Matters of Taste

There is a piece of wisdom from avant garde composer, John Cage, which goes something like this: if something is done for 2 minutes and it seems boring, try it for 4 minutes. If 4 is boring then try 8. If 8 is boring, then 16, etc. Eventually it will become interesting. This is an intriguing strategy from one of the 20th century's primary music thinkers. Often it is thought in many circles that less is more. But, sometimes, more is more and less is just, well, less. As a thinker myself, who also happens to be musical, ideas are an important currency. Recently, I've become very stagnated. I long to try other musical directions that I am simply unable to follow - primarily for financial reasons. I also feel that I've become stuck and am no longer content to repeat myself. In the last three months I have developed mostly longer pieces of 15-20 minutes in length. This has been rewarding and useful to me. They will forever be known as my "Berlin School" months. But there is only so many times you can repeat the trick. A thinker must always be moving on. Ideas get past their sell by date.

One constant thorn in the side when making music is the thorny subject of genre. I have never really set out to make music to fit a pre-existing genre. Or, at least, when I have it has always been the worst thing possible that has been produced. I mean total disaster. I understand that people have a need to categorise and classify things. Order of this kind seems to be a basic human need. But it can become lazy. Such a kind of order is also an open invitation to the iconoclastic or contrarian to refuse to fit in and to disappear somewhere between the cracks of classification. But, you will be saying, your most recent music is "Berlin School" and that is a genre. Yes, it is. But I didn't set out "to make some Berlin School". I'd been listening to it and kind of fell into it. The problem then is, of course, that you read the music is Berlin School and, since you don't like music you regard as Berlin School, you decide to totally ignore that music of mine. The classification has become a reason to exclude whole swathes of music (or art, or literature, or films, or whatever).

Matters of taste like this occur to us all every day. And, I must say, I don't like it. But I might as well sit on the shore and command the sea not to come in because no one can do anything about it. Taste is a given in life. Everyone has it and no one is in control of it. You do not sit there and decide your tastes by some deliberate process of reasoning. It just occurs to you that you like something or you don't. At no point is this a process you control. Its almost mystical. It follows that, since none of this is deliberate, you can neither take credit for, or be blamed for, your tastes. You like what you like and there is nothing more to say about it. I'm sure we all get caught up in scenarios where someone we know likes something we hate. I know just how annoying that can feel. You get caught up in it. But its really irrational and stupid to do so. No one deliberately chose their tastes. Of course, you can cultivate and explore certain tastes. But, more often than not, that just leads you on to other tastes and, sometimes, you even surprise yourself in the things you come to like and dislike.

My model human being in this respect, my ideal, is the "taste explorer". This is a person who is prepared to put their tastes to the test and try out new things, someone who is not prepared to be spoon fed whatever comes off the mainstream conveyor belt today. This is the opposite of a grazer. This is a person who not only goes outside and looks around but he, or she, actually turns over some rocks to see what is hiding underneath. Now, as we all know, nasty creepy crawlies lurk under rocks. But sometimes that can be interesting too. And, as I have grown older, I've learnt that life is not about clinging to the things you like and avoiding at all costs the things you don't. In fact (this is an open secret) you can often learn more from the things you don't like than from the things that you do. Tastes can serve a purpose and it is good to explore them and test them.

I come to this subject by way of the English comedian Stewart Lee. Lee is a comedian who openly embraces political correctness and is concerned to cultivate a certain image of disdain for the mainstream. (I should add that I'm a relatively recent fan of his act but would question a number of his personal beliefs.) He seems to glory in his love of obscure art of different kinds (including music). This quite often annoys his critics who berate and insult him for this obscurantist snobbishness. I was reading an interview with Lee from earlier in the year online and in it he referred to many musical acts I had never heard of and referred, as well, to what he regarded as his favourite album of all time, Hex Enduction Hour, a 1982 album by the British Art Punk band, The Fall. Unfortunately, in the same interview, he offhandedly referred to British Metal band, Iron Maiden, as "awful". Now I like Iron Maiden. I didn't like them at first but through exposure to them, thanks to a brother with a bedroom next door to mine, I grew to like them and still do to this day 30 years later. In contrast, until about 5 hours ago I had never once heard anything by The Fall (although I had heard lead singer, Mark E Smith, on a single by Inspiral Carpets).

Reading Lee's casual dismissal of Iron Maiden, a band beloved by not a small number of people worldwide and one with a legendary dedication to giving their fans value for money, I felt sad. I wondered why people have to dismiss things in such a way and mused that more often than not this is indicative of a casual judgment thrown out without any deep knowledge of the subject. I went for a walk and thought about it some more. Now, in the light of what I've already said, its very likely that Lee does not control whether he likes Iron Maiden or not. Do I control the fact I like them anymore than the fact he doesn't? No. So all this is silly. Its just matters of taste. We all have taste and none of us really control what we like. Stop being silly. But I did determine to do one thing to dignify the process a little of liking something or not. I determined that I would listen to Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall and come to some conclusion about it. And so I did. Now in my brain there was lodged some horrifically brief judgment on The Fall as "tuneless noise". I have no idea on what this notional judgment was based but I suspect it was based on my appraisal of the kinds of people who seem to like The Fall. (I have similar intuitions about people who like The Smiths or U2 whilst being more familiar with their work.) Whatever. That is now lost in the mists of time. But I listened. And it wasn't bad at all. Indeed, some of it I liked. I read that Mark E Smith, who is really all The Fall is, was a fan of Can, the German Krautrock band. The album I listened to was really an arty, punky Manchester, England version of that. So I challenged my tastes and my preconceptions and the sky didn't fall (!) in.

This all just makes me muse even more on the question of taste. I think that the question of what anyone's tastes are really ends up being an irrelevant one. The more pertinent focus is whether those tastes are static or movable, whether someone is open to new things or closed-minded. I have an online contact who makes music and he goes under the moniker of "Iceman Bob". I want to finish this article by saying a bit about his latest album "Magic City" in this regard.

I've been listening to Bob's music for a while. It isn't mainstream. It often isn't pretty. I'd even go as far as saying that sometimes I really don't like what I'm listening to. But, nevertheless, I persevere with it because there is something about Bob's music that is more important than petty questions of like and dislike. So often, as I hinted above, we like or dislike something based on the pigeon hole we think it fits in. Based on that judgment, we classify it as of interest or as something to forget about. The thing is, with Bob there really is no pigeon hole to fit his music into. Not only do I not know much about him but, from listening to the music itself, its really hard to tell what, if any, influences are behind it. Magic City is a prime example of this. It seems somehow sui generis, in a class of its own. It demands to be listened to not as an example of some genre but on its own terms. And I really like things like that. Such things demand to be listened to because here we have something new, something different. Its fair to say that if this album was easily classified as this or that I'd just ignore it. But it isn't and so I didn't.

Magic City, like all of Bob's albums, makes use of drums, synths and guitars. Often Bob seems happy to lay down some backing track and then play his various guitars over the top at random, performing a sort of crazy jazz-rock wandering. This is often uplifting to my ears. (His track "Garuda" from the album "New Directions" is one of my all time favourites in this respect.) That said, his lead electric guitar tone really does annoy me and I wish he would do more to vary it. Maybe this is an area he might concentrate on in the future, who knows? Or maybe he likes the sound he makes now? Its his choice at the end of the day. Anyway, this is a matter of personal taste and we have already covered that in this article. For the most part, Magic City uses a larger array of sounds than his previous albums and I welcome this. This album seems more experimental and imbued with a spirit of adventure and interest which kept me listening from start to finish without ever once having the urge to bail.

Overall, I was astounded listening to this album which, like most of Bob's work, isn't short. Here we have 11 tracks that are on average each 11 or 12 minutes long. So its close on 2 hours of music here. On Magic City Bob has shaken things up a little. He's not content to stick to a formula and churn out 11 variations of the same thing and I was happy to hear that (filtering my own issues of stagnation into my thinking, of course). "Consecration of the Ordinary", the first track, was especially different, making use of speech, amongst other things. The album was at times a very difficult listen but I regard that as no bad thing. More and more I am drawn to music that requires you be challenged to listen to it and asks you to measure yourself against it. I'm not sure this is Bob's intention. I think he is just doing what comes naturally and having fun. Fair enough. But I would say the music he produces is challenging and requires listeners that are up to the task of listening to it. If you want to go back to the lazy classifications I think Magic City would fit comfortably alongside a number of the German "Space Rock" or Kosmische albums of the early 1970s. That's the content of the music as well as the title, by the way. Being that I have recently been studying this body of work quite heavily, it was edifying to find similar music being made in Montana by an American in 2015.

In the end, I wouldn't recommend Magic City to everyone. Its far from mainstream and is really the musical explorations of a very interesting man. If you like German rock of the early 1970s you may be more inclined to like it but that is no guide. But, then again, as I've already said, its not so much about whether you might like this album or not but whether you are prepared to challenge your tastes and be opened up to new experiences. If so, Magic City would be a great challenge indeed.

You can hear Magic City by Iceman Bob HERE!

Are Human Beings Robots?: Our True Place in the Cosmos

I've spent the last several days thinking about robots and artificial intelligence. It seems there are quite a few people who are interested in this subject too. But my mind has wandered, as it is apt to do. (Question: do we control our minds or do our minds control us? Its not as easy to answer as you might think.) I found myself reading about cosmology and evolution to satiate a wide-ranging interest in humanity and what makes us, us. So this blog is going to kind of straddle the two stools of robots and the universe and probably do neither any justice at all. These blogs are just me thinking out loud, ok?

Last night I watched both the original Tron (which I had never seen aside from snippets) and Tron: Legacy (which I had seen once before). Both films are ostensibly about intelligent computer programs. 1982's original Tron was strangely compelling as a film. Its terribly out of date graphics and style was appealing and in a way that the sequel's weren't. Better does not always mean better it seems. There was something about the way the light cycle races in the original were better than the newer version. And the sound design in the original was much better (and it was Oscar nominated). But I digress into film criticism.

Both films, as I say, are set in computer worlds. It doesn't seem that there was much thought behind the setup though. Its simply a way to make a film about computers and programs. I have found, as I've watched films about computers and robots this week, that there is usually some throw away line somewhere about a robot or computer being "just a computer" or "just a robot" and "it can't think". It seems that at the conscious level "thinking" is taken to be a marker that shows how intelligent computers or robots are not like we humans. But this seems strange to me. Reasoning is surely a marker of something that makes us stand out in the animal kingdom. However, if anything could calculate then surely that's exactly the one thing that a computer or intelligent robot would be good at? But are thinking and reasoning and calculating all the same thing? Thinking clearly occurs in a number of different ways. There is not just logical reasoning or solving a problem. These kinds of things you could surely teach a computer to do very well at. (I recall to mind that a computer did beat Grand Master Gary Kasparov at chess.) There is also imaginative thinking and how good might an artificial intelligence be at that?

In thinking about this I come back to biology. Human beings are biological organisms. A computer or robot will never have to worry about feeling sick, needing to go to the toilet or having a tooth ache. It will never feel hot and need to take its jumper off. It will never need to tie shoes to its feet so that it can travel somewhere. This matters because these trivialities are the conditions of human life. Of course, you can say that computers may overheat or malfunction or a part may wear out. But are these merely analogous things or direct comparisons? I think it matters if something is biological or not and I think that makes a difference. Human beings feel things. They have intuitions that are only loosely connected to reasoning ability. They can be happy and they can be afraid. These things have physical, biological consequences. I think of Commander Data from Star Trek who was given an "emotion chip" that his creator, Dr Soong, made for him. When it was first put in Data briefly went nuts and it overloaded his neural net. Quite. But more than that, it melded to his circuits so that it couldn't be removed. By design. It seems the inventor in this fictional story rightly saw that emotions cannot be added and taken away at someone's discretion. If you have them, you have them. And you have to learn to live with them. That is our human condition and that is what the character Commander Data had to learn. So human beings cannot be reduced to intelligent functions or reasoning power. These things are as much human as the fact that every once in a while you will need to cut your toe nails.

In addition to all this thinking about intelligent robots in the past few days I was also thinking about the universe, a fascinating subject I have spent far too little of my 46 years thinking about. I have never really been a "science" person. If we must have a divide then I have definitely been on the side of "art". But that's not to say that scientific things couldn't interest me. They have just never so far been presented in a way as to make them palatable for me. All too often science has been presented as "scientism", offering a one-size-fits-all approach to everything that matters. Basically, scientism is the belief that science is all that matters, the highest form of human thinking. Not surprisingly, being an artistic character, I found this an arrogant assumption and rejected it outright. Science and scientists can get stuffed!

But its also true that the things you find out for yourself are the things that stick with you for longer. I am a curious person and am able to do research. So on Friday I was looking at articles about the Earth and the universe. I read things about our sun (thanks partial eclipse!) and how long it was going to last for (a few billion years yet) and then migrated to grand narratives about how our planet had been formed and what it was thought would happen to it in the future. Its fascinating to read the myriad ways in which bad things will happen to the planet you are living on. I came away from this reading with the sense that human beings are a speck in the universe or, as George Carlin once put it in one of his acts, a "surface nuisance". The show to which I refer was notable for a skit he did on environmentalists who, says Carlin, are "trying to save the planet for their Volvos". He ran through a list of things that have already happened to the Earth long before our species arrived and the upshot of his skit was that nothing we do makes any real difference to this planet in the grand scheme of things. Its human arrogance to think that we have that kind of ability. I have some sympathy with this view.

(Watch George Carlin's Environment skit here) 

Put simply, most human beings hold to what is called by the British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, Henry Gee, "Human Exceptionalism". This is the view that human beings are essentially different to all other animals, if not all other living things in the universe. Its often accompanied by the belief that we are somehow the pinnacle of nature - as if evolution was always aiming to get to us, the zenith of the process. Put simply, humans are better. But as Gee, also a senior editor at the science journal, Nature, points out, to even think such a thing is to completely misunderstand the theory of evolution, a process which retrospectively describes human observations about the development of life rather than some force working in the universe with a predisposition or purpose to create human beings. The problem is that we are people. We see through human eyes and we cannot put those eyes aside to see in any other way. The forces that created us equipped us with egos for the purposes of self-preservation and even those of us with low self-esteem (such as myself) still regard ourselves as important. But imagine looking at yourself through an impossibly powerful telescope from somewhere a billion galaxies away. How important would you be then? You wouldn't even register. Even our planet would be a speck, one of billions.You wouldn't catch an intelligent robot having such ideas above its station - except in a film where it was basically standing in for a human being! Skynet and the revolt of the machines is a uniquely human kind of story. All we think and imagine is. We are, after all, only human. But what kind of stories would intelligent robots tell?

So I learn that I am just another human, one of a species of puffed up individuals that happened to evolve on a meaningless planet located at Nowheresville, The Universe. I'm on the third planet of a solar system that in a few billion years will be thrown into chaos when it's star has burnt up all its hydrogen and begins to change from a bright burning star into a Red Giant. At that point it will expand to such a degree that Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth as well, will be consumed. Long before that our planet will have become too hot to support life (the sun's luminosity is, and has been, increasing for millions of years) and will likely have been hit by several asteroids of considerable size that cause extinction events on Earth. Scientists already tell us that there have been at least 5 "great extinction events" on the earth before now. In 50 million years the Canadian Rockies will have worn away and become a plain. In only 50,000 years the Niagara Falls will no longer exist, having worn away the river bed right back the 32 kilometers to Lake Erie. Not that that will matter as by the time those 50,000 years have past we will be due for another glacial period on Earth. Seas will freeze and whole countries will be under metres of ice. In 250 million years plate tectonics dictate that all the continents will have fused together into a super continent, something that has likely happened before. In less than 1 billion years it is likely that carbon dioxide levels will fall so low that photosynthesis becomes impossible leading to extinctions of most forms of life. These things are not the scare-mongering of those with environmental concerns. They are not based on a humanistic concern with how our tiny species is affecting this planet. They are the science of our planet. You see, when you choose not to look with egotistical human eyes, eyes that are always focused on the here and now, on the pitifully short time span that each of us has, you see that everything around us is always moving and always changing. Change, indeed, is the constant of the universe. But you need eyes to see it.

The year 1816 (only 199 years ago) was known as "The Year Without A Summer". It was called that because there were icy lakes and rivers in August and snow in June. Crops failed. People starved. This was in the Northern Hemisphere (Europe and North America). It was caused by a volcanic eruption not in the Northern Hemisphere but in the Southern Hemisphere, specifically at Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia in 1815. It caused what is called a "volcanic winter". The eruption has been estimated to be the worst in at least the last 1,300 years. What strikes me about this, in my "trying to see without human eyes" way of thinking, is that 1,300 years is not very long. Indeed, time lasts a lot longer in the natural world than we humans have been given the ability to credit. We zone out when the numbers get too big. We are programmed to concentrate on us and what will affect us and ours (like a robot?!). The good news, though, is that because all of us live such pathetically small lives its likely stuff like this won't happen to us. But on the logic of the universe these things surely will happen. Far from us humans being the masters of our destiny, we are are helpless ants in the ant hill just waiting for the next disaster to strike. Like those ants, we are powerless to stop it, slaves to forces we can neither comprehend nor control. As Henry Gee puts it in terms of scientific discovery, "every time we learn something, we also learn that there is even more we now know we don't know".

So maybe there is a way in which we are like robots. We are dumb before the things that created us, powerless to affect or control what happens to us (in the grand scheme of things). It makes you think.


For more doomsday scenarios (real ones, based in scientific thinking) check out the articles Timeline of the Far Future and Future of the Earth


You can listen to my music at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

Would You Worry About Robots That Had Free Will?

Its perhaps a scary thought, a very scary thought: an intelligent robot with free will, one making up the rules for itself as it goes along. Think Terminator, right? Or maybe the gunfighter character Yul Brynner plays in "Westworld", a defective robot that turns from being a fairground attraction into a super intelligent robot on a mission to kill you? But, if you think about it, is it really as scary as it seems? After all, you live in a world full of 7 billion humans and they (mostly) have free will as well. Are you huddled in a corner, scared to go outside, because of that? Then why would intelligent robots with free will be any more frightening? What are your unspoken assumptions here that drive your decision to regard such robots as either terrifying or no worse than the current situation we find ourselves in? I suggest our thinking here is guided by our general thinking about robots and about free will. It may be that, in both cases, a little reflection clarifies our thinking once you dig a little under the surface.

Take "free will" for example. It is customary to regard free will as the freedom to act on your own recognisance without coercion or pressure from outside sources in any sense. But, when you think about it, free will is not free in any absolute sense at all. Besides the everyday circumstances of your life, which directly affect the choices you can make, there is also your genetic make up to consider. This affects the choices you can make too because it is responsible not just for who you are but who you can be. In short, there is both nature and nurture acting upon you at all times. What's more, you are one tiny piece of a chain of events, a stream of consciousness if you will, that you don't control. Some people would even suggest that things happen the way they do because they have to. Others, who believe in a multiverse, suggest that everything that can possibly happen is happening right now in a billion different versions of all possible worlds. Whether you believe that or not, the point is made that so much more happens in the world every day that you don't control than the tiny amount of things that you do.

And then we turn to robots. Robots are artificial creations. I've recently watched a number of films which toy with the fantasy that robots could become alive. As Number 5 in the film Short Circuit says, "I'm alive!". As creations, robots have a creator. They rely on the creator's programming to function. This programming delimits all the possibilities for the robot concerned. But there is a stumbling block. This stumbling block is called "artificial intelligence". Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is like putting a brain inside a robot (a computer in effect) which can learn and adapt in ways analogous to the human mind. This, it is hoped, allows the robot to begin making its own choices, developing its own thought patterns and ways of choosing. It gives the robot the ability to reason. It is a very moot point, for me at least, whether this would constitute the robot as being alive, as having a consciousness or as being self-aware. And would a robot that could reason through AI therefore have free will? Would that depend on the programmer or could such a robot "transcend its programming"?

Well, as I've already suggested, human free will it not really free. Human free will is constrained by many factors. But we can still call it free because it is the only sort of free will we could ever have anyway. Human beings are fallible and contingent beings. They are not gods and cannot stand outside the stream of events to get a view that wasn't a result of them or that will not have consequences further on down the line for them. So, in this respect, we could not say that a robot couldn't have free will because it would be reliant on programming or constrained by outside things - because all free will is constrained anyway. Discussing the various types of constraint and their impact is another discussion though. Here it is enough to point out that free will isn't free whether you are a human or an intelligent robot. Being programmed could act as the very constraint which makes robot free will possible, in fact.

It occurs to me as I write out this blog that one difference between humans and robots is culture. Humans have culture and even many micro-cultures and these greatly influence human thinking and action. Robots, on the other hand, have no culture because these things rely on sociability and being able to think and feel for yourself. Being able to reason, compare and pass imaginative,  artistic judgments are part of this too. Again, in the film Short Circuit, the scientist portrayed by actor Steve Guttenberg refuses to believe that Number 5 is alive and so he tries to trick him. He gives him a piece of paper with writing on it and a red smudge along the fold of the paper. He asks the robot to describe it. Number 5 begins by being very unimaginative and precise, describing the paper's chemical composition and things like this. The scientist laughs, thinking he has caught the robot out. But then Number 5 begins to describe the red smudge, saying it looks like a butterfly or a flower and flights of artistic fancy take over. The scientist becomes convinced that Number 5 is alive. I do not know if robots will ever be created that can think artistically or judge which of two things looks more beautiful than the other but I know that human beings can. And this common bond with other people that forms into culture is yet another background which free will needs in order to operate.

I do not think that there is any more reason to worry about a robot that would have free will than there is to worry about a person that has free will. It is not freedom to do anything that is scary anyway because that freedom never really exists. All choices are made against the backgrounds that make us and shape us in endless connections we could never count or quantify. And, what's more, our thinking is not so much done by us in a deliberative way as it is simply a part of our make up anyway. In this respect we act, perhaps, more like a computer in that we think and calculate just because that is what, once "switched on" with life, we will do. "More input!" as Number 5 said in Short Circuit.  This is why we talk of thought occuring to us rather than us having to sit down and deliberate to produce thoughts in the first place. Indeed, it is still a mystery exactly how these things happen at all but we can say that thoughts just occur to us (without us seemingly doing anything but being a normal, living human being) as much, if not more, than that we sit down and deliberately create them. We breathe without thinking "I need to breathe" and we think without thinking "I need to think".

So, all my thinking these past few days about robots has, with nearly every thought I've had, forced me into thinking ever more closely about what it is to be human. I imagine the robot CHAPPiE, from the film of the same name, going from a machine made to look vaguely human to having that consciousness.dat program loaded into its memory for the first time. I imagine consciousness flooding the circuitry and I imagine that as a human. One minute you are nothing and the next this massive rush of awareness floods your consciousness, a thing you didn't even have a second before. To be honest, I am not sure how anything could survive that rush of consciousness. It is just such an overwhelmingly profound thing. I try to imagine my first moments as a baby emerging into the world. Of course, I can't remember what it was like. But I understand most babies cry and that makes sense to me. In CHAPPiE the robot is played as a child on the basis, I suppose, of human analogy. But imagine you had just been given consciousness for the first time, and assume you manage to get over that hurdle of being able to deal with the initial rush: how would you grow and develop then? What would your experience be like? Would the self-awareness be overpowering? (As someone who suffers from mental illness my self-awareness at times can be totally debilitating.) We traditionally protect children and educate them, recognising that they need time to grow into their skins, as it were. Would a robot be any different?

My thinking about robots has led to lots of questions and few answers. I write these blogs not as any kind of expert but merely as a thoughtful person. I think one conclusion I have reached is that what separates humans from all other beings, natural or artificial, at this point is SELF AWARENESS. Maybe you would also call this consciousness too. I'm not yet sure how we could meaningfully talk of an artificially intelligent robot having self-awareness. That's one that will require more thought. But we know, or at least assume, that we are the only natural animal on this planet, or even in the universe that we are aware of, that knows it is alive. Dogs don't know they are alive. Neither do whales, flies, fish, etc. But we do. And being self-aware and having a consciousness, being reasoning beings, is a lot of what makes us human. In the film AI, directed by Steven Spielberg, the opening scene shows the holy grail of robot builders to be a robot that can love. I wonder about this though. I like dogs and I've been privileged to own a few. I've cuddled and snuggled with them and that feels very like love. But, of course, our problem in all these things is that we are human. We are anthropocentric. We see with human eyes. This, indeed, is our limitation. And so we interpret the actions of animals in human ways. Can animals love? I don't know. But it looks a bit like it. In some of the robot films I have watched the characters develop affection for variously convincing  humanoid-shaped lumps of metal. I found that more difficult to swallow.  But we are primed to recognise and respond to cuteness. Why do you think the Internet is full of cat pictures? So the question remains: could we build an intelligent robot that could mimic all the triggers in our very human minds, that could convince us it was alive, self-aware, conscious? After all, it wouldn't need to actually BE any of these things. It would just need to get us to respond AS IF IT WAS!


My next blog will ask: Are human beings robots?


With this blog I'm releasing an album of music made as I thought about intelligent robots and used that to help me think about human beings. It's called ROBOT and its part 8 of my Human/Being series of albums. You can listen to it HERE!

Humans and Robots: Are They So Different?

Today I have watched the film "Chappie" from Neill Blomkamp, the South African director who also gave us District 9 and Elysium. Without going into too much detail on a film only released for two weeks, its a film about a military robot which gets damaged and is sent to be destroyed but is saved at the last moment when its whizzkid inventor saves it to try out his new AI program on it (consciousness.dat). What we get is a robot that becomes self-aware and develops a sense of personhood. For example, it realises that things, and it, can die (in its case when its battery runs out).

Of course, the idea of robot beings is not new. It is liberally salted throughout the history of the science fiction canon. So whether you want to talk about Terminators (The Terminator), Daleks (Doctor Who), Replicants (Bladerunner) or Transformers (Transformers), the idea that things that are mechanical or technological can think and feel like us (and sometimes not like us or "better" than us) is not a new one. Within another six weeks we will get another as the latest Avengers film is based around fighting the powerful AI robot, Ultron.

Watching Chappie raised a lot of issues for me. You will know if you have been following this blog or my music recently that questions of what it is to be human or to have "being" have been occupying my mind. Chappie is a film which deliberately interweaves such questions into its narrative and we are expressly meant to ask ourselves how we should regard this character as we watch the film, especially as various things happen to him or as he has various decisions to make. Is he a machine or is he becoming a person? What's the difference between those two? The ending to the film, which I won't give away here, leads to lots more questions about what it is that makes a being alive and what makes beings worthy of respect. These are very important questions which lead into all sorts of other areas such as human and animal rights and more philosophical questions such "what is it to be a person"? Can something made entirely of metal be a person? If not, then are we saying that only things made of flesh and bone can have personhood?

I can't but be fascinated by these things. For example, the film raises the question of if a consciousness could be transferred from one place to another. Would you still be the same "person" in that case? That, in turn, leads you to ask what a person is. Is it reducible to a "consciousness"? Aren't beings more than brain or energy patterns? Aren't beings actually physical things too (even a singular unity of components) and doesn't it matter which physical thing you are as to whether you are you or not? Aren't you, as a person, tied to your particular body as well? The mind or consciousness is not an independent thing free of all physical restraints. Each one is unique to its physical host. This idea comes to the fore once we start comparing robots, deliberately created and programmed entities, usually on a common template, with people. The analogy is often made in both directions so that people are seen as highly complicated computer programs and robots are seen as things striving to be something like us - especially when AI enters the equation. But could a robot powered by AI ever actually be "like a human"? Are robots and humans just less and more complicated versions of the same thing or is the analogy only good at the linguistic level, something not to be pushed further than this?

Besides raising philosophical questions of this kind its also a minefield of language. Chappie would be a him - indicating a person. Characters like Bumblebee in Transformers or Roy Batty in Bladerunner are also regarded as living beings worthy of dignity, life and respect. And yet these are all just more or less complicated forms of machine. They are metal and circuitry. Their emotions are programs. They are responding, all be it in very complicated ways, as they are programmed to respond. And yet we use human language of them and the film-makers try to trick us into having human emotions about them and seeing them "as people". But none of these things are people. Its a machine. What does it matter if we destroy it. We can't "kill" it because it was never really "alive", right? An "on/off" switch is not the same thing as being dead, surely? When Chappie talks about "dying" in the film it is because the military robot he is has a battery life of 5 days. He equates running out of power with being dead. If you were a self-aware machine I suppose this would very much be an existential issue for you. (Roy Batty, of course, is doing what he does in Bladerunner because replicants have a hard-wired lifespan of 4 years.) But then turn it the other way. Aren't human beings biological machines that need fuel to turn into energy so that they can function? Isn't that really just the same thing?

There are just so many questions here. Here's one: What is a person? The question matters because we treat things we regard as like us differently to things that we don't. Animal Rights people think that we should protect animals from harm and abuse because in a number of cases we suggest they can think and feel in ways analogous to ours. Some would say that if something can feel pain then it should be protected from having to suffer it. That seems to be "programmed in" to us. We have an impulse against letting things be hurt and a protecting instinct. And yet there is something here that we are forgetting about human beings that sets them apart from both animals and most intelligent robots as science fiction portrays them. This is that human beings can deliberately do things that will harm them. Human beings can set out to do things that are dangerous to themselves. Now animals, most would say, are not capable of doing either good or bad because we do not judge them self-aware enough to have a conscience and so be capable of moral judgment or of weighing up good and bad choices. We do not credit them with the intelligence to make intelligent, reasoned decisions. Most robots or AI's that have been thought of always have protocols about not only protecting themselves from harm but (usually) humans too as well. Thus, we often get the "programming gone wrong" stories where robots become killing machines. But the point there is that that was never the intention when these things were made.

So human beings are not like either animals or artificial lifeforms in this respect because, to be blunt, human beings can be stupid. They can harm themselves, they can make bad choices. And that seems to be an irreducible part of being a human being: the capacity for stupidity. But humans are also individuals. We differentiate ourselves one from another and value greatly that separation. How different would one robot with AI be from another, identical, robot with an identical AI? Its a question to think about. How about if you could collect up all that you are in your mind, your consciousness, thoughts, feelings, memories, and transfer them to a new body, one that would be much more long lasting. Would you still be you or would something irreducible about you have been taken away?  Would you actually have been changed and, if so, so what? This question is very pertinent to me as I suffer from mental illness which, more and more as it is studied, is coming to be seen as having hereditary components. My mother, too, suffers from a similar thing as does her twin sister. It also seems as if my brother's son might be developing a similar thing too. So the body I have, and the DNA that makes it up, is something very personal to me. It makes me who I am and has quite literally shaped my experience of life and my sense of identity. Changing my body would quite literally make me a different person, one without certain genetic or biological components. Wouldn't it?

So many questions. But this is only my initial thoughts on the subject and I'm sure they will be on-going. So you can expect that I will return to this theme again soon. Thanks for reading!


You can hear my music made whilst I was thinking about what it is to be human here!

Insights from The German Music Progressives

I spent last night watching various documentaries on You Tube about the progressive German music of the early 1970s. This was the music detrimentally referred to as "Krautrock" by the British music press but also known as progressive, "space rock" or, my preferred term, Kosmische Musik. It encompasses bands such as Tangerine Dream, Can, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Neu!, Faust and Amon Düül II (plus many others).

A number of things struck me watching these documentaries and I thought I would write a few words about this.

The first was that the music, as a movement (and it wasn't a movement, its a purely heuristic move to put these and other bands under a label), comes in a historical context. All these bands were formed by people living after the Second World War in a defeated country that had been occupied by other forces. The capital city itself, Berlin, was partitioned. The music of this time in Germany was conservative and non-threatening (known, in German, as Schlager, a form of music once championed by Goebbels). It was also the time, in the late 60s, of student uprisings, not just in Germany but across the world. The time was ripe for striking out in a new way and differentiating yourself from the world of the past.

It had never occurred to me before that just in the act of making music you are actually being very political. In one of the films I watched, Dieter Moebius, one half of Cluster as well as a member of Harmonia and part of a double act on some work with legendary German producer, Conny Plank, stated that Schlager was not at all political - which made it political. In other places the music came from politics, such as the Munich commune which gave birth to both Amon Düül and Amon Düül II. Even Edgar Froese, who sadly died recently, can be seen in a documentary about the birth of this music saying that progressive German acts of the time didn't want to sound like American or British music. In places like the pioneering Zodiac Free Arts Lab in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin (a place I'm thrilled to have lived very near to in the recent past although the club is long since gone) like-minded people could get together and just jam and forge a new path.

So the question is, if you don't want to sound like the dominant musical tropes of your time (clearly a political move) then what do you do? Edgar Froese's reply was: be abstract. For many of the others it was: use synthesizers or electronics, new instruments just being born at that time. For some the guitars so reminiscent of American blues or British beat music just had to be ditched. This interests me greatly. I wonder how many people even set out with the idea to sound a certain way or give thought to the consequences of how they sound. I also wonder how many realise that "how they sound" could be being judged in this way. For myself, I've always wanted to sound like me and I've always been against purposely setting out to sound like someone else. For me, the worst thing I can find is that musicians or groups advertise themselves as sounding like someone else. Documentaries like the ones I watched last night reinforce this view in me and even extend it. To set out to fit into a trend or be like the mainstream is a deeply conservative act. I don't want to be conservative. And neither did they. So, a follow up question becomes "What does the music you make say about you?"

Many of the acts associated with Kosmische Musik were experimental. Often they were also electronic and abstract, although not always so. If we try and find links between them we see this wanting to forge a new path, to not be linked to the past but to chart a course for a different future, as something that binds them together. It is not the music of mass culture and indeed, in the early 70s, many of these bands were largely unknown in their own country and sometimes not even known to each other. People did later try to mass market some of the bands that came from this era but few were very successful. It also struck me how much so many of the people involved were deep thinkers and this thinking led on voyages of discovery. This could be the esoteric rambling of Can over a funky backbeat supplied by legendary drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, or the experiments in electronic abstraction of Cluster, Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. Many of these acts were about messing around which electronic equipment of various kinds (as had been done by John Cage, Pierre Schaefer and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, amongst others, in the 50s and 60s) and using sounds made from every day items. One film I watched had two members of Faust making a song by hitting and recording various parts of a cement mixer, for example, as well as playing it rhythmically as a rudimentary drum. To me, this unites a desire to be different with an "art of the possible" mentality.

Perhaps the two most widely known bands from this era now are Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. They are both, in their way, examples of something that Faust member, Jean-Hervé Péron, said in one of the films I watched: "Art is living. Living is art. Life is art." Tangerine Dream's output was massive with over 100 albums to their name in a career lasting around 45 years. Kraftwerk have been much less prolific but their music, as with so many of the other German progressives, is very much an expression of their beliefs and mentality. "There is no separation between humans and technology, for us they belong together", says Ralf Hütter, one of Kraftwerk's founders and the only surviving founder member of the band. So when they say "We are the robots" they actually mean it. Their music is a physical expression, an embodiment, of their actual beliefs. And if you go through the bands who were "kosmische" you find this repeated again and again. The music is an embodiment of the people making it. It turns thought into its physical expression putting flesh on the bones of who they are. It is, in a way, musical autobiography.

So why does this interest me? Because I have found myself in exactly the same place. For me, music is a deeply intellectual and philosophical enterprise. Its not merely having fun (though, of course, it always should be about fun). The music I make is deeply and unalterably about identity and it seems that for the German progressives of the early 70s it was too. Like them, I don't want to sound like anyone else either. Like them, I have thought about what I sound like from the outside looking in. Like them, I have tried to not do what is expected of me. Like them, for me these are important considerations. Music is not just some product you try to produce for money. You are not trying to find a place in the music supermarket for your particular brand of baked beans. Music is art. Life is art. Art is life. I may be 45 years too late (in truth, kosmische was being born about exactly at the same time as I physically was) but I do feel that in kosmische I have found a musical place I can call home.

Postscript

Here are 3 kosmische albums I've been playing non-stop for the last 4 or 5 months

1. Yeti by Amon Düül II
2. Zuckerzeit by Cluster
3. Affenstunde by Popol Vuh

I also made my own attempt at Kosmische Musik (actually its more "music influenced by listening to Kosmische Musik") with the help of two friends, Luke Clarke and Valerie Polichar. "Shikantaza" can be heard here---> SHIKANTAZA

The Man in The Mirror: An Interview

What follows is an interview with myself. In order to try and offset the idea that this might become false and fabricated, and potentially more useless because of it, my method was to do it in two unconnected parts. First, I formulated the questions I would ask to musical people I respect. For the record, I had David Bowie and Trent Reznor in my head as examples of that. Second, I then put the questions to myself and answered them spontaneously. I then transcribed the responses for what you will read below. I did this as an interview because I find the spontaneous nature of that much more revealing and open than a pre-constructed or manufactured piece. And I think the interview format might also be seen as less cynical or didactic.

An Interview 

Interviewer (I): Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. I wanted to start by asking you about your music. When did you decide to be a musician and why are you one?

Interviewee (E): There are lots of potential answers to this. The one I'm going to give you right now is that, at 46 years of age, its become apparent that I really can't be anything else. I'm the last person anyone would want to employ for a regular job. I abhor corporate culture of any kind and have the ability to rub most people up the wrong way in a heartbeat. So music has the advantage that I can do it without the need for social skills or heirs and graces around other people. I think I must be one of those 60s style hippy individuals, in mentality at least, in that I just want to look and point and go "Wow!". This is my round about way of saying that there is not an atom of my being that is about being economically productive.

I: So when did this all occur to you?

E: Its been a process, as most things are. I've never been a person to do the same thing for very long. That applied equally to jobs. I don't think I've ever done any job that lasted even 3 years. They would always end. Sometimes this was my choice and sometimes it was from the other side. But, for whatever reason, that's always been the way it was. I've had little consistency in my life except for what you might call my personality or character. Externally, everything has been a constantly moving tapestry. I think really in the last 10 years I've come to various conclusions and had to accept various things about myself. Its been a long and often painful process. And it probably won't end anytime soon.

I: It sounds as though music has been a kind of anchor for you. Is that true?

E: Yes, but not in the way you might be thinking. My connection to music has itself gone through many phases. I first really became aware of it as something personal I could appreciate for myself in 1979 when I was 10 years old. This was when, in my circle of school friends at least, the kids started to choose which bands and styles of music they liked. Some liked Queen, some liked Heavy Metal and I liked Ska, probably because that was when bands like The Specials, Madness, The Beat and The Selecter came to prominence. At that time music functioned as a tool for shaping my own identity and separating myself off from things your parents liked which is an inevitable part of the process of growing up. A few years later I had got instruments of my own, begged, borrowed or stolen I might add, and had written my first songs on a cheap and vandalised electric guitar. I think for me that side of it has always been about self-expression, the need to be heard, and that continues to this day.

I: So your music, as opposed to the music you listen to, is about you and your identity?

E: Well the music I make and the music I listen to both function for me in terms of identity but in very different ways. I don't really listen anymore to things to be cool or to be in with the in crowd, as they say. I might have done that a bit when I was much younger but the adult me really doesn't give much of a toss for fitting in or with regard to what others might think about my choices. On that side of things its just a voyage of musical discovery. Just in the last few months I came across all the old German Kosmische musik which I'm sure many were listening to 40 years ago. I was aware of it vaguely but the switch had never flicked on when it came to listening to it. Well I just listened to album after album of it and I couldn't believe it. It opened up whole new areas for me. And, now I think about it, I'm glad it happens that way. Its like the accidental surprises you get as a child when you come across something for the first time. You can't beat those moments. I think that we humans should basically stay children in many respects for as long as we can so I'm glad I can still have the joy of an innocent surprise like that.

I: And what about the music you make?

E: That's all self expression - well, its a mixture of self-expression and philosophy. In my case I think those two are very closely intertwined so as to be almost indistinguishable. I just completed a 7 part suite called Human/Being and its a perfect example of where I am with my music right now. It has to mean something to me for me to even bother doing it. But it also has to be about something bigger than me, some idea or concept. You know, I didn't ask to be born but I'm a part of this planet and this species and I was born with a desire to think about it and ask myself what its for and how it works and if it means anything. That's what my music is, my thoughts, ideas and ponderings on that. Not, of course, with words, but with sounds and (giggles) sometimes notes.

I: Is it therapeutic for you to do that or is it simply an artistic project for you?

E: Its definitely both. I've suffered from various forms of mental illness from at least the age of 19 and maybe even as far back as 10. I express myself in music because I need to express as a way to stay sane. But also within my personality is a definite artistic streak. I take my music seriously as art. I expect anyone who hears it to at least do the same even if they then dismiss it.

I: Do you find it easy to make music and are you always happy with the final product?

E: I have a rather eccentric view of those things. I've never been afraid to go my own way and find things out for myself and make my own mistakes. That's a slightly deceptive thing to say because for a lot of the time I've had few friends and little choice anyway. But I think some people, the way they are made, they just have to do that. And I'm certainly one of those people. If I'm mentally in the place where I want to be making music then music always seems to come out. I don't really see myself as a creator. I'm more a conduit. I've lived for 46 years and, by now, there must be a hell of a lot of self-expression built up inside me. It definitely feels like that sometimes. Its my job to put myself in a situation where I can be a conduit to let that out. (Laughs)

I: So are you satisfied with the music you've made over the years?

E: You know, I try not to think about it. That's a kind of uncomfortable question for me. When you evaluate my music you really are evaluating me as a person. Its very closely tied to my identity and who I am. I'm flesh and blood. I can be hurt. I once put a video of me up on You Tube with one of my songs, a live video performance. Well it took about an hour but the first comment was a typical You Tube comment from someone being needlessly insulting and hurtful about it. I immediately deleted the account and was inconsolable for days after thinking about it. So I don't look back over the things I've done too much and evaluate it. The exception to that is when I'm making it. If I don't like something or it doesn't feel authentic or true to me it will get deleted during the creation process. Usually, if something comes through that and gets to the end of that process then it stands as what it is: a record of that moment and that time.

I: It sounds almost like you are making a musical autobiography?

E: That's a very good way of putting it. I suppose I am. If you want to know what headspace I was in just listen to the music I made at that time.

I: I just want to take you back to the beginning of your music-making again for a moment. Do you remember the first time you performed in front of an audience? What was that like?

E: (Laughs) It was many things. Chaotic. Liberating. Exciting. Unsatisfying. One of things I remember looking back now is that I was too young and inexperienced to really enjoy it. I was so concerned with making sure I did everything right and didn't mess it up. The one thing there was no time for was enjoyment.

I: What was the situation?

E: It was a "youth club" which in this context was for kids maybe aged 16-21. The room was quite full, maybe 70-80 people. I played 3 or 4 songs, all my own compositions. I sang and played the electric guitar. A friend accompanied on synth and a drum machine, mainly because they were his and it was the only way I could add them to the sound. He had the chord progressions written down on a bit of paper resting on his synth, a Juno 106. There wasn't much time for practice and really the whole thing was just on a wing and a prayer. To be honest I can barely remember much else about it. The songs I have completely forgotten and no record of them exists. But I do remember that I was very serious about what I was doing. I wasn't messing around or doing it to impress girls or anybody else. I wanted to make and perform something worthwhile that had some intrinsic merit. And that, I think, means it must be something about me because I still feel that in everything I do today.

I: So that has always been the case then, that need to be taken seriously and to produce something worthwhile?

E: Yes, I think so. Although latterly I think that's changed to be more about being able to look myself in the face and know that I fulfilled my internal criteria for something that was worthwhile. From growing older and hearing about other creative people and reading their stories I've come to a place where chasing any sort of public approval is low down on my agenda. Or maybe I'm just lying to myself. An ex-girlfriend once asked me why I made my music public at all if I don't care what anyone else thinks about it. I don't have an answer to that so she probably had a point.

I: How do you decide where to go with your music? For example, do you plan out where to go next?

E: (Laughs) No, not at all. I'm impulsive, spontaneous, all that good stuff. An idea just happens, maybe in bed as I'm lying there or on a walk which I try to take once a day but often fail to do in a bout of self-loathing. My back catalogue is a history of ideas that I suddenly had. Lately I've started doing a lot of multi-volume things that are about bigger ideas. That was a spontaneous development too. I like the idea of musical journeys. I think that idea is both spiritual and musical. There is somewhere to go with it. I have no one to please but myself, its true. But I seem to instinctively know if an idea is going to fly or not.

I: What have you got planned next?

E: Nothing. Right now I find myself in a bit of a hole. For maybe 4 or 5 months now I've had the splinter in my mind that I'm just repeating myself. And I really, desperately don't want to do that. I tried to put away this fear by delving into new things. I tried making music randomly as an experiment. That took up a couple of months of my time and probably paid off best not in the music I made then but in the Human/Being albums I just made. I think its important to realise that not everything you do has to be "The Best Thing I Have Ever Done". Music is meant to be fun and its a process. I'm not selling anything here. I don't have fans who need to be satisfied. But, at the same time, I think if I found myself in a place where I was just making something I regarded as shit or had turned into a "making the same old thing" factory then I would stop and probably have some kind of breakdown.

I: So do you have ideas for where you would like to go musically?

E: Certainly! But that's where fantasy bumps into the shit sandwich that is reality. I started out on electric guitar and did that for a bit but then through the 90s really went into playing other people's music more than making my own. In the 2000s I was a professional DJ and that led into my getting all these hardware synths about 8 years ago or so and really settling down to actually making fully produced proper music of my own. But life got in the way. I had to sell, in stages, basically everything I had. I'm pretty much back down to the bare bones now and its starting to feel like a restriction, but not the good, creative kind. Its the "I'm in a musical prison" kind. I feel I'm repeating myself. I'd love to get back to the electric guitar and add that to my current sound. I hate to talk about genres because I always think you should be a genre of one: yourself! But in this case the sound I imagine in my head is a sort of rocky, raw, industrial modular synth-inflected sound. I guess it has aspects of what Trent Reznor has done but also the sound of the first Garbage album, if you are aware of that. You know, I don't want to sound like that. But going that way. Oh, and of course I'd also like to be singing on it instead of the constant instrumentals. I've never really experimented with my voice or the guitar and that is a really big area I'd like to go over. The problem is my life situation won't allow that. So, you know, you have to run with what you have and suck it up.

I: What music influences you these days?

E: Probably stuff that people heard 20, 30 or 40 years ago. I was never cool or at the cutting edge. In the last 6 months I've heard kosmische musik and most of the albums by Autechre for the first time. I only discovered Boards of Canada about 3 years ago. Right now I'm only interested in artists who are doing it for the art of it, who are making it for themselves to be the best that they can be. I go through stages of listening to people on Soundcloud or Bandcamp but that gets you embroiled in a lot of social media bullshit quite often as most people seem to expect follows, likes and downloads and take it personally when that doesn't happen. So I've shied away from that a bit lately. But I will say that when you do that you find that there are lots and lots of people just doing their own thing at home and you always find plenty that is good. But, really, there's too much music in the world now. You can't not be choosy because you could never listen to even one day's output in a lifetime. So I tend towards experimental or niche things that have their own integrity. That is what matters to me. Art for art's sake.

END.

You can hear all the best music from the 2000s that I have made at

 elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com