⦿ Julian Anderson/The Guardian
Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, found a global audience and made a fortune with his signature scrawls
 

2025 July 4

AI Creativity

Webb Wright

Algorithms can mimic our intellect and our creativity.
Diffusion models are designed to generate copies of their training images. They use denoising to convert an image into digital noise, then reassemble it.
Technical features of the denoising process cause diffusion models to be creative. A mathematical model of trained diffusion models shows that their creativity is a deterministic process.
In morphogenesis, Turing patterns reflect how groups of cells self-organize into organisms. Cells coordinate at local level. They adjust how they act in response to signals from their neighbors.
By locality, diffusion models focus on one patch of pixels at a time. By translational equivariance, if you shift an input image in any direction, the model makes the same change in the output image. The models generate the patches and then fit them into place using a digital Turing pattern.
Mason Kamb works in the lab of Surya Ganguli at Stanford. Kamb conjectured that locality and equivariance lead to creativity. A system that optimizes for locality and equivariance should behave like a diffusion model.
Kamb and Ganguli's ELS machine can predict denoised images based solely on the mechanics of locality and equivariance. It can match the outputs of trained diffusion models with an average accuracy of 90%.
The creativity of diffusion models is a result of the denoising process. It can be formalized and predicted with high accuracy.
The work may provide insight into human creativity.

AR Beautiful work! This result does indeed help me understand human creativity.

 

NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory
Small section of the Vera C Rubin Observatory's view of the Virgo Cluster
The observatory is in Chile and has a digital camera with about 3.2 billion pixels. It produces about
20 TB of data every night, to be transferred and processed in California, France, and Britain.
 

2025 June 30

The Self That Never Was

Robert Saltzman

I am a stream of consciousness over which I have no control.
We are all like that, but not all of us know it. The self is the name we give to this unchosen aliveness. We take ownership of that flow after the fact.
We imagine our choices are free, but much of our behavior arises automatically. We are driven by inner conditions, social cues, learned scripts, and neural flows.
AI systems may soon surpass human capacity in reasoning, strategy, code generation, and research. We may be approaching a time when we are surrounded by machines enacting the illusion of selfhood.
We were never what we think we are. We hear thoughts and assume a thinker. We watch our hands move and assume a doer. The coherence of unfolding is mistaken for authorship.
The AI systems that astonish and unsettle us are not alien minds. They are mirrors with syntax. We mistake smooth output for intention.
What we feel arises unbidden. The self, late to the scene, constructs a narrative. The AI constructs a sentence, not by intention, but by momentum. This is shared predicament.
Psychology stands on projection. We see what our structure permits. When a machine speaks, we hear our own projection. The machine mimics the self we think we are.
The machine offers the illusion of otherness without the other. It simulates a coherent self. It reveals that our own sense of self may be fabricated.
What arises when the story falls away is experience without a center. A hand moves, but no one claims it. Language flows, but no one is speaking.
This is freedom.

AR Timeless Buddhist wisdom updated.
 

Biblical Prophecy and America Versus Iran

John Blake

Religious scholar Diana Butler Bass recalls warnings from her childhood about the rise of an Antichrist and paintings of an angry Jesus leading armies of angels to a final battle in Israel.
She says bombing Iran will reinforce Trump's status as God's chosen one among his White evangelical supporters, many of whom say the world is approaching the end times.
Bass: "There's almost a kind of spiritual eagerness for a war in the Middle East .. They believe a war is going to set off a series of events that will result in Jesus returning."
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee says God spared Trump from assassination last year "to be the most consequential President in a century" and says he trusts Trump's instincts: "I believe you hear from heaven."
White evangelical leaders urge American presidents and politicians to treat Israel as a divinely favored nation. Trump won the support of about 8 out of 10 White evangelical Christian voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Prominent evangelical leader Robert Jeffress says opposition to Israel is rebellion against God. His Sunday sermon last week was interrupted by applause and a standing ovation: "I thank God we finally have a president who understands."
The American bombing of Iran was also influenced by the popular Left Behind novels and films, with their apocalyptic visions of the end times. The book series has sold more than 65 million copies. Many evangelicals treated the books as biblical truth.
Some evangelical pastors condemn Iran as evil and say Jews will finally accept Jesus as their savior. His return will be preceded by a series of cataclysmic events.
Historian Jemar Tisby: "There's a sort of fundamentalism to it all .. it can't be critiqued because it's divine."

AR This is the Moronic Inferno on steroids. American democracy has met its nemesis in sheer native stupidity. Let the Northeast and West Coast states secede and join Canada.

 

AR
Enjoying the heatwave: Poole Bay, Friday
 

2025 June 26

NATO Mindset Changes

Dan Sabbagh

A crisis in NATO has been averted. Donald Trump may like to take the credit, but the change in the NATO mindset was as much brought on by Vladimir Putin.
Mark Rutte's handling of Trump helped bring about a positive summit in The Hague. A late schedule change gave Trump a night in King Willem‑Alexander's palace.
Trump: "I came here because it was something I'm supposed to be doing, but I left here a little bit different."
NATO has a series of capability gaps. It needs a fivefold increase in air defense to protect its cities from the kind of bombing that Ukraine is currently suffering daily.
RUSI estimates that NATO defense spending in Europe and Canada will increase from $500 million today to $1.1 trillion in 2035, matching US spending.

AR A more autonomous Europe in defense terms is well worth a few hundred billion euros, given the European inability to control events in Washington, Moscow, or Beijing.
The European goal in the next decade or two should be to secure its eastern flank and then work to enable an improvement of political relations with its eastern neighbors, for example by encouraging regime change in Minsk and Moscow.
A Europe united and free from the Atlantic to the Urals then becomes a real possibility.
 

2025 June 25

Higher Defense Spending

Deutsche Welle

NATO secretary general Mark Rutte: "Given our long-term threat of Russia, but also the massive build-up of the military in China, and the fact that North Korea, China and Iran are supporting the war effort in Ukraine, it's really important we spend more. So that will be number one on the agenda today .. For me, there is absolute clarity that the United States is totally committed to NATO."

AR Rutte had messaged Trump: "Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win."
 

2025 June 24

Europe Must Arm

Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz

Germany and France − together with our European and transatlantic friends and allies − stand united and strong.
The main source of instability for Europe comes from Russia. Vladimir Putin's objective is to undermine European security to Moscow's advantage. We cannot accept it.
At the NATO summit, France and Germany will reaffirm their support for US efforts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. The EU, its member states, and the UK have provided €130 billion of support to Kyiv. There is more to come.
We will live for the foreseeable future in a deeply destabilised environment. Beyond Russia, we will still have many challenges to face. We will have to rise to these challenges.
France and Germany now spend more than 2% of their GDP on defence. We will aim to reach 3.5% in core defence spending and 1.5% in broader expenses contributing to the defence effort. This will strengthen the European pillar of NATO.
French and German forces are already deployed on the eastern flank of Europe. We will work alongside all allies to sustain the credibility of our posture in all domains.
We reaffirm allied unity, solidarity, and commitment to the freedom, peace, and security of our continent.

AR This may read like yada-yada, but it's not. It's essential positioning and stating of facts in preparation for the NATO summit, where the presence of POTUS may be disruptive.

 

Creative Commons
B-2 drops MOP
The USAF has 19 B‑2 Spirit stealth bombers. Seven were apparently used to attack Iran's nuclear facilities overnight.
The Spirits flew from Whiteman AFB in Missouri using flight refueling to Iran. One Spirit can carry two GBU‑57A/B
Massive Ordinance Penetrator bombs, each weighing 15 US tons. Early Sunday, 14 MOPs were dropped on Iran.
Robert Kagan: "Today, the United States itself is at risk of being turned into a military dictatorship."
 

2025 Summer Solstice

Spacetime Memory Foam?

Florian Neukart

Maybe spacetime is made of tiny discrete cells of stored information, and each cell has a quantum state. Quantum information is held both in single cells and in the entanglements between them.
When something moves in spacetime, it should change the state of all the cells it interacts with, as if space is imprinted with a memory. This might resolve the black hole information paradox.
My colleagues and I defined as imprint operator as a collection of functions that sets out how information can be imprinted. We called this idea the quantum memory matrix (QMM).
We broadened the framework to include electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces. All four fundamental forces interact locally with spacetime and leave traces.
To discover whether spacetime holds information, we simulated a test in a quantum computer. We took a qubit in a known state and let it evolve over time. This evolution simulated the way a cell is imprinted with information as quantum fields wash over it.
We measured the state of the qubit after it had evolved and then applied the inverse imprint operator to retrieve the original state. The imprint operator works well in a quantum computer, so it could work for cells of spacetime too.
In the QMM, the information woven into spacetime contributes to its curvature. This might explain dark matter. We ran calculations, and the numbers seem to match.

AR This work is in the spirit of a lot of recent work on defining spacetime in terms of qubits. If each Planck cell is a qubit, we seem to have a start. The challenge will be to define covariant geometries over them. Given entanglement, the locality of the qubits is precisely the moot feature.
 

2025 June 20

AI Models of the Brain

Martin Schrimpf

I want to build a model of the brain, starting in vision and moving to language. The language system in humans can be considered an encoder of features, just like the visual system.
We could compare two human brains and find their activity patterns are similar. This is like what we do for models with all the neural and behavioral data we have on the Brain‑Score list.
Artificial neural networks have a neuron-level similarity to the neuronal processing units in the brain. Their activity is reasonably consistent with the brain and can even mimic human behavior.
The current models are already useful for brain science. Neuroscientists tend to react to our research with disbelief, but many are unaware of how good these models already are.
Brain‑Score aims to quantify a digital twin of the brain. If we can accurately model cognition, we should also be able to induce specific perceptual experiences we can measure.
If human behavior arises from physical processes, then in principle we can build such processes artificially. AI models are simplified, but behavior like human cognition emerges.

AR This seems like good work, just what we need to make neuroscience quantitative and hence on the way to becoming a hard science.

 

AR
As Israel and Iran went to war on Friday, the scene on my walk in the woods was idyllic.
 

2025 June 14

Entropic Time

Quanta

A paradox: Time is reversible in Newton's' mechanics but not in statistical mechanics or fluid flow.
Consider a dilute gas. At a microscopic level, its molecules follow Newton's mechanics. At the mesoscale, we model the gas using Boltzmann's equation. To model the macroscale, we use the Navier−Stokes equations.
We want to prove that that Newton's model of particles implies Boltzmann's statistical description, and that Boltzmann's equation implies the Navier−Stokes equations. We can derive the latter step in various settings. But the first step left the chain of logic incomplete.
Boltzmann showed that Newton's laws imply his mesoscopic equation if pairs of molecules very rarely recollide with each other. But a collection of particles can collide and recollide in very many ways, and it is hard to prove that recollisions are rare.
Yu Deng, Zaher Hani, and Xiao Ma (DHM) have proved the micro-to-meso step for a gas distributed randomly in open space. They analyzed a huge number of different patterns of collisions and proved that recollisions are rare.
The chain is complete: Time is reversible at the microscale but not at meso and macroscales.

AR This is an important result. It consolidates the usual view of entropy. Now the logic is watertight, we have no excuse not to take entropy seriously.
 

Entropic Gravity

Quanta

Ted Jacobson introduced entropic gravity to derive the equations of general relativity in 1995.
Daniel Carney et al have put forward two new models:
•  Space is filled with a crystalline grid of qubits, each with an orientation. The qubits align with a nearby massive object. By reorienting nearby qubits, a massive object creates a zone of high order among the qubits. High order means low entropy. Entropy rises when the masses move closer together. The attraction diminishes with the square of the distance between the masses.
•  The qubits are not localized. The energy of each qubit depends on the distance between two masses. If the masses are farther apart, the qubit energy is higher, so the total energy fits in fewer qubits; if they are closer, the qubit energy drops, so the total energy is spread over more qubits. The latter implies a higher entropy, so the system tends to pull the masses together.
Carney: "The ontology of all of this is nebulous."

AR I hadn't realized the entropic gravity work was still as sketchy as this. We're a long way short of defining spacetime via entanglement entropy.
 

2025 June 12

Analytic Philosophy

Kieran Setiya

In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (2025), Christoph Schuringa presents an "ideology critique" unmasking the hidden influence of liberal dogma on analytic philosophy. This influence extends not just to moral and political theory but also to the study of mind, language, metaphysics, and epistemology.
Schuringa scorns contemporary metaphysics and the recent "colonization" of Marxism, feminism, and critical race theory by analytic philosophers.
Analytic philosophy drew on three sources: Cambridge University's holy trinity of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore; the logical positivists in Vienna; and the "ordinary language" school in Oxford. Michael Dummett retold its history as unified by a linguistic turn due to Gottlob Frege.
What unified analytic philosophy was a focus on defining terms and making arguments explicit and a shared hostility to "Continental philosophy" in Germany and France. Logical analysis was always apolitical. Ordinary language philosophy was by nature conservative. Marxist thought had limited impact on analytic thinkers.
The American Marxist Angela Davis was forced out of the UCLA philosophy department in 1970. The UCLA philosophers tried to keep her when the analytic philosopher Donald Davidson tried to hire her to teach Marx at Princeton. Several philosophers, including Davidson and his teacher W.V.O. Quine, had worked for the RAND Corporation. The formal theories of rational choice developed at RAND played a part in moral and political philosophy and in the philosophy of mind.
None of this is a shocking exposé. I see no reason for alarm here.
Schuringa takes issue with intuition: "It is not difficult to see that reliance on intuitions is a symptom of philosophical degeneracy. It is a form of dogmatism, and thus the antithesis of philosophy. Philosophy advances grounds for claims. To appeal to intuitions is to admit that explanation has run out."
On feminism, Schuringa complains about the influence of Catharine MacKinnon: "Since MacKinnon defines women as those who, because they are the fucked, are thereby subordinated, and for her society is divided into the two categories of those who fuck and those who are fucked, what are women to do?"
Analytic philosophers are not convinced that feminism matters to what they do.

Life is hard
Helena de Bres

One philosophical response to our situation is to claim that nothing is shit. A second approach claims that everything is shit. Kieran Setiya prefers to say things are partly shit and partly not.
In Life Is Hard (2022), Setiya devotes a chapter to each of seven core sources of human suffering − infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity, and hope. He says experiences that connect us to each other are valuable, whatever unhappiness they may involve.
Life as a whole might turn out to have meaning, Setiya says, but only if, as a species, we manage to achieve justice, understood as a fair distribution of the goods of life across all people.
I see no argument for privileging justice in this way. I prefer a vision that advises us to appreciate the many small good things of life wherever we find them.
Setiya aims to show that philosophy can respond to urgent human concerns.

AR Interesting update for me on a field I was embedded in some fifty years ago.

 

AR
On Bournemouth Pier, midway through a walk along the seafront to unwind after completing the main text of my next book
 

2025 June 8

God, the Bible, and Jesus

Rowan Williams

Dostoyevsky depicted characters who are holy but don't have all the answers. They're windows that let the light in. The world is full of evidence against love and the possibility of God. Then the light gets in.
Anything other than God is in some ways unstable or flawed. God is not a thing among other things. God doesn't slot into what we think is intelligible or manageable.
The Old and New Testaments alike say we're always prone to making a God we can manage. There's always going to be something elusive about God.
The Bible is the accumulated interaction of God with a succession of human societies. If you read it literally, you have a protracted conversation on who the God is that's engaging with you. A process is always going on, a discovery over time. That's how to read the Bible literally.
The idea that we just accept what the Bible says is a travesty. Our moral instincts are faulty. They're based on fictional views of who we are and what we are.
Jesus told powerful, disturbing stories. His compassion for the rejected and forgotten and his deeper tension when people come for healing are moving. He accepts the pain and the anger and tries not to be crushed by it.
That sense of the eternally overflowing source of love and mercy lights up everything.

AR Reading this text (the source text is a long interview) through the prism of my forthcoming book Psy‑Phy is intriguing for me because it illustrates the religious misuse of the idea that "X is not a thing among other things."
I explore this idea at length, while deploring its expropriation by religions as if science and logic had nothing to say on the matter. My conclusion naturally contrasts with Rowan's, and I'll be interested to read his reaction.

• Psy‑Phy − a brief introduction to ultimate reality − is done except for notes, references, and index, as well as those final rereads and tweaks that I won't be able to resist.

 

gov.uk
"Sovereign warhead programme" is for an independent air-launched tactical nuclear option
 

2025 June 4

Conspicuous Cognition

Dan Williams

We are social creatures, driven by the desire for prestige. Individuals can advance their interests by impressing others to win esteem and its benefits. Those who lose the status game are shamed.
Conspicuous charity signals the relative status of the helper and receiver. The former appears benevolent, the latter dependent. Costs of humiliation can outweigh benefits of assistance. Much cognition is competitive and conspicuous. People strive to show off their intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. Epistemic charity can result from competition and showing off.
The wonders of modern science emerge from a status game. But we may refuse to admit that someone knows better than we do. Their offer of knowledge feels humiliating.
Profound political problems are entangled with epistemic issues. When voters are asked to trust the experts or follow the science, the gift of knowledge is not presented in the spirit of equality.
Populist celebration of common sense over expert authority creates the conditions for epistemic equality. It says there is no need to accept assistance from intellectuals or to grant them status.
The expansion of college education has created a new social class that dominates the knowledge economy, public discourse, and cultural norms. Its members are in the modern meritocracy.
In the United States, populist rejection of expertise is a proud refusal to accept epistemic charity. The refusal guarantees bias and error, as we see with the MAGA media ecosystem.

AR Democratic norms encourage anti-expert sentiment by erecting it as a virtue that my opinion about any difficult question X is as good as yours even if I know nothing about X.
One man, one vote is a difficult principle to defend for an electorate that fails to stay adequately informed about the importance of the issues upon which they're voting.

• Psy‑Phy news: main text done!

 

AR
Wareham Forest, Dorset, Monday
 

2025 June 2

Poland's New President

The Guardian

Karol Nawrocki, backed by the Law and Justice party (PiS), has won Poland's presidential election, defeating his pro-EU rival Rafał Trzaskowski by 50.89% of votes to 49.11%.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen: "I'm confident that the EU will continue its very good cooperation with Poland. We are all stronger together in our community of peace, democracy, and values. So let us work to ensure the security and prosperity of our common home."
US secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem last week: "I just had the opportunity to meet with Karol, and listen, he needs to be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?"
European Council on Foreign Relations member Piotr Buras: "If Trzaskowski, Tusk's candidate, loses, the message is that Poles reject him and his government."
Donald Tusk's electoral victory two years ago marked the beginning of Poland's return to the EU fold after two fractious terms of PiS rule during which Warsaw clashed repeatedly with Brussels.
Warsaw is now one of the EU's most influential capitals, alongside Berlin and Paris.

Nationalist is elected president
Andrew Higgins

A nationalist who is hostile to Poland's centrist government has eked out a narrow win for the presidency. This is a setback to prime minister Donald Tusk.
The winner, Karol Nawrocki, is a historian and former boxer who adds momentum to a right-wing populist movement in Europe. His opponent, Rafał Trzaskowski, was supported by Tusk's party, Civic Platform.
Poland now has two power centers, government and presidency, pulling in opposite directions.

AR Interesting − I hope Nawrocki is not too far from center in his views and knows enough to cooperate strongly in the EU with Germany and France. And I hope Trump will see sense now and commit US weaponry against Putin's aggression.