I like the general ideas on the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, and Jason Slaughter, the owner of channel, has probably done more than anyone else to popularize the ideas behind Dutch transportation engineering.

His latest video on autonomous vehicles is the summary of years of work and one of the best attacks on the tech-utopian ideas underlying the autonous vehicle movement.

The video is long, but it’s really worth watching whole thing. Enjoy!

I’m fascinated by the idea that whales are an advanced civilization right in front of us that we have haven’t given much thought to communicating with. Our idea of aliens has been shaped by Star Trek, and we think that we’ll happen upon some green creatures that conveniently speak fluent English.

There’s increasing hope that we’ll be able to understand whale speech, and this short podcast with one of the professors leading the effort is worth a listen if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Sperm whale vocalizations are like clicks rather than the more familiar whale sounds that have become favorite ambient noise tracks. It’s not exactly soothing background music, but interesting to listen to this clip.

Going back to my reading of Jarod Lanier, I think he’d caution against the whole hyped up title of the podcast that boldly claims we’re using AI to communicate with whales. To quote from his piece There is no A.I.:

A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures. In both cases, it’s people who have written the text and furnished the images. The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but it can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations, rather than as the invention of a new mind.

This is no way undermines the technological achievements behind an LLM. It’s changing the accent. Instead of a futuristic machine magically solving problems, the work of thousands of humans is being compared by a fancy calculator to make guesses how other humans and possibly non-humans communicate.

I’ve started to get more interested in the thought of Jaron Lanier. What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me is a short look at some of the points he originally wrote about in You Are Not a Gadget.

Music operates on a plane separate from literature, and a lot of information about it isn’t written down. Most of the world’s compositions were never notated, and what was written down is often minimal; although scores do exist for very old Chinese music—some of the oldest are for the noble guqin, a kind of zither—they amount to mnemonic devices, lists of strokes and playing positions. The earliest European scores are similar, with lists of notes. What we now call “early music” is largely a modern stylistic invention.

Western historiography excels at things that fit into the modern Western paradigm of writing, data, and computation. Music is a prime example of something that doesn’t fit into that mold. Meditation, spirituality, and religious practice are even harder nuts to crack.

What frustrates me is not that we don’t know many things and likely can’t know many things, it’s the lack of humility to assume that there’s nothing to be known if it doesn’t fit within the framework of Western knowledge.

The exquisite skills involved in making instruments can seem to hover just beyond the edge of scientific understanding, and can easily be lost when war, plague, and famine break the chains linking masters and apprentices. And yet the traditions of a lost musical culture can sometimes be revived.

And these oral traditions are exceedingly fragile and easy to lose forever. What I think is also often overlooked is that reconstructions based on written fragments are still fundamentally different than the original thing.

Changing course slightly, there’s a beautiful commentary on how true luxury comes from the from the physical over the digital:

The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.

And it’s the imperfections of the physical world that make it so much more beautiful than the cold sameness of the digital world:

Much of the music we enjoy today makes use of audio loops, by means of which a note can be repeated with absolute precision. Because of my work with computers, I had early access to looping tools, and I was able to play around with loops earlier than most musicians. At first, the techniques didn’t speak to me; music is about change, I thought, while loops are about artificially preventing change. When so-called minimalist composers—Philip Glass, Terry Riley—ask musicians to play the same phrases repeatedly, what emerges from this technique isn’t repetition but an exquisite awareness of change: using a traditional, physical instrument, each repetition reflects your breath, your pulse, the weather, the audience, the light, bringing subtlety into consciousness.

From The Economist:

In Japan the age at which men lose their virginity has always been high. It has remained so: in 2022, 42% of men in their 20s said they had never had sex, while 17% of those in their 30s were virgins, too. A government report from 2022 found that 40% of men had never been on a date.

My guess is this then sets off feedback loops that only make the problem worse, and separating cause and effect isn’t that clear cut.

I’ve had a few interesting conversations lately about materialism and doubts about scientific orthodoxy. One of the problems that quickly comes up is that anything that’s considered scientific has to be well within the materialistic paradigm. Not surprisingly, experiments conducted within a materialistic framework confirm materialism.

In one of my meandering conversations about this topic, someone mentioned feeling a deep sadness, that something was off while walking through a certain neighborhood of Amsterdam. Looking it up later, that person learned it was the main Jewish neighborhood of the city. Something of the trauma of most of the residents being deported and murdered less than a century ago lingers on.

There’s a thing called the stone tape theory, which posits that horrific events somehow leave a lasting impact on their surroundings. Can you ever really set up a double-blind setting and ask participants about the energy they feel from a place? I doubt it, but there’s something thought-provoking here.

Something similar happens in the case of organ transplants—recipients get memories and emotions that couldn’t possibly be linked with the organs they received under the current scientifically orthodox understanding of the body.

There’s also the research by Ian Stevenson of cases with children possessing plausible past-life memories. There’s certainly no silver bullet proving rebirth, but there is enough, in my opinion, to question whether scientific materialism as currently defined can adequately explain the world.

The person who’s made the most headway in questioning scientific materialism is, undoubtedly, Rupert Sheldrake. This interview gives a nice overview of his work. What’s chilling is that Sheldrake says he only published his initial findings because he was young and single; had he already been married with kids and a mortgage, he never would have taken the risk of publishing something “heretical”. He goes on to outline how the scientific establishment works more to enforce orthodoxy rather than test new ideas.

What can’t be ignored in all of this is that non-materialists are magnates for charlatans. The average tarot card reader, astrologist, or fortune teller is just a scammer. People like James Randi made a career of demolishing these types and then claiming he’d proven scientific materialism as a philosophy.