Category Archives: Soapbox

Its all in the mind

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Decorative image of a flowerWe all exist in our own minds where we construct a world based on our proprioceptive and mental experiences.  I have written previously about the accumulation of experiences over time leading to the building of our consciousness [see ‘Is there a real ‘you’ or ‘I’?’ on March 6th 2019].  In Jonathan Coe’s recent novel, ‘The Proof of Innocence’ during a tiff between a young couple on a train travelling along the south coast of France, the girl, who is watching an episode of the TV show ‘Friends’ on her phone, says to the boy, who is admiring the view and admonishing her for not doing the same, ‘You don’t know what’s going on in my head. Because you are not there.’  Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe took advantage of the inaccessibility to others of our minds to create a parallel world of her own in order to free herself from constraints and conditions of imprisonment in Iran.  She has described feeling liberated when she realised that no one could take the parallel world away from her.  She chose not allow others access to her parallel world; however, we can choose to give some level of access through communicating with others.  I am confident that my wife has a pretty good idea of what is going on in my head, or least a much better idea than that of the young couple in Jonathan Coe’s novel, because we have been communicating with each other for about forty years.  If you are a regular reader of this blog then you have been on a journey which will have provided glimpses of my mind.  Reading allows us to learn about humanity through looking into the inner lives of others [see ‘Reading offline’ on March 19th 2014] who are prepared share, probably in the spirit of reciprocal altruism.  There is some risk involved in sharing because the closedness of your inner life appears to be essential to its role as a survival tool; however, understanding others also helps to navigate and thrive in society, which implies that sharing also has an important role.

Sources:

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, The feeling of freedom, FT Weekend, 7th & 8th December 2024..

Jonathan Coe, The proof of my innocence, Penguin, 2024.

Reproducibility in science and technology

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Schematic diagram from cited paper in Open Research EuropeIt has been suggested that there is crisis in science concerning the reproducibility of data [1].  New research findings are usually published based on data collected only by the group reporting the new findings, which raises the probability of bias in the results as well as reducing their likely validity.  It also creates a temptation to tamper with or falsify data given the incentives to publish.  It is unlikely that any prestigious journal would publish work that simply demonstrates that previously published findings can be reproduced consistently.  Yet, when they have tried to reproduce published data from experiments, many researchers have been unable to do so [2], which perhaps perversely makes the attempt to reproduce results publishable.  However, if no one has attempted to reproduce a published dataset then it stands until demonstrated to not be reproducible, which implies that much of the data in the published literature could be irreproducible and hence of dubious value.  This is a bigger problem than it might seem, because most scientific and technological innovation is built on the findings of fundamental research.  Hence, we are building on shaky foundations if results are not reproducible. Similarly, the transition from prototypes to reliable products is dependent on achieving reproducibility in the real-world of results obtained with a prototype in the laboratory.  I have been discussing these issues with a close collaborator for a number of years and last week we published a letter, in Open Research Europe, summarizing our views.  In ‘Achieving reproducibility in the innovation process’ [3], we propose that a different approach to reproducibility is required for each phase of the innovation process, i.e., discovery, translation and application, because reproducibility has different implications in each phase.  The diagram, reproduced from the paper (CC-BY-4.0), shows our ideas schematically but follow the link to read and comment on them.

References

[1] Baker, M. (2016). Reproducibility crisis. Nature, 533(26), 353-66.

[2] Camerer, C. F., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Ho, T. H., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., … & Wu, H. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(9), 637-644.

[3] Whelan M & Patterson EA, (2025). Achieving reproducibility in the innovation process, Open Research Europe, 5:25. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.19408.1

Is the autonomous individual ceasing to exist?

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Society consists of a series of bubbles.  A century or so ago, your bubble was largely defined by where you lived, your village or neighbourhood, because few people travelled any significant distance and you probably knew everyone living around you.  A decade or so ago, your bubble was probably defined by the newspaper you read or the radio/TV channels you preferred [see ‘You’re all weird!’ on February 8th, 2017]. Today social media defines bubbles that are geographically widely-dispersed.  This both fractures local communities and gives a global reach to influencers on social media.  Some social media ‘dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life’.  The quote is from George Orwell’s 1941 essay, Literature and Totalitarianism.  He goes on ‘And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison.’  Of course, he is writing about totalitarianism not social media but his words seem sinisterly appropriate to the apparent intention of some social media influencers and platforms that promote alternative narratives which are not consistent with reality.  Orwell suggested that if totalitarianism becomes world-wide and permanent then literature, the truthful expression of what one person thinks and feels, could not survive.  Despite Orwell’s fear that he was living ‘in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist’, totalitarianism did not abolish freedom of thought in the 1940s.  Now in the 2020s, we have to ensure that social media does not become a modern instrument of totalitarianism, suffocating freedom of thought, isolating large sections of society from reality, dictating ideology and governing emotional life. We need to think for ourselves and encourage others to do the same.  In their book, ‘Radical Uncertainty – Decision-making for an Unknowable Future‘, John Kay and Mervyn King repeatedly ask ‘What is going on here?’ as a device for thinking about and reviewing the evidence before reaching a conclusion.  It is a simple device that we could all usefully deploy in 2025. Happy New Year!

Sources:

George Orwell, Literature and Totalitarianism, 1941 available at https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/64/1006/LiteratureAndTotalitarianism.html

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, The feeling of freedom, FT Weekend, 7th & 8th December 2024.

John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty – Decision-making for an Unknowable Future, Little Brown Book Group, 2020.

Emergence of ideas leading to a lack of deep insights

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Decorative imageIn Surrealism, which emerged after World War 1, artists attempted to allow the subconscious mind to express itself and resulted in illogical montages or dreamlike scenes and ideas.  Some surrealists championed the subconscious because they thought it would release society from the oppressive rationality of capitalism.  Anna Wiele Kjaer of the University of Copenhagen has suggested that instead our subconscious has been colonised by capitalism and is being shaped the endless of streams of disconnected images flowing from our phones, which are as incongruous as any surrealist montage.  To decolonise our subconscious and to replenish our creativity many of us need a digital detox involving time away from our electronic devices [see ‘Digital detox with deep vacation’ on August 10th, 2016] allowing our brains to switch into mind wandering mode for long uninterrupted periods [see ‘Mind wandering’ on September 3rd, 2014].  Cormac McCarthy has described how ideas struggle against their own realisation and come with their own innate scepticism that acts like a steering mechanism for their emergence from our subconscious.  He also suggests that all ideas come to an end when they lose lustre becoming a tool, perhaps as a theory, strategy or plan, and you can no longer entertain the illusion that they hold some deep insight into reality.  Many of my thoughts never coalesce into an emergent idea but remain as illogical and disconnected as a surrealist montage and the few that do emerge don’t provide deep insights into reality that I recognise.

Sources:

Anya Harrison, Another Surrealism, 2022

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger, Pan MacMillan, 2023.

Jackie Wullschläge, Surrealism at 100: does it still have the power to disrupt?, FT Weekend, 27 January 2024.

Image: Ceramic tile by Pablo Picasso in museum in Port de Sóller Railway Station, Mallorca.