now a complete von Neumann constructor. Have you created new life on Earth?

Biological lineages, such as our ~4 billion-year-old one, might be some of the oldest physical structures on earth because they keep regenerating themselves

Suppose you then rig up Alice so it acquires (through your design) more information: it can use rocks and the minerals derived from them as raw materials to make new 3D printers. Are Alice and her offspring (Bob, Charley, Daisy and Eve) now life? Getting annoyed with continually having to find raw materials for all the little 3D printers running around, you decide to equip one offspring, Eve, with even more acquired information: solar panels for energy that enable Eve to go out by itself and use that acquired information to hunt for minerals. Is Eve now life?

For this latest design you gain acclaim for engineering the first ever self-reproducing 3D printer that is completely autonomous and doesn't require supervision. You put a lot of information and programming into making your constructor. Although you care deeply for your creation, your insurance company worries about the unfavourable losses if Eve ever takes over the Earth. So, you figure out a way to get your little autonomous 3D printer sent on the next mission to Mars as a stowaway. Imagine Eve has a happy existence in a hidden valley on Mars, and goes on to produce many copies of itself. Humanity discovers the valley a few million years later to find the process of evolution on 3D printers generated a wide variety of them that are quite different from your original design - small ones, big ones, blue ones, red ones, ones that hunt other 3D printers for resources, and so on.

The value of this thought experiment is that it allows us to play with the notions of life and alive. Intuitively, we feel that life emerged, or maybe that the new robots are even alive. Did the 3D printers become life? If so, at what point did they become life? Are they alive?

The 3D printers form a lineage. On Mars, novel functions were discovered via evolution, branching off new lineages, each with independently derived functions developed through selection. But back on Earth, the origin of this lineage was your engineering. And you yourself are part of a nearly 4 billion-year-old lineage going all the way back to the origin of life on Earth. Notice that the 3D printer lineage and your lineage aren't really separate. The 3D printers would not have appeared without a long history of accumulation of functional information on Earth, just as you never would have appeared without that long history. It is for this reason that, to truly study independent examples of life, we must discover alien life and not just make it in the lab.

It is impossible to remove our own agency in attempts to produce artificial life: anything we create is part of our own lineage, and therefore represents the same life. Biological lineages, such as our ~4 billion-year-old one, might be some of the oldest physical structures on Earth because they keep regenerating themselves. Not only that, but they are also powered by information to continually expand and evolve.

But let us look at the functional information that makes us. Some was acquired around 4 billion years ago when life got started, but most was acquired over evolutionary time. We learned how to build our bodies around 540 million years ago, and to digest cooked food maybe in the past million years. We are a bundle of information, acquired at different stages, some acquired by the bacteria in our gut, and some acquired through culture. From the lineage viewpoint, the 3D printers were always life, there was no nonlife/life transition in our thought experiment. But something did change over the course of their evolution - they acquired functional information over millions of years on Mars, and were able to use this information to do novel things - that is, they came closer to what we would call alive. It is in this sense that we might consider the 3D printers to represent new examples of alive things, each generating new possibilities for life.

Our aim is to understand life on Earth and on other worlds, and to understand its origin. But in order to achieve this we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about life. A cat is an instance of an organism that is alive. But it is also a 4 billion-year-old lineage of independently derived functional information. The question of whether Schrödinger's cat is alive or dead might not be the right one - in either case, it is life.

In the corner of the room a 4 billion-year-old lineage is sitting, currently in the shape of a cat. That is life.
Published in association with the Santa Fe Institute, an Aeon Strategic Partner.

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What can Schrödinger's cat say about 3D printers on Mars? - Michael Lachmann & Sara Walker | Aeon Essays

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On a sofa in the corner of the room, a cat is purring. It seems obvious that the cat is an example of life, whereas the sofa itself is not. But should we trust our intuition? Consider this: Isaac Newton assumed a universal time flowing without external influence, and relative time measured by clocks - just as our perception tells us.

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Shortly before killing 50 people at two New Zealand mosques, the man arrested for the Christchurch massacre posted an online manifesto that alluded to the "Great Replacement" - a racist demographic theory that stokes fears of white people becoming, effectively, extinct. Within hours of the shootings, this act of terrorism inspired by a conspiracy theory had already gone on to birth conspiracy theories about itself. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh speculated that the shooter was a secret leftist hoping to use the attack to smear the reputation of the political right.

That a single tragedy could be so tangled in conspiracy mongering should be no surprise at this point. We've all watched conspiracies grow from myriad soils: the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the political passions of George Soros, vaccines, climate change, even the football secrets of the New England Patriots. Conspiracy theories appear to have become a major part of how we, as a society, process the news. It might be harder to think of an emotionally tinged event that didn't provoke a conspiracy theory than it is to rattle off a list of the ones that did.

The ubiquity - and risks - of all these conspiracies has caught the attention of scientists. For years, the potentially dangerous consequences of conspiracy led many researchers to approach belief in conspiracies as a pathology in need of a cure. But that train of thought tended to awkwardly clash against some of the facts. The more we learn about conspiracy beliefs, the more normal they look - and the more some scientists worry that trying to prevent them could present its own dangers.

The experts I spoke with all said that the internet had changed the way conspiracies spread, but conspiracies, both dangerous and petty, have always been with us. Nobody knows, really, how popular conspiracy beliefs used to be, because it wasn't a thing surveys regularly tracked until recently, said Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist at VU Amsterdam. But he and Michael Wood, professor of psychology at the UK's University of Winchester, both pointed to a study that suggests conspiracies have consistently peered out of the pages of American newspapers for at least a century.

Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, cataloged and coded more than 100,000 letters to the editor published in The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and found the number of letters alleging and discussing conspiracy theories to have been pretty consistent over the last 120 years. This study isn't perfect - the newspapers are still gatekeepers to what conspiracies were deemed fit to publish - but because it encompasses two different papers over a wide swath of time and many editorial leadership changes, Uscinski told me that it's reasonable to assume we're looking at something that reflects what interests readers, more so than what interests editors.

That research is significant to understanding conspiracy belief as a societal norm. "There was some crazy stuff that they were more than happy to publish," Uscinski said. "The CIA is creating lesbianism. We found alien planets. ... Jimmy Carter is a communist agent. Secret baby farms where they're growing organs for people. It all wound up in there."

And, it turns out, most of us believe in some strange goings-on behind the curtains. More than half of Americans think there was more than one person involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for example. A 2014 study found that more than half of Americans believe in at least one medical conspiracy - a list that includes things like doctors giving children vaccines they know to be dangerous or the idea that the Food and Drug Administration intentionally suppresses natural cancer cures because of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry. The more specific conspiracies you ask about in polls, the higher the percentage of Americans that believe in at least one, Uscinski said. He thinks it's likely everyone has a pet conspiracy to call their own.

What's more, conspiracy beliefs aren't necessarily all that special, said Carrie Leonard, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Leonard studies broader categories of what are known as "erroneous beliefs" - paranormal experiences, gambling fallacies, that sort of thing. The more we learn about conspiracy beliefs, the more they seem to have in common with these other kinds of wrong ideas, she said. Feeling a lack of control over various aspects of life, a tendency toward paranoid thinking, failure to understand and use statistics and probabilistic reasoning - all those things correlate with belief in ghosts and slot-machine prowess as much as with belief in the Illuminati. In fact, Leonard said, if you believe in the paranormal, you're more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, and vice versa. (A finding that is probably completely unsurprising to the editors of The Fortean Times.)

At the same time, though, conspiracy theories have a sociopolitical aspect that makes them stand out. Leonard, and other researchers, think of belief in conspiracy as an interaction between individual tendencies and social circumstances. So, for instance, if you're part of a group that is marginalized by society or lacks power in important ways you're more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. That means being a member of a racial minority is a predictor of conspiracy belief - and so is unemployment, low economic status, or even just being a member of a cultural group that's looked down on by people in positions of power.

Likewise, consider who is accusing whom of engaging in conspiracy. Uscinski's study of newspaper letters to the editor tracked the social status of the letter writers. Consistently, he found conspiracies were punching up. Not only did average people write more than 70 percent of the conspiracy letters - as opposed to elite members of society - the conspiracies alleged were usually aimed at people in positions of power. There's also no evidence to suggest that conspiracy belief is a phenomenon of the far right or the far left, Uscinski said. Americans broadly believe in a "them" pulling the strings and manipulating the country.

And this is where conspiracy beliefs start to get tangled up with truth. Because history does contain real examples of conspiracy. Pizzagate was a dangerous lie that led an armed man to walk into a family restaurant, convinced he was there to rescue children from pedophilic members of the Democratic Party. But that incident also exists in the same universe as the Tuskegee experiments, redlining and the Iran-Contra Affair. "I have this conspiracy that Western governments are involved in an international spying ring," Wood said. "Before about 2014 that would have made you a conspiracy theorist. Now we know it's true."

Summoning - and demonizing - the belief in conspiracies can also have political consequences. "During the Bush Administration, the left was going fucking bonkers ... about 9/11 and Halliburton and Cheney and Blackwater and all this stuff," Uscinski said. "As soon as Obama won they didn't give a shit about any of that stuff anymore. They did not care. It was politically and socially inert." In turn, conspiracy theories about Obama flourished on the right. Uscinski said he is frustrated by this tendency for partisans to build up massive conspiracy infrastructures when they are out of power, only to develop a sudden amnesia and deep concern about the conspiracy mongering behavior of the other side once power is restored. It's a cycle, he said that threatened to make social science a tool of partisan slapfights more than a standard of truth. And in a 2017 paper, he argued that conspiracy beliefs could even be useful parts of the democratic process, calling them "tools for dissent used by the weak to balance against power."

These issues add up to more scientists beginning to have questions about what the goals of conspiracy belief research should actually be. Do we want an entire field of study aimed at preventing conspiracy theories from forming and dispelling the ones that do?

"I don't think so," Wood said. "I'm sure some people would disagree with me on that. But the objective shouldn't be nobody speculates about people in power abusing power. That's a terrible outcome for the world."

He's right - some scientists do disagree. Leonard, for instance, acknowledged that the world is complex, but viewed conspiracy theories as largely negative - erroneous beliefs, like gambling fallacies, but with the power to disrupt whole societies rather than just one person's bank account.

Of course, all this debate assumes eliminating conspiracy theories is even possible. Van Prooijen told me that he's currently working on a line of research to see whether a false conspiracy belief can be corrected by giving the people who believe in it something they've lacked - power and control over their own lives. In laboratory experiments, this seems to work, he said. Empower people, give them a sense of control, operate with transparency, and conspiracy theories seem to become less appealing.

Trouble is, in the real world, who has the ability to offer that kind of empowerment?

That's right. THEM.

"If a group of people strongly distrusts a government or group of leaders, anything they do will raise suspicion," van Prooijen said. Whether they want to get rid of conspiracies or not, scientists (and global leaders) are kind of stuck. Conspiracy beliefs are the norm, and difficult to shake because the people with the most interest in shaking them are, usually, the very people the conspiracy is meant to fight. As van Prooijen put it: "It's not an easy task."

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Shortly before killing 50 people at two New Zealand mosques, the man arrested for the Christchurch massacre posted an online manifesto that alluded to the "Great Replacement" - a racist demographic theory that stokes fears of white people becoming, effectively, extinct.

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast

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When you order stuff online, it may cost less to have it shipped across the world than across the street.

Take the Mighty Mug. It's a travel mug that's almost impossible to knock over, invented by a guy in New Jersey named Jayme Smaldone. A few months ago, Jayme realized he could order a knockoff Mighty Mug from China and get it shipped for less than it would cost him to ship his mug to a neighbor.

The reason for this price gap, Jayme claims, is a secretive group of postal policymakers that meets every four years to fix international shipping rates. A kind of postal illuminati.

Today's episode: A conspiracy theory that's actually real. How the decisions made behind closed doors make it cheap to buy things from across the world, but are also distorting the global economy.

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast subscribe to Planet Money podcast When you order stuff online, it may cost less to have it shipped across the world than across the street. Take the Mighty Mug. It's a travel mug that's almost impossible to knock over, invented by a guy in New Jersey named Jayme Smaldone.

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Cognition - How Your Mind Can Amaze and Betray You: Crash Course Psychology #15

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How Much Energy Does A Housewife Use In A Day

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rare footage of 1950s housewife in LSD experiment.flv

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How two scientists built a bridge between Newton and Einstein in 'empty' spaces | Aeon Videos

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Gravity retained a somewhat mystifying quality, even after the Newtonian revolution: how could one object affect another from great distances? The same could be said about light, heat and magnetism, which all seemed to jump through empty space.

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Self-deception seems inescapably paradoxical. For the self to be both the subject and the object of deceit, one and the same individual must devise the deceptive strategy by which they are hoodwinked. This seems impossible. For a trick to work effectively as a trick, one cannot know how it works. Equally, it is hard to see how someone can believe and disbelieve the same proposition. Holding p and not-p together is, straightforwardly, to contradict oneself.

Despite its seemingly paradoxical qualities, many people claim to know first-hand what it is to be self-deceived. In fact, philosophers joke that only prolific self-deceivers would deny that they experience it. Nevertheless, there are skeptics who argue that self-deception is a conceptual impossibility so there can be no genuine cases, just as there can be no square-circles.

Yet self-deception seems undeniable in spite of its alleged incoherence. For the fact is, we are not always entirely rational. Certain situations, such as falling in love or being in the frenzied grips of grief, heighten susceptibility to self-deception. Betrayed lovers everywhere, anxious to discard the damning evidence of infidelity, know precisely Shakespeare's meaning at sonnet 138:

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies

Self-deception is so curious a thing that it is a source of intrigue in the arts and sciences alike. Biologists such as Robert Trivers, for example, have begun to investigate self-deception's evolutionary origins, probing its function and potential value.

On the one hand, evidence suggests that specific instances of self-deception can enhance wellbeing and even prolong life. For example, multiple studies have found that optimistic individuals have better survival rates when diagnosed with cancer and other chronic illnesses, whereas 'realistic acceptance' of one's prognosis has been linked to decreased life expectancy. On the other hand, self-deception seems like the ultimate delusion. Simultaneous belief and disbelief in a proposition is surely symptomatic of irrationality, placing one's mental health and capacity for reason in jeopardy.

Existing debates face the challenge of connecting the philosophical and the practical aspects of the problem. Either self-deception is ruled out as incoherent, or it is accepted as a brute fact. If the former, the skeptic must justify the countless cases where it appears to occur. If the latter, some serious revisions to our conception of self are required.

Ideally, we should seek a single solution to both dimensions of the problem so that our explanation of self-deception also points the way to its prevention. For, while deceiving ourselves might occasionally seem to our advantage, in the long term it is self-alienating. And as we shall see, Buddhist approaches to self-deception achieve the synthesis of practical and philosophical resolutions more fully than do the dominant Western theories.

Self-deception belongs to a family of concepts involving psychological manipulation, such as wishful thinking, repression, denial and dissociation (emotionally removing oneself from a traumatic experience to avoid confronting it). Skeptics about self-deception struggle with all these concepts because they normally think of the self as internally unified and self-aware, making concealment of unwelcome self-knowledge impossible.

However, this contradicts psychoanalytic theories on the conscious and unconscious mind. It also goes against experience. We don't always know ourselves as well as we think, and sometimes we convince ourselves of that which is evidently false or overwhelmingly improbable. The fine line between ambition and self-deception is often manifest around New Year, when many of us are forced to concede that our goals have crumbled from the heady heights of self-improvement plans into delusional wishful thinking.

If self-deception is paradoxical, the experience itself is even more perplexing. Unlike the immediacy of other experiences, how it feels to be self-deceived is knowable only retrospectively, after the spell has been broken.

Take Oedipus. Anxious that the prophecy of patricide and incest will be fulfilled, he leaves his home and family. Though he is genuinely shocked and sickened at the discovery of his true identity, there are indicators throughout the play to suggest his wilful ignorance. Given his fear of patricide, why does Oedipus continue blithely on his way after killing a man? Given his fear of committing incest, why does he marry a widow without first piecing the puzzle together? Such neglect leads the audience to suspect that, somehow, Oedipus was dimly aware of his identity before its full disclosure, and that he either repressed this awareness or deceived himself to avoid the painful truth.

Thankfully, for most of us, our small acts of repression, denial and self-deception are more mundane. For instance, data gathered through self-reporting on consumption often delivers distorted results, reflecting the respondents' preferred self-image rather than any objective facts. It would be foolish to read self-deception into every omitted glass of wine or unrecorded biscuit - embarrassment and forgetfulness are equally plausible explanations. Even if self-deception is the root cause, this behaviour seems fairly harmless.

Strategies of postponement and misrepresentation allow us to conceal our true nature even from ourselves

Somewhere on the scale between extremely damaging and totally insignificant self-deception we find examples that resonate. If ancient wisdom traditions are right and the quest for self-knowledge is a fundamental part of human flourishing - as in the Socratic maxim 'know thyself' - then self-deception undermines the central aims of the good life. Convincing ourselves of what is manifestly false or impossible is both existentially crippling and socially harmful. This propensity is sometimes referred to as the mal du siècle: a general malaise triggered by unsettling awareness of our potential and identity.

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre invokes the concept of mauvaise foi, or bad faith, to explicate self-deception. He argues that many people are afraid to confront themselves, preferring to follow prescribed norms and fulfil pre-assigned roles rather than to strive for self-realisation. He illustrates bad faith with a few examples: a woman's hesitant reaction to a man's advances, a waiter's self-identification as 'nothing more' than a waiter, a homosexual's unwillingness to acknowledge his sexuality. These strategies of postponement and misrepresentation allow the person to conceal their true nature even from themselves. Sartre deplores this mode of life, for, while such strategies might serve as effective coping mechanisms in the short term, in the long run they are existentially paralysing.

This kind of self-deception, the sort backed up by conformity to norms or stereotypes, is extremely difficult to detect. And, naturally, the most pervasive forms of self-deceit are the hardest to root out. This is especially clear in cases of discrepancy between what a person professes, and how they feel or behave.

Of course, the presence of a bias does not automatically imply self-deception. People can discriminate unknowingly, even against their will, and there is a world of difference between ignorance, and wilful ignorance of one's own biases and prejudices. As the US civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson put it in 1993: 'There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps ... then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.' Still, discrepancy between belief and behaviour can sometimes signal self-deception, as can the language we use.

It is a mistake to treat the philosophical and the practical aspects of the problem of self-deception as entirely distinct. For what use is an explanation of this phenomenon unaccompanied by a strategy for its alleviation? Prominent Western theories on self-deception tend to leave the practical problem unresolved. But there is an alternative, Buddhist approach. The artful combination of three Buddhist theories provides a philosophically therapeutic perspective on self-deception. Before turning to this response, however, let's delve deeper into the concept of self on which the paradox depends.

Skeptics about self-deception claim that any genuine examples would need to satisfy impossible conditions, such as the knowing-dupe or the contradictory belief conditions. They claim that satisfying the first condition means being duped by one's own duplicitous scheme while satisfying the second is tantamount to abandoning reason. Such skepticism represents the minority view, since so many examples of this supposedly impossible phenomenon are clear. Yet it remains a theoretical option.

For the skeptic's defeat we must show either: (1) that the fact of somebody holding inconsistent beliefs is reconcilable with the idea of a unified centre of conscious beliefs; or (2) that the skeptic misconstrues the conditions under which self-deception occurs. Arguably, the skeptic's account of self-deception reduces the complexities of human psychology to what is possible at one single moment in time, under the assumption that no sane, cognitively competent person simultaneously believes p and not-p.

But if this is an argument against self-deception, it is time to revise our model of selfhood. Indeed, far from precluding the possibility of self-deception, the multifaceted nature of consciousness might actually help to explain it.

Western philosophy has produced several responses to the paradox of self-deception, the most recurrent of which are the temporal partitioning and the psychological partitioning approaches. Both challenge the (still dominant) conception of the self as completely internally unified and fully self-aware. They are designed to show that self-deception is paradoxical only if the Cartesian model of the self as a non-composite, immaterial substance - whose purity we imagine we partake of - is accepted. Without this idea of the self, self-deception is a puzzle, but it is not a paradox.

Deceiving oneself is just a more unusual case of lying

Some leading philosophers in consciousness studies and the nature of mind reject the Cartesian concept of self. Aside from the lack of empirical evidence for such a self, it would surely be too abstract and impersonal to bear a connection with the individual of lived experience, who engages and interacts in the temporal world. But the influence of the Cartesian model has historically been so significant that it continues to shape the debate. Although both temporal partitioning and psychological partitioning proposals challenge this model of the self, they do not resolve the practical problem of eliminating self-deception.

Advocates of temporal partitioning might invoke the appointment case to explain how self-deception works. The philosopher Brian McLaughlin at Rutgers University in New Jersey summarises it as follows:

In order to miss an unpleasant meeting three months ahead, Mary deliberately writes the wrong date for the meeting in her appointment book, a date later than the actual date of the meeting. She does this so that three months later when she consults the book, she will come mistakenly to believe the meeting is on that date and, as a result, miss the meeting.

This is supposed to show that self-deception does not require simultaneous belief in p and not-p. Instead, all that is required is an intention to induce the belief not-p at the time of believing p. In this case, there is no time when Mary believes both that her appointment is on Thursday and that it is on Friday. Rather, she relies on her faulty memory so that, when she eventually consults her diary, she will have forgotten her act of deception.

We can contest the likelihood of Mary's forgetting. Indeed, if the prospective appointment (let's say, with the dentist) elicits such a reaction, she will surely struggle to put it out of her mind. What matters though is that temporal partitioning challenges the idea that the act of deception and the experience of deceit must coincide. Deceiving oneself therefore largely resembles deceiving somebody else, and is just a more unusual case of lying.

For the skeptic, this account won't cut it. The obvious objection is that temporal partitioning seems not so much to explain self-deception as to explain it away. After all, if after three months Mary has forgotten the true date of her appointment, doesn't this show that the Mary who deceived is, in some sense, a different person from the Mary who is deceived? If we distinguish cases of self-deception from cases of self-induced deception, we might protest that the appointment case is an example only of the latter. And even if we are satisfied that temporal partitioning explains how self-deception occurs, it cannot tell us how to overcome it.

Another common explanation of self-deception appeals to psychological partitioning between the different facets of the self. On this view, self-deception does involve simultaneous assent to p and not-p but this is not paradoxical because of the multifaceted nature of the self. Rather than treat the self as fully integrated, we should see it as a process, the product of a complex structure composed of various elements. One part of the self can conceal its beliefs from another part, making self-deception possible.

It is only in moments of introspection that the illusion of a unified self is cast into doubt. An advantage of this theory is that it accommodates different levels of self-awareness within one individual, explaining discrepancies between the conscious and unconscious mind.

The philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty at Harvard Medical School illustrates how this might work with the example of Dr Laetitia Androvna:

A specialist in the diagnosis of cancer, whose fascination for the obscure does not usually blind her to the obvious, she has begun to misdescribe and ignore symptoms that the most junior premedical student would recognise as the unmistakable symptoms of the late stages of a currently incurable form of cancer.

Androvna deflects the questions of her concerned colleagues away from her condition, though she does put her affairs in order (eg, by making a will). The mismatch between her behaviour and her consciously held beliefs suggests that, at some level, she recognises her illness but is finding ways to keep her conflicting acknowledgements apart.

Again, the skeptic argues that psychological partitioning is incompatible with genuine instances of self-deception because this approach likewise undermines the identity of deceiver and deceived. From this perspective, if the self is divisible then, to be sure, one part might deceive another, but is this self-deception? If we challenge the unity of the self, must we also challenge the idea of self-deception?

According to Buddhism, the answer is no.

Early Buddhists did not explicitly discuss the problem of self-deception, at least not as it's understood in Western philosophy. What they did do, however, was provide detailed accounts of three theories that, collectively, provide a response to both the philosophical and practical aspects of the problem. These are (1) the theory of no-self ( anātman); (2) the theory of wilful ignorance ( avidyā); and (3) the theory of two truths ( satyadvaya).

These teachings are variously interpreted within Buddhism, but all schools agree that they can provide transformative insights into our own nature, banishing our tendency for self-deception. While we're inclined to treat self-deception as the exception rather than the rule, Buddhists see it as our default position. They claim that most people repress and deny uncomfortable truths, deceiving themselves on an almost unimaginable scale about all manner of things. From the Buddhist point of view, the skeptic's only success lies in the extent of their self-deceit: by defining the self in ways that make it impervious to change, they also strip it of potential.

Specifically, Buddhists claim that we routinely convince ourselves that what is perishable and impermanent can be a lasting source of satisfaction. This illusion only reinforces our existential situation, which is one of profound suffering. From this perspective, even when false beliefs offer temporary relief from painful truths, self-deception merely prolongs the inevitable. Since none of us can stave off our demise forever, each of us is eventually forced to confront the reality of our own transience.

The remedy to all this is a fearless acceptance of our own impermanence and insubstantiality. By abandoning our self-image as fixed centres of agency, Buddhists argue that we eliminate the stultifying effects of greed and hatred borne from egoism. This process eventually leads to liberation through self-awareness, consisting of awareness of the fundamental lack of any self at all.

No-self ( anātman) is Buddhism's most famous, but also most frequently misunderstood, theory. Buddhists supply several arguments against the existence of an eternal, changeless, transcendental and metaphysical self. To understand these arguments, we must contextualise them against the backdrop of the Vedic view of the self, dominant in classical India. In the Vedic worldview, the innermost kernel of a person, the ātman, corresponds to the fundamental source and ground of reality, the Brahman, which is essentially unchanging.

Buddhists reject this on two fronts. First, if the self existed in this way, it could not engage in worldly experience but would instead stand inertly outside of time and space. It would thus bear no relation to the human person who lives and changes through time. Moreover, since experience confirms that everything is causally conditioned, hence subject to change and degradation, an immutable self could never be empirically observed. Second, Buddhists argue that obsession with a fixed self is morally problematic, and that this belief perpetuates selfishness. Belief in the self is therefore seen as both the symptom and the cause of deluded attachment.

The human person is a process, not a thing

Ironically, then, Buddhists are inclined to see belief in a single substantial self as the severest, most dangerous instance of self-deception. This immediately raises the question: if there is no-self, who can be the subject of self-deceit? To answer, we must invoke the theory of two truths ( satyadvaya), which stipulates a distinction between ultimate and conventional truth.

In his study of self-deception in different traditions, the philosopher Eliot Deutsch of the University of Hawaii demonstrates one of the ways in which the no-self theory is often misconstrued. He argues that Buddhists can 'have little to say' about self-deception because they do not accept the ultimate reality of the metaphysical self. If this disqualifies Buddhists from debates on self-deception, it must also disqualify many Western philosophers who do not approach the paradox of self-deception with a unitary self in mind (including advocates of temporal and psychological partitioning).

On the contrary, although Buddhists reject the ultimate existence of the self, they accept the conventional (we might say, practical or functional) reality of conceptually constructed persons. And crucially, as we have seen, it is the conventional person - not an ultimate self - who expresses the full range of human emotions and deploys the tactics of self-manipulation, including self-deception.

Buddhists conceive of conventional reality in terms of conceptualisation. Hence, the concept of a person reflects nothing more than the imposition of this idea on to ephemeral elements of which we are composed, called the skandhas. The skandhas include: the physical body, sensory experiences, cognitive awareness of perceptions, intentional acts of will and consciousness. None of these remain stable over time but there is a causal connection between the past, present and future skandha s. This is sufficient for personal identity even though there is no such thing as a numerically identical self.

In other words, the human person is a process, not a thing. Our language typically fails to communicate this fact, and my repeated use of the word 'I' sustains the illusion of the self as an underlying, constant feature of reality.

To explain how self-deception occurs, Buddhists can distinguish ultimate from conventional truth. Like the temporal and psychological partitioning approaches, epistemic partitioning challenges the identity of deceiver and deceived. At the level of ultimate truth, there simply is no-self who could be self-deceived. At the level of conventional truth, we encounter the person (who is an illusion, better thought of as a sequence of person-stages). Unlike temporal and psychological partitioning, however, epistemic partitioning goes a step further. It not only explains the mechanism of self-deception but also contains the seeds of its elimination.

The Buddha's teachings are renowned for their therapeutic orientation, and self-deception seems the antithesis of an authentic life of human flourishing. Buddhism stresses the link between discerning truth (with 'right view' as the first step on the noble eightfold path) and moral fulfilment. The distinction between ultimate and conventional truth not only explains the origins of our illusions but helps us to overcome, or see through, their deceptive character.

The final goal of this process is the complete alleviation of suffering, including the suffering borne out of self-deception. Epistemic partitioning of ultimate and conventional knowledge results in two modes of knowing, which we might call the cognitive/intellectual and the affective/practical. We might know ultimately that everything is impermanent and insubstantial yet remain attached to merely conventional things. Ourselves, for instance.

We display wilful ignorance of perishability as we cannot bear to lose the things we hold most dear

Once we internalise this truth, however, Buddhists suppose that delusional compulsions for transient things will be gradually undermined. Just as there is no ultimately real self, neither are there any ultimately real tables, chairs and so forth. The identity we assign to composite things made up of parts is just the product of mental construction, reflecting our ingrained tendency to impose structure, stability and substance.

Though we know that things change and degrade, we act as though they are permanent. Such a discrepancy between conscious cognitive belief and innate affective attitude signals self-deceit. Put simply, we display wilful ignorance ( avidyā) of perishability because we cannot bear to lose the things we hold most dear.

Why, then, do Buddhists treat conventional truths as truths at all? Indeed, if they are nothing but convenient fictions, isn't this a distortion of truth's meaning? Again, Buddhists see the therapeutic dimension of their philosophy as justifying this manoeuvre: belief in the self would be both inaccurate and unhelpful, whereas belief in the person is key to accomplishing the goals of Buddhism. Mindfulness forces us first to confront the wide chasm between our self-image and the ultimate truth of our nature; and second, helps us to bridge that chasm by becoming increasingly aware of the workings of the mind and its deceptive strategies so that we no longer repress and deny our true feelings.

It might strike the modern reader as patently wrongheaded to suggest that any religious tradition contains the seeds of a solution more satisfying than secular proposals. For, understandably, many see religious belief as coterminous with wishful thinking and incompatible with reason. However, the Buddhist response sketched here depends exclusively on arguments about human nature that are equally open to dispute and defence. There is no recourse to mystical or non-empirical claims. And because the problem of self-deception is more personal than many of philosophy's other problems, viable solutions must work both in theory and in practice. Though the many forms of self-deception make the effectiveness of a universally applicable remedy unlikely, Buddhists would concur with Macbeth's doctor that 'Therein the patient must minister to himself.'

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How Buddhism resolves the paradox of self-deception - Katie Javanaud | Aeon Essays

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Self-deception seems inescapably paradoxical. For the self to be both the subject and the object of deceit, one and the same individual must devise the deceptive strategy by which they are hoodwinked. This seems impossible. For a trick to work effectively as a trick, one cannot know how it works.

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When IBM's Deep Blue chess computer defeated the world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, humanity let out a collective sigh, recognising the loss of an essential human territory to the onslaught of thinking machines. Chess, that inscrutably challenging game, with more possible game states than there are atoms in the Universe, was no longer a canvas for individual human achievement. Newsweek called it 'The Brain's Last Stand'.

Why was the loss so upsetting to so many? Not because chess is complicated, per se - calculating differential equations is complicated, and we are happy to cede the work to computers - but because chess is creative. We talk about the personality, the aesthetics of chess greats such as Kasparov and Bobby Fischer, seeing a 'style of play' in the manipulation of pieces on a grid. Chess was a foil, a plane of endeavour, for storytellers as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov and Satyajit Ray, and we celebrate its grandmasters as remarkable synthesisers of logic and creativity. It was particularly galling, then, for Kasparov to lose to a machine based not on its creativity but its efficiency at analysing billions of possible moves. Deep Blue wasn't really intelligent at all, but it was very good at avoiding mistakes in chess. One might argue that its victory not only knocked humanity down a peg but demonstrated that chess itself is not, or does not have to be, the aesthetic space we imagined it.

And yet Kasparov, after having lost to what he later called 'a $10 million alarm clock', continued to play against machines, and to reflect on the consequences of computation for the game of kings. And not just against them: for the past two decades, Kasparov has been exploring an idea he calls 'Advanced Chess', where humans collaborate with computer chess programs against other hybrid teams, sometimes called 'Centaurs'. The humans maintain strategic control of the game while automating the memorisation and basic calculation on which great chess depends. As Kasparov described an early such match:

Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions.

Kasparov argues that the introduction of machine intelligence to chess did not diminish but enhanced the aesthetics of the game, creating a new space for creativity at the game's highest levels. Today, players of 'freestyle' chess work with high-end chess systems, databases of millions of games and moves, and often other human collaborators too. Freestyle teams can easily defeat both top grandmasters and chess programs, and some of the best centaur teams are made up of amateur players who have created better processes for combining human and machine intelligence.

These centaur games are beautiful. The quality of play is higher, the noise of simple human errors reduced, making space for the kind of pure contest that the platonic solids and geometries of chess idealise.

We are all centaurs now, our aesthetics continuously enhanced by computation. Every photograph I take on my smartphone is silently improved by algorithms the second after I take it. Every document autocorrected, every digital file optimised. Musicians complain about the death of competence in the wake of Auto-Tune , just as they did in the wake of the synthesiser in the 1970s. It is difficult to think of a medium where creative practice has not been thoroughly transformed by computation and an attendant series of optimisations. The most profound changes have occurred in fields such as photography, where the technical knowledge required to produce competent photographs has been almost entirely eclipsed by creative automation. Even the immediacy of live performance gets bracketed by code through social media and the screens we watch while recording events that transpire right before our eyes.

In fact, the shift might be much more profound for the audience than the artist. Being a critic or consumer of art now relies on a deep web of computational filters and guides, from the Google and Wikipedia searches we use to learn about the world to the recommendation systems queueing up books, songs and movies for us. We rely on computational systems for our essential aesthetic vocabulary, learning what is good and beautiful through a prism of five-star rating systems and social-media endorsements, all closely watched over by algorithmic critics of loving grace. We shape our aesthetic expectations around these feedback loops, finding channels and lists that seem to match our interests and then following them. Google has already introduced a system that proposes responses to your emails based on millions of prior conversations, and the company Narrative Science has been creating algorithmically generated journalism for years.

Today, we experience art in collaboration with these algorithms. How can we disentangle the book critic, say, from the highly personalised algorithms managing her notes, communications, browsing history and filtered feeds on Facebook and Instagram? She exemplifies what philosophers call the extended mind, meaning that her memories, thoughts and perceptions extend beyond her body to algorithmically mediated objects, databases and networks. Without this externalised thinking apparatus, she is not the same critic she would be otherwise. This is true not just in pragmatic terms, in that she might not be nearly as good or efficient at her work, but in biophysical terms as well. Our brains adapt to the tools that we use, like London taxicab drivers with their enlarged hippocampi for mapping the city's convoluted streets (or the GPS-dependent smartphone users whose shrivelled hippocampi can't even navigate them around their own neighbourhoods).

Our entire cultural horizon is shaped by the filtering mechanisms of our news feeds, inboxes and search results

The extended mind is now also becoming a space of collective cognition. The critical network of literary reception made up of that critic, the author she writes about, both their friends and followers, the hashtags, links and cross-references that bind these nodes together, all form a much more inclusive tapestry of cultural discourse than was ever possible before. We depend on our friends and social networks to tell us what to think about new creative works, and that process of assessment and sharing depends on algorithmic filters designed to maximise attention, traffic and profits.

Sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu painstakingly mapped the deeply social dimensions of cultural judgment in the 20th century, but today the deeply intersubjective nature of taste is not just obvious but almost subliminal. Algorithms are shaping the reception of works at the forefront, but also the periphery. The entire horizon of our cultural perspectives is shaped by the filtering mechanisms that populate our news feeds, prioritise our inboxes and rank our search results. And they are, of course, built out of our own collective responses to prior stimuli, modelling a collective aesthetic project that we (often unknowingly) participate in with every click and purchase.

The immediate creative consequence of this sea change is that we are building more technical competence into our tools. It is getting harder to take a really terrible digital photograph, and in correlation the average quality of photographs is rising. From automated essay critiques to algorithms that advise people on fashion errors and coordinating outfits, computation is changing aesthetics. When every art has its Auto-Tune, how will we distinguish great beauty from an increasingly perfect average?

The visceral reaction is to rebel against these simulations of progress and perfection. Many artists today explore the seams and rough edges of digital platforms, creating art out of the glitches and unintended juxtapositions that they can eke out of increasingly complicated creative systems. A few years ago, the American science-fiction author Bruce Sterling helped to champion the idea of the 'new aesthetic', predicated on the 'eruption of the digital into the physical'. The art form celebrates the gritty, avant-garde edge of pixelated shear, and explores the inherent tensions between digital representations of culture and the consequences those representations have when plucked out of two-dimensional server-farm splendour rendered back into richer cultural forms. Carefully crafted physical representations of 8-bit graphic art, giant physical pins emulating the skeuomorphic place-markers in digital map software: these efforts to see like machines are also clearly rebellions against the aesthetic constraints of computation.

Lurking behind these efforts to disrupt the normal functioning of computational culture is a deeper creative need. What we crave most in art, what we reward more than anything else, is surprise. Marcel Duchamp's urinal, the introduction of perspective to landscape painting, stream-of-consciousness literature - these creative breakthroughs achieve much of their impact by shocking us into some new perspective on the world. Little wonder that the modernist poets were so fascinated by the metaphors of blasts and explosions, or that art has such a long and complicated history with warfare. We need art to surprise us in order to blow up the world, to create fissures out of which the new can emerge.

Computation is not good at this. Algorithms are wonderful for extrapolating from past information, but they still lag behind human creativity when it comes to radical, interesting leaps. So far, they are much better at identifying and replicating surprising content than they are at producing it themselves. Platforms such as Facebook or Flickr's 'interestingness' quotient ultimately measures a kind of surprise, one that draws on information theory as well as aesthetics. We respond to viral memes on social media because they produce something unexpected, often leveraging the deep relationship between surprise and humour. It is telling that so many memes now hide their linguistic tells (more tractable to algorithmic watchdogs than images) inside GIFs and JPEGs that circulate in a kind of shadow economy of surprise.

More often than not, it is a human creator who bends computational tools to achieve a breakthrough

Surprise will remain a human territory, at least for the short term, because it is so idiosyncratic in the first place. Our sense of the unpredictable is so oddly tuned that true randomness can sometimes seem too regular, too predictable, like a long string of coin tosses where the same side comes up many times. At the same time, we are quite choosy about the kinds of novelty that count, a form of distinction that could, in the end, be precisely what we mean by aesthetics. How many art critiques and book reviews boil down to the judgment 'this is a predictable extrapolation'? Newness is necessary but not sufficient for human surprise. There is a cadence, a significance that we seek in the aesthetics of surprise that reaches deeper than mere randomness. As pattern-seeking animals, we are looking not just for comprehensible behaviours but for signs and portents - stories about the world that allow us to configure reality according to an aesthetic logic.

And that aesthetic, the deeply ingrained logic that the poet John Keats framed in his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1819) as 'beauty is truth, truth beauty', provides a space for humanity in the age of culture machines. There is a future for human aesthetics in the modulation, the casting of surprise. We will continue responding most powerfully to those creative stimuli that somehow reconfigure our brains, literally allowing us to see in a new way. Machines can occasionally do that for us, like David Cope's beguiling, algorithmically composed classical music (which disturbed so many audiences by emulating masters such as Mozart entirely too well). But more often than not, it is a human creator who bends computational tools to achieve a breakthrough that somehow becomes more than a recombination or incremental advancement of prior work.

Inevitably, the generation of those surprising works will grow more dependent on computational tools, following in the steps of every other field and industry. And so we come to the second major opportunity for human creativity in the face of increasingly intelligent, competent and aesthetically capable machines. In order to survive, but more importantly to thrive, in the age of algorithms, we need to cultivate a deep respect for algorithmic literacy and the capacity to 'read' the impact of computational influences on our work - not necessarily to resist those influences, but to understand them and use them to become better humans.

To follow this argument, we have to contemplate how computation is changing our fundamental cultural grammars of action. Our ubiquitous smartphones, sensors and platforms are more than just new nouns on the stage of cultural practice. They are generating new verbs and grammatical relationships, many of them so obvious that we no longer even pause to contemplate the godlike powers encoded in the phrase 'to google' something. As the media theorist Lev Manovich's work on Instagram suggests, the general dissemination of cellphone cameras goes beyond making photography more accessible; it fundamentally changes what photography means. We are starting to perceive the world through computational filters, perhaps even organising our lives around the perfect selfie or defining our aesthetic worth around the endorsements of computationally mediated 'friends'.

In other words, digital platforms are imposing exponential shifts in creative practice and possibility. It is possible, sometimes even trivial, to make genetic code sing or translate pitch into colour. Perceived as patches, programs, little nests of scripting, databases and sensors, such things are just demonstrations, methods or practices. But these tools are, first of all, endlessly recombinant, allowing stunning concatenations of creative cause and effect. Second, and more importantly, they depend on the same universal ideology of computation that drives Silicon Valley's continued expansion into cultural life. According to this logic, it's all data, from DNA to footstep counters, from high-frequency stock trading to videoblogging. And while that makes more aspects of cultural life accessible to algorithms, it also makes all the same aspects tractable for art.

As creators and appreciators of the arts, we would do well to remember all the things that Google does not know

Artists can now, in a very real way, make art out of the stock market or the emanations of our smartphone radio antennae. Art that is surprising, and new, and computational. Art that reverses the almost gravitational force currently sucking agency, money and meaning out of 20th-century industries and redistributing them to a small technological elite. For that reason alone, the emancipatory power of art is vitally important as we come to terms with the deep consequences of cultural computation. Surprise might get us to the door but it is after our neurons are reconfigured, after we can see what we could not before, that really interesting things begin to happen.

The role of art in creating new forms of legibility, of literacy, will become crucial for humans attempting to swim in the ocean of computation, that vast deep we can only appreciate through metaphor, analogy or creative interpretation. At times, it seems like the only way we can really come to terms with the full consequences of algorithms is when they play in our cultural spaces, like Google's DeepMind machine-learning algorithm in its path of conquest from Atari videogames to the mythically creative game of Go, or its equally mesmerising and psychedelic image-processing cousin, Deep Dream.

Human creativity has always been a response to the immense strangeness of reality, and now its subject has evolved, as reality becomes increasingly codeterminate, and intermingled, with computation. If that statement seems extreme, consider the extent to which our fundamental perceptions of reality - from research in the physical sciences to finance to the little screens we constantly interject between ourselves in the world - have changed what it means to live, to feel, to know. As creators and appreciators of the arts, we would do well to remember all the things that Google does not know.

The creative response to computation needs to pursue both of these avenues - the human capacity and receptivity for surprise; the need for new creative computational literacies - to contend with the sea change we are living through. It's a challenge that goes beyond coming to terms with algorithms, and one that might become a question of survival on an intellectual level, if not a physical one.

The remarkable precipice we stand beside now is one where our tools are, in a transformative way, just as plastic as we are. Our algorithmic systems are watching us, learning from us, just as we learn from them, creating the possibility for a complex dance of intention, anticipation, creativity and emergence based on individual people, algorithms, and the social and technical structures that bracket them all. This is terrifying and breathtaking all at once, and it's artists that we need most of all to make sense of a future in which our collaborators are strange mirror machines of ourselves. Aesthetics has always been the unforgiving terrain where we assess pragmatic reality according to the impossible standards of the world as we wish it would be. Computation is a parallel project, grounded in the impossible beauty of abstract mathematics and symbolic systems. As they come together, we need to remain the creators, and not the creations, of our beautiful machines.
'What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing' by Ed Finn is out now via MIT.

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How algorithms are transforming artistic creativity - Ed Finn | Aeon Essays

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When IBM's Deep Blue chess computer defeated the world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, humanity let out a collective sigh, recognising the loss of an essential human territory to the onslaught of thinking machines. Chess, that inscrutably challenging game, with more possible game states than there are atoms in the Universe, was no longer a canvas for individual human achievement.

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Free will, watchmaker theory, existential choices, etc.

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Big questions answered. Big theories explained. Philosophical concepts in under 2 minutes from the BBC Radio 4 programme - A History of Ideas. Animated by Co…

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The cat is crouched low to the ground, whiskers brushing grass. It inches forward in minute movements, eyes drilling towards two sparrows just ahead. It tenses, set to spring. The birds prance like sparring boxers, unaware. But then the cat's muscles relax. The moment wasn't quite right - something in the angle or the air. It creeps another inch closer, and another, tautens again, then bursts forwards.

Cats make decisions. And they make decisions about similar kinds of things to us: whom to hang out with and whom to avoid, what to have for dinner tonight and where to get it from. By the standards of most life on Earth, cats have highly sophisticated brains. This gives them a range of behavioural options - a degree of freedom, we might say.

It is often thought that science has shown that there is no such thing as free will. If all things are bound by the same impersonal cosmic laws, then (the story goes) our paths are no freer than those of rocks tumbling down a hill. But this is wrong. Science is giving us a very powerful and clear way to understand freedom of the will. We have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Instead of using an electron microscope or a brain-scanner, we should go to the zoo.

There we will find animals using a wide range of skills that give them options for what to do - skills that we share. These abilities have evolved through natural selection because they are essential for survival: animals need to weigh different factors, explore available options, pursue new alternatives when old strategies don't work. Together these abilities give all animals, including humans, an entirely natural free will, one that we need precisely because we are not rocks. We are complex organisms actively pursuing our interests in a changing environment.

And we are starting to understand the cognitive abilities that underpin this behavioural freedom. Like most evolved capacities, they are a matter of degree. Take, for example, the ability to delay gratification. For a hungry cat, this means being able to hold back from pouncing until it is sure the sparrow is within range and looking the other way. Experimenters measure this ability by testing how long an animal can resist a small treat in return for a larger reward after a delay. Chickens, for example, can do this for six seconds. They can choose whether to wait for the juicier titbit or not - but only if that titbit comes very soon. A chimpanzee, on the other hand, can wait for a cool two minutes - or even up to eight minutes in some experiments. I am guessing that you could manage a lot longer.

The chimpanzee therefore has more options: if a juicier treat became available after six seconds, a chimp would be free to choose whether to wait for it, but a chicken would not. If you can delay gratification even longer, you have still more options: whether to turn down dessert because you are on a diet, or to forego all pleasure in this world in the hope of a heavenly reward.

As we start to understand, and learn to measure, the capacities that underlie behavioural freedom, we can begin to put this natural free will on a scale. Paralleling the measurement of intelligence, we could call it the freedom quotient: FQ. Such a scale should give us new insights into the factors that hinder or enhance our efforts to shape our lives. In other words, FQ should tell us how free we are - and how we can become even more so.

We desperately need a new way of thinking about free will. The concept lies at the heart of how we see ourselves: assumptions about the extent to which we choose our own fate inform everything from social policy and criminal justice to our personal motivations and sense of life's meaningfulness. But common conceptions are a muddle, mostly stemming from a pre-scientific age.

One prevalent idea is that freedom requires a supernatural ability to transcend the laws of nature, because otherwise we would appear to be mere puppets of cause and effect. This makes free will into something mysterious, which would set us apart from the rest of creation. As this notion contradicts everything we know about the world, it is no surprise that ever more people are concluding that free will must be an illusion.

Yet all around us, every day, we see a very natural kind of freedom - one that is completely compatible with determinism. It is the kind that living things need to pursue their goals in a world that continually presents them with multiple possibilities. Our intuitive sense that we have free will is based upon this behavioural freedom. And unlike the old mystical idea, this natural ability to shape our future is central to our own wellbeing and that of society. This is what FQ sets out to capture.

A few thinkers have been working towards a naturalistic approach to free will since the 1970s. But in recent years their number has mushroomed - to the point where we might now talk about a small but significant revolution in ideas. There is not yet one single dominant view or definition: different scholars from different traditions tend to emphasise different aspects. But when we join the available dots we get a fairly clear sketch of what FQ might aspire to measure. And it is simply this: the ability to generate options for oneself, to choose, and then to pursue one or more of those options.

Each of these parts is important. First: the capacity to generate options. We are not inclined to ascribe much free will to the creature that sees only one possible course of action, particularly in situations where that course is failing to deliver the goods. That is the kind of behaviour we might associate with an automaton - with the robot whose axles keep turning even though the wheels have fallen off. In 1982 the American cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter called such behaviour 'sphexish' after the digger wasp Sphex ichneumoneus that allegedly follows very inflexible behavioural routines (and is therefore easily tricked by mean entomologists). It is disputed whether the wasps really are so unbending, but the name has stuck to denote a mechanistic pursuit of a single course of action.

Of course, the number of available options will depend partly upon the circumstances - but also partly on a creature's creativity and flexibility. In one test to get a treat out of a complex box, for example, chimps tried up to 38 different ways of solving the problem, whereas baboons managed just a handful.

Much of what is required to see decisions through corresponds to processes that we traditionally associate with the will

So we want the ability to generate multiple options. But secondly, we also want to be able to choose between them in a meaningful way. Choosing meaningfully means something like weighing up the pros and cons. If a creature were able to generate six options for itself in any given situation, we might be impressed. But we would be less impressed if it arbitrarily chose which option to take. We would probably conclude that this creature was driven more by randomness than by a genuinely free will. Of course there will be times when we might just as well toss a coin, either because the options are identical (to go foraging in either of two equally laden blackberry bushes) or because we do not have the information to make an informed choice (to explore either of two equally unknown paths in the forest). But most of the time, we want to weigh the options and choose between them in the light of our interests and values (the blackberry bush farthest from the bear's den).

Thirdly, we want to carry out the choices we have made. Admittedly, much of this depends on things that go on outside of our heads: my decision to eat blackberries could easily be thwarted by finding that they are rotten. But a lot of what is required to see our decisions through also corresponds to processes inside our heads, processes that we traditionally associate with the will. Being free to write an essay, for example, requires that I have the concentration and self-control to stop myself from surfing the web instead.

This three-phased approach is a simplified sketch: the messy reality is that these phases overlap and interact with each other (and with a lot else besides). But it does provide a loose framework within which to consider the kind of underlying capacities that we need in order to exercise natural free will. The first phase, in which we generate options for ourselves, is associated with creativity and innovativeness; perhaps also a kind of openness or intellectual adventurousness. By contrast, the second phase, the ability to weigh options, is what we ordinarily consider to be the capacity to reason. The third phase, pursuing the chosen option, requires different capacities again - mostly what goes under the heading of willpower, such as the ability to delay gratification, which for chickens means up to a six‑second limit and for great apes, including humans, somewhat longer.

If you are able to imagine a number of options for yourself, weigh them with regard to your interests, and then commit yourself to the one that seems the best, you are exercising your free will. Of course, all of these are tasks you might be able to perform better or worse. If you have an abundant imagination, for example, and can think of 20 potential places to forage whereas others can only think of 10, then you have more options and will therefore be freer. If, on the other hand, you are weak-willed, then options that require you to delay gratification - such as walking 10 miles to the juiciest blackberry bush - might be closed, and so you will be less free. These are the variations that an FQ scale should reflect.

At present, we are some way from being able to measure FQ in a generalised sense. Some of the capacities central to this idea of natural free will have established tests, like the American psychologist Walter Mischel's 1970s 'marshmallow test' for self-control (one marshmallow is placed in front of you; if you manage to not eat it for 15 minutes, you get a second one - and are allowed to eat both). But the measurement of, say, creativity remains controversial, although tests do exist (eg, how many uses can you think of for a jellybean?). And once all the component capacities do have reliable tests, there would then come the tricky problem of how to weight them in order to come to an overall score. Is someone who considers few options but is very good at seeing their decision through freer than someone who conjures a host of creative options but is poor at implementing them?

Fortunately, compilers of psychometric tests are used to making such tricky decisions. And it might be that different weightings prove useful for different purposes. In this sense, FQ would be no different from IQ, the intelligence quotient. Like free will, intelligence is a useful but rather fuzzy-edged idea that on closer inspection has many components. IQ tests reflect this: they are composed of sub-tests that measure such different abilities as verbal comprehension, spatial reasoning and working memory. FQ, too, would be a broad summary of a range of component abilities reflecting the different phases of decision-making.

And as with IQ, the usefulness of an FQ scale will depend on whether it correlates with anything else of interest. We would expect someone with, for example, a high IQ to be better at solving difficult engineering problems, learning new languages or constructing complex arguments in law courts. If high IQ did not correlate with these things, we would wonder if it was a meaningful reflection of what we ordinarily consider to be intelligence. Similarly with FQ: we would expect those scoring highly to be good decision-makers, with a strong sense of ownership of their actions and control over their fate; whereas those scoring lowly would be those who see few options for themselves, who feel compelled or addicted, and who are unable to meet their goals or stick to their plans.

Once up and running, we can imagine the kinds of applications and consequences that FQ, as a measure of natural free will, might have. First, we usually hold people accountable for acts that they made freely: if a person lashed out while having an epileptic fit, we would not blame them as we would if they punched someone after cool reflection. But there is no agreed basis for assessing which acts are free. Different countries - and even different states within countries - approach this differently, using a muddle of factors from psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience without a coherent framework. At the same time, many are dissuaded from thinking too deeply about underlying causes, because in the old paradigm this implies a determinism that undermines all accountability.

A measure such as FQ could help to bring some clarity to these discussions - though the implications for deciding who should be punished, when and why, are complex. But it is a fair prediction that most current prison inmates have a lower FQ than average (in one New Zealand study, for example, 40 per cent of those with the lowest level of self-control had criminal convictions by the age of 32) - and so in that sense could be considered less accountable. And whether or not prisons are an effective deterrent, it is a reasonable prediction that they are further lowering the inmates' FQ: making responsible decisions depends on a set of skills, but prisons are (mostly) highly regulated, low-stimulation environments, with few opportunities to develop any such skills. No wonder that reoffending rates are high.

Second, FQ could help us to better understand the complex relationship between free will and social and political freedom. It is clear that states can restrict the freedom of their citizens through laws and other measures. But a state could also limit freedom by hindering the development of FQ, for example, by restricting access to education or brainwashing with propaganda. The long and shameful history of book-banning reflects attempts to diminish a people's freedom not through chains or walls, but through limiting the options and ideas that occur to them.

it is a good guess that prison populations will have lower than average FQs and that raising FQs would reduce crime

But a person's FQ will be affected by his environment even without such explicit manipulation. Someone's sense of whether a wide range of options are available to her will depend upon the attitudes of her parents, teachers and the messages she receives from broader society. Girls in the US, for example, tend to have a lower sense of their competence in maths and sciences than boys, regardless of their actual grades - and consequently fewer girls see careers in these areas as an option. African Americans have a lower sense that their fate is in their own hands than do white Americans - a sense (called locus of control) that is associated with higher academic attainment.

It will always be the case that some people have a freer will than others, and some of that will come down to genes and fortune. But much of that inequality will also stem from systemic advantages and disadvantages: say, the difference between a privileged upbringing with the best education and a community that says everything is possible versus an upbringing that stunts a person's innate capacities and tells him he is a loser. Some people are lucky, developing the will and opportunities to succeed despite a tough start. But for others, a low FQ will make it difficult for them to improve their lot.

Attempting to smooth out inequalities in FQ - and to raise the FQ of everyone - should therefore be a goal of schools and of social policy. This ties in with the idea of 'positive liberty' - the idea that a person should be free, not just from restraints, but through having the skills and opportunities to actively pursue a fulfilling life. Of course, all this assumes that a higher FQ is a thoroughly good thing. But we have good reason to think that this is indeed so, both from society's point of view, and for each of us individually.

Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University and a leading advocate of a naturalised approach to free will, has argued that our capacities for reason, self-control and so forth evolved to enable us to live in complex societies. The notion that we need a significant part of our free will in order to follow rules might at first sound counter-intuitive. But it is actually a familiar idea: we know, for example, that a strong will is required to resist temptation. Often those temptations are to do things that violate social norms, such as coveting your neighbour's ass or punching him if he covets yours. Hence it is a good guess that prison populations will have lower than average FQs and - equally - that raising FQs would reduce crime.

As well as being broadly socially desirable in the sense that it helps us to manage our behaviour so that we can all get along, a higher FQ should also bring personal benefits. Certainly some of its component elements do correlate with good things. The personality trait known as openness to experience, which includes curiosity and imagination and is therefore crucial to the option-generating phase, has been associated with higher job satisfaction, happiness and quality of life. Or self-control, which is essential to putting one's choice into effect, correlates with higher educational attainment, more stable relationships and lower frequencies of drug use or criminal conviction.

Once we understand the particular set of capacities that contribute to a free will, we can each individually think about how we might become freer. We can expand our possibilities by learning to be more creative and to explore more options; we can learn techniques that help us to better choose between those options; and we can strengthen the capacities, such as focus and willpower, that allow us to pursue our choices. This might not guarantee happiness and self-fulfillment, but it should make them more likely. Certainly it would put us more in control of our lives: that is, better able to align our everyday actions with our deepest goals and values.

I have claimed that FQ - the freedom quotient - is a measure of our natural freedom of the will. But some people will ask whether these psychological capacities are really free will: for some, a really free will is one that is not determined by anything - one that stands outside the causal chains of nature. Such a person might feel cheated when offered instead a set of capacities that we share (to a degree) with cats and chickens.

We could of course use a different name for what FQ is describing: perhaps 'psychological freedom', 'inner freedom', 'autonomy' or 'agency'. But I think there are good reasons to stick with the old term. Although there is one strand of thinking in which free will is juxtaposed with determinism, there are also other, more everyday uses that are much less metaphysical. One recent study, for example, found that 'the folk concept of free will is defined by the capacity to choose based on one's desires and free from constraints'. Another found that 'conscious, rational choice and self-control seem to be integral parts of what people perceive as free'.

Even the freest will is still limited, and everyone is ultimately a part of life's great web of causes and connections

Even when theologians use the term 'free will', they are still referring to something very close to what FQ describes. It is with our will, they might say, that we choose to give into temptation or instead to take the path of righteousness. I agree. The difference is that in the Christian tradition, our wills must be absolutely free - not caused by anything such as genes or environment - as only then could it possibly be warranted to send sinners to hell for eternity. With FQ, by contrast, we can recognise that even the freest will is still limited, and that everyone is ultimately a part of life's great web of causes and connections.

Here again the comparison with intelligence is revealing. For much of the past 2,000 years in the West, intelligence was conceived in terms of a God-given faculty of reason that set humans wholly apart from other creatures. 'Intellect' and 'will' were seen by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, for example, as the two pre‑eminent faculties of the soul, which did not depend at all on the body.

Now we know differently: we know that we have evolved through a long process of natural selection and that we share our faculties to varying degrees with other animals. Upon realising this, we did not conclude that there wasn't really any such thing as intelligence - rather, psychologists set about putting it on a scientific footing. Similarly, we should not say that there is no such thing as free will, just because it is not how the theologians imagined; rather, it is time we put it, too, on a scientific footing.

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Free will is back, and maybe this time we can measure it - Stephen Cave | Aeon Essays

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The cat is crouched low to the ground, whiskers brushing grass. It inches forward in minute movements, eyes drilling towards two sparrows just ahead. It tenses, set to spring. The birds prance like sparring boxers, unaware. But then the cat's muscles relax. The moment wasn't quite right - something in the angle or the air.

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Ideas of Order: The Shapes of Art in Lot 49

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Ideas of Order: The Shapes of Art in Lot 49

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The illuminated disks atop Adobe Systems' downtown San Jose headquarters have transmitted a secret message since 2012. On Monday, Adobe revealed that Jimmy Waters, a high school math teacher in Knoxville, Tenn., had cracked that code. The semaphore had been transmitting the audio broadcast of Neil Armstrong's historic moon landing in 1969. That's right, not the text but the actual audio.

Waters discovered the project, San Jose Semaphore, last summer while he was looking up something about Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel, "The Crying of Lot 49." The text of that work was the code originally programmed by New York-based artist Ben Rubin in 2006. Seeing there was a new message, Waters began trying to decipher it while watching and writing down the sequences online from Tennessee.

He discovered a pattern that led him to believe it could represent a space - or a silence - in an audio file, and when he graphed the results it looked like an audio wave. He dismissed that as being too difficult but came back to it and eventually ran his results into a program that would convert his numbers to audio. The first results came back sounding like chipmunks squeaking.

So he tweaked things and found himself listening to the historic broadcast, which ends with Armstrong's famous line, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

"There was a part of me that knew I solved it, but I wondered is that really it?" Waters said. "It seemed so simple once I did that. But how could I just end up by chance getting the audio for the moon landing?"

Instead of keeping his prize for solving the puzzle, Waters is giving it to his students - who didn't know about his accomplishment before he flew out to California. Adobe is donating Creative Cloud software and two 3D printers to the school's computer lab in his name.

The San Jose Semaphore was launched in 2006 as part of the first ZERO1 art and technology festival. The four 10-foot high, bisected yellow disks of LED lights that span 70-feet of the 18th floor of Adobe's Almaden Tower don't actually spin - they're just programmed to appear that way. The disks seem to spin into different positions every few seconds, spelling out a message in semaphore, a communication method that relies on visual signals similar to flags or hand signals.

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Two scientists, Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, took six weeks to figure out the original message, though it took months for the disks to spell out all 800 paragraphs. Rubin - who came to San Jose to congratulate Waters on Monday - said the second message was intended to be harder to solve, but he was relieved that someone finally did it.

With hackers and WikiLeaks in the news regularly, Rubin says the topic of cryptography has entered the public consciousness as never before. And, yes, he's already at work on version 3.0, but he's not saying much about it. "I have to come up with a new idea that takes this to a new level," he said. "This time I want to make it a little bit harder and add - well, I shouldn't say anymore."

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Adobe semaphore code cracked by Tennessee high school teacher

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The illuminated disks atop Adobe Systems' downtown San Jose headquarters have transmitted a secret message since 2012. On Monday, Adobe revealed that Jimmy Waters, a high school math teacher in Knoxville, Tenn., had cracked that code. The semaphore had been transmitting the audio broadcast of Neil Armstrong's historic moon landing in 1969.

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Gray Matter

By Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman

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Credit Credit Marion Fayolle

How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods about voter fraud, climate change and crime statistics that large swaths of the population have bought into. But collective delusion is not new, nor is it the sole province of the political right. Plenty of liberals believe, counter to scientific consensus, that G.M.O.s are poisonous, and that vaccines cause autism.

The situation is vexing because it seems so easy to solve. The truth is obvious if you bother to look for it, right? This line of thinking leads to explanations of the hoodwinked masses that amount to little more than name calling: "Those people are foolish" or "Those people are monsters."

Such accounts may make us feel good about ourselves, but they are misguided and simplistic: They reflect a misunderstanding of knowledge that focuses too narrowly on what goes on between our ears. Here is the humbler truth: On their own, individuals are not well equipped to separate fact from fiction, and they never will be. Ignorance is our natural state; it is a product of the way the mind works.

What really sets human beings apart is not our individual mental capacity. The secret to our success is our ability to jointly pursue complex goals by dividing cognitive labor. Hunting, trade, agriculture, manufacturing - all of our world-altering innovations - were made possible by this ability. Chimpanzees can surpass young children on numerical and spatial reasoning tasks, but they cannot come close on tasks that require collaborating with another individual to achieve a goal. Each of us knows only a little bit, but together we can achieve remarkable feats.

Knowledge isn't in my head or in your head. It's shared.

Consider some simple examples. You know that the earth revolves around the sun. But can you rehearse the astronomical observations and calculations that led to that conclusion? You know that smoking causes cancer. But can you articulate what smoke does to our cells, how cancers form and why some kinds of smoke are more dangerous than others? We're guessing no. Most of what you "know" - most of what anyone knows - about any topic is a placeholder for information stored elsewhere, in a long-forgotten textbook or in some expert's head.

One consequence of the fact that knowledge is distributed this way is that being part of a community of knowledge can make people feel as if they understand things they don't. Recently, one of us ran a series of studies in which we told people about some new scientific discoveries that we fabricated, like rocks that glow. When we said that scientists had not yet explained the glowing rocks and then asked our respondents how well they understood how such rocks glow, they reported not understanding at all - a very natural response given that they knew nothing about the rocks. But when we told another group about the same discovery, only this time claiming that scientists had explained how the rocks glowed, our respondents reported a little bit more understanding. It was as if the scientists' knowledge (which we never described) had been directly transmitted to them.

The sense of understanding is contagious. The understanding that others have, or claim to have, makes us feel smarter. This happens only when people believe they have access to the relevant information: When our experimental story indicated that the scientists worked for the Army and were keeping the explanation secret, people no longer felt that they had any understanding of why the rocks glowed.

The key point here is not that people are irrational; it's that this irrationality comes from a very rational place. People fail to distinguish what they know from what others know because it is often impossible to draw sharp boundaries between what knowledge resides in our heads and what resides elsewhere.

This is especially true of divisive political issues. Your mind cannot master and retain sufficiently detailed knowledge about many of them. You must rely on your community. But if you are not aware that you are piggybacking on the knowledge of others, it can lead to hubris.

Recently, for example, there was a vociferous outcry when President Trump and Congress rolled back regulations on the dumping of mining waste in waterways. This may be bad policy, but most people don't have sufficient expertise to draw that conclusion because evaluating the policy is complicated. Environmental policy is about balancing costs and benefits. In this case, you need to know something about what mining waste does to waterways and in what quantities these effects occur, how much economic activity depends on being able to dump freely, how a decrease in mining activity would be made up for from other energy sources and how environmentally damaging those are, and on and on.

We suspect that most of those people expressing outrage lacked the detailed knowledge necessary to assess the policy. We also suspect that many in Congress who voted for the rollback were equally in the dark. But people seemed pretty confident.

Such collective delusions illustrate both the power and the deep flaw of human thinking. It is remarkable that large groups of people can coalesce around a common belief when few of them individually possess the requisite knowledge to support it. This is how we discovered the Higgs boson and increased the human life span by 30 years in the last century. But the same underlying forces explain why we can come to believe outrageous things, which can lead to equally consequential but disastrous outcomes.

That individual ignorance is our natural state is a bitter pill to swallow. But if we take this medicine, it can be empowering. It can help us differentiate the questions that merit real investigation from those that invite a reactive and superficial analysis. It also can prompt us to demand expertise and nuanced analysis from our leaders, which is the only tried and true way to make effective policy. A better understanding of how little is actually inside our own heads would serve us well.

Philip Fernbach is a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business. Steven Sloman is a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University. They are the authors of the forthcoming "The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone."
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Opinion | Why We Believe Obvious Untruths

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Gray Matter By Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods about voter fraud, climate change and crime statistics that large swaths of the population have bought into.

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I use this stirling engine to explain entropy. Entropy is normally described as a measure of disorder but I don't think that's helpful. Here's a better description. Visit my blog here: http://stevemould.com Follow me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/moulds Buy nerdy maths things here: http://mathsgear.co.uk

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From Quanta Magazine ( find original story here).

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and "should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill."

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

"You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant," England said.

England's theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. "I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong," he explained. "On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon."

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken "a very brave and very important step," said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England's work since its early stages. The "big hope" is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

"Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across," said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. "I was struck by the originality of the ideas."

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. "Jeremy's ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena," Shakhnovich said.

England's theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation - that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life - that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

"He's trying something radically different," said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England's work. "As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it's going to be very much worth the investigation."

At the heart of England's idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the "arrow of time." Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called "thermodynamic equilibrium," in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room's energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or "closed" system, an "open" system can keep its entropy low - that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms - by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph "What Is Life?" the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger's day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system's behavior becomes more and more "irreversible." The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. "Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved," Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks' formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. "We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment's external drives on the way to getting there," he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

"This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments," England explained.

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, "A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself." In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating. He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its "Darwinian takeover" was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth's diverse flora and fauna. But according to England's theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. "It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization," England said. "Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven't been looking for them we haven't noticed them."

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. "This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying," Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. "Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process," he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

"He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp," said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. "I'm particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules."

England's bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England's theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates. "One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things," she said. "But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle."

Brenner said he hopes to connect England's theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur - "a fundamental question in science," he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. "Natural selection doesn't explain certain characteristics," said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve," Louis said.

"People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems," Prentiss said. Whether or not England's ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, "thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made."

Emily Singer contributed reporting.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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From Quanta Magazine ( find original story here). Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it.

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In a hushed, darkened room inside London's Young Vic theatre, two young people are about to make a terrible mistake. The woman has just been married off to someone she doesn't love; the man is desperate for the two of them to be together. Perhaps, he suggests, he could confront her husband. She recoils: too public. Too liable to go wrong. If only there were another way ...

Anyone who's read or seen The Postman Always Rings Twice knows what happens next: the husband winds up dead. But this isn't James M Cain - it's a rehearsal for Middleton and Rowley's 17th-century thriller The Changeling; and, much more gruesomely, this will be the first murder of many.

"Vengeance begins," the woman mutters, ominously, later on. "Murder, I see, is followed by more sins."

Although it is four centuries since revenge tragedies like this first appeared on stage, they have lost little of their charge. And it seems we can't get enough of them. The Changeling opens in late January, to be followed a month later by John Webster's brilliant - and brilliantly chilling - The Duchess of Malfi, which opens just up the road at the Old Vic. In recent years, the National Theatre has hosted two more Middletons (The Revenger's Tragedy and Women Beware Women), then, last summer, Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, which despite its domestic setting became, in Katie Mitchell's fiercely precise production, every bit as intense. By the time touring troupe Cheek by Jowl bring their new version of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore to the UK - it is currently darkening summery Sydney - the theatrical murder rate in London will have notched up still further. One hopes that costumiers have stocked up on fake blood.

On the face of it, few things seem more remote to 21st-century Britain than the world of Jacobean tragedy: a shadowy universe in which sexual and political betrayal combine with incest, insanity, forced marriage and ferocious honour codes that would not disgrace the 19th-century mafia (many are, indeed, set in Italy). Their cast-lists are often an alphabet soup of semi-southern European names; their belief systems seem impossibly remote. And that's to reckon without the bizarre plotting. The Duchess of Malfi is tortured by her brothers for having remarried, then strangled along with two of her children; one brother runs mad. In The Changeling, the heroine loses her virginity to her disfigured servant - the ironically named De Flores - then is forced to pimp out her maid to the man she herself is in love with (the maid dies in a fire). In , a sister becomes guiltily pregnant by her brother, only for her heart to be cut out and skewered on a dagger. Women Beware Women culminates in a killing spree administered by poisoned incense.

So what is it about these violent and baroque plays, four centuries old ( Malfi dates from about 1613, The Changeling 1622 and 'Tis Pity about 1630), that haunt our contemporary imagination? What kind of culture did they spring from? And why are they once again filling our theatres?

In the bustling café at the Young Vic, director Joe Hill-Gibbins admits it's a puzzle - but a fascinating one. "We consider ourselves as very different to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, but some moments you think: 'God, I had that conversation in a bar the other day.' Once you delve into it, it's not so different." He grins. "People have those T-shirts that say: Same Shit, Different Day. That's how I think about it."

Certainly the themes that dominate The Changeling - forbidden desire, political power struggles combined with battles between the sexes - haven't gone away. But one of the plot's key tensions (perhaps the major reason it still resonates) is the conflict between things that seem straightforward to us, yet are utterly insurmountable to the people in the play. The heroine, Beatrice-Joanna, can't simply get a divorce; she has to arrange a murder. De Flores can't dream of marrying his employer, so he sleeps with her by stealth. The pact they enter into, driven by mutual loathing and erotic frustration, is one of the most weirdly kinky in all early modern drama; even their death scene, in which they apparently stab each other while locked in a closet, has the feel of a sex game gone gruesomely wrong. The play, powered by Middleton's guttural, throaty language, has an immediacy that feels almost indecently alive.

The young actor Jessica Raine - currently on screen in the BBC drama Call the Midwife - is Beatrice in the new production, playing her with (if rehearsals are anything to go by) fragile sincerity rather than the spoilt brattishness she's sometimes given. "Middleton's characters are always in the moment," she observes. "They have the seed of an idea and follow it through with 100% certainty. They don't think about the consequences." Hill-Gibbins agrees. "We've been rehearsing the scene where Beatrice has the idea of getting De Flores to kill, and Middleton has De Flores just walk on. She just has to act. And at the end of that scene, De Flores says he's going to kill Alonzo, and who appears? Alonzo. The play doesn't allow anyone any time."

If The Changeling's plot seems suffocating, then so too is its setting: locked inside a Spanish castle from which there appears to be no escape, its characters are forever flitting from room to room, navigating a warren of Escher-like spaces in which some figures materialise as if from nowhere, others disappear without trace. In Richard Eyre's 1988 production at the National, the set was dominated by an enormous iron grille, staircases rising dizzyingly to either side; when Declan Donnellan of Cheek by Jowl brought the play to the Barbican in 2006, he and designer Nick Ormerod built a false auditorium on stage, plunging the audience into the sepulchral recesses of the theatre itself.

Chiaroscuro is these plays' default setting; not for nothing has the editor of Middleton's recent collected works, Gary Taylor, compared them to the paintings of Caravaggio and Frans Hals. Overhearing is a key component of their plots, just as characters often talk in whispered asides; and they are full of things being spied on or mistaken in the dark, whether it's wax statues impersonating dead children ( Malfi) or a "bed trick" whereby a man is fooled into sleeping with the wrong woman ( Changeling and many others).

With good reason, suggests Emma Smith of Hertford College, Oxford, who has published extensively on revenge tragedy. In contrast to the outdoor playhouses of the Elizabethan era, these were dramas written for cramped indoor theatres, hot, claustrophobic - and lit only by guttering candles. Moral shadiness is inevitable, she argues, particularly given their echoes of James I's gossipy, incestuous court: "It almost seems inconceivable that they would be wholesome entertainment. That's partly why they seem so gothic and shadowy."

What is striking, though, is that our taste for these dark brews is a recent one: for a good portion of their history, they were regarded as creaky and unconvincing. Although The Changeling and Malfi remained popular for their comic scenes when the theatres were reopened after Cromwell (Pepys saw the former in 1660 and thought " it takes exceedingly"), they fell from favour as neoclassical drama, clearer and more crystalline, came into fashion. After the 1670s, apart from a short-lived 18th-century reworking, The Changeling disappeared entirely from the stage until the 1950s. Malfi was luckier - the script was cleaned up a number of times, meaning it was restaged infrequently. But there is no record of a production of 'Tis Pity anywhere between 1663 and 1923.

It was TS Eliot who rescued these plays from critical oblivion, writing (in a poem) of Webster's capacity to see "the skull beneath the skin", then in a 1927 essay acclaiming The Changeling as Middleton's greatest drama: "an eternal tragedy, as permanent as Oedipus or Antony and Cleopatra ... the tragedy of the not naturally bad but irresponsible and undeveloped nature, caught in the consequences of its own action". Their ambiguity wasn't something to be apologised for; it was an essential ingredient of their success.

Even Eliot struggled, however, with the plays' mutinous unwillingness to be pigeonholed. Though they are tragedies in the mould of the Roman writer Seneca, they are both funnier and crueller than we might expect. With their wisecracking antiheroes and deliberately unlikely plot twists, they are suffused by caustic irony, challenging us to take them as shlock rather than shock. The Revenger's Tragedy mercilessly sends up the entire genre, while The Changeling is in fact a tragedy and a comedy combined: alongside the Beatrice-De Flores plot there runs another story (probably written by Middleton's collaborator William Rowley) set in a lunatic asylum, in which a virtuous wife resists a series of suitors while all around her the inmates rehearse a court masque. The whole thing is quite literally mad; and when, for instance, De Flores presents the severed digit of his victim as a "token" to Beatrice, off-handedly remarking that "I could not get the ring without the finger", it is difficult to know whether to be horrified or to laugh.

Hill-Gibbins nods. "It's one of the reasons why the play's called The Changeling, I think, that fluidity. Even in the main plot there are sick, screwed-up jokes. And the subplot is comic, but also tragic. It's the old cliché, someone slipping on a banana skin - painful, but that's why it's funny."

Donnellan, who has probably staged more of these plays than any director living, sees a more serious purpose beneath their insouciant disregard for genre: the blurring of boundaries between right and wrong. "A really good horror reminds you that you're not just the victim; you're also the monster. Psycho is a great film because of the very subtle shifts of identification. You're not just the woman who is murdered in the shower, you're also the murderer. It's entertainment at the deepest level."

But "entertainment" comes at a price. These plays force us to look directly at taboos from which we naturally flinch. Female characters in particular are made to suffer to a degree now generally unimaginable: forbidden from attempting sexual independence, they are then tortured for daring to resist. At times these texts have been seen as proto-feminist because they show women taking control of their own destinies - never more so than in the spine-tingling scene where the Duchess faces execution with an imperiousness that shames the men around her ("Tell my brothers," she coolly remarks, "that I perceive death, now I am well awake, / Best gift is they can give, or I can take"). Conversely, they have been written off as misogynistic, sadistic fantasies.

Smith argues that the plays themselves can't seem to resolve the issue. "A lot of recent criticism has suggested that they are so multi-angular because they're documenting contemporary social uncertainties about what women are. Are these women remarkable and admirable, erotic and powerful, or shocking and terrible? They're both, and also neither."

Donnellan's own view has shifted over the years ('Tis Pity was the first play he directed, in 1980: a more straightforwardly feminist account, he admits, than their current one). " Malfi seems the cheapest of the plays, because it's watching men torture a woman to death all evening. But there's a lot of modern guilt in that reading. She and Annabella" - in 'Tis Pity - "are in impossible situations, but they do make decisions."

Still harder to assess is what these plays say about us now. They were rediscovered as psychological thrillers just as the writings of Freud began to take hold in Britain, before being punkily restaged by the counterculture that tore through theatre from the 1950s on. Between September 1978 and June 1979, as the government struggled with industrial unrest, uncollected rubbish and unburied corpses, there were no fewer than six professional stagings of The Changeling - so far a record. Is there an echo with the present? Does that play in particular speak to the fear of being trapped in never-ending crisis, that - as Beatrice worries of herself - we're in a "labyrinth" of own making?

Hill-Gibbins isn't convinced ("I'm not sure that the euro crisis has disturbed me so much that I've decided to put on a sex tragedy"), but Donnellan is at least willing to admit the idea that in troubled times we don't always yearn for feelgood entertainment. "I don't think we're getting any saner," he says, simply. "Nor do I think that these people are madder than we are."

Maybe in the end, too, the plays offer a kind of hope. Perhaps by observing such horrors, we escape the need to perform them for real. "It reminds us of madnesses that are present in all of us," Donnellan says. "Every so often it's important to empty our prisons and see who we've got locked up there. Even if it's just the prisons of our imagination."

The Changeling is at the Young Vic, London SE1, 26 January-25 February (020 7922 2922); The Duchess of Malfi is at the Old Vic, London SE1, 17 March-19 June (0844 871 7628; ); 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is at the Cambridge Arts theatre, 26-28 January, then touring.
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In a hushed, darkened room inside London's Young Vic theatre, two young people are about to make a terrible mistake. The woman has just been married off to someone she doesn't love; the man is desperate for the two of them to be together. Perhaps, he suggests, he could confront her husband.

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The Princely House of Thurn and Taxis ( German: Fürstenhaus Thurn und Taxis [ˈtuːɐ̯n ʊnt ˈtaksɪs]) is a family of German nobility that is part of the . It was a key player in the postal services in Europe during the 16th century, until the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and became well known as the owner of breweries and builder of many castles.

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'The English aesthetic is closer to how I dress than the American,' says Elisabeth Von Thurn Und Taxis. When we meet at London's Chiltern Firehouse, around the corner from her Marylebone home, the editor-at-large of American Vogue breezes in dressed in a deconstructed shirt dress (Esteban Cortazar - a recent discovery) and Nicholas Kirkwood flats, carrying a yellow bag. Her dark eyes twinkle as she shares pertinent style observations - scattered with art, travel and cultural references - in a lilting accent that settles somewhere between New York, London and her native Germany.

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My Fashion Life: Elisabeth Von Thurn Und Taxis Interview

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'The English aesthetic is closer to how I dress than the American,' says Elisabeth Von Thurn Und Taxis. When we meet at London's Chiltern Firehouse, around the corner from her Marylebone home, the editor-at-large of American Vogue breezes in dressed in a deconstructed shirt dress (Esteban Cortazar - a recent discovery) and Nicholas Kirkwood flats, carrying a yellow bag.

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You can try constructing a similar truth table to show that the law of non-contradiction is also a tautology. Its truth table is a bit more complicated, though. However, since the law of excluded middle is a tautology, it should hold no matter what the truth value of p is.

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"The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making," said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers.* His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person-the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one.

This "really undermines the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation," said Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, charmingly titled, "The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas."

There's a fabulous irony in the idea that drunk people are emotionally steeled rationalists who are willing to do whatever it takes to save lives. But Duke and his research partner, Laurent Bègue, aren't necessarily arguing that drunk people are ace philosophers and logicians; it's more that their findings challenge common assumptions about how people make decisions.

"There's this argument that utilitarian ethics are correct; they're associated with people who are less emotional. Our finding was that this may not necessarily be the case," Duke said.

One explanation he offered is that drunk people might be less sensitive to what happens to the guy who's on the wrong side of the hypothetical tracks or bridge-"it seems like a reasonable explanation that the effects of alcohol would decrease emotional sensitivity toward someone else's pain." In general, he said, the study reinforces the complexity of figuring out why people make the choices they do. "Ethical decision-making is influenced by things like substances-it shifts the ethical frame by which we view the world."

Duke also recognized that the implications of the study are limited, especially because the sample size is so small. Plus, the questions themselves have flaws.

"To be honest, with the trolley problem in general, there is going to be a range of seriousness with which people view it, because it's kind of a ridiculous premise," said Duke. "I don't know that inebriated people would take it any less seriously. But alcohol can make it almost more simplistic-they may be less likely to question some of the assumptions upon which the task is based."

In other words, drunk people are more willing to "just go with it" when a random graduate student asks them to participate in a thought experiment about killing people. Utilitarian or no, the inebriated may be the philosophy researcher's dream.
* This post originally stated that the researcher's name is Aaron Blake. We regret the error.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Emma Green is a staff writer at ​ The Atlantic, where she covers politics, policy, and religion.

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Are Drunk People More Philosophically Rigorous?

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"The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making," said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers.* His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person-the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many.

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In this talk, I want to ask how far can we go in our search for understanding and knowledge. Will we ever find a complete form of the laws of nature? By a complete form, I mean a set of rules that in principle at least enable us to predict the future to an arbitrary accuracy, knowing the state of the universe at one time. A qualitative understanding of the laws has been the aim of philosophers and scientists, from Aristotle onwards. But it was Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687, containing his theory of universal gravitation that made the laws quantitative and precise. This led to the idea of scientific determinism, which seems first to have been expressed by Laplace. If at one time, one knew the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, the laws of science should enable us to calculate their positions and velocities at any other time, past or future. The laws may or may not have been ordained by God, but scientific determinism asserts that he does not intervene to break them.

At first, it seemed that these hopes for a complete determinism would be dashed by the discovery early in the 20th century; that events like the decay of radio active atoms seemed to take place at random. It was as if God was playing dice, in Einstein's phrase. But science snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by moving the goal posts and redefining what is meant by a complete knowledge of the universe. It was a stroke of brilliance whose philosophical implications have still not been fully appreciated. Much of the credit belongs to Paul Dirac, my predecessor but one in the Lucasian chair, though it wasn't motorized in his time. Dirac showed how the work of Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg could be combined in new picture of reality, called quantum theory. In quantum theory, a particle is not characterized by two quantities, its position and its velocity, as in classical Newtonian theory. Instead it is described by a single quantity, the wave function. The size of the wave function at a point, gives the probability that the particle will be found at that point, and the rate at which the wave function changes from point to point, gives the probability of different velocities. One can have a wave function that is sharply peaked at a point. This corresponds to a state in which there is little uncertainty in the position of the particle. However, the wave function varies rapidly, so there is a lot of uncertainty in the velocity. Similarly, a long chain of waves has a large uncertainty in position, but a small uncertainty in velocity. One can have a well defined position, or a well defined velocity, but not both.

This would seem to make complete determinism impossible. If one can't accurately define both the positions and the velocities of particles at one time, how can one predict what they will be in the future? It is like weather forecasting. The forecasters don't have an accurate knowledge of the atmosphere at one time. Just a few measurements at ground level and what can be learnt from satellite photographs. That's why weather forecasts are so unreliable. However, in quantum theory, it turns out one doesn't need to know both the positions and the velocities. If one knew the laws of physics and the wave function at one time, then something called the Schrodinger equation would tell one how fast the wave function was changing with time. This would allow one to calculate the wave function at any other time. One can therefore claim that there is still determinism but it is determinism on a reduced level. Instead of being able accurately to predict two quantities, position and velocity, one can predict only a single quantity, the wave function. We have re-defined determinism to be just half of what Laplace thought it was. Some people have tried to connect the unpredictability of the other half with consciousness, or the intervention of supernatural beings. But it is difficult to make either case for something that is completely random.

In order to calculate how the wave function develops in time, one needs the quantum laws that govern the universe. So how well do we know these laws? As Dirac remarked, Maxwell's equations of light and the relativistic wave equation, which he was too modest to call the Dirac equation, govern most of physics and all of chemistry and biology. So in principle, we ought to be able to predict human behavior, though I can't say I have had much success myself. The trouble is that the human brain contains far too many particles for us to be able to solve the equations. But it is comforting to think we might be able to predict the nematode worm, even if we can't quite figure out humans. Quantum theory and the Maxwell and Dirac equations indeed govern much of our life, but there are two important areas beyond their scope. One is the nuclear forces. The other is gravity. The nuclear forces are responsible for the Sun shining and the formation of the elements including the carbon and oxygen of which we are made. And gravity caused the formation of stars and planets, and indeed, of the universe itself. So it is important to bring them into the scheme.

The so called weak nuclear forces have been unified with the Maxwell equations by Abdus Salam and Stephen Weinberg, in what is known as the Electro weak theory. The predictions of this theory have been confirmed by experiment and the authors rewarded with Nobel Prizes. The remaining nuclear forces, the so called strong forces, have not yet been successfully unified with the electro weak forces in an observationally tested scheme. Instead, they seem to be described by a similar but separate theory called QCD. It is not clear who, if anyone, should get a Nobel Prize for QCD, but David Gross and Gerard 't Hooft share credit for showing the theory gets simpler at high energies. I had quite a job to get my speech synthesizer to pronounce Gerard's surname. It wasn't familiar with apostrophe t. The electro weak theory and QCD together constitute the so called Standard Model of particle physics, which aims to describe everything except gravity.

The standard model seems to be adequate for all practical purposes, at least for the next hundred years. But practical or economic reasons have never been the driving force in our search for a complete theory of the universe. No one working on the basic theory, from Galileo onward, has carried out their research to make money, though Dirac would have made a fortune if he had patented the Dirac equation. He would have had a royalty on every television, walkman, video game and computer.

The real reason we are seeking a complete theory, is that we want to understand the universe and feel we are not just the victims of dark and mysterious forces. If we understand the universe, then we control it, in a sense. The standard model is clearly unsatisfactory in this respect. First of all, it is ugly and ad hoc. The particles are grouped in an apparently arbitrary way, and the standard model depends on 24 numbers whose values can not be deduced from first principles, but which have to be chosen to fit the observations. What understanding is there in that? Can it be Nature's last word? The second failing of the standard model is that it does not include gravity. Instead, gravity has to be described by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. General relativity is not a quantum theory unlike the laws that govern everything else in the universe. Although it is not consistent to use the non quantum general relativity with the quantum standard model, this has no practical significance at the present stage of the universe because gravitational fields are so weak. However, in the very early universe, gravitational fields would have been much stronger and quantum gravity would have been significant. Indeed, we have evidence that quantum uncertainty in the early universe made some regions slightly more or less dense than the otherwise uniform background. We can see this in small differences in the background of microwave radiation from different directions. The hotter, denser regions will condense out of the expansion as galaxies, stars and planets. All the structures in the universe, including ourselves, can be traced back to quantum effects in the very early stages. It is therefore essential to have a fully consistent quantum theory of gravity, if we are to understand the universe.

Constructing a quantum theory of gravity has been the outstanding problem in theoretical physics for the last 30 years. It is much, much more difficult than the quantum theories of the strong and electro weak forces. These propagate in a fixed background of space and time. One can define the wave function and use the Schrodinger equation to evolve it in time. But according to general relativity, gravity is space and time. So how can the wave function for gravity evolve in time? And anyway, what does one mean by the wave function for gravity? It turns out that, in a formal sense, one can define a wave function and a Schrodinger like equation for gravity, but that they are of little use in actual calculations.

Instead, the usual approach is to regard the quantum spacetime as a small perturbation of some background spacetime; generally flat space. The perturbations can then be treated as quantum fields, like the electro weak and QCD fields, propagating through the background spacetime. In calculations of perturbations, there is generally some quantity called the effective coupling which measures how much of an extra perturbation a given perturbation generates. If the coupling is small, a small perturbation creates a smaller correction which gives an even smaller second correction, and so on. Perturbation theory works and can be used to calculate to any degree of accuracy. An example is your bank account. The interest on the account is a small perturbation. A very small perturbation if you are with one of the big banks. The interest is compound. That is, there is interest on the interest, and interest on the interest on the interest. However, the amounts are tiny. To a good approximation, the money in your account is what you put there. On the other hand, if the coupling is high, a perturbation generates a larger perturbation which then generates an even larger perturbation. An example would be borrowing money from loan sharks. The interest can be more than you borrowed, and then you pay interest on that. It is disastrous.

With gravity, the effective coupling is the energy or mass of the perturbation because this determines how much it warps spacetime, and so creates a further perturbation. However, in quantum theory, quantities like the electric field or the geometry of spacetime don't have definite values, but have what are called quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations have energy. In fact, they have an infinite amount of energy because there are fluctuations on all length scales, no matter how small. Thus treating quantum gravity as a perturbation of flat space doesn't work well because the perturbations are strongly coupled.

Supergravity was invented in 1976 to solve, or at least improve, the energy problem. It is a combination of general relativity with other fields, such that each species of particle has a super partner species. The energy of the quantum fluctuations of one partner is positive, and the other negative, so they tend to cancel. It was hoped the infinite positive and negative energies would cancel completely, leaving only a finite remainder. In this case, a perturbation treatment would work because the effective coupling would be weak. However, in 1985, people suddenly lost confidence that the infinities would cancel. This was not because anyone had shown that they definitely didn't cancel. It was reckoned it would take a good graduate student 300 years to do the calculation, and how would one know they hadn't made a mistake on page two? Rather it was because Ed Witten declared that string theory was the true quantum theory of gravity, and supergravity was just an approximation, valid when particle energies are low, which in practice, they always are. In string theory, gravity is not thought of as the warping of spacetime. Instead, it is given by string diagrams; networks of pipes that represent little loops of string, propagating through flat spacetime. The effective coupling that gives the strength of the junctions where three pipes meet is not the energy, as it is in supergravity. Instead it is given by what is called the dilaton; a field that has not been observed. If the dilaton had a low value, the effective coupling would be weak, and string theory would be a good quantum theory. But it is no earthly use for practical purposes.

In the years since 1985, we have realized that both supergravity and string theory belong to a larger structure, known as M theory. Why it should be called M Theory is completely obscure. M theory is not a theory in the usual sense. Rather it is a collection of theories that look very different but which describe the same physical situation. These theories are related by mappings or correspondences called dualities, which imply that they are all reflections of the same underlying theory. Each theory in the collection works well in the limit, like low energy, or low dilaton, in which its effective coupling is small, but breaks down when the coupling is large. This means that none of the theories can predict the future of the universe to arbitrary accuracy. For that, one would need a single formulation of M-theory that would work in all situations.

Up to now, most people have implicitly assumed that there is an ultimate theory that we will eventually discover. Indeed, I myself have suggested we might find it quite soon. However, M-theory has made me wonder if this is true. Maybe it is not possible to formulate the theory of the universe in a finite number of statements. This is very reminiscent of Godel's theorem. This says that any finite system of axioms is not sufficient to prove every result in mathematics.

Godel's theorem is proved using statements that refer to themselves. Such statements can lead to paradoxes. An example is, this statement is false. If the statement is true, it is false. And if the statement is false, it is true. Another example is, the barber of Corfu shaves every man who does not shave himself. Who shaves the barber? If he shaves himself, then he doesn't, and if he doesn't, then he does. Godel went to great lengths to avoid such paradoxes by carefully distinguishing between mathematics, like 2+2 =4, and meta mathematics, or statements about mathematics, such as mathematics is cool, or mathematics is consistent. That is why his paper is so difficult to read. But the idea is quite simple. First Godel showed that each mathematical formula, like 2+2=4, can be given a unique number, the Godel number. The Godel number of 2+2=4, is *. Second, the meta mathematical statement, the sequence of formulas A, is a proof of the formula B, can be expressed as an arithmetical relation between the Godel numbers for A- and B. Thus meta mathematics can be mapped into arithmetic, though I'm not sure how you translate the meta mathematical statement, 'mathematics is cool'. Third and last, consider the self referring Godel statement, G. This is, the statement G can not be demonstrated from the axioms of mathematics. Suppose that G could be demonstrated. Then the axioms must be inconsistent because one could both demonstrate G and show that it can not be demonstrated. On the other hand, if G can't be demonstrated, then G is true. By the mapping into numbers, it corresponds to a true relation between numbers, but one which can not be deduced from the axioms. Thus mathematics is either inconsistent or incomplete. The smart money is on incomplete.

What is the relation between Godel's theorem and whether we can formulate the theory of the universe in terms of a finite number of principles? One connection is obvious. According to the positivist philosophy of science, a physical theory is a mathematical model. So if there are mathematical results that can not be proved, there are physical problems that can not be predicted. One example might be the Goldbach conjecture. Given an even number of wood blocks, can you always divide them into two piles, each of which can not be arranged in a rectangle? That is, it contains a prime number of blocks.

Although this is incompleteness of sort, it is not the kind of unpredictability I mean. Given a specific number of blocks, one can determine with a finite number of trials whether they can be divided into two primes. But I think that quantum theory and gravity together, introduces a new element into the discussion that wasn't present with classical Newtonian theory. In the standard positivist approach to the philosophy of science, physical theories live rent free in a Platonic heaven of ideal mathematical models. That is, a model can be arbitrarily detailed and can contain an arbitrary amount of information without affecting the universes they describe. But we are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. Instead, we and our models are both part of the universe we are describing. Thus a physical theory is self referencing, like in Godel's theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent or incomplete. The theories we have so far are both inconsistent and incomplete.

Quantum gravity is essential to the argument. The information in the model can be represented by an arrangement of particles. According to quantum theory, a particle in a region of a given size has a certain minimum amount of energy. Thus, as I said earlier, models don't live rent free. They cost energy. By Einstein's famous equation, E = mc squared, energy is equivalent to mass. And mass causes systems to collapse under gravity. It is like getting too many books together in a library. The floor would give way and create a black hole that would swallow the information. Remarkably enough, Jacob Bekenstein and I found that the amount of information in a black hole is proportional to the area of the boundary of the hole, rather than the volume of the hole, as one might have expected. The black hole limit on the concentration of information is fundamental, but it has not been properly incorporated into any of the formulations of M theory that we have so far. They all assume that one can define the wave function at each point of space. But that would be an infinite density of information which is not allowed. On the other hand, if one can't define the wave function point wise, one can't predict the future to arbitrary accuracy, even in the reduced determinism of quantum theory. What we need is a formulation of M theory that takes account of the black hole information limit. But then our experience with supergravity and string theory, and the analogy of Godel's theorem, suggest that even this formulation will be incomplete.

Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind. I'm now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and that we will always have the challenge of new discovery. Without it, we would stagnate. Godel's theorem ensured there would always be a job for mathematicians. I think M theory will do the same for physicists. I'm sure Dirac would have approved.

Thank you for listening.

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In this talk, I want to ask how far can we go in our search for understanding and knowledge. Will we ever find a complete form of the laws of nature? By a complete form, I mean a set of rules that in principle at least enable us to predict the future to an arbitrary accuracy, knowing the state of the universe at one time.

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THUNK - 86. Cognitive Biases & the Socratic Method

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Human thought has hundreds of hard-wired bugs. The Socratic Method gives us a fighting chance to overcome them.

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Alternative to the Law of Excluded Middles

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Alternative to the Law of Excluded Middles

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Western philosophers have not, on the whole, regarded Buddhist thought with much enthusiasm. As a colleague once said to me: 'It's all just mysticism.' This attitude is due, in part, to ignorance. But it is also due to incomprehension. When Western philosophers look East, they find things they do not understand - not least the fact that the Asian traditions seem to accept, and even endorse, contradictions. Thus we find the great second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna saying:

The nature of things is to have no nature; it is their non-nature that is their nature. For they have only one nature: no-nature.

An abhorrence of contradiction has been high orthodoxy in the West for more than 2,000 years. Statements such as Nagarjuna's are therefore wont to produce looks of blank incomprehension, or worse. As Avicenna, the father of Medieval Aristotelianism, declared:

Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.

One can hear similar sentiments, expressed with comparable ferocity, in many faculty common rooms today. Yet Western philosophers are slowly learning to outgrow their parochialism. And help is coming from a most unexpected direction: modern mathematical logic, not a field that is renowned for its tolerance of obscurity.

Let's start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning 'four corners'. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

We know that the catuskoti was in the air because of certain questions that people asked the Buddha, in exchanges that come down to us in the sutras. Questions such as: what happens to enlightened people after they die? It was commonly assumed that an un enlightened person would keep being reborn, but the whole point of enlightenment was to get out of this vicious circle. And then what? Did you exist, not, both or neither? The Buddha's disciples clearly expected him to endorse one and only one of these possibilities. This, it appears, was just how people thought.

At around the same time, 5,000km to the west in Ancient Athens, Aristotle was laying the foundations of Western logic along very different lines. Among his innovations were two singularly important rules. One of them was the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM), which says that every claim must be either true or false with no other options (the Latin name for this rule, tertium non datur, means literally 'a third is not given'). The other rule was the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): nothing can be both true and false at the same time.

Writing in his Metaphysics, Aristotle defended both of these principles against transgressors such as Heraklitus (nicknamed 'the Obscure'). Unfortunately, Aristotle's own arguments are somewhat tortured - to put it mildly - and modern scholars find it difficult even to say what they are supposed to be. Yet Aristotle succeeded in locking the PEM and the PNC into Western orthodoxy, where they have remained ever since. Only a few intrepid spirits, most notably G W F Hegel in the 19th century, ever thought to challenge them. And now many of Aristotle's intellectual descendants find it very difficult to imagine life without them.

That is why Western thinkers - even those sympathetic to Buddhist thought - have struggled to grasp how something such as the catuskoti might be possible. Never mind a third not being given, here was a fourth - and that fourth was itself a contradiction. How to make sense of that?

Well, contemporary developments in mathematical logic show exactly how to do it. In fact, it's not hard at all.

At the core of the explanation, one has to grasp a very basic mathematical distinction. I speak of the difference between a relation and a function. A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs. Keep that distinction in mind; we'll come back to it a lot.

Now, in logic, one is generally interested in whether a given claim is true or false. Logicians call true and false truth values. Normally, and following Aristotle, it is assumed that 'value of' is a function: the value of any given assertion is exactly one of true (or T), and false (or F). In this way, the principles of excluded middle (PEM) and non-contradiction (PNC) are built into the mathematics from the start. But they needn't be.

To get back to something that the Buddha might recognise, all we need to do is make value of into a relation instead of a function. Thus T might be a value of a sentence, as can F, both, or neither. We now have four possibilities: { T}, { F}, { T, F} and { }. The curly brackets, by the way, indicate that we are dealing with sets of truth values rather than individual ones, as befits a relation rather than a function. The last pair of brackets denotes what mathematicians call the empty set: it is a collection with no members, like the set of humans with 17 legs. It would be conventional in mathematics to represent our four values using something called a Hasse diagram, like so:

Thus the four kotis (corners) of the catuskoti appear before us.

In case this all sounds rather convenient for the purposes of Buddhist apologism, I should mention that the logic I have just described is called First Degree Entailment (FDE). It was originally constructed in the 1960s in an area called relevant logic. Exactly what this is need not concern us, but the US logician Nuel Belnap argued that FDE was a sensible system for databases that might have been fed inconsistent or incomplete information. All of which is to say, it had nothing to do with Buddhism whatsoever.

Even so, you might be wondering how on earth something could be both true and false, or neither true nor false. In fact, the idea that some claims are neither true nor false is a very old one in Western philosophy. None other than Aristotle himself argued for one kind of example. In the somewhat infamous Chapter 9 of De Interpretatione, he claims that contingent statements about the future, such as 'the first pope in the 22nd century will be African', are neither true nor false. The future is, as yet, indeterminate. So much for his arguments in the Metaphysics.

The notion that some things might be both true and false is much more unorthodox. But here, too, we can find some plausible examples. Take the notorious 'paradoxes of self-reference', the oldest of which, reputedly discovered by Eubulides in the fourth century BCE, is called the Liar Paradox. Here's its commonest expression:

This statement is false.

Where's the paradox? If the statement is true, then it is indeed false. But if it is false, well, then it is true. So it seems to be both true and false.

Many similar puzzles turned up at the end of the 19th century, to the dismay of the scholars who were then trying to place mathematics as a whole on solid foundations. It was the leader of these efforts, Bertrand Russell, who in 1901 discovered the most famous such paradox (hence its name, Russell's Paradox). And it goes like this:

Some sets are members of themselves; the set of all sets, for example, is a set, so it belongs to itself. But some sets are not members of themselves. The set of cats, for example, is not a cat, so it's not a member of the set of cats. But what about the set of all the sets that are not members of themselves? If it is a member of itself, then it isn't. But if it isn't, then it is. It seems that it both is and isn't. So, goodbye Principle of Non-Contradiction. The catuskoti beckons.

Here you might wish to pause for a brief sanity check. Do scenarios such as these really break the chains of Aristotelian logic? Well, an increasing number of logicians are coming to think so - though matters remain highly contentious. Still, if nothing else, examples of this kind might help to remove the blinkers imposed by what Wittgenstein called 'a one-sided diet' of examples. We'll need to keep those blinkers off as we return to those tricky questions that the Buddha's disciples asked him. After all, what does happen to an enlightened person after death? Things are going to get only more disconcerting from here on in.

The Buddha, in fact, refused to answer such queries. In some sutras, he just says that they are a waste of time: you don't need to bother with them to achieve enlightenment. But in other texts there is a suggestion that something more is going on. Though the idea is never really elaborated, there are hints that none of the four possibilities in the catuskoti 'fits the case'.

For a long time, this riddle lay dormant in Buddhist philosophy. It was only around the second century CE that it was taken up by Nagarjuna, probably the most important and influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself. Nagarjuna's writings defined the new version of Buddhism that was emerging at the time: Mahayana. Central to his teachings is the view that things are 'empty' ( sunya). This does not mean that they are non-existent; only that they are what they are because of how they relate to other things. As the quotation at the beginning of this essay explains, their nature is to have no intrinsic nature (and the task of making precise logical sense of this claim I leave for the reader to ponder; suffice it to say, it can be done).

The most important of Nagarjuna's writings is the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the 'Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way'. This is a profound and cryptic book, whose principle theme is precisely that everything is empty. In the course of making his arguments, Nagarjuna often runs through the four cases of the catuskoti. In some places, moreover, he clearly states that there are situations in which none of the four applies. They don't cover the status of an enlightened person after death, for example.

Why might that be? Nagarjuna's reasoning is somewhat opaque, but essentially it seems to go something like this. The language we use frames our conventional reality (our Lebenswelt, as it is called in the German phenomenological tradition). Beneath that there is an ultimate reality, such as the condition of the enlightened dead person. One can experience this directly in certain meditative states, but one cannot describe it. To say anything about it would merely succeed in making it part of our conventional reality; it is, therefore, ineffable. In particular, one cannot describe it by using any of the four possibilities furnished by the catuskoti.

It is striking how useful his invention proves in the context of Buddhist metaphysics, though Buddhism played no part in inspiring it

We now have a fifth possibility. Let us write the four original possibilities, { T}, { F}, { T, F} and {}, as t, f, b and n, respectively. The way we set things up earlier, value of was a relation and the sets were the possibilities that each statement might relate to. But we could have taken value of as a function and allowed t, f, b and n to be the values that the function can take. And now there is a fifth possible value - none of the above, ineffable, that which lies beyond language. Call it i. (Strictly speaking, it is states of affairs that are ineffable, not claims, so our values have to be thought of as the values of states of affairs; but let us slide over this subtlety.)

If something is ineffable, i, it is certainly neither true nor false. But then how does i differ from n, neither true nor false? If we are looking at individual propositions, it is indeed tricky to discern any difference. However, the contrast comes out quite clearly when we try to join two sentences together.

Look at the sentence 'Crows can fly and pigs can fly.' You'll notice that it is made up of two distinct claims, fused together by the word 'and'. Expressions that are formed in this way are called conjunctions, and the individual claims that make them up are known as conjuncts. A conjunction is true only if both conjuncts are true. That means it is false if even one conjunct is false. 'Crows can fly and pigs can fly', for example, is false as a whole because of the falsity of the second conjunct alone. Similarly, if p is any sentence that is neither true nor false, that means ' p and pigs can fly' is false. By contrast, if p is ineffable, then ' p and pigs can fly' is ineffable too. After all, if we could express the conjunction, we could express p as well - which we can't. So i and n behave differently in conjunctions: f trumps n and i trumps f.

What I have just described is an example of a many-valued logic, though not a common one. Such logics were invented by the Polish logician Jan Łukasiewicz in the 1920s. He was motivated, as it happens, by Aristotle's arguments that contingent statements about the future are neither true nor false. In order to make sense of such claims, Łukasiewicz came up with a third truth value. It is indeed striking how useful his invention proves in the context of Buddhist metaphysics, though once again, Buddhism played no part in inspiring it. His innovation is entirely the product of the Western philosophical tradition.

On the other hand, if Łukasiewicz really wanted to get to grips with Buddhist thought, he shouldn't have stopped with his many-valued logics. Perhaps you have already seen what's coming next...

Philosophers in the Mahayana traditions hold some things to be ineffable; but they also explain why they are ineffable, in much the way that I did. Now, you can't explain why something is ineffable without talking about it. That's a plain contradiction: talking of the ineffable.

Embarrassing as this predicament might appear, Nagarjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience ( noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you can't even ask this question. Call it mysticism if you want; the label has little enough meaning. But whatever you call it, it is rife in great philosophy - Eastern and Western.

Anyway, what did Nagarjuna make of this problem? Nothing much. He didn't even comment on it. Perhaps that's not so surprising: after all, he thought that certain things might be simultaneously true and false. But later Buddhist philosophers did try to wriggle out of it, not least the influential 15th-century Tibetan philosopher, Gorampa.

Pardon? In explaining what they do, are we not talking about them? Well, yes, of course we are

Gorampa was troubled enough by the situation that he attempted to distinguish between two ultimate realities: a real ultimate reality, which is ineffable, and a 'nominal' ultimate reality, which is what we end up talking about when we try to talk about the real ultimate. But wait a minute - the nominal ultimate is obviously effable: by definition, it is the reality that we can talk about. In that case, if we say that ultimate reality is ineffable and we are actually talking about the nominal ultimate, what we are saying is false. Thus Gorampa's proposal refutes itself.

Interestingly, Kant made a similar move. He distinguished between two notions of noumenon, the realm beyond the senses: a positive one and a negative one. According to him, only the negative one is legitimate. We cannot talk about things of this kind; we just need to be aware of them to mark the limit of what we can talk about. Pardon? In explaining what they do, are we not talking about them? Well, yes, of course we are.

The Gorampa/Kant predicament is, in fact, inevitable. If one wishes to explain why something is ineffable, one must refer to it and say something about it. To refer to something else is just to change the subject.

So we have now hit a new problem: the contradiction involved in talking of the ineffable. In a sense, the possibility of a true contradiction is already accommodated by that both option of the catuskoti. (Our Western thinkers could not even say this much.) Alas, our contradiction is of a rather special kind. It requires something to take both the values true and ineffable, which, on the understanding at hand, is impossible. Yet the resources of mathematical logic are not so easily exhausted.

In fact, we have met something like this before. We started with two possible values, T and F. In order to allow things to have both of these values, we simply took value of to be a relation, not a function. Now we have five possible values, t, f, b, n and i, and we assumed that value of was a function that took exactly one of these values. Why not make it a relation instead? That would allow it to relate something to any number of those five values (giving us 32 possibilities, if you count). In this construction, something can relate to both t and i: and so one can say something true about something ineffable after all.

The similarities between this and our Buddhist paradox of ineffability are, you must admit, pretty unnerving

The technique we are using here is called plurivalent logic, and it was invented in the 1980s in connection with the aforementioned paradoxes of self-reference. In fact, one of those paradoxes is not a million miles away from our ineffability predicament. It is called König's paradox, after the Hungarian mathematician Julius König who wrote it up in 1905, and it concerns ordinals.

Ordinals are numbers that extend the familiar counting numbers, 0, 1, 2, etc, beyond the finite. After we have been through all the finite numbers (of which there is, of course, an infinity), there is a next number, ω, and then a next, ω+1, and so on, forever. These ordinals share an interesting property with the counting numbers: for any set of them, if there are any members at all, there must be a least one. How far, exactly, the ordinals go is a vexed question both mathematically and philosophically. Nevertheless, one fact is beyond dispute: there are many more ordinals than can be referred to using a noun phrase in a language with a finite vocabulary, such as English. This can be shown by a perfectly rigorous mathematical proof.

Now, if there are ordinals that cannot be referred to in this way, it follows that one of them must be less than all the others, for that is true of any collection of ordinals. Consider the phrase 'the least ordinal that cannot be referred to'. It obviously refers to the number in question. This number, then, both can and cannot be referred to. That's our paradox. And since it cannot be referred to, one cannot say anything about it. So the facts about it are ineffable; but we can say things about it, such as that it is the least ordinal that can't be referred to. We have said ineffable things.

The similarities between this and our Buddhist paradox of ineffability are, you must admit, pretty unnerving. But those who developed plurivalent logic were entirely unaware of any Buddhist connections. (I say this with authority, since I was one of them.) Once again, the strange claims of our Buddhist philosophers fall into precise mathematical place.

There is, of course, much more to be said about all these matters. But we have now seen something of the lie of the land. So let me end by stepping back and asking what lessons are to be drawn from all this.

One is a familiar one. Mathematical techniques often find unexpected applications. Group theory was developed in the 19th century to chart the commonality of various mathematical structures. It found an application in physics in the 20th century, notably in connection with the Special Theory of Relativity. Similarly, those who developed the logical techniques described above had no idea of the Buddhist applications, and would, I am sure, have been very surprised by them.

The second lesson is quite different and more striking. Buddhist thought, and Asian thought in general, has often been written off by Western philosophers. How can contradictions be true? What's all this talk of ineffability? This is all nonsense. The constructions I have described show how to make precise mathematical sense of the Buddhist views. This does not, of course, show that they are true. That's a different matter. But it does show that these ideas can be made as logically rigorous and coherent as ideas can be. As the Buddha may or may not have said (or both, or neither): 'There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.'

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The logic of Buddhist philosophy goes beyond simple truth - Graham Priest | Aeon Essays

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Western philosophers have not, on the whole, regarded Buddhist thought with much enthusiasm. As a colleague once said to me: 'It's all just mysticism.' This attitude is due, in part, to ignorance. But it is also due to incomprehension.

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THUNK - 27. Gödel and the Black Hole of Mathematics

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Kurt Gödel proved that math has an incurable flaw that will plague it, and us, forever. Learn what it is, and why it has to do with everything from your computer to your brain!

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Great movie -- ties into time period and theme of Lot 49

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Ghosts on the shore

In Japan, ghost stories are not to be scoffed at, but provide deep insights into the fuzzy boundary between life and death

Christopher Harding

Sweet artifice

Dandies in the age of decadence favoured synthetics over nature, nowhere more so than in perfumery's fabulous counterfeits

Catherine Maxwell

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'What's going on?' How seeking meaning is futile in the Coen Brothers' universe | Aeon Videos

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The Coen Brothers' 2009 film A Serious Man tells the story of a mild-mannered physics professor, Larry Gopnik, whose comfortable existence in the US suburbs of the 1960s implodes in a manner recalling the fate of the prophet Job.