Squander energy: Take the train

I have been working out just how much energy I use on my way to work each day. Yes, I know, trains are so much more environmentally friendly than cars, and I am certainly glad that I can commute to work now rather than driving in. But this note isn’t about whether what is, on the whole, a lower energy option. It is about the many areas on the train where energy is grossly squandered.

In fact the type of train we get on our local line is a model of how to squander energy and reduce the lifetime of the system. I suspect that the designers were frustrated aircraft designers, given how much of the train is designed as a sealed environment – not a very sensible assumption for a domestic UK train. Here are the main points:

• All train’s external doors are electric. So as soon as they fail, the whole carriage will be out of bounds to users. At some point in the not too distant future, whole trains will probably be out of commissions for door repairs.
• All internal doors are electric. The point of this is hard to imagine. Like in shops, there seems to be an obsessive assumption that opening doors is a problem. This isn’t even true with a trolleyful of groceries, let alone a briefcase.
• Inside the carriage, there are 24 small lights, one over each seat. You can turn them on or off a you choose, but a) they provide no meaningful illumination during the day time; b) they are always on by default – an absurd starting point in summer, and given that the carriage has overhead lights too, probably pure waste even in winter; and c) I seem to be the only person who ever turns them off.
• The main lights are always on too. Having spent many years travelling in the earlier model, I don’t recall any problem in expecting the train staff to turn the main lights on and off as and when needed. If we must have an electrical system, wouldn’t light-sensitive switches be a better solution?
• There are overhead electric signboards throughout the train. Most of the time they tell you nothing but the name of the train company and what time it is. I do not need to be told this by a train. All its other messages repeat what the tannoy system says anyway. Assuming that electric signs are solving a significant problem that the tannoy announcements do not (which I find hard to believe), they could at least be switched off when they are saying nothing meaningful.
• There are no openable windows – the whole place uses electrical air conditioning and heating. One or other is on at all times. The system is constantly far noisier than one would have thought possible, and has been from Day 1. But this is England – when have we ever needed air conditioning? I have never been in a train, even at the height of summer, when opening the windows did not provide a perfectly adequate solution. There are no temperature controls, so the automated system rules absolutely. Some days it is too cold, even at the height of summer. And as with the doors, as soon as the air conditioning fails, the train will be out of commission. This will almost certainly mean that its energy and carbon impact will be even higher as it goes into repair sooner and more often and is finally junked a decade or two earlier than its predecessors.
• I go to the loo. The door is electric. It has an electric sign saying whether or not it is occupied. When I get in, the switch to close the door is electric. So is the (separate) switch to lock it. As there are no window, the light has to be on permanently, and so is the air conditioning. The loo flush is electric. The switches to unlock and open the door are electric. Not one of these things needs to be electric.
• As we pass through Woking station at 7.53 am – one of the major hubs southwest of London – every single light I can see is on - even out on the platforms in the sunshine. Fortunately this is not the rule - other stations, especially the smaller ones, have their lights turned off. But especially in the larger stations electricity is being wasted just as badly as a Woking. Again fortunately, there does not seem to be a single superfluous light on at Clapham Junction, which is still, I believe, Europe’s busiest station. But Waterloo is not short of uselessly illuminated lamps.

As we wait to leave Woking, the guard announces that the train next to us is having ‘door difficulties’ that are causing it to be delayed. No fooling?

As I understand it, the rolling stock on this line was 35-40 year old before it was replaced by this all-electric, all environmentally-hostile model. I will be surprised if this stock makes it to its twentieth anniversary without major mishap, or to its thirtieth birthday at all. The old trains were not good, but that was mainly because they were extremely old, unkempt and unmaintained. These, it seems to me, are designed to have a short and absurdly expensive life.

Intelligent Design – So what?

I remain as bemused as ever by Intelligent Design (ID). My problem with it is not in sifting through the empirical pros and cons but in understanding why anyone would offer such extraordinarily weak arguments for what they surely regard as an extraordinarily important issue.

To start with, I am not an atheist. I don't have enough religious feeling to qualify as an atheist. I don't believe in god in the same sense that I don't believe in fairies, but no one would call me an 'adaemonist'.

Yet I don’t find ID completely nonsensical. In fact many years ago it suddenly occurred to me that the universe is not the finished product, but only a succession of prototypes, with each successive tick of the cosmic clock adding a new version, each improving slightly on its predecessor. The final design, which would show the universe in its ultimate, perfect form, will emerge only at the end of time. The universe isn’t the design, it’s the designing.

It gave me quite a shiver. Such a model would explain the somewhat unsatisfactory nature of the universe as we human beings currently experience it, for example. Satisfyingly Hegelian too, which suited my temper in those days. However, almost immediately I realised that it didn’t really help, because there was no way to telling the difference between this and what nature seems to be doing under its own steam.

Unfortunately, ID doesn’t strike me as being half as plausible as my personal fantasy. In fact I could not initially think of any reason even to consider it as an alternative. But just to jump-start the argument, I have tried to identify a sequence of assumptions that would make it more plausible.

Firstly, let me assume there are certain key problems science really is unable to solve, such as the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of consciousness. I know no reason at all to believe that science can't solve these problems (though in the case of consciousness I am quite certain that contemporary science is going about it the wrong way), but without this assumption there doesn’t seem to be very much reason to turn to any non-scientific alternative.

Secondly, let me go beyond my first assumption and assume that we can prove that science can't solve these problems. This is a much stronger assumption, since it puts explicit limits on the powers of our single most powerful mode of explanation even in areas to which it seems proper to apply it. This assumption makes a mockery of science’s performance to date - how often has someone (often an eminent scientist) pronounced the limits of science, only for them to be rolled back yet again within a few years? - but it seems essential to the ID case. Certainly ID's own arguments for limiting science’s domain make little sense. But again just to get the ball rolling, I will make this assumption too.

So what follows from science being inherently unable to solve these central problems? That ID is correct? That ID is at least worth considering? No. Nothing follows from this. One might just as reasonably infer (as scientists and philosophers often do) that there are simply inherent limits to our ability to grasp the universe – that we are victims of ‘cognitive closure’.

Again I disagree with both the idea of cognitive closure and the usual grounds for asserting it, which is that there is no reason for evolution to have bestowed on us the ability to understand everything, so it didn’t. I think this argument is both logically fallacious, based on factually incorrect premises and fundamentally misunderstands the origins and nature of intelligence, but as an explanaiton for any limits to science it is at least as good an alternative as Intelligent Design.

Better, in fact. After all, neither pragmatic nor inherent limits to science make any other alternative explanation any more likely than before. As a positive explanation of the kind, both science and ID offer must stand on its own merits. Neither is made one jot more credible by the failure of other explanations. Given the possibility of cognitive closure, ID would not even be justified by the demonstrable failure of every possible alternative.

But let’s assume that the failure of science does imply that ID is correct. At this point in the argument, most proponents of Intelligent Design seem pretty keen (at the moment) to deny that they are using this idea to smuggle the concept of God into the argument (or, more precisely, into science lessons in schools), so let’s see if we can help them.

OK, so we assume that there must be an Intelligent Designer. Does that mean that this designer is God? No. It only suggests that it he/she is a designer. Even sticking within the limits of conventional Western thought, this entity could just as easily be thought of as a sort of cosmic engineer, for even an entity that is capable of operating on a literally universal scale isn’t necessarily divine. In his sci-fi novel Contact, Carl Sagan included a nice detail – that if you worked out the value of pi to millions and millions of places, you would eventually arrive at a string of 1’s and 0’s that, if printed out out in a rectangular matrix, displayed a perfect circle. Thus proving that the universe was indeed designed, and even that the designer could tinker with the laws of mathematics, which is a lot more profound than merely fixing the laws of physics. But it says nothing about the divine status of the universe's maker. Certainly not that they are Our Maker.

But how about if we concede that our cosmic engineer is indeed divine? What does that get us? From the point of view of the usual ID enthusiast, not much. Let's leave aside the problem of knowing the nature of an entity that inhabits a universe within which the whole of our universe is only a detail, and whose nature is, purely by virtue of its divinity, unknowable in any meaningful sense. Assuming we could penetrate such mysteries, which God is it? I’m damned if I know. As it were. It certainly does not follow from anything about the concept of divinity (especially not a deity of whose existence we know solely through their creation of the universe) that he, she or it is Christian, Jewish or of any other denomination, why they created the universe or what it all means. For all we know, it was Spargliqot, the Niddli God of Alpha Centauri, who did it for a lark.

On the other hand, unless you want to treat the whole of Genesis as a metaphor (and therefore just another inadequate pointer to the nature of our Intelligent Designer), I can’t for the life of me see how any of this process connects to the process of Creation described in the Old Testament.

So where does that leave Intelligent Design? Nowhere. It is a complete non sequitur, not only with regard to any alleged shortcomings of science but also (at least as far as the apologists of any particular religion are concerned) at every other step along the way. In fact it seems to me that the only way to validate the theory of Intelligent Design is by assuming that it is true!

So why do fundamentalists bother? Because they are making the same mistake that Christians have made ever since Copernicus, which is the desire to have it both ways. They want to believe in a deity of such unimaginable nature, character and intentions that they would be able to create the universe, but they want to justify their belief in their unimaginable deity by imagining them anyway.

For a religion that is supposedly based on faith, it's an odd way to go about things.

God among the chimpanzees

A thought for all those fundamentalists who can't bear the idea that their Imaginary Friend could have created a world that evolved: what are they to make of the now overpowering evidence of intelligence in non-human species?

The scientific evidence is straightforward: a wide variety of non-human species can use language, make tools, recognise themselves in a mirror, refer to themselves, or even make jokes. These species include chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orang utans, bottlenose dolphins, African grey parrots, elephants and assorted crows, ravens and other corvids. And we have only just started looking seriously.

So what can we say? That God has given them all souls too - and presumably their own covenant and messiah? Or that he has created creatures that have consciousness and self-consciousness, yet which He has doomed to oblivion and death, without hope of redemption or eternal life? Oops...

Of course, this is just as big a conundrum for evolutionary theory, or at least its more narrow-mindedly Darwinian variants. It looks rather like the intelligence manifested by human beings, dolphins, birds and other primates not only does the same job but it actually of just the same kind - homologous, as evolutionists say. According to conventional Darwinism, such a structural homology can only realistically have occurred if all these species share a common ancestor that also had this intelligence.

Unfortunately, we have not shared a common ancestor with dolphins for 90 million years or with parrots for more than 300 million. And whatever thoseancestors were, they certainly were not intelligent.

There is a Darwinian solution, of course. See my Birth of Reason. I am also currently trying to get a couple of essays out on this topic, though it is proving hard to get them published.

What Turing actually said about intelligence

Some time ago I was thinking about writing a paper on how the AI community had thoroughly misunderstood what it meant to be intelligent, so their efforts were necessarily in vain. With characteristic restraint, I called it ‘AI is a lost cause’. I have yet to complete it, and I suspect that intelligent life on this planet will have evolved to a higher (and indisuputably non-computable) plane before I do.

However, one of the striking results of my background research was discovering what Turing had actually said about what he thought he was doing. For example, described his own model as dealing with ‘problems which can be solved by human clerical labour, working to fixed rules, and without understanding’ (quoted in Copeland 2002). He also described electronic computers as ‘intended to carry out any definite rule of thumb process which could have been done by a human operator working in a disciplined but unintelligent manner’ (in Copeland 2002, emphasis added. See Hodges 1992: 484 and passim for other examples).

So far is this from intelligence that it is almost a specification for Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ – the very antithesis of intelligent activity.

I leave the reader to ponder the question of whether Turing’s descriptions are even slightly compatible with pursuing human (or other kinds of natural) intelligence in computational terms. I think the answer is pretty clear. So is the value of Jerry Fodor's interesting/ludicrous claim that 'Pretty much everything about the cognitive mind that we have learned in the last fifty years or so was taught us either by Chomsky or Turing' (in the TLS on 13 September 2002).

If you would like to see the existing draft of 'AI is a lost cause' - which is perhaps 90% ready - please click here.

On theories that don't matter

Many years ago I thought of writing an essay entitled ‘On theories that don’t matter’. The basic idea was that there are three kinds of scientific theory. Some are true (as far as we can tell), and so matter. Others are demonstrably false, and so don’t matter scientifically, although they may be fruitful in other ways or historically interesting. And then there is a third kind of theory, which claims that it is true that there is – and can be - no specific category of knowledge we can call ‘truth’ (or indeed ‘falsehood’).

If such a theory is false, then it goes the same way as any other false theory. But if it is true, and it succeeds in proving that there is no such as thing as truth or falsehood, then there is still no reason to think that they matter. After all, they deny the reality of the one criterion by which something can be thought to matter from a scientific point of view – its truth. If they are true then there is no such thing as truth, so they are not true.

But unfortunately, if a theory that undermines the very notion of truth and falsehood is found to be true (whatever that might mean) then there is no such thing as truth in general, so no possibility of ‘scientific’ knowledge at all.

So it is a serious problem for scientists everywhere. And yet many of the most important (or at least most prominent) theories of the last two centuries have been of this third, epistemologically nihilistic kind. Behaviourism, evolutionary psychology, meme theory – all of them render the very idea of truth meaningless. If they are false, they are taking up a lot of intellectual bandwidth; and if they are true then we are up the creek.

Nor is this just about science. Philosophically speaking too, many – I suspect most – of the major schools of western thought have implicitly taken a similarly self-contradictory perspective. Empiricism is obviously incapable of delivering anything like truth, since there is no reason to believe that any accumulation of particular experiences, no matter how assembled, would tell us the truth. On the contrary, it simply implies that experience is little more than an accumulation of prejudices. But rationalism equally self-contradictory. Although it argues that we don’t enter into experience naked, it never seems to explain why we should think that the structures we bring to experience represent anything better than systematic experience.

Philosophy has differed from most of science in that it generally admits to these problems. Kant and Hume, for example, were entirely explicit about the impossibility at arriving at the truth. Science has seldom been quite so consistent. Indeed, some of its main practitioners have adopted a positively Olympian position, and propagating the truth of theories that, if applied to themselves, would cause them to disappear into their own unintelligibility.

For example, had behaviourism been true, it would also be true that the only reason I believed behaviourism to be true was that it was ‘reinforcing’ to believe it. Or rather, I did not even ‘believe’ it; I simply said that I believed it. What is more, I said that I believed it for the same reason (or rather, the same cause) that I like strawberries or that I am afraid of giant spiders – because it is reinforcing to do so. At no point does any actual belief take place, and in no sense can any of my statements be thought of in terms of truth or falsehood. Likewise for B.F. Skinner and his supporters – whenever they made a statement in favour of behaviourism or offered evidence in favour of their hypotheses, they made them – and we said we believed them – solely because it was reinforcing to do so. Truth and falsehood never came into it. Or rather, I say that truth and falsehood never come into it, exactly as though that were a meaningful proposition, but in fact I’m just saying this particular sting of words because my personal reinforcement history makes me do it. Under different personal circumstances I might have said that truth and falsehood were absolutely essential. For all I know, that is just what people did say, when behaviourism was still in vogue. Or rather, I say ‘for al I know’, but…

And so on, down the dark tunnels of infinite regression. In the end, if behaviourism is true then behaviourism – and literally everything else you or I or any other human being has ever said - is utterly empty.

Likewise for evolutionary psychology. According to this account, we ‘know’ about the world as we do because evolution has found it adaptive to look at it one way rather than another – the way, say, a crocodile looks at the world. Not only does this offer us no particular epistemic access to the world but, according to evolutionary psychology, it is utterly improbable that we could ever have evolved any way of looking at the world that was any closer than the demands of reproductive fitness required. And even if our evolved worldview were absolutely spot-on, there is no way we could know that it was, and no way we could kept it that way if evolution decides to head off in some other direction.

It is surprising just how many supposedly scientific theories of human knowledge are denying any strictly epistemic grounds (including evidence, argument, logic, mathematics, scientific method, and so on) for believing things. Of course, if they are true then it is not a self-contradiction, because nothing is a self-contradiction, because there are no criteria of logical coherence that make any sense any more. Even so, I find it quite worrying. Well, I say that I find it worrying, but…

All these theories – and many more - are undermined by the same problem, namely that they deny either the reality of or the relationship between the knowing structure we usually call the subject and the world of objects we may or may not be able to know. For a theory to matter doesn’t demand that we have any particular view about what subject and object are or exactly how they are linked together, but it does demand that you have some idea that knowledge is a relationship of this general kind. Eliminate either side and knowledge dissolves into dust.

Which is of course just what all the theories I referred to above do. They either deny that one side (usually the subjective side) exists or undermine its independent reality. Like a viral infection (a metaphor widely employed by meme theorists), a pattern of reinforcement or an advantageous adaptation invades your brain, takes command of its resources to replicate itself, and there’s nothing you can do about it. A meme or an adaptation or a reinforcement can only be displaced from our apparently quite brainless brains through another equally brainless process of selection or reinforcement.

There’s nothing you can do about it. But then, there’s not much ‘you’ left over to do anything. ‘You’ are little (and in some versions nothing) more than the sum of the adaptations or memes or reinforcements in your head – which is to say, the sum of your current prejudices. Can you simply criticise and reject a prejudice on the grounds that it violates your goals or values or that it simply doesn’t make sense? Richard Dawkins seems to think so. But then both your values and the criteria and mechanisms by which you make sense of things are themselves just more prejudices you had already been infected by.

So even if you could evict them, what difference would it make? Such prejudices play no special role in the workings of your mind, such as providing the higher order integrative function that is usually assigned to logic or mathematics or regulating activity and experience through values. There is no possibility of either verification or falsification. On the contrary, all of these theories are inherently trivialising. Nothing rises above the level of a catchy tune, a good feeling or a neat reproductive trick.

Rather oddly, something else all these theories share is a comprehensive disregard for what is already known about how our intelligence operates, which is anything but in the manner of reinforcement, meme and selection’s shared method of trial and error. Intelligence proceeds by a process of abstracting higher level principles, values and goals, from action in the world, which in turn provide it with a capacity for insight and criticism. Through these, intelligence studies the empirical surfaces and functional utility of things for both the underlying structure and the existential qualities that can only be reached through a process of systematic, active construction. Since reinforcement and selection and all the rest are completely anathema to any such process, plainly they cannot offer us any explanation of intelligent activity and experience.

Hence all these supposedly scientific theories’ fundamental self-contradiction. Once one lapses into the view that an idea or value or method colonises my mind through some process of exogenous variation and selection over which I exercise no subjective control, as opposed to the idea that I believe in certain values, symbols, methods and purposes because I have good reasons to do so, then it is hard to see why one should not apply the same logic not only to every aspect of science itself, such as the notion of objectivity or scientific method, but also to the particular theory that is making this claim. But of course, once the idea of objectivity is abandoned as possessing no more intrinsic value than a catchy tune, then that is the end of science. As with any reductionism, all such theories make science unthinkable, for they argue that what counts as ‘science’ depends solely on what notion of science is currently especially infectious. and what counts as ‘thinking’ is whatever happens to be in my head.

Or perhaps one should privilege certain players in this particular game (e.g., scientists). But that still leaves the problems of exactly why one should privilege any particular disciplines, concepts or values in this way, and where the line should be drawn between the privileged and the non-privileged. There seems to be no compelling answer to the former, and in the absence of such an answer, there is no hope of an answer to the latter. And even if there were compelling reasons for privileging certain critical components of human experience, that does nothing to explain how such privileged areas could have come into existence.

If, on the other hand, ‘subjective control’ and ‘good reasons’ are taken to include at least the objectively testable coherence, consistency, completeness and correctness of ideas, values, and so on, then plainly the dual reduction of intelligence to biology and culture that underlies so much contemporary thinking cannot be completed. There are no doubt very many undigested aspects of our biology and culture that prejudice and compromise science, but it is doubtful whether any such failing of reason could not be overcome by its further development.

A bad attack of physics envy

Physics is the easiest and least important of the sciences, and a very bad model for studying anything else.

I know, as a psychology/sociology graduate with a bias towards history, I’m probably just jealous. But there is still a case to answer. In particular:

1. Physics is easy. We only constructed physical laws first because they were obvious by comparison with the far more difficult laws of biology and intelligence.
2. Physics is unimportant. It would make no difference at all to anything that matters to human beings if some of the most basic facts of the physical universe were quite different.
3. Physics is a lousy model for any other science, and we have wasted long enough on physics-worship.

1. Physics is easy

Proposition No.1 is simple and obvious. Is it at all likely that we would have solved the most profound and difficult of scientific problems first, leaving only relatively superficial and easy problems for later? No. Is the study of physical structures and processes especially challenging by comparison with their chemical, biological or intelligent counterparts? No. You can do it in a lab, under nicely controlled conditions, and (at least by comparison with, say, organic systems) its findings are pretty easy to replicate and falsify.

Of course, the results have a pleasing universality. Everything I know about protons or light appears to be true of protons and light everywhere, and it seems pretty easy to identify and demarcate protons and light themselves, which can scarcely be said of higher level structures such as species or even organisms. How much harder then is it to comprehend language or consciousness?

2. Physics is unimportant

Proposition No.2 – that it would make little difference to anything that mattered to human beings if many basic physical facts were different – is pretty straightforward too. What if some prestigious lab announced tomorrow that quarks really were (as our German cousins have so presciently intuited) made of yogurt, and vice versa? Assuming that they continued to provide the necessary infrastructure of chemical and biological processes, what difference would it make? To anyone but physicists, none at all. So why should we regard our knowledge of physics as especially important?

In his masterpiece, Solaris, the great Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem speculated that the apparently intelligent planetary ocean that covered his eponymous planet was able to construct increasingly substantial human beings out of neutrinos, which the ocean was able to mould into atoms that would then generate the familiar chemical, biological and psychological structures needed to produce the creatures through which it communicated with its human visitors. In other words, the physical building blocks were different, but the architecture remained exactly the same. In that situation, what difference would it make if Lem were actually right, not just in fiction but in fact? Beats me.

It is not even as if physicists have a compelling track record regarding non-physical problems. True, many of the suggestions physicists have made to their neighbours have been very penetrating (most famously, perhaps, Schrödinger’s What is Life?). But equally eminent physicists have got it completely wrong. For example, Lord Kelvin, author of the second law of thermodynamics and the absolute temperature scale later named after him, notoriously condemned evolution because the timescales it required exceeded anything that could be supported by known physical processes. The Sun simply could not stay warm enough long enough for life on Earth to have evolved to its present level. ('On the age of the sun’s heat', Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 5, March 5, 1862, pp. 288-293, part 1, reprinted here.)

For Kelvin, who believed that 'overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all round us', this may not have seemed a fundamental difficulty, but physics's superior status to biology meant that is intervention was disastrous. Even ‘Darwin was so shaken by the power of Kelvin's analysis and by the authority of his theoretical expertise that in the last editions of On The Origin of the Species he eliminated all mention of specific time scales’ [source]. So science was put back several decades by the presumption that if it was impossible for something to happen according to current physical knowledge, that should be good enough for everyone else. The utterly compelling logic of evolution, driven by the thorough observation of the simplest biological facts and the simplest deduction, were not enough: the authority of physics was sufficient to stymie one of the few contributions to science that exceeded Kelvin’s own.

In short, not only would it not matter much if physics were quite wrong about basic physical realities, but sometimes science as a whole would be a lot better off if it trusted a little less to the alleged pre-eminence of physics and a bit more to the evidence and logic of each individual discipline. The adoration of quantum mechanics' doctrine of uncertainty is constantly casting its baleful shadow far and wide – such a great excuse for sloppy thinking, such an irresistible enticement to intellectual self-censorship, and such a pall of comfortable pessimism. Regardless of whether this is a valid interpretation of quantum theory (and my personal impression is that it is not),the root cause often seems to be an unthinking acceptance of the authority of whatever physicists say. The recent dominance of evolutionary and genetic research is having a similarly destructive effect on our thinking about human beings, and for essentially the same reason - the predominance of authority over findings and argument.

3. Physics is a bad model for science

Finally, physics is a lousy model for other sciences. Its very simplicity makes it susceptible to all manner of techniques and empirical superficialities it would be quite absurd to demand of other sciences. How could one possibly conduct ethology or ethnology in the laboratory or by experimental methods or the logic of ceteris paribus? What has the great mass of psychological experimentation that has striven to mimic physics contributed to our understanding of human nature? As one must expect of methods that trivialise the subtleties of human experience and action, only trivia.

Of course, I simplify, perhaps even trivialise a little too. But then when was there a time when physics was not aggrandised? Ernest Rutherford (a wonderful experimentalist) was not alone in believing that ‘In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting’. But then he also followed in the Kelvin tradition of opinionated prognosis, saying ‘The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine’. With that kind of track record in physics, what on earth would compel me to listen to his opinions on anything else?

What is wrong with physics, then? Well nothing really. As far as it goes. But it only goes to the limits of physical structures and processes, beyond which it has no more to say than sociology has to say about steroid chemistry. Apart from (perfectly valid) generalities of the kind offered by Schrödinger et al., physics makes no useful predictions about higher sciences. What is more, it lacks the ability to do so not because they are no better than stamp-collecting or because the structures and processes of life or intelligence are too complex to be manageable but because they are qualitatively different. A quite different logic is at work in tulips and sperm whales and human beings.

Not that supra-physical entities are not also physical; but physics-worship tends inevitably to the invariably false ‘nothing-but-ism’. A living thing can be broken into its physical constituents, but then it is both literally and metaphorically dead, and there is nothing at the physical level that explains just what it is that makes something alive. This is not a plea for mysticism: one can’t deduce architecture from the physics of bricks either.

A far more appropriate definition would be to say that any method is scientific that delivers knowledge that is adequate to its object. On that basis, the methods of science are defined more rationally, which is to say, by a careful consideration of the goals it seeks to achieve (i.e., objective knowledge of a specific domain of reality), and not a priori by what happens to have been a useful approach in some of the easier areas of reality. Grovelling before the altar of physics really is the worst kind of anti-scientific argument from authority.

So let’s hear it for the higher sciences: chemistry, biology and whatever we end up calling the science of intelligence.

Why won't markets solve our environmental problems?

Like most unrepentant lefties, I get tired of hearing people talk about markets as though they we some kind of panacea rather than the combination of adolescent abstraction and crooked game they obviously are to anyone who bothers to work out how they really operate.

But just to cut through the usual theological speculation (which would, I am quite sure, have shocked Adam Smith, who seems to have been generous, humane and sophisticated moral philosopher who distrusted business deeply), would someone please point me at, say, three major corporations that organise their own internal operations as a market?

Can't think of even one? Me neither.

So why not markets? Because they don’t work, they don’t make sense and they don’t exist.

Markets don't work

Well, they work in part, but only to the extent that you would expect self-regulating system to work that had no mechanisms to directly tell them whether or not they are doing the right thing. Money and profit are quite good guides to certain kinds of poorly understood or marginal situations, but neither ‘running society as a whole’ nor ‘forestalling the worst ecological crisis since the glaciers retreated from Oxfordshire’ are among them.

A market is like evolution: pretty impressive on its own terms, but if you wanted to create an intelligent organism, would you settle for a system that took half a billion years, repeatedly went off in all sorts of directions no one in their right mind would have chosen, and finally came up with – a giraffe?

Likewise for markets. They have created a fantastic (and I mean that word literally) level of productivity, knowledge and control. But they have absolutely no sense of direction, purpose or self-control.

And as we have been discovering almost daily ever since the world’s government decide that markets were The Answer, if you don’t like markets but work in an area where they predominate, you had better have massive political power at your disposal if you plan to buck them, because not only do markets have no self-control but they are too big for anyone who does have an idea of where they want to go or how they want to get there to deflect, and too deaf to anything but profitability to be persuaded. Like a muscle-bound idiot, markets are wonderfully impressive to people who like gawping at lats and pecs, but you would be very ill advised to engage them in conversation about anything of any actual significance - or to get in their way.

So markets go wherever their own witless impetus takes them. As a result they have created (some of – let’s not exaggerate their significance) the enormously powerful economies and societies of the modern world. But they have also created systems for energy use, food production, resource utilisation, mass communications and any number of other basic social functions that are currently showing every sign of running us straight over a cliff.

Markets don't make sense

Nor do markets really make much sense. If companies don’t operate internally in terms of markets, and neither do governments or any other kind of organisation that knows what it is trying to achieve, it is for the simple reason that, again like evolution, relying markets really is an extraordinarily irrational way of behaving. It is as if you wanted to know what the average of the numbers from 1 to 6 was, and instead of simply dividing the sum of these numbers by how many numbers there are (i.e., the lamentably centralised approach of mathematics), we decided to ask thousands of people to guess, and assumed that the group shouting loudest were right.

True, there are many social functions we do not know how to directly organise efficiently or effectively yet. But if that is the rationale for markets, then they make sense only as a last resort, could only work if we kept a careful eye on how things were going, and they would have always to be surrounded by the power to intervene when things start to go wrong.

For example, the exploding problem of ‘externalities’ – i.e., the fact that the markets are utterly unresponsive to the fact that the environment is collapsing – can only be detected by markets if you cobble together some artificial regulatory and pricing system that can tell this poor deaf, simple-minded creature what the hell the is going on.

Hence the autism of markets that is so truly frightening. If markets were human beings, they would be kept in a home for the terminally bewildered. But our current approach to markets is the very reverse. It is to empower them to make every possible decision about how we will run the world – some of the most crucial parts of which markets cannot even register.

Even those things we are pretty good at doing rationally and we know from massive experience that markets cannot do, such as running health, defence or social security systems, are increasingly being handed over to markets to run, and through a succession of global treaties and agreement, we are progressively (is that the right word?) abdicating our right to regulate and intervene.

Markets don't exist

Which brings me to the third problem – that markets don’t actually exist. When we abdicate our control of major social systems to ‘the market’ we are not in fact doing any such thing. In practically every industry and sector, the entire world market is under the thumb of perhaps seven or eight companies. Oil, food distribution, money, cars, computers, pharmaceuticals, fertilizer – in how many of these sectors do the seven largest players make up more than 70% of the market? In such conditions, the entire theoretical basis of the market, with its freedom of movement and openness of information, disappears.

In a way this could be a good thing. If there are only a few global players, each operating truly planetary systems that manage the flow of the world’s resources, then clearly a massively rational system is in fact in control. In that case, could it not be argued that the illusion of the market in fact conceals a rational system for managing society’s needs? So it would seem, listening to some market advocates.

But unfortunately, because the interests that control what counts as ‘rationality’ are those of shareholders rather than society as a whole, both the power of public reason and the economic power of society as a whole have been co-opted to narrow sectional interests. What is more, those interests are not only not neutral to the interests of society as a whole; the two sides are directly and fatally opposed.

All economic systems assume some form of exploitation. We exploit mines and forests and agricultural land and the powers of physics and chemistry and biology and the talents of human beings. But the most fundamental basis of a capitalist system is the fact that the people who actually make and do everything are rewarded for their efforts with only a fraction of the wealth they create. We work, hand over everything we make, and get paid. And because what we have done is worth more than our collective pay, there is a profit left over.

This exploitation is concealed by the superficial fairness of contract relationships, even to the point where the participants are perfectly convinced of fairness of this exchange and the absence of any alternative. But from the present point of view, what it ultimately means is that society’s economic powers have been co-opted to serve the interests of a class whose entire livelihood relies on the exploitation of society at large.

So markets don’t work, don’t make sense, and don’t exist. Especially if you are faced with a crisis on the present scale. On the other hand, if I were planning to organise the end of the world, I know exactly who I’d turn to - someone blind, deaf, self-centred, simple-minded… Now, who might that be?