Angelic corporate beings

Legally, [the European and US] notion of a corporation is very much the product of the European high middle ages. The legal idea of the corporation as fictive person...a person who, as Maitland the great British legal historian put it, 'is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for the natural persons of who is composed' was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250AD, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries as also universities, churches, municipalities and guilds. The idea of a corporation as an angelic being is not mine, incidentally. I borrowed it from the great medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz who pointed out all that this was happening right around the time that Thomas Aquinas was pointing out that angels were really just the personification of Platonic ideas. According to the teaching of Aquinas, he notes, every angel represented a species. Little wonder then that finally the personified collectives of the jurists, which were juristically immortal species, displayed all the features attributed to angels.

The jurists themselves recognized that there was some similarity between their abstractions and the angelic beings. In this respect it may be said that the political and legal world of thought of the later middle ages began to be populated by immaterial angelic bodies, large and small. They were invisible, ageless, sempiternal, immortal and sometimes even ubiquitous, and they were endowed with a corpus intellectualae or mysticum -- an intellectual or mystical body -- which could withstand any comparison with the spiritual bodies of the celestial beings. All this is worth emphasizing because while we are use to assuming that there is something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations in historic terms they are actually strange exotic creatures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it.

-- from Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

See also Griffin.

Small miracle

An as-yet-unextinguished marvel in a time of mass extinction:

A songbird weighing just 25 grams makes a 14,500 km journey twice a year. Northern wheatears fly from Alaska, across Asia to sub-Saharan Africa -- one of the longest migrations on record.

-report, paper

Souped up

Armen Mulkidjanian makes the case that life as we know it originated in freshwater thermal springs not unlike Darwin's warm little pond. Jack Szostack is sympathetic but Nick Lane continues to argue that deep sea vents are a more likely starting point. Martin Brasier, who discovered the oldest fossils so far -- 3.43 billion year old bacteria in Australian rocks -- holds fire. He says 'The rock record is the only safe witness we have.'

I tried to cover these issues in outline in the Xenophyophore and Yeti crab chapters my forthcoming book.  It looks as if I didn't go too far wrong.

Griffin

'The City [of London] does have at its heart something very beautiful - this ancient story of the power of the citizenry within the ancient constitution, which flows through the memory of the City.'

I asked [Father William] Taylor how he reconciled this beautiful side with his notion of a demonic spirit inside the same conceptual framework. He answered immediately. 'A demonic spirit is a fallen angel. This is the problem. It is not serving its intended purpose. It has become suborned to another purpose. In its ceremony the City continues to articulate the power of the citizenry but it has been completely overtaken by the money men. I conceptualise the City not as an evil in itself but as a thing that has become perverted from its true vocation.'

-- from Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson

The fish in the sea

A study suggests that most fish in the oceans today are descended from freshwater species. One possible implication of this, notes a report is that:

it is possible that seas may be more prone to extinctions than land, rivers or lakes; while rivers and lakes form an "arc of survival" that can reseed the oceans when marine species are lost. 

"I don't think our results show that seas are strongly inhospitable, but they may become so at certain points in time," [says study co-author John Wiens]. Unfortunately, the strong ocean acidification that is predicted for the near future means we may be heading for one of those times now, he adds. 

Today, however, rivers and lakes may not be healthy enough to help re-supply the oceans...

Flow is a force that gives us meaning

As if they were needed, reminders -- one and two -- that human enhancements are most likely to be seen first and predominantly in the military-industrial killing complex rather than in some libertarian fantasy world.

P.S. 19 Feb: The Brain, weaponized

Ancient seagrass

A swathe of seagrass in the Mediterranean could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. The 'meadow' is probably 80,000 to 200,000 years old. Despite its historical robustness, the seagrass is now threatened by climate change. The Mediterranean is warming three times faster than the world average, and each year P. oceanica meadows decline by around 5 per cent. "They have never experienced the speed of climate that the Mediterranean is currently experiencing."

--report, paper

Poiesis

If what is or is not an ethical truth is contingent on the types of biological organisms that we are, then changing the types of biological organisms that we are will change the nature of what is or is not ethical.

So writes Greg Nirshberg in a reflection titled Genetic Modification and Human Ontology. This is probably useful as far as it goes.

One of the matters scarcely explored, however, is that significant modifications to the human genome and associated systems, will, if undertaken at all, be undertaken in the context of changes in even larger the systems in which they are embedded. [1] To (mis?)use the language suggested by Andrew Pickering, there will be a 'dance of agency' between (on the one hand) scientists and society and (on the other) the world as revealed through performance. Agency -- and therefore ethics -- will be an emergent property of interaction between the two.

But even if we are necessarily ignorant of many of ethical (and spiritual) questions that will confront us or our descendants can we not still develop working hypotheses (or ideas to explore in performance rather than cognition)?  So, for example, we may consider this from James Lovelock, (echoing Lewis Thomas here):

The remaining life span of the biosphere is unlikely to be much more than 500 million years, so that if humans died out the chances of our replacement by another intelligent communicating species is improbable. If this is true then we have a goal a purpose. As part of the Earth system our job is to help keep our planet habitable and perhaps become a step in the evolution of an intelligent planet.

One small but essential way of pursuing such a goal would be the tending of forests and other ecosystems through interaction and learning over time: techniques of ecological restoration/recreation/new-creation that are 'alive to emergence.'

Footnote:

[1] See also level 3 systems complexity as described by Brad Allenby and Dan Sarowitz in The Techno-human Condition, plus their short posts here.

(Image from Solaris - Lem/Tarkovsky)

P.S. 9 Feb: 'You...have to consider the possibility that cognitive enhancements may go hand in hand with moral enhancements.'

Who's there?

[With the claim that the self is like a waterfall, Julian] Baggini is trying to save the self from neuroscience, which is admirable considering that neuroscience continues to show how convoluted our brains are. I am not sure if he is successful – argument by metaphor can only go so far, empirical data wins at the end of the day.

-- so writes Sam McNerney. But Baggini's point may be sounder than McNerney allows. Nor is it particularly new. In A New Biology for a New Century (2004), Carl Woese writes:

Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow.

It may be objected that a conscious self is an altogether different kind of thing from a non-conscious biological organism, but why?  Doesn't it make more sense to suggest that consciousness is, among other things, something like a light bulb on a dimmer switch: continuous from off through dim to bright?

John Keats wrote that he lived a life of allegory. However you take it, we are something like what Robert Sapolsky almost calls obligate metaphorists.

P.S. 30 Jan: See Self as Symbol by Tom Siegfried and Emblems of Awareness by Laura Sanders.

Setting aside any judgement on Rupert Sheldrake,  Mary Midgley is right when she writes: 'We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution.'

The eyes of Anomalocaris

...this magnificent animal, probably the first in the line of apex predators of these shallow seas, had a compound eye that, in many ways, resembled the eye of today’s dragonfly. Anomalocaris had perhaps as many as 16,000 hexagonal facets (individual units of the eye called ommatidia) in each eye and probably good vision.

--Ivan R Schwab

On being and not being astonished

...Studying patients has taught us where memories might be stored, but not what physically constitutes a memory. The answer lies in the multitude of tiny modifiable connections between neuronal cells, the information-processing units of the brain. These cells, with their wispy tree-like protrusions, hang like stars in miniature galaxies and pulse with electrical charge. Thus, your memories are patterns inscribed in the connections between the millions of neurons in your brain. Each memory has its unique pattern of activity, logged in the vast cellular network every time a memory is formed...

-- from What are memories made of? by Hugo Spiers

...Perhaps it is not surprising that we do not live more surprised. After all, we are used to unlikelihood. Being born into it, raised in it, we become acclimated to the altitude, like natives in the Andes. Moreover, we all know that the astonishment is transient, and sooner or later our particles will go back to being random...

-- from On Probability and Possibility by Lewis Thomas

'We have become, in a painful, unwished-for way, nature itself.'

The text of my book went to the copy editors a little while ago so it is basically done and dusted (bibliography, permissions for quotation and images, minor corrections notwithstanding). It will be published in October.

Looking over the final chapter yet one more time (and promped in part by an interview with Emma Marris at Chinadialogue), I turned thence to 'Natural Man' by Lewis Thomas, first published in The Lives of a Cell in 1974.   I think this essay, from which I quote in my final chapter (and which can be found online here) may be one of the wisest of recent decades.

image from Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs by Charles Darwin (1842)

Soap, fertilizer, glycerin for blowing up soldiers, margarine

A. Remington Kellogg...was among the first to commission “vivisections” on porpoises even though, in his own words, “a live porpoise can be handled about as readily as a satchel of dynamite.” This did not deter the intrepid scientists who “fell to the unlovely task of restraining the furiously squealing animal in order first to expose the skull and then to saw into it to expose the brain.” When these operations were performed, Kellogg was witness to “a strangely large brain, one with elaborate patterns of convolution such as were generally thought to be more or less unique to human beings.”

-- from a review by Michael Greenberg of The Sounding of the Whale by D. Graham Burnett

'Plankton chronicles'

A series of two minute films in high def. Good images and commentary.

Books

Each species is like a book, the product of literally billions of years of editing and re-editing through the process of evolution, and each species has its own unique story to tell. These stories are all nonfiction, and more important, stories of survival, of navigating billions of years of persistence. These stories include the cures to many (if not all) human diseases. They include instructions for converting sunlight into stored chemical energy with near-perfect efficiency. But the most important stories are the ones we have not yet imagined.

-- Richard L. Pyle

Eaten

The consumption of animals such as whales, dolphins and manatees is on the rise in poor nations. Declines in coastal fish catches have led people to look for other sources of meat...

Cetaceans are making their way to dinner plates as other protein sources are dwindling in coastal areas of west Africa, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines and Burma. From 1970 to 2009, at least 92 species of cetaceans were eaten by humans.

- report, paper.

You, robot

2012 is the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the second world war code-breaker who dreamed up the test in 1950 while pondering the notion of a thinking machine, so expect a flurry of competitions in his honour. Bear in mind, though, that the Turing test is a poor gauge for today's AIs. For one thing, the test's demand that a program capture the nuances of human speech makes it too hard. At the same time, it is too narrow: with bots influencing the stock market, landing planes and poised to start driving cars, why focus only on linguistic smarts? One alternative is a suite of mini Turing tests each designed to evaluate machine intelligence in a specific arena. For example, a newly created visual Turing test assesses a bot's ability to understand the spatial relationships between objects in an image against that of a human. Others want to stop using humans as the benchmark. Using a universal, mathematical definition of intelligence, it could soon be possible to score people and computers on a scale untainted by human bias. Such universal tests should even be able to spot a bot that is far smarter than a human.

-- Paul Marks

'the infinite succession of soft and radiant forms'

If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weed curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, grange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.

-- so wrote Edmund Gosse, recalling his boyhood seashore explorations on the Devon coast with his father in the 1850s.

News from Scotland, including (supposedly) the first sighting in British waters of the ancient amphioxus, or lancelet, indicates that at least a few inshore locations in the north of this island have survived the ravages of more than a century of intense fishing and other depredations. Could this be a token of more to come, and of a measure of recovery?

Black iron snail

A scaly foot sea snail from the Dragon Vent. The scales are covered with layers of pure pyrite and iron sulphide.

Potbelly hill

Nearly all the women were wearing head scarves, even burkas. I saw one woman so pious that her burka didn't even have an opening for her eyes. She was leaving a cell-phone store, accompanied by a teen-age boy wearing a T-shirt that said "RELAX, MAN," over a picture of an ice-cream cone playing en electric guitar. You wouldn't think an ice cream could play a electric guitar, or would want to. I was reminded of Schmidt's hypothesis [with respect to Göbekli Tepe] that hybrid creatures, unknown to neolithic man, are particular to highly developed cultures - cultures which have achieved distance from and fear of nature. If archeologists of the future found this T-shirt, they would know that ours had been a civilization of great refinement.

-- from The Sanctuary by Elif Batuman, who says that she likes to think that 'when it comes to identifying a headless man with an erection, I'm as sharp-eyed as the next person.'

Among the things about Göbekli Tepe that I did not know, and learned from Batuman's piece, is archaeologists speculate that the weak foundations of the stones may have had some acoustic purpose: perhaps the pillars were meant to hum in the wind. (See this)