Last two by Marsh, for now

Ngaio Marsh. Overture to Death (1939) The Vale of Pen Cuckoo: an inoffensive old house inhabited by a squire, his son, and his cousin. A plain old church and adjacent vicarage inhabited by the vicar and his daughter. A doctor with an invalid wife, attracted to a newcomer who is too smart by half. Two women of a certain age infatuated with the vicar, hating each other, and vying for the right to play the overture to the play. The play is put on to raise funds to replace the piano in the village hall. Someone rigs that  piano with a gun aimed at the player. The gun goes off when the victim treads on the loud pedal.
     Alleyn untangles the clues, manages to construct an accurate timetable, and finds that everything hinges on a box used to elevate a watcher to window level. The charm of the book is its character drawing. Marsh had a sharp eye for foolishness, and for the evil done by people who consider themselves respectable. She also has some sympathy for people who suffer from a stunted emotional life. Well done. ***

Ngaio Marsh. Death and the Dancing Footman (1942) Another case that’s solved by constructing a precise timetable, this time made possible a by a footman who dances to Boomps-A-Daisy, a popular tune he hears on the radio. The characters aren’t as interesting as usual. The setting is a weekend party that the host has deliberately arranged to bring antagonistic people together. We know from the beginning that this will result in murder. The puzzle is first, who will be the victim; and second, how it was done. A handy snow storm forces the unwelcome conclusion that the murderer is one of the guests.
     Alleyn sorts it all, of course. The solution is suitably satisfying in terms of poetic justice, and a romance blossoms. Marsh has a soft spot for lovers. She also tries her hand at natural disaster: her description of a car journey through a snow-covered wilderness is a kind of set piece.  ***

Two more by Marsh

Ngaio Marsh. Death In A White Tie (1938) It’s The Season. Lord Robert “Bunchy” Gospell, a friend of Alleyn and many other people, is found dead in a taxi after a specially successful coming out party. He has been keeping eyes and ears open to discover what he can of a blackmail racket. That was the motive for killing him. The murderer has ben very, very clever, but his eye and taste for elegant Renaissance objets do him in. That, and very careful tracing of the times different people were able to overhear Bunchy’s call to Alleyn.
     Bunchy at one point reflects on the cruelty of dragging young women through the debutante season, of placing them so blatantly on show for the marriage market. He’s a kind man, and  always dances with some of the wallflowers. Troy was at the ball, so Alleyn can plead his suit. Marsh is very good on the social and psychological effects of the Season. She flubs Alleyn’s love story. She’s trying for some kind of noble renunciation in case Troy rejects Alleyn, I think, and it doesn’t work. The glimpses in the later books of the Alleyns as a married couple and parents are more convincing.
     There’s some casual and silly racism here, too. Definitely of the times, and a reminder that current attempts to present a less offensive version of the past don’t work well. Marsh usually expresses irritation and more at racist attitudes, so its presence here jars.
     Nevertheless, a good puzzle, and a pretty good portrait of the upper classes behaving and misbehaving. ***

Ngaio Marsh. Death at the Bar (1939) Three friends arrive for their annual holiday in Ottercombe, an isolated fishing village with a cosy pub. One of them, a vain barrister, prods a recently a established local man. Later, the barrister dies of cyanide poisoning. The several other people with reason to dislike him create the maze that Alleyn and Fox must traverse. All’s well that ends well, including the obligatory romance. A nicely done puzzle, as usual, and nicely done semi-satiric portraits of te common vices of vanity, lechery, jealousy, envy, and so on. I’m still on a Marsh binge, and enjoyed rereading this novel. ***

Five by Marsh

Ngaio Marsh. Death of a Peer (1940) (A Surfeit of Lampreys [1941] in the UK) The Lampreys are a charming bunch of aristocratic ne’er-do-wells, with appallingly vague notions of how to spend money (when they’ve got it). They’ve managed to survive on luck. But now they really have run out of money, and Lord Charles’s appeal to his older brother, Lord Wutherwood and Rune, elicits an ill-tempered refusal. A few minutes later Wutherwood falls out of the lift, dying of a nasty skewer in the eye. Alleyn and crew do a nice bit of ‘teckery as usual, but the charm of this novel is the family, and the portrait of their New Zealand friend. She’s a nice girl, pleasantly overwhelmed by London, and an essential witness.

     The murderer could have been one of the family, but Marsh, I think, couldn’t bear to let one of these delightful specimens hang, so one of the servants dunit. That’s not a spoiler, as several servants have motive enough.
     A pleasant entertainment. Marsh always delivers, even when she’s not at the top of her form. **½

Ngaio Marsh. Dead Water. (1963) A boy suffers from warty hands and bullying. A “lady in green” at the spring tells him to wash his hands in the stream. He does so, and his warts disappear. Of course an industry grows up around this event. The owner of the property wants the whole thing shut down, and arrives to enforce her will. A day or so later, one of the promoters is found dead at the spring. Personal as well as business rivalries and entanglements make Alleyn’s job more difficult than usual. Marsh shows us a mix of greed, naive faith, passionate partisanship, cool skepticism, jealousy, and sundry other human failings. Above average for Marsh. It was one of the novels adapted for the TV series starring Patrick Malahide. ***.

Ngaio Marsh. Death in Ecstasy (1936) Nigel Bathgate, with nothing to do, visits the Church of the Sacred Flame, a syncretic cult designed to separate the credulous from their pennies and pounds. He witness the death of a Chosen Virgin at the moment of induction into that blessed state. An early Alleyn, he’s still somewhat too self-consciously facetious. Bathgate acts both as note-taker and reporter. Marsh indulges her talent for satire and social comedy. The motive for murder was money, as it often is. Well done entertainment, with nicely modulated touches of melodrama, and a subtext warning against peculiar creeds. I enjoyed this re-read.
     My copy was given me by my Aunt Rosemary. It’s a Penguin printed in 1941, with the green-for-crime cover of a genuine Penguin paperback, and a tea stain. Apparently a well-read copy on thin newsprint, now browning around the edges. On the last page it invites readers to deposit the book at any Post Office for distribution to the armed forces. The back cover is an advert for Pears soap, at 6d a bar.  ***
 

Ngaio Marsh. Enter a Murderer (1935) The second Alleyn mystery. The puzzle is plausibly set and solved. The setting is a theatre company, the murder occurs on stage, Alleyn happens to be in the audience courtesy of Nigel Bathgate, whose friend Frank Gardener plays the lead. Alleyn’s still an imitation of the early Wimsey, but Marsh’s skill at keeping up the  narrative pace allows us to be swept along on a pleasant wave of make-believe. I enjoyed this re-read, not least because of the convincing ambience of the theatre. Well done. **½

    

Ngaio Marsh. Vintage Murder (1937) Alleyn’s in New Zealand, riding the train to Middleton, where the theatre company that’s also on the train will be performing. Once again, Marsh convinces us of the reality of her theatrical setting. The actors, the managers, the stage staff, all ring true. The opening chapter tells of the journey through the New Zealand night. As a set piece, one of the best descriptions of train travel I’ve read.
     The murder of the company’s manager and majority owner leads to revelations of past and present rivalries and a few crucial secrets swimming among the red herrings. This is the fifth Alleyn. Marsh has mastered the genre, and shows increasing confidence in her writing. These novels are now historical documents. Comparison with what once was contemporary fiction shows what current attempts at historical fiction usually get it wrong. A pleasurable re-read. ***

What is Life? A comment on Viruses

There have been many definitions of “life”. I think the simplest definition of life is this one: Life is a system that acquires the substances and energy needed to continue to exist and to reproduce. If it fails to do this, it ceases to exist. Any such system is an organism.

By that definition, a virus is alive. It’s the simplest form of life: a packet of genetic information that drifts about until it latches onto a cell that it can invade. It then uses the cell to acquire the substance and energy it needs in order to reproduce.

Since a virus needs another organism to survive and reproduce, it is a parasite. Most parasites either do not harm their hosts or provide some benefit. A few (mostly microbes) are necessary for their host’s well-being and even continued existence. A few parasites harm their hosts, and some kill their hosts. A parasite species will survive only as long as its hosts do not die out.

It’s likely that many viruses, like many microbes, are not merely beneficial but necessary for their hosts’ well being. We know enough about bacteria, for example, to know that without them we would have trouble digesting much of our food. We don’t know that much about viruses. But we do know that some of them kill bacteria that are dangerous to us. We also know that viruses can transport bits of DNA between species, and that this sometimes results in beneficial changes to an organism’s genome.

What all this amounts to is that we are woefully ignorant of viruses’ roles in the web of life. The handful that bother us create the impression that we would be better off without them. That is certainly a false impression. We just don’t know enough. Yet.

Footnote: Very early on, some computer programmers wrote small programs with a rather strange property: they would use the computer's operating system to write copies of themselves into every available memory space. Rewriting these programs so that they would send copies of themselves to other computers was the next step. Thus the computer virus. Are they alive? Most of them are not. To be alive, the program would have to also prevent the computer from shutting down, thus maintaining the energy it needs for continued existence.

Do we live in a simulation? (long read)

A comment on David Chalmers’ ideas about virtual reality

Abstract: I argue that the brain’s construction of our experience is in fact a simulation, and consider some of the implications of this view.

David Chalmers has recently been noticed for his ruminations about whether we live in a virtual reality (or simulation), and whether we could tell. In an interview published in New Scientist, he claims that we could not know whether we are living in a simulation. (1) On CBC’s radio program Quirks and Quarks he was one of three people asked this question (2), and Mary Hynes interviewed him on Tapestry. (3) Several of his discussions around this topic are available online: a search on “David Chalmers virtual reality” will present a dozen or more examples.

My answer is, “Of course we live in a simulation. It’s the one created by our brains.” (4) What’s more, the “I” that experiences this simulation is itself part of the simulation. So it would be more accurate to say that “We live as a simulation created by our brains.”

As asked, the question assumes that “I” is somehow distinct from the simulation. That assumption is misleading. Its explicit formulation dates from Descartes, who assumed that mind (or perhaps soul, he’s not very clear on the distinction) and body are separate. He does this because we experience our bodies. But that experience of my body is the “I” that experiences it. There is no separate experience. That is, there is no evidence that “I” can experience anything other than what my body and brain present as reality, which includes the experience of “I”. Thus, the simulation of reality includes “I”. (5)

Elsewhere, Chalmers has claimed that consciousness is the hard problem. Yes it is, if one assumes that “I” is separate from the reality it experiences. However, if “I” and experienced reality are one, then “I” is what is simulated as the experiencer.

Each of us lives as their own simulation. We can compare those simulations by converting them into other simulations. We can talk about our experience, or make pictures, or replicate the situation in the presence of other people, or ask others to do what we did. (6) What’s important about these comparisons is that we can detect differences, and we can detect them reliably. For example, I don’t know whether you see red or green as I do, but we can tell whether or not we see the same or similar differences between red and green. I don’t know how you see Aunt Emily, but we can both recognise that a photo is or is not a picture of her. We can also tell whether we both see that one portrait is a painting and another is a photograph. And that one shows her as a girl, and the other as an old lady. (7)

Science is the attempt to describe whatever it is that the brain simulates. That is, science is an attempt to create a simulation that is the same for everyone. Thus, a scientific theory is an attempt to eliminate the differences between our individual simulations. Suppose I can’t see the same red/green difference that you see, yet by some method we can both detect the same difference between red and green. One method would be to measure the frequency of red and green light, and agree that we observe the same measurements. By this method we have filtered out those idiosyncratic differences caused by the differences in our retinal cells and brains. We have created a simulation (the measurements) that we have in common. We have replaced our individual “subjective” simulations with a common “objective” one. We infer that the shared method of seeing red/green difference must therefore be closer to whatever it is that our simulation simulates. We call that whatever-it-is “reality”. But in fact all we ever do is compare simulations.

Scientists have discovered that aspects that can be mathematised are constant in a way that other aspects are not. This relates to what Wigner called the “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. (8) I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all. Mathematics is the part of language that translates exactly from one language to another; it’s a lossless translation. For example, no matter how the symbols are pronounced, the algebraic expression (a+b=c) means exactly the same in every language. (9) As every multi-lingual person knows, there is something lost in the translation of every other kind of speech. Each language creates a different simulation; neither their elements nor the relationship between elements map exactly onto each other. Languages are not congruent simulations; they are similar but not identical. The constancy of mathematics across languages preserves what’s constant across simulations. (10)

Mathematics works by abstraction. Moreover, it does not describe content, but structure. A mathematical statement expresses a relationship between two or more entities. The red/green difference can be expressed as a difference in wavelength: red is larger than green. This statement says nothing about the experience of red and green that we may or may not share, nor does it say anything about the quality we label “colour”. It states only that one aspect of our experience of the colours red and green is constant. It also states that we must take care to arrange our experience so that this constancy is revealed.

The consequence is that the closer science gets to a universal simulation, the more abstract that simulation becomes. It is finally pure structure. The most abstract simulation is that created by physics. Einstein’s relativity theories are descriptions of structure. Special relativity describes how the shape of one person’s experience can be precisely transformed into the shape of another person’s experience, given that we know their relative velocities. General relativity goes a step further and describes our experience of reality in terms of its space-time structure. Quantum physics describes interactions, that is, the behaviour of entities that behave differently (for example like waves or particles) depending on context. Hence what we can know about them is context bound. What’s more, context defines events and vice versa. Thus, quantum physics describes reality in terms of event-contexts.

But neither theory describes whatever it is that we label reality. They describe structures, the structure of space-time in the one case, and the structure of event-contexts in the other.    

Both theories are highly abstract. They are highly reliable and precise in predicting how we will experience those abstract aspects. Hence the belief that these more abstract descriptions are truer descriptions of reality than the more concrete subjective simulations of reality that our brains create. I don’t think that belief is justified. What’s more, I think the question of what’s real is an unanswerable one. We know our own experience, because we are that experience. We can know some of what each other’s experiences have in common, because we can talk about them, or make pictures of them, or express aspects of them in music and dance, or describe them using mathematics.

                                     

In the New Scientist interview, Chalmers says “I think, at the very least, virtual worlds [created by virtual reality devices] provide a particularly pure illustration of Descartes’s problem.” Descartes had a problem because he assumed not only that body and mind are separate entities, but that one is physical and the other is not. (11) Chalmers perpetuates Descartes error by asking whether we can know whether we “live in” a simulation. That question makes sense only if “I” and the simulation are ontologically distinct entities. (12) Assuming that distinction begs the question: If “I” is not an essential part of the simulation, then of course we can know “I” is “living in” that simulation. The question is interesting, that is productive, if and only if “I” is an essential part of the simulation.

The brain creates the experience of reality, including “I” as the experiencer of that reality. We can know no other. It is the brain’s creation of our experience that enables “virtual reality” devices. What’s significant about these devices is that they present the “first-person” viewpoint. That is, they present the same structure as the subjective reality that they imitate. They are incomplete, however, because they do not simulate the proprioception necessary to experience the 1st person viewpoint as “I”. (13)

Chalmers ends his New Scientist interview with “A sort of structuralist conception of reality – that the world isn’t intrinsically the way we thought it was, but still has a similar sort of structure – is very strongly suggested by modern science.” I think he’s right. The brain’s simulation of reality is enough like reality, whatever reality “really is”, that we survive quite well. But exactly how much it is like reality can’t be decided. The theories of physics are highly abstract descriptions of some aspects of the structure of our experience of reality, and that is the best we can do.

Notes
(1) Interview with David Chalmers in New Scientist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25333710-900-david-chalmers-interview-virtual-reality-is-as-real-as-real-reality/

(2) Broadcast 2022-03-05. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-51-quirks-and-quarks/clip/15898721-could-living-computer-simulation-and-were-tell

(3) Broadcast 2022-08-23 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/are-we-living-in-a-simulation-look-to-free-guy-not-the-matrix-for-answers-says-david-chalmers-1.6393525

(4) Here’s one explanation of how the brain does this; an online search will garner many more: https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/reality-constructed-your-brain-here-s-what-means-and-why-it-matters

(5 ) Every creature with a brain computes some simulation of reality. The bar for accuracy and completeness is rather low. The simulation needs only to be good enough to raise the odds that the creature will survive long enough to reproduce. For example, a frog reacts to a moving fly-size blob, but not to a static one. It will try to catch a raisin tossed past it, but will ignore a dead fly lying near it.

(6) The arts can create simulations of realities that don’t exist, and even of realities that can’t exist. We call these simulations “fictions”. Simulations of reality are called “history”, “physics” “reports”, “portraits”, "descriptions", etc. We have many terms for simulations, because we can make so many different kinds of them.

(7) These comparisons depend on our memories of Aunt Emily. That is, we compare one simulation (the photo of Aunt Emily) with another (our memories of Aunt Emily).

(8) http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableEffectiveness.pdf

(9) Wigner writes “My principal aim is to illuminate it from several sides. The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” It seems to me that this statement encapsulates Wigner’s puzzlement. I think he fails to notice that mathematics is a component of language. It is not a separate language.
    All known languages include ways of expressing or describing number, size, shape, spatial and temporal relations, collections of things (sets), kinship (classification), rates of change, etc. These terms label mathematical concepts. The number and sophistication of mathematical terms or concepts varies between cultures, but all cultures have mathematical concepts. These concepts are used to communicate individual experience just as the rest of language is used.
    Mathematics begins as an attempt to regularise trade, property, kinship obligations and rights, etc. That is, mathematics is part of the attempt to find those common elements of our individual experience that satisfy our desire for justice, fairness, equity, connection, community, etc.
    Mathematics as a method for enabling and enforcing justice, fairness, equity and so on was formalised in rules of kinship rights and obligations in pre-literate tribal societies, and such rules still make up an essential part of what we experience as our way of life. Literate societies wrote down these rules, and added recipes for calculating the requisite quantities.
    Mathematics as a discipline begins with Euclid’s attempt to organise the concepts into a logical structure. This logical structure translates exactly from one language to another.

(10) Linguists refer to “idiolects”, our idiosyncratic versions of our common language. That idiosyncrasy is in fact the definition of “style”. To understand someone is to translate their idiolect into one’s own, a process we perform almost entirely without conscious awareness. That unconscious translation is one source of mutual misunderstanding. See Steiner (1975).

(11) Another problem generated by the mind-body dichotomy is expressed as “How can the non-physical mind cause physical effects?”

(12) Another version of this problem is whether we would ever know whether we were minds uploaded into a computer.

(13) It’s not clear how a virtual reality systems could provide proprioception. Some kind of body-suit could provide external sensory inputs, but it couldn’t provide internal ones. Perhaps inputs through the brainstem could do it, but experimentation would raise interesting ethical problems. The study of the sensations produced by training simulators is instructive: Our brains can and often will construct more complex sensory experiences than the actual sensory data provide.

Bibliography
Many thinkers have stimulated my ideas. I am grateful to them all. The following represents a small selection of the sources most relevant to this paper.

Damasio, A: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994; revised 2005)
Damasio, A: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999)
Gelernter, David H: The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (1994)
Hawking, Stephen: The Theory of Everything (2002)
Hofstadter Douglas & Dennett, Daniel: The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981)
Hofstadter, Douglas: Gödel, Esher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
Hofstadter, Douglas: I Am a Strange Loop (2007)
Kraus, Lawrence: A Universe From Nothing (2012)
Norman, Donald A.: The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988)
Rees, Martin: Just Six Numbers (1999)
Rosenfeld, Israel: The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten. (1991)
Sacks, O: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985
Sacks, O: The Island of the Colorblind (1997)
Sacks, O: The Mind's Eye (2010)
Steiner, George: After Babel (1975)

2022-04-14