MULTIVERSES

Many animals play. But why? 

Play has emerged in species as distinct as rats, turtles, and octopi although they are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. 

While some behaviors —  hunting or mating for example — are straightforwardly adaptive, play is more subtle. So how does it help animals survive and procreate?  Is it just fun? Or, as Huizinga put it, is it the primeval soil of culture? 

Our guest this week is Gordon Burghardt, a professor at The University of Tennessee and the author of the seminal The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits where he introduced criteria for recognizing animal play.

 Gordon has spent his career trying to understand the experience of animals. He advocates for frameworks such as critical anthropomorphism and the umwelt so we can judiciously adjust our perspectives. We can play at being other.

This week Multiverses is brought to you by ... the internet. 

Links

• Multiverses.xyz
• The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits
• Gordon's academic homepage

Milestones

(00:00) Introduction

(2:20) Why study play?

(4:00) Criteria for play

(5:00) Fish don’t smile

(5:50) The five criteria: 1. incompletely functional

(7:40) 2. Fun (endogenous reward)

(8:20) 3. Incomplete

(9:45) 4. Repeated

(10:50) 5. Healthy, stress free

(13:30) Play as a way of dealing with stress (but not too much)

(16:40) Parental care creating a space for play

(17:45) Delayed vs immediate benefits

(20:45) Primary, secondary and tertiary play

(26:00) Role reversal, imitation, self-handicapping: imagining the world otherwise

(31:00) Secondary process: play as a way of maintaining systems

(33:37) Tertiary process: play as a way of going beyond

(34:45) Komodo dragons with buckets on their heads

(39:22) Critical anthropomorphism

(42:40) Umwelt — Jakob von Uexküll

(49:18) Anthropomorphism by omission

(53:00) Play evolved independently — it is not homologous

(53:45) Do aliens play?

(1:00:10) Play signals — how to play with dogs and bears

(1:04:00) Inter species play

(1:09:00) Final thoughts

Language is the ultimate Lego. With it, we can take simple elements and construct them into an edifice of meaning. Its power is not only in mapping signs to concepts but in that individual words can be composed into larger structures. 

How did this systematicity arise in language?

Simon Kirby is the head of Linguistics and English Language at The University of Edinburgh and one of the founders of the Centre for Langauge Evolution and Change. Over several decades he and his collaborators have run many elegant experiments that show that this property of language emerges inexorably as a system of communication is passed from generation to generation. 

Experiments with computer simulations, humans, and even baboons demonstrate that as a language is learned mistakes are made - much like the mutations in genes. Crucially, the mistakes that better match the language to the structure of the world (as conceived by the learner) are the ones that are most likely to be passed on.

Links

• Simon's website with art, music, and talks on language evolution 
• Simon's academic homepage
• Simon on X
• Multiverses Podcast home

Outline

(00:00) Introduction

(2:45) What makes language special?

(5:30) Language extends our biological bounds

(7:55) Language makes culture, culture makes language

(9:30) John Searle: world to word and word to world

(13:30) Compositionality: the expressivity of language is based on its Lego-like combinations

(16:30) Could unique genes explain the fact of language compositionality?

(17:20) … Not fully, though they might make our brains able to support compositional language

(18:20) Using simulations to model language learning and search for the emergence of structure

(19:35) Compositionality emerges from the transmission of representations across generations

(20:18) The learners need to make mistakes, but not random mistakes

(21:35) Just like biological evolution, we need variation

(27:00) When, by chance, linguistic features echo the structure of the world these are more memorable

(33:45) Language experiments with humans (Hannah Cornish)

(36:32) Sign language experiments in the lab (Yasamin Motamedi)

(38:45) Spontaneous emergence of sign language in populations

(41:18) Communication is key to making language efficient, while transmission gives structure

(47:10) Without intentional design these processes produce optimized systems

(50:39) We need to perceive similarity in states of the world for linguistic structure to emerge

(57:05) Why isn’t language ubiquitous in nature …

(58:00) … why do only humans have cultural transmissions

(59:56) Over-imitation: Victoria Horner & Andrew Whiten, humans love to copy each other

(1:06:00) Is language a spandrel?

(1:07:10) How much of language is about information transfer? Partner-swapping conversations  (Gareth Roberts)

(1:08:49) Language learning  = play?

(1:12:25) Iterated learning experiments with baboons (& Tetris!)

(1:17:50) Endogenous rewards for copying

(1:20:30) Art as another angle on the same problems

To stop global warming it is not enough to stop atmospheric CO2 rising. That is not the meaning of net zero.

Despite net zero being a core concept in the Paris Agreement, it appears to be much misunderstood. The idea of net zero can be traced back to the work of  Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at Oxford and a veteran of several IPCC assessments.

 Myles explains the original intent of net zero and what we really need to aim for: zero transfer of carbon between the geosphere (Earth's crust) and everywhere else (oceans, land, atmosphere). 

Myles also makes a strong case that, if we want to hit the 2050 goals we need to invest more heavily in large-scale geological carbon capture and storage. Many climate activists worry that such a policy would detract from the progress of renewables and give the fossil fuel industry carte blanche to continue emitting.  But Myles points out that our reliance on fossil fuels is not falling as quickly as we need, and  CCAS is technologically viable, economically feasible, and essential to reaching true geological net zero.

• Multiverses website
• Myles' academic home page
• Resources on Net Zero from Oxford

(00:00) Intro

(2:29) What is net zero?

(4:12) Net zero is not a stable state but dynamical

(6:20) If we stabilise concentrations of CO2 we would see half as much warming again

(9:10) The meaning of net zero is often confused

(12:20) The danger of carbon accounting double counting

(16:56) The difficulty of establishing additionality

(19:52) Geological net zero is what was originally meant by net zero

(21:30) There are no significant natural sources or sinks of carbon between the biosphere and geosphere

(27:25) COP 28: the fossil fuel industry has got to be part of the solution

(30:50) “It is almost dangerous to claim it’s possible to solve the climate crisis without getting rid of CO2 on a very large scale … injecting it back into the Earth’s crust”

(32:30) Phasing out fossil fuels altogether is effectively letting the industry off the hook

(32:45) To what extent can we trust the fossil fuel industry? The potential dangers of CCAS

(35:30) “The cost with today’s technology of recapturing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing under the North Sea … “ is such that the natural gas industry could recapture all emissions and still be profitable at current prices

(40:10) Carbon pricing has failed: people do the cheapest thing first and the costly, slow-to-develop things (e.g. CCAS) are not coming fast enough

(42:20) The difficulty of getting a carbon capture flywheel going

(45:05) Intermittent energy supply is not a problem for carbon capture

(45:45) Is biochar a viable alternative to geological carbon capture?

(47:08) Biochar can’t hit the scale we need

(48:55) Extended producer responsibility

(50:10) eFuels (synthetic fuels)

(50:44) Final comments: we have the technology but we need to be realistic, we need to start  taking carbon back

Can we trust our emotions as a guide to right and wrong?

This week's guest James Hutton is a philosopher at the University of Delft who argues that emotions provide a way of testing our moral beliefs — similar to the way observations are used in natural sciences as evidence for or against theories.

This is not to say that emotions are infallible, nor that they are not themselves influenced by our moral beliefs, but that they do have a place in our moral inventory. In particular, the destabilizing power they can have — their capability to clash with our beliefs — is an important counterpoint to the entrenchment of poorly justified beliefs.

I found myself revising my own views throughout this discussion. It feels right that emotions play a role in our decision-making. Perhaps that feeling is justified.

• James' academic website
• Multiverses website

Outline

(00:00) Intro

(2:28) Start of conversation: Metathical frameworks

(4:45) Reason alone cannot provide moral premises

(6:30) Are moral principles self-evident? Or do we have a moral sense?

(11:00) Is emotion antithetical to reason?

(12:00) Emotional senses:Amia Srinivasan’s example of Nour, an example where emotions are trustworthy

(23:00) Antonio Damasio & Descartes’ Error: the importance of emotion as a motivating force

(29:30) … But should it be a motivating force?

(30:30) Tolstoy’s emotional reaction to an exection and how it disrupted his moral theory of progress

(34:50) Emotions can cause us to revise our moral beliefs

(37:25) This does not mean emotion is infallible as a guide to morality

(40:25) The tension between reasoning from principles and emotional reaction creates a useful instability

(42:00) The analogy between science and moral reasoning: sometimes observations (and emotions) should be ignored, but sometimes we should pay attention to them

(46:00) Is it possible to have a no-holds-barred ethics incorporating principles and emotions? (Not really!)

(49:40) Observations and theories are perennially in conflict, sometimes we reject the observation

(50:40) Utilitarianism: elegant but easy to find cases where it clashes with our intuitions

(51:50) Harvesting organs — where the greatest good for the number does not feel right

(53:20) Ethics and Inuition — Peter Singer: we shouldn’t trust our emotions

(54:20) But why trust the utilitarian principle over our intuitions?

(57:45) Situations in which we need to be wary of our emotions: burn a teddy vs releasing tonnes of CO2

(1:03:00) Emotional blind spots: abstract, global, probabilistic, outgroup vs ingroup

(1:08:00) Partiality: should we treat everyone equally, or do we have special obligations to friends and family?

(1:10:28) Heckled by a doorbell

(1:11:50) Partiality is a litmus case for utilitarian principles vs intuition

(1:15:30) Given emotions are fallible how do we make good use of them?

(1:17:30) Unreliable emotions and ethical knowledge: blood sugar, mood &c. cause emotional noise

(1:19:30) How do we deal with noisy information in other areas — the analogy with testimony

(1:23:50) Defeaters — cues that give us pause to double check our emotional responses

(1:25:40) Negative meta-emotions: e.g. shame at being angry

(1:26:25) Should we expand our emotional repertoire?

(1:30:20) Flight shame as an example of a new emotional response

(1:34:25) Should we expect evolution to have created morally fitting emotional responses?

(1:38:15) The problems with evolutionary debunking arguments

(1:46:43) This is work in progress — google James Hutton Delft to get in touch

Could AI's ability to make us fall in love with be our downfall? Will AI be like cars, machines that encourage us to be sedentary, or will we use it like a cognitive bicycle — extending our intellectual range while still exercising our minds?

These are some of the questions raised by this week's guest Santiago Bilinkis. Santiago is a serial entrepreneur who's written several books about the interaction between humanity and technology. Artificial, his latest book, has just been released in Spanish.

It's startling to reflect on how human intelligence has shaped the Earth. AI's effects may be much greater.

Links:

• Santiago's  book Artificial co-authored with Mariano Sigman
• Multiverses.xyz

Outline:

(00:00) Intro

(2:31) Start of conversation — a decade of optimism and pessimism

(4:45) The coming AI tidal wave

(7:45) The right reaction to the AI rollercoaster: we should be excited and afraid

(9:45) Nuclear equilibrium was chosen, but the developer of the next superweapon could prevent others from developing it

(12:35) OpenAI has created a kind of equilibrium by putting AI in many hands

(15:45) The prosaic dangers of AI

(17:05) Hacking the human love system: AI’s greatest threat?

(19:45) Humans falling in love may not only be possible but inevitable

(21:15) The physical manifestations of AI have a strong influence over our view of it

(23:00) AI bodyguards to protect us against AI attacks

(23:55) Awareness of our human biases may save use

(25:00) Our first interactions with sentient AI will be critical

(26:10) A sentient AI may pretend to not be sentient

(27:25) Perhaps we should be polite to ChatGPT (I, for one, welcome our robot overlords)

(29:00) Does AGI have to be conscious?

(32:30) Perhaps sentience in AI can save us? It may make it reasonable

(34:40) An AGI may have a meaningful link to us in virtue of humanity being its progenitor

(37:30) ChatGPT is like a smart employee but with no intrinsic motivation

(42:20) Will more data and more compute continue to pay dividends?

(47:40) Imitating nature may not necessarily be the best way of building a mind

(49:55) Is my job safe? How will AI change the landscape of work?

(52:00) Authorship and authenticity: how to do things meaningfully, without being the best

(54:50) Imperfection can make things more perfect (but machines might learn this)

(57:00) Bernard Suits’ definition of a game: meaning can be related to the means, not ends.

(58:30) The Cognitive Bicycle: will AI make us cognitively sedentary or will it be a new way of exercising our intellect and extending its range?

(1:01:24) Cognitive prosthetics have displaced some intellectual abilities but nurtured others

(1:06:00) Without our cognitive prosthetics, we’re pretty dumb

(1:12:33) Will AI be a leveller in education?

(1:15:00) The business model of exploiting human weaknesses is powerful. This must not happen with AI

(1:24:25) Using AI to backup the minds of people

The Gomboc is a curious shape. So curious many mathematicians thought it could not exist. And even to the untrained eye, it looks alien: neither the product of human or natural processes.

This week Gábor Domokos relates his decade-long quest to prove the existence of a (convex, homogenous) shape with only two balance points. 

The Gömböc is not just a mathematical curio, its discovery led to a theory of how "things fall apart", of the processes of abrasion that — whether on Earth, mars, or deep space — ineluctably reduce the number of balance points of objects. 

The Gomboc is the shape all pebbles want to be, but can never reach.

Show notes at multiverses.xyz

(00:00) Intro

(2:40) Start of conversation — what is a Gomboc?

(4:30) The Gomboc is the “ultimate shape” it has only two balance points

(5:30) The four vertex theorem: why a 2D shape must have 4 balance points

(6:30) (almost) nobody thought a Gomboc existed

(8:30) Vladimir Ilych Arnold’s conjecture

(9:00) Hamburg 1995, the beginning of a quest

(10:30) “Mathematics is a part of physics where experiments are cheap”

(11:50) A hungry scholar sits next to a mathematical superstar

(13:00) Ten years of searching

(15:00) Domokos and Varkonyi's gift for Arnold

(15:30) Arnold’s response: “good, but now do something serious”

(16:50) We cannot easily speak about shapes.

(18:00) A system for naming shapes

(21:00) “The evolution of shapes is imprinted in these numbers”

(21:50) Pebbles evolve towards the Gomboc, but never get there

(24:50) How to find the balance points of shapes by hand

(30:00) Physical intuition and empirical exploration can inform mathematics

(30:30) A beach holiday (and a marital bifurcation point)

(34:00) “No this was not fun, it was a markov process”

(36:40) Working with NASA to understand the age of martian pebbles

(38:20) An asteroid, or a spaceship?

(43:00) The mechanisms of abrasion

(45:50) The isoperimetric ratio — does not evolve monotonically …

(47:50) … But the drift to less balance points is monotonic

(49:00) The process of abrasion is a process of simplifying

(50:00)  We can name the shape of Oumuamua because it is so simple

(51:00)  Relationship between Gomboc and (one way of thinking about) entropy

(55:00)  Abrasion and the heat equation — curvature is “like” heat and gets smoothed out

(58:00)  The soap bar model — why pointy bits become smooth

(1:00:00) Richard Hamilton, the Poincaré conjecture and pebbles

(1:04:00) The connection between the Ricci flow and pebble evolution

(1:09:00) Turning the lights on in a darkened labyrinth

(1:12:00) The importance of geometric objects in physics (string theory)

(1:13:30) Another way of naming natural shapes: the average number of faces and vertices

(1:15:00) “Earth is made of cubes” — it turns out Plato was right

(1:16:30) Could Plato’s claim have been empirically inspired?

(1:17:50) “Everything happens between 20 and 6”

(1:18:30) The Cube and the Gomboc are the bookends of natural shapes

(1:19:30) The Obelisk in 2001 — an unnatural, but almost natural shape

(1:22:00) Poincaré on dreaming: genius taps the subconscious

From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us?

 Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, and a scholar of Heidegger, Pessoa, Football (Liverpool FC), and humour — among other things. He crosses over between analytic and continental traditions and freely draws on quotes from Hume, poetry and British pop bands. 

 Simon argues that philosophy begins in disappointment, not wonder.  But its goals can be wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment, and freedom.  It can play many roles: as a tool for developing scientific theories, for exposing ideology for tracing the underpinnings of language and experience. Anywhere where other fields fear to tread, that's where philosophers step in. 

Show notes and links to books at Multiverses.xyz

(00:00) Intro

(3:00) Beginning of conversation: disappointment as the start of the journey

(7:55) Punk & Philosophy

(11:20) Trauma and tabula rasa

(12:30) Not making it in a band, becoming a philosopher

(19:30) Wittgenstein as a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy

(21:50) Mill and the origin of the label “continental philosophy”

(24:30) Philosophy has a duty to be part of culture

(28:00) The difficulty with philosophy being an academic tradition

(29:30) The Stone

(32:30) Football as a phenomenon for study that invites people in to philosophy

(35:00) Philosophy as pre-theoretic & Pessoa’s Ultimatum

(39:00) Will analytic philosophy run out for road and be subsumed into science?

(41:00) Two lines of human imagination

(42:00) Should philosophy ever be a single honours subject, or should it always aid other realms of thought?

(43:00) Philosophy as pre-science

(44:30) Phenomenology as reflection on the lived world

(47:00) Alberto Caeiro (Pessoa) and anti-poetry

(48:50) The saying of ordinary things to fascinate angels

(54:00) Impossible objects will keep philosophers busy

(57:00) The task of philosophy as deflationary, as not making progress

(1:00:00) Should philosophy of physics be part of physics?

(1:04:30) Context: What can’t I read Descartes like I’m talking to your right now?

(1:06:00) Is context colour or is it inseparable from ideas?

(1:15:30) Rorty: Continental philosophy as proper names vs problems in analytic philsophy

(1:19:20) Trying to walk the line between two traditions of philosophy

(1:20:00) Obscurantism vs scientism

(1:23:00) Permission to think on their own, to expose ideology

(1:26:00) The internet has been good for philosophy

(1:26:30) Audio as a new platform or agora for philosophy

Large language models, such as ChatGPT are poised to change the way we develop, research, and perhaps even think. But how do we best understand LLMs to get the most from our prompting?

Thinking of LLMs as deep neural networks, while correct, is not very useful in practical terms. It doesn't help us interact with them, rather as thinking of human behavior as nothing more than the result of neurons firing won't make you many friends. However, thinking of LLMs as search engines is also faulty — they are notoriously unreliable for facts.

Our guest this week is James Intriligator. James trained as a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard, but then gravitated towards design and is currently Professor of the Practice in Human Factors Engineering and Director of Strategic Innovation at Tufts University. 

James proposes viewing ChatGPT not as a search engine, but as a "glider" that journeys through knowledge. By guiding it through diverse domains, it learns your interests and customizes better answers. Dimensional prompts activate specific areas like medicine or economics. 

I like this playful way of thinking of LLMs. Maybe gliding (LLMs) is the new surfing (of the web). 

Links:

• James' home page 
• Multiverses website

The physical solidity of books encourages notions of "the text" or "the canonical edition". The challenges to this view from post-modernist thought are well known. But there are other ways in which this model of a static text may fail. 

Our guest this week is Peter Robinson (my dad!) who takes us through his work on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This is a paradigmatic case of a work of literature that defies understanding as fixed text. Originally it would have been read, or performed. What exists now are fragments of transcripts of performances. And copies of those fragments. And copies of copies.

Using techniques from phylogenetics, Peter has led efforts to piece together the relationships between these manuscripts. By tracing how transcription errors (or edits) appear to propagate, we can create a family tree of the texts, just as we can trace the propagation of biological traits through generations.

Sounds simple? "After 30 years of working on this, we're really just beginning to understand what a representation of a textual tradition using these tools gives us"

• Peter's academic homepage
• Peter's article in Nature on The Canterbury Tales (there are not many articles in Nature about Chaucer!)
• Multiverses home

For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were static decade-to-decade.  We now see rapid change.

It's hard to contemplate what now? let alone what next?

Peter Schwartz is a futurist, SVP for Scenario Planning at Salesforce, author of The Art of Long View, and a founder of the Long Now Foundation. He thinks about the future, both envisioning its many possibilities and harnessing these scenarios to answer the question: what do we do now?

In this conversation, we discuss the Long Clock, working with Steven Spielberg, what the future may hold (the ISS becoming a hotel?) what it almost certainly will (accelerating climate change is something we cannot avoid, we must adapt as well as driving down emissions) and how we should approach thinking about it.

• multiverses.xyz/podcast — the show home
• The Art of the Long View — Peter's book on scenario planning
• The Long Now Foundation homepage — with talks by Peter, Niall Ferguson (sometimes in debate!) Sam Harris, Kim Stanley Robinson and many others