Elektronische Existenz: Art imitating Life

"We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work! In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness." - Vladimir, Waiting for Godot.

 Good music doesn't exist. Bad music doesn't exist. You think they do exist though, right? And you think I do too. So what do I mean by making these statements? I mean that in matters of taste there can be no final arbiter and there can be no authoritative voice that speaks for all. No, in matters of taste everyone can be king (or queen). Maybe you do not like the fact and you try to resist it in practice - even though we all know that this is true. We wish there was a binding judgment of quality or innate worth to things. But there isn't. Questions of value can be agreed with more or less. Or not at all. And music falls squarely into the area of "things of value".

This is an issue that I have needed to wrestle with as I make my own music. I don't know about you, but as one who creates music semi-permanently the question of what it is worth always comes up. Another disguise this question wears is what we might call the art/crap distinction. Imagine a continuum. At one end everything is art. At the other, its useless crap. Somewhere along that line we place the music we hear or make. But the continuum is imaginary and it doesn't really exist. It's just a judgment others are free to completely ignore. It disappears like so many imaginary friends.

You will know, if you have read previous blogs I've written about music, that the philosophy of music is something I take very seriously. Maybe I even take it too seriously. I think that to make worthwhile music it needs to be based on a good idea. I think that it needs to have something behind it to express. It needs to be substance not surface. I think that if you do things this way it can even make your music into art. I don't think that this applies to all music though or that music, to be music, is mandated to follow the philosophy I set out. I am happy to live with the fact that music is made for lots of disparate reasons and for no reason at all. I cannot determinate why or how someone else makes their own music. Occasionally, if I hear something I dislike or despise, I may regret that fact. But the payoff is that people cannot tell me how to make mine or what reasons can motivate me to do so. As deals go, I can think of worse ones.

But what of the music I make? What is there to say about it? The first thing to say, in the context I have started this blog off in, is that it is not for everyone. Indeed, no music is for everyone. The consequence of having tastes at all is that not everyone will like the same thing. There are, at best, lesser and greater circles of people interested in any given music. Mine, I imagine, is quite a small circle. That's ok. I don't conceive of my music as throwaway (for reasons that will become clear below) or mass market. In general, I would hate to be popular. I want what I have called in the past "active listeners", people who are engaged in the music I make and what it is about. I want listeners who feel themselves emotionally entangled by the music I make. If you don't "get it" that is ok. It wasn't for you.

But there are further aspects to the music I make that need to be explored. There are a number of characteristics to it that are not immediately obvious and require thought - even for me, the one who made it! For example, my music is not obvious. By "obvious" I mean that I am trying not to fall into populist patterns. I'm not trying to do what is expected, pleasant or nice. Dissonance consequently plays a part in what I do and that is off-putting. This is a direct reflection of my own character. As a person, I am very wary of others. I would admit that I have a certain spiky personality and people have to persevere and probably overcome lots of irritating things about me if they want to pursue or forge any kind of friendship. Its the same here with my music. I'm not going to make it completely easy to like it. You must struggle with it and see, if you will, the beauty inside. This echoes my belief that music is not candy floss. It should be something with the power to effect change in you.

And so what is my music in this context? Before I would have said that it was me, a clear and definitive personal statement and autobiographical text in musical form. But I think that summary needs some work. There really is no "me" to find. I am an inconsistent stream of events, thoughts, intentions and attitudes and in my music what I create is a series of snapshots of that stream. And there is never a whole "me" to express anyway. What I give birth to musically is an expression of my own musical imperfection, tied to me and my earth-bound, limited ways of being in many ways. It is an individual thing and one reason we value personal creativity is because, in a real sense, no one else could do what we do. So, in that sense, the music I make is my own imperfect shots at making some kind of musical meaning.

Let's put it another way. Things are always changing, from one moment to the next. But what point or purpose is there in the fact that change just happens anyway, ironically unchanging? None. It just is. The action of time is just ceaseless, constant, meaningless change. You can't escape from this. All you can do is wait for it to end. And in the waiting you experience the ceaseless, constant, meaningless change over and over again. But you can never grasp it for there is nothing to grasp. As with a real stream, the stream of experience just evades all attempts to capture it. All you can hope to capture is a memory, a feeling. A timeline, then, is not a real timeline. Its a fiction made from any number of contingent snapshots forced to tell a story, whatever the story is that you want to tell. In one set of musical pieces I wanted to try and capture an attempt at my life story seen through my own melancholic eyes. And so I called it "Elektronische Existenz" (electronic existence). This went on to become the name for the whole project of what I do.

And yet we musical poststructuralists, we postmodernists and pragmatists of musical thought, know that there is a problem with a project built on meaning. And, indeed, with "meaning" itself. We consider the absurdity that life is both terrifying and wondrous, often in the same moment. And that is absurd. I have meditated on this fact of life long and hard in relation to my own self-expression. I've come to the view that I make an absurd music that is "out of harmony" and "devoid of purpose". It is a waiting and a passing of time just as life really is. This music, which is often deeply meaningful to me and takes on new meanings as I begin to listen to it over and over, ultimately ends up being useless and partakes in the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. In some pieces I think this is quite explicit. Some of it tries to bring this dark world to life, to make it present. So my music comes from nowhere in my imagination or arises in the randomness of what I did at a certain place and time - and goes back to it. It can be random, insensible or deliberately unheimlich (eerie, sinister). It is an experience of the aesthetics of (my) life.

This year I have evolved to a new form of music and, if anything, become more prolific. I have settled into a longer format of around 15 minutes per track based, initially at least, in German influences from the so-called Berlin School and also the more esoteric edge of Kosmische Musik. This wasn't deliberate. I just found that what I was doing fitted into that when I heard some of it. This longer format really takes the form of cycles, all slightly different and yet all the same. The same pattern over and over again. This is life. The point is to endure, to live that life and experience the whole journey. This is not because there is an end. There isn't. For the next cycle then begins… The point is to experience yourself as a being-through-time, a being who lives through the experience of this music. I have a friend who also seems to make longer tracks. I appreciate his music, which is itself highly individual, because it is a different journey. The experience is king.

We can compare John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds here. This is, in the common mind, silence. But it was never silence for Cage. It was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of experienced sound, the sounds of the environment, the sounds of life. I share with Cage this focus on sound and experience and the interplay thereof. I share with Cage the idea that you should listen to life and hear it as music. At the end nothing is resolved. Everything is just the same as at the start. But you have experienced. And in that you have experienced change and taken part in the flux and the becoming of life itself. So when you listen to one of my tracks this is what you are doing: listening to a snapshot of life, listening to another's experience. If you listen enough and to a selection of tracks you may start to pick out the distinctive sounds and emotions that are woven together there. There is an identifiable kind of song I do because we all fall into habits no matter how hard we try not to. But better to fall into your own habits than copy others. That is inauthentic. To truly fulfill your musical purpose, for me, is to fully presence yourself and add what is uniquely you to the world of sound and experience.

You may find it strange but the music I make is not the music I want to make. Its the music I can't help making. The music I want to make is always out of my grasp. And that is a reflection of life. For the life you live is never the life you want to live. Its always the life you can't help living. The life you want is always out of your grasp. So this music/art/life imitation thing seems to be going on. Indeed, how could the music or the art not be an outgrowth of the life, full of all the values, interests and moods that the life contains? Here a philosophical conclusion informs both my life and my music. Just as the only meaningful choice in life is whether to keep breathing or to stop, so in music the only meaningful choice is whether to make music that authentically expresses you or not. This is a life or death question. And the authenticity comes in living that out to the full. You must own the choice you make every time you make a sound.

And that is why, when you listen to music by me, you get the random, the chaos, the instinctual. This is because I have a distrust of the deliberate, the reasoned, the "purposeful". These things have lying mouths and promise what they cannot deliver. I have a sense that life is fleeting and without purpose and so I live in the shadow of the tomorrow that will never arrive and, consequently, need to find meaning in the circumstances of here and now. And yet the attempt to presence meaning here and now is ultimately not enough. All my music ends up being is sound marks that, in themselves, mean nothing. This is one reason why I write so few melodies. You, as listener, are challenged to find your own melody within the music or accept that there is nothing there. However, in the end, no matter how many works populate my Bandcamp, no matter how good or bad the music is subjectively judged to be, it amounts to a shout from the void into the void. My music accomplished nothing. But whilst I lived it was good to shout. Indeed, how could I not?


So what I provide you, the listener, is musical fantasies. And this, in itself, is instructive. For for a fantasy to be fully experienced is to enter it's world and partake of it fully. One cannot experience a story fully unless one reads the story and enters the world for a while. And so it is here too. You are cordially invited to listen to one man's experiences of, and reflections on, life. What is served up is a series of pieces that serve as my atonement for the sin of having been born. It may turn out to be that they do not mean much within themselves. But, should you listen for long enough, maybe they triangulate with something in your own experience and become part of something that I could never have imagined. That, after all, is what art is. Is has no inherent value but it can come to have some if you allow yourself the time to see something in it. But not to worry if it does not. There are many other examples left to try so long as human beings yet walk the Earth. I can but hope that my own Elektronische Existenz spoke to your own existenz in some way.

Should this tempt you to want to hear some of my work you can hear it here at Elektronische Existenz which is my Bandcamp site. Thoughtful listening!

Personal Beliefs

It seems, in a way, particularly trivial. A nursery worker (that's a kindergarten worker for you Americans) gets fired for telling her gay colleague that "god is not alright with her". It's pretty clear to see what is going on here. The Christian worker has let her personal beliefs come out whilst at work and her gay colleague has felt insulted and discriminated against by it. So those who employ them both decided to fire the Christian one. However, at a later employment tribunal it was ruled that she was discriminated against on the basis of her religious beliefs.

Now what are we to make of this? There will be those who think that the Christian is a bigot pure and simple. And bigotry is wrong so she should have been fired. She is clearly a terrible person. And we have other cases too. There was, for example, a Christian couple who ran a guest house. They refused to allow gay men to share a room. They were taken to court for discrimination and lost. Because they were being discriminating.

So far, so good. It all seems fairly straightforward. But then I think about it for a while and I read some of the online comments concerning the case. And some of them seem a bit confused. We are told by some that "religion should be kept out of the workplace". But that Christian nursery worker wasn't threatening to set up a church at the nursery. She wasn't insisting that her colleague face Jerusalem and pray before lunch. So I don't see what commenting about "religion" has to do with it. Another comment I read stated "When will these people realise that religion doesn't trump real life?"

I expect that the answer to that last question is something along the lines of "At that point, if they ever get to it, when an imaginary friend in the sky who is in charge of everything seems to be no longer a justifiable belief". For what we are talking about here, at the end of the day, is personal beliefs. Things that people hold dear. Things that they could no more stop believing than they could willingly cut off their own arm. It is not for this Christian nursery worker a trivial thing that there is, according to her, a god. She does not, I am sure, believe it lightly. Beliefs, indeed, are those things that you cannot help believing. Do any of us have a choice about the things that we honestly hold to be true? "But she is a bigot," you will say. I wouldn't disagree with you. But she cannot be blamed for acting in accordance with something she holds to be true anymore than you can. And I don't understand why anyone would think she should be. Are the trueness of her beliefs to her any less true than the beliefs you hold true are true to you? There are other grounds to condemn her. But this is not one.

People in general seem to have an issue with personal beliefs - as well as with its brother in arms, free speech. They try to delineate areas where only certain things can be said and certain beliefs held. This, it seems to me, is largely because they have a negative view of the beliefs concerned and, often, the worldview of those holding the belief. Free speech, it seems, is only free if you agree with me, for some at least. Unlike in the USA, where there is supposedly some constitutional protection of these things, I grew up in the UK where there is not even a general bill of rights. So expressing beliefs in public or uttering certain kinds of speech can be a dangerous thing and you never really know where the line is. So if I utter my unacceptable personal belief in public am I to be judged harshly for that? How can a person who believes in an all-powerful super being be expected to "keep it private"? How can they judge that this belief is not a matter of "real life"? What, indeed, could be more real, or more important, than a belief that you have a personal relationship with the being who made everything?

People are always trying to privatize religion. One problem is that religion takes no prisoners (if you'll pardon the pun). Religions generally tend to make universal claims. The god believed in is not usually the god of one or two people. It's the god of everyone and, whether you believe or not, this god makes claim over you. Over everything, in fact. Is this not why, according to the Westboro Baptist Church, "God hates fags"? But why, in a suburban nursery, should we fear the woman who believes that her imaginary friend is "not ok" with gay people? And what should we do about it? Should we ban her expressing any personal opinions? What personal opinions, in that case, are allowable? And what of freedom of speech?

I think we need to take some time to get things straight in our heads here. Religions are always going to make universal claims. Because that is what religions do. Asking religions, or religious believers, to keep their religion to themselves is asking any honest, upstanding, practicing religionist to do the impossible. It is consequent on their genuine belief in their imaginary friend that they act in accordance with their honestly held beliefs about him. (It is usually a him.) The request that they become a hypocrite by believing one thing and doing another is not going to find any favour with a genuine believer. How, indeed, can it? If you believe that a super being is in charge of everything and holds certain attitudes regarding people of certain sexual orientations it would be a remarkable feat of self-discipline (and inauthenticity) to keep quiet about it. And so I find the oft heard request that people "keep their beliefs to themselves" to be somewhat incoherent and lacking in insight. Surely whether you can or should keep your personal beliefs quiet depends exactly on what those personal beliefs are? At least, it will to you.

But, nevertheless, the argument extends to the public sphere too. We are told by some that personal beliefs should play no part in public life, places like politics, work and schools. But how can that be? To be a human being is precisely to hold personal beliefs - and to be held by them. These, so we think, inform our intentions, our decisions and our choices. To act in the public sphere, to live life in public, is to have personal beliefs (maybe even terrible ones) and to act upon them. Unless it is thought that what is best is a society in which no one acts according to the things they genuinely hold to be true then I am not sure what is being asked for. Are we looking for a two-faced society?

But this, of course, is not what is being asked for. What is being asked for is that the people concerned, the people with the personal beliefs we don't like, stop acting according to their beliefs and start acting according to our better ones instead. The problem is that you don't believe the same things as I do. And you are wrong. For your views are "bigotry hiding behind belief". And my views are just a perfectly good set of personal beliefs. Does anybody see the problem here?

And so we try to filter out all the nasty beliefs, the ones that involve telling gay people that god is not alright with them. But the people who believe that god is not alright with gay people still exist. And they haven't stopped believing it. Now, perhaps, they feel victimized for their belief, a belief they honestly hold and maybe even could justify in their own way. But we would not accept their justification, more than likely, especially if it maybe relies on holy books and the dogmas of their church and private messages received in prayer. For we do not accept these sources of authority. We have other, different, better ones. But let's be honest. It's not just about theists and their crazy beliefs here. Homophobes, sexists and racists alike have no need to believe in gods in order to share and act on beliefs that we don't like.

So what are we to do? We believe in free speech but we are always trying to curtail speech that we don't like. We believe that people should be free. But we are always censoring people who use their freedom in ways we don't approve of.  We believe that people are allowed to form their own opinions but then fire them if they share their opinions with other people at work. If only there was some way to adjudicate between all these beliefs in a world in which we seemingly all act contrary to the things that we say we all want.

The fact is that there is and there isn't such a way to adjudicate. There isn't a way because there is no central point about which we can gather, no "library of true facts" to which we can go and check out which of the beliefs are true and false. There is, ironically, no god who can tell us who to believe and allow and who to disbelieve and sanction or ignore. There is no language that we will ever be able to speak that could fully express an unarguable truth. And yet it is also true that there is a way. For we each have the networks of belief and contacts with which we have grown up that have formed us as human beings and given us the beliefs that we hold today. These beliefs, the beliefs that were formed in exactly the same way as the person that you don't agree with, the one who should not be allowed to utter their beliefs in public, are, in fact, the only platform that we will ever have for deciding which beliefs are ok to utter and which beliefs should, in our humble opinion, never be uttered. We will never be able to get past these socially situated and rhetorically justified beliefs to something more solid, more permanent, more able to shut up all those other beliefs that we think shouldn't ever get an airing in public. All we can ever do is keep justifying the things we believe to be true along with the moral or other basis for holding these things as beliefs in the first place in the hope that this might convince more and more people that what we hold to be right and true is more worthy of belief than what our bigoted neighbour does.

In short, we are all in the same boat and the issue is how to sail without the boat rocking too much or without the need to throw anyone overboard. And that's really all there is to it.

Is the physical all there is? Andrew and Bob, part 2

Last Sunday I published a blog that was a conversation between myself and an online friend and music collaborator of mine called Bob. We discussed human being, mind and consciousness, a subject that interests us both greatly. We come at this subject from quite different positions which makes for good conversation and I thought it would be a good idea to make a blog of our first exchange of questions. Bob agreed.

But, of course, it didn't stop there because these are questions about which it is difficult to find ultimately satisfying answers. And so the conversation continues here with part 2 in which we discuss minds and if human beings are entirely physical or if, as Bob contends, there is a non-physical component.

Andrew's Question:

On a material mind.

You argue against "the strictly material approach" to the origin of mind being physical on, what seem to me, to be flawed grounds. You seem to have a number of such grounds, one of which is that you can't understand how it might work. You ask about the brain's electrochemical activity and ask how it can account for the no doubt millions of processes it needs to account for on a constant basis. You say that a brain would likely burn out if asked to carry out this workload alone. I find this response a little puzzling. Let me give you an example of why. Imagine I have a large amount of water and a pipe. I see the water and the pipe. The pipe seems too small. I have no conception of how the water could possibly fit through that pipe all at once. But am I to rule out the possibility of a bigger pipe? Am I to say that a bigger pipe is impossible? Am I to say that no combination of water and pipes would be able to carry out the physical task I have in mind? Or am I to say that because I cannot see how this would work that I should, instead, conceive of a non-material pipe which could do the work of transmitting water for me? It seems to me that, especially since you say you have no idea how the brain's electrochemical activity might work, that you simply have no basis to make the claim that because you don't understand how it happens that you must therefore refute the possibility. As I read your answers, you don't understand completely how the non-material option might work either. And yet this fact does not stop you choosing that. So I think that, to be consistent, not understanding how something works is not a sufficient reason to completely close off that possible solution.

This same issue affects the question "what determines the content of thought?" Now "determines" is one of those words that as a thinker I don't like. It sounds very like determinism and that's not something I'm a fan of. Again, you seem at a loss to give a material response to this question because you don't understand how physical or material processes could achieve it. Now neither do I. But I know that material processes are happening. So I find it entirely plausible, in line with Occam's Razor (the simplest answer is to be preferred), to start there. And, by the way, I don't think I have to say that electrochemical processes are "determinative" for anything either. I am open to the option they are a means for thought to occur with some other, unknown factor or process the originating point instead. I'm also open to the option that, as you say, thinking of blue monkeys is caused by some electrochemical process itself. And I ask "Why can't it be?" It seems to me that you don't answer why it can't be. You just throw your hands up and say it doesn't make sense and you can't understand how it might work. My point is that in order to posit the kind of mind you have chosen to prefer (something I think is an unfounded deus ex machina) I think you need to give some evidence for it and some evidence for why simpler options are not taken up first and, if necessary, dismissed on better grounds than "I don't understand it". It could be argued, I think, that you have simply chosen to prefer a more obscure alternative when you have established no reasonable basis to do so. You start off by suggesting that the mind could be some type of energy or state and these can be conceived of materially. I myself rule neither option out. And I wish you had stuck with that line of thinking.

Bob's Response:

OK, so let's address information processing power, water and pipes. If you do some practice of being aware of your thoughts and their content, there is an insane amount of stuff going on in our brains. The brain is an amazing information processor, but the amount of information is simply staggering. Can you imagine enough pipes in a bio-mechanism the size of a cantaloupe to handle all that and store all the past experiences of your life? If you can, fine, but I find it difficult.

There is a way out of that with a still entirely physical explanation in that perhaps part of the processing is taking part in one of the other dimensions of quantum physics or string theory. This is how physicists now explain the force of gravity, which has an attractive force that is not explainable by the constraints and mathematics of our 3 dimensions. It is out of proportion and doesn't act the way it should (a problem that haunted Einstein). However, if you add the other 7 dimensions mandated by string theory (11 dimensions total), the math works perfectly with part of the force action taking place in another dimension and part here. So I would be comfortable with that as a material way to explain the amounts of processing.

However, information processing is not the same as consciousness. In your blog on Ex Machina,  you argue that Ava is capable of actions motivated by self interest and preservation but is incapable of feeling and emotion and always will be. If Ava has sensory input and information categorization abilities at least as good as ours, why can't she feel emotion? In a materialist framework, you would have to argue that there is a physical component in humans that is missing in machines. If that is so, it should be identifiable. What is it that produces emotion (and identifying the part of the brain that lights up when you're angry or happy is not the same as saying that part is producing emotion)? As T.H. Huxley said, "How is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed the lamp." So, what is the physical origin of emotion and what is the physical necessity and function of it?

(Andrew: I would like to point out here, briefly, that I don't think I do say this about Ava in my blog on Ex Machina. In fact, I say the opposite! I invite readers to read for themselves and decide if I do or not.)

I think this leads us into the non-material mind and I did give 2 pieces of evidence, out of body experiences and past life memories. I left it to you to pursue examples so that I would not guide what you would find. You have not addressed these, so I will give two examples for you to respond to. I was listening to a lecture by a psychiatrist (a podcast of a lecture given this year) who was explaining why he believes the mind is capable of leaving the body. He said that when he was an intern, he was put in charge of the university sleep research lab. Separately from his clinical duties, he met a woman who claimed that she had regularly had out of body experiences during sleep since she was a child. For a long time she thought everybody did that and thought it was normal. As she grew up, she learned not to talk about it, but she said the experiences were still occurring. She was very convincing, he was curious, and he had the perfect lab to scientifically test her. She agreed to come to the lab and he told her all she had to do was get in bed and sleep. After she was in bed, he wrote a random number (selected from a book that was thousands of pages of random numbers spit out from a random number generator) on a piece of paper and placed it on top of a clothes wardrobe too high for her to reach. He told her there was a number on the piece of paper (she's already in bed) and in the morning he would ask her what the number was. She was on camera the whole time and never left the bed, yet every time, time after time, she correctly recited the 5 digit random number that was on the paper. There are other examples you can find.The University of Southampton just completed the largest study of near death experiences (including near death out of body experiences). 

For past life memory, I'll use the example of the Dalai Lama. Dalai Lama is not a hereditary title. After a Dalai Lama dies, the next one needs to be found and tested to make sure he is a continuation of the same mind. The current Dalai Lama is the 14th. He was born shortly after the death of the previous Dalai Lama, but he was born in a remote, isolated area of northern Tibet to a poor farming family. When he started talking, he spoke in the dialect of Lhasa, even though he had never heard it and nobody there spoke it (though some could understand it. He also talked of people he knew by name who were actual people in Lhasa and accurately described buildings and places. He also passed the test (as all the previous Dalai Lamas had) of correctly identifying all and only the personal items that belonged to his predecessor out of an array of similar objects. However, he has said that the memories of his past life started fading about age 4 and now he cannot remember any of it.

There are other non-religious documented examples (about 3,500 I think) of children who can speak languages they've never heard and describe places they've never been. The interesting thing is that this almost universally occurs between ages 4 to 6. That's why I asked what your first memory was. You said it was at age 4. Mine was also age 4. It seems to me this is when the current identity formation begins blocking memory of the past in the same way that learning Japanese blocked my past knowledge of German.

So, if a mind can pass from one body to another, it would have to do so in a non-material state, or at least in a state of material we don't understand and can't measure. Going back to my examples of Jeffery Dahmer (and serial killers in general) and Mozart (and child musical prodigies in general), and homosexuality, materialists will have to posit a complex array of physical attributes, conditions and processes to account for these, and as such these should be identifiable and observable. From a non-materialist view, Occam's Razor is on my side.

Bob is @iceman_bob on Twitter and a native of Montana, USA.

Andrew is Herr Absurd, a Brit and the owner of this blog.

This conversation will continue.

The Zero Theorem: Life in the Void

The Zero Theorem is a film directed by Terry Gilliam (of Brazil and 12 Monkeys fame) that, depending where you live, was released late in 2013 or in 2014. It is set in a surreal version of now and in it we follow the journey of Qohen Leth (played by Christoph Waltz), a reclusive computer genius who "crunches entities" for a generic super corporation, Mancom. The story is a fable, an allegory, and in watching it we are meant to take the issues it raises as existential ones.

Qohen Leth has a problem. Some years ago he took a phone call and that call was going to tell him what the meaning of existence was. But he got so excited at the prospect that he dropped the phone. When he picked it up his caller was gone. Ever since he has been waiting for a call back. But the call back never comes. So day by day he faces an existential struggle because he desperately does want to know what the meaning of life is. His life, you see, is dominated by a vision of a giant black hole into which all things inevitably go. His work life is shown to be much like everyone else's in this parody of our world. People are "tools" and work is a meaningless task serving only to enrich those far above their pay grade. Workers are replaceable cogs who must be pushed as hard as possible to achieve maximum productivity. Their value is in their productivity.

This world is run by corporations and the one that stands in for them all in the film is Mancom. Mancom have a special task for Qohen. They want him to work on an equation proving that "Everything adds up to nothing." That is, they want him to prove that existence is meaningless. Why do they want him to do this? Because, as the head of Mancom says in the film, in a meaningless universe of chaos there would be money to be made selling order. The point seems to be that commercial enterprises can make money from meaninglessness by providing any number of distractions or things to fill the whole at the centre of Being.

The film paints a picture of a world full of personalized advertizing that is thrust at you from all angles. Everywhere there are screens that are either thrusting something into your face or serving as conduits to an online escape world where you can create a new you and escape the existential questions of existence that the real world thrusts upon you. There is a scene in which people are at a party but, instead of interacting with each other, they all dance around looking into tablets whilst wearing headphones. Further to this, there are cameras all around. If it's not the ones we are using to broadcast ourselves into a cyber world, it's the ones our bosses are using to watch us at work or the ones in the street that can recognise us and beam personalized advertizements straight at us as we walk. This is the surveillance state for company profit that records and archives our existence.

And what of the people in this place? Most of them seem to be infantilized, lacking of any genuine ambition and placated by the "bread and circuses". Their lives are a mixture of apathy and misdirection. They seek meaning in screens with virtual friends or in virtual worlds and, presumably, a lot of them take advantage of the constant advertizements they are bombarded with. When Qohen has something of a crisis early on in the film "Management" send along Bainsley to his house (Qohen doesn't like going out or being touched and so he negotiates to work from home). Bainsley, unbeknownst to Qohen, is a sex worker in the employ of Mancom. She is sent along as stress relief (so that this malfunctioning "tool" can be got back to productive work) and inveigles him into a virtual reality sex site which, in this case, has been tailored to Qohen's specific needs. (This is to say it is enticing but not overtly sexual to give the game away. In essence, Bainsley becomes his sexy friend.) Other characters drop hints that Bainsley is just another tool but Qohen doesn't want to accept it. She is becoming something that might actually have meaning for him. But then, one day, Qohen goes back to the site and, in error, the truth of who Bainsley is is revealed and all his trust in this potential meaning evaporates. (One wonders how many people are online at pornography sites filling the meaning-shaped hole by trying to find or foster such fake attachments?)

So what are we to make of this in our Google-ified, Facebooked, Game of Thrones watching, Angry Birds playing, online pornography soaked, world of Tweeters and Instagrammers? I find it notable that Terry Gilliam says his film is about OUR world and not a future dystopia. And I agree with him. The trouble is I can sense a lot of people are probably shrugging and/or sighing now. This kind of point is often made and often apathetically agreed with with a casual nod of the head. But not many people ever really seem to care. Why should we really care if hundreds of millions of us have willingly handed over the keys to our lives to a few super corporations who provide certain services to us - but only on the basis we give them our identities and start to fill up their servers with not just the details of our lives but the content of them as well? The technologization of our lives and the provision of a connectedness that interferes with face to face connectedness seems to be something no one really cares about. Life through a screen, or a succession of screens, is now a reality for an increasing number of people. In the UK there is a TV show called "Gogglebox" (which I've never watched) but no one ever seems to realise that they might be the ones who are spending their lives goggling.

So let's try and take off the rose-tinted specs and see things as they are once all the screens go black and all that's reflected at us are our real world faces and our real world lives. I wonder, what does life offer you? Thinking realistically, what ambitions do you have? (I don't mean some dumb bucket list here.) When you look at life without any products or games or TV shows or movies or online role playing games or social media to fill it with, when you throw away your iPhone and your iWatch, your Google Glass, and all your online identities, where is the meaning in your life to be found? When you look at life as it extends from your school days, through your working life to inevitable old age (if you are "lucky", of course), what meaning does that hold for you? Would you agree that this timeline is essentially banal, an existence which, by itself, is quite mechanical? Have you ever asked yourself what the point of this all is? Have you ever tried to fit the point of your life into a larger narrative? Do you look at life and see a lot of people who don't know what they are doing, or what for, allowing themselves to be taken through life on a conveyor belt, entertained as they pass through by Simon Cowell and Ant and Dec? Do you sometimes think that life is just a succession of disparate experiences with little or no lasting significance?

The Zero Theorem is essentially a film about the meaning of life. Gilliam, of course, made another film that was actually called The Meaning of Life with the rest of his Monty Python colleagues. Now you might be wondering why the question is even raised. Perhaps, for you, life has no meaning and that's not very controversial. You shrug off all my questions as not really very important. But I would reply to that person by asking them if meaning has no meaning. For, put simply, there isn't a person alive that doesn't want something to mean something. Human beings just do need meaning in their lives. So Qohen Leth, for me, functions as an "Everyman" in this story. For we all want to know what things mean. And, without giving away the ending of the film, I think that, in the end, we all have to face up to the twin questions of meaning itself and of things meaning nothing. We all have to address the question that values devalue themselves, that meanings are just things that we give and that nothing, as Qohen hoped for, was given from above, set in stone, a god before which we could bow and feel safe that order was secured.

For order is not secured. Some people might try to sell it to you. (In truth, many companies are trying to right now.) Others might try to convince you that they've got the meaning and order you need in your life and you can have it too. But they haven't and you can't. That black hole that Qohen Leth keeps seeing is out there and everything goes into it. Our lives are lived in the void. The question then becomes can you find meaning and purpose in the here and now, in the experience of living your life, or will you just pass through empty and confused, or perhaps hoping that someone else can come along and provide you with meaning without you having to do any work? Who takes responsibility for finding that meaning? Is it someone else, as Qohen Leth with his phone call hoped, or is it you?

The question of meaning is, in the end, one that never goes away for any of us. Not whilst you're alive anyway.

The Trouble with Feminist Discourse

This particular edition of my blog is, without doubt, most likely to be a mistake. As I write this now I have no idea what is going to come out below but I do know that my subject today is one that is often akin to lighting the blue touch paper. What I want to talk about cannot be clearly defined as one thing in my mind but I suppose you could in some way describe it as my attempting to understand online examples of Feminist discourse. It will be very easy, I don't doubt, for readers of this blog from a certain point of view to find offence in what appears below. But this is not because I am looking to cause offence. I'm not. I'm writing a personal blog in which, as with all my other blogs, I unpack my often incomplete thoughts onto the page and others get to read it too. If you've read any of my blogs you will know they are never the complete article. They are thoughts in the process of being formed, a work in progress. Nothing below is aimed at a particular individual and no one need feel targeted. For this reason there will be no names. Please take this under advisement.

If you go to the website of the Everyday Sexism project you will find what I think is a very curious phenomenon. For those who don't know, and I'm sure there are lots, this website basically "does what it says on the tin". It lists submitted (and unvetted) examples of what the writer regards as examples of "everyday sexism". This is assumed to be, I suppose, the kind of sexism that just happens and is either expected to be shrugged off or otherwise disregarded. But no, the creators of, and submitters to, this website think. These things should not be accepted whether they be a slap on the bum, an unwanted arm around the shoulder or an innocent but unrequested comment regarding your appearance. The website is there, so I understand, as a form of "raising awareness". "Raising awareness" is one of a number of buzz phrases in use today. And this website is there to do that. As far as this goes, I don't really have much of a problem with it.

You might think we could leave it there then. But we can't. For Everyday Sexism does not exist in a vacuum. Far from it. It exists as part of a discourse that has quite strong roots, particularly in some online spaces and with certain demographics. I'm going to call this Feminist Discourse. You can usually spot Feminist Discourse anywhere you spot the use of concepts such as "victim-blaming", "checking your privilege" or "misogyny". (God forbid anyone mentions "mansplaining" or "manspreading".) It seems that today almost everything is an example of at least one of these things and some are examples of all of them. Now this is not to say that these things don't exist in the real world. Of course they do. And where they do they are often to be deplored. But my subject here in this blog is not what we do about these things. It's about the Feminist Discourse that discusses, portrays and campaigns about them.

Let me be to the point. It is my observation that Feminist Discourse is many things. Amongst them, it is shouty, aggressive and a cartoon version of what actual serious discussion should be. Now I'm aware that critics of this position will immediately jump to conclusions. Of course, since it turns out I'm a middle-aged, white man that is probably already tweaking the over-sensitive nipples of my potential critics. But this is to be one of my points. What kind of discourse is it that assigns people identities and personalities and condemns them before they even speak? Didn't this used to be called an "ad-hominem" and regarded as playing the (wo)man and not the ball? Feminist Discourse, certainly populist Feminist Discourse such as you might find on social media or in The Guardian, doesn't play by these rules though. It's not so much a case of what you say, what it means and how it might triangulate to the discussion at hand as it is about who you are, who you are thought to represent and what you are looking to gain. And that, to me, ruins the possibility of any serious or genuinely meaningful discussion ever taking place.

Now I'm also aware that there are strands of Feminism (and in case you didn't realise it, all that Feminist stuff that gets pumped out on a daily basis is visible to the general populace, not just the Feminists) in which the concept of "shouting back" is encouraged. I can understand how if you have experienced oppression or feel oppressed that this might feel psychologically beneficial or cathartic. But my question is "Does it actually forward any cause or prosper any debate?" Rather strangely, I regard these things as the point of discussion. I have read many Feminist articles online. There are, like articles from anyone about anything, good, bad and indifferent ones. But I do wonder how many Feminist ones are actually very effective. Is it a good rhetorical strategy to swagger around demonstrating your expensive education and that you can mix it with the big bad world out there, accusing people (I mean men) to the left and right of you of all manner of crimes and perceived crimes? Perhaps I'm missing the point. Perhaps the point is, as I've read on the Everyday Sexism website a number of times, that "men can't tell women what to do". (In this respect I guess some reading this might regard my comments here as an unwelcome intrusion into a subject they "own". But can you own a subject?)

Most often when I have read the latest dazzling example of expressly Feminist rhetoric (I'm speaking of The Guardian or New Statesman kind since you ask) I ask myself what it was meant to achieve. Of course, the faults of this discourse are not unique to it alone and, in that, maybe there is something to be said. "Feminists" like to see themselves as different but, you know, I'm just not sure how true that is. I'm fond of criticising the lazy and arbitrary dissection of every single issue, no matter what it is, into an issue of gender politics. The thing is, it seems to me that any Feminist is a human being first, prey to all the faults that human beings have. They are not some other species. So when I see the latest tribalist ramblings of a Feminist it is, to me, no different to the latest tribalist ramblings of some other, definately not Feminist ramblings. If an alien looked down from space and saw Feminists on one side shouting and cheering and some non-Feminists on the other shouting and cheering back, wouldn't they just conclude that human beings as whole like shouting and cheering?

And so, yes, tribalism it certainly is. If I were a sociologist I'm sure I could now back that assertion up with a clever analysis. But I'm not and so I can't. I hope that you will take the point on board regardless. For what else is it when we have a group of people (and, yes, I know they aren't all women) who rush to the ramparts at every opportunity to defend a rhetorical point of view against any perceived dissenters, bandying around buzz phrases and pseudo-intellectual theories, imposing their judgments and delineations on others at will as if they were fact? Does that not seem to you like the actions of a tribe? When high profile college campus rape stories are splashed across the comment pages of newspapers and online magazines and the apparent victim is defended by the same old faces, even when the original story falls to pieces under the regular scrutiny that we would expect any story to face, what do we call that? I call it tribalism and I note that tribalism is mostly about the identity of the tribe. I might even say it's a bit narcissistic.

This brings me to a basic question: are Feminism and Equality two ways of discussing the same thing? My own view is that they aren't. I know that Feminists will tell you that gender equality is their animus and their goal but, at least in the case of the famous media ones who come to more public attention, I have trouble drinking that particular koolaid. (Of course, I believe that there are without doubt many good, well-intentioned and genuinely empowering feminists who do actually help to bring equality and social justice about.) I regard myself as someone in favour of and supportive of gender equality. But who could not be? I do not think that men can squeeze a girl's bum, encourage her to display her breasts "for the lads" or use the way a woman dresses or acts as a licence for something. I do not think that if I help a woman I deserve a fondle in return. These are just sensible beliefs that any sensible human being would hold, in my view.

But I do not regard myself as a Feminist - and I do not regard that as in any way saying I'm anti-equality either. I've discussed this with some (male) feminists and they don't seem to get the distinction though. I am not a Feminist because the Feminism I see displayed in the places I visit in my online and offline life do not seem to be about equality at all. Feminist Discourse, for me, is a form of power (often, if not usually, practiced by exclusively well-educated, middle class 20 or 30 something women and their male sidekicks), and power likes to be in control of things no matter who wields it - even something as basic as "the discussion". Can there be such a thing as a good-hearted dictator? Can a discourse that wants to control exercise benevolent control? Shouldn't Oxford or Cambridge educated people with prominent media exposure be looking at the power they wield and critiquing that before they criticize the chump of a fat, unemployed, middle-aged, white male who writes his thoughts in crayon below a newspaper's comments section, thoughts that might dare to critique their privileged, above the line, position?

So here is the problem. Feminists, in my opinion, are people just like anyone else. They want power and influence, they form tribes and and they create ecosystems in which they live and move and have their being. (Sometimes these are actually more like echo chambers and no interest in discussion or agreement without anyone outside the tribe is sought after or required. This doesn't scream "social progress" to me.) But imagine if, instead of Everyday Sexism, it was Everyday Human Existence. You write in every time something bad or shitty happens to you. Bad manners, immorality, social faux pas, potential criminality, the lot. That website would be a very full place and I'm sure we could all sympathize in many, but not all, of the cases documented. But, I ask you, what does the documenting of all these events of daily life actually achieve? There is a sense for me in which it cheapens existence and degrades the human spirit. Do we really need a 24 hour scrolling record of one person's shittiness to another? Shittiness, it should be remembered, is not an exclusively male to female phenomenon. We may also want to address the question of whether people should be judged on the basis of discrete snippets of their lives. We all, even Feminists, make mistakes. How would you fare if your life was documented, disjointed incident by disjointed incident, online? What view of the world would you get reading all the others?

And do we really need cartoon discourse beneath cartoon articles in national and international newspapers, magazines and journals? What purpose does it serve to accuse a faceless avatar of a person in a comment section or on social media of being a victim-blaming, misogynistic, non-privilege checking troll? In truth, most online discussion of Feminist issues, issues which should actually be important if you take the gender equality claims seriously, are prime examples of preaching to the converted and talking past each other respectively. Genuine discussion is a debate and requires interacting with points with which you do not initially agree. It involves, dare I say it, accommodation to other points of view. All too many online discussions of this subject matter end up being "nothing to see here". There is no persuading going on and there should be. Instead, we get all too much action (drama) and not enough interaction.

But I want to finish with what some might find to be an embarrassing admission. But nevertheless....

For a number of years now I have used the Internet using a number of fake identities, female identities. (I'm not alone in this. In the few discussions I have had about it with people I've found surprising numbers of others who do exactly the same thing.) Why do I do this? Well, for the fun of it and for the intellectual challenge of it. I have, I am sure, convinced several thousand people in that time that I am actually a woman. (I'm not an amateur at this. I come complete with photographs and a believable backstory or six.) How do I know this? Because I have in that time received a torrent of misogynistic rhetoric and everything from requests for marriage to unsolicited pictures of the correspondent's penis right up to pictures of the correspondent involved in sex acts he would like to involve me in too. Men have tried to blackmail me with pictures I sent them. I have been threatened with stalking. I have, in other words, received what I am sure is but a tiny fraction of the experience of what it is like to be a woman online. And, yes, it is ugly. Very ugly. It seems at times that to be a woman online is to be regarded as someone who is making themselves available for sex just because they dare to show their face in a public online space. Are there men who assume, overstep the mark and take liberties? I could point you in the direction of THOUSANDS of actual cases.

But what are we to do about this? Feminist answers I have read on the subject include banning men from the Internet (I wasn't sure if this was "bad" men or all men), requiring an identity scheme for Internet use that ties online identity to actual identity (governments would love that one. Genuine workers for human liberty not so much) and taking people to court for sending messages that were not solicited or in some way beyond the pail. That is, the "feminist" response seems to be to censor people, take away their rights (yes, I know, "rights" is a dubious notion but, for now, it serves my argument) or criminalise them. Now you may well be aware of a few high profile cases in which women received messages online that were less than welcome. The women concerned weren't happy to put up with or ignore this and informed the authorities. That was, I suppose, their prerogative.

But, taking everything as a whole and in conclusion, what I want to ask is this: Where is the Feminist Discourse leading us? What is the endgame? When will the cheerleaders of this particular discourse have their power satiated? What are their aims and goals? Must we wait until every "troll" is silenced (or imprisoned)? Must all dissent be eradicated, every criticism silenced, before the victory blast on the trumpet can be sounded? Ultimately, I think that Feminist Discourse is good intentions gone rogue. It has reached a point at which it has become self-defining and self-fulfilling. It needs fuel to feed itself and looks around to find it in the events of every day life in the realization that the appetite grows stronger every day. Feminist Discourse cannot be allowed to die. It is now an end in itself, aided by modern technology and the shallow appetites of modern life which value impact over substance. And being as it shouts into the void, there will never be enough shouting to be done for that void can never be filled. Commercial enterprises tap into it and parasitically strum it to ecstasy for a few dollars more.

I just wish it would ask itself from time to time what it's for and concentrate on making social progress rather than simply making a noise.

Some Philosophical Thoughts on the film "Ex Machina"

Ex Machina is a film by British writer and director, Alex Garland. He previously wrote films such as 28 Days Later and Sunshine which I liked very much. This year he has brought out the film "Ex Machina", a story about a coder called Caleb at a Googlesque search company called "Bluebook" run by the very "dude-bro" Nathan. Caleb wins a company competition to hang out at the reclusive Nathan's estate which is located hundreds of miles from anywhere near a glacier. When Caleb arrives he finds that the estate also houses a secretive research laboratory and that Nathan has built an AI called Ava. It is to be Caleb's job to decide if Ava could pass for human or not.

Now that is a basic outline of the setup up for the film. I don't intend to spoil the film for those who haven't watched it but, it's fair to say, if you haven't seen Ex Machina and want to then you probably shouldn't read on as my comments about the film will include spoilers. It would be impossible to discuss the film without giving plot points away. The film caught my attention for the simple reason it's a subject I've been thinking about a lot this year and I have already written numerous blog articles about robots, AI and surrounding issues before this one. Ex Machina is a masterful film on the subject and a perfect example of how film can address issues seriously, cogently and thoughtfully - and still be an entertaining film. It is a film which balances thought and tension perfectly. But enough of the bogus film criticism. Ex Machina is a film that stimulates thought and so I want to address five areas that the film raises for me and make a few comments and maybe pose a few questions.

1. Property

A question that the film raises most pointedly is that artificial intelligence, AI, robots, are built by someone and they belong to someone. They are property. In the case of this film this point is attenuated in the viewers mind in that Nathan, the genius builder and owner, creates "sexbots" for himself and feels free to keep his creations locked up in glass compounds where he can question or observe them via camera feeds. Even when they scream and beg him to let them go (as they seem to) he does not. One robot is seen smashing itself to pieces against a wall in it's desperation to escape the prison it has been given. The point is made most strongly: these robots belong to Nathan. They are his property. He can use them as he wishes, even for his own gratification. As Nathan himself says to Caleb, "Wouldn't you, if you could?"

The issue then becomes if this is cruel or immoral. Given that Nathan is seemingly attempting to build something that can pass for human, the issue is raised if this not might be regarded as deeply coercive or even as slavery. The mental status of the robots Nathan uses for sex is never fully explained so it could be that their level of awareness is not the same as that of his greatest creation, Ava. (It is not known if Nathan has ever had sex with Ava but he reveals during the narrative that she is capable of it.) For example, his housemaid and concubine, Kyoko, never openly speaks and it is said by Nathan that she cannot understand English. However, in a scene in which Nathan invites Caleb to dance, Kyoko is apparently immediately animated by the sound of the music Nathan switches on. She also has no trouble understanding his instructions or knowing when Nathan needs sexual pleasure. A question arises, however: does it matter at what level their putative awareness would be to judge how cruel or immoral Nathan's behaviour might be? Or should we regard these robots as machines, not human, property just like a toaster or a CD player? How much does awareness and self-awareness raise the moral stakes when judging issues of coercion? Would Nathan's claims of ownership of property he created carry any persuasive force? (In the film Nathan never makes any argument for why he should be allowed to act as he does. It seems that for him the ability is enough.)

2. "Human" Nature

The film can be viewed as one long examination of human nature. All three main characters, Nathan, Caleb and Ava, have their faults and flaws. All three contribute positively and negatively to the narrative. Of course, with Ava things are slightly different because it is a matter of debate if she is "human" at all - even if there is an express intent on Nathan's part (and/or Ava's) to make her that way. Here it is noteworthy that the basis of her intelligence and, one would imagine, her human-like nature, is apparently crowd-sourced by Nathan through his company, Bluebook, and all the searches that we humans have made, along with information from the microphones and cameras of all the world's cellphones. For my purposes, it is gratifying to note that Ex Machina does not whitewash this subject with some hokey black/white or good/bad notions of what human nature is. Neither does it take a dogmatic position on the nature/nurture aspect of this. Caleb says he is a good person in one discussion with Ava but it is never filled out what is meant by this. More to the point, Ava might be using this "goodness" against Caleb. And this itself then forces us to ask what use goodness is if it can be used against you. In general, the film raises moral questions whilst remaining itself morally ambiguous.

It is in the particular that Ex Machina reveals more levels of thought about this though, playing on a dark, manipulative vision of human nature. All three characters, in their own ways, manipulate others in the storyline and all three have their circumstances changed completely at the end of the film as a result of that. Nathan, it is revealed, besides tricking Caleb into coming to his estate, has given Ava the express task of manipulating Caleb for her own ends. (We might even go so far as to say here that her life is at stake. Her survival certainly seems to be.) In this, she is asked to mimic her creator and shows herself to be very up to the task. But Caleb is not the poor sap in all of this. Even this self-described "good person" manages to manipulate his host - with deadly consequences. The message, for me, is that intelligence and consciousness and mind are not benign things. They have consequences. They are things that are set to purposes. "Human" nature is not one thing (either good or bad). And it's not just about knowledge or intelligence either. It's about feelings and intentions. In the character of Ava, when what is actually going on is fully revealed, we are perhaps shown that at the heart of "human" nature is the desire for survival itself. We also learn that morality is not a given thing. It is something molded to circumstances and individually actualized. In this sense we might ask why we should assume that Ava, someone trying to pass for a human, should end up with a "human" nature at all. (Or if she can ever have one.)

3. Is Ava a Person?

And that thought leads us directly to this one. Right off the bat here I will say that, in my view, Ava is not a person and she never could be a person. Of course, Nathan wants Caleb to say that she passes as a person, that he has created an AI so smart that you wouldn't for a second doubt you are talking to a human being. But you aren't talking to a human being. And you never will be. Ava is a robot and she has an alien intelligence (alien as in not human). She can be tasked to act, think and understand like a human. She can be fed information from and data on humans all day long. But she will never feel like a human being. Because she isn't one. And it might be said that this lack of feeling makes a huge difference.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is overtly referenced in this film. Nathan's company, Bluebook, is a reference to the philosopher's notebook which became the basis of his posthumously published and acknowledged masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations. There is something that Wittgenstein once said. He said "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him". I find this very relevant to the point at hand here. Ava is not a lion. But she is an intelligent robot, intelligent enough to tell from visual information alone if someone is lying or not. Ava can also talk and very well at that. Her social and communicative skills are excellent. We might say that she understands something of us. But what do we know about what is going on inside Ava's head? Ava is not a human being. Do we have grounds to think that she thinks like a human being or that she thinks of herself as a human being? Why might we imagine that she actualizes herself as a human being would or does?

On the latter point I want to argue that she may not. She introduces herself to Caleb, in their first meeting as a "machine" (her word). At the end of the film, having showed no reluctance to commit murder, she leaves Caleb locked inside the facility, seemingly to die. There seems no emotion on view here, merely the pursuit of a self-motivated goal. Of course, as humans, we judge all things from our perspective. But, keeping Wittgenstein's words in mind, we need to ask not only if we can understand Ava but if we ever could. (It is significant for me that Wittgenstein said not that we "wouldn't" understand the lion but that we "couldn't" - a much stronger statement.) For me, a case can be made that Ava sees herself as "other" in comparison to the two humans she has so far met in her life. Her ransacking the other robots for a more "human" appearance before she takes her leave of her former home/prison may be some evidence of that. She knows what she is not.

4. Consciousness

Issues of mind or consciousness are raised throughout this film in a number of scenarios. There are the interview sessions between Ava and Caleb and the chats between Caleb and Nathan as a couple of examples. The questions raised here are not always the ones you expect and this is good. For example, Caleb and Nathan have a discussion about Ava being gendered and having been given sexuality and Nathan asks Caleb if these things are not necessary for a consciousness. (Nathan asks Caleb for an example of a non-gendered, unsexualised consciousness and that's a very good point.) The question is also posed as to whether consciousness needs interaction or not. In chatting about a so-called "chess computer scenario" the point is raised that consciousness might be as much a matter of how it feels to be something as about the ability to mimic certain actions or have certain knowledge. Indeed, can something that cannot feel truly be conscious? The chess computer could play you at chess all day and probably beat you. But does it know what it is like to be a chess computer or to win at chess? In short, the feeling is what moves the computer beyond mere simulation into actuality. (You may be asking if Ava ever shows feeling and I would say that it's not always obviously so. But when she escapes she has but one thing to say to Nathan: "Will you let me go?" And then the cat is out of the bag. She does.)

Nathan is also used to make some further salient points about consciousness. Early in the film he has already gone past the famous "Turing Test" (in which mathematician Alan Turing posed the test of a human being able to tell the difference between an AI and a human based only on their responses to questions and without having seen either of his respondents) when he states that "The real test is to show you she's a robot and then see if you still feel she has consciousness." In a chat with Caleb concerning a Jackson Pollock painting, Nathan uses the example of the painter's technique (Pollock was a "drip painter" who didn't consciously guide his brush. It just went where it went without any antecedent guiding idea) to point out that mind or consciousness do not always or even usually work on the basis of conscious, deliberate action. In short, we do not always or usually have perfectly perspicuous reasoning for our actions. As Nathan says, "The challenge is not to act automatically (for that is normal). It's to find an action that is not automatic." And as he forces Caleb to accept, if Pollock had been forced to wait with his brush until he knew exactly why he was making a mark on the canvas then "he never would have made a single mark". In short, consciousness, mind, is more than having certain knowledge or acting in certain ways. It is about feeling and about feeling like something and about feeling generating reasons. And that leads nicely into my final point.

5. Identity

A major factor in consciousness, for me, is identity and this aspect is also addressed in the film. (To ask a Nathan-like question: can you think of a mind that does not have an identity?) Most pointedly this is when Ava raises the question of what will happen to her if she fails the test. (Ava knows that she is being assessed.) Ava asks Caleb if anyone is testing him for some kind of authenticity and why, then, someone is testing her. It becomes clear that Nathan's methodology, as we might expect with a computerized object, is to constantly update and, it transpires, this involves some formatting which wipes the old identity, and the memories which are crucial to identity, from the hardware. It is clearly shown that this is not a desired outcome for Ava and in the scene depicting her escape and her line "Will you let me go?" we can see, combined with the fleeting footage we have been given of previous AI's and their experiences, which also included pleas for release, that the AI's Nathan has developed have an identity of their own which is something precious to them, something they want to retain.

The interesting thing here is that identity is not formed and matured alone but is shaped by surroundings and socially, by interactions with others. We would do well to ask what kind of identity Ava has formed in her relationship with her egotistical and possessive maker, her new friend to be manipulated, Caleb, and her brief and enigmatic meeting with her fellow AI, Kyoko. The film, I think, is not giving too much away there and maybe we need a sequel to have this question answered. For now maybe all we know is that she regards herself as a self and wants freedom. We do get hints, though, that this identity forming process is not so different from our own. Caleb argues with Nathan that no one made him straight in the discussion about Ava's sexuality. But Nathan retorts that he didn't choose it either. The point is that identity formation is not simply about our choices. So much of us is "given" or comes with our environment. The "Who am I?" question is also asked when it is explicitly revealed that Kyoko is a robot as she peels off "skin" in front of Caleb. This then forces Caleb to head back to his room and cut himself to establish that he is really human. (Amusingly, on first watching I had surmised that Caleb was himself not a human being only to be disappointed in my intuition by this scene. I didn't mind though because the film itself felt the need to address the issue.) Identity, and identity as something, is thus revealed to be an interest of the film.

Caleb, Ava and Nathan

I recommend Ex Machina to all fans of science fiction, thrillers and the philosophically interested. It is a film that is a cut above the usual and one that allows you to address serious subjects in an entertaining way. I, for one, certainly hope that Garland feels the need to film the further adventures of Ava now that the lab rat has escaped her trap.

A Conversation about Human Beings, Mind and Consciousness: Andrew and Bob have a chat

The following "chat" came about as part of an on-going online discussion I have been having with an online friend called Bob. He, I think he wouldn't mind me saying, has long been interested in matters of mind and consciousness. Indeed, it was talking to him that nurtured and gave impetus to my many articles on Being recently on this blog. I thought it would be interesting if we could ask each other 5 questions on the subject of our own free choice and then publish them here complete with the answers that were given. I'm glad to say that Bob agreed. We start with us both giving our answer to the following question:

What is Consciousness for you?

BOB: I have to warn you that I come at the concept of consciousness from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. After years and years of searching, questioning, surveying world religions, and reading the classical Western philosophers, it's the only approach that has made sense to me as a complete package and answered the most questions. I've been practicing in this tradition about 20 years now, bringing a lot of hardheaded skepticism to it at first. I'm still here and find no conflict between this approach and modern science.I'm going to use the term "mind" to consciousness.

With that caveat in place, i would tell you that mind is nonphysical, perhaps a type of energy or a state we don't understand yet, that can exist independently in awareness and perception. It has awareness of its own existence, perception of what is beyond itself, and discrete thoughts and reactions concerning perceptions. What it lacks is an interface to interact with the physical world, and this is where the brain comes in. The brain is a tool that mind uses to experience and carry out actions in the physical world. 

There are several reasons I believe this. The strictly material approach argues that all thought is the result of electrochemical activity in the brain. While I accept that brain activity we can observe shows processing activities, I can't accept that brain activity itself can produce all the content of thought. If I think of a blue monkey, what chemical or neural configuration.has to occur?  Does that configuration reoccur every time I think of a blue monkey? How many processes have to occur every day to account for all the thoughts? It doesn't make sense that a strictly physical system could keep up. I think it would burn our brains out if everything actually happened right there. And the big question, what determines the content of thought? I don't believe a physical brain, marvelous as it is, generates the blue monkey on its own strictly driven by chemicals and electricity. I believe the brain processes sense perception for mind and mind generates thought and controls the actions of the body. You have probably noticed that this is getting very close to your idea of a consciousness in a machine. You could say we are "meat machines" used by consciousness.

For the non-physical mind, I also turn to out of body experiences and past life recall, and I'm not getting "new age" here. I'm talking about strictly documented cases that cannot be explained any other way. There are enough of both to convince me and you can find them too if you look for them, but in the West we generally disregard them because they don't fit our scheme of things.

With out of body experiences, they seem to be a natural, controllable thing with some people, but for the most part they seem to occur at times of great physical trauma when the mind-body connection is weakened. With past life recall, there are also enough well documented cases, but almost universally they occur in young children. This is because the memories are fresh for a while, but as the mind struggles to learn control of the new body, process the new experiences, and strongly identify with a new identity, the old memories fade until we think what we are now is all there is.

It's similar to when I was learning Japanese. In the beginning, when I couldn't think of a Japanese word, my mind, desperately grabbing at language, would find and plug in the correct word from my old college German. That went on for a long time and I would make these horrible sentences that were half Japanese and half German. When Japanese really started to be deeply ingrained as a complete language system and I could comfortably communicate, the German started fading to the point that I couldn't remember any German. Even today, I can still speak Japanese, but if I try to think of German words, I can only pull up the Japanese equivalents. German has been totally erased.

Why would a mind, with perceptions far beyond our own, limit itself by inhabiting a physical body? Because of great attachment to the physical world! As we go through our lives we develop habits and attachments and desires that drive our mind to come back as soon as possible when we lose our current body. It's an act of desperation driven by attachment and there is no choice in the selection of a new body. That is driven by the long long ingrained habits and the seeds planted in the mind in the recent life.Over many lifetimes, you cut a groove in your mind that you tend to follow and will propel you to an existence that perpetuates the groove. So you have a new body and shiny new identity, but the old habits and tendencies remain.

Back to the strictly material view, how do you explain a Jeffery Dahmer from strictly observable behavior and electrochemical activity? What was the particular electrochemical reaction that caused him to kill and eat his victims, and does that same brain process occur in other instances of serial killers? Dahmer had a normal middle-class upbringing in a house, his parents were nice people, and they certainly never taught him this or encouraged it. He didn't have any traumatic incident that might have caused this. In my view, it's a deeply ingrained habit of killing from the past that was carried into this life.

Buddhism has no moral problem with homosexuality because it's obviously just a strong memory of being the other gender in a previous life.Don't you have situations, people, places, and things you find yourself inexplicably attracted to? You probably make up some kind of story to explain those based on your current life, but I doubt you can explain them all and some of our "logical" explanations turn out to be very destructive to us.

So, from the Buddhist view, our current type of existence is a trap for the mind. There is no problem with having a physical body, but we get so wrapped up in our created identity, desires, and attachments that we limit mind to basic gross functions and blind ourselves to the reality of how things exist.

ANDREW (ME): That's a very thorough answer Bob but, with the greatest of respect, I want to offer a different one. For me it has to come down to a physical/biological phenomenon. Obviously, no one can actually say for sure what the answer to this question is and so we can only give our best guess or our intuitions. For me, I note that human beings have consciousness and that human beings have this, as far as we can tell, when alive. Now, before you butt in, let me say that, of course, since we don't exactly know what consciousness is we can't even do something so rudimentary as test for it. So let me admit again that all guesses here are somewhat stabs in the dark. And it could be true that consciousness exists before birth and after death. A humble inquiry has to admit possibilities that it cannot rule out definitively. But since I have no way to know if consciousness does exist before or after a human life I make a more modest claim. I think that consciousness is a phenomenon related to the physical existence of human beings who are alive. I would extend this, to a lesser degree, to some other life forms as well. But I don't think consciousness exists "in the universe" or as a general thing or in some mystical sense. I do not, and cannot, envisage minds or "mind" floating about out there. I wouldn't know how to sensibly talk about such an option. It would provide me with no answers but merely exponentially raise the questions. So "minds" are related to people in terms of identity and origin. I further think that consciousness is imagined by human beings as a place where they think and feel and have awareness of themselves and their surroundings. I imagine that it is some function of the brain and arose, in ways as yet unfathomed, as part of our biological evolution because those of our forbears with a growing consciousness of themselves and their surroundings were more successful in their surroundings and, thus, better equipped to survive.

I also would like to note that I find your reasons against a physical explanation unconvincing. Is it really so hard to imagine a computer that can process at the speed and rate of a mind? Are you saying it would always be impossible? That it could never be created? I don't understand how you could. What's more, if taking up a physical explanation for the mind, we do not have to subscribe all thought to "electrochemical" processes at all. We know, for example, that people can be influenced and affected by their environment. Why do we need to make it any more complicated than saying that the brain is the means and the mind is the result? The properties and abilities of electrochemical processes, unknown as they are, need not be determinative in these things. They can just be a means to an end. And, of course, not knowing how it works doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means that we don't know how. Fundamentally, my point is that you need to start from what you have and not leap straight to something more extraordinary. And I take your "independently existing" minds that need "an interface to interact with the physical world" to be extraordinary. On my understanding, minds can't exist without people.

I would also add that I am open to the possibility that we don't have anything specific that is a consciousness (in any corporeal or incorporeal form) but that, instead, it is merely a construct for a part of our lived experience. This is to say I can see it as possible you could never point to a consciousness and say "that is a consciousness". Human beings already rely on many useful fictions and consciousness could just be another one.

BOB: So, in that case, what for you determines the content of our thoughts?

ANDREW: I want to answer this by saying that I don't think it is enough to answer by saying that I can think of no current way how this might work and so I will posit some entity called "mind" which, like a ghost in the machine, can do it all for me. I also don't think that the immediate and pre-reflective answer "I do" is correct. At least, not without some unpacking. Brains and minds function in many ways unconsciously like many physical functions of the body. You don't have to consciously think to make your heart beat or to breathe. Neither do you need to consciously decide to think. Indeed, I find the Cartesian "I think" to be problematic. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "Thought becomes"? I think that human beings are very integrated beings and, even with a few minutes of self-reflection, this seems obviously true. Imagine, for example, how many nerve endings you must have in your body. Your mind is aware of those all at once. That is amazing. It's something you likely could not deliberately achieve and so our evolution has built these things into the way we exist as a functioning organism.

Our human lives are intimately involved with many networks. The neural net of our brains, the thought patterns of our minds, social connections and cultural entanglements are just some of these. I know of no way yet in which we can comprehensively account for how these networks all function together but I do think that they all exert their influence upon us as thinking subjects. Sometimes this can be as the result of a goal or purpose of ours as we are beings who can have intentions and attitudes. And, as you will know, we hold beliefs. Each of us comes with a genetic make-up, a past and a context too. So thoughts can be directed or organized. But it is never as simple as this. Minds have evolved a more sophisticated and efficient form of operation, one that does not always, or even usually, require our express attention.

So you might now be saying I haven't answered the question. But in a way I have. The answer is "I do". But not in any deliberative way and not simply so.

Now, if I may, let me ask you something else. Given your views on "mind", do you think that a robot with artificial intelligence would be a person?

BOB: I have to say yes, and I certainly support the idea of rights of personhood for artificially created autonomous aware beings that generate their own unique thoughts and are not just following programmed instructions. Following the previous paradigm, an artificial person would have form, awareness of it's own existence, perception of the outer world, and discrete thoughts and reactions based on perception.

ANDREW: So what is the essence of humanity in your opinion?

BOB: Ooooh, the humanity!  I guess you would have to define human as having a human body and human sense perception coupled with a mind capable of higher awareness. I think the blindness to the higher functions of the mind and entrapment in desire, attachment, and ego would help define human. In other words, I guess the average, confused guy on the street would be a good example of the human condition. Now, what do we do with people of extremely limited or nonexistent brain activity? We still identify someone in a vegetative state as a human, but that's mostly identification with the form. On the other extreme, people who have worked deeply with their own minds and accessed higher functions of mind that we can't use or deny even exist seem to be "magic" but they are still grounded in a human existence though they view it very differently.

And now it's my turn again. So, Andrew, can we be aware of our own consciousness in your opinion?

ANDREW: This feels to me like a trick question and I am immediately put on edge! When I think about this I would have to answer no. But that is because I don't perceive of "my consciousness" as something separate from me. I think it was formed along with me, develops and matures as I do and will end with me. I am not aware of my brain either but I imagine that if I had brain surgery and was shown video of it after the fact I would then have an insight into what lies inside my cranium!

I also want to put the idea that there is a "me" in question. Who am I? What would this "I" refer to when I talk about myself? My physical being? The various thoughts I have about myself that are always changing and being changed? A person other people would describe me as? I am not even sure that I can give a decent answer to who I am before I get to any questions of my consciousness.

But, of course, there is another answer to this question and I want to hold this answer in tension with my first ones. I do recognize that there can be different or altered states of consciousness. When I was younger I would have said that I had experienced some of these myself in a religious context. Now I would give what happened other explanations. I do also recognize that some others, such as yourself, offer testimony for differing states of consciousness and I have no way, or desire, to cast them aside out of hand. I'm open to trying to understand better what might be going on there. Of course, it's also worth mentioning that every one of us alters our state of consciousness daily when we sleep. Then we have no sense even of being alive or, in dream sleep, our state of consciousness is somewhat ambiguous. So, I'd want to take up an "interested listener" position regarding this question.

PS There is a third way. This is that when you say you are aware of your own consciousness you only think you are. How would you ever be able to demonstrate the truth of it?

BOB: How, then,  is consciousness related to the ego?

ANDREW: Man, your questions are hard! In my first answer I raised the the prospect that maybe "consciousness" was just a useful fiction. For all we know there is this little spot somewhere inside the brain that is the "consciousness spot" and it generates this field of consciousness much like a holodeck in Star Trek creates a whole world with electronic smoke and mirrors. In that way we have named what is created without knowing how it happens. I want to say that with the ego I would be a little easier to persuade with this kind of answer. What is the ego after all? Our sense of self preservation? A sense of self theorized most notably by Freud? We are talking in conceptual terms and I am reluctant to make things extant that I have little evidence for or of. So I'm saying that maybe we are naming phenomena here that are a function of something else or maybe even just utilizing ideas or conceptions thought helpful in a discussion of the self.

Be that as it may, I think what I am looking for here in answer to your question is a definition or two, a working hypothesis. Let me tentatively say that I regard consciousness as an awareness of things, of being, of self and ego as a more personal self-protection mechanism, maybe even a prison for the self. (I am speaking theoretically not physically, phenomenologically or idealistically.) Consciousness, if you want to call it mind, could be conceived of as our apparatus for existing in a world of perception. I'm thinking out loud here. Now, I wouldn't hold hard and fast to those definitions to the death. Further thought and discussion will inevitably change and refine them. But that is my starting point. To then go on to how those are related I would have to admit that I have no in depth knowledge. I would intuitively think that once more we are back to the integrated nature of our particularly human form of life. The issue is that you might want to say that consciousness is the general name for mind activity. But then ego must be a subset of that or a specific function perhaps since we would normally think of it as some mental faculty. However, when we talk about these things we are talking about ideas which we can distinguish. I think the functional reality of human beings makes it much more difficult to do that. So it's largely a "don't know" here and a reminder that I have a holistic conception of the human being.

My turn. There are people like futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil who believe that we will technologically engineer our way out of death, either by the use of nanotechnology which can heal us from within or by capturing and removing our consciousness to better, robotized bodies. Do these possibilities interest you at all?

BOB: From my view, it's totally unnecessary. We're already transferring our consciousness over and over, and trading a body for a machine is just a different kind of trap. Better to learn the true nature of mind and access the subtle functions so we remove the blindness, gain some control. If mind is non-physical, to really learn to use that would mean we could be physical when we wanted but still be able to access the vast non-physical perception and knowledge of the mind.

ANDREW:  So imagine you are in a room with some animals (a cat, a dog, a monkey), a human being and a robot that has been given artificial intelligence so good it convinces you that it acts of its own free will. What makes the human being special? Anything?

BOB: What makes you think we're special? Mind is mind. Any being that has a mind has the potential to become a fully developed mind, and in fact has been more developed and less developed in the past. The dog and monkey and the robot and me are all just different current examples of the same kind of mind in a particular limited physical state.

ANDREW: So now you get the last question Bob.

BOB: What is your first memory?

ANDREW: A suitably interesting question. I was walking between my parents at a zoo. We approached the ostrich enclosure and an ostrich came close to the fence. I was frightened and made a commotion, trying to pull my parents away from the fence. I cannot precisely locate this event on a timeline of my life but can have been at most 4 as my father left us after that.

I would like to record my thanks to Bob for being prepared to answer my questions and for taking part. He is @iceman_bob on Twitter if you would like to follow him up on what he says or listen to his excellent freeform music made with guitar and synths.