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 Its terribly out of date graphics and style was appealing and in a way that the sequel's weren't. Better does not always mean better it seems.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

My Eccentric (but no less valid) View On Life

The thoughts started to come as I lay on my bed, the light fading away from the day to become night once more. I drifted in and out of sleep as the darkness covered me like a blanket, everything silent except for the playlist of Trent Reznor music I had in the background.

Why do people recoil when someone, perhaps a musical artist in a song or a writer in a book, seems to suggest that suicide is a way out? It struck me that these people act as if death is a secret and life is an experience you are not supposed to be able to escape from. Indeed, more widely there seems to be some unspoken, unarticulated idea that taking your own life is in some sense not allowed. Not allowed by who? For what reason? And then I think of the picture that often gets tweeted or shared on social media about suicide. Its this one (it was easy to find):

I despise the logic of the poster this girl holds up. I despise it for a number of reasons but the main reason I despise it is for a crucial piece of logic its missing. Let's for a moment skip over the error that "suicide does not end the chances of life getting worse" (it does, because there is then no life to get worse!) and move on to the second half of the poster. It is said here that if you kill yourself that your life will never get any better. Well, true enough as far as it goes. But YOU WILL BE DEAD. And dead people don't have to worry about trivialities like "better" or "worse" at all. They are DEAD. So the poster enunciates a living person's perspective and not a dead person's. Worse, it gives a particular living person's view and not a universal one. Usually when I see that someone has tweeted this again I feel a flush of anger that once more someone is tweeting illogical banalities, trying to lock people into the prison of a life they don't share in a world in which some don't even want you to know that by taking some very simple steps you could have escaped from existence, forever, in very short order. What are they scared of? Some people's lives are unutterably bad and I would doubt their sanity if they DIDN'T want to escape them.

Now I don't really mean to go on about suicide. As I've already suggested, the subject makes a lot of people antsy and nervous - most often for reasons they can't even describe. But I needed to report the thoughts that just came to me unbidden as I lay in the silence of my room. I really do enjoy silence. It is very spiritual and very cleansing to the soul. It strips away all the effluvia of life that attaches to you when you chat and interact with others and get the grime of life onto you. Life is not a nice thing. You collect things that you need to periodically wash off just like the dirt that causes you to shower or bathe. I recommend sitting, lying or even walking in silence (and preferably darkness) to anyone. As I lay on my bed my thoughts broadened from this initial thought to thinking about life itself.

Now I don't claim my thoughts about life are mainstream. I don't claim they are moral. To be honest with you I could really care less about being either of those things. But, as with my music, I would try and claim that my thoughts are honest - in the sense that I have given time to them and they are as accurate a description and summary of them as I can give at this time. Maybe that counts for something and maybe it doesn't. I know I'm not the only person who thinks but there seem to be a lot of people who don't. So here goes.

The thought often occurs to me (every day) "What if life is the prison and death is the escape?" I wonder who of my readers can even appreciate that as a genuine question that makes their mind do real work thinking about it. But that's a real, genuine and live question for me. If it was put to me as a proposition I wouldn't have too much trouble accepting it as true. Because life can seem like a prison to many people. For much of my life it has. If there were a mythical button you could press which took your life back to point zero, the point of your conception, and, instead of living your life, you never existed instead, I could and likely would press that button. I can, hand on heart, honestly say that there hasn't been a day in my life, now stretching over 46 years, when I have felt that life was worth living. Not a single day. Of course, like others I have good days and bad. But that's not the point. The point is is there anything that would make a human life worthwhile? Can life mean anything if it ends?

Of course, there are consequences of accepting this premise. Crime and punishment, for one thing, is radically re-envisioned. Death, on this view, is seen as an escape from any punishment (which is why the death penalty makes no sense. You are essentially freeing the criminal from the burden of life). Any crime you can commit you eventually get away with. Human beings are mortal, they all die. They all escape in the end. At the point of death it matters not if you lived 70 years "free" (human freedom is a whole other discussion!) or 70 years incarcerated. Every punishment has a terminal limit: the length of your life. I think this is why religionists and people who talk in spiritual terms try to change the game and extend the narrative. They want to be moral. They want to believe that bad things do get punished and there is justice. But, I'm sorry to say, I just don't consider myself that naive. And, trust me, I am naive in a great many ways about a great many things. I even wrote a song about my naivety once. But not on this. There is, ultimately, no justice. Morality is just the power to impose your views on others. For where there is no power there is no morality - whether that's an invisible being or a Govt with arms and a legal system. I think a lot of the genuinely bad people in the world know this. I think many of them are a lot more realistic about life than the white knights and the angels on the side of good who maintain the pretense of a fantasy world of justice and good just to get them through the day.

It was a radical moment for me when I started to think about life in cosmological terms. We are like ants on a really small and insignificant planet that is placed nowhere special in the universe. There are billions of galaxies just in our bit of the universe. On one theory there may even be billions of universes, a multiverse, in which every possible version of you is living every possible life you could live. But you are stuck, in the meantime, with the life that only you can live because you are stuck being you. Even if this life of yours lasts as long as a human has ever lived (around 120 years I think) that's just an eye blink of time, a finger snap. Its nothing. Its inconsequential to anything. The universe will literally not notice that you ever lived and your impact against the huge background of all that is will be as good as nothing. I don't say all that in any nihilistic sense although I do believe that most things human beings put their faith in are merely egotistical devices for their survival. I say that because I think its actually true and it is in some sense liberating to come to some conclusions about things like that.

Ever since I've thought that we are all as meaningless and inconsequential as we think ants are, or microbes or amoeba or bits of dust, I've felt somewhat liberated. The idea that everyone escapes from life because we all die I find liberating too. Nietzsche, a great intellectual inspiration for me, was a man who suffered with many physical ailments over a number of years. He writes in one passage that the thought of suicide brings him safely through many a night. This is because the thought that life might go on forever is actually not a terribly appetising one. Imagine living the life you live forever. It goes on and on and never stops even as you age. I don't know about you, but actually I hate that idea. For me, the knowledge that I actually won't exist for very long and that I will NOT exist forever is a whole lot better. In fact, knowing that I will die is, paradoxically, what has kept me alive until now. I'm not ashamed to say that I have personally struggled more than once with the idea of suicide. I'm alive because I know that whatever I suffer won't last. Because it can't. We live in a physical universe and in a physical universe everything changes and all things degrade and pass away.

I just finished writing a set of musical pieces about what it means to be a human being. Maybe you have heard some of them. I literally think about what it means to be human, to be alive and associated things, every day. Seeing pictures people post online of the sea or mountains or animals makes me wonder. Its like the purpose of my largely empty life is to ponder on what life is for. The answer might be that its not for anything. Life just is. A chaotic and insensible universe, the expression of no will but just of random events, gave birth to thinking animals from its own illogic. Those animals can think and reason and they turn that reason on themselves but it drives them mad and makes no sense and they realise that there often aren't any reasons or any logic to things. And that makes sense on one level. Logic is human and only of use to humans. The universe doesn't have to be logical. It is unlogical. But this drops a huge turd in the thinking of human beings who need logic to function. Their egos need to capture and control the information and sense data that they receive so they can make use of it. Humans need order but the universe is not ordered. It dawns on them that, actually, life, the universe and everything is not about them at all. They are just by-products, peripheral, inconsequential.

Or something like that.....


Thanks for reading. You can hear my Human/Being series of music at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

Human/Being: Soundtrack for Thinkers and Thinking

If you know anything of me at all, you will know by now that I both make electronic music and also like to think (and talk) about things. I am one of those people burdened with thoughts. I have said before that when I make music I am not actually making music - I am doing philosophy with sound. This has very much proved to be true in my first major series of 2015, the Human/Being project. This project, which grew to 7 parts, started off as thinking about humanity after reading stories of the Nazi concentration camps in World War 2 and after watching the film "Under The Skin" starring Scarlett Johansson. This lead me to create 2 albums that felt like some kind of science fiction soundtrack (in my mind, at least) as I mused on these ideas. But, as has become common in the last 12 months, I did not end up stopping there. Human/Being expanded, spread its wings, both sonically and philosophically, and other ideas were explored besides those with which I began (which you can read about in the last blog I made on this site). I want to take a few paragraphs now to explain (to myself if nobody else) what I have been doing.

What is the idea behind Human/Being? Well, it began as me thinking about what it means to be human. I did this by setting us and our planet in some kind of cosmic context and also by thinking about examples of human behaviour and then asking myself what I learned about our species in the light of the example I had chosen. Very many, if not most, human beings are VERY anthropocentric. I tried to be neither anthropocentric nor misanthropic in thinking about our species but the thing is, when you do that, its quite easy to think of us as specks of dust on an insignificant planet that is placed nowhere special in the universe. That IS a useful insight. But it can't be the beginning and end of the discussion. I wanted to ask what it MEANS to be human, not just how significant or not we may be in universal terms (which remains "not very").

My project was not planned out intellectually from the start with a road map of the ideological territory I wanted to survey. As is normal for me when making music, I allowed myself to roam where I wanted to. This, of course, does not promote any unity of thought but it does have the benefit of being honest in that nothing is set up here. I thought as honestly and openly as I could about the subjects that came up and allowed the thoughts I had to inspire the music. The music is and remains a soundtrack to my thoughts. It always was that and I can't imagine it ever being anything else. I wrote and recorded the music to this series in a deliberate "Berlin School" style. This style, popularised in the 1970s, is based on multiple synthesizers playing sequences or drones and is often completely devoid of explicit rhythm instruments such as drums. The idea is to create a sound field (as I call them) and this fits in perfectly with the idea that the music here should be a soundtrack for thinking (and thinkers, I hope).

Human/Being ended up being divided into 7 unequal parts. They are:

Human/Being

A: Jedem Das Seine
B: Arbeit Macht Frei

Human/Being 2

Human/Being 3

Human/Being 4

A: This Doesn't Exist
B: in Absentia

Human/Being 5

Human/Being 6

Human/Being 7

Its worth pointing out here that I definitely do see these albums as a connected series. Ideally, they should be listened to as one giant narrative. But I appreciate that at 9 hours and 28 minutes long that is a major undertaking for anyone. They should at least, I hope, be listened to as self contained albums. I consider myself an album artist. I tell multi-part stories and the tracks are meant to be complimentary. I don't make single track or quick music. My work is to be taken time with and absorbed. I'm working with ideas as much as sounds and that needs TIME. This is one reason that here I have consciously tried to lengthen the pieces. Not only is this a harder musical challenge (musicians always need to be stretching their wings in my philosophy of music), but it forces the listener into either listening properly or ignoring it altogether. This aspect of making music that challenges listeners to take the music seriously is something that appeals to me. I'm not after just any old listener. Listeners have to prove themselves worthy of listening! And that means being open to being changed or influenced by the music.

I have written about part one and its concentration camp and science fiction film origins elsewhere on this blog and so I won't regurgitate what I said about that part here. In retrospect, though, those first two albums do have a very "science fiction soundtrack" feel to them and I'm glad about this. Aspects of that sound crop up again as you go through the series but other flavours crop up too, salting the meal with new tastes. This begins as early as Human/Being 2 which takes as its point of departure the death of Tangerine Dream creator, Edgar Froese. I wrote this album just as the news of his death came through. I was not a Tangerine Dream fan. This is, to be honest, because I have really only begun to dig into the history of German electronic music in the last 6 months. This is now a cause of shame and horror to me because there is so much there I never realised. This shows me, yet again, that we each have our own individual journeys through life to make. Things will happen to us in our time and not according to some pre-determined plan. What one person learns aged 20, another only learns aged 50. And so it was that in the latter part of 2014 I came to dig through the early 1970s of German electronic music and found... wonders untold!

Human/Being 2, in a musical sense, is perhaps the most thoughtful and dramatic album of the whole series. It starts with Froesen, my tribute to the prolific Berliner Froese, and winds its way through 3 further tracks that were written in the depths of one long night when I never went to sleep. Like every album in the series, but archetypally so here, this is an album fundamentally about SYNTHESIS. This is a SYNTHESIZER album and I used the controls of the synthesizers to manufacture sounds. You may wonder why I am emphasizing that. Its because I have this sense that that is not what a lot of people do. They smile and wonder at all these knobs, sliders and buttons but don't actually use them to see what they do. Here, I did. Thematically, its all a bit of a mess on this leg of the project. You have to understand that by 5 or 6am I was firmly in the throes of sleep deprivation and started to muse on if humanity as a whole was awake or asleep (and what the difference is) and how easy it would be to drive a human being mad. (Recent reports of American torture of their prisoners takes hold of my mind here.) I ended up musing on human beings as enslaved in so many different ways (and, of course, in varying degrees). It should enlighten us that it is very, very easy to be pessimistic about the human race.

Human/Being 3 exhibited more philosophical unity. Here I have one connected theme running through the music and inspiring a soundtrack. It is the twin ideas of "being" and "time" - and how those two ideas intersect. Originally, this was suggested to me by German philosopher Martin Heidegger's book but I thought about it in my own sweet ways rather than by reading that weighty and often incomprehensible tome. My thoughts concerned the nature of human beings as beings who exist within time, a concept which is so important in informing us about everything from our identity (identity is very time-bound, a timeline we tell ourselves and reflect upon constantly, informing and reconfiguring that same timeline in the process) to our place in the world. Without the concept of time we just would not be who we are as human beings. Time intimately and necessarily informs us who we are and what that means.

I also considered the concept of how we all come to be. Time is an eternity - infinitely before us and infinitely after us. We cannot comprehend or imagine it. Within that a billion billion random events occur and some of those random events result in us. I considered the idea that each of us is the outcome of a sexual act that might never have happened. And, if it didn't - at that precise time and place - then none of us would exist. Imagine your mother and father, instead of having sex that night, had just gone to sleep. You wouldn't exist. This is what I refer to as "Point Zero", the point at which your existence was decided. The last two tracks on this album coalesce around a common theme. That theme is that we exist constantly in the present. We never live either in the past or the future. One is always behind us, one always in front. But we are never in either. I reflect musically on what that means to always live NOW, watched over by two shadows and their influence. Human/Being 3 has a more stark and clinical sound than either parts 1 or 2.

Human/Being 4 is a second part of the project that comes in two halves after the opening part. Philosophically speaking, this part is the "post-structuralist" part. If you aren't sure what that means feel free to either look it up or skip over it. My hunch is that if you are in sympathy with such thought then you will already know what that line of thinking is about and, if not, then you likely won't be anyway. If you are aware of the post-structuralist conversation then the song titles used in part 4, things such as "Nothing Outside The Text", "Open Space Where An Author Should Be", "Non-Realist" and "The Insufficiency of Presence" should be poking you in all the right places.

What I am getting at with part 4 is the idea that our images of ourselves as human beings, as a race and as people, are always at least a fiction, always incomplete. They are not an "is the case". They are a becoming. We are constantly being created and recreated but we never reach the target. Our ideas about ourselves aren't solid immovable objects but warm plastic that is constantly malleable. We leave traces of what we are but the full, filled in outline never becomes visible. Human beings and humanity are things you try to grasp but, like air, you always end up grasping nothing. This whole idea lies behind the track "Keyser Soze", the character from Bryan Singer's 1995 film, "The Usual Suspects". As Kevin Spacey (who plays the character in the film) says "...and like that, he was gone". Thus, the two halves of part 4 are titled "This Doesn't Exist" and "in Absentia". Whatever you say is there is at least false.

Musically, I love part 4 very much. This is because we get some of that old "science fiction soundtrack" vibe back from earlier in the series but with other different ideas too. Its a part of the project that is different but fits together nevertheless. I've been thinking a lot about all the very many ways we humans find to divide ourselves today and, it seems to me, we often go out of our way to do so. We find pleasure in dividing ourselves in as many (often facile) ways as possible and emphasize what sets us apart and not what should bring us together. This leads me back to thinking about the opening part of the series and how people could essentially farm death in concentration camps. Empathy really is the beginning and end of it. If you see a person as less than you then it opens your mind up to treating them worse than you would expect in return. The model of this part of my project here, the idea that difference is complimentary and makes the whole stronger, may be thought of as naive but, to me at least, it is no less compelling for that.

Human/Being 5 is about motivation. Human beings seem capable of creating motives for anything they can think of. Often these may be deluded or simply ill-judged. Sometimes we would say the motives are right but the actions end up wrong. Its quite difficult to be a human being. There is also a whole industry (particularly, it seems, in the USA) devoted to motivating people. There is also the reverse side of the coin though: demotivation. There have never been as many people on this planet as there are now. And there have never been so many just doing nothing. In the age when there was more to do in or with life than ever before there is a plague of boredom. This should give us pause for thought. The music here is two parts slightly unsettling and one part poignant and thoughtful. I love it when I can zone in on the warm, fuzzy feeling from time to time. The track "Rather Keep Nothing" on Human/Being 5 is one such time. Just simple, pure, honest music that communicates a very naive feeling. I never know when it will happen but, when it does, I think I get more in touch with something beyond myself, something timeless that resonates through my being the way a sunset on a beach might do for some other people. We all need these moments, I think, when the noise of the world goes away and purer, deeper, more innocent things, things that really matter, come to the fore.

Human/Being 6 looks at "the human condition" in the round and in a way influenced by the reading of actual philosophers. In reading and thinking philosophically, I came across the statement of Sartre's that we are "condemned to be free". This was in reading Nietzsche's discussions in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) about how human beings came to value truth and knowledge and reason. His argument there was based in human beings as at one time a definite social grouping, a herd, which found certain forms of life necessary. Expulsion from this herd, the freedom to think and act individually, something we now value and prize greatly, was at that time, in pre-modern societies, a terrible punishment, an exclusion from the comfort and well-being that the hive mind brought. Nietzsche called that being "condemned to be an individual". Later, Sartre talked in his existential context of being "condemned to be free", a sense in which you have no choice but to live and to choose and to act and to think if you want to live. You have no choice in this matter. It goes hand in hand with being alive. In that sense, the burden of living is all on you. In these modern times its a burden that takes a heavy mental toll on many.

On a parallel stream to this thought I had been thinking recently about logic and its development in the context of a universe some 13.8 billion years old and so vast and unexplored and unexplained that it literally overwhelms us. It is a source of constant bafflement to me that this universe created sentient life. If you accept that there is no sort of mind or intelligence behind all that then it really is quite a question to ask why we came to be, a product of random and complex actions and reactions in the vast emptiness of space that forms worlds and whole systems of worlds and then, just as easily, wipes them away and starts again. Indeed, there have already been several great extinction events, as they are called, on our own planet. And, in this context, I thought about humans, many of whom like to think of themselves as ordered and logical, whatever that last term might mean. I suspect it actually means something very fabricated and humanistic. But, I ask myself, if there is such a thing as logic, then surely it came from the illogic, the chaos, of the universe? Is it really logic? Is it not just human beings seeing the world in a certain way? I find it funny that beings on some tiny, insignificant planet, would pride themselves on a "logic" that chaos created. By chance.

The third track of this album ("Cause and Effect/Flux") leads us back to my reading of Nietzsche. One of his great points is that humans, not least scientific humans, falsify the universe to make it useful for themselves and for us. We are counters, measurers, quantifiers. None of this means anything for ultimate truth or for questions such as if we are right or wrong about anything. They are, in fact, strictly speaking not concerned with either thing at all. For human beings, it is what is of use that counts. (Nietzsche says elsewhere that humans don't so much care about being right or wrong as being harmed as a result of being right or wrong. Spot the difference.) One such error Nietzsche sees is in the doctrine of cause and effect. As Nietzsche sees things, the universe is in constant flux, a stream of events. Only by abstracting two points, and calling them a cause and an effect, does that doctrine even make sense. But Nietzsche sees that as unfaithful to the stream of events and says that calling something a cause and an effect is to arbitrarily focus on some points and arbitrarily ignore others. Its merely an arbitrary choice fitted to the purposes of people who want to explain things in a certain way. And so this says something about human beings, a species that take things from their constant experience and order them in ways that are of use to them.

A word now on the music here. I continue in the style I have adopted for this series which is adopted from the Berlin School of synthesizer music, popularised primarily in the 1970s. But I've upped the game - and the pace - particularly with the second track, "Logic from Unlogic", which is very rhythmically based. Rhythm is a natural impulse in any music I make (hence the "disco" in an old moniker of mine, Geeky Disco) and its been hard in this series to try and restrain it - although I think I've had some success with it. Here I wanted the sound to be noticeably synthesized again but not go over old ground. The challenge to create in a given style but add variation and make it different was very much to the fore in this part of the project. Here I have used some discordant tones to convey a sense of not quite being in control. My music often seeks to perform a mood or emotion and be related instinctively and intuitively to the track title. Hence, here you can expect some sense of being uncontrollably free, some unlogic and some flux.

And so we come to the finale, the 7th and final part. As I write, this is the only part of the project not yet published. This is because listeners to the first 6 parts used up the 200 free downloads that Bandcamp allocate to their users per month. Thereafter, the site forces you to charge for your music, something I do not want to do. A big "thank you" at this point to anyone who has downloaded one of those 200 albums in only 18 days. I certainly never expected that. But that also adds pressure on me to make part 7 worthy of the 6 previous parts people seem to have found so enjoyable. That is a good pressure and I welcome it. And I think I have done it. Human/Being 7 is to be subtitled "The Infinite Sea" and, although I have already completed it, it will be available when I get my 200 free downloads back on 24th February.  That subtitle is again taken from my reading of Nietzsche.

In paragraph 124 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) Nietzsche writes:

"In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any land."

What is there to say about this? Well, that I see it as a comment on the human condition, the human situation. The land behind us is gone. There is no turning back in life, no safe refuge behind us. The past is literally a place you can never go. As Nietzsche writes, "the land is gone". Every day of life ends with a burning of the bridge and a no way back. There is only one direction in life and that is forwards, forwards on an infinite sea. And the sea is not something you can master although it may be sometimes something you can navigate. Tides will take you this way and that, storms will send you off course to either disaster or to as yet unknown wonder. But this sea is infinite. It is your lot, your form of life, your place. It is both your infinite playground and your infinite prison. And that is the metaphor that I want to give as the lasting thought of this somewhat eccentric series of albums on Human/Being. I don't claim that is has been a philosophically coherent series. Indeed, it has, frankly, been fragmentary. But it has been honest.

Musically, I have enjoyed my wanderings with "The Berlin School". Of course, I did it in my own way. That is what every musician should do. They should leave THEIR stamp on things. In part 7 you are to imagine yourself the captain of your very own schooner on the high seas. The music will lead you on a journey out across the ocean, an ocean that never ends. You must sail. You must navigate. You can do no other, wherever the ocean leads. Life is often pictured as a journey - and for good reason. The metaphor of the journey is, in the end, the most powerful one I have for this musical voyage I have taken through Human/Being. And for life itself.....

You can hear the first 6 parts of Human/Being exclusively at Elektronische Existenz right now.

Part 7, The Infinite Sea, will be added there on 24th February 2015.

The music is currently priced at 50 cents per album but should anyone make any payment you may rest assured that I will never collect it and it will return to you after 21 days or so automatically. It is important to me that my music is, and always remains, free of charge.

PS Longer term followers of my music might notice that the pylons have made a comeback in the artwork that accompanies my music. I find them an enduring metaphor for myself in so many ways.